Who's on First (23 page)

“They said yes.”

“All right, Vadim. Details. Details. Details.”

“Very well, Julian. I tell you this because I have sworn great love for America. I am telling you something I should not be telling you
until tomorrow night
.”

“What happens tomorrow night?”

Vadim looked instinctively at his watch. “By tomorrow night, two things happen. If by three
P.M.
eastern daylight time the Russian freighter leaves the American port with the Van de Graaff, Viktor and Tamara will be on the eleven
P.M.
Moscow-time nonstop SAS flight, Moscow to Stockholm.”

Blackford was unbelieving. “But you tell me this tonight. When there is still time to stop the freighter, wherever it is.” A test, he thought suddenly: “Where is it?”

The reply was instantaneous. “Portsmouth, New Hampshire.”

“What is its name?”

“The
Mechta
.”

“When is the Van de Graaff scheduled to load?”

“Tomorrow, about noon.”

It was fatally clear to Blackford. Vadim had, calmly, handed Blackford the hand grenade. If it went off, Viktor would die. Vadim had left it to Blackford to decide whether to act now, or wait twenty-four hours, when it would be too late to stop the shipment.

“What do you
expect
me to do, Platov? I'm not the goddam U.S. Government. I'm not even God! I only work here. We mounted a huge operation, at tremendous risk, to capture the headlines, restore morale, and reassure the whole tired, sick, hopeless world that we're
still
number one, and cheer them and give them hope. We succeeded. Or we think we're on the way to succeeding. Now you're asking
me
to lie low—”

“Only for twenty-four hours.”

“—to lie low and risk the whole shebang, possibly the lives of millions. In order to save the life of one Russian.”

“Viktor is more than one Russian.”

“Why?”—Blackford almost shouted it out.

“He is, first of all, Viktor Kapitsa, the gentlest man of science ever born. Second, he is,” and it was Vadim's turn to raise his voice, “
the man who gave you the Russian secrets you desperately needed
.”

“Vadim, Vadim, look. My experience with Viktor was over three days, in a comfortable villa. Yours was over eight years, in hell. Even in three days I came to know that Viktor—and Tamara—were special. And my whole point about the operation is really the same as yours.
Viktor
gave us what we wanted. But the fact that
he
gave it to us shouldn't mean that it's suddenly valueless! Shouldn't mean that there was
no point
in our breaking our ass to get it. What you're asking is that we reverse the
whole business
. To spare Viktor's life. But we
risked
Viktor's life in the first place—and he was willing to do it. The logic is airtight. Viktor cooperated with us, he
gave
us what we wanted because
he knew
it was important for us to have it. For us, now, to give it back is to undo not only our own thinking but also Viktor's thinking.
Don't you follow me?
”

“You speak like a lawyer.”

“No. I don't. I speak like a goddam philosopher. A transideological philosopher. It was Trotsky who said, ‘Who says A must say B.' Viktor said A. Tell me: Why didn't Viktor defect?”

“Because, he told me, he does not think he could live outside Russia. I understand that feeling also. Sometimes I am so miserable with homesickness.”

Blackford said nothing. How did what Vadim said change the bargain? Viktor's life in return for: the first satellite?

Vadim spoke again. “I need not tell you, Blackford, that I would kill myself before telling to anybody that I visited you tonight. I had to tell you, because my conscience it is not big enough for the heavy load. Tomorrow night I will telephone to confess. I will telephone to the Director. I will tell him—unless you interrupt my plans—that it is—done. By then, Viktor will be flying to Stockholm. He—after he reports to the President—they—will have to decide themselves whether—
Mechta
reaches Sebastopol.”

“Where are you staying, Vadim?”

“I am going to drive back to my house tonight.”

“It's one in the morning, and you live on the Hudson.”

“I will not sleep until eleven
P.M
., Moscow time, tomorrow. If you send the police to stop the shipment, why do I need to be here to know about it? I will be in my house maybe at noon, maybe earlier.”

