But it’s a start.
Part III
“All large trees on the mountains were leveled in dense rows, whereas in the valleys one could see both roots and trunks of age-old giants of the taiga broken like reeds. The tops of the fallen trees were directed to us. We were going north towards the super-hurricane that had raged here years ago… I climbed Shakrama mountain and for the first time saw the unbelievable land of dead forest… everything has been leveled and scorched in the Great Hollow… and in the center of it all, a cluster of trees were still standing upright like bare telegraph poles, all devoid of leaf and branch.”
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?