I. MAN AS A WEAPON

Captain Sarah Lomax at first saw nothing unusual about the visitor. Many pleasant Army officers came and went, sometimes reporting in to General Coppersmith, sometimes setting forth on one of Coppersmith's mysterious errands. This Major Michael A. Dugan looked nice enough — neither young nor old, neither strange nor familiar, neither handsome nor ugly. He greeted her civilly but did not try to make small talk.

When he stood up, she sensed something strange about the way he did it.

He was sitting; he was rising; he was up. That was all. The movement had neither beginning nor end, neither slouch nor effort to it. It poured like water. She blinked at him, wondering what was missing. General Coppersmith's words called her and Dugan both to attention.

"You're Dugan," said the general.

"Yes, sir," said the major.

"You're the greatest spy in the world," the general went on, in a tone which would have been pure insolence if it had been used the other way around, by a major toward a general.

Dugan said nothing. He merely stood there, militarily erect, eyes upon the general's face. Outside the window, rain fell upon Tokyo from a sky so white that it made the whole city a pastel of silvers, grays, and light blues. The clear, permeating pale light fell upon Major Dugan's half-humorous wide-awake face; but beyond a willingness to be agreeable, there was no sign of expression from him.

It was General Coppersmith who backed down. Sardonic, alert, he relaxed a little into that challenging sarcasm which served him in place of camaraderie or humor.

"Come on in. I would not have called for you if I hadn't needed you."

"Thank you, sir," said Major Dugan. Passing Sarah's desk, he smiled directly and personally at her. There was the Irish in his smile, a quirk which promised mischief, which hinted that there was always fun in life. He said to her, quietly, but without pausing in his soundless measured steps toward the general's office:

"And thank you, Captain, for making me at home."

He gave her a glance which made her almost blush. Not until Coppersmith slammed the door behind them both did Sarah realize what was so strange about this Major Dugan: poise. He had effected every movement, no matter how commonplace, with the complete efficiency of a cat questing for prey. Yet the smile he had given her had in it nothing more than an unusual amount of humor and simple friendliness.

Sarah watched the base of her desk lamp. When the tiny switch glowed, she was to cut in the dictaphone and take down the conversation in the inner room. But the signal did not come. Impatiently, she ranged her needle-sharp pencils beside one another and looked out the window. From the fifth floor of the Dai Gojugo Ginko she could see most of Tokyo running south and east, past burned-out Asakusa to the water gleaming like a ribbon in the distance. She wondered what Dugan had been doing out there, in the quiet, wet city, himself as imperturbable as rain. She could imagine that his unostentatious friendliness would work miracles, but surely there was more than mere friendliness to being a spy…?

Just who was Dugan? And why hadn't she heard of him before? As Coppersmith's secretary, she knew almost everything; as his assistant executive, she reminded the general himself of his own secrets. Yet this suave friendly man had come in from the rain bone dry. Where had he left his coat and cap? How had he known where the cloakroom was?

The light went on.

Sarah picked up one of the three telephones on her desk. It was not a telephone at all, though it looked like one, but merely the receiver for the ultrasensitive microphone which, hidden in a handsome desk calendar, stood in the middle of General Coppersmith's office.

"I tell you, we've got to handle it from here," the general was saying. "Even if the plane did make it, we won't have enough information to go on. You can't keep the peace by letting a neighbor think he has the jump on you. You're supposed to know Japan, Major. You were here before the war?"

"Yes, sir," said the strange friendly voice." I was here."

Sarah could visualize General Coppersmith's baleful yellow-brown eyes, his brushed auburn hair, his surgically neat shaven cheeks as, in his most formidable and lionlike manner, he put this next question:

"And would Japan have attacked Pearl if they had really known all our secrets — known the secret of our tremendous industry, our terrible science?"

The stranger's voice showed that he walked cheerfully into the trap. Perfectly quietly and blandly, he said, "No, sir, they would not have attacked if they had known what we could do."

Coppersmith pounced; Sarah's pencil raced across the page as she took the words down—"Then, why, Major, if you are the super-spy they said you were, why in the name of suffering humanity didn't you betray enough American secrets to the Japanese to scare them off? You could have saved your country the agony of war. You were, I am told, the only man whom the U.S. had planted in the Imperial Japanese Headquarters."

Sarah waited, pencil poised, for the answer. But the next voice was Coppersmith's again:

"Well, speak up, Major!"

"I had no instructions."

"You mean to say that you let Pearl Harbor happen when you might have prevented it, just because you did not have instructions?"

Sarah had trouble getting the major's voice. It was low, even, and rapid, "…a spy. My duty was to report Japan's plans whenever I could get them, not to interfere. I was not in a position to persuade the Japanese that America had secrets of such magnitude. I was not told about—" He mentioned the code names so rapidly that she did not recognize them and could not get them down.

Coppersmith spoke again, and his voice held a note of satisfaction. "Let me say it again. You let the world burn up in war because you did not have instructions to stop the fire?"

Defiance entered the major's voice. It was keyed to a note of respect, but articulated far more plainly than necessary: "General, I never presumed that I could have stopped the war. I was pretending to be a Japanese officer. How could I have betrayed enough American secrets to prevent Pearl Harbor, without giving my own identity away? Our ambassador here was one of the most popular foreign diplomats ever to stay in Tokyo. If even he could not scare off the Japanese, how should I?"

Grimly, Coppersmith said, "I'm asking you."

"My mission was intelligence. I fulfilled it to the limit of staying alive. When I had to choose between shutting up and living, or talking and dying, I shut up. That was what I was told to do."

"Suppose you were given the most dangerous job in the world?"

Unexpectedly, the major laughed, "I've had it, sir."

Coppersmith joined in the laughter; Sarah heard a dubious note to it. Coppersmith said, "I need information, but I want — even more than that — for the enemy to know that I have the information."

"Who is the enemy, sir?" The strange major spoke with what sounded like innocent candor. Sarah wished she could see his smiling, unreadable face when he said it; and the general's expression, sure to be formidable, must have been odd, too.

Coppersmith must have kept a straight face because he answered very simply, "Russia. But I should have said potential enemy, Major."

"Yes, sir, you should have."

Again there was a long silence. Sarah turned a page in her notebook.

Coppersmith spoke again. "I'm going to have to trust you, Major Dugan, with the biggest secret in the world."

Dugan said nothing, but from the way the general spoke, Sarah guessed that he had nodded. The telephone pressed her ear almost painfully as she strained to catch every sound from the microphone in the next room.

"I want you to spoil the secret of Atomsk."

"Atomsk?"

Coppersmith spelled it out, adding, "It's the Russian atomic center. We want them to know that we know all about it. We want them to guess as to how we know about it. We want to get the information for our own use, but we don't just want to know about it as a bombing target. We want the Russians to suspect us so much that they will not fool themselves. For that, we need a man as a weapon."

