Schmidt was a booming braggart, but engaging, and he had a right to be proud of all his country had achieved. And, he claimed, this was the nearest anybody had come to colonising a hostile alien planet. ‘So maybe the Russian flag will be the first to be planted on Mars!’
We applauded such sentiments politely, and I wondered what the Martians might have to say about that.
On the Wednesday afternoon we stopped at a town called Noril’sk, which is on the Yenisei river, still some five hundred miles from our final destination. Here a group of companies were mining for nickel ore. We dropped supplies of various kinds; ours was the first significant visit to the town since the winter had relented.
Eric Eden and I took the chance to slip out of the gondola and walk about the town. It was a shabby, functional place, surrounded by a stout wire fence, the buildings mere shacks of cinder blocks and mortar and prefabricated panels, the streets of bare, tamped-down dirt. There seemed to be cement mixers everywhere. There were elements of mundanity: aside from the factories there was a school, a church, a hospital, a repair shop for the few automobiles in the dirt roads – all mostly half-built. People lived and worked here, then, and raised children. There was even a small cinema; a handwritten billboard told me it was showing Cherie Gilbert’s A Martian in Hollywood. But it was a desolate place, and I was chilled to the bone despite my expensive cold-weather gear.
‘You know, I spent some time in this part of the world before the Second War,’ Eric admitted, for the first time in my hearing.
I grunted. ‘Let me guess. You were here to learn how landships fare on the tundra.’
He smoothly ignored that. ‘It’s not easy out here. Just living, I mean.’ We paused by a half-built shell of concrete and cinderbrick. ‘For a start there’s the months of darkness, when it gets so cold the mortar will freeze before you can set your brick, and even when the summer comes you get this terrible humidity, and mosquitoes everywhere. The people here are a desolate sort, either drafted in or seduced by false promises of a new life on the frontier – you know the kind of thing.’
‘Why the fence? To keep the townsfolk in?’
He grinned. ‘Or the wolves out. They call the moonlight the wolves’ sunshine, you know.’
A hooter sounded, like a ship’s, calling us back to the Vaterland. It was time to move on.
And, even as Eric and I turned away from the fence, the snow started to fall – suddenly, without warning, it seemed to me, from a clear sky. We had to cling to each other, and follow other shadowy forms, to make our way back to the airship.
‘Even here,’ muttered old Arctic hand Eric Eden. ‘Even here, at this extreme place, the ends of the earth, the weather is – odd.’
Thus, Wednesday. We travelled on overnight.
And on the Thursday morning we woke over our destination, the Taymyr peninsula.
8
AT CAPE CHELYUSKIN
After a hurried, subdued breakfast, we passengers donned our cold weather gear once more and prepared to descend from the gondola. We were ready for work; many of the scholars had brought cameras, and various other instruments in bags and cases. As we filed down the gondola’s ramp I recognised one instrument from the manufacturer’s name, stamped on its box; it was a Geiger counter, to measure radiation.
Once outside, standing with Eric and Ben, I discovered that we had come down in the middle of a military camp, over which the flag of the Russian Empire fluttered in a mercifully light breeze. I saw a cluster of buildings, and field guns and heaps of ammunition under tarpaulins, and rows of automobiles, some fitted with skis for travelling on the snow – there was even a landship, a small one, done out in white and grey Arctic camouflage.
All of this, along with an airfield large enough to host an airship the size of the Vaterland, was enclosed by a fence. And on the northern perimeter of the compound I saw a cluster of watchtowers and gates, and a battery of big Navy guns installed on pivoted mounts.
‘That way lies the ocean,’ came a voice. ‘You can smell the salt, I think. And that’s the way the guns are set. To the north, beyond the perimeter.’ It was Walter Jenkins, bundled in black furs. He wore a heavy-looking Russian fur hat, and what I could see of his face was screened by the lenses of his thick dark sunglasses, and pale skin cream. I wondered if his scarring was made more or less a discomfort in the deep cold.
‘Good morning, Walter,’ Eric Eden said dryly.
Joe Hopson clapped him on the arm. ‘It is good to see you. You mustn’t hide yourself away on the return jaunt, you hear? With four of us – well, that’s enough for bridge.’
‘Bridge?’ Walter seemed bemused.
Now Otto Schmidt called us together, the crowd of us passengers with a couple of the crew, and a squad of soldiers. He led us towards the gate on the north side. Towards the sea, then.
Walter walked with me. ‘It is not far to our destination. The Russians, having made the discovery by chance – after I had predicted it for years! – have set up shop admirably close to the site. Do you know where you are, Julie?’
‘The Taymyr Peninsula. North coast of Russia, a bit of land sticking out into the Arctic Ocean—’
‘And separating the Seas of Kara and Leptov, yes.’
We came to the mesh fence, at a heavily guarded gate. A crewman from the Vaterland had already taken the passports of the passengers in the party; a junior officer scrutinised these, and called us through. Beyond the fence, oddly, the scent of the ocean seemed much stronger.
‘But,’ Walter said, ‘what is this place in particular? Do you know? It is called Cape Chelyuskin. The extreme northern end of the peninsula…’
Now, as I looked around, I could see the ocean. Beyond a swathe of dark, hard-frozen beach, the water looked black, and further out sea ice gleamed white as bone. As we walked slowly forward, I saw a shadow in the ground before us: a circle, a pit, watched over by soldiers with automatic weapons and field wireless sets. A shaft dug down into the ground: it was just as I had witnessed at Amersham.
‘And this Cape,’ Walter went on, ‘happens to be the northernmost spot on the whole of the Eurasian continent. Right here, where we’re standing. The northernmost. Now do you see?’
I breathed, ‘The Martians. They came north. As far as they could.’
‘From all across Eurasia, from Berlin, St Petersburg, from Peking, even from Constantinople. As for those who landed in the Americas, it is thought that again they streamed north, and crossed into Asia by the Bering Strait – not much of an obstacle to the Martians, especially in the winter. There were a few sightings in the Canadian territories – Martians on the move! It’s odd, by the way, that they made little use of their flyingmachines.’
‘And Africa? What of the Martians of Durban?’
‘That remains a mystery. They left their pits, certainly. There are rumours of sightings in the forests of central Africa: finds of gorillas and chimpanzees, apparently drained of their blood… Some day we may send an expedition into that dark heart and find out. In South America it may be the same, though no one has yet penetrated the Amazon jungles to find out… Come now. There’s something else you must see.’