POBEDOGRAD
“Pobedograd,” Nell read, noticing the suffix. “A city?”
“You’re kidding,” said Geoffrey.
The tycoon nodded, laughing deeply as they whooshed down the tunnel.
“What does the name mean?” Nell asked.
“Victory City,” Maxim said. “Hold on, now!”
The train clattered down the white wormhole, swerving right, left, left, right, and always down deeper as the temperature rose. At last, a smudge of light at the end of the tunnel resolved into a subway station floating in the black void: “Here we are.” Maxim opened a hand at the window as the subway car emerged into a cavern that stretched to their left, containing what seemed to be a train yard. The surreal train depot ahead was crowned with a rococo entablature inlaid with Cyrillic white letters a yard tall: SEKTOP 7.
“Sector Seven?” Geoffrey asked.
Maxim nodded. “Yes, Dr. Binswanger. The city is divided into seven sectors.”
Brass streetlamps highlighted the white marble platform like a rectangular layer of cloud suspended in the solid darkness.
The car stopped at a right angle to the station’s platform. They detrained onto a lower landing to the right of the car, and Nell felt the temperature rise into the high 60s. They walked north, as far as they could tell, toward the station, and smelled engine exhaust thick in the air.
Coming out from behind the subway car, they saw a droning portable generator the size of a truck trailer parked on the tracks to the left of the station’s platform. Electrical cables ran from the generator to a conduit under the platform, into which much larger cables from the tunnel also fed. Geoffrey’s eyes followed the blue rails of the train tracks in front of the station, which headed west as they converged in total darkness.
“You’re probably wondering where the tracks go, Geoffrey?” Maxim observed. “Some say workers breached a pocket of poison gas while digging that tunnel. Two hundred men were sealed inside to die. Their ghosts still haunt Pobedograd, or so the locals say.” Maxim gave them a sardonic glance. “Others believe it goes all the way to Moscow.”
Maxim climbed stairs to the platform and greeted the men there, who looked like bodyguards and brandished automatic weapons. The billionaire led them all into the station house through its doorless entryway. A steel beam supported the high, pitched ceiling inside. The far wall framed a great window of thick leaded glass reinforced with wire mesh. Steel shutters fixed against the ceiling were obviously designed to swing down and seal the window like a blast shield. Geoffrey and Nell could hardly believe the view through the window.
Coming out of the void, a skyline of a city gleamed, trimmed with colored lights reflecting in a subterranean river, a miniature Hong Kong under a sky of solid rock. The far bank of the river was lined with three-story apartments, restaurants, and nightclubs, some still under construction. Behind them, wedge-shaped city blocks of taller buildings with Gothic, classical, deco, and modernist façades, rooftops, and pinnacles radiated from a towering star-shaped building thirty-five stories tall at the center, which reached up to the ceiling of the vast chamber. The central tower was fused to one of two natural columns of rock that buttressed the capacious cavern. Colorful neon lights covered the tower’s angular walls like a Las Vegas hotel. A five-pointed Soviet star extended long points across the limestone ceiling from the tower’s crown, shedding a soft glow that plated the city with a silver luster like permanent moonlight. Nell and Geoffrey looked at Maxim with wide eyes.
“This is my city,” the oligarch said. “The last place on Earth that is still free.” He looked at his guests, and he smiled. “What happens in Pobedograd, stays in Pobedograd.”
Geoffrey noted Maxim’s dark eyes burning as he surveyed his subterranean metropolis. “You built this, Maxim?”
“I bought this, Geoffrey. For $382,772 from the Kaziristani government.” The magnate laughed. “Soviets built it. Or more precisely, their slaves did. One of those slaves, buried somewhere down here, was my grandfather.” Maxim waved, and one man activated a switch beside what appeared to be a large door to the right of the window. Geoffrey noticed SEKTOP 6 stenciled in faded red letters on the door as it slid sideways into the wall to reveal steps leading down to two Mercedes limousines parked at the curb in front of the station.
Maxim and Galia got into the lead limo, waving in Geoffrey and Nell, who sat across from them. Maxim’s bodyguards got into the limo behind them.
“You said there are species that you need us to identify,” Nell said. “Is this where they come from?”
“We will get to work soon enough, Doctor.” Maxim knocked on the partition behind him, and the car moved forward. “This natural cavern is almost largest ever discovered, I’m pretty sure. Surrounding it are others even bigger! Before Soviets came, the village of Gursk mined salt here for seven centuries. They helped carve this world beneath Mount Kazar. Soon city’s power plant will be online, in a few hours now, I believe. Isn’t that right, Galia? Then my city will be entirely self-sufficient and will burn as bright as day. Then we will no longer need anything from the surface. It will be a very luxurious resort to live in, don’t you agree, Geoffrey?”
“As a last resort, I guess,” Geoffrey conceded. “It’s certainly a spectacular place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here.”
To the right of the train station, a string of dim streetlamps arched over a baroque bridge with gilded wreaths carved into the balustrades. As the limos cruised over the bridge, Nell and Geoffrey looked out the left window at the black currents of the river between lampposts wrapped with bronze dolphins. A ghostly waterfall glowed blue in the distance, cascading down the western wall of the cavern. To the right of the bridge, the sparkling river seemed to drop down, flowing deeper into a channel that disappeared under the eastern wall.
“My River Styx!” Maxim proclaimed.
“Wow,” Nell whispered.
On the other side of the river, they turned right and then left, heading north along the city’s eastern edge. Three-story buildings displaying a dozen European architectural styles flickered past them on either side in their jiggling headlights. Many were lit up and apparently inhabited. Small electric cars zoomed through the city’s streets. They passed shops, apartment houses, fire stations, factories, banks, nightclubs, and grocery stores. It was like a museum of architecture, Nell thought as she observed the people on the streets. They were mostly well-dressed adults or construction workers. She noticed no children, though one woman appeared to be pregnant. “How many people live here?”
