Starships? They were invented in Russia.
Pavel Chekov
A man whose name the world has never known stares at one whose first translates as “tyrant,” but which might as well be “God” to the quarter of the Earth he rules. He is tired, the nameless man is. Tired unto death. He will turn eighty-six this year, which according to the edict of a long-dead Pope and the supposed passing of a man in whom he has no faith is 1992. He is tired, the man is, but his work is not yet done.
Khan Noonian Singh’s face is still, implacable as the demand made just now to his taskmaster, his rocket-builder, who says nothing. The nameless man, who long ago took on the initial “K,” the first letter of his patronymic, stares at Khan without a hint of fear. There is nothing Khan can do to him that has not been done before.
“Did you hear me, K?”
“Yes, Emperor.”
“Can it be done?”
K’s mind is far away, awash in figures. He hardly hears Khan’s words. His body feels light as a small child’s. The figures coalesce and halt upon a single number, a number which then recedes, as though an embodiment of itself. K watches the digits fade among the stars, longing to accompany them, knowing he never will.
“I said, can it be done?”
Khan’s voice has the merest hint of steel. If K says “no,” he knows, he will be dismissed, dismissed not merely from this room nor from his job but from life itself, another man brought in then, another after that if necessary, until some wretched craven worker answers “yes” to Khan’s demand.
“I will need—“
“You will have everything you need.”
With that the audience is over. K turns to go (he has not been sitting; there is no place to sit here, save for Khan), knowing Khan’s word is law, will be heard throughout his realm, thanks to the functionary standing by an ever-active computer console, whose transmissions will precede K everywhere he goes. He has never before been called to audience, but the first year of Khan’s reign has seen dams raised, atomic plants constructed, entire populations evicted from their homes and nations. Khan’s edicts are second but to those of God, and God, K knows, does not live here, has not for many decades, near as long as K has been alive. What former leaders tried to do, Khan has accomplished all but effortlessly. Now, he has put K onto the highest goal of all.
The stars, K thinks. This obscene oaf will reach the stars.
It amuses him to think that, to know it, being that Khan’s passage thereto will not be that of conqueror but refugee. He and his fellow “supermen” have surpassed the deeds of Stalin, Hitler, let alone those of Khan’s own forebear-by-name, who first strode the Russian steppes – but here in this room, Khan has confessed to a nameless old man that he does not think their reign will last.
Nor will it, K thinks. I will see to that.
The thought startles him with its suddenness and certainty. He nearly pauses in the doorway, staggered by the grandeur of the task he has of a sudden taken on. Such hesitation, though, might betray his intent. He catches himself and hobbles on, the weight of his responsibility greater than that of the laden barrows he so briefly trundled from open pit mines, decades past. He is astonished not by his audacity, but by the abrupt return of something he had thought lost to him long ago.
I am redeemed, K thinks. I have regained my soul.
He is not surprised to be awakened, merely startled, as might be a doe in the headlights of an oncoming car. It is June 27, 1938; though only thirty-one, he feels suddenly as old as time itself. He blinks against the glare of the men’s lamps, raising himself from bed, his wife recoiling reflexively beside him, as though that gesture or any other might save her from her husband’s fate. Two of the men are likewise shy, and appear embarrassed and self-conscious. “Witnesses,” he thinks, wondering how many other such scenes have been played out in his poor country. The other men, larger, with rough faces and rougher hands, hustle him erect and wait impatiently as he gets dressed. He asks permission to kiss his three-year old Natasha goodbye, receives a glare as his refusal. Xenia comes to herself enough to get him a change of underwear, but the men forbid that gesture too, leaving her standing stupidly in the doorway, his briefs dangling from her hand. In minutes, he has been bundled into the Black Maria.
