Red Plenty

by Francis Spufford

  ‘Hello, Frenchie,’ he says. ‘Is Himself available?’

  Immediately she wiggles out from behind the desk and click-clacks across in her heels to open the big door for him. She is not thin and she fills the whole of her knee-length skirt. As Mr Kiev (or is it Mr Volodyavostok) steps deftly through the slot of daylight she’s summoned, he whispers something that makes her giggle and drops a casually proprietorial hand onto her round behind. The simper hasn’t quite left her face as she pulls the door to again, but it vanishes when she sees the direction of Lebedev’s haggard gaze. Though as gazes go, this one is virtually abstract, there being so little left in him to respond to such things.

  ‘Hmph,’ she says. Not for you.

  ‘Are you French, then?’ asks Lebedev. She only glowers.

  *

  Another lung cell. There is a way for a blob of goo to cause a ras mutation that persists. The gummy electron-seeking missile has to arrive, and glue G into C in the exact right place, at the exact right moment in the life of the cell when for once the enzyme cannot compare ras to its negative. That is, when the lung cell is already busy dividing into two lung cells. The goo floats in, and finds inside the nucleus a double helix which has been unzipped into two separate strands, each of which is going to grow back into a complete copy of the genome. Of all the random blobs of goo in the random rainstorm, here comes the blob that suckers onto Chromosome 11 in the position to create the always-on version of ras, just as the unzipped halves of Chromosome 11 are waving loose. It’s too late for the editorial enzyme: there’s nothing to correct the mutant C against. Along the strand instead travels a polymerase, a construction enzyme, steadily building out the other half of a new double helix. And when it reaches the C, it obligingly supplies a new counterpart for the other side which is a match, which is a perfect opposite. The corrupted code has reproduced itself. After a while, there are two sets of completed chromosome pairs in the nleus. They pull away from each other. The nucleus stretches, puckers out like dumb-bells, splits into two as well. Last the outside wall of the cell repeats the split, stretching and pulling and puckering back into a pair of separate fatty spheres. One contains ras in its original uncorrupted form, but beside it Lebedev now has a new lung cell with ras switched on in it forever. And immediately ras takes charge of the cellular machinery and starts the build-up to superfast cell multiplication. A cell running ras full-time won’t co-operate with nearby cells in any other task. It isn’t interested, for example, in being part of a lung. Binary at last, it only wants to become two cells, four cells, eight sixteen thirty-two –

  But it’s all right. The body is used to occasional runaway accidents with ras. It has one last defence mechanism. As ras goes crazy, another gene, away over on Chromosome 17, detects the molecular signature of the build-up and neatly, swiftly, initiates cell suicide. The cell dies. With it goes the mutant ras.

  This has happened thousands of times.

  *

  What is the tactful, the effective way of announcing that your life’s work has been wasted?

  On 18 December last year Lebedev sat in a meeting at Minradioprom, the Ministry of Radio Production, and heard the assembled bigwigs of government and the Academy talk themselves into destroying the Soviet computer industry. That wasn’t quite how they put it, of course. The question was what model of machine to develop for the Unified System which was supposed to manage the economy in the 1970s. On the one side lay the possibility of designing their own standardised range of next-generation mainframes. On the other was a proposal to copy the family of machines which were the standard commercial solution in the West, the IBM 360 series. Everyone at the meeting paid compliments to homegrown Soviet technology, but they had talked about it, most of them, as the risky option. They were charmed by the safety of choosing an existing product with existing, well-established software. And so they had gone with safe, despite all he could do.

  But safe was an illusion. He had tried and tried and yet somehow failed to convey the simple truth that, if they chose IBM, they would not, in fact, get IBM machines. They would not get IBM software. They would not get IBM reliability. These things were not available for delivery to the Soviet Union. They would be committing themselves, instead, to reverse-engineering the IBM 360 in the dark, with limited documentation and no original model of a 360 to dismantle. It would take years. And the 360 had been introduced in 1965! It was half a decade old before the effort to copy it even began. So they would be condemning themselves not just to imitation, but to perpetual obsolescence as well. They’d be forever chasing the prospect of doing what the Americans had already done, years and years before. Oh, there would still be the special military machines to build, to guide the smashing of atoms and the launching of cosmonauts, but there’d be no general flowering. There’d be no more of the contest between the design bureaus which had kept the Institute for Precision Mechanics racing for processing speed against the Institute of Electronic Control Machines and the Institute of Cybernetics and SKB-245. There’d be no more glorious eccentricities, like Brusentsov’s trinary processor at the University of Moscow, the only one in the world to explore three-state electronics. There’d be no pushing outward at the frontier of the achievable. There’d be no design any more, properly considered; just slow, disconsolate copying.