“Almost five thousand right now,” Maxim said. “Mostly workers, but guests have begun to arrive.” He activated a special cell phone in the car to check for messages.
Between blocks, Nell and Geoffrey saw spokelike streets radiating from the central tower’s pointed ramparts. At the head of each avenue stood a hulking bronze colossus posed in righteous glory. She recognized Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and other revolutionary heroes. From the star-shaped tower’s pinnacle, the five points of the glimmering star stretched over the city’s main avenues. Some of the streets were lit only by construction crews and traversed by trucks and forklifts. Other avenues were empty, twilit, and still.
“Pobedograd was originally a giant bomb shelter,” Maxim said, turning off his phone. “For Communist Party elite—in case they succeeded in destroying world. I turned it into a playground for rich, and a haven for oppressed—two classes that are often same, eh? But I am only law here. Don’t worry, I’m benevolent dictator.”
The refined city surpassed anything they had seen on their journey across the impoverished countryside of Kaziristan. Here, Geoffrey thought, under a mountain.
“Stalin was addicted to underworld,” Maxim explained. The hulking magnate’s body was outlined in the window of the limousine like the profile of a mountain. His black hair and beard flowed like basalt over his shoulders as he flashed a look at Geoffrey with volcanic eyes. “Koba dug railroads and cities across Soviet Empire. Places where he could plan his disasters, and hide from their consequences. He was Devil, Dr. Binswanger.” Maxim looked grimly through the window.
“Koba?” Nell asked.
“You mean Stalin?” Geoffrey asked.
“Da,” Maxim grunted.
“You mentioned your grandfather,” Geoffrey said.
Maxim nodded. “My grandfather was doctor, like yourself. A physicist. For telling truth, he was sentenced to Belbaltlag so he could help dig White Sea–Baltic Sea Canal, which was very first gulag. Prisoners used pickaxes and shovels to dig one-hundred-forty-mile canal in only twenty months, at cost of twenty-five thousand men—some say one hundred thousand. Nobody really knows.” Maxim shrugged and spread the fingers of one hand, shaking his head. “Records are sketchy. The canal was too narrow for ships, however. So it was nothing more than mass grave for criminals, counterrevolutionaries, and enemies of state. My grandfather survived Belbaltlag. One of few. He survived two more gulags, as well, until he arrived here. He was tough man.” Maxim looked at Nell. “But here, at Pobedograd, he died, along with seventy-five thousand other men who were building this glorious hiding place for Koba.”
“Stalin.” Nell nodded softly.
“Da.” Maxim sipped from a silver flask, which he offered to Geoffrey and Nell, who politely refused. The oligarch continued, occasionally dropping articles as his cadence stressed certain phrases and words with explosive volume: “My father was genius, like my grandfather! Unlike him, however, he did not try to work inside Soviet system. He was entrepreneur in black market, instead. They branded him a gangster, just like me. Gangsters were only ones getting anything done in Russia in those days. Today, still true. The Party did not care. All they cared about was who was breaking law and if they received sufficient bribes to look other way. Our state made us what we had to be in order to survive, Geoffrey. I stepped into my father’s shoes at seventeen, after he was murdered by officials who were not bribed enough. Since then, all Russian authorities are my enemies. And I am theirs, since then.”
“I see,” Nell said with a worried glance at Geoffrey.
Maxim slapped Geoffrey’s thigh, grinning in a conspiratorial expression. “You see this city, Geoffrey? It’s nothing! The ground of Moscow is hollow with such places. Some were dug centuries ago by Ivan the Terrible. Others are so secret, even Russian government possesses no record of their construction!” Maxim laughed heartily, his Russian humor a potent cocktail of despair, outrage, and futility mixed with sly self-mockery. But there was a hidden declaration of war in his laugh, as well. “Under Moscow, Stalin’s underground was intended to keep state officials safe. Instead, it became refuge for enemies of state. Even in Stalin’s time, a black market of dissidents and geniuses, smugglers and rebels, all marked for murder, took root underground. During the ’70s, I, too, was saved, more than once, by hiding in Stalin’s catacombs. Many connections I made there helped me carve my slice of Soviet Union when it collapsed. By bribing the right officials and guaranteeing paychecks to oil, gas, and mine workers when Russian state could not, I gained their loyalty and kept power on so people would not freeze. I kept factories, schools, and hospitals from closing when no one else knew what to do. But when Russian government began hunting down so-called oligarchs, to reclaim what they call the ‘Party’s gold,’ I left, with my family and all of my wealth. That is something Russian government can never forgive, or forget. I own homes on all five continents—twenty-seven estates from Italy to Hawaii, from Manhattan to Hong Kong, from Israel to Costa Rica. I own a fleet of aircrafts, including three DC-10s, an American football team, an Italian basketball team, a French movie studio, and cable news networks in Australia, Eastern Europe, and Brazil. I moved all of my money and all of my family and friends out of Russia so I could not be blackmailed. Many of them live here now. And yet, at any moment, I could be assassinated. Three of my friends, other so-called oligarchs, have been murdered in broad daylight in major cities outside Russia. One was killed in downtown Manhattan. Digitalis in his Diet Coke. Another was killed in Argentina. Polonium in his toothpaste.” Maxim shrugged. “I am hunted wherever I go. Except here!”
Geoffrey noted the heavy security the billionaire was traveling under and glanced darkly at Nell.
