Chapter 29: Necessary Replacement
Ksenia did this… because she loves me? I’d hate to find out what she’d do if she hated me.
Rudy’s angst about Astrakhan didn’t go away just because Vitaly waved some magic friendship wand and bought fresh oranges in Krasnoyarsk. They could have ridden to Vladivostok, or around the world, and the train ride wouldn’t have been long enough to resolve how he felt. Rudy could not dismiss Vitaly’s goodwill and companionship and, surprisingly, his logic. But the good Vitaly was doing for Rudy could not vanquish the ache in Rudy’s chest. Vitaly had at least pushed Rudy to a different level of stalemate, moving from wondering what he’d done wrong to wondering what good Ksenia might have been doing by disappearing before he could make any radical proposal. But it was still a stalemate, conflicting thoughts unable to advance, no matter what Rudy and Vitaly thought or said as they sat by their window, peeling oranges and watching the river valley rumble past in the persistent gray rain.
Rudy wouldn’t resolve that stalemate when they got back to Irkutsk, or for a long while after. There wasn’t time.
Their train rolled into Irkutsk Station a little before ten on Friday morning. Galina Filipovna met them on the platform, a large gray bag hanging from her shoulder. Kolya was close behind her. “Rudy,” the director said, “I need you. We must go to the Ring base.”
“The Ring—is something wrong?”
“Much. Come. Koyla, help Vitaly with their things.”
What little Rudy had planned for the rest of the day—go home, shower, drop by campus to check on projects and make a to-do list for next week—jammed like a wheel with a stick through the spokes. Galina Filipovna was already turning to leave the platform, but Rudy stayed in place and looked up the line to the train cars back in the rain. “Vitaly’s trunk, my bike….”
Vitaly interrupted. “I’ll ride it back to your place,” he said, putting his hand on Rudy’s arm. “Kolya can get a taxi for my things.”
Rudy fished the key out of his pocket. “Be careful. Wet streets.”
“No wheelies today, promise.” Vitaly took the key with a glint in his eye that outshone the prospect of getting very wet on the ride across town. Kolya took Rudy’s backpack. Rudy hurried after Galina Filipovna, who marched straight through the station to the parking lot, to a blue minivan from the Institute motor pool, with the ISTI logo on the side. She handed Rudy the key. “You drive. You won’t kill anyone.”
Galina Filipovna climbed into the passenger seat; Rudy hurried to the other side to take the wheel, start the motor, and put the van in gear. “Which way?” he asked.
“Goloustrenskiy Route—you know the way?”
Rudy knew the road well; it was his favorite route east, into the hills, to Lake Baikal, less busy than the shorter main route up the river southeast from Irkutsk. The Ring base sat beside that road, at a village called Goryachiy Klyuch, just under an hour away. They got in the van and charged east into the traffic, across the river, through city.
Galina Filipovna sat ramrod straight, hands clutched tightly in her lap. She looked straight out the windshield, eyes burning, as if daring anything, even the rain, to get in their way. “This rain,” she said. “Isaac Gennadyevich says it is flooding sections of the tunnel.”
“Isaac… the foreman? Doesn’t he have pumps running?”
“Yes, but he says the pumps aren’t keeping up.” Galina Filipovna clenched her jaw, then burst out. “We’re weeks behind already, flooding will set us back further, and now the National Academy has withdrawn its support. Putin—” she spat the name “—is diverting science funds to military and police… police whose work I am helping him do!” she shouted at the street, raising her fists, shaking them at the fish truck Rudy passed. “The Academy will have a third of its usual budget for research. The Kremlin has directed them to focus those rubles on projects with immediate security or commercial applications. The Ring will not make missiles or money.”
Rudy’s jaw dropped. “Does that mean… we’re finished?”
The van jounced over a string of potholes. A toolbox clattered around behind them. Galina Filipovna didn’t flinch. “No. Never. It just means we have to cover the 20% hole the Academy is putting in our budget… plus the hole that Isaac Gennadyevich’s incompetence is eating into our accounts.”
Rudy squirmed at the prospect of sitting through an unpleasant personnel meeting. “So, you’re bringing me along to…?”
“Assess the situation,” she said. “Inspect the tunnels, determine why the pumps aren’t keeping up. And, more broadly… look around, at the entire operation. Give me recommendations for getting back on schedule.”
