The wrong end of time, p.16
The Wrong End Of Time, page 16
“Are we going to keep driving through the day, or lie up somewhere, or what?”
“Now that's odd,” Danty said, biting his lip. “I was thinking we ought to worry about this car, because obviously the licence number can be recognised, and you'd expect that if Lora doesn't show at home it'll be reported. But I have this absolute conviction that we're safe if we go on driving. I have this crazy idea that even if the car has been-oh-reported stolen, say, it's not going to be taken seriously.” He hesitated. “And I can only think of one explanation for that.”
“What?” Magda demanded.
“Well . . .” Danty licked his lips. “I think because the person who would report it is 'Iurpin, and he's in trouble.”
He glanced reflectively at Lora, in case she had heard. But she was asleep.
Sheklov thought: Bad trouble? Because it would be a catastrophe for the whole world it he were caught.
“Is Turpin one of vours?” Ma$da asked, with a sidelong glance at Sheklov. When he didn't answer, she answered for herself. “I guess he must be, since he collected you from the submarine.”
“What's the use of denying it?” Sheklov said wearily. “Yes. he is. And he's one of the greatest heroes in history and he's never going to get credit for it.”
“He will one day,” Danty said.
“What?”
“I know what you mean,” Danty murmured. “I've often wondered how the world had stayed in one piece, and I just saw a good reason. He told you about all the missiles, the radar, and that kind of stuff-right?”
“Yes.”
“Thank God somebody did,” Danty said, and Magda nodded. Are these people never going to stop amazing me? Shek– lov thought. He said curiously, “Tell me something, will you? How do you feel about about me?”
"As a Russian agent?" Danty suggested, and on Sheklov's hesitant nod gave a shrug. "Oh, as a brave man, I guess. Dedicated. You'd have to be. And clever. But if you mean as a-a foreigner, a communist, all the other things, then . "
“Lucky,” Magda said.
“I don't get that,” Sheklov said. “How, lucky?”
“Well, because you still have somewhere to go,” Magda said. “That's as near as I can define what I mean. Look at us here in this country. We're in the same sort of mess as the Romans were once, and the Spanish, and God knows who else. We've been at the top of the heap, and now there's no choice except either to run like hell to stay where we are, never getting any place else, or to start the long slide down. Me, I think we started down years ago. We've been the richest country in the world, we've been the most powerful, we've been the most influential, andsame as always-we got used to it. We got blas6. Because we couldn't climb any higher, we stopped being able to advance, There hasn't been anything genuinely new in the States for years and years, just changes rung on what we already had. But of course we were afraid of being overtaken. So we drifted into this mess we're in right now, where we care more about our own selfishness and greed than we do about anyone or anything else. What's a good career for a bright young man these days? Why, the security force-or a tidy slot in the hierarchy of Energetics General--or something of that kind. Where are our poets, our musicians, our inventors? They've turned rebl And got stamped onl” She glanced at him. “Aren't I right?”
“Being 'on top' isn't the important thing,” Sheklov said.
“Of course not,” Magda snapped. “If it were, we'd feel satisfied. We'd feel-oh-fulfilled!” _
“And we don't,” Danty said. “Say, Vassilyl There's one thing you haven't told us yet, and I have this impression that it's the most crucial point of all. Why in the world did they decide to risk sending you to the States? I mean, if Turpin is one of your agents, he must have been here for years-”
“Twenty-five,” Sheklov said.
“That long? Hmml Yes, it figures. And he can't be the only one, right?”
“No, he's not.”
“So why did they have to send you? I mean, you could have walked straight into the jaws of the sexies, couldn't you? Lots of practice has made them very good at their job.”
Sheklov thought for a long moment. Then he told them: . xxv1 After that there seemed to be very little left to say. The car hummed onward into the night. Clouds were closing in ahead of them; it felt as though the familiar prospect of the stars were being shut away. Sheklov, conscious of having long ago passed the point of no return, was resigned to letting happen what would.
