But my impatience, along with my polemical fervor, was put to the test.
Between April 3 and August 14, 1945, I received no news from the men who had entrusted me with their manuscripts.
A report about the notorious atom bomb dropped on Japan distracted me from any thought of the physicist, the geologist-ethnographer, and their hypotheses. But a telegram I received instantly cast everything in a new, unexpected light:
“Compare 30 June 1908 seismic data from impact and second American present. Searching for black woman.”
There was no doubt. My physicist was referring to the atom bomb I had heard about on the radio.
I admit that I felt as if I had been hit in the head by a heavy sack.
In a state of excitement, I dug into the details of the test bomb’s explosion in New Mexico, where from the site of a vaporized steel tower, a pillar of fire could be seen for many dozens of kilometers. With intent focus, I read descriptions of the explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where a blinding fireball of gases reaching temperatures of twenty million degrees traveled upward, leaving behind a column of flame that burned through clouds and billowed across the sky into a gigantic mushroom of black smoke.
My hands trembled as I compared these details with descriptions of the Tunguska taiga explosion that I had painstakingly prepared for a debate.
To verify my findings, I spent time at the Academy of Sciences, in the Meteorite Committee, and obtained additional material about the “Tunguska Fall.” While there I also learned of the death of the scientific secretary for meteorites, L.A. Kulik. This renowned Russian scholar voluntarily stepped forward to defend the Motherland during the very first days of the Great Patriotic War with the same faith in victory that amazed the world during his investigations into the Tunguska meteorite.
How sad that this outstanding scientist was not able to complete his research by comparing the seismic recordings from the meteorite and an atomic explosion!
With help from the Academy of Sciences institute, I managed to perform this comparison.
One feature of the seismograph readings from the Tunguska impact was a record of two jolts, separated by a time interval correlating to the distance between the seismograph station and the site of the explosion. The second jolt that reached the monitoring stations was from the airwave, which traveled from the site of the explosion more slowly than the wave that passed through the earth’s crust.
Analysis of readings from the seismographs monitoring the atomic explosion in Nagasaki fit the picture painted by the recordings from June 30, 1908, with amazing precision. Could it really have been that back in 1908 we were already dealing with the first atomic explosion on earth?
Before me lay the envelope concealing the thoughts of the Russian theoretical physicist who had ingeniously divined an atomic reaction in the Tunguska disaster. I could barely control my irritation at the scientist who was off searching for some red-haired black woman in the taiga instead of publishing his ideas. I decided that my wavering was excessive. I unsealed the envelope.
My conjectures were proven right. My theoretician had foreseen everything.
Yes, the Tunguska disaster, in which explosions were heard a thousand kilometers away, a disaster that caused unprecedented destruction and an actual earthquake, that generated a blinding ball of gas that reached temperatures in the tens of millions of degrees and was then transformed into a pillar of fire shooting upward that was seen at a distance of 400 kilometers – this disaster could only have been an atomic explosion.
The physicist assumed that the meteorite that entered the earth’s atmosphere, whose weight he determined to be one hundred kilograms at most – not thousands or hundreds of thousands of tons as previously believed – was, unlike most metal meteorites, not made of iron-nickel, but of uranium, or of even heavier transuranium elements, unknown on earth.
The enormous temperature that the meteorite built up as it flew through the earth’s atmosphere was one of the conditions making a nuclear explosion possible. The meteorite exploded, discharging its atomic energy without ever touching the ground. Most of its mass instantaneously vaporized and the rest was converted into energy equal to the energy produced by two hundred thousand tons of explosives.
This explains why L.A. Kulik was unable to find any trace of the meteorite or its crater. There was nothing at the center of the windfall but a swamp that formed over the permafrost layer.
Finally, my physicist’s hypothesis explained the last two remaining puzzling aspects of the Tunguska disaster. The mysterious silvery clouds that illuminated the earth at night were remnants of the meteorite’s radioactive substance blasted up to the Heaviside layer by the force of the explosion. Their atoms’ radioactive decay caused the surrounding air to glow.
