Paco closed the door behind him. "What's the matter, my friend?" he
grinned. "Are you attempting to play two games at once?"
* * * * *
The morning tour was devoted to Red Square and the Kremlin.
Immediately after breakfast they formed a column with two or three
other tourist parties and were marched briskly to where Gorky Street
debouched into Red Square. First destination was the mausoleum, backed
against the Kremlin wall, which centered that square and served as a
combined Vatican, Lhasa and Mecca of the Soviet complex. Built of dark
red porphyry, it was the nearest thing to a really ultramodern
building Hank had seen in Moscow.
As foreign tourists they were taken to the head of the line which
already stretched around the Kremlin back into Mokhovaya Street along
the western wall. A line of thousands.
Once the doors opened the line moved quickly. They filed in, two by
two, down some steps, along a corridor which was suddenly cool as
though refrigerated. Paco, standing next to Hank, said from the side
of his mouth, "Now we know the secret of the embalming. I wonder if
they're hanging on meathooks."
The line emerged suddenly into a room in the center of which were
three glass chambers. The three bodies, the prophet and his two
leading disciples flanking him. Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev. On their
faces, Hank decided, you could read much of their character. Lenin,
the idealist and scholar. Stalin, utterly ruthless organization man.
Khrushchev, energetic manager of what the first two had built.
They were in the burial room no more than two minutes, filed out by an
opposite door. In the light of the square again, Paco grinned at him.
"Nick and Joe didn't look so good, but Nikita is standing up pretty
well."
Trailing back and forth across Red Square had its ludicrous elements.
The guide pointed out this and that. But all the time his charges had
their eyes glued to the spaceship, settled there at the far end of the
square near St. Basil's. In a way it seemed no more alien than so much
else here. Certainly no more alien to the world Hank knew than the
fantastic St. Basil's Cathedral.
A spaceship from the stars, though. You still had to shake your head
in effort to achieve clarity; to realize the significance of it. A
spaceship with emissaries from a Galactic Confederation.
How simple if it had only landed in Washington, London or even Paris
or Rome, instead of here.
They avoided getting very near it, although the Russians weren't being
ostentatious about their guarding. There was a roped off area about
the craft and twenty or so guards, not overly armed, drifting about
within the enclosure. But the local citizenry was evidently well
disciplined. There were no huge crowds hanging on the ropes waiting
for a glimpse of the interplanetary celebrities.
Nevertheless, the Intourist guide went out of his way to avoid
bringing his charges too near. They retraced their steps back to
Manezhnaya Square from which they had originally started to see the
mausoleum, and then turned left through Alexandrovski Sad, the
Alexander Park which ran along the west side of the Kremlin to the
Borovikski Gate, on the Moskva River side of the fortress.
Paco said, "After this tour I'm in favor of us all signing a petition
that our guide be awarded a medal, _Hero of Intourist_. You realize
that thus far he has lost only two of us today?"
Some of the others didn't like his levity. They were about to enter
the Communist shrine and wisecracking was hardly in order. Paco
Rodriquez couldn't have cared less, being Paco Rodriquez.
The _stilyagi_ girl had been correct about the Kremlin being an
overgrown museum. Government buildings it evidently contained, but
above all it provided gold topped cathedrals, fabulous palaces
converted to art galleries and displays of the jeweled wealth of
yesteryear and the tombs of a dozen czars including that of Ivan the
Terrible.
* * * * *
They trailed into the Orushezhnaya Palace, through the ornate entrance
hall displaying its early arms and banners.
Paco encouraged the harassed guard happily. "You're doing fine. You've
had us out for more than two hours. We started with twenty-five in
this group and still have twenty-one. Par for the course. What happens
to a tourist who wanders absently around in the Kremlin and turns up
in the head man's office?"
The guide smiled wanly. "And over here we have the thrones of the
Empress Elizabeth and Czar Paul."
Unobtrusively, Hank dropped toward the tail of the group. He spent a
long time peering at two silver panthers, gifts of the first Queen
Elizabeth of England to Boris Godunov. The Progressive Tours assembly
passed on into the next room.