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He was putty in her hands. I was disgusted by the way she exploited Vlad’s weaknesses. I left him in her carnal clutches, though I felt really sorry for Vlad. Maybe I could scare him up something to drink.

  The closest train-stop to Tunguska is near a place called Ust-Ilimsk, two hundred kilometers north of Bratsk, and three thousand long kilometers from Moscow. Even London, England is twice as close to Moscow as Tunguska.

  A secondary line-engine hauled our string of cars to a tiny railway junction in the absolute middle of nowhere. Then it chugged away. It was four in the morning of June 26, but since it was summer it was already light. There were five families running the place, living in log cabins chinked with mud.

  Our ranking KGB officer, an officious jerk named Chalomei, unsealed our doors. Vlad and I jumped out onto the rough boards of the siding. After days of ceaseless train vibration we staggered around like sailors who’d lost their land-legs. All around us was raw wilderness, huge birches and tough Siberian pines, with knobby, shallow roots. Permafrost was only two feet underground. There was nothing but trees and marsh for days in all directions. I found it very depressing.

  We tried to strike up a conversation with the local supervisor. He spoke bad Russian, and looked like a relocated Latvian. The rest of our company piled out, yawning and complaining.

  When he saw them, our host turned pale. He wasn’t much like the brave pioneers on the posters. He looked scrawny and glum.

  “Quite a place you have here,” I observed.

  “Is better than labor camp, I always thinking,” he said. He murmured something to Vlad.

  “Yeah,” Vlad said thoughtfully, looking at our crew. “Now that you mention it, they are all police sneaks.”

  With much confusion, we began unloading our train cars. Slowly the siding filled up with boxes of rations, bundled tents, and wooden crates labelled SECRET and THIS SIDE UP.

  A fight broke out between our civilians and our Red Army detachment. Our Kaliningrad folk were soon sucking their blisters and rubbing strained backs, but the soldiers refused to do the work alone.

  Things were getting out of hand. I urged Vlad to give them all a good talking-to, a good, ringing speech to establish who was who and what was what. Something simple and forceful, with lots of “marching steadfastly together” and “storming the stars” and so on.

  “I’ll give them something better,” said Vlad, running his hands back through his hair. “I’ll give them the truth.” He climbed atop a crate and launched into a strange, ideologically incorrect harangue.

  “Comrades! You should think of Einstein’s teachings. Matter is illusion. Why do you struggle so? Spacetime is the ultimate reality. Spacetime is one, and we are all patterns on it. We are ripples, comrades, wrinkles in the fabric of the …”

  “Einstein is a tool of International Zionism,” someone shouted.

  “And you are a dog,” said Vlad evenly. “Nevertheless you and I are the same. We are different parts of the cosmic One. Matter is just a …”

  “Drop dead,” yelled another heckler.

  “Death is an illusion,” said Vlad, his smile tightening. “A person’s spacetime pattern encodes an information pattern which the cosmos is free to …”

  It was total gibberish. Everyone began shouting and complaining at once, and Vlad’s speech stuttered to a halt.

  Our KGB colonel Chalomei jumped up on a crate and declared that he was taking charge. He was attached directly to the Chief Designer’s staff, he shouted, and was fed up with our expedition’s laxity. This was nothing but pure mutiny, but nobody else outranked him in KGB. It looked like Chalomei would get away with it. He then tried to order our Red Army boys to finish the unloading.

  But they got mulish. There were six of them, all Central Asian Uzbeks from Uckduck, a hick burg in Uzbekskaja. They’d all joined the Red Army together, probably at gunpoint. Their leader was Master Sergeant Mukhamed, a rough character with a broken nose and puffy, scarred eyebrows. He looked and acted like a tank.

  Mukhamed bellowed that his orders didn’t include acting as house-serfs for egghead aristocrats. Chalomei insinuated how much trouble he could make for Mukhamed, but Mukhamed only laughed.

  “I may be just a dumb Uzbek,” Mukhamed roared, “but I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck! Why do you think this train is full of you worthless stukachi? It’s so those big-brain rocket-boys you left behind can get some real work done for once! Without you stoolies hanging around, stirring up trouble to make yourselves look good! They’d love to see you scum breaking your necks in the swamps of Siberia …”

  He said a great deal more, but the damage was already done. Our expedition’s morale collapsed like a burst balloon. The rest of the group refused to move another millimeter without direct orders from Higher Circles.

