Altered States -Volume III. Hinge of Fate

Chapter 7

Evgeny Krinov handed the young staffer a large box, a solemn look on his face.

“Take these as well,” he said matter of factly. “They’re just cluttering up the storage room and have become a fire hazard. So let us put them to the fire and be done with it. See that they go directly to the incinerator.”

“As you wish, sir.” The staffer took the box and hastened away, and Krinov watched him go, his eyes dark and thoughtful. That is the last of them, he thought. That will put an end to Kulik’s nonsense once and for all.

An astronomer and geologist, Krinov was a well known scientific researcher with an expertise in meteorite falls. Born in 1906, he was a two year old child when the greatest fall of his lifetime, perhaps the greatest in modern history, occurred in the strange event on the morning of June 30, 1908, just north of the Stony Tunguska River in Siberia. As it happened, however, Krinov was working at the meteor division of the Mineralogy Museum of the Soviet Academy of Sciences between 1926 and 1930, when the intrepid Leonid Kulik mounted his first expeditions to the Tunguska region to try and discover the cause of the event.

It was very strange, but Kulik had uncovered a number of key findings that could lead to the answer to the enigma. The first were the awesome physical evidence of a massive explosion in the Great Hollow. Thirty million trees were felled there, in a radial pattern where each fallen tree pointed back to the epicenter of the cataclysmic event. The second key finding had been thermal-the clear scorching of the trees, even beyond the fallen zone which covered all of 1400 square kilometers. A blinding flash of light had left its imprint in the dead wood, and searing flames left their mark well beyond the Great Hollow.

The next key clue was more enigmatic, a magnetic footprint that seemed to lay on the land, ranging 1400 square kilometers. The soil itself exhibited the effects of some strange magnetic anomaly, and it was later learned that disturbances in the earth’s magnetic field had both preceded and followed the event. Auroras and strange noctilucent clouds appeared for days after.

This was not all. There were botanic effects in the plants, mutations in the animals, strange genetic effects that caused trees to enter a period of accelerated growth at the edge of the event, while others were twisted and stunted into malformed shapes, some flecked with small embedded nodules of glass. Exotic materials were found in the soil, and there was a measurable radiation effect, ionizing radiation that became thermo-luminescent at night, creating an eerie glow at times over the land.

Krinov got very interested in the matter, and resolved to accompany Kulik on a return expedition years later, in 1930. He still bore the scars of that journey, and in more than one way. Braving the Siberian winter was always dangerous, and he had suffered a severe frostbite on his feet that compelled him to withdraw and spend a lengthy time in the hospital. The doctors had been forced to amputate a big toe, and now Krinov walked with a characteristic limp, though that was not the worst mark the trip to Tunguska had left on him.

Kulik was convinced that the site he had discovered, that haunting swath of utter destruction in the Great Hollow, was hiding the hidden remains of a meteorite, though no evidence was ever found to support this claim. Yet Kulik’s ardor would not abate. He set himself to draining and digging up one swampy bog hole after another, disheartened to find a broken tree stump in his favored prospect, which proved it could not be the site of an impact. Anything big enough to cause the devastation that stretched for kilometers in all directions would certainly not have left a tree stump standing at the bottom of its impact crater. Kulik had forbidden any photographs of that stump, but Krinov had secretly taken several to use as evidence in the heated scientific debate that he knew would soon follow on the heels of the expedition.

Kulik remained determined to continue looking for the meteorite, and it was said that he eventually found something very strange during one of his excavations. When questioned about his findings one day the bristly Kulik just looked at Krinov from behind those dark round eyeglasses of his, his eyes strangely alight. Then he did something that astounded Krinov. He reached into his pocket and handed his associate a small hand compass.

“Find north for me please,” Kulik had said quietly.

Krinov blinked, but indulged his colleague and stood in the center of the room, consulting the compass until he could point himself north. Then Kulik got up and walked slowly to Krinov’s side, a wry smile on his face.

“Are you sure?” he said.

To his amazement, Krinov looked down at his compass and saw it spinning in mad circles. He looked at Kulik, who then stepped back, taking his seat again, gesturing that his associate should consult his compass again. Sure enough, the reading was normal now. Krinov tapped it, looking at the compass with some suspicion.

“Oh yes, I thought you would jump to that conclusion,” said Kulik. “It’s quite proper. Keep it and see for yourself.” Then he got up and slowly headed for the door, turning with a smile as he left. “Good day, Evgeny.”

