Time’s Eye

Kolya’s full name was Anatole Konstantinovich Krivalapov. He was forty-one years old, and this tour of duty on the International Space Station had been his fourth.

Kolya, Musa and Sable, the crew of the ferry, clambered down through the living compartment of the Soyuz, making for the descent module. They were clumsy in their thick orange spacesuits, their pockets crammed with the souvenirs they intended to keep from the ground crews. The living compartment was to be jettisoned during reentry and would burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, and so was full of junk to be removed from the ISS. This included such items as medical waste and worn-out underwear. Sable Jones, the one American in the crew of three, led the way, and complained loudly in her coarse southern-USA English. “Jeez, what’s in here, Cossack jockstraps?”

Musa, the Soyuz commander, gave Kolya a silent look.

The descent compartment was a cramped little hut, filled by their three couches. Sable had been trained up on the ship’s systems, but she was the nearest thing to a passenger on this hop back to Earth. So she was first into the cabin, where she scrambled into the right-hand couch. Kolya followed, clambering down into the left-hand couch. During this descent he would serve as the spacecraft’s engineer, hence his allocation of seat. The compartment was so small that even as he headed for the furthest point of the cabin he brushed past Sable’s legs, and she glared at him.

And now Musa came plummeting down, a bright orange missile, helmet in hand. He was a bulky man anyhow, made more so by the layers of his suit. The couches were so crammed together that when the three of them were at rest their lower legs would be pressed against one another’s, and as Musa awkwardly tried to strap himself in, he shoved Kolya and Sable this way and that.

Sable’s reactions were predictable. “Where did they make this thing, a tractor factory? …”

It was a moment Musa had been waiting for. “Sable, I have listened to your mouth flapping for the last three months, and as you were commander there I could do nothing about it. But on this Soyuz ,I, Musa Khiromanovich Ivanov, am commander. And until the hatch breaks open and we are hauled out by the ground crew, you, madam, will—what is the English phrase? Shut the fuck up. ”

Sable’s face was like stone. Musa was a tough veteran of fifty who had served as Station commander himself, and had even been to the Moon, though not to command the multinational base there. They all knew that his admonishment of Sable would have been listened to by their comrades on the Station and, crucially, by the ground controllers.

Sable said through gritted teeth, “You’ll pay for that, Musa.”

Musa just grinned and turned away.

The descent compartment was cluttered. It contained the spacecraft’s main controls, as well as all the equipment that would be needed during the return to Earth: parachutes, flotation bags, survival gear, emergency rations. Its walls were lined with elasticized tags and Velcro patches, and were covered by material to be returned from the Station, including blood and stool samples from the biomed program, and cuttings Kolya himself had made from the pea plants and fruit trees he had been attempting to grow. All this stuff crowded in from the hull, reducing the space available for human beings even further.

But amid the clutter there was a window, to Kolya’s left-hand side. Through it he glimpsed the blackness of space, a slice of sky-bright Earth, and the struts and micrometeorite-dinged walls of the Station itself, shining brightly in the raw sunlight. The Soyuz, still docked to the Station, was carried by the bigger craft’s ponderous rotation, and shadows slid across Kolya’s view.

Musa worked them through the preseparation checklist, talking to the ground and to the crew in the Station. Kolya had little to do: his most important item was a pressure test of his spacesuit. This was a Russian ship, and unlike the pilot-oriented American engineering tradition, most of the systems were automated. Sable continued to grumble as she reached for various controls, which were situated around the capsule at all positions and angles. Some of them were so awkward to reach, veteran cosmonauts learned, it was better to poke at them with a wooden stick. But Kolya took a perverse pride in the ship’s low-tech, utilitarian design.