That, at least, sounded like my father. But I had had to goad him into being himself! Something was wrong with him, something beyond a broken arm. His spirit had been shattered. By what? “Sorry,” I said. “How long before they remove the cast?”
“Six or eight weeks.”
“Just in time for spring.” He was not amused. I decided to risk another opening. “At least you won’t be wearing it at your retirement party.”
Now I had truly angered him. “Who said I was going to retire?”
Uncle Vladimir, for one. It didn’t seem like a good time to mention the brother-in-law from State Security, however. “Well, you are approaching the age—”
“—The age where I could go to the reserve if I wanted to. I still have lots of work to do, like keeping you rocket boys from bankrupting the country!”
I accepted the criticism. “Fine. Five years from now, when you do finally retire, what would you like to be doing?”
‘I’ll never retire.” Awkwardly, still trying to learn to shift his weight with a heavy cast throwing him off balance, he got to his feet and turned the television back on. We were just in time for Vremya, the evening newscast. And in case I didn’t get the point, he turned to me and said, “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
That was the highlight of my visit. I slept that night on the floor, dreaming of a dark-eyed Foros whore climbing into my lap. I woke up early, while my father was still sleeping, and began hitching back to Simferopol and Yevpatoriya.
I was saddened by my father’s condition. He had always been a presence in my life, but now I could see the day when, like my mother, he would no longer.
Cosmos 110 continued to circle the earth, sixteen sunrises and sunsets every day, with Blackie and Breezy trapped in their special couches, eating and drinking from tubes. I imagined Saditsky and his copilot, Kostin, doing the same thing a month or two months from now. At least they could tell each other war stories, if they hadn’t used them all up in training.
By March 15, the twenty-first day of the flight, there were signs that systems were starting to fail. Because of the mysterious overheating, the atmosphere inside the vehicle was getting foul as fumes and particles were baked out of the equipment.
Presented with this data, the State Commission chose to end the mission at the first opportunity, on the twenty-second day. I was at my console in mission control when the command was given to fire Cosmos 110’s retro-rockets, thinking, poor dogs! Liftoff had been a terrible shock to them. What did they think of this, after three weeks of weightlessness?
The equipment section of the spacecraft separated, to our collective relief. On several occasions, including Gagarin’s flight, the separation had not taken place as planned, at great risk to the mission. A spherical spacecraft like Cosmos 110 could not safely go through the fires of reentry with the conical equipment section still attached. It would start to tumble like a baton, heating unevenly and ruining its trajectory.
As Cosmos 110 dived into the atmosphere, it created its own cloud of ionized gases, which prevented further radio communication. Now we had to wait for the recovery forces to report.
America’s manned spacecraft splashed down in the ocean because America had a vast navy to deploy for quick recoveries. We did not. Our vehicles had to come down on land.
Gagarin and the other Vostok pilots had ejected from their vehicles, landing by personal parachute while the sphere, slowed by its own ‘chute, hit rather harder. This method could not be used for a multimanned vehicle — Voskhod-Cosmos had no ejection seats. Nor was it possible to build and safely deploy a parachute large enough to slow the five-ton ball sufficiently to prevent, as Korolev put it, “a week in the hospital” for the crew.
The bureau’s geniuses had attached a second, smaller retro-rocket to the shrouds of the recovery parachute itself! As the spacecraft got close to the ground, a wirelike probe would spring out, hit the earth and trigger the rocket, which would fire for a second, enough to cushion the landing so that it felt like an elevator coming to ground.
We got word from the recovery forces that Cosmos 110 had been sighted, that the parachute had deployed. The spacecraft’s trajectory had been shallower than planned, and it had come down sixty kilometers short of the aiming point, southeast of the city of Saratov, at 5:15 P.M. The landing zone was fogged in, and the parachute rescue team didn’t reach it until almost seven. The weather kept the recovery helicopters from landing until the next morning, but Blackie and Breezy were reported to be fine. A bit unsteady on their four legs, but healthy. They had survived their hundreds of visits to the Van Allen belt.
And cleared the way for Saditsky and Kostin to fly Voskhod 3. As we left Yevpatoriya under the light of a crescent Moon, a Moon where brave little Luna 9 rested, we all felt we were about to catch up with the Americans, and then pass them for good.
14
Program L-1
I returned to Moscow on the afternoon of Wednesday, March 16. Triyanov, meeting our plane at Chkalov, told me to take a day off, a gift I appreciated, since I was technically still a student and there remained papers to write and exams to take. As a newly energized member of the Komsomol, there were also meetings of the school’s Party committee to attend. I could even bore Marina with tales of my adventures at Baikonur and the Crimea.
I would have liked to bore Lev with them as well, but some job for the Chelomei organization was keeping him especially busy out in Reutov. Only the Omsk Twins were around, and all they wanted to hear about was the Crimean prostitutes.
Back at my desk in Department 90 that Friday, my first job was to write a report on all the decisions I made as a member of the flight support team during the dog flight. “Should I mention being chewed out by Artemov for no reason?” I asked Triyanov, who had already heard about the affair.
“If he had as much to drink as they say, he probably doesn’t remember it. I wouldn’t remind him.” He had called me into his office to remind me to hurry up, since the manned follow-up to the dog flight was still looming.
“Oh, he was definitely drunk,” I said. “In front of the generals and everyone.”
“Artemov is a noted specialist in rocket fuels,” Triyanov said, smiling faintly. “Besides, if you were sixty years old and staring into the open grave of your career, you’d drink, too.”
“Would it be so bad for Artemov if Filin became the chief?” From Filin’s jolly mood on the flight back, and the sudden deference shown him by other bureau employees and military space people, it was clear he was about to take over. The double success of Luna 9, which was Filin’s alone, and of the dog mission, which he had championed over Artemov’s objections, made him Korolev’s true heir, a good engineer who was aggressive and — what Russians loved most—lucky.
And a murderer? That, too, was a Russian tradition.
“Not at first,” Triyanov was saying. “You would have the usual congratulations all around, speeches about how Artemov will be his righthand man. Then one day Artemov will be packed off to another institute, or to a university. He won’t be happy taking orders from Filin, because he’s not Korolev. And Filin will be unhappy that Artemov is unhappy.”
“When will it happen?”
Triyanov shrugged. “There’s still one big battle to be fought, about the lunar orbit program.”