Red Moon

1 The Kremlin Hospital

I was present at the beginning of the end.

The winter of 1965–66 was my final one as a student at the Bauman Higher Technical School, a huge wreck of a place situated on the west bank of the Moscow River. Founded in 1830 as the Tsar’s Vocational School, Bauman was later honored with the name of an obscure Bolshevik who had never attended it, and could not, in fact, have passed the entrance exams.

The name, like those of so many Soviet institutions, was deliberately misleading, suggesting a small college with a student body specializing in, perhaps, auto mechanics. But Bauman was actually the equivalent of your California Institute of Technology. It was an engineering university with twenty thousand students, the elite of Soviet secondary schools, who were trained for jobs in the missile and aircraft industries, and in the intelligence community.

The basic course lasted six years; over half the students flunked out or transferred to less-demanding schools. If you survived to the fifth year, your main challenge was to convince the placement committee to give you the job you wanted, meaning any job as long as it was in Moscow.

My father, a deputy Air Force commander in the Moscow military district, could have arranged such a job for me with a single phone call. But, with that flair for bullheadedness that I share, he refused. Fortunately, I had good luck in the assignment of a thesis adviser.

Vasily Filin was a senior engineer and deputy director of the Experimental Design Bureau Number 1, the organization that created and built my country’s first intercontinental ballistic missile, that launched Sputnik, that made Gagarin the first human in space. Filin was a tall, nervous, long-faced man, quite old to me at the time: He was fifty-nine. He oversaw my work, and that of half a dozen other fifth-year students, with precision and decency, unlike some I could name. But we had no personal interaction until one day in October 1965, when he suddenly raised his head from the papers on his desk, looked at me as if seeing me for the first time, and said, “Ribko, what are your plans?”

He didn’t need to specify, of course. He meant career plans. “The Rocket Force, I think,” I said without much enthusiasm. I had done my summer military service north of Moscow in godforsaken Orevo, at a camp for future missileers. Unless one of the civilian design bureaus in the giant defense industry requested me, I was going to be commissioned as a senior-engineer lieutenant the coming June. It was one of the many ironies of the Soviet system that only a major effort by my father — a career military officer and Hero of the Soviet Union — could keep me a civilian.

I wasn’t upset at the idea; far from it. I looked forward to fulfilling whatever task the Party chose for me.

“You’ll be wasted in uniform,” Filin said, sniffing with unconcealed derision. He folded his hands on the desk, examining them for defects. “What about my organization?”

“I’d love to work at the bureau, but I heard that your quota was filled.”

I think I embarrassed Filin. “Well, yes,” he said quietly. “There are many important people with nephews this year.”

When the silence grew awkward, I rose to gather up my papers. Filin put his hand flat on them. “How are your secretarial skills?” he asked suddenly.

“Well, I can type,” I said. My late mother, Zhanna, had given me a typewriter for my thirteenth birthday, hoping I might become a poet rather than a soldier.

“Now we’re getting somewhere!” What Filin proposed was that I, a graduate of the Bauman School, should join his organization, the Korolev bureau, as his clerk. “The important thing is to avoid wearing green.”

As I said, I would have been happy to wear a uniform, but other factors made military service less attractive than Filin’s offer. For one, my father had warned me that if I went into the Rocket Force, I was likely to be stationed north of the Arctic Circle. “We’re expanding the missile base up there,” he said, “and they’re hungry for young, unmarried engineers.” Such an assignment would likely last five years, and I found Moscow cold enough already.

More important, I was desperately in love with a fellow student, Marina Torchillova, and dreamed of marrying her. There would be no wedding if I moved to Murmansk.

Proving that, like so many of the fellow students I had criticized all my life, I could also put my selfish needs above those of the Party, I began spending one or two days a week out in the suburb of Kaliningrad, typing letters for Filin, serving as his courier, and sometimes — once he discovered that I was licensed — as his driver.

And continued to pine after Marina, who, strangely, still resisted my charms.

On the leaden, snowy afternoon of Thursday, January 13, 1966, I arrived at the Kremlin Hospital with a stack of documents for Filin to review. I had learned, in three months of part-time work, that he was prone to ill health, especially in times of crisis. And there was often a crisis. The upper levels of the Korolev bureau, which included Filin, were routinely criticized by their masters on the Council of Ministers for continued failures at putting an unmanned probe on the Moon. The more complaints the ministers had, the more Filin’s head ached, and so he was off to the Kremlin Hospital, not far from the Bauman campus.

The location wasn’t remotely convenient for me. I still had to rise before dawn to catch the metro to Yaroslavl Station, then the train out to Kaliningrad, where I would collect Filin’s daily load of documents and be assigned a car, which I would then drive back into Moscow. The trip never took less than three hours.

During my several visits that week, I had decided that the Kremlin Hospital was a pleasant refuge. Aside from the doctors themselves, said to be the best in the country, there were the nurses, who, whatever their medical skills, had obviously been selected for their good looks. No wonder Filin ran here whenever he could.

I found him sitting at the desk in his room, talking to Boris Artemov, one of the other deputy directors at the bureau. Filin was wearing slacks and a white shirt rather than a hospital gown. He accepted his documents and I turned to wait outside. “I should have you take these down the hall when I’m finished,” Filin said. The look on my face must have showed my confusion at this statement.

Artemov, a handsome, bald Ukrainian even older than Filin, cleared his throat and spoke: “The chief is here today.”

“Korolev?” I said.

Filin nodded. Sergei Korolev was the genius who had designed and built our country’s first missile. I had only glimpses of him so far, this small, thickset man with a short neck, always moving somewhere in a hurry, never alone. He was our von Braun, though nobody outside Russia knew: It was forbidden for his name to be published.

“Is he sick?”

Filin waved a hand dismissively. “Some routine procedure. He sprang it on us last week.”

Artemov nodded toward the door. “He was taken into surgery not too long ago.”

“I hope it goes well,” I said, knocking on the wooden table near Filin’s chair.

“I wouldn’t want to be the doctors if anything happened to Korolev. People don’t disappear quite the way they used to, but an exception would be made, believe me.”

Filin and Artemov turned to their papers; dismissed, I went out to the hallway, where I sat down on a bench and took a book out of my coat pocket. I was noting the filthy linoleum floor, the peeling paint on the walls, the dim lighting, when I was startled by the sound, not far off, of a man screaming, then quickly silenced. Before I could truly react, I heard a familiar voice: “Yuri! What are you doing here?”

I looked up to find my father, Nikolai, approaching. “Papa?”

He was wearing his green uniform, of course, with the three stars of a colonel-general, and his red Hero of the Soviet Union medal. I had not seen him in two weeks. In fact, in those days I rarely saw him more than once a month. He was often traveling on business for the Air Force’s general staff, where he had worked for the past few years. Even when my mother was alive and we all lived together, he was often absent.

To my surprise, he hugged and kissed me. This demonstration from the unusually reserved, severe Colonel-General Nikolai Ribko made me stammer as I explained about Filin, not mentioning Korolev. My father nodded. “I hope you’re not here as a patient,” I said to him.

He smiled as he always did whenever I used phrases that weren’t strictly functional. “I’m in excellent health. I’m visiting Vladimir.”

Vladimir was my uncle, my mother’s brother, an official of State Security. “Is he all right?” That Uncle Vladimir could be hospitalized without my knowing it was no surprise: I was only in his company two or three times a year, and his activities were completely secret.

My father tilted his head to one side and shrugged. “He’s heavy, you know.” This was true: Uncle Vladimir was taller than my father and me, a trait that must have served him well as a young Bolshevik thug, but in late middle age he had grown hugely fat.

My father didn’t look well himself. Normally very confident, even swaggering, he seemed lost, older than his fifty-five years. “Let me get you some tea,” I said.

“What I need is vodka.” That, like the kiss, was also strange: My father only drank vodka when forced to, never by choice.

Nevertheless, he followed me to a table where a pretty nurse tended a pot. “How long is Vladimir supposed to stay here?”

“They’re running more tests. If they don’t find anything new, he will go home tonight.” He practically gulped the tea and slammed down the cup. “I’ll tell him you said hello.” He did not offer to take me to him.

At that moment a pair of younger officers, a colonel and major, both in their thirties, appeared. “Good morning, General!” one of them addressed my father, though with nothing like the deference one would expect from a relatively junior officer. Then I realized why: The young colonel was Yuri Gagarin, our country’s first man in space, a bright-eyed, handsome man whose most notable trait was his small stature. He barely came up to my chin, and I am not tall.

Introductions were made, and I learned that the taller, dark-haired, hawk-nosed and almost aristocratic major was named Ivan Saditsky.

It was a brief encounter. Gagarin and Saditsky were on their way out of the hospital. In moments they were gone, and so, with another hug, was my father.

He had barely disappeared around the corner when Filin emerged from his room, papers in hand. Artemov was not with him.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize you were finished.”

“I’m not.” He waved the papers. “There’s so much noise here today.”

“And important visitors.” I told him about my brief encounter with the famous Gagarin.

“Here to check on Korolev, no doubt.”

“Is there any word on his condition?”

He grunted. “No. By my count, he’s been in surgery for five hours.”

Five hours seemed like a long time for a routine procedure. “What’s wrong with him?”

“He told me last week it was a polyp. He’s lucky if that’s all it is, since he’s been working himself to death. He spent time in the camps, too, you know.”

Before I could say more, the door to the operating chamber opened. A man in a bloody surgeon’s gown came out. “Dr. Cherbakov,” Filin said, turning toward him.

Cherbakov ignored him, speaking instead to the pretty nurse who had been serving tea. “Call Katayev again. I need him.” The nurse reached for the telephone and began to dial.

“Why is this is taking so long?” Filin asked Cherbakov, who was lighting a cigarette with trembling hands.

“There are some complications.”

“What kind?”

“A tumor. Where is he?” Cherbakov was more interested in the nurse than in Filin.

The nurse said, “There’s no answer.”

“Damnit, I’ve got a man on the table!”

“He had to drive in from his cottage—”

As Cherbakov turned away, Filin grabbed his arm. “What’s going on?”

“I’m calling in a specialist.” He tugged his arm free and headed to the theater door.

“I’m not through talking to you!”

“Talk to him.” Cherbakov nodded at a man in a gray suit, the hospital administrator, who had suddenly appeared and was now urgently conferring with the nurse.

Before Filin could say anything, the administrator approached him. “You’re Comrade Korolev’s associate? You should know that the original operation was a success. The polyp was removed.”

“Then what is the problem?”

The administrator was sweating. “A tumor was discovered. The size—” He turned to the nurse, who held up both fists. “—Well, very large. That was successfully removed by Dr. Cherbakov and the patient is stabilized.”

“So far, I’ve heard nothing but good news.”

“Unfortunately, the patient continues to hemorrhage.”

“How badly?”

The administrator hesitated a moment too long. Filin got red in the face. “You’re telling me Korolev is in there bleeding, and we’re waiting an hour for this specialist?”

“The government always wants us to call in a specialist in these cases. I can show you the document.”

“Fuck your document. That won’t save you.”

“Katayev is the deputy minister of health. He’s Brezhnev’s personal surgeon.”

“If he’s that good, he should have been doing the operation in the first place!”

With the administrator warned, and the potential accusation stated, an agitated Filin returned to where I was standing, helpless. “Remember what you’ve seen and heard,” he told me. “You are my witness.”

The telephone rang at the nurse’s station. The nurse answered it, handed the phone to the administrator, who then ran to the door of the operating theater. A moment later he emerged with Cherbakov, just as a very polished man of fifty, wearing gold-rimmed glasses and a French suit, arrived from down the hallway.

Filin rose and joined the three men. “Are you Katayev?” he asked.

“Yes,” the new man answered, handing his overcoat to the administrator. From that point on, he completely ignored Filin. “Where are the X rays?”

“Inside,” Cherbakov said.

“I’ll scrub.” He slapped Cherbakov on the back. “Don’t worry, children,” Katayev said. “Your savior is here.”

Filin followed them into the theater, leaving me alone with the administrator and the nurse. Both of them looked at me with a mixture of fear and anger: Until a few moments ago, I was just another worker. Now they had to worry about what I might say.

Minutes later, looking paler than he had when he went in, Filin burst out of the operating theater. The door flew open far and long enough for me to see, inside, a mass of bloody linens and discarded plasma bags piled to overflow in one corner. The floor was slippery with blood.

The patient, of course, was in the glass-walled chamber beyond, hidden by sheets, assistants, and support gear.

I realized that Filin had walked completely past me, completely past the worried administrator and nurse. A moment later Cherbakov emerged, immediately lighting a cigarette. His hands shook even more.

Finally Katayev glided out, shaking his head and snapping his fingers to the administrator. “My coat.”

“Where are you going?”

“Back to my cottage.”

“What about your patient?” the administrator pleaded, with a sidelong glance at me. “Aren’t you going to operate?”

“I don’t operate on dead men.”

Then he plucked the cigarette from Cherbakov’s shaking hands, and walked away.

2 State Security

After the disturbing scene with the doctors concerning the fate of Sergei Korolev, I moved around Filin’s hospital room, bundling up his papers. “Should I take these back to the office?”

“Yes,” he said, numbly, like a man who had been struck.

“Would you like me to call a doctor for you?”

“Those butchers! No!” For a moment he looked lost. “Yuri, what are we going to do without him?”

“Is he really dead?” It was a stupid thing to say, but that’s what came out of my mouth.

“You heard the big specialist.” Filin lowered himself to his bed, making himself even smaller. “And he wasn’t even sixty!”

“Who will tell the people at the bureau?”

“Not me,” he said, swinging his legs up on the bed and lying flat on his back, arms over his face. “His family is around somewhere. It will be up to them, and the Central Committee.” Every facet of Korolev’s life and work was a State secret. “Fifty-nine years old!”

“You’re sure you’ll be all right? Is your family coming to visit you?” I knew Filin had a wife and son, though I had never met them.

“They’ll be coming to get me out of this place tonight, if I have anything to say about it!” Suddenly he reached out, took my hand, and looked into my eyes. “You were my witness, Yuri.”

“Yes, I was right there—”

“There are going to be a lot of questions. I’ll have to answer them, and you have to stand by me.”

I had no idea of what he was talking about. “Yes.”

It wasn’t until I drove away from the hospital that I realized the significance of Filin’s obsession with Korolev’s age. He, too, was fifty-nine.

Back in Kaliningrad, after a miserably slow drive, I returned the car and carried Filin’s papers upstairs. It was getting dark — on those short winter days the sun would set at four in the afternoon. The main administration building seemed deserted, a disappointment: I was hoping to see what Korolev’s death would mean. But the news had not spread, and I certainly wasn’t going to be its messenger.

I returned to Bauman via the train and the metro, and a cold walk in the dark to what would be a lonely weekend, since Marina had gone off to visit her parents in Orel.

I shared a flat on October Street with three other students. One of my roommates, a dark, good-looking Georgian named Lev Tselauri, and I went out to a movie on Saturday night, a film about the Great Patriotic War — not that we cared: It was just a way to get out of the two-room flat. The rest of the weekend we studied, since we both had an exam on Monday morning.

There was no mention of Korolev’s death — or existence, for that matter — on Saturday, not in the papers or on the radio.

Sunday morning, however, the headlines in Pravda and Izvestiva proclaimed the death of the great hero. Not on the front page, but inside, filling pages three and four. It was Lev who showed me. “Is this where you’re working? At Korolev’s bureau?” he said.

Technically, my place of work was a secret, identified only by a mailbox number. But Lev knew that my particular mailbox dealt with manned spacecraft and interplanetary probes. It was pointless to deny it, and I didn’t.

“That means we’re rivals.” Lev had told me weeks ago of his assignment to a different design bureau, this one known only as Number 52 and concentrating on, I assumed, missiles or aircraft. This was the first I’d heard that my country had a second bureau for spacecraft.

Rivals.

On Monday, Lev and I caught a bus on Spartak Street, hoping to connect with one moving north and west on the Ring Road to Leningrad Prospect. Our exams would take place at the Ilyushin aircraft bureau. The bus was a better choice than the metro, given the time we would have to spend walking between stations. And even during the October 1964 coup, when Khrushchev was forcibly retired and tanks could be seen at most downtown intersections, the buses still ran on time.

Today, however, with the temperatures below freezing and half a meter of snow on the ground, the bus simply stopped in front of the Dynamo Stadium on Leningrad Prospect.

I was jammed in the back, standing next to Lev, when we heard someone up front say, “Christ, what’s wrong now?”

“Roadblock,” the driver said.

Lev shouted, “Get your fat ass out there and tell them to open it!” He grinned with the knowledge that the driver would never know who had said this.

I looked out the window and immediately saw the reason for the delay. A stream of military trucks was flowing out of the old Central Airport and turning south onto Leningrad Prospect, presumably headed for Red Square, less than three kilometers away. First built when the Tsar was in power and now surrounded by military design bureaus, airplane factories like Ilyushin and Sukhoi, as well as the sprawling Moscow Aviation Institute, Central was all but useless as an airport now. Its proximity to Red Square made it a good place to land troops for parades, however.

“Has there been another coup?” Lev said.

I finally realized the cause of the traffic jam. “It’s Korolev’s funeral. We could be stuck here all morning.” Polished green trucks rolled past, with parade troops huddled in their open backs. An occasional Zil or Mercedes limousine roared down the VIP lane in the center of the prospect. I was beginning to see how important Korolev had been.

“Oh, yes, your great genius is dead. You should transfer to my organization right now if you want to put the first man on the Moon.”

“Your organization.”

Lev gave me a sly look, then touched a finger to the tip of his nose. “Number 52. Ask around.”

Suddenly the bus lurched back to life, to scattered, sarcastic applause.

With the delay, however, we were late for our exams. Strangely, our proctor was more frantic than we were. “Ribko, what are you trying to do to me?”

I didn’t know what he was talking about. “A man was just here looking for you. State Security.” Typically for a Russian, the proctor made it seem as though I was doubly at fault, not only for the tardy bus, but because I had kept a security official from handing out some no doubt well-deserved punishment.

“Do I take the test or not?”

“Yes. He said he’d be back, so don’t mess around.” He actually slapped the papers down in front of me. Lev gave me a sympathetic look, and took a seat as far away from me as he could.

I was too shaken — State Security, for me? — to concentrate on my test at first. But my five years of training at Bauman paid off. Pretty soon I was solving equations faster than I could write the answers.

I returned the test before the time was up. The proctor accepted it, then nodded me toward a door where a tall State Security type in glasses and black overcoat waited. “Your Uncle Vladimir wants to see you.”

My father had told me once that Uncle Vladimir did not work out of the dreaded Lubiyanka but from the fourth floor of the building behind the Belorussia Station. That is where my escort delivered me.

There is a saying that fat men are graceful; if so, Uncle Vladimir was an exception. He wasn’t hugely fat like Nero or some mountainous caesar — just round, like a pink, hairless bear, and about as coordinated. If there was a glass of water on a desk, he was sure to knock it over. His office had to have been the despair of the housekeeping staff. God, not they, only knew how many important files had been ruined, or lay cemented together, on Uncle Vladimir’s desk.

Not that he was untidy; far from it. He dressed better than any Russian I knew, and was obsessively neat about his person. I would almost say he was fastidious, as much as any man in his business could be. In that he was a Nefedov, like my mother.

As I arrived, he closed a red-colored file that was open in front of him and removed his glasses. I think it hurt his face to smile, but he tried. He did not rise: Though he and my father had little in common, both were more reserved than the average Russian man. “How was your test?”

“I passed it.”

“You don’t have many more to go before you get your degree.”

“Half a dozen, I think.” He nodded, as if processing the data, so I asked, thinking of his recent hospital stay, “How are you feeling?”

Uncle Vladimir seemed surprised by the question. “As good as I ever do this time of year.” He changed the subject without protest from me. “How do you like your job in Korolev’s organization?”

“Well, I’m not doing the work I was trained for. But I hope to get a position in the spring.”

He tapped on the red folder. “You can have one now.”

“There are no vacancies.”

When Uncle Vladimir managed a smile, it was only with his eyes. “Korolev is gone: That’s one vacancy.”

I didn’t know how to react to a statement like that. I liked Uncle Vladimir and felt comfortable with him. I had even tried to model myself on him, to be as cultured, well-read, informed, interested in the world. I felt I could be irreverent with him on our infrequent family occasions, but not here. So I said nothing, and he went on, more seriously: “Korolev’s death has upset many of our leaders, notably Ustinov. This doctor, Cherbakov, turns out to be a regular butcher. What he was doing operating on the chief designer no one understands. Who hired him? What really killed Korolev?”

“I assume someone will do an autopsy.”

“They cremated him. Hard to do an autopsy on a pile of ashes.” Uncle Vladimir consulted another file. “It seems his death couldn’t have come at a worse time. The Americans just made a two-week-long space-flight. Apparently they put one of their Geminis together with the other—”

“They made a rendezvous. Not a docking.”

Uncle Vladimir nodded. “Good, you follow these things. Ustinov and the others are afraid that because Korolev is dead, the Americans will beat us to the Moon.”

“I thought we were far ahead of them.”

“Not by much, and not for long. Yuri, our leaders are worried. ‘He who controls the high ground of space controls the world.’ Do you know who said that?”

