    Copyright (c) by Alexander Lazarevich, 1989, 1999.
    
    For  non-commercial  use  only! You may  copy  this  text  and
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    About  commercial publishing rights, please contact  Alexander
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                                              Alexander LAZAREVICH
    
    
    
                          THE MOON DREAM
                            (a legend)
    
    
       A legend is an imaginative work of fiction that purports to
                                                          be true.
                                      Definition from a dictionary
    
    
    
    1.
    
    All  his  life was one long road to the Moon. All his life  he
was  racing against time to reach it. Sometimes it seemed  to  him
that he would be too late, the span of human life being short  for
someone  who  had  had  to start virtually from  scratch,  from  a
fragile  glider, a plaything of winds, to gradually build  up  and
enhance his design into a spaceship capable of taking man  to  the
Moon.  He  had built the glider when he was still very young,  but
even  back then he was longing for greater things than just flying
in the air, remaining a prisoner of the Earth's atmosphere.
    
    Even  back then, he saw the Moon in his dreams. There he  was,
opening  the hatch, climbing down a short ladder in his cumbersome
spacesuit, to put his foot on the rocky surface. The rocks flooded
with  a dazzling Sun set against the inky blackness of sky. A land
of silent, dazzling, and dead beauty. The only relief for the eyes
being  a  small  blue  sickle of Earth  in  the  black  sky.  And,
surrounded with all this boundless lifeless Nature, there She  was
-  The  Machine,  The  Ship, the material manifestation  of  human
thought, a particle that had absorbed all the achievements of many
millennia of the Earth's civilization, a small fragment  of  Home,
that can shelter the cosmonaut from the abyss of Space...
    
    The  first time he experienced that feeling had been  when  he
was  trying out his glider - the vast emptiness of the  sky  might
have  been overpowering, but he was inside the womb of his Machine
-  and that made him invincible. His life in those moments totally
depended  on  his  Machine, and he loved her for that  feeling  of
Salvation  that She gave him. He loved his Machines and that  love
was an unending source of happiness to him. But in the moon dreams
everything  was even more vivid, even more delicious. The  feeling
of happiness was hundreds, thousands of times more intense ...
    
    At  first he himself did not believe that this dream could  be
transformed  into  reality.  The  distance  from  a  glider  to  a
spaceship was too great. To build a spaceship one would  need  the
labor of hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people. And the
people  that were living around him did not know any moon  dreams.
There  was  nobody  to  build the ship  with.  "A  dream,  just  a
dream..." - thought he ...
    
    But  then, the wars came. First, the second world war, then  a
"cold" one. People suddenly needed rockets to hurl atomic bombs at
each  other. From one continent to another. Far enough not to  see
the  millions one would kill. A nod of the Great Leader was enough
to  make tens of thousands of people start building rockets -  not
for moon dreams, for a crust of stale bread.
    
    He  was  appointed Chief designer and he constructed a rocket.
It could hurl a hydrogen bomb all the way to America, and that was
what  the  generals demanded. The generals were quite happy.  They
did  not  know  that the rocket could do something else  as  well,
something  which  was not in the specifications. That  "something"
was  only known to the "Chief" (as his subordinates came  to  call
him).  What  he  knew was that after a certain  modification  that
rocket could put a satellite into orbit around the Earth, and even
a  manned  spacecraft. It could even deliver a cargo to the  Moon,
albeit  a  small  one  (a man with a life support  system  and  an
additional rocket to bring him back from the Moon would have  been
a  load  far beyond its capacity), but he felt that he had already
traveled half way to his Moon Dream. Now, the critical factor  was
time. He was no longer young. He had to make it in time...
    
      It  was about that time that the Great Leader died,  and  to
the  power  in the country rose a new ruler, who was  known  as  a
great  liberal and who proclaimed peaceful co-existence  with  the
other  nations of the world. The Chief realized that to  make  his
Moon  dream  come true, he would now have to become  not  only  an
engineer,  not  only an industrial manager, but  a  politician  as
well.  "Let us," - he proposed to the new ruler - "demonstrate  to
the  entire  world  our  power, but also our peaceful  intentions.
Let's  launch the most powerful rocket in the world,  but  without
the  bomb, for a purely scientific purpose - let it put into Earth
orbit  a  satellite, and later, perhaps, a satellite  with  a  man
onboard."  The  new ruler took a fancy to the idea, regardless  of
the  fact  that  he  had a very vague notion of what  a  satellite
really  was. The most important thing for him was to cut Americans
down to size. For several years those guys had been boasting about
their plans to launch a satellite - without any visible result.
    
    To  spite  the Americans, the new ruler gave his go-ahead  for
launching  the first satellite, and then, the first man in  space.
What  the new ruler especially liked about the latter was the fact
that  the  cosmonaut did not see any trace of God in heaven  while
visiting there, which, beyond any reasonable doubt, was to  him  a
final  proof of atheism and historical materialism, which, in  its
turn,  augured well for the expected speedy arrival of the  bright
communist future.
    
    Meantime,  the  "cursed capitalists" turned green  with  envy.
The handsomest and the youngest of American presidents summoned to
the White House all his scientific advisors and told them:
    "We,  the richest and freest nation in the world, are  lagging
in  space  behind  Russia, a country bled dry by its  totalitarian
regime! How can America ever wipe off this national disgrace?  How
- that's what I want to hear from you."
    
