So much for Shapcott’s harbinger of astronautical doom. He hasn’t seen her at all. Or anyone, obviously.

There was a lot of chatter just after the accident—Mission Control and half the experts on the planet trying to find a solution, any solution. It’s quiet now. They’ve figured out what he knew from the moment it happened.

It’s all down to physics, as usual. Force, kinetic energy, and gravity. The debris that made an unannounced appearance at his EVA, severed his tether, and sent him spinning in toward the Earth below. The fuel in his thrusters that he burned off in a desperate, futile attempt to get back to the ISS.

And still, no Laika.

His radio crackles, the tinny voice being relayed from the space station, for now. He wonders again if he’ll be out of range before the situation becomes terminal, and part of him hopes so.

“Carl, Carl do you copy?”

Oh, God. It’s Shapcott. They shouldn’t do this to Shapcott. It’s cruel to make her listen to the play-by-play of what’s coming.

“Still here,” he replies.

“Carl,” she begins, then falls silent.

“The view’s amazing,” he says. “If circumstances were different, I’d say I wish you were here.”

For a moment, the only thing he can hear in the universe is his own breathing.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“It’s not your fault,” he replies.

“I’ll stay with you.”

“No. God, no. Don’t do that to yourself. Any of you. There’s nothing to say. I’ll update Mission Control for as long as I can, but just . . . don’t talk to me. Please.”

“Carl,” Shapcott asks, “Is she there? Have you seen her?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he says, but that’s a lie.

When you read about Laika, as a kid, you get the idea that she went into space, came home, got a victory parade in Red Square, and went on the propaganda circuit giving lectures to adoring crowds of other Soviet dogs.

But Laika never came home. She was the first animal to orbit the Earth, and she was never meant to come home. Sad, but, you know. Science! The Space Race!

And Shapcott had told him something once, after a few drinks, but before one thing had led to another. “The cosmonauts tell this story,” she’d said. “When they’ve been deep in the vodka. The Russians lost people to space sooner than we did. They had time for . . . legends, I guess, to take root. And they say that when one of us is about to bite it up there, the last thing they see is Laika.”

“How could anyone know that?” he had asked.

“Oh, from the last transmissions of half-mad cosmonauts cooking in their Sputniks as the cooling systems failed or whatever. Official records wiped but living on in whispers at Baikonur. You know, however stories get passed on.”

“They believe this?”

“When they’re on the ground? No. When they’re up there?” Shapcott had paused to finish her drink. “Who knows what people believe—when there’s so little separating them from infinity?”

Carl hadn’t told Shapcott, but he’d been so space-crazy as a kid, so hungry to know. He’d studied and read beyond the usual superficial histories, and when he’d learned the truth, ten-year-old Carl had cried for poor betrayed Laika.

Laika was expendable. He’s not so self-pitying to believe that he was considered expendable. And yet, here he is. Going out just like Laika.

It’s hard to know his current velocity—he tried to do the math in his head but it turns out there are limits to even his logical detachment. Maybe his long, fast fall will still be slow enough that his air going bad or waste building up in his system will kill him first.

It sounds like a miserable way to go. He’d rather be a meteorite than a satellite.

And he might still get his wish. He’s starting to feel warmer, and the Earth seems to loom ever larger, ever nearer.

The radio stays silent. He’s not sure if he’s out of range or if they’re honoring his request as a last wish. He keeps talking anyway. Someone down there might be listening, and it gives him something to do.

For science, and all that.

No, that’s another lie. Really, it’s because he finds, now, in the ultimate quiet and on the verge of the ultimate moment, that he doesn’t want to die alone after all.

So he talks.

He talks about space, about being an astronaut. He talks about how beautiful the Earth is. He talks about the fucking debris up here, and how he hopes that maybe now, people will finally be motivated to do something about it.

When his vision starts to blur, and he feels hotter with every second, and he doesn’t know whether the oxygen is running out, or if re-entry has truly begun, or if he’s just losing it at last…

That’s when he talks about Laika.

“We were wrong, Shapcott. We didn’t understand,” he says. “She wasn’t a harbinger of doom. She was a dog. They’ve always loved us, protected us, even when we send them to die. She’s not a threat. Maybe she’s a guard, a warning. No, because then she would have come before I ever left the station . . .”

The Earth is so big, and it’s hot, and he’s lonely.

“Not a spectre, not a guard. A friend. The last thing she’d want is for anyone else to die alone.”

And he feels it.

A cold nose, pressed against his face. Relief from heat and solitude.

“Hey, girl. Hey, puppy.”

Tail wagging. Sloppy, licking tongue.

“Who’s a good girl? I’m glad to see you too. You want to play? Yeah, let’s go. Let’s go play.”