Джон Болл - The First Team

“You still think that you have a government, then?”

“Of course. And if you admit it, Mr. Zalinsky, so do you.”

Zalinsky tightened and Hewlitt saw it, but he was unafraid. He knew the man better now; to cross him directly would be an invitation to disaster, but he liked to talk and discuss so long as things remained on that plane.

“Explain to me,” Zalinsky said.

"All right. This is a very big and complicated country, very different from your own and run under a different system. Our people are different, our ways of doing things, even our recreations. You and your people would take years to learn the mechanism. It is like a vast machine that you have not built and have not been taught to operate. We have machines in this country that take months just to learn to run. You can’t do it without the United States government; the whole thing would fall down around your ears.”

Zalinsky fitted the tips of his fingers together. “You do not think that I have enough smartness, then.”

“You would have to be at least a hundred thousand men to try it alone,” Hewlitt said. “You don’t have enough trained people to run your government and ours too. You have simply taken much more food on your plate than you are able to eat.”

“You have given me to think,” Zalinsky said. “Because it is the food that I must eat.” He paused and glanced down at himself. “And already I am too fat.”

“What did you do before you came here, Mr. Zalinsky?” Hewlitt asked. “I have read a great deal of your political material for many years and I never saw your name.”

Zalinsky seemed to welcome the opportunity to reminisce for a moment. “I was first a factory manager,” he said. “At a small factory where they made for women sweaters. It was not working well, there were not enough sweaters and they were of worse quality. So I was sent to see if I could fix.”

“Did you?”

“First I investigated to find what was wrong — the equipment, the workers, or the materials. Also the designs, the planning, and the management. I found that something was wrong with the workers.”

“Let me guess,” Hewlitt interjected. “They were being given too much political indoctrination along with their jobs. It interfered with their production.”

Zalinsky stared hard at him, not in animosity, but in frank curiosity. “Where you learn this?” he asked.

Hewlitt denied it with a shake of his head. “I didn’t, I just guessed. I know quite a bit about your country even though I’ve never been there.”

“You have accuracy,” Zalinsky admitted. “I stopped the lectures and made a closer watch of the machine operations. In a few weeks we had more and much better sweaters. I was told to start the lectures once more. To this I said that I would obey if they wished this more than sweaters. After that it was not furthermore a problem.”

“Go on,” Hewlitt invited.

“After a few months I am sent to one of our biggest steel mills. It will not work properly. This time I find that the machines are all mistaken — they are not in the right places. So I stop production and we move the machines with much work. For this I have terrible criticism, but in time the plant begins once more to work and we make steel. Before four months we have make more steel than if we had not made a stop.”

“Mr. Zalinsky,” Hewlitt said, “politics aside, the next time that you take over a plant, let me know. I’ll buy some stock in it.”

“So, you wish to exploit the workers!”

Hewlitt refused to take the bait. “When you buy stock, Mr. Zalinsky, you’re not exploiting the workers, you’re betting on them.”

Zalinsky’s mood changed, he leaned forward and unconsciously dropped his voice to a lower tone. “I become aware that in politics you have talent,” he said. “I give you warning — listen! Talk not out of this office, anywhere. Colonel Rostovitch, he is tougher than the steel I made. He is the planner that we are here. He listens, he knows. Himself he is now here and each day come more of his people. If he shoot you, I have no one to speak my own language.”

“I’ll be careful,” Hewlitt promised. “Thank you for the warning.”

He was thinking of Bob Landers as he walked out of the office; he was far from trusting Zalinsky, who was his immediate concern. The formidable Colonel Rostovitch could wait.

Marc Orberg leaned far back on the sybaritic davenport in his penthouse apartment, propped on his elbows, and ground his teeth in a combination of harsh frustration and mounting rage. His life, with which he had been so richly satisfied, was falling to pieces and he was unable to endure the humiliation.

He was not getting any publicity at all, and that was more essential to him than sex itself. The wild days of the Orberg decision against the draft were long past, so were the riots he had led against the police, the campus disorders, the bombings he had helped plan. He had accomplished all this, and now he was being ignored!

That was not the worst of the injustice that was being done to him. He had composed a new song that was a sure million-copy seller, as all of his songs were since he had become world famous, but the song had not sold a million copies because the bastards who were running things now had yanked it off the market because it was obscene. What the hell did they expect from him anyway, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm ? It was a clever song, clever as hell; it could have been an even bigger hit than “Pigpen,” the one the cops hated so much. But they had killed it just because it was about a naked woman who gets laid at the finish. Nat Friedman had warned him, but Nat was always warning him because he was a scared little runt and too cautious.

After that had happened he had decided to give a concert; he wanted to look again at an auditorium jammed with screaming, adoring faces; faces that loved him and hung on his every word, every gesture that he made. They would wait for him by the hundreds outside and there would be the business of the paper slips and a bunch of new girls to screw anytime he liked. Nat had booked the concert all right, after advising that they should lay low for a while. That had been like Nat, always timid, always afraid.

He had gotten all dressed up in his trademark costume, let them wait an extra twenty minutes for kicks, and then had come on stage, Marc Orberg in person, to look out at the vast emptiness before him with only a few hundred people gathered down front to hear him sing. They had made a fuss when he had appeared, of course, but the silent mockery of the thousands of empty seats in the big sports arena had been more than he could endure. They couldn’t treat him like that; they had found that out when he had stalked off in a blinding rage.

Nat had calmed him down, had told him to go out and sing so that they wouldn’t have to give all of the money back, particularly on the performance bond that would run into real dough. Just to make Nat happy he had gone back on stage and had sung two songs; if more of them couldn’t come, then that was all that they deserved. The applause hadn’t been loud enough, the screams of delight hadn’t been there, so he had walked out again, this time for good. He had performed; so no one got any money back and that was that. But it hadn’t died there, because the humiliation of it had galled him every hour of every day afterward.

Not one damn girl had been there after the show, not a one to share his six-thousand-dollar bed and there wasn’t another like it in the world.

He smashed a fist into the simulated fur upholstery as he realized once more that he hadn’t been to bed with any kind of a female for days. He wanted a woman, even another of the timid little virgins out for the thrill of a lifetime, and getting it.