by Rudy Rucker
A sharp poke in the thigh interrupted my reverie.
“Quit bawling, fatso, this isn’t the Ukraine.”
The voice came from beneath the piano. Leaning down, I saw a man sitting cross-legged there, a thin, blond man with pale eyes. He smiled and showed his bad teeth. “Cheer up, pal, I mean it. And pass me that vodka bottle you’re sucking. My name’s Vlad Zipkin.”
I passed him my bottle. “I’m Nikita Iosifovich Globov.”
“Nice shoes,” Vlad said admiringly. “Cool jacket, too. You’re a snappy dresser, for a rocket-type.”
“What makes you think I’m from the space center?” I said.
Vlad lowered his voice. “The shoes. You got those from Nokidze the Kazakh, the black market guy. He’s been selling ‘em all over Kaliningrad.”
I climbed under the piano with Zipkin. The air was a little clearer there. “You’re one of us, Comrade Zipkin?”
“I do information theory,” Zipkin whispered, drunkenly touching one finger to his lips. “We’re designing error-proof codes for communicating with the…you know.” He made a little orbiting movement with his forefinger and looked upward at the shiny dark bottom of the piano. The Sputnik had only been up since October. We space workers were still not used to talking about it in public.
“Come on, don’t be shy,” I said, smiling. “We can say ‘Sputnik,’ can’t we? Everyone in the world has talked of nothing else for months!”
It was easy to draw Vlad out. “My group’s hush-hush,” he bragged criminally. “The top brass think ‘information theory’ has to be classified and censored. But the theory’s not information itself, it’s an abstract meta-information …” He burbled on a while in the weird jargon of his profession. I grew bored and opened a pack of Kent cigarettes.
Vlad bummed one instantly. He was impressed that I had American cigarettes. Only cool black-market operators had classy cigs like that. Vlad felt the need to impress me in return. “Khrushchev wants the next sputnik to broadcast propaganda,” he confided, blowing smoke. “The Internationale in outer space—what foolishness!” Vlad shook his head. “As if countries matter any more outside our atmosphere. To any real Russian, it is already clear that we have surpassed the Americans. Why should we copy their fascist nationalism? We have soared into the void and left them in the dirt!” He grinned. “Damn, these are good smokes. Can you get me a connection?”
“What are you offering?” I said.
He nodded at Lyuda. “See our hostess? You see those earrings she has? They’re gold-plated transistors I stole from the Center! All property is theft, hey Nikita?”
I liked Vlad well enough, but I felt duty-bound to report his questionable attitudes along with my information about Starsky. Political deviance such as Vlad’s is a type of mental illness. I liked Vlad enough to truly want to see him get better.
Having made my report, I returned to Kaliningrad, and forgot about Vlad. I didn’t hear about him for a month.
Since the early ‘50s, Kaliningrad had been the home of the Soviet space effort. Kaliningrad was thirty kilometers north of Moscow and had once been a summer resort. There we worked heroically at rocket research and construction—though the actual launches took place at the famous Baikonur Cosmodrome, far to the south. I enjoyed life in Kaliningrad. The stores were crammed with Polish hams and fresh lamb chops, and the landscape of forests and lakes was romantic and pleasant. Security was excellent.
Outside the research complex and block apartments were dachas, resort homes for space scientists, engineers, and party officials, including our top boss, the Chief Designer himself. The entire compound was surrounded by a high wood-and-concrete fence manned around the clock by armed guards. It was very peaceful. The compound held almost fifty dachas. I owned a small one—a kitchen and two rooms—with large gar-den filled with fruit trees and berry bushes, now covered by winter snow.
A month after Lyuda’s party, I was enjoying myself in my dacha, quietly pressing a new suit I had bought from Nokidze the Kazakh, when I heard a black ZIL sedan splash up through the mud outside. I peeked through the curtains. A woman stamped up the path and knocked. I opened the door slightly.
“Nikita Iosifovich Globov?”
“Yes?”
“Let me in, you fat sneak!” she said.
