“Why do you suppose they did it now?” I asked. I certainly had no idea.
“There’s some kind of war going on. Your old friend Artemov has been making trouble.” I had heard that much, but could see no connection to the purge of the Third Enrollment.
I realized that I needed to talk to Uncle Vladimir. Before I could do that, I needed more information. To get the information, I needed some reason to see my commander.
Within moments I marched out of the gym and headed for the administration building, asking for Colonel Belyayev. None of the student-cosmonauts was in the habit of simply dropping in on Belyayev, though he encouraged us to visit whenever we had questions or problems. He was, after all, the officer who signed our fitness reports. Knowing that, my pathetic plan was to use my accident as an excuse to volunteer for some other work, preferably the kind of duties I performed for Filin in my student days back at the bureau.
But Colonel Belyayev was not in the office today, not expected. I saw my little scheme vanish like a soap bubble, and turned away, only to hear the assistant say, “Colonel Gagarin is in. Would you like to speak to him?”
Why not? “Yes.”
On that morning Yuri Gagarin was thirty-three years old, though he seemed much older. He had gotten heavy again, understandably, given a crushing schedule that required him to make dozens of public appearances where drinking was mandatory. He had no time for physical exercise. I already knew he was angry about his inability to log any time in the air. And, of course, given what happened to Komarov, there was no chance our ministers would allow him to fly in space again.
“Ribko! I’d forgotten about your injury,” he said when I hobbled into his office. “I was hoping you could drive me into town.”
“If your car has an automatic transmission, I can.”
“You’re sure?”
“There’s no physical problem. I’m supposed to be at a geology class at ten A.M.—”
He picked up the telephone and told Belyayev’s assistant that Ribko was being excused for the day. Then he grabbed a notebook and his overcoat and hat, and held the door for me. “This way.”
Gagarin needed me to drive him because he was frantically trying to finish his degree at Zhukovsky. “I’ve been writing a thesis since September,” he said. “It never seems to get done.”
The subject was winged aerospace vehicles. “Like Spiral,” I offered.
“Yes. Though my conclusions won’t make our Spiral friends very happy.” Gagarin had concluded that the only part of an aerospace plane system that the USSR could claim to have demonstrated was the launch system. “We’ve built several models and mockups, but they’re just that… models. We need special materials for the wings and body, to keep the plane from burning up when it reenters the atmosphere. We also need better computer guidance systems, since a pilot will never be able to fly such a reentry.” He went on for quite a while, obviously rehearsing material from the thesis.
“What it lacks most is a mission,” he said, finally. “I can’t figure out what a spaceplane will do that a satellite or a Soyuz couldn’t do better. The fact that we are devoting millions of rubles to this fantasy is stupid.”
By now we had been driving for half an hour, and had reached the Garden Ring Road. I felt brave enough to ask our first man in space, “Why do they make you go to Zhukovsky, when you’ve got so much other work to do?”
He grinned, and I saw a bit of the young pilot who had become so famous so quickly. “General Kamanin wants the first cosmonauts to be pioneers in the command of new space forces. You can’t be a general without an education, and I shouldn’t even have been made a colonel.” I mentioned my father, who had struggled to get through the Red Banner Academy after years of flying.
“Yes. The system now takes pilots and forces them to be bureaucrats. Kamanin said that his plan was to fly us once or twice, then build a bigger cosmonaut team and a larger training center around us.
“He’s also been trying to get control of launch vehicles moved from the Central Space Office to the Air Force. I think he would also like to put the manufacturers back in their place, too.”
“You mean the Korolev bureau?”
“All of the bureaus. They forget that the military is the customer.”
“Because the military doesn’t want to go to the Moon.”
“Yes. It’s not all their fault. The problems are higher up.” Then, looking back down at his papers, he added, casually, “We wrote a letter to Brezhnev about that.”
“A letter?”
“The cosmonauts, those who have flown. We drafted a letter about the confusion in all our space efforts and sent it to the Central Committee. They have to do something, and soon.”
I was stunned to hear this. Heroes of the Soviet Union did not, as a rule, write critical letters to the leadership. Especially not a group of them! “Has there been any response?”
“Well,” Gagarin said, his eyes narrowing, “we are all being examined by military intelligence. Five men are being kicked out of the detachment. We may have started a war.”
I was glad that we were crawling bumper-to-bumper on Leningrad Road, because the news that it was indeed military intelligence “reviewing” our files nearly caused me to lose control of the vehicle. This was very bad news.
We had reached the entrance to the Zhukovsky Academy. I pulled over and asked Gagarin if he wanted me to wait. “No, I’ll ride back with Titov; he’s meeting me. Please take the car back to the center. Thank you for being my chauffeur, and remember — things are going to change in our program. I promise you.”
With that, the short, increasingly stout first man in space hurried off to school.
I retraced my route, heading back down Leningrad Road toward the Belorussia Station and Uncle Vladimir’s office. This was dangerously close to being absent without leave, but I had been excused from classes for the day, and was simply making one stop on the way back to Star Town. Or so I was prepared to testify.
The guard telephoned to Uncle Vladimir’s office. To my surprise, he was present and available, though I was instructed to meet him in half an hour, at the gate to Dynamo Stadium, several blocks away.
I used the time to buy a roll from a kiosk, and was sitting on the hood of the car eating when I saw him approach, on foot. He was red-faced with exertion. “This is the longest distance I have walked in ten years,” he said by way of greeting.
“I’m sorry.”
“It was my choice. It wouldn’t be good for either of us for you to be seen wandering the halls there.” He seemed to have recovered. “How have you been?” We had not seen each other in months, and had rarely spoken since I had told him that I was going to be enrolled in the military cosmonaut team. “Aside from your poor ankle,” he said, noting my cast. “A savage beating by your military rivals?”
I explained about my parachuting mishap.
“And you really thought going into the service was somehow safer than working at the bureau?” He was teasing me, which was a relief. I had been prepared for anything up to and including physical violence. “What brings you crawling back to me?”
I wasn’t even going to question his statement, especially since it was more or less correct. “There’s a war going on between the clans,” I said, and briefly laid out what Gagarin had told me, without naming Gagarin as my source.
Uncle Vladimir listened carefully as I spoke, nodding now and then; then he grabbed me by the shoulder. “It’s new, and yet not new at all. I had heard grumblings about the space program coming from much higher up.” He made a little circling gesture with a finger, as if indicating an airplane. Perhaps one circling Mount Olympus, observing a war of the gods. “You’re in some danger yourself.”