Who's on First (4 page)

Rufus had to suppress a yawn. He too knew about the Soviet Union. But eventually the Director
would
get to the point.

“What they want is to destroy what they are preparing to call the ‘myth of bourgeois scientific invincibility.' Our job is to prove it is
not
a myth. If the Soviets are pulling ahead, we need to know that; if we can keep them from pulling ahead, that's our priority. In either event, we need more specific knowledge than we have of the state of missile art over there. There doesn't seem to be anything we can do to speed up the program at home. The Navy announced Vanguard two years ago. It flopped, with the Viking rockets. Ike bucked the business over to the Army, with Von Braun and his beloved Redstone. Now the President himself called in Von Braun, but the guy has this teutonic thoroughness, and he doesn't like to play scientific hunches: He's got a specific launching problem he hasn't been able to crack; he wants to build, and he says January of
next year
is the earliest he thinks we can hope to go with a satellite. The President asked him would ours be the
first
satellite in space, and Von Braun shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Esk da CIA.' Which is exactly what Ike did.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him
I
didn't know.” He looked at Serge and paused. “But that I would find out.”

He waited—as if expecting to be pressed to proceed.

But Rufus never pressed. And Serge had had eight years of training in self-control.

“Okay, let me put it in the briefest way. There's an all-star Russian delegation going to Paris for an international scientific conference to launch the International Geophysical Year. The conference is scheduled to last five days. The plan, at one level, is quite simple. It is to … detach … one of the participants who can be counted on to have the information we want—and to get that information from him.”

Rufus interrupted. “I don't do that sort of thing. I thought you knew that.”

“I don't have ‘that sort of thing' in mind.”

Rufus was silent.

“We have somebody in mind to whom the approach would be different. We figure there's a fair chance of success. The downside risk—public knowledge of the abduction of a Soviet official in an allied country by an official agency of the United States—is quite simply unacceptable. So the plan you work out, Rufus, would have to provide bulletproof protection against that exposure. You're smarter than anyone at
that
sort of thing, so I didn't come here with a plan that goes beyond one central point.”

Rufus looked at him, said nothing.

But now Serge spoke.

“I do not understand. I do not mean that I do not understand the importance of the mission. I do understand the importance of the mission. And it is true I am a physicist by profession. But how can I possibly—no, no,” he shook his head, “it is impossible, impossible. Me! I know those people. I go to school with those people. They know me. They will recognize me even now. For them I am the traitor. No, it is quite impossible. Who are you going to … kidnap? Blagonravov? You will perhaps be thinking next you will be getting state secrets from Lenin! Poloskov? He puts his mouth on Stalin's behind twenty times twenty times twenty times twenty years—but if you want me to go to the France to give Poloskov a feeling for my fists, I will go. Mirtov? Mirtov knows only about the speed of light and the frequency of the orgasms. No, my dear Director, I would like to help …”

“I had none of these men in mind.”

“Then who?”

“Viktor Kapitsa.”

Serge shot up, turning his chair over. His face had turned white, and the words were whispered.

“Viktor … They are permitting
Viktor
to go with the delegation to Paris? No, no—
Viktor Kapitsa in Paris?
”

“His name has been filed with the French authorities as a member of the delegation.”

“I was eight years with Viktor in Vorkuta.” Serge spoke the words as if at a morgue.

“I know that,” the Director answered.

Jerry came in and said dinner was ready. “If that's what you want to call it,” he added chirpily as, imitating the gesture of a maître d'hôtel, he bowed low, indicating with exaggerated motion the direction of the dining room.

5

Vadim Platov wondered why, on that day, the train had moved only for a half hour. But then he also wondered why he continued to spend time wondering about anything, let alone evidence of logistical irrationality. The reason—he concluded—was that his mind continued to work. How long would
that
go on? He had been given a tenner under Article 56, Section 10, which was directed at nonspecified forms of “Anti-Soviet Agitation.” Instantly his mind had gone to work to collate the random statistics he had begun idly assembling when, two years earlier, Stalin had reintroduced the draconian
katorga
. Would he
live
ten years?—under the conditions in Vorkuta? As a scientist, he warned himself sternly, he had to deal scientifically with scientific evidence: It never pays, in science, to deceive oneself. “What is the point in building a bridge which will fall down?” the professor at the engineering school at Kiev had once observed.

