Time’s Eye

“I’m smart technology, but not that smart,” the phone said. “I think it’s some archaic dialect.”

Cecil de Morgan stepped out of the crowd, adjusting his mud-spattered morning jacket with an easy self-awareness. “A rather fine education was once wasted on me. I still recall a little of my Euripides …” He spoke rapidly to the strangers. They jabbered back. De Morgan held his hands up, obviously telling them to slow down, and spoke again.

After a minute of this de Morgan turned to Grove. “I think we’re getting through, Captain, if imperfectly.”

Grove said, “Ask them where they’re from. And when. ”

Ruddy said, “They wouldn’t understand the question, Captain. And we probably wouldn’t understand the answer.”

Grove nodded; Bisesa admired his imperturbability. “Then ask them who commands them.”

It took de Morgan a couple of tries to get that across. But Bisesa could understand the answer without interpretation.

“Al-e-han-dreh! Al-e-han-dreh! …”

Abdikadir stepped forward, his eyes alive with a wild surmise. “He did come this way. Is it possible? Is it possible ? …”

16. Reentry

The retro-rocket burn was brief, a push in the back. But it was enough to knock them out of orbit.

So it was done, the decision made, and whatever remained of Kolya’s life—minutes or years—was irrevocably shaped as a consequence.

After launch, reentry was the most dangerous part of a space mission, for the great energies expended to inject them into orbit now had to be dissipated in friction against the air. The only in-flight casualties of Kolya’s country’s space program had occurred at reentry, and he remembered those poor cosmonauts in his heart now, as he remembered the crew of the lost space shuttle Columbia. But there was nothing to do but wait. The Soyuz was designed to bring itself home without support from the ground, or instructions from its crew. Kolya, who had been trained as a pilot, longed to be less a passenger, to be more in control of events—to have a joystick in front of him, to do something to bring the ship home.

He glanced out of his window. The tangled jungles of South America, laced by cloud, passed for the last time beneath the prow of the spaceship. He wondered if anybody would ever see such a sight again—and how soon it would be before even the existence of such a place as this remote continent was forgotten. But as the Soyuz passed over the Americas toward the Atlantic he saw a storm, a creamy-white spiral, that sat like an immense spider across the Gulf of Mexico. Minor storms spun off across the Caribbean islands, Florida, Texas and Mexico. These children of the monster in the Gulf were themselves devastatingly powerful, and had scratched deep gouges into the forest that covered central America. Worse, the central mother storm system was itself edging north, and surely little would be spared from Houston to New Orleans. This was the second superstorm system they had seen in the last few days—the remnants of the first were still coursing across the eastern United States and the western Atlantic. But there was nothing the cosmonauts could do for anybody on the ground, not even warn them.

Right on time there was a series of bangs from above and below. The craft shuddered, feeling subtly lighter. Explosive bolts had detonated, jettisoning the descent compartment from the other two sections of the Soyuz: the rocket engines and their garbage would now burn up like meteors, to baffle whoever was down there on the ground.

They endured the next few minutes in a silence broken only by the ticking of their instruments, the humming of the air supply. But the small noises of the various gadgets were almost cozy, like being in a home workshop, Kolya thought. He knew he was going to miss this environment.

As they fell across the sky, the resistance of the thickening air began to bite. Kolya watched the deceleration build up on the meter before him: 0.1 g, 0.2 g. Soon he began to feel it. Pushed back into his couch, his straps felt loose, and he tightened them. But the rise in pressure wasn’t steady; the upper atmosphere was lumpy, and the compartment shuddered as it fell, like an airliner passing through turbulence. Kolya was aware, as he had been during no previous descent, of the smallness and fragility of the capsule within which he was falling to the ground.