When I came to my arrival on Artemov’s blacklist, my father got angry. “That drunken son of a bitch had better watch himself,” he said.
“Do you know Artemov?”
“I know of him. I may not see Kamanin, but I see Rudenko, the chief of staff.” I had never bothered to clarify my father’s position on the high command of the Soviet Air Force, though I knew Vershinin was alone at the top of the pyramid, with a chief of staff directly below him, through which several “deputy commanders” reported. Kamanin was a deputy commander for space, among other things. My father was on the staff, responsible for some activity in the Moscow military district. “Just this morning he was complaining about your bureau and the way it burns up money. There’s a huge fight right now about your rescue forces, did you know that?”
“No.”
“It’s bad enough that we have to spend money to chase down your spaceships every few months, but for this man-on-the-Moon business we’re being asked to assign eighteen thousand people and dozens of aircraft because your ships could land anywhere on the planet!
“Vershinin supports Kamanin, wants the Air Force to be in the space business, so he lets Rudenko take this request for a billion-ruble ‘air army’ to Grechko.” Grechko was the minister of defense, an old-line infantry officer from the war. “Remember, now, Grechko’s got the Navy coming in at the same time, because they have to start deploying recovery ships in the ocean, so he blows his top! ‘We’re not going to the Moon!’ he says. ‘Let the fucking scientists build these rockets out of their own pockets! No, no, no!’ ”
My father was red-faced laughing at this memory. “Ustinov himself had to intervene, and even he would authorize only half the money Kamanin wanted. And this is for programs we don’t control — we have to rely on Artemov to build his rockets and his spaceships and make them work, which they don’t.”
I couldn’t disagree. In fact, I agreed with enthusiasm, a bad habit of mine when alcohol affects me. And it was certainly at work on me that evening.
“Yuri, are you happy in this work?”
“It’s fascinating,” I said, “if I get to do it.”
“You can’t do anything from the shithouse.”
“Eventually someone else will take my place there.”
“That just means there will be more people in the shithouse with you. Since he took over your bureau, Artemov has been acting more and more like an emperor.” He refilled my glass. Maybe it was my recent exposure to cold, the fact that I hadn’t eaten well in the last couple of days, but I was drunk. My father was barely sipping. “We should find you something else to do, some other work.”
“But I have to stay where I am.”
“No you don’t.”
“Vladimir wants me there.” Had I not been alight with drunken camaraderie, I would never have dared mention Uncle Vladimir’s name.
My father’s eyes narrowed. He set his glass down carefully, as if afraid it would shatter in his hand. “Have you been working for Vladimir?”
“Yes.” I could have added that my “spy” work had been a total failure for months, but could see that my father wasn’t going to be satisfied with a half-truth.
“Goddamnit.” Now his face was red, and not with amusement. “I told you to stay away from that business! No wonder Artemov got rid of you! He probably found out.”
I had allowed myself to linger on that possibility, but not for long, choosing instead to believe I had been denounced by one of my fellow engineers. My father’s passion made that hesitation seem all the more foolish: In addition to being a murderer, possibly even a saboteur, Artemov had all kinds of powerful connections. It was plain he knew I was a spy.
“What should I do? Where can I go?” They almost certainly wouldn’t take me at the Chelomei bureau, assuming I would even want to work there.
“The space units.” He meant the Central Space Office, which was still part of the Strategic Rocket Force.
“I’m a civilian.”
“You’re also a senior lieutenant in the reserve. You could be placed on active duty with a single phone call.” A year ago I had tried very hard to avoid military service. Now I was sitting in my own apartment, working for the Korolev bureau, thinking about embracing it.
“I want to think about it.”
My father got to his feet. “Don’t take too much time. The longer you wait, the more damage Artemov can do to you.”
The next night Marina called to congratulate me on my safe return, heroics, and so on, and she happily agreed to meet me in the morning, which was Saturday, February 18. Now swollen with rubles like a cartoon capitalist, I offered to take Marina to Uncle Vladimir’s restaurant in the Ostankino Tower.
At ten o’clock, after no more than the usual misadventures, including a stop at a book kiosk at the Yaroslavl Station, I arrived at her building. This time I was waved upstairs by the bemedaled porter, and, gift book in hand, knocked on Marina’s door.
Alla, her pretty little hard-line roommate, answered. “I don’t think Marina can go out today,” she said.
“Why not?” I could see past her into the room; everything looked normal, though there was no sign of Marina.
Then I heard a retching. “Oh,” I said.
Alla looked rueful. “It started yesterday. She thought she’d be feeling better, but…”
“I understand. I’ll call tomorrow, to see how she’s doing. Here.” I handed Alla the book, Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees, which had just come out. Marina had made us read lots of untranslated Hemingway during our English-language classes.
Disappointed, with rubles burning a hole in my pocket, I spent the day lurking in downtown Moscow. I believe I wound up buying a chair and hauling it back to Kaliningrad on the train.
22
Marina
At the bureau the next week, we received a special shipment of American magazines with information on the Apollo fire. Triyanov was going to send them to the documentation center for translation, but both Yastrebov and I pointed out that we read English, so we were given several pieces each to abstract.
I was horrified to learn that the astronauts had been locked inside their Apollo, high on its launchpad, with their spacecraft pressurized to more than one atmosphere at one-hundred-percent oxygen! In that environment a spark immediately explodes into a flame, and materials that should not burn will burn happily. Apparently this was what happened aboard Apollo that night: A stray spark, perhaps from some arcing wire, had blossomed in the rich oxygen, quickly spreading to fabric netting, Velcro, the canvas of the astronauts’ couches. Even the air itself became superheated.
This would have been a serious accident rather than a disaster if not for the fact that Apollo’s main hatch was a heavy three-piece monstrosity that could not be opened in less than two minutes under the best of conditions. The high pressure inside the spacecraft made it almost impossible to remove the inner hatch, which was partially sealed against the spacecraft wall by that pressure.
Some reports said that the astronauts had succumbed quickly, asphyxiated by toxic gases sucked into their pressure suits when hoses melted through. Other reports said that they were burned to a crisp. Horrible stories.
What fascinated me most was the bitter criticism directed at NASA and at North American, the main contractor for Apollo — the equivalent of the Korolev bureau — for lax workmanship and for disregard of safety in such a hazardous test.