Red Moon

41 The Fraternity Of Eagles

On Monday, May 6, 1968, almost a year to the day of my arrival at Star Town, I was called into Colonel Belyayev’s office along with Shiborin after we had showered following exercise.

Belyayev looked tired and unhappy; Shiborin, thanks to his friends in the fraternity of eagles (as the pilots called themselves), had told me earlier that the training center doctors were trying to ground Belyayev. “They say he’s got some problem with his heart, like Slayton, the American astronaut. But who can believe those sons of bitches after what happened in January?”

January, of course, was when the cosmonaut team had suffered a purge in which five students had been dismissed. Every one of the dismissals eventually was laid to “medical disqualification,” thanks to the willingness of the medical staff to cooperate with General Kamanin — who, through no coincidence, supervised the Aviation Hospital in addition to the manned space program — in finding a face-saving way of getting rid of those he wanted to get rid of. It was ludicrous to believe that five healthy young officers, having already passed the rigorous medical exams to get into the cosmonaut team, would in two years’ time become so unfit they had to be dismissed!

“I thought hero-cosmonauts didn’t have to worry about the doctors.”

“As long as Kamanin and Kuznetsov are on their side. But both of them are angry with Belyayev.” Well, he had let discipline slide: A couple of weeks ago a couple of inspectors from Kamanin’s staff had made a surprise visit to the morning exercises, which, luckily enough, both Shiborin and I were attending, and found less than a third of the cosmonauts present. Belyayev was also being blamed because some of the boys got drunk during the trips to Baikonur and Yevpatoriya supporting the last L-1 failure, though I don’t know what Kamanin and the others expected; you ship these guys off to fairly remote locations to do a job, then punish them when they find some way to amuse themselves when the job vanishes. “They’re going to put Nikolayev in Gagarin’s post, and that leaves Belyayev right where he is.”

Gagarin had been the deputy director of the training center when he died, and it was clear Kamanin was grooming him to eventually take over from Kuznetsov. Being director of the center was a very desirable job: interesting work, tremendous power, and the ability — if one chose to exploit it — to live like the ruler of a small country.

“So they won’t let him fly, but they won’t let him move up the chain of command.” A very frustrating situation, even if you weren’t an eagle.

“He’ll probably chew us out just to make himself feel better.”

Nothing like that happened, of course. Belyayev merely acknowledged our salutes, and told us to sit down. “You’ve both performed well in your initial training so far, and with the search-and-rescue teams for the crash.

“We are assigning you both to support the lunar programs L-1 and L-3. These will be part-time positions; you will still continue your student training under my supervision, including the mandatory exercise program.” Belyayev was looking at paperwork on his desk when he added this, missing the smug look Shiborin fired at me. “Your primary job will be to serve as flight-crew representatives to the factories making the rocket and the spacecraft. It’s not flying, but it’s very important work. We need our own eyes and ears in these places.”

Just like that, my cosmonaut career took a major turn. I was going to be spared the tedium of working on the military Soyuz program, or in the Almaz space-station team — both vehicles were years away from test flights and had yet to appear at the center in the form of actual hardware rather than wooden mockups.

The lunar programs were the reason I had wanted to become a cosmonaut. I was still thrilled with the idea of planting my country’s flag on that dark, rocky soil, a crescent earth above me. I knew, of course, that I could never be first: One of our cosmonauts, or some American, would beat me. But to get there at all would be a dream, and to work on the hardware was one giant step toward fulfilling that dream.

My only regret, hearing the news of the assignment (and the further orders that Shiborin and I were to fly to Baikonur tomorrow morning), was that I would have no chance to pursue my private investigation of the deaths of Korolev and Gagarin. Given the resources available to me at that time — which is to say, none — perhaps this was for the best.

Shiborin, ever the eagle, managed to talk his way into the cockpit of the Tu-104 heading east the next morning. I rode on the hard metal benches with a group of engineers from, I soon learned, the Kuznetsov bureau, builders of jet engines who had moved into the rocket field in the past couple of years. Not too happily, to judge from their comments.

As the green of the Moscow District gave way to steppe and desert, I began to think of my mother, now revealed to me as a spy for State Security. Or so Uncle Vladimir had said; again, I had no confirmation. She had been exiled to a wasteland populated only by dangerous weapons and those who worked on them, and never seemed the same. What had happened to her out here?

What would happen to me?

Gagarin’s death did nothing to appease the demons dragging down our space program — demons who worked for Uncle Vladimir, I was now convinced. Ustinov insisted on additional unmanned test flights of the Soyuz; fine, in principle, but there were only two more vehicles that could be ready for launch within the next few months. The canny minds in the Ministry of General Machine-Building had not been able to find enough money to build more Soyuz spacecraft when they were needed. If two more were wasted on yet another set of tests, there would be no manned launch until the fall of the year.

These same ministers were insisting we send two cosmonauts around the Moon in a relatively untested L-1! The eighth L-1 wasn’t even completely built, though we expected it to be shipped to Baikonur in time for a launch attempt in July. Two successful unmanned tests of the L-1 were required before Soviet cosmonauts could follow.

What was waiting for Shiborin and me and the boys from the Kuznetsov organization at Baikonur was the first of the Carrier rockets, the giant white shells (at least that’s what the Carrier looked like to me: an artillery round) that were to lift the L-3 lander and yet another version of the Soyuz into Earth orbit, then fire them toward the Moon.

The weather at Tyuratam was beautifully springlike. We were quartered in a new hotel, the Cosmonaut, just opened in spite of the fact that it was not completely finished: The floors in my room were still bare wood. But with the warm nights and warmer days, it was tolerable.

That afternoon Shiborin and I were bused to the launch site along with the Kuznetsov workers. I had not visited Baikonur since joining the military cosmonaut team, and was stunned by the amount of construction that had been finished in little more than a year: The assembly building at Area 1 that had formerly dominated the landscape was now dwarfed by a longer, taller structure to the north. Beyond that was a pair of launchpads, massive concrete pits, each one flanked by a lightning tower 180 meters tall and a launch-support structure, an open collection of platforms, pipes, and girders 145 meters high, that, I was informed by one of my fellow travelers, actually moved to one side prior to ignition of the Carrier rocket itself.

This new assembly complex was called Area 110; the pads were 100-Right and 100-Left. And heading for 100-Right was a Carrier, flat on its side, giant conical tail first.

Even Shiborin was impressed. “Too bad the Americans can’t take a look at this. They’d quit.”

“Their Saturn is bigger,” I said. “And, believe me, they’re watching this right now. We could stand out on a field and wave, and in a few days our pictures would be at the CIA.” I think my statement surprised him. The fact that the USSR flew picture-taking spy satellites for years was well-known; it was what most, if not all, of our many Cosmos spacecraft were. Shiborin was probably not aware that America’s spy-satellite program was even more extensive, and had been active longer, or so my father had once told me.

“Maybe I should drop my pants and show them my ass.” Shiborin hated any suggestion that the U.S. was superior to the Worker’s Paradise.

We entered the cavernous assembly building, where pieces of yet another Carrier were stacked. I got my first good look at the first stage of the monster, and counted thirty engines in it! It was as appalling as it was daring. Even the American rocket program, blessed with the cream of Nazi designers and their years of experience, had shied away from the Nova rocket because its first stage required eight engines. I could have stood looking at this beast all afternoon, but at that moment I saw something equally, or even more, interesting — my old friend Lev Tselauri.

He was, as we all were by now, wearing a white coat. Unlike Shiborin and me, who were gaping at the unassembled Carrier like peasants inspecting a new tractor, he was busily putting our Kuznetsov bureau companions to work. I debated how to approach him. If I should.

Then he solved the problem for me, excusing himself from the clutch of white coats and walking toward me. Shiborin noted this. “Friend of yours?” he said.

“I don’t exactly know.”

Lev’s arms opened and he embraced me. “It’s good to see you,” he said. “Marina told me how you came to check on her.”

Remembering the exact events of that social call — I tortured myself by thinking about our kiss at every opportunity — only made me feel more guilty. But it was clear that Lev was once again my friend. Or, at least, my ally. I felt this when I introduced him to Shiborin, when Lev asked if we could speak privately.

“I feel responsible for what happened to you,” I told Lev. “Your interrogation.”

“Why? Did you denounce me?”

“No. But I talked you into leaving the Chelomei bureau.”

He laughed. “I wouldn’t have missed the last year for anything! It’s been most educational. Artemov, Filin, Feoktistov, all of them — they are fascinating men. Brilliant engineers, each in his own way.” He pointed up at the Carrier’s first stage. “Of course, my old boss, Chelomei, has a monster Moon rocket of his own on the drawing board. Much better than this.”

“Is he going to build it?”

“If he had the money, he would. But our country is committed now to this one.”

“It looks impressive.”

“Yes, it does. If it flies, it will be even more impressive.”

“You sound doubtful.”

Lev shook his head and looked at the concrete floor. Though new, it was already showing cracks, perhaps due to the strain of bearing the monstrous weight of the Carrier. “It’s a collection of compromises. Too many engines. My God, thirty in the first stage. The Saturn 5 has only five. So did the second stage of that vehicle, though they were smaller, and two of them failed on the launch last month.”

“Well, with thirty engines, surely we can withstand a failure or two.”

“If one engine fails, you automatically lose a second.” Now he pointed at the tail section, where two dozen engines were arrayed around the rim, like points on a twenty-four-hour clock, with six clustered in the center. “Each engine has a twin on the opposite side. If, say, number 3 fails, number 17 automatically shuts down, to keep the thrust symmetrical.”

“Then the remaining engines have to burn slightly longer.”

“Correct. I see that you’ve retained your keen Bauman training.” He smiled as he took out a cigarette and lit it. “It’s a plumbing nightmare, though.”

“How did such brilliant engineers like Artemov and Filin let this happen?”

“The failures of this design, according to Artemov, are Korolev’s fault. For one thing, he wouldn’t use the fuels Glushko wanted.” Glushko was the master builder of Soviet rocket engines. “They had such a huge disagreement that Glushko refused to work on the project. Which is why we’ve got Kuznetsov’s designs, which aren’t as powerful or reliable—”

“Which is why you’ve got thirty engines as opposed to twelve or—”

“—or five, like the Saturn or Chelomei’s 700 rocket. It’s going to be very difficult to teach the Carrier to fly. The one on the pad right now never will.”

That was news to me. “I thought the first launch was going to take place as soon as the fit checks were complete.”

“Theoretically, it could.” He gestured with his cigarette toward the area just above the thirty clustered engines. “But we found stress cracks in the first one before we even raised it to vertical. Someone badly blundered in calculating the strength of materials, especially once subjected to extreme cold.” The fuel tanks in the Carrier used only kerosene, as Korolev had insisted, but the oxidizer was liquid oxygen, cooled to minus 150 degrees.

“ ‘Those responsible will be punished.’ ” I assumed Triyanov and the rest of the kindergarten still had reason to say this.

“If not punished, then interrogated at length.”

“That must have been awful.”

“Surprisingly.” He took one last drag from his cigarette, then stubbed it out against the skin of the Carrier tail section. No one seemed to notice. “At first we all thought it was some kind of joke. But they actually drove some black vans up to the bureau and started taking us away.”

“Where to?”

“The Lubiyanka itself. Not to the basement, just to the interrogation rooms. They started grilling us about sabotage. The L-1 failures, the parachutes on Soyuz, the fucking guidance system. Of course, you know and I know that most of the failures are subsystems: The bureau doesn’t build the parachutes, we subcontract them to Tkachev’s bureau. Guidance, too. We do the overall design and assembly, but we depend on the subcontractors to deliver parts to spec.

“They didn’t give a shit about the facts. I mean, they started complaining about Proton failures. Well, first-stage problems were Chelomei’s business. The upper stage was the only thing you could fairly blame us for.

“As far as I know, every one of those failures can be explained by sloppy workmanship, poor design, obsolete electronics, or just bad luck. But they claimed to have evidence that unauthorized people had access to the vehicles in the assembly buildings here in Baikonur.” He lit up another cigarette. “I guess some mystery saboteur was able to throw a wrench into one engine or pull a wire somewhere else. Who knows?”

“Who was doing the questioning?”

“State Security. One guy in particular was really beating up on me, some fat bastard in a fancy suit. Artemov said later his name was Nefedov.”

He was called away at that point, and I was left there with pieces of the Carrier rocket, knowing I finally had some proof that my dear Uncle Vladimir was truly at the heart of a conspiracy to destroy our Moon program.

42 Carrier

Lev’s prediction regarding the Carrier turned out to be true. As soon as the vehicle was raised into position for launch, cracks were “discovered” by inspectors working for the State Commission. The planned launch, still several weeks off, was canceled and the first vehicle written off as a “model” for “fit checks” of the new launch structure. This was a valuable use for it, though we’d have learned the same from a vehicle capable of flight. (In fact, a number of flaws were discovered in the gantry itself, some of them serious enough to have forced the first Carrier to be rolled back to the assembly building while repairs were made.)

All of this took days to decide, days in which Shiborin and I acted as test crewmen for the mockup of the L-3 lander and yet another version of the Soyuz/L-1 command module, this one known as the LOK, for lunar orbit cabin. The L-3 and LOK were scheduled to be fired into orbit aboard the second Carrier. Our work involved climbing into the seats of the LOK, Shiborin as commander, me as flight engineer, and carrying out many tedious commands from the staff a few meters away.

It was slightly more fun to take turns climbing into the L-3 landing vehicle, though it was not complete. We took turns because the L-3 would only descend to the surface of the Moon carrying a single crew member, the military commander, while the flight engineer remained in orbit aboard the LOK. You could peer out the forward window and imagine yourself seeing the craters of the Sea of Serenity from the height of a few thousand meters. This work was also more tiring, since the L-3 lander didn’t have a seat; restrained by a series of straps, the pilot simply stood up to fly it. Shiborin solved this problem by liberating a small wooden ladder from the construction team and sticking that inside the cabin. It wasn’t comfortable, but it did allow us to sit down without having to be extracted from the cabin during the long periods of time when the test team was engaged in argument.

No sooner had we completed this series of tests than the first Carrier was rolled back into the assembly building to be taken apart, and we repeated the tests with its LOK and L-3. This made little sense because both spacecraft would have to be reintegrated with a new launch vehicle at some point in the future, and any tests made now repeated. But much of what we did in those days made little sense.

Once we had completed that work, the L-1 vehicle Number 8 was declared ready for mating with its Universal Rocket, so Shiborin and I, and our test team, which included Lev Tselauri, shifted to the Proton assembly building at Area 92, several kilometers to the east.

We had left Star Town on May 7 thinking we would be absent for a week, no more. We were still living at the Hotel Cosmonaut when June turned into July. It was difficult enough for me, having packed for a shorter trip, but there was no one to miss me back home. Shiborin, on the other hand, was married, and frequently bitter about the separation. On a couple of weekends he managed to get himself assigned as a copilot on one of the transports commuting between Tyuratam and Chkalov, and go home for a few days.

These trips allowed him to catch up on the news. The commission investigating the Gagarin-Seregin accident had still not found the cause, the weather balloon having been discredited. Pilot error was now the leading theory, which rightly infuriated the community of eagles. There had been a formal ceremony naming the training center after Gagarin. Nikolayev had been appointed deputy in Gagarin’s place, and Belyayev, as expected, had been passed over. Colonel Bykovsky, to the surprise of many, had been jumped over Leonov as commander of the first squad within the cosmonaut team — the one for civilian programs, including Soyuz and the lunar missions. Bykovsky had been the commander of the spacecraft intended to dock with Komarov’s doomed Soyuz and I had worked with him, though not much. He was quiet and competent and his appointment was a good move.

The war over the next Soyuz missions was still raging, with Star Town and the Korolev bureau arguing about the composition of the crews, while above them, Ustinov insisted that the next pair of spacecraft be flown without crews at all.

And, meanwhile, a completely redesigned Apollo spacecraft was delivered to Cape Kennedy for a return to manned flight in September.

