The other was saying, “The Teremni preceded the Great Palace. One of its walls was used to become the rear of the later structure. We can enter it fairly freely.”
They entered through another smaller doorway a hundred feet or more from the main entrance, climbed a short marble stairway and turned right down an ornate corridor, tapestry hung. They passed occasionally other uniformed guards, none of whom paid them any attention.
They passed through three joined rooms, each heavily furnished in Seventeenth Century style, each thick with icons. The guide brought them up abruptly at a small door.
He said, an air almost of defiance in his tone, “I go no further. Through this door and you are in the Great Palace, in the bathroom of the apartments of Catherine Second. You remember your maps?”
“Yes,” Hank said.
“I hope so.” The guard hesitated. “You are armed?”
“No. We were afraid that my things might be thoroughly searched. Had a gun been found on me, my mission would have been over then and there.”
The guard produced a heavy military revolver, offered it butt foremost.
But Hank shook his head. “Thanks. But if it comes to the point where I’d need a gun—I’ve already failed. I’m here to talk, not to shoot.”
The guard nodded. “Perhaps you’re right. Now, I repeat. On the other side of this door is the bathroom of the Czarina’s apartments. Beyond it is her paradnaya divannaya, her dressing room and beyond that the Ekaterininskaya sala, the throne room of Catherine Second. It is probable that there will be nobody in any of these rooms. Beyond that, I do not know.”
He ended abruptly with “Good luck,” turned and scurried away.
“Thanks,” Hank Kuran said after him. He turned and tried the door-knob. Inwardly he thought, All right Henry Kuran. Hennessey said you had a reputation for being able to think on your feet. Start thinking. Thus far all you’ve been called on to do is exchange low-level banter with a bevy of pro-commie critics of the United States. Now the chips are down.
* * * *
The apartments of the long dead czarina were empty. He pushed through them and into the corridor beyond.
And came to a quick halt.
Halfway down the hall, Loo Motlamelle crouched over a uniformed, crumpled body. He looked up at Hank Kuran’s approach, startled, a fighting man at bay. His lips thinned back over his teeth. A black thumb did something to the weapon he held in his hand.
Hank said throatily, “Is he dead?”
Loo shook his head, his eyes coldly wary. “No. I slugged him.”
Hank said, “What are you doing here?”
Loo came erect. “It occurs to me that I’m evidently doing the same thing you are.”
But the dull metal gun in his hand was negligently at the ready and his eyes were cold, cold. It came to Hank that banjos on the levee were very far away.
This lithe fighting man said tightly, “You know where we are? Exactly where we are? I’m not sure.”
Hank said, “In the hall outside the Sobstvennaya Plovina of the Bolshoi Kremlevski Dvorets. The czar’s private apartments. And how did you get here?”
“The hard way,” Loo said softly. His eyes darted up and down the corridor. “I can’t figure out why there aren’t more guards. I don’t like this. You’re armed?”
“No,” Hank said.
Loo grinned down at his own weapon. “One of us is probably making a mistake but we both seem to have gotten this far. By the way, I’m Inter-Commonwealth Security. You’re C.I.A., aren’t you? Talk fast, Hank, we’re either a team from now on, or I’ve got to do something about you.”
“Special mission for the President,” Hank said. “Why didn’t we spot each other sooner?”
Loo grinned again in deprecation. “Evidently because we’re both good operatives. If I’ve got this right, the extraterrestrials are somewhere in here.”
Hank started down the corridor. There was no time to go into the whys and wherefores of Loo’s mission. It must be approximately the same as his own. “There are some private apartments in this direction,” he said over his shoulder. “They must be quartered—”
A door off the corridor opened and a tall, thin, ludicrously garbed man—
Hank pulled himself up quickly, both mentally and physically. It was no man. It was almost a man—but no.
Loo’s weapon was already at the alert.
The newcomer unhurriedly looked from one of them to the other. Then down at the Russian guard sprawled on the floor behind them.