He expects to be taken to a jail cell, but is instead brought to a row of wooden boxes, and thrust inside one without comment or explanation. Within that tiny unlit space, he can at first see nothing. Gradually, his eyes adjust until he can make out the dim glow of the hallway, spilling through the doorway’s chink – but the box is so shallow he cannot turn, can only stand with his back pressed against the entrance, wondering how long he will remain there. At first he tries to count the seconds, minutes, but loses track after the first hour or so. After that he knows nothing save that he is helpless and alone.
After an endless time they come for him, jerking back the door and laughing as he falls backward onto the floor. He blinks against the glare, is kicked and urged to stand, which he cannot. They seize him and take him to interrogation. One man is soft-spoken and persuasive. “You’ll get a term regardless,” he says. “Why not confess now? Otherwise, you stay here with us until you do. Why not accept your guilt, and go on to camp, to fresh air, sunshine, decent food and work? Why stay here until you croak?”
“Dung! Counter-revolutionary filth!” the other man interrupts. “I’ll give you your nine grammes right now!” he screams, fingering his holstered pistol. “Confess!”
He has nothing to confess to. What had he done? A year ago, he had been demoted from section head to the post of “senior engineer.” He had eight years’ experience in building rockets by then, and opposed the design bureau’s new concentration on solid motors. Liquid-fueled airplanes were his forte, a rocket-driven fighter his goal since 1932. Liquid motors could be throttled and controlled; solid engines were fireworks, good for nothing save carrying warheads or boosting airplanes off a runway or a ship’s deck. Accusations that he has been in clandestine correspondence with German rocket engineers are ludicrous. Surely, he thinks, his friends and fellow engineers will intercede on his behalf, bring the particulars of his arrest before Comrade Stalin. Within a day, a week at the outside, the order for his release will come, these grim-faced men send him on his way, back to his wife and child, with abject apologies.
They do not. They come for him again the next night and the next, again and again without pause or mercy. At first relieved to be assigned a cell, without window though it is, he soon comes to realize that is a torture all its own. Every hour on the hour, a guard wakes him with the scraping open of the door’s spyhole, strategically placed to cast illumination directly into his eyes. “Prisoner! Stand up!” He stands and turns for inspection, collapsing instantly as the guard leaves, only to await the next arrival. Each evening, the cruel one curses him and his family and forebears, complex multi-layer curses such as he has never heard. “Your mother lay with horses in ditches, then washed herself with horsedung afterward. Your father was an eater of omelets made from dog’s-vomit. Confess, you sire of a syphilitic dwarf! Confess, or we will make you wash your eyes with the urine of a prisoner with dysentery.”
Each day he receives a ration of ten ounces of bread. Each day he is allowed a cup or so of water. Each night he is tortured. The cruel one beats him with a rubber truncheon sometimes, other times clamps his hands flat to a table, so to strike his knuckles with a ruler’s edge. His jaw is broken and left dangling throughout one night’s session. Another has him standing until dawn. One evening they bring him in and have him sit down in a comfortable chair, insisting he remain awake.
One month to the day from his arrest, he confesses. What choice has he? Whatever awaits him in camp, it cannot compare to this. He longs for camp as for liberation. He admits his guilt to all charges, signs the paper given him without a glance at what it says.
Khan’s order is that K prepare for flight within a thousand days an interstellar spacecraft with a hundred-person crew. The vessel is to be ground-launched upon demand, so to provide Khan’s chosen “supermen” escape in case their empire falls. It must carry all supplies and cargo needed to establish a colony on a new world, and be capable upon arrival at its destination of long-term interplanetary flight, so to exploit a solar system’s resources. Were Khan’s people normal humans, the demand would be impossible. Their genetically-engineered physiques, however, permit application of as yet rudimentary suspended animation technology, fatal to normal human beings. Thus, the problem becomes one of numbers merely. K need only construct the largest rocket ever made, prepare for launch a spaceship such as the world has never seen.
