Kolymsky Heights

by Lionel Davidson

  Apart from the broken arm and neck she was otherwise uninjured. She had frozen rapidly, brain damage being minimal. And she was perfect. And also perfectly whole: lips, tongue, flesh, organs (her digestive ones indeed arrested while at work on the fish) all healthily fresh: quick frozen. There was even saliva in her mouth. Apart from her height she seemed in all respects of absolutely modern type. And yet, in all respects, she was not. Of which, more later.

  Now two things must be said. Of all inhabited lands on earth this region, of prehistoric ice, is the only one where such a find could be made. Next, it was made at precisely the moment when use could be made of it – although our operations have been very careful and she is barely blemished. I cannot bring myself to disfigure her.

  I look at her often. She is still in my tunnel, serene and detached in time, for ever in her eighteenth year. You will see her. So, the end of one long chain of chance and the beginning of another – this most momentous other, the reason you are here.

  I do not doubt, in connection with this, that you will have many things to tell me. Well, I await them.

  And now to begin.

  One

  THE POSTMAN & THE PROFESSOR

  1

  At ten to nine on a June morning, a shining and brilliant morning that promised a day of great heat, a lady of sixty-three cycled through the streets of Oxford.

  She cycled slowly, corpulent and majestic as some former Queen of the Netherlands, sun hat bobbing, flowered dress billowing. Up and around churned the floral thighs until, turning into the High, they were arrested by a slowly changing traffic light. She swooped at once off her saddle and applied the brake – applied it a moment too late so that her broad-sandalled feet went pit-a-pat in small skittering hops as she wrestled with the machine.

  Bad co-ordination. Oh, schrecklich, schrecklich. Everything today was frightful, not least her head. She took the opportunity to remove her hat and fan the head, also to pull at a clinging portion of skirt and shake that about too.

  Her sister had advised her to stay in bed today. Out of the question. With retirement age three dangerous years behind her, she could not allow a cold in the head to keep her in bed. Her employer would not be staying in bed. And other people were after her job. Miss Sonntag’s colds did not, like other people’s, come in winter; hers came in summer, during heatwaves, with stupefying intensity. When the whole world was full of flowers and delight, she turned into an imbecile. She felt hot and cold by turn now, dazed, unnatural, a lump.

  The lights changed and she ascended once more and pedalled regally on. In the city of bicycles there were not today many bicycles. The university was in its long vacation, but her professor was not yet on vacation. Until he went – which would not be before the River Spey showed more salmon – there would be no time off for her. Ach!

  Brasenose passed, and Oriel and All Souls. She turned in at the close as the clocks all began chiming nine. The little forecourt was airless and deserted, no bicycles in the bicycle stand. She chained her own and went wearily inside. The caretaker had sorted the post and separated the professor’s with an elastic band. She took her hat off, and sneezed.

  The air in her room was stale but chill. She tried to turn the air conditioner off but couldn’t, and opened the window instead. Then she switched the electric kettle on and looked for the post. She could not see any post. But she had somewhere seen some post. Her head was so thick she couldn’t remember where. In the hall, perhaps, where it had arrived? She went out and searched the hall. No post.

  The kettle was whistling, so she went back in and made herself a cup of coffee and hung up her hat. Underneath the hat, on the chair, was the post. She gazed dully at it, and blew her nose. Then she drank some coffee and started work, and almost at once was interrupted by the telephone. She answered it, continuing to straighten out letters and toss the envelopes into the bin; and had completed them all before hanging Up. This was when she realised that something else was wrong with the post. There were six foreign envelopes. There were only five foreign letters.

  She shuffled the letters blankly about, and then looked on the floor and in the bin. In the bin were the six foreign, envelopes, and ten British ones, all empty. She saw this was going to be a totally bad day. She also saw that her boss had arrived. His long stooping form had tramped past the glass panel of her door. She sat back on her heels and considered her sister’s advice. Then she pulled herself together and in an addled way began matching letters and envelopes to find out which was missing.

