The words were forming in my mouth when Marina said, “Oh, God, look at that man!”
A man in the green greatcoat of an Air Force general was standing ten meters away, urinating against the wall of a building. As we watched, he clumsily zipped up, then stumbled away.
Staggering drunks were hardly an uncommon sight in Moscow in those days, though it was shocking to see one on a Sunday, and here on the Frunze Embankment, home to generals. “Go home!” Marina shouted, causing the man to turn, bleary-eyed.
There were more shocks to come. The drunken pisser was my father.
“Oh shit,” was all I could say. Marina recognized him at the same time I did. We looked at each other in horror.
“Go,” she said. “Go to him.” And she turned away.
“What about you?”
“I’ll be at home.”
Hoping for, or perhaps needing, a good-bye kiss, I reached for her hand as, behind me, I heard a slurred version of my name. This from my father, who prided himself on not being a typical Russian drunkard. Pissing in the street in the middle of the afternoon!
Marina jerked her hand away. “Don’t call me,” she said.
I had so little experience with drunks that I did not know what to expect from my father’s condition. Generally one is either sloppy and sentimental, or violently angry. Given General Ribko’s normally testy disposition, I was relieved to find that he was weeping.
“Where’s Marina?” He had seen her.
“She had to leave.” I got him headed toward his building, which was across the street.
“You love her?”
Strange to hear my father, who never spoke of emotions of any kind, use that word. “I think so.” Into the elevator.
“I loved your mother.”
Now I knew my father, the grim, hardened hero of two hundred combat missions and a dozen military-political intrigues, was truly wounded. In the six years since my mother’s death, he had never mentioned her. The only sign she had ever shared his life was a portrait of her in a place of honor in the main room of his flat.
There was no time for me to probe at this opening; just as I got him safely inside his flat, he vomited. The rest of the evening is best left to the imagination.
Only when I was sure he was in bed, safely asleep, did I turn down the lights and go out into the cold winter night.
8
Clans
Early the next week, with the weather still frigid, Moscow locked in winter’s cold fist, I was called to Filin’s office. I bundled up, but still froze as I hurried across the facility.
Filin’s birdwoman secretary looked even more fragile than ever… perhaps it was the heat in the building, which was almost suffocating. “He wants to talk about your schoolwork,” she told me, I guess to make sure I didn’t bring up any bureau business. “He needs to leave for the airfield in half an hour.”
Filin was smoking and signing his way through a stack of documents when I entered. He ignored me until I had found a chair. Then, last paper signed, he pushed back the papers. “There. It’s all shit, but nicely wrapped.” Like a swimmer coming up for air, he blinked and focused on me. “Good morning.” He grabbed a draft of my report off the cabinet behind him.
Mindful of the birdwoman’s warning, I launched into a brief description of my work on the Voskhod crew equipment, just as I had briefed him on more mundane subjects in the past. Filin listened only long enough to light a new cigarette, then waved me to silence, the trail of fresh smoke describing a Z in the air. “You don’t think much of the habitability systems on our Voskhod.”
I was the most junior of the junior engineers and my experience with these habitability systems was limited to that unpleasant ride on the Tu-104 and some additional research for my report. I really had no business writing a critical report.
Yet, I had learned that one of the reasons Voskhod 3 had not been launched in the fall of 1965 was due to serious shortcomings in life support. The oxygen-generation system was underperforming in tests, a serious problem. On a simpler, but more baffling level, Voskhod lacked a way to measure water consumption by the cosmonauts — it hadn’t been necessary with single cosmonauts flying for a few days, because the spacecraft carried more than enough water. Two men in orbit for twenty days was much more challenging, yet all the big brains in Department 90 had come up with was a plan to have the cosmonauts count the number of mouthfuls they used! The temperature controls were tricky and unreliable, and the foam covering for the walls turned out to be flammable, and gave off particles that could easily irritate eyes and lungs. And so on.
So I felt confident in maintaining my negative position. Filin seemed to surrender. “Well, we hope to fly a pair of dogs next month. Hopefully we can fix some of the problems then.” He handed the report back to me. “Triyanov thinks you have promise. Listen to him. He’s a good man.”
I didn’t know what else to say, offering only a lame, “How is your health?”
He threw open his hands. “There are days when I feel like a college boy. But today I feel like a dead man.” He stood up, heading for the window, gesturing vaguely toward the east with his cigarette. “I don’t like flying to the launch site. Five hours sitting on a metal bench, bouncing all over the sky.”
“Is that where you’re headed today?”
“Yes. Another Luna launches next week. We got so close last time.” Luna 8 had been in its final descent to the surface of the Moon near the crater Galileo when its braking engine switched on… seconds too late. The little lander couldn’t slow down enough, and smashed into the lunar dust. Filin, Artemov, and even Korolev, had been summoned to the Kremlin to be “beaten by the hammer,” the hammer in this case being Comrade Sergei Afanasyev, the head of the ministry, a giant of a man with a volcanic temper, whose intimidating physical manner justified that charming nickname. “The Hammer is threatening to cancel the whole program if we screw up one more time.”
“How can he do that unless he cancels the manned missions as well?” The Luna probes were designed to gather data about the surface so a manned lander could be designed. Otherwise there wasn’t much point in them.
“I mean, he will cancel the bureau’s part of the program and give it all to other organizations.”
“Like Chelomei’s?”
I uttered that name without really thinking, and was surprised at Filin’s reaction. He slowly turned to face me. “Not many people know about Chelomei,” he said.
I mumbled something about having heard him mentioned at Bauman, which seemed to satisfy Filin. “He is one smug, political bastard. He went out and hired Khrushchev’s son and made him one of his deputies! The Hammer loves him, too. They party together down in the Crimea.
“This is a very difficult time for our organization, Yuri. With Korolev gone, we could tear ourselves apart. The Hammer is always saying we do too much… we build missiles and launchers and spy satellites and communications satellites and space probes and manned spacecraft. He already got Korolev to start selling off the pieces before he died, and maybe that’s right. Maybe we try too much.
“But not the Moon program. You can’t spread that all over a bunch of different organizations. Look at the Americans: Everything is NASA. They used military rockets only when they had to. Now they’re building their own big Saturns and Apollos, and they don’t have to fight with the generals.
“If I thought that giving Chelomei the lunar program would beat America, I might feel better. But he’s a terrible engineer, very dictatorial, in love with his own ideas even when they make no sense. He doesn’t realize that you can’t change the laws of physics by wishing. His greatest skill is theft.” Theft meaning the copying of Western designs, a rich tradition in my country in those days.