The superstitious fear of the Evenks who wandered the windfall during the first days after the disaster was directed toward the “wrath” of dazzling Ogdy, god of fire and thunder. Everyone who spent time in this cursed place died of a horrible and baffling illness that covered internal organs with ulcers. The poor Evenks wound up victims of the nuclear decay of minute remnants of the meteorite that scattered over the area of the disaster.
How brilliant and astute my physicist’s ideas now seemed! After all, this was the very phenomenon with which the Japanese were confronted in Nagasaki after the atom bomb exploded. The decay of the remaining atoms could continue for one-and-a-half to two months.
The upcoming issue of our journal with the physicist’s article had already been laid out and sent to the printers when I received a telegram from him in Vanovara: “Hypothesis wrong. Destroy manuscript. Saw black woman. Heading back.”
I was beside myself with indignation. Once again I refused to believe the physicist.
It would be hard for anyone else to imagine how reluctant I was to part with the hypothesis that the meteorite caused a nuclear explosion! I could not, simply could not force myself to telephone the printer.
But what was I to do? What proof that he was wrong could the physicist have found at the site of the disaster?
Another telegram, again from Vanovara, was delivered. I unfolded it with trembling hands: “Last descendant pre-glacial black Siberians found. Publish.”
I stared at Sergei Antonovich’s telegram in bewilderment. What bearing could the pre-glacial black woman have had on the hypothesis about the nuclear explosion? Finally I realized that there was no getting to the bottom of this. At the very least, that would require the imagination of a crazy person. Giving up on any and all conjecture, I unsealed Sergei Antonovich’s envelope and tried to figure out whether his article would be the right length to replace the other, which had already been incorporated into our upcoming issue.
I became so engrossed in my professional duties I failed to notice that my door had opened and a bearded man had entered my office in muddy boots that were tracking dirt on my parquet floor. After unfastening his fur jacket and removing his ushanka, he reached out his hand like an old friend.
Looking inquisitively at this stranger, I muttered a polite greeting and…suddenly I recognized him.
The beard! The missing glasses! But how did he get to Moscow so quickly? The telegram had only just arrived!
I grabbed it and looked at the dispatch date: well, of course…there was a delay.
“The manuscript…” the physicist blurted, breathing heavily. He had apparently been walking fast. “I rushed here from the airport…”
“The journal is still at the printers,” I replied. “But where are your glasses?”
The physicist gave a dismissive wave.
“They broke.”
He silently sat down, took a tobacco pouch out of his pocket, rolled a cigarette with his brown, calloused hands, and fumbled as he tried to retrieve his flint. I offered him an electric lighter. The visitor smiled awkwardly.
“Gone a bit wild,” he remarked laconically as he lit up.
We sat facing one another in silence. I examined my transfor
med scholar. He now seemed broader in the shoulders. A healthy tan and thick, curly beard gave him the appearance of a strapping young buck. Inhaling the smoke from his strong, cheap tobacco, he stared pensively into the corner. His thoughts were somewhere far away.
“Curious?” he asked concisely.
“Of course!”
“You know,” he looked at me, and suddenly, squinting myopically, was transformed into the theoretical physicist I had known, “until now, I had never slept in the forest, and I had only seen a swamp from a train car window. I couldn’t stand mosquitoes, so I never went to the dacha. I bathed twice a week,” he flicked ash on the floor and then grinned and gave me a guilty glance. “In short, I’ve gone a bit wild,” he added, not quite coherently.
We again fell silent.
