nferences?" "I'm doing something useful. I'm improving pipeline insulation materials." "But you've done that already. Now you're making some smelly new compounds. People have to hold their noses when they go past your den under the stairway." Koltukhov merely grinned. "All right," he said, lighting another cigarette. "I'll let you in on my secret. My idea is a much better one than yours. How do we protect our pipes and steel structures from corrosion by sea water? By covering them with insulation. Besides being expensive, this method isn't always dependable. When cracks form in the insulation, corrosion goes ahead faster than ever, as you yourself know. Another way of controlling corrosion is by using electricity, but this is expensive too, and it involves a lot of work. You have to string transmission lines and bring a positive charge to the pipeline. My idea is a plastic coating that would serve as insulation and have an electrostatic charge at the same time." "Not a bad idea," said Privalov. "But mine is better. It does away with both pipes and insulation." Koltukhov dismissed it with a wave of his hand. "You talk like a college boy, Boris." The car drove into the Institute yard. "Is old man Bagbanly in town?" Privalov asked. "I think so. Why?" "I'd like to get in touch with him." "Yes, do go and have a talk with him. He'll throw cold water on your idea, if anyone does." They sat on the balcony drinking tea. Professor Bakhtiar Bagbanly thoughtfully stirred his glass as he gazed out on the broad crescent of city lights skirting the bay. A Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences, he was a clever, erudite man with the skilful hands of a gifted experimenter. He had been Privalov's favourite lecturer when Privalov was an undergraduate twenty years before. Many of Professor Bagbanly's former students dropped in to discuss their work with him. He was generous with his knowledge and advice, and he addressed all the young people by their first names. They addressed him in the Eastern fashion as "Bakhtiar Muellim", meaning "Teacher Bakhtiar". The old man had a large grey head, black eyebrows and a drooping silvery moustache beneath a hooked nose. Professor Bakhtiar Bagbanly fixed his twinkling brown eyes on Privalov and said, "I didn't understand a thing. Your words are as vague as the dreams of a camel. Now tell me straight out. What is it that you want?" Privalov knew that the old man's brusque manner was not to be taken seriously, and so he let the "camel" bit pass unheeded. "I'll begin from the beginning", he said, taking a sip of tea. "We're starting to design a pipeline across the bed of the Caspian." The old man nodded. "A pipeline, as you know, is not an end in itself," Privalov continued. "It is only a means towards an end, which is a regular supply of oil." "What's wrong with using a pipeline to attain this end?" "As far as that goes, nothing. But what is the purpose of the pipes? To separate the oil from the environment." "That's well put." "Please don't make fun of me, Bakhtiar Muellim. When it comes to the technique of transporting oil across a sea, or transporting one liquid through another in general, our thinking is conservative. How do our pipelines differ from those used in ancient times? Well, the pipes are more durable and the pumps more powerful. But the principle of the thing remains the same. Pipeline delivery is better than using oil tankers, of course. It's cheaper and it does not pollute the sea. But, you realize-" "I realize that you don't like pipes. How do you propose to replace them?" "This is what came to my mind." Privalov finished his tea and moved his glass aside. "I recalled Plato's experiment. If we take oil with the same specific weight as that of water and pour it into the water, surface tension will cause the oil to assume the minimum shape and form a sphere. Isn't that so? But suppose we build up surface tension in such a way that it acts along two axes instead of three? Then one cross-section of the oil will be a circle and the other- In a word, the oil will take the shape of a cylinder. The surface of the oil will become a pipe, as it were." Professor Bagbanly grinned and shook his head. "Ingenious! A pipe without a pipe. But please proceed." "Further," Privalov continued enthusiastically, "we must have a field. Imagine an underwater power beam pulsed along a route. A definite frequency would generate a field in which the oil stretches along the beam. Do you realize what that would mean? A stream of oil running through the water from the west coast of the Caspian to the east coast." "You've described the design of the steam locomotive to me," the professor said. "Now tell me how it can travel without being pulled by horses. What would make the stream of oil move?" "Perhaps the energy