Wonderful, said Hendricks, and got on with his own. These were not going so well either.
By Christmas — at Christmas — the next news arrived. The Japanese ship had crept back into Nagasaki unnoticed. All the crew had crept off it, and away on leave. When they came back they were being dispersed and the ship broken up. For its engines were clapped out and its equipment was clapped out, and the ship was finished.
Hendricks passed a hand over his face. He felt like that ship.
He had at last received a reply from the wild young man. His own previous letter, one of a series, had been dignified and discreet. He had had it mailed in an area where the young man was thought to be at present. It was on plain paper and gave a local postbox number for reply. It said that the old friend mentioned earlier, from Oxford, England, was making a last attempt to reach him. The matter was urgent and personal, and a kind acknowledgment was requested by return for the present letter.
The kind acknowledgment came back on the letter itself. It was in red felt-tip and said fuck off spook.
Hendricks thought he could give up then. Nothing more would come, he was certain. The crew of a Japanese tramp would show no zeal to help a friendly intelligence agency. The young man was not friendly to any intelligence agency, and had not been fooled by this one.
But still he postponed the decision. Not much money was being spent, and he decided to consider the matter again in April, when the new budgetary year came round.
April came round, and he considered it again. In particular he considered Rogachev.
Not a bad record, but not outstanding; nothing at all out of the ordinary. He had done time in a labour camp in the fifties, but so had many other Russian scientists — it was a respectable thing to have done. Respectable, in fact, was the description for him, and biology his field — a teamwork field. If anything remarkable was going on in it some whiff would surely have come from other teams by now. No other whiffs had come. Was it likely that an old man of eighty-one had come up with something on his own? It was not likely. Far more likely, the years of isolation had brought on childish delusions. There was something childishly gleeful in the tone of the messages.
Hendricks hesitated only briefly, then he closed the inquiry down: papers to be kept current for six months in case by chance something new did come up, although he didn’t expect anything to come up.
But something did then come up. By chance something quite new came up.
7
The satellite came up, over the Indian Ocean. And twenty minutes later it was over Siberia.
The satellite was one of a group of three delivered to the US military by Boeing, a development of the company’s Big Bird series. Each of the three had a telemetry package that allowed instantaneous relay, and each was in a slightly different orbit.
This one was in a polar orbit. Travelling north-south, it made a complete circuit of the earth once every ninety-four minutes. Its intelligence-gathering equipment was turned on only over the territory of the old Soviet Union, however. There it had to monitor upwards of 500 land objectives.
An hour before another satellite had overflown the site, and there had been no recordable activity. But when this one came round, 300 miles to the west of it, the fires were already burning.
At first the fact went unnoticed for the satellite’s current objective was a missile base. Of this it had to take four still photographs and ten seconds of video. All the stills were good, despite freckling along the right-hand edges, but the results showed no change and were merely saved for reference.
The video was different. Something was spotted moving in it. A loaded flat-bed truck was moving. This was unusual at three o’clock in the morning, and attention was diverted to it to find out what it might be carrying through deep snow at that hour. For this reason some time passed before it was noticed that the right-hand edge of the video was also freckled.
Optical enhancement brought up the freckles as flames and interest rapidly switched to the new development.
The location of the distant fire was soon established, as was its probable origin in an explosion: the flames were still shooting one hundred feet high. This was surprising, for the low-rated objective had not been known to house explosives. In earlier listings it had been marked as a weather station. Later analysis had shown the ground to be covered over a wide area with ventilators, indicating that work went on below ground, and too extensively for simple meteorology. The radio traffic and transport pattern showed no military significance, however, so the low rating was retained, but all visible structures were marked and thereafter updated. They consisted of a few concrete buildings, telegraph poles, generator housings, power pylons, and a fenced area of sheds, evidently used for storage, just off the landing strip.
The enhanced freckles were compared with earlier photographs, and some differences emerged. The largest concrete structure, apparently the dome of something below, had vanished, and so had the generator housings. Pylons and poles had been toppled, sheds blown down, and burning debris scattered over a wide area.
More optical work brought other images into definition. A thin thread-like line of beads, at first glance glowing debris, was detached from its background of flame and translated into a formation of men. They were standing in line, each with his hands on the shoulders of the man in front. They were bandaged about the eyes, and dressed only in underpants — their clothing evidently abandoned in flight from the burning buildings.
Slightly apart from this line was another man, also in underpants, but with no discernible bandage. This individual had something in his hands. It was not possible to see what it was, but a study of the video showed his head going up and down while those of the men in line turned towards him and away.
An anthropometrist was called in.
This expert’s field was body movement and measurement and he concluded that what was in the man’s hand was a list, and that a rollcall was going on; and from the ten seconds of action that it was a rapid one, not surprising for almost naked men in fifty degrees of frost. But some aspects of it puzzled him, and he asked for further imaging work to clarify the effects of flame and heat distortion. The imaging work was done but it did not solve the problem. He ran a few tests to prove that what he was beginning to suspect could not be true. But it seemed that it was true.
the men who stood in their underpants in the Siberian ice had arms that were too long. There was something not right about their femurs, too, and the whole shape of their legs. The man reading the list and calling out the names was built the same way. And however the anthropometrist juggled the results, the way did not turn out to be human.
April was the month of this observation.
8
In April Lazenby was into a fish, and it was a magnificent one.
The salmon had actually looked at him as it leapt. It was as big as a big dog and all the way through its long arc it had looked at him. Then it hit the water and went deep, into the Long Pool, taking Lazenby’s enormous Bloody Butcher with it.
Last year he had caught nothing at all, but already this season he had had several splendid touches. The river was in spate, red-brown with peat, and roaring like an engine. It was full of fish. The water boiled over the rocks, spray dashing high, and wherever he looked there were fish. The very air was full of them. He’d seen nothing like it! An incredible spring run!
He had tried all his normal flies, big sunk ones for the coloured water, Thunder and Lightning, Childers, Ackroyd. And they’d gone for them, oh yes; some heart-stopping tugs. Tugs only, but they couldn’t make out the flies in all the peat. For the fish to take it needed something flashier, a big old-fashioned Butcher, so he had tied one on, and right away had the rod nearly snatched out of his hands. He backed up the bank now and scrambled along it, letting out line. He could feel the fish on the end, very strong, twisting and turning.