2. The scops is a small owl found in southern Europe, Russia and Central Asia.
ALEXANDER KAZANTSEV
1946
EXPLOSION
THE STORY OF A HYPOTHESIS
An image from distant childhood is engraved in my memory. High ground ends abruptly at the water, as if sliced by a gigantic knife. The broad river makes a sharp turn. Its banks are wild, rocky, forbidding. Immediately beyond them is the ageless taiga.
Our boat is traveling along the Upper Tunguska, as the Angara is called here. Only the helmsman and I stay on board through the shallows. All the others, including my father, are pulling the tow-rope. Now the shallows are behind us and everyone is rowing. I’ve taken my place at the stern and feel every bit the captain. Our ship is a galley. We are dauntless corsairs, off to discover new lands beyond the ocean. Hey, who’s up in the crow’s nest? What’s that island on the horizon? A floating island? Sound the whistle! All hands on deck! Rafts, one after another, come out from behind dark cliffs that obscure half the sky. We hear bleating.
The captain knows exactly what’s going on. The cursed slave traders have robbed the natives, herded their livestock onto the floating island, and stowed the shackled slaves deep down in the hold. I can see that now’s the time for a noble seafaring feat. Have at them, corsairs, forward!
It is a quiet, quiet morning. Not a cloud in the sky. Off in the distance is the faint rumble of yesterday’s shallows.
I curse the splashing of our oars. The despicable slavers mustn’t notice a thing. The galley is fast approaching the floating island. The sheep and the hut on the lead raft are clearly visible. But I know it’s really the deckhouse of the slavers’ captain. There he is, the one with the beard, in a blue shirt, stepping outside to look at the sky. He stretches, scratches his back, and then yawns and makes the sign of the cross over his mouth. Quiet, oarsmen! We must approach the enemy unnoticed and then immediately take him by storm. Off to the left, a squirrel rustles the foliage. If he looks… Quiet, so quiet. You can barely hear the splashing of the oars.
And suddenly, a horrific blow. I hunch down. I’m crying. I’ve forgotten all about the corsairs. The raftsman falls to his knees in surprise. His mouth is open. The sheep are bleating and rushing straight for the water. And then a second blow, more horrific than the first. The door to the hut bursts violently open, but nobody comes out. To the left, beyond the taiga, something flashes, rivaling the sun.
“Hang on!” my father’s voice barely reaches me. The air – thick, heavy – slams down on me with a jolt. I grab the boat’s side, I scream. I’m echoed by the terrified, frenzied bleating of the sheep. I can see the sheep being toppled into the water, one after another, as if a giant hand was sweeping them off the raft. A giant wave is coming down the river. I see how the now empty raft breaks into pieces. Its logs are suddenly upright. Our boat is tossed as if we’re going down rapids. I swallow water and try to catch air with my mouth. My fingers open, and, drenched, I tumble down to the bottom.
There, the water smells of fish. And all of a sudden it’s totally quiet.
A distant memory, a page from my childhood diary. There it is, a dog-eared brown notebook labeled 1908. Back then, thirty-eight years ago, two hundred and fifty kilometers from the spot where the sheep were swept from the raft into the water, a terrible meteorite fell into the taiga. In Siberia, this event has been much written and talked about.
Why did I need my old notebook? Why is my desk piled high with articles and books about the Tunguska meteorite?
Full of polemical ardor and argumentative fury, I pick up a piece of paper. Yes, I’m ready to argue!
Perhaps it is best to start the story from the moment when, on the morning of April 3, 1945, two men came to see me at the journal’s editorial office. Each of them placed a bulky envelope on my desk.
One of them, a man of gigantic height, put a large suitcase on the floor. He was extremely stoop-shouldered; it appeared as if he was studying something on the floor. He had large, chiseled features. Pensive light blue eyes peered out from under shaggy eyebrows that had grown together. His companion sat upright in his chair without touching its back. He was slender and a bit narrow in the shoulders. His horn-rimmed glasses gave his face, which featured rather prominent cheekbones, an expression of erudition.