They arrived at a giant steel door guarded by armed men. They read faded red letters stenciled on the steel: SEKTOP 2. Maxim waved out the window, and the guards activated a switch. The door rolled sideways into the wall and revealed a road that proceeded uphill into another part of the city.
The low ceiling over the road resembled the barrel vaulting of a Gothic monastery now. This section of the city seemed to be unoccupied and dark.
“This was a garrison for Stalin’s guards,” Maxim remarked, waving at the windoow. “It was built as shelter for villagers of Gursk six centuries ago. He sealed all sectors of city with lead-lined doors to protect them from floods, fires, radiation—or revolution.” Maxim winked sardonically at Nell.
There was no illumination in this sector except for their cars’ headlights. Nell noticed a few rats scurrying across the street in front of the limo.
“Most people born into poverty and oppression deserve it, I think,” Maxim inveighed. “The world they are willing to live in is their natural habitat, like crocodiles in mud or rats in sewers.”
Nell was startled as Maxim leveled his piercing gaze at both of them.
“And most people born into freedom and prosperity don’t deserve it, either—since they did nothing to create it and nothing to preserve it. Indeed, they do a little more each day to tear it down, if only by looking the other way while it crumbles. That is the sad truth, my friends.”
“So who are the ones who deserve a better world in your view, Maxim?” Nell asked.
“Those who create it—even as the rest try to tear it down every step of the way.” A bitter, world-quaking laugh rocked the hulking man’s shoulders. “But you are biologists. Every day you observe the animal kingdom. Surely you have noticed the unsustainable march humanity is on? We are headed back to mud, cannibalizing those who briefly dragged us out.” Maxim observed the shocked look on their faces. “Do not worry, Doctors,” he said. “I have classed you among those who are deserving. Both of you have courage to fight the status quo. You use your brains, which is to say, you are honest. Unlike many of your peers, who sell their opinions to the highest bidder. I have researched your backgrounds and I assure you, when whole world goes to hell, you will always have your place here, if you want it.”
“Well,” Geoffrey said. “That’s good to know.”
“I think it would be hard to leave the whole world behind, even for your utopia, Maxim,” Nell said. “There is too much good in it.”
“It depends, I think, on what you’re leaving behind,” Maxim said. “There are many here who found the choice quite easy.”
They traveled deeper into the medieval sector of the city as the road grew steeper. They slowed and turned abruptly left, still heading uphill. After another few minutes, they arrived at a large steel door marked with red letters:
SEKTOP 1
“Here we are!”
Maxim rolled down the window, waving twice at the waiting guards, who activated a switch. Again, the door rolled sideways into the rock. Both limos pulled into a wide cobblestone courtyard before a glistening golden palace. “Premier Stalin’s personal residence,” Maxim announced, presenting the baroque façade with a flourish as he noticed his guests’ dumbstruck reaction. “Just in time for cocktails,”
“Cocktails?” Geoffrey stammered. “It’s breakfast time, isn’t it?”
“In Pobedograd, day is night,” said Maxim.
9:00 P.M. MAXIM TIME
Geoffrey and Nell emerged from Maxim’s armored limousine eagerly, and both of them gasped before the resplendent mansion that erupted like a fantasy inside the domed cavern. They noticed a forest of yellow stalactites dripping from the ceiling as they climbed the curving steps to the palace entrance that was framed by a polished marble portico and onyx pillars with gold-leafed capitals.
At the top of the stairs, Nell looked up to see an enormous crystal chandelier suspended under a golden umbrella dome over the foyer. The chandelier illuminated a polished floor of inlaid stone with spiraling geometric designs. To each side, curving stairways carpeted in crimson swept up to the second story.
Maxim stopped to have a word with one of his men in the foyer. “She does not want any guards inside,” Geoffrey overheard him tell Galia Sokolof. There was a brief argument between them, and Maxim waved off Galia and the rest of his men. Then Maxim motioned for Nell and Geoffrey to follow him up the crimson stairway on the left.
At the top, he led them between two banks of doors and turned left up a short stairway to a door on the right—another submarine hatch with a dog wheel in the center. Maxim pushed a button. The wheel turned as someone on the other side opened the door inward.
“Please, my friends,” said Maxim. “Let me show you my conservatory.”
They stepped through the hatch into a rectangular room that was indeed the size of an English manor’s conservatory, with a high corbeled ceiling from which three gold-and-crystal chandeliers hung spaced from right to left. In the far left corner of the chamber was a glass tube in which a wrought iron stairway corkscrewed through the floor and ceiling. The back wall of the room seemed to be hewn into the solid bedrock of Mount Kazar, but most of the clawed rock face was covered by luxuriant red velvet curtains. The other three walls were lined with book-laden shelves and mahogany paneling displaying gold-framed paintings that seemed to be forgotten masterpieces. To the right of the door was a great oaken desk, and on the wall behind it was an array of video monitors displaying various parts of Maxim’s city.
The room’s parquet floor was scattered with silk Persian rugs, and in the center of the room, directly in front of them, was a long banquet table pointing toward them, where four seated dinner guests now rose to greet them.
“Hey, man!” said a moonfaced man with a ponytail. “Oh, my God! Is that you, Nell?”
“Otto?” Nell asked, amazed.
The man ran and hugged her.
“Geoffrey, let me introduce you to Otto Inman,” she said. “He was on Henders Island in the NASA lab before you got there.”
“Yeah, before it was totally destroyed,” Otto said, reaching out to shake Geoffrey’s hand. “I didn’t figure on Henders Island when I designed it.”
“Nice to meet you.” Geoffrey shook his hand.
A stocky Asian man with graying hair approached them, and Otto introduced him. “This is Katsuyuki Fujima,” he said, uncertain whether he had gotten the name right.
