Singularity

by Bill DeSmedt

  “Thank you. I am quite pleased with it myself.” Grishin stroked his cheeks and chin. “Some of my colleagues here did not fare nearly so well under the knife, in my opinion.”

  Bonaventure’s eyes grew wide. “Wait a minute. You’re dead. Shot during the ’91 coup.”

  “Not quite dead, though I still carry a fragment of that bullet lodged in my skull. The surgery in question was reconstructive in intent. But it seemed a shame to waste the opportunity to, ah, put a new face on things, so to speak.”

  “Mstislav Platonovich, huh?” Knox said. “Listen, I’m just going to stick with Arkady Grigoriyevich,’ if you don’t mind. One first-name-plus-patronymic per person is about my limit.”

  “As you wish, Mr. Knox,” Grishin nodded agreeably. Truth be told, he’d grown used to the pseudonym himself, to living within the legend, like any good undercover operative. “And, while we are all being so convivial, we may as well see to your comfort. I think you’ll find these chairs will afford you a better view. Yuri?”

  His face an expressionless mask, the Georgian installed first the man, then the woman, in two of the armchairs adjoining Grishin’s desk.

  Grishin glanced down and frowned. “Yuri, please be so kind as to remove Mr. Knox’s handcuffs.” Turning to the woman, he said, “I regret, Ms. Bonaventure, that you are a bit too, ah, formidable to extend you a similar courtesy.”

  He smiled at her apologetically. She grimaced in return.

  “However,” he went on, “I can offer you one small amenity, in view of the fact that our discussion will be in Russian. Sasha, would you mind serving as interpreter for Ms. Bonaventure?”

  Grishin waited while Sasha changed places. Then he placed his hands together, in an attitude resembling prayer, and said, “Let us begin.”

  Knox watched the wall-mounted display behind Grishin’s desk come to life. A single image filled the fifty-inch screen: the wizened corpse of an elderly man lying in state, coffin all trimmed in red, an enormous hammer and sickle as a backdrop, honor guard to left and right.

  “We start,” Grishin said, “by returning to that pivotal moment in Soviet history which Mr. Knox alluded to earlier. To February 9th, 1984, the sad day when Soviet Premier and former Chairman of the Committee on State Security, our Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, died. Of renal collapse, according to our official pronouncements. Though, as always in such cases, it proved impossible to prevent rumors from circulating.”

  Knox nodded. “I remember those rumors. They must have peaked just around the time I got to Moscow. I was barely off the plane before I started hearing all about how Andropov had been murdered.” Those same half-remembered rumors had helped weave the pattern he’d first glimpsed back at Weathertop.

  “A lot of it was just plain weird, though,” Knox went on. “Death by knitting needle or some such. Heard that one from the cab driver on the way in from Sheremetevo airport. And that wasn’t even the strangest part.”

  It was Grishin’s turn to nod. “The self-immolating assassin.”

  “I guess you must have taken that same cab ride sometime.”

  A melancholy smile flitted across Grishin’s face. “No, Mr. Knox. I did not need to hear this tale second hand. I was there.”

  The display now held an image of a lavish hospital suite with a clunky-looking dialysis unit against one wall and a still figure, recognizably the man from the funeral scene, lying on a cot. A banner at the bottom of the frame proclaimed Совepшeнно Сeкpeтно—Top Secret—all in red.

  Grishin leaned back in his chair and contemplated the image in silence. The Council seemed equally rapt. The only sound in the cabin was the occasional groan of metal as Navtilus shouldered the Atlantic’s ever-increasing weight.

  When Grishin resumed speaking, addressing the Council now, his voice was slow and solemn. “I stood in Yuri Vladimirovich’s hospital room that dreary February morning. Saw with my own eyes what Mr. Knox has called a ‘knitting needle.’ Stood at the foot of Yuri Vladimirovich’s deathbed and beheld the smoldering corpse of his murderer there on the floor beside him.” The camera now panned down alongside the bed to reveal . . .

