“There are two launches just months away. Even if the factory opened on time, it would be too late.”
Mishin and Bushuyev exchanged a glance. “We might have a solution. The docking clamp.”
“What about it?”
“With both capsules in orbit at the same time, one could dock with the other…”
“And the cosmonaut could then bring the dogs aboard the capsule with the heat shield. Yes, that just might work.” The Chief Designer found himself fully awake now, almost bursting with energy. “This will be an even greater accomplishment than we planned. Two ships docking in space! You, comrades, are geniuses.”
“About the dogs,” said Mishin or Bushuyev.
“Yes, yes. What about them?” His mind raced, cycling through all the considerations that this new project required.
“Kasha is gone.”
“What do you mean gone?” He would need to assign additional engineers to the docking project. There had been problems getting a good seal. Sometimes he cursed the Vostok’s spherical shape. So practical and so simple, but it made it hard to attach things to the outside.
“Nadya and Leonid took her.”
“Took her where?” But the one capsule would not have to return to Earth, so maintaining balance for reentry was not required and the docking apparatus could be attached permanently to the door.
“They didn’t return with us from Ukraine.”
“They’re with Ignatius?” The other ship, though, would need some sort of detachable clamp. Mishin and Bushuyev had been working on one. They would not have suggested the idea if they did not think it would work. Neither was much for taking risks.
“They left on their own. It’s unclear where they might have gone.”
“Surely Ignatius knows. She would never let the two of them out of her sight.”
“We saw them leave, and Ignatius wasn’t with them.”
“Are you telling me they ran away?” He imagined the docking clamp releasing from a capsule and tumbling away through open space.
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t try to stop them?” The Chief Designer’s voice inched up in volume with each word, the hard syllables coming gravelly from the back of his throat.
“We tried.”
He shouted, “But you failed!”
Mishin took a half step forward and spoke the Chief Designer’s name. “You of all people should possess the capacity to forgive a failure.”
The Chief Designer’s scar throbbed.
“Why would they leave me?” he asked.
“The reasons should be obvious,” said Mishin or Bushuyev. “The real question, the one that should comfort you, is why did they stay for so long?”
The Chief Designer would have liked to weep. He felt the sorrow, yes, like cold in his bones, but part of him already looked for a solution. The mission was ready. He would allow sadness later. Always later. What he needed now was a pilot and a dog.
Kharkiv, Ukraine—1964
Leonid and Nadya had made it to the station in Kharkiv too late to catch the train he had originally intended, the one Ignatius had marked on the map. It would have carried them to Kiev, and there in the throngs of the city they could have disappeared. At least Leonid assumed that was Ignatius’s plan. At least that much of her plan was his plan, too. But while Nadya was a trained pilot and he had been taught the basics, neither turned out to be much as navigators. First, it took them more than an hour to find a store where they could purchase new clothes. They changed in the store, and left their uniforms behind. Leonid regretted abandoning his medals, not because he felt he had earned them, but because they were not his to do with as he pleased. The medals belonged to his brother.
Leonid took the map and the money and the note from the Americans, and transferred them to the pocket of his new pants. The fabric was too stiff, sharp folds that prodded him when he climbed back into the car.
If it was possible to make every wrong turn on the way to the station, they had done it. Lefts instead of rights, missed turns, street names that had no corresponding mark on the map. It was only by luck that they discovered the station. Out of nowhere, its shallow brown dome sprung into view, and just the top of the sign that identified it. The building looked more like a church than a station, except of course for the trains.
Leonid ran inside to buy tickets while Nadya found a place to park the car, but it was already an hour too late. The attendant, shuffling a stack of unused tickets as if it were a deck of cards, told him they would have to wait until tomorrow. The attendant stared hard at Leonid’s face.
“You look like…”
“I get that a lot lately,” said Leonid in Ukrainian, and hurried away.
A large map, taller than Leonid and twice as wide as that, hung on the wall opposite the ticket counter. The map had been glued directly to the plaster, paper curling out at the corners. It seemed to show every rail line in the whole country, even a few stations in southern Russia. There were many more here than on the map Ignatius had given him, marked in red like veins. Or was it arteries that carried red blood and veins blue? Giorgi would have known. A train chugged by on the other side of the wall.
He scanned the map of his home country and was saddened to recognize so few of the place names. What had he ever really known of it except the valley? Were there still people he knew there? Did they have newspapers or television? Had they seen his face? If they had, did anyone recognize him? There were no pictures of him from when he was a boy. Well, many were taken when he first came to Star City, but he declined to ever look at them. He did not know if his appearance now bore any resemblance to the boy he once was.
There, in the tiniest font imaginable, tucked in the middle of darker greens that meant mountains, he saw one name he knew. Bohdan, the hero of Ukraine. He tried to remember Grandmother’s stories. She repeated them so often he should have known them by heart. But he only remembered a few. The hero, like the town that bore his name, had faded to near nothing.
At the bottom of the map, abutting the Black Sea, where Bohdan Khmelnytsky had oared for the Ottomans, sat Odessa. Leonid knew nothing about the city except the name. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out the note from the Americans, folded into a square, fraying at the edges and ripping along the creases. He opened the paper gently using his fingertips and reread the note: Hope to see you soon! —Your Friends from America. Could he escape to America? He knew even less about America than he did about Odessa. Defecting was not the escape Ignatius had intended, but no matter how grateful Leonid might have been for her unexpected assistance, he still did not consider her a friend. To her he owed nothing. To Nadya, though…
He followed one red line on the map east from Odessa. It marked a jagged path to Kharkiv, to the very station where he stood. He had planned to go to Kiev because it seemed like the best place to start, but it turned out he could get to where he was going directly. Leonid returned to the ticket counter and bought two tickets to Odessa. The train left in less than an hour.
“You can’t get to Kiev from there,” said the attendant. “At least not easily.”
“The destination doesn’t matter much.”
But it did. For the first time he felt where he was going mattered. Nadya came in, Kasha trotting unleashed beside her. Nadya gazed up, inspecting the architecture in a disinterested way. The paint on the underside of the dome was flaking off, revealing an older version of the same color underneath.
“Tomorrow, we’ll be on the other side of the country,” Leonid told her.