The Czechs were working on making bigger radios that were not portable but that could create a field larger than a room. They’d only managed to make one other. It was enormous—it took up two stories at the Škoda plant—but it only gave them about double the containment space. There were theories that two radios used in unison might exponentially strengthen the signal—maybe even create a wavy pattern as big as a city. But nobody had any idea what would really happen when two radios were nested together.
“Marta became very different when we made love in the radio’s field,” Peter said. “So did I. I hadn’t let myself have too many feelings for a long time. I don’t know if I ever had very many to begin with. But now we were two spies who were in a place that was totally secure, completely safe for that moment—and that moment could last for hours.
“I’ll never forget that little pallet bed in the Nové Butovice panelak. It wasn’t much more than a piece of foam rubber with some sheets on it. That white pallet with her pale skin against it and her dark hair—she wore her hair cropped short, like a boy’s. Every time she was with me it could be the last, and we came to each other desperately. I’ve never felt like anything mattered so much to me, because it mattered so much to her.
“We did our spook business too, of course. She’d tell me what she’d learned. And then I’d give her the duplicate, recharged batteries, and she would go. She’d be back five seconds after she left. That was how long it took for me to come inside radio time with her and then to leave her there after we were done.”
The Department of Defense went to work on three tubes that Marta got out for them, and pretty soon Peter knew they were the real McCoy, that Marta wasn’t running some convoluted operation on him. But the DOD techies couldn’t go any further. There was something that their glass makers were doing, something that the defense engineers couldn’t duphcate. They couldn’t make a working radio.
Things began to fall apart. The East was going down, and Somebody in the KGB wanted very much for the battery problem to be solved. If it could be, the inevitable might be forestalled, the system saved. And then it finally dawned on that Somebody that he had all the time in the world. All he had to do was put his engineers into the second, big radio’s field. They could work on smaller devices until the big one’s batteries wore down. Then they could quickly put in a fresh set and drop back out of time to work some more. The work could progress at a miraculous pace! Why not?
There was the worry about the “nesting problem” of having a separate radio within a radio field. There was the one theory of exponential strengthening. And there was the theory that the two radios would cancel one another out—and cancel out all the futures within the scope of either. And there was the fact that nobody had any goddamn idea what would actually happen when they tried the experiment.
But these were not exactly the children of high officials who would be at risk, after all. And besides, they were only Czechs and not Russians.
All that would be necessary was good security: a rotating shift of guards, and a political officer who was familiar with the project to oversee them. This political officer would be the one to turn the knob, to tune them in. It should be someone proven, but expendable. Marta Plášilová drew the assignment.
“I remember the day she told me about this,” Peter said. “We were lying naked on the pallet. I offered her the chance to get out of there, to come to the West.”
“And what would I do there in America?” she asked me. “Surf in California?”
“Why not?” I said. “There are places in the world that are not so gloomy.”
She just shook her head. “But I am gloomy,” she said. She pouted and I kissed her bunched-up lips and cradled her in my arms. “I don’t want to take my gloom to a strange, bright place. I want Praha to become a bright place and I will lose my gloom with her.”
“It is bright now,” I said to her. “Here in this part of Praha.”
“Yes, here with you, my love. This is enough happiness for me.”
“A moment? Less than a moment?”
“It will have to do.”
“But I drew her to me and I held her and we made love again. Not yet, I thought. The gloom can wait a while. Not yet.”
Peter and I had been drinking red wine when he told me of this. He dipped his fingertips in the wine and rubbed one finger lightly about the rim of his glass. The glass was crystal, and it sang a single, pure note.
“Did I tell you? She smelled like rain. Whenever we were together like that, she always smelled like rain.”
Marta did not defect. There was never really any chance that she would. She went ahead with the radio experiment.
“We planned it all out very carefully. She had me believing that we could pull off the ultimate spook trick and subvert the entire project. Some of the engineers and glass makers were already Marta’s agents—they’d given us good intelligence—and some of them had strong potential for becoming agents. Nearly all of them had a grudge against the state that Marta had ferreted out. Given time, Marta told me that she could get some hold on all of them. She could have, probably.
“I thought that she would age a year or so, and then she would be in control inside the radio, and I would get to see her again. See her in practically no time. She had me believing. She was a hell of an operative. But I think she knew from the start that this was a typical project of the Czechoslovakian government.”
On the night when they turned on a radio inside another radio’s field, Peter was at the U Mlhy. It was a different pub back then—no foreigners except for the occasional spy. He sat in his usual corner.
“I looked at my watch. I wore one back then. I counted the time. And then, everything lurched. The world folded and unfolded, like a giant had stepped on reality and crushed it down for a second, and then everything had sprung back up out of the distortion when the giant took its foot off.
“I remember this drunk next to me staring at his glass of liquor and saying ‘Bad belorovka. Very bad belorovka.’ But it wasn’t the belorovka. I knew what it was. Something fucked up. Something went really, really wrong.”
Nothing ever got fixed in Prague and what got done was done badly back then. There was no such thing as progress.
Everyone who knew how to make the tubes vanished in the experiment. Peter dug as deeply as he could into the matter without completely exposing himself. Nobody had ever been able to duplicate the tubes, in the East or West.
He still has contacts that will tell him of any developments. There have been none.
1989 came and the rot finally got into the Eastern Bloc’s skeleton and all the eternal monuments to the inevitable dialectic crumbled and collapsed like so many panelaks that had reached the age of fifteen. A playwright dissident became president, and nobody got shot, at least in Prague.
Peter quit the CIA. He moved into a place in Dejvice, into Vaclav Havel’s old neighborhood. He started an export business, using some of the glassworks connections he’d made following up on how the vacuum tubes might have been produced. Eventually he’d come to specialize in Bohemian crystal. And then he moved into more exotic goods that paid extremely well and were questionably legal. He didn’t seem to care.