    And  one of his advisors said: "It's 1961 now. If we get  down
to  work immediately, before the 60s are out we can land a man  on
the moon. Hopefully, the first in the world."
    
    - "Let's do it!" - said the Handsome President.
    -  "But  what about the enormous appropriations that  will  be
need..."
    -  "I'll  bring  the Congress around." And he did  bring  them
around...
    
    Two  years later the Handsome President was assassinated, when
he  was going around the city of Dallas in a beautiful automobile,
sitting  next to a beautiful woman, his wife, who then beautifully
mourned  him  in  front of a world-wide television audiences  (the
funeral of the Handsome President turned out to be the first world-
wide  TV  broadcast  in history transmitted via  a  communications
satellite), but soon thereafter recomposed herself and  married  a
Greek multimillionaire.
    
    One  more  year  passed,  and the Soviet  Ruler,  known  as  a
Liberal  and  a  Peacemaker, who liberally gave  away  the  Soviet
taxpayers' money for cutting Americans down to size and for  anti-
religious propaganda, was deposed by his former deputy,  who  used
to  hold medal boxes while his boss was awarding the Gold Stars of
the Heroes of the Soviet Union to the cosmonauts.
    
    But  although the Handsome President and the Liberal Ruler had
both left the stage of history, the process that they had started,
by  that  time, was already unstoppable, and became known  as  The
Space Race. The prestige of the two Superpowers was at stake.  The
funding unlimited.
    
    Here is your chance, Chief. The only thing now was to make  it
on  time. And it wasn't even the race with the Americans.  He  was
racing  against  Time itself, the time that was left  for  him  to
live.  How much time had he left? For the last few months  he  had
been feeling a strange pain in his stomach. And the Moon Dream was
so close...
    
    
    2.
    
    The  preparations for the Soviet lunar mission were  conducted
in  great secrecy. Work was under way on the giant rocket that was
to  deliver  to the Moon everything, including cosmonauts  with  a
smaller  rocket  that was to be launched from the Moon  to  return
them  to  Earth. But in parallel with this project, which  was  so
similar  to the American Apollo program, in even greater  secrecy,
one  more  lunar  mission  project was being  worked  upon  -  the
simplified  project, just in case we are not on time.  Even  in  a
country  which  had  not long before that passed  through  a  gory
ordeal  of war and terror, even in that savage country,  the  mere
thought of that back-up project made most of those few people  let
on  the  secret feel uneasy. The project was breathing a  chilling
breath of Death down their spines.
    
    That project was a one-way manned mission to the Moon. Such  a
mission  would not need a smaller rocket to be launched  from  the
Moon to return to Earth, it would not need a heavy heat shield for
re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. Such a mission does not need
many things, it carries along very little cargo, and that's why it
could  be  launched  on a relatively small  rocket.  It  could  be
launched right away, and there would be no need to wait until  the
Big  Rocket, similar to the one that the Americans were  building,
was ready.
    
    One  cosmonaut in a small capsule, equipped with  retrorockets
for soft landing on the Moon. He would become the first Man to set
his  foot  on  the  Moon.  He  would  conduct  all  the  necessary
scientific  experiments, and radio the results back to Earth.  And
when the air supply ran low, he... well, let's put it this way: he
would swallow a pill. And would go to sleep. Forever. And he would
live  forever  in  posterity's  grateful  memory.  The  Hero,  who
sacrificed his life for the Good of Science.  For Soviet  Science,
the most progressive and advanced science in the world.
    
    -"Well,  let's hope it won't come to this" - those let  in  on
the  secret tried to reassure themselves - "We'll prepare  a  real
there-and-back mission ahead of the Americans, and there'll be  no
need to sacrifice a human life in the name of science."
    -  "But  what if we still don't make it on time?"  -  "In  any
case,  it  must be a Soviet man who will step on the  Moon  first,
proving  by  his  heroism the superiority of our system  over  the
capitalism.  Only  our  system can  create  a  man  who  puts  the
interests  of  the  society  before his personal  interests,  even
before  his own life... And then, surely they'll select  for  that
mission some terminal cancer patient, who is doomed anyway. Rather
than dying in hospital... How does that song go: "it's bad to  die
in one's bed, it's good to die on the field of battle". Even death
is beautiful, when the world is looking on you..."
    But,  in spite of all such reasoning, everybody tried to  keep
away  from  the  sealed warehouse, where the flight-ready  one-way
lunar mission capsule was stored. If the rocket for the there-and-
back mission were ready ahead of the Americans, that capsule would
be  scrapped. But if there were any threat of Apollo coming  first
in  the  race,  this  capsule would be installed  on  the  already
existing launch vehicle...
    
    
    3.
    