Rudy had visited the site at Goryachiy Klyuch just a couple times. He had only walked around the old logging camp that the Institute had acquired and repurposed as the base of operations for excavation and, someday, construction of the Ring. He had never been out in the tunnel itself, burrowing north and south away from the base, into the hills and arcing around to meet a few kilometers shy of Lake Baikal. He found the idea of going underground and seeing the excavation and the pumps far more appealing than sitting through whatever chewing-out the foreman would get from Galina Filipovna.
The director didn’t say much more on the drive out to the Ring base. She asked about Samara; Rudy said they encountered no problems there, thanks to Vitaly’s excellent planning and efficiency. She expressed her disappointment about Astrakhan—not Rudy’s personal mishap, about which she knew nothing, and about which Rudy wasn’t going to say a word, but only the loss of the prospective client and the waste of Rudy’s time, sending him so far for nothing.
At Goryachiy Klyuch, Rudy pulled the van up to the open chain-link gate. He didn’t dare take the van farther: solid gravel ended at the fence, and the gravel inside the compound was half-churned into mud. The trucks and heavy equipment parked haphazardly inside the compound could perhaps traverse the wet ground, but the rear-wheel drive van wouldn’t make it past the gate.
The rain had let up, but the Ring base signaled trouble that went beyond the temporary inconvenience of mud: messy piles of materials, tools and machinery left out in the open… the base was 50 kilometers out in the country, but bandits would drive 50 kilometers for good gear and easy pickings.
Rudy and Galya followed a path of rickety pallets and scrap plywood and boards laid over the wet ground to the foreman’s trailer. The door was unlocked, but Isaac Gennadyevich was not inside, and none of the workmen they shouted to outside could say where their foreman had gone. The foreman didn’t carry a mobile phone or a radio, so Rudy and Galya were left waiting in the trailer for half an hour.
As they sat on the foreman’s angular couch, Galya produced from her bag a black binder. A slip of paper with the abbreviation TSK was taped to the spine.
“Ring Technical Specifications,” she said, laying the binder on Rudy’s lap. TSK—K for Koltso. “You should read it, especially the first part on tunnel requirements. I want you to be compare what’s laid out in the TSK with what Isaac Gennadyevich shows you underground.”
Rudy opened the cover halfway before catching Galya’s words. “Shows me… shows us, right?”
Galya stood up and stepped to the trailer window. It was stuffy inside the trailer. She raised the sash to let in some fresh air and looked toward the forested hills. “Some of the spaces underground are… too small, for my liking. Your… attentive observations will suffice. Please study.” And without another word or another look, Galya opened the door and went outside. Rudy propped the door open and watched Galya follow another scrap-wood path past the latrine and out of sight behind the abandoned loggers’ mess hall.
Galya’s anxiety concerned Rudy, but she would take care of herself, and she expected him to take care of… well, an inspection of the Ring. The air was still humid, but no drops were falling. He’d been cooped up all week in the train; he wanted some fresh air, too. He brushed some wet gravel off the step, sat down by the trailer door, and began reading TSK Chapter 2: Technical Requirements for Excavation and Reinforcement.
Rudy was just finishing his third pass through that chapter—with a few diversions to check references to equipment installation, power, and other requirements that were a year or two away—when a big man in grimy coveralls came galumping across the muddy gravel, running mostly on his left leg while gamely hauling the right along with more gingerly steps. “Hey! Hey, Institute man!” the big man shouted. He skidded to a stop at the foot of the trailer steps and leaned on his left leg. “I found the foreman. He’s coming.” Rudy looked past the big man and saw a second man, pale and scowling, about 30 meters back, making up the distance with no due haste.
“Thanks,” Rudy said to the man right in front of him. He glanced up at the big, creased face under the silver hardhat. The big man turned to make sure his boss was still approaching. He winced as he stepped on his right foot. “You hurt that foot?” Rudy asked?
“Nah,” the big man said. He hopped backward and thumped his butt against the metal railing beside the steps. He yanked off his mud-caked right boot and shook it upside down. Gravel spilled out. “Rocks in my boot.” He put the boot over his hand and poked a fat fingertip through a crack in the rubber sole.
“You should get new boots,” Rudy said.
“I should get a paycheck on time,” the man replied with a wink.
“Maksim!” The foreman was just a few steps away. “Quit grousing. Is this the man?”
