“What can I do for the people?” Danko shouted, louder than thunder.
And suddenly he tore at his chest with his hands and plucked out his heart and lifted it high above his head.
MAXIM GORKY
I should briefly explain why I went to the Central Archive of Space Travel. Otherwise what I am about to tell you would be incomprehensible.
I am a spaceship’s doctor and have taken part in three missions. My medical speciality is psychiatry. Astropsychiatry, as they now call it. The problem I am working on is one that first arose a long time ago, in the 1970s. At that time a journey to Mars lasted more than a year, and one to Mercury almost two. The motors were only fired on takeoff and landing. Astronomical observations were not carried out on board—artificial satellites were used instead. What would the crew do then, over the long months of their journey? In the first years of space travel—practically nothing. This enforced inactivity led to nervous collapse, sapped people’s strength, caused illnesses. Reading and radio programs were not enough to replace what the first astronauts lacked. They needed work, creative work, which was what they were accustomed to. And then the idea of recruiting people who had outside interests was put forward. The idea was that it did not matter what they liked doing, as long as it gave them something to keep them busy during the flight. And so pilots were also extremely proficient mathematicians. Navigators were students of ancient manuscripts. Engineers spent all their free time writing poetry….
In the flight manuals for astronaut training another point—the famous twelfth point—was added: “What are the candidate’s hobbies? What is the candidate interested in?” However, very soon another solution was found for the problem. For interplanetary travel, spaceships were fitted with atomic-ion drives. The length of flights was cut down to a few days. The twelfth point was removed from the training manuals. And then a few years later the problem reappeared, in an even more acute form. Mankind graduated to interstellar travel. Atomic-ion rockets, traveling at near-light speeds, still took years to fly to the closest stars. The time passed more slowly in the swiftly moving rocket, and flights could still take eight, or twelve, or even twenty years….
The twelfth point appeared again in the flight manuals. In fact, it became one of the most important considerations for choosing a crew. Interstellar travel, from the point of view of the pilot, consisted of 99.99 percent downtime. Radio signals broke off a month or so after takeoff. After a month the interference was so great that optical signals had to be broken off. And ahead lay years, years, years….
Back in those days rockets were manned by crews of six or eight, had tiny cabins and a fifty-meter greenhouse. For us, who now travel in interstellar liners, it is difficult to imagine how people managed without a gym, a swimming pool, a cinema, a promenade….
I’m losing my thread and the story hasn’t even started yet. Nowadays the twelfth point no longer plays a major role in the choice of crew. For scheduled flights along standard routes that is only fair. However, for long-distance research flights people with hobbies are still needed as crew members. At least, that is my opinion. The twelfth point is the subject of my academic research. The history of the twelfth point has brought me here, to the Central Archive of Space Travel.
I should acknowledge that the word archive isn’t one I like all that much. I am a starship’s doctor, and that is more or less the same as being an eighteenth-century ship’s doctor. I am used to traveling, to danger. I have made all three of my interstellar journeys on research trips. I participated in the first trip to Procyon and have always been filled with a desire for discovery. On the three planets that orbit Procyon there are several objects that I named: do you know what it’s like to name an ocean that you discovered?
Archive was a word that frightened me. But things turned out differently from how I imagined. I don’t know, and haven’t yet been able to find out, who was the architect of the Central Archive of Space Travel. It must have been someone extremely talented. Talented and brave. The building is on the banks of the Siberian Sea, created twenty years ago when they built a dam on the Ob. The main building of the archive is on the hills by the seaside. I don’t know how they managed to do it, but it looks like the building hangs over the water. Light and aiming upward, it looks at a distance like a white sail….
There are fifteen people who work in the archive. I have managed to strike up acquaintances with several of them. They are almost all of them temporary workers. An Austrian is gathering material on the first interstellar flight. There is a scholar, from Leningrad, writing a history of Mars. The shy Indian is a famous sculptor. He said to me: “I need to know their spiritual world.” There are two engineers: a husky chap from Saratov who looks like the heroic test pilot Chkalov and a small politely smiling Japanese man. They need to find background material for some project or other. I don’t know exactly what. When I asked him, the Japanese replied very politely: “Oh, it’s really nothing significant! It’s nothing for you to waste your attention on.” But I’m drifting away again. Back to the story.
