“Sit!” Vlad said suddenly. The dog sat obediently.
“She understands Russian,” Vlad said.
“Nonsense,” I said. “She just reacted to your voice.”
“There must be other Russians nearby,” Nina said. “A secret research station, maybe? Something we were never told about?”
“Well, I guess we have a mascot,” I said, scratching the dog’s scalp.
“Come here, Laika,” Vlad said. The dog pricked her ears and wandered toward him.
I felt an icy sensation of horror. I snatched my hand back as if I had touched a corpse. With an effort, I controlled myself. “Come on, Vlad,” I said. “You’re joking again.”
“Good dog,” Vlad said, patting her.
“Vlad,” I said, “Laika’s rocket burned up on re-entry.”
“Yes,” Vlad said, “the first creature we Earthlings put into space was sentenced to be burned alive. I often think about that.” Vlad stared dramatically into the depths of the valley. “Comrades, I think something is waiting here to help us storm the cosmos. I think it preserved Laika’s soul and reanimated her here, at this place, and at this time…It’s no coincidence. This is no ordinary animal. This is Laika, the cosmonaut dog!”
Laika barked loudly. I had never seen the dog without the rubber oxygen mask on her face, but I knew with a thrill of supernatural fear that Vlad was right. I felt an instant irrational urge to kill the dog, or at least give her a good kick. If I killed and buried her, I wouldn’t have to think about what she meant.
The others looked equally stricken. “Probably fell off a train,” Mukhamed muttered at last.
Vlad regally ignored this frail reed of logic. “We ought to follow Laika. The…Thunder-God put her here to lead us. It won’t get dark till ten o’clock. Let’s move out, comrades.” Vlad stood up and shrugged on his backpack. “Mukhamed?”
“Uh …” the sergeant said. “My orders are to stay with the vehicles.” He cleared his throat and spat. “There are Evenks about. Natural thieves. We wouldn’t want our camp to be raided.”
Vlad looked at him in surprise, and then with pity. He walked towards me, threw one arm over my shoulder, and took me aside. “Nikita, these Uzbeks are brave soldiers but they’re a bit superstitious. Terrified of the unknown. What a laugh. But you and I…Scientists, space pioneers…the Unknown is our natural habitat, right?”
“Well …”
“Come on, Nikita.” He glowered. “We can’t go back and face the top brass empty-handed.”
Nina joined us. “I knew you’d turn yellow, Globov. Never mind him, Vlad, darling. Why should you share your fame and glory with this sneaking coward? I’ll go with you—”
“You’re a woman,” Vlad assured her loftily. “You’re staying here where it’s safe.”
“But Vlad—”
Vlad folded his arms. “Don’t make me have to beat you.” Nina blushed girlishly and looked at the toes of her hiking boots. She could have broken his back like a twig.
The dog barked loudly and capered at our feet. “Come on,” Vlad said. He set off without looking back.
I grabbed my pack and followed him. I had to. I was guarding him: no more Vlad, no more Globov …
Our journey was a nightmare. The dog kept trying to follow us, or would run yipping through ratholes in the brush that we had to circle painfully. Half on intuition, we headed for the epicenter of the blast, the little hillock at the valley’s focus.
It was almost dusk again when we finally reached it, battered, scratched and bone-tired. We found a yurt there, half-hidden in a slough off to one side of the hill. It was an Evenk reindeer-skin tent, oozing grayish smoke from a vent-hole. A couple of scabby reindeer were pegged down outside it, gnawing at a lush, purplish patch of swamp moss. The dead trees around had been heavily seared by the blast, leaving half-charcoaled bubbly lumps of ancient resin. Some ferns and rushes had sprung up, corkscrewed, malformed, and growing with cancerous vigor.
The dog barked loudly at the wretched reindeer, who looked up with bleary-eyed indifference.
We heard leather thongs hiss loose in the door flap. A pale face framed in a greasy fur hood poked through. It was a young Evenk girl. She called to the dog, then noticed us and giggled quietly.
The dog rushed toward the yurt, wagging her tail. “Hello,” Vlad called. He spread his open hands. “Come on out, we’re friends.”
The girl stepped out and inched toward us, watching the ground carefully. She paused at a small twig, her dilated eyes goggling as if it were a boulder. She high-jumped far over it, and landed giggling. She wore an elaborate reindeer-skin jacket that hung past her knees, thickly embroidered with little beads of bone and wood. She also had tight fur trousers with lumpy beaded booties, sewn all in one piece like a child’s pajamas.
