‘I am truly sorry, comrade,’ he said. ‘But I cannot report failure of the mission to Moscow. I must detonate the grenade.’
‘Even though it will kill you.’
‘It will kill you also.’
‘That,’ I said, ‘is also an important consideration.’
‘My father,’ said Trofim, standing straighter as he gave vent to this small confession, ‘was a soldier. He died of cancer. He said, in hospital, that he wished he’d died on the battlefield. He said that dying on the battlefield was better than dying in hospital. If I have to choose, I know which one I prefer.’
‘You omit the third option, which is not to die at all.’
‘To complete the mission,’ he said, holding out the grenade.
‘Think, Trofim! You want to turn this premier nuclear facility into a radioactive crater? Think of the hundreds of thousands you will slaughter! Children — women—’
Then Trofim said the most extraordinary thing I ever heard him utter. In a clear voice, as if reciting sacred text, he said, ‘We are not alone in the universe, comrade.’
It took me a moment to gather enough of my wits even to reply. ‘What?’
‘There are higher intelligences guiding what we do here.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Comrade, they are radiation aliens. If I detonate this grenade, and explode this nuclear pile, I will transform my grossly material consciousness into pure radiation.’
‘No you won’t,’ I said.
‘Yes, I will.’
‘Seriously, Trofim, you won’t.’
‘Yes,’ he repeated, articulating a credo too grounded in faith to be challenged, ‘I will. My consciousness will move to a higher dimension.’
‘Trofim, you don’t sound like yourself.’
‘It will not be death. I will be translated into a realm of pure energy. This blast will propel me, and I will face our sponsors face to face.’
I considered this, and tried to formulate the most trenchant criticism. There had to be a way I could make Trofim see its lunacy; some form of words that would persuade him. In the end I opted for, ‘No you won’t.’
‘Yes I will.’
‘Translated into pure radiation? Meeting radiation aliens? This won’t happen.’
‘Yes it will.’
‘No it won’t.’
‘Yes it will.’
‘No it won’t.’
‘Yes it will.’
‘It will not.’
‘Yes it will.’
This argumentative strategy was not having the desired result. I tried a different tack. ‘If you explode the grenade, all that will happen is that you will exterminate your consciousness, and mine.’
‘No I won’t,’ he said.
‘You’ll die.’
‘No I won’t.’
‘Yes you will.’
‘No I won’t.’
‘Yes you will!’
‘I shall meet the radiation aliens,’ he said, firmly.
‘Comrade,’ I said. ‘Listen to me carefully. The radiation aliens — I made them up. Me! You’re talking to their creator. Comrade Frenkel and I, and a gaggle of other science fiction writers, back in the 1940s. We wrote them.’
He was looking at, but not seeing, me. ‘Comrade Frenkel…’
‘Comrade Frenkel has his own reasons for wanting to pretend this absurd narrative is real. But it is not real. Please do not believe in my ridiculous science fiction! I do not write science fiction for you to believe in it! For God’s sake! For the sake of the Mekon himself — don’t! None of us really understood what radiation even was, back then! It was all rumour, and conjecture, and wild stories about the American attack on Hiroshima. We didn’t know! If you pull that pin, you won’t be translating yourself into a higher consciousness; you’ll be blasting yourself into sand and ash and scattering yourself in fine grained, radioactive form across the whole east of Europe.’
‘Comrade Frenkel told me,’ said Trofim, with a stubbornness that was not aggressive, since it inhered simply, we might even say purely, in the very limitations of his own mind, ‘told me that you were a slippery fish. A slippery fish, he called you.’
‘You can’t believe all this UFO mumbo-jumbo?’
‘Of course!’ he said.
‘You’ve been brainwashed,’ I told him. ‘You’ve joined a cult.’
‘Religion,’ he said, as if considering the concept.
‘Marx called religion the opium of the people,’ I said, angrily. ‘But at least opium is a high-class drug. UFO religion? That’s the methylated spirits of the people. It’s the home-still beetroot-alcohol of the people.’ I was furious, of course, because I knew I had failed. This had been my chance to talk Trofim round — poor, dumbheaded Trofim. This had been my moment to overpower him with my superior wits, just as he would (given the chance) have overpowered me with his superior muscles. But if my supposed skill with words was not sufficient even to persuade an individual like Trofim, then what good was I? In retrospect I wonder if I wasn’t being unfair to myself. It is of course easier to fool an intelligent man than a stupid one, for the intelligent man is in the habit of shifting his thoughts around and around, where the stupid one more often than not has fastened onto a single notion like a swimmer clinging to the raft that will keep him afloat. In retrospect, I suppose I could never have persuaded Trofim of the idiocy of believing that the middle of an atomic blast was the gateway to a higher mode of existence.
I fumbled in my jacket pocket and located a cigarette. It was, I knew, the last cigarette I would ever smoke — and so it proved.
‘What are you doing?’ said Trofim.
‘I’m smoking my last cigarette,’ I said, snapping back the metal lid of lighter and manoeuvring its knob of flame onto the end of the white tube. ‘The last cigarette,’ I added, ‘that I shall ever smoke.’ Sucking the smoke into my chest added a tincture of calm to the rattled choler of my body. My stress unnotched itself one belthole. I breathed out, lengthily.
‘I believe that smoking is not permitted in here, comrade.’
‘By all means,’ I said, ‘fetch a supervisor and report me.’
He stared at me. ‘Smoking is very bad for your health,’ he said.
‘So is being caught at the exact heart of a nuclear conflagration.’
‘Comrade,’ he said mournfully, ‘please do not be sarcastic.’ There was a popping noise: Trofim was tutting. That would be like him — to tut me like a disappointed schoolmaster.
‘I’ll make you a deal,’ I replied. ‘I will abjure sarcasm for the remainder of my earthly existence, if you agree not to pull the pin on your grenade.’
‘It’s too late.’
I breathed in another long draw on my cigarette. Despite the absurd situation in which I found myself, relaxation was starting to spread through my muscles. ‘This alien realm to which you will be transported. Will I get there too? Or will I be blasted to material atoms, even as you translate into radiation consciousness?’
‘You don’t understand, comrade,’ he said.
‘I’m trying to understand.’
‘You don’t believe.’
‘Comrade Trofim,’ I said, turning away from him to face the pool, ‘if you pull that pin, then I shall lose all respect for you.’
‘I have already pulled the pin, comrade,’ he said, in a wavery voice.
That was what the popping sound had been. The fuse had been ticking down all those long seconds of chatter. I had, perhaps, a single second remaining of earthly life.