He survives the time of Stalin in preparation for the future. His country has no bombers capable of crossing the world’s oceans, but in his mind there lies the power to bring America atomic fire. That is not his goal; he is a loyal communist, so far as minding orders, but his aim is on the stars. The world’s first atomic bombs are so heavy as to make their would-be missiles vast beyond belief, but Russian hubris, second but to God’s, has no care for scale. If engines burning liquid fuel are unequal to the task, what of engines burning atoms? For some time he considers that, knowing that, should war come, it little matters how much radiation such motors will emit. In time, though, the advantages of atomic rockets fall second to improved chemical motors. What matter Russian rocket chambers are dwarfed by those planned by the Americans? Clustered engines, outboard stages, will serve the place as well.
In 1957, he sees his brainchild off. It is a clumsy-looking thing, four cone-shaped boosters placed about a tapered core, twenty main engines and a dozen verniers, swiveling to ensure trajectory. It is impractical for war; it needs a day to fuel and fire. It is beautiful. He watches it take flight, staring until it disappears. Not since his first wife first gave birth has he felt so happy.
Two months later, another rocket does the thing that it was built for. The Americans, vain and foolish, have aimed to loft a “civilian” satellite, forsaking an existing missile for a new bird, Vanguard, all untried. His rocket, though, is ready. In October, it lofts Sputnik. In November, the bitch Laika barks at the world from Sputnik 2. In December, the first U.S. Vanguard lights, then blows asunder. “Kaputnik,” their press calls that. A joke.
He cannot laugh. He has won nothing. His Rube Goldberg of a rocket will suffice to fulfill some future paltry goals – a man in space, perhaps the moon – but those are nothing. A solar system awaits. Rockets made as yet of paper, the chemically-fueled cousins of his would-be atomic-powered missile, will be needed for that goal. His task-master, Nikita Khrushchev, is as Eisenhower to such schemes. Already the premier has scorned the moon, near enough almost to touch. He wants missiles. He wants guns, and bread and circuses, quick and easy, fast and cheap.
Long ago, a Russian movie showed men flying to the moon. Back then, that was but a dream, the dream of a deaf schoolteacher, Konstantin Tsiolkovski, who at seventy-three years old saw his dreams built as models, and then filmed. Tsiolkovski would have turned a hundred, had he lived, the day of Sputnik 1’s planned launch, an anniversary untimely missed, due to snafus. Tsiolkovski, a loyal communist, awarded all his patents to the State.
He is loyal, yes, loyal still, despite incarceration, pain and loss. He has, however, had his moments of coveting after fame. Sputnik would win him some of that, he thought, imaging his name emblazoned below headlines. The “Chief Designer,” he is called. For just a moment, with his satellite, he thinks his time has come. But then the Nobel Committee is sent packing, their hallowed prize denied, some nameless functionary calling Sputnik an achievement of the “Soviet people,” not him.
My name is K, he thinks that day, feeling comrade to a man who fought to reach a castle, never yielding, always failing, finally dying, his goal in plain sight all the while.
Call me K.
K boards the completed starship, his tour a birthday present to himself. He is eighty-nine. The DY-100 lies in its erection-cradle, a bizarre echo of a submarine in shape, its cargo modules lined up to either side like great metallic A-frames. K climbs an inclined gangway and enters the ship’s airlock to find himself standing on the ceiling of an inverted deck. Of late, Khan’s archeologists have unearthed an alien artifact, whose technologies permit application of artificial gravity to the suspended animation area – but this discovery came too late to influence the ship’s design. The four narrow decks of its “conning tower” provide the crew a small infirmary and exercise area. “Above,” within the octagonal centerbody, lies a despun cylindrical core. Its first deck is a garage for a quartet of “runabouts,” Soyuz spacecraft devoid of their re-entry capsules, their semi-spherical work compartments equipped with jointed arms. K marvels at the garage’s complexity, imagining the DY-100’s spin halted, the core rotated to bring the runabouts’ deployment cradles into alignment with their egress hatches. He descends to the control and sensor deck, then walks forward and peers through the doorway to the base of the ship’s landing boat, imagining a time when war is done, Khan gone, the DY-100 no makeshift starship, become instead the vessel with which the solar system will be won. Too frail to make his way into the lander, he shuts his eyes to picture its spare interior, large enough to seat the ship’s entire complement. He imagines the DY-100 bound for Mars, a hundred men and women awaiting launch within its nose, their lander an escape craft in the event of booster failure. He pictures a crew of Martian colonists making ready for their first landing, replacing most of the boat’s couches with auxiliary fuel, shuttling to and from the surface until all personnel and cargo have put down. He turns and makes his way aft, leaving the DY-100’s nose for the transfer compartment, a doughnut about the central tunnel. From here, according to the ship’s original design, crewmembers would leave free-fall for the module rings, each pie-slice module full of concentric cylinder-slices of decks, the outermost deck at one tenth gee due to the ship’s rotation, a veritable mansion built for interplanetary emigrants.