Even though the weather at Tyuratam had grown hot, dusty, and dry, even though I was spending a growing amount of time searching for my own food, taking care of my own laundry, and trying not to become romantically entangled with a certain dark-eyed waitress at the commissary in Hotel Cosmonaut (I had heard she was in the business of collecting cosmonauts, and I would have been in her second ten, I believe), I decided I was better off in Baikonur for the moment.

One night in late June, as I was leaving the Area 92 building hoping to catch a ride back to Tyuratam, I found a familiar figure rummaging through the trash piled high beside the building. It was Sergeant Oleg Pokrovsky, the scrounger and hunter I had met on my first visit here.

If possible, he seemed even more raggedy than when I last saw him, though that had been at the beginning of a winter hunt. I said hello, and, I was pleased to see, he recognized me. “The young man who was interested in Blackie and Breezy.”

“The same.”

“Not the same.” He gestured at my uniform. ‘I see I am to salute you.” He straightened up and executed a perfect one, a bizarre sight, this aged scarecrow in a shabby uniform standing at attention next to a heap of garbage.

In return, I gave him the most half-assed salute possible, adding, “You have heroically fulfilled the tasks of the Motherland,” one of the many automatic phrases used in the military. “I regret that I don’t have a drink to offer you tonight.”

He grinned. “I am Oleg Pokrovsky, and I always have something to drink.” It wasn’t vodka, but a bottle of beer, already open.

Even though I never much cared for beer, I took a swig and was surprised at how good it tasted. Perhaps my exile to Baikonur was changing me.

“The last time I saw you, you were heading off to kill zaigak.”

“Last week?”

“A year ago. When Komarov was killed.”

Oleg shook his head. “I killed my first zaigak a few days ago.”

Among my bad habits is insisting on my point of view beyond the point where it would be polite to stop. “Maybe you only got one then, but last April you were heading off to one of the tracking sites to do the same thing. They kept the ‘official rifle’ there, you said.”

“Yes,” he said. “And that’s what I used.”

It was as though we were speaking two different languages. Either that, or Sergeant Oleg lived in a time zone entirely his own, where a year could be confused with a week, like a character in a science fiction story. “Well,” I said, enjoying the private fantasy, but not wishing to prolong the debate, “I hope you got a good dinner out of it.”

“Look what they paid me.” He opened the flap of his own bag, and pulled out a pistol, its gray metal gleaming in the light of the street lamp overhead. I had fired a pistol several times in my reserve training, now five years in the past, but that had been a heavy Borodin, not this sleek thing.

“What do they call it?”

“The officer who gave it to me said it was a PB-8. The Special Forces use it.” Special Forces were the elite commando units of the Soviet Army. “He said he had won it in a bet, and it made him nervous to have it around.”

“How does it make you feel?”

He hefted it, then twirled it on his finger like a character from an American cowboy movie. Until, that is, he dropped the pistol on the pavement. We bumped heads trying to recover it. All right, perhaps we had kept swigging from the beer — with Sergeant Oleg several swigs, if not whole bottles, ahead of me. Finally he recovered the weapon. “Careful,” I said. “It might be loaded.” Like the two of us.

“Oh, it’s loaded,” he announced with glee. He even ejected the clip and showed it to me. “Eight rounds!”

“You could get into a lot of trouble with eight rounds.”

I was thinking of the damage one could do to an enemy, but Oleg misunderstood. “Do you think so? I know we’re not issued weapons, but…”

I would have explained, but sweeping headlights told me a car was coming, and I still needed a ride. I said good-bye to Sergeant Oleg, promising to see him again, and ran toward the car, waving frantically to get it to stop.

The next morning, when I went downstairs to rendezvous with Shiborin, I found a message from my father. He had arrived with some inspection team yesterday afternoon, and was staying at the old hotel.

I had not seen my father in a couple of months, not since the death of Gagarin, though we had talked briefly on the telephone during one of his trips to Eastern Europe. His sudden presence here at Baikonur filled me with dread, because I knew I needed, finally, to be open and honest with him, and that it would be difficult.

Thanks to Shiborin, I made an early exit from the day’s work and met my father at his hotel. It was still light, still hot and dusty, but he insisted on walking through the streets of old-town Tyuratam. Imagine an Arab bazaar taking place in a canyon lined with Khrushchev-era concrete buildings.

He bought nothing, so I got food for both of us from a vendor. When I asked him why we bothered to leave the relative comforts of the hotel, he said, “Watchers.”

I found this humorous. “Who would be watching Colonel-General Ribko?”

“You’d be surprised,” he said. “With this stupid business in Czechoslovakia, not to mention all the problems in the space program, all security forces are on alert.” He grunted, disgusted. “Most of them wind up watching each other.”

I realized this was my best opportunity. “I’ve been one of them,” I said. “One of Uncle Vladimir’s watchers.”

For a moment I thought he hadn’t heard, since he kept walking as usual. Then his left hand shot out and grabbed my right arm above the elbow, painfully. He drew me close. “After I told you not to?” he said. The look of betrayal on his face made me ashamed.

“It was already too late,” I said, lamely.

“And you kept it secret from me all this time? You went into the cosmonaut team working for that man?” Each sentence was like a slap, as my father’s sense of betrayal gave way to disbelief, then anger. “Do you have any idea of the risks you’ve taken?”

“I think I do. Now.”

He rubbed his hand on his face, as if wiping away a stain. “You should have told me.”

Now, driven by embarrassment, I got angry myself. “You should have told me about Mama.”

“What do you mean?”

“She worked for State Security, too. So I’ve joined the Air Force and become a spy; so what? It’s in my blood!”

Had I been younger, he would have hit me. Or maybe it was the very public location of our argument that restrained him. “He told you that, did he? Vladimir?”

“Who else?”

“Is that what he used to get you to work for him?”

“He offered to get me a job in the Korolev bureau,” I said. “Something you refused to do.”

“Don’t be childish!” Now he was almost pleading. “I wanted you to live your own life! Be an engineer, whatever. Not a snitch.” He flicked his hand at my uniform shirt. “Not a soldier.”

“Well, I’m not a snitch anymore. I told Vladimir I wouldn’t make reports to him.”

He thought about that for a moment, then laughed. “Good. Good for you, standing up for yourself. He’ll destroy you, but at least you’ve repossessed your soul.”

“Why would he destroy me? He wasn’t happy, but I’m certainly no threat to him.”

“What were you investigating, Yuri?”

“Korolev’s murder. If it was murder. I don’t know anything anymore.”

“Oh, Korolev was murdered. And he was not the only one. Yuri, there is a war going on, not just for the space program or who gets to the Moon, but for the whole country. On one side you have the Party and State Security, on the other — well, other forces.”

“Clans,” I said, remembering Triyanov’s warnings to me when I worked at the bureau.

“Exactly! And unless you are in one of the clans, you’ll never understand anything. The only way to remain safe is to stay completely out of it!”

“Well, I’ve gotten out of it.”

“You think so. You worked for State Security, yet you wear an Air Force uniform. No one knows which side you’re on, and that’s the most dangerous position of all.” Somehow we had gotten turned around and were headed back to the hotels, just a father and son, senior and junior military officers out for a pleasant stroll in one of the socialist republics.

If ever I needed a father’s advice, now was the time. “Tell me, then, what do I do?”

“Nothing. Nothing but your cosmonaut work. That should keep you busy enough.” He spoke slowly, as if formulating some plan in the part of his brain not engaged in speaking to me.

“And what will you do?” I hoped he would share his plan with me.

“I’ll take care of everything.” He grabbed my arm again; this time it actually hurt. “But you have to promise me: no more intelligence work. No more reports to anyone”

What else could I do? I had failed horribly as a spy, anyway. “I promise.”

Even as I gave my word, I knew I was certain to break it. I had questions that needed answers — answers I knew I would never hear from my father.

43 The Devil’s Venom

I managed to stay out of my father’s way for the next several days, a task made easier by the flood of new State Commission members arriving for the launch of the eighth unmanned L-1, now scheduled for no earlier than July 16.

Shiborin and I knew that we would stay at Baikonur through the launch, returning to Star Town via Yevpatoriya with Bykovsky and Leonov and their flight engineers, who came for the launch with the bigshots.

On the morning of the thirteenth, a new Universal Rocket 500 was rolled out to its pad at Area 92. Shiborin and I were prepared to walk with it, into the hot, dusty wind, when Lev showed up wearing a makeshift burnoose and holding two others, which he handed to Shiborin and me. “When it gets like this, you’ve got to be a Bedouin,” he said.

Much amused, we arranged ourselves, marching out behind the giant rocket and the puffing train engines. As we got closer to the concrete launchpad and the towering support structure, Shiborin departed, and Lev and I were alone.

“Who would have believed this?” he said, looking up at the tower, at the Universal Rocket slowly being lifted to vertical. “Two years ago we were students!”

“ ‘The Party makes use of talent,’ ” I said, quoting some inane Komsomol slogan.

Lev laughed. Then, surprising me, he said, “You never ask about Marina.”

This was true. I had deliberately avoided the entire subject. I wasn’t ready to have a serious discussion. “Marina?” I said, as if it were the most natural question in the world, one friend to another on the streets of Moscow. “How is she?”

He laughed again. “She’s fine. She asks about you whenever we talk.” Then he frowned, and seemed to hesitate, which was unusual for him. “Come and see us. Come and see her.”

I realized I couldn’t avoid the subject any longer. “The burnoose was a good idea, Lev. Having me come to see you and Marina is a bad one. We’ll all be uncomfortable.”

“More uncomfortable than we are now? You and I used to live together. We work in the same business. We’ve been together every day for the past eight weeks!”

“You should have thought of that when you started seeing Marina behind my back.”

“I was wrong. She was wrong. Maybe you were wrong, too.” He was red-faced now, whether from embarrassment or anger, I couldn’t tell. Perhaps both. “It wasn’t as though I pursued her. She felt neglected.” He held up a hand to silence my protest: “Nevertheless, the fault is mine. I’m ashamed of myself. But I want us to be friends again.”

Even in my anger, I knew I was hardly blameless — not just for neglecting Marina, for lying to her, but in kissing her during our last meeting. “All right,” I said, worn down. “I will come and see both of you as soon as we get back.” And so I made a second promise I was unlikely to keep.

Lev kissed me. “We have to stick together, Yuri. Being questioned by State Security was frightening. Imagine what they will do if there’s another ‘accident.’ ”

“But there will be accidents. These are very complex machines.”

“You and I know that because we’re professionals. But State Security doesn’t, and nor do most of the politicians they serve. Besides…” He actually looked over his shoulder, as if expecting to see a black van lurking there on the launchpad. “There have been a number of mysterious accidents.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean, systems that worked perfectly during final checkout — the same kind of work you and I have been doing the past few weeks — suddenly fail the day of launch, as if somebody walked in at the last minute and pulled a wire or jabbed a screwdriver into a tank. Some mindless bit of vandalism that would be enough to cause a short or a leak.”

“Nobody gets into the assembly buildings without clearance.”

He practically snorted. “In theory,” he said. “The same theory that makes all Soviet citizens equal. Yes, all the military and bureau people have passes, but people from the commissions walk through all the time. Who checks them?”

“Who needs to check them? They’re bigshots.”

“Any one of them could do the damage, just the same.”

“So could a disgruntled member of the checkout team.”

He was patting at his shirt for a cigarette. “Yes, yes, yes. If there’s another suspicious accident, the finger will point to one of us.” He found his cigarette.

“Don’t light up here.”

He ignored me. “Don’t worry. They don’t start fueling for hours yet.”

Shortly before ten o’clock that evening, as the upper stages of the Universal Rocket were being pumped full of liquid nitrogen and hydrazine — what Sergei Korolev had called the “devil’s venom”—a weld failed. Poisonous hydrazine spewed out of its tank like water from a hose. Fortunately the hydrazine did not come into contact with its oxidizer; they were hypergolic fuels, meaning they would have ignited all by themselves, causing a conflagration that would have undoubtedly destroyed the Universal Rocket and its L-1 payload, and possibly the Area 92 pad, too.

However, three members of the crew were overcome by fumes; in fact, their lungs liquefied on contact with the hydrazine.

Shiborin and I learned this horrible news at breakfast at the Hotel Cosmonaut. The next L-1 launch would be delayed, of course, since the Universal Rocket had to be returned to the assembly building. “Shit,” Shiborin said. “We could be stuck here all summer.”

Fortunately not. We ran into Lev Tselauri on the bus to Area 92, and he told us that there would be no testing for a month, possibly longer, while this latest accident was investigated. He did not add anything in front of Shiborin, but the look on his face was clear enough: investigated by State Security, he meant.

All that Shiborin and I could do that morning was collect our personal belongings and express condolences to the surviving members of the launch team.

Well, I did do one other thing. As soon as I heard about the latest disaster, I sought out Sergeant Oleg Pokrovsky and purchased his PB-8 Special Forces pistol for a fistful of rubles and the most expensive bottle of vodka I was able to buy at the Hotel Cosmonaut.

Maybe I overpaid, but I thought that I would need protection in the days to come.

The Tu-104 returning to Chkalov that afternoon was packed with people from the Korolev bureau, including my former bosses Filin and Triyanov, sitting together and looking exhausted. I would have said hello immediately, but was stuck several seats away, wedged into a window by a sleeping Shiborin — who had somehow failed to get himself assigned as copilot on this flight. I watched Filin and saw clearly the telltale signs of stress… glasses off, fingers to the bridge of his nose, then opening to rub his temples. He would, I judged, require immediate hospitalization upon returning to the Moscow District.

Triyanov was, in spite of tired eyes, more relaxed, frequently shrugging, offering nothing.

Somewhere over the Urals, Shiborin awoke and decided to visit the cockpit. Shortly thereafter Triyanov took a walk down the aisle and spotted me. “Senior Lieutenant Ribko!” he announced, cheerfully tossing me a casual salute. “How does the uniform fit?”

“Quite well.”

He dropped into Shiborin’s seat. “I hear you are in Bykovsky’s group.”

“Since early May.”

“It’s not the best place for a military engineer, you know. All the lunar crews will have civilians in that second seat. Your seat.”

“Is there a good place for a military engineer?”

Triyanov laughed. “From what I hear, maybe not.” He and I both knew that the Chelomei military projects were stalled, not likely to require crews for two years or more. “You’ve managed to keep your sense of humor. Given what your center has endured this year, that should qualify for a Hero of Socialist Labor at the very least.”

“I’ll be sure to invite you to the ceremony.”

He slapped my knee. “You should never have left the bureau, young man. In time, people would have forgotten your… tainted origins.” He lowered his voice. “You certainly weren’t the only one serving two masters.”

This was a dangerous subject for a public conversation. “Did you know Colonel Seregin?” I asked, hoping to change the subject completely.

“Very well. He and I worked on a program together at Akhtubinsk six or seven years ago. He was a good pilot. So was Gagarin, for that matter. Not a lot of recent stick time, but he had the natural skills.”

“They’re saying the crash was pilot error.”

“That’s bullshit.” He shifted in his seat, perhaps to better aim his index finger between my eyes. “I had a situation once in a 15 that could have ended the same way. I was making a low pass — two hundred meters off the ground — when a bulb on the display exploded this far from my face.” He held his hand a few centimeters from his nose. “I was completely blinded, face bloody, all I could do was react by instinct and pull up.

“It worked, thank God, but I was seconds away from death, and no investigators would have known why. The only damage was to me — cuts on my face, blood in my eyes. One tiny missing bulb on the control panel. All that evidence would have been obliterated if I’d punched a hole in the ground.” He sat back, still indignant on behalf of Gagarin and Seregin. “They’d have said ‘pilot error,’ and they’d have been just as wrong.”

“They haven’t been able to find the canopy.”

“No. Because something happened to those guys. Some oxygen canister or hydraulic cylinder could have gone blooey, blown out the canopy and knocked Gagarin and Seregin out long enough for them to hit the ground.” He was silent for a moment, picturing the horror. “It doesn’t take much.”

