– I'm asking you, Colonel! – shouted at the frozen in the middle of the Persian carpet, the general, standing at the massive polished writing table. Glass from the portrait of Felix Edmundovich glittered menacingly behind the general's back. – Come on! The colonel, striking a step, sinking into the carpet, approached. Dzerzhinsky saw off the guest with a portrait look.
– I ask you how it could have happened that Gracis spent seven days in orbit
unnoticed ?! – bulging, pitch- black eyes on the roll, with a look of impatient objections, devoured Smirnov, general.
– We have everything written down. She disappeared from radar and was not even detected.
intelligence service during …
– Why do they report this to me from third parties ?! – the colonel winced:
«As in prison, here are informants. They make a career on the bones," Colonel Smirnov thought unflatteringly. The colonel's eyes glazed sadly at the slender cypress tree outside the office window …
«The general's shoulder straps were crying. I will retire, to hell. Let everything burn, with a blue flame. The colonel's pension will be enough", – the saving thought tenderly touched his temple.
– Go! – unexpectedly barked the general, – Major! – the last spoken word did not immediately reach the colonel's consciousness, but when his hand touched the cold metal of the door handle: «How? Major ?!" – for a moment Smirnov paused, then pulled the heavy, black leather door of the office towards himself and went out. The colleagues never saw Colonel Smirnov again. There were various rumors that he was promoted to the academy in Moscow for a general's post. Such are the vicissitudes of the service. And Elena, meanwhile, at ease, but persistently was questioned by majors, captains, colonels and various military men and everyone asked her the same question, how she started from a reusable ship in an emergency capsule. And why I stayed in orbit for seven days. And for the umpteenth time she repeated the same thing, that she immediately lost consciousness and did not remember anything, that she woke up only on the ground. Yes, to be sure, and the rescue capsule with a man on board spent seven days in Earth orbit and remained unnoticed, this has never happened in astronautics. No matter how the departmental services tried, there were no perpetrators of what happened, and there was not for the only reason that nowhere in any corner of the world was the capsule recorded by the international tracking service for space objects. It turned out that Elena appeared from Space. Suddenly from nothing and a capsule? General Fedorov, appointed responsible for the investigation of the incident, stood on the firm positions of Marxist- Leninist philosophy, where the principle of the primacy of matter and the secondary nature of consciousness is clearly formulated. Therefore, miracles do not happen. And since miracles do not happen, it means that the capsule with Elena was simply not noticed. Sighing heavily, and burying his blind gaze in the instructions and prescriptions neatly laid out on the desk, he was senility worried about the fact that had happened. But an incomprehensible shiver ran through his cheeky face and sleek bald head, and a sigh of relief escaped the general's thick lips. But the intelligence of Western countries does not confirm the discovery. So there are no guilty ones. A stupid expression hardened on the general's face, reflected in the stubbornly knitted bushy eyebrows and a firm gaze above the eyes that looked like bones from smoked prunes.
