by Adam Roberts
I slapped at it with my hand, and this action occasioned a very strange expression to bloom very slowly, like some creature of the deep seas, on Trofim’s face. I remember thinking to myself: A mosquito? In Moscow at this time of year? Spring was not far away, true, but winter nevertheless had the city in its grip, and it was still very cold. Nor was it particularly warm inside the restaurant. A Scarf Of Red was playing on the radio. Except that there was no radio. I was imagining the music. Or it was playing next door. The sound had a distorted, unsettling quality. Perhaps it was playing next door, and the sound was coming muffled through the wall. Something like that.
There was a very strange atmosphere in the place. I brought my hand back round to the front, and saw only a miniature Moscow-shaped splatch of blood in the exact centre, like a stigmata.
Something was wrong. Something was not right.
I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong. The restaurant was deserted, but even though I could look round and see that it was empty I somehow got the sense that it was simultaneously crowded with people. Clearly that couldn’t be right: either a place is empty, or else a place is full. I tried to wrangle the excluded middle. It wouldn’t budge. It occurred to me that the place might be haunted - I might have picked up on the spectral presence of the dead, still thronging that place. But I don’t believe in ghosts.
I looked at Trofim. Trofim looked at me.
‘So,’ I said. ‘Trofim, is it?’
‘Comrade?’
‘That’s your name?’
He nodded once.
‘I am Skvorecky,’ I said.
He nodded again, as if to say, This, I know.
I looked around. I was acutely, suddenly, uncomfortable. I felt utterly out of place. Time to leave, I thought. Like a schoolboy caught out of school, I measured the chances of being able to make a run for it, dashing past Trofim to the door and away. But I was old and frail, and Trofim young and fit-looking. It was unlikely I would even reach the door. Besides, there was some kind of obstacle in the way, something invisible, or visible (one of the two) that interposed between the door and myself. Perhaps this was only my mind rationalising a disinclination to move.
The back of my neck stung from where the mosquito had bitten me. The strangest little conversation with Frenkel was not taking place.
Trofim, on the other hand was staring at me with a weird intensity.
‘Comrade,’ he said, eventually, with the air of somebody who has been weighing up an important question in his mind. ‘Your nose?’
‘My nose,’ I said.
‘Your face?’
‘Like it, do you?’
‘What is wrong with your face?’
‘It too accurately reflects the state of my soul,’ I replied.
His eyes went a little defocused at this. ‘Comrade,’ he said, in an uncertain voice.
After a little while he said, ‘What I mean is.’ But getting this much out seemed to exhaust him. There was a long pause.
I smiled at him.
‘There are scars on your face,’ he said eventually.
‘And my face is just the part of me that you can see,’ I agreed.
Frenkel was back. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said, sitting down. The waitress brought over two cups of black coffee, along with some slices of bread and shavings of cheese. He smiled at her, less unconvincingly than she smiled at him. She retreated to a back room.
‘Konstantin,’ Frenkel said urgently, when we were alone. ‘Did I tell you which ministry I work in?’
‘You said you were very junior.’
‘I did? Well, yes, that’s true. Indeed mine is not a well-known or powerful section of government. It is concerned with UFO sightings.’ He poured the coffee. ‘UFO sightings,’ he said again, as if perhaps I hadn’t heard him the first time.
‘People who have seen UFOs,’ I said.
‘Indeed. We’re a busy little ministry. Though minor.’
‘Are there many such sightings in the Soviet Union?’
‘Many! More than you’d believe. Oh, it’s the United States that gets all the attention, of course, with their fifty-one areas and their triplicate Close Encounters. But more UFO sightings are reported in the Soviet Union, year by year, than in the USA. Did you know that?’
‘I had no idea.’
‘We keep it secret,’ said Frenkel. He shrugged. ‘We’re good at secrecy, in the USSR. The Americans have no talent for secrecy. They try, believe me; they get their CIA involved in all the sightings, black-suited men. But the USA as a nation simply leaks secrets.’
‘Their lack of secrecy is evidently a symptom of national degeneracy, ’ I said.