And Danty, having heard the story in full, sank back in his seat with a ferocious scowl of concentration and said nothing for so long that eventually Sheklov dozed.
He was awoken at last by Magda's voice.
“I'm worn outl” she said loudly. “It's nearly dawn.”
"Then I guess I'd better take the wheel again," Sheklov said. "Danty can't drive one-handed, and"-with a glance behind him, blinking to clear sleep from his eyes.-"Lora's still asleep, isn't she?"
“Looks like it,” Danty said. “I'd take my turn if I could -but this arm's stiffening up pretty bad. Mag', can we like pull in for breakfast? I'd like to get to a washroom and change the dressing on this cut.” He checked, seeming to be struck by an idea. “Sayl Make the left branch at the next interchange, will you? I'm getting it clearer in my head now. We have to shoot for the border in North Dakota some place. I'll know it when I see it.”
“Service zone four miles,” Magda read from a sign. “That must be after the next interchange, then. Will do. . . . By the way, how are you feeling?”
“As though that crack on the head loosened my brains,” Danty said with a shrug. “But I'll live.”
Properly roused from sleep now, Sheklov looked out at the morning as it spread across the vast net of the superway. A web spun by an inconceivable spider, a mesh of concrete offering the illusion of freedom to go, yet turning you back whenever you approached the limits you must not exceed , . .
Yes. A metaphor of the country. Perhaps of the human condition. Horriblel
All his doubts stormed back into his mind. For a brief instant he was able to imagine that he had dreamed his admissions of last night; then Danty said, “Vassily, how are you?” And he knew they had been real.
“As well as can be expected,” Sheklov said with ghoulish humour.
“That goes for all of us.” He rubbed his eyes. “Mag', I've only been dozing, not completely asleep. I've been working it out. North Dakota, like I said. If we go over as a party, we're likely to be recognised. I don't know why or how, I only feel it. I'm still trying to sort that out. But something else keeps getting in the way. Vassily, you did say, didn't you, that the aliens showed pictures of Earth?”
“Nine still pictures,” Sheklov said.
“Could you-well-maybe draw them for me?”
“I guess so,” Sheklov answered after a moment for thought. “I looked at the photographs often enough. Might not get the details right, but in principle they'd be correct.”
“Fine,” Danty said, and gave his crooked smile. “Over breakfast I'll take you up on it. Mag', isn't that the service zone up ahead?”
The restaurant of the service zone was nearly empty. Only a couple of incurious long-distance truck-drivers glanced at them as they entered. Having collected coffee and food from the counter, they sat down around a table isolated in the centre of the room and Danty produced a stack of paper serviettes.
“Okay, Vassily, shoot,” he said, and sat back, sipping his coffee.
“What are you doing?” Lora, said dispiritedly. She had hardly seemed to be awake when she stumbled from the car; now she sat with eyes red, hair tangled, displaying every sign of exhaustion, as though she had been the one who had to drive through the night. Magda, by contrast, seemed hardly affected. Pale, perhaps, but calm-faced and moving without obvious signs of fatigue.
“Drawing,” Sheklov said, unclipping a batlpen from his pocket. He added, reaching for the first of the pile of white serviettes, “And I'm not very good at it. But I'll do what I can.”
He completed each drawing with quick, sure strokes; he had studied these enigmatic pictures-or at least the photos of them brought back from Pluto's orbit, smeared a little with free-space cosmic radiation, but with pretty good detail surviving-and they were branded on his memory. Of course, pen-sketches like these were hard to makke clear. He added a' caption to each, summarising what the experts had deduced about them.
Finally, when the others had finished their food, he gestured for a space to be cleared and laid them out in sequence in front of Danty.
"This first one is obviously a view of our galaxy," he said. "One can see the spiral arms. Then there's a clear view of the alien ship, which is a plain ovoid, but quite unlike anything of ours, so it's unmistakable. Then there's a view of the sun from a long way out in space-from about where the alien ship is orbiting, in fact. You can be certain of that because the constellations in the background match. I don't know astronomy well enough to do more than dot them in. Then there's a view of Earth, here; the continents are perfectly recognizable, though they're partly masked by cloud, as though the aliens are working from a particular picture.
