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.