On the first day, in the evening, I spoke to the chief archivist. He is a man, still young, but who is almost completely blind as the result of a fuel tank explosion. He wears glasses with three lenses. They are blue. You can’t see his eyes. This makes it appear that the chief archivist never smiles.
“So,” he said after hearing me out, “you need to start with the materials from Sector 0-14. I’m sorry, that’s our own internal classification, it won’t mean anything to you. What I mean is the first expedition to Barnard’s Star.”
To my embarrassment, I knew almost nothing about this journey.
“You flew in the other direction,” the chief archivist said, shrugging. “Sirius, Procyon, 61 Cygni…”
I was surprised that he knew my service record so well.
“Yes,” he continued, “the story of Aleksey Zarubin, the commander of that expedition, gives a very interesting answer to your question. They’ll bring you the materials in half an hour. Good luck.”
His eyes were invisible behind the blue glass. But his voice sounded sad.
And the materials are here on my desk. The paper is yellow, on several of the documents the ink (they used ink back then) has faded. But someone has carefully protected the text: infrared photofilms are attached. The paper is covered with transparent plastic; they feel dense and smooth to the touch.
Out of the window—the sea. It slides dully up to the shore, the waves make a noise like pages being turned….
In those days an expedition to Barnard’s Star was daring, maybe even desperate. It takes six years for light to reach from Earth to Barnard’s Star. The ship would be accelerating for half the journey, decelerating for the other half. And although sub-light speeds would be reached, the flight there and back would still take around fourteen years. For the people flying in the rocket, time would pass more slowly: fourteen years would become forty months. This is not an unusually long stretch of time, but the problem was that for almost all this time, thirty-eight months out of the forty, the ship’s engines would have to work at full power. The nuclear fuel reserves were calculated precisely. Any deviation from the path would mean the death of the expedition.
Nowadays it seems like an unbelievable risk to set off into space without having sufficient fuel reserves, but back then there was no other option. The ship could carry no more than what the engineers managed to pack into the tanks.
I read the report of the committee that chose the crew. The candidates for captain come up one by one and the committee always says: “No.” No, because the flight is exceptionally difficult, because colossal resilience needs to be combined with almost incredible daring. And suddenly the committee says: “Yes.”
I turn a page. Here is where the story of Captain Aleksey Zarubin begins.
Three pages further on and I start to understand why Aleksey Zarubin was unanimously chosen as the commander of the Pole. This man embodied to the most unusual extent both “ice” and “fire”: the calm wisdom of a researcher and the wild temperament of a warrior. This must have been why he was sent on dangerous missions. He always found a way to escape from what appeared to be the most hopeless situations.
The committee had chosen the captain. As tradition dictated, the captain must now choose his crew. Speaking for myself, Zarubin didn’t really choose his crew. He simply invited five astronauts who had already flown with him. To the question: “Are you willing to go on a difficult and dangerous flight?” they all replied: “With you, yes.”
In the materials there is a photograph of the crew of the Pole. It is monochrome, without depth. The captain was twenty-seven years old when it was taken. He looks older in the photograph: a full, slightly puffy face with prominent cheekbones, his lips tight shut, a prominent crooked nose, wavy soft-seeming hair, and strange eyes. They looked peaceful, almost lazy, but had somewhere in their corners a mischievous, reckless spark….
The other astronauts are even younger. The engineers, a husband-and-wife team; there is a joint photograph in the file, they always flew together. The navigator had the thoughtful gaze of a musician. There was a female doctor. I suppose I must have looked just as serious in the first photograph they took of me when I joined the Star Fleet. The astrophysicist looks stubborn, his face is covered in burn marks; he and the captain once made an emergency landing on Dione, one of the moons of Saturn.
Point twelve in the flight manual. I flick through the pages and confirm my hunch: the photograph told the truth. The navigator is a musician and a composer. The serious woman has a serious hobby: microbiology. The astrophysicist studies languages: he is already fluent in five, including Latin and Ancient Greek. The husband-and-wife engineers have only one hobby: chess, a new variant, with two queens of each color and an eighty-one-square board….
