Dugan began tying his supply bag to the tree trunk. He had an advantage over the two of them, whoever they were; even if they were armed, he stood an excellent chance of putting them both out of action by luring them over to the tree with some odd but minor animal noise and dropping on them. He kept waiting for the second person to answer, but all he could hear was a soft sigh, singularly out of place in this fortressed woodland.
The first voice spoke again, in a much gentler tone: "I didn't mean it to sound cruel, darling… It was just a joke."
Dugan could not make out the answer, but it was a woman's voice, insistent, half-whispering, urgent. The man said, "Well, at least let us get off the path. The sentry is apt to be along any minute and what would he think if he saw the officer of the guard with a lovely girl like you?"
The two of them moved under Dugan's tree. Dugan, high up, grinned to himself like a triumphant ape. This was the way he liked espionage to go! Everybody cooperating.
The man and girl went on with their lovers' quarrel. Dugan gradually put their identities together. She was Irina Ivanovna Dekanosova, which would — by the Russian custom of using the father's Christian name as a modified middle name — make her the daughter of Ivan Dekanosov.
Old Dekanosov was, or had been, an expert engineer. He was in some kind of trouble, serious enough to make him an outcast, not serious enough to get him shot.
Irina was allowed to hold a routine job. The father had to live above ground in something which Irina described as "a hut"; the daughter was still privileged to live below ground, somewhere inside Tunnel Forty-one. The daughter had not been permitted to see her father for some months, until some bright young officer of the Special Section got the idea that she should be ordered to visit her own father for the purpose of spying on him. The old man was suspected of withholding scientific information.
Irina was on her way back to the Inner Camp. But she had taken a long detour in order to meet Aleksandr. Aleksandr, whose surname did not come out of the conversation, was a young Red Army officer. He had seen Irina going in and out of the camp on her way to her father's hut in the woods. He had fallen in love with her and had recently gotten into the habit of taking her photograph out of the personnel file and kissing it — an administrative procedure which made them both laugh tenderly and indulgently at themselves.
Dugan shifted his position a little and a piece of bark dropped down on the ground beside the lovers. "What's that?" cried Irina.
"Nothing," said Aleksandr. Dugan could imagine him peering upward and resisted the cheery temptation to spit in the man's eye.
They were silent, all three of them. Dugan wished that he could interrupt and ask them a few questions. How did Irina find the "hut"? What kind of an engineer was old Dekanosov and what kind of trouble had he gotten into? But all Dugan could reasonably expect was that they would skip the mush and get back to the meat of the matter.
They did not. For what seemed to Dugan an incredible time, they cooed beneath the tree. Looking at his watch, he found it was a mere forty minutes. A sentry passed, going along the path a few feet away. All three of them froze when he stopped.
For an instant there were four human figures alone in the dark woods. The sentry smelt people with some vestigial prehistoric sense, left over from primitive man. Irina and Aleksandr knew the sentry was there, but did not suspect that they had a tough one-hundred-and-sixty-pound Cupid perched on a branch above them. Dugan knew where the other three were; but the couple and the sentry, to a greater or less degree, merely sensed human presence. The sentry did not seem scared of the dark, but he was far from being at ease.
In the throaty, croaking voice which people of all nationalities use when they are alone in the dark and are not sure that they are being heard, the sentry said: "Is that you, Ivan?"
Dugan, exultant at being handed so much free information by the lovers, found it hard to resist an extempore remark or two. But resist he did.
Even more croakily and throatily, the sentry said, "Who's there?" More silence.
Dugan wondered, "Why doesn't the blithering fool turn on his flashlight and have a look?" Then he realized that if people went to the trouble of hiding a city under a forested mountain range, the most elementary dictates of caution would require a total suppression of flashlights. Even the most incurious aviator would become inquisitive about a forest which flashed little lights here and there every night; five-watt lightning bugs were out of the question.
