Wireless.

by Charles Stross.

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to Wireless Wireless.

This is not a novel. This is a short-story collection. This is not a short story. This is the introduction to a short-story collection. This is not fiction. This is a sequence of concepts that I am transferring into your conscious awareness via the medium of words, some of which may be false. Danger: here be epistemological dragons . . . Danger: here be epistemological dragons . . .

I'm Charlie Stross, and I have a vice I indulge in from time to time: I write short fiction. I've been writing short stories (in various length factors) and getting them published in magazines for a long time-my first short story in the British SF magazine Interzone Interzone came out in 1986-and although I don't make much money at it, I still keep doing it, even though these days I write full-time for my living. came out in 1986-and although I don't make much money at it, I still keep doing it, even though these days I write full-time for my living.

Short stories are a famously dead format in most genres of written fiction. Back in the 1950s, there was a plethora of fiction magazines on the shelves of every newsagent: but changes in the structure of the magazine-publishing business killed the fiction markets, and what had once been a major source of income for many writers turned into a desert. Even science fiction-which has a long tradition of short stories as a major subfield, going back to the 1920s and the pages of Astounding Science Fiction Astounding Science Fiction, and which has fared better than other genres in terms of the survival of the monthly magazines-isn't a terribly fertile field to plow. Because of the way the publishing industry has evolved, if you want to earn a living, you really need to write novels: short-fiction outlets, with a very few exceptions, pay abysmally.

It wasn't always thus. The science fiction novel was itself something of a novelty until the 1950s; the famous names of the early-SF literary canon-Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and less-well-remembered names such as Fredric Brown and Cyril Kornbluth and Alfred Bester-were primarily short-fiction writers. With dozens of monthly newsstand pulp-fiction magazines demanding to be fed, and a public not yet weaned to the glass teat of television, the field was huge. Video didn't so much kill the radio star as it did for the short-fiction markets, providing an alternative distraction on demand for tired workers to chill out with.

But the SF short-story field survives to this day. It's in much better shape, paradoxically, than other genres, where the form has all but died. It would be hard to describe it as thriving, at least compared to the golden age of pulps-but science fiction readers are traditionalists, and those of us who write short fiction aren't primarily in it for the money: we've got other, less obvious, incentives.

(Actually, I'm not sure I know anyone who writes fiction at any any length solely for money. If you've got the skill to string words into sentences, there are any number of ways to earn a living, most of which are far less precarious than the life of a freelance fiction writer. At the risk of overgeneralizing, it's one of those occupations you go into because you can't length solely for money. If you've got the skill to string words into sentences, there are any number of ways to earn a living, most of which are far less precarious than the life of a freelance fiction writer. At the risk of overgeneralizing, it's one of those occupations you go into because you can't not not do it, and any attempts to justify it by pointing to commercial success are, at best, special pleading. If Stephen King had failed to get his big break with do it, and any attempts to justify it by pointing to commercial success are, at best, special pleading. If Stephen King had failed to get his big break with Carrie Carrie, if J. K. Rowl ing's first Harry Potter book had sold out its first thousand-copy print run and thereafter gone out of print, I'm willing to bet that they'd have kept on writing regardless.) Speaking for myself, I'm an obsessive fiction writer. I write because I've got a cloud of really neat ideas buzzing around my brain, and I need to let them out lest my head explode. But having ideas is only part of the reason I write-otherwise, I could just keep a private journal. The other monkey riding my back is the urge to communicate, to reach out and touch someone. (Or to lift the lid on their brainpan, sprinkle some cognitive dissonance inside, stir briskly, then tiptoe away with a deranged titter.) Everyone I know who does this job has got the same monkey on their shoulders, urging them on, inciting them to publish or be damned, communicate or die.

If you're a compulsive communicator, nothing gets your attention like feedback from the public-a signal saying "message received." To many writers, money is one kind of feedback; nothing says "message received" quite like the first royalty check after your book earns out the advance. It tells you that people actually went out and bought it bought it. (And it pays the grocery bills.) Then there are the reviews, be they brilliant or misguided, or occasionally brilliant and and misguided, which tell you a little bit about how the message was received or misunderstood. They don't pay the grocery bills, but they still matter to us. misguided, which tell you a little bit about how the message was received or misunderstood. They don't pay the grocery bills, but they still matter to us.

