End to Ordinary History

by Michael Murphy

  Within this influential body worked Georgi Baranov, Kirov’s closest friend and ally in the government. The son of a Russian father and Uzbek mother, Baranov had been raised in Tashkent and trained to the Way of Hurqalya before Kirov was born by Kirov’s grandfather, Ali Shirazi. Believing that the insights of their school had significance for evolutionary theory, he had studied biology, earning a doctorate at Moscow University in 1933. From 1934 until the war, he translated papers in embryology and genetics from English and French into Russian, gaining a reputation as an able interpreter of scientific developments abroad. During the war he helped administer a medical-supply factory, but resumed his studies of foreign work in 1946. In 1962 he joined the Committee for Science and Technology, where his knowledge of developments around the world informed the government’s thinking about its scientific priorities. In all these positions, Baranov had worked patiently to promote the synthesis of science and spiritual illumination he had inherited from Ali Shirazi.

  Except for the war years, Baranov had gone to Tashkent every spring to renew his spiritual practice. For more than forty years, he had returned to the desert mosque, performed the zikhr, and practiced silence in the Well of Light. During one of his retreats before the war, Ali Shirazi had made him the formal guardian of his grandson. The charge had been sealed with a vow: Baranov would bring young Volodya into the Soviet elite to promote the Way of Hurqalya and protect their secret school. When Kirov came to Moscow in 1955, Baranov provided the connections that led to his present position in the Scientific and Technical Directorate of the KGB.

  Sixty-four years old now, Baranov was well regarded by his government colleagues. His portly physique, the slight stoop of his shoulders, the heavily dimpled face with its kind and curious expression fit a Russian stereotype of the learned and well-loved professor. He sat behind his desk, his eyes magnified by thick horn-rimmed glasses.

  “Your grandfather predicted it, Volodya,” he said with a husky voice. “We have become the two leading experts, and the Academy has turned to us. Its operating chief, Ivan Strelnikov himself, will name you chairman of this unprecedented commission. It is the opening we have worked for all these years, the greatest chance we’ve had to win acceptance of our ideas.”

  He pushed a folder toward Kirov. “This describes the government mandate for the Academy study you will head. Last August, the two cosmonauts pictured here saw an apparition during a Soyuz flight and lost control of their capsule. The event has alarmed certain members of the Committee for Science and Technology, because their investigation cannot account for the cosmonauts’ breakdown or the panic that happened in ground control, a panic that led to the capsule’s crash. There are features of this, Volodya, that defy all ordinary explanations. As the government’s leading expert in parapsychology and altered states of mind, you will be asked to provide new explanations for the behavior of everyone involved.”

  Kirov studied the cosmonauts’ faces. Both were muscular, impassive-looking men in their thirties. “Boris Marichuk, the dark-complexioned one, was part Uzbek,” Baranov continued. “He saw the apparitions first. According to mission control, he saw them almost continuously, until his struggle caused their crash. The other man, Doroshenko, could not calm him down.”

  “How long did the episode last?” Kirov asked, holding the photos to the light.

  “About three hours, off and on. The summary gives the times exactly.”

  “And we have tapes?”

  Baranov switched on a tape recorder. After a moment of static, a voice came on. “It is trying to tell me something!” Marichuk’s falsetto crackled through the static. “Listen—it is trying to speak!” Then a second voice could be heard, trying to reassure him.

  “This happened about an hour after Marichuk first saw the thing.” Baranov stopped the tape. “Ground control begins to question him for more details.”

  “What color is it?” an angry voice shouted. “Marichuk, can you hear me? Tell us what color it is?”

  After some static and metallic banging, Marichuk’s voice was audible in the distance, sounding like a scolded child. “Green, emerald-green . . .” His words trailed off. “Now it has no color.”

  “Marichuk, do you hear us? Now, listen! Tell us what color it is. Or what it looks like. Does it have a shape?” Ground control was pleading. “Please describe its shape. Tell us what it looks like!”

