Time Travel Omnibus, page 662
Then it was over, and Harman moved through a triumphal procession of eager reporters, scattering bonhomie and predictions of victory, saluted again and again by electronic flashes which for long minutes burnt green and purple on his retinas; and so to the big, quiet car with motorcycles before and behind, off into the anonymous night. He wondered idly whether any reporter had been kind enough to beg an opinion or two from Ferris.
* * *
He refused to draw the car’s shades, of course, preferring to remain visible to the public behind his bullet-proof glass. There was a risk of assassination, but though increasing it was still small. (How the eyes must have hovered over JFK, like a cloud of eager flies. But no one could wish to assassinate Harman . . . surely.) He settled in the rear seat, one hand still relaxed upon the leather, the other resting calmly on his own right thigh. The outline of the chauffeur’s head showed dimly through more impervious glass . . . In four days he would rate six motorcyclists before and behind; with two only to supplement the eye-detector’s van and this purring car, he felt almost alone. Better to recall the seventeen watchers (the number had been rising still, the Argus eyes of destiny marking him out); or the eye of the camera, which held within it a hundred million watchers here and now. The show had gone well. He felt he might have succeeded without the silent eyes, the nodes of interference born of the uncertainty principle which marked where information was siphoned into the years ahead. How far ahead? No one knew; and it did not matter. Harman believed in himself and knew his belief to be sincere, even without this sign from heaven to mark him as blessed of all men.
And that was strangely true, he knew. The princes and powers of the world had been scanned for the stigmata of lasting fame (not the Soviets, of course, nor China); politicians—Harman smiled—often scored high, yet none higher than eight or nine. Seventeen showed almost embarrassing enthusiasm on the part of the historians, the excellent, discriminating historians yet to be.
I shall deserve it, Harman told himself as his own home came into view, searchlights splashing its pale walls and throwing it into due prominence. In a brief huddle of guards he passed within to the theoretical privacy of his personal rooms, sincere and knowing again that he was sincere. He would fulfil his promises to the letter, honest and uncompromising, ready to risk even his reputation for the good of Democracy. He paced the mildly austere bedroom (black and white, grey and chrome); he fingered the chess set and go-board which magazines had shown to the nation. The recorders whirred companionably. His clothes were heavy with sweat, inevitable under the hot lights; the trick was not to look troubled by heat, not ever to subside and mop oneself like Ferris, poor Ferris.
This room had no windows, for sufficient reasons; but Harman knew of six optical bugs at the least. Naked in the adjoining shower, he soaped himself and smiled. Seventeen watchers—or perhaps nineteen or twenty, for the power was still rising within him—the bugs and the watchers troubled him not at all. That, he was certain, was his true strength. He had nothing to hide from the future, nor from the present; in all his life, he believed there was no episode which could bring shame to his biography. Let the eyes peer! The seedy Ferris might weaken himself with drink, with women, but Harman’s energies flowed cool and strong in a single channel, which for convenience he called The Good Of The Nation.
He tumbled into pyjamas, his erection causing some small discomfort. Four days. Only four days and then: no compromise. The hard line. Straight talk, nation unto nation. He would give them good reason to watch him, Harman, the ultimate politician. He felt, as though beneath his fingers, the Presidential inheritance of red telephones and red buttons.
The eyes of time were upon him. He knew he would not fail them.
THESE STONES WILL REMEMBER
Reginald Bretnor
This is my confession. I have killed Ignatiev. I have killed Academician Andrei Konstantinovitch Ignatiev, the century’s foremost genius, the universal scientist, the unique mind that triumphed in half a dozen disciplines, some of them totally unrelated. That is what Pravda and other party organs always said about him, and they did not exaggerate. He was a theoretical physicist, a Nobel laureate. He was a physical chemist, again a Nobel laureate. He was the recipient of how many Lenin Prizes? How many decorations?