“Lenin?”

“Lyndon Johnson. The same ruthless bastard who killed Kennedy so he could become President. Imagine what he would do to us if he could put his missiles on the Moon.”

Even then I knew that Mr. Johnson already had quite a few missiles much closer to Moscow than the Moon, but, again, I kept my mouth shut.

Uncle Vladimir folded his fat hands on that red folder. “I’ve been asked to find a volunteer for a special mission inside the space program. Specifically, inside Korolev’s organization.”

I had trouble understanding what he wanted. My confusion must have been obvious. “Yuri, I want you to start looking around at Korolev’s bureau. Keep notes. Report to me.”

“Become a spy?”

“Think of it as being a criminal investigator.”

“Why me? I’m an engineer, not an investigator.”

Uncle Vladimir tapped the folder. “Because of your technical training. And because I can trust you.” Only then did I realize that the red folder on his desk was my personal State Security file.

“All right.” I saw nothing wrong with helping a criminal investigation into Korolev’s death. Filin would approve. “When do I start?”

“As soon as you go back to Kaliningrad. Your boss, Dr. Filin, will be informed that you are to be promoted to engineer in his section. Try to act surprised.”

“I’ll do my best. How do I make reports?”

“To me, personally. It means we’ll be seeing more of each other.” He hauled himself to his feet and extended his hand to me. I shook it. Then Uncle Vladimir caught me staring at the red folder.

“Something on your mind, Yuri?”

“What else does it say in there?”

Uncle Vladimir laughed. “Go home.”

3 Experimental Design Bureau Number 1

The next morning, as ordered, I presented myself at Filin’s office. However, for the first time in the weeks I had worked for Filin, I was forced to wait in the outer office with Nadiya, Filin’s birdlike secretary. The many phones on her desk rang constantly, preventing us from having any conversation about the death of Korolev, the future of the bureau and Filin himself, and — most importantly for me — whether the bureau’s personnel department had left any messages regarding a promotion for administrative assistant Ribko.

Presently the door to Filin’s office opened, and half a dozen men, both civilians and military, emerged. The civilians had the look of engineers — white shirts, glasses, and, since Korolev never wore one, no ties. The military guys, some of the dozens of representatives of the Ministry of Defense at the bureau, had glasses, too, but wore ties with their green uniforms. Filin waved me in.

His desk, at one end of the office, was actually the top of a T whose leg was a long conference table lined with chairs. He motioned me to one side of the table, and sat down.

He was looking much better than he had in the hospital last week. Years younger, in fact. I said so. “I’ve always been able to respond to a crisis,” he said, with quiet pride. Well, any man who had risen to this level in the armaments business had survived many crises. Filin had told me once, during one of my early errands, how during the Great Patriotic War he had narrowly escaped death at the hands of military officers just like those he had ushered out of his office.

His job, in the dark days when Nazi armies were plundering European Russia, had been to supervise the acceptance of Katie bombardment rockets by the artillery forces. The Katies were some of the most effective firepower our army had at that time, but a whole batch of them, already accepted on Filin’s signature, had just failed, flying far off target or exploding in their launchers. And in Stalin’s time, any hint of sabotage or “wrecking” was punishable by instant execution without trial.

Filin got a tip from a friendly State Security officer — if that’s not a contradiction in terms — that he was going to be blamed for the last series of failures.

Thus warned, Filin stayed awake the entire night preparing a defense. He knew, for example, that the faulty rockets had conformed to the standards. So some other factor was involved.

The next morning he was summoned to his commander and told officially of the charges against him. Thanks to his research, he was able to point out that the solid fuel used in the Katies was susceptible to extremes of temperature. They were being used in brutally cold winter weather for the first time, and this factor, so Filin said, was changing their centers of gravity, making it impossible for them to fly to their targets.

The commander glared at Filin, then summoned one of the scientific staff into the meeting, making Filin repeat the story. “Is this possible?” the commander asked the scientist.

The scientist thought for a moment, then said: “Yes. In fact, it’s obvious. We should have thought of it ourselves.”

So the commander exploded at the scientist, and Filin took that opportunity to escape from the office. As he did, he passed five men with rifles — the execution squad, who had been calmly waiting for the order to shoot him.

“What’s going to happen here, without Korolev?” I asked.

“That’s what everyone is trying to decide. Who will run the bureau?”

“One of Korolev’s deputies, I assume.” That group included Filin himself.

“That’s logical, but the ministry is trying to ram one of its people down our throat.” He nodded at the closed door, indicating the group of people who had just departed. “We were just discussing ways to…” He smiled, choosing the word carefully: “… deflect that.”

He cleared his throat, then reached for a paper on the table. “Speaking of personnel changes, I have just been told that, in spite of restrictions on the size of my section, I am authorized to hire a junior engineer for it.” He waited for my reaction.

“May I apply?” It was all I could think to say.

“The job is yours, Yuri. It pays two hundred fifty rubles per month.” I couldn’t tell whether I had failed, or passed, some test. “I think you’ll find the work interesting.”

“Is it working on spacecraft?”

“Oh, yes. Manned spacecraft,” he said. “Manned spacecraft to the Moon.” Now he had surprised me, though I can’t explain why. I knew my country had a space program, but even then, the business of putting a man on the Moon still seemed to me a fantasy, like the socialist paradise we all hoped to inherit. Only at that moment, when someone in authority openly proclaimed it, did I finally believe. “You will finish your studies at school, of course. As your adviser, I could hardly encourage you to leave now.

“But you can divide your time between here and school. You will report to Stepan Triyanov in Building 11 tomorrow at eight A.M.”

So ended my career as an errand boy. I made the long trip back to Bauman, to attend another class, then hurried home just as it was getting dark.

The five-block hike to my building was more difficult than usual because I was carrying a bag of groceries. I had stood in line at a kiosk for an hour just to buy half a dozen oranges. It would be a little celebration for Marina, who was supposed to return from Orel tonight. My roommates had promised to stay away until ten P.M.

As I approached the building, I noticed a black, official-looking Zil limousine idling near the entrance. Near the entrance was all right. You had to worry when it was parked in the back, near some stairway. That meant some poor soul was about to be hauled out of his flat, dragged downstairs, and driven off to an interrogation cell.

Or, at least, it had in the old days. Growing up in and around Moscow most of my life, I had played “Knock” with my friends. One boy would be the agent of State Security. He would suddenly point at another… who then had to run to home base for safety before the rest of us could catch him. If we did, we took him out and “shot” him. It was a pretty good game, far more interesting than hide-and-seek, but we had to stop after Yegor Sinchik’s grandmother caught us and beat the hell out of us. I didn’t expect the “knock” to come for me these days — especially given my current assignment for Party and country. But it was still a reminder.

My father had made himself right at home. He was sitting at the table reading a book and drinking from a tiny shot glass, which he kept filling from a vodka bottle.

“Where did you get this piss?” Those were his first words to me as I opened the door.

“The booze or the book?” I squeezed past him to set the groceries on the counter.

“The booze. The book’s okay.”

I saw that the book was a romance I had received as a gift when I was eleven, Herbert Wells’s Time Machine. The book represented another attempt by my mother to steer me away from a military-industrial career and into the arts. “What’s wrong with the booze? You brought it.”

“When?”

“May, I think. We drank a toast to your Order of Kutuzov’s beard or whatever.”

“It was the Red Star and that means this swill has been open for seven months! Don’t you ever drink?”

“Not enough, apparently. And when did you get so interested in vodka?”

Slightly chastened, the general got up to his full height of five-feet-three-inches and kissed me, awkwardly. “It’s my work.” He sighed. “I may be a bad father, but I’m the only one you’ve got.”

“What brings you across the river on a cold night?”

The general moved to the living area, peering out the frosty window. “I had a call from Vladimir, something about a possible new job for you.”

“Yes. He wants me to keep my eyes open at the bureau. And report to him.”

My father seemed to slump. “I asked him not to involve you.”

“In what? His work? It’s Party business, isn’t it?”

“Yuri, there is a big difference between Party business and Vladimir’s dirty work.”

I had unloaded some of my groceries, putting out some black bread and herring. I scrounged a chunk of sausage and put that on the table, too. “Did you want me to say no?”

“What I want is for him to stay out of your life.”

I had never seen my father like this, at least not on the subject of Uncle Vladimir. He was actually red-faced, uncomfortable. “Did you tell him that you were at the hospital the other day?”

“No. Did you?”

“No. And you shouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

He was already making that familiar gesture with open hands, the one that said, don’t ask, before taking a healthy bite of the sausage and grunting with satisfaction.

“What’s this all about?”

“Can’t I be concerned about your welfare?” he said, mouth full, crumbs flying. “I’m a military officer. I understand honor and truth. You won’t find that in State Security. You’ll have to lie to everyone from now on.”

“That’s ridiculous!” I was annoyed. I had been enjoying the secret thrill of being an agent of State Security, especially since it had gotten me the bureau job I wanted. And here my father was, ruining my fun.

There was a knock at the door. My father almost jumped. “Are you expecting someone?”

“Yes,” I said, rather sharply. I opened the door to Marina.

She looked lovely, though somewhat hidden, in her fur hat and heavy coat, carrying a bag much like the one I had carried. Her dark hair, her green eyes, her smile, her voice — all conspired to excite me. We held each other until my father said, “Well, come in and close the door.”

Marina set her bag on the table. “It’s nice to see you again, General.”

He barely grunted as he buttoned his tunic, prelude to a quick departure. Marina smiled at both of us and moved into the kitchen.

“What will you tell her?” the general asked me quietly.

“What do you care? You didn’t even say hello to her!”

“I told you, she is the wrong woman.”

“So that allows you to be rude?” To be honest, I rarely spoke to my father like this. But I was angry at him before Marina’s arrival, and thanks to my new job and association with Uncle Vladimir, feeling more independent.

I must have reached him. “Tell her I’m sorry.”

“You tell her.”

He shook his head. “If only her father…”

“What about her father?”

“That’s just it: No one seems to know. But everyone seems to think it was bad.”

“Let me handle it, Papa.”

“He’s not good with women.”

We were cleaning up dinner, not that there was much left. I carefully unwrapped the oranges and presented them to Marina. “For you.”

“Are you sure?”

Instead of answering, I kissed her. She slipped away. “I taste like salt—”

“I like salt.”

“You’re a sex maniac. It’s very bourgeois.”

“Hey, I’m the guy in the Komsomol. By definition, I’m not only authorized to define bourgeois, I’m also allowed to be a sex maniac.” I got my arm around her, began rubbing her hip. We kissed again.

She broke away. “Let’s finish cleaning up.” Her voice had suddenly grown husky. “When are Lev and the twins back?” My other two roommates, Mark and Sasha, were as dissimilar as two men could be: Mark was tall, brooding, thin, a bit stupid. Sasha was short, happy, fat, and brilliant. Sasha was even four years older than Mark. Nevertheless, because both of them happened to be from Omsk, Marina dubbed them twins.

“At ten.”

It was almost nine. “We’ll have to hurry,” Marina said, unbuttoning her sweater.

Early on in our relationship, Marina had decided she would be the responsible one, watching what little money either of us had (not much, given our student allowances), cleaning up the leftovers, and, most specially, worrying about appearances. Some of my roommates might blithely fornicate with their girlfriends while I was sleeping in the same room: That was a fact of life in the student apartments. To my relief, Marina insisted on privacy.

This personal dignity was one of the things I loved about her, especially since I felt I had none. I consoled myself with the knowledge that Marina was three years older, and in the fashion of women everywhere, much more mature.

We had met during my fourth year at Bauman, when Marina became my tutor in English — a subject in which, you will not be surprised, I showed great and sudden improvement. There was an undeniable instant attraction between us which, naturally, neither of us acted upon for months. I knew that she had recently ended a marriage that seemed to have been State-ordained, possibly for some diplomatic assignment in Europe. Marina was understandably very reluctant to talk about it, and I knew better than to keep asking. Her age was another early obstacle. My father, hearing later that Marina and I were getting serious, wondered how we would ever have children!

But, slowly and awkwardly, we had found each other.

Within minutes the flat was clean. I unfolded the bed as Marina drew the blinds and, magically, continued her dance of the seven veils — sweater off first, then bracelet, watch and earrings, then shoes and stockings. Only when I turned out the light did she remove her blouse and let me unzip her skirt, which I carefully folded. I took her in my arms.

In spite of the fact that she was older and had been in a marriage, Marina was much less experienced in bed than I, quite a trick given my own relative innocence when we met. Her ex-husband, she said, simply demanded sex every three days, like a clock, caring nothing for her pleasure or state of mind.

Naturally, I did my best to be nothing like this former brute. From Marina’s pleased reactions, I believe that I succeeded.

When we had satisfied ourselves, Marina rose to wash her face. From the kitchen — a few feet away — she asked me how my job with Filin was going.

“Fine.” She emerged from the kitchen, looking pink and pretty, and started gathering her clothes. As I helped her, I said, “They’re making me a junior engineer.”

Her eyes widened with pleasure and surprise. “That’s wonderful! I was worried that you wouldn’t be accepted there!” And would have to leave Moscow was the unfinished threat. “You said it was going to be impossible.”

“Something changed. I start real engineering tomorrow. When I finish my degree in a couple of months, I’ll be full-time.”

“You should have told me earlier.”

I laughed. “Why? Would you have done something different?”

She arched an eyebrow. “I guess you’ll never know.” While I was considering those possibilities, she said, “Are they going to find you an apartment in Kaliningrad?”

I hadn’t thought of that. I couldn’t stay in the Bauman student housing past spring, certainly. A good apartment was very difficult to find in the Moscow area. Marina read the confusion on my face. “You stick to the engineering, darling. When it’s time, I will deal with the apartment.”

She kissed me again, then reached for her coat.

“Do you have to go?”

“Yes.”

“It’s the middle of the night. And it’s below zero.” I got off the bed, feeling that we had unfinished business. “I’ll walk you.”

She put her hand on my chest. “I’ve done this a hundred times. And your roommates will be here any minute.” We kissed at the door. “In spite of extreme provocation, I still love you.”

“I love you, too,” I said. Then she left.

From the window, I saw her slip on the frozen street under the yellow light, then disappear around the corner.

Only then did I realize that something had changed in our relationship. I had not told her about being present at the death of the now-famous Korolev, about my other new job with Uncle Vladimir, about the fact that my new job at Experimental Design Bureau Number 1 was courtesy of Uncle Vladimir.

My father always warned me that there was a black mark against Marina. I told myself it would be better for her if she didn’t know.

But I couldn’t forget my father’s words. On my first day with State Security, I had started lying to Marina.

4 Department 90

The next morning, it took me two hours to change my status from part-time assistant to Vasily Filin to junior engineer in Department 90. Once I received my pass, I left the overheated personnel office and returned, as ordered, to Filin’s. “All set? Good. I hoped to introduce you to Triyanov personally, but now I have a meeting. Hurry over to Building 11 and you might be able to catch him.”

“Will Triyanov be in the meeting, too?”

“Yes. It’s all about our next manned space launch.”

With minimally useful directions from Nadiya the bird woman, I headed out the back of the main building, entering an area that looked like a village square, and probably served that purpose. In front of me was a huge portrait of Korolev himself, bordered in black. At the base of the portrait were heaps of flowers. As I walked toward Building 11, I wondered where the mourners had gotten so many flowers in the middle of winter.

Experimental Design Bureau Number 1 was located on the site of a former Tsarist arsenal in what used to be the village of Podlipki. Podlipki — except for its train station — had since been renamed in honor of the late arms minister Kalinin, and was, in fact, no longer a village, but merely a suburb of Moscow, just outside the planned Ring Road.

Given the size of the bureau, and my lonely mission, I suddenly felt lost, like a stranger in a foreign city.

Building 11 was a four-story pile of gray with dim corridors painted a dark green. Endless rows of office doors, with no signs to indicate what lay behind them.

Eventually I found Department 90, and Stepan Triyanov, who turned out to be a wiry, wizened man in his mid-fifties. I would later learn that he had been a glider pilot back in the thirties — just like the late Korolev; it was where they met and became friends, who wound up commanding partisan units during the war. Triyanov had won a Hero of the Soviet Union medal in combat, then gone into test flying, doing some of the first service tests on the MiG-15.

Triyanov glanced at my papers for perhaps a millisecond. “Filin telephoned me,” he said, which obviously explained everything. “So, Yuri,” he continued, “whose nephew are you?”

That was an embarrassing, if all-too-typical Russian question. Before I could stammer my way through some inadequate answer, Triyanov said, “Any relation to General Nikolai Ribko?”

“My father.”

“We worked together briefly after the war on rocket assists for jet planes. I would have thought he’d put you in the aircraft business.”

“He didn’t put me here. I came from Bauman.”

Triyanov ignored this. “I haven’t seen him for years, though I hear of him from time to time. Your mother?”

“She died six years ago.”

“Life,” Triyanov said. He turned and gestured around him. Department 90 was a large office crammed with desks. “This is the kindergarten, where we keep all the college students,” Triyanov said. Half a dozen men about my age looked up from their work. “Here’s a new victim,” Triyanov announced. “Equipment-tester third class Yuri Ribko. Make his life miserable.” Then he called, over his shoulder, “We’re going to the meeting,” and led me out.

It was a cold day, and I was still freezing in my heavy overcoat, but Triyanov wore only a military flying jacket. He seemed not to feel the cold. Or to care who might hear him. “You’ll like it in Department 90,” he said. “It’s where the real fun is. We have access to our own fleet of planes and helicopters by ministerial decree — the Air Force can scream, but they can’t do anything about it. One of those boys with the slide rules comes up with something, we find out if it’ll work. It’s very hands-on. By the way, do you fly?”

“No,” I told him, as I struggled to keep up.

“You can learn here, if you want. You should. We may be forming our own cosmonaut team.”

That was a surprise. “I thought the cosmonauts were all in Star Town.” Star Town was a military village farther down the Yaroslavl Highway.

“That’s just the Air Force detachment. Gagarin and Bykovsky, those guys. Even Tereshkova.” He made the name of the famous woman cosmonaut sound like a disease. “Do you know Feoktistov?”

I remembered Konstantin Feoktistov as the scientist in the crew of Voskhod 1, the first spacecraft to carry more than a single pilot, launched fifteen months earlier. I said so.

“Scientist!” Triyanov laughed. “Feoktistov is one of this bureau’s most important engineers! He designed Voskhod, in fact, which was why Korolev wanted him to fly on it. The Air Force wouldn’t let him. They said they needed three pilots, which was a pile of shit — a rabbit could fly Voskhod.

“They lost that argument, so they said Feoktistov wasn’t healthy enough. He had a back injury and couldn’t do parachute training.

“The Vostok cosmonauts needed to be parachutists, because that’s how they landed. But the Voskhod crew was going to come down right inside the spacecraft! Nobody was going to be ejecting!

“So then they got political and said Feoktistov had never joined the Party. He was unreliable.

“But he’d been a partisan in the war. He had been put before a Nazi firing squad along with his friends and gotten machine-gunned! The bullets missed and he crawled out from under his dead buddies after dark! Don’t tell me he’s unreliable!”

We had returned to the main administration building, where there was an auditorium on the ground floor. Several men and women — all of them quite young — were hanging around the lobby, some in conference, some having bitter arguments. None of them paid me or Triyanov the slightest attention as we opened the door to the auditorium proper, Triyanov still talking: “Eventually the Air Force had to give in. But only on Feoktistov! No more civilian cosmonauts, they said.

“Well, as they say, ‘Once the first pickle’s out of the jar.’ We’re just waiting for the new ship, Soyuz, to start flying, and we’re going to make sure that someone from this bureau is in every crew.”

We waited for a moment. There were perhaps fifty people in the room, about a dozen of them at a head table covered with green felt, with the rest in the audience. I spotted Filin himself at the head table. “There’s Feoktistov.”

The scientist-engineer-cosmonaut was seated one over from Filin, and turned out to be a mild-looking, silver-haired professor around forty years old. He even wore glasses. “He’s not what I expected,” I blurted.

Triyanov laughed. “That’s just the thing. Before Gagarin’s flight, the damn doctors figured you had to be some kind of superman to fly in space. Well, it turns out to be a lot less stressful than flying a jet. Anybody can do it, unless you’ve got a bad heart or something.” Triyanov smiled. “I’m going to do it.”

I couldn’t hide the astonishment on my face. “That’s right: fifty-five years old. Korolev would have cleared himself to fly, if he could have. He was only four years older than me.” Triyanov suddenly became reflective. “He just ran out of time.”

I became aware that the man sitting between Filin and Feoktistov — none other than bullet-headed Boris Artemov — was speaking: “I’m against putting another ruble into any more Voskhod flights. We should cut our losses and move on.”

“That’s Artemov,” Triyanov whispered to me. “He was Korolev’s number-one deputy.”

“Is he going to take over the bureau?”

“He’d like to, but he’s not Russian. And he has a lot of enemies.” Triyanov grinned. “Sounds as though he’s making more today.”

Filin had pushed back his chair and was looking at Artemov with astonishment. “Sergei Korolev hasn’t even been in the ground a day and we’re already spitting on the grave! The chief had a plan for four more missions, and we should stick to that plan!”

