"Take ten minutes," I said grandly. "Fifteen. But where do I come in?"
She lit a cigarette and went on. "This office is concerned with the economic processes taking place within the Tuvinian Autonomous Region of the RSFSR, an area that makes the Dakota Bad Lands look like Miami Beach. The capital city of this region is Kysyl Khoto. We have a tourist there."
"Tourist?" I asked.
"A covert source of information," Dr. von Munger explained. "If I keep giving you secrets, you'll have to stay here."
"I know all about this cloak-and-dagger stuff," I told her. "I read 'The Gold Bug' when I was twelve."
"Our informant recently transmitted this message," she said, handing me a sheet of paper. On it were typewritten six Russian words and a number. I'd remembered enough from my Conversational Russian 101 to coax this Cyrillic puzzle into English. "Kysyl," I read aloud. "That must be a proper name. Railhead. K. E. Ziolkovsky. 5000 meters/second. Luna." I handed the paper back to the good-looking Dr. von Munger. "The boy who sent this note takes the brass cup for brevity. What's it all mean?"
"Luna is in Russian what it was in Latin," she explained, just in case I'd missed that point. "Do you know who Ziolkovsky was?"
"Sure," I said. "Konstantin Edouardovitch Ziolkovsky hatched the notion of spaceships, back about 1900. The Reds must be naming their bird in his honor. Dr. von Munger, you're beginning to get through to me." I took the paper back from her to check it. "Five thousand meters per second. If that's delivered exhaust-velocity, the mass-ratio would be twenty-six lifted for one delivered. They must be using ozone to get that. If they're using ozone, they've got an inhibiter to hold it stable. If this all means what it seems to, they can make the moon in two steps. And it's about time someone did."
Dr. von Munger shook her head. "I'm happy that you derive so great a pleasure from the notion of a flight to the moon," she said, "but you're forgetting that this rocket belongs to the Russians. They won't be inviting any of us Yankees to join them in admiring the view from the rim of Copernicus. We'll be looking up, Dr. Huguenard. They'll be looking down at us, on a five-to-one power gradient. That'll put your Intercontinental Ballistic Missile out in the woodshed behind the washboard, won't it?"