Red Moon

17 The Launch

Baikonur had changed noticeably since my first trip there, not eight months in the past. Great strides had been made in construction of the Carrier rocket facilities: The giant assembly building, just a skeleton of girders in February, was now enclosed, solid, a monolith on the horizon.

Beyond that, the superstructures and lightning towers of the twin Carrier launchpads rose like church spires. I couldn’t help but be impressed. I had no idea of what the Carrier itself looked like, but if the assembly building and towers gave any clue, it was two or even three times taller than the Soyuz launch vehicle — which seemed gigantic enough to me as I watched it roll out to the pad at Area 1.

Other than the incessant construction, the endless stream of trucks coughing their way past the facilities at Area 1, Baikonur felt the same. I had first come there in March, now I was here in December, with snow on the ground, leaden-gray skies overhead, a cold wind sweeping across the steppe.

The cold wind matched my personal life. Marina and I had barely seen each other in six months. We had met three or four times after our argument about my cosmonaut medical tests, but with my graduation and the end of her studies for the year, she went home to Orel for several weeks, while I plunged into full-time work as a flight tester for the new Soyuz spacecraft. Marina had not returned to Bauman immediately; her “translating” skills had required her to go abroad on a long-term assignment in Germany. She had sent me several letters and postcards care of the bureau’s new “postbox”—Number V-2572—so I still had hope.

As I had with my father. He had shed his cast in time for my graduation, and seemed more fit and happier than I had seen him in many years — certainly since the death of my mother. I realize it was because he had lost weight and added some color during his forced rehabilitation. But when we saw each other during that summer — not often — he was not drinking. He didn’t speak about his work, even to the extent he had, so I had no idea of what was going to become of him. Retirement still loomed.

Then there was Uncle Vladimir. I never expected to see him again, after my pathetic career as an investigator for State Security had obviously fingered the wrong man — Filin — as Korolev’s murderer.

But I underestimated Uncle Vladimir’s compassion, and tenacity. Shortly after my graduation, on one of the most beautiful summer days I can ever remember seeing in Moscow, he asked me to meet him in Izmailov Park, where half of the population of the city was busy shopping at the flea market.

Picture this: a bulky man in an expensive suit picking his way among the stalls, bartering with farmers offering cucumbers, lettuce, strawberries, stuffing his prizes into his bag. Meanwhile, two obvious agents of State Security follow at an indiscreet distance. What were the farmers thinking? That Uncle Vladimir was some provocateur from the Central Committee, testing the limits of “free market”? Or perhaps some important un-person, like former Premier Khrushchev, being let out for some air?

I immediately apologized for sending his investigation down the wrong road. He shrugged it off. “In the old days there would have been a rush to judgment. Someone would have been punished instantly — whether he was guilty or not. This way takes longer, but it’s better.”

There was a conversational detour while he engaged a farmer from Davidovo about some kind of peppercorn, I believe. “Aren’t you going to buy anything?” he said suddenly. Before I could explain why not — I had not known we were coming here; was spending all my time out in Kaliningrad, eating at the bureau canteen — he went on: “You’ve piled up a tidy sum of money working for us, you know. Sasha!” He turned to one of his assistants.

I had not known I was getting paid as an informant for State Security. It only made me feel worse, especially when Uncle Vladimir pressed fifty rubles into my hand. “Get yourself some decent vegetables.” So I shopped, too, under Uncle Vladimir’s supervision. “I hope you’ll have the chance to spend more time with Artemov. He has many powerful friends, and it’s made him arrogant. Possibly even dangerous.”

That had become quite obvious, after his coup against Filin, the Hammer, and poor Chelomei. “But he’s head of the whole bureau!”

“Oh, Yuri,” he said, patting me on the shoulder. “You’re now a member of his pet department. You’ll see a lot of Artemov as time goes by.”

There was something in the casual way he said this that triggered a small epiphany for me: Uncle Vladimir’s reach into the bureau or the ministry had not only gotten me hired, he had gotten me tested at the medical institute and thus qualified for Artemov’s little cosmonaut team! I was even more impressed with his power that day, and more in doubt of my own skills than ever before: Had Uncle Vladimir arranged for me to pass the medical exams? Maybe I was really unhealthy, unqualified, in over my head?

I had come to Baikonur this time as a crew equipment specialist for Soyuz, in spite of the fact that there would be no crew aboard this mission. There should have been. Back in the spring, once the succession wars had ended, the ministry had forced Artemov to agree to dock a pair of unmanned Soyuz vehicles in October, and to fly two manned missions together in December.

Well, ministers can order, but machines will do what they want. The first Soyuz was not launched until November, and quickly demonstrated that there was room for improvement in its design. Within a few hours of launch, as the team at Baikonur was getting ready to roll out the second Soyuz to its pad, it became clear that a thruster on the orbiting vehicle had become stuck — just like the American Gemini 8!—and had not only used up all its fuel, but had left the spacecraft tumbling end-over-end.

Obviously there could be no docking. Not only that, but there was no easy way to return Soyuz safely to Earth — an important milestone in the testing of any manned spacecraft. Projections showed that Soyuz would dive into the atmosphere on its own around the 39th orbit, destroying itself somewhere over a foreign land, or over the ocean.

Some genius in the guidance area came up with the idea of firing the Soyuz’s main retro-rocket in short bursts, which allowed the orientation system for reentry — not the same system that had spent all its fuel — to operate for brief periods, too. In this way the spacecraft could be gradually brought under some control, and commanded to reentry over the USSR.

Forty-eight hours after launch, on the 32nd orbit, a final burn was made. That, alas, was the last anyone saw of the first Soyuz. It was tracked as far as the city of Orsk, on the standard reentry path, then disappeared, very likely to automatic self-destruction.

It was a pretty thorough disaster of a test flight, but Artemov rallied the troops and convinced the State Commission — headed by none other than Tyulin — that the problems with the attitude-control system could be corrected, and that a single Soyuz could be launched in December to test the fixes, and prove out the landing system before the twin manned flights in late January.

After helping with the final checkout of crew equipment inside the vehicle, I became a spectator, watching the proceedings from the roof of the assembly building perhaps seven hundred meters from the pad itself. It was a cold afternoon, December 14, the sun already setting behind us.

The little group included some of the military cosmonauts training to fly Soyuz, including Saditsky. As the countdown reached zero, the twenty main engines of the Soyuz launcher roared to life, superhot steam spewing around the base of the vehicle.

Then stopped, as if someone had shut off a garden hose.

We all looked at each other. “That’s not right,” Saditsky said. We waited longer, stamping our feet nervously, but there was still no launch, no further activity out on Pad 31 except for whisps of steam blowing around the base of the gantry.

Liquid-fueled rockets like Soyuz could be shut down safely, of course, though it was hardly routine. An American Gemini launch had suffered the same fate almost exactly a year prior to this.

But the memory of the Nedelin disaster was still strong in the minds of the Baikonur launch teams, so their approach to the loaded rocket was cautious. It took almost half an hour before any cars and trucks headed toward the pad. The group included Artemov, bundled up in a black coat, wearing a black hat, as he hurried out of the building that housed the control center.

Once we saw the trucks, we knew there would be no further launch attempt that day, so we all went back inside. I glanced at Saditsky and his friends, who seemed very calm: Maybe they were telling themselves that this proved the reliability of the Soyuz safety systems.

Then we heard a muffled thump behind us, from the direction of the launchpad. As one, we turned and saw the escape rocket hauling the Soyuz into the air and downrange!

You must picture the entire Soyuz vehicle, the huge conical base (the four strap-on boosters clustered around the core) tapering to a narrow cylinder, which was the two upper stages. Atop them was a wider cylinder, the Soyuz itself — propulsion module, bell-shaped crew module and spherical orbital module, the latter two encased in a protective shroud. At the very tip was a long, mushroom-headed escape rocket intended to rescue a crew from disaster at zero altitude on up to an altitude of twenty thousand meters, where the first stage burned out.

The whole structure looked like an Arabian minaret, the difference being that a building couldn’t explode with the strength of an atomic bomb.

“Well, that wouldn’t have happened with Voskhod,” Saditsky joked, knowing full well that Voskhod had no such escape rocket: A disaster on the pad would have meant death to its crew.

“Grachev wants his bonus,” said another pilot. Grachev was the designer of the escape rocket. His bureau would get a financial bonus for a “flight test.”

We saw the successful parachute deployment, and began to relax when General Kamanin and one of his aides suddenly appeared in the room. “Into the hallway, now!”

“What’s the problem?” someone asked.

“Look for yourself.” Kamanin pointed to the pad.

We had been so busy watching the escape rocket and the parachute that we forgot about the vehicle itself. The escape rocket had ignited the fuel in the Soyuz propulsion module and upper stages. Flames were shooting into the sky, and more ominously, flowing down the length of the vehicle to the very large amounts of explosive fuel in the first stage.

No one needed further encouragement as we pushed out of that room with its big glass windows and into a narrow corridor. The door was not even closed when we saw a flash of light, followed three seconds later by a whump! Then another and another. I lost count of the not-so-distant explosions, which knocked plaster off the walls and tiles off the ceiling, making the lightbulbs jerk. We almost choked on the dust.

Then there was nothing.

When I was a child, living with my mother in the Crimea, where my father was stationed, we went through an earthquake. This felt very much like that — short, violent shaking, then nothing. But you feel afraid to look. Has it stopped?

Some brave soul pushed open the door to the room where we had all been standing. I don’t know which sight was more frightening — the shattered spire of the Soyuz rocket, now spewing black smoke hundreds of meters into the air, the twisted girders of the gantry (how many people had just been killed, I wondered? Artemov?), or the room itself, with the windows blown out, furniture upended, shards of glass embedded in the walls. We would have been riddled.

It turned out that only one officer was killed, a specialist who had tried to take cover behind a concrete wall when he saw the coming explosion. Several other members of the launch team were injured. Artemov was safe.

That was the end of 1966, a year of one failure after another.

18 The Opening

The commission investigating the latest Soyuz mishap quickly determined the cause — which was so odd and unexpected that Triyanov insisted on reading the final conclusion out loud to his pupils in the kindergarten, a group that included not only me and Yastrebov, but also Yeliseyev and Kubasov, the first members of Department 731 to be included in Soyuz flight crews.

“First, the cause of the shutdown was a broken fuel line in one of the first-stage strap-on boosters. Those responsible have been punished.

“Now, the question remained: What triggered the escape rocket? It was designed to fire if gryoscopes in the core stage noted a deviation in the planned trajectory, or if one of the strap-ons separated prematurely—” By this time I had seen film of just this amazing event, from early R-7 failures. “—Or if the boosters underperformed so badly that the vehicle would not reach orbit. None of those conditions applied.”

“And those responsible have been punished,” Yastrebov said, to growing amusement.

“To continue… another possible cause was a signal from the control center, which was not sent. Yet another was the possibility that moving the gantries back into place somehow jarred the rocket, but the gantries did not even touch the rocket. Yet, all of those responsible have been punished.” Now there was open laughter, from Triyanov, too. He closed up the report.

“That’s it?” Yastrebov said. “Where’s the conclusion?”

Triyanov smiled. “I’ll give you a hint. The gyroscopes were powered down, but not completely off. Anyone?”

No one seemed willing to venture a guess, so I raised my hand. “The Earth moved.”

Triyanov bowed his head. “Correct. The gyroscopes sensed the rotation of the Earth and judged that the whole vehicle was off course, igniting the escape rocket. Junior engineer Ribko escapes punishment.”

I wish I could say that my “brilliant” answer was the result of logical thinking and detailed knowledge of Soyuz guidance systems, but it was an intuitive guess: When I heard the word gyroscope, I immediately saw a spinning ball, which became the Earth itself.

I became aware that several of my colleagues were staring at me. I chose to believe some of them were simply noticing me for the first time, rather than hating me on sight.

So repairs were made to the Soyuz launcher and spacecraft, and another vehicle was targeted for launch no earlier than February 7, 1967—less than two weeks from that date. The manned twin launches would take place in April. We had to hurry: Having completed its Gemini program, America was even now getting ready to launch three astronauts into Earth orbit aboard the first manned Apollo. Their launch was scheduled for February 16. As I had been doing several days every week for the past three months, I got on the bureau’s bus heading for the Chkalov air base.

At this time my work in the department involved pressure suits and equipment for extra-vehicular activity, since the bureau’s plans for a manned lunar landing called for the pilot-cosmonaut to transfer from the Soyuz to the L-3 lunar lander using this method — an insane, impractical one I thought even then, but the construction of an internal transfer tunnel between the two vehicles was not possible because of the arrangement of the modules, and for reasons of weight.

As of January 1967, the Americans had performed ten hours of tests in open space, with results varying from the positive to the near disastrous. We had allowed Leonov to float at the end of his tether (in more ways than one) from the second Voskhod for less than ten minutes, and he had almost lost his life trying to reenter the spacecraft. His suit ballooned to rigidity, preventing him from bending enough to get back inside. He had actually let air out of his suit to make it more flexible, risking the bends as he did.

For the docking of the first two manned Soyuz craft, we had to send two men in pressure suits from one craft to the other. One cosmonaut would be launched first, alone, in the active ship, while a crew of three followed a day later in the target vehicle.

Why two and not one, as would be the case in the real lunar mission? During our very first tests with a cosmonaut wearing his bulky pressure suit and backpack, we saw that it was impossible for him to get through the exit hatch in the Soyuz orbital module. It was just too small. I know, because I was one of the bureau engineers who tried on several occasions to get through that hatch, both on the ground and, in one very unpleasant test, in our Tu-104 weightless laboratory.

How could that have happened? Well, some State decree two years back had specified that the pressure suit and backpack would be smaller than they actually turned out to be, and the hatch of the spacecraft had been designed to those outdated measurements. (Those responsible, of course, have been punished.)

Artemov and the other chiefs at the bureau had done their share of screaming at Severin, head of the organization that designed the pressure suit, but he pointed out — quite rightly — that the suit and backpack were new technology, that changes had had to be made based on lessons from Leonov’s close call, and why couldn’t the hatch be made a little wider?

Well, later models of Soyuz would have a bigger hatch, but it was too late to change the existing spacecraft. So accommodations had to be made. First the backpack was to be replaced, for these early transfers only, with a legpack. That is, the life-support package was put into a container that the pressure-suited cosmonaut would wear strapped to the front of his thighs. After all, it was not as though he would need to be able to walk: Legs were useless appendages in that environment.

The second change was to add an additional EVA crew member to help his partner with suiting and egress. It was much safer that way, and should have been standard procedure from the very beginning. (It was later for Apollo, Shuttle, and Mir missions.)

Of course, the addition of a second set of heavy EVA equipment forced us to make other trade-offs: We had to lose over a hundred kilograms of food, supplies, and machinery from a spacecraft that was already designed to a minimum.

These were the issues I dealt with at the bureau and at Chkalov during the cold, depressing winter of 1966–67. Four crew members, two from the military team and two from the bureau, were being trained as EVA crew members. Those of us on the support team had to fly with them, train them, observe their actions, make corrections in procedures and equipment, then try them out all over again.

Time was short and we began to work weekends. On Saturday morning, January 28, 1967, we had a particularly difficult session aboard the Tu-104. We wanted to have a film-and-television record of the EVA to help with future equipment design, and for cosmonaut training, not to mention propaganda reasons, but where to put the camera in order to get a good picture of the proceedings?

Someone had proposed having the lead EVA crewman, military cosmonaut Khrunov, hold the camera in his hands and float away from the docked spacecraft to a distance of ten meters. (I suspect this was the same someone who designed the Soyuz hatch to that minimum figure.)

On this Saturday, as we coasted into perhaps the fourth of thirty planned zero-G arcs, with one of the cosmonauts already green and ready to vomit, the very hard-working and intelligent Khrunov, inside his pressure suit with “backpack” strapped to his legs, struggled mightily to hook up a safety tether, take the camera into his hands, and somehow push himself off into space — or, in this case, the interior of the Tu-104. He pushed with one hand and immediately started tumbling. Grabbing the tether with his one free hand only made things worse.

And, just like that, he was out of time. No more free fall.

It reminded me all too much of my first flights testing the Voskhod toilet. Every time poor Khrunov pushed off, he turned over, then had to be supported through the crushing weight of another descent and climb by the aircraft.

