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And then one of the technicians decided to joke and asked half colonel if they should brand the brooms. The chief said in surprise: Haven’t you branded them yet? The jaws of all the technicians in the smoking room dropped. The technician who tried to joke said: and where should we brand it – on the handle? The half colonel replied: yes, on the handle and on each twig separately…
On the whole, officers and warrant officers in the air regiment were mainly young, aged from 20 to 35. There was less than a tenth of those aged forty and over. So when they had a little free time, they played the fool as they could.
They did so especially in winter: they liked to dump somebody in the snowdrift or just play snowballs. They removed a small entrance ladder to the shelter of the neighboring service group and quickly put up a hill of snow. A technician who went out of the shelter did not suspect anything, made a step and… felt a bit of a paratrooper during his very first jump.
Having shaken off the snow and sworn, he shouted – we are being attacked! The other members of his group flew out of the shelter to be attacked by those who had removed the ladder! It was funny just like in childhood – a pig pile of officers, warrant officers and soldiers…
When the squadron engineer, a mustached and stern major, the oldest of all those lying in the snow, came out of his separate shelter upon hearing the noise, he shouted: Stop playing the fool in the snow!
Also, pilots and technicians had a special approach to dividing into teams: those married played against the bachelors, and the bachelors beat the married more often somehow. Sometimes the mustached played against the shaven, and very rarely the pilots played against the service staff that worked on the land.
The games were not very frequent: there was one day off – Sunday, and not everybody had a day off on the same day.
A plane, the more so – a pilot, should fly. The whole regiment flew almost every other day. The first and fourth squadrons on one day, the second and third on the next one. There were day and night flights, training and operational flights. A part of the regiment was on constant business trips upon the tasks given at the launch site: they flew all over the country, sometimes the plane returned in two or three days, sometimes in two weeks.
Sometimes the flying line was half empty, and then the regiment gathered again, but almost never completely. The days of operational flights were always the most strenuous ones. Technicians and mechanics prepared almost twenty planes for the flight, pilots had pre-flight trainings, studied the plan of flights.
All the maintenance groups worked on different planes, each in accordance with its profile, sometimes almost all of them gathered on one which had to fly first, and then dozens of technicians and mechanics swarmed in all parts of the plane at once. After preparing this one they started working on others.
Pre-flight preparation, preliminary preparation, preparation for a second flight and post-flight one, and also regular maintenance work on different elements and the whole plane… there were many of them. Finally the planes were ready, the crews started checking and launching the engines.
There are four of them on AN-12, each almost 4 00 °CV… The airfield is covered by deep rumble, and the planes go to the steering paths one by one, then to the take-off runway and disappear above the taiga. The airfield gets empty, and technicians can have a little rest.
Now the first plane returns and drives to its line, the technicians go there again to prepare it for the second flight. One more returns, now everybody goes to this one, and all the planes that fly on this day or night follow the same procedure. Having accomplished the flying task, the plane returns to its line for good. The technicians carry out the post-flight preparation, the plane is fuelled to the full and stays there to rest.
It happens to every plane that flies on that day. Finally everybody is back on the line, all the planes are checked and fuelled, and the airfield grows quiet. The tired pilots and land maintenance workers return home or to the barracks. The airfield is closed and passed for guard to the field squadron.
The procedure is the same every other day. During flights sometimes there were small pauses, one or two hours long: planes landed on the airfield to make room for another rocket in the sky.
The best season is summer: the clothes are light, and you don’t have to uncover the plane before the flight and cover it back again afterwards.
Lost in his everyday affairs of MS 88 crew commander, Sergey felt strange easiness and better performance of brain, mind or probably all senses. It was as if there were two commanders in him: one dealt with the multitude of space affairs, and the other one relived his life on Earth.
In his thoughts he constantly had flashbacks of childhood, studies, smiles of the girls he knew, first flights in the air club, service in the Air Force, but they were getting shorter and shorter and started to feel quite different.
It was as if looking at the life of a person totally strange to himself, that is, quite different. It does look like a split personality, but this diagnosis would not be correct, thought Sergey.
Remembrances of childhood came most often… Was it then that he got his first desire to fly? It is most probably connected with an incommunicable feeling of freedom you had during the longest school holidays – in summer.
Almost every summer he went to the countryside, except for two trips to the seaside and two or three shifts in a pioneer camp. But he enjoyed most of all spending his holidays in the countryside with his numerous grandmothers. In ten years of studying at school in the city, he spent at least two years on holidays in the countryside.
