The old soldier goggled at Rob, astonished. “Why—why so you are! How do you come to this godforsaken place, Rob? It’s been a long long time!” He seized Rob’s hand and pumped it enthusiastically. On his other side Edwin shook his head in amazement, not needing to understand the talk.
“I wanted to see some ruins in the Kyzylkum Desert, and I need a good map of the district.”
“Yuri! Bring vodka! We have to celebrate, my friend!” He beamed at Rob. “You have hard currency, yes? Your best vodka, Yuri!”
The best that Zarafshan had to offer was not very good.
An hour later Rob had sipped enough bad vodka to thoroughly upset his stomach. “You see, it’s a security issue,” Anatoly confided. “You say you are not CIA, and I believe you. But will the authorities believe me, when I tell them? An American speaking perfect Russian would make a baby suspicious, you know. You have been carefully taught.”
“But there’s nothing there,” Rob said. He topped off their vodka glasses.
“It’s just a desert, right, Ed?”
Edwin pulled out and unfolded their map. Anatoly examined it with suspicion. “They used spy satellites to make this map!”
“I bought it from the National Geographic, for three dollars. It was in their magazine.”
“You’re joking, really? Holy mother, I’m ashamed for us. Gorbachev drove the country to the dogs.”
Rob tried to stick to the point. “Why should anybody care, if we want to tour the Kyzylkum Desert? There’s no security issue at all. They quit excavating the site at Aqebin in 1918.”
Anatoly drained his glass in a gulp. “If your interests are solely archaeological, I can say you waste your time here. Whatever the ruins, however important or beautiful they were in 1918, they’re gone—pssssshhh!” He waved his hand parallel to the bar top, to indicate flatness.
“Good gosh, how?”
Anatoly stared down at his glass so hard that Edwin took the hint and refilled it. “Don’t tell us if it makes you uncomfortable, Anatoly,” Rob said. He felt terribly guilty now about manipulating the poor old man. How had he been able to blithely do this so often in New York last summer? “I wouldn’t want to get you into trouble on any account.”
“Oh, my friend, you are so kind!” Anatoly flung an arm around Rob’s shoulders. “And it’s ridiculous, just security paranoia. There’s no reason you shouldn’t know. It’s old hat! But I’ve been a soldier too long to change my ways easily. When I was young Stalin was in power, you understand? So we learned to be circumspect. Look, come to my house—I will give the map to you. Tell who you like, print it in the magazine, sell it to the Western press for hard currency. It’s no longer important.” “That’s so very kind of you, Anatoly.” Rob felt worse than ever. It was unfair doing this, like arm-wrestling a child.
Anatoly nodded, his gray eyes bleary. “The fact is, that area was used for an H-bomb test in the fifties. Mostly they did that sort of thing near Semenovka, northeast of here. An ugly place there, whew! But they also dropped one not far from your site. I suppose it was an experiment. I don’t know why they didn’t keep it up. Since nobody lives there, and it’s a desert, it was a very suitable target.”
“Oh my gosh!” Rob repeated the information for Edwin’s benefit. “Does that mean it’s still dangerous to go there?”
“I wouldn’t think so, after forty-some years,” Edwin said thoughtfully.
Anatoly confirmed this. “But play it safe, my friend. Don’t eat anything that grows there, not that there is any farming, only a few nomads. And don’t drink the water. That’s an American joke, ha ha!”
The vodka bottle was nearly empty, and Rob paid the barman. He thought that Anatoly had probably had enough for one day. They walked with the old soldier back to his dismal concrete apartment building in the more modern street of the town. The hallway was filthy and smelled of cabbage and urine. There were no bulbs in the light sockets, and many of the doors were secured with padlocks. An old woman in the dingy apartment, a wife or a
sister dressed in black, glared bitterly at Rob and said, “Drunk, again!”
“I’m very sorry,” Rob said sheepishly. “I didn’t mean him to.”
Anatoly stumbled to a desk and pulled a drawer open. “Your map, my friend!” He pushed the folded map into Rob’s hand and leaned on his shoulder, sniffling. “We will do this again, yes? Tomorrow? I will meet you at the bar!”
