Who Goes There?

Unfortunately I don’t have a lot to say about Tom Purdom. “Reduction in Arms” is actually my first Purdom story, despite the fact that I’ve been meaning to get around to reading at least a couple of his short stories before this. In this unique case, I decided to consult a certain colleague, Gideon Marcus over at Galactic Journey (which I’m now writing for), since he had known Purdom personally for some years, and he came back with an obituary segment he wrote for the SFWA.

This is not the whole piece, but you get the idea:

Tom was a titan. His career spanned eight decades, putting him among the Top 5 active SF authors in terms of longevity. Moreover, he was ahead of his time, featuring persons of color, positively portrayed queer couples, and polyamory in his SF works… in the early sixties. But most of all, Tom was a mensch of the first order, doing good without tooting his horn. And he was a good friend.

I couldn’t have said it better.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1967 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It’s been reprinted only once in English, in the anthology International Relations Through Science Fiction (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander). Purdom apparently turned “Reduction in Arms” into a novel in 1971, but that’s only been printed the one time. From what I can tell he had envisioned the short story first and then decided to expand on it.

Enhancing Image

It’s the near future, and the Cold War has simmered down a bit in the wake of the Treaty of Beijing Peking, in which the US and USSR have agreed to keep tabs on each other for the sake of preventing nuclear annihilation. Of course, weapons of mass destruction don’t necessarily have to be nuclear, as the unnamed (to my recollection) narrator tells us that the US government has been tipped off to a possible secret lab in a Russian mental hospital. Lesechko, a scientist and a patient at said mental hospital, is rumored to be experimenting with a “ninety-five plus” virus—a bio-weapon with such a rapid spread that it would kill off 95% of a country’s population before a vaccine could be produced. The few who happen to be immune to such a virus would inherit a land of ruins, and needless to say the Cold War would turn very hot very fast. The narrator works a desk job and as such is in no immediate danger, but his colleagues, namely Weinberg and Prieto, are sent to inspect the mental hostpial.

The aim is to see, by way of inspection and interrogation, if the rumors are true, and if so to stop the experiments. The problem is that the team’s second aim is to preserve the Treaty of Peking, since it’s paramount for arms reduction and there are people on both sides who want the treaty thrown in the garbage—to make the Cold War heat up again. As you can guess, this almost has more in common with John le Carré spy novels than with genre SF conventions, although it does remind me of Algis Budrys’s Who?, which also had an explicit Cold War theme and dealt with the thorny nature of US and USSR relations. Like in Who?, there’s a dilemma at work. The narrator puts the core issue succinctly enough:

We assumed the Russians would deny us access, and we would have to negotiate with them. Before the negotiations began, we had to let them know we would withdraw from the treaty if they destroyed the lab while we were negotiating and tricked us into inspecting real patients. If they wanted to keep the treaty, they could either prove no lab had ever been hidden in the hospital—let their technical staff and ours figure out how—or they could show us the lab and give us all the information Lesechko had obtained.

The setup is very good. There are a couple things holding this story back from being more engaging, though. Let’s talk narrators. We have a first-person passive narrator here, in the sense that he doesn’t really do anything and is only reporting the events of the story after the fact. Now, a first-person passive narrator could work, depending on what type of story you’re telling. One of my favorite narrators in all of literature is in William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, and that guy spends most of the novel telling someone else’s story; but then the thing with Maxwell’s novel is that it’s about the tragedy of not treating someone with empathy at a time when they could really use a helping hand. A passive narrator can work in a story that’s light on action, but the problem is that “Reduction in Arms” is, at its core, an espionage thriller. Such a story requires a sense of urgency and a level of apparent danger that demands the reader’s involvement, and this is all deflated when the narrator is a) not in any danger, and b) writing about these events like he’s writing a not-terribly-interesting memoir. I was not on the edge of my scene when I should’ve been.

Another problem is length, although it’s not the problem I usually have with story length. Purdom had apparently written “Reduction in Arms” as a novelette, then shortened it and submitted, got rejected, then expanded it back to novelette-length. Given the weight of the subject matter, I actually think this story is too short, which you could say is the best negative criticism you can give of something. At 23 magazine pages I think it could’ve easily been double that length and made into a novella. We are introduced to a few interesting characters, Prieto especially with his background in the Cuban Revolution, but there’s little dialogue and we’re not given much time with these characters before everything goes to hell. I can see why Purdom would return to this material and make a novel out of it, because it’s rich as a what-if scenario and a pseudo-historical document. There were a lot of SF stories written during the Cold War that were about the Cold War, especially during its hotter moments (the Bay of Pigs “fiasco” is referenced here), but Purdom’s story feels more plausible than most. Just as importantly, this is not a story that mindlessly demonizes the Soviets.

There Be Spoilers Here

The lab turns out to be real, which would be bad enough, but Prieto also goes rogue and starts on a rampage against security and lab assistants. In a way this is convenient, despite the lives lost, because if the secret lab had just been discovered then the US would have reason enough to back out of the treaty; but with Prieto going against orders and threatening to take off with lab documents, the Soviets have very good reason to cooperate with US agents. The only solution that would satisfy both parties is for Weinberg to get the documents out of Prieto’s hands—by any means necessary. Weinberg is a trained agent, but he’d never actually had to kill anyone before; now he had to kill one of his own countrymen. It’s objectively the right thing to do, but Weinberg has to work himself up to it, and it doesn’t help that Prieto is very skilled gunman. “Whenever people talk about the good of humanity, Tolstoy had said, they are always getting ready to commit a crime.” The resulting shootout ends in Prieto dying and Weinberg narrowly surviving, more importantly with the documents intact. It’s a thrilling climax that could’ve been made better by a change in perspective and more development of the characters who are in the thick of it.

The very end implies that this skirmish over the bio-weapon lab will not be the last such incident, although I couldn’t help but be distracted by the story seemingly ending mid-sentence. I think the ellipses are supposed to be foreboding, but I was more thinking that the story had been cut off before it reached a proper conclusion.

A Step Farther Out

I wanna recommend “Reduction in Arms” more than I do. It’s a great idea for a story that ultimately still feels like a rough draft. In 1967 it might’ve been more impressive, hence it making the cover of the F&SF issue it appeared in. It could also be that I had recently read le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, because I simultaneously felt like I knew where Purdom was coming from and that this Cold War spy fiction deal had been done better. I do wanna give Purdom another chance in the future.

See you next time.