Dugan spent most of the night looking for the handpiece which he had dropped — a crude mitten formed of inner tube which he had used when crossing the river on the power wires. His summer with a carnival many years ago had stood him in good stead. There was no other way of getting into the oruzhenii raion without risking a mechanical alert. But now he was quietly, tracelessly in. And all this could be lost and undone if he did not find the self-betraying rough-stitched mitten.
At last he stepped on it. Thrusting it into his pocket, he set off uphill.
Two arcs of the tire casing had provided him with double-thickness rubber shoes with which to walk the wire. Two more arcs had served him as footpads; these he put on now. They tied over his shoes with tight string. He had cut the tread down until each footstep left the imprint of a bear's paw. He wished, almost desperately, that he had made a closer study of bears' locomotion, but at the same time he wished to fool nothing more than the casual glance of a soldier. He knew that he could not fool a dog or a woodsman.
The day before, the slope had looked manageable from the far side of the river. Traveling laterally uphill, away from the power lines, he soon found that he came to the end of the woods. A vast reach of scree, loose rock which poured down on him whenever he clambered up it a few feet, cut him off from the farther heights of the mountain. The scree might extend upward a mere forty or fifty feet; it might be two hundred before he came to the manageable chimneys of the cliff. In either event he could not afford to risk the uproar of a rockslide.
He stood poised, balancing himself with feet wide apart, like a bear. His sack of food and clothing, laboriously pilfered along the way, now seemed to weigh a ton. The nerve-racking torture of climbing the powerline tower had kept him tense and poised while he walked the wire and climbed down — two towers beyond the far side of the river — to the ground. But the moment his feet had touched ground, the magic strength went out of him.
The air was full of the smell of spruce and fir and larch. There were a few oak trees scattered here and there in the woods. He heard insects stirring, but no immediate sound of animal life. A mile or two back, where the power lines crossed the river, he thought he had heard the sound of machinery; at this distance, none of that noise carried through.
He was in a dark world.
Above him there was the loose rock reaching an unknown distance. Down-slope and far above him there was the interminable reach of forest which he had seen on the air photographs. By Washington, D.C., standards, this was Atomsk.
But down on the ground it wasn't.
Atomsk itself might lie anywhere within a total territory half the size of Delaware. He could wander for days in vain before he came to the camouflaged narrow-gauge railways which he expected to find. He could trip into a thousand booby-traps before he ever got near the actual atomic workshops. He could walk through electric-eye beams and be tracked by men with infra-red spotlights, dying under their gunfire before he even knew he was seen. He could fall into anti-animal traps. He could — there was no limit to the number of things which he could do, if he were not careful.
For a wild, brilliantly clear moment of despair he realized where he was. Mission successful. Too successful. Thus far.
But who else had gotten this far? Perhaps German and Japanese spies had also reached this point. Perhaps Englishmen had been shot to death on this very slope. Perhaps this was the way the Chinese agent had crept. It didn't do any good merely to get near the geographic point. He wasn't Peary. This wasn't geography. He had to look at things, see people doing work.
Almost irresolutely, he tried another foothold on the scree. The rock clattered down after he had taken his second step. On the insecure footing, his bear-paw sandals — which had been tied to ankle-high Red Army boots, two sizes too large for him — threatened to twist under him and turn his ankle. He started to move backward. Again the rock clattered.
To his right an imperfection of the darkness showed that dawn was on its way.
He could not tell where he was. The rain, which had fallen intermittently throughout the night, now began to fall again.
Carefully he edged his way along the loose rock. He found a large rock, hip-high.
Reaching along it with his hands, he discovered that the flat side faced the slope. Trying to visualize its appearance from the lower part of the slope, he decided that it was safe enough.
He huddled against it. Waiting for a little more light, waiting for the terrain to climb back out of nightmare blindness and to join him in the world of real and visible things, he remembered that not so far away — in airline distances — General Coppersmith slept in a comfortable well-sprung bed, snoring the snore of the mighty. And if he pulled night duty, Colonel Landsiedel was probably getting himself a cup of coffee in the Dai Ichi Building. Landsiedel did not have to kill anyone in order to drink a cup of coffee. He did not have to cross rain-wet mountains. He did not have to win fortunes and throw them away. He did not have to lie and cheat and betray and steal. He did not have to mock children or get innocent people in trouble. All he had to do was to reach into his pocket and take out a nickel — the lucky devil.
And Sarah — he both wanted and did not want to think of her now.
Dugan relaxed. He did not dare relax too much or his overstrained body would let him drop off to sleep. But he let his mind go down to a low level of consciousness and across the ever-returning imaginary beach of his life-long reverie he saw his mother and father — whom he had never known — walking along the seal-pup coast. What kind of people had they been? What world, not yet begotten, had they conjured up in begetting him? Aleuts were understandable; he had read every book on them that he could find. Irish were understandable.
But what kind of a universe would the Creator have to make before an Irish Aleut could find a place in it? This was the world of Michael Andreanov Dugan — the rain and the rock and the fresh-smelling trees, into which man brought the stench of oppression and fear, and the even worse odors of chemical and more-than-chemical death. Here was the one kind of world he could come to terms with — a place in which authority gave him rewards for punishing mankind. He would, he suspected, have been dead or heartbroken or imprisoned long ago if he had had to stay in the United States. Yet comfortable people, in their unbelievably safe and friendly homes, might well turn the pages of a book or magazine and wish that they too could be spies for awhile.