"After that, there's a human-built rocket, possibly a satellite-launcher, possibly one of our own ships that made the Pluto trip first. That's interesting; apparently the engineers have spotted some detail-refinements in the design, and they seem promising. It's rather as though you were to try to draw a Model T from memory and absentmindedly make it look like a much more recent make of car.
“Then there's this. An explosion. Notice it's centred on the United States. And in the original I'm afraid I haven't drawn this very well-in the actual picture you can see it's nuclear. The likeliest explanation, the one that frightens us so much, and drove my superiors to send me here, is that it's a strike by the aliens.”
Magda was staring, fascinated, although Lora was leaning back in her chair with her eyes half-closed and Danty was bestowing only casual glances on each successive picture. Suddenly irritated by his lack of interest, Sheklov let his tone grow sharper.
“Next is this one, a plain circle. That puzzled us terribly. But the logical conclusion is that it's the Earth again, wiped out by clouds of dust and smoke. Because here . . .” He reached for the last two drawings.
“This is fire. No mistake about it. Something burning violently. And last of all there's-this.”
He laid down the caveman picture, the figure draped in skins waving a stone axe. And sat back.
There was a dead silence.
Eventually Danty picked up the drawings, like Magda gathering her tarot cards, and reversed them. He laid them out again on the table in the opposite order, turning each around as he set it down so as to be the correct way up from Sheklov's viewpoint the other side of the table.
“No,” he said. “This way.”
For a long moment Sheklov stared at them. Then he raised his eyes to Danty's calm, amused face.
“Are you-sure?” he said huskily.
“As sure as I am that we're going to find a way over the border. dodge the guards. dodge the mines, get to safety. And that's close to 100 per cent. I only got one life, Vassily, and I'm fond of it in spite of everything.”
Sheklov sat frozen. In his mind he could hear words, as clear as though someone were uttering them aloud:
The last shall be first, and the first . . .
“Right,” Danty said with a chuckle. “Let's move on.” . xacvn . “But he was wrong,” Bratcheslavsky murmured, taking from its.pack yet another of his endless series of papyrosi and bending its cardboard tube to a right angle preparatory to lighting it at the flame of the hanging brass lamp that swung from the centre of the small room's white ceiling.
Standing by the window that gave such a fine view of the city of Alma-Ata, shrouded at the moment in the pale gray mists of early evening, Sheklov said without looking around, “Of course he wasn't He was simply lying.”
He sighed and helped himself to a cigarette from the pack, then came to join Bratcheslavsky on the cushions piled here and there across the floor, not randomly but with the imprecise symmetry of a Japanese sand-garden.
“But you knew the whole border was heavily beset with patrols. And the farther the frontier zone from a major city and major roads-in North Dakota, for example, where you were heading for-the more it's likely to be infested with these 'private' defence forces. You must have realized thatl”
“Naturally I did.” Savouring the aromatic tobacco, Sheklov let a puff of smoke drift into the updraught from the lamp-Same. Glints of light flashed on its supporting chains.
“And you didn't try to argue with him? Not at all?”
“I was past the stage of disbelieving-hirn,” Sheklov said after a short pause. “I'd been convinced, long before, that he was possessed of a talent I'd barely dreamed of.”
“And it's lostl” Bratcheslavsky barked, jumping to his feet in the first access of honest rage Sheklov had ever seen from him. “When I think what use we could have made of him-ach!”
Sheklov remained squatting on his cushions, gazing up at the old man who had been his mentor for so long, seeing him with curiously different eyes. He felt that his mission, brief as it had been, had altered him. Aged him? Yes, possibly it was only that . . . yet he felt it reached deeper into his personality. He felt not simply that he had crammed a great many years into the space of a few weeks, but also that he'd been educated.
Educated? Enlightened? No, that still wasn't the precise turn of phrase he was after. He cogitated, and suddenly he had it.
Made more wise.
