Fall of a Cosmonaut

began keeping it, asked the others aboard Mir about their dreams. Early on they had cooperated. The most cooperative had been the American, Tufts. Tufts’s Russian was grammatically correct but heavily accented. Tsimion’s English was no better. The two had become friends and had once been chastised by Vladimir Kinotskin for playing catch in the communal room with a ball of rolled aluminum foil that floated wildly across the small area.

“You could break something,” Kinotskin had said, suggesting but not exerting his command as senior officer, though he was more than a decade younger than Tsimion.

Tsimion was a botanist with no great ambition. Space was not the final frontier but an escape from his routine and badly paid future of agricultural research in Siberia. He had volunteered for the training, threw himself into it, and succeeded in qualifying.

“Everything is already broken,” Tsimion had said.

“Nevertheless …” Kinotskin had said, and the game had stopped. Kinotskin was muscular, blond, and humorless, with a doctorate in aeronautical engineering from Moscow State University. He was ambitious, handsome, unmarried, and slated to be a spokesman for the Russian space program when he returned to earth, his uniform covered in medals, his teeth covered in caps of artificial whiteness, and the small mole just below his left eye neatly and surgically removed without leaving a scar.

The American was gone now, taken back to earth by an American space shuttle at 17,500 miles an hour, replaced by another Russian, Rodya Baklunov, who had joined the crew carrying specimens of fat white worms in carefully sealed canisters. In addition to his other chores Baklunov, a small, powerfully built, and nearly bald man, spent most of his time with his worms. He did not share the nature of his experiments with Kinotskin or Tsimion, who now sometimes dreamt of those worms. In his dreams, the worms, hundreds of them, had escaped and were floating around the cabin. Baklunov was floating after them and with gloved hands slowly recapturing the worms and placing them back in a canister from which they immediately escaped.

“Don’t touch them,” Baklunov said in the dream. “Just a touch will make your skin burn and peel off in seconds, leaving a bloody screaming Vladovka begging to be shot because when the bleeding stopped, Tsimion Vladovka would turn into a giant, bloated white worm.”

In fact, in the dream, one fat white worm squiggled through the air and clung to the exposed hand of Tufts, the American, who immediately began to peel to near screaming death. And then Tsimion saw that three more worms were heading toward him. Beyond these worms, Baklunov was still patiently, calmly plucking worms from the air and putting them in the canister from which they would immediately escape. This was always the point at which Tsimion awoke.

Tsimion had recorded that dream and the variations in his journal. He wondered if when he returned to earth the dream would continue to come. He felt sure it would.

The third thing, and most important, that he disliked about Mir and that caused him to think, “if I get to earth,” was the gradual disintegration of the space station. Systems were dying and had to be jury-rigged and frequently repaired. The inside of the spacecraft, so clean in photographs and diagrams shown to the world, was beginning to look like the messy workshop of a weekend tinkerer. Cables with fraying wires were wound with tape, panels once lit were permanently dark, and small metal boxes on the floor were tied in to perform tasks that should have been part of the internal system of the station. Solar panels shut off without reason. One of two oxygen generators in the Kvant I module seldom worked. The backup generator frequently failed. Their backup was an emergency cylinder that could be started to create a chemical reaction which produced oxygen. Tsimion was not at all sure the emergency cylinder would work. The last backup was individual oxygen packs with a supply of a few hours, supposedly enough time for the three cosmonauts to make it through the docking passage and into the Soyuz capsule, which could detach and return them to earth.

But there had been problems in the past, even a fire before Tsimion’s time on Mir, and it had become clear that even following emergency procedures there would not be enough time for all the cosmonauts to get to the Soyuz and detach while a major breakdown was underway. Even if they could detach, an explosion destroying Mir, which might happen in seconds, could overtake and destroy the Soyuz before it could distance itself from the station.

Ground control knew and Tsimion and the other cosmonauts knew that they were sitting inside a space bomb continuing to circle the earth, performing meaningless experiments simply to demonstrate to the world that the only space station, the first real space station, in orbit was Russian.

There had been a time when Russian children wanted to be cosmonauts, treated when they returned from space missions with the welcome of heroes. Parents gave their children the names of cosmonauts. Russia was overcrowded with Yuris named in honor of the iconic Yuri Gagarin, who was overwhelmed by his being a national treasure for simply sitting in a sphere he didn’t control and circling the earth a few times.

Now Russians did not even know the names of the cosmonauts who orbited the earth. Children wanted to be economists, bankers. They wanted to earn degrees in business. Engineering schools and research institutes, like the one Tsimion had attended, were closing down. Science and space were of little interest. The young were looking to the earth and their bank accounts, not to the skies.

And so, Tsimion spent each day in nearly resigned anticipation of that squawking alarm that would tell them yet another system had failed, another crisis was about to begin.

Tsimion Vladovka did not blame the solar-winged tomb in which they sped. Mir had been launched more than a decade ago. It was not intended for existence beyond a decade. It had done its job. It was tired.

Mir reminded Tsimion of the little horse in Raskolnikov’s dream in Crime and Punishment. It was Raskolnikov’s dream that had haunted him for more than two decades and was responsible for Tsimion starting his dream journal, which, he rationalized, might be of scientific interest back on earth.

In Raskolnikov’s dream, he is once again a small boy in the village where he was born. He is with his father. A big man comes out of a tavern and climbs into a cart. The cart is to be drawn not by the large horse with thick legs who normally pulls it, but by a small horse. The man takes the reins and invites people to join him on a ride.

“Come,” the man shouts drunkenly. “Climb aboard.”

People come laughing and climb onto the cart, crowding together.

The small boy tells his father that the horse cannot pull all those people. The father tells the boy that there is nothing they can do.

The big man yanks the reins and orders the small horse to pull. The horse tries valiantly, stumbles, breathes cold air. The big man whips the horse and then climbs down to beat him. The boy breaks away from his father and runs to help the fallen horse, who is now being clubbed and whipped. The big man turns to the boy, saying, “This is my horse. I’ll kill him if I wish.” The horse dies and as he dies the boy kisses his mouth.

Tsimion thought of Mir as that small horse and himself as the young Raskolnikov. The difference was that the man who owned Mir was faceless and on the ground, and Tsimion Vladovka did not dare protest as he rode the horse through starry blackness and red-white sunlight high about the clouds of earth.

It was a gamble. All others had gone. They had managed to leave the dying horse before its last breath.

“It is safe,” spokesmen at ground control had announced. “Our problems have been small and we have planned for their correction and executed all needed repairs. No one has been seriously injured or died on Mir.”

There is always the possibility of a first time. In the history of chance, there was always an inevitable first time that altered the odds forever.

Mir had floated for well over eleven years at three hundred and ninety kilometers above the earth, had circled that earth close to seventy thousand times.

Tsimion had recently developed a fourth concern. Baklunov had begun to talk to himself and he had developed a dreamlike gaze and a knowing smile. When spoken to he answered, but he seldom looked at Tsimion or Kinotskin when they talked to him. The little man performed his duties, kept himself immaculately clean and well