I managed to see Katya again on Saturday, November 1, on my last free weekend before returning to Baikonur for checkout on the tenth L-1, the one that would finally pave our path to and from the Moon.

There were no further explosive revelations regarding my parents’ lives, or mine, or Katya’s, just another shallow sexual evening that left me feeling drained yet energized, guilty and yet strangely happy. Strangely because weeks, now months, had passed, and I was no closer to proving that Uncle Vladimir had somehow killed Korolev, not one bit more knowledgeable about his plans and powers. And still, when I had the time to think of such things, wondering where and how he would take action against me.

Knowing that snow would soon cover the ground around Star Town, I dressed in a track suit and went for a run early the morning of Sunday, November 2. I didn’t particularly enjoy running—almost none of the cosmonauts did—but I had found that it made me feel more energetic, especially with a trip coming up that would require me to sit on my ass in a cramped, cold spacecraft for endless hours.

The building that was intended to be permanent housing for the Fourth Enrollment, among others, had been ninety percent complete in July. It was, I now judged, ninety-one percent complete. After my run, I returned to my lonely flat on its first floor to find my father sitting on a chair in a puddle of sunlight, wearing a civilian overcoat.

Getting over my initial shock and surprise, I greeted him. He seemed genuinely pleased to see me, though, as usual, he had to offer some criticism: “You should lock your door.”

“There’s nobody in this area but cosmonauts and their families,” I said. “Not on a Sunday morning.”

“I got in.”

“You’re an Air Force general.”

He flicked at the lapel of his coat, which opened to show that he was wearing civilian clothes. “Not today.”

“I don’t have anything worth stealing.” This was, more or less, true. I had splurged to buy a small television set, which I had used perhaps three times in the past six months. My possessions at that time were limited to military uniforms, athletic gear, my handwritten notes from training classes (there were no workbooks), and a few books. My furniture looked as though it had been salvaged or stolen in the first place.

“I’m not speaking about thieves. It’s your personal security.”

“Uncle Vladimir’s assassins?”

A look of genuine fright passed across my father’s face. Then, strangely, he forced himself to laugh. “You’ve been reading too many spy novels,” he said, holding up an index finger in the universal Russian symbol that says: We are under surveillance.

I thought the idea was ridiculous, but elected to play along. “Let me buy you breakfast,” I said.

Once we were outdoors, my father said, “I’ve already eaten.”

“Me, too. I just wanted the listeners to know we had a reason to leave.”

“This is not a joke, Yuri.”

“Sorry.” One of my many failings is that I sound as though I’m joking when I’m not. “How was Czechoslovakia?”

“Not as bloody as Hungary, from what they tell me. We didn’t have to hang traitors from the streetlights. But we managed to anger everyone in the international community, and most of our allies, too. They know that if the tanks can roll into Prague, they can roll into Warsaw or Bucharest, too. They’ll never allow this again.”

“Things change.”

“Some things.” He looked almost wistful. “Now, have you done what I said? Have you stayed away from Vladimir?”

“I haven’t spoken to him for months.”

“Have you been pressured in any way? Followed?”

“Not that I can tell. You would know better,” I said. “You insisted we come outside to talk.”

“Just a precaution.” He looked around at Star Town, the tall, gray apartment buildings among the birch and pine trees, the central commissary and market building in front of us, the cold-looking lake to our right, the half-finished structures by it. We were the only ones out on this dreary morning. “This place keeps getting bigger and bigger.”

“Kamanin is trying to make it bigger yet,” I said. “He wants the training center to become a scientific-research institute with twice the staff.”

“Yes, yes, and he wants the Air Force to become the Central Space Office, too. I know all about it. Everyone on the high command is sick to death of it.”

“They must be pleased by Zond 5.”

He grunted. “They think it’s a giant waste of money, Yuri. The Americans are going to beat us to the Moon. That’s been obvious since—”

“—since Korolev died?”

For an instant my father seemed to sag, but he quickly recovered, smiling. “It was obvious that day in 1961 when the Americans announced they were going to go to the Moon. They have too many resources. We never had a real program until 1964, and it still wasn’t on track when Korolev died. But that doesn’t concern us.”

