Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe

a wish and it was granted.

As of Thursday morning, May 5, the pravda was still that nothing had

happened.

Thursday afternoon the climate abruptly changed. K’s cohorts had at last

decided on a pravda; to wit: an American military plane had attempted to cross the

border of the Soviet Union. Soviet rocket fire had shot it down from an altitude of

60,000 feet as soon as it had crossed the border. The Soviet peoples were very much

distressed that America would even attempt such an act of bald aggression. The

Soviet peoples wanted peace. Such aggression would not be tolerated. Any other such

planes would not only be shot down but the bases from which the attacks were made

would be destroyed. Such was K’s new pravda at the end of a five-hour speech.

The only connection between pravda and fact lay in the existence of an

American plane down on Soviet soil. The locale of the incident shifted 1,500 miles.

The plane is “shot down” at an extremely high altitude (if true then those exhibits

in Gorky Park were as phony as K’s promises of safety to Nagy and Pal Maleter). No

mention at all is made of four long years of humiliating defeat. Pravda suppresses

the truth and turns the incident into a triumph of Soviet arms. The Soviet

newspapers and radio stations, all state-owned, spout the same line. All during this

period the Voice of America was jammed. K. made certain his serfs heard nothing but

the pravda.

We learned it by being ordered-not requested-to report to the Alma Ata

office of the Director of Intour

ist. There we were given a long, very stern, but fatherly, lecture on the aggressive

misbehavior of our government, a lecture that included a careful recital of the U-2

pravda.

Once I understood, I did something no American should ever do in the Soviet

Union. I lost my temper completely. I out-shouted the director on the subject of

American grievances against the Soviet Union. My red-headed wife most ably supported

me by scorching him about Soviet slave labor camps, naming each one by name,

pointing out their location to him on the big map of the Soviet Union which hung

back of his desk, and telling him how many people had died in them- including

Americans.

We stomped out of his office, went to our room and gave way to the shakes. I

had lost my temper and with it my judgment and thereby endangered not merely myself

but my wife. I had forgotten that I was not protected by our Bill of Rights, that I

was not free to bawl out a public official with impunity-that I was more than 2,000

miles from any possible help.

Communism has no concern for the individual. The Soviets have liquidated

some 20 to 30 millions of their own in “building socialism.” They kept after Trotsky

until they got him. They murdered a schoolmate of mine between stations on a train

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in Western Europe and dumped his body. Terror and death are as fixed a part of their

tactics as is distortion of the truth. Their present gang boss is the “liberator” of

Budapest, the “pacifier” of the Ukraine-a comic butcher personally responsible for

the deaths of millions of innocent people.

All this I knew. I knew, too, that our own policies had softened beyond

recognition since the day when Teddy Roosevelt demanded the return of an American

citizen alive-or the man who grabbed him, dead- and made his threat stick. In these

present sorry days no American citizen abroad can count on protection from our State

Department. We have even voluntarily

surrendered our own soldier’s Constitutional rights, drafted and sent willy-nilly to

foreign lands. We still permit the Red Chinese to hold prisoner hundreds of our boys

captured nearly ten years ago in Korea. We do nothing about it. I did have the cold

comfort of knowing that I had behaved as a free man, an American. I cherished the

thought. But I could not honestly pat myself on the back. My anger had been a

reflex, not courage. Pride would not be much to chew on if it had got my wife and