"To go in, to get out, and, after he was out, to leave traces?"

"Right. If the Russians think we know about their precious secret, they will be less disposed to take a chance. If we ourselves do know what the secret is, we will be less inclined to wage war against an unknown and therefore exaggerated danger. This is the meanest kind of fight there is, Major. It's a fight to keep the peace."

"There are better ways of doing that, General. Politics. If your Chief and the Republicans…"

The microphone went dead. Sarah felt as though she had been slapped. She set the mock telephone back in its cradle. She patted her hair back into place, lined up the pencils, slipped the notebook to the edge of her blotter. Why had General Coppersmith cut her off?

She already knew about Atomsk.

Atomsk was the biggest secret in the world. But there was still something that he did not want her to hear. She sat immobile at her desk. She found herself almost hating the poised stranger who came in and got the general's innermost confidence in their first interview, who smiled like a nice friendly man, and then turned out to be something not-quite-human — a spy.

The door opened. Dugan stood in the doorway, inches shorter than General Coppersmith. Sarah thought, for a moment, that he looked like an image of the Buddha. There was an unearthly Oriental calm on his face. Coppersmith, usually a model of dignity, looked positively flustered beside him.

"Put it out of your mind, Major. We do the military end. They do the political. Come back in an hour. I'll have Dr. Swanson and Captain Lomax — you've met her, here, haven't you? — brief you on what we do know."

"Yes, sir," said Dugan to the general, but his eyes were on Sarah when he said it. She could not tell how his expression changed but she got the idea he was twinkling at her. Coppersmith gave the major and herself a bleak nod and closed his door.

Dugan looked down at her. "You didn't miss much. I just tried to give your general a lecture on politics and he wouldn't take it."

Sarah stood up. She didn't know what else to do. "Miss much? Miss what? I don't know what you mean…"

"Your pencils. Two of them are blunt. Your hair, right above your left ear — it's a little disarranged. You must have been taking our conversation down, probably from one of those phones. I saw the general working some kind of a switch with his knee and I thought he had somebody listening in, just in case I tried to compromise him."

Sarah tried to get indignant, but it didn't work; she could feel a smile pushing its way up and breaking irresistibly upon the corners of her mouth.

Major Dugan was grinning very frankly now. She wondered how she could ever have thought — two minutes before — that he looked like an Oriental. He looked like the friendly and amusing kind of Irishman — the kind who will make jokes out of troubles even if it's raining sudden death. Dugan changed his tone. With sympathetic friendliness he said:

"You didn't miss anything, Captain. I'll tell you sometime. And we'll keep his secret for him, won't we?"

Sarah didn't dare deny anything or admit anything. Feeling herself a fool, she could only say, "What secret?"

"Atomic Siberia. The weapons place." He had to lean very close to her to whisper the final word: "Atomsk."

She should have told him off, but she nodded like a nitwit. Dugan took her arm and gave it a light, friendly, almost impersonal squeeze.

"Don't mind me, Captain Lomax. I'm on your team. You know, like the old-fashioned vaudeville magicians. I'm showing off and playing tricks on you, when I have no reason to do it. I suppose it's that I guess we're going to have to work together, and I want you to like me. I promise you I won't be a nuisance long." He stood back and laughed drily. "Not if you ship me off to Atomsk."

"I–I—I—" She felt herself blushing. She still couldn't say anything, conceding that she had listened in on the telephone. At last she got it out, "I'm sorry."

"Don't be," said Dugan, slipping deftly out the door.

Don't be what? she wondered. Sorry? Standoffish? Formal? She wished he would come back.

As she sat down at her desk the realization flooded into her mind. This was supposed to be the solution to Atomsk — Atomsk, the very name of what had haunted her for weeks. This one man was all they were going to use. One friendly, comical young major against all the mystery and poison of the radioactive hills… She began to wish they hadn't picked this particular man. And she wished, too, that she knew more about him. Or else that she hadn't, somehow, felt his presence so.

II. THE CITY UNDER THE LEAVES

The little light went on, went off, went on again, and stayed on.

Captain Lomax went into General Coppersmith's office. He sat at his desk, his back to the light. As was her privilege, she sidestepped the visitor's chair which faced the window and took the inconspicuous straight chair by the edge of the window. Thus she sat at the general's right. He had taken no notice of her entrance. His fingertips touching, he held his hands a few inches above the desk and revolved his wrists so as to produce meaningless geometric effects.

Sarah waited for him to speak.

While waiting, she admired him. He looked definite where Dugan had seemed friendly and blurred. Coppersmith was imperturbable, elegant, deadly — so profoundly self-assured that he had no need for arrogance. For three hundred years the Coppersmiths had run their county along the Hudson; with his family, authority had become a cultural trait. Yet Coppersmith, faced by Atomsk, was powerless to meet the problem himself. He might go in some day with a gun, but he could never go in unnoticed. Sarah found something surprising in the realization that Dugan could do something which Coppersmith, despite all his wealth and power and military authority, could not possibly do for himself.

Dugan had the power to come and go.

Dugan had the capacity to stay alive when other men babbled or shuddered at the wrong time, and died for their first mistakes.

Dugan was his own weapon. She was annoyed at herself for liking him, for being pleased by his showoff trickery, for being piqued by his challenge to her as a person. But she suspected that if Dugan were — no, not the best spy in the world, but merely one of the best hundred spies, her annoyance was known to him just as much as her liking. The thought almost gave her gooseflesh. It was uncomfortable, having somebody around who could see right into your mind.

Coppersmith must have been thinking the same thing. Without looking at her, he asked, "Do you trust him?"

She wanted to say that she couldn't tell, that she didn't know, that she really didn't trust Dugan; but the smiling, kindly, teasing face came to the surface of her mind and she blurted out, "Why — ah — yes, I do."

General Coppersmith sounded disgusted. "I trust him, too," said he. "He's guaranteed enough by other people. But I like to make my own independent judgment on a man — when it comes to a job like this. And I can't. I started to pin him down and he reached out for the one thing that would make me wince."

"You cut me off," said Sarah.

Coppersmith stared at her. This time there was no reproach in his expression, only puzzlement. "Politics. He knew I couldn't talk politics about the Old Man. So he talked it. He got away from me like a figure in a dream." Coppersmith sighed. "If he can treat other people the way he has treated us, he'll do for the job. Tell him to come back. Leave word with Colonel Landsiedel that I want Dugan. And I want Landsiedel himself. Go ahead and brief Dugan on Atomsk."

"How much, General?"

"All of it."

"Even the plane, sir?"

Coppersmith swiveled his chair around so that he could look straight at her. "When we use a man like that, Sarah, we have to bring him all the way in. Tell him everything you know. You know everything I know. Everything. His life is going to depend on it."

