TORN CURTAIN
By RICHARD WORMSER
(A novelization of the film written by Brian Moore and directed by Alfred Hitchcock.)

"Traitor, traitor, traitor," she said. "You've made me feel like a--"
"Sarah--"
"Oh, Michael, take me home." She flung herself against him. His arms went around her. "Please, Michael..."
If he could find the mikes, cover them for just a moment--someone was rapping sharply on the door. The voice of his new masters. It was amazing how fast he jumped when the whip was cracked.
"I can't," he said quietly. It was the only thing he could say--if he wanted to stay alive....

TORN CURTAIN
Published by DELL PUBLISHING CO., INC.
750 Third Avenue New York, N.Y. 10017
Copyright © 1966 by Universal Pictures Corp., Inc Dell ® TM 681510, Dell Publishing Co., Inc.
All rights reserved
First Dell Printing--July, 1966
A novel by Richard Wormser, based on a screenplay by Brian Moore.

TORN CURTAIN

1

Danes are among the finest sailors in the world; Danish ships, among the most reliable; Danish cuisine, generous and tasty. Herr Professor Doktor Karl Manfred, wearing an identification tag that assigned him to the Karl Marx University of Leipzig in the Deutsche Demokratische Republik--in other words, Communist East Germany--stood by the bulletin board of the Danish ship Absalom and stared at a beautifully colored poster of three-quarters naked folk dancers prancing on a turfy field and cursed Danish ships, Danish sailors, Denmark and all its works.
The ship's purser, neatly and thoroughly scrubbed, starched and ironed, came up and said: "Patience, Doctor Manfred, patience. The entire engineering staff is working on the heating system."
He spoke in English.
Dr. Karl Manfred shrugged, his short neck disappearing completely within the turned-up collar of his fur-lined overcoat "Where is your famed Scandinavian ingenuity?" he asked. "Where is your efficiency? Where, in Gott's hellish name, is there a warm place on this ship?"
"In the engine room," the purser said. "But the heat won't go through the system to the passenger quarters."
"The crew is warm, then?"
"Only the black gang, the oilers and firemen and engineers."
"Then I will be a fireman. Get me a suit of overalls, furnish me a shovel."
"We are an oil burner, Dr. Manfred."
"Get me--" Another passenger hurried by, over-coated, gloved, blue-nosed, and marked with a card on his lapel that said "Professor Michael Armstrong, Southern Oklahoma Baptist College, U.S.A." He smiled, coldly, and was about to pass on when Manfred called him: "Dr. Armstrong. Is it cold in the American cabins, or is this some sort of Danish revenge for Schleswig-Holstein?"
'It's cold," Armstrong said. He started on again, but Manfred caught his arm.
The purser said: "The entire engineering staff is working on the problem. It should be solved in a manner of hours."
"Caught you," Manfred said. "A matter of hours, not a manner. My English is better than yours."
Armstrong said, "If you'll stop being so jolly and playful, Dr. Manfred, I'd like to go to my cabin. I'm going to get under the covers and eat these two sandwiches I have in my pocket--if they haven't frozen yet."
The purser said, "Oh, sir, the steward would bring you food in your cabin."
"The steward has disappeared."
Dr. Manfred said: "He has resigned and enlisted as an oiler. It's warm in the engine room."
The purser looked from one angry professor to the other, raised his eyebrows, and vanished, in the worldwide manner of hotel men and pursers when trouble comes up that they can't solve.
Armstrong took a gloved hand out of his pocket and removed Manfred's gloved fingers from the sleeve of the American overcoat. "Let me go, Manfred. You're damned playful today."
"I am a Prussian. A coastal Prussian. It delights me to find a place so much colder than my native soil."
"Damned playful. Let me go, Manfred. We shouldn't be seen together too much."
Manfred shrugged again. His eyes were cold, completely at odds with his ponderous amiability. "Two professors discussing something harmless. No one would suspect Michael Armstrong, formerly of the U.S. Interspace Committee, of being indiscreet."
"God damn you!" Each syllable of the cry came out separately, sharp and clear, as though frozen in distilled water.
The elephantine jocosity was all gone now. Manfred said, "You haven't gotten rid of the girl yet."
Armstrong gulped, and his lips thinned. "In good time. In Copenhagen. What do you expect me to do, push her over the rail?"
The German said gravely, That would make trouble. No, don't do that."
Armstrong stared. A steward passed them, half trotting to keep a silver-plated tureen of soup from freezing before he could get it to someone's cabin, and the two physicists stared at each other till the waiter was gone.
Then Armstrong said, "You're not fooling, are you? There wasn't anything I could do. When they fired me off the Interspace Committee, they gave me a consolation prize; they didn't cancel my ticket to this shindig in Copenhagen. They didn't cancel Sarah's either; she was my assistant then, she is now. What the hell could I do?"
Manfred said slowly, "You always have an answer, don't you?"
The American turned and walked away. Standing still had increased his chill; his teeth started to chatter. He opened a stateroom door that had his name lettered on its neat little card.
The connecting door to the next cabin was open; his berth was a mess of tumbled blankets. A highball on the nightstand was the color of good black coffee as it sat in its fiddly holder.
Armstrong slammed the door behind him and leaned against it. The cold had drained his strength, and the talk with Manfred hadn't helped any.