Shiborin had returned, looking to claim his seat. Triyanov rose and threw him a salute, too, which Shiborin returned. As Triyanov departed, Shiborin looked after him. “Who the hell was that?”

I kept forgetting about the giant walls between the bureau and the Gagarin Center. Tired, and growing more nervous about the pistol in my baggage — suppose State Security was waiting at Chkalov to search us? I could be sent to prison for possession of a firearm — I simply told Shiborin that Triyanov was an old friend from my time in the bureau, which had the virtue of being partly true.

My father may have ordered me to give up spying, but no one, it seemed, could stop me from lying to my friends.

44 Semipalatinsk-20

The day after my return from Baikonur, I learned — along with the rest of the Fourth Enrollment — that we would shortly be sent to Feodosiya on the Black Sea, a place I knew slightly from my teenage years in the Crimea. For two weeks we would be either in the woods, simulating off-course Soyuz landings on Mother Russia, or bobbing in the water practicing landings at sea. The primary Soyuz crews were off on a long holiday because there were no manned vehicles for them to fly; the lunar teams, including support personnel Ribko and Shiborin, were not needed for at least a month due to the recent accident at Baikonur.

This news was profoundly depressing to Shiborin, who had just returned from two months away from home. I found it helpful, since it forced me to examine my situation and make a plan. I had good evidence that Uncle Vladimir was involved in Korolev’s death — confirmed, in a way, by my own father — and in the sabotage of the lunar program, thanks to Lev’s information.

But I could no more confront Uncle Vladimir than I could march into the Kremlin and punch Brezhnev in the nose. Nor was there any law-enforcement agency I could trust. Yes, my father said he would “take care” of things. But my impending departure for Feodosiya, sure to be followed by another stay at Baikonur, made me impatient.

I wanted answers about Uncle Vladimir, about what he had told me about my mother. Who would know?

I had had no contact with Katya since my awful birthday party at Ostankino Tower. She had told me not to call her, but even foolish and naive as I was in those days, I knew this would not absolve me of blame. Nor would my forced absence in the gardens of Kazakhstan. Before I could learn anything useful — assuming Katya had information she would share — I needed to get back in her good graces.

And as much as I wanted her to help me combat Uncle Vladimir, I truly did want to repair our relationship.

I have not gone into great details concerning that relationship. It was intensely physical and, I can see now, more emotional on her side than it was on mine. I loved her, in a way, but never dreamed of spending my life with her as I did with Marina.

I don’t claim that Katya wanted to marry me. At thirty-six, she had already arranged her life to her satisfaction, I think. But she seemed to enjoy my company, especially our lovemaking. I did, too, though I was first confused and even frightened by her aggressiveness: I thought I was supposed to be the initiator, as I had largely been with Marina. Not so. In fact, Katya initiated most of our activities, social as well as sexual.

I couldn’t just appear at her front door with an armful of flowers, though this was the only idea I had. I needed romantic advice, but my two closest friends were Shiborin — married since the age of nineteen — and Lev, an unlikely source of information for a variety of reasons.

At physical training one morning I found myself running through the woods with Ivan Saditsky. Well, I was running; he was walking ahead of me, huffing and puffing like a pensioner, when I caught up to him. He looked so ill, pale and bent over, that I stopped and asked how he was.

“Trying not to vomit,” he said, waving his hand dismissively.

“I’ll call Novikov.” He was our instructor that morning.

“No, you won’t. You’ll leave me to die here in peace, thank you.” He straightened out; color began to reappear in his face. “What idiot thinks that running through the forest is any kind of preparation for going to the Moon?”

“Well, they claim we’re in a race,” I said, joking.

Saditsky grunted. “Given the way our rockets have been working, we’ll probably have to walk.” He blinked. “Do you have a cigarette?” I reminded him that I didn’t smoke. “Remind me to denounce you at the next Party meeting.” That was typical Saditsky: While I was a grudging but regular attendee, I had never actually caught him at a meeting. And he was a full Party member.

I knew better than to ask him how Soyuz was going: The program was stalled while the factories struggled to build spacecraft. But here it occurred to me that he might be of assistance with my problem. “Ivan,” I said, “do you remember Katya?”

“I never forget a nice ass,” he said. “When are you going to bring her around again?”

“That’s the problem: We had a big fight a while back, and she’s not speaking to me.”

He grinned slyly. “Maybe I shouldn’t help you. I bet I can find her myself.”

It was stupid for me to worry about Saditsky taking Katya away from me; she wasn’t in any sense with me. But I felt some jealousy, anyway, which he must have noticed. “I’m joking. I am a married officer in the Soviet Air Force, after all.” Saditsky’s marriage was widely known to be troubled, though not so troubled that his wife Anya complained to Belyayev or others — which could have ruined his career. Apparently she was willing to look the other way regarding the womanizing as long as Saditsky’s cosmonaut career brought them both rewards. What would happen after Saditsky flew Soyuz and became a Hero of the Soviet Union was another matter.

“There are two possible approaches, Yuri. The honest one where you go crawling back to Katya on your hands and knees, begging her to take you back.”

“That was my first thought.”

“It’s a terrible idea. It gives her all the advantage, and, forgive me, from what I’ve seen of this Katya, she’s got enough advantages.”

“What’s the other approach?”

“Plan very carefully to meet her by accident. Run into her at a market or at some subbotnik project, like picking potatoes out in Dmitrov.” It was the Party that came up with subbotniks, those Saturday work projects that took us all to the fields in summer to engage in proletarian labor. During spring and autumn, we often helped on construction. This not only reminded effete city dwellers and bureaucrats of the price others had to pay for university educations, electric lights, and so forth, it also provided much-needed field hands. “Make sure she sees you, then get all embarrassed and flustered and try to get away. If she comes after you, you’ve got the advantage.” He grinned again. “I know you, Ribko. You can handle the flustered business like an ace.”

“Then what?”

Now he laughed out loud. “If you can’t figure out what to do when the gorgeous Katya throws herself back at you, you don’t deserve her!”

Then, wheezing, he staggered off to complete his run.

At this time of year there was always a subbotnik going on, especially at places like Katya’s institute, which was still in the process of being built. So I shamelessly followed Saditsky’s cynical orders and went directly to the center’s political officer, Colonel Nikeryasov, asking to be put on a subbotnik at the Institute for Space Research. Two days later — on Friday morning — I was told to report to the institute in question at seven on Saturday morning, to help with pouring concrete.

I knew less about pouring concrete than I did about female psychology, but subbotniks did not require expertise, only enthusiasm. In civilian clothes, I took the train into the city.

I believe it was General Borodin, hero of the war against Napoleon, who said, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” My clever plan died a painful death before I even reached the institute.

For one thing, the weather was terrible, a cold rain more suited to Moscow in April than in July. This alone meant that pouring concrete was going to be difficult, if attempted at all. The foul weather also affected the guards at the institute, who looked at my military pass and lack of military garb, and decided to detain me.

So I sat in the cramped entryway, waiting for the guards’ supervisor to wrench himself away from his cozy office, while unhappy people tracked in mud from Khoroshev Street. The supervisor arrived prepared to berate or possibly arrest me. But on inspection, my passport turned out to be sufficiently important-looking that he began to grumble to the guards first. “You idiots. Can’t you make a fucking decision without disturbing me?” Then he asked me why I was at the institute today.

“I’m helping with your subbotnik.”

The supervisor was prepared for any answer but that. To think some engineer-lieutenant in the Air Force would voluntarily visit a civilian institute to “help” with a communal work project! Now he had to make a telephone call.

Before he could get to it, however, Katya entered.

She saw me instantly, and I her, as if we had planned this rendezvous. Given the location, and the presence of the guards, it was impossible for me to think about making a sudden run for it. For one thing, the supervisor still held my passport. For another, the guards would have pulled out their guns. So I stood there, empty-handed, a foolish look on my face that wavered between happiness and sheer surprise.

Katya’s face betrayed a quick change of emotion, too, from confusion to annoyance to what seemed like resignation. “Is this supposed to be flattering?” she said by way of greeting.

“You know this officer?” the guard supervisor asked her.

“He’s strangely familiar to me.” Resignation had been replaced by her usual sense of amusement.

“You can vouch for the fact that he’s not a spy?”

A look passed between Katya and me. “He’s no danger to the institute,” she said, her hesitation noticed only by me. “He is, however, a very naughty boy.”

Now the supervisor and the guards got the idea. There was some elbowing, some winking, and within moments I had retrieved my passport and been waved into the institute.

With Katya.

“Why today of all days?” she said, as we walked into the rainy central courtyard. She had yet to say hello.

“I just got back from two months in Baikonur.”

“There are several weeks between your birthday and your departure still unaccounted for.”

“I was hurt and angry.” It was true enough.

“No, Yuri, I was hurt and angry. I was the one who waited for a call or a letter or any kind of apology.”

“I’m apologizing now, in person.”

“Can you even remember why?”

“For embarrassing you in front of Uncle Vladimir.”

That apparently was close enough to soothe her. At least it took the edge off her anger. “Are you really here for the subbotnik?”

“Yes. I arranged it so I could see you.”

She smiled. “Well, you’ve seen me and you’ve stumbled your way through the beginnings of an apology. Now that you’ve accomplished your mission, why don’t you run back to Star Town before they actually make use of you.”

I could thank the Ribko bullheadedness for my answer. “I came to work. I hope I can see you later.” And I marched off with no idea of where I was going, only that I was putting meters between Katya and me.

The weather made it impossible to pour concrete or do any work outside, but those of us on the Party detail found other tasks. Mine was to paint the hallways of a new laboratory building, which I did happily, if sloppily, for the rest of the day. They fed us a hot stew, which was a nice surprise, and at four o’clock I felt more virtuous — a good little Komsomol member — than I had in months. Perhaps in two years.

I left the institute the same way I entered, passing the same guards, who this time shared a friendly wave. I headed for the street wondering what I would do with the rest of my Saturday, when Katya appeared from my left, taking my arm.

“All right. Eight hours of hard labor is sentence enough. I forgive you. But be very careful.”

She was tugging me toward the bus stop. “Where are we going?”

“To my flat. Where else?”

“Your parents were stationed at Semipalatinsk-20. It’s in Kazakhstan, east of Baikonur.”

This was hours later, after ten that evening. We had gone directly from the institute to Katya’s flat, where we made angry, almost savage love without discarding much of our clothing. Or so it seemed. I do remember taking off my shoes.

We went out to find food for dinner, then returned, and made love again, just as desperately as before. Then lay in each other’s arms, talking as if no time had passed, as if there had been no awful scene in front of Uncle Vladimir.

“I haven’t seen him more than once or twice since then,” she said. “He’s been busy with his schemes.”

“He seems to have a lot of them.”

“You have no idea.” I was beginning to get some idea, of course, but didn’t want to spoil the moment by pressing. “I’m surprised you know so little about your own family. I got the impression your mother and your uncle were extremely close.” And that is how we came to the subject of where my mother and father lived when I was a teenager. Semipalatinsk-20, one of our many defense “mailbox” cities.

“Never heard of it,” I said.

“It’s where most of our atomic bombs are exploded.”

“I can’t imagine what they were doing there.”

“Your father was flying aircraft that dropped bombs.”

“You know for sure?”

She sighed. “Vladimir told me once that Zhanna died because of that place. Because of your father’s work. Yes.”

I sat up in bed. “How could my father’s work have killed my mother?”

Katya lay back, running her hands through her blond hair, which had grown tangled and matted by the violence of our lovemaking. The sheet covering her slid down as she did, exposing her breasts. The sight alone was enough to cause my heart to pound. I would have reached for her again, had I been doing anything but hearing my family’s secrets.

“Your mother hadn’t wanted to go to Semipalatinsk. She wanted to stay with you.” Katya brushed the hair back from her face, adjusted her covering sheet. “You must have been adorable at that age.”

“Absolutely,” I said, “and I’ve deteriorated since then. Why did my mother go?” I had always wanted to ask her, but never had.

“Your father insisted. Maybe he didn’t want to be alone out there.” Maybe, I thought, he knew that if Zhanna were exiled with her husband, Vladimir would have to find some way to get them both back to Moscow. “They used to drop atomic bombs from airplanes. I did some studies on the radiation patterns when I was in college. We were horribly careless… marching divisions of soldiers through ground zero a few hours after an explosion.

“There was one test that really went wrong. A-2, September 1956, it was. A bomber was supposed to drop a device in a certain zone, but the pilot misread his chart.”

“Maybe the chart was wrong.” I’d seen enough mistakes like that in the space program.

“Very likely. But the bomb went off too close to one of the viewing sites. Everyone there got a severe dose of radiation. I think there were twenty or so, and most of them were dead within five or six years.”

“Including my mother.”

“Yes.”

I had always sensed that the relationship between my mother and father grew colder during those three years in the desert. When I was younger and we all lived in the Crimea, they had been affectionate with each other, touching, laughing. And with me.

When we were finally reunited in Moscow when I was sixteen, that had all changed. They were cordial with each other, but distant, somehow. At the time I thought it was because we had all grown so much older, and because my father was beginning his travels all over the USSR and Europe, which kept him away from home.

Suppose it was due to this terrible accident? It was as if my mother had died in a car crash where my father was driving… but had lingered like a ghost, haunting him, for years.

It was impossible for me to imagine the horror my mother faced — killed by her husband, seeing herself slowly and steadily withering. Even people sentenced to the Gulag, or the basement of the Lubiyanka, had hope. Not my mother.

“I’m surprised my father ever got promoted after something like that.”

“I think they found someone else to blame. The navigator of the plane, maybe. And, really, Yuri, this is why I was so angry with you on your birthday.”

“Why?”

“Your uncle made sure the reports emphasized Colonel Ribko’s heroism under difficult circumstances, all of that. Vladimir saved your father.”

45 The Second Cosmic Velocity

The Monday after my reunion with Katya, I departed for the Crimea, returning to Star Town after two weeks only to enter a period of intense medical testing in which all members of the Fourth Enrollment were subjected to a series of centrifuge rides. Actually, we had been offered the chance to volunteer. To no one’s surprise, all thirteen of us did so, though I believe one of my colleagues, Captain Sasha Korchugin, an Air Force navigator, surely wished he hadn’t. His heart stopped during one of the tests. Fortunately, he was revived, but he was immediately packed off to the Aviation Hospital to convalesce, and we all knew that our group had suffered its first real casualty.

I didn’t see Katya during that month, though I sent her a letter from Feodosiya, and spoke to her by telephone when I got back to Star Town. Our relationship seemed to have been rebuilt.

I had no contact at all with my father. He might well have been taking care of things, as he had promised. Certainly I saw no signs that I was under surveillance. (That is, no more than any of us were.) I believe he was also distracted from my problems by the “rescue” of Communism in Czechoslovakia by the armies of “brother” nations, which began in mid-August.

The first week of September found Shiborin and me back on the plane to Baikonur. At the Hotel Cosmonaut, we crossed paths with our colleagues in the Soyuz branch of the cosmonaut team, including Beregovoy, Shatalov, and Saditsky. They had just supported the successful unmanned launch of spacecraft Number 9 on August 28 under the cover name of Cosmos 238. Number 9 operated flawlessly for three days, then thumped down safely in the prime landing zone. “A gigantic waste of resources,” Saditsky told me. “They were nervous about the parachute system, fine. But you don’t need to launch the vehicle into space to test that: You can kick it out the door of an airplane.” He shook his head. “And we’re going to waste yet another Soyuz next month because everyone’s afraid.” According to the very conservative plan ordered by Minister Ustinov, even with the success of Cosmos 238, the next phase of the program would allow a single-manned Soyuz to dock with another unmanned one. The ambitious EVA originally planned for Komarov’s flight sixteen months in the past was seen to be too risky.

My attention turned to the L-1 lunar orbit program. A new spacecraft, Number 9 (not to be confused with the newest Soyuz) was in the assembly building being mated to a new Universal Rocket 500. The welds in the upper stages of the rocket had been examined and no leaks were expected. Nevertheless, I wasn’t overly confident. I heard from Lev, who also flew in with the Korolev bureau team, that the investigation of the stage that had failed so disastrously in July had not turned up any flaws in its welds, either.