"Even the camera?"

Coppersmith nodded. "Of course. We're giving him Atomsk. Do you understand — giving it to him? He'll worry about it from now on."

Captain Lomax felt the weight of weeks slipping from her. Ever since the first reports had come through, they had been pure nightmare. The story was tantalizing, strange, terrifying in its implications of the unknown; but even worse than knowledge was the secrecy. She had gone to sleep fearing she would speak in her dream; she had crossed streets afraid that a car might hit her, hurt her, make her delirious, so that she would say the unmentionable word — Atomsk.

The news came in from three different directions, but in each case it bore the name: the city of Atomsk. The first report was handed in by the Chinese. A military officer from Nationalist intelligence brought a special memorandum to the American Ambassador in Nanking. The original Chinese report was beautifully brush-written. The accompanying English-language text was typed with a purple ribbon on wretched paper. The story was simple:

One of the spies of the Generalissimo had been sent to reconnoiter Russian dealings with the Chinese Communists. He found himself on the track of something strangely interesting. Pretending to be a simple coolie, he blundered his way into an underground Russian city in Eastern Siberia. The name of the city was given in Chinese as Ya-t'ung-ssu-k'e and in Russian letters as ATOMCK — Atomsk. The Russians had been suspicious of him and had made him drink a glass of milky-colored water which caused him to become ill. But he escaped and got back to the Nationalist lines in Mukden, just before Mukden fell. The spy died before he could be flown out.

He had only one specific message: "Gauze nets of silly beast, suction two or four."

Along with the report from Mukden, the Chinese had sent the spy's right arm. And it was mildly radioactive.

The second report — which came from Europe — was a detailed description of plans for a secret underground city. The Russian who turned it in was a Soviet deserter, an officer. No one knew why he deserted. He knew all about the "Atom-gorod" plans as of December, 1945; he had not been allowed to know anything of the project after that date. American military authorities took him into the American Embassy for safekeeping and a special guard was put around the building.

The precautions were useless. A sniper's shot hit the renegade Russian deserter in the face when he carelessly looked out of an Embassy window. A stray shot, said the local Russians. A good rifle with telescopic sights and a fine rifleman behind it, said the local Americans. But the stranger was dead. He had given a location in latitude and longitude — in the wooded hills not far from Vladivostok.

But, after only one long interview, he had died.

The third report came in from Japan, through U.S. Navy channels. An American LST had run northeast from Hokkaido, up into the Sea of Okhotsk. The radioman happened to understand the Russian wireless code; he had been trained for liaison during the war, but had never had a chance to use his skill. By another coincidence, he happened to be playing with the wireless receiving unit. He caught the distress signal of a Russian aircraft, signaling weakly in open code. It was calling, "Atomsk, Atomsk." There was no answer to the call. The signal stopped suddenly.

Either the plane had crashed or the Red Air Force had shot it into silence.

That was all — these three reports. The Chinese report had reached Washington on November 28. The deserter's story had been brought in by courier on December 10. While these two were still being discussed and threshed out, the report from Japan had come in on January 22.

The official reaction was violent. A majority of the people concerned — fifteen or eighteen in number — said: "Leave it alone. What if they do have a place called Atomsk? Can we do anything about it? We have no authority under the United Nations Charter."

But a vigorous minority fought against inactivity. From American headquarters in Tokyo, a top intelligence expert — General Frederick Coppersmith — was sent to Washington to urge action. Eastern Siberia was a lot closer to Tokyo than it was to Washington or Frankfurt; American authorities in Japan threatened to take independent action to look into Atomsk if they did not get a definite policy out of Washington.

Nothing happened.

Under local orders — neither authorized by Washington, nor prohibited in advance — an American photographic plane ran out over the Sea of Okhotsk, crossed the Siberian coast just south of Bogopol, thus violating Russian territorial sovereignty, and made a single photographic run over the hills where Atomsk was said to exist.

By the time the plane reached the reported location of Atomsk, the Far Eastern air was full of Russian radio calls, all of them in code. American radio experts in Japan went out of their minds plotting the locations of Soviet stations which had never been heard on the air before. Soon the ground stations were followed by aircraft calls. The Soviet pilots spoke to one another sharply, cryptically, under the stress of extreme excitement. The whole of the Red Far Eastern Air Force seemed to have been called out to intercept the American plane.

But the American plane got through — almost.

It was a special model-one of the new experimental reconnaissance planes designed to survive by speed and by speed alone. It put on acceleration which the Russians had never seen before. It rose to a height on which they had not planned. But the Russians caught it, right at the photo finish, in the high cold air above the 38th degree North Latitude which divides American-occupied from Russian-occupied Korea. Down came the plane.

The pilot died either in the air or on impact. But the plane did not burn. That was another one of its novel features. It had been built not to burn. Its purpose was to see, to run, to get the message back.

Communists and Americans reached the wreckage on the ground; the Communists got there first and pulled the cameras out of the plane. Not until the self-propelled howitzers began moving silently for range did the Communist troops go back, back, back, two miles to their side of the border.

The Americans apologized locally to the Soviet military authorities. They said, "The pilot must have lost his bearings." No better pilot ever flew; no better bearings had ever been kept. But, in diplomacy, the word is the thing. The Russian military delegation in Tokyo displayed no ill will. They seemed to regard it as a good joke played by American professional soldiers on Russian professional soldiers, and — besides — they had nothing to worry about. They knew that their people had taken all the cameras out of the wreckage of the plane.

If they had known the truth, they would have been unhappy.

The Russian search had overlooked one camera. Which was not in the least surprising, because talented engineers had built the camera so that it would be overlooked. It was small, but good; it was activated by a special signal in the plane's radio transmitter. When started, it kept on going till its film ran out. Pre-focused, it adjusted for color and brightness automatically. When its job was done, the lens cover snapped back automatically and it looked like a small hydraulic jack on the landing gear.

The Russians didn't get that one.

The film was a special color film, fresh from the developmental laboratories in Rochester, New York.

The photographs were sent back to Washington in duplicate. The planes carrying them were given fighter escort until they were entirely out of the range of continental Asiatic bases. The photographs were precious. They showed Atomsk itself.

Hills, covered with leaves — mostly fir and pine trees, but some deciduous. The forest was heavy and the snow was heavy. There was no sign of mankind, but there were odd angular shapes in the contours, shapes which no glacier had ever fashioned, no rock strata had ever built up by tilting and faulting. There was a city there, perhaps. And perhaps it was Atomsk.

III. EYES TURN TO ATOM-GOROD

A docile Major Dugan followed Captain Sarah Lomax into a temporary U.S. Army building out beyond Atsugi airfield. The M.P. at the gate telephoned in before he let them pass. He started to gaze curiously at the pretty WAC captain until Dugan, quite officiously, said to her: "Hurry up, sis. We're going to be late."

