We all wore white smocks, but that was as far as the comparison went. People wandered in and out, smoking cigarettes. There were times when one or more of the doors stood open to the weather.
“Doesn’t that contaminate the spacecraft?” I said to Yastrebov, one of my bureau colleagues, a testy man of forty who had no college education of any sort, but a thorough practical knowledge of space vehicles.
“Our electronics are so rugged that a little dust won’t hurt them,” he said, proudly. “Remember — in a few days this whole thing will have a bomb set off underneath it!”
I accepted the statement at the time, but then remembered how many puzzling failures had occurred with our spacecraft — such as eleven Lunas in a row — and wondered if a more controlled environment might have helped.
In any case, one exhausting week after my arrival at Baikonur, I stood shivering outside, mouth open in wonder at the rollout of the giant launcher with Spacecraft Number 5 safely tucked inside its shroud, when I felt an elbow in my ribs. “Need a warm-up?” A battered flask appeared in my hand, and I took a swig. The single shot of vodka — assuming it was vodka — spread warmth through my frozen bones, as if I’d just backed up to a fire.
My benefactor was a tall, scrawny sergeant I had seen wandering in and out of the assembly building running errands several times during the week. We had not actually spoken until now, when I thanked him. “If it’s good enough for the Seven,” he said, showing a mouth half-filled with steel teeth, “it’s good enough for us.”
For a moment I was afraid I had just taken a swig of honest-to-God rocket fuel — not an unusual occurrence, I was to learn later, since the Seven burned a mixture of liquid oxygen and good old alcohol. But I wasn’t struck blind, and the sergeant seemed in good spirits, so I quit worrying.
The sergeant’s name was Oleg Pokrovsky, and he had come to Baikonur with the first labor battalions almost eleven years ago. I couldn’t guess his age — anywhere from a hard thirty to possibly fifty. “How many launches have you seen?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Two hundred, maybe. Here, there—” He nodded over his shoulder toward the right flank, where the even more gigantic pads for Chelomei’s Proton stood on the horizon. “Out east, too.” He pointed with his flask to the left flank. “Where we had the accident.” I had heard rumors back in Kaliningrad, then seen a monument flash by on one of the bus rides, that some years back a missile had exploded on a launchpad while workers and various officials, including Marshal Nedelin, head of the Rocket Force, were present in the open. Something like a hundred of the poor souls, including Nedelin himself, had been vaporized in the thousand-degree flame. “How about yourself?” he said.
“This will be my first.”
“Ah, a virgin.” Pokrovsky laughed and offered me another swig, which I was happy to take, the sweet warmth of the first having faded away. “Now, follow me.”
I had no chance to protest, since he was already turning away from the crowd watching the rollout.
Not far from the assembly were a few small cottages left over from the early 1950s, when several miners and their families lived here in a tiny settlement known as Zarya. Korolev himself lived here for weeks at a time during the first tests of the Seven as an intercontinental ballistic missile, as well as the launches of the first Sputniks, Lunas, and Vostoks.
The cosmonauts traditionally spent the night before their launches in one of the cottages, too. I thought of my friend Saditsky and his copilot, trying to go to sleep some cold, dark night a few weeks from now, knowing they were to be fired one hundred fifty kilometers up. Like being shot at sunrise!
Pokrovsky told me all this as he led me across the frozen ground, toward what, I didn’t know. But then he stopped. “There they are.”
Inside a fenced compound, a pair of husky mutts were at play. They seemed cheerful, their hot breath visible in the cold air. “Breezy and Blackie,” Pokrovsky said. “Your cosmonauts.”
It was my turn to laugh. I had been hearing about the “dog” flight for weeks and had spent days crawling in and out of a spacecraft designed to accommodate two pups in harness, but had never seen the animals themselves. And here they were. “They’re going to take a ride few people will ever take,” I said.
“Or would want to,” Pokrovsky said with a grunt, helping himself to another swig. “I’ve seen two hundred launches, and I’ll bet I’ve seen fifty of them go wrong.”
True, of course. Rockets were notoriously unreliable. This might be one of the last times these dogs would romp at sunset in their short lives.
Even if things went as planned, was it fair to punish these dogs? What sins had they committed to deserve to be trapped in a sphere for three weeks and flung around the world three hundred fifty times?
Sergeant Oleg pulled a piece of greasy sausage out of a pocket, tore it in half and tossed it to the dogs, who happily devoured it.
“The doctors might not like that,” I said.
“Are you going to report me?”
I had three shots of Sergeant Oleg’s rocket fuel under my belt. It made me daring. “Of course not.” At that moment I was called away by one of my coworkers, since our bus was leaving.
Behind me, the Voskhod launcher trudged toward its black gantry.
At Baikonur I saw Filin only from a distance, his white smock one of many moving in and out of the assembly building, or in passing at the hotel. But chance put us together on the bus back to Leninsk.
“I liked your friend, Lev,” Filin announced.
“Can you find a place for him?”
Filin spread his hands. “It’s too early. We have been trying to steal the lunar orbit mission from Chelomei, but we have no real plans. If I had a dozen like your Lev right now, to tell me just what Chelomei has learned, then we could make progress, but…”
Another engineer interrupted us at that point, ending our brief encounter. I realized I had done almost no spying during my week in Baikonur — had not even seen Artemov, for example. Would Uncle Vladimir feel I was failing?
I began to wonder how Marina was doing. And my father. I had not been in contact with either of them for a week at that point.
As for the launch of Breezy and Blackie aboard Spacecraft Number 5, I got no closer than the television screen in the support room of the launch control center. Right on time, the twenty engines in the launch vehicle’s first stage lit up. As the rocket rose, the ingeniously designed tulips of the launch structure — four counterweighted arms — fell open. We could feel the roar even inside our protected building.
The newspapers called it a Cosmos satellite, the 110th in a series. But to me, it would always be Spacecraft Number 5, Breezy and Blackie’s ship.
12
The Command And Control Center
Later the day of the launch, our whole team packed up and got back on the plane. But we did not return to Moscow. Our first stop was the Crimea, the city of Yevpatoriya, where the military had built a satellite tracking-and-control center that our bureau was beginning to use for manned flights. (A dozen kilometers away, there was a deep-space tracking site; we were forced to cluster them in the Crimea because it was one of the southernmost parts of Soviet territory.)
By the time we arrived, after dark, we knew that Cosmos 110 had been placed in its initial orbit and that the upper stage had fired again to raise that orbit’s high point to nine hundred kilometers. This would cause Breezy and Blackie to pass through the Van Allen radiation belts on each trip around the world, as part of another questionable scientific experiment. (Was it really a mystery, twenty years after Hiroshima, that radiation was likely to be harmful?)