The Mirror Maze Read online

  “We don’t want kids from poor families to starve either, but that doesn’t mean the government has to run the supermarkets,” Eva pointed out.

  It was a thought. Mel considered it as he took a bite of his sandwich.

  “Where are you from, Mel?” Sadie asked him.

  “Right here, Pensacola. My folks are across in Warrington. How about you?”

  “I’m from California, the same part as Eva.”

  “San Francisco?”

  “San Jose—south. Ever get there?”

  “Once or twice. I wouldn’t claim to know it. You like California?”

  “It’s not what it used to be. Everybody works for the state, lives off the state, or runs the state.”

  “Our father used to say that there are three Marxist states in the Western hemisphere,” Eva said. “Cuba, Nicaragua, and California.”

  Mel grinned. “What does he do?”

  “He’s in aerospace—a systems engineer.”

  “Is that where Stephanie got her notion to go into physics?”

  “Probably.”

  “So how about you? What got you interested in politics and this whole business?”

  Eva sipped her iced tea. “Oh, lots of different things. But part of it was him too. He gets so mad sometimes at the shambles that became of the space program. He thinks that Apollo, back in the sixties, was a bigger disaster for this country than the Vietnam war.”

  Mel looked astonished. “But it was a success, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s the whole point,” Eva said. “Some of the worst mistakes in history have resulted from trying to apply methods that work fine in one field to another where they don’t. Even when it becomes obvious that they’re making things worse and not better, people refuse to abandon them, precisely because they were so successful before.”

  “Explain,” Mel invited.

  “After Sputnik and the Gagarin flight, Kennedy redirected all the national resources onto a moon shot. And in less than ten years, we’d done it. A dazzling success. And then people started to think, surely if centralized control and massive federal spending could do that, then centralized control and massive federal spending could do anything. All our social problems could be solved the same way.”

  “Okay…”

  “So, we got the Johnson Great Society programs, and we’ve been making things worse ever since. But they won’t give up. After all, we did get to the moon. How can you argue with success? At least Vietnam was a failure and we learned something from it. Apollo was a wonderful technical achievement, sure, and I’m not trying to knock it, but it came twenty or thirty years too soon. Malinvestments eventually liquidate themselves as depressions. And that’s what we’ve been having in the space programs—a depression caused by the resources invested in the wrong things back in the sixties.”

  Mel had propped his chin in a hand and was watching her across the table. He was thinking that, without a doubt, intelligence was the world’s most potent aphrodisiac. “Okay,” he agreed, not taking his eyes off her.

  “Does that make sense?” she asked.

  “A lot.”

  “Eva, I’ve always wondered, where do you get all this information from?” Sadie asked, sounding perplexed.

  “Everywhere,” Eva said. “It’s keeping track of it all that’s the problem. My place is getting to look like a print shop that got hit by a library wagon… Oh, and that reminds me, I still want to see that library-organizer program that you told me about.”

  “I’ll get a copy,” Sadie promised.

  “What’s this?” Mel asked them.

  “It’s a program Sadie has that I wanted to play with,” Eva said. “I’m trying to hook up my own local reference system off the net.”

  “Are you managing okay?”

  “With a lot of fooling around… but I think I’m getting there.”

  The opportunity was too good to miss. “Well, that’s my field,” Mel said. “Maybe I could stop by and have a look at it for you sometime? I’ve got a few hacker’s routines that might help.”

  Eva regarded him for a second or two with eyes that held just the right mixture of mischievousness and curiosity—twinkling, but not enough to be mocking, and for long enough to be more than indifferent. “Sure, why not?” she said.

  “I’ll provide the know-how. You get the pizza,” Mel offered.

  “You’ve got a deal.”

  “How about tonight?” Mel wasn’t about to quit while he was on a roll.

  “I can’t,” Eva said. “I’m tied up for a few evenings. Can we make it next week? Wednesday would be good.”

  “Sure, Wednesday it is.” Mel couldn’t believe his good fortune. Sadie winked at him slyly.