But the feedback from a novel is slow to arrive, and thin beer indeed after the amount of effort that went into fermenting the brew.

Imagine you've got an office job. You go to work every day, and there's a perk: the office is about ten feet from your bedroom door. (No lengthy commute!) You sit in that office-alone, for the most part-and write, hopefully without interruption or human companionship. Sometimes you get bored and take a day or two off, or go do the housework, or go shopping. And sometimes you find yourself working there at 10 p.m. on a Saturday night because you took Friday off, and Thursday before it, and your demon conscience is whispering in your ear, reminding you to put in the hours. You're almost always on your own.

You'll find it generally takes somewhere between a month and a year to write a novel-sometimes more, sometimes less. And once it's written, you deliver it to your agent or editor, and it disappears for a couple of months. Then it reappears as a job in the publisher's production queue, moving in lockstep through a series of well-defined processes on its way to being turned into cartons of finished books. There's a little wiggle room, but in general if you turn in a book, it will take a year to show up in hardcover (and then another year before it's reprinted in paperback).

So: once a year, you get the fanfare and fireworks show of a new book coming into print. And then the reviews and reader comments trickle in, usually over a period of a couple of months. Then the long silence resumes, punctuated by the odd piece of fan mail (a surprising proportion of which is concerned with pointing out the same hugely significant typo on page seven-that escaped both you and your editors-as the previous sixteen e-mails) . . .

Short stories are different: they push the reward-feedback button much more frequently than novels. (And that's why a lot of us start out writing short stories before we tackle novels.) There's an addictive quality to writing short stories, like being a rat in a behavioral-science experiment that rewards correct performance of some complex task with a little electric shock to the medial forebrain bundle. Not only do they not take months or years to write (when things are going well, it's more like hours or days), but you can send them out to a magazine or anthology editor with some hope of hearing back within a couple of months. Better still, if a magazine decides to buy your story, it can be in print in a couple of months. Push the button harder, rat! It's great training for acquiring the motivation to engage with the bigger, slower job of writing a novel.

The speed of the short-story publication cycle brings me to the second reason I write them: I get to play with new ideas in a way I can't manage at novel length. Novels are huge, cumbersome projects that take a long time to bolt together; in contrast, short stories are a quick vehicle for trying out something new, the fiction writer's experimental workbench. I can focus on a particular idea or technique to the exclusion of everything else-which brings it into focus and lets me explore it to the full without worrying about whether it unbalances the plot development or fits with the protagonist's motivations or whatever.

The lack of money also means there's less at stake. If I'm working on a novel, I can't afford to try out an untested new writing technique in it. At worst, I might end up having to throw six months' writing in the trash when it proves unfixable: a mess in any situation, and potentially catastrophic if you're self-employed and working to deadline. But I can take a day or two off to write a short story and see if it works: throw it at a magazine, put it out in public, and see if my readers throw rotten tomatoes or gold sovereigns. Or, for a bigger idea-a new stylistic experiment, for example-I can treat it as a pilot project for a novel: take a month, write a couple of novelettes or a novella, find a home for them in an anthology or a magazine.

Anyway: here's Wireless Wireless.

I wrote the stories in this collection between 1998 and 2008. Some of them were purportedly written for money-at least, an editor approached me, and said, "Would you like to write me a story about Subject X? I'll pay!"-but none of them was cost-effective; the money was just the excuse. They span the spectrum from the short-short "MAXOS" all the way up to "Palimpsest" and "Missile Gap," novellas that bump up close to the complexity and depth associated with novels. Some of them were written in response to a specific challenge from an editor ("Unwirer," for example, had to fit a theme anthology's remit-tales in which the developmental history of science and technology had followed a different path) while some were written in response to challenges from within ("Snowball's Chance" because an imp of the perverse taunted me to write a traditional Pact with the Devil story). Some were stylistic experiments ("Trunk and Disorderly" might, had things gone differently, become the opening of a novel; instead, I settled for the easier technique of Saturn's Children Saturn's Children) while others were exercises in a familiar key ("Down on the Farm," for example, is one of a piece with my other Laundry stories, collected in The Atrocity Archives The Atrocity Archives and and The Jennifer Morgue The Jennifer Morgue).

What they've all got in common, however, is that they're a communication channel. Hello, are you receiving? Over.

Missile Gap

BOMB SCARE

Gregor is feeding pigeons down in the park when the sirens go off.

