Ball Lightning(31)
After Lin Yun translated, he shrugged nonchalantly. “We drop.”
He added a few more sentences, which Lin Yun translated. “In Siberia, a one hundred percent guarantee isn’t necessarily a good thing. Sometimes you fly all the way only to discover it would have been better to have fallen halfway. Dr. Gemow knows this from experience. Isn’t that right, Doctor?”
“That’s enough, Captain,” Gemow said, obviously pricked by the remark.
“You used to be an air force pilot?” Lin Yun asked Levalenkov.
“Of course not. Just the last guard commander at the base.”
We felt a sudden heaviness, and out the window the snowy fields fell away as the plane took off. Now, apart from the engine sound, the snow beat even more urgently on the plane. The air currents blew away the snow that had accumulated in the window troughs. Looking outside beneath the plane, we could see through the dense snow and fog the vast forests slowly slipping past, or the occasional iced-over lake, spots of white dotted through the black forests that reminded me of the photos on Gemow’s wall. Looking down at Siberia, I felt immensely gratified that ball lightning had brought me to a place I never imagined I would go.
“Siberia, hardship, romance, ideals, sacrifice...,” Lin Yun murmured, her head leaning on the glass as she raptly watched the foreign land.
Gemow said, “You’re talking about the Siberia of the past and of fiction. Today all that’s left is greed and loss. Everywhere on the ground below us is rampant logging and hunting, and black crude from oil-field leaks flows unchecked.”
“Chinese,” said Levalenkov from the pilot’s seat. “Lots of Chinese. They exchange fake alcohol that turns you blind for our furs and timber. They sell down jackets filled with chicken feathers....?But friends of Dr. Gemow I’ll trust.”
We stayed silent. The storm buffeted the plane about like a leaf, and we wrapped tightly in our coats against the torment of the cold.
After around twenty more minutes of flying, the plane started its descent. Below us I could see a large clearing among the trees, where the plane eventually landed. When we disembarked, Gemow said, “Leave the coats. You won’t need them.” This baffled us, since the door had opened to a blast of threateningly frigid air, and the world of swirling snow outside was even more formidable. Leaving Levalenkov behind to wait for us, Gemow headed straight out from the plane with us following close behind as the wind ripped through our clothes like gauze. The snow was deep, but the sensation under my feet told me that we were walking along rail tracks. Not far ahead of us was a surface entrance to a tunnel, but from here we could tell it had been sealed up by a concrete wall. We entered the short tunnel portion before the cement wall, which got us out of the wind a bit. Gemow pushed away the snow and heaved aside the large rock he uncovered to reveal a dark hole about one meter in diameter.
Gemow said, “This is a spur tunnel I dug around the cement seal. It’s over ten meters long.” As he spoke he took out three large rechargeable flashlights, passed one to each of us, and, carrying the third, motioned for us to follow him into the hole.
I was right behind him, with Lin Yun taking up the rear, as we practically crawled through the squat tunnel. It was claustrophobic in the cramped space, and my feeling of suffocation grew the farther in I went. Suddenly Gemow stood up, and I followed. In the gleam of the flashlight I saw we were in a broad tunnel that sloped gently downward into the earth, leading to the train tracks I had sensed outside and off into the darkness. I shone the flashlight on the wall, and saw smooth cement studded with metal pegs and bands, evidently once hung with electrical cables. We followed the tunnel downward, and the chill gradually disappeared as the depth increased. Then we caught the odor of damp, and heard dripping water—the temperature was now above the freezing point.
Space suddenly opened up before us. My flashlight beam lost its target, as if the tunnel had come out into the pitch-black night. But looking carefully I could still see the circle illuminated by the flashlight high up on the ceiling, too high and too dim to make anything out. Our footsteps had multiple echoes, so I couldn’t be certain how big the place was.
Gemow stopped and lit a cigarette. Then he began: “More than forty years ago, I was a doctoral student in physics at Moscow State University. I still remember clearly the day that thousands of us watched Yuri Gagarin, just returned from space, cross Red Square in an open-top jeep. He waved flowers, and his chest was covered in medals. Overflowing with passion and harboring a desire to accomplish a grand thing in a brand-new world, I voluntarily requested to join the Siberian branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences that was just then being set up.
“Once I got there, I told my supervisor that I wanted to work on something completely new, something with no foundation whatsoever, regardless of the difficulty. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘You’ll join Project 3141.’ Later I found out that the project code had been chosen based on the value of pi. For days after first meeting the person in charge of the project, the academician Nikolai Niernov, I didn’t know what it was about. Niernov was a very unusual person, fanatical even given the politics of the time, someone who secretly read Trotsky and was enamored with the idea of global revolution. When I asked him about the nature of Project 3141, this is what he said: ‘Comrade Gemow, I know that recent accomplishments in space flight are particularly attractive to you, but what do they matter? From orbit, Gagarin wasn’t able to toss so much as a rock down onto the heads of those capitalists in Washington. But our project is different. If we succeed, it will turn all the conventional weapons of the imperialists into toys, and make their air force flight groups as fragile as butterflies, and make their fleets as flimsy as cardboard boxes floating on the water!’