Frenkel took me at my word. ‘It is! Certainly as far as UFOs are concerned, it’s a shocking lapse. All their sightings end up in the press. Few of ours do.’
‘And why are our UFOs a matter for secrecy?’ I asked, ingenuously.
At this Frenkel looked at me with frank astonishment. ‘It is one of the jobs of my branch of government to keep track of UFO sightings,’ he went on. ‘Not all of them merit a great deal of attention of course. Indeed, few of them do. But those few . . .’ He shook his head, and once again we were back in the realm of awkward theatrics.
‘Petrazavodsk,’ said Trofim, as if prompting.
‘Do you know what happened at Petrazavodsk?’ Frenkel asked me. ‘September 20th 1977? Do you know?’
I shook my head.
‘Aliens - described by eyewitnesses as radiating pulsating beams of light. One witness called them huge jellyfish of light. Thousands saw them.’
‘I don’t remember it being in the newspapers.’
‘Of course it wasn’t in the papers! We had orders to keep it all quiet. But Andropov sent an order to the KGB and the whole Russian army - watch the skies! Seven and a half million men, watching the skies! They were scared, you know. Scared. I personally interviewed Captain Boris Sokolov, who was right at the heart of the encounter.’
I looked at Trofim. He was staring at me.
‘Konstantin,’ said Frenkel, leaning forward. ‘Do you believe in UFOs?’
‘You’ll need to frame the question more precisely,’ I replied.
It took Frenkel a second or so to process this, and then he laughed briefly and unconvincingly. It sounded like a horse sneezing. ‘I see what you mean, of course,’ he said, his face serious once more. ‘My question is ambiguous between, Do you believe UFOs are a feature of contemporary culture? - which of course they are - and Do you believe in the literal reality of UFOs? Am I right? So do you believe in the literal reality of UFOs?’
‘Somedays I’m not sure I believe in the literal reality of literal reality,’ I said.
Trofim’s brow crinkled, and his small eyes became an even smaller portion of his big face. They were like an umlaut over the fat U of his nose. The jaws of his mind chewed over this indigestible statement. He did not look happy.
‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ Frenkel said. ‘I think you don’t believe UFOs are real. Am I right?’
‘A rhetorical question?’
‘I’d hazard the guess,’ Frenkel persevered, ‘that you’re a materialist . Right?’
‘Do you mean a dialectical materialist?’ I returned, affecting an innocent expression.
‘Comrade Frenkel wants to know if you . . .’ boomed Trofim; but Frenkel’s hand was on his forearm.
‘Don’t worry too much about what Comrade Skvorecky says,’ he advised the fellow, and I found myself wondering about the exact nature of their relationship. What was Trofim to Frenkel? His bodyguard ? His minder? His jailer?
‘Ever since I’ve known him,’ said Frenkel, ‘Comrade Skvorecky has been an ironist. That’s a fair description, no?’
‘It has an ironic aptness,’ I replied, trying to scratch an itch inside the scar tissue on my face.
A mosquito had bitten me on the back of my neck.
It was the strangest thing.
Something was not right about that
bite.
‘But even an ironist may have sincere beliefs about some things,’ Frenkel was saying. ‘He may, for example, harbour a suspicion that the cosmos is so vast - so unimaginably vast - that humanity cannot be the only sentient creature to inhabit it. Skvorecky here used to write science fiction,’ he added.
‘As did you,’ I reminded him.
He flapped his right hand. ‘Keep that to yourself, please,’ he said. ‘That’s not something I like to boast about. Particularly in my present job. But you haven’t answered my question! Put it this way: do you think there’s a reasonable possibility that UFOs might be - real ?’
‘Do you?’
‘That’s just it! If you’d asked me a decade ago I’d have said no. I mean, I’d have said: If you sift through all the sightings, and you filter out the hoaxers and the fantasists, the sleepwalkers and the drunks, the over-imaginative people who go to bed having watched It Came From Jupiter on the television, filter out the suggestible and the idiotic, the people who can’t tell the difference between a commercial airliner and a spacecraft from Sirius Minor, then there would only be a few left, and those few could be described as honestly mistaken. But . . . But! But!’
