by Bill DeSmedt
Knox joined in the encomium. Well, and why not? Even in the Soviet era, the Russians had had a world-class metallurgical and materials research program. This latest advance, while breathtaking, was perhaps predictable. With the rest of the room, he lifted his full glass of vodka and drained it, Russian-style, in a single swallow.
Now the champagne and vodka began to flow in earnest, as guest after high-ranking guest rose to extol the achievements of Grishin Enterprises and the virtues of its CEO. Russians never needed much of an excuse to tie one on, and Grishin had given the crowd two excellent pretexts. The inauguration of the summer research season, coupled with the unveiling of the miniature marvels of (almost) room-temperature superconductivity, had induced a state bordering on euphoria at the crowded banquet tables.
Before embracing Christianity in the year 988 CE, Prince Vladimir of Kiev had rejected Islam by reason of its doctrine of total abstinence. “Drinking is the joy of the Russes,” the Chronicle of Ancient Years quotes him saying. “We cannot exist without that pleasure.” The revelers certainly seemed intent upon proving the wisdom of the good prince’s words tonight.
With the party now in full swing, Arkady Grigoriyevich Grishin left the Olympus of his dais to walk amongst mere mortals.
A new wave of toasts began propagating down Knox’s own table, prompted by Grishin’s arrival at its head. Then Galina was standing up, perhaps a trifle more unsteadily than warranted by the residual pitch and roll of the hyperstabilized vessel.
She raised her glass. “To our host, our leader, our dear Arkady Grigoriyevich. Future winner of Nobel Prize!”
“Arkady Grigoriyevich!” voices in various stages of inebriation echoed the refrain through the banquet hall.
“Za nashego spasitelya! Excuse, please—to Our Savior! Savior of children, of whole entire world!” Galina was on a roll now. “With Arkady Grigoriyevich to lead, very soon now we catch the—we cage the, the—” her English having chosen this crucial juncture to desert her altogether, she blurted out in Russian, “—Tunguskii Vurdalak!”
That was troweling it on a bit thick. Savior of the world? Chalk that one up to the vodka. Then Knox noticed Grishin’s eyes. They had gone cold and hard over a smile held too long. What in Galya’s tipsy hyperbole could have brought that on?
What was that thing she’d said at the end there? Something about catching or caging a something. The message on Grishin’s cylinder the other night had said something about “catching,” too.
But, catching a . . . Tunguskii Vurdalak! What, pray tell, might that be? Knox listened for Sasha’s whispered simultaneous translation, but none was forthcoming. He tried to suppress the effects of several glasses of vodka long enough to think this through.
The Tunguskii part was easy. It referred to Tunguska, one of the most godforsaken places in all of Siberia. Actually, that might be aiming too low; one of the most godforsaken places on earth was more like it. Knox’s long-ago Soviet ethnography survey course had touched upon Tunguska, as briefly as possible. Hundreds of thousands of square miles of empty wilderness infested with reindeer, bears, wolves, and in the mercifully brief summers, mosquitoes the size of lapdogs.
But a Vurdalak? Not one of your garden-variety Russian words, that’s for sure. Something out of folklore, maybe? He rummaged through musty mental storehouses of Russian vocabulary, unused lo these twenty years. When it finally came, inspiration flowed from an unlikely source: Knox yielded to no man in his encyclopedic knowledge of movie trivia, and he seemed to recall an early-196os spaghetti-horror trilogy, including an episode entitled “The Vurdalak.” Starring Boris Karloff. About, about . . . let’s see . . . about some sort of Slavic ghoul or vampire or werewolf.
The “Werewolf of Tunguska” ?
Knox looked up. The awkward moment had passed. Grishin was his affable self again, applauding and complimenting a blushing Galina on her splendid, if undeserved toast. Marianna was acting as if nothing had happened. They all were. Knox put the thought aside and rejoined the party.
But deep down in the subcortical recesses of Jonathan Knox’s onboard pattern-matching device, “Tunguska” was ringing a bell.
An alarm bell.
20 | Alive!