Artemov was already shaking his head. “Look at those plans in light of what’s happened.”

“Now, your boss Filin has suddenly become the dark horse,” Triyanov went on. “As long as Korolev was alive, he was stuck where he was, below Artemov and others. But now anything can happen.”

Artemov went on: “The next mission is supposed to prove that two men can live in space for two weeks. A month ago we needed to know that, but now we don’t. Two men named Borman and Lovell just lived in space for two weeks, or don’t any of you read the papers?”

Someone in the audience spoke up. “How do we know what kind of condition they were in?”

“We saw them walking on the aircraft carrier. They looked fine. There’s been nothing in the press about medical problems.”

“What makes you think the Americans would tell us if there were?” That from a man in an Air Force uniform off to one side. I had seen him coming out of Filin’s office the day before.

“Think about it,” Artemov snapped. “They showed the recovery live on television… something we don’t have the guts to do. Have they postponed any flights? No, they’re going to launch another Gemini in March!”

“There’s still the test of the spacesuit,” Filin said.

“Test it on Soyuz! My point is that four more Voskhod flights are a diversion of time and energy away from our real goal, which is beating the Americans to the Moon!”

That brought forth a murmur of agreement. Artemov pressed on. “Look, we all realize that Voskhod existed because the chief wanted to keep Khrushchev happy. The Americans are going to put two men in space? Fine, we’ll put three. They’re going to walk in space? We’ll beat them.

“We’ve managed to forget how risky the system is. Maybe I should ask Dr. Feoktistov here—” Artemov nodded to the engineer-cosmonaut “—how confident he was riding the booster with no launch-escape system.”

No one in the West knew it at the time — and very few in my country, even within the space community — that the vaunted “multiman” Voskhod was nothing more than a Vostok shell with the safety equipment (pressure suit, ejection seat) removed to make room for three men without spacesuits.

Voskhod also lacked any means of escape in case of booster failure during the first minutes of flight — much like your Space Shuttle to this day.

Worst of all, the system that allowed Voskhod to thump down on land was a second retro-rocket attached to the lines of the main recovery chute. A sensor on the Voskhod itself triggered this reserve rocket when the shell was just a few feet off the ground, slowing it to a gentle landing.

“The boosters worked well in both cases,” Feoktistov said, looking like a man wanting to avoid an argument.

“Lucky for you. Of course, Belyayev and Leonov wound up spending a night with the wolves because of another little malfunction.” Artemov spread his hands. “The evidence is staring us in the face. We have a pointless program that is only likely to kill someone. I say we drop it.”

There was a moment of silence. Finally Filin said, “Remind me, Boris, not to have you speak at my memorial service.” There was laughter, except from Artemov, who stared at the table and shook his head. Filin continued smoothly, “We are a collective right now. We’ve heard from both sides. Is there a move to make this radical change? Hands?” Artemov’s shot up. His was the only one at the head table. “Well, it seems we should all continue working as before. Including those of you working on the third Voskhod. Thank you.”

Some of those in the meeting still wanted to talk, but Artemov was already leaving the stage. Before he disappeared, Triyanov had me on my feet. “Well,” he said, “that was a good example of what it’s going to be like around here.”

“Chaos?”

“Korolev’s meetings were like that, too. People shouting at each other, calling each other idiots. Of course then the chief would make a decision, and that would be the end of it. Artemov doesn’t have that power. As for Filin, we’ll just have to see…”

I was still fairly reeling from the experience. “Did Filin and Korolev get along?”

“Who knows? They fought like dogs. When the chief went into the hospital, they hadn’t spoken for three weeks.”

Triyanov seemed lost in thought for a moment. I waited as long as I thought polite, then said, “Where should I start work?”

He turned toward me, his old self after that momentary lapse. “I need an assistant for a test I’m conducting tomorrow. Ever been weightless?”

“Never.”

Triyanov smiled. “Perfect. Be in the department tomorrow at six A.M. We’ll drive to the airfield from there.”

Seeing someone he knew, he excused himself, leaving me to think about what Uncle Vladimir had said, that I would find suspects wherever I looked.

I realized that the least likely — and therefore most likely — suspect had been in front of me from the very beginning.

Filin himself.

5 The Test Flight

Chkalov air base, named for a test pilot as famous in Russia as your Chuck Yeager is in the U.S., lay no more than twenty kilometers to the east of the bureau, yet the trip took an hour and a half. This on top of my train ride and hike through darkness to the bureau itself. I met up with a cheerful, tireless Triyanov and several of my new coworkers, then boarded a bus that rattled off to the highway. We passed through cottages, then into a mixture of open fields, white with snow, and birch trees.

Triyanov told me that this bus carried workers from the bureau to the cosmonaut training center at Star Town every day, though we got off before that.

By eight I sat in the ready room dressed in a track suit, going over my notes on the Voskhod life-support systems. Triyanov had made me read a stack of documentation before leaving the night before. Naturally the documents were too sacred to be permitted off the bureau grounds, so I had had to take notes… I even made sketches. Here were the oxygen bottles, here was the nitrogen tank. Here was water. These were the switches that controlled the system. These were the dials telling you how much of anything was left.

It might as well have been written in Chinese.

“All set?” Triyanov said, startling me. He, too, wore a track suit, in addition to a leather flight jacket and a stocking cap.

“Will it do any good if I say no?”

Triyanov laughed. “Not a bit, but I like your spirit.” He looked at the notes. “Don’t worry about that shit. It’s all been flown before. Maybe I’ll let you try it out yourself.”

“With all the vast amount of training I’ve had?”

“Look, you’ve got about as much training as one of the crewmen is going to have. He’s some scientist that Korolev wanted to fly, Keldysh’s nephew. He’s not a pilot, either.” (You know, of course, that the scientist was not literally nephew to Keldysh, the head of the Academy of Sciences, but a protégé.) “Besides,” Triyanov added, “we find out most about a system when it’s used for the first time by an absolute novice. If anything can go wrong, it will. Triyanov’s law.”

I picked up my jacket and, lamb to a slaughter, followed Triyanov out to the plane.

Even at eight in the morning I couldn’t tell if the sun was up. The leaden, cloudy sky was gray rather than black, so I was willing to believe a rumor to that effect. I just wished it would go ahead and snow… preferably before I had to board the aircraft.

I had ridden in a Tupolev-104 three times in my life. The twin-engine jet was the standard liner of the Air Fleet. But this one had been modified — or, looking at it another way, ruined. Most of the seats had been removed from the passenger compartment. Those that remained were more military in style — made of uncomfortable-looking metal — and crammed forward.

The rest of the compartment was taken up by a mess of cables, consoles, and a shiny metal ball about two meters across.

As Triyanov helped me up the ladder, I blurted, “What the hell is that?”

“That is the Voskhod spacecraft,” Triyanov said. “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen one before.”

“Sorry.” In my months as Filin’s assistant, I had only seen a schematic of the Luna landing probe, which looked much like a basketball, but nothing of Vostok, Voskhod, or Soyuz.

“What did you expect it to look like?”

“I don’t know. A cone, maybe. Like the American ships.”

“Soyuz and Sever are our cone-shaped vehicles. We are just getting ready to fly Soyuz unmanned.”

“We’ve got four different kinds of manned spaceships?”

“Actually, there are about six… if you believe all the rumors from other bureaus.” Triyanov patted the rusted metal surface of the Voskhod. “This ball was in space a few years ago, can you believe that? One of the unmanned flights before Gagarin. No place in a museum, however. Right back to work.”

“Efficient use of Party resources. I think that was one of the slogans from the last congress.”

“Well, we want to be in line with the correct thinking.” I got the clear impression Triyanov cared little for Party slogans. “Voskhod is actually the same shape as Gagarin’s Vostok. Only that earlier version was built for one pilot. This carries two or three seats—”

“—With no escape system. That much I do know.”

“Don’t say that too loudly,” Triyanov said, jerking his head toward the forward compartment. “Some people around here are sensitive about that.”

I saw why when the door to the cockpit opened, and out came a familiar-looking young pilot, puffing on a cigarette.

Triyanov started to introduce us, but the pilot surprised me by smiling and holding up his hand. “I know Yuri. Nikolai Ribko’s son. We met at the Kremlin Hospital.” Now I recognized him: Ivan Saditsky, the young major who was traveling with Gagarin the day Korolev died.

Saditsky snuffed out his cigarette and crawled inside the Voskhod mockup. “Is he flying the mission?” I asked Triyanov.

“He’s been the leading candidate for the past few weeks, but Kamanin keeps changing his mind.” Kamanin was another general, this one in charge of manned spaceflight and the military cosmonaut team.

Saditsky immediately began complaining loudly about a set of switches on the control panel being out of reach. Triyanov gently explained that the mockup was not configured as a flight simulator, but merely to test life-support systems.

“How do I know you’ve got them in the right place when everything else is cockeyed?” Saditsky snapped, pulling himself through the circular hatch. “I’ve trained on a different system for six months. Sitting inside that piece of crap will set me back.”

Triyanov glanced sideways at me. “What do you want me to do?”

Saditsky smiled at me. “Are you the bureau’s test engineer, Yuri?”

I glanced at Triyanov, who answered, “He certainly is!”

Saditsky slapped me on the back. “Then you can test your bureau’s system!”

“Where are you going?” Triyanov asked, as Saditsky headed for the hatchway.

“Back to the center,” he snapped. “I’ll be looking for your report.”

And he was gone. “What a prick,” one of the other bureau engineers muttered, but only when Saditsky was safely out of range.

“Speaking of pricks,” Triyanov said, pointing at me, “we’ll need yours.”

“Excuse me?”

“The test, Yuri. It’s part of the life-support system. How does man piss in weightlessness?”

“I thought they’d have mastered that by now.”

“The Vostok cosmonauts couldn’t get out of their spacesuits, so they just peed into a hose, like pilots. Even Tereshkova… they rigged some kind of catheter for her.

“Feoktistov and his two pals on the first Voskhod were the only ones to fly without suits, so far. We had them wearing hoses and bottles, too, which was tolerable only for a day. The next flight is two weeks long. Who wants to be putting on and taking off a condom the whole time?”

“None of us, I’m sure.”

“Step inside. Shoes off.” Triyanov moved aside as I bent down to unlace my sneakers. Then I grabbed the access bar mounted above the circular hatch, as I had seen Saditsky do, and slid in, feetfirst.

There was only one seat, on the far wall of the sphere, and it was mounted at right angles to the hatch. On the “floor,” which was a collection of tubes, wires, and netting, someone had thoughtfully placed several wooden blocks — steps. I used those to reach the seat, careful not to bump anything.

There was light from the hatch, and a single lamp just above my head. Otherwise the sphere was dark. I was reclined, almost on my back. The seat was covered with a blue cushion and felt surprisingly comfortable. In front of me was an instrument panel like that of a small airplane. At my right hand was a pistol-grip controller. I found I could reach the panel and the controller without even extending my arms.

“Cozy, isn’t it?” Triyanov said.

“I could take a nap.”

“That’s about the only thing these guys will be able to do for two weeks.”

“I think I could stand it for maybe a day.”

“Well, they say that in weightlessness it all seems so much bigger.”

“All right,” I said, “two days.” Triyanov laughed, then I continued: “Now, what about this pissing tube?”

“That’s the genius of these guys at the medical institute. They want to do away with the tube completely. For one thing, it would save space inside the cabin. The tube also means that a lot of the precious body fluid is lost. It evaporates, it never gets where it’s supposed to go.”

“So what?”

Triyanov was taking extreme delight in this. “Some of them have the idea that if we can save that piss, we can purify and filter it, and turn it back into drinking water.” He must have seen the look on my face. “Don’t worry, we’re not testing the recycling system. Though you’ve drunk worse if you’ve ever turned on the tap in downtown Moscow.…” Triyanov jerked a thumb toward a receptacle in the cabin wall below my feet. “There.”

“There?” The instrument looked more like a saddle than a toilet seat. Instead of being flat, the rear and forward areas were raised.

“You apply yourself to the ‘fountain,’ close it down.” Triyanov showed that the front section pivoted open and shut. “Then do your Party business.”

“Sitting on the wall?”

“It won’t make any difference in weightlessness.”

“We’re not weightless.”

“We will be soon.”

I climbed out of the spacecraft as the last test crewman came aboard, tugging the airplane hatch closed. I could feel rather than hear the jets starting up.

“We can simulate weightlessness by first diving the whole plane, then pulling up into a climb. As we go over the top of the arc, we float. Just like cosmonauts.”

“For how long?”

“About forty seconds.” He winked. “Long enough.” He handed me a plastic bottle. “Drink up!”

Fifteen minutes after takeoff, we had reached an altitude of ten thousand meters, orbiting above the clouds east of Moscow and headed toward Noginsk, when Triyanov told me to get inside the spacecraft. Other crewmen loaded film into cameras aimed through the porthole.

“All you have to do is unstrap, float over, sit down, and launch.”

“It might take me a couple of tries.”

“Don’t worry about that. We’re supposed to fly twenty arcs.” I edged into the seat. Triyanov reached inside and helped me close the restraints, then slid out to find his own seat.

The aircraft seemed to topple forward, and I felt myself flung toward the ceiling of the Voskhod as we dove toward the ground. Once my father took me to an amusement park in the Crimea. The big attraction there was a roller coaster, and I badgered him until he allowed me a ride. He also insisted on coming along. I found the ride terrifying and wonderful. The merited test pilot of the Soviet Union threw up. Strapped into this little cabin, being shoved toward its ceiling, I felt like my father had felt, queasy and disoriented.

Pulling out of the dive was a bit better — for me, as I sank into the comfortable blue cushion. For a few seconds I felt a bit like a cosmonaut during launch. The others in the compartment, who were having the blood in their bodies pushed toward their feet, were turning various shades of white and green.

Then the plane began to climb, so sharply that I now felt as though I were standing on my head. Only the straps saved me from tumbling in a reverse somersault.

The angle of climb changed slightly… and the loose ends of my straps began to float. I had meant to get a head start on the test by slipping off my pants. Too late. I unbuckled, wondering how many seconds I had lost, and immediately turned the wrong way. I braced myself against the cabin roof and pushed backward.

“That’s the way!” Triyanov was floating outside the hatch. “Farther back… and lower.”

“How much time left?” I felt as though I’d been floating for five minutes already.

“Don’t worry about that. Get in the saddle.”

I finally managed to brace myself to where I could begin to think about my duties. I was sweating like a boxer now.

A claxon sounded.

“Okay, try it next time,” Triyanov said, swimming back to his seat. “Leave your pants off.”

I hadn’t quite managed to get myself back in the seat when the plane began to dive again. My shoulder and side ached, but I twisted into position, and clapped on the chest restraint.

Over the roller coaster again.

On the second arc, I started out by turning the right way, and had myself braced, pants down, when the claxon sounded.

On the third, I got my bare bottom into the saddle.

On the fourth, I closed the pivot and managed a trickle.

As the fifth arc began, some of what little urine there was began floating inside the cabin.

“Piece of shit,” Triyanov said, meaning the device, not me.

Then he threw up.

During the next three arcs, I made further attempts, none of them entirely or even remotely successful. “The tank is empty,” I finally told Triyanov, and I didn’t mean Voskhod’s.

Green and miserable, he waved me out of the spacecraft. “You’ve done enough.”

I strapped myself into one of the metal chairs and rode out the next few arcs as a passenger. I realized that the other test work — incomprehensible to me — had largely stopped, as the other test-crew members strapped themselves down like Triyanov, heads lolling, useless. In fact, I soon realized I was the only man still standing. “How long does this go on?” I asked.

“We ordered twenty arcs, twenty arcs is what we’ll get, even if we’re all dead.” Well, with the aircraft diving and climbing, it was impossible to imagine walking to the cockpit door to tell the pilots otherwise.

From the look on Triyanov’s face, the remaining eleven arcs were an agonizing eternity. I felt bad that I didn’t feel worse… allowing myself to unstrap and float freely during the thirty seconds of freefall for each arc.

It was like being on that roller coaster again, with Triyanov in place of my father.

Eventually we leveled out, and people began to recover. “Well,” Triyanov asked, once he had regained his proper color, “what shall we say about our space toilet?”

“It didn’t seem well-designed.”

“Good. That’s exactly what we will report.” He smiled wanly. “Be sure your name goes ahead of mine.”

“If you say so.”

“The organization’s first response will be to blame the tester. You will probably have to repeat your space pissing.”

“If that’s what they want.”

“I can see that these flights don’t bother you, Yuri. Maybe I should get you into our cosmonaut team.”

It was a joking comment, but it hit me like a fist. And I thought, I had become a spy without even trying. Why not a cosmonaut, too?

6 Ostankino Tower

I spent the rest of that week in more mundane tasks at the bureau, charting the data from the tests and learning just how little I knew. The idea that I could somehow compete with the senior engineers around me in any bureau business — much less that of becoming a cosmonaut—soon struck me as foolish.

Returning exhausted to my building on Friday evening, I found a message from Uncle Vladimir waiting for me with the key lady. This was necessary because we didn’t have telephones in our student flats.

The key lady’s name was Liliya, and, like most middle-aged or elderly Russian women, she was round and potatolike. She had lovely blue eyes, however, and a ready smile, so some of the guys flirted with her, which caused her to blush and look quite pretty. Perhaps this sort of maneuver softened her up, or maybe she was just a romantic, but you could sneak girls past her at will. If she caught you, she might wag her finger — but always with a smile.

This day, Liliya seemed unusually concerned when she handed me the message, which simply said for me to meet Uncle Vladimir at the restaurant in the Ostankino Tower tomorrow at noon.

Noting Liliya’s frown, I asked her if there was a problem. “The man who brought it was an officer,” she said, referring to an officer of State Security, which in her world only meant bad news. Explaining my relationship with State Security was not, of course, an immediate option. “He said you would be here in five minutes,” she added, which did chill me: I had stopped for bread at one kiosk on my walk from the metro station, then even lingered at another kiosk, which happened to be offering shoes — all of which turned out to be the same size, too big. But no one could have predicted correctly when I would arrive home.

Was Uncle Vladimir having me followed?

I knew the Ostankino Station and environs quite well. It was a fairgrounds devoted to the Exhibit on Scientific and Technical Achievements, dominated by a gigantic sweeping spaceship monument, a tribute to Gagarin. There you also found the new thirty-story television tower and its revolving restaurant.

Gagarin’s anonymous engineers, such as the newly deceased Korolev; my boss, Filin; and his rival, Artemov, lived in a series of handsome flats — almost like the individual condominiums you see in Scandinavian countries — literally in the shadow of the monument. Consequently I had come through the station here twice a day for weeks, but had never been motivated, or rich enough, to enter the tower itself… the top of which, on this wintry Saturday, was shrouded in mist.

When I showed my documents to the guard, I was separated from the line and sent into the elevator. No one grumbled: They would have done the same and never looked back.

When I emerged on the thirtieth floor, there was no Uncle Vladimir, nor any sign of him, and none of his helpful State Security associates. The restaurant itself was largely empty — whether it wasn’t open at this hour, or just not open to the general public, I didn’t know. I had never actually eaten in a restaurant at that time in my life… cafés, yes. But this place was in a different class. It had a name — the Stakhanov — emblazoned on the wall in gold script, and was equipped with many expensive-looking furnishings, silver spoons, white tablecloths.

I glimpsed a waiter and a waitress, and possibly even a cook, but all three were seriously busy not working. To them, I was a thin young hooligan in a cheap overcoat, not a customer.

I stood there looking out the window, hoping for a view of Moscow sliding by slowly beneath me, but saw only clouds. Finally, as we made a complete revolution back to the elevators, Uncle Vladimir appeared, alone, his great bulk almost filling the cage.

“This way,” he said, nodding to one of the empty tables, passing several (I thought) perfectly good tables on the way.

We had barely settled into the overstuffed red chairs when the staff, recognizing a dignitary, descended on us likes flies on a pile of shit. Words I had never heard in my life tumbled out of their mouths — appetizers, entrées — all accompanied by a lot of head-bobbing. Suddenly they were peasants and we were lords. I was torn between disgust at the display and the disturbing feeling that I could easily get used to such service.

They brought us vodka and smoked salmon, to take the chill out of our bones, and cleared off to prepare the lunch, which, to my relief, Uncle Vladimir ordered. I couldn’t help saying, “They certainly live up to the name.” Stakhanov had been a legendarily tireless, much-cited, heavily rewarded — and if not fictitious, then grotesquely exaggerated — hero — coal miner of the 1930s.

Uncle Vladimir allowed himself the briefest of smiles. “A restaurant doesn’t have a State quota, Yuri. It either has good food or it doesn’t. Which this place does. Korolev thought so.” He glanced out the window in the general direction of the bureau’s residences. “He used to bring his girlfriend here. Then kept coming after they were married, always sitting at this same table.”

“I knew there had to be a reason we were here.”

“We have to meet someplace other than the office; why not somewhere pleasant… and historically relevant?”

We tossed back our second shots of vodka and salmon. My hands betrayed my nervousness… I spilled some of the vodka as I refilled Uncle Vladimir’s glass.

