Omon Ra (12 page)

“O-oh, in Africa there’s a river as long as this … O-oh, in Africa there’s a mountain as high as this … O-oh, crocodiles and hippos … O-oh, monkeys and rhinos … O-oh … Ah-ah-ah-ah …”

On the word “rhinos” there was a crackling like a piece of tarpaulin ripping, and a moment later there were just short beeps, but just a second before that—if it wasn’t my imagination—Sema’s song turned into a scream. I was jolted again, my back hit against the ceiling, and I dropped the receiver. From the change in the roaring of the engines, I guessed the second stage had begun firing. Probably the most terrible thing for Sema was switching on the engine. I imagined what it was like—breaking the safety glass and pressing the red button, knowing all the while that a second later the huge gaping openings of the rocket tubes would spring into violent life. Then I remembered Ivan, and I grabbed the receiver again, but it was still beeping.

I hit the hook a few times and yelled: “Ivan! Ivan! Can you hear me?”

“What is it?” I finally heard him say.

“Sema, he’s …”

“Yes,” he said, “I heard it all.”

“Are you going soon?”

“In seven minutes,” he said. “D’you know what I’m thinking about now?”

“What?”

“I suddenly remembered how I used to catch pigeons as a kid. You know, we took this big wooden crate and sprinkled breadcrumbs under it and stood it on edge, and we propped up the opposite edge with a stick with about ten metres of string tied to it. Then we hid in the bushes or behind a bench, and when a pigeon wandered under the crate, we pulled the string. Then the crate fell on it.”

“That’s right,” I said. “We did the same.”

“And you remember, when the crate comes down, the pigeon starts trying to fly off and beats its wings against the sides, so the crate even jumps about?”

“I remember,” I said.

Ivan didn’t say anything else.

In the meantime, it had turned quite cold. And it was harder to breathe too—after every movement I wanted to catch my breath, as if I’d just run up a long flight of stairs. I began lifting the oxygen mask to my face to take a breath.

“And I remember how we used to make bombs with cartridge cases and the sulphur from matches. You stuff it in real tight, and there has to be a little hole in the side, and you put several matches in a row beside it…”

“Cosmonaut Grechka.” The bass voice in the receiver
was the one that had woken me with abuse before the start of the flight. “Make ready.”

“Yes, sir,” Ivan answered without enthusiasm. “And then you tie them on with thread—insulating tape’s better, because sometimes the thread comes loose. If you want to throw it out of the window, say from the seventh floor, so it explodes in midair, then you need four matches. And …”

“Stop that talking,” said the bass voice. “Put on your oxygen mask.”

“Yes, sir. You don’t strike the last one with the box, though, the best thing is to light it with a dog-end. Or else you might shift them away from the hole.”

I heard nothing after that except the usual crackle of interference. Then I was bounced against the wall again, and the short beeps sounded in the receiver. The third stage had fired. The fact that my friend Ivan had just departed this life at an altitude of forty-five kilometres—as simply and unpretentiously as he did everything—strangely failed to make any impression on me. I didn’t feel any grief; quite the opposite, I felt a strange exhilaration and euphoria.

I suddenly realised that I was losing consciousness. That is, I didn’t notice when I lost consciousness, I noticed when I regained it. A moment before, I was holding the receiver to my ear, and now it was lying on the floor; there was a ringing in my ears, and I gazed down at it in stupefaction from my saddle up under the ceiling. A moment before, the oxygen mask was hanging round my neck like a scarf—and now as I shook my head in an effort to rouse myself, it was lying on the floor beside the telephone receiver. I realised I needed
oxygen, so I reached for the mask and put it to my mouth—I felt better instantly, and I could feel I was very cold. Fastening all the buttons of my padded jacket, I put the collar up and lowered the earflaps of my fur cap. The rocket was shaking slightly. I wanted to sleep, and even though I knew it wasn’t a good idea, I couldn’t fight it—I folded my hands on the handlebars and closed my eyes.

I dreamed of the moon—the way Mitiok used to draw it in our childhood: a black sky, pale yellow craters, and a distant mountain range. Walking slowly and smoothly towards the blazing orb of the sun hanging above the horizon was a bear, with its front paws held out in front of its muzzle: it had the golden star of a Hero of the Soviet Union on its chest, and a trickle of dried blood ran from the corner of its mouth, which was set in a pitiful grin. Suddenly it stopped and turned its face towards me. I felt it watching me, and I raised my head to glance into its motionless blue eyes.

“I and this entire world are nothing but a thought someone is thinking,” the bear said in a quiet voice.

I woke up. Everything was very quiet. Clearly some part of my consciousness had maintained contact with the outside world, and the sudden silence had affected me like an alarm clock going off. I leaned down to the spy holes in the wall. The nose cone had already separated from the rocket, and there in front of my eyes was the earth.

I tried to work out how long I’d been asleep, but I couldn’t put any definite figure on it. It must have been a few hours at least: I felt hungry already, and I began rummaging through the things on the upper shelf—I
thought I’d seen a can opener there, but it wasn’t there now. I decided it must have been shaken off onto the floor and started looking around for it, but just at that moment the phone rang.

“Hello!”

“Stand by, Ra. Omon, can you hear me?”

“Yes, Comrade Flight Leader.”

“So far everything seems to be going okay. There was just one difficult moment, when the telemetry malfunctioned. Not that it actually malfunctioned, you understand, they simply activated another system in parallel and the telemetry failed to operate. They even lost control for a few minutes. That was when you were short of air, remember?”

He was speaking in a strange way, quick and excited. I decided he must be feeling very nervous, though just for a moment I suspected he was drunk.

