The Incandescent Ones

Book 0: Fred Hoyle's World of Science Fiction

by Fred Hoyle, Geoffrey Hoyle

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

Young Peter, a student of Byzantine art forms at Moscow University, through a cryptic sentence in a lecture receives a message to buy two books of his choice at exactly 1.30 pm in the university bookstore. When he opens the package, a third book, 'The Life of Pushkin', a very special copy indeed, has been included. It is this third book that leads Peter to Armenia on a series of adventures of the sort that Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle know how to spin so skilfully and so spell bindingly. Peter's mission includes finding his father again after many years of separation. And from his father he receives the remarkable 'battery' - plus a very difficult task to perform.

Release date: June 24, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 123

Sample

The spin-off of discoveries from the Dark Ages penetrated even to the Slavic World.

These were the words with which it all started. Spoken by Professor Ortov of Moscow University.

“The spin-off of discoveries from the Dark Ages …” Not the sort of thing you’d ever say by mistake. Ortov knew what he was saying but he didn’t know to whom it was said. It was a code address signal to a member of his class of some two hundred students who were attending his lectures on the art forms of Byzantium.

The lectures were held at 8 A.M. on cold, dark January mornings on the twenty-seventh floor of the University building, an ancient mausoleum dating from the Stalin period, before the oppressive regime in Russia really gained a firm hold on the people.

I’d risen about 7 A.M. in my dorm at the student hostel to which I’d been assigned the preceding September. Rolling with a groan off my half-metre-wide bed, with its apology of a mattress, and negotiating a bare feminine leg protruding from a nearby bed, I made my way to the showers.

Instead of working on the steady-droplet principle of an American shower, all the water came down on your head in a simple deluge, operating in the manner of a flush lavatory. You simply stood underneath a hole, pulled a piece of string, and down it all came—cold.

I was still gasping by the time I’d dressed, but at least I was fully awake and prepared for the day. Arriving early at the canteen safely ensured my securing a piece of bread and a bowl of sour milk. Ten minutes later I was on my way to Professor Ortov’s lecture, arriving eventually at the twenty-seventh floor, after the usual cattle-truck exercise on the elevators.

Actually, I’d soon come to prefer lectures at eight o’clock in the morning, because the classrooms had less of a smell about them at that time of day. The girls, chubby things mostly, but with a few hard-muscled ones mixed among them, used to sit predominantly to one side of the room; and the Russian men, not being interested at 8 A.M., sat at the other side. Being American, and therefore different in my habits, I sat among the girls. But in truth I didn’t have too much of an eye for them, even the muscly ones, because I had to keep a close watch on Professor Ortov, a man of solid stature in his middle fifties, with a shock of pepper-and-salt hair and a mouthful of big teeth. I kept watch on Professor Ortov, not because I was overly interested in the art forms of Byzantium, but because of what he might say. Week after week, I listened for it:

“The spin-off of discoveries …”

In my capacity as a rookie agent, I’d been told just one big thing—to listen for this phrase, and, should I hear it, to purchase two books of my choice on the same day at 1.30 P.M. from the university bookstore. Pretty slim equipment for an agent—rookie or otherwise. Yet step by step, with remorseless logic, these seemingly trifling instructions were to make me the plaything, not just of the intelligence agencies of both West and East, but of a third agency whose very existence I was still entirely unaware of. Multum in parvo.

I was brought up by my father. Although children in my position are supposed to suffer in later life from a one-parent syndrome, if I did I was certainly not conscious of it. Indeed, my early life was anything but monotonous or withdrawn. My father’s name was Anaxagoras, which I understood to have been the name of his paternal grandfather, a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church. But people in our hometown of Ketchum, Idaho, had little use for it. They called my pop Alexei, or just plain Alex.

When I was young, my father spent ten years working in the Moscow office of the U.S. trade association, thus putting to effective use his knowledge of the Russian language, which, as he often told me, he had learned as a first-generation immigrant from his Russian parents. And I too had become a fluent speaker of Russian, from accompanying my father when he took up the trade post. In fact, I was brought up in Moscow from the age of three to thirteen.