“Yes, perfect.” The man nodded at Otto. “Very nice to meet you. I am a biologist from Nagoya University, Japan.” He reached out to shake Nell’s hand.
“He was on Henders Island, too, briefly,” Otto said. “He helped collect specimens on the last day we were there.”
“One big happy reunion,” Geoffrey said with a puzzled glance at Nell.
Nell arched her eyebrows. “Interesting.”
“Yes,” Katsuyuki agreed.
A thin, pale, black-haired man with coal black eyes approached them. “Hello! I am Dimitri Lagunov.” The slender Russian wore a thin black goatee and glasses. “I am the only biologist here who was not on Henders Island, it seems. It is very good to meet you both. This is Klaus Reiner.”
A tall, blond German man wearing spectacles and a business suit without a tie greeted them. “Hello. I’m just an electrical engineer,” he said. “Working on the power plant.” He shrugged.
Geoffrey and Nell shook his hand.
Maxim strode to a leather armchair at the head of the table, its back to the red velvet curtain. “Please, everyone, sit down!” His basso profundo voice compelled them like a force of nature, and everyone took a seat at his end of the table to either side.
“So are you now going to say, ‘I’m sure you are all wondering why I brought you here’?” Nell asked, giggling. “Because that would really be funny right now, Maxim.”
The anxiety of the others at the table crumbled into nervous laughter.
Maxim smiled. “Something like that. You seem to have made introductions already.” He nodded at the train of waiters who entered the hatch door bearing trays of food and champagne. “Let me welcome you all as guests. I thank each of you for answering my invitation.”
With fresh flutes of champagne, his guests obliged him in a toast.
“I wonder if any of you can identify what you are now being served,” Maxim said as the waiters placed a dish before them.
Quite obviously, it was a serving of seared mushrooms—so the stakes increased as each scrutinized the variety presented on the plates. All sampled the fungi, which had a meaty flavor drizzled with a tart pomegranate sauce.
“Armillaria,” Nell volunteered. “Honey mushrooms?”
“Ah! Our botanist, the newlywed Nell Binswanger, is correct! Very good!” Maxim raised his large hand to signal one of his men, who dimmed the chandeliers in the room.
As the room darkened, everyone gasped to see the mushrooms on their plates, on their forks and in their mouths glowing green, blue, orange, and purple. Maxim’s chest quaked as he laughed. “Explain to them, please, Nell.”
She recovered from the surprise. “Armillaria is a bioluminescent mushroom,” she said. “The mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of one of the longest-living fungi. One single organism can spread over three square miles and live for thousands of years. They produce fox fire, which is bioluminescent and grows on rotting logs. In olden days, Scandinavians used them to mark paths through the forest during the long northern nights.”
“Very good,” Maxim purred like a panther. “She is very good, Geoffrey.”
“But this isn’t foxfire,” Nell protested. “Foxfire is blue or green. This is more like … rainbowfire.”
“That is an excellent name for it, Nell!” Maxim approved.
“Is it edible?” Otto asked, triggering laughs around the table.
“Oh, yes!” Maxim relished a bite of the lightly seared mushrooms, which glowed orange and pink on his fork; then he sipped some champagne. “And quite delicious.” Maxim raised his left arm.
Some of his men now carried forward three tall boxlike objects covered in black cloth and set them in a row on the far side of the banquet table. “I would like you all to tell me everything you know about what I show you next.”
The men pulled off the shroud from the first box and revealed an acrylic aquarium half-filled with water. Maxim’s guests rose and gathered around as they noticed living things inside the aquarium.
“Whoa!” Otto said, laughing. A fluorescent sea spider hunted what looked like swimming snails swishing above it. “No freaking way!” Otto exclaimed.
“Ammonites?” Geoffrey gasped.
The scientists peered with open mouths at the miniature ram’s horn coils that jetted through the water like tiny nautiluses.
“They have been extinct for sixty-five million years!” Katsuyuki cried.
“No, Dr. Fujima,” said Maxim.
Geoffrey broke into a wide grin. “You found them here?”
“Yes!” said Dimitri.
“Please, tell me about them, Geoffrey,” Maxim said.
Waiters served them another round of hors d’oeuvres: ammonite escargot.
“There was a time when they ruled the seas, reaching ten feet across,” Geoffrey said. “The Roman historian, Pliny the Elder, named them after examining their fossils near Pompeii and noted their resemblance to the ram horns worn by the Egyptian god Amon. You know, the one King Tut was named after? But this is impossible.…”
“Amen,” said Otto.
“Don’t laugh,” Nell said. “But we probably adopted that word from the tradition of invoking Amon in prayers.”
Maxim laughed. “Go on.”
“Some think these creatures may have plowed across the sea’s surface like Jet Skis, hunting with heads and arms like armored squid,” Geoffrey said.
“Well, they were right, Geoffrey,” Maxim said. “I’ve seen them do it.”
“Do you know how huge a discovery this is?” Katsuyuki said, his hands shaking. “It’s a miracle!” Otto gave him a high five.
“How do they taste?” Maxim asked.
“We’re eating them?” Nell asked.
“Oishii!” Katsuyuki nodded, elated. “Delicious.”
“Chewy,” Otto said, laughing.
“And that’s a sea spider,” Geoffrey said, pointing at the multicolored eight-legged creature that reached its impossibly long, folding arms out to the racing ammonites. “One of the strangest crustaceans. This one’s really colorful! They seem to be a branch that split off from all other arthropods about half a billion years ago…”
“Some think they actually are arachnids—before they evolved for land,” Otto said.
“That’s debatable, Doctor,” said Katsuyuki, admiring the specimen.