She sidled up, grinning coyly, and touched my face and clothes in curiosity. “Nikita,” I said, touching my chest.
“Balan Thok,” she whispered, running one fingertip down her sweating throat. She laughed drunkenly.
“Is that your dog?” Vlad said. “She came from the sky!” He gestured extravagantly. “Something under the earth here…brought her down from the sky…yes?”
I shrieked suddenly. A gargoyle had appeared in the tent’s opening. But the blank, ghastly face was only a wooden ceremonial mask, shaped like a frying pan, with a handle to grip below the “chin.” The mask had eye-slits and a carved mouth-hole fringed with a glued-on beard of reindeer hair.
Behind it was Balan Thok’s father, or maybe grandfather. Cunningly, the old villain peered at us around the edge of his mask. His face was as wrinkled as an old boot. The sides of his head were shaven and filth-choked white hair puffed from the top like a thistle. His long reindeer coat was fringed with black fur and covered with bits of polished bone and metal.
We established that the old savage was called Jif Gurd. Vlad went through his sky-pointing routine again. Jif Gurd returned briefly to his leather yurt and re-emerged with a long wooden spear. Grinning vacuously, he jammed the butt of it into a socket in the ground and pointed to the heavens.
“I don’t like the look of this,” I told Vlad at once. “That spear has dried blood on it.”
“Yeah. I’ve heard of this,” Vlad said. “Sacrifice poles for the thunder-god. Kulik wrote about them.” He turned to the old man. “That’s right,” he encouraged. “Thunder-God.” He pointed to the dog. “Thunder-God brought this dog down.”
“Thunder-God,” said Jif Gurd seriously. “Dog.” He looked up at the sky reverently. “Thunder-God.” He made a descending motion with his right arm, threw his hands apart to describe the explosion. “Boom!”
“That’s right! That’s right!” Vlad said excitedly.
Jif Gurd nodded. He bent down almost absentmindedly and picked little Laika up by the scruff of the neck. “Dog.”
“Yes, yes,” Vlad nodded eagerly. Before we could do anything, before we could realize what was happening, Jif Gurd reached inside his greasy coat, produced a long, curved knife, and slashed poor Laika’s throat. He lifted her up without effort—he was terribly strong, the strength of drug-madness—and jammed her limp neck over the end of the spear as if gaffing a fish.
Blood squirted everywhere. Vlad and I jumped back, horrified. “Hell!” Vlad cried in anguish. “I forgot that they sacrifice dogs!”
The hideous old man grinned and chattered excitedly. He was convinced that he understood us—that Vlad had wanted him to sacrifice the dog to the sky-god. He approved of the idea. He approved of us. I said, “He thinks we have something in common now, Vlad.”
“Yeah,” Vlad said. He looked sadly at Laika. “Well, we rocket men sacrificed her first, poor beast.”
“There goes our last lead to the UFO,” I said. “Poor Laika! All the way just for this!”
“This guy’s got to know where the thing is,” Vlad said stubbornly. “Look at the sly old codger—it’s written all over his face.” Vlad stepped forward. “Where is it? Where did it land?” He gestured wildly. “You take us there!”
Balan Thok gnawed her slender knuckles and giggled at our antics, but it didn’t take the old guy long to catch on. By gestures, and a few key words, we established that the Thunder-God was in a hole nearby. A hidden hole, deep in the earth. He knew where it was. He could show it to us.
But he wouldn’t.
“It’s a religious thing,” Vlad said, mulling it over. “I think we’re ritually unclean.”
“Muk-a-moor,” said the old man. He opened the tent flap and gestured us inside.
The leather walls inside were black with years of soot. The yurt was round, maybe five steps across, and braced with a lattice of smooth flat sticks and buckskin thongs. A fire blazed away in the yurt’s center, chunks of charred pine on a hearth of flat yellow stones. Dense smoke curdled the air. Two huge furry mounds loomed beside the hearth. They were Evenk sleeping bags, like miniature tents in themselves.
Our eyes were caught by the drying-racks over the fire. Mushrooms littered the racks, the red-capped fly agaric mushrooms that one always sees in children’s books. The intoxicating toadstools of the Siberian nomad. Their steaming fungal reek filled the tent, below the acrid stench of smoke and rancid sweat.
“Muk-a-moor,” said Jif Gurd, pointing at them, and then at his head.
“Oh, Christ,” Vlad said. “He won’t show us anything unless we eat his sacred mushrooms.” He caught the geezer’s eye and pantomimed eating.
The old addict shook his head and held up a leather cup. He pre-tended to drink, then smacked his rubbery, bearded lips. He pointed to Balan Thok.
