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Yakov.”
    “I know.”
    “When we get home, they’ll make us stick to the story.”
    “Of course.” She said this with total resignation, as if it was the least any of us could expect.
    Soon we bored of the news and the television. While Galenka was answering letters from friends and family I went back to run my own check on Yakov. To our disappointment Baikonur still had no specific recommendations beyond maintaining the present medication. I sensed that they didn’t want blood on their hands if something went wrong with him. They were happy to let us take responsibility for our ailing comrade, even if we ended up killing him.
    “Let me out, Dimitri. I’m fine now.”
    I looked at him through armored glass of the bulkhead door. Shaking my head, I felt like a doctor delivering some dreadful diagnosis.
    “You have to stay there for now. I’m sorry. But we can’t run the risk of you trying to open the hatch again.”
    “I accept that this isn’t a simulation now. I accept that we’re really in space.” His voice came through a speaker grille, tinny and distant. “You believe me, don’t you Dimitri?”
    “I’ll see you later, Yakov.”
    “At least let me talk to Baikonur.”
    I placed the palm of my hand against the glass. “Later, friend. For now, get some rest.”
    I turned away before he could answer.
    He wasn’t the only one who needed sleep. Tiredness hit me unexpectedly—it always came on hard, like a wall. I slept for two hours, dreaming of being back on Earth on a warm spring day, sitting with my wife in the park, the mission happily behind me, deemed a success by all concerned. When I woke the dream’s melancholic after-effects stayed with me, dogging my thoughts. I badly wanted to get home.
    I found Galenka in the pilot’s position.
    “We have contact,” she said, but I knew from her tone of voice that it wasn’t all good news.
    “The Progress called in?”
    “She’s stuck, Dimitri. Jammed in down there. Can’t back out, can’t go forward.”
    “Fuck.”
    What was only apparent when the Progress reached the root complex was that there was no solid surface to Shell 4; that the tangled mass of roots was, to all intents and purposes, the sphere itself. There were gaps in that tangle, too, like the interstices in a loosely bundled ball of string. Methodically and fearlessly, the Progress had set about finding a way through to whatever was underneath. On its first attempt, it had traveled no more than a third of a kilometer beneath the nominal surface before reaching a narrowing it couldn’t pass through. The second attempt, picking a different entry point, had taken it a kilometer under the surface before it met a similar impasse. With fuel now running low-just enough to get it back to the Tereshkova , with some in reserve—the Progress had opted to make one final attempt. It was then that it had got itself stuck, lodging in a part of the thicket like a bullet in gristle.
    Galenka sent commands to the Progress, to be relayed through to it when a window opened. She told it to use its manipulators to try and push itself backwards, and to wiggle its reaction thrusters in the hope that it might shake itself loose. It was the best she could do, but she wasn’t optimistic. We waited three hours, by which time Baikonur were fully appraised of the situation. Then a window opened and the Progress reported that it was still jammed tight, despite executing Galenka’s instructions.
    “Before you say I should have listened to you,” she said. “I did listen. But bringing her back in just wasn’t the right decision, given what I knew at the time.”
    “I fully concurred, Galenka. No one’s blaming you.”
    “Let’s see what Baikonur have to say when we get back, shall we?”
    “I’m sure they’ll be in a forgiving mood. The amount of data we’ve gathered ...”
    “Doesn’t begin to add up against physical samples, which we’ve now lost.”
    “Maybe.”
    “Maybe what? I’ve tried