by Philip Wylie
“We come in peace also,” Paula interrupted.
Mrs. Dwight said nervously, “Shhhh—!”
“We are nevertheless,” the Russian went on, “prepared for all eventualities. In the holds of our ships we carry atomic bombs. We are prepared to withdraw and to hurl these upon you and your—spectacular—City of New York—”
Again Paula broke in. Her voice was amiable, clear, and loud. She wondered, as she spoke, if atomic bombs would be in the hold, at this point, granted they had been brought along. She half suspected not: they would be out on deck, in view, if there were any. Paula said, “We are also, of course, ready for eventualities. This river under your ships is mined. So is the harbor. Any hostile act on your part, or the appearance of such an act, would result in your instant dissolution. You were in great danger this morning when you trained these small cannon on our city.”
Ilnya’s flush was now quite evident and it was followed by a slight pallor. Her upper lip, on which was a peach-down mustache of pale hairs, showed sweat beads. The crew and the officers said nothing; but they surged minutely as if they were made of paper and a faint breeze had blown amongst them.
Nevertheless, in spite of Paula’s ominous, wholly untrue assertion, the Russian leader thrust out her broad, hard jaw and smiled. “We were prepared to run such a risk.
We are familiar with the technical abilities of the American people. For the last day’s steaming, we have been on the alert, half expecting that you might attack at any time—”
“Look—” Paula cut in.
“I have prepared an address for the occasion. It is necessary for me to explain why we Soviet women have come this long way to liberate the American women slaves of capitalism. I—”
Paula turned her back and rapidly, rudely translated what had been said. Then she pivoted again and smiled charmingly at Ilnya Basrov. “Look. We, the women of America, know all about your Soviet ideas of our need for liberation. We don’t happen to agree we require the effort. We’re glad you came across. We don’t care much for long speeches. I realize what I say is neither diplomatic nor proper protocol and I don’t give a button on Stalin’s pants. Besides, it’s hot on this damned steel deck. If you have any liquor on board, we’d enjoy a cocktail. Afterward, we want you to come ashore—as many of you as dare leave the shadow of your little guns. We want you to see our city, our country. We’ve arranged a banquet for you tonight. The whole gang of you. If you want to make speeches, you’ll get a chance then. As far as we’re concerned, politics have shrunk down to something mighty small. Our men and boys are gone. That’s what interests and worries us. If you have any ideas on that, we’ll be only too glad to listen.”
Ilnya Basrov and her colleagues exhibited changing emotions as Paula spoke. It angered them to have their leader interrupted. It obviously infuriated them to be told that the women of America had no interest in their mission. The statement about not liking long speeches was a simple insult; yet it was uttered so candidly and with such a friendly smile that they did not know how to take it. Besides, they had thoroughly digested the thought that the Hudson River was full of mines. The American woman had not even bothered to say whether or not they were atomic mines. The Americans, of course, were a formidably technical people even though the samples before them looked like the cartoons of typical capitalist wasters and exploiters. But their curiously redheaded spokesman sounded as if she meant what she said—she seemed good-tempered—and she showed common sense. No one had looked forward to long speeches in the full sun on the steel deck. This American had also asked about a drink, which was flattering, since an enormous buffet had been prepared in the officers’ mess and there was vodka for all the toasts that any woman could stand and drink.
The invitation to go ashore—and the sight of New York had filled the women with a desire to do so—was perhaps a trap. Still, some could be sent ashore while the majority remained on the alert. The Beet might even be withdrawn to the high seas during negotiations.
Ilnya Basrov had such thoughts. She decided that temporizing was advisable. She swallowed her indignation. She even smiled. While Paula translated what she had said to the horrified committee, the Russians conferred. At the end of the parley, Ilnya beamed.
“Come,” she cried. “Let us have the drink, then!”
In the dining salon, where damask all but disappeared under a load of delicacies, Paula raised a glass and made the first toast. It pleased her hosts; it pleased Paula also:
“To Stalin, wherever he is!”