A stoop-shouldered fortysomething male in a dark suit, pale-skinned and thin, he pays no attention at first: the birds hold his attention. He stands at the side of a tarmac path, surrounded by damp grass that appears to have been sprayed with concrete dust, and digs into the outer pocket of his raincoat for a final handful of stale bread crumbs. Filthy, soot-blackened city pigeons with malformed feet jostle with plump white-collared wood pigeons, pecking and lunging for morsels. Gregor doesn't smile. What to him is a handful of stale bread is a deadly business for the birds: a matter of survival. The avian struggle for survival runs parallel to the human condition, he thinks. It's all a matter of limited resources and critical positioning. Of intervention by agencies beyond their bird-brained understanding, dropping treats for them to fight over. Then the air-raid sirens start up.

The pigeons scatter for the treetops with a clatter of wings. Gregor straightens and looks round. It's not just one siren, and not just a test: a policeman is pedaling his bicycle along the path toward him, waving one-handed. "You there! Take cover!"

Gregor turns and presents his identity card. "Where is the nearest shelter?"

The constable points toward a public convenience thirty yards away. "The basement there. If you can't make it inside, you'll have to take cover behind the east wall-if you're caught in the open, just duck and cover in the nearest low spot. Now go!" The cop hops back on his black boneshaker and is off down the footpath before Gregor can frame a reply. Shaking his head, he walks toward the public toilet and goes inside.

It's early spring, a weekday morning, and the toilet attendant seems to be taking the emergency as a personal comment on the cleanliness of his porcelain. He jumps up and down agitatedly as he shoves Gregor down the spiral staircase into the shelter, like a short troll in a blue uniform stocking his larder. "Three minutes!" shouts the troll. "Hold fast in three minutes!" So many people in London are wearing uniforms these days, Gregor reflects; it's almost as if they believe that if they play their wartime role properly, the ineffable will constrain itself to their expectations of a humanly comprehensible enemy.

A double bang splits the air above the park and echoes down the stairwell. It'll be RAF or USAF interceptors outbound from the big fighter base near Hanworth. Gregor glances round: a couple of oafish gardeners sit on the wooden benches inside the concrete tunnel of the shelter, and a louche City type in a suit leans against the wall, irritably fiddling with an unlit cigarette and glaring at the NO SMOKING signs. "Bloody nuisance, eh?" he snarls in Gregor's direction.

Gregor composes his face in a thin smile. "I couldn't possibly comment," he says, his Hungarian accent betraying his status as a refugee. (Another sonic boom rattles the urinals, signaling the passage of yet more fighters.) The louche businessman will be his contact, Goldsmith. He glances at the shelter's counter. Its dial is twirling slowly, signaling the marked absence of radon and fallout. Time to make small talk, verbal primate grooming: "Does it happen often?"

The corporate tough relaxes. He chuckles to himself. He'll have pegged Gregor as a visitor from stranger shores, the new NATO dominions overseas where they settled the latest wave of refugees ejected by the communists. Taking in the copy of the Telegraph Telegraph and the pattern of stripes on Gregor's tie, he'll have realized what else Gregor is to him. "You should know, you took your time getting down here. Do you come here often to visit the front line, eh?" and the pattern of stripes on Gregor's tie, he'll have realized what else Gregor is to him. "You should know, you took your time getting down here. Do you come here often to visit the front line, eh?"

"I am here in this bunker with you." Gregor shrugs. "There is no front line on a circular surface." He sits down gingerly on the bench opposite the businessman. "Cigarette?"

"Don't mind if I do." The businessman borrows Gregor's cigarette case with a flourish: the symbolic peace offering accepted, they sit in silence for a couple of minutes, waiting to find out if it's the curtain call for World War IV, or just a trailer.

A different note drifts down the staircase, the warbling tone that indicates the all clear these days. The Soviet bombers have turned for home, the ragged lion's stumpy tail tickled yet again. The toilet troll dashes down the staircase and windmills his arms at them: "No smoking in the nuclear bunker!" he screams. "Get out! Out, I say!" Out, I say!"

Gregor walks back into Regent's Park, to finish disposing of his stale bread crumbs and ferry the contents of his cigarette case back to the office. The businessman doesn't know it yet, but he's going to be arrested, and his English nationalist/neutralist cabal interned: meanwhile, Gregor is being recalled to Washington DC. This is his last visit, at least on this particular assignment. There are thin times ahead for the wood pigeons.