The sentry began to think himself a fool. "Ha!" he said to himself. He spat on the ground. Dugan heard the creak of his strap as he shifted the rifle. His footsteps departed.
"This can't go on, darling," said Aleksandr.
Fine, thought Dugan in the tree, let's do something.
Irina answered, "But there's no way out…?"
"Who wants out?" thought Dugan. I want in.
"Be patient, darling. Perhaps the authorities will see your father's case in its true light."
What in the name of the blue-bottomed bellowing baboons of a Byzantine bedlam, thought Dugan, is the gal's dad's case?
Sometimes telepathy works nicely, though it is hard to prove; and, as if to oblige Dugan, up above them, Irina explained, "They can't be expected to understand problems of radioactive sewage. Don't you realize that the only thing which can save Father would also mean the ruin of all Atomsk?"
"Sh-h-h," said Aleksandr, "don't use the name!"
"Not even here in the forest?" Irina asked in a practical, indignant, feminine way.
"You never know who's listening—"
Damn right you don't, thought Major Michael A. Dugan of the United States Army.
"Don't be silly," said Irina.
That's right, thought Dugan, don't interrupt the girl. Let her tell me the rest of the story.
"But your father — he would have held up the work for months. The Deputy Commissar came in from N.K.A.R. He himself showed that your father was concealing traces of capitalist cowardice and bourgeois humanitarianism…."
"My father's no humanitarian!" said Irina wrathfully. "He just wanted the project to succeed. Didn't he originally write the original syllabus for the whole project—?"
"The Konspekt Proekta," murmured Aleksandr respectfully. Dugan cheerfully noted the title.
"— and if," said Irina, "we ever had a flood here and the Honorable Senior Expert Engineer, or whatever the pompous fool calls himself, had to turn the valve up above Number Eighteen, what do you think would happen to Atomsk?"
"Nothing, sweetheart," said Aleksandr patiently. "That's all been explained. Let's not argue over technical matters. We shouldn't even be talking about them in the first place. It's not loyal. It's not right. Not Socialist. Let's talk about us. Give me a kiss… "
"I am not going to stop talking about technical matters," said Irina firmly. Atta girl, thought Dugan, keep it up! She went right on, "And my father's life and mine are in danger over what you call technical matters, and if you say you love me, you might at least make an effort to understand the technical matters which are important to the woman you say you love, even though you don't act much like it."
Helpless, outraged, male, and inarticulate, Aleksandr tried to splutter a protest. But Irina went right on, following a fine note of irony which made Dugan throw a kiss down on top of her head:
"If the new extra-expert high-grade engineer does turn on the valve over Number Eighteen, what do you think will happen?"
"I don't know," said Aleksandr wearily and pacifically. Do tell us, Irina, thought Dugan. He grinned on his perch. Do tell us, dear girl! Do!
She did:
"The radioactive waste will all pour into the big septic tanks, won't it?"
"Yes," said Aleksandr.
What then? thought Dugan.
"And do you think that septic tanks will settle the problem of radioactive waste?"
Of course not! thought Dugan, enjoying his role of a silent third. What will?
Aleksandr, still miserable, said, "No."
"The waste will pour into the ground."
"That's right," said Aleksandr brightly, "way down, where it can do no harm."
"That's wrong," said Irina firmly, "it will do harm. The whole ground beneath us will become radioactive."
"Just a little bit, maybe," said Aleksandr optimistically.
"Enough to kill us all unless we abandon all our work here and go to—"
"Sh-h-h! Don't say that name — not even to me!" cried Aleksandr. "You could die for knowing it."
Dugan almost fell out of the tree as he flapped his ears, trying to catch the echo of a thought. If Irina had said the name, that would have given him the lead on the second Soviet atomic research site. But Irina sighed a loud plain sigh, and said:
"Don't let me fight you, darling."
"I won't," said Aleksandr.
How are you going to manage that? thought Dugan. There was another long fruity silence beneath the tree. Dugan was happy to note that kissing had apparently survived the Soviet purge of "degenerate" middle-class cultural traits.