of the beam itself. A conductor moves in a magnetic field if it crosses lines of force, doesn't it? I don't know yet, Bakhtiar Muellim. I'm just advancing a bare hypothesis." "Bare and defenceless," the old man added. There was a long silence. Then Professor Bagbanly rose and began to pace the balcony. "You speak of surface tension," he said finally, "and you hope old Bakhtiar will gladden your ears with a harmonious concept. You nurse an idle hope, my son. The surfaces of matter constitute one of the fundamental riddles of modern physics. The surface tension of liquids is a zone where the specific properties of surfaces manifest themselves. Surface tension produces forces that are always directed inwards. The tea in that glass is in a state of tension. Its surface presses inwards from the top and bottom and sides with a force of more than ten tons per square centimetre. Hence, liquids are well-nigh incompressible. Until recently it was thought that liquids could not be compressed at all. Or take solids. When we cut a piece of clay with a knife we disunite whole worlds and form new surfaces. In the process, energy is released." "Just what lies under a surface?" Privalov asked. "I don't know, my son. Nobody knows yet. How can you get under it? If you scrape off a surface, another surface of the substance immediately forms. It is the interface on which the interatomic forces that hold the elements of a substance together interact with the ambient medium and achieve a balance in some specific fashion. How? That is something we don't yet know. But if we get to know it, then sooner or later we'll penetrate to the heart of the matter. And once we have fathomed the secrets of surfaces we will proceed to utilize the colossal force latent in them." "Do you mean to say that my idea is too far ahead of the times?" Privalov asked sadly. "It well may be. Take an example which Shuleikin cites in his Marine Physics. When an express train brakes suddenly the enormous kinetic energy it releases is absorbed by the extremely thin surface layer of contact between the wheels and brake-shoes, yet this does not seem unbelievable. "Suppose," Bagbanly continued as he walked back and forth, "we succeed in increasing the surface tension and-" "You agree, Bakhtiar Muellim!" Privalov almost shouted. "Don't be in such a hurry. I assume that it is possible-theoretically, but not in reality." "Why?" "Because your oil 'sausage'-if you succeed in making one-will encounter tremendous resistance as it moves through the water. Friction, my friend. Friction is also a property of surfaces. The surface layers will tear away from the inner layers, and the jet will disintegrate." "Excellent," said Privalov. "That means we have another job-that of reducing the friction." Bagbanly dropped into an armchair and burst out laughing. "You're wonderful, Boris," he said, wiping his eyes with his handkerchief. "Both friction and surface tension are child's play to you. You're even prepared to turn matter inside out." "Well, I'll be going, Bakhtiar Muellim, " Privalov said with a sigh. "Thanks for your advice." The old man stared at him intently. "You know what? Take me in as a member of the team on this project. I'll work on it out of curiosity. Who knows what may come of it? But only on condition we don't go to extremes. We'll concentrate on the underlying principles and nothing more." CHAPTER NINE IN WHICH AN EXPERIMENT NOT ENTIRELY SUITABLE FOR THE HOME IS DESCRIBED "Are you sure the knife fell overboard, Rita?" Anatole Benedictov said. "Yes, I'm sure." "Quite sure?" "Well, really!" Rita laid aside her book and rose from the sofa. "Don't be angry, darling. You see, a couple of men have hunted for the knife on the sea bottom at that place and they failed to find it." "It would be easier to find a needle in a haystack." "You've changed lately. Your attitude to my work is different. That's why I asked." "You're the one who's changed, Anatole. You're simply stopped noticing me. Do give up those experiments. Please give them up. They'll drive you crazy. They've already come between us. Think of how wonderfully we were getting along before that ill-fated discovery." "That's true," said Benedictov. "We were, weren't we?" Rita asked hopefully. Benedictov glanced at his watch. "A person is coming to see me in a few minutes. We'll be doing some work together." Rita shook her head and silently left the study. Anatole Benedictov had fallen in love with Rita several years earlier, when he was teaching at the University and she was a gay, vivacious biology student there. Shortly before that he had presented a brilliant thesis for an advanced degree dealing with electric currents in living organisms, and had published a study of electric fish which had aroused much discussion among biologists. During