“What’s more, I’ll tape half the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for them if you like. But that would be overdoing it. We need only pick one of the five or perhaps seven people in the ministry who could have the information.”
Abakumov was indignant.
“So arrest every one of the bastards. Why beat your brains out over it? What are seven people? Ours is a big country; we won’t run out of population!”
“Can’t be done, Viktor Semyonovich,” Ryumin replied judiciously. “The Foreign Ministry isn’t like the Ministry of the Food Industry. That way we would lose the trail completely, and besides, somebody in one of the embassies might skip out and join the non-returners. We simply have to find out exactly who it was. And as quickly as possible.”
“Hmm,” Abakumov said thoughtfully. “Only I don’t understand what we’re comparing with what.”
“One tape with another.”
“One tape with another? . . . Right, do you think you’ll have the know-how sometime, Selivanovsky?”
“I still don’t understand what this is all about, Viktor Semyonovich.”
“What is there to understand? There’s nothing hard about it. Some bastard, some dirty rat, probably a diplomat—otherwise he would have had no means of knowing about it—called the American embassy from a phone booth and ratted out our intelligence agents over there. It has to do with the atom bomb. Finger him and you’ll be a hero.”
Selivanovsky looked past Oskolupov at Yakonov. Yakonov met his gaze and raised his eyebrows slightly. This was intended to mean that the whole thing was unprecedented, that the methodology did not exist, that they had no background, that they had enough to worry about as it was, that they should leave this alone. Selivanovsky was intelligent enough to understand this twitch of Yakonov’s eyebrows and the whole situation, and was preparing to muddy the waters.
But Foma Guryanovich Oskolupov had been doing some thinking of his own. As head of department he was determined not to be a mere figurehead. Since his appointment to that post, he had become more and more convinced of his superior merits, and he fully believed that he could master all the department’s problems and solve them more easily than anyone else; otherwise he would not have been appointed. Although he had only an elementary education, he could not entertain the idea that any subordinate of his could understand their business better than he, except perhaps for matters of detail or situations where some minor adjustment was needed. He had recently been at a first-class health resort, where he had worn civilian dress instead of uniform and had passed himself off as a professor of electronics. He had met there the eminent writer Kazakevich, who had not been able to take his eyes off him. Kazakevich kept taking notes and said that in Foma Guryanovich he had found the model for his portrait of a modern scientist. After this stay in the sanatorium, Foma felt every inch a scientist.
On this occasion, too, he understood the problem instantly and took the bit between his teeth.
“Comrade Minister! Of course we can do it!”
Selivanovsky looked round at him in surprise.
“Which establishment can we do it in? Which laboratory?” he asked.
“The telephone lab at Marfino. You said it’s a telephone call, didn’t you? Right, then.”
“But Marfino is working on a more important assignment.”
“Never mind. We’ll find somebody to do it. There are three hundred people there; surely we can find somebody?”
He stared with doglike eagerness at the minister.
Abakumov didn’t quite smile, but his face again expressed approval of the general. He had been just the same on his way up: Show me the enemy, and I’ll smash him to pulp. We all like juniors who resemble ourselves.
“Good man!” he said approvingly. “That’s the way to look at it! The state’s interests are what matter! Everything else is secondary. Right?”
“Precisely, Comrade Minister! Precisely, Comrade Colonel General!”
Ryumin was apparently not at all surprised or impressed by the selfless dedication of the pockmarked major general. With a casual glance at Selivanovsky, he said:
“I’ll come and see you tomorrow, then.”
He exchanged a look with Abakumov and left the room, treading softly.
The minister explored his teeth with a finger, removing remnants of the meat he had eaten for supper.
“Well, then, when is it going to be? You’ve led me on long enough—to begin with, it was the first of August, then it was the October holiday, then the New Year. . . . What about it?”
He looked hard at Yakonov, forcing him to answer for himself.
Yakonov seemed to have difficulty in finding a comfortable position for his neck. He bent it slightly to the right, then slightly to the left; he raised his chilly blue eyes to look at the minister, and then lowered them again.