While the guard was still adjusting his wits to the rather improbable brother-sister relationship of the two officers, they went on in. Sarah had had two solid days of visits with Dugan, and had gotten accustomed to his casual mystifications, which almost inevitably had the effect of drawing attention away from himself and to the other people who went with him.

At Finance he had signed vouchers providing for his pay to be drawn by General Coppersmith's office and deposited to his account in a Minneapolis bank.

At Weather he had talked for hours, while Sarah got very bored, with a zealous young meteorologist who seemed to know everything about the Siberian cold fronts. Before Dugan was through, it seemed that he should find his way around Asia merely by looking at the clouds.

Then Sarah had taken him over to the Counterintelligence, where a very solemn colonel gave Dugan a lecture on the responsibilities of the investigating officer. The interview was spoiled when an aide put a slip of paper in front of the colonel. Sarah, reading the clean-cut penciled handwriting upside down, saw that the note said, "This is the Dugan." At that the colonel got very red, said they were wasting his time, and told Sarah that Coppersmith ought to brief his own people. As they went out, Dugan apologizing for nothing in particular, the colonel said to him:

"I'd like to talk to you, if you ever talk. But I guess you don't."

"Talk, sir?" said Dugan. "Certainly."

"About yourself," said the colonel.

Dugan laughed. "There's not much to say, Colonel. If I get back here, I'll ask permission." His tone implied he would not ask very hard.

That was all they saw of Counterintelligence. The old colonel looked as though he did not expect to see Dugan again — not in this life, at least. Sarah had tried to make him talk:

"Major, you were here during the war?"

"Uh-huh," said he. "And you weren't. We could have had fun if you'd been here."

"Silly," she said. "They'd have shot me."

"They didn't shoot me," said Dugan. "I was an Imperial Japanese officer. You could have been fixed up as a Czarist Russian. Or else as an Irish girl. Did you realize that Ireland was neutral? The Irish just wanted to be sure to get a chance to fight on all sides, the way they usually do. I got a Legion of Merit for serving against the United States and for passing as a Japanese."

"I don't see how you did it. You don't look Japanese to me. Just sort of Italian or maybe Syrian or just funny Irish."

For answer he put his hands up to his face, pulled his eyelids slantwise, drew his lower lip down. Then he said, "Boo, I'm Hachiman, the Japanese war god." She laughed, but she noticed she had not gotten any personal details out of him.

This trip was to the office of the photo analyst who studied the pictures from the weather plane. The analyst himself came to the door and showed them into a comfortable room, furnished with a Franklin stove, wicker furniture of the kind usually found on hotel porches, photographic drainboards and cubicles, and an impressive number of safes. Among the photographic odors there was a homey sort of smell which Sarah could not place.

The analyst, Dr. Swanson, offered them seats. Dugan sniffed significantly. Dr. Swanson eyed him:

"Anything wrong, Major? I guess our chemicals smell bad to anybody who's just come in from the outside."

"What I smell," said Dugan, "is scarcely chemical. I think that it's McTeague's Highland Cream."

Swanson blushed all the way down to his shirt collar. "One of the boys did have a drink recently. Can I offer you one?"

"You can," said Dugan, "but Captain Lomax has religious scruples and will drink nothing but hot Japanese tea."

When Swanson left to make up highballs, Sarah said, "Thanks for getting me out of that drink. I hate refusing. How did you know I don't drink?"

"I asked the Japanese who keeps your room. Sh-h-h," said Dugan, as Dr. Swanson came back.

Drinks in front of them, Swanson smiled wanly, "Here's to Atom-gorod."

Dugan said something in Russian and Swanson answered in the same language. They both sounded to Sarah as though they had very strong mid-Western accents. Apparently they weren't saying anything important, because Dugan slipped back into English:

"And the Communists have butchered the Russian language, too, along with everything else. It's just like them, to set up a place so secret that they don't dare think about it themselves, and then give it a name like that. The old Russians would have called it Atomnii-gorod and would have had scientific congresses meeting there every six months."

Swanson agreed. "They need more cover. I got a lot out of those photographs, but even without me, the place would have shown up. I suppose General Coppersmith has given you all the evidence."

Dugan turned to Sarah. "Did he?"

Sarah sipped her tea from a Japanese cup and looked up at Dugan through the steam. He did not sound as though he meant the question, so she just said:

"I've given you the basic briefing."

Swanson turned to her. "Did you tell him about the N.K.A.R.?"

Dugan intercepted the question. "She mentioned it, but since she does not speak Russian, she may have missed some of the terms. That's Narodnii Kommisariat Atomnovo Razvitiya—"

"I know that much," said Sarah. "People's Commissariat of Atomic Development."

"But why N.K. when all the other commissariats have been turned into ministries?" asked Dugan. He stretched out his legs, leaned back, looked through his pale amber glass, and acted like a man who was prepared for long scientific discussions. Swanson, too, relaxed and said he supposed that they did not want to change the number of constitutional ministries. By leaving the secret agency with the old-fashioned name, they could publish their formal governmental structure in good faith.

While Dugan was talking, Sarah studied him. He was of middle height. There was a quaint mobility to his face, a quickness of expression which made her suspect that in his early childhood some warm-hearted quickly responsive woman had taught him the rudiments of human relationships. He was acting a role, but it was a role which he enjoyed acting. He was talking, smiling, agreeing, dissenting, frowning, smiling again, all in turn. Who was she to say that this was not the real, the true Dugan? People were not their dead selves but their live selves. Yet in the case of a man like Dugan, there must be alternative selves, other personalities patterned to the occasion and the culture. Dugan-the-Japanese must have been just as believable as Dugan-the-American; Japanese must have liked him because he was Japanese; otherwise he would have been found out and killed. How could she like a man who existed only by virtue of his own command, who played perpetually on a stage of make-believe? What was he, anyway? Dugan was no name for a man with black hair, black eyes, olive skin — or was it? Was he a Turk or a Greek, an Italian or an Egyptian, or (wildest chance of all, this) simply an American?

And how could he like her? She was Coppersmith's assistant. She was valuable to him among friends, just as other people, men, and women too, must have been valuable to him among enemies. He wanted her to like him; it made his work easier. Therefore, the easiest thing for him to do would be to show her that he, for his part, liked her. But did he, truly? How could she know? How could she ever know?

Swanson had just said, "I knew the pilot. They killed him. They had a right to, but I hate them for it just the same."

Sarah supposed he was talking about the photo plane. Dugan responded by closing his face — quite literally shutting out all expression for an instant — so that he looked like a dead man. Or like a Japanese! Sarah saw, with a flash of intuition, that she had caught him betraying himself — for the first distinguishable second in days of their being together. For once, Dugan had gone back to his wartime role and had responded with the manner of a Japanese, the dead formal silence with which Japanese men bore news of disaster. He must have had many friends among the Japanese during his years of wartime spying: and of them, many must have died, so that the expression of quick military sorrow could have become habitual. But before she could catch her breath or say anything, Dugan let his face go doleful in the American manner. He looked Irish again, and American too.