‘But?’
He lowered his voice. ‘Something major is happening. We’re right in the middle of it. It’s happening now. I’m no UFO cultist. By nature I’m a sceptic. But things have been passing over my desk that can’t be explained away. There’s been proof. It’s more than just long-distance lorry drivers seeing lights in the sky outside Irkutsk. It’s - it’s real.’
‘How exciting,’ I said, in an unexcited voice.
‘I don’t expect you to believe me right off, of course,’ said Frenkel. He sat back in his chair. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you at all. It’s highly secret. It has galvanised the highest levels of government, I can tell you that. It’s big. I, personally, have spoken to the General Secretary himself about it.’
‘How exciting,’ I said again. ‘To meet the General Secretary,’ I added, for the benefit of Trofim’s scowling expression.
‘Now, just listen for a moment,’ Frenkel said. ‘You’re the only person in the entire world I can have this conversation with. Do you understand that? Because you and I have shared a unique experience.’
‘Does Comrade Trofim know our secret?’
‘I trust Trofim,’ said Frenkel. Trofim sat up more straightly in his chair. But Frenkel immediately added, ‘Comrade, would you mind going and standing over by the door?’
‘The door?’ replied the huge fellow.
‘Just for five minutes. I have something personal to discuss with my old friend.’
A little awkwardly, Trofim extracted his treetrunk legs from beneath the caf’ table and stood. He made his way ponderously to the door, turned, and stood motionless beside it.
‘He’s well trained,’ I observed.
‘Listen!’ said Frenkel, urgently. ‘If I were to say to you that I have proof that aliens are amongst us, that would be a big enough secret. But if I were to say to you . . . the aliens are here, and I have proof, and they - they - they are appearing exactly as we wrote them, in that dacha in the 1940s on Comrade Stalin’s express order - what then? Because only you and I, in the whole world, know about that fiction!’
‘If you were to say that?’ I observed. ‘And if I were to find it hard to credit?’
‘But it’s true. How would you explain it?’
‘I’m not sure what you’re asking me to explain.’
I glanced at Trofim, by the door. He stood unnaturally still, like a robot with the power supply switched off. The three of us were the only people in the restaurant; a fact which struck me, for the first time, as very peculiar. A central Moscow restaurant, at the end of a working day? Shouldn’t it be crowded with people? The windows were black, as if the sun had given up on the day and sulked off. The clock on the wall showed four in the afternoon, but it felt much later. I felt suddenly exhausted. Ready for bed. This tiredness gave me a little push of inner annoyance. ‘This whole conversation,’ I announced, ‘is most idiotic.’
‘The truth sometimes is.’
‘Let’s be clear,’ I said. ‘The six of us concocted that story of space aliens.’
‘We did.’
‘We didn’t base it on anything factual at all. We invented radiation aliens. Crazy, really. I don’t believe a single one of us even approximately understood the physics of radiation.’
‘That’s right.’
‘It was fiction. It was our fiction. We made it up. It’s not real.’
‘Fictional and unreal are not synonyms,’ said Frenkel, smiling as if he had articulated a piece of profound wisdom.
‘Ivan, you’re saying that the story we invented is somehow, I don’t know, happening in the real world? That there’s proof that radiation aliens are invading?’
‘There is! There’s evidence!’
‘Then the evidence is hoaxed. It is fictional. Maybe somebody has found out about our plan, and is going to the trouble to reproduce it in the real world.’
‘But why should they?’
‘I’ve no idea. I’ve really no idea.’
‘More to the point, how could they know? Only you and I know, in the whole world!’
‘As to that,’ I said. ‘I assume somebody kept a record. It must be filed somewhere.’
‘It isn’t.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘I know because I’ve looked. I have access to those sorts of files, and it’s not there. And anyway, who would file it?’
‘Malenkov?’ I suggested.
‘Him? He didn’t keep records of anything at all! Secrecy was his whole life. He didn’t even keep a diary. No, not him. And none of us, none of the writers concerned, we wouldn’t have the chance, even if we wanted to. No records!’
