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illustration by Alan Giana
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I. Kolyma labor camp, sometime during World War II
"Korolev."
D 327 did not look around. He was busy. His joints grated together,
his ligaments groaned as he lifted the pickax over his head–a
motion as fast as he could manage, yet so terribly slow, slower
even than the last time, which had been slower in turn than the
time before that; then he released his breath and with it the
tension, and the will, so that his arms fell forward and allowed
the tip of the pick to glance across the jagged face of the wall.
A few greasy-black chips pattered his shoes. The fall of the pick
almost balanced in joy the inevitable ordeal of lifting, but not
quite, so D 327’s misery accumulated in minute increments like
the drift of slag in which he stood ankle-deep. He knew that none
of the other workers, spaced five paces apart down the length
of the tunnel, were faring any better. They had been ordered to
dig for gold, but he knew this tunnel held no gold; this tunnel
was the antithesis of gold; the gold had been pried from its workers’
teeth and chased from their dreams; and his pick was as soft and
blunt as a thumb. He raised it again, and tried to lose count
of how many times he had done so.
"Korolev."
D 327 tried to focus his attention not on the lift and fall, lift
and fall of his triple burden, arm and pick and arm, but on the
slight added weight in his right jacket pocket–an imagined weight,
really, so coarse and mostly air was the bit of bread he had palmed
from poor Vasily’s plate at midday. Vasily had collapsed at just
the right time. Later, and Vasily would have used that crust to
swipe even the shine of food from the tin plate, would have thrust
it into his mouth with his last dying breath. Sooner, and the
guard would have noticed the remaining food and snatched it away.
Guards starved less quickly in the Kolyma than the prisoners,
but all starved. A dozen times D 327 had come deliriously close
to eating his prize, but each time he had refrained. Many of his
fellow prisoners had forgotten how to savor, but he had not. After
supper would be best: Just before sleep, as he lay with his face
to the barracks wall, the unchewed food in his mouth would add
warmth and flavor to oblivion.
"Korolev."
The voice was cold and clear and patient, an electronic pulse
against the rasps, clinks, drips, and scuttles of the tunnel.
What word, in this hole, could bear such repetition? Only a name,
like God, or Stalin.
"Korolev."
I heard that name often at the Institute, D 327 thought. Often
in my presence others said that name. A response was expected,
assumed; was only just. Down fell the pick, clatter and flake;
he turned, half afraid of seeing nothing in the light of his carbide
lamp.
Instead he faced an infinitude of stars.
"Come down from your orbit, Comrade Korolev. Come down to Earth,
that a mere mortal may speak with you."
The stars were printed on a sheet of glossy paper: a page. A hand
turned the page, to a cutaway diagram of a tapered cylinder like
a plump bullet. Inside its shell flowed rivers of arrows. At that
moment, more clearly even than he remembered his own name, Sergei
Korolev remembered another’s.
"Tsiolkovsky," he said.
"Your memory is excellent, Comrade Korolev." The man who had held
the open book before Korolev’s face reversed it and examined it
himself. He wore a full-dress officer’s uniform, and two soldiers
flanked him. "Exploration of Cosmic Space with Reactive Devices, by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Published 1903. And did the czar recognize
his genius? Fah! If not for the Workers’ Revolution, he would
have died of old age still wiping the snot of schoolboys in Kaluga."
He sighed. "How often we visionaries labor without recognition,
without thanks."
"It is a shame, Citizen General. I am sad for you."
The officer snapped the book shut one-handed. In the dim light
of Korolev’s helmet gleamed the brim of the officer’s cap, the
golden eagle’s wings, and the rifle barrels of the soldiers on
each side. "You flatter me, Korolev. I am only an engineer like
yourself. And henceforth you may call me Comrade Shandarin, as
you would have before your crimes were exposed and punished."
He surveyed the meager rubble beneath Korolev’s feet. "Your service
here is done. From today you serve the Motherland in other ways.
You will join me in my work."
Korolev was not attentive. Just as the mere sight of food could
flood his mouth with saliva and his stomach with growling, raging
juices, the glimpse of Tsiolkovsky’s diagrams had released a torrent
of images, facts, numerals, terms, all familiar and yet deliciously
new. Apogee and perigee. Trajectory and throttle. Elevation and
azimuth. Velocities and propellants and thrust. He was trying
to savor all this, and this man Shandarin was distracting him.