“Yu-yu-your journal,” the giant began, stumbling over the letter y, “would no doubt be interested in a scientific debate that will be settled during an Academy of Sciences ethnographic expedition to the Podkamennaya Tunguska region.”
“If you can call the assertion and refutation of nonsense a scientific debate,” the man in glasses commented caustically.
“I would ask that yu-yu-you not interrupt me,” the first visitor turned to him ferociously. “I offer yu-yu-you two envelopes.” He was now speaking with me as if he did not notice his adversary. “They spell out two hypotheses in regard to a strange ethnographic puzzle.”
“Would you be so kind as to acquaint me with the essence of the debate?” I requested.
“Are yu-yu-you aware that in northern Siberia, east of the Ye-ye-Yenisei, there lives a people, the Evenks? People our age – of course I’m not talking about experts – sometimes incorrectly call them the Tungus. Evenks belong to the ye-ye-yellow race and are related to the Manchurians. They were once warlike invaders who encroached into Central Asia. However they were squeezed out by the Ya-Ya-Yakuts, and, after retreating to the north, they took refuge in the impenetrable forests of Siberia. True, the Ya-Ya-Yakuts also had to relinquish the flourishing land that they had conquered to stronger invaders – the Mongols – and also depart for the Siberian forests and tundra, where they became the Evenks’ neighbors…”
“Sergei Antonovich is so fond of ethnography that he never passes up an opportunity to promote that science,” my second visitor interrupted. “I’ll take the liberty of formulating his thought: neither the Evenks nor the Yakuts are indigenous to Siberia.”
He spoke with demonstrative seriousness, but the slightly lowered corners of his lips lent his mouth an expression of faintly discernible mockery.
“And I’ll prove it! Here! Would yu-yu-you care to have a look?”
With a groan, Sergei Antonovich bent down and opened his huge suitcase and, to my utter astonishment, removed a gigantic yellow bone. He triumphantly placed it on the table before me, on top of the manuscripts.
“What’s that?” I drew away involuntarily.
“A tibia of the indigenous inhabitants of Siberia,” Sergei Antonovich announced dramatically, looking at me with happy, luminous eyes.
“Indigenous inhabitants?” I cringed as I tried to imagine what someone with such a bone would look like.
“It is the tibia of an elephant,” Sergei Antonovich dispelled my assumptions.
“In Siberia? Elephants? Mammoths perhaps?” I asked doubtfully.
“Elephants! It was I who found this bone. Last ye-ye-year I crisscrossed the taiga’s swamps and crests, crawled up and down inaccessible hills in search of fossils, any fossils, and just imagine – at the sixty-fifth degree north latitude and one hundred fourth degree east longitude I stumbled upon an elephant graveya-ya-yard. Mountain ridges, like a gigantic fence, had blocked access to a plateau from all sides. The hot Siberian sun had melted a layer of permafrost and… Here, have a smoke,” he extended his cigarette case.
“Thanks, I don’t smoke.”
“I myself sawed off the material for this cigarette case from an actual elephant tusk – straight, not curved like a mammoth’s. For three weeks I ate nothing but cow parsnip. That’s a plant from the umbrelliferae family much better suited for making flutes than edible dishes. I left all my provisions at the elephant graveya-ya-yard so that I would be able to carry this bone and part of the tusk back with me.”
“It should be noted that Sergei Antonovich selflessly loaded himself up with these curious bones in addition to samples of valuable ores he had found. An amateur ethnographer, an amateur paleontologi
st, and on top of all that, a professional geologist.”
The giant glanced at his companion.
“Study of the exposed geological strata led me to conclude that Siberia had a hot, African climate before the last glacial period. It was roamed by elephants, tigers…”
“And, naturally, black Africans lived there, as our distinguished scholar is prepared to assert.”
