Milton Lesser

HE FELL AMONG THIEVES

The little green man was bewildered. This was a world he couldn’t comprehend

CHAPTER I

NICK SKINNER buried his parachute just outside the city of Pinsk, which lies well within the Pripet Marshes, deep in Russian-occupied Poland and not a hundred miles from the Soviet border.

His mouth was very dry and his palms clammy, and for a moment he listened as the plane droned away overhead. From the direction of Pinsk, a big anti-aircraft searchlight stabbed up half-heartedly through the dense fog. When the drone of the engine faded away, so did the light.

And Skinner was alone.

The Pripet Marshes sprawl like a rotting carcass over the Russo-Polish frontier, dank and noisome, alive with the eerie night sounds of swampland. Soviet country…

Half a thousand miles to the West was the other side of the Iron Curtain, and safety. But Skinner knew it might be a long time before he could hightail it in that direction. Maybe never…

Me, Nick Skinner, he thought. Captain in the C.I.A. And because my mother was once a dark-eyed Russian beauty, because we had spoken the language of the Tsars as much as English in my Weehauken childhood, I was the man for the job.

Bedding down as well as he might in the inky night of the Pripet, Skinner found it hard to believe that the glistening halls of the Pentagon lay only forty-eight hours behind him. But that’s the way you had to work in the Central Intelligence Agency. Quickly, so quickly, that there isn’t time for anything to leak out.

Skinner could remember the grave, serious faces as they ushered him into the office of the five-star general. A tall man with a lined, work-weary face, the general had come right to the point. “Skinner,” he said, “what do you know about Russia?”

Skinner could remember the grave, general put him at his ease. He shrugged. “Not, a great deal, sir. I speak the language like a native. My mother came over right after their revolution in 1918. But I’ve never been closer to Soviet territory than a good-will tour in Czechoslovakia. They took some of us on that right after the war, before they started to get unpleasant.”

The general laughed softly. “All-right. You speak the language well, and that’s important! What part of Russia did your mother come from?”

“Tula, I think. Large town a couple of hundred miles south of Moscow. I’m almost sure it was Tula, General. My mother’s dead now.”

“Tula it, is then. That’ll be your home town, Skinner.”

“What?”

“Simple. Your identification papers will show you’re a native of Tula, one Nikolay Mironov. Occupation: transient worker. You see. Skinner, you’re going to Russia. You leave right after we’re finished here, as soon as they can give you the proper clothing.”

Skinner said he thought the general was joking.

BUT THE older man shook his head, making a bridge of his hands, interlacing the fingers and peering over them at Skinner. “Hardly. Skinner, do you know anything about Russia’s ability to produce, atomic weapons?”

“No, sir. Just what I read, that’s all. We know they set off at least one atomic bomb about two of three years ago. We know they’re hunting up uranium ores furiously—”

“They’re not! Up until a few months ago your account would have been perfectly correct. But doesn’t it

strike you as odd that they contented

themselves with merely that one explosion? Further, our underground contacts report a startling thing. The hubbub over uranium ores had died down completely inside the Iron Curtain. They extracted most of their uraninite in the Erz Mountains, where two rich veins meet at a town in Czechoslovakia called Joachimsthal. The town is now deserted, Skinner! For some reason, or reasons, the Reds have apparently lost all interest in the manufacture of atomic weapons.

“You’re going to Russia to find out why. We’ve got to know. Skinner. You figure it out: maybe, just maybe, the balance of power is still in our favor because of superiority on atomic weapons. And that’s holding the war-hungry Soviets on a mighty slim leash. Now they scoff at atomics….”

Skinner stood up. “Does Intelligence draw any conclusions?”

“Of course. The only conclusion we can draw. The Reds have something else, Skinner. They must have. Some secret weapon so utterly powerful they can forget all about their work with atomics. Frankly, Skinner, we’re afraid. And we’re sending you to find out what it’s all about. That is, if you’ll go….”

Skinner’s heart pounded furiously under his ribs, and his fingers trembled slightly when they took the drink the general offered. He even forgot to be surprised that liquor was present at these secret meetings, and he didn’t answer until he’d taken three stiff shots of bourbon. “Hell,” he said. “You don’t have to ask me. I’m in the C.I.A. and that’s that. You think I ought to go, and I’ll go. Don’t get me wrong. General. I’m no hero. But I didn’t enter this service to twiddle my thumbs. You got a job you think I can handle. I’ll go.”

After that, the General was apologetic. “There’s no plan, Skinner. Nothing. We don’t know enough of what’s going on to formulate one. You’ll be on your own, completely on your own. You’ve got to find that weapon—whatever it is that’s made the Russians throw their atomic preparations out the window. Then you’ve got to get that information back here. I’ll be frank, Skinner: I know a few people who’ll be surprised if you’re able to get back—with it.”

And that was that. Skinner could have no farewells, because you never knew when you’d say goodbye to the wrong person. He was clothed in a coarse wool shirt and a pair of denims. They gave him a .45 and enough ammunition to choke an elephant. They gave him identification papers, in Russian. Ration papers, travel papers, a transient’s visa, all in Russian. He wasn’t Nick Skinner any longer, he was Nikolay Mironov of Tula.

They didn’t waste any time. Before he knew it he was on a plane winging over the Atlantic, and a dozen hours later he stepped out in Occupied Germany. A lot of back-slapping there, and wishes of good luck; a good night’s sleep and a day at the Officer’s Club in Bonn.

He knew he’d not be dropped in Russia itself, because there was no organized underground movement there to get him started. Outside of Pinsk, instead, in Eastern Poland. After that—well, he might have to plod all the way across the Eurasian land mass and back again, on foot if necessary. And at the outset he didn’t have the slightest idea where to go. No one did….

NOW, IN the Pripet, he waited for dawn. It came slowly, with great masses of fog billowing in with the wind from Russia. A Polish refugee in Bonn had warned him to stay put until the fog lifted from the surface

of the swamp because the bogs and quagmires could be deadly.

By the time the sun began to make inroads, in the smoking white haze, he was hungry—and drenched. He set out along a muddy road which skirted stinking pools of muck that almost smacked of the tropics. The shoulder-holster of his .45 and the two cartridge belts chafed his skin under the denim shirt, but there was something comforting about their presence as he loosened each of the buckles a notch.

He found the two-lane highway which led to Pinsk, turned East upon it. The way led to Pinsk—and to Russia.

An occasional car bumped past noisily, but horse-drawn wagons were more common, driven by old peasants in their simple rustic garb. Once a small motorized column of red troops sped by on motorcycles and old lend-lease jeeps, and Skinner watched the peasants pull their wagons off the road and into the swamps. One old fellow with a tired gray face couldn’t get his wagon out of the mud, and Skinner helped him.

He muttered his thanks in Polish—at least Skinner guessed it was thanks, because the seamy old face smiled at him. But the peasant grumbled and muttered to himself when he received an answer in. Russian. If this simple farmer were typical, the Poles lost no love on their Russian masters.

“Pinsk?” Skinner demanded.

When the peasant nodded sourly, Skinner climbed into the wagon beside him, and with much clearing of his throat and swearing, the old man drove his horses forward. The two scrawny beasts made almost as much noise as he did.

There were a lot of Red Army, men in Pinsk, wearing their bright gray uniforms. The town was a dirty, isolated place, seemingly, serving no other purpose than to attract all the horseflies and mosquitos in the area.

IN BONN they’d told Skinner, to seek out the Red Star Inn which, before the “Liberation”, had been called the Inn of Pripet. It turned out to be a weather-beaten old building that looked like a barn. Inside, the big room was musty, gloomy, foul-smelling. Off to the left, half a dozen Red soldiers laughed and joked at the bar, and one of them would make lewd gestures at the Polish barmaid every time she came past. She hardly seemed to notice him.

A man with a big, unkempt moustache that would have been Stalinesque had it not been iron-gray, was cleaning glasses at the other end of the bar. The girl’s father, Skinner guessed.

“Vodka,” he said, waiting while the old man poured the drink. Skinner had a money belt and a billfold, both given to him in Bonn, and both cram-full of Russian currency. The native vodka, Skinner realized after one choking swallow, bore the same relationship to the smoother United States product as corn-liquor bears to bonded bourbon, and sometimes the stuff ran as high as a hundred-fifty proof, or seventy-five per cent alcohol. The Red Army boys were getting a refill from the barmaid, and it didn’t look like their first. All of them seemed pretty gay.

“Why do you Pinsk people live out. here in the middle of the swamps?” Skinner asked the barman. That question would serve as identification; if he were a member of the Polish underground, the old man would know the right answer.

But he merely growled from behind his moustache: “The government was supposed, to drain these marshes, my friend. You know that. But then came the war.”

Skinner shrugged, ambling slowly down the length of the bar until he was in such a position that he’d get his next drink from the girl.

“Hey, Pole!” shouted one of the Red Army boys, a blond lad too young: to have seen action in World War II. He was grinning in expectation of some joke about to be perpetrated.

Skinner wiped his lips, tried to make his voice steady. Here was his first contact with the Reds themselves. “I’m no Pole,” he said quietly, in Russian. The soldier seemed very disappointed.

“Oh, Comrade. Well, then will you have some vodka with us?”

One of the others demanded: “Why aren’t you in uniform?”

“I served my time,” Skinner said. “Ninth Field Army and guerrilla work near Smolensk. I’m in the reserve now.”

“That’s a coincidence,” the blond lad told Skinner, slapping him on the back. “We’re from the Ninth. What do you think of General Roskinov’s new policy?”

Who the hell was General Roskinov?

SKINNER mumbled something about being out of the service for three years, and then he called loudly to the girl for more Vodka. “It’s on me, Comrades,” he assured the Red Army boys, and they were very pleased. All ordered double vodkas as Skinner asked the girl, a buxom thing in peasant garb, the same question he’d asked her father.

She didn’t bat an eyelash. She said, “After you live in the Pripet for a time, you get to like it. The life is so quiet.” And that, precisely, was the answer Skinner sought.

He smiled at her, casually. “Are you doing anything tonight, miss… uh…”

“Natasha.” She smiled, making eyes at Skinner in such a way that all the Red Army boys turned to watch, “No, I’m not doing anything.”

“Well, would you like to spend the evening with an ex-officer of the Red Army—?”

“Officer, eh?” the blond Red demanded, respect in his voice.

Skinner shrugged. “Just a lieutenant. But, Comrades, you’re interfering with an operation of love.”

They laughed at that, and one of them muttered the Russian equivalent of the idiom about their not being able to get to first base with the girl. Skinner told them it was superior-technique, and they laughed again.

Natasha said, “Yes, I’d like that. Did you say seven?”

“I didn’t say. But seven is fine, Natasha. You can call me Nikolay—and I’ll see you then.”

“Yes, Nikolay,” she agreed demurely, and blushed.

“Yes, Nikolay,” one of the Reds mimicked her speech. “I don’t know how you do it, Comrade Nikolay.”

Skinner had a few more drinks with the Reds—their treat this time—and then his head began to swim. He’d eaten nothing for close to twelve hours, and now he ordered some sausage and black bread, the middle-European equivalent of a hamburger.

After that he excused himself and went to one of Pinsk’s three barber shops, which was a bathhouse as well. While he was shaved, he heard water splashing in the ancient metal tubs in a rear room. Like barbers anyplace else—from Ancient Greece to the present—Skinner’s man deluged him with a constant flow of chatter, half in Polish which he did not understand, half in a very badly spoken Russian.

Shave concluded, the barber began to finger the buttons of Skinner’s shirt. “You’ll want a bath, of course.”

Skinner shoved his hands away. “Of course not.”

“But, sir, everyone who shaves here also bathes here, and for so little extra money. Come—”

SKINNER had to push the dirty hands away again. A bath would feel mighty good to his cramped muscles, but he could just see himself stripping off the shirt, and exposing his .45 and cartridge belts. He’d be in the hands of the Secret Police before he had time to put his shirt on again.

“No, thanks,” he said, this time more firmly. He paid the man, who was talking to himself as he made his way back to the bath room, doubtless to check upon the aniount of soap his bathers were using.

Skinner wandered around town idly, chafing at the delay. The robust good health of Natasha’s red cheeks and buxom figure was an exception. Most of the people of Pinsk were thin and undernourished here in this dirty little city which was the focal point of Russo-Polish trade across the Pripet Marshes. The trade was one-way, of course—all to the advantage of the overlords, and you could see that in the people’s faces.

By six o’clock a change came over the town, and Skinner was nervous because he couldn’t put his finger on the reason, for it. The streets became almost deserted, and that didn’t seem right, not now, just at the close of the working day. Those people he did encounter were fearful, suspicious, alert—and more than once he saw some of them detained and questioned by gray-uniformed Red Army men.

One of the soldiers laid a big hand on his shoulder, and Skinner felt the fingers scant inches from his holster-strap. It was the blond boy from the Red Star Inn.

“Comrade Nikolay,” he said, not friendly now, “just what is it you’re doing in Pinsk? What brings you here?”

Skinner smiled. “Why?”

“Answer the questions, please.” He was alarmed about something, but at the same time he was a cocky, arrogant new member of the army which, not too many years before, had shattered the German Wehrmacht. He could be dangerous.

Skinner said he was a transient worker out of Tula.

“Is that so? What brings you to Poland?”

Skinner mumbled something about a vacation, and the soldier snickered. Probably it was a mistake. As if anyone would want to take a vacation in this poor conquered land.

“Your papers, please.”

Skinner removed the identification card and travel visa from his billfold, showed them, to the soldier, who was very surprised. But the travel visa proclaimed that one Nickolay Mironov, of Tula, could travel with impunity any place in Russia or Poland. That was an unusual thing in a land where a man sometimes had to wait months to receive permission to leave his home town.

Skinner winked. “Comrade, I told you I was an ex-officer.”

“Secret mission, eh?”

Skinner winked again. “Something like that. I can’t talk—”

“Well, then let me see your discharge papers, Comrade Nikolay.”

Damn! Skinner had invented that story about the Ninth Field Army on the spur of the moment, but in a country where service was both universal and drawn out, a man would not travel without his discharge certificate or a photostat of it.

Skinner wished he knew what the hell was going on, what had caused all the trouble. And the blond lad of the Red Army held his hand out, waiting for the papers Skinner didn’t have.

There was a rumpus down the street. It looked like an old peasant, probably as innocent as Adam before Eve, couldn’t answer all the questions thrown at him. The blond soldier ran to join his companions, calling over his shoulder that he’d see Skinner later. Not if I can help it, Skinner thought grimly.

CHAPTER II

NATASHA wore a simple, low-cut peasant dress which must have been, around for a long time, because she couldn’t quite hide the deft patchwork and stitching. “You’re early,” she said.

“I know. Does it matter?”

She shook her head. “No. I get off now anyway. You want to take a walk out on the marshes or something?”

“Well, I’d rather just sit and talk. Provided you have a place we can talk without being disturbed.”

“I know of such a place, Nikolay. Come.”

She took a bottle of vodka from the shelf, came around the bar and let Skinner hold her hand. They looked just like a couple about to embark on a date, and no one in the Red Star Inn paid them any attention, although the place was pretty crowded by now.