In spite of my misgivings, early on the morning of September 15, 1968, the latest Universal Rocket 500 rose from the Area 81 pad, lighting up the summer night as it carried the lunar space probe that would be announced to the world as Zond 5. We watched the launch from the range tracking site at Area 97, several kilometers to the south, under a half-Moon, with summer breezes gently stirring the trees.

Over the next few hours, the upper stages, including the bureau’s troubled Block D, performed flawlessly, sending Zond 5 on its climb to that half-Moon.

At midday Shiborin and I boarded an An-24 with Colonel Bykovsky and his lunar cosmonauts, and flew directly off to Yevpatoriya, to take part in the mission from the primary control center. When we arrived, we learned that Zond 5 had suffered its first failure, the all-too-familiar inability of the star-tracking system to orient itself. This time, however, a backup system that sighted on Earth and the Moon managed to keep the spacecraft on course, though it lacked precision and meant that the hoped-for reentry into Earth’s atmosphere would be uncontrolled.

I did note a lack of the usual generals and ministers at Yevaptoriya. Only Artemov and his bureau deputies, including Filin, and the Hammer’s deputy, Tyulin, were there. Not even General Kamanin came. At first I assumed it was for protective reasons: No one wanted to face another inexplicable failure. Then I learned that a very important meeting was being held back at Baikonur to get the Carrier rocket program back on track. The first test launch was rescheduled for November, with a second to follow in February 1969. These dates were important, because we had also learned that the Americans were considering a “surprise” flight around the Moon themselves in January 1969, though they had yet to fly a manned Apollo at all!

It finally seemed as though my country’s lunar program was beginning to move, like an army advancing on three fronts.

Zond 5 carried a “crew”: a number of turtles, worms, and flies, in addition to some scientific instruments and cameras. On September 18, the spacecraft made its closest approach to the Moon, coming to within 1,950 kilometers of those gray craters and plains as it swung around the far side. Then it headed back toward Earth, speeding up to what Pravda called the “second cosmic velocity”—that is, the speed at which a spacecraft reentered the atmosphere, as opposed to the first cosmic velocity, which was required to leave Earth’s gravity — aiming toward a window in space no more than thirteen kilometers across.

There was incredible tension among the team in the control center. The failure of the star tracker and the reliance on the relatively crude Earth-Moon orientation system meant that Zond 5 could not be steered onto a precise trajectory. It was going through that window more or less by luck and momentum, and where it would wind up, nobody could say.

The rescue-and-recovery forces, having learned their lesson, were set up for ocean recovery this time. There would be no self-destruct if Zond 5 managed to survive reentry.

Zond 5 reached the second cosmic velocity of eleven kilometers a second as it dived into the atmosphere on September 21, the external heat on the skin of the spacecraft reaching thirteen thousand degrees centigrade. The deceleration subjected the worms, turtles, and flies to as much as sixteen Gs — more than twice the desirable load. (And after having been spun up to eight Gs twice within the past month, I could not imagine a crew functioning for long at sixteen. Or at all.)

We expected to wait half an hour or longer to learn the fate of our lunar craft, but within five minutes of the projected landing time, the rescue service reported that Zond 5 had survived its passage back to Earth, splashing down in the Indian Ocean one hundred and five kilometers from the tracking ship Borovichy. The turtles and their companions were alive.

The crew of the Borovichy turned the blackened bell of Zond 5 over to an oceanographic ship, the Golovnin, which carried it to Bombay for flight back to the USSR.

On the morning of September 22, 1968, there was not a drop of alcohol to be found within fifty kilometers of the Yevpatoriya Station. I am ashamed to say I consumed my share, and perhaps more. The last thing I remember is a very drunken Saditsky telling me, “Now we’ve screwed ourselves. If we’d flown Soyuz with a crew last month, we would be ready to launch a manned L-1. We could have beaten the Americans around the Moon.”

I didn’t believe Saditsky. The Americans hadn’t flown Apollo at all.

By the end of September, autumn was already half over, with the trees around Star Town shedding their leaves. I could recall only a few days of summer — no surprise, given that I had spent almost three full months away from home.

Even back at Star Town, I had little free time. Our group training continued with more intensity, though without Sasha Korchugin, who had lost flight status for good and was given a position on the Gagarin Center staff. Part of the syllabus was a series of rides in the back seats of MiG-15 trainers for the nonpilots in the group. Pilots like Shiborin were allowed to fly in the front seats, though always with an instructor from the 70th Seregin Squadron.

Given that my greatest exposure to a MiG-15 was in picking up its shattered pieces, I approached these flights with dread, but found myself enjoying them — half-hour hops out to Kirzhach, then back. On a couple of occasions the instructors let me take the controls, and I got some small sense of how exciting it must be to totally master a fighter jet. No wonder the pilots I knew — Shiborin, Saditsky, Triyanov, even my father — were such arrogant shits most of the time. They had proven themselves in a whole different world.

On October 11, the Americans launched their first manned Apollo, nineteen months behind their original schedule. The eleven-day flight by astronauts Schirra, Eisele, and Cunningham went flawlessly from a technical standpoint, though the crew often quarreled publicly with flight controllers. Hearing this, Shiborin shook his head in amazement. “What kind of training do these Americans have? If a Soviet crew acted that way, they’d get court-martialed!”

This was Shiborin at his most naive. Even as he was watching the antics of Captain Schirra with astonishment, Colonel Beregovoy, the veteran test pilot and cosmonaut assigned to the first manned Soyuz, was failing his final examinations on docking procedures while his backup pilot, Shatalov, was acing them.

Did this make any difference to Beregovoy’s assignment? Not a bit. He had friends in high places, even higher than General Kamanin, and extra tutoring was arranged. On October 26, 1968, he was launched into orbit aboard spacecraft Number 10, officially named Soyuz 3 and designed to be the active partner in a docking. (Spacecraft Number 11, his target, was launched the day before, though not announced and named as Soyuz 2 until Beregovoy was safely in space.)

Beregovoy’s Soyuz was supposed to approach its target on autopilot during the first orbit. At a distance of 180 meters, he took over manual control, and then the fun began. Beregovoy closed in on Soyuz 2, only to turn away before docking. He radioed that his orientation system had failed. He was allowed to maneuver Soyuz 3 away and get some rest before another attempt on the second day.

This one went no better. Beregovoy got to within fifty meters this time, then somehow went sailing past. Again, he blamed the guidance system.

By this time there was no fuel in either Soyuz for additional attempts. At Yevpatoriya there were concerns about Beregovoy’s physical state; sensors detected some impurities in the atmosphere aboard Soyuz, which might have affected him.

Soyuz 2 thumped down safely on October 28 and Beregovoy himself followed two days later. He faced some harsh questioning from members of the State Commission, including Artemov and Kamanin, and like any good pilot, stuck to his story that the docking guidance system had failed him. Privately the cosmonauts said it was Beregovoy’s error, but since he was the only one aboard, who was going to contradict him?

And to be fair, a postflight investigation showed a whole series of problems that contributed to the failure, beginning with our desire to risk only a single pilot when Soyuz was designed to operate with a pilot and flight engineer. Many of Beregovoy’s difficult maneuvers had to be carried out in zones where he had no contact with Yevpatoriya or remote tracking stations, and often in literal darkness. Beregovoy did admit, later, that he had been ill the first day of the flight, which surely hadn’t helped him. And the Soyuz controls did not match those in the simulator he had trained on so doggedly.

Nevertheless, a cosmonaut had survived a Soyuz flight. Plans were made for an ambitious follow-up — a docking between two manned Soyuz in January, with an EVA by two cosmonauts. This was, of course, the same mission originally intended to be flown in April 1967. Saditsky was assigned as commander of one of the four crews.

In our lunar branch, my bosses Colonel Bykovsky and Colonel Leonov were told that one of them would command a two-man L-1 crew on a flight around the Moon as soon as we demonstrated a controlled reentry. They complained that one more unmanned test would give America the first triumph. (Though NASA had not officially announced it, everyone knew that Apollo 8 would make such an attempt in late December.) Both cosmonauts claimed they could manually pilot a controlled landing, and failing that, were willing to risk a 16-G ballistic reentry.

But the State Commission, the Hammer, Ustinov, and even Kamanin, who usually sided with the pilots in matters like this, weren’t listening. There had been too many failures. No one wanted to kill two more cosmonauts on a risky flight around the Moon when there was no guarantee that Apollo 8, which would also be the first manned test of the giant Saturn V-5, would succeed.

It was exciting — almost frantic. It was also the time when my father finally returned to Moscow.

46 Zond 6

I managed to see Katya again on Saturday, November 1, on my last free weekend before returning to Baikonur for checkout on the tenth L-1, the one that would finally pave our path to and from the Moon.

There were no further explosive revelations regarding my parents’ lives, or mine, or Katya’s, just another shallow sexual evening that left me feeling drained yet energized, guilty and yet strangely happy. Strangely because weeks, now months, had passed, and I was no closer to proving that Uncle Vladimir had somehow killed Korolev, not one bit more knowledgeable about his plans and powers. And still, when I had the time to think of such things, wondering where and how he would take action against me.

Knowing that snow would soon cover the ground around Star Town, I dressed in a track suit and went for a run early the morning of Sunday, November 2. I didn’t particularly enjoy running — almost none of the cosmonauts did — but I had found that it made me feel more energetic, especially with a trip coming up that would require me to sit on my ass in a cramped, cold spacecraft for endless hours.

The building that was intended to be permanent housing for the Fourth Enrollment, among others, had been ninety percent complete in July. It was, I now judged, ninety-one percent complete. After my run, I returned to my lonely flat on its first floor to find my father sitting on a chair in a puddle of sunlight, wearing a civilian overcoat.

Getting over my initial shock and surprise, I greeted him. He seemed genuinely pleased to see me, though, as usual, he had to offer some criticism: “You should lock your door.”

“There’s nobody in this area but cosmonauts and their families,” I said. “Not on a Sunday morning.”

“I got in.”

“You’re an Air Force general.”

He flicked at the lapel of his coat, which opened to show that he was wearing civilian clothes. “Not today.”

“I don’t have anything worth stealing.” This was, more or less, true. I had splurged to buy a small television set, which I had used perhaps three times in the past six months. My possessions at that time were limited to military uniforms, athletic gear, my handwritten notes from training classes (there were no workbooks), and a few books. My furniture looked as though it had been salvaged or stolen in the first place.

“I’m not speaking about thieves. It’s your personal security.”

“Uncle Vladimir’s assassins?”

A look of genuine fright passed across my father’s face. Then, strangely, he forced himself to laugh. “You’ve been reading too many spy novels,” he said, holding up an index finger in the universal Russian symbol that says: We are under surveillance.

I thought the idea was ridiculous, but elected to play along. “Let me buy you breakfast,” I said.

Once we were outdoors, my father said, “I’ve already eaten.”

“Me, too. I just wanted the listeners to know we had a reason to leave.”

“This is not a joke, Yuri.”

“Sorry.” One of my many failings is that I sound as though I’m joking when I’m not. “How was Czechoslovakia?”

“Not as bloody as Hungary, from what they tell me. We didn’t have to hang traitors from the streetlights. But we managed to anger everyone in the international community, and most of our allies, too. They know that if the tanks can roll into Prague, they can roll into Warsaw or Bucharest, too. They’ll never allow this again.”

“Things change.”

“Some things.” He looked almost wistful. “Now, have you done what I said? Have you stayed away from Vladimir?”

“I haven’t spoken to him for months.”

“Have you been pressured in any way? Followed?”

“Not that I can tell. You would know better,” I said. “You insisted we come outside to talk.”

“Just a precaution.” He looked around at Star Town, the tall, gray apartment buildings among the birch and pine trees, the central commissary and market building in front of us, the cold-looking lake to our right, the half-finished structures by it. We were the only ones out on this dreary morning. “This place keeps getting bigger and bigger.”

“Kamanin is trying to make it bigger yet,” I said. “He wants the training center to become a scientific-research institute with twice the staff.”

“Yes, yes, and he wants the Air Force to become the Central Space Office, too. I know all about it. Everyone on the high command is sick to death of it.”

“They must be pleased by Zond 5.”

He grunted. “They think it’s a giant waste of money, Yuri. The Americans are going to beat us to the Moon. That’s been obvious since—”

“—since Korolev died?”

For an instant my father seemed to sag, but he quickly recovered, smiling. “It was obvious that day in 1961 when the Americans announced they were going to go to the Moon. They have too many resources. We never had a real program until 1964, and it still wasn’t on track when Korolev died. But that doesn’t concern us.”

“It may not concern you, but it sure concerns me! This is my life!”

“Beating the Americans to the Moon? You’ve never said a thing about that to me.”

“Well, there are many things I haven’t said to you. Or you to me, such as the truth about Mother’s death.” I don’t know why I chose that moment to raise that subject; the instant the words were said, I wanted to erase them.

My father turned and looked at me as though I were a stranger. “What are you talking about?”

“Your bomb test at Semipalatinsk in September 1956. It was called the A-2, wasn’t it? You dropped it from your plane?”

His face reddened, and I knew he was angry. “You lied to me. You said you hadn’t spoken to Vladimir.”

“I haven’t.”

Now he was confused. Among the many other things I had never mentioned to him was my relationship with Katya, so who could possibly have told me this terrible secret if not Vladimir? “I’ve made many mistakes in my life, Yuri. Some were my fault. Some were… bad luck. Following the wrong orders,” he said, obviously trying to control his voice. “But that day, with that plane, and what it did to your mother and those other people… that is the one I live with.”

“You never talked about it.”

“What should I have said?” he snapped. “ ‘Oh, by the way, Yuri, when your mother and I were in the desert, I managed to poison her’? It was bad enough watching her die, knowing it was my fault.” He started walking back toward my flat. “I need a drink.”

I hurried to catch up with him, struggling with my emotions and at the same time wondering if I had anything for him to drink.

He stopped at the front door, blocking it so I couldn’t open it. “What are you going to do?”

“About what?”

“Your… information.”

“What can I do? I’m going to try to be a good cosmonaut and a Communist. I’ve proven to myself that those are the only things I’m good at.” That seemed to satisfy him; he let me open the door.

In my flat I dug through my bags for tomorrow’s flight to Baikonur — already packed — and found an unopened bottle of vodka; I had gotten into the habit of buying one before each of my trips, for barter, if nothing else. I handed it to my father, then turned to find some glasses. “Don’t bother,” he said, drinking directly out of the bottle.

He handed it to me, and I took a drink, too. It tasted quite good after several minutes in the chill and cold. “Yuri, if you will accept one last piece of advice from your father, be patient. These troubles — with Vladimir, with me — they will end.”

“Yes. With my exile to the Arctic Circle.”

He laughed and raised the bottle in a mock toast. “You have Zhanna’s sense of humor. She never lost it, not even at the end.”

“That will comfort me as I watch the snow fall in prison.”

He capped the bottle and stuck it under his arm. “If you’re careful, if you follow your orders, you might survive. But I warn you, any deviation could be dangerous.”

Maybe the jolt of that vodka made me feel like an American cowboy. I reached back into my bag and pulled out the PB-8 pistol I had bought from Sergeant Oleg. “I’m ready.”

“Put that fucking thing away!”

I suddenly felt stupid and childish. So I did as he said, putting it back in the travel bag. “Yuri, don’t travel with that thing. Not now. If it’s found in your luggage, you will go to jail and I won’t be able to save you.”

So, like a good son, I did as my father told me, hiding the pistol behind some books on my shelf.

He hugged me and wouldn’t let me walk him to the main gate.

November 7 was Revolution Day, and the excuse for celebrations. Even if orbital mechanics had not dictated that the launch of the next L-1 could not take place until November 10, the holiday would have ensured it. In the city of Leninsk, an outpost of Russians surrounded by a sea of indifferent Kazakhs, there were two days of parties that interrupted all work.