The resources of Khan’s empire, from the Middle East to Asia Minor, are at his disposal. Price is no object – but technology is not wholly amenable to funds. The spacecraft alone is so far beyond the existing state-of-the-art as to be all but impossible. Nor can the most advanced technologies be relied upon. Integrated circuits, for instance, may prove unreliable over the course of a journey a century long. Transistors, K decides, will more probably survive. Soyuz spacecraft will serve as EVA pods. The most recent European-designed single-stage-to-orbit vehicle is to be a “landing boat.” The spacecraft itself is contracted to an aircraft bureau as old nearly as the Revolution. It will be called the DY-100.
Having no time to design and test a single booster capable of launching so gargantuan a ship, K turns to his greatest brainchild, the N-1, second only to the Americans’ Saturn in its payload. Eight of these conical behemoths are clustered about a core stage powered by a circle of N-1 booster engines. Three decades ago, K tried and failed to perfect the N-1 in racing America to the moon; now, by dint of Khan, dozens of such rockets are built and test-fired in enlarged mining tunnels, that Khan’s enemies not gain knowledge of his interstellar bolthole. A subterranean factory and launch-site is likewise prepared by means of detonating atomic warheads underground, the spaceship, pad and launcher then assembled in the resulting bubbles by teams of slaves, their lives cut short by lingering radiation.
K supervises every facet of the operation, unconcerned by his own body’s contamination. He is a widower, his children grown and gone to their own lives. He has but two tasks: to do as Khan has bid, and to follow his heart’s calling. He is happy. His time has come.
“None of you swine have committed a crime!” the judge answers his protest. “Ten years hard labor! Go! Next!”
His is sentenced to the Kolyma, site of a surface gold mine. For five months in the dead of winter the one-time rocketeer cuts trees, digs holes and pushes a wheelbarrow. Then, miraculously, his case is “re-investigated.” Without transportation to Moscow, he hitches 150 kilometers to Magadan, is driven from an army barracks and then, wandering in thin clothes through a winter of fifty degrees below, comes upon a fresh loaf of bread. He sneaks back into the barracks, hides beneath a bunk, awakens frozen to the ground. He finds work and survives the winter, is saved from scurvy by a stranger en route to Moscow, sent then to a “science-camp” and put to work designing bombers. In 1945 he is released, but remains at his job, so to serve the Motherland. That September, he travels to Germany to inspect the work of Nazi rocketeers, but finds little there, the Americans having stripped Peenemunde bare.
The Germans’ expertise, however, proves invaluable. Hundreds of them are brought to Russia to be exploited for the sake of Stalin. Never permitted to build rockets, let alone to see them fly, they nevertheless design what will be the outboard boosters of the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile.
K turns eighty-eight in 1994. But for the constant ache in his jaw and the creaking of his arthritic joints, he feels himself no more than fifty. My second childhood, he thinks, recalling when he was a veritable child, unmindful of adulthood’s toll, watching rocket-planes rise from frozen runways. Sixty years to the day from when the word came to attach a rocket motor to an airframe, he bears witness to the assembly of a ground-facilities test version of the DY-100. The hundred-odd meter long spacecraft is trundled to the launch pad on rails and brought erect, its core stage booster, so great it must be assembled in place, already waiting. Two eights of wedge-shaped modules are likewise brought into place and affixed to the spacecraft core. One set provides quarters for the awakened “supermen;” the other is filled with cargo and suspended animation canisters. The N-1 assemblies – each comprising the first two stages of K’s one-time moonbound booster – arrive and are attached to a faceted cone of a shroud. K stares and stares at his creation, then leaves the cavern that it be fueled. Today, the booster motors will be fired for as long a period as the launch pad will be exposed to their thrust, come flight. Should all go well, the test ship will be disassembled, the pad minutely gone over and left awaiting installation of the real thing. A failure means K’s life is over. He does not care. It will not fail, he knows.
Nor does it. Within a distant bunker, K monitors the firing, imaging the sight of flames and smoke and waterfalls of water turned to steam, second only in its magnificence, that spectacle, to when the starship yet to come will rise, its cavern-roof blown back by explosives, its deadly cargo gone to vie with heaven as they could not reign on Earth.
