© Copyright 1991 Victor Pelevin.
     © Translated from Russian by Yuri Machkasov (machkasov@yahoo.com)
     Date: 17 May 2001
     Russian  original  copyright  © 1991 Victor Pelevin, "Text" Publishers, Moscow, Russia.

               Dedicated to the heroes of the Soviet Space.


     This translation copyright © 2001,  Yuri Machkasov. Permission  to
distribute this work in its entirety or any  of  its parts  by  any and  all
electronic means (including,  but not limited to  creating  local electronic
copies,  hosting  on  public  servers  and transmitting  over  networks  and
protocols) is  hereby  granted on condition that the work  itself as well as
this  notice appear unchanged  in  any such distribution.  All  other rights
reserved.  The author  may  be  contacted by means  of  electronic  mail  at
machkasov@yahoo.com. All rights to the Russian  original are not intended to
be usurped or infringed upon by this translation and remain property of  the
corresponding copyright holders, or in public domain as the case may be. All
endnotes are by the translator.

[image lunokhod.jpeg] 

1.

     Omon(1) is not a particularly common name, and  it maybe isn't the best
there is. My father gave it to me. He worked in  police all of his life, and
he wanted me to become a policeman too.

     -  You see,  Ommie, -  he would tell me often after having a couple  of
drinks, - with this name, if you decide on police...  And especially if  you
join the Party(2)...

     Even though father's job included shooting people from time to time, he
had a kind  heart, and he was cheerful and agreeable by nature. He  loved me
very much, and he hoped I would achieve that which he wasn't able to achieve
himself. And what he wished for was a plot of land in the suburbs so that he
could grow  cucumbers  and beets on it -  not for  eating, or selling at the
farmer's market. That too, of course, but mainly for just being able to hack
at the earth with  a spade after stripping  naked from the waist  up, to see
the purplish earthworms  writhe and all  the  assorted underground  life  go
about its business, to haul the wheelbarrow full of manure across the entire
subdivision, stopping at strangers' fences to  have a couple of jokes.  When
he realized he was not  going to  get any of that, he began to hope that  at
least one of the Krivomazov(3) brothers was going to live a happier life (my
older brother  Ovir(4) whom my father  wanted to become a diplomat died form
meningitis when he was  in fourth grade; all I remember about him is that he
had a big oblong mole on his forehead).

     Father's  plans   concerning  my  future  never  quite  inspired   much
confidence in me; he himself  was a Party member,  and he  had a  good name,
Matvei,  but  all  he  managed to scrape  together at  the end  was a meager
retirement pension and a lonely alcoholic old age.

     I don't remember mom all too well. One single memory is all that's left
-- how dad, drunk and  in uniform, tries  to pull the  gun from his holster,
and  she,  crying,  with  messed-up  hair, grabs  at his  hands,  screaming:
"Matvei, stop it!"

     She died when I was very little, and I was brought up  by my aunt, only
visiting  my father on  the  weekends. He would be puffy and red-faced, with
his medal that he was so proud of hanging askew on  his worn out pajama top.
His  room  always  smelled  badly,  and on the  wall  there  was  a  copy of
Michelangelo's "Creation", where the bearded  God  is floating over Adam who
is  lying on  his back, God's arm  outstretched  to meet the man's  delicate
hand. This picture seemed to have a rather odd effect on my father's nature,
apparently reminding him of  something  from his  past. When  in his room, I
usually played with the toy railroad set sitting on  the floor, and he would
snore on  the converted sofa. Sometimes he would wake up, squint at me for a
while,  and then hang down halfway  from the  sofa steadying himself against
the floor  and reach towards  me with his big  hand, all covered  in  bluish
veins, which I was supposed to shake.

     - What's your name now? -- he'd ask.

     - Krivomazov, -- I'd answer,  faking the innocent smile on my face, and
then he would  pat me on the head and  give me candy. All of this  he did in
such a mechanical fashion that I almost was not disgusted.

     There's  nothing much  I can  say  about  the aunt  -- she  was  pretty
indifferent  towards me,  and tried to arrange it so that I spent most of my
time in various camps and "extended day care groups". By the way, it is only
now that I can see the extraordinary beauty of that last expression.

     From my childhood I only managed to remember that which was related, so
to  say, to my  dreams of  the sky. Of  course, this  wasn't  how  the  life
started.  Before that, there was  a long,  brightly  lit room full of  other
children  and large  plastic  blocks, and there were the stairs of  a wooden
slide glazed over with ice that I was scaling up hurriedly, and some cracked
young drummer  boys in the yard made from painted stucco, and  lots of other
stuff. But it can hardly be said that it  was I who saw those things; for in
the early childhood (just like, ostensibly, after death)  a  person is going
in many directions  at once, and therefore it is  safe to assume  that he is
not there yet,  his  full personality  to  arrive  only  later,  along  with
attachment to one fixed, specific direction.

     Our  apartment was not far from the "Cosmos" movie theatre. An enormous
rocket  made of shiny metal always  reigned supreme  over  our neighborhood,
standing as  it were on  a narrowing plume  of titanium  smoke, resembling a
huge curved blade piercing the  ground(5).  Surprisingly,  it  was  not  the
rocket that started me  as a person, but  a wooden airplane installed on the
playground on our block. It was not quite an airplane, rather a small wooden
house with two windows which  acquired wings and tail made from pickets when
the fence was  taken down, and  then they  covered  it with  green paint and
decorated with several large orange  stars. Two, maybe three of us could fit
inside, and  there also was  a  small  loft  above  with a triangular window
overlooking  the wall of  the army draft office. By  an  unspoken  agreement
honored  throughout  the block,  this  loft  was  always assigned  to be the
pilot's cockpit,  and every  time  the plane was shot down the people in the
main body were to bail out  first, and only then, when the earth was already
imminently gaining on the windows with  a deafening howl,  only then was the
pilot allowed to join  the  others -- if he managed to do  it  in  time,  of
course. I always  tried to  get to be the pilot, and I even mastered the art
of seeing the sky  with clouds and the Earth floating beneath in place where
the  draft  office  was standing,  fuzzy violets  and  dusty  cacti  looking
dejectedly down on us from its windowsills.

     I always liked movies about pilots; it was one of these movies that was
linked  with  the  strongest experience of  my childhood.  One  time, on  an
outer-space-black December night, I switched on the aunt's TV set and saw on
the screen an  airplane swinging its wings gently, with an ace of spades and
a cross stenciled on its  body. I shifted  closer  to the screen, and  right
away the canopy  over the  cockpit came looming large  into view; behind the
thick glass  an almost inhuman face could be seen smiling,  in a soft helmet
with shiny black  Bakelite  earphones, behind goggles  resembling  ones that
skiers  put on. The pilot lifted the gloved hand and  waved at  me. Then the
body  of  another plane  appeared on  screen,  shot from inside; behind  two
identical sets  of controls  two pilots  were  sitting in mutton  overcoats,
watching intently over  the evolutions of  the enemy  fighter,  flying right
nearby, through thick translucent plastic braced by steel frame.

     - Spot nine, -- said one of  the pilots  to the other. -- They're going
to bring us down.

     The  other one, with the handsome face of  a  habitual  drunkard,  just
nodded.

     - I'm not holding it against you, -  he said, apparently continuing the
conversation  that was  just  interrupted. -- But  remember this: you better
make sure that with you and Barb -- it's for the rest of your life... To the
grave.

     This was when I stopped acknowledging the happenings on the screen -- I
was struck by the thought, not even the thought, but its barely recognizable
shadow  (as if the thought itself floated by somewhere in the vicinity, only
touching  my head  with  one of its edges) -- about how, if I by glancing at
the  screen could see the world from the inside of the cockpit where the two
pilots in overcoats were sitting -- how  in  fact there's  nothing that  can
stop me from getting into that or any other cockpit without  the aid of  any
television, because the experience  of flight is  reduced to  just a  set of
perceptions,  and  the  principal  ones  of  them  I had  already learned to
simulate long ago,  while  sitting in the loft of  the winged  hut with  red
stars, looking at the draft office wall that impersonated the sky and making
faint humming noises with my mouth.

     This indistinct realization had so  shaken me that the remainder of the
movie  I  observed with half of my  mind,  only  tuning  into the television
reality when smoky trails appeared on the screen, or a line  of enemy planes
on  the ground  swept by across it. "This means", I thought,  "that  you can
look from inside yourself as  if from inside the plane, and it does not even
matter at  all  where  you look -- the  only  important  thing  is what  you
see...". Ever  since,  when  I  trundled  along some  snowy street,  I would
imagine that I  am in fact flying an airplane over snow-bound fields, making
wide turns, and I tilted my head so that the world would tilt  obediently --
to the left, or to the right.

     And still, that person  that I am now able to confidently name "I" have
in fact formed later, gradually over  time.  I consider the first glimpse of
my  real soul to be the exact moment when I realized that one can aspire not
to the thin blue film of the sky, but beyond it to the bottomless  black pit
of  space. It happened  the same  winter, one evening, when  I was wandering
around  the  Industry  Achievements  Expo(6).  I  was walking  down a  dark,
deserted alley covered with snow, and  then I heard a buzzing sound from the
left, like a huge phone ringing. I turned and I saw him.

     Reclining, sitting on emptiness as if  it  were an  easy chair,  he was
moving forward  slowly,  and  just  as  slowly  the  lines  and  tubes  were
straightening out behind  him. The glass  of his helmet was pitch black, and
only a small triangular  reflection was burning bright on its surface, but I
knew he could see me. He was quite possibly dead for some centuries now. His
arms were confidently outstretched  towards the stars, and his feet  did not
require  any kind of support to such  an extent that I realized once and for
all that true freedom can  only be attained through weightlessness, and this
is why, by the  way, all my life I found all those Western radio "voices"(7)
and writings of assorted solzhenitsyns so  incredibly boring, because  while
in my heart  of hearts I, of course, could not help but  be sickened  by the
Soviet  state,  the  demands  of  which,  vague  but  powerfully threatening
nonetheless,  were forcing any  group  of  people, no matter how  small,  no
matter how  fleetingly assembled,  to endeavor to imitate  painstakingly the
tawdriest of its members, but  upon gaining the understanding that  no peace
or freedom can exist here  on  Earth my spirit soared skywards, and anything
that my  chosen  path ever demanded from  me from that moment on could never
become contrary to my conscience, because the conscience  called me to space
and paid little attention to what was going on below.

     It was just a stained glass mosaic on the wall of the pavilion in front
of me, depicting a cosmonaut in  open space, but in one instant it  conveyed
to me more than the dozens of books that I had  read to date. I  was looking
at it for a long, long time, and then I suddenly felt someone looking at me.

     I turned around and saw a boy standing behind me, about my age, looking
rather strange  -- he was wearing a leather helmet with shiny black Bakelite
earphones, and there  were swimming goggles hanging around his neck. He  was
half a foot taller  and probably a little older; as he entered the zone that
was illuminated by the floodlights he raised his black-gloved hand, his lips
grimaced in a cold smile, and for a second the pilot of the fighter with the
black ace flashed before my eyes.

     They  called him Mityok(8). It turned out that we lived very  close  to
each other, even though we  went to  different  schools.  Mityok was  unsure
about many things, but there was one thing he knew for certain. He knew that
he would become a pilot first, and then he would fly to the Moon.



2.

     There seems to  be some sort of  strange connection between the general
outline of life and the small episodes  that one constantly finds himself in
without assigning any significance  to  them. I can see  clearly now that my
destiny was  quite  accurately  determined at the time when I  had not  even
started to  pay  any  earnest consideration to  the way  I'd  like to see it
unfold,  moreover --  it was already  demonstrated  to me then, albeit in  a
slightly simplified way. Maybe that  was just a future echo.  And maybe that
which we assume to be a future echo  is  in fact  the seed of  that  future,
taking to  root at the very moment that later, from afar,  we come to regard
as an echo that flew back from the future.

     Anyway, the summer after the seventh grade was hot and dusty. The first
half of it I remember only for the long bicycle rides on one of the suburban
parkways.  I  would  attach  a  special  rattler  onto the rear  wheel of my
semi-racing "Sport" bike, made from a piece of cardboard folded over several
times and fastened to the frame  with a clothespin -- when I was moving, the
paper  would strike against the  spokes producing  rapid gentle  clattering,
reminiscent of the roar  of an airplane engine. Storming down the paved hill
I  would again and again become a fighter acquiring  the target. The fighter
was not usually a Soviet one, but that wasn't my fault, it was just that  in
the beginning of that summer I've heard an  inane song  somewhere, and there
were lines in it about "Fast as bullet is my "Phantom",  In the sky all blue
and clear It is quickly  gaining altitude." I have to say that the stupidity
of  this  song,  while quite apparent to me, never  interfered with the warm
sensation  that it aroused deep in my soul. What other lines I remember from
it?  "'Cross the sky  a smoky  trail... My dear Texas  left  behind...". And
there were a mother and a father in it, and some Mary, made very real by the
mention of her last name later in the song.

     By mid-July I was back in the city again, and then Mityok's parents got
vouchers for  us  to go  to  the summer  camp named "Rocket".  This was your
regular camp in  the  South,  in some ways maybe  even better than a  lot of
others. I only remember well the first few days of  it, but  everything that
would become so significant  later on happened in those  few days.  While in
the  train on the way there, Mityok and I ran back  and forth about the cars
and dropped any bottles we  could find  into the toilets  -- they would fall
down onto the railway tracks rushing  by  under the small round porthole and
explode noiselessly,  with  the  song that was following me around imparting
the  sweet  flavor  of  the  struggle for  the freedom  of  Vietnam  to this
uncomplicated activity.

     Next day our entire group that was traveling together by the same train
disembarked at the  damp terminal of  a Southern  town  and was  loaded onto
trucks after a headcount.  We were driving on a road winding its way between
mountains for a long time, and then the sea  showed itself  to our right and
brightly colored barns were approaching  us. We got off onto a paved square,
they assembled us  in formation and led to the flat-roofed glass building on
top  of a hill. That was  the mess, where we were greeted by a  cold dinner,
even though it  was already  supper time(9), since we arrived several  hours
later than  expected. The  dinner  was not  particularly tasty -- soup  with
small star-shaped  noodles, boiled chicken with rice and stewed dried fruits
for desert.

     Hanging on the  threads  from  the  ceiling of the  mess, covered  with
something  that  appeared to be  sticky  when you  looked  at it, there were
spaceships made from craft paper. I was observing one of them for some time.
The unknown artisan expended a lot of shiny foil to decorate it, splattering
it all over with the words "CCCP"(10).The ship was hanging right in front of
our table, glowing orange from the sunset, suddenly reminding me of a subway
train headlamp lighting up in the black void of  a tunnel.  I became sad for
some reason.

     Mityok, on the contrary, was chatty and joyful.

     -  They had one kind of spaceships in the twenties,  - he said, jabbing
the  air with his fork, - and  then it  was different  in the  thirties, and
different again in the fifties, and so on.

     - What are you talking about -- spaceships in the twenties? -- I  asked
feebly.

     Mityok considered it for a second.

     - Alexey Tolstoy had those huge metal eggs where explosions would occur
at minute  intervals, giving energy for the propulsion(11), - he said. -- At
least that  was the  main  principle. There can be a lot of  variations,  of
course.

     - But they never actually flew, did they? -- I said.

     - These don't either, - he countered and pointed at the subjects of our
discussion, swaying lightly in the draft.

     Finally I understood what he  meant to say, even  though I would hardly
have  been able  to  put  it  precisely in  words.  The only space where the
starships  of  the  Communist future  were  flying --  incidentally, when  I
encountered  the word "starship"  in science  fiction books, I always though
for some reason that it had something to do with the red stars on the bodies
of  the Soviet  space technology -- in short, the only place where  they did
indeed  fly was the Soviet citizens' collective consciousness,  just  as the
mess hall around us was the space into which the group who lived in the camp
before us launched their starships,  so that they would still  be traversing
the  space-time continuum over the  dinner  tables even when the creators of
the  cardboard fleet are no longer  around.  This thought superimposed  onto
that  special unspeakable  longing  that always took hold  of  me when I was
eating the camp's dried fruit compote to produce a peculiar idea in my head.

     - You  know, I always  liked to assemble plastic airplanes, - I said, -
those kits that you glue together. Especially the military ones.

     - So did I, -- replied Mityok, - but that was long time ago.

     - The ones from  GDR(12)  were good.  And ours often did not  have  the
pilot included. That really sucked. When the cockpit is empty, I mean.

     - Exactly, - Mityok said. -- Why are you talking about it?

     -  Know what, I wonder, - I said, pointing with my fork at the starship
hanging right over our table, - is there anyone inside there or not?

     - No idea, - said Mityok. -- But you're right, it is interesting.

     The camp was situated on a gentle mountain slope, and the lower section
of it formed something like a little park. Mityok disappeared  somewhere, so
I walked there alone;  a couple of minutes  later I found myself  in a long,
empty  alley lined  with  cypresses, casting  deep shadows  in  an  advanced
warning of  the approaching darkness.  Enormous plywood boards with drawings
on  them hung off the  chain link fence bordering the asphalt walk path. The
first depicted  a young pioneer(13)  with a  plain Russian face, looking far
ahead and  clutching the  brass  horn adorned with a  red  flag against  his
thigh. The same pioneer was on the second one,  with a drum slung around his
shoulders  and sticks in his hand. On the third one -- him again, continuing
to look  ahead from  under the hand raised in salute(14). The next board was
twice as wide as the other  ones, and it  was very long -- about ten feet, I
guess. It was painted in two colors; the side  from which I was  approaching
slowly was red, and then it became white,  with a jagged wave that separated
the colors overcoming the white field, leaving  a trail  of red behind it. I
did not  realize at  first  what that was, and only  when  I came  closer  I
recognized  in the intertwining  red and white splotches  Lenin's face, with
the protuberance of the  beard resembling the battering  ram, his face  left
open. There was  no back to Lenin's head -- it only had  the  face, and  the
entire  red  surface  behind it  was  in itself  Lenin;  he  looked  like an
incorporeal god, his manifestation only a ripple on the surface of the world
he had created.

     I stubbed my toe  on  the  crack in the asphalt and transferred my gaze
onto the next board -- it was the  pioneer, now in  a  spacesuit, red helmet
under his arm, with a sharp pointy antenna and letters "CCCP" written on it.
The next  pioneer was  already  sticking  halfway out of the flying  rocket,
saluting with  his  heavily gloved  hand.  And  the  last pioneer, still  in
spacesuit, was  standing on the merrily yellow Moon next to  his ship, which
looked very much like the cardboard  rocket in the mess hall. Only  his eyes
were  visible, they were  exactly the same eyes as  the ones  he had  on the
other boards, but now that the  rest  of his face was obscured by the helmet
they seemed to contain an expression of unspeakable agony.

     I  heard  steps coming fast behind me; when I  turned around, there was
Mityok.

     - You were right, - he said, coming closer.

     - About what?

     - Look, - he stretched out his hand holding something dark.  I  managed
to discern a small Play-Doh figurine, its head wrapped in foil.

     - There was this little paper chair inside, and he was sitting on it, -
said Mityok.

     - You didn't take apart that rocket from the mess, did you? -- I asked.

     He nodded.

     - When?

     - Just now.  Ten  minutes ago. It's the  strangest thing, everything in
there... - he crossed his hands, making a lattice with his fingers.

     - In the mess?

     -  No, in the rocket. When they were making it, they started  with this
guy. They made him, stuck him to the chair and totally papered him over.

     Mityok handed me a piece of cardboard. I took  it and was  able to make
out tiny, very elaborately drawn  gauges,  controls, buttons  and  even some
kind of painting on the wall.

     - But the most interesting thing is, - Mityok continued dolefully and a
little despondently, -- there was no door there. The hatch is painted on the
outside, but on the inside it's solid wall, with gauges and stuff.

     I looked at  the paper scrap once again and noticed a little  window in
which the small distant Earth was shining bright blue.

     - If I could get my hands on  the guy that put this  rocket together, -
said Mityok, - I'd definitely break his face.

     - Why?

     Mityok did not answer. Instead he wound up his  arm to chuck the little
figurine over  the fence, but I caught  his hand and asked him to give it to
me. He did not object, and I  spent the next half hour looking  for an empty
cigarette box to put it in.

     The echoes of this  bizarre discovery  caught up with us the next  day,
during the siesta hour.  The door opened, they called Mityok's name, and  he
stepped out into the corridor. I've heard  snippets of conversations, "mess"
was mentioned a couple of times,  and it was  only too clear.  I also got up
and  went  out into the corridor. A pair of camp instructors, he - lanky and
mustachioed, she - short and red-haired, were handling Mityok in the corner.

     - I was there too, - I said.

     The male instructor stared me down approvingly.

     - You want to crawl together  or separately?  -- he asked. I noticed he
was holding a gas mask in a green canvas bag.

     - How could  they possibly crawl together, Kolya, - said  the other one
bashfully, - when you only have one gas mask. Has to be one after the other.

     Mityok took a step forward, glancing slightly back at me.

     - Put it on, - the instructor said.

     Mityok put the gas mask on.

     - Get down.

     He got down on the floor.

     - Go, - said Kolya, clicking his stopwatch.

     The  dorm was at least fifty yards  long, and  the corridor spanned the
entire length of  it. The surface of the floor was shrouded in linoleum, and
when Mityok  started  forward  it squeaked  -- softly but  disgustingly.  Of
course, Mityok did not make it in the three minutes that the instructor gave
him --  he did not even  make it one  way in  that time, but when he crawled
back to us, Kolya did not choose to have him do  it all over,  because there
were only a couple of minutes left in the  siesta.  Mityok took the gas mask
off. His face was red,  with drops of  sweat and tears all over it, and  his
feet  were  already covered  with  blisters  where they rubbed  against  the
linoleum.

     - Now you, - the instructor said, passing the wet gas mask on to me. --
Get set...

     It is a mysterious and wondrous sight,  the  corridor  when you look at
its  linoleum-clad infinity through the  fogged lenses  of a gas  mask.  The
floor you are lying on is cooling your breast and stomach, the far end of it
barely visible, with the pale stream of the ceiling almost coming to a point
together with the walls. The gas mask is cinching your face, pressing at the
cheeks,  making  your lips  draw forward  in a kind  of half-kiss,  directed
apparently at everything around you. Before  you are nudged slightly, giving
you  the  go-ahead,  at least a couple dozen  seconds  pass; they  drift  by
agonizingly slow, and you are able  to notice  a lot of things. There's some
lint, and  translucent  sand grains in the  notch  where two linoleum panels
meet, and a knot in the wood  paneling at  the very bottom of the  wall that
was  painted over, and  this is  an ant that became just two dried-out  thin
drops but left a reminder  of itself in the future, in a form of a small wet
spot  a couple of feet further, where the  foot of a person walking down the
corridor stepped a second after the catastrophe.

     -  Go,  - I  heard over  my head,  and I  was on  my way,  merrily  and
earnestly.  The  punishment  looked  like  a  joke to  me,  and  I  couldn't
understand why Mityok suddenly came apart. First ten yards  flashed by in an
instant,  but then it became harder.  When you crawl, at some point you have
to push against the floor with the  upper part of your foot, where  the skin
is thin  and tender, so  if you haven't anything  on you  get blisters right
away. Linoleum was clinging to  my body,  it seemed like hundreds of insects
were drilling  into  my feet, or like I  was crawling on  the freshly  paved
asphalt. I was surprised how slowly  the time was dragging on -- there was a
large  amateur watercolor  painting  on  the  wall,  depicting  the "Aurora"
cruiser(15) in  the  Black Sea, and I noticed that I have been crawling past
it for quite some time, while it hasn't moved an inch.

     And then suddenly  everything changed.  I mean, everything continued as
it was -- I was  still crawling down the corridor, just as  before, but  the
pain and the tiredness, after having reached the point  of being unbearable,
switched something off  inside me.  Or switched on, I don't know.  I noticed
all of a sudden that everything is very quiet around me, only  the  linoleum
is  squeaking  under my  feet, like something being dragged on rusty  little
wheels, and somewhere far below the windows the sea is rumbling, and farther
still, as if  from beyond the sea, the loudspeaker is singing with the voice
of many children.

     The life  was a  gentle green miracle, the sky was still and cloudless,
the  sun  was  shining  --  and  in the middle  of this world there was  the
two-storied  dorm  building,  and inside it was a  long corridor, and  I was
crawling  along it in a gas mask. And this fact was, on one hand, so obvious
and  natural,  and on the  other hand  --  so hurtful and grotesque,  that I
started crying under my rubber second face, taking  comfort in  my real face
being hidden from the instructors and especially the door frames, from where
dozens of eyes were peering at my glory and my shame through the cracks.

     My  tears dried up  in  another few yards,  and I began  to  feverishly
scramble for at least one thought that  would have given me  the strength to
go on, because the terror before the  instructor was no longer sufficient. I
closed my eyes, and it was night, its velvet darkness disturbed from time to
time by the stars  lighting before my eyes. The  distant song became audible
again, and very, very softly, probably even silently, I began to sing along.

     The tinny  sound of  the  trumpet spread over the  camp  -- it was  the
wake-up signal. I stopped and opened my eyes.  I still had about three yards
to go before the end  of the corridor. There was a  shelf on the  slate gray
wall in front of me,  with  a  yellow Lunar  globe  standing on  top of  it;
through  the  glass  that was sprayed with tears and  fogged  over it seemed
fuzzy and washed out, as though it was not standing on the shelf but instead
floating in the grayish void.



3.

     The first  time  in my life that I drank  wine was in  winter,  when  I
turned fourteen.  It happened in an industrial garage; Mityok would bring me
there because  his brother,  a  morose hippie who conned his way  out of the
draft(16),  worked  there as  a  night  guard.  The  garage occupied a large
fenced-off plot strewn with cement blocks, which Mityok and I  have taken to
climbing for hours on end,  sometimes  finding ourselves in wondrous places,
isolated  completely  from  the  rest  of  the real world  and looking  like
sections  of a  long-abandoned  spaceship,  with  its  empty hull (strangely
resembling  a pile  of  cement blocks)  the  only thing  left  standing. The
streetlights over the crooked  picket fence also contributed to the illusion
with their mysterious, otherworldly glow, and the clear, empty sky displayed
only a smattering  of small stars -- in other words, if you didn't count the
empty wine  bottles and iced-over urine flows, it  was the  outer space that
surrounded us.

     Mityok suggested  that we go inside,  where it's warm, and we  directed
our steps to the corrugated  aluminium half-sphere of the  garage, its shape
also  vaguely  related to something  from space. It was dark inside, and the
outlines of the trucks that smelled  of gasoline  were hulking indistinctly.
There was a small wooden cubicle with a glass window tucked against the wall
in  the corner;  the light  was  shining  inside. Mityok  and I squeezed in,
sitting ourselves  on the narrow and uncomfortable bench, and silently drank
some  tea  from  an  old peeling tin pan. Mityok's brother  was smoking long
<I>papirosy</I>(17), thumbing through an old  issue  of "Technology  Review for the
Youth", and did  not  acknowledge  our  presence  in the  slightest.  Mityok
produced a bottle from under the bench, placed it on  the table with a thump
and asked:

     - Want some?

     I nodded, even though I  had  a  bad feeling about this inside.  Mityok
filled the glass  from which I was  just drinking  tea to the  brim with the
dark-red  liquid  and  handed  it  to me; clicking into  the  rhythm of  the
process, I grabbed  the glass,  put it to  my lips and drank, amazed  at how
little effort  one has to expend to do  something for the first  time. While
Mityok and his brother  were busy  drinking the rest, I was listening to the
experiences  inside  me, but  nothing  was  really  happening.  I  took  the
magazine, opened it  randomly and stared at  a two-page  spread filled  with
tiny pictures of various flying contraptions that you had to guess the names
of. I liked one of them better than the  others  -- it was an American plane
that  could  use  its wings as a propeller for vertical  take-off. There was
also  a small rocket there with a cockpit for the pilot, but I didn't get  a
good look at it because Mityok's  brother, without as much as a single  word
or even a glance at  me, pulled the magazine  back from my hands. That  hurt
me, and in order to hide it I shifted to the other table  where the can with
plug-in boiler stood, surrounded by dried-out sausage scraps. Suddenly I was
overcame with disgust  over the thought  that I was sitting here in this rat
hole which  smelled of garbage, over the fact  that I have  just drunk cheap
port from a grubby glass,  and that the entire vastness of the country where
I live was just a multitude of similar rat  holes, also smelling of garbage,
where people also just finished drinking cheap port, and most importantly it
was painful to think  that  all the wonderful multi-colored lights that take
my breath away every time  I pass by a window situated far enough  over  the
night capital  -- they all were lights  of  exactly those stinky shacks.  It
hurt most of all when compared with the beautiful  American  flyer from  the
magazine  spread. I  lowered  my eyes and saw  the  newspaper  on the table,
serving as a tablecloth; it  was covered in greasy  stains, round marks from
glasses and bottles  and cigarette burns. The headlines were scaring me with
their icy inhuman briskness  and might --  nothing was standing in their way
now,  not  for a long time, but they continued to strike into the emptiness,
blow after monstrous blow, and in that  emptiness, especially when  drunk (I
noticed I was already drunk, but did  not pay  much attention to  that), one
was liable to get his lumbering soul in the way  of a "principal task of our
time" or "greetings from cotton pickers'". The  room around the table became
completely unrecognizable, and Mityok was staring  at me  intently. Catching
my glance, he winked and asked me, his tongue slightly unwieldy:

     - So, are we going to the Moon or what?

