Origin - Season One (37 page)

With only his backpack and no luggage to collect, he made his way to the underground tube station and took the first train to South Kensington, switched to the Circle line and got off at Victoria. He found a bathroom, washed the gel and dye out of his hair, then the makeup off his face and changed into a pair of jeans, a sweater and Converse All-Stars.

He took the Victoria line to Green Park and ran to the platform for the Jubilee Line just fast enough to know if he was being followed. He got off at London Bridge, then walked the last half-mile to the address Reginald had given him, arriving just after nine in the evening.

Francis crossed the street and stepped into the alley between two of the buildings. He waited for a full five minutes before crossing back over. Instead of ringing the bell, he waited until an elderly woman came out to walk her dog and slipped through the closing door behind her.

Once inside he took a mobile phone from his pocket and called Mike, who, if all had gone according to plan, would be waiting in a bar just across the Thames. Ten minutes later, a black cab stopped two blocks down the road. The man who got out was bald, visibly overweight and dressed in a dark gray hand-me-down wool suit. He wore a pair of thick glasses held together in two places with dirty gauze tape.

Francis opened the door when Mike arrived. “You look good, Mike.”

“Piss off. Can I take this stomach off now? It’s beginning to make my back ache.”

“Sure, but don’t lose it. You’ll need to put it back on when we leave.”

They took the stairs to the fourth floor, emerging into a dimly lit, dusty hallway with a cracking stone floor and yellowing walls. 405 was the last door on the right.

Francis told Mike to stay back and stood at the door, listening. He was prepared to accept that nobody was home when he heard what might have been a pan drop onto the floor, followed by a quick round of cursing in a foreign language. Francis looked back down the hall, nodded at Mike and knocked on the door.

The man who opened it and peered out at Francis over the chain was sixty if he was a day. He was wearing a threadbare bathrobe and a pair of moccasins in no better shape. He looked like he hadn’t shaved in a few days, but the face wasn’t hostile or even suspicious, just curious. “Can I help you?”

He looked Francis up and down several times with no hint of a reaction.

“I was asked to give you this,” Francis said and held out a brown paper envelope.

“Open it,” the man said.

Francis tore off the end of the envelope and pulled out a stack of crisp British fifty-pound notes folded in a single sheet of lined notepaper.

“Here,” the man said and held out his hand.

Francis handed him the envelope.

The man first counted the money then read the note. As he did, the creases on his forehead gave way to an amused narrowing of the eyes, and finally a smile. “I should send you back with an answer. But I’m guessing you didn’t come from across the river.”

He closed the door, released the chain and opened it again. “Come in. And please forgive my manners. When I moved here in ‘76, life was simpler. Now you never know what the hell people want when they start banging on your door.”

Francis stepped inside and was immediately consumed by the unmistakable odor of books. It was a pleasant smell, not moldy exactly, but musty.

“I have a friend,” Francis said. “Waiting outside.”

“Then by all means, tell her to come inside.”

“It’s not –”

“I’m joking,” the man said. “Ask him in. It’s all here in the note.”

When Mike joined them the man held out a hand to Francis and said, “My name is Maksym, but you should call me Max or I may not realize you’re talking to me. It’s been a long time since anyone used it.”

“I’m Gary,” Francis said.

“Ah, yes, Gary. Like Tom, Dick and Gary. Never mind, you don’t have to tell me. You call me Max, I’ll call you Gary and Tchaikovsky can write the music. It’ll be great.”

Francis laughed and stepped aside.

“I’m Mike,” Mike said, and shrugged when Francis gave him a foreboding look.

“I’m pleased to meet you, Mike,” Max said. “It’s a good look for you, I think. You look like you sell shitty used cars to people like Gary here who can’t afford anything else.”

Both Mike and Francis found themselves laughing.

“I know, I’m hilarious,” Max said. “My granddaughters think I look like that asshole on Coronation Street, you know the old man, Cole? No, of course you don’t know. I don’t really know either, but I can imagine. Most people on TV these days look like assholes.”