They walked together, not speaking, up a flight of sagging wooden stairs and thence across a dark hallway to a little room. The chamber contained a bed, quite large and quite thin of mattress, an old discolored dresser with a cracked mirror hanging from a peg over it, and a chair. Natasha slumped down on the bed after closing the door and bolting it, and Skinner crossed the room to the stiff-backed chair.

“Now,” she said, “just who are you?”

Skinner shook his head firmly. “Nikolay Mironov will be good enough. That’s who I am, Nikolay Mironov.” He wouldn’t tell every buxom peasant lass he met who he was, whether she knew the underground counter word or not.

She smiled. “All right, Nikolay. What do you want of me?”

“Well, I’d like you, or somebody, to take me through the swamps and into Russia.”

“You speak Russian. Your name is Nikolay Mironov. You are a Russian. Why do I have to take you? Also, what business would it be of mine whether you get through the swamps and across the border?”

SKINNER got up, paced around the room. He placed his hands on Natasha’s shoulders and dug the fingers in hard through the thin dress until she winced. “Who I am doesn’t matter. But I have an important mission, and if “you’re what you claim to be, you’ll take me.”

“Have you any proof?”

“No, and that’s the truth.” It was. The only identification he had was counterfeit Russian.

Natasha grinned at him. “But for one thing, I think I would turn you over to the officials and forget all about you.”

“What’s that one thing?”

“What happened in town today. Don’t tell me you don’t know why Pinsk is so excited?”

Skinner told her he didn’t.

“There was a farmer named Kurzowski hunting for snakes in the marshes. The government pays a bounty, you know. You don’t? Well, never mind. Anyway, Kurzowski found something.”

“What?”

“Kurzowski found a parachute, purely by accident. It was not Russian-made, Nikolay, and the soldiers

say it has not been in the swamps outside of Pinsk for more than a few hours, a day at most. There is someone here in Pinsk who does not belong.” She pushed his hands away from her shoulders. “But one thing I’ll have to admit, ‘Nikolay’, you speak perfect Russian.”

“So do you,” he reminded her. “And you’re Polish. Now will you take me?”

“I suppose—” Natasha’s words were cut off in mid-sentence. Someone pounded on the door.

“Open up!” a voice called loudly, and it sounded like the blond Red Army youth. “I’m looking for the Russian from Tula who calls himself Nikolay Mironov.”

“He’s not here,” Natasha said sleepily.

“I told you to open. I would like to see that for myself.”

Natasha groaned wearily, got up and went to the door. She hissed over her shoulder, “Get into, bed, quick! Under the covers.” Then, aloud: “I will open under one condition. That you count to ten before you enter. I… uh… would like to get covered again.”

The Russian grunted his acceptance of the condition, and Natasha withdrew the bolt. Quickly, she crossed back to the bed, her hands working with the buttons of her dress. Skinner caught on and thumbed open the bottle of vodka, spilling a little of it on the blanket. The room was dim with the light of only one candle, and by the time Natasha reached the bed, she was wearing exactly nothing.

SHE PULLED off one of the covers and draped it across her shoulders, swinging it about her white body like a cloak, but leaving enough revealed to show that she wasn’t dressed. Skinner pulled the other blanket up to his neck, smiled once at Natasha who stood by the bed, then watched the door swing in.

The blond soldier stalked into the room.

He sniffed at the smell of vodka, glanced briefly and then again at Natasha, who fussed, modestly with her blanket, then saw Skinner half-hidden under the covers. “I thought you said he wasn’t here.”

Natasha shrugged, letting the blanket fall from one of her shoulders. “We did not want to be disturbed.”

The soldier snorted, turned to Skinner. “Go away. Comrade,” the American said.

“In a moment. I merely want to finish the job. Your discharge papers, please.”

Natasha walked between him and the bed. “You can see—Nikolay is not dressed. Just where do you think he carries those papers?”

As a matter of fact. Skinner was fully clothed but, with Natasha, he hoped the blanket would fool the Russian.

“Well,” he said, “take me to his clothing. Where is his clothing? I’ll find the papers myself.”

Skinner got angry then. “Remember, Comrade, a secret mission. Do you want to make a fool of yourself?”

He was a stubborn one, that Russian. “Doubtless everything will be in order. But I want to check on that.”

Skinner lay there, unmoving, while the soldier’s glance raked the room. “Hey! Where is your clothing?”

He pushed Natasha aside and came to the bed. “Where is it?”

Skinner just stared at him.

Swiftly, so swiftly that it caught the C.I.A. man completely by surprise, the soldier ripped the blanket off the bed. Skinner lay there in his denim shirt and trousers. He felt foolish. It looked like his mission inside the Iron Curtain would die before it started, here in Poland, only hours from the beginning. And he might die with it.

“You’re dressed,” the Red said, “and the woman is not. Now, that’s strange. So strange that I’m going to ask both of you to come with me.”

Natasha was behind him—but then she was oh top of him. She jumped on his back and circled his neck with her arms and the blanket slipped off her to the floor.

“Run!” she cried. “Run!” She fought like a tiger, clawing and scratching’, arid the blond soldier cursed as he writhed around the room in her grasp, blood trickling down his cheeks from where her nails had raked them.

By the time he threw her clear, depositing her in a sobbing heap on the floor, and then kicking her to make sure she remained that way. Skinner had his .45 out and pointing straight at the Red’s belly. “Put your hands oh the back of your head,” he said quietly. “Clasp them there. If you move a muscle, I’ll kill you.”

NIGHT IN Pinsk. The first really cold night of the year, with a bitter autumn wind howling in from the Marshlands. And three figures fighting that wind as they cut across the last paved street and set out upon a dirt road that twisted into the swamps east of the city.

“What can we do with this Red?” Natasha demanded.

Skinner shrugged himself more deeply inside the overcoat which had belonged to the girl’s father. “I don’t know,” he confessed. “We couldn’t leave him in the city. He’d have them hunting for us without wasting any time about it.”

“Well, I know what I’d,do, were I in your place.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

She spat. “He’s a Red, Isn’t he? And he can get you into trouble can’t he? I’d kill him.”

Skinner couldn’t see the soldier’s face in the darkness, but he knew it must have lost a shade or two of color just then. “We can’t kill him,” Skinner said. “Not in cold blood.”

“No? You’ll learn. Listen, Nikolay—I’m not in the underground out of any whim. The Reds killed my brother, and my mother died soon after that. You’ll learn.”

Skinner had a problem, all right. He had the Red’ helpless at gunpoint now, but as soon as he released him, the man would go scampering off to warn his fellows. Also, Natasha would find herself in a lot of hot water. Still, the alternative was murder….

The Red. Army youth had not lost his arrogance. “How far do you think you can go in the swamps at night? Why don’t you turn back and give yourself up, Nikolay? At least you’ll have a warm bed to sleep in, eh?”

“I slept in the marshes last night, and I can do it again tonight. That is, Natasha, if you’ll sit guard duty with me.”

She nodded eagerly, almost too eagerly. Skinner thought. But hell, he had nothing to worry about as far as the girl was concerned. He’d better concentrate on putting as much distance as possible between them and the city. And then they’d worry about sleeping.

SKINNER HAD no watch, guessed that it was after midnight when they stopped. “This ground looks as dry as any,” he shouted over the wind.

He paced back and forth for a time while the Russian stretched out on his back and Natasha eased herself down against a tree trunk. “Try to get some sleep,” the American told Natasha. “I’ll stand, the first watch.”

“All right—if you promise to wake me so I can do my share.”

Skinner said he promised, but he wasn’t so sure. He’d as soon spend the whole night on guard himself; but in the end he decided to leave it up to his ability to remain alert. If he grew weary, time enough to awaken the girl then.

The soldier slept restlessly, tossing and turning, trembling in the cold. Natasha seemed somewhat more comfortable, but Skinner heard her moan in her sleep more than once. For his own part, he walked a little circle for himself in the clearing, beating his chest briskly to fight off the cold. They’d have about as much of a chance to start a fire in this dank mess as they’d have in the middle of the ocean, with nothing but seaweed for kindling.

The minutes dragged by, lengthened into hours. It seemed to grow even darker, and the wind’s fury increased. Would dawn never come?

“Nikolay?”

“Huh?”

“You go to sleep now. I will watch.”

“Listen,” he tried to stop! a yawn, couldn’t, “I feel wide awake, and—”

“And nothing. I will watch now, that’s all.”

Wearily, Skinner agreed. Sleeping in this cold would be no picnic, but it would give. him a little more strength for tomorrow, and they’d both need that for the trek ahead of them. He gave Natasha the .45, watched her get up, a shadow among shadows in” the darkness, heard her flip the gun open.

“Loaded,” she grunted with satisfaction and then Skinner Kit the ground. He was asleep almost at once.

HIS LEGS were numb from the cold when he awoke. A gray dawn had seaped into the Pripet with the morning fog, half-hiding the girl and the soldier. They were both standing five or six paces from Skinner, and they were speaking in heated whispers. The Red looked very frightened.

Suddenly, he turned and ran off into the swamps. Natasha did not try to stop him. Instead, Skinner heard the girl counting: “One, two, three, four—”

“What the hell’s going on?” Skinner cried.

“Later. Five, six, seven—”

“Damnit, I said what’s going on!”

“Eight, nine, ten.”

Natasha cocked the .45 and plunged into the swamp.

Silence. Skinner swore softly to himself.

A scream—not a woman’s voice, but a man’s. After that, more silence, for perhaps the space of a heartbeat. Then Skinner heard the .45 roar once, and once only. In a moment, Natasha appeared again in the clearing, handed Skinner his gun butt first. She said hot a word.

“Well?” Skinner demanded.

“Well what?”

“Suppose you tell me what happened.”

“Won’t it be enough if I say you don’t have to worry about the Red?”

“No. What happened?”

“Well, we couldn’t go on this way. He’d get us into trouble sooner or later.”

“I know that, but I saw no way out.”

“I did, I saw one. We played a little game, and I won. Oh, the Red didn’t want to play it at first, but I was very firm. I gave him ten seconds to escape, and then I ran after him with your gun. Don’t you think it was fair?”

“Then what happened?”

“I said” you don’t have to worry about the Red any more. You don’t.”

Anger washed over Skinner in a wave. “Then you murdered him?”

The girl snorted, “Murder, he says! Look, Mr. Nikolay Mironov Smith or whatever your American name is, don’t you know we’re fighting a war? The Polish underground has been fighting it a long time because the Nazis and the Reds, occupied my country at the same time. Other undergrounds fight too—and whoever sent you in here didn’t send you in to twiddle your thumbs. When you fight a “war you kill, and it’s hot murder. You kill to protect your home, your. people, your—”

Abruptly, she was sobbing. She threw herself at Skinner, burying her face against his shoulder, crying softly, over and over, “I had to kill him. I couldn’t help it. I had to kill him….”

“We’ll get out of here when you’re ready,” Skinner said. He did not want to argue. He couldn’t argue with the girl’s logic. She’d done more for the Russian than he’d have done for her had. the situation been reversed. At least she’d given-him a chance. Skinner knew a long road lay ahead of him, and suddenly he found himself wishing that he had some of the girl’s spirit, some part of her ability to accept facts bleakly and coldly for what they were. He realized he would need that in the long days ahead.

“WE’RE ON the frontier now,” Natasha said.

Skinner looked around him: The Pripet lay behind them and they stood on a wide grassy plain which rolled off, without change, to the horizon in all directions. They’d reached the tiny town of Luniniec on the second day of their flight, after they’d exhausted the meager supply of food Natasha had taken from Pinsk. There they’d eaten and rested and, from careful questioning. Skinner learned that the natives had heard nothing of a parachute, or a dead Russian soldier. After that, they’d plodded in a northeasterly direction through the swamps, another day and night, until suddenly the bogs faded away behind them and an occasional farmhouse dotted the land.

Now they stood on the frontier, and Natasha extended her hand. “What is it you Americans do, shake hands?”

Skinner nodded.

“Here, then—shake mine. And good luck, my American friend. If you walk in that direction—” she pointed across the barbed wire fence—“you should: reach the village of Slutsk by late afternoon. From there you can get a bus to Bobruisk—and from that point, a train to wherever you’re going. Good luck.”

“What will you do?”

“Oh, I’ll manage. Probably I’ll stay for a time in Luniniec with some friends. I’ll be back in Pinsk before you know it, and life will go on as if you’ve never been there.”

“There’s something else we Americans do,” said Skinner. “Poles, too.” He put his arms around the girl, felt her buxom figure snuggle up against his chest, kissed her. I  sightly at first, then fiercely.

“I never could have made it without you, Natasha. Here, right at the beginning, I’d have been finished.”

“Kiss me again, Nikolay. Some day I’ll be able to tell my friends what an American kiss is like. Ahh….”

“Goodbye, Natasha,” Abruptly he turned, pushed apart two of the strands of wire, stepped through the fence. When he looked again, the girl was trudging back the way they had come. She’d reach the Pripet Marshes at about the same time that he got to Slutsk.

SKINNER approached the clerk in the little depot in Slutsk. “When’s the next bus for Bobruisk?”

“There’s no ‘next bus’. There is only one bus, and that leaves in an hour. Your travel visa, please.”

Skinner showed it to the man, a sour-faced old fellow with glasses.

“Umm-m, yes. Seems to be in order. Six rubles, fifty kopeks.”

Skinner counted out the unfamiliar change, exchanged it for his ticket, a filthy yellow stub which probably would be collected and used again. “Thank you.”

The man looked surprised. “Don’t thank me, thank the State. They gave you your visa.”

Little things like that, thought Skinner as he clambered into the rickety bus. The State this and the State that. The State everything. Meanwhile, he didn’t have the vaguest shadow of a plan. The bus to Bobruisk, then—then, what? Another trip to some equally unheard of place? Just poking around the incredible length and breadth of the Eurasian land mass until he found something? It might take years.

And the Russians had stopped their playing with atomic power, suddenly, without warning. Why? Why except that they’d found something so much more powerful that atomics were relegated to the position of Fourth of July—or May Day—firecrackers? No, thought Skinner, the little hick-towns couldn’t give him his answer, and the more he dallied, the harder it might be to find that answer. From Bobruisk he’d take the train to Moscow….

SONYA FYODOROVNA Dolohov had a headache. But it didn’t stop her work. No, she’d see the man from Lubianka Street in spite of it, she’d merely have to be more careful, that’s all. Some wine, some dancing, the wee hours of the morning in her apartment. Then, who could tell? Bah! A big, loud bah to Boris Rashevsky and all men! Rashevsky carried Secret Police written all over his stupid face, and like all men, he could he had—for a price. Swaggering Laurenti Beria, who ruled the M.V.D. with an iron will, now he might be different. It was said in Moscow that Beria had to answer to no one, but Josef Stalin himself.

But for now at least, Sonya need not worry about Laurenti Beria. Just Rashevsky, that clumsy, pawing ape. And, looking at the soft contours of her figure in the mirror as she dressed, smiling and even humming a little tune which was definitely capitalist and hence outlawed, Sonya knew she’d be able to extract the information from Boris Rashevsky, first lieutenant to Beria, head of the M.V.D., the dreaded Secret Police.