one of his lectures he had noticed several girls giggling and whispering as they passed a sheet of paper through the auditorium. He strode rapidly over to them and snatched up the paper. He looked down at it and frowned. What he saw was a sketch of himself, shaggy-haired, thickset, with a fish's tail, conducting with a trident as fish danced round him. Beneath the sketch were the words, written in a fine handwriting: Neither fish nor fowl, neither physicist nor biologist, He's an intermediate class electro-ichthyologist. "Whose work is this?" he asked, letting his angry eyes roam over the auditorium. A slender blonde girl rose. "It's mine," she said politely, her brown eyes gazing boldly into Benedictov's. It was an announcement rather than a statement. "Thank you," Benedictov said slowly, in a slightly nasal voice, thrusting the drawing into his pocket and continuing his lecture. After they were married, Benedictov admitted to Rita that when she said "It's mine" he had suddenly felt a wave of heat engulf him. As for Rita Matveyev, she had long been in love with the brilliant lecturer. Rita graduated from the University the year they were married and started teaching biology in a secondary school. That same year Benedictov was given a laboratory at a research institute. Here he enthusiastically continued his investigations in the sphere of action potentials. The young couple led a fast-paced life, keeping open house for their many friends. Half a year before their cruise on the Uzbekistan the Benedictovs had moved into a new flat. On moving day there occurred a strange event which triggered a series of disasters. Rita and her husband had decided to leave a lot of their old things behind when they moved. Anatole naturally protested when he found her putting an old flower vase and a rusty bar of iron into a packing crate. "We agreed not to take such things, Rita," he said. "You ought to throw that trash away." Rita discarded the vase but insisted that she could not part with the bar of iron, which had been in the possession of her family for years and years. "A Matveyev relic?" Benedictov asked with a laugh, picking up the bar. He turned it over in his hands and shook it. The blade of a knife slid out of the side of the bar. Benedictov stared dumbfounded at the narrow blade. It was covered with a thin, transparent layer of grease through which a wavy pattern showed. He cautiously touched the blade. His fingers went through it-just as they would have passed through empty space. He pressed his hand to his eyes. "What's the matter?" Rita asked in alarm. She came up to him and glanced at the bar. Her eyes widened. No, she didn't know anything about the bar except, that according to an old family legend a distant ancestor had brought it back from India. Her father had treasured the bar all his life, and now she was doing the same. No one had ever imagined there might be something inside it. Benedictov held the bar as if it were a rattlesnake. He slowly closed his fist over the blade. His fingers came together over emptiness. Rita gave a start. "Wait a minute," she said. "There was another bar just like this one, all covered with rust. We used it to prop up the old wardrobe that had a broken leg." She ran into the next room, returning a moment later to say, "It's gone. We must have thrown it out yesterday when we carted all that old rubbish away." The first few moments of astonishment gave way to curiosity. Benedictov carefully examined the bar. Two lines of letters were engraved on one side. Between the two lines there was something that looked like a crown. Or it might have simply been a spot of rust. Benedictov noticed a fine line running round the outside of the bar. The whole thing was obviously not a solid bar of iron but a box with a cover. After a long struggle Benedictov finally pried off the top. Inside the box lay a knife handle, with a piece of cloth wound round it. The cloth must have become loosened with time and when the box was shaken the blade dropped out. There was nothing extraordinary about the beautiful handle of yellowed ivory. It could be grasped. He concluded that the section of the blade that went into the handle must be made of ordinary metal too, otherwise it would not remain attached to the handle. But the blade itself! It passed freely through everything without leaving the slightest trace, as though it were made of thin air. The first glimpse of the mysterious knife marked a turning point in the life of the Benedictovs. Anatole determined to get to the root of the mystery. "Penetrability. The ability to pass through matter. That's the goal, Rita. You say this knife has been in your family at least two hundred years? Well, if they could make a knife that passes through matter you and I can certainly do the same." Anatole