After a day and a night of sleep, Dugan emerged into a second dawn ready for more travel. He buried the extra sections of inner tube and tire casing with which he had done his tight-rope act on the power lines; taking a careful sight over the cliff below him, he tried to spot-photograph the position of the big tree on his memory so that he would be able to find tire and tube again if he ever needed them, though he dreaded the notion of climbing the towers again and moving on the high live wires.
Then he took stock of his position.
The fact that a sentry line had followed the river was evidence he was within the outer radius of Atomsk.
But the lack of special precautions along the river bank, and the probability that this little stream was one of the tributaries of the Doubikhe — which in turn had no signs of precautionary measures being taken against radioactive waste contaminating its banks — made him realize that he had to move into another watershed before he could expect to be near the real works themselves.
Again, the presence of heavy power installations was suggestive of the possibility that power was being fed from either coal or hydroelectric stations down near Spassk into the hills in which he now found himself.
But the air photographs had showed no power lines and the total non-concealment of the lines at this point probably meant that they led to a complete sham factory which, if seen from the air by a stray plane, would explain the march of pylons over the forested hills.
After all, even in Russia, people did not run major power cables off into the woods and extend their terminals into squirrels' nests. All the propaganda in the world could not explain anything as odd as that, nor could the secret police suppress all telling of such a peculiar sight. The Soviet authorities had their own airmen to baffle, as well as ours. If they didn't fool everybody, they might as well come out in the open and let the pilots know the exact locations of secret installations. Furthermore, the planes around here all carried enough gasoline to get them to American Korea or to American Japan; and how could any secret police guess the even more secret hearts of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of flyers, all of whom had the physical capacity to flee? They could do something by pairing pilots with one another, or by holding the families of airmen as hostages; but that would be insufficiently secure. After all, they had had the one American photo plane over, earlier in the spring. How were they to know when they would have another?
If this were an ordinary country, Dugan could have cut loose and moved in with the people, using impudence and talkativeness as a means whereby to triangulate the mystery until he was ready to strike for the center of it. But this was not long-inhabited, settled countryside. This was new, raw, and policed. He could not expect to slip into a casual role, or to slip out of it again.
All human settlement in this area was part and parcel of the Narodnii Kommisariat Atomnovo Razvitiya. Once he made contact with human beings, he had to be prepared to undertake a definite role and to play it to the bitter end. No longer would it be useful to play the Jew tortured into frenzy by the Germans, or the amiable Asiatic half-wit who loved his glorious Soviet comrades. He either had to be a believable person in the Soviet system, or else he had to stand exposed as an intruder.
At that moment, while he stood at the cliff edge getting his bearings, the first outlines of his final plan began to flash into his mind…
He sighed and quoted a wise American Indian saying to himself, something which an old Osage had once taught him. It was, peculiarly, a quotation from a mussel:
Behold these rushing waters. I have not made them without a purpose. I have made them to be the means of reaching old age.
The lake-bed mussel-spirit had seemed an odd authority for an Osage to be citing, but the usefulness of reaching old age had impressed Dugan many years ago and here, on the forested brow of a Siberian cliff, he remembered the more-than-ancient wisdom of the New World.
Trotting almost dogwise, he set off uphill into the forest.
By mid-morning he had reached the spine of the little sub-range of hills. He saw that the valley ahead of him probably drained into the Doubikhe, which ruled it out as the site of innermost Atomsk. But he saw something else which made his heart beat faster. A small train, far smaller than it should have been with all allowances for distance, climbed in a curious uneven obstinate way up an abnormally steep grade.
This made Dugan almost race along the mountain side. Twice he found himself crossing paths. Each time he listened as carefully as a wild beast before he trusted himself to cross the tracks of man. He stopped to eat more of the bread and ham: his stock was running low but he had more things to worry about than eating. He counted on being able to live in the woods if he had to.
The sun had dropped down toward afternoon before Dugan saw what he wanted. There, ahead of him, were the roofs of a factory and assembled outbuildings. Renewing his caution, he approached.
A few minutes brought him to a clearer view. The power lines, sure enough, marched in from civilization and ended at the curiously quiet plant. Open and unconcealed tracks showed the rail link to the main Soviet system, but there was no sign of the narrow-gauge tracks which carried the small train he had seen.
Dugan cut to the right and started down the slope. Halfway down he stopped. This was it!
A small-gauge track ran out from the rear of the factory and led up to a perfectly plain sort of quarry. Quite evidently, the air view would explain the track as an engineers' improvisation designed to bring stone down to the factory for further construction or road-building purposes. But this particular quarry had something possessed by no other quarry in the world.