In emulating the toasting tactics of their male diplomats, the Russians had failed to reckon with one factor. For, while they were solid and rugged women, they were not accustomed to the rapid imbibation of one glass of vodka after another. Vodka, like everything else, had been short in Russia since 1917; and the comrades were not encouraged to use it freely, in any case. The American ladies, however, were graduates of a long schooling in the cocktail hour. Mrs. Altbee in particular had a competence in that respect: she had been seen to drink, by actual count, fourteen stingers in an hour and a half and to leave the cocktail lounge where she had done it with a steady tread—with not so much as the flicker of an eye.
It was true that, after the fifth toast, caviar was served along with several kinds of smoked fish, the pickled eggs of Siberian ducks, fancy breads, rare cheeses and other victuals which the American delegation fell upon with appreciation. But it was also the fact that Mrs. Altbee took Ilnya Basrov and two of the other Russian plenipotentiaries to a corner and engaged in a series of private toasts, not without malice aforethought. It soon became evident that the Russian leader, although she kept her balance and her look of great physical strength, grew flushed, began talking rapidly and laughed with almost every sentence she uttered.
When, acting as translator, Paula noticed that Ilnya had taken an interest in the material of Mrs. Altbee’s dress, and when the latter woman gave a furtive wink, Paula felt that the situation was ripe for further action. She tapped on a tumbler with a knife and brought silence. She said buoyantly, in Russian, “I suggest that you ladies, having shown us such extreme hospitality, come ashore now and permit us to begin a return of the kindness.”
There was consultation and some bickering. But presently a delegation of fifty-five women, under Ilnya, began to be ferried, ten at a time, to the Bessie. The Soviet women wanted desperately to see what lay beneath the skyscrapers.
Paula’s recollections of the remainder of the afternoon and evening were somewhat hazy owing not to the vodka but to the number and variety of scenes in which she participated and of interrogations for which she acted as interpreter. In the last she was aided by some of the guests who, it proved, spoke English quite well.
Fifth Avenue buses were waiting at the dock for just such an opportunity as the shore party furnished. The Soviet women insisted on examining the buses before they rode in them—not for fear of infernal machines but, simply, to see what the engines were like. They next demanded to be let out at the base of the first real skyscraper they encountered. Its interior had been badly damaged by fire. But the fact only pleased the Russians because it allowed them to see more of the structural members of the building.
At a subway kiosk the procession made another stop and they descended to the dark, now-unused platforms. The women who came from Moscow were smug concerning the superiority of their handsome subway stations. Shown around with flashlights, they asked to board a train stalled there. They said that their subway cars were better planned. When Paula’s torch fell upon the map of the subway system which every car contained, Ilnya asked immediately, “How many miles per inch?”
She was told.
“How much is built—how much proposed?”
“It’s all built.”
Ilnya scowled; she thought she was being told a lie. “How much does it cost to make the longest ride?”
Paula told her that too.
Ilnya translated it to kopeks. She scowled again.
The buse
s reached the Greenwich Village area of Manhattan.
Not all of this region had been burned. There were women on the street, young girls and babies in the parks, women running stores, women driving cars and trucks.
“Rather nice houses,” said one Soviet woman.
“These right here happen to be where working people live,” Paula said. “Would you like to see inside them?”
The Russians picked a block of identical houses. The nature of the visit was swiftly explained to its women tenants. What they then saw had an astonishing effect upon the women from the USSR.
“Imagine!” one chattered afterward. “The husband merely drove a truck. The wife is not employed at anything but the raising of babies. And they have beds with springs! Irons which electricity heats! A stove of gas, without coal or wood to carry! An electrical machine to clean the rugs! Two kinds of water in pipes, the hot and the cold.
And many things the use of which I do not know and cannot imagine, but all very complex! Eight different dresses for the woman! Nine pants and eight coats, the man!