“You’d probably like to know just why it was I traveled to the site of the Tunguska disaster, what I was looking for there? I’ll start with the taiga landscape where the trees were blown down. Just imagine: at the disaster’s center, around the swamp that used to be considered the main crater where, supposedly, the explosion had the strongest impact, the forest was left standing. The trees, which were knocked down everywhere else within a radius of thirty kilometers, are standing rather than lying there. Huge sticks are sticking up out of the ground, and new growth is already sprouting among them… That’s what’s left of the trees; their roots are long since dead, they have no bark – it was scorched and fell away. All the branches were sheared by monstrous winds, and the knots where the branches once were are charcoal. Telegraph poles – that’s what these trees look like. Only a vertical hurricane could have left them standing, a hurricane that blew down from above.”
My visitor took a deep drag of his cigarette and, with evident pleasure, blew a thick cloud of smoke up to the ceiling. I did not interrupt his silence.
“This was the image I needed,” he continued, apparently finding it difficult to tear himself away from his thoughts. “Why was this dead forest left standing? Only because the trees in that spot were perpendicular to the blast wave. And that could only have been the case if the explosion took place above the earth! Gases rising to a temperature in the hundreds of thousands of degrees, after traveling at a tremendous velocity, sliced off branches, scorched trees, and left behind a vacuum. The cold air that rushed into it put out the fire.”
“So there was an explosion after all?” I was almost glad.
“Yes, at an altitude of five kilometers above ground. I calculated this altitude based on the area of the dead forest left standing. A simple geometry problem.”
“If the meteorite didn’t make contact with the ground, it could only have been a nuclear explosion. Now I’m prepared to defend your hypothesis even against you!” I exclaimed earnestly.
“That’s interesting,” the physicist remarked. “A scholarly duel? Go ahead and make your case!”
And so we entered into a rather strange debate. The physicist did, in the end, wind up being my adversary, but we had exchanged roles.
“What could have caused the meteorite to instantaneously explode?” the physicist asked, puffing on his cigarette.
“We’ve got to assume that it was made of a uranium isotope with an atomic weight of 235 capable of a so-called ‘chain reaction.’”
“Correct. Either a uranium or a plutonium isotope. Now, describe what this chain reaction looked like, and you’ll immediately see the weakness of the hypothesis you’re defending.”
“I’ll be glad to. If the atoms of a uranium isotope are bombarded with neutrons, which have no electric charge from elementary particles of substance, when a neutron hits, the nucleus will split into two parts, releasing tremendous energy and emitting, on top of that, three neutrons that break up neighboring atoms, which in turn emit three neutrons each. There’s your description of a continuous chain reaction that doesn’t stop until all the uranium atoms decay.”
“That’s all correct. But tell me, what is needed to trigger an atomic reaction?”
“The first atom has to break apart; the first nucleus has to be hit with a neutron.”
“Exactly. But there’s a trap hidden here. Do you know how far apart atoms are from one another? The distance between them is like the distance between planets, if we put atomic nuclei on a planetary scale. Just try to hit a planet – a nucleus – when you’re flying along like a comet, as we can imagine neutrons to be. Physicists have calculated how thick a layer of uranium the neutron would have to pass through in order, based on probability theory, to hit an atomic nucleus. Some calculate that to trigger a chain reaction, the so-called critical mass of uranium needed would be at least eighty tons.”
“That’s not true! You’re resorting to dirty tricks. That’s what they used to think. Just one kilogram is enough to start a nuclear reaction.”
“I agree,” the physicist smiled. “You’re beating me at my own game, but you don’t realize I have another trick up my sleeve. Yes, it’s true that a neutron stream can’t start a chain reaction in a half-kilogram of uranium, but in a kilogram it definitely can. What does that mean? We seem to have already established that the meteorite that fell had to have at least a kilogram of uranium-235 isotope.”
“Absolutely right.”
“But we also need flying neutrons. Tell me, what started the reaction? Where did the neutron stream come from?”
“Cosmic rays? After all, they do have flying neutrons, don’t they?”
“You’ve done your homework, you’ve definitely done your homework,” the physicist grinned. “But that same sort of neutron stream was also present outside the atmosphere. Why didn’t the meteorite explode there?”