"And what work is that–Comrade?"
Shandarin laughed, a series of sharp detonations in the tunnel.
"Why, what a question. The work your Motherland trained you to
do, of course. Do you think your skills as a gold miner are in
demand?" He reached into his brass-buttoned coat (and one part
of Korolev, eternally cold in his thin and tattered parka, noted
how the coat retained the smooth, unwrinkled drape of great comfort
and thickness and weight) and pulled out a folded sheaf of papers
that he handed to Korolev. "The chief problem," he said, as Korolev
exulted in the glorious feel of paper, "is distance, of course.
The German rockets have a range of hundreds of kilometers, but
are thousands of kilometers possible? Not all the Motherland’s
enemies are her neighbors. The V-2 achieves altitudes greater
than eighty kilometers, more than sixteen times the height of
your GIRD-X; our new rockets must fly even higher than the Germans’."
Korolev leafed through the papers. His blisters smeared the charts
and graphs no matter how much care he took. Shandarin continued:
"So our rockets must somehow better the Germans’ twenty-five thousand
kilograms of thrust, and by a wide margin at that. This requires
drastic innovations in metallurgy or design, if not both–Comrade,
are you listening?"
Korolev had turned one of the charts on its side, so that the
rocket’s arc swept not from right to left, but upward in a languid,
powerful semicircle, as if bound for . . .
His thumb left a red star in its path.
"I am listening," Korolev said, "and so is everyone else." He was aware
of fewer noises, fewer motions, from the other miners, and some
of the Institute’s concern for security had returned to him, along
with an echo of his voice of command. "In my day," Korolev continued,
"such talk was classified."
Shandarin shrugged, grinned. "I am speaking only to you, Comrade,"
he said. He inclined his head backward, toward the soldiers, and
said, "We may speak freely before cretins," then flicked a gloved
finger toward the miners, "and even more so before dead men."
He slid a page from Korolev’s hands and held it up for all to
see, turned completely around, waved the sheet a little so that
it fluttered. No miner met his gaze. He turned back to Korolev.
"Shall we go?" He feigned a shiver. "I am not so used to the cold
as you."
In 1933, after the GIRD-X triumph, after the vodka and the toasts
and the ritual congratulations from Comrade Stalin (delivered
in great haste by a nearsighted bureaucrat who looked as if he
expected rockets to roar out of the doorways at any moment), Korolev
and his mentor Tsander, who would die so soon thereafter, had
left their joyous colleagues downstairs and taken their celebration
aloft, clambered onto the steep, icy rooftop of the Moscow office
building that housed the State Reaction Scientific Research Institute.
To hell with the vodka; they toasted each other, and the rocket,
and the city, and the planet, with a smuggled and hoarded bottle
of French champagne.
"To the moon!"
"To the sun!"
"To Mars!"
They ate caviar and crabmeat and smoked herring, smacked like
gourmands and sailed the empty cans into orbit over the frozen
streets of the capital. Never, not even in the Kolyma, had Korolev
so relished a meal.
He remembered all this, and much more, as he sat beside Shandarin
in the sledge that hissed away from the snow-covered entrance
of Mine Seventeen. He burned to examine the papers, but they could
wait. He folded them and tucked them into his worn and patched
jacket, through which he almost could have read them had he wanted
to. As Shandarin regarded him in silence, he pulled the crust
of bread from his pocket and began nibbling it with obvious relish,
as if it were the finest delicacy plucked from the ovens of the
Romanovs. He settled back, closed his eyes, and in eating the
bread relived the bursting tang of the caviar, the transcendent
release of the launch, the blanketing embrace of the night sky
that no longer danced beyond reach. In this way he communed with
his former self, who dropped gently down from the rooftop of the
Institute and joined him, ready to resume their great work, and
the sledge shot across the snow as if propelled by yearning and
fire.
II. Baikonur Cosmodrome, September 1957
Awakened by the commingled howls of all the souls in Hell, a startled
Evgeny Aksyonov lifted the curtain of his compartment window and
looked out onto a circus. Loping alongside the train was a parallel
train of camels, a dozen or more of the gangling beasts, their
fencepost teeth bared as they yelped and brayed and groaned, lips
curled in great ropy sneers. Bulging gray sacks jogged at their
flanks, and swaying atop each mount was a swarthy, bearded rider
in flowing robes, with a snarl to rival that of his camel.
