“Sorry, sorry,” said the General Designer without looking up, shuffling to the side to move around the Chief Designer.
“Isn’t your work in the other direction?” asked the Chief Designer. “And should you really be smoking?”
The General Designer looked up. A slight flush came to his cheeks.
“If you must know,” he said, “some combination of my nerves and last night’s vodka has necessitated that I seek out a toilet.”
The Chief Designer chuckled. “Please, don’t let me keep you. Is Nedelin at the launchpad?”
“Yes, yes.” The General Designer hurried away. His gait was an awkward shuffle, as if by pressing his buttocks together he could hold the shit inside. It was not so different from his normal walk, thought the Chief Designer. Except that the General Designer never seemed to stop spewing shit from the other end. The Chief Designer tried to banish such thoughts. He was here for a favor, and thinking ill of the man from whom the favor was asked would be of no benefit. And the General Designer, to his credit, had been almost civil. Almost human. Maybe this would work out, after all.
A pebble kicked up into the Chief Designer’s shoe, lodging under his heel. He crouched down and tried to fish the pebble out with his finger. His knee ached. The pebble eluded him. He pried off the shoe and dumped it. The pebble, barely bigger than a grain of sand, dropped out. The Chief Designer retied his shoe and lifted himself to standing.
White light flashed ahead of him. The white faded and where the Proton rocket had been there was now only an orange blossom of flame, churning out smoke and radiating waves of heat like a rippling halo. The Chief Designer felt the boom in the air before it crashed into his ears. He covered them with his hands until the sound died enough to tolerate. The ground shook, just a tremble at first, growing into a violent rocking that almost knocked him from his feet. A wave of dust rushed at him, up his nose and into his eyes. The dust cast a meter-high haze over the whole landscape.
Tiny figures, silhouetted by the light, fled in the Chief Designer’s direction, but few got far before falling. An acrid stench reached him. Vapors of the rocket fuel. Toxic. He pulled out his handkerchief and held it over his nose and mouth. Was he far enough away? Surely the fumes would disperse. A flock of birds rose up in front of the fireball like shrapnel from a secondary explosion.
The General Designer came from behind him and ran past, still cinching his belt. One half of his shirt remained untucked. The Chief Designer called out to him, told him to wait, but he could not hear his own voice, did not know if he even made a sound. Was his throat damaged by the fumes, or had the sound of the explosion deafened him?
He sprinted after the General Designer, who ran with the gracelessness of one who had never run before, not even at play as a child. The Chief Designer gripped the General Designer by the shoulder, which sent him spinning, almost to the ground.
“Stop!” screamed the Chief Designer.
The General Designer turned and made to run again. The Chief Designer placed one large hand on each of the General Designer’s shoulders and squeezed.
“It’s too late,” said the Chief Designer.
The two men turned to the launchpad. The flames had lessened, no longer churning but still burning bright. The top of the Proton emerged out of the blaze. Without warning, it fell straight down, as if the column underneath had been snatched clean away.
THE CHIEF DESIGNER had thought the steppe dry before, but now in the area scorched by the explosion it was as if the very idea of water had evaporated. Dry brown dirt had been replaced with dryer gray ash. The ground crunched beneath his feet. Whole chunks of soot clung to his shoes.
He learned to avoid the larger piles of ash, many of which had once been human. Sometimes he could even make out the shape of a body splayed across the ground. Other piles had bones poking out. All told, some two hundred people were still unaccounted for, but they would never be identified. No amount of patience could reassemble flakes of ash to resemble the people they had come from. The grimace of one skull looked like any other. Nedelin had been identified by the fused clump of brass that had once been his medals. His uniform and flesh had burned completely away.
Somehow, the tower at the pad still stood. It was charred black almost to the top, crowned by bare metal, shining silver in the afternoon sun. The remnants of the Proton lay in a heap at the base of the tower, long cylindrical sections crossed like spent logs on a hearth. A rocket was not much more than a tube, when it came down to it.
Ignatius jogged across the ash toward the Chief Designer. Her motion seemed too casual, too carefree. The somber scene required slowness. After the rush to save the few survivors, everything had decelerated. The Chief Designer was reminded of people strolling along the banks of a river. It was a specific memory of a specific river, wet mud emanating a murky scent, but he could not recall the time or the place. The people he had seen walking there were strangers.
Ignatius slowed as she approached the Chief Designer and then stopped beside him. She covered her mouth with a fist and released a cough from deep in her lungs.
“This dust,” she said. The ash covering her jacket made the leather look several shades lighter.
“Try not to think of where it comes from,” said the Chief Designer.
“Now there’s an unpleasant thought. Thank you for that.”
“What do you want?”
“Not happy to see me? I’ll be brief. The General Designer is by the fueling station—at least what remains of it. Now might be an excellent time to repeat your request to him.”
“Now might be an excellent time to leave him alone.”
“The world has not stopped, Chief Designer. Not even for this. The Americans will keep launching rockets, and now you’re our only chance to beat them to the moon. To Mars.”
“Surely even the Americans will pause for this.”
“They’ll never know this happened.”
“You can’t hide the deaths of hundreds.”
“I already have. Tomorrow morning, Pravda will report that Nedelin died in a plane crash. The families of the deceased will be told the same. And anyone who knows otherwise will be convinced that if they tell the truth, they might meet a similar fate.”
Without realizing it, the Chief Designer had let Ignatius guide him in the direction of the fuel station. The walls of the building were tumbled over in the direction of the blast, pipes and tubes sprouting from charred concrete like the decapitated stems of flowers. The General Designer was there amid the rubble, stooping over and then standing back to his full height, a head taller than everyone around him. The Chief Designer stopped walking.
He asked, “Is there a chance that you arranged this so that the General Designer would assist me?”
“You always think the worst of me,” said Ignatius, “though I suppose it would be a lie to claim that this is something I would be incapable of.”
“Often you seem less human than these piles of ash.”
“Let the two of us never discuss our relative humanity.”
The Chief Designer’s lips turned up in a reluctant smile.
“I suppose,” he said, “that would make the General Designer the most righteous among us.”
“One can be intolerable and righteous both.”
“I’ll speak to him. Thank you, Ignatius.”
“Oh god, please don’t form the habit of thanking me.”
“Only this once.”
Ignatius spun on the point of her toe and headed off in a direction that seemed to have no potential destination, just open steppe all the way to the horizon. Somehow the dust did not kick up with her steps.