    In  mid-November  of 1965, the designer of the  non-returnable
lunar  capsule  was summoned by the Chief Designer who  told  him:
"Immediately  check  the  condition of the  oneway  lunar  mission
capsule  and  send it to the launch site. In ten  days,  both  the
capsule and the launch vehicle must be ready for launch."
    The  capsule designer, surprised and frightened, looked at the
Chief.  The  Chief  was looking very ill.  He  was  said  to  have
undergone a very serious surgical operation. Cancer.
    -  "Don't  be  afraid,"  - said the Chief,  having  noted  the
frightened expression on the face of the other man - "it's just  a
test  flight.  We are going to send to the moon an  ape..."  -  he
stopped for a moment, as if contemplating something in his  mind's
eye - "yes, an ape.. We've got to see how he's going to survive  a
soft landing on the Moon."
    The  Chief  noticed  that the other  man  was  looking  at  an
envelope  lying  on  his desk. Without saying a  word,  the  Chief
reached  for the envelope and turned it face down. It was a  large
manila paper envelope. The kind of envelope a surgeon might use to
send a surgery report to the physician in charge of a patient. The
capsule  designer even thought that he had caught a glimpse  of  a
seal of some hospital on the face of the envelope.
    -  "In ten days we won't even be able to transport the capsule
to  the launch site." - he started to protest to the Chief -  "The
railroads are now..."
    -  "Two weeks" - said the Chief, interrupting him, and it  was
clear  from  the  tone of his voice that the deadline  was  final.
Knowing from his previous experience that it was no use to  haggle
with  the  Chief, the capsule designer said goodbye and  left  the
room.
    Left  alone, the Chief picked up the open envelope,  and,  for
the   umpteenth  time  went  over  its  contents.  "It's  a  death
sentence..." - he whispered inaudibly - "A death sentence. To  me.
Can it be that I won't make it on time?"
    And the Moon Dream was as close as never before...
    
    
    4.
    
    He escaped from all of them !!!
    
