by Adam Roberts
‘I don’t mind hearing it,’ I said.
‘And how’s your memory?’
‘It has holes.’
‘Do you remember this? Stalin personally commissioned us to write a coherent and plausible story of alien invasion, and then - surely you’ll remember this - not long after, Stalin personally ordered us to quit the undertaking. Your memory isn’t so malfunctional as to forget that, is it?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not to forget that.’
‘Kiev,’ he said looking around. ‘It always was a shithole. I was here in the war, you know? It was a shithole then, and it’s a shithole now.’
‘It was certainly full of holes, in the war,’ I said. ‘And, to be fair to it, it has far fewer holes now.’
‘Shitheap, then,’ he said. ‘Eh Saltykov?’
And the conversation stalled for a while.
‘After the war,’ said Frenkel, in an expansive tone of voice, as if beginning a lecture, ‘an official Soviet archeological expedition was digging in Kiev. There was a lot of rebuilding, so there was plenty of opportunity. This was a site on Reitarskaya Street - it’s been kept completely secret, of course. It was a tomb, a vault, twenty feet below the ground. Inside was a massive chest. Inside the chest were five hundred books. Books in Russian, but also in Greek, in Arabic, even in fucking Sanskrit. The MVD arrived in a matter of hours, bunged everything into three covered trucks, and carried it all away to Moscow.’
‘Intriguing,’ I said, ‘if not wholly plausible.’
‘It’s real,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen these artefacts. I have held the books in my hand.’
‘Really?’
‘Books filled with drawings, technical plans, instructions. Orbital stations. Docking equipment for spaceships.’
‘If the KGB owns the groundplans for spaceships and space-stations, then am I to assume that the Soviet Union has been secretly constructing advanced spacecraft?’
‘No. It was not about building our own spaceships. It was about preparing the machinery necessary to receive their spaceships.’
‘Like getting instructions from Hitler to build garages in Moscow so he can park his tanks?’
‘Not like that! Do you know what else was there? A handwritten manuscript. Slovo o polku Igoreve, Prince Igor’s adventures. The Prince Igor! Written by Pyotr Borislavovich - the famous Pyotr Borislavovich. They’ve been here for thousands of years.’
‘And yet they are still to arrive.’
‘That’s it!’ he sounded, excited. ‘That’s exactly right!’
‘Back in Moscow, when I sent you up to that safe apartment with Trofim. You were supposed to call her, Dora Norman, and get her to meet with me, remember?’
‘I remember the chute,’ I said, darkly. ‘And I remember you putting a pistol into my mouth.’
‘Oh that was just to, you know. What do the French say? Pour encourager les - les—,’
‘Aliens?’
‘Exactly. We’re old friends, you and I. I went to a good deal of effort to bring you onside. To help you believe. You could have done some good. You see, I was foolish enough to trust our friendship. We’d been friends before, hadn’t we? When we met Stalin? I didn’t see why we wouldn’t be friends still. You would have helped me because of our friendship. But you’re not very good at friendship. Too much the ironist.’
‘Irony is a jealous mistress,’ I said.
‘But,’ Frenkel went on, adopting an incongruously oleaginous voice, ‘I still think of myself as your friend, Konsty,’
‘Is that why you sent the red-haired fellow to smother me with a pillow in my hospital bed?’
‘I wonder if you’ll be able to understand why I would do such a thing?’ he mused.
‘Wonder away.’
‘Besides he was unsuccessful - wasn’t he? You’re still alive - aren’t you?’
‘Not for want of trying.’
‘The important point is,’ said Frenkel, locking his fingers together, and pushing his palms out, producing thereby a Geiger-counter crackle of pops and snaps in his joints. ‘You don’t believe in UFOs?’
This question, calmly posed, seemed to me to distil the entire hectic week into a quiet intensity. It was, it occurred to me, it. I did not rush an answer. I opened my mind to my thoughts, as a person flips through a well-read novel. What evidence was there? None. ‘Let us say, no,’ I said.
‘Would you say that you can prove there are no UFOs?’
