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

efficient. They had to be. The Commies had been slaughtering anyone who opposed them for forty years now. To survive as a Russian underground you had to be good.

No, it wasn’t a feeling of exclusion. Paul Koslov was stretched out on the bed of his king-size Astoria Hotel room, his hands behind his head and staring up at the ceiling. He recapitulated the events of the past months from the time he’d entered the Chief’s office in Washington until last night at the dacha with Leonid and Ana.

The whole thing.

And over and over again.

There was a line of worry on his forehead.

He swung his feet to the floor and approached the closet. He selected his most poorly pressed pair of pants, and a coat that mismatched it. He checked the charge in his .38 Noiseless, and replaced the weapon under his left arm. He removed his partial bridge, remembering as he did so how he had lost the teeth in a street fight with some Commie union organizers in Panama, and replaced the porcelain bridge with a typically Russian gleaming steel one. He stuffed a cap into his back pocket, a pair of steel rimmed glasses into an inner pocket, and left the room.

He hurried through the lobby, past the Intourist desk, thankful that it was a slow time of day for tourist activity.

Outside, he walked several blocks to 25th of October Avenue and made a point of losing himself in the crowd. When he was sure that there could be no one behind him, he entered a pivnaya, had a glass of beer, and then disappeared into the toilet. There he took off the coat, wrinkled it a bit more, put it back on and also donned the cap and glasses. He removed his tie and thrust it into a side pocket.

He left, in appearance a more or less average workingman of Leningrad, walked to the bus station on Nashimson Volodarski and waited for the next bus to Petrodvorets. He would have preferred the subway, but the line didn’t run that far as yet.

The bus took him to within a mile and a half of the dacha, and he walked from there.

By this time Paul was familiar with the security measures taken by Leonid Shvernik and the others. None at all when the dacha wasn’t in use for a conference or to hide someone on the lam from the K.G.B. But at a time like this, there would be three sentries, carefully spotted.

This was Paul’s field now. Since the age of nineteen, he told himself wryly. He wondered if there was anyone in the world who could go through a line of sentries as efficiently as he could.

He approached the dacha at the point where the line of pine trees came nearest to it. On his belly he watched for ten minutes before making the final move to the side of the house. He lay up against it, under a bush.

From an inner pocket he brought the spy device he had acquired from Derek Steven’s Rube Goldberg department. It looked and was supposed to look considerably like a doctor’s stethoscope. He placed it to his ears, pressed the other end to the wall of the house.

Leonid Shvernik was saying, “Becoming killers isn’t a pleasant prospect but it was the Soviet who taught us that the end justifies the means. And so ruthless a dictatorship have they established that there is literally no alternative. The only way to remove them is by violence. Happily, so we believe, the violence need extend to only a small number of the very highest of the hierarchy. Once they are eliminated and our transmitters proclaim the new revolution, there should be little further opposition.”

Someone sighed deeply⁠—Paul was able to pick up even that.

“Why discuss it further?” somebody whose voice Paul didn’t recognize, asked. “Let’s get onto other things. These broadcasts of ours have to be the ultimate in the presentation of our program. The assassination of Number One and his immediate supporters is going to react unfavorably at first. We’re going to have to present unanswerable arguments if our movement is to sweep the nation as we plan.”

A new voice injected, “We’ve put the best writers in the Soviet Union to work on the scripts. For all practical purposes they are completed.”

“We haven’t yet decided what to say about the H-Bomb, the missiles, all the endless equipment of war that has accumulated under the Soviets, not to speak of the armies, the ships, the aircraft and all the personnel who man them.”

Someone else, it sounded like Nikolai Kirichenko, from Moscow, said. “I’m chairman of the committee on that. It’s our opinion that we’re going to have to cover that matter in our broadcasts to the people and the only answer is that until the West has agreed to nuclear disarmament, we’re going to have to keep our own.”

Leonid said, and there was shock in his voice, “But that’s one of the most basic reasons for the new revolution, to eliminate this mad arms race, this devoting half the resources of the world to armament.”

“Yes, but what can we do? How do we know that the Western powers won’t attack? And please remember that it is no longer just the United States that has nuclear weapons. If we lay down our defenses, we are capable of being destroyed by England, France, West Germany, even Turkey or Japan! And consider, too, that the economies of some of the Western powers are based on the production of arms to the point that if such production ended, overnight, depressions would sweep their nations. In short, they can’t afford a world without tensions.”

“It’s a problem for the future to solve,” someone else said. “But meanwhile I believe the committee is right. Until it is absolutely proven that we need have no fears about the other nations, we must keep our own strength.”

Under his hedge, Paul grimaced, but he was getting what he came for, a