And yet, thought Sarah, he was a Japanese for just that moment, a Japanese like the nisei interpreters and intelligence men in our own Army.

She picked up the thread of the conversation again. Dugan was protesting, "You mustn't hate the Russians. If you do have to fight them, hating them is no use, medically or psychologically. It reduces your own efficiency."

"And you throw your trump away," said Swanson.

"You know it, too?" Dugan asked the question quickly, eagerly.

"You mean," said Swanson, "that liking people is the only way to win wars, or even better, to get out of them? Certainly. Any scientist will tell you that. America will get sick and weak if it hates. That's why I'm sorry I hate the Russians right now. I hope I'll get over it. I've got to. If we have humanness on our side, we can be muddled and mixed up and argumentative, and still come out right. If that's what you mean by knowing it, too, I know it. But the Army doesn't. Just try to tell them they ought to like their enemies." Swanson sounded defiant.

Dugan sighted Swanson over the top of his glass. "We can't change everything, doctor. I'm alive right now, because I liked the Japanese while I was doublecrossing them and making their plans go haywire, as far as I dared." A dry chuckle, very Irish, followed. "I really liked them. Defeating Japan was the best way I knew of helping the Japanese people. I had friends, and I sent some of them to die. But though my Japanese friends and I could not have agreed on the precise reason for it in each case, they and I would have agreed that dying for the sake of Japan was a good thing to do. If I go into Siberia, I'm going in the damndest pro-Russian you ever saw. Do you think I could stand it, otherwise?"

Swanson asked the question which Sarah had not dared to ask, "What are you, Major?"

"American, right now," said Dugan flatly.

Swanson persisted, embarrassed but dogged, "No, I mean racially."

"American," Dugan repeated. "Call me a Cherokee, if you want to explain my looks. Sorry I can't tell you the truth; but I'm a secret." Dugan grinned at Sarah, and went on, "The captain has been trying to figure me out for days. I wish I could help her. The Army won't let me. Anyhow, we're talking too much. Let's get down to Atomsk."

"Right," said Swanson in a disciplined but friendly way. "I'll get the pictures."

He went to one of the safes and twirled the knob, standing so that they could not see the position of the dial. The safe door swung open. Swanson went to his desk, picked up an intercommunication microphone, and said, "Swanson. Safe three. Handsome and ready. Ready?"

A tinny remote voice answered, "Ready, doctor," from the box. Swanson went back to the safe and opened it.

Dugan asked, "Just what would have happened if you hadn't put that call through?"

Swanson jerked his head upward to the nozzles of the fire-extinguisher system. "Gas. We would have all gone out like lamps. Sirens would have gone off. Two armored cars would have come up here lickety-split. Not to mention a radio alarm." He grinned proudly. "Atomsk is just one of the things that we have pictures of. You have no idea what a plane can do with the new infra-red flares."

He spread a thick sheaf of photographs on one of the drafting tables, pushing the table over to Sarah and Dugan with the heel of his palm. It rolled easily on rubber-tired casters. Dugan caught the edge of the table, stopping it. With a pleasant nod, he dragged Sarah's chair closer to his own and held the pictures so that she could see them, too.

They seemed to show the same thing — a series of views of a forested hill country. Two low ranges ran parallel. There was a streak of light which could be water, between them. The pictures showed no sign of human habitation.

"It's simple enough," said Swanson. "He came in low. Two or three minutes in from the coast he started taking pictures. He hoped to make two runs, but by the time he had gotten over once, the whole Siberian sky was full of ack-ack and aircraft. He ran for the Korean border. He went faster than they thought he could, but then a couple of new models showed up on their side and they ran faster than we thought they could. We couldn't have fighter aircraft waiting to escort him in, but we did have some L-5's just accidentally scouting around. We also had a lot of jeeps, both Korean and American, out on a sort of Boy Scout hike.

"But just as he touched the line, one of the Soviet planes stopped in mid-air. At least, it looked like that to the Air Force colonel who told me about it — stopping for a fifth of a second. Must have just about killed the Soviet pilot inside. Something came out of that Russian plane. It overtook our man at top speed—"

"Overtook him?" asked Sarah. "It must have been a guided missile?"

Swanson smashed the fist of his left hand into the palm of his right, "Like that. Tracked him. Overtook him. Killed him. Down came the plane. Two miles our side of the line. But it was near a highway and the Russians' Koreans got there before our people could make it. Close to battalion strength. Border guards, I suppose. It shows that they have good staff work and high readiness. They stood our people off with guns. Fired a few shots."

"Nobody hurt?" said Dugan. "It wasn't in the papers and none of the Japanese I know mentioned it."

"Nobody hurt," said Swanson. His light eyes looked dreadfully earnest. He ran his hand over his forehead; he was half-bald and the gesture made him look like a cartoon of the typical scientist. "I don't know how much longer we can go on trading passes. They didn't want publicity because they didn't know how much we had gotten. Besides, they were invading us. We didn't want publicity because we had these—" He gestured at the photos.

"Why did they leave these pictures?" asked Sarah. "Wasn't there something about a concealed camera?"

Swanson gave her a bleak smile. "I helped design it before he went. Good thing, too. Some Russian officer showed up and stripped the plane. They had the wreckage for two hours before we got enough force and enough brass to move in. Our people didn't even meet a Russian officer. Just some of the Communist Koreans. The body was stripped naked. All the instruments were gone from the plane. All the cameras. Even the pilot's personal papers and dogtags. But they missed one camera. It didn't look like a camera."

"Where was it?" said Sarah.

"It was built to be missed," Swanson declared in warning tone.

Dugan nodded his agreement. Sarah, who knew anyhow, said nothing.

Swanson pulled out a photostat from the bottom of the pile. It was a pale photograph with the overlay of a map printed by hand in glaring white. The map showed a big underground city which ran underneath two or three peaks in the range, depending on what you counted as peaks.

Swanson explained what he had done. For weeks he had gone over the photographs, finding tell-tale lines of color difference in the trees, odd shadows which added up to the modification of natural terrain. Two photographs together showed shadow lines which hinted at camouflaged excavation, damaged trees showing power lines, a thickened brook hinting at water overflow.

The colors of the photographs ranged from pale greens to weird purples. Swanson explained:

"These aren't meant to pick up the actual colors, but to range from infra-red all the way up through the visible spectrum. We figured that the Russians would build their camouflage doctrine on the assumption of black-and-white photography or color perception by the naked eye. They couldn't fool us on the color pattern and the black-and-white pattern, not at the same time. See how this film shows up the differences in foliage tints?"