Rashevsky strutted in promptly at eight, a huge bull-necked man with a bristly, close-cropped head of graying hair, loose, sensuous lips, beady, little pig-eyes which almost seemed to come together, and a ridiculously delicate nose. “Ah, Sonya,” he said, smiling broadly.”

She allowed her hand to be kissed. “Colonel. My own private Colonel Boris! How good it is to see you—”

“My dear, how I waited for the hour! I fumed arid fretted over some paper work—yes, I can fume and fret—I—your gentle Colonel Boris, when it is you. I am waiting to see. But Beria stood over me, and Beria wanted the work finished.” He sighed.

“Beria. Always it is Beria. Is the man a god?”

Rashevsky got alarmed. “Please, my dear, I know you mean nothing, but must you always use those words? God, what is God but a figment of the warped capitalist imagination? And since the capitalists have constructed an Iron Curtain around their countries, we’ve gone a long way in stamping that myth out.

“And something else. Why, last week I heard you humming something capitalist—”

Sonya smiled demurely. “Well, I promise to do.neither again. Now can we go and have some fun?”

RASHEVSKY nodded eagerly helped Sonya on with her sable wrap—a gift from Beria, months ago, before she’d turned her attentions to the more talkative Rashevsky. Then they took the elevator down to the street, where Rashevsky’s long, sleek car awaited them.

The Symphony first, at the Stalin Theater, where the orchestra rendered a stirring performance of Prokofief’s latest work. It sounded a lot like his earlier and extremely charming Peter and the Wolf, Sonya realized, except now the part of Peter was relegated to the benevolent Dictatorships of the Proletariet, wherever they existed, and the lean hungry wolf became Capitalist Imperialism. The triumphant fourth movement was the Korea Movement, and idly Sonya wondered if they’d ever really know what was happening in that tiny Asiatic country.

Later, champagne and caviar at the Club Molotov—restricted to officials of the Kremlin and the M.V.D. and a few lucky foreign diplomats who’d remained much more rational than that man in Yugoslavia—what was his name?

“You see,” said Rashevsky, sipping his fifth champagne, “we really have everything the capitalists claim, to have. A beautiful club, is it not?”

Sonya smiled. “I’ve been here before.”

The Colonel drank the remainder of his champagne in one gulp, ordered another one from the waiter who stood at attention near the silver urn which held their magnum. Good, thought Sonya, let him grow jealous. It might loosen his thick tongue….

“When?” Rashevsky pouted, small-boy fashion.

“Oh, what’s the difference? I’m here with you now, my Colonel. Would you like to dance?”

He nodded, got up, followed her to the dance floor. The band played liltingly the strains of a delicate, Strauss waltz. Strauss, the genius of the waltz, who’d come from Austria to Mother Russia to do his wonderful work in a properly invigorating atmosphere.

RASHEVSKY danced clumsily, holding the slim, beautiful girl in a two-hundred-pound bear-hug. She was glad when the music stopped. But then, as Rashevsky led her back to their table, the band played a loud fanfare, and all eyes turned to the elaborate doorway.

Someone spoke into a microphone: “All please rise for the Foreign Office and the M.V.D!”

Shoulder to shoulder, two men came into the room, indifferent to the homage which was their due. Gray-haired, vitriolic Vishinsky, Commissar of the Foreign Office, number three man in the Soviet hierarchy—and dark, swarthy Laurenti Beria, walking with his swaggering stride. Beria—who could tell what place in the hierarchy that mysterious figure filled? Some even hinted at number one, above old Yussov Djugashvilli-Stalin himself….

Beria, head of the Secret Police—certainly the most feared man in all of Russia. But that didn’t matter, and Sonya found other thoughts crossing her mind in rapid succession. Vishinsky and Beria together, an oddity. Did it mean, then, that the secret thing which had cast aside the production of atomic bombs was coming to flower? Vishinsky and Beria certainly looked cheerful enough….

“Look how everyone loves them,” Rashevsky was saying, as he sat down again! “Isn’t it wonderful, my dear?”

“Yes, and I suppose you’re right about Commissar Beria—a truly mighty figure.”

“Hah—now it is you talking about my chief as if he were… ah… a deity. If you don’t stop staring at their table, I think I will suggest we leave this place.”

“Suggest it.”

“My dear—”

She waved at Beria, who waved back while Vishinsky scowled darkly at this lack of dignity. “Go ahead, my Colonel, suggest it. I don’t bite, really, and I’m a little tired anyway.”

“Very well. I’ll take you home. My, notice how early it is….”

“THIS CHAMPAGNE of yours is delicious,” muttered Rashevsky, placing a big hand on Sonya’s lovely white shoulder, where the straps would have been had her evening gown come with straps.

She nestled closer to him, stroked his cheek. “My Colonel…”

“Soft little kitten!”

“Yes, thank you for turning off the lights. It is much more pleasant here in the dark.”

“My priceless jewel!”

“You know, of course, I was only trying to make you jealous at the Club Molotov. I don’t know much of how you work, but I’ll wager that you do an amount equal to Beria’s own.”

“Why, thank you. Yes, yes, to be sure. I do, but few people realize it. Why, only yesterday…”

“What about yesterday, my Colonel?”

“Kitten! Jewel!” That seemed to be the extent of his imagination.

“I said, what about yesterday?”

“Yesterday? Why, we… no, no, it would only trouble your delicate mind.”

“I’m interested.”

“No. I have,said no.”

“Well, is that definite?”

“It is.”

Sonya Fyodoroyna Dolohov sighed, stood up, put on the lights, lit a cigarette. “I suddenly have a headache,” she said, crossing, to the door and opening it. “Will you call me next week?”

Rashevsky bowed, mopping his glistening brow with a silk handkerchief. “Sooner, if you’d like. Thursday?”

“Thursday,” she agreed, letting him kiss her hand, then closing the door behind him.

Maybe on Thursday the pig-ape would talk…

MOSCOW. Less than a week before—Washington. Striding past the Spazzo House—the American Embassy—Nick Skinner found it hard to believe. If anyone had told him, a week before, that he’d be walking the streets of Moscow within a few days, Skinner would have laughed outright.

He felt suddenly like a fly caught, not on the tenuous outer regions of a spider web, but at the core, where all the spider had to do was wrap its great hairy body, around him. And Moscow was a spider’s web in more ways than one. Here was the matrix, the core, the hub. But the web wove its way outward in all directions: China, Romania, Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland… insatiable, it trailed, delicate filaments invitingly….

No one had told him to contact the Embassy, and he considered it an unwise move. First place, he doubted that the Embassy knew of his presence, and he had no proof of his identity beyond his ability, to speak American—something which any good Russian spy should be able to do. Also, any contact with the Embassy might make him that much less efficient as a free-roving agent. And finally, if he were caught, and if he’d been working in conjunction with the portfolio boys, they’d find themselves in plenty of hot water too.

Skinner left the Spazzo House behind him, walked the length of Lenin  Avenue. There seemed to be as many green-uniformed city police arid gray-uniformed soldiers as there were citizens on the crowded streets. Twice Skinner was halted, questioned, then released.

The third time, as he approached the gaunt brick wall of the Kremlin, he got a surprise. A soldier, not a policeman, stopped him, and said: “Your papers, Comrade.”

Skinner showed them.

“Transient worker, eh? What are you doing, in Moscow?”

“Vacation.”

“Vacation? Then you’re a Sthakanovite. But Where’s your badge of merit?”

Skinner had pulled a serious boner. Apparently only those workers who produced above and beyond their quotas could expect vacations. “It… has not come yet.”

“Not come yet? Either you have it or you don’t have a vacation. From Tula, eh? Won’t you provincials ever learn you can’t pull the wool over our eyes? Come with me.”

“Where are we going?”

“Just shut your mouth and come along. You’ll find out soon enough.”

“Da,” said Skinner. “I will go.”

LAURENTI BERIA pushed back his sleek black hair, grunted with satisfaction when he smiled at himself in the mirror and saw the fine rows of even white teeth. He turned to his aide with part of that smile still lingering on his face, the cold part.

“Colonel Rashevsky, what do you know about the Dolohov woman?”

Rashevsky looked up from his desk, spilling some ink on an official document and cursing softly. “Why… not much. But I do know that she’s the loveliest creature in all of Moscow.”

“Very lovely,” Beria admitted. “Also very deadly. Sonya Fyodorovna Dolohov works for the underground.”

“What?”

Beria smiled again. “Are you deaf? I said she works for the underground. As a matter of fact, she’s one of their leaders. I’ve known that for a long time, Rashevsky—”

“My Commissar!” Rashevsky croaked, purpling. “Give me a squad of three men, and I—”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Rashevsky. She’d wind you around her little finger and go skipping off into hiding. Also, I don’t intend to do a thing about Dolohov—not yet. The agent who informed me, the only man who knew, is now in Siberia. He might have talked, and I don’t want it known that we know. You do understand, don’t you, Colonel?”

“Well, I… of course I can theorize and—”

“Why don’t you just say no?”

“I am confused,” said Rashevsky, hanging his head.

“Dolohov is an underground leader. She can take us to other leaders—pfft! We will close a ring around them, but not now. When we’re ready. Meanwhile, Rashevsky, play your role of the infatuated lover; it fits you well. But don’t tell the woman things which you should not like to see fall into the wrong hands. Clear?”

“Clear.”

“And don’t let anyone know what I have just told you. Clear?”

“Clear.”

“Why don’t you take the afternoon off and pay your sweetheart a surprise visit of love?”

“But I’ve hardly done my work!”

“I think the M.V.D. will manage without you for an afternoon. Good day, Colonel.”

A SLOW, steady drizzle. A cold October drizzle, chilling the flesh and stiffening the bones. Prelude to the Russian winter, Skinner realized. He wondered if he’d live to see that winter.

The soldier had ushered him, without questions, without a word spoken between them, to a police station, and there, in a rear alley, they’d shoved Skinner on a big open truck along with a score of weary Russians.

Now the rain pelted down harder, and Skinner tried to use his tattered overcoat for a hood. The man to his left nudged a gaunt elbow against his ribs.

“Rotten luck, eh, Comrade?” He was an old fellow, Skinner observed; hard to tell how old, but certainly in his sixties. He crouched next to the American in a corner of the truck, his long, impossibly thin body twisted like a pretzel. His face was long, too, matching the body. All in all, very drab—except for the eyes which glowed almost like twin coals in his head.

“You’re telling me,” Skinner agreed. “I didn’t do a thing, but they took me.”

The old man’s voice was throaty, deep. “As if you have to do anything to get taken.”

“Umm-m, true. But I just got in from Tula, and I don’t know, what’s going on.”

“Who does? But one can guess, Comrade! Me, I’m from the Crimea, a long way off. A Cossack there, long and long ago—aye, how I remember the old days! A man was a man then because he could split a charging horseman from crown to navel with one blow of his saber. Would you believe that I got fourteen of the Kaiser’s best that way?”

Skinner grunted something, waited for the man to continue.

“But you want to know why they took you. Well, ordinarily, they’d resort to the labor pools when they need something done. But I recollect it was different for the uranium mining in the Erz Mountains four or five-years ago. Then they merely plucked, you off the street, for they believed in quick, decisive action—and they still do, if the thing is so secret they don’t want it to get around. One moment you walk the streets of Moscow, the next—who knows?”

“You think it’s more uranium mining?” Skinner demanded. This might possibly be a lead, he knew and he didn’t want to lose the one slim thread the man offered.

“Uranium! You sure must have vegetated a long time in Tula, comrade. No one mines uranium now, and I mean no one.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Confusing, you mean. The Cominform doesn’t let us draw our own conclusions, telling us that since Uncle Joe wants peace, nothing put peace forever and ever, he’s stopped all work on atomics. But they speak out of both sides of their mouths, for they tell us all the time to arm, arm, arm against Capitalist Aggression.”

“Your talk borders on treason,” Skinner said mildly.

The man drew out a long, razor-sharp knife, ran its edge idly over his fingernails. “I don’t think so, my friend. You probably were hearing things.”

“Don’t get me wrong. I said it was treason. I didn’t disagree.”

The man scratched his head, lowered his voice to a coarse whisper, chanted, sing-song fashion: “East gate, West gate—”

Skinner shrugged. “If that song identifies you and you want me to give the countersign, you’re wasting your time. I said I’m new here. I meant it.”

The Cossack hunkered down inside his torn cape so that only the top of his grizzled head showed. He whispered, so low that Skinner had to bend close to hear: “I am Tuman Tumanov, Comrade. I don’t know where, they’re taking this truckload of men to work, but I don’t intend to go there.”

“Nikolay Mironov,” Skinner said, reaching for Tumanov’s hand and grasping at firmly for a moment. “I’m with you.”

THE TRUCK roared out from its alley, and through the cab’s back window Skinner could see the helmeted head of the driver, and next to that the guard’s head. Probably the guard carried a gun.

“Now?” Skinner demanded.

But Tumanov smiled. “Have patience, my friend. The results of the Revolution have been with us for more than thirty years. It might take twenty more before the Counter-revolution gains any headway. Meanwhile, we’re too close to the police station. Have patience, and I’ll let you know.”

The truck clattered on over the cobbled byways of Moscow, avoiding for the most part the more crowded avenues, lurching from side to side with the weight of the men in its rear. The rain had turned Skinner’s old coat into a sodden ruin.

Tumanov sneezed loudly. “Those ryua!” he muttered. “Those stupid fish! They’ll make me catch my death of cold out here. Would you rather be indoors, Comrade?”

“I would.”

“Then what are we waiting for?” Tumanov got up, a big ungainly creature with a long neck, thin, stooped shoulders and stilt-like legs. Six and a half feet tall. Skinner guessed, and he didn’t weigh a hundred and fifty pounds, wringing wet.

They eased themselves toward the rear, pushing their way through the listless men who sat or crouched around them in the truck, taking cautious, wary steps every time the truck lurched. Finally, they reached a little guard-railing, no more than knee-high. Beyond it waited the rain—and a narrow, muddy, deserted street.

“A man could run as fast as we are riding,” Tumanov, observed. “Jump, then let yourself roll to a stop and you won’t get hurt.”

Skinner stood poised for a moment, then pitched himself out of the truck. He hit hard, tumbled, rolled over, struck his head against the cobbles. Voices yelled, the truck screeched to a stop, heavy boots pounded back along the cobblestones.

Tumanov helped him to his feet, shook him. “Umm-m, nasty cut on your head. Run, Comrade! Some fool let it be known that we… departed. The guards come now—”

Skinner looked down the street, saw two soldiers some fifty paces away, running for them. One of the Reds held a rifle in his hands, but he made no attempt to use it. Apparently they wanted the prisoners alive for whatever purpose they’d been taken in the first place.

SKINNER ran after Tumanov, crossed the street and plunged into a sliver of an alley which squirmed its way between two houses. Water cascaded down upon them from the eaves, and more than once Skinner stumbled and fell in the oozing mud underfoot. Sure-footed, Tumanov growled over the delay, but always he waited.

They emerged on another street much like the first with its row after row of frame, houses, but Skinner didn’t have time to look. He heard the soldiers pushing through the narrow passageway with much banging and cursing, and then Tumanov grabbed his arm in a grasp of steel and pulled him along.

