‘Right next to the stable containing the baby Jesus?’
‘I’m serious! It was a sphere, a metal sphere, the size of a cottage. It came right down.’
‘Like H. G. Wells predicted. Did it make a crater?’
‘No! It descended in silvery light, and hovered a metre or so above the earth. I got out of my car and I walked through the mud — it was muddy, you know. The mud clung to my boots like cold treacle. When I got within twenty feet the thing came to life. It was so smooth and silvery I could see my reflection in it! A silver sphere five metres across. The whole field was reflected in it, distorted after the manner of convex mirrors. And then it grew legs.’
‘It grew legs?’
‘They sprouted from its belly. There was something insectoid about it. It was like a robot-insect. Great tail legs.’
‘Three legs? Like H. G. Wells’s tripods.’
‘Two legs.’
‘So more like Baba Yaga’s house?’
‘They were nothing,’ he said, in a serious voice, ‘like chicken legs.’
‘I’ll tell you one thing I do remember from that time in the dacha,’ I said. ‘I remember we called Wells Shit-Shit-Wells. I remember that. It wasn’t very respectful to our great ancestor, really.’
‘It came after me. Great loping strides. I was terrified. I tried to make it back to my car, but…’ Frenkel slapped both palms onto the table. ‘It got me!’
‘Got you where?’
‘Got me inside its sphere — a metal tentacle came out, and yes, before you say it, that’s like Shit-Shit-Wells too. Except that these were disembodied, radiation creatures; they weren’t the octopoid aliens Wells predicted.’
‘Did the aliens in Wells’s War of the Worlds have eight legs?’ I pondered. ‘I don’t believe they did.’
‘I wish you’d take me seriously!’ said Frenkel.
And he evidently did wish that.
He told me the whole incident. The details piled up. The silver globe wasn’t real. Or it was real, but only the obtrusion into our material dimension of something far greater, a massy transcendentally-furnaced battleship — or something. ‘The radiation aliens,’ said Frenkel, for the half-dozenth time, such that by sheer force of repetition the word began to acquire familiarity and therefore reality in my mind. ‘They don’t communicate using material means, you see. They possess a form of telepathy, I suppose. They probed my mind, and as they did so I caught glimpses of their plan. They — probed me — very fully.’
He stopped and looked up. I became aware of Trofim looming over the table. ‘Comrade Frenkel,’ he said. ‘I need to visit the toilet.’
‘Can it wait?’
‘Not really, comrade.’
Crossly Frenkel waved him away. ‘Go on, then. Hurry.’ As the big man’s back receded across the caf’ floor I thought again about making a run for it. But, as before, something in the room prevented me. Except that there was nothing in the room. There is either something in a room, or there isn’t something in a room; it can’t be both at once. Why didn’t I run for it? You will perhaps think: did I believe that the radiation aliens were in the room? But I didn’t think that. It was something else. I wasn’t sure what.
‘Wake up!’ Frenkel said. ‘Daydreamer!’
‘What?’
‘Wake up! Wake up!’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘I really must be going.’
‘Put yourself in my position for a moment,’ Frenkel advised me, with a queer expression on his face. ‘Imagine that you had become convinced that this story we invented was coming true. How would you explain it?’
‘I’d assume I was dreaming,’ I said, after thinking about it for a moment.
He glowered at me, and then, oddly, he started laughing. ‘Pinch myself on the cheek!’ he chuckled. ‘And wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Very well; let’s assume we tried that, and it had no effect. Assume you decide you’re awake, and it’s still happening. What then?’
The next thing I remember I was outside on the street. It was late. The buildings, towering in the dark all around looked as granite as giant tombstones, punctured in a few places with rectangles of yellow illumination. Above, in the spaces above the rooftops and between the buildings, the sky was black-grey, with the strangest tints of violet and mauve and an unnatural pink or pale green glow to the west. The streetlights burned fuzzily, a line of alien eyes glowering down upon the road. A car passed.
Another.
A small-engine motorcycle buzzed past with a mosquito sound. Mosquito? I reached round to feel the back of my neck. There was a lump.
I don’t have exactly clear memories of getting out of that place. I suppose I said goodbye to Frenkel, once and for all, and got to my feet and simply walked away. Yes: now that I express my supposition I can locate that memory in my head. There it is. I said goodbye; I got up; I left. That is the way memory works. It follows supposition.
I started walking along the street, passing the Office of Liaison and Overseas Exchange; shut up now and dark. There was a taxi parked outside the main entrance, and as I walked past the driver got out onto the pavement. He was a medium-sized, middle-aged man. ‘Taxi for Comrade Skvorecky?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I was told to wait here for Comrade Skvorecky.’
‘How do you know my name?’
‘The fare has already been paid.’
‘Paid?’ I asked. I was surprised, but I overcame that feeling rapidly enough. I’ll confess the thought of being chauffeur-driven home appealed rather more than joining the evening crush on the Metro.
‘I am,’ said the fellow, with a rather prissy exactitude, ‘a licensed taxi driver. My name is Saltykov.’
‘Do you always introduce yourself to your fares, Comrade Saltykov.’
‘No.’
‘Well — all right. A taxi ride home, then.’ I told him my address, and climbed into the back of his vehicle. It did occur to me to wonder whether accepting Frenkel’s paid-for cab was in some sense compromising myself. But I decided that I was too tired to bother my head with untangling his motivations for spinning so peculiar, and improbable, a story — or for seeking me out, as he evidently had, after so many years. There would be time to think it all through the next day, I thought.
The taxi pulled away from the kerb. I settled myself into the back seat as forcefully as if I knew that I was destined to spend several days in that taxi. But, of course, I cannot have known that I was going to spend days on that very seat, inside that very taxi. I could not see the future. Time doesn’t work that way. Time goes from A to B, and not the other way around. Time runs forward. Or it runs backwards. One of the two. But it must do one of those two things, and there cannot be a third thing it does.
CHAPTER 5
I peered through the passenger window and at an unfamiliar neighbourhood. ‘Comrade,’ I said, as the taxi slowed down, ‘you appear to be parking.’
‘We are here, comrade,’ said the driver. He applied the handbrake with an unusual precision. ‘This is the Pushkin Club.’
‘The what?’
‘The Pushkin Chess Club.’
‘I do not live in a club,’ I pointed out. ‘I was hoping to go home.’
‘As a member of the club,’ he said, ‘I invite you to regard the Pushkin as home.’
‘That is indeed generous of you,’ I returned. ‘But I no longer possess the mental clarity to play chess effectively.’
‘Then you shall not play chess!’ He spoke with the magnanimity of a benefactor. Then he got out of the car, came round, and opened the passenger door. I looked up at him from inside. ‘This feels rather,’ I confided, ‘as if you are abducting me.’