The blankets heaved and tossed and a head came up from them; it was a girl's head, tousled but distinctly attractive. "The glamorous food of Denmark," the girl said. "What did you do, catch a salmon and smoke it?"
"One of the East German delegates stopped me just outside the dining saloon, which was full of chattering teeth and dropping forks. He had some interesting little notes on cosmic bombardment. I brought you two sandwiches, Sarah."
More of the girl came out of the cocoon. She cried: "Oooh," as the cold hit her, and groped for the highball. There was no ice in it. She gulped some of the almost straight whiskey.
"Alcohol only makes you colder," Armstrong said. "It brings the body heat to the surface, where it can escape easily." He pulled his left hand out of his pocket and laid two wax-paper-wrapped objects on the blankets.
A small blue hand came out and grabbed the sandwiches; then Sarah, head, hand and provisions, disappeared under the covers again.
Armstrong slipped out of his overcoat, pulled off his gloves and started to dive for the bed. Then he paused and kicked his shoes off, pulled up the blankets while the girl screeched, and got under the covers.
"My God," her muffled voice said, "what have you been doing, swimming?"
"Climbing an iceberg," he said. He raised his knees to make a tent, and tucked the covers over his head. Some feeling began to come back to his hands and feet, and his eyes got accustomed to the gloom enough to see Sarah doggedly munching on the ham sandwich he had kept from freezing in his gloved hand.
She mumbled something.
Armstrong asked, "What?" The blankets absorbed all echo; his voice sounded dead to him.
Sarah--her full name was Miss Sarah Trelawney Sherman--swallowed, and said: "One hell of a honeymoon."
"The purser assures me the heat will be on any time."
"Freezing to death, eating sandwiches on a ship famous for its international cuisine, and having the honeymoon before the wedding. It isn't scientific."
"Huh?"
"You're the big scientist. I've only got one year in on my M.A--Science is a method, professor. One step at a time. First the courtship, then the wedding, then the honeymoon."
"This is all the thanks I get for feeding you."
The ship had been rolling gently; now it started pitching, too. Then a hissing noise came into the cabin.
"Heat!" Armstrong said. "They've fixed the heating system!"
He popped his head out of the covers. After a moment Sarah's came out alongside him. She put her head on his shoulder. "July is a nice month for weddings."
"Sure, sure. July, August. Well be finished with the antideuteron count by then and--"
"When we were on the Interspace Committee, it was all right, but I am not going to be the only common--law wife on a Baptist campus."
"Let's forget the campus," Michael Armstrong said. "I don't have to start teaching till fall, and by then the government will be asking me back."
"You mean you'd use S.O.B.'s laboratory and then quit?"
"S.O.B.? I never realized it came out that way.. .. It would be in the interest of my country, Sarah, and what benefits the United States Government benefits every S.O.B. in America." The little cabin was warming rapidly. He slid out of bed and stood in his stocking feet, an arm upraised. "Wrongway Armstrong. Every scientist but one starts out in college and ends up in Washington. But not Armstrong. Oh, no. He starts off in high-ranking Washington and ends up trying to expound Pythagoras over the sound of the good old college cheer: Rah, rah, S.O.B. rah."
Sarah slipped out of bed, too. She had on flannel pajamas, woolen socks, and a fur coat. "You're breaking our agreement, Michael"
"Huh?"
"You weren't going to blast out at Washington, and I wasn't going to ask you to marry me. I know, I know, I broke it first, but that's no excuse. Why don't you laugh, Michael?"
He had never felt less like laughing in his life. So he reached out and took her in his arms, and kissed her passionately, and hoped she wouldn't know how little his heart was in the pleasant work.
He was saved by a knock on the cabin door. He dropped his arms, rubbed his face with the back of his hand against possible lipstick stains, and crossed the tiny cabin to open the door a crack.
A steward said: "Radiogram, sir."
He took the gaudily colored envelope, ripped it open. It was addressed to him on the ship; and the message was short:
"Your book is ready. Elmo Book Store/ Kanalgade 14/Kebenhavn"
He cleared his throat. Behind him there was the noise of Sarah padding into her own cabin, the shsshhhing sound of her brushing her hair. He said clearly: I'm sorry I opened this, steward. It's not for me."
The Norwegian face wrinkled in profound thought. "But, sir--"
Michael got his wallet out fast, slipped a bill out of the front compartment, put it on the man's silvered tray. "Not for me."
He and the steward both looked down at the bill. It was a five--U.S.
The steward said: "Quite so, sir," in his best British accent, and backed away, the opened radiogram on the tray, the five slipping into the side pocket of tight black breeches.
Michael Armstrong closed the door and leaned against it, weakly. This brought him facing Sarah, who had come out of her cabin again with her hairbrush still working.
She said: "That was a five-dollar bill."
"What big eyes you have."
"You're worried. You always overtip when you're worried."
He said: "Let's get to the dining saloon and eat before the heat goes off again."
She opened her mouth to say something and then apparently thought better of it; she just nodded.

