The message was brutally simple: Prevent the Americans from mounting a rendezvous flight to meet the visitor. Use all necessary means available.
Maria cleared the computer’s little glowering red readout symbols and got heavily to her feet. She burned the letter in the kitchen sink, then went into the bedroom and put the computer back into its fitting inside the electronics suitcase.
Use all necessary means available.
That meant Cavendish. He was her only tool, her only weapon. She sat on the bed next to the suitcase. The mattress sagged and squeaked under her.
Cavendish. She closed her eyes, but still saw the look of agony on the old man’s wretched face. And that was merely when she had been asking him for information. Now she had to use him somehow, and if he resisted, she would have to punish him.
Maria shuddered.
Behavioral psychology began with Pavlov’s work on dogs, Maria had learned. Western psychologists developed this into the principle of positive reinforcement: reward the subject when he does the correct thing, and withhold the reward when he fails to do the correct thing. It was a weakling’s approach to the problem, requiring enormous amounts of time and patience, for little return.
Maria’s superiors had long ago discovered that the reverse principle works better, more surely. Punish the subject for failure, and only when he obeys you absolutely do you withhold the punishment. It was the same principle that Pavlov had discovered, actually. But by manipulating the punishment instead of the reward, you got better results, more quickly. The long-term effect on the subject was deleterious, of course, but that could not be helped.
Maria fingered the control knobs on her suitcase of electronic gear. The microelectrodes had been implanted in Cavendish’s brain many years earlier, but they still worked, and they were so small that they had escaped detection all these years.
Western psychologists would have put the electrodes into the brain’s pleasure center, to reward Cavendish for good behavior with a jolt of pure electronic rapture. The surgeons in Moscow, however, knew better. Maria could cause a variety of effects in Cavendish’s brain, ranging from sleeplessness to agony.
If he refuses to help me, she thought, with mounting apprehension, I’ll have to torture him.
Markov gulped down his second vodka-tonic and put the glass precisely on the ring it had left on the Formica table when he’d picked it up.
“As a revolutionary,” he told Stoner, “I would say that we have hit a stone wall.”
“That’s your considered opinion, is it?”
Sighing unhappily, “Yes.”
Stoner slid out of the booth, walked unsteadily to the bar and got two more beers and two vodka-tonics.
“You are anticipating a long siege,” Markov said as Stoner put the glasses on their table.
“A true revolutionary must be prepared for long sieges,” Stoner answered gravely. “And for stone walls.”
“We have enough of those,” said Markov.
“In a good cause there are no failures, only delays.”
Markov raised his glass. “To the revolution.”
“We will gain the inevitable triumph,” Stoner quoted Roosevelt, “so help us God.”
“Do you have any plans for dinner?” Markov asked once the glass left his lips.
Stoner slowly shook his head.
“Do you foresee eating a meal sometime this evening?”
“I guess so. No hurry.”
“Of course.”
“Were you successful in rousing our good friar, Brother Reynaud?” Stoner asked.
“If I had good news about that, would I be drinking here with you in this lugubrious mood?”
“Lugubrious? You are a linguist, aren’t you?”
“At times,” Markov said.
“Lugubrious.” Stoner turned the word over in his mind. “Now is the winter of our discontent…”
Markov raised his glass halfheartedly. “Our revolution is not going well, I’m afraid.”
“Well, the American Revolution didn’t start off too smartly, either, friend. We’re in our Valley Forge period, right now.”
Markov’s face brightened a bit. “That’s right. You were a revolutionary nation, too.”
“Were? We are a revolutionary nation,” said Stoner. “We invented the telephone, didn’t we? Wasn’t that a revolution? And the airplane, the computer, the Mickey Mouse wristwatch—that was a real revolution, my friend.”
“I thought we invented the telephone,” Markov said, scratching at his beard. “I’m sure I read that in Pravda once.”
“Okay, you can have the telephone. But we invented TV dinners.”
“A true revolution.”
“And bubble gum.”
They drank to bubble gum.
Jo pushed her castered chair away from the computer console and glanced up at the big clock on the wall of the Pit. It was slightly past six.
“I’ve had it,” she told the programmer sitting next to her. “Nine hours with no break except for a lousy sandwich.”
“And nothing to show for it but chipped nails,” the programmer said.
She grinned at her. It’s in a good cause, she said to herself. All the extra calculations of the spacecraft’s projected track, they’re more work but they’re necessary for the rendezvous mission. If it comes off.
To the programmer, she said, “Listen, if they’re not paying you overtime you shouldn’t work overtime. Working through lunch hour was enough.”
“I just do what I’m told,” she said, getting up from her chair and heading for the ladies’ room.
A few minutes later Jo went out into the hot sunshine. She decided to stop off at the Officers’ Club before facing dinner.
As soon as her eyes adjusted to the club’s dimness she saw Stoner and Markov over in the corner booth. Actually, she heard them before she saw them.
“To the glorious October Revolution and all the revolutionary peoples of the world!” Markov was shouting. “I toast you all, wherever you are!”
Stoner looked up as Jo walked over to their booth. She asked, “Is this a private celebration, or can anybody join?”
Markov answered instantly, “Come! Sit down! Join our funeral.”
“Funeral?” Jo slid into the booth beside the Russian.
Stoner lifted his glass an inch from the tabletop and saluted her with it.
“We are celebrating the Fourth of July a few months early.” His words were slightly slurred. “I think.”
“But why call it a funeral?”
“Russian melancholy.”
“Then there is the glorious November Revolution,” Markov said, blithely ignoring their words. “Ah, my friends, that was the turning point. When the immortal Lenin appeared at the train station in Petrograd, the world changed.”
An unhappy-looking Marshallese waitress, solid and square as a sack of cement, came to their table. “More drinks?” she asked.
Jo ordered a piña colada. Markov had gone to straight vodka on ice. Stoner stayed with beer.
When the drinks came, Stoner said, “I think we ought to toast the United States Marine Corps: the brave men who wrested this island from its fanatical Japanese defenders in nineteen forty-something.”
Looking from one of them to the other, Jo asked, “What’s going on here?”
“You really want to know?” Stoner replied.
“Yes!”
“Don’t ask.”
For an instant, Jo looked as if she was going to be angry. But then she laughed, shook her head and picked up her frosted goblet. “Okay,” she said. “If that’s the way you want to play it. But at least tell me what we’re drinking to.”