The old Cossack knew the city like a rat knows its burrows, darting through alleys which Skinner failed to see until’ they started through them, leading a wild chase up the twisting side streets, trotting boldly over broad plazas and pushing his way insolently through crowds of passersby who carried on their business in spite of the rain. Skinner, who considered himself in top physical condition, found it hard to keep up with the Cossack, for all his sixty-odd years. It almost appeared that the old man moved lazily, clumsily, his long legs pounding against the cobbles heavily, but Skinner discovered that those great loping strides ate up distance.

Skinner’s breath came in rapid gasps, his vision blurred, his head still whirled from the fall. When Tuman Tumanov sauntered casually out upon a wide avenue, even stopping to peer into a shop window and observe the pretty trinkets which were not for sale unless you belonged to the Party, Skinner paused to wipe the blood off his forehead. “You—think—we’re clear of—them?” he panted.

“I know we are,” Tumanov said, smiling. “Although I was born in the Crimea, I know my Moscow, Comrade Nikolay. We have lost them.”

“Well, can they check on us in any way?”

“How? You tell me how. We went through no classification at all, so, unless some soldier happens to recognize us, it is as if we never had been there. Apparently classification would have taken place when the truck reached its destination. But without us, eh?” Tumanov grinned, broadly, and a chuckle surfaced from deep down in his belly. “Is it goodbye, then, Comrade Nikolay, after such a pleasant little interlude? I can just see their faces after they get lost in one of those alleys!”

Skinner looked at the man earnestly. “I have no place to go, Tuman. I’d cast my lot with you, if you’ll have me. Especially if it means meeting people who know that countersign you tried to get from me.”

“It sure could mean that,” Tumanov admitted. “But first for a samovar of good hot tea to warm the bones.”

He led Skinner into a restaurant, humming Meadowlands in his deep, booming voice.

CHAPTER III

“JUST WHO are you?” Tumanov demanded, after the tea had been served.

Skinner shrugged. “In Poland recently I asked a girl of Pinsk why her people dwell in the Pripet—”

“By Peter, then! You are a member of the Polish underground!”

Skinner shrugged. “I didn’t say that. I might be. But I didn’t say. Why don’t you let it go at that, Tumanov? If you oppose the regime, as I think you do, why not merely say I am on your side?”

“Nikolay Mironov of Tula, eh? What’s the main street of Tula?”

“Lenin Avenue. They used to call it Trotsky Avenue, before what happened in Mexico—”

“All right. And who heads the Tula Soviet?”

“Search me. I haven’t been, in Tula since before the war.”

“Who—never mind! You have your answers ready. Comrade Nikolay, I can see that. Still I would like a dozen kopek for every mile between Tula and where you really come from.”

A waiter brought pipes and a pouch of what the Germans would have called ersatz tobacco, and selecting his own, Skinner gave the man half a dozen kopek. He tamped the bowl full, lit up, then said to Tumanov: “Wherever I came from, I am here in Moscow for a purpose.”

“Aren’t we all! What is yours, Nikolay?”

“The government has ceased to worry its head about the manufacture of atomic weapons. Why?”

“Ahh,” Tumanov sighed, “that is indeed a good question. We of the underground would like to know the same thing in order to pass it along through the proper channels. But all we hear are wild-eyed rumors. Thus-and-so is happening beyond the Ural Mountains, thus-and-so has struck the mining regions in the Erz, Commissar Beria has decided thus-and-so….”

“In other words, you don’t know.”

“Correct. We’ll find out one day, I think. But then it might be too late for the Americans, for the British, for the French—for everyone else. Of one thing I am sure, Nikolay: something strange occurred in the Urals, maybe east of the Urals, on the steppes of Siberia where already the Winter winds are howling. It is something which can shatter the current balance of power in the world. But don’t ask me what, because I don’t know. I think maybe that truck-load of laborers are now on the first leg of a journey which will take them east of the Urals, for there are rumors that masses of equipment must be moved here to Moscow before the Winter snows make the roads impassable. Do I make sense?”

“Uh-huh. Go on.”

“There’s no place else to go. That’s all I know. We have workers who even now try to extract the information. Workers who—Nikolay, why don’t you join us? Together, perhaps…”

Skinner emptied his pipe in a large bronze ashtray, placed the pipe down on the table, stood up. “Lead on,” he said, smiling. He thanked the fates which had brought him together with this great gangling creature, Tuman Tumanov. Awful, rough sledding here in Moscow without him….

SONYA DOLOHOV extended her hand and Skinner took it, shaking hands with the girl eagerly. “So you’re the underground leader here in Moscow?”

A very beautiful woman, she smiled almost languidly. “No one said that.”

“I say it. We had to pass along more signs and countersigns to get to you than I knew existed.”

The girl shrugged. her shoulders. “We’ll let that pass. Tuman, you said he wanted to join us?”

“That is what I said, Sonya.”

“I take it then that you vouch for him?”

“Yes.”

“Who recommended him to you?”

“No one. I merely met him in a labor truck, and—”

“Fool!” Sonya backed away as if she had been struck. “One day your impetuosity will get us all into trouble. What do you know of this man?”

“Why, nothing.”

Skinner knew this would be different, not like a buxom peasant lass in Poland at all. And certainly he couldn’t expect to work alone in Moscow. He started to say something, but the girl raised her hand for silence.

“Your name is Mironov, eh? Where are you from, Mironov?”

Tumanov said, “Tula, he says.”

“Will you let him talk?”

Wordless, Skinner showed his papers.

“Then it is Tula, eh Mironov?”

“No, but thoses forgeries would fool everyone from the Secret Police to the Underground, I see.”

“All right, then, where are you from?”

“A week ago I walked the streets of another national capital—Washington D.C.”

“Washington!” This was Tumanov.

Sonya seemed unimpressed. “I heard him. He said Washington, but can he prove it?”

“No,” said Skinner, “not really. I wouldn’t make much of a Secret Agent if I carried a little badge which said U.S.A., would I?” He unbuttoned his shirt, reached into the holster and withdrew his .45. He handed it to Sonya. “Does this look Russian?”

“N-no. I can read a little English. It says ‘Colt .45.’ Colt, an American gun, true enough. What’s your real name, Mironov?”

“Nick Skinner. But don’t call me that—get into the habit, it’s Nikolay Mironov.”

“Umm-mm,” Sonya mused. “An American gun, and when asked his name he didn’t offer something stereotyped like Smith or Jones…. Very well, Mironov. I have made up my mind.”

SKINNER waited, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He looked at Tumanov, but the old man stared back at him helplessly. Whatever the decision, then, it was the girl’s to make and if negative, she might decide to do with him what Natasha had done with the Red soldier.

“You have more ammunition?” Sonya demanded.

Skinner nodded.

“Give it to me.”

Wordless, he unbuttoned his shirt all the way, removed the two cartridge belts, placed them on a table.

The girl opened his .45 removed all the shells but one from the cylinder. “Here,” she said, handing him the weapon. “Twirl it.”

He spun the cylinder, waited.

“What would you do if I asked you to play a little game of Russian roulette to show your good intentions, Mironov?”

A nice game, Russian roulette, Skinner thought. A lovely game. You took a gun with only one bullet, twirled the cylinder, placed the snout against your temple and pulled the trigger. The odds were distinctly in your favor, but odds have been known to go awry.

Skinnier toyed idly with his pistol. “I’d tell you to go to hell. I’m not going to do anything like that to satisfy your damned vanity.”

She smiled. “All right. I wasn’t going to ask you.”

Tumanov eased his lanky frame against a wall, giving vent to a loud sigh.

Then the girl spoke again: “Everything appears to be in your favor, Mironov. I think an M.V.D. operative from Lubianka Street, acting without the initiative of a Westerner, would have accepted the game, taking his chances with Russian roulette. Wait, let me finish. That still doesn’t mean I accept you for what you declare yourself. Then I’d play the part of the buffoon, don’t you think?

“I offer an alternative, Mironov. We give you a job to do, you do it. Then—we’ll see. How does that sound?”

“I have my own work. I didn’t come here on any sight-seeing tour. But I guess if that’s whit you want, that’s what I do.”

“Good. Sleep here, tonight if you like. Tumanov has his quarters downstairs, and I’m sure he’ll have a bed for you. Tomorrow, precisely at noon, an M.V.D. courier will cross Lunatcharsky Square, on his way to Lubianka Street. He will carry a briefcase, Mironov. You will bring me that briefcase.”

Skinner nodded grimly, reached for his cartridge belts.

“Wait,” Sonya told him. “Forget about those. Leave your gun behind as well. If they catch you, those things won’t make you look much like Nikolay Mironov of Tula, will they? Tumanov will give you a knife. Tumanov loves his knives, and he has a wonderful collection. Good night.”

After the girl left through an inner door, Turnanov set a samovar to boil on the stove. “Smile, my friend,” he said. “For a moment I thought she would have you killed.”

Skinner frowned. “How did she know about the courier?”

“A remarkable woman, Sonya. Sometimes she lets the men of Lubianka Street make love to her, and you’d be amazed how they talk. Ahh, the tea is boiling!”

NOON. Lunatcharsky Square with its crowds of people. A crisp, chill autumn day which both remembered summer and foretold winter.

At eleven-fifty-nine, Skinner had arisen from his bench, crossing the Square to where Lubianka Street enters it, waiting there with Tumanov’s knife taped under his shirt against his chest. Noon….

The courier strode briskly through the Square, looking neither to right or left, but straight ahead, his uniform neat, the brass buttons polished, the holster hanging freely at his side. In his left hand he carried a bulging brown briefcase, swinging it carelessly with the motions of his stride. He brushed past Skinner close enough to reach out and touch him. But Skinner did the reaching out.

He grabbed the courier’s shoulder, spun him around, pulled the knife free of its tape at the same time, hiding it in the crook of his arm from anyone who might pass. “Smile,” he said. “Smile or I’ll slit your throat.”

The courier smiled.

“Now, keep smiling.” A man and a woman walked by, wheeling a baby carriage. “Beautiful day, isn’t it, Josef?” Skinner asked the courier, pricking the man’s chest just above his heart, with the knife.

“Q-quite beautiful. Comrade.”

“I see you’re on time, Josef. Thank you. Now, please give me the briefcase and your holster.”

“Yes, Comrade,” said the courier, unfastening the holster and giving it to Skinner.

“Now, the briefcase…”

The man started to comply, but suddenly he swung the briefcase around from his left side. It gathered momentum, struck Skinner’s face squarely, staggering him. He heard the knife clatter to the sidewalk, juggled the holster for a moment trying to remove the pistol.

Something pile-drived against his stomach, forcing all the air from his lungs. He doubled over, half-aware of a curious crowd gathering. Then he fell.

He still clutched the holster, tore the gun from it now, rolled over. A booted foot stamped down, the heel crushing his wrist against the sidewalk, pinning it there helplessly and throwing the pistol from his fingers.

He scrambled away on his hands and knees, tried to rise, but a wave of nausea rolled up from his stomach, bringing a reeling, spinning sensation to his head. The courier kicked out with his foot again, and Skinner tried to ward off the blow. Partially, his forearm deflected it, but the square toe of the boot crashed against his jaw, its force hardly diminished. He flipped halfway over, then fell on his face.

Something pounded against his head—hard blows which pushed his bloody face down on the sidewalk. The noise of the crowd found a hole and buried itself, and all Skinner heard, until he heard nothing, was the ringing in his ears….

“GOOD AFTERNOON, Colonel Rashevsky.”

“My Commissar looks cheerful.”

“Indeed I am, Boris. Indeed I am.” Laurenti Beria lit a cigarette, twisting his lips to let the smoke out through a corner, of his mouth. “Vishinsky informs me that the foreign office nears completion of its work with Project X.”

“Satisfactory completion, my Commissar?”

“Yes. It believes everything Vishinsky and his crew have told it. How can it doubt, not having any other criteria on which to base its judgment?”

“Is it ready to cooperate?”

“I would say so. I very definitely would say so. It is developing a fast hatred for the Western world.”

Rashevsky licked his thick lips. “Then what remains?”

“Nothing much. We must next convince it to use its tremendous scientific powers against the West, to rid the world of evil and make us ready for a new era. That will be comparatively simple, now that the first task nears its successful end. Rashevsky, you will find some vodka in the top drawer of my desk. I think this calls, for a celebration. Careful, careful, you’ll upset the flowers. Yes, in that drawer…”

Rashevsky opened the drawer, removed the half-full bottle and two glasses. At that moment, a phone rang. Beria crossed to the desk, picked up the receiver. “Yes? Oh.” He held his hand over the mouthpiece. “It’s for you, Boris.”

“For me? Hello. Yes, this is Colonel Rashevsky. What? Is that so? Is that so? Of course. Naturally. I’ll be right down.”

“Well?” Beria demanded.

“Urgent,” Rashevsky said, opening the door, “An as yet unidentified man attempted to waylay our courier as he crossed the Square. You know, Commissar, the courier who was bringing the written transcript of your talk with the Foreign Office?”

“Did they kill the man?”

“No,” Rashevsky growled, rubbing his hands together, “Better yet. They’ve captured him. He’s in the detention room right now.”

“Fine. Fine! Be gentle, Boris, but be persuasive. If you have any trouble, feel free to call on me. Perhaps you can forget all about Sonya Dolohov. Perhaps we begin to crack the Underground right now.”

Rashevsky grunted thank you under his breath. He’d make up for his feelings of guilt with this Underground agent who waited in the detention room. Sometimes, Boris, he thought, you talk too much. If you hadn’t told Sonya how swiftly the M.V.D. can work, if you hadn’t demonstrated with the courier who would cross Lunatcharsky Square, this would not have happened. He smiled, remembering the glorious evening, remembering Sonya’s lovely white skin, her languid smile, her kisses. Well, as it turned out, no harm had been done, and it was worth it….

“YOU, GET up!”

A soldier prodded Skinner to his feet, gave him a glass of water which he drank gratefully,

A huge, heavy-set man with a bull neck and sensuous face entered the room, his uniform thoroughly be-medaled. Said the soldier: “This is Colonel Rashevsky. You will answer his questions, Comrade.”

Rashevsky! Skinner almost choked on his water. These Russians believed in going whole-hog at the drop of a hat. In the Pentagon, Rashevsky was known as the number two man of the M.V.D., right behind Laurenti Beria himself.

“Gently,” Colonel Rashevsky, chided in his booming voice. “Gently. Would you like to leave Lubianka Street alive, Comrade?”

“I don’t blame you. I—bah!” Abruptly, Rashevsky knocked the glass of water from Skinner’s hand, grabbed the American’s shirt up high near his throat and tugged. “I like this way better, much better. You’ll talk—or—”

Someone entered the room, a smaller man, dark, swarthy, rather handsome.

“Ah, Boris,” he shook his head sadly. “I followed you because I suspected something like this would happen. What do you think we are, the old Nazi Gestapo? Primitive barbarians?”

For all its strength, Rashevsky’s booming voice was fawning. “I tried, my Commissar. Really I did. I started in the prescribed way. ‘Would you like to leave Lubianka Street alive?’ I said. But I thought—”

“You thought! Truly, Boris, why don’t you leave that to me? Here, I tell you what. You may sit and watch while I demonstrate the proper technique on this frightened young man here. But I’m a busy man, Boris, and I will give you this one demonstration only.”