“It’s still a cool theory,” Otto said. “What’s in this one?”
An attendant pulled the shroud from the next tank, which was dry. Inside, yellow and orange animals that glowed circled round and round on the bottom.
“Gammarids?” Geoffrey suggested, looking into the dry aquarium.
“Yes,” agreed Dimitri. “Some kind of amphipod, like gammarids, we think. We call them gammies.”
“But adapted for land?” Geoffrey said. “With only eight legs?”
“Look at the spikes on their backs,” Nell said. “They look like aetosaurs!”
“What are aetosaurs, Nell?” Maxim asked, leaning back in his chair and watching the scientists as waiters served another round of appetizers and replenished their champagne.
“One of my favorite dinosaurs, with spikes on its back pointing to each side.”
“It’s thought that gammarids may have evolved in Lake Baikal or the Caspian Sea, which isn’t so far from here, I think,” Otto said.
Dimitri smiled. “Lake Baikal is rather far from here, Dr. Inman. But you are right, the gammarids there have similar spikes on their armor.”
“They’re also known as killer shrimp,” said Otto. “They’re a big concern at Berlin University. They’ve been migrating from the Caspian Sea across Europe through the Danube and wreaking havoc. They’ve even been turning up in England and Scotland recently. But no one has ever recorded a land-based species! And with only four pairs of legs?”
“They must have undergone an independent Hox gene mutation, like early arthropods, when they crawled on land four hundred million years ago and became hexapods,” Geoffrey said.
“Hexapods?” Maxim asked.
“Bugs,” Geoffrey clarified. “With only six legs.”
“But why are they glowing?” Nell wondered. “They seem to be blind. No eyes, at all! See?”
“They move like tiger beetles!” Katsuyuki exclaimed with an eight-year-old’s delight. “So fast! But why in a circle, around and around?”
“We’ve noticed they move like that sometimes,” Dimitri acknowledged, shrugging.
“Wait a minute … army ants,” Nell murmured.
“Huh?” the others asked.
“Army ants are blind, so they follow scent trails laid down by other ants’ abdominal glands. If an ant travels in a spiral, others following it can get trapped in death circles, with thousands of them turning like hurricanes until they die of starvation.”
“No way,” Otto said. “I’ve never heard of that.”
“But why do the gammies glow if they’re blind? Why do any of these species? I don’t get it.”
“They eat … what did you call it? Rainbowfire,” Maxim said.
“We think the bioluminescence in the fungus either grows on them or continues to glow once ingested,” Dimitri said.
“They must stick out like Christmas lights to predators,” Nell said, puzzling. “Maybe that’s why they’re covered with spikes.…”
“How long would adaptations like these take to evolve?” asked Katsuyuki, shaking his head.
“Well, Lake Baikal is the oldest freshwater lake on Earth.” Dimitri shrugged. “It lies hundreds of kilometers east of the Urals.”
“How old is it?” asked Nell.
“Some say fifty million years.”
“It might be a clue.” Nell looked at Geoffrey.
“The Caspian Sea is a lot closer,” Geoffrey said. “And the Aral Sea. And in any event, I don’t think any of them are old enough. We’re looking at things that must have origins dating back to the great age of marine mollusks, which ended around the time of the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago. This is a region with major tectonic activity, which made these mountains. What I don’t understand is how could a cave system this size last for so long?”
“The Urals are the oldest mountain range on Earth, Dr. Binswanger. They are two hundred fifty, maybe three hundred million years old,” said Dimitri.
“Ah! Who knows when these specimens were trapped underground and begun diverging, then?” Otto said.
Nell whispered in Geoffrey’s ear: “This is much better than Kauai, sweetheart.”
He nodded and speared a gammarid tail, dipping it in cocktail sauce as she clinked her flute of champagne against his.
The attendant pulled the shroud from the third tank.
The German electrical engineer, Klaus Reiner, who had watched and listened in silent awe as the scientists described the species presented to them at this extraordinary banquet, now spoke up. “What in hell are these?” he said, pointing at glowing bubbles bobbing up and down inside the dry tank.
The others were silent.
Maxim laughed softly.
“We have no idea,” Dimitri confessed, “what these are.”
Small creatures like Christmas tree ornaments glowed pink and orange with four fins that made them spin or glide as they floated up and down.
“How are they doing that?” asked Otto.
“They look like Dumbo octopuses!” Nell said. “Are they filled with gas?”
A light like an ignited match flared inside one of the small bell-like creatures as it rose inside the tank.
“Bombardier beetles!” exclaimed the German.
The scientists turned to him.
“Sorry. I did a paper on them as an undergraduate.…”
“I thought you were an electrical engineer,” Nell said.
“I was studying biochemical energy systems for a while.”
“Explain, please, Dr. Reiner,” Maxim said.
“Bombardier beetles mix hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone generated in separate glands to create an explosive chemical reaction, like a rocket engine. It generates enough heat to boil water. These things might be using a similar process to inflate a bladder with hot gas.”
“Like sky lanterns,” Katsuyuki said.
“Hot air balloons!” Nell said.
Maxim blew a plume of cigar smoke straight up. “Excellent.”
Geoffrey shook his head, staggered by the implications. “We’ve got water, land, and air organisms? How elaborate is this ecosystem?”
“Let me show you.” Maxim nodded at one of his men, and the man pulled a golden sash that parted the red velvet curtains at his back, revealing a great oval window encircled by a wide bronze frame embedded in the solid rock.
Everyone rushed to the window before the curtains had completely opened, and Maxim swiveled in his leather chair to gaze with them through the thick pane of glass that stretched twenty feet high and forty feet wide. The polished window was dark except for glowing colors and shapes that slowly began to emerge. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Maxim said, “May I present Pandemonium.”
