“Of course not!” said Fransi indignantly.
“I believe you,” giggled the ex-Great One. “Isn’t it wonderful? I, too, am quite insane!”
THE END
HEIRS APPARENT
History, despite the pretensions of some historians, is hardly an exact science—and perhaps for that very reason, it furnishes an unusually fascinating basis for speculative science fiction, for the logical intuition of a good fiction writer may provide conclusions as valuable as those of the academic scientist. Here is a new and frighteningly convincing aftermath of a Russo-American war, developed with an acute understanding of the people of both countries. M.ost Russians in current fiction are merely fashionably villainous straw men, constructed in complete ignorance of Russian culture and mores—as were the Germans in fiction of a dozen years ago. (We are often amused to read stories of the 1940’s reprinted now with the black-hearted Nazis revised as black-hearted Communists to fit the current style in villains.) But Robert Abernathy, who holds a Ph.D. from Harvard in Slavic, has endeavored to portray a Russian who, according to the lights of his own culture, is a hero—in conflict with a representative American . . . and with a third force which lurks in history as heir to both warring civilizations.
WARILY CROUCHING, Bogomazov moved forward up the gentle slope. Above his head the high steppe-grass, the kovyl, nodded its plumes in the chilly wind. He shivered.
All at once the wind brought again the wood-smoke smell, and his nostrils flared like a hunting animal’s. With sudden recklessness he rose to his full height and looked eagerly across the grasslands that sloped to the river.
Down yonder, hugging the river bank among scanty trees, was a cluster of crudely and newly built thatched huts. Bogomazov’s hunger-keen eyes were quick to note the corral that held a few head of cattle, the pens that must mean poultry, as well as the brown swatches of plowed fields. The wanderer licked his lips, and his hand, almost of itself, unbuttoned the holster at his hip and loosened the pistol there.
But he controlled his urge to plunge ahead; he sank down to concealment in the grass again, and his tactician’s glance swept over the scene, studying approaches, seeking human figures, signs of guards and readiness. He saw none, but still he did not move; only the habit of extreme caution had kept him alive this long and enabled him to travel a thousand miles across the chaos that had been Russia.
Presently two small figures emerged from one of the huts and went unhurriedly to the chicken-pens, were busy there for a time, and returned. Bogomazov relaxed; it was almost certain now that he had not been seen. At last he obeyed his rumbling stomach and resumed his advance, though indirectly so as to take advantage of the terrain, stalking the village.
He was a strange, skulking figure—Nikolai Nikolayevich Bogomazov, onetime Colonel of the Red Army and Hero of the Soviet Union; now ragged and half-naked, face concealed by a scraggly growth of beard, hair slashed awkwardly short across the forehead to prevent its falling into his eyes. His shoes had gone to pieces long ago and the rags he had wrapped around his feet in their place had worn through, leaving him barefoot; he did not know how to make shoes of bark, peasant-style. His army trousers flapped in shreds around his bony shanks. The torn khaki shirt he wore was of American manufacture, a trophy of the great offensive two years earlier that had carried the Russian armies halfway across Europe and through the Near East into Africa . . . those had been the great days: before the bitter realization that it would never be enough to defeat Western armies; after the destruction of the great cities and industries, to be sure, but before the really heavy bombardments had begun. . . .
Bogomazov wormed his way forward, mouth watering, thinking of chickens.
He was close enough to his objective to hear contented poultry-noises, and was thinking of how best to deal with the plaited reeds of the enclosure, when a voice behind him cried startledly, “Oho!”
The stalker instinctively rolled to one side, his pistol in his hand; then he saw that the man who had shouted was some yards away and backing nervously toward the nearby hovels—a stocky, shabby figure, broad face richly bearded; most important, he had no weapon. Bogomazov came to a quick decision; sheathing his gun, he got to his feet and called sharply, “Halt!”
