From the author: . . It happens sometimes that a hero leaves early and you have to wait... Through the darkness of time the light will fall, like a star from the sky! In an old, old “Khrushchev” there lived and there was a logistics manager Nikolai Petrovich, with such an unforgettable surname that he himself forgot it from time to time. In such cases, he would furtively peek at his passport or driver's license with irritation. Nikolai Petrovich was already approaching forty. But the anniversary had not yet arrived, so Kolya desperately clutched at the folk wisdom: “By the time you’re forty, there’s no money and there won’t be any more.” “It’s not evening yet, there’s still a chance!” - he muttered, losing himself in disturbing dreams. Petrovich loved 3 things very much: Gagarin, women's curling and news about the collapse of financial pyramids. When the overly cheerful voice of a youthful announcer spoke about the victims of another scam, Nikolai, sitting royally on a well-worn chair-bed and leisurely sipping beer, sincerely exclaimed with childish delight: “What suckers! They themselves buried the money in the dirt, pinocchio, oh, unplanned!!!” Friends often reproached Petrovich for his indifference to football, hockey and other proper sports. “What did you find in this curling? Even the name is hard to pronounce...” Kolya would have been happy to explain his craving to his friends, but he couldn’t. No words can convey that vague, but sparkling and sparkling sensation like champagne, rising from the solar plexus to the throat, when on the screen of a shabby “plasma” gentle and nimble girlish hands with filigree skill clear the way for a mighty, weighty cobblestone, gently guiding “His Degree” into the holy of holies - to the very heart of the mandala of victory, wealth and glory. Turning his gaze to his Lyuska, furiously rubbing the laminate and at the same time chattering with her friend on the phone: “Katyukha, forget about the goat! What a little boy you are...", Nikolai for a split second felt a prick of something in his heart, but definitely not conscience or fear... Rather, it was a mixture of bewilderment, disgust and a special nameless state that arises every time you approach an unfamiliar tap and open cold water, anticipating that hot water would pour out, and so it turns out. The entire northern (side) wall of the loggia was covered with photographic portraits of cosmonaut No. 1. Every day Gagarin smiled radiantly and widely at Nikolai from newspaper clippings, labels, printouts and calendars. And Petrovich knew for sure that Yuri smiled at him in a special way, not like everyone else. There was a smell of a big secret here... As a child, his father often told Kolya about the Cosmonaut. How the whole country watched the first flight with frozen hearts. Just like then – in ’61 everyone rejoiced and celebrated almost as much as in ’45. And about the catastrophe that interrupted the flight of the hero’s life. Kolya refused to believe that it all ended that way. The world simply could not be so unfair, it had no right to be. And then the nineties came. Stormy youth, gatherings until the morning drinking vodka in huts and garages. One day in dank April, one man with whom they were drinking - a half-homeless man, but of an intelligent appearance, after Nikolai made a toast to Gagarin, strangely, looked at him with a pleading smile and said: “Do you know that He is alive?” ?!.”A few months after the first flight into space, humanoid humanoids from a star located 500 light years from our sun contacted scientists of the Soviet Union using neutron radio messages. As soon as humanity, represented by Yuri, entered the vastness of the universe, they immediately established contact with us, and with the USSR - everyone else was late! They, of course, had long ago achieved complete communism, abundance, eternal youth, etc. The Kalrokhs (as they called themselves) immediately invited us to visit, so to speak, to establish friendly relations. Already in 1963, they radiographed us drawings of a rocket that could fly to them in just 20 years. However, the rocket first had to be built... It took four years. And so, in 1968, the expedition set off to a distant star. Of course, only Gagarin could fly - other candidates were not even!!!