  Only a fool would choose safety on these terms. Surely Kosygin can be brought to see it? Tactfully. Effectively. ‘Minister –’ But Lebedev has begun to sag. He peers at his watch in the gloom. It’s hours, now, that he’s been waiting here in the labyrinth. Bone ache is being joined by a fever that rises up through his emaciated body like hot mist. There’s a film of damp on his forehead and things inside his mind are losing their clarity and starting to melt into each other.

  *

  Another lung cell. Chance upon chance upon chance upon chance. Of all the billions of cells in Lebedev’s lungs, there will be some millions where the diol epoxide gum from his cigarettes stuck itself, not to ras, but to the gene on Chromosome 17 that initiates emergency cell suicide; and of those millions there will be some thousands where the crucial blob blew in just in time to land on a strand of DNA in the midst of cell division, and got itself copied. So, scattered here and there through the billions of cells whose little bulging windows of fat face the channels of the lung, there are some thousands, randomly distributed, where the suicide gene on Chromosome 17, later to be called P53, isn’t working. Here’s one of them. And into it, after fifty years of delicious Kazbek smoke, there flies one more random molecule of goo, and it travels straight to ras to scramble the vital G into C, and it arrives just in time, too, to evade the editorial enzyme and get copied into a new cell.

  And it’s not all right. The new cell with mutant ras in charge of it is a tumour unbound, freed from the body’s safety systems to multiply and multiply, unstoppably, selfishly, altogether indifferent to its effect on Lebedev’s lung, and on Lebedev.

  This only has to happen once.

  *

  Lebedev starts to cough again and this time he can’t stop. There’s no far side to it, no end to it; it’s like putting out an arm to balance yourself and finding there’s no wall to lean on any more. He tumbles down and down into the cough. It’s all mucus in there, no air, no air, and he can’t bring up the lump of noxious matter that’s blocked his passages and he can’t get out of the struggle to shift it either. He’s choking. His ears roar. His vision pocks with little breeding asterisks of light, coagulated across the dim sfumato of the corridor. His head drops between his knees. Hack. Hack. Hack. Panic, and beyond panic to the threshold of a dizzy indifference. Then the obstruction comes free, drops out as a vile, metallic mouthful. Shaky-handed wiping; spitting; wiping.

  ‘Comrade?’

  His vision clears to darkness. She’s standing over him, holding out her water glass, glaring at him with reluctant pity.

  ‘You should go home,’ she says.

  ‘I’ll wait,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t matter how long.’
<
br />   ‘No,’ she says, ‘you should go home. Don’t you understand?’

  *

  The effects of carcinoma in a major airway include shortness of breath, weight loss, bone pain, chest and abdominal pain, hoarseness, difficulty swallowing and chronic coughing. Metastasis to spine, liver and brain is common: further symptoms may then include muscle weakness, impotence, slurred speech, difficulty walking, loss of fine motor co-ordination, dementia and seizures. Radiotherapy is of limited effectiveness. Fluid build-up behind the lung obstruction eventually leads to pneumonia and death.

  This, unfortunately, is certain.

  Notes – VI.1 The Unified System, 1970

  1 A cell. A lung cell: the molecular biology of this chapter is accurate as far as it goes, and I am assured that the dwindling probabilities of the molecular events in it are at least of the right orders of magnitude. But it should be remembered that the chapter only follows one possible route by which one toxin in tobacco smoke can induce one variety of lung cancer. There are many other routes, other toxins, and other cancers, so a realistic path towards carcinogenesis would be much less linear than the simple illustrative zoom I have selected here. It would trace its way in massive parallel through a massively forking labyrinth of probabilities. I drew heavily on – inhaled heavily from – Theodora R. Devereux, Jack A. Taylor and J. Carl Barrett, ‘Molecular Mechanisms of Lung Cancer: Interaction of Environmental and Genetic Factors’, Chest 1996, 109; 14–19; and on Stephen S. Hecht, ‘Tobacco carcinogens, their biomarkers and tobacco-induced cancer’, Nature Reviews Cancer 3, October 2003, pp. 733–44. I am also indebted to Dr Claerwen James for enlightenment via conversation and email.

