The Dog (18 page)

Just before three o'clock, Gu arrived at the Glass Institute. To get to the door, he'd had to push through a crowd of researchers reading in unison from
Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong
. He clutched the telegram tightly in his fist, his shield in case someone tried to force a Little Red Book into his hand. Inside the Institute, the chanting voices resounded through the open windows. He climbed toward the fourth floor, his feet squeaking slightly within the swampy confines of his steel-toed boots. He had not eaten since before dawn, and the detritus of the day's travel had settled in his lungs and hardened. He wheezed and bellowed, trying to crack that cement by whatever pneumatic force he could muster. At the third-floor landing he dropped his bag against the wall and slumped against the railing, elbows on knees, hacking.

The wet, clotted rasp echoed up and down the featureless stairwell. Gu had been gulping down hydrochloric acid vapor for years. It had wafted from the furnaces next to his workstation at the 505's special fused quartz workshop, and when he'd transferred to the 508 to train the welders there, their shed was in a perpetual fog of the stuff.

“Comrade,” a voice said. Gu was still doubled over, and when the latest cycle of glottal torture ended, he spat on the floor, wiped his nose on his sleeve, and looked up.

“It's you!” Gu choked out.

Zhou Yuqing took the older man's hands. “Teacher Gu,” he said. He squeezed hard, then reached to embrace him, but Gu was seized by another coughing fit.

When it subsided, Zhou shouldered his old teacher's bag and the two slowly ascended the stairs. On the fourth floor, the clipped sound of the crowd floated in through the open window at the end of the hall and dueled with the speakers mounted on the wall, commingling to produce an almost pleasant drone, like the low buzz of insects in a forest. A portrait of Mao hanging at the hall's midpoint had been draped with black bunting.

In the conference room at the end of the hall their comrades waited. Zhou and Gu entered, and Lei Guangyu, former director of the Beijing 505 Glass Factory and an old oak of a man, caught them both in an embrace. More came forward, all the best glassworkers in the country. Tang Baorong, Fu Shuming, Zhang Dequi. There were about forty there that day, old hands who'd been reassigned to Task One from their posts at the 901, the 508, the Glass Institute, the Beijing Glass Instrument Factory, the Beijing First Light Industry Bureau, the Academy of Sciences. They beheld the faces of old friends, and their hearts rose up. Their spirits overflowed with joy.

Zhou Yuqing had worked with many of them at the 505 when it had been called the Beijing Second Spectacles Factory. They had supplied the revolution with lenses through which enemies were sighted and destroyed, stars charted—they had made the very glasses through which the Chairman gazed when he wrote his poetry. They were the technicians who'd cast the crystal lenses for
China-4
, the country's first spy satellite. Here was Tang Baorong, who had pioneered use of the rosebud on the oxyhydrogen torch. Tan Sitong, named after one of the six gentleman martyrs, but whom they called Sparrow, still bearing the long scar and chipped tooth from a supercooled bolus of fused quartz that had exploded during an experiment back when the silicon workshop was little more than a goat shed bolted to the side of the 505. Shang Min, the brilliant engineer who'd assembled the first modern oxyhydrogen furnace in China, pinching the cheeks of Old Teacher Gu between her stubby fingers.

At the front of the room stood Pan Caohang, the director of the 505, an elegant figure, tall, his ring of white hair cropped close to his scalp, geologic layers of skin drooping beneath his eyes. The creases on his forehead had only deepened since his colleagues had seen him last. He stooped a bit. The 505 had burned to the ground a year earlier and he'd overseen its reconstruction. Without fuss or undue hand-wringing he'd led his workers into battle and achieved victory.

Standing next to him was Beijing Vice Mayor Li Quan. The workers didn't know what to make of this politician. He appeared to be suffering mightily from the heat. Sweat cascaded from his face. He was stocky and his head appeared to have grown, unaided by a neck, directly from his shoulders. He looked as if, as a younger man, he might have been an explosive physical force. Now he wore his weight like a suit of chain mail. His heavy cheeks and thick lower lip glistened in the hard light shining through the windows.

Neither Pan Caohang nor Vice Mayor Li had slept in thirty-six hours.

