Short Fiction by Mack Reynolds (ready to read books .TXT) 📕

At the office, later, Catherina grinned at him and made a face. She ticked it off on her fingers. “Riesling, barack, smoked black beer, and borovika gin⁠—we should have know better.”

He went along with her, putting one hand to his forehead. “We should have stuck to vodka.”

“Well,” she said, “tonight we can be virtuous. An intellectual evening, rather than a carouse.”

Actually, she didn’t look at all the worse for wear. Evidently, Catherina Panova was still young enough that she could pub crawl all night, and still look fresh and alert in the morning. His own mouth felt lined with improperly tanned suede.

He was quickly fitting into the routine of the office. Actually, it worked smoothly enough that little effort was demanded of him. The Czech employees handled almost all the details. Evidently, the word of his evening on the town had somehow spread, and the fact that he was prone to a good time had relieved their fears of a martinet sent down from the central offices. They were beginning to relax in his presence.

In fact, they relaxed to the point where one of the girls didn’t even bother to hide the book she was reading during a period where there was a lull in activity. It was Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.

He frowned remembering vaguely the controversy over the book a couple of decades earlier. Ilya Simonov said, “Pasternak. Do they print his works here in Czechoslovakia?”

The girl shrugged and looked at the back of the cover. “German publisher,” she said idly. “Printed in Frankfurt.”

He kept his voice from registering either surprise or disapproval. “You mean such books are imported? By whom?”

“Oh, not imported by an official agency, but we Czechs are doing a good deal more travel than we used to. Business trips, tourist trips, vacations. And, of course, we bring back books you can’t get here.” She shrugged again. “Very common.”

Simonov said blankly. “But the customs. The border police⁠—”

She smiled in a manner that suggested he lacked sophistication. “They never bother any more. They’re human, too.”

Ilya Simonov wandered off. He was astonished at the extent to which controls were slipping in a satellite country. There seemed practically no discipline, in the old sense, at all. He began to see one reason why his superior had sent him here to Prague. For years, most of his work had been either in Moscow or in the newly opened industrial areas in Siberia. He had lost touch with developments in this part of the Soviet Complex.

It came to him that this sort of thing could work like a geometric progression. Give a man a bit of rope one day, and he expects, and takes, twice as much the next, and twice that the next. And as with individuals, so with whole populations.

This was going to have to be stopped soon, or Party control would disappear. Ilya Simonov felt an edge of uncertainty. Nikita Khrushchev should never have made those first motions of liberalization following Stalin’s death. Not if they eventually culminated in this sort of thing.

He and Catherina drove to her meeting place that evening after dinner.

She explained as they went that the group was quite informal, usually meeting at the homes of group members who had fairly large places in the country. She didn’t seem to know how it had originally begun. The meetings had been going on for a year of more before she arrived in Prague. A Czech friend had taken her along one night, and she’d been attending ever since. There were other, similar groups, in town.

“But what’s the purpose of the organization?” Simonov asked her.

She was driving her little air-cushion Moskvich. They crossed over the Vltava River by the Cechuv Bridge and turned right. On the hill above them loomed the fantastically large statue of Stalin which had been raised immediately following the Second War. She grimaced at it, muttered, “I wonder if he was insane from the first.”

He hadn’t understood her change of subject. “How do you mean?” he said.

“Stalin. I wonder how early it was in his career that he went insane.”

This was the second time in the past few days that Ilya Simonov had run into this matter of the former dictator’s mental condition. He said now, “I’ve heard the opinion before. Where did you pick it up?”

“Oh, it’s quite commonly believed in the Western countries.”

“But, have you ever been, ah, West?”

“Oh, from time to time! Berlin, Vienna, Geneva. Even Paris twice, on vacation, you know, and to various conferences. But that’s not what I mean. In the western magazines and newspapers. You can get them here in Prague now. But to get back to your question. There is no particular purpose of the organization.”

She turned the car left on Budenská and sped up into the Holesovice section of town.

The nonchalance of it all was what stopped Ilya Simonov. Here was a Party member calmly discussing whether or not the greatest Russian of them all, after Lenin, had been mad. The implications were, of course, that many of the purges, certainly the latter ones, were the result of the whims of a mental case, that the Soviet Complex had for long years been ruled by a man as unbalanced as Czar Peter the Great.

They pulled up before a rather large house that would have been called a dacha back in Moscow. Evidently, Ilya Simonov decided, whoever was sponsoring this night’s get together, was a man of prominence. He grimaced inwardly. A lot of high placed heads were going to roll before he was through.

It turned out that the host was Leos Dvorak, the internationally famed cinema director and quite an idol of Ilya Simonov in his earlier days when he’d found more time for entertainment. It was a shock to meet the man under these circumstances.

Catherina Panova was obviously quite popular among this gathering. Their host gave her an affectionate squeeze in way of greeting, then shook hands with Simonov when Catherina introduced him.

“Newly from Moscow, eh?” the film director