So this is Kazakhstan, thought Aksyonov, who before this trip
never had been farther east than the outskirts of Moscow, the
home of a maiden aunt who baked fine tarts. He breathed the choking
dust and coughed with enthusiasm; he was too young to be uncomfortable.
One of the camel drivers noticed him gawking, grinned, and raised
a shaggy fist in a gesture so rude that Aksyonov hastily dropped
the curtain and sat back, fingering his own suddenly inadequate
beard. He rummaged in his canvas bag for the worn copy of Perelman’s
Interplanetary Travels, which he opened at random and began to read, though he could have
recited the passage with his eyes closed. He soon nodded off again,
and in his dreams he was a magnificent bronze fighter of the desert,
who brandished a scimitar to defy the rockets that split the sky.
No conductor, no fellow passenger disturbed his sleep, for Evgeny
Aksyonov was bound for a place that did not officially exist,
to meet a man who officially had no name. Access to such non-places
and non-people was strictly regulated, and so Aksyonov was the
only passenger aboard the train.
"Come," the soldier on the platform said, after he peered from
Aksyonov’s face to his photo and back again just enough to make
Aksyonov nervous. "The Chief Designer expects you."
For fifteen minutes or more, he drove Aksyonov along a freshly
paved highway so wide and straight it seemed inevitable, past
a series of construction sites where the hollow outlines of immense
buildings rose from pits and heaps of dirt. Gangs of workers swarmed
about. Atop one pile of earth, three armed soldiers kept watch:
the men swinging picks below must be zeks, political prisoners, the Motherland’s most menial laborers. A
gleaming rail spur crossed and recrossed the road, and Aksyonov
began to brace himself for each intersection, because the driver
did not slow down. Some completed buildings looked like administrative
offices, others like army barracks. Behind one barracks were more
inviting dwellings, a half-dozen yurts. A couple of Kazakh men
were in the process of rolling a seventh into place, as if it
were a great hide-covered hoop.
The driver abandoned Askyonov without speech or ceremony at the
concrete lip of a kilometer-wide pit. Aksyonov looked down sixty
meters along the steep causeway that would channel the rocket
blasts. He shivered and retreated from the edge of the launch
pad, a tremendous concrete shelf hundreds of meters square. No
amount of rocket research would make him fond of heights. Above
him soared three empty gantries, thirty-meter talons that would
close on the rocket and hold it fast until liftoff.
Hundreds of workers dashed about the pad. Some drove small electric
carts, some clambered along scaffolds that reached into the tips
of the gantries and the depths of the pit. Among them were many
Kazakh men, distinguishable even at a distance by their felt skullcaps.
Amid all this activity, Aksyonov tried to look as knowledgeable
and useful as possible while he guarded his luggage and felt homesick.
As he considered getting out his book, he was jolted nearly off
his feet by a voice that boomed and echoed from everywhere: to
left, to right, the pit, the sky.
"Testing. Testing. One two three. Tsiolkovsky Tsiolkovsky Tsiolkovsky."
Then came several prolonged and deafening blasts, like gusts into
a microphone. Aksyonov clapped his hands over his ears. No one
else in the whole anthill took any visible notice of the racket.
"Hello. Hello. Hello." The words rolled across the concrete in
waves and rattled Aksyonov to the bone. "Can you hear me? Eh?
Hello? I’m asking you–you there with the beard. Yes, you, the
one doing no work. Can you hear me?"
Aksyonov released his ears and looked about the launch pad. Unsure
where to direct his response, he waved both hands high above his
head.
"Good," the voice said. "Wait there. I’ll be right up–" The next
words were swallowed in a spasm of rattling coughs that echoed
off the sides of the pit and seemed to well up from the earth
itself. Aksyonov covered his ears again. In mid-cough, the amplification
stopped, and all that fearsome reverberation contracted to a single
small voice that hacked and cleared its throat far across the
concrete pad.
Aksyonov turned to see a man step out of an elevator set into
one of the support pillars. The man walked toward Aksyonov, swabbed
his mouth with a handkerchief: heavy-set, fiftyish, with low,
thick eyebrows and a brilliant gaze. He wore an overcoat, though
the day was warm for autumn.
