“Surprisingly.” He took one last drag from his cigarette, then stubbed it out against the skin of the Carrier tail section. No one seemed to notice. “At first we all thought it was some kind of joke. But they actually drove some black vans up to the bureau and started taking us away.”
“Where to?”
“The Lubiyanka itself. Not to the basement, just to the interrogation rooms. They started grilling us about sabotage. The L-1 failures, the parachutes on Soyuz, the fucking guidance system. Of course, you know and I know that most of the failures are subsystems: The bureau doesn’t build the parachutes, we subcontract them to Tkachev’s bureau. Guidance, too. We do the overall design and assembly, but we depend on the subcontractors to deliver parts to spec.
“They didn’t give a shit about the facts. I mean, they started complaining about Proton failures. Well, first-stage problems were Chelomei’s business. The upper stage was the only thing you could fairly blame us for.
“As far as I know, every one of those failures can be explained by sloppy workmanship, poor design, obsolete electronics, or just bad luck. But they claimed to have evidence that unauthorized people had access to the vehicles in the assembly buildings here in Baikonur.” He lit up another cigarette. “I guess some mystery saboteur was able to throw a wrench into one engine or pull a wire somewhere else. Who knows?”
“Who was doing the questioning?”
“State Security. One guy in particular was really beating up on me, some fat bastard in a fancy suit. Artemov said later his name was Nefedov.”
He was called away at that point, and I was left there with pieces of the Carrier rocket, knowing I finally had some proof that my dear Uncle Vladimir was truly at the heart of a conspiracy to destroy our Moon program.
42
Carrier
Lev’s prediction regarding the Carrier turned out to be true. As soon as the vehicle was raised into position for launch, cracks were “discovered” by inspectors working for the State Commission. The planned launch, still several weeks off, was canceled and the first vehicle written off as a “model” for “fit checks” of the new launch structure. This was a valuable use for it, though we’d have learned the same from a vehicle capable of flight. (In fact, a number of flaws were discovered in the gantry itself, some of them serious enough to have forced the first Carrier to be rolled back to the assembly building while repairs were made.)
All of this took days to decide, days in which Shiborin and I acted as test crewmen for the mockup of the L-3 lander and yet another version of the Soyuz/L-1 command module, this one known as the LOK, for lunar orbit cabin. The L-3 and LOK were scheduled to be fired into orbit aboard the second Carrier. Our work involved climbing into the seats of the LOK, Shiborin as commander, me as flight engineer, and carrying out many tedious commands from the staff a few meters away.
It was slightly more fun to take turns climbing into the L-3 landing vehicle, though it was not complete. We took turns because the L-3 would only descend to the surface of the Moon carrying a single crew member, the military commander, while the flight engineer remained in orbit aboard the LOK. You could peer out the forward window and imagine yourself seeing the craters of the Sea of Serenity from the height of a few thousand meters. This work was also more tiring, since the L-3 lander didn’t have a seat; restrained by a series of straps, the pilot simply stood up to fly it. Shiborin solved this problem by liberating a small wooden ladder from the construction team and sticking that inside the cabin. It wasn’t comfortable, but it did allow us to sit down without having to be extracted from the cabin during the long periods of time when the test team was engaged in argument.
No sooner had we completed this series of tests than the first Carrier was rolled back into the assembly building to be taken apart, and we repeated the tests with its LOK and L-3. This made little sense because both spacecraft would have to be reintegrated with a new launch vehicle at some point in the future, and any tests made now repeated. But much of what we did in those days made little sense.
Once we had completed that work, the L-1 vehicle Number 8 was declared ready for mating with its Universal Rocket, so Shiborin and I, and our test team, which included Lev Tselauri, shifted to the Proton assembly building at Area 92, several kilometers to the east.
We had left Star Town on May 7 thinking we would be absent for a week, no more. We were still living at the Hotel Cosmonaut when June turned into July. It was difficult enough for me, having packed for a shorter trip, but there was no one to miss me back home. Shiborin, on the other hand, was married, and frequently bitter about the separation. On a couple of weekends he managed to get himself assigned as a copilot on one of the transports commuting between Tyuratam and Chkalov, and go home for a few days.
These trips allowed him to catch up on the news. The commission investigating the Gagarin-Seregin accident had still not found the cause, the weather balloon having been discredited. Pilot error was now the leading theory, which rightly infuriated the community of eagles. There had been a formal ceremony naming the training center after Gagarin. Nikolayev had been appointed deputy in Gagarin’s place, and Belyayev, as expected, had been passed over. Colonel Bykovsky, to the surprise of many, had been jumped over Leonov as commander of the first squad within the cosmonaut team — the one for civilian programs, including Soyuz and the lunar missions. Bykovsky had been the commander of the spacecraft intended to dock with Komarov’s doomed Soyuz and I had worked with him, though not much. He was quiet and competent and his appointment was a good move.
The war over the next Soyuz missions was still raging, with Star Town and the Korolev bureau arguing about the composition of the crews, while above them, Ustinov insisted that the next pair of spacecraft be flown without crews at all.
And, meanwhile, a completely redesigned Apollo spacecraft was delivered to Cape Kennedy for a return to manned flight in September.
Even though the weather at Tyuratam had grown hot, dusty, and dry, even though I was spending a growing amount of time searching for my own food, taking care of my own laundry, and trying not to become romantically entangled with a certain dark-eyed waitress at the commissary in Hotel Cosmonaut (I had heard she was in the business of collecting cosmonauts, and I would have been in her second ten, I believe), I decided I was better off in Baikonur for the moment.
One night in late June, as I was leaving the Area 92 building hoping to catch a ride back to Tyuratam, I found a familiar figure rummaging through the trash piled high beside the building. It was Sergeant Oleg Pokrovsky, the scrounger and hunter I had met on my first visit here.
If possible, he seemed even more raggedy than when I last saw him, though that had been at the beginning of a winter hunt. I said hello, and, I was pleased to see, he recognized me. “The young man who was interested in Blackie and Breezy.”
“The same.”
“Not the same.” He gestured at my uniform. ‘I see I am to salute you.” He straightened up and executed a perfect one, a bizarre sight, this aged scarecrow in a shabby uniform standing at attention next to a heap of garbage.
In return, I gave him the most half-assed salute possible, adding, “You have heroically fulfilled the tasks of the Motherland,” one of the many automatic phrases used in the military. “I regret that I don’t have a drink to offer you tonight.”
He grinned. “I am Oleg Pokrovsky, and I always have something to drink.” It wasn’t vodka, but a bottle of beer, already open.
Even though I never much cared for beer, I took a swig and was surprised at how good it tasted. Perhaps my exile to Baikonur was changing me.