Red Moon

Epilogue

Yuri Ribko and I had essentially completed our work when yet more delays on the International Space Station — or was it the war in Serbia? Perhaps both — brought me back to Moscow.

This time he offered to pick me up at my hotel near the Russian Space Agency, and drive me to his flat. When he arrived, however, I didn’t recognize him. He was thirty pounds thinner and his hair was gone. I had noted some change in his appearance, but this was shocking.

He saw my reaction. “Yes, I look terrible.” He smiled. “But I look great for a man in my physical condition.” He admitted that he had been diagnosed with liver cancer months before — after we had started our work. And he would not live to see his story published.

I didn’t know what to tell him. I couldn’t lie — couldn’t promise him that somehow I’d kick the machinery of the American publishing industry into a higher gear.

He shrugged. “I’ve told my story. If anyone but you hears it, that will be good. But I told it once.” He thumped his chest. “It was important for me.”

I hugged him. He patted my back. “No more talk of this! Into the car.”

Once we were on the road, I asked where we were going. “Let me surprise you,” he said.

We headed off into Moscow’s murderous traffic. I told Yuri I had finished transcribing his story, right up to that terrible accident in July 1969.

“It was no accident,” he said. I had suspected as much. I had been marshaling strength to ask Yuri if he had sabotaged the Carrier. “During the final checkout, I simply jammed a piece of pipe into one of the first-stage engines, into its combustion chamber.”

“No one caught you?”

“I was a military officer whom everyone knew. I had worked at the bureau. I was a cosmonaut. The guards were watching other people.

“Besides… Vladimir thought I was neutralized. We shared the same dream. Why would I jeopardize it?”

“Why did you?”

He drove silently for a minute or more. “I lost faith.”

“In the Party?”

“That was long gone. No, I think I lost faith in my people. And in myself. In that moment I was prepared to die, and prepared to kill everyone.” Another silence. “I became as big a monster as Vladimir.”

I realized we were out in the country. “We aren’t going to Korolev?” I said. “I thought you lived there.”

Now he grinned. “You’ll see where I live.”

Ten minutes later we were at the back gate to Star Town.

“My country’s rules,” he said, as we locked the car into a portable garage only slightly bigger than the vehicle itself. “I was assigned here in 1967, and here I stayed. The same ground-floor flat, by the way.”

“Even though you left the cosmonaut team.”

“Yes. ‘For reasons of health.’ ”

We followed a sidewalk toward the residential buildings. Some were new; some actually housed American astronauts and their families. In the square I could see the statue of Yuri Gagarin.

“Did anyone suspect your uncle’s role in all this? Or yours?”

“No. There was a huge investigation of the 5L accident, of course, and it showed exactly what I had done… but there was no one to link me to it. We didn’t launch another Carrier for two years.” He interrupted himself to say hello to a middle-aged officer wearing the stars of a lieutenant-general. “Shiborin,” he said. “He eventually got two spaceflights. Now he’s head of faculty at the academy.”

“Where you work.”

“Yes.”

“Will he talk to me?”

Ribko smiled. “Are you thinking you need witnesses? Second sources? Corroboration for my fantastic story?”

“Even if I don’t, my editors will.”

“Shiborin will talk. Others, too. Come.”

We turned down a sidewalk that wasn’t lit at all, and had to go slowly until entering a building that would have been called a slum in any American city. Yuri led me to a door on the ground floor.

Inside, the place was crowded, but comfortable-looking. Books lined the walls. A relatively new television sat in the corner. There were several framed photos on the wall — a three-star general I took to be Nikolai Ribko, a beautiful woman who must have been Zhanna, and a group portrait of the Fourth Enrollment.

Yuri brought me a beer and we sat.

“It seems that you were in a unique position.”

“Absolutely,” he said. “Had I stayed in the bureau, I never would have seen the military side. And what I learned at the bureau helped me make sense of what I saw at the training center and the air base. It was only because I had friendships and relationships that crossed lines, that were outside the little boxes, that I was able to learn the truth.”

“And take action.”

A long silence. “Yes. To take action.”

“Suppose the Soviet Union had reached the Moon first—”

“It would have meant a lot of parades in our country, and a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth in yours. We would have then spent millions or billions more rubles, and then abandoned the whole business. Perhaps Americans would still be going to the Moon today. Or you would have gone to Mars first. Beat the Reds to the Red Planet, hmmm?” He smiled. “We can’t change the past. We can barely change the future!”

At that moment, I put aside all my doubts, all my questions, and allowed myself to believe in Yuri Ribko. He had changed the world, and changed it for the better. How many of us ever can or will know that?

The door opened, and a pretty, dark-haired, gray-eyed woman in her fifties entered carrying a shopping bag. “Marina,” Yuri said, leaping up to greet her. “Meet my friend!”