    On  the frosty morning of December 3, 1965, two of the Chief's
closest  associates,  who were let on the secret,  rolled  a  huge
container with an "ape" into the launch gantry elevator  and  took
it  to  the  top of the rocket. They helped the Chief out  of  the
container  and  seated him in the capsule. After that,  everything
was just as he had imagined it to be, just as the first cosmonauts
had  often  described  it to him: the shudder  running  along  the
rocket body as it was lifting off, the roaring of the engines, the
g-loads... The g-loads weren't high though, the trajectory was not
very  punishing, since the original plans called for  the  one-way
mission to be manned with a terminally ill pilot.
    Post-operative seams were aching, his blood was  throbbing  in
his  temples,  and  at  his  side a  tape  recorder  was  running,
transmitting  to  Earth  faked telemetry data  on  the  pulse  and
respiration rate of the ape, which, of course, was absent from the
capsule.   The   ape,  which  had  once  been  bartered   from   a
"progressive"  African  state  for a  crate  full  of  Kalashnikov
machine  guns,  and  which had already been  written  off  in  the
official  documents  as  lost in a space experiment,  remained  on
Earth.  According  to  the secret plan devised  by  the  Chief  in
collusion  with his associates, that ape was to meet  a  sad,  but
honorable fate: its ashes, encased in an urn, were to be  entombed
in  the Kremlin wall under a plaque bearing the name of the  Chief
Designer.  But the name was just a name, a convention invented  by
man. What mattered was that his ashes would never be buried in the
same  wall with the ashes of those who had ordered his arrest back
at  the  time of the Great Purge of 1938, of those who, throughout
all  his  life, had been interfering with his work, pestering  him
with  idiotic government orders and absurd secrecy, those who  had
been  plotting  against  him and snitching  on  him  -  all  those
generals,  politicians, academicians. Let them lie buried  in  the
same wall with an ape!
      He  had  escaped  from  all of them!  He  had  escaped  from
practitioners of medical "science" incapable of curing a man,  but
quite  capable of protracting his misery, suspending  the  already
doomed  in  a  semi-dead/semi-alive  condition  with  the  use  of
medication  and state-of-the-art equipment, making him suffer  the
agony,  from  which he would have been long ago delivered  by  the
merciful  Death,  had the practitioners of the medical  profession
not  committed an outrage upon Death Himself. He had escaped  from
the  humiliation of a slow death, when a man dies gradually, piece
by piece. First he becomes incapable of walking, then he loses the
faculty  of speech, and finally his consciousness is destroyed.  A
grown,  intelligent, proud man reverts to a condition of a diaper-
soiling  baby  -  no greater indignity could be imagined.  But  he
escaped from medicine, and now he would die a quick, beautiful and
dignified  death, in his right mind, being at the very  summit  he
had been climbing to all his life!
    Of  course,  it  might have been easier  to  go  to  the  Moon
without  hiding  under  the  guise  of  an  "ape",  to  go   there
officially, as a hero sacrificing his own life in the interests of
the Soviet science. But then, while on the Moon, he would have had
to  take soil samples, make some primitive chemical experiments on
them,  and send reports back to Earth. The last few hours  of  his
life  would  have  been spent in going through an absurd  charade,
entirely  useless, since anyway in a few years the Moon  would  be
visited by a two-way mission (whether it would be a Soviet  or  an
American  mission  was  wholly  immaterial  to  the  eternal  High
Science), which would bring back to Earth moon rock samples  which
can be much more skillfully studied by professional geochemists in
their  well-equipped labs on Earth. All his bustling around  would
have  boiled down to one thing: to give the government news agency
TASS  a  chance  to  trumpet the news about  the  advanced  Soviet
science  and technology having beaten the Americans to  the  Moon.
And  that  would have been a great lie, since the Americans  could
also have sent a one-way mission to the Moon long ago, had such  a
perverted,  verging on paranoia, idea as sending a man to  certain
death in the name of national science prestige occurred to them.
    All  this would have been an exercise in falsehood and vanity,
and  falsehood and vanity shall not defile the mystery  of  death.
The Chief chose to leave earthly life quietly, without fanfare.
    Of  course,  that  didn't  mean that  TASS  wouldn't  have  to
release  an  official  announcement about the  launch,  since  the
Americans had surely detected the rocket launch through their  spy
satellites,   and   their   electronic   surveillance   was    now
eavesdropping on the telemetry data. But that would have to be  an
announcement  about the launch of an unmanned lunar probe  of  the
Luna  series. What was the last probe's number? Seven? That  makes
this one Luna 8...
    ...  The  g-loads ended. The Chief suddenly felt  a  wonderful
freedom in his body that is only possible in zero gravity. Luna  8
had been injected into a trajectory aimed at the Moon. Visible  in
a  porthole  was  planet Earth, light blue, with blindingly  white
spots of clouds. Slowly, very slowly, almost imperceptibly to  the
eye, it was getting smaller in size. There were people left behind
on  that  planet. He had escaped from all of them! He had  escaped
from General Secretaries and Presidents! From KGB men and CIA men!
From  cabinet  ministers  and shift foremen!  From  all  kinds  of
inspectors and commissions of inquiry! From physicians and funeral
directors!  From  wives and mistresses! From  everybody!  For  the
first time in his life he was absolutely free! He no longer had to
report  to  his  superiors, and to give directions and  administer
rebukes  to  his subordinates, he no longer needed to struggle  to
obtain  funds... The only thing he had to do now was to relax  and
enjoy  the fruits of his lifetime of work. Left there, down below,
were  grimy  stack-furnaces and noisy trains, hydrogen  bombs  and
napalm-drenched jungle, junkyards, sewers, polluted lakes,  jails,
labor   camps,  safe  cabinets,  files  classified  "top  secret",
thousands of kilometers of barbed wire and whole armies  of  armed
guards. Who might have thought that from high above, all this hell
looks  so beautiful, so white and innocent, and even with  a  blue
rim of its atmospheric veil!
    Like  an angel, the Chief made his ascension above the  wicked
planet Earth.
    To  meet  his  death,  he was flying to  the  Moon,  the  dead
planet, which henceforth was to become the planet of the dead.  He
was  to  find  a communion with the heavenly purity. The  heavenly
bodies are pure because they are lifeless. Where there's no  life,
there's nobody to foul things up, hence the purity.
    The  Moon  Dream,  which  had seemed impossible,  was  finally
coming  true. Thousands upon thousands of people had piled up  the
pyramid  from the top of which the Chief could reach for the  Moon
and  touch  it.  Among these people were, to  use  a  clich  from
official  TASS announcements, "the Soviet workers, scientists  and
engineers,  who, through their dedicated labor have  achieved...",
etc..  Other  people, who also had had a hand in this achievement,
were  the  Great Leader who had decided to create a rocket  shield
for his country, and his successor, the peace-loving liberal Prime
Minister,  and  the  Handsome President, with his  hurt  patriotic
feelings. The Chief thought that he had outsmarted all of them. He
even  thought that he had outsmarted History itself, by making  it
work  for  him,  for him alone, for making his Moon  Dream  become
reality.  As a true Engineer, who, out of dead materials available
from  Nature, creates a machine capable of translating into action
the  will  of  its  creator, he, out of materials  available  from
History  - out of Cold War, out of national pride, out of personal
traits  of  leaders of the Superpowers - had created a  Mechanism,
which turned his dream into reality...
    
    
    5.
    
    On  the  next  day, December 4, the Chief was  awakened  by  a
slight jolt.
    The  capsule was almost imperceptibly vibrating, and there was
a  muffled  rumble of an operating rocket engine  -  a  trajectory
correction  was  being performed on commands from  Earth.  With  a
feeling of detached sadness, the Chief thought about those  people
on Earth who were now staying up late to calculate the trajectory,
who  were working so that an "ape", whom they had never even seen,
could  successfully  reach the Moon, and the next  day,  the  5th,
payday,  they would go to the paymaster's office to receive  their
pittance of a salary for this work. "Or rather, they won't , since
December  5 is a holiday, Constitution Day. That means they'll  be
paid  today. And those who are on duty tomorrow will be paid extra
for  working on a holiday." Strangely enough, that thought brought
him comfort, and he stopped pitying the people who were working to
provide ground support for his flight.
    He  glanced  out  the porthole. During the time  that  he  had
slept, the capsule had traveled a long way from Earth, and now the
Earth  looked no bigger than a saucer. What he could see was,  for
the most part, the night side of the Earth, faintly illuminated by
moonlight  -  a  mysterious dark surface with  sparsely  scattered
cities glowing in the night like embers. On one side of the Earth,
the  Sun  lit a thin bluish-white sickle, while on the other  side
the  Earth  was rimmed with a lurid, blood-red line of dawn.  And,
next  to  this  dark nightly planet, a sun hang in the  sky  -  an
insufferably  bright, harsh sun, blinding the  eyes  like  a  lamp
during an interrogation. And all this against a backdrop of  space
blackness. A creepy sight.
    He  turned  to the opposite porthole. There he could  see  the
Moon.  It was still far away, but some of the bigger craters  were
already visible. It suddenly occurred to the Chief that he was the
first man to see lunar craters with the naked eye.
    -  "And  this is just the thin end of the wedge!" It was  just
three  days before the full moon. The illuminated portion  of  the
lunar  disk  was  already almost round, and  the  ragged,  twisted
shadows  of  the mountains were only visible at its western  edge.
Over  the  rest  of the disk, the sun was high, the black  shadows
were  almost absent, and lively bright rays radiated for thousands
of  kilometers from  Tycho crater, all over the face of the  Moon.
The moonlight seemed to emanate silence. Yes, this was the Moon  -
the  Queen  of Night, the Queen of Silence, the Queen of Purity...
the Queen of Death. And it was to Her that he was flying...
    