He said in Russian, “Always violence. The sadness of violence. When faced with crisis, threaten violence if outpointed. Your race has much to learn.” He switched to English. “But this is probably your language, isn’t it?”
Loo gaped at him. The man from space was almost as dark complected as the Negro.
The extraterrestrial stepped to one side and indicated the room behind him “Please enter, I assume you’ve come looking for us.”
They entered the ornate bedroom.
The extraterrestrial said, “Is the man dead?”
Loo said, “No. Merely stunned.”
“He needs no assistance?”
“Nothing could help him for half an hour or more. Then he’ll probably have a severe headache.”
The extraterrestrial had even the ability to achieve a dry quality in his voice. “I am surprised at your forebearance.” He took a chair before a baroque desk. “Undoubtedly you have gone through a great deal to penetrate to this point. I am a member of the interplanetary delegation. What is it that you want?”
Hank looked at Loo, received a slight nod, and went into his speech. The space alien made no attempt to interrupt.
When Hank had finished, the extraterrestrial turned his eyes to Loo. “And you?”
Loo said, “I represent the British Commonwealth rather than the United States, but my purpose in contacting you was identical. Her Majesty’s government is anxious to consult with you before you make any binding agreements with the Soviet complex.”
The alien turned his eyes from one to the other. His face, Hank decided, had a Lincolnesque quality, so ugly as to be beautiful in its infinite sadness.
“You must think us incredibly naive,” he said.
Hank scowled. He had adjusted quickly to the space ambassador’s otherness, both of dress and physical qualities, but there was an irritating something—He put his finger on it. He felt as he had, some decades ago, when brought before his grammar school principal for an infraction of school discipline.
Hank said, “We haven’t had too much time to think. We’ve been desperate.”
The alien said, “You have gone to considerable trouble. I can even admire your resolution. You will be interested to know that tomorrow we take ship to Peiping.”
“Peiping?” Loo said blankly.
“Following two weeks there we proceed to Washington and following that to London. What led your governments to believe that the Soviet nations were to receive all our attention, and your own none at all?”
Hank blurted, “But you landed here. You made no contact with us.”
“The size of our expedition is limited. We could hardly do everything at once. The Soviet complex, as you call it, is the largest government and the most advanced on Earth. Obviously, this was our first stop.” His eyes went to Hank’s. “You’re an American. Do you know why you have fallen behind in the march of progress?”
“I’m not sure we have,” Hank said flatly. “Do you mean in comparison with the Soviet complex?”
“Exactly. And if you don’t realize it, then you’ve blinded yourself. You’ve fallen behind in a score of fields because a decade or so ago, in your years between 1957 and 1960, you made a disastrous decision. In alarm at Russian progress, you adopted a campaign of combating Russian science. You began educating your young people to combat Russian progress.”
“We had to!”
The alien grunted. “To the contrary, what you should have done was tr
y to excel Russian science, technology and industry. Had you done that you might have continued to be the world’s leading nation, until, at least, some sort of world unity had been achieved. By deciding to combat Russian progress you became a retarding force, a deliberate drag on the development of your species, seeking to cripple and restrain rather than to grow and develop. The way to win a race is not to trip up your opponent, but to run faster and harder than he.”
Hank stared at him.
The space alien came to his feet. “I am busy. Your missions, I assume, have been successfully completed. You have seen one of our group. Melodramatically, you have warned us against your enemy. Your superiors should be gratified. And now I shall summon a guide to return you to your hotels.”
A great deal went out of Hank Kuran. Until now the tenseness had been greater than he had ever remembered in life. Now he was limp. In response, he nodded.
Loo sighed, returned the weapon which he had until now held in his hand to a shoulder holster. “Yes,” he said, meaninglessly. He turned and looked at Hank Kuran wryly. “I have spent the better part of my life learning to be an ultra-efficient security operative. I suspect that my job has just become obsolete.”
“I have an idea that perhaps mine is too,” Hank said.