     I nodded, and my gaze transfixed on the small column titled "NEWS  FROM
ORBIT".  The  lower  part  of  the  text  was  torn  off, and the column now
consisted of only "The  twenty eighth  day  started..." in a bold type. This
was quite enough  -- I  understood  everything and closed my  eyes. Yes,  it
really was  like that  -- the holes in which we  spent our lives were indeed
dark  and soiled,  and we  ourselves  were, probably, a  good match  for the
holes, but in the deep blue  sky overhead between sparsely sown feeble stars
a special kind of bright points existed, artificial, crawling slowly through
the constellations, made right  here, on the  Soviet soil, in  the  midst of
puke,  empty bottles  and  noxious tobacco  smoke, fashioned out  of  steel,
semiconductors and electricity, and flying now  through space. And every one
of us, even the blue-faced drunk cowering toad-like in the snowdrift whom we
passed on our way  here, even Mityok's brother and, naturally,  Mityok and I
-- we all had in that cold clear blue ether our own small embassy.

     I ran out  into the yard and stared  for  a long, long time, choking on
tears, at  the  yellowish-blue, unbelievably close  disk  of the Moon in the
translucent winter sky.



4.

     I don't really  remember the  exact  moment I decided  to  apply to Air
Force academy. I guess I don't remember it because this decision had ripened
within  my soul  (and Mityok's as  well) long before we graduated  from high
school. For a brief time we were faced with  the problem of choice --  there
were many  academies scattered  throughout the country, but  we have decided
very  quickly,  upon  seeing  in the "Soviet Aviation" magazine a full-color
fold-out  describing  the  life  in  Lunar  City  of  the  Maresyev(18)  Red
Banner(19) Flight Academy  in Zaraisk. Right away we could almost feel being
in  the throng of first-year cadets, among the plywood mountains and craters
painted yellow, we  recognized our future selves  in the buzz-cut guys doing
flips on the bars  and throwing  bath water,  frozen in time by  the camera,
from huge enameled pans of such a tender shade of peach that it  immediately
evoked  childhood  memories,  and  this  color  for  some  reason  was  more
compelling, aroused more trust and desire to go study in Zaraisk than all of
the adjoining  photos of flight simulators, which resembled nothing so  much
as half-decomposed airplane corpses teeming with crawling people.

     Once the decision was made, the rest was pretty uncomplicated. Mityok's
parents, frightened  by the  murky fate of his older brother, were glad that
their youngest son would be attached to such a sure and stable business, and
my father has finally drunk himself into stupor by that time, and spent most
of his days just lying on the sofa facing the wall with the bulge-eyed moose
woven on the rug hanging on it; I wouldn't be surprised if  he  did not even
understand that I was going to become a pilot, and to my aunt it was all the
same.

     I remember the town of Zaraisk. More precisely, I can neither  say that
I remember  it nor that I forgot --  so few  things were there that one  can
remember  or  forget. In  the very  center  a whitestone belfry was standing
tall, famous for some duchess  having jumped off of it in times  immemorial,
and  even though  it  has  been many  centuries since,  her  feat was  still
remembered in the town. The town history  museum was  right next to it, with
post office and police station nearby.

     When we got off the bus, an unpleasant driving rain was falling, it was
cool and damp.  We cowered under the canopy of some basement with "Elections
Office" banner on top,  and waited for half an  hour until the rain  abated.
Behind the basement door there seemed to be drinking going on, we could feel
the thick  onion stench and  hear voices,  someone was insistently proposing
that they sing a song from a popular movie;  finally,  tired male and female
voices started singing.

     The rain ended, we ventured out in search of the next bus and found the
exact same  one that brought us here. It turned out that we did  not have to
get  out  of it at all;  we could have waited out the rain inside  the  bus,
while the driver  was having lunch.  We drove past small wooden houses, then
they disappeared and we  entered  the forest. It was in this forest, outside
of  the town, that the Zaraisk Flight  Academy was located. We had to go  on
foot  about  three miles  from the final stop of  the bus, which  was called
"Vegetable Market"; there  was no trace of any  market in the vicinity,  and
someone explained to us that  the name carried over from  before the war. We
got  off the  bus  and  started  along  the  road sprinkled with  soggy pine
needles, it  led us  further and further into the  forest, and just  when we
started thinking that  we were going the wrong way it abruptly terminated at
the  gate welded from steel pipes, bearing huge tin stars; all around it the
forest was  pressing  against the  unpainted  gray wooden fence,  with rusty
barbed  wire  snaking  its  way  on top of  it. We  showed  our  letters  of
recommendation  from the  draft  office  and  newly-minted passports to  the
sleepy  guard at the  checkpoint,  and he let  us in,  directing us  to  the
clubhouse where the meeting was about to begin.

     A paved road was leading into the small camp, and the Lunar City that I
saw  in  the  magazine  revealed itself  immediately  to  the  right of  it,
consisting of several long, one-storied yellow barrack buildings, a dozen or
so  tires  dug  halfway  into  the  ground and the lot  imitating  the lunar
landscape. We went past it to the clubhouse, where the boys who came for the
entrance exams(20) were swarming around the supporting columns. Soon we were
visited by an officer who appointed someone to be "in charge" and ordered us
to  register   with   the  entrance  commission  and  then  go  receive  the
"inventoried items".

     On account  of  warm weather the entrance commission was sitting  in  a
Chinese-looking  open-air  gazebo. It was actually  three  officers who were
drinking beer  to the eastern  music  that played quietly  on the radio  and
distributing  pieces of  paper with numbers in exchange for the documents we
gave them.  Then they  led us to  the  edge of  the stadium which  had  been
overrun with  waist-high weeds  (it  was  obvious  nobody had  been  playing
anything on  it for  ten years at  the least)  and  presented  us  with  two
military tents -- we were going to live in them during the exam session. The
tents were tightly  packed sheets  of multilayer rubber, and we had to pitch
them  on the wooden  poles stuck in the ground. We all got acquainted  while
lugging  the cots into the tents;  we  made bunk beds out of them,  the cots
were ancient, very heavy, with  nickel-plated balls  that you could screw on
top of the posts  when they weren't connected to the upper bunk. These balls
they  gave us separately, in special bags, and when the  exams were  over  I
sneakily removed one of  them and hid  it in the  same  cigarette  pack that
housed the Play-Doh pilot  with a foil head, the only living witness of that
unforgettable Southern evening.

     It seemed like we  spent a very short time in those tents,  but when we
took  them  off  we  discovered  that  under  them  a  thick,  vigorous  and
disgustingly white pillow of weeds managed to grow  out. I don't recall much
about  the  exams  themselves,  only  that  they  turned  out  to  be  quite
uncomplicated, and it even upset me not to be able to fit on the  exam sheet
all the graphs and formulas into which the long spring and summer days spent
poring  over the textbooks have been distilled. Mityok and I got the  points
required for admission effortlessly, and then there was the interview  which
we dreaded most. It was conducted by  a  major, a colonel and some old-timer
with  a  jagged  scar across the  forehead,  dressed  in well-worn technical
forces uniform. I said I  wanted to be  in the cosmonaut detachment, and the
colonel asked me what is  the  Soviet  cosmonaut. I  was scrambling  for the
right answer for so long that finally the faces of my interviewers  began to
reflect deep grief, from which I concluded that  I was about to be shown the
door.

     - All right, - said the  old timer, who was silent until then, - do you
remember how you first thought of becoming a cosmonaut?

     I panicked, because I had absolutely no idea  what the  right answer to
that  question was.  Motivated,  apparently, by  utter  despair, I  began to
relate the story of  the red Play-Doh figurine and the cardboard rocket with
no exit. The old timer perked up instantly, his eyes began to glow, and when
I came to the  place where Mityok and I had  to crawl  along the corridor in
the gas mask, he  grabbed  my hand  and  burst into laughter, which made the
scar on his forehead turn purple. Then he suddenly became somber.

     - Do you  know, -  he said, - that this is not your average daily chore
-- flying in space? What if your Motherland asks you  to give your  life for
it? Then what, eh?

     - Well, I'm as good  for it  as  the next guy, -  I  said, furrowing my
brow.

     Then he stared straight into my eyes, and looked at me for  what seemed
like three minutes.

     - I believe you, - he said finally, - you can do it.

     When he heard that Mityok, who wanted to go to the Moon since he  was a
kid, was also applying,  he scribbled  his name on  a piece of paper. Mityok
told  me  later that  the  old man  was  grilling  him on why it had  to  be
necessarily the Moon.

     The next day, after breakfast, they pinned the lists with the names  of
those accepted to the columns of the clubhouse, Mityok and I were there next
to  each other, out of the alphabetical  order. Somebody dragged  himself to
the  appeals  committee,  the  others  were jumping for joy on  the  asphalt
criss-crossed with white lines, or running to the phone booth, and above all
of that I remember a white swath left by a jet in the faded sky.

     Everyone   accepted    was   invited   to   the   meeting   with    the
instructor-teaching staff, the professors were already waiting for us in the
clubhouse. I  remember the heavy  velour drapes,  a table across  the entire
stage  and the  officially-austere officers sitting  behind it. Leading  the
meeting  was a youngish lieutenant-colonel with  a pointed gangly nose,  and
all the  time  while  he  spoke I was imagining  him in the flight suit  and
helmet, sitting in the cockpit of a MiG, camo-striped like an expensive pair
of jeans.

     - Guys, I don't wish  to frighten you,  I don't  want to start our talk
here with scary words, right? But  you all know -- we don't choose the times
we live in, it's the times that choose  us.  It might be inappropriate on my
part to give you this information, but I am going to tell you anyway...

     The lieutenant-colonel interrupted himself for a second, leaned over to
the  major sitting next  to him  and whispered something in  his ear.  Major
furrowed  his  brow,  tapped  the  end  of his  pencil  against  the  table,
apparently deciding something, and then nodded(21).

     - All right, - the lieutenant-colonel started again  softly, - recently
at a  closed meeting of morale officers(22) the times in  which we live were
defined as pre-war period!

     Lieutenant-colonel  became  silent,  expecting some kind of reaction --
but the audience  apparently  did  not get  it. At  any rate,  Mityok  and I
definitely did not get it.

     - I'll explain, - he  said even more  softly, - the meeting was held on
June 15,  right? So, until  June 15 we were  living in the after-war period,
and since then -- a full month -- we live in the pre-war period. Clear now?

     For several seconds there was complete silence.

     - I  am not telling  you this  to scare  you,  - the lieutenant-colonel
continued,  now in his normal voice, - it's just that you have to understand
the kind of responsibility  put on our  shoulders, right? You made the right
choice when you  came to our Academy. I would like to tell you  now that our
primary  goal  here is not to simply make  you into pilots, but  to make you
into real men, right? And when you receive your diplomas and military ranks,
you can be sure that by that time you are going to become Real Men, with the
capital M, as capital as it only can be in the Soviet country.

     The lieutenant-colonel sat down,  adjusted his tie and caught the  edge
of  the  glass with his lips -- his  hands were shaking, and I could swear I
heard his teeth clanking almost inaudibly against glass. The major rose.

     - Guys,  -  he  said  in a sonorous voice, -  though  it  would be more
correct to call you  cadets now, but  I still would like  to address you  in
this  manner --  guys! Recall  the famous story of  the  legendary character
glorified by Boris Polevoy!  The  one whose name our  academy proudly bears!
He,  who  after  losing both of  his legs in  battle, did not  surrender but
instead soared as  Icarus into the sky to continue pounding the  Nazi beast!
Many have told him it was impossible, but he always remembered that he was a
Soviet man!  Don't you forget  that  either, never  forget that! And we, the
instructor-teaching  staff, and  I personally, the flying  morale officer of
the Academy, we  promise  you  -- we will make real  men  out of you  in the
shortest possible time!

     Then  we were  shown our  bunks in the first-year dorm,  where we  were
being moved from the tents, and led to the mess. Hanging on threads from its
ceiling were dusty MiG's and Il's, resembling giant islands suspended in the
air among the fast  squadrons of houseflies. The dinner was not particularly
tasty -- soup with small star-shaped  noodles, boiled chicken with  rice and
stewed  dried  fruits for  desert. After  the meal we  immediately felt like
sleeping,  Mityok  and I  barely dragged  ourselves to  our cots and I  fell
asleep at once.



5.

     Next morning I  was awakened by a moan right over my ear, a moan filled
with  deep pain  and  disbelief.  In  fact, I  must have been hearing noises
through my sleep for some time, but I was jolted into the full consciousness
by  only  this, particularly  loud and  tormented cry.  I opened my eyes and
looked around. On the cots everywhere there was  some  kind of slow groaning
motion,  I  tried to prop myself  on my  elbow but couldn't, because  I  was
apparently locked in place with several wide straps,  like ones used to keep
together overstuffed  luggage; the  only  thing  I  could do is turn my head
slightly from side to side. From  the  nearby cot a boy named Slava from the
Siberian town of Tynda, whom I  met yesterday, was  looking at me, his  eyes
full of intense suffering, the lower part of his face hidden under some kind
of tightly stretched cloth. I  wanted to open my mouth  to ask him what  was
going on,  but  found out that I couldn't move my tongue, and moreover I did
not feel the lower half of my  face at all, as if it fell asleep.  I figured
that my mouth was gagged  and  bound as well, but did not  have  time to get
surprised over it, because I felt sudden horror: in the place where  Slava's
feet were supposed to be, his blanket stepped  sharply down instead, and the
freshly starched sheet there was bearing  fuzzy reddish blots, the kind  you
see  watermelon  juice  leave on white  kitchen towels. The most frightening
thing  was that  I couldn't feel my own feet and  couldn't raise my  head to
look at them.

     - Fifth deta-ach-mint! -- the deep booming voice of the sergeant at the
doors was unusually full of subtle intonations and  replete with innuendo, -
bandage time!

     Right away about a dozen of second- and  third-year students  (or to be
more precise, cadets of the second and third year of duty, I figured that by
looking at the patches on  their sleeves) entered the room. I never saw them
before;  officers told us they  were  "on potatoes"(23). They  were  wearing
strangely rigid high boots and moving about  awkwardly, steadying themselves
now and again against the walls and bedframes. I noticed unhealthy pastiness
in their  faces, also  bearing the marks of  prolonged suffering  which have
molded  into some kind of  unspeakable  readiness, out of place here  as  it
seemed, and in that  moment I recalled the words  of the pioneer  salutation
that Mityok and I repeated along with everybody else in the pioneer camp, on
that faraway plot of asphalt -- I recalled it and finally understood what it
was that  we actually  meant  when  shouting  "Always ready!"(24), deceiving
ourselves, our comrades at the rally and the clear July morning.

     One after  another they  rolled the  cots  out  into the corridor, with
moaning and thrashing first-years strapped to them, and then there were only
two cots  left -- mine and the one by the window on which  Mityok was lying.
The straps did not allow me to  look at him, but out of the corner of my eye
I could make out that he was awake and lying quietly.

     They came for us in about ten minutes, turned me around feet  first and
started rolling along the corridor. One of  the cadets was  pushing  the cot
while  the other was pulling it backing up, it appeared as  if he was trying
to contain the cot that was gaining on him. We maneuvered into a narrow long
elevator and went up, then the second-year backed away from me again through
another corridor and we stopped before the door covered with black imitation
leather, with a large brown sign on it which I could not  read because of my
uncomfortable  position.  The door opened and I  was  wheeled into the room,
under the enormous crystal  chandelier in  form of  a  bomb; the top  of the
walls  had a  figured ornament of alternating hammers, sickles(25) and vases
wrapped in vines.

     The straps  were taken off  and I propped myself  on  the elbows trying
hard not to look at my feet; ahead of me  in the room's depths was a massive
desk with the a green lamp on it, illuminated by the grayish light filtering
sideways through the tall narrow window. The man sitting behind the desk was
obscured from sight by an issue of "Pravda"(26), a  kind wrinkled face  with
glowing  eyes looking  straight at  me from  its front  page.  The  linoleum
squeaked and Mityok's cot came to a halt right beside mine.

     The pages being turned  rustled several more times, and then the  paper
came to rest on the table.

     We were facing the same old man with the scar  across the  forehead who
was   grabbing  my  hand  at  the  interview.  He  was  now   decked   in  a
lieutenant-general   uniform,   complete   with   golden   brooms   on   the
shoulders(27),  his  hair  carefully combed and his gaze sober and clear.  I
also noticed that  his face  seemed to copy  the  one from the front page of
"Pravda"  which had been looking at me the previous  moment,  so that it was
almost like in that movie(28) where they show you one icon at first and then
it is slowly replaced by  another  one -- the images similar but not exactly
the same, and because the actual moment of  the transition was  glossed over
the icon appeared to be morphing in front of your eyes.

     - Since we are going to be working with you guys for  a long time  now,
you may call me "comrade mission chief", - said the old man. -- I would like
to  congratulate you -- based on the results of the exams and especially the
interview  (he winked as he was saying that) you have been enrolled directly
in the first  year program of the secret cosmonaut academy under auspices of
First Department of the KGB(29). So you  will have to become Real  Men  some
other time,  and right now get your stuff  -- you're going  to Moscow. We'll
meet you there.

     I  got the  full meaning  of those words only when we  were back in the
empty  dorm room,  wheeled there  again  through  the  same long  corridors,
linoleum singing  something  soft and full of nostalgia under the tiny steel
wheels of the  cot, prompting me to recall all of a sudden  a long-forgotten
July afternoon by the sea.

     Mityok and I slept through the  rest of the day --  I guess they spiked
our  yesterday's  dinner with some  kind of drugs (we were really sleepy the
next  day,  too),  and  in  the  evening  we  were  visited  by  some  merry
straw-haired lieutenant  in  shoes  that were  squeaking  as  he walked.  He
wheeled our cots, one after another, with jokes and laughs along the way, to
the asphalt <I>platz</I> in front  of  the cement shell of an open-air stage, where
several top generals with kind  intelligent  faces were  sitting behind  the
table, our comrade mission chief among  them. We could, of course, get there
on  our own, but lieutenant told us that this  is the standing order for the
first-years and asked us to lie still so as not to confuse others.

     Because  of  the multitude  of cots  standing  side by side the  square
resembled the yard of a car factory or  farm  equipment show, and above  it,
following  a   convoluted  trajectory,  a   stifled  moan   was  fluttering;
disappearing from one place, it reappeared in the other,  then the next one,
like a giant mosquito darting over the cots. On the way there the lieutenant
said that the graduation ceremony was now going to take place, combined with
the final exam.

     Soon he, first among several dozen lieutenants  just like him, pale and
anguished but  still with inimitable grace, was dancing the "Kalinka"(30) to
the  deliberately  sparse  accompaniment  of  the  flying  morale  officer's
accordion. Lieutenant's  last name was Landratov,  I heard it  when  he  was
presented with a  small red booklet and  congratulated on  his diploma. Then
all the  others  were performing the same  dance, and  finally I  got  bored
looking at  them. I turned  my head  towards the stadium  field that started
right at the  edge of the <I>platz</I> and suddenly came  to realize why it was  so
overwhelmed with weeds.

     I was looking at them swaying in the wind for a long time, and imagined
that the cracked, peeling gray fence with barbed wire on top, running behind
the decrepit  goalposts, was  in  fact the Great  Wall,  and despite all the
pickets  that  were  either hanging  loose or  missing  altogether it  still
stretches as it did for millennia from the rice fields of the  faraway China
right down here to the town of Zaraisk, imparting the ancient Chinese spirit
to everything  around it --  the lacy gazebos where the entrance  commission
sits  in hot  weather,  decommissioned rusted-through  fighter, and  antique
military tents I am staring at from my cot, holding fast under the covers to
the small nickel-plated ball I screwed off the bedpost.

     The next day a  truck  was carrying  Mityok and  I through  the  summer
forest  and the  fields, we were sitting on  our  backpacks against the cool
metal truck bed. I remember  the swaying  canvas awning above us,  the  tree
trunks and withered gray poles of an abandoned telegraph line rushing  past.
From time to  time the trees would give  way and allow the triangles of pale
gloomy sky to peek through. Then we had a short stopover and five minutes of
blissful silence, interrupted  only by heavy faraway thuds, which the driver
(who  had to go into the bushes) explained to us  were large-caliber machine
guns coming in short bursts at the  firing  range of the nearby Matrosov(31)
Infantry Academy. Then the incessant jolts resumed and  I dozed  off, waking
for  just a  few seconds when we already reached Moscow, in time to catch  a
glimpse  of  "Child's  World"(32)  arches,  as   if  a   reminder   of  some
long-forgotten summer school vacation.



6..

     When I  was a  kid I would often imagine  the newspaper  spread,  still
smelling of fresh  ink, with a large portrait of myself in the middle  (with
the helmet on, smiling), titled:

     "Cosmonaut Omon Krivomazov reported in excellent spirits!"

     Hard to understand why I wanted that  so much. I guess I always  wanted
to live part of my life through the eyes  of other people -- those who would
look at that photograph and think of me, imagine my  thoughts, feelings, the
delicate fabric  of my soul. And most importantly,  of course,  I wanted  to
turn into one of those other people myself,  stare into my own face composed
of the typographic dots, think about what kind of movies this man likes, who
his girlfriend might be, and then suddenly realize that this Omon Krivomazov
is  in fact me. Since those times I have changed, in  a subtle and unhurried
way. I stopped caring about opinions  of others, because I  realized  -- the
others would never care about me, and they are going to be thinking about my
photograph, not even me  personally,  with  the same indifference as I think
about photographs of other people. So the news that my heroism was to remain
hidden and unknown was  not a big blow for me; the big blow was  that  I was
going to be a hero.

     Mityok and I took turns visiting  the mission  chief the next day after
our arrival, right after we were outfitted with black uniforms like the ones
in other military academies -- only the shoulder patches were bright yellow,
with mysterious letters "BKY"(33) on  them. Mityok  went first, and about an
hour and a half later they sent for me.

     When the tall oak doors swung open before me I was  a little stunned by
the degree to which the  view  unfolding before me copied a  set of some war
movie.  There was a big table  in  the  middle of the room,  covered  with a
yellowish map and surrounded by several people  in  military uniform  -- the
mission chief, three  other generals who looked nothing like each other  but
at the same time all very much like a popular author and playwright Borovik,
and two colonels, one short and stout, his face a shade of purple, the other
-- lean and thin-haired, resembling an aged sickly boy, wearing dark glasses
and sitting in a wheelchair.

     -  The chief of Flight Control  Center, colonel Halmuradov,  - said the
mission chief pointing at the fatso with the purple face.

     He nodded.

     -  Morale  officer  for   the   special  cosmonaut   squadron   colonel
Urchagin(34).

     The  colonel  in  the  wheelchair turned  his face  towards me,  leaned
forward  a bit  and  took off his  glasses,  as  if  to  study  me closer. I
shuddered involuntarily -- he  was  blind, eyelids of one of  his eyes fused
together, between  the  lashes  of  the  other one  I  could  make  out  the
glistening whitish mucus.

     -  You  may  call  me  Bamlag(35) Ivanovich,  Omon,  -  he  said  in  a
high-pitched tenor. -- I hope we're going to be good friends.

     For some reason the mission chief did  not  introduce the generals, and
they did not by their manner demonstrate that they even saw me. On the other
hand, I thought I saw one of them at the final exam in the Zaraisk Academy.

     - Cadet Krivomazov,  -  the  mission chief introduced  me. -- Shall  we
begin now?

     He turned to me, resting his hands on his stomach, and started talking.

     - Omon, you probably read the newspapers, see movies and so on, and you
know that Americans have landed several of their cosmonauts on the Moon, and
even drove around there in a motorized conveyance. This would  seem  like an
entirely peaceful endeavor, but that depends on how you look at  it. Imagine
if you  will  a common hard-working man from a  small  country, let's say in
Central Africa...

     The  mission chief scrunched  his face and imitated rolling his sleeves
and wiping sweat off his brow.

     - Then he sees that Americans landed on the Moon, while  we...  You get
the picture?

     - Yes sir, comrade lieutenant-general! -- I answered.

     - The principal goal of the space experiment  for which you,  Omon, are
now beginning to  be prepared is  to demonstrate that in technology terms we
roughly match the capabilities  of the Western countries,  and that  we  are
also capable  of sending missions  to the Moon.  To  send  there a  piloted,
returnable craft is beyond our means at  this  point. But  there is  another
possibility -- to launch  an automated vehicle that  we won't have  to bring
back.

     The  mission chief was  bending over  the  relief  map with  protruding
mountain ranges and minuscule crater holes.  Right through the middle of  it
there was a bright-red line, like a fresh scratch from a nail.

     - This is a section  of the Lunar surface, - said the mission chief. --
As you well know, Omon, our  space science is mostly concerned with the dark
side of  the Moon, in contrast to the Americans, who  prefer to land  on the
visible side.  This long line  is  the Lenin Fault, discovered several years
ago by our domestic satellite. It  is a unique geological  formation, and in
that region  we have  recently  dispatched a automated expedition  to obtain
samples of the Lunar soil. According to results of the preliminary analysis,
there formed an opinion concerning the need  for  further exploration of the
fault. You  are probably aware  that  our space program  is oriented chiefly
towards the use of automatic devices. Let the Americans risk their own human
lives; we only endanger mechanisms. And so there is now an idea of sending a
special  self-propelled vehicle,  so called lunokhod(36),  that  will  drive
along the bottom  of the fault and transmit valuable scientific data back to
Earth.

     Mission chief  opened a drawer in  the desk  and  began grasping inside
while keeping his eyes on the table.

     - The combined length of  the  fault is a hundred miles, but  its width
and  depth are  insignificant, measuring  mere  yards. We  assume  that  the
lunokhod will be able to travel along it for fifty miles -- this is how long
the  batteries should last --  and then place in its center a pennant with a
radio beacon, which would transmit into space the words "PEACE", "LENIN" and
"USSR", encoded in electromagnetic impulses.

     His hand appeared from under the table clutching  a little  red-colored
car. He wound  it  up with a key and placed it at the  beginning of  the red
line on  the map. The car began crawling forward with a  whir. It was just a
child's toy: a body very much resembling a tin  can, sitting on top of eight
small black wheels, with "CCCP" painted on its side and two bulges in  front
that  looked like eyes. Everyone stiffly followed its progress, even colonel
Urchagin was  turning his head in sync with the others. The  car reached the
end of the table and fell over.

     -  Something like that,  - the mission chief said  contemplatively  and
shot me a glance.

     - Permission to address the senior officer! -- I heard myself saying.

     - Fire away.

     - But the lunokhod is automated, comrade lieutenant-general!

     - Absolutely.

     - So what do you need me for?

     The mission chief lowered his head and sighed.

     - Bamlag, - he said, - your turn.

     The electric  motor  of  the  wheelchair  whirred  softly,  and colonel
Urchagin drove out from beside the table.

     -  Let's go for  a walk, -  he  said,  approaching me and  grabbing  my
sleeve.

     I turned  quizzically to  mission chief. He nodded. I followed Urchagin
into the corridor  and we  started along  it --  I  was walking  and  he was
driving  beside me,  controlling  the  speed  with a  lever crowned  with  a
homemade little pink plastic  ball,  containing  a figured red rose  inside.
Several times  Urchagin would open  his  mouth, attempting to say something,
but he shut it again every time,  I started  thinking that he  probably does
not  know where to start, and  then he grabbed  my wrist in  a very  precise
movement with his slightly damp narrow hand.

     -  Listen  to  me  closely,  Omon,  and  don't  interrupt,  -  he  said
intimately,  as  if  we had  just  finished  singing a  song together  by  a
campfire.  -- I am  going to  begin from  a distance.  You see,  the fate of
mankind consists to  a very  large  extent  of things  that are  convoluted,
seemingly absurd  or unnecessarily bitter. You have to be able  to  see very
clearly, very distinctly, to keep yourself from  making mistakes. History is
never the way  they write in the  textbooks. There is dialectics in the fact
that Marx's teachings, directed  towards a prosperous country, took hold  in
the most  backward  one instead. We  communists  just did not  have time  to
formally prove the validity  of our  ideas --  too  much effort spent on the
war, too long turned  out to be  the struggle with  the remnants of the past
and  the  internal  enemies  of the  state.  We  could not defeat  the  West
technologically.  But  the  struggle of ideas is the  field where you cannot
take a  rest for  even a  split  second.  It is  a paradox, and  it is again
dialectics,  that we  are  aiding  truth  with deception, because Marxism is
bringing the all-conquering truth with  it, while  that  for which  you  are
going to  give  your life - formally  represents  a  deception. But the more
deliberately...

     I felt cold in the pit  of  my stomach and reflectively tried to snatch
my wrist away, but colonel Urchagin's hand seemed to have transformed into a
small steel cuff.

     - ... more deliberately  you are going to accomplish your  heroic feat,
the  greater  degree  of   truth   it  will  actually  attain,  the  greater
justification your short but beautiful life will acquire!

     - Give my life? What feat? -- I asked in a croaking voice.

     -  The very same, - replied the colonel  very-very softly, almost as if
he was frightened, - that more than a hundred of boys just like you and your
friend have already accomplished.

     He fell silent, and after a while continued in the normal tone.

     - Have  you heard that our space program relies on the use of automatic
devices?

     - I have.

     - Well, right now we're going to  go to  Room  329, so you can find out
what our automatic space devices look like.



7.

     - Comrade colonel...

     - Comrade  co-olonel! -- he shot back mockingly.  -- They asked  you in
the Zaraisk  Academy  quite  clearly if  you  were ready to  give your life,
didn't they? You remember what you answered, huh?

