by Adam Roberts
He slapped the metal pole amiably. The light was pouring down upon him, as if in a shower. And then, perhaps believing that what he had to communicate to me was better uttered in the decent darkness of the space in between the streetlamps, he took hold of my arm at the elbow and walked on. ‘Top secret.’ He repeated.
‘I’m agog.’
‘Ms Norman and I flew into Moscow from Kiev,’ he said.
I stopped and bowed my head. ‘I shall keep this profound secret in my innermost heart, and undertake never to tell a soul.’
‘That’s not the secret,’ he said, with a sharper tone, tugging harder on my arm as he walked on. ‘Unless you realise why we were in Kiev?’
‘Perhaps you were visiting the celebrated Kiev opera?’
‘No no,’ he said. ‘Like I said, I’m a safety inspector. I’m part of a top-secret exchange programme between the Soviet and American governments. I bring my expertise in nuclear safety to a number of Soviet reactors. That’s how I know Saltykov.’
‘You knew him before his taxi-driving days?’
‘[Oh he knows a tremendous amount about nuclear power,]’ said Coyne, reverently. [That’s his training. That used to be his career. He’s fallen out with the administration over some footling nonsense, dissent or something. But he knows. I’ve had dealings with him before, and there’s nobody whose knowledge of nuclear power I respect more.]’
We were walking now in the dark between streetlamps. Indeed, I noticed that the next streetlamp along was not illuminated. A broken bulb, I supposed. Twenty metres further down the street the next light along hovered in the air like a beacon. Then the strangest thing: just as I was looking at this it suddenly went out. All the lamps along Zholtovskovo, to that point where the street bends through ninety degrees, snuffed out.
Buzz, buzz. One by one, clicking off into darkness.
Though the night was moonless, things were not completely black; many of the windows in the buildings were illuminated, and there was a glow over the rooftops from the Garden Ring, one block behind. But it was pretty dark, for all that. ‘Localised power failing,’ I said.
Again: that weird miniature crescendo of a mosquito’s buzzing.
‘[Power,]’ said Coyne, in English. ‘[A word with many meanings. I visit Soviet power stations. The Soviet authorities get the benefit of my expertise in beefing up their security. The American government gets to feel it has an agent inside the Soviet system, checking up on an enemy state’s nuclear capacity. Of course I’m only ever allowed inside civilian installations. But it’s a mutuality thing,]’ and he switched to Russian. ‘It’s a sign of the increasing thaw between our two nations. It is dark, though, isn’t it?’
Directly above, between the architectural margins of the two lines of rooftop, a few stars were visible. One, winking at me as if to take me into its confidence, slid steadily along the sky. A plane.
‘Is this the top secret thing that you wanted to tell me?’
‘That’s not the top secret thing,’ said Coyne. ‘Or, to speak precisely: that is top secret - it’s [classified], as we say in the States. But that’s not what I want to talk to you about. I have something more important to tell you. All that jabber, back in the chess club. UFOs? You believe?’
‘I like to think of myself as a rationalist,’ I said. It was cold, and I crossed my arms and hunched my shoulders beneath my coat.
‘Quite right. Most of those UFO stories, they can be dismissed. But there are a few that are hard to dismiss, no? A small proportion, granted. But consider any phenomenon in the world, I mean, for instance, natural phenomena. Most phenomena in the world are mostly chaff, with a small proportional kernel of truth. Ask yourself this: What if a UFO were to provide us with hard evidence?’
‘That would clear up some of the uncertainty on the subject,’ I conceded, not really very engaged with the conversation.
‘Agreed. And that would be good, no?’
‘Certainty may be preferable to uncertainty,’ I said, unsure where Coyne was going.
‘The only question then,’ he said, speaking more rapidly, as if excited by his own words, ‘is: What constitutes evidence? An alien craft? Some alien pilots? Embalmed alien bodies to stick in the Smithsonian behind perspex? A chunk of alien machinery in the Moscow Polytechnical Museum, yeah?’
‘That would be something.’