Not that Vadim Platov had ever been interested in building bridges, but he was very much interested in the scientific principles involved in bridge building. It was in physics, not engineering, that he had distinguished himself, graduating with honors in the class of 1938 and winning a fellowship to study under Academician Pekrovskii, the astrophysicist. He wished instead that he had devoted all those thousands of hours to the study of hypnotism. He couldn't quite remember whether hypnotists could hypnotize themselves—or just other people … Perhaps, he ruminated, he might have succeeded in hypnotizing himself by looking at a mirror and practicing on himself the same skills he practiced on others. Then, then, after hard concentration—he might succeed in causing himself to lose consciousness. Consciousness of the cold. In about a half hour it would be his turn to lie on the floor, and the turn of his two companions to sit on him, one on the legs, the other on the torso, thus providing him a little extra warmth. In approximately a half hour Glinka—the illiterate Glinka, little Glinka with the eye patch, the two missing front teeth, and the perpetual smile—Glinka would advise them that a half hour had gone by, because of course their watches, those of them who had watches—Vadim had had a watch, won it as a prize after his paper was published—had been taken from them at the processing center at Riga, but one of the men, the big Kurd, had hidden his. A clumsy guard had forgotten to make him open his mouth. Glinka told the men that all his life he had had the gift of time, that he never used a watch nor needed the summons of a bell but would come in from the fields to receive his lunch and his supper at exactly the specified hour even as a young boy, and his parents, who had a radio, would show him off to their family and friends, saying, “Tell us when it will be six o'clock, Glinka.” In due course he would raise his little hand and say in a high happy voice, “It is nearing six o'clock, Father.” Whereupon the father would turn up the volume and, inevitably, within a moment or two, Radio Moscow would announce that the hour was six o'clock.

They had found the man who had hidden his watch. And soon after that the Armenian began smoking cigarettes which he had now mysteriously come by, and the big bearded Kurd whose watch had been discovered and who had been beaten for concealing it observed the Armenian with ill-disguised suspicion. Shortly after Glinka called out the hour of midnight, the sixty occupants of the railway car heard a stifled cry followed by a gurgle followed by silence, and the next day when the door was opened and the five pails of gruel were slid into the car, the prisoner nearest the door jerked his thumb behind his shoulder and said, “The Armenian is dead.” From behind him the prisoners passed up the corpse and flung it over the side. The guard called for an officer from the command car. A captain came, looked at the corpse, and up again at the impassive faces he could see framed by the space opened up by the door. He hesitated, whispered instructions to an orderly, then removed a whistle from deep inside his vest and blew three times on it. In a few seconds six guards with semiautomatic AK-47s stood behind him at attention. The officer looked up at the men huddled about the railway car opening.

“Tonight,” he called out in a rasping voice, creating clouds of steam in the subzero cold, “you will not get your rations.” The prisoners were silent.

“And right now,” the officer's voice achieved a mechanical stridency, “we shall teach you that executions are a privilege of the Soviet State, not of counterrevolutionaries.”

The orderly returned with a sheet of paper. The officer looked at it, turning it around so that the typed roster faced his orderly, to whom he said in a loud voice: “Place your finger on one number.” The orderly did so.

“Call out that number.”

“V 282.”

“V 282, present yourself.”

There was no motion from within the car.

“For every minute I am kept waiting, I shall add another number.” The silence, thought Vadim, whose own number was V 280, was profounder than any he had ever heard, profounder even than the silence when the colonel had risen to pronounce sentence on him at Riga.

In exactly one minute, the captain repeated the ritual with the orderly, who now called out, “Number V 295!”

At this point there was a shout from the end of the car, and the men moved to permit the Kurd passage to the open door. He looked down at the officer, spat, and said: “Let them alone. It was me.” With dignity he managed to lower himself to the siding. The officer pointed to a telephone pole ten meters away and the Kurd was led there. His hands were tied behind the pole and, immobilized, he faced his comrades. Three of the six soldiers, on command, hoisted their rifles and fired. The officer withdrew his pistol from its holster, approached the Kurd, slumped now over to one side, and shot him behind the head. Vadim looked across the width of the car at the young man of his own age who had not uttered a word in the three weeks since their common journey began. His hair was blond, and a bandage of sorts was wound about his left ear. His eyes were streaming tears.