“Yeah, chief.”
“All right. Beat it.”
Maksim pulled and stomped his bad boot back on, then strode away, less galumphily than he’d come, toward a couple payloaders parked by a big garage.
Rudy flipped the binder shut, got up, and extended a hand. The foreman ignored the gesture as he climbed the steps and looked inside his trailer. “They said the old lady was here?”
Rudy drew his hand back slowly and clasped it with the other on the TSK in front of him. “Galina Filipovna is here. She has stepped away. She has asked, Isaac Gennadyevich, that you conduct me around the tunnel so I may inspect the flooding and report to her.”
Rudy was surprised and alarmed to find that Isaac Gennadyevich resisted taking Rudy down into the tunnel. The foreman said he’d already reported the problems. He offered to mark the flooded areas on a map for Rudy to take back to Irkutsk. When Rudy asked about the pump placement and capacity, Isaac put up a wall of chatter and complaints about other issues. Not sure what authority was his to flex, Rudy reminded the foreman that they both answered directly to Galina Filipovna, and that she had directed Rudy to inspect the dig.
The dig foreman surrendered warily. “Come on,” he said and trudged off toward the garage. Clutching the binder, Rudy followed Isaac to an off-road cart sitting outside. The two seats were both wet from rain. Isaac started the machine, and they bounced toward the winding entryway of an old iron mine, a brief and unsuccessful project that predated the logging camp. When they went in the tunnel, Isaac Gennadyevich stopped chattering. Rudy had to pry explanations out of him, but even without much cooperation from the foreman, with only his 30-minute reading of the TSK, Rudy could see much of the work was substandard. Long stretches of the tunnel were poorly cleared, poorly reinforced, and not ready for the installation of infrastructure or scientific equipment. Two remote access points were blocked by cave-ins; the third, farthest to the east, Rudy didn’t get to see because it had been started in the wrong spot and bored in the wrong direction, missing the main tunnel by half a kilometer. The ventilation shafts in the deepest stretches weren’t bringing enough air from outside to cool the interior to safe temperatures for men operating heavy machinery or for the research equipment that would be installed.
But nowhere did they run into flooding. Groundwater seeped into some caverns, leaving some standing water a few inches deep, but Rudy saw nothing that would stop the big drills or dump trucks from making progress through the tunnel.
“I didn’t want to bother the old lady,” Isaac shouted over the echoing growl of the engine, “and I don’t want to get these guys in trouble. But they’re a bunch of layabouts and complainers. I tell ’em what’s got to be done. I tell ’em the schedule. But they won’t keep up.”
“But where are the pumps?” Rudy asked. Even if rain water wasn’t making it down to the drilled portions of the Ring, the site study anticipated possible groundwater deposits in the eastern reaches, closest to the lake. The TSK called for pumps and pipes to carry water out. As far as Rudy could tell, none of that infrastructure had been installed or even staged.
Isaac wouldn’t give a straight answer. First he said they only had pumps in the south arm, where they hadn’t gone yet. When Rudy suggested they head back that direction, Isaac said they wouldn’t have time today. When Rudy said he’d stay late and go in by himself, Isaac muttered something about shipping delays and some deal and, again, not wanting to get “the old lady” upset over nothing.
When they came out to daylight over three hours later, the wind was coming up, stirring the bright clouds but not breaking them yet. Rudy had covered the maps in his binder with blue and red ink. He emerged hungry and with a clear impression that Isaac Gennadyevich understood the deficiencies in the work and felt no urgency about rectifying them.
Rudy expected Galina Filipovna would be waiting for them at the foreman’s trailer. But he didn’t see her there, or by the van, or outside any of the other buildings in the compound. Rudy texted her—back from underground… next steps? While Rudy waited for a response, Isaac slid out of the cart and, without a word to Rudy, walked stiffly to his trailer. Absent further direction from Galina Filipovna, Rudy decided he might as well look over some of the construction records.