    
    6.
    
    On  the evening of December 6, the capsule approached the Moon
so  closely that the looming mass of the lunar disk filled up  the
entire  porthole like a giant impending wall falling  towards  the
capsule and threatening to crush it.
    The  Chief  glanced  at his watch. According  to  the  mission
plan, at that moment the Earth was supposed to be transmitting the
last  pre-landing  instructions to the capsule's on-board  control
device.  Yes, that was how they flew to the Moon in the  good  old
1960s - there was just not enough space on-board the spacecraft to
install a computer for trajectory calculations, since at the  time
such a computer weighed at least several tons. The computer had to
stay on Earth.
    The  Chief glanced at the control panel of the instrumentation
box.  Of  course, it was only in his mind's eye that he could  see
electronic triggers switching inside that box, committing to their
electronic  memories a long sequence of ones  and  zeroes  radioed
from Earth. After that, the control device would send the received
data  back  to  Earth,  and down on Earth  they  would  check  the
returned  message  for  errors that were  almost  inevitable  when
sending  data over so long a distance, and would send  corrections
to the capsule, and would check the reception once again, and only
after that the capsule would start the lunar landing sequence.  Up
till that moment, the Chief would have no knowledge of whether the
capsule had received the instructions, or, let's say, its receiver
had broken down, and he was going to smash to atoms. Hours went by
in  agonizing  suspense. The lunar craters in  the  porthole  were
getting closer and larger...
    Finally,  soon  after  midnight (Moscow  time),  when  it  was
already  December 7, he once again felt a slight jolt: preparatory
to the main engine retro burn, the attitude control thrusters came
to  life  in order to turn the spacecraft around so that the  main
engine nozzle faced the Moon. The Moon slipped downward out of the
porthole's  field  of view, to be replaced by  a  patch  of  star-
studded  sky. The oppressive feeling of the overhanging  wall  was
suddenly  gone. The Chief moved closer to the porthole.  Now  that
the  Moon  was  below  (even  if "below"  was  just  a  matter  of
convention,  since there was no gravity in the  capsule  yet),  it
felt  distinctly different. It now felt as if he were soaring high
above  an  unlimited expanse of plain extending for  thousands  of
kilometers.  Effortlessness  and  freedom.  The  Moon  Dream   was
approaching  its climax. The lyrics of an old marching  song  that
had  been very popular in the Soviet Union back in the 1930s,  the
"Aviators' march", were throbbing in his head:
    
         "Yes, we were born to make the Dream come true!
         We are the ones to bridge the chasm of space!
         And we have wings of steel instead of arms
         And our hearts are motors filled with flames!"
    
       At  00 hours 50 minutes 20 seconds Moscow time, the capsule
began  to vibrate, was suddenly filled with a low resonant  sound,
and  the  force  of  gravity,  to  which  he  had  already  become
unaccustomed  after the three days of flight in  weightlessness  ,
suddenly pressed the Chief into his seat - it was the retro engine
coming to life.
    "Here  goes! Everything will be decided in a minute!"  -  said
the Chief in an excited whisper. He glanced at the altimeter dial:
80 thousand meters altitude, 70 thousand, 60 thousand...
         "Yes, we were born to make the Dream come true!"
     50 thousand meters, 40 thousand, 30 thousand ....
         "We are the ones to bridge the chasm of space!"
    20  thousand,  10  thousand, 5 thousand,  3  thousand  ...  He
wasn't singing, he was reciting, almost shouting in a voice hoarse
with excitement...
         "And we have wings of steel instead of arms"
      2 thousand, one thousand, 800 meters, 500 meters, 300 meters
...
    "Almost  forgot!"  -  thought he.  He  reached  to  the  radio
transmitter power cord and yanked it loose. The ground controllers
lost  signal  from  Luna 8 at an altitude of 70  meters.  But  the
spacecraft no longer needed ground control - it was descending  in
an automatic mode... 50 meters, 40 meters, 20 meters, 10, 5...
         "And our hearts are motors filled with flames!"
    The  engine  jet  was kicking aside sheets of  lunar  dust.  3
meters, two, one, impact!... Silence - the engine had shut down...
A  gentle  swaying  on  the shock-absorbers.  A  cloud  of  slowly
settling  dust  in  the porthole. The capsule clock  indicated  00
hours, 51 minutes 30 seconds, Moscow Time.
    He  was on the Moon. The first among humans. Still alive.  The
Moon Dream came true. "I made it. Made it! Made it!!!"
    