     I  was  sitting on a metal chair that was fastened  to the floor in the
center of the room, my arms were strapped to the armrests, my feet -- to the
chair's legs. The heavy drapes on the windows were  drawn  shut; there was a
telephone without the dial standing  on a  small desk in the corner. Colonel
Urchagin was sitting across from me in his wheelchair, smiling and joking as
he talked, but I could sense that he was dead serious.

     - Comrade  colonel,  please understand, I am just a regular guy...  You
seem to be  mistaking me for someone else... And I am absolutely not the one
who...

     Urchagin's wheelchair whirred, he moved from his  place, drove up to me
very closely and stopped.

     - Now wait, Omon, - he  said. -- Wait just a moment. This is where  you
go wrong. You think our soil is drenched in what kind of blood? Non-regular?
Some special blood? From some uncommon people?

     He stretched his hand towards me, felt my face and then struck with his
dried-out fist against my lips -- not hard, but enough for me to get a taste
of blood in my mouth.

     -  It is drenched in this exact blood. From normal, regular guys,  like
you are.

     He patted me on my neck.

     - Don't get  angry, - he said,  - I am now like a second father to you.
If need be, I can even punish you with a belt.

     -  Bamlag Ivanovich, I don't  feel  I'm ready to  be a hero,  - I said,
licking the blood off. - I mean, I feel I am not ready... I think I'm better
off returning to Zaraisk than this...

     Urchagin  bent over towards me and started  talking  softly and gently,
stroking my neck:

     -  You  silly  boy,  Ommie.  Just understand,  my  dear, that  this  is
precisely the essence of heroism, that the hero is always someone who is not
ready for it, because heroism is a thing that is impossible to prepare  for.
You can, of course, be trained to run to the firing slot  very  quickly, you
can get accustomed  to throwing yourself  onto  it, we are teaching all that
stuff, but the  spiritual  act of  heroism  cannot  be learned, you can only
accomplish it.  And  the more you wanted to  live  before it, the better for
heroism. Heroism,  even  invisible,  is  essential  for  the  nation  --  it
nourishes that principal force which...

     Suddenly  a loud screech reached our ears. A black  shadow  of  a large
bird flying very close to the window darted by the  drapes,  and the colonel
fell silent. He contemplated something for a  minute in his wheelchair, then
switched on  the  motor and rolled out  into the corridor. The  door slammed
shut behind him, then opened again after a minute or two, and a straw-haired
Air Force lieutenant with a length of a rubber hose in his hands entered the
room. His faced looked familiar, but I couldn't quite place it.

     - Remember me? -- he asked.

     I shook my head. He approached the table and sat on top of it, his feet
in shiny black  boots hanging  down;  one look at them was enough for  me to
recall where I have seen him -- it  was that lieutenant from Zaraisk Academy
who wheeled our cots onto the square. I even thought of his last name.

     - Lan... Lan...

     - Landratov, - he said, flexing the hose. -- They sent me here to  have
a  talk with you. Urchagin did. What are you, nuts? Do you really want to go
back to the Maresyev's?

     - It's not that I particularly  want to go back, - I said, - but I sure
don't want to go to the Moon. To be a hero.

     Landratov  chuckled  and  slapped  his  hands  against his stomach  and
thighs(37).

     - That's rich. Listen to him - he doesn't want to. And you  think maybe
they're going to  leave  you alone  now? Let  you go? Or return  you  to the
Academy?  And even  if they did return you  -- do you have any  idea  how it
feels to get up from the bed and  take  your first steps on crutches? Or the
way you feel when there's a rain coming?

     - No, I don't, -- I said.

     - Or maybe you expect that when you legs heal it's  going to be peaches
and cream? Last year we  court-marshaled two guys for treason. Starting with
the fourth year, we have the simulator training -- know what that is?

     - No.

     - Well, in short it is very much like the real thing,  you sit as if in
the  cockpit, got all your  controls,  pedals,  but  you look  at a  monitor
screen.  So these two are conducting the exercise, and instead of practicing
immelman  turns they just  fucking  take  off  to  the west  at extreme  low
altitude. And no response  to the hails.  So then we  pull them out of there
and  ask: what's with you, guys?  What the hell were  you thinking? And they
just stand there. One did answer, though.  Later. He said: "Just wanted, you
know, to find out how it feels, you know. For just a moment..."

     - So what happened to them afterwards?

     Landratov slapped the hose hard against the table he was sitting on.

     -  What's the difference, - he  said. -- Main thing is -- you can kinda
really feel for them. You always hope that you will eventually start flying.
So when they tell you the whole truth... Think about it:  who needs you with
your  prosthetics?  Besides, we only have a handful of planes in the country
anyway, they  fly  along  the border so Americans can snap pictures of them,
and even those...

     Landratov fell silent.

     - "Even those" what?

     - Never mind. Here's what  I'm saying -- you don't really  believe that
you  are  going  to traverse the skies  in a fighter  jet after the  Zaraisk
Academy, do you? Best case  -- you'll end up in the  dance ensemble  at some
Air Defense regional  command center. But most likely you'll just dance your
"Kalinka"  in  restaurants. A third  of our guys  drink themselves to death,
another  third, the  ones for whom the  operation goes badly, simply  commit
suicide. How do you feel about suicide, by the way?

     - I don't, - I said. -- Never thought about it.

     -  I did. Especially in  the second year. Especially one time when they
were showing Wimbledon on the TV, and I was on guard  duty at the clubhouse,
with  the  crutches and all. That  got me really depressed.  And then  I got
better, you  know. You see,  you have to decide something here for yourself,
then  it all becomes easier. So be careful, when you  get those thoughts you
just don't  give  in  to them. Think instead about all the cool stuff you'll
see if you  really  haul your butt to  the Moon. These motherfuckers  aren't
letting you out alive anyway. Get with the program, OK?

     - You don't like them very much, do you?

     -  What's  there  to like?  They  won't  say a word of truth ever. This
reminds me: when you talk to the mission chief, never mention anything about
death or even  that you're going to  the  Moon.  You are to talk exclusively
about automatics, understood? Otherwise we'll be having another talk in this
room. I have my orders, you know.

     Landratov waved  the hose in the air, took a  pack of "Polyot"(38) from
his pocket and lit up.

     - That friend of yours, he agreed right away, - he said.

     When I finally got out into the open air my head was spinning slightly.
The inner patio, isolated from the city by the enormous brownish-gray square
hulk of the building, resembled very much a piece of a suburban subdivision,
cut out  in the exact form of the yard and transferred here  intact:  it had
the  crooked wooden gazebo  with peeling paint, a gymnastics bar welded from
steel  pipes that  now supported a green rug, apparently someone was beating
the dust out of it, left it hanging and forgot about  it; there were rows of
vegetables in the ground, a chicken coop,  a training circuit,  a  couple of
ping-pong tables and several tires dug in halfway and  arranged in a circle,
evoking  images  of Stonehenge in my head.  Mityok was sitting  on the bench
near the exit, I came closer, sat beside  him, stretched my legs and  looked
down at the black britches of my uniform -- after my meeting with  Landratov
I couldn't chase away the feeling that those weren't my legs inside them.

     - It cannot all be true, can it? -- asked Mityok quietly.

     I shrugged. I did not know what exactly he was talking about.

     -  OK,  about  the aviation I can believe,  -  he said. -- But  nuclear
weapons... I suppose  you could make two million political prisoners jump at
the  same time in '47. But we don't have them anymore, and nuclear tests  --
they're like every month...

     The  door  that  I  just  came  out of  opened  and colonel  Urchagin's
wheelchair  rolled out into the yard, he braked and traced  the yard several
times over  with  his ear. I understood that he  was looking for us,  to add
something to  the  things  he  already  said, but  Mityok  fell  silent, and
Urchagin apparently decided not  to bother  us. The  electric motor  started
whirring  again  and the wheelchair took off towards the far section of  the
building; passing in front of us, Urchagin turned his head with a  smile and
seemed to look into our souls with the kind hollows of his eyes.



8.

     I  assume most  of the  inhabitants of Moscow  know full  well what  is
beneath  their  feet  during  the time they  spend in endless  lines of  the
"Child's World" or pass through the "Dzerzhinskaya"(39) station,  so I'm not
going  to waste my time here(40).  Suffice it to say that the mock-up of our
rocket was  real size, and there was enough  space  left  to put another one
next to it. Interestingly enough, the elevator was really  ancient, pre-war,
and was  descending so slowly  that  one had time  to read a couple of pages
from a book.

     The mock-up  was  thrown together quite  roughly, in  places the lumber
showed through, but the workstations for the crew were exact replicas of the
real ones.  All of that was  designed for practical  exercises, which Mityok
and I weren't  supposed to  begin  for some time. In spite  of that, we were
transferred and assigned quarters deep below, in an  expansive room with two
pictures  on the wall depicting  windows opening to the  panorama of  Moscow
being  built. There were seven cots inside, so we  figured we were going  to
get company soon.  The dorm was  separated from  the training facility where
the model  of  the  rocket was located  by  a  three  minute walk through  a
corridor,  and  a  weird thing happened  to the elevator: where it  was very
slowly descending  just recently, it now  turned out to have been ascending,
just as slowly.

     But we  weren't going up very often, and the best part of our free time
was  spent  inside  the training hall. Colonel  Halmuradov was  teaching the
course   in  basic   theory  of  rocket   flight,   using  the  mock-up  for
clarifications. While we were  studying  the  hardware the rocket was just a
learning aid, but  come evening the floodlights were turned off,  and by the
dim glow of the wall fixtures the mock-up would turn into something wondrous
and  long-forgotten  for  a few moments,  sending to Mityok and me  the last
salute from the childhood.

     We were first. Other guys who formed  our crew gradually appeared later
on. Syoma Anikin was  first to arrive, a  short sturdy  fellow  from  Ryazan
region;  he was enlisted in the Navy  before. He  looked great in the  black
cadet uniform which  made Mityok look  like a clothes hanger. Syoma was very
quiet and composed and spent all his time practicing,  a habit we  all would
be better off picking  up, even though  his task was  the simplest and least
romantic. He was our first stage,  and  the  young life of his  (as Urchagin
would  say  with  his  penchant  for  transposing words  in  a  sentence  to
underscore  the gravity of the moment) was designed  to  be  cut short after
four minutes  of  flight. The success  of the entire mission depended on the
preciseness of his actions, and were he to make even a  slightest mistake we
would all meet a swift and pointless demise. He seemed to take it very close
to heart, so he was practicing even when left alone in  the dorm,  trying to
make his movements completely automatic.  He would squat, close his eyes and
start moving his  lips  --  counting to two hundred and  forty,  - then turn
counterclockwise,  pausing  every forty  five degrees of the arc, performing
elaborate manipulations with both  his hands. Even though I knew that in his
mind he was undoing the latches that fastened the first stage to the second,
every time it looked like a fight  scene from a Hong Kong blockbuster to me.
After completing this complex job eight times, he would fall on his back and
kick up hard with both legs, pushing the invisible second stage away.

     Ivan Grechka was our second  stage, he  came  a  couple of months after
Syoma. He was a blond blue-eyed Ukrainian, taken here from the third year of
the Zaraisk  Academy,  so he still  was  not  too  sure on his feet.  But he
possessed a certain inner clarity, a perpetual smile directed to the outside
world, which endeared him to everyone he met. He and Syoma became very close
friends. They would needle  each other jokingly  and compete for the fastest
time and  cleanest  separation  of their  respective  stages.  Syoma was, of
course, much quicker, but then  Ivan only  needed  to  undo four latches, so
from time to time he did come ahead.

     Our third  stage --  Otto Pluzis  --  was a  rose-cheeked introspective
Baltic(41) who,  as far as I can remember, never  joined Syoma and  Ivan  in
their practice sessions in the dorm; it seemed that the only  thing  he ever
did  was crossword puzzles  in the "Red Warrior" magazine while lying on his
cot  (he  would  always  cross  his  legs in  shiny  boots  on the  gleaming
nickel-plated bedframe). But seeing the way  he disposed with his portion of
latches on the mock-up it became crystal clear that if any of the systems in
our rocket were reliable at all, the third stage separation was it. Otto was
a  little on the weird side -- he loved to tell stupid stories after "lights
out", like those kids scare each other with in camps and on sleepovers(42).

     - So this one time this mission is going to the Moon, - he would say in
the darkness. -- They  fly like really long  time. So they're almost  there.
And  then  the hatch opens and all these people in white  scrubs come in. So
these cosmonauts are,  like, "We're flying to the Moon!". And  those  in the
scrubs go: "Sure, sure you are. Just don't get so excited. We'll have a shot
of this really nice medicine now..."

     Or something like this:

     - So these people are going to Mars.  And they're almost there, so they
look  out  the window.  Then they turn around  and see  this man, short  and
dressed all  in red, and  he's  got this huge switchblade in  his hand. "So,
guys, - he asks, - you want to go to Mars, don't you?"

     Mityok  and I finally  were granted  access  to our  hardware  when the
training  of the guys from ballistics turned  up  a notch. Syoma Anikin  was
almost  unaffected by  the change  --  the altitude of his  heroism was only
three miles,  so  he would just put  a  cotton-filled overcoat on top of his
uniform.  It was harder  for  Ivan,  since the  moment  for his  march  into
eternity came up at  thirty  miles, it  was  cold  up  there and the air was
pretty thinned out,  so he had to train in  a fur coat, fur boots and oxygen
mask which made his entry into the  narrow porthole  on  the mock-up  really
tight. Otto, surprisingly, got it easier -- they were supposed to outfit him
with a special spacesuit with electric heating system  fashioned by the "Red
Hill" factory seamstresses  from several American high-altitude flight suits
we took  in Vietnam, but the suit was not  ready yet, so he was  training in
scuba gear; I  still have  before  my eyes an image of his  reddened, sweaty
poke-marked face behind the glass mask rising over the edge of the porthole.
Upon  emerging  he  would  say  something  that sounded  like  "Zweigs!"  or
"Tsveiks!"(43).

     The  general theory  of  the space automation  was taught  in  turns by
mission chief and colonel Urchagin.

     Mission chief's name was Pcadzer Vladilenovich Pidorenko.  He was  born
in a small Ukrainian village of Pidorenka, and so the  name was inflected on
the first "o". His father worked  in CheKa as well, and gave his son  a name
constructed from the first  letters of "Party  Committee for  Agriculture of
Dzerzhinsky   region";  besides,  the  names  "Pcadzer"  and  "Vladilen"(44)
combined to  give exactly fifteen letters -- corresponding to the number  of
Soviet  republics. But he couldn't stand being addressed by name anyway,  so
his subordinates linked  to him  through varied  work-based relations either
called  him  "comrade  lieutenant-general" or, like  Mityok and  I, "comrade
mission  chief". He pronounced  the word  "automation" with such  dreamy and
pure intonation  that the Lubyanka  office to which we ascended to listen to
the  lectures  resonated  like  a soundboard of a  giant piano for a moment;
however, even though  the  word itself  popped in his speech quite often, he
never conveyed any technical knowledge to us,  relating instead stories from
his  life  or  reminiscing  about  the  times  he  was  conducting  guerilla
operations in Belarus during the war.

     Urchagin never touched any technical subjects either;  he would chuckle
and shell sunflower seeds into his mouth(45), or tell us something humorous.
He asked us, for example:

     - How do you break farts in five parts?

     When we told him we didn't know, he gave the answer himself:

     - You got to fart into a glove.

     And broke out in high-pitched giggles. I was astonished by the constant
optimism of this man: blind, paraplegic,  bound to a wheelchair -- but still
carrying out his duty while never failing to take enjoyment in his life.  We
had  two  morale  officers in  the Space Academy,  who  we called  political
instructors  sometimes  behind their  backs -- Urchagin  and Burchagin, both
alumni of  the Korchagin Military-Political Academy, both  looking very much
like each other. They had only one electric-powered Japanese-made wheelchair
among them, so  while  one  of them was busy conducting the  morale-boosting
activities, the other  one would lie quiet and motionless on a bed in a tiny
room  on the fifth floor  --  in uniform, with the blanket  drawn  up to the
waist  to obscure the bedpan from  prying eyes.  Sparse  furnishings  of the
room,  a special cardboard  pattern for writing with narrow slits for lines,
the invariable glass of strong tea on the desk,  white blinds on the windows
and a potted plant -- all that moved me  almost to tears, in those minutes I
even  stopped  thinking  that all  communists  are cunning,  double-crossing
calculating bastards.

     Dima  Matyushevich was  the  last  to come on board, assigned to  be in
charge of the lunar module. He was  extremely  introverted and his hair  was
completely  gray  despite  his young  age. He  always  carried himself  very
independently; the  only  thing about him that I knew was that he served  in
ground  forces.  Upon  seeing the  posters with  nighttime landscapes  above
Mityok's cot which  he  ripped  out  of the  "Working Woman"  magazine, Dima
pinned up a piece  of paper over  his cot, with a picture of a tiny bird and
large printed letters:

     OVERHEAD

     THE ALBATROSS

     Dima's  arrival coincided with introduction of a new learning  subject.
It was titled like  that movie -- "Strong In  Spirit". This wasn't a subject
in the normal sense of the word, even though  it featured prominently in the
curriculum.  We  got  visited by people  for whom heroism was  in  their job
description -- they told us  about  their lives simply, without  any pathos,
their words were plain as talk around the  kitchen, and because of  that the
essence  of  heroism appeared  to grow  out of  the mundane, from the little
everyday things, from that gray cold air of ours.

     Among  all the  strong in spirit I remembered  one retired  major best,
Ivan Trofimovich  Popadya(46). Funny  name. He  was tall, a regular  Russian
warrior (his forefathers fought in the battle of Kalka  River(47)), his face
and neck all red,  covered in whitish beads of scars, and with a patch  over
his  left eye. He had a very unusual life story:  he started out as a simple
ranger in a state wildlife preserve, where  Party and government bosses used
to hunt, and  his responsibility was to drive  the animals -- bears and wild
boars -- onto  the shooters  behind the trees.  Then the disaster stroke.  A
mature male boar jumped the pennant line and mortally wounded with his tusks
a member of government, who  was hiding behind a birch.  He died en route to
the city, and the conference of the government officials decided to prohibit
the  top brass  from  hunting  wild  prey.  But such  necessity,  of course,
continued to arise  --  and  so  one time Popadya was called  to  the  Party
meeting at the preserve headquarters, they  explained everything to  him and
said:

     - Ivan! We cannot order you -- and even if we could,  we wouldn't, such
is the  nature of the offer. But you see, we really need this.  Think  about
it. No one is going to force you.

     Popadya thought  long  and hard, all through  the  night,  and the next
morning went back to the Party committee and told them he agreed.

     - I never expected anything less from you, -- said the local secretary.

     Ivan  Trofimovich  was issued a  bulletproof  vest, metal  helmet and a
boar's skin, and thus began his new line  of work -- which could  be  justly
called daily  heroism.  He  was  a  little apprehensive  the first couple of
times, especially fearing for his exposed legs, but then he kind of got used
to it; also the government members (who knew what the deal was) tried to aim
for  his sides, protected by  the vest, under which Ivan Trofimovich  always
placed a little pillow  for softness.  Naturally,  from time  to  time  some
enfeebled  Central  Committee veteran  would miss, sending Ivan  Trofimovich
onto disability pay; he used  the time to read a lot of books, including one
that became his favorite -- memoirs  by Pokryshkin(48). To give you an  idea
just how dangerous his job really was, comparable as it was to armed combat,
his Party membership card that he carried in the internal sewn-in pocket had
to be replaced  every week because it would be riddled with bullet holes. In
those days that he was seriously wounded  other  rangers would step  in, his
own son Marat  among them, but  Ivan  Trofimovich was still considered to be
the most experienced worker, so the most important cases would fall on  him,
and they  even  held  him back if some insignificant regional  committee was
coming for a  routine hunt (each  time  that happened  Ivan Trofimovich took
offense, just like Pokryshkin when denied  a sortie with his  own squadron).
Ivan Trofimovich was cherished. In the meantime, he  and his son studied the
behavior and vocalizations  of  the wild inhabitants of the forest -- bears,
wolves, boars -- and thus improved their skills.

     It was already some time ago that the  capital  of  our  Motherland was
visited by  an American politician  Kissinger. He  was  participating  in  a
crucial round of negotiations on a nuclear arms reduction treaty -- made all
the more important by  the fact that we never had  any, but  our adversaries
were to never find out. Because of all that Kissinger was  cared  for at the
highest  state level, all branches of service were involved -- for  example,
when it became known that the sort of  women he likes  most  were voluptuous
short brunettes, four of such exact swans floated in formation over the Swan
Lake of  the  Bolshoi in front of his turtleshell-rimmed eyeglasses gleaming
in the darkness of the government luxury box.

     Negotiations were  easier  to  conduct  amidst  a hunt,  so they  asked
Kissinger  what  kind of  prey  he  prefers.  Apparently  attempting a  fine
political joke he said that he'd like to bag a bear, and was quite surprised
and frightened when the next morning he  was  indeed taken hunting. On their
way there he was told that the round was closed on two bruins for him.

     These were Ivan and Marat Popadya, communists, the best special rangers
of  the  entire  preserve.  The  guest  felled  Ivan  Trofimovich  with  one
well-aimed shot, as soon as  he  and Marat emerged from the forest on  their
hind legs  growling; his  carcass was  hoisted  by specially  designed loops
attached in  the  fur and dragged to the truck.  But  the American  couldn't
quite get at Marat, even though he was firing almost point-blank while Marat
was  deliberately moving  as slow as he possibly could, squaring those broad
shoulders  of his  against American's bullets. And suddenly  the  unexpected
happened -- the rifle of our guest from over the ocean misfired and he, even
before anyone was able to understand what  was going  on,  threw it into the
snow bank and charged at Marat with  just a  knife. A  real bear  would have
disposed  of  such a  hunter  in no time,  but  Marat remembered  the  grave
responsibility he  was entrusted with. He lifted his paws and roared, hoping
to scare the American away, but instead Kissinger -- whether he was drunk or
very brave, who knows -- ran closer and struck Marat in the stomach with the
knife, the thin blade penetrated between the strips of the vest. Marat fell.
All of  this happened in full  view of his father,  lying just  a  few yards
away, Marat was dragged to him  and Ivan Trofimovich realized  that  his son
was  still alive -- he  was moaning softly. The  blood trail he  was leaving
behind on the snow was not a special fluid from a hidden container -- it was
real.

     - Hold on, son! -- Ivan Trofimovich whispered, choking on tears, - hold
on!

     Kissinger  was  beyond  himself with excitement.  He  suggested to  the
officials  accompanying  him  that they should share a bottle there  on  the
"<I>mishki</I>"(49), as he said, and  then sign the agreement right  away. They put
the Employee  Of The Month board taken off  a nearby rangers' hut on  top of
Marat   and  Ivan   Trofimovich,  forming  a  makeshift  table,  with  their
photographs  among  others  right  there on the board.  All Ivan Trofimovich
could see over the next hour was the multitude of feet  shuffling about, all
he could hear was drunken foreign talk and quick babbling of the translator;
the Americans  dancing on the table almost  crushed him.  When the  darkness
fell and the horde has left, the agreement was signed and Marat was  dead. A
thin thread of  blood  was dripping from  his muzzle onto the bluish evening
snow, and on his  fur a golden Hero's star(50) glistened in  the  moonlight,
put there by the chief ranger. All through the night the  father lied across
his dead son crying, not ashamed of his tears.

     Suddenly the  words "There is always a place for heroism  in our lives"
that  looked  at me every morning  from  the wall of  the training facility,
after  having lost their meaning  and becoming  stale long ago,  filled with
fresh  significance for me. It was not some romantic gibberish anymore,  but
instead  a precise  and sober statement of the  fact that our Soviet life is
not  the instance of reality but instead a kind  of  a forechamber to it.  I
don't know if that  was clear  or  not.  Take America, for example.  Nowhere
between the sparkling shop window and a Plymouth parked at the curb is there
a  place for  heroism, and there  never was, if you  don't count the moments
when a Soviet  intelligence agent passed by,  of course.  And here,  you can
found yourself standing by an exact same window, on  exact same curb  -- but
the times around you are  going to be either  post-war or pre-war, and right
there the door leading to heroism  is  going  to crack  open  for  you, even
though it is actually going to happen on the inside.

     - You've got it,  - said Urchagin  when I confided my thought in him, -
but  be careful. The door  to  heroism  does open  from the inside, but  you
accomplish the actual feat on  the outside.  Don't let  yourself slide  into
subjective idealism.  Otherwise right away, in a  blink of an eye, your path
upward, so high and proud, shall have lost its meaning.



9.

     It was May  already, some of the peat bogs around Moscow  were  on fire
and the sun, pale but hot nonetheless, was looking down from the smoggy sky.
Urchagin gave me this book by a Japanese writer who  was a kamikaze pilot in
WWII, and I  was  amazed to no end by the similarities of the state of being
he described to my own. Just like he  did, I never  took time to think about
that  which  was waiting for me, lived only in the here and now, lost myself
in  books, forgot about everything when looking at the movie screen flashing
with explosions (every Saturday night they showed military-historic films to
us), was  really upset about  my not-too-high marks  for training. The  word
"death" was always present in my life  in a way of a reminder note  stuck to
the wall  -- I knew it  was  there  in  place, but I never looked at it long
enough. I never discussed this topic with Mityok  either, but when they told
us  that our equipment training is finally about to start we looked at  each
other and seemed to have felt the first breeze  of  the icy storm imminently
gaining on us.

     At  the first sight  the lunokhod  looked  like  a large metal  clothes
hamper put  on  eight  heavy wheels resembling those you find on streetcars.
Its  body  featured  loads  of  assorted  protuberances, differently  shaped
antennae, robotic  arms and  other  stuff --  none of it  functional; it was
there just for the sake of  TV cameras,  but made a profound impression  all
the  same. The  roof was sporting diagonal serrated notches  --  this wasn't
done  on purpose, it's just  that they used  the  sheetmetal for  the subway
station floor  where it meets  the escalators,  and  it's  always  like that
there. Nevertheless, it made the machine appear even more mysterious.

     Strange are the depth of the human psychology! First  thing it needs is
detail. I remember when I was young, I would often draw  tanks and airplanes
and show them to my  friends. They always liked those  pictures  where there
were lots of superfluous lines, so that I  would  even put  more of them all
over. So  was  the lunokhod --  a convincingly complex and  clever  piece of ◯
machinery.

     The lid swung away  -- it was hermetically sealed, with  rubber gaskets
and  several layers  of  thermal isolation  material. There  was some  space
inside -- approximately  like in the turret  of  a tank, and fastened to the
floor was a slightly modified frame from the "Sport" bicycle, complete  with
pedals and two gears, one of them welded carefully to the rearmost axle. The
handlebars were your  regular semi-racing "horns";  by  means  of a  special
transfer case they could be used to wiggle the front wheels slightly, but as
they  told us there should not be any need for that. The walls were equipped
with shelves, but those were empty for now; the space between handlebars was
occupied by a compass, and on the floor there was a tin box painted green --
a transceiver with  a  phone. In front  of  the handlebars in the wall there
were two tiny lenses, like  the  fisheyes they  put  into the doors; if  one
looked through  them, he  could see  the edges of  the  front wheels and the
pretend  manipulator. A radio  receiver hung in the  back  -- just a  common
mass-market  brick of red plastic,  with a black  volume control handle (the
mission  chief explained  to us that in order to  prevent the  psychological
separation from our country  every Soviet spacecraft  is designed to receive
"Mayak"(51)  programming). The large  convex outside lenses were covered  on
top and  sides by  metal shielding,  giving the  front of  the  lunokhod  an
appearance of  a face -- or rather a  muzzle, quite agreeable in fact,  like
the ones they draw on watermelons or appliances in children's comics.

     When  I installed myself inside for the first time and  the lid clicked
shut over me I thought that I would never be able to endure such cramped and
uncomfortable surroundings. I had to dangle over  the frame, distributing my
weight between the hands clutching the  bars, feet pushed against the pedals
and the saddle which did not so much accept its share of weight as determine
the posture my body was forced to assume. The  cyclist leans in this fashion
when developing  higher speed -- but then he has an opportunity to flex back
which I did not have, since my head was already pressing  against the lid as
it was. However, truth be told, a couple of weeks after the training started
I did  get used to  this and it turned out that there was quite enough space
inside for  one to forget for hours on end  how  little space there actually
was.

     The round "eyes" were located right in front of my face, but the lenses
distorted the view to such an extent that it  was utterly impossible to make
sense of anything beyond the thin steel of the machine. On the  other  hand,
the spot just in front of the wheels was enlarged and in sharp focus, as was
the  edge  of  one  of the toothed antennae; everything else disappeared  in
zigzags  and  patches,  as if you  were  staring  into a long  dark corridor
through the glass of a gas mask.

     The machine was really heavy, and it was hard to cause it to move -- so
that I even started  doubting  that I  would be  able to conquer  the entire
fifty miles of the lunar surface in  it. After just one spin around the yard
I got winded, my back was aching, the shoulders hurt too.

