Omon Ra (16 page)

There was a crunching sound, and the little red lamp went out.

•

Landratov’s hand trolley was a lot lighter than my moonwalker and
it moved a lot faster. The powerful searchlight lit up the round gallery and the cables
running along its walls, all with a sticky covering of some kind of tacky fibres. As far
as I could tell, the gallery was an abandoned metro tunnel. At several points other
tunnels branched off from it, just as dark and lifeless as the one I was travelling
along. Occasionally rats ran across ahead—some of them were as big as small
dogs—but they paid no attention to me, thank God. Then came a side tunnel on the
right, just like the others, but as I got close, the trolley jerked so sharply to the
right that I flew off onto the rails and bruised my shoulder badly.

The points I’d just ridden over were set in a halfway position, so
that the front wheels went straight ahead while the back wheels went to the right; as a
result, the trolley was jammed solid. I knew I had to go on in the darkness on foot, and
I began slowly feeling my way forward, regretting that I hadn’t picked up
Landratov’s pistol, though it would hardly have saved me from the rats if they
decided to attack.

Before I’d gone fifty metres I heard shouting and dogs barking ahead
of me. I turned and ran back the way I’d come. Lights came on behind me; turning
to look, I saw
the grey forms of two Alsatians leaping over the
sleepers ahead of the swaying circles of torchlight which were all I could see of my
pursuers.

“There he is! Belka! Strelka! Get him!” someone yelled behind
me.

I turned into the side tunnel and set off as fast as I could, striding
high so I wouldn’t break my legs. I stepped on a rat and almost fell; then
suddenly I saw the bright unwinking points of unearthly stars shining off to my right. I
dashed towards them, collided with a wall, and clambered over it, clutching at the
cables, and all the while feeling the Alsatians rushing at my back. I tumbled over the
top of the wall and fell, and the only reason I didn’t hurt myself was that I
landed on something very soft, which felt like an armchair covered in polythene. I
squeezed into a crevice between some boxes and crates and began creeping along it;
several times my hands knocked against the backs of chairs and the arms of armchairs
wrapped in polythene. Suddenly it was brighter. I heard a quiet conversation very close
by and I froze. Right in front of my face was the back panel of a wardrobe—a large
sheet of hardboard with the word “Nevka” stamped on it. I heard barks and
shouting behind me, and then a loud voice amplified by a megaphone:

“Stop that! Quiet! We’re on the air in two minutes!”

The dogs carried on barking, and an insolent tenor voice tried to explain
what the problem was, but the megaphone started roaring again:

“Fuck off out of here if you and your dogs don’t want to be
court-martialled!”

The barking gradually faded—obviously the dogs had
been dragged away. After a minute I felt brave enough to peek out from behind the
wardrobe.

At first I thought I must be in some huge ancient Roman planetarium. On an
immensely high vaulted ceiling, set among glass and tin, the distant stars glimmered at
about one-third of full voltage. About forty metres from the wardrobe stood an old
crane; attached to its lifting arm, about four metres above the ground, was a Salyut
spacecraft, shaped like a huge bottle. Docked with the Salyut was an Agdam T-3 cargo
shuttle; the spaceship sat on the lifting arm the way a plastic model aeroplane sits on
its stand. The entire structure was obviously too heavy for the crane to support,
because the stern of the cargo shuttle was supported by a couple of long beams braced
against the floor; I could just make them out in the half-light, but when two
floodlights came on right beside the wardrobe, they became almost invisible because,
like the wall behind them, they were painted black and covered with pieces of glittering
foil that reflected the electric light.

The floodlights were fitted with filters, and their light was a strange,
deathly white. Apart from the spaceship, which immediately looked very convincing, they
also lit up a television camera and two machine-gunners who were smoking beside it, and
a long table with microphones, food, and spectrally transparent bottles of vodka looking
like icicles that had been hammered through the table; sitting at the table were two
generals. At one side stood a table with a microphone, at which a man in civilian
clothes was sitting. Behind him was a large sheet of plywood with the word
“News” and a drawing of the earth; rising crookedly over the earth
was a five-pointed star with long, extended side rays. Another
civilian was leaning over the table and talking to the man behind the microphone.

“Double three!”