Dugan and Sarah nodded.

Swanson ran his finger along the patterns which neither of the others could see till he pointed them out; but it was amazing how clear each pattern remained, once it had been pointed out.

A fantastic city lay beneath the leaves. Swanson's voice rang with technical enthusiasm as he explained the enormous care which had gone into the building of Atomsk. Purely by air view, it would never have been detected. A renegade, a panicky Soviet pilot, and a Chinese coolie had had to show the way; otherwise it never would have been found.

Swanson said, very emphatically, "Do you see — they have hidden it from their own people, too? They have thousands of planes and thousands of pilots in this part of the world. They could not post Atomsk as a prohibited area without a million or so people finding out about it. They had to leave it so that even Russian aircraft would find nothing. The best way to keep a secret is to have no secret to keep, in the first place. No lights. No roads. No warnings. Just the empty forest, and on the ground the secret police shunting people this way and that with a thousand prohibited zones. Any one of them could have been Atomsk. But this one is it."

Sarah said, "If there's any question of needing more information, why don't we fly another plane in?"

"And fight?" said Dugan.

"Or have the pilot tried publicly and shot, with ourselves unable to explain it to his mother or his Congressman? Imagine the newsreel pictures. The world couldn't stand it, not the way things are going now."

Dugan stared straight ahead. "If they don't know what we know, but do know that we know a lot, they'll slow down. And if somebody gets in and botches things up for a while, they will know that we know. Their surprise will be gone. You agree, doctor, that they put it close to the Siberian coast so that their raiding aircraft — in the event of war — could throw heavy radioactive trash down on us even if they don't develop a bomb?"

Swanson's eyes lit up. "You figure it that way, too? That was my guess. If they did want to dump bomberloads of isotopes on us, they needed the plant near Vladivostok and the coastal airfields. But not too near. I suppose they have other cities farther back. But this one is the mischief-making place."

Dugan rose. "Can I take the pictures with me?"

"No," said Swanson. "I'll give you a map instead. It won't mean much, but you can always come back and look these over, right here."

"Thank you," said Dugan. "I may."

Swanson called the gate. They said goodbye to him. Sarah watched Dugan. Since his one break, when he had accidentally used the Japanese facial expression for commiseration she had found herself eyeing him protectively, making swift calculations as to how often he dared go off guard, even with herself. As they walked toward the gate she summoned up her courage and said:

"You did something wrong in there, Major."

He looked at her quickly, alert, smiling, not at all angry. With gay formality he asked, "What was it, Captain?"

"You looked Japanese when Swanson said he knew the pilot."

Dugan became serious. "Looked Japanese? How do you mean that?"

Sarah persisted. She felt intolerably shy, trying to tell him his own business, and admitting that she had been watching him so specially and so intently. She squeezed his arm, as if to make her words casually affectionate, and then felt herself more of a fool than ever. Dugan was smiling at her with nothing more than serious attentiveness. Her thoughts went out of focus when she tried to think of how many possible Dugans there were behind that commonplace manner; among them all, there must be one who understood her motives. She stammered and finally said, "I happened to be looking at you. When he said that his friend was killed, you let your face go blank."

"Deadpan," said Dugan flatly. "That's what a Japanese would do. And I did it?"

"Yes, and it even made your features look Asiatic, somehow. You didn't even look like an American."

She felt the muscles of his arm stiffen where her hand touched his sleeve. He kept his voice even, but did not look at her, nor smile, this time: "And do I usually look like an American to you?"

"Of course." She smiled up at him, trying to catch his eye. "A little strange, perhaps, but strange in a nice way." She felt reckless. "I'd even call you handsome. But when you had that one particular expression, it didn't fit. It gave you away."

Dugan stopped as they reached the jeep. He looked straight at her. "I like you, Sarah, and I hope you like me. But don't like me too much. I have things to do that don't leave me much time to be myself. Anyway, thanks for catching me. But you needn't worry. If I hadn't felt at home with you and Swanson, I'd have been on my guard. The expressions fit. I make them fit."

And what, thought Sarah, can I say to that? She was glad to be able to turn her back and to climb into the jeep beside the driver. Dugan clambered into the back seat, and off they went.

IV. MR. ANYBODY

General Coppersmith sent Dugan down to Yokohama to talk to a man who had some special and recent information about the Siberian-Manchurian border, both sides of which were controlled by the Communists, Russians facing Chinese. With Dugan definitely out of the way, he telephoned Colonel Landsiedel to come on over.

Meanwhile he gave Sarah dictation.

"The gamble is atrocious. Smooth professional half-criminal spies, like the Europeans who made a business of espionage, could not be persuaded to go into a half-Arctic wilderness with six divisions of police troops between themselves and the next safe place. And there is no point in asking the Japanese to do a job like this. They might get caught or end up on the wrong side. It had to be an American. Those tenses are all wrong, Sarah. Don't take it down."

"Yes, sir." She started to get up.

"No, don't go away. Just sit. I want somebody to talk to. You'll do." He looked down at the trim feminine figure, at her softly wavy brown hair, her gray-blue-eyes. She made the immaculateness of her uniform seem dainty instead of military.

Coppersmith knew why he was angry. He wanted to go himself. Twenty years ago, he would have fought for the chance. But he couldn't do it, now. He dared not risk capture; his mind was too full of things that the Russians wanted to know. Physically, he could not trot prodigious distances through rain and snow in the high latitudes. He could not move week after week among strangers, his life hanging on each casual word. This man Dugan was valuable, but he was still expendable. And Dugan, though no youth, was much harder and tougher than himself.

"Do you like him, Captain?" said Coppersmith. "You've been palling around with him."

Sarah looked serious. "Very much. He is a very humane sort of person. He likes everybody. But I don't know whether he has ever been candid. He's always on guard."

"That's no wonder," said Coppersmith. He stopped pacing and stood right in front of her. She bent her neck back, looking upward at him and then gave up. She looked at the notebook in her lap. She straightened out an imaginary wrinkle in her skirt. At last the silence compelled her to look all the way up to the general's face. He was standing so close to her that he seemed to reach to the ceiling. He was staring down at her. When she stirred, he became aware of her again.

"Sorry," he said. "So he's on guard. He ought to be. I've told you about him, haven't I?"

More accusingly than she should, she told him he had not.

Coppersmith looked puzzled. "All of this is in compartments. Nobody is supposed to know what's happening in the next box. Up to now Dugan has been working on Japanese problems, and he's been Landsiedel's man. Of course, I heard gossip. It was probably correct, considering who it was that told me."

"Who?"

He glared at her and then, without giving the source, told her the story.