  2 Lebedev has smoked sixty unfiltered Kazbek a day for fifty years: I’m making up the specific numbers, but he’s known to have been a persistently heavy smoker. See Malinovsky, Pioneers of Soviet Computing, p. 26.

  3 Hero of Socialist Labour, Order of the Red Banner of Labour, two Orders of Lenin: Lebedev’s authentic ironmongery. The Orders of Lenin are the biggest deal. For the fringe benefits of the various Soviet medals, see the Wikipedia entries for each.

  4 As the joke says, if a crocodile ate him: authentic. See, again, Graham, A Cultural Analysis of the Russo-Soviet Anekdot.

  5 ‘The Minister does know I’m waiting, doesn’t he?’ says Lebedev: this scene, up at the macro scale of the dark corridor in the Kremlin, is a fantasia generated from the single true fact (for which see Malinovsky, Pioneers of Soviet Computing, p. 26) that Lebedev did drag himself to a meeting with Kosygin in 1970, when he had a ‘life-threatening pulmonary illness’, to remonstrate about the decision in December 1969 to abandon independent Soviet computer design in favour of trailing after IBM, years late; and Kosygin did refuse to see him. But in life, the palming-off took the form of an unsatisfactory encounter with one of Kosygin’s deputies, not the complete stonewalling that happens here, and no doubt it happened in bright daylight.

  6 And the ignorance is particularly bad in the Soviet Union: for a sense of what Soviet medicine did know, clinically, about cancer in the mid-sixties, see the vivid descriptions of diagnosis and radiotherapy in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s banned Cancer Ward, translated by Nicholas Bethell and David Burg (London Bodley Head, 1968).

  7 On 18 December last year Lebedev sat in a meeting at Minradioprom: Malinovsky has a partial transcript of the discussion at this crucial meeting, which was complicated by political rivalries between different bureaux which stood to lose or gain depending which way the decision went, and by the fact that Lebedev and his allies’ proposal to maintain native Soviet design capability came with a secondary plan to cooperate with ICL in Britain. See Pioneers of Soviet Computing, pp. 130–2. For the IBM-modelled ‘Unified System’ as it actually inched into existence in the 1970s, late at every stage, see N.C.Davis and S.E.Goodman, ‘The Soviet Bloc’s Unified System of Computers’, Computing Surveys vol. 10 no. 2 (June 1978), pp. 93–122.

  8 Brusentsov’s trinary processor at the University of Moscow: see Malinovsky, Pioneers of Soviet Computing, pp. 134–8.

  9 Fluid build-up behind the lung obstruction eventually leads to pneumonia and death: despite the tone of clinical certainty here, I do not know what kind of carcinoma Sergei Lebedev contracted, or even for sure that his ‘serious lung disease’ was cancer, though it seems overwhelmingly likely. But he did die of it, whatever it was, in July 1974; the fuzzy undesigned probabilistic machinery of his body did, in one fashion or another, generate the deterministic process required to shift him, conclusively, from 1 to 0.

  2.

  Police in the Forest, 1968

  ‘Mama? Listen to this,’ said Max, whose book was propped against the jar of rowanberry preserve on his side of the breakfast table. Max was only normally clever at algebra; he was not especially good at playing chess; he did not crave the use of telescopes or gaze hungrily at the Computer Centre, like some of Akademgorodok’s children. What Max liked was to read, and read, and read, anything he could get his hands on, from nonsense poetry to adventure stories, but particularly anything that was dense and spiky and gave him something to chew over. You could never give him a better present than a book. He laughed at adult jokes she didn’t think he ought to be able to see just yet, sudden deep chuckles that seemed to conjure up close – too close, too sudden – the man he’d be, a man who, if he was going to be extremely good at anything, was going to be extremely good at words. It was a worry. This was a wonderful place to grow up if you were a budding physicist, but where was a good place for a budding poet? Were there any? He might at least be better off back in Leningrad. There was a thought to hold onto: something he might conceivably gain, her little hostage, dragged around by her decisions, if today went as she expected it would.