‘The burden of proof is not mine,’ I noted. ‘It is on the people claiming the extraordinary.’
‘But who is to say which state of affairs - aliens, no aliens - is extraordinary? At any rate, you accept that you cannot prove that aliens do not exist.’
‘It’s a big cosmos.’
‘Exactly! Let us say, then, that I cannot prove to you that aliens exist. Even though I believe it with a perfect certainty. And you cannot prove to me they do not exist.’
‘We should, then, go on the balance of probabilities. My belief is more probable than yours.’
‘I disagree.’
‘We can agree to disagree. I think we both know what is going on.’
‘And what is that?’ Frenkel asked.
The words came smoothly, and easily, although I am not sure I had arranged all the elements in the picture until that moment. But as I said it, there, it all cohered. It was my brain’s new-found ability to understand the picture. It was my new brain.
This is what I said to him. ‘The world is changing,’ I said. ‘Gorbachev is dismantling the Soviet Union. You, and people like you - people with authority, people hidden and secret - do not want it to happen. You are engaged upon an illegal and covert operation to destabilise perestroika, and unseat Gorbachev; to create - no, wait: to recreate - the crisis days of the Great Patriotic War. Because the USSR is losing the Cold War, you have decided that America will not function as the enemy. But because you, like all old and stubborn Communists, revere Stalin, you have decided to resurrect the old man’s plan. And so you have spent years building the narrative of alien invasion, and adding heft to it by scattering clues, props, assertion and even creative denial to fix the belief in people’s minds. It’s nonsense, but it is surprising how much nonsense people will believe. Particularly in worrying times.’
‘Go on,’ said Frenkel.
‘Oh I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe the American, Coyne, was part of a secret team assembled to blow up the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl. That is the main event: that’s what you’re really doing. You blow up Chernobyl - and then go public with the story. Aliens! War! Special measures - roll back glasnost, remilitarise the nation, the Soviet Union steps to the vanguard! It leads the world against the new threat. And of course, you have all the evidence, all the props and trimmings, kept, you say, in a secret warehouse in Moscow since being dug out of the ground in Kiev after the war.’
‘You tell a compelling story,’ said Frenkel. ‘I always admired your storytelling powers.’
‘Thank you,’ I replied. ‘Except that this story is not science fiction. It is a murder story. Trofim said as much, inside the reactor. These people would be laying down their lives, by the million, for the greater good. The survival of Communism.’
Frenkel seemed to be considering this. ‘But Trofim believed, literally, in the aliens. Didn’t he?’
‘That you were able to persuade Trofim of this absurd story,’ I said, ‘does not surprise me. He was hardly the most nimble-witted individual I have ever met.’
‘And Nik?’
‘Nik?’
‘The gentleman I sent to your hospital to kill you.’
‘Ah - Comrade Red-hair.’
‘Did it seem to you that he believed?’ Frenkel asked.
‘In the aliens.’ I recalled. ‘I suppose so. But, Jan, so what? Naturally you need a story capable of being believed by many people. That is necessary. Naturally you have worked to convince your underlings that it is the truth. It is after the manner of a cult,’ I said. ‘Look at Tr
ofim: he believed the aliens were attacking Chernobyl, even though he was himself planting the bomb!’
‘Or perhaps he believed that he himself planting the bomb was the method by which the aliens were attacking Chernobyl?’
I thought about this for a while. It was a curiously resonant, and oddly disconcerting, observation. ‘Wouldn’t aliens be more likely to use laser cannons, or photon torpedoes?’
‘And wouldn’t Hitler be more likely to fire V2 rockets and atom bombs at Soviet troops? Yet I once fought a Nazi in a farmyard, and he was armed with a shovel.’
‘Hardly the same situation.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘Jan, you were planning to tell the world that aliens had blown up Chernobyl. I was a witness that Trofim was the agent of destruction, not space visitors. Thus I had to be eliminated.’
