‘I saw the rope,’ I repeated.
‘Your disbelief is stubborn,’ said Frenkel. ‘Disbelief can be like belief in that respect.’
‘Let’s talk about the UFO phenomenon,’ he said.
‘I am enjoying this talk,’ I replied. ‘It is diverting and stimulating.’
‘But permit me to ask a question,’ he said. ‘You do not believe in the material reality of UFOs, or aliens, or abductions, or any of that?’
‘No.’
‘And yet you cannot deny that many people do believe in those things.’
‘Of course.’
‘So you deny the reality of UFOs, but you do not deny the reality of UFOs as a cultural or social phenomenon?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Well then. Let us say three million people in the USSR, and three million in the USA, not only believe in UFOs, but claim to have experienced them directly. To have seen them. To have been abducted by them — to have had procedures enacted upon their bodies, semen extracted from their genitals, memories wiped from their minds.’
‘Is it so many?’
‘At a conservative estimate.’
‘It is a large number.’
‘Some of these people,’ said Frenkel, ‘are perhaps lying. Perhaps they are malicious, or bored, or perhaps they are seeking attention and fame and the like. So they tell these stories of alien abduction, even though they know them to be false.’
‘Eminently plausible.’
‘But surely you cannot believe that all six million people who report UFOs are like this? Six million wicked liars? Impossible!’
‘Not all of them, by any means.’
‘Perhaps only a small proportion of them are deliberately lying?’
‘The remainder,’ I said, ‘are simply mistaken.’
‘Mistaken? Nearly six million people — mistaken?’
‘Indeed. Hallucinating perhaps. Or interpreting ordinary occurrences in an extraordinary way.’
‘Six million people hallucinating in unison?’
‘It sounds a little improbable,’ I said. ‘But it is the only explanation that fits the facts.’
‘May we not apply your earlier test of probabilities, in lieu of proof?’
‘But that’s it,’ I said. ‘There are only two explanations for this widespread reportage of alien abduction. So let us test the respective probabilities of the two. Somebody claims to have been abducted by a UFO. Let us discard the possibility that he is deliberately lying, since, as you say, not all the six million can be liars. So what has happened? Either he has been literally abducted. Or else he has in some sense imagined the experience. A dream, a hallucination. Perhaps it was not an alien, but only a spectre from the subconscious mind. Which is more likely?’
‘There is a third possibility.’
‘That he is lying?’
‘No, we have agreed to discount that,’ said Frenkel. ‘So we have on the one hand, perhaps, an actual alien; and on the other perhaps a phantom from the subconscious mind. But there is a third possibility.’
‘Go on,’ I prompted.
‘You must listen carefully,’ he said. ‘We are approaching the reality of the situation. What I will say may dissolve your unbelief quite away.’
‘I doubt that,’ I said. ‘But I am listening.’
‘You think of alien abduction as something that happens to certain individuals.’
‘Are you saying it does not?’
He shook his head. ‘No, no. It does happens to individuals, of course. But also it happens to a mass of people.’
‘Millions of them,’ I said.
‘If an individual imagines something that’s not there we say he hallucinates. But what happens when a whole people imagines something?’
‘Mass hallucination?’
‘You are being distressingly literal minded. I shall give you an example. What is Communism, but the dream of a whole people? If an individual dreams utopia, he is just a dreamer. But once an entire people dream it, it becomes reality.’
‘Communism seems to be a dream from which people are waking up,’ I observed.
This might have made him angry, but instead he seized upon it. ‘Exactly! Exactly. We have stopped collectively imagining Communism, and so it is decaying around us. You suggested that UFOs were either material objects in the universe, or else the abductee simply imagined it. I say that what we need is an act of collective imagination, an act as heroic and world-changing as the October Revolution. I say that we are on the cusp of alien invasion — a real one, not an imaginary one — and that the only thing that can save us is a world capable of collectively willing those aliens into our observation.’
‘Imaginative revolution,’ I said. ‘Naturally such rhetoric appeals to a creative writer. But what about an ordinary citizen? What do you think, Saltykov?’
‘He agrees with me,’ said Frenkel.
‘You’ve been silent a very long time, Saltykov,’ I said, loudly. ‘Don’t sulk! What is your opinion of all this blather?’
‘A little deaf, I think,’ whispered Frenkel. ‘In his right ear.’
His head was still turned away. I looked at the back of his neck; his lager-coloured hair; his narrow, pale cranium. ‘Old friend,’ I said, loudly, ‘what’s the matter?’
‘There’s nothing the matter with old Saltykov,’ boomed Frenkel, putting his arm around the man’s back and clapping his shoulder? ‘Eh? Eh?’ Saltykov’s body jiggled with the motion imparted to it by Frenkel’s jollity.
‘Oh!’ I said, as I understood. Saltykov permitting himself to be touched? By a man? Oh, of course.
I took a deep breath. Matters were more serious than I had realised.
The odd thing, as I contemplated the situation I was in, was how little fear I felt. This was odd because I could still remember what it felt like to experience fear, so much so that I was actually conscious of the gap between the former and the present state of mind. I was also aware of a deep penetration of sorrow, as if a heavy stone fell through an inner shaft in my soul, into my depths. It was a sad business. It is sad to lose a friend, and nothing that had happened in the explosion had robbed me of the capacity to experience the weight of that. Nevertheless there was very little acuteness of emotional attack in my cut-about brain.
‘I’m not the bad guy,’ Frenkel was saying, earnestly. ‘You mistake me. I’m the good guy. I’m the one trying to save humanity.’
‘By committing mass murder?’
‘On the contrary: mass redemption. There may be casualties, of course. But casualties are one of the best ways of bringing home to people — that which they do not yet realise, but which is the bald truth — that we are fighting a war.’
‘I’ve had enough of war,’ I said.
‘Nonsense! You’re a hero of the Great Patriotic War, a warrior of Communism. Come on, Konstantin,’ Frenkel boomed, getting to his feet and hauling me up. ‘You are staying in a hotel, here in Kiev. Take me to it! Show me some hospitality!’
I was unsteady on my feet, and staggered a little like a drunk. Saltykov, of course, remained sitting on the bench glowering at the sparrows.
Poor old Saltykov.
‘I thought you said,’ I put in, in as steady a voice as I could manage, ‘that your gun has been taken from you?’
‘Pending investigation,’ he confirmed. ‘But my muscles are still there — I have not lost my muscular strength.’
‘You always were a big Slav,’ I agreed.
‘And now, in your enfeebled state, you are frankly no match for me.’ I saw the glint of metal tucked into the sleeve of his coat. ‘Come! Take me to the hotel.’