Vadim got up and, dejectedly, walked toward the door. He reached for Blackford's hand perfunctorily, and then he broke down, his arms around the taller man, sobbing, his whole frame shaking. Blackford returned the embrace, and said soothingly, again and again, “I'll see, Vadim, I'll see, Vadim. I'll see.…”

The following day, September 10, at ten in the morning, on the ground floor of an office building in a suburb of Boston, a trim middle-aged man wearing a double-breasted suit, an unsullied raincoat, and a brown fedora, and carrying a slim leather briefcase, scanned the directory, and then entered the elevator, depressing the ninth-floor knob. He went to 912, on the entrance pane of which was lettered,
High Voltage Engineering Corporation
. He presented his card to the receptionist, who excused herself, and presently beckoned him to follow her to the office of Mr. Arrowsmith.

Arrowsmith rose, and extended his hand. “So nice to see you, Mr. Gautier. Can I take your coat?”

Gautier allowed the comptroller to remove it. He sat down opposite the desk, and opened his briefcase. He spoke with a French accent.

“I have here, Monsieur Arrowsmith, as we arranged over the telephone yesterday, a certified check in the amount of $210,000 drawn on the Bank of Montreal, for your unit, which I understand you can make available to me immediately at your warehouse?”

“Yes, indeed. It is assembled. The technicians worked on it late into the night. I am delighted your company has found use for it. It is a very versatile machine. I believe we have three units in operation in Canada, so yours will hardly be the first!”

“Indeed. But we hope our products will be the best … in the whole world.”

“What exactly does your company produce, if I may ask, Mr. Gautier?”

“I shall be very happy to send you our literature. Perhaps—who knows—you will one of these days be purchasing something from us?”

“Who knows, indeed, who knows,” said Arrow-smith, writing out a receipt. “Young John from this office will take you to the warehouse. You have your own van, you said?”

“It is waiting outside.”

“Fine, then—here's your receipt.” He rang a buzzer, and an ill-kempt, fat seventeen-year-old, chewing gum, came in. “This is my son John. John, Monsieur Gautier from Canada. You're to show him the way to the warehouse. Give this”—he handed a slip to John—“to Phil Kemp. He'll take it from there.” Mr. Arrowsmith looked at the large clock on the wall. “I figure you should be back in the office not later than eleven, John.” Gautier looked aside rather than appear to take notice of an exercise in paternal discipline. “Good-bye, Monsieur Gautier. Or is there anything else I can do for you while you're in Burlington?”

“Thank you, no. I'll carry my raincoat. Thank you, and good-bye.”

An hour later the van was loaded. It required six men to ease the cumbersome machine into it. The foreman, Phil Kemp, handed a bulky work manual to Gautier. “Sorry we don't have one of these in French.”

“No problem,” Gautier said. “Our people can handle English without any trouble.”

“Okay, then, good luck with it.”

They shook hands.

Two hours later the van was at the wharf in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where the ship was docked. The men and hauling machines were ready. It was the work of forty-five minutes to remove the Van de Graaff unit to the loading platform, lift it up over the deck, lower it into the belly of the ship, and secure it. By three in the afternoon, the snap of autumn in the air coming in with a fresh northeasterly, the freighter was cleared by the harbormaster to leave the port. Promptly the Russian freighter
Mechta
loosened its dock lines and set out on the planned fourteen-day passage to Sebastopol.

28

“Mr. President, might I make a procedural suggestion?”

The President glowered, but said nothing. That meant yes.