THE ERA OF fire is winding down now, the elegance of energy congealing into gross matter. The temperature of the universe-seed drops below ten billion degrees after the first second. The attenuating nexus is barely energetic enough to synthesize even the simplest chemical elements. The work of filling in the periodic table must be left to the stars.
Jack Adler stirred in his sleep and moaned.
Half a million years out, ongoing expansion lowers the universe’s temperature to a few thousand degrees absolute, cool enough that true atoms can precipitate from its charged particle plasmas. At a stroke, the heavens shed their pearly luminescence and don the utter black of night in mid-ocean.
“Jack? Can you hear me?” The oddly familiar voice faded in and out at the edge of consciousness.
. . . A night with no stars. The first starlight is still a billion years in the future. It will take that long for the early universe’s trace inhomogeneities to gather hydrogen into stellar-sized clumps large enough to ignite under their own weight.
Jack wet his lips, tried to swallow. “Gone,” he croaked. “All gone.” He turned back toward the receding radiance, but too late, too late. The bright morning of existence was over. Its brief noon had given way to evening. The sun of creation had set, and all that was left now was a dance in the long afterglow.
And through it all, forged from the same gargantuan gravitational forces as are gradually molding gas into galaxies, the last primordial black hole, sole relic of the creation, sails outward through the darkness.
A darkness that fled as Jack pried gummy eyelids apart and fought to hold them open against the onslaught of day.
With the light, the voice returned too. “He is coming around, I think,” it said.
Jack tried to focus, to resolve shifting patterns of shadow and glare into the shapes he knew must be there. He raised his head for a better look, stopped when he felt a warning throb at the base of his skull. It felt as if someone had been pounding away on that spot with a hammer and cold chisel—someone who might be coming back any minute.
He lay back, panting, his strength taxed by even this much exertion. Took a deep breath and wished he hadn’t: the air reeked of disinfectant and rancid floor wax. Experimenting, he found his eyes had adjusted to the light, enough that he was able to take in his surroundings. A glance down confirmed what his sense of touch had already told him: his arms and chest were swathed in bandages. And he was lying on a simple, steel-framed cot, one of three lined up along one bilious green wall of a small, airless room. A soot-flecked window, closed tight despite the noon heat, gave out on blank brick wall. Could have been anywhere, or nowhere.
He looked up to find the owner of the voice. There he was, sitting on the next cot over.
“Luciano,” Jack whispered hoarsely.
The little Italian geologist smiled down at him. “Yes, Jack, I am here.”
“Where is here, exactly?”
“The university hospital in Tomsk. I came by to look in on you on my way home to Bologna. And not only I. A . . . a friend is here to see you too.”
“Good to see that you are back with us, Professor Adler.” A second voice, deeper and differently accented but no less familiar. “For a while we feared we might lose you.”
Standing behind Luciano, hovering—threateningly? solicitously?—over Jack’s hospital bed was . . . “Academician Medvedev? What are you doing here?”
“I came in to have this x-rayed.” Medvedev’s left arm was in a sling. “They seemed to have set it well enough back at the Vanavara polyclinic, but I thought it best to be sure. Then, too, I wanted to check on your progress. I have what one might call a personal interest in your recovery.
“Jack,” Luciano said quietly, “say hello to the man who saved your life.”
&n
bsp; Moving slowly and gingerly, Jack managed to prop himself into a semblance of a sitting position without reawakening the throb in the back of his head. Damned if he’d listen to the tale of his improbable rescue—by Medvedev, of all people!—from flat on his back.
“So, when Igor did not bring you back,” the big Russian was saying, “I went to your campsite to look for you. I could barely see a thing in the darkness, but I knew the growl of a wolf well enough, and its stink.”
He paused, then said, “That was a foolish thing you did, Adler. Brave, but foolish, to challenge a wolf like that. I was almost too late to save you.”
“How . . . how did you manage that, anyway? I thought I was a goner for sure.”