  Back in his car, he sang out loud all the way to the intersection of Fairfield and Palafox, where, in his exuberance, he failed to see the red light. The truck coming across the intersection almost failed to see him.

  “Officer, have you ever been in love?” he asked, grinning like an imbecile at the highway patrolman who, as luck would have it, had been parked across the street, drinking coffee at the time.

  “Buddy, either you’re drunk, or you’re on dope, or you’re an asshole, ” the policeman said, unimpressed, as he wrote out the ticket. “Which do you want it to be?”

  CHAPTER 14

  The countryside around the village of Uspenskoye, to the east of Moscow, was a serene area of regal old pines, birch groves, winding rivers, and open fields, reserved for dachas—luxurious country homes—allotted to members of the classless society’s privileged elite. General Leonid Goryanin of the KGB stood looking out through a window at a landscape which after the snowstorm of the previous day had taken on a fairy-tale appearance, with snow clinging to the trees like frosting on a cake, picked out in the moonlight of a now cloudless night. Behind him, the Soviet Minister of Defense, Marshal Georgi Androliev, who was also the First Deputy Secretary of the Party, spoke over a brandy glass from a recliner to one side of the room’s open pine-log fire.

  “You know, Leonid, I don’t mind saying it—there’s something exciting about what’s happening in America right now. Don’t you think so? Come on, admit it. It has a new, fresh air… a clean feel about it. I think these people are the first honest thing that’s happened in the world since 1945. They’ve discovered that old-fashioned thing that we’re so used to laughing at these days that most people forget it was ever taken seriously: Principle.”

  Goryanin turned away from the window and smiled tolerantly. The dinner before the rest of the company left had been fine, with a lot of joking and old anecdotes. Androliev was getting on in years, and his tongue was running a little loosely after the generous flow of drink. “You mean all this about freedom and dignity, and realizing everyone’s full potential?”

  “But isn’t that exactly what Marx was calling for? He was interested in the economic system only as a means of creating the conditions for individual emancipation. That’s something that everyone forgets. The ironic thing, when you really take the trouble to look at it, is that our Revolution and the American Revolution were both fought for virtually the same ideals.” There was a pause as Androliev gazed into the flames. Then he added distantly, “We were both betrayed… by the same forces. And now we’ve joined them.”

  Goryanin frowned and moved back toward the center of the room. “Betrayed? By whom?”

  Androliev made a meaningless gesture in the air with his free hand. “Oh, I don’t know… Circumstances, maybe.” Goryanin wasn’t sure if the older man was just rambling because of the drink, or backing off from something that he shouldn’t have mentioned to someone of Goryanin’s lower rank. Either way, Androliev went on, “I heard an American joke the other day, that they tell about us. It goes, ‘How many remaining true-believers in Marxism, east of Poland, does it take to change a light bulb?’ Do you know what the answer was?”

  “What?”

  “ ‘Both of them’… And it’s true, isn’t it? You know how much al
l the slogans are worth, as well as I do. But we play the game of pretending, and in the process we forget that we manufacture our own form of logic, which the rest of the world doesn’t share. Only three percent of our farming land is privately owned, and not a tractor or an ounce of fertilizer. Yet that three percent feeds most of the country. If those owners were given another half percent—just another half of a percent, mark you—we wouldn’t have a problem producing food. But instead we choose to waste four hundred tons of gold each year buying it abroad. Now try and explain that to me in any language that both you and I know is common sense… We have to build walls and fences to keep our own people in… can’t let them see any example of another way of life that might be possible… It can’t go on, Leonid. We have to change or disintegrate. I think this is an opportunity. We must seize it somehow.”

  Goryanin set his own glass down and glanced at his watch. “Anyway, it’s time I was getting back. I’ve already stayed longer than I meant to. The evening was very enjoyable, thank you.” He lowered his voice pointedly. “And this isn’t a wise way to be talking, you know, even for someone in your position… and of all people, to someone like me. Who knows who I might be reporting this too, first thing tomorrow morning?”

