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Everywhere, stars were green.
The nearby stars, for instance: Alpha Centauri and Sirius and Procyon and Tau Ceti, names from science fiction, the homes of mankind in the ages to come. Green as blades of grass!
He tipped his head this way and that. Everywhere he looked it was the same: stars everywhere had turned to chlorophyll green.
What could this mean?
Yuri Gagarin flew on, alone in the dark of the Earth, peering out of his warm cabin into an unmarked celestial night.
At last he flew towards the sunlight once more. This first cosmonaut dawn was quite sudden: a blue arc, looking perfectly spherical, which suddenly outlined the hidden Earth. The arc thickened, and the first sliver of sun poked above the horizon. The shadows of clouds fled across the ocean towards him, and then the clouds turned to the colour of molten copper, and the lightening ocean was grey as steel, burnished and textured. The horizon brightened, through orange to white, and the colours of life leaked back into the world.
The green stars disappeared.
Space was a stranger place than he had imagined.
He looked down at the Earth. To Gagarin now, the Earth seemed like a huge cave: warm, well-lit, but an isolated speck on a black, hostile hillside, within which humanity huddled, telling itself stories to ward off the dark. But Gagarin had ventured outside the cave.
Gagarin wished he could return now, wished his brief journey was even briefer.
He closed his eyes. He sang hymns to the motherland. He saw flashes of light, meteoric streaks sometimes, against the darkness of his eyelid. He knew this must be some radiation effect, the debris of exploded stars perhaps, coursing through him. His soft human flesh was being remade, shaped anew, by space.
So the minutes wore away.
It would not be long now. He anticipated his return to Earth, when the radio commands from the ground control would order his spaceship to prepare itself. It would orient in its orbit, and his retro-rockets would blaze, slamming him with a full-body blow, forcing him back into his couch. Then would come the brief fall into the atmosphere, the flames around his portholes as the ablative coating of Swallow turned to ash, so that he became a man-made comet, streaking across the skies of Africa and Asia. And at last his ejection seat would hurl him from the spent capsule, and from four thousand metres he would drift to Earth on his parachute – landing at last in the deep spring air, perhaps on the outskirts of some small village, deep in the homeland, such as his own Klushino. The reverie warmed him.
Have you come from outer space?
Yes, he would say. Yes, I have. Would you believe it? I certainly have …
But the stars, he would have to tell them, are green.
… We can’t continue. The anomalies are mounting. The Poyekhali is becoming aware of its situation.
Then we must terminate.
Do you authorize that? I don’t have the position to –
Just do it. I will accept the blame.
Again, the voices! He tried to shut them out, to concentrate on his work, as he had been trained and he had rehearsed.
He had no desire to return to Earth a crazy man.
And yet, even if it had to be so – horrible for him, for Valentia! – still his flight would not have been without value, for at least something would have been learned about the insidious deadliness of space.
He threw himself into his routine of duties once more. The end of the flight was crowding towards him, and he still had items to complete. He monitored his pulse, respiration, appetite and sensations of weightlessness; he transmitted electrocardiograms, pneumograms, electroencephalograms, skin-galvanic measurements and electro-oculograms, made by placing tiny silver electrodes at the corners of his eyes.
He ate a brief meal, a lunch squeezed from tubes stored in a locker set in the wall. He ate not because he was hungry, but because nobody had eaten in space before: Gagarin ate to prove that such normal human activities were possible, here in the mouth of space. He even drifted out of his couch and exercised; he had been given an ingenious regime based on rubber strips, which he could perform without doffing his pressure suit …
Again, a noise from outside the craft. Unfamiliar voices, a babble.
Laughter.
Were they laughing at him? As if he was some ape in a zoo cage?
And – Holy Mother! – a scraping on the hull, as if hands were clambering over it.
The noises of the craft – the steady hum and whir of the instruments, the clatter of busy pumps and fans – all of it stopped, abruptly, as if someone had turned a switch.
Gagarin waited, his breath loud in his ears, the only sound.
The hatch, behind Gagarin’s head, scraped open. His ears popped as pressure changed, and a cold blue light seeped in on him.
There were shadows at the open port.
Not human shadows.
He tried to scream. He must reach for his helmet, try to close it, seek to engage his emergency air supply.
But he could not move.
Hands on his shoulders, cradling his head. Hands, lifting him from the capsule. Had he landed? Was he dreaming again? A moment ago, it seemed to him, he had been in orbit; and now this. Had something gone wrong? Had he somehow re-entered the atmosphere? Were these peasants from some remote part of the Union, lifting him from his crashed Swallow?
But this was not Kazakhstan or any part of the Union, and, whatever these creatures were, they were not peasants.
He was out of the craft now. Faces ringed his vision. They looked like babies, he thought, or perhaps monkeys, with grey skin, oversized heads, huge eyes, and small noses, ears and mouths. He could not even tell if they were men or women.
He closed his eyes. When he opened them, the faces were still there, peering in on him.
He could not read their emotions. But it did seem to him that he found in one of the distorted faces a little more – compassion. Interest, at least …
So. Do you think this Poyekhali is conscious of where it is?
It could be. It seems alert. If it is, we have broken the sentience laws …
The heads were raised in confrontation.
I won’t be held responsible for that. The systems are your accountability.
But it was not I who –
Enough. Recriminations can wait. For now, we must consider – it.
They studied him again.
Perhaps he was, simply, insane.
He had, he realized with dismay, no explanation for this experience. None, that is, save his own madness, perhaps induced by the radiation of space …
The beings, here with him, were floating, as he was.
He was in a room. His Vostok, abandoned, was suspended here, like some huge artefact in a museum. The Vostok looked as fresh as if it had just come out of the assembly rooms at Baikonur, with no re-entry scorching.