‘[But how would we know it to be alien?]’ he went on, slipping into English. ‘[Might it not be, say, a prop? How will we know? How will we know, in this reality or another reality? By its effects, that’s how. By their fruit shall ye know them. Not something that looks like a raygun, because you might have taken that from a film set. But something that actually shoots destructo-rays.]’
‘[You have one of those rayguns about your person?]’ I asked. ‘[Now that the lights have gone out, I find myself become alarmed at the prospect of muggers.]’
He stopped. ‘[Really?]’
‘[Not really, comrade. There are no thieves in Russia, because Communism provides for all needs.]’
‘The effects, not the artefacts,’ said Coyne, more slowly, in Russian. ‘No? That’s what I want to talk to you about. Imagine they had a weapon that could lay waste to eastern Europe, western Russia.’
‘They?’
‘You know whom I mean by they.’
‘Scientologists?’
Humour slid past him. ‘No - no - aliens. Imagine it! They might - what’s the word, [brandish] it . . .’
‘Brandish,’ I said.
‘Sure, exactly. Say these aliens brandished their weapon, and world leaders said: I don’t believe you, you’re bluffing. OK? Now, what if it was actually used, the weapon was fired and Europe and Russia were devastated - you couldn’t argue with that, could you?’
‘Stop for a minute,’ I said. ‘I need to catch my breath.’ We stopped. I panted. My lungs are not those of a young man; and neither are they the lungs of a non-smoker. ‘Let me just see whether I understand you correctly,’ I said, when I had the puff. ‘Hostile UFO aliens have a weapon that will devastate Europe and Russia. They plan to use this weapon.’
‘That puts it very well.’
‘And you believe in these aliens?’
He didn’t answer for a few moments. Finally he said, ‘The business of surveying nuclear reactors is an immersive business. You know? You go around inside these reactors, and your attention is very minutely focused on the internal details: pipes and cladding; spent fuel pools; reactor cores. But every now and then I put my mind out from the inward details, and picture the whole system of nuclear reactors - all of the reactors in the world, spread out beneath the sky, all round the curve of the earth. Hundreds of them. I imagine myself soaring suddenly high in the sky, looking down. Do you know how that makes me feel?’
‘Vertiginous?’
‘Worried. Vulnerable, that’s how it makes me feel. If I were an invading alien force - well, I would be looking down upon a spread of fantastically powerful bombs, that my enemy had thoughtfully arranged right in the heart of his territory, just waiting for me to trigger them.’
We started walking again. Eventually he spoke again. ‘How well do you know Kiev?’
‘Kiev?’ I shrugged, and folded my folded arms more tightly against the cold. ‘I passed through there during the war. There wasn’t much to see.’
‘It’s been rebuilt. There’s a lot of rebuilding there. Digging and filling in. Uncovering the past. Building tends to involve that. Reitarskaya Street. Is that an address that means anything to you?’
‘No.’
‘No matter. Did you know that there’s a power station not far from Kiev?’
‘I should imagine there are power stations not far from most large cities. Cities need power, after all.’
‘The one near Kiev is called Chernobyl. Have you heard of it?’
‘I never did well,’ I said, ‘in my Memorising the Names of Soviet Power Stations class at school.’
‘Well well,’ he said.
‘Quite. Chernobyl, anyway, means [wormwood], in English.’
‘Chernobyl,’ I repeated.
‘[Wormwood,]’ he said, speaking English now, [is in the Bible. It’s in the Book of Revelation. Do you know it?]
‘[The Apocalypse of St John,]’ I said. ‘[The end of the world, and so on.]’
‘[Precisely! Wormwood - the Bible says that a bomb will fall like a gleaming star, and destroy millions of lives, at—]’
Then things happened very suddenly. Trying to remember the sequence of events afterwards I was struck by how staged it seemed, right from the start. This may have been because the first thing to happen was the sudden glare of an arc lamp directed down upon us, as if we were indeed inside a theatre and not out on a cold dark Moscow street in the middle of the night. I heard the click of the light being switched on, and the fizz (I’m sure) of its filament heating up. I was blinded, of course; the light was sudden and intense. It was also from directly above, as if somebody had leaned out of a top-floor window and shone a lamp downwards. I felt a weird twist in my stomach. Light, light, light. Buzz, buzz. I blinked. Coyne had cried something out, in his surprise, but I couldn’t tell you what it was. His bony hand darted out, like a cobra-strike, and seized my shoulder. I blinked. I blinked again. Out of the ammonium wash of the sudden light, the shape of the building to my left was starting to become discernible.
