He was hanging back in a different group, but I pushed my way through it to greet him cheerfully. “When did you start?”
“Today is my first official day, though I’ve been running errands for the past few weeks.”
“That sounds familiar. Filin apparently likes to test his students as secretaries first.”
“Actually, this was for Artemov. Excuse me, Yuri.” He hurried away, to catch up with the others, who were now being ushered into the building. The speed with which he ran away was unnecessary; in fact, during the whole of our brief conversation, Lev had seemed nervous and awkward. Of course, it was his first day on the job and first visit to the cosmonaut training center. Since he had spent time doing menial tasks for Artemov, he might also have heard that I was on his boss’s shitlist.
These were all good reasons, but they left me feeling more alone than ever.
General Kamanin and several other high-ranking types, including Artemov, were waiting for us inside. Apparently toasts had been drunk, even at this relatively early hour, because some of the guys were red-faced and laughing. Not alclass="underline" Kamanin stood dourly off to one side, arms crossed like a schoolteacher regarding a rowdy classroom.
“Is everyone here? Good. Welcome to the new facility.” The speaker was none other than Colonel Yuri Gagarin himself, dressed, like his fellow seven Soyuz cosmonauts, in a track suit and wearing a white headset around his neck. He had been assigned as the backup commander for the “active” Soyuz, which was to be piloted by Colonel Komarov.
Komarov and the others were clustered around the docking simulator. It fell to the world-famous Gagarin, who also served as deputy director of the training center, to serve as our host. He did his job well, though I wondered then how much damage this administrative work did to his flying skills.
He gave a short speech about the benefits of having so much training equipment “finally under one roof.” It seems outrageous in retrospect, but with less than a month to go before their launch, the Soyuz crews had never had a single place in which to do the bulk of their integrated training, where they could sit in spacecraft mockups that actually resembled the flight article, talking on the radio to the same people who would be controlling and assisting their mission, reading data on their control panels that reflected real flight parameters, and seeing outside their windows the sights they would see in orbit. Obviously the zero-G flights had to launch from an airfield, but these poor guys had done their training at our bureau, in chambers at Chkalov, at the spacesuit factory in southeast Moscow, and at Baikonur, too. “We are just in time for the first flights of Soyuz.”
There was no open acknowledgment of the irony of Gagarin’s statement, except a muttered, “Not a moment too soon,” from an officer behind me. It was Saditsky, of course, who made the statement for my ears alone, I think. We shook hands as General Kuznetsov, head of the training center, began to repeat Gagarin’s welcome, though not as artfully.
“It’s better than Voskhod, isn’t it?” I said.
“Anything’s better than Voskhod. Soyuz will be a good ship.” He glanced around, not wishing to be overheard. “I wish we had more time for training. And I wish you guys had more time to get the bugs out.”
“Everybody’s in a hurry to beat the Americans.”
“The Americans were in a big hurry to beat us, and look what happened.” Given Saditsky’s candor, I wondered, and not for the first time, how he had ever managed to become a cosmonaut. “So, Ribko, when are you coming to train with us?”
“Not for years,” I said. “There are too many people in line ahead of me.” This was a polite lie, of course. My brief career as a bureau “cosmonaut” had less to do with my undeniable lack of seniority than with my colossal mistake in going to work for Uncle Vladimir.
“Well, hang in there. We’ll be flying a lot this year.” He knocked on the side of the simulator for luck. “This is wood, isn’t it?”
As we spoke, the greetings concluded and people were free to move about. Like two pensioners out for a summer stroll in Gorky Park, we ambled around the primary simulator, a collection of walls, operator consoles, and wiring that had a mockup spacecraft buried somewhere inside it.
Further into the hall, which was a long, open area resembling a narrow basketball court, I found mockups of other spacecraft: One appeared to be a Soyuz. It had the telltale bell-shaped reentry module of that vehicle. But it was on the nose of a long, cylindrical vehicle that had a habitation area behind the bell. Through an opening in the cylinder I could see a hatch cut through what should be the heat shield.
“How’d you like to ride that thing through reentry?” I asked a young captain who happened to be taking the same sort of tour. (I was thinking about the scorched interior of the Soyuz we’d fished out of the Aral Sea. And that spacecraft had a one-piece heat shield, however defective.)
The captain laughed nervously. “I’m sure they’ll test it many times.”
More than twice, I hoped.
There was another completely different type of vehicle on display here, too: This one looked like a copy of the American Mercury or Gemini — a cone perhaps three meters across at its base, topped by a smaller cylinder with its own tapering cylindrical nose. This unit was mounted in front of an even larger habitation module — one that had an actual antiaircraft cannon mounted on the exterior.
I walked around to the other side to get a better look at this phenomenon when I happened upon a knot of people that included Artemov and some colonel, who asked our chief, “Now that we’ve got our Soyuz simulator, Boris, when do we get the L-1?”
Everyone laughed except Artemov, who snapped, “What do you need L-1 for?”
“Well, we might be flying it this summer,” the colonel said, smiling. More laughter.
“L-1 will be flying, but it’s far from certain that your people will be aboard.”
Sudden silence throughout the hall. I saw a couple of the Soyuz guys — military — shaking their heads, and heard someone behind me, not Saditsky, mutter, “Here we go again.…”
“Listen to that drunken bastard,” said another.
Artemov persisted. “We design the rockets and the spacecraft, and we can fly them. You guys should stick to airplanes.” He pointed back at the upside-down Soyuz and then at the big Mercury-Gemini copy behind him. “Besides, you’ve got all these fine military vehicles here from Kozlov and Chelomei. Fly them.” He turned his finger into a pistol and made shooting noises. “Guns! You Air Force guys never change!”
He walked away, laughing and shaking his head. Realizing I was the only civilian in a group of angry officers, I also made a quiet but steady retreat.
“He’s clearly unstable.”
So said Uncle Vladimir to me that night when I told him of Arte-mov’s latest display. After returning to the bureau, I had run off to my apartment, using the classic Russian technique of leaving my jacket behind. (“Ribko? Haven’t seen him lately, but he must be around somewhere. His jacket’s still on the chair.”) I had not wanted to test a bogus excuse on Triyanov.
I felt I had to phone Uncle Vladimir not only about Artemov, but also about my potential enrollment in military service, and could not have done so from the bureau. (There are now pay telephones in Moscow, but they were not to be found in Kaliningrad in those days.) He took the call, and suggested I come down to his office near the Belorussia Station as soon as possible.
This left me in an awkward situation: I was absent from the bureau without leave. I had thought I could run home, make the call, and return within the hour. A trip down to the State Security annex would finish the day.