Dark silence and another bowl of slops. Dark silence forever, and the slops periodically. Wait for something to happen. Something horrible will happen.
Nothing happened, and that’s worse.
Dark and silence and slops.
The M.V.D. had all the time in the world….
AFTER THREE weeks a doctor examined Skinner, shook his head in amazement, permitted them to take him, shaking and afraid, from Quarters C to a bright upstairs room.
“Ah, Mironov,” Laurenti Beria said. “How do you feel?”
“Uhh.”
“Did you ever, play a little game when you were young, Mironov? Associating ideas? I name something, you counter with the first word which comes to your mind. Shall we begin? Red. ”
“Color.”
“Communist.”
“Trotsky.” Hah, the Communist they hate.
“Square.”
“Lunatcharsky.”
“Remember.”
“Forget.”
“Briefcase.” Beria smiled, lit a cigarette.
“Courier.”
“Knife.”
“Tuma—blade! “ Careful, Skinner…
“Knife.”
“Blade.”
“Knife.”
“Blade, blade, blade—”
“Tuma.”
“Sound.”
“Tuman. Is it Tuman? Tuman who?”
“Name.” Skinner felt dizzy, but they stopped him when he tried to sit down.
“Sonya Fyodorovna Dolohov.”
“Name.” But how does he know? How does he know? Don’t let your heart jump so.
“Whose?”
“Woman.”
“Tuman and Sonya.”
“Man and woman.”
“Underground.”
“Subway.”
“Tula.”
“Mother.”
“Mironov.”
“Nikolay.”
Beria leaned forward, crushed out his cigarette. “America.”
“Country.” Why America? Coincidence?
“Iron Curtain.”
“Europe.”
“Stalin.”
“Tito.”
“Ah! Tito, eh? You would oppose Stalin, Mironov? Atomic Bomb.”
“Stop.”
“Project X.”
“The unknown quantity.”
“Confess.”
“Torture.”
“Confess.”
“Torture.”
“Confess?”
“Never! ”
Wearily, Beria stood up. “His mind is still sharp, don’t you think, Colonel Rashevsky?”
“Yes, my Commissar. Sharp.”
“UNFORTUNATELY, it may crack soon. Well, no matter. If we fail here, we have other ways. Take him below, Colonel.” After they had gone, Beria turned to the doctor, a small man with watery eyes and thick glasses. “Well?”
“You will notice that his mind is both keen and hostile. For Stalin his response is Tito—”
“Don’t be pedantic!” Beria snorted. “More important than that, my dear doctor, is the fact that he responded to ‘atomic’ bomb’ with the word ‘stop’. Apparently, he knows something, eh? But we drew a blank, with Project X. I’d like to keep Mironov around long enough to find out just what, if anything, he knows of Project X. Do you think, ‘unknown quantity’ might have been a calculated, rational answer?”
“It might indeed have been that, Commissar.”
“Could you be more definite?”
“If the Commissar desires—”
“No, no! I want your professional opinion, not an echo of my own thoughts.”
“Well, it is impossible to tell. If I had to render a verdict, all I could say is perhaps.”
“Perhaps! That’s most helpful. Very well, doctor, you’re dismissed.”
As the medical man shuffled from the room, Boris Rashevsky returned, lit a big cigar, waited for Beria to speak.
“Boris, how is the Polish investigation progressing?”
“Better than we could have hoped. The soldier Svidrigailov did not die. From his oral description, pictures have been drawn, and we’re circulating them in Pinsk now. Some day soon the woman should be found.”
“I hope so,” Beria said, leafing idly through some papers on his desk.
SKINNER was dumbfounded. They gave him a living room, a bedroom, a bath. All the good food he wanted, anything. They let him write his own menu each morning, brought him the food three times a day, excellently prepared. They encouraged reading, stacked the room with hundreds of books. Music was piped in somehow through the walls, and not all of it was the new Communist art which had replaced the accepted—and Capitalistic—forms with its own shallow, one-track theme.
Surprised or not, at first Skinner slunk around his quarters fearfully, expecting calamity to drop upon him at any moment in some new, and more hideous, form of torture.
It failed to materialize.
Four days, five, then a week. Skinner gained back the weight he had lost. Suspicion and fear faded away slowly. Confidence returned to his stride, to his eyes, to his thoughts, After two weeks he found himself humming along with the music, reading avidly the books they supplied—not all Communist dogma, either.
Once on the fifteenth day a phone in the living room rang, and Skinner picked up the receiver doubtfully. His doubts faded. A girl’s voice, pleasant, sweet, cultured. She spoke with him about the city of Tula, a warped conversation about the city, magnifying, its beauty, its points of interest, its charm, minimizing what the Communist regime had done there. Skinner’s answers were always vague—he had never been closer to Tula than he was at the present moment!
But each day the girl would call, and slowly Skinner grew homesick for the city he had never seen. Its streets its trees, the crystal streams which gurgled in its parks…
On the thirty-first day—Skinner kept his record carefully on a little scratch-pad they had given him—the girl did not call. A day later, the music stopped. Uniformed men came in and carted out, Skinner’s books. Others came and took the furniture, piece by piece, locking off the bedroom and the bath and leaving Skinner in the now-bare cubicle which had been, the living room.
He failed to get his dinner that night. And soon after, the lights in his underground vault faded, leaving him in darkness. He’d come to accept that, for they’d turned the lights off every night, the lights which were recessed in niches high up near the ceiling.
WHEN SKINNER awoke, it was still dark. It remained, dark. Pitch-black—and silent….
He tried to accept it with a Stoic calm. But he thought, over and over again: They tricked rne. They gave me everything, made me soft, then plunged me back into this! The intensity of his thoughts, and his hatred, bordered on hysteria, but he could not check them.
The phone rang.
Of all the furniture that alone they’d left in the room, some place on the floor. On hands and knees Skinner groped for it, found it, placed the receiver at his ear with trembling fingers. Silence.
He placed the receiver back on its cradle in the darkness.
The phone rang.
He picked it up.
Silence.
Keep it off the hook—
It rang anyway.
“Hello? Hello? HELLO!”
Silence.
He smiled, picked up the phone, fondled it for a moment when he remembered the nice girl’s voice which had spoken of Tula. Then he hurled the instrument at the wall, heard it strike, clatter to the floor.
It went right on ringing.
He lifted it, hurled it again. Still again, heard it shatter.
He sobbed foolishly when it stopped ringing. He sat in the center of the floor, gazing sightlessly into darkness, listening for anything, anything but the utter silence. He wished he hadn’t destroyed the phone, wished it could ring again.