  We spent three days then, on the station’s telegraph, waiting for orders. The glorious Fiftieth Anniversary of the event came and went, and everything was screwed up and in a total shambles. The gloomiest rumors spread among us. Some said that the Chief Designer had tricked us KGB to get us out of the way, and others said that Khrushchev himself was behind it. (There were always rumors of struggle between Party and KGB at the Very Highest Circles.) Whatever it meant, we were all sure to be humiliated when we got back, and heads would roll.

  I was worried sick. If this really was a plot to hoodwink KGB, then I was in it up to my neck. Then the galley car caught fire during the night, and sabotage was suspected. The locals, fearing interrogation, fled into the forest, though it was probably just one of Chalomei’s stukachi being careless with a samovar.

  Orders finally arrived from Higher Circles. KGB personnel were to return to their posts for a “reassessment of their performance.” This did not sound promising at all. No such orders were given to Vlad or the “expedition regulars,” whatever that meant. Apparently the Higher Circles had not yet grasped that there were no “expedition regulars.”

  Nina and I were both severely implicated, so we both decided that we were certainly “regulars” and should put off going back as long as possible. Together with Vlad, we had a long talk with Sergeant Mukhamed, who seemed a sensible sort.

  “We’re better off without those desk jockeys,” Mukhamed said bluntly. “This is rough country. We can’t waste time tying up the shoelaces of those Moscow fairies. Besides, my orders say ‘Zipkin’ and I don’t see ‘KGB’ written anywhere on them.”

  “Maybe he’s right,” Vlad said. “We’re in so deep now that our best chance is to actually find an artifact and prove them all wrong! Results are what count, after all! We’ve come this far—why turn tail now?”

  Our own orders said nothing about the equipment. It turned out there was far too much of it for us to load it aboard the Red Army tractor vehicles. We left most of it on the sidings.

  We left early next morning, while the others were still snoring. We had three all-terrain vehicles with us, brandnew Red Army amphibious personnel carriers, called “BTR-50s,” or “byutors” in Army slang. They had camouflaged steel armor and rode very low to the ground on broad tracks. They had loud, rugged diesel engines and good navigation equipment, with room for ten troops each in a bay in the back. The front had slits and searchlights and little pop-up armored hatches for the driver and commander. The byutors floated in water, too, and could churn through the thickest mud like a salamander. We scientists rode in the first vehicle, while the second carried equipment and the third, fuel.

  Once underway, our spirits rose immediately. You could always depend on the good old Red Army to get the job done! We roared through woods and swamps with a loud, comforting racket, scaring up large flocks of herons and geese. Our photoreconnaissance maps, which had been issued to us under the strictest security, helped us avoid the worst obstacles. The days were long and we made good speed, stopping only a few hours a night.

  It took three days of steady travel to reach the Tunguska basin. Cone-shaped hills surrounded the valley like watchtowers.

  The terrain c
hanged here. Mummified trees strewed the ground like jackstraws, many of them oddly burnt. Trees decayed very slowly in the Siberian taiga. They were deep-frozen all winter and stayed whole for decades.

  Dusk fell. We bulled our way around the slope of one of the hills, while leafless, withered branches crunched and shrieked beneath our treads. The marshy Tunguska valley, clogged and gray with debris, came into view. Sergeant Mukhamed called a halt. The maze of fallen lumber was too much for our machines.

  We tottered out of the byutors and savored the silence. My kidneys felt like jelly from days of lurching and jarring. I stood by our byutor, resting my hand on it, taking comfort in the fact that it was man-made. The rough travel and savage dreariness had taken the edge off my enthusiasm. I needed a drink.

  But our last liter of vodka had gone out the train window somewhere between Omsk and Tomsk. Nina had thrown it away “for Vlad’s sake.” She was acting more like a lovesick schoolgirl every day. She was constantly fussing over Vlad, tidying him up, watching his diet, leaping heavily to his defense in every conversation. Vlad, of course, merely sopped up this devotion as his due, too absent-minded to notice it. Vlad had a real talent for that. I wasn’t sure which of the two of them was more disgusting.

