Dr Berlin

by Francis Bennett

  On the table beside a worn leather armchair was the framed portrait of a good-looking young man in air-force uniform whose smile, frozen for ever in its youthful innocence, called so painfully across the emptiness that his tragic early death had inflicted on Radin.

  The words of the letter resonated through Berlin’s mind, their mystery unresolved. Why had Viktor insisted that he be the first? Could there be a coded message that only he would understand? Was there somewhere in this apartment some possession that Radin wanted him alone to find? It was an unlikely theory, but while he stood in Radin’s study, no other took its place.

  Berlin scanned the tightly packed bookshelves – he recognised none of the authors except for Tsiolkovsky, the renowned father of the Soviet space industry, though he had never opened any of his books. Viktor had The Investigation of Cosmic Space by Reactive Vehicles, The Theory of the Jet Engine, and his final work, Space Rocket Trains. Then there were yellowing scientific journals and the records of symposia arranged meticulously in date order. Space Science and Engineering, The Soviet National Space Engineering Symposium, Space Exploration. There was nothing here that interested him – he was a historian, not a scientist – and he had no intention of writing a history of the Soviet space effort, nor of Radin’s contribution to it.

  He unlocked the filing cabinet with the key Olga had given him and searched through personal correspondence meticulously organised, so typical of Viktor. There were the texts of speeches he had given in the order he had given them and academic diplomas from his youth: Radin was a professor of aeronautical engineering at twenty-four. There were letters of commendation from his professors; his official citations for the decorations he had received – these were unexpected signs of vanity. Berlin found a copy of the judgement that had sent him to Kolyma and the identification tag he must have worn there; the official letter telling him of the death of his son, and a newspaper cutting with a photograph showing his son’s widow receiving the posthumous award of Hero of the Soviet Union from the First Secretary; letters from different medical specialists over the years about the state of his hands, with the same message that the damage was too great for anything to be done. Each had Radin’s courteous reply pinned to it, except for one from a specialist in Boston, who thought he might be able to reconstruct Viktor’s hands, but he would need at least a year or more of his time to do so. That offer Viktor had refused. No doubt the politicians to whom he was accountable would have suspected some CIA trick behind the invitation and prevented him from going to America.

  With difficulty, Berlin shifted the cabinet from its position against the wall. Nothing had fallen behind it, nor were there any secret compartments, though he hadn’t expected to find any. He went through the drawers of the desk, carefully removing each one in turn and feeling behind it for concealed papers. All he retrieved were some ancient crumpled envelopes, a torn piece of blotting paper and a broken pencil.

  Angry with himself for imagining even for a moment that Viktor might have acted as crudely as that, he sat down at his desk and surveyed the room. Perhaps his interpretation was wrong; perhaps he had read into the words a meaning they couldn’t support. Forget the fantasy of a coded message. Read the sentence as the generosity of a dying man, and accept it for what it is. What would he like to remind him of Viktor? The drawings of spaceships, an old man’s last speculations about a future he would never see? A blueprint of an early rocket? But wherever he looked, the thought wouldn’t leave him alone. Was that really why Viktor wanted him here?

  He could hear Viktor’s voice in his ear, he could feel the presence of his energy in the room, the small, neat man talking, gesturing, arguing, directing, driving those around him to levels of achievement they didn’t know they were capable of, a continual source of inspiration to anyone who came in contact with him.

  Anything of mine to remind you of our conversations, which brought me so much pleasure.

  Radin must have calculated that he would puzzle over that sentence, that he would worry away at it until he had found the code to unlock its meaning. He knew then that his first response had been right. There was something here that Viktor wanted him to have, which was why he wanted him here first. He was sure it would not be found in the bedroom or the sitting room, nor would it be trapped behind a cabinet or simply left in a desk drawer. Viktor wasn’t like that. He was a meticulous man, an engineer for whom order and organisation were everything. He could sit at his desk and lay his hands on any piece of information he wanted because he knew exactly where it was.

  ‘The future of civilisation is to be found in our ability to tame chaos by imposing order. Order is the mark of man’s ingenuity.’ How many times had he heard Viktor say that? He must look out for anything that disturbed the patterns Viktor had established. He looked again at the arrangement of photographs, the correspondence on his desk, the drawings pinned to the wall. They yielded no clues. Nothing jarred. Nothing was obviously out of place. He returned to the bookcase to examine the journals again. The titles were listed alphabetically by author or by date of issue, as might have been expected. A familiar precision was there, too.

  Then he spotted it. Every so often the number of an issue of Space Exploration was repeated. There were two copies of issue 39, two of 50, two of 58. Why keep a second copy? He pulled one out. The covers were genuine, but inside each issue the printed text had been cut out neatly with a razor blade, and inserted in its place were a few pages of manuscript in Radin’s neat and careful handwriting.

  He pulled out all the second issues, and withdrew the manuscript concealed within each one. Together they added up to more than fifty pages of closely written text. He looked at the title-page. An unofficial report into the space flight of Cosmonaut A. Alexandrof.