painted glowing pictures of Altered Matter which man could easily control. Rita became enthusiastic too. She helped Anatole to set up experiments and kept a record of their results. Weeks and then months passed. Benedictov turned his study into a small laboratory where, more and more frequently, he worked through the night. He grew impatient and irritable. Rita noticed that his behaviour had become strange. At times he would be depressed and sullen, and then he would suddenly become his cheerful, energetic self again, capable of working for days on end without resting. He fell into apathy just as suddenly. Rita grew worried. She now realized that Anatole had taken on a job that was too much for one man. But when she tentatively suggested that he ought to let the Academy of Sciences know about his discovery he declared that he could not do this until he himself got to the bottom of it. With great difficulty she persuaded him to take her on a holiday cruise on the Volga. We already know how disastrously their holiday ended. When the doorbell rang, Anatole jumped up but Rita got to the door first. She opened it to Nikolai Opratin, who looked his usual dapper self in an elegant grey suit. Bending his neatly combed head, he touched his cold lips to Rita's hand and inquired after her health. "I am in perfect health," Rita said, enunciating the words distinctly. "Goodbye." "Hold on, there. Where are you going?" Anatole asked. "To the pictures." The door slammed shut and the two men were left alone in the flat. "All the better without her." Anatole growled, leading the way into his study. Nikolai Opratin cast a critical glance over the equipment. Then he removed his jacket, carefully pulled up his trousers at the knees, and sank into an armchair. Benedictov sat down opposite him. "First, Anatole, I want you to tell me in detail about the knife," Opratin began. He listened closely to Benedictov's account. "Indian magic. If I hadn't seen it myself I wouldn't believe it. Penetrability ends near the handle, you say?" "Yes, there's a sort of intermediate zone of about six millimetres. The part that goes into the handle is ordinary steel." "Did you weigh the blade?" "Yes. The weight corresponds to the size." "That's extremely interesting. It means the knife behaves like ordinary matter in the gravitational field." "It seems to me," said Benedictov, "that the bonds between atoms, or perhaps within atoms, have been changed in some way in this knife. I am convinced that the properties of living organisms, whose vital functions are connected with the discharge of energy in the form of action potentials, will provide the key to the riddle." He went over to the round aquarium encircled by wire and launched into a discourse, but Opratin soon interrupted him. "I get the picture, Anatole," he said courteously but firmly. "You put the fish between the plates of a capacitor in an oscillatory circuit and look for a resonance in the bioelectrical frequency of the fish. I don't think this avenue will lead you anywhere. You're right, though, about one thing -that the inter-atomic bonds in the knife were altered. But how was the energy of the intrinsic bonds of this substance overcome? If we only had the knife now! By the way, you said it lay inside an iron box. You haven't lost the box too, have you?" Benedictov took a small iron bar from a drawer and held it out to Opratin. It looked something like a pencil case. Opratin sprang to his feet. "What the devil!" he exclaimed. "The same letters!" Engraved on the cover were the letters "A M D G". Below the letters a crown had been engraved, and below that were "J d M" in smaller letters. Opratin walked the length of the study and back again, his steps ringing like the pounding of a hammer. "What's the matter?" Benedictov asked, turning his head to follow Opratin. "What's upset you?" "Oh, nothing much. What do those letters stand for?" "The upper four are the initial letters of a Jesuit motto but I don't remember it. I don't know what the bottom ones stand for. It's unlikely they have anything to do with our problem." "Well, let's not lose time setting up our first experiment. When you described your generator I got an idea. Was a crate of instruments delivered to you today?" "Yes. By the way, were you the one who sent that ape to this place disguised as an electrician?" "How could you ever think that? He's my laboratory technician. Extremely useful, and not a bad fellow at all. But to get back to business. I think we should begin with a minimum surface, with the point of a needle." Opratin opened a case and took out a metal holder to which a long, highly polished needle was attached. Then he briefly set forth the method of the experiment. The equipment lay on a small table, under a binocular magnifying glass. The