VOYAGE

It's a moonless night, and the huge reddened whirlpool of the Milky Way lies below the horizon. With only the blue-white pinprick glare of Lucifer for illumination, it's too dark to read a newspaper.

Maddy is old enough to remember a time when night was something else: when darkness stalked the heavens, the Milky Way a faded tatter spun across half the sky. A time when ominous Soviet spheres bleeped and hummed their way across a horizon that curved, when geometry was dominated by pi, astronomy made sense, and serious men with horn-rimmed glasses and German accents were going to the moon. October 2, 1962: that's when it all changed. That's when life stopped making sense. (Of course, it first stopped making sense a few days earlier, with the U-2 flights over the concrete emplacements in Cuba, but there was a difference between the lunacy of brinksmanship-Khrushchev's shoe banging on the table at the UN as he shouted, "We will bury you!"-and the flat-Earth daydream that followed, shattering history and plunging them all into this nightmare of revisionist geography.) But back to the here and now: she's sitting on the deck of an elderly ocean liner on her way from somewhere to nowhere, and she's annoyed because Bob is getting drunk with the F-deck boys again and eating into their precious grubstake. It's too dark to read the ship's daily news sheet (mimeographed blurry headlines from a world already fading into the ship's wake), it'll be at least two weeks before their next landfall (a refueling depot somewhere in what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration surveyors-in a fit of uncharacteristic wit-named the Nether Ocean), and she's half out of her skull with boredom.

When they signed up for the emigration-board tickets, Bob had joked: "A six-month cruise? After a vacation like that we'll be happy to get back to work!" But somehow the sheer immensity of it all didn't sink in until the fourth week out of sight of land. In those four weeks they'd crawled an expanse of ocean wider than the Pacific, pausing to refuel twice from huge rust-colored barges: and still they were only a sixth of the way to Continent F-204, New Iowa, immersed like the ultimate non sequitur in the ocean that replaced the world's horizons on October 2, 1962. Two weeks later they passed The Radiators. The Radiators thrust from the oceanic depths to the stratosphere, Everest-high black fins finger-combing the watery currents. Beyond them the tropical heat of the Pacific gave way to the subarctic chill of the Nether Ocean. Sailing between them, the ship was reduced to the proportions of a cockroach crawling along a canyon between skyscrapers. Maddy had taken one look at these guardians of the interplanetary ocean, shuddered, and retreated into their cramped room for the two days it took to sail out from between the slabs.

Bob kept going on about how materials scientists from NOAA and the National Institutes were still trying to understand what they were made of, until Maddy snapped at him. He didn't seem to understand that they were the bars on a prison cell. He seemed to see a waterway as wide as the English Channel, and a gateway to the future: but Maddy saw them as a sign that her old life was over.

If only Bob and her father hadn't argued; or if Mum hadn't tried to pick a fight with her over Bob-Maddy leans on the railing and sighs, and a moment later nearly jumps out of her skin as a strange man clears his throat behind her.

"Excuse me, I didn't mean to disturb you."

"That's all right," Maddy replies, irritated and trying to conceal it. "I was just going in."

"A shame: it's a beautiful night," says the stranger. He turns and puts down a large briefcase next to the railing, fiddling with the latches. "Not a cloud in sight, just right for stargazing." She focuses on him, seeing short hair, a small paunch, and a worried thirtysomething face. He doesn't look back, being preoccupied with something that resembles a photographer's tripod.

"Is that a telescope?" she asks, eyeing the stubby cylindrical gadget in his case.

"Yes." An awkward pause. "Name's John Martin. Yourself ?"

"Maddy Holbright." Something about his diffident manner puts her at ease. "Are you settling? I haven't seen you around."

He straightens up and tightens joints on the tripod's legs, screwing them into place. "I'm not a settler, I'm a researcher. Five years, all expenses paid, to go and explore a new continent." He carefully lifts the telescope body up and lowers it onto the platform, then begins tightening screws. "And I'm supposed to point this thing at the sky and make regular observations. I'm actually an entomologist, but there are so many things to do that they want me to be a jack-of-all-trades, I guess."

"So they've got you to carry a telescope, huh? I don't think I've ever met an entomologist before."

"A bug-hunter with a telescope," he agrees: "kind of unexpected."