2

But the danish are very efficient people; the heat didn't go off again. As Michael made his way to the radio room on the top deck that night, every scientist he passed commented on it. The Americans called him by his first name, the Englishmen called him Armstrong, the others Professor or Doctor.
I am very well liked, he thought, I am a respected figure in science. I am the most respected scientist on the staff of Southern Oklahoma Baptist University. His contract there called for the teaching of freshman chemistry, biology and science, as well as any advanced courses that six or more students signed up for. Any time he had left over he could devote to his own work in the remarkably well-equipped laboratory that some Baptist, presumably from southern Oklahoma, had left the university and which they had never used.
Somewhat to his surprise, the radio operator on duty was a girl. She had a little cap like an airline hostess's on her shining, long-bobbed hair; she took off her earphones without disturbing either hat or hair, and slid neatly from behind the transmitter with a flash of nylon. "Yes, sir.”
"I'm Michael Armstrong. Could I have another look at the radiogram I received earlier?"
"Certainly, Mr. Armstrong." The girl smiled, looked at his lapel card. "Professor Armstrong."
She was bored, ready to flirt. Michael didn't feel up to it. He smiled back, but as distantly as possible, and the girl, unused to indifference on the part of young men, looked startled and then sulky. She flipped her way through a day log, scribbled a number on a pad and went to the files, brought him his message.
It hadn't changed since he had read it quickly standing in the cabin door. Elmo Book Store. No. 14 on the Kanalgade, which was undoubtedly Canal Street in Danish.
He said: "Miss, is this the correct spelling of Copenhagen?"
She leaned across the counter, her head under his. Whatever it was that made her hair shine so smoothly smelled nice, too. The door to the corridor opened and shut behind him and he pulled his face back a little.
The girl said: "Oh, yes, sir, that is correct in Danish."
An accented voice behind him said: "I saw you in here, Professor, and came at once."
Michael put his hand over the message; thank goodness he had big mitts. He turned to face Professor Karl Manfred. "Evening, Herr Doktor."
Manfred said: "It is about Miss Sherman. She was to have lunch with me, but she was not there."
"Too cold," Michael said. "She wouldn't come out of her cabin."
"Ah, quite so. And now?"
"Oh, when the heat came on she blossomed again. I think she's in the lounge now, listening to the chamber music. Why don't you see?"
Manfred stared at him, the absentminded professor to the life. "The lounge," he said, as though memorizing a difficult set of directions. "I see. Yes, the lounge. I go."
The girl had gone back to her set, was sending something or other. Michael pulled a pad of radiogram blanks toward him, used the soft office pencil. He frowned a minute, and then copied the name and address of the bookstore carefully, and then: "message received. arrive hotel angleterre 0900 tomorrow," and signed his name. "I'd like to send and pay for this please."
The manicured hand finished tapping off a message; the girl used the side of her hand to work the key. Again there was the removal of the headset, the flash of the nylon legs.
"Sir, I will be glad to send this at once. But there is no need to pay. It will be on your account."
“I’ll pay now."
"As you wish, sir."
She gave him his change in Danish kroner. Maybe he ought to go see the purser and get some more Danish money. He shrugged. Not worth while, not at all essential.
He went slowly down the companionways to the lounge, two decks below. He wondered if he had thanked the pretty radio operator; he almost turned back to do it.
Then he wondered at himself, and at the trivial things that can disturb a man at just about the most worried time of his life.
Neither Manfred nor Sarah was in the lounge; the string trio was still manfully playing. But Michael Armstrong was completely tone-deaf.
He went to the bar off the lounge. There they were, both of them, on the high, bolted-down stools. Sarah was laughing and their heads were very close together.
Something hot and cold at the same time shot through his chest. It wasn't jealousy and it was, it wasn't fear and yet it was that, too.
It seemed the most important thing in the world to hear what they were talking about.
But Michael Armstrong turned away and went to his cabin.
He locked the door that led into Sarah's room, and then pressed the button for the steward. When the man came, he ordered a double bourbon on the rocks. He had wanted a drink badly until he had seen Manfred and Sarah; then he hadn't wanted it badly enough to go into the bar.
When the drink came and had been signed for, he locked the corridor door and slowly undressed, sipping the whiskey as he did so. By the time he was in his pajamas, there was nothing but melting ice in the glass.