    
    7.
    
    Yes,  everything was exactly as it had been in the Moon Dream.
He  found it quite an effort to struggle into the spacesuit within
the  confined  space  of the capsule. Then he squeezed  through  a
hatch  into  the even more confined space of the airlock  chamber,
similar  to  the one that had been used not long before  that,  in
March  1965  for the first spacewalk in history during  Voskhod  2
mission  -  an inflatable chamber made of strong airtight  fabric,
compactly folded during launch from Earth. He closed the hatch  to
the  cabin behind him. Switched on the depressurization  pump.  At
first, the pump's swooshing sounds were clearly audible, then they
grew softer, softer... Finally, the air from the chamber was gone,
along  with  all  the sounds. To open the opposite  hatch  in  the
bottom  of the chamber, the Chief had to hook it with his  foot  -
there was no way to do this by bending down, since the chamber was
so narrow. In the open hatch, he saw a short ladder, a meter and a
half  long. The Chief started to climb down. When he got  down  to
about  half  a  meter above the surface, the ladder ended  and  he
jumped.  The Moon's gravity is only one-sixth of the Earth's,  and
that was why the fall seemed to the Chief to be a little too long,
although  it  actually lasted less than a second. But finally  his
feet touched the ground and slipped (the lunar soil turned out  to
be  slippery).  He would have lost his balance, had  he  not  been
quick enough to catch hold of a rung of the ladder. He then took a
few steps and looked around.
    Everything  looked like he had imagined it to be, and  at  the
same time it was different. There were no ragged steep cliffs. The
terrain in this part of the lunar Ocean of Storms was smooth,  and
only  in  the  north-east, barely rising above the  horizon,  were
rounded  outlines of some hills - probably belonging to the  outer
rim  of  crater Galileo, located a few kilometers from the landing
site.  He  turned around and looked at his footprints.  They  were
clearly  imprinted in the lunar soil, except for  the  first  two,
which were a little blurred because of his having slipped. "That's
a  shame!"  - thought he - "This is historic, isn't it? The  first
footprints  left  by Man on the Moon." And it  was  then  that  he
really  felt  that  he was on the Moon. Not  understood  it  -  he
understood  it all along - but really felt it. He felt  that  this
footprint  on  the Moon, where there is no rain  nor  wind,  would
remain  intact for millions of years, and that his  body  when  he
died  would  be preserved in the airless environment thousands  of
times  better than the mummy of any of the pharaohs. None  of  the
Egyptian pharaohs had been able to make his slaves build him  such
a tomb as the one built for the Chief Designer by Russian moujiks.
He was on the Moon. The Moon Dream had come true. He suddenly felt
fear.
    He  bent down, picked up a stone. A Moon stone. He squeezed it
in  his  gloved  hand. Crumbs started to fall. They  were  falling
slowly,  very  slowly.  As if in a dream.  In  a  moon  dream.  He
suddenly had an urge to know how this stone felt to the touch.  He
bent  down, collected an armful of stones and headed back  to  the
capsule...
    When   back   in  the  capsule  he  removed  his  helmet,   he
immediately felt a pungent scent. Strange, alien scent of the moon
dust that covered the boots of his spacesuit in a thick layer.  He
removed  the  gloves, touched the stones. They were soapy  to  the
touch. Turned them in his hands. Their colors varied depending  on
the  light's  angle of incidence. And that seemed  to  be  it.  He
didn't know what else he could do. The excitement had subsided  to
be  replaced  by weariness. Post-operative seams were aching  with
renewed intensity. He had a snack and immediately fell asleep...
    
    
    8.
    
    He  woke  up  because it was hard to breathe. The  instruments
showed that oxygen was running out. He was hearing a ringing sound
in his ears.
    And  it  was then that he saw an apparition. The face  of  the
interrogator,  the  one who had questioned him  on  that  terrible
night  back in 1938, suddenly appeared in the porthole.  "We  know
that  you are a German spy anyway, but it would be better for  you
if  you made a confession." - said the apparition in a very clear,
distinct voice - "So, I am asking you for the last time:  who  are
you working for?"
    The  Chief  was  somehow  aware  that  all  this  was  just  a
hallucination  caused by oxygen starvation, and that  the  nearest
security  man was at least 380 kilometers away, if the astronomers
were  correct.  And  that's why he answered the interrogator  with
fearlessness and sincerity:
    "I  don't  give a damn about your Germany! All  my  life  I've
been working for one man only - for myself!"
    The  apparition gnashed his teeth in rage and dissolved in the
vacuum of space.
    "However,  its  time to end it all." - thought the  Chief  and
started  to don the spacesuit. He didn't want to die in a  capsule
that was as narrow as a casket.
    
    
    9.
    
