He sighed and helped himself to a cigarette from the pack, then came to join Bratcheslavsky on the cushions piled here and there across the floor, not randomly but with the imprecise symmetry of a Japanese sand-garden.
“But you knew the whole border was heavily beset with patrols. And the farther the frontier zone from a major city and major roads-in North Dakota, for example, where you were heading for-the more it’s likely to be infested with these ‘private’ defence forces. You must have realized thatl”
“Naturally I did.” Savouring the aromatic tobacco, Sheklov let a puff of smoke drift into the updraught from the lamp-Same. Glints of light flashed on its supporting chains.
“And you didn’t try to argue with him? Not at all?”
“I was past the stage of disbelieving-hirn,” Sheklov said after a short pause. “I’d been convinced, long before, that he was possessed of a talent I’d barely dreamed of.”
“And it’s lostl” Bratcheslavsky barked, jumping to his feet in the first access of honest rage Sheklov had ever seen from him. “When I think what use we could have made of him-ach!”
Sheklov remained squatting on his cushions, gazing up at the old man who had been his mentor for so long, seeing him with curiously different eyes. He felt that his mission, brief as it had been, had altered him. Aged him? Yes, possibly it was only that . . . yet he felt it reached
deeper into his personality. He felt not simply that he had crammed a great many years into the space of a few weeks, but also that he’d been educated.
Educated? Enlightened? No, that still wasn’t the precise turn of phrase he was after. He cogitated, and suddenly he had it.
Made more wise.
Yes. Yes, exactly. He had had his entire perspective on the world, the human condition, the universe, turned upside-down-and the new version was no less real than the traditional one. He was in the predicament of a savage shown a mirror for the first time, who has painfully to learn the truth that a man’s right hand reflected in a mirror is his left.
But all that had been present in his mind while he was in Canada, arranging his onward journey to Russia with the aid and connivance, of the company whose representative he had nominally been during his time in the States. So now it had flashed back to his awareness in less than the blink of an eye, and Bratcheslavsky was still talking.
“Not only that, what’s morel Not just a man with a talent we’d give our eye-teeth to controll But very likely Turpin too, who’s been a mainstay of human survival for a quarter of a centuryl”
“But they don’t suspect him of being an agent, do they?” Sheklov demanded. “Only of-uh-contact with subversives!”
“There’s too damned good a chance of his being tried for treason.” Curtly. “The Navy has jumped into the mess with both feet, and every corporation that’s jealous of Energetics General is demanding a chance to take over the defence contracts, and all in all you never saw anything more like the Byzantine Empire in your life! I wouldn’t bet against the possibility of the President being deposed, I swear I wouldn’tl”
..By an Army coup?”
“Yes, of course. It’s inevitable, you know, once you let the armed forces take over key organs of your government. Simply because they can impose rigid discipline on their ‘members, whereas the loose, inchoate mass of the public is uncontrollable, they’re bound to wind up giving the orders. Didn’t we come perilously close to it ourselves a couple of times? And it wasn’t good judgment that saved us, only luckl”
Bratcheslavsky tore the. cigarette from his mouth and gave it a rearing glare; he had bitten completely through its cardboard tube. Tossing it into a sandbowl with an oath. he lit another.
“But surely, even if we do lose Turpin,” Sheklov countered, “this process will bear out what Marxism has always prophesied: the dissolution of the capitalist state into a brutal internal power-struggle. There’ll be so many factions we’ll be able to feed in spies, saboteurs, subversives, anyone we choose. All we’ll have to do is identify those of the competing parties that are prepared to sell out in order to do down their rivals. Ten years, of that; and America will never be a menace to the world again.”