Every Dog Deserves A Happy Ending...

Especially if you're Laika. Because good God that gets me right in the gut every time I hear about it. Apparently it gets to Nick Abadzis too, because he'll be giving Laika the ending she should have had several times over this week. If you need some cheering up (and if you read that first link, you likely do!) go give them a look.

Me, I've always been a bit of a sap where animals are concerned. So, forgive me if I decide to get in on this action in the sappiest way possible. Here's the ending I always envisaged for our brave little canine cosmonaut...it's a quick little bit of fluff I wrote when I needed a bit of cheering up. Enjoy!

TEST-FLIGHT

Excerpt From ‘LAIKA, UNRESOLVED’ (H&S, 2070):

The dog was the first test of the system.

A mongrel mutt of unidentifiable origins. A bit of terrier, certainly. She was named Laika. It meant curly. The Russians fired her into space without planning to get her back down. Later, one of the engineers would commit suicide from the guilt. Others could never look at a dog again without weeping. One or two would remain satisfied that they had done the right thing. The correct thing.

In his twilight years, Oleg Gazenko, the scientist who had found Laika on a Moscow street and adopted her, expressed regret for allowing Laika to die: "The more time passes, the more I'm sorry about it. We shouldn't have done it... We did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog.” This was a sentiment shared by many involved in the space-programs of the twentieth century super-powers. The ghost of Laika haunted the public imagination for a century-the eternal symbol of every animal victimized by man in the course of civilization.

Laika, of course, knew none of this. All she knew was that men she had trusted, men who had given her treats and scratches behind the ears had bundled her up into a confined capsule, immobilized her, and left her alone in the dark. She whined as the rocket took off, and ate her paste. It was a nutrient gruel that the Russians would vary only a little when they gave it to their human cosmonauts later. It did not satisfy her hunger and only made her thirsty. When the thermal insulation came loose, she began to grow hot and then sleepy. After a while, she simply hung in her brown leather harness with its crimson star stitched on the front. Eventually, she would cook to death in her tiny capsule before it completed its orbit and returned to Earth.

Laika would be memorialized on the Monument to the Conquerors of Space, erected in Moscow in 1964. Her figure stood beside such luminaries of the Russian Space Program as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Yuri Gargin. It was only fitting as she had been the first Earthling to reach space.

One hundred years later, a new system was invented and again, Laika was called upon to act as a test subject.

The Russians lost contact with Laika’s capsule four hours after take-off. Six hours after take-off, Laika died. It left the chrononauts exactly two hours to dock with the capsule, initiate a rescue operation and return up-time. A perfect test of the technology. it had everything a public relations advisor could want: Human interest, a photogenic dog, and time-travel.

Ten minutes after Laika passed out from the heat, she awoke in a cool, sterilized environment and was fed her first solid food in days by chrononaut Alexia Gazenko. An hour later, her bio-rhythms had returned to normal and she was as perky and frisky as she had been before she’d been fired into space.

Upon returning to the late twenty-first century, Laika was immediately adopted by Simon Parkwell, the scientist in charge of the PRIMEtime project. A noted proponent of animal free testing, Parkwell had chosen Laika as the test subject of his technology over other proposed luminaries such as Martin Luther King Junior, Joan of Arc, and Anne Frank. When asked for a comment in interviews he was reported to say, “What can I tell you? I’m a sucker for dogs.”