Combat, page 4
"Well," Hank said, "I'm sick of it, too, and I haven't any answer either, but I'll be darned if I've heard the Russkies propose one. And just between you and me, if I had to choose between living Soviet style and our style, I'd choose ours any day."
Char said nothing.
Hank added flatly, "Who knows, maybe the coming of these Galactic Confederation characters will bring it all to a head."
She said nothing further and in ten minutes the soft sounds of her breathing had deepened to the point that Hank Kuran knew she slept. He lay there another half hour in the full knowledge that probably the most desirable woman he'd ever met was sleeping less than three feet away from him.
Leningrad had cushioned the first impression of Moscow for Henry Kuran. Although, if anything, living standards and civic beauty were even higher here in the capital city of world Communism.
They pulled into the Leningradsky Station on Komsomolskaya Square in the early morning to be met by Intourist guides and buses.
Hank sat next to Char Moore still feeling on the argumentative side after their discussion of the night before. He motioned with his head at some excavation work going on next to the station. "There you are. Women doing manual labor."
Char said, "I'm from the Western states, it doesn't impress me. Have you ever seen fruit pickers, potato diggers, or just about any type of itinerant harvest workers? There is no harder work and women, and children for that matter, do half of it at home."
He looked at the husky, rawboned women laborers working shoulder to shoulder with the men. "I still don't like it."
Char shrugged. "Who does? The sooner we devise machines to do all the drudgery the better off the world will be."
To his surprise, Hank found Moscow one of the most beautiful cities he had ever observed. Certainly the downtown area in the vicinity of the Kremlin compared favorably with any.
The buses whisked them down through Lermontovskaya Square, down Kirov Street to Novaya and then turned right. The Intourist guide made with a running commentary. There was the famous Bolshoi Theater and there Sverdlova Square, a Soviet cultural center.
Hank didn't know it then but they were avoiding Red Square. They circled it, one block away, and pulled onto Gorky Street and before a Victorian period building.
"The Grand Hotel," the guide announced, "where you will stay during your Moscow visit."
Half a dozen porters began manhandling their bags from the top of the bus. They were ushered into the lobby and assigned rooms. Russian hotel lobbies were a thing apart. No souvenir stands, no bellhops, no signs saying To the Bar, To the Barber Shop or to anything else. A hotel was a hotel, period.
Hank trailed Loo and Paco and three porters to the second floor and to the room they were assigned in common. Like the Astoria's rooms, in Leningrad, it was king-sized. In fact, it could easily have been divided into three chambers. There were four full sized beds, six arm chairs, two sofas, two vanity tables, a monstrous desk—and one wash bowl which gurgled when you ran water.
Paco, hands on hips, stared around. "A dance hall," he said. "Gentlemen, this room hasn't changed since some Grand Duke stayed in it before the revolution."
Loo, who had assumed his usual prone position on one of the beds, said, "From what I've heard about Moscow housing, you could get an average family in this amount of space."
Hank was stuffing clothes into a dresser drawer. "Now who's making with anti-Soviet comments?"
Paco laughed at him. "Have you ever seen some of the housing in the Harlem district in New York? You can rent a bed in a room that has possibly ten beds, for an eight-hour period. When your eight hours are up you roll out and somebody else rolls in. The beds are kept warm, three shifts every twenty-four hours."
Hank shook his head and muttered, "They call me Dobbin, I've been ridden so much."
Paco laughed and rubbed his hands together happily. "It's still early. We have nothing to do until lunch time. I suggest we sally forth and take a look at Russian womanhood. One never knows."
Loo said, "As an alternative, I suggest we rest until lunch."
Paco snorted. "A rightest-Trotskyite wrecker, and an imperialist war-monger to boot."
Loo said, dead panned, "Smile when you say that stranger."
Hank said, "Hey, wait a minute."
He went down the room to the far window and bug-eyed. One block away, at the end of Gorky Street, was Red Square. St. Basil's Cathedral at the far end, and unbelievable candy-cane construction of fanciful spirals, and every-colored turrets; the red marble mausoleum, Mecca of world Communism, housing the prophet Lenin and his two disciples; the long drab length of the GUM department store opposite. But it wasn't these.
There on the square, nestled in the corner between St. Basil's and the mausoleum, squatted what Henry Kuran had never really expected to see, in spite of his assignment, in spite of news broadcasts, in spite of everything to the contrary. Boomerang shaped, resting on short stilts, six of them in all, a baby blue in color—an impossibly beautiful baby blue.
The spaceship.
Paco stood at one shoulder, Loo at the other.
For once there was no humor in Paco's words. "There it is," he said. "Our visitors from the stars."
"Possibly our teachers from the stars," Hank said huskily.
"Or our judges." Loo's voice was flat.
They stood there for another five minutes in silence. Loo said finally, "Undoubtedly our Intourist guides will take us nearer, if that's allowed, later during our stay. Meanwhile, my friends, I shall rest up for the occasion."
"Let's take our quick look at the city," Paco said to Hank. "Once the Intourist people take over they'll run our feet off. Frankly, I have little interest in where the first shot of the revolution was fired, the latest tractor factory, or where Rasputin got it in the neck. There are more important things."
"We know," Loo said from the bed. "Women."
"Right!"
Hank was wondering whether or not to leave the room. The Stilyagi were to contact him. Where? When? Obviously, he'd need their help. He had no idea whatsoever on how to penetrate to the Interplanetary emissaries.