  “Nobody, as you very well know,” Androliev said, rising. “Because KGB though you might be, you are also a dear nephew. But you are right… I babble too much.” He pressed a button by the fireplace. “My driver will take you back, of course. Are you going back into the city?”

  “Yes, my apartment on Kutozovski Prospekt.” Goryanin had his own dacha, too, a smaller one, with smaller grounds around it—his rank didn’t merit treatment comparable to the defense minister’s.

  The door opened, and a servant appeared. “Bring the general’s coat and hat,” Androliev instructed. “And have the chauffeur bring a car around to the front door to take him back into the city.”

  Later, reclining comfortably in the back seat of the minister’s handmade Zil limousine as it rolled along the snow-cleared highway into town, Goryanin thought over the things that Androliev had said. He hoped that his uncle wasn’t attracting attention from other, less forgiving directions—he was genuinely fond of him. Had Goryanin worked for any of several other directorates within the KGB, the situation would have presented a real problem of conflicting loyalties, and he didn’t like to think too much about which side might have won. But as things were, his area of responsibility lay purely with technical matters and the protection of secrets relating to military equipment. Worrying about who might or might not be reliable to whom at the top, along with all the messy business which that entailed, wasn’t his problem. And he was perfectly happy, he decided as he looked out at the Moscow suburbs, stark and austere in the patches of light from the streetlamps, to let things remain that way.

  CHAPTER 15

  Mel wasn’t exactly sure what he hoped to learn or achieve as he drove out of the Denver-Boulder airport, bound for the General Plasma Dynamics corporation. But Hermann Oberwald was a national adviser on energy matters, and GPD was a research corporation involved in the energy field. Stephanie had confirmed that from the little she knew about the political side of GPD’s affairs, some of the corporation’s executives had dealt with Oberwald on occasion, and his name had appeared on several documents that she’d seen. It didn’t add up to a lot to go on. But the situation hadn’t exactly offered much in any direction when he and the others analyzed it over and over back at the offices of E and W, and they had to start somewhere. Mel was simply interested in any information that might provide a beginning to unraveling more of Oberwald’s activities and connections. There could be nothing approaching a plan of action beyond that at this stage.

  His other reason for choosing to begin with GPD, of course, was that Stephanie’s working there gave him a legitimate “in.” In his call to Edward Gilman, the corporation’s president, he had said merely that he represented the law firm of Evron and Winthram, and that he needed certain information concerning the affairs of the late Stephanie Carne. As Mel had hoped, Gilman had agreed to see him without delay. Mel had no idea at this point of whether or not he would reveal the truth about Stephanie, although she had left no doubt that she considered Gilman to be trustworthy. It all depended on how the interview went. The partners had left it to his discretion.

  Mel had also called Stephanie’s family from Boston to express his condolences at the news of her death, which he said he’d received from a friend. He had learned that the body was being flown back to California, and that the funeral would take place there in three days time. The girls’ father had asked Mel if he knew of Eva’s whereabouts, since they had been trying to locate her ever since the tragedy, but without success. Mel could only say that he hadn’t been in touch with Eva for a long time now, which at least was the truth. He had assured them that he himself would be there.

  That gave him today to fly to Denver to find out whatever he could at GPD, leaving Stephanie to get some rest in his apartment in Boston. Then, two days later, he would have the strange experience of going to California with her to attend her funeral—she had insisted that she wanted to be there. Mel wasn’t too sure how they were going to handle that part of it. But he dismissed the thought from his mind as he identified the shape of GPD’s main reactor building a quarter mile or so off the highway, and moved a lane rightwards to take the next exit ramp.

  One day at a time…

  • • •

  Ed Gilman listened stonily as his older cousin, Kenneth, spoke from the telescreen in Gilman’s office. Kenneth, who lived in upstate New York, was an investment banker from the more aristocratic side of the family. Gilman’s notion to rid himself of the strings that came with government financial support went back a lot further than the recent meeting with Roth and the deputation from the Industrial Liaison Commission. Kenneth’s call was in response to a question that Gilman had put to him some time ago on the possibility of a private loan to pay back what GPD had been granted and to cover its further liabilities. A group was prepared to put up the required funds, it turned out, but the terms were far from Gilman’s liking. In fact, they completely defeated the object of the whole exercise.