3

The lobby of the Hotel Angleterre was a troubled pool of gabbled sound. Somehow or other the close confines of the ship had kept the delegates talking in English, French or, at worst, German; but now, released on dry land and joined by all the other delegates who had come to Copenhagen by air or other ships, everyone was speaking in his native tongue.
The assistant manager, the concierge, and several porters were working the mob like sheepdogs, cutting out a delegate here and there as they matched up lapel badges, luggage and room numbers.
Sarah and Michael stood near the front of the lobby, staring out at the wide plaza. Sarah said: "It all looks so foreign."
Michael laughed. "Well, it's Denmark after all. You wouldn't expect Times Square or the Dupont Circle."
I’ve never been out of the United States before. I looked forward to it so much."
"Did I hear the past tense?"
She didn't answer. He took her elbow, wanting to say something, not knowing what to say, but then a porter stood in front of him. "Dr. Armstrong, this way, please."
He was herded into an elevator, down a corridor, his bags coming along on a porter's dolly. The man unlocked a door, bowed him in, pushed the bags after him,-started putting them on luggage racks. "There you are, Dr. Armstrong."
Michael gave him five kroner, not at all sure that was right. But the porter said: "Thank you very much."
"Tell me, do all Danes speak English?"
"Well, not all the children. And many speak French and German instead."
"I see."
The man left at a dog trot, anxious to bed down as many scientists as possible as quickly as possible; perhaps there was a prize offered by the hotel management.
The side door of the room opened with a grating key, and Sarah was there. "I have the room here," she said.
"Scandinavian efficiency?"
"American bribery," she said. "Do you have any Danish money to tip the man?"
He still had change from the radio message; he funneled it into her hand. Michael could hear the porter leaving, at an even faster trot than the first one.
Sarah came back. "Just had a jolly, jolly encounter with Mme. Jolas, the intellectual pride of the French scientific world."
"Oh?"
"She told me what a shame she thought it was that the Interspace Committee dumped you."
"You let her have it with both barrels, I hope."
Sarah shrugged. "I told her that Professor Armstrong didn't believe a physicist was really a well-rounded one till he had taught a few years. Single-barreled out of a shotgun."
"Who's bitching about Washington now?"
She joined him at the window. The city stretched out in front of them. Sarah said it all seemed so flat.
"I think it's like Holland," Michael said. "Below sea level, with dikes."
"Will we have time for sightseeing? Or do you have to work on your speech?"
He had to get to the bookstore. He said: "Don't you want to rest?"
"My first time out of the country? Are you crazy? I’ll unpack and send some of my stuff to the pressers. Your evening clothes, too. Rumpled professors are distinctly out this year."
She went over and started unclasping his suitcase.
Michael said: "I'd rather do it myself, thanks."
She straightened, her face red. "You're the boss."
Then she reached for his briefcase, opened it "Want to dictate your speech?"
"It's all done," Michael Armstrong said.
"Oh?" Her hand went into the case, brought out a typescript. She had nice hands, a little large for a girl's, but smooth and well-shaped. For two years now those hands had worked alongside his, doing everything he told them to. Sometimes he felt he knew them better than he knew the girl.
She was asking him if the pages she was holding were his speech for that night. He was the youngest delegate asked to read a paper at the conference.
He nodded.
She opened the blue cover, looked at the opening lines. "Michael!"
He raised his eyebrows for an answer.
"You've made an awful mistake. This is the ban-the-bomb speech you gave at Pawling."
"How many of the delegates were at Pawling?"
Her horrified eyes stared at him. "Michael!" She ran to him, grabbed his lapels. "You'll be committing professional suicide if you give an emotional disarmament speech before your leading international colleagues. They expect something learned and original from you. And, anyway, you dropped the ban-the-bomb thing, you said. Didn't like the people on the bandwagon with you."
Michael rubbed his thumb and forefinger together nervously, chewed at the inside of his cheek. "All right, all right. Don't start nagging. I'll think of something."
"Off the cuff?"
He found himself glaring at her. "I've got a hypothetical formula I can put on the board, and weave fantasies and changes around it"
"What--"