‘That wasn’t the reason.’ He grimaced, with glee, or pain, it was hard to say. ‘And besides you are getting things the wrong way around. You think we concocted a story of aliens in order to shore up Communism. I have seen what the USSR was capable of under a strong Communist leadership. So have you. And now we need only look to Afghanistan to see what it is capable of under a weak, reformist, crypto-capitalist leadership. I know which system is better geared to protecting humanity. I do not wish to invent space aliens in order to shore up Communism. I wish to shore up Communism because it is the best defence against alien invasion.’
‘By shore up Communism you mean things like . . . murder Americans.’
‘Coyne?’ Frenkel seemed actually shocked. ‘I didn’t murder him.’
‘But of course you want to pretend that the aliens murdered him.’
His eyes were wide open in his solid, Slav face. ‘Konsty,’ he said. ‘You were there when Coyne was murdered.’
‘He was hooked up in a poacher’s snare, by somebody leaning out of a window, hoisted twenty feet above ground, and then dropped down to break his back.’
‘Ah,’ said Frenkel. ‘Lifted up, how?’
‘By a rope.’
‘Ah,’ said Frenkel. ‘You remember there being a rope?’
‘I do.’
‘But I have read the police reports. No rope was discovered at the scene.’
‘I saw the rope,’ I said.
‘The Militia officers did not.’
‘I was there.’
‘And yet there is no material evidence.’
‘I suppose the rope was removed from the scene by the murderers.’
‘And how, exactly, did they do this? It was tied around his ankle, no? So did you see somebody come down and untie it?’
‘No,’ I conceded.
‘And yet you stayed by the body until the Militia arrived?’
‘They arrested me immediately.’
‘So, there was no rope. And yet you remember seeing a rope. Now: if the physical evidence contradicts witness testimony, wouldn’t you be inclined to mistrust the witness? People sometimes see things that aren’t there, after all. They may not be lying; they may be genuinely mistaken. Genuinely hallucinating.’ He smiled broadly at me.
‘I saw the rope,’ I repeated.
‘Your disbelief is stubborn,’ said Frenkel. ‘Disbelief can be like belief in that respect.’
‘Let’s talk about the UFO phenomenon,’ he said.
‘I am enjoying this talk,’ I replied. ‘It is diverting and stimulating.’
‘But permit me to ask a question,’ he said. ‘You do not believe in the material reality of UFOs, or aliens, or abductions, or any of that?’
‘No.’
‘And yet you cannot deny that many people do believe in those things.’
‘Of course.’
‘So you deny the reality of UFOs, but you do not deny the reality of UFOs as a cultural or social phenomenon?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Well then. Let us say three million people in the USSR, and three million in the USA, not only believe in UFOs, but claim to have experienced them directly. To have seen them. To have been abducted by them - to have had procedures enacted upon their bodies, semen extracted from their genitals, memories wiped from their minds.’
‘Is it so many?’
‘At a conservative estimate.’
‘It is a large number.’
‘Some of these people,’ said Frenkel, ‘are perhaps lying. Perhaps they are malicious, or bored, or perhaps they are seeking attention and fame and the like. So they tell these stories of alien abduction, even though they know them to be false.’
‘Eminently plausible.’
‘But surely you cannot believe that all six million people who report UFOs are like this? Six million wicked liars? Impossible!’
‘Not all of them, by any means.’
‘Perhaps only a small proportion of them are deliberately lying?’
‘The remainder,’ I said, ‘are simply mistaken.’
‘Mistaken? Nearly six million people - mistaken?’
‘Indeed. Hallucinating perhaps. Or interpreting ordinary occurrences in an extraordinary way.’
‘Six million people hallucinating in unison?’
‘It sounds a little improbable,’ I said. ‘But it is the only explanation that fits the facts.’
‘May we not apply your earlier test of probabilities, in lieu of proof?’
‘But that’s it,’ I said. ‘There are only two explanations for this widespread reportage of alien abduction. So let us test the respective probabilities of the two. Somebody claims to have been abducted by a UFO. Let us discard the possibility that he is deliberately lying, since, as you say, not all the six million can be liars. So what has happened? Either he has been literally abducted. Or else he has in some sense imagined the experience. A dream, a hallucination. Perhaps it was not an alien, but only a spectre from the subconscious mind. Which is more likely?’