“You gave everyone a good scare, Omon. Sleeping like that. We almost had to postpone the launch.”

“I’m sorry, Comrade Flight Leader.”

“Never mind, never mind. It’s not your fault. They just drugged you too heavily before the trip to Baikonur. So far everything’s going just fine.”

“Where am I now?”

“On the working trajectory already. You’re flying towards the moon. You mean you slept through the escape from earth orbit too?”

“I must have. You mean Otto’s already …”

“Yes, Otto’s gone already. Surely you can see the nose cone’s already separated? But you had to do two extra orbits. Otto panicked at first. He just wouldn’t switch on the rockets. We thought he’d chickened out,
but then the lad pulled himself together … Anyway, he sent you his regards.”

“And Dima?”

“What about Dima? Dima’s okay. The automatic landing system isn’t used during the inertial section of the flight. Though he still has the corrections to make … Matiushevich, can you hear us?”

“Yes, sir,” said Dima’s voice in the receiver.

“Okay, you rest for now,” said the Flight Leader. “Standby tomorrow at 1500 hours, then correction of trajectory. Over and out.”

I put down the receiver and pressed my eyes against the spy holes to gaze at the blue semicircle of the earth. I’d often read how all the cosmonauts were astounded by the sight of our planet from space. They wrote about some fabulously beautiful misty effect, and how the cities with their shining electric lights on the dark side reminded them of huge bonfires, and how they could even see the rivers on the daylight side—well, none of it’s true. The thing the earth seen from space resembles most is a large school globe, like I remembered seeing through the steamed-up glass of a gas mask. I was soon sick of the sight; I rested my head as comfortably as I could on my arms and went to sleep again.

When I woke up, the earth was no longer visible. All I could make out through the spy holes were the white spots of the distant and unattainable stars, blurred by the lenses. I imagined the existence of a huge, immensely hot sphere hanging entirely unsupported in the icy void, billions of kilometres from the closest stars, those tiny gleaming dots, of which all we know is that they exist, and even that’s not certain, because a star
can die, while its light will carry on travelling out in all directions, so really we don’t know anything about stars, except that their life is terrible and senseless, since all their movements through space are predetermined and subject to the laws of mechanics, which leave no hope at all for any chance encounters. But then, I thought, even though we human beings always seem to be meeting each other, and laughing, and slapping each other on the shoulder, and saying goodbye, there’s still a certain special dimension into which our consciousness sometimes takes a frightened peep, a dimension in which we also hang quite motionless in a void where there’s no up or down, no yesterday or tomorrow, no hope of drawing closer to each other or even exercising our will and changing our fate; we judge what happens to others from the deceptive twinkling light that reaches us, and we spend all our lives journeying towards what we call the light, although its source may have ceased to exist long ago. And me, I thought, all my life I’ve been journeying towards the moment when I would soar up over the crowds of what the slogans called the workers and the peasants, the soldiers and the intelligentsia, and now here I am hanging in brilliant blackness on the invisible threads of fate and trajectory—and now I see that becoming a heavenly body is not much different from serving a life sentence in a prison carriage that travels round and round a circular railway line without ever stopping.

We travelled through space at a speed of two and a half kilometres a second, and the inertial section of the flight lasted about three days, but I had the feeling I’d been flying for at least a week. Probably because the sun passed in front of the spy holes several times a day, and every time I was able to watch a quite incredibly beautiful sunrise and sunset.

All that was left now of the immense rocket was the lunar module, made up of the correction and braking stage, where Dima Matiushevich was sitting, and the descent vehicle, that is, the moonwalker on its platform. In order to save fuel, the nose cone had separated before escape from earth orbit, and now there was open space beyond the fuselage of the moonwalker. The lunar module was flying backwards, so to speak, with its main rocket pointing towards the moon, and gradually the way I felt about it changed just as it had with the cool lift in the Lubyanka building, when it was transformed from a mechanism for going down underground into a device for going up to the surface.

At first the lunar module rose higher and higher above the earth, until at some point it gradually became clear that it was falling towards the moon. But there was a difference. In the lift I went down and came up
with my head pointing upwards, but I hurtled out of earth orbit with my head pointing downwards; it was only later, after a day or so of the flight, that I found myself with my head upwards, falling with ever-increasing speed down a black well, clutching the handlebars of my bicycle and waiting for its nonexistent wheels to collide silently with the moon.

I had time for all these thoughts because for the time being I had nothing to do. I often felt like talking to Dima, but he was always busy with all his complicated corrections to the trajectory. Sometimes I picked up the receiver and heard his incomprehensible exchanges with the engineers at Central Flight Control:

“Forty-three degrees … Fifty-seven … Yaw …”

I listened to all this for a little while, then gave up on it. As far as I could understand, Dima’s main task was to catch the sun in one optical device, the moon in another, measure something, and transmit the result to earth, where they had to check the actual trajectory with the projected one and calculate the length of the corrective impulse required from the engines. Judging from the fact that I was jerked about quite roughly on my saddle several times, Dima seemed to be coping with his task.

When the shocks stopped, I waited about half an hour, picked up the receiver, and called him.

“Hello! Dima!”

“Yes, I hear you,” he said in his usual dry manner.

“Have you corrected the trajectory, then?”

“Seems like it.”

“Was it difficult?”

“It was fine,” he answered.

“Listen,” I said, “where did you pick up all that stuff? All those degrees and things? We didn’t have any of that in class.”

“I served two years in a strategic rocket detachment,” he said. “The directional system’s much the same, only you use the stars. And without any radio communications—you work it all out yourself on a calculator. Make a mistake and you’re fucked.”

“And if you don’t make a mistake?”

Dima didn’t answer that one.