“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.