needle and the holder were placed in a screw-clamp with a micrometer screw in such a way that the needle point was close to a steel cube. All this was inserted in a coil between parallel plates and enclosed in a thick-walled vessel. Wires connecting the apparatus with the electrostatic machine and the oscillator ran through holes drilled in the glass. "Now we'll see what your oscillator is capable of," Opratin remarked. "Well, here we go. We'll try to make the electric field act on the intrinsic bonds of the substance of this cube." The disc of the electrostatic machine began to whirl, humming softly. "Switch on the oscillator," Opratin commanded. A tumbler clicked. Inside the glass vessel the little motor slowly turned the micrometer screw, bringing the point of the needle closer and closer to the cube. Opratin and Benedictov kept their eyes glued to the magnifying glass. A bell tinkled as the tip of the needle came into contact with the cube. The automatic recorders were switched on. The point continued to move, penetrating into the steel. But the sensitive instruments did not record any force. The needle was entering the steel cube without meeting resistance! That lasted only a moment. The next instant Opratin and Benedictov were flung against the wall. The glass chamber was shattered to smithereens. Benedictov looked round. He was overwhelmed. Had it all been a dream? Opratin rose to his feet. His face was pale. Blood trickled down his forehead. "The cube!" he cried. "Where is it?" They found the cube in a corner beside fragments of the screw-clamp. When they examined it under a microscope they could not find the slightest trace of a hole made by the needle. But the automatic recorder, an impartial witness, told them that the needle had penetrated into the steel to a distance of three microns. The two scientists sank into armchairs facing each other. For a time they were silent. "What," Benedictov finally said, "do you think of the whole thing?" "I think it was a great moment." Opratin spoke in a calm voice and his face now wore a somewhat detached expression. "We achieved penetrability for an instant by weakening the bonds of the substance of the cube. But the energy that created those bonds was released-and that was what hit us." After a long pause he continued, his voice calmer than ever: "We've made a start, Anatole. But we won't get anywhere working at home. Once we're invading the structure of matter there's no telling what kind of blasts may be produced. We must build a big installation. We'll need a Van de Graaff generator without fail. We're going to conduct a great many experiments." "What do you propose?" "I can arrange matters so that I work by myself, without any outsiders poking their noses in. But what about you? You aren't a member of our staff, unfortunately." Opratin fell silent. Then he said bluntly: "You'll have to join the staff of the Research Institute of Marine Physics." Nikolai and Yura had been experimenting with mercury in the small glassed-in gallery in Cooper Lane for several days. They had put together a "mercury heart", an old-fashioned apparatus used to demonstrate how electric current builds up surface tension. The device was assembled on one pan of a laboratory scales. A large drop of mercury was covered with a solution that would conduct electricity. A screw with a needle lay so that the point of the needle touched the mercury. The drop of mercury was connected by the conducting solution to the anode of a storage battery and the needle was wired to the cathode. A weight on the other pan kept the scales balanced. The electric current increased the surface tension, making the drop of mercury shrink and move away from the needle. But when the circuit was thus broken, the drop of mercury spread out until it again touched the needle. This "mercury heart" pulsated continuously. The young engineers tried to act on the "heart" with high frequency current by winding a spiral round the apparatus and linking it up with a valve oscillator. They hoped a certain definite frequency of oscillations would greatly increase the surface tension of the mercury and squeeze it to such an extent that it would no longer touch the needle. Then, by adding mercury and registering the increase in the weight of the drop, they could measure the degree to which the surface tension had increased. They tried different shapes of spiral and different frequencies but nothing came of it. The "mercury heart" continued to pulsate with the same calm, steady rhythm. "We're not getting anywhere," said Yura, turning off the current. "We're just wasting our time." But Nikolai patiently continued to vary the experiment. CHAPTER TEN DESCRIBING A FIND THAT COMPELS THE AUTHORS TO END PART ONE AND SWITCH TO THE FIRST HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY