They worked on the Doctor for eleven hours. Yevgeny's head started to throb inside of ninety minutes, but he kept enough of his composure. Katchatkovich was old, brittle – thorny and corrosively bitter. Yevgeny's hatred for him was like a drug. He wanted to indulge and indulge and indulge in it and indulge in it and let it erase everything else, including and most sweetly especially Dr. Alexander Piotr Katchatkovich. He is the source! He is the origin of the deceit, the murder – the killing of the soul!
Faintly he understood that that was an overstatement – other men had been just as vital to the cancer. But Stalin, Trotsky, F.E. Dzerzhinsky...were not wired to that chair.
So Yevgeny fed himself on little morsels of hate only. He improvised a decision that he would space Kachatkovich's beating out over time, sensing that the old Party member was leathery, but lacked endurance. Let him build a little hope, then break it down again. Besides, a fast beating would probably just kill him.
"So, what? You want to be a capitalist? You want to take a Mercedes-Benz through the drive-through at McDonalds? Drop atomic weapons on innocent women and children of the proletariat when you're not exploiting their labor?"
"I am a Communist who opposes tyranny. We know that Stalin murdered all the most experienced military officers in his purges of the '30s, leaving the Motherland wide open to attack by the Fascists! The Iron Man didn't build Russia – he all but killed it. Of course, you know that even speaking of those purges is a crime punishable by arrest and summary disappearance. The proletariat must rule itself, as Marx and Engels wrote. It will do without the madmen. The madmen you helped create. The madmen you helped create, Dr. Alexander Piotr Katchatkovich. The Scientist of Stalingrad...the Dr. Frankenstein of Monster Russia."
"I saved the Soviet Un – " The Doctor started. Yevgeny decided it was time to increase the intensity and threw a %100 punch from the shoulder into the bound man's jaw.
Katchatkovich, eyes glazed, worked his jaw and Yevgeny heard something roll glassily inside there.
Yevgeny went on. "Light weight plastics that made vehicles and gear lighter and easier to move. Advanced electronics that dazzled not only the Fascists but the best minds in Britain and America – " Katchatkovich made a show of spitting a splinter of tooth onto the floor, " – the "Katchatkovich medicines" that were first handed out to the citizens of Stalingrad during the siege and have since been made mandatory for the docility of millions from Bordeaux to the ruins in Tokyo. Atomic weapons theory and design, so that Stalin had a working bomb to drop on Berlin by 1945, to force the surrender of the French in ‘48?" Yevgeny leaned down into the Doctor's face and worked his lungs as he spoke so that his breath slapped Kachatkovich's face. "All invented by you with your Doctor of Sciences degree from Moscow University? While German artillery rained around your basement shelter?" He smacked Katchatkovich across the splintered side of his face. The rage threw his hand harder than he'd meant. "Horse shit!" He slapped his captive going back the other way. The Doctor was swallowing – Yevgeny knew he was swallowing blood, trying to hide it from him. "Does the state think that we are so stupid? Does the state think that we are really so stinking, staggering, epically stupid as to believe that all was done by only you, alone? We in the Judges do not take your medications, Dr. Katchatkovich. Our minds are still free."
He had been beating his captive back and forth with the palm and then the back of his hand, until the old man's eyes glazed over and, finally, blood streamed out of his mouth. Satisfied, Yevgeny flopped into his own chair.
"By the Virgin," he heard Josef breath behind him.
"Without you," Yevgeny gasped cheerfully, getting his breath back, "there would have been no Patriotic War of Expansion. That bastard Stalin would never have used his atomic horrors on Tokyo, in France, on London, on New York. The Americans would never have attacked Murmask, Leningrad, Warsaw, Prague in return. They knew, the Americans...they could see the evil you had created. They left the Japanese in their home islands at the end of the first Great Patriotic War so that they could move those troops into position against us, didn't they? Russians couldn't see the truth, because Russians are told only lies, aren't they?"
"An atomic attack by the capitalists was inevitable..." Katchatkovich slurred. "When the class struggle was led into the nuclear age by the Union of Soviet – "
"We nuked them first!"
"To realize the dream of worldwide Socialism!"
"To put all the world under the boot of Stalinism!" Yevgeny screamed. "Only the death of Stalin in the atomic bombing of Leningrad in 1950 could begin to derail the madness! You could not have been the sole inventor – why were the others concealed? What were their names? How did the state profit by keeping them hidden? How could it be thought that that ridiculous story of the lone genius would be believed? No one had heard of you before, and no one has heard of you since. Look at you. Dissolved in alcohol, playing chess with your second rate guards."
"You'll freeze in Siberia for what you did to Mikhail and Conrad," Katchatkovich's frail voice cracked. The vodka had worn off, and they had refused to bring him any more. Dawn was coming in through the window. The snow had stopped. The sound of tears was coming in. Yevgeny was suddenly aware of each of the eleven hours they had been in this room. "Those men had seven grandchildren between them."