     Now every  other day, taking turns  with Mityok, I took the elevator to
the surface,  stripped down to my underwear, climbed  into  the lunokhod and
started  my  regimen  of turning  circles in the  yard  to strengthen my leg
muscles, frightening the chickens and even squashing  them from time to time
-- I was not doing it  intentionally, of  course, but  I found it absolutely
unrealistic  to  distinguish  a  wayward  chicken  from a  piece  of an  old
newspaper or, for example,  some laundry stripped  from the  line  by a wind
gust, and in addition I could never put on the brakes in time to avoid them.
At  first  colonel  Urchagin would drive in  his wheelchair  in front of me,
showing me  the  way  --  he  looked like a  greenish-gray blob  through the
lenses, -  but then I  got the knack  for it and  could go around the entire
yard  with my  eyes  closed  -- one only had to dial  an exact turn into the
handlebars and machine described a sweeping circle  all by itself, returning
to the starting point of the journey. I didn't even have to peer through the
"eyes"  most  of  the time; I  just  worked  my  muscles  and mulled  my own
thoughts. Sometimes I would remember my  childhood, sometimes -- imagine how
the rapidly approaching moment of my departure  into  eternity was  going to
feel like.  From time  to  time I  also tried  to wrap up some of the  older
conundrums which started surfacing again in my consciousness. For example, I
would start thinking -- who exactly am I?

     It has to  be  said that this  question bothered me since I  was a kid,
usually early in the morning when I woke up and  found myself staring at the
ceiling. Afterwards, when I grew up  a little, I began asking it at  school,
but  all I got in  response was  that consciousness  is a property of highly
organized  matter consistent with Lenin's theory  of reflection.  I couldn't
quite  catch the meaning of those words, so I kept  wondering  -- how come I
could  see?  And who is that  "I" that  is seeing? And what does it actually
mean -- to see? Am I seeing  something on the outside or just looking within
myself?  And  what is  "outside"  or "within"?  I often felt  right  on  the
threshold of solution, but  when I tried to  make the last step towards it I
would suddenly lose the "I" which was just now standing on that threshold.

     When my aunt went to work  she often asked our  neighbor  to look after
me,  an old  woman  whom I  also  pestered with  all those questions, taking
delight in seeing her struggle with the answers.

     - You, Ommie boy, have a soul inside you, -  she'd say,  - it peers out
from you  through your  eyes, and it lives  in your  body, like your hamster
lives in the pot. This soul is a part of God, who created us all. So you are
this soul.

     - Why would God have me sit in this pot? - I asked.

     - I don't know, - said the old woman.

     - Where does he sit himself?

     - Everywhere, -- the old woman answered, showing with her hands.

     - So I am also God?

     - No, - she'd say. -- A man is not God. But he is divinely inspired.

     - Is the  Soviet Man also divinely inspired? -- I asked, having trouble
with the unfamiliar words.

     - Of course, - said the old woman.

     - Are there many gods? -- I asked.

     - No. He is one.

     - Then why does the dictionary say there are many? --  I asked pointing
at the Atheist's Encyclopedia on the aunt's bookshelf.

     - I don't know.

     - Which one is better?

     But the woman answered again:

     - I don't know.

     And then I asked:

     - Can I choose for myself?

     - Go ahead, Ommie boy, - the  old woman laughed, and so I buried myself
in  the  dictionary, where they had stacks of different gods. I particularly
liked Ra, the  god in whom ancient Egyptians  put their trust many millennia
ago -- I liked him  because he had a hawk's head, and pilots, cosmonauts and
other heroes in general were often called "Motherland's hawks" on the radio.
So  I decided that if I am indeed inspired by a god, let this be the  one. I
remember I  took a large notebook and scribbled this  note in it, taken from
the dictionary:

     "<I>During the day Ra traverses the Celestial Nile in the Manjet-boat, the
Barque  of Millions  of Years, shining light on the world, in the evening he
transfers  to the  Mesektet-boat, the Barque of Night, and  descends  to the
underworld where he travels the Nether Nile fighting off forces of darkness,
and in the morning he appears on the horizon again</I>."

     The ancient people  couldn't  have known that  the Earth  was  in  fact
rotating around the Sun, it said  in the  dictionary, and  this is  why they
created this romantic myth.

     Right under the article's text  in the dictionary there was  an ancient
Egyptian picture  showing  Ra's  transfer from one  barque  to the other; it
depicted two identical  boats side-by-side in which two girls were standing,
one of them passing to the other a hoop with  a  hawk sitting inside -- that
was Ra. Most of  all I liked that the boats, in addition  to  a lot of other
stuff in them, contained what unmistakably was four Khruschev-era  six-story
housing projects.

     Since  then, even  though I continued to respond to the name  "Omon", I
would always call myself "Ra", and that was the name of  the  main character
in  my private adventures that  I experienced before falling asleep, with my
face turned to the wall and eyes closed -- until the time, that is,  when my
dreams have undergone the usual age-related transformation.

     I wonder if anyone seeing the photo of the  lunokhod in the paper would
be  visited  by  a thought that inside the  steel  box,  whose existence  is
justified  by its  task to crawl  fifty miles on the  Moon and  fall forever
motionless, there  is  actually a  person peering  out through its two glass
lenses? On  the other hand, what's  the difference. Even if someone does get
an  inkling, they  still would never guess that this  person was  in fact I,
Omon  Ra, the  true hawk of our  Motherland, as the mission chief  said once
embracing me by  the shoulders at the window and pointing with his finger to
the glowing thundercloud in the sky.



10.

     Another subject that  appeared in our  curriculum -- "General Theory of
the Moon" -- was considered  optional for  everyone except Mityok and I. The
lectures were conducted by the doctor of philosophy (Ret.)  Ivan  Evseyevich
Kondratiev. For some reason I did not hit it off with him, even though there
was no clear  rationale for my  dislike; his  lectures were, as a  matter of
fact,  quite interesting.  I  remember  that the  first meeting  with us  he
started in a very unusual fashion -- he read poems about the Moon to us from
scraps of paper for at least half an hour, becoming  so  touched  himself at
the end that he had to wipe  his glasses. I was still  keeping notes  at the
time, and this lecture left behind a nonsensical pile of quotational debris:
"And like a golden drop of honey The Moon is twinkling sweet and high... Not
long  did moon's  vain  hopes delude us,  Its dreams  of  love  and prideful
fame... The Moon! how full of sense and beauty Is that one sound for Russian
heart!.. But in this world the other  regions, By  moon tormentedly beset...
And in  the sky, resigned to everything, The disk of moon in shallow grin...
The flow of thought he  was directing, and subjugated thus  the Moon... This
uneasy  and watery moonness..."(52). And  two  more  pages in the same vein.
Then he  became solemn and  started speaking  in authoritative voice, almost
chanting:

     - My friends! Let us remember now the historic words of Vladimir Ilyich
Lenin, related by him in the year nineteen hundred eighteen in his letter to
Inessa Armand: "Of all the planets  and celestial bodies, - he wrote, - Moon
remains the principal one for  us."(53) Years  have passed  since then, many
things have changed in the world. But Lenin's judgment had lost neither  its
incisiveness  nor importance,  the  time having reaffirmed its validity. The
radiant  fire of Lenin's  words casts a special glow on the today's date  in
the calendar. Indeed,  the Moon plays  an  enormous role in the evolution of
the humankind.  A  prominent Russian  scientist Georgy Ivanovich  Gurdzhiev,
while  still in the underground  period  of his  activity, had developed the
true Marxist theory  of  the Moon. In  accordance  with it,  Earth  had five
different moons --  and this is the reason that the star,  the symbol of our
great state,  has five  ends.  The fall  of  each of the previous moons  was
accompanied by social upheavals and catastrophes  -- thus, for  example, the
fourth  moon  which crashed onto our planet  in 1904, becoming known  by the
name of the Tunguska  meteorite, caused the first  Russian revolution, which
was followed closely  by the second.  The moons that  fell before it  led to
other changes in the  socioeconomic formation -- though of course the cosmic
catastrophes  were not affecting  the level of development of the productive
forces, which formed independently of  the will and conscience of the people
as well as  influence of planets, but instead contributed to crystallization
of the  subjective  precursors  of  the  revolution(54).  The  fall  of  the
contemporary Moon -- moon number five, the last one remaining, - shall usher
in the full and absolute  victory of communism within the  boundaries of the
Solar system. While studying  this  particular subject  we  will  pay  close
attention to the two major  works by Lenin regarding the Moon: "Moon And The
Uprising" and "Advice From A Stranger"(55). We will start  today's lesson by
addressing the bourgeois falsifications of the topic --  the views according
to  which all  organic life on  Earth is nothing  but food  for  the Moon, a
source of the emanations consumed by it(56). This can be proven wrong simply
by pointing out  that the goal of existence of organic  life on Earth is not
the nourishment of  the Moon  but instead,  as Vladimir  Ilyich Lenin  amply
demonstrated, the construction of a  new society,  free from exploitation of
man number one, two and three by man number four, five, six and seven...

     And  so  forth.  He  spoke  effusively  and  intricately,  but  what  I
remembered best was an example that stunned me with its poetic  quality: the
weight on the end of a string makes the clock go, the Moon is such a weight,
Earth is  the clock, and life is the movement  of  gears and  singing of the
mechanical cuckoo.

     Quite often we would have some kind of medical evaluation -- naturally,
we all  have been studied  from head to toe and  crosswise. This is why upon
hearing  that  Mityok  and  I  had  to  pass  something  that  sounded  like
"reincarnational evaluation", I just wrote it off as another reflex check or
blood  pressure  monitoring --  the  first word did not  convey anything  in
particular to me.  But when I was  called downstairs  and saw the specialist
that  was supposed to conduct the evaluation  I  was overcome with  childish
fear, very out of place considering what I was destined for in the very near
future but insurmountable nonetheless.

     It was not a doctor before me in white scrubs with stethoscope sticking
out of  his pocket but an officer, a  colonel, but not in uniform --  he was
wearing some kind of strange black cassock with shoulder patches. He was big
and  fleshy,  his  face  red, as  if burned  by hot soup.  Around his neck I
noticed  a nickel-plated  whistle and a  chronometer, and but  for his eyes,
which resembled the visor hole  of a heavy tank, he would look like a soccer
official. He conducted himself  very amiably, though, laughing often, and by
the  end of our talk I  did  feel more at  ease. He talked  to me in a small
office where  there  were only  a  desk,  two chairs,  an examination  table
wrapped  in plastic and a door into the next room. After filling out several
yellowish forms he  gave me  a measure of some bitter liquid to drink, put a
small hourglass on the  desk in front of me and exited  through  the  second
door, instructing me to follow him there when all the sand has fallen to the
bottom.

     I remember myself looking  at the hourglass, amazed  at how slowly  the
grains of sand roll down through the glass neck, until  I realized that this
was happening because each grain  possessed free  will and did not  want  to
fall  down, for this was tantamount to death for them.  And at the same time
their  eventual  fall was  inescapable,  and both our  and "other"  world, I
thought,  were very similar to this hourglass -- when all  who lived  die in
one  direction, the  reality turns upside down and  they become alive again,
that is, begin to die in the other direction.

     I was really  sad about  this for some time but  then noticed that  the
sand  was  not falling anymore, and remembered that I'd  better  go and show
myself  to the colonel. I felt trepidation and at the same time  an  unusual
lightness; I recall trying for quite a while  to reach the door behind which
they were waiting for me, that was odd considering it was two or three steps
away.  When I finally laid my hands on the door handle I  pushed it, but the
door did  not open. Then I pulled it  towards me  and discovered that I  was
pulling on a  blanket instead. I was on  my cot,  Mityok was sitting at  its
edge. My head was spinning slightly.

     - So? How was it? -- asked Mityok. He was strangely agitated.

     - How was what?  -- I asked, pushing up on my elbows and attempting  to
ascertain what had happened.

     - The reincarnational evaluation, - said Mityok.

     -  Wait, -  I said, recalling  how I was  pulling the  door  handle,  -
wait... No. Can't remember a thing.

     For some reason I was feeling empty and alone, like I had just traveled
across a  barren  autumn field, and  the  sensation  was so  peculiar that I
forgot  about  everything else, including  the  feeling  of impending death,
ceaseless in the  last months, though it had lost its  edge by now, becoming
just a background for all other thoughts.

     - I see. You signed it for them, didn't you?(57) -- asked Mityok with a
hint of loathing in his voice.

     - Get lost, - I said turning towards the wall.

     -  These  two  burly  corporals in black frocks  haul you in, -  Mityok
continued, - and tell me: "Here, take back your Egyptian." And your shirt is
all covered with puke. Is it really true you don't remember a single thing?

     - True, - I answered.

     - Well then, wish me luck, - he said. -- It's my turn to go now.

     - Break a leg, - I said. More than anything else in  the world I wanted
to sleep, because I had a feeling that if I fall asleep fast enough, I would
wake up being myself again.

     I heard the door squeak behind Mityok, and next it was already morning.

     - Krivomazov!  To the mission chief, on the double! -- one of  our guys
shouted  in my ear. I started to wake up, but managed to come  to completely
only when I was already dressed. Mityok's cot was empty and undisturbed, all
the other  guys were  in their places, still  in  underwear. I was feeling a
certain tension in the air,  everybody was stealing awkward glances at  each
other, even Ivan was  not shooting off  his usual morning jokes, very  funny
even though totally  stupid. I realized something must have happened, and on
my way  up to  the third above-ground floor was trying  to  figure out what.
Walking down the corridor and squinting at the sun which tried to force  its
way in through the drawn blinds I caught my reflection in  an enormous dusty
mirror,  marveled at  the ghostly  paleness of my face and realized  that my
heroic feat had, for all intents and purposes, already begun.

     The mission chief rose to greet me and shook my hand.

     - How is your training? -- he asked

     - Progressing, comrade mission chief, - I said.

     He stared probingly into my eyes.

     - Good, - he said after a while, - I see. Here's what I called you here
for, Omon. You  are going to help me. Take this tape recorder, - he waved at
a  small  Japanese Walkman on the desk in front of  him, - take the forms, a
pen, and go to room three twenty nine, it should be empty now. Have you ever
transcribed recordings?

     - No, - I answered.

     - It's simple.  You cue the tape forward a little, write what you heard
and then cue it further. If you didn't catch  something  the first time, you
rewind and listen again, several times if you need to.

     - Understood. Am I dismissed?

     - Yes. Wait. I  think you should understand why I asked you to  do this
and not someone else.  You will  soon face  questions,  the kind that nobody
down there, -  the mission chief pointed  to the  floor, -  will be  able to
answer  for you. I would be within my rights not to answer you either, but I
think  it's better for you to be  in the loop. But keep in mind, neither the
morale  officers nor the crew have  to ever find out what you are  about  to
learn. What is happening now  is a breach of protocol on my part. As you can
see, even generals commit those.

     I  silently  took  from the desk the  recorder and several yellow forms
like those I  saw yesterday, and went to three twenty nine.  The shades were
drawn shut, the familiar metal chair with leather straps on the armrests and
legs was still standing in the center, but now some wires were going from it
to the wall. I sat behind the small desk in the corner, placed the ruled pad
in front of me and turned on the tape.

     - Thank you, comrade colonel... Very comfortable, it's a recliner,  not
a chair,  ha-ha-ha... Of course I am nervous.  This is kind  of like a test,
right?... I see. Yes. With two "i"s -- Sviridenko...

     I switched the recorder  off. This was unmistakably Mityok's voice, but
it was strange, like someone have  attached bellows  instead of lungs to his
vocal cords -- he spoke sonorously and effortlessly, on a continuous exhale.
I rewound the tape a little, pushed "Play" again and  did not stop the  tape
anymore(58).

     - ...test, right?... I see. Yes. With two "i"s --  Sviridenko...  Thank
you, but I don't smoke. Nobody in  our group  does -- they'd throw you right
out... Yes, for more than a year now. I can't quite believe it myself. Since
I was a boy  I  always dreamed of going to the Moon... Of course, of course.
Precisely, only those with the soul that is crystal clear. To  think -- with
the entire Earth below... About who on the Moon? No, never heard about it...
Ha-ha-ha, so that was a joke, you're funny... This place look weird, though.
Well, unusual. Is it like that everywhere or only in the Special Department?
All  those skulls  on  the  shelves,  oh  my God,  standing like  books. And
labeled, just look at that... No, no,  not  in that sense at all. If they're
here,  it  means they need  to  be here. Research,  databases  and stuff.  I
understand.  I understand. You  don't  say... So well  preserved... And this
one, above the eye --  from a pickaxe(59)?.. That's mine. They had two other
forms there  as  well.  The last  check -- before Baikonur(60). Yes.  Ready.
Comrade  colonel,  I have  already  described in detail...  Just talk  about
myself, starting from  the  childhood? No, thank you,  I  am  comfortable...
Well, if that's a general order, sure. Why don't you install headrests, like
in cars. Otherwise the pillow is going to fall down if it shifts... Aha, and
I  was just  thinking -- why do you have this mirror on the wall. And you're
going  to put another  one on the table. Wow,  that's a thick candle... From
whose fat? Ha-ha-ha, that's a joke again, right, comrade colonel... Amazing.
First time I see something like that, honest. I only read in  books that you
could do that, but never seen it for myself. Mind-boggling. Like a corridor.
Where? Into this one?  Jesus Christ, how many of those mirrors you have here
-  a regular barbershop. No,  of course not, comrade  colonel... Never  had.
It's just a saying, I picked it  up from my grandma. I am a devoted atheist,
or  I  wouldn't have  gone to  the flight academy...  I  remember, but  very
roughly. I was already eleven by the time we moved  to Moscow; I was born in
that  small  town -- you know, it just sits there  by the rail line, a train
comes by every  couple of days and that's all.  It's  quiet. The streets are
dirty, geese walk  around. Many  drunks. And  everything is  just so gray --
doesn't  matter if it's  summer or winter. Two  factories, a  movie theater.
Well, there's also the park -- but  you understand, no one in his right mind
would show his  face  there. And then, you know, something rumbles above, so
you just look to the sky. Well,  what's there  to explain... And I also read
books all the time, I owe to them everything that is good in me(61). My most
favorite was, of course,  "The Andromeda Nebula"(62). Very big influence  on
me, that book had. Imagine,  this Iron Star... And on that very black planet
there's our cheerful Soviet  starship with a swimming pool,  a  spot of blue
light around it, and where the light ends -- adversary  life forms, they are
afraid  of light  and can  live only in darkness.  Some kind of jellyfish, I
didn't  quite understand that part, and also the Black  Cross -- I guess  he
was  making a  dig at the clergy there.  This Black  Cross was there, he was
stalking  in  the  darkness,  and where the blue  light is  the  people  are
working,  mining  for  anameson.  And  then  this  Black  Cross like  shoots
something  mysterious at them! It was aiming for Erg Noor himself, but brave
Nisa Krit shielded  him with  her body. And then our guys really got back at
them, like revenge -- a nuclear blast from there to the horizon, they  saved
Nisa Krit, and  they caught the  principal jellyfish, and back to Moscow.  I
was reading it and thinking -- how do people work in our embassies abroad! A
very good book. And there's another  one I remember.  They had some  kind of
black cave there or something...

     - ...

     -  No, the cave was afterwards,  and  it was  not  a  cave,  more  like
corridors.  Very low  corridors, and  ceiling all  covered  with  soot  from
torches. The warriors always walked  with torches at  night,  protecting his
highness  the prince.  From Accadians,  they  said.  But  really  they  were
protecting  him  from  his  brother, of  course...  You, sir  Master of  the
Northern Tower, please forgive me if I  said  something wrong, but everybody
thinks that -- warriors  and serfs, both. You may order  my  tongue cut out,
but still everyone would tell  you the same. The Queen Shubad herself posted
this squadron there, against Meskalamdug. Every time he  rides by on his way
to the hunt,  he  always  passes the  Southern Wall,  and  those two hundred
warriors  with him  in  copper helmets --  what's that for,  fighting lions?
Everybody's  talking about it... What  do  you mean?  What's  with you,  sir
Master of the  Northern Tower, were you chewing too  much five-leaf again? I
am Ninhursag, Arrata's priest and  carver of seals.  I mean, I'm going to be
carver of seals when I  grow  up, I am still little... come on, why are  you
writing,  you must  know  who  I  am.  You gave  me that bridle  with copper
figuring.  You don't remember? Why... Wait... So we're  sitting with Namtura
--  you  know, the one with his ears lopped off, he was teaching me to carve
triangles. This is the hardest one for  me. You have to make  two deep cuts,
and then from the third side you just dig with a broad chisel, and... Right,
so then somebody from the outside tears away the curtain, and so brazenly --
so we look up, and those two warriors are standing there. Rejoice, they say,
with the great  joy! Our prince is prince no more, but King  Abarraggi! Just
embarked on his way to the Goddess  Nanna, so naturally, we have to be going
too. Namtura is  crying  --  from happiness, I guess, singing  something  in
Accadian, and starts gathering his rags in a big bundle. And I went out into
the yard  right away, only told Namtura to  pick  up the chisels. And in the
yard -- Urshu  Victorious! -- all  those  warriors,  and  with torches, like
broad daylight...  No,  not at all, sir Master  of  the Northern  Tower!  Of
course not. It's what Namtura  is mumbling all the  time... Never had, and I
never brought  sacrifices either. Don't.  I am  the  nunn of  the great King
Abarraggi now, you  can't just cut my ears off all of a sudden,  you need  a
royal decree for that... Apology accepted. Right, so the chariots with bulls
were ready. Here's  when  sir  Master  of the  Locks  came  to  me  -- here,
Ninhursag,  he said, take this  dagger made from the  government bronze, you
are an adult  now. And  also he  gave  me a small sack of barley meal -- you
cook that along the way, he said. So I look  around  and I see those, in the
copper helmets, walking around. So I think: Urshu the Great! I mean, Anu the
Great!  This  must  mean that  Meskalamdug  finally buried the hatchet  with
Abarraggi... Wise decision, I  thought, you don't  quarrel with the King  --
not when his every word is Anu. And then they showed me to my chariot, so  I
climb into it. There was  also  this  boy standing there -- he was directing
the bulls. I never saw him before. I only remember that he had the turquoise
necklace, very expensive. And the dagger tucked under his  belt -- must have
just gotten it too. So, I  looked back at the  fortress,  and I got a little
sad and stuff. But then the clouds parted, and in the clearing the Moon just
burst out... I felt so happy and light right away...  So then they push away
this stone slab near the stables -- and there's the entrance into the caves.
I never  knew there was  a cave there.  Really  I didn't... Why, may I never
distinguish myself in  battle! That was you, wasn't  it? Now  I remember. So
right there you,  sir  Master of the Northern Tower, approached us  with two
goblets of beer, and you said -- here, from Meskalamdug, the king's brother.
And the same  skirt you were  wearing as now, only you had the copper helmet
on your head. So, we  drank. I never drank beer  before that, ever. Then the
second  boy shouted something,  and we drove ahead -- right into a  crack in
the cliff. I remember the road was descending, and around me -- I didn't see
a thing, it was so dark... Afterwards? Afterwards I found myself here in the
tower. That's from beer, isn't it?.. Are they going to punish me now? Put in
a  word for me, sir Master of the  Northern Tower. Tell  them how it was. Or
just pass them the tablets, now that you wrote everything down.  Of course I
have  it  with me...  No,  I'm not going  to give it  to you. I'll  affix it
myself. Nobody better lay a hand on my seal, by  U... Anu  the Great.  Here.
You  like it, don't you? I made it  myself. Third time  a charm. This is god
Marduk. What  do you mean -- "fence", those are  the  Elder  Gods  standing.
Please help me, sir Master  of the Northern Tower!  I will carve three seals
for you,  I  will. No, I'm not crying... There, I won't anymore. Thank  you.
You  are truly wise and  mighty  man,  I say  this with all my heart. Please
don't tell anyone  I cried... They'd say: what kind of Arrata's priest is he
-- let him drink a little beer and he's ready to cry... Of course I want to.
Where? From the  South or  North? �Cause  you have this wall all covered  in
mirrors here. I see... Sure I know that.  That was  when Ninlil went to  the
clear stream  to  bathe herself, and then she stepped out to the  shore. Her
mother would tell her again and again, but she went just  the same, so she's
stepping onto the shore, see, and that's  when Enlil knocked her up. So then
he comes to the city of Kiur, but the Council of Gods says  to him -- Enlil,
you rapist, away  from the city  with you! But Ninlil,  she went after  him,
sure thing...  No, not blinding at all. The other two? That was after,  once
when  Enlil  turned into watchman near the crossing, and then when Nanna was
already in Ninlil's womb...

     - ...

     - And then,  those two  are  just different manifestations of the same.
You can say thus: Hecate is the  dark and  mysterious  side, while Selena --
light and  wondrous. I must admit I  am off my horse  here  -- just  heard a
couple of things here and there in Athens... Sure, sure I've been to Athens.
Under Domician that was. I was hiding there. Or we wouldn't be talking right
now, Abbas  Senator, we wouldn't be  riding  in this  palanquin  of yours...
Impugning the royal name, what else. Presumably I said that the master has a
statue of the princeps in his yard, and that they went and buried two slaves
nearby. But he never had any statue in the first place.  Even under Nerva we
were  still  apprehensive  about returning.  But  with our  current princeps
there's nothing to worry about. He sent to us Plinius Secundus himself to be
the  Legate --  these are the times  that  we live in, glory be  to Isis and
Serapis!  Not  for...  No,  not  at all, Abbas Senator,  by Hercules! This I
picked up in Athens, they have Egyptians there now like you won't believe...
What interesting tablets you have, one  almost can't see the wax.  And these
lions' muzzles -- are they made  of electron?  Corinthian bronze,  you don't
say... First time I see that... Sextius Rufinus. No, of freed slaves. Here's
the nice thing about palanquins -- when the slaves are skilled, of course --
you can  ride and write. And  the light is  shining just like in a room, the
pines passing by...  It's  like you  look  inside  my soul,  Abbas  Senator.
Constantly  within  myself I compose them. Not in the Marcial's order,  I am
afraid - just  dulling  the stylos...  Songs I sing with brief  verse,  like
Catullus  was singing, and before him Calbus and ancients. What do I care! I
have left the Forum in favor of verses... Of course I am exaggerating, Abbas
Senator. These are  verses, after all. As a matter of fact, that's why I was
brought along with  the Christians'  case  --  because  of  literature. Just
wanted to look at our Legate. A  great man, he is... Well,  not exactly as a
witness. No,  I  wrote it like it was --  that  Maximus, he really was  from
Galilee. They'd assemble  at his place at night, inhale some kind  of smoke.
And then he clambers up to the roof wearing only his caligae, and cries like
a cockerel  -- one look at that, and I knew right  away they  must have been
Christians... Well, about the bats I embellished a little, I admit. So what?
The gladiator school was already crying for them anyway.  And  that Legate I
liked very much. Right...  He invited me to the table, listened to my poems.
Praised  me  lavishly. And then he says  -- why don't  you, Sextius, come to
dinner. When the Moon is full. I will send for you,  he  says... And  he did
send, he  really did. I gathered all the cartouches with the  poems --  what
if, I  thought, he'd send me to Rome?  I put on my best cloak... How could I
wear a toga  -- I don't have the citizenship. So then we're  riding, and out
of the city  for some reason. For a long  time we were riding, I  even dozed
off in the chariot. I  wake up, look around --  a  villa,  or a  temple,  or
something like that, and people with torches. So, you  see, we go inside  --
through  the  house  and into the garden.  And they  already have tables set
there, right under the skies, and the Moon is shining. Such a large  Moon it
was that night. And the  slaves say  to me -- sir Legate  will be right out,
why  don't you lie  beside  the table,  drink some wine. This is your place,
under that  marble lamb.  Well, I lie down, and I drink, - and then I notice
everyone around is  looking at me funny... And not a word. What was it,  I'm
thinking, that the Legate must have told them about my poems... I got chills
even, honest.  But  then two harps started playing  behind the screen, and I
became so cheerful all of a sudden -- simply amazing. I don't even  remember
how  I ended  up dancing around... And then they  brought  out  the  flaming
tripods, and then  those  people in  yellow  chitons... They  weren't  quite
themselves, if you know what I mean -- they sit, and sit some more, and then
extend their hands  toward the Moon and start chanting something in Greek...
No,  I  couldn't make it out  -- I  was dancing, making  merry. And then sir
Legate  shows up -- he  had the Phrygian helmet on  for some  reason, with a
silver disk, and a flute in his hand. Eyes gleaming. He poured me more wine.
Those  are some good poems that you're writing, Sextius, he says to me. Then
he  started  talking about  the  Moon --  exactly like you  just did,  Abbas
Senator. Now wait  a minute, you have  been  there too, haven't  you? Right.
Ha-ha, and all this time I'm thinking  -- why is  it we're traveling in your
palanquin.  But how...  You have your  toga on now, sure, but then  you were
dressed  in  a chiton, and Thracian helmet, just like the Legate. Yeah,  and
that  red  spear  you  were  holding,  with  the  horsetail.  I  was  really
uncomfortable  turning my back  to  you. But  Legate  kept  saying  -- here,
Sextius,  why  don't you look at Hecate, he says, and I will  play the flute
for you. And he started playing -- really softly. So I  looked up, and I was
looking -- and then you are asking  me about  Hecate and  Selena. When did I
manage to climb into your palanquin? Is everything all right? Well, glory be
to I... Hercules. Apollo and Hercules. That's fine, I  brought them with me,
for Legate  to read.  And  you, Abbas Senator,  dabbling in literature also?
That's  why you have  been writing  and writing  all  this time. A-a.  As  a
keepsake. So  you liked the poems too. This hour is for you -- it walks like
Leah,  and rose is reigning over  hair  so fragrant. Of  course.  I can even
affix my gemma. That's all right, the cutting is not that deep, it does  not
require a lot of wax. It'll print through. Are  we almost  there? Why  thank
you, Abbas Senator, my hair does seem to be a little messed up. And how much
does a mirror like that  cost in the Metropolia? You don't say, this kind of
money would buy you a house around our place in Viphinia. Is this Corinthian
bronze as well? Silver? And some kind of inscription...