From Moscow we returned to Ketchum, which was certainly some difference in life style. Ketchum, I might say, small place that it is, is one of the largest collection points in the United States. But, unlike Moscow, for sheep, not people. It is also near to Sun Valley, which was important to my father, for he was a keen skier of a high-grade amateur class. However, by the time I was fifteen he had to give me best on the slopes, much to his seeming regret. To the time of his disappearance, we often made mountain expeditions together. Indeed, it was from these boyhood trips that I developed my passion for open-mountain skiing, the kind of thing which sets the normal prepared-slope artist’s teeth on edge. For good reason. I was always suffering minor injuries, which three or four years later went a long way towards keeping me out of the U.S. national ski team. I suppose the bangs and bruises knocked a fraction of a second off my timings, but this was the least part of it. It was rather that, whenever the national trials came up, I always seemed to be either hobbling around or to have one arm in a sling. Even so, I could not keep away from the wide clean snowfields of the big mountains. Nor could my father. One day, when I was coming up sixteen, he did not return from a solitary expedition among the hills.

Thereafter, I was boarded away at high school for upwards of a year, a painful, fretful, and solitary year, from which I escaped at last by enrolling at the early age of seventeen at the University of Washington. This I did by putting myself down as a student of the Russian language and literature, which made life easy for me. No trouble getting good grades with plenty of time to spare, while others sweated through their courses.

During winter vacations I worked as a ski instructor, and during the summer I took to the water, offering instructions in the art of water skiing to those willing to pay for my services. As I look back over this period, I can now see one or two somewhat unusual aspects to it. At the time, however, I was quite unaware of any oddity. While I had many acquaintances at the University, unlike most other students I failed to make any close friends. While outwardly I seemed approachable, I was in fact a bit of a loner.

Students of the liberal arts, like me, were required to take a science course at some stage of their university careers. This requirement was much dreaded, and most chose astronomy or earth-science as the least unpalatable alternative. Perversely I chose physics, and surprisingly I got an A grade in it. I was pleased, in a boyish kind of way, thinking nothing further of it.

Most American universities like their foreign-language students to spend a semester at least, better a year, in the country where the main language of study is actually spoken. So in my senior year, when I reached a suitably advanced stage in my work, I wrote the Dean’s office with the proposal that I should spend a year at Moscow University. This was agreed to in the late spring, with my entry scheduled for the coming fall.

On my side, there was nothing devious in this arrangement. The deviousness only began when I was called to an interview, ostensibly to discuss my visit to Russia. I was surprised to find, not the instructor to whom I was accustomed, but a more senior professor of Slavonic studies, a man well known in scholastic circles. It was he who advised me to attend Professor Ortov’s lectures. Then, in a grave tone of voice, to my very considerable astonishment, he suggested it would be a useful service to my country if, while in Russia, I were to undertake a small straightforward task. Should the learned Professor Ortov, with his pepper-and-salt hair and his mouthful of big teeth, use a certain phrase, then on that same day, at 1.30 P.M. precisely, I was to purchase two books from the Moscow University bookstore. Nothing more. Multum in parvo, as I said before.

For this service I was to receive a financial consideration, a kind of honorarium as one might say. In my chronically impoverished condition, this seemed a persuasive argument. I expected to receive a few hundred dollars, and this I would happily have spent. But when a few days later I found five thousand dollars had been paid to my account at the First National of Seattle I was much too scared to touch it at all. Not that I was frightened physically. It was more I had the feeling that someone was trying to buy my soul.

One reason I would have been glad of a bit of money to spend would have been to enjoy the last of the winter’s snow by myself, without needing to work as an instructor. To give an idea of the kind of thing I would have been happy to avoid, one day at the ski center I was sitting in the instructor’s office enjoying a cup of coffee when my attention was riveted by an exceedingly loud tread of boots on the wooden floor outside. Thinking a veritable giant was bearing down on me, I glanced up to see a small grey-haired, round-faced man, pince-nez stuck on a sharp nose, appear at the office door. He wore a windbreaker bearing the monogram of the Maryland Sno’ Skeeters. His boots continued to beat a murderous tattoo on the floor as he advanced on me with outstretched hand.

“Edelstam,” he announced with an apologetic air.

