ON THE
BEACH
Misha’s first
impressions of the disturbingly familiar alien continent are of an
oppressively humid heat and the stench of decaying
jellyfish.
The Sergei Korolev floats at anchor in the river
estuary, a huge streamlined visitor from another world. Stubby fins
stick out near the waterline, like a seaplane with clipped wings:
gigantic Kuznetsov atomic turbines in pods ride on booms to either
side of its high-ridged back, either side of the launch/recovery
catapults for its parasite MiG fighter-bombers, aft of the broad
curve of the ekranoplan’s bridge. Near the waterline, a boat bay is
open: a naval spetsnaz team is busy
loading their kit into the landing craft that will ferry them to
the small camp on the beach. Misha, who stands just above the
waterline, turns away from the giant ground-effect ship and watches
his commander, who is staring inland with a faint expression of
worry. “Those trees—awfully close, aren’t they?” Gagarin says, with
the carefully studied stupidity that saw him through the first
dangerous years after his patron Khrushchev’s fall.
“That is indeed what
Captain Kirov is taking care of,” replies Gorodin, playing his role
of foil to the colonel-general’s sardonic humor. And indeed,
shadowy figures in olive green battle dress are stalking in and out
of the trees, carefully laying trip wires and screamers in an arc
around the beachhead. He glances to the left, where a couple of
sailors with assault rifles stand guard, eyes scanning the jungle.
“I wouldn’t worry unduly, sir.”
“I’ll still be
happier when the outer perimeter is secure. And when I’ve got a
sane explanation of this for the comrade general secretary.”
Gagarin’s humor evaporates: he turns and walks along the beach,
toward the large tent that’s already gone up to provide shelter
from the heat of noon. The bar of solid sunlight—what passes for
sunlight here—is already at maximum length, glaring like a rod of
white-hot steel that impales the disk. (Some of the more
superstitious call it the axle of heaven. Part of Gorodin’s job is
to discourage such non-materialist backsliding.)
The tent awning is
pegged back: inside it, Gagarin and Misha find Major Suvurov and
Academician Borisovitch leaning over a map. Already the scientific
film crew—a bunch of dubious civilians from TASS—is busy in a
corner, preparing cans for shooting. “Ah, Oleg, Mikhail.” Gagarin
summons up a professionally photogenic smile. “Getting
anywhere?”
Borisovitch, a
slight, stoop-shouldered type who looks more like a janitor than a
world-famous scientist, shrugs. “We were just talking about going
along to the archaeological site, General. Perhaps you’d like to
come, too?”
Misha looks over his
shoulder at the map: it’s drawn in pencil, and there’s an awful lot
of white space on it, but what they’ve surveyed so far is
disturbingly familiar in outline—familiar enough to have given them
all a number of sleepless nights even before they came ashore.
Someone has scribbled a dragon coiling in a particularly empty
corner of the void.
“How large is the
site?” asks Yuri.
“Don’t know, sir.”
Major Suvurov grumps audibly, as if the lack of concrete
intelligence on the alien ruins is a personal affront. “We haven’t
found the end of it yet. But it matches what we know
already.”
“The aerial survey—”
Mikhail coughs, delicately. “If you’d let me have another flight, I
could tell you more, General. I believe it may be possible to
define the city limits narrowly, but the trees make it hard to
tell.”
“I’d give you the
flight if only I had the aviation fuel,” Gagarin explains
patiently. “A chopper can burn its own weight in fuel in a day of
surveying, and we have to haul everything out here from
Archangelsk. In fact, when we go home we’re leaving most of our
flight-ready aircraft behind, just so that on the next trip out we
can carry more fuel.”
“I understand.”
Mikhail doesn’t look happy. “As Oleg Ivanovitch says, we don’t know
how far it reaches. But I think when you see the ruins you’ll
understand why we need to come back here. Nobody’s found anything
like this before.”
“Old Capitalist Man.”
Misha smiles thinly. “I suppose.”
“Presumably.”
Borisovitch shrugs. “Whatever, we need to bring archaeologists. And
a mass spectroscope for carbon dating. And other stuff.” His face
wrinkles unhappily. “They were here back when we would still have
been living in caves!”
“Except we weren’t,”
Gagarin says under his breath. Misha pretends not to
notice.
By the time they
leave the tent, the marines have gotten the Korolev’s two BRDMs
ashore. The big balloon-tired armored cars sit on the beach like
monstrous amphibians freshly emerged from some primeval sea.
Gagarin and Gorodin sit in the back of the second vehicle with the
academician and the film crew: the lead BRDM carries their
spetsnaz escort team. They maintain a
dignified silence as the convoy rumbles and squeaks across the
beach, up the gently sloping hillside, then down toward the valley
with the ruins.
The armored cars
stop, and doors open. Everyone is relieved by the faint breeze that
cracks the oven heat of the interior. Gagarin walks over to the
nearest ruin—remnants of a wall, waist high—and stands, hands on
hips, looking across the wasteland.
“Concrete,” says
Borisovitch, holding up a lump of crumbled not-stone from the foot
of the wall for Yuri to see.
“Indeed.” Gagarin
nods. “Any idea what this was?”
“Not yet.” The camera
crew is already filming, heading down a broad boulevard between
rows of crumbling foundations. “Only the concrete has survived, and
it’s mostly turned to limestone. This is old.”
“Hmm.” The first
cosmonaut walks round the stump of wall and steps down to the
foundation layer behind it, looking around with interest. “Interior
column here, four walls—they’re worn down, aren’t they? This stuff
that looks like a red stain. Rebar? Found any intact
ones?”
“Again, not yet,
sir,” says Borisovitch. “We haven’t looked everywhere yet, but . .
.”
“Indeed.” Gagarin
scratches his chin idly. “Am I imagining it, or are the walls all
lower on that side?” He points north, deeper into the sprawling
maze of overgrown rubble.
“You’re right, sir.
No theory for it, though.”
“You don’t say.”
Gagarin walks north from the five-sided building’s ruin, looks
around. “This was a road?”
“Once, sir. It was
nine meters wide—there seems to have been derelict ground between
the houses, if that’s what they were, and the road
itself.”
“Nine meters, you
say.” Gorodin and the academician hurry to follow him as he strikes
off, up the road. “Interesting stonework here, don’t you think,
Misha?”
“Yes, sir.
Interesting stonework.”
Gagarin stops
abruptly and kneels. “Why is it cracked like this? Hey, there’s
sand down there. And, um, glass? Looks like it’s melted. Ah,
trinitite.”
“Sir?”
Borisovitch leans
forward. “That’s odd.”
“What is?” asks
Misha, but before he gets a reply both Gagarin and the researcher
are up again and off toward another building.
“Look. The north
wall.” Gagarin’s found another chunk of wall, this one a worn stump
that’s more than a meter high: he looks unhappy.
“Sir? Are you all
right?” Misha stares at him. Then he notices the academician is
also silent, and looking deeply perturbed. “What’s
wrong?”
Gagarin extends a
finger, points at the wall. “You can just see him if you look close
enough. How long would it take to fade, Mikhail? How many years
have we missed them by?”
The academician licks
his lips: “At least two thousand years, sir. Concrete cures over
time, but it takes a very long time indeed to turn all the way to
limestone. And then there’s the weathering process to take account
of. But the surface erosion . . . Yes, that could fix the image
from the flash. Perhaps. I’d need to ask a few colleagues back
home.”
“What’s wrong?” the
political officer repeats, puzzled.
The first cosmonaut
grins humorlessly. “Better get your Geiger counter, Misha, and see
if the ruins are still hot. Looks like we’re not the only people on
the disk with a geopolitical problem . . .”