Chapter Fourteen
1.
Anastas Azarin lifted the glass of lukewarm tea, pressed the spoon out of the way with his index finger, and drank it down without stopping until the glass was empty. He thumped it down in a circle of old stains on the end of his desk, and the spoon rattled. His orderly came in from the outer office, took the glass, refilled it, and set it down on the desk in easy reach. Azarin nodded shortly. The orderly clicked his heels, about-faced, and left the room.
Azarin watched him go, his mouth hooking deeply at one corner in a grimace of amusement that wrinkled all his face before it died as abruptly as it came. During that short moment, he had been transformed—his face had been open, frank, and friendly. But when his features smoothed again, all trace of the peasant, Azarin, left them. It was possible to see what Azarin had taught himself to become during his years of rising through the system: impersonal, efficient, wooden.
He went back to reading the weekly sector situation report, his blunt, nicotine-stained forefinger following the words, his lips muttering inaudibly.
He knew they laughed at him for his old-fashioned samovar. But the orderly knew what would happen to him if the glass ever remained empty. He knew they joked about the way he read. But they knew what would happen to them if he found errors in their reports.
Anastas Azarin had never graduated from their academies. He had never scribbled on their blackboards or filled their copybooks. While they were polishing the seats of their school uniforms on classroom benches, he had been out with his father, hefting an axe and dragging the great balks of timber through the dark forest. While they took their civil service examinations, he was supervising labor gangs on the taiga. While they hunched over their desks, he was in Mandjuria, eating bad rice with the little brown men. While they sat at home with their wives, reading their newspapers and dreaming of promotion, he was in a dressing station, dying of typhus.
And now he had a desk of his own, and an office of his own, and a pink-cheeked, wide-eyed orderly who brought him tea and clicked his heels. It was not their joke—it was his. It was he who could laugh—not they. They were nothing, and he was sector commandant—Anastas Azarin, Colonel, S.I.B. Gospodin Polkovnik Azarin, if you please!
He bent over the reports, muttering. Nothing new. As usual, the Allieds kept their sector tight. There was this American scientist, Martino. What was he doing, in his laboratory?
The American, Heywood, could not tell. From his post with the Allied Nations Government, Heywood had managed to arrange things so that Martino’s laboratory was placed close to Azarin’s sector. But that was the best he had been able to do. He had known Martino, knew Martino was engaged in something important that required a room with a twenty-foot ceiling and eight hundred square feet of floor space, and was called Project K-88.
Azarin scowled. It was all very well and good to have such faith in Martino’s importance, but what was K-88? What good was an empty name? The American, Heywood, was very glib with his data, but the fact was that there was no data. The A.N.G. internal security system was such that no one, even Heywood, could know much of what was going on. That in itself was quite normal—the Soviet system was the same. But the fact was that in the end it would not be some cloak-anddagger secret agent, with his flabby white skin and his little cameras who would deliver the K-88 to them. It would be Azarin—simple Anastas Azarin, the peasant—who would pull this thing apart as a bear destroys a dead tree to find the honey.
Martino would have to be interrogated. There was no other method of doing it. But for all Novoya Moskva wasted its air on the telephone, there was no quick way of doing it. There was no getting people into Martino’s laboratory. He had to be waited for. Men had to be ready at all times, prepared to pluck him from some dark street on the day he wandered too close to the line, if that lucky accident ever did occur. Then—one, two, three, he would be here, he would be questioned, he would be released, all in a matter of a few days before the Allieds could do anything, and the Allieds would have lost the K-88. And that devil, the American Rogers, no matter how clever he was, would have been taught at last that Anastas Azarin was a better man. But until that time, everyone—Azarin, Novoya Moskva—everyone—would have to wait. All in good time, if ever.
The telephone on his desk began to ring. Azarin swept up the receiver. “Polkovnik Azarin,” he growled.
“Gospodin Polkovnik—” It was one of his staff assistants. Azarin recognized the voice and fumbled for the name. He found it.
