“Why are you telling us this?” asked Nadya.
“I just ask you to remember that the Chief Designer does care for you. He may not know how to state it. His actions may seem contrary to it. But he has always, as long as I have known him, had a plan.”
Leonid asked, “If not for his plan, would my brother still be alive today?”
Mishin flinched. “Maybe so.”
Leonid felt hot red rise up his neck and into his cheeks. His hand gripped the crank as if he might close the window with Mishin’s arm still inside. The crank was made from the cheapest plastic. Could he squeeze hard enough to shatter it? Nadya took his other hand.
“We’re leaving,” she said.
Bushuyev put a hand on Mishin’s shoulder and pulled him away from the car.
“We didn’t see you,” said Bushuyev.
But he and Mishin both stared at the car until Nadya maneuvered it around the corner.
“Perhaps in America it will be a simple matter to go for a drive,” said Nadya. She glanced in the mirror.
“I would kill for anything in my life to be simple,” said Leonid.
“No, you wouldn’t.”
Leonid took deep breaths, a calming technique that the Chief Designer had ordered the cosmonauts, and their twins, to master. Even the air he breathed, thought Leonid, would be a reminder of that man. Maybe escape was a fantasy. Leonid unfolded Ignatius’s map and traced his finger along the lines.
Kaliningrad, Moscow Oblast, Russia—1964
The Chief Designer met his private car at Domodedovo Airport while the rest of the party took a bus back to Star City. He would have liked to have gone with them. The thought of his bed appealed to him, but it was early still, and he felt he owed it to Giorgi to work even harder than before. His stomach protested, a wash of burning bile welling up at the base of his esophagus. He swallowed hard three times, a trick they taught the cosmonauts to fight nausea, but it was not particularly effective. Heartburn and nausea were different conditions, after all. Had Giorgi felt like this all over? In Siberia, the Chief Designer had seen men burn their hands over candle flames. They were so cold that they could not feel the heat until it was too late.
The road paralleled the railway on the route to RKK Energia, his old headquarters before Star City, and still the site of Vostok’s—and now Voskhod’s—final assembly. If one followed the tracks in the other direction, for thousands of kilometers, they would lead eventually to the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Every capsule, every piece of every rocket, had already traveled such vast distances before it ever made it into space. The tracks veered away from the road.
The old part of the factory appeared first through the trees, tall windows surrounding the whole structure, giving off warped, wavy reflections. The walls were crested with a thin outcropping of brick, a pathetic attempt at decoration. His old office was in the narrow turret on the near corner, concrete and glass stretching high above the complex like the control tower back at the airport. It was still his office, he supposed, but he did not recall the last time he had sat at the desk. He wondered if reports piled up there like they did at Star City. He would have to check.
Here the road intersected the tracks, the car bouncing across the rails, nearly launching the Chief Designer’s head into the ceiling. Thump thump. A crane car, splotched with red rust like patches of inflamed skin, idled on the tracks. A decade ago, he had requisitioned the funds to build a shelter for the crane, but the request had been denied. At least a tarpaulin would have helped, but he had forgotten about the crane until right now. He knew he would forget about it again as soon as he entered the factory.
His driver parked the car in a weedy patch of dirt by the door to the offices. It was supposed to be the best parking space, the shortest walk in winter from car to front door, but this entrance was the farthest from the factory proper, and a maze of hallways lay between it and any of the destinations the Chief Designer might actually seek out. He exited the car and walked toward the other door, the one that opened directly onto the factory floor, some hundred meters away. He was only halfway there when the rumble started. He felt it first through his feet and then the tall windows rattled in their old frames. He stepped away from the wall, worried that at any moment one of the panes might shake loose. Ripples of heat rose above the factory roof, quivering the trees and clouds beyond. The twin smokestacks of the forge seemed to move as if they were made of the same smoke that burped out of the top of them.
He was late. The heat shield test had already begun. He hurried, almost trotting, trusting his feet even though the ground seemed at any moment ready to shake from under him. The heat hit even before he rounded the building. Then the glow, still half a kilometer away, emerged like a second sun, but too close, rising from within the earth instead of far over the horizon. The Chief Designer squinted against the blaze. One of his RD-107 engines had been mounted horizontally to a reinforced concrete slab, the open end of the nozzle aimed directly at a working mock-up of Voskhod.
It was this engine that had destroyed the Chief Designer’s hopes time and again. There had been so many tests that he could identify the exact moment the heat shield would fail by the particular color its surface blazed, as it went from red to orange to cream, and just before it reached white the whole thing would erupt, liquid metal spraying from the structure underneath, solidifying into abstract hunks that still marred the concrete slab like sculpture.
Shielding his eyes, the Chief Designer fumbled along the wall until he found the door to the control room, little more than a sheet metal hut. The technicians, eyes glued to dials and readouts, did not greet him. One console in the corner let out a repetitive beep, like a heart monitor. A teacup tittered on a saucer. The cup had Nadya’s face printed on it.
The Chief Designer retrieved a mask from beside the slitted observation window. The mask was patterned after the kind used by welders, but without the lower half, just a glass visor covered with several layers of BoPET, which allowed one to look directly into the flame of the engine, to pick out details that otherwise would have been lost in the blaze. Through the visor, the thrust of the engine always reminded the Chief Designer of Amsel Falls. He and several other engineers had managed to visit the waterfall on their way home from Germany after the war, diverting their convoy, trucks full of V-2 rocket parts and more than a few German scientists, far to the south. It was the only time the Chief Designer had ever left the soil of the Soviet Union. He had wanted something to remember from the trip other than the insides of German bunkers. He could have been executed for that excursion, for risking the precious spoils of war on a personal vacation. But by that point, the Chief Designer was, if not numbed to, at least familiar with the looming threat of execution.
More than just the sight of the falls, though, the engine reminded him of the sound of cascading water. Amsel Falls had struck him then as the loudest thing he had ever heard. The power of it humbled him. Now, the flames of the engine affected him the same way. He sometimes thought he was too proud a man for his own business. He wanted control, and every test, every launch, every single day reminded him that he had none.
The heat shield burned at what seemed like a slow pace, concentric rings of bright flame starting from center and burning the surface layer outward, like sheets of paper flaring away one after the other. The color went from orange to yellow to cream. The rings of flame came faster. This was where heat always won. This was the moment when Nadya, the one who died, would have felt the first shudder of a problem as the capsule reentered the atmosphere. She would have had just enough time to wonder about it before the capsule burst apart, disintegrating to nothing.