A military doctor from the training center called a halt to the whole business, which started an argument that lasted through two more zero-G arcs, and then the pilot of the plane signaled us that weather was getting bad and we would be heading back to Chkalov earlier than planned.

Khrunov was dripping wet when we got him out of the suit. He said he thought he could master the maneuver, given time.

“You don’t have time,” I said. The other cosmonauts reluctantly agreed.

One of them suggested simply mounting the camera on a telescoping pole, allowing Khrunov to essentially film himself. That seemed more promising, though we would have embraced just about any alternative. But this camera-pole also represented a design challenge, and more training for the crew, and we landed feeling we had taken two giant steps backward.

Another aircraft landed just before we did, an An-124 transport. Planes like this were always going in and out of Chkalov, of course, but what caught my eye here was the presence of several official-looking cars and some familiar faces gathered around the aircraft. One of them was Artemov.

Mindful of my surveillance duties, which I had not performed in weeks, I wandered over to the transport.

Not only was Artemov here, but also Filin, still looking subdued after his defeat and hospitalization. He greeted me, and asked me how my flight had gone.

Within reason, I tried to be honest with Filin. “Not very well,” I said, then sketched out some of our problems.

“Everything is going wrong,” he said. “Look at this.” “This” was the Antonov’s cargo, a huge rocket engine, still covered in a clear plastic wrapper.

“What is it?”

“It’s one of Kuznetsov’s engines for the Carrier rocket, on its way to Zagorsk for testing. There will be thirty of these monsters in the first stage.” At that time I still had not seen a sketch or model of the monster Moon rocket, but with each fragment of the puzzle, the beast grew in my mind. Thirty engines!

“Not Glushko’s?” Glushko was one of the pioneers of the Soviet space program — if you didn’t believe that, all you had to do was ask him — who had designed and built the engines for most of our missiles and space launchers by that time.

“He and Korolev disagreed about the fuels,” Filin said, the remembered horror of that battle still plain on his face. “Glushko wanted to use devil’s venom to get more power.” Devil’s venom was bureau shorthand for exotic fuels like fluorine or hydrazine that had been one of the causes of the famous Nedelin disaster. “Korolev wanted to stick with fuels he knew. He also didn’t trust Glushko’s schedule.” Rocket engines were notorious for taking much longer to build than predicted. Even at that time, America was still struggling with its big F-1 engines for the Saturn 5. “So we’re stuck using a big pile of engines built by a company that makes jet airplane motors.”

“You don’t sound optimistic.”

“It’s been a long few months. I have to fly to Baikonur tomorrow for the Soyuz flight, and I don’t know that we’ve fixed the problems. The first L-1 is supposed to fly soon, too.” He was clearly overwhelmed with the enormity of his obligations, and who could blame him? I was thirty years younger and staggering under the weight of my own more modest load.

“Are they really that far ahead?”

“They got started in nineteen sixty-one, while our Central Committee wouldn’t even listen to talk about a man on the Moon until three years after that. Even if you assume that we are spending the same money they are, and we aren’t, they have a three-year head start. Oh, yes, the Americans are about to take a great leap forward—”

“Vasily!” Artemov was calling to Filin as he approached. When I had looked his way, I had seen another man moving like a sleepwalker, a tortured soul. Now, just moments later, he seemed reborn. I wondered if he had taken a couple of shots of his own personal devil’s venom.

Even Filin noticed this. “I’m not interested in any more of your ‘good news,’ Boris.” He was quite curt for a man talking to his boss.

But Artemov was in a genuinely good mood. “You’ll like this news, believe me. Last night the Americans had an accident at their cosmodrome. A fire in the Apollo.”

I couldn’t quite see how this was good news. Neither did Filin, glancing at me. “Was anyone hurt?”

“Oh, yes,” Artemov went on, gleefully. “The whole crew, Grissom, White, and Chaffee, were killed. Burned to a crisp, their spacecraft destroyed right on the pad!” He was practically dancing.

“Have they said how long they’re going to be grounded?” Filin asked. In spite of a clear effort to be sympathetic, the color was returning to his face, the life to his voice.

“If it were us, we’d say six months, knowing it was going to be a year. At least that much.”

No American triumphs for a year! We could fly Soyuz, fly L-1 around the Moon, who knew what else, in that amount of time!

I was just as elated as Artemov and Filin. Bad as things had been, we had been given a second chance.

19 Sabotage

“It’s not so much a matter of murder,” Uncle Vladimir said, pausing as he split a log with an ax, cleanly, smoothly. “Now it’s sabotage.”

He handed the pieces to me; I was collecting them for a fire at his dacha here on the west side of Moscow, near Petrovo-Dalniye.

I had telephoned him upon returning to my one-room flat in Kaliningrad, in a new building about halfway between the main entrance to the bureau and the train station at Podlipki. (Yes, I had my own telephone by that point.) On the bus ride back from Chkalov, I had realized, yet again, that as a spy for State Security, I was a failure, if not an outright liability. What, for example, was I supposed to report from my latest “encounter” with Artemov? That he was happy about someone else’s death? Did that make him Korolev’s murderer? Filin had been happy about the dead American astronauts, too. And so, to my shame, had I.

I was hoping Uncle Vladimir would release me from service, that he would let me concentrate on being a good engineer for the bureau, and on being a much better boyfriend to Marina.

All he did was invite me to his dacha the next day.

Several of the people who lived in my new building had cars of their own, storing them in sheds in what was supposed to have been park land just down the street. So I was able to beg a ride as far as downtown Moscow that Sunday morning, to the Arbat, where I could catch the train as far as Usovo, the end of the line, where Uncle Vladimir met me himself. Dressed more casually than I’ve ever seen him, he was driving his own car.

His three-room dacha, gray, weathered, pieced together from available boards and planks, sat in a birch forest near the Iskra River. Through the bare trees I could see other, similar structures — and several that did not look pieced together, but rather designed and constructed. As if Uncle Vladimir was the piggy with house of sticks, while down the lane lived a piggy in a house of bricks.

As a further surprise, there was a woman staying with him. Katya Pershina was her name, and she was, I judged, in her middle thirties, with a quick, easy smile. She was tall — taller than I, and even taller than Uncle Vladimir, with the regal bearing of a Scandinavian film star. Perhaps it was her pale blue eyes, which looked through me with almost complete disinterest. She was clearly no stranger to Uncle Vladimir and his ways. “I’m going down to the village,” she said after we had been introduced. “Hope to see you later, Yuri.”

Uncle Vladimir said nothing about her, but merely led me outside, where he had been chopping wood.

“Sabotage?” I said, sounding even stupider than I felt.

“It’s happened,” he said, violently cleaving another log. “When Korolev was alive, we had a suspicious series of accidents. A whole spacecraft getting dropped from an airplane, a self-destruct signal coming out of nowhere.”

“ ‘Those responsible have been punished,’ ” I said, not thinking.

Uncle Vladimir looked at me. “Yes. As a matter of fact, they were.” Chunk went another log. “The lucky ones are probably doing the very same thing today that I am, though in a much colder place.

“The more we looked into your bureau and its ministry, and their relationships with the military, the more suspicious it all became. There has been a pattern of failure over the past year, wouldn’t you say?”

“It would be hard to find any successes at all,” I said.

“Yes. And because of the nature of your space business, it’s the Korolev organization which cuts across all of it. You’re here in Moscow, you’re at the factories, you’re at the launch center, the tracking sites.”

“And Artemov goes to all of them.”

“Artemov. Or someone close to him.” Finished with his task — actually, he’d done an amazing amount of work for a man his size — he set the ax aside and picked up the last of the firewood himself. “Who’s to say it’s only Artemov, hmmm?”

I followed him to the door.

“Pasternak lived over there, did you know that?” he said, gesturing with the ax. He smiled. “And now Khrushchev does.”

Katya returned not long after that, and we had a pleasant meal in front of a very warm, noisy fire. I could not figure out her relationship with Uncle Vladimir, whether they were lovers or just good friends. I had never seen my uncle with a woman, but, given the few times I had seen him, period, that was not surprising.

My uninformed guess was that Katya worked in State Security, and when she slipped effortlessly into perfect English (singing along with some music Uncle Vladimir was playing — Shirley Bassey?), I felt sure they were colleagues at the very least.

Eventually I had to be taken back to the train. As Katya said goodbye, she happened to add: “I completely forgot to ask. You must know Marina Torchillova. A wonderful girl. Say hello to her from me.”

On the drive to the station, while I was thinking that over, Uncle Vladimir gave me my orders: to watch for any sabotage, any sign of “wrecking.” He gave me a special phone number to call, an escalating series of codes. “You’re between the condition we call Scorpion 2, which is the presence of enemy agents in a closed area.” Scorpion 1, I learned, was the mere suspicion of enemy activity.

Enemy activity. Uncle Vladimir also told me that I might not be dealing with mere “anti-socialist” forces, but with our country’s main enemy — the CIA itself.

Thus ended my Sunday in the country, which began with my simple hope to give up a career as a snitch and ended with my enrollment as a full-fledged antisaboteur and Cold Warrior.

As the gateway to dacha country, where all the Kremlin bigshots had their places, the Usovo Station had one of the best markets in the entire USSR. Waiting for the train back to the Arbat, I strolled through them, happening upon one selling flowered-silk scarves. Since it was Sunday night and the grandmother running the kiosk was anxious to get home, I was able to buy one for only two rubles. Grandmother even tied the scarf in a ribbon for me.

The purchase encouraged me to change my travel plans. Once back in Moscow, I chose not to continue on to Kaliningrad, but instead took the metro to the Bauman area, heading for Marina’s flat. Since I was fortified with a proper gift and charged with a personal mission from Katya Pershina, I felt justified in calling on Marina without warning.

It had been a strange time for the two of us. Between Marina’s studies and working trips, and my own six-day-a-week schedule at the bureau, we had barely seen each other, no more than twice a month. Well, we had spent one glorious weekend alone in my new Kaliningrad flat, bare floors and all, in August, where we reached a truce about my “cosmonaut career,” which had progressed not one centimeter since spring.

At other times we would go out, see a film or a concert, as if we were second-year students, then find some semiprivate place to make love. She seemed to need it as much as I did; when one night we wrapped ourselves in our coats and made love on the snowy grounds of the Peter and Paul Cathedral, I realized that both of us had completely lost our sense of shyness. Perhaps our decency, too.

As I walked up the steps to Marina’s building, I could actually feel my excitement growing, like a hunger.

The key lady this Sunday evening was an older man, a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, judging from the medals he wore on his olive jacket. “Stop right there,” he ordered.

I told him I was just going up to see Marina Torchillova.

“She’s not in.”

“You must keep a pretty good eye on the girls to know that.” There were probably two hundred of them living in that building.

He obviously heard something in my voice he didn’t like. His eyes narrowed, and I felt like a recruit about to be chewed out by a drill sergeant. “It’s my business to know who goes in and out of this place. And you, snot-nose, are not going in.”

I have a temper, but, thanks to my father’s physical corrections at an early age, have learned to control it. Barely. For an instant I considered simply walking up the stairs, making him yell for the militia, or telling him to pick up the phone and call, for example, Uncle Vladimir, who would utter the magic words “State Security.”

But it passed. I realized that it was late, that I had an early flight to Baikonur ahead of me in the morning. And, frankly, I was a little afraid of the way Marina might react to a surprise visit. “You’re doing a good job,” I told the guard. “Would you be kind enough to see that Marina gets this?” I handed him the wrapped scarf, and added a ruble. “Tell her it’s from Yuri.”

That softened him quite nicely. In fact, he insisted that I share a little “sip” of vodka with him. Which, knowing I faced a cold walk, I accepted.

On the way back to the metro stop, I ran into Lev Tselauri carrying two bags of produce in the same direction. “Lev!” I called.

His head jerked, as if he had heard a gunshot instead of my voice. “What are you doing down here?” he asked.

I told him. “And what are you doing over here?”

He held up his bags. “My turn to shop.”

I grabbed one of the bags and walked with him down the street, across the bridge, catching up quickly on the latest adventures of the Omsk Twins, and of the oversized young student from the Caucasus — a big eater, apparently — who had taken my place.

“Have you been in touch with Filin at all?” It had been too early for Lev to join our bureau last spring, or rather, too late, since his thesis was being supervised by an adviser who worked for Chelomei. But he was now at the point I had been, ready to sign up for permanent employment.

“No.” He actually looked ashamed of himself.

“He said the door was open for you.” No answer. “Things can’t be going very well with Chelomei.”

He sighed. “It’s all military work, and, yes, it’s not going very well.”

“You heard about the American astronauts?” He nodded. “It’s our opening, Lev. We have the chance to catch them, maybe pass them. I’m going to talk to Filin tomorrow. You need to write him a letter. Now’s the time!”

We had reached our old building. “You’re right. I can’t wait.” He smiled, finally. “You’re a good friend, Yuri. Lucky I ran into you tonight. Let’s storm the cosmos.”

I walked away, laughing, feeling better than I had in days, weeks. Ready to storm the cosmos.

20 The Recovery Team

My newfound elation and enthusiasm for my work — both official and unofficial — lasted through takeoff from Chkalov air base until we were almost halfway to Baikonur.

We were in a noisy old Antonov-12, the various propulsion and guidance specialists from other departments in the bureau, plus our handful of crew equipment specialists from Department 731 under Triyanov. Other planes had been taking off that morning, carrying Filin, Artemov, several of the bureau’s cosmonauts, and whole groups of military officers. If things went well, the flight of Soyuz spacecraft Number 3 would be the last unmanned test. In early April we would put crews aboard Numbers 4 and 5 and dock them together in space.

Somewhere in the skies between Samara and Orenburg, Triyanov landed on the bench next to me. “Scouting our landing zones?” he said. “Good.”

I hadn’t thought of that at all, of course; I’d merely been watching the snowy landscape slide past. It was a clear day, and, like all days spent flying to Baikonur, a shortened one. But I realized that Triyanov was right: Gagarin himself had parachuted out of his Vostok from this altitude and roughly this area.

I also realized that Triyanov had my arm in a death grip. “What did you say to Artemov?”

“I haven’t spoken to Artemov at all.” This was the truth. I had seen him, together with Filin, at the Chkalov base the previous Saturday. But I hadn’t said a word to him, nor had he directed any remarks to me.

“Well, he’s added your name to his shitlist.”

I felt sick, not only thinking about what this meant to my bureau career, but also what it meant to my work for Uncle Vladimir. “I don’t know why.”

Triyanov shrugged. Clearly this was not an issue for him. “Well, it happens. Maybe your reports on the EVA tests have been too critical.” That was certainly a possibility. Triyanov smiled slyly, and lowered his voice. “Maybe one of your colleagues denounced you.”

For a moment I couldn’t imagine why — I got along well with the various cosmonauts and test engineers, all of whom were senior to me. Then I remembered my “stroke of genius” regarding the last Soyuz failure.

Triyanov read my thoughts. “ ‘It’s the tall weed that gets cut down,’ ” he quoted. “Well, whoever or whatever, we’ve got to deal with this. You can’t work on the EVA anymore.”

“But I’m the only one who never gets sick.”

“I didn’t say the decision makes any sense, Yuri.” He frowned. “The trouble is, I don’t have anywhere to put you that will keep you out of Artemov’s sight, not with a launch coming up—”

Now I was getting angry. “Should I catch the next plane back to Moscow?”

“There won’t be a plane back to Moscow anytime soon. And you didn’t let me finish. I don’t want to disrupt the other teams before the launch, but there is one area that has no representative from our department, and really needs it: the recovery team.”

“I thought that was the responsibility of the Air Force.”

“Kamanin and the Air Force are supposed to do search and rescue, yes. And we have bureau people who fly out with them to secure the spacecraft and make it safe for shipping back to Kaliningrad. But we have no one to deal with our crew members and their needs. They will be surrounded by doctors and military people.”

I saw the logic in this. “Fine. But we won’t have a crew member on this launch.”

“Better yet. Go along with Kamanin’s people and see how they screw up, and maybe we can fix the problems before we actually fly, hmmm?” He handed me a pass. “Find General Kamanin or one of his people. They are airmen, not rocketeers.”

“I know the difference.”