“Yes, I’m certain that a tribe of indigenous, pre-glacial Siberians existed and, perhaps, even had descendants who have survived to the present. In the wilds of the Siberian taiga there are legends of a mysterious black-skinned woman…”
“There is a colorful description of an encounter with her from Kuleshov, an Angara hunter,” Sergei Antonovich’s companion said, removing his glasses so as to wipe them with his handkerchief. Squinting, he was looking over my head, off into the distance. “Thanks to Sergei Antonovich’s kind persistence, I have learned it by heart. Imagine: a roar, a rumble, and wet, black stones amid white foam. Almost scraping the cliffs overhanging the riverbank, a small boat is bouncing over the rocks. The boat’s high nose is plunging into the foam. In it stands a black-skinned woman wearing nothing but a loincloth. Long, red hair flutters and blows in the wind. Kuleshov was ready to swear that she was of gigantic height. He didn’t manage to see her face. The hunter said that she is shaman to some old folks. She was probably going through the rapids without clothing because she was afraid they would weigh her down if she fell overboard.”
“I maintain that this is the last descendant of pre-glacial Siberians,” Sergei Antonovich placed his huge fist on the desk. “Her distant heredity has left its mark on that woman!”
“That’s a curious little conclusion, unsupported by the slightest rationale. No reasonable person would be likely to arrive at such a conclusion.”
“I’d like to see yu-yu-you reject it when we get there,” Sergei Antonovich bristled. “I have made up my mind to take yu-yu-you with me, even though yu-yu-you’re an armchair physicist, and the expedition party is already complete. I’ll take yu-yu-you along as my opponent and won’t let yu-yu-you spend a minute on your electrons and neutrons until yu-yu-you give in and recognize my hypothesis.”
The physicist smiled.
“We are asking you to unseal the envelopes,” he turned to me, “ and publish the hypothesis that we will be sending you via telegraph from Vanovara, where the interdisciplinary Academy of Sciences expedition led by Sergei Antonovich is heading.”
“And please telegraph me in Vanovara to let me know what abstruse gibberish this distinguished, thoroughly negative scholar has sealed in his envelope,” Sergei Antonovich muttered.
My feuding visitors bade me farewell and left. I started to wonder, looking at the envelopes left behind on my desk, what could possibly have provoked such discord between experts from two entirely different fields?
“Excuse me,” I was addressed by a quiet voice. Looking up, I saw the physicist before me. This time his eyes were serious, his lips tightly pursed. “I came back to warn you that my envelope really does contain a hypothesis, but it has nothing to do with the black-skinned woman, which would undoubtedly come as quite a shock to dear Sergei Antonovich, who has forbidden members of his expedition to be distracted by extraneous questions.”
“What is your hypothesis about?” I asked, intrigued. This business was becoming increasingly tangled.
“About the Tunguska meteorite.”
“The one that fell close to the Vanovara trading post in 1908?”
“The one that never fell to earth.”
Never fell to earth?! Shattered rafts, swimming sheep, and a glow above the taiga all passed before my mind’s eye.
“Were you there when it fell?” I could barely contain myself.
“There are no special expeditions there, and I took the opportunity of my dispute with Sergei Antonovich over the matter of the black-skinned woman to visit the region. I want to establish certain details and then I will send you a telegram asking you to unseal the envelope. You will understand what needs to be done.”
His manner was perfectly matter-of-fact as he explained all this with a disarming tone of certainty.
“I have my reasons for not telling anyone about my hypothesis just yet. I will acquaint Sergei Antonovich with it when we arrive there. Otherwise he just might refuse to take me with him. And now, good-bye!”
My extraordinary confidant extended his hand and told me his name. The day had delivered yet another shock: before me stood a famous theoretical physicist. I gazed at the door that shut behind him, trying to make sense of what had just taken place. The story of the black-skinned woman somehow faded into the background. It was now an entirely new thought that bothered me.
There was no meteorite?!
No, I would not give in so quickly! I was ready to fight. I saw the disaster’s glow with my own eyes and felt the gigantic explosion’s air wave. My mind was made up. I would refute the famous physicist’s hypothesis, whatever it might be.
I dug into my files and took out everything relating to the Tunguska meteorite, which I had at one point taken a special interest in. There was the entry from my childhood diary. There was also a quote from the speech that L.A. Kulik gave to the Academy of Sciences in 1939: “The fact that the Tunguska meteorite fell at approximately seven o’clock on the morning of June 30, 1908, has been noted by numerous observers…under clear skies and in calm weather… After the fireball fell on the taiga, a ‘pillar of fire’ rose above it toward the sky, and then three or four powerful blows rang out that could be heard a thousand kilometers away. The blast of air drove giant waves down rivers and knocked people and animals off their feet. Fences were flattened, construction sites were damaged, houses shook, and objects hanging in them swung.”