The rusty iron bar that Privalov brought home from the bazaar lay at the bottom of the pantry for more than a fortnight. Privalov had not forgotten about the bar but simply had no time to examine it. Finally, one afternoon, he attached a vise to the kitchen table. Humming a popular tune, he laid out his tools. His wife Olga, who was doing up the dishes, frowned. "I wish you wouldn't bring home so much junk," she grumbled. "What do you want that dirty piece of iron for?" Meanwhile, Privalov had put the bar into the vise and was removing a thick layer of kerosene-softened rust with a sharp scraper. "It's not iron," he said. "Don't you remember? I once told you that iron is rarely met in its pure state. It is usually alloyed with carbon to make steel. The element iron, or ferrum, is found in a pure state only in laboratories. Incidentally, it hardly ever rusts. All the rust on this bar means that it is steel." "What about stainless steel?" "Stainless steel is just a name. There is sometimes more chromium and nickel in it than iron. "I seem to be learning lots of new things in my old age," Olga said, wiping a plate. Her eyes were amused. After a time she said, "Let's go to the cinema, Boris. I know where 'The Sorceress' is on. It's an old picture, but we haven't seen it." "I have nothing against 'The Sorceress'," said Privalov as he scraped away. "You know I've always stood up for witches, magicians and goblins. But before we deal with the occult sciences I'd like to see what's inside this little box." "Box? Do you mean to say this little bar is hollow?" "Exactly. The moment I picked it up at the bazaar I noticed that it's too light for its size. But I didn't see any joints, and I wanted to learn how it's put together." "Be careful, Boris. It could be a booby trap." "That's not likely. I don't see a single opening for a fuse or a safety lock." "But what if it really is one?" Privalov grinned. "You remind me of the grandmother in Tolstoy's Childhood. Remember? She refused to listen to an explanation of why small shot isn't the same as gunpowder." "A very flattering comparison." "Don't fly into a huff. You see, the box was made very long ago, before delayed-action mechanisms were invented." He set a frying pan on the gas range and put the box in the pan. "Are you going to fry it?" "I'm applying the cleansing action of fire." Privalov turned the box over. "We'll just warm up all these rheumatic old joints." Humming all the time, he shook some tooth-powder into a saucer, poured water into it and stirred the mixture, then dipped a cloth in it and smeared the sides of the box. The chalk hissed as it quickly dried on the hot metal. Next Privalov dipped a dry rag in kerosene and squeezed out the rag above the box. The yellow drops were instantly soaked up by the chalk. Thin, clear-cut lines forming a severe geometrical pattern showed up, as though scratched on the box by a needle. "It's put together with dowels, like a wooden box. The edges must have been caulked, and then the whole thing was polished. Kerosene on chalk will always show up a crack, no matter how tiny." "You're not going to open it now, are you?" "Oh, yes, I forgot. 'The Sorceress'." Privalov quickly tidied up the table and went off to wash his hands. Boris Privalov entered the laboratory towards the end of the day. "Do you remember the rusty iron bar I picked up at the bazaar that day?" he asked Nikolai and Yura. "Here it is, all cleaned up." "Why, it's dowelled," said Nikolai, turning it over in his hands. "Must have been made ages ago." "Let's open it," Privalov suggested. He went over to the bench and put the box into the jaws of a vise. With each tap of a hammer the dowels loosened, one side of the box rising at an angle. Another blow of the hammer, then still another, and one side of the box clattered to the floor. Three heads bent over the open box. Inside lay a white roll of cloth. Yura reached out to touch it but Privalov caught his arm. He cautiously unwrapped the roll. Inside it were sheets of thin but strong paper. The pages were covered with fine handwriting in letters that were hardly connected with one another. "It's in a foreign language!" Yura exclaimed. Privalov pushed his glasses up onto his forehead and looked down at the manuscript. "Black ink", he said. "It wasn't written in this century. Ink isn't made out of nut-gall nowadays. From the way the letters are shaped they must have been written with a goose quill. And it's in Russian, although in the old-time spelling." "An old manuscript!" Yura exclaimed delightedly. "Boris, we must get Val to read it for us. She's a philologist and her field is Old Russian." "Could it be a last will and testament, I wonder?" Privalov said thoughtfully. He began to read, but it was slow work because of