“The speed of the neutrons should play a decisive role here. At a high velocity, neutrons might not do much damage to a nucleus, like a bullet that goes through a board but doesn’t knock it over.”
“Remarkably true,” the physicist banged his fist on the desk. “To start a chain reaction, flying neutrons have to slow down.”
“If the high temperature, the heating up of the meteorite as it moved through the atmosphere, affected neutron velocity…”
“You’ve fallen into the trap!” the physicist cried, jumping to his feet. “You’ve been crushed, dear opponent! It’s time to start making assumptions. ‘If’! There’s no ‘if’! I don’t know how the Americans made their atomic bomb, but, without meaning to, you and I have figured out its entire ‘mechanism.’ Yes, the hardest thing the Americans had to do was slow down the neutrons. And it’s doubtful they could have done that without heavy water.”
“That’s true, the Americans really did use heavy water. How well informed you were, off in the taiga!”
“I was well informed before the taiga, not in the taiga. I’m a theoretician after all. Theoreticians are supposed to see solutions to problems far in advance, many years before they’re solved by practitioners, empiricists. So in the case of our meteorite, it’s hard to imagine that there could have been any inhibitory elements in place that would have been activated at just the right moment. After all, these elements were put in place in the American atomic bomb artificially.”
“So what were you searching for in the Tunguska taiga if before going you knew that no nuclear explosion could have occurred?” I jumped up, ready to pounce on the physicist, who had just refuted his own theory with devastating dispassion.
“I was looking for something that might have been there before the disaster. For that, I lugged a mine detector over many a kilometer, while being sucked dry by those damned mosquitoes.”
“A mine detector?” I stared at the physicist and was silent for a few moments as I thought something through.
“And did what you found there change your views?” I almost shouted. “Do you really think that the explosion might have been manmade, that we were dealing with an atomic bomb?”
“No,” the physicist replied calmly. “The nuclear explosion was not caused by a bomb.”
“I give up. I can’t do this anymor
e. So, none of it’s true… You didn’t find anything?”
“Yes, over the course of a month and a half in the area of the windfall I did not find the meteorite crater, any fragments or traces of the meteorite, or any metal objects that might have been there before the explosion. That’s not surprising. Even trees were pushed four meters deep into the peat. But…”
“But what? Don’t torment me… Tell me, what did you find there?”
“Don’t interrupt. I’ll tell you everything in the proper order.”
“I give up. I’m not your adversary anymore; I’m just going to listen. But please allow me to write it down.”
“As I already told you, my search with the mine detector yielded nothing. Since the expedition was only beginning its work, under the terms of my agreement with Sergei Antonovich, after my search in the area of the windfall I had to join him in the search for his idiotic black-skinned woman of the taiga. Of course, at that point, I didn’t think that she could disprove my initial hypothesis. We got ourselves some Evenk guides, and, riding their reindeer, set out on our journey.”
“The nuclear explosion and the black woman! What’s the connection?” I groaned.
“You promised not to interrupt.”
“But a scientist like you has to have some logic. Well, fine. I’ll keep quiet.”
“For about two months we tirelessly hunted for the last of the tribe of black-skinned Siberians. We learned that she was alive and was practicing something akin to shamanism somewhere. We finally caught up with her at a nomad’s camp near a village with the amazingly melodious name of ‘Taimba,’ which doesn’t sound anything like either Russian or Evenk. An Evenk brought us there, Ilya Potapovich Lyuchetkan, who once upon a time served as guide for Kulik himself, despite the fact that the shamans forbade this. Lyuchetkan was ancient, with a wrinkled, brown face and such narrow eyes that they almost always seemed to be closed.
“‘The shamaness is a strange woman,’ he said, stroking his smooth chin. ‘Forty years ago, maybe less, she came to the Khurkhangyr clan. Ruined, she was.’
Red Star Tales Page 24