One of our interrogators was a scrawny hard-line Stalinist named Yezhov. He’d been a student of the biologist Lysenko and was convinced that Vlad and I could turn wheat into barley by forced evolution. Vlad finally blew up at this. "You charlatans!" he screamed into the microphone. "Not one of you has even read Tsiolkovsky! How can I speak to you? Where is the Chief Designer? I demand to be taken to Comrade Sergei Korolyov! He’d understand this!"