Red Moon

Prologue

In Russia these days, nothing is easy.

I’m sure you could make the argument that nothing there has ever been easy, but the old order changeth, and now pensioners find themselves selling apples on the street while mafiyosa cuddle in restaurant doorways with six-foot-tall blondes all the while yelling into cell phones. You can walk into an office and see computers running Windows 3.0, but won’t find a toilet with a seat. Homemade garages sprout like mushrooms at the base of Khrushchev-era worker storage units while cars choke the inadequate streets. A McDonald’s gets built in two days as Red Square is swept by men with straw brooms.

My contact was an hour late. Had that happened to me at home in California, I’d have been thirty minutes gone. But in Korolev, formerly Kaliningrad, a grim industrial suburb an hour’s drive north of the Kremlin, an hour’s tardiness was expected, forgiven, hardly noticed.

Besides, the steady deliveries of German beer, ordered from the wary staff of the Rendezvous restaurant by universal semaphore, encouraged me to be charitable.

Then again, there was nothing else I wanted to be doing. I had come to Moscow to report on the delicate situation between Russia and NASA concerning the International Space Station. This $25-billion project was starting to kick into high gear, except for the fact that a key Russian component called the service module was falling behind schedule, threatening the whole program with delays and higher costs. A U.S. congressman and his staff who had come to Moscow to, as they said, “draw a line in the sand,” had done no such thing. The Russian spacecraft builders had conceded the problem — no money — and blamed the government for failing to deliver the promised cash. I could see that the next week’s activities would consist of various parties commiserating over that unfortunate situation, a bit of hand-wringing here, some posturing there, without changing the basic facts.

During a break in one of these meetings at the Russian Space Agency, I found myself sitting in a hallway with Dennis Gulyayev, who recognized my name from a book I had written on the Apollo-Soyuz docking some years back. “You know a lot about our space program,” he said, adding, before I could preen, “for a Westerner.”

“It’s always been a hobby,” I told him. “I grew up watching American astronauts doing spacewalks and going to the Moon. But I always wondered about your side. You guys were first, after all. Sputnik, Gagarin, the spacewalk.”

Dennis got a faraway look in his eyes. “We could have been first to the Moon, too.”

I had heard a bit about the abortive Russian man-on-the-Moon program. “Come on, Dennis. You were nowhere close to beating Apollo 11.”

Now he got amused. “That’s what the histories say.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “The histories are wrong.”

“Well, I guess I’ll just have to take your word for it.”

“If you’re interested, I could introduce you to a friend of mine. He knows the real story. He might tell you.”

I got suspicious. Russians were always trying to sell things to Westerners these days. “For a price?” I said.

Dennis shrugged. He knew exactly what I meant. “No, he’ll tell you because you wrote that Apollo-Soyuz book. I’ve seen it in his flat. He reads and speaks English.”

Several people passed us, the congressman among them, along with one of the deputy directors of the Russian Space Agency. We smiled and held our places.

“He’s getting old. He’d like to tell the story. But nobody in Russia will publish it.”

“There aren’t many in America who will publish it, either.”

“I think he would like to tell the story to someone, even if it only gets printed after his death. He’s a friend of my father’s. They worked together.”

I was bored, I thought it couldn’t hurt. “What’s his name?”

“Ribko. Yuri Nikolayevich Ribko.”

“Never heard of him.”

“You wouldn’t have. But he was everywhere — at Korolev’s bureau, at Star Town, at Baikonur. He saw more of the story than most.”

What the heck: I might get a good anecdote about the pioneering days of the Russian space program that would help my ISS piece. I told Dennis to arrange a meeting at the Rendezvous, a restaurant that happened to be located within walking distance of my hotel in Korolev.

Not that the hotel was anything special: It was a former center for the reeducation of Party cadres or something like that, much like a school dorm at a hick American junior college. It had been chosen for easy access to the heart of the Russian space program, since the flight control center, the gigantic Energiya Corporation headquarters, and the Central Research Institute of Machine-Building (don’t try to say that too quickly) were all nearby. I could walk to the Rendezvous, saving myself the challenges of getting around Korolev, or Moscow, at night without an escort.

So I nursed my third beer and watched a young and prosperous-looking Russian couple finish their dinner. The only other customers that night were four Scandinavians — carton manufacturers from Oslo, as I recall.

Shortly after eight, Ribko entered.

He was, I judged, in his late fifties. Short, red-faced, with a full head of silver-black hair, he was slim, as Russians go. Blue eyes behind thick glasses. A quick smile that showed some literal steel, but handsome. We shook hands and I thanked him for coming. “Dennis insisted,” he said, shrugging.

“It seems that Dennis wanted us to meet.”

I ordered him a beer and asked if he minded my taping.

“No, I’ve been taped many times before.” He gave that quick smile again. “This, however, will be the first time my permission was asked.”

To warm up, I asked Ribko what he was doing these days. It was risky, if you don’t like awkward replies: I know of one former space official who survives by making Venetian blinds; another is a dispatcher in a factory. “I’m a consultant, you would say, to the Air Force Academy in Monino. I teach… earth studies.” He pointed a finger at the ceiling, then at the table.

“Space observation?” He nodded. “And you used to work in the Moon program.”

“Program L-1/L-3, yes.”

“Which almost beat the U.S. to the Moon.”

“We could have. We came very close.”

I sat back, assuming a posture of friendly skepticism. At least that’s what my editor calls it. “You really think so? I know you were close to a manned lunar orbit. But a landing?”

Ribko continued to smile, but his eyes narrowed ever so slightly as he leaned toward me. “I know the stories that are being told. They only have part of the truth, because the tellers don’t know, or can’t face it.”

“But you do. Because you were—”

“At the heart of it. For three years, I was at the very heart of Program L-1/L-3.”

“I wonder,” I said at that point, as much for myself as for Ribko, “if anyone cares.”

He wagged a finger at me. “The world would be different now if we had won. The same things that stopped us are stopping you, on ISS.”

“Well, then,” I said, substantially more intrigued. “Tell me.”