It is all true. It is also true that he was a Member of the Central Committee of the Party. He was not just a creature of the men inside the Kremlin—he was one of them. He was also an egomaniac: totally self-centered, completely self-assured, utterly ruthless. Physically, he was immensely strong, with the shoulders of a bull and the huge, round, bald head of a Turkish wrestler. And he was cruel. His colleagues feared him. His women first believed they loved him, then invariably discovered that they loathed and hated him.
He was also the man whose influence freed me after I had spent eleven years in prison.
I met him first many years ago, when we were both at the University, where we had friends in common—a professor of mathematics, his wife, and his daughter, Evgenia, a very quiet, gentle girl whom I had hoped to marry. Always he made fun of me, of my long, thin frame, my pale thin hair, and he would make crude jokes about my specialty, about the ancient languages I loved. “Our Fredichka” he’d say, “will soon announce the most important of discoveries that there are eighty-seven words in Old Minoan referring to a woman’s private parts. Imagine it! He has written a five-hundred-page dissertation of the subject.”
I would turn red, and he would simply roar with laughter. My name is Frederic—my father, a musician, named me after Chopin, whom he loved—but no one had called me Fredichka since childhood. Ignatiev did, and the way he did it robbed me of any dignity I might have had. Much of my life then was given to my poetry, and he mocked even that, reciting unkind parodies in a falsetto imitation of my voice. For a long time, I put up with it, for Evgenia’s and her parents’ sake. Then I became aware that she and Ignatiev were lovers, and I withdrew as unobtrusively as possible, somehow sensing that the affair, for her, would end in bitterness, in her hating and despising him—and herself even more. I withdrew into my languages, into my poetry, into the company of other language scholars and other poets. Eventually I obtained a position at the Institute for Ancient Languages, teaching, doing research, writing monographs.
It was a good life, and my career, though quiet, was not undistinguished. There were no Nobel Prizes for me, no glittering honors, but enough recognition so that I felt established, necessary. Unfortunately, too, there was enough to arouse jealousy among a few over whose heads I was promoted; and I had been indiscreet enough, and had felt secure enough, to associate too carelessly with poets who were dissidents, and to publish poems of my own crying out against political injustices. I never did learn who denounced me, but one night, after eight and a half years, they came for me.
If you have read Solzhenitsyn, you are familiar with what followed: Lubyanka Prison, the cells, the questionings—the endless questionings, the subtle tortures of the mind and body—and then the mockery of a trial, and the cold, locked, closely guarded van to Dvershinsk Barracks. There I spent those eleven years. It was a prison for scientists and scholars, very much like the one in The First Circle. We worked interminably, given the minimum of food, of warmth, of clothing needed to keep us working. Often I wondered whose learned papers I was writing, what influential Party academic’s translations I was toiling over. But at least I was able to study, learn, and maintain my linguistic skills, and to scribble poetry too, for my fellow prisoners and sometimes even for the guards.
When I was summoned, it was the dead of winter, and once again it was at night. I had just fallen asleep in my cold, hard bed when I was awakened by hands shaking me. A guard I did not know looked at the paper in his hand by flashlight.
“Kolpakov?” he said. “Frederic Platonovitch Kolpakov?”
I admitted my identity.
“Get up and dress,” he ordered. “You are to leave this place.”
“To leave?” I exclaimed. “Wh-what do they want of me?”
“They didn’t tell me,” he growled. “Get your clothes on. You’ll need nothing else.”
I rose and dressed, conscious that my companions had awakened, feeling their fear echoing my own. As I walked out with the guard, some of them whispered goodbye to me, wishing me good luck.
The guard walked me through the icy hallways to the office of the prison commandant, a heavy man with agate eyes and a deceptive joviality. I asked him politely where they were taking me, and he replied with a barking laugh. “Why, I can’t tell you that! Every-thing’s going to be a big surprise!” He slapped me on the back. “Maybe they’ll take you to the Moscow zoo and feed you to the lions, ha-ha-ha!”
They gave me underwear and socks and shoes, a shirt, a tie, an ill-fitting civilian suit, a badly worn but heavy overcoat. They put a shabby suitcase in my hands. I signed several documents.