Intrigued, Maddy watches as he screws the viewfinder into place, then pulls out a notebook and jots something down. "What are you looking at?"

He shrugs. "There's a good view of S Doradus from here," he says. "You know, Satan? And his two little angels."

Maddy glances up at the violent pinprick of light, then looks away before it can burn her eyes. It's a star, but bright enough to cast shadows from half a light-year's distance. "The disks?"

"Them." There's a camera body in his bag, a chunky old Bron ica from back before the Soviets swallowed Switzerland and Germany whole. He carefully screws it onto the telescope's viewfinder. "The Institute wants me to take a series of photographs of them-nothing fancy, just the best this eight-inch reflector can do-over six months. Plot the ship's position on a map. There's a bigger telescope in the hold, for when I arrive, and they're talking about sending a real astronomer one of these days, but in the meantime they want photographs from sixty thousand miles out across the disk. For parallax, so they can work out how fast the other disks are moving."

"Disks." They seem like distant abstractions to her, but John's enthusiasm is hard to ignore. "Do you suppose they're like, uh, here?" She doesn't say like Earth-everybody knows this isn't Earth anymore. Not the way it used to be.

"Maybe." He busies himself for a minute with a chunky film cartridge. "They've got oxygen in their atmospheres, we know that. And they're big enough. But they're most of a light-year away-far closer than the stars, but still too far for telescopes."

"Or moon rockets," she says, slightly wistfully. "Or sputniks."

"If those things worked anymore." The film is in: he leans over the scope and brings it round to bear on the first of the disks, a couple of degrees off from Satan. (The disks are invisible to the naked eye; it takes a telescope to see their reflected light.) He glances up at her. "Do you remember the moon?"

Maddy shrugs. "I was just a kid when it happened. But I saw the moon, some nights. During the day, too."

He nods. "Not like some of the kids these days. Tell them we used to live on a big spinning sphere, and they look at you like you're mad."

"What do they think the speed of the disks will tell them?" she asks.

"Whether they're all as massive as this one. What they could be made of. What that tells us about who it was that made them." He shrugs. "Don't ask me, I'm just a bug-hunter. This stuff is big, bigger than bugs." He chuckles. "It's a new world out here."

She nods very seriously, then actually sees him for the first time: "I guess it is."

BOLDLY GO

"So tell me, Comrade Colonel, how did it really feel?"

The comrade colonel laughs uneasily. He's forty-three and still slim and boyish-looking, but carries a quiet melancholy around with him like his own personal storm cloud. "I was very busy all the time," he says with a self-deprecating little shrug. "I didn't have time to pay attention to myself. One orbit, it only lasted ninety minutes, what did you expect? If you really want to know, Gherman's the man to ask. He had more time."

"Time." His interrogator sighs and leans his chair back on two legs. It's a horribly old, rather precious Queen Anne original, a gift to some tsar or other, many years before the October Revolution. "What a joke. Ninety minutes, two days, that's all we got before they changed the rules on us."

"'They,' Comrade Chairman?" The colonel looked puzzled.

"Whoever." The chairman's vague wave takes in half the horizon of the richly paneled Kremlin office. "What a joke. Whoever they were, at least they saved us from a pasting in Cuba because of that louse Nikita." He pauses for a moment, then toys with the wineglass that sits, half-empty, before him. The colonel has a glass too, but his is full of grape juice, out of consideration for his past difficulties. "The 'whoever' I speak of are, of course, the brother socialists from the stars who brought us here." He grins humorlessly, face creasing like the muzzle of a shark that smells blood in the water.

"Brother socialists." The colonel smiles hesitantly, wondering if it's a joke, and if so, whether he's allowed to share it. He's still unsure why he's being interviewed by the premier-in his private office, at that. "Do we know anything of them, sir? That is, am I supposed to-"

"Never mind." Aleksey sniffs, dismissing the colonel's worries. "Yes, you're cleared to know everything on this topic. The trouble is there is nothing to know, and this troubles me, Yuri Alexeyevich. We infer purpose, the engine of a greater history at work-but the dialectic is silent on this matter. I have consulted the experts, asked them to read the chicken entrails, but none of them can do anything other than parrot pre-event dogma: 'Any species advanced enough to do to us what happened that day must of course have evolved true Communism, Comrade Premier! Look what they did for us!' (That was Shchlovskii, by the way.) And yes, I look and I see six cities that nobody can live in, spaceships that refuse to stick to the sky, and a landscape that Sakharov and that bunch of double domes are at a loss to explain. There are fucking miracles and wonders and portents in the sky, like a galaxy we were supposed to be part of that is now a million years too old and shows extensive signs of construction. There's no room for miracles and wonders in our rational world, and it's giving the comrade general secretary, Yuri, the comrade general secretary comrade general secretary, stomach ulcers; did you know that?"