It seemed inexhaustibly supplied with little trains. While Dugan watched, a tiny train steamed out of the quarry. He thought to himself and then wondered.
"Why do they use steam?"
His question was answered when he saw the smoke pattern in the air. It made the yard engine more believable. Who would electrify a mere yard line or expect a little steam train to continue underground? The steam locomotive had been obviously waiting in the quarry, behind some high wooden sheds. Its smoke made a big lazy pile in the air, where the engine had been waiting. The little train disappeared into the factory yard. Dugan thought, but was not sure, that he could see little human figures opening a gate in a fence for the little train to pass through.
Reaching into his shirt pocket, he took out a piece of steel, no thicker than a wire but beautifully machined. Into this he fitted two small lenses. Holding the gadget at the hooked end of the thin steel rod, he brought the factory yard into focus by careful manipulation of the forward lens. His miniature telescope worked.
Three soldiers guarded the gate to the factory. That was not in the least unusual. In the Soviet Union, paradise of the working class, all factory gates were guarded by soldiers. As he watched, they swung the gate open again.
The little engine scuttled out of the factory yard, across the open country, uphill to the quarry. With no train behind it, it made good speed — perhaps thirty-five or forty miles an hour. Dugan had trouble keeping his delicate telescope aligned upon it.
From within the quarry, once the engine disappeared, smoke began to pile up again in the mid-afternoon sky. But before the smoke had reached much volume — certainly before its pattern had attained the diffusion of the first wait of the engine — the little locomotive came popping out of the quarry again. With a new train.
"Popular sort of quarry," murmured Dugan to himself.
In justice to the Russians, he had to admit that at no one time had he seen two trains. If he had been flying over the area, the most he would have seen was a train going downhill or a yard engine going uphill. Unless the N.K.A.R. people were complete fools, the waiting trains were hidden in tunnels or in sheds of some kind between their disconnection from the hypothetical, camouflaged electric line which brought them there and the plain-in-sight steam line which took them down the slope to the factory.
This time the train hesitated in front of the gate. The soldiers must have been getting tired of their jobs. This gave Dugan a chance to steady his two lenses and to get a clear view of the little railroad cars. They were open trucks but they did not carry rock.
They carried people. The people gave an unusual impression of being well dressed. Each car had a guard standing up in it. The guards did not seem to hold rifles. Presumably they held submachine guns or machine pistols. Even with the telescope he could not make that out.
This view spoiled one of Dugan's hopes. He had half hoped that he might find regular trails running underground or overground, with forest concealment, into Atomsk. He might have tried to slip a ride on an ordinary-sized train. But a well-policed toy was not likely to provide him any concealment. He couldn't expect to hang on underneath anything that small and it was out of the question for him to try to sneak a ride in a flat car with a guard pointing a machine pistol at him. "Feet. You got to take me," he murmured. The train went on into the factory and soon afterward the little busybody of an engine came charging out of the gate at a frantic rate of speed. The guards had to jump. Dugan rather liked the personality of that unknown engineer.
The little engine went boldly up the hillside and disappeared into the quarry. Why should the Russians take to running a cross between Wagnerian elves and Labor Day at Coney Island?
Labor Day! There was the answer. Dugan made a quick mental count. This day was the thirtieth of April. Thirty days hath September, April — and the next day would therefore be the first of May, Russian Communist Labor Day. All the big shots of the atomic administration and atomic police were getting down to Spassk or even Vladivostok for the parades, the speeches, the singing, and the binges.
When the third train came out, Dugan tried to follow it with his telescope to see if the figures of women and children could be seen intermixed with those of men. At that distance, he could not be sure but he suspected that nobody got away from the N.K.A.R. without leaving a family behind. The people all sat in the flat cars. They all wore white tops to their clothes, odd coats, or else uniforms; he could not be sure of who they were. They did not stand up so that he could sort them out according to size and shape. Mighty unobliging of them, thought Dugan.
The importance of the holiday impressed itself on Dugan. People couldn't ride very long in little flat cars like that. Not at the density in which those people were packed in. Therefore the people had all stood up and waited in the "quarry" before getting on the little train to come down to the "factory." But if they had been doing that, where was the little engine getting all its fresh trains? And if the trains were the ones on which the people had ridden all the way from Atomsk center, whatever it was called, would they be likely to add large numbers of additional waiting people from the mysterious reserves of the quarry? That, too, seemed improbable. Therefore the people had probably come straight through from Atomsk center. Therefore Atomsk center could not be very far away. An electric locomotive could take cars like that at almost any speed, but it seemed unlikely that even Russians would run more than forty miles an hour with that many people, no evidence of safeguards, and a slightly uneven roadbed.
