The Chief Designer leaned down and spoke into the microphone, “You’re doing well, Giorgi.”
The speaker filled with a heavy pulled breath.
Giorgi said, “Mishin, Bushuyev? Is that all you have?”
One of them twisted the knob a quarter turn to the right. The change in speed did not seem like much to the Chief Designer, but as when launching a rocket, he was not in the thing itself, where he was sure the experience was different. He wondered what other jobs were like his, where one never experienced the final product. Even generals had once been soldiers themselves.
“Much better,” said Giorgi. The words sounded forced, but the lines on his readouts bounced in a steady pattern.
Another revolution and another. The door to the observation room clicked shut, and Ignatius was standing over the console, next to the Chief Designer.
“I didn’t hear you enter,” said the Chief Designer.
“I didn’t wish to distract you.”
“And yet here you are.”
Several more revolutions, the centrifuge stretching into a green blur. The Chief Designer and Ignatius watched in silence, their heads turning in unison to follow the motion of the capsule. Ignatius shook her head once as if she were dizzy.
“I’m taking Nadya and Leonid,” she said. “They’ll go on a planetarium tour. The major cities. Also to two or three towns where mobile planetariums have been set up. Have you seen the mobile planetariums? They’re quite brilliant. Everything fits into a truck.”
“I need Nadya and Leonid here,” said the Chief Designer.
“All they ever do is care for the dogs, and now you have a team of veterinarians on hand all day and night.”
“They have other duties.”
“If I’m not mistaken, Leonid is currently sitting on a bench in the quadrangle. While I’m sure this is essential to Star City’s operations, surely someone else can take over for a few weeks.”
“Is he not entitled to a moment of rest?”
“You said he has duties.”
The Chief Designer took the few steps to the back of the observation room. Ignatius followed.
“I don’t believe you’re actually a writer,” said the Chief Designer, “but with the way you twist words, you should be.”
“I could write stories like Tsiolkovski. Adventures in outer space.”
“You shouldn’t joke about his stories. Most of us in Star City are here because we read them in our youth.”
“I don’t joke, Chief Designer. I read them, as well. Why do you think this assignment was given to me?”
“Certainly not for your personality.”
“Who’s joking now?”
The Chief Designer tapped a finger on his scar, the widest, deepest part in the middle.
“There’s no way I can stop you from taking Nadya and Leonid?”
“You could try, but I have all the leverage and you have none.”
“There’s very little that I do have. And now you take away two of the only people I can rely on.”
“Just for a short time.”
“Time is another thing that I lack.”
Ignatius reached into the pocket of her coat and pulled out a small square of paper. She held it up and inspected the front, appraising it like a jewel, and then flipped it in her fingers to face the Chief Designer. It was a photograph of Khrushchev’s dog, tiny and brown, the hair hanging off its ears twice as long as the ears themselves.
“If one were to need a dog quite similar to this one,” said Ignatius, “wouldn’t it help to search in several cities instead of just Moscow? Nadya and Leonid will only be busy for a few hours at the planetariums. I don’t care what else they do while we travel.”
He inspected her as he might a new component for a rocket, trying to ascertain from her appearance alone exactly how the complex machinery inside might work. “You’re helping me?”
“I’m talking, Chief Designer. Only talking.”
“Thank—”
“Stop. There’s nothing else to say.”
She reached into her coat’s other pocket and pulled out a stack of papers that had been rolled into a tube. Unrolling them, she handed the papers to the Chief Designer. They were marked at the top with the insignia of OKB-52. A brief abstract in the middle of the first page described what was to follow. The Chief Designer started to skim it, got halfway through, and then stopped to start over at the beginning. It was a report on the status of the General Designer’s ablative heat shield. Flipping through the pages, the Chief Designer found what he was looking for, a simple line graph that showed the shield’s performance through a range of temperatures. He tracked his finger along the x-axis of the graph until he found a particular number. If the graph was accurate, and if he was reading it correctly, then the General Designer’s heat shield worked. It could return a capsule safely through the atmosphere.
“Where did you get this?” asked the Chief Designer. He retraced the graph with his finger.
“Why do you always ask questions you know I won’t answer?” She looked up and to a corner of the room. “What’s that noise?”
A high-pitched tone came from the direction of the centrifuge, modulating up and down.
“Is something broken?” asked Ignatius.
Mishin and Bushuyev laughed. The Chief Designer stepped to the console and turned a silver knob next to the speaker. The tone increased in volume.
“Giorgi’s whistling,” said the Chief Designer. “He should barely be able to breathe, but he whistles to show us that he’s fine.”
“I don’t recognize the tune.”
“I think it’s ‘Korobeiniki.’ At least how ‘Korobeiniki’ would sound if you had a train parked on your chest while you whistled it.”
“I think I prefer this version,” said Ignatius.
A timer on the console dinged. Mishin and Bushuyev adjusted knobs on the console, clicked metal switches from up to down. New creaks and moans came from the machine as it swept by, each revolution slower than the last. The capsule crept around the circumference on the final turn, lurching to a stop in front of the gate. Giorgi whistled through the end of the tune, and then coughed into the microphone.
“We’re done?” he asked.
“For today,” said the Chief Designer into the microphone, “unless you have another verse.”
Georgiu-Dezh, Russia—1964
The last time Leonid was in Georgiu-Dezh, some fifteen years ago, it had been called Liski. He did not remember anything specific about the city, just a sense of its enormity. But now, as the train neared the station, he realized his memory was incorrect.
The train tracks had cut through cultivated fields, grains whipping in the wind, straight lines of sugar beet stalks. Once, a field of sunflowers appeared, each angled in the same direction, lit up as if they were giving the light and the sun receiving it. The Chief Designer and everyone at Star City thought themselves special, but these flowers had reached the sky long ago. Sometimes a silo poked up in the distance, gray and indistinct, like a primitive rocket. Sometimes the steep peaked roof of a barn showed above the stalks of grain.
Georgiu-Dezh’s buildings rose barely higher than that, a few stories at most. The bulk of the town consisted of houses crammed right up against each other, some even sharing chimneys. The train slowed. A horse drew a carriage away from the train station. A carriage! The roads were paved with loose stones, if they were paved at all. The only structures of any significance were a factory, several kilometers away, its stacks lofting like monuments, heaving out black smoke, and an old sobor, white-walled, the four onion domes on the corners shimmering blue, the one in the center gold.