Black Sun

by Owen Matthews

  He took a step forward and followed her line of sight. Two watchers loitered on the opposite side of the boulevard, not bothering to conceal themselves. Vasin swore, quietly.

  “Come back to the bathroom. I have something to say to you.”

  Vasin shook his head. Masha moved closer to him, her voice low and sibilant in his ear.

  “I know a safe place we can meet. Not even your friends out there know all the secrets of Arzamas.”

  Vasin tried to form the word no, but his mouth, still trembling with the taste of her kiss, would not say it.

  “Where?” he whispered.

  “The Univermag.”

  The central department store—the most public place in the city. For a moment Vasin thought that she was making a desperate joke.

  “There’s a cafeteria in the basement for the shop workers. A Georgian called Guri runs it. Tell him you’re a friend of Seraphim’s. Say I sent you. He can call me at any time.”

  “Masha, we cannot.”

  “You don’t want to see me again?”

  He ran a hand through his thinning hair. Yes, I do.

  “No. I don’t. Not this way.”

  Masha nodded, slowly.

  “Adamov used to say, ‘There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men.’ Typical of him. The physical world as something knowable, the human one a mystery. But I never agreed. There is nothing secret about men. It’s all about lust, ambition, fear. Mostly, fear. Like yours, now. You don’t want to lose what you have. Your place in the world. Your kontora.”

  “It’s not that. Not fear.”

  “I see.”

  “Not fear for me, I mean.”

  “For me, then?”

  Vasin could find no answer.

  “Can it be that you are really an honest man, Sasha?”

  Her low tone was half-mocking. But only half.

  Vasin thought of Katya Orlova. Of the dossiers buried in Orlov’s safe. Of the soulless, numberless universe of brutalized functionaries that he served, a nebula so vast that it had created its own moral gravity.

  “Honest? I don’t know what that means.”

  They parted in the hallway, Masha thanking him formally and loudly for his help and his strong back for the benefit of the microphones, with expressions of mutual esteem. The stairs, as Vasin descended them, seemed made of jelly, the street a sea of pearly autumn light.

  * * *

  —

  I am a thief of the spirit, he thought. Faithless. I seduce people into confidences and betray them. What does it mean, then, if I myself have been seduced?

  Vasin felt the disconnection that usually came with drunkenness, though without drink’s sweet numbness. He remembered a childhood summer holiday at Gagra, on the Black Sea coast, with his mother. Striking out from a beach larded with pale bodies, Vasin had swum far into the swell. Beyond the reach of his mother’s admonishing yells, far out at sea and as far from his fellow human beings as he had ever been or ever would be in his life, Vasin’s schoolboy backstroke failed him. Cramping in a cold current, his body refused to obey. He remembered the calmness and clarity of that moment. The intense blue of the sky, the refractions of sunlight in water as he bobbed below its surface. And far away, the horizon of the world to which he was suddenly sure he would never return. Above all, his sense of childish indignation. He was in the wrong element. Looking downward, he saw the dark blue place where he would presently drown. It was inexplicable. It was unfair. He should not be here. He was in the wrong place. And death was coming to punish him for his trespass.

  Then the strong arm of his rescuer enfolded him, hauling him back into air.

  Vasin felt a similar helplessness now. With Masha he had plunged into the wrong element. His faculties of reason and calculation had deserted him. He felt himself transfixed in a private maze of signs and portents, unreadable to him. Most disturbing of all, this maze had appeared inside himself.

  Vasin walked to Kuznetsov’s apartment, trailing silence. He tried to wrestle his thoughts back to the case. This puzzle, as firm in his hands as a knot, had become the only substantial thing in his suddenly inexplicable life.

  III

  By daylight the corral of barracks where Korin lived looked even grimmer than at night. The gravel road had largely dissolved into the underlying mud, and the frozen ruts tripped Vasin as he walked. The knocked-together houses seemed to have given up on straight angles and stooped and tottered like drunks. He glanced at a wooden pole to which an ancient electrical junction box was haphazardly attached. Cables sagged toward the houses. The only light shone from the windows of Korin’s block.