I apologized, but all he did was shrug, and dip a piece of the salmon into the puddle on the table. For all his sophistication, he was a true Russian: He wouldn’t even let a milliliter of vodka go to waste. “How are you and your girl getting along?”

Marina was off in Kaluga baby-sitting a group of European tourists, and I had not seen her in several days. “Fine.”

“Marriage plans?”

Marriage to Marina was an idea I had only fantasized about. I had never actually proposed it to her. “Not so far.”

“A wife can be an impediment at your age. Besides,” and here he managed a painful smile, “why buy the cow when the milk is free?” He laughed, too, a frightening sound.

There was an interruption as cabbage soup arrived. Only when the waitress had withdrawn did Uncle Vladimir turn to business. “What do you think of the bureau?”

Grateful for the change in subject, I quickly laid out my impressions of the open tension between Filin and Artemov, and threw in some of Triyanov’s comments as well. The time I had spent chained to a desk in Department 90 had convinced me that while Korolev had been widely loved, he had also been feared.

As I made my report, Uncle Vladimir consumed everything on his plate, wiping up whatever was left with a piece of bread. When I was finished, he nodded, rested his left elbow on the table and pointed directly at my nose. (I don’t think I realized until that moment that Uncle Vladimir was left-handed.) “By the power of the Party and the Central Committee, I am appointing you deputy prosecutor. Who do you charge with Korolev’s death?”

“Aside from the doctors and officials of the hospital?”

“Should the death turn out to be something more than plain negligence, yes.”

“My first choice would have been Artemov…” I paused dramatically. It is embarrassing to think of how smug I felt that day. “… But now I would place Filin at the top of the list.”

“Your own boss.”

“He was present in the hospital the day Korolev died.”

“So was Artemov.”

“Yes. But not in Korolev’s room.”

“As far as you know.”

“As far as I know.” I plunged ahead. “But Filin was under great stress for some mysterious reason—”

“Like someone from a Pushkin story, perhaps?”

Now I was starting to hear my own words as I spoke them — a sure sign that I was floundering. All I could do was finish weakly. “He tried to cancel some of Korolev’s projects the moment the man was dead.”

Uncle Vladimir smiled with real warmth. He was enjoying himself. “All right, let’s examine the case of brother Filin, then. He and Korolev first worked together twenty years ago, in Germany. They were on our team that rummaged through the rubble in search of Nazi secrets. Of course, in those days Filin was the chief and Korolev was the deputy.”

“So there’s even more cause for resentment.”

“Oh, yes. I agree completely that Filin would be a good candidate.” He settled back. “Now look at brother Artemov. On the surface, the perfect deputy to Korolev. In private, however, they disagreed about everything up to and including the time of day. Artemov was either at Korolev’s throat or at his feet.

“Better yet, their association went back thirty years, to GIRD.” I had heard something of GIRD, the Society for Rocket Research — starry-eyed students who managed to convince General Tukachevsky to give them a pittance to fund a few early rocket flights, until Tukachevsky was arrested and shot in Stalin’s big purge. The same fate befell the heads of the GIRD; some of the junior members, such as Korolev, were merely arrested and shipped off to the Gulag. “The letter denouncing Korolev was written by Artemov to save his own ass.”

That was a stunning revelation to me. “Then how could Korolev stand to have Artemov around?”

“People will say or write anything once they find themselves in the basement.” He meant, of course, the basement of the Lubiyanka Prison. “Korolev himself had to denounce some of his colleagues. And, perhaps he felt guilty that he had stolen Artemov’s wife.”

It was clear that I was completely out of my depth. “It’s a good thing I’m not a state prosecutor.”

Uncle Vladimir acknowledged the joke, then said something that I remembered years later: “You would be surprised how little attention was paid to evidence in those days.” He went on. “But you see the complications, Yuri. These people… they fight, they argue, they plot, but still they have this special bond. They want to go to the Moon. Yes, they will build armaments for our country — but the armaments they like best are the ones that fulfill their dreams, not the needs of the Soviet people. Their arguments are about the best way to accomplish this. Like rabbis arguing about God.”

It was clear he was disgusted with the whole bunch. From my brief encounters with Uncle Vladimir in a family setting, I knew he disdained believers in God, especially Jewish believers in God. “There is even another party, another potential killer. Korolev’s true rival, Chelomei.”

“I don’t know that name.”

“He is even more secret than Korolev was, because all his work so far has been for the military. I want you to be alert for any information about him, too.”

I misunderstood. “But I just started working at Korolev’s bureau!” I said, protesting as strongly as I dared. People didn’t change jobs in those days the way they do now, believe me. I expected to work at the bureau long after my spying for Uncle Vladimir was finished.

Uncle Vladimir was already huffing with effort as he hauled himself out of the chair. “You will stay right where you are, Yuri. I want you to exploit your existing connection to Chelomei.”

“Who?”

“Your roommate.” Another piece of the puzzle. Lev Tselauri had mentioned his mysterious boss, and the “rivalry” with the late Korolev. So his secret “post-office” bureau was headed by this Chelomei! “Of course, all of this may add up to nothing. Remember that you do not carry the whole weight of the investigation on your young shoulders. Others are also working.”

I stood then, too, and when Uncle Vladimir reached over and snatched a piece of cold veal off my plate, I realized I had been so busy showing off I had not eaten more than a few bites of my first restaurant meal. “You have a natural talent for this work,” he said. “As time goes by, I see a growing need for young people with technical and mathematical skills inside State Security. This could be a great opportunity for you.”

“Thank you.”

“I wish your father would.” For a brief moment Vladimir Nefedov changed from a mysterious figure from the dark world of State Security back to a fat uncle chewing my food. “When do you see him next?”

“Tomorrow.”

Uncle Vladimir gave me no message; he only nodded. “We will leave separately. I go first.” And thus I was back again in the world of State Prosecutors, the basement of Lubiyanka, the knock on the door. I had to be very careful. I was furious with myself for even entertaining that brief fantasy about becoming a cosmonaut.

I had gone to lunch in hopes I might be reaching the end of my association with State Security. When I left, it was clear I had barely begun.

7 The Embankment

Sunday dawned clear and cold. At noon I was supposed to take the metro over to the Frunze Embankment, to my father’s flat, so I could have slept late. But my lunch with Uncle Vladimir haunted my dreams, and I awoke early, just as the sun rose in the southeast, shining through the shadowy buildings onto the frozen Yauza River.

Years of practice had taught me how to keep quiet while moving around the flat, just as years of practice had no doubt taught the Omsk Twins and Lev to sleep through anything short of a nuclear attack. I made a cup of tea and had a roll for breakfast, then sat on the couch going over the last of my school papers. Triyanov had told me that my report on the Voskhod toilet would serve as the basis of a senior thesis on habitability systems for manned spacecraft. Without making any conscious choice, I was being shunted onto a specific career track that had nothing to do with my interests in mathematics or trajectories. I suppose I should not have been surprised. After all, I was rapidly being turned into an investigator for State Security, too.

“Breakfast reading?” Lev appeared out of the other room suddenly, surprising me as he picked up the typist’s latest draft of my report.

“That’s secret,” I told him.

“It should be,” he said, making a face. “It’s years behind the ones we’re designing.”

I hadn’t planned to quiz Lev so early; had wondered, in fact, just how I would ever begin to probe for Chelomei’s secrets. But here it was. “I must have missed the flights of Chelomei’s spacecraft,” I said. “Which ones were they?”

“I see someone has been talking. Your father?” Fortunately, Lev took my embarrassed silence at the accidental mention of Chelomei’s name as confirmation of my father’s supposed talkativeness. “Fine. The general staff loves my boss, because he works for them.

“As for our spacecraft, you’ll see soon enough,” he said, rising to the challenge. He began ticking them off on his fingers. “First, there’s our space station, which was just approved by the Council of Ministers. Then there’s our lunar orbiter — your dead boss Korolev was trying to take that away from us, but now he’s gone.”

“The new heads of my bureau have allies, too.”

Lev spread his hands at the insanity of it all. “They have to use our launcher! The only way a Korolev bureau spacecraft is going to the Moon is on top of a Chelomei rocket! They don’t even fit together… it doesn’t make sense.”

“You make Chelomei sound like some kind of genius.”

“He is. He’s a passionate man… very cultured. I was in his office just this week, in fact. You should see it, Yuri. He’s like one of those people in an American movie, with a dark suit and a bright tie. He’s surrounded by polished wood, hundreds of books. Poetry and novels, too, not just engineering texts.”

I had never seen Korolev’s office, but I had seen Korolev’s style, which was strictly functional.

“He has a vision, too. It would be very easy for him to sit back and do whatever the generals want. Build bigger missiles. Shoot down American spy satellites. Collect his State prizes. He does all this, but he still believes, Yuri. He wants to see man — a Russian man — walking on the Moon. On Mars. And you know what?” Lev needed no encouragement to keep speaking. “He wants his people to fly his spacecraft. Yes, he’ll let the military cosmonauts fly the military vehicles, but not the lunar spacecraft. He’s very close to creating his own group using new people.”

“New people like you?” I debated telling Lev that the Korolev bureau was way ahead of him already.

“Why not? I’m fit. My eyes are good. I’m learning to be a pilot.” I hadn’t known that. “Besides, I would much rather explore space than fight a war.”

Then, perhaps feeling that he had revealed too much, he stopped. He pointed to the Voskhod papers on my desk. “I’m sorry… it’s really not that bad.”

“No, I tested it myself: It is a terrible design.”

“That’s because Voskhod is small. Chelomei’s space station is so large it has sleeping quarters as well as a bathroom.”

There was a knock at the door, loud enough to wake the Omsk Twins in the other room. I answered it; Liliya, the key lady, had a telephone message for me. “Your lady friend is coming back early,” she announced, handing me a slip of paper. “She says she will be home at noon.”

The moment she was gone, Lev laughed. “Why does she bother writing it down when she’s going to scream it all over the building?”

The Omsk Twins stumbled in then, effectively ending my interrogation of Lev. While it was now easier for me to picture this mysterious Chelomei, all I had learned was that he was a kindred spirit to Korolev, Artemov, and Filin. (Lev seemed to be one of them, too.) Not a murderer.

And what, exactly, was I?

Marina lived in another block of student flats not far from my own, but on the eastern side of the Yauza. I had hoped she would be alone — not an unusual expectation on a Sunday, with roommates who could be off studying in the library. Not only was she not alone, but one of her roommates was screwing her boyfriend in the next room.

Marina’s hug and kiss were hurried. “Let’s go, please.” She grabbed her coat as I tried not to hear the creaking of ancient bedsprings.

Once we had exited the building, our boots crunching on the January snow, Marina relaxed, became playful, taking my arm, letting me stop her for a kiss. Kaluga had been cold; the trip had been shortened because pipes burst inside the big Tsiolkovsky Museum. One of her tourist charges had flirted with her. “He was a rich Western journalist, very handsome, too,” she said.

“With a wife and four children back in Paris. Not to mention another set in London.”

“He swore that he was unmarried.”

“If you’re trying to make me jealous, don’t bother,” I said. “Take the best offer you can get.”

Then, disappointed that I didn’t want to play her game, she pouted, but not for long. It was only when I told her that I was on my way to visit my father that she showed real annoyance.

“Yuri, he hates me.”

“He likes you better than he likes me these days.” I was trying to be encouraging, but failed.

After much pleading, she agreed to come with me, on the condition that we would leave after a few hours.

We emerged from the Frunze Station into another world. Handsome buildings rose all around us. The cars that zipped down the wide street were shiny and black, in spite of the snow and slush. Marina noticed this as I did. “It pays to be a general,” she said. It was true: This part of Moscow belonged to general officers working at the Ministry of Defense headquarters, or at the many, many military academies and institutes around the city. Even the kiosks looked more prosperous.

It was a five-block march from the station to my father’s building. I hurried Marina as much as I dared, knowing that my father had expected me to arrive at least two hours earlier. I must have been too intent on the task, because Marina suddenly stopped. “What’s wrong?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You haven’t said a word since we left the station. We hardly talked all the way over here.”

She had that ability — common enough in women, I have learned — to read a man’s state from body language and things not said.

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“Something has changed with you in the past week or so. I wasn’t sure before I went to Kaluga, but now I can see it.”

“Well, I have a job now. It’s very difficult. Maybe that’s it.” That wasn’t it, of course — what was different was my secret job with State Security.

Only then did I ask myself… why not tell her? Marina had her own associations with that world. A simple statement that I did, too, should end all the questions with hugs of understanding. No more hiding.

The words were forming in my mouth when Marina said, “Oh, God, look at that man!”

A man in the green greatcoat of an Air Force general was standing ten meters away, urinating against the wall of a building. As we watched, he clumsily zipped up, then stumbled away.

Staggering drunks were hardly an uncommon sight in Moscow in those days, though it was shocking to see one on a Sunday, and here on the Frunze Embankment, home to generals. “Go home!” Marina shouted, causing the man to turn, bleary-eyed.

There were more shocks to come. The drunken pisser was my father.

“Oh shit,” was all I could say. Marina recognized him at the same time I did. We looked at each other in horror.

“Go,” she said. “Go to him.” And she turned away.

“What about you?”

“I’ll be at home.”

Hoping for, or perhaps needing, a good-bye kiss, I reached for her hand as, behind me, I heard a slurred version of my name. This from my father, who prided himself on not being a typical Russian drunkard. Pissing in the street in the middle of the afternoon!

Marina jerked her hand away. “Don’t call me,” she said.

I had so little experience with drunks that I did not know what to expect from my father’s condition. Generally one is either sloppy and sentimental, or violently angry. Given General Ribko’s normally testy disposition, I was relieved to find that he was weeping.

“Where’s Marina?” He had seen her.

“She had to leave.” I got him headed toward his building, which was across the street.

“You love her?”

Strange to hear my father, who never spoke of emotions of any kind, use that word. “I think so.” Into the elevator.

“I loved your mother.”

Now I knew my father, the grim, hardened hero of two hundred combat missions and a dozen military-political intrigues, was truly wounded. In the six years since my mother’s death, he had never mentioned her. The only sign she had ever shared his life was a portrait of her in a place of honor in the main room of his flat.

There was no time for me to probe at this opening; just as I got him safely inside his flat, he vomited. The rest of the evening is best left to the imagination.

Only when I was sure he was in bed, safely asleep, did I turn down the lights and go out into the cold winter night.

8 Clans

Early the next week, with the weather still frigid, Moscow locked in winter’s cold fist, I was called to Filin’s office. I bundled up, but still froze as I hurried across the facility.

Filin’s birdwoman secretary looked even more fragile than ever… perhaps it was the heat in the building, which was almost suffocating. “He wants to talk about your schoolwork,” she told me, I guess to make sure I didn’t bring up any bureau business. “He needs to leave for the airfield in half an hour.”

Filin was smoking and signing his way through a stack of documents when I entered. He ignored me until I had found a chair. Then, last paper signed, he pushed back the papers. “There. It’s all shit, but nicely wrapped.” Like a swimmer coming up for air, he blinked and focused on me. “Good morning.” He grabbed a draft of my report off the cabinet behind him.

Mindful of the birdwoman’s warning, I launched into a brief description of my work on the Voskhod crew equipment, just as I had briefed him on more mundane subjects in the past. Filin listened only long enough to light a new cigarette, then waved me to silence, the trail of fresh smoke describing a Z in the air. “You don’t think much of the habitability systems on our Voskhod.”

I was the most junior of the junior engineers and my experience with these habitability systems was limited to that unpleasant ride on the Tu-104 and some additional research for my report. I really had no business writing a critical report.

Yet, I had learned that one of the reasons Voskhod 3 had not been launched in the fall of 1965 was due to serious shortcomings in life support. The oxygen-generation system was underperforming in tests, a serious problem. On a simpler, but more baffling level, Voskhod lacked a way to measure water consumption by the cosmonauts — it hadn’t been necessary with single cosmonauts flying for a few days, because the spacecraft carried more than enough water. Two men in orbit for twenty days was much more challenging, yet all the big brains in Department 90 had come up with was a plan to have the cosmonauts count the number of mouthfuls they used! The temperature controls were tricky and unreliable, and the foam covering for the walls turned out to be flammable, and gave off particles that could easily irritate eyes and lungs. And so on.

So I felt confident in maintaining my negative position. Filin seemed to surrender. “Well, we hope to fly a pair of dogs next month. Hopefully we can fix some of the problems then.” He handed the report back to me. “Triyanov thinks you have promise. Listen to him. He’s a good man.”

I didn’t know what else to say, offering only a lame, “How is your health?”

He threw open his hands. “There are days when I feel like a college boy. But today I feel like a dead man.” He stood up, heading for the window, gesturing vaguely toward the east with his cigarette. “I don’t like flying to the launch site. Five hours sitting on a metal bench, bouncing all over the sky.”

“Is that where you’re headed today?”

“Yes. Another Luna launches next week. We got so close last time.” Luna 8 had been in its final descent to the surface of the Moon near the crater Galileo when its braking engine switched on… seconds too late. The little lander couldn’t slow down enough, and smashed into the lunar dust. Filin, Artemov, and even Korolev, had been summoned to the Kremlin to be “beaten by the hammer,” the hammer in this case being Comrade Sergei Afanasyev, the head of the ministry, a giant of a man with a volcanic temper, whose intimidating physical manner justified that charming nickname. “The Hammer is threatening to cancel the whole program if we screw up one more time.”

“How can he do that unless he cancels the manned missions as well?” The Luna probes were designed to gather data about the surface so a manned lander could be designed. Otherwise there wasn’t much point in them.

“I mean, he will cancel the bureau’s part of the program and give it all to other organizations.”

“Like Chelomei’s?”

I uttered that name without really thinking, and was surprised at Filin’s reaction. He slowly turned to face me. “Not many people know about Chelomei,” he said.

I mumbled something about having heard him mentioned at Bauman, which seemed to satisfy Filin. “He is one smug, political bastard. He went out and hired Khrushchev’s son and made him one of his deputies! The Hammer loves him, too. They party together down in the Crimea.

“This is a very difficult time for our organization, Yuri. With Korolev gone, we could tear ourselves apart. The Hammer is always saying we do too much… we build missiles and launchers and spy satellites and communications satellites and space probes and manned spacecraft. He already got Korolev to start selling off the pieces before he died, and maybe that’s right. Maybe we try too much.

“But not the Moon program. You can’t spread that all over a bunch of different organizations. Look at the Americans: Everything is NASA. They used military rockets only when they had to. Now they’re building their own big Saturns and Apollos, and they don’t have to fight with the generals.

“If I thought that giving Chelomei the lunar program would beat America, I might feel better. But he’s a terrible engineer, very dictatorial, in love with his own ideas even when they make no sense. He doesn’t realize that you can’t change the laws of physics by wishing. His greatest skill is theft.” Theft meaning the copying of Western designs, a rich tradition in my country in those days.

Filin paused then, to catch his breath before spewing further, I thought. But the silence stretched, so I offered a comment: “We’ll use his Proton, won’t we? For our own lunar spacecraft?” Once again, I had blundered, mentioning the secret Proton.

But Filin was so intent on his tirade that he didn’t notice my lapse. “We may use his Proton, assuming he can get the damned thing to fly properly.” He described two successful launches of the big booster the previous spring, but though both had delivered large payloads to orbit, the violence of the ride had made them useless, and would have seriously injured a cosmonaut crew. “That’s another thing: Chelomei will give the generals any damn thing they ask for, whether they need it or not. The Proton was designed to carry a fifty-megaton nuclear warhead. Who needs a big cigar to blow a deeper hole in the ground?”

He flopped down behind his desk again, stacking and restacking papers. “Chelomei is supposed to use his Proton to send a cosmonaut around the Moon in his own little spacecraft,” he said, much more quietly now. “The Central Committee gave him that job when Khrushchev was still in power. Just before he died, Korolev got them to think about giving it back to us. He showed them how ridiculous it was to use Chelomei’s spacecraft, which had no proven propulsion, guidance, recovery, or environmental systems, when we here at our bureau have done all these things over and over again.

“It’s still up in the air, though. It all depends on my new Luna.” I could see the point: It would validate the Korolev team’s guidance, propulsion, and deep space communications, for starters. “The bonus is, if it works, we also beat the Americans. Their Surveyor won’t be ready for months yet.”

Nadiya the birdwoman was in the doorway. “They’re here for you,” she said, her face a mask of annoyance at me, at Filin, and for all I know, at her lot in life.

Filin actually started at this rebuke. Then, as if catching himself, he smiled. “A minute.” Nadiya glared at me before withdrawing, at which point Filin burst into laughter. “For the tiniest moment, I thought she meant the black van was finally here for me!” The black vans, of course, were favored by State Security in rounding up enemies of the people not so very many years before. “I was sure something had happened to the spacecraft!”

He was clearly manic, a man under extreme pressure. As if I needed any further proof, when I excused myself, he suddenly seized me and kissed me like a son. “Yuri, you have stood by me. Keep up the good work, and God willing, you will take the next trip at my side.”

Wondering what Filin meant, I got out of there.

The office was practically deserted when I returned. Some of my colleagues had gone off to the cosmodrome with Filin, while others were no doubt at lunch.

Triyanov saw me sneaking back in and asked where I’d been. Filin’s office, I told him.