On the tenth, however, another white Universal Rocket 500 thundered into the sky carrying an L-1, Number 12 in the series, with improved navigation systems, and a crew of turtles and other small test creatures. The evening launch went well, as did the trans-lunar burns of the Block D engine, sending the spacecraft, now known as Zond 6, on its way to the Moon.

As the team flew off to Yevpatoriya in the morning, we learned that an antenna on Zond 6 had failed to deploy as planned, making communications difficult. But the improved navigation system was working, meaning that the trajectory to and from the Moon could be precise enough to allow a controlled reentry.

On the twelfth, Zond 6 carried out a major midcourse correction burn, which raised our hopes. Two days later it slipped around the limb of the Moon, dipping to within 2,400 kilometers of the surface, then headed back to Earth.

During this time, Shiborin and I worked with the L-1 cosmonauts, teams of Bykovsky-Rukavishnikov, Leonov-Makarov, Popovich-Sevastyanov, three commanders from the military team, three flight engineers from Department 731 of the bureau, all of them hoping to be aboard the next L-1 as it visited the Moon. The crews took turns inside a bare-bones mockup of an L-1—the same size as the descent module of the Soyuz — performing simulated engine burns and commands.

At one point, when Zond 6 was out of communication range, Shiborin and I climbed into the mockup, he in the commander’s seat, me as flight engineer. Neither of us were big men, but our knees almost touched the control panel above us. “Can you imagine spending seven days in something this small?” Shiborin asked in amazement.

“You can see the whole universe outside the window.”

“That might help for the first day. This is really suited only for creatures the size of turtles.”

“You’ll be weightless. They say that makes the place feel bigger.” Shiborin only grunted. “The Gemini astronauts survived eight days, then fourteen days, and they didn’t have any more room than this.” Now he failed to reply at all. I couldn’t blame him. The L-1 cabin seemed even more cramped than the Voskhod in which I had performed my first tasks as a bureau “flight test” engineer.

I suspected that Shiborin was growing tired of the endless classes and weeks away from home. He wanted to fly, and thought he was ready. Well, we were. Any of us in the Fourth Enrollment could have been assigned to a Soyuz or an L-1 crew and been ready for launch in four months. Unfortunately, we had fifty other cosmonauts in line ahead of us.

Zond 6 made midcourse corrections on the sixteenth and the seventeenth, as it fell faster and faster back to Earth. Artemov and his flight controllers began to really feel that a controlled reentry was going to take place. On the evening of the seventeenth, as planned, the L-1 separated from its cylindrical service-and-propulsion module and dived through the narrow target corridor in the sky over Antarctica, nine thousand kilometers from its planned landing point in Kazakhstan.

The first dive slowed Zond 6 from a speed of eleven kilometers per second to little more than seven — still very fast. Then, rolling right and left to generate lift from its bell shape, Zond 6 climbed back out of the atmosphere for several minutes before making a second dive. This one was steeper, slowing the vehicle to less than two hundred meters a second. At no point during the reentry did the G load exceed seven and then only briefly. A cosmonaut crew would have found this ride much less stressful.

The recovery teams in the primary zone received signals showing that Zond 6 was going to land about 150 kilometers south of Baikonur itself. Then nothing.

This silence was not unusual: Our recovery forces were stretched thin, even in the primary zone. Contact could be lost by simply having a helicopter or search aircraft turn in the wrong direction. Further, we knew that one of the antennas on Zond 6 had failed before the spacecraft left Earth orbit. Perhaps that was the reason for the silence. Analysis of telemetry from one of the remote sites showed that Zond 6 had deployed its parachute. “The next L-1 will carry two cosmonauts,” Artemov announced to the Yevpatoriya team.

In high spirits, we flew back to Moscow the morning of the eighteenth, where there was still no news. I went back to my flat to unpack, and was finishing a bowl of soup when Shiborin came to my door. “I just saw Leonov,” he said. “They found the Zond.”

I knew it was bad news from the look on his face. “What happened?”

“A seal ruptured during reentry. The inside of the spacecraft burned and the parachute came out early. The whole thing smashed into the desert. The only thing they salvaged was some film from one of the cameras.”

I could only imagine what Bykovsky or Leonov, or any of the lunar cosmonauts, were thinking. What else could possibly go wrong? It was as if American agents were playing a game with us — tantalizing us with near success, only to snatch it away at the last second.

Even if Zond 6 hadn’t crashed, we knew it would take a delay of a month or two in the Apollo 8 launch to give us a chance to beat America around the Moon. Now we would need a miracle — to have the Saturn or Apollo suffer some kind of accident.

Thoughts like that made me ill. The next morning I felt even worse when I saw the newspapers reporting the “triumph” of our country’s last attack on the cosmos, proudly publishing a photo of Earth taken from deep space — a photo that had been salvaged from the crushed pieces of Zond 6.

47 Pyrotechnics

In the following week, winter descended on Star Town with short days and blowing snow, and morale sank so low it was as if the beloved Yuri Gagarin had died the day before, not back in March. I resumed my routine of exercise followed by classes. There was one postmortem meeting concerning Zond 6 that I attended, where I heard the same thing Shiborin had told me, but at much greater length.

However, I was finally able to keep my promise to Lev about visiting him and Marina.

The lunar cosmonauts and their support team — Shiborin and I — were scheduled to spent Saturday, November 30, visiting the rocket test site at Zagorsk, a town a hundred and fifty kilometers northeast of Moscow, directly out the Yaroslavl Highway from Kaliningrad, for our first sight of L-3 lunar-lander hardware in action.

Given the nature of the tests, I knew Lev, not to mention Filin himself, would be present, and so I telephoned Department 731 a day ahead to arrange a return to Kaliningrad with my former colleagues. This (I thought) simple request created a surprising amount of fuss, resulting in a call from Triyanov to Colonel Belyayev. The result was formal approval for me to switch buses in Zagorsk, and a merciless amount of teasing from Leonov, Popovich, Shiborin, and the others for most of the three-hour ride to the site.

Driving through Zagorsk proper, I noted an ancient, tumbledown monastery not far from the road. I had never considered myself particularly religious — not surprising, I suppose, given the official atheism of the Soviet State. But I had also grown up hearing the phrases “thank God” or “God be praised” uttered by even the most ardent Communists, including Uncle Vladimir. I suddenly wanted to see the monastery more than I wanted to see the lunar lander, a desire that was as impractical as it was politically dangerous.

Ten kilometers past the monastery we found a collection of relatively new housing much like Star Town, and on the outskirts of that, the test facility. From my studies and chat in the bus, I knew it had half a dozen stands built into hillsides, where rocket engines of any size could be bolted into place, then fired, their actual thrust measured against the specified amount (never quite the same in practice) and the type of vibration (sometimes enough to destroy the engine).

These tests required the stands to be relatively far apart — if one of the big engines blew up, you didn’t want it destroying the stand next door — and immense amounts of piping, tankage, and refrigeration, much like the launchpads at Baikonur.

Today we were going to observe a different kind of test, however. A model of the L-3 lander was hanging from a crane twenty meters up. You couldn’t call it a mockup, since it looked nothing like the actual spacecraft: It was merely a cone-shaped mass sitting on a platform containing four legs and the L-3 landing motor. Below this was a patch of bare earth that had been sculpted into a fake lunar landscape, like the one in the building at the Gagarin Center.

As could be expected, preparations for the test were running late when we arrived, leaving us with free time to stand around stomping our feet in the cold. I found Lev as he finished a conversation with one of the bureau’s film cameramen. “How long is this going to last?” I asked.

“Don’t blink or you’ll miss it.” He nodded toward the camera operator. “He’ll be running film at superhigh speeds, though, so in a couple of days we’ll be able to watch everything in slow motion.” He clapped his gloved hands together. “You’re coming home with me?”

“Yes.” I spared him a recitation of the bureaucratic crisis I had caused by making such an outrageous request.

A siren sounded, signaling us to take our places. I rejoined Shiborin and the other military cosmonauts, all of us in our olive-colored greatcoats.

There was no countdown, no obvious warning of any kind. Suddenly we heard a hissing that quickly turned into a high-pitched roar. Bluish flame shot out of the engine at the base of the L-3 mockup, which was then released from the crane.

Still tethered, but no longer supported, it hovered briefly, then dropped straight down to its “lunar” landing site. At the moment its feet touched, we heard and felt a thud. Four little gouts of flame shot up from smaller rockets mounted above each of the four legs. The lander sat there for several seconds, then emitted several smaller pops as coverings flew off the cone.

“Is it quite finished?” one of the cosmonauts behind me said, earning a laugh.

Closer to me, Shiborin muttered, “That would rattle your teeth right out of your head.”

I glanced at him. He was frowning and shaking his head. “Maybe they figure you’d prefer one big jolt to several.” The smaller rockets that fired upward were designed to keep the L-3 on the ground once it touched down. Our limited data from the Luna probes suggested that a fully loaded L-3, with its high center of gravity (in lunar terms) could easily bounce off the surface and possibly topple over, dooming its pilot.

“And maybe our lander is just too damn tall.”

The sound the coverings made as they flew off was familiar to me, though I couldn’t remember why. When the lander had been “safed” enough for us to approach it, I found Lev and asked him what they were. “Small pyrotechnics,” he said. “Little bombs that blow off covers for sensors and antennas. We had problems with our space pyros on Zond 6, so we decided to test some standard military charges. They seem to have done a good job.”

The drive back to Kaliningrad took twice as long as the drive out, because snow started to fall and traffic on the highway slowed. To make matters worse, the bureau bus quit at one point, and we all had to get out and push.

It was after seven when we reached Lev and Marina’s flat. The bus driver kindly offered to drop us near their building, after I tipped him five rubles.

Marina looked happier and more relaxed than the last time I had seen her, now six months in the past. She was doing her hair differently, and she wore a dark blue dress that hugged her slim hips like silk. I’m not sure it wasn’t made of silk.

She had a truly wonderful feast waiting, real beef with potatoes and carrots, a bottle of some French champagne, and for dessert, strawberries with sugar. I thought it would be impolite to ask where Marina had gotten a treasure like strawberries in November, but she offered it unbidden: “My most recent assignment was in Washington,” she said.

I wanted to ask about Washington, but Lev abruptly stood up and excused himself, grabbing his coat. “If you’re going out, may I have the rest of your dessert?” I said, joking.

“Help yourself,” he said. “I’ve got to run over to the bureau for an hour.”

Marina said nothing, so I made the protest on her behalf. “What can be so important that it can’t wait a few hours?”

“I’ve got a presentation to make tomorrow, and I left the notes on my desk.” And just like that, he put his coat on and left.

“I suppose he thought we’d stop there before coming here,” I said. We began clearing the dishes.

Marina tilted her head to one side, a gesture that meant yes and no. “It’s just an excuse,” she said. “He wants us to have some time alone.”

I was confused. As usual, my only response was a joke. “That’s a terrible idea! Suppose I can’t keep my hands off you.”

Marina set down the dishes and put her arms around my neck, her mouth on mine tasting of strawberries and champagne. After several delicious moments, we broke, and she rested her head on my shoulder. I held her close, drinking in her sweet perfume, my hand roaming up and down her back, as I had so many times before. “Tell me what’s going on here,” I said.

“Lev and I — our relationship has ended.”

Now I was even more confused. “But he’s still living with you!”

She shrugged. “We’re together only because of the flat. With his travel and mine, we barely cross paths.” She took my hands and looked into my eyes. “I didn’t know any other way to tell you. Neither did he. So he… planned to bring us back together.”

“That’s what I call a good friend.” She smiled. Only then did I realize that she had said “back” together. And only then did I think of Katya.

“Lev is a good man, Yuri. A good friend. He feels terrible about what happened.”

At that moment I wanted to stay with Marina forever. I also wanted to flee into the November night. “I don’t know what to say,” I blurted, helplessly.

She laughed. “Say you still love me.”

“I still love you.” It was true.

“Then we can be friends again.”

“More than friends.” I was saying things without any conscious thought, only a vague concern about what they might mean.

“I’m in Moscow through the New Year,” she said.

“I’ll call you tomorrow.” We kissed again. And shortly thereafter I said good night, not wanting to be present when Lev returned.

I don’t remember walking to the Podlipki Station, don’t remember feeling the cold. That’s how wrought up I was.

It was only on the train home to Star Town that I had time to set aside my terror about this possible new future with Marina, about my ill-fated relationship with Katya, and think again about the popping sound and the smell of the pyros.

I had heard the same sound the day Gagarin died, as his plane flew over our group of parachutists on the runway at Kirzhach. Had some small military pyro been used to sabotage Gagarin’s plane?

Now if I could only remember where I had encountered that smell.

48 Davydov

The next morning was Sunday, technically a free day. Nevertheless, I showed up at the gym after a light breakfast, hoping to use exercise as a way of straightening out my thoughts.

For an hour I ran and lifted weights. The only sounds I heard were my feet slapping against the floor, the weights creaking, my own panting. The workout felt good, physically. As for my mental state, I did not achieve clarity, only a kind of numbness.

Shortly after nine, as I was about to quit, Shiborin and several others showed up. “Did you hear the news?” Shiborin said.

“No.” I was immediately apprehensive. News was usually bad.

“Belyayev met us when we got home last night. They want us to do our winter survival training starting Monday.”

“We weren’t supposed to do that until January.”

“It’s already especially cold in Vorkuta,” he said, grinning. “Actually, he said they expected us all to be busy in January, with the next Soyuz mission plus the first Carrier launches.”

“And yet another L-1.”

“Yes. We’re rolling rockets out of the factory like sausages.” I was surprised to hear this allusion to the famous quote by our former leader, Khrushchev, whose name had disappeared from the newspapers four years ago. Shiborin was growing more openly cynical. Was it my influence? Or that of his fellow eagles, like Saditsky? Or just an inevitable result of exposure to life in Star Town? In a way, it made me sad, like seeing a beautiful young girl starting to smoke cigarettes and wear makeup.

Knowing I would be gone again for at least a week helped focus my thoughts. Not on the Marina or Katya matter, which I knew even then was not solvable without anger and pain, but the nagging business of that popping sound and the pyros.

I needed to talk to Davydov, the air-crash investigator. But where would I find him on a Sunday? There was no telephone directory for the Moscow area; I didn’t even know where his institute was located.

But, thinking of Davydov’s dogged and relentless work habits, I suspected I could probably find him at Chkalov.

“Did you hear about Kamanin?” Davydov said, as he labored to push open the door to the hangar where the wreckage of Gagarin’s plane was laid out.

“No.”

“The Central Committee hit him with a formal reprimand.”

“Why?”

“For losing Gagarin. And Seregin. ‘Failure to exercise proper authority’ was the phrase they used.”

“Do you think it’s fair?”

“It’s only fair if they blame everyone else who was responsible. All they really want to do is write ‘the end’ to the whole story. Careful where you step.” I was following him into the darkness. “Don’t move.”

I froze in place while Davydov moved off like a shadow to turn on a light, which was so dim it was as if the inside of the hangar were bathed in moonlight.

All around me, in a grotesque parody of an aircraft shape, was arrayed the wreckage of Gagarin’s MiG-15. Most of the pieces were the size of a hand — mere fragments — though there was a large, intact piece of the tail, and an even bigger chunk that used to be the engine.

I was standing near the nose when Davydov returned to my side. “Now, what’s all this about a bomb in the cockpit?”

I told him about the sound I had heard the day of the crash and how I had learned it was a common pyro charge used by our military, adding Triyanov’s story about the damage even a small explosion in the cockpit could do. “When I was part of the search team, we couldn’t find most of the canopy.”

“More than sixty percent of it is still missing.”

“So it’s plausible that a small pyro could have exploded, shattering the canopy and possibly knocking the pilots unconscious long enough for them to crash.”

“Very plausible, given the lack of an obvious mechanical failure.” He stooped over to examine some bit of the smashed nose section. When he straightened, his voice was lower. “Most of us think someone wanted Gagarin dead. A small pyro with a pressure trigger, or a small timer. You could place it behind the control panel or between the front and back seats in a few minutes. Step back, watch them take off, and wait. Boom. The charge destroys itself and the timer. Two dead pilots, no evidence.”