"Calendar," said Dugan, very happily talking to himself, "you have gone and set it up for me."
Holiday.
People going out.
Speeches by Stalin, about Stalin, concerning Stalin, or dedicated to Stalin, all day long. Even in Atomsk, they wouldn't miss a chance to cheer themselves up by celebrating their loyalty to the Russian Generalissimo. Then, for the lower-ranking ones, parades or at least meetings. For the big shots, parties. Very respectable parties. No dancing. No women at most of them. Merely tons upon tons of food, gallons upon gallons of vodka. Toasts to everything and each other, centered on the subject of the working class and the working class' own special savior, Joe Stalin.
Dugan, running a tongue-tip over the dry top of his mouth, knew just how the Russians would feel tomorrow night. As tight as ticks and as happy as the hogs that lived next door to the brewery.
And the day after tomorrow—
Alas! the working class would be all tired out. The foremen would be irritable, the managers would have headaches, the senior political bosses and scientists would probably discover themselves to be the victims of Fascist stomach troubles — poisoned vodka from Keokuk, Iowa, or polluted kvass brewed by hellish types in Joplin, Missouri. Who could tell? The headaches would feel pretty Fascist.
And Dugan?
That was Dugan's chance to exfiltrate. He could be the little man who wasn't there. He could march, as it were, right out of the administrative wallpaper. He couldn't expect to be lucky enough to find thousands of Russians with identical D.T.'s, but he could hope to trot around, shabby and hangdog, like one of the confused workers.
Perhaps he would not need to be an injured man, after all. All day long, he had been thinking about playing the part of an injured man; he had decided that he could not play the part without really being injured; and from this depressing conclusion he had come to the even more depressing problem of just how to injure himself, where, and with what, to a degree that would appease critical-minded Soviet surgeons without impairing the mortal usefulness of Major Michael A. Dugan. It would be worth a great deal to be able to omit that particular stratagem from his agenda.
Waiting no further to study the train, he set off downhill. When he came to the flat of the valley, he approached a cleared area. The woods and brush had been cut back in a long strip twenty-odd meters wide in order to make way for a road which would be out of reach of fire.
Dugan ran back and forth along the wood's edge on his side of the road, but he could not be sure of being unobserved. After all, if he had seen as much as he did with a gimcrack telescope, what might not a sentry with binoculars observe? He waited for dusk, cursing his luck that had put the road across the middle of his afternoon. He ate up the last of his ham, some more bread, and he took off his boots to rest his feet. It was no fun marching with stolen boots.
When dusk fell upon the highway Dugan put his bearpads back on his feet and scuttled across. He knew that bears rarely went around — in any part of the world — with sacks slung over their shoulders. But he did not wait for complete darkness before climbing up the other hill. By taking a chance in the early dusk, he gained almost two hours of useful light — light which diminished in the thickness of the forest but which meant the difference between some progress and none at all. And by waiting till dusk, he had made himself mistakable; if a long-range sentry had been watching the road, and had driven along later on to investigate, he might be taken in by the print of bear tracks.
Dugan was sweating profusely by the time he reached the next hilltop. It was pitch dark. On one of his stolen Russian wrist watches — the one which he had kept because it had a good luminous dial and was waterproof as well — he saw that it was past eight in the evening. He rested a few minutes and then started downhill very carefully, picking his way so as to move with a maximum of silence.
Disquiet grew upon him. He had the feeling of being watched.
Still more quietly he kept on going, though he began to grope for a good place to hide.
He walked right into a huge oak tree.
Standing perfectly still and listening intently, he could hear human voices far away and could hear the even more distant resonance of machines.
But no one seemed nearby.
He tried to shinny up the tree and could not make it. He was too tired, and the sack too heavy and clumsy, for him to get up to the lowest limbs of the tree.
After several more vain tries he took off his belt, removed the rope from the mouth of the sack and, tying them together with a sheathed knife at the end, threw one end over a branch. He let the knife down until he could reach it and found that he still had rope to spare. He tied the mouth of the sack to the free end of the rope, pulled the sack up the first branch, and then climbed after it.
Just as he was trying to get farther up into the tree, he heard footsteps. They were regular. Two people were coming along a path.
He had seen no path, felt no path underfoot.
Dugan froze against the trunk of the tree, breathing lightly and quietly.
The footsteps stopped, almost beneath him, and a perfectly clear man's voice said, in good Russian, "It sounds like sabotage to me."