Vice Mayor Li rapped on the metal desk at the front of the conference room. He held an official document labeled “Task One.” He opened with a call to arms. “As a reward for your exemplary service to the People's Republic, you are instructed to build the crystal sarcophagus of the founder of the People's Republic, Chairman of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Mao Zedong!”

The workers clapped.

“Labor in harmony and with revolutionary spirit to achieve this goal within ten months!” Li read. They clapped again, but with diminished enthusiasm, and Director Pan had to step forward, clapping furiously, to rouse them.

As a political task, Task One took precedence over all other assignments. A special bureaucracy, Office Nine, had been created, with Li and Pan at the helm, to oversee construction of the coffin and the Memorial Hall. Everyone in the room was reassigned to the 505, effective immediately. Across the country, more workers were being rallied to the task. Even as he spoke, engineers and technicians were traveling to Beijing to complete the construction team.

Li went down a list of aesthetic requirements for the coffin, and made clear they would incorporate none of the crypto-mysticism that had crept into the design of Lenin's box. There would be no attempts to reanimate Chairman Mao, not now, not ever. This was not temporary storage. This design was to be eternal, elegant, pragmatic. It was to be an everlasting symbol of the People's Republic.

Technical guidelines followed: earthquake-resistant to magnitude 8.0, glare-proof, airtight, and, most important, the crystal was to be pure to 99.9999 percent—six nines to be confirmed by atomic spectography at the Beijing 401. And, Li Quan said again, waving his open palm forward to lead his troops to battle, it was to be ready in ten months.

Pan Caohang pulled a document from the folder in his hand and laid it on the table. The closest of the workers, Vitrics Professor Emeritus Hong Li, picked it up. He tentatively rotated the page, tipped his head and adjusted his glasses, turned it another ninety degrees. He tugged at his wrinkled earlobe. The document was a blurry facsimile from the embassy in Moscow, the image a rainstorm of ink surrounded by a fuzzy border.

“Director Pan,” the old professor said, “my eyes aren't what they once were.”

Vice Mayor Li lunged and snatched the facsimile from his hands. He balled it up and flipped it into a corner. “It's Lenin's coffin! We don't need inferior Soviet technology polluting our design process!”

Soviet crystal coffin technology was, in fact, the most advanced in the world, which was why a delegation had already been dispatched to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to study Ho Chi Minh's coffin. A gift from the Soviet Union, it was a back door to their superior fabrication techniques. But border skirmishes had soured relations between the People's Republic and Vietnam, and the delegation would spend a week sequestered in windowless rooms at the Red Star Hotel in Hanoi with nothing better to do than play cards. They would return to Beijing without so much as a weather report.

Vice Mayor Li and Director Pan had been dispatched on a mission as well, summoned in the dead of night to Premier Hua Guofeng's quarters and instructed to locate Dr. Sun Yat-sen's coffin. A furious storm had unleashed itself on the city as they left for the Temple of Azure Clouds.

It was well known that in 1925 the Russians had built a crystal coffin for Dr. Sun's remains, but that by the time it arrived on Chinese soil he had already been entombed. The coffin had gone into storage, and was believed to be somewhere in the basement of the temple, but there were many chambers, and the curator, to his great embarrassment, couldn't produce any documentation hinting at the coffin's location. A decade earlier Red Guards had ransacked the temple and there were no logbooks, no manifests for anything.

The storm had flooded the temple's basement, and after hours of wading through knee-deep water Li and Pan found it, buried beneath boxes of scrolls, covered by a moldy canvas sheet. One look and Director Pan knew the coffin would not do. The side panels were steel with nickel plating. Only the lid was crystal, an unacceptable solution, as mourners would be forced to look down on Chairman Mao. When Pan measured the coffin, it was too short for the Chairman.

Just before dawn they returned to Zhongnanhai with the news. Premier Hua, who appeared not to have moved from his desk, which was bare except for two telephones and an overflowing ashtray, accepted their report and dismissed them.

Later that morning, with the Central Committee and high-ranking cadres gathered to pay their respects at the Great Hall of the People, Premier Hua summoned Vice Mayor Li Quan to his side. Chairman Mao lay in state within a boxy acrylic coffin hastily fabricated by the First Plastics Factory. The premier leaned close to Li's ear, so close he could feel the older man's lips moving. “He looks like a catfish in a tank.”

