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surrounded the valley like watchtowers.
    The terrain changed here. Mummified trees strewed the ground like jackstraws, many of them oddly burnt. Trees decayed very slowly in the Siberian taiga. They were deep-frozen all winter and stayed whole for decades.
    Dusk fell. We bulled our way around the slope of one of the hills, while leafless, withered branches crunched and shrieked beneath our treads. The marshy Tunguska valley, clogged and gray with debris, came in to view. Sergeant Mukhamed called a halt. The maze of fallen lumber was too much for our machines.
    We tottered out of the byutors and savored the silence. My kidneys felt like jelly from days of lurching and jarring. I stood by our byutor , resting my hand on it, taking comfort in the fact that it was man-made. The rough travel and savage dreariness had taken the edge off my enthusiasm. I needed a drink.
    But our last liter of vodka had gone out the train window somewhere between Omsk and Tomsk. Nina had thrown it away “for Vlad’s sake.” She was acting more like a lovesick schoolgirl every day. She was constantly fussing over Vlad, tidying him up, watching his diet, leaping heavily to his defense in every conversation. Vlad, of course, merely sopped up this devotion as his due, too absent-minded to notice it. Vlad had a real talent for that. I wasn’t sure which of the two of them was more disgusting.
    “At last,” Vlad exulted. “Look, Ninotchka, the site of the mystery! Isn’t it sublime!” Nina smiled and linked her solid arm with his.
    The dusk thickened. Huge taiga mosquitoes whirred past our ears and settled to sting and pump blood. We slapped furiously, then set up our camp amid a ring of dense, smoky fires.
    To our alarm, answering fires flared up on the five other hilltops ringing the valley.
    “Evenks,” grumbled Sergeant Mukhamed. “Savage nomads. They live off their reindeer, and camp in round tents called yurts. No one can civilize them; it’s hopeless. Best just to ignore them.”
    “Why are they here?” Nina said. “Such a bleak place.”
    Vlad rubbed his chin. “The record of the ‘27 Kulik Expedition said the Evenk tribes remembered the explosion. They spoke of a Thunder-God smiting the valley. They must know this place pretty well.”
    “I’m telling you,” rasped Mukhamed, “stay away. The men are all mushroom-eaters and the women are all whores.”
    One of the shaven-headed Uzbek privates looked up from his tin of rations. “Really, Sarge?”
    “Their girls have lice as big as your thumbnails,” the sergeant said. “And the men don’t like strangers. When they eat those poison toadstools they get like wild beasts.”
    We had tea and hardtack, sniffling and wiping our eyes from the bug-repelling smoke. Vlad was full of plans. “Tomorrow we’ll gather data on the direction of the treefalls. That’ll show us the central impact point. Nina, you can help me with that. Nikita, you can stay here and help the soldiers set up base camp. And maybe later tomorrow we’ll have an idea of where to look for our artifact.”
    Later that night, Vlad and Nina crept out of our long tent. I heard restrained groaning and sighing for half an hour. The soldiers snored on peacefully while I lay under the canvas with my eyes wide open. Finally Nina shuffled in, followed by Vlad brushing mud from his knees.
    I slept poorly that night. Maybe Nina was no sexy hard-currency girl, but she was a woman, and even a stukach can’t overhear that sort of thing without getting hot and bothered. After all, I had my needs, too.
    Around one in the morning I gave up trying to sleep and stepped out of the tent for some air. An incredible aurora display greeted me. We were late for the 50th anniversary of the Tunguska crash, but I had the feeling the valley was welcoming me.
    There was an arc of rainbow light directly overhead, with crimson and yellow streamers shooting out from the zenith towards the horizons. Wide luminous bands, paralleling the arch,