The film was a special color film, fresh from the developmental laboratories in Rochester, New York.
The photographs were sent back to Washington in duplicate. The planes carrying them were given fighter escort until they were entirely out of the range of continental Asiatic bases. The photographs were precious. They showed Atomsk itself.
Hills, covered with leaves — mostly fir and pine trees, but some deciduous. The forest was heavy and the snow was heavy. There was no sign of mankind, but there were odd angular shapes in the contours, shapes which no glacier had ever fashioned, no rock strata had ever built up by tilting and faulting. There was a city there, perhaps. And perhaps it was Atomsk.
III. EYES TURN TO ATOM-GOROD
A docile Major Dugan followed Captain Sarah Lomax into a temporary U.S. Army building out beyond Atsugi airfield. The M.P. at the gate telephoned in before he let them pass. He started to gaze curiously at the pretty WAC captain until Dugan, quite officiously, said to her: "Hurry up, sis. We're going to be late."
While the guard was still adjusting his wits to the rather improbable brother-sister relationship of the two officers, they went on in. Sarah had had two solid days of visits with Dugan, and had gotten accustomed to his casual mystifications, which almost inevitably had the effect of drawing attention away from himself and to the other people who went with him.
At Finance he had signed vouchers providing for his pay to be drawn by General Coppersmith's office and deposited to his account in a Minneapolis bank.
At Weather he had talked for hours, while Sarah got very bored, with a zealous young meteorologist who seemed to know everything about the Siberian cold fronts. Before Dugan was through, it seemed that he should find his way around Asia merely by looking at the clouds.
Then Sarah had taken him over to the Counterintelligence, where a very solemn colonel gave Dugan a lecture on the responsibilities of the investigating officer. The interview was spoiled when an aide put a slip of paper in front of the colonel. Sarah, reading the clean-cut penciled handwriting upside down, saw that the note said, "This is the Dugan." At that the colonel got very red, said they were wasting his time, and told Sarah that Coppersmith ought to brief his own people. As they went out, Dugan apologizing for nothing in particular, the colonel said to him:
"I'd like to talk to you, if you ever talk. But I guess you don't."