Krinov never forgot that, or anything else he had learned on that expedition. He tested the compass for long years after that, and it always read true. But nothing else ever read true concerning Tunguska. It was most disturbing. Kulik had labored to take aerial photographs of the whole disaster site and delivered them to the academy to fuel the debate. There were 1500 in all, and Krinov spent a long time studying them… until they became a fire hazard.

One day, his soul still shadowed by the strange events of that brief time he had spent in the wild lands of the Siberian north, he gathered up each and every one of the negatives, put them in a sturdy box with a bunch of old newspapers, and handed them off to a staffer with the order to take them directly to the incinerator. There, he thought with just the barest sigh of relief. Now no one else will ever know…

Yet others did know, though what they had discovered in that forsaken place was kept a well guarded secret, known only to a very few. One of them was a man who followed in Krinov’s footsteps, one Nikolai Vladimirovic Vasilyev, who later assumed the title Krinov once held as Deputy Chairman of the Commission on meteorites and cosmic dust at the Russian Academy of Sciences. It was Vasilyev who had come across a hidden cache of positive photographs made by the very same negatives Krinov had destroyed that day.

It was Vasilyev who then devoted his life to the study of the Tunguska event, becoming the director of the Interdisciplinary Independent Tunguska Expeditions society, and collecting data and writing about the event to his dying day. And it was Vasilyev who penned the cryptic notes into his literature concerning the many “oddities” surrounding the event, claiming it was evidence of something much more than a simple meteorite strike, something vast and deeply significant, and a warning concerning the possibility of a collision with earth threatening “aliens” from outer space. What had he discovered in those photographs? What was Krinov really trying to hide by destroying the negatives?

Mainstream science had long ago dismissed the notion that the explosion in 1908 had been caused by a UFO, but there are other “aliens” that come from space, and the earth had been visited by them many times before.

Aboard the airship Narva, Captain Selikov wanted to get as far away from that river as he could, but he also knew it was dangerous to do so until they had a firm fix on their location.

“This weather is clouding over again,” he said as he shook his head, clearly unhappy. “The cloud deck is very low and it extends for what looks to be two hundred kilometers in every direction. We can’t see a thing up here, and I’m not inclined to take the ship down until I can determine how thick that deck is. But we might get down right on top of the clouds and use the sub-cloud car.”

“What is that?” Orlov had never heard of such a thing.

“Think of it as a bit of an amusement park ride, Mister Orlov,” said Selikov. And he explained how they would lower a device, a spy basket, that looked like a big hollow bomb suspended on a long cable, complete with tail fins to aid its movement through the air.

“A man with good eyes in there can call up the land forms and then we can find the river again and navigate. Otherwise we could drift about up here and get even more lost than we already are. If the deck isn’t too low, we’ll reel you in and come on down.”

“Good then,” said Orlov. “Let me be the man in the basket. It’s boring shuffling about up here trying to stay warm.”

“I’m afraid you won’t get any help on keeping warm if you volunteer here,” Selikov warned. “There’s no heat in the car.”

“Well, there’s no heat up here either, so what’s the difference?”

“You can read a navigation chart?”

“Of course,” said Orlov, with just a hint of irritation. So it was decided, and Orlov was led off to the rear gondola by a mishman. When he saw the contraption he was about to ride in, he grinned from ear to ear. It was exactly as Selikov had described it, the shape of a huge bomb, with windows in the nose and four fins on the narrow tail. A man could lay prone inside, his head in the nose, and make observations that he could call up to the airship bridge gondola above on a hand cranked telephone.

“Here,” said the man, handing him a pair of binoculars and a chart book. “You’ll need these.”

Minutes later they were lowering the pod on the long steel cable and Orlov thrilled to the sound of the wind whistling on the tail fins, though its cold fingers found their way into every seam and hollow, chilling him at once.

Down he went, trailing behind the great mass of Narva until the airship was lost from sight and, in spite of the chilling cold, Orlov found the ride thrilling, laughing as he was swallowed by the heavy vapors of the cloud deck. He was to call up the moment he broke through the deck, but it took much longer than he expected. Finally, when the cable was near its maximum extension, the mist and cloud thinned and the pod broke through into clear air.

