Missile Gap

Homeward Bound

The big ground effect ship rumbles softly as it cruises across the endless expanse of the Dzerzhinsky Ocean at nearly three hundred knots, homeward bound at last. Misha sits in his cubbyhole—as shipboard political officer he rates an office of his own—and sweats over his report with the aid of a glass of Polish pear schnapps. Radio can’t punch through more than a few thousand miles of air directly, however powerful the transmitters; on earth they used to bounce signals off the ionosphere or the moon, but that doesn’t work here—the other disks are too far away to use as relays. There’s a chain of transceiver buoys marching out across the ocean at two thousand kilometer intervals, but the equipment is a pig to maintain, very expensive to build, and nobody is even joking about stringing undersea cables across a million kilometers of sea floor. Misha’s problem is that the expedition, himself included, is effectively stranded back in the eighteenth century, without even the telegraph to tie civilization together—which is a pretty pickle to find yourself in when you’re the bearer of news that will make the Politburo shit a brick. He desperately wants to be able to boost this up the ladder a bit, but instead it’s going to be his name and his alone on the masthead.

“Bastards. Why couldn’t they give us a signal rocket or two?” He gulps back what’s left of the schnapps and winds a fresh sandwich of paper and carbon into his top-secret-eyes-only typewriter.

“Because it would weigh too much, Misha,” the captain says right behind his left shoulder, causing him to jump and bang his head on the overhead locker.

When Misha stops swearing and Gagarin stops chuckling, the Party man carefully turns his stack of typescript face down on the desk then politely gestures the captain into his office. “What can I do for you, boss? And what do you mean, they’re too heavy?”

Gagarin shrugs. “We looked into it. Sure, we could put a tape recorder and a transmitter into an ICBM and shoot it up to twenty thousand kilometers. Trouble is, it’d fall down again in an hour or so. The fastest we could squirt the message, it would cost about ten rubles a character—more to the point, even a lightweight rocket would weigh as much as our entire payload. Maybe in ten years.” He sits down. “How are you doing with that report?”

Misha sighs. “How am I going to explain to Brezhnev that the Americans aren’t the only mad bastards with hydrogen bombs out here? That we’ve found the new world and the new world is just like the old world, except it glows in the dark? And the only communists we’ve found so far are termites with guns?” For a moment he looks haggard. “It’s been nice knowing you, Yuri.”

“Come on! It can’t be that bad—” Gagarin’s normally sunny disposition is clouded.

“You try and figure out how to break the news to them.” After identifying the first set of ruins, they’d sent one of their MiGs out, loaded with camera pods and fuel; a thousand kilometers inland it had seen the same ominous story of nuclear annihilation visited on an alien civilization: ruins of airports, railroads, cities, factories. A familiar topography in unfamiliar form.

This was New York—once, thousands of years before a giant stamped the bottom of Manhattan island into the sea bed—and that was once Washington, D.C. Sure there’d been extra skyscrapers, but they’d hardly needed the subsequent coastal cruise to be sure that what they were looking at was the same continent as the old capitalist enemy, thousands of years and millions of kilometers beyond a nuclear war. “We’re running for home like a dog that’s seen the devil ride out, hoping that he doesn’t see us and follow us home for a new winter hat.”

Gagarin frowns. “Excuse me?” He points to the bottle of pear schnapps.

“You are my guest.” Misha pours the First Cosmonaut a glass then tops up his own. “It opens certain ideological conflicts, Yuri. And nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news.”

“Ideological—such as?”

“Ah.” Misha takes a mouthful. “Well, we have so far avoided nuclear annihilation and invasion by the forces of reactionary terror during the Great Patriotic War, but only by the skin of our teeth. Now, doctrine has it that any alien species advanced enough to travel in space is almost certain to have discovered socialism, if not true communism, no? And that the enemies of socialism wish to destroy socialism, and take its resources for themselves. But what we’ve seen here is evidence of a different sort. This was America. It follows that somewhere nearby there is a continent that was home to another Soviet Union—two thousand years ago. But this America has been wiped out, and our elder Soviet brethren are not in evidence and they have not colonized this other-America—what can this mean?”

Gagarin’s brow wrinkled. “They’re dead too? I mean, that the alternate-Americans wiped them out in an act of colonialist imperialist aggression but did not survive their treachery,” he adds hastily.

Misha’s lips quirk in something approaching a grin: “Better work on getting your terminology right first time before you see Brezhnev, comrade,” he says. “Yes, you are correct on the facts, but there are matters of interpretation to consider. No colonial exploitation has occurred. So either the perpetrators were also wiped out, or perhaps… well, it opens up several very dangerous avenues of thought. Because if New Soviet Man isn’t home hereabouts, it implies that something happened to them, doesn’t it? Where are all the true Communists? If it turns out that they ran into hostile aliens, then… well, theory says that aliens should be good brother socialists. Theory and ten rubles will buy you a bottle of vodka on this one. Something is badly wrong with our understanding of the direction of history.”

“I suppose there’s no question that there’s something we don’t know about,” Gagarin adds in the ensuing silence, almost as an afterthought.

“Yes. And that’s a fig leaf of uncertainty we can hide behind, I hope.” Misha puts his glass down and stretches his arms behind his head, fingers interlaced until his knuckles crackle. “Before we left, our agents reported signals picked up in America from—damn, I should not be telling you this without authorization. Pretend I said nothing.” His frown returns.

“You sound as if you’re having dismal thoughts,” Gagarin prods.

“I am having dismal thoughts, comrade colonel-general, very dismal thoughts indeed. We have been behaving as if this world we occupy is merely a new geopolitical game board, have we not? Secure in the knowledge that brother socialists from beyond the stars brought us here to save us from the folly of the imperialist aggressors, or that anyone else we meet will be either barbarians or good communists, we have fallen into the pattern of an earlier age—expanding in all directions, recognizing no limits, assuming our manifest destiny. But what if there are limits? Not a barbed-wire fence or a line in the sand, but something more subtle. Why does history demand success of us? What we know is the right way for humans on a human world, with an industrial society, to live. But this is not a human world. And what if it’s a world where we’re not destined to succeed? Or what if the very circumstances which gave rise to Marxism are themselves transient, in the broader scale? What if there is a—you’ll pardon me—a materialist God? We know this is our own far future we are living in. Why would any power vast enough to build this disk bring us here?”

Gagarin shakes his head. “There are no limits, my friend,” he says, a trifle condescendingly. “If there were, do you think we would have gotten this far?”

Misha thumps his desk angrily. “Why do you think they put us somewhere where your precious rockets don’t work?” he demands. “Get up on high, one push of rocket exhaust and you could be halfway to anywhere! But down here we have to slog through the atmosphere. We can’t get away! Does that sound like a gift from one friend to another?”

“The way you are thinking sounds paranoid to me,” Gagarin insists. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, mind you: only—could you be overwrought? Finding those bombed cities affected us all, I think.”

Misha glances out of his airliner-sized porthole: “I fear there’s more to it than that. We’re not unique, comrade; we’ve been here before. And we all died. We’re a fucking duplicate, Yuri Alexeyevich, there’s a larger context to all this. And I’m scared by what the politburo will decide to do when they see the evidence. Or what the Americans will do…”