Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [42]
At one o’ clock that afternoon, Korolev escorted Gagarin and Titov to the top of the gantry for a final rehearsal of boarding procedures alongside the now-vertical rocket. All of a sudden Korolev became weak with exhaustion, and had to be helped down from the gantry and back to his cottage on the outskirts of the launch complex to get some rest. In time, Gagarin would discover that the Chief Designer’s stocky, rugged appearance disguised a very fragile man.5
Meanwhile, at an Army barracks on the outskirts of Saratov, General Andrei Stuchenko was awoken in the pre-dawn darkness by a telephone call from someone very senior and very frightening at the Kremlin. ‘A man is shortly to fly into space. The cosmonaut will land in your district. You are to organize his safe recovery and reception. You answer for this with your head.’6 Stuchenko promised he would comply. He grabbed a map of his region, divided it into grids and spent the day deploying his troops as fast as he could, to watch for something amazing – a boy falling out of the sky.
The evening before the flight, Titov and Gagarin settled down in a cottage a few kilometres from the pad. Nikolai Kamanin visited them briefly, and (as his diary records) Gagarin took him aside for a few moments, whispering tensely, ‘You know, I’m probably not quite right in the head.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘The flight’s tomorrow morning, and I’m not the slightest bit worried. Not the tiniest bit, d’you see? Is that normal?’
‘It’s excellent, Yura. I’m very glad for you. Good night!’
Of course Korolev came along for a few minutes to settle his cosmonauts for the night. ‘I don’t know what all this fuss is about,’ he teased. ‘Five years from now, the unions’ll be subsidizing holidays in space.’ Everybody laughed. Korolev calmly looked at his watch and said good night. This was the signal for the cosmonauts to bed down.
Vladimir Yazdovsky, the senior Director of Medical Preparations, had spent the day in their bunk room, organizing a little treat for the doctors. He had inserted strain gauges into the mattresses to register whether the cosmonauts tossed and turned in their sleep. Wires trailed from the bunks and through a suspiciously fresh hole in the wall to a clutch of batteries outside the cottage. A data cable ran off for a few hundred metres to another building, where the doctors had set up their knobs and dials. Of course this experiment was supposed to be a secret, but as Yuri and Gherman understood from bitter experience, the doctors were sure to demand entertainment of some kind, whatever the time of day. (‘There’s nobody looking through the keyhole, but you know you’re being watched.’) History records that both men slept perfectly well. Common sense tells us otherwise. Gagarin eventually admitted to Korolev that he did not sleep a wink. It was not just the impending flight preying on his mind. He wanted to concentrate on lying still, so that the doctors would declare him well-rested and fit for duty in the morning. No doubt his highly disciplined understudy Titov employed a similar trick, with the result that both men were less refreshed next morning than they would have been if the doctors had left them alone. Before going to bed Gagarin confided to Kamanin that he had always considered Titov’s chances to be exactly the same as his own. He knew that the merest hint of upset in their last night’s ‘sleep’ could still make a difference. Months later, he joked to Korolev that the only reason he had gone into space on the morning of April 12 was because Titov turned over in his cot the night before.7