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Pavel Chekov
A man whose name the world has never known stares at one whose first translates as “tyrant,” but which might as well be “God” to the quarter of the Earth he rules. He is tired, the nameless man is. Tired unto death. He will turn eighty-six this year, which according to the edict of a long-dead Pope and the supposed passing of a man in whom he has no faith is 1992. He is tired, the man is, but his work is not yet done.
Khan Noonian Singh’s face is still, implacable as the demand made just now to his taskmaster, his rocket-builder, who says nothing. The nameless man, who long ago took on the initial “K,” the first letter of his patronymic, stares at Khan without a hint of fear. There is nothing Khan can do to him that has not been done before.
“Did you hear me, K?”
“Yes, Emperor.”
“Can it be done?”
K’s mind is far away, awash in figures. He hardly hears Khan’s words. His body feels light as a small child’s. The figures coalesce and halt upon a single number, a number which then recedes, as though an embodiment of itself. K watches the digits fade among the stars, longing to accompany them, knowing he never will.
“I said, can it be done?”
Khan’s voice has the merest hint of steel. If K says “no,” he knows, he will be dismissed, dismissed not merely from this room nor from his job but from life itself, another man brought in then, another after that if necessary, until some wretched craven worker answers “yes” to Khan’s demand.
“I will need—“
“You will have everything you need.”
With that the audience is over. K turns to go (he has not been sitting; there is no place to sit here, save for Khan), knowing Khan’s word is law, will be heard throughout his realm, thanks to the functionary standing by an ever-active computer console, whose transmissions will precede K everywhere he goes. He has never before been called to audience, but the first year of Khan’s reign has seen dams raised, atomic plants constructed, entire populations evicted from their homes and nations. Khan’s edicts are second but to those of God, and God, K knows, does not live here, has not for many decades, near as long as K has been alive. What former leaders tried to do, Khan has accomplished all but effortlessly. Now, he has put K onto the highest goal of all.
The stars, K thinks. This obscene oaf will reach the stars.
It amuses him to think that, to know it, being that Khan’s passage thereto will not be that of conqueror but refugee. He and his fellow “supermen” have surpassed the deeds of Stalin, Hitler, let alone those of Khan’s own forebear-by-name, who first strode the Russian steppes – but here in this room, Khan has confessed to a nameless old man that he does not think their reign will last.
Nor will it, K thinks. I will see to that.
The thought startles him with its suddenness and certainty. He nearly pauses in the doorway, staggered by the grandeur of the task he has of a sudden taken on. Such hesitation, though, might betray his intent. He catches himself and hobbles on, the weight of his responsibility greater than that of the laden barrows he so briefly trundled from open pit mines, decades past. He is astonished not by his audacity, but by the abrupt return of something he had thought lost to him long ago.
I am redeemed, K thinks. I have regained my soul.
He is not surprised to be awakened, merely startled, as might be a doe in the headlights of an oncoming car. It is June 27, 1938; though only thirty-one, he feels suddenly as old as time itself. He blinks against the glare of the men’s lamps, raising himself from bed, his wife recoiling reflexively beside him, as though that gesture or any other might save her from her husband’s fate. Two of the men are likewise shy, and appear embarrassed and self-conscious. “Witnesses,” he thinks, wondering how many other such scenes have been played out in his poor country. The other men, larger, with rough faces and rougher hands, hustle him erect and wait impatiently as he gets dressed. He asks permission to kiss his three-year old Natasha goodbye, receives a glare as his refusal. Xenia comes to herself enough to get him a change of underwear, but the men forbid that gesture too, leaving her standing stupidly in the doorway, his briefs dangling from her hand. In minutes, he has been bundled into the Black Maria.