“Well, Yung?”
“There has been an explosion in the American scientist’s laboratory.”
“Get men in there. Get the American.”
“They are already on their way. What shall we do next?”
“Next? Bring him here. No—one moment. An explosion, you say? Take him to the military hospital.”
“Yes, sir. I very much hope he is alive, because this, of course, is the opportunity we have been waiting for.”
“Is it? Go give your orders.”
Azarin dropped the receiver on its cradle. This was bad. This was the worst possible thing. If Martino was dead, or so badly damaged as to be useless for weeks, Novoya Moskva would become intolerable.
2.
As soon as his car had come to a stop in front of the hospital, Azarin jumped out and climbed quickly up the steps. He marched through the main doors and strode into the lobby, where a doctor was waiting for him.
“Colonel Azarin?” the wiry little doctor asked, bowing slightly from the waist. “I am Medical Doctor Kothu. You will forgive me—I do not speak your language fluently.”
“I do well enough in yours,” Azarin said pleasantly, anticipating the gratifying surprise on the little man’s face. When it came, it made him even more well disposed toward the doctor. “Now, then—where is the man?”
“This way, please.” Kothu bowed again and led the way to the elevator. A brief smile touched Azarin’s face as he followed him. It always gave him pleasure when simple-looking Anastas Azarin proved to be as learned as anyone who had spent years in the universities. It was something to be proud of, too, that he had learned the language while burning leeches off his legs in a jungle swamp, instead of out of some professor’s book.
“How badly is the man injured?” he asked Kothu as they stepped out into another hall.
“Very badly. He was dead for a few moments.”
Azarin jerked his head toward the doctor.
Kothu nodded with a certain pride of his own. “He died in the ambulance. Fortunately, death is no longer permanent, under certain circumstances.” He led Azarin to a plate glass window set in the wall of a white-tiled room. Inside, still wearing the torn remnants of his clothes, incredibly bloodied, a man lay in the midst of a welter of apparatus.
“He is quite safe now,” Kothu explained. “You see the autojector there, pumping his blood, and the artificial kidney that purifies it. On this side are the artificial lungs.” The machines were bunched together haphazardly, where they had quickly been brought from their usual positions against the walls. Doctors and nurses were clustered around them, carefully supervising their workings, and other doctors were busy on the man himself, clamping torn blood vessels and applying compression to his armless left shoulder. As Azarin watched, orderlies began shifting the machines into systematic order. The emergency was over. Things were assuming a routine. A nurse glanced at her watch, looked over at a rack where a bottle was draining of whole blood, and substituted a fresh one.
Azarin scowled to hide his nervousness. He was having a certain amount of difficulty in keeping his glance on the monstrous scene. A man, after all, was made with his insides decently hidden under his skin. To look at a man, you did not see the slimy organs doing their revolting work of keeping him alive and real. To see a man like this, ripped open, with mysteriously knowledgeable, yes—frightening—men like this Kothu pushing and pulling at the moist things that stuffed the smooth and handsome skin . .
Azarin r
isked a sidelong glance at the little brown doctor. Kothu could do these abominable things just as easily to him. Anastas Azarin could lie there like that, hideously exposed, with men like this Kothu desecrating him at his pleasure.
“That’s very good,” Azarin barked, “but he’s useless to me. Or can he speak?”
Kothu shook his head. “His head is crushed, and he has lost a number of his sensory organs. But this is only emergency equipment, such as you will find in any accident ward. Inside of two months, he’ll be as good as new.”
“Two months? ”
“Colonel Azarin, I ask you to look at what lies on that table and is barely a man.”
“Yes—yes, of course, I’m lucky to have him at all. He can’t be moved, I suppose? To the great hospital in Novoya Moskva, for example?”
“It would kill him.”
Azarin nodded. Well, with every bad, some good. There would be no question, now, of Martino being taken away from him. It would be Anastas Azarin who did it—Anastas Azarin who tore the honey from the tree.
