“The zeppelin was full,” the Russian said. His English was excellent, with only the barest hint of an accent. “Forty, forty-five passengers, maybe that many again in the crew. I didn’t count.”

He pressed the trembling end of his hand-rolled cigarette to his lips and inhaled, a wet hiss whistling through his teeth as he sucked the crimped twist of paper. He breathed in deeply, holding the smoke for an impossibly long time, as if I would be put off that easily.

“Mr. Andropov,” I prompted him. He waved me off and took another drag.

Once a world class thinker on par with Tesla, Leonid Andropov had vanished along with nearly 100 others when the New York-bound zeppelin George V failed to arrive as scheduled on January 7, 1934. There’d been no distress call, no signal. None of the rescue planes scouring the zeppelin’s flight path spotted any sign of wreckage or survivors. The papers suggested it had been shot down by the Germans, sparking a two-week war panic.

That was the last anyone heard of the George V until three months later, when Andropov reappeared in the waters off Nova Scotia, clinging to a makeshift raft of burned, twisted metal, none of which had come from the zeppelin. It took another month for the Russian to convince the Canadian government of his identity and be transferred to the U.S.

“We were halfway over the Atlantic, on the way to New York,” Andropov continued. “The weather was terrible. Rain, wind. We drank to ignore it. There was alcohol enough for everyone twice over. When it happened, we thought it was the weather changing, that we had made it through. We thought we’d caught a break.”

He stopped to roll another cigarette. I thought he’d have done better by a drink, but alcohol was verboten in the psychiatric wing. His hands shook more tobacco onto the floor than into his rolling paper. I took pity on him and handed over my pack, two shy of full. That was going on my voucher. Andropov thanked me with a nod. According to his paperwork, Andropov was born in August, 1894, making him just shy of his fortieth birthday, but he looked older by twenty years. He’d lost at least forty pounds since his most recent photograph, taken about a year before. His face sagged and his hair had great streaks of white through it. His once-full beard had gone patchy and his arms were blotchy with eczema. He fidgeted and scratched, sending flurries of skin into the air. His days of science were far behind him.

“The light was incredible,” he continued. “As I said, we thought it was the sun breaking through the storm. We actually cheered, can you believe it, Mr. Dimmick?”

“Call me Charlie. What happened?”

“It happened so fast. The glass shattering, the fire, the screaming. The crew died fighting. Not all of them, but most.”

“Fighting the fire, you mean? Trying to keep the zeppelin in the air?”

“No, no, no,” Andropov said. “Fighting the space men.”

“The what?”

“The space men. The men with the golden eyes and crimson skin.”

# # #

Continued in the "First Encounters" novella: The Ghost Writer, available for the Kindle from Amazon.com and all other ebook formats from Smashwords. See links above for ordering information.