The old woman positively bared her teeth at Rob, snarling a silent warning. Rob said, “You remember I’m going to the desert, Anatoly. Some other time, all right? Good-bye, thank you again!” He broke away gently, and ducked back out to the dark splintered stairway where Edwin was waiting. “I feel terrible. Let’s go back.”
Edwin said, “It’s a very different way to make an acquaintance, that’s for sure.” They groped their way out into the street and began walking back to the hotel. The short winter day was over, and it was cold.
Rob pulled on the double mittens and his hat. “Ed. What I did just now. Was that right?”
There were no streetlights in Zarafshan, nor any billboards or neon advertisements. And local motorists dangerously pinched pennies by driving only with their parking lights, turning on the headlights only in the most dire of emergencies. So the moon reigned unrivalled in a broad dome of sky.
Edwin stared up at it. “I don’t know, Rob. It’s not like they refer to the instant friendship stunt in the Ten Commandments. But I think the fact that you feel bad about it is significant… Does the issue of mental privacy ever bother you?”
“Huh?”
“You wouldn’t make yourself invisible and then peek down women’s blouses, am I right? We established that in Atlantic City. Suppose then that people have a right to mental privacy, as well as physical privacy.”
Rob had never thought of it that way. “It does sound reasonable,” he said slowly. “But if I’m rigid about that, I’ll never do anything at all. This entire weird thing is in the head. I’d wind up all Zen, like you said. At some point my own agenda overrides these issues.”
“Mmm, that’s a tough one all right—to know when that action point has arrived. Your problem, bud, is that you have no societal channels to guide your abilities. Suppose you had tremendous physical strength instead. There are acceptable things to do with that gift: you could be a lineman for the Washington Redskins, for instance. But you, you don’t have any models except maybe in the comics. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so important for you to find these people at Aqebin. With them to help, maybe you won’t always have to invent yourself from scratch.”
“Ed, you’ve been really cogitating on this.” Rob was touched and impressed.
Edwin grinned at him, his teeth white in the moonlight. “Well, it was just a thought. And it is very nice to have a good map, and Anatoly had a blast of an afternoon. It’s a reasonably fair exchange.”
“If he’d had any more fun I would’ve been sick right there in the bar,” Rob said with feeling.
“We’ll go home and dose you with Pepto-Bismol,” Edwin said soothingly. CHAPTER 8
Finding a car was far more difficult. People with four-wheel drive vehicles needed them for farming or other work, and were not about to rent them out casually. Rob systematically interviewed the various touts and brokers around town, and rejected several possibilities as too unreliable or underpowered. “We’re trusting our lives to this vehicle,” he pointed out.
“If it breaks down out there, we’re toast.”
“I’m not questioning your judgment at all,” Edwin assured him. “I wish the local drivers believed in automotive maintenance, but I suppose out here there’s a parts problem.”
A week had gone by, and Rob was beginning to feel desperate. At some point, as he had told Edwin, he had to override other people’s agendas. Perhaps
that action point was approaching. He lay on the bed and considered the problem. If he had to, if no other possibilities opened up, Rob could muscle somebody into rentin
g them a good car. When would it be okay to do that?
The beds in their hotel were very foreign, lumpy kapok mattresses on squeaky iron-sprung frames. Edwin had made them more comfortable by spreading the Therm-a-Rest pads and the down sleeping bags on top. The door opened and Edwin put his curly dark head in. “Is this a good moment, or are you doing something weird?”
“I’m here. I was just thinking.”
He came in. “What would you say, Rob, to a Land Rover? The only problem with it is that it’s from England—the steering wheel’s on the right side.”
“You’re kidding, Ed! Where’d you find one? You don’t even speak the language!”
“There are folks who are fluent in English in Zarafshan. I just met all two of them, at the monthly church service.”
“I didn’t even know it was Sunday. How’d you get onto it?”
“Asked at the bar, of course. Would you be willing to have dinner with
Reverend Pallet and his wife? They’re Wesleyan missionaries from England. They have to go to Kabul for a month—he needs new dentures—and if you act reasonably respectable and trustworthy tonight they’ll rent us their precious Land Rover while they’re gone.”