Now Orlov thrilled to the sight of the vast landscape beneath him, the endless green forest of the Taiga as far as the eye could see. Small lakes and marshy peat bogs dotted the landscape, and he caught the dull gleam of water everywhere. The last time he had seen anything so exhilarating was when he had leapt from the KA-226 helicopter over the Mediterranean, and came parachuting down off the Spanish coast. Soon he spied a wandering ribbon of grey water off his starboard side, and he consulted his chart book, looking for some telltale bend or curve in the river’s course that he could match up to the drawings.

He called up the sighting, cranking up the box that operated like a military field phone and sending navigation orders to the helm. Little by little he maneuvered the airship to starboard, until they were directly over the river, and slowly heading northeast.

Then he saw it, something winking like sunlight on a diamond in the distance. He watched it for some time, then decided to steer the airship a few more points to starboard to get closer. Yes, there could be no doubt now. It was no random reflection where the sun might have broken through a hole in the clouds to find water. Could it be deliberate? Was someone was down there with a mirror or some other shiny metal, perhaps even a lantern, trying to catch his eye? He called up to notify Captain Selikov to see what he wanted to do.

“Good news,” said Selikov on the phone. “Keep us close to that signal. We’ll hover here and see what we can find out about it. That may be a local Evenik hunter who can put us on the map.”

The airship hovered and they soon began the slow process of reeling in the sub-cloud car, until Orlov was hauled up through the cloud deck and his pod was recovered. Then Narva achieved a slight change in her gas bag pressure balance using the pumps to move helium and inflate the ballonets to reduce buoyancy. It was just enough to allow the ship to slowly descend through the thick, grey clouds until her vast bulk emerged like a great alien spacecraft, slowly descending towards the forest below.

Now they could all see the glint of something on the tundra beneath them, a bright object in a clearing that occasionally caught the sunlight that was able to pierce the weather in thin golden shafts. It was not a man after all, not a local hunter, and Captain Selikov was disheartened.

“Well at least you got us to the river again,” he said. “I had hoped we would find someone out here, but what are the chances of that?”

“You mean to move on?” Orlov seemed eager to explore the finding and see what they had discovered.

“Why not?”

“Look at this,” said the Chief, with a wry grin. He handed Selikov his compass and the hands were making a wild spin, much more erratic than they had seen before.

“Yes? So the compass is still useless. What of it?”

“It was never this bad,” said Orlov. “Whatever that thing is it may be the source of this interference. Why don’t I go down with a few men to have a look.”

Selikov seemed restless, and clearly uneasy with the proposition. He had heard too many stories of this region, the stuff of horror tales and nightmares. Besides that, he felt an unaccountable anxiety here, a chill along his spine that was not from the Siberian cold. He had been watching the ship’s elevator panel to note the airship’s pitch, and was surprised by the odd vibration he had noted in the glass leveling tube. It was not the engines, he knew. Like Dobrynin with his reactors, Selikov had come to know every sound and vibration of his airship over the years, and his engines had been running smoothly.

No. It was something else, and it gave him a feeling of profound unease. There was something wrong here. He could see it in the glint of light from the clearing below, and feel it in the air all about him. Yet he could not grasp what it was, like a sound just below the threshold of hearing that nonetheless could be subtly perceived, a ghostly cantata that for him was a dirge from hell itself.

“It looks metallic,” said Orlov, his curiosity obvious as he studied the light source through a pair of binoculars. “If this is the source of that magnetic interference, we ought to have a look.”

It was only Orlov’s insistence as the nominal mission leader that compelled the Captain to relent and hover in place, descending into a clearing not far from the source of the light and hovering the ship at 100 meters.

“Alright, Orlov,” he said quickly. “We’re wasting time here. That’s probably nothing more than an aircraft that got lost out here and crashed. If you must go see for yourself, then be quick about it. We can lower you and a few men in the main cargo basket aft.”

“Good enough,” said Orlov. “Hey Troyak,” he shouted. “Bring your equipment!”

The Chief decided to go down with Troyak and another Marine, a man named Chenko, and they would do a brief ground reconnaissance to see what Orlov had discovered. Orlov did not believe in fairy tales and ghost stories, though he had to admit that Selikov’s dark mood, and the almost palpable edginess and fear displayed by many of the crew members, was somewhat infectious. His curiosity drove him on that day, though he would come to regret his little fishing expedition here in more ways than one.