FRIGHTENED young man—yes! Skinner felt like hell, weak, dizzy, his face swollen and bloody. On top of that, he’d had one minute with Colonel Rashevsky of the M.V.D. But Rashevsky rapidly assumed the role of a mere hatchetman. In his place now, enigmatic Laurenti Beria. Molotov, they told you in Washington, might be a yes-man for Stalin. Vishihsky, the same. But not Beria. Beria had a mind of his own, and Beria was the second most dangerous man in Moscow, if not the first….

“…Comrade,” Beria was saying, “what my aide started to say was true. Despite what you hear, you can leave this building alive. How does that sound to you?”

“It sounds fine.”

“What’s your name, young man?”

“Mironov, Nikolay. Here are my papers—”

“I don’t have to see your papers. I believe you know your name. Where are you from?”

“Tula.”

“Tula—a beautiful little city! What brought you to Moscow?”

“Work. I sought work.”

“Did you find it?”

“Yes—no!”

“That’s an interesting answer. Did you find it?”

“Yes. A man said he would pay me a hundred rubles if I took him that briefcase.”

“What man?”

“I don’t know.”

“Didn’t he have a name?”

“He failed to tell me.”

“You’re lying.”

“He failed, to tell me.”

“Where did you say you’d meet her?”

“Not her. Him. A man, like I said.”

“My mistake. Where?”

“In Lunatcharsky Square. On a bench.”

“Near the fountain?”

“Yes, near the fountain.”

“Strange, there’s no fountain in the Square. What fountain did you have in mind?”

“No fountain. Just in the Square.”

“When?”

“12:15.”

“A shame. The tune is long past. What did they look like?”

“Who?”

“The men.”

“One man, just-one. Short, heavy, nondescript.”

“Nondescript, I see. Did you know the contents of the briefcase?”

“No.”

“Their point of origin?”

“No.”

“Where was it being taken?”

“I wasn’t told.”

“Do you know what treason is?”

“Of course I know.”

“And what you did—was that treason do you think?”

“You tell me.”

“You’re no fool, Mironov. It was treason. Now, did the man have a name?”

“I said no.”

“Where were you educated, Mironov?”

“In Tula.”

“At the University?”

“Yes. At the University.”

“Peculiar. Tula has no University. What did you study at this University which doesn’t exist, Nihilism?”

“I…”

“Let me see’ your papers now.”

Beria lit a cigarette, blew smoke in Skinner’s face. “Umm-mm. Tula, all right. Why did you say at the University?”

“I thought you’d like me better if I was educated.”

“Why are you free to travel in Russia and Poland?”

“I’m a transient laborer.”

“I can read. Why? What can you do?”

“A—lot of things. They gave me the visa in Tula.”

Beria took the knife from a guard. “I take it this was yours.”

“Yes.”

“Where did you get it?”

“The man gave it to me.”

“Why did you agree to his proposition?”

“Money. I needed money.”

“What did he look like?”

“You asked me that.”

“What did he look like?”

“Short, heavy—”

“I know. Nondescript. Do you know who I am?”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“Do you know?”

“I think you are Commissar Beria.”

“Beria, that is who I am. I will talk with you again, Mironov. Guards, take him to Quarters C, please.”

Beria was speaking in earnest whispers with Colonel Rashevsky when they led Skinner from the room.

“TUMAN! Tuman, you idiot! You see, Mironov did not return.”

“Perhaps he’s been caught.”

“I doubt it.” Sonya paced back and forth for a moment, then put her coat on. “Tuman, this could mean trouble. If he works for the M.V.D. he knows who we are. I will have to warn our—no! I might be followed. Tuman, you’ve made a mess of things.”

The old man sipped his tea noisily. “I still don’t think so, Sonya. I believe Mironov told the truth. I believe they have him in Lubianka Street even now, if he’s alive. I intend to find out.”

“Ridiculous, Tuman! But if you insist, I have a better way. When Rashevsky calls, I will permit him to take me out. Men, bah! After I speak with Rashevsky, I’ll find out just how wrong you are.”

“Or right,” said Tumanov, sipping his tea.

CHAPTER IV

SILENCE and madness.

Quarters C.

Black, black, black…

Interminably.

Suddenly, light. Blinding, stabbing agony lancing in through dilated pupils, cutting into the brain, wrenching a scream from the lips.

Laughter. His own? Skinner didn’t know.

Then silence again.

Food. A bowl of slops from somewhere.

Thud! A crashing sound, every three seconds. Outside his cell at first, theft within it. Outside his head, then within. Thud, thud, thud…

Silence.

Silence.

SCREAMING SILENCE!

Damp seeping in, and cold. The damp froze, solidified. The clammy sweat on Skinner’s flesh turned to ice. Cold. Almost too cold to move. But you had to move, because if you stood still the cold would get out, and you never would move again. Stamp back and forth. Five paces forward, five to the rear. Beat your chest. Work your fingers. Slap your face against the cold.

Another bowl of slops, frozen slops. Suck the ice and it will melt into an odious slush which you can eat. If you can stop trembling long enough to eat.

To survive, the human body can acclimate itself to outrageous temperature changes. Skinner’s did. But not necessarily subtle, the Russian torture-chamber is unique in its thoroughness.

Skinner got so he could laugh at the cold. He laughed.

It grew hot. Not slowly, for Skinner hardly remembered that vague midpoint where mounting heat returned the room to normal. Heat merely encroached, at once, and the cold was gone. Broiling, roasting heat took its place.

Moisture evaporated. Lips cracked. Skin parched, blistered. Sweat failed to come. Eyes burned shut. Breathing became an impossible effort.

Cold again. Hot. Cold…

Then normal. Cheery light. Glowing dully at first, easing Skinner’s eyes back into the visible spectrum. More light, bright, invigorating.

A table. And food. Delicacies, heaped one on the other in attractive dishes. Caviar, black and red. Champagne. Crisp roast fowl. All the trimmings.

Taste them. Taste—

Spit and retch…

Champagne like dishwater. Worse than dishwater. Bicarbonate-flavored caviar.

Dark silence and another bowl of slops. Dark silence forever, and the slops periodically. Wait for something to happen. Something horrible will happen.

Nothing happened, and that’s worse.

Dark and silence and slops.

The M.V.D. had all the time in the world….

AFTER THREE weeks a doctor examined Skinner, shook his head in amazement, permitted them to take him, shaking and afraid, from Quarters C to a bright upstairs room.

“Ah, Mironov,” Laurenti Beria said. “How do you feel?”

“Uhh.”

“Did you ever, play a little game when you were young, Mironov? Associating ideas? I name something, you counter with the first word which comes to your mind. Shall we begin? Red. ”

“Color.”

“Communist.”

“Trotsky.” Hah, the Communist they hate.

“Square.”

“Lunatcharsky.”

“Remember.”

“Forget.”

“Briefcase.” Beria smiled, lit a cigarette.

“Courier.”

“Knife.”

“Tuma—blade! “ Careful, Skinner…

“Knife.”

“Blade.”

“Knife.”

“Blade, blade, blade—”

“Tuma.”

“Sound.”

“Tuman. Is it Tuman? Tuman who?”

“Name.” Skinner felt dizzy, but they stopped him when he tried to sit down.

“Sonya Fyodorovna Dolohov.”

“Name.” But how does he know? How does he know? Don’t let your heart jump so.

“Whose?”

“Woman.”

“Tuman and Sonya.”

“Man and woman.”

“Underground.”

“Subway.”

“Tula.”

“Mother.”

“Mironov.”

“Nikolay.”

Beria leaned forward, crushed out his cigarette. “America.”

“Country.” Why America? Coincidence?

“Iron Curtain.”

“Europe.”

“Stalin.”

“Tito.”

“Ah! Tito, eh? You would oppose Stalin, Mironov? Atomic Bomb.”

“Stop.”

“Project X.”

“The unknown quantity.”

“Confess.”

“Torture.”

“Confess.”

“Torture.”

“Confess?”

“Never! ”

Wearily, Beria stood up. “His mind is still sharp, don’t you think, Colonel Rashevsky?”

“Yes, my Commissar. Sharp.”

“UNFORTUNATELY, it may crack soon. Well, no matter. If we fail here, we have other ways. Take him below, Colonel.” After they had gone, Beria turned to the doctor, a small man with watery eyes and thick glasses. “Well?”

“You will notice that his mind is both keen and hostile. For Stalin his response is Tito—”

“Don’t be pedantic!” Beria snorted. “More important than that, my dear doctor, is the fact that he responded to ‘atomic’ bomb’ with the word ‘stop’. Apparently, he knows something, eh? But we drew a blank, with Project X. I’d like to keep Mironov around long enough to find out just what, if anything, he knows of Project X. Do you think, ‘unknown quantity’ might have been a calculated, rational answer?”

“It might indeed have been that, Commissar.”

“Could you be more definite?”

“If the Commissar desires—”

“No, no! I want your professional opinion, not an echo of my own thoughts.”

“Well, it is impossible to tell. If I had to render a verdict, all I could say is perhaps.”

“Perhaps! That’s most helpful. Very well, doctor, you’re dismissed.”

As the medical man shuffled from the room, Boris Rashevsky returned, lit a big cigar, waited for Beria to speak.

“Boris, how is the Polish investigation progressing?”

“Better than we could have hoped. The soldier Svidrigailov did not die. From his oral description, pictures have been drawn, and we’re circulating them in Pinsk now. Some day soon the woman should be found.”

“I hope so,” Beria said, leafing idly through some papers on his desk.

SKINNER was dumbfounded. They gave him a living room, a bedroom, a bath. All the good food he wanted, anything. They let him write his own menu each morning, brought him the food three times a day, excellently prepared. They encouraged reading, stacked the room with hundreds of books. Music was piped in somehow through the walls, and not all of it was the new Communist art which had replaced the accepted—and Capitalistic—forms with its own shallow, one-track theme.

Surprised or not, at first Skinner slunk around his quarters fearfully, expecting calamity to drop upon him at any moment in some new, and more hideous, form of torture.

It failed to materialize.

It was snowing everywhere except in Red Square, where the sunlight shed a golden radiance

Four days, five, then a week. Skinner gained back the weight he had lost. Suspicion and fear faded away slowly. Confidence returned to his stride, to his eyes, to his thoughts, After two weeks he found himself humming along with the music, reading avidly the books they supplied—not all Communist dogma, either.

Once on the fifteenth day a phone in the living room rang, and Skinner picked up the receiver doubtfully. His doubts faded. A girl’s voice, pleasant, sweet, cultured. She spoke with him about the city of Tula, a warped conversation about the city, magnifying, its beauty, its points of interest, its charm, minimizing what the Communist regime had done there. Skinner’s answers were always vague—he had never been closer to Tula than he was at the present moment!

But each day the girl would call, and slowly Skinner grew homesick for the city he had never seen. Its streets its trees, the crystal streams which gurgled in its parks…

On the thirty-first day—Skinner kept his record carefully on a little scratch-pad they had given him—the girl did not call. A day later, the music stopped. Uniformed men came in and carted out, Skinner’s books. Others came and took the furniture, piece by piece, locking off the bedroom and the bath and leaving Skinner in the now-bare cubicle which had been, the living room.

He failed to get his dinner that night. And soon after, the lights in his underground vault faded, leaving him in darkness. He’d come to accept that, for they’d turned the lights off every night, the lights which were recessed in niches high up near the ceiling.

WHEN SKINNER awoke, it was still dark. It remained, dark. Pitch-black—and silent….

He tried to accept it with a Stoic calm. But he thought, over and over again: They tricked rne. They gave me everything, made me soft, then plunged me back into this! The intensity of his thoughts, and his hatred, bordered on hysteria, but he could not check them.

The phone rang.

Of all the furniture that alone they’d left in the room, some place on the floor. On hands and knees Skinner groped for it, found it, placed the receiver at his ear with trembling fingers. Silence.

He placed the receiver back on its cradle in the darkness.

The phone rang.

He picked it up.

Silence.

Keep it off the hook—

It rang anyway.

“Hello? Hello? HELLO!”

Silence.

He smiled, picked up the phone, fondled it for a moment when he remembered the nice girl’s voice which had spoken of Tula. Then he hurled the instrument at the wall, heard it strike, clatter to the floor.

It went right on ringing.

He lifted it, hurled it again. Still again, heard it shatter.

He sobbed foolishly when it stopped ringing. He sat in the center of the floor, gazing sightlessly into darkness, listening for anything, anything but the utter silence. He wished he hadn’t destroyed the phone, wished it could ring again.

Silence.

COME SMALL corner of his mind remained rational, knew he could not take much of the treatment this time without cracking. Only a few hours, it could not have been more than that, for they hadn’t brought his bowl of slops. And yet he felt his mind slipping, slipping….

The lights flashed on brightly. The door opened, swung in. Two guards came, lifted him to his feet. Sobbing, he pushed their hands away, stood up straight, marched out of the vault between them. An elevator, going up. A polished corridor, a flight of stairs. A familiar room, a suave, handsome face which Skinner had grown to hate—Laurenti Beria.

“Something came up which made me forget all about the schedule mapped out for you, Mironov. I think you will agree that you’re lucky.”

“Yes, I’m lucky.”

“We’re efficient here, Mironov. Quite efficient. I think our efficiency would surprise even you, and from what I’ve recently been led to believe, you’ve had intensive training. No, don’t answer. You’ll see what I mean in a moment. Colonel Rashevsky?”

Rashevsky poked his big head in from another room. “Yes, My Commissar?”

“You will bring in the woman now.”

Rashevsky entered the room briskly for all his great bulk, dragging behind him a creature which once had been a young woman. She hardly looked it now. Instead, Skinner saw a gaunt, trembling bag of bones with dirty, loose-hanging yellow skin, flaming cheeks, dull, sullen eyes, disheveled hair, an unsteady, faltering gait. She waited, halting in Rashevsky’s wake, her dull eyes riveted to the floor.

Beria smiled. “You know this woman, Nikolay Mironov?”

Skinner shook his head. “I never saw her before in my life.”

“Boris, you will elevate the woman’s face, please.”

Rashevsky prodded her chin, raised her head, got her glance off the floor.

“Miss Palowski,” said Beria, “do you know this man?”

The sullen eyes flickered, stared at Skinner. The woman grunted as her eyelids blinked shut.

“You know him?”

“I know him.”

“Who is he?”

“He calls himself Nikolay Mironov. He kissed me once, did you know that he kissed me? Oh yes, he did.”

“I don’t get it,” Skinner persisted.

“You will. Her name is Palowski—Natasha Palowski.”

NATASHA! This—Natasha? A broken, haggard, skinny wreck of a woman, the buxom Polish lass who, a couple of months ago, had led Skinner through the Pripet Marshes to the Russian frontier?

“I assure you,” said Beria, “this is Natasha Palowski. Subjected to the treatment with which you now are familiar, she did not prove quite so strong. Two weeks, and she crumpled. Utterly. You see, Mironov, we’ve patched together the entire story. A valiant youth of the Red Army, who now is convalescing in a Polish hospital, survived this woman’s murderous attack. A trader going from Lunniec to Pinsk found him, brought him in. The soldier described your girlfriend here, and it wasn’t too difficult to trace her.