Baikonur was clutched in winter’s death grip when we arrived. The wind blew so much snow around that I was sure we would have to abort our landing and divert to Tashkent, but we bumped down.

I’d never seen so many people around the hotel at Area 17, military and civilians, and civilians from a whole variety of bureaus, including Chelomei’s. They were to launch a Proton rocket with an unmanned L-1 two weeks after the Soyuz.

Naturally, the day after we arrived, the Soyuz launch was postponed several days, to February 7. The guidance team was still struggling with fixes to prevent another unplanned firing of the launch escape system.

The delay gave me a chance to begin attending daily briefings at Area 2 on the status of recovery forces, and to make myself known to General Kamanin and his team, one of whom was cosmonaut Ivan Saditsky, who greeted me like an old school classmate. “When are you going to fly Soyuz?” I asked him.

“Not until next year. No one would admit that Voskhod 3 was really canceled for months, so poor Kostin and I were stuck on that until November, while everyone else got to study Soyuz. Now we’re in the group, but not in any of the crews, while we catch up.”

He laughed when I told him I was here to work with the search-and-rescue team. “First you have to find them! The Air Force hates spaceflight so much that they starve us for money. I think they allow us a dozen helicopters to search the recovery zones, that’s it. No wonder Leonov and Belyayev had to sit there fighting off the wolves.”

I was startled to hear this, but learned that it was true. The Soviet Air Force had been given the authority to train cosmonauts because they were selected from the ranks of single-seat fighter pilots. But most of the military money and power had gone to the Strategic Rocket Force, which grew out of the regular army and artillery units. The rocketeers controlled the launch sites and tracking stations, and operated the military satellites. Kamanin had to fight his own Air Force leadership to get any kind of support at all. “Come on, meet Kamanin.”

Having grown up in a military family, I was amazed at Saditsky’s casual manner with his three-star general, a slim, short man in his late fifties. Saditsky actually patted Kamanin on the shoulder to get his attention.

Kamanin seemed not to mind. When we were introduced, he said, “Any relation to General Nikolai Ribko?”

“My father.”

“We fought together during the war. The Voronezh and Second Ukrainian Fronts. I used to see him at headquarters. How is your mother?”

My mother was six years dead at this point. Obviously Kamanin didn’t know. I chose to lie rather than embarrass him. “Last time I saw her, she was fine.” This, of course, wasn’t true at all: The last time I saw my mother, she was gray, emaciated, a travesty of herself.

“Say hello for me, please.”

Why had I lied? Perhaps, having alienated Artemov, I wanted to avoid adding the head of the Air Force’s space program to my list of enemies.

As Kamanin and his hangers-on departed, Saditsky said to me, “You were lucky. You saw his grandpa side. He can also be a Stalinist bastard, so be careful.”

I was glad for the warning, and, though I’m ashamed to admit it, glad for my own dishonesty, because I was going to be spending a lot of time around General Kamanin.

The various delays caused the launch of Soyuz Number 3 to take place at 6:20 A.M. on February 7, 1967. The weather had warmed considerably, but the wind was blowing at eight meters a second, a good clip, though not enough to force another postponement.

The launcher rose quickly, brightly, into the gray morning sky, as, not wishing to be trapped behind a third-floor window in case of another accident, we watched from the grounds outside the assembly building. Within minutes Kamanin and the head of the State Commission had arrived from the blockhouse and comandeered their cars. They were all headed for the Crimea.

Not me, however. I was to “stand by” with the primary recovery aircraft at Outskirts Airport. However, since Soyuz Number 3 was not scheduled for reentry until the tenth, three days hence, I was free to remain at Baikonur itself.

Which I did, joining some of the other recovery pilots and engineers at the tracking station at Area 18. I felt conspicuous as one of very few civilians in a group of men in green uniforms, and more than once caught them glancing at me with cautious curiosity.

Upon reaching its planned orbit successfully, Soyuz Number 3 had been given the official name of Cosmos 140. There was a worrisome communications failure early on, but it cleared itself up.

All went well until the fifth orbit, about eight hours after launch, when the guidance system (remember the gyroscope problem?) refused to lock onto the sun as planned, to allow the winglike solar panels to provide power. While rolling around, Soyuz proceeded to burn up a lot of fuel unnecessarily.

Once the spacecraft was put in the proper attitude, the main engine on the Soyuz — essential for any rendezvous — was fired. That event, on the twenty-second orbit, was a success. But it was clear that the spacecraft wasn’t going to orient itself, so Artemov, Kamanin, Tyulin, and the other commissioners down at the flight control center in the Crimea, reluctantly decided to bring her down early, on orbit 33, when the trajectory would intersect the main recovery zone fifty kilometers northwest of Baikonur itself.

Once that decision had been made, I grabbed my bag and joined the group rushing back to Area 17. Early the next morning I boarded an An-12 transport and waited for a signal from the tracking radars of the Air Defense Force.

A weak signal from Cosmos 140 was received at 7:49 local time, indicating that the spacecraft had fired its retros and survived reentry into the atmosphere. The weakness of the signal meant that the spacecraft was going to land short of its aiming point.

Nevertheless, we took off into the winter sky and headed west.

For three hours the planes from Baikonur, and others from Air Force fields in Aralsk and Novokazalinsk, crisscrossed the recovery zone, working toward the west in search of the site of the last transmission from the spacecraft.

Finally our plane had to put into Aralsk to be refueled. While we were still on the ground, our pilot learned that the crew of another An-12 had sighted a parachute on the ice of the Aral Sea. They were low on fuel, too, so were heading back to Aralsk.

But this report gave me and the three-man military recovery team time to climb into one of the helicopters waiting there. This little squadron headed southwest, quickly crossing a strip of frozen desert, over Cape Shevchenko, then onto the ice of the Aral.

Dubnin, a young para-rescue officer, asked me if the Soyuz could float. “Haven’t you trained for a water rescue?” I asked, amazed at such a basic question.

“Are you kidding? This squad only got assigned to this jump two weeks ago. So help me out.” I assured him that the Soyuz was designed to float. “And you’re absolutely sure about this?”

“We even train the cosmonauts to egress while they are in the water. Why?”

“Because the report said ‘parachute,’ not spacecraft.”

“Maybe they got separated somehow.” Dubnin didn’t seem encouraged by this. “Hey, it’s on the ice, isn’t it?”

He pointed out the window. “How thick do you think it is down there?”

When I looked, I saw patches of open water. Obviously the ice couldn’t be very thick at all.

It took our squadron of helicopters less than twenty minutes to reach the site. The parachute was easy to spot, its red stripes standing out clearly against the snow-covered ice. As we got closer, I also saw a smear of soot, like a giant’s footprint, spreading out from the spot.

But I couldn’t see the spacecraft. As we circled, all we saw was a spacecraft-sized hole in the ice.

“Shit,” Dubnin said, seeing the same thing.

As the lead helicopter, we descended first, hovering two meters off the ice close to the parachute canopy, which billowed in the wash from our rotor. Dubnin attached a line to himself and dropped out of the door — safely. “Come out,” he signaled. The other two guys on his team, disdaining the safety lines, jumped down. After putting on my gloves, and saying a prayer, I followed them.

The ice seemed solid, but Dubnin signaled the helicopter to stand off. The second helicopter, a Mi-8, designed for heavy lifting, moved in, the heavy cable and tow hook dangling from it.

The three of us approached the spacecraft — rather, the hole in the ice where the spacecraft should have been — cautiously. Dubnin stopped about three meters from the jagged edge and got down on his belly and began to push himself along like a crawling baby. “You, too,” he said. “Distribute your weight.”

I was soon glad we did: The ice had been shattered by the impact of the spacecraft and the heat of its soft-landing rocket. The edge of the hole showed that the thickness of the ice was five or six centimeters — enough to support the weight of a man, if he were careful. But we could see cracks in the snow beneath us. “Can we land the chopper?”

“No,” Dubnin said. “How deep down is it?”

It was hard to see, with chunks of melting ice obscuring the view through the water. But there was the shiny silvery nose hatch of the Soyuz, bobbing ever so slightly. The heavy lines of the parachute rigging ran down to it. “Two meters,” I said.

“Shit, shit.” Dubnin signaled the transport chopper closer. “We’ve got to get a line on it now. It’s filling with water.”

I saw that he was right. The other two rescuers were rolling up the parachute, and literally trying to hold onto it. Not that they were likely to keep a metal ball weighing a ton from sinking while standing on ice!

As the hook came swinging down, I thought of the dead American astronaut Grissom, whose first spaceflight in Mercury had ended with near disaster in the water. The hatch on his spacecraft had blown open prematurely, filling it with water as Grissom swam for his life. His rescue helicopter had already hooked on, but could not lift the weight of a spacecraft filled with ocean, and had had to release it to the depths. Grissom had almost drowned.

Dubin tried to grab the swinging hook, but missed. I snagged it, only to find there was no tension in the line. With the hook in my hand, I fell right into the hole in the ice.

I don’t know which hurt more, the shock of the icy water, which felt like a million needles on my face and hands, or hitting the Soyuz with my side. Somehow I managed to hold onto the hook, still slack, as I floated there, my coat and boots filling with water, blinking at the horror of my situation. I am a good swimmer; my father even took me snorkeling during our time in the south. Being underwater was nothing to fear… unless you were freezing, and hurt, and wearing several kilograms of heavy winter clothing.

I held onto the ringlike collar of Soyuz, trying not to breathe, then saw what I should do. I jammed the hook of the towline into the joint where the parachute lines attached to the spacecraft. (There was a special hook somewhere on that spacecraft for recovery, but I didn’t have time to look for it.) The line went taut, and I pulled myself up, one arm, then another, to be grabbed by Dubnin, who was screaming. “You fucking idiot!”

It was even colder out of the water, as a very slight wind froze me to my bones. I was gasping. Dubnin hauled me back toward our helicopter, which had lowered itself to within a few centimeters of the ice. He pushed me inside and screamed at a crewman, “Get those clothes off him!”

He must have given orders to the pilot, too, because we lifted off, leaving the rescue team on the ice, and started heading back toward Aralsk.

Looking back, my teeth chattering, my whole body shivering as I painfully peeled off my wet, frozen clothing, I saw Soyuz Number 3, also known as Cosmos 140, being lifted out of the hole, a stream of water pouring from its bottom, as Dubnin and his men stumbled and fell gathering up the parachute rigging while trying not to repeat my icy dive.

The spacecraft was safely returned to Kaliningrad, where it was discovered that a small plug in the base of Soyuz Number 3—a section made deliberately removable to allow maintenance on a thermal gauge in that location — had burned through during reentry, scorching the interior of the spacecraft and allowing it to fill with water and sink following touchdown on the ice.

Analysis of the flight showed that the guidance system was still unreliable, the power margins were slim, and the reentry trajectory was unpredictable. The heat shielding was so faulty that it would have burned, or drowned, a crew.

Confronted with this string of failures, what did the State Commission do?

It authorized the launch of four cosmonauts on Soyuz vehicles 4 and 5 two months hence, in April 1967.

21 General Ribko

After several nights in an astonishingly primitive hospital in Aralsk, I returned to Kaliningrad a quiet hero, as Triyanov described it. “You get credit for saving the spacecraft for analysis,” he said. “But remember that the results of the analysis are embarrassing for many people, so they don’t want to be reminded of your heroism.”

Frankly, I was relieved not to be criticized for my clumsiness. I had not made a heroic leap into the icy deeps — I had stumbled!

There was also a small bonus for my actions — fifty rubles — which when added to my small-but-steady salary made me feel, for the first time in my life, relatively rich. I needed furniture in my apartment, of course, but I could also begin to think about a car of my own. Perhaps in three or four years’ time.

My first night back, my father visited my apartment for the first time. I wasn’t completely surprised: He had called me from Air Force H.Q. a couple of hours before his arrival. Actually, the call itself was the surprise. (I was still getting used to the idea of having a telephone of my own.) I had seen him only briefly in the last six months, perhaps half a dozen times since our bizarre encounter at the Foros resort, and not at all since the new year: He had been on assignment in Europe.

As he stood there in the open door, wearing his full military uniform, including its bright-red Hero of the Soviet Union star, holding a loaf of bread, a package of salt, and a bottle of brandy in one arm, he looked better than he had in years — certainly vastly improved over the tired, aging man with his arm in a cast I had seen in Foros. To add to the strangeness, before he entered he actually saluted me! “It gives me great pleasure to recognize your quick thinking and courage,” he said, like Brezhnev bestowing a medal.

I blushed, and even though I was wearing civilian clothing, snapped my best reserve officer salute in return. “Thank you, Comrade Colonel-General.”

Then he did give me a big bear hug. “You can’t believe how many generals have been talking to me about my son the past few days. The story came right up the chain in the rescue services to Kutasin himself.” My father smiled knowingly. “He was extremely relieved to be able to report to the ministers that the spacecraft had been safely recovered, rather than have to explain why it was lost.”

“I can’t take credit for the recovery,” I said, telling my father about my misadventure with the grappling line, having to be fished out of the icy water by Dubnin and his team.

“It’s the idiot who sets out to be hero who gets himself and everyone around him killed.” He patted his medal. “I won this because I let myself get blinded by the sun and broke off an attack.” He was opening the brandy; I handed him my only two glasses. He poured two fingers in each, no more. “We were dropping on a formation of Nazi tanks at Kursk and I lost my bearings, pulled up. I can still hear Frolov screaming at me, calling me a motherfucker right before his plane exploded.

“I was ashamed of myself, but because I had turned away from the attack, I saw this pair of Messerschmidts coming in behind everyone. So I dived on them and got them with my cannon.” My father had rarely spoken of his activities in the war, though I knew he had flown almost two hundred combat missions in the Ilyushin-2, a dive-bomber. He had certainly never given me any details on this pivotal event in his career. “So my big heroic act came about because I had screwed up. And even though I shot down those two Nazi bastards, if Frolov had lived I might have been court-martialed instead!” This was a sentiment I could easily share. We clinked glasses.

Then I had to explain how I had wound up on the recovery team, a story that was even more inglorious in the telling. He grunted with approval when I mentioned General Kamanin. “I haven’t talked to him in years. He’s one of the chief’s nephews.” The chief in this case being Marshal Vershinin, the commander in chief of the Air Force. “He’s very by-the-book. Not a bad man to work for, though. You could do worse.”

When I came to my arrival on Artemov’s blacklist, my father got angry. “That drunken son of a bitch had better watch himself,” he said.

“Do you know Artemov?”

“I know of him. I may not see Kamanin, but I see Rudenko, the chief of staff.” I had never bothered to clarify my father’s position on the high command of the Soviet Air Force, though I knew Vershinin was alone at the top of the pyramid, with a chief of staff directly below him, through which several “deputy commanders” reported. Kamanin was a deputy commander for space, among other things. My father was on the staff, responsible for some activity in the Moscow military district. “Just this morning he was complaining about your bureau and the way it burns up money. There’s a huge fight right now about your rescue forces, did you know that?”

“No.”

“It’s bad enough that we have to spend money to chase down your spaceships every few months, but for this man-on-the-Moon business we’re being asked to assign eighteen thousand people and dozens of aircraft because your ships could land anywhere on the planet!

“Vershinin supports Kamanin, wants the Air Force to be in the space business, so he lets Rudenko take this request for a billion-ruble ‘air army’ to Grechko.” Grechko was the minister of defense, an old-line infantry officer from the war. “Remember, now, Grechko’s got the Navy coming in at the same time, because they have to start deploying recovery ships in the ocean, so he blows his top! ‘We’re not going to the Moon!’ he says. ‘Let the fucking scientists build these rockets out of their own pockets! No, no, no!’ ”

My father was red-faced laughing at this memory. “Ustinov himself had to intervene, and even he would authorize only half the money Kamanin wanted. And this is for programs we don’t control — we have to rely on Artemov to build his rockets and his spaceships and make them work, which they don’t.”

I couldn’t disagree. In fact, I agreed with enthusiasm, a bad habit of mine when alcohol affects me. And it was certainly at work on me that evening.

“Yuri, are you happy in this work?”

“It’s fascinating,” I said, “if I get to do it.”

“You can’t do anything from the shithouse.”

“Eventually someone else will take my place there.”