Khan’s people will not enjoy such comfort. Upon awakening, they will live and plot just beside their walls of glass-walled beds, leaving sealed those become by mischance coffins. Nor will they ride acceleration couches to space, their inheritance of alien machinery rendering their comatose forms immune to thrust. They will leave the Earth unknowing and leave an unknowing Earth behind, the latter to be shocked upon emancipation of the realms of “supermen” with evidence of Khan’s departure, and – should K succeed in his clandestine stockpiling – the plans of this marvel, this ship of stars, which though a contrivance in that role will give humanity the planets.
K leaves the ship, walks ‘round behind it, staring upward at its two motors, little plates of ion engines, their thrust pitiful, minute. He smiles. Step by step he walks the starship’s length, coming finally to the nose, within which the lander sleeps. High above him, Khan himself has painted a pair of words. K stares and blinks and laughs and laughs, so hard his sides are sore, then leaves, shaking his head in wonder. O such a world, he thinks, to have such “supermen.”
Khan has misspelled his ship’s name.
Across the ocean, the man who gave Hitler the V-2 has been put in charge of NASA. For years, this man has tried to turn his new people’s hearts to space. Eisenhower, though, dubs Sputnik a “basketball,” and scoffs at plans to reach the moon.
K’s plans fall on ears as deaf. Failing to sell his super-booster as a moonship, he courts the Soviet Air Force. Give me rubles, you own the sky, he says, drafting plans of space stations, fleets of spacecraft in Earth orbit. The generals laugh. K flies a man to orbit, another man, at Khrushchev’s bequest selects a woman – then in August, 1962, as two cosmonauts fly twin Vostoks in space, is told to turn his N-1 rocket to the task of orbiting six men in a station built to fire H-bombs. Three months after, another plan of Khrushchev’s goes awry, missiles found in Cuba and driven from there by threat of war. K shudders. A year and more has passed since John Kennedy invoked the moon, recalling to K a Japanese, who twenty years before that spoke of awakening a giant, and filling him by dint of sneak attack with a terrible resolve. What will Kennedy, who on Al Shepard’s fifteen minute flight said “before this decade,” make of an enemy’s fortress in the sky?
Summer 1963, K delivers Khrushchev’s spacegirl, who spins about the Earth with a comrade-spaceship at her side. Five months later, a tragedy sees a launch site made memorial to a murdered president, which renaming K takes as augury, none too fond of old McKinley, who once made war on Cuba (where U.S. warships harbor still). In February, K meets personally with Khrushchev, answering the premier’s demand that three cosmonauts be flown at once with a proviso of his own. Give me the moon, you have your troika, K says, then goes to work to loft the three. Without time to build a new ship, he strips Vostok of its ejection seats, installs three couches side by side. The men have no means of launch escape, nor have they room for spacesuits. Their capsule is so heavy its parachutes cannot support it; a retrorocket will be lit a mere meter from the Earth that the crew reach the ground alive. In October, K’s soul hangs in the balance as the three go up. During that flight, Khrushchev is deposed. “There are more things in heaven and Earth,” K radios in explanation of the Voskhod’s premature return, the ship’s commander, Vladimir Komarov, upon landing, altering the traditional cosmonauts’ oath, “ready to carry out any task set us by the government” to “ready to carry out tasks set us by any government.”
