Here they were, hauling ass direct from the airport, straight out of the city to Starry Town. This was Muldoon’s second visit. Their first trip out had been better. Then, the American crew — Muldoon, Bleeker, and Stone, with the NASA technical people and program managers — had stayed in an Intourist hotel. It was no palace, but it was right in the middle of downtown Moscow, with Red Square and the Kremlin a walk away. Every morning the Soviets had arrived with buses to take the Americans out to Starry Town, and every evening they’d brought them back.

And the hotel had had a bar in the basement.

That bar had proved to be a magnet for foreign nationals, one of the few congenial places in the city. There were other Americans to be found there, and Germans, Cubans, Czechs. Muldoon and the NASA guys had made that bar their own.

There’d been no harm done, save for a few late nights and bleary mornings. But in retrospect, he could see the problem for the program managers. Not to mention the Soviets. In that bar, they are out of control, those Americanskis!

So this time out, things were arranged differently.

At Kaliningrad the convoy turned east toward Shchelkovo. The architecture changed. There were wooden houses, along both sides of the road; unlike the Soviet-style apartments closer to Moscow, these were painted brightly and decorated with ornate wood carvings. Muldoon could smell woodsmoke. And every few hundred yards there were hand pumps.

It was all kind of cute and rural, but desperately primitive. Wooden houses and hand pumps, next door to a cosmonaut training center.

The convoy turned right on an unmarked road, into a pine forest. Just around the bend there was a guard post. After a couple of minutes’ checking with the drivers, the convoy went on into a large clearing in the forest. There were several tall apartment buildings there, a few low office buildings, some stores. At one end of the clearing there were small lakes, at the other a dozen large, blocky structures.

Shawled babushkas pushed baby carriages along the sidewalks, while the noise of jet aircraft ripped down constantly from the air.

This was Starry Town, purpose-built to house and train the cosmonaut corps. It struck Muldoon as a cross between a university campus and a military training camp.

The driver pointed out the hydro pool, a neutral buoyancy trainer, the Cosmonaut Museum. At the center of the clearing, facing the convoy, was a statue of Gagarin: larger than life, heroic, inspirational.

Muldoon grimaced. There were no statues to him, anywhere, even though he’d gone so much farther than Gagarin. But then, he wasn’t safely dead.