First, he had obtained much of the necessary information concerning Atomsk. He had confirmed its location. By catching the reference to the "Kuznets Syllabus, Section 204," he had validated the information for which Generalissimo Chiang's spy had paid the price of a slow and horrible death. "Gauze nets of Silly Beast, suction 2 or 4" — what a waste of effort and life! He had gotten the four invaluable place names. Let somebody else go looking into them. Why didn't the United States farm out some of these jobs to the Turks or the French or other nations?
Second, he had found out that there was only one pile. Hundeshausen's papers, stowed away inside his shirt, ought to keep the scientific boys busy for a while. There was no use trying to memorize stuff like that. Later on, he would have to face the problem of how to get the papers all the way back to Washington. At the moment it looked as though it would be just as easy to deposit them on the edge of the crater Tycho on the moon; but time had a wonderful capacity of softening hard problems. Things got easier the more you thought about them. These papers were trash — waste — nothing at all — less than nothing at all, until Dugan got out of Atomsk, alive.
But he could not go out, having come thus far, without affirming his personal power over these people. They too were enemies. The vision of his Aleut ancestors flashed across his mind, their fur-rimmed faces gleaming as they drove their kayaks into surf. His mother's clan had been primitive aristocrats — fish-spearing nobles of the North Pacific, living between volcanoes and the rain. How had the Russians treated them? The Czarist Russian trader-officials had brought piety and a bad life to the islands before America took title in 1867. The Russian commonwealth, which had promised freedom and the common power for a little while after 1917, had been able to deliver to mankind nothing better than the Old Slave State in new and more deadly form. Russia had no place for him, Major Michael A. Dugan. Russia was merely one more stretch on the long tedious road leading nowhere. It would be good to let the Russians know that he had passed.
And therewith his mission would be fulfilled — the mission which bridged worlds, connecting the warm human welcoming world of Sarah Lomax to the mute brute danger of these silent but living hills. He could strip the mask from Atomsk by letting the Russians know he had come. He could fling back at them the assertion of his own personality, and at the same time fulfill the precise letter of his orders. He saw the orders again, as they lay on the mat beside his place in the roast-eel restaurant; he remembered that he had not dared look up because Sarah's unhappy face awaited him. Now, perhaps, he could finish Atomsk and when he next saw Sarah, he could see her without his mission throwing a crystal-hard pane of misunderstanding between them.
Atomsk might die or not die; but Atomsk would know, in time, that outside malignancy had hurt it. The camouflage and the silence would be made vain, just as much as if he had entered into the underground town with a roar of gunfire and glare of Very lights. One task would finish the job.
The third, last task, was the valve. If Irina knew what she was talking about, in her chatter to Aleksandr on the path, the valve was near entrance 18. But were those her exact words?
Dugan, hunched over his accumulated loads like a big but intelligent gorilla, tried to remember himself, hours ago on the tree limb, listening to the lovers down below. The words faded from blankness to brightness, by a curious reverse process, such as they use in the movies, and he saw them imprinted on the black screen of his own mind:
"…nad vocyemnadtsadtou…" In any language, that meant "over the Eighteenth" or "above Number Eighteen." But the question now was, how much upness did it take to signify the Russian word nad? Dawn was coming and there was not too much time to waste.
Furthermore, he did not know when the effects of the drug would wear off and let his temporarily suppressed fatigue come pouring back all over him, leaving him as limp as an old-fashioned rag doll.
Resolutely he seized the bushes beside the tunnel entrance and began to climb. It was difficult with one hand holding the tools, but he made it. There was probably an easier way to get up there, but he did not have time to search it out. When he was fifteen to twenty feet above the tunnel door, someone stopped in the doorway below him. Dugan froze into almost total immobility. The person waited for two or three minutes, which seemed like short eternities to Dugan. Then he moved away.