How can you say there was no meteorite, my esteemed friend? Or do you trust your incisive intuition over the testimony of many thousands?
Yet here we have the objective recordings of insensate instruments. The air wave was twice registered in London, meaning that it circled the globe twice. Seismograph stations in Irkutsk, Tbilisi, Tashkent, and Jena registered surface waves with an epicenter in the area of the Podkamennaya Tunguska.
What do you have to counter that, my dear learned physicist? Conceit incarnate?
I leafed through a multitude of eyewitness accounts:
“A fireball brighter than the sun…a pillar of fire seen for hundreds of kilometers…black clouds of smoke that turned into a storm cloud in the clear sky…glass cracked 400 kilometers away…”
This testimony came from the Irkutsk Seismograph Station’s correspondence network. It cannot be ignored. To continue: “it swept away tents,” “it finished the reindeer,” “it stirred the forest” – that was from the Evenks.
“A burst of heat like your shirt was on fire…” – that was from a worker in Vanovara. Even near Kansk, 800 kilometers from where it fell, a locomotive driver, alarmed by the crashing noise, brought his train to a halt.
No, my distinguished but foolish adversary, the time when L.A. Kulik was compelled to prove that a meteorite fell on Tunguska has passed. Since then, Kulik has led several expeditions to the area. Traces of staggering destruction were discovered there: the taiga was blown down to the ground over an area of eight thousand square kilometers. You will see for yourself a gigantic span where trees fell, where the trunks of giant larches lie, their roots, unscrewed from the ground, pointing to one spot – the center of the phenomenal catastrophe. You will be convinced that over a radius of thirty kilometers not a single tree was left standing, and at a radius of sixty kilometers, trees were uprooted at all elevations. An explosion of that force would require hundreds of thousands of tons of the most powerful explosives.
Where could all that energy come from? I will give you the same answer, my dear scientist, that you would give a schoolchild. A meteorite, maintaining its orbital velocity, hit the earth, and all its kinetic energy was instantly converted to heat, which is tantamoun
t to an explosion.
I will direct your attention, my learned adversary, who has never been to the area of the Tunguska disaster, that for local inhabitants, the meteorite’s fall is not in dispute. The natives claim that not a single local has gone near the spot where dazzling Ogdy, the god of fire and lightning, came down from the sky. It has been cursed by the shamans. Only during the first days after the disaster did the Evenks walk through the wind-flattened forest, looking for the charred carcasses of their reindeer and the ruined huts where their belongings had been stored, and saw fountains of water that gushed out of the earth for three days. It would perhaps be better, my adversary who no doubt deserves a better fate, if instead of a hypothesis that disavows an obvious phenomenon you came up with an explanation for the local inhabitants’ enduring fear.
And finally, the last unexplained phenomenon that attests to a cosmic connection.
A photograph lies before me on my desk that was taken by a local schoolteacher in Narovchat in Penza Province. The photograph was taken at night, one day after the meteorite fell in Siberia. And here is a reference to Academician Fesenkov – still alive and kicking – who was at the Tashkent Observatory that night waiting in vain for darkness to fall so he could commence his observations.
After the meteorite fell, across the entire region, from the Yenisei Basin to the Atlantic Ocean, and even in Central Asia and along the Black Sea, there were white nights such that you could read at midnight. At an altitude of 83 kilometers, shining silver clouds of unknown origin were observed.
There’s a problem for you to solve, my dear adversary, vainly yearning for laurels. Explain the connection between this phenomenon and the meteorite that fell, but don’t compromise yourself by disputing the established fact of a fallen fireball.
In short, I was infected with polemical fervor, and a biting, brilliant article that would smash to bits the anti-meteorite hypothesis, whatever it might be, was already in my inkwell. I could barely wait to learn the contents of the envelope I’d been given.
Red Star Tales Page 23