Comrade Zhdanov, the head of the newly formed Atomic Division, shuffled his papers.
“Well?” Stalin repeated. “Tell me about our atom bomb.”
“Yes, Comrade Secretary,” Zhdanov began. “I have conducted the investigations required, but I regret to have to inform the council that there is no significant change in the forecasts. We simply do not have the materials. It may be possible to complete the ten-year development program in eight years, but the consequences of such a concentration of resources will put immeasurable strains on the rest of the economy.
“And,” he added morosely, “it would also have a severe effect on the development of the aircraft required for delivery.”
It was as he had feared.
“The other option?” he asked.
Zhdanov shuffled his papers again. “The possibility of stealing the material required has been thoroughly investigated. The trains the Americans use to carry their refined uranium from the plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to Los Alamos are not heavily guarded. The actual theft could probably be accomplished by one of our partisan bands without too much trouble. Getting it and them back home might be difficult, and the political consequences of exposure would undoubtedly be grave. But these problems can be overcome.
“Unfortunately,” he continued, “there is another which cannot be. Each train carries only enough atomic material for the making of, at most, two bombs. For us to have anything less than thirty would be worse than useless. The Americans would not take us seriously. We could hardly hope to hold up fifteen trains.”
Zhdanov turned to look at Stalin for the first time, but the General Secretary’s face held a strange expression, almost a quizzical smile. He was in fact remembering a train holdup he’d organized forty years before, in the days of the Georgian armed bands. One hundred thousand rubles had been the prize, but the denominations of the bills had been so large that anyone who’d tried to cash one had been instantly arrested. Those were simpler days.
“Thank you, Andrei Andreyevich,” he said perfunctorily. “Has anyone anything positive to suggest?”
He was answered with a stony silence.
“So we cannot make it, and we cannot steal it,” Stalin said softly. “But make no mistake, we must have it. The alternative is at least five years during which the capitalist world will have the power of life and death over us. I refuse to accept that we shall win this war only to lose the peace. From this moment an atomic bomb is First Priority.
“You” — he looked straight at Zhdanov — “will solve the unsolvable.”
Anatoly Sheslakov thought to himself that it had been all very dramatic, but not very logical. If it was unsolvable, it couldn’t be solved; if it could be solved, it was not unsolvable. The word game did not help very much. But he had appreciated the seriousness of the situation since two that morning, when everyone in the Atomic Division had been summoned from their beds and harangued by a white-faced Zhdanov.
Sheslakov leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette, and watched the people walking past his door. He left it open for the occasional glimpse offered of Zhdanov’s secretary, Tania, she of the wonderfully erect stance and lovely ankles. He harboured no amorous ambitions — in fact her personality rather grated on him — but he loved watching her; she had that physical arrogance of youth which he, and indeed his much-loved wife, had long ago lost.
He was approaching fifty, and most of his face bore the signs of his age. The eyes though were still bright and sharp, evidence of the undimmed intellect behind them. People had often said of him, sometimes kindly, sometimes not, that he had the perfect planner’s brain, an ability to juggle an almost infinite array of variables into patterns of breathtaking simplicity that was matched only by his lack of imagination. He always replied that imagination was only the ability to stretch logic beyond what seemed, to lesser mortals, logical.
He had been twenty at the time of the Revolution, and had joined the Red Army in a fit of enthusiasm that he still found hard to explain. But it had paid dividends. His brilliance had outweighed his late arrival in the Party, and soon he was a commissar on the way up. After the Revolution he’d risen through the ranks of the state planning organs, prospering as they did with the adoption of a fully planned economy in the late twenties. The purges of the following decade decimated his colleagues but Sheslakov always survived; he had too good a brain for the Party to waste, too austere a brain for the Party leadership to feel threatened. He was a political neuter, a problem solver whose only demand of authority was that it should provide him with an endless supply of interesting problems. The outbreak of war and his assignment to the GRU and Atomic Division had changed the nature of the problems but not, fortunately, the scope they offered to his talents.
The First Priority was clearly a case in point. Sheslakov had all the relevant information — the military reports, espionage reports, industrial reports, scientific reports — scattered across his desk. Most of what they contained was now filed in his brain. He could see no reason to dispute Stalin’s statement that they could neither make nor steal enough atomic bombs, but his intuition insisted that this was one riddle that had an answer. And intuition, he had always thought, was nothing more than logic making use of facts that were stored in the unconscious.
He lit another cigarette and closed his eyes. What were the arguments against the theft? He took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote, in neat capitals, “NOT ENOUGH CAN BE STOLEN.” Not enough for what? For a possible war against the Americans? No, for deterring the Americans from starting such a war. The Americans would know how much of the Uranium-235 had been stolen, and consequently how many bombs could be made. A dead end, it had to be. So why didn’t it feel like one? He could see no hidden assumptions. There had to be something else.
Sheslakov spent the rest of the afternoon attacking the problem from the other end, checking through the reports covering a possible acceleration of the Soviet program. He could find no hopes there. Feeling, for him, unusually frustrated, he ate dinner in the GRU canteen and went for a walk along the river. It was a warm evening for early May, the sky clear after the day’s spring showers, and he surrendered himself to pleasant reveries, secure in the knowledge that parts of his mind were still carefully sifting through the problem.
It was just after eight when, sitting on an old capstan and staring across the water at a factory gutted by a German bomb, he found the hidden assumption he’d been searching for. And in the seconds that followed the pieces of an answer seemed to slip into each other like the parts of a matryoshka doll.
He lit a cigarette and sat for a few moments more watching the evening shadows lengthen. Then he walked briskly back to Frunze Street, collected a bottle from his office, and took the elevator back down to the floor that housed the GRU Secretariat. As expected, he found Olgarkov still at his desk, a mountain of a man surrounded by a mountain of paperwork. Seeing the bottle, Olgarkov produced two glasses from a drawer with a magician’s flourish.
They drank each other’s health and Sheslakov sank into the sofa beneath the window.
“Two things, Pyotr Alexeyevich,” he said.
“First Priority, I assume.”
“Word spreads fast.”
“Words like those do.”
“One, I want a report from Rosa, in Washington, as quickly as possible.” He dictated the questions he wanted answered. “How long?”
“It will have to come out through Alaska,” Olgarkov replied. “A week, perhaps ten days.”