  There were ten British envelopes and ten British letters; three American envelopes and three American letters; two German envelopes, two German letters; one Swedish envelope, no Swedish letter. She looked at this envelope again. It was a tatty one. The address was written on a slip of tissue paper and stuck on with Sellotape. Nothing was in it. After a while, unable to understand anything any more, she merely took everything in to the professor and told him they were a letter short.

  The professor looked up at her, mystified.

  ‘A letter short, Miss Sonntag?’

  This envelope has no letter.’

  He had a look at the envelope.

  ‘Goteborg, Sverige,’ he said. ‘What is there at Goteborg, Sverige?’

  ‘The university, perhaps?’

  ‘With absent-minded professors, perhaps?’

  This thought occurred to her just as he said it, and she cursed the cold in her head. At another time she would have had the thought first and left the envelope where it was (as, it was later thought, she had probably done at least once before). Thick-headedness had sent her hunting through the accursed bin.

  Her head was no less thick but she said stolidly, ‘This does not seem to me a professor’s letter. I mean, naturally there is no letter, but –’

  ‘That’s all right, Miss Sonntag.’

  The professor took his jacket off. His unusual head, large and knobbly and extending in various unexpected directions, was bald as an egg. It was glistening now. ‘It’s awfully hot in here,’ he said. ‘Is the air conditioning going?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Miss Sonntag sneezed defensively into a Kleenex. ‘It is keeping my cold going.’ She watched him wind his glasses round his ears and examine the envelope more closely.

  The address was written in ballpoint in shaky block letters:

  PROF G F LAZENBY

  OXFORD

  ENGLAND

  Professor Lazenby looked at the back of the envelope and then at the front again. Then he held it up to the light. It was a flimsy airmail envelope and he looked through it. Then he looked inside and after a moment withdrew a tiny strip of tissue paper partially stuck to the bottom.

  ‘Well! I did not see this,’ Miss Sonntag said.

  ‘Quite all right, Miss Sonntag.’

  There was nothing on the paper. He upended the envelope and carefully tapped it.

  ‘You don’t think there was some powder in there and I have thrown it in the bin?’ Miss Sonntag said, alarmed.

  ‘We can go and look in the bin.’

  ‘Well, I will do it! Naturally. I am just so sorry. It has not occurred to me –’

  They both went and looked in the bin. They removed the envelopes, carefully tapping each inside the bin. They removed all the envelopes, but there was no powder in the bin. There was just, at the bottom, another strip of tissue paper.

  At that moment Miss Sonntag remembered that the phone had gone as she opened the first envelope, and that the first envelope had been the Swedish one, which naturally had been the first to go into the bin. She began explaining this to Lazenby but he only said, ‘Quite all right, Miss Sonntag,’ and they both went back to his glassed-in room off the main lab. A few graduate students were by this time at work in the lab; it was the department of microbiology.

  Lazenby inserted himself into his chair and loosened his tie. Then he looked at the two bits of paper and smelt them. ‘These are cigarette papers,’ he said. He held one up to Miss Sonntag and looked a
t the envelope. ‘The address is also on a cigarette paper,’ he said.

  ‘Well! I don’t know about this. I don’t know what I am to do,’ Miss Sonntag said faintly. She couldn’t smell anything on the paper.

  ‘How about getting me a cup of coffee?’ Lazenby said. ‘Also … maybe … that fellow from Scientific Services. You’ve got his number.’ He was looking sideways along one of the papers. There was nothing on it but he had an idea something was in it. There was a suggestion of indentations on the surface.

  ‘Of course. At once, Professor. But I wish to say,’ Miss Sonntag said formally, ‘that without this cold in my head I could not have made this mistake. It is not something –’

  ‘What mistake? No mistake, Dora,’ the professor said kindly, and also accurately. ‘It was acute of you to spot this. Most thorough. I admire it.’