“It may not concern you, but it sure concerns me! This is my life!”

“Beating the Americans to the Moon? You’ve never said a thing about that to me.”

“Well, there are many things I haven’t said to you. Or you to me, such as the truth about Mother’s death.” I don’t know why I chose that moment to raise that subject; the instant the words were said, I wanted to erase them.

My father turned and looked at me as though I were a stranger. “What are you talking about?”

“Your bomb test at Semipalatinsk in September 1956. It was called the A-2, wasn’t it? You dropped it from your plane?”

His face reddened, and I knew he was angry. “You lied to me. You said you hadn’t spoken to Vladimir.”

“I haven’t.”

Now he was confused. Among the many other things I had never mentioned to him was my relationship with Katya, so who could possibly have told me this terrible secret if not Vladimir? “I’ve made many mistakes in my life, Yuri. Some were my fault. Some were . . . bad luck. Following the wrong orders,” he said, obviously trying to control his voice. “But that day, with that plane, and what it did to your mother and those other people . . . that is the one I live with.”

“You never talked about it.”

“What should I have said?” he snapped. “ ‘Oh, by the way, Yuri, when your mother and I were in the desert, I managed to poison her’? It was bad enough watching her die, knowing it was my fault.” He started walking back toward my flat. “I need a drink.”

I hurried to catch up with him, struggling with my emotions and at the same time wondering if I had anything for him to drink.

He stopped at the front door, blocking it so I couldn’t open it. “What are you going to do?”

“About what?”

“Your . . . information.”

“What can I do? I’m going to try to be a good cosmonaut and a Communist. I’ve proven to myself that those are the only things I’m good at.” That seemed to satisfy him; he let me open the door.

In my flat I dug through my bags for tomorrow’s flight to Baikonur—already packed—and found an unopened bottle of vodka; I had gotten into the habit of buying one before each of my trips, for barter, if nothing else. I handed it to my father, then turned to find some glasses. “Don’t bother,” he said, drinking directly out of the bottle.

He handed it to me, and I took a drink, too. It tasted quite good after several minutes in the chill and cold. “Yuri, if you will accept one last piece of advice from your father, be patient. These troubles—with Vladimir, with me—they will end.”

“Yes. With my exile to the Arctic Circle.”

He laughed and raised the bottle in a mock toast. “You have Zhanna’s sense of humor. She never lost it, not even at the end.”

“That will comfort me as I watch the snow fall in prison.”

He capped the bottle and stuck it under his arm. “If you’re careful, if you follow your orders, you might survive. But I warn you, any deviation could be dangerous.”

Maybe the jolt of that vodka made me feel like an American cowboy. I reached back into my bag and pulled out the PB-8 pistol I had bought from Sergeant Oleg. “I’m ready.”

“Put that fucking thing away!”

I suddenly felt stupid and childish. So I did as he said, putting it back in the travel bag. “Yuri, don’t travel with that thing. Not now. If it’s found in your luggage, you will go to jail and I won’t be able to save you.”

So, like a good son, I did as my father told me, hiding the pistol behind some books on my shelf.

He hugged me and wouldn’t let me walk him to the main gate.

November 7 was Revolution Day, and the excuse for celebrations. Even if orbital mechanics had not dictated that the launch of the next L-1 could not take place until November 10, the holiday would have ensured it. In the city of Leninsk, an outpost of Russians surrounded by a sea of indifferent Kazakhs, there were two days of parties that interrupted all work.

On the tenth, however, another white Universal Rocket 500 thundered into the sky carrying an L-1, Number 12 in the series, with improved navigation systems, and a crew of turtles and other small test creatures. The evening launch went well, as did the trans-lunar burns of the Block D engine, sending the spacecraft, now known as Zond 6, on its way to the Moon.

As the team flew off to Yevpatoriya in the morning, we learned that an antenna on Zond 6 had failed to deploy as planned, making communications difficult. But the improved navigation system was working, meaning that the trajectory to and from the Moon could be precise enough to allow a controlled reentry.

On the twelfth, Zond 6 carried out a major midcourse correction burn, which raised our hopes. Two days later it slipped around the limb of the Moon, dipping to within 2,400 kilometers of the surface, then headed back to Earth.