He would have hit her, but the phone rang and stopped them. He let his breath out in a long, whooping sigh, and reached for the instrument, the un-American instrument, so high-waisted and dainty. But Sarah already had it.
"Dr. Armstrong's room. This is his assistant, Miss Sherman." It was the way she always answered calls in the lab, in his office, even in the apartment they had shared in Washington. When they had moved to Oklahoma, she had had an apartment below bis in the Faculty Teacherage.
"Hello," Sarah was saying. "Hello, hello. They've been cut off. Scandinavian efficiency, hah!"
"Did they say who it was?" His own voice sounded hollow as an empty oil drum to him.
Sarah's strained face said it sounded that way to her, too. "Some bookstore," she said. "An Englishman. He said: This is the Something Bookstore. Is Mr. Armstrong there?'"
"Anderson in Washington said there was a store here that had a book, or could get a book, I've been looking for. I'd forgotten. I’ll run around there while you get hold of the valet or the maid or whatever and send your clothes out."
"And your evening suit?"
"Yes, yes, of course!"
She said sadly, "You needn't shout at me."
He was close to tears as he plunged down the corridor toward the elevator.
There was a flight of marble stairs winding around the lattice-work shaft in which the old water-power cage ran. It was a relief to trot down the broad steps, missing every other one, using up some physical energy. He'd lose his white-tie outfit if it went out to the pressers'; no matter, where he was going there'd be damned few formal occasions.
His feet, slapping on the marble, cried: "Sa-rah, Sa-rah--" The day of the burned bridge, he thought The day of the beginning of the end. The day of--
The stairs ended, and he was in the lobby. The number of delegates had thinned down; the luggage was all gone, and the assistant manager was at his desk behind the room clerk, busily studying a menu printed on heavy cream board.
Michael Armstrong started across the lobby, taking long strides, his shipbound legs eased by the trot down the stairs.
Karl Manfred--Herr Professor Doktor Karl Manfred, of the Karl Marx Institute--came out of nowhere and confronted him. "Dr. Armstrong. My dear Professor, what a pleasure. I was just to enquire about your room number."
There was no getting past him; the strong German hand had grasped Michael's lapel. "Yes?"
“The finest of brains must be fed. It is my pleasure to ask you and Miss Sherman to have luncheon with me."
"Sorry." Not so brusque, Armstrong. "I'm terribly sorry, Herr Professor. I have a date with Professor Hengstrom at one-thirty. He flew over from Stockholm ahead of time especially for it"
"And Miss Sherman?"
Charm him, pal, charm him. "I count on her to amuse the professor while I think of what to ask him next. I’ll tell you; I’ll be on the speaker's dais tonight. Why don't you escort Miss Sherman to the banquet?"
"The banquet," Manfred said pensively. "Yes, yes the banquet. Perhaps."
He let go of the lapel men. Michael crossed the lobby to an ornate street map of Copenhagen framed under glass on the wall. He was trying to find the Kanalgade when the porter he had tipped came up. "May I help you, Doctor Michael Armstrong?"
"The Kanalgade," Michael said.
The porter nodded twice, happy to have such an easy assignment. "Here we are," he said, laying a stubby finger on the glass. "At the Hotel Angleterre, first in service, cuisine and comfort in Copenhagen. Now, you go across the square in front, and so, and so, and there is a canal. Along this you follow, and so and--"
"I know the Kanalgade well," Karl Manfred's fruity voice said. "I shall be honored to be your guide. It is no problem at all." He took Michael's elbow. He was a great one for the laying on of hands. There was again nothing to do but allow oneself to be pushed to the door, out into the street.
They turned to the right, just as the porter had said. Michael said: "I forgot to tip that porter."
“For what? He did nothing for you but a common courtesy. You Americans, you ruin servants wherever you go. Did I ever tell you I once attended the university here. This was in the days when we all expected great things from the study of cosmic radiation and--"
The thick voice rambled on, some sort of story about college-boy pranks, a weekend trip that Manfred and some Danish students, male and female, had taken to Helsingborg--"not Helsingor, which is in Denmark, for which my visa was good, you understand, but across the Oresund in Sweden. This, you understand--"
This went on and on. Then it broke off. "But here is the Kanalgade. Which number is it?"