Yes. Yes, exactly. He had had his entire perspective on the world, the human condition, the universe, turned upside-down-and the new version was no less real than the traditional one. He was in the predicament of a savage shown a mirror for the first time, who has painfully to learn the truth that a man's right hand reflected in a mirror is his left.
But all that had been present in his mind while he was in Canada, arranging his onward journey to Russia with the aid and connivance, of the company whose representative he had nominally been during his time in the States. So now it had flashed back to his awareness in less than the blink of an eye, and Bratcheslavsky was still talking.
“Not only that, what's morel Not just a man with a talent we'd give our eye-teeth to controll But very likely Turpin too, who's been a mainstay of human survival for a quarter of a centuryl”
“But they don't suspect him of being an agent, do they?” Sheklov demanded. “Only of-uh-contact with subversives!”
“There's too damned good a chance of his being tried for treason.” Curtly. “The Navy has jumped into the mess with both feet, and every corporation that's jealous of Energetics General is demanding a chance to take over the defence contracts, and all in all you never saw anything more like the Byzantine Empire in your life! I wouldn't bet against the possibility of the President being deposed, I swear I wouldn'tl”
..By an Army coup?"
“Yes, of course. It's inevitable, you know, once you let the armed forces take over key organs of your government. Simply because they can impose rigid discipline on their 'members, whereas the loose, inchoate mass of the public is uncontrollable, they're bound to wind up giving the orders. Didn't we come perilously close to it ourselves a couple of times? And it wasn't good judgment that saved us, only luckl”
Bratcheslavsky tore the. cigarette from his mouth and gave it a rearing glare; he had bitten completely through its cardboard tube. Tossing it into a sandbowl with an oath. he lit another.
“But surely, even if we do lose Turpin,” Sheklov countered, “this process will bear out what Marxism has always prophesied: the dissolution of the capitalist state into a brutal internal power-struggle. There'll be so many factions we'll be able to feed in spies, saboteurs, subversives, anyone we choose. All we'll have to do is identify those of the competing parties that are prepared to sell out in order to do down their rivals. Ten years, of that; and America will never be a menace to the world again.”
“You're an optimist there days!” Bratcheslavsky grunted.
“I have good reason. I found things over there I wasn't expecting, would have assumed not to exist. Admittedly, they are neither officially admitted nor properly understood, but they exist, and I'm here because they do.”
He drew a deep breath.
“Lookl My stay there was measured in daysl I don't believe I could have run across what I did unless thesethese virtues and talents are widespread. Just considerl” He raised a finger. “First, I encountered someone with a talent we'd never imagined to be real, only it was real and I had proof. What's more, he . . . well, it's an unfashionable virtue, but it is one.”
“Self-sacrifice,” Bratcheslavsky said.
“Yes.”
There was a long, cold pause. During it Sheklov felt himself carried back in space and time, to the train he had taken over the Canadian border on Danty's instructions. None of them had the mind to question his orders by that stage. No one had suspected the genuinepess of his Canadian passport; for him it had been easy. For Lora and Magda, somewhat harder . . . but there was a wellestablished underground railway into Canada, had been for over a generation, and it had been surprisingly simple to obtain advice and even a guide. (Of course he'd only heard the details afterwards.)
For Danty, though. .
He'd looked out of the train's window, and seen that car racing down one of the blocked stub-ends of dirt road heading north, and behind a mask of trees he'd seen that rose of flame. Just for a moment, a second or two.
Why? Why? Merely so as to ensure that when his train was checked by the border-guards, most of them would have been diverted to investigate the explosion? It was far too high a pricel
But he continued, raising another finger. "And I met Magda, who in spite of the stifling effects of public conformism had worked out, from the inside, the true historical analogies for her country's predicament. And"a third finger-"Lore, who behaved in this crazy manner and nonetheless was ready to abandon her. old life for good and all, simply because she'd discovered that her father had lied to her since she was born. That hatred of hypocrisy is a healthy sign …. Did you bring them out safely, by the way? I didn't hear."