the unfamiliar spelling. The manuscript began as follows: "I commence this epistle on the second day of January in the year of Our Lord 1762, desirous of passing on my thoughts and ideas to my beloved eldest son, Alexander. "My youth was spent in trials and tribulations and wanderings, similar unto those of Homer's Ulysses. Upon attaining manhood I was often called away from home by duty, so that I seldom saw you, Alexander. After you entered the service I retired. Now I spend my days at home, and I see less of you than ever. "As I await my last hour I have chosen this time to set down an account of matters to which I have given much thought, and I place my hopes in you, for you are strong in the sciences. "I shall put down my story point by point, from the beginning, lest I should omit something. First, during the reign of our great ruler, Peter the Great, son of Alexis, eternally blessed be his memory, I was despatched on a long journey...." 2 NAVAL LIEUTENANT FEDOR MATVEYEV Many the men whose towns he saw whose ways he proved', And many a pang he bore in his own breast at sea, While struggling for his life and his men's safe return. Homer -THE ODYSSEY CHAPTER ONE WHICH TELLS OF THE CAMPAIGN OF PRINCE BEKOVICH-CHERKASSKY Lieutenant Fedor Matveyev of the Russian Navy had gone through the same school as many another young nobleman who, by the will of Peter the Great, was torn away from his placid rural life and cast into the maelstrom of those turbulent times. The School of Navigation in Moscow, instruction in carpentry, the wheel wright's craft and shipbuilding in Holland, the Louis Quatorze Nautical School in Marseilles, artillery training in Paris, and round-the-clock work in the shipyards of the new, cold city of St. Petersburg had turned the illiterate village bumpkin, pigeon fancier and church singer into a smart naval officer fluent in foreign languages and inured to the deprivations of a wanderer's life. The indomitable will of Russia's extraordinary tsar had scattered these young men of a new mould far and wide. Fedor Matveyev was not the least surprised when he received orders to join a hydrographic expedition on the Caspian Sea. He and young men like him had no time to be surprised-they were too busy surprising others. When Fedor reached the Caspian town of Astrakhan his ears were still ringing with the roar of the battles on the Baltic Sea, and his right shoulder ached from a wound made by a Swedish falcon bullet. He was struck by the quietness here. In contrast to the steel-grey waters and overcast skies of the Baltic, the Caspian Sea was green; it had yellow sandy beaches, a dazzling blue sky and a merciless southern sun. The tsar's instructions ordered the expedition, which was under the command of Prince Bekovich-Cherkassky, "to search assiduously for harbours and rivers where ships might be put in and scout-boats find a haven during storms; to establish the location of sandbars and underwater reefs, and enter all these and other things on maps; to cross the sea and note the location of islands and shoals; to put the width of the sea on the map". Fedor Matveyev enthusiastically set about mapping the unfamiliar sea. There was an ancient mystery about those uninhabited, windswept shores. Fedor knew that beyond the sun-baked yellow sands lay fabulous India. He was unaware, as yet, that Prince Bekovich-Cherkassky's expedition had another mission, a secret one. Finding the shortest trade route to India had long been one of Peter the Great's ambitions. He had heard much about that country's wonders and unbelievable wealth. Indian goods reached Europe through Persian and Arab merchants. European goods flowed to India through the same hands. Yet, reflected Peter, Nature herself had decreed that Russia should be a middleman in the commerce between Europe and Asia. On the route to India lay Khiva and Bukhara, troubled lands whose rulers were constantly engaged in strife. In the year 1700 Shah Niaz, Khan of Khiva, had expressed a desire to become a subject of the Russian tsar, hoping with Peter's help to bolster up his shaky throne. But then new rulers succeeded one another so rapidly in Khiva that it was impossible to keep track of them. Everything was a mystery in that sun-scorched land. For instance, old maps showed the Amu Darya flowing into the Caspian Sea. Herodotus, the Greek historian, and Arab historians also, said the Amu Darya flowed into the Caspian. Yet it was rumoured that the fickle river had shifted its channel. The rulers of Khiva, it was said, had built an earthen dam which caused the river to flow into the Sea of Aral. What sort of river was this Amu, river of the Bull, known to the ancient Romans as the Oxus and to the Arabs as the Jihun? Peter the Great was aware that it rose somewhere in India. If it could be