Korolev resumed his journey across the continent. When he finally reached Moscow, his case was reopened and his sentence was reduced, to eight years. Just as he was about to be returned to the Far East, the engineer Andrei Tupolev intervened and had him transferred to the sharashka on Ulitsa Radio, the prison-laboratory in which Tupolev and other aviation engineers were incarcerated on political charges no less vague than his.
He spent the war in the Tupolev sharashka, the Special Design Bureau of the 4th Special Department of the NKVD, which was eventually moved to Omsk and the Caucasus as the Nazis advanced across Soviet territory. First assigned to the wing design of the Tu-2 light bomber, Korolev then worked on the liquid-fueled rocket boosters for the Petlyakov-2 dive bomber, the auxiliary rocket engines for the Lavochkin-5 fighter plane, the D-1 shortrange ballistic rocket, and the D-2 winged guided missile. His mouth was fitted for dentures, but his heart remained weak, his complexion pallid. After the war, although not yet officially rehabilitated, he was allowed to establish a plant in the small town of Podlipki outside Moscow. It was there that, identified in the Soviet press only as the Chief Designer, Korolev developed the R-7. It was the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile.
Yuri had been tested for patience; there had been a battery of clever, sneaky, potentially humiliating tests that he had passed easily and for which he had dissembled his contempt. But he had also been tested for his alacrity and decisiveness. He decided now that Tania had been gone long enough, he would fetch her back.
Opening the door, he peered through the sliver of light and oriented himself within the infirmary. A long well-scrubbed hall stretched before him, its lights dimly, greenishly fluorescent. The shorter hall was to his right. He recalled his passage around the outside of the building. Marshak’s office would be on the other side of the infirmary, virtually diagonal to the storeroom. If so, then Grigoriev’s room was on this side, down the long hall.
Yuri followed his deduction, padding lightly. The first room was dark, uninhabited, as was the second. A cold radiance emanated from the next-to-last room. He furtively glanced in.
Tania wasn’t there. Grigoriev lay in the hospital bed as he had for the past six months, nearly his entire body and head bandaged. The switch to the buzzer was gripped by his right hand, which was unbandaged and immaculate. It was a muscular hand with neatly trimmed nails. It existed in disjointed, mocking opposition to the body. Yuri wondered if Grigoriev always held the switch. And then he frowned. Why hadn’t Tania returned to the storeroom? Yuri stepped through the doorway.
First, he felt tremendous elation. Grigoriev was lying there, not him. It could have been him, but he had been in the air that day, training in a Mig-19. Second was the sweet, pungent odor of disinfectant. Never had Yuri perceived such a perfectly disinfecting scent. His body was cleansed just inhaling it. Although the odor was nothing like Gzhatsk, it evoked his hometown and the quiet, shrubbery-lined lane that passed behind the house and meandered to school. He recalled the apple and cherry trees and the bushes thick with gooseberries and currants. The odor of the disinfectant was the chemical distillation of Russia, lush and confident, marching ahead to the future.
Yuri wondered whether Grigoriev was aware of his presence and whether he should speak. The patient gripped the buzzer switch with the vitality of someone not only awake, but finely attuned to his surroundings.
“Hey,” Yuri said. He paused. He felt moved to speak. “It’s me. Just thought I’d drop by.”
There was no stirring in the bed, no acknowledgment.
“Yes, tomorrow’s liftoff. Didn’t they tell you? No?” Yuri chuckled. “Perhaps you no longer have clearance.”
He dropped onto a wooden chair by the bed and slid it closer. He spoke in a low voice.
“I don’t want you to think I’m anxious about the flight. That’s not why I’m not sleeping. The R-7’s good, so is the spaceship, they’ve been tested. I’m perfectly confident. Honestly, I’m just wandering around tonight, looking for a little action. You know Tania, the one who was just here? Exquisite, really. It’s too bad you can’t see the nurses. They’ve picked them well. I’m sorry for you, pal. But what can I do? I’ve got to live my life, you’ve got to live yours. Look, I’ll give it to her good. Just like you would have, if you had the chance. So figure I’m doing it on your behalf. Really, I am.” Yuri laughed. “I’m going to make love to her for the whole cosmonaut corps, for all mankind!”
Yuri stood, vaguely dissatisfied with his speech. Tomorrow he would be obliged to make another one, to the launch crew assembled at the base of the rocket. He’d need to ask the Chief Designer to write it. He wandered over to the window and looked through the blinds. The sky had cleared and Virgo, the Virgin, was visible in the south.
The buzzer sounded, Yuri started. He turned and glowered at the patient, in dismay at Grigoriev’s betrayal. They had been through much together: the tests, the training, a survival course in the Urals. Now Grigoriev had slightly raised the switch in his direction, as if he were firing at Yuri with it.
But the gun’s retort was not a single, insistent razz. Grigoriev was squeezing the switch to produce a series of short and long pulses. Yuri recognized the letters of the telegraphic alphabet: Go. Grigoriev was telling him to leave? Because his visit was unwelcome? Or was the imperative a warning?
Some kind of quick, surreptitious commotion made itself evident in the corridor, a womanish commotion. There were whispers. A door slammed, alarmingly. Yuri’s expression didn’t change. It wouldn’t be held too much against him if he had left the pilots’ cottage to say a few last words to Grigoriev—the visit might even be incorporated in his legend—but he preferred not to get caught at all. And he still had to find Tania.
Grigoriev repeated the sequence. Go! Now Yuri took it as an encouragement.
“See you later,” he said.
As he exited Grigoriev’s hospital room, footsteps approached around the corner. They didn’t belong to Tania. They were too heavy. The shoes’ heels tapped hard against the wood, their dot-dot-dash spelling Marshak. Yuri scurried in the opposite direction, back down the corridor.
He reentered the storeroom, closed the door, and discerned at once that the blinds had been drawn, immersing the room in a dark more viscid than before. Alert as a wild animal, he paused and considered the significance of the closed blinds. Either Tania had closed them or someone else had. He kept his body very still, sniffing, listening hard, and waiting for his pupils to dilate.
Perfume. Not Tania’s. He waited for his night vision to soak up the stray quanta still loose in the room and careening against the linen and the glassware. In the corner where he had hidden earlier, someone else now concealed himself, huddling against a pillar of towels. No, herself. Indeed, two or three women pressed against each other in the corner, given away by the whites of their eyes. Zinia? Maybe also the tall, long-haired nurse he liked. Was her name Ludmilla? The third shade he didn’t recognize at all, except to exclude her from the possibility of being Tania.
He did not look directly at the nurses, pretending not to see them. He was unsure of the situation, but guessed that it required a display of limitation. Most of the psychological tests had been like that. Although it was easy to calculate the correct answers to the questions and perform the desired behavior, you had to show that the answers and behavior weren’t calculated. The Chief Designer had been looking for a degree of openheartedness and sincerity that would indisputably distinguish the New Man. Yuri had reasoned that his own openheartedness and sincerity would be incriminated by a too-evident manifestation of self-knowledge.