competing to see who was quicker and better at running through the operations to detach his stage. Sema was nimbler, but Ivan had to open only four catches, so sometimes he was quicker.
Our third stage, Otto Plucis, was a ruddy-faced meditative Balt. As far as I can recall, he never once joined Ivan and Sema when they were practising in the barracks—he always seemed to be lying on his bunk doing the crosswords in
Red Warrior
, his legs in their painstakingly polished boots crossed on the gleaming nickel-plated bar of the bedstead. But you only had to see how he dealt with his share of the catches on themodel to realise that if there was one reliable section in our rocket, then it was the separation system for the third stage. Otto was a funny guy. After the all-clear, he enjoyed telling stupid stories like the ones children tell to frighten each other at summer camp.
“Once, this expedition flies off to the moon,” he would say in the darkness. “They’ve been flying for ages, and they’re just getting close. Then suddenly the hatch opens and in come some people in white coats. The cosmonauts say: ‘We’re flying to the moon!’ The people in white coats say: ‘Fine, fine. No need to get excited. We’ll just give you this little injection …’ ”
•
Mitiok and I still hadn’t begun technical equipment training when the training for the ballistics group was made more complicated. It hardly affected Sema Anikin—his feat of heroism took place at a height of four kilometres, and all he had to do was put on a padded work jacket over his uniform. It was harder for Ivan: at forty-five kilometres, where his moment for immortality arrived, it was cold, and the air was already rarefied, so he trained in a sheepskin coat, tall fur boots, and an oxygen mask, which made it difficult for him to climb in through the narrow hatch on the model. Otto had things easier—a special spacesuit was made for him, complete with electrical heating. It was sewn by the seamstresses at the Red Mountain clothing factory from several American high-altitude suits captured in Vietnam, but it wasn’t quite ready yet—they were still finishing off the heating system. In order not to lose time, Otto practised in a deep-sea diver’s suit; I can still see his red, sweaty,pockmarked face behind the glass of the helmet as it rose out of the hatch; when he said hello, the friendly words came out as strangely jumbled sounds.
•
The lectures on the general theory of automated cosmic systems were read to us in turn by the Flight Leader and Colonel Urchagin.
The Flight Leader was called Pkhadzer Vladlenovich Pidorenko. He got his name from the small Ukrainian village where he was born. His father had been in the Cheka too, and following the fashion of those days, he’d taken his son’s first name from the first letters of the Russian words for “Party and Economic Activists of the Dzerzhinsky District”, while his second was an abbreviation of “Vladimir Lenin”: what’s more, if you added up the letters in the two names Pkhadzer and Vladlen, there were fifteen, the same as the number of Soviet republics. But he couldn’t stand being called by his own name, and subordinates who served with him called him either Comrade Lieutenant-General or, like myself and Mitiok, Comrade Flight Leader. He pronounced the phrase “automated systems” with such pure, visionary intonation that for a second his office in the Lubyanka, which we went up to for his lectures, was transformed into the sounding board of some immense grand piano—but even though the phrase turned up in his speech quite often, he gave us absolutely no technical information, and spent most of the time telling us run-of-the-mill stories or reminiscing about his wartime days with the partisans in Belorussia.
Urchagin didn’t deal with any technical topics, either.He usually nibbled on sunflower seeds, laughing as he spat out the shells, or told us jokes.
“How do you divide
Our third stage, Otto Plucis, was a ruddy-faced meditative Balt. As far as I can recall, he never once joined Ivan and Sema when they were practising in the barracks—he always seemed to be lying on his bunk doing the crosswords in
Red Warrior
, his legs in their painstakingly polished boots crossed on the gleaming nickel-plated bar of the bedstead. But you only had to see how he dealt with his share of the catches on themodel to realise that if there was one reliable section in our rocket, then it was the separation system for the third stage. Otto was a funny guy. After the all-clear, he enjoyed telling stupid stories like the ones children tell to frighten each other at summer camp.
“Once, this expedition flies off to the moon,” he would say in the darkness. “They’ve been flying for ages, and they’re just getting close. Then suddenly the hatch opens and in come some people in white coats. The cosmonauts say: ‘We’re flying to the moon!’ The people in white coats say: ‘Fine, fine. No need to get excited. We’ll just give you this little injection …’ ”
•
Mitiok and I still hadn’t begun technical equipment training when the training for the ballistics group was made more complicated. It hardly affected Sema Anikin—his feat of heroism took place at a height of four kilometres, and all he had to do was put on a padded work jacket over his uniform. It was harder for Ivan: at forty-five kilometres, where his moment for immortality arrived, it was cold, and the air was already rarefied, so he trained in a sheepskin coat, tall fur boots, and an oxygen mask, which made it difficult for him to climb in through the narrow hatch on the model. Otto had things easier—a special spacesuit was made for him, complete with electrical heating. It was sewn by the seamstresses at the Red Mountain clothing factory from several American high-altitude suits captured in Vietnam, but it wasn’t quite ready yet—they were still finishing off the heating system. In order not to lose time, Otto practised in a deep-sea diver’s suit; I can still see his red, sweaty,pockmarked face behind the glass of the helmet as it rose out of the hatch; when he said hello, the friendly words came out as strangely jumbled sounds.
•
The lectures on the general theory of automated cosmic systems were read to us in turn by the Flight Leader and Colonel Urchagin.
The Flight Leader was called Pkhadzer Vladlenovich Pidorenko. He got his name from the small Ukrainian village where he was born. His father had been in the Cheka too, and following the fashion of those days, he’d taken his son’s first name from the first letters of the Russian words for “Party and Economic Activists of the Dzerzhinsky District”, while his second was an abbreviation of “Vladimir Lenin”: what’s more, if you added up the letters in the two names Pkhadzer and Vladlen, there were fifteen, the same as the number of Soviet republics. But he couldn’t stand being called by his own name, and subordinates who served with him called him either Comrade Lieutenant-General or, like myself and Mitiok, Comrade Flight Leader. He pronounced the phrase “automated systems” with such pure, visionary intonation that for a second his office in the Lubyanka, which we went up to for his lectures, was transformed into the sounding board of some immense grand piano—but even though the phrase turned up in his speech quite often, he gave us absolutely no technical information, and spent most of the time telling us run-of-the-mill stories or reminiscing about his wartime days with the partisans in Belorussia.
Urchagin didn’t deal with any technical topics, either.He usually nibbled on sunflower seeds, laughing as he spat out the shells, or told us jokes.
“How do you divide
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