     - ...

     I  can  make  it  out.  There... To  Lieutenant  Wolf,  for the Western
Prussia. General  Lüdendorf. Begging your pardon, brigadenfuehrer,  it  just
opened by itself. An amazing cigarette  box,  shining like a mirror.  So you
were   already   lieutenant   in  '15?   Air  Force,   too?   Please  don't,
brigadenfuehrer, you  are making  me uneasy. Because of those three  crosses
I'm not  even  allowed to fly sorties  anymore. There are  lots of Yak's and
MiG's in this world, they say, but only one Vogel Von Richthofen. If not for
that  special  mission, I'd probably be covered  in mold now,  alone  in the
empty barracks... Yes, like "bird". My mother was upset at  first  when  she
found out how my father was planning to name me.  But Baldur Von Schirach --
they  were friends with  my father -- even dedicated an entire  poem to  me.
They study  it  in schools  now...  Careful  --  they're  shooting from that
window... No, the wall is thick enough... I can only imagine what he'd write
if  he  knew about the special mission. This was something  else entirely. I
really bought into that transfer to  the  Western front business, only found
out  in Berlin what it was.  First off,  I got  upset, naturally. I thought:
don't they  have anything better  to do  in "Ahnenerbe" --  recalling combat
pilots from  the  front...  But  when I saw that plane -- Holy Virgin  Mary!
Right away... No, not at all, brigadenfuehrer, I just lived  in Italy when I
was  a kid. Right. Never in all my years of flying I've seen such beauty. It
was only later that I  figured out it  was actually Me-109,  only  different
engine and wings a little longer...  Damn,  the ammo belt jammed... No, it's
all right, I'll manage... So, I walked into  the hangar and just stood there
breathless. So  white, so light -- like it was glowing in the dark. But what
was most amazing -- the preparation. I thought I'd be studying hardware, and
instead they took me to you  guys in "Ahnenerbe", measured the skull, Wagner
playing all along, and  don't  bother asking questions -- everyone's silent.
In short, when  that night  they woke me up I thought it was skull measuring
time again. Then  I look out --  no, these two Mercedes are standing  behind
the window, engines working... Great shot,  brigadenfuehrer! Right under the
turret. How come you're so good with  this thing... So we get  in,  we ride.
Then... Yes, it was cordoned  off, SS guys with torches. We pass them,  then
we get out of  the  forest,  then some kind of building with  columns and an
airport. Not  a soul in sight, gentle breeze -- and the Moon in  the  sky. I
thought I  knew all air fields around Berlin, but I  never saw that one. And
there's  my  plane,  right on  the  runway,  something  attached  under  the
fuselage, also white, kind of like a bomb. But they didn't even let me stand
near it, whisked into that building right away... No, I don't recall really.
Only  remember that Wagner  was  playing. They ordered me to  disrobe,  then
bathed me like I was a baby... No, no, save the grenades for later... Rubbed
my skin with  oil  -- you know, smells  of something ancient, very pleasant.
And they gave me the  flight  uniform, except it was all  white. And  all my
awards right  there on  the breast.  Well, Vogel, I thought, this is it... I
was  dreaming  all my  life about something  like  that.  Then  those,  from
"Ahnenerbe", say to me: go on, captain, go to your plane. They will tell you
everything there. Took turns shaking my hand. So I went. Even the boots were
white,  I was afraid to step in the dust... just a moment. So I go up to the
plane, and there... Wait a  minute, if it  wasn't you, brigadenfuehrer, only
not  in this steel helmet but  in some kind of black cap... So you  begin to
explain it to me  -- climb  to  eleven thousand,  bearing on  the Moon,  the
button is on the left panel... Damn. Just  missed  it...  And that white pad
you  gave me, and then coffee with cognac from the thermos.  I am saying  --
no, I never drink before the flight, and you  looked at me sternly -- do you
have any idea, Vogel, who this coffee is from? So then I turn around and see
-- I'd never believe that... Right. Just  like in newsreels, and the suit is
the same,  double-breasted. Only  with  a cap  on his  head, and  binoculars
around  his  neck. And mustache  a  little  wider  than  they  draw  on  the
portraits. Or it only  seemed that way because of moonlight. He waved at me,
like  at a stadium or something... Anyway,  so I drank  the coffee, got into
the plane, put my oxygen mask  on right away  and took off. And it became so
easy all of a sudden --  like I  was  breathing with  two breasts instead of
one. I climbed  to eleven,  bearing on  the Moon -- it was  huge that night,
half the sky, and then I looked  down. It was all greenish down there,  some
river glistening... That's  where I  pressed  the button. The  plane started
veering to the right, how  I got down -- I  don't even know... Sign it?  You
also scribble something for  me -- just to remember you by. Thank you... Did
many of them manage  to  get through  to  Berlin? Sure, that I understand...
Nothing major, just the brick fragments, I guess. The bridge  of the nose is
intact...  Right, I told you nothing major, I can see it now. This cigarette
box -- you can shave looking into that thing, no mirror needed...

     - ...

     - No, I don't need it anymore;  I didn't even  ask  for it in the first
place. You put it  here yourself, comrade  colonel, just after  you lit that
candle... What was later -- I  read the books,  then I made  a telescope for
myself, a small one.  I mostly studied the  Moon. I even remember  I went as
lunokhod to the school matinee party once... I remember that evening like it
was yesterday... No,  evening,  all  matinees were in the  evening then, and
Saturday was exchanged with  Monday that time(63)... All our  guys assembled
in the hall --  they all had those simple costumes, you know, so they  could
dance. And I had this thing on -- get down on all fours and it really looked
like lunokhod. Music  is blaring, everybody's so flushed... I stood there by
the door  for a while, and  then just  went walking  around the empty school
building. The corridors are all dark, nobody's there... So I crawl towards a
window, on all fours, and right behind it in the sky --  this Moon,  it  was
not even  yellow, rather green somehow, like  on that picture,  you know?  I
have a poster  over my cot, from  the "Working Woman". This  is where I gave
myself a word that I  was going to get to the  Moon... Ha-ha-ha... Well,  if
you, comrade colonel, are going to do your best, that means I will get there
for sure... Afterwards? Zaraisk Academy, right  after  high school, and then
here  right away... You received  it?  Yes, comrade  colonel, I  know,  it's
always better when it's informal like that, on a human level. Right here? Is
it all  right that  the  ink  is  blue? Exactly.  The simpler the  soul, the
shorter  the protocol... Thank you. Raspberry, if I could. Where  do you get
these  carbonation  charges,  for  the siphon?  On the other hand... Comrade
colonel, may I ask you one question? Is it true that all the lunar soil ends
up  here  with you? I don't remember really, one of our  guys, I guess... Of
course I'd  like to, I  only saw it  on TV...  Wow... How much does this jar
hold? Ten ounces  or so?  Could  I really? Thank you... Thank you so much...
Just give me another tissue, to make  sure... Thank you. Sure I remember. To
the right, through  the  corridor, to the elevators, and then down. I  won't
make it by  myself?  Still  under the  influence? So you just see me  along,
then... Woo... No,  never.  The new uniform? No, I  like it, why? We already
had caps in the army once -- the Budyonny hats(64). Looks good, but a little
unusual -- no bill, and the badge is round... No, I didn't forget... What do
you mean -- to the left? Why the torch? Couldn't the electrician... oh yeah,
the  secret access.  A little light  here, the  stairs  are  really steep...
Almost like our lunar landing module. Comrade colonel, that's a dead en...

     There was a loud click and two voices, one  male and one female, belted
out in unison:

     - ...on their lips. The song to this day can be heard in the depths...

     A short pause followed.

     - Of grasslands so fresh, -- the woman sang half-inquisitively.

     - Malachite of the steppes(65), -- reaffirmed the rich baritone.

     I switched the recorder off. I was very scared. I recalled  the colonel
in  the  black cassock with  the whistle  and chronometer  around his  neck.
Nobody  was asking Mityok any questions; that to which he was giving answers
was just soft whistling noise interrupting his soliloquy from time to time.



11.

     Nobody  asked me about  Mityok. Truth  be told,  he wasn't friends with
anyone except myself,  only played  homemade  cards  with Otto from time  to
time. His cot was already taken out from our dorm, and now only the  posters
from "Working Woman" with pictures of "Moonlit Night over Dnieper" and "Khan
Baikonur"  were left as a reminder that there  was once someone named Mityok
living in our world. At the lessons everyone was trying to look like nothing
happened, colonel Urchagin being especially perky and friendly.

     In  the  meantime our small  squadron,  not  noticing the  loss of  the
soldier  as it were, was about to sing its "Little Apple" to the end. No one
was talking about it directly, but it was clear -- the  flight is around the
corner. The  mission chief met with us a  couple of times, telling us how he
was fighting  in  Kovpak's  battalion(66) during  the war,  we all  had  our
pictures  taken -- one by one at first, and then all together, and then with
the  teaching staff in front of the banner. Then we started to meet more new
cadets, they were training separately from us,  I didn't  know exactly  what
for -- there was some talk about an  automated probe to  Alpha Microcephalos
right after our  mission but I wasn't completely sure that the new guys were
in fact the crew of that probe.

     One evening in early September I was suddenly called before the mission
chief. He  wasn't  in his office and the adjutant  in the waiting room, idly
flipping through pages of an old issue of Newsweek, told me he was  in three
twenty nine.

     From behind the  door with  the  number  "329" I could hear voices  and
something that sounded  like  laughter. I  knocked,  but no  one answered. I
knocked one more time and turned the handle.

     A wide strip of  tobacco smoke was hanging under the ceiling, reminding
me for some reason of the jet  trail in the summer sky over Zaraisk Academy.
Strapped with his hands and legs to  the  metal chair  in the middle  of the
room was a small  Japanese  man -- that  he was Japanese I figured  from the
little red circle inside a white rectangle on the sleeve of his flight suit.
His lips were swollen and  blue in color, one eye turned into a  narrow slit
in the middle of massive purple  haematoma, the flight suit  was  splattered
with  blood  --  some  fresh,  some brown and caked over. In  front  of  the
Japanese I saw Landratov  in shiny high boots  and dress uniform of  an  Air
Force  Lieutenant. By the  window, leaning against  the wall with  his  arms
crossed, a  short young man  in civilian clothes  was  standing. The mission
chief  was  sitting in the corner behind the  desk -- he was  looking at the
Japanese  absentmindedly, tapping  against the  desk  with the  end  of  his
pencil.

     - Comrade mission chief, -- I  started, but he waved his hand at me and
began  collecting  the  papers  strewn  across  the desk  into a  folder.  I
transferred my gaze to Landratov.

     - Hi, - he said, offering me  his wide palm, and then all of a  sudden,
absolutely unexpectedly for  me, kicked the Japanese  as hard as he could in
the stomach with his boot. The Japanese gasped.

     - This bastard  here doesn't  want  to be on  the  joint crew!  -- said
Landratov, his eyes wide with amazement, throwing  his arms up,  and rattled
out on the  floor a short tap sequence  with double slap on the  boots,  his
feet turning unnaturally outward.

     - As you were, Landratov! -- the mission chief burbled getting out from
behind the desk.

     From the  corner of  the room I heard a soft whine filled with definite
hatred; I looked there and saw a dog, sitting on its hind legs before a navy
blue plate  with  a rocket printed on  it. It was a very old husky, her eyes
were  completely red, but what startled me  was not her  eyes but  the small
light green  uniform top covering her upper body, with the shoulder  patches
of major-general and two Orders of Lenin on the breast.

     - Meet Comrade Laika(67), - said the mission  chief catching my  stare.
-- She's  the  first  Soviet  cosmonaut. By the  way,  her  parents are  our
colleagues. Worked in the Organs(68), in the North.

     Mission chief  produced a small flask of  cognac, which he proceeded to
pour  onto the plate. Laika made  a feeble attempt  to nip him in the  hand,
missed it and started whining again.

     - She's  quite  vigorous, isn't she?  -- the mission chief said  with a
smile.  --  But  what  she  shouldn't  have  done is pee all over the place.
Landratov, why don't you go bring a rag.

     Landratov went out.

     -  Yoy o tenki  ni narimashita ne, - said the Japanese,  unsticking his
lips. - Hana wa sakuragi, hito wa fujiwara.

     The mission chief turned quizzically to the young man at the window.

     - He's just  delirious, comrade  lieutenant-general,  -  the young  man
replied.

     The mission chief picked the folder off the desk.

     - Let's go, Omon.

     We  ventured  out  into  the  corridor, and  he put  his hand  over  my
shoulders. Landratov, rag in hand,  passed us by  and  winked at me, closing
the door into the three twenty nine behind him.

     -  That  Landratov,   he's  still  green,  -  said  the  mission  chief
contemplatively, -  hadn't settled  yet.  But an outstanding pilot.  A  born
pilot.

     We walked several yards in silence.

     -  So, Omon,  -  said the mission  chief,  -  Baikonur  the  day  after
tomorrow. This is it.

     I  have been waiting for these words for some months now, but still the
sensation was of a heavy snowball, with a steel nut  inside, jamming into my
solar plexus.

     -  Your call letters are  going to be  "Ra", as you  requested. It  was
hard, - the mission chief jabbed his finger up into the air, - but we pushed
it through. Only not a word about it there, - he pointed down, - not yet.

     I didn't remember ever having requested anything of the sort.

     At  the final testing on the rocket  mock-up I was just an  observer --
other  guys were  passing the  exams, and I was sitting on  the bench by the
wall  watching. I've passed my test  a week before, making the fully  loaded
lunokhod turn a hundred yard long figure eight inside  six minutes. The guys
made their time precisely, and then they had us all standing in formation in
front of the mock-up for the farewell photo  shoot.  I  never saw the actual
picture, but I can  imagine  perfectly  how it  turned  out: Syoma Anikin in
front, his face and hands still bearing  the traces of motor oil, behind him
-- Ivan  Grechka,  leaning onto an aluminium walker  (his  stumps ached from
time to time because of  all the underground dampness),  in  a  long  mutton
overcoat,  an undone oxygen mask hanging low around his neck,  then  -- Otto
Pluzis, in the silver spacesuit padded for warmth with a woolen blanket with
a merry  yellow  duckling print, his helmet was drawn back resembling a hood
stiffened  by  interstellar  frost. Then  Dima  Matyushevich  in  a  similar
spacesuit, only the patches of  blanket were  simply green-striped, not with
ducklings,  and then I, the last of  the crew,  in the cadet uniform. Behind
me, in the electric wheelchair of his -- colonel Urchagin, and mission chief
to the left of him.

     - And now, according to  tradition which had turned into a good custom,
- the mission chief said when the  photographer was done, -  we are going to
come up for a few minutes to the Red Square(69).

     We walked across the large  hall and  paused by the small steel door --
to cast  the last look on the rocket, exactly like the one on  which we were
destined  to  soar into the  sky soon.  Then  the  mission chief opened that
little  hole in the wall  with a key  from his ring and we started along the
corridor I've never ventured to before.

     We were  weaving  for  a long  time  between  stone  walls  with  thick
multicolored cables snaking their way along them, several times the corridor
turned sharply, the ceiling coming down so low now and  again that we had to
bend  under. Once I spotted a shallow niche in the  wall with wilted flowers
in it,  a  small  memorial plaque was  hanging nearby, "Here in 1923 comrade
Serob Nalbandyan was viciously murdered with a shovel" inscribed on it. Then
a red carpeted strip appeared under our feet, the corridor widened  and then
ended with a stairwell(70).

     The  stairwell was very long, by its  side  there  was  an incline with
narrow flights  of  steps in the middle --  just  like for strollers  in the
underground passages. I figured why  they  made it  like that when I saw the
mission  chief rolling the  wheelchair with colonel Urchagin up the incline.
When he got winded Urchagin  would  pull  the hand brake and  they  froze in
place, so the others  didn't need  to climb too fast, especially considering
that Ivan always had problems with long stairs. Finally  we ascended  to the
massive oak doors  with  state  seals  carved into  them, the  mission chief
unlocked them with his key, but the door halves saturated with dampness only
gave way when I pushed against them with my shoulder.

     We  were  blinded by sunlight,  someone shielded his eyes with a  hand,
others  turned away  -- only Urchagin  was sitting calmly, with the  routine
half-smile on his face. Once we got accustomed to the light it turned out we
were facing the gray  crypts of the Kremlin wall(71) and I realized  we must
have gone  through the  back  door of  the Mausoleum(72). I haven't seen the
open sky for such a long time that my head was spinning.

     - All cosmonauts,  - the mission chief spoke softly, - all of them,  no
matter how many there were, came  before the  flight here, to the stones and
stands that are sacred to every Soviet  person,  to take  a fragment of this
place in their hearts with them to space. Immensely long and arduous was the
journey  that  our  country  went  through -- we  started with machine  guns
mounted on horse-drawn carriages, and now you guys are working with the most
sophisticated  automatic technology,  - he paused and looked us  over with a
cold unblinking  stare, - that our Motherland had entrusted into your hands,
which Bamlag  Ivanovich  and  I  explained  to you  in  our lectures.  I  am
confident that in this, your last walk on the surface of our Motherland, you
will carry away some remembrance  of the  Red Square with you, even though I
cannot know what it will turn out to be for each of you...

     We were standing silently on the surface of our dear old planet. It was
late in the day, the sky was getting slightly overcast, the bluish firs were
waving their  branches  in the  wind. We  smelled some kind of  flowers. The
clock  tower started  chiming five, mission chief  adjusted the hands on his
watch and told us we still had a couple of minutes.

     We  went out onto  the steps in front of  the  Mausoleum.  There wasn't
anyone  on  the entire  square if you didn't count  two just  changed  honor
guards,  who  never  acknowledged  they  have  seen  us at  all,  and  three
mysterious long coats walking  away in the direction  of the clock  tower. I
looked around, trying to soak in everything I was seeing and feeling at this
moment -- the graying walls of the State Department Store,  the empty "fruit
market" of the St. Basil's, Lenin's Mausoleum, the red-bannered green copper
dome  barely  discernible  over  the  wall, the fronton  of  the  Museum  of
History(73) and the leaden sky, hanging low and looking away from the Earth,
quite  probably unaware of the steel  penis  of the Soviet rocket  about  to
penetrate it.

     - It's time, -- said the mission chief.

     Our  guys filed slowly back behind  the Mausoleum. A minute  later only
colonel Urchagin and I were left under the "LENIN"  inscription. The mission
chief looked at his watch and coughed, but Urchagin said:

     - One moment, comrade lieutenant-general. I'd like to have a word  with
Omon.

     The  mission chief nodded and  disappeared behind the  polished granite
corner.

     - Come here, my boy, - said the colonel.

     I came there. The first drops of rain, heavy and sparse, fell  onto the
stones  of  the  Red Square. Urchagin  grasped  for something in the air,  I
stretched out my hand. He took it, pressed it slightly and jerked me towards
him. I bent over and he started whispering in my ear. I was listening to him
and looking at the way the steps were darkening in front of his wheelchair.

     Comrade Urchagin  must have been talking  for two minutes, making  long
pauses. After  falling silent he pressed my palm once more and took his hand
away.

     - Now go, join the others, - he said.

     I made a movement in the direction of the hatch but stopped.

     - And you?

     The raindrops were quickening all around us.

     -  That's  all right, -  he said,  producing an umbrella  from a sheath
resembling a  holster, attached to the side of  his  chair. -  I'll  take  a
little spin here.

     This is what I brought with  me from the Red Square falling slowly into
the  night  -- the darkened stone  pavement and the slim  figure  in the old
uniform  top, sitting  in  the  wheelchair trying to open the stubborn black
umbrella.

     The dinner  was not particularly tasty --  soup with small  star-shaped
noodles,  boiled  chicken with  rice  and  stewed  dried  fruits for desert;
usually after drinking  the  liquid  I  would eat  up  all the squishy fruit
morsels, but  this time I only ate the wrinkled bitter  pear, then felt sick
all of a sudden and pushed the plate away.



<ul><a name=12></a><h2>12.

     I was floating on one of those water bicycles though thick  reeds, with
enormous telegraph poles sticking out of  them, the  bicycle was  unusual --
not the one with the  pedals in  front of the  seat; it seemed to have  been
converted from the real ground bicycle, between the two long fat floats they
installed the frame with the  word  "Sport" written on it. It was absolutely
unclear where  all those reeds came from,  and the water bicycle, and even I
myself. But I didn't care about that. It was so beautiful around me that all
I wanted to do  was float farther and farther, and look about, and I guess I
wouldn't have  even thought of wanting anything  else  for a  long time. The
most beautiful thing was the sky -- slender long purple clouds hung over the
horizon,  resembling a wing of  strategic bombers in formation. It was warm,
and  the water splashed  a  little  against the  paddles, and  an echo of  a
distant thunder rumbled in the west.

     Then  I  figured it  was not thunder  after all. At  regular  intervals
something within of  me, or maybe outside of me, started to shake so hard my
ears  were  ringing.  After every blow the surroundings  --  the river,  the
reeds, the  sky above  --  looked  more  and  more worn out.  The world  was
becoming familiar down to the smallest  detail, like that bathroom wall  you
have been staring at while sitting on the toilet, and it was happening fast,
until I suddenly realized that my bicycle and I were not among reeds, or  on
the water, or even under  the sky,  but instead inside a translucent  sphere
which separated me from everything  else.  Each blow made the  walls of  the
sphere  harder  and thicker,  less and less light penetrated  through  them,
finally  it got very  dark.  When the  sky  over my  head was replaced by  a
ceiling, a  dim  electric  bulb  turned  itself  on,  walls began  mutating,
changing  shape, drawing  closer, twisting and forming some kind of shelves,
crowded  with glasses, tin cans and who knows what  else. This is  where the
rhythmic  convulsions of  the world became that which it was  from the  very
beginning -- a ringing telephone.

     I was inside  the  lunokhod,  sitting in  the  saddle, clutching at the
handlebars and bent down to the  frame. I was wearing the flight  coat,  fur
hat with earflaps and fur boots, the oxygen mask wrapped around my neck like
a scarf.  The green box  of the telephone screwed onto the floor was ringing
off the hook. I lifted the receiver.

     -  Fuck  you, you  shit-faced  fag! --  the  monstrous  bass in  my ear
exploded  with tortured desperation.  -- What are  you  doing there, jerking
off?

     - Who's this?

     - Chief of Flight Control Center colonel Halmuradov. You awake?

     - What?

     - Suck my dick, that's what! One minute countdown!

     - One minute countdown, affirmative! -- I  screamed back, biting my lip
in horror, bloodying it, and grabbed the handlebars again with my free hand.

     - As-s-s-hole, - the receiver exhaled, and then I caught indecipherable
snippets of  conversation --  I guess the person who was  just yelling at me
was now talking to someone else, holding the microphone  away from his face.
Then something beeped in the receiver and I heard a different voice, talking
in  a  detached  and mechanical fashion,  but still with  a  thick Ukrainian
accent:

     - Fifty nine... fifty eight... fifty se-wen...

     I  was in  that  state  of profound guilt  and shock  when people start
moaning  loudly,  or  shout  dirty  words; the thought  that I almost caused
something irreparable to happen obscured everything else in my mind. Keeping
track of the  numbers peeling off into  my ear I tried to make sense of what
was happening  and came to a conclusion that I hadn't in fact  done anything
horrible yet. I recalled only how  I put down the bowl with the stewed fruit
and pushed myself away from the table,  having lost the  appetite. The  next
thing  I  remembered was the  ringing radio, demanding  that  I  pick up the
receiver.

     - Thirty three...

     I noticed that lunokhod had been fully  stocked. The shelves  that have
always been  barren were  now tightly packed -- oily  cans with the  Chinese
luncheon  meat "Great Wall"  were glistening on  the  bottom, while the  top
shelf contained a pad, a tin mug, can opener and a holster with the handgun,
all that drawn together with thick wire. My  left thigh was pressing against
the large oxygen tank  marked "FLAMMABLE"; my right -- against the aluminium
water canister, its sides reflecting the tiny lamp on the wall. A map of the
Moon was hanging under the lamp, sporting two large black dots, of which the
bottom one was marked "Landing Site".

     - Sixteen...

     I  pushed myself against the  lenses on the  wall. Outside was complete
darkness -- as could  be  expected, since the lunokhod was covered with  the
nose cone deflector.

     - Eight... Se-wen...

     "The fleeting seconds of the countdown, - I recalled comrade Urchagin's
words, -  what are they but the  voice of history multiplied by  millions of
televisions?"

     - Three... Two... Wun... Ignition.

     Somewhere deep below I heard roar and thunder -- it was becoming louder
by the  second and  soon exceeded any imaginable limit. Hundreds  of hammers
were striking into the steel body of the  rocket. Then everything started to
shake, I bumped my head several times on the wall -- if not for the fur hat,
I  swear my brain  would have  been  splattered  all  over. Several cans  of
luncheon meat fell onto  the floor, then came a  blow so hard I  immediately
thought  of a  catastrophe -- and the  next  moment in the receiver I  still
continued to hold to my ear I heard a distant voice:

     - Omon! You're off!

     - <I>Poyehali</I>!(74) --  I  shouted. The thunder  turned  into a  steady and
mighty rumble, shaking -- into  vibrations like  those you  experience in  a
fast-moving train. I put the receiver back, and it rang again.

     - Omon, are you all right?

     It was  the voice of Syoma,  superimposed onto the  monotonous drone of
flight information being read out loud.

     - Sure I'm  all  right, -  I said,  -  but why  are we... On  the other
hand...

     - We thought they were going to scrub the liftoff, you were sleeping so
soundly.  The moment  is  calculated very  precisely, you know.  The  entire
trajectory  depends  on  it. They even sent a soldier up the  rocket, he was
banging  with his boots on the cone, to wake  you  up. And they were raising
you on the intercom all the time.

     - Aha.

     We were silent for several second.

     - Listen, - Syoma started  again, - I only have four minutes left, even
less now. Then I  am disconnecting the first stage. We all already  said our
good-byes to each other, but you... You know, we won't be talking anymore.

     I couldn't find any words that would be appropriate in this  situation,
the only thing I was feeling was extreme embarrassment.

     - Omon, - called Syoma again.

     - Yes, Syoma, - I said, - I can hear you. So we're flying, I guess.

     - Yes, - he said.

     - How  are you doing?  -- I  asked, fully recognizing the futility  and
even insult contained in my question.

     - I'm all right. And you?

     - Fine. What do you see?

     - Nothing. It's all closed in here. The noise is horrible. And shaking.

     - Me too, - I said.

     - Well, - said Syoma, - I should be going now. You know what? When  you
get to the Moon, you remember me, OK?

     - Of course, - I said.

     -  You just think about me. Think that  I  was  there. Syoma. The first
stage. Promise?

     - I promise.

     - You must complete the mission, and do everything you need  to do, you
hear?

     - Yes.

     - It's time. Farewell.

     - Farewell, Syoma.

     I heard several clicks in  the receiver, and then above  the static and
the  roar of the  engines I  caught  Syoma's voice  --  he  was  singing his
favorite song on  top of his  lungs. Then I heard a noise  as if a length of
canvas was being ripped up, and  the receiver turned to the short beeps, but
in the moment before that, if I was not dreaming it up, Syoma's song  became
a scream. I again  got shaken violently, smashing  with my back against  the
ceiling, and lost  my  grip  on the  receiver. By the  changed tone  of  the
engines  I figured that  the second  stage  was  now operational. I  bet the
hardest thing for Syoma was to fire up the engine. I tried to imagine how it
must feel --  to  break the glass over the safety switch and press  the  red
button, knowing  all the  while  that  a  split  second later  the  enormous
wuthering  funnels  of  exhaust  ports  are  going  to come  alive.  Then  I
remembered Vanya and grabbed the receiver again, but it was still beeping in
my ear. I slammed my hand several times against the radio and shouted:

     - Vanya! Vanya! Can you hear me?

     - What? -- his voice asked finally.

     - Syoma, he's...

     - Yes, - he said, - I heard everything.

     - Are you... soon?

     - In seven  minutes, - he said. --  You know what  I am  thinking about
now?

     - What?

     - I just  remembered my  childhood.  How we  were  catching pigeons. We
would take this crate, you know, a small wooden one, like they ship tomatoes
in from Bulgaria, we'd  spread some breadcrumbs under and position it on the
edge, and one side we'd prop up with a stick, and tie a rope to it, like ten
yards or so.  We hid in the bushes, or behind a bench, and as soon as pigeon
walked in, we'd yank the rope. And the crate fell over.

     - Right, - I said, - so did we.

     -  Remember how when the  crate  falls the  pigeon wants to scram right
away,  and  starts  flapping  its wings against the sides -- the crate would
jump up and down then.

     - I remember, - I said.

     Vanya fell silent.

     In the  meantime it started getting quite cold. And it  was  harder and
harder to breathe -- every time I moved I wanted  to catch my breath, like I
just ran up a long flight of stairs. I  started to press the  oxygen mask to
my face to inhale.

     - And also  I remember how we were  blowing up the spent handgun shells
with match heads. You  stuff them in, flatten  the opening, and there has to
be a small hole -- and so you put several matches to it side by side...

     - Cosmonaut Grechka, - the receiver interjected  suddenly with the bass
that woke me up and swore at me before the start, - get ready.

     - Aye,  aye, - said  Vanya  faintly. -- And then you secure them with a
thread, or better yet, electrical  tape, �cause  thread slips sometimes.  If
you want to throw it out the window, like seventh floor, so that it blows up
in mid-air, you need four matches for that. And...

     - Quit talking, - the bass said. -- Put on the mask.

