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.”