Yakonov knew that he was very clever. Yakonov knew, too, that people even cleverer than himself, people whose minds were on their work for fourteen hours a day, all year round, with not a single day off, were concentrating on that accursed contrivance. . . . The recklessly generous Americans, who publicized their inventions in generally available journals, were also indirectly participating. Yakonov knew as well the thousands of difficulties already overcome and the fresh ones through which his engineers were struggling like swimmers in a heavy sea. Yes, the very last of the absolutely final deadlines for which they had pleaded with this lump of meat buttoned up in a tunic was only six days away. But they had been forced to plead for and agree to ridiculous deadlines only because the Coryphaeus of Sciences had at the very beginning allowed a single year for what was really ten years’ work.
Now they had agreed, in Selivanovsky’s office, to ask for a reprieve of ten days. They would promise two prototypes of the telephone device by January 10. This was what the deputy minister had insisted on. And what Oskolupov wanted. Their intention was to produce something, half finished but freshly painted. For the time being, nobody would test, indeed nobody would know how to test, the absolute reliability of the coding. Before it reached the stage of serial production, and before sets were dispatched to Soviet embassies abroad, another half year would have elapsed, and both the coding and the sound quality would have been put right.
But Yakonov also knew that inanimate objects ignore deadlines set by men, and that what would emerge from the apparatus on January 10 was not human speech but gibberish. And what had befallen Mamurin would inevitably be repeated with Yakonov: The Boss would call Beria in and ask, “What idiot made this machine? Get rid of him.” And Yakonov would become at best another “Iron Mask,” but more probably an ordinary zek once again.
With the minister’s eyes on him, he felt the noose tightening round his neck. He fought down his craven fear and blurted out as if gasping for breath: “Another month! Just one more month! Till February the first!”
He looked imploringly, almost doglike, at Abakumov.
Talented people are sometimes unfair to mediocrities. Abakumov was cleverer than Yakonov supposed. It was just that prolonged lack of exercise had rendered the minister’s brain useless to him. His whole career had worked out in such a way that thinking had always brought setbacks, whereas zealous subordination had always brought gain. Abakumov therefore tried to avoid mental exertion as far as possible.
He probably knew in his heart that ten days or even a month would not help when two years had already gone by. But in his eyes the blame rested on this trio of liars; Selivanovsky, Oskolupov, and Yakonov had only themselves to blame. If the job was so difficult, why, when they took it on twenty-three months ago, had they agreed to a year? Why hadn’t they asked for three? (He had forgotten that he himself had put them under merciless pressure.) If they had dug their heels in with Abakumov, Abakumov would have dug his heels in with Stalin; they could have settled for two years and stretched it to three.
But the terror secreted in them during so many years of subjugation was so great that not one of them, then or now, had the courage
to stand up to his superiors.
Abakumov’s own practice was to allow himself some leeway, and when he was dealing with Stalin, he always added a couple of months. On this occasion Iosif Vissarionovich had been promised that one sample of a Scrambler telephone would be placed before him by March 1. So that in the last resort they could be allowed an extra month, but it must really be a month and no more.
Abakumov took up his fountain pen again and asked quite simply:
“When you say a month, are you using ordinary human language or bullshitting again?”
“Exactly one month! Exactly.” Delighted by this happy outcome, Oskolupov beamed as though he were eager to take off directly for Marfino and seize a soldering iron himself.
Abakumov scribbled a note in his desk diary.
“That’s it, then. By the Lenin anniversary. You’ll all get Stalin Prizes. Selivanovsky, will it be ready?”
“It will! It will!”
“Oskolupov, I’ll have your head, remember. Will it be ready?”
“Well, Comrade Minister, all it needs now is . . .”
“What about you, Yakonov? You know what you stand to lose? Will it be ready?”
Yakonov stuck to his guns.
“One month! By February first.”
“And if it isn’t? Think about it, Colonel. Colonel! You’re lying, aren’t you?”