"You are Aksyonov," he said, hand extended. He said it as if he
had reviewed a list of names in the elevator, and had selected
just the right one for the job; if he had said Dyomin or Pilyugin
or Molotov, Aksyonov would have answered to it just as readily,
then and forever. "My name is Sergei Korolev," the older man continued,
"but you are unlikely to hear that name again. Here I am only
the Chief Designer, or the Chief. Welcome to Baikonur Cosmodrome."
Aksyonov made a little bow, just more than a nod. He had rehearsed
his opening and was quite proud of it. "I am honored to meet the
man who designed the first Soviet rocket."
"And I am honored to meet the designer of our future ones," Korolev
replied. "In collaboration, of course. Space is a collaborative
effort, like a nation, or a cathedral. Come with me, please,"
he added over his shoulder, for he already was well on his way
across the pad. Aksyonov grabbed his bags and scrambled to catch
up.
"I regret that I have no time to give you a tour of the facility,
nor a proper interview. Can you recognize a lie when you hear
one? What I just told you was a lie. Truthfully, I do not regret
it at all, for I am glad finally to be busy with this launch of
the Fellow Traveler–you read the brief I sent you, yes? Yes. Instead of the usual
formalities, you will accompany me on all my rounds in the coming
week, from this moment. Will this be satisfactory?"
"Very much so, Comrade Korolev. Er, Comrade Chief."
"Simply Chief will do. Hello, Abish, you mad Kazakh, please keep
it out of the pit, will you?" he cried to a waving, grinning man
who whizzed past in an electric cart. "You come from the Academy
with the highest recommendations, Comrade Aksyonov. So high that
you actually had a choice of postings, and choice is a rare thing
in this new century. Tell me, why did you choose Baikonur? Do
you nurse some abiding love for sand?"
"Primarily, Comrade–er, Chief–I came here to work with you." He
awaited some response, got none, and went on. "Also, Comrade Shandarin’s
design group involves–well, let us say much more conventional
applications of rocketry? Your work at Baikonur, what little I
could learn of it, seemed much more interesting."
"I understand," the Chief said. He led the way down a metal spiral
staircase that clamored at every step. "Comrade Shandarin is like
the old Chinaman, who lobs arrows of flying fire at the Mongols.
The firepower is greater and greater, but still the Mongols keep
coming." At the foot of the reverberating stairs, he turned back
and stared at Aksyonov’s luggage. "What in the hell are all these
things you carry around with you?"
Aksyonov stopped. "Ah, just some . . . just my luggage, Chief."
The older man’s gaze was unreadable. "My clothes, and books .
. . and some personal items . . ." He faltered.
After some thought, the Chief grunted in mingled assent and surprise
and said, "Books are useful." Turning to the parking lot, he swept
one arm back toward the launch pad. "Consider this a personal
item, too."
As the two men approached, a large soldier bounded from a car,
threw open the back door, and stood at attention. In one hand
he held a book, his place marked with an index finger.
"Thank you, Oleg," the Chief said, and followed Aksyonov in. "Oleg
here is reading his way through all the major published works
on rocketry and interplanetary travel. What do you think of the
Goddard, Oleg?"
"Very interesting, Chief," the soldier said, as he cranked the
ignition. Aksyonov studied the man’s thick, shaven neck.
"It is a directed reading," the Chief continued. He pulled a slide
rule and a slim notebook from his coat. The shadows of the gantries
swept across his face as the car circled the parking lot. "If
I must live with an armed escort, I will at least be able to converse
civilly with him."
"Would you like to converse now, Chief ?" the driver asked.
"No, thank you," said the Chief. His fingers danced across the
numbers as Aksyonov looked out the back window at the receding
claws of the pad.
III. Baikonur Cosmodrome, 4 October 1957
"Ten."
Ten seconds to go, and no work left to be done. Wonderful, wonderful.
Korolev stretched out his legs beneath the scarred wooden desk,
pulled the microphone forward, and relaxed as he counted down
to zero.
"Nine."
A hundred meters away from this steel-encased concrete bunker,
Korolev’s voice must be booming across the launch pad. Only the
topmost fifteen meters of Old Number Seven would be visible above the icy white fog vented from its liquid-oxygen
tanks. Korolev had watched it through every periscope, from every
angle, until his cheeks ached from squinting. Now he attempted
to watch nothing. His subordinates glanced up from their consoles
and radar screens sweaty and white-lipped, like men ridden by
nightmares. Let them worry. It was part of the learning experience. Korolev was done
with worries–for eight more seconds, anyway. Then the next trial
would begin, but in the meantime he would savor his triumph like
a crust of bread.
