Kolymsky Heights (25 page)

He went through a door, leaving it very slightly ajar. And presently there was the sound of tapping on another door and Stepanka’s voice speaking softly in Russian. And then silence; and Kolya waited in it, looking about the room.

At each end was a spiral staircase to the gallery; and in a shadowy corner a huge television set and a globe and a drinks trolley. Also a cage. Something moved in the cage, and he walked slowly towards it; but the cage was only a lift, and it was his own image moving there in the mirror that backed it, and he turned sharply round to the door again listening.

Another door had closed somewhere and he heard a click as it was locked. And then an odd whining sound, and the door nudged open and a wheelchair drove smoothly in.

‘Well!’ Rogachev said. His hand was outstretched, a great smile on his face. ‘I have waited for you, my friend. I have waited so eagerly.’

And now what am I to say to you? It was a lifetime ago we met.
And now I am an old man, and will not get much older. I will
show you what I have to show, and you will take back what I
have to give. It’s all done now, everything complete
.

That you are here, I know, and you will tell me how it
happened. That you would come I never doubted. It was not
light-hearted, that discussion of ours those years ago. My own
part I kept immediately and I know you took advantage of it –
although I saw no result. As you see, I have followed your
career
…

As to my own
…

My own is so bound up with the events of this land, it cannot
be separated. Over seventy years the Soviet Union lasted – a
mighty structure, solid as rock. Now, like an optical illusion, all
gone
.

Only two things of value, I believe, ever came out of it, and of
these one would have happened elsewhere. The other could
only have happened here
.

‘I will have two things to show you,’ Rogachev said.

They had spoken for a few minutes but Porter still stared at him, trying to recollect the man. The red hair had gone. All the hair had gone. The skin had gone, too – just great blotches left on scalp, face, hands. And the big body, once so robust, was shrunken away, wrapped in a shawl.

‘What the hell happened to you – the explosion?’ he said.

‘The satellite saw the ruins, did it?’

Porter told him what it had seen, what both satellites had seen, and the scarred forehead wrinkled.

‘The rollcall, eh? And the bandages. Not bad. Still, it’s nothing, nothing at all, the earliest subjects. But now we have to move. There’s a lot to do.’

He was steering towards the gallery.

‘My electric chair,’ he said, ‘once my predecessor’s, who gave a name to the device. You won’t know of him.’

‘Zhelikov? Sure I know of him,’ Porter said.

‘You do?’ Rogachev glanced at him. ‘Well, you’re going to learn more,’ he said.

He was opening a door under the gallery. A small cloakroom led off it, all its surfaces insulated with padding. Fur coats hung from the hooks. Rogachev carefully bolted the door behind them.

‘Help me up,’ he said. ‘We are going somewhere cold, and must clothe ourselves.’

Porter helped the old man into a coat, also a fur hat and gloves, and did the same for himself.

‘You’ll find goggles in a pocket. Maybe you don’t need them

– I can’t stand the cold any more.’ He strapped a pair round his own head, and opened a door in the far wall. A blast of icy air emerged. Beyond the door a line of strip lights had come on, revealing a long ramp descending into a tunnel. The wheelchair hummed softly down the ramp and Porter held on to the back. Frost glittered everywhere; abnormal frost, huge multi-coloured wafers, delicate and glassy, that clung trembling to the walls and fell in tinkling showers as they passed.

‘I accustom in a minute or two,’ Rogachev said, his voice muffled. He was holding a glove over his mouth and nose. ‘But I can’t stay below more than ten minutes, anyway.’

They were going evidently into permafrost, unchanging, unthawing, so that the frost had vitrified. At the bottom, the tunnel levelled out into a wide chamber. Here the lighting was not only on the roof but also set into the tube-like walls; the whole place brilliantly illuminated, sparkling with crystal.

A block of ice stood in the middle and Rogachev steered towards it.