“That just means there will be more people in the shithouse with you. Since he took over your bureau, Artemov has been acting more and more like an emperor.” He refilled my glass. Maybe it was my recent exposure to cold, the fact that I hadn’t eaten well in the last couple of days, but I was drunk. My father was barely sipping. “We should find you something else to do, some other work.”

“But I have to stay where I am.”

“No you don’t.”

“Vladimir wants me there.” Had I not been alight with drunken camaraderie, I would never have dared mention Uncle Vladimir’s name.

My father’s eyes narrowed. He set his glass down carefully, as if afraid it would shatter in his hand. “Have you been working for Vladimir?”

“Yes.” I could have added that my “spy” work had been a total failure for months, but could see that my father wasn’t going to be satisfied with a half-truth.

“Goddamnit.” Now his face was red, and not with amusement. “I told you to stay away from that business! No wonder Artemov got rid of you! He probably found out.”

I had allowed myself to linger on that possibility, but not for long, choosing instead to believe I had been denounced by one of my fellow engineers. My father’s passion made that hesitation seem all the more foolish: In addition to being a murderer, possibly even a saboteur, Artemov had all kinds of powerful connections. It was plain he knew I was a spy.

“What should I do? Where can I go?” They almost certainly wouldn’t take me at the Chelomei bureau, assuming I would even want to work there.

“The space units.” He meant the Central Space Office, which was still part of the Strategic Rocket Force.

“I’m a civilian.”

“You’re also a senior lieutenant in the reserve. You could be placed on active duty with a single phone call.” A year ago I had tried very hard to avoid military service. Now I was sitting in my own apartment, working for the Korolev bureau, thinking about embracing it.

“I want to think about it.”

My father got to his feet. “Don’t take too much time. The longer you wait, the more damage Artemov can do to you.”

The next night Marina called to congratulate me on my safe return, heroics, and so on, and she happily agreed to meet me in the morning, which was Saturday, February 18. Now swollen with rubles like a cartoon capitalist, I offered to take Marina to Uncle Vladimir’s restaurant in the Ostankino Tower.

At ten o’clock, after no more than the usual misadventures, including a stop at a book kiosk at the Yaroslavl Station, I arrived at her building. This time I was waved upstairs by the bemedaled porter, and, gift book in hand, knocked on Marina’s door.

Alla, her pretty little hard-line roommate, answered. “I don’t think Marina can go out today,” she said.

“Why not?” I could see past her into the room; everything looked normal, though there was no sign of Marina.

Then I heard a retching. “Oh,” I said.

Alla looked rueful. “It started yesterday. She thought she’d be feeling better, but…”

“I understand. I’ll call tomorrow, to see how she’s doing. Here.” I handed Alla the book, Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees, which had just come out. Marina had made us read lots of untranslated Hemingway during our English-language classes.

Disappointed, with rubles burning a hole in my pocket, I spent the day lurking in downtown Moscow. I believe I wound up buying a chair and hauling it back to Kaliningrad on the train.

22 Marina

At the bureau the next week, we received a special shipment of American magazines with information on the Apollo fire. Triyanov was going to send them to the documentation center for translation, but both Yastrebov and I pointed out that we read English, so we were given several pieces each to abstract.

I was horrified to learn that the astronauts had been locked inside their Apollo, high on its launchpad, with their spacecraft pressurized to more than one atmosphere at one-hundred-percent oxygen! In that environment a spark immediately explodes into a flame, and materials that should not burn will burn happily. Apparently this was what happened aboard Apollo that night: A stray spark, perhaps from some arcing wire, had blossomed in the rich oxygen, quickly spreading to fabric netting, Velcro, the canvas of the astronauts’ couches. Even the air itself became superheated.

This would have been a serious accident rather than a disaster if not for the fact that Apollo’s main hatch was a heavy three-piece monstrosity that could not be opened in less than two minutes under the best of conditions. The high pressure inside the spacecraft made it almost impossible to remove the inner hatch, which was partially sealed against the spacecraft wall by that pressure.

Some reports said that the astronauts had succumbed quickly, asphyxiated by toxic gases sucked into their pressure suits when hoses melted through. Other reports said that they were burned to a crisp. Horrible stories.

What fascinated me most was the bitter criticism directed at NASA and at North American, the main contractor for Apollo — the equivalent of the Korolev bureau — for lax workmanship and for disregard of safety in such a hazardous test.

All of the articles agreed on one thing: America’s race to the Moon had come to a complete halt. Everyone expected the Soviets to catch and pass them, and soon. Well, at the end of the month we were scheduled to launch our first unmanned L-1—a Soyuz modified for flight around the Moon with better navigational systems, and minus the spherical orbit module on the nose.

The recovery challenges were immense. Even though the goal of the first L-1 was to get aimed somewhere in the general direction of the Moon, we all hoped the spacecraft could be commanded to a return on planet Earth. If we were lucky enough to be faced with that, the possible landing sites were many, ranging from most of the USSR to the world’s equatorial oceans and all countries between fifty-one degrees north and south latitude. (It was this possibility that caused Defense Minister Grechko to choke on the cost of creating a recovery force.)

Even assuming unlimited money, the USSR didn’t have the vehicles or personnel to create a standby team, so our Ministry of Foreign Affairs stepped up its campaign in favor of treaties regarding the peaceful return of peaceful spacecraft to their country of origin, while we at the bureau concentrated on the mechanics: transponders and trajectories.

It was tedious work, especially coming after the translations, but I was happy for it, because it kept me from wondering why Marina had not contacted me since the Saturday I found her sick with the flu.

I was in touch with her. I spoke to her several times by telephone in the days immediately after our near — dinner date, in which she confessed to a lingering illness that prevented our seeing each other. As any man would, I wondered if she were avoiding me — but on the phone she sounded ill. I even got Alla on the phone by mistake, and she told me, without prompting, that Marina was off at the Bauman clinic that afternoon.

So I burrowed into my work and did not ask questions, and was very surprised to come home one Wednesday night at eight P.M. to find Marina waiting patiently in the lobby of the building. The porter, a pale young man whose name I never managed to get, had made her a cup of tea, as if she were some visiting aunt. To be fair to the porter, Marina looked pale, drawn, and frail. I almost felt as though I had to help her up the stairs.

I knew instantly that her visit was going to be “special”—no one, even in the best of health, would venture out to Kaliningrad on a cold winter night in the middle of the week. But I was so pleased to see her again, so proud to be showing off my apartment, now equipped with two chairs and a table in addition to the bed, that it was half an hour before we really began to talk. “Alla said you’d gone to the clinic. What did they tell you?”

Her eyes filled with tears, and I began to get worried. What if she were truly ill? I had seen that look on my mother’s face. “I’m pregnant,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.

My ears roared. Birth control in the USSR, in those days, was primitive. The pill existed only in the West; we were encouraged to use condoms, assuming you could ever find them in a store. In truth, couples tried to be careful, and when caught, turned to abortion. I’m sure I turned several different colors as my emotions wrenched from fear to relief to an entirely new kind of fear. “What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know yet.”

I nodded. I didn’t know what I wanted yet, either. Nor did I know what to say. “How far along?”

“About eight weeks. Less than three months, they think.” I handed her a handkerchief, because tears were spilling down her face without letup.

“Well, then.” I took her in my arms. “I have all kinds of information on the State wedding palace…” I had made inquiries last year, when our relationship seemed so strong.

“Yuri, I can’t marry you.”

“Why not? Don’t worry about my father. Don’t worry about anything. Half the people we know got married because the girl got pregnant.”

She blinked furiously now, and wound her open hand as if that gesture would help her speak. “It’s not your baby,” she said, finally, fatally, her face suddenly defiant.

“What do you mean?” I said, stupidly and helplessly.

“What do you think I mean! There was someone else, okay? The baby could not be yours.” She blew her nose. “You’re the engineer. Do the math.”

In fact, by then I had. There had been a period of six, maybe eight weeks from November to the New Year where we had not even seen each other, much less made love.

“Who is it?”

She stood up. “I’m not going to tell you.”

“You owe me—” I was angry now.

“I’m not going to tell you!”

I flung my glass at the wall. Fortunately, it didn’t break, though it spewed cold tea across the room, then caromed onto the floor with a truly annoying clatter. I was immediately ashamed of my temper. As ashamed as I was disgusted with the sight of Marina right then.

All I could think to do was to slink over to the corner and pick up the glass. I went into my kitchen area to get a towel.

When I returned, Marina had stopped crying and put on her coat. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“Home.”

“At this time of night? Alone?” Actually, I would have relished kicking her out into the snow, but she was sick — with morning sickness, obviously — and I couldn’t be that cruel. “Stay here.” She was weak enough to accept the offer.

I slept on the floor, wrapped in my winter coat, and not very well. I woke instantly when Marina rose early the next morning, while it was still dark, and ran directly to the bathroom to throw up.

God help me, I pretended to be asleep as she cleaned herself up, gathered her things, and quietly left.

23 My Mother

My disastrous personal life obviously had an effect on my work in Department 731—rather, on the enthusiasm I brought to it. Remember that I had been pushed off to the side, away from the exciting work of preparing my colleagues Yeliseyev and Kubasov, as well as military cosmonauts Khrunov and Gorbatko, for their upcoming spacewalk. Three other bureau engineers, Grechko, Makarov, and Volkov, had been accepted for cosmonaut training by General Kamanin, and half a dozen others — including Triyanov himself — were running back and forth to Chkalov air base for zero-G flights and parachute jumps, getting in line for future Soyuz crews.

I, on the other hand, occupied my time writing memos on the lack of recovery resources.

My role in the “investigation” of the murder of Sergei Korolev or the “sabotage” of our programs dwindled to nothing. Filin had been cleared; Artemov struck me as a power-hungry thug who was certainly capable of either crime, or both, but he was inaccessible to me now.

The only bright spot was the news that Lev Tselauri had been hired by the bureau and would be joining Department 731. I didn’t hear this from Lev himself, but from Filin, whom I saw briefly at one of the endless committee meetings for the upcoming L-1 launch, which took place on March 10, 1967, under the cover name Cosmos 146.

Since recovery wasn’t part of the Cosmos 146 flight plan (it was considered a sufficient challenge just to successfully fire Chelomei’s fifth Proton into orbit, then launch L-1 toward the Moon using the new upper stage), I remained at the bureau, working toward a more ambitious test of the second L-1, to follow in early April.

On Sunday, March 12, I took the train and metro across and around Moscow to the Vagankov Cemetery, which, I realized, was not far from IMBP, where I had undergone medical tests last spring.

My mother was buried there, under an expensive monument that still bore her portrait, somewhat faded after six years, much like my memories of her. As usual, I had to bribe the guard to gain access to the cemetery, which was supposedly closed for maintenance, though I suspect the sign was put up by the guards whenever they ran short of cash. Then I was allowed to rent a bucket containing a sponge and some cleaning solvent.

Following a brutal year of decline, my mother Zhanna died on March 12, 1961, one month to the day before Yuri Gagarin’s triumphant first spaceflight. At the time, we had returned to Moscow after years of what my mother certainly saw as exile in the Crimea. She was a Moscow girl who met my father at a Party gathering celebrating the Soviet nonaggression pact with Hitler. (They were both understandably coy about telling me this for many years.) My father was then a pilot junior enough to have been spared the purges that destroyed the upper ranks of the Air Force in the late 1930s; he had been stationed in the Leningrad Military District and had flown combat missions against the Finns before winning a transfer to a demonstration unit based at the Central Airfield.

My parents were married in January 1941 and settled down to the constrained but pleasant life of a junior officer in Moscow; my mother was working as an elementary-school teacher when the Nazis attacked that June. Within weeks she had been evacuated, with her whole school, to Kazan, where she discovered she was pregnant.

My father, of course, had gone to the front shortly after the conjugal visit that resulted in my conception. They did not see each other for almost two years; he only saw me for the first time when I was fifteen months old.

Reunited at war’s end, we did not return to Moscow, but moved to the Feodosiya in the Crimea, where my father was given command of a fighter squadron; then, after completing a correspondence course at the Red Banner Academy (I can remember him sitting up nights, cursing the papers in front of him), an air regiment. My mother resumed teaching. Her mother, Galina, came to live with us.

It was, I realize, a happy time. I had friends; so did my parents. The Crimea has nicer weather than any other part of the USSR. When I was thirteen, however, my father was transferred to Kazakhstan, to a remote posting at a secret base. Only my mother was allowed to accompany him there: I remained in the Crimea with Grandmother Galina for two years, until we all moved to Moscow in the year of the Sputnik, 1957.

Something had gone wrong with my parents’ marriage during those two years in the desert, though the posting had had the opposite effect on my father’s career. (He had offended someone in Moscow, or he would have stayed in the capital at war’s end.) Even though he was over the age limit, he was enrolled at the academy for general staff officers and, in due time, became a general. My mother never taught after her sojourn in the desert, made no new friends, even though she had grown up in Moscow. She spent her time nursing Galina through her last days. Even before her final year, she herself was frequently hospitalized.

Such was the outline of her life — and I knew little more than that.

I had no flowers to bring; they could not be found in Moscow that March. But I was prepared to clean the monument.

Someone had beaten me to it. The winter grime had already been cleared away, and given the visible streaks on the marble facing, not long ago, either. I looked around. Sure enough, through the trees thirty meters away, standing in front of another monument, was a stocky man in a green Air Force greatcoat carrying a bucket of his own. My father, who as far as I knew, had never entered this cemetery since the day his wife was buried.

I only took time to touch the monument — for luck, I suppose — before hurrying off, calling, “Papa!”

He turned toward me, blinking in surprise, gesturing toward my bucket with his. “You, too?”

“Every year.”

If he took that as reproach for his own years of neglect, he didn’t show it. “It’s hard to believe it’s been six years.”

“I’m glad to see you here.”

Nor did he react to my words. “My driver’s over this way.” He assumed — rightly — that I would appreciate a ride. “How have you been?”

Giving up the idea of sharing any conversation about my mother, I went ahead and told him about the end of my relationship with Marina, including the pregnancy.

That brought him back to life. “I’m glad you’re finished with that little whore.”

“Please don’t call her that.”

He grunted. “When you begin to see her more clearly, Yuri, you won’t like it much. She wrecked one marriage already, and the kind of work she does…” He stopped, shaking his head at the disgrace of it all. “How is your work?”

I couldn’t help smiling. “It makes my personal life look like a happy dream.”

He stopped and took my arm. “Have you thought about my offer?”

Yes, I had. During my frequent bus rides all over the northeast sector of the Moscow district, I had wondered what it might be like to go on active duty. I had worn a uniform during my reserve training; God knows I was familiar with the military life. “It’s interesting,” I said, “but I don’t want to wind up assigned to Baikonur for five years. Or up north.”

“Suppose I promised you you could stay in Moscow?”

Being an active-duty officer in Moscow was far from the worst job in the world. A good number of the people working at the Korolev bureau wore uniforms, and aside from that, their professional lives were identical to those of their civilian colleagues. “That would be different.”

“You know, too, that your commitment is only five years. You can transfer back to the reserve and take a job in industry then, after Artemov’s sins have caught up with him.” I laughed. Five years or fifteen — at that moment all I wanted was a change in my circumstances. Joining the Strategic Rocket Force was as close as I could come to enlisting in the French Foreign Legion. “It will also get you out of Vladimir’s clutches.”

That made up my mind. “Go ahead, then.”

He hugged me. “I’ll take care of this in the morning.”

We reached his car. Before we climbed in, I took my father’s arm. “Where were you stationed when you and Mama went to the desert?”

“Semipalatinsk. The nuclear-test range. It’s not actually very far from your Baikonur. I had given up fighters to fly Tupolevs on bomb tests. Why?” He grinned. “Don’t worry: I won’t let them send you there. In fact, I may have a surprise for you.”

“What kind of surprise?”

“Come on, Yuri! Let your father have some fun!” We got in the car. “If I told you, what kind of a surprise would it be?”

24 The Dangers Of Rocket Fuel

On Monday, all of Department 731 was bused over to Star Town for the opening of the new flight simulation building.

I had been to the center once before, when undergoing my test on the centrifuge. Visits by bureau personnel other than our Soyuz cosmonauts were discouraged — not by the military people, but by Triyanov and others in the bureau. “Why should we build simulators here, then have to ship them to the Air Force so they can pretend to control our spaceflights?” he had said more than once.