"Eight."
Just weeks before, Comrade Khrushchev had given the go-ahead for
an orbital satellite launch–a launch that would impress the world
(so he said) with the fearsome might of the Soviet intercontinental
ballistic missile. Ha! As if Washington were as easy to reach
as orbit. The Party Chairman had played right into the Chief Designer’s
hands.
"Seven."
Granted, Old Number Seven was a remarkable design achievement. Twelve small steering rockets
and four strap-on boosters surrounded a central core with twenty
separate thrust chambers. The metallurgists, wringing their hands,
had told Korolev that his project was doomed, that any single
rocket of Soviet make would shatter well before it reached four
hundred and fifty thousand kilograms of thrust. Very well, Korolev
said: How about two dozen, three dozen smaller rockets clustered
together? The union is greater than the individual; was this not
the essence of Communism?
"Six."
For hours, Khrushchev and the members of the Politburo, who knew
as much about rocketry as any equivalent number of camels, had
scampered about the launch pad like Siberian peasants on the loose
in Red Square. They wanted to touch everything, like children;
Korolev had to be stern with them. And they asked childish questions:
How much does it weigh? How fast does it go? How high will it
fly? The answers made them even more excited, and Khrushchev was
the most excited of all. "This is a great work you do, Comrade
Korolev!" he kept saying. The man’s cigar ashes were everywhere,
and Korolev had not seen his favorite tea glass since.
"Five."
Comrade Shandarin’s objections, though they went unheeded at the
Kremlin, were sound. What good was an ICBM that took hours to
fuel and launch? One so large that it could be moved only by railway?
One that could not maneuver itself to its target, but had to be
guided by human controllers on the ground? Worst of all, from
Shandarin’s standpoint, only the northeastern corner of the United
States had anything to fear from Old Number Seven. "Comrade," he intoned, "there are precious few military targets
in Maine." The restless old Chinaman could hear the Mongols laughing.
"Four."
Just a week before, young Aksyonov, at the close of a routine
meeting, had loitered about with the constipated expression that
signified an important question welling up inside. "Chief, I am
confused," the young man said. "The field marshal keeps referring
to Old Number Seven as a ballistic missile. Perhaps I am wrong, Chief, but–is Old Number Seven not a rather inefficient design for a ballistic missile?"
"Three."
Korolev had beamed at the young man, leaned forward and said,
"I do not think that a fair assessment, Comrade Aksyonov. I think
it would be more accurate to call Old Number Seven a shitty design for a ballistic missile."
"Two."
"But," Korolev continued, "it will make a marvelous booster rocket
to send men into space."
"One.
"Ignition!"
And so a new star blossomed in the Central Asian desert and rose
into the heavens, and even over the thunderous roar of the rockets
the others in the command bunker heard the Chief as he threw his
head back and laughed.
IV. Steppes north of Baikonur, February 1961
Aksyonov stood beside the Chief, their elbows touching, twin binoculars
raised. An eagle wheeled across Aksyonov’s portion of sky, and
he instinctively turned his head to keep it in view, then caught
himself and swung back to focus on the orange parachute as it
grew larger and larger–though not quite so large as expected.
Aksyonov lowered his binoculars and checked his map, but the Chief
needed no confirmation. "Our peacock has flown off course," he
muttered, and rapped twice on the roof of the cab.
The truck roared forward, jolted along the frozen ruts of the
dirt lane, and the swaying engineers in the back held on as best
they could. Across the vast fields to right and left, toy-sized
trucks and ambulances raced alongside. A flock of far-distant
sheep surged away from an oncoming truck; the wind carried the
honks and bleats for kilometers. Streams of vehicles converged
on the drifting orange blossom that was Pyotr Dolgov.
The Chief was on good terms with each of the prospective cosmonauts
at Star City, knew their names and families and hobbies and histories,
knew in fact everything in their dossiers (and KGB dossiers omitted
nothing). The Chief had selected these men from thousands of candidates,
in consultation with Khrushchev and, seemingly, half the Politburo;
and despite all this, Aksyonov was convinced that the Chief never
liked Pyotr Dolgov.