He spoke Russian. Fine. So what? Could he simply march up to the spacecraft and knock on the door? Or would he make himself dangerously conspicuous by just getting any closer than he now was to the craft?
As he stood now, he felt he was comparatively safe. He was sure the Russkies had marked him down as a rather ordinary American. Heavens knows, he'd worked hard enough at the role. A simple, average tourist, a little on the square side, and not even particularly articulate.
However, he wasn't going to accomplish much by remaining here in this room. He doubted that the Stilyagi would get in touch with him either by phone or simply knocking at the door.
"O.K., Paco," he said. "Let's go. In search of the pin-up girl—Moscow style."
They walked down to the lobby and started for the door.
One of the Intourist guides who had brought them from the railroad station stood to one side of the stairs. "Going for a walk, gentlemen? I suggest you stroll up Gorky Street, it's the main shopping center."
Paco said, "How about going over into Red Square to see the spaceship?"
The guide shrugged. "I don't believe the guards will allow you to get too near. It would be undesirable to bother the Galactic delegates to the Soviet Union."
That was one way of wording it, Hank thought glumly. The Galactic delegates to the Soviet Union. Not to the 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 make-up 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 metrofanushkagirls?"
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 world-wide 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."
"O.K., 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 KGB putting tails on the tens of thousands of tourists that swarmed Moscow and Leningrad, became a little on the ridiculous side. Besides, what secret does a tourist know, or what secrets could he discover?
At any rate, Hank found no interference in his wanderings. He deliberately avoided Red Square and its spaceship, taking no chances on bringing himself to attention. Short of that locality, he wandered freely.
At noon they ate at the Grand and the Intourist guide outlined the afternoon program which involved a general sightseeing tour ranging from the University to the Park of Rest and Culture, Moscow's equivalent of Coney Island.
Loo said, "That all sounds very tiring, do we have time for a nap before leaving?"
"I'm afraid not, Mr. Motlamelle," the guide told him.
Paco shook his head. "I've seen a university, and I've seen a sport stadium and I've seen statues and monuments. I'll sit this one out."
"I think I'll lie this one out," Loo said. He complained plaintively to Hank. "You know what happened to me this morning, just as I was napping up in our room?"
"Yes," Hank said, "I was with our Argentine Casanova when he picked her up."
Hank took the conducted tour with the rest. If he was going to beg off the next day, he'd be less conspicuous tagging along on this one. Besides it gave him the lay of the land.
And he took the morning trip the next day, the automobile factories on the outskirts of town. It had been possibly fifteen years since Hank had been through Detroit but he doubted greatly that automation had developed as far in his own country as it seemed to have here. Or, perhaps, this was merely a showplace. But he drew himself up at that thought. That was one attitude the Western world couldn't afford—deprecating Soviet progress. This was the very thing that had led to such shocks as the launching of the early Sputniks. Underestimate your adversary and sooner or later you paid for it.
The Soviets had at long last built up a productive machine as great as any. Possibly greater. In sheer tonnage they were turning out more gross national product than the West. This was no time to be underestimating them.
All this was a double interest to a field man in Morton Twombly's department, working against the Soviets in international trade. He was beginning to understand at least one of the reasons why the Commies could sell their products at such ridiculously low prices. Automation beyond that of the West. In the Soviet complex the labor unions were in no position to block the introduction of ultra-efficient methods, and featherbedding was unheard of. If a Russian worker's job was automated out from under him, he shifted to a new plant, a new job, and possibly even learned a new trade. The American worker's union, to the contrary, did its best to save the job.
Hank Kuran remembered reading, a few months earlier, of a British textile company which had attempted to introduce a whole line of new automation equipment. The unions had struck, and the company had to give up the project. What happened to the machinery? It was sold to China!
Following the orders of his underground contact, he begged out of the afternoon tour, as did half a dozen of the others. Sightseeing was as hard on the feet in Moscow as anywhere else.
After lunch he looked up Sovietska Park on his tourist map of the city. It was handy enough. A few blocks up Gorky Street.
It turned out to be typical. Well done so far as fountains, monuments and gardens were concerned. Well equipped with park benches. In the early afternoon it was by no means empty, but, on the other hand not nearly so filled as he'd noticed the parks to be the evening before.
Hank stopped at one of the numerous cold drink stands where for a few kopecks you could get raspberry syrup fizzed up with soda water. While he sipped it, a teen-ager came up beside him and said in passable English, "Excuse me, are you a tourist? Do you speak English?"
This had happened before. Another kid practicing his school language.
"That's right," Hank said.
The boy said, "You aren't a ham, are you?" He brought some cards from an inner pocket. "I'm UA3-KAR."
For a moment Hank looked at him blankly, and then he recognized the amateur radio call cards the other was displaying. "Oh, a ham. Well, no, but I have a cousin who is."
Two more youngsters came up. "What's his call?"
Hank didn't remember that. They all adjourned to a park bench and little though he knew about the subject, international amateur radio was discussed in detail. In fifteen minutes he was hemmed in by a dozen or so and had about decided he'd better make his excuses and circulate around making himself available to the stilyagi outfit. He was searching for an excuse to shake them when the one sitting next to him reverted to Russian.
"We're clear now, Henry Kuran."
Hank said, "I'll be damned. I hadn't any idea—"
The other brushed aside trivialities. Looking at him more closely, Hank could see he was older than first estimate. Possibly twenty-two or so. Darker than most of the others, heavy-set, sharp and impatient.
