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TISHA COULD NO longer hold himself back. "Dear Lord in Heaven, man! What are you saying? Get him out of that trance, now!"
A concerned Dr. Bragin complied. The tape recorder was switched off and notepads were laid aside.
For a moment or two Arthur blinked in bewilderment, newly restored to his contemporary self. As he took in the room and its frumpy furnishings with contemporary eyes, he grinned. But a puzzled look crossed his face as he registered the expressions of the others in the room and began to recall....
"It's like waking up from a dream," he muttered. "A dream that tries to fade away. If you concentrate, you can remember."
"You'll soon establish perfect control," said Diana soothingly. "You'll soon have a sense of conscious continuity between yourself---and your alter ego."
"I was in that joint just off Karl-Marx Street! I'm sure it's the same place. This room was the inn. And before---no, afterwards, I'm getting mixed up---I was in a hotel room. Now what was I doing? Got it! I was penning a letter to Ludmilla Degtyarova!"
"And there it is." Diana indicated the notepad lying open on the sofa beside him; the pages were covered with scrawly handwriting.
Igor launched himself across the room to snatch the pad up. "It's a bloody melange, that's what this is! These officer fellows are straight out of Three Sisters---names and all. Okay, so Delko did travel part of the way with an army doctor and two soldiers. But all this nonsense about a comet! Little did I suspect, Pushkaryov, when you made that crack about Jules Verne---!" He tossed the notepad down.
Tisha also stood up, so as not to be overshadowed by Igor. "Let's get our facts straight. Something exploded over Tunguska in the middle of Siberia in 1910, yes?"
"No," said Igor. "In 1908. I once wrote an article about the Tunguska mystery, if you recall."
"I stand corrected. Anyway, Eric Delko was safely in the grave by then. It certainly didn't happen in 1878, dear boy."
Bragin, too, stood up. "Excuse me, Mr. Pushkaryov, but am I safe in assuming that Arthur is fully au courant with the actual life of Delko?"
"Absolutely. Must we all keep breaking out in French? We're Soviet artists, not 19th century Russians."
"If there are no gaps in Arthur's knowledge of the facts, then he couldn't possibly invent something to fill in those gaps."
"He could hardly fill gaps, if there aren't any."
"So he's fantasizing," Igor said.
"No, he can't be. Oh, admittedly he fantasizes that he's Delko---in the psychological sense. But he has to do it accurately, just as I instructed him. He can only invent around the known facts. He doesn't have the free rein to make up whatever he wishes. I must say, nothing like this has happened before in my experience. It's an important and fascinating new development." However, Bragin hardly sounded very happy about it. Actually, what had happened was confoundedly embarrassing....
"Maybe Tolkachyov is insane?" suggested Igor. "You know, cuckoo? Around the bend, as the Americans say?"
"Thank you very much for the vote of confidence!" huffed Arthur.
"We have to get to the bottom of this," said Bragin. "I shall reinforce my instructions---then we'll skip forward a few weeks. Probably that'll put us back on the right track..."
Just then the double doors opened, and Alex wandered into the room without having bothered to knock---attracted by their voices raised in dispute.
"Damn it, man!" snapped Tisha. Was the caretaker keeping watch on them, as well as on the building? Was it possible he worked for the dread KGB?
"Do you wish something to eat?" asked Alex. "Some refreshments?"
Tisha fixed him with a hard stare for several moments, before allowing, "Maybe we should break for lunch?"
"It couldn't have been a comet, could it?" Arthur said. "That Tunguska thing? I thought it had all the characteristics of a nuclear explosion in midair? The heat flash. Radiation scabs on the reindeer. The pattern of tree-fall, the growth spurt in the trees afterwards."
"Yes, yes," agreed Igor sarcastically. "Naturally I came to that conclusion in my article. A nuclear explosion in 1908---nothing more obvious, when you come to think of it."
Tisha noted how Alex had pricked up his ears. "Be off with you," he told the caretaker. "Get on with it---we're hungry."
Slowly Alex slouched from the room.
"There's no other explanation, is there, that fits all the facts?" asked Diana.
"Our scientists are working hard on the Tunguska problem every year," Igor explained. "They use helicopters and Geiger counters."
"And still nobody knows for sure," said Tisha. "From all I've heard it's---damn it, downright Delkonian! Who knows what happened? Who will ever know?"
"It was you who dragged outer space into all this, in the first place!" Igor shouted accusingly.
Outside, the sun shone down dazzlingly upon the snowscape, though a curtain of cloud was in the offing...
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