    He  was  standing on the lunar plain and looking at the stars,
which were just as distant as they were back on Earth. The capsule
stood behind his back. "Face to face with the chasm of space, with
only  the  faithful machine around. A befitting death for  a  real
man!" - thought the Chief and started to unlock the helmet...
    ...  The helmet popped like a cork from a bottle of champagne.
The  air  puffed  out  through the collar  of  the  spacesuit  and
condensed  into  a thick halo of mist around his  head.  The  last
thing  that  the Chief could see through the mist was the  helmet,
falling  slowly,  and  slowly  turning  around,  casting  blinding
reflections  from  the  sun. The milky mist  was  quickly  dimming
behind  a  veil of blood - blood vessels in the eyes were bursting
from the drop of pressure...
    Space touched the head of the Chief and received him into  the
world of lifeless purity...
    
    
    10.
    
    ...Headache. Darkness. A voice of a stranger: "He seems to  be
regaining  consciousness..."  The Chief  opened  his  eyes.  White
ceiling.  A face of a man looking down at him. A doctor. "So,  how
do  you  feel after the operation?" Operation? Oh, yes, operation.
Cancer... And what about the Moon? What about the one-way mission?
A  dream?!  Must  have  been.... Anesthesia...  A  dream,  just  a
dream...  Haven't  made it, haven't made it, haven't  really  made
it?! Must make it, must make it, must make it!
    "He is hopeless..." - said somebody in a whisper...
    
    
    11.
    
    Extracts from official TASS announcements:
    "On  December 3, 1965, the Soviet Union conducted a launch  of
automated  space probe Luna-8. The purpose of this launch  is  the
further development of elements of the system for soft landing  on
the Moon and scientific research...
    ....  On  December 7 at 0 hours 51 minutes 30 seconds,  Moscow
time,  Luna-8 reached the Moon in the vicinity of crater  Galileo.
During  the probe's approach to the Moon, an integrated functional
test  of all the systems supporting soft landing was carried  out.
The  test  has  demonstrated  that  the  probe's  systems  operate
nominally during all the phases of the landing on the Moon, except
the final phase."
    On  January  16,  1966, all the national  papers  carried  the
official  announcement about the death of the Chief Designer.  The
urn with the ashes was buried in the Kremlin wall.
    On  January 31, 1966, automated probe Luna-9 was launched.  On
February 3 it made the world's first soft landing on the Moon  and
transmitted to Earth a panoramic picture of the lunar surface,  in
which  one could see a small lunar stone lying about a meter  away
from the spacecraft.
    Soon after that, under the care of the Chief's successor,  who
was  hurried  along  not by the Moon Dream but  by  pressure  from
political leadership, a giant rocket for the two-way lunar mission
exploded on the specially built launch pad that cost billions, and
completely destroyed it. There was neither time nor money to build
a  new one. A decision was made not to send a manned mission.  The
Soviet Union quit the Moon Race.
    On  July  20, 1969, man's foot stepped on the surface  of  the
Moon for the first time in history. That man was an American,  the
commander  of  Apollo  11. And it was this date  that  became  the
historic  date.  Nobody  realized that the  really  historic  date
should  have  been not the 20th , but rather 24th  of  July,  when
Apollo 11 safely returned to Earth with live astronauts onboard.
    For  the consolation of the Soviet people, in 1970 the  Soviet
government used a low-capacity rocket to put on the Moon a robotic
moon   rover  (a  'Lunokhod'  in  Russian),  which  was   remotely
controlled by ground controllers, and which, allegedly, was better
than a live cosmonaut. At least, it didn't need to be brought back
to Earth.
    Americans  visited the Moon six more times. The  last  mission
was  Apollo  17  in December 1972. Having realized that  they  had
nobody to compete against, the Americans stopped the expensive and
useless missions.
    The  last Soviet lunar probe to land on the Moon was Luna  23.
This  happened  on November 6, 1974. After that, people  left  the
Moon alone for decades.
    One  cannot fool history forever. The mechanism of  the  Space
Race,  designed,  built and started by the Chief designer,  having
been left without its master, became rusty and fell to pieces. The
Moon  Dream melted away, and it suddenly became evident that there
were  no material interests behind it. In the 20th century  people
were still not ready to approach the Moon from a practical angle.
    They  would never have been ready though, had it not been  for
that  Space  Race,  which, at first glance seemed  meaningless.  A
really  innovative  enterprise  cannot  generate  profits  in  its
initial  phase, only losses. Only after the first steps have  been
made,  a  pecuniary  interest comes into play,  which  makes  such
enterprise  self-propelling. Pragmatic Americans would never  have
started  space exploration by themselves. In order  to  draw  them
into  this  undertaking,  History  needed  a  country  which   was
irrational  to  the point of absurdity, a country which  would  be
willing to spend billions on space, even while its own people were
starving.  And  History created such a country.  A  country  which
wouldn't have lasted a day with its incredible ways, had not  some
Laws  of History, still unknown to us, protected that country from
decay  with  its  mysterious force field, until that  country  had
fulfilled its Historical Mission.
    And  it  may  well be that the Chief Designer has  managed  to
accomplish  everything  (or  almost everything),  not  because  he
outsmarted  History, but because he himself was an  instrument  in
the  hands of History. One can hardly expect that people will ever
realize  the  true  scale of what has happened. They  will  always
believe  that the greatness of this or that event is  measured  in
the  numbers  of the casualties, and that's why wars, revolutions,
and  reigns of bloodthirsty dictators will always seem to be  more
important  than scientific discoveries and technological advances.
And  the  very  idea that a revolution, a war, and a  reign  of  a
bloodthirsty  dictator  were,  in  the  hands  of  History,   just
preliminary  phases in a technological project, just  a  means  of
creating a people who saw a flight into space as a breakthrough to
Freedom,  such  an  idea  will always look  ridiculous,  and  even
sacrilegious.
    In  the  meantime, mankind's coming out into space became  the
second  great event in the history of life on Earth  -  the  first
such great event being the emergence of life from the ocean, where
it  had  originated, onto the land. But could the first amphibians
ever  realize  the  true  meaning  of  what  they  were  about  to
accomplish,  and  where would all this eventually  lead  to?  From
their  own  perspective, they were just trying  to  adapt  to  the
drying-up of their local puddle, which must have seemed to them an
event of tremendous importance...
    