Having bested Apollo’s crew, K in March of 1965 goes Gemini three months better, sending Alexei Leonov outside to take a little walk. Voskhod 2 deploys an airlock, an external cylinder, to give Alexei egress; done with his spacewalk, he cannot enter, his spacesuit swelled too fat with air. Twice the ten minutes he spent dancing Alexei struggles, then bleeds his suit of pressure, that his comrade not be left to cut him free, jettison the lock and land alone. Two years and a month later, K adds to January 1967’s toll of three Americans a dead spaceman of his own. Apollo 1’s crew (one of them America’s premier spacewalker Ed White) have been asphyxiated in Florida; Soyuz 1’s lone pilot Komarov plummets spinning to the earth upon failure of his parachute.
Years more K fights to take the moon, failing to man-rate the Zond, whose test-ship’s first photograph of Earthrise over the moon’s horizon in 1968 is eclipsed by that shot from Apollo 8, which Christmas portrait becomes an eight-cent stamp. Five times K’s N-1 rises, four times falls. The first launch, ’68’s, puts up an unmanned version of “Battlestar Khrushchev;” the Americans’ answer, a nuclear-tipped Saturn, comes near to bombing Egypt. February 1969’s N-1 suffers engine failure, that of July destroys its pad. Neil Armstrong walks the moon two weeks and three days later (Apollo missions through number twenty have been approved the month before; the last is cancelled the next January, Eighteen and Nineteen in September). The third N-1 fails in June, 1971; days later, the first space station crew, Salyut 1’s troika, return to Earth as corpses, their air lost the moment they undocked. The last N-1 takes flight November of ’72, does not go far.
December sees the last Apollo put the first scientist on the moon.
K’s robots have reached the moon, photographed its backside, roved its surface for months, returned minute samples to the Earth (the first attempt an unacknowledged failure a day after Armstrong’s step). Anonymous, his triumphs bested, K fights to perfect his lunar steed. Beaten to the moon’s surface, he will own it, put down bases, send men for weeks. The Americans have stopped building Saturns; the last lofts Skylab in ’73 (two more of their fleet of fifteen will be mothballed, made museum exhibits, years later). K has two new N-1s, their bugs gone, he prays and hopes, near to flight a year later. Six more are in construction.
April 1974, K is fired. An engineer who testified against him is his replacement. The N-1s are torn apart, their components used as storage sheds, sunshades, gazebos. K is sixty-eight, his daughter, 39. Had she become a cosmonaut, his rocket left to fly, she might have walked the moon. Will she, K wonders, see another man, let alone a woman, take such footsteps in her lifetime? Likely not.
Khan calls K into audience the day the ship is through. It is the New Year, the dawn of 1996. Things are not going well for Khan. His empire, as he foresaw, is dissolving. The outskirts alone are falling now – England, Belgium, France – but the center cannot hold. Superior ability breeds superior ambition, Khan told the world on taking power, not saying what he perhaps knew: that the most superior of ambitions was to hold the world entire. Khan thought to be that one man, the one man among many – but other men, his “equals,” in his eyes, hold the same desire. Their empires are at war. Whole populations are being bombed, Europe laid waste again. Across the sea, America watches, impregnable behind its defensive missile shield, the “Eugenics Wars” mere headlines to a fat and happy people. Khan is furious, mad as Stalin. Looking at him, K realizes this is his final audience. He shall not leave this room alive. His task finished, he is useless. Worse than useless; he is dangerous. He alone knows all things. His workers are long dead, designers lesser to him slain or jailed. Khan’s bolthole, should he use it, must be secret forevermore. K takes a breath and speaks, interrupting Khan’s accolades and promises. He has one chance, K knows. One chance only. He must take it.
“There is one thing I want.”
Khan stares at him. The old man looks back. Khan smiles, and with a gesture gives his minions leave to go. He can slay K with a blow. He is curious what K will say.
“Take me with you.”