“Very well—do your best. And quickly.”
“Of course, Colonel.”
“If there is anything you need, come to me. I will give it to you.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you.”
“There’s nothing to thank me for. I want this man. You will do your best work to see that I get him.”
“Yes, Colonel.” Medical Doctor Kothu bowed slightly from the waist. Azarin nodded and walked away, down the hall to the elevator, his booted feet thudding against the floor.
Downstairs, he found Yung just driving up with a squad of S.I.B. soldiers. Azarin gave detailed instructions for a guard, and ordered the accident floor of the hospital sealed off. Already, he was busy thinking of ways this story might be spreading. The ambulance crew had to be kept quiet, the hospital personnel might talk, and even some of the patients here might have gathered an idea of what was going on. All these leaks had to be plugged. Azarin went back to his car, conscious of how complex his work was, how much ability a man needed to do it properly, and of how, inevitably, the American, Rogers, would sooner or later bring it all to nothing.
Five weeks went by. Five weeks during which Azarin was unable to accomplish anything, and of which Martino knew nothing.
3.
Every time Martino tried to focus his eyes, something whirred very softly in his frontal sinuses. He tried to understand that, but he felt very weak and boneless, and the sensation was so disconcerting that he was awake for an hour before he could see.
For that hour he lay motionless, listening, and noticing that his ears, too, were not serving him properly. Sounds advanced and receded much too quickly; were suddenly here and then there. His face ached slightly as each new vibration struck his ears, almost as if it were resonating to the sounds he heard.
There was some kind of apparatus in his mouth. His tongue felt the hard sleekness of metal, and the slipperiness of plastic. A splint, he thought. My jaw’s broken. He tried it, and it worked very well. It must be some kind of traction splint, he thought.
Whatever it was, it kept his teeth from meeting. When he closed his jaws, he felt only pressure and resistance, instead of the mesh and grind of teeth coming together.
The sheets felt hot and rough, and his chest was constricted. The bandaging felt lumpy across his back. His right shoulder was painful when he tried to move it, but it moved. He opened and closed the fingers of his right hand. Good. He tried his left arm. Nothing. Bad.
He lay quietly for a while, and at the end of it he had accepted the fact that his arm was gone. He was right-handed, after all, and if the arm was the only thing, he was lucky. He set about testing, elevating his hips cautiously, flexing his thighs and calves, curling his toes. No paralysis.
He had been lucky, and now he felt much better. He tried his eyes again, and though the whirring came and jarred him, he kept focus this time. He looked up and saw a blue ceiling, with a blue light burning in its center. The light bothered him, and after a moment he realized he wasn’t blinking, so he blinked deliberately. The ceiling and the light turned yellow.
There had been a peculiar shifting across his field of vision. He looked down toward his feet. Yellow sheets, yellowishwhite bedstead, yellow walls with a brown strip from floor to shoulder height. He blinked again, and the room went dark. He looked up toward the ceiling and barely saw a faint glow where the light had been, as though he were looking through leaded glass.
He couldn’t feel the texture of the pillow against the back of his neck. He couldn’t smell the smell of a hospital. He blinked again and the room was clear. He looked from side to side, and at the edges of his vision, just barely in sight and very close to his eyes, he saw two incurving cuts in what seemed to be metal plating. It was as though his face were pressed up to the door slit of a solitary confinement cell. He inched his right hand up to touch his face.
4.
Five weeks—of which Martino knew nothing and during which Azarin had been unable to accomplish anything.
Azarin held the telephone headpiece in one hand and opened the inlaid sandalwood box on his desk with the other. He selected a gold-tipped papyros and put the tip in one corner of his mouth where it would be out of the way. There was a perpetual matchbox on his desk, and he jerked at the protruding match. It came free, but the pull had been too uneven to draw a proper spark out of the flint in the box. The match wick failed to catch light, and he thrust the match back into the box, jerked it out again, and once more failed to get a light. He swept the matchbox off his desk and into the wastebasket, pulled open his desk drawer, found real matches, and lit the papyros. His lip curled tightly to hold the cigarette and let him talk at the same time.