  “I say ‘corpse,’ ” Grishin’s voice dropped to a whisper, “but in truth what remained of the assassin’s body bore no resemblance to a human being, living or dead. It was merely a single long, fine strand of protoplasm, burnt to a crisp. It took an electron microscope to confirm its human origin. To the unaided eye, it looked more like a heap of charred spaghetti, of the very thinnest kind.”

  “A self-destruct that turns a person into angel hair pasta?” Knox said. This was grotesque! But then, he’d expected no less of Arkady Grigoriyevich. “How?”

  “Ah, if we only knew that, Mr. Knox.” Grishin sighed and shook his head. “I will not deny it: long after we had abandoned the goal of unmasking the assassin’s co-conspirators, we continued our investigation solely in hope of recovering that miraculous device. Then, as now, we could have put it to good use.”

  I’ll bet! Knox could picture KGB hit squads roving the back streets of the world’s capitals, transforming enemies of the people into primo piatto at a blast from Grishin’s magic vermicelli gun.

  But Grishin was rattling on. “Rivals in the apparatus,”—here he paused to look meaningfully at the little guy he’d called Karpinskii—“had engineered my appointment as chief investigator, trusting I would fail. In that they were not disappointed, not for the longest time.

  “It seemed hopeless, after all. KGB Ninth Directorate had followed prophylaxis SOPs to the letter: no human soul could have entered that facility undetected. And, press them as we might, none of the guards would confess to having seen a thing. All we had to go on was the murder weapon itself—this.”

  He punched a combination into a keypad and pulled open a drawer. He reached in and withdrew a long, twisted metallic shape, set it down carefully on the surface of the desk.

  “This is the actual implement that pierced our Yuri Vladimirovich’s heart that winter day in 1984. On it are inscribed what appeared to be words. Don’t trouble to strain your eyes, Comrades, the writing is warped beyond all recognition. As if this object had been through the fires of hell.” Grishin quivered minutely, momentarily caught in the grip of some disquieting inner vision. “Only much later would we come to realize how close that metaphor was to the literal truth.

  “Even so, with the aid of ultraviolet illumination, x-ray microscopy, various other techniques . . .” A dismissive shrug; Grishin was not a technology guy. “Suffice it to say we managed to decipher the inscription. It read: Tunguska Cosmologist VII-1989 Support.”

  Grishin held up his right hand, four fingers raised. “Four words. Only four. Rather cryptic for a claim of responsibility, if that was the intent. Doubtless there had been no room for more on the object’s surface. Still, four clues.

  “Tunguska?” Grishin ticked off the first of the four fingers. A tired smile tugged the corner of his mouth. “We knew where that was well enough. We instituted the appropriate inquiries in that hellhole, searching for any trace of an aboriginal nationalist movement with the wherewithal to have perpetrated this outrage. We found nothing—nothing smelling of an assassination plot against the premier, in any case.”

  Counting off the second finger now. “That left ‘Cosmologist’ as the only other substantive clue. Over the next eighteen months, until that ingrate Gorbachev shut down the investigation, we interviewed any number of researchers, eventually getting around to our young friend Sasha here.

  “You know, Comrades,” Grishin mused, “in some ways that aspect of the investigation was even more bizarre than tracking down leads through the wastes of Siberia had been. Quasars, Big Bangs, heat-death of the universe . . .” That slight quiver again. “But in any case, it, too, only led to a dead end.

  “As to ‘Support’—not to mention vii-1989, which we took to be a calendar notation—well, where could we turn?” Grishin appealed to his audience. “ ‘Support’ for what? And when? In
July of ’89? A date five years in the future? It plagued me, this four-part riddle. My, shall we say, precarious situation in the wake of the debacle forced my attention away, onto more pressing concerns. Nonetheless, I never forgot the mystery of those four words.

  “So, you can imagine my surprise when, in mid-summer of 1989, who should turn up again but our young astrophysicist.” Grishin gave a nod in Sasha’s direction. “Best of all, he came to us. Arrived on our doorstep, so to speak, petitioning for access to the secret archives of Kulik’s second Tunguska expedition.

