the minutes wore away.
It would not be long now. He anticipated his return to Earth, when the radio commands from the ground control would order his spaceship to prepare itself. It would orient in its orbit, and his retro-rockets would blaze, slamming him with a full-body blow, forcing him back into his couch. Then would come the brief fall into the atmosphere, the flames around his portholes as the ablative coating of Swallow turned to ash, so that he became a man-made comet, streaking across the skies of Africa and Asia. And at last his ejection seat would hurl him from the spent capsule, and from four thousand metres he would drift to Earth on his parachute – landing at last in the deep spring air, perhaps on the outskirts of some small village, deep in the homeland, such as his own Klushino. The reverie warmed him.
Have you come from outer space?
Yes, he would say. Yes, I have. Would you believe it? I certainly have …
But the stars, he would have to tell them, are green.
… We can’t continue. The anomalies are mounting. The Poyekhali is becoming aware of its situation.
Then we must terminate.
Do you authorize that? I don’t have the position to –
Just do it. I will accept the blame.
Again, the voices! He tried to shut them out, to concentrate on his work, as he had been trained and he had rehearsed.
He had no desire to return to Earth a crazy man.
And yet, even if it had to be so – horrible for him, for Valentia! – still his flight would not have been without value, for at least something would have been learned about the insidious deadliness of space.
He threw himself into his routine of duties once more. The end of the flight was crowding towards him, and he still had items to complete. He monitored his pulse, respiration, appetite and sensations of weightlessness; he transmitted electrocardiograms, pneumograms, electroencephalograms, skin-galvanic measurements and electro-oculograms, made by placing tiny silver electrodes at the corners of his eyes.
He ate a brief meal, a lunch squeezed from tubes stored in a locker set in the wall. He ate not because he was hungry, but because nobody had eaten in space before: Gagarin ate to prove that such normal human activities were possible, here in the mouth of space. He even drifted out of his couch and exercised; he had been given an ingenious regime based on rubber strips, which he could perform without doffing his pressure suit …
Again, a noise from outside the craft. Unfamiliar voices, a babble.
Laughter.
Were they laughing at him? As if he was some ape in a zoo cage?
And – Holy Mother! – a scraping on the hull, as if hands were clambering over it.
The noises of the craft – the steady hum and whir of the instruments, the clatter of busy pumps and fans – all of it stopped, abruptly, as if someone had turned a switch.
Gagarin waited, his breath loud in his ears, the only sound.
The hatch, behind Gagarin’s head, scraped open. His ears popped as pressure changed, and a cold blue light seeped in on him.
There were shadows at the open port.
Not human shadows.
He tried to scream. He must reach for his helmet, try to close it, seek to engage his emergency air supply.
But he could not move.
Hands on his shoulders, cradling his head. Hands, lifting him from the capsule. Had he landed? Was he dreaming again? A moment ago, it seemed to him, he had been in orbit; and now this. Had something gone wrong? Had he somehow re-entered the atmosphere? Were these peasants from some remote part of the Union, lifting him from his crashed Swallow?
But this was not Kazakhstan or any part of the Union, and, whatever these creatures were, they were not peasants.
He was out of the craft now. Faces ringed his vision. They looked like babies, he thought, or perhaps monkeys, with grey skin, oversized heads, huge eyes, and small noses, ears and mouths. He could not even tell if they were men or women.
He closed his eyes. When he opened them, the faces were still there, peering in on him.
He could not read their emotions. But it did seem to him that he found in one of the distorted faces a little more – compassion. Interest, at least …
So. Do you think this Poyekhali is conscious of where it is?
It could be. It seems alert. If it is, we have broken the sentience laws …
The heads were raised in confrontation.
I won’t be held responsible for that. The systems are your accountability.
But it was not I who –
Enough. Recriminations can wait. For now, we must consider – it.
They studied him again.
Perhaps he was, simply, insane.
He had, he realized with dismay, no explanation for this experience. None, that is, save his own madness, perhaps induced by the radiation of space …
The beings, here with him, were floating, as he was.
He was in a room. His Vostok, abandoned, was suspended here, like some huge artefact in a museum. The Vostok looked as fresh as if it had just come out of the assembly rooms at Baikonur, with no re-entry scorching.
He looked beyond his spacecraft.
The room’s walls were golden. But the room’s shape was distorted, as if he was looking through a wall of curved glass, and so were the people themselves.
They seemed to have difficulty staying in one place. They could pass through the walls of this room at will, like ghosts.
They even passed through his body. He could not move, even when they did this.
They took hold of his arms, and pulled him towards the wall of the room. He looked for his Vostok spacecraft, but he could no longer see it.
He passed into the wall as if it was made of mist; but he had a sense of warmth and softness.
Now he was in a cylindrical room. He was enclosed in a plastic chair with a clear fitted cover. The cover was filled with a warm grey fluid. But there was a tube in his mouth and covering his nose, through which he could breathe cool, clean air. A voice in his mind told him to close his eyes. When he did so he could feel pleasing vibrations, the fluid seemed to whirl around him, and he was fed a sweet substance through the tubes. He felt tranquil and happy. He kept his eyes closed, and he seemed to become one with the fluid.
Later he was moved, within his sac.