He had only one grandmother, but she had at least ten cousins, and if more distant relatives are taken into account, then a good half of the locals was related to him as well… But it was not the most important thing.
The house doors were almost never locked – the “lock” was usually a wooden spinner nailed to the door frame. If it lay parallel to the ground, the door was locked, if perpendicular, it was open. Sometimes the door was locked with the help of a padlock, but it only happened if the owners went to town for a long time to visit their children.
In summer, the population increased probably twice. Numerous grandsons, granddaughters and great-grandchildren came to visit their grandparents practically from all parts of the huge country. Only on the small street with 30 houses where Sergey lived most often, changing the houses of his grandmothers by turns, at least ten summer residents appeared – several girls from Moscow and boys from Leningrad, Siberia and the Far East…
You had to get acquainted and make friends with everybody. But it only happened for the first time, and then they just grew up together, meeting almost every year in the same village.
His grandmother’s house was situated right at the foot of a small mountain located near the street; Sergey liked to climb it and look at the spaces of this part of Central Russian Upland from above. Just below he saw his street, then fields and vegetable gardens going down from it, and orchards near the stream.
When he looked at all that, he sometimes had the desire to stretch out his arms and fly, but he surely couldn’t. He just could run very quickly down the mountain with his arms stretched to the sides, trying to jump as high as possible while running. The slope was not very steep, and sometimes he could fly for just a few meters…
Now they flew millions of kilometers together. But he did not feel that childish feeling of joy or happiness from a second-long several-meter flight.
It was left there, very far on the spaces of Central Russian Upland.
Chalk mountains, steppes and forests, valleys and small plateaus, ravines and streams: 3 months of summer holidays passed almost imperceptibly to explore all these.
The village he usually went to was situated in Bobrovsky district of Voronezh Region. Nearby there was a river Bityug – a tributary of the Don. The village comprised several dozen streets, and some were located several kilometers from the central part.
The river flowed in a huge valley bordered from two sides by huge plateaus covered with forest. Most often he visited one of the grandmothers whose house stood practically at the foot of a small 50-60-meter mountain, with several higher mountains near it, and all that merged into a vast plateau of about 200–300 meters high, with a wheat field on it stretching to the horizon.
There were not many houses – about thirty, and they lined an ordinary country road. There were a lot of corn and potato fields around going down to a big stream. Closer to the stream, the fields turned into orchards with apple trees, pear trees and plum trees – it’s difficult to remember everything that grew there…
On the other side of the street, which was the farthest from the village, along the second half of houses, closer to the beginning of mountains, there were cherry gardens. Each one of ten houses had its own Cherry Garden, and unlike the one described by Chekhov, nothing threatened them.
The cherry trees were small – it was easy to brace them with the fingers of two palms. The trunks were dark grey, almost black, with shining yellow delicious gum, more like amber, flowing down. Sergey and his friends liked to eat this gum from the tree, but sometimes they also bit some bark and then had to spit it out.
The ripening cherries were dark red, and then became almost black unless picked on time. In twenty minutes one could easily pick a full three-liter can. By this time the grandmothers rolled the dough with rolling pins and cut it into circles for the future vareniki…
Usually about one hundred vareniki were made – not the small ones like they do in town, but sized like a small cake. 6–8 cherries were put into the circle of dough, it was poured with granulated sugar, and the edges were rolled in a beautiful winding seam. The dough was thin, and the round-sided cherries bulged from the varenik, making it almost triangular.
That’s it – put them in boiling water and they are cooked after they flow up. Vareniki increased by three to four times in size, the swollen and boiled cherries looked like blue grapes bulging from the semi-transparent dough… The mixed sugar and cherry juice yielded very delicious hot sweet-and-sour syrup, and you felt like swallowing the cherries themselves with stones in them, which often happened.
Vareniki with cherries are very tasty…
Yes, they really are…
What is it? – Sergey thought. – There is an echo in my head, or I’m going mad?
There is no threat of that, said the strange voice again.
Who is talking to me, then, is there a space bogie on the rocket?
The voice grew silent and then answered a bit sadly: I am the one who has been here all the time…
Dear me! – thought Sergey. – Are you God?
The silence answered: I am something closer to Peter…
This is the one who has the keys to paradise? – asked Sergey.
There are no keys… and even no paradise. More exactly, it is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, – he heard an answer in his head.
Can you be more specific? For instance, we are flying to Mars – will we find life there or at least did it exist there? – Sergey continued the telepathy session.
Actually, you are not flying just to Mars… And there surely was life there, even similar to yours in some respect, but there is nothing left of it, sounded in Sergey’s head.
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