Francis smiled, “Aren’t you curious to know why we’re here?”

“A little,” Max said. “But I figure you’re the one that came to see me, so you’ll tell me or decide you don’t want to, in which case I’d be an ass for asking.”

“How do you know Reginald?” Francis asked.

“He’s a bum,” Max said and laughed. “I met him at the embassy in Vienna. The man can play poker, I’ll give him that much.”

“Where did you defect from?” Mike asked.

“The Ukraine. Although back then it was all just the USSR. Even today they call us Russians.”

Max spat out the last word, as if it had left a bad taste in his mouth. “But enough about me. You have come a long way. I can tell by your accents. Are you Canadians or Americans?”

“Americans,” Francis said. “I have something that might interest you. Do you have a computer?”

“Do bears shit in the woods?” Max said and walked down the hall.

They followed him into a spacious living room with an old oak writing desk at one end surrounded by several stacks of books. There was a tattered Chesterfield at the other end of the room in front of a large fireplace. Max sat down at the desk and flipped open the lid on his laptop. The desktop background was a grainy, sepia-tone picture of a group of young men in flight suits standing in front of an empty rocket launching site. Max saw both of them looking and said, “Baikonur in ‘72. I’m the handsome one.”

Francis handed him the CD. “I should warn you now, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“Like an American showing up at my door on a Sunday night to pay off a thirty year old gambling debt?”

When it was obvious Max was going to do things at his own pace and preferably in silence, Francis and Mike both took a seat on the couch and began leafing through old copies of National Geographic. Mike began to doze.

When he opened his eyes, he didn’t know if he had fallen asleep or just nodded off for a few seconds, but when he turned around, both Francis and Max were gone. Mike was on his feet and moving across the room before he even noticed someone had taken off his shoes. He headed for the door, but saw the chain was still on. Then he heard a soft humming from somewhere in the house and followed it to the kitchen.

Max was standing by the sink pouring champagne into three tea mugs on a plastic tray. Francis was bent over at the other end of the kitchen with his head in the fridge. Max looked up when Mike came in with a grin that ended just below his earlobes. “My dear boy, I was just coming to wake you. I mean to propose a toast.”

Francis looked on, amused, as Max picked up the tray and walked back into the living room.

“I’m not going to ask you where you got that disc,” he began, “Because I think it might ruin the moment. But tell me, is it real?”

“It’s real,” Francis said. “I can –”

“Not another word,” Max said. “That’s all I wanted to know.”

He handed them each a cup and raised his own. “Za vashe zdorovie!” he said and downed the mug in a single gulp.

They did their best to repeat the toast and followed his example. When he put his mug back down on the tray Francis said, “I’m glad we’ve made your day, I really am –”

“But you didn’t come here to drink. I know. Forgive an old man his follies.”

“Consider them forgiven,” Francis said. “I just want to know –”

“If I’ve lost my mind or actually have something useful to tell you?” Max finished.

“Well, I wouldn’t have put it that way, but yes.”

“Have you ever been in space, Gary? Either of you. Mike?”

“Call me Francis, that’s my real name. And no, we’ve never been in space. That’s right, isn’t it, Mike?”

“Very funny,” Mike said.

“Okay,” Max said, “then you’ll have to use your imagination. Seeing the earth with the stars behind you changes a man. I don’t mean it makes you crazy; that’s just incidental in my case. Well, mine and a few others that I can think of. But anyway, I digress. Once you have been up there, you cannot look at the universe the same way again. It has a way of bringing the blind arrogance of those who believe we are unique to the universe into stark contrast with reality. The earth is not a grain of sand in the desert; it is a single molecule in one of those grains. When we talk of probability within the finite world of man on earth, we openly accept that as the numbers grow larger, the chances of variables increase. If we discover a rare bug on a tree or a flower in some remote rain forest, we conclude quite happily that the chances of finding another in all the thousands of acres that surround it are probably quite high. Only the bug or the flower, for whom such distances are unfathomable, and for whom their immediate surroundings are by necessity the world entire, would refute the possibility outright. The human observer accepts it as fact because he is on the outside looking in. To see the world from the outside, is to see that bug and marvel at its stupidity. The chances of there not being other intelligent life in the universe are so slim they don’t bear thinking about. Do you follow me? Tell me if you don’t; I know I’m rambling.”

