Missile Gap

right here and now if you want. I'm only here for five years, but my successor should be okay about taking on an experienced RA…the hard bit is going to be maintaining focus. Uh, I can sort you out a subsistence grant from the governor-general's discretionary fund and get NSF to reimburse him, but it won't be huge. Would twenty Truman dollars a week be enough?'

Maddy thinks for a moment. Truman dollars — the local scrip — aren't worth a whole lot, but there's not much to spend them on. And Rob's earning for both of them anyway. And a PhD…that could be my ticket back to civilization, couldn't it? 'I guess so,' she says, feeling a sense of vast relief: so there's something she's useful for besides raising the next generation, after all. She tries to set aside the visions of herself, distinguished and not too much older, gratefully accepting a professor's chair at an ivy league university. 'When do I start?'

Chapter Nine: On the Beach

Misha's first impressions of the disturbingly familiar alien continent are of an oppressively humid heat, and the stench of decaying jellyfish.

The Sergei Korolev floats at anchor in the river estuary, a huge streamlined visitor from another world. Stubby fins stick out near the waterline, like a seaplane with clipped wings: gigantic Kuznetsov atomic turbines in pods ride on booms to either side of its high-ridged back, either side of the launch/recovery catapults for its parasite MiG fighter-bombers, aft of the broad curve of the ekranoplan's bridge. Near the waterline, a boat bay is open: a naval spetsnaz team is busy loading their kit into the landing craft that will ferry them to the small camp on the beach. Misha, who stands just above the waterline, turns away from the giant ground effect ship and watches his commander, who is staring inland with a faint expression of worry. 'Those trees — awfully close, aren't they?' Gagarin says, with the carefully studied stupidity that saw him through the first dangerous years after his patron Khrushchev's fall.

'That is indeed what captain Kirov is taking care of,' replies Gorodin, playing his role of foil to the colonel-general's sardonic humor. And indeed shadowy figures in olive-green battle dress are stalking in and out of the trees, carefully laying tripwires and screamers in an arc around the beachhead. He glances to the left, where a couple of sailors with assault rifles stand guard, eyes scanning the jungle. 'I wouldn't worry unduly sir.'

'I'll still be happier when the outer perimeter is secure. And when I've got a sane explanation of this for the comrade General Secretary.' Gagarin's humor evaporates: he turns and walks along the beach, towards the large tent that's already gone up to provide shelter from the heat of noon. The bar of solid sunlight — what passes for sunlight here — is already at maximum length, glaring like a rod of white-hot steel that impales the disk. (Some of the more superstitious call it the axle of heaven. Part of Gorodin's job is to discourage such non-materialist backsliding.)

The tent awning is pegged back: inside it, Gagarin and Misha find Major Suvurov and Academician Borisovitch leaning over a map. Already the scientific film crew — a bunch of dubious civilians from the TASS agency — are busy in a corner, preparing cans for shooting. 'Ah, Oleg, Mikhail.' Gagarin summons up a professionally photogenic smile. 'Getting anywhere?'

Borisovitch, a slight, stoop-shouldered type who looks more like a janitor than a world-famous scientist, shrugs. 'We were just talking about going along to the archaeological site, General. Perhaps you'd like to come, too?'

Misha looks over his shoulder at the map: it's drawn in pencil, and there's an awful lot of white space on it, but what they've surveyed so far is disturbingly familiar in outline — familiar enough to have given them all a number of sleepless nights even before they came ashore. Someone has scribbled a dragon coiling in a particularly empty corner of the void.

'How large is the site?' asks Yuri.

'Don't know, sir.' Major Suvurov grumps audibly, as if the lack of concrete intelligence on the alien ruins is a personal affront. 'We haven't found the end of it yet. But it matches what we know already.'

'The aerial survey—' Mikhail coughs, delicately. 'If you'd let me have another flight I could tell you more, General. I believe it may be possible to define the city limits narrowly, but the trees make it hard to tell.'

'I'd give you the flight if only I had the aviation fuel,' Gagarin explains patiently. 'A chopper can burn its own weight in fuel in a day of surveying, and we have to haul everything out here from Archangel. In fact, when we go home we're leaving most of our flight-ready aircraft behind, just so that on the next trip out we can carry more fuel.'

'I understand.' Mikhail doesn't look happy. 'As Oleg Ivanovitch says, we don't know how far it reaches. But I think when you see the ruins you'll understand why we need to come back here. Nobody's found anything like this before.'

'Old Capitalist Man. ' Misha smiles thinly. 'I suppose.'

'Presumably.' Borisovitch shrugs. 'Whatever, we need to bring archaeologists. And a mass spectroscope for carbon dating. And other stuff.' His face wrinkles unhappily. 'They were here back when we would still have been living in caves!'