“But you, Mironov—you are what intrigues me now. A parachute in the Pripet marshes, a man who speaks Great Russian like a native but who has never before set foot inside our frontier…”

“He is American,” Natasha said, sotto voce. “Did you know that I was kissed by an American?”

“Yes,” Beria repeated quietly.

“American. The parachute was of American manufacture, Mironov. Surely you’ll talk now? More conditioning would be so pointless—”

“What will you do with the girl?”

“Do with her? What can we do with her? Her mind is hopelessly shattered. She’d be a waste to the State. We’ll kill her, of course. Painlessly. Colonel Rashevsky, will you be good enough to take her out and have her shipped to the proper disposal unit? There’s no place here on, Lubianka Street for that….”

During his first long period of confinement, Skinner’s mind had filled with hatred, such stark, cold hatred as he never had known before. But he’d had no place to release it, and the emotion worked like a backlash, got all muddled up and produced hysteria. Now it could be different, now even as he ranted Skinner almost could feel a safety valve letting off necessary steam.

“You filthy, Godless bastard!” he cried. “You contemptible, stinking slime! You—”

RASHEVSKY ran back into the room after” giving Natasha over to some guards. He charged at Skinner, struck his face with stinging open-palm blows. Right, left, right—

Skinner took it for a while. Then he bellowed, ducking in under the wild swings and planting his right fist in Rashevsky’s ponderous belly. The man let out a loud groan as his face turned purple. He began to fall.

Skinner felt better all the time. Sometimes it could work like that. Maybe a few weeks in the hospital, a few months convalescing at some quiet, peaceful place might have returned him to normal. But there was another way, this way. His body needed no healing; the second phase of Beria’s treatment already had supplied that. His mind, then—and his complete loathing for Beria and what he stood for, his opportunity to turn that loathing into action, these were medicine no hospital staff could duplicate.

Skinner did not permit Rashevsky’s body to sag to the floor. He caught the huge man under his armpits, spun him around, held him up against the edge of a desk. With his free hand he tore Rashevsky’s pistol from its holster. “Sit right where you are, Beria,” he said, “or I’ll kill this man.”

Smiling, Beria shrugged. “I assure you, he is replaceable. Go ahead, kill him if it will make you happy. You still won’t get out of here. But I am surprised at Colonel Rashevsky, really surprised.”

From the doorway, a guard peered into the room. Skinner snapped off a shot, but the bullet plowed harmlessly into the wall and the guard ducked out of sight.

“He’ll be back,” Beria promised softly.

From somewhere, an alarm bell clanged loudly. In a moment. Skinner heard the grating of machinery. A thick slab of steel slid down from the ceiling, clanked against the floor, cutting off the doorway.

“You see,” said Beria, “you’re trapped.”

“So are you.”

SKINNER let Rashevsky fall. When the man began to squirm around on the floor, Skinner bent over him, applying the butt of the pistol quite unemotionally to his skull. Rashevsky groaned again and was still.

A buzzer sounded on Beria’s desk.

“My phone,” he said.

“Go ahead, answer it.”

“Hello? Yes, yes. Of course. Hold on—”

“What is it?” -

“This building is sectioned off into steel compartments. We’re in one now, Mironov. Do you mind if I call you Mironov, not knowing your real name?”

Damn the man—he was all iron nerves and composure!

“As I was saying, we’re blocked off. They want to know if they should fill the chamber with tear-gas.”

“It’ll get you too.”

“My dear Mironov, don’t you think I know that? Tear gas never killed anyone. But it will, render you quite harmless, and—”

“Tell them that at the first trace of tear gas I’ll put a bullet through you.”

Beria paled slightly, spoke into the phone.

Skinner grunted, said, “Now tell them this! I’m going to take Rashevsky’s belt and tie your hands behind your back. I’m going to walk out of this room with you in front of me. Oh, they can get me from behind, I know that. But they won’t kill me so quickly that I won’t have time to take you with me. Is that clear? Tell them to give me thirty seconds, then to remove that steel door. Tell them we’re coming outside. Tell them that if anyone out there makes a hostile move, I’ll also kill you. Go ahead, talk!”

Beria relayed the message into his phone muttered to Skinner: “You’ll never get away with it. Where in Moscow can we go?”

“You let me worry about that.”

Skinner removed, Rashevsky’s leather belt, worked deftly,and quickly with it, securing Beria’s hands behind his back, prodding him to his feet.

Again, the clanking of machinery. The metal door scraped on its runners, slid up into the ceiling.

Skinner pushed the chief of the M.V.D. ahead of him into the corridor.

UNIFORMED men stood all along their path in the corridor, grumbling among themselves. Once or twice they blocked the way, made threatening gestures, but Skinner prodded his captive ahead of him with the pistol. The little knots, of soldiers dispersed to let them through, but Skinner could almost feel the eyes boring into the small of his back, and more than once he expected the jarring impact of a bullet in one final flash of pain before he stopped feeling anything.

They took ah elevator down, and here again anything could happen. One flick of a switch and the soldiers could trap them helplessly in the shaft.

Nothing happened. The door slid soundlessly open on the ground floor, and the American stalked out into a big hall with Beria. More guards. Fifty. A hundred. Skinner let them see him flick the automatic off safety, then he headed for the door.

He opened it—and got a surprise.

Winds howled furiously through Lubianka Street, snow fell in great blinding flurries. The wind piled huge banks of it high against the brick walls. The Russian Winter…

Skinner gestured to a captain with his free hand. “You! Bring winter garments for two. Hurry!”

Beria yawned. “Just where do you think you can go? That snow is three feet deep.”

He couldn’t answer that one, Skinner knew. A car would not get far, sinking down to, its fenders in that fresh-fallen snow. On foot then? Where? He could Beria with him to Sonya and Tumanov, but then what? He’d leave a trail that any doddering old peasant could follow, let alone the M.V.D.

“Stop wracking your brain,” Beria advised him. “It is all so futile anyway. Mironov, if I were to tell you something, if I were to tell you what I believe you crossed our frontier to find out, you would then see what I mean.”

It sounded like a dodge. Beria might be grasping at straws to save his neck. Still…. Skinner shrugged.

“Go ahead, talk. But make it fast, because when that man comes back with our coats, we get the hell out of here.”

“Precisely at noon tomorrow,” Beria said, “the United States of Arrierica will be destroyed.”

CHAPTER V

SKINNER waved the man with the coats away. Suave Laurenti Beria had the poker face to end all poker faces, and the way he made that, statement, he might have, been talking about tomorrow’s weather. Something was cooking, all right. Something so big that Soviet production of atomic bombs had fallen by the wayside. But this bland statement…

“Go on. Keep talking.”

Beria smiled coolly. “Who said I wanted to tell you more?”

“I said. Unless you’d like to settle for a bullet instead. I don’t expect to get out of this alive, Beria, so I can kill you now as well as later.”

“Better make it now,” said Beria, “for I won’t talk.”

“You’d better! You—”

“You’re acting like a hysterical school girl, Mironov. Is that what they teach you in the American Secret Service? Don’t you think I know you won’t shoot me now? First, you need me to get out of here. Second, you would like to hear more of my story. Third—but must I go on?”

Wearily, Skinner shook his head, then motioned for the man to come forward with his winter garments.

TUMANOV pulled the fur collar up around his ears.

“Wait,” Sonya called to him. “It’s hopeless, Tuman. You just can’t walk down Lubianka Street, and—”

Tumanov shrugged boney shoulders under the great coat. “I have no choice. Your Colonel tells you they have Nick Skinner. Very well. If we find out what the Kremlin has up its sleeve, what better way to pass that information along to where it will be useful than through an, American agent? Even if we somehow did get across the frontier, assuming we found out what’s going on, who is to say that the Americans will believe us? Skinner they will believe. I will get Skinner.”

“Just like that. How, Tuman? How?”

“I will get him,” said Tumanov, pushing the door out against the fierce wind, “or I will die trying….”

SKINNER found it difficult climbing into the heavy garments while he kept his gun trained on Laurenti Beria. He faltered once or twice, almost dropped the weapon. He could see the Red Soldiers watching eagerly, if he made one slip, just one small slip, it would be his last…

Finally, it was done. He told the captain to open the big oak door, motioned Beria out through the portal ahead of him. The Russian Winter closed in….

Ten steps. Twenty. Pulling one booted foot out of the snow and pushing it forward. Still, the eerie feeling remained a bullet might crash into his back at any moment, putting an abrupt end to the whole wild adventure. Well, he would take Beria with him if they fired. Perhaps Beria, stalking through the snow ahead of him, had the same tingling sensation up and down his spine.

There in the snow ahead of them, a figure. Tall and thin even in the overcoat. So tall and so thin that it didn’t seem possible, and yet—

“Tuman! I’ll be damned! ”

“Tovaritch! Comrade! Comrade Nick…”

The old Cossack shuffled forward through the snow, a great grin spreading across his battered face like the spring thaw. He embraced Skinner with long, snake-like arms.

Beria grunted, started to bolt away. But Skinner pushed himself clear of the Cossack, cocking his pistol. “Hold on, Beria! Take one more step, and—”

The leader of the M.V.D. halted, turned and faced them.

Tumanov roared his laughter. “But this is rich! Not only do you escape, but you take Commissar Laurenti Beria with you. Comrade Nick, maybe there is something to this American way of life!”

Skinner smiled, “Can you get us away from here so that the M.V.D. won’t be able to follow?”

“Comrade, you insult me! I am a rat, a quick gray rat, and all Moscow is my burrow. Come, and you will see.”

Tumanov was as good, as his word. Half a block down, then a flight of stairs hidden in an alley, buried under snow. A dark, wet passageway. “Air-raid shelter from the late war,” Tumanov grunted, leading them.

Another alley, where you had to fight your way through the drifts of snow. Still another, and underground again. Tumanov must have had the eyes not of a rat, but of a cat.

Out into the snow once more. Shuffle along through it, knife your body into the wind. Down into a pit, through a tunnel, long and winding. Tumanov ahead, rapping on a door above his head. An answering knock, a loud squeaking, a shaft of light cutting down.

They clarnbered up a rickety ladder—and Sonya Fyodorovna Dolohov waited for them in a cozy living room. “You got him, Tumanov! I take it back, all back, Tuman! Men are wonderful, you big, handsome, grinning ape. And who? Oh, no! The prize catch of them all, Beria. Tuman, I love you passionately….”

“Please be quiet,” the Cossack grumbled. “I rescued no one, captured no one. Tovaritch Nick did all the work. I hope you have some tea ready. Yes? Splendid.”

“SO, SAID Skinner, starting on his third cup of strong dark tea, “that’s about it. Now it’s your turn, Beria. Tell them what you told me;”

“Simple. I merely said that tomorrow, precisely at noon, the United States of America will be destroyed.”

Sonya crossed to a cupboard, came back with pipes, gave one each to

Skinner and the Cossack. “We have heard rumors,” she said. “So many rumors. Yes, there is something new, something terrible. But we don’t know what. We have no idea—”

“You’ll not get it from me,” Beria said. “One way or the other, you will kill me, is it not so? So why should I talk?”

Tumanov grinned coldly. “Commissar Beria, I have heard of your refined tortures on Lubianka Street.” He shrugged. “They… have their value. But we Cossacks are more primitive. There is a sliver of burning wood under the fingernails, a beating on the soles of your feet, the slow application of heat to your eyes, a tearing of the ears, the leash of a wild pig attatched to your— But do I make myself clear? It is a question of how you would prefer to die.”

Tumanov went’ back to, sipping his tea noisily. Beria looked at him, paled. Smiling cheerfully, Tumanov got up, stretched, lit a fire on the stove. “I will talk,” Beria whispered. “What’s the difference? There isn’t a thing you can do anyway.”

Tumanov sighed his disappointment, but Skinner said the one word: “Talk.”

“You’re an American,” Beria said.

“You have read, the American news papers with their sporadic accounts of—what is it you call them?—flying saucers.”

*’Sure. Mass hysteria, probably.”

“Bah! You Americans make me laugh with your smugness. You can’t explain it and so you write it off as simply as that. Do you think we closed all our atomic factories because of mass hysteria? Do you also think that the American continent alone was visited by these… flying saucers? Do you?”

“Go on.” The man’s crazy, Skinner thought. And yet…

“One landed here, Mironov. East of the Ural Mountains. In it was a creature. Our science, yes, even the Soviet science, is as dust at its feet. Why not, Mironov? It is a vast universe. Far out in each direction, as far as our telescopes can see, horde after horde of galaxies, a hundred million stars in each. The creature gestures vaguely. It is from somewhere out there. We don’t know where. We don’t care!

“Earth, what is Earth? The prick of a pin on the carcass of an elephant. Less. A virus on the body of a bacterium on the leg of a flea. Do I make myself clear? The creature is from somewhere else, and it happens that its world is a million years further along the road of evolution than is our planet. Fission bombs, fusion bombs, nerve-gas, germ warfare—bah! What are these beside its science? The puny, stumbling, instinctive crying of a new-born babe! It has science, Mironov. Science….

“I have seen samples. I have—but no matter. It also has a cold hatred of evil, Mironov. Not emotional, that hatred goes beyond emotions. An intellectual hatred. We took it to Moscow, gave it over to the Cominform, the Foreign Office, my own M.V.D. We showed it the good life, the Russian life. We showed it motion pictures, read it speeches, fed it books. Then we demonstrated the evils of your decadent Western world.

“In short, the creature is indoctrinated. You are no fool, Mironov, and so I imagine you realize our tutelage was… shall we say a trifle biased? The creature believes—firmly, very firmly—that the West is bent on conquest, on enslavement, on destruction. Specifically, the United States. We have fed wood to the fire, have kindled the flames of its wrath.

“In short, Mironov, the creature which stepped out of a flying saucer in the Ural Mountains shall be on demonstration in Red Square tomorrow, shall stay there, unmoving, and shall, precisely at twelve o’clock noon, destroy the United States.”

THE FOLLOWING morning. Ten o’clock. Skinner imagined himself all the varieties of a gullible idiot rolled into one. A weird, impossible story, but they could not shake Berla away from it as much as one hair’s breadth. And so, cursing impotently, Skinner had left him with Sonya and Tumanov, had set out himself for Red Square.

Yes, Sonya had heard something about a mass meeting in Red Square, but wouldn’t they have to postpone it, with the show still falling? And true, there could be life elsewhere in the Universe. Surely everyone who’d seen a flying saucer in the past few years had not downed one drink too many.

Then, had Beria spoken truth? Skinner knew he’d be taking an unwise gamble if he concluded otherwise, still, what could he do? Inform the American Embassy, watch the courteous diplomats laugh him off politely? He doubted if they could get a message through, to Washington in time, anyway. Find the creature, if the creature existed, and let it know that the Cominform had fed it a bunch of lies? Sure, just like that—undoing in five minutes months’ of careful indoctrination!

Any way he turned, he found no solution. He might as well be batting his head against the Kremlin’s grim brick walls….

He received his first shock as he cut across Kerensky Street and into the Square which faced Lenin’s tomb. All about him, the snow came down, piling up in larger and larger drifts. But it wasn’t snowing in Red Square!

