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American Intelligence experts knew perfectly well that preparations for Vostok’s launch were under way. Washington time was eight hours behind Baikonur’s. While the cosmonauts were resting on their wired-up mattresses, President Kennedy appeared on an NBC early-evening television programme sponsored by Crest toothpaste. He and his wife Jacqueline talked with reporters Sander Vanocur and Ray Scherer about the difficulties of raising their small children, and about the president’s ‘hands-on’ management style. Kennedy mentioned that political events often appeared more subtle and complex from inside the Oval Office than they did to the outside world. Even as he smiled and joked for the television cameras, he knew that a significant defeat awaited him in just a few hours’ time.8

At 5.30 a.m. on April 12, Korolev and Yazdovsky breezed into the cosmonauts’ darkened room, all hale and hearty, and turned on the lights. ‘What’s this, my dears? A lie-in?’ Gagarin and Titov went through the motions of awakening from a deep and untroubled slumber.

‘How did you sleep?’ the doctors asked.

‘As you taught us,’ Gagarin answered warily.

Korolev went off to check his rocket, but after Gagarin and Titov had washed and shaved, he rejoined them in the day-room for a simple breakfast of concentrated calories and vitamins in the appetizing form of a dark brown paste. Even in Gagarin’s heavily censored published account of that day, The Road to the Stars, Korolev’s exhaustion is evident:

The Chief Designer came in, and it was the first time I’d ever seen him looking careworn and tired. Clearly he’d had a sleepless night. I wanted to give him a hug, just as if he were my father. He gave us some useful advice about the coming flight, and it seemed to me that talking to us cosmonauts cheered him up a bit.9

The doctors arrived from another building across the road to give the cosmonauts a final check-up, bringing with them more of their favourite things: a clutch of sticky, round sensor pads. Titov and Gagarin stood there patiently, half-naked, while the pads were glued into place on their torsos. Star City’s director Yevgeny Karpov gave them each a bouquet of flowers to cheer them up. Actually he was passing them on from the old woman, Klavdiya Akimovna, who usually lived in the cottage. He could not let her in just now, which was probably just as well, for she had a touching story about her son, who was a pilot just like Yuri, but who had been killed in the war. No need to mention that, she said. Karpov ushered her away with a few kind words and took the flowers into the cosmonauts’ room. He wanted to say something important, something meaningful on this great occasion, but could not think of anything sensible. ‘Instead of advice and farewells, all I could do was joke and tell funny stories and other pieces of nonsense, just like everyone else. At the breakfast table we squeezed space-food out of tubes and pretended we thought it was amazingly delicious.’10

After breakfast, when the doctors had finished with their pads and glue, the cosmonauts were driven across to the main spacecraft assembly building. The huge construction floor for the Vostok was empty. The rocket and capsule were already out at the pad, but in a closed-off side facility there remained some small but essential items of equipment still to prepare – the spacesuits.

So far, Titov and Gagarin had been treated exactly alike. Now, in the clean white glare of the suiting-up room, a subtle shift of emphasis came into play. Titov was the first to receive his padded undergarment; the first to climb into his pressure-suit; the first into the bright orange outer layer. By the time he was fully dressed in his suit, Gagarin was barely ready. Titov knew not to become excited about this. The technicians had dressed him first, and Yuri second, so that the First Cosmonaut would spend less time between here and the launch pad overheating in his suit. During the drive to the gantry both their suits were ventilated, rather ineffectively, by plug-in fan boxes inside the crew bus. Just