Nevertheless, a series of “peace treaties” between the Air Force, represented by General Kamanin, and our bureau, notably Artemov and Triyanov, had resulted in the construction of the appropriate simulators.

I had seen the building under construction last spring. It was a three-story structure right across from the centrifuge. We spilled out of the buses, perhaps forty of us, and stomped around in the cold waiting for whoever had the keys to the place. There were several Air Force officers milling around with us — student cosmonauts, I assumed — and one familiar face from the other bus, Lev Tselauri.

He was hanging back in a different group, but I pushed my way through it to greet him cheerfully. “When did you start?”

“Today is my first official day, though I’ve been running errands for the past few weeks.”

“That sounds familiar. Filin apparently likes to test his students as secretaries first.”

“Actually, this was for Artemov. Excuse me, Yuri.” He hurried away, to catch up with the others, who were now being ushered into the building. The speed with which he ran away was unnecessary; in fact, during the whole of our brief conversation, Lev had seemed nervous and awkward. Of course, it was his first day on the job and first visit to the cosmonaut training center. Since he had spent time doing menial tasks for Artemov, he might also have heard that I was on his boss’s shitlist.

These were all good reasons, but they left me feeling more alone than ever.

General Kamanin and several other high-ranking types, including Artemov, were waiting for us inside. Apparently toasts had been drunk, even at this relatively early hour, because some of the guys were red-faced and laughing. Not all: Kamanin stood dourly off to one side, arms crossed like a schoolteacher regarding a rowdy classroom.

“Is everyone here? Good. Welcome to the new facility.” The speaker was none other than Colonel Yuri Gagarin himself, dressed, like his fellow seven Soyuz cosmonauts, in a track suit and wearing a white headset around his neck. He had been assigned as the backup commander for the “active” Soyuz, which was to be piloted by Colonel Komarov.

Komarov and the others were clustered around the docking simulator. It fell to the world-famous Gagarin, who also served as deputy director of the training center, to serve as our host. He did his job well, though I wondered then how much damage this administrative work did to his flying skills.

He gave a short speech about the benefits of having so much training equipment “finally under one roof.” It seems outrageous in retrospect, but with less than a month to go before their launch, the Soyuz crews had never had a single place in which to do the bulk of their integrated training, where they could sit in spacecraft mockups that actually resembled the flight article, talking on the radio to the same people who would be controlling and assisting their mission, reading data on their control panels that reflected real flight parameters, and seeing outside their windows the sights they would see in orbit. Obviously the zero-G flights had to launch from an airfield, but these poor guys had done their training at our bureau, in chambers at Chkalov, at the spacesuit factory in southeast Moscow, and at Baikonur, too. “We are just in time for the first flights of Soyuz.”

There was no open acknowledgment of the irony of Gagarin’s statement, except a muttered, “Not a moment too soon,” from an officer behind me. It was Saditsky, of course, who made the statement for my ears alone, I think. We shook hands as General Kuznetsov, head of the training center, began to repeat Gagarin’s welcome, though not as artfully.

“It’s better than Voskhod, isn’t it?” I said.

“Anything’s better than Voskhod. Soyuz will be a good ship.” He glanced around, not wishing to be overheard. “I wish we had more time for training. And I wish you guys had more time to get the bugs out.”

“Everybody’s in a hurry to beat the Americans.”

“The Americans were in a big hurry to beat us, and look what happened.” Given Saditsky’s candor, I wondered, and not for the first time, how he had ever managed to become a cosmonaut. “So, Ribko, when are you coming to train with us?”

“Not for years,” I said. “There are too many people in line ahead of me.” This was a polite lie, of course. My brief career as a bureau “cosmonaut” had less to do with my undeniable lack of seniority than with my colossal mistake in going to work for Uncle Vladimir.

“Well, hang in there. We’ll be flying a lot this year.” He knocked on the side of the simulator for luck. “This is wood, isn’t it?”

As we spoke, the greetings concluded and people were free to move about. Like two pensioners out for a summer stroll in Gorky Park, we ambled around the primary simulator, a collection of walls, operator consoles, and wiring that had a mockup spacecraft buried somewhere inside it.

Further into the hall, which was a long, open area resembling a narrow basketball court, I found mockups of other spacecraft: One appeared to be a Soyuz. It had the telltale bell-shaped reentry module of that vehicle. But it was on the nose of a long, cylindrical vehicle that had a habitation area behind the bell. Through an opening in the cylinder I could see a hatch cut through what should be the heat shield.

“How’d you like to ride that thing through reentry?” I asked a young captain who happened to be taking the same sort of tour. (I was thinking about the scorched interior of the Soyuz we’d fished out of the Aral Sea. And that spacecraft had a one-piece heat shield, however defective.)

The captain laughed nervously. “I’m sure they’ll test it many times.”

More than twice, I hoped.

There was another completely different type of vehicle on display here, too: This one looked like a copy of the American Mercury or Gemini — a cone perhaps three meters across at its base, topped by a smaller cylinder with its own tapering cylindrical nose. This unit was mounted in front of an even larger habitation module — one that had an actual antiaircraft cannon mounted on the exterior.

I walked around to the other side to get a better look at this phenomenon when I happened upon a knot of people that included Artemov and some colonel, who asked our chief, “Now that we’ve got our Soyuz simulator, Boris, when do we get the L-1?”

Everyone laughed except Artemov, who snapped, “What do you need L-1 for?”

“Well, we might be flying it this summer,” the colonel said, smiling. More laughter.

“L-1 will be flying, but it’s far from certain that your people will be aboard.”

Sudden silence throughout the hall. I saw a couple of the Soyuz guys — military — shaking their heads, and heard someone behind me, not Saditsky, mutter, “Here we go again.…”

“Listen to that drunken bastard,” said another.

Artemov persisted. “We design the rockets and the spacecraft, and we can fly them. You guys should stick to airplanes.” He pointed back at the upside-down Soyuz and then at the big Mercury-Gemini copy behind him. “Besides, you’ve got all these fine military vehicles here from Kozlov and Chelomei. Fly them.” He turned his finger into a pistol and made shooting noises. “Guns! You Air Force guys never change!”

He walked away, laughing and shaking his head. Realizing I was the only civilian in a group of angry officers, I also made a quiet but steady retreat.

“He’s clearly unstable.”

So said Uncle Vladimir to me that night when I told him of Arte-mov’s latest display. After returning to the bureau, I had run off to my apartment, using the classic Russian technique of leaving my jacket behind. (“Ribko? Haven’t seen him lately, but he must be around somewhere. His jacket’s still on the chair.”) I had not wanted to test a bogus excuse on Triyanov.

I felt I had to phone Uncle Vladimir not only about Artemov, but also about my potential enrollment in military service, and could not have done so from the bureau. (There are now pay telephones in Moscow, but they were not to be found in Kaliningrad in those days.) He took the call, and suggested I come down to his office near the Belorussia Station as soon as possible.

This left me in an awkward situation: I was absent from the bureau without leave. I had thought I could run home, make the call, and return within the hour. A trip down to the State Security annex would finish the day.

Yet, I felt I had to see Uncle Vladimir.

I make no apologies for my dithering. This was how I lived my life, always trying to be the dutiful son, especially when I was not. Within moments I had remembered the reasons for my call to Uncle Vladimir, and after leaving a message with Triyanov’s office saying I would not be back today for personal reasons, grabbed my only other coat and headed for the train.

Eventually I found myself back inside that huge, messy office, feeling just as nervous as I had a year ago. I noted my own red folder on Uncle Vladimir’s desk; it was noticeably fatter than I remembered.

“He’s certainly drinking,” I said of Artemov.

“I think his problems go deeper than that. He strikes me as a man in a crisis.” He had been tapping a pencil, which he now dropped, a gesture of considerable frustration by Uncle Vladimir’s standards. “I wish I could get you closer to him.”

“My friend Lev is working for him now.”

“Yes, your Georgian buddy,” he said, adding, “We have our eye on him.” It was said most casually, but made me wonder: Did he consider Lev to be a potential watcher, or someone to be watched? “As we will have our eye on Artemov during this next launch. The number of accidents and failures is appalling, like the first days of a war.” He blinked. “Where will you be?”

“At Baikonur to begin with, then wherever the recovery team goes.”

“You’re wasted there.”

“I think so, too,” I said. Seeing an opportunity to make the transition to the next, painful subject, I added, “Which is why I’m leaving the bureau.”

Uncle Vladimir listened to this, then smiled in disbelief. “That’s interesting, Yuri. Where are you going to be working?”

“In the Strategic Rocket Force. As an officer.”

I believe I surprised him. “I see.” He pushed back in his chair, looking down at his desk for a moment. “You’ve been listening to your father again.”

“He is my father.”

“And I would be the last person to ask you to go against your father’s wishes. Even in the service of the Party.”

“I think I can serve the Party as an officer.”

“Yes, yes, yes. But it will be more difficult for you to help me. You see that, Yuri?”

“I can’t see that I’ve been much help to you at all.”

“It’s not a question of what arrests we make based on what you tell me. Our business is to gather information, and you have been quite good about that. You give me the ability to keep other sources honest, for example. And your career in the bureau has just begun. Who knows where you might wind up in a few months or years?”

“As long as Artemov is in charge, I’ll be staying right where I am, in the outhouse.”

He waved away the whole idea of Artemov. “Artemov will be lucky if he doesn’t wind up in prison.” He leaned forward. “All right, how far along have you gotten?”

I told him I was scheduled to take my military medical exams on Thursday. If I passed, and there was little doubt I would, given that I had passed the substantially more rigorous cosmonaut training tests, I would be subject to immediate call-up. “All right, take your exams, but don’t take the oath without talking to me. I’m going to see if we can’t improve your situation.”

That, of course, was the last thing I wanted, given that the original “improvement” in my situation as Filin’s assistant had marked me as a spy. But I felt I had to make some concession to Uncle Vladimir. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll call you first.”

We shook hands, and I got out of there as fast as I could.

25 The Credentials Committee

It turned out that Triyanov never knew I was absent that afternoon. He had stayed at Star Town to smooth ruffled eagle feathers. It was especially lucky for me, because two days later I needed a whole morning off. This time, though, I actually managed to formulate an excuse that fit the situation. “I have to take an examination regarding my military reserve status.”

“Anytime you want to get out of that, let me know,” Triyanov said. “The reserve people are very good at excusing engineers doing important space research.”

I thanked him for his offer, but nevertheless presented myself early Thursday at the same Aviation Hospital in Sokolniki, where my father had been hospitalized after his car crash the previous spring. It was slightly irregular, in that my prior military medical examinations had been performed in a clinic at Bauman, but my father had arranged it.

The doctors there were exactly like those at the IMBP, except that they wore uniforms under their white coats. They also had my IMBP tests in front of them, and contented themselves with a few hours of completely routine checks — blood pressure, hearing, eyesight — to confirm the earlier data. I think their primary criterion was whether or not my breath would fog a mirror held up to my nose.

As I was dressing to go, my father arrived carrying a garment bag over his shoulder. “You passed,” he said. “Congratulations.”

I thanked him, then said, regarding the bag, “A new uniform?”

“Yes. For you.” He thrust it at me. “Put it on. You’re coming with me.”

As a reserve senior lieutenant, I was allowed to wear a uniform, and had a faded one back home in my closet, complete with my rocketeer badge. But this was new! “Shouldn’t I take the service oath first?”

“Don’t worry about it. There are going to be others just like you where we’re going.”

“Where are we going?”

“Star Town.”

On the drive out of Moscow, I guessed that this maneuver was my father’s lure; even if technically a member of the Strategic Rocket Force, I would be assigned to the cosmonaut training center. Somehow he had been able to pull strings with the Air Force officials who controlled the place. Why couldn’t he have done that eighteen months ago? It would have saved me two false steps in my career.

The parking lot in front of the main administration building at the training center was jammed with an unusual number of expensive official cars. I had been teetering on the edge of nervousness. At this point I gave in to the emotion. “I can’t go in there!”

“Of course you can.”

“What if they ask me a military question?”

My father waved the folder in front of me. “They will know your background, Yuri. You aren’t the only reserve officer they’re considering today. There are people here from missile factories and even from the universities. It’s a military credentials committee, so they are looking at you as a potential military officer.”

Feeling the pinch of the stiff collar and tie, trying not to slip on the ice in my shiny new shoes, and trying (uselessly) to slick down my non-regulation hair, I followed my father into the building. “It seems like a lot of fuss to hire engineers for the center.”

Now my father smiled in triumph. “They don’t have committees like this to hire engineers, Yuri. This is for the next enrollment in the cosmonaut team.”

In a hallway on the first floor, outside the meeting room, a row of chairs had been set up. I was given the last one.

The chairs were filled with officers and even a pair of sergeants from the Air Force, Air Defense Force and the Strategic Rocket Force, perhaps thirty men in all. The only thing they all had in common was obvious good health. Even the ages ranged from the low twenties to mid-thirties. Each man sat there, hands folded, eyes closed, or in some cases, open and staring, waiting for what would surely be a turning point in his life.

Mine, too, I realized. I had taken several small steps down the road to becoming a member of the bureau’s cosmonaut team, but could not have expected to train for a flight for at least two or three years, perhaps longer. Now I was about to jump ahead in line. The USSR had not had a manned flight for over two years, but I expected that sorry situation to change in the next month. And given the number of military vehicles being built, it was possible that soon we could be flying missions to Earth orbit or the Moon every other month.

I rehearsed a statement saying how eager I was to fulfill any missions the Party and nation would ask of me.

Every ten to fifteen minutes the door to the meeting room would open — the interviewee would emerge to disappear back to his military base (never to return?). A colonel named Nikeryasov, a man even bigger, rounder, and more intimidating than Uncle Vladimir, would then summon the next candidate.

If the credentials committee took a lunch break, I never saw it. Fully four hours after my arrival, I was the last to be summoned. “Senior Lieutenant Ribko, Yuri Nikolayevich,” Colonel Nikeryasov announced.

I rose and, in my best parade-ground manner, entered the room.

There were twenty generals and colonels waiting for me, and no place to sit. Nikeryasov merely pointed to a place on the floor facing the committee, I saluted and stood at attention.

The chair of the panel was none other than General Kamanin. I also recognized Colonel Belyayev, one of the famous Voskhod cosmonauts. Several of the other officers wore the insignia of the military medical services. The rest were jowly, bored-looking Air Force men.

Kamanin announced my name to his fellows, and gave my personal data, birthdate, place, education, Party (Komsomol) status, finishing with employment: engineer, Department 731, Central Experimental Design Bureau of Machine-Building, Postbox V-2572. (I’m not sure I had ever heard the bureau’s official new name at that time.) One of the generals, recognizing the address, grunted and sneered, “One of Artemov’s people,” as if that were a curse.

Then the questioning began. What did I know about spaceflight? What military training did I have? Did I plan to become a full member of the Communist Party? How was my health?

The only time I gave what was clearly an unsatisfactory answer was when asked if I had undergone parachute training. I had not, while, I’m sure, every pilot who was a candidate, and most of the engineers, had done so.

“Lieutenant Ribko can become qualified as a parachutist,” Kamanin said. “We already have evidence of his fearlessness, in the recovery of spacecraft Soyuz.” Several panel members turned to that page of my dossier, and were somewhat mollified.

The final question was this: Why did I want to become a cosmonaut? Here I drew on my childhood, citing the imaginary novels by Wells, Verne, and Tsiolkovsky that my mother had urged on me, how I had shaped my education in order to make some of those visions a reality, not only for the romance of discovery and exploration, but for the glory of the socialist state, and its security. I said I wanted the first man to walk on the Moon to be a Communist from the USSR. (And managed to half-believe it even as I said it.)

Finally Kamanin said, “Do you have any questions for us, Lieutenant Ribko?”

“Only this, Comrade General: How many candidates will be enrolled at this time?”

“We will accept as many as twenty,” he said, “reporting on May 7.” Nobody timed anything for the first week of May in my country. People were too busy celebrating May Day and the days that followed.

Thus dismissed, I thanked the general and the committee, executed a smart salute, turned on my heel, and walked out.

I remember thinking that my chances of selection were good, with twenty possible cosmonauts out of the thirty candidates I had seen. I said as much to my father as we drove away. “Yuri,” he said, shaking his head, “this is only the third of four days of meetings. You are also competing with dozens of men who barely missed the cut two years ago.”