The ground: dry. The air: clear. A curtain of snow arid cold all around the Square, but not within it. And the huge expanse pulsed with a radiance more golden than sunlight, and more pleasant. Midsummer in Red Square, winter for the rest of Moscow.

Perhaps the Russians had made strides toward conquering the elements, perhaps they’d even travelled further in that direction than Western science. But as Skinner peeled off his overcoat and joined the noisy throngs in Red Square, he knew they could not have gone this far. The whole place smacked of an alien science, an alien world…

Laurenti Beria’s claims almost seemed modest!

On the balcony over Lenin’s tomb rested a platform—perhaps a hundred feet square and glossy black in color, an imposing slab of polished jet. From this the golden radiance seemed to emerge, leaping up in a million million tiny motes and creating a great canopy over all of Red Square.

ATOP THE platform rested—something.

Flying saucer, flying disc, spaceship—what did the name matter? The first man who had seen one of these things, back in 1947, had not called it a saucer at all; he’d merely declared that it moved with a saucer-like motion, spinning, scaling, perhaps like a flat rock thrown out over water. But the name had stuck. Skinner knew, and he remembered the vain effort of the Air-Material Command to track down one of the will-o’-the-wisp spacecraft.

This thing, on the jet platform atop Lenin’s tomb almost looked like a saucer! A big golden platter, thirty feet across and certainly no more than six or seven feet thick, with a raised bubble of what looked like glass bulging out from its upper surface.

Around the bubble stood several figures, but from this distance Skinner could not see them clearly. He pushed through the crowd, elbowing the dull-eyed, jostling workers from his path. Closer…

He recognized Stalin first, a small thick-set man whose military uniform failed to hide a generous paunch, whose moustache seemed in life larger than it did in pictures. To the dictator’s left stood plump Molotov, his bald head shining under the golden light, his spectacles reflecting the radiance and hiding his eyes. To Stalin’s right—Vishinsky, white-haired, nervous, fidgety. Grouped around them were a trio of lesser dignitaries, one of them wearing the uniform of a Field Marshal.

The crowd roared hysterically when Stalin raised his hand. More roaring and Stalin smiled, but with the big back moustache protruding down over his upper lip it looked like a leer. Finally the crowd settled back in silence, and scores of Red soldiers in the Square relaxed their grips on bayoneted rifles.

“CITIZENS of the People’s Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” Stalin said into a microphone, “we called you to assembly today, here around the tomb of our illustrious father, Lenin, to reveal a great thing we have fostered.”

The crowd roared.

“We have called down from the sky a friend of the People’s Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to help us in our plight. The decadent Western imperialistic capitalists push in on our land from all sides—”

Molotov initiated a hissing and booing. The whole mob hissed and booed.

“We don’t desire war. We never have desired war. We desire, instead, peace, like the peace our fine friends in China are bringing to their little neighbor, Korea. Or like the peace we ourselves have carried to the now happy countries of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, to the Baltic States, to—but we need not go on. We are sure you know our intentions.

“We have found a way to bring that peace to all the world. It will entail destruction for some millions of decadent, ruthless capitalistic barbarians who dwell in the dictatorship of the United States. We have learned that recently in the United States a high military tribunal from the Pentagon conducted an investigation of the Senators, the so-called ‘people’s representatives’. We have learned that this tribunal found thirty-seven Senators guilty of crimes against the State, that is, they spoke out in their frightened voices that the military dictatorship of the United States was conducting itself poorly. We have learned that, as a result, these thirty-seven poor representatives of the people were lined up against a wall of the Lincoln Memorial and shot. And every one of the millions who voted for them in a so-called ‘secret ballot’ was deprived of his home, of his automobile, of his food allotment, taken away from his wife and children and sent off to a concentration camp in another decadent nation called Canada.”

The people in the Square roared their indignation, and Skinner started to sweat. They believed this, they believed every word of it!

“But we stray from the subject. Our friend from the sky has made a study of the world, and he agrees with us. We can have peace—but we must first destroy the Dictatorship of the United States. Our friend from the sky, an impartial observer, can do this for us. We could, of course, do it for ourselves, but with the idea of peace so strong within our hearts, we could not bring ourselves to that. And thus our friend—although he is lofty in his ideals—is not a pacifist. He hence will destroy the Dictatorship of the United States at twelve o’clock noon today, or, in a very few minutes.”

Wild, frenzied roaring from the crowd.

Skinner craned his neck to see what was happening on the jet platform. The bubble atop the saucer trembled, shook, slid back. Something popped out. Two feet tall, emerald-green in color, two legs, four arms, wearing a jaunty red uniform, fashioned for him by the tailors of the Kremlin, no doubt. His face looked just like a man’s, and just as large, out of all proportion to his spindly body. Like a man’s eyes—but behind the eyes, somehow peering out through them, was a million years of wisdom. What fantastic science might lurk at those twenty tiny fingertips? Skinner did not know, but suddenly Beria’s words came back to him, and he believed. Yes, the creature could destroy the United States. And naive of everything here on Earth, believing the lies the Kremlin had dreamed up for him, he’d do it, too. He had to be stopped, and fast. But how?

Vishinsky barked into the microphone now, his raw, angry voice cut ting through the crowd like a knife. “You will observe around the Square a series of giant screens,” he said.

Skinner looked, and even as the Russian spoke, the screens seemed to slide up out of the pavement, huge shining things. Russian super-science? No! From alien space…

“On each screen you will see an air view of a city. The cities of the Dictatorship of the United States! At noon, the small black dots of people in the streets on those screens will be seen to fall in great bunches, to be destroyed while not one stone of the cities is harmed. How will this come about? As a leader of your glorious People’s Government, I can understand, naturally. But you will not be able to understand at all.

“It is sufficient to say that deadly cosmic radiation waits in space at all times, emanations called cosmic rays. What protects. the Earth from their bombardment is our atmosphere, and over each of these cities, precisely at noon, our friend from the sky will strip a path, a channel, through that atmosphere, allowing the cosmic rays to penetrate.

“In one instant, the tiny dots of people in those streets will be broiled to death by the deadly radiation. The world will be free!”

FASCINATED, Skinner stared at the screens. Pictures swam into view—huge, tri-dimensional, three-color television. Again, not Russian, but alien science!

New York on one screen. Times Square, bustling, alive. Skinner could almost read the news tape on the Times Building. Chicago, Michigan Avenue. The gleaming white Wrigley building. Washington. Pennsylvania Avenue, the mall.

New Orleans like a giant pinwheel with its crescent streets. San Francisco and the graceful span of the Golden Gate bridge. Los Angeles, sprawling, white, clean. Richmond, with the yellow trollies struggling up the hill to Main Street. Detroit, Philadelphia, Houston, Minneapolis, Boston…

All our major cities, every one of them. And the people in the streets, in their homes, unsuspecting. Late evening in the United States, perhaps one a.m. in New York, midnight in the Midwest, eleven o’clock further West—all the giant cities ablaze with light, the streets alive with moviegoers, with people strolling. Others—asleep for the night, tucked in the, security of their beds, little dreaming that destruction hovered overhead.

Even as he watched, Skinner knew that cosmic radiation could kill more efficiently and more thoroughly than atom bombs. Strip the atmosphere away momentarily, leave nothing to absorb the rays, and the results would be sheer hell.

Wildly, Skinner tore his gaze away from the screens and sought instead a large clock on the other side of the Square. Ten minutes to twelve! He found himself wondering if the wheels already had been set in motion. Perhaps now there was no way to avert catastrophe. Like a vast, sprawling time-bomb, alien science waited to atomic bombs. Strip the atmosphere above the American cities. Possibly, just possibly, the creature from space still had to activate his mechanisms—

Suddenly, a disturbance on the platform of jet. Another figure had joined the group, snow still melting on his coat. And that meant he’d just come into the golden area from outside, from where the winds of Winter brought snow to Moscow’s streets.

Skinner squinted, almost yelled out loud, Beria!

The M.V.D. man stood talking earnestly with Vishinksy, addressing an occasional remark to Stalin, nodding vigorously every time Molotov spoke.

Finally, Vishinsky turned to the microphone, said: “All soldiers in Red Square, please alert! We have reason to believe an American agent stands in the crowd. He is armed and dangerous. He is tall, broad of shoulders, with close-cropped black hair, prison style. His identification papers will read ‘Nikolay Mironov, a transient worker out of Tula’. Until he is found, the proceedings will be delayed…”

A BREAK, a way out? At least temporarily, Skinner knew, but certainly no more than that. Somehow, Beria had escaped from Sonya and Tumanov. But that didn’t matter. Skinner had to delay his capture, had to lose himself so thoroughly in the milling mob. that he’d, escape detection. It wouldn’t be easy.

All around him the Moscovites gazed suspiciously into one another’s faces. A few scattered fights started. Women screamed. That much Skinner liked, but he saw the Red soldiers stalking through the crowd efficiently, pulling all the tall dark men out and lining them up directly under the brick wall of the Kremlin. Skinner slouched down slumped his shoulders, stared at his feet.

An old woman, her face creased and toothless, cackled in his ear: “You’re tall and dark, eh? Aren’t you? Stop bending like that. There, I thought so! Are you the American?”

Skinner ducked off into the crowd and the old woman tried to follow, but she was cut off from him almost at once by a hundred pressing bodies. Someone else laid a heavy hand at the base of his neck, a big, ponderous peasant.

“Tall and dark-haired, huh? And maybe you speak English—” The man’s fetid breath reeked of decayed food, and Skinner stiff-armed his face away, pulling his hand back quickly when the peasant tried to bite him. Insane mob.

The soldiers came from all sides, observing, seeking. Skinner tried to slouch away, to scowl stupidly, to shuffle his feet like any one of a hundred tired peasants. But abruptly he came face to face with a soldier, and the Red grunted: “All right, Comrade, you fit the description. Come along.”

Holding him by an arm, the soldier led Skinner through the mob and over to the gaunt brick wall of the Kremlin, where he was deposited unceremoniously with a score or so of other men, all tall and dark. More came every moment, some laughing foolishly, others looking frightened. Half a dozen soldiers paced off the area, and the men stayed put.

Finally, after what seemed’ an interminable time and after several hundred men had joined the group at the foot of the brick wall, a squad of soldiers came hurrying through the Square, led by a swaggering, if slightly battered Boris Rashevsky, pushing people from their path, using rifle-butts when necessary.

Behind them, smiling arrogantly, walked Laurenti Beria.

CHAPTER VI

BERIA glanced briefly at each of the tall dark men, shook his head irritably. He started to smile again when he saw Skinner, and he said, quietly, “That’s the man. Search him for weapons, but do not hurt him. I want him alive.”

Skinner darted back toward the fringes of the mob, toward the eager sea of faces which stared at him, but someone stuck out a foot and tripped him. When he got up, crossed bayonets barred his path. Rashevsky slapped him smartly across the face, backhanded, and he reeled with the blow. The Colonel lumbered forward to give him more, but Beria stood between them. “That is quite enough, Boris,” he said. “You will get your chance later.”

They disarmed him, cleared a path through the crowd, led him out through it to the platform atop Lenin’s tomb. From all sides, the faces stared at him more with curiosity than with hatred, and even here in the heart of Soviet Russia, Skinner guessed that the masses felt something less than adoration for their rulers. But what did it matter? He’d failed miserably. The clock chimed the quarter hour. Fifteen minutes after twelve. He’d delayed them that long. For fifteen minutes. But the cosmic radiation which hovered over American cities was in no hurry,and when it acted, it would act instantly.

They took Skinner behind the platform to where a flight of wooden stairs climbed its side, and in another moment they ascended. Until they prodded him forward, until Rashevsky pushed him with a big ham of a hand, Skinner stood, mouth agape, staring at the golden saucer from space.

There didn’t seem to be a seam on if, nor a bolt, nor a rivet. All of one piece of metal, polished until its surface almost mirrored the Communist brass hats as clearly as a looking glass. Idly, Skinner realized that the green creature had, disappeared. Probably he was busy within his saucer; inside the glass bubble, perhaps. But when he faced the dome, Skinner caught a vague glimpse of complex machinery behind it—and that was all. Then did the space-being wait deep inside his ship?

Skinner hardly had time to consider. He began to smile in spite of his predicament. Here he stood on a platform with the men who ruled the Soviet world with absolute authority, arid his thoughts wrapped themselves around a little green creature who’d come to Earth from the unknown depths of space.

BERIA strode to Stalin, whispered in the little man’s ear. Close up, the dictator presented an ugly appearance. Small, except for his belly which the double-breasted military uniform failed to hide, he stood with one shoulder higher than the other, a plain, coarse man with a pock-marked, ugly face. Skinner found it hard to believe that half the world kowtowed to this small man from Georgian Russia—but there it was.

Stalin turned to face the American after Beria assured him Skinner was unarmed. The dictator sighed, jabbed a finger at Skinner’s chest. “Commissar Beria tells me your mission here was to discover what the People’s Government of the U.S.S.R. had developed to replace atomic power. You have seen, is it not so?”

Skinner grunted something under his breath.

“You will see more! We will hold you here, on this platform. You will watch the video screens as our friend from the sky makes ready to open the way for—what’s the term, Commissar Vishinsky?”

“Cosmic radiation.”

“For cosmic radiation. Do you believe this is fitting punishment for you, forcing you to see your country destroyed?”

“I don’t have much choice in the matter, do I?”

“If you put it that way, no. And after all this is over, Commissar Beria informs me that one of his men has some business to settle with you. Well, that is their affair. Meanwhile,” Stalin rubbed his fat hands together, “in a very few moments we shall stand shoulder to shoulder, Mr. American Spy, and watch how the people die in all the cities of your land.

“I expect to dictate terms to the remaining peasants and townsfolk next week, in Washington, There will of course be land reform, giving the land to the Soviets of peasants which will rise in the United States—with the Soviets themselves coming from Russia, naturally. Before long, decadence will leave the North American continent and the glorious New Order will replace it. How does that sound?”

My God, Skinner thought, he’s like Hitler and Napoleon rolled into one.

Aloud, he said: “Go to hell.”

STALIN laughed’ nervously, but Skinner’s mild profanity paled before Vishinsky’s tirade. It seemed that he, Skinner, couldn’t talk to the Premier like that. It seemed that no one could. Loyal Commies had been interned in Lubianka and then killed for less. Didn’t Mr. American Spy know when he was well off? Didn’t he want to cherish his last few remaining hours of freedom, before the M.V.D. got him again?

Skinner said he was sorry if he had hurt anyone’s feelings, but Mr. Vishinsky could go to hell too. Actually, he knew that wasn’t helping matters any, but a terrible wrath had filled his insides and even now threatened to overflow. Mostly, he felt it for himself. He’d come close, so close to success, and then failed utterly. Result: destruction waited for the United States in the hands of a four-armed green midget….

The bubble atop the saucer stirred, rolled back. Out came the little creature, vaulting the rim of the open bubble gracefully and landing, almost at Skinner’s feet. The American almost wanted to laugh. Here was the agent of disaster, and the top of his shining, green dome hardly reached above Skinner’s knees.

“This is the American?” demanded the green man in a high, childish treble.

Laurenti Beria nodded.