I gaped at her. She addressed me with filthy words. Shocked, I let her in. She was a dusky, strong-featured Tartar woman dressed in a cheap black two-piece suit from the Moscow G. U. M. store. No woman in Kaliningrad wore clothes or shoes that ugly, unless she was a real hardliner. So I got worried. She kicked the door shut and glared at me.
“You turned in Vladimir Zipkin!”
“What?”
“Listen, you meddling idiot, I’m Captain Bogulyubova from Information Mechanics. You’ve put my best worker into the mental hospital! What were you thinking? Do you realize what this will do to my production schedules?”
I was caught off guard. I babbled something about proper ideology coming first.
“You louse!” she snarled. “It’s my department and I handle Security there! How dare you report one of my people without coming to me first? Do you see me turning in metallurgists?”
“Well, you can’t have him babbling state secrets to every beatnik in Moscow!” I said defensively.
“You forget yourself,” said Captain Bogulyubova with a taut smile. “I have a rank in KGB and you are a common stukach. I can make a great deal of trouble for you. A very great deal.”
I began to sweat. “I was doing my duty. No one can deny that. Besides, I didn’t know he was in the hospital! All he needed was a few counseling sessions!”
“You fouled up everything,” she said, staring at me through slitted eyes like a Cossack sizing up a captured hog. She crossed her arms over her hefty chest and looked around my dacha. “This little place of yours will be nice for Vlad. He’ll need some rest. Poor Vlad. No one else from my section will want to work with him after he gets out. They’ll be afraid to be seen with him! But we need him, and you’re going to help me. Vlad will work here, and you’ll keep an eye on him. It can be a kind of house arrest.”
“But what about my work in metallurgy?”
She glared at me. “Your new work will be Comrade Zipkin’s rehabilitation. You’ll volunteer to do it, and you’ll tell the Higher Circles that he’s become a splendid example of communist dedication! He’d better get the order of Lenin, understand?”
“This isn’t fair, Comrade Captain. Be reasonable!”
“Listen, you hypocrite swine, I know all about you and your black market dealings. Those shoes cost more than you make in a month!” She snatched the iron off the end of my board and slammed it flat against my brand new suit. Steam curled up.
“All right!” I cried, wringing my hands. “I’ll help him.” I yanked the suit away and splashed water on the scorched fabric.
Nina laughed and stormed out of the house. I felt terrible. A man can’t help it if he needs to dress well. It’s unfair to hold a thing like that over someone.
Months passed. The spring of 1958 arrived. The dog Laika had been shot into the cosmic void. A good dog, a Russian, an Earthling. The Americans’ first launches had failed, and then in February they shot up a laughable sputnik no bigger than a grapefruit. Meanwhile we metallurgists forged ahead on the mighty RD-108 Supercluster paraffin-fueled engine, which would lift our first cosmonaut into the Infinite. There were technical snags and gross lapses in space-worker ideology, but much progress was made.
Captain Nina dropped by several times to bluster and grumble about Vlad. She blamed me for everything, but it was Vlad’s problem. All one has to do, really, is tell the mental health workers what they want to hear. But Zipkin couldn’t seem to master this.
A third sputnik was launched in May 1958, with much instrumentation on board. Yet it still failed to broadcast a coherent propaganda statement, much less sing the Internationale. Vlad was missed, and missed badly. I awaited Vlad’s return with some trepidation.
Would he resent me? Fear me? Despise me?
For my part, I simply wanted Vlad to like me. In going over his dossier I had come to see that, despite his eccentricities, the man was indeed a genius. I resolved to take care of Vlad Zipkin, to protect him from his irrational sociopathic impulses.
A KGB ambulance brought Vlad and his belongings to my dacha early one Sunday morning in July. He looked pale and disoriented. I greeted him with false heartiness.
“Greetings Vladimir Eduardovich! It’s an honor and a joy to have you share my dacha. Come in, come in. I have yogurt and fresh gooseberries. Let me help you carry all that stuff inside!”
“So it was you.” Vlad was silent while we carried his suitcase and three boxes of belongings into the dacha. When I urged him to eat with me, his face took on a desperate cast. “Please, Globov, leave me alone now. Those months in the hospital—you can’t imagine what it’s been like.”