All right, I thought: twenty out of a possible two hundred. I still felt good about my chances. After all, hadn’t General Kamanin himself remembered me?

26 Universal Rocket 500

My fancy new uniform took its place in my closet right beside its more tattered predecessor, and I went back to work at the bureau. Everything there was frantic, since we were preparing the unmanned L-1 for launch on April 7–8, along with the two manned Soyuz craft on April 20–22. I had no contact with my father, except for one telephone call telling me that the credentials committee would not announce its choices until the end of April. That was fine, since I could not possibly leave the bureau before then. More disturbing, however, was his news that the committee was now saying it was likely to select only fifteen candidates, or possibly as few as ten.

I had no more contact with Marina; I saw Lev only at several program reviews, and then only at a distance. He was attached to Artemov like a third arm, and probably as useful. It was two weeks of madness, fifteen hours a day, until we left for Baikonur on Thursday, April 6, 1967.

The Tyuratam hotels were jammed to twice their normal capacity, understandably, given that the vehicles belonged to two entirely different — and, need I say, not remotely friendly — organizations. The rivalry was complicated by the fact that the lunar version of Chelomei’s Proton carried our bureau’s L-1 spacecraft, which itself would be pushed out of Earth orbit by our Block D upper stage. Block D was part of the even more gigantic Carrier rocket.

There were engineers from different engine-design teams, too, plus officials from two different State Commissions overseeing matters for the Central Committee, not to mention Air and Rocket Force officers. Everybody wanted to be part of the excitement: Here in April 1967, the Soviet Union would reclaim its rightful place as the world’s leader in the exploration of space.

It helped, I think, that spring was early here on the steppes of Kazakhstan. While Moscow was still trudging through the end of a long winter, fresh southern breezes were caressing the town and the launch center. The same breezes, of course, would soon become hot, nasty winds. Tulips were beginning to bloom, for a brief time, before being scorched.

Friday, the day before the launch, I had a chance to see my first Proton rocket up close. What a monster! Unlike the Voskhod and Soyuz rockets, which had a quaint, old-church Russian look to them, the Proton was pure socialist realism: a thick white cylinder except for the base, where six slim fuel tanks hugged the central core, and at the top, where the bureau’s Block D upper stage and L-1 marred the clean line. Even the names suggested different mentalities: The Voskhod and Soyuz were cousins of the original “Seven” booster. Proton’s official name was Universal Rocket #500K. Universal Rocket! It should have been serviced by gleaming silver robots.

“It’s like a soldier,” a familiar voice said. “A sentry knowing he must storm the cosmos in the morning.”

I turned and saw none other than Sergeant Oleg, my escort to the home of space dogs Breezy and Blackie from last February. He looked exactly as he had then, though the beautiful weather better fit his lack of an overcoat. He had a knapsack slung over a shoulder. “You’re a poet, Sergeant!”

He grinned, showing missing teeth. “Some reporter said it right over there.” He nodded toward another clump of sightseers, one of several crawling all over Area 82 like vermin.

“Well, you’re an honest man, at least.” Sergeant Oleg had been right about one thing: The support structure for the Proton Universal Rocket was also futuristic. Where the veteran Seven rockets sat enclosed in a cocoon of girders that opened only at liftoff, the Proton’s structure slid off to one side, as if to make sure that at the proper moment all eyes were only on the rocket.

I asked Sergeant Oleg what he was up to, realizing that I had never been quite sure of his job. It was not technical; he seemed a bit too grimy to be allowed into the assembly buildings. He could have been a guard, but here again his appearance worked against him; he would never pass an inspection. My guess was that he was a truck driver. “Hunting,” he answered, proving me wrong in an instant.

“What is there to hunt around here?”

“Damned little. But the dukes want fresh meat for their table, so…” He shrugged. I almost laughed at “dukes,” wondered if he meant the Baikonur generals, or the many visiting civilian nobles. Probably both. “I’m off to the east. They’ve got a license for saigak at Dzhusaly.” Saigak were a species of deer native to that area, perhaps fifty kilometers away, the location of the downrange tracking stations.

“Won’t you need a rifle?”

“They keep the official rifle locked up there.”

“Where’s your truck?”

He hefted his knapsack. “They can’t spare a truck for me until I’ve got a kill.” And he took off walking, heading in the general direction of China.

Those of us in the recovery team gathered at the new and freshly painted Area 82 assembly building late the next morning for the launch. All the preparations went smoothly; except for the fact that everyone’s attention kept drifting to the Universal Rocket on its pad, it might have been any lazy Saturday afternoon in spring — perfect for a subbotnik, helping the farmers plant crops.

A horn sounded somewhere in the distance at the five-minute mark. We all shaded our eyes in the bright sunlight, and at a few seconds after noon we saw bright fire from the base of the Proton. For the longest time, the rocket sat there spewing clouds of steam, building up thrust. Then it slowly began to rise as the sound and vibration reached us: a rapid but violent popping that only hinted at the power needed to send this beast into the sky.

And into the sky it went, faster and faster, until it was just a contrail heading wherever it was Sergeant Oleg went. We found ourselves clapping. “That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” a female voice said.

I thought no more about that voice for the moment, since I had to follow the rest of the team back around to the front of the building where the cars and buses were parked. There we waited, until another group emerged from the building itself with the news that the L-1 spacecraft and its Block D stage were safely in orbit. The vehicle was to be publicly known as Cosmos 154.

Only then did I recognize the face that matched the female voice I had heard. It was Uncle Vladimir’s beautiful lady friend from State Security. “Katya?”

Pale blue eyes narrowed, she glanced at me for a moment, obviously having no idea of who I was. “Vladimir Nefedov’s nephew—” I started to say, when she brightened. “Yuri! Hello! I wondered if I would see you here!”

With all the high-ranking officials swarming over Tyuratam and Baikonur with their “secretaries” or girlfriends, the launch center was hardly an all-male environment. But Katya was literally the first woman I had conversed with in all my previous travels, other than the occasional key lady or shopgirl.

It turned out that Katya was staying at the same hotel as I was, having come along with a group from the Academy of Sciences. We arranged to meet later that night, if all went well.

Unfortunately, all did not go well. Returning to the hotel, I learned that the Block D upper stage had exploded when reignited to boost L-1 toward the Moon. This left me with no L-1 to recover, since the damaged spacecraft was now wobbling uncontrollably in the wrong orbit, and would reenter the atmosphere when and where the laws of physics, not the flight-control center, chose.

In spite of the failure — or perhaps because of it — Katya and I met that evening in the lobby of the hotel. I was going out for a walk and she was coming in with her group of scientists. “When will be you be off duty?” I asked, assuming she was serving as State Security control over the scientists.

“I went off duty when the spacecraft blew up,” she said. “I’ll meet you down here in ten minutes.”

True to her promise, she returned shortly, hair brushed and lipstick freshened, looking more like a movie star than ever. She was also carrying a bottle of Georgian wine. “A gift from an admirer?” I asked, wondering if Uncle Vladimir was that admirer.

“How ever did you know?” And she smiled.

“I hope he won’t be upset that he’ll be missing out.”

“If I’m happy, he’ll be happy.” She linked her arm in mine. “I believe your mission is clear.” To make her happy? In what ways? I think I blushed.

Attached to the hotel was a café where I had eaten quick breakfasts, never dinner. But there were few dining options in that part of Tyuratam in those days, so I had no real choice but to take Katya there.

Either we were early, or the various military and civilian officials were busy drowning their sorrows, because the café was half-empty. Nevertheless, we stood in line to get a table, then stood in line to order. Finally we were able to sit and open our wine, knowing it would be a long wait for our actual meal.

“How have your scientists been behaving?” I asked, trying to be as sociable as possible without mentioning State Security.

“They were quite good until news of the failure hit them. Now I suspect they’re behaving badly, though God knows where. Go ahead, taste it.” She had poured the wine, which was sweet and fruity, typical Georgian stuff I knew from my teens. “I don’t work for your uncle, by the way.”

I blushed again. “I assumed you did.”

“I work at the Space Research Institute on studies of the surface of the Moon. We had a camera aboard your spacecraft that was supposed to take pictures and help us finish our maps.”

“How did you meet Vladimir, then?”

“The cameras came from a military satellite, so we had to decide who would have access to the raw photos. Your uncle and I were both on the committee.”

I hadn’t realized Uncle Vladimir reached into other areas of the space program but then, I really knew almost nothing about his responsibilities. Or powers.

But as we talked, I thought less about my uncle and more about Katya. She had graduated from Bauman and had even studied under some of the same professors. She knew Filin (though not Artemov) because she had done graduate work in the Korolev bureau on the very first Luna probes, which were the first in the world to hit the Moon, then fly around it and take pictures of its “dark” side. She had joined the Space Research Institute when it was founded three years ago, something she openly admitted she regretted: “Science is the poor cousin in the space business. The engineers do whatever they want and only throw the military enough bones to keep them paying the bills. We are only brought out when some idiot Westerners visit Moscow and want to see a ‘space center’ and the geniuses of our program.” She sounded more amused than bitter. Then she raised her glass. “To the next L-1.”

Maybe it was the wine or the beautiful spring evening or the gypsy music being piped into the café, but I found myself completely entranced with Katya, in spite of the ten-year age difference.

Eventually our food arrived, and we soon found ourselves with empty plates and an equally empty bottle of wine. Since there was still a rosy light in the western sky, I suggested a walk outside.

We could hear voices from the open windows of the ten-story apartment buildings nearby. Occasional bits of music. Shouts and laughter that came from the hotel, along with the sound of at least one smashed glass.

We had only gone a little way down the road when Katya took my hand, and let my arms encircle her. Awkwardly, since she was taller than me even without heels, we kissed standing right by the side of the road, swept by the headlights of at least one passing car, whose occupants cheered us on.

“Come to my room, Yuri,” was all she said, and I did.

Long after midnight I crept back to the room I shared with my friend from the bureau, feeling more alive than I had in my life. Katya in bed was — how shall I put this? — very different from Marina.

I lay awake for at least an hour, trying to remember the touch of her beautiful skin, her fragrance, wondering when and where I could see her again, and just how Uncle Vladimir was going to react to this news.

27 Soyuz 1

I had to be off to Area 2 early the next morning and didn’t dare stop by Katya’s room. The eight Soyuz cosmonauts were entering their final days of training, and one of their tasks this morning was to rehearse emergency egress from their two spacecraft, both of which were still sitting upright on the floor of the assembly building next to their Soyuz launch vehicles. As a member of the team that would recover both crews, I had to take part.

The first set of exercises involved the backup crews, with Gagarin, Kubasov, and Gorbatko showing that they could climb through the nose hatch of Soyuz Number 4, the active docking craft.

Of course, Soyuz Number 4, like Soyuz Number 5, already had its spherical orbital module in place in preparation for launch. (It would be jettisoned prior to reentry.) So the egress of the three men was very time-consuming, and not at all realistic, especially when all three cosmonauts had to be extra careful not to damage any switches or other equipment as they unstrapped and climbed out.

Nikolayev, the backup commander, completed his escape from Number 5 in almost the same amount of time it took for the three in Number 4 to do the same thing. When apprised of this, Nikolayev joked, “Yuri’s smaller than anyone,” which happened to be true and caused everyone, including the great Gagarin himself, to laugh.

Then we watched as the crewmen who would actually fly the mission went through the same rigmarole. Komarov, Yeliseyev, and Khrunov out of 4, Bykovsky out of 5. Bykovsky, who wasn’t much larger than Gagarin, was the clear champion, though the Komarov team showed it could move when needed. I was encouraged to know that they were sufficiently at home in their spacecraft to move about it with some confidence. It would certainly make things easier for them once they’d thumped down out on the steppes.

Saditsky, Kostin, and several other cosmonauts were present, as was General Kamanin, who smiled and nodded at me. Kamanin and Gagarin were called away before the egress training could be completed. “The State Commission just now realized that Gagarin is the backup commander, meaning he could command the next Soyuz mission,” Saditsky told me. “They had a shitfit.”

“What’s the problem?”

“They don’t want to risk their big hero.”

“What does Gagarin think about this?”

“He fought to get himself assigned to the crew! He says he’s too young to be a museum exhibit.”

“What do you think?”

Saditsky smiled. “I wish I was the only cosmonaut in the team, so I could be the first man in space and the first to walk on the Moon. Failing that… Gagarin’s a pilot: He’s been sitting on his ass for six years and he wants to fly. Let him.”

Just as the cosmonauts were packing for their next destination, the big doors at the far end of the building opened and two forklift trucks pulled in, each one dragging a pair of green bundles on a trailer. These were the Soyuz recovery parachutes, a primary and a reserve for each vehicle, packed and fresh from testing in Feodosiya and ready to be installed. Having no interest in this procedure, I was about to leave when a group of my colleagues from the bureau, led by none other than Artemov himself, arrived, with Lev Tselauri tagging along like a puppy.

Feeling a bit resentful at Lev’s iciness, or arrogant about my chances with the military cosmonaut team, I approached them. Artemov, who was busy giving unnecessary orders to the installation team, didn’t notice, but I saw a look of dread move across Lev’s face, like a cloud passing in front of the sun. But only momentarily. “How did the egress go?” he asked.

“The prime crews did a good job. Backups could use more work.”

“That’s the way it should be.”

“How have you been?” I asked.

From the way he slumped, you’d think I had just told him his family had been wiped out by Nazis. “I have something to tell you,” he said, his voice a harsh whisper.

Lev took me by the arm and marched me away from the crowd around the spacecraft, all the way into the April afternoon.

“I’ve been avoiding you.”

“I noticed.”

“I’m sorry. But you will understand.” I hoped so: This was not the cheerful, cynical, brilliant Georgian I had lived with for two years. “You see, I’m getting married.”

He seemed anything but happy. “Congratulations.”

“To Marina.”

For a moment I couldn’t see or hear anything. For an even longer moment, I couldn’t say anything. Lev waited — did he think I was going to hit him? I suppose that crossed my mind. But all I could do was say, “Oh. I hope you’ll be very happy.”

“You have a right to be angry.”

“Don’t tell me about my rights.” By then I was walking away, blind with fury. Marina and Lev! I remembered the time I had run into him in her neighborhood when I made a surprise visit to her building. I stopped, turned back. “When did it start?”

“Last summer.” Having confessed, he now seemed defiant, ready to answer any question, no matter how painful.

But I had no desire to hear any more answers. I felt exhausted and wanted only to return to the hotel.

Which did not happen for two more hours. I spent them sitting alone on the bus, trying not to hate Marina and Lev, torturing myself with the knowledge that my father had been right about her.

I don’t remember much about the preparations for the launch of the vehicles that would officially become Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 2. The weather turned bad after a week, bringing cold, almost wintry rain that doused the launch center, the town of Tyuratam, and everyone’s spirits. Defense Minister Ustinov flew in for the meeting of the State Commission, and threw everyone into a tizzy by questioning plans for the Soyuz docking. He thought the commander of the active craft — Komarov — should rely more on the automatic docking systems, which had never actually been tested in orbit.

It was impossible to change the procedures this late in the training, of course, but that didn’t stop Artemov and his deputies from putting Komarov and Gagarin through a series of pointless exercises.

On April 19, a group of Air Force generals flew into Tyuratam, among them my father. He left me a note at the desk telling me that he had arrived, that he would be with Marshal Rudenko and General Kamanin and the other chiefs, but he hoped we would see each other.

There was also a letter from Katya, mailed from Moscow. It was just a few lines, saying how much she had enjoyed spending time with me, and most importantly, giving me her address and phone number. That simple letter, following the revelation of Marina’s treachery, lifted my spirits so much that I looked forward to going back to Moscow, something which, for several days, seemed unappealing, now that I knew of the approaching Lev and Marina wedding, not to mention the birth of their child!

On the evening of the twenty-first, my father asked me to join him and the other generals at a dinner in old-town Tyuratam. “It’ll be a great opportunity for you,” he said when I balked. “Buy a few rounds and make sure you thank everyone, because these are the guys who signed your appointment to active duty.”

It was a horrible evening, since I knew no one but my father. Out of boredom — or was it despair over Marina? — I got drunker than I have in years.