Michael's mind was blank as a thin slice of snowball. "Just a moment. A bookstore. Elmo's Bookstore."
"And we stand right in front of it. A lucky chance."
Manfred's hand, his eternally groping hand, was now grasping the handle of the bookshop door. There was no shaking him off; he was worse than the albatross, he was an octopus clinging to Armstrong with all eight tentacles. Manfred held the door, and Michael went into Elmo's Bookstore.
It wasn't very big, but it was certainly international; tables of French, German, Swedish, English, even Japanese books were offered for sale; one fairly large bin held nothing but Hebrew volumes. Apparently Elmo's offered anything but Danish; the walls were Latin on the left and Greek on the right
The clerk who came forward was tall, dressed in black stockings, a very plain dress; her hair was pulled back severely. So they had beatniks in Denmark, too.
She said something in Danish, obviously an offer of help. Then she glanced down at Michael's shoes--the way all Europeans spot Americans--and said: "May I help you?"
"You have a book for Michael Armstrong."
"One moment"
She went away, through a ground-glass door into what seemed to be an office. The man she brought with her was nothing at all in the beat line; he was portly and red-faced, and dressed in a race-track tout's checked suit. "Yes, sir?"
"You have a book for Professor Armstrong.”
"Well, that's about right" The accent was faintly cockney. The bright little eyes swiveled from Manfred to Michael "It's a very rare book. I was told not to sell it to no one else."
"I'm Armstrong," Michael said impatiently. This day was going as well as a twenty-mile hike through knee-deep water. "What do you want, identification?"
"It'd help."
Michael opened his wallet driver's license, faculty card from Oklahoma; outdated pass for the Interspace Committee; gasoline credit card.
"That'll do. Magda, get me that book on my desk, there's a dear."
The beatnik girl said languidly, "Coming right up, Freddy," in what she must have thought was American English. She wandered dreamily back in the office.
"This book I am looking forward to," Manfred said. "It must be a first-century Bible."
Freddy chuckled: "Now there'd be a rare bird, wouldn't it just?"
Magda came back and handed the book to Freddy. It was wrapped securely in heavy brown paper, bound with yellow string. "There you are, Professor, all ready and paid for. Your friend in the states sent me a money order.”
"Professor Stevenson?"
"An old friend of mine," Freddy said promptly. "And a gentleman and scholar."
Armstrong said: "Thank you," and turned away. But Manfred stopped at the French counter and picked up a book. He handled it deftly, lovingly. "Do you know this, Professor Armstrong? L’Amour de Galileo, very witty, an eighteenth-century parody of the naturalists."
Michael made no move to take the proffered book. "I'm afraid I'm deficient in a sense of humor, Professor."
Manfred sighed, dropped the book back on its table, and they left the shop. "And what is it you have received, Professor Armstrong? A book on physics, a novel, poetry? I admit it, I am curious about the private lives of my colleagues."
Michael started to say it was none of Manfred's business; but brusqueness would lead to suspicion and suspicion to--
He ripped the string off, slid the paper wrapping away. The neat Danes had brightly painted trashcans on every corner; he threw the wrappings away, and then thought the message might have been on them. No, they had said in the book. They had been very explicit
He turned the volume so he could read the spine. Oh, Lord. It was in English, an American book. It was called The Six Little Peppers and How They Grew.
He said quickly: "It's a present for Miss Sherman. She loved it when she was a child and wants to read it over again."
The thick, omnipresent hand reached out, the spatulate fingers closed on the aged volume. Manfred took the book, opened it, looked at the copyright page. T would hardly think Miss Sherman was so old."
"Her mother read it to her. It had been her mother's favorite, too." This was getting in the field of the desperately ridiculous.
"Very sentimental,'' Manfred growled. "I would not think it of Miss Sherman, that efficient assistant who takes such good care of you."
"I got the impression you liked Sarah, Professor."
"The question is, do you like her?"
Before he thought, Michael said: "Like her? We're being married in the summer."
Manfred swung around in front of Michael, halting him. The big head on its heavy neck tilted up to peer into Michael's face; the guttural voice growled a single syllable: "So?"
Michael stepped around the German and marched on toward the hotel

