Short Fiction Mack Reynolds (best ereader for pdf and epub .txt) 📖

sure. The palace was built in the Seventeenth Century and was popular with various czars. It has been a museum for some time. We suspect that the Galactic Confederation delegates are housed in the Sobstvennaya Plovina which used to be the private apartments of Nicolas the First. It is quite define that the conferences are being held in the Gheorghievskaya sala; it’s the largest and most impressive room in the Kremlin.”

Hank stared at the two maps feeling a degree of dismay.

She said impatiently, “We can help you more than this. One of the regular guide-guards at the façade which leads to the main entrance of the palace is a member of our group. Here are your instructions.”

They spent another fifteen minutes going over the details, then she shot a quick glance at her watch and came to her feet. “Is everything clear⁠ ⁠… comrade?”

Hank frowned slightly at the use of the word, then understood. “I think so, and thanks⁠ ⁠… comrade.” He, as well as she, meant the term in its original sense.

He followed her to the door but before his hand touched the knob, it opened inwardly. Paco stood there, and behind him in the corridor was Char Moore.

The girl turned to Hank quickly, reached up and kissed him on the mouth and said, in English, “Goodbye, dollink.” She winked at Paco, swept past Char and was gone.

Paco looked after her appreciatively, back at Hank and said, “Ah, ha. You are quite a dog after all, eh?”

Char Moore’s face was blank. She mumbled something to the effect of, “See you later,” directed seemingly to both of them, and went on to her room.

Hank said, “Damn!”

Paco closed the door behind him. “What’s the matter, my friend?” he grinned. “Are you attempting to play two games at once?”

The morning tour was devoted to Red Square and the Kremlin. Immediately after breakfast they formed a column with two or three other tourist parties and were marched briskly to where Gorky Street debouched into Red Square. First destination was the mausoleum, backed against the Kremlin wall, which centered that square and served as a combined Vatican, Lhasa and Mecca of the Soviet complex. Built of dark red porphyry, it was the nearest thing to a really ultramodern building Hank had seen in Moscow.

As foreign tourists they were taken to the head of the line which already stretched around the Kremlin back into Mokhovaya Street along the western wall. A line of thousands.

Once the doors opened the line moved quickly. They filed in, two by two, down some steps, along a corridor which was suddenly cool as though refrigerated. Paco, standing next to Hank, said from the side of his mouth, “Now we know the secret of the embalming. I wonder if they’re hanging on meathooks.”

The line emerged suddenly into a room in the center of which were three glass chambers. The three bodies, the prophet and his two leading disciples flanking him. Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev. On their faces, Hank decided, you could read much of their character. Lenin, the idealist and scholar. Stalin, utterly ruthless organization man. Khrushchev, energetic manager of what the first two had built.

They were in the burial room no more than two minutes, filed out by an opposite door. In the light of the square again, Paco grinned at him. “Nick and Joe didn’t look so good, but Nikita is standing up pretty well.”

Trailing back and forth across Red Square had its ludicrous elements. The guide pointed out this and that. But all the time his charges had their eyes glued to the spaceship, settled there at the far end of the square near St. Basil’s. In a way it seemed no more alien than so much else here. Certainly no more alien to the world Hank knew than the fantastic St. Basil’s Cathedral.

A spaceship from the stars, though. You still had to shake your head in effort to achieve clarity; to realize the significance of it. A spaceship with emissaries from a Galactic Confederation.

How simple if it had only landed in Washington, London or even Paris or Rome, instead of here.

They avoided getting very near it, although the Russians weren’t being ostentatious about their guarding. There was a roped off area about the craft and twenty or so guards, not overly armed, drifting about within the enclosure. But the local citizenry was evidently well disciplined. There were no huge crowds hanging on the ropes waiting for a glimpse of the interplanetary celebrities.

Nevertheless, the Intourist guide went out of his way to avoid bringing his charges too near. They retraced their steps back to Manezhnaya Square from which they had originally started to see the mausoleum, and then turned left through Alexandrovski Sad, the Alexander Park which ran along the west side of the Kremlin to the Borovikski Gate, on the Moskva River side of the fortress.

Paco said, “After this tour I’m in favor of us all signing a petition that our guide be awarded a medal, Hero of Intourist. You realize that thus far he has lost only two of us today?”

Some of the others didn’t like his levity. They were about to enter the Communist shrine and wisecracking was hardly in order. Paco Rodriquez couldn’t have cared less, being Paco Rodriquez.

The stilyagi girl had been correct about the Kremlin being an overgrown museum. Government buildings it evidently contained, but above all it provided gold topped cathedrals, fabulous palaces converted to art galleries and displays of the jeweled wealth of yesteryear and the tombs of a dozen czars including that of Ivan the Terrible.

They trailed into the Orushezhnaya Palace, through the ornate entrance hall displaying its early arms and banners.

Paco encouraged the harassed guard happily. “You’re doing fine. You’ve had us out for more than two hours. We started with twenty-five in this group and still have twenty-one. Par for the course. What happens to a tourist who wanders absently around in the Kremlin and turns up in the head man’s office?”

The guide smiled wanly. “And