The sense grew stronger of a fizzing sound, or a sub-rumble, or some strange almost inaudible yet powerful and unmistakable sound. It made the watery marrow inside my bones tremble, whatever it was. It made the hairs on my skin shiver upwards. I didn’t know what it was.
I blinked.
Then there was a second sound, and this one was unambiguous: a high-pitched whistle, or soprano songnote, like tinnitus.
I was screwing my eyes up. I could see Coyne standing next to me, the colours of his clothing bleached by the ferocity of the light. I squinnied some more, and his face became visible. He was not standing, his feet were not on the ground. His head was floating. I looked again, and saw that his whole body was above his head; and that his head was upside down, on a level with mine. His face looked - alarmed. I daresay mine did too.
His arm was out and his hand was gripping my shoulder, such that when his body jerked upwards and made as if to fly into the sky, it was this grip that, initially, held him back, though it nearly hauled me off my feet. His face was still level with mine, although now bulging and red, but his feet were ten feet up in the air. His fingers clawed at the fabric of my coat. There was a heave, and his grip failed and then he was gone.
I stumbled. I looked up, but looking up stung my eyes and I could see very little; except that, there in the very heart of the glare, was a wriggling figure.
It was a very impressive show.
The tinnitus-whistle grew in volume, and the rumbling sub-bass seemed to grow too; my stomach swirled and swirled, and my scrotum tightened so hard it was painful. I felt a sensation I had not experienced since I was a child immediately before Christmas. It was partly excitement, and the numinous sense that something extraordinary was about to happen; but this feeling - you know it, of course; the feeling I’m talking about - it is in the nature of this feeling that it was also flavoured with alarm. Or terror.
Something snapped.
Afterwards, when trying to explain it to the Militia, that was the phrase that came back to me. It was not quite the sound of something snapping; not a rope giving way for instance. It may actually, on reflection, have been an absence rather than a presence; not the sound of something giving way, but the consciousness that the sub-bass thrum had ceased, the apprehension that a sound was lacking.
I started to breathe in. You know that kind of breath. It is a breath of wonder. Quite a show! Really, quite a show!
The breath was a third drawn when the whistling stopped, and the light changed quality. I heard a new noise: a rapidly crescendoing whiffling sound, and I had the sense that something was coming down. And with a heavy crunch Coyne landed on the pavement directly in front of me. He came down head first, and a long snake curled down through the air after him to tumble onto his body.
I jumped back, startled, but even as I jumped I understood what had happened. So having jumped onto my left foot I launched forward again, and went down on one knee beside him.
He was still breathing, and still capable of movement. He had fallen on his front, but he was using his fingers, scraping them against the ground and drawing them back into a fist, and scraping them outwards again, to push a sheet of dark paper out from underneath him and to slide it along the pavement. But it wasn’t paper, it was fluid. He had fallen on top of, and broken open, a bottle of artist’s ink, and that was now spreading its stain along the floor. His head was turned to the left.
Coiled on his back was a silver rope. I reached forward and touched it, and it felt warm. It was no thicker than a finger. It coiled and coiled, and it was tethered to Coyne’s ankle.
There was no rope.
‘Coyne,’ I said, leaning over his ear. He wasn’t moving. His back was not rising or falling. Of course it was not ink, spilling out from underneath him. I wanted to say something to him, but my mind was perfectly empty. I had no idea what to say. What could I say? What ought I to do?
Coyne spoke. ‘React!’ he told me, in a raspy voice.
And the whole unrealness of the experience burst pressed itself upon me. Of course it was a show! A show for my benefit! Of course I ought not to be frozen there. I ought to react. When you put on a show, you expect your audience to react.