“This is astounding, Ed. Is there a place on this planet where you couldn’t find a friend?”
Edwin laughed at him. “I might say the same thing about you,bud!”
What struck Rob that evening at dinner was the genuine friendship Edwin could kindle. It was nothing at all like his own false vodka-fueled intimacy with poor Anatoly. The Pallets were like something out of Rudyard Kipling, an elderly British couple in the wildest outposts of the empire.
Rev. Pallet had a thick white mustache and a bald head fringed all around with white. He greeted Rob with a deep startling bark:
“Can you manage a standard transmission, young man?”
“Sure,” Rob said, considerably rattled.
“Good!” To his relief, Edwin rescued him by asking a question about the Wesleyan mission organization. But this left Mrs. Pallet to Rob. She looked far too fragile to be living in Central Asia, a silver-haired old lady with loose thin transparent skin. It was hard to think of things to say to her.
He sat dumb, ill at ease. How pathetic, to be able to read thoughts, and
control minds like a god, and yet not be able to converse! The self-imposed limitations he had put on his own power bound him now hand and foot. He couldn’t trawl in her mind for topics of mutual interest. Maybe in Aqebin he would find somebody he wouldn’t have to control himself with.
Mrs. Pallet seemed to take pity on him, because she said, “You have a great look of my grandson, Mr. Lewis. He went up to Oxford last year. Would you like to see his picture?”
“Very much,” Rob said with sincerity. The dullest family photographs would be better than sitting here silent. She took out a huge old-fashioned scrap book. Rob didn’t see any resemblance to the grandson, a too-handsome young towhead in a scholar’s gown. “But who are these?” he asked, pointing to a snapshot of a pair of babies.
“Oh, those are the darling twins, my niece’s girls. She named them Hermione and Henrietta. I can’t imagine why, the poor mites!”
Then everything was all right. Rob agreed with Mrs. Pallet that the naming of twins, particularly identical twins, was a high and arcane art. They discussed teething, and Mrs. Pallet told him all about the work they were doing to promote child health care and vaccinations in Uzbekistan. They sat down to a stubbornly Western meal, lamb chops with potatoes and turnips. Afterwards the entire party adjourned to the garage, where Rev. Pallet showed them the air filter and the radiator cap on the old but well-loved
Land Rover, and lectured them about hoses.
“What a wonderful pair,” Rob said as they walked back to the hotel. “I admire a man who’s obsessive about regular oil changes.”
Glowing with food and good fellowship, Edwin laughed. “It sure gives a guy confidence when he borrows his car. I’rn glad you enjoyed the evening. We’ll drive them to the airport next week, and then we can start. That will give us plenty of time to scare up supplies.”
Only a few more bureaucratic obstacles remained for that last week. Even renting a privately owned car involved filling out forms and getting minor officials to sign off on them. For a while it looked like the entire expedition would collapse for want of the signature of a deputy assistant undersecretary. Rob had been ready to get tough, but the more experienced Edwin came to the rescue with cigarettes and chocolate bars.
A week later Rob drove cautiously north out of Zarafshan. Until he actually took the wheel, he hadn’t realized how disconcerting a right-hand drive could be. If traffic in the former USSR had run on the left, then he could have just made a complete switch. But driving on the right, in a car with the steering wheel on the right, was endlessly confusing. The Land Rover persisted in drifting into the center of the road. Luckily traffic was sparse, mostly pedestrians, with donkeys and camels and one bicycle.
Beside him Edwin wrestled with Anatoly’s map. It was very large, paper backed with cloth, and lettered in Cyrillic. Correlating it with the National Geographic map and the photocopy of the 1918 hand-drawn site map was no easy task. “As long as we keep heading north it should be all right,” he decided at last. “I told you the compass would be useful.”
The old gray Land Rover was fully loaded. By Edwin’s advice, jerricans of gasoline and plastic canisters of water made up most of the load. That and the food had made a big hole in Rob’s hoard of casino dollars. Since he didn’t know how many days the trip would take, he had gone long on staples: potatoes, strange Central Asian noodles, and bags of the flat local bread.
“You won’t mind eating lean for a week or so,” he joked to Edwin.