Except that it wasn’t ice, Porter saw. Some kind of plastic; its upper section hollow. A coating of frost wafers had fallen on it, and Rogachev took a little spatula from his coat and carefully removed them. A transparent case was beneath, embedded with a network of fine hairlines.

‘A temperature control,’ he said, ‘to prevent shrivelling.’

Porter couldn’t at first be sure, but it looked to him as if a girl was in the case.

‘It opens quite easily – a silicon seal. Just give me a hand to hold it,’ Rogachev said, and raised the lid.

A girl was in the case.

She was on her back, eyes closed, very pale. A white sheet covered her from abdomen to knees but she was otherwise naked. Blonde braids of hair were draped at either side of her breasts, and her closed eyes, slightly slanted, were set above high cheekbones, the lips a little open as if breathing. Her wrists were crossed on the sheet, right over left. She was tall, shapely, very handsome.

Porter looked from her to Rogachev’s goggles.

‘What’s this?’ he said.

‘A young woman, perhaps seventeen. We had to carry out some operations on her, as far as possible from the back. But also a Caesarean section – she was eight months pregnant. Hold the lid.’

He leaned over and very carefully drew down the sheet, exposing a row of sutures above fair pubic hair; there was no reddening of the skin and the neat stitching looked new. ‘The scar couldn’t heal, of course. But the baby was there, perfectly formed. As you see, the girl is fair. Her eyes are grey. In life her colour would be better, but that’s how we found her so we kept her the same shade.’ He drew the sheet back in position.

‘Who is she?’ Porter said.

‘We call her Sibir, after the country. This is how I found her.

She had died instantly and was preserved instantly – quick frozen. Don’t be afraid, you can touch her. She’s well embalmed now.’

He reached forward himself and raised the upper wrist. The hand came up quite flexibly. It was a broad hand, the fingers long but square, the nails short and ragged.

‘The arm underneath is broken, the left one. She fell on it – she was a left-hander. The finger pads and the palm are quite deeply scored there. Leave that alone, but touch her, make contact. You won’t get another chance.’

Porter drew off a glove and gingerly felt the girl’s face. It was smooth, full, by no means cold – indeed, to his own chilled hand, it felt warm. He stroked the skin, the nose, felt the ear lobes beneath the braids.

‘I can’t stay much longer – it needs heated suits, from the labs,’ Rogachev told him. ‘That door at the back leads up there. This is my own entrance. I come often. Take a good look – walk round her. She’s tall, isn’t she? Distinctive. A good face – Slav, would you say?’

Porter walked round the case. The slant of the eyes didn’t look to him Slav. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. The legs were scratched, but the nails on her toes better than on her fingers: she had worn footwear. ‘What’s the story?’ he said.

‘A unique one. You’ll never see anything like her. She’s been in that state for forty thousand years. Before Slavs, before any of the present races of the world. I found her in a block of ice. She’s one of the two types we all spring from, perhaps the matriarch of millions – she had given birth before. I don’t know what became of her earlier offspring, but the child she was carrying I know a
lot
about. Oh yes!’

He closed the lid and turned his chair and set off immediately, and Porter followed him.

A few steps up the ramp Porter stopped and looked back. He could still see her in her case, alone in the brilliant tunnel; could see her lips a little open, and for a moment had the illusion that
they were moving. But it was only the crystals, again fluttering down.

Rogachev had braked the chair and turned, his goggled eyes also looking down. His mouth was twisted slightly in a smile.

‘Do you know the story of King Saul?’ he said. ‘His father sent him out to find lost donkeys, and he found a kingdom. Zhelikov sent me to find a mammoth and I found a lost world. As a matter of fact I found something more – something quite … incalculable. But where to start?’

Where does it start? At Pitsunda, with the accident that led to
my appointment? Or a little before, the chance meeting at
Oxford? Or long before, the first meeting with Zhelikov?
Well, say that one
. 1952.