The last entry in the twelfth point of the flight manual is that of the captain. He has a strange hobby—unusual, perhaps unique. I’ve never seen anything like it. That the captain had a keen interest in art ever since he was a child is understandable: his mother was an artist. But the captain paints very little, his interests lie elsewhere. He dreams of rediscovering the long-lost secrets of the old masters—how to make oil paints, how to blend them and prepare them for use. He carries out his chemical research, as he does everything, with the tenacity of a scientist and the temperament of an artist.
Six people, six different characters, different fates. But the tone of the expedition is set by the captain. They love him, they believe in him, they support him. And so they all know how to be unflappably calm and unstoppably daring.
Blast off.
The Pole heads for Barnard’s Star. The nuclear reactor is working, an invisible stream of ions flows from the various nozzles. The rocket accelerates constantly, the crew feels this. To start with it is difficult to walk, difficult to work. The doctor insists on the imposition of a regimen of activity. The astronauts get used to the conditions of the flight. The greenhouse is set up, then the radiotelescope. Normal life begins. Monitoring the reactor, the equipment, the various mechanisms: this takes up very little time. Four hours a day are all that is required for the crew to work at their specializations. The rest of the time can be employed as each crew member prefers. The navigator composes a song—the whole crew ends up singing it. The chess players spend hours at the board. The astrophysicist reads Plutarch in the original….
The log contains short entries: “The flight continues. The reactor and the ship’s equipment are working perfectly. Morale is excellent.” And suddenly there is one that sounds like a shout: “The rocket has passed the limit of reception of television signals. We saw the last report from Earth yesterday. How difficult to say good-bye to one’s homeland!” And the days still go by. Another entry: “Have set up the antenna for receiving optical signals. We hope that we will receive signals from Earth for another seven or eight days.” They were happy as schoolboys when the signals actually lasted another twelve days….
Its speed increasing, the rocket headed toward Barnard’s Star. The months went by. The nuclear reactor worked with absolute accuracy. The fuel was spent exactly according to the plans, not a milligram more.
The catastrophe happened without warning.
One day—this was in the eighth month of the journey—the reactor started to function in a different way. A parallel reaction made the fuel consumption increase sharply. The brief entry in the log reads: “We do not know what has caused the side reaction.” Yes, back in those days they still did not know that infinitesimal impurities in nuclear fuel could sometimes change the speed of a reaction….
The sea sounds outside the window. The wind is up, the waves are no longer rustling—they slap down cruelly as they come in to shore. Someone is laughing in the distance. I cannot, I should not be distracted. I can almost see these people in the rocket. I know them—I can imagine what it was like. Perhaps I am mistaken about the details—but what importance does that have? And in fact no, I am not even mistaken in the details. I am sure that it happened exactly like this.
In the retort, over a burner, a brown liquid boiled and bubbled. Brown smoke curled through the condenser. The captain was carefully examining a test tube filled with a dark red powder. The door opened. The flame of the burner flickered, jumped. The captain turned round. The engineer stood in the doorway.
The engineer was shaken. He was under control, but his voice betrayed how agitated he was. It was someone else’s voice, louder, unrealistically harsh. The engineer tried to speak calmly and could not.
“Sit down, Nikolay.” The captain pointed him to a chair. “I carried out these tests yesterday evening and got the same result….Sit down….”
“What do we do now?”
“Now?” The captain looked at his watch. “There’s fifty-five minutes to go till supper. So we can talk. Please tell everyone.”
“Very good,” the engineer mechanically replied. “I’ll tell them. Yes, I’ll tell them,” He did not know why the captain was reacting so slowly. With every second the Pole was gathering speed, and a decision would have to be made forthwith.
“Look,” said the captain, and handed him the test tube. “This will most likely interest you. This is mercury sulfide, cinnabar. A damn fine pigment. But it normally gets darker when exposed to light. I’ve figured it out—it’s all to do with particle size….”
He spent a while explaining to the engineer how he had managed to produce a light-resistant cinnabar. The engineer impatiently shook the test tube. There was a clock set into the wall over the desk, and the engineer could not help glancing at it: thirty seconds, and the ship’s speed increased by two kilometers per second; another minute, another four kilometers per second….