“It's just this. The question what to do with Serge, or what to do
to
him, we can take as long as we want to decide. He's not going anyplace. He's desperate, all right, but if there's any extreme we could classify as possible, it's that he might commit suicide, as an act of repentance. Or more properly, atonement. After all, he told
me
what he did. And Serge is solely responsible. If he didn't have a troubled conscience, we wouldn't know now that the Van de Graaff is on its way to Russia. The point is, he's not going to leave that little house of his on the Hudson. He's not going to fly the coop. So if your instructions are to throw the book at him, we can do that—tomorrow, a week from tomorrow, or a month from tomorrow. There's only one question on a short fuse, and that is: Do we, or don't we, stop the
Mechta?
”

The President, having expressed himself vigorously on Communists, defectors, scientists, intelligence services, counterintelligence services, defective security, and general brainlessness, was suddenly: the commander in chief. He turned to the Secretary of State:

“On a scale of zero to one hundred”—it was one of the President's favorite formulations, and everyone in the Situation Room—the Secretary, the Director, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the chief of Naval Operations, the national security advisor—had heard him use it again and again: “on that scale, where would you put a satellite launch by the Soviet Union ahead of one by our own people?”

“I would put it, Mr. President, at one hundred. I can't think of a single accomplishment by the Soviet Union with greater potential impact. To travel, in the public memory, in one year, from the country that gunned down Hungarian students to the country that launched a space program, with the obvious implications this has of a military nature, is an exercise in self-transformation. The neutralists arrange their moral priorities with their eye on power. That is my judgment of the matter.”

The President turned to his national security advisor. “You agree, Bob?”

“Yes, I do. Even though I assume within one year we would overtake them. The legend is that all important Soviet scientific postwar achievements—the atom bomb, the hydrogen bomb, the whole works—are derivative. In a way, that's true. But Tsiolkovsky, the major theorist of rocket flight, was after all a Russian. The point is they've developed a forward inertia, and a space satellite would give it explosive credibility, shifting world opinion, critically, in the neutralist world especially. I have here something written by Whittaker Chambers after the Russian ICBM tests were announced a couple of weeks ago. Listen to one sentence: ‘Before this illimitable prospect'—he's talking about Russian scientific advances in missiles—‘humility of mind might seem the beginning of reality of mind. As starter, we might first disabuse ourselves of that comforting, but, in the end, self-defeating notion that Russian science, or even the Communist mind in general, hangs from treetops by its tail.'”

“Hm. That feller can sure write. Why don't we get him to work up some speeches for me? Talk to Nixon about that, Bob. Yeah, I see your point. Now answer me something else: If we stop the
Mechta,
how long do you suppose it would be before they got themselves another one of those machines? I take it there are three hundred or whatever around, and that they're not even on the banned-export list—nobody at Commerce was told about the sensitivity of the goddam thing—”

“Mr. President,” the Director said gently but firmly, “we didn't want to advertise in any way that it had a potential security value …”

“Yeah, yeah. There's always a
reason
. But back to the question: Suppose we clamped a security ban on export, and regulated production and sales, how long would we hold 'em up?”

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs spoke up. “We've looked into that question, sir, and it's hard to say. We figure to go with our launch in January. If we could hold the Russians three-four months, that would make the difference. They're not likely to find an alternative to the E-Beam Van de Graaff system—”

“Don't get scientific with me, Nate.”

“Sorry, sir. I mean, they're not likely to find another way around the problem they've got left. They know now the
existence
of the machine. Allen will have the exact location of every unit by noon tomorrow, as I understand it. With three hundred of them sitting around, a total of eight abroad, the best we could hope for is keeping them out of Russia for six months or so.”

“Six months would do it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So what you're all saying boils down to this: If we stop the
Mechta, we'll
launch the first satellite. Is there a simpler way of saying it? The Washington
Post
is always saying I'm a simpleton, which I may be, if it takes a simpleton to understand that if the Washington
Post
was running the country we'd be broke, invaded, or both, in six months. Make that eight months. Anyway, is that too simple a way to put it?”

There was silence in the room.

“Okay, now if we decided to pull her in … Where is she right now, Arleigh?”

The chief of Naval Operations replied:

“At 1700, the
Mechta
was 450 miles east of Portsmouth, on a course of 075 degrees, leaving her, as it happens, exactly 2,500 miles from Gibraltar. She's traveling at sixteen knots, 384 miles per day, so she would reach Gibraltar in the early morning of the eighteenth.”