I could see it all. A hand reaching in, pulling back. A person retreating into the shadows as Gagarin and Seregin approached. “It couldn’t be just anyone, of course. Chkalov is a military base and their security is pretty good. It would have to be someone on the ground crew—”

“—or someone with special access.”

“Fine. Who?”

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling sick.

Because I did know. I had remembered where I encountered that distinctive smell of a pyro, not more than an hour after Gagarin and Seregin crashed.

“Yuri?”

Bleary-eyed, my father stared at me from his open door. He was wearing a peasant blouse and old trousers, suspenders hanging down, as if he had just pulled them on. I pushed past him into the flat. “It’s midnight!”

“I know what time it is. Close the door.”

He was about to make more complaints, but my manner and the look on my face alerted him that this was not a friendly visit.

“You killed Gagarin,” I said.

He weighed several responses as he stepped away — out of reach? — and pulled up his suspenders. “You’ve been spying again.”

“Not by choice. Pieces of the puzzle just keep finding me.”

He sat down, motioning me to do the same. But I remained standing. I told him about the pyros, the missing canopy, the bogus conclusion of the accident board. About the smell on my hands.

“I thought it was Vladimir, though I was never sure, because I couldn’t connect the Gagarin murder to Korolev’s. You were the only person in both places.

“You were also at Baikonur, the bigshot Air Force inspector. You could have sabotaged those rockets and spacecraft, too.”

He stared past me, his eyes clouded. He shook his head, as if trying to deny my charges, but only said, “I tried to protect you.”

“It’s all true.”

“It was necessary.”

For the second time in two days, my heart was pounding and I was short of breath, though the circumstances could not have been more different. I had wandered for hours after my meeting with Davydov, eventually returning to my flat and taking out the PB-8 pistol. I had planned to confront my father with the evidence and, I suppose, arrest him.

But as I worked through the things I had seen — the day at the Kremlin Hospital when Korolev died, the times I had seen my father at Baikonur, the encounter at Chkalov — I felt sure I was misinterpreting everything, that I had become as paranoid and suspicious as the State Security spies I hated.

So I left the pistol in the flat and took the train into town to speak to my father, hoping he could dissuade me and place the blame where it belonged: on Uncle Vladimir, or on someone else entirely.

“That’s what we’ve always said in this country, isn’t it, Papa? No matter what we do… burn the farmers, arrest the dissidents, shoot the Trotskyites, make deals with Nazis… it’s necessary.” This was making me sick to my stomach. “Did you kill Mother, too? Was that necessary?”

He tried to hit me, but I blocked it. He was strong, for his age, but after all my months of exercise, so was I. I shoved him back into his chair and held him there.

“I should report you.”

“To whom? You think you know everything that happened, but you don’t.”

That was certainly true. It wasn’t as though I could turn my father over to the militia; those drunken fools could barely arrest a traffic violator. A three-star general would immediately be turned over to his service, or State Security, where it was very likely that he had allies.

And this was my own father! I wanted him to offer a magic explanation, to clear himself in my eyes.

Nothing was said. For moments the only sound was our breathing. Then the clock struck one A.M. I had to be up in four hours.

“I’m going out of town,” I said, finally. “I’ll be home at the end of the week. Try not to kill anyone else in the meantime.”

I walked out without a backward glance.

49 Vorkuta

I didn’t sleep at all until boarding the An-12 at Chkalov the next morning, when I promptly began to doze, waking as Shiborin shook me two hours later on approach to Vorkuta.

“You didn’t miss a thing,” he said, nodding out at the landscape, a frozen tundra that was almost treeless. What could be seen of it through the low clouds, that is. “It’s been overcast all the way.”

The weather matched my mood — cold, colorless, unforgiving. I badly wanted to punish my father for his lies, for his crimes. Next on that list was the Party itself, which allowed all of it to happen.

I felt I should include myself on the list of criminals. I had spied and lied, too.

But in this grim outpost on the Arctic Circle, there was no opportunity for vengeance. Survival was the issue, and not my survival in a simulated “off course” spacecraft landing; surviving in Vorkuta itself as winter approached.

I had heard whispers all my life that Vorkuta was also the center of our country’s Gulag, the system of prison work camps, where political prisoners and criminals were sentenced to exile, or to hard labor in the mines. Of course, I saw nothing of these, just blocks of drab, sooty apartment flats, occasional public buildings and factories, and unplowed roads leading off toward the horizon. There was no other reason for the town to be here: no missile center or Air Force base, for example. One look at the primitive airport was enough to convince me of that. Only a small, frozen river running through the middle of the town hinted at any possible commerce. I could imagine boats putting in during the summer months to pick up loads of ore, which would travel a few kilometers north to the sea, then west to Murmansk.

It was already getting dark when the ten of us — four cosmonauts, a doctor, and no fewer than five instructors — reached a military barracks on the north side of the city. One of our instructors from the Gagarin Center, Captain Voronin, took us around to a shed and showed us our Soyuz/L-1 descent capsule. Fitted with two seats, an ancient Air Force radio, and a wooden control panel on which some humorous test subject — possibly Saditsky — had inscribed obscene commands (“Begin penis insertion!”), it was no more than a shell. “You’ll each be issued a standard recovery kit,” Voronin assured us. “It will be identical to those included in each flight vehicle.”

“Will we have a gun to shoot wolves?” Shiborin was friends with Leonov, whose Voskhod 2 flight had first alerted us to the need for such weaponry.

Voronin looked uncomfortable. “We don’t have authorization for firearms, yet. We’re too far north for bears here, anyway.”

I didn’t know whether to believe that or not, but I wished I had packed my illicit PB-8 along, if only to see the look on Shiborin’s face when I pulled it out.

“We heat the shell to thirty-five degrees before taking it off the truck,” Voronin informed us, returning to his prepared script. “So it will have the same residual heat as a spacecraft that has just reentered.”

“They’ve thought of everything,” Shiborin said.

Shiborin and I were the first “crew,” wakened at six A.M. in darkness, given a cursory medical examination, then breakfast. “Leonov told me to eat heartily,” Shiborin said. I had noticed he was taking double helpings. I wasn’t so sure: A full belly would mean less reliance on “emergency” rations, but it would also require more sanitary exercises, as our instructors called them. And there was no toilet in the Soyuz/L-1 descent capsule. I ate lightly.

Then, dressed in flight suits over which we were allowed to wear our officer’s coats, we were off to the trucks. It was cold, not bitterly so, but enough so that I had no trouble believing it was a few days before winter, and that I was on the Arctic Circle.

Shiborin teased Voronin: “Do you also warm us up before we get dropped in the snow?”

The goal of the test was for the two of us, commander Shiborin and flight engineer Ribko, to survive for forty-eight hours. We had gone through hours of survival lessons back at the center, of course, and had been given pointers and handbooks by our support team last night.

Their advice was simple: Establish communication, stay in the spacecraft as much as possible, and wait for the “rescue” teams to arrive. (Our instructors would be standing by with their radios a kilometer off. I suspected they would also sneak up and check on us from time to time.)

We arrived a few moments after our Soyuz had “landed.” The problem was, the spacecraft was tipped onto its side. We weren’t going to be lowered through the nose hatch like real cosmonauts, we were going to have to crawl on our hands and knees like dogs slipping under a fence. When Shiborin saw the arrangement, he called Voronin “bastard.”

Voronin, who was no older than us, seemed unhappy. “Most of the spacecraft have tipped over on landing,” he said.

“The ones that haven’t crashed or gone through the ice,” I said, unable to stop myself.

The metal of the hatchway was, as promised, still warm. Snow had melted underneath the spacecraft, in fact. I crawled in first, and immediately discovered another challenge: The seats were to one side and on top. (Even seeing the spacecraft on its side, I had hoped that they might be on the bottom.)

I curled up in one corner, my side against the control panel, as Shiborin entered and saw the layout. “This isn’t training,” he said, “this is torture.”

The hatch was closed behind us, as it would be on landing, and with a final radio check, the test officially began. It was like hide-and-seek, with Shiborin and me counting off fifteen minutes until we could open the hatch from the inside (necessary, because the air quickly began to get stifling) while our instructors ran and hid.

At the stroke of fifteen minutes, I used the radio to call them, was given permission to crack open the hatch. As soon as I did so, Shiborin said, “Let me out of here. I don’t feel so good.”

The rules allowed him to exit the craft at any point. Better yet, his “sanitary exercise” was also allowed. Even if it were forbidden, were Voronin and his team going to search the area for frozen piles of shit?

Then we settled down to an extremely dull morning. I broke out the rations and water — we had very strict rules about how much water to consume — and amused myself by speculating on how quickly the spacecraft was cooling down, while Shiborin dozed.

When I tired of that, I went back to considering my situation. Maybe it was due to my agitated mental state, but sitting in a cramped, cold Soyuz mockup on the tundra seemed not that far removed from an L-3 parked on the lunar Sea of Serenity. If anything, the L-3 would be more comfortable! And I would have the added pleasure of seeing the surface of the Moon outside my window.

On the Moon there would be no Uncle Vladimir, no General Nikolai Ribko, no Ustinov or the Hammer or their clans. There might be Americans, but there would be no Communist Party.

No matter what, I had to find some way to save my cosmonaut career. I wanted that visit to the Moon.

After our midday reports, and a meal of dry, sublimated curds and nuts, I dozed off, waking in pain and confusion less than an hour later. “What the hell is going on?” Shiborin snapped.

Someone was rapping on the cold metal of the spacecraft! We feigned joy at our “rescue,” and opened the hatch all the way.

Voronin was standing there. The others were climbing off the truck with a line to attach to the spacecraft. “The test is canceled,” he announced.

“What did we do?” Shiborin said, fearful that his early visit to the toilet might have derailed his cosmonaut career.

“Nothing. You will complete the training another time.” Voronin turned to me. “Lieutenant Ribko needs to return to Moscow immediately on personal business.”

After a stop at the barracks to collect my belongings, I was driven down to the airport and put on another An-12 heading south.

I had to leave Shiborin and the others behind. Poor Shiborin was told he and Voronin would be teamed for another survival “flight” the next day.

No one had any idea of the nature of my “personal business,” which, of course, allowed me several hours to fret. Was I being arrested? Possibly, though surely someone would have arrested me in Vorkuta so I could be returned to Moscow in custody.

I was alarmed that Colonel Belyayev and Ivan Saditsky were at Chkalov to meet me when I arrived. But Belyayev looked elsewhere as Saditsky put his arm around me. “I’m sorry to tell you this, Yuri, but your father is dead.”

50 Vagankov Cemetery

These were the facts: At six o’clock that morning, about the time, allowing for the different zones, that Shiborin and I were eating our breakfast in Vorkuta, a militiaman taking the train back to Moscow from his post in Monino happened to get off at the Tsiolkovsky Station, the one closest to Star Town, to buy a newspaper, he said. (One of his fellow officers conceded that it was to buy vodka, which was always in stock at that station.)

He noticed a man’s body at the end of the platform, under a dusting of snow, a man in a full military uniform, dead from a gunshot wound to the left temple. No weapon was found in the area, ruling out suicide. This was the official information, of course, which meant nothing to me.

My father, Colonel-General Nikolai Tikhonovich Ribko, Hero of the Soviet Union, Pilot First Class, graduate of the Red Banner Air Force Academy, and holder of the Order of the Red Star.

That was how he was described in a column in Red Star, the newspaper of the Soviet armed forces, two days later. He died, of course, “while fulfilling his duties.” I could have written a more interesting obituary: shameless tool of the Communist Party, poisoner of hundreds or thousands of Soviet citizens, murderer of at least two, or shall we count my mother as three?

Add coward.

That word could also have been applied to me during the tortured days that followed my return from Vorkuta. I was taken to see the body in the morgue at the Central Aviation Hospital, and gave my permission for its cremation. My father’s stars and medals entitled him to burial in the cemetery at Novodevichy Convent, the final resting place of many heroes of Soviet aviation and industry, but I insisted that his ashes should rest in Vagankov, next to those of my mother.

Since there were no other survivors, I inherited the contents of the flat in Frunze Embankment — though not the flat itself, of course. One of my father’s adjutants, a Lieutenant Colonel Kozlov, explained that it would be assigned to another member of the Air Force high command, though not for several weeks, at least. They would give me time to dispose of my father’s possessions, a process I was not eager to begin.

Katya joined me in a brief visit to the flat, however, the day before the funeral service. I expected to find some explanation, some note, but found nothing unusual, though Katya pointed out that everything was clean and in its place, as if the owner had planned to take a long trip….

The funeral took place on Saturday, December 6, 1968, a cold, bright day — the day when Bykovsky or Leonov could have commanded a manned L-1 launch, had things gone differently.

Had my father not interfered.

There was a good crowd: Shiborin and his wife. Lev and Marina, together but not, I judged, truly together. Filin and Triyanov. Saditsky and several other cosmonauts, plus my father’s immediate associates, and General Kamanin himself. (How many of them would have come if they’d known how much more difficult the late General Ribko had made their lives?)

And, of course, Katya and Uncle Vladimir.

I had received a genuinely warm call of condolences from Uncle Vladimir the day I returned from Vorkuta, which was especially painful, given my long suspicions of him. His manner at the funeral was completely proper, and caused me to doubt my own feelings.

But then, doubt was my most dominant emotion that week, and for several that followed.

Katya, who had rushed to Star Town the moment she heard the news of my father’s death, had won my gratitude (if not my heart) for all time for the way she stayed by my side, helping me deal with the awful postmortem rituals and necessities, ultimately organizing and serving as hostess for a reception following the funeral that we held at the flat. Here I accepted condolences for what seemed like the tenth time, and drank far too heavily toasting the memory of General Ribko — whose official portrait, now bordered in black, dominated the living room.

“This has been a terrible year,” General Kamanin said. “So many losses. It feels like the war.” For him, it was true: Gagarin, Seregin, Ribko. And he could hardly have forgotten about poor Komarov. Of course, one of his friends had murdered the others. But things like that happened in war.

Eventually the mourners began to leave. I sent Katya home and accepted a ride back to Star Town with the Shiborins. I walked into my flat more alone in the world than I had ever been. I was now an orphan.

Through all of my mourning I had stayed dry-eyed, but here, now, I wept. I wept for myself, like a child. I wept for my country and my friends. I had lost my father, after all. Long before his actual death.

Colonel Belyayev had encouraged me to take some time off, but I presented myself at morning exercise the Monday after the funeral. I had already lost a week due to the cancellation of my winter survival training; I didn’t feel I could afford to miss anything else.

I needn’t have bothered. Most of my group’s training time was devoted to gossiping about the American program — it appeared as though Apollo 8 was truly going to be launched soon — or discussing Kamanin’s plans to reorganize the Gagarin Center, raising its status from that of a military unit to an actual scientific-research institute, doubling the size. Even the cosmonaut team itself, already divided into various branches, was to be split up.

There were also final examinations for the eight cosmonauts training for the next pair of Soyuz missions, including Saditsky. This time there was no political maneuvering; everyone scored well, and the crews got ready to leave for Baikonur confident we would finally accomplish a manned docking and spacewalk, almost two years after we first tried it.

These distractions were a blessing, because while I was present in body, I could not concentrate. Had I been graded on exercises or even my favorite academic subjects, I would have flunked. Belyayev had been right, and I should have taken a holiday.

After two weeks I began to emerge from my daze, becoming more active. I felt the urge to sweep everything bad out of my life, to start over for the New Year.

One of my first targets was the PB-8 pistol stashed behind my books. But on the morning when I went to find it, it was gone.

In its place was a note — a single piece of paper, written in my father’s neat hand. “Yuri, I will pay the penalty. Remember our good times and your mother, and forgive me. Papa.”

It had never occurred to me to ask what gun he had used to kill himself. He had come here and taken mine! No wonder he had been found so close by, at Tsiolkovsky Station.

(Had the weapon been found? If so, by whom?)