  ‘Mama?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m just getting to the end of this science-fiction book, and they’re at a kind of place that gives wishes, like a genie, only it’s alien technology, and it’s very dangerous? And there’s a silly man and a tough man, and the silly man rushes forward, and he makes this kind of enormous wish for everybody in the whole world to be happy, but the alien thing squishes him instead. And I was wondering, if it’s supposed to be a kind of a – a kind of a –’

  ‘A metaphor?’

  ‘Yes? I mean a sort of a sideways picture. You know. Of here.’

  ‘Show me.’ Zoya licked her fingers, and Max passed her the book over the black bread and the yoghurt. Happiness for everybody, she read where Max’s finger was pointing. Free! As much as you want! Nobody will leave unsatisfied! And then he was suddenly silent, as though a huge fist had punched him in the mouth. She flipped it over to look at the spine. Roadside Picnic. Well, well.

  ‘Maybe it’s a coincidence,’ said Max.

  ‘No it isn’t,’ she said. ‘It’s the author being clever, like you. Right; come on, then, Mr Literature. Hop skip. Time for us to get moving.’

  By the front door of the flat Max gave his usual, resigned demonstration that his satchel contained homework workbook textbook pencils. At ten he mislaid objects with such spectacular facility that it was as if all bags and pockets he had anything to do with connected to secret exits from the workaday cosmos; he had taken to spreading his hands and raising his eyebrows when things vanished, acting out the bemused shtick of a stage magician, and she doubted that his class teacher found it very charming. She pulled her coat on over her labcoat and they wrapped themselves up in scarves and gloves and woolly hats. It was the end of winter, but still around fifteen below zero outside, dry Siberian cold.

  Tereshkova Street was churned to a hard black chaos like the surface of a filthy sea. Better to take the route to Max’s school behind and between the apartment buildings, on the snowy paths under the trees. It was old snow now, creaking and snapping underfoot as they stepped through its crust. The sky was slaty-dark. From the block ahead and to the left, a column of white was still rising from the window of the apartment where a desperate tenant had cracked open
the communal steam-pipe to get some heat. Their breaths rose in smaller columns. Max’s nose sharpened to a bright pink point. A flight of computer programmers went by on cross-country skis, flick flick, flick flick, between the black uprights of the pines. Across the crunching expanse of Morskoi Prospekt, where the next grade up of apartment buildings glowed oxblood and ochre in the gloom, and the boxed-in wooden balconies twinkled with lights like harem windows in the Arabian Nights. Uphill towards the Presidium a blood-orange of a sun was just hoisting itself above the horizon: downhill, in the direction of the Ob Sea, you could hardly see anything in the darkness. The beach was for skating in winter, if you were hardy enough, and for hooking river-fish through holes sawed in the ice.

  School 21 lay in the town’s grandest zone, among the Academicians’ houses. Here the sidewalks were swept, and they joined a steadily increasing traffic of other kids with satchels, trudging along. She was the only parent, so far as she could see. Max too had been taking himself to school these last couple of years, but on this particular day she wanted to walk him right to the gate, and actually watch him go in, under the wretched centennnial banner of Lenin blessing the children.

  ‘Max –’ she said.

  ‘Hey, that professor you used to dance with is waving to you.’

  She looked across the street and there, to be sur was Leonid Vitalevich, climbing out of his green Volga and flapping an affable hand. In anyone else, this would represent a very public declaration of solidarity, under the circumstances, but with Leonid Vitalevich, you could never tell what he had noticed, or chosen to notice. This was the man who, they said, had tried to pose a mathematical problem to each of the candidates when his institute was deciding who to nominate to the Academy; genuinely not realising, so they said, that the fix was in from the outset. He had always been very pleasant to Zoya, though it was a while now since there had been one of the old interdisciplinary seminars. Cybernetics was not the meeting ground it used to be. She smiled and waved back; but Leonid Vitalevich must have put his foot on a slippery patch because, ba-boomp, down he went into a heap of black coat and splayed legs. A crumpled old crow, with its feathers on end. His driver hurried round to pick him up and helped him away up the path to the Academicians’ club.