“How was he?” Triyanov seemed genuinely concerned.

I tried to describe Filin’s mood swings without going into the substance of our conversation. Triyanov heard me out, then nodded. “I’m not surprised. There is tremendous pressure on him to make this flight. None of us have Korolev around to frighten the ministry or go to Ustinov.”

“I thought the ministry and Ustinov were the same.”

Triyanov showed me his steel teeth, shaking his head like a grandfather tolerating a child’s question. “In a socialist paradise, Yuri, every worker has the same goal. Since we have not yet achieved that paradise, emotions and alliances affect every decision.

“Ustinov has been the master of the arms industry for twenty-five years. Korolev, Korolev’s bureau, and Artemov have been loyal supporters, producing many triumphs for him. So he protects us and listens to our complaints.

“But Ustinov is not God. He was never part of Khrushchev’s clan, so there were always checks on his power. His rival is a general named Grechko, whose creature the Hammer is.”

“And the Hammer supports Chelomei. Who hired Khrushchev’s son.”

Triyanov nodded. “Exactly. Now, when Khrushchev was kicked out, his whole clan suffered. Ustinov has an excellent relationship with Brezhnev and Kosygin, the new leaders, so we have been insulated against punishment for our failures.

“But the war goes on. The Hammer wants to put his deputy, General Tyulin, in charge of the bureau. Tyulin is a part of Ustinov’s clan… but the Hammer trusts him much more than he will ever trust Artemov or Filin. It’s also a great way to get Tyulin out of his office.”

“Would that be so bad? Having a deputy minister come in and take over?”

“Not at all. Tyulin is an old rocketeer; he worked for GIRD when he was a college student, before the Army got hold of him. He’s very wise in the ways of the world. You’ll meet him.

“But whatever his virtues, he has not grown up here. So all the pretenders to Korolev’s throne will join forces against him.”

It was bad enough trying to deal with the hard work of engineering, with facts and figures. How could I possibly be expected to keep straight all these personalities, these clans? “It sounds medieval,” I said.

Triyanov laughed and shook my hand. “Nothing less!” Then his tone changed. “Speaking of matters medieval, there is a meeting of the bureau’s Party members tomorrow evening in the main auditorium.” Triyanov obviously knew that I was, like any ambitious student at Bauman, a member of the Party’s youth organization, the Komsomol. I had joined as a Young Pioneer at the age of twelve, much as an American male would join the Boy Scouts. I had managed to progress through the ranks without distinguishing myself. No one had ever asked me to become secretary of a Pioneer or Komsomol group, for example.

And though I would laugh at other people’s jibes — such as those I’d heard from Triyanov on our test flight — and might even make a cautious one myself, I was not anti-Party by any means; and I put in more than my share of time on Saturday potato-picking and other Party work. Even as I realized that my country, my government, my Party had committed errors, I believed they rose out of pure motives, to create a better world. I did not approve of the West, with its money-grubbing and imperialist wars, such as the one in Vietnam.

Yet, in my last year at Bauman I had grown wary of the petty jealousy that infected Party activities, having seen promising students denounced anonymously, so I had not been especially active. Which was to be expected and, in fact, was tolerated in last-year students. Besides, I was an engineer; engineers were allowed certain eccentricities, as long as their work was directed toward the betterment of the worker’s paradise. And there was no profession more glorious than aviation engineering.

I thanked Triyanov for the notice. “Will I see you there?”

He laughed so hard he got red in the face. “I never joined the Party. Otherwise I’d be wearing two stars and sitting in some office over at Chkalov. I went to meetings, of course, when I was younger than you, primarily to meet girls. But their fathers and mothers and relatives kept disappearing, and it made me think there were dangers involved in being a Bolshevik. Then the war came along, and nobody cared whether you had a Party card or not. They wanted to know if you could kill Germans.”

I didn’t know what to say to him. The situation didn’t require sympathy. But, as a good Party member — or potential member, since I was still only in the Komsomol — I could hardly be enthusiastic.

Triyanov noted my discomfort, standing and taking me by the arm. “You go, Yuri. Keep in mind, however, that five percent of the population of our Soviet Socialist Republic are Party members. But one hundred percent of our cosmonauts.”

The cosmonaut business again.

It was only much later, as I took the train back to Moscow, that I did the math: Triyanov was fifty-five years old, since he had recently left active duty in the Air Force. He would have been about twenty-seven, close to my age, when the awful purges began, when Stalin massacred thousands of old Bolsheviks and a lot of young ones, in addition to God knows how many others.

What must Party meetings have been like in those days? With the Terror loose in the land? When any innocent statement could be twisted into a slander against the Soviet State?

I shuddered, and not from the cold.

9 “The Moon Speaks Russian!”

At 9:44 Moscow Time, on the evening of Thursday, February 3, 1966, a vehicle once known in the bureau as the thirteenth in the E-6 series, officially Luna 9, a two-meter-tall collection of cylinders topped by an onion-shaped covering much like a church dome, began firing its single retro-rocket as it dropped toward the dark-gray surface of the Moon. Locally it was just after sunrise on the Ocean of Storms, near the lunar equator.

For forty-five seconds the motor fired, slowing Luna’s rate of descent to twenty-five kilometers an hour. Then the onion dome blew open and an object the size and shape of a basketball sprang free one second before the cylinder and its rocket crunched into the lunar soil. The basketball landed softly some distance away, bouncing once, twice, into a crater perhaps twenty-five meters across, rolling to a stop on the dusty upslope.

Four minutes passed as the top of the basketball opened like the petals of a flower, sprouting four whip-wire antennas and a small panoramic television camera. The basketball had been deliberately made bottom-heavy, so the top of the basketball wound up on top. The petals themselves served as antennas for receiving commands from Earth.

Then a message was beamed across three-hundred thousand kilometers to the giant receiving antenna at our deep-space tracking site in Simferopol, Crimea. It took a second and a half for the radio signal to travel that distance. I’m here! I made it! Luna 9 said.

The control room, filled with tired men in civilian clothes and in the green uniforms of the Central Space Office, erupted in cheers. After five years of failure, the USSR had soft-landed a spacecraft on the Moon, beating the Americans by months. Now we — not the Americans — would discover just what the surface of the Moon was really like. Was it covered in dust that would swallow a heavy spacecraft and a cosmonaut? Or was it solid ground like some Earthly desert?

At 4:50 the next morning, the first pictures began to arrive at Simferopol. Over the next two hours, half a dozen photos would be transmitted, showing a panoramic view of ordinary rocks casting their long shadows, the rim of the crater, the black sky of a lunar day, and even one of Luna’s own antennae.

Some of the pictures were broadcast live over Moscow television as they were received, which is where I first saw them on the morning of the fourth, in the common room of my apartment building just after breakfast. Given the nature of our Soviet-built television, the pictures were little more than black-and-white blurs accompanied by what sounded like a rush of static interrupted by occasional beeps and blips — telemetry from the probe.

Yet, this was a tremendous achievement. The Americans had managed to crash a Ranger probe into the Moon, but they were nowhere near ready to land one softly as we had. (That day’s Izvestiya was headlined, “The Moon Speaks Russian!”) It was obvious that the lunar landing rattled our American and European rivals, since the Jodrell Bank Observatory in England pirated the Luna 9 photos and published them without permission.

I’m ashamed to say that Luna 9’s victory also served to show the superiority of our bureau’s systems to those of Chelomei, as I reminded Lev, who joined me in the common room to view the pictures. “If your boss needs directions to the Moon,” I teased, “we can help.”

“Comrade Chelomei would merely thank your bosses for lighting the way for his glorious and much larger Proton rocket and our spacecraft — which will be successful long before its ninth try.” Lev was as sarcastic as ever, but in his eyes I saw conflict. He was pleased that our country had accomplished the landing, but also knew that the Korolev bureau would get the acclaim. In the battle over which organization would make the lunar flight, every weapon counted.

Filin and his team returned to Kaliningrad the middle of the next week, the day after the heroic Luna 9’s batteries expired and the pictures stopped coming. The weather was so awful — clear skies with a vicious wind — that the triumphal reception was moved inside.

I was lucky to squeeze in, and then only because Grechko, one of the future bureau cosmonauts, worked on Filin’s team and was able to get a pass for me.

The welcome was a big deal. A lectern had been set up at the front of the hall next to a long table covered in green baize. The various masters of space were there, in strict order of rank — from the Hammer himself, Afanasyev, who really did loom over the others like a monolith. Next to him was the mysterious Tyulin, the bureau’s master-in-waiting; then Artemov, looking flushed and possibly drunk; and several unfamiliar faces, all of whom were soon identified as Barmin, Ryazansky, Pilyugin, Babakin — heads of other enterprises that had contributed to the success of Luna 9.

At the very end was Filin himself, surprisingly subdued with this talk of space victories and State prizes. I said as much to Triyanov, catching up to him on the walk back to Building 11. “It’s probably just exhaustion,” he said. “Even before Korolev died, Filin bore the brunt of all the failures. I think he took them personally, even though most of them were caused by exploding rockets.” Here he smiled wickedly. “Artemov’s rockets.”

I recalled Filin’s habit of taking to his bed when things were especially bad; certain personalities would have the same reaction when things were going especially well for them, as if intense emotion of any kind caused a collapse. “Well, this must be a happy day for the whole bureau.”

“Yes and no. Right now the Hammer is over in the main building telling Artemov that he wants this bureau to take over the program to send a cosmonaut around the Moon.” Triyanov did not mention the name “Chelomei,” nor did I offer it up. I was learning.

“I thought that had already been decided. We were to build all the manned lunar vehicles.”

“We were given the manned lunar landing back in 1964, but another organization was given the manned lunar orbit. Can you imagine anything so stupid? You build one set of vehicles, a launcher, and a manned craft, to go ninety-nine percent of the way to the Moon, and turn around and build a whole different set to cover the last twenty kilometers!” He shook his head. “Well, that was the Khrushchev style.

“Before he died, Korolev had managed to shoot a lot of holes in this arrangement. He showed how we could send a simplified version of our own Soyuz spacecraft on the lunar orbit, and had lined up Ustinov and others behind it. It helped that the competition was shooting itself at the same time.

“But no one, not even Ustinov, was going to risk a war with the Hammer and the others as long as we were still crashing Lunas. Now, though…” He paused as we flashed our passes to the guard and entered our building. “Filin is probably the only one who realizes how much work has landed on their shoulders. And how pitiless the Hammer will be about our deadlines.”

We went up four flights of stairs — I don’t ever recall seeing Triyanov take an elevator — and down the hall to the flight-test office. As he was about to open the door, Triyanov paused. “Take a good look at your colleagues, Yuri. Grechko, Makarov, Yeliseyev.” These were some of the members of the kindergarten. “One of them is going to be on that first flight around the Moon. If Artemov and I have anything to say about it, one of them might take the first step on the surface.”

Naturally, when I entered the office I found none of the future Moon orbiters or walkers present. Grechko and Makarov were almost certainly busy with Artemov and Filin. But I looked at their desks — not so very different from mine — with a greater sense of wonder.

Riding the train back to Moscow that night, I got an idea: Knowing how devoted Lev was to the whole idea of manned spaceflight, how perfect he would be for the flight-test department, and how shattered he would be when Chelomei lost the lunar mission, why not introduce him to Filin? Transfers between bureaus were rare, but not impossible, especially with Lev, like me, in the prediploma stage.

I was feeling quite good about my generosity when I walked up the steps to my building to have Liliya, the giant key lady, practically fly out of her kiosk with another message in her hand. “Yuri, it’s your father. He’s in the hospital.”

The message directed me to the Aviation Hospital, which was in Sokolniki, northeast of central Moscow and, as these things go, fairly close to Bauman. I hurried back to the metro and retraced my path to the Kursk station, then around the Ring to Komsomol Station, changing to the blue line, exiting two stops away.

The Aviation Hospital sat surrounded by the huge Sokolniki Park just a few blocks from the metro stop. It was dark, of course, as I reached the entrance, and it took half an hour to get past the various guards and key ladies and find my father.

I was worried about him, naturally. Beyond that, I felt sorry for him, knowing his feelings about the Aviation Hospital. “A bunch of optometrists” is what he called them. The staff of the facility was famous for its precision in judging pilots’ eyesight, and not much else. Of course, like all Soviet military medical establishments, it was blatantly politicized: If somebody higher up wanted a particular person medically disqualified, some disorder would always be found.

There was a young Air Force officer sitting outside his room who told me that my father had had an “accident” while returning from a visit to some research facility out in Shchelkovo, a town a few kilometers out from Sokolniki close to Chkalov air base and the cosmonaut training center. “What kind of accident?” I asked. “How is he?”

The officer would only tell me that my father seemed to be resting comfortably. He insisted on getting a doctor to answer any other questions. I allowed myself to be relieved that my father had not, at least, been found frozen to death in some snowbank.

The doctor was even younger than the officer; he couldn’t have been much older than me, in fact. And instead of answers, he had questions. “Has your father been under stress lately?”

“No more stress than usual,” I said. We went back and forth like this for a few moments before I learned the story:

My father had visited an institute in Shchelkovo for some celebration, having been driven there. As expected, the vodka flowed freely, and my father had climbed into the car and driven off. The doctor was not about to claim that my father was drunk, but to me it was obvious: Father had been an ace pilot in his day, but, to my knowledge, had never qualified for a driver’s license.

“He headed back to Moscow, but missed a turn and ran off the road in Lukino. He was lucky he was close to a militia station, because two of them noticed the tracks going off into the snow when they came off work, and decided to investigate.

“Your father suffered a broken collarbone and was suffering from exposure when they found him.”

“May I see him?” The doctor led me into the room — a private one for a general and Hero of the Soviet Union, of course, on a floor filled with private rooms.

My father was sleeping, but could not have been very comfortable. His left arm and shoulder were wrapped in a giant elevated cast. There was a nasty cut, now stitched and bandaged, and a bruise on that side of his face. All I could think to say was, “How long will he have to wear the cast?”

“Eight weeks.”

At that moment a nurse appeared in the doorway. “Yes?” the doctor said.

“There’s someone here to see him,” the nurse said, indicating me. “Her name is Marina.”

“When did you decide to forgive me?”

Those were my first words to her, as we broke what seemed like a desperate hug.

“What makes you think I have?” Before I could respond to that, she said, “How is your father?”

I explained, adding, “He’s asleep now, so you don’t have to worry about him.”

“Well, I am starting to worry about him.” His drinking, she meant.

“Me, too.”

She took my hand. “I’m sorry I was such a bitch. I love you so much, and I was afraid your father was going to take you from me.” She told me how she had decided to surprise me at the flat, and had learned from Liliya about my father’s accident.

“I wouldn’t let him do that.”

She kissed me again. I could not let her go. Shocking as it may sound, within moments we — my shy, private Marina and I — were making love, passionately, frantically, in one of the empty rooms, as my father slept off the effects of his accident and a disapproving nurse shook her head in dismay.

10 The State Commission

The first two weeks of February 1966 were a blur of schoolwork, bureau tasks, and Marina. She had schoolwork, too, of course, but spent more and more time at my room. If the Omsk Twins cared — or noticed — they said nothing.

Lev, busy with his own burden of school finals and diploma work, had taken to spending nights with a friend out in Reutov, home of the Chelomei bureau.

My father was discharged from the Aviation Hospital on the ninth, little more than a week after his accident. We had not discussed the accident in any detail. Perhaps you find this strange; looking back, I do, too. But our conversations had never been long or deep, except on those rare occasions, when I was younger, that I was able to get him talking about flying combat missions in the Great Patriotic War, or testing Sukhoi and MiG fighters. The week after the accident, his only comment was that he had been “a damned fool.”

Even when I telephoned him from my office at the bureau the night before, to tell him I would try to be present when he left, he had been blunt. “They’re sending me to Foros,” he said, naming the resort on the Black Sea often used by the Air Force.

“Then I want to see you before you go.”

With great difficulty, I managed to get to Sokolniki at eight in the morning, his scheduled time of discharge, only to find that I was too late. The nurse on his floor — the same nurse who had witnessed my disreputable lovemaking with Marina — happily informed me that General Ribko had been driven away only minutes before!

Confused and angry, I sat down on a bench inside the main entrance, gathering my strength before submitting to the cold, the metro, the train to Kaliningrad. It was another gray, nasty day, like most of them that month. “So you didn’t listen to your father,” a voice said, startling me.

Uncle Vladimir stood there, slipping on his gloves, accompanied by two obvious State Security types.

We embraced. “He didn’t tell me to stay away.”

“Not in so many words, I’m sure. But I’ll bet he didn’t encourage you to come all the way over here to see him in his agony.”

“His agony?”

“His helplessness.” He gestured awkwardly with his left arm. “He can’t even dress himself with any ease. Fortunately, he won’t be tempted to drive, either.”

With a nod of his head at his two companions, and me, he headed outside. I chose to follow, and was glad I had when he said, “Let me drive you to your bureau.”

Uncle Vladimir’s car was a black Zil, newer than bureau Zils I had driven during my time as Filin’s errand boy, and much better maintained, its engine running smoothly, which was a relief. In my experience, at least one motor trip in five from Moscow to Kaliningrad would involve a breakdown of some kind.

I settled in the back as the two goons got in the front. No sooner had we pulled onto Korolenko Street headed for Preobrazhensky than Uncle Vladimir said, “Korolev was murdered.”

I said nothing. “We not only reviewed all the medical data with specialists from different organizations—” here he smiled “—but questioned everybody who was in contact with Korolev that day.

“He had come through his surgery in surprisingly good shape, for a man of his age and health. He was most probably smothered.”

All I could do was nod. Until that time, my own probings and speculations had felt like a more grown-up version of hide-and-seek, dress-up, or pretend. If Korolev had been murdered, then one of those who saw him that afternoon was a killer.

“We will be watching Chelomei, Artemov, and the others very carefully,” Uncle Vladimir said. “But I am depending on you for information on Filin.”

“I understand.”

We drove in silence for a while, turning off crowded Preobrazhensky onto the Ring Road, heading north and west back toward Kaliningrad. At one rutted, potholed stretch we almost collided with a truck. As our car swerved to safety, the driver, speaking for the first time, said, with satisfaction, “I got that son of a bitch’s number.”

“Relax,” Uncle Vladimir said. “This road is like a minefield.”

It was true. In spite of the luxurious accommodations, I was getting motion-sick from the sudden swerves and bumps — I, survivor of the vomit-inducing flight in the Tu-104!

“Nikolai has started drinking,” Uncle Vladimir said, a statement of fact that did not invite contradiction.

“I think so.”

“He only has a year left on active duty.” That could have explained his depression: My father’s entire life was the Air Force, and he faced a mandatory transfer to the “reserve” at age fifty-five, a forced retirement that, for him, would be a living death. Theoretically, his three-star rank could have kept him employed for five years longer, but, thanks to his freely offered opinions, he had been passed over for all the jobs that would have made that possible. “Even if the high command wanted to keep him on, they won’t now.” After the accident, he meant.

“Can’t he join one of the aircraft bureaus?” Many retired Air Force generals took jobs at aircraft-design bureaus such as Tupolev or MiG.

“The aircraft business is dying,” Uncle Vladimir said, a hint of sarcasm in his voice. “Our State resources are going toward building the missile shield, and landing men on the Moon. Now, if your father had moved to the Rocket Force…”

We both knew how silly that idea was; my father despised the Rocket Force, whose leadership had come from artillery: “Those who crawl will never fly,” he was fond of saying.

“None of this matters until he regains his health, I suppose.”

It was all I could offer, but Uncle Vladimir seized my hand as if I had just won a Lenin prize. “That’s what we want.”

In order not to arouse suspicion, he dropped me where the Yaroslavl Highway crosses the Ring Road, within walking distance of the bureau’s main gate. The precaution was unnecessary: When I entered through the main gate, I saw half a dozen black Zils lined up, making their entrance. Some meeting of bigshots on one of the bureau’s many projects, I assumed.

Uncle Vladimir’s reluctance to be seen close to the gate did make me wonder, briefly, about the Korolev bureau’s own First Department, the State Security representatives attached to every significant Soviet enterprise. I could not then have identified the head of the First Department — he would not have been secret, but the bureau had thirty thousand employees at that time, with dozens of “deputy directors” such as Artemov and Filin — but assumed he had approved my hiring. Had my papers come to him with the endorsement of State Security? Or just a clean bill of health?

Did anyone else in the bureau know that I served two masters?

Back in Department 90, I had barely resumed work when Triyanov loomed over my desk. “Back early? Good. How was your father?” I muttered something noncommittal. “Good. We have emergency visitors who want to talk about Voskhod. Come along.”

Triyanov marched six of us to the main building, where we joined a presentation to the State Commission for Manned Spaceflight. The chair was none other than Georgy Tyulin, the Hammer’s deputy.

Actually, it was about half the actual commission, normally about two dozen representatives from the ministry, the bureau, the Central Space Office, and others. Since the agenda of the meeting was the upcoming launch of two dogs aboard a Voskhod — by my thinking, half a spaceflight — the number of commissioners seemed about right.

There was a group of military officers present, sitting together down near the front. I recognized Gagarin and Saditsky, and thought again of Korolev’s murder: Had these two seen him during their visit to his hospital? More suspects!