     - Aye. And  you don't strike the box against the last match; best thing
is to light it  from  a smoldering cigarette butt. Or  they  will shift away
from the little hole.

     I have heard nothing after that, only  the usual rattle of static. Then
I got bumped against the wall one more time and the  receiver began beeping.
That my  friend Vanya had just shuffled off this mortal coil at the altitude
of  thirty  miles in  the same  simple and unassuming  fashion which  marked
everything he'd  ever  done was  not quite getting  through to me. I was not
feeling  bereaved  at  all, on  the contrary,  I  was strangely  upbeat  and
euphoric.

     Then I noticed that I am losing consciousness. I mean, I noticed that I
am regaining it,  not losing. I have  been  just holding the receiver  to my
ear, and all of a sudden it was on the floor, my ears were ringing and I was
staring  stupidly  down at it  from my saddle hoisted  up there  against the
ceiling. The  gas mask was just  draped over my neck like a scarf -- and all
of a sudden I was shaking my head trying to get my bearings straight,  while
the mask  was lying  beside the receiver. I figured  I was  oxygen-deprived,
reached for the mask and  pressed it to my lips -- it got better right away,
and I felt how cold I actually was. I fastened all the  buttons on the coat,
raised my collar and lowered the flaps  on the hat over my ears.  The rocket
was vibrating gently. I became very sleepy, and even though I knew it wasn't
a good idea I couldn't help it -- I crossed my hands on  the bars and closed
my eyes.

     I was dreaming of the Moon -- like Mityok was drawing it when he was  a
kid: black  sky,  pale yellow craters and a faraway mountain  range. Holding
his paws in front of his muzzle, a bear with  the golden star of the Hero in
his fur was moving slowly and fluidly toward the fireball of the Sun burning
over the horizon, a dribble of  dried-up blood showing in  the corner of his
agonizingly twisted mouth. Suddenly he stopped and turned in my direction. I
felt his stare upon me, raised my head and looked  deep into  his still blue
eyes.

     -  I and all this world -- we  are nothing but someone's  dream, - said
the bear softly.

     I woke up. It was dead quiet. I guess some part of my consciousness had
been  maintaining  the link  to  the  outside  world, and  the  silence that
enveloped  me acted like an  alarm  clock. I bent over towards the "eyes" in
the wall. It turned out that deflector had already detached -- I was looking
at the Earth.

     I tried to ascertain how long I was asleep -- and couldn't come up with
any specific estimate. Not less than several hours, that's for sure, because
I was hungry. I started grappling on the top shelf -- I remembered seeing  a
can opener  there, but couldn't find it.  I reasoned it  must have fallen on
the floor and began looking around -- and then the phone rang.

     - Hello!

     - Calling Ra, over. Omon! Can you hear me?

     - Aye, aye, comrade mission chief.

     -  Well,  thank goodness, looks  like everything's OK. There  was  this
moment,  see, very  bad, the telemetry just  quit on us. It  did not exactly
quit, see,  but  we  had  to  activate that other system  in  parallel,  and
telemetry wasn't  going through. We had to  abandon control  for a couple of
minutes. That's when you started running out of air, remember?

     He was  speaking very quickly and seemed strangely  agitated. I decided
he was  nervous,  but in the back of  my mind flashed a thought that he  was
simply drunk.

     - You,  Omon,  gave us all a good scare. You were sleeping so tight, we
almost had to postpone the launch.

     - My fault, comrade mission chief.

     - No, no,  that's OK. It's not your fault, really. They overdid  on the
drugs before Baikonur. But everything is going smoothly so far.

     - Where am I now?

     - On the working  trajectory, the ballistic sector. Going for the Moon.
Have you slept through acceleration from the satellite orbit, too?

     - Looks like I have. So, Otto has already...

     - Otto has already. Can't you  see the deflector have detached? You had
to make a couple of  extra orbits,  though. Otto panicked  at first.  Didn't
want  to switch on the booster block. We even thought he chickened  out. But
then the  guy got his  act together, and... In short,  he's  sending you his
good-byes.

     - What about Dima?

     - What  about  him? Dima's  all right.  The  landing  automatics is  in
standby mode in the inertial  segment.  Oh, that's right,  he still has that
correction... Matyushevich, are you receiving us?

     - Aye, sir, - said Dima's voice in the receiver.

     - Get some rest,  - said the mission chief. -- The next transmission is
tomorrow at fifteen hundred, then the trajectory correction. Mission control
out.

     I put the receiver down and pressed my face  to the  "eyes", looking at
the  blue semicircle of the Earth. I often read that all cosmonauts, without
exception, were awestruck by the sight of our planet from space.  They wrote
about  some unbelievably beautiful mist enveloping it, about  the  cities on
the  night side, gleaming  with  electric lights, resembling enormous pyres,
about even being able to distinguish rivers on the day side -- well, just so
you know: none of this is true. What the Earth looks most like from space is
a  smallish school globe  when you  see it through, let's  say, fogged  over
lenses of a gas mask. This spectacle got real dull real soon, I cozied up to
the handlebars and fell asleep again.

     When I woke up  the Earth was nowhere  in sight.  Through the lenses  I
could distinguish only a smattering of stars, faraway and unattainable, made
fuzzy by the optics. I  imagined the existence of a giant fireball,  hanging
in icy darkness without being  attached to anything,  many billions of miles
away  from the nearest stars, tiny  brilliant points  about which  the  only
thing we know is that they exist,  and even that is not certain, because the
star  could  die,  but  its light  would  still  continue  to spread in  all
directions - which means that  in fact we know  absolutely nothing about the
stars, except  that their life is harrowing  and  pointless, since all their
progress through space is predetermined for all time and subject to the laws
of mechanics  and  gravity, not leaving any hope for a chance encounter. But
we  humans, I was  thinking, we seem  to meet, laugh, slap each other on the
backs and  go our  separate  ways, but at the  same time in some independent
dimension  where  our  conscience  dreads to  peek we  instead  are  hanging
motionless,  surrounded by  emptiness, with no  top or bottom, yesterday  or
tomorrow, with no hope to ever grow closer to someone else or to express our
will and change our destiny in even the smallest of ways; we judge about the
events happening to others by observing the deceitful glow that  reaches us,
and all our life we are marching towards what we think is  a light, when the
source of that light  might have long ceased to exist. And this also,  I was
thinking, all my life I subjugated to the dream of soaring above the throngs
of   workers   and  peasants,   members   of  the  military   and   creative
intelligentsia(75), and  now,  hanging in the  glistening black  void on the
invisible  threads  of  fate, I  could see that being a  celestial  body was
something akin to  receiving a  life sentence in a jail  railroad car moving
perpetually around the city freight loop.



13.

     We were  flying at a  speed  of a  mile and a half per  second, so  the
inertial segment of our flight took about three days, but I felt it was more
like a week. That  was probably because the sun passed by the "eyes" several
times a day and every time I was treated to a sunset of breathtaking beauty.

     All  that  was left  of  the giant rocket  now was  the  lunar  module,
consisting  of  the  correction   stage   and  braking  stage,  where   Dima
Matyushevich was sitting, and the lander, or more simply the lunokhod itself
fastened to a platform. To save  fuel, the nose cone was discarded back when
we  were accelerating from  the circular orbit,  so outside the shell of the
lunokhod there was nothing but space now. The lunar module  was traveling in
a  way  backwards,  facing the  Moon with  its  main  engines, and  my  mind
performed the same trick as with the chilly elevator back on Lubyanka, which
turned from the mechanism of descending into the  depths of the Earth into a
device for ascending to the surface. At first  the lunar module was climbing
higher and higher above Earth, and then it  gradually turned out that it was
falling onto the Moon. But there was some difference, too. In the elevator I
was  riding with my head pointing  up, whether I was going up or down. But I
shot out of the Earth orbit with my head down, and only later, after about a
day of flying, I found out that I, with my  head now up,  am falling  faster
and faster  into a deep black well, clutching the handlebars and waiting for
the moment when the non-existent  wheels  of my  bicycle crash silently into
the Moon.

     I  had  enough  time for thinking  about all that because I didn't have
absolutely anything else to do. I often  felt the urge to talk to  Dima, but
he was constantly busy with numerous  and very complex procedures related to
course  correction. From  time to time I  would lift the  receiver and catch
some  of his unintelligible  cursory  communications with the flight control
engineers back in the center:

     - Forty three degrees... five seven... Pitching... Yaw...

     I'd  listen  to  it for  some time  and then  tune  out.  From  what  I
understood,  Dima's main task was to catch Sun into the visor of one optical
instrument and Moon at  the same time into another, measure  something there
and  relay the results  back to  Earth, where they  would compare the actual
trajectory with the computed one  and determine the length of the corrective
firing of the impulse engines. Judging by the fact that I was jolted several
times in my saddle, Dima was acquitting himself admirably.

     When the  jolts ceased,  I waited for  half  an hour  more, lifted  the
receiver and called:

     - Hello! Dima!

     - Speaking, - he answered in his usual dry tone.

     - So, have you corrected the trajectory?

     - Looks like it.

     - Was it hard?

     - OK, I guess, - he answered.

     -  Listen, - I said.  -- How come you're  so good  with this stuff? All
those degrees and pitch and what not? We never had that in the lectures.

     - I served for two years in the Strategic Missile Forces, - he said,  -
they  have a  very similar guidance system, only  using stars.  And no radio
contact  --  you  have  to  do it yourself, with  a calculator. You make one
mistake, and you're fucked.

     - And if you don't?

     He didn't answer.

     - What did you do there?

     - Tactical watch at first. Then strategic.

     - What does that mean?

     - Nothing special. If you're sitting  inside a tactical missile, you're
on tactical duty. And if  you're in the strategic, then  you're on strategic
watch.

     - Was that hard?

     - It's OK.  In civilian terms, it's like a night watchman. One full day
in the missile, three days recuperation.

     - This is why you're all gray... Are they all gray there?

     Dima didn't answer again.

     - This is from the responsibility, right?

     -  Nah. It's more from the  training launches,  -- he said with obvious
unwillingness.

     - What training launches? Oh, that's when they have that small print on
the last page of "Izvestiya"(76) that nobody should be traveling in this and
that quadrant in the Pacific, right?

     - Yes.

     - And do they make those launches often?

     -  It  varies,  really. But  you have to  draw the  straws every month.
Twelve times a year, the entire squadron, all twenty five of us. So the guys
are getting gray, naturally.

     - What if you don't want to draw?

     - It's only a saying. Nobody's drawing anything. In reality, before the
training launch the  morale officer goes around and gives those envelopes to
everyone. Your straw is already inside.

     - So, if it's short, can you refuse?

     - First off, it's the long one, not the short one. And second, no,  you
can't. The only thing you can  do is  apply  for the cosmonaut squadron. But
you have to be pretty darn lucky.

     - Do many guys get lucky?

     - No idea. I did, as you can see.

     Dima was  not exactly  forthcoming with his answers, and often he would
make pauses which were rather rude. I couldn't think of anything else to ask
him and put the receiver down.

     Next  time I  attempted to talk to  him was several minutes before  the
braking was supposed to start. I am  embarrassed to say that I was motivated
by a kind of cruel wonderment: whether Dima  was going  to change his  style
before... In short, I wanted to  check if  he was going to be as reserved as
during our  last  conversation,  or if the  imminent end of the flight would
make him somewhat more talkative. I picked up the receiver and called out:

     - Dima! This is Omon speaking. Please pick up.

     And immediately heard the reply:

     - Listen, can you call back in  a couple of minutes? No,  wait, is your
radio working? Switch it on, quick!

     And  he  slammed  the  receiver  down.  His  voice  was  brimming  with
excitement, so  I figured they were saying something about  us.  But "Mayak"
was transmitting music instead:  when  I turned  on the  radio  I heard  the
jangling  of the  synthesizer  fading  in  the  background, the program  was
ending,  and in a  few seconds radio fell silent.  Then I heard the "precise
time" beeps  and found out  that in  Moscow it was fourteen hundred  of some
kind of hours. I waited a while longer and picked up the phone again.

     - Did you hear? -- asked Dima eagerly.

     - I did, - I said. -- Only I caught the tail end of it.

     - Remember?

     - No, - I said.

     - That was Pink Floyd. "One Of These Days".

     - I can't believe the working masses would ask for that to be played on
the radio, - I said with astonishment.

     - Of course not, - said Dima. --  It's the theme music for the "Life of
Science" program. From the "Meddle" album. Pure underground.

     - You mean you're a Pink Floyd fan?

     - Me? I love them. I  had all the records collected. What do  you think
about them?

     This was the first time I heard Dima talk in such lively voice.

     - Yeah, they're OK, - I  said. -- Not all of it, though. They have this
record with a cow on the cover...

     - "Atom Heart Mother", - said Dima.

     - That  one  I  like. And there was  another  one  I remember -- it's a
double  album, where they sit outdoors, and there  is a  picture on the wall
with the same place where they sit...

     - "Ummagumma".

     - Could be. That one, I think, is not even music at all.

     -  Right!  It's  shit,  not music! -- barked  someone's  voice  in  the
receiver, and we stopped cold for a couple of seconds.

     -  Well,  I wouldn't  say  that, - Dima  started talking finally, - not
really. At the end  they have a  new version of "Saucerful Of  Secrets". The
timbre  is different  from  what they had on the  "Nice  Pair".  And vocals.
Gilmore is singing.

     That I didn't remember.

     - What did you like on "Atom Heart Mother"? -- Dima asked.

     - You know, there  are those two songs,  on the  "B" side.  One is very
soft, just a guitar. And the  other one with the full orchestra. It has this
beautiful bridge. Dum di-di-di-di-di-di-di-di dum da-dum tri-di-dum...

     - I know,  - said Dima.  -- "Summer Sixty Eight". And the  soft  one is
"If".

     - Could be, - I said. - So, which was your favorite record?

     - I'm not in  the  business of  picking favorite  records, -  said Dima
contemptuously. - I like music, not records.  With  "Meddle", for example, I
like  the last song. About  the  echoes. I even break down sometimes when  I
listen  to  it. Translated  it, with  the dictionary and all.  "Overhead the
albatross... And help me understand The best I can..."

     Dima swallowed hard and was silent.

     - You seem to know English well, - I said.

     - Yeah,  they already  told  me that in  the missile  squadron.  Morale
officer did(77). But that's not the point.  I couldn't find this one record.
The  last  leave,  I even went  to  Moscow  especially for  that,  took  400
rubles(78) with me. Hustled all around(79) -- no one even heard about it.

     - What was the record?

     -  You  wouldn't know. It's  for  a  movie.  "Zabriskie Point". Spelled
Z-A-B-R-I-S-K-I-E.

     - Oh, that, - I said. -- I had that one. But it wasn't the album, I had
it recorded  on a reel-to-reel. Nothing special... Dima! What's  wrong? Talk
to me!

     For a long time  there  was  only static in the receiver, and then Dima
asked:

     - What was it like?

     -  Well, how should I say that, - I said pensively. -- You heard "Mor",
didn't you?

     - Sure. Only it's "More", not "Mor".

     -  So  it  was kind of  like that, but  no  singing. Just your  regular
soundtrack. If you heard "Mor", you can  safely say  you  know what that one
was, too. Typical Pinks. Saxophone, synthesizers. And on the "B" si...

     The  receiver  beeped and  Halmuradov's roar filled  the  entire  space
around me.

     - Calling Ra, over! Look at them, just fucking gabbing away! Not enough
to do? Get ready with the soft landing automatics!

     - Oh, shut up! It's ready! -- Dima answered.

     - Then  proceed with orientation of the  braking booster  axis to Lunar
vertical!

     - All right.

     I peeked  out through the lunokhod's "eyes" and saw  the  Moon.  It was
very close -- the picture before my eyes would have resembled the Petlyura's
Ukrainian flag(80) if the top part were blue and not  black. The phone rang.
I picked up, but it was Halmuradov again.

     - Attention!  At  the  count  of three activate the braking booster  by
command from the radio altitude meter!

     - Got it, - said Dima.

     - One... Two...

     I dropped the receiver.

     The booster fired.  It was working in fits  and  starts; twenty minutes
later I  was suddenly thrown with my shoulder against the wall, then with my
back  against the ceiling,  everything started  shaking with unbearably loud
thunder and  I figured that Dima marched off into immortality without saying
goodbye.  But  I was  not feeling slighted -- if  you don't  count that last
conversation, he was always reserved and unaccommodating, and I imagined for
some  reason  that  after  spending  entire  days  in  his  intercontinental
ballistic  thing  he  understood  something  special,  something  that would
forever free him from the obligation of observing the greeting etiquette.

     The  moment  of the landing itself I did  not notice. The  shaking  and
detonations suddenly stopped, and beyond the lenses was again the same pitch
black  darkness as before  the  start.  At first  I thought  that  something
unexpected happened, but then I remembered  that I  was actually supposed to
land during the lunar night.

     I waited, not quite knowing for what, and then the phone rang.

     - Halmuradov here, - said the voice. -- Everything all right?

     - Aye, aye, comrade colonel.

     - The telemetry is about to kick in, - he said, - it'll lower the guide
rails. Drive down to  the surface and report. And don't forget to brake, you
hear?

     And then he added in  a softer voice, apparently holding the microphone
away from his mouth:

     - Un-de-hround. What the fuck.

     The lunokhod swayed back and forth, and I heard a muffled thud from the
outside.

     - Go, - said Halmuradov.

     That  was quite probably the hardest part  of my job -- I had  to drive
down from the lander using two narrow guard  rails  that were now leading to
the lunar  surface.  The  rails  had special  notches  on them,  so  it  was
impossible to slide off, but there still  remained the risk  of one  of  the
rails  ending up on some rock,  which would make the  lunokhod  topple  over
while riding  down. I made several revolutions with the pedals  and felt the
massive  machine tilt and start going by itself.  I stepped on the brake but
the inertia was stronger, lunokhod  was  being dragged down, then the  brake
gave  with a loud  bang  and my legs rotated  the  pedals  backwards several
times, lunokhod lunged unstoppably forward,  lurched  from side to side  and
positioned itself evenly, on all eight of its wheels.

     I  was  now  on the Moon. But  I  haven't  experienced  any  particular
emotions over this  fact; I was more  concerned with  how I was going to put
back the gear chain that had been ripped out. As  soon as I  finally managed
to  do that, the  phone rang again. It was the mission chief. His  voice was
very official and solemn.

     -  Comrade  Krivomazov! On  behalf  of the entire  flight command staff
being present at the moment at the Control Center, I congratulate you on the
occasion  of  soft landing of the Soviet automatic station "Luna-17B"(81) on
the Moon!

     I heard slapping sounds and figured it was champagne being opened. Then
snippets  of music filtered through, some  kind of march, but I could hardly
make it out through the static in the receiver.



14.

     All of my childhood dreams about the future were born of gentle sadness
native to  those  evenings that seem to  be detached  from the  rest of your
life, when you lie in deep grass  by the remains of someone else's campfire,
your bicycle resting nearby, the  west still bearing purple  bands  from the
sun that had  just  set,  while in the east  there  are already first  stars
popping up.

     I haven't seen or experienced very much in my life, but I liked most of
what  I have,  and I  always  counted on  the trip  to the  Moon  to  absorb
everything that I passed by in hopes of encountering it again later, to take
it in  more finally and forever  this time; how was I to know  that the best
things in life are always seen as if from the  corner of  one's eye? While I
was  a  kid, I often imagined extraterrestrial vistas: stone-strewn  planes,
furrowed  by  craters and illuminated by  otherworldly light, sharp mountain
peaks in the distance, black sky with the glowing coal of the sun  and stars
around it; I pictured the layers of  space  dust,  many  feet deep, and  the
stones resting motionless on the lunar surface for billions  and billions of
years -- I was for some reason strongly impressed by the thought  of a stone
being able  to remain in one place for all  that time, and then I would bend
down  and pick it up with  the thick fingers  of my spacesuit. I thought  of
looking up and seeing the blue globe of Earth above, looking like the school
globe distorted  by the  teared-over  lenses  of the gas mask, and how  this
ultimate moment of my life will connect me to all those other moments when I
felt myself on the verge of something wondrous and unfathomable.

     In reality, the Moon turned out to be this tiny space, stuffy, confined
and black,  with the feeble electricity switching  on  once in  a while;  it
turned out  to be the invariable darkness in  the  useless lenses and fitful
uncomfortable  sleep in a scrunched-up position, my head pushing against the
hands crossed on the handlebars.

     I was moving  slowly,  no more than three  miles a  day, and  I had  no
notion  of what the world around  me looked like.  On the other  hand,  this
domain  of eternal darkness probably did not  look  like anything  at all --
except myself there was no one else for whom something  here would have been
able  to look like something, and I did  not switch on the front headlamp to
conserve energy in the  battery. The ground under the  wheels was apparently
absolutely  smooth --  the machine  was gliding over it steadily. I couldn't
turn  the handlebars at  all,  though  --  something  must  have  jammed the
steering during landing, so the only thing left to do for me was to push the
pedals.  The toilet  was  extremely uncomfortable in use - so much so that I
always held it  in until the last possible moment, just like long ago during
the siesta  hours in the day  care.  But still, my journey into space was so
long in the making that I was not about to let the sullen thoughts take hold
of me, and I was even happy sometimes.

     The hours and days passed; I only stopped when I needed to drop my head
onto the hands  and  fall  asleep.  The stores of  luncheon meat  were being
depleted slowly, there was less and less water in the canister, each evening
I extended by half an  inch the red line on the map hanging  before my eyes,
and the end of the line was  drawing closer and  closer to the  little black
dot beyond which it will cease to exist. The dot reminded me of the way they
mark the stations on  the subway map; the fact  that it did not have  a name
was very irritating, and so I scribbled "Zabriskie Point" next to it.

     Clutching  the nickel-plated  ball with my right hand in the pocket  of
the coat, I  have been staring at the label with the  words "Great Wall" for
at least an  hour  now. I was feeling the warm breeze over the fields of the
faraway China, and annoying buzz of the phone on the floor interested me not
a bit, but I picked up the receiver after a while anyway.

     - Calling Ra,  over! Why are  you not responding? What's with the light
switched  on? And standing  in place? I  can  see  everything  here  through
telemetry.

     - Just resting, comrade mission chief.

     - Report the odometer readings!

     I looked at the small steel cylinder with numbers.

     - Thirty two point seven kilometers.

     - All right, turn off the light and listen here.  We've been looking at
the map -- you're just coming up to the place.

     My heart skipped a beat,  even though I knew that the  black  dot which
was staring at  me  like  a  barrel of a  gun  from the map  was still  some
distance away.

     - What place?

     - The landing module of the "Luna-17B"

     - But I am the "Luna-17B", - I said.

     - So what. They are, too.

     He appeared to be  drunk -- again. But I understood what he was talking
about. It was  that  mission for  delivering  the lunar  soil  samples,  two
cosmonauts  landed   on  the   Moon  that   time,  Pasyuk  Drach  and  Zurab
Parzwania(82). They had a small rocket with them, they  used it to  launch a
pound of soil back to Earth, after  which they lived for a minute and a half
on the surface of the Moon and then shot themselves.

     - Attention, Omon! -- said the mission chief. -- Be  very careful  now.
Reduce the speed and turn on the headlamp.

     I  flicked  the  switch  and pressed against  the  black lenses  of the
"eyes". The optical distortions made the blackness around the  lunokhod seem
to come around in a kind of an arch  above, continuing as endless  tunnel in
the  distance. I  only could  make  out clearly a small patch  of the  stony
surface in front,  uneven  and  scratchy  -- it  must have  been the ancient
basalt shield; every yard or so across the line of my  movement short oblong
humps were protruding from it, resembling very much sand dunes in a  desert,
it was weird that I did not feel them at all while moving.

     - Well? - the receiver inquired.

     - I can't see anything.

     - Turn off the lights and go. Slowly.

     I was driving  for forty  more minutes.  And then lunokhod bumped  into
something. I picked up the phone.

     - Calling Earth, over. There's something here.

     - Headlamp on.

     Right in the middle  of my field  of  view two hands  in black  leather
gloves were lying,  the outstretched fingers on  the right one cradling  the
handle of a scoop still containing  a  small amount  of sand mixed with tiny
pebbles, while the left was clutching the glistening  Makarov(83). Something
dark  was visible  between the hands. Looking more intently, I was  able  to
discern the raised  collar of  the  officer's coat and  the  top  of the hat
sticking  out  of it;  the  shoulder and part of the  head  of the prostrate
person were obscured by the lunokhod's wheel.

     - Well, Omon, what is it? -- exhaled the receiver into my ear.

     I described briefly the picture before my eyes.

     - The patches, shoulder patches, what kind?

     - I can't see them.

     - Back up a couple of feet.

     - Lunokhod does not back up, - I said. -- Pedal back is the brake.

     - Ahh... Oh shit... How many times  I told  the chief constructor... --
the mission  chief mumbled. -- Well,  as they say: if I knew where I'd fall,
I'd put  some  hay there. This is  what I  was wondering -- if it's Zura  or
Pasha. Zura was a captain, you see,  and Pasha was a major. All  right, turn
the light off, you'll deplete the battery.

     - Aye,  sir, - I said,  but before carrying out the order  I looked one
more time at  the  motionless hand and the woolen top of the hat. I couldn't
bring  myself  to start  moving for a while,  then I clenched my  teeth  and
leaned on the pedal with all my weight. The lunokhod jerked up, and a second
later -- down.

     -  Go,  -  said  Halmuradov,  who replaced  the  mission  chief at  the
controls. -- You're behind schedule.

     I  was saving the battery  and spending almost  entire time in complete
darkness, rotating the  pedals doggedly and turning the lights on for just a
couple of  seconds at a time to consult  the compass -- even though that did
not make any sense at all, since the handlebars were not functioning anyway.
But those were my orders from Earth. It is hard to describe the sensation --
darkness, a hot confined space, sweat dripping  down from my forehead, light
swaying  motion  --  I  would  imagine a  fetus in the womb  must experience
something similar.

     I  was  aware,  of course, that  I  was  in fact on the  Moon.  But the
enormous distance that was separating me from the Earth took  on a  shade of
pure abstraction. I felt  that  the people I  was  talking to over the phone
must  be  somewhere  close --  not  because their voices were  clear in  the
receiver,  but  because  I  could not  imagine  the  duty relationships  and
personal feelings  -- something  so completely ephemerous --  to be  able to
stretch  several hundred thousand miles. The strangest thing of all was that
the memories which  connected me  to  my childhood seemed to have  stretched
over the same unthinkable distance.

     When I was still in school, I usually would while away the summers in a
suburban village on  a side of the parkway.  Most of the time I spent in the
saddle of a bicycle, sometimes putting  on twenty - twenty five miles a day.
The bicycle was  not  properly adjusted --  the  handlebars were located too
low,  and I had  to lean forward  quite  a bit over them, just like  in  the
lunokhod. And so  now, apparently because my body  was  forced to assume the
same position for a long  time, I began having mild  hallucinations. I would
drift  off, go to sleep while I  was still awake -- that was especially easy
because of  darkness --  and imagine that  I  see  my shadow on  the asphalt
flying  back from under me, see  the dotted  white line of  the  median  and
inhale the air saturated with exhaust. I even started perceiving the roar of
trucks  rushing by and the  rumble  of  tires against the  asphalt; only the
scheduled  transmissions from  Earth brought  me back. But then I would drop
out of  the lunar reality again,  transport myself to that suburban road and
realize how significant the hours I spent there were in my life.

     Once I  was  hailed by comrade Kondratiev,  who started  reading  poems
about the Moon again. I did not know how to ask him to stop nicely, but then
he began  to read one poem that  seemed like a  snapshot of my soul from the
very first lines.

     - You and I, we believed in the closeness of fate

     But I started to notice as I'm looking back

     How my youth that I'm fond of recalling of late

     Seems so out of my stripes, and unreal as heck.

     It's the glow of the Moon, full of subtle deceit

     Right between me and you, like the shore and the drowned,

     Or the telegraph road and your back which I see

     As you race to that Moon on the bike that you owned.

     For a long time you....

     I sobbed softly, and comrade Kondratiev stopped cold.

     - How does it go next? -- I asked.

     - I forgot, - said comrade Kondratiev. -- Went right out of my head.

     I did not  believe him, but  I knew that  to  protest or  beg  would be
futile.

     - What are you thinking about now? -- he asked.

     - Nothing really, - I said.

     - This can't be, -  he said. -- At least  one thought is always running
around in the head. Tell me, will you?

     - I recall my childhood often, - I said unwillingly. - How I would ride
the bicycle. Very  much like  now. And one thing I still can't understand --
there I was, riding the bicycle, and I remember how the handlebars were low,
and the breeze so fresh...

     I fell silent.

     - Well? What's that you can't understand?

     - I was going towards the river, I think... So how come I...

     Comrade  Kondratiev was silent for a couple of minutes and then put the
receiver down.

     I turned "Mayak"  on --  by  the way,  I didn't  put much faith  in  it
actually being "Mayak", even though the radio  was trying to assure me of it
every couple of minutes.

     - Seven sons are the gift to our Motherland from Maria Ivanovna Plahuta
from the village of Maly Perehvat(84), - related the voice soaring above the
working  midday(85)  of the faraway Russia, - and  two of them, Ivan Plahuta
and Vassily Plahuta, are serving in the military now, in the  Tank  Corps of
the Ministry of the  Interior. They asked us to  play for  their mother  the
joke song  "Samovar".  We are fulfilling  your  request,  boys.  Dear  Maria
Ivanovna, for you today the  song will be performed by the People's Joker of
the USSR(86) Artem Plahuta, who  responded to our request with all  the more
willingness considering that he himself demobilized eight years prior to the
brothers, in the rank of sergeant major.