The premier withdrew, clasped his hands, and focused his attention on the honor guard. Li backed away. The premier's shame was obvious, and it was the fault of Li and Pan. There was no question: the final design must be eternal, cast in crystal, worthy of the father of modern China.

The vice mayor continued. Casting and fabrication teams would be housed at the 505. The Academy of the Arts would prepare an array of designs, and Office Nine would select the most suitable. “Ten months,” he said again.

Zhou Yuqing, ever earnest, perhaps the only one by temperament unafraid of Li Quan, spoke up. “Comrade Vice Mayor, I mean no disrespect, but this task will be very difficult to complete in fewer than three years.” There were some noises of assent in the room. What he'd meant by very difficult was impossible. They'd all done the math in their heads.

The annealing process could not be rushed. Crystal pulled too soon from the cooling furnace would have the tensile strength of rock salt. And for slabs of the size required by Task One, proper annealing would take at least three years.

Li Quan spoke over the tops of their heads, addressing the back wall. “When completion of a task requires conditions that do not exist, create proper conditions!” He punctuated the words by slapping his palm onto the desk. Professor Emeritus Hong Li jumped in his chair.

“Comrade Vice Mayor,” Zhou said, “we're just humble workers, and we can't defeat physical laws. There will be serious difficulties building the coffin if we don't have at least three years.”

“You must be prepared to overcome all difficulties with an indomitable will and in a planned way!” Li Quan said. “No delays.”

Zhou Yuqing resigned his challenge. Vice Mayor Li was powerful, and could have had him labeled a reactionary element and locked up. But more important, there was no sense in arguing with the Party. The Party outranked physical laws, scientific fact, logic. This knowledge was as essential to those in the room as the marrow in their bones. The Party was their water, their food, their thoughts.

Director Pan had a way of tucking his chin and speaking to his chest in a voice that made it difficult to hear, a mannerism that required the workers to lean forward and grant him their full attention. He was by reputation a clever leader. He said that he felt he should lend his support to Zhou Yuqing, who had shown the courage to speak his mind, even though he lacked a complete understanding of the political realities of the task.

“Comrade Zhou is correct to identify the problem,” Pan said quietly. “There is no benefit to ignoring it. But in the end, the annealing protocols for this task present a problem like any other. We have been faced with insurmountable obstructions before, and we have defeated them. We are not afraid of a hard and bitter struggle. We will attack with revolutionary spirit and we will achieve victory.”

Pan lifted his face. “For years we've been hunting mice. Now let us hunt tigers.”

He fixed his eye on Zhou Yuqing.

“Director Zhou, will you serve as secretary of the casting and fabrication team? Will you lead your comrades into battle?”

Zhou instinctively put his hands up to wave away such an absurd suggestion. His cheeks darkened and he made careful study of a crack in the concrete at his feet.

“Lead this team into battle!” Pan called. “Destroy whatever obstacles stand in your way!”

Zhou stammered out a declaration of his unworthiness, but the workers shouted him down.

“Serve the People!” Vice Mayor Li shouted.

“Serve Chairman Mao,” the workers called back.

“I am honored to serve,” Zhou said, “but only if Comrade Gu Yasheng will serve as vice secretary.”

The old welder nodded his assent.

In this manner Comrade Zhou Yuqing was made secretary of the team. His reluctance to accept the post was more than a standard show of deference. There was one thing of which he was certain: Task One was destined to fail. The impossibility of success was lost on no one, yet there was no doubt they would attack blindly, with full red hearts, like a cavalry riding directly into enemy cannons. Zhou would head the charge, and he would be the first to fall.

*   *   *

In two days, the 505's logistics battalion constructed a special workshop, approximately the size of a basketball court, in the northeast corner of the factory. Two brick walls lined with asbestos sheeting were erected to form the inner corner of the workshop and segregate their work from the rest of the factory. Casement windows on the outer walls were painted black. Wooden benches were installed along the walls for sleep. The team would work seven days a week, with meals delivered on rolling carts from the canteen.