turned back into the Caspian, and if he, Peter, could be master of its banks, or at least live in peace and friendship with those who held them, India's rich commodities could be delivered down that river to the Caspian Sea, across the Caspian to the city of Astrakhan, and from there up the Volga into Russia-by-passing the Persian merchants. These Indian commodities would be cheaper, and, besides, Russia's treasury would profit. Furthermore, Peter had heard there was gold in that area, near the town of Irket. All these rumours must be verified. The area must be explored by trusty men. Peter could not tolerate delay. Early in May 1714 he ordered Prince Bekovich-Cherkassky, a lieutenant in the Preobrazhonsky Guards Regiment, to set out for the Caspian Sea with the men he needed, "to search for the mouth of the river Amu Darya". On May 19 he ordered the Prince, in addition, "to proceed to Khiva and from there to Bukhara, to ascertain the possibilities of trade, and under cover of that, to find out everything he could about the town of Irket." Before his conversion to Christianity Prince Alexander Bekovich-Cherkassky's name had been Devlet Kizden Mirza. He came from a line of Kabardian rulers. As a boy he had been stolen by Nogai tribesmen. He fell into the hands of the Russians when Russian troops under Vassily Golitsin besieged the town of Azov, and was taken into the home of Vassily's brother Boris, one of Peter's tutors. In 1707 he was sent abroad to study. Soon after, he married into the Golitsin family, taking Boris Golitsin's daughter, the Princess Martha, for his wife. When Prince Bekovich-Cherkassky joined the Preobrazhensky Regiment he attracted the tsar's attention. It was to this strong, courageous, well-educated young man with a knowledge of the East that Peter the Great assigned the difficult mission of finding a route to India. On his way to Astrakhan, which he reached in August 1714, Prince Bekovich-Cherkassky stopped at Kazan, on the Volga. Here he took more than 1,500 soldiers and 19 cannon under his command. The expedition set sail from Astrakhan for Guryev, a town on the Caspian, at the mouth of the Ural River, on November 7 and nearly perished at the very beginning of the voyage. A vicious autumn storm scattered the twenty-seven light Volga boats and two schooners. The battered flotilla limped back to Astrakhan one month later, at the beginning of December, without ever having reached Guryev. After wintering at Astrakhan and obtaining about two dozen new boats, the expedition set sail again on April 25, 1715. Prince Bekovich-Cherkassky stood on the weather side of the quarter-deck as his flagship emerged from the Volga delta into the expanses of the sea. The green waters of the Caspian now gurgled beneath the schooner's keel. The Prince stood there, lost in thought. He was only a little Over thirty at the time, and the realization that he was responsible for so many men and so many ships weighed heavily on him. He gazed in silence across the green vastness, wondering what awaited him beyond those deserted shores and the burning, shifting sands. The flotilla cruised along the eastern coast of the Caspian until late autumn. It stopped at Guryev, rounded the Mangyshlak Peninsula and sailed southwards for a long time, mapping and describing in detail the strange, deserted coastline. The sun blazed down on them. The barrels of water taken on at Guryev became putrid; the men were tormented by thirst. But even stronger than thirst was the yearning for distant Russia, for shady forests and smoke rising from the chimney of one's own log cabin. The flotilla sailed past a gap in the coastline through which the sea rushed noisily. This was the mysterious Gulf of Karabugaz, eternally covered with a dark haze of evaporation. Then it sailed over a long, dangerous underwater spit that is now called Bekovich Bank. After rounding the bank it entered Krasnovodsk Bay, a place that slept the sleep of the dead amidst burning sands and hillocks. In the autumn of 1715, one year after it had first sailed out into the Caspian Sea, the flotilla returned to Astrakhan. The expedition had failed to reach either Khiva or Bukhara, and it had not learned anything about gold in that area. But it had confirmed the fact that the Amu Darya did not flow into the Caspian and that its old channel had dried up. Also, it had mapped the coast of the Caspian. The expedition proved to be too small and unsatisfactorily equipped for a long, dangerous overland journey. On February 14, 1716, Prince Bekovich-Cherkassky was given a new assignment. He was appointed Ambassador to the court of the Khan of Khiva with instructions to proceed to Khiva along the Amu Darya, carefully studying the river and examining the dam to see whether the river could be turned back into its o