By the time he reached the top of the scree, he felt like Michael A. Dugan again. He allowed himself a single private laugh. They would have to catch him first, and there were a lot of dead men all over the world who had made the mistake of trying to grab Dugan when Dugan was in no mood to be grabbed. He felt, at the foot of the cliffs, that it would be almost cheering to meet a hostile person…
But he still had the world to himself.
The cliff was not much. The scree reached so high that it was a mere twenty-odd feet to the top: bushes provided a clear guide. He clambered up, his sack swinging awkwardly across his back; again he wished that he had taken time to tie it like a rucksack instead of having it hitched by the rope which ran over his shoulder, and down to his belt.
At the crest, the woods began again. In climbing, Dugan dislodged a good-sized rock, which made a fearful clatter as it drove crashing on downward; but there was no response.
Just at the very edge of the cliff, Dugan found what he had been looking for. A heavy old tree had started to tip over the cliff and had not fallen. Its large, powerful roots had risen on the upper side, leaving space for a little nest. Boldly Dugan dug with his hands, trying to drop the earth in little broadcast showers upon the accumulated leaves and pine needles which made the floor of the forest. The tree was too close to the edge for any sentry to walk between it and the cliff; and there was no evidence of regular human passage on the uphill circumference. The nest looked safe.
Dugan kept digging until the sky began to show streamers of red dawn in the east. There was not much to get out of the way; just a few shoots of root to dislodge and a mass of wind-driven humus and earth to throw away.
The nest would not shelter him against rain, but it would blend him evenly into the landscape and would shelter him from passing attackers. Nobody could get close enough to kill without getting close enough to be killed. The only real danger was from dogs, but not one dog in a million had sense enough to make a discovery, go back silently to his master and report it, and return equally silently with his master to the site of the discovery.
Dugan took off his boots, turned his socks inside out, put his socks and boots back on again. He made the upper half of a bed out of his sack and crawled in under the tree just as the first streaks of sunshine shot through the sky. He took a long generous drink from his canteen and ate ham and bread, holding the ham in one hand and the bread in the other. Then he popped his head up between two roots and peered around like a gopher.
He could not see the power lines. Around him was the forest. Oak trees were common (just as they had been in the air pictures of Atomsk which Coppersmith had shown him in Tokyo) but most of the wood was coniferous. The forest rose above him, seen close up as trees: the forest fell below him, seen far away as a single continuous carpet. The river was somewhere down under the lower trees, its surface hidden by the forest. The power lines were around a bend in the tributary valley. He was at least a mile and a half, perhaps two miles, inside the prohibited zone.
He was already, he felt sure, under the territorial jurisdiction of the People's Commissariat of Atomic Development, not to mention the Ministry of Internal Defense. With that comforting thought he timed himself to sleep for twenty-four hours.