Clothes for twenty babies and children, where they have three! A radio, even, and she says, unless the interpreter lies, they were soon to buy television, radio pictures! It is fantastic!”
Paula hid a capitalistic grin. . . .
It went on until the early hours of morning.
The Park Plaza did not greatly impress the visitors. They assumed it to be the lair of plutocrats. However, when they were shown scores of hotels equally luxurious, one woman asked, “How many capitalists do you have?”
Most stores, of course, had been burned or looted. What was left, what nobody wanted or had stolen, still enormously impressed the women. They began to believe accounts given them of what the stores had once contained, the quantities, the quality, and the prices.
Toward evening, Ilnya confided to Paula, “We have much to learn. And in some things we have been misinformed.”
“What you ought to see,” Paula answered, “is how it looked before the catastrophe. You ought to see, also, how our farmers live, and our miners, and the rest.
There is poverty—sure—”
“In the Soviet,” Ilnya sighed, “all are poor.”
“I know. Except the Politburo. Artists and writers. Politicians.
Commissars. The bosses. All are poor. Here—well—if you will stay—”
“I will stay,” Ilnya answered, “until I am satisfied we have the facts. After all, the NDVK has vanished. So who will punish us for staying? We Russian women felt we should carry out what we could of the Plan. The police we have not yet reshaped. Perhaps it is just as well. I would like a dress such as the one you wear.”
“Nothing,” Paula said, not truthfully, “could be easier!”
The Russian women were even more astonished, almost embarrassed, to be assigned individual rooms. Paula had a feeling that they would feel lonesome—a feeling verified by the fact that the shore party spent more time grouped in the corridors than in their private quarters.
While she changed for dinner, Paula had another visit from Mrs. Altbee, who entered looking triumphant and made a circle with her thumb and forefinger. “When I think how scared I was this morning—!”
“Me, too.”
The President was amazed. “You were?”
“Poor things! Sure, I was scared. Everybody is—of Russians.
But they’re just women, kind of nice women, with a few nutty ideas.”
“They show an aptitude for conversion.”
“We’ll try to keep ‘em ashore overnight. The longer they stay, the more they’ll see. The more they see the more ground Lenin loses. It would be a good idea to scare up clothes for them. It would be another good idea to get together all the hairdressers we can find and open all the beauty parlors around here that are intact and treat the officials and officers and the crew to a complete going-over. We should find more and better presents for the banquet—”
Mrs. Altbee nodded. “What about jewelry? I could collect quite a lot of that before the evening is over. Sending around to women I know.”
Paula shook her head. “I doubt if they’d be much interested in jewels. Plans for a bulldozer would be more like it, or one dozen traveling cranes, or perhaps just a nice assortment of vacuum cleaners. I don’t know for sure, but apparently they haven’t got a single one of them over there. Did you notice the way the naval officers ran them—
cleaned that truck driver’s carpets?”
“I did,” Mrs. Altbee replied. “And I also gathered there are plenty of Russian women who can do lots of the things we can’t. Like run city water chlorination units and inspect sewers and service power plants and pour concrete. What would you think of my making a proposal tonight to exchange goods and people?”
“I think it would be fine.” Paula gave her hair a last touch. . . .
It was three in the morning. . . .
With Ilnya, after an exhausting and scary climb by flashlight, Paula stood at the top of the Empire State Building. The night was clear and there was moon enough to give some concept of the size of the wrecked metropolis at their feet. They talked, their words ignored by the half dozen women who had accompanied them on the climb.
“It will be difficult,” Ilnya sighed, “to explain at home the real facts.”
“Not very. For one thing, we’ll send you back with a shipload of books and magazines and movie reels.”
“And machines?”
“And machines,” Paula nodded. “And you’ll send us technical experts—”
“—who will be ordered to learn English as of the day they are ordered to duty.”
“Why order them? Why not ask for volunteers?”