* * * *
In the morning, the Progressive Tours group was scheduled to visit a co-operative farm, specializing in poultry, on the outskirts of Moscow. While the bus was loading Hank stopped off at the Grand Hotel’s Intourist desk.
“Can I send a cable to the United States?”
The chipper Intourist girl said “But of course.” She handed him a form.
He wrote quickly:
SHERIDAN HENNESSEY
WASHINGTON, D. C.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED MORE SATISFACTORILY THAN EXPECTED.
HENRY KURAN
The girl checked it quickly. “But your name is Henry Stevenson.”
“That,” Hank said, “was back when I was a cloak and dagger man.”
She blinked and looked after him as he walked out and climbed aboard the tourist bus. He found an empty seat next to Char Moore and settled into it.
Char said evenly, “Ah, today you have time from your amorous pursuits to join the rest of us.”
He raised an eyebrow at her. Jealousy? His chances were evidently better than he had ever suspected. “I meant to tell you about that,” he said, “the first time we’re by ourselves.”
“Hm-m-m,” she said. Then, “We’ve been in Russia for several days now. What do you think of it?”
Hank said, “I think it’s pretty good. And I have a sneaking suspicion that in another ten years, when a few changes will have evolved, she’ll be better still.”
She looked at him blankly. “You do? Frankly, I’ve been somewhat disappointed.”
“Sure. But wait’ll you see our country in ten years. You know, Char, this world of ours has just got started.”
REVOLUTION
Paul Koslov nodded briefly once or twice as he made his way through the forest of desks. Behind him he caught snatches of tittering voices in whisper.
“… That’s him…The Chief’s hatchetman…Know what they call him in Central America, a pistola, that means…About Iraq…And that time in Egypt…Did you notice his eyes…How would you like to date him…That’s him. I was at a cocktail party once when he was there. Shivery…cold-blooded—”
Paul Koslov grinned inwardly. He hadn’t asked for the reputation but it isn’t everyone who is a legend before thirty-five. What was it Newsweek had called him? “The T. E. Lawrence of the Cold War.” The trouble was it wasn’t something you could turn off. It had its shortcomings when you found time for some personal life.
He reached the Chief’s office, rapped with a knuckle and pushed his way through.
The Chief and a male secretary, who was taking dictation, looked up. The secretary frowned, evidently taken aback by the cavalier entrance, but the Chief said, “Hello, Paul, come on in. Didn’t expect you quite so soon.” And to the secretary, “Dickens, that’s all.”
When Dickens was gone the Chief scowled at his trouble-shooter. “Paul, you’re bad for discipline around here. Can’t you even knock before you enter? How is Nicaragua?”
Paul Koslov slumped into a leather easy-chair and scowled. “I did knock. Most of it’s in my report. Nicaragua is…tranquil. It’ll stay tranquil for a while, too. There isn’t so much as a parlor pink—”
“And Lopez—?”
Paul said slowly, “Last time I saw Raul was in a swamp near Lake Managua. The very last time.”
The Chief said hurriedly, “Don’t give me the details. I leave details up to you.”
“I know,” Paul said flatly.
His superior drew a pound can of Sir Walter Raleigh across the desk, selected a briar from a pipe rack and while he was packing in tobacco said, “Paul, do you know what day it is—and what year?”
“It’s Tuesday. And 1965.”
The bureau chief looked at his disk calendar. “Um-m-m. Today the Seven Year Plan is completed.”
Paul snorted.
The Chief said mildly, “Successfully. For all practical purposes, the U.S.S.R. has surpassed us in gross national product.”
“That’s not the way I understand it.”
“Then you make the mistake of believing our propaganda. That’s always a mistake, believing your own propaganda. Worse than believing the other man’s.”
“Our steel capacity is a third again as much as theirs.”
“Yes, and currently, what with our readjustment—remember when they used to call them recessions, or even earlier, depressions—our steel industry is operating at less than sixty per cent of capacity. The Soviets always operate at one hundred per cent of capacity. They don’t have to worry about whether or not they can sell it. If they produce more steel than they immediately need, they use it to build another steel mill.”