The colonel sits up straight, anticipating the punch line: it's a well-known fact throughout the USSR that when Brezhnev says "frog," the premier croaks. And here he is in the premier's office, watching that very man, Aleksey Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers, third most powerful man in the Soviet Union, taking a deep breath.

"Yuri Alexeyevich, I have brought you here today because I want you to help set Leonid Illich's stomach at rest. You're an aviator and a hero of the Soviet Union, and more importantly, you're smart enough to do the job and young enough to see it through, not like the old farts cluttering up Stavka. (It's going to take most of a lifetime to sort out, you mark my words.) You're also-you will pardon the bluntness-about as much use as a fifth wheel in your current posting right now: we have to face facts, and the sad reality is that none of Korolev's birds will ever fly again, not even with the atomic bomb pusher-thing they've been working on." Kosygin sighs and shuffles upright in his chair. "There is simply no point in maintaining the Cosmonaut Training Center. A decree has been drafted and will be approved next week: the manned-rocket program is going to be wound up and the Cosmonaut Corps reassigned to other duties."

The colonel flinches. "Is that absolutely necessary, Comrade Chairman?"

Kosygin drains his wineglass, decides to ignore the implied criticism. "We don't have the resources to waste. But, Yuri Alexeyevich, all that training is not lost." He grins wolfishly. "I have new worlds for you to explore and a new ship for you to do it in."

"A new ship." The colonel nods, then does a double take, punch-drunk. "A ship?"

"Well, it isn't a fucking horse," says Kosygin. He slides a big glossy photograph across his blotter toward the colonel. "Times have moved on." The colonel blinks in confusion as he tries to make sense of the thing at the center of the photograph. The premier watches his face, secretly amused: confusion is everybody's first reaction to the thing in the photograph.

"I'm not sure I understand, sir-"

"It's quite simple: you trained to explore new worlds. You can't, not using the rockets. The rockets won't ever make orbit. I've had astronomers having nervous breakdowns trying to explain why, but they all agree on the key point: rockets won't do it for us here. Something wrong with the gravity, they say it even crushes falling starlight." The chairman taps a fat finger on the photograph. "But you can do it using this. We invented it, and the bloody Americans didn't. It's called an ekranoplan, and you rocket boys are going to stop being grounded cosmonauts and learn how to fly it. What do you think, Colonel Gagarin?"

The colonel whistles tunelessly through his teeth: he's finally worked out the scale. It looks like a flying boat with clipped wings, jet engines clustered by the sides of its cockpit-but no flying boat ever carried a runway with a brace of MiG-21s on its back. "It's bigger than a cruiser! Is it nuclear-powered?"

"Of course." The chairman's grin slips. "It cost as much as those moon rockets of Sergei's, Colonel-General Colonel-General. Try not to drop it."

Gagarin glances up, surprise and awe visible on his face. "Sir, I'm honored, but-"

"Don't be." The chairman cuts him off. "The promotion was coming your way anyway. The posting that comes with it will earn you as much honor as that first orbit. A second chance at space, if you like. But you can't fail: the cost is unthinkable. It's not your skin that will pay the toll, it's our entire rationalist civilization." Kosygin leans forward intently.

"Somewhere out there are beings so advanced that they skinned the Earth like a grape and plated it onto this disk-or worse, copied us all right down to the atomic level and duplicated us like one of those American Xerox machines. It's not just us, though. You are aware of the other continents in the oceans. We think some of them may be inhabited, too-nothing else makes sense. Your task is to take the Sergei Korolev Sergei Korolev, the first ship of its class, on an historic five-year cruise. You will boldly go where no Soviet man has gone before, explore new worlds and look for new peoples, and establish fraternal socialist relations with them. But your primary objective is to discover who built this giant mousetrap of a world, and why they brought us to it, and to report back to us-before the Americans find out."