"And seven times seven years in the State Security Committee to answer for," Yevgeny retorted. It had shaken his confidence when the snow had stopped. The new daylight energized him – but he knew that it was only a matter of hours before smothering exhaustion would land on him. "Tell me – " He pitched his voice as if the subject were a brand new one, "who were the other scientists and engineers? Answer for them. Were they Jewish slave labor, or political dissenters? They were killed to keep the secret. Where did the bulldozers dig their grave?"
Katchatkovich started cranking out laughs, even though the pain they caused his broken face was clear to be seen. "Their graves? Their graves are very far from here. Very, very far, may the poor bastards rest in peace. Bring a man who fought alongside your grandfather a drink."
"No. Who were they?"
"Patriots."
"What good it did them. You are almost there. It doesn't matter anymore. You are sitting in your grave. I can work on your face some more if that's what it takes to convince you, but why go through that?"
Katchatkovich's beard looked whiter now, against the black and blue injuries to his face, and his blood. His eyes were more mangled than ever.
His head began to bob a very little bit. "My name is… Doctor Alexander Piotr Katchatkovich," he said. "I was educated at the University of Moscow, earning a Doctor of Sciences Degree. I helped to create this world. I am the single man most responsible for the creation of this world, and the triumph of the Communist state within it."
Yevgeny drove his fist down into Katchatkovich's belly, and thought he felt it bump against his spine in the back.
"I am telling you!" Katchatkovich heaved. Tears streamed down his face. "God damn you! You pieces of dog shit, you don't deserve to live in the glorious Soviet Union!"
"May Jesus Christ be your witness to that," Yevgeny agreed sincerely.
"I was twenty-seven years old when I was assigned as a junior scientist to a secret project...the Soviet study of quantum physics. We were administered by the KGB."
What the Hell is he talking about now? Yevgeny wondered. But he stayed his hand - something seemed to be on the horizon, now.
"You understand quantum physics?" Katchatkovich asked, looking at the floor. Yevgeny understood that it was an insult, and let it pass. "It deals with the most fundamental interactions of matter, energy, states of being. The universe...the entire universe fits together, like teeth on a zipper, on a scale...imagine if a gnat wore trousers, a gnat in Siberia, and you were the next nearest thing to those..."
The Doctor stopped, and concentrated for a brief while on merely breathing. "It encompasses, it was found, also time travel."
For the first time in an interrogation, the giant Judge with the scars on his mouth from his own KGB sessions felt the bottom drop out of his stomach.
"Nonsense," he said. But so weakly that everyone ignored him.
"In the fifth year that I was with the project, it was found that there was a way to travel backward through the fifth dimension. The theorems were crude, it couldn't be done accurately. But it could be done. The project was being conducted in the closest secrecy at a campus built under KGB supervision outside of Stalingrad. I was chosen as the traveler not because I was the best qualified or the most intelligent – but because I have a photographic memory. A quirk. A quirk of the brain that made it my destiny."
"That is very interesting," As soon as Yevgeny cut Katchatkovich off, the chill vanished off the back of his neck. "But the KGB wasn't even founded until the 1950s. In your day, it was called the NKVD." It's good that he's making mistakes like this - it shows how hard it's getting for him to think. "And I'm supposed to believe that you flashed forward to a future Soviet Union, grabbed a few super technologies, and brought them back, in order to save the Soviet Union of the past. How could there be a Soviet Union of the future at all if you had to visit the future to save it?"
"No." Katchatkovich admitted. "It is not possible to change history."
Yevgeny was relieved that they weren't going to spend any more time on this dead end. He was momentarily without anything to say. To keep the initiative, he said, "Isn't it lovely that the old woman who's apartment this was managed not to be reassigned plastic Katchatkovich furniture?"
Christ, have I said too much? Something to reveal our location? No...what's it matter? He'll be dead in a few hours anyway.
Katchatkovich plowed on, as if correcting Yevgeny's wrong ideas was going to be as effortful as shoveling frozen gravel, but nonetheless had to be finished as soon as possible. "It is possible to create a copy of a universe." Katchatkovich's voice suddenly dropped. "I did not travel forward in time. I came backward. I was born in 1956 in the Alphaverse. I created the Betaverse when I arrived in February of 1942."
Yevgeny had tried to hope that this monstrous story had been a lie. But it was so impossible – and Katchatkovich gave it to him not in tones to placate. If it was true – he was now looking into a window the like of which no human being could fully hold all in his mind.
They have warped and tortured the truth so often...Yevgeny's thoughts were slow with the stun of what he was hearing. Is this not exactly the thing they would call perfection?
He didn't know how long he sat there speechless, but it was long enough for the Doctor to decide to fill the hole.
"I departed from Alpha in August of 1988."
"Three years from now," Yevgeny said, forcing himself to sound contemptuous.
"No!" Katchatkovich bobbed his head sharply in place of stamping his foot. With the blood staining his beard he looked like a demon schoolmaster. "There is no relation! This is the Betaverse! I brought in my memory the fundamentals of sciences that had been perfected by that time. Plastics, atomics, mood enhancement drugs, calculating machines of lightning speed. Doing this, I created a divergence in the stream of time, a fraternal twin to the Alphaverse that would now have a different destiny."