Zarafshan was too small to have suburbs. The country began when the asphalt quit and the dirt road carried on. Goats and sheep grazed on the tamarisk as they passed, and the shepherds stared at them. By afternoon the land had become true desert. Rob saw now why “Kyzylkum” meant “Red Sands.” The road meandered across stark red rocky ridges and down into sand-choked valleys where only tough camel thorn and saxaul grew. A stiff wintry wind stirred the pinkish dust into the air and carried it along for miles. The horizon was hazy and brown with it. Even when he looked straight up, the sky didn’t seem perfectly blue.
Before the short winter day began to end they stopped for the night in a
steep little valley. The wind whistled down at what felt like a hundred miles an hour. “Wow, it’s cold,” Rob remarked as he stepped down. “I’m glad we’re sleeping in the Rover. A tent would blow right away.”
“Let’s light a fire so we can have a hot meal. Oh, for my LP camp stove!
Open wood fires are the dickens in windy weather.”
“Just build it downwind of the car.”
“Trust me, Rob. Do I look like a greenhorn?” Edwin gathered pale brittle twigs from under the saxaul bushes and expertly lit a cooking fire. They toasted lamb kebabs over the fire and ate them on flat bread. “How long will the meat hold out?” Edwin asked.
“I got half a lamb’s worth at the market. Even in this cold it’ll probably go bad before we can eat it all.”
“Good, then let’s barbecue a few more!”
Rob felt very strange, sitting cross-legged on a rug in the desert eating slightly gritty grilled lamb and drinking Uzbek wine. Edwin reclined on one elbow like an ancient Roman, nibbling on a sword-shaped skewer, perfectly at ease. Rob couldn’t help saying, “I can’t believe we’re doing this. What if it doesn’t pan out?”
“You worry too much, Rob,” Edwin said lazily. “Take it as it comes. If
Aqebin turns out to be a bust, we’ll have had an extended camping trip. A vacation.”
“In the Kyzylkum Desert in Uzbekistan.”
“You’ve spent too much time in Atlantic City. Exotic and unusual vacations are the best. That casino jaunt with you was the tamest trip I’ve made since I was a kid, when we went to se
e the Hoover Dam.”
Rob paused to chew. The local lamb was sinewy-tough, even after marinating all day in oil and spices in one of Edwin’s Ziploc bags. “What do you think our destination will be like?”
Edwin waved his skewer around. “Probably it’ll look like this—a rocky desert. But maybe …” He sat up straight and pointed with his free hand at Rob. “Maybe there’ll be, I know, a large starship lying crash-landed on the sands. The surviving space-travelers need the human race’s help to get back to Beta Centauri. So they call on you for help, and give you the muscle to persuade the United Nations for them. Am I right?”
Rob applauded, laughing. “Or how about a more H. Rider Haggard scenario—a lost city of adepts in the desert, all of them tarnhelming like mad to keep out of view.”
“They’d have a problem with surveillance satellites. Maybe an underground city, that would be very cool. Ruled by a babelicious native queen.”
“I’m a married man, so she’ll have to fall madly in love with you.”
“Carina will mount an expedition to rescue me. She’d like that—she approves of breaking down gender barriers.”
The only camping equipment available in the local market was cheap woolen rugs. Rob had picked up half a dozen of these for sitting and sleeping on.
The idea was to transfer all the fragile baggage, like Edwin’s laptop and the bread, into the Rover’s front seat. Then they could spread some rugs and the mattress pads over the load in back and sleep on them under cover, the bed of the old-fashioned Rover being just long enough for this.
It was completely dark now, so cold that touching the metal of the car with bare fingers hurt. In the sky hung endless stars, more than Rob had ever seen. Repacking the car was difficult even in the 40-watt glow of Edwin’s fancy camping lantern. The jerricans, water jugs and suitcases made an extraordinarily lumpy surface. Also the load was so high in back that there was hardly room to squeeze in under the roof, especially for Edwin’s broad shoulders. With a lot of grunting and thrashing in the narrow space they rolled themselves in the down sleeping bags. “You wouldn’t let me bring my tent,” Edwin complained from close beside him. “It’s from E.L. Bean, a geodesic that sleeps four.”
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