Short Fiction, Mack Reynolds [best book reader txt] 📗

Earth, but to the Soviet Union. He wondered what the neutrals in such countries as India were thinking.

But at least there were no restrictions on Paco and him.

They strolled up Gorky Street, jam packed with fellow pedestrians. Shoppers, window-shoppers, men on the prowl for girls, girls on the prowl for men, Ivan and his wife taking the baby for a stroll, street cleaners at the endless job of keeping Moscow’s streets the neatest in the world.

Paco pointed out this to Hank, Hank pointed out that to Paco. Somehow it seemed more than a visit to a western European nation. This was Moscow. This was the head of the Soviet snake.

And then Hank had to laugh inwardly at himself as two youngsters, running along playing tag in a grown-up world of long legs and stolid pace, all but tripped him up. Head of a snake it might be, but Moscow’s people looked astonishingly like those of Portland, Maine or Portland, Oregon.

“How do you like those two, coming now?” Paco said.

Those two coming now consisted of two better than averagely dressed girls who would run somewhere in their early twenties. A little too much makeup by western standards, and clumsily applied.

“Blondes,” Paco said soulfully.

“They’re all blondes here,” Hank said.

“Wonderful, isn’t it?”

The girls smiled at them in passing and Paco turned to look after, but they didn’t stop. Hank and Paco went on.

It didn’t take Hank long to get onto Paco’s system. It was beautifully simple. He merely smiled widely at every girl that went by. If she smiled back, he stopped and tried to start a conversation with her.

He got quite a few rebuffs but⁠—Hank remembered an old joke⁠—on the other hand he got quite a bit of response.

Before they had completed a block and a half of strolling, they were standing on a corner, trying to talk with two of Moscow’s younger set⁠—female variety. Here again, Paco was a wonder. His languages were evidently Spanish, English and French but he was in there pitching with a language the full vocabulary of which consisted of Da and Neit so far as he was concerned.

Hank stood back a little, smiling, trying to stay in character, but in amused dismay at the other’s aggressive abilities.

Paco said, “Listen, I think I can get these two to come up to the room. Which one do you like?”

Hank said, “If they’ll come up to the room, then they’re professionals.”

Paco grinned at him. “I’m a professional, too. A lawyer by trade. It’s just a matter of different professions.”

A middle-aged pedestrian, passing by, said to the girls in Russian, “Have you no shame before the foreign tourists?”

They didn’t bother to answer. Paco went back to his attempt to make a deal with the taller of the two.

The smaller, who sported astonishingly big and blue eyes, said to Hank in Russian, “You’re too good to associate with metrofanushka girls?”

Hank frowned puzzlement. “I don’t speak Russian,” he said.

She laughed lightly, almost a giggle, and, in the same low voice her partner was using on Paco, said, “I think you do, Mr. Kuran. In the afternoon, tomorrow, avoid whatever tour the Intourist people wish to take you on and wander about Sovietska Park.” She giggled some more. The worldwide epitome of a girl being picked up on the street.

Hank took her in more closely. Possibly twenty-five years of age. The skirt she was wearing was probably Russian, it looked sturdy and durable, but the sweater was one of the new American fabrics. Her shoes were probably western too, the latest flared heel effect. A typical stilyagi or metrofanushka girl, he assumed. Except for one thing⁠—her eyes were cool and alert, intelligent beyond those of a street pickup.

Paco said, “What do you think, Hank? This one will come back to the hotel with me.”

“Romeo, Romeo,” Hank sighed, “wherefore do thou think thou art?”

Paco shrugged. “What’s the difference? Buenos Aires, New York, Moscow. Women are women.”

“And men are evidently men,” Hank said. “You do what you want.”

“OK, friend. Do you mind staying out of the room for a time?”

“Don’t worry about me, but you’ll have to get rid of Loo, and he hasn’t had his eighteen hours sleep yet today.”

Paco had his girl by the arm. “I’ll roll him into the hall. He’ll never wake up.”

Hank’s girl made a moue at him, shrugged as though laughing off the fact that she had been rejected, and disappeared into the crowds. Hank stuck his hands in his pockets and went on with his stroll.

The contact with the underground had been made.

Maintaining his front as an American tourist he wandered into several stores, picked up some amber brooches at a bargain rate, fingered through various books in English in an international bookshop. That was one thing that hit hard. The bookshops were packed. Prices were remarkably low and people were buying. In fact, he’d never seen a country so full of people reading and studying. The park benches were loaded with them, they read as the rode on streetcar and bus, they read as they walked along the street. He had an uneasy feeling that the jet-set kids were a small minority, that the juvenile delinquent problem here wasn’t a fraction what it was in the West.

He’d expected to be followed. In fact, that had puzzled him when he first was given this unwanted assignment by Sheridan Hennessey. How was he going to contact this so-called underground if he was watched the way he had been led to believe Westerners were?

But he recalled their conducted tour of the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad. The Intourist guide had started off with twenty-five persons and had clucked over them like a hen all afternoon. In spite of her frantic efforts to keep them together, however, she returned to the Astoria Hotel that evening with eight missing⁠—including Hank and Loo who had wandered off to get a beer.

The idea of the K.G.B. putting tails on the tens of thousands of tourists