Francis nodded. Not out of politeness, but because he did understand. Or at least he thought he did.

“Everything on that disc is scientifically sound,” Max said. “By which I mean, it fits together within the realms of possibility.”

“Could you be a bit more specific?” Francis said.

“Sure. How about this? A professor at MIT, I forget his name…”

“Bershadsky,” Francis said.

“Yes, him. He leads a team of software engineers to create a file compression program that NASA is going to test on board Voyager two. And why not? They have very limited bandwidth to begin with, so the smaller the files, the better. The Russian space program tried something similar at about the same time. You with me so far?”

“I think so,” Francis said.

“Good. The timing checks out perfectly with the Voyager two launch and trajectory. The fact that NASA does not openly acknowledge it used such software means nothing. NASA, like any government organization, does not share everything it does with the public, especially the embarrassing things. And in this case, I’m tempted to think the reason is that the program didn’t work. Or at least not at first. The question of how the pictures on that disc evaded all but a single person, and ended up in the hands of the man it did, may seem unlikely. But when you factor in certain circumstances unique to the period, it’s easy to understand how it could happen. For one, the three decades preceding the ‘90s were the golden age of development and technology. That may be hard to appreciate when you look around and see how much sleeker and smaller things have become. But that’s just the point. Almost every technology in use today, especially in electronics, is simply a scaled down or scaled up version of things that have been around for a long time. But in the late seventies and early eighties, things were moving too fast for any one person or organization to keep up with it all. Bear in mind also that reliability was a major issue at the time. Launching a rocket in those days, especially in the Soviet program, which was notoriously unreliable, was like playing Russian roulette, if you’ll forgive the pun. Sometimes they took off and sometimes they just sat there and refused to go anywhere. More often, they blew up and killed a few people for good measure. And those that did make their way into orbit often stopped working when they got there. Sometimes they stopped and started again and sometimes they didn’t. The point is, the cracks for such a discovery to fall through were everywhere. If you want to know what I think happened, NASA woke up one morning and found itself with a bunch of binary gibberish no one could make any sense of and realized the professor’s program had decided to work. By then the software to decompress the files was probably gathering dust in a Massachusetts basement somewhere. So who do they call? Who else? And once he had the pictures and saw what they were, the conclusion is simple.”

“It is?” Francis asked.

“Sure. Given the chance, I probably would have done the same. Although I doubt I would have been able to keep my mouth shut for quite as long. That is the truly astounding thing in my opinion.”

“Reginald seemed to think they have done more than just keep it a secret.”

Max nodded. “Indeed, quite a lot more. I was getting to that. The satellite in the images looks like a relatively conventional communications model, but the probes are not Russian, American or European. They must have been built in private. I would have said that was unlikely, but then I’m guessing you’ve already figured out that money doesn’t seem to be an issue here.”

Mike nodded, “The Karl Gustav Foundation.”

“Right. So that just leaves the question of how they were launched. Building them is one thing. That could be done anywhere with enough resources. But launching something into space, even a relatively small object, is a major undertaking and not something that can be done unnoticed. My guess is the Chinese. They have been lifting cargo into orbit since ‘85, mainly for their own and the European programs.”

“And what are these probes meant to do?” Francis asked.

“I have no idea. But judging by the unusually large number of antennas, I’d say they were probably designed to listen for signals coming from somewhere in the area of Jupiter.”

“What about the submarine?” Mike said.

“An interesting idea, I have to admit. It’s a first generation Victor-class boat. The hull may well have been available as scrap, but that’s all it would have been. Everything else would have been stripped. It would have been an ambitious undertaking to get her seaworthy again, especially with those doors. Who knows.”