  “Only on the condition that the entire fission-fusion hybrid project is scrapped,” Kenneth repeated. “I’m sorry, Edward, but they were unanimous and quite firm—and if you want my opinion, I fully agree with them. It was ill-conceived from the start, it has major technical and safety problems, and it’s highly doubtful if it could ever pay its way economically. I did try to advise you against it ten years ago, if you remember, but to no avail. Now I’m afraid the bird has come home to roost.” Kenneth was a big man, with saggy jowls and a droopy-eyed face that gave him something of a bloodhound look. His conveying of regrets, as Gilman well knew, was purely a matter of form. Behind his expressionless countenance he was probably delighted. He had never disguised his disdain for what he regarded at his cousin’s “mechanic’s” tendencies.

  “But that’s ridiculous,” Gilman protested. “This whole corporation was founded specifically to develop the hybrid. What else do you suppose we’d have left to do here if we drop it? It’s what GPD is!”

  “It’s in the energy business, which as we all know is crucial these days,” Kenneth replied. “The suggestion is that its resources be redirected into sounder, more proven technological areas, such as direct solar generation and wind turbines.”

  “Windmills!” Gilman exploded. “God man, we’re just entering the twenty-first century and you want to put us back in the fifteenth! And the whole solar thing is a fraud. The government has been trying to make it efficient for years by decreeing that it will be, regardless of what the laws of physics and economics say. But it can’t work. Have you any idea what—”

  “Such approaches would earn significant tax concessions, as well as generous direct subsidies, which would put you in a far more viable financial position than you can boast of at present,” Kenneth retorted coolly.

>   “It’s government money that I’m trying to get away from,” Gilman protested. “We can’t afford to take their money. It’s ruining us.”

  “Then I don’t think you’re really in a bargaining situation,” Kenneth replied.

  Gilman slumped back in his chair and shook his head tiredly. “Look, how did we get back to this myth that the fission-fusion hybrid isn’t viable? We’ve been running tests and analyses for over two years. The basic physics derives from work done at Princeton, Livermore, Sandia Labs, Oak Ridge, MIT, Culham in England, and the Osaka laser institute for decades before that. It’ll work. It’s safe. It’s the future. We’ve shown you all the reports. We’ve given you the figures. What else do you want?”

  “We have other reports from sources of our own—highly authoritative sources, I might add—that are less optimistic,” Kenneth said. “Enthusiasm is commendable, but it does run the risk of allowing subjectivity to cloud one’s judgment.”

  “What sources?”

  “That is confidential. But as I said, they are highly authoritative, and my associates have accepted their view as being the more objective and impartial—a decision with which I concur.”

  Gilman was shaking his head. “No, I wouldn’t do it. It’s totally out of the question. We ll keep looking. I’d rather see us sell what we’ve got for scrap than turn it over to making windmills.”

  “That’s a matter for you and your colleagues to decide. I’ll not take this as final. Perhaps we’ll leave it with you awhile to think over.”

  “Don’t hold your breath.”

  “Well, we’ll see. Good day.”

  Gilman stared mutely, and the screen blanked out. A moment later Ruth’s voice came from the intercom. “Mr. Shears from Evron and Winthram in Boston is here. I’ve brought him up. He’s out here with me now.”

  “Lord, is it that time already? Very well, Ruth, show him in, would you?” Gilman closed the folder of financial figures lying on his desk and set it to one side. Then he got up, crossed the office, and opened the door. The young man who had been in Ruth’s office rose from his chair and approached, carrying a briefcase. Ruth introduced them and they shook hands. Gilman ushered him into his own office, closed the door behind them, and showed him the visitor’s chair. Then he resumed his own seat behind the desk. “Well, Mr. Shears, what can I do for you?”