The other froze at the tone of command, and stared sullenly at the armed scarecrow confronting him. Farther off a door banged and there were footsteps hurrying nearer. Bogomazov watched without a tremor as a half-dozen other men and boys approached and stopped beside the first man, as if he stood on an invisible line. A couple of them carried rifles, but the lone interloper did not flinch. Not for the first time, he was gambling everything on a bluff. And these were merely peasants.
“What place is this?” he demanded in the same crisp voice of authority.
“Novoselye,” one answered hesitantly. “The New Settlement.”
“I can see as much. Who is responsible here?”
“Wait a minute,” rumbled the big bearded man who had first spotted him. “How about telling us who you are and what you want?” He shuffled uneasily from one foot to another as the stranger’s cold eyes raked him, but succeeded in maintaining a half-hearted air of defiance.
“My name doesn’t matter for the present,” said Bogomazov slowly. “What does matter is that I am a Communist.”
He felt and saw the stiffening, the electric rise of tension, the furtive crawling look that came into the score of eyes upon him; and outwardly Bogomazov was cool, relaxed, but inwardly he was like a coiled spring. His hand hovered unobtrusively close to the pistol butt.
This was the die-cast. He knew personally of too many cases of Communists beaten, assassinated, lynched by those who should have followed their orders, during the storm of madness and despair on the heels of the great disasters, the storm that still went on. . . . Bogomazov had been too clever to be caught, just as he had been clever enough to realize in time, when three months ago the total breakdown of the civil authority had commenced to envelop the military as well, that in the North where he then was the Northern winter now setting in would finish what the bombardments had begun. A thousand miles of southward trek lay behind him—from the lands where the blizzards would soon sweep in from Asia to blanket the blackened relics of the Old and New Russias, where the River Moskva was making a new marsh of the immense shallow depression that had been the site of Moscow, where scarcely a dead tree, let alone a building, stood on all the plain that had once been ruled by Great Novgorod and greater Leningrad.
The man with the beard said warily, “What do you want of us . . . Comrade?”
Bogomazov let out his breath in an inaudible sigh. He said curtly, “Are there any Communists among you?”
“No, Comrade.”
“Then who is responsible?”
They looked at one another uneasily. The spokesman gulped and stammered, “The . . . the American is responsible.”
Bogomazov’s composure was sorely tested. He frowned searchingly at the speaker, “You said—amerikanets?”
“Da, tovarishch.”
Bogomazov took a deep breath and two steps toward them. “All right. Take me to this American . . . at once!”
The peasants faltered briefly, then moved to obey. As Bogomazov strode up the straggling village street in their midst, he was very much aware that a man with a rifle walked on either side of him—like a guard of honor or a prisoner’s escort. Bogomazov left his holster-flap unbuttoned. From the hovels some women and children peered out to watch as they passed; a whisper fluttered from hut to hut: “Kommuníst prishól . . .
They stopped in front of a shed, built roughly like the other buildings, of hand-hewn boards. From inside came a rhythmic clanging of metal, and when Bogomazov stepped boldly through the open doorway he was met by a hot blast of air. A stone forge glowed brightly, and a man turned from it, shirtless and sweating, hammer still raised above an improvised anvil.
As the blacksmith straightened, mopping his forehead, Bogomazov saw at first glance that he was in truth an A
merican or at least a Westerner; he had the typical—and hated—features, the long narrow face and jaw, the prominent nose like the beak of some predatory bird, the lanky loose-jointed build. The Russian word amerikanets means not only “American,” but also, as a slang expression, “man who gets things done, go-getter”; and it had passed through Bogomazov’s mind that these peasants might have applied the term as a fanciful sort of title to some energetic leader risen from among them—but, no: the man before him was really one of the enemy.
With a smooth motion Bogomazov drew and leveled his pistol. He said, “You are under arrest in the name of the Soviet Government.”
The other stared at his unkempt menacing figure with a curious grimace, as if he were undecided whether to laugh or cry. The pistol moved in a short, commanding arc; the hammer fell from opened fingers, thudding dully on the earthen floor.