“Vladimir, don’t worry, this dacha is your home, and I’m your friend.”
Vlad grimaced. “Just let me spend the day alone in your garden, and don’t tell the KGB I’m antisocial. I want to conform, I do want to fit in, but for God’s sake, not today.”
“Vlad, believe me, I want only the best for you. Go out and lie in the hammock; eat the berries, enjoy the sun.”
Vlad’s pale eyes bulged as they fell on my framed official photograph of Laika, the cosmonaut dog. The dog had a weird, frog-like, rubber oxygen mask on her face. Just before launch, she had been laced up within a heavy, stiff space-suit—a kind of canine straitjacket, actually. Vlad frowned and shuddered. I guess it reminded him of his recent unpleasantness.
Vlad yanked my vodka bottle off the kitchen counter, and headed outside without another word. I watched him through the window—he looked well enough, sipping vodka, picking blackberries, and finally falling asleep in the hammock. His suitcase contained very little of interest, and his boxes were mostly filled with books. Most were technical, but many were scientific romances: the socialist H. G. Wells, Capek, Yefremov, Kazantsev, and the like.
When Vlad awoke he was in much better spirits. I showed him around the property. The garden stretched back thirty meters, where there was a snug outhouse. We strolled together out into the muddy streets. At Vlad’s urging, I got the guards to open the gate for us, and we walked out into the peaceful birch and pine woods around the Klyazma Reservoir. It had rained heavily during the preceding week, and mush-rooms were everywhere. We amused ourselves by gathering the edible ones—every Russian knows mushrooms.
Vlad knew an “instant pickling” technique based on lightly boiling the mushrooms in brine, then packing them in ice and vinegar. It worked well back in our kitchen, and I congratulated him. He was as pleased as a child.
In the days that followed, I realized that Vlad was not anti-Party. He was simply very unworldly. He was one of those gifted unfortunates who can’t manage life without a protector.
Still, his opinion carried a lot of weight around the Center, and he worked on important problems. I escorted him everywhere—except the labs I wasn’t cleared for—reminding him not to blurt out anything stupid.
Of course my own work suffered. I told my co-workers that Vlad was a sick relative of mine, which explained my common absence from the job. Rather than being disappointed by my absence, though, the other engineers praised my dedication to Vlad and encouraged me to spend plenty of time with him. I liked Vlad, but soon grew tired of the constant shepherding. He did most of his work in our dacha, which kept me cooped up there when I could have been out cutting deals with Nokidze or reporting on the beatnik scene.
It was too bad that Captain Nina Bogulyubova had fallen down on her job. She should have been watching over Vlad from the first. Now I had to tidy up after her bungling, so I felt she owed me some free time. I hinted tactfully at this when she arrived with a sealed briefcase containing some of Vlad’s work. My reward was another furious tongue lashing.
“You parasite, how dare you suggest that I failed Vladimir Eduardovich? I have always been aware of his value as a theorist, and as a man! He’s worth any ten of you stukach vermin! The Chief Designer himself has asked after Vladimir’s health. The Chief Designer spent years in a labor camp under Stalin. He knows it’s no disgrace to be shut away by some lickspittle sneak …” There was more, and worse. I began to feel that Captain Bogulyubova, in her violent Tartar way, had personal feelings for Vlad.
Also I had not known that our Chief Designer had been in camp. This was not good news, because people who have spent time in detention sometimes become embittered and lose proper perspective. Many people were being released from labor camps now that Nikita Khrushchev had become the Leader of Progressive Mankind. Also, amazing and almost insolent things were being published in the Literary Gazette.
Like most Ukrainians, I liked Khrushchev, but he had a funny peasant accent and everyone made fun of the way he talked on the radio. We never had such problems in Stalin’s day.
We Soviets had achieved a magnificent triumph in space, but I feared we were becoming lax. It saddened me to see how many space engineers, technicians, and designers avoided Party discipline. They claimed that their eighty-hour work weeks excused them from indoctrination meetings. Many read foreign technical documents without proper clearance. Proper censorship was evaded. Technicians from different departments sometimes gathered to discuss their work, privately, simply between themselves, without an actual need-to-know.