“I’ll go now,” he said finally. “I need to tell the others.”
The captain shut the cabin door tightly. He carefully put the test tube into a rack. He listened. The reactor’s cooling system was buzzing quietly. The engines that increased the Pole’s speed were working perfectly.
…Ten minutes later the captain went down to the crew’s quarters. Five people were standing waiting for him. They were all wearing their astronaut uniforms, which they put on only on rare occasions, and the captain understood: he did not need to explain the situation to anyone.
“So…,” he started. “Apparently I’m the only one who forgot to get dolled up….”
Nobody smiled.
“Sit down,” the captain said. “A council of war…So…Well. Let the youngest speak first, as is the custom. You, Lenochka. What should we do, what do you think?” He turned to the woman.
She spoke very seriously:
“I am a doctor, Aleksey Pavlovich. This is a more technical question. Please let me give my opinion later.”
The captain nodded:
“Of course. You are the wisest of us all, Lenochka. And the quickest thinker. I’d be willing to bet that you have an opinion. You do have one already.”
The woman didn’t answer.
“Well,” the captain said, “Lenochka will talk later. So now it’s your turn, Sergey.”
The astrophysicist flung his arms wide.
“This has nothing to do with my specialism either, I don’t have any firm opinions. But I know that the fuel will last for our trip to Barnard’s Star. Why turn back halfway?”
“Yes, why?” the captain repeated. “Because we can’t come back. We can turn back halfway. But we can’t return once we reach our destination.”
“Agreed,” the astrophysicist said thoughtfully. “But is it really true that we can’t come back? We ourselves, of course, will not return. But people will fly after us. They will see that we haven’t come back and will set out to find us. Astronautics is a developing science.”
“Developing,” the captain laughed. “As time goes by…So, we should fly onward? Am I understanding you correctly? Very good. Now you, Georgey. Does this relate to your specialism?”
The navigator leapt up, pushing his chair back from the table.
“Sit down,” the captain said. “Sit down and speak calmly. Don’t jump around.”
“There is no way to get back!” The navigator was almost shouting. “We can only move onward. Onward, through the impossible! Anyway, think about it, how can we return? Didn’t we know that the expedition would be a difficult one? Of course we knew. And here we are, up against the first difficulty, ready to throw it all in….No, no, onward, ever onward!”
“Ri-ight,” the captain drawled. “Onward through the impossible. Sounds good…Well, what do the engineers think? You, Nina Vladimirovna? You, Nikolay?”
The engineer looked at his wife. She nodded and he started to speak. He spoke calmly, as if thinking aloud.
“Our flight to Barnard’s Star is a research expedition. If we six learn anything new, make any discoveries, then that in itself won’t have any value. Our discoveries will only develop a value when they are known to other people, to mankind as a whole. If we fly to Barnard’s Star and have no means of return, what’s the point of any discoveries we make? Sergey said that people would end up flying after us. That’s true. But the ones who follow will have to make these discoveries without us. What will our contribution have been? What benefit will our expedition have been to humanity? In fact, we will only have caused harm. Yes, harm. They will wait on Earth for our expedition to return. They will wait in vain. If we come back now, then the amount of time lost will be minimized. A new expedition will set out. We will set out ourselves. We may lose a few years, but the material we have gathered so far will be stored on Earth. At the moment there’s no chance that will happen….Fly on? Why? No, we—Nina and I—are against it. We have to go back. At once.”
There was a long silence. Then Lena asked:
“And what do you think, Captain?”
The captain smiled sadly.
“I think that our engineers are right. Beautiful words are nothing but words. But common sense, logic, calculation: these are all on the side of the engineers. We are flying in order to make discoveries. And if these discoveries are not transmitted to Earth, then they are worthless. Nikolay is right, a thousand times right….”
Zarubin stood up and walked heavily round the cabin. It was difficult to walk: movement was impeded by the triple-strength gravity caused by the acceleration of the rocket.