‘What?’
‘React!’ he ordered.
‘I don’t understand what you want me to do. Laugh? Clap?’
He rolled his eyes.
‘You want me to, what?’ I said, growing angry, and conscious for the first time of how rapidly my heart was beating. ‘What, burst into applause?’
He seemed to be nodding. ‘Or—’ he started to say, his lips working as if he were chewing the pavement.
‘Or what?’ I snapped at him. My startlement was converting itself into anger. How dare he scare me like this? ‘Or how else am I supposed to react to such an absurd performance? Or what will you do, exactly?’
As abruptly as it had switched on, the light went out. The darkness was everywhere. I blinked and blinked, and only very slowly did his body start to become visible to me again. There was a sudden movement of the rope, a repeat of the whiffling sound - or perhaps it was a broken, gaspy breath from Coyne’s lungs, squeezed from his broken ribcage. In fact, the more I consider it, I wonder whether this wasn’t exactly the sound of the death rattle. I had read about such a thing as a death rattle, though I had never heard one in life before. I leant further forward, pulling off my right glove to place a finger on the artery in his throat. Touching his neck was an uncanny thing, and not pleasant. His felt like a sack of knucklebones from a butcher’s, not a neck. There was no pulse at all. The last of his breath whiffled out of him.
‘Four,’ he said, very distinctly.
The streetlights came on as I sat back. I could see that I had been kneeling in his blood, and that my trousers were marked with it. And as I looked up I could see two Militia officers, guns out, running along the Zholtovskovo, running with furious haste and towards me.
CHAPTER 8
They put me in a basement cell with no windows. There was an electric light bulb in a wire cage on the ceiling. The blank walls were covered with tooth-sized white tiles. I sat on the bench. After a while I lay down on the bench. It being a Militia cell the bench was long enough for me to lie upon. Had it been KGB the bench would have been too short, and set into the wall at enough of an angle to threaten to roll me off it and onto the floor, so as to make sleep harder. But the Militia are ordinary police, and a fair amount of their work involves locking drunks away and letting them sleep themselves law-abiding. The KGB, conversely, prefer a sleep-deprived prisoner. A prisoner is more useful to the KGB exhausted.
&nbs
p; In another reality, perhaps, I stayed awake and plotted my escape. But in this reality, I fell asleep. A couple of hours at the most.
I woke at the sound of footsteps outside, and then the door sang its hinge-scraping song - a pure, soprano tone. Two officers roused me and led me upstairs, both of them as tall and broad and impassive as Klaatu himself. One was carrying handcuffs; but he took one look at me, elderly and shuffling as I was, and evidently concluded they were superfluous.
It was the small hours of the night, and the station was quiet. Decades of cigarette smoking had imparted a warm, stale quality to the declivities and crevices of the building. The smell was a mixture of tobacco, body odour, upholstery and a metallic quality hard, precisely, to identify: gunmetal, perhaps. I was sat at a table in an interrogation room and left to my own devices for perhaps quarter of an hour. The table, no larger than a statue’s plinth, was crowded with enamel mugs: white sides, blue-lipped as if with cold, I counted nine of them. Some were empty. Some held inch-thick discs of cold, oily-looking coffee, as black as alien eyes. I pondered why they had sat me down at this table, with all these used mugs, but my brain was not working as smoothly as would have been good. It was the dead of night. I am an old, tired man.
Eventually a young officer unlocked the door, gathered all the old mugs onto a tray and carried them away without saying a word. The door closed and the key turned with a noise like a blown raspberry; and then, without pause, it blew another raspberry as it was unlocked. The door swung open again.
‘My name,’ said the officer, sitting himself down opposite me, ‘is Zembla.’ He put a tape recorder on the table between us.
‘I’m pleased to meet you,’ I said.
‘Are you prepared to assist us in our enquiries?’
‘By all means.’
He peered at me with two midnight-coloured eyes. The cloth of his uniform creaked as he shifted in the chair. On went the recorder. ‘Officer Zembla, interrogation February 20th 1986. Suspect to state his name.’
‘Konstantin Skvorecky.’