K imagines one brief moment. He sees himself awakened, decades hence, light years distant. He imagines his frail body come to life amidst the stars. He seems to feel his heart shake with the travail of waking from “cold sleep.” He takes his last few breaths, a mere mortal, only human, incapable of withstanding a return to conscious life. He is embraced by some “superman,” held in Khan’s own arms perhaps, taken to a portal to see the light of a distant sun.
“You will not survive,” Khan says.
“Will I, here?” K answers.
Khan stares at K, then nods. “Very well.”
(MORE)
In 1957, he sees his brainchild off. It is a clumsy-looking thing, four cone-shaped boosters placed about a tapered core, twenty main engines and a dozen verniers, swiveling to ensure trajectory. It is impractical for war; it needs a day to fuel and fire. It is beautiful. He watches it take flight, staring until it disappears. Not since his first wife first gave birth has he felt so happy.
Two months later, another rocket does the thing that it was built for. The Americans, vain and foolish, have aimed to loft a “civilian” satellite, forsaking an existing missile for a new bird, Vanguard, all untried. His rocket, though, is ready. In October, it lofts Sputnik. In November, the bitch Laika barks at the world from Sputnik 2. In December, the first U.S. Vanguard lights, then blows asunder. “Kaputnik,” their press calls that. A joke.
He cannot laugh. He has won nothing. His Rube Goldberg of a rocket will suffice to fulfill some future paltry goals – a man in space, perhaps the moon – but those are nothing. A solar system awaits. Rockets made as yet of paper, the chemically-fueled cousins of his would-be atomic-powered missile, will be needed for that goal. His task-master, Nikita Khrushchev, is as Eisenhower to such schemes. Already the premier has scorned the moon, near enough almost to touch. He wants missiles. He wants guns, and bread and circuses, quick and easy, fast and cheap.
Long ago, a Russian movie showed men flying to the moon. Back then, that was but a dream, the dream of a deaf schoolteacher, Konstantin Tsiolkovski, who at seventy-three years old saw his dreams built as models, and then filmed. Tsiolkovski would have turned a hundred, had he lived, the day of Sputnik 1’s planned launch, an anniversary untimely missed, due to snafus. Tsiolkovski, a loyal communist, awarded all his patents to the State.
He is loyal, yes, loyal still, despite incarceration, pain and loss. He has, however, had his moments of coveting after fame. Sputnik would win him some of that, he thought, imaging his name emblazoned below headlines. The “Chief Designer,” he is called. For just a moment, with his satellite, he thinks his time has come. But then the Nobel Committee is sent packing, their hallowed prize denied, some nameless functionary calling Sputnik an achievement of the “Soviet people,” not him.
My name is K, he thinks that day, feeling comrade to a man who fought to reach a castle, never yielding, always failing, finally dying, his goal in plain sight all the while.
Call me K.
K boards the completed starship, his tour a birthday present to himself. He is eighty-nine. The DY-100 lies in its erection-cradle, a bizarre echo of a submarine in shape, its cargo modules lined up to either side like great metallic A-frames. K climbs an inclined gangway and enters the ship’s airlock to find himself standing on the ceiling of an inverted deck. Of late, Khan’s archeologists have unearthed an alien artifact, whose technologies permit application of artificial gravity to the suspended animation area – but this discovery came too late to influence the ship’s design. The four narrow decks of its “conning tower” provide the crew a small infirmary and exercise area. “Above,” within the octagonal centerbody, lies a despun cylindrical core. Its first deck is a garage for a quartet of “runabouts,” Soyuz spacecraft devoid of their re-entry capsules, their semi-spherical work compartments equipped with jointed arms. K marvels at the garage’s complexity, imagining the DY-100’s spin halted, the core rotated to bring the runabouts’ deployment cradles into alignment with their egress hatches. He descends to the control and sensor deck, then walks forward and peers through the doorway to the base of the ship’s landing boat, imagining a time when war is done, Khan gone, the DY-100 no makeshift starship, become instead the vessel with which the solar system will be won. Too frail to make his way into the lander, he shuts his eyes to picture its spare interior, large enough to seat the ship’s entire complement. He imagines the DY-100 bound for Mars, a hundred men and women awaiting launch within its nose, their lander an escape craft in the event of booster failure. He pictures a crew of Martian colonists making ready for their first landing, replacing most of the boat’s couches with auxiliary fuel, shuttling to and from the surface until all personnel and cargo have put down. He turns and makes his way aft, leaving the DY-100’s nose for the transfer compartment, a doughnut about the central tunnel. From here, according to the ship’s original design, crewmembers would leave free-fall for the module rings, each pie-slice module full of concentric cylinder-slices of decks, the outermost deck at one tenth gee due to the ship’s rotation, a veritable mansion built for interplanetary emigrants.
