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In part these fell to the ground as precipitation, with radioactive effects.
From another author, such a speculation would have been greeted with derision, but when presented
by the distinguished Kazantsev, with his honored war record and background as a technologist, it
commanded respect Always careful to offer it only as an interesting hypothesis in the form of popular
science or as science fiction, Kazantsev developed his theory for the next ten years, finally presenting
it in 1958 in its most elaborate form in the story-article "A Guest from the Cosmos," which was
published in Yunyi Tekhnik (Young Technician), the monthly of the Communist Youth League. Later
it became the central piece of his 1963 book of the same name.
"A Guest from the Cosmos" was set in a locale that, for Kazantsev, was familiar: the cabin of an arctic
survey ship carrying a group of scientists into northern Siberia. This time, however, their purpose is to
find a spot in the Arctic that approximates to the climate of Mars and establish whether life can exist
there. One of the scientists, Krymov, claims to know with certainty that there are Martians and that
they have visited earth. Having been bom a Tungus in the area of the Stony Tunguska, he was a boy
when the great explosion of 1908 occurred. The event had far-reaching effects both on him and his
family.
"My father went into the fallen taiga," Krymov explains, "and saw a huge column of water flowing
out of the ground. A few days later he died in terrible pain as if he was on fire. But there was no trace
of fire anywhere on his body. The old people of the tribe became terribly afraid. They forbade all of
the Evenki [Tungus] people to go into the area of the fallen trees. They called it a cursed place. The
shaman said that it was there that the god of fire and thunder, Ogdy, descended to the earth. All who
go to that place are burned with an unseen fire."
Pressed to give his interpretation of the death, Krymov adds, "In the legend about the god Ogdy who
burns with an unseen fire - what could this fire be that leaves no traces on the body? It could be
nothing other than radioactivity, which begins to appear at a certain time after an atomic explosion."
To Krymov, only one explanation - that the object was a burning spaceship plunging out of control
through the earth's atmosphere - could explain what they knew of the Tunguska catastrophe.
"Apparently the travelers died en route from cosmic rays or from meteorite bombardment," he states.
"As the uncontrolled ship approached the earth, it resembled a meteorite because it flew into the
atmosphere without reducing its speed. The ship burned up from friction just as a meteorite would
burn. Its outer shield was burned off, and its atomic fuel experienced conditions that made possible a
chain reaction. Then an atomic explosion occurred and our cosmic guests died on the very day they
were supposed to descend to earth."
Though some dismissed the idea, many members of Soviet scientific circles carefully studied
Kazantsev's theories. Writing in Znaniye-Sila (Knowledge Is Strength) in June 1959, Professor Felix
Zigel, who taught aerodynamics at the Moscow Institute of Aviation, remarked that "at the present
time, like it or not, A.N. Kazantsev's hypothesis is the only realistic one insofar as it explains the
absence of a meteorite crater and the explosion of a cosmic body in the air." As for Kazantsev's
standing as a fiction writer, Zigel said, "It is generally known that at times - nay, often - new ideas that
proved to be most valuable to science were first expressed not by scientists, but by writers of scientific
fantasy." Within the Soviet Union Kazantsev's work remained highly respected and the subject of
furious debate. In 1954 he was admitted to the Communist party, a considerable distinction for an
author. As for his worth as a scientist, he wrote in June of 1957 an article called "Observation of
Radio Signals from an Artificial Satellite and their Scientific Value" for Radio, the journal of the
Soviet Ministry of Communications. The article foreshadowed the launching of a Soviet satellite and
even revealed the radio frequency on which it would broadcast. Four months later, Sputnik 1 was
launched.
As the Tunguska controversy raged on, a gradual polarization became apparent. One group, under
hard-line meteorite experts like Krinov and K.P. Florensky, refused to admit that anything except a
conventional meteorite could have wreaked the havoc in Siberia in 1908; even such well-publicized
reversals of position as that of V. Fesenkov, who announced in October 1960 that he no longer
believed in the meteorite theory, could not shake the conviction of this group. Fesenkov, A.
Shternfeld, and a growing body of ingenious, often younger technologists agreed with Kazantsev that
the blast had been atomic, while on the question of the power source they were, if not prepared
absolutely to accept Kazantsev's idea, willing at least to keep an open mind. The postwar scientific
establishment had seen enough of the atomic age and considered enough of the new theories to know
that today's impossibility was tomorrow's reality. Applying the newest techniques of cosmology,
atomic physics, and chemistry to the available data, they set out to seek a final explanation of the
mystery of 1908.
8 - The Fire Came By
Could the explosion of 1908 have been atomic?
Was the sudden, dazzling "flash of light" that seemed to split the morning sky over the
Tunguska region the flash of a nuclear blast?
Was the painful heat experienced by witnesses 40 miles away the instantaneous thermal wave
of this flash?
Could the blinding "pillar of fire" that surged upwards for miles have been an atomic fireball?
The "huge cloud of black smoke" that billowed over the entire area - was this an atomic
mushroom cloud?
Was the strange disease that produced scabs on the reindeer the result of radiation burns?
These questions set Soviet scientists on a furious quest for new data that might provide the answers, as
well as on a search through the mountain of evidence already accumulated by the many earlier
expeditions investigating the meteorite theory. In their quest they looked for comparisons to the
Alamogordo test and to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, three events of 1945 that marked the
beginning of a terrifying new age. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]