I took him at his word, and looked into the pool. ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘At any rate, it’s not sinking up.’
‘You threw it in!’
‘You said it was waterpoof.’
‘But I hadn’t primed it!’ Trofim’s capacity for petulance, like his musculature, was larger than a normal person’s. ‘I hadn’t primed it! It’s ruined now! How can I prime it now? You’ve ruined everything!’
‘Look on the bright side,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t your fault. If you take me back to Moscow you can put the blame on me.’
‘We’ve got to retrieve it! We have to fish it up!’
‘The best thing would be to go down like a pearl diver. Give me the gun and take your jacket off.’ He looked towards me, and there was something almost heartbreaking in the way hope flickered in his eyes, for the second or so before he thought better of himself. His eyes narrowed. ‘You’re trying to trick me.’
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘It must be thirty metres deep, that pool. You probably wouldn’t be able to hold your breath under water for long enough.’
‘You go!’ He brought the gun closer to my face.
‘Well I certainly couldn’t hold my breath. You know how poorly my lungs function.’
A sly look, or what approximated one for Trofim, crept into his features. ‘Aha,’ he said. ‘You’re trying to trick me again, but I’m wise to you! Your lungs don’t work anyway! You could go under the water without ill effects.’
I looked steadily at him. ‘Could you explain your logic?’
‘My what?’
‘Your logic. The logic of that statement.’
‘The logic is,’ he said, ‘that, and there is logic. It is logically the situation that since your lungs don’t work in air, you won’t need them under the—’ He looked at me. ‘Under the, um.’
‘When you describe this as logic…’ I said.
His eyes defocused momentarily; but he snapped back. ‘This is my logic!’ he cried, brandishing the gun.
‘And it is a very persuasive argumentative tool,’ I agreed. ‘But it won’t make my lungs work under water.’
Something gave way in his will. His shoulders sagged. His voice, when he spoke, was almost imploring. ‘What am I suppose to do now?’
‘Why don’t the two of us get out of here?’ I said. ‘Go find a bar and discuss that important question over a drink?’
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘I can’t leave. The mission. You were in the army, after all. You know the importance of orders. You understand the importance of completing your mission.’
‘Having been in the army,’ I said, ‘I know how often commanding officers send honest soldiers to their deaths for no very good reason.’
But this didn’t hit home. ‘Comrade Frenkel is a great man,’ he told me, stiffly. ‘This mission is of the utmost importance for the continuing success and survival of, survival of, the Soviet Union.’
‘I’d say the Soviet Union needs good men like you alive,’ I said. ‘I’d say you can serve the Soviet Union better alive than you could as a corpse.’
‘I could at least shoot you,’ he said, in a meditative voice.
‘I’ll wager those aren’t your specific orders.’
‘Oh no. I don’t have any specific orders with respect of you. I don’t believe Comrade Frenkel expected you to be here.’
‘Well there you go.’
‘But he’s keen on his men showing initiative,’ Trofim added, aiming the handgun at my head. His brow creased once again, and the redness rose once again in his cheeks. ‘I wish you hadn’t thrown the suitcase into the pool!’
‘What can I say? I’m an impulsive man.’
He remembered then that he was holding the grenade. ‘I could pull the pin,’ he said, holding it up between us. ‘And throw this in the water. It would sink down, wouldn’t it. Plus, I’d have time to get out of this chamber, at any rate.’
‘Come come, comrade,’ I said. ‘This is a nuclear power station. You are trying to blow up a nuclear power station. Or have you forgotten? You think a seven-second grenade fuse gives you enough time to outrun a nuclear explosion?’
Two fat worry lines wormed into the flesh of his brow. ‘You’re right of course,’ he said, in a gloomy tone. ‘Well, there’s nothing for it then.’ He aimed the gun again at the centre of my brow.
‘Comrade,’ I said. ‘Think what you’re planning! To blow up this power station — it would be like dropping an atomic bomb on the heart of the Ukraine! Have you any idea how many would die? Do you really want their deaths on your conscience?’
But this, I realised at once, was the wrong tack to take. The worry lines disappeared from Trofim’s brow, and a rather vulgarly calculating expression passed across his eyes. ‘But, comrade,’ he said, ‘Didn’t you yourself fight in the Great Patriotic War? How many millions died then, defending Russia? How many is too many? Some thousands may perish in Ukraine, but they will be sacrificing their lives for a greater purpose.’
I felt my temper begin to stretch. Clearly the thing to do at that time, in that place, was to try and talk Trofim round; get him to holster his gun and put the grenade down. To persuade him to leave. Who better to do this than a man who has spent years as a writer honing his powers of expression? But I had had a long day. ‘Oh, don’t be idiotic,’ I snapped. ‘Purpose? What plan could possibly justify such sacrifice of life?’
He looked almost gloating. ‘It’s secret.’
‘So? You’re going to kill me anyway!’
‘Yes,’ he agreed, slowly, as if the reality of the situation were only then dawning on him. ‘I suppose I am going to kill you.’ My stomach swirled.
‘So, why not tell me?’
‘Oh no,’ he said, ingenuously. ‘I was ordered to tell nobody.’
‘Comrade, permit me to say, I believe you will tell me. What harm can there be in talking to a dead man? Dead men keep secrets better than anybody.’
‘Orders.’
‘You’d send me to my grave without knowing?’
This clearly troubled him. ‘I do apologise, comrade. But there’s really nothing I can say.’
I had to keep him talking. Perhaps, I thought to myself, Saltykov will come back in, creep up behind him and disarm him. I didn’t want to dwell on the details of how he would do this: Saltykov’s weakling-buffoonishness tangling with this slab of honed military flesh. If I had tried to picture the details to myself its impossibility would have impressed itself upon my mind and scorched my hope. But I wanted to hang on to the possibility. ‘I shall try and reason with you, comrade,’ I said, ‘as one old soldier to another. Things have very clearly not gone according to plan for you, here in Chernobyl. You will have to explain to your superiors why you failed to complete your mission. Take me back to Moscow, and I will support your story. Any story you care to concoct. I am a writer after all, and good at concocting stories.’
‘Stories of monstrous octocats from space,’ he said, in an enormously mournful voice.
‘Science fiction is the literature of the future,’ I said, scratching through my brain to recall some of the vatic emptinesses of Frenkel’s pronouncements on the genre. ‘Science fiction imagines the future. It seeks not to reproduce the world, as have all hitherto existing literatures, but to change it. It is the Communism of literary forms. It is the literature of proletarian possibilities.’