Khan’s people will not enjoy such comfort. Upon awakening, they will live and plot just beside their walls of glass-walled beds, leaving sealed those become by mischance coffins. Nor will they ride acceleration couches to space, their inheritance of alien machinery rendering their comatose forms immune to thrust. They will leave the Earth unknowing and leave an unknowing Earth behind, the latter to be shocked upon emancipation of the realms of “supermen” with evidence of Khan’s departure, and – should K succeed in his clandestine stockpiling – the plans of this marvel, this ship of stars, which though a contrivance in that role will give humanity the planets.
K leaves the ship, walks ‘round behind it, staring upward at its two motors, little plates of ion engines, their thrust pitiful, minute. He smiles. Step by step he walks the starship’s length, coming finally to the nose, within which the lander sleeps. High above him, Khan himself has painted a pair of words. K stares and blinks and laughs and laughs, so hard his sides are sore, then leaves, shaking his head in wonder. O such a world, he thinks, to have such “supermen.”
Khan has misspelled his ship’s name.
Across the ocean, the man who gave Hitler the V-2 has been put in charge of NASA. For years, this man has tried to turn his new people’s hearts to space. Eisenhower, though, dubs Sputnik a “basketball,” and scoffs at plans to reach the moon.
K’s plans fall on ears as deaf. Failing to sell his super-booster as a moonship, he courts the Soviet Air Force. Give me rubles, you own the sky, he says, drafting plans of space stations, fleets of spacecraft in Earth orbit. The generals laugh. K flies a man to orbit, another man, at Khrushchev’s bequest selects a woman – then in August, 1962, as two cosmonauts fly twin Vostoks in space, is told to turn his N-1 rocket to the task of orbiting six men in a station built to fire H-bombs. Three months after, another plan of Khrushchev’s goes awry, missiles found in Cuba and driven from there by threat of war. K shudders. A year and more has passed since John Kennedy invoked the moon, recalling to K a Japanese, who twenty years before that spoke of awakening a giant, and filling him by dint of sneak attack with a terrible resolve. What will Kennedy, who on Al Shepard’s fifteen minute flight said “before this decade,” make of an enemy’s fortress in the sky?
Summer 1963, K delivers Khrushchev’s spacegirl, who spins about the Earth with a comrade-spaceship at her side. Five months later, a tragedy sees a launch site made memorial to a murdered president, which renaming K takes as augury, none too fond of old McKinley, who once made war on Cuba (where U.S. warships harbor still). In February, K meets personally with Khrushchev, answering the premier’s demand that three cosmonauts be flown at once with a proviso of his own. Give me the moon, you have your troika, K says, then goes to work to loft the three. Without time to build a new ship, he strips Vostok of its ejection seats, installs three couches side by side. The men have no means of launch escape, nor have they room for spacesuits. Their capsule is so heavy its parachutes cannot support it; a retrorocket will be lit a mere meter from the Earth that the crew reach the ground alive. In October, K’s soul hangs in the balance as the three go up. During that flight, Khrushchev is deposed. “There are more things in heaven and Earth,” K radios in explanation of the Voskhod’s premature return, the ship’s commander, Vladimir Komarov, upon landing, altering the traditional cosmonauts’ oath, “ready to carry out any task set us by the government” to “ready to carry out tasks set us by any government.”