To be a bad spy meant being dead, or humiliated. To be a middling spy meant that you went on for a while, like "Captain Stearns," until somebody a little smarter than yourself came along and killed you. But to be a good spy meant that you were willing to go to war with the universe, willing to abandon the decent good things of life for a road which led away from reason. How many people had he killed thus far, on his way to Atomsk? He could not count them and be sure. He knew, with a deep unhealing sense of pain, that his ability to forget killing was itself bad, a flaw in himself, and that it was worse than the killing.
The dim blur in the east had become a perceptible border of gray. By resting his eyes in the somewhat deeper darkness of closed eyelids and then peering intently about him, he was able to see something of his vicinity.
There was a blur of blacker darkness running up the deep gray of the loose scree, just ahead of him.
Wearily he rose to his feet and crept on bear-paw soles over to the patch he had seen.
His guess had been right. It was a clump of bushes which had knotted themselves into the loose rock and had frozen the rockfall.
Eagerly and almost carelessly he clambered upward. He felt nothing but roots or rocks when he swept the firm cold ground with the heel of his palm — using the heel so as to leave no imprint of human hand or fingers. He untied the undersoles from his boots, undid the mouth of his sack, dropped each undersole in, dropped each piece of string after them. For a while he would not have to be a bear.
The easier walking cheered him. He followed the line of bushes, with the light rising about him every minute.
His gloom of waiting had given way to the cheer of action; he counted the chances in his favor and reminded himself, for the thousandth time, that he had changed into all-Soviet clothing and gear. He had nothing which was of American origin, except for the little package of secret-service gadgets which made a lump in his shirt pocket; and he practiced a thousand times the quick reach for the pocket and the twisting throwing-away of rocks or bits of wood which he had hidden there, just to be sure that if he were shot, challenged, or overtaken, he would manage to get rid of the little bundle before he was seized. Nobody would find those things on him unless it was a clean shot in the heart or head first time. And as long as they did not find his tiny camera, his little needle gun, and the other things, he could tell lies as long as they could listen, and they would not prove that he was anything but an errant, willful, half-demented citizen of the Soviet Union.
He was glad he had taken precautions in Tokyo — getting his appendectomy scar re-cut, through the skin, and re-stitched in the Russian surgical manner; and finding a Japanese dentist who had, with much mystification, replaced his good American dental work with the cheapest Japanese craftsmanship, such as a Red Army man might have gotten in Russian-occupied Manchuria. Of course, if they took detailed full-length x-rays of him, they would find evidence of surgery and bone repair which was un-Russian in character, but even at their worst they would be unlikely to do that. So he stood a chance of surviving — one chance in a couple of hundred million — even if they did get hold of him.
By the time he reached the top of the scree, he felt like Michael A. Dugan again. He allowed himself a single private laugh. They would have to catch him first, and there were a lot of dead men all over the world who had made the mistake of trying to grab Dugan when Dugan was in no mood to be grabbed. He felt, at the foot of the cliffs, that it would be almost cheering to meet a hostile person…
But he still had the world to himself.
The cliff was not much. The scree reached so high that it was a mere twenty-odd feet to the top: bushes provided a clear guide. He clambered up, his sack swinging awkwardly across his back; again he wished that he had taken time to tie it like a rucksack instead of having it hitched by the rope which ran over his shoulder, and down to his belt.
At the crest, the woods began again. In climbing, Dugan dislodged a good-sized rock, which made a fearful clatter as it drove crashing on downward; but there was no response.
Just at the very edge of the cliff, Dugan found what he had been looking for. A heavy old tree had started to tip over the cliff and had not fallen. Its large, powerful roots had risen on the upper side, leaving space for a little nest. Boldly Dugan dug with his hands, trying to drop the earth in little broadcast showers upon the accumulated leaves and pine needles which made the floor of the forest. The tree was too close to the edge for any sentry to walk between it and the cliff; and there was no evidence of regular human passage on the uphill circumference. The nest looked safe.
Dugan kept digging until the sky began to show streamers of red dawn in the east. There was not much to get out of the way; just a few shoots of root to dislodge and a mass of wind-driven humus and earth to throw away.
The nest would not shelter him against rain, but it would blend him evenly into the landscape and would shelter him from passing attackers. Nobody could get close enough to kill without getting close enough to be killed. The only real danger was from dogs, but not one dog in a million had sense enough to make a discovery, go back silently to his master and report it, and return equally silently with his master to the site of the discovery.
Dugan took off his boots, turned his socks inside out, put his socks and boots back on again. He made the upper half of a bed out of his sack and crawled in under the tree just as the first streaks of sunshine shot through the sky. He took a long generous drink from his canteen and ate ham and bread, holding the ham in one hand and the bread in the other. Then he popped his head up between two roots and peered around like a gopher.
He could not see the power lines. Around him was the forest. Oak trees were common (just as they had been in the air pictures of Atomsk which Coppersmith had shown him in Tokyo) but most of the wood was coniferous. The forest rose above him, seen close up as trees: the forest fell below him, seen far away as a single continuous carpet. The river was somewhere down under the lower trees, its surface hidden by the forest. The power lines were around a bend in the tributary valley. He was at least a mile and a half, perhaps two miles, inside the prohibited zone.
He was already, he felt sure, under the territorial jurisdiction of the People's Commissariat of Atomic Development, not to mention the Ministry of Internal Defense. With that comforting thought he timed himself to sleep for twenty-four hours.
And did sleep the twenty-four — wakened only occasionally, halfway to the surface, by the passage of animals or the faraway tootling of a train whistle. In one of these wakings his mind reached out for a missing sound — a sound which he had not heard for many hours. At last he placed it: the buzz of airplanes. He had heard no planes overhead since he left Yevgenevka… That, too, was a sign that he had neared his target area.