“Hah! As to that, we Siberians have been dealing with wolves since before your Declaration of Independence was signed. Simple, really: a wolf’s jaw is very powerful, true, but the superstructure of his snout is quite fragile. It requires only that you get the wolf to bite onto something and hold still long enough to smash a rock down on his nose. He then loses his appetite entirely.”
“Bite and hold onto what?”
In answer, the Russian held out his gypsum-encased left forearm. “I wrapped my shirt around it as best I could. Even so, the beast fractured my ulna.”
Not for the first time, Jack was reminded what medved meant in Russian; the man must have the strength and courage of a bear to go with the rest of his ursine attributes.
“I . . . I don’t know how to thank you, Dmitri Pavlovich,” Jack began.
“Just Dmitri, Dzhek,” Medvedev said. “There can be no such formalities between two who have faced death together.”
Was that it? The reason Medvedev—or Dmitri, then—was acting so downright cordial? More than cordial: beneath the gruff exterior, the man seemed almost . . . friendly.
“As to thanks,” he held up his good hand, “let us hear no more of that! As head of the expedition, I bear responsibility for the safety of all its members. Besides, can you imagine the paperwork involved in shipping home a dead American?”
Jack couldn’t believe it. Medvedev had made a joke!
Quick as it had come, the flash of humor vanished. The Russian sat down heavily on the adjacent cot and sighed. “No, Dzhek. You owe me no thanks. It is I who owe you an apology: we have had our differences, but that is no excuse for making you camp alone in that isolated site. Especially with wolves about . . .”
“That’s all right, Dmitri. How could you have known? If your Siberian wolves are anything like their American cousins, it’s unusual for them to come anywhere near a human, much less attack one. Hardly seems natural . . .”
Jack stopped talking then, thinking about what he’d just said. His memories of that night—initially fuzzy and unreal, as if they’d happened to somebody else—had been gradually coming into focus as they’d talked. Now everything rushed back full force. It hadn’t been natural at all! “My God!” he choked out, “Igor! My experiment!”
“Jack, are you all right?” Luciano asked.
“Huh?” Jack wiped at his eyes. “Yeah, I’ll be okay. I was just remembering.” Remembering what? Igor’s death, the ruined SQUID, and something else—something important, something that kept slipping away again. It was something to do with . . .
“Dmitri, did you happen to see, well, anyone else at the campsite, besides me and Igor?”
Medvedev didn’t answer immediately. A look of concern flashed across his face, to be echoed on Luciano’s. When the Russian did speak, it was in tones usually reserved for talking to small children, or madmen. “Your man who became a wolf, you mean?”
“Jack,” Luciano said, “please, understand: for the most part your wounds were minor, less severe than Dmitri’s, in fact. Of far greater concern were the injury to your head and its attendant hallucinations. It was only luck that the helicopter already happened to be inbound to the expedition site, or we might have lost you.”
Medvedev gave Jack a sheepish grin. Luck had had nothing to do with it; that chopper had been part and parcel of the Russian’s plan to send Jack packing.
Luciano was still talking. “Even so, it took two hours to ferry you back to Vanavara, another four for the med-evac to Tomsk. And, all that time, you were raving about your, your werewolf. About a man who had bitten Igor’s throat out.”
“Given the intensity of the delusion,” Medvedev added, “we feared brain damage. But the doctors here assure me your MRIs show nothing more than is to be expected with concussion.”
Jack made no response, just lay there, feeling trapped. They were dismissing what he had seen with his own eyes as some sort of trauma-induced hallucination. Somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to make his death, and the destruction of his experiment, look like a wild-animal attack. And it had worked: even his friends, both the old one and the new one, had bought it.
And how could he blame them? It was all so wildly improbable. If only his head would stop aching so he could think. Why would anyone trek all the way to the wilds of Tunguska just to kill a cosmologist and trash his experiment?
His experiment, his find—could that be it? But it was potentially the most devastating discovery of all time. Why would anyone try to suppress it? . . . to suppress him?
No, it couldn’t be!
But the more he thought—thought about how unexpectedly precise the object’s periodicity had been, the more he knew it was true: somebody had been tampering with the micro-hole’s orbit. Didn’t they realize how incredibly dangerous that was? How the wrong move could decelerate the PBH into a death-spiral to the core and bring the end in decades instead of centuries?