  ‘So? Ah. Thank you. Yes. Coffee,’ Miss Sonntag said, and fairly hurtled through to her own room, her cheeks pink. She couldn’t remember when he had last called her Dora. Her sense of smell had miraculously returned. She smelt flowers everywhere, also her own lavender water, and through the open window glorious Oxford, and beyond it the rest of this kindliest and most gentle of lands.

  Miss Sonntag and her sister Sonya, some years older, had found a haven in England from Germany just before the war, ‘sponsored’ by a friend of their father’s, a fellow-doctor. The doctor had kept them with him in Oxford throughout the war and later taken an interest in their welfare. In Germany Sonya had had medical ambitions, and Dora academic ones – neither attainable for them in that land; and not easy in England either, since their education had been dislocated for years. In the end Sonya had gone into nursing, and Dora into the university’s administration, neither of them marrying, until Professor Lazenby had whisked Dora off to his own institute. That had been fifteen years ago and she had been with him ever since. Three sugars in his coffee. She spooned them in, still glowing at recollection of the tribute to her thoroughness. Then she recollected the other thing he wanted. The man from Scientific Services.

  2

  The man from Scientific Services was a former student of Lazenby’s who remembered him chiefly as rather a sketchy performer at his work but a useful bluffer when experiments went wrong. He had gone down with a disappointing Third and got a job with the old Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. From Ag & Fish he had gone somewhere else, and after that Lazenby had lost touch with him. He had surfaced again, urgently soliciting help and inviting the professor to lunch, a few days before Lazenby was due at a conference in Vienna. Although having much to attend to, Lazenby could not well resist a plea from an old student; but he had been greatly surprised at the opulence of the meal laid before him. During the meal the old student invited him, as Lazenby understood it, to become a spy.

  ‘Oh, nothing like that, Prof! Much too strong a word.’

  ‘You want me to report on what people say to me in private in Vienna?’

  ‘Not personal things, of course not. Programmes, costly budgeting things. There’s an immense amount of duplication going on. Cannot be good for science, Prof.’

  ‘I find that someone is duplicating my work and tell you?’

  ‘Someone else might find it and tell us. Then Scientific Service would tell you.’

  ‘Scientific Services is a government body?’

  ‘A sort of government body.’

  ‘I see.’ He had heard of this sort of government body in America. There they called it the CIA and many American scientists did indeed assist it, as he knew, in the ways mentioned. Lazenby hoped to God it wouldn’t catch on in England. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Thank you for the meal, Philpott. I have enjoyed it.’

  ‘Give us a try, Prof! Let me send you some stuff in your own field.’

  ‘By all means. Who gave you it?’

  ‘Oh, people you know. All top class.’

  ‘Why didn’t they give it to me?’

  ‘Didn’t spot the significance, I expect. It needs putting together, you know. Scraps here, scraps there.’

  ‘Yes.’ Scraps. Smelly. ‘Well, I shall be very interested,’ he said.

  ‘You will be, Prof. I promise you. Most useful stuff, particularly at budget time. All our contributors say so.’

  ‘And will I continue to receive the useful stuff,’ Lazenby asked, ‘should I decide not to be a contributor?’

  ‘Good of the country, Prof.’

  ‘The country?’

  ‘Science.’ Philpott blinked. ‘Knows no boundary. Taught me that yourself. Republic of Science. The fact is – stray items, of no use to the other chap, do turn out to be of the greatest use to one. Happens very frequently. Honestly, Prof, they all do it.’

  ‘Who do?’

  ‘Foreigners. They expect one to do it. Would be highly surprised to learn you weren’t in touch with someone like us already. I assure you!’

  ‘Well. I will accept your assurance. And the stuff,’ Lazenby gravely told him.

  And to his surprise it did turn out to be useful. Scraps, as Philpott had said, but skilfully put together. And showing indeed possible duplication of some projected work. Not much, but enough to give him pause.

  With only a small feeling of guilt he had acceded to Philpott’s request. Not grossly violating any confidences. Just scraps that might prove of interest to some other chap in the republic. And these scraps, too, had come back to him, interwoven with others, in the bulletins that periodically arrived from Scientific Services. They arrived not by post but by courier, accompanied by a note suggesting an early reading, and a request that the material should not be photocopied.