On noticing that Vadim was staring at him, Viktor Kapitsa turned his face away, but in that railway car there was no privacy, and Vadim Platov knew that although he had not studied hypnotism, or extrasensory perception, he had succeeded in communicating to the young man that he, Vadim, was forever grateful to him for this comment of tears. Vadim himself closed his eyes, and suddenly the words appeared before him which he had not thought to utter since he was twelve years old and his grandmother died, thereby relieving him of the (counterrevolutionary) task of a daily recitation. He prayed: He prayed for the Kurd, prayed for the stranger across the way, prayed for the executioners, prayed for Stalin—but his scientific training then asserted itself. If he prayed for Stalin—prayed that Stalin should mend his ways—then Stalin might become commendable, and if he was commendable, Vadim would logically be obliged to revere him. But all he could ever do was hate the monster, so he must
not
pray for him, otherwise he would face a terrible dilemma. He remembered suddenly that his grandmother, who had actually traveled abroad before the Revolution and studied philosophy in Germany as a girl, once told him that not even God could ordain a contradiction. He was very hungry. But the five pails of gruel with the long-handled spoons sat there in the silence, untouched. The guard, looking briefly over his shoulder in the direction of the officers' car, slid the door shut without removing the pails, as he would normally have done. The door would not open again until the next morning; captain's orders.

It was, Vadim reckoned, the warmest day of the summer. The temperature was above freezing and, at midday, he even found himself unbuttoning his heavy jacket, experiencing a sensual thrill felt not more than a dozen days in the year. He sat with his back to the great pile of frozen wooden railroad ties—the weather would never be warm for long enough to thaw them out, and in his gloved hand he fondled the eleven-ounce lump of bread which was the whole of the day's hard rations: At the end of the day they would be given a pint of a fishy gruel, and, at breakfast time, nothing. Vadim said to his companion, “Viktor, today I think, I think that we are going to make it.”

Viktor Kapitsa had begun to chew on his bread. He ate very slowly, with deliberation, and did not speak while he chewed. “I don't know, Vadim. We have five more years. Shall we play again at our game?”

Statistics, with improvisations on numbers and concepts, was their principal diversion. Viktor had been what they called a “calculating prodigy.” At age five he could give out the sum of a list of figures, each with as many as four digits, of whatever length. His father felt it his duty to report this peculiarity to the party secretary at the 8th District of Kharkov where Viktor's father worked as bookkeeper at the shoe factory that was the center of commercial life in the 8th District. The secretary was held in awe because he had been present (he was a railroad porter) at the Finland Station when Lenin arrived there on that great day in April. Vitkovsky amused himself for a half hour interrogating the little boy and giving him longer and longer lists to add. The boy's little voice without hesitation gave the answer to the first question: How much is 578 plus 624 plus 1009 plus 333? The secretary painfully added the figures to corroborate the boy's accuracy. After the next question, he stopped, confident that Viktor was giving the correct reply. He tried then the multiplication tables. “How much is 381 times 411?” On these Viktor would hesitate, closing his eyes and shaking his hair slightly, but the delay was never more than for a second or two. There were conferences, and it was decided that when he became seven years old, the state should take Viktor to a special school in Moscow where he would keep company with the brightest young sons of Lenin's associates and develop his skill in such a way as to be of maximum use to the state. The elder Kapitsa felt free to urge on the secretary the comparative advantages of keeping the boy in Kharkov, but the secretary by this time spoke as though it had been the personal decision of Lenin himself that Viktor should go away to school. Happily, Lenin died before Viktor was seven and the secretary disappeared without a trace, leaving his successor with no known file on Viktor Kapitsa, who, accordingly, went to the regular Soviet school. There his precocity was acknowledged enthusiastically by a stocky, imperious woman in her sixties who had taught the children since before the inauguration of the last Czar. She took over Viktor's schooling, and arranged that at age thirteen he should indeed go away—to a special school, fashioned after the German
gymnasia,
where Viktor was introduced to physics. His avid pursuit of it carried him through the university at Kharkov and then to the Lenin Institute for graduate work and, finally, experimental work under Perelman and Fortikov, disciples of the great Tsiolkovskii, who had founded GIRD—in Russian, the Group for the Study of Reactive Motion. By the mid-thirties GIRD had evolved into a rocket research program where, at age twenty-one, Viktor Kapitsa, fair, lithe, even-featured, slightly distracted in demeanor, was acknowledged as a young man of established achievement, having already published an astonishing paper on the aerodynamic problems of space flight which was distributed among laboratory technicians of the Moscow Military Air Academy.