by Rudy Rucker
“I hate you, Zipkin! So this is your revenge at last, eh? Sending me to Siberia! You beatnik scum! You think you’re smart, blondie? You’re weak, you’re sick, that’s what! I wish the KGB had shot you, you stupid, selfish, crazy …” My eyes flooded with sudden tears.
Vlad patted my shoulder, surprised. “Now don’t get all worked up.”
“You’re nuts!” I sobbed. “You rocketship types are all crazy, every one of you! Storming the cosmos…well, you can storm my sacred ass! I’m not boarding any secret train to nowhere—”
“Now, now,” Vlad soothed. “My imagination, your thoroughness—we make a great team! Just think of them pinning awards on us.”
“If it’s such a great idea, then you do it! I’m not slogging through some stinking wilderness …”
“Be logical!” Vlad said, rolling his eyes in derision. “You know I’m not well trusted. Your Higher Circles don’t understand me the way you do. I need you along to smooth things, that’s all. Relax, Nikita! I promise, I’ll split the fame and glory with you, fair and square.”
Of course, I did my best to defuse, or at least avoid, this lunatic scheme. I protested to Higher Circles. My usual contact, a balding jazz fanatic named Colonel Popov, watched me blankly, with the empty stare of a professional interrogator. I hinted broadly that Vlad had been misbehaving with classified documents. Popov ignored this, absently tapping a pencil on his “special” phone in catchy 5/4 rhythm.
Hesitantly I mentioned Vlad’s insane mission. Popov still gave no response. One of the phones, not the “special” one, rang loudly. Popov answered, said, “Yes,” three times, and left the room.
I waited a long hour, careful not to look at or touch anything on his desk. Finally Popov returned.
I began at once to babble. I knew his silent treatment was an old trick, but I couldn’t help it. Popov cut me off.
“Marx’s laws of historical development apply universally to all societies,” he said, sitting in his squeaking chair. “That, of course, includes possible star-dwelling societies.” He steepled his fingers. “It follows logically that progressive Interstellar void-ites would look kindly on us progressive peoples.”
“But the Tunguska meteor fell in 1908!” I said.
“Interesting,” Popov mused. “Historical-determinist cosmic-oids could have calculated through Marxist science that Russia would be first to achieve communism. They might well have left us some message or legacy.”
“But Comrade Colonel …”
Popov rustled open a desk drawer. “Have you read this book?” It was Kazantsev’s space romance. “It’s all the rage at the space center these days. I got my copy from your friend Nina Bogulyubova.”
“Well …” I said.
“Then why do you presume to debate me without even reading the facts?” Popov folded his arms. “We find it significant that the Tunguska event took place on June 30, 1908. Today is June 15, 1958. If heroic measures are taken, you may reach the Tunguska valley on the very day of the 50th anniversary!”
That Tartar cow Bogulyubova had gotten to the Higher Circles first. Actually, it didn’t surprise me that our KGB would support Vlad’s scheme. They controlled our security, but our complex engineering and technical developments much exceeded their mental grasp. Space aliens, however, were a concept anyone could understand.
Any skepticism on their part was crushed by the Chief Designer’s personal support for the scheme. The chief had been getting a lot of play in Khrushchev’s speeches lately, and was known as a miracle worker. If he said it was possible, that was good enough for Security.
I was helpless. An expedition was organized in frantic haste.
Naturally it was vital to have KGB along. Me, of course, since I was guarding Vlad. And Nina Bogulyubova, as she was Vlad’s superior. But then the KGB of the other departments grew jealous of Metallurgy and Information Mechanics. They suspected that we were pulling a fast one. Suppose an artifact really were discovered? It would make all our other work obsolete overnight. Would it not be best that each department have a KGB observer present? Soon we found no end of applicants for the expedition.
We were lavishly equipped. We had ten railway cars. Four held our Red Army escort and their tracked all-terrain vehicles. We also had three sleepers, a galley car, and two flatcars piled high with rations, tents, excavators, Geiger counters, radios, and surveying instruments. Vlad brought a bulky calculating device, Captain Nina supplied her own mysterious crates, and I had a box of metallurgical analysis equipment, in case we found a piece of the UFO.
We were towed through Moscow under tight security, then our cars were shackled to the green-and-yellow Trans-Siberian Express.
Soon the expedition was chugging across the endless, featureless steppes of central Asia. I grew so bored that I was forced to read Kazantsev’s book.
