Potemkin village

A Novelet by FLETCHER PRATT

I

Director Unterbaum of the Intercolonial Office rose from his chair as the pair came in. "I take it you haven't met before?" he said. "Mr. and Mrs. Lanzerotti, this is Ann Starnes, the recording photographer, and Robert Heidekopfer, one of our better writers."

There were smiles and acknowledgments. Unterbaum touched a pair of buttons on his desk and two chairs slid out of the walls to make a group of five. "Sit down, please," he said. "Now I'm not going to mince words. The reason you're here is because the Council wants you-three of you, at least-to undertake a mission. Vincent-" he indicated Lanzerotti, who nodded a dark head-"already knows something about it, but for the benefit of Miss Starnes and Mr. Heidekopfer, I will say that we want to send you to Tolstoia."

Heidekopfer smiled and said, "Sounds better than that trip to the polar mines on Mars, eh Ann?"

"Warmer, anyhow," said the girl, turning a carefully-kept blonde head. "But I thought Tolstoia was closed to visitors."

"The patriarch has agreed to let a delegation in for this visit," said Unterbaum, "so we can render a fair and unbiased report on Tolstoia, in word, picture and observation. The point is this; there are some islands about three hundred miles off the coast of Tolstoia, between it and South Bergenland-the Wrightley Islands. They have no resources, but Tolstoia wants to colonize them." He touched buttons again, and a map appeared on the wall showing the almost-round shape of the island nation, with the islands and the tip of South Bergenland at the right.

Unterbaum went on: "They're uninhabited, so there isn't any objection from the Demographic Commission, although it's unusual for one of the hermit-states to expand. But there are certain features of the request that make the Council inclined to go slow; or at least to want more information."

He stopped, seeming to wait for a question, so Heidekopfer asked it. "What are they?"

Lanzerotti answered, "To begin with, the place was founded in accordance with the philosophy of Count Leo Tolstoi, a Russian writer of some centuries back. The Russians discovered that a sect of people who believed in his ideas was growing up in their country, and considered it a threat to the organization of their state. They couldn't dispose of the Tolstoians under the genocide laws, so they appealed to the Council and it agreed to expatriate all the Tolstoians the Russians could identify."

"Then it was a penal colony, like the Moon mines?" inquired Heidekopfer.

"No," said Lanzerotti. "As a matter of fact, when the announcement was made, the Tolstoians came forward in numbers and identified themselves. But they thought they were going to have a reservation set apart for them in Russia itself, and when they found they were going to an island on Venus, there was a certain amount of resentment."

"Do you think it still exists? That if they're allowed to get hold of the islands, they'll do something drastic-say start a war?"

"Not after all these years," said Lanzerotti. "It's nearly three centuries, and national resentments don't last that long without something to feed on. Besides, pacifism was one of Tolstoi's doctrines."

"Then what are we supposed to look for?"

Lanzerotti spread his hands. "We don't know. That's what's worrying the Diplomatic Division. Asking for more territory indicates a rising birth-rate, but the kind of territory they're asking for doesn't promise a rise serious enough to worry the Demographic Commission. We don't consider it likely that Tolstoianism has become militant. But to be honest, we just don't know."

Ann Starnes smiled. "It sounds like hunting for a needle in a haystack when you don't even know whether there's any needle," she said.

"On the contrary," said Unterbaum, "we're fairly certain there is a needle, and a sharp one. What we need to know is what kind of needle it is before someone gets stuck with it. Listen-" He snapped up one of the lids in his desk and spun a wheel of recording tape. "Planes aren't allowed to land in Tolstoia, of course, but every once in a while one comes down there, and occasionally a yacht or fishing-craft gets wrecked on the coast. Now the normal procedure in such a case with a hermit-state is that they hold survivors and notify someone to come and get them. They stopped doing that about eighty years ago."

"What do you mean?" said Heidekopfer. "Stopped notifying or stopped rescuing survivors?"

"It isn't quite certain," said Unterbaum, "but here's the sequence, such as it is. Seventy-eight years ago Bernard Jones and his wife disappeared while on a flight from MacNider to South Bergenland." He indicated the map. "You see, that would carry them close to Tolstoia. Three months later one of the fishing vessels, which are the only form of communication the Tolstoians have, turned up at MacNider. It had a letter from Mrs. Jones. She said her husband had died in a crash landing, and she was staying in Tolstoia with the permission of the authorities."