‘Then no records were kept. It’s only in our memories, yours and mine. And therefore, unless we are capable of shaping the real world with our mental fantasies - perfectly unconsciously, in my case - any resemblance between our story and the real world is merely coincidental.’
‘I have proof!’
‘Jan,’ I said. ‘You’ve come across certain reports of UFO activity, and you fancy a resemblance between those reports and that ridiculous story we concocted years ago. But its coincidence. It must be. The resemblance is pure chance.’
‘Radiation aliens,’ he hissed. ‘Listen: do you remember the American spaceship that exploded?’
‘Last month, you mean? That was in the news. What was it called?’
‘[Challenger,]’ he said in English. Then: ‘It means Aggressor!’
‘It was a launchpad malfunction, I believe.’
‘That’s what they’re saying, of course that’s what they’re saying. But I have seen top-secret reports that it wasn’t anything of the sort. I have seen the reports! The craft was hit by a beam of concentrated radiation energy in flight!’
‘I find that hard to believe.’
Frenkel was positively bouncing in his seat now, like an excited child. ‘Everything is about to change,’ he said. ‘Our government is talking to the Americans at the highest level, with a degree of openness never seen before. D’tente is the watchword. It will be the end of Communism - Gorbachev is planning it, I’m certain. He’s planning an alliance with America to fight the space threat together!’
I looked over at Trofim by the door. ‘Jan, it’s—’
‘Ivan!’ he snapped.
‘Ivan, of course. Ivan: it’s been a pleasure meeting you again, but . . .’
‘Think through what we planned. The aliens would attack power stations, remember? Long Island, do you remember that? The Long Island disaster we planned? That power station that went into meltdown?’
‘I think we got the wrong name for the New York island.’
‘We planned they would explode an American rocket on launch, remember? They would—’
‘Coincidence,’ I interrupted, ‘Launching rockets is
an inherently risky business.’
‘But the aliens?’ he hissed. ‘The aliens themselves? You think they’re not here? Right now - in this place?’
This made an unpleasantly insectile sensation scutter along my spine. It chimed with my sense of there being something wrong in that place. Ghosts in the room. Goosepimples on my forearms. But of course - nonsense. I said so, and speaking the word solidified the fact of it: ‘Nonsense.’
‘I have met them!’ said Frenkel, with disconcerting intensity.
‘You have?’
‘I was driving,’ he said. I can’t express how little I wanted to hear this particular confession, but he was in spate. ‘My engine died. I saw a light - and it came right down to earth. It landed in a field beside the road I was on.’
‘Right next to the stable containing the baby Jesus?’
‘I’m serious! It was a sphere, a metal sphere, the size of a cottage. It came right down.’
‘Like H. G. Wells predicted. Did it make a crater?’
‘No! It descended in silvery light, and hovered a metre or so above the earth. I got out of my car and I walked through the mud - it was muddy, you know. The mud clung to my boots like cold treacle. When I got within twenty feet the thing came to life. It was so smooth and silvery I could see my reflection in it! A silver sphere five metres across. The whole field was reflected in it, distorted after the manner of convex mirrors. And then it grew legs.’
‘It grew legs?’
‘They sprouted from its belly. There was something insectoid about it. It was like a robot-insect. Great tail legs.’
‘Three legs? Like H. G. Wells’s tripods.’
‘Two legs.’
‘So more like Baba Yaga’s house?’
‘They were nothing,’ he said, in a serious voice, ‘like chicken legs.’
‘I’ll tell you one thing I do remember from that time in the dacha,’ I said. ‘I remember we called Wells Shit-Shit-Wells. I remember that. It wasn’t very respectful to our great ancestor, really.’
‘It came after me. Great loping strides. I was terrified. I tried to make it back to my car, but . . .’ Frenkel slapped both palms onto the table. ‘It got me!’
‘Got you where?’
‘Got me inside its sphere - a metal tentacle came out, and yes, before you say it, that’s like Shit-Shit-Wells too. Except that these were disembodied, radiation creatures; they weren’t the octopoid aliens Wells predicted.’