What makes the evening stand out in memory was the sight, at two A.M., as we all staggered out of our cars back at the hotel, of cosmonauts Khrunov and Komarov playing tennis! (The eight cosmonauts, along with their trainers and General Kamanin, were staying at another — the only other — hotel near ours. There were too many of them to spend the night in Korolev’s old cottage out at the launch site.) “What the hell are these guys doing out at this hour?” some two-star general grumbled.

“They’re sleep-shifted, General. The launches will take place before dawn, which means they have to wake up around midnight. So they’ve been going to bed and waking up earlier and earlier each night, to change their internal clocks.” That, at least, is what I tried to say… God only knows what the general heard.

But he nodded in approval, and gave me a bear hug. “It’s good to have one of these smart guys along to explain these things,” he said, and over the shoulder of my newfound friend, I could see my father nodding in approval, as behind him, the gentle Komarov smoothly returned the vicious serves of my friend Khrunov.

Three-fifteen A.M., the cold morning of Sunday, April 23, 1967, Area 2, Baikonur. I stood with the crowd outside the assembly building that served the Area 2 pad, and the one at Area 31. Bathed in spotlights, Soyuz spacecraft and launchers stood in both places. Here, in front of me, Colonel Vladimir Komarov, the forty-year-old Hero of the Soviet Union, the first Soviet cosmonaut to make a second flight into space, stepped up to a microphone and addressed the dignitaries about the great honor of making the first manned test flight of Soyuz. Wearing a leather flying jacket over a coverall much like a track suit, Komarov looked rested and eager, unlike the rest of us, who were not sleep-shifted, but merely awake indecently early.

The brief ceremonies concluded, Komarov waved and, accompanied by Gagarin, Artemov, Kamanin, and the crew of the second Soyuz, got into the bus that would take him to the gantry three kilometers away.

Some of the onlookers dispersed to various posts in the control center, others went searching for tea. I hung back, watching the proceedings, wondering how I would feel should I be lucky enough to be in Komarov’s place someday. I could see the brightly lit, frozen, and steaming rocket rising above me. Then the dark landscape of the cosmodrome falling away as I rode the elevator to the ingress level with my backup pilot, with my general, and with the chief designer of my spacecraft.

There was very little room at the top level of the gantry. Kamanin and Artemov would have to stay at the elevator, leaving Gagarin to hand Komarov himself over to the four technicians who would help him into Soyuz. Two of them guided him through the EVA hatch (still too small!) in the side of the orbital module. Another tech waited inside, braced on wooden blocks so as to avoid touching flight equipment, helping Komarov lower himself to a plastic slide we called the “shoehorn,” allowing him to slip feetfirst through the even smaller nose hatch down into the bell-shaped command module. There, the fourth tech, sitting in the empty flight engineer’s couch on the right side of the spacecraft, helped steady Komarov as he carefully descended into the commander’s couch, then helped him hook up his comm lines and fasten his straps. It would be up to this same technician to squeeze past Komarov back up the nose hatch, removing the blocks and shoehorn as he went. The outer hatch would be dogged shut, and the team of technicians and the backup pilot would withdraw.

Within moments Komarov would be alone on top of the rocket, the only human being within a circle six kilometers across.

I had sat in those couches in a similar Soyuz; you hooked your heels into stirrups at the base of your couch, which forced your knees up toward your chin. Of course, it would be roomier in orbit. But if all went well, Komarov would have to make room for two new companions a day into the mission, too!

At 5:30 the viewing area fell silent as flames appeared at the base of the Soyuz, lighting up the dark sky. Sheets of ice cascaded off the rocket as it built up power, then slowly rose, the gantry opening for its escape, the rumble and roar of the first-stage engines rattling the buildings around us.

Soyuz 1 wasn’t even out of sight when I found myself glancing over to the second pad, where Soyuz 2 waited for its turn, twenty-four hours from now.

Shivering with cold, and convinced we had another day of dismal weather ahead of us, I went inside the assembly building, seeing smiling faces wherever I went, including Lev Tselauri’s. Soyuz 1 had reached orbit as planned, eight minutes after launch, and Komarov had reported that all systems were working well. “The Americans better watch out now,” I told Lev.

Grateful for any words from me that weren’t reproachful, Lev smiled and nodded.

I went looking for a couch to take a nap, since there was no point in returning to the hotel, forty kilometers away, only to have to come back here later in the day for the second launch. Besides, most members of the State Commission and the dozens of journalists covering the mission were right here, filling the offices on the second floor.

I had barely stretched out under my coat on a bed of tarps when I felt someone shaking my shoulder. “Get up, Ribko.” It was Dubnin, my comrade from the Aral Sea rescue. “We’re going on standby.”

Things had started to go wrong with Soyuz 1 an hour after reaching orbit. One of the twin solar-power panels, designed to spring out from the side of the equipment module like a wing, had failed to deploy. This was a fairly serious problem, since it limited the amount of power available for necessary spacecraft systems such as life support and navigation. In fact, without the second solar panel, Soyuz 1 could probably only operate for about twenty hours of flight. Now, this was enough time to perform a docking with Soyuz 2 and the EVA. My good friend cosmonaut Saditsky, one of several carrying information to and from the commission members on the second floor, said that some bureau engineers were talking about having Khrunov and Yeliseyev physically free the stuck panel during their EVA, an idea that I thought insane. It would be difficult enough for them to perform the simple tasks they had rehearsed: To effect repair work on equipment not designed for it, on a panel that could suddenly spring free and hit them, was dangerously stupid.

The diminished power problem, though serious, was not the biggest threat to the success of the mission. Komarov was unable to orient the spacecraft with any predictability. Engineers here at Baikonur, and with the team of specialists down at the control center in Yevpatoriya, suspected that exhaust gases from steering rockets had fogged over the optical sensor designed to lock onto the sun and certain stars.

Without orientation, there was no way for Komarov to perform the engine burns that would shape his orbit for rendezvous. He was, after all, flying the active craft of the pair.

In early afternoon, on his fifth orbit, Komarov tried to orient Soyuz by sighting on Earth’s horizon. This, too, failed. Shortly after that, his Soyuz 1 sailed off into a series of orbits that took him over Africa and America, outside our tracking and communication system. Komarov was supposed to rest during this eight-hour period, but I doubt he slept any more than did the commission members boiling up and down the stairs to the second floor, hurrying into and out of cars that roared off toward Tyuratam. (One of the earlier ones carried Gagarin, off to serve as a voice link to Komarov from Yevpatoriya.) Or any better than his comrades, Bykovsky, Khrunov, and Yeliseyev, who had to go to bed about two P.M. that afternoon, just in case they still had to launch.

By seven P.M., the rescue team had moved to the Outskirts Airfield, and were standing by, which for most of us meant finding food, smoking, or catching naps.

Since I was known to have been a bureau engineer on Soyuz, I was continually asked what I thought. Would we be flying out to recover Komarov next morning? Or would it be Komarov, Yeliseyev, Khrunov the following day? I wanted to be honest about the unlikelihood of a second launch and docking, but didn’t want to encourage the others to relax. So I stuck to the Party line: Komarov was a well-trained pilot and engineer, support teams here at Baikonur, at Yevpatoriya, and in Moscow were working to fulfill the mission, and so on.

“You’re full of shit,” Dubnin said, finally.

Complicating our preparations was a rainstorm that blew through the area in the afternoon, just enough water to turn every spot of bare earth into a muddy sea. Flight controllers wouldn’t want to land Komarov in the middle of this, but then, the prime recovery zone was dozens of kilometers to the north and west. Was it raining there? Nobody seemed to know.

At midnight, contact was reestablished with Komarov. He had slept fitfully; the solar panel was still stuck; and the solar orientation system was still broken. The State Commission canceled the Soyuz 2 launch, and decided to land Komarov at the beginning of his seventeenth orbit, about 5:30 in the morning.

We were ordered to be ready to take off in three hours.

28 Orsk

An hour before we climbed into the Ilyushin-18 that was to carry us to Aralsk — site of my “hospitalization” following my adventure on the ice — the word came to “stand by.”

“What’s gone wrong now?” Dubnin asked.

Since I had at least a theoretical chance of understanding what was causing the delay, I got on the telephone to the tower dispatcher who had waved us off, and learned that as Komarov and Soyuz 1 flew around Earth on their fifteenth orbit, instructions for his reentry burn were radioed up to him. But communications were spotty, and no one on the ground was certain he would be able to execute them with the failed orientation system.

Sure enough, ninety minutes later, as Komarov flew over Africa at the end of his sixteenth orbit, the stations tracking Soyuz 1 saw no change in its trajectory. Once in voice contact, Komarov confirmed that the ion sensor had lost its fix as the spacecraft moved into darkness, and the Soyuz autopilot had prevented the retro-rockets from firing.

This was a problem, but not a disaster, and not even unprecedented: The Voskhod 2 cosmonauts, Belyayev and Leonov, had had to postpone a reentry burn. What complicated matters was the lack of power aboard Soyuz 1. Komarov couldn’t just go round and round Earth waiting for the perfect daylight opportunity. He only had two more chances, the seventeenth and eighteenth orbits. And there was no time to recalculate the complex maneuvers for a manual reentry in time to get them to Komarov for a landing on the seventeenth.

So it was to be the eighteenth orbit, with a projected touchdown time of 8:30 Baikonur time.

This information allowed us to file a new flight plan, because the prime landing zone shifted farther to the west, toward the city of Orenburg, a two-hour flight.

We couldn’t take off as quickly as we wanted; we had to wait for General Kamanin and several of his staff, who came racing up in a single car, right onto the pavement of the runway apron, where one of the local generals met them.

Finally we took off, at 6:45, hours after we should have, knowing that Komarov’s Soyuz was probably going to have landed by the time we reached the area. The local Air Defense Force units, not officially part of the recovery team, were put on alert and told to have helicopters ready.

Kamanin brought us the latest information, that Komarov had made a good reentry burn, though he would now follow a ballistic trajectory. The bell-shaped Soyuz, like Gemini and Apollo, had a slightly offset center of gravity, allowing it to generate a small amount of lift in order to adjust its landing point. But the orientation had to be perfect, which was not the case for Soyuz 1. Using the ballistic method, the spacecraft would spin slowly about its long axis, negating the lift, making the trajectory steeper and increasing the G forces felt by the pilot. Knowing this, however, flight controllers projected Komarov’s landing site to be east of the city of Orsk, which was itself almost two hundred kilometers east of Orenburg, shortening our trip by half an hour.

Like most of those on the plane, I dozed as we droned west. Only Kamanin, carefully writing in a small notebook, stayed awake.

At one point, halfway to Orsk, a pale lieutenant colonel with Kamanin muttered, “He should be down by now.”

“Thank God,” Kamanin said. “This was too ambitious for a first flight. Two spacecraft, four cosmonauts, docking, spacewalks. What the hell were we thinking?”

He noticed me blinking sleepily across from him. “Getting out of Artemov’s organization is a smart move for you, Ribko.”

I was so tired it took me fifteen minutes to realize that Kamanin had just told me I was getting a job at the cosmonaut training center. I wasn’t so tired, however, that I assumed he meant as a cosmonaut.

Even from the air, Orsk looked like a grim little town, nothing but identical gray apartment buildings wreathed in smoke and dust. The only striking sights on the horizon were several factory smokestacks, clearly the source of the pollution.

As we strapped in for landing a little after ten A.M., Dubnin wound up next to me. “Your cosmonaut should be at the airport by now.” I hoped so. Kamanin and the other generals would take charge of him, while Dubnin and I flew off with helicopters to recover the spacecraft.

Taxiing in, however, it was clear that Komarov had not arrived. A faded yellow bus raced toward us, meeting our party as we came down the stairs. It had barely stopped and we had barely managed to drink in the noxious spring air of Orsk when a bald major general popped out of the bus, a gray look on his face. “General Kamanin, I’m General Avtonomov, deputy district commander. Soyuz 1 landed at 8:24 about sixty-five kilometers east of here.” He clearly didn’t want to say what came next: “The spacecraft is reported to be on fire and the cosmonaut has not been found.”

Kamanin and his colleagues exchanged quick glances. So did Dubnin and I. Fatigued and confused, I could not really react to the awful news. Soyuz on fire? Where would Komarov be? He couldn’t eject.

Just then a smaller car drove up, disgorging another general, this one wearing two stars, identifying himself as Lieutenant General Tsedrik, Avtonomov’s boss. “We just got a telephone call from a Rocket Force unit in Novo-orsk. They say Komarov is in a hospital in a settlement a few kilometers from the landing site.”

That was more promising: Soyuz 1 could have crash-landed, injuring Komarov, who was then taken to a hospital. “Let’s get going,” Dubnin said, but Tsedrik was going on: “I’ve reported this information to the Ministry of Defense.”

“We’re going to the landing site,” Kamanin said. “Is the helicopter ready?”

“Minister Ustinov insisted that you call him the moment you arrived,” Tsedrik said nervously, obviously not wanting to get into a crossfire between Ustinov and Kamanin.

“Until I’ve found Komarov and visited the spacecraft, I have nothing to report,” Kamanin snapped. He pointed at Tsedrik, at one of his generals, one of his colonels, then at Dubnin and me. “Come along.” And we marched toward the Mi-8, whose rotor was already beginning to turn.

Within five minutes we were in the air, and not long after that the navigator of the helicopter handed a message to Kamanin, who glanced at it, and smiled bitterly. “It’s from Vershinin himself,” he said to his aide, naming the commander in chief of the Soviet Air Force. “He wants me to go back to Orsk and call Ustinov.”

“What do I tell the pilot?” the navigator asked.

“Keep flying,” Kamanin ordered.

Which we did, for half an hour. Finally Dubnin could stand it no longer. “We should be there by now,” he said, then he hauled himself up to the cockpit.

“He’s right,” Kamanin said, following him.

It was difficult to hear over the flapping of the rotors, but Kamanin and Dubnin got into an argument with the pilot.

Moments later they were back with the rest of us, faces flushed. “Can you believe that?” Dubnin was practically screaming. “They were taking us in the wrong fucking direction!”

Kamanin overlooked Dubnin’s intemperate outburst, probably because he shared the sentiment. “Remind me to call Kutasin the moment I am back in Orsk,” he said to Tsedrik. “I look forward to hearing how a trained rescue crew can get lost in clear weather.”

Kutasin was the guy in charge of the recovery aircraft and pilots. From Kamanin’s voice, I assumed he wouldn’t be in charge much longer.

It was 11:30, three hours after Komarov’s landing, that his official welcoming team finally reached the landing site, a grassy prairie unbroken by tree or hill. The wind blew from the west, carrying a heavy, burning-chemical smell.

Our misdirection meant that a second helicopter from Orsk, carrying the rest of Kamanin’s staff, beat us. The original rescue helicopter was also still parked here. A small crowd had also gathered — workers from some nearby collective farm, a couple of soldiers in the uniform of the Rocket Force, and for some reason, a group of science students. I guess they had happened to be in the area.

Soyuz 1 itself could not be seen — not as a spacecraft, anyway. It was a smoldering lump of earth at one end of a tangled parachute. “Go to that hospital, now,” Kamanin ordered Tsedrik. “See if Komarov is there.”

Tsedrik saluted and turned back to our helicopter. Did he realize how pointless his mission was? No one could have survived this crash.

As we walked toward the wreckage, we were briefed by the pilot of the original search-and-rescue helicopter. “The farmers say the vehicle came down like a rock, twisting at the end of the ’chute, which didn’t open.” Not only one parachute, I saw, but both the primary and reserves; they had somehow deployed together. Komarov never had a chance.

“The vehicle hit, then exploded and began to burn.”

“The soft-landing rockets,” I said, though no one asked me.

“The farmers threw dirt on it, to kill the flames, but…” He shrugged. There was truly nothing more that he could say.

Dubnin grabbed a shovel from one of the onlookers and began jabbing it into the wreckage. “Careful!” I said. “The fumes are toxic.”

“I’ll hold my breath.”

In the mound of dirt and shattered metal, only one piece of the spacecraft was identifiable: the round silvery ring of the forward hatch that connected the command module and orbital module.

I got a shovel myself, and for the next hour Dubnin and I struggled to remove the earth that had been piled on the wreckage. “What did they use, a bulldozer?” Dubnin said at one point. In any other circumstances, I’d have laughed.