In 1952, suddenly, inexplicably, I found myself under arrest. I had done nothing wrong – nothing at all. The director of my institute had perhaps done something, although I doubted it. But the whole research team was rounded up, and sentenced, and scattered to the four winds, myself to the Kolyma and the little camp at Panarovka.

At that camp, Zhelikov; met for the first time.

Zhelikov, already most eminent, was also by then a most seasoned prisoner with many terms and many camps behind him. At Panarovka just then he was preparing a series of lectures, and on my arrival – a young low-temperature specialist – he obtained permission for me to assist him.

Those lectures were a great success, with camp officials and prisoners alike; but afterwards he told me he had given them
only to get off onerous camp duties. He also confided how he had come by this useful trick, and of the events surrounding it.

At another camp, during the war, Zhelikov had found a most interesting pair among the prisoners, Korolyov and Tupolev. Both were ‘enemies of the people’, Korolyov’s particular crime being sabotage: the misuse of munitions for making fireworks. This pair had got up a seminar, on the subject of aerodynamics, which had relieved them of hard labour for a considerable time – the source of Zhelikov’s later inspiration.

Which was only the beginning of the story. For when Tupolev one day was unexpectedly released, he immediately pulled strings to get his friend Korolyov released also. Tupolev then went on to make the bombers bearing his name that helped win the war, and Korolyov returned to his fireworks: the model staged rockets that preceded his ballistic missiles and enabled him, some years later, to put the first man in space.

Even that isn’t the end of it. For Korolyov had planned to put not a man but a monkey first in space; and for this purpose he later secured
Zhelikov’s
release. Zhelikov’s work on the conditioning of monkeys was of course well known, and he sped off right away to start conditioning
this
monkey.

Of that particular development nothing came. For one reason or another not a monkey but a dog was ultimately chosen (the celebrated Laika), and Zhelikov’s public protests at the decision won him another sentence. This time to Panarovka … and the course of lectures.

From Panarovka, not long after the lectures, Zhelikov was suddenly plucked one night, for reasons I did not know, but which I learned years later at Tcherny Vodi.

There were three reasons – the first a freakish idea of Stalin’s.

In his late-night reading, the restless insomniac had come upon a little book of Zhelikov’s on the subject of hibernation. He had become interested in hibernation. This was partly for
the purpose of preserving the lives of cosmonauts in future space voyages, but mainly with a view to preserving his own. The body of his predecessor Lenin he had had embalmed as a lasting icon for the people. His own he thought of having hibernated so that at some future time it would be of greater benefit to them.

With his security chief Beria he had discussed this idea.

A corps of the most faithful guardians would be required to maintain his body, as he himself had maintained Lenin’s. But even more urgently work had to begin, by the leading experts, and in the greatest secrecy, on
how
he should be hibernated.

The leading expert on hibernation was Zhelikov, and the most secret place in the Soviet Union was Tcherny Vodi.

This was the craziest of the reasons.

The other reasons were not crazy, and the second concerned Tcherny Vodi itself.

In 1952 the research station was engaged solely with work on chemical and bacteriological warfare; its activities covered by a weather station that had stood on the site for many years. The work required large numbers of test animals, and the severe climate combined with a shortage of air transport had seriously reduced the stock, hampering the military programme. A project for breeding hardier test animals had begun, but the methods were primitive and not successful.

On examination (by Minister Beria and his assistants) it was found that the prisoner at Panarovka could be the man for this, too. As well as being a world expert on hibernation he was also one on the conditioning of animals: as early as the 1920s he had worked in this field with his great mentor Pavlov.

But the third reason – Zhelikov’s own – was one he had already raised in his lectures. It concerned Siberia.

Some little while before, a large-scale geological survey had shown the land to be, without question, the richest on earth. It had more oil than Arabia, more gold and diamonds than Africa, more mineral value than anywhere else on the planet;
the vast bulk of this treasure being locked in permafrost, dormant. The attempts to exploit it, always with forced labour, had been inefficient; and in any case had barely scraped the surface. It seemed unlikely that people would ever come in useful numbers to work in this hostile territory. Zhelikov’s idea was to enhance the intelligence of animals to do it.