Having bested Apollo’s crew, K in March of 1965 goes Gemini three months better, sending Alexei Leonov outside to take a little walk. Voskhod 2 deploys an airlock, an external cylinder, to give Alexei egress; done with his spacewalk, he cannot enter, his spacesuit swelled too fat with air. Twice the ten minutes he spent dancing Alexei struggles, then bleeds his suit of pressure, that his comrade not be left to cut him free, jettison the lock and land alone. Two years and a month later, K adds to January 1967’s toll of three Americans a dead spaceman of his own. Apollo 1’s crew (one of them America’s premier spacewalker Ed White) have been asphyxiated in Florida; Soyuz 1’s lone pilot Komarov plummets spinning to the earth upon failure of his parachute.
Years more K fights to take the moon, failing to man-rate the Zond, whose test-ship’s first photograph of Earthrise over the moon’s horizon in 1968 is eclipsed by that shot from Apollo 8, which Christmas portrait becomes an eight-cent stamp. Five times K’s N-1 rises, four times falls. The first launch, ’68’s, puts up an unmanned version of “Battlestar Khrushchev;” the Americans’ answer, a nuclear-tipped Saturn, comes near to bombing Egypt. February 1969’s N-1 suffers engine failure, that of July destroys its pad. Neil Armstrong walks the moon two weeks and three days later (Apollo missions through number twenty have been approved the month before; the last is cancelled the next January, Eighteen and Nineteen in September). The third N-1 fails in June, 1971; days later, the first space station crew, Salyut 1’s troika, return to Earth as corpses, their air lost the moment they undocked. The last N-1 takes flight November of ’72, does not go far.
December sees the last Apollo put the first scientist on the moon.
K’s robots have reached the moon, photographed its backside, roved its surface for months, returned minute samples to the Earth (the first attempt an unacknowledged failure a day after Armstrong’s step). Anonymous, his triumphs bested, K fights to perfect his lunar steed. Beaten to the moon’s surface, he will own it, put down bases, send men for weeks. The Americans have stopped building Saturns; the last lofts Skylab in ’73 (two more of their fleet of fifteen will be mothballed, made museum exhibits, years later). K has two new N-1s, their bugs gone, he prays and hopes, near to flight a year later. Six more are in construction.
April 1974, K is fired. An engineer who testified against him is his replacement. The N-1s are torn apart, their components used as storage sheds, sunshades, gazebos. K is sixty-eight, his daughter, 39. Had she become a cosmonaut, his rocket left to fly, she might have walked the moon. Will she, K wonders, see another man, let alone a woman, take such footsteps in her lifetime? Likely not.
Khan calls K into audience the day the ship is through. It is the New Year, the dawn of 1996. Things are not going well for Khan. His empire, as he foresaw, is dissolving. The outskirts alone are falling now – England, Belgium, France – but the center cannot hold. Superior ability breeds superior ambition, Khan told the world on taking power, not saying what he perhaps knew: that the most superior of ambitions was to hold the world entire. Khan thought to be that one man, the one man among many – but other men, his “equals,” in his eyes, hold the same desire. Their empires are at war. Whole populations are being bombed, Europe laid waste again. Across the sea, America watches, impregnable behind its defensive missile shield, the “Eugenics Wars” mere headlines to a fat and happy people. Khan is furious, mad as Stalin. Looking at him, K realizes this is his final audience. He shall not leave this room alive. His task finished, he is useless. Worse than useless; he is dangerous. He alone knows all things. His workers are long dead, designers lesser to him slain or jailed. Khan’s bolthole, should he use it, must be secret forevermore. K takes a breath and speaks, interrupting Khan’s accolades and promises. He has one chance, K knows. One chance only. He must take it.
“There is one thing I want.”
Khan stares at him. The old man looks back. Khan smiles, and with a gesture gives his minions leave to go. He can slay K with a blow. He is curious what K will say.
“Take me with you.”
K imagines one brief moment. He sees himself awakened, decades hence, light years distant. He imagines his frail body come to life amidst the stars. He seems to feel his heart shake with the travail of waking from “cold sleep.” He takes his last few breaths, a mere mortal, only human, incapable of withstanding a return to conscious life. He is embraced by some “superman,” held in Khan’s own arms perhaps, taken to a portal to see the light of a distant sun.
“You will not survive,” Khan says.
“Will I, here?” K answers.
Khan stares at K, then nods. “Very well.”
(MORE)