Dugan was known as the odd American who looked enough like a Japanese to work in the Secretariat of the Board of Fleet Admirals and Field Marshals all through the war. He had planted himself there along about the summer of 1941. When Pearl Harbor broke, he risked his life to get a message out; but the message was stopped. No identifiable American couriers showed up, so Dugan had decided that a live Japanese captain — if boneheaded enough — was worth two dead spies any day. He had settled down to work in his assumed Japanese role, successfully mixing up papers, making other people imperil codes, and spreading misunderstanding around Imperial Headquarters. He had had a hand in sending Admiral Yamamoto to his death and, always in the guise of a doggedly loyal Japanese Army captain, he had slipped out bad news from one Japanese official to another until the Imperial Army refused to send air support to the Imperial Navy in the Philippines and the Imperial Navy had retaliated by withholding munitions needed by the Army on Okinawa.

Just before the Japanese surrender, Dugan had received a Japanese decoration. Right after the surrender, when he identified himself to some startled Americans at Atsugi airfield, he had been flown back to the United States. The President had him over to lunch at the White House and somebody in the Pentagon gave him a Legion of Merit, chiefly for having stayed alive.

"And the funniest part of the story was," Coppersmith concluded, "the way Finance refused to pay him when they found he had been drawing Japanese pay all those years. He offered to pay them back his Japanese in yen if they would give him his American pay in dollars. The last I heard of the story — and mind you, it may not be true — Dugan had gotten so mad at everybody that he put in for a Purple Heart because he got gashed during a B-29 raid on Tokyo. The people in Awards and Decorations said he couldn't get a gash counted if the Americans inflicted it on him, and Dugan stumped them on that by arguing that he had been hurt by a Japanese — by mistake. He didn't get the ribbon. Funny thing — I think he wanted it."

Colonel Landsiedel arrived promptly. He was a tall, slim young man who had been one of the Assistant Military Attaches in Tokyo just before the war. It had been his privilege to run one courier message to Dugan in 1941. He had expected to find a seedy half-caste in some unsavory barroom. Instead, he was ushered into the presence of an incredibly pompous Japanese captain who lectured him on Japanese military security, insisted on inspecting all of Landsiedel's papers while a dozen other Japanese officers hung over his shoulder, and ended up by slipping the reply message into Landsiedel's wallet as he returned it. Then he had Landsiedel marched out of a Japanese division HQ under MP guard, shouting rude things after him in bad English.

Landsiedel that very day became a Dugan hobbyist and found there were several other men in the Army who shared his interest in collecting stories about Dugan. When Landsiedel came in with the Occupation and found Dugan not only alive, but decorated by the Japanese, he almost wept with the sheer artistic pleasure the sight gave him, Landsiedel, as an intelligence officer.

Landsiedel spoke fair Japanese and found himself Dugan's immediate superior. He set Dugan to tasks worthy of Dugan's talents and, before Coppersmith called Dugan in, Landsiedel had had Dugan seeking spiritual peace in the quietude of a remote Buddhist monastery. It just happened that one of the co-priests was a Japanese Field Marshal whom the Japanese government — from either ignorance or charity — had listed as dead.

Landsiedel gave a glowing account of Dugan's exploits, winding up with:

"He's the greatest actor I've ever seen or heard of, General. He doesn't use make-up or costumes or anything like that. He can just work himself into a role till he feels like it from the inside out. He can be old or young, Japanese or American, a professional man or a breezy workingman, any time he feels like it. People believe him. If he had happened to turn crook, he'd have been the greatest confidence man of all time. He's anybody, General. Mr. Anybody."

The general waved the eulogies aside.

"That's all right, Colonel. I'll take your word on it. Is the man loyal, or just clever?"

"He's pathologically loyal, General. Because of his family background."

"What is his family background?"

"I thought you knew, sir. Half-Irish and half-Aleut."

"Half-what?" snapped Coppersmith. "I thought he was one of those American Japanese what-you-may-call-ems?"

"Aleut. Aleutian Islander. Sort of like American Indians or Eskimos, sir. I don't really know. They're Christian — Russian Orthodox. The Russians converted them before we bought Alaska. Dugan once told me that his father was Catholic and his mother Russian Orthodox but that he had joined the Presbyterian Church."

Coppersmith said, "Never mind the religion. How could anybody get to be an Irish Aleut? It doesn't seem possible to me."

Landsiedel explained. "Dugan's father was an Irishman from Minneapolis. He went up in the Yukon gold rush and didn't find any gold. He went to the Andreanof group in the Aleutians when he got the idea of starting a fox farm—"

"Fox farm?"

Sarah interrupted. "People do raise foxes, for their skins. They bring terrific prices in the fur market."

"That's right, Captain," said Landsiedel. "Only Dugan's father met this native girl and married her. When the baby was still tiny, the parents died in a typhus epidemic. They were both buried two inches above the frost line. The baby was taken back to Minneapolis and brought up there."

Coppersmith looked out of the window. "Minneapolis doesn't seem to be a very good place to become an Imperial Japanese Army officer. How did he learn to pass for a Japanese?"

"He never really told me, but I met a man who knew him in high school and at the University of Minnesota. Dugan looked even more Oriental when he was a boy than he does now. Other children nicknamed him 'Jap' Dugan. That got him so thin-skinned that he took up the study of Japanese in college. You can't ever get through explaining that you're half-Irish and half-Aleut."

"I'm not, Colonel," said Coppersmith glumly. "Hudson Valley Dutch."

"That was a figure of speech, sir. What I meant was that—" Landsiedel looked puzzled and sympathetic. "If a man really is Irish and Aleut, what can he do? He can't just settle down to being the hometown preacher or lawyer. And neither Ireland nor the Aleutians meant a damned thing to Dugan, personally. He looked like a Japanese and he felt like an American. So he joined the Army, figuring we could use him. He got a direct commission long before the war, on the strength of his Japanese studies."

"You have his Army record in black and white?"

"We can account for it, General. All except the war, when he was here. And Dugan doesn't know it, but two of the locked-up Japanese lieutenant generals have given him a very good character. They didn't even know that he was an American."

"How's that?" interjected Coppersmith.

"One of them said that the idiot Hayashi mislaid the papers for the Okinawa logistic plans and the other testified that Captain Hayashi made everybody nervous by keeping in touch with a nincompoop Imperial prince they had as chairman for some do-nothing planning board. The regular generals and admirals would get a decent plan made up without the prince having a chance to muddle it, and then Hayashi would tip off the prince and everything would get held up for six months. Nobody could put a finger on Hayashi, because the prince might go off to the palace and tattle. They didn't know that their 'Hayashi' was an American. I'm satisfied with what he did here from Pearl Harbor on…" Landsiedel unconsciously looked out of the window at the half-rebuilt ruins of Tokyo.

"You're defending him," said Coppersmith. "Why are you defending him?"

