At five minutes after the hour, there was a flickering and then there were only forty-nine. By eleven o'clock, the eyes had been cut down to forty-six.
The evening of the first, there were only thirty-nine.
By the third, there was only a dozen. And every hour that went by saw another light wink out....
He stood in a Moscow subway station, watching the trains thunder past and keeping an eye on a trash can in a little niche near an elaborate mosaic of Malenkov. None of the comrades, he thought, would think of depositing litter near the mosaic of the leader and so the can had never been used.
And since the cleaners knew it was never used, there was no earthly reason why it should have to be disturbed and emptied. So the can sat there and had never been touched.
Except once.
For a moment the platform was deserted and Stan walked rapidly back to the can. A moment later he held the fusion package in his hand....
Somebody barked something at him and he looked up, startled.
A few yards away, there was a man in the uniform of the people's police. He could have been hiding for any one of a number of reasons, Stan thought. He could have been watching for petty thievery or perhaps there had been a drive against littering the platforms.
But it didn't matter why he was there. The point was he was asking questions in Russian and Stan couldn't answer him.