     The mandolins tinkled, cymbals crashed  a couple  of times,  and then a
voice full with deep feeling started singing, pressing on the  r's like on a
bystander in an overflowing bus:

     - It's r-really hot, the boil-boiling water...

     I  slammed the  receiver down. The words made me  physically cringe.  I
remembered Dima's gray head and the cow from the "Atom Heart Mother"  cover,
and my  back twisted in  a slow cold  shiver. I  waited for a minute or two,
then decided  that the song must be over by now and turned the black  handle
again.  It was  quiet for a  second, and then the baritone that  went for  a
moment into hiding burst out into my face:

     - Tea it ser-rved for all the bastards,

     Fiery water was on tap!

     This time I waited much longer,  and when I turned the radio back again
the woman host was speaking:

     - ... us remember our cosmonauts, as well as all  those  whose  earthly
toil makes their celestial watch possible. It is for them today that we...

     I  suddenly went back deep  into  my own thoughts,  or more  accurately
crashed into one of them, as if under the  ice, the hearing returned back to
me only several minutes later,  when the somber choir  of distant basses was
already putting the last bricks into the monumental wall of  the  new  song.
Despite  the fact that I was  completely  divorced  from  reality,  I  still
continued to automatically  push on  the pedals,  sticking my right knee far
out -- this way the blister from the fur boot was not hurting too badly.

     Here's what struck me.

     If I could  now, by closing  my eyes,  place myself -- to  the extent a
person could  be in a place at all -- on the illusory  suburban parkway, and
the  non-existent asphalt, foliage and  sun before my closed eyes became for
me as real  as if I was  in fact rushing down the hill at my favorite second
gear;  if,  having  completely forgotten  about  Zabriskie Point,  which was
literally just ahead,  I  still  was  from  time to  time happy for  several
seconds at a time, - didn't this all mean that while  still in my childhood,
right  then, when I was not simply  a detached part of the world immersed in
the  summer happiness, when I  really  did  fly by  on my bicycle along  the
asphalt  strip, towards the wind and the sun,  oblivious  to everything that
was waiting  for me ahead, - didn't it mean that at  that time I was already
rolling forward across the dead black surface  of the  Moon, only perceiving
what was reaching me through  the crooked "eyes" of the lunokhod solidifying
around me?



15.

     "Socialism is a society of civilized co-operative workers headed by the
monstrous Rasputin, being  copied and  photographed not only by large groups
of collective propagandists  and agitators,  but also collective organizers,
distinguished  by  their  place in the  historically  determined  system  of
utilizing the airplanes against the needs and tribulations of the low-flying
cavalry, which in turn is dying, withering, but  is  as limitless as we need
to reorganize the People's Inspections Office."

     Above the text, printed in gold letters, there was a cartouche with the
golden sharp-bearded profile and the word "LENIN" arranged in a semi-circle,
bordered by two olive branches made from foil. I passed by this place often,
but  there were always other people around, and I couldn't inspect it closer
with them watching. I stared the  entire installation over: it was a largish
easel, about a yard in height, clad in purple velvet. It was attached to the
wall  by two  hinges,  with  the other  end of it  held  tightly by  a small
hook-and-eye. I looked around.  The siesta hour  was not over yet, and there
was no one in the corridor. I went to the window -- the alley leading to the
mess hall was empty as well, with only  two  lunokhods creeping slowly along
it towards me from  the far end; I recognized that those were Yura and Lena,
the camp counselors.  It was quiet, only  soft clanking  of  the ball on the
ping-pong table was reaching me from down on the first floor -- the  thought
of someone having permission to play ping-pong during the siesta hour filled
me  with melancholy.  I  unhooked the  easel  and  pulled it  towards me. It
exposed a portion  of the wall behind, with a big switch in the middle, also
painted gold. Feeling more  and  more  uneasy in the  pit of  my stomach,  I
stretched my hand and clicked the switch up.

     A soft whistle sounded and  I,  while  still  not completely  conscious
about what it was,  felt that I performed something  horrible over the world
around me and over myself. The whistle came on again, now louder, and all of
a  sudden it  turned out  that the switch, the opened purple  door  and  the
entire corridor where I was standing -- none of it was real, because in fact
I was not standing before the wall with the switch on it at all, but instead
sitting in a very  uncomfortable pose in some strange, very tight place. The
whistle sounded once more, and in a couple of seconds the lunokhod congealed
all  around. Another whistle,  and  a thought flashed  through my mind  that
yesterday,  before lowering my head onto the handlebars, I continued the red
line on the map exactly to the black dot signed "Zabriskie Point".

     The whistles were the telephone ringing.

     - Had a nice nap,  you motherfucker? -- rumbled the  receiver  with the
voice of colonel Halmuradov.

     - You are motherfucker yourself, - I said, suddenly getting mad.

     Halmuradov burst  into laughter, vibrant and  infectious --  I realized
that he was not offended at all.

     - I am  here all alone  again, in the Control Center. All our guys went
to  Japan,  to   hash  everything  out  for   the  joint   mission.  Pcadzer
Vladilenovich  is sending his  greetings, he  was very upset he  wouldn't be
able to say  goodbye in person -- everything was decided in the last moment.
And they left me here, all because of you. So, today's the day  when you are
deploying the radio beacon? Your troubles are over, looks like? Happy?

     I did not answer.

     -  You couldn't be mad at me, huh? Omon? Is it about me calling  you an
asshole back then? Come on! You were having the  entire Control Center doggy
style, we almost had to scrub the mission, - said Halmuradov. -- What's with
you? You're like a broad... Are you a  man or what? This day in  particular.
You just remember.

     - I remember, - I said.

     - Button everything down as tight as you can, - started Halmuradov with
concern, - especially the coat over the neck. Now, about the face...

     - I know everything better than you do, - I interjected.

     -  ... goggles first,  then wrap the scarf over, the hat goes on  last.
Tie it  under the chin. Gloves. The sleeves  and boots  -- cinch around with
the string. Vacuum  is no  joke.  If everything is right, you'll have  about
three minutes. Understood?

     - Yeah.

     - Not "yeah", fuck you, "aye, sir!". Report when ready.

     They  say that in  the last minutes of his  life a  man sees it in  its
entirety, as if in rapid rewind. I wouldn't know. Nothing like that happened
to me,  no matter how I tried. Instead I vividly, down to the minute detail,
imagined Landratov  in  Japan --  how  he is walking  down  a sunlit morning
street, in expensive freshly  bought sneakers, smiling and probably not even
thinking what  it was he  put them on  in  the morning.  I also imagined all
others -- the mission chief,  now transformed into a graying intellectual in
a suit and tie, and comrade Kondratiev, giving a thoughtful interview to the
"Vremya" correspondent(87). But not a single thought about myself was coming
to me. To calm myself down I turned "Mayak" on and listened to a quiet song.
I remembered how long ago in my childhood I was  crawling on linoleum in the
gas  mask, singing  along silently with the distant loudspeaker, and started
singing in a soft voice.

     Suddenly the radio switched off and the phone rang.

     - Well, - asked Halmuradov, - ready?

     - Not yet, - I answered. -- What's the rush?

     - You really are an asshole, - said Halmuradov, - now I get why in your
personal record  it said that  you didn't have any childhood friends, except
that fuck that we  shot. Do you ever think about others, and not yourself? I
am going to miss tennis again.

     For some  reason  the thought that  Halmuradov, his  fat  pasty  thighs
squeezed  into  white  shorts,  will be standing soon on the  tennis  court,
bumping the ball on the asphalt, and I  will not be anywhere anymore, seemed
incredibly  insulting to me --  not  because  I was jealous towards him, but
because  I  recalled  with blinding clarity  a sunny  September  day at  the
stadium,  from the high school times. But then I remembered that  once there
is no me,  there won't  be  any  Halmuradov or any stadium either,  and this
thought chased away the melancholy that I dragged with me from the dream.

     -  Others? What others? -- I  asked quietly. -- Never mind, though. You
go, I'll handle it myself.

     - You drop that.

     - No, you can go, really.

     -  Drop  it,  -  said Halmuradov earnestly.  --  I have to fill out the
forms, close  the books, register the signal from the Moon, put the time and
date. You just do your thing fast, OK?

     - What about Landratov, is he in Japan too?

     - Why do you ask? -- muttered Halmuradov with suspicion in his voice.

     - No reason. Just remembered something.

     - What did you remember? Huh?

     -  Nothing really, - I  answered. -- Remembered how  he was dancing the
"Kalinka" at the final exam.

     -  Understood.  Hey,  Landratov,  are  you  in Japan or not? There's an
inquiry about you here.

     I heard laughter and slippery whine of fingers clutching the receiver.

     - He's here, - Halmuradov said finally. -- Sends his greetings.

     - Same to him. All right, looks like it's time to go.

     - Push out  the hatch, -  Halmuradov began  talking  in  fast monotone,
repeating  the  instructions that I knew by heart, -  and  grab  on  to  the
handles,  so  that the air does  not throw  you. Than inhale from the oxygen
mask through the scarf  and get out. Fifteen steps  along  the  path of  the
lunokhod, take out the pennant with radio beacon,  put it down and switch it
on. Carry  it a little farther, will  you, or the  lunokhod will shield  the
signal... Then... Well, we gave you the handgun, one round is in the barrel,
and our cosmonaut detachment never had any cowards...

     I put the  receiver back. The phone  began ringing again, but I paid no
attention  to it. For a moment I was overcome with  desire not to switch the
beacon on, so that this bastard Halmuradov could sit in the Center until the
end of the day and then  receive  some kind of official Party reprimand, but
then I remembered Syoma and his words that I must complete  the mission  and
do everything I needed to do. I couldn't betray the guys from the first  and
second stage, and  silent Dima  with them, they  died so that I could now be
right  here, and in  the  face of their short but exalted lives  my anger at
Halmuradov  seemed petty and shameful in  comparison.  When I realized  that
now,  in  a few moments, I am going to pull together and do everything I was
supposed to do, the telephone quit ringing.

     I began preparing myself, and in half an hour I was ready. I stuffed my
ears and nose extremely tight with special hydro-compensatory tampons  (that
is,  oiled  cotton balls)  and  performed  a  check-up  of  my  clothing  --
everything appeared to be tightly buttoned, tucked  and  cinched; the rubber
band of the motorcycle goggles was pulling  too strongly,  so that they were
cutting  painfully into  my face,  but I decided not to bother --  I did not
have  too  long to  suffer from  it.  Taking the  holster from  the shelf, I
extracted the gun, cocked it and shoved it into the pocket of my coat. After
slinging the backpack with the pennant-radio beacon over my shoulder I would
put  my hand on the receiver but then remembered that I have already plugged
the ears, and anyway  I wasn't much in the mood to spend the last moments of
my life in discussions  with Halmuradov. I  recalled our last talk with Dima
and decided that I was right to deceive  him about "Zabriskie Point" the way
I did. It must feel bitter to leave this world if you are leaving some  kind
of a mystery behind.

     I exhaled like I was going  to dive into water and began taking care of
business.

     The long  hours of training  made my body remember what it needed to do
so precisely that I haven't stopped for  a second, even though I had to work
in almost total darkness, because battery was depleted to the point that the
lamp wasn't giving out any light  at  all  -- only the dark  red worm of its
spiral  could be  seen.  First  I had  to undo  the five  screws  around the
perimeter of the hatch. When  the last of them clanked  on the floor, I felt
my  way on the wall for the bump of the glass window of the  emergency hatch
release port and whacked  it hard  with the last remaining can of the "Great
Wall".  The glass  shattered. I  put my hand inside, inserted my finger into
the ring of the actuator and jerked it towards  me. The actuator was in fact
the "F-1" hand grenade fuse, so it had a delay of about three seconds, which
gave  me just  enough time  to grab the handlebars and place my head  as low
down as  I could. Then I heard a blast above  my head  and lunokhod shook so
violently that I was almost  thrown out of the saddle, but I managed to hold
on. The next second I raised my head. The bottomless blackness of open space
was  above me.  Between it  and  myself was  only  the  thin  plastic of the
motorcycle goggles. It was pitch dark  all  around. I bent over, took a deep
breath from  the oxygen mask, then scrambled awkwardly over the rim  of  the
hatch, raised myself up on my feet  and started forward -- every step coming
at  a cost of  enormous effort because of splitting pain in my back, which I
was  flexing for the first time in a month. I really  didn't  want to go the
full fifteen  steps, so  I went down on one knee, unfastened the  tie on the
backpack with the  radio beacon  and began pulling it  out, but it caught on
the fabric  with its  switch and wouldn't  budge. It was becoming harder and
harder to keep the air in my lungs, and for  a short moment I panicked --  I
thought that  I would die right then without fulfilling that for which I was
here.  But  then  the backpack slipped  off,  I  placed the beacon  onto the
invisible surface of the Moon and turned the switch. The ether was now being
filled  with  the  encoded  words  "LENIN",  "USSR"  and  "PEACE",  repeated
automatically every three seconds, and on the body  of the beacon a tiny red
lamp was shining, illuminating the picture  of  the  globe floating  through
wheat stooks  -- for the  first  time in  my life I noticed that the coat of
arms of my Motherland represents the view from the Moon.

     The air  was  burning to rush out of  my lungs,  and  I knew  that in a
couple  of  seconds I  will  exhale  it and  swallow  a  mouthful  of  fiery
emptiness. I chucked the nickel-plated ball  as far as I could.  It was time
to die.  I took the  gun out, placed it  against  the temple  and  tried  to
remember what was  most important in  my short existence, but  nothing would
come to my  head except the story of Marat Popadya that  his father told us.
It seemed absurd  and even  insulting that  I  would die  with this thought,
which  did not have absolutely any bearing on my own life, and I was  trying
hard to think about something else but couldn't, my mind drawing the picture
of the winter woods, a clearing, the rangers hiding in the bushes, two bears
approaching  the hunters  growling  -- and pulling the  trigger,  I realized
suddenly with indisputable  clarity  that  Kissinger knew. The gun misfired,
but it was  obviously  all over even  without  it,  I saw bright  lifesavers
floating before my eyes, tried to catch one of them, missed  it and  crashed
onto the icy black lunar basalt.

     A sharp stone was lodged against my cheek -- it was not painful because
of the scarf, but uncomfortable nonetheless. I  propped myself on the elbows
and looked around. There  wasn't  anything  to be  seen. My nose was itching
like crazy, I sneezed and one of  the  cotton tampons flew out. I jerked the
scarf  off of my neck, then  the  goggles and hat, then pulled the remaining
tampons out  of the  nose  and ears. I couldn't hear anything, but the smell
was distinctly moldy. It was wet and rather cold, despite my having the coat
on.

     I stood up,  tried  to  feel  around with  my hands  and  began  moving
forward.  Right  away  I tripped  over  something  but managed to regain  my
balance. In  a few  steps my hands met  a  wall;  I could  feel thick cables
hanging low  along it, covered in sticky fluff. I turned back and started in
the other direction, this time I was walking much more carefully, raising my
knees  high,  but tripped again  anyway. Then another  wall  with cables was
under my hands. This is when I noticed the tiny  red  lamp about  five yards
away, illuminating the metal pentagon, and recalled everything.

     But  I wasn't  able to rationalize it  or even have a single thought on
the matter  -- far away  to my right something  flashed, I  turned  my head,
shielding the  eyes instinctively with my hand and was  able  to distinguish
between the fingers  a  long tunnel, bright light shining at the end  of it,
revealing the walls covered with cables.

     Turning away, I saw the lunokhod standing on the  rails, my  long black
shadow falling over it (unknown artisan  splattered  it all over  with stars
and the  words "CCCP"), and  moved backwards in its  direction,  covering my
eyes  from the  blinding light which floated to me over the rails, reminding
me somehow of the setting sun.  Something banged on the lunokhod's side  and
at the same moment I heard a loud crack; I realized I was  being shot at and
dashed  behind  the lunokhod.  Another  bullet chimed  against its side, for
several seconds it  was resonating  like a giant funeral  bell. I heard  the
soft  clickety-clack of wheels on the rails, then another shot, and then the
sound of wheels died down.

     - Hey you, Krivomazov! -- an inhumanly loud voice thundered. -- Get out
with your hands in the air, you son of a bitch! They gave you a medal!

     I peeked carefully from behind the  lunokhod: about fifty yards from me
a  small handcar  was standing on  the rails, its headlamp shining brightly,
and in front  of the  light a man  with a bullhorn  in his left hand  and  a
handgun  in his right was  swaying on widely positioned  legs. He raised the
weapon,  a shot  rang  out  and the  bullet, having deflected  several time,
whizzed by under the ceiling. I hid my head again.

     - Get out, you bastard! One!

     The voice sounded familiar, but I couldn't quite place it.

     - Two!

     He shot one more time, hitting the side of the lunokhod again.

     - Three!

     I peeked out carefully and saw him place the bullhorn onto his handcar,
stretch his  arms to the sides and trudge in  a  slow gait between the rails
towards  the  lunokhod.  When he came  a little closer, I heard  that he was
making  buzzing  sounds  with his mouth, imitating the airplane engines, and
recognized him immediately -- it was  Landratov. I started backing  away but
quickly realized  that once he flies past the lunokhod I will  be completely
defenseless. After a  moment's hesitation,  I crouched and lunged under  the
low serrated bottom.

     Now the only thing I could see was the pair of feet jumping from tie to
tie,  very  agile but  turned somehow outwards. It looked  like  he did  not
notice.  Approaching  the lunokhod  he started buzzing in a different,  more
strained  tone;  I understood that he  was banking  sharply,  trying  to fly
around  the  lunokhod. His boots  flashed  between the heavy cast wheels and
then, unexpectedly for  even  myself, I  grabbed  his  legs. When  my finger
encircled  his shins I almost let  go because of the  sickening sensation of
emptiness in his boots. He screamed and fell down, I didn't release my hands
and the prosthetics under the  supple leather turned unnaturally sideways. I
gave them one more twist  and started climbing out from under the  lunokhod;
when I extricated  myself he was already crawling  towards the  gun which he
dropped when he fell and  which was now lying  between the  rails. I did not
have more than a couple of seconds, so I grabbed the massive pentagon of the
beacon and lowered it  forcefully  on the  back of  Landratov's straw-haired
head.

     I heard a crunching sound, and the red lamp went out.

     Landratov's  handcar was much lighter  than my  lunokhod and was moving
much faster. The headlamp attached to a large car battery was illuminating a
round gallery, cables strewn along its walls all covered with  the same kind
of sticky threads that grow, for example, on the twine that you  use to hang
something  from the ceiling in  a kitchen  or a dining room. The gallery was
apparently an abandoned subway tunnel, several times other  tunnels branched
off,  just  as black  and lifeless  as the  one  I  was  traveling  in. Rats
sometimes crossed the ties -- some of them were the size of a small dog, but
thankfully they took no interest in me. Then another side tunnel appeared on
the  right,  similar  to  the previous ones,  but when  I approached  it the
handcar swerved to the right so forcefully that I was thrown onto the rails,
hurting my shoulder.

     Turned out that the switch I  was passing was  in half-locked  state --
the front wheels went  forward while the rear turned right, and  as a result
the handcar was lodged dead. I figured that I would have to make the rest of
the way on  foot in complete darkness,  and plodded forward, regretting  all
the  while  that I  didn't take Landratov's Makarov  with me  --  though  it
certainly would be useless  against  the rats anyway if they decided to jump
me.

     I didn't make it as far as a hundred feet when I heard dogs barking and
people  shouting ahead. I  turned and  began  running  back. Lights went  on
behind  me,  looking over my shoulder  I  could  see the gray  bodies of two
German shepherds jumping over the ties in front  of people pursuing me;  the
only visible part of the pursuers were the swaying  dots of the flashlights.
Nobody was shooting -- I guess they were afraid to hit the dogs.

     - There he is! Belka! Strelka!(88) Sic him! -- someone screamed.

     I turned into the side tunnel and scurried  ahead with as much speed as
I could muster, jumping high to avoid breaking  the legs. I stepped on a rat
once and almost slipped, and then I saw bright,  unblinking, unearthly stars
-- they were  shining to the right  of me, I dashed  there, bumped  into the
wall and started climbing, grabbing onto cables and sensing with my back the
German  shepherds speeding towards me. Once I  tumbled over the edge, I fell
down and didn't  break my  neck  only because I slammed into something soft,
like a recliner still wrapped in plastic. I tumbled over it, squeezed myself
into an opening between the rows of cartons and crates and started crawling.
Several times my hands bumped against plastic covers on backs of  chairs and
arms of  sofas. Then it started  getting  lighter.  I heard someone  talking
softly right  nearby and froze. In front of me was the back of a bookcase --
a  plywood sheet with  a big  word "Nevka" stamped  on it.  The barking  and
shouting was still going on somewhere  behind me, and then I heard someone's
voice, amplified through a bullhorn:

     - Stop that! Silence! We're live in two minutes!

     The  dogs  continued  barking,  and  someone  started  explaining in an
impertinent tenor what the problem was, but the bullhorn roared again:

     - I  said, get the fuck off the set! I'll have you court-marshaled, and
those dogs with you!

     The  barking  faded in  the distance  -- I guess they  dragged the dogs
away.  A couple  of minutes later  I gathered enough courage  to  peek  from
behind the bookcase I was lying next to.

     At  first  I  imagined I  was inside  some kind  of  an  ancient  Roman
planetarium.  On  the  very  high  domed  ceiling  the  distant  stars  were
glistening with tin and glass, switched to about one third of full capacity.
A hundred  feet  from where  I was I saw an old tower  crane; hoisted on its
boom about  ten  feet above the  floor the  enormous  bottle of the "Salyut"
space station  was floating  in the air, with the cargo ship "Agdam T-3"(89)
attached to it, speared  by the boom like a  plastic model of an airplane by
its support. Apparently  the  setup in  this configuration  was a little too
heavy for the crane,  because the rear end of the cargo  ship was buttressed
by a couple of logs; one could kind of distinguish them in the darkness, but
once  two  powerful  floodlights  switched  on right next to me they  became
practically  invisible, because just  like the  wall  behind them they  were
painted black,  with specks of foil  stuck to them shining  bright under the
lights.

     The floodlights were equipped with special filters, so that their light
was strange, kind of  ashen  white. Besides the space  station, which  right
away starting looking  very  realistic, they were illuminating  a  large  TV
camera with letters "Samsung" across it (next  to the camera two guards with
machine guns were having  a  cigarette  break) and a long table stuffed with
microphones,   plates  of  food   and  ghostly  translucent  vodka  bottles,
resembling  icicles pounded  into the table; behind the  table two  generals
were sitting, both looking  somewhat  like a  popular author and  playwright
Borovik.

     Nearby I  saw a smaller table with  one microphone, a man  in  civilian
clothes  sitting  at it. Behind him was  the  plywood  board  with  "Vremya"
written on  it and the picture of the globe  above which a five-- ended star
was soaring, its side ends elongated. Bending over the table  another person
in civilian clothes was discussing something with the man at the microphone.

     - Take three!

     Who said that I did not  catch. The  second civilian ran  to the camera
quickly and turned it in the direction of the small  table. A bell rang, and
the man with the microphone started talking clearly and deliberately:

     - We are now at the leading edge of the Soviet space science, in one of
the field  offices of the Central  Flight  Control.  For  almost seven years
cosmonauts Armen Vezirov  and Djambul  Mezhelaitis(90) have  been conducting
their orbital watch. This flight, the longest  in  history, made our country
the beacon of  the international space exploration. It is  symbolic that our
cameraman Nikolai Gordienko and I find ourselves here  at the exact day when
cosmonauts are about to  perform a significant  scientific task -- in thirty
seconds they  will conduct a spacewalk in order to deploy  the astrophysical
module "Kvant".

     The stage  was flooded  with soft and indistinct light  -- I  raised my
head  and  saw  that  the bulbs on  the  ceiling were  now switched to  full
strength. A magnificent panorama of the starry sky unfolded before my  eyes,
the sky for which humans were yearning for so many centuries,  inventing all
those beautiful but utterly naive legends about shiny nails in the celestial
sphere.

     I heard muffled bumps from where the "Salyut" was hanging  -- like they
bump  into the stuck door of  a cellar, anxious that it would smash the sour
cream  jugs standing right  behind  it if opened too hard.  After a while  I
noticed the edge of the hatch raise slightly above the surface of the  space
station, and immediately from the table  with the man  and  the microphone I
heard:

     - Attention! We are live!

     The hatch opened slowly, and  from  inside the space station appeared a
round silver helmet  with the short  antenna on top. Everyone at  the  table
burst in applause, the helmet was followed by  shoulders and silver hands --
first thing they  did was attach the emergency line to a special loop on the
body of  the space  station,  the movements were  fluid and slow,  no  doubt
perfected  during the  long hours spent  training in the pool.  Finally  the
first cosmonaut emerged into the open space  and stopped a couple  of  paces
from  the hatch  -- I thought  that  it must require  significant bravery to
stand ten  feet above ground. Then I had a feeling that one  of the generals
at the table was looking  in  my direction and I pulled my  head back behind
the  bookcase. When  I decided  to stick it  out again, both cosmonauts were
already  standing  on top  of the space station, shining  white  against the
backdrop  of the inky space  void  strewn with tiny specks of stars.  One of
them  was holding a small  box. It was, I  guessed, the astrophysical module
"Kvant". The cosmonauts slowly and kind of under-watery proceeded across the
body of  the spaceship, stopped beside a long mast that was sticking out and
screwed  the  module to  it rather  quickly. Then  they turned  towards  the
camera, waved their hands fluidly and with the  same diver steps returned to
the hatch, in which they disappeared one after the other.

     The hatch closed, but I was still looking  at the stars blinking in the
unimaginable distance -- where the Cygnus was  stretching  its long  slender
arms, unsure about who to open its embrace to: whether it should be the vast
Pegasus, occupying a  good  half  of the sky, or the small but so touchingly
bright and clear Lyre.

     The man in  civilian  clothes was all the while prattling excitedly and
briskly into his microphone:

     - For  the duration  of the  spacewalk complete silence  enveloped  the
Control  Center. I  have to admit that I was holding  my breath as well, but
everything went through smoothly. One cannot but marvel at the precision and
efficiency of the  cosmonauts'  movements -- it is obvious that the years of
training  and their orbital watch were not in vain. The scientific equipment
installed today...

     I crawled back behind the bookcase. A very strange state took  hold  of
me  --  I  was  suddenly  overcome  with  apathy  and  indifference  towards
everything that was happening. If they  were to try and grab me right there,
I doubt I would have put much of a fight or tried to flee -- all I wanted to
do was get some rest. Placing my head on top of my crossed hands, as was  my
lunar habit, I fell fast asleep. The voice kept muttering:

     - The television transmission of the work in open space was  made  by a
special  camera installed by the payload  specialist  on one  of  the  solar
panels of the base block.

     I slept for a long  time -- five hours at least. Several times  someone
started to  shift the furniture around swearing all  the while, then a whiny
female voice  demanded that  the sofa be replaced,  but I did not even move,
hoping that all this was just a dream. When I came to it was quiet. I raised
my  head carefully and peeked out.  The table with  the microphone was empty
now, the camera draped over with canvas. Only one spotlight was illuminating
the spaceships.  There  were no people  anywhere. I got out from behind  the
bookcase  and looked  around: everything was just like during  the  program,
only now I noticed on the floor under  the spaceship  a  rather  big pile of
waste, disgustingly flashing  the cans and white labels of the "Great Wall";
right before my eyes something splashed  into it softly.  I went  up  to the
table where the  remaining vodka  and plates of food were still standing;  I
badly  needed a  drink. As soon as I sat down my spine curved automatically,
assuming the bicycle pose, but I was able to straighten up with some effort,
combined  the  vodka leftovers from  several bottles  --  it  made two  full
glasses -- and tipped them into  my mouth one by one.  For several seconds I
pondered if I should chase it down with one of the  pickled mushrooms on the
plate,  but when  I  saw the  fork  covered in  hardened  briny  slime,  the
revulsion won over.

     I remembered  my  crewmates and imagined another room  similar to  this
one, with five steel coffins probably standing on its floor  -- four already
welded shut and  one still  empty. I  guess in some sense the guys were much
happier wherever they  were now, but I was feeling sad all the  same. Ten  I
though about Mityok. Soon my head began to spin and I reacquired the ability
to think about the happenings of this day. But instead of doing the thinking
I  started recalling  my last  day  on Earth, the stones of  the  Red Square
darkening  from  the  driving  rain, comrade  Urchagin's  wheelchair and the
chance touch of his warm lips whispering in my ear:

     "Omon. I know how difficult  it was for you to  lose a friend and learn
instead  that from your very  childhood you were approaching  the  moment of
your immortality side  by side with a skillful and cunning enemy  -- I don't
even want  to  say his  name aloud. But still,  try  to  remember  that  one
conversation where he, you and I were all present. He said then: "What's the
difference  which  thoughts  a  person  has  when  he  dies? Aren't  we  all
materialists?" You remember -- I said then that  after he dies, a man  lives
through the fruit  of  his  labor. What  I  didn't say was another thing, of
paramount importance. Know this, Omon: even though nobody really has a soul,
of course, still every soul is an entire universe. This is the dialectics of
being.  And  while there  is at least one soul  where our  way is  alive and
victorious,  this  way  will not  perish.  For  there shall exist  an entire
universe, and the center of this universe shall be this..."

     He waved his hand describing a circle over the stones that were already
glistening menacingly.