During this time, Shiborin and I worked with the L-1 cosmonauts, teams of Bykovsky-Rukavishnikov, Leonov-Makarov, Popovich-Sevastyanov, three commanders from the military team, three flight engineers from Department 731 of the bureau, all of them hoping to be aboard the next L-1 as it visited the Moon. The crews took turns inside a bare-bones mockup of an L-1—the same size as the descent module of the Soyuz—performing simulated engine burns and commands.

At one point, when Zond 6 was out of communication range, Shiborin and I climbed into the mockup, he in the commander’s seat, me as flight engineer. Neither of us were big men, but our knees almost touched the control panel above us. “Can you imagine spending seven days in something this small?” Shiborin asked in amazement.

“You can see the whole universe outside the window.”

“That might help for the first day. This is really suited only for creatures the size of turtles.”

“You’ll be weightless. They say that makes the place feel bigger.” Shiborin only grunted. “The Gemini astronauts survived eight days, then fourteen days, and they didn’t have any more room than this.” Now he failed to reply at all. I couldn’t blame him. The L-1 cabin seemed even more cramped than the Voskhod in which I had performed my first tasks as a bureau “flight test” engineer.

I suspected that Shiborin was growing tired of the endless classes and weeks away from home. He wanted to fly, and thought he was ready. Well, we were. Any of us in the Fourth Enrollment could have been assigned to a Soyuz or an L-1 crew and been ready for launch in four months. Unfortunately, we had fifty other cosmonauts in line ahead of us.

Zond 6 made midcourse corrections on the sixteenth and the seventeenth, as it fell faster and faster back to Earth. Artemov and his flight controllers began to really feel that a controlled reentry was going to take place. On the evening of the seventeenth, as planned, the L-1 separated from its cylindrical service-and-propulsion module and dived through the narrow target corridor in the sky over Antarctica, nine thousand kilometers from its planned landing point in Kazakhstan.

The first dive slowed Zond 6 from a speed of eleven kilometers per second to little more than seven—still very fast. Then, rolling right and left to generate lift from its bell shape, Zond 6 climbed back out of the atmosphere for several minutes before making a second dive. This one was steeper, slowing the vehicle to less than two hundred meters a second. At no point during the reentry did the G load exceed seven and then only briefly. A cosmonaut crew would have found this ride much less stressful.

The recovery teams in the primary zone received signals showing that Zond 6 was going to land about 150 kilometers south of Baikonur itself. Then nothing.

This silence was not unusual: Our recovery forces were stretched thin, even in the primary zone. Contact could be lost by simply having a helicopter or search aircraft turn in the wrong direction. Further, we knew that one of the antennas on Zond 6 had failed before the spacecraft left Earth orbit. Perhaps that was the reason for the silence. Analysis of telemetry from one of the remote sites showed that Zond 6 had deployed its parachute. “The next L-1 will carry two cosmonauts,” Artemov announced to the Yevpatoriya team.

In high spirits, we flew back to Moscow the morning of the eighteenth, where there was still no news. I went back to my flat to unpack, and was finishing a bowl of soup when Shiborin came to my door. “I just saw Leonov,” he said. “They found the Zond.”

I knew it was bad news from the look on his face. “What happened?”

“A seal ruptured during reentry. The inside of the spacecraft burned and the parachute came out early. The whole thing smashed into the desert. The only thing they salvaged was some film from one of the cameras.”

I could only imagine what Bykovsky or Leonov, or any of the lunar cosmonauts, were thinking. What else could possibly go wrong? It was as if American agents were playing a game with us—tantalizing us with near success, only to snatch it away at the last second.

Even if Zond 6 hadn’t crashed, we knew it would take a delay of a month or two in the Apollo 8 launch to give us a chance to beat America around the Moon. Now we would need a miracle—to have the Saturn or Apollo suffer some kind of accident.

Thoughts like that made me ill. The next morning I felt even worse when I saw the newspapers reporting the “triumph” of our country’s last attack on the cosmos, proudly publishing a photo of Earth taken from deep space—a photo that had been salvaged from the crushed pieces of Zond 6.