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at the front. Everyone followed its motion intently; even Colonel Urchagin turned his head in timewith the others. The toy reached the edge of the table and tumbled onto the floor.
    “Something like that,” the Flight Leader said thoughtfully, casting a quick glance at me.
    “Permission to speak, sir?” I heard my own voice.
    “Fire ahead.”
    “Surely the moonwalker is automated, Comrade Lieutenant-General?”
    “It is.”
    “Then what am I needed for?”
    The Flight Leader lowered his head and sighed.
    “Bamlag,” he said, “your turn.”
    The wheelchair’s electric motor hummed, and Colonel Urchagin moved away from the table.
    “Let’s go for a little walk,” he said, driving over and taking hold of my sleeve.
    I glanced enquiringly at the Flight Leader. He nodded. I followed Urchagin out into the corridor, and we began walking slowly along—that is, I walked and he rode beside me, adjusting his speed with a lever which was topped by a homemade Plexiglas ball with a carved red rose inside it. Several times Urchagin opened his mouth and was about to speak, but each time he closed it again, and I was already sure he didn’t know where to begin, when he suddenly grabbed my wrist in his narrow hand.
    “Listen carefully now, Omon, and don’t interrupt,” he said with feeling, as though we’d just been singing songs together round the campfire. “I’ll start with the general background. You know, the fate of humanity is full of tangled knots, things that don’t seem to make any sense, bitter realities hard to accept. You have to see things very clearly, very precisely, in order not tomake too many mistakes. Nothing in history is like it is in the textbooks. Dialectics led to Marx’s teaching, which was intended for an advanced country but won its victory in the most backward one. We Communists had no time to prove the correctness of our ideas—the war cost us too much of our strength, we had to spend too long struggling against the remnants of the past and our enemies within the country. We just didn’t have the time to defeat the West technologically. But in the battle of ideas, you can’t stop for a second. The paradox—another piece of dialectics—is that we support the truth with falsehood, because Marxism carries within itself an all-conquering truth, and the goal for which you will give your life is, in a formal sense, a deception. But the more consciously …”
    I felt my heart sink, and I tried spontaneously to pull my wrist free, but Colonel Urchagin’s fingers seemed to have turned into a narrow hoop of steel.
    “… the more consciously you perform your feat of heroism, the greater will be the degree of its truth, the greater will be the meaning of your brief and beautiful life!”
    “Give my life? What heroism?” I asked in a faint voice.
    “Why, the very same heroism,” he said equally quietly, sounding as though he was frightened, “that has already been demonstrated by more than a hundred young lads just like you and your friend.”
    He said nothing for a moment, and then continued in his former tone of voice: “You’ve heard it said that our space programme is based on automated technology?”
    “Yes.”
    “Let’s you and me go to room 329, and they’ll tell you about our space automation techniques.”

“Comrade Colonel!”
    “Comrade Camel!” he echoed, mocking me. “They asked you at Zaraisk if you were willing to give your life, didn’t they? What answer did you give?”
    I was sitting in an iron chair bolted to the floor in the centre of the room; my arms were clamped to the armrests, my legs to the chair’s legs. The windows were covered with thick blinds, and in the corner there was a small writing desk with a telephone without a dial. Colonel Urchagin was sitting opposite me in his wheelchair; as he spoke he laughed, but I could tell he was deadly serious.
    “Comrade Colonel, you must understand, I’m just an ordinary boy. You think I’m some kind of