  “It doesn’t have a color now.” Marichuk was in pain.

  “And its shape, what is its shape?”

  “Now I am inside it . . .”

  “This is Doroshenko.” The second cosmonaut’s voice came on. “He has gotten sick again. When he tries to describe it, he gets dizzy.”

  “This sequence is repeated several times.” Baranov switched off the tape. “Ground control asks him about its shape, color, size, position, and he gets sick.”

  “Let it play some more.” Kirov closed his eyes. “How long did the questioning last?”

  “You’ll have to the read the summaries, but I think they questioned him for over an hour. He never gave them a consistent description.”

  The tape was filled with electronic whining. “It has more than three dimensions,” Marichuk’s voice was barely audible. “Sometimes it is very close. Very close. Then far away. But I know we are inside it.”

  “He is in agony!” Kirov whispered.

  “It is close and far,” Marichuk’s voice crackled. “But it has more than three dimensions . . .”

  “That was all he ever said about it.” Baranov stopped the tape. “That sometimes it was emerald-green, but usually had no color. That it had more than three dimensions, and that it seemed both far and near.”

  “And he always got sick when he tried to describe it.”

  “Until there was nothing to vomit. The space-agency people say he was throwing up blood.”

  “The Earth of Hurqalya.” Kirov wrote the phrase on an envelope and passed it across Baranov’s desk. “I think he saw something that lived there,” he whispered. “You said angels were involved.”

  Baranov nodded, turning by reflex to see that his office door was closed.

  “And Doroshenko?” Kirov asked. “How did he describe it?”

  “He said it was a silver saucer, and gave its location precisely. One can see that he read science fiction.”

  “Familiar categories help prevent vertigo,” Kirov said with a nod. “It is amazing that Marichuk held out for his perceptions so bravely.”

  “The ground control people were relieved by Doroshenko’s description, even though it sounded like a flying saucer! The idea of an emerald labyrinth that seemed both far and near upset them.” Baranov turned on the tape, and they listened to the second cosmonaut trying to soothe his comrade. In the background something like a hammer was banging.

  Kirov imagined the cosmonaut floating in zero gravity as he struggled with his vision. Then shouts came from mission control. Terror was breaking loose at both ends of the radio transmission. Baranov stopped the tape and replayed the shouting between capsule and ground. “We have not taught our people that the planet is incomplete,” he said. “Or that a larger earth contains it. Now everyone begins to panic. This sounds like madness! There is an investigation to discover why mission headquarters lost control like this. It has never happened before.”

  “It wants us to fly through that hole!” Marichuk was screaming. “Can’t you see it? It wants us to fly through that hole!”

  There were sounds of the two men struggling.

  “That hole in front of us!” Marichuk’s distant voice cried. “Just ahead. The thing is talking now, embracing me! It wants to take us through that hole!”

  “We are going down,” Doroshenko shouted to the ground. “Can’t you control it? He turned on our retrograde rockets . . .”

  His voice trailed off into static, and Baranov turned off the tape. “Here they began an uncontrolled descent,” he said. “There were no more voices after this. The capsule exploded a minute later
when it hit the atmosphere.”

  They sat in silence, shaken by the horror of it. Kirov picked up the space pilots’ pictures. Neither seemed a likely candidate for encounters with extranormal entities. “He called it a ‘a gate.’ He wanted to fly through ‘a gate,’ ” he whispered. “They seemed like simple men. Marichuk especially. He never tried to fake a description of it. What do you think, Georgi? Can you remember anything like this? In all our studies of UFOs, no one has stayed so close to one so long without describing it in ordinary language.”

  In the spell of the tape Kirov had glimpsed the apparition. Its opening to extra dimensions, the sense that it would embrace you, its command to fly through an opening into some other space, were all things he had encountered during his initiation to the Way of Hurqalya. “But why? Why?” he whispered, studying the cosmonauts’ faces. “How long had they been in orbit?”