“Yes, sir. I appreciate that the Allieds are putting great pressure on us for the return of this man.” The connection from Novoya Moskva was thin, but he did not raise his voice. Instead, he tightened it, giving it a hard, mechanical quality, as though he were driving it over the wires by force of will. He cursed silently at the speed with which Rogers had located Martino. It was one thing, negotiating with the Allieds when it was possible to say there was no knowledge of such a man. It was quite another when they could reply with the name of a specific hospital. It meant time lost that might have been stolen, and they were short of time to begin with. But there had never been any hiding anything important from Rogers for very long.
Very well, then that was the way it was. Meanwhile, however, there were these telephone calls.
“The surgeons will not have completed their final operation until tomorrow, at the earliest. I shall not be able to interrogate the man for perhaps two days thereafter. Yes, sir. I suggest the delay is the surgeons’ responsibility. They say we are lucky to have the man alive at all, and that everything they are doing is absolutely necessary. Martino’s condition was most serious. Every one of the operations was extremely delicate, and I am informed that nervous tissue regenerates very slowly, even with the most modern methods. Yes, sir. In my opinion, Medical Doctor Kothu is highly skilled. I am confirmed in this by my file copy of his certification from your headquarters.”
Azarin was gambling a little there, he knew. Central Headquarters might decide to step in whether it had an ostensible reason or not. But he thought they would wait for a time. Their own staff had passed on Kothu and the rest of the medical team in the local hospital, since it was a military establishment. They would hesitate to belie themselves. And they knew Azarin was one of their best men. At Central Headquarters, they did not laugh at him. They knew his record.
No, he could afford to gamble with his superiors. It was a valuable thing to practice, for a man who would some day be among the superiors and was readying himself for it.
“Yes, sir. Two weeks more.” Azarin bit down on the end of the papyros, and the hollow filter tube of gilt-wrapped pasteboard crumpled. He began chewing it lightly, sucking the smoke in between his teeth. “Yes, sir. I am aware of the already long delay. I will bear the inte
rnational situation in mind.”
Good. They were going to let him go ahead. For a moment, Azarin was happy.
Then the edge of his mind nibbled at the fact that he still had no idea of where to begin in his interrogation—that not the first shred of the earliest groundwork had been done.
Azarin scowled. Preoccupied, he said, “Good bye, sir,” put the telephone down, and sat with his elbows on the desk, leaning forward, the papyros held between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.
He was very good at his work, he knew. But he had never before encountered precisely these conditions. Neither had Novoya Moskva, and that was a help, but it was no help on the direct problem.
These temporary detentions were normally quite cut-anddried. The man was diplomatically pumped of whatever he would yield in a short space of time. Usually, this was little. Occasionally, it was more. But always the man was returned as quickly as possible. Except in cases where it was desirable to stir the Allieds up, for some larger purpose, it was always best not to annoy them. The Allieds, upset by something like this, could go to quite extraordinary lengths of retaliation, and no one could tell what other strategies they might not cripple with their countermoves. Similarly, there were certain methods it was best not to use on their people. Returning a man in bad condition invariably made things difficult for months afterward.
So, usually it was a day or two at most before a man was returned to the Allieds. There, Rogers would take a day or two in discovering how much Azarin had found out. And that was the sum of it. If, at times, Azarin learned something useful, Rogers neutralized it at once. In Azarin’s opinion, the entire business was a pitiful waste of time and energy.
But now, with this Martino, what did he have? He had a man who had invented something called a K-88, a man of high but undocumented reputation. Once more, Azarin cursed the circumstances of the times in which he lived. Once more he was angrily conscious of the fact that it was being left for the working professional—for Anastas Azarin—to clean up the work done by such fumbling amateurs as Heywood.
American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 Page 75