Bogomazov sensed rather than saw the painful uncertainty of the armed men in the doorway; he didn’t turn his head. “Keep your hands in sight,” he ordered. “Stand over there.” The man obeyed carefully; evidently he understood Russian.
“Now,” said the Communist, “explain. What kind of infiltration have you been carrying on here?”
The American blinked at him, still wearing that ambiguous expression. He said mildly, his speech fluent though heavily accented, “At the moment when I was so rudely interrupted, I was trying to beat part of a gun-mounting into a plowshare. We put in the fall wheat with the old-style wooden plows; a couple of iron shares will make the spring sowing a lot easier and more rewarding, and we may even be able to break some more land this fall.”
“Stop evading! I asked you . . . Wait.” Feeling intuitively that the psychological moment had come, Bogomazov gestured brusquely at the men in the doorway. “You may go. I will call when you are needed.”
They shuffled their feet, fingered the rifles they held, and melted away.
The American smiled wryly. “You know how to handle these people, don’t you? . . . But I wish you’d quit pointing that gun now. You aren’t going to shoot me in any case until after you’ve questioned me, and I wouldn’t advise you to then. I’m not a very good blacksmith, I admit, but I am the only person here who knows anything about farm management . . . unless you happen to be a stray agronóm.”
The Russian lowered the pistol and caressed its barrel with his other hand, his face expressionless. “Go on,” he said. “I begin to see. You are a specialist who has turned his knowledge to account to obtain a position of leadership.”
The other sighed. “You might say that, or you might say I was drafted. The original nucleus of this community was two light machine guns—abandoned after all the ammunition was used up in brushes with the razbóiniki. This group was footloose then; I persuaded them to strike south, since when winter came they’d have broken up or starved, and look for unblighted land to farm. As for me, I used to work for the United States Department of Agriculture; what I know about tractor maintenance doesn’t do much good just now, but some of the rest is still applicable. I realized pretty early—after I walked away by myself from a crash landing near Tula—that my chances of survival alone, as an alien, would be practically zero. . . . My name, incidentally, is Leroy Smith—Smith means huznéts, but I never thought I’d revert so far to type,” he added with a glance at the smoldering forge.
“Go on, Smeet,” said Bogomazov, still fondling the gun. “What have you accomplished?”
The American gave him a perplexed look. “Well . . . these people here aren’t a very choice bunch. About half of them were factory hands—proletarians, you know—who’ve had to learn from the ground up. The rest were mostly low-grade collective farm workers—fair to mediocre at carrying out the foreman’s orders, but lost when it comes to figuring out what to do next. That, of course, is where I come in.” He eyed the Russian speculatively. “And you, as a lone survivor, must have talents that Novoselye can use. We ought to be able to make a deal.”
“I,” said Bogomazov flatly, “am a Communist.”
Smith’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, oh,” he murmured under his breath. “I should have known it—the way he bulled in here, the way—
“There will be no deal. As a specialist, you are useful. You will continue to be useful. You will remember that you are serving the Soviet State; any irregularity, any sabotage or wrecking activities—I will punish.” He hefted the pistol.
The American said wearily, “Don’t you realize that the Soviet State, the Communist Party, the war—all that’s over and done with, kaput? And America too, I suppose—the last I heard our whole industrial triangle was a radioactive bonfire and Washington had been annexed to Chesapeake Bay. Here we’re a handful of survivors trying to go on surviving.”
“The war is not over. Did you think you could start a war and call it quits when you became nauseated with it?”
“We didn’t start it.”
In the light of the forge Bogomazov’s eyes glittered with a color that matched the metal of the weapon he held. “You capitalists made your fundamental mistake through vulgar materialism. You thought you could destroy Communism by destroying the capital, the wealth and industry and military power we had built up as a base in the Soviet Union. You didn’t realize that our real capital was always—ourselves, the Communists. That’s why we will inherit the earth, now that your war has shattered the old world!”