‘There is a third possibility.’
‘That he is lying?’
‘No, we have agreed to discount that,’ said Frenkel. ‘So we have on the one hand, perhaps, an actual alien; and on the other perhaps a phantom from the subconscious mind. But there is a third possibility.’
‘Go on,’ I prompted.
‘You must listen carefully,’ he said. ‘We are approaching the reality of the situation. What I will say may dissolve your unbelief quite away.’
‘I doubt that,’ I said. ‘But I am listening.’
‘You think of alien abduction as something that happens to certain individuals.’
‘Are you saying it does not?’
He shook his head. ‘No, no. It does happens to individuals, of course. But also it happens to a mass of people.’
‘Millions of them,’ I said.
‘If an individual imagines something that’s not there we say he hallucinates. But what happens when a whole people imagines something?’
‘Mass hallucination?’
‘You are being distressingly literal minded. I shall give you an example. What is Communism, but the dream of a whole people? If an individual dreams utopia, he is just a dreamer. But once an entire people dream it, it becomes reality.’
‘Communism seems to be a dream from which people are waking up,’ I observed.
This might have made him angry, but instead he seized upon it. ‘Exactly! Exactly. We have stopped collectively imagining Communism, and so it is decaying around us. You suggested that UFOs were either material objects in the universe, or else the abductee simply imagined it. I say that what we need is an act of collective imagination, an act as heroic and world-changing as the October Revolution. I say that we are on the cusp of alien invasion - a real one, not an imaginary one - and that the only thing that can save us is a world capable of collectively willing those aliens into our observation.’
‘Imaginative revolution,’ I said. ‘Naturally such rhetoric appeals to a creative writer. But what about an ordinary citizen? What do you think, Saltykov?’
‘He agrees with me,’ said Frenkel.
‘You’ve been silent a very long time, Saltykov,’ I said, loudly. ‘Don’t sulk! What is your opinion of all this blather?’
‘A little deaf, I think,’ whispered Frenkel. ‘In his right ear.’
His head was still turned away. I looked at the back of his neck; his lager-coloured hair; his narrow, pale cranium. ‘Old friend,’ I said, loudly, ‘what’s the matter?’
‘There’s nothing the matter with old Saltykov,’ boomed Frenkel, putting his arm around the man’s back and clapping his shoulder? ‘Eh? Eh?’ Saltykov’s body jiggled with the motion imparted to it by Frenkel’s jollity.
‘Oh!’ I said, as I understood. Saltykov permitting himself to be touched? By a man? Oh, of course.
I took a deep breath. Matters were more serious than I had realised.
The odd thing, as I contemplated the situation I was in, was how little fear I felt. This was odd because I could still remember what it felt like to experience fear, so much so that I was actually conscious of the gap between the former and the present state of mind. I was also aware of a deep penetration of sorrow, as if a heavy stone fell through an inner shaft in my soul, into my depths. It was a sad business. It is sad to lose a friend, and nothing that had happened in the explosion had robbed me of the capacity to experience the weight of that. Nevertheless there was very little acuteness of emotional attack in my cut-about brain.
‘I’m not the bad guy,’ Frenkel was saying, earnestly. ‘You mistake me. I’m the good guy. I’m the one trying to save humanity.’
‘By committing mass murder?’
‘On the contrary: mass redemption. There may be casualties, of course. But casualties are one of the best ways of bringing home to people - that which they do not yet realise, but which is the bald truth - that we are fighting a war.’
‘I’ve had enough of war,’ I said.
‘Nonsense! You’re a hero of the Great Patriotic War, a warrior of Communism. Come on, Konstantin,’ Frenkel boomed, getting to his feet and hauling me up. ‘You are staying in a hotel, here in Kiev. Take me to it! Show me some hospitality!’
I was unsteady on my feet, and staggered a little like a drunk. Saltykov, of course, remained sitting on the bench glowering at the sparrows.