  “Seven days, but others have been up longer. We are certain they weren’t poisoned or drugged. Neither had a history of mental instability. Marichuk, in fact, had been up before.”

  “Has either one had hallucinogens?”

  “Neither of them. I checked that carefully. The Committee has made certain that no one in mission headquarters is covering up. Neither of them took any drug. Both of them, however, had some training in meditation from our Indian doctor. Just like Tereshkova.”

  Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, had suffered a nervous breakdown after the flight of Vostok 6 in 1963. Like her, Marichuk and Doroshenko had trained with an Indian yogi. “The panic in ground control is amazing,” Kirov said. “I will enjoy our doctors’ attempts to explain it.”

  “Strelnikov is looking for other explanations,” Baranov said, glancing at a picture of the famous scientist hanging by his desk. “And that is where our assignment begins. You and I have asked for this, my friend. We are the first ones he has turned to. Already he is trying to explain it away. He even asked me if the Americans could have done it! He asked me to ask you: could the Americans trigger such a panic?”

  “Impossible. Not one chance in a million. No one could harness such forces.”

  “But your network, your Texas millionaire and his German friends? You think there is nothing there?”

  “They are dabbling. Not one of them has made the kind of breakthroughs we hear rumors about. I have met them face to face. We have looked at their work from every angle. No one in the West could deliberately cause an episode like this—in Boone’s Red Lab or anywhere else.”

  “But Boone’s experiment with his Witch’s Cradles and our satellites? Directorate T believes they had two successes.”

  “Because our two satellites broke down when Boone tried his experiments doesn’t prove that his people caused it. Even if they did, the phenomena involved in this incident are of another order entirely. There is no comparison. Psychokinesis can only disrupt extremely delicate instruments—in satellites, perhaps, in certain computers, on a few radar screens. And perhaps you can have an effect telepathically on some people at a distance. But it is absurd to think that Lester Boone or anyone else could produce an apparition like Marichuk’s or a panic in ground control.”

  Baranov settled back in his chair. Kirov’s judgment confirmed his own intuition that psychic warfare was mainly the stuff of science fiction. “Then it must come from the fishermen,” he said, pointing toward the sky. “And our cosmonauts went for the bait.”

  “They saw the bait, but couldn’t be hooked.” Kirov felt a sudden guilt. “Georgi, I have a confession. In Prague, when your note arrived, I thought of defection.”

  “I sensed it, as you know.” Baranov’s face filled with sadness. “This is a tenuous effort. But we are summoned to it—how many times has it been? And now we are called through our cosmonauts. If they did not take the bait, we must.”

  Realizing that Kirov might defect, Baranov had prepared himself. But his friend’s admission pained him deeply. Losing his closest ally would jeopardize his lifelong work to educate the Soviet leadership to these mysteries. “You must never defect,” he whispered, holding the younger Russian’s gaze. “It would betray every friend of our work, and all our efforts through these twenty years. You know what damage it would do.” He pointed to the ceiling. “The fact that all this has happened shows us that forces are helping. Something is calling you back, Volodya, calling you back to your vows.”

  Kirov returned his friend’s look, letting him see the shame he felt. The opening these events in space represented deepened the horror of his near-defection. Too many of his fellows lost heart, forgetting their country’s resilience. Too many of them could not see that their dreams could be realized here, in spite of all the difficulties, if only they worked to achieve them. When things were most hopeless, it seemed something always appeared to support him—in this case, a power greater than any difficulty. After a long silence, he looked down at the cosmonauts’ pictures. “I take it there is more than this crash.”

  “The capsule crash is only half of the story,” said Baranov. “Alexander Rozhnov has had a vision too! That is why the Committee of Science and Technology has asked the Academy for an investigative commission. Only Rozhnov, as Committee chairman, has enough influence to cause such an amazing request. Only he could involve Strelnikov in this.”