    
    12.
    
    "Well, now we seem to have completely lost our way. Where  are
we now?"
    -  "Just  a  moment, master!" - replied the moon  rover's  on-
board  computer,  while  it  was using  the  rover's  antennas  to
interrogate navigation satellites suspended over the Moon  in  the
libration points.
    -  "O.K. It's 9 degrees 8 minutes north, 63 degrees 18 minutes
west."
    - "Where on the Moon is that?" - asked the human.
    -  "In  the  vicinity  of  crater Galileo."  -  responded  the
machine.
    -  "Oh,  my  god, it's in the middle of nowhere! I can't  even
see  any human footprints here. How could it be that for an entire
century  of lunar exploration by man nobody has ever been to  this
place?"
    -  "Just  a  moment, master!" - via a communication satellite,
the  rover's  on-board computer was rummaging through the  central
lunar  database. - "It is true that people have never  been  here,
but  nevertheless, this location is worthy of note.  An  automatic
lunar probe Luna-8 landed somewhere around here 150 years ago."
    -  "Automatic probe? You mean, one of those things  they  used
to launch back in the 20th century?"
    - "That's correct."
    -  "So,  what  do they have here now? A conservation  area?  A
museum?"
    -  "Nothing of the kind. The probe impacted and is believed to
have  been  destroyed. Present-day historians don't consider  this
particular ancient landing site important. The tourists won't come
here.  This  is nothing even remotely like the Apollo  11  landing
site,  where  they  had  to erect elevated  viewing  walkways  for
tourists  to protect historic first footprints of Man on the  Moon
from  being  trampled. Take, for example, the Luna-9 soft  landing
location, which is one hundred kilometers south of here. It's  the
first-ever  soft  lunar  landing. It is an  officially  recognized
historic landmark, they even installed a meteoroid shield over it.
But the tourists almost never go there. This whole area is too far
from anywhere - 800 kilometers from the nearest base. It is sad to
see  how  we  fail to fully appreciate our historical roots..."  -
said the machine with a reproachful note in its synthesized voice.
It  believed that the first automatic lunar probes were the direct
ancestors  of the entire lunar machinery. The object  of  especial
veneration for the moon rovers was the first Soviet Lunokhod.
    -  "Does  that  mean that no one has ever visited  the  Luna-8
impact site?" - asked the human.
    -   "No   one   ever."  -  responded  the  on-board   computer
sorrowfully.
    The  human  was doing some quick mental arithmetic. The  craze
for  genuine 20th century artifacts was relatively new. One  could
safely assume that nobody had yet thought about recovering Luna 8.
It  didn't matter if it had been destroyed on impact - there still
must  be some loose parts lying around. There was an antique  shop
at  the base in the Korolev crater where he could sell them  at  a
good  price. He would be able to buy a space tug, set up  his  own
business carrying supplies from the Moon to the space stations  in
low  Earth  orbit, and, if he was really lucky, there was  even  a
chance that by the end of his life he would be able to permanently
settle on Earth...
    -  "O.K." - said the human to the rover - "Since you say  it's
somewhere around here, start searching for Luna 8."
    It  didn't take much searching. As soon as they climbed a  low
hill, they saw something glittering in the distance. "Magnify."  -
asked  the  human,  looking  at the rover's  display.  -  "Magnify
more... But this cannot be..."
    At  that moment he realized that he would certainly be able to
spend the rest of his life on Earth...
    
    
                       Korolev, Moscow region, Former Soviet Union
    
    
    August 1-8, 1989 (First original Russian version )
    December 1990 - January 1991 (second Russian version)
    July 1999 (English version)
    November 2000 (English version, second revision)*
    
    
    *  Author's  Note:  English is not my native  tongue  and  I'm
afraid that my grammar and style are, at best, barely passable.  I
would like to thank Nancy Steisslinger (USA) for being kind enough
to  read  the  first English version and suggest some  grammatical
corrections,  which were incorporated in this second  revision  of
the  English version of the text. If you have any suggestions that
might  improve the style of this text, please do not  hesitate  to
contact me at lazarevicha@online.ru.
    
    If   you   liked  this  story,  don't  forget  to  check   out
A.Lazarevich's home page (http://webcenter.ru/~lazarevicha), where
some of my other stories are available.
    