It did not take the wisdom of Solomon to foresee that this little man, with his pince-nez and leaden gait, was not going to be the success of the year on the slopes. In fact, he was quite shockingly bad. His ineptness was made the more painful to me by the profuse thanks he offered for the few inadequate bits of advice I was asked to give him. Even after a long hour and a half of it, I still could not escape, for he insisted on buying me a sandwich—because earlier he had interrupted my cup of coffee. While we ate, he showed me pictures of his wife and daughter, and of his home in Maryland. The wife was much the same as himself, but the daughter was a healthy, strong-looking young woman with short hair, wide-set eyes, and dimpled cheeks. Odd that this girl could be the offspring of such a thumping, clumping fellow. But nature somehow contrives to shuffle us all around in a remarkable way, a fact I’d already noticed quite a few times before. At last my Sno’ Skeeter was gone, and I was left lamenting the loss of the best part of one of my few remaining late spring days among the snows.

This short sketch of my early years by no means tells all, but it gives quite enough, I think, up to the September day when I arrived once more in Russia. In my capacity as a rookie agent I had received no training, nor any further instruction, and the five thousand dollars still lay untouched in my account at the First National of Seattle.

After Professor Ortov’s lecture, the morning dragged by without my being able to give any real attention to what was going on around me. The lunch break came at last, and I found a vacant seat in the canteen and there consumed a small pot of Turkish coffee. At 1.10 P.M. I started on my way to the bookstore. I had decided already on two titles which it was reasonable for a student in my position to buy, but I wanted to have a few minutes’ time in hand, so as to go through the motions of seeming to select the two books.

In a style which I felt to be neither too hasty nor yet too leisurely, I made my choices from the bookstore shelves. The girl clerk on duty at the purchase desk was one I had not seen there before. I had made several previous visits, not too many—I hadn’t haunted the place or anything like that—but enough so that I believed I knew all the desk clerks by sight. But this one was either new or she had escaped my previous investigations. She was about five feet six in height, with shining dark hair, and with brown wide-set eyes. Dimples appeared in her cheeks as she spoke. The language was native Russian.

A voice at my elbow, a clear, resonant English voice, English not American, asked, “I wonder, sir, if I might presume to ask for your help? I am looking for Kransky’s Life of Pushkin.”

The man had light hair and eyes, the eyes clear and hard. He was tallish, maybe six feet one, and spare of build. Although he didn’t move much, I had the strong impression of firm muscle and of an athletic constitution. This assessment was of a kind I was well used to making, from my years of experience as an instructor. In that job you were always on the look-out for the rare client with a high physical capacity, because you could do a lot more with him, which was a relief from so many of the others, like the Sno’ Skeeter from Maryland. This fellow was about thirty-five, I would say, old for a student, if he was a student. I translated his request to the girl. With a dimpled apology to me for stopping packing my books, she took them away with her as she went off to find a copy of Kransky’s Life of Pushkin.

“Been in Russia long?” I asked.

“A few days. I’ve been coming here, on and off, for quite a number of years. A friend asked me to pick up a copy of this Kransky book.”

“Your friend reads Russian?”

“Hardly be of much use to him if he didn’t, would it?”

I felt the Englishman to be consciously studying me with his cold blue eyes, and I myself, sensing this business was going to be far less simple than I had imagined, was acutely aware of everything about him, to a point where I would be in no difficulty to recognise him should we ever meet again.

Then the girl was back, with my parcel neatly wrapped, and with a copy of the Life of Pushkin in the other hand, which she handed to the Englishman. I paid for my two purchases, fascinated again by the dimples in the girl’s face. I wondered if I was supposed to make some mention of the homestead back in good old Maryland, but with the Englishman still hovering nearby, I decided against it. So with what I hoped was a noncommittal nod, I simply took my leave.

An hour later I unpacked the parcel, quite openly in a small cubicle at the reading room of the main University library. The package contained three books. The one I hadn’t bought was the Life of Pushkin by Alexander Kransky.

I was of course aware that an ‘incident’ had just taken place, but it quite defeated my imagination to understand what the incident might portend. Indeed I would be prepared to state that the full subtlety and counter-subtlety of what had just transpired in full public view back there in the bookstore would probably have baffled even the most experienced of agents. That some form of interchange of books might have taken place was reasonably obvious. On the face of it, I was at the losing end of the interchange, if there had been one, for when I examined my copy of Kransky there was nothing unusual about it. Quickly I ran through all the pages. No passages in it had been marked, no words were underlined, nothing obvious and silly like that. No student’s comments in the margin, as there might have been if . . .