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

his disk calendar. “Um-m-m. Today the Seven Year Plan is completed.”

Paul snorted.

The Chief said mildly, “Successfully. For all practical purposes, the U.S.S.R. has surpassed us in gross national product.”

“That’s not the way I understand it.”

“Then you make the mistake of believing our propaganda. That’s always a mistake, believing your own propaganda. Worse than believing the other man’s.”

“Our steel capacity is a third again as much as theirs.”

“Yes, and currently, what with our readjustment⁠—remember when they used to call them recessions, or even earlier, depressions⁠—our steel industry is operating at less than sixty percent of capacity. The Soviets always operate at one hundred percent of capacity. They don’t have to worry about whether or not they can sell it. If they produce more steel than they immediately need, they use it to build another steel mill.”

The Chief shook his head. “As long ago as 1958 they began passing us, product by product. Grain, butter, and timber production, jet aircraft, space flight, and coal⁠—”

Paul leaned forward impatiently. “We put out more than three times as many cars, refrigerators, kitchen stoves, washing machines.”

His superior said, “That’s the point. While we were putting the product of our steel mills into automobiles and automatic kitchen equipment, they did without these things and put their steel into more steel mills, more railroads, more factories. We leaned back and took it easy, sneered at their progress, talked a lot about our freedom and liberty to our allies and the neutrals and enjoyed our refrigerators and washing machines until they finally passed us.”

“You sound like a Tass broadcast from Moscow.”

“Um-m-m, I’ve been trying to,” the Chief said. “However, that’s still roughly the situation. The fact that you and I personally, and a couple of hundred million Americans, prefer our cars and such to more steel mills, and prefer our personal freedoms and liberties is beside the point. We should have done less laughing seven years ago and more thinking about today. As things stand, give them a few more years at this pace and every neutral nation in the world is going to fall into their laps.”

“That’s putting it strong, isn’t it?”

“Strong?” the Chief growled disgustedly. “That’s putting it mildly. Even some of our allies are beginning to waver. Eight years ago, India and China both set out to industrialize themselves. Today, China is the third industrial power of the world. Where’s India, about twentieth? Ten years from now China will probably be first. I don’t even allow myself to think where she’ll be twenty-five years from now.”

“The Indians were a bunch of idealistic screwballs.”

“That’s one of the favorite alibis, isn’t it? Actually we, the West, let them down. They couldn’t get underway. The Soviets backed China with everything they could toss in.”

Paul crossed his legs and leaned back. “It seems to me I’ve run into this discussion a few hundred times at cocktail parties.”

The Chief pulled out a drawer and brought forth a king-size box of kitchen matches. He struck one with a thumbnail and peered through tobacco smoke at Paul Koslov as he lit up.

“The point is that the system the Russkies used when they started their first five-year plan back in 1928, and the system used in China, works. If we, with our traditions of freedom and liberty, like it or not, it works. Every citizen of the country is thrown into the grinding mill to increase production. Everybody,” the Chief grinned sourly, “that is, except the party elite, who are running the whole thing. Everybody sacrifices for the sake of the progress of the whole country.”

“I know,” Paul said. “Give me enough time and I’ll find out what this lecture is all about.”

The Chief grunted at him. “The Commies are still in power. If they remain in power and continue to develop the way they’re going, we’ll be through, completely through, in another few years. We’ll be so far behind we’ll be the world’s laughingstock⁠—and everybody else will be on the Soviet bandwagon.”

He seemed to switch subjects. “Ever hear of Somerset Maugham?”

“Sure. I’ve read several of his novels.”

“I was thinking of Maugham the British Agent, rather than Maugham the novelist, but it’s the same man.”

“British agent?”

“Um-m-m. He was sent to Petrograd in 1917 to prevent the Bolshevik revolution. The Germans had sent Lenin and Zinoviev up from Switzerland, where they’d been in exile, by a sealed train in hopes of starting a revolution in Czarist Russia. The point I’m leading to is that in one of his books, The Summing Up, I believe, Maugham mentions in passing that had he got to Petrograd possibly six weeks earlier he thinks he could have done his job successfully.”

Paul looked at him blankly. “What could he have done?”

The Chief shrugged. “It was all out war. The British wanted to keep Russia in the allied ranks so as to divert as many German troops as possible from the Western front. The Germans wanted to eliminate the Russians. Maugham had carte blanche. Anything would have gone. Elements of the British fleet to fight the Bolsheviks, unlimited amounts of money for anything he saw fit from bribery to hiring assassins. What would have happened, for instance, if he could have had Lenin and Trotsky killed?”

Paul said suddenly, “What has all this got to do with me?”

“We’re giving you the job this time.”

“Maugham’s job?” Paul didn’t get it.

“No, the other one. I don’t know who the German was who engineered sending Lenin up to Petrograd, but that’s the equivalent of your job.” He seemed to go off on another bent. “Did you read Djilas’ The New Class about a decade ago?”

“Most of it, as I recall. One of Tito’s top men who turned against the Commies and did quite a job of exposing the so-called classless society.”

“That’s right. I’ve always been surprised that so few people bothered to wonder how Djilas was able to smuggle his book out of one of Tito’s strongest prisons and get it to publishers in the West.”

“Never thought of it,” Paul agreed. “How