  There was no answer when Vasin knocked gingerly on the door. Peering in through the window, he saw a figure curled on the bed, still fully dressed. Vasin fished in his pocket for a kopeck and tapped it on the window.

  “Come!”

  Inside, the barrack was nearly as chilly as the outside air. His breath steamed. Korin remained recumbent.

  “Major Vasin, sir.”

  “Hell you want?” Korin propped himself up on an elbow. His face was gray with exhaustion. “Masha? Again?” Korin’s voice was anxious as a father’s.

  “No, sir. Maria Vladimirovna is fine. But I wanted to talk to you. Urgently.”

  Wearily, the old man swung his legs off his couch and rubbed his face. He glanced at the cold stove.

  Korin turned his heavy, bearded head toward Vasin. “Coffee is in the kitchen.” Korin addressed him in the familiar form, but his tone was more paternal than patronizing.

  As Vasin heated the pot, Korin pushed past him into the primitive bathroom and urinated unceremoniously, not bothering to close the door. On his way back through the kitchen the old man snatched up a paper bag, grabbed a handful of biscuits, and stuffed them into his mouth, unselfconscious as a child.

  He shuffled across the room and sank into the decrepit sofa in front of the unlit stove. Vasin brought two steaming mugs and sank into an equally knackered armchair opposite him.

  “This better be good, son.”

  “Wanted to talk to you about Adamov.”

  Korin grunted dismissively.

  “My job, sir. A man is dead, Colonel Korin.”

  “A man is dead! A man is dead!” Korin squeaked the words in a mocking falsetto. “What’s one man, Vasin? What’s one academician’s son compared to what we are achieving here?”

  Vasin couldn’t think of any answer that didn’t sound unbearably naïve.

  “I have come across some information. I understand there may be certain dangers associated with the latest design. I heard that Adamov is concerned about the power of RDS-220. He’s worried about the ‘unpredictable effects.’ ”

  Korin sat forward abruptly, like a machine that had been switched on. His eyes were intense.

  “Who do you have on the hook, Chekist?”

  “Apparently there was a new type of…‘tamper’? Made of solid uranium? That could have the effect of—”

  “Stop right there, boy. Your little canary has been singing you a fine song, but you have no idea what you are talking about.”

  “I believe it is relevant to the death of Fyodor Petrov, sir.”

  Korin stared from under his bushy eyebrows with a ferocity that could have stopped a truck.

  “Have you mentioned these fairy stories to anyone else?”

  “No, sir. I have not.”

  “That true?”

  “Yes, sir.” Vasin felt himself involuntarily quaking like a scolded schoolboy.

  “Why not?”

  “Because…it is unconfirmed. Just a story. As you say. But I wanted to ask you…”

  “Vasin—that your name? Vasin. Listen to me. Forget e
verything you think you know about RDS-220. There’s nothing for you there. You are crashing about in something that’s more dangerous than you know.”

  “That sounds like a warning.”

  “It is a warning. It is a fucking warning. And before you say, ‘What have you got to hide?’ I tell you this. That half-baked information you are blabbing about? It touches on the most closely guarded secrets of our Motherland. I promise you, whoever it is you work for, that your boss’s boss isn’t authorized to know this information. You understand? Just forget you ever heard it. Take it to your grave.”

  “Does Adamov fear that the bomb could be too powerful?”

  “Are you fucking deaf, boy?”

  “Help me understand. You don’t have to tell me any more secrets. But why am I being told that this is connected to the Petrov case?”

  “Someone told you that?” Korin’s voice suddenly cracked with urgency. “Who? Who the hell told you that?”

  “Just tell me why they’re wrong.”

  Korin subsided into his sofa, chewing his lip. “Not your own theory, then? Someone in the Institute going about saying this shit?”

  “Correct.”

  “They told anyone else but you?”

  “No, sir. Not as far as I know.”

  “Just the two of you. You and your little stool pigeon.”

