VOYAGES BEYOND · 1968 · THE SEA OF TRANQUILITY
The Chief Designer lives
14 January 1966, a Moscow operating theatre. The anonymous genius the Soviets call only the Chief Designer is bleeding to death under a surgeon's hands. This is the timeline where the bleeding stops.
You are reading the timeline that almost was · notes marked THE RECORD are real history
14 JAN 1966 · MOSCOW
Moscow, January 1966. The man on the operating table is the most important person in the Soviet Union, and the public does not know his name. The papers call him only the Chief Designer. He built Sputnik, he launched Gagarin, and in 1959 his machines scattered small titanium pennants across the Moon. Now he means to send a living hand to plant one. He came in for a routine polyp. The surgeon finds a fist of cancer instead, and cannot pass a breathing tube, because a labor camp broke this man's jaw in 1938. His name is Sergei Korolev.
In the timeline recorded here, the bleeding slows under the surgeon's hands, and the Chief Designer opens his eyes.
The atlas keeps other pages near this one
