People going out.
Speeches by Stalin, about Stalin, concerning Stalin, or dedicated to Stalin, all day long. Even in Atomsk, they wouldn't miss a chance to cheer themselves up by celebrating their loyalty to the Russian Generalissimo. Then, for the lower-ranking ones, parades or at least meetings. For the big shots, parties. Very respectable parties. No dancing. No women at most of them. Merely tons upon tons of food, gallons upon gallons of vodka. Toasts to everything and each other, centered on the subject of the working class and the working class' own special savior, Joe Stalin.
Dugan, running a tongue-tip over the dry top of his mouth, knew just how the Russians would feel tomorrow night. As tight as ticks and as happy as the hogs that lived next door to the brewery.
And the day after tomorrow—
Alas! the working class would be all tired out. The foremen would be irritable, the managers would have headaches, the senior political bosses and scientists would probably discover themselves to be the victims of Fascist stomach troubles — poisoned vodka from Keokuk, Iowa, or polluted kvass brewed by hellish types in Joplin, Missouri. Who could tell? The headaches would feel pretty Fascist.
And Dugan?
That was Dugan's chance to exfiltrate. He could be the little man who wasn't there. He could march, as it were, right out of the administrative wallpaper. He couldn't expect to be lucky enough to find thousands of Russians with identical D.T.'s, but he could hope to trot around, shabby and hangdog, like one of the confused workers.
Perhaps he would not need to be an injured man, after all. All day long, he had been thinking about playing the part of an injured man; he had decided that he could not play the part without really being injured; and from this depressing conclusion he had come to the even more depressing problem of just how to injure himself, where, and with what, to a degree that would appease critical-minded Soviet surgeons without impairing the mortal usefulness of Major Michael A. Dugan. It would be worth a great deal to be able to omit that particular stratagem from his agenda.
Waiting no further to study the train, he set off downhill. When he came to the flat of the valley, he approached a cleared area. The woods and brush had been cut back in a long strip twenty-odd meters wide in order to make way for a road which would be out of reach of fire.
Dugan ran back and forth along the wood's edge on his side of the road, but he could not be sure of being unobserved. After all, if he had seen as much as he did with a gimcrack telescope, what might not a sentry with binoculars observe? He waited for dusk, cursing his luck that had put the road across the middle of his afternoon. He ate up the last of his ham, some more bread, and he took off his boots to rest his feet. It was no fun marching with stolen boots.