In Siberia by Colin Thubron Page A

heart sank. Heloomed big and surly behind his desk, in shirtsleeves. His features were obscure oases in the blank of his face: pin-prick eyes, a tiny, pouting mouth. I squeaked across the room to shake his hand. It was soft and wary. It motioned me to sit down.
    Where could I tactfully begin? He wasn’t going to help. He was gazing at me in passive suspicion. So I asked after the institute’s recent successes.
    He went on staring. All his answers came slowly, pronounced in the gravelly bass of authority. Progress had been made in the climatic adaptation of livestock, especially sheep, he said, and in a biochemical substance to stimulate the growth of wheat and rice…. But he did not enlarge on this. I thought he looked faintly angry.
    Then I hunted for projects safely past, and alighted on the perilous Soviet scheme for steering Siberian rivers away from the Arctic to irrigate Central Asia and replenish the Aral Sea. He said: ‘It was a useless scheme, horrible. It would have been an ecological disaster for both Siberia and Kazakhstan. Our scientists here were categorically against it, and the project was scrapped.’
    I shifted nervously in the face of his morose stillness. There had been a project, I continued, in which artificial daylight was used to increase fertility in mink, fox, pigs…. It had something to do with the effect of the retina on the pituitary gland, I remembered, and sounded faintly repellent; but the General Secretary might approve.
    He said: ‘I only know they breed different coloured Arctic fox-furs now.’ He tossed a batch of imagined stoles dismissively over his shoulder. ‘Blue, navy blue, green. Any colour.’
    But the remembered words of Soviet apologists, of Lavrentiev himself, were crowding back into my head. Some thirty years ago they promised that nuclear power would by now be centrally heating enormous tracts of Siberia and flooding Arctic towns with artificial sunlight. ‘ Dramatic changes in Siberia will astound the world, changes that will make Siberia ideally suitable for human habitation. ’
    I said: ‘There was an idea for melting permafrost by controlled nuclear power….’
    The Secretary was unmoved. ‘That was just an idea,’ he said.
    I felt grateful for this honesty. But the voices of the old enthusiasts went on clamouring in me. ‘It was proposed to fire coal underground,’ I continued, ‘to feed hydro-electric stations from underground funnels.’
    A cigarette waggled unlit between the Secretary’s fingers. ‘It didn’t work. It was impossible.’
    â€˜Then what about the scheme for fuelling power-stations with steam, using the Kamchatka volcanoes?’
    He shrugged. ‘I haven’t even heard of it. And it doesn’t fall within the province of this institution….’ He was slumped deeper behind his desk, huge in the slope of his beer-gut. His eyes were ice-pale. I imagined they had no pupils. I felt at sea. My jacket had fallen open on my prayer-belt, which guaranteed me immunity from pestilence and the cockatrice’s den. I hid it with my arm. I was unsure what a cockatrice was, but the General Secretary might know.
    By now my questions, his answers, and the voices from the still-recent past seemed to be interlocked in a formal dance. I lit despairingly on an old success story. ‘The hydrodynamic cannon…’
    â€˜ It slices off whole layers of hard earth ,’ Lavrentiev had said, ‘ and opens coal deposits in a matter of hours .’
    â€˜They were discontinued years ago,’ answered the General Secretary. ‘They couldn’t really do the job. The principle is now used only to press matter, not cut it open. The cannon could only drill a small hole….’
    We had reached a strange impasse. It was I who was believing in a future, it seemed, and he who was denying it. But I floated out a last fantasy, something I had childishly