“I don’t get it,” Vlad said.
“Right,” I said, getting to my feet. “Well, you hold him here, and I’ll go back to camp. I’ll have the soldiers in by midnight. We’ll beat the truth out of the old dog-butcher.”
“Sit down, idiot,” Vlad hissed. “Don’t you remember how quick he was with that knife?”
It was true. At my movement a sinister gleam had entered the old man’s eyes. I sat down quickly. “We can outrun him.”
“It’s getting dark,” Vlad said. Just three words, but they brought a whole scene into mind: running blind through a maze of broken branches, with a drug-crazed, panting slasher at my heels…I smiled winningly at the old shaman. He grinned back and again made his drinking gesture. He tossed the leather cup to Balan Thok, who grabbed at it wildly and missed it by two meters. She picked it up and turned her back on us. We heard her fumble with the lacing of her trousers. She squatted down. There was a hiss of liquid.
“Oh Jesus,” I said. “Vlad, no.”
“I’ve heard about this,” Vlad said wonderingly. “The active ingredient passes on into the urine. Ten savages can get drunk on one mushroom. Pass it from man to man.” He paused. “The kidneys absorb the impurities. It’s supposed to be better for you that way. Not as poisonous.”
“Can’t we just eat the muk-a-moors?” I said, pointing at the rack. The old shaman glowered at me, and shook his head violently. Balan Thok sashayed toward me, hiding her face behind one sleeve. She put the warm cup into my hands and backed away, giggling.
I held the cup. A terrible fatalism washed over me. “Vladimir,” I said. “I’m tired. My head hurts. I’ve been stung all over by mosquitoes and my pants are drenched with dog blood. I don’t want to drink the poison piss of some savage—”
“It’s for Science,” Vlad said soberly.
“All my life,” I began, “I wanted to work for the good of Society. My dear mother, God bless her memory …” I choked up. “If she could see what her dear son has come to…All those years of training, just for this! For this, Vlad?” I began trembling violently.
“Don’t spill it!” Vlad said. Balan Thok stared at me, licking her lips. “I think she likes you,” Vlad said.
For some weird reason these last words pushed me over the edge. I shoved the cup to my lips and drained the potion in one go. It sizzled down my gullet in a wave of hot nausea. Somehow I managed to keep from vomiting.
“How do you feel?” Vlad asked eagerly.
“My face is going numb.” I stared at Balan Thok. Her eyes were full of hot fascination. I looked at her, willing her to come toward me. Nothing could be worse now. I had gone through the ultimate. I was ready, no, eager, to heap any degradation on myself. Maybe fornication with this degraded creature would raise me to some strange height.
“You’re braver than I thought, Nikita,” Vlad said. His voice rang with unnatural volume in my drugged ears. He pulled the cup from my numbed hands. “Considered objectively, this is really not so bad. A healthy young woman…sterile fluid…It’s mere custom that makes it seem so repellent.” He smiled in superior fashion, gripping the cup.
Suddenly the old Siberian shaman stood before him guffawing crazily as he donated Vlad’s share. A cheesy reek came from his dropped trousers. Vlad stared at me in horror. I fell on my side, laughing wildly. My bones turned to rubber.
The girl laughed like a xylophone, gesturing to me lewdly. Vlad was puking noisily. I got up to lurch toward the girl, but forgot to move my feet and fell down. My head was inflamed with intense desire for her. She was turning round and round, singing in a high voice, holding a curved knife over her head. Somehow I tackled her and we fell headlong onto one of the Evenk sleeping bags, crushing it with a snapping of wood and lashings. I couldn’t get out of my clothes. They were crawling over me like live things.
I paused to retch, not feeling much pain, just a torrent of sensations as the drug came up. Vlad and the old man were singing together loudly and at great length. I was thumping around vaguely on top of the girl, watching a louse crawl through one of her braids.
The old man came crawling up on all fours and stared into my face. “Thunder-God,” he cackled, and tugged at my arm. He had pulled aside a large reindeer skin that covered the floor of the yurt. There was a deep hole, right there, right in the tent with us. Fighting the cramps in my stomach, I dragged myself toward it and peered in.
The space in the hole was strangely distorted; it was impossible to tell how deep it was. At its far end was a reticulated blue aurora that seemed to shift and flow in synchronization with my thoughts. For some reason I thought of Laika, and wished again that Jif Gurd hadn’t killed her. The aurora pulsed at my thought, and there was a thump outside the tent—a thump followed by loud barking.