  He sat down at the desk and opened the manuscript. The only Soviet cosmonaut who had flown in space was Yuri Gagarin. He’d never heard of Alexandrof. What was Viktor on about? He began to read.

  *

  How strange to imagine (Viktor wrote) that when you read this you will be hearing a voice from the grave. Olga will have written to you, you will have puzzled over my instructions. You will have wandered around my apartment racked with indecision. I can see your reaction in all its stages of confusion. Flattery: that I should have chosen you before all my friends. Self-doubt: why you before others? Suspicion: what was the reasoning behind my instruction? Dismissal: this can have nothing to do with you, you are imagining it. Until finally that dogged, rigorous curiosity which makes you worry away at a problem until you have discovered the truth, drives you to find the manuscript I have crudely concealed for you. You see, my friend, I have observed you closely. I have come to know you well.

  So, now you have my manuscript in your hands. Prepare to have your faith tested. I shall lay siege to your beliefs. Defend them well. Cling hard to the myths that have framed your life. I will shake them to their foundations. Hang on to your cherished illusions. Before you finish reading, you may find them slipping from your grasp.

  Now read on, my friend.

  *

  Antonin Alexandrof was always the one for me, right from the beginning. I never liked the farm boy Gagarin, whose sweet smile has become the embodiment to the world of the superiority of the Soviet ideal, and will help to extend the life of this intolerable regime by at least another generation. How subtle our rulers are in their choice of hero. Alexandrof shone out among the rest. Manned space flight was more than an adventure to him. He had the intelligence to see that it was another step in the unending confrontation between man’s ingenuity and courage and the dangers and mysteries of the unknown.

  Not only was he the right physical size – medium height, slim, athletic – he was articulate, and he had genuine intellectual curiosity. He wanted to know everything about my spacecraft: how it was constructed to withstand the huge stresses it would encounter on its journey, the extremes of heat and cold; how the engines worked, how much thrust they must generate to throw the capsule out of the
earth’s gravitational pull; how many litres of fuel were consumed in a second; the effect of this acceleration upon the human body; how the stages of the rocket separated one from another; the dimensions of the spherical capsule; the layout of the cockpit and our reasons for it; the temperatures the defensive shield would have to resist if the capsule were to survive the intense heat generated by its re-entry into the atmosphere. Always questions and more questions in his search for knowledge. There was hardly a detail he wasn’t curious about. He was the only one of that group of twenty cosmonauts who wanted to do more than inspect the capsule to see if they could fit inside it. I spent many hours with him, showing him my drawings and plans, sharing with him my ambitions and my dreams, while he listened, always giving me his full attention.

  I cannot say I got to know him well. I satisfied his thirst for knowledge, and I had to be content with that. He did not seek my companionship, nor, as I discovered, was he close to anyone in that first group of cosmonauts. There was some part of him that he held back from his relationships. I wanted to know more about him, but he cleverly avoided talking about himself. I learned from his file that he was born in Leningrad, the son of a doctor and a primary-school teacher; that he had attended university at the Institute of Aeronautical Engineering in Moscow; when he joined the air force and what aircraft he had flown – there were many hours on MIG 17s and 19s. He told me he had a wife and two small sons, but I learned little more about him from his own lips.

  In many ways he reminded me of my son Kyrill: he had that same eager innocence, that same trust that said ‘give me your machine and I will fly it for you’, never doubting that the machine would fly, nor that he would return to earth safely. I once asked Alexandrof if he had known Kyrill. ‘I knew of his exploits,’ he replied, ‘though I was never lucky enough to meet him. He was an inspiration to all of us.’ Kyrill, you may remember, had briefly snatched the world air-speed record from the Americans a few weeks before his death.

  Alexandrof had never seen action, he told me in a rare confessional moment, and he regretted that. Flying in space was the closest parallel he could find. That was the only clue he gave me about what drove this quiet, almost scholarly man to undertake the extremes of physical testing that our scientists demanded – often mistakenly, in my opinion, but that argument is for another time – or what made him want to outshine his colleagues. You could not spend an hour in his presence without being made aware of the extraordinary inner drive that fuelled his ambition. I was never in doubt that he wanted to be the first man in space.

  We met at the top of a 28-storey lift shaft in the Moscow State University. I am sure Lev Rudnev, Stalin’s architect, who designed this unbelievably ugly building, never imagined the use to which our medics would put his lift shaft. I had gone to review our training schedule. Can the human body operate effectively in a state of weightlessness? That was what the doctors had been asked to investigate. We knew by then that dogs could survive the stresses of space flight and the ordeal of life without gravity, so why not humans? I wanted to see for myself what the weightlessness training consisted of, whether we were not wasting our time in an experiment that told us little or nothing. In my experience, medics become obsessed with the data from their experiments, and only unwillingly can they be persuaded to part with the results. All I wanted was a young man strong enough to sit inside my rocket, remain conscious during the flight and return to earth alive.