“Waiting for a relief rocket is out of the question,” the captain continued. “There are two other possibilities. The first is to return to Earth. The second is to fly to Barnard’s Star…and then fly back to Earth. To return in spite of the loss of fuel.”
“How?” the engineer asked.
Zarubin went back to his chair and sat down without answering immediately.
“I don’t know how. But we have time. There are still eleven months to go before we reach Barnard’s Star. If you decide to return now, then we will return. But if you believe that we can think up something over the next eleven months, that we can invent some sort of solution, then…then onward, through the impossible! That’s all I’ve got to say, my friends. What about you. It’s your turn, Lenochka.”
The woman winked at him.
“You’re the quickest thinker. I’d be willing to bet that you have something worked out already.”
The captain laughed.
“You lose! I haven’t got anything in mind. But there are still eleven months left. We’ll be able to think up something during that time.”
“We have faith,” the engineer said. “We have faith.” He was silent for a moment. “Although, to tell the truth, I’m not sure how we’re going to make it. Fuel levels on the Pole will be at eighteen percent when we get there. Eighteen percent instead of fifty…But you’ve said you’re certain, and that’s that. We’ll go to Barnard’s Star. Like Georgey said, onward through the impossible.”
The door squeaks quietly. The wind ruffles the pages, hurries about the room, filling it with the damp smell of the sea. Smell’s a funny thing. There are no smells on board a rocket. The conditioners clean the air, keep the temperature and humidity levels constant. But conditioned air is tasteless, like distilled water. They tried artificial scent generators a couple of times, but nothing came of them. The smell of normal Earth air is too complicated; it’s difficult to reproduce. Like now…I smell the sea, the damp autumn leaves, and a distant smell of perfume, and from time to time, when the wind gets up, the smell of earth. And a very faint smell of paint.
The wind leafs through the pages….What was the captain banking on? He really had to “think something up.” And he was the only experienced astronaut on board the ship.
Of course, Zarubin could rely on the help of the members of his crew—the navigator, the engineers, the astrophysicist, the doctor. But that would be later. First of all, he had to “think something up.” That is the particular specialism of a ship’s captain.
I am a doctor, but I have been on space flights and I know that there is no such thing as a miracle. When the Pole reached Barnard’s Star, it would only have 18 percent of its fuel remaining. Eighteen instead of fifty…
There is no such thing as a miracle. But if the captain had asked me if I believed he would find a way out, I would have said, “Yes.” I would have answered straightaway, without needing to think: “Yes, yes, yes!” I don’t believe in miracles, but I believe implicitly in people.
In the morning I asked the chief archivist to show me Zarubin’s paintings.
“You’ll need to go upstairs,” he said. “But…Tell me, have you read all the documents?”
He listened to my reply, and nodded.
“I understand. I thought as much. Yes, the captain took on a great responsibility….Would you have trusted him?”
“Yes.”
“So would I.”
He was silent for a long time, biting his lips. Then he stood up and pushed his glasses up his nose.
“All right then, let’s go.”
The chief archivist walked with a limp. We walked slowly along the corridors of the archive.
“You’ll read some more about this,” the archivist said. “If I’m not wrong, it’s in the second volume, round about page one hundred. Zarubin wanted to discover the secrets of the Italian Renaissance masters. From the eighteenth century onward there had been a falling off in oil painting, at least on the level of craft. Many people considered that this was an irreversible decline. Artists were unable to get hold of colors that were at the same time bright and long lasting. The brighter they were, the quicker the paintings faded. Especially blues. Well, Zarubin…but you’ll see.”
Zarubin’s paintings hung in a narrow sunlit gallery. The first thing that leapt out at me was that each painting was only one color—red, blue, green….
“These are studies,” the archivist said. “Technical exercises, nothing more. Here’s his Study in Blue.”
Two fragile human figures—a man and a woman—with strap-on wings were flying side by side through a blue sky. Everything was painted in different shades of blue, but I had never seen so many. It was a night sky, blue-black, on the lower left edge and a transparent warm midday blue in the opposite corner. The people’s wings were painted in shades of light and dark blue, shading into violet. At points the colors were harsh, clear, sparkling, and in other parts they were softer, muted, transparent. Next to this painting, Degas’s Blue Dancers would have seemed very limited and poorly colored.