9:55 P.M.
Slowly, their eyes made out the outlines of another world on the other side of the window.
A vast lake, splotched with swirling patches of color, channeled into the distance through a corridor angling slightly to the right as far as the eye could see. Hundreds of feet above was a vaulted ceiling with iridescent paisley patterns overlapping over the rock.
The faint light of the chandeliers lit up the area closest to the window. As suspended forms moved closer in the dark, they took on real shape; as they moved away, they dissolved into spectral ciphers. Multitudes of phosphorescent creatures swirled in glowing storms and spiral galaxies receding to the vanishing point in the colossal cavern.
Geoffrey scanned the surface of a lake below. He saw creatures snaking over the water, visibly breaking into pieces and rejoining as they swam like the centipede Maxim had shown them. Bioluminous hordes of gammarids darted over glowing patches on the lake’s surface.
All the scientists were pressed against the window, cupping their hands to both sides of their heads as they peered through the thick glass. Nell looked up at the cavern’s ceiling, which was coated with a shaggy pelt of stalactites. An island of stalagmites the size of buildings soared from the center of the lake with columns reaching all the way to the ceiling at its highest point, six hundred feet above. And every spire was dusted with rainbowfire.
Purple globes the size of beach balls dangled red tentacles like levitating Portuguese man-of-wars. A faintly illuminated organism like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade float moved languidly over the lake in the distance, extending long feathery plumes at one end that fanned cyclones of orange and pink bubbles into its whale-sized mouth.
Nell sighed, holding on to Geoffrey. “What in the hell are we looking at?”
Maxim pointed to a plaque centered on the bottom frame of the window.
“‘Hell’s Window,’” Maxim translated. “That’s just what Stalin thought he was looking at as he sat in this very chair. I imagine he felt right at home. As for me, I call it Pandemonium.” He spoke in Russian to one of his men to the right of the window, who nodded as he pulled down a heavy switch.
The chandeliers dimmed to a flicker, and a rack of locomotive headlamps mounted inside the cavern ignited above the window and flooded the chasm with beams of light. The patches on the lake’s surface now appeared to be gray masses like shingled lily pads over which yellow and orange gammarids scrambled. Along the shore, more of the amphipods flowed in herds, ranging from the size of mice to hippos. More poured down over the window from above and across its lower ledge.
Overcoming their initial shock, the scientists began exclaiming all at once, each reacting to something else as they pointed in different directions.
One of the yellow and pink striped blimps drifted toward them under the spiked ceiling. Spiraling feathers recoiled one by one from the air as they snagged swarms of orange and pink balls like the specimens in the tank on the table before them.
“F*ck me!” Otto laughed, delirious as he hung on the window like a boy at the monkey enclosure.
“Sky whales,” Nell breathed.
“Good!” Maxim approved.
“Could it be some kind of medusae or mollusk?” Geoffrey wondered, gripping Nell’s hand. He realized, as did the rest of the scientists, that not only hundreds of millions of years but also a truly vast environment would be required to produce such a variety of life and all these complex interrelationships.
“The gammies are all over the ceiling, too!” Otto pointed up at the cavern’s vault, which was overrun by amphipods grazing on the stalactites.
“Look at that nearest herd, crossing the lake,” said Dimitri. “The ones at the perimeter have mandibles.”
“Maybe it’s another antlike adaptation,” Nell said. “Some gammies might be specialized to defend the colony.”
“Maybe they’re predators, stalking the herd,” Katsuyuki said.
“That layer on the lake looks like the bacteria–fungus mats in the Movile cave in Romania,” Nell said. “It grows chemosynthetically and is the base of the food chain for thirty-three endemic species.”
“Interesting,” Maxim said.
“Everything seems to eat the rainbowfire on the walls and ceiling, too,” added Geoffrey.
“And everything glows,” Katsuyuki said. “Maybe there is a connection!”
“I don’t know,” Nell said. “Digestive enzymes would pretty quickly denature the luciferase that makes the fungus glow.…”
“Most things down here are probably transparent,” Geoffrey said. “So their food would glow at least partway down even if the luciferase were hydrolyzed by digestive enzymes.”
“Maybe,” she considered. “Or maybe the organisms are simply coated by glowing spores.”
“Both, I think,” said Dimitri. “And they must produce their own bioluminescence, as well.”
“Are we going to glow now, too?” asked Otto.
Everyone laughed nervously.
“You already are, I think!” Maxim smiled in satisfaction as he watched the enraptured scientists admiring his world.
A white twenty-foot-long segmented animal swam in a side-to-side motion among the gray patches. It disarticulated into forty smaller animals that raided the grazing amphipods on a fungal mat. The pieces reassembled and snaked through the gammarid herd to oohs and ahs from the gallery. One of the mandible-bearing gammarids at the perimeter of the herd crawled over the others with long legs, chasing the centipede.
“They are guards,” Nell whispered. “The big ones are soldier gammies.”
The soldier gammarid seized a segment of the animal, and the other segments scattered, jumping back into the water.
“Huh! The centipedes sacrifice one bit to save the rest,” Geoffrey said.
“Like a lizard giving up its tail,” Otto said.
The segments reconnected in the water as they swam off.
“See ya later, aggregator,” Otto said.
“Perfect, Dr. Inman.” Maxim stamped his hand on the arm of his chair. “That is what we will call them! Aggregators!”
Geoffrey saw a band of white encrusting the shoreline below. “Is this … salt water?”
“Yes.” Dimitri nodded.
“How big is Pandemonium?” Nell asked.
