Story IV: The Gondolier

An astronaut drifts away from his ship.

I – THE FATHER

Commander Kozlov’s father, Sergei, gripped airplane armrests as if he were on a rollercoaster ride, but he had an affinity for the stars. His friends called him a “space buff,” and his wife teased him about being a “stargazer,” but as a professor of Ancient Greek at Princeton, the father quietly thought of himself as a spacephile.

“Philos means mutual friendship, but another word, agape, would be even closer,” he wrote his ten-year-old son, Mikhail in a birthday card: “ἀγάπη is a deep love shared with no expectation of it being returned.”

In 1977, the week Mikhail was born, the first of two Voyager spacecraft was launched for Saturn. The coincidence charmed Sergei, and he began to cut newspaper clippings of the four-year mission for his infant son. Then, in a surprise to everyone, the two spacecraft exceeded their anticipated lifespans and the mission continued on for decades. At the time of his father’s death in 2008, the two probes still radioed messages from the barre…