He knew a way onto the roof of the apartment block. The world expanded around him. City lights swamped the lower portions of the sky but the stars above shone in patterns that for the first time in his life he could recognize and name. A cosmonaut wasn’t a true cosmonaut till he flew in space. The single act transformed him from the human to the celestial. Portraits of Gagarin hung everywhere, more than when he’d lived; a new street, a new building was named in his honour almost every week. His life and his act were part of history, they lived in the narrative of the species. Tomorrow would be another day of training, another day in the box.
With Gevorkian he was carrying out a launch-abort drill when Ges came to them with the news they’d expected for weeks, and with each passing day had dreaded more. “Apollo 8 is on its way to the Moon.”
State television ignored the flight. Newspapers reported it in a short column on the inside pages, if at all. The cosmonauts viewed the coverage at the Army’s Space Transmissions Corps building on Komsomolsky Avenue. In the dark theater, the men exchanged bitter whispers. It should’ve been two of us. If Sergei Pavlovich were still here, it would’ve been us, we’d’ve been first.
Of course, they’d known the Americans were test-flying the rocket they called the Saturn-5. They’d known they were using it to propel their Apollo Command and Service Module and the three men aboard farther from Earth than any human being had ever travelled; but they’d hoped for some glitch, some technical problem with the Saturn-V, and for the mission to be aborted.
Apollo 8 was sending back pictures from a mere 100 kilometres above the surface. The American astronauts were describing the colours of the terrain. They likened it to a beach.
The next morning, December 25, 1968, Yefgenii returned to Komsomolsky Avenue before dawn. Snow fell on Moscow, dusting the streets and decorating the rooftops like white tinsel. A pale winter Moon hung in its first quarter. In a burst of emotion it struck him: three Americans were up there. They’d sailed across the Far Side, gazed down where no human eye had looked before and seen the earthrise.
He wept. Gevorkian had called him a legend but the old legends were dead. This was a new one, and bigger than any in history: not just Ivan the Terrible, but all of them, the equal of Gagarin: Borman, Lovell and Anders were circling the Moon, reciting verses from the Book of Genesis, and, in America, it was Christmas Eve.
NO WATER RAN HERE, none fell. The Baikonur Cosmodrome stood on a remote desert plain more than 2,000 kilometres from the nearest open sea, and only in winter when the snows came did the land reveal itself to be on Earth and not some other celestial body. When fronts passed through, wind boosted sand off the desert. It got into everything, through the cracks in the windows and doors. Yefgenii felt fine grit rolling across his eyes and round his teeth, felt it scratching his skin.
In February, the cosmonaut corps was summoned to observe the maiden test flight of the N-1 rocket. A bus conveyed them from their accommodation to Pad 110, where they trooped out to gaze up at the gigantic metal candle. Early in the day its nose had pricked the cloudbase. Now the air was clear.
Yefgenii knew nearly every detail of its operation. On a forthcoming flight it would propel the two-man L-3 spacecraft to the Moon and return part of it to the Earth. The L-3 was heavier than the Zond because it comprised a lunar orbiting vehicle and separate lunar lander. The N-1 was the most powerful rocket ever created. At that moment, Yefgenii would’ve climbed to the top of the great metal pillar and ridden it into the depths of space. He saw the same hungry look in the others’ eyes. They were sick of the rehearsal and wanted the performance. They wanted to be first.
The bus scooted them to an observation platform. The cosmonauts stood in rows, with binoculars. When the countdown reached zero, thirty engines lit. First the fires flashed on, then, seconds later, thunder shook the ground. The rocket separated from the Earth with a slow ascent up the gantry, then gained speed, soon streaking in a high arc out over the desert.
Then the fires went out. Yefgenii’s eyes strained through his binoculars. The rocket had disappeared. Seconds later an inferno blazed far away in the desert, the Moon above bit by bit masked by a thickening plume of smoke.
The cosmonauts and engineers dispersed into small groups, men who trusted each other. Some were philosophical. It had been a maiden flight. Things go wrong.
Gevorkian’s mood was more despondent. He knew more about the engineering of the rockets than any of them. “We don’t have the Americans’ money, their industry. They’re ahead, their vehicles are more advanced.”
Yefgenii said, “The Americans spent millions of dollars designing a pen that could work in space. What did we do?” Gevorkian’s head was down, his eyes were down. “What did we do?”
Gevorkian lifted his head. “We used pencils.”
“We used pencils.”
THEY TRAINED for the lunar landing in a modified Mi-4. Yefgenii had never flown a helicopter before he entered the cosmonaut program. He soon became adept.
He sat at the top of the craft, under the rotor. The blades levitated storms of sand off the desert floor. The helicopter tipped up into the air, out of the sand, and soared into a blue sky patched by heaped white clouds. It was spring at Baikonur. The desert was dry, the air was hot.
As he climbed, he saw the towering slabs of concrete that housed the N-1 processing plant. They rose out of the center of the Cosmodrome while to either side spread rows of launchpads, and, beyond, barely visible from this part of the desert, the tracking stations and the railway line. Heat haze blurred the railway into a vague gray band.
From ceiling he pitched the helicopter down and guided it toward the training grounds. In principle he was simulating a descent from lunar orbit to a precise initiation point over a potential landing site. The landing would be carried out by the pilot, flying solo in the LK, while the flight engineer orbited the Moon in the stack containing the principal living compartment, the reentry capsule and the main engines of the L-3, all together known as the LOK.
He hovered at just over 100 metres above the training grounds. Markings simulated craters, ridges and boulders. He selected a clear zone and then shut down the engine. The Mi-4 dropped at once, its rotors turning in the rush of air. Yefgenii pitched and yawed the craft, dead-sticking down toward the landing site. He made a soft touchdown on the exact spot he’d nominated.
His performance was scored. He restarted the engine and recovered to the start point to repeat the exercise. He was one of six men training for the lunar landing. His scores ranked number one.
Gevorkian worked on the development of the LK, the lunar lander, but already the American Apollo 9 mission was conducting tests of their own Lunar Module in Earth orbit. Then, in May, Apollo 10 travelled to the Moon. The Americans undocked their Lunar Module in orbit, descended to within 50,000 feet of the surface to reconnoiter landing sites, ascended for rendezvous with their Command Module, and made a successful return to Earth. Yefgenii knew next time would be the landing attempt: Apollo 11 was scheduled to launch in July.
Desert preparations continued nonetheless. Sun scorched the sand. Air simmered in the throat. The cosmonauts and technicians suffered during the day and the heat wouldn’t let them sleep at night. Scorpions could prevail here, but not men. Yefgenii and the other command pilots of the lunar training group endured the conditions to simulate a descent to the surface of the Moon, but no manned flight was scheduled, only another test of the N-1 sometime that summer.