And how had they kept it secret? Any installation big enough to do the job would have been impossible to conceal from satellite surveillance. The whole world would know about it by now.
But somehow the world didn’t know. Only he did. At least that explained why they’d tried to kill him.
What if they were still trying?
Jack raised his head. “Dmitri, there hasn’t been any publicity about my . . . my accident, has there?”
Medvedev shook his head. “This is still Russia, Dzhek; old habits die hard. We notified families and home institutions, of course. And posted an update to the Tunguska webpage. But just the bare facts: wolf attack, two casualties—no names, no details. We had hoped that you would recuperate enough to participate in our final press conference and tell the full story yourself. But now that the expedition is over . . .”
“No, no press conferences just yet,” Jack said. Then he processed the rest of it. “Did you say over?”
“Your doctors felt it best to keep you sedated for a time, hoping your mind might heal itself.”
“How long? What day is this?”
“It is August 3rd,” Luciano said.
“Five days?” Christ! They’d had nearly a week to find out he’d survived, and track him here!
Whoever they were.
“This year’s expedition is over,” Medvedev confirmed. “Luciano is, as he said, already leaving for home. As may you, of course, once you are recovered.” He hesitated. “Though I had intended to offer that you stay at my dacha while you are convalescing. Only if you feel well enough, of course.”
“I’m feeling better. Really.” He couldn’t stay here, lying in this hospital bed. It was only a matter of time till word got out that he had survived. And he couldn’t just hop on a plane and leave the country: he’d have to show a passport first. That might be all the killers needed to find him again.
He couldn’t let that happen. He had to stay alive, if only long enough to get the word out. No, Medvedev’s offer sounded like the best bet.
Jack sat there, silently regarding his new best friend. You saved my life, Dmitri. How’d you like to save the world into the bargain?
21 | Raise the Titanic
GALINA FELT FLUSH with pride and anticipation, so excited that she hardly minded pulling the morning shift for the hopelessly hung-over Komarov. Today was the day:
finally, Arkady Grigoriyevich had given the go-ahead for capture!
Somehow Arkady Grigoriyevich always seemed to know the opportune time for initiating the next step in this cascade of complex operations. What an honor to be working on this project with him. Really, he made one feel again as in the old Soviet Union. Hardships and privations, yes—though not on Rusalka of course!—but, with them, a conviction that it was all worthwhile. A conviction that imbued the simple business of life and work with a heroic quality so sadly lacking in post-Soviet Russia.
And, really, wasn’t this magnificent Antipode Project an echo of those grim, glorious times, when, led by dread Stalin, Russia had stood alone at the hinge point of history and fought back against another darkness threatening to engulf the world? Russia had saved all of humanity then, had saved the future itself from the horrors of Fascism, at Stalingrad. And now, in the hours to come, they would do so once again. Her own generation’s Stalingrad—Galina smiled at the monumental incongruity of the idea—and she had been chosen to serve.
She blinked back sudden tears and looked again at the readouts. The lights were still green, but flashing faster—almost turnover time. A glance at the chronometer confirmed it: 10:46 A.M. Vurdalak was approaching its Azores apogee.
“Apogee” indeed! An apogee was the point in an object’s orbit where it was furthest away from the Earth. How could one apply the same word to an object that was “orbiting” entirely within the Earth, tunneling endlessly round and round miles below the surface? Still, what else to call these highest points in Vurdalak’s subterranean trajectory, grazing the underside of the crust at twenty degree intervals, stitching an invisible sinuous ring around the planet? When this was all over, they would have to sit down and work out some new terminology.
The gravitometer was now tracking Vurdalak’s brief transit of the capture chamber some two hundred kilometers northwest and three thousand meters down. Here, at the highest point in its arc, Vurdalak moved at its slowest, spending whole milliseconds within the cage before hurtling down again along its return path into the bowels of the Earth. Round and round and round it goes, but while it is here . . .
