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

The other took a deep swallow of his Pilsen Urquell. He pursed his lips and thought about it. “You know, I wonder if they’d dare. Such a case brought into the People’s Courts might lead to all sort of public reaction these days.”

It had been some years since Ilya Simonov had been in Prague and even then he’d only gone through on the way to the ski resorts in the mountains. He was shocked to find the Czech state’s control had fallen off to this extent. Why, here he was, a complete stranger, being openly talked to on political subjects.

His cross-the-table neighbor shook his head, obviously pleased. “If you think Prague is good, you ought to see Warsaw. It’s as free as Paris! I saw a Tri-D cinema up there about two months ago. You know what it was about? The purges in Moscow back in the 1930s.”

“A rather unique subject,” Simonov said.

“Um-m-m, made a very strong case for Bukharin, in particular.”

Simonov said, very slowly, “I don’t understand. You mean this⁠ ⁠… this film supported the, ah, Old Bolsheviks?”

“Of course. Why not? Everybody knows they weren’t guilty.” The Czech snorted deprecation. “At least not guilty of what they were charged with. They were in Stalin’s way and he liquidated them.” The Czech thought about it for a while. “I wonder if he was already insane, that far back.”

Had he taken up his mug of beer and dashed it into Simonov’s face, he couldn’t have surprised the Russian more.

Ilya Simonov had to take control of himself. His first instinct was to show his credentials, arrest the man and have him hauled up before the local agency of Simonov’s ministry.

But obviously that was out of the question. He was in Czechoslovakia and, although Moscow still dominated the Soviet Complex, there was local autonomy and the Czech police just didn’t enjoy their affairs being meddled with unless in extreme urgency.

Besides, this man was obviously only one among many. A stranger in a beer hall. Ilya Simonov suspected that if he continued his wanderings about the town, he’d meet in the process of only one evening a score of persons who would talk the same way.

Besides, still again, he was here in Prague incognito, his job to trace the sources of this dry rot, not to run down individual Czechs.

But the cinema, and TV! Surely anti-Party sentiment hadn’t been allowed to go this far!

He got up from the table shakily, paid up for his beer and forced himself to nod goodbye in friendly fashion to the subversive Czech he’d been talking to.

In the morning he strolled over to the offices of the Moskvich Agency which was located only a few blocks from his hotel on Celetna Hybernski. The Russian car agency, he knew, was having a fairly hard go of it in Prague and elsewhere in Czechoslovakia. The Czechs, long before the Party took over in 1948, had been a highly industrialized, modern nation. They consequently had their own automobile works, such as Skoda, and their models were locally more popular than the Russian Moskvich, Zim and Pobeda.

Theoretically, the reason Ilya Simonov was the newly appointed agency head was to push Moskvich sales among the Czechs. He thought, half humorously, half sourly, to himself, even under the Party we have competition and pressure for higher sales. What was it that some American economist had called them? a system of State-Capitalism.

At the Moskvich offices he found himself in command of a staff that consisted of three fellow Russians, and a dozen or so Czech assistants. His immediate subordinate was a Catherina Panova, whose dossier revealed her to be a party member, though evidently not a particularly active one, at least not since she’d been assigned here in Prague.

She was somewhere in her mid-twenties, a graduate of the University of Moscow, and although she’d been in the Czech capital only a matter of six months or so, had already adapted to the more fashionable dress that the style-conscious women of this former Western capital went in for. Besides that, Catherina Panova managed to be one of the downright prettiest girls Ilya Simonov had ever seen.

His career had largely kept him from serious involvement in the past. Certainly the dedicated women you usually found in Party ranks seldom were of the type that inspired you to romance but he wondered now, looking at this new assistant of his, if he hadn’t let too much of his youth go by without more investigation into the usually favorite pastime of youth.

He wondered also, but only briefly, if he should reveal his actual identity to her. She was, after all, a party member. But then he checked himself. Kliment Blagonravov had stressed the necessity of complete secrecy. Not even the local offices of the ministry were to be acquainted with his presence.

He let Catherina introduce him around, familiarize him with the local methods of going about their business affairs and the problems they were running into.

She ran a hand back over her forehead, placing a wisp of errant hair, and said, “I suppose, as an expert from Moscow, you’ll be installing a whole set of new methods.”

It was far from his intention to spend much time at office work. He said, “Not at all. There is no hurry. For a time, we’ll continue your present policies, just to get the feel of the situation. Then perhaps in a few months, we’ll come up with some ideas.”

She obviously liked his use of “we” rather than “I.” Evidently, the staff had been a bit nervous upon his appointment as new manager. He already felt, vaguely, that the three Russians here had no desire to return to their homeland. Evidently, there was something about Czechoslovakia that appealed to them all. The fact irritated him but somehow didn’t surprise.

Catherina said, “As a matter of fact, I have some opinions on possible changes myself. Perhaps if you’ll have dinner with me tonight, we can discuss them informally.”

Ilya Simonov was only mildly