Dugan spent most of the night looking for the handpiece which he had dropped — a crude mitten formed of inner tube which he had used when crossing the river on the power wires. His summer with a carnival many years ago had stood him in good stead. There was no other way of getting into the oruzhenii raion without risking a mechanical alert. But now he was quietly, tracelessly in. And all this could be lost and undone if he did not find the self-betraying rough-stitched mitten.
At last he stepped on it. Thrusting it into his pocket, he set off uphill.
Two arcs of the tire casing had provided him with double-thickness rubber shoes with which to walk the wire. Two more arcs had served him as footpads; these he put on now. They tied over his shoes with tight string. He had cut the tread down until each footstep left the imprint of a bear's paw. He wished, almost desperately, that he had made a closer study of bears' locomotion, but at the same time he wished to fool nothing more than the casual glance of a soldier. He knew that he could not fool a dog or a woodsman.
The day before, the slope had looked manageable from the far side of the river. Traveling laterally uphill, away from the power lines, he soon found that he came to the end of the woods. A vast reach of scree, loose rock which poured down on him whenever he clambered up it a few feet, cut him off from the farther heights of the mountain. The scree might extend upward a mere forty or fifty feet; it might be two hundred before he came to the manageable chimneys of the cliff. In either event he could not afford to risk the uproar of a rockslide.
He stood poised, balancing himself with feet wide apart, like a bear. His sack of food and clothing, laboriously pilfered along the way, now seemed to weigh a ton. The nerve-racking torture of climbing the powerline tower had kept him tense and poised while he walked the wire and climbed down — two towers beyond the far side of the river — to the ground. But the moment his feet had touched ground, the magic strength went out of him.
The air was full of the smell of spruce and fir and larch. There were a few oak trees scattered here and there in the woods. He heard insects stirring, but no immediate sound of animal life. A mile or two back, where the power lines crossed the river, he thought he had heard the sound of machinery; at this distance, none of that noise carried through.
He was in a dark world.
Above him there was the loose rock reaching an unknown distance. Down-slope and far above him there was the interminable reach of forest which he had seen on the air photographs. By Washington, D.C., standards, this was Atomsk.
But down on the ground it wasn't.
Atomsk itself might lie anywhere within a total territory half the size of Delaware. He could wander for days in vain before he came to the camouflaged narrow-gauge railways which he expected to find. He could trip into a thousand booby-traps before he ever got near the actual atomic workshops. He could walk through electric-eye beams and be tracked by men with infra-red spotlights, dying under their gunfire before he even knew he was seen. He could fall into anti-animal traps. He could — there was no limit to the number of things which he could do, if he were not careful.