Time Will Run Back by Henry Hazlitt Read Free Book Online

walked up and down as if trying to absorb this.
    An intercom buzzed on his desk. “Yes. I’ll see him right away.”
    He turned to Peter. “It’s Bolshekov. Go out through this back door. The guard at the end of the corridor will show you the way down. Be back here promptly at ten o’clock tomorrow.”
    The next day Peter found his father in an altered mood.
    “Even if nothing had happened to your mother, I would soon have faced a decision about you. Obviously you couldn’t have been kept isolated on that island all your life. As soon as I passed on, you would have been automatically assassinated.”
    “Why?”
    “First, for being my son. And second for being miseducated, and hence an ideological menace.... Your life is in the greatest danger.”
    He sank into a chair. “I can trust no one.”
    Peter was amazed. “Not even Bolshekov?” He remembered how many times Stalenin had publicly lauded the “loyalty” and “devotion” of Bolshekov. Hadn’t he given a renewed expression of his confidence on May Day?
    “I trust Bolshekov least of all,” said Stalenin. “He is the greatest menace to my regime, to my life. And to yours.”
    “But why?”
    “There was a time when I did trust Bolshekov completely. Perhaps his own ambition had not yet become overvaulting. He is tremendously able, shrewd, fearless—and a complete fanatic. There was a time when, though I was known as No. i, the twelve members of the Politburo had no numbers. Bolshekov exposed a plot within the Politburo to assassinate me. He extorted confessions from the three members involved, and they were liquidated. I should have known that those confessions were meaningless. You can make anybody confess to anything. But I was away addressing the Wonworld Congress of Scientists at Paris when all this occurred. When I got back there was no version but Bolshekov’s for me to hear. He convinced me that this plot was the result of the absence of any clear line of succession to my power. Such plots were apt to recur, he pointed out, so long as anybody in the Politburo thought he could seize power with me out of the way. I asked his suggestion for the cure. He recommended that everybody in the Politburo be given a public number so that the resort to violent methods for succession to power would be impossible. I agreed to this. And, still more unfortunately, out of gratitude I named him No. 2. Not till I had done this did I realize what should have been obvious to me from the first—that in naming him No. 2, I had in effect publicly named him as my titular successor. Now all he had to do was to get rid of me. And that, I have found, is precisely what he is planning to do.”
    “But wouldn’t it be a simple matter, Your Supremacy, to give him a lower number?”
    Stalenin waved his pipe impatiently. “A man in Bolshekov’s position cannot be demoted. Suppose I named him No. 3 or 4 or 5? This public evidence of my distrust would mean that no one would ever know whether to obey him or not. Everyone would shun him. He could not hold even minor power. He himself would know that he was doomed, and have me killed, if he had the chance, before I had him killed. No, the only thing is to arrest him, force a confession out of him, and then kill him.”
    “But—”
    “You are wondering,” continued Stalenin, “why I could not simply have him shot and then blame the shooting on enemies of the State. I have thought of that. There are one or two things to be said in its favor. For example, I could accuse others, whom I suspect of being ambitious, of having engineered the assassination. I could have confessions wrung from them, so diverting all suspicion from myself and killing several birds with one stone. You may be sure that Bolshekov has thought of doing the same thing in my case—having me assassinated, staging simultaneously a fake attempt on his own life, having other members of the Politburo—especially Adams—arrested, extorting confessions from them,