The subjects of these meetings were predictable: status of communications, tracking- and flight-control systems, booster, recovery forces, and so on. The plan was to fire two dogs into space aboard Spacecraft Number 5 in two weeks’ time, around February 23. The poor animals were originally supposed to stay aloft for thirty days, but before the gang from Department 90 even found chairs, we could hear the commissioners deciding to cut that to twenty. For one thing, there was apparently some pressure to get the manned Voskhod launched and in orbit before the big Party Congress on March 29. Even assuming that everything went well with the dog flight, they would be landing around March 22, and there would be no time to analyze the data and make changes before a manned launch that same week.

It was also apparent that the life-support systems would not keep the pups alive for a month. At this point in the proceedings, Tyulin looked up from his spectacles and asked, “Wasn’t there a critical report on crew systems from Department 90?”

As one, my half-dozen colleagues and Triyanov turned to me. I blushed, waiting with horror to be told to stand up and give an accounting of myself. Fortunately, Artemov himself took the microphone and said, “There are a number of open issues on life support and all departments are looking at them carefully. They do not affect the launch of Number 5, however.”

The commission moved on to the next point. I couldn’t help glancing over at the cosmonauts, where I caught Saditsky smiling at me. He gave me a formal salute, whether applauding my criticisms or mocking me, I couldn’t tell. It was strange to think that he was just a few weeks away from rocketing into space history.

I wanted to speak with Saditsky, but as the meeting ended, the cosmonaut contingent left with Tyulin and several other uniformed types. I returned to the kindergarten with Triyanov and the others, only to be met by my roommate Lev Tselauri, furiously arguing with the guard to Building 11.

I immediately remembered that I had arranged for him to come and meet Filin — the pass had been good enough to get him through the gate, but insufficient to get him into any of the buildings. The problem was that I had not confirmed the meeting today with Nadiya, Filin’s assistant, and with members of the State Commission wandering around loose, it was unlikely that Filin could take any time for Lev.

I felt terrible: He had traveled all the way from Reutov and even done a Stakhanovite job of shaving and wrestling himself into a tie. But I tried not to show my confusion, explaining about the emergency meeting, and reversing course back toward Filin’s office.

Filin’s woman lived for moments like this, where she had the power and I was a crawling serf. “As you can imagine,” she said, with immense satisfaction, “his whole morning was taken up with this meeting, and I’m sure he won’t have any time for student interviews.” She made “student interviews” sound like “colonic surgery.”

I was trying to think of how I could make this mistake up to Lev when Filin entered, looking surprisingly happy. “Yuri! You dodged a bullet in that meeting today.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“Several members of the commission, including Tyulin, would love to kill the Voskhod flights. But others want them to go ahead. You don’t want to be in the middle of that war, my friend. Keep yourself out of the line of fire when you get to the cosmodrome.”

Filin had, in passing, mentioned a possible trip for me to Baikonur, but I had assumed it was months in the future, and said as much. “No, we’re leaving tonight! Didn’t you hear the commission set a launch date?” He became aware of the birdwoman twitching at his side. “What is it, Nadiya?”

Both of us explained the matter of Lev’s interview as Filin nodded with amusement. “Where is he now?”

“Out in the hall.”

“Well, since he traveled all the way out here… bring him in.” I tried not to show any sign of triumph as I brought Lev in, but I’m not sure I completely succeeded.

As Filin held the door for Lev to enter, he turned to me one final time: “What are you waiting for? Go and get packed!”

11 State Scientific Test Range Number 5

My country’s giant launch center, known to Western powers as Baikonur Cosmodrome, held as many outright lies as secrets, beginning with its name: Baikonur was actually the name of a town some two hundred kilometers to the northeast, the direction the early Sputniks, Lunas, and Vostoks were launched. Our Party leaders knew that American spy systems would be able to detect any launches, but hoped to conceal their source for as long as possible by pretending the site was farther along the trajectory than it really was.

This ruse was thought necessary because until 1960 the cosmodrome had the only pads capable of launching long-range missiles against America. Of course, on May Day 1960, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over central Russia, after having flown directly over “Baikonur” with its cameras clicking away, and not for the first time.

Nevertheless, the facility known in bureau paperwork as State Scientific Test Range Number 5—to its growing number of residents as Tyuratam, Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, and to any friends and relatives who might try to write them as Post Office Box 500, Tashkent—still bore the entirely fictitious name of Baikonur Cosmodrome.

The facility had been dug out of trackless desert beginning in 1955, when our missiles began to outgrow State Test Range Number 4 near Volgograd. A commission had weighed sites in Perm (north) and Stavropol (south) before settling on the third choice of an open pit mine a few kilometers north of the railhead at Tyuratam on the Syr Darya River.

It allowed Sergei Korolev and the other early missile designers to fire their R-5s, R-11s, and R-7s over vast emptiness toward Kamchatka in the Far East, where warhead reentries could be tracked.

The construction was a miserable business: Winters in this desert could be brutal, and following a brief spring when tulips bloomed on the steppe, the crushing heat of summer followed, with temperatures easily climbing into the thirties and hot sand blowing. Have I mentioned the flies? The utter lack of trees?

Nevertheless, the labor battalions did their job, and the first launch-pad grew on the edge of an old quarry. Others began to sprout to the east and west — what the locals called the “left flank” and “right flank” as opposed to the “center.”

Baikonur’s growing pains were years in the past when our plane arrived late on the wintry afternoon of February 12 at the Outskirts Airfield at Leninsk, the name for the new military city surrounding old-town Tyuratam. To give you some idea of the scale of the place, we were still forty kilometers south of Baikonur’s center and its Voskhod launch-pad. There wasn’t a single structure to indicate that we were near the world’s first spaceport.

We lived in a hotel in Leninsk, from which we were bused to the center every morning at seven A.M. The less said about the hotel, the better. What I remember most is that the bathroom in the room I shared with another bureau engineer was so foul (and the weather too cold to allow us to open the windows for fresh air) that we quit using it, preferring to use a common one on the floor below.

The drive took the better part of an hour, though halfway there we passed the first signs of the space complex itself, the huge tracking antennas of Area 21, situated on the only hill for kilometers around.

Area 2, the heart of the center, was dominated by the giant slab-sided assembly building. It was here that segments of the bureau’s launch vehicles, brought by rail from the manufacturing plant in Samara (the launch vehicle itself) or from Kaliningrad (the upper stages), were assembled on a kind of giant rotisserie; the core of the launch vehicle would be rotated a quarter turn so that its four strap-on boosters could be attached. This was the genius of the Korolev team: In 1954 they had been ordered by the Kremlin to build a rocket strong enough to carry our heavy atomic bombs. But no country possessed a single-rocket engine capable of lifting the things, so Korolev’s team clustered four simple, reliable engines in a central stage, then surrounded that element with four tapering strap-ons, each with four clustered engines of its own.

Shorn of its upper stages, the vehicle (in its basic form known as the R-7) looked more like a cone than a slim, needle-nosed rocket ship. Certainly it bore little resemblance to its distant parent, the Nazi V-2. Looks didn’t matter; the Seven did its job admirably well. And in my first days at Baikonur, learning of this for the first time (because the configuration of the Seven was still secret from everyone in the world except American intelligence services), I was struck by its size, ruggedness, and reliability.

I spent a week inside the assembly building, climbing in and out of Spacecraft Number 5 in my stocking feet from dawn to after dark. I had many supervisors, each with a set of alligator clips or leads that needed to be plugged into various systems inside the spacecraft.

Even though a Voskhod had held three cosmonauts (admittedly, not in comfort), there was damned little room for me; unlike the test vehicle used on the aircraft tests, this was configured to hold two dogs. Naturally, the hounds couldn’t be expected to sit in couches, so a spacecraft-within-a-spacecraft had been built, with two side-by-side harnesses that would hold the canine cosmonauts, who would be hooked up to an amazing number of wires, hoses, and so on.

Nevertheless, I did my best to follow the orders of engineers from our bureau as well as researchers from the medical institute, and a couple of scientists as well.

In my few spare moments I marveled at the lack of sterile conditions. I had by then seen pictures of American space vehicles being prepared for launch inside chambers that resembled hospital operating rooms by technicians in surgical masks, with the air pressure higher inside than outside, to keep dust particles from penetrating.

We all wore white smocks, but that was as far as the comparison went. People wandered in and out, smoking cigarettes. There were times when one or more of the doors stood open to the weather.

“Doesn’t that contaminate the spacecraft?” I said to Yastrebov, one of my bureau colleagues, a testy man of forty who had no college education of any sort, but a thorough practical knowledge of space vehicles.

“Our electronics are so rugged that a little dust won’t hurt them,” he said, proudly. “Remember — in a few days this whole thing will have a bomb set off underneath it!”

I accepted the statement at the time, but then remembered how many puzzling failures had occurred with our spacecraft — such as eleven Lunas in a row — and wondered if a more controlled environment might have helped.

In any case, one exhausting week after my arrival at Baikonur, I stood shivering outside, mouth open in wonder at the rollout of the giant launcher with Spacecraft Number 5 safely tucked inside its shroud, when I felt an elbow in my ribs. “Need a warm-up?” A battered flask appeared in my hand, and I took a swig. The single shot of vodka — assuming it was vodka — spread warmth through my frozen bones, as if I’d just backed up to a fire.

My benefactor was a tall, scrawny sergeant I had seen wandering in and out of the assembly building running errands several times during the week. We had not actually spoken until now, when I thanked him. “If it’s good enough for the Seven,” he said, showing a mouth half-filled with steel teeth, “it’s good enough for us.”

For a moment I was afraid I had just taken a swig of honest-to-God rocket fuel — not an unusual occurrence, I was to learn later, since the Seven burned a mixture of liquid oxygen and good old alcohol. But I wasn’t struck blind, and the sergeant seemed in good spirits, so I quit worrying.

The sergeant’s name was Oleg Pokrovsky, and he had come to Baikonur with the first labor battalions almost eleven years ago. I couldn’t guess his age — anywhere from a hard thirty to possibly fifty. “How many launches have you seen?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Two hundred, maybe. Here, there—” He nodded over his shoulder toward the right flank, where the even more gigantic pads for Chelomei’s Proton stood on the horizon. “Out east, too.” He pointed with his flask to the left flank. “Where we had the accident.” I had heard rumors back in Kaliningrad, then seen a monument flash by on one of the bus rides, that some years back a missile had exploded on a launchpad while workers and various officials, including Marshal Nedelin, head of the Rocket Force, were present in the open. Something like a hundred of the poor souls, including Nedelin himself, had been vaporized in the thousand-degree flame. “How about yourself?” he said.

“This will be my first.”

“Ah, a virgin.” Pokrovsky laughed and offered me another swig, which I was happy to take, the sweet warmth of the first having faded away. “Now, follow me.”

I had no chance to protest, since he was already turning away from the crowd watching the rollout.

Not far from the assembly were a few small cottages left over from the early 1950s, when several miners and their families lived here in a tiny settlement known as Zarya. Korolev himself lived here for weeks at a time during the first tests of the Seven as an intercontinental ballistic missile, as well as the launches of the first Sputniks, Lunas, and Vostoks.

The cosmonauts traditionally spent the night before their launches in one of the cottages, too. I thought of my friend Saditsky and his copilot, trying to go to sleep some cold, dark night a few weeks from now, knowing they were to be fired one hundred fifty kilometers up. Like being shot at sunrise!

Pokrovsky told me all this as he led me across the frozen ground, toward what, I didn’t know. But then he stopped. “There they are.”

Inside a fenced compound, a pair of husky mutts were at play. They seemed cheerful, their hot breath visible in the cold air. “Breezy and Blackie,” Pokrovsky said. “Your cosmonauts.”

It was my turn to laugh. I had been hearing about the “dog” flight for weeks and had spent days crawling in and out of a spacecraft designed to accommodate two pups in harness, but had never seen the animals themselves. And here they were. “They’re going to take a ride few people will ever take,” I said.

“Or would want to,” Pokrovsky said with a grunt, helping himself to another swig. “I’ve seen two hundred launches, and I’ll bet I’ve seen fifty of them go wrong.”

True, of course. Rockets were notoriously unreliable. This might be one of the last times these dogs would romp at sunset in their short lives.

Even if things went as planned, was it fair to punish these dogs? What sins had they committed to deserve to be trapped in a sphere for three weeks and flung around the world three hundred fifty times?

Sergeant Oleg pulled a piece of greasy sausage out of a pocket, tore it in half and tossed it to the dogs, who happily devoured it.

“The doctors might not like that,” I said.

“Are you going to report me?”

I had three shots of Sergeant Oleg’s rocket fuel under my belt. It made me daring. “Of course not.” At that moment I was called away by one of my coworkers, since our bus was leaving.

Behind me, the Voskhod launcher trudged toward its black gantry.

At Baikonur I saw Filin only from a distance, his white smock one of many moving in and out of the assembly building, or in passing at the hotel. But chance put us together on the bus back to Leninsk.

“I liked your friend, Lev,” Filin announced.

“Can you find a place for him?”

Filin spread his hands. “It’s too early. We have been trying to steal the lunar orbit mission from Chelomei, but we have no real plans. If I had a dozen like your Lev right now, to tell me just what Chelomei has learned, then we could make progress, but…”

Another engineer interrupted us at that point, ending our brief encounter. I realized I had done almost no spying during my week in Baikonur — had not even seen Artemov, for example. Would Uncle Vladimir feel I was failing?

I began to wonder how Marina was doing. And my father. I had not been in contact with either of them for a week at that point.

As for the launch of Breezy and Blackie aboard Spacecraft Number 5, I got no closer than the television screen in the support room of the launch control center. Right on time, the twenty engines in the launch vehicle’s first stage lit up. As the rocket rose, the ingeniously designed tulips of the launch structure — four counterweighted arms — fell open. We could feel the roar even inside our protected building.

The newspapers called it a Cosmos satellite, the 110th in a series. But to me, it would always be Spacecraft Number 5, Breezy and Blackie’s ship.

12 The Command And Control Center

Later the day of the launch, our whole team packed up and got back on the plane. But we did not return to Moscow. Our first stop was the Crimea, the city of Yevpatoriya, where the military had built a satellite tracking-and-control center that our bureau was beginning to use for manned flights. (A dozen kilometers away, there was a deep-space tracking site; we were forced to cluster them in the Crimea because it was one of the southernmost parts of Soviet territory.)

By the time we arrived, after dark, we knew that Cosmos 110 had been placed in its initial orbit and that the upper stage had fired again to raise that orbit’s high point to nine hundred kilometers. This would cause Breezy and Blackie to pass through the Van Allen radiation belts on each trip around the world, as part of another questionable scientific experiment. (Was it really a mystery, twenty years after Hiroshima, that radiation was likely to be harmful?)

The dogs were in a sleep period — induced by sedatives delivered to them by one of the many intravenous tubes I had helped install and test — timed to coincide with the eight hours out of every twenty-four in which we had no ability to track and control our manned spacecraft. In those days there were sixteen sites spread across the middle of the USSR, from Latvia in the west to Yelizovo on the far eastern Kamchatka Peninsula. All of the stations were farther north than desired, but that could be said of Baikonur and the rest of the USSR. We also had a pair of specially designed tracking ships on station in the Atlantic Ocean. Even so, we could only communicate with our spacecraft two-thirds of each day.

Veterans of the trip from cosmodrome to tracking station had thought to buy food for themselves before leaving. As a first-timer, I was unaware of the total lack of facilities at Yevpatoriya, which was much smaller than Leninsk. We were to bunk in a military barracks near the airfield, and though I saw a couple of kiosks, they weren’t open. And while we had escaped the snows of Moscow and Baikonur, it was still cold and rainy, not a night to be out.

Fortunately, one of my colleagues saw my empty hands and took pity on me, offering me half a loaf of bread and a pickle.

It was still raining in the morning, and the Crimea, my former sunny homeland, looked pretty dismal in the gray, cold light. I was able to get a proper breakfast at the officers’ canteen next to the barracks, and went off to the tracking station on the bus.

The Yevpatoriya tracking site — Command and Control Center Number 16, according to the documents — was dominated by a huge dish, with another one being built right beside it. A long building about three stories tall held the primary control room, and it was here that I found myself stationed for an entire shift.

Along with a group of medical people, I was put in the last of four rows of tables. Many of the other tables had control panels on them; one or two even had television screens of some sort that displayed data from Cosmos 110. My “display” consisted of three thick notebooks. Presumably I was to leaf through them if so ordered.

Things were going well so far with Cosmos 110, at least as far as life-support systems went, so I had nothing to do but watch the various specialists, most of them military officers in their green uniforms, joking with each other and occasionally remarking on the progress of the spacecraft as its position was displayed on a giant display much like a movie screen. It was very crude. The big dog that represented Cosmos 110 moved jerkily as the human operator manually placed it, much as you moved slides on an overhead projector. The data, which had to be radioed from other tracking sites, was often minutes out of date. I remember thinking that it was a miracle we had been able to put an object on the surface of the Moon with this technology.

During a dead zone in the flight, I was excused to get a drink of water, and saw cosmonaut Saditsky, who greeted me like an old friend. He was not wearing his uniform, and, in fact, looked tan, as if he had spent a week on vacation, which turned out to be true, in a way. “They sent us here from Moscow last week,” he said, “and we had a few sunny days before the rain started.” Apparently a Voskhod simulator of sorts had been set up in one of the other rooms in the building to allow Saditsky and his copilot, Kostin, to rehearse their mission time lines. “You get some idea of just how alone you are up there when you do that.”

“So it’s been valuable.”

Now he shrugged. “Two days of it were valuable. They wanted to keep us here to do some work with the dogs. We have a hand controller that will allow us to turn their spacecraft up, down, and around.” I didn’t see a problem with that, so Saditsky slapped me on the back. “The damn high-rate antenna on the spacecraft didn’t deploy. We can get medical readings from the dogs and send commands to the ship, but only if they’re very basic, the equivalent of a few words.” Low-rate commands were transmitted like Morse code. These were insufficient for steering the vehicle.

“That’s too bad.”

“At least I got some sun,” he said, heading off.

“Good luck with the flight,” I called after him.

“Don’t hold your breath,” was all he said.

This was the second time I had heard Saditsky make a negative comment about Voskhod 3. I was still trying to figure out why — fear? — when I returned to the control room in time to take part in my first crisis.

When Cosmos 110 had come into radio contact again, the telemetry showed that the temperature inside the spacecraft was rising. It wasn’t dangerous yet, but it had crept up and up over the past hour.

I had been excused by Yastrebov, the bureau’s shift flight leader, but when I walked back in, you’d have thought I had allowed an assassin to take a shot at Brezhnev. “Have a nice walk?” Artemov snapped at me. He was surrounded by other bureau bigshots as well as a uniform or two. I could smell the liquor on his breath. “Why is the spacecraft overheating?”

“I don’t know,” I said, reaching for the documents on my desk.

I saw Yastrebov close his eyes, like a cow waiting for the butcher’s blow, as Artemov exploded. “Don’t know? Then what the fuck are you doing in my control room?”

My father had a temper and I had been on the receiving end of some tirades in my life, but nothing quite like this. My face burned with shame, but I kept calm. I think I sensed that the others were embarrassed — certainly Filin, who could be seen over Artemov’s shoulder, raised his eyes to heaven. “Maybe it’s a stuck thermostat,” I said.

“Maybe the dogs have built a campfire!”

I tried to keep calm, turning to Yastrebov. “No one has reported an anomaly in the life-support electrical system.…”

“Correct.” Had it been a thermostat, there would have been some sign that power wasn’t being used properly.

“Then it can’t be one of these systems.”

“You’re sure of that?” Artemov was rocking back and forth on his feet, as if girding himself to launch an assault on me.

Filin spoke up then. “There could a dozen reasons, Boris. The communications problem could be affecting thruster firings.”

As Artemov weighed this, one of the other officials tugged on his arm, leading him off. The mass of officials moved with those two, like a cellular organism searching for material to be absorbed.

I was shaking as I sat down. My heart was pounding so hard I could practically hear it as I continued looking through the documents.

Filin returned then, patting me on the shoulder. “He’s drunk,” he said quietly. “He saw you come in late, and went for you. It could have been anyone. God knows there are enough things going wrong.” All I could do was swallow. “Why don’t you take a couple of days off — go down to Simferopol,” he said, taking out a pad and a crayon. “I’ll write you a pass to the hotel there.”

A hotel in Simferopol sounded attractive. Then I remembered that my father was “recovering” just over the mountains.

“Thank you very much,” I said, “but could you write me a pass for Foros?”

13 The Resort

I don’t wish to discuss the tribulations of my journey from Yevpatoriya to Foros, a distance of perhaps sixty kilometers. Remember that much of the Crimea, in those days, was mountainous and undeveloped, while the beach communities were restricted zones, either for exotic installations such as Command and Control Center Number 16, or for resorts and sanitaria catering to Party and military officials. There were few decent roads; there was almost no regularly scheduled bus service.

Nevertheless, armed with my important-looking pass from Filin that had been countersigned by the commander of the tracking facility, I was able to hitch a ride on a military truck up into the Koshka Mountains to Simferopol, where I simply flagged down a series of personal vehicles or farm trucks, offering the drivers rubles for a ride to the other coast.

