Phase Space. Stephen Baxter

which would crush you. Or perhaps you have committed acts of such barbarity, that you can only function by dwelling in an elaborate illusion –

       Don’t blame us. You made yourselves. You made your world. We are the ones trying to protect you.

      My God, he thought.

      The Angel said again, Are you sure you want me to turn it off?

      He couldn’t speak.

      And, in a gentle snow of pixels, the softwalls themselves began to dissolve.

      He looked down. Even his body was becoming transparent, breaking into a hail of cubical pixels, full of light.

      And then –

       POYEKHALI 3201

      It seemed to Yuri Gagarin, that remarkable morning, that he emerged from a sleep as deep and rich as those of his childhood.

      And now, it was as if the dream continued. Suddenly it was sunrise, and he was standing at the launch pad in his bright orange flight suit, his heavy white helmet emblazoned ‘CCCP’ in bright red.

      He breathed in the fresh air of a bright spring morning. Beyond the pad, the flat Kazakhstan steppe had erupted into its brief bloom, with evanescent flowers pushing through the hardy grass. Gagarin felt his heart lift, as if the country that had birthed him had gathered itself to cup him in its warm palm, one last time, even as he prepared to soar away from its soil, and into space.

      Gagarin turned to his ship.

      The A-1 rocket was a slim white cylinder, forty metres tall. The three supporting gantries were in place around the booster, clutching it like metal fingers, holding it to the Earth. Gagarin could see the four flaring strap-on boosters clustered around the first stage, the copper-coloured clusters of rocket nozzles at the base.

      This was an ICBM – an SS-6 – designed to deliver heavy nuclear weapons to the laps of the enemies of the Soviet Union. But today the payload was no warhead, but something wonderful. The booster was tipped by his Vostok, shrouded by a green protective cone: Gagarin’s spaceship, which he had named Swallow.

      Technicians and engineers surrounded him. All around him he saw faces: faces turned to him, faces shining with awe. Even the zeks, the political prisoners, had been allowed to see him today, April 12 1961, to witness as the past separated from the future.

      They were right to feel awe. Nobody had travelled into space before! Would a human body be able to survive a state of weightlessness? Would cosmic radiation prove lethal to a man? Even to reach this deadly realm, the first cosmonaut would have to ride a converted missile, and his spaceship had just one aim: to preserve him long enough to determine if humans, after all, could survive beyond the Earth – or if space must forever remain a realm of superstition and dread.

      Gagarin smiled on them all. He felt a surge of elation, of command; he basked in the warm attention.

      … And yet there were faces here that were strange to him, he realized slowly, faces among the technicians and engineers, even among the pilots. How could that be so, after so many months of training, all of them cooped up here in this remote place? He thought he knew everybody, and they him.

      Perhaps, he wondered, he was still immersed in his dream.

      … For a time, he had been with his father. He had been a carpenter, whose hands had constructed their wooden home in the village of Klushino, in the western Soviet Union. Then the ground shook as German tanks rumbled through the village. His parents’ home was smashed, and they had to live in a dug-out, without bread or salt, and forage for food in the fields …

      But that was long ago, and he and his family had endured, and now he had reached this spring morning. And here, towering over him, was the bulk of his rocket, grey-white and heavy and uncompromising, and he put aside his thoughts of dreams with determination; today was the day he would fulfil the longings of a million years – the day he would step off the Earth and ride in space itself.

      Gagarin walked to the pad. There was a short flight of metal stairs leading to the elevator which would carry him to the capsule; the stairs ran alongside the flaring skirt of one of the boosters. White condensation poured off the rocket, rolling down its heroic flanks; and ice glinted on the metal, regardless of the warmth of the sun.

      Gagarin looked down over the small group of men gathered at the base of the steps. He said, ‘The whole of my life seems to be condensed into this one wonderful moment. Everything that I have been, everything I have achieved, was for this.’ He lowered his head briefly. ‘I know I may never see the Earth again, my wife Valentia, and my fine children, Yelena and Galya. Yet I am happy. Who would not be? To take part in new discoveries, to be the first to journey beyond the embrace of Earth. Who could dream of more?’

      They were hushed; the silence seemed to spread across the steppe, revealing the soft susurrus of the wind over the grass which lay beneath all human noises.

      He turned, and climbed into the elevator. He rose, and was wreathed in white vapour …

      And, for a moment, it was as if he was surrounded by faces once more, staring in on him, avid with curiosity.

      But then the vapour cleared, the dream-like vision dissipated, and he was alone.

      

      ‘Five minutes to go. Please close the mask of your helmet.’

      Gagarin complied and confirmed. He worked through his checklist. ‘I am in the preparation regime,’ he reported.

      ‘We are in that regime also. Everything on board is correct and we are ready to launch.’

      Swallow was a compact little spaceship. It consisted of two modules: a metal sphere, which shrouded Gagarin, and an instrument module, fixed to the base of Gagarin’s sphere by tensioning bands.

      The instrument module looked like two great pie dishes welded together, bristling with thermal-radiation louvres. It was crammed with water, tanks of oxygen and nitrogen, and chemical air scrubbers – equipment which would keep Gagarin alive during his brief flight in space. And beneath that was the big TDU-1 retrorocket system which would be used to return the craft from Earth orbit.

      Gagarin’s cabin was a cosy spherical nest, lined with green fabric. His ejection seat occupied much of the space. During the descent to Earth inside the sphere, small rockets would hurl Gagarin in his seat out of the craft, and, from seven kilometres above the ground, he would fall by parachute. In case he fell in some uninhabited part of the Earth, the seat contained emergency rations of food and water, radio equipment, and an inflatable dinghy; thus he was cocooned from danger, from the moment he left the pad to the moment he set foot once more on Earth.

      There were three small viewing ports recessed into the walls of the cabin, now filled with pure daylight.

      At Gagarin’s left hand was a console with instruments to regulate temperature and air humidity, and radio equipment. On the wall opposite his face, TV and film cameras peered at him. Below the cameras was a porthole mounted with Gagarin’s Vzor optical orientation device, a system of mirrors and optical lattices which would enable him to navigate by the stars, if need be …

      ‘Three minutes. There is a faulty valve. It will be fixed. Be patient, Major Gagarin.’

      Gagarin smiled. He felt no impatience, or fear.

      He reached for his controls, wrapped his gloved hands around them. There was a simple hand controller to his right, which he could use in space to orient the capsule, if need be. To his left there was an abort switch, which would enable him to be hurled from the capsule if there were some mishap during launch. The controls were solid in his hands, good Soviet engineering. But he was confident he would need neither of these controls, during the launch or his single orbit of Earth.

      The systems would work as they should,