“In Siberia,” he said, “when the skies would actually clear, it was as if there were more stars than space between them. That one there is actually a planet. Mars. You can tell it’s a planet because it doesn’t shimmer.” He pointed up at nothing in particular.
“To continue our conversation from dinner,” said Nedelin, “this beauty—we can all agree that the night sky is beautiful?”
“Yes,” said the Chief Designer.
“Agreed,” said Ignatius.
“Isn’t it better if beauty is a natural state with no need of a guiding hand to create it? Because we’re a species of painters, we assume that all beauty must be similarly created. But weren’t the first paintings just copies of nature? Isn’t the sky itself full of every symmetry and color? Why do we feel the need to make the source of our aesthetic have a source? At what point is the source sourceless?”
“Marshal,” said the Chief Designer, “I feel I’ve drunk too much to follow you completely. I didn’t know the army trained philosophers.”
“In Stalingrad, there were no lights. We burned no fires. Only stars, when the smoke from smoldering rubble did not cloud things up too badly. Being a soldier there was to be suspended between the ugliness of war and the splendor of the sky. And one’s only occupation between skirmishes was to think.”
The Chief Designer thought of Leonid, locked in the Vostok far above them, a speck coursing through the static backdrop of stars. Leonid spoke in the same sort of poetry as Nedelin.
The three of them had stopped walking, each gazing up at a different section of sky. There were no insects to chirp, no trees where a night bird might perch. The breeze came only as a faint sensation against the skin.
“I apologize,” said Nedelin. “I seem to have turned the mood somber.”
“Sometimes I feel that somber is the natural mood,” said the Chief Designer, “but we manage to turn it light now and again.”
They resumed walking. The Chief Designer welcomed the sound of the crunching gravel beneath their feet. The lights of the dormitories never seemed to get nearer when he watched but were always somehow closer when he looked again. Then they arrived.
The dried-up remains of saxauls sprouted from either side of the road where it entered the residential complex, two dormitories simply called Dom 2 and Dom 4. The Chief Designer did not know where Doms 1 and 3 might be, if they existed at all. A single wild apple tree in the center quadrangle had managed to survive. Nedelin said good night without stopping and continued to Dom 2. The Chief Designer and Ignatius were left alone with the few lights still alive in the windows. He remembered a similar evening with his wife after they were first married, before his son was born. It might have been the very night his son was conceived. But this woman was not his wife. Was his wife even his wife anymore? He had not seen her in so long.
“I thought you were with Nadya and Leonid,” said the Chief Designer.
“We finished the assignment.”
“Did you find one? Did you find a dog like Kasha or Khrushchev’s Byelka?”
“Many dogs, but none that matched. Part of me hopes that Khrushchev’s little rat is a singular entity. Hell if there are more of them.”
“Then you didn’t finish the assignment.”
“I don’t work for you, Chief Designer. I’m happy to help out when I can, but don’t confuse me for Mishin or Bushuyev.”
“I can never tell where the limits of your caring lie.”
“It will be easier for you if you accept that I don’t really care at all. I have a role and I perform it and I don’t give it much thought beyond that.”
“I can never tell if that role is to thwart me or to aid me.”
“Neither. My role is to motivate you.”
“And the General Designer, too?”
“You’re a little easier to deal with, Chief Designer. The General Designer, he has no memory of the gulag. He never suffered like you did, and so he can’t understand loss as you do. I get my way with you far more often than I should, because I scare you. Don’t misunderstand me. You should be scared. So should the General Designer. I’m not praising him, just pointing out how ignorance works in his favor. At least in the short term.”
“And in the long term?”
“One of you will go to Mars, and I’ll back whoever can get there first.”
“You’re here to watch the engine test, then?”
“I end up where I need to be. And I have faith that you will as well.”
“Faith?”
“It seems the old gods aren’t quite as dead as Nedelin believes. Good night, Chief Designer.”
As she walked away, she pulled a third, full bottle of vodka from her jacket pocket and pried out the cork.
BY THE TIME the Chief Designer arose in the morning, the dormitories were already empty. He showered, lingering in the stream of water even though it was cold. The dining hall was dark and abandoned, but he found the remains of a black bread loaf in the kitchen pantry. He searched the drawers, metal things with squeaking brackets, until he found a suitable knife. Gripping the loaf with a cloth napkin, he set the blade on the exposed end and sawed lightly until the serration worked a groove in the crust. The knife was sharp. It did not take much pressure. He went slowly and lightly, trying to finish the slice without crushing the rest of the loaf. It was a small challenge he made for himself, to complete this one task with no unnecessary damage. He poured himself a glass of water and ate the bread plain.
Outside, morning light preceded the rising sun, turning both sky and ground the same orange. Clouds, mere wisps, streaked the sky with a lighter hue. The atmosphere quivered at the horizon. Launch towers poked up in the distance like limbless tree trunks, a sparse forest. The Chief Designer walked toward the tower twinned by the Proton rocket. It was several kilometers away, but he had plenty of time to get to the bunker before the summer heat grew too oppressive.
The Chief Designer hummed a tune as he walked. He did not know the name of the song or the words, but the tune was simple and pleasant. Giorgi often sang it in the evenings. To the Chief Designer, it seemed more appropriate for mornings. Some birds sing at dawn and others at dusk. In Baikonur, of course, no birds sang at all. Or maybe they did. The Baikonur Cosmodrome was actually hundreds of kilometers away from the city of the same name, the title a sleight of hand aimed at the Americans. The Chief Designer knew it had taken but a single flight of the U-2 to uncover the ruse.
The bunker came into sight over a tangle of brown brush. Half buried, the bunker looked like the remains of a devastated castle. Several small figures emerged from the door and hurried toward the rocket. As he got closer, the Chief Designer could see the activity around the rocket itself, a swarm of bug-sized people moving in frantic patterns in front of the pad. When the light came through the latticework of the tower at the proper angle, still more technicians could be seen clinging to the platforms. Ants on the stalk of a plant.
Inside the bunker, technicians played with their control panels. No one seemed to notice when the Chief Designer entered. He cleared his throat, hoping for any sort of acknowledgment. He had planned to wait for the test in the bunker, but now it felt unwelcoming. He left and continued down the dirt road in the direction of the Proton.
He had not made it far when the General Designer almost ran into him, his face toward the ground, walking fast in the other direction. The General Designer smoked a long, thin cigarette, exhaling a continuous line of smoke behind him like a steam trail above a train.