Of course he was lying. And of course he should have asked for two months. But what was done could not be undone.
“It’ll be there, Comrade Minister,” he promised miserably.
“Remember, I didn’t put the words in your mouth. I can forgive anything but not deception! Off you go now.”
With lighter hearts they trooped out, as they had come, in single file, averting their eyes before the icon of the five-meter Stalin.
Their rejoicing was premature. They did not know that the minister had set a trap for them.
As soon as they had been shown out, a new arrival was announced: “Engineer Pryanchikov!”
* * *
* Oblast: A province, or area, that serves as a subnational administrative division of the state.
Chapter 17
Hot Water
THAT NIGHT ABAKUMOV HAD BEGUN by ordering Selivanovsky to produce Yakonov. Then, without letting any of the others know, he had sent two telephoned telegrams to Marfino at fifteen-minute intervals, summoning to the ministry the zek Bobynin, then the zek Pryanchikov. The two were delivered in separate cars and made to wait in different rooms with no opportunity to concoct a story.
Pryanchikov was in any case hardly capable of doing so. His natural candor was such that many a sober child of the times considered him mentally deficient. “A phase shift” was their term for it in the sharashka.
Just now he was even less capable of collusion or prevarication than usual. He was still dazed by brilliant visions of Moscow speeding dizzily past the Pobeda’s windows. After the suburban gloom surrounding the camp area at Marfino, driving out onto the brilliantly lit highway, then on toward the cheerful bustle of the station, and on again to the neon-lit shop windows of the Sretenka came as a shock. For Pryanchikov neither the driver nor his two companions in plainclothes existed; it was as though he were inhaling and exhaling flame, not air. He could not tear himself away from the window. He had never been driven through Moscow even in the daytime, and in the whole history of the sharashka not a single prisoner had ever seen Moscow by night.
At the Sretenka Gate the car was held up by the crowd leaving the cinema and then by a traffic light.
Prisoners in their millions imagined that in their absence life outside had come to a halt, that there were no men left, and that women were pining away with no one to share, no one needing their love. But Valentin saw the well-fed, animated metropolitan crowd surging past, caught glimpses of hats, veils, silver-fox furs; and his tingling senses were assailed through the frosty air, through the solid bodywork of the car, by wave after wave after wave of perfume from the women walking by. He heard laughter, the buzz of voices, tantalizing fragments of conversation, and he wanted to smash the plastic glass and cry out to those women, tell them that he was young, that he was full of longing, that he was in prison for no reason! After the monastic seclusion of the sharashka, this was a fairy-tale world, a taste of the high life that he had never had the luck to lead as a penniless student, then a prisoner of war, then a prisoner.
Afterward, waiting in a room of some sort, Pryanchikov looked right through the tables and chairs that stood there. The emotions and impressions that had him in their grip were reluctant to let him go.
A glossy young lieutenant colonel asked Pryanchikov to follow him. With his scraggy neck, his thin wrists, his narrow shoulders, and his skinny legs, he had never looked like such a weakling as when his escort left him at a door and he entered Abakumov’s office.
He did not even realize that it was an office—it was so spacious—and that it belonged to the pair of golden shoulder boards at the end of the great room. Nor did he notice the five-meter Stalin at his back. Nocturnal Moscow and its women were still passing before his eyes. Valentin might have been drunk. He just could not conceive why he was in this hall and what sort of hall it was. He would not have been surprised if beautifully dressed women had come in and started dancing. How ludicrous to imagine that somewhere, in a semicircular room lit by a single blue lightbulb, though the war had ended five years ago, he had left unfinished a glass of cold tea and men were puttering around in their underwear.
His feet were treading on carpet, wastefully laid on the floor. The carpet had a soft, deep pile, and you just wanted to roll on it. There was a row of big windows in the right wall, and on the left side of the room a tall mirror reached down to the floor.
Free men don’t appreciate things! To a zek, who cannot always get to a cheap little mirror smaller than the palm of his hand, looking at himself in a big mirror is a treat!
