Peter Higgins - Truth and Fear

‘What you’re going to see,’ Dukhonin began, ‘needs no introduction. It speaks for itself. The culmination of years of work. Years of patient—’

‘Get on with it.’

He switched off the room light and set the projector running. It clattered and whirred, casting flickering monochrome images on the screen. White letters, jittering almost imperceptibly on a dark background under a faint snow of dust and scratch-tracks:

A series of serial numbers and acronyms. A date about two months before.

The only sounds in the room were the clattering of the projector and Dukhonin’s heavy breathing. From time to time he gave a quiet moan. He probably didn’t know he was doing it.

Chazia watched the screen.

Men in heavy winter clothing were working outside in the snow. They were making adjustments to a large and heavy-looking metal object, a squat, solid, rounded capsule about ten feet high and twenty feet long. It resembled a swollen samovar turned on its side. Tubes and rivets and plates. One of the men turned to the camera and grinned. Thumbs up. Then the men had gone and the screen showed the thing alone. The camera dwelled on it for a moment or two and a caption came up. UNCLE VANYA. Then the scene cut to a wide expanse of windswept ice. A tall metal gantry, a framework of girders rising into a bleak sky. Tiny figures moving at the foot of it gave a sense of scale.

Another scene change: the heavy, swollen capsule being winched up the gantry and set in place at the top. More snow-bearded technicians gurning excitedly at the lens. And then nothing. Only the flat emptiness of the winter tundra: mile upon mile of grey icefields under a grey sky. Chazia waited. Nothing happened. Thirty seconds. A minute. Nothing.

Chazia shifted in her seat.

‘Steopan—’

‘Wait,’ he hissed. Tension in his voice. Excitement. ‘Wait.’

The entire screen lit up, a brilliant, dazzling white. A blinding flash erasing the tundra and the sky.

Dukhonin let out a small ecstatic sigh.

‘You see?’ he said. ‘You see what I can give you?’

Chazia was sitting forward in her chair, gripping the armrests. There was a knot in her stomach of joy and excitement and desire. As the blinding light faded, the screen showed a huge burning column roaring into the sky. There was no sound but she could hear it roaring. A thick pillar of destruction surging thousands of feet upwards. The air itself on fire. Boiling. The base of the column must have been five hundred yards across, and thickening steadily. It looked like an immense tree in full summer leaf, half a mile high. A mile. At the top it flattened and spilled outwards, its leafhead a canopy of roiling power and destruction. Cataclysm. The force of it left her breathless.

At the base of the mile-high tree a wind began: an expanding circular shout of power, racing outwards from the centre, scouring the snow off the ice, scouring the ice itself, whipping it into a tidal wall hundreds of feet high, hurtling at tremendous speed towards the watching camera. When it struck the lens the picture stopped. The screen went blank. The film clattered to a halt.

Dukhonin switched on the room light and extinguished the projector lamp.

‘Did you see? Did you see? One of these–just one of them!–can obliterate an entire city. And at Novaya Zima they are building hundreds. And that’s just the beginning. We have plans… Imagine, Lavrentina… There is no limit. No limit at all.’

Chazia felt a constriction in her throat. Power on this scale… Her legs and arms felt weak. She did not trust herself to stand.

‘Who knows , Steopan?’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Who knows ? Does Khazar know? Does Fohn ? Was it only me that did not know about this?’

‘No, no,’ said Dukhonin. ‘Of course not. This is all mine. My doing. They brought this idea to me alone. And I have made it real! But you can join me, Lavrentina, and—’

‘Who brought it Steopan ? Who brought you this knowledge? ’

‘Technicians. Professors. Scientists. They’re at Novaya Zima, all of them.

‘But where is this from ? Where did they get this knowledge from? ’

‘What kind of question…? They are very brilliant men.’

‘And they came to you?’

‘Of course they came to me. An undertaking like this needs resources. Materials. Workers. Organisation of the highest order. They had gone as far as they could on their own. They needed help. Who else would they come to?’

‘You’re saying these scientists and professors did this?’ She waved her hand towards the blank projection screen. ‘ This? On their own ? They worked on it, knowing what they had, and never told anyone. Never sought official sanction? Never came to the Novozhd in Council for recognition and protection and support. And then, when they had gone as far as they could on their own they came to you ? To you alone ? Who approached you? Some professor ? Some engineer ?’

‘Not at all. Of course not. They were frightened men. Out of their depth. They knew the importance of what they had, and the risks… the risks that it would get into the wrong hands. You couldn’t trust an idiot like Khazar with a thing like this. There was a middle man. An intermediary.’

‘Who?’

‘His name was Lura.’

‘ Lura? ’ Chazia stared at Dukhonin. She wanted to hurt him. Gouge out his other eye. Tear out his throat. ‘Shall I describe to you this Lura ?’ she said. ‘Tall and thin? A pockmarked complexion? Thick shiny hair and big brown eyes like a fucking cow? A red silk shirt?’

‘Yes. That’s right. That’s Lura.’

‘It is Kantor,’ said Chazia. ‘Josef Kantor.’

Chazia turned to Bez, waiting like a shadow behind Dukhonin.

‘Kill this useless idiot,’ she said.

Bez moved so fast that Chazia barely saw what he did.

‘Find Iliodor, wherever he is,’ she said when he had finished. ‘I want these offices closed. The whole thing completely gone. Everyone who works here is to be dealt with. No trace. He is to do nothing about Novaya Zima, not yet, but I want a list of all the personnel there. Tomorrow. I want this tomorrow. In the morning. Tell Iliodor this.’

Bez nodded.

‘And when you have done that, there is a woman. Maroussia Shaumian. Iliodor has the file. The SV were to pick her up this evening, but they did not succeed. There have been previous failures. Find her and bring her to me.’

‘Of course,’ said Bez. Something lopsided happened to his face. Chazia realised it was a smile.

‘I want her alive,’ she said. ‘And in a condition to speak to me.’

In cloud-thickened moonless snow-glimmered darkness, in the hard bitter coldest part of the night, three miles east of the Lodka, crooked in a sharp elbow-bend of the River Mir, pressing hard against the south embankment, lay the eight flat, tangled, overgrown, neglected, lampless and benighted square miles of the Field Marshal Khorsh-Brutskus Park of Culture and Rest.

Three centuries earlier, the Park had begun life as the gardens of the Shurupinsky Palace, landscaped by Can Guarini himself, and the shell of the palace–its grounds long since appropriated to the greater needs of the citizens of Mirgorod–still stood, encircled ( girt is the only word that will actually do) by an elegant, attenuated, over-civilised gesture of a moat, slowly succumbing to decay and sporadic, unenthusiastic vandalism. Long before the expropriation, the successive princes Shurupin in their financial prime had provided for themselves handsomely. In the high summer of the palace’s splendour, the Ladies’ New Magazine had produced a special supplement devoted to describing in detail, with tipped-in lithographs by Fromm, the thirty-two bedrooms, the eleven bathrooms, the glorious ballroom, the galleried library, the palm court, the orangery, the velodrome, the stabling for fifty horses, the private hospital, the theatre, the extensive Cabinet (in truth, a Hall) of Curiosities, the observatory with its copper revolving roof and huge telescope, and the artificial island in the lake where, on summer afternoons, tea might be taken under a lacy canopy of ironwork.