At last Aleksandr said, rather throatily:
"We must go back, sweetheart. I'll go off duty soon and I've got to smuggle you through the North Gate before I go back to barracks."
"But why smuggle me?" cried Irina. "I've got a pass."
"Your pass is made out for ten o'clock. It's almost one, now. They'd make trouble for you. Come on!"
Does that include me? thought Dugan. Oh, thank you, yes! I'll be right along. He tied his supply bag a little more tightly to the tree and prepared to shinny down as fast as he could. All weariness was forgotten in the face of this opportunity. With nice people like this to help him along, he could keep going for days. He felt a glow of gratitude to Aleksandr and Irina for their lavish bestowal of information, inadvertent though it was. The dim outlines of an itinerary began to take form in his mind. First, a look around. Second, some information. Third, some sabotage. Perhaps he could manage all three.
Aleksandr and Irina began moving off down the path.
Dugan dropped to the ground. His boots, tied by their laces to each other, hung around his neck like fantastic water-wings. The path, partly covered with pine needles, was cold beneath his socked feet. He sounded to himself as noisy as an elephant crashing through a clump of dried-out bamboo; but Irina and Aleksandr, blissful in the unrationed pleasures of being young, being of assorted sexes, and being alive, were totally unaware of him. Dugan feared that he might be missing some additional bits of select and uplifting scientific conversation.
But he could not follow them closely enough to hear them without running a serious risk of being heard by them, happy though they were. Then, too, perhaps, they were beginning to listen for the sound of Soviet sentries — not realizing that a genuine grinning spy was marching in their wake.
Aleksandr said, "Wait here." Irina did. Twenty-five feet farther back, Dugan did, too.
Soon a commotion was heard ahead. Aleksandr's voice, which had been tender to the point of sheepishness, now brayed across the hillside as he gave orders to the sentries at the gate. There were sounds of men running hither and yon. Underneath all this uproar, Dugan luckily caught the sound of Irina stepping off the path and into some bushes. He did likewise.
Apparently the troops of the guard detachment had been taught to run the paths blindfolded. It was still so dark that Dugan could not see his own hands, but the measured trot of soldiers was even. Four men jogged up the path, passed Irina, passed Dugan, and went on.
A low whistle sounded from downward and ahead. Dugan heard Irina's quick light footsteps on the path. Hoping desperately that he could follow the sound without falling over obstacles or down steps, Dugan followed, just as lightly and even more quickly.
An almost imperceptible change in the cadence of Irina's steps warned him of paving or stairs. He hesitated long enough to feel flagstone beneath his feet and then followed downward, probing for each step with his toes. Desperately in haste, he almost did a frantic ballet dance getting down to the entrance to Atomsk.
Dugan reached a hand probingly ahead of him and felt unfamiliar material. It was Irina's hair. He drew his hand back as if her head had been red-hot. He was rewarded by a whisper from Aleksandr, who sounded mere inches away. Dugan almost feared that he would get kissed by Aleksandr, who would thereupon be surprised to find his sweetheart with a week's stubble of beard.
"This way," whispered Aleksandr, "and you will stay out of the black light. You know we make a picture of everything that goes through the main door."
"Yes," she breathed.
This was no time for half-measures. Dugan hoped that Irina was wearing a scarf or, at the least, a rather loose dress. He reached out, his fingers attuned to an incredible sensitiveness; this was one of the psycho-physical tricks which his Japanese teachers had shown him. He made the very skin on his fingertips become as aware as his eyeballs or his tongue-tip, but at the same time he moved his hand rapidly, not slowly, forward into the dark — ready to stop instantly at a resistance of one two-hundredth of an ounce. He touched cloth and stopped.
Hoping that it was her shoulder he had reached, he moved his hand back and forth. It seemed the back of a dress. There was no motion to account for breathing. Something brushed his knuckles; it was the tip of a scarf. He let his fingers, lighter than moth's wings, explore the shape of the scarf and then he seized the corner.