On June 30, 1908, a huge, mysterious fireball had smashed into the Tunguska River valley of the central Siberian uplands. This place was impossibly remote. Kazantsev suggested that the crash point had been chosen deliberately to avoid injuring Earthlings.
It was not until 1927 that the first expedition reached the crash site, revealing terrific devastation, but—no sign whatsoever of a meteorite! They found no impact crater, either; only the swampy Tunguska valley, surrounded by an elliptical blast pattern: sixty kilometers of dead, smashed trees.
Kazantsev pointed out that the facts suggested a nuclear airburst. Perhaps it was a deliberate detonation by aliens, to demonstrate atomic power to Earthlings. Or it might have been the accidental explosion of a nuclear starship drive. In an accidental crash, a socially advanced alien pilot would naturally guide his stricken craft to one of the planet’s “poles of uninhabitedness.” And eyewitness reports made it clear that the Tunguska body had definitely changed course in flight!
Once I had read this excellent work, my natural optimism surfaced again. Perhaps we would find something grand in Tunguska after all, something miraculous that the 1927 expedition had overlooked. Kulik’s expedition had missed it, but now we were in the atomic age. Or so we told ourselves. It seemed much more plausible on a train with two dozen other explorers, all eager for the great adventure.
It was an unsought vacation for us hardworking stukachi. Work had been savage throughout our departments, and we KGB had had a tough time keeping track of our comrades’ correctness. Meanwhile, back in Kaliningrad, they were still laboring away, while we relaxed in the dining saloon with pegged chessboards and tall brass samovars of steaming tea.
Vlad and I shared our own sleeping car. I forgave him for having involved me in this mess. We became friends again. This would be real man’s work, we told each other. Tramping through savage taiga with bears, wolves, and Siberian tigers! Hunting strange, possibly dangerous relics—relics that might change the very course of cosmic history! No more of this poring over blueprints and formulae like clerks! Neither of us had fought in the Great Patriotic War—I’d been too young, and Vlad had been in some camp or something. Other guys were always bragging about how they’d stormed this or shelled that or eaten shoe leather in Stalingrad—well, we’d soon be making them feel pretty small!
Day after day, the countryside rolled past. First the endless, grassy steppes, then a dark wall of pine forest, broken by white-barked birches. Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands campaign was in full swing, and the radio was full of patriotic stuff about settling the wilderness. Every few hundred kilometers, especially by rivers, raw and ugly new towns had sprung up along the Trans-Sib line. Prefab apartment blocks, mud streets, cement trucks, and giant sooty power plants. Trains unloaded huge spools of black wire. “Electrification” was another big propaganda theme of 1958.
Our Trans-Sib train stopped often to take on passengers, but our long section was sealed under orders from Higher circles. We had no chance to stretch our legs and slowly all our carriages filled up with the reek of dirty clothes and endless cigarettes.
I was doing my best to keep Vlad’s spirits up when Nina
Bogulyubova entered our carriage, ducking under a line of wet laundry. “Ah, Nina Igorovna,” I said, trying to keep things friendly. “Vlad and I were just discussing something. Exactly what does it take to merit burial in the Kremlin?”
“Oh, put a cork in it,” Bogulyubova said testily. “My money says your so-called spacecraft was just a chunk of ice and gas. Probably a piece of a comet which vaporized on impact. Maybe it’s worth a look, but that doesn’t mean I have to swallow crackpot pseudo-science!”
She sat on the bunk facing Vlad’s, where he sprawled out, stunned with boredom and strong cigarettes. Nina opened her briefcase. “Vladimir, I’ve developed those pictures I took of you.”
“Yeah?”
She produced a Kirlian photograph of his hand. “Look at these spiky flares of suppressed energy from your fingertips. Your aura has changed since we’ve boarded the train.”
Vlad frowned. “I could do with a few deciliters of vodka, that’s all.”
She shook her head quickly, then smiled and blinked at him flirtatiously. “Vladimir Eduardovich, you’re a man of genius. You have strong, passionate drives …”
Vlad studied her for a moment, obviously weighing her dubious attractions against his extreme boredom. An affair with a woman who was his superior, and also KGB, would be grossly improper and risky. Vlad, naturally, caught my eye and winked. “Look, Nikita, take a hike for a while, okay?”
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 call 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 labeled 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,” shouted someone.
“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 codes 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 worth-less 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, stir-ring up trouble to make yourselves look good! They’d love to see you scum break 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 50th 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 c
ome 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, brand new 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 Tunguksa basin. Cone-shaped hills surrounded the valley like watchtowers.
The terrain changed 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 in to 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.