"Anything wrong about that?" asked Heidekopfer.

"There's nothing wrong with any of this," said Unterbaum, "at least as far as that instance goes. It's other things. Nothing has been heard of Mrs. Jones since. Seventy-six years ago, a musician named Bruno Zaleski went on a yachting trip in the South Ocean with a party of three. They never came back. After the usual interval letters came through from all of them. They said they found Tolstoia a Venusian paradise and were going to stay. Zaleski was heard from again. At the time of the next incident, one year later, his brother received a letter telling how happy he was."

He paused for a moment. "The incident sixty-seven years ago was the beginning of a new series. It concerned a man named Walter Artem, another plane case. Like Jones, he disappeared. One of the Tolstoian fishing-craft brought him back, but he was dead. They had preserved his body carefully. I'll show you the picture."

He touched the stud and the watchers found themselves gazing at a coffin, partly glassed so the occupant was visible to the waist. Rose Lanzerotti gave a little cry and with reason, for the face within was peculiarly horrible; bloated and suffused with blood, the neck swelling out over a clearly visible rope.

"They explained he had hanged himself," Unterbaum continued.

"I have a question," said Ann Starnes. "Why did they go to all the trouble of preserving him just the way he died? It sounds as though they were afraid somebody might get suspicious."

"That's what I thought," said Unterbaum. "But there's an explanation. The records show that the Tolstoians, even while they were in Russia, showed a peculiar reverence for their dead when they were important people. It's a hold-over from their twentieth century leader Lenin. They preserve bodies this way so they're visible. The explanation that came with Artem's body was that the Tolstoians didn't know how important he was, but thought he might be big enough to deserve preservative treatment."

"Polite of them," murmured Lanzerotti.

"Very," said Unterbaum. "Almost too polite. Because it was repeated-since Artem there have been six cases of castaways on Tolstoia committing suicide and being delivered at MacNider in preserved form."

"All hangings?" asked Heidekopfer.

"No. One stabbing, three shootings, two overdoses of soporifics. There are autopsy records on those, and they're legitimate."

"Seems a high proportion of suicides among the castaways," said Heidekopfer. "Can anything be made of that?"

"Nobody seemed to think so," said Unterbaum. "Seven suicides out of a given group over a period of eighty years isn't much, after all. The thing that stirred up our office was the discovery that in the past eighty years not one castaway has come back alive. They've either been crated out as suicides or sent through letters saying they have decided to become citizens of Tolstoia."

He paused a moment to let that sink in. "A number of these cases are rather special. There was Carmenilla Baio, forty-four years ago. She was a video dancer on a flight from MacNider to South Bergenland. Sent out the usual letter saying she had decided her future lay in Tolstoia, and followed it with another one a couple of years later. That's ordinary enough, but the case made the news, and when we went through the records, we found that when she disappeared she had been married only three months and was passionately devoted to her husband. Her second letter was written in a kind of code, and asked him to fake an accident and join her there."

"Did he?" asked Ann Starnes.

"Any possibility of forgery in those letters?" asked Heidekopfer at the same time.

Unterbaum turned to the girl. "No to your question. As for the other one, Carmenilla Baio's private code was certainly no forgery."

Heidekopfer said, "It appears that the Tolstoians compel them to stay there, and if they argue, bump them off. Is that it?"

"That would be a charge of genocide. I do not think-" began Lanzerotti.

"I don't either," said Unterbaum. "The Tolstoians wouldn't expose themselves to such a thing, especially in view of their origins. No, I'm convinced they have been quite honest, leaning over backward-as witness the preserved suicides-but there's some factor in the equation we don't know. And I won't deny that there's danger in the trip."

"Then I'm going," said Rosa Lanzerotti, decisively. She was a small woman with vivid Italiote coloring.

Ann Starnes said, "Might as well square the party off, hadn't we? It would be nice to have someone to handle the recording tapes and films."

Unterbaum frowned. "The Intercolonial...