
His thumb left a red star in its path.
"I am listening," Korolev said, "and so is everyone else." He was aware of fewer noises, fewer motions, from the other miners, and some of the Institute’s
concern for security had returned to him, along with an echo of his voice of command. "In my day," Korolev continued, "such talk was classified."
Shandarin shrugged, grinned. "I am speaking only to you, Comrade," he said. He inclined his head backward, toward the soldiers, and said, "We may speak
freely before cretins," then flicked a gloved finger toward the miners, "and even more so before dead men." He slid a page from Korolev’s hands and held it up for all
to see, turned completely around, waved the sheet a little so that it fluttered. No miner met his gaze. He turned back to Korolev. "Shall we go?" He feigned a shiver.
"I am not so used to the cold as you."
In 1933, after the GIRD-X triumph, after the vodka and the toasts and the ritual congratulations from Comrade Stalin (delivered in great haste by a nearsighted
bureaucrat who looked as if he expected rockets to roar out of the doorways at any moment), Korolev and his mentor Tsander, who would die so soon thereafter, had
left their joyous colleagues downstairs and taken their celebration aloft, clambered onto the steep, icy rooftop of the Moscow office building that housed the State
Reaction Scientific Research Institute. To hell with the vodka; they toasted each other, and the rocket, and the city, and the planet, with a smuggled and hoarded
bottle of French champagne.
"To the moon!"
"To the sun!"
"To Mars!"
They ate caviar and crabmeat and smoked herring, smacked like gourmands and sailed the empty cans into orbit over the frozen streets of the capital. Never,
not even in the Kolyma, had Korolev so relished a meal.
He remembered all this, and much more, as he sat beside Shandarin in the sledge that hissed away from the snow-covered entrance of Mine Seventeen. He
burned to examine the papers, but they could wait. He folded them and tucked them into his worn and patched jacket, through which he almost could have read
them had he wanted to. As Shandarin regarded him in silence, he pulled the crust of bread from his pocket and began nibbling it with obvious relish, as if it were
the finest delicacy plucked from the ovens of the Romanovs. He settled back, closed his eyes, and in eating the bread relived the bursting tang of the caviar, the
transcendent release of the launch, the blanketing embrace of the night sky that no longer danced beyond reach. In this way he communed with his former self, who
dropped gently down from the rooftop of the Institute and joined him, ready to resume their great work, and the sledge shot across the snow as if propelled by
yearning and fire.
II. Baikonur Cosmodrome, September 1957
Awakened by the commingled howls of all the souls in Hell, a startled Evgeny Aksyonov lifted the curtain of his compartment window and looked out onto a
circus. Loping alongside the train was a parallel train of camels, a dozen or more of the gangling beasts, their fencepost teeth bared as they yelped and brayed and
groaned, lips curled in great ropy sneers. Bulging gray sacks jogged at their flanks, and swaying atop each mount was a swarthy, bearded rider in flowing robes,
with a snarl to rival that of his camel.
So this is Kazakhstan, thought Aksyonov, who before this trip never had been farther east than the outskirts of Moscow, the home of a maiden aunt who baked
fine tarts. He breathed the choking dust and coughed with enthusiasm; he was too young to be uncomfortable. One of the camel drivers noticed him gawking,
grinned, and raised a shaggy fist in a gesture so rude that Aksyonov hastily dropped the curtain and sat back, fingering his own suddenly inadequate beard. He
rummaged in his canvas bag for the worn copy of Perelman’s Interplanetary Travels, which he opened at random and began to read, though he could have recited
the passage with his eyes closed. He soon nodded off again, and in his dreams he was a magnificent bronze fighter of the desert, who brandished a scimitar to defy
the rockets that split the sky.
No conductor, no fellow passenger disturbed his sleep, for Evgeny Aksyonov was bound for a place that did not officially exist, to meet a man who officially
had no name. Access to such non-places and non-people was strictly regulated, and so Aksyonov was the only passenger aboard the train.
"Come," the soldier on the platform said, after he peered from Aksyonov’s face to his photo and back again just enough to make Aksyonov nervous. "The
Chief Designer expects you."
For fifteen minutes or more, he drove Aksyonov along a freshly paved highway so wide and straight it seemed inevitable, past a series of construction sites
where the hollow outlines of immense buildings rose from pits and heaps of dirt. Gangs of workers swarmed about. Atop one pile of earth, three armed soldiers
kept watch: the men swinging picks below must be zeks, political prisoners, the Motherland’s most menial laborers. A gleaming rail spur crossed and recrossed the
road, and Aksyonov began to brace himself for each intersection, because the driver did not slow down. Some completed buildings looked like administrative
offices, others like army barracks. Behind one barracks were more inviting dwellings, a half-dozen yurts. A couple of Kazakh men were in the process of rolling a
seventh into place, as if it were a great hide-covered hoop.
The driver abandoned Askyonov without speech or ceremony at the concrete lip of a kilometer-wide pit. Aksyonov looked down sixty meters along the steep
causeway that would channel the rocket blasts. He shivered and retreated from the edge of the launch pad, a tremendous concrete shelf hundreds of meters square.
No amount of rocket research would make him fond of heights. Above him soared three empty gantries, thirty-meter talons that would close on the rocket and hold
it fast until liftoff.
Hundreds of workers dashed about the pad. Some drove small electric carts, some clambered along scaffolds that reached into the tips of the gantries and the
depths of the pit. Among them were many Kazakh men, distinguishable even at a distance by their felt skullcaps. Amid all this activity, Aksyonov tried to look as
knowledgeable and useful as possible while he guarded his luggage and felt homesick.
As he considered getting out his book, he was jolted nearly off his feet by a voice that boomed and echoed from everywhere: to left, to right, the pit, the sky.
"Testing. Testing. One two three. Tsiolkovsky Tsiolkovsky Tsiolkovsky."
Then came several prolonged and deafening blasts, like gusts into a microphone. Aksyonov clapped his hands over his ears. No one else in the whole anthill
took any visible notice of the racket.
"Hello. Hello. Hello." The words rolled across the concrete in waves and rattled Aksyonov to the bone. "Can you hear me? Eh? Hello? I’m asking you–you
there with the beard. Yes, you, the one doing no work. Can you hear me?"
Aksyonov released his ears and looked about the launch pad. Unsure where to direct his response, he waved both hands high above his head.
"Good," the voice said. "Wait there. I’ll be right up–" The next words were swallowed in a spasm of rattling coughs that echoed off the sides of the pit and
seemed to well up from the earth itself. Aksyonov covered his ears again. In mid-cough, the amplification stopped, and all that fearsome reverberation contracted to
a single small voice that hacked and cleared its throat far across the concrete pad.