  Our people had rigged up a special cage that fell down the lift shaft. For a second or two of their descent, our cosmonauts would experience something akin to weightlessness. It told us nothing and was a foolish waste, of time. Send them up in a MIG fighter, I argued, they will learn more there. But the doctors would not listen to me. That situation has not changed. Only a few moments ago in this bedroom where I am secretly writing this text, despite my protestations my own doctors have once again denied me painkillers, fearing the damage to my kidneys. What does it matter? I tell them. I will be dead from other causes long before my kidneys give out. But they are not persuaded.

  They were all there, Alexandrof, Gagarin, Titov and the others. One by one they climbed into the cage, which was then released to drop down the lift shaft, coming to rest on compressed-air buffers. Alexandrof was the last to go.

  ‘I have some questions, Comrade Director,’ he said to me while he waited. He was a serious, dark-haired man, who seldom smiled. He was a little taller than the others, and he reminded me more of a teacher than a pilot.

  ‘Have I time to answer them now?’ I asked.

  He wanted to have an hour or so of my day, he said, if I could grant him that. He indicated the sort of questions he would ask. I was intrigued, and we agreed to meet later that week. He would drive the forty kilometres or so from Zvyozdny Gorodok, the compound that was being constructed to house the cosmonauts’ training programme, meet me in my Moscow apartment and then return.

  We followed the same routine whenever I was in Moscow. How many precious days of my life have I wasted in meetings with the supervisors of the State Planning Committee, with its absurd five-year plans that any child could have seen were doomed to feil? How many more hours in the offices of the Space Flight Commission, arguing a case with men who had little idea of what I was talking about? Bureaucracy is strangling hope in this country, and smothering dreams of adventure. This country’s future is being held to ransom by men without courage and having too much power. I despair.

  Alexandrof would telephone to arrange a time to meet. We would sit in my study and he would produce his notebook, where he had written down what he wanted me to explain. He would take notes as I talked. When the interview was over, we would have a drink, never more than one, which he always took standing up, then he would thank me and leave. There was no intimacy in the relationship. He never called me anything than ‘Comrade Director’. But I looked forward to his visits: they became a regular feature of my trips to Moscow. In that city, these were rare moments of engagement with a mind that interested me.

  What did he want to know? The precise details don’t matter, at least, not in the context of what I am trying to tell you. Nor would you be able to follow our technical language, that is quite beyond your competence. I want you to understand that I came to respect Alexandrof. He was not another reckless fighter pilot who wanted to show off his courage by going further and faster than anyone had ever gone before. There was a rigour about him that I liked. He was thoughtful, his questions were well prepared, his observations often useful. I began to trust his point of view. I made a number of important modifications to the interior layout of the capsule as a result of his comments.

  Our meetings continued uneventfully for some time. Then one evening, two days after I had been summoned to return to Moscow for a series of planning meetings which were to last ten days, when in fact, with a halfway decent organisation, the work could have been done in three, Alexandrof telephoned me and asked if he could see me at once. If I detected any stress in his voice I put it down to the progressive effects of the training programme. I agreed that he should meet me at my apartment that evening at the usual time.

  ‘We are hearing persistent rumours,’ he told me as soon as I had shut the door, ‘that the launch date has been brought forward.’ He was referring, I knew, to the date for the bunch of the first manned space flight.

  I had not authorised any change in date, and told him so. I was the director of the project, nothing could be altered without my consent. To my surprise that did not satisfy him. He urged me to find out if the rumour was true. Bringing the launch date forward by six weeks would mean cutting short the cosmonauts’ training, and that, he believed, was a mistake. I agreed, though not for the reasons he gave me. The new launch date would also deny us vital testing time on some of the brand new technologies we were using on the craft. We were at that time experiencing a number of serious difficulties, particularly with the parachute spring releases. Unless they functioned properly, the descending capsule would sim
ply plunge to the earth, killing the cosmonaut. I would not agree to send my rocket into space until I was sure that it was likely to return with its human cargo unharmed.

  Again I tried to reassure Alexandrof that he was mistaken, but without success. When he had gone, I thought about the visit. He had shown great personal courage. After all, I could have been the one who had changed the launch date. He had made it clear that his concern was for the project and the benefits its success would bring to the country. There was nothing personal in his anxiety. There never was with Alexandrof. He was not trying to save his own skin. If I was further convinced in my assessment of Alexandrof as the ablest of our group of cosmonauts, I was equally mystified at the rumour about the changes in the schedule. But I knew that my authority could not be overridden and thought no more about it. Rumours about everything were a daily occurrence, as they are bound to be in a world that is nourished on lies.

  The following day I received a telephone call from my assistant, Voroshilov. It had been a struggle, he said, but the rescheduling task had been completed and was now ready for me to review. There were still some details of the new arrangement that worried him, he confessed, in particular the reduced time for testing some of the more advanced equipment. The spring release on the parachutes persistently malfunctioned in test after test. Perhaps we could talk about these issues when I returned.

  ‘I have not authorised any rescheduling of the launch date,’ I said.

  There was a stunned silence. Then Voroshilov said, ‘I have in my hand an instruction signed by the Central Committee that the launch date has been brought forward by six weeks. We are to reschedule the entire programme. That is what we have been doing over the last forty-eight hours. We have hardly slept.’