There were other pictures hanging there as well. Study in Red: two crimson suns above an unknown planet, a chaos of shadows and half shadows, from blood-red to pale pink. Study in Brown: an imaginary fairy forest…
“Zarubin had a great imagination,” the archivist said. “He was just trying out his colors. But then…”
He fell silent. I waited, looking at the blue impermeable glasses over his eyes.
“Just read more,” he said quietly. “Then I’ll show you some other paintings. Then you’ll understand….”
I read as fast as I can, trying to grasp the most important points.
The Pole flew to Barnard’s Star. The spaceship reached its maximum speed and then the motors started to go into reverse. Judging from the brief entries in the log, everything proceeded normally. There were no accidents, no illnesses. And the captain was, as always, calm, confident, cheerful. He spent a lot of his time studying the technology of paint manufacture, and painting his studies….
What was he thinking of, in his cabin? The log and the navigator’s personal journal do nothing to answer this question. But here’s an interesting document. It’s the engineer’s report. It discusses faults in the cooling system. Dry, precise language, technical terms. But between the lines what I read was the following: “My friend, if you have second thoughts, you can still turn round. Retreat with honor….” And there’s a note in the captain’s hand: “The cooling systems will be repaired once we reach Barnard’s Star.” And what that meant was “No, my friend, I haven’t changed my mind.”
Zarubin didn’t change his mind. He drove the Pole onward, through the impossible. Nineteen months after takeoff they reached Barnard’s Star. The dim red star had only one planet, almost as large as Earth, but covered in ice. The Pole tried to land. The ion stream from the engines melted the ice and the first attempt at landing was unsuccessful. The captain chose a different spot—and the ice melted again. Six times the Pole tried to land, until it finally came across a granite cliff under the ice.
At this point, the entries in the log start to be made in red ink. This was the traditional method of recording discoveries.
The planet was dead. Its atmosphere was almost pure oxygen, but there was not a single living creature, not a single plant on its dead surface. The thermometer read minus fifty degrees.
“An undistinguished planet,” the navigator wrote in his diary, “but what a wonderful star! A whole avalanche of discoveries…”
Yes, a whole avalanche of discoveries. Even now, when research into the formation and evolution of stars has taken a great leap forward, even now the discoveries made by the crew of the Pole are still to a large extent useful. The research made into the gaseous envelope of “red dwarves” of the Barnard’s Star type is still cited as one of the fullest and most accurate studies.
The log…The scientific report…The astrophysicist’s handwriting, setting out his paradoxical hypotheses on the evolution of stars…And, finally, what I was looking for: the commander’s order to return. It was unexpected, implausible. Not willing to believe it, I quickly flick through the pages. The entry in the navigator’s journal. Now I believe, I know for a fact—this is how it was.
One day the captain said:
“Enough. Time to go home.”
Five people looked silently at Zarubin. The clock ticked calmly….
Five people looked at the captain. They were waiting.
“Time to go home,” the captain repeated. “You know that we have eighteen percent of our fuel remaining. But there is a way out. First of all, we need to make the rocket lighter. We need to get rid of all the electronic equipment apart from the navigation controls….” He saw that the navigator wanted to say something, and stopped him with a gesture. “That’s how it needs to be. Apparatus, internal partitions in the empty tanks, bits of the greenhouse. And the most important is the heavy electronic apparatus. But that’s not all. The main usage of fuel takes place during the first few months of a flight—because of the slow acceleration. We’ll have to get used to being uncomfortable: the Pole will take off not at three g’s, but at twelve.”
“Accelerating like that we won’t be able to control the rocket,” the engineer interrupted. “The pilot won’t be able to—”
“I know that,” the captain interrupted firmly. “I know that. Control of the ship over the first few months will have to be carried out here, from the planet. One crew member will stay here….Silence! Silence, I said! Remember, there’s no other way out. This is how it will be. So, I’ll carry on. You, Nina Vladimirovna, and you, Nikolay, will not be able to stay: you’re going to have a child. Yes, I know. You, Lenochka, are the ship’s doctor and so you have to fly. Sergey is the astrophysicist. He needs to fly as well. And Georgey can’t control himself. And so the only one left is me. Once more—silence! This is how it will be.”