Inside the narrow trailer, Isaac had taken his seat behind a small desk with nothing on it but a blank notepad, two square carpenter pencils, and dust. The desk mostly barricaded the dig manager off from anyone who entered the space. Rudy paced the area in front of the desk, opening file cabinets, riffling through folders, lifting blueprints pinned over blueprints on the walls, seeking any sign of intentional and useful record-keeping. The foreman sat back in his chair eating a bag of chips. When Rudy asked for documents that would answer basic questions about incoming shipments, fuel consumption, and maintenance schedules, Isaac would vaguely point his greasy fingers toward one file drawer or another. Or he’d just shrug and crunch another chip as Rudy engaged in a mostly futile search through pages and folders that showed no clear sign of intentional filing.
In one overstuffed green folder, Rudy found receiving paperwork tucked between two thin operating manuals for small equipment. “We need to organize these documents,” Rudy said. “We’re not running grandma’s ice cream cart. We’re building one of the biggest scientific projects in history.”
Isaac sniffed and muttered, “An ice cream cart at least makes ice cream.”
The cloud over the dig manager’s face and his sullen, insulting tone reminded Rudy of the Dmitris, the last men who had prompted him to physical violence, men who were now dead because of others’ violence. That incident had inclined Rudy to avoid confrontations, just avoid trouble and troublemakers and focus his energy on physical problems. But Rudy recalled now the disgust that had prompted his outburst at the Dmitris, and he felt the same disgust at the disrespect Isaac showed and the same powerful urge to rub that disrespect out.
And after the frustration of Astrakhan, after two weeks of just keeping himself together and trying to make some patient peace, Rudy was primed to stop being patient.
Rudy set the papers down on the green folder, next to his black binder on the couch, and turned slowly toward the foreman. Rudy took one slow step, leaned over and grabbed the near edge of the desk. Isaac stopped with a chip halfway to his mouth. His eyes showed some life, fearful life. “What—” was all Isaac said before Rudy pulled the desk forward and set it even with the door. He turned the latch and shoved the desk outside a few centimeters, enough to wedge the door open and give him room to get between the desk and the wall. Rudy bent his knees, got a firm grip under the edge of the desk, and shoved. The desk tipped upward. The notepad slid and flopped onto the metal stairs next to the clattering pencils. Rudy got his shoulder under the desk and heaved. The edge of the desk caught the topmost hinge, which gave way instantly. Rudy kept pushing, and the desk flipped over the steps onto the gravel, legs up, with a dull crack.
Rudy stepped back from the door. “Now you,” Rudy said, avoiding Isaac’s eyes, staring outside at the upside-down desk, the fanned notepad pages, the thin door now flapping by its bottom hinge in the afternoon breeze. “Get the fuck out of here.”
Isaac Gennadyevich dropped his nearly empty chip bag on the floor and crossed the bare space to the door. When he looked outside, Galina Filipovna had appeared alongside big muddy Maksim and the big upside-down desk. She had exchanged her black office shoes for a pair of oversized rubber boots heavy with mud. A few other diggers were approaching from the machinery shed, perhaps not alarmed but at least interested in whatever was causing this ruckus.
“Get out,” Rudy seethed, loud enough for Galya and the men outside to hear.
Isaac stepped onto the small porch of the trailer. From the top step, he looked down at Galina Filipovna, expecting her to countermand her underling’s rash outburst.
Rudy stood in the broken doorway, also looking at Galina Filipovna around Isaac’s shoulder, wondering if he’d gone too far.
“You heard the man,” Galina Filipovna said. “Get out.”
For a tense moment, Isaac didn’t move. He looked around at the men, then at Rudy, right behind him. Rudy took a single step, and that movement appeared to make up Isaac’s mind. The dig manager walked fitfully to his car outside the fence, apparently unable to reconcile an urge to nonchalantly preserve his dignity with an impulse to run for his life.
Everyone watched the dig manager depart… everyone except Galina Filipovna, who kept her eyes on Rudy. As Isaac’s green Lada kicked up gravel and headed for the highway, Galina Filipovna walked around the upended desk and up the steps, awkwardly in the big boots, which slipped at her heels under the weight of the mud sticking to them. Maksim and the other workmen stepped closer, surrounding the desk.
Galina turned to the small group. “Maksim, gather your crew chiefs.” She glanced at her watch, then looked right at Rudy. “Your new foreman here will meet with you all at 16:00.”
“Yes ma’am, thank you ma’am,” Maksim said to Galina Filipovna. Then he barked at his colleagues, “All right, spread the word—new chief at 16. Until then, back to work!” He clapped his big hands, pounding a small cloud of dirt from his palms, and the workers dispersed, leaving Rudy agog at Galya on the trailer step.