Irina whispered to Aleksandr, "I must be getting chilly. I feel gooseflesh all over."
"Sh-h-h." Then he said, "Now!"
Fortunately Aleksandr did not try to be gallant. He went first, presumably holding Irina by the hand. Irina was in the middle, with Dugan — gingerly holding a fingernail-sized expanse at the tip of her scarf — following. Dugan felt Irina step sidewise and released his hold just in time. If she had reached up with her left hand she would have touched him in the face. (Then, he knew, he would have had to knock her unconscious with a short jab to the throat, fleeing to the woods with an unconscious Irina and a distraught Aleksandr left behind; Dugan pitied the lovers and did not wish to hurt them.)
Irina slipped sidewise through two vertical pillars which felt, as Dugan followed, like uprights of six-centimeter iron pipe.
Dugan's eyes at last caught the indirect glow of a very dim light inside a doorway. Below him, twenty feet downward and thirty or forty feet away, he saw three entrances to corridors. The entrances were twice the size of household doors. The lights within them were set far back in the interior. These must be tunnels, he thought, and the nearer one the guardhouse.
A chain rattled as Aleksandr padlocked the little door through which they had come. For two or three seconds he saw the two of them silhouetted against the dim faraway little lights. Aleksandr stood erect and proud; his uniform collar fitted well; well-brushed curly hair showed between cap and forehead. Irma's hairdo was Russian-style with a bun at the back; Dugan could not be sure, but he suspected her of being amazingly pretty.
They moved away, hand in hand and Dugan voicelessly said farewell: "Goodbye, poor lovers. For your own sakes, I hope you never see me."
At the tunnel level, Irina hastened away.
Dugan took the opportunity to move away from the gate, to the top of a flight of steps.
As Aleksandr, returning, passed him, Dugan melted into a small tree. Aleksandr passed within inches and went back to the main gate. He stood there, silent until a sentry called. Then he began bellowing back.
Dugan ruefully made a package of his tricky little gadgets — all except for a tiny camera which would not have been noticed on him even if he were stripped naked, and a single pliofilm-sealed wafer of cyanide — and hid them just under the roots of the tree. The items were inside Atomsk with him and he could find them again, if he lived through the night.
Then he went down the steps boldly, to the tunnel entrance. He was right in supposing that a concrete sidewalk, heavily covered with pine needles, ran along the hillside so as to provide a well-drained exterior walk between tunnel entrances. If the installation were bombproof, it probably had interior walks as well.
Dugan stepped off the walk on the far side. The walk ran in a little gully which probably connected with a bigger valley. The guardhouse was now behind him and to his left; the entrances to his right; nothing but forested slope to his immediate and forward right. He shivered at the thought of what the Russians were most likely to have installed on that innocent-seeming slope — spring guns, electric eyes, steel traps, high-voltage wire.
Squatting and teetering on the balls of his feet, like a Japanese, Dugan peered into the nearest tunnel. He shifted a few inches to the left to get a better view.
Suddenly he smiled, all to himself in the darkness. He stood up and began stripping off his clothes. People came in and out of doors inside the corridor. One person moved rapidly and quietly along the external walk, breathing a tune through his teeth, with the effect of muffled whistling, so loudly that Dugan could catch the melody. Dugan froze so completely as to dissolve into the night, and then went back to his undressing.
He rolled his clothes into a neat little bundle. When at the Japanese spy school, he had been taught to carry the pliofilm-wrapped cyanide wafer inside his cheek so that a single crunch of the molars would produce immediate suicide. It was characteristic of him that he left the wafer in his shirt pocket.
He shivered in the bitter cold and then walked into the nearest tunnel, stark naked.
A Russian opened one of the side doors, glanced at Dugan, nodded apologetically, and preceded him to the shower room.
Dugan followed, put his clothes near a wash basin, and began to take a hot shower. It felt good.
More Russians came in. None of them paid him special notice — yet.