'Except we weren't,' Gagarin says under his breath. Misha pretends not to notice.

By the time they leave the tent, the marines have got the Korolev's two BRDMs ashore. The big balloon-tired armored cars sit on the beach like monstrous amphibians freshly emerged from some primeval sea. Gagarin and Gorodin sit in the back of the second vehicle with the academician and the film crew: the lead BRDM carries their spetsnaz escort team. They maintain a dignified silence as the convoy rumbles and squeaks across the beach, up the gently sloping hillside, and then down towards the valley with the ruins.

The armored cars stop and doors open. Everyone is relieved by the faint breeze that cracks the oven-heat of the interior. Gagarin walks over to the nearest ruin — remnants of a wall, waist-high — and stands, hands on hips, looking across the wasteland.

'Concrete,' says Borisovitch, holding up a lump of crumbled not-stone from the foot of the wall for Yuri to see.

'Indeed.' Gagarin nods. 'Any idea what this was?'

'Not yet.' The camera crew is already filming, heading down a broad boulevard between rows of crumbling foundations. 'Only the concrete has survived, and it's mostly turned to limestone. This is old.'

'Hmm.' The First Cosmonaut walks round the stump of wall and steps down to the foundation layer behind it, looking around with interest. 'Interior column here, four walls — they're worn down, aren't they? This stuff that looks like a red stain. Rebar? Found any intact ones?'

'Again, not yet sir,' says Borisovitch. 'We haven't looked everywhere yet, but…'

'Indeed.' Gagarin scratches his chin idly. 'Am I imagining it or are the walls all lower on that side?' He points north, deeper into the sprawling maze of overgrown rubble.

'You're right sir. No theory for it, though.'

'You don't say.' Gagarin walks north from the five-sided building's ruin, looks around. 'This was a road?'

'Once, sir. It was nine meters wide — there seems to have been derelict ground between the houses, if that's what they were, and the road itself. '

'Nine meters, you say.' Gorodin and the academician hurry to follow him as he strikes off, up the road. 'Interesting stonework here, don't you think, Misha?'

'Yessir. Interesting stonework.'

Gagarin stops abruptly and kneels. 'Why is it cracked like this? Hey, there's sand down there. And, um. Glass? Looks like it's melted. Ah, trinitite.'

'Sir?'

Borisovitch leans forward. 'That's odd.'

'What is?' asks Misha, but before he gets a reply both Gagarin and the researcher are up again and off towards another building.

'Look. The north wall.' Gagarin's found another chunk of wall, this one a worn stump that's more than a meter high: he looks unhappy.

'Sir? Are you alright?' Misha stares at him. Then he notices the academician is also silent, and looking deeply perturbed. 'What's wrong?'

Gagarin extends a finger, points at the wall. 'You can just see him if you look close enough. How long would it take to fade, Mikhail? How many years have we missed them by?'

The academician licks his lips: 'At least two thousand years, sir. Concrete cures over time, but it takes a very long time indeed to turn all the way to limestone. and then there's the weathering process to take account of. But the surface erosion…yes, that could fix the image from the flash. Perhaps. I'd need to ask a few colleagues back home.'

'What's wrong?' the political officer repeats, puzzled.

The first cosmonaut grins humorlessly. 'Better get your Geiger counter, Misha, and see if the ruins are still hot. Looks like we're not the only people on the disk with a geopolitical problem…'

Chapter Ten: Been Here Before

Brundle has finally taken the time to pull Gregor aside and explain what's going on; Gregor is not amused.

'Sorry you walked into it cold,' says Brundle. 'But I figured it would be best for you to see for yourself.' He speaks with a Midwestern twang, and a flatness of affect that his colleagues sometimes mistake for signs of an underlying psychopathology.

'See what, in particular?' Gregor asks sharply. 'What, in particular?' Gregor tends to repeat himself, changing only the intonation, when he's disturbed. He's human enough to recognize it as a bad habit but still finds it difficult to suppress the reflex.

Brundle pauses on the footpath, looks around to make sure there's nobody within earshot. The Mall is nearly empty today, and only a humid breeze stirs the waters on the pool. 'Tell me what you think.'

Gregor thinks for a moment, then summons up his full command of the local language: it's good practice. 'The boys in the big house are asking for a CAB. It means someone's pulled his head out of his ass for long enough to realize they've got worse things to worry about than being shafted by the Soviets. Something's happened to make them realize they need a policy for dealing with the abductors. This is against doctrine, we need to do something about it fast before they start asking the right questions. Something's shaken them up, something secret, some HUMINT source from the wrong side of the curtain, perhaps. Could it be that man Gordievsky? But they haven't quite figured out what being here means. Sagan — does his presence mean what I think it does?'