Triyanov glanced at my papers for perhaps a millisecond. “Filin telephoned me,” he said, which obviously explained everything. “So, Yuri,” he continued, “whose nephew are you?”
That was an embarrassing, if all-too-typical Russian question. Before I could stammer my way through some inadequate answer, Triyanov said, “Any relation to General Nikolai Ribko?”
“My father.”
“We worked together briefly after the war on rocket assists for jet planes. I would have thought he’d put you in the aircraft business.”
“He didn’t put me here. I came from Bauman.”
Triyanov ignored this. “I haven’t seen him for years, though I hear of him from time to time. Your mother?”
“She died six years ago.”
“Life,” Triyanov said. He turned and gestured around him. Department 90 was a large office crammed with desks. “This is the kindergarten, where we keep all the college students,” Triyanov said. Half a dozen men about my age looked up from their work. “Here’s a new victim,” Triyanov announced. “Equipment-tester third class Yuri Ribko. Make his life miserable.” Then he called, over his shoulder, “We’re going to the meeting,” and led me out.
It was a cold day, and I was still freezing in my heavy overcoat, but Triyanov wore only a military flying jacket. He seemed not to feel the cold. Or to care who might hear him. “You’ll like it in Department 90,” he said. “It’s where the real fun is. We have access to our own fleet of planes and helicopters by ministerial decree — the Air Force can scream, but they can’t do anything about it. One of those boys with the slide rules comes up with something, we find out if it’ll work. It’s very hands-on. By the way, do you fly?”
“No,” I told him, as I struggled to keep up.
“You can learn here, if you want. You should. We may be forming our own cosmonaut team.”
That was a surprise. “I thought the cosmonauts were all in Star Town.” Star Town was a military village farther down the Yaroslavl Highway.
“That’s just the Air Force detachment. Gagarin and Bykovsky, those guys. Even Tereshkova.” He made the name of the famous woman cosmonaut sound like a disease. “Do you know Feoktistov?”
I remembered Konstantin Feoktistov as the scientist in the crew of Voskhod 1, the first spacecraft to carry more than a single pilot, launched fifteen months earlier. I said so.
“Scientist!” Triyanov laughed. “Feoktistov is one of this bureau’s most important engineers! He designed Voskhod, in fact, which was why Korolev wanted him to fly on it. The Air Force wouldn’t let him. They said they needed three pilots, which was a pile of shit — a rabbit could fly Voskhod.
“They lost that argument, so they said Feoktistov wasn’t healthy enough. He had a back injury and couldn’t do parachute training.
“The Vostok cosmonauts needed to be parachutists, because that’s how they landed. But the Voskhod crew was going to come down right inside the spacecraft! Nobody was going to be ejecting!
“So then they got political and said Feoktistov had never joined the Party. He was unreliable.
“But he’d been a partisan in the war. He had been put before a Nazi firing squad along with his friends and gotten machine-gunned! The bullets missed and he crawled out from under his dead buddies after dark! Don’t tell me he’s unreliable!”
We had returned to the main administration building, where there was an auditorium on the ground floor. Several men and women — all of them quite young — were hanging around the lobby, some in conference, some having bitter arguments. None of them paid me or Triyanov the slightest attention as we opened the door to the auditorium proper, Triyanov still talking: “Eventually the Air Force had to give in. But only on Feoktistov! No more civilian cosmonauts, they said.
“Well, as they say, ‘Once the first pickle’s out of the jar.’ We’re just waiting for the new ship, Soyuz, to start flying, and we’re going to make sure that someone from this bureau is in every crew.”
We waited for a moment. There were perhaps fifty people in the room, about a dozen of them at a head table covered with green felt, with the rest in the audience. I spotted Filin himself at the head table. “There’s Feoktistov.”
The scientist-engineer-cosmonaut was seated one over from Filin, and turned out to be a mild-looking, silver-haired professor around forty years old. He even wore glasses. “He’s not what I expected,” I blurted.
Triyanov laughed. “That’s just the thing. Before Gagarin’s flight, the damn doctors figured you had to be some kind of superman to fly in space. Well, it turns out to be a lot less stressful than flying a jet. Anybody can do it, unless you’ve got a bad heart or something.” Triyanov smiled. “I’m going to do it.”
I couldn’t hide the astonishment on my face. “That’s right: fifty-five years old. Korolev would have cleared himself to fly, if he could have. He was only four years older than me.” Triyanov suddenly became reflective. “He just ran out of time.”
I became aware that the man sitting between Filin and Feoktistov — none other than bullet-headed Boris Artemov — was speaking: “I’m against putting another ruble into any more Voskhod flights. We should cut our losses and move on.”
“That’s Artemov,” Triyanov whispered to me. “He was Korolev’s number-one deputy.”
“Is he going to take over the bureau?”
“He’d like to, but he’s not Russian. And he has a lot of enemies.” Triyanov grinned. “Sounds as though he’s making more today.”
Filin had pushed back his chair and was looking at Artemov with astonishment. “Sergei Korolev hasn’t even been in the ground a day and we’re already spitting on the grave! The chief had a plan for four more missions, and we should stick to that plan!”
Artemov was already shaking his head. “Look at those plans in light of what’s happened.”
“Now, your boss Filin has suddenly become the dark horse,” Triyanov went on. “As long as Korolev was alive, he was stuck where he was, below Artemov and others. But now anything can happen.”
Artemov went on: “The next mission is supposed to prove that two men can live in space for two weeks. A month ago we needed to know that, but now we don’t. Two men named Borman and Lovell just lived in space for two weeks, or don’t any of you read the papers?”
Someone in the audience spoke up. “How do we know what kind of condition they were in?”
“We saw them walking on the aircraft carrier. They looked fine. There’s been nothing in the press about medical problems.”
“What makes you think the Americans would tell us if there were?” That from a man in an Air Force uniform off to one side. I had seen him coming out of Filin’s office the day before.
“Think about it,” Artemov snapped. “They showed the recovery live on television… something we don’t have the guts to do. Have they postponed any flights? No, they’re going to launch another Gemini in March!”
“There’s still the test of the spacesuit,” Filin said.
“Test it on Soyuz! My point is that four more Voskhod flights are a diversion of time and energy away from our real goal, which is beating the Americans to the Moon!”
That brought forth a murmur of agreement. Artemov pressed on. “Look, we all realize that Voskhod existed because the chief wanted to keep Khrushchev happy. The Americans are going to put two men in space? Fine, we’ll put three. They’re going to walk in space? We’ll beat them.
“We’ve managed to forget how risky the system is. Maybe I should ask Dr. Feoktistov here—” Artemov nodded to the engineer-cosmonaut “—how confident he was riding the booster with no launch-escape system.”