He broke the end of the protective plastic rod, found a vein in his wrist, jabbed, thrust home.
Even as he administered the medicine to himself, he felt another wave of the intolerable fatigue and nausea sweeping over him. He tried to say to himself, "Major Dugan, you're not a young man." But there was no time here, no time now, for reconsideration. He reeled down the steps like a drunken man, blind with fatigue and dizzy with the initial impact of the stimulating drugs.
The reeling probably saved his life.
He collided heavily with a Soviet officer. The other man, whose uniform could be felt — heavy, warm, and epauletted — as Dugan grabbed his shoulder, stepped back with an oath and said:
"You drunken fool! Get back to your quarters! What are you looking for—?"
Thick-voiced Dugan replied, "Number Eighteen. I'm a plumber, comrade general, a plumber, got to fix a leak in the sprinkler. Need tools."
The colonel shook Dugan, holding him tightly by the upper arms, rocking him back and forth vigorously until Dugan's head almost snapped off. The violent motion made the drug strike home and in a single surging thrill of well-being Dugan felt himself come back to normaclass="underline" physical, mental normal. He was ready again to fight.
But he kept his voice thick until the colonel, with surprising practical sense, walked him back to Number Eighteen, showed him the tool locker, and then stood over him, waiting for Dugan to plumb away at his plumbing. In a low, sheepish, but more sober voice Dugan said to the coloneclass="underline"
"Comrade Colonel, I'm better now. It was just three little drinks. And such good vodka, too. If the Comrade Colonel will excuse me, I will rest a minute and will then do my work and I will go back to quarters and I will not go outside any more unless I have to and I hope the Colonel will not report it because tomorrow is May Day and I am usually a very careful man and I am even a member of the Communist Party and if the Colonel will wait a minute until we can go over to where there is a bright light I will show the Comrade Colonel my Communist Party membership card and my Trades Union card and my passes and all—"
While talking, Dugan was eyeing the man's position. If the colonel did not go away soon, he would have to be chopped down with the side of a hand — a process which, to be effective, meant killing in about one case out of ten. Dugan had no wish to kill human beings unnecessarily, but he was prepared to drop the colonel to the ground and, with the Russian stranger unconscious, to stuff him into the tool locker. Dugan himself had already gotten a large pair of parallel-jaw pliers, an excellent German monkey wrench, and a short length of steel which he could use for a crowbar. Best of all, he had found a hooded flashlight, where the beam could be controlled by shutters with a little fingertip control on the side. It was an aperture just like the aperture openings on the cheap, indestructible tough little Brownie Kodaks of his childhood.
The colonel looked down at Dugan and the assortment of tools. With contemptuous kindliness he said: "All right, get your work done. But get back to quarters and sleep off that jag before you get in trouble. I haven't got the time to admire your papers… Good night, comrade."
"Good night, Comrade Colonel," said Dugan humbly. The colonel left, disappearing rapidly into the night.
Dugan took stock.
First, he had obtained much of the necessary information concerning Atomsk. He had confirmed its location. By catching the reference to the "Kuznets Syllabus, Section 204," he had validated the information for which Generalissimo Chiang's spy had paid the price of a slow and horrible death. "Gauze nets of Silly Beast, suction 2 or 4" — what a waste of effort and life! He had gotten the four invaluable place names. Let somebody else go looking into them. Why didn't the United States farm out some of these jobs to the Turks or the French or other nations?
Second, he had found out that there was only one pile. Hundeshausen's papers, stowed away inside his shirt, ought to keep the scientific boys busy for a while. There was no use trying to memorize stuff like that. Later on, he would have to face the problem of how to get the papers all the way back to Washington. At the moment it looked as though it would be just as easy to deposit them on the edge of the crater Tycho on the moon; but time had a wonderful capacity of softening hard problems. Things got easier the more you thought about them. These papers were trash — waste — nothing at all — less than nothing at all, until Dugan got out of Atomsk, alive.
But he could not go out, having come thus far, without affirming his personal power over these people. They too were enemies. The vision of his Aleut ancestors flashed across his mind, their fur-rimmed faces gleaming as they drove their kayaks into surf. His mother's clan had been primitive aristocrats — fish-spearing nobles of the North Pacific, living between volcanoes and the rain. How had the Russians treated them? The Czarist Russian trader-officials had brought piety and a bad life to the islands before America took title in 1867. The Russian commonwealth, which had promised freedom and the common power for a little while after 1917, had been able to deliver to mankind nothing better than the Old Slave State in new and more deadly form. Russia had no place for him, Major Michael A. Dugan. Russia was merely one more stretch on the long tedious road leading nowhere. It would be good to let the Russians know that he had passed.
And therewith his mission would be fulfilled — the mission which bridged worlds, connecting the warm human welcoming world of Sarah Lomax to the mute brute danger of these silent but living hills. He could strip the mask from Atomsk by letting the Russians know he had come. He could fling back at them the assertion of his own personality, and at the same time fulfill the precise letter of his orders. He saw the orders again, as they lay on the mat beside his place in the roast-eel restaurant; he remembered that he had not dared look up because Sarah's unhappy face awaited him. Now, perhaps, he could finish Atomsk and when he next saw Sarah, he could see her without his mission throwing a crystal-hard pane of misunderstanding between them.
Atomsk might die or not die; but Atomsk would know, in time, that outside malignancy had hurt it. The camouflage and the silence would be made vain, just as much as if he had entered into the underground town with a roar of gunfire and glare of Very lights. One task would finish the job.
The third, last task, was the valve. If Irina knew what she was talking about, in her chatter to Aleksandr on the path, the valve was near entrance 18. But were those her exact words?
Dugan, hunched over his accumulated loads like a big but intelligent gorilla, tried to remember himself, hours ago on the tree limb, listening to the lovers down below. The words faded from blankness to brightness, by a curious reverse process, such as they use in the movies, and he saw them imprinted on the black screen of his own mind:
"…nad vocyemnadtsadtou…" In any language, that meant "over the Eighteenth" or "above Number Eighteen." But the question now was, how much upness did it take to signify the Russian word nad? Dawn was coming and there was not too much time to waste.
Furthermore, he did not know when the effects of the drug would wear off and let his temporarily suppressed fatigue come pouring back all over him, leaving him as limp as an old-fashioned rag doll.
Resolutely he seized the bushes beside the tunnel entrance and began to climb. It was difficult with one hand holding the tools, but he made it. There was probably an easier way to get up there, but he did not have time to search it out. When he was fifteen to twenty feet above the tunnel door, someone stopped in the doorway below him. Dugan froze into almost total immobility. The person waited for two or three minutes, which seemed like short eternities to Dugan. Then he moved away.