Pryanchikov halted, drawn to the mirror as if by a magnet. He went up close to it and examined his clean, fresh face with satisfaction. He adjusted his tie a little, then the collar of his blue shirt. Then he backed away slowly, inspecting himself en face, at an angle, and in profile. He concluded these evolutions with a sort of dance step. Then he went up close to the mirror again and examined himself thoroughly. Gratified to find himself quite handsome and elegant, in spite of his blue overalls, he moved on, not meaning to get down to business (he had forgotten all about that) but intending to continue his survey of the room.
Meanwhile, the man who could imprison anyone he pleased in one half of the world, and in the other half have anyone he pleased murdered, the all-powerful minister, in whose presence generals and marshals turned pale, was watching this puny zek with curiosity. He had arrested and condemned them by the million, but it was a long time since he had seen one at close quarters.
Pryanchikov minced toward the minister and looked at him inquiringly, as though he had not expected to find him there.
“You are Engineer . . . er . . . ” Abakumov consulted his scrap of paper.
“Er, yes,” said Valentin absently. “Pryanchikov.”
“You’re a senior engineer in the group working on the, er . . . ” He glanced at his notes again. “. . . artificial speech device?”
“What? What d’you mean, artificial speech device?” Pryanchikov waved a hand dismissively. “Nobody at our place calls it that. They changed its name during the campaign against kowtowing to foreign science. It’s a vocoder. Voice coder. Or scrambler.”
“Anyway, you’re the senior engineer.”
“I suppose so. What about it?” said Pryanchikov warily.
“Sit down.”
Pryanchikov sat down with alacrity, carefully hitching up his trousers with their knife-edge crease.
“Please speak quite frankly. You needn’t be afraid that your immediate superiors will punish you for it. This scrambler, then, when will it be ready? Speak frankly, now! In a month’s time? Or maybe you need two months?
Speak up and don’t be afraid.”
“Ready? The scrambler? Ha-ha!”
Pryanchikov flung himself against the soft leather chairback, threw up his hands, and loud, youthful laughter rang out under that vaulted ceiling for the first time. “Whatever do you mean? I can see you just don’t understand what the scrambler is. Let me explain it to you!”
He bounced out of the springy chair and darted over to Abakumov’s desk. “Got a bit of paper? This will do!” He tore a leaf from a blank notepad on the minister’s desk, grabbed the minister’s meat-red pen, and began sketching a complex of sinusoids in hasty squiggles.
Abakumov was not alarmed. The strange engineer’s speech and movements were so childishly honest and spontaneous that he put up with this encroachment and watched Pryanchikov curiously, without listening.
“You must realize that the human voice consists of many different harmonics,” said Pryanchikov, sputtering in his eagerness to get it all said in a hurry. “Well, the idea of the scrambler is to reproduce the human voice by artificial means. . . . Blast! How do you manage to write with such a lousy pen? . . . to reproduce it by adding together at least the main harmonics, each transmitted by a separate set of impulses. You are familiar, of course, with Cartesian rectangular coordinates—every schoolboy is—but what about Fourier’s series?”
“Hold on,” Abakumov said, coming to his senses. “Just tell me one little thing: When will it be ready? And I mean ready.”
“Ready? . . . Hmm. . . . Haven’t really thought about it.” The city by night was losing its fascination as his mind focused on the work he loved. “The interesting thing is this: The job gets easier if we make the timbre of the voice coarser. In that case the number of components . . .”
“I’m asking you for a date. First of March? First of April?”
“Are you serious? April? . . . Without the cryptographers we’ll be through in, say, four or five months, no earlier. And what’s it going to sound like when we get around to coding and decoding the impulses? The voice quality is bound to be even coarser. So let’s not try to guess!” he urged Abakumov, tugging at his sleeve. “I’ll explain the whole thing to you here and now. When you understand, you’ll agree that haste will get us nowhere!”
In the First Circle Page 14