The cosmonaut would sit in the commons for hours waxing his absurd
mustache and bragging to everyone about his sexual exploits and
his skydiving expertise. "More than five hundred jumps, my friends,
and not so much as a sprained ankle. You see this little pocket
volume of Lenin? I collect them, just to have something to read
on the way down. After the chute is open, there is nothing else
to do, you see? Eventually I will have read all the great man’s
works between earth and sky! How many scholars can say as much?"
And so on and so on, as the other cosmonauts hooted and jeered
throughout. The Chief, shambling through the commons with a fresh
sheaf of problems under his arm, would glare at him, and say nothing.
Yet Dolgov was the obvious man to test the East’s ejection system,
and such a test must be done without delay, if what the Chief
read in the KGB reports, and in Life magazine, were to be believed. Woe indeed, that long, dry, cold
spring, if the Chief caught someone taking a break to smoke a
cigarette or place an idle telephone call or, worst of all, take
a nap. "Do the Americans and the Germans shirk their jobs, down
there in the tropics?" he would yell, waving the latest publicity
photographs of the seven toothy spacemen. (The Americans surely
would send the first dentist into space.) The Chief found this
strange, perpetually sunny launch site, this Cape Canaveral Florida,
a locale as exotic as Mars or the moon; to him it was always "down
there in the tropics." So Dolgov was hustled through his training,
and the final test was scheduled for late February.
The experiment was simple. Dolgov, suited up, was strapped into
a prototype ejection seat inside a full-size mock-up of the East
craft. Then the mock-up was carried aloft in the cargo bay of
one of the big Antonov transports. Thousands of meters above the
steppes, the capsule was shoved without ceremony out the back
of the plane. Once clear, Dolgov pressed the "eject" button. Very
simple. Also lunatic, but the schedule at Baikonur Cosmodrome
made generous allowances for lunacy.
Dolgov had summed up the procedure: "You feed me to the plane,
and the plane shits me back out!"
The Chief had winced, and then nodded his head.
The Chief’s truck was not the first to arrive that afternoon.
A gaggle of engineers all tried to climb over the tailgate together,
and the Chief, impatient, gestured for Aksyonov to help him over
the side. The rippling parachute danced sideways, but was anchored
by the prone figure on the ground.
A pale soldier with a rifle jogged up to the Chief and said: "It’s
bad, Comrade Designer. Perhaps you should wait for the–" The Chief,
of course, was already past, and Aksyonov checked his stride a
bit so as not to outpace the Chief.
Dolgov lay on his back, arms and legs sprawled as no living man
would willingly lie. His helmet, its faceplate shattered, rested
at a crazy angle on his shoulders yet still was bolted to the
suit.
The Chief stared down at the body and said, "We are fools before
men and before God."
Doctors arrived, circling somewhat to maintain a respectful distance
from the Chief, and confirmed the obvious: Dolgov’s neck was broken.
He had done no reading on the way down.
"His helmet must have struck the hatch upon ejection," Aksyonov
said, for he felt he should say something. "He knew the risks,"
he added.
"Not as well as you, my friend, and certainly not as well as I."
The Chief’s voice was deceptively quiet. By now dozens of others
had gathered. They looked sick, ashen, aghast, but the Chief’s
face was taut with fury. Slow and gentle in his rage, he knelt
on the frozen ground, reached past the doctors, grasped Dolgov’s
outflung hands, and folded the arms across the orange chest so
that Dolgov seemed to grasp the chest straps of his parachute.
"Better that way," the Chief grunted.
He turned and walked back toward the truck, into the cold wind,
Aksyonov close behind. As he walked, the Chief pulled from his
bulky jacket his notebook and a ball-point pen, shook the pen
to get it going (it was of East German make), and began to write,
pen plowing across the page, line after line. As he wrote, the
Chief stepped over gullies and around rocks without stumbling
or looking up. A marmot scampered across his path, practically
underfoot. The Chief kept writing.
At the end of the lane, where the earth was permanently churned
by the wide turns of tractors, the pale soldier had found a use
for his rifle: He held it up horizontally, like a cattle gate,
to keep three shriveled peasant women at bay. As the Chief approached,
the eldest called: "What is wrong, Comrade? What’s all the fuss?"
The Chief replied as he passed, without looking up or ceasing
to write: "I just broke a young man’s neck, Madam, with a slide
rule and the stroke of a pen."
The old woman instantly crossed herself, then realized her error
and clapped her hands to her face; but Aksyonov and his Chief
could not care less, and the soldier was intent on the romping
parachute, as rapt and wide-eyed as a child. |
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