"Timid?" Landsiedel was aghast. "No, no. Nothing like that. But you can't hurry Dugan. When he himself feels like hurrying, the Irish part of him gets to working and he goes through obstructions like a shotgun slug through peanut brittle. But if there's no point in hurrying, he takes his time like his mother's people. I think he could wait a hundred years if he had to."
"I can't wait. Not about Atomsk," said Coppersmith.
"He knows it. He'll go at it, lopsided. He will improvise. He doesn't believe in plans. He says that every day of spying involves thinking about six thousand choices ahead, and that if every man tried to multiply all the six thousand choices to their mathematical aggregate, he'd freeze like a catatonic. Dugan says that the only way to stay alive is to float with the run of things. It's gotten him places nobody else ever reached."
"Such as—?"
"He visited Nazi Germany in 1939 on leave, just before he settled down in Tokyo. He went on his own money and his own time. When he got there he introduced himself as a representative of the Japanese secret police. Right in Gestapo headquarters. The Germans showed him all their engineering designs for the proposed murder camps and Dugan copied out a set. He thought that the White House might want to release them, off the record. Nobody believed him in Washington."
"What's so wonderful about that?" said Coppersmith. "The War Department hadn't told him to do it."
"Don't you see it, sir? You do, don't you, miss?" He waved his arms at them. "He goes into Germany on a regular American passport, without any cover or plans or preparations. He talks his way into Gestapo headquarters, chums around with the whole pack of them, takes his reports to the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, who was a little mystified but who accepted the stuff anyhow — much good it did Japan! — and then walked out of Germany under his own power with the Gestapo congratulating him on his wonderful set of forged American papers. Has anybody else you ever heard of done anything like that, sir?"
"I've heard a lot of things in my time, Colonel. How will he do on Atomsk?"
"He knows Russian pretty well. He can pass for some kind of Soviet Asiatic subject. He speaks Chinese badly but fluently. He knows perfect Japanese, excellent German, and several other assorted languages. He'll get as near as anybody could. It's not a matter of comparing him to anybody else. He has one chance in a hundred. Nobody else has a chance at all."
Sarah couldn't help looking up at Coppersmith. This was so much like what the general himself had been saying to her that she wanted to see how he took it.