  “At last,” Vlad exulted. “Look, Ninotchka, the site of the mystery! Isn’t it sublime!” Nina smiled and linked her solid arm with his.

  The dusk thickened. Huge taiga mosquitoes whirred past our ears and settled to sting and pump blood. We slapped furiously, then set up our camp amid a ring of dense, smoky fires.

  To our alarm, answering fires flared up on the five other hilltops ringing the valley.

  “Evenks,” grumbled Sergeant Mukhamed. “Savage nomads. They live off their reindeer, and camp in round tents called yurts. No one can civilize them; it’s hopeless. Best just to ignore them.”

  “Why are they here?” Nina said. “Such a bleak place.”

  Vlad rubbed his chin. “The records of the ’27 Kulik Expedition said the Evenk tribes remembered the explosion. They spoke of a Thunder-God smiting the valley. They must know this place pretty well.”

  “I’m telling you,” rasped Mukhamed, “stay away. The men are all mushroom-eaters and the women are all whores.”

  One of the shaven-headed Uzbek privates looked up from his tin of rations. “Really, Sarge?”

  “Their girls have lice as big as your thumbnails,” the sergeant said. “And the men don’t like strangers. When they eat those poison toadstools they get like wild beasts.”

  We had tea and hardtack, sniffling and wiping our eyes from the bug-repelling smoke. Vlad was full of plans. “Tomorrow we’ll gather data on the direction of the treefalls. That’ll show us the central impact point. Nina, you can help me with that. Nikita, you can stay here and help the soldiers set up base camp. And maybe tomorrow we’ll have an idea of where to look for our artifact.”

  Later that night, Vlad and Nina crept out of our long tent. I heard restrained groaning and sighing for half an hour. The soldiers snored on peacefully while I lay under the canvas with my eyes wide open. Finally, Nina shuffled in, followed by Vlad brushing mud from his knees.

  I slept poorly that night. Maybe Nina was no sexy hard-currency girl, but she was a woman, and even a stukach can’t overhear that sort of thing without getting hot and bothered. After all, I had my needs, too.

  Around one in the morning I gave up trying to sleep and stepped out of the tent for some air. An incredible aurora display greeted me. We were late for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Tunguska crash, but I had the feeling the valley was welcoming me.

  There was an arc of rainbow light directly overhead, with crimson and yellow streamers shooting out from the zenith toward the horizons. Wide luminous bands, paralleling the arch, kept rising out of the horizons to roll across the heavens with swift steady majesty. The bands crashed into the arch like long breakers from a sea of light.

  The great auroral rainbow, with all its wavering streamers, began to swing slowly upwards, and a second, brighter arch formed below it. The new arch shot a long row of slender, colored lances toward the Tunguska valley. The lances stretched down, touched, and a lightning flash of vivid orange glared out, filling the whole world around me. I held my breath, waiting for the thunder, but the only sound was Nina’s light snoring.

  I watched for a while longer, until the great cosmic tide of light shivered into pieces. At the very end, disks appeared, silvery, shimmery saucers that filled the sky. Truly we had come to a very strange place. Filled with profound emotions, I was able to forget myself and sleep.

  Next morning everyone woke up refreshed and cheerful. Vlad and Nina traipsed off with the surveying equipment. With the soldiers’ help, I set up the diesel generator for Vlad’s portable calculator. We did some camp scut-work, cutting heaps of firewood, digging a proper latrine. By then it was noon, but the lovebirds were still not back, so I did some exploring of my own. I tramped downhill into the disaster zone.

  I realized almost at once that our task was hopeless. The ground was squelchy and dead, beneath a thick tangling shroud of leafless pines. We couldn’t look for wreckage systematically without hauling away the musty, long-dead crust of trees. Even if we managed that, the ground itself was impossibly soggy and treacherous.

  I despaired. The valley itself oppressed my soul. The rest of the taiga had chipmunks, wood grouse, the occasional heron or squirrel, but this swamp seemed lifeless, poisonous. In many places the earth had sagged into shallow bowls and depressions, as if the bedrock below it had rotted away.

  New young pines had sprung up to take the place of the old, but I didn’t like the look of them. The green saplings, growing up through the gray skeletons of their ancestors, were oddly stunted and twisted. A few older pines had been half-sheltered from the blast by freaks of topography. The living bark on their battered limbs and trunks showed repulsive puckered blast-scars.

