Page 25 - Tales Apocalyptic and Dystopian

The Republic of Tunguska

“Let us order some tea and wait. It will be a pleasure to listen to
this traitor change his tune and come crawling to us for mercy.”
The two internal security men sipped their tea and made small talk
as the minutes passed by. Turning the screws on a prisoner under
interrogation was not an unfamiliar procedure to either of them; they
might as easily have been waiting in a railway refreshment room for
their train to pull into the station.
After half an hour the radio again hissed and yowled as the
frequency to which it was set was sought by a distant operator.
“Hello, hello? This is Nicolai Betya, prime minister of Tunguska,
calling the owners of a nuclear bomb in our territory.”
“Eh?” Vupinkov blinked. “Has he gone mad?”
“We’ll soon find out.” Beverich began sweating, a field of fine
droplets sprouting out on his neck and forehead. “Comrade Betya,
listen to me! We’ll have none of this nonsense, do you hear? Now,
will you confess or will you die instantly in the blast of that bomb in
the next room?”
“Neither. Since we last communicated, I have taken a plebiscite of
all the inhabitants of Tunguska. This was a simple matter, given the
fact that I am the only living human being within a radius of two
hundred kilometers. We—that is, I—have voted to secede from your
body politic and set up our own sovereign nation, the Republic of
Tunguska. Following adoption of the constitution by the assembly, I
was unanimously elected prime minister.”
“This will not help you, comrade,” Beverich shouted into the
microphone. “Feigning insanity has never worked. Mental illness is
itself a crime, as you well know. Now tell us who you have been
working with in the West!”
“Well, comrade, for the last fifteen minutes I have been working
with the governments of three major Western countries, all nuclear
powers in their own right. I must thank you for the powerful radio.
My contacts were men in the intelligence agencies of those nations,
men who had tried—unsuccessfully, I might add—to recruit me in
the past. They had given me the frequencies on which they might be
reached in case I changed my mind. To make a long story short, the
Republic of Tunguska has been recognized by those countries and a
mutual security pact has been verbally approved. As Tunguska is a
self-proclaimed nuclear-free zone, any detonation of a bomb within

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