  “Our interviews with Sasha during the assassination inquiry must have started something stirring in him. He had already been working on black hole formation in the very early universe, you see.” Grishin smiled indulgently, as if no more ridiculous waste of time could possibly be imagined. “And, with the clue of the inscription to go on, had become increasingly convinced of something called the Dzhakson-Ryan hypothesis.”

  “Jackson-Ryan, sure.” Knox was getting tired of listening. “But with the added twist that the thing’s still down there.”

  “Precisely.” Grishin didn’t bat an eye at Knox’s recognition of the two astrophysicists’ names. “Sasha thought he saw a way to investigate one of his precious primordial objects at first hand. But he needed our authorization to view Kulik’s sequestered archives.”

  Grishin chuckled. “Suddenly, after a lapse of five years, all the pieces of the puzzle had fallen into my hand: here was a cosmologist asking our support for research into Tunguska—all of this in July of 1989!”

  “What did you do?” Knox asked.

  “Do?” Grishin laughed outright. “What do you think I did? I had him arrested, of course.”

  Then he turned to Sasha and, as if to say it was all in fun, gave him a big grin.

  It was all Sasha could do to smile in return. The images now chasing one another across the datawall weren’t making it any easier: a montage of his younger self, mere hapless junior astrophysics professor that he’d been, traversing the stations of KGB in-processing: handcuffed, strip-searched, peering out at the camera through a tiny grate in a massive ocher door . . .

  “Regrettably,” Grishin was saying, “we could turn up nothing to tie our young friend to the Andropov affair. Still, just to be on the safe side, we held onto him.”

  Sasha wiped suddenly sweaty palms against his trouser legs. If Grishin was aware of the effect these reminiscences were having, he gave no sign.

  “Then one day,” he went on, “perhaps three or four months after we had first detained him, I received word that Sasha wished to confess—but only to the officer in charge of the investigation. Nominally, that was still myself. Though I had since moved on to other responsibilities, I arranged to have him brought in on the chance that I might, after five long years, wipe the stain of that one egregious failure from my record.

  “But Sasha surprised me.” Grishin winked at him—winked! “He had not come to confess to anything, you see, but rather to tell me—Actually, Sasha, you tell it better than I.”

  Sasha swallowed the lump in his throat and dutifully picked up his cue. “Well, yes, what else had I to do for all those months, after all, but think. And my interrogators’ questions told me more, I fear, than my answers told them. In my cell at night, long after lights-out, I would puzzle over what I knew of the affair: over why, in particular, an assassin would think to write an endorsement of cosmological research on his murder weapon. Until finally there came a day when I had it all worked out—“

  “Most of it, anyway,” Grishin reminded him. “We still do not know all of it.”

  “True. But, in any case, near enough for me to ask to talk with Arkasha again.”

  “To talk with me,” Grishin said. “Indeed to spin out for me what was perhaps the most fantastic tale ever told in the cellars of the Lyubyanka.” He gave a brief chuckle. “As you will appreciate, Comrades, that took some doing; there has been stiff competition for that particular honor, over the years.”

  “Fantastic? No, Arkasha,” Sasha protested, “once all the facts were taken into account, it—”

  “It still remained science fiction of the rankest sort,” Grishin cut him off. Then he turned to address the Council once again. “Yet, Comrades, I must confess it: that curious interview remained in my mind long after I’d had Sasha thrown back in his cell. In the darkening days that followed, as the strength of will that alone had made Russia great crumbled all around us, I found my thoughts turning to it again and again. How differently things might have been made to turn out if what Sasha claimed were true . . .

  “And then I thought: why not make him prove it?”

  A wry smile on his face, Knox listened to the tale of how, six months later, Grishin had had Sasha transferred to a minimum-security facility attached to Foreign Intelligence headquarters in the Yasenevo suburb of Moscow.

  “Out there in ‘The Woods,’ as we called it,” Grishin was saying, “I could keep a closer eye on our young friend. For his part, Sasha found his new situation far more conducive to research—not to mention, more congenial—than his accommodations as a mere detainee had been.”

  Knox shook his head in wonderment. Against all odds, Sasha had once again managed to ingratiate himself with the powers-that-be. Dale Carnegie’s disciple rides again!—this time winning friends and influencing people in that selfsame state security R&D establishment made infamous by Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle.