  Something malign had entered the soil. Perhaps poisoned comet ice, I thought. I took samples of the mud, mostly to impress the soldiers back at camp. I wasn’t much of a scientist, but I knew how to go through the motions.

  While digging I disturbed an ant nest. The strange, big-headed ants emerged from their tunnels and surveyed the damage with eerie calm.

  By the time I returned to camp, Vlad and Nina were back. Vlad was working on his calculator while Nina read out direction-angles of the felled trees. “We’re almost done,” Nina told me, her broad-cheeked face full of bovine satisfaction. “We’re running an information-theoretic analysis to determine the ground location of the explosion.”

  The soldiers looked impressed. But the upshot of Vlad’s and Nina’s fancy analysis was what any fool could see by glancing at the elliptical valley. The brunt of the explosion had burst from the nearer focus of the ellipse, directly over a little hill I’d had my eye on all along.

  “I’ve been taking soil samples,” I told Nina. “I suspect odd trace elements in the soil. I suppose you noticed the strange growth of the pines. They’re particularly tall at the blast’s epicenter.”

  “Hmmph,” Nina said. “While you were sleeping last night, there was a minor aurora. I took photos. I think the geomagnetic field may have had an influence on the object’s trajectory.”

  “That’s elementary,” I sniffed. “What we need to study is a possible remagnetization of the rocks. Especially at impact point.”

  “You’re neglecting the biological element,” Nina said. By now the soldiers’ heads were swiveling to follow our discussion like a tennis match. “I suppose you didn’t notice the faint luminescence of the sod?” She pulled some crumpled blades of grass from her pocket. “A Kirlian analysis will prove interesting.”

  “But, of course, the ants—” I began.

  “Will you two fakers shut up a minute?” Vlad broke in. “I’m trying to think.”

  I swallowed hard. “Oh yes, Comrade Genius? What about?”

  “About finding what we came for, Nikita. The alien craft.”
Vlad frowned, waving his arm at the valley below us. “I’m convinced it’s buried out there somewhere. We don’t have a chance in this tangle and ooze … but we’ve got to figure some way to sniff it out.”

  At that moment we heard the distant barking of a dog. “Great,” Vlad said without pausing. “Maybe that’s a bloodhound.”

  He’d made a joke. I realized this after a moment, but by then it was too late to laugh. “It’s just some Evenk mutt,” Sergeant Mukhamed said. “They keep sled-dogs … eat ’em, too.” The dog barked louder, coming closer. “Maybe it got loose.”

  Ten minutes later the dog bounded into our camp, barking joyously and frisking. It was a small, bright-eyed female husky, with muddy legs and damp fur caked with bits of bark. “That’s no sled-dog,” Vlad said, wondering. “That’s a city mutt. What’s it doing here?”

  She was certainly friendly enough. She barked in excitement and sniffed at our hands trustingly. I patted the dog and called her a good girl. “Where on earth did you come from?” I asked. I’d always liked dogs.

  One of the soldiers addressed the dog in Uzbek and offered it some of its rations. It sniffed the food, took a tentative lick, but refused to eat it.

  “Sit!” Vlad said suddenly. The dog sat obediently.

  “She understands Russian,” Vlad said.

  “Nonsense,” I said. “She just reacted to your voice.”

  “There must be some other Russians nearby,” Nina said. “A secret research station, maybe? Something we were never told about?”

  “Well, I guess we have a mascot,” I said, scratching the dog’s scalp.

  “Come here, Laika,” Vlad said. The dog pricked her ears and wandered toward him.

  I felt an icy sensation of horror. I snatched my hand back as if I had touched a corpse. With an effort, I controlled myself. “Come on, Vlad,” I said. “You’re joking again.”

  “Good dog,” Vlad said, patting her.

  “Vlad,” I said, “Laika’s rocket burned up on reentry.”

  “Yes,” Vlad said, “the first creature we Earthlings put into space was sentenced to be burned alive. I often think about that.” Vlad stared dramatically into the depths of the valley. “Comrades, I think something is waiting here to help us storm the cosmos. I think it preserved Laika’s soul and re-animated her here, at this place, at this time … It’s no coincidence. This is no ordinary animal. This is Laika, the cosmonaut dog!”