4

Sarah and professor Hengstrom were waiting in the lobby of the Angleterre for him. The old Swede still had traces of the red hair that had flamed so brilliantly when he had lectured to Michael and a dozen other graduate students in Pittsburgh years before.
He grabbed Michael's right forearm with both his hands, squeezed. "It is so good to see you again, my dear boy. And your lovely assistant here, such a surprise. Or perhaps she is more than an assistant?"
Karl Manfred cleared his throat. "Dr. Manfred, do you know Professor Hengstrom?" Michael asked.
"Of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science," Manfred said sourly. "Yes."
Hengstrom said: "Dr. Manfred." Then he turned his head. "Michael, shall you and I and Sarah have our lunch now? We go to the Tivoli, the finest smorgasbord this side of Sweden." The old man laughed. "You see, I already call her Sarah."
Manfred plodded away stumpily.
Hengstrom looked after him: "He used to be a nice fellow. But for twenty years he has worked for the Russians." The old scientist threw up his hands. "Let's forget all that. Now we eat and you tell me what you have been doing."
"Intergalactic math," Michael said. "Some other things, but they wouldn't interest you too much."
Hengstrom laughed. That is pure research, certainly."
"First I’ll have to ask you to forgive me a moment, while I wash up."
Sarah said: "Let's see your precious book, Michael"
He covered the title with his hand. But the gaudy, childish cover was unhideable. Without answering, he turned away towards the men's room, feeling a sharp pain between his shoulder blades, where Sarah must be staring.
He stepped into the center booth in the lavatory, directly under the light, and opened the ridiculous book. A number had been lightly penciled on the end paper: 117.
He turned to that page, and held the page up to the light, brutally bending the boards back against the spine of the book.
The light showed pinpricks over certain letters. He tore off a piece of toilet paper and rested it on the reservoir of the toilet while he wrote.
Apparently me encoder had had trouble finding the letters he wanted; the message went on for five pages, but it was very short when he got it completely copied. He checked through the next few pages to make sure it didn't continue, then read it:
"immediate welcome ready! if emergency contact landweg 341 seven miles from capital. PI."
Michael Armstrong grunted, read the message through three times, then flushed it away.
The book was more of a problem. He carried it back out to the desk, asked the clerk to keep it for him, and then rejoined Sarah and Professor Hengstrom.
Lunch was apparently good, from Sarah's exclamations and Hengstrom's eager and ample consumption. But Michael didn't taste the spicy smorgasbord or the martini that preceded it
The conversation was easy enough. Intergalactic math was indeed part of what Michael had been working on; but it was more hobby work than professional. Professor Hengstrom had always been one of the last of the great "pure" scientists, the savants who insisted that research should be conducted with no thought for practical results; if practical results happened, they could be turned over to engineers; if they didn't, man's knowledge had been increased anyway.
Of all the colleagues he knew well, Hengstrom was the only one who had heartily approved when Michael was let go by the Interspace Committee and had to return to teaching.
There was a better chance of turning up a genius at Southern Oklahoma Baptist, Hengstrom had written Michael, than there was of turning up a new and valuable concept while doing the work of politicians and generals.
If the world ever blew up, it was almost a certainty that the last act of Professor Hengstrom would be an attempt to measure the intensity of the flash; and it was an absolute certainty that if able to do this, he would incinerate with a happy smile on his elderly face.
On the way out of the restaurant, Michael stopped at the counter of the pretty cigarette girl and bought a package of local cigarettes. He laid a Danish bank-note on the counter, waved away the change and steered Sarah through the door the old gentleman was holding for her.
"Here I must leave you," Hengstrom said. "I have promised Honsen at the Royal Danish Academy that I would come out and see what he has been doing. Beautiful work he has been doing, on the bending of light waves."
He waved a gloved hand and was gone.
"Beautiful work, and completely useless," Michael said.
"Stop stalling," Sarah said.
"Stalling, dear?"
"And drop the dear. You just paid five dollars or thereabouts for a pack of cigarettes. And while you were out, the concierge gave me an envelope for you. He said it contained the airline ticket you asked him to buy."
"I hope you tipped him, dear."
"That cigarette girl was pretty, but a single kroner would have been enough. You never overtip unless you're very worried. And where are you flying?"
Michael took a deep breath. "Stockholm."
Sarah started walking toward the hotel. "When, Michael?"
"This afternoon," he said.
She took a half-skip and whirled around to face him. "But the congress. What about tonight? You're giving our speech."
He said harshly, "This is more important. I have to talk to the Swedish Defense Department."
She repeated the phrase incredulously: "Swedish--Defense--Department?”
"All right," Michael said. "I telephoned them this morning and told them about my work on Gamma Five being canceled."
"Just casually told them? I’ll bet you talked a half an hour."
"They said the Swedish government might back the project"
"But you're an American! You can't work in defense for a foreign government"
"They offered to clear it with U.S. State, of course. Washington's already cabled clearance."
"Cabled? When did you get a cable?"
He said: "From my friend the concierge. That's when I asked him to get me the flight booking." He felt as though he was strangling on his own tongue. Everything he said made it necessary to invent a new lie; and like most men in his profession, he simply wasn't trained or accustomed to ad-libbing; it was his nature to think very carefully before saying anything at all.
Sarah said: "It's all beginning to clear up. You never intended to give this speech at all. That's why the only manuscript I could find was the old ban-the-bomb thing."
He took a deep breath, stared out at the wide street. But the people passing by, the cars scurrying along were no inspiration. Finally he said, "All right. I didn't want to tell you till I was certain. You know how much Gamma Five means to me."
She nodded, gravely, like a little girl told she can't go on a picnic and determined not to cry about it. Love for her filled him and he wanted to put his arms around her and hold her close, and drop everything that could possibly hurt her.
She said, "I must be the very first girl in history to be jilted at a Danish scientific congress. What am I supposed to do? Get a new fiancé? Karl Manfred likes me, I can tell." She pretended to shudder.
Michael Armstrong said: "Oh, come on. You can see the congress through. After all, you're a scientist yourself. Take notes for me, and I’ll be home in time for the wedding."
“In two months?"
He said: "Oh, sure." He'd either be home in two months, or not at all, in which case he'd not have to answer for breaking his promise.
Sarah said slowly, "I don't see why I can't go to Stockholm with you." She took the sleeve of his coat in her hand. "Aren't I any use to you any more?"
Oh, what a tangled web we weave when once we start to deceive. He hadn't thought of that in years, not since he was a small boy. There was really no answer. He knew he sounded feeble as he said, "I’ll be much, much too busy."
"When aren't you busy?" Her eyes flashed, her gloved hands waved, she was Portia on the Kanalgade in Copenhagen. She should have collected a crowd, but perhaps the fact that she was speaking in a foreign tongue drove the passersby on. "You were busy in Washington, in Oklahoma, on the ship. Here in Copenhagen you've been as busy as a bee with two hives. Just the reason you ought to take me. The busier you are, the more you need me, and you know it"
She finished triumphantly; she had made her point. There wasn't anything to say.
So he said nothing; he just shook his head slowly from side to side.
Her eyes filled with tears and she turned and ran down the stately, beautiful street, through the classic, beautiful city, a girl with a broken heart.
Michael Armstrong walked slowly after her.

