"Smith, Cordwainer - Angerhelm UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Cordwainer)

It was about this time that I came in. He couldn't get hold of Mr. Spatz and there was real trouble.
The point is that all three of them led together. The Valley people had picked up the name (and it is not up to me to tell you how they got hold of it). The name Angerhelm had been running all over the Soviet communications system. Practically every Russian official in the world had been asked if he knew anything about Nelson Angerhelm and almost every official, at least as far as the boys in the Valley could tell, had replied that he didn't know what it was all about.
Some reference back to Mr. Khrushchev's conversation
with the Secretary of State suggested that the Angerhelm inquiry might have tied hi with this. We pursued it a little further. Angerhelm was apparently the right reference. The Valley people already had something about him. They had checked with the F.B.I.
The F.B.I, had said that Nelson Angerhelm was a 62-year-old retired poultry farmer. He had served hi World War I.
His service had been rather brief. He had gotten as far as Plattsburg, New York, broken an ankle, stayed four months hi a hospital, and the injury had developed complications. He had been drawing a Veterans Administration allowance ever since. He had never visited outside the United States, never joined a subversive organization, had never married, and never spent a nickel. So far as the F.B.I. could discover, his life was not worth living.
This left the matter up in the air. There was nothing whatever to connect him with the Soviet Union.
It turned out that I wasn't needed after all. Spatz came into the office and said that a conference had been called for the whole Intelligence community, people from State were sitting hi, and there was a special representative from OCBM from the White House to watch what they were doing.
The question arose, "Who was Nelson Angerhelm? And what were we to do about him?"
An additional report had been made out by an agent who specialized hi pretending to be an Internal Revenue man.
The "Internal Revenue agent" was one of the best people in the F.B.I, for checking on subversive activities. He was a real expert on espionage and he knew all about bad connections. He could smell a conspirator two miles off on a clear day. And by sitting in a room for a little while he could tell whether anybody had had an illegal meeting there for the previous three years. Maybe I am exaggerating a little bit but I am not exaggerating much.
This fellow, who was a real artist at smelling out Commies and anything that even faintly resembles a Commie, came back with a completely blank ticket on Angerhelm.
There was only one connection that Angerhelm had with the larger world. He had a younger brother, whose name was Tice. Funny name and I don't know why he got it.
Somebody told us later on that the full name tied in with Theiss Ankerhjelm, which was the name of a Swedish admiral a couple hundred years ago. Perhaps the family was proud of it.
The younger brother was a West Pointer. He had had a regular career; that came easily enough out of the Adjutant General's office.
What did develop though, was that the younger brother had died only two months previously. He too was a bachelor. One of the psychiatrists who got into the case said, "What a mother!"
Tice Angerhelm had traveled a great deal. He had something to do, as a matter of fact, with two or three of the projects that I was liaising on. There were all sorts of issues arising from this.
However, he was dead. He had never worked directly on Soviet matters. He had no Soviet friends, had never been in the Soviet Union, and had never met Soviet forces. He had never even gone to the Soviet Embassy to an official reception.
The man was no specialist, outside of Ordnance, a little tiny bit of French, and the missile program. He was a card player, an awfully good man with trout and something of a Saturday evening Don Juan.
It was then time for the fourth stage.
Colonel Plugg was told to get hold of Lieutenant Colonel Potariskov and find out what Potariskov had to give him. This time Potariskov called back and said that he would rather have his boss, the Soviet Ambassador himself, call on the Secretary or the Undersecretary of State.
There was some shilly-shallying back and forth. The Secretary was out of town, the Undersecretary said he would be very glad to see the Soviet Ambassador if there were anything to ask about. He said that we had found Angerhelm, and if the Soviet authorities wanted to niter-view Mr. Angerhelm themselves they jolly well could go to Hopkins, Minnesota, and interview him.
This led to a real flash of embarrassment when it was discovered that the area of Hopkins, Minnesota, was in the "no travel" zone prescribed to Soviet diplomats in retaliation against their "no travel" zones imposed on American diplomats in the Soviet Union.
