It was a curiously remote and cut-off feeling to find himself in this northern Russian port. Moscow, even the train journeys, had been different. Moscow was the capital and all capitals were to some extent cosmopolitan. Moltsk was not! Moltsk was Russian grimness, Russian austerity, Russian gloom personified. A brooding fear hung over the place. One could imagine the effect, the alarm, if an Englishman were to speak to any man or woman among these depressed crowds; and one could also imagine Moltsk in winter, under a couple of feet of snow.
Shaw gave a shiver and walked on more quickly, saw the naval dockyard area away to the east, where the streets sloped to the sea. There were a few masts and funnels visible over the tops of buildings, and a number of vast, towering cranes, and the smell of salt water. That — and, except for the muted street sounds, for there was surprisingly little traffic, an uncanny, spine-chilling silence.
It was as though Moltsk was waiting for something to happen, as though the port was some hibernating juggernaut biding its time to strike. Shaw had an instinctive and very strong feeling that he’d been right, that he was pretty near the heart of things now.
Approaching his hotel he could see the name ahead in big letters. Chaffinch had booked a room for him at the Nikolai, by telephone from Moscow. He had apologized for the accommodation; and when Shaw arrived there he found that the place, though large enough, was little better than a one-star pub in its air of dinginess and its lack of amenities. Yet it was pretty full, and staying there were a number of junior officers of the armed forces, Red Army captains and below mostly, and a bunch of civilians who seemed to be fraternizing a good deal with the Army, talking quietly and earnestly in corners. These civilians must be from Moscow; they looked subtly different from the Moltskites, less repressed, fully accepted by the military. Shaw formed the notion, without any real evidence to go on, that they worked side by side with the Army.
There was little doubt that something was going on in Moltsk, and when Shaw filled in the detailed forms at the reception-desk and produced his passport he got the unspoken impression from the clerk’s harassed manner that it had all been stepped up in the last day or so — which might explain why nothing had come through earlier to suggest that Moltsk might be the centre of this mysterious threat. Shaw didn’t like the atmosphere at all, but, on the chance that he might pick up something useful, he went into the lounge just before lunch and pushed through a boisterous bunch of young officers towards the bar, where he asked for a vodka. He spoke in Russian; but as he did so, he felt a hand fingering the cloth of his suit and then he was smitten heavily between his shoulder blades and a voice said loudly, “English?”
Shaw turned and looked into the grinning face of a young captain of artillery, all epaulettes and gilded high collar, a young man who seemed to have been hitting the vodka bottle rather hard. Shaw smiled back politely and said, “Yes, I’m English. You speak the language?”
“Sure do. Guess I was a year in America, as Assistant Military Attaché in our Embassy in Washington.”
Shaw laughed, crinkling the flesh round his eyes in sudden amusement. “Correction. You speak American!”
The young man roared with laughter, slapped his thigh and translated loudly to several others nearby. There was a general laugh and Shaw found that he was the centre of a vodka-swilling group of officers. The man who had first spoken seized his hand and began pumping it. He roared, “Say, what do you think of Moltsk, Englishman?”
“I’ve not seen much of it yet. Captain.”
“Menikoff. Captain Menikoff.”
“Fine, my name’s Alison, Peter Alison.”
“Al — i — son. I have it. Alison, you will have a drink.”
“Thanks, but—”
“I insist!” Captain Menikoff pushed through to the bar and slammed his own glass down on it. “Guess we don’t see many limeys around here!” Grinning broadly he interpreted his own remark and again there was a bellow of appreciative laughter. The Russians, Shaw decided, were easily amused. “Why have you come to Moltsk, Alison?”
“To see one of our people.” Shaw took the drink which Menikoff passed to him, twirled the stem of the glass in his fingers. “I’m on the staff of WIOCA”
“So?” Menikoff put his glass down. “I am interested in that, Alison. I have seen your fine libraries, your exhibitions of books and of beautiful paintings. I envy you, Alison.”
Curious, Shaw reflected, the respect the Russians had for culture when it was directed at the workers. They rated their artists and writers far higher than did England hers, and yet at the same time they were a military-minded nation — not that that was necessarily incompatible… after all, one of England’s finest field-marshals was said to have carried a book of poetry with him into battle. He asked lightly, “Why do you envy me, Captain Menikoff? Does the military life not satisfy you?”
“Oh, but certainly it does,” Menikoff answered quickly. “Possibly I use the word envy in a wrong sense.” He hesitated, seeming at a loss to explain, then went on with a boyish naivety, “But I congratulate you because you are in Russia — and envy you because you are an intellectual — and I congratulate you again because you are at this moment in Russia and not in… England…”
He tailed off; there was a sudden silence, and he went very white. He didn’t say any more and Shaw wondered what he had meant; could be his English at fault — Menikoff wasn’t really as fluent as he liked to think — or on the other hand he could well have been on the verge of a vodka-inspired indiscretion. Shaw lifted an eyebrow, quizzically. “Why so?” he asked.
Menikoff shrugged uncomfortably and said, as though repeating a lesson, his boyishness gone now, “Our country leads the world, Alison, that is why. Intellectually, militarily, in all spheres. Soon we will lead other worlds as well, following in the footsteps of Gagarin and Titov and the others. You understand? Nobody can hope to surpass the Soviets, even to rival their great achievements…”
Shaw listened in growing boredom to the spate of propaganda. The buzz of conversation had started up again now; Shaw tried to lead Menikoff back to what he had said earlier but the man had taken a grip on himself and was thoroughly wound up. Nothing would stop him. One or two of the others joined in and Shaw talked generally, exercising his Russian, but he soon realized that he wasn’t getting anywhere and had already had too much vodka for his liking; and he escaped to the dining-room.
As he ate, he went on thinking about Menikoff and the more he thought the more he felt that those remarks had been leading somewhere. That sudden silence, and then an end of Menikoff’s exuberance. He frowned, lit a cigarette as he waited for the next course — waited interminably for the next course. If the secrets were penetrating down to captains’ level, then it pointed to two things: One, Russia was nearly ready, was right on the brink of starting something; and two, it shouldn’t take him long to ferret out what that something was.
It had better not.
After lunch he got the reception-clerk to call a car and he was driven out of Moltsk openly to Professor Godov’s home. This was inland, some thirty kilometres north-west of Moltsk, and two kilometres from its nearest population centre — the tiny cluster of dwellings which made up the isolated village of Emets.
It was in bleak, grim country across which the winds blew right off the Arctic Ocean from the Pole; an almost terrifying land of flat plain and dreary swamp and little vegetation beyond low shrubs and moss, for they were north of the forests that covered the southern tip of the Peninsula. This was barren tundra which in winter would remain under snow and ice for months at a time. An utterly oppressive place in which to live, a place inhabited only by nomadic huntsmen and fishermen, apart from the few small communities like Emets itself. Godov, Shaw thought, must be a genuine hermit, a cranky recluse, to live in such a place… but then, no doubt, an old man of his years wouldn’t want much more out of life than to be left alone in peace and tranquillity — and after all this region had been his childhood home, and Chaffinch had told him that Godov was a true son of the people even now. Moreover, he was probably still regarded as being to some extent in exile even though he was now considered harmless. It was a fitting place to be in exile, all right. And it must have been some childhood!