  Vasin shrugged an affirmative. Korin breathed a silent oath.

  “Very well. Let me ask you some questions, to help you understand. What is a nuclear bomb?”

  “A weapon of war.”

  “Just a very big bomb, a weapon of war, you say. Wrong. They were once. But now there are too many of them. They are too powerful. Nuclear weapons are the end of human history in all places, for all time.”

  Vasin was silent. Outside the windows the afternoon light faded.

  “And you know who wields that power? Men like General Pavlov. Come across him?”

  Vasin nodded.

  “Ever heard of Totskoye? Don’t bother answering. You haven’t. A godforsaken place out in the Orenburg steppes. Back in September ’fifty-four they tested a bomb there. RDS-4. Except it wasn’t the bomb they were testing. It was the effect on men. Whose men? Our men. Yes. Forty-five thousand Soviet troops marched out into battle positions on the steppe. The 270th Rifle Division, plus about twelve hundred tanks and armored personnel carriers. They were told that it would be a regular military exercise, but with a mock nuclear explosion that would be filmed. No protective gear was given. They dropped the bomb about thirteen kilometers away. Close enough. A forty-kiloton yield, detonating at an altitude of 350 meters. About twice as powerful as the Hiroshima device. About five minutes after the blast they sent in aircraft. Three hundred of them, to drop conventional bombs on the area. Then, three hours later, they sent in the tanks, to practice taking a hostile area after a nuclear attack. And in the meantime the general who planned the whole exercise was sitting in an underground nuclear bunker. Know who it was? Marshal Georgy Zhukov, that’s who. The most decorated soldier in Soviet history. The Victor of Berlin. The Victor of Kursk. He sat in a bunker while his men advanced into the hot zone.”

  “Why did they do that?”

  “Political games, boy. They wanted to test the effects of nuclear fallout on men. And to make a point. Play some politics. Stalin always believed that nuclear weapons could never be used on a battlefield, only deep behind enemy lines. His deputy Malenkov agreed. And after Stalin’s death, Malenkov was in line to take over. He hated Zhukov, feared his reputation and his ambitions. So the honored Marshal and war hero decided to stage a nuclear test, with human subjects, at Totskoye, to prove something about a battlefield nuclear war. But mostly to prove that Stalin had been wrong, and that Malenkov was still wrong.”

  “What happened to the men?”

  “The men? Fucked, to a greater or lesser extent. Cancers. Leukemia. Radiation poisoning. You saw what happened to your precious Petrov. It was worse for the tank men who drove right to ground zero, and inhaled the heavy-metal fallout.”

  “They never knew?”

  “The nuclear detonation would have been hard to fucking miss. I’ve seen a few myself. They’d been told it was safe, and who are we to question the wisdom of the Party and government? The Party is the intellect, honor, and conscience of our country. Oh, I can tell what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: Korin is a subversive element. This traitorous jailbird. How can he be trusted with a responsible position in the defense of our Motherland?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No, sir. Not what I’m thinking at all, sir.” Again the mocking falsetto. “Keep talking, sir, and I’ll write it all in my little report that I’ll submit to my superiors in due course and they’ll praise me for my diligence and move me up the queue for a new car.”

  Korin stilled Vasin’s attempt to answer with a raised hand.

  “No. Just listen, once more, and I will spell it out for you in simple words. Ever heard of Richard Jordan Gatling and Cyrus McCormick?”

  “Never, sir.”

