“There’s only so much sunlight,” said Giorgi, “and it won’t wait for you to digest.”
He grabbed the ball and took it to the net, bouncing it around as he waited for everyone else to join him.
THE TELEVISION MONITOR fish-eyed the interior view of the anechoic chamber, stretching it out toward the corners. Only objects centered perfectly in the camera showed true perspective. As Giorgi moved around the room, his proportions changed. When he reached for something offscreen, his arm seemed to grow as it neared the edge. When he stood, his head elongated into a tube, lips round, nose beaked, eyes like a dopey cat.
Leonid checked in on him a few times a day. This was not required. Technicians manned the observation room all day and night, making notes about Giorgi’s heart rate and respiration even as he slept. And it was not as if Leonid could talk to Giorgi. Communication was forbidden. In the morning, one of the technicians would assign Giorgi a set of arbitrary tasks, written on a half sheet of paper, slid through the slit under the door with Giorgi’s breakfast.
Today, breakfast consisted of butterbrots with ham and two fried eggs. While Giorgi ate in the chamber, the technicians ate the same thing in the observation room.
The main monitor showed the whole room, distorted corner to distorted corner, but there were two other monitors, as well. One focused on the bed and one on the desk, which now served as Giorgi’s breakfast table. Giorgi took a kettle and set it on the small electric hotplate on the side of the desk. The microphone in the chamber picked up the sizzle as condensation dripped onto the burner. Breakfast included coffee, but one cup was never enough for Giorgi. He drank three or four every morning, though he never touched a drop after that.
Following breakfast, Giorgi slid the tray back through the slit with the wooden rod, which he had returned to the chamber after taking down his makeshift volleyball net. The entryway was sealed at the other end by a second door, and the sound of the metal clanking could be heard through the speakers and from the door itself. Pressurized air hissed out of the chamber as a technician retrieved the tray. She hastily resealed the hatch.
The one space in the room not covered by a camera was the toilet and sink. Giorgi went there, and one technician waited with his hand over the switch to turn off the speakers. If Giorgi took a shit, then the speaker would be turned off until he reappeared on the main camera. If he did anything else—piss, bathe, wash his face, clean his teeth, shave—then the speakers would be left on. Giorgi started singing, some old folk tune, one that the technicians seemed to recognize, but Leonid did not know it. The songs of his own childhood were in a different language.
Water splashed in the sink. Sometimes Giorgi’s singing lost its words, turned garbled, or degraded into a hum. The technician turned the volume on the speakers up so loud that the sound hurt Leonid’s ears. There, between notes, a small scraping sound. The technician turned the volume back down to a reasonable level. “Shaving,” he said, miming the dragging of a razor across his own face. The other technician wrote something on a notepad.
Giorgi reentered the camera’s view. He stopped, looked up and directly into the lens, and rubbed his fresh-shaven cheeks. He pressed harder, distorting the shape of his mouth. He flapped his lips open and closed like a fish. The technicians chuckled. Giorgi was the only cosmonaut who made an effort to relieve the dullness of their task. Leonid thought that perhaps the only thing worse than being in the chamber itself would be watching it on television for hours on end.
Giorgi released his face, clapped once, and then dropped directly into a set of push-ups. Leonid left the observation room. Once Giorgi started working out, it could be hours before anything else happened at all.
LEONID ALMOST RAN into the Chief Designer in the hallway.
“How is he?” asked the Chief Designer, looking over Leonid’s shoulder at the door to the observation room.
“You’re back?” asked Leonid.
“You can see me, can’t you?”
There was something different about the Chief Designer. Leonid was reminded of whenever a twin took over for their deceased sibling. Everyone could sense the difference, but of course people changed after being in outer space. Where had the Chief Designer been that could have altered him so?
“Giorgi’s fine,” said Leonid.
“Good, good. It’s almost time, you know.”
The Chief Designer was grinning. Leonid did not know that the Chief Designer knew how to grin.
“Time for what?” asked Leonid.
“For our next launch, of course.”
Leonid checked up and down the hall. It was empty.
“But we haven’t found the other dogs,” he whispered.
“Of course, of course. We’ll launch the dogs first. But it’s also time for our next human cosmonaut. Giorgi is more than ready.”
“There’s just Giorgi, though, no twin.” Leonid still whispered.
“Don’t worry yourself, Leonid. Everything’s been worked out.”
With that he turned and sauntered down the hall. If Leonid had to describe the Chief Designer then, he would have said jolly, a word he was sure had never been used to describe anyone in the whole of Star City’s history.
The Kremlin, Moscow, Russia—1964
Every time the Chief Designer visited the Kremlin, he was led through a different tangle of hallways but always ended up in the same room. At least he thought it was the same room. There was a chance that the whole structure comprised similar rooms all furnished with the same long table, the same wood-paneled wainscoting, the same square clock to the right of the door and the same portrait of Marx to the left. Thinking back to other government buildings he had visited, the Chief Designer was unsure that he had not encountered the same arrangement in entirely different cities.
He followed one of Khrushchev’s aides down a narrow hallway, lined on one side with high windows and on the other with an ornate colonnade, each post carved with curlicues and flutes and flowers. One tulip pattern, repeated in each column, reminded the Chief Designer of the launchpad for the R-7, the section of column above the flower like the smoke trail of a rocket disappeared through the ceiling.
The aide opened a door at the end of the hallway and then opened a door immediately to the right, through which the Chief Designer found the familiar room. He looked up to confirm it, but he did not need to. He knew the portrait of Marx was there even before he saw it. Khrushchev sat at the far end of the table. There was no one else in the room.
“Tell me, comrade,” said Khrushchev before the Chief Designer had taken a seat, “how go preparations?”
“Everything’s on schedule, Mr. Khrushchev.” The Chief Designer sat.
“For the Revolution, then?”
“We’ll have a most impressive celebration.”
Khrushchev bent over the table, his pale skin pinched around his eyes. His hair, what was left of it, wispy and white, longed for a comb. Khrushchev’s cheeks, usually plump with mirth, seemed instead puffy with fatigue.
“It’s a shame about Nedelin,” he said.
“He was a great man.”
“Did he ever share with you his stories of the war?”
“Yes, a few.”
“Tell me, do you think men were braver then? Did the bravest all die in the war, and we’re what’s left?”
“I believe,” said the Chief Designer, speaking slowly, “that those times brought out the bravery in all men. Our people had no choice but to be brave.”
“What’s the source of our courage today, then?”
“Certainly our cosmonauts.”