Vlad’s behavior was especially scandalous. He left top-secret documents scattered about the dacha, where one’s eye could not help but fall on them. He often drank to excess. He invited engineers from other departments to come visit us, and some of them, not knowing his dangerous past, accepted. It embarrassed me, because when they saw Vlad and me together they soon guessed the truth.
Still, I did my best to cover Vlad’s tracks and minimize his indiscretions. In this I failed miserably.
One evening, to my astonishment, I found him mulling over working papers for the RD-108 Supercluster engine. He had built a cardboard model of the rocket out of roller tubes from my private stock of toilet paper. “Where did you get those?” I demanded.
“Found ‘em in a box in the outhouse.”
“No, the documents!” I shouted. “That’s not your department! Those are state secrets!”
Vlad shrugged. “It’s all wrong,” he said thickly. He had been drinking again.
“What?”
“Our original rocket, the 107, had four nozzles. But this 108 Supercluster has twenty! Look, the extra engines are just bundled up like bananas and attached to the main rocket. They’re held on with hoops! The Americans will laugh when they see this.”
“But they won’t.” I snatched the blueprints out of his hands. “Who gave you these?”
“Korolyov did,” Vlad muttered. “Sergei Pavlovich.”
“The Chief Designer?” I said, stunned.
“Yeah, we were talking it over in the sauna this morning,” Vlad said. “Your old pal Nokidze came by while you were at work this morning, and he and I had a few. So I walked down to the bathhouse to sweat it off. Turned out the Chief was in the sauna, too—he’d been up all night working. He and I did some time together once, years ago. We used to look up at the stars, talk rockets together…So anyway, he turns to me and says, ‘You know how much thrust Von Braun is getting from a single engine?’ And I said, ‘Oh, must be eighty, ninety tons, right?’ ‘Right,’ he said, ‘and we’re getting twenty-five. We’ll have to strap twenty together to launch one man. We need a miracle, Vladimir. I’m ready to try anything.’ So then I told him about this book I’ve been reading.”
I said, “You were drunk on working-hours? And the chief Designer saw you in the sauna?”
“He sweats like anybody else,” Vlad said. “I told him about this new fiction writer. Aleksander Kazantsev. He’s a thinker, that boy.” Vlad tapped the side of his head meaningfully, then scratched his ribs inside his filthy house robe and lit a cigar
ette. I felt like killing him. “Kazantsev says we’re not the first explorers in space. There’ve been others, beings from the void. It’s no surprise. The great space-prophet Tsiolkovsky said there are an infinite number of inhabited worlds. You know how much the Chief Designer admired Tsiolkovsky. And when you look at the evidence—I mean this Tunguska thing—it begins to add up nicely.”
“Tunguska,” I said, fighting back a growing sense of horror. “That’s in Siberia, isn’t it?”
“Sure. So anyway, I said, ‘Chief, why are you wasting our time on these firecrackers when we have a shot at true star flight? Send out a crew of trained investigators to the impact site of this so-called Tunguska meteor! Run an information-theoretic analysis! If it was really an atomic-powered spacecraft like Kazantsev says, maybe there’s something left that could help us!’”
I winced, imagining Vlad in the sauna, drunk, first bringing up disgusting prison memories, then babbling on about space fiction to the premier genius of Soviet rocketry. It was horrible. “What did the chief say to you?”
“He said it sounded promising,” said Vlad airily. “Said he’d get things rolling right away. You got any more of those Kents?”
I slumped into my chair, dazed. “Look inside my boots,” I said numbly. “My Italian ones.”
“Oh,” Vlad said in a small voice. “I sort of found those last week.”
I roused myself. “The chief let you see the Supercluster plans? And said you ought to go to Siberia?”
“Oh, not just you and me,” Vlad said, amused. “He needs a really thorough investigation! We’d commandeer a whole train, get all the personnel and equipment we need!” Vlad grinned. “Excited, Nikita?”
My head spun. The man was a demon. I knew in my soul that he was goading me. Deliberately. Sadistically. Suddenly I realized how sick I was of Vlad, of constantly watchdogging this visionary moron. Words tumbled out of me.
