Finally I said, “Katya—”
She glanced at me, eyes blazing. “You’re being an idiot.”
I stopped, keeping distance between us. I felt ashamed, foolish, but told myself it had to be done. I had to sever my links with Uncle Vladimir, and that included Katya. Yes, as a good Party member would say, for her own good. “I had to tell him.”
“You had to do no such thing! It’s not even a question of being rude to your own uncle, and to me, on your birthday — it’s stupid! He’s a very powerful man, and in case you haven’t noticed, he ranks the Party above family.”
“So he’ll have me killed?”
Katya merely closed her eyes, a sign she was exasperated almost beyond belief. “I know you must have some intelligence, Yuri. You graduated from Bauman. You made it into the cosmonaut team. Maybe it’s because I’m older, but sometimes you make no sense to me. You have no knowledge, no vision, only a response to whatever happened to you last.
“In fact, you have a lot of growing up to do. Maybe you should call me when you’re older. Ten years older.”
She turned and walked away. I chose not to follow her. I’m not sure I could have moved, in any case.
On Sunday, April 14, 1968, Soyuz spacecraft Number 8, configured as the active craft for a planned docking sequence, was launched successfully from Baikonur, and given the name Cosmos 212. The next day, April 15, Soyuz Number 7 reached orbit as Cosmos 213, the new target ship starting out four kilometers ahead of its pursuer, which closed in almost immediately for a successful docking that we were able to watch on television in the Star Town auditorium. (Those members of the Fourth Enrollment not assigned to remote tracking stations, such as Senior Lieutenants Ribko and Shiborin, were excused from other duties for this event, like students on a field trip to a museum.)
Within four hours, Cosmos 212 and 213 separated and went on to test improvements in the guidance systems. Cosmos 212 returned safely to Earth on Wednesday, April 17, making a controlled reentry (using the bell of the Soyuz to create lift and steering) for the first time. The only anomaly was that high winds in the landing zone caught the recovery parachutes after touchdown, dragging Cosmos 212 five kilometers across the steppe, beating the hell out of its skin and heat shield.
Cosmos 213, returning the next day, suffered almost the same fate, performing a controlled reentry only to be dragged across the ground by winds. This time the high winds kicked up a dust storm that kept the spacecraft from being recovered for hours.
Had cosmonauts been aboard, of course, the parachutes could have been manually separated, sparing the spacecraft their bumpy rides.
The twin docking, the second such success in a row, encouraged the Soyuz crews to hope that the next flights would be manned. This in spite of Defense Minister Ustinov’s order that there would be more unmanned tests no matter how well the Cosmos 212–213 mission went. Nobody could tell them for sure, so their feelings about the week’s events were mixed.
And early on the morning of April 23, 1968, the seventh unmanned L-1 was launched for a planned loop around the Moon and return to Earth. Unfortunately, six minutes and twenty seconds into the flight, the second-stage engines of the Universal Rocket 500K abruptly stopped and the launch escape system fired, pulling the L-1 away. It was quickly learned that a component failure had mistakenly ordered the shutdown, causing the loss of the mission.
For every two steps we took forward, there was another giant step back.
In the middle of the next week, the Moscow area suffered one of its spring freezes, and with eighty percent of Gagarin and Seregin’s MiG-15 now recovered, the commission suspended additional searches.
So far, the study of the wreckage had produced no clue to the cause of the crash, except this: There was no Plexiglas from the canopy.
There could have been several mundane explanations for that. If Gagarin or Seregin had taken the first step toward firing their ejection seats just before impact, the canopy would have been fired away first. The problem with that explanation was that no one had yet found the canopy, and it should have been within one or two hundred yards of the crash site.
The other possible reason? The impact of the crash was so violent that it shattered the Plexiglas into shards too small to be found. Several investigators clung to this; others, such as Davydov, with the experience of a dozen such accidents, scoffed at it.
Something, then, had shattered the canopy before the crash. But what?
Perhaps two days after this mystery appeared, so did an explanation. Some other search team — State Security’s, perhaps? — had found wreckage of a weather balloon suspiciously close to the ground track of the Gagarin-Seregin aircraft between Kirzhach and the crash site. The balloon had been shattered by some sort of impact.
Now, the words “weather balloon” suggest something filmy, lighter than air, like a soap bubble, but in fact, the vehicle is a thin metallic ball under pressure, giving it considerable rigidity and resistance. An aircraft hitting such an object could easily be damaged, possibly shattering a canopy and incapacitating the pilots.
Possibly. I found it suspicious that this weather-balloon wreckage magically appeared after the subcommission realized that the MiG-15’s canopy was missing. No agency had yet come forward to claim the weather balloon, either. Was it from the Air Force, who had three airfields in the vicinity, and routinely launched weather balloons? Or from the State Meteorological Service? Did they have a launching site or station nearby? Well, no one seemed quite sure of that, at least not in the last week of April, 1968.
Nevertheless, as I heard in the few meetings I was allowed to attend, the weather balloon was seized upon as the “cause” of the crash that killed Yuri Gagarin and Vladimir Seregin.
The only dissenters to this conclusion were the lower ranks, like me, and even Davydov, who scoffed openly at the idea. “What were these pilots supposedly doing? Flying with their eyes closed? The sky was clear in Zone 20 at the time of the crash. They would have seen that balloon five kilometers away.”
The cosmonaut team also protested, even writing a letter to Ustinov himself complaining about the conclusions of the overall commission. They never received a reply or even an acknowledgment.
So as the spring of 1968 turned into summer, as my father’s world prepared for war, as I saw lines of battle sketched in ink between the Cosmonaut Training Center named for Yuri Gagarin and Artemov’s bureau and its allies, as my personal life shrank to nonexistence, as I weighed the truth of the revelation that my mother had been a spy for State Security, as my country and America kept racing for the Moon, I waited nervously for Uncle Vladimir’s next move.
Interlude
“I always heard the story that Gagarin and Seregin got distracted because they were hunting,” I said to Yuri Ribko. It had been months since our last meetings at my hotel. We were back at the Rendezvous in Korolev early on a cold winter night. I had managed to free myself from coverage of a Presidential impeachment to accompany a group of NASA astronauts doing winter survival training at the Gagarin Center. Some months prior to this, the first two elements of the International Space Station, the Russian Zarya and the American Unity, had been docked together by the crew of STS-88. The astronauts now shivering inside some Soyuz descent module on a field northeast of Moscow hoped to someday live in those modules. Assuming the missing pieces got delivered, which was still an open question, one which, thankfully, Yuri Ribko and I did not have to answer.