Smith watched him talk with a sort of dazed fascination, and then, the spell breaking, smiled faintly. “Before you go about inheriting the earth, it will be necessary to worry about lasting out the winter.”
“Naturally!” snapped Bogomazov. He stepped back to the doorway, and called, “You there! Come on in.” He singled out one of the armed peasants. “You will stand guard, to see that this foreigner does not escape or commit any acts of sabotage, such as damaging tools. You will not listen to anything he may say. So long as he behaves properly, you will leave him strictly alone, understood?”
The man nodded violently. “Yes, Comrade.”
“I am going to inspect the settlement. You, Smeet—back to making plowshares, and they had better be good!”
Winter closed down inexorably. Icy winds blew from the steppe—not the terrible fanged winds of the Northern tundras, but freezing all the same; and on still days the smoke from the huts rose far into the bright frosty air, betraying the village’s location to any chance marauders.
There was no help for that, but there was plenty of work to be done. Almost every day the forge was busy, and on the outskirts of Novoselye hammers rang, where new houses were going up to relieve the settlement’s crowding. It would have been good to have a stockade, too; but on the almost treeless plain it had become necessary to go dangerously far to find usable timber.
Bogomazov, making one of his frequent circuits of the village in company with Ivanov, his silent and caninely devoted fellow-Communist who had strayed in a few weeks after him, halted to watch the construction. The American Smith was lending a hand on the job—at the moment, he had paused to show a former urban clerk how to use a hammer without bending precious nails.
Bogomazov watched for a minute in silence, then called, “Smeet!”
The American looked round, straightened and came toward them without haste. “What is it now?”
“I have been looking for you. Some of the cattle are sick; no one seems to know if it is serious. Do you know anything about veterinary medicine?”
“I’ve done a little cow-doctoring—I was brought up on a farm. I’ll take a look at them right away.”
“Good.” Watching the other turn to go, Bogomazov felt an uneasy though familiar surprise at the extent to which he and the settlement had come to rely on this outlander. Time and again, in greater or lesser emergencies calling for special skills, the only one who knew what to do—or the only one who would volunteer to try—had been this inevitable Smith.
There was an explanation for that, of course: from Smith’s references to his prewar life in America, Bo
gomazov gathered that he had worked at one time or another at a remarkable variety of “specialties,” moving from place to place and from job to job, in the chaotic capitalistic labor market, in a manner which would never have been tolerated in the orderly Soviet economic system. . . . As a result, he seemed to have done a little of everything and to know more than a little about everything.
And Bogomazov was aware that, behind his back, the villagers referred to the foreigner as “Comrade Specialist”—improperly giving him the title of honor, tovarishch, though he was not even a Soviet citizen, let alone a Party member. . . .
That train of thought was a reminder, and Bogomazov called, “Wait! Another matter, when you have time . . . I am told that the stove in Citizen Vrachov’s hut will not draw.”
Smith turned, smiling. “That’s all right. Vrachov’s wife complained to me about it, and I’ve already fixed the flue.”
Bogomazov stiffened. “She should not have gone to you. She should have reported the matter to me first.”
The American’s smile faded. “Oh . . . discipline, eh?”
“Discipline is essential,” said Bogomazov flatly. Ivanov, at his elbow, nodded emphatic agreement.
“I suppose it is.” Smith eyed them thoughtfully. “I’ve got to admit that you’ve accomplished some things I probably couldn’t have done—like redistributing the housing space and cooking up a system of rationing to take the village through the winter—and making it stick.”
“You could not have done those things because you are not a Communist,” said Bogomazov with energy. “You are used to the ‘impossibilities’ of a dying society; but we are strong in the knowledge that history is on our side. There is nothing that a real Bolshevik cannot achieve!”
Ivanov nodded again.
“History,” Smith said reflectively, “is notorious for changing sides. I wonder if even a Bolshevik . . . But in the case of Vrachov’s wife’s chimney, your discipline seems rather petty.”
The Russian drew visibly into himself. “Enough!” he said sharply. “You are to see to the cattle.”
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 60