…I have in front of me the calculations that Zarubin made. I am a doctor, but I understand all of them. One thing I notice straightaway: The calculations are made, one might say, to the limit. The ship will be stripped down to the limit, the gravitational force at takeoff will be pushed to the limit. Most of the greenhouse will be left on the planet, and so the daily ration for the astronauts will be small—much lower than the established norms. The backup power supply with its two mini-reactors will be removed. Almost all the electronic equipment will be removed. If something unforeseen happens on the flight back, the rocket will be unable even to make it back to Barnard’s Star. “The risk is raised to the power of three,” is written down in the navigator’s diary. And below that: “But for the person who stays behind, it is raised to the tenth power, the hundredth….”
Zarubin will have to wait for fourteen years. It is only then that another rocket can come to find him. Fourteen years alone, on an alien frozen world…More calculations. The most important thing is the energy supply. It will have to be enough to control the rocket remotely, and then last for fourteen long, endless, eternal years. And once again, everything is worked out to the limit, right on the edge.
A photofilm of the captain’s quarters. It is made out of sections of the greenhouse. Through the transparent panes you can see the electronic apparatus and the mini-reactors. The tele-control antennae are on the roof. And all around is a frozen desert. Barnard’s Star shines coldly in the gray, dim, fog-covered sky. It is about four times as large as the Earth’s sun but shines no brighter than the moon.
I quickly go through the log. Here’s everything: the captain’s parting words, the agreement reached about radio contact over the first few days of the journey, and a list of objects which need to be left for the captain….And suddenly four words: “The Pole takes off.” And then there are some strange notes. They look as if they were made by a child: the lines cross over one another, the letters are angular, broken. That is the twelve-g acceleration.
I make out the words with difficulty. The first entry: “All is good. Damn gravity overload! Purple patches in front of my eyes…” Two days later: “We’re accelerating as planned. Impossible to walk, we can only crawl….” A week later: “Difficult, very [crossed out]…we’re coping. The reactor is working as calculated.”
Two pages of the log are not filled in. On the third, heavily blotted, is the following entry, written at an angle: “Contact lost with ground control. Something is blocking the beam. It is [crossed out]…It is the end….” But then, right on the edge of the page, is another entry in a much firmer hand: “Contact with ground control reestablished. The power indicator shows strength at level four. The captain is giving us all the energy from his mini-reactors, and we can’t stop him. He’s sacrificing himself….”
I close the log. Now all I can think about is Zarubin. The breakdown in communications must have been unexpected for him. A sudden light on a control panel…
The warning buzzer went off. The needle trembled and pointed to zero. The radio signals came through, but the control signals did not.
The captain stood by the transparent walls of the greenhouse. The dull crimson sun sank over the horizon. Brown shadows fled along the frozen riverbed. The wind howled, threw up dusty snow, hurled it up into the faded red-gray sky.
The warning buzzer rang continuously. The radio signals were growing diffuse; they were no longer strong enough to control the rocket. Zarubin looked at the setting Barnard’s Star. Behind him the lamps flashed feverishly on the electronic control panel.
The purple disk was quickly falling behind the horizon. For a moment crimson fires flared up: the last rays of the sun fractured on thousands of ice crystals. Then darkness fell.
Zarubin went over to the control panel. He turned off the buzzer. The arrow pointed to zero. Zarubin turned the power regulator. The greenhouse was filled with the whine of the motors of the conditioning system. Zarubin turned the power regulator as far as it would go. He walked round the other side of the control panel, removed the lock, and turned the regulator twice more. The whine turned into a shrill, penetrating, ringing roar.
The captain turned to the wall and sat down. His hands were shaking. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. He leaned his cheeks against the cold glass.
He would have to wait for the new powerful signal to reach the rocket and bounce back to him.
Zarubin waited.
He lost his sense of time. The mini-reactors roared, almost as if they were about to explode, the motors of the conditioning system howled and groaned. The fragile greenhouse walls shuddered….
The captain waited.
Finally, some power allowed him to stand up and go over to the control panel.