“Do they all scowl so?”

“It is a national trait,” Molotov assured him.

Skinner slumped dejectedly. “I also eat little children.”

“Really?” The green, man rubbed his dome with one of his upper arms. “No one told me that.”

Molotov smiled sagely. “He is lying. Again an American trait.”

“Umm-mm, they must be terrible,” said the green man. “I’m so glad my ship got lost in space. It gave me an opportunity to land here and right a wrong. Well, I suppose I can get started—”

“Of course,” said Stalin, still rubbing his hands together.

Skinner’s head whirled. Such a completely naive creature! Naive, yes—but ten thousand generations of science stood behind him and his ignorance of Earth played right into Soviet hands. A happy accident for the Commies, bent on world domination, but doom for the free peoples of the planet.

THE GREEN man danced around for a time, flexing tiny muscles. “Whole banks of dials and levers to work,” he mumbled, half to himself. “I do wish I had a little more time.”

“Please! “ Molotov pleaded. “The! decadent capitalists of the West, may decide to unleash their atomic bombs at any moment.”

“Is that so? Even with their Mr. American spy here—that is his name, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” agreed Molotov. “Even with him here. They’d sacrifice anything to conquer our free land.”

“Very well,” the creature nodded doubtfully. But he still jumped up and down, flexing diminutive muscles.

It was then that Skinner acted. He had no plan—nothing. But another moment or two might be too late, for once the green man closed the bubble over his shining dome…

All eyes on the platform watched the creature from space, and Skinner got to Boris Rashevsky first. Poor Rashevsky, the American thought, astounded at his own objectivity in what must surely be the moment of death. Poor Rashevsky! Probably he’d cut quite a swaggering figure. But Skinner had cut him down to size once, and now as the Colonel gaped at the green creature. Skinner could do it again.

He stepped quickly toward the M.V.D. Colonel, reached out, plucked the long black pistol from its holster. Rashevsky almost fell on his back in surprise, but some of the soldiers down below had seen the action, and they cocked their’ own rifles.

“Don’t shoot! “ Molotov wailed into the microphone. “You’re liable to hit the Premier!”

The rifles lowered. A roaring, surging sea of sound swept up from Red Square, as more people saw an American loose among their rulers, a gun in his hand.

Slowly, Rashevsky’s face turned purple. “You will give me that gun, Mironov.” He spit the words out, one slow syllable at a time: “I don’t care if I die, not now. You have shamed me, and anyway, they would kill…” Slowly, one small motion at a time, he advanced on Skinner.

From the corner of his eye, the American saw Laurenti Beria creeping up behind him. This would never do. In another moment it would be an abortive one-man war, and he’d lie dead atop Lenin’s tomb. He could get Rashevsky, but could he swing around in time, to ward off Beria?

Abruptly, he ducked in under Rashevsky’s flailing arms as the man reached him, caught the Russian’s midsection with his shoulder, and, still holding the gun, swung him up into the air. Bellowing, Rashevsky clawed at his face. From, somewhere off in the crowd a rifle barked once, and the Field Marshall, standing near Molotov, pitched forward on his face.

Skinner spun around rapidly, half a dozen times and then again. Centrifugal force flung Rashevsky’s limbs out straight, held him helplessly atop Skinner’s shoulder. He bellowed and roared, but the noise of the crowd made it sound more like, a whimper.

THEN SKINNER dropped quickly to one knee, hurling the man at Beria.

The M.V.D. Commissar ducked, fell forward, and Rashevsky hurtled over his head, tumbling off the flat top of the spaceship and rolling over to the edge of the platform which supported it. He tried to stand up, lost his balance, swung his arms wildly to regain it.

He didn’t make it. Still bellowing,

he tumbled off the platform, striking the ground thirty feet below. From the way he sprawled, with his head hanging limply off to one side, it looked like his neck was broken. But Skinner couldn’t be sure because the crowd swarmed all over him. Perhaps, out of fear more than anything else, the Russian people had bowed under the yoke of their Communist despots, but their hatred for the Secret Police was intense. Like carion they covered Rashevsky…

Skinner turned to Beria. “Stay just where you are, on hands and knees. Don’t try to get up, or I’ll kill you.” He pointed the pistol at Beria’s face.

“This is ridiculous,” Molotov stammered. “You can’t get away with anything. You’re only delaying the end, and—”

The green creature smiled. “It certainly was an interesting demonstration. Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Yes! “ Vishinsky hissed. “Get inside your ship and start your machinery.”

“Better not,” said Skinner.

“Umm-mm. I’m much lighter, than that giant you just threw off the ship. I’ll wager you could throw me a long distance. No, I’d better not. But on the other hand, my bones are not fragile. They don’t break readily. Still, a big brute like you interests me—”

“Hop inside,” Skinner said. “And don’t lock that bubble. I’m coming in after you.”

“Don’t tell me what to do! You know, now that I think of it, that’s what these men were trying to do, and it can get pretty annoying.”

Skinner waved the gun. “If, you want to be temperamental and dead, it’s all right with me. I could smash this whole crazy ship up, and then where would, your Russian friends be?”

“Kill him!” Stalin pleaded, “Someone kill him! Commissar Beria, you’ll wind up in your own Quarters C unless you kill him!”

Beria looked at Skinner, remained on hands and knees.

“You know,” said the green man, “I could like you, Mr. American Spy. That is, if you didn’t come from an evil place. But I could like you because when you try to order me around at least you’re blunt about it. Not my friends, here, though. Oh, no! They’re sly and tricky and they say things which mean other things and—”

“I will be damned!” Skinner roared. “Maybe you can be un-indoctrinated yet. Now, get the hell inside that bubble.”

Tittering, the creature scampered to the edge of the open bubble, dropping through it within the ship.

Skinner whirled and almost dropped his gun. Tuman Tumanov was mounting the stairs behind the platform, his gaunt head peering over the edge. “Hello, everybody,” he said. “It wasn’t hard to get up here, not with air that confusion down below. Need any help, Tovaritch Skinner?”

Laughing, Skinner shook his head. “I don’t think so. But you sure do get around, Tuman. And Sonya, too. My gosh—here comes Sonya!”

Tumanov muttered something, turned for a moment to help the girl onto the platform. Then he strode eagerly toward Stalin, his Premier. “I just thought you’d like to know that I hate your guts, ‘Uncle Joe’. I never had a chance to say this before, but I do. Before the Revolution, things weren’t exactly perfect, but at least I could ride my horse all over the Crimea and come charging all the way down to Yalta if I wanted. Now, I can’t even own a horse, thanks to you and the New Order—”

“…you see,” Sonya was telling Skinner, “Tuman was busy, drinking his tea, and Commissar Beria must have slipped his bonds. First thing I knew, he hit me. When I’ got up and called Tuman, the Commissar was gone. When…”

Skinner was hardly listening. Everything had’ turned in their favor so suddenly. Everything…

“YOU WILL put down your weapon, Mr. American Spy. Or else I will kill you.”

Whirling, Skinner faced the bubble. Perched jauntily on its edge, the little green creature held a thin metal tube in his hand; “It fires an atomic projectile the size of your thumb-nail, Mr. American Spy. Don’t make me use it.”

“I thought you said you like—”

“I am confused. Very confused. Please, drop your weapon. I will count three numbers, spaced at intervals of a second. By then…”

And so it ended, thought Skinner. He’d drop his gun and the soldiers would mount the stairs, would swarm in on him from all sides, would—

He flipped the gun to Tumanov, who was not so surprised that he could not catch it. “Watch them, Tuman. I don’t think you have to worry about the big boys too much, they’re soft. But watch Beria—”

“One,” said the -little green creature.

“Listen, you midget,” said Skinner, “you’re not only a physical midget, but you’re an intellectual midget as well.”

“What? Two.”

“Oh, stop that stupid counting!” Skinner took a cautious step forward. “You let them tell you a pack of lies, and you believe every word of it. If that’s intelligence, then I’m a braying jackass. I can’t tell you the other side of the story, not in a few seconds, but I could take you where you can get it first hand. Then—”

“Three.”

“Okay. Okay, you gave me three. Now shoot!” Skinner took another step. “Well, what’s the matter? Shoot!”

“I am thinking.”

“It’s about time. They filled your head with a lot of pretty theories, I’ll bet. But they didn’t show you anything, did they? They didn’t show you one example of a happy Russian, living under their glorious New Order. Did they?”

“N-no. But they said—”

Skinner took another step. “Well, I can take you to America and show you some things which will open those eyes of yours so wide they’ll pop right out of your head.” /-

“I don’t think I’ll like that. I—oh, I see, it is just an idiom.”

STILL WALKING slowly, Skinner reached the little creature. He did not try to grab the tube, for one quick movement might be his last. Instead, he stood with hand outstretched and presently the green man dropped the weapon in his palm. “Very well, Mr. American Spy,” he said. “Show me.”

Turning, Skinner heard a wild battle cry from Tumanov. “Hy ypa!” roared the Cossack with an oath that might have been with the Crimean riders for a hundred years. Up and down leaped Tumanov on his long legs. “We have won, Comrade Nick! We have won—”

Skinner, tried to yell a warning, but Tumanov was too busy with his own personal celebration to pay any attention to Beria. The M.V.D. chief leaped at him before he could fire, deflecting the gun with his left arm as he charged. The pistol roared once and then clattered to the metallic surface of the spaceship. Skinner barely had time to see Sonya, who’d been hit by the stray bullet, slumping down near the yawning bubble; then he leaped in toward Tumanov and the Commissar, forgetting all about the strange weapon in his hand.

For a brief instant Vishinsky and Molotov barred his path, but Skinner bowled them over like an All-American tackle making two rapid down-field blocks. Dimly, he was aware of something stirring beneath his feet, but he payed it no heed. Both Vishinsky and Molotov got up, darted for the staircase behind the platform. Stalin followed them, pale and trembling, telling Beria what he must do to the Cossack before he too clambered down the rickety stairs.

Over and over the two men rolled the long, lean underground agent from the Crimea and the no-longer suave chief of the. M.V.D. Three times Skinner tried to break them up, but three times they rolled out of his reach, clawing and cursing and kicking at one another. Finally, Skinner managed to get the back of Beria’s belt in one hand and the collar of his shirt in the other. He heaved mightily, lifting the Commissar off a panting and exhausted Tuman Tumanov and throwing him clear off the ship and out onto the apron of the platform which held it. Beria, crouched there, shaking his fist, but he did not try’ to return.

“Sonya?” Tumanov demanded, getting up.

“I don’t know.” Skinner helped him to his feet.

They found the girl off the ship on the other side of the apron, flat on her back. Her blouse below her right breast was red and wet, but she smiled feebly when she saw Tumanov.

“I tried to watch the fight, Tuman. Did you… win?”

“He won,” Skinner lied.

“Good! All men I have felt are idiots. But—not—Tuman, even though—he—likes tea so much…”

Bullets began to pepper the apron, and some of them clanged against the spaceship’s side. Now that the Communists had fled, Skinner and Tumanov made an inviting target, but so far only a few soldiers had worked their way behind the platform to where they could fire effectively. More would come soon.

Tumanov stood up very straight and the bullets zinged around him. “She is dead,” he said. “Sonya, just like my daughter she was….” Tears welled up in. the old man’s eyes’ and, unashamed, he let them fall. Skinner pulled him away, climbed back up to the spaceship, felt something slam against his shoulder, spinning him halfway around. He tottered on the edge for a moment, looking down over a sheer drop of thirty feet and remembering how Rashevsky had fallen.

Slowly, inch by agonizing inch, he pulled himself up. He lay trembling for a moment on the gleaming metal and then he staggered toward the bubble, aware of Tumanov’s sobs as the old man followed him.

The green creature poked his head out at them. “Come on, Mr. American Spy! I thought you said something about taking me to America!” It was then that Skinner became aware of the stirring, rumbling sound beneath his feet. Apparently the little man had warmed up his motors—or whatever served for motors on a flying saucer from the depths of stellar space. And that could explain the flight of the Commies: they did not want to get caught on the outside of a spaceship, not when it took off.

His left arm numb. Skinner reached the bubble, staggered inside. Tumanov tumbled in after him and, smiling, the green creature slammed it shut. “Shall we go?” he wanted to know.

NO GAS engine. No turbo-jet. Not even rockets. The spaceship simply rose up from its platform, slowly at first, like a helicopter without rotors. Skinner, stared outside through the bubble, saw the oriental towers of the Kremlin dropping away slowly beneath them through the snow, saw—

Hands over the edge of the saucer!

Laurenti Beria chinned himself up, soon lay fill length on the saucer’s surface not a dozen feet from the transparent bubble. “He’ll be killed,” Skinner said. At the’ last minute Beria had gone along for the ride, getting a hand-hold just as the ship took off. But why?

Skinner soon found out. The green creature shrugged wearily. “No, he won’t be killed. We’ll land slowly and let him off.”

Evidently, that was what Beria had in mind. They’d land—and then anything might happen….

Tumanov gritted his teeth. “That Beria! It was Beria who killed my Sonya, forcing, the gun to go off. You!”

“Who, me?” asked the green creature.

“Yes, you. Which one of these things controls our flight?”

“Why, this button here. And this one, and this one…”

Tuhianov grunted, moved over until he crouched near the instrument panel, his head almost scraping the ceiling in the low cockpit. He stuck out long fingers and pressed the studs at random.

The ship dipped, plunged forward, dipped again, like a frail rowboat near the eye of a hurricane. Outside on the smooth surface of the saucer, Beria swayed helplessly, rolled toward one edge and then the other as the ship pitched.

Tumanov pressed a new combination of buttons, then sighed his satisfaction. Skinner felt himself falling, falling. The floor became the ceiling for one wild, instant, and when they had righted themselves and he could look again, the surface of the saucer was empty.

He might have seen a dot dwindling away far astern and below them.

THE SAUCER landed once more inside the Iron Curtain, on a deserted stretch of frontier country within the Pripet Marshes. Tumanov climbed out slowly, shook hands with Skinner. “Perhaps I’ll see you again someday, Tovaritch Nick.”

“I hope so.”

“I still have work to do, a lot of work. Out here on the frontier I can get things ready for the time your people are prepared to bring peace to the world—real peace…”

A tall gangling figure, Tuman Tumanov faded off into the swamp. Skinner stared after him until he could see nothing but the swirling clouds of mist. Then he climbed back inside the bubble atop the saucer, fashioning a sling for his injured arm and settling back while the little green man took off again.

That day which Tumanov sought, which Sonya and Natasha and so many others had died for—that day would come soon.

Skinner could picture the stir a flying saucer would create in Washington. A nationwide tour for the green man from space, an official visit to the United Nations, perhaps an offer to vouch for the value of every product which had ever received a three-second commercial on television.

But in the end the man from space would see the truth. With his cultural heritage telling him he must fight evil wherever he saw it, he would place undreamed of science at the disposal of the United Nations. Because the Commies had seen samples of that science for themselves, it would be a big stick they would be able to understand.

It might—it just might—negate the necessity for war. But if it didn’t, no bookie in the world would place his money on the Commies….

As they winged their way West, Skinner felt very good indeed.

THE END

Content

Milton Lesser
HE FELL AMONG THIEVES

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI