THE CHIEF DESIGNER peered into each room he passed until he came to one where the patient was completely covered by a white sheet. He entered and pulled the sheet back, revealing the black face of a mummy, dry skin stretched tight, lips shriveled back to reveal charred teeth. He had once taken his son to see a mummy at an Egyptian exhibition in Moscow years before. The mummy had terrified the boy. Only a trip to a whole other museum, one with taxidermied animals posed as if in nature, had finally dispelled the fright.
There was nothing to identify the thing before the Chief Designer as young Giorgi. Whatever had made his face recognizable, that made it recognizable as a face, had burned away. Had it not been still attached to a body, the Chief Designer could have dismissed this face as no more than an old hunk of wood, weathered to black. He touched the face. It felt like plastic. He tried to ignore the smell.
He had seen worse in the gulag. A desiccated corpse had nowhere near the gut-churning effect of a fresh wound. The smell was not so pungent as gangrene. With Giorgi he did not have to watch a body slowly rot away. It had been hot and fast. The Chief Designer massaged the scar on his scalp.
“Giorgi, my friend. I was finally ready for you. What’s the story from the Bible? Who has read a Bible in decades? My mother, though, took us to church. There wasn’t a church proper, but we met in the basement of an apartment building. One of the men who lived there read passages from the Bible and then explained them, as if such stories required explanation. It was the story of the prodigal son, Giorgi. He was the one who left and came back. I was going to bring you back.”
The Chief Designer took labored breaths. The simple act of talking exhausted him, how he imagined the cosmonauts must feel in the centrifuge. He rubbed his eyes.
“I should weep for you, my friend, but it seems I can’t. One day, I’ll grieve you properly. All of Russia will. You were the last of the original six. The last true cosmonaut. The only one.”
He pulled the sheet back over Giorgi’s face. His hands trembled. He turned. Ignatius stood in the doorway.
“You’re more sentimental than most in Star City would suspect,” she said.
“What will you do with the body?” asked the Chief Designer.
“We’ll bury him in his hometown. His family will be told that he died in a training accident. Training with planes, mind you. No statues, I’m afraid. Not yet.”
“If I don’t live to see the day when he can be honored, will you see to it?”
“I’m not that much younger than you, but yes, I’ll make sure his statue is a particularly majestic one.”
“You make jokes?”
“How else do we cope with this?”
“You can start by reassuring me that all of it hasn’t been a mistake.”
Ignatius chuckled. “What will you do now?”
“I’m afraid that the only solution is to make my largest mistake yet.”
“Which is?”
“There is one fully trained cosmonaut left.”
“You wouldn’t, would you?”
“Tell me an alternative. Do you know where I was before I came to the hospital? I was at the Kremlin. I announced my plans to Khrushchev. Not just sending his dog to space, but a cosmonaut at the same time. The General Designer’s heat shield works. We can save the dogs without needing twins for them. But that wasn’t enough for me. I promised a human flight, too.”
“It’s Nadya, then, who will finally fly her mission.”
Ignatius took one step into the room. Two men entered behind her, each wearing a black coat. The Chief Designer realized how difficult it was to tell an undertaker from a security officer. The man on the left carried a long black bag draped over his arm, canvas coated with rubber. He removed the sheet from Giorgi, spread the bag alongside his body, and with the help of the other man lifted the body, light as paper, into the bag’s long slit. The zipper ratcheted loud in the room.
MARS HEARD the commotion in the hallway outside the radio room, but he did not go to investigate. He had been living there full-time for a month, only leaving to get food and relieve himself and bathe but seldom that. The Chief Designer had visited less and less, and then Mishin and Bushuyev, too. They still stopped by occasionally to speak a few words to Leonid, but even those had been reduced to mere pleasantries. Leonid, for his part, never had much to say to anyone but Mars. Whenever one of the others spoke to him, he would answer their questions, then echo the questions back, wait for an answer, and comment on it with a single word. Good. Unfortunate. Interesting. Then the conversation ended, the duty of both sides fulfilled.
It reminded Mars of the two young engineers, a man and woman whose names he could not remember, who had begun to spend time together, sneaking away to walk on the quad, taking meals at the same time, pressuring the chiefs to put them on the same projects. That initial spark had faded, though. After a few months they made only the motions of a relationship. Yes, the couple still ate at the same time, but where once the meals had been about little touches and whispered, punch-drunk exchanges, they descended into rote silence. They seemed to say just enough to each other as necessary, as if conversation were an unwanted obligation. It was no surprise to anyone, except maybe the couple, when things finally fizzled out completely. It had been over for some time without them even noticing.
Maybe the Chief Designer and the others could not come to grips with a thing that should have ended long ago still going. They had expected days, and instead it was months. They had prepared only so many words, so many thoughts, and their supply was long since exhausted. Leonid refused to die. No, that was not it. Dying simply did not occur to Leonid. That is what Mars had concluded. Death was the thought of death. So far, Leonid had other things to think about.
Mars was lying on the cot when the radio crackled. Usually he was up and waiting, but he had been lost in his own thoughts, the only thoughts, besides Leonid’s, he ever had access to anymore.
“Hello?” came Leonid’s voice from the speaker. Every day, the sound seemed farther away, even though Mars knew the opposite was true. The orbit decayed. Every moment brought Leonid a hairsbreadth closer to the atmosphere and the same fiery reentry that had claimed Nadya. And Mars’s brother.
Mars tumbled getting off the cot and fell against the console, bashing his elbow. He turned on the microphone and spoke through his teeth, gritted against the numbing pain that shot up the length of his arm.
“I’m here,” he said.
“Is anyone else with you?” asked Leonid.
“No one else.”
“I’ve been thinking…”
“Yes?”
“I’ve been thinking about why I was fearful before the launch. I knew it meant my death, yes. I knew the dangers, that my death might come before I could actually accomplish anything. I knew I might never beam back a single word, which seems strange now, since I have spoken so many to you. Do you write them down?”
“I didn’t think to.”
“That’s all right. It would make a terrible book, anyway.”
“Certainly the book would have been hard to follow.”
“I’ve been thinking that the reason I was scared is not because of what fate awaited me but because of the many familiar things I had to leave behind. All I knew since childhood was Star City. Maybe I was always just a martyr-in-training there, but I knew the people and they knew me. I had a routine. I had a bedroom in which I lived for more years than I can remember. I still know what books are on the shelves. Has anyone cleaned out my room?”
“As far as I know it remains untouched. Leonid, your brother, was supposed to move in, but he refused. He stayed in his old room in the twins’ dormitory.”