The power indicator pointed into the green zone. The signals were now strong enough for him to control the rocket. Zarubin gave a weak smile and said: “So…,” then looked at the speed at which the power was being consumed. It was happening one hundred and forty times more quickly than had been factored into the calculation.
That night the captain did not sleep. He worked out a program for the electronic navigator. He had to correct all the deviations that the temporary loss of contact had caused.
The wind howled over the snowdrifts on the plain. The vague polar sun rose over the horizon. The crazed mini-reactors screamed as they gave off their energy. The energy that had been carefully parceled out to last fourteen years was now being thrown out into the surroundings with a generous hand….Uploading the program into the electronic navigator, the captain walked tiredly round the greenhouse. The stars shone above the transparent ceiling. Leaning against the control panel, the captain looked up into the sky. Somewhere above him, the Pole, gathering speed, was flying directly toward Earth.
It was very late, but I went to see the chief archivist. I remembered that he had told me about some of Zarubin’s other paintings.
The chief archivist was not asleep.
“I knew you would come,” he said, quickly putting his glasses on. “Come on, it’s just through here.”
In the next room, lit by fluorescent lamps, there hung two small pictures. For a moment I thought that the archivist was mistaken. I thought that Zarubin could not have painted these pictures. They were so different from what I had learned that day: they were not experiments with color, or images of fantastic subjects. They were normal landscapes. One showed a road and a tree, and the other was a picture of a forest.
“Yes, they’re by Zarubin,” the archivist said, as though he had read my thoughts. “He stayed on the planet, you know that, of course. It was a risky way to escape, but it was a way nonetheless. I speak as an astronaut…as a former astronaut.”
The archivist pushed his glasses up his nose, and paused.
“Then Zarubin did what…you know…He gave off all the energy he’d had in reserve for fourteen years over the course of four weeks. He directed the rocket, kept the Pole on course. And then when the ship reached sub-light speed, it started to brake within normal gravitational parameters, and the crew could steer themselves. By this time, Zarubin had almost no energy left in his mini-reactors. And there was nothing he could do. Nothing. Zarubin did some paintings. He loved Earth, loved life….”
The painting showed a road running between villages, heading over the brow of a hill. A mighty fallen oak lay by the road. He had painted in the style of Jules Dupré, in the style of the Barbizon School: earthy, knotted, full of life and power. The wind drives some ragged clouds across the sky. There is a boulder lying by the gully at the edge of the road; it looks as if some traveler has only recently sat there…each detail is carefully painted, lovingly, with an unusual richness of color and sense of light.
The other painting is unfinished. It is a wood in springtime. Everything is filled with air and light and warmth….Surprising golden tones…Zarubin knew the best colors to use.
“I brought these paintings back to Earth,” the archivist said quietly.
“You?”
“Yes.” The archivist’s voice sounded sad, almost guilty. “There is no proper end to the materials you have been looking at. They are part of other expeditions already….The Pole returned to Earth and a rescue mission was immediately sent out. They did everything to make sure that the rocket reached Barnard’s Star as quickly as possible. The crew agreed to fly at six g’s. They reached the planet and did not even find the greenhouse. They risked their lives ten times, but didn’t find…Then, and this was many years later—they sent me. There was an accident en route. So.” The archivist raised his hand to his eyes. “But we got there. We found the greenhouse, the paintings….We found a note from the captain.”
“What did it say?”
“Just four words: ‘Onward through the impossible.’ ”
We looked at the pictures in silence. I suddenly realized that Zarubin had painted them from memory. He was surrounded by ice, the evil light of crimson Barnard’s Star, and he mixed warm sunny colors on his palette….In the twelfth point of the flight manual he could have with justice have written: “I enjoy…no, I have a love, a great love for Earth, for life on Earth, for the people who live there.”
The empty corridors of the archive are quiet. The windows are half open; the sea breeze makes the heavy drapes move. The waves come in even and heavy. It seems that they are repeating the same four words: “Onward through the impossible.” And then they are quiet, and then they come again and dash themselves on the sand: “Onward through the impossible.” And then they are quiet again.
I want to answer the waves: “Yes, onward, ever onward!”