     "And  now for the principal thing that you must learn,  Omon.  You will
not understand my words now, but I am speaking them for the moment that will
be later, when I  am no longer  beside you. Listen. Even one pure and honest
soul is  enough  for our country to become  the leader in space exploration.
One such soul is enough for the red banner of victorious socialism to unfurl
high above the Moon. But at least one soul, for  at least one moment  --  is
indispensable,  because  it  is  in  this  soul  that  the  banner  will  be
soaring..."

     I suddenly  felt  a  strong stench  of male  sweat, turned  around  and
tumbled onto  the floor, knocked down by a hard blow from a fist  in a thick
rubber glove.

     Towering above me was a cosmonaut in a  worn-out  woolen  spacesuit and
helmet with red letters "CCCP". He grabbed an empty bottle, broke it against
the edge of the table and bent over me with the glass shard in his hand, but
I managed to roll over, leaped to my feet and ran. He lunged after me -- his
movements were sluggish but at the same time extremely fast, and it was very
scary. I  caught the second cosmonaut  from the  corner  of my eye -- he was
hurriedly  climbing down the black log propping up the  body of "Agdam T-3",
sloughing off the foil stars as he  went. I ran to the doors,  slammed  into
them with  my entire body, but they were locked.  I rushed back, avoided the
first cosmonaut but bumped into the second; he struck me hard with the heavy
magnetized boot, aiming for  the groin, but hitting me in the shin, and then
tried to spear me with the pointy  antenna on his head. I shrank away again.
Suddenly I realized that  I have just  drunk the  vodka  for which they must
have been  waiting for  probably several years, and that's when I got really
scared. I looked around, noticed on one of the walls  a small iron door with
a red lightning in  a triangle and words "CAUTION! DANGER!" and ran  towards
it.

     Right behind the door was a narrow corridor with  resonant metal floor.
I made what seemed to be only  a couple  steps along it and heard behind the
heavily vibrant clang of the metal soles. This sound tripled my strength and
speed,  I turned a  corner and saw another  short corridor ending in a round
ventilation shaft  with  the  raggedly  torn  wire mesh screen, a stationary
blade  of a rusty  ventilator behind it.  I would lunge back,  but  suddenly
found myself  so close to the pursuer that I didn't even perceive him in his
entirety, taking in instead a set of unrelated sensations -- the sphere with
the dark plastic visor and the red  letters  "CCCP", black  rubber fist with
the  small  translucent  trident,  the overpowering smell  of sweat  and the
patches of a major on the woolen shoulders painted silver. Next moment I was
already  slithering in  the ventilation  shaft.  I squeezed  past  the giant
blades,  resembling a  ship's  screw, rather  quickly,  but  when I  started
climbing the narrow well,  leading somewhere far above, my coat bunched into
a knot, I  got stuck and folded over like a fetus in the  womb. Then I heard
rustling  sound  underneath,  something  touched  my foot,  I  shot  upwards
screaming, covered the remaining yards in mere seconds and started squeezing
through a horizontal  opening. It ended  in a round porthole, beyond which I
could distinguish  the globe  of  the Earth  covered in opaque  haze  of the
clouds. I sobbed and began crawling to it.

     Through the thin film of tears the Earth seemed  blurry and indistinct,
floating  as it were  in the yellowish void, I was observing it across  this
void  as  I  was  drawing  near,  clambering towards  it,  until  the  walls
constricting me  from the sides gave way  and the  brown  tiles of the floor
rushed up to meet me.

     - Hey! Comrade!

     I opened my eyes. A woman in dirty blue uniform was standing over me, a
bucket at her feet; she was holding a mop.

     - Are you sick or something? What do you want here?

     I transferred my  gaze -- there was  a brown door in  the wall,  marked
"next  inspection  7/14".  Beside  it a calendar  was hanging with the large
photo of Earth and words "For the Peaceful Cosmos". I was  lying  in a short
corridor with painted walls, three or four doors were around me. I looked up
and saw  the black hole of the ventilation shaft in the wall across from the
calendar.

     - What? -- I asked.

     - I said, are you drunk or what?

     Steadying myself against  the wall, I scrambled to my feet and shuffled
away.

     - Where do you think you're going, - said the woman and spun me around.
I  walked  in the  opposite direction. Around  the corner  began a short and
steep staircase, terminating at a  wooden door beyond which an unclear noise
could be heard.

     - Go, - the woman nudged me in the back.

     I climbed the stairs and  looked around, -- she was still looking at me
apprehensively -- then pushed the door  and found  myself  in a  dark recess
where several people in civilian clothes were standing.  They didn't pay any
attention to  my emergence.  A growing rumble  sounded  from a  distance,  I
looked  sideways and read the words "V. I. Lenin Library"  in bronze letters
on the wall.

     This must be Earth, I thought suddenly.

     I walked out  of  the  nook beside the staircase  and  began  shuffling
slowly across the platform towards the large mirror at its end. The menacing
orange time signs above it were reporting that it  was not evening yet, even
though it was  rather late in the day,  and that the previous train left the
station about four minutes ago. In the mirror I was greeted by  a young man,
his face  unshaven,  apparently for a long time, his  eyes bloodshot and his
hair  very  disheveled. He was wearing a dirty black  cotton-filled coat and
generally  had an appearance of  someone who spent the last night hell knows
where.

     Come  to  think of  it,  that  was exactly  the  case.  The  patrolling
policeman with  small dark moustache started shooting me suspicious glances,
so when  the train came I stepped into the open door without hesitation. The
door  closed,  and  I  was now  riding  into my  new life.  The  mission  is
continuing, I thought. Half  of the  bulbs  in the lunokhod were burned out,
and that made the light  seem stale. I sat on the bench, the woman beside me
reflexively pressed her legs together, shifted away and occupied the  opened
space  between us  with her produce  sack  -- it  contained several packs of
rice, a  box  of star-shaped noodles and a frozen whole chicken in a plastic
bag.

     Still, I  had to decide now where I wanted to  go. I raised  my eyes to
the subway map hanging on the  opposite wall beside the emergency brake  and
began to look where exactly on the red line(91) I was located.



<ul><a name=16></a><h2>Translator's notes..

     By 1984,  Soviet  Union  was well  underway to "1984" (at least  it was
obvious to  people who  cared to  think  about things  like that). With  the
Orwellian  framework already  understood and  accepted as given,  this  book
takes the  next logical step (while paying homage to the original in  subtle
ways -- compare "Room  329" and "Room  101") and continues to beat  the idea
silly: in a society where there are thought  criminals,  it is natural, even
imperative,  to expect  thought  heroes. This  line of reasoning appeared so
convincing to me that I did not suspect anything wrong with the first-person
perspective belonging  to someone clearly marching  to his  death  until the
narrator's mission was  at an  apparent end, but there were still some pages
left in the book. Thus, realizing the nature of  the final meta-jump -- that
the  only reason for and  sole  consequence of that  heroism was supposed to
take hold  for  a  brief moment inside the unwitting hero's head,  with  the
remaining universe enriched  by this very fact and  <I>nothing else</I>, regardless
of absence  of  <I>any</I>  physical  manifestation of his deed  - left me  with  a
feeling of utter delight. To try and share that feeling was the main impetus
for starting this project.

     Psychometrists usually divide  intelligence tests  into two categories,
one of them  being  "culture-fair" (that  is, without obvious  references to
objects,  events and ultimately a  language which  would clearly belong to a
specific  culture) and  the other,  naturally,  opposite. Chemistry  exam is
culture-fair, because chemistry  is the same everywhere; "Who  Wants To Be A
Millionaire" is culture-unfair, because a non-American would find himself at
a distinct disadvantage when facing a question about the 1968  World Series.
In this  sense,  Pelevin's prose is unfair  to  the extreme. It is not  only
uniquely  Russian, utilizing the abundant capacity of  the language, of both
civilized and obscene  variety  (unlike the wastepaper dominating the modern
Russian  literary landscape); no,  it's  also  inextricably Soviet, in  fact
post-Soviet,  processed-and-condensed-Soviet. Pelevin explicitly  counts  on
the  reader's knowing chuckle as  popular culture icons  and images, pounded
since   early   childhood   into   anyone  who   experienced  the   ultimate
brain-laundering   (washing  is   too   mild  a   word)   of  the  Communist
education-indoctrination system, are turned inside out.

     What I am trying to accomplish here is to get  myself off the hook as a
translator. To my taste, there are entirely  too many notes in the preceding
text. At the  same  time as I  am  offering  my profound apologies for their
proliferation,  my  defense  is  that  it  was  necessary  to  eliminate the
home-field advantage the fabled "Soviet people", and especially  Muscovites,
have  over Pelevin's books.  I  was  sorely tempted  to provide more  -- for
example,  note that the  kamikaze pilot's  memoirs are  probably "A Japanese
Pilot's  Own  Story Of The  Suicide Squadrons" by Kuwahara Yasuo, or explain
how Ahnenerbe is related to the skulls on the shelf or what an immelman turn
is,  but I think I resisted  the urge admirably, only limiting myself to the
readily  recognizable  realities (if one is permitted to use the word in the
context of this book) of Soviet life. Well, almost.

     On  the  other  hand, the  original text in  several  places  contained
references to more specific Russian pop-culture artifacts, mostly in form of
lines  from  popular songs. Where these lines  did not disrupt the fabric of
narration or  contribute to it in a significant manner, I  allowed myself to
omit them entirely. This decision is the obverse side of the  desire  stated
in the previous  paragraph, as I  do not see the point of providing a rhymed
snippet that would be a starting point of an association  for  a Russian  --
only  to chase  it  perforce with  the  elaborate  comment  in an attempt to
explain what  exactly the association is and what it's  related to. Factoids
are  one  thing;  saddling  the  reader  with  my  own memories  and  mental
connections is quite another. This is not my book; I am just a translator.

     Another popular  Soviet  patriotic song (about  pilots,  no  less) goes
something like "We were  born to turn a fairytale  into  reality", which was
readily stood on its  head by irreverent dissidents by  substituting "Kafka"
for the "fairytale" (the Russian words sound very similar). I don't have any
doubt  that  this line, good enough by itself to describe the entire plot of
this book, crossed Pelevin's mind when he was writing "Omon Ra". Kafka holds
the patent on the calm interweaving of absurd reasoning and events into what
seems to be otherwise sane environment until  it  is blown sky-high  by that
same reasoning,  a distinguishing  feature of almost every sentence  Pelevin
ever wrote. In fact, his "Life of Insects" is openly borrowing and expanding
the "stranger-turned-into-bug" motif -- characters  of  that book are people
<I>and</I> insects (mosquitoes, ants,  dragonflies, dung beetles and so  on) at the
same time, or at least travel between their avatars seamlessly.

     Explaining in detail what  the  "Maresyev Academy" means, then dropping
Matrosov's name in  the same  context  and waiting  a couple  of pages until
exploring  what  that entails,  while interspersing the veiled  reference to
Korchagin  in-between is  calculated to  make the  reader pat himself on the
shoulder  for "getting it"  --  a pleasant experience, to be sure, no  doubt
accounting in  the  large part for  popularity of  Pelevin's books among the
remains of the Soviet self-described "intelligentsia". Pelevin's books allow
us all to  perceive  ourselves as part of the "cultural elite" (to be  fair,
there  are also usually deeper layers than this simple example). Even  while
self-consciously catching myself at  being thus  baited, I  still can't help
but enjoy  the  resulting  buzz, probably similar  to one  the  consumer  of
detective stories experiences  when he figures out "who done it" just before
the  oh-so-smart  police inspector  does.  I  must  admit  that  this device
Pelevin, once convinced of its  effectiveness, is prone to overusing.  "Omon
Ra"  may be considered  as the  first  part of a trilogy (so far),  with the
remaining books being "Buddha's Little Finger" and "Generation P"  (and to a
lesser extent "Golden Arrow" -- as kind of an accompanying apocripha) -- but
to a large degree these are actually the same book, only becoming bigger and
more elaborate (and switching time periods from late Soviet  to early Soviet
to  post-Soviet  to  openly  inconsequential).  Not  surprisingly,  however,
one-joke  (all  right,  one-and-a-half-joke)  setups  work  better in  small
formats,  and that's why I  pay more respect  to his <I>rasskazy</I>, short stories
("Omon  Ra" is a <I>povest</I>, traditional Russian genre that  is a "small novel",
or a  "long short story",  if you will)  -- the best  of  which  are utterly
untranslatable exactly because of their concentrated nature.

     Consistent, if not increasing with time, virtuosity in handling  of the
language, coupled with playful pop-Zen detachment (or determined alienation)
from the "coarse reality" are hallmarks of almost all Pelevin's <I>oeuvres</I>, and
can be regarded as  heralding a new style, or at least direction, in Russian
literature. There  is  a famous  Russian  quote stating that "Pushkin is our
everything". Continuing the analogy, Pelevin is our Buddhism, existentialism
and "new age", all rolled into one. This does not mean that his books are as
good or as destined  for eternity as  "Library  of Babylon", "The  Trial" or
"The Plague" -- but this is not their point. To learn quantum mechanics, one
rarely  goes  and  dusts up  the  1910s  volumes of "Physical  Review"  with
original Einstein's  articles (even though that  actually  might do a lot of
good).  There are instead modern textbooks  that  digest, rearrange, enhance
and generally make them  more fit (from the textbook author's point of view)
for  human  consumption. In the same  vein, Pelevin  is  Borges,  Castaneda,
Cortazar and Camus (not to mention Kafka) for the New  Age of post-Communist
Russia. Even as I recognize the innate limitations of the approach, I cannot
but acknowledge the masterful treatment it receives. My hope is that my work
will allow you to do the same.

     Yuri Machkasov

     April-May 2001

     Framingham, MA.



<ul><a name=17></a><h2>Notes:.

     (1) OMON --  Russian  abbreviation  for a Special Forces  Detachment, a
crack police squad.

     (2) The Communist  Party, of course  --  since there was only one,  the
word "Party" was sufficient. Party  membership was  an essential requirement
for  advancing the  career beyond mid-level  management -- or junior officer
rank.

     (3)  An  obvious play on  the Karamazov name, but  sounding quite a bit
uglier to the Russian ear -- "Krivo" means "crooked", and "mazov" is derived
from "mazat'", "to miss completely" or "to smear" .

     (4)OVIR -- Russian abbreviation for a local office of Interior Ministry
formally charged with adjudicating cases for exit visas for Soviet citizens,
as well as registering entry of foreigners into the country.

     (5)Author refers  to  the  "Space Conquerors" monument  in the northern
part of  Moscow, near the Ostankino TV  tower (which is, incidentally,  much
higher). Space Exploration museum is located in its base.

     (6)A  permanent  exposition grounds  built in grand style shortly after
the  WWII  to  showcase the  great  state of  the  Soviet  economy. Separate
buildings  - "pavilions"  -  were  dedicated  to  different branches of  the
industry. Referred to  later  is the  "Cosmos" pavilion,  housing  something
similar to the Smithsonian's space collection.

     (7)Radio  programs  of various short-wave  Western  stations  based  in
Europe and broadcasting (usually in Russian) to USSR, usually referred to as
"golosa" - "voices" or "enemy voices", after the "Voice of America".

     (8)Informal short from Dimitry.

     (9)In Russia dinner  usually takes place  in the early afternoon, while
supper, also quite substantial, happens in the evening.

     (10)Russian letters standing for USSR; should be quite familiar in this
form to the reader.

     (11)Referring  to the  science fiction novel "Aelita", concerned with a
Mars expedition in just  such a  vehicle.  Naturally, the characters find an
oppressive capitalist society there, too, and assist in overthrowing it.

     (12)German Democratic Republic, East Germany.

     (13)The name  of  the youth organization  for children of approximately
middle  school age, essentially scouts with  the Communist twist. Membership
was more or less mandatory. Symbols of "young pioneers" included a badge and
red neckerchief (to be worn  to school daily), as well  as the horn and drum
mentioned here.

     (14)The  salute resembled the military  one, except  the  hand  drawn a
little higher,  diagonally  bisecting  the  face  with  tips  of the fingers
slightly above the head, not touching it.

     (15)This WWI  cruiser is  purported  to have given the signal  for  the
October 1917 Bolshevik coup by firing a blank from  its anchored position in
the Neva river in St. Petersburg (where it is still on display).

     (16)The military draft was  (and still is) mandatory for every male age
18, with a 2 year (3 in the Navy) tour of duty as a private (crewman). Young
males with enough sense  to  try to avoid it would fake (often successfully)
psychiatric   disorders.  Top-rank  universities  provide  deferment,  while
training the students so that they attain  the junior officer (ensign)  rank
upon graduation and are not required to enter active duty.

     (17)Cheap  cigarettes with recessed paper  filters, loosely filled with
second-grade tobacco.

     (18)A. Maresyev, historical  figure and main  character in B. Polevoy's
novel "Story Of  The  Real Man".  His plane  shot down  over German-occupied
territory in  the summer  of 1942, and he himself  wounded in both  legs, he
managed  to crawl back over 18 days  back to  Russian positions. Later, with
legs  amputated below the knees, he taught himself to fly airplanes again on
prosthetics and insisted  on being reinstated as pilot.  He  is  still alive
(now 85 years old). The book  is  required  reading  in  the  school Russian
Literature curriculum.

     (19)This means it was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.

     (20)Soviet institutions  of higher education relied  (and  still do) on
entrance exams, not standardized tests, to evaluate applicants,  who have to
be physically present on site over a certain time in summer to pass them.

     (21)The seeming incongruity of a senior officer  asking permission from
one   of   lesser  rank   is   explained  on   the  next  page:  while   the
lieutenant-colonel is Air  Force, the  major is  KGB, and therefore is above
all  other  officers in  the Academy when  it  comes  to policy decisions or
"state secrets". See also next note.

     (22)More precisely "political officers", Party bosses (formally bearing
officer ranks) attached to every sufficiently large military unit.

     (23)Every fall thousands of civilians (especially college  students) as
well   as  military  personnel  were  required  to  help   the  agricultural
communities in their area  with the  harvest for  several  weeks --  usually
vegetables (most often potatoes, hence the expression) around Moscow, but it
could be fruit or cotton, depending on the climate.

     (24)The  standard response required of pioneers when addressed with "Be
ready for struggle in the name of Lenin and the Communist Party!"

     (25)Hammer and sickle -- symbols  of  the Soviet Union, present  on its
flag and state seal (coat of arms).

     (26)"Truth", the official daily of the Communist Party

     (27)Shoulder patch insignia; top officers starting from general/admiral
and up had the state seal (globe bordered by wheat stooks -- hence the broom
analogy) in gold at the bottom of the gold-tone patch, with large stars (two
of them in this case) above it denoting the rank.

     (28)Described is the last  reel of "Andrey Rublyov", the film by Soviet
director  A. Tarkovsky,  which  has the  camera panning  silently over icons
(religious  paintings  on  wood)  created  by  Rublyov,  a  genius  XIV<SUP>
</SUP>century Russian painter.

     (29)This is in fact a meta-reference,  Pelevin's specialty: usually the
"first department" at any state enterprise is the more or less official name
of the KGB officer(s) assigned to  monitor political conformity and handling
of "state secrets"; what would the "first department" of the KGB itself do?

     (30)Referring to a dramatic  moment in  the  "Story Of  The Real  Man":
Maresyev is dancing "Kalinka", a rather acrobatic Russian solo dance,  at an
officers' party; when a  general approaches  him afterwards  to commend  his
performance,  he   reveals  the  prosthetic  legs,  thereby  prompting   the
astonished  general to  cast  aside doubts  about  Maresyev's abilities  and
consider restoring his flying privileges.

     (31)A.  Matrosov,  a historical WWII figure. With his detachment pinned
down by a German machine gunner in  a fortified concrete firing position, he
managed  to  sneak  on  it and  then  threw himself onto  the slot,  thereby
interrupting  the fire long enough for others to get  closer and destroy the
position  with hand grenades.  Came  to  symbolize the heroism of the Soviet
soldiers.

     (32)A  large  department store  in the center  of Moscow,  on  Lubyanka
square, right next to the  headquarters of CheKa/NKVD/MGB/KGB. Both of those
late XIX -- early XX century buildings occupy an entire city block.

     (33)Probably abbreviation of "Senior Cosmonaut Academy" in Russian.

     (34)Obvious allusion to P. Korchagin, a  fictional main character in A.
Ostrovsky's book "Thus The Steel Was Tempered", set in the early years after
the  Revolution. Becomes blind and paraplegic due to  illness but  continues
his  heroic  work as a  Party representative  at some  grandiose  steel mill
project.

     (35)In fact,  an official  abbreviation for Baikal-Amur Railroad  Camp,
one of the largest labor camps in the USSR

     (36)Literally "Lunar Rover". There in fact was a Lunokhod, even two  of
them, deposited successfully on the Moon surface by the Soviet "Luna" series
spacecraft    on    11/17/1970   and    1/15/1973,    (see,   for   example,
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990109.html   and  compare   with  latter
description  here).  I will leave the word  untranslated,  since it plays  a
significant  part  in the narration  and can  be  perceived  as  similar  to
"sputnik" -- which even my word processor recognizes as valid.

     (37)The slaps are part of the "Kalinka" routine.

     (38)"Flight", generic Russian cigarettes.

     (39)A  centrally located  subway  station, with  exits to the  Lubyanka
(formerly Dzerzhinsky) square.

     (40)An urban legend asserts that there is  a vast top secret city under
the central part of Moscow, and the sewers and tunnels of the subway are but
a  small  part  of  the "real" network  of  tunnels  and  access  corridors,
stretching  in some  places  far  beyond  the boundaries of the city itself.
According to  the  legend,  the hub  of  this  network, a giant  multi-level
underground "building", is located under the KGB headquarters.

     (41)A  collective  name  for  peoples  of  the  Baltic  republics  (now
independent): Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. See also note #82.

     (42)One of Pelevin's short stories, "Blue  Lantern",  for which  he was
awarded in 1993 the Russian Booker Prize  (Best Russian-Language Book of the
Year), describes an evening of Zen-like scary stories in a pioneer camp.

     (43)"Sveiks" - "Safe" (Latvian).

     (44)From "VLADImir LENin"; this name is not uncommon. There was a short
period  in  which it was fashionable to give children  unpronounceable names
"with a meaning", usually clumsy patriotic abbreviations.

     (45)An  archetypal Russian leisure activity; compare to American  habit
of eating popcorn.

     (46)Literally "priest's  wife",  from  Russian "pop".  Russian Orthodox
priests  are  not sworn  to celibacy. ("Pop" is to "priest" as  "cop" is  to
"policeman").

     (47)A crucial battle (1223) lost  by Russians, first confrontation with
Mongol  forces  under  Genghis  Khan,  precursor to  the  subsequent  almost
century-and-a-half (1236-1380) occupation of Russian duchies by  the  Golden
Horde.

     (48)Soviet WWII ace pilot. Colonel, thrice Hero of the Soviet Union. 48
dogfight victories  flying  Bell Cobra; 11  more  in MiG-3. Shot  down  four
times. Famous for his use of ramming of the enemy aircraft.

     (49)"bears" (Russian)

     (50)The Hero of the Soviet Union award, highest military honor, has the
form of a star.

     (51)A centrally distributed information and entertainment program, with
news briefs on the hour, capable of  being received almost  anywhere  in the
USSR at multiple locations on both AM and FM dials.

     (52)Snippets  of classic  Russian poetry,  often  with the word  "Moon"
replacing  the actual  subject  of  the  sentence. In  succession:  Nabokov;
Pushkin; Pushkin again; Gumilev; Blok; Pasternak; Yesenin.

     (53)Parodying  an  oft-quoted  Lenin's  utterance; the  original phrase
concerned the place of cinema among arts.

     (54)A brief, but  accurate explication of the communist  theory -- that
confluence of  "objective" (certain  level  of dissatisfaction and political
maturity of the "working masses")  and "subjective" (presence  of a suitable
leader, for example) circumstances would inevitably lead to a  revolutionary
shift in  "socioeconomic  formation"  (defined  as  specific relationship of
people to the means of production)

     (55)Actually "Socialism And The Uprising"; second work  exists but  has
nothing to do with Moon, of course.

     (56)This  is  in  fact one  of the  theories by  Gurdzhiev,  a renowned
spiritualist of Russian descent. In true Orwellian fashion, the same  person
could  easily  be regarded  first  as a  prominent  scientist and then  as a
bourgeois falsificator,  though  rarely  in  the same  speech  ("Oceania had
always been at war with Eurasia").

     (57)Meaning  the  so-called  "non-disclosure   note"  in  which  person
acknowledged being barred from discussing  the details and  the very fact of
his  encounter with KGB officials;  demanded, and given, customarily at  the
end of such encounters.

     (58)The  following  text  (the  content  of  the  recording)  had  been
published by Pelevin as a separate short story under the title "Lunokhod".

     (59)Leon (Lev) Trotsky, a  Russian  revolutionary, was  killed  in 1940
while in exile in Mexico City with a pickaxe blow to the head by a fanatical
Stalinist.

     (60)Near this Kazakhstan town the Soviet space launch site was located.

     (61)A  popular saying attributed to M. Gorky: "Everything that is  good
in me I owe to books".

     (62)A rambling futuro-philosophical  science  fiction  novel  by Soviet
writer A. Efremov. Described below are some of the more dramatic scenes from
the book.

     (63)All Soviet  holidays were tied to  specific  dates, so in  order to
give  people a three-day  weekend  when the  holiday fell on Tuesday it  was
customary to work on Saturday and take Monday off instead.

     (64)A  woolen, helmet-like cap with  a sharp peak  and ear  flaps named
after S. Budyonny, famous cavalry commander.

     (65)Lines from  a  popular  song  "Little  Apple". See also  the  first
sentence of second paragraph in the  next chapter, where two more lines from
it  are related  in prose  (the  song  actually mentions its own title,  but
referring  to another  song with the  same  name, one that was  popular much
earlier -- around WWI.)

     (66)S. Kovpak, cavalry commander in the Red  Army since the  early days
of the Revolution; during WWII conducted  guerilla raids  with his battalion
against insurgent Ukrainian forces in Carpathian Mountains.

     (67)"Husky"  (Russian), the name of the  dog which  officially was  the
first animal  to have been launched into space (in  fact, probably the first
animal to have been successfully launched and brought back).

     (68)Informal  name for the various incarnations of secret  police. What
is meant here is that the dogs were guarding prisoners in the Northern labor
camps; the  special  branch of the armed forces charged with such guard duty
fell  under  control  of   MVD  -  the  Ministry  of  the  Interior,  parent
organization of KGB.

     (69)A vast brick-paved  square in the city center just outside  Kremlin
wall; about a mile from Lubyanka.

     (70)The  entire  paragraph  is  a   tongue-in-cheek  self-reference  to
Pelevin's own short story "Reconstructor".

     (71)Interred  in and close to the Kremlin wall are the remains of Party
and military leaders.

     (72)A large red/pink granite and marble structure in the middle of  the
Red  Square against the wall,  housing  mummified  body  of Lenin, open  for
public viewing,  and flanked by honor guards (at least it was  at the time).
Its top also served as stands for highest  government officials during state
parades and other events.

     (73)Described is a complete clockwise panorama of the Red Square.

     (74)"Let's  ride!",  the  phrase  attributed to  the first cosmonaut Y.
Gagarin  on liftoff. Repeated religiously  by all commanders of Soviet space
missions since, for luck.

     (75)An  established  formula  of  social stratification in  the  Soviet
society.

     (76)An official central government (formally not Party) daily.

     (77)Knowing English,  the language of  the "likely enemy", could easily
land a person in trouble as being politically unreliable or worse - planning
treason, which explains the morale officer's interest.

     (78)At the time,  a 3-4  months'  salary for mid-level technical job --
that is, a significant sum.

     (79)Meaning on  the black market in Western goods,  concentrated mainly
in big cities.

     (80)Blue field on  top of  yellow field.  Was the official  flag of the
Ukraine in  1919-1921, under Chairman S. Petlyura; readopted in 1991 as  the
flag of the independent Ukrainian republic.

     (81)"Luna-17" (not "B")  was the  actual  name of the Soviet spacecraft
that delivered Lunokhod-1 to the Moon.

     (82)First  name is made  to sound  typically Ukrainian, second  one  --
typically Georgian. Considerable effort had been expended  to prove that the
Soviet space program was truly  "international", that is,  involved  "ethnic
minorities" - the native peoples of the Soviet republics. See also note #90.

     (83)Make of a handgun issued to senior officers.

     (84)Literally "Minor Intercept".

     (85)"Working Midday" -- daily program of the "Mayak" network, featuring
musical  numbers "by workers' request". The inane  texts imitate  the syrupy
nature of the program quite accurately.

     (86)Mocking the "People's  Artist of the  USSR" title, the highest form
of government recognition for an artist.

     (87)"Time", the nightly news program on Channel 1 (of 2)  of the  state
television.

     (88) "Whitey" and "Arrow" -  names of two dogs that (together) followed
Laika into space.

     (89)Wordplay: while  "Salyut" ("Firework")  is the real name of the old
Soviet  space station  (shaped like a bottle), it is also the brand of cheap
wine, and  "Agdam"  is unequivocally the  brand of Armenian  brandy.  Actual
cargo ships were called "Progress", and there was a "T" series of them.

     (90)The first name of the first cosmonaut is typically  Armenian, while
his last name is typically Azerbaijani. The second cosmonaut is  the amalgam
of last names of noted Soviet poets -- one Kazakh, one Lithuanian.

     (91)The lines  on  the  Moscow  subway map  are  marked with  different
colors; the "Lenin  Library" station (also  in the city center, across  from
Kremlin) is indeed on the red line.