A grim, faint smile was visible on the Russian’s face. “Because they would all volunteer.”
There was a pause. Ilnya stared into the night and shook her head.
“Then,” Paula said, “call for volunteers and pick from them. After all, it’s fairer.”
“A funny word you use so often! ‘Fairer’! What is fair? To lose all the men until we can learn to fertilize the female artificially?”
“You think you can?”
“Why not? Soviet science can do anything!”
“American science, though it hasn’t tried much yet to crack that problem, thinks the chances of synthetic human fertilization are pretty slim. And might produce only girls.”
Ilnya shrugged. “To us, what matter? My husband was a general of the Red Army. I had three sons. Two daughters. Fifteen lovers, maybe twenty, who knows?
Soldiers are away a lot. You had lovers?”
Paula didn’t answer.
“Yes?” The Russian insisted. “Oh—no? No, I see. You are timid in strange ways, you Americans.”
“I had them,” Paula replied quietly.
Impetuously, then, in the gloom, on the forbidding tower, Ilnya leaned and kissed Paula. “I like you,” she said. “I trust you. You tell the truth. It is sad, yes? We shall have no more lovers and no more husbands. Nothing.” Her deep voice fell lower still and abruptly she began to sing a love song which, like most Russian songs, was melancholy.
The Russians among the women behind her joined in and the notes swept across the great, destitute city. The American city.
We’ve found peace, Paula thought, and sisterhood, too late for brotherhood.
What’s happened?
Where is this turning planet taking us?
What are we still here for? Was there any reason behind the vanishing of our men?
She joined falteringly in the song. She felt Ilnya’s muscular arm come lightly to rest on her shoulders. She put an arm around the Russian woman.
If we can get the world going again, Paula thought . . . if the women can create a really effective government . . . if they can learn all that they were not allowed to know and neglected even to wonder about . . . and if friendship of all the women on earth can be made real . . . then perhaps some laboratory worker will find a way to
start babies in us and even to produce boy babies, and by the time we are old and they are mature . . .
humanity may be worthy of two sexes.
With that thought, fierce and impellent, came homesickness.
It was as if home had bells and she could hear them ringing, calling . . . had its own particular perfume and above the harsh odor of ashes she could sense that distant sweetness . . . or as if Bill was walking in the house and on the lawn but she, a deserter, was not there to join him.
“I am nostalgic,” said Ilnya.
“Me too.”
“But you will soon be at home. I will stay here, I think. So much to learn! To do!
Your mission is finished. Mine begins.”
11
IN WHICH CERTAIN FURTHER CHANGES ARE ENCOUNTERED.
Gaunt drove into Miami. It had rained in the early morning. His tires churned through puddles and marred their surfaces. Behind him the water stirred, settled and again mirrored green palm fronds, scarlet and yellow flowers, the blue sky. It was hot.
Vines draped the empty lots on Brickell Avenue, vines which sagged from tree to tree like camouflage nets. Clusters of heavy blossoms hung on long stems in the dark shade of the vines.
To his surprise, the drawbridge was lifted. He stopped. After a time another car stopped also. The man in it looked at Gaunt and Gaunt looked at the man. They did not know each other. They watched the ship, a small one, putting out to sea. It was the kind of vessel that had traded in the Bahamas and Gaunt wondered idly about conditions in those nearby islands. The ship clanked into the channel; the bridge closed with a series of unsure, quivering descents. Gaunt drove over it and into an untended parking yard where, months before, boys had hustled the myriad cars away and an hourly charge had been made. It was free now, and no boys worked in the sunshine. Perhaps fifty cars stood haphazardly where there was room for a thousand.
Some stores were open. Above most of them, newly painted signs indicated what sort of credit numbers and ration ticket colors were required of patrons. Men walked on the street. Men and boys leaned in shady places against trees or sat on lawns and curbs; a frustrated and desultory look showed in every eye.