finger.
But the pain didn't come, and neither did sleep, and at last Jazz was able to just lie there and think. Better still, in a little while his thinking grew far less fuzzy; indeed, in comparison to the mental slurry he'd recently been accustomed to, it became like crystal. And he began to ask himself all over again those questions he had been asking, but which he'd never found the time to answer. Like:
Where the hell were his friends?
He'd been out of Russia… what, two weeks now? And the only people he'd seen (or rather, the only ones who'd seen him) were a doctor, a DO, and a nurse who grunted a little but never spoke. But he did have friends in the Service. Surely they would know he was back. Why hadn't they been to see him? Was he that banged-up? Did he look that bad?
'I don't feel that bad,' Jazz whispered to himself.
He moved his right arm, clenched his right fist. The hole through his wrist had healed and new skin had knitted over the punctures front and back. It was pure luck that the point of the ice-axe had slipped between the bones and managed to miss the arteries. The hand was a little stiff and out of practice, that was all. There was some pain, but nothing he couldn't survive. Come to think of it, there wasn't much of pain in anything right now. But of course he couldn't move everything — could he? Jazz decided he'd better not try.
What about sight? Would his room be in light or darkness? The 'snow' of his bandages was thick and dark. They said they'd saved his sight. From what? Had his eyes been hanging out or something? 'Saved his sight' could mean anything. That he'd be able to see, for instance — but how well?
Suddenly, for the first time since he'd been there, he knew real panic. They might have kept something back until he'd been fully debriefed, so as not to discourage or distract him: where there's life there's hope, sort of thing. How about that? What if they hadn't told him everything?
Jazz got a grip of himself, gave a derisive snort. Huh! Told him everything? Christ, they hadn't told him anything! He was the one who'd been doing all the -
Talking…
His new clarity of mind was leading him in a frightening new direction, and it was all downhill going; the more he considered the possibilities, the faster he went and the more frightening it got; bits of a puzzle he hadn't known existed until now were starting to fall into place. And the picture they made was one of a clown, a puppet, with his name on it. Michael J. Simmons: dupe!
He bent his right elbow, lifted his hand to his bandaged head, began picking at the bandages where they covered his eyes. But carefully; he only needed a peephole, nothing more than that. A narrow gap between strips of bandage. He wanted to see without being seen.
In a little while he believed he'd succeeded. It was hard to tell with any degree of certainty. The snow was still there, but if he narrowed his eyes to slits the light (there wasn't a lot of it) became more nearly natural. It was like when he was a child: he'd used to lie in bed with his eyes slitted, simulating the slow, regular breathing of sleep. His mother would come in and put the light on, stand there looking at him, and she was never quite sure if he was asleep or awake. But now, with these bandages swathing his face, it should be so much easier.
He straightened his arm again, found his button and pressed it. Now his nurse would know he was still awake, but the principle would be the same: when she came in he'd be able to look at her and she wouldn't know it. He hoped!
In a little while soft, unhurried footsteps sounded. Jazz pressed his head back into his pillows, waited in the near-darkness of his room. Around him the air-conditioning hummed faintly; the air had a mildly antiseptic smell; his sheets felt somehow coarse to those parts of his body which were exposed. And he thought:
It doesn't feel like a room in a hospital. Hospitals feel artificial, unreal, at best. But this one feels like fake artificial…
Then the door opened and the light came on.
Jazz squinted straight up; only the fact that his eyes were shuttered saved them from dazzle from the naked light-bulb where it hung on its flex from the ceiling. As for that ceiling itself: that was of dark grey stone, pocked from blasting and patterned with folded, tightly-packed strata. Jazz's hospital room was a man-made cave, or at least it was part of one!
Too stunned to move, he lay there frozen as his nurse came to the side of his bed. Then, fighting the anger and revulsion he felt welling inside, he slowly turned his head to look at her. She scarcely glanced at him, merely reached down to feel his pulse. She was short and fat, wore her hair straight and short-cropped, like a medieval knight, also wore the uniform and starched cap of a nurse. But not a British nurse. A Soviet nurse. And all of Jazz's worst fears were realized.
He felt her fingers on his wrist, at once snatched his hand away. She gasped, took a pace to the rear, and the heel of one of her square black shoes came down hard on something that crunched. She stood still, glanced at the floor, looked hard at Jazz and frowned. Her green eyes narrowed where they tried to penetrate the slit in his bandages. Maybe she saw the steely glint of his grey eyes in there; anyway, she gasped a second time and her hand flew to her mouth.
Then she went down on her knees, gathered up fragments of tablet, came upright with fury written right across her pudgy face. She glared at Jazz, turned on her heel and headed for the door. He let her get there, then called out: 'Comrade?'
She paused instinctively, whirled and thrust out her jaw, glowered her hatred of the spy, then rushed out and slammed the door behind her. She had left the light on in her hurry to go and report all of this.
He looked to his left, his alleged 'dead' side, and saw a deep saucer of pale yellow fluid standing on a bedside table. Inclining his head and stretching his neck as far as he could in that direction, he inhaled deeply, smelled a strong antiseptic odour. How easy it was to create a hospital atmosphere: rubber tiles on the floor to deaden footfalls, a saucer of TCP for the too-clean smell, and a constant flow of sterile, temperate air. Simple as that.
The walls of Jazz's room (his cell?) were of corrugated metal sheets bolted to vertical steel stanchions. There'd be laminated padding, too, Jazz supposed, to keep the room soundproofed and isolated. Or it could be the case that in fact this entire area was a hospital, built to serve the staff of the Projekt. After the Perchorsk Incident, they'd probably decided it was advisable. A hospital area would be handy for periodic check-ups and would probably be situated alongside a decontamination facility — assuming, that is, that there was still an atomic pile down here. Back in the West they were pretty sure that there had been one. Anyway, Jazz had already spotted an excess- radiation warning device on the wall; at present it was green, with just a tinge of pink showing in the aperture.
The uneven rock ceiling was maybe nine feet high on average; it looked very hard stuff and there were no fractures, not even small ones, that Jazz could see. Still (and even taking into account the massive steel stanchions) he felt just a touch of claustrophobia, something of the enormous weight of a mountain pressing down on him. For by now there was no doubt at all in his mind but that that was where he was: under the Urals.
Running footsteps sounded and the door was thrown open. Jazz lifted his head as far as restrictions would allow and stared at the people who came panting into the room. Two men, and behind them the fat nurse. Hot on their heels came a third man; his white smock and the hypodermic in his hand gave him away at once: Jazz's favourite pulse-feeler, the clucking doctor. Well, and maybe now he'd have something worth clucking about.
'Mike, my boy!' the man in front, dressed in casual civilian clothes, motioned the others back. He approached the bed alone, said: 'And what's all this that Nursie's been telling us? What? You didn't take your pills? Why ever not? Wouldn't they go down?' The ingratiating voice was that of Jazz's DO.
Jazz nodded stiffly. 'That's right, 'old boy',' he answered harshly, 'they sort of stuck in my craw.' He lifted his right hand and tugged at his fake bandages, tore them from his eyes. He stared at the four where they stood frozen as if they were insects trapped in amber.
After a moment the doctor muttered something in Russian, took an impatient pace forward and gave his needle a brief squirt. The second man into the room, also dressed casually, caught his arm and dragged him to a halt. 'No,' Chingiz Khuv told the doctor curtly, in Russian. 'Can't the two of you see that he knows? Since he's awake, aware and with all his wits about him, let's keep him that way. Anyway, I want to talk to him. He's all mine now.'