He looked beyond his spacecraft.
The room’s walls were golden. But the room’s shape was distorted, as if he was looking through a wall of curved glass, and so were the people themselves.
They seemed to have difficulty staying in one place. They could pass through the walls of this room at will, like ghosts.
They even passed through his body. He could not move, even when they did this.
They took hold of his arms, and pulled him towards the wall of the room. He looked for his Vostok spacecraft, but he could no longer see it.
He passed into the wall as if it was made of mist; but he had a sense of warmth and softness.
Now he was in a cylindrical room. He was enclosed in a plastic chair with a clear fitted cover. The cover was filled with a warm grey fluid. But there was a tube in his mouth and covering his nose, through which he could breathe cool, clean air. A voice in his mind told him to close his eyes. When he did so he could feel pleasing vibrations, the fluid seemed to whirl around him, and he was fed a sweet substance through the tubes. He felt tranquil and happy. He kept his eyes closed, and he seemed to become one with the fluid.
Later he was moved, within his sac. He was taken through tunnels and elevators from one room to another. The tunnels varied in length, but ended usually with doorways into brightly lit, dome-shaped rooms.
After a time his fluid was drained and he was taken out of the sac. It was uncomfortable and dry and his head hurt. He was pinned to a table. He was naked now, his orange flight suit gone. He did not seem able to resist, or even to help in any way, had he wished.
He was in another room, big and bright.
Though he was not uncomfortable, he found he could not move, not even close his eyes. He was forced to stare unceasingly up at a ceiling, which glowed with light.
He waited, laid out like a slab of meat in a butcher’s shop.
His fear faded. Even his bewilderment receded, failing to overwhelm him. Who were these monkey-people? Who were they to treat him like this? … But he could not move, so much as a finger.
One of the monkey-faces appeared before him. It studied him, with – at least – interest. He wondered if this was the one who, an immeasurable time before, had beheld him with a trace of compassion.
… Do not be afraid.
The wizened mouth did not move, and he could not understand how he heard the words, yet he did.
However, he was not afraid.
The being seemed to be hesitating. Do you know who you are?
Of course he knew who he was! He was Flight Major Yuri Gagarin! The first man in space! …
He remembered the laughter.
He felt anger course through him, dispelling the last of his fear. Who were these people to mock him?
This should not have happened. It has never happened before.
Hands – human, but stretched and distorted – reached towards him. And then withdrew.
It may be you have the entitlement to understand more, before we … The sentience laws aren’t clear in this situation. Do you know where you are?
He had no answer. If not in orbit, then on Earth, of course. But where? Was this America?
No. Not America. The misshaped head turned.
The ceiling turned to glass.
He could see a sky. But not the sky of Earth. Two stars nestled at the zenith, so close they almost touched, connected by a fat umbilical of glowing gas. One, the larger, was sky blue, the other, small, fierce and bright, carried hints of emerald.
Around this binary star, a crude spiral of glowing gas had been cast off, and lay sprawled across more distant stars. And before those stars a fainter cloud glowed, bubbles of green light, like pieces of floating forest.
The bubbles were cities in space, and they turned the starlight green.
Gagarin shrank within himself. Was he seeing the future of man? How far had he come from Earth? A thousand light years? More? He was, he realized, very far from home …
And yet, in his awe and wonder, he remembered the laughter. Had he been brought back from the dead to be mocked?
No. Listen.
Voices, booming around him:
… Yuri Gagarin, Hero of the Soviet Union, would never again fly in space. There have been many monuments to him.
His ashes were to be buried in the wall of the Kremlin, an enduring mark of his prestige. He would be commemorated by statues, in the cosmonauts’ training ground at Star City, and another on a pillar overlooking a Moscow street called Leninski Prospect.
The cosmonauts would remember him in their own way, by aping the actions he took on his final day: on each mission they would watch the film he saw the night before his flight – White Sun in the Desert – they would sign the doors of their rooms as he did, they would even pause in their bus transports to the booster rockets to climb outside to urinate, as he did.
The site where Gagarin crashed his MiG-15 became a shrine, with a memorial and a tablet recording his life. And every spring, the people who looked after this shrine would trim the tops of the trees along the angle of his crashing plane, so that it was possible to stand by his memorial and look up and see through the gap to the sky …
Mankind has covered the Galaxy. But nowhere away from the Earth has life been found, beyond simple one-celled creatures.
When Yuri Gagarin was born, Earth was one little world holding all the life there was, to all intents and purposes. And it would have stayed that way if Gagarin and his generation – Americans and Russians – had not risked their lives to enter space in their converted ICBMs and primitive little capsules.
The destiny of all life, forever, was in their hands. And if they had failed – if they had turned back from space, if war had come and they had turned themselves to piles of radioactive ash – there might now, in this future age, be no life, no mind, anywhere. For every human alive in 1961, there are now billions – perhaps tens of billions. Gagarin’s simple flight in his Vostok spaceship was perhaps the most important event in the history of mankind, our greatest wonder of all …
The monkey face, looking in at him. Perhaps, he thought, it might once have been human. Do you understand what is being said? This is what we tell people. It is what this – monument – is for. Every day, Gagarin flies again.
You see that Gagarin will never be forgotten. Gagarin’s actions, heroic and trivial, continue to haunt our present.
Emotions swirled in him: pride, terror, awe, loneliness.
He tried to understand how this might have been done. Had they stolen his ashes from the wall of the Kremlin, somehow recombined them to –?
No. Not that.
Then what? And what of Valentia, Yelena, Galya? Where they buried under dust millennia deep?
… Enough. It is time to rest.