His own last work had been with the
most
intelligent animals. At his station in the Caucasus he had got chimpanzees solving problems on an abacus, having first conditioned them to that place from their habitat in the tropics.

This idea he suddenly found himself discussing in the most bizarre circumstances, and at the highest level. The night he was plucked from the camp he was taken by helicopter to an airfield. In an aeroplane he was given a decent suit – for he had left camp in his prison footcloths and tunic – and presently found himself, dazed, being driven through the streets of Moscow to the Kremlin, and the dictator’s lair.

Stalin watched him eat a meal, and then had talked with him throughout the night. The dictator was in his field jacket with pockets and he walked slowly round the room smoking his pipe. ‘Well – enough,’ he said at last, waving his pipe. ‘Now give your opinion on the proposal for hibernation.’

The proposal for hibernation is horseshit, Zhelikov said, but he did not say this aloud.

‘Yosef Vissarionovich,’ he said aloud, ‘I must tell you frankly that this is a very good proposal. It needs much work. I would first have to hibernate many other subjects, and be assured of their complete resuscitation before beginning to think – this goes without saying – of hibernating
you
.’

He had worked himself up to such an extent over the other proposals that it only then dawned on him (so he told me) that this was the one to buy all the rest.

‘First-class laboratories, proper conditioning chambers, the highest degree of security, and the whole work under my own
direction! Enemies are always about, prying for information – which on any subject concerning you should on no account be given. On that my stand would have to be inflexible. Whichever place is chosen, I need to have charge of it.’

Stalin had emitted puffs of smoke and a series of grunts at these remarks, and he now took a long squint at Zhelikov.

‘Well, we’ll see,’ he said. ‘But what of this place they talk about, Tcherny Vodi? Is it a suitable place?’

‘I don’t know this place,’ Zhelikov said. ‘When the plans and a map become available I could give an opinion.’

Stalin picked up the phone and called Beria, in bed.

At a quarter to six in the morning Minister Beria arrived with the plans and a map, having roused his ministry for them.

Zhelikov scanned the map and whistled.

‘So near Panarovka – and I knew nothing of it!’ he said, ‘Well, the place is good. But the station … ’ He was turning over sheets and decided he could now expand himself. ‘The station is horseshit.’

‘How horseshit?’ Beria said.

‘All on top. Where would I put my conditioning chambers?’

‘Where do you have to put conditioning chambers?’

‘Below. It would mean excavating the mountain.’

‘Excavate the mountain,’ Stalin said.

‘And shifting the present station to do it. Shift a whole station? And have engineers sink laboratories in a mountain?’

‘Shift the station, sink engineers in a mountain,’ Stalin said, and laid down his pipe. ‘I will take a nap now.’ He patted Zhelikov on the shoulder. ‘You will stay some days, Lev Viktorovich. We will talk more of this,’ he said.

Zhelikov stayed a week in the Kremlin, and during the following one he took over at Tcherny Vodi.

In the summer and autumn of 1952 engineers levelled and removed the top of the mountain, and began mining inside it. Zhelikov supervised these operations.

At this time the research station had been a
sharashka
–a
special camp for scientists. Some scores of these establishments were scattered about the Soviet Union, together with fifty reserved cites for less secret work. All of them came under the administration of the Ministry for State Security. The cities were normal cities, containing shops, apartment blocks, schools, and they were for free employees: the only restrictions being that permits were needed to get in or out.

The
sharashkas
, on the other hand, were for prisoners serving sentences. Some of the sentences were quite short – eight, ten years; although in the special case of Tcherny Vodi it was understood that nobody would ever get out. A man coming to the end of a ten would merely get another ten for accumulated infringements; or in exceptional circumstances he might get off and become a free worker with privileges. But he would never get out. This was because certain advances in bacteriology could also not be allowed to get out.