“Well,” she said, “you appear to have grasped the primary problem and resolved it.” She glanced at the unhinged door. ”Let’s step inside.” She pulled her stockinged feet out of the heavy boots and padded inside. She reached under the couch and retrieved her black office shoes.
Rudy followed Galya into the trailer. He tried to swing the door shut, but the last hinge broke free. The door was thin but intact; Rudy leaned it against the railing and wondered if he might find spare hinges anywhere on site.
Galya sat on the small couch, leaving Rudy to take the foreman’s black padded chair. They talked across the newly empty space that drew in the fresh afternoon air.
Galya picked up the TSK from where Rudy had left it on the couch. She saw his marks throughout Chapter 2, then turned back to the timeline in Chapter 1 and handed the binder, open to that page, across the space to Rudy.
“As you can see, tunneling and above-ground clearing should be nearing completion. We should be ready to pour concrete, install equipment, and build stations. But I take it you recognize we are not ready.”
“Galina Filipovna, I didn’t mean to overstep—“
“You did not overstep. My observations outside and my conversations with the workers led me to the same conclusion. You simply anticipated my action and carried it out. A foreman shows initiative. You are foreman now.”
“Foreman?” Rudy’s mind raced through a dozen reasons he wasn’t the man for the job. As specialist, he managed staff only in an ad hoc capacity. The Ring excavation crews dwarfed the staff he informally managed on campus, and those crews would expand with building. His work on the road was mostly solo, and always short projects, in and out in a week or two. The machinery here, the timeline, the Ring itself—enormous. And he’d never built a particle accelerator.
Of course, he’d never built a computer network before taking those PCs out of the crates he’d guarded and loaded for Vitaly. He’d never managed construction and renovation before Galina promoted him to specialist. Galina knew his experience as well as he did. He needn’t trouble her with protestations that she had evidently already considered and dismissed. She wouldn’t offer him the position if she didn’t think he could do it.
“Foreman?” Rudy repeated. “Who would answer to me? To whom would I answer?”
“Foreman is foreman, first man. Every man here answers to you,” Galya said, ignoring his conditional and asserting his foremanship, as she had in front of the men, as present fact. “If you see someone doing something wrong, you stop them and show them how to do it right. If you see someone doing something you do not understand and they cannot explain what they are doing and why, you stop them until they explain.”
Galya reached across and tapped the binder. “You answer to the Ring Technical Specifications. This book tells everything the Ring must do. If you encounter a problem and can’t meet the specifications, you report it to me. If any changes are necessary, I will authorize them. Otherwise, the Ring is yours to finish on time…” she peered over at the timeline in Rudy’s hands “…which, factoring in what I’ve seen today, and with room for what you may tell me about the tunnel, I say is 30 months. I could be wrong. Study the Ring Technical Specifications, this site itself, our stockpiles of materials, and the market for additional necessary materials. Get these men on track, and two weeks from now, Friday next, report to me your estimate of completion time. If your estimate seems more reasonable than mine, so be it. But my estimate is very reasonable. Whatever timeline we settle on, I have no doubt in your ability as foreman to carry it out.”
Rudy sank back into the black chair. No stretch of his imagination this morning, sitting across from Vitaly on the train, dealing another hand of durak, would have placed him in this chair this afternoon. Vitaly couldn’t have seen it. Ksenia couldn’t—
Ksenia crossed his mind for the first time since he’d gotten off the train. If she hadn’t walked away, if he’d said and she’d said what they were both feeling, he might well not be in this chair.
Vitaly’s voice echoed in his head: Ksenia did what she had to do… for good reason.
No, Rudy protested inside. Ksenia didn’t do this. She couldn’t know this would happen. Even if she had known, if I had known, I’d have said no, not worth losing….
“Rudy?” Galya drew him out of his thoughts. “Is something the matter?”
Rudy had cast his lot by throwing Isaac Gennadyevich out. He had no doubt that removing the old foreman was the right thing to do. He had plenty of doubt that he was the right man to replace the old foreman. But Galina Filipovna was telling him to do this job, the job. He couldn’t walk away from that.
He raised the binder, weighed it with both hands. “I have a lot to learn.”
“Yes, and you will,” Galya said. “The men will return in 45 minutes. Tell me now what you saw underground.”