I didn’t see who said that. The second civilian ran over to the
camera and pointed it towards the small table. A bell rang, and the man at the
microphone began to speak:

“Today we are at the front line of Soviet space science, in one of
the branches of Central Flight Control. Cosmonauts Armen Vezirov and Djambul Mezhelaitis
are now in their seventh year on board an orbital spacecraft. This is the longest space
flight in history, and it has put our country at the forefront of world space
technology. It is symbolic that I should be here with cameraman Nikolai Gordienko on the
very day when the cosmonauts are carrying out an important scientific
assignment—in exactly thirty seconds they will emerge from their craft into open
space in order to install the Quantum astrophysics module.”

The entire space was suddenly illuminated by a soft, diffused
light—I raised my head and saw that the lamps on the ceiling had been turned up to
full voltage, revealing a magnificent panorama of the starry sky to which man has
aspired for so many centuries, the inspiration for those beautiful but naïve
legends about silver nails driven into the firmament.

There was the sound of muffled blows from the direction of the
Salyut—the sound of a shoulder hammering on a cellar door which is swollen from
damp, when the person opening it is afraid of overturning the pots of sour cream just
inside. Finally I saw the door of the
hatch projecting slightly
above the fuselage of the spaceship, and the man at the table with the microphone
spoke:

“Attention, we’re going live!”

The hatch slowly opened, and a round silvery helmet with a short antenna
appeared above the side of the spaceship. Everyone at the table applauded; the helmet
was followed by shoulders and a pair of silvery arms—the first thing they did was
attach a safety line to the special bracket on the fuselage; their movements were very
slow and smooth, perfected by long hours of training in the swimming pool. Finally the
first cosmonaut clambered out into open space and stopped a few steps away from the
hatch. I thought it must take quite a lot of courage to stand like that four metres
above the ground. Then I had the impression that one of the generals at the table was
looking in my direction, and I pulled my head in behind the wardrobe. When I shoved it
back out again, both cosmonauts were standing on the spaceship, their suits blindingly
white against the inky-black background of the cosmic abyss, scattered with the tiny
points of stars. One of them was holding a small box; the cosmonauts moved with a slow,
underwater gait along the fuselage of the spaceship to a tall mast and quickly screwed
the box to it. Then they turned to face the television cameras, waved their hands
smoothly, walked back to the hatch with that same underwater stride, and one after the
other disappeared inside.

The hatch closed, but I went on staring at the stars glittering so
unimaginably far away—at the long, slim arms of the constellation of the Swan,
uncertain whether
to embrace the huge Pegasus which covered half
the sky, or the small but touchingly pure and clear Lyra.

The man in civilian clothes was speaking rapidly and happily into his
microphone:

“While the operation was in progress there was silence here at
Central Flight Control. I must confess I was holding my breath too, but everything went
according to plan. One has to marvel at the cosmonauts’ precision and
coordination—the years of training and orbital flight have clearly not been
wasted. The scientific equipment installed today …”

I crept behind the wardrobe. I felt apathetic, indifferent to everything.
If they had tried to catch me then, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to run for
it or even resist; the only thing I wanted to do was sleep. Following my moonside habit,
I rested my head on my folded arms and dozed off. Through my sleep I heard a voice:

“This television broadcast of men at work in open space came from a
camera installed by the flight engineer on one of the main unit’s solar
batteries.”

•

I slept for a long time, maybe five hours. A few times someone began
moving things around and swearing close by, then a thin female voice said the divan had
to be changed, but I didn’t budge—I could have been dreaming. When I finally
came round, everything was quiet. I stood up cautiously and glanced out from behind the
wardrobe. There was no one at the table with the microphone, and the television camera
was covered with a groundsheet. One floodlight lit up the spaceship.
I couldn’t see anyone there. I came out from behind the wardrobe and looked
around: everything was just the same as during the television broadcast, but now I
noticed there was quite a large pile of garbage under the spaceship—horrible
scraps of white paper and empty tins.

I went over to the table, to the leftover vodka and plates of hors
d’oeuvres; I wanted a drink badly. When I sat down, my back automatically hunched
over into the bicycle posture; I straightened up with considerable effort and poured all
the leftover vodka together—there was enough for two full glasses, and I drank
them down one after the other. For several seconds I thought about following them with
one of the marinated mushrooms left on the plate, but the sight of a fork covered in
sticky slime made me feel squeamish.