Then I and the unknown guard went out into the night. There I encountered my first surprise. No black, shrouded van awaited me. Instead, the guard walked me to an enormous limousine, its engine purring smoothly, a cloud of steam coming from its exhaust. He opened the back door.
“Get in,” he ordered.
As the door swung open, the light went on inside. I looked. I stared. Ignatiev was sitting there.
He had scarcely changed. His features had matured. His head and shoulders appeared even more massive than before. I was, of course, familiar with his career, with the achievements and the fame that had, I knew, taken him far, far away from such narrow, unkind worlds as mine.
“Come, Fredichka,” he said, all the old contempt still in his voice, “get in the pretty car. You and I are going for a ride.”
“A-Andrei Konstantinovitch!” I stammered.
“Good, you remember me. Get in, get in!”
I eased myself down into the luxury of the seat, gripped the miserable suitcase between my trembling knees. The door was closed behind me. We began to move. As we drove out of the courtyard and through the surrounding rings of fences, I saw the guards we passed saluting. I was in shock. I could not imagine why I had been freed. I did not know whether I really had been freed. I was astounded at the identity of my deliverer. But I was out of prison. No walls confined me. There were no guards—at least none I could identify. Through the car’s window, I saw the winter stars, bright in the frozen sky. Tears ran down my cheeks. I could not speak.
“You are wondering why I secured your release?” he said then. “You are wondering why I, Ignatiev, have taken my old friend Fredichka out of his prison? Well, I’ll tell you this much—it is because I need your languages. The rest you will learn later. For the moment, please remember that you are not yet fully free, that the authorities released you to work for me.”
I shook my head. Why would Ignatiev, of all people, need my languages? I mumbled, trying to tell him of my gratitude.
He dismissed the effort with a gesture. “Before we finish”—he leaned toward me, and suddenly the contempt left his voice—“you will have earned your pay. Also, I promise you there will be many crumbs of fame from the cake I’ll cut. But first there will be work for both of us. Tomorrow I will tell you more, and also we will have to feed you better than they have, and get you clothing to replace those rags, and have a proper doctor look at you.”
There were several more miles to go before we reached his dacha, his villa far out in Moscow’s suburbs, and during the drive he asked me questions: about the prison, about the work they’d had me doing there—with which he was surprisingly familiar. I answered him as fully as I could, apologizing because events had been too much for me; and then he began talking about people we had known long ago, telling me who had died, who had been promoted or disgraced, who had published what. It was all new to me. In prison I had heard almost nothing. But he never mentioned Evgenia or her parents, and I was thankful for that. Indeed, I had never seen him so warm and human; nor was I ever to again.
It was nearly midnight when we reached the dacha, a rambling wooden building more than a century old, built originally for some long-forgotten nobleman or wealthy merchant. Wonderingly, I walked into its warmth, its light and shadow, stepping on its Oriental carpets, gazing at huge tiled stoves, bronzes, paintings, ancient icons, antique furniture, a silver samovar lording it over lesser silver and silver-gilt from the great workshops of the Czarist past. Despite the hour, his housekeeper, a tall, handsome woman who I learned later also was his mistress, first brought us brandy—brandy, I could not believe it!—then took us in to supper, served by a buxom servant girl. I realized that I had not eaten a really decent meal since my imprisonment.
For the moment, my apprehension vanished. I ate and drank for the first time in eleven years. Ignatiev also ate, talking occasionally and watching me with the familiar expression of half-amused contempt, but all my attention was focused on that meal. I, who had grown to think that I had disciplined myself beyond such things, realized suddenly how hungry I had been. Finally, when we had finished, my suspicions of him, my dislike—yes, my hatred of him—all were dulled. Gratitude comes easily to the half-starved and newly freed.
He and the woman took me to a bedroom next to what must once have been the nursery, a nurse’s or a governess’s, small, bare, but—Bozhe moi!—with its own washbasin and toilet, all new. The bed was made. It had already been turned down. I sat down on it, smoothing the pillow unbelievingly.