Eventually we were able to push the hatch ring to one side. Below it were the remains of the control panel, which had merely shattered into a mass of wires and metal fragments rather than simply burning. This conglomeration was imbedded in a completely scorched set of structures that I recognized as the crew couches. In the middle of this was a twisted, broken microphone attached to a blackened fragment of a white communications headset — and, I soon saw, a blackened lump that was all that remained of Colonel Komarov.

My father’s generation saw much of death, women and children blown to pieces by Nazi bombs, soldiers cut in half by machine-gun bullets and vaporized by artillery shells, friends who disappeared into the cellar of the Lubiyanka, and thence to some lime pit.

I had only my mother’s slow, painful deterioration to guide me. The sight of poor Komarov in his destroyed Soyuz made me weep. All I could do was point with the shovel. Dubnin signaled to Kamanin and the others—“We need a coffin!”—and I was gently moved aside as the medical team took over.

One of the farmer’s wives brought me some tea and I sat on the grass. Kamanin examined the wreckage, then, patting me on the shoulder, hurried back to his helicopter to make his horrifying report to Ustinov and the Central Committee.

After a while Dubnin sat down with me, offering a shot of the worst vodka I have ever tasted. “We have nothing left to do. They want the wreckage to stay as it is.”

“Forever?” I said, stupidly.

“Until they’ve analyzed the site.” Only then did I see that a photographer was making a record of the pathetic scene. “Some specialists from Moscow are on their way. They deal with airplane crashes.”

Our small recovery team was ignored for the next several hours, as various aircraft and vehicles arrived. Some carried members of the State Commission from Baikonur — General Kerimov, General Tyulin, General Rudenko. A lot of generals. Kamanin returned from Orsk.

Artemov came from Yevpatoriya with a group of bureau types to stand there shaking their heads.

Gagarin arrived with Artemov. He looked like a man who had lost his brother and wanted to take it out on someone. “This was your fault,” he said to Artemov.

“We don’t know whose fault this was,” Artemov replied, lamely.

“Bullshit. You broke your own rules to launch this thing because you wanted to look like a big hero for May Day. How do you like it now? Think you’re going to be made a Hero of Socialist Labor for this fuckup?”

Gagarin was a tiny man compared to Artemov but the Ukrainian shrank from him in fear. Kamanin, who wasn’t much taller than Gagarin, intervened at this point and steered the first man in space away to cool down. Artemov was left shaking with rage, pointing at Gagarin’s back. I don’t know exactly what he said, but the words “that little shit” carried to me.

It was getting dark out on the prairie, and the helicopter carrying Komarov’s coffin was ready to lift off. Kamanin ordered the official photographer, Dubnin, and me to fly with him back to Orsk. By this time I believe he had been awake for thirty hours straight; he fell asleep the moment we were in the air.

A battalion of cadets from a local military school were lined up on the runway as an honor guard as Kamanin and his aides and Dubnin and I carried the coffin to the same 11–18 that had brought us here from Baikonur about a month ago — or so it seemed that night.

Before we took off, there was another call from Moscow, from Marshal Vershinin, its contents relayed to Kamanin by one of the aides. “The marshal wants to be reassured that Komarov’s body isn’t too disfigured for an open-casket ceremony.”

For the first time all day, Kamanin’s temper exploded. He told me to open the coffin and summoned the photographer. I did as told, trying not to look at the slab of coal, perhaps the size of a human thigh, resting on white satin. “Take a picture for the marshal.” Then he turned to the aide: “Tell the marshal that the body will be cremated as soon as we reach Moscow. If he wants to view something, let him view an urn.”

29 Senior Engineer-Lieutenant Ribko

Even the flight back to Moscow grew complicated and troublesome: Weather closed Chkalov air base, which was our primary destination, since it was next door to Star Town. Nor could we go to Vnukovo, the big airport that, had things gone better, would have been the site of a May Day greeting for cosmonauts Komarov, Bykovsky, Yeliseyev, and Khrunov.

We wound up at Sheremetyevo, a smaller airport northwest of Moscow, where we waited almost two hours for transportation. While we sat there, we were joined by the other Soyuz crew members, who had flown first from Baikonur to Orsk, then followed us to the Moscow area.

The convoy of official cars brought Komarov’s widow in addition to several cosmonauts from the center. I had seen and felt enough sadness for one day, so I got myself away from them.

Among those greeting us was my father. “Don’t you have any luggage?” he said.

“It’s still in Tyuratam.” The only personal item I carried, other than my passport and my clothing, was the letter from Katya.

As we walked to the car, we could hear wailing behind us. Even some of the waiting drivers were wiping away tears. “Christ,” my father said, “this is terrible. People haven’t cried like this since Stalin died.”

I had been so immersed in the sorry business at hand I had completely forgotten about the larger world. Obviously Komarov’s death had been announced to the public, which included the Americans. Were they jumping up and down now, realizing that once again the Moon race was even?

Or was it even? The very ambitious and complex goals planned for Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 2 had been met by the Americans a year or more ahead of us. They had conducted rendezvous half a dozen times while we had yet to accomplish it once. Their tracking and recovery systems were superb. Their Saturn rockets were now equal or superior to our Proton, and their even more powerful Saturn V-5 was inching closer to a test.

Perhaps it was my fatigue, but that night, as my father’s driver took us back to Kaliningrad, I felt that the race was over, that our programs were second- or even third-rate — fine for scoring risky “spectaculars,” not so good for a complex challenge like landing a man on the Moon, and returning him safely to Earth.

Imagine my feelings, then, when my father turned to me and said, “Vershinin signed the order yesterday, before he knew about Komarov.”

“What order?” I’m sure I sounded irritated.

“The order enrolling you in the cosmonaut team.”

The order—? So I had made it after all. Kamanin had known it before we left Baikonur. How did I respond? I laughed out loud. “That is perfect timing.”

My father frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Our space program just crashed, Papa. Could there be a worse time to become a cosmonaut?”

“Airplanes crash all the time.”

“Airplanes fly by the hundreds. Not once every two years.”

“They’ll be flying again by November seventh.” This was another big anniversary, of the 1917 Revolution. “That’s what they’re saying at headquarters.”

“They can say whatever they want. There aren’t going to be any Russian cosmonauts in space for a year, maybe two.”

Now he was getting irritated. “You’re tired. Get some sleep and maybe in the morning you can appreciate the chance you’ve got.”

“I do appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for everything you’ve done.” I was sincere, though it took me a moment to realize it. “When am I supposed to report?” I didn’t want to show up at Star Town in my uniform the day of Komarov’s funeral. I would also need a couple of weeks to get free of the bureau. My God, I had to break this news to Triyanov, to Filin.

And to Uncle Vladimir.

“Monday, May eighth. It’s all in the papers.”

I nodded. Actually, I had it easy: I already lived in the neighborhood. Some of my new colleagues would be coming from remote air bases, uprooting families.

We pulled up to my building. “Yuri, you’ll do fine in the service. Even if you don’t fly in space, they’ll have work to do. Space engineering, which is what you said you wanted.”

“I know.”

“You’re better off in the military than with Artemov. I didn’t like what I saw out at Baikonur, and I wasn’t the only one. I don’t care who his protector is, bad things are going to happen to that man, and you don’t want to get caught in the wash. Get out of that bureau and stay as far away from it as you can.”

This was a tone of voice I had rarely heard from my father. It reminded me, in fact, of Uncle Vladimir’s, when talking about the “basement.” I didn’t want to see anyone arrested and shot, but at the moment I had little sympathy for Artemov, or for Lev, or for the many people in the bureau between those two.

I said good-bye, then went up to my flat.

I didn’t sleep well that night. On the plane from Orsk to Moscow, I had heard enough details about Komarov’s heroism to thoroughly imagine his last moments. How he had performed a manual orientation of Soyuz as it approached the end of the seventeenth orbit, lining up the spacecraft by sighting on the day/night terminator, then restarting the autopilot to steer the vehicle through the darkness. He had had to resume manual control for a brief, frantic moment when Soyuz 1 emerged into sunlight again, to make sure it was still oriented properly, then let the autopilot command the engine firing. All this while knowing he had at best three more hours of power, that an orientation failure would mean death in the atmosphere, and even the delay of another orbit would force him to try to land in Europe or, more likely, in the Atlantic Ocean.

Komarov was well-trained for each of these events, but had never rehearsed them all in this sequence, and in such demanding circumstances.

Yet, he had done the job brilliantly, performing the guidance checks, observing the retro firing, the jettisoning of the equipment module followed by the orbital module, and plunging into the atmosphere — where the last Soyuz had suffered a heat-shield failure, frying its insides.

He emerged from the radio blackout caused by reentry and reported the burn times to Yevpatoriya. The only other communication from him was a mention of the parachute problem. Then nothing, as Soyuz 1 plummeted to the prairie at three hundred kilometers an hour.

Hearing all this, is it any wonder I dreamed I was falling, falling, falling?

At a few moments past eight the next morning, after this fitful sleep, I stood in Triyanov’s office as he examined the documents from the Ministry of Defense. “I don’t believe this!” He was so angry his face flushed and the muscles stood out in his neck. “Have we treated you that badly, Ribko?”

“No, sir,” I said, lying only slightly. Triyanov had been fair and supportive. Artemov was another matter. “I felt I could better serve my country—” I started to say.

“Don’t give me that shit,” he said. “Don’t even try to justify it! You’re going over to the enemy.” He seemed to boil over. “You won’t like serving under Kuznetsov: He’s from the old school.” Kuznetsov was the commander of the cosmonaut training center under Kamanin. I had not heard many good things about him. “You’re going to regret this.”

I couldn’t let that statement go unchallenged. “How can you say that? You spent thirty years in the Air Force.”

“I had no other choice! I didn’t have a fancy Bauman education and a job like this.” He practically threw the papers back at me. “You think you’re getting off the ship just before it sinks, don’t you?”

I was too slow denying it. Triyanov smiled bitterly. “Well, maybe you’ll be right. God knows, we’re in for a rough few months.” He fumed in silence for a moment. “Well, you might as well leave now. Everything here will be frozen while those responsible for Soyuz 1 are identified and punished.” He stood up then, and to my surprise, rather than punching me, held out his hand. “Good luck, Yuri.”

I shook it. Then, surprising me again, Triyanov snapped a salute, which I returned. “Better work on that,” he said.

By noon I had cleaned out my desk, gathered my Baikonur luggage (which had arrived back at Chkalov early that morning), and signed out at the bureau personnel office. I had one more stop to make — Filin.

Nadiya the birdwoman was guarding the gate, as usual. “He’s not here,” she said, not even bothering to look up, or hear what I had to say.

“Do you expect him soon?”

Now she raised her head. “He had to leave for Feodosiya this morning.” Feodosiya was the test site in the Crimea where parachutes were packed. Yes, there would many trips to Feodosiya in the next few weeks for those investigating the Soyuz 1 disaster.

I took out a pencil and paper, and scribbled a note. “Would you give this to him?”

Then I walked out the main gate, away from the job I had dreamed about such a short time ago.

There remained the matter of Uncle Vladimir. When I returned to my flat, I telephoned his office, and was put directly through to him. “I already heard,” he said. There was no reproach in his voice, only a tiredness, which surprised me. After experiencing Triyanov’s rumblings, I expected Uncle Vladimir to explode at me like Vesuvius. But all he said was, “Congratulations.”

“Thank you.”

Then he surprised me again. “Our association will continue. I will be in touch with you shortly concerning your new tasks.”

He hung up then, not waiting for an argument, not that I was in a position to make one. The message was frightening: It was one thing to be a spy inside an organization like the Korolev bureau… it was one of the functions of State Security to report on industrial enterprises.

But the military was different. There, political officers represented the Party, serving as a guard against sabotage or subversion. There weren’t supposed to be informants like me, especially in elite units like the cosmonaut team.

I had been unable to escape detection in the Korolev bureau, and it had effectively ruined my career. What price could I expect to pay if discovered? It would be a lot worse than exile to the spacecraft recovery team, possibly even prison.

So I had not escaped after all. I was merely going to be Uncle Vladimir’s spy inside Star Town.

These were my thoughts as I listened to somber music on the radio, and the announcer describing Komarov’s funeral cortege into Red Square.

I glanced at the new uniform hanging in my open closet, and felt more lonely than I had in years, since the day my mother died.

I took the crumpled letter off my table and dialed Katya’s number.

Interlude

I had to leave Russia after my second series of tapings with Yuri Ribko — to his relief, I suspect. It must have been difficult for him to sit there with me, hour by hour, discussing this very painful period in his country’s life, not to mention his own personal crises.

But he did it, with generally good grace, and I piled up a dozen cassettes filled with his narrative before returning home to Washington, where the travails of our chief executive were drawing journalists like, to borrow a phrase from Yuri Ribko, shit draws flies.

As the presidential scandal played itself out, another crisis erupted in Russia itself, this one over the collapse of the ruble. As my magazine’s Russia “specialist,” and the one least eager to pry “scoops” out of the special prosecutor’s office, I was shipped back to Moscow for a shorter visit.

Even though only a few months had passed since my winter trip, I could see that people were in a more subdued, resigned mood, almost like wartime. Dennis Gulyayev, my contact at the Russian Space Agency, was actually hostile. “Your bankers did this to us,” whatever this was.

So I was on my own reaching Yuri Ribko, calling his flat from the Penta Hotel one night, in between charmingly accented messages from various prostitutes offering to drop by.

At Ribko’s, a woman answered, in English. “Oh, yes, I’m sure he’d like to talk to you.”

Yuri answered, quickly determined where I was, and offered to come down and see me. “You won’t have any luck traveling out here.”

He hung up before I could ask the name of the woman on the phone. Katya?

Yuri was limping as he entered the lobby of the Penta. He looked thinner, paler. “I tripped on the street, like a drunk,” he said, when I expressed concern. “Stone-cold sober, too.”

We found a quiet place in the hotel bar, not an impossible task on this weekday night. “Nineteen sixty-seven was a terrible year for everyone,” Ribko said suddenly. “You lost your Apollo astronauts in January, and then had all these other accidents.” It was true: 1967 was a black year for American astronauts. In addition to Grissom, White, and Chaffee, two other NASA astronauts died in accidents (car and airplane crashes) while one of the Air Force’s Manned Orbiting Laboratory astronauts got killed at Edwards. The X-15 had its first fatal crash in 1967, too.

“We lost Komarov, then had two L-1 missions fail miserably. They never even reached orbit.” I had my notes on these: L-1 Number 4 failed on September 18, 1967, when only five of the six engines in the first stage of its Universal Rocket lit as planned, a failure that allowed the L-1 to make a successful test of the launch escape system.

L-1 Number 5, launched November 21, 1967, got a little higher before the second stage of its Universal Rocket failed. The launch escape system was tested again, landing the reentry module some 285 kilometers downrange.

“There was one triumph,” Ribko said. “We finally got two Soyuz ships docked in orbit, and returned them safely.” He was talking about the Cosmos 186 and 188 missions of late October 1967, which accomplished a tricky automatic docking in space, before separating and reentering separately. “Even then, the damned orientation system on one of the craft failed and it made a ballistic reentry, just like poor Komarov.”

“Did it crash?”

“No. We’d solved the parachute problem by then.” He went on to tell me how the commissions investigating the Komarov disaster had taken two months to come to the official conclusion that the parachutes had been packed improperly. “The real problem, I found out later,” Ribko said, “was that during a thermal test of both spacecraft, some idiot left the covers off the parachute canisters. The heat melted parts of the canisters and prevented the ’chutes from coming out cleanly. Neither ship was safe to fly.

“This means that even if the other problems hadn’t happened, if we had gone ahead and launched Soyuz 2, we would have had four dead cosmonauts, not just one.”

As for the Americans, 1967 was a time for regrouping. Only on November 7 of that year, the very day Ustinov and the Central Committee had once hoped to mark with a manned L-1 flight around the Moon, NASA launched the first of its giant Saturn 5 moon rockets, a spectacular success. “Yes, the Saturn V-5,” Ribko insisted on calling it, noting its genesis in the design of the Nazi V-2 rocket, and its builder, Wernher von Braun.

“By December 1967, both of us, the USSR and the U.S.A., had picked ourselves up, like runners who had stumbled in a race, and taken one or two tentative steps.…”