She reread every paper and report she had. Then she went to Zukolev and asked for two things. The first was a travelling wave tube amplifier, a technology developed by the British and Americans during World War Two to boost radio signals. The second was a set of plans for something called a rake receiver. Valera thought that combining a stronger signal with a more sensitive receiving system might be the key to opening up a hole in the atmospheric barrier and getting a message into space. She made her case to Zukolev and, after his usual complaining about time and expense, both pieces of equipment were delivered to her lab the next month.

Combining the travelling wave tube amplifier with the rake receiver did exactly what she’d hoped, but it wasn’t a solution. For every broadcast that worked, another didn’t. A fifty per cent success rate in lab conditions wasn’t good enough. But she was convinced she was on the right track. So she repeated test after test, each time getting different results, and each time pretending that she wasn’t getting closer and closer to the definition of madness.

After two more months, Valera had gone back to reading through her library for fresh inspiration. She was now halfway through.

She poured herself a weak cup of coffee from her samovar—another hard-fought-for gift from Zukolev—and carried the next stack of papers over to her desk.

Valera could read for hours, and she did, stopping only for occasional refills of coffee. She was happy losing herself in the theoretical world and forgetting the reality of Povenets B. But by late afternoon she’d found nothing to help her solve her problem. It was frustrating. She knew she couldn’t rush the science, but she also knew after her meeting with Zukolev that she needed to deliver something resembling progress soon.

She emptied the last of the samovar and started on the next pile of papers. Halfway down was a slim report from 1957 by a military engineer called Leonid Kupriyanovich about his development of an experimental portable telephone. She paced up and down the small amount of free floor space, clutching her coffee in one hand and Kupriyanovich’s report in the other. By the third page she knew she was on to something.

Because of its diminutive size, Kupriyanovich’s phone could only broadcast a very weak signal. He’d overcome this limitation not by trying to make his signals stronger, but by making them larger, wider. He used asynchronous code division to spread his transmissions across a much broader bandwidth than they needed, effectively increasing the odds of them reaching their destination. Instead of trying to turn the signal into a rocket, he turned it into the wind.