devices. He succeeded and returned to flying in June 1943. Before any intentional amputation can occur, Omon and his friend are whisked out of the academy into a top-secret installation, located under KGB headquarters in Moscow. There, they start preparing for a supposedly uncrewed mission to the Moon. Omon is told that to substitute for researching, building and launching an automated probe, the Party prefers to use people, trained for "heroism", to fulfill the tasks nominally performed by machines, such as rocket stage separation, space vehicle course correction and so on. Soon Omon indeed seems to be launched to the Moon, strapped into a seat inside a Lunokhod, which he is meant to drive like a bicycle on the lunar surface. He is the final piece in a multi-stage mission to deliver a radio beacon to a specific point on the Moon and activate it. This he does, even though once he leaves the confines of the hermetically sealed Lunokhod, his protection against the vacuum and the interstellar cold consists of a cotton-filled overcoat and "special hydrocompensatory tampons" stuffed up his nose. However, when the time comes for Omon to shoot himself after he places the beacon, according to his orders, the gun he was given for the purpose misfires. Omon finds himself not on the Moon at all, but in an abandoned subway tunnel, where he had been driving his Lunokhod all along, ignoring all signs which might have given him a clue as to his real whereabouts. He tries to escape and is chased and shot at, but he manages to find his way into the "normal" world again, coming up into one of the stations of the Moscow Metro. One of Omon's "teachers" explains the idea behind the charade: even if the fact that the Soviet Union is a champion of peaceful space exploration holds true only inside a person's head (namely, the hero's; no one knows of him or his mission apart from its organizers), this is not any different from it being the reality. The reality, when it concerns subjects not capable of being experienced, is in fact only a perception formed in people's consciousness, and can be manipulated to the extent that the question of "true" version of events becomes meaningless. Title The title, Omon Ra, refers to the main character's given and chosen names. Omon's first name comes from the acronym for a