It worked well enough, though the trip took six hours. Fortunately the rain had stopped; the sky sharpened to that lovely Crimean blue I remembered, and coming down the eastern side into Foros, I was stunned by the beauty of the vineyards and the sea beyond. This took my mind off the terror of the ride on a switchbacked roadway in the front seat of a very old truck with its very young driver. Time has mercifully robbed me of his name, though not the image of him hunched over the wheel, knuckles white, swerving dangerously close to death.

After a stop at a crossroads kiosk, I reported to the first militia station I came to — never a bad idea in any case — where the presentation of a bottle of vodka won me the likely location of the sanitorium catering to generals of the Air Force.

So it was evening when I arrived at the gate leading to the sanitorium itself. The guards there were not remotely impressed with my pass, and I had no money for further gifts of vodka, but they were willing to escort me as far as the lobby, where other guards watched me with skepticism as a message was relayed to Colonel-General Ribko.

It was a long wait, which I filled by eating my dinner, purchased at that earlier crossroads, and realizing that a number of unusual personal transactions were going on around me.

I could not have made this comparison in 1966, but the lobby of the sanitarium was like a resort in the West. Its tile floors, shaded lamps, and couches all faced a desk where keys could be got and messages left. It seemed busy when I arrived — pleasantly busy in a way that Russian public places are not, filled with groups of men in relaxed clothing, smiles on their faces. Also women. Many women, most of them my age or younger, all too willing to cling to the arms of these men.

I was seeing my first prostitutes.

I was not so naive that I thought prostitution to be a capitalist curse, though that’s what they taught us in Komsomol. I had just never seen one, that I knew of. Certainly not a whole flock, with their tinkling bracelets, low laughter, floral perfume, high heels—

“Satisfied?”

I turned, and here was my father, standing there with his left arm out to one side in its cast, a look of distaste on his face. His color was better than it had been in the Aviation Hospital, though that could have been caused by annoyance rather than improved health.

“Don’t get angry with me. I’m not running your resort.” My encounter with Artemov, not to mention an aggravating day of Soviet-style travel, had stiffened my spine.

My father sensed this and hugged me. “You’re right. I’m the one who should be ashamed.”

“You’re a single man. You’re allowed to have girlfriends.” Now I was teasing.

“Not like this. These girls are all married women, can you believe that? The director thinks that it cuts down on disease.” Now he was shaking his head. “What kind of a wife or mother would do this? What kind of a husband would let her?”

I followed him out of this den of iniquity to his room. What immediately struck me was the light in the hallways — there was light. Even in Command and Control Center Number 16, half the lightbulbs were stolen and taken home by staffers. This impressed me as much as the cadre of married socialist sex laborers. Or nearly as much.

My father’s room was also nice, certainly the equal of his apartment on Frunze Embankment. There was a big bed, nice curtains, several chairs and a couch, and the biggest color television I had ever seen outside of a space-launch control room.

And food. One of the side tables groaned with caviar, good white bread, and meat. There were a couple of wine bottles, too, unopened, I noted with relief. Cards wishing General Ribko a “speedy recovery,” signed by officers at the headquarters of the Moscow Military District.

I was speechless with admiration, and hunger. “Go ahead,” my father said, waving at the sideboard. “I can’t eat all that stuff.”

As I dug in, he turned off the TV, then sank into a chair with a big sigh. “Now, what the hell are you doing down here?”

I explained the launch of the dogs and my job at the command and control center. Before I had finished, he was already nodding. “I remember these control centers. They’re trying to build a big one out in Bolshevo,” he said, naming yet another town in the forest northeast of Moscow. “I don’t see why they have to build their own cities.”

“Come on, Papa, you know the ministry won’t let them use the existing bases.” I had heard stories on my visit to Yevpatoriya, how the Air Defense Force in particular, who had their own radar dishes all over the place, had protested bitterly at these interlopers from the Central Space Office, complaining that the tracking and communications stations interfered with their very important radar and aircraft beacons. As if allowing another dish at some site in the Ukraine would open the doors to American nuclear bombers!

It was all a matter of resources. You have no idea of how poor my country was in those days, twenty years after the end of the Great Patriotic War, in which an ungodly number of people had died — over twenty million, certainly, and possibly closer to thirty. The Nazis occupied the best of our lands for several years, stealing whatever they could carry and destroying the rest.

We had emerged from the rubble—“victorious!”—determined to have a level playing field with rich, far-off America under its “gentleman shopkeeper,” Mr. Truman, and had devoted most of our resources to the development of nuclear weapons, tanks, aircraft, and missiles. Even our schools, such as Bauman, were essentially military academies, training “soldiers” for this work.

This was why the hallways at Command and Control Center Number 16 were often dark. Why I had to hitchhike across the spine of the Crimea. Why the Air Defense Force guarded its bases, which is to say its allotted apartments and food supplies, so tenaciously.

And why I felt a growing outrage at the luxuries I was seeing here in this sanitorium in Foros, building on the unease I had begun to feel when dining at the Stakhanov with Uncle Vladimir.

Maybe I was still a good, pure little Communist. I didn’t mind being poor, as long as everyone was poor and we were working toward the same goal. “I see that whoever runs this resort doesn’t have to worry about resources.” It bothered me that my father, a notorious straight arrow throughout his career, often openly critical of Party and military “fat cats,” was resting his broken arm in this decadent spa.

“Yes, well, I don’t know how they do it.” He cleared his throat, clearly casting about for a change of subject. “How is your spaceflight coming?” Had we been anywhere other than the private room of a Hero of the Soviet Union, a three-star general, I would have taken my father’s reluctance to talk as a sign we were being monitored.

“The flight is going fine,” I said, and changed the subject right back. “I didn’t realize Foros was so nice. Is this where you and your buddies would always run off to?” Active-duty Air Force officers were required to take five weeks of leave every year. “Did Mama ever come here?”

That was a low blow, a sure sign that I had lost control of my mouth. My father’s eyes narrowed. “I never came here until ordered last week,” he snapped.

That, at least, sounded like my father. But I had had to goad him into being himself! Something was wrong with him, something beyond a broken arm. His spirit had been shattered. By what? “Sorry,” I said. “How long before they remove the cast?”

“Six or eight weeks.”

“Just in time for spring.” He was not amused. I decided to risk another opening. “At least you won’t be wearing it at your retirement party.”

Now I had truly angered him. “Who said I was going to retire?”

Uncle Vladimir, for one. It didn’t seem like a good time to mention the brother-in-law from State Security, however. “Well, you are approaching the age—”

“—The age where I could go to the reserve if I wanted to. I still have lots of work to do, like keeping you rocket boys from bankrupting the country!”

I accepted the criticism. “Fine. Five years from now, when you do finally retire, what would you like to be doing?”

‘I’ll never retire.” Awkwardly, still trying to learn to shift his weight with a heavy cast throwing him off balance, he got to his feet and turned the television back on. We were just in time for Vremya, the evening newscast. And in case I didn’t get the point, he turned to me and said, “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

That was the highlight of my visit. I slept that night on the floor, dreaming of a dark-eyed Foros whore climbing into my lap. I woke up early, while my father was still sleeping, and began hitching back to Simferopol and Yevpatoriya.

I was saddened by my father’s condition. He had always been a presence in my life, but now I could see the day when, like my mother, he would no longer.

Cosmos 110 continued to circle the earth, sixteen sunrises and sunsets every day, with Blackie and Breezy trapped in their special couches, eating and drinking from tubes. I imagined Saditsky and his copilot, Kostin, doing the same thing a month or two months from now. At least they could tell each other war stories, if they hadn’t used them all up in training.

By March 15, the twenty-first day of the flight, there were signs that systems were starting to fail. Because of the mysterious overheating, the atmosphere inside the vehicle was getting foul as fumes and particles were baked out of the equipment.

Presented with this data, the State Commission chose to end the mission at the first opportunity, on the twenty-second day. I was at my console in mission control when the command was given to fire Cosmos 110’s retro-rockets, thinking, poor dogs! Liftoff had been a terrible shock to them. What did they think of this, after three weeks of weightlessness?

The equipment section of the spacecraft separated, to our collective relief. On several occasions, including Gagarin’s flight, the separation had not taken place as planned, at great risk to the mission. A spherical spacecraft like Cosmos 110 could not safely go through the fires of reentry with the conical equipment section still attached. It would start to tumble like a baton, heating unevenly and ruining its trajectory.

As Cosmos 110 dived into the atmosphere, it created its own cloud of ionized gases, which prevented further radio communication. Now we had to wait for the recovery forces to report.

America’s manned spacecraft splashed down in the ocean because America had a vast navy to deploy for quick recoveries. We did not. Our vehicles had to come down on land.

Gagarin and the other Vostok pilots had ejected from their vehicles, landing by personal parachute while the sphere, slowed by its own ‘chute, hit rather harder. This method could not be used for a multimanned vehicle — Voskhod-Cosmos had no ejection seats. Nor was it possible to build and safely deploy a parachute large enough to slow the five-ton ball sufficiently to prevent, as Korolev put it, “a week in the hospital” for the crew.

The bureau’s geniuses had attached a second, smaller retro-rocket to the shrouds of the recovery parachute itself! As the spacecraft got close to the ground, a wirelike probe would spring out, hit the earth and trigger the rocket, which would fire for a second, enough to cushion the landing so that it felt like an elevator coming to ground.

We got word from the recovery forces that Cosmos 110 had been sighted, that the parachute had deployed. The spacecraft’s trajectory had been shallower than planned, and it had come down sixty kilometers short of the aiming point, southeast of the city of Saratov, at 5:15 P.M. The landing zone was fogged in, and the parachute rescue team didn’t reach it until almost seven. The weather kept the recovery helicopters from landing until the next morning, but Blackie and Breezy were reported to be fine. A bit unsteady on their four legs, but healthy. They had survived their hundreds of visits to the Van Allen belt.

And cleared the way for Saditsky and Kostin to fly Voskhod 3. As we left Yevpatoriya under the light of a crescent Moon, a Moon where brave little Luna 9 rested, we all felt we were about to catch up with the Americans, and then pass them for good.

14 Program L-1

I returned to Moscow on the afternoon of Wednesday, March 16. Triyanov, meeting our plane at Chkalov, told me to take a day off, a gift I appreciated, since I was technically still a student and there remained papers to write and exams to take. As a newly energized member of the Komsomol, there were also meetings of the school’s Party committee to attend. I could even bore Marina with tales of my adventures at Baikonur and the Crimea.

I would have liked to bore Lev with them as well, but some job for the Chelomei organization was keeping him especially busy out in Reutov. Only the Omsk Twins were around, and all they wanted to hear about was the Crimean prostitutes.

Back at my desk in Department 90 that Friday, my first job was to write a report on all the decisions I made as a member of the flight support team during the dog flight. “Should I mention being chewed out by Artemov for no reason?” I asked Triyanov, who had already heard about the affair.

“If he had as much to drink as they say, he probably doesn’t remember it. I wouldn’t remind him.” He had called me into his office to remind me to hurry up, since the manned follow-up to the dog flight was still looming.

“Oh, he was definitely drunk,” I said. “In front of the generals and everyone.”

“Artemov is a noted specialist in rocket fuels,” Triyanov said, smiling faintly. “Besides, if you were sixty years old and staring into the open grave of your career, you’d drink, too.”

“Would it be so bad for Artemov if Filin became the chief?” From Filin’s jolly mood on the flight back, and the sudden deference shown him by other bureau employees and military space people, it was clear he was about to take over. The double success of Luna 9, which was Filin’s alone, and of the dog mission, which he had championed over Artemov’s objections, made him Korolev’s true heir, a good engineer who was aggressive and — what Russians loved most—lucky.

And a murderer? That, too, was a Russian tradition.

“Not at first,” Triyanov was saying. “You would have the usual congratulations all around, speeches about how Artemov will be his righthand man. Then one day Artemov will be packed off to another institute, or to a university. He won’t be happy taking orders from Filin, because he’s not Korolev. And Filin will be unhappy that Artemov is unhappy.”

“When will it happen?”

Triyanov shrugged. “There’s still one big battle to be fought, about the lunar orbit program.”

“I can’t believe the ministry will let Chelomei keep it.”

“Me, neither.” He stood up, indicating that my time there was ended. “But I couldn’t believe they gave it to that idiot in the first place.”

I laughed at this, and was halfway out the door when Triyanov stopped me. “Yuri — have you had your tonsils out?”

“Yes.” I wanted to ask why, but Triyanov intimidated me. More confused than ever, I left his office and returned to the kindergarten, where my senior colleagues were busy discussing the latest American space adventure.

On March 17, the Americans had launched another Gemini spacecraft, Number 8, piloted by astronauts Armstrong and Scott.

The two-man Gemini program had accomplished most of its original goals — to show that a manned spacecraft could change its orbit and rendezvous with another vehicle, to allow an astronaut to work in open space, and to keep a crew healthy and productive for four days, then eight, then fourteen.

The only remaining goal, and it was a terribly difficult one, was to link two spacecraft. If the Americans couldn’t do this, their whole Apollo lunar landing program would be doomed, since it depended on making rendezvous and docking in lunar orbit.

Armstrong and Scott succeeded in docking their Gemini to an unmanned Agena vehicle within a few hours of launch, an impressive achievement that made me jealous.

Then disaster struck: A thruster on the Gemini started firing on its own, spinning the combined vehicles like a bullet. Mistakenly assuming that the problem was caused by the Agena’s thrusters, the crew separated, and found themselves spinning faster now, with the added danger of a collision with the Agena.

Armstrong finally stopped the spinning, but to do so, he tapped into the fuel intended to steer Gemini through reentry. He and Scott were ordered to return at first opportunity, and they found themselves floating in the Pacific Ocean less than eight hours after their glorious launch from Florida.

It was the first time any manned spaceflight had been cut short by such an emergency — two of ours, by cosmonauts Popovich and Bykovsky, had been shortened by a day or two for less critical reasons, though no one knew this at the time — and the astronauts’ escape from death overshadowed the triumph of the first docking in space. Our newspapers were very critical of the Americans for being so backward that they had to land their astronauts in the ocean, where they could easily drown. I guess this was considered more dangerous than almost being eaten by wolves in the Urals, like cosmonauts Belyayev or Leonov, or practically freezing to death in the wilderness outside of Saratov, like Blackie and Breezy.

The talk quickly turned to Voskhod 3. “It’s too bad we have to let those dumbshit jet jockeys fly the thing,” Yastrebov said. “They’re only better than dogs because they can complain.”

“How does that make them better?” another guy said, to much laughter.

I found this all disappointing — the contempt my fellow “test engineers” had for the military cosmonauts and Saditsky’s clear reluctance to fly Voskhod. It all still looked like fun to me — dangerous fun, yes. Why couldn’t everybody feel that way?

I got home late, and Lev came in even later, looking awful, as if he had slept in his clothes. More precisely, as if he’d been wearing them for days while not sleeping at all. “Let me make you some tea,” I said, not that I was his mother.

“It’s the least you can do,” he said, collapsing into a chair in the kitchen nook. “Since your bosses have beaten us.”

I knew he could only mean the lunar orbit program. “What happened?”

“The Hammer drove out to see Chelomei on Tuesday.” That was the day Cosmos 110 landed. “He told him the Military-Industrial Council was worried about our ability to deliver a manned spacecraft on schedule, and that we were going to have to let the Korolev bureau build it. Launching it on our Proton, of course.

“Chelomei practically tied him up and refused to let him leave the office until he promised to give us two more days to show him our progress.” He yawned and let his head hang down. “Which is where I’ve been for the last forty-eight hours — wiring a test article so it looked like it could fly.”

Lev didn’t seem willing to admit that the council had been right. Chelomei didn’t have a vehicle ready to fly, and wouldn’t any time soon.

“The Hammer came back with a bunch of people from the council and they barely looked at it. So it’s over. The first ship to fly around the Moon will be Korolev’s.”

“If it’s not Apollo.”

“The Americans are so busy fishing their astronauts out of the ocean that we can still beat them.” That was Lev, competitive to the end.

I told him I was sorry, lying only slightly, then said: “Look, at least you got to meet Filin. He liked you, and he’s probably going to take over the bureau. You can come there and build your Moon ship.”

“Yes. And look like a traitor to all the friends I leave behind.”

“Come on! You’re still a student! People do get reassigned, don’t they?”

He got to his feet, a bit unsteadily, as if he’d been drinking. “I’m going to sleep. Then I’ll think about it.”

Lev slept most of the weekend. The Omsk Twins went out of town, so Marina spent the night, which was something entirely new and pleasant. I returned to the bureau the next week and buried myself in work with new energy, ready to get Voskhod 3 flying in spite of all its critics, anxious to storm the Moon.

By Monday, March 28, I had even done more work on my dissertation, and wanted Filin to see it, so I contrived a visit to his office. Naturally, I also hoped to eavesdrop on activities that were none of my business.

I could tell immediately that something was wrong. There were voices coming from inside Filin’s office. Many voices. And Filin’s birdwoman was so subdued I assumed she had suffered a death in her family. “He’ll see you when they leave,” she said, in a voice so pathetic I almost wanted her to be brusque and territorial.

After twenty minutes, Filin’s door opened and eight or nine people came out, mostly bureau engineers and the usual brace of military officers. And one unexpected person — Artemov himself, who seemed momentarily surprised at my presence. Our eyes met for the slightest moment; he blinked, as if a stray shaft of sunlight had pierced his retina, then turned away and continued his conversation.

Afraid of what I’d find, I didn’t want to go into Filin’s office. It was almost as bad as I’d feared: Filin, normally lanky, was bent at his desk like a question mark.

“Hello, Yuri.” He smiled sardonically. “Did you see the big parade?” Out of his office, he meant.

“It was hard to miss.”

I closed the door. The office smelled like cigarette smoke and stale sweat. I handed Filin my papers, which he accepted numbly. Then he seemed to unwind, stretching, as if awaking from a bad dream. “It’s very bad,” he said, sighing with finality.

“I don’t understand,” I said, and I truly didn’t. Filin should have been like a conquering general returning to Rome in triumph.

He waved toward the departed Artemov and company. “The medical institute had a disaster over the weekend. The Voskhod oxygen system had a failure on the nineteenth day of a simulated flight. So no one thinks we can fly that long.”

“Eighteen days is still almost two weeks longer than we’ve flown so far.”

“But only four days longer than the Americans have flown. And that’s assuming we get even that far. Can you imagine what the Military-Industrial Council will be saying if we have to bring the cosmonauts back after ten days? Or a week? We’ll look like failures.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“That’s the business we’re in, Yuri. Worst of all, this morning there was an accident at Baikonur, too.” Having just visited the cosmodrome, I felt an irrational sense of alarm, as if I had a personal investment in what happened there. Well, perhaps I did. “A rocket failed.”

“That happens frequently.”

“It was the same sort of rocket we use to launch Voskhod. Had there been a crew aboard, they would have been killed. If the telemetry is right, we have a generic problem that will require weeks to fix.”

“Voskhod 3 won’t be hurt by a few delays. It will give us time to fix the oxygen system.”

Filin smiled at me as if I were a child, or worse, an idiot. “Every delay takes that flight one day closer to cancellation.”

“Why do they want to cancel it? Haven’t they already paid for the spacecraft?”

“It’s the risk, Yuri. Not only the real risk of a disaster, but the risk of losing face by not breaking an American record. And there is money to be saved on recovery forces and salaries for tracking personnel, not to mention a whole rocket, which could all be used for another program.” He cleared his throat. “Artemov says we need the money for our new lunar program, the one we stole from Chelomei. Program L-1.”

“Won’t the ministry give us the money they were going to give Chelomei?”

Now Filin laughed out loud. I guess the question was so ridiculous, he couldn’t begin to answer it. He rose, indicating that my time was up, squeezed my shoulder again, and headed me toward the door. “You may be asked to do some unusual things in the next few weeks, Yuri.”

“What kind of things?”

“Tasks. Tests. Do them. It will all turn out to your benefit, I think.”

I had no idea of what Filin was talking about for several days. When I did get an inkling, it was too late to ask him.…

Filin had checked himself into the Kremlin Hospital.

15 The Medical Institute

Department 90 of the Korolev bureau had been formed in the spring of 1964, specifically to train civilian engineers and doctors as flight-crew members. Colonel Stepan Triyanov, a test pilot at the military institute at Chkalov then in the process of being “transferred to the reserve,” had been hired to run it.

In his first few months, Triyanov successfully prepared Feoktistov, one of the bureau’s best engineers, as well as a civilian scientist and a doctor from the medical institute, to serve as benign spacecraft passengers, if nothing else. Feoktistov and the doctor, whose name was Yegorov, wound up making that first Voskhod flight along with Vladimir Komarov, one of the best cosmonauts from the military’s team.

Naturally, the younger engineers of the bureau thought this was the dawning of a new day, when healthy, well-educated technicians would push aside the short, hard-drinking, relatively uneducated jet jockeys — not to mention the thoroughly uneducated female parachutist — who had piloted the Vostoks.

