BOLDLY GO
“So tell me, Comrade
Colonel, how did it really feel?”
The comrade colonel
laughs uneasily. He’s forty-three and still slim and
boyish-looking, but carries a quiet melancholy around with him like
his own personal storm cloud. “I was very busy all the time,” he
says with a self-deprecating little shrug. “I didn’t have time to
pay attention to myself. One orbit, it only lasted ninety minutes,
what did you expect? If you really want to know, Gherman’s the man
to ask. He had more time.”
“Time.” His
interrogator sighs and leans his chair back on two legs. It’s a
horribly old, rather precious Queen Anne original, a gift to some
tsar or other, many years before the October Revolution. “What a
joke. Ninety minutes, two days, that’s all we got before they
changed the rules on us.”
“‘They,’ Comrade
Chairman?” The colonel looked puzzled.
“Whoever.” The
chairman’s vague wave takes in half the horizon of the richly
paneled Kremlin office. “What a joke. Whoever they were, at least
they saved us from a pasting in Cuba because of that louse Nikita.”
He pauses for a moment, then toys with the wineglass that sits,
half-empty, before him. The colonel has a glass too, but his is
full of grape juice, out of consideration for his past
difficulties. “The ‘whoever’ I speak of are, of course, the brother
socialists from the stars who brought us here.” He grins
humorlessly, face creasing like the muzzle of a shark that smells
blood in the water.
“Brother socialists.”
The colonel smiles hesitantly, wondering if it’s a joke, and if so,
whether he’s allowed to share it. He’s still unsure why he’s being
interviewed by the premier—in his private office, at that. “Do we
know anything of them, sir? That is, am I supposed
to—”
“Never mind.” Aleksey
sniffs, dismissing the colonel’s worries. “Yes, you’re cleared to
know everything on this topic. The trouble is there is nothing to
know, and this troubles me, Yuri Alexeyevich. We infer purpose, the
engine of a greater history at work—but the dialectic is silent on
this matter. I have consulted the experts, asked them to read the
chicken entrails, but none of them can do anything other than
parrot pre-event dogma: ‘Any species advanced enough to do to us
what happened that day must of course have evolved true Communism,
Comrade Premier! Look what they did for us!’ (That was Shchlovskii,
by the way.) And yes, I look and I see six cities that nobody can
live in, spaceships that refuse to stick to the sky, and a
landscape that Sakharov and that bunch of double domes are at a
loss to explain. There are fucking miracles and wonders and
portents in the sky, like a galaxy we were supposed to be part of
that is now a million years too old and shows extensive signs of
construction. There’s no room for miracles and wonders in our
rational world, and it’s giving the comrade general secretary,
Yuri, the comrade general secretary,
stomach ulcers; did you know that?”
The colonel sits up
straight, anticipating the punch line: it’s a well-known fact
throughout the USSR that when Brezhnev says “frog,” the premier
croaks. And here he is in the premier’s office, watching that very
man, Aleksey Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers, third
most powerful man in the Soviet Union, taking a deep
breath.
“Yuri Alexeyevich, I
have brought you here today because I want you to help set Leonid
Illich’s stomach at rest. You’re an aviator and a hero of the
Soviet Union, and more importantly, you’re smart enough to do the
job and young enough to see it through, not like the old farts
cluttering up Stavka. (It’s going to take most of a lifetime to
sort out, you mark my words.) You’re also—you will pardon the
bluntness—about as much use as a fifth wheel in your current
posting right now: we have to face facts, and the sad reality is
that none of Korolev’s birds will ever fly again, not even with the
atomic bomb pusher-thing they’ve been working on.” Kosygin sighs
and shuffles upright in his chair. “There is simply no point in
maintaining the Cosmonaut Training Center. A decree has been
drafted and will be approved next week: the manned-rocket program
is going to be wound up and the Cosmonaut Corps reassigned to other
duties.”
The colonel flinches.
“Is that absolutely necessary, Comrade Chairman?”
Kosygin drains his
wineglass, decides to ignore the implied criticism. “We don’t have
the resources to waste. But, Yuri Alexeyevich, all that training is
not lost.” He grins wolfishly. “I have new worlds for you to
explore and a new ship for you to do it in.”
“A new ship.” The
colonel nods, then does a double take, punch-drunk. “A
ship?”
“Well, it isn’t a
fucking horse,” says Kosygin. He slides a big glossy photograph
across his blotter toward the colonel. “Times have moved on.” The
colonel blinks in confusion as he tries to make sense of the thing
at the center of the photograph. The premier watches his face,
secretly amused: confusion is everybody’s first reaction to the
thing in the photograph.
“I’m not sure I
understand, sir—”
“It’s quite simple:
you trained to explore new worlds. You can’t, not using the
rockets. The rockets won’t ever make orbit. I’ve had astronomers
having nervous breakdowns trying to explain why, but they all agree
on the key point: rockets won’t do it for us here. Something wrong
with the gravity, they say it even crushes falling starlight.” The
chairman taps a fat finger on the photograph. “But you can do it
using this. We invented it, and the bloody Americans didn’t. It’s
called an ekranoplan, and you rocket boys are going to stop being
grounded cosmonauts and learn how to fly it. What do you think,
Colonel Gagarin?”
The colonel whistles
tunelessly through his teeth: he’s finally worked out the scale. It
looks like a flying boat with clipped wings, jet engines clustered
by the sides of its cockpit—but no flying boat ever carried a
runway with a brace of MiG-21s on its back. “It’s bigger than a
cruiser! Is it nuclear-powered?”
“Of course.” The
chairman’s grin slips. “It cost as much as those moon rockets of
Sergei’s, Colonel-General. Try not to
drop it.”
Gagarin glances up,
surprise and awe visible on his face. “Sir, I’m honored,
but—”
“Don’t be.” The
chairman cuts him off. “The promotion was coming your way anyway.
The posting that comes with it will earn you as much honor as that
first orbit. A second chance at space, if you like. But you can’t
fail: the cost is unthinkable. It’s not your skin that will pay the
toll, it’s our entire rationalist civilization.” Kosygin leans
forward intently.
“Somewhere out there
are beings so advanced that they skinned the Earth like a grape and
plated it onto this disk—or worse, copied us all right down to the
atomic level and duplicated us like one of those American Xerox
machines. It’s not just us, though. You are aware of the other
continents in the oceans. We think some of them may be inhabited,
too—nothing else makes sense. Your task is to take the Sergei Korolev, the first ship of its class, on an
historic five-year cruise. You will boldly go where no Soviet man
has gone before, explore new worlds and look for new peoples, and
establish fraternal socialist relations with them. But your primary
objective is to discover who built this giant mousetrap of a world,
and why they brought us to it, and to report back to us—before the
Americans find out.”