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?’
42
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.