Kurchatov returned a couple of minutes later with another fellow in a white lab coat in tow. Molotov was surprised at how young Max Kagan looked; he couldn’t have been much past thirty. He was a medium-sized man with curly, dark brown hair and intelligent Jewish features.
Kurchatov spoke to Kagan in English, then turned to Molotov. “Comrade Foreign Commissar, I present to you Maksim Lazarovich Kagan, the physicist on loan from the Metallurgical Laboratory project of the United States.”
Kagan stuck out his hand and vigorously pumped Molotov’s. He spoke in voluble English. Kurchatov did the honors: “He says he is pleased to meet you, and that he aims to blow the Lizards to hell and gone. This is an idiom, and means about what you would think.”
“Tell him I share his aspirations and hope they are realized,” Molotov answered. He eyed Kagan and was bemused to find Kagan eyeing him back. Soviet scientists were properly deferential to the man who was second in the USSR only to the General Secretary of the Communist Party. To judge by Kagan’s attitude, he thought Molotov was just another bureaucrat to deal with. In small doses, the attitude was bracing.
Kagan spoke in rapid-fire English, Molotov had no idea what he was saying, but his tone was peremptory. Kurchatov answered hesitantly in the same language. Kagan spoke some more, slamming a fist into an open palm to emphasize his point. Again, Kurchatov’s answer sounded cautious. Kagan threw his hands in the air in obvious disgust.
“Tell me what he is saying,” Molotov said.
“He is complaining about the quality of the equipment here, he is complaining about the food, he is complaining about the NKVD man who accompanies him whenever he goes outside-he attributes to the man unsavory sexual practices of which he can have no personal knowledge.”
“In any case, he has strong opinions,” Molotov remarked, hiding his amusement. “Can you do anything about the equipment of which he complains?”
“No, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” Kurchatov answered. “It is the best available in the USSR.”
“Then he will have to use it and make the best of it,” Molotov said. “As for the others, thiskolkhoz already has better food than most, but we shall see what we can do to improve it. And if he does not want the NKVD man to accompany him, the NKVD man will not do so.”
Kurchatov relayed that to Max Kagan. The American answered at some length. “He will do his best with the equipment, and says he will design better,” Kurchatov translated. “He is on the whole pleased with your other answers.”
“Is that all?” Molotov asked. “It sounded like more. Tell me exactly what he said.”
“Very well, Comrade Foreign Commissar.” Igor Kurchatov spoke with a certain sardonic relish: “He said that, since I was in charge of this project, I ought to be able to take care of these matters for myself. He said I should be able to do more than wipe my own arse without a Party functionary’s permission. He said that having the NKVD spy on scientists as if they were wreckers and enemies of the people would turn them into wreckers and enemies of the people. And he said that threatening scientists with the maximum punishment because they have not fulfilled norms impossible of fulfillment is the stupidest thing he has ever heard of. These are his exact words, Comrade.”
Molotov fixed his icy stare on Max Kagan. The American glared back, too ignorant to know he was supposed to wilt. A little of his aggressive attitude was bracing. A lot of it loose in the Soviet Union would have been a disaster.
And Kurchatov agreed with Kagan. Molotov saw that, too. For now, the state and the Party needed the scientists’ expertise. The day would come, though, when they didn’t. Molotov looked forward to it.
If you were going to keep your clothes on, you couldn’t have a whole lot more fun than riding a horse down a winding road through a forest in new springtime leaf. The fresh, hopeful green sang in Sam Yeager’s eyes. The air had that magical, spicy odor you didn’t get at any other season of the year: it somehow smelled alive and growing. Birds sang as if there was no tomorrow.
Yeager glanced over to Robert Goddard. If Goddard sensed the spring magic, he didn’t show it. “You okay, sir?” Yeager asked anxiously. “I knew we should have put you in a buggy.”
“I’m all right,” Goddard answered in a voice thinner and raspier than Yeager was used to hearing from him. His face was more nearly gray than the pink it should have been. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve, then made a small concession to the evils the flesh is heir to: “Not much farther, eh?”
“No, sir,” Sam answered, as enthusiastically as he was able. Actually, they had another day of hard riding ahead of them, maybe two days if Goddard didn’t get over being poorly. “And when we do get there, we’ll give the Lizards’ stumpy little tails a hell of a tweak, won’t we?”
Goddard’s smile wasn’t altogether exhausted. “That’s the plan, Sergeant. How well it works remains to be seen, but I do have hopes.”
“It’s got to work, sir, doesn’t it?” Yeager said. “Doesn’t look like we’re going to be able to hit the Lizards’ spaceships any other way but long-range rockets. A lot of brave men have died trying, anyhow-that’s a fact.”
“So it is-a melancholy one,” Goddard said. “So now we see what we can do. The only problem is, the aiming on these rockets could be a lot finer.” He let out a wry chuckle. “It couldn’t be much worse, when you get down to it-and that’s another fact.”
“Yes, sir,” Yeager said. All the same, he still felt like somebody in the middle of a John Campbell story: invent the weapon one day, try it the next, and put it into mass production the day after that. Goddard’s long-range rockets weren’t quite like that. He’d had help on the design not only from the Lizards but also from the Germans, and they hadn’t been built in a day any more than Rome was. But they had come along pretty darn quick, and Sam was proud to have had a hand in that.
As he’d feared, they didn’t make it into Fordyce by sunset. That meant camping by the side of US 79. Yeager didn’t mind for himself, but he worried about what it was doing to Goddard, even with sleeping bags and a tent among their gear. The rocket scientist needed all the pampering he could get, and, with the war on, he couldn’t get much.
He was as game as they came, and didn’t complain. He had some trouble choking down the rations they’d packed, but drank a couple of cups of the chicory brew that made do for coffee. He even made jokes about mosquitoes as he slapped at them. Sam joked, too, but wasn’t fooled. When Goddard got into his sleeping bag after supper, he slept like a dead man.
Not even more of the chicory ersatz got him out of first gear the next morning, either. But, after he’d managed to heave himself up into the saddle, he said, “Today we give the Lizards a surprise.” That seemed to hearten him where rest and not-quite-coffee hadn’t.
Fordyce, Arkansas, bustled in a way Yeager had seen in few towns since the Lizards came. It boasted several lumber mills and cotton-ginning establishments and a casket factory. Wagons hauled away the output of the last-named establishment, which had never had slack time even during the lost days of peace and probably stayed busy round the clock these days.
The country south and west of Fordyce along US 79 looked to be a hunter’s paradise: stands of oak and pine that had to be full of deer and turkey and who could say what all else. They’d given Sam a tommy gun before he set out from Hot Springs. Hunting with it wasn’t what you’d call sporting, but when you were hunting for the pot sportsmanship went out the window anyhow.
Four or five miles outside of Fordyce, a fellow sat on the rusted hood of an abandoned Packard, whittling something out of a stick of pine. The guy had on a straw hat and beat-up overalls and looked like a farmer whose farm had seen a lot of better days, but he didn’t have a drawl or a hillbilly twang in his voice when he spoke to Yeager and Goddard: “We been waitin’ for youse,” he said in purest Brooklyn.