5

All that Sarah could think of was to get away from Michael and stay away. She was stunned, horrified. She wasn't a prude, this wasn't the age of the great Victoria; so they had been lovers, she and Michael, and he was throwing her over; that had happened to girls before, and it had happened to her before, too.
But all this came without warning, there was nothing gradual about it. She had never thought of Michael as a devious person; she had loved him largely because of the elemental simplicity characteristic of so many men in his profession; if they brooded, if they grew absentminded and inattentive, it was because they were thinking of their work.
A girl knew where she stood with Michael Armstrong: in second place. Maybe third, if you take the Gamma Five and the intergalactic math as separate rivals for his attention.
It was unbelievable that he could have planned to ditch her this way, and she not suspect it; it showed a side of Michael that was as unbelievable as finding out that one's pet poodle was carrying a membership card in the Bricklayers' Union and had been working the night shift
Running in high heels is exhausting; she dropped to a walk. After all, Michael was not likely to be pursuing her at any breakneck speed; she must have made him thoroughly uncomfortable with her insistence, her girlishly playful insistence that he take her along.
Her face turned hot. My God, she thought, I've still got a girlish blush in me.
A gaudy poster caught the corner of her eye. Travel bureau. Just what the jilted girl needs. This was much better than talking to the concierge in the lobby of the Angleterre and having Michael come in and see her.
She turned in.
The two men behind the counter seemed to be English; but you could never tell, so many of the Danes were linguists. One of them was saying, "Fifteen suitcases missing from that tour that came in this morning."'
Sarah said, I’ve a return ticket to New York. Could you tell me when the next flight is?"
The other clerk said, “They could be any place, back in London, gone on over the pole, any place." Without turning his head he added: "Pan-Am left at noon, miss. You can fly S.A.S. at sixteen forty-five."
Sarah made the adjustment necessary to change military air time into American civilian. Quarter of five in the afternoon. She said: "That'll do fine." She fished her ticket out of her bag and laid it on the counter.
The clerk started filling in the cryptic spaces, pressing the cryptic keys that have to be filled in and pressed to make out an airline ticket His partner said: "And then there are Mr. Williamson's golf clubs."
"Not classified as hand luggage under the Warsaw Convention," Sarah's man said cryptically. The teletype he had pressed pressed back at him, clicking.
He said: "Your reservation is confirmed, Miss Sherman."
She watched him writing up her ticket, copying the data from the old one. And suddenly she knew she wasn't going to quit without a fight. Nobody could be as different as Michael Armstrong appeared to be; no one could change that fast. She said: "Could you find out when Dr. Armstrong's flight leaves for Stockholm?"
The clerk said: "Oh, yes, miss. We have a complete interchange between all offices, airlines and hotels in Denmark; every flight is immediately printed in everyone else's machine."
He proudly turned, and got a sheaf of long tear-off sheets from the hook behind the teletype machine. "Armstrong, Armstrong--he flies out today, Miss Sherman?"
"This afternoon, yes."
The clerk shook his head firmly, "You're wrong, Miss Sherman. The only Armstrong booked out of Copenhagen this afternoon is Michael, going to Berlin. East Berlin, as a matter of fact"
"Behind the Iron Curtain?"
"Quite so," the clerk said. "People do, you know."

6

Time to go. Time to move out and face whatever it was he was going to face. Michael Armstrong watched the porter load his bags on the dolly and start down the corridor with them. He started to follow, and then stopped outside Sarah's door.
He knocked, and the door swung open at once.
But the woman who opened it was not Sarah; she was a chambermaid. She said something in Danish, undoubtedly a negative. Michael looked over her shoulder. The room was stripped, the closet open and empty, the sheets piled up on the floor by the chambermaid.
Gone. Caught a plane back to the States, probably; or maybe to Paris or London for a shopping spree or whatever girls did when the world cracked apart from around them.
The porter was waiting by the elevator; he walked on slowly to join him..
* * *
He got an aisle seat on the plane, glanced at the sleeping man next to him, let himself go limp. No use crying before you were hit.
The hostess came along the aisle, checking the passengers, asking if they wanted anything. As she passed him going toward the back of the plane, he turned his head, as most of the male passengers did, to admire the straight seams of her nylons.
Raising his eyes from that lovely sight, he saw another one.
Sarah was sitting in the last row of the plane.
She was sharing a pair of seats with a lady in her early forties, painted and curled, hatted and furred to an extent that read show business from any distance whatsoever. Catching Michael's eye, she smiled and bowed graciously.
The seat belt sign