Yevgeny stared. He opened his mouth.
"Ah!" The noise Katchatkovich made was a shout. "Why? You want to know why? Because Socialism was dying. It was a closely held secret that Moscow would be bankrupt in a matter of years – the Soviet Army had been bled white and humiliated in Afghanistan by Muslim zealots who were puppets of the CIA. There were shortages, there were bread lines in Moscow…capitalist greed…" The Doctor was only faintly disgusted at the memory of a problem that wasn't his any more. "Kids in Moscow paying fifty American dollars at a market stall for a pair of American blue jeans. Did they know one line of the Communist Manifesto? In a few more years? Anarchy. Civil war. No doubt the Americans pounced as soon as they saw our weakness."
"The KGB remained the last guardian of Socialism." Now that he'd started talking, Katchatkovich wasn't stopping. He had gone over the hump of the interrogation and was on the downhill slope. "We were watching General Secretary Gorbachev and his backward policies of openness and restructuring. We in the KGB knew that the security of the Soviet Union rested with us, only with us. It was not difficult to get the funding…the KGB's financial affairs are vast and deeply secret. We built the machines on a pasture so old the Magyars had probably grazed their cattle there. We had to make sure I didn't suddenly appear halfway through a wall. As Russia crumbled, we calibrated the machines for a date somewhere between 1940 and 1943…"
My God…Yevgeny sat staring. What was it like? The moment of that journey? Was it a flash, or did it last forever? Did you feel yourself shrinking into the womb again, and coming out the other side? Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin never went anywhere compared to you, Dr. Katchatkovich.
But Katchatkovich had nothing to say about the journey. "You know what really won the battle of Stalingrad? Not the new technologies. No, there was barely time to begin manufacture. Intelligence. This universe became different from the one I was born in the moment I arrived, but things were still the same enough at that early time that all I had to do was memorize postwar history books, and I could tell Comrade Stalin and Comrade General Chuikov everything they could want about the Fascist order of battle, supplies, equipment…anything. The nuclear attack on Berlin…right on the Fuhrer's command bunker. Intelligence…and blood, and vodka, and raw nerves."
My God, Yevgeny thought. My God…why have you abandoned me?
He jumped up from his chair to get his circulation flowing again, get his brain working. In his chest he felt an unbearable, growing diamond of – he couldn't call it hate. He couldn't call it his fiercest rage. He had known those. This went past them a thousand kilometers.
He turned his back to Katchatkovich. He knew a surpassing certainty that the Doctor was about to die. "Does the state have this time travel technology now?"
He heard Katchatkovich shrug. "Why should they use it?"
"The Americans are still out there."
"They will fall in time."
"Was it worth it to you?"
"Huh." Katchatkovich's noise was as bitter as copper and death. "Yes. It was forty years ago. The Great Patriotic Wars, those…those I am thankful for. But they are only a dream…"
Yevgeny turned around.
The Doctor's head was tilted as far back as the chair and the joints in his neck would allow. Tears were suddenly cascading down his cheeks, and his thin chest was shaking and shaking. "They took what they wanted from me – once they had it all, I was an empty glass. I…was never the brightest…nor the best…other men took what I had brought them and made what they wanted out of it. And they told me I was a Hero of the Soviet Union! The Soviet Union I was born to…who knows what awful fate it finally met…I ran! I ran to this dreamworld…and I played chess with Conrad and Mikhail, and drank."
Yevgeny stared at Dr. Alexander Piotr Katchatkovich, and, perversely, he felt something like a sympathy of tears turn in his chest, right at the bottom of his windpipe. Sooner or later, everyone breaks. He had been seventeen when the KGB interrogators had taken him to the Lubyanka with questions about his mother's political activities at the school where she taught. He thought of the things he had babbled about his mother, and his spine went numb all the way to his pelvic joint.
"Your crimes against nature," he began, and had to start again. "Your crimes against nature and freedom are too monstrous to be even thought about. God in Heaven is appalled at you. The people cry out for justice."
"Huh," Katchatkovich snorted, blinking – his eyelids gooey with tears. "Fuck your mothers."
Yevgeny's slammed his chair down nearly between the Doctor's knees, its back to Katchatkovich. Yevgeny's eyes were wide with feral rage again as he straddled the chair in front of the time traveler, the man who had had an ego monstrous enough to do what it had done, to pump life into this mismatched corpse.
Katchatkovich's eyes flew open, as if he was absolutely surprised to find that strangulation was the method of his disposal.
The Hero of the Soviet Union's neck was like a stalk of celery in his killer's hands.
Brian says, "My poems and short stories have appeared at Nuvein.com, among others. My stage play Managed Lives was produced at the Vero Beach Theater Guild in July of 2002. I live on the Treasure Coast of Florida, I fill in the blank marked Occupation with 'gentleman adventurer.'"