This was ironed out. The Soviet Ambassador was asked,
would he like to go see a chicken farmer in Minnesota?
When the Soviet Ambassador stated that he was not particularly interested in chicken farmers, but that he would be willing to see Mr. Angerhelm at a later date if the American government didn't mind, the whole thing was let go.
Nothing happened at all. Presumably the Russians were relaying things back to Moscow by courier, letter, or Whatever mysterious ways the Russians use when they are acting very deliberately and very solemnly.
I heard nothing and certainly the people around the Soviet Embassy saw no unusual contacts at that time.
Nelson Angerhelm hadn't come into the story yet. AH he knew was that several odd characters had asked him about veterans that he scarcely knew, saying that they were looking for security clearances.
And an Internal Revenue man had a long and very exhausting talk with him about his brother's estate. That didn't seem to leave much.
Angerhelm went on feeding his chickens. He had television and Minneapolis has a pretty good range of stations. Now and then he showed up at the church, more frequently he showed up at the general store.
He almost always went away from town to avoid the new shopping centers. He didn't like the way Hopkins had developed and preferred to go to the little country centers where they still have general stores. In its own funny way this seemed to be the only pleasure the old man had.
After nineteen days, and I can now count almost every hour of them, the answer must have gotten back from Moscow. It was probably carried hi by the stocky brown-haired courier who made the trip about every fortnight. One of the fellows from the Valley told me about that. I wasn't supposed to know and it didn't matter then.
Apparently the Soviet Ambassador had been told to play the matter lightly. He called on the Undersecretary of State and ended up discussing world butter prices and the effect of American exports of ghee to Pakistan on the attempts of the Soviet Union to trade ghee for hemp.
Apparently this was an extraordinary and confidential thing for the Soviet Ambassador to discuss. The Undersecretary would have been more impressed if he had been able to find out why the Soviet Ambassador just out of
the top of his head announced that the Soviet Union had given about a hundred and twenty million dollars credit to Pakistan for some unnecessary highways and was able to reply, therefore, somewhat tartly to the general effect that if the Soviet Union ever decided to stabilize world markets with the cooperation of the United States we would be very happy to cooperate. But this was no time to discuss money or fair business deals when they were dumping every piece of export rubbish they could in our general direction. ,
ft was characteristic of this Soviet Ambassador that he took the rebuff calmly. Apparently his mission was to have no mission. He left and that was all there was from him.
Potariskov came back to the Pentagon, this tune accompanied by a Russian civilian. The new man's English was a little more than perfect. The English was so good that it was desperately irritating.
Potariskov himself looked like a rather horsey, brown-faced schoolboy, with chestnut hair and brown eyes. I got to see him because they had me sitting in the back of Plugg's office pretending just to wait for somebody else.
The conversation was very simple. Potariskov brought out a recording tape. It was standard American tape.
Plugg looked at it and said, "Do you want to play it right now?"
Potariskov agreed.
The stenographer got a tape recorder in. By that time three or four other officers wandered in and none of them happened to leave. As a matter of fact one of them wasn't even an officer but he happened to have a uniform on that very day.
They played the tape and I listened to it. It was buzz, buzz, buzz. And there was some hissing, then it went click-ety, dickety, dickety. Then it was buzz, buzz, buzz again. It was the kind of sound hi which you turn on a radio and you don't even get static. You just get funny buzzing sounds which indicates that somebody has some sort of radio transmission somewhere but it is not consistent enough to be the loud whee, wheeeee kind of static which one often hears.
All of us stood there rather solemnly. Plugg thoroughly a soldier, listened at rigid attention, moving his eyes back
and forth from the tape recorder to Potariskov's face. Potariskov looked at Plugg and then ran his eyes around the group.
The little Russian civilian, who was as poisonous as a snake, glanced at every single one of us. He was obviously taking our measure and he was anxious to find out if any of us could hear anything he couldn't hear. None of us heard anything.
At the end of the tape Plugg reached out to turn off the machine.
"Don't stop it," Potariskov said.
The other Russian interjected, "Didn't you hear it?"