"I guess I am." Landsiedel smiled wryly. "Some people back in the Pentagon thought that Dugan shouldn't have sat on his — shouldn't have just hung around Tokyo. They said that he should have made a run for China or Russia after getting his hands on everything he could."

"And why didn't he?"

Sarah spoke up, "I don't see that he could have gotten away from Japan. It wouldn't have been easy for a Japanese officer to desert. Did you ever hear of one who did?"

Coppersmith ignored her question and kept his eyes on Landsiedel.

Speaking very deliberately, Landsiedel said, "That wasn't Dugan's way of doing things. He told me that most spies fail because they forget their primary mission—"

Landsiedel hesitated long enough to get their full attention, and then went on, " — which consists of staying alive. He said he could have gotten away from the Japanese but he was not at all sure that he could get through the Russians or the Chinese. They might have shot him. He could do something in Tokyo. He did not know what he would be worth if he started out for Washington and lost two years or lost his life in the process. That brings me to this mission, General. Don't expect him to be orthodox. He'll float where others would sink. He'd rather come back alive and report failure than not come back at all. You can't push Dugan."

"Sounds timid to me," said Coppersmith, with an ironic curl to his lip showing that he did not really mean the remark.

"Timid?" Landsiedel was aghast. "No, no. Nothing like that. But you can't hurry Dugan. When he himself feels like hurrying, the Irish part of him gets to working and he goes through obstructions like a shotgun slug through peanut brittle. But if there's no point in hurrying, he takes his time like his mother's people. I think he could wait a hundred years if he had to."

"I can't wait. Not about Atomsk," said Coppersmith.

"He knows it. He'll go at it, lopsided. He will improvise. He doesn't believe in plans. He says that every day of spying involves thinking about six thousand choices ahead, and that if every man tried to multiply all the six thousand choices to their mathematical aggregate, he'd freeze like a catatonic. Dugan says that the only way to stay alive is to float with the run of things. It's gotten him places nobody else ever reached."

"Such as—?"

"He visited Nazi Germany in 1939 on leave, just before he settled down in Tokyo. He went on his own money and his own time. When he got there he introduced himself as a representative of the Japanese secret police. Right in Gestapo headquarters. The Germans showed him all their engineering designs for the proposed murder camps and Dugan copied out a set. He thought that the White House might want to release them, off the record. Nobody believed him in Washington."

"What's so wonderful about that?" said Coppersmith. "The War Department hadn't told him to do it."

"Don't you see it, sir? You do, don't you, miss?" He waved his arms at them. "He goes into Germany on a regular American passport, without any cover or plans or preparations. He talks his way into Gestapo headquarters, chums around with the whole pack of them, takes his reports to the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, who was a little mystified but who accepted the stuff anyhow — much good it did Japan! — and then walked out of Germany under his own power with the Gestapo congratulating him on his wonderful set of forged American papers. Has anybody else you ever heard of done anything like that, sir?"

"I've heard a lot of things in my time, Colonel. How will he do on Atomsk?"

"He knows Russian pretty well. He can pass for some kind of Soviet Asiatic subject. He speaks Chinese badly but fluently. He knows perfect Japanese, excellent German, and several other assorted languages. He'll get as near as anybody could. It's not a matter of comparing him to anybody else. He has one chance in a hundred. Nobody else has a chance at all."

Sarah couldn't help looking up at Coppersmith. This was so much like what the general himself had been saying to her that she wanted to see how he took it.

Coppersmith stood up. Landsiedel stood up, too. Coppersmith waved him back into his chair with an imperious gesture.

Coppersmith said, "Your man is expendable this time. Tell him I don't want the one-percent chance. I want success. Nothing but success. He can float all he wants to; he can run the show himself. But he must reach Atomsk, study it, let the Russians know that somebody has been there, and come back here. By this coming summer. If he can't do that, he needn't bother."

"Bother? You mean, bother to go? Who else would you send?" Landsiedel tried to rise to protest, but Coppersmith dropped an authoritative hand on the colonel's shoulder. The yellow leonine eyes blazed as Coppersmith said, with judicial and terrible distinctness:

"Tell him not to bother to come back at all. He can die. You would, Colonel, for a job like this. I would, too. He's no better than the rest of us. Atomsk matters more than our whole army in Japan."

Sarah was on her feet, struggling for words to protest.

Coppersmith snapped at her: "Sit down, Sarah. I know what I am doing. I'm going to give these orders to Dugan, myself."

Landsiedel murmured, "Will he take them?"

Coppersmith glared at him, "Take them? He's got to take them."

"Sir," said Landsiedel, "if he gets near Atomsk, who's going to follow him to make him obey? Don't pin him down, General. He'll do better if you give him leeway."

"Colonel Landsiedel," said General Coppersmith, "do you think that you and this girl and I can originate these orders? This is the American nation commanding. Dugan must succeed or fail. If he fails, others will follow. With the same orders. Till we reach Atomsk."

Coppersmith dropped his hand from Landsiedel's shoulder and sat on the edge of the desk. He opened his hands in a gesture of helplessness and finality.

Landsiedel stood up. "Yes, sir," he said.

It was then that they both noticed Captain Lomax. Completely silent, she was weeping. They could see the tears roll down her cheeks and see the effort she was making to regularize her breathing. She broke away from them and ran out of the room.

V. OUTFITTERS TO CATASTROPHE

Captain Lomax was waiting for Dugan when he emerged from General Coppersmith's inner office late the next morning. She had been watching the telltale light in her lamp base, hoping that the general would cut her in, but she had received no signal.

Ignoring the chance that Coppersmith might follow Dugan through the door, she seized Dugan's arm and said:

"Has he given you orders?"

Dugan nodded calmly. "You're an inquisitive person. Yes, he gave me orders."

Sarah cried out, "He told you to succeed or not to come back! He told you to die!"

"Sh-h-h," said Dugan, "that's just his way of talking. I'm no worse off than I was yesterday, or will be tomorrow. Anyhow, my orders are classified. We can't talk about them privately." He grinned at her expression. "You're not being official, are you, Captain?"

"Of course not!" She held his arm. "What are you going to do about it?"

"Succeed, I suppose. It seems to be the only solution which would annoy no one." Gently he plucked her hand from his sleeve and let it drop. He rolled his eyes in the direction of the general's door. "Don't get yourself in trouble, Sarah."

"But—"

He lowered his voice. "Can you meet me for lunch?"

She nodded.

He leaned over her desk, scribbled some Japanese characters on her memorandum pad. "This is Sawayama's seafood place, right beyond the Tokyo Shibaura building. Show this to any Japanese policeman, and he'll direct you. You can walk. It's four or five blocks, counting American style. Twelve-thirty or thereabouts."

When he saw that she still looked woebegone, he chuckled at her, "Don't."

"Don't?"

"Don't think Coppersmith is so tough. He's just doing this for my own good. People always do, you know."

"Do?"