I remembered my crewmates, and imagined a hall like this one, with zinc
coffins standing on the floor—four soldered shut and one still empty. I supposed
in some ways the others were happier than I, but I still felt sad for them. Then I
thought about Mitiok. Pretty soon I got this buzzing in my head, and I found I could
think about what had happened that day. But instead of doing that, I remembered my last
day on earth, with the rain darkening the cobblestones on Red Square, Colonel
Urchagin’s wheelchair, and his warm lips brushing my ear as he whispered:

“I know how hard it was for you to lose your friend and learn that
ever since you were a child you had been approaching your moment of immortality arm in
arm with a cunning and experienced enemy—I won’t even pronounce his name.
But remember a certain
conversation at which the three of us were
present, when he said: ‘What does it matter what thought a man dies with?
We’re materialists, after all.’ You remember I said that after he dies a man
lives on in the fruit of his deeds. But there is something else I didn’t say,
something even more important. Remember, Omon, although man, of course, has no soul,
every soul is a universe. That’s the dialectic. And as long as there is a single
soul in which our cause lives and conquers, that cause will never die. For an entire
universe will exist, and at its centre will be this …”

He gestured across the square, where the cobblestones gleamed, black and
menacing.

“And now for the most important thing you must remember, Omon. You
can’t understand what I’m going to say yet, but I’m saying it for a
moment that will come later, when I won’t be beside you. So listen. Just one pure
and honest soul is enough for our country to take the lead in the conquest of space;
just one pure soul is enough for the banner of triumphant socialism to be unfurled on
the surface of the distant moon. But there must be one pure soul, if only for a moment,
because the banner will be unfurled within that soul …”

Suddenly I caught a powerful smell of sweat and started to turn around,
only to be knocked from my chair by a blow from a fist in a thick rubber glove.

A figure towered over me in a tattered felt spacesuit and a helmet with
the letters
USSR
painted on its rim in red. He grabbed an empty bottle,
smashed it against the table, and leaned down over me with the jagged edge in his raised
hand; I managed to roll away, jump to my feet, and run for it. He set off after
me—although his
movements were very slow, he still managed to
move very fast, in a way that was terrifying. I spotted his companion out of the corner
of my eye—he was hurriedly clambering down one of the black beams propping up the
Agdam T-3, knocking off the tinfoil stars as he went. I ran to the doors and charged
them with my shoulder, but they were locked. I ran back and dodged past the first
cosmonaut, only to run straight into the second, who swung his leg and kicked at me with
a boot with a heavy magnetic sole. He aimed for the groin but hit me on the
leg—and then tried to butt me in the stomach with the sharp antenna on his helmet.
I managed to dodge away again. It was then I realised I’d drunk the vodka they had
probably been looking forward to for years, and I felt really scared. Ahead of me I saw
a small door with the word
DANGER
painted on it, and a bolt of lightning
inside a triangle. I ran for it.

Behind the door was a very narrow corridor with a rumbling iron floor. I
forced myself to run about five metres along it, and then I heard again the heavy
clanging of magnetic soles behind my back. That gave me speed and strength: I turned a
corner and saw a short corridor ending in the round opening of a ventilation shaft with
its wire grille torn away. Beyond the opening stood a motionless rusty fan blade. As I
turned to run back, I was so close to my pursuer I didn’t even sense him as a
single whole, just a collection of unrelated impressions: a sphere with a bottle-green
Plexiglas visor and huge red letters, a black rubber glove with a small transparent
trident protruding from it, a powerful smell of sweat, and a major’s epaulettes on
silver-painted felt. The next instant I was already squirming into the ventilation
shaft behind the wire netting; I squeezed pretty quickly between
the blades of the huge fan, like a ship’s propeller, but when I began climbing
into the shaft that led upwards and away, my padded jacket bunched up and I got stuck
there, squirming like an embryo in the womb. There was a rustling sound below me and
something touched my ankle. I shouted and jerked myself free and upwards, covering two
metres in a matter of seconds and then squeezing into a horizontal branch of the shaft.
It ended in a round opening, and beyond that I could see the earth swathed in wispy
clouds; I sobbed and crawled towards it.