Five hundred employees of the bureau swamped Korolev and Triyanov with applications to be included in the next space crew. This turned out to be 497 too many. Forced to be ruthless by the realities of flight opportunities, Triyanov simply excluded those who a) had not been with the bureau for at least five years or b) had no higher education. The bureau’s State Security department was allowed to reject applicants for lack of Communist Party or Komsomol work. These strictures eliminated a couple of hundred right there.

What really separated the true cosmonaut candidates from the pretenders was the centrifuge. Triyanov took a few busloads of applicants over to Star Town to witness a test run on one of the military guys. It was bad enough to see someone whirled round and round at the end of that big arm to the point of obvious distress, but the regime also called for the cupola containing the subject to be tumbled. The number of candidates melted like snow in spring — just from the thought of the centrifuge, not the test itself.

Eventually Triyanov found a hardcore bunch of about thirty who were qualified and willing, and in 1965 he shipped them into Moscow to the Institute for Medical and Biological Problems, the civilian center for space medicine. A dozen passed the tests.

There was no age limit, because Triyanov considered himself a cosmonaut candidate. He managed to squeak through the IMBP tests, too, though I don’t know how: I had heard he was actually blind in one eye. Perhaps the doctors were intimidated by him.

These thirteen were told that they were going to be transferred to the Department 90 team “any moment now,” but nothing happened for months.

Well, what happened was that General Kamanin, the military chief of cosmonaut training, who had accepted Feoktistov and Yegorov on the Voskhod crew only at gunpoint, found out about Korolev’s plans for a civilian cosmonaut team, and screamed all the way to the Military-Industrial Council.

He was able to wave in their faces a 1960 Politburo decree giving the Air Force the sole right to select and train crew members for Soviet manned spaceflights.

He even went so far as to show that the Air Force was opening the cosmonaut team to other areas of Soviet society: He planned to train engineers and scientists at Star Town right alongside his pilots. All during 1965, Kamanin had been running his own set of medical examinations — through the Aviation Hospital, which, conveniently, reported to him through the Air Force chain of command — with the idea of selecting forty new cosmonauts.

But then it became clear that there was no room for forty new cosmonauts at Star Town — there weren’t enough apartments, instructors, or equipment. Nor, since there were already thirty cosmonauts at the center, was there likely to be a need for that many crew members for years.

So Kamanin cut the number in half, and what do you know? The ones who got selected were mostly young Air Force jet jockeys! Yes, there were several engineers — all military. And a physician — military. No scientists. No civilians.

This, then, was the situation in the spring of 1966, as Voskhod 3 waited and waited, as Program L-1 took its first steps, as the “advanced” spacecraft Soyuz took shape: Kamanin’s center had fifty military cosmonauts, ranging from the famous Gagarin and Titov to the more obscure Saditsky, to a score of anonymous candidates still in their early training.

Korolev’s bureau had a dozen engineers, and Triyanov, assigned to Department 90, but not called “cosmonauts” for fear of provoking Kamanin.

It was at this time that Triyanov asked me if I would go to the IMBP for medical tests, to see whether I would qualify as a full-fledged member of the department.

When I broke the news to Marina the Sunday before I started, she was completely against the idea. Not of flying in space, since that was only a fantasy at this time.

She didn’t want me to turn myself over to the doctors at the IMBP at all. “Why not?” I demanded. “These are the best medical specialists in the country!”

“Then I pity our country,” she snapped. She had traveled in the West and seen their clinics and hospitals. Ours, she said, were medieval by comparison. Given what I knew of Russian hospitals from Korolev’s death, and my mother’s long illness, I should have agreed. But I was too excited about my new adventure to think straight.

Ultimately Marina relented, and kissed me for good luck.

Thinking of hospitals and the fate of Korolev reminded me of my “other” responsibilities. I had no way of knowing just how closely Uncle Vladimir’s people tracked my movements — other than having me followed when he wanted to meet me — and, in fact, had no official way of contacting him.

So I went down to the key lady’s desk and begged the grandmother on station that Sunday night to let me use the telephone, calling Uncle Vladimir at the only home number I knew, that of his dacha. To my amazement, he answered with a single word: “Yes.”

I identified myself, and immediately noticed a change in his manner. He became jolly Uncle Vladimir talking to his nephew, not some mysterious force in the organs of State Security. “Yuri! Nice of you to call. What’s going on? Is your father back yet?” And more of that kind of thing.

I took this as a signal to avoid any overt mention of my work for him. “I didn’t know whether you’d heard or not, but I’m going to be at a medical institute for the next week undergoing some tests.”

He hadn’t heard — or so he let me think. “You’re not ill, are you?”

“No. It’s just part of my work.”

We did more family chitchat, and I hung up. His last words to me were, “Call me when you get out.”

There were five other bureau engineers who showed up at the IMBP on Khoroshev Lane in northwest Moscow, on the southern edge of the Central Airfield, the following Monday. Among them was Yastrebov, who had worked on the Cosmos 110 support team with me. I ran into him at the Begoyva metro station and walked with him to the hole-in-the-wall entrance to IMBP, which had more barbed wire and grim-faced guards than Baikonur itself. (I learned years later that the institute was bordered on three sides by the headquarters of the military intelligence directorate.)

Both of us carried small bags containing toiletries and a change of clothes. We had been told to prepare for five days of examinations, though we were also warned that tests could be extended into the following week.

Inside the compound we were directed to a side building that looked much like a pre-Revolution family residence. The house had actually been a kindergarten building until the creation of the IMBP. On the first floor was a classroom of sorts, where we were greeted by a Dr. Vasilyev, a man in his thirties, with dark, slick-backed hair and glasses, who told us that we were not patients at the IMBP, but “test subjects,” since the data collected from our examinations would be used in medical research papers. “There is a small bonus for this work, which will be paid to you at the end of your tests.”

“If I like it here, can I come back again?” Yastrebov said, jokingly.

Even Vasilyev smiled. “First see how you like it.”

There were forms to fill out — not only medical histories, but releases, security pledges, and soon. After a couple hours of that, we were shown our rooms on the second floor, where we got rid of our clothes, trading them for track suits. For the next week, everyone we saw either wore white lab coats or these track suits. Then we were split up to various rooms for the expected tests: heart rate, blood pressure, eyesight, urine samples. We were also measured, not just our height and weight, but in several other parameters, such as the distance from shoulders to hips; we had to be able to fit into the acceleration couches of a Soyuz, and into pressure suits.

After a lunch of porridge, which left us wanting more to eat, there were X rays and chest-thumpings and reflex tests — tedious, yes, but nothing unusual. During a break I happened to meet Yastrebov in the hallway. “This is nothing,” I said.

“You idiot. They haven’t even started on us. All this does is help them to identify your remains.”

That chilled me. Obviously Yastrebov, who worked with men who had already gone through the IMBP, knew more than I did. But what could they really do? There was no room in the little kindergarten house for large torture equipment — not unless they had their own Lubiyankastyle basement.

Sure enough, my next test was the vestibular apparatus — imagine a dentist’s chair equipped with a complete set of chest straps and restraints. I was belted into this thing, which then began to rotate to my left for a minute, all the while having to answer moronic questions from the examiner. (“What is twelve times eleven?”) Fine. But then the chair suddenly reversed direction for another minute, with more questions to be answered. So far, so good. When it stopped, I was unstrapped and ordered to bend down and touch the floor, then straighten up.

I almost passed out. As I felt the room swirl and my stomach turn over, I noticed the examiner writing down my reactions.

Before the end of the day, I was locked into a soundproof room and told to describe what sounds I heard, if any.

One of the bureau candidates was dismissed that first day. I remember seeing him pack up, a wistful look on his face. His dream of spaceflight was over.

Over the next few days we survivors would be stretched on a tilt table for over an hour, with the angle of tilt being changed according to some diabolical pattern, and our reactions to various angles duly noted. We would be encased in a kind of barrel from the waist down with the air pressure being bled out of the barrel. (Another one of us passed out after this test, and went home that evening.) We put on masks to measure our exhalations, then pumped away on a special bicycle. After every test, we would repeat the blood-pressure and heart-rate checks. The goal, we realized, wasn’t just to test us to destruction, but to evaluate our organism’s response to all these stresses.

There were also several sessions with psychologists of one kind or another, being quizzed about everything from what we saw in ink blots to what we thought of each other and the doctors examining us. One psychologist was deliberately insulting, hoping to judge our quickness to anger.

On Thursday the four of us were bused out to the cosmonaut training center for a ride on the centrifuge. After my experience with the bureau’s “weightless” airplane, I was worried less about this test than any of the others, though I confess I had a bad moment once I was locked into the very tiny cupola and waiting to be swung on the end of the arm, the unfortunately named “dead-man switch” that would stop the test clutched in my hand. But it all started slowly, with the G loads building gradually, as they would on a Voskhod or Soyuz launch, peaking at five Gs, when the first stage would be low on fuel while the twenty engines were still blasting away. Then there was a drop-off, simulating the burnout of the first stage and its separation, followed by an immediate multi-G jolt as the supposed second-stage engine blasted to life.

It was the longest six minutes I spent in a week of many stretched, unpleasant minutes. I unbuckled myself and climbed out of the cupola with new sympathies for Blackie and Breezy. At least I had known what was happening to me.

The centrifuge test disqualified a third member of our shrinking team. The tests on Friday took us to one of the big, gray buildings in the IMBP compound, where we walked past a chamber under construction; it was intended to take three different “test subjects” on a simulated space mission lasting one year.

That afternoon the three “survivors” were gathered back in the classroom, as Dr. Vasilyev presented two of us — including me — with documents stating that we had passed the first stage of the medical commission.

Yastrebov hadn’t flunked, but he was going to have to repeat some tests in the next week. He didn’t look happy about it.

I rode home to Bauman with the evening crowds, feeling light and relaxed, as if I’d crawled out of a pool after a long swim.

On Monday I walked into Triyanov’s office and proudly presented him with my IMBP documents. He barely looked at them as he announced, “Voskhod 3 has been canceled. Artemov is the new head of the bureau.”

16 The Succession

I couldn’t hide my surprise, my shock. “Why?”

“Why Artemov, or why no Voskhod?” Triyanov was inhumanly calm, a gift, I was sure, from his days as a test pilot. At that moment I could never hope to emulate him.

“Either! Both!”

“Well, they’re the same thing. A month ago the big bosses had decided that the bureau was going to be run by Tyulin. Everybody was in agreement that no one man could replace Korolev, especially since even he had suffered a string of failures. Tyulin would break up the bureau into smaller units while the core — including this department — would concentrate on manned flights to the Moon, especially with Chelomei’s lunar orbit mission given to us.”

“That’s what I don’t understand: The ministers thought the bureau was being mismanaged, but still they wanted us to take over the Moon program.”

“Clans. Chelomei’s bureau is just as badly mismanaged, and he has the added burden of being hated by Ustinov, who felt that with an old pro like Tyulin as boss, our bureau — with some radical restructuring — could still do the job, which is to beat the Americans. Never forget that that is the goal.

“Our good friend Filin screwed everything up by succeeding with Luna 9, and with the dogs. Suddenly the bureau didn’t look so mismanaged.”

“But, shouldn’t that have worked to Filin’s advantage? Artemov was opposed to the dog flight, but it worked great!”

“In a perfect socialist paradise, it would have all been to the glory of Filin. But Filin’s Jewish mother has always kept him from making the kind of friends Artemov makes, such as the Hammer himself.”

I guess I had been blind. Filin’s Jewish heritage never seemed relevant. Certainly he gave no outward sign of any suspicious religious activity, unlike my father and even Uncle Vladimir, who were always saying, “Thank God,” “God be praised,” like old Orthodox peasants.

“So Filin’s good luck all landed on Artemov.”

Triyanov smiled, like a teacher hearing a student recite a multiplication table. “Now you’re getting it. It will still take weeks for things to play out… the Hammer has to wait for the Party Congress to distract Ustinov before Artemov can be officially crowned the new king.” (This was a little pun on Korolev’s name, which translated as “king.”) “But you will see him everywhere now. And, much as I like Filin, it’s good news for our little department here.”

“How?”

“Korolev wanted to create his own cosmonaut team, but chose not to challenge the Air Force directly. Tyulin wouldn’t, either, since he’s still a military man at heart. Filin really doesn’t care.

“But having pulled off this coup, Artemov is going to look for another battle, and he has always despised the military. He’ll try to kick their pilots off the crews completely, you watch.”

All these politics and machinations were too much for me. I wanted to be back at my desk worrying about numbers. Better yet, I suddenly wished I could go back to a classroom at Bauman, preferably about my second year, when I was happiest.

“Now, what is this?” Only then did Triyanov look at the certificate from IMBP I had placed on his desk. “You passed. Congratulations. How did you like it?”

“I learned a lot.”

Triyanov laughed. “Very diplomatic.” He slid the certificate back at me. “Well, when they picked the first military cosmonauts, no one had any idea what they would face, so they got perfect physical specimens and didn’t worry about intelligence.

“Pretty soon they discovered that intelligence was as important as physical fitness, which is how Feoktistov managed to sneak in. You’re lucky, Yuri: You have both, with the added bonus of youth. You could be making trips into space to the end of the century. You could walk on Mars.”

I remembered that Triyanov himself wanted to fly in space, at the age of fifty-five.

“There are lots of people around here with more experience,” I said, thinking of Yeliseyev, Kubasov, Grechko, some of my senior colleagues.

“Yes. They will get the first chances. They’ll become Heroes of the Soviet Union. But you will have more fun, I think.”

I stood to leave, then realized that Triyanov was still looking at me. “Is there something else?”

“I was a little worried about you, Yuri. You came out of nowhere, like someone’s favored son. I handed you the shit jobs just to see if you’d do them, and you have. I don’t care who your uncle is—” For a moment I thought he meant Uncle Vladimir, but he was speaking generally. “—take my advice and follow your better instincts. Over time, it is the only way.”

Was he warning me? Embarrassed and confused, I walked back to the kindergarten, where several other engineers were hard at work in groups, on the telephone, moving in and out with great purpose. Something I, at that moment, did not have. Or, rather, I had too many purposes. To better myself. To satisfy Uncle Vladimir. To make Marina happier with me. To make my father happier with me.

That night as I left the bureau and joined the legions marching to the Podlipki Station, I felt the first warmth of spring in the air. Places on the broken sidewalks and muddy streets were suddenly bare. Steam rose from heating pipes and chimneys, covering everything in a light fog, the way I always imagined London to look in the stories of Sherlock Holmes. I wished for Mr. Holmes’s brilliance that night, but felt only a mental fog.

I had not seen Marina since being released from the IMBP; impulsively, hoping to clear my mind or, at least, change my luck, I stopped at her building across the river.

Since she had resisted the idea of my medical tests, relenting only at the last minute, I had telephoned her first thing Saturday to tell her the good news of my hard-won certificate. Hearing that I had passed them did not ease her worries — it seemed to have the opposite effect. Suddenly she was “busy” that day. And Sunday.

And as she came down the stairs, she was already dressed to go out, and looked quite severe. If the appearance hadn’t been warning enough, she actually turned her face away when I tried to kiss her. “So now they’re going to shoot you into space.”

“No. The real reason for the medical testing was so that I could do my work in the department. Many things would have to happen before I could become a cosmonaut. I’m still not even a full-time employee at the bureau.” As I said all this, I could tell she wasn’t listening. “Is something else wrong?”

She shook her head forcefully, but unconvincingly. “I’m just worried about everything.” Then she did kiss me, which was enough to quell my growing anger. Maybe I was being selfish: Marina had troubles that had nothing to do with me. Her schoolwork. Her job.

“Where are you going?”

“Alla and I were going to a Party meeting.” Alla was a rabid young Communist friend from Marina’s hometown.

“Since when did I become less important than cookies and punch with the Komsomol?”

“I promised her I would go. I’ve made excuses the last couple of times.”

“Well, let me walk you.”

I felt our whole relationship hanging on her answer. “Please don’t,” she said, after a painful moment. She busied herself with her scarf and gloves. Then, with another kiss, she went out into the dark spring evening.

I thought about following her, then rejected the idea as juvenile. She clearly didn’t want to see me right now. Without saying so, she was giving me an ultimatum: Give up the bureau, especially the idea of being a cosmonaut, and she would come back to me.

But giving up that idea not only meant betraying my soul, it also carried a very real risk….

It also meant going against Uncle Vladimir.

Interlude

My first sessions with Yuri Ribko took five long evenings at the Rendezvous in Korolev. It was somewhere around the end of the first discussion that I decided he had a story worth listening to, and I began to record the tale. I went back to the U.S., and contact between us ceased.

Then, unexpectedly, less than two months later, I found myself flying back to Russia. I telephoned Ribko, who agreed to meet again. Soon a pattern was established: Ribko would arrive late, grudgingly accept a beer, then insist on complaining about some new American slander against Russia on the International Space Station project, which had stalled because of the failure of the Russians to live up to an agreement to build certain components to an agreed-on schedule.

One night in our second session I got fed up. “If anyone should be complaining, it’s America. Your government hasn’t put a goddamn dime into the service module and right now it’s going to delay the whole project by a year or more.”

His face flushed and he reached for the bottle. “First of all, you expect us to give up our space station—” Good old Mir was still in orbit that winter, nine years beyond its design life and eighteen months after everyone on the planet thought it was finished. “—and surrender to yours.” He smiled. “I’m not saying this is my personal view. But it is a view which would be shared in this neighborhood.” The Rendezvous was on Tsiolkovsky Street, a few blocks north and east of Russia’s Mir flight control center, which itself was just across the street from the gigantic facilities of the Energiya Corporation, what used to be Experimental Design Bureau Number 1, aka the Korolev Bureau. “And we hear that your Boeing company is as far behind on its module as we are on ours. But everyone prefers to blame the Russians.”

With that, he clinked his beer glass against mine. “Through adversity to the stars,” he said. After that, things went more quickly, though I had to miss a night because my editor wanted me to visit some nightclub on Kutuzov Prospect, which had the tallest, thinnest, most dangerous-looking women I’ve ever seen.

So there was a break in Yuri’s narrative, ending in April 1966, with the cancellation of Voskhod 3, with Artemov as the new leader of the Korolev bureau, with new problems on the home front.

He wanted to pick up the story early the following year. “What happened in between?” I said. “It must have been important.”

“What happened was one success after another for America, and one hidden failure after another for us.”

Well, from my knowledge of space history, I knew that after the quasisuccessful docking flight of Armstrong and Scott on Gemini 8, NASA had flown four Gemini missions, each one aimed at improving techniques for rendezvous and docking, and for EVA.

Not that these missions were routine. Stafford and Cernan on Gemini 9 had seen their Agena docking target fail to reach orbit — and an inert replacement failed to shed its aerodynamic shroud, so the crew could only rendezvous and not dock. Cernan’s EVA had turned out to be pretty madcap, too. He was supposed to strap himself into a rocket-powered backpack and fly around. To protect Cernan’s fabric pressure suit from the hot gases of the backpack’s rockets, engineers had added a layer of wire mesh to his legs! Fortunately, Cernan’s suit overheated and, blinded by sweat, he was unable to don the backpack at all, probably saving himself from an ugly and fatal accident.

Later missions—Gemini 10, 11 and 12, crewed by Young and Collins, Conrad and Gordon, Lovell and Aldrin — went progressively better.

At the same time, the U.S. matched the accomplishment of the bureau’s Luna 9 by soft-landing Surveyor 1 on the Moon on June 2, 1966, and even improved on it: Surveyor landed under its own rocket power, like a future manned spacecraft, where Luna 9 had bounced on the surface like a basketball. The U.S. did the Russians one better by scouting Apollo landing sites from above with two wildly successful lunar orbiter missions.

The first Apollo launcher and spacecraft were tested in 1966, too, though without astronauts aboard. The next steps were manned Apollo flights, scheduled to begin in February 1967, and the test of the giant Saturn 5 launcher.

As for the Russians—

They tried their own lunar orbiters, modifications of the E-6. The first, called Luna 10, was a success in April — May 1966, though it didn’t carry cameras. Luna 10 did manage to serenade the delegates of the 23rd Party Congress with a rendition of the “Internationale” played from lunar orbit, however.

The next orbiter crashed into Kamchatka. The third got safely on its way to the Moon, but suffered a systems failure en route. Failure. A fourth, Luna 12, finally carried Soviet cameras into lunar orbit.

A follow-up to Luna 9, Luna 13, bounced onto the Moon’s surface near the crater Seleucus on Christmas Eve.

Work proceeded on unmanned tests of the L-1 and its Earth orbital precursor, called Soyuz.

Chelomei’s Proton launcher, following two initial successes, failed in late March, grounding it for several months.

And at Baikonur, the assembly building and launchpads for Russia’s giant Moon launch vehicle, the Carrier, took shape.

As the new leader of the Korolev bureau, which was given the clunky new name of the Central Experimental Design Bureau of Machine-Building, Boris Artemov plowed ahead with Soyuz, with L-1, with the Carrier rocket. He also defied General Kamanin and the Soviet Air Force by creating his own cosmonaut team under Stepan Triyanov. As part of the bureau’s reorganization, it became known as Department 731.

Meanwhile, Yuri Nikolayevich Ribko graduated from the Bauman Higher Technical School and in June 1966 became a full-fledged member of Department 731.