On that same day, Saturday, December 21, the American Apollo 8 roared off its launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Astronauts Borman, Lovell, and Anders were the crew. Within hours they had fired the upper stage of their Saturn V-5 and sent themselves soaring toward the Moon.

Three days later they burned the engine of the Apollo service module, putting themselves into lunar orbit, where they stayed for twenty hours. On December 25—Christmas Day in the West — they began their journey home, splashing safely down in the Pacific on December 28, winning the first heat of the race to the Moon.

51 The World’s First Experimental Space Station

Our national response to Apollo 8, as reported to the cosmonaut team by General Kamanin, was to press the battle on all fronts. An unmanned L-1 would be launched January 20; if it succeeded, a manned L-1 would follow in April.

The Soyuz docking, rendezvous, and EVA test of our prototype Hawk lunar spacesuit was to be launched in mid-January. There would be a second twin docking flight in summer, and two additional docking missions testing the lunar Soyuz/L-3 capture system (which was different from the Soyuz/Soyuz model) in the fall and winter.

The first Carrier launch vehicle would fly in February, a second in May.

The L-3 lander would begin its unmanned orbital trials by late in the year.

Finally, in summer we would send a new type of unmanned probe called the E-8 to the Moon: It would land, as the E-6 had, but dig up some samples, which would then be shot back to Earth and recovered! We hoped this sample-return mission would steal some of Apollo’s thunder, and might very well show that the creative Soviet approach to lunar exploration was just as timely and efficient as the American plan.

As we walked out of the meeting, I asked Saditsky what he thought of the staggering number and variety of launchers and spacecraft. “It’s like the Zhukov method of clearing a minefield,” he said, mentioning our honored commander of the Great Patriotic War. “If you don’t have well-trained sappers with useful tools, you simply line up vast numbers of soldiers and march them through it. Many soldiers will die, but the minefield will be cleared.”

Shortly thereafter, on Monday, January 13, 1969, Shiborin and I flew back to Baikonur for checkout on L-1 Number 13.

As a Bauman graduate, an engineer, and an atheistic Communist, I was not generally superstitious, but even I noticed the many instances of that unlucky number. Beyond the date of our flight and the serial number of the L-1, one of the two Soyuz was also serial number 13. And Lieutenant Colonel Shatalov, who would be launched as the pilot of Soyuz Number 12, was the thirteenth pilot-cosmonaut of the USSR in a line beginnning with Gagarin. (This public honor came complete with medals and special automobile license plates bearing that number!) Shatalov claimed to be unconcerned, but I heard there were discussions among the more superstitious members of the State Commission about the subject. (To this day you can find buildings in Moscow without a thirteenth floor — they call it “12-A.” And let’s not forget that the original surveyors of the Baikonur Cosmodrome made sure that “Area 13” would become the cemetery!)

In fact, the original launch date for our thirteenth pilot-cosmonaut was to have been January 13, but Shiborin and I knew it had been postponed even before we left Chkalov. Technical problems? No one seemed quite sure about the reason.

Nevertheless, on cold and snowy January 14, Vladimir Shatalov became Cosmonaut 13 when his Soyuz reached orbit safely and was announced as Soyuz 4. A day later, spacecraft Number 13 with a crew of Volynov, Yeliseyev, and Khrunov was also launched successfully, becoming Soyuz 5.

Having learned from the fiasco of Beregovoy’s failed docking, our flight directors allowed Shatalov — piloting the active craft in the scenario — two full days to adapt to weightlessness. Even the three cosmonauts aboard Soyuz 5 were required only to make some small engine burns during the first day, placing their craft in the proper target orbit.

Shortly after noon (Baikonur time) on the sixteenth, Soyuz 4 approached to within one hundred meters of Soyuz 5 using the automatic guidance system. Then Shatalov took over manual control and eased into a perfect docking. Watching the events live on state television, we also heard a comment from the crew of Soyuz 5 as the probe of the active craft entered the drogue of the passive docking unit: “Help, we’ve been raped!”

I thought of the comments scrawled on the control panel of the Soyuz mockup used for winter survival training as those of us listening in the command post at Area 18 burst into laughter.

As State television’s censors no doubt began fielding irate phone calls from members of the Central Committee, our commentators trumpeted the establishment of “the world’s first experimental space station,” massing over thirteen thousand kilograms and consisting of four different habitable modules. Well, yes and no — to get from one pair of modules to the other, you had to go outside the space station, like swimming across a river to reach the other room of your house. Stupid.

Then it was time for the years-delayed EVA. Khrunov and Yeliseyev moved into the orbital module of Soyuz 5 and donned their white Hawk suits, the same model we had used in zero-G aircraft flights — the suits that had the life-support pack attached to the legs. Volynov remained sealed inside the Soyuz 5 command module, prepared to film as much of the activity as he could through the small windows.

Shatalov, meanwhile, was sealed inside the command module of Soyuz 4, with the outer hatch of his orbital module unlocked.

We saw fuzzy black-and-white pictures of a ghostlike Khrunov emerging from Soyuz 5 and moving slowly toward us along the handrails built onto the exterior of both orbital modules for this purpose. He stopped to inspect the docking mechanism, taking a series of photographs, then continued on to Soyuz 4. Only when he had reached the hatch of the other vehicle did Yeliseyev emerge and follow Khrunov onto the rails.

It took an hour from the time the hatch on Soyuz 5 opened until Khrunov and Yeliseyev were safely buttoned up inside Soyuz 4. From all indications, the Hawk spacesuit worked very well. The two spacecraft separated as planned after four and a half hours together.

Khrunov, Yeliseyev, and Shatalov made a safe landing in the primary zone a day later, on the seventeenth. Volynov, flying Soyuz 5 alone, had a much more difficult time of it.

Trouble began for him when the cylindrical equipment module failed to separate from the command module after making the all-important retro burn. Soyuz 5 began its descent into the atmosphere with its heat shield covered. Of course, the spacecraft’s center of gravity and basic flight dynamics were totally fouled, too. The spacecraft swung around so that it was reentering nose-first. Temperature inside the spacecraft began to rise. Volynov expected to burn up. He ripped pages out of his journal and stuffed them inside his flight suit, next to his chest, hoping they might survive the flames.

Then, magically, the equipment module separated on its own. Volynov was able to swing the freed command module back to the right attitude and go ahead with a ballistic reentry, which subjected him to nine Gs. He had to have worried about the parachute system, though, which had been subject to excessive heat when Soyuz 5 was flying nose-forward.

The ’chutes did open as planned, though Volynov’s landing was hard enough to knock out several of his teeth. Far from the primary zone, he had to wrap himself in winter survival gear and crawl out of Soyuz 5 unaided.

(All this we learned later, of course, though I can imagine the horror at the flight-control center in Yevpatoriya. Not again!)

For all of Volynov’s troubles, Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 were two steps forward, back into the race.

On the nineteenth, the latest Universal Rocket 500 thundered off its pad carrying L-1 Number 13 on the flight we hoped would pave the way for a manned L-1 in April or May. I was optimistic: While I didn’t believe that all of our failures were my father’s work (our own lack of quality-control in the manufacture of rocket engines and electronics would have doomed some of those flights, anyway), he had created bizarre last-minute failures on launch vehicles that had passed stringent checkout.

He was gone now. I myself had sat through the checkout and State Commission reports on the status of the UR-500 and the L-1.

So I was stunned when the new mission ended within five minutes as the second stage of the launcher failed, the escape rocket pulling the L-1 safely away before the self-destruct charges blew, parachuting to a landing downrange.

Then I began to have horrifying doubts: Suppose I had accused my father unfairly? Suppose someone else was tampering with our spacecraft?

No, no, no. I had his letter. I had the other evidence. If I had been wrong, he wouldn’t have admitted his guilt.

He wouldn’t have killed himself with my pistol.

In any case, these were the things I told myself as I flew back to Moscow with Shiborin and Leonov and the other disappointed lunar cosmonauts.

The day after our return — January 22—there was a parade in honor of the four new Soyuz cosmonauts. Even the student-cosmonauts of the Fourth Enrollment were given the morning off to be bused to Red Square to take part, standing in the crowd in Borovitsky Plaza on the southwest corner of the Kremlin complex.

Our publicly known cosmonauts, such as Nikolayev and Beregovoy, were part of the motorcade. Others, even such long-serving veterans as Ivan Saditsky, who would command one of the next Soyuz flights, stood with the spectators. As we waited, I asked Saditsky when he hoped to fly. “My crew will be ready by July,” he said, “but we won’t have a vehicle until September. The factories can’t keep up with the demand.” I could see why: We were trying to test four different models of the Soyuz — the orbital version just flown by Shatalov and his comrades, the L-1 that had just failed, yet another version of the L-1 configured for the first Carrier launch next month, plus the L-3. All were built by the same plant in Kaliningrad. “Meanwhile, the Americans are getting their lunar module ready. They could be on the Moon this summer.”

I admired the American successes, but I found that hard to believe. “They say they need to test the lunar module three or four times before they try that.”

“They often say one thing and do another. They already announced a lunar landing crew for a flight in July. Armstrong is the commander.” I hadn’t heard that news, but then, I had been busy with my father’s affairs.

“Do you think they’ll succeed?”

He stared out over the crowd, many of them stamping their feet on this cold day, others sipping openly from flasks. “Yes.” He must have seen the shock on my face. Saditsky was honest, even brutally so, but he was also competitive. “Something went wrong. I don’t know when… maybe it was when Korolev died.” That had been the very day we met, Saditsky, my father, and Gagarin, almost three years ago to the day. And two of those men were now dead. “Maybe it was when Yuri crashed.”

At that moment I realized he was right — but far too conservative. Something had indeed gone wrong, but it hadn’t started the day Gagarin died, or Korolev, but much earlier. It started when the Glorious Revolution of the Russian people, a genuine attempt to create a new way of life, had become just another case of rule by force. When a small group of men with guns found they could steal without fear, that they could murder those who disagreed with them. What allowed them to survive was their ability to buy silence, with apartments and food and cars, and the promise of a good education, which would make access to apartments, food, and cars that much easier. All they required in return was mute complicity.

My father was a part of it. So was Uncle Vladimir. So was Saditsky, for that matter.

And so was I.

Just then, a line of cars slowed to make the final turn into the Kremlin, and we all heard several sharp sounds. “What was that?” I asked, stupidly.

“Gunfire!” Saditsky snapped. “Look!”

We pushed through the crowd, which had suddenly come alive, in time to see a young officer being flattened by burly security men in dark coats. He waved a gun like a wild man. There was blood on the snow. Shards of shattered glass.

The windows had been shot out of the lead car, the one carrying Nikolayev and Beregovoy. They were crumpled in the back seat, their condition impossible to tell. Shot in the face, their driver lay with his head against the steering wheel.

That was as close as I got. Uniform or no, I was pushed back into the crowd by the growing number of guards who cleared a path for the other cars in the procession to escape.

I lost track of Saditsky and Shiborin as I was moved along with the crowd, down Znamenka Street. Once we were a block from the shooting site, we were able to disperse, and I circled south to where the Star Town bus was parked, on Lenivka.

There I found most of my fellow cosmonauts and their wives, some of them quite shaken by what they had seen and heard.

We waited for the better part of an hour until Saditsky and Artyukhin, another senior cosmonaut, returned. “Everyone is fine,” Artyukhin announced. “Nikolayev, Leonov, Tereshkova were completely unhurt. Beregovoy had some cuts from flying glass.”

“What about the driver?” I asked. He had clearly been hurt.

“The driver is dead.” Someone else asked who the assassin had been shooting at. “Brezhnev,” Saditsky said. “They think the gunman mistook Beregovoy for Brezhnev.” The two did resemble each other.

The bus started up and Saditsky sat down next to me. I could smell the vodka on his breath. “Too bad he missed,” he said, so quietly I almost didn’t hear him.

“Brezhnev, or Beregovoy?”

“Either one. They’re both bastards.”

52 Red Moon

The next afternoon I went to see Katya, our first visit since the day of my father’s burial. It was a workday, but given my long stay at Baikonur and my various personal crises, Colonel Belyayev was happy to let me leave Star Town early.

I was determined to be honest with Katya, to tell her about my resumed relationship with Marina (though I’d had no contact with her since the funeral, either!), to make as clean a break as possible. I didn’t expect it to be easy, or painless.

I had not alerted her to my arrival. For one thing, simply getting in touch with her at the Space Research Institute was a tedious, often fruitless process. For another, I hoped to deliver my message quickly, without giving her a chance to build up some tidal wave of emotion that might drown both of us.

I succeeded in exactly one of my goals: surprising Katya. “Well, since you’re here, come in,” she said. She immediately headed toward the kitchen. “I just got home. Have you eaten?”

“I had something on the train.”

She returned with a bottle and two glasses. “You will have a drink, though.”

That was one thing I was finding easier to accept. “Yes.”

We touched glasses and drank. Well, I did. She sipped and put hers down. “I need to make a phone call. Sit down.”

I did, and she went off to the other room for a moment, door closed.

Was she calling another man, perhaps? Had I disrupted Katya’s plans? I suspected so when she returned, a flush on her cheeks.

“Were you at Borovitsky?” she said.

“I saw most of it, yes.” I described the events, leaving out Saditsky’s comments, and my own thoughts.

“It’s a terrible thing. Shooting at Brezhnev won’t solve whatever problems this man had.” The would-be assassin turned out to be a young army officer with a history of grievances, or as they would now be called, mental problems. “It will only give State Security an excuse to crack down.”

“Since when have they ever needed an excuse?”

“Since they started paying attention to what the rest of the world thinks. They’ll still smash you in the face, but they want everyone to believe it was for your own good.”

This was unusual talk coming from Katya. “Are you afraid of something?”

She wouldn’t look at me. “No. No, it’s winter.” Here she smiled. “I’m a year older. My waist refuses to shrink no matter how much I starve myself, and the sleep lines have become permanent.”

I took her hands in mine, kissing them. “Katya, you’re beautiful.”

“If that were true, you wouldn’t be here to break up with me.”

She gave my hands a squeeze, then sat back, challenging me to deny it. “Why do you think that?”

“Because you’ve never gotten over your little dark-haired spy. Marina. No, let me finish.” I had started to protest. “You’ve been distant. You’ve been on trips for days and weeks and never sent a letter. I’ve become a convenience to you. And now you don’t need me.”

“That’s not true.”

“Which part?” She was challenging me now. Here came that emotional tidal wave.

“You were never a convenience.”

I think I surprised her, enough so that her manner became more gentle. “But you are here to tell me we won’t be seeing each other anymore.”

I found I could barely speak, that I had tears in my eyes. “Yes.”

She sighed. She also had tears in her eyes — sadness or anger, I couldn’t tell. “Then you should probably leave.”

I put down the glass and stood up.

So did Katya, reaching for me. Our arms went around each other. I wanted to put her head on my shoulder, to console her, but she was so tall the idea was ludicrous. We merely touched foreheads for a moment. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.” I was failing in my search for magic words.

“I know. I hope you believe the same of me.” I opened the door. “One last bit of advice, from someone who was fonder of you than she should have been: When they order you to the hospital, watch out.”

This was alarming, not just for what she said, but for the abrupt change of subject.

“Why? Will they try to kill me?”

She smiled and shook her head. “They can kill you now, silly. No. When they send you to the hospital, they’re getting ready to kick you out of the cosmonaut team.”

“How am I supposed to stop them?”

“That’s up to you. I just thought you should be warned.”

Then I did kiss her, fiercely, passionately, finally.

It was dark, of course, when I left Katya’s building and headed for the Belorussia Station. There were few people on the streets and no kiosks open; curious, because it was a typical winter night when people would shop.

I saw that a black Zil was rolling down the street a little behind me. Even more curious. I glanced around, wondering who was being followed.

Me. The car slowed, and I began to run down a cross street.

Another car, this one a Volga, suddenly flashed its lights in front of me. I was trapped. This car had militia plates — local police. So while there was nowhere to run, I had no reason to run. After all, I was a military officer in uniform!