Zhelikov made this the first of his changes. All the workers became free workers, although still unable to leave; and he had inquiries made by the security service to attract other specialists, people whose particular situations made them suitable for a life that, while cloistered, offered the highest scientific freedom together with unparalleled living conditions.

The living conditions he set about making.

And he had his chimpanzees flown in from the Caucasus.

In this period Stalin died (of a heart attack, March 1953) and Minister Beria was shot. Their successors had no interest in hibernation but a large amount in Zhelikov’s other developments; and these by now had cost several billions.

The original installation he had had shifted back into position, although now underground. In this he had no interest, but he had its laboratories attached to his own on Level Three. On Level Four he had installed the living quarters – the studio apartments, library, gymnasium, tennis courts, swimming pool and gardens – with special solar lamps, to his own
design, roofed in the ‘outdoor areas’ and controlled to give night and day inside the mountain. He also made the first hybrid apes.

‘Is this real?’ Porter said.

‘Of course.’ Rogachev watched him pouring a drink and nodding up at a Rembrandt. They were back in the library.

‘I choose the pictures from old state catalogues. If they’re available I get them on loan for a few months. We get anything we want – films, music, books, papers. The staff join me here for social evenings occasionally. Or I look into their club. They have their own library, of course; this one is Zhelikov’s, built up over his twenty-five years here.’

‘Well, he doesn’t seem to have wasted his time.’

‘He didn’t waste it anywhere. A truly great man, as history will one day acknowledge. His fellow jailbird, Korolyov you know, they acknowledged only at his state funeral. Then the world knew who had made the satellites. The man himself was kept secret before. His.
space
station they kept secret even for years after his death. But he began the exploration of space. That’s one of the things that came out of the Soviet Union.’

‘Zhelikov’s ape being the other?’

Rogachev smiled.

‘No, no. What
I
have found is the other. Zhelikov was certainly the better scientist. But my discovery came by chance – as the momentous things do. Of course it couldn’t have come without his work, which was in every way remarkable. Yes, he made apes. But he also made problems.’

Zhelikov’s apes, by the early 1960s, were far ahead of anything in the world. This he knew for certain, for he was receiving all research papers, and he also knew the reason for it.

Although still in its infancy, genetic manipulation was causing concern abroad. The scientists engaged in it were finding difficulty in raising funds, were uncertain where the
work would lead, and were worried at possible damage to their future careers.

Zhelikov was unconcerned about his future career, had no budget worries, and knew exactly where his work would lead. It would lead to a hardy animal that could live in Siberia and perform intelligent tasks. He had no ethical doubts at all.

He had a further advantage. The foreign workers, almost to a man, had no special training in physiology. In his own extraordinary life he had trained with the greatest physiologist of his age. Pavlov was noted not only for the ‘Pavlovian reflexes’ of dogs but for his brilliant studies on all mammalian structure.

At Tcherny Vodi Zhelikov had dozens of his unpublished papers, on which they had worked together, with careful sketches of embryonic development. Pavlov had urged him always to study the embryo for an understanding of limbs, organs and other structures, and had passed on his own exceedingly dexterous methods of doing so.

By the mid-1960s Zhelikov had not only a hardy chimpanzee but one that walked upright; that could drive home a nail with a hammer, select and use a nut for a bolt, dress itself in warm clothing, go and find a chosen package in a cold conditioning chamber, and return to unpack and then correctly repack the package.

He bred from the animals, and encountered his problem.

Although his apes reproduced they did so divergently. The intelligent ones proved to be not hardy; the hardy ones not intelligent. This problem occupied him into the next decade, and his advances – all in intelligence – became increasingly self-defeating. An intelligent ape was of use in the Arctic only if it was hardy; there was no present need for one elsewhere. The problem was to combine intelligence
with
hardiness, and reliably reproduce it, generation after generation.