He expects to be taken to a jail cell, but is instead brought to a row of wooden boxes, and thrust inside one without comment or explanation. Within that tiny unlit space, he can at first see nothing. Gradually, his eyes adjust until he can make out the dim glow of the hallway, spilling through the doorway’s chink – but the box is so shallow he cannot turn, can only stand with his back pressed against the entrance, wondering how long he will remain there. At first he tries to count the seconds, minutes, but loses track after the first hour or so. After that he knows nothing save that he is helpless and alone.
After an endless time they come for him, jerking back the door and laughing as he falls backward onto the floor. He blinks against the glare, is kicked and urged to stand, which he cannot. They seize him and take him to interrogation. One man is soft-spoken and persuasive. “You’ll get a term regardless,” he says. “Why not confess now? Otherwise, you stay here with us until you do. Why not accept your guilt, and go on to camp, to fresh air, sunshine, decent food and work? Why stay here until you croak?”
“Dung! Counter-revolutionary filth!” the other man interrupts. “I’ll give you your nine grammes right now!” he screams, fingering his holstered pistol. “Confess!”
He has nothing to confess to. What had he done? A year ago, he had been demoted from section head to the post of “senior engineer.” He had eight years’ experience in building rockets by then, and opposed the design bureau’s new concentration on solid motors. Liquid-fueled airplanes were his forte, a rocket-driven fighter his goal since 1932. Liquid motors could be throttled and controlled; solid engines were fireworks, good for nothing save carrying warheads or boosting airplanes off a runway or a ship’s deck. Accusations that he has been in clandestine correspondence with German rocket engineers are ludicrous. Surely, he thinks, his friends and fellow engineers will intercede on his behalf, bring the particulars of his arrest before Comrade Stalin. Within a day, a week at the outside, the order for his release will come, these grim-faced men send him on his way, back to his wife and child, with abject apologies.
They do not. They come for him again the next night and the next, again and again without pause or mercy. At first relieved to be assigned a cell, without window though it is, he soon comes to realize that is a torture all its own. Every hour on the hour, a guard wakes him with the scraping open of the door’s spyhole, strategically placed to cast illumination directly into his eyes. “Prisoner! Stand up!” He stands and turns for inspection, collapsing instantly as the guard leaves, only to await the next arrival. Each evening, the cruel one curses him and his family and forebears, complex multi-layer curses such as he has never heard. “Your mother lay with horses in ditches, then washed herself with horsedung afterward. Your father was an eater of omelets made from dog’s-vomit. Confess, you sire of a syphilitic dwarf! Confess, or we will make you wash your eyes with the urine of a prisoner with dysentery.”
Each day he receives a ration of ten ounces of bread. Each day he is allowed a cup or so of water. Each night he is tortured. The cruel one beats him with a rubber truncheon sometimes, other times clamps his hands flat to a table, so to strike his knuckles with a ruler’s edge. His jaw is broken and left dangling throughout one night’s session. Another has him standing until dawn. One evening they bring him in and have him sit down in a comfortable chair, insisting he remain awake.
One month to the day from his arrest, he confesses. What choice has he? Whatever awaits him in camp, it cannot compare to this. He longs for camp as for liberation. He admits his guilt to all charges, signs the paper given him without a glance at what it says.
Khan’s order is that K prepare for flight within a thousand days an interstellar spacecraft with a hundred-person crew. The vessel is to be ground-launched upon demand, so to provide Khan’s chosen “supermen” escape in case their empire falls. It must carry all supplies and cargo needed to establish a colony on a new world, and be capable upon arrival at its destination of long-term interplanetary flight, so to exploit a solar system’s resources. Were Khan’s people normal humans, the demand would be impossible. Their genetically-engineered physiques, however, permit application of as yet rudimentary suspended animation technology, fatal to normal human beings. Thus, the problem becomes one of numbers merely. K need only construct the largest rocket ever made, prepare for launch a spaceship such as the world has never seen.
