Irina was allowed to hold a routine job. The father had to live above ground in something which Irina described as "a hut"; the daughter was still privileged to live below ground, somewhere inside Tunnel Forty-one. The daughter had not been permitted to see her father for some months, until some bright young officer of the Special Section got the idea that she should be ordered to visit her own father for the purpose of spying on him. The old man was suspected of withholding scientific information.
Irina was on her way back to the Inner Camp. But she had taken a long detour in order to meet Aleksandr. Aleksandr, whose surname did not come out of the conversation, was a young Red Army officer. He had seen Irina going in and out of the camp on her way to her father's hut in the woods. He had fallen in love with her and had recently gotten into the habit of taking her photograph out of the personnel file and kissing it — an administrative procedure which made them both laugh tenderly and indulgently at themselves.
Dugan shifted his position a little and a piece of bark dropped down on the ground beside the lovers. "What's that?" cried Irina.
"Nothing," said Aleksandr. Dugan could imagine him peering upward and resisted the cheery temptation to spit in the man's eye.
They were silent, all three of them. Dugan wished that he could interrupt and ask them a few questions. How did Irina find the "hut"? What kind of an engineer was old Dekanosov and what kind of trouble had he gotten into? But all Dugan could reasonably expect was that they would skip the mush and get back to the meat of the matter.
They did not. For what seemed to Dugan an incredible time, they cooed beneath the tree. Looking at his watch, he found it was a mere forty minutes. A sentry passed, going along the path a few feet away. All three of them froze when he stopped.
For an instant there were four human figures alone in the dark woods. The sentry smelt people with some vestigial prehistoric sense, left over from primitive man. Irina and Aleksandr knew the sentry was there, but did not suspect that they had a tough one-hundred-and-sixty-pound Cupid perched on a branch above them. Dugan knew where the other three were; but the couple and the sentry, to a greater or less degree, merely sensed human presence. The sentry did not seem scared of the dark, but he was far from being at ease.
In the throaty, croaking voice which people of all nationalities use when they are alone in the dark and are not sure that they are being heard, the sentry said: "Is that you, Ivan?"
Dugan, exultant at being handed so much free information by the lovers, found it hard to resist an extempore remark or two. But resist he did.
Even more croakily and throatily, the sentry said, "Who's there?" More silence.