“Yes, yes! That’s my point.” Khrushchev straightened his back, gesturing as he spoke, thrusting his finger above him with each phrase. “You know I’m excited for Byelka to fly, but I’m concerned. They tell me that the Americans are ready to launch their next project. Gemini, it’s called. While we send two dogs, they’ll send two people, Castor and Pollux, if you will.”
The Chief Designer smiled at Khrushchev. It was an insincere expression, he knew, one he only used with the Premier. Mishin and Bushuyev sometimes called the Chief Designer Torgovets for his ability to push the space program ahead as often with charisma as with science.
“I have a proposition that might get you more excited for the mission.”
“Do you, now?” Khrushchev furrowed his brow, but underneath his eyes widened.
“We will rendezvous two ships in outer space. We’ll launch the dogs in Vostok, and then launch a cosmonaut in Voskhod, bringing the new ship into close orbit with the first. They will fly in tandem. Imagine the photograph. The first picture taken of a spaceship while in orbit!”
“This can be done?”
“It will be!”
Khrushchev sprang to his feet. “Chief Designer, you always prove me wrong when I doubt you. One day maybe I’ll learn.”
“It’s your job to be diligent.”
“Who will be the cosmonaut?”
“We have several in training. All excellent candidates.”
“I can’t wait to meet whoever it is.” He sat back down. “This will be safe for Byelshenka?”
“If he’s a brave dog, then I believe there’s nothing to fear.”
“Nedelin was a brave man.”
“Then let’s honor his memory with bravery of our own.”
Khrushchev rapped his knuckles on the table three times, and a door immediately opened on the opposite side of the room from the door where the Chief Designer had entered. A woman came in bearing an exquisite silver tray. Planted on top of the tray were two crystal glasses and a tall bottle full of brown liquid. A paper label on the bottle said something in English. The woman poured the liquid to the brim of each glass and handed one first to Khrushchev and then to the Chief Designer.
“It’s called bourbon,” said Khrushchev. “Kennedy used to send me a case of the stuff now and again. Johnson sends nothing.”
The Chief Designer raised his glass. “To departed friends. May we honor them with our actions.”
“To departed friends,” echoed Khrushchev.
Two glassfuls later, the Chief Designer left the Kremlin by a different hallway, though he could not tell it apart from the first.
Star City, Russia—1964
Nadya sipped tea from a cup with a picture of her face on it. Such tea sets had been popular the year after her launch. As Ignatius put it, every home in the Soviet bloc had received one as a gift for the New Year in 1960. While visiting planetariums and looking for dogs, Leonid had seen the sets in every secondhand store he came across, the cheap porcelain chipped and faded, Nadya’s face reduced to that of a ghost. The tea set at Star City was apparently made of better stuff, the picture still as crisp as ever. Nadya hummed a simple melody between sips.
Leonid sat opposite Nadya at one of the low tables in the lounge, and beside him sat Ignatius, who revolved a teacup in her fingers, orbiting Nadya’s face in and out of view. She was never one to sip, preferring instead to chug down whatever liquid she was served. She pulled out a crumpled pack of cigarettes and tapped the bottom until one poked up. She grabbed it with her teeth directly from the pack.
“You’re not supposed to smoke in the building,” said Nadya. “It damages the equipment.”
“Even the Chief Designer smokes in the building.”
“I’ve never seen him.”
“That’s because the Chief Designer never smokes around you. When you leave a room, he has no compunction about lighting up, even around the most delicate equipment.”
Ignatius reached into the pocket of her leather jacket and pulled out a match that she had somehow struck before it even emerged. The tip of the cigarette fizzed. She took in a deep drag and puffed out a gray cloud that covered the whole corner of the room.
“I don’t like the smell,” said Nadya.
“Nor do I,” said Ignatius. She puffed again. “Have you seen this, Leonid?”
She held up the cigarette box, smoothing out the creases with her thumb. Leonid had seen the brand, Cosmos, before. The boxes came in any number of bright colors with space-themed illustrations. Fantastical renderings of Vostok, portraits of Nadya like those on the teacups, other cosmonauts, Sputnik, rockets. He had lost count of all the different designs. This one, though, he had not seen before, a new portrait. It looked familiar but off, and he knew it was his brother, or himself, despite the fact that the nose was skewed and his smile never stretched so wide.
“I don’t even smoke,” he said.
“There are also playing cards and matchboxes. Oh, and I was sent portraits of Kasha and Byelka for approval. Kasha strikes a noble pose! I should have brought it to show you.”
“A noble pose might be all that’s left of her,” said Nadya.
“Please, Nadya. I didn’t mean to bring the conversation down. We have months yet.”
“One dog for another. I don’t care for the exchange whenever it happens.”
Ignatius pointed with the smoldering end of her cigarette. “Remember that. It’s always an exchange, always one thing for another thing, and if you do it right, then the other thing is of a slightly lesser value than what you get.”
“Lesser value?” Nadya held the teacup up in front of her.
Ignatius’s carefree expression, the one she always bore, soured. “When you have two objects of equal value but only need one, what do you do? Choosing in such a situation is a game of chance. And you were all chosen the day you left your homes. Tsiolkovski had a plan, and none of the rest of us ever had the wherewithal to challenge it. The Chief Designer made it worse, for certain, but the whole mess was put in motion while he was nothing more than a junior engineer. His grand ambitions aside, this is a burden he couldn’t have borne had Tsiolkovski not paved the road for him in advance.”
“I always thought…” Leonid was interrupted by a commotion in the hallway. A cluster of technicians sprinted past the open door, talking to each other all at once, a ruckus like one of Giorgi’s parties. Then came stragglers, running hard and silent except for panted breaths, white lab coats fanning out behind them. More people wore lab coats at Star City than Leonid thought could possibly need to.
Nadya set down her teacup, and Ignatius ground out her cigarette on a corner of the table, smearing the ash into the wood.
“What happened?” asked Ignatius.
“The chamber,” said Nadya. “They’re headed in the direction of the chamber.”
THE HALLWAY OUTSIDE the observation room was filled to bursting with technicians, white coats rubbing up against white coats. They surged as a single mass at the door, but there were too many of them to get anywhere. Ignatius shouted for them to move, and when no one did she and Nadya began to pull them out of the way, and not gently. Several of the technicians tried to fight back until they saw that it was Nadya who moved them. One stubborn man refused, not budging until Ignatius pinned his arm painfully behind his back and led him aside like a prisoner. Leonid watched from a step behind.
Just inside the door to the observation room, Mishin and Bushuyev stood there like bouncers, pushing away anyone who neared the threshold. Nadya and Ignatius made it to the door, Leonid a step after, even as the ranks of technicians closed up behind them. Leonid kept getting shoved in the back. Flailed elbows found a way to his ribs.