"Loosen it. Your bar is obviously not positioned properly."

"It is!" Mirsky insisted.

"Major—"

"Yes, yes!" He jammed the heel of his heavily gloved hand against the bar again. He hadn't hooked his ankles and right wrist; he floated away from the hatch and had to waste precious seconds reeling in his line and dragging himself back. Hook. Pound. Unhook. No result.

Water up to his chest, cold, slopping past his neck seal into his helmet when his angle shifted. He swallowed some accidentally and choked. There. Colonel will think I'm drowning and show mercy!

"Jiggle it," the colonel suggested.

His gloves were almost too thick to reach into the groove where the bar now resided, held in place by the partly open hatch. He pressed, his sleeves filled with cold and his fingers numbing. He pressed again.

His suit was no longer neutrally buoyant. He was starting to sink. The bottom of the tank was thirty meters below, and all three of the divers had accompanied Orlov. There was nobody between him and drowning if he could not make it to the simulated Soviet hatch on his own power. And if he did not leave now—

But he didn't dare. He had wanted the stars since adolescence, and panicking now would put them out of his reach forever. He screamed in his helmet and slammed his glove tip into the groove, causing a sharp freezing jolt of pain to go up his arm as his fingers crammed into the inner fabric and casing.

The hatch began to move again.

"Just jammed," the colonel said.

"I'm drowning, goddammit!" Mirsky shouted. He hooked his wrists onto the lip of the ring and sputtered water from his mouth. The suit's air entered and exited just above the neck ring of his helmet, and he could already hear the suck and gurgle.

Floodlights came on around the tank. The hatches were suspended in watery noon brightness. He felt hands under his arms and around his legs and saw the three other cosmonaut trainees vaguely from the corners of his foggy faceplate. They kicked away from the hatch complex and hauled him higher, higher to his grandmother's archaic and welcome heaven.

They sat at their special table away from the two hundred other recruits and were served fine thick sausages with their kasha. The beer was cold and plentiful, if sour and watery, and there were oranges and carrots and cabbage cores. And for dessert, a big steel bowl of fresh-made, rich vanilla ice cream, unavailable for months while they trained, was set before them by a smiling mess officer.

When dinner was over, Yefremova and Mirsky strolled across the grounds of the Cosmonaut Instructional Center with its hideous black steel water tank half-buried in the ground.

Yefremova came from Moscow and had a fine eastern slant to her eyes; Mirsky, from Kiev, could as easily have been German as Russian. Still, coming from Kiev had its advantages. A man without a city: this was something Russians could sympathize with, feel sad about.