The Chief shook his head. “As long ago as 1958 they began passing us, product by product. Grain, butter, and timber production, jet aircraft, space flight, and coal—”
Paul leaned forward impatiently. “We put out more than three times as many cars, refrigerators, kitchen stoves, washing machines.”
His superior said, “That’s the point. While we were putting the product of our steel mills into automobiles and automatic kitchen equipment, they did without these things and put their steel into more steel mills, more railroads, more factories. We leaned back and took it easy, sneered at their progress, talked a lot about our freedom and liberty to our allies and the neutrals and enjoyed our refrigerators and washing machines until they finally passed us.”
“You sound like a Tass broadcast from Moscow.”
“Um-m-m, I’ve been trying to,” the Chief said. “However, that’s still roughly the situation. The fact that you and I personally, and a couple of hundred million Americans, prefer our cars and such to more steel mills, and prefer our personal freedoms and liberties is beside the point. We should have done less laughing seven years ago and more thinking about today. As things stand, give them a few more years at this pace and every neutral nation in the world is going to fall into their laps.”
“That’s putting it strong, isn’t it?”
“Strong?” the Chief growled disgustedly. “That’s putting it mildly. Even some of our allies are beginning to waver. Eight years ago, India and China both set out to industrialize themselves. Today, China is the third industrial power of the world. Where’s India, about twentieth? Ten years from now China will probably be first. I don’t even allow myself to think where she’ll be twenty-five years from now.”
“The Indians were a bunch of idealistic screwballs.”
“That’s one of the favorite alibis, isn’t it? Actually we, the West, let them down. They couldn’t get underway. The Soviets backed China with everything they could toss in.”
Paul crossed his legs and leaned back. “It seems to me I’ve run into this discussion a few hundred
times at cocktail parties.”
The Chief pulled out a drawer and brought forth a king-size box of kitchen matches. He struck one with a thumbnail and peered through tobacco smoke at Paul Koslov as he lit up.
“The point is that the system the Russkies used when they started their first five-year plan back in 1928, and the system used in China, works. If we, with our traditions of freedom and liberty, like it or not, it works. Every citizen of the country is thrown into the grinding mill to increase production. Everybody,” the Chief grinned sourly, “that is, except the party elite, who are running the whole thing. Everybody sacrifices for the sake of the progress of the whole country.”
“I know,” Paul said. “Give me enough time and I’ll find out what this lecture is all about.”
The Chief grunted at him. “The Commies are still in power. If they remain in power and continue to develop the way they’re going, we’ll be through, completely through, in another few years. We’ll be so far behind we’ll be the world’s laughing-stock—and everybody else will be on the Soviet bandwagon.”
He seemed to switch subjects. “Ever hear of Somerset Maugham?”
“Sure. I’ve read several of his novels.”
“I was thinking of Maugham the British Agent, rather than Maugham the novelist, but it’s the same man.”
“British agent?”
“Um-m-m. He was sent to Petrograd in 1917 to prevent the Bolshevik revolution. The Germans had sent Lenin and Zinoviev up from Switzerland, where they’d been in exile, by a sealed train in hopes of starting a revolution in Czarist Russia. The point I’m leading to is that in one of his books, ‘The Summing Up,’ I believe, Maugham mentions in passing that had he got to Petrograd possibly six weeks earlier he thinks he could have done his job successfully.”
Paul looked at him blankly. “What could he have done?”
The Chief shrugged. “It was all out war. The British wanted to keep Russia in the allied ranks so as to divert as many German troops as possible from the Western front. The Germans wanted to eliminate the Russians. Maugham had carte blanche. Anything would have gone. Elements of the British fleet to fight the Bolsheviks, unlimited amounts of money for anything he saw fit from bribery to hiring assassins. What would have happened, for instance, if he could have had Lenin and Trotsky killed?”
The Mack Reynolds Megapack Page 51