  “They’re Americans, boy. Engineers. These days they tell the kids that Russians invented everything under the sun. Ridiculous. McCormick invented a reaping machine, boy. Back in the 1830s, when Pushkin was alive and we were serfs. It could do the work of a thousand men with sickles, and never tire. And Gatling invented a gun. Based it on a seed drill he’d designed. He discovered that feeding seeds into a pipe or bullets into a chamber is the same principle. Gatling designed the first machine gun. Ten barrels, hopper-fed, hand-cranked. It fired two hundred rounds a minute, more than an entire battalion of soldiers with muzzle-loading muskets. Mowed men down like standing corn when the Americans had their civil war. McCormick invented a reaper of corn, Gatling a reaper of lives. I read Gatling’s memoirs back when I was at the Kharkov Institute. He said his machine gun bore the same relation to a rifle as Mr. McCormick’s reaper did to a scythe or Herr Singer’s sewing machine to a plain needle. And he was right. Automation could multiply the work a human hand can do a thousandfold. Gatling’s genius was to bring automation to war. And he did it because if men had such terrible weapons, they would see the futility of fighting war. If a four-man machine-gun crew could kill a thousand infantrymen in five minutes, what would be the point of ever fighting? That’s what our Gatling thought. And was he right?”

  Vasin shook his head obediently.

  “Automated war just meant bigger slaughter. And Robert Oppenheimer. Another American. He built the first ever atom bomb. Called it Trinity, like the heathen Jew he was. He said, ‘The atomic bomb has made the prospect of future war unendurable.’ Sound familiar? He said, ‘It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.’ That was just after they dropped two devices on Japan. Oppenheimer thought using atom bombs on cities would make war unthinkable.”

  “Last time we spoke, you said RDS-220 is about stopping war forever.”

  “My friend remembers. The difference is that Oppenheimer never reached his ‘different country.’ The largest bomb he made was only twenty kilotons. That’s as much conventional explosives as a thousand heavy bombers can carry these days, more or less. He multiplied the killing work a single bomber could do by a thousand. See what I’m getting at? Oppenheimer was just another Gatling. He made war more deadly, but didn’t make it unthinkable. Human minds—or at least the minds of generals—don’t work like that. I told you about Totskoye. As soon as we had our own atom bombs, we immediately began thinking about how to use them on the battlefield. No. For war to be truly unthinkable, it must be truly unwinnable. We need a weapon so powerful its use is suicidal for everyone. ‘A thermonuclear war cannot be considered a continuation of politics by other means. It would be a means of universal suicide.’ At least you know the man who said that. It was Adamov. And it’s Adamov who has brought u
s to that new land of Oppenheimer’s at last. We’ve reached the final thousand-times multiplication. Adamov has discovered the means of mankind’s extinction as a species. That postwar place that Gatling and Oppenheimer dreamt about? RDS-220 will put us there. Science is on the verge of vanquishing war. The intellectuals will have beaten the soldiers at their own game. Finally, we will have a weapon so deadly that even the most pigheaded general would never use it.”

  “Only if RDS-220 is a success.”

  “Fucking right.”

  “But why would Adamov alter the design of the tamper?”

  Korin cut him off, suddenly furious.

  “Who are you to ask why? Tampers and uranium. You are an ape poking about in a laboratory. You are as lost as the soldiers and politicians in charge of this whole place. None of you have any idea of what you are dealing with. Science will forge a different country. Adamov will, do you hear?”

  Korin leaned forward and grabbed Vasin’s upper arm with a grip that could have burst a bottle. The older man shook Vasin’s whole body, twice, hard. Then he released his grip. For a while the only sound was Korin’s labored breathing.

  “You are saying, Colonel, that this is bigger than me. That I am not authorized to continue doing my investigation, nor am I authorized to know why.”

  “If you haven’t understood the stakes by now, friend, you never will.”

  “Let’s say I do not fuck off out of your affairs. What will happen, Colonel?”

  Vasin was speaking in a low, controlled voice, but he knew that it was his stung pride talking. He had expected his insolence to spark another flash of anger from the old man. But instead Korin only swung his legs back onto the couch and sank deeper into his stained pillows, as though the fight had gone out of him. Or perhaps he had lost interest in arguing.

  “Then there is nothing I can do for you.”

  Korin passed a hand over his weathered face and closed his eyes.

  The old’s man’s tongue flicked over his lips, like a lizard’s. After a long moment he opened his eyes again. Korin’s former passion, his storyteller’s animation, had disappeared. His stare had become hard and cold.