  On one occasion, when a bulletin had been mislaid for some weeks, unread, Miss Sonntag had been astonished to find that all the words on it had disappeared. To prevent a recurrence of the mishap she had photocopied the next bulletin. The photocopy had come out blank, and the original itself had gone blank. It was the recollection of this – and the ways of foreigners – that had brought Philpott to mind when Lazenby gazed at the cigarette papers.

  Lazenby met his old student for a drink at the Mitre. Philpott had urgently requested the meeting either at the institute or in London. Lazenby had no intention of running up to London and didn’t want him at the institute. The Mitre was a much more discreet venue – few tourists yet on the scene and all the students away. They sat quietly in a corner while Philpott produced, one after the other, various papers from his briefcase.

  One was a photo of the envelope and the bits of cigarette paper; another an enlargement of the address; and some others showed treatments that had been applied.

  ‘The envelope and the sticky tape are Swedish,’ he said, ‘but the ballpoint isn’t. The cigarette papers are Russian. We believe a sailor posted them. We believe he was given the cigarettes and told to slit them and remove the tobacco, and then put the papers in an envelope and send them off. The address was written on this third paper. It was in faint pencil and you probably didn’t notice.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Lazenby admitted.

  ‘Well, it was there. The pencil lead is Russian, too. What probably happened is that something was inscribed on one layer of paper in order to impress it on another underneath. The ones underneath were wrapped as cigarettes and given to the sailor – presumptive sailor – together with this other for the address. This one he had to tape to the envelope and then trace over the pencil with ballpoint.’

  ’Well now. Very clever.’

  ‘Yes. This is what came off the cigarette papers.’

  Lazenby looked at the enlargement. The indentations had been enhanced in some way and revealed a string of figures:

  18 05 22 (01 18 01-05) 04 05 21 (31 27 12-15)

  10 05 18 (46 10 49-52) 16 19 01 (18 11 13-14)

  There were several lines more.

  ‘What is it?’ he said.

  ‘You’ll see it breaks into segments, each starting with a group of three numbers. Forget the bits in brackets. The first lot is eighteen, five, twenty-two; the
n four, five, twenty-one; and ten, five, eighteen … It’s alphabetic code, English alphabet – that is, one stands for A, two for B. You’ll see how it works out.’

  Lazenby tried for a minute and got lost.

  ‘The first group is R-E-V,’ Philpott said, ‘the second J-E-R, the third D-E-U, and so on. They’re books of the Bible. The bracketed groups give chapter and verse, and the hyphenated portions identify the words required. Here it is.’

  Lazenby looked at a new sheet.

  I am he that liveth/ I am yet alive/

  in the north country/ in dark waters/ in

  the waste howling wilderness/ Wherefore

  do you not answer me?/ Behold new things

  do I declare/ The eyes of all/ shall be

  opened/ Send me therefore the man/

  understanding science/ of every living

  thing/ Let me hear thy voice concerning

  this matter/ the first day at midnight/

  Voice of America.

  ‘The Voice of America is in the Bible?’ Lazenby said, bemused.

  ‘Well, no it isn’t,’ Philpott confessed. ‘That group just came out as VOA and there was no book for it. It is quite plain in context, though.’

  ‘Ah. The same with science, is it?’

  ‘Science? No, that’s the Book of Daniel.’ Philpott consulted another sheet. ‘Yes, Daniel one, verse four.’

  ‘Good.’ Lazenby finished his drink. ‘That is a very good thing to know,’ he said.

  ‘Have you any idea what this is about, Prof?’

  ‘None at all. Tell me yours.’

  ‘Well.’ Philpott frowned. ‘We believe it’s from a Russian scientist, a biologist, someone in a life science, anyway. He evidently knows you, or of you. He has tried to reach you before. He’s come up with something he thinks a lot of. He wants you to let him know if you got it and understood it. He can get the Voice of America. That, more or less, is what we consider it means.’