The others turned to Maxim.
“It goes for sixty miles in that direction,” Maxim said, pointing.
“We used a high-powered laser surveyor to find out,” Dimitri said. “We think that’s how long the cavern is. It may be longer.”
“Dear God,” Reiner said.
Nell noticed a battery of light beams that penetrated the lake below the surface. “Hey!” She pushed herself away from the glass and pointed at the spiral staircase in the far corner of the room. “Can we go downstairs? Is there another window down there?”
Otto looked up and saw another phalanx of light beams above, which illuminated a pair of cables that seemed to span the lake toward the island. “Can we go upstairs?”
“Can we go into Pandemonium?” Katsuyuki asked.
“It’s not a good idea right now,” Maxim replied, with a deep laugh.
“Papa!” A peal of laughter like a fanfare announced a small girl crowned with tousled golden hair as she bolted into the conservatory, charging past the scientists.
Maxim swiveled as he saw her coming and absorbed the blow as she launched into his lap. The big man grunted and hugged her. “Hello, Sasha! Everyone: let me introduce my daughter.”
“Hello to all of you scientists!” She waved. “Did you see the cherry puffs? And the Legopedes? Ha!” Sasha contorted in a snaking motion sticking her tongue out.
Maxim grinned indulgently as she shook hands with each of his guests. “Sasha has names for everything in Pandemonium,” he explained. “Some of them are pretty good.”
Sasha clasped Nell’s hand. “Nice to meet you. What’s your name?”
“I’m Nell, Sasha. And this is my husband, Geoffrey.”
Maxim extinguished the lights in Pandemonium. “I think that is all for tonight.”
The others groaned in protest.
“I am sorry. But it takes huge amount of energy to keep burning these lights,” said Maxim. “Tomorrow, you shall begin cataloging and categorizing the animals of Pandemonium. In addition to being a functioning city, I envision Pobedograd as a working museum and laboratory, where scientists can study and preserve its natural wonders for all time. But tonight, please enjoy any of our three riverfront nightclubs where, if you choose to gamble, you’ll find each of you has a thousand dollars credit. We will cut you off before you lose too much! There are three wonderful restaurants, too. Cars are waiting in front of the palace to take you to your accommodations. Please enjoy! But don’t stay out too late. We will pick you up at nine A.M. tomorrow morning to start work.”
10:35 P.M.
Several limousines were waiting for them in front of the golden palace.
As Otto climbed into one of the cars, he called Nell and Geoffrey. “We’ll be meeting at Volya later. That’s a restaurant, if you’re interested!”
“Sounds good!” Nell said. “Maybe we’ll meet you there.”
The cars shuttled them back to Sector Six, where the city lights sparkled in the permanent night. Along the riverfront they passed nightclubs spilling raucous partiers into the street and a rooftop establishment their drivers recommended for first-class service, atmosphere, food, and even some civilized gambling. Geoffrey and Nell noticed the blue neon sign that read VOLYA on the side of the building, but they requested they be taken to their accommodations first.
At the west end, they passed a row of newly refurbished apartments. The last one turned out to be their “bridal cottage.” The ornate polished brownstone was located closest to the waterfall and seemed to have been carved out of the living rock of the cave’s west wall.
The driver of their car pulled their luggage from the trunk and then hauled it upstairs from the street. He opened the front door with a plastic key card and showed them into their luxury apartment. Inside the door was a swank art nouveau entry. Upstairs the driver showed them a living room with plush white carpets and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city.
On the far side, a gray leather couch U’d around a glass coffee table mounted on a fossil ammonite. A gas-fueled fire flickered in a fireplace faced with rock bearing foot-long trilobites. The floor-to-ceiling picture window framed the luminous blue waterfall cascading down the western wall. Lit candles and fresh-cut flowers decorated the suite.
The driver showed them to their bedroom to the right and deposited their luggage. The walls of the high-ceilinged room were paneled with slabs of rock embedded with crinoid fossils like lotus flowers in an Egyptian frieze. The gleaming bed was spread with copper-colored silk and banked high with gold silk pillows. Tucked deep into one of the pillows was a box of chocolate truffles. On top of the polished stone headboard was a magnum of champagne on ice surrounded by tropical flowers. In one lonely crystal vase on the headboard stood the pink rose Geoffrey had picked for Nell in front of Brick Dorm at Woods Hole, a whole world ago.
Nell and Geoffrey both offered the man a tip, but he refused graciously and handed them a card with a number to call for assistance or room service. He informed them that the refrigerator in the kitchen downstairs was fully stocked.
Nell saw the phone beside the bed. “Can we call out?”
“Oh, no.” The man shook his head, gesturing around them. “Too deep.”
It was only after the driver closed the door downstairs that they squeezed each other in disbelief and totally geeked out.
11:22 P.M.
Nell rested her head on his chest, gazing out the window at the blue cascade. They both lay sprawled in the silken sheets, sunk deep into the Swedish mattress. “A completely new world,” she said.
“Even more complex than Henders Island,” he said.
“If not as old.”
“Much bigger, though.”
“But not as dangerous,” she said, stretching luxuriously. “I love it!”
“Species that evolved in subterranean conditions could never compete aboveground,” Geoffrey confirmed. “So there’s no risk of them taking over, I should think.”
“It’s the opposite of Henders Island: an alien ecosystem that is fragile instead of deadly.”
“Most are,” he reminded her. “We need to remember that, honey.” He squeezed her arm gently. “Henders Island was the exception, not the rule.”
“You’re right. I know. This is definitely helping me get over my post–Henders Island stress disorder, I think.”
“Good.”
“Hey, I’m hungry. Let’s go to that restaurant.”