But these militia officers weren’t in uniform, which was unusual. One of them, gray-haired, hawk-nosed, said, “Passport.”

I handed it over without a word—

— as one of the others hit me from behind, a sharp blow to my back that forced me to my knees. Outraged, wincing, I turned to look at my assailant, who was a heavyset young thug.

And behind him… Uncle Vladimir.

He stepped forward and gently helped me to my feet, saying, “That’s how it used to be done, Yuri. We would distract you, then hit you from behind.” He tapped a finger on the back of my head. “With a bullet.”

I was still panting from the pain in my back. It was difficult to talk. “Why are you doing this?”

“You needed a stronger lesson. You’re a bright young man with a great future, but you’re also bullheaded, like your father. I’ve learned that I can’t be subtle with you.” He leaned close. “Let it go.”

“Let what go?”

The other thugs had moved off, out of earshot. “Korolev. Gagarin. Sabotage.”

“I did.”

“If you had, your father would still be alive.”

He didn’t need to say anything else: At that moment I knew for certain what I had already suspected. “He was working for you. You wanted those men killed.”

“Your father, Yuri, was a marvelous weapon. Technically trained, able to go anywhere, cold-blooded and ruthless when it was necessary. When he died, I wept genuine tears.”

It took all my willpower not to smash him in the face. “He hated you.”

“He feared me. Your father, Yuri, was a serf. He came from a family of serfs who had lived in their own shit for a thousand years. Your mother’s side of the family — my side, a family you share, Yuri — we’re lords. Aristocrats.”

“I thought we were all Communists.”

Uncle Vladimir laughed so hard I thought he would choke. Hoped he would. “Someday. Until that happy day, we use whatever tools we have. A worker is just a tool.”

“I don’t believe it. My father wasn’t an ignorant peasant—”

“True. He was a clever man, as peasants go. Not clever enough to keep himself out of trouble, of course. I had saved him, protected him. He had to do what I wanted.”

There was still a dull ache in my back, but I felt as though I could run. If I found the chance, which didn’t seem likely. “Why was it necessary?”

“What?”

“The death of Korolev, the sabotage, all of it?”

The look on Uncle Vladimir’s face was one I had never seen before — not on his face, at least. It reminded me of Filin, of Lev, even of myself. “Why did you go to Bauman, Yuri?”

“My mother—”

“My sister wanted you there. Because I had gone there.” He raised his head. “I was one of those dreamers once, Yuri. I even met Tsiolkovsky. But the Revolution turned me into… well, into what I am now.”

“I still don’t understand—”

“They were ruining our program, Yuri! Korolev was completely overextended, failing in health, yet no one would refuse him! He had to leave the scene.” It was very clear to me now: Uncle Vladimir was like an earnest college student trying to make a point to a skeptical professor. Old habits took over: God help me, I joined in!

“And Gagarin was a threat from the military.”

“Exactly. They would have made things more efficient, yes, but only for weapons and spy satellites. Russia deserves a Red Moon, Yuri. Mars will be ours, too. The Red Planet, right?”

“But, what about the sabotage, Artemov’s arrest—”

“Artemov needed to know he was no Korolev.” It was true; thanks to the failures, Artemov had only a fraction of Korolev’s power. “And you need to know that you are not your father.”

I stared stupidly as Uncle Vladimir motioned to one of his thugs, who stepped forward with an object wrapped in a cloth.

My pistol. It was dusty, as if someone had dropped it in flour.

“Did you know that this was the weapon that killed your father?” I had been afraid of that; I nodded. “And that it contains your fingerprints as well as his?”

“Yes.”

“Any further… disruptions will force me, as an officer of State Security, to reopen the matter of your father’s suicide. As a murder.” The thug quickly wrapped up the pistol and tucked it away. “The fact that you are a member of the cosmonaut team won’t save you. The only thing that saves you now, Yuri, is that you are my only link to my sister.” He rubbed his shoulders. “It’s getting colder, don’t you think?”

“Fuck you.”

All he did was smile at me, then turn to his team. “Let’s go.”

Within moments, I was alone on that dark street.

I told no one about the encounter, of course. No one would have believed it.

But my back hampered me, and my physical-training instructor reported it to Colonel Belyayev the next morning, and I was summoned to his office. I told him I had slipped on the ice last night.

“Drinking?”

“No, sir.” I don’t know whether he believed me nor not.

“Well, a few days in the hospital should shape you up.”

Remembering Katya’s warning, I almost begged him not to send me to the hospital. “It’s only a bruise,” I said. “It will heal.”

Belyayev hated the military doctors at Star Town, so he was sympathetic. Still: “I have a report here. I’ve got to take some action.”

“Can’t I be put on limited duty for a few days?” Here my lack of military experience showed.

“It would have to be for at least two weeks.”

“I should be fine after two weeks, sir.”

“All right.” He signed the papers.

Which, unfortunately, prevented me from going to Baikonur for the launch of the first Carrier rocket on February 20. So I was not present for the heartbreaking moment when that giant failed a minute after liftoff and had to be destroyed.

53 Vehicle 5L

In early March 1969, the American Apollo 9 crew commanded by McDivitt made a completely successful test of the lunar landing craft. We thought they would press ahead with a lunar landing attempt on Apollo 10, but they stuck to their test program and made plans to send Apollo 10 to test the lunar module in orbit around the Moon. The LM was too heavy to accomplish a landing, anyway, and there were still many problems, such as communications, to be worked out before a landing could be attempted.

At that same time, Military Unit 26266 was reorganized, with Shiborin and me now assigned to its Fourth Directorate for lunar programs, though there was now one less of these: The manned L-1 mission was canceled. The Council of Ministers and the Central Committee — or was this all Uncle Vladimir’s doing? — had realized that a single loop of the Moon by a pair of Soviet cosmonauts would be insufficiently impressive.

All our resources were to be devoted to the E-8 unmanned sample-return mission, and to the L-3 lunar landing program. Even the Soyuz missions were starved for resources to feed L-3; poor Ivan Saditsky’s flight, another rendezvous and docking, this time with the passive craft in orbit first, was postponed to October.

I did as I was told, by Colonel Belyayev, now head of the center’s First Department, and by Colonel Bykovsky, head of the Fourth Directorate under Belyayev. As a member of the Fourth Enrollment, I made up my winter survival training in March as well as my parachute jumping, then entered the last phase of training, spending several weeks learning the basic systems of the Soyuz, the L-3, and the Almaz military space station as not just a test engineer, but a crew member. I was facing final technical and political examinations to take place in July. They would determine my future as a cosmonaut.

I floated through these days and weeks powerless, dazed, even overwhelmed, much as I had been during my first weeks at Bauman, almost nine years in the past. Katya was out of my life — especially when I realized it must have been her phone call that alerted Uncle Vladimir to my presence the night of our last encounter.

And Marina? For most of this time, March, April, and May of 1969, she was out of Moscow on another assignment, courtesy, I assumed, of Uncle Vladimir. I told myself it was all for the best; an association with me could only harm her.

Which is why I was surprised, one night in late May, just after the safe return of America’s Apollo 10 mission, in which astronauts Stafford and Cernan swooped to within twenty-five kilometers of the lunar surface (were they tempted to simply press on, to make the first landing, knowing they would not be able to return home?) to find Shiborin at my door with a note in his hand.

He waved me outside, into a beautiful spring evening. “Are they changing the schedule again?” I asked. We were both about to depart for Baikonur, for checkout on the payload of the second Carrier rocket.

“No. We got a telephone call for you a couple of hours ago.” He handed me the note — Marina wanted me to meet her at Tsiolkovsky Station tonight. “I didn’t know your phone was broken.”

“It’s not,” I said, folding the note.

Shiborin looked at me. “That explains why she wanted me to tell you outside.” He raised an eyebrow. “Are you under surveillance, Yuri?” The idea seemed to shock him.

I wiggled the note. “Marina seems to think so.”

He absorbed this unsettling news, then said something I never forgot: “I don’t care what kind of trouble you’re in, Yuri. If you need anything—anything—tell me.”

At that moment, I could have kissed him.

I practically ran for the station, which was half a kilometer from the front gate of Star Town, at the end of a pathway through the woods.

The latest train from Moscow had come and gone, but Marina was waiting at the end of the platform, under the only working light. We had not seen each other in months, and for the first few moments of this reunion we clung to each other like lost souls.

“I don’t have much time,” she said. In fact, we could see the train returning to Moscow approaching from the southeast.

“Stay the night.”

“They’re sending me away again tomorrow!” Her voice was shrill; she calmed down. “It’s Lev,” she said.

“What about him?”

“He’s been arrested.”

“He was arrested before—”

“That time he was only questioned, Yuri! Now he’s been charged with sabotage of some rocket! He’s in Lefortovo!” That was the prison in downtown Moscow.

“He hadn’t moved out?” I was surprised that the idea of the two of them still living together, even as brother and sister, upset me.

“Well, he has now.” Such venom was unlike Marina, and convinced me that she was upset.

“I’m sorry.”

She sighed. “The neighbors told me when I got home.”

“What can I do?”

“Talk to your uncle. Talk to Vladimir. He’s the only one who can save him.”

I would rather have simply traded places with Lev. “I’ll try,” I said. And I meant it.

The atmosphere around Baikonur during the last days of June 1969 was poisonous, with people shouting for no reason, loudly blaming each other for the smallest of mistakes. The reason, of course, was fear. The assembly building and the offices and the hotel were filled with new faces — including Uncle Vladimir — all there to apply pressure, to make sure this Carrier launch went perfectly. Lev, I learned, was not the only engineer under suspicion, though he was the only one who had actually been arrested and charged.

Since the payload for this Carrier — serial number 5L — included a mockup of an L-3 lunar lander, our checkout team was headed by none other than my old boss, Filin. He was the one who quietly confirmed Lev’s arrest. “Things have gotten very bad in the bureau, Yuri. Everything has been taken out of our hands. I used to think you were crazy to go over to the military, but it can’t be any worse there.”

The work was monotonous; the weather dry, hot, irritating. I took up smoking simply to give myself more reasons to get out of the gigantic Carrier assembly building during the long days preceding its rollout. (The building was supposed to be air-conditioned, and it was cooler, but some flaw in the system also made it feel damp and swamplike.)

It was while smoking that I managed to reconnect with Sergeant Oleg Pokrovsky, who was now shaven and fitted with a uniform that might not have been clean, but resembled a military garment. He was leading a construction team building a special viewing site here at Area 100. “What’s this for?” I asked.

“The big bananas from Moscow,” he said. “The blockhouse is too far away to get a good view of the launch.” That was true: The twin pads at Area 110 were so distant from the control center that they were over the horizon. The assembly building itself was closer — still a safe couple of kilometers away.

When I asked Sergeant Oleg how he had been, he shook his head. “These are terrible times.” I could only shrug in agreement.

There was no opportunity for me to keep my promise to Marina concerning Lev — not that I had much hope that a word from me would have any positive effect on his situation. I saw Uncle Vladimir during those two weeks of preparation only from a distance, only in a crowd of fellow “big bananas” and security people.

He was like royalty; in fact, exactly as he had said.

On the night of July 2, with our checkout work completed and Carrier Number 5L sitting on its pad at Area 110, Filin led a team of us — bureau and military — out to a restaurant in old-town Tyuratam. It served Asian food of some kind, with a rice wine that quickly went to our heads. We sang. We talked about Carrier-powered trips to the Moon beginning next year. “Shiborin and Ribko, colonists at Tycho!” We toasted America’s Apollo 11 crew, Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin, even now working at their Florida launch site and preparing for an attempted lunar landing.

Before long, Filin was weeping. I could have joined him.

As we staggered out into the summer night, a fleet of automobiles was delivering another party. Uncle Vladimir’s.

I had drunk just enough wine to lose my fears of him, and pushed forward, shouting his name. Several bodyguards or lesser royals surrounded me, but Uncle Vladimir said, “He’s my nephew. I’m happy to see him.” He grabbed me and kissed me, something he had never done. “Be smart, Yuri. Smart and short.” His voice was low as he steered me away from the others.

“I want you to let Lev Tselauri go. He’s no saboteur, and you know it.”

“Of course I know it. He’s merely my ‘switchman,’ the one I can blame. His arrest throws the fear of God into everyone else. This Carrier will fly.”

“Fine. Everyone is terrified into submission. Lev sits in jail. Why not release him?”

Uncle Vladimir stared at me with what I took to be amusement. “What do you have to offer me?”

“What do you mean?”

“You are asking me for a favor. You offer me something in return.”

I could not give him anything, but I could give up something. A sacrifice to a lord. “I’ll resign from the cosmonaut team. I’ll refuse to join the Party and they’ll dismiss me.”

He stared at me, judging my determination. Then he extended his hand toward his party — still waiting — summoning one of his associates. They conferred briefly; Uncle Vladimir even scribbled a note, which the associate took away. “It’s done,” he said. “Your friend will be freed tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll submit my resignation when I return to Star Town.” It was a formality: In spirit and in action, I had already delivered my resignation.

The next day — Thursday, July 3, 1969—Filin reported that Lev had indeed been cleared of charges and released. “It was ridiculous to begin with,” he said. “They picked him because he was Georgian and didn’t have powerful relatives in the business.”

I registered this news with no real emotion. I was playing Uncle Vladimir’s game now, by his rules.

The 5L launch was scheduled to take place after dark, at ten P.M. The time was dictated by conditions at the Moon, three days hence, when our unmanned L-1 and L-3 mockup should be in orbit over a potential landing site.

At eight P.M., Shiborin and I — who had no blockhouse responsibilities — met at the new viewing site. Bathed in floodlights, Carrier 5L shone against the night sky like the spire of a cathedral.

The two of us were on foot. The actual seats in the stand were reserved for Uncle Vladimir and his fellow members of the State Commission, and a team of photographers who would be standing by to capture their triumphant reactions to the magnificent Carrier launch.

The countdown proceeded smoothly. As the loudspeaker told us there was one minute to go, I saw Uncle Vladimir and his friends smiling at each other like children at a birthday party.

I made sure I was in reach of Shiborin, who was looking at the not-so-distant Carrier coolly, appraising it. “I bet that’s a rough ride,” he said. “Thirty engines in the first stage. Can you imagine?”

I could; I had seen reports of how the first Carrier launch failed because the savage vibrations had shattered fuel lines. These had now been insulated and rerouted, so they were expected to withstand the stress very nicely.

Thirty seconds.

Nearby, in the open door of the assembly building, Sergeant Oleg stood smoking. I waved at him and he blew smoke toward me.

Fifteen seconds. Even at this distance, I could hear the whirr and whine of motors coming to life on 5L.

Zero. White light appeared at the base of the beast. It would have been blinding in daylight; our night-adjusted eyes saw nothing for several seconds, though we began to hear — and feel — the rattling roar of those thirty engines.

Slowly 5L began to rise, the roar becoming a wall of sound and fury — I could feel it pushing me back toward the building — the light growing even more intense. Then…

Then a ball of flame appeared at the base, blossoming like a flower from hell. We felt a dull thud as 5L began to falter.…

It actually stopped in midair, a few hundred meters off the ground—

And began to topple!

I grabbed Shiborin, who was standing there, open-mouthed with horror. “Inside!” I shouted.

We plunged toward the door Sergeant Oleg held open, Shiborin ahead of me. I couldn’t resist one last look, and saw the escape rocket lifting the L-1 away from the crumbling Carrier just as the spire became a fireball, exploding like an atomic bomb.

The heavy door slammed behind us just as a spray of debris rained against it.

We hurried through the giant building, emerging on the front side, away from the launchpad, gingerly opening the door to be sure it was safe.

“I think everything’s fallen down,” Sergeant Oleg said.

Shiborin was more skeptical. “Don’t be too sure. That thing could have launched pieces ten kilometers high.”

So we lingered there, in the doorway, for a few extra minutes. Then, motivated by simple human decency, we worked our way around to the reviewing stand.

It had been shredded, then cooked. All of the royal observers were dead, including my uncle, Vladimir Nefedov of State Security.