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