The resources of Khan’s empire, from the Middle East to Asia Minor, are at his disposal. Price is no object – but technology is not wholly amenable to funds. The spacecraft alone is so far beyond the existing state-of-the-art as to be all but impossible. Nor can the most advanced technologies be relied upon. Integrated circuits, for instance, may prove unreliable over the course of a journey a century long. Transistors, K decides, will more probably survive. Soyuz spacecraft will serve as EVA pods. The most recent European-designed single-stage-to-orbit vehicle is to be a “landing boat.” The spacecraft itself is contracted to an aircraft bureau as old nearly as the Revolution. It will be called the DY-100.
Having no time to design and test a single booster capable of launching so gargantuan a ship, K turns to his greatest brainchild, the N-1, second only to the Americans’ Saturn in its payload. Eight of these conical behemoths are clustered about a core stage powered by a circle of N-1 booster engines. Three decades ago, K tried and failed to perfect the N-1 in racing America to the moon; now, by dint of Khan, dozens of such rockets are built and test-fired in enlarged mining tunnels, that Khan’s enemies not gain knowledge of his interstellar bolthole. A subterranean factory and launch-site is likewise prepared by means of detonating atomic warheads underground, the spaceship, pad and launcher then assembled in the resulting bubbles by teams of slaves, their lives cut short by lingering radiation.
K supervises every facet of the operation, unconcerned by his own body’s contamination. He is a widower, his children grown and gone to their own lives. He has but two tasks: to do as Khan has bid, and to follow his heart’s calling. He is happy. His time has come.
“None of you swine have committed a crime!” the judge answers his protest. “Ten years hard labor! Go! Next!”
His is sentenced to the Kolyma, site of a surface gold mine. For five months in the dead of winter the one-time rocketeer cuts trees, digs holes and pushes a wheelbarrow. Then, miraculously, his case is “re-investigated.” Without transportation to Moscow, he hitches 150 kilometers to Magadan, is driven from an army barracks and then, wandering in thin clothes through a winter of fifty degrees below, comes upon a fresh loaf of bread. He sneaks back into the barracks, hides beneath a bunk, awakens frozen to the ground. He finds work and survives the winter, is saved from scurvy by a stranger en route to Moscow, sent then to a “science-camp” and put to work designing bombers. In 1945 he is released, but remains at his job, so to serve the Motherland. That September, he travels to Germany to inspect the work of Nazi rocketeers, but finds little there, the Americans having stripped Peenemunde bare.
The Germans’ expertise, however, proves invaluable. Hundreds of them are brought to Russia to be exploited for the sake of Stalin. Never permitted to build rockets, let alone to see them fly, they nevertheless design what will be the outboard boosters of the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile.
K turns eighty-eight in 1994. But for the constant ache in his jaw and the creaking of his arthritic joints, he feels himself no more than fifty. My second childhood, he thinks, recalling when he was a veritable child, unmindful of adulthood’s toll, watching rocket-planes rise from frozen runways. Sixty years to the day from when the word came to attach a rocket motor to an airframe, he bears witness to the assembly of a ground-facilities test version of the DY-100. The hundred-odd meter long spacecraft is trundled to the launch pad on rails and brought erect, its core stage booster, so great it must be assembled in place, already waiting. Two eights of wedge-shaped modules are likewise brought into place and affixed to the spacecraft core. One set provides quarters for the awakened “supermen;” the other is filled with cargo and suspended animation canisters. The N-1 assemblies – each comprising the first two stages of K’s one-time moonbound booster – arrive and are attached to a faceted cone of a shroud. K stares and stares at his creation, then leaves the cavern that it be fueled. Today, the booster motors will be fired for as long a period as the launch pad will be exposed to their thrust, come flight. Should all go well, the test ship will be disassembled, the pad minutely gone over and left awaiting installation of the real thing. A failure means K’s life is over. He does not care. It will not fail, he knows.
Nor does it. Within a distant bunker, K monitors the firing, imaging the sight of flames and smoke and waterfalls of water turned to steam, second only in its magnificence, that spectacle, to when the starship yet to come will rise, its cavern-roof blown back by explosives, its deadly cargo gone to vie with heaven as they could not reign on Earth.
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