  Baranov opened a folder. “This report,” he said, “contains a summary of Rozhnov’s background. He described the experience to me. As you will see, it happened here in Moscow, in his apartment on Alexei Tolstoi Street. And it has happened more than once.”

  “Is he interested in esoteric matters?”

  “He has flirted with methods of self-regulation. Techniques to control his heartbeat and breathing, but nothing more exotic than that. I wouldn’t call him an adept.”

  Kirov scanned Baranov’s report. “May I talk to him?” he asked.

  “I am trying to arrange it before our meeting with Strelnikov tomorrow. He’s desperate to understand what happened. His doctors have been no help. Again, no poisoning, no drugs, no instability. Just, poof! The thing appears, in the middle of Moscow this time!”

  “He is an anthropologist and has studied the mountain people of Georgia. He must have studied their shamanism.”

  “Perhaps. But there is no evidence that he ever practiced their rituals. His most famous work was in linguistics. He has discovered ten or fifteen languages among the people of the Caucasus.”

  “And you are sure he is the one who called for the commission.”

  “I am absolutely certain. The Academy of Sciences has never been called upon like this to study the apparitions of cosmonauts and their connection to the mind’s further reaches. And to think that Strelnikov himself will supervise it! The investigation could cause a sensation.”

  “It could lead to the openings we want,” Kirov whispered. “Or to their ridicule. Strelnikov and his colleagues could use this to debunk all the things we seek. This is the greatest challenge we’ve faced.”

  Baranov nodded gravely. “But I think we are prepared.” He paused, studying Kirov’s face. “Volodya, let me ask you one more time. Are you absolutely certain that the Americans and Europeans have nothing to do with this? If they don’t, we can be more certain of our course.”

  “Georgi, you must believe me. There is no special insight in Europe or America about such episodes. Our own backward country leads the world in its alertness to them. Nowhere else have UFO accounts been so carefully studied. Nowhere else is there a circle like ours. My grandfather knew more about these spaces than all the experts I have met in the West.”

  “And you are absolutely certain that nothing like this has happened to any of the American astronauts?”

  “A few have glimpsed strange objects, technically UFOs. And a few have had mystical feelings. But nothing like this has happened. If it had, we would have heard about it. I cannot remember an incident like this in any Western report. To stay in contact for almost three hours as Marichuk did without reducing it to ordinary perc
eptions, or without blacking out, is amazing. It may be that a signal has reached us.”

  12

  SINCE JANUARY 1964, the month of his release by the French police, Kirov had maintained a Moscow apartment in a three-story building on Udjinsky Pereulok, four blocks from the Kremlin. The yellow-brick building had been the home of Russian aristocrats in the nineteenth century and had been preserved for its historic interest, but was slated for demolition in 1980 by the Municipality of Moscow’s city planners. Kirov’s apartment was on the second floor, with an outside staircase that helped him keep his distance from the other occupants, most of whom were artists and widows of government bureaucrats. Its rooms faced a yard behind the building filled with maple trees that were losing their leaves this day in mid-October.

  The apartment had a small kitchen, a bedroom with a single cot, and a spacious book-lined study. All three rooms were painted buttercup yellow like the building’s exterior, but stains from leaking pipes ran down every wall. The place had a musty smell and seemed on the verge of losing its plaster to the joint erosion of water and age, but Kirov was grateful for its sanctuary. It was the one place besides his ancestral house in Tashkent and the mosque near Samarkand that felt like home, the one place in Moscow that carried something of the Light that gathered through his mystical practice. As he arranged the documents he had brought from Baranov on tables by his desk, he felt a gratitude. The stillness that had grown in these rooms through the years of his occupancy was as strong as ever. It would give him the peace and strength he needed in these next few weeks.

  He unpacked his suitcase and opened the windows of all three rooms. Only the distant laughter of children playing in the yard behind the building broke the silence. It was fortunate, he thought, that this assignment permitted him to work here. The concentration he needed would be impossible in the offices of Directorate T.