‘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 Trofim: 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.
Poor old Saltykov.
‘I thought you said,’ I put in, in as steady a voice as I could manage, ‘that your gun has been taken from you?’
‘Pending investigation,’ he confirmed. ‘But my muscles are still there - I have not lost my muscular strength.’
‘You always were a big Slav,’ I agreed.
‘And now, in your enfeebled state, you are frankly no match for me.’ I saw the glint of metal tucked into the sleeve of his coat. ‘Come! Take me to the hotel.’
‘We’ll need to get a tram,’ I said. ‘It’s quite a long way from here. Or we could get a taxi.’
‘Distance,’ said Frenkel, giving me another slap on the back to move me along. ‘In a sense it is a subjective quality, is it not? Distortions in the space-time continuum. For what you describe as a long way, reachable only by taxi,
I
would call just across the road.’ He pointed at the entrance to our hotel. ‘The very building from which I saw you and Saltykov come out not half an hour ago.’
Another push, and I stumbled a few more steps. ‘It’s really not a very nice hotel,’ I said. ‘Why don’t we find somewhere nice for a drink? We can continue our conversation. I was enjoying our conversation.’
‘Come on,’ he said, giving me another shove. ‘I have something special for you. You can still serve the greater good.’
The road was not busy, which was fortunate since it took me a long time to shuffle across to the far side. I felt enormously decrepit. I felt this because it was true. And there I was, standing in front of the main entrance to the hotel, with Frenkel’s wrestler’s torso pressed up against my back. I could feel the sharp point of his knife against my kidney. ‘Straight through the lobby and into the lift,’ he said, into my ear.
‘The key.’ I said. ‘I’ll need to collect the key from the concierge.’
‘You really think I’m a fucking idiot,’ said Frenkel, not unkindly. ‘That I should fall for such a thing? You didn’t leave the key with the concierge. She’s still up there in the room. You can just knock on the door, and she’ll let you in.’