  “Our working relationship, too,” Grishin went on, “was evolving in those final months of Soviet power. From jailer and prisoner, we were becoming something more like co-workers—even colleagues, if you will.”

  “That’s just hostage syndrome,” Marianna cut in. “Long-term captivity creates a dependence on the captor that’s easy to mistake for friendship, even love.” She caught Grishin’s mocking smile, and glared back. “Don’t look for it to happen here anytime soon, Grishin!”

  “You may call it what you will, Ms. Bonaventure. The fact remains, Sasha and I became indispensable to each other: he designing each new experiment; I overcoming all obstacles standing in its way, making it happen. And always our young friend would urge me on to yet greater efforts with the words: ‘It must be true, Comrade Director, for it has already happened?”

  His voice dropped a register or two, “And Sasha was right. Thanks to him, when the end came in 1991 we had a plan in place. A plan to literally turn back the clock!”

  Knox was obscurely pleased to see Grishin pull a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and mop his brow. Thank goodness some one else found this whole business as unsettling as he did.

  “To turn back the clock,” Grishin repeated. “Yes, but how far? To when? Even as we were assembling the wherewithal to realize the ‘time warp’ capability itself, a separate study group was already poring over the turning points of recent history, searching for a fulcrum—a single event which, had it gone another way, would yield an outcome out of all proportion to the effort required to alter it.”

  “The biggest bang for the buck,” Knox volunteered.

  Grishin ignored him. “We examined many such scenarios, weighing each carefully, since it is in the nature of the case that one only gets one chance at changing one’s own past. Still, even the most drastic proposals were given their fair hearing.” He stared at Karpinskii, as if challenging the little man to deny it.

  “At one point, we went so far as to consider canceling out Stalin’s murder of Kirov back in 1934, in hopes of averting the lamentable episode of the cult of personality altogether.” Grishin sighed. “Alas, uncertainty effects are said to make the consequences of intervention more indeterminate the further back one goes. The alternative futures begin to multiply beyond the possibility of prediction or control.”

  That was too much for Knox. “Translation: you would have liked to undo the horrors of Stalinism, but you couldn’t be sure what that drastic a change might have done to your own cushy lifestyles.”

  “That is the troubl
e with you, Mr. Knox. You cast everything in the worst possible light. Try to see things from our perspective. In retrieving the Tunguska Cosmic Object, my associates and I have saved the world itself from the ultimate catastrophe. Are we not then entitled to promote our own best interests as well—interests virtually synonymous, I remind you, with the welfare of our nation as a whole?”

  “Why do I get the feeling that, for you, saving the world is just a means to an end?”

  Grishin shook his head in irritation. Still, he seemed determined to finish his rambling project report. “In the end—and I will not pretend this decision was a matter of indifference to me personally—we elected to negate the assassination of the one man who, had he but lived, could have averted our national tragedy. A man who had the wisdom and the will to guide Russia through her difficult transition to a new, information-based Communist society. The man who died that February morning twenty years ago, with a fragment of the future piercing his heart: Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov.”

  Naturally. Who better than the patron saint of state security to ensure the KGB’s continued dominance on into the Newly-revised World Order? There was a problem, though . . .

  Knox felt compelled to talk out of turn again. “My own memories of Andropov aren’t anywhere near as fond as yours, Grishin. I seem to recall that, between the two of them, he and Ronald Reagan nearly started World War III.”

  Andropov had only held the post of General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party for fifteen months before death deposed him. But in his brief hour of strutting and fretting on the international stage, tensions between the superpowers had escalated to the point of spawning a whole grass-roots Nuclear Freeze movement. Those were the days when Soviet MIGs were downing Korean jetliners, when a made-for-T V movie called The Day After could touch off a national epidemic of weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth. Long-nurtured arms-control negotiations were crashing and burning right and left while facile sound-bytes like “evil empire” and “fascism, American style” winged their way back and forth between the hemispheres, catch-phrases taking the place of diplomacy—taking the place, indeed, of rational thought of any kind.