“Yeah?”
“And gamble the night away.” She grinned, eyes wide.
“Good Lord! All right…”
11:58 P.M.
Maxim sat on a large crescent-shaped black leather couch in the dark before the wedge-shaped windows of his penthouse. From the top floor of the Star Tower, he presided over the city as the construction crews worked around the clock below. And he waited.
The magnificent lighting fixture carved into the cavern’s ceiling glowed like a glass nebula poured into the shape of a five-pointed star. Its five opalescent points flickered like lightning in clouds or a gigantic burned-out fluorescent bulb on the verge of igniting. He was waiting for the dawn.
Sasha burst into the room, startling him as she leaped over the back of the couch onto the cushion beside him. “What are you looking at, Papa?” she asked in English. His precocious daughter spoke Russian, English, and French perfectly.
She was a genius, like her father and grandfather, he realized, with some wariness. “Go to sleep, child! You should be in bed. It’s almost midnight!”
“It’s never night here,” Sasha said. “And it’s never day, either, Papa.”
“Tomorrow, it will be,” he said.
His daughter frowned under her mop of blond hair and squinted at him skeptically. “Where’s Alexei?” she asked.
“Your brother will be here, very soon.”
“Papa?”
“Yes?”
“Thanks for kicking the guards out of the palace. I don’t like them. They look at me funny.”
“Who?”
“All of them.”
“Have they ever done anything to you, malishka?”
“No. But I do not like their guns!”
“They’re here to protect you. But from now on, they will stay in front of the palace. They will still have to use bathrooms, though. OK?”
“OK, Papa. Papa?”
“Yes?”
“They won’t hurt anybody, will they?”
“Who?”
“The guards. I mean, they won’t … The scientists will be all right, won’t they?”
“Of course, malishka.”
“Promise?”
“Yes.”
“Good!”
“Why do you ask?”
“I just miss the other ones. They were nice.”
“I told you, Sasha, they had to leave. They had to go back home. That’s all.”
“OK.”
“Now, bedtime!” he roared comically with a monster growl as he waved his arms.
She hugged her mountainous father around the neck and kissed him on his furry cheek before jumping away and running toward the tram dock on the far side of the penthouse. “Bonsoir, Papa!”
Her voice receded around the central column of natural stone that supported the Star Tower. When he heard the motors engage, he knew that she had made it to the tram car and was on her way back to the palace. The tram rode a cable from the Star Tower in the center of the city to a private passageway through the north wall of Sector One. Stalin had escape routes from all his escape routes. He had anticipated every means of egress.
Maxim sipped a tumbler of Scotch and water, leaning back on the curving leather couch, tortured by the waiting. Then, at last, like an explosion, the phone rang, and he snagged it like a panther. “What’s happening?”
“Sorry, Max,” came Galia’s voice. It was the only voice that always told him the truth, no matter how dangerous. It seemed grim now, already. “The men you sent to start the power plant … are dead. Including Klaus Reiner.”
Maxim exhaled, deflating on the couch.
“Thirteen men, Maxim. That’s twenty-two so far, in Sector Four alone. Five more in the rest of the city…”
“They are sabotaging me, Galia!” Maxim bellowed.
“The team was attacked, Maxim! We don’t know by what, but it wasn’t men and it wasn’t sabotage. The workers are demanding to be let go of their contracts. They say they’ve seen ghosts. They say Sector Four is haunted. They refuse to go in there again!”
“Chush’ sobach’ya!” Maxim cursed. “Double their bonuses, Galia.”
“It won’t work this time.”
“If they discover I’m here,” Maxim yelled, “they will cut off our power, Galia! It could happen at any time. We must get the power plant online!”
“Maxim!” Galia cried, and paused. “I understand. But we need those scientists to tell us what is happening in Sector Four right now or we may never get the power turned on,” he implored. “You have to tell them the truth. You have to tell them why they’re really here!”
“It’s too soon,” Maxim said, gazing through the window. “Maybe it’s a breach. From Pandemonium…”
“You know what has happened,” Galia reproached him.
“They did this to me! The f*cking KGB!”
“No! You brought this on yourself.”
Maxim scoffed. “They set me up!”
Galia sighed. “If they did, you fell for it. You must face it now, my friend! I have more bad news. Your dearest friend, Akiva—”
“What?” Maxim roared, jolting upright and holding the phone like a gun to his head. “No!…”
“Akiva was killed yesterday. Shot down in the streets of Majorca. He and his son, Visali.”
Maxim fell back as though shot through the heart. “I told him to come here,” he sobbed, clenching his teeth.
“This is their reply to you. Don’t you see?”
“They can go to hell!”
“You can’t bargain with them. They have your son, Maxim! They have Alexei. He will be next!”
Maxim’s seventeen-year-old son had disappeared eleven days ago while hiking in the Himalayas. Russian newspapers had quoted anonymous officials who speculated that Maxim Dragolovich had many enemies, and if he wanted to see his son again, he should turn himself in and face justice in Russia. Though it had been delivered by television and newsprint, it was not a subtle ransom note. His friend Akiva had published Maxim’s “response” to them in his own newspaper last week, quoting Maxim’s declaration that Russia would reap what it had sown if his son was not returned to him unharmed.
“Maxim,” Galia coaxed.
“No one can leave,” Maxim whispered. “Guard every entrance. Send this message, through one of Akiva’s newspapers,” he growled quietly like a dormant volcano, alarming Galia now. “If they touch my son, vengeance for their fifty million murders will rise up across Russia and swallow them all. No one, and nothing, will be spared.”
“Chief, I can’t—”
“Tell them!”
“Boss…”
“Tell them to check their f*cking mail!”