The woman left, but Ignatiev lingered for a moment. “Sleep well, Fredichka,” he said. “There’ll be no guards to wake you, no snores, no sicknesses.” He laughed. “And you can turn the light on and off when you want to. But before I leave you, I must tell you something. I am starting on a new career. I am going to be the world’s most famous archaeologist. I, Ignatiev, will tear out the best protected secrets of the past, and you shall help me. Spokoynoi noch.”
His words echoed dully in my head, only half understood. I too mumbled a goodnight, and with that he left me. Still dazed, I un-dressed, got into bed—and could not sleep at first because of the luxurious privacy, the silence. Then twice I woke, thinking I was still in prison, dreaming. Then I slept beautifully till almost nine, when the woman, Marfa, came to wake me.
I did not see him until much later in the day. Instead, a man whom I took to be his driver-bodyguard drove me in the big limousine to several of the best shops in Moscow, where ordinary people could not buy, and bought me clothing, shoes, everything I possibly might need. He drove with a minimum of conversation, telling me coldly and courteously that this was what Ignatiev wanted done. He bought our lunch in a good restaurant. Then we went to a clinic where a hard-faced elderly doctor checked me over: blood-tests, X-rays, specimens, cardiograms, even an electroencephalograph. I could tell that she knew at a glance where I had spent my years, but neither she nor I made any comment.
It was five in the afternoon when we returned, and Marfa showed me to his library, where he was waiting for me, looking strangely out of place among fringed and beaded lamps, looming bookcases, and a bronze bust of Pushkin. Here too, his passion for collecting was evident. On his desk stood a lovely silver kovsh, glowing with plique-a-jour enamel, and other precious objects were everywhere. Marfa closed the door behind her. He waved me to a chair.
I looked at the expensive suit I now was wearing. “You—you have been very kind to me, Andrei Konstantinovitch. I—I want you to know—”
He cut me off. “If you are going to work for me—and I assure you that you’re going to work hard for me—we can’t have your clothes stinking of a prison, and we must keep you healthy so that you can work.”
He looked down at a pile of monographs on his desk. “Are you familiar with Professor Rivokhin’s recent work in linguistics and philology?”
I shook my head.
“You ought to be,” he said. “You did most of it, and it was all based on certain basic premises you suggested in a paper before they hauled you off.”
I thought of all the work I had done over the years—and of the journals I had not received. “You—you mean that this Rivokhin—that he has simply taken credit for everything I’ve done? That he has added nothing to it?”
“Nothing,” said Ignatiev. He laughed, contemptuously again. “Fredichka, Rivokhin is eminent, an Academician like myself, like myself a ranking Party Member. You have never understood the importance of belonging to the aristocracy—especially one that is secure because it calls itself servant instead of master. Solzhenitsyn recognized us for what we are, we of the new class, but few others have. So your work has become old Rivokhin’s; all he has done is to change a few words and lengthen a few sentences. He does not even understand what you were aiming at”—he leaned forward, his vast shoulders shadowing the desk—“the scientific rebuilding of ancient languages, even of lost tongues, from their surviving remnants, the reconstitution of their words, their grammars, of their exact sounds. Tell me, am I right?”
I was astounded at his knowledge, at his insight. Here was the goal I had cherished in my mind, the goal I had never dared to formulate so clearly even to myself. My expression told him every-thing; I did not need to answer him.
“There! We understand each other—except that you never looked ahead as far as this. You never thought of marrying your theories to computer technology, did you, Fredichka? No? Well, neither has Rivokhin.” Again he burst out laughing. “A poet in prison and a thieving intellectual dunderhead! Well, I have thought of it, and that is what we’re going to do, you and I. I will show you how to state your theories so that computers can handle them and test them. I am not worried about the outcome; I am already certain that basically they are completely valid. Can you see how this will revolutionize archaeology, this perfect knowledge of the ancient tongues?” He threw his head back. He hammered on his desk. “The discoveries of Schliemann, of Sir Aurel Stein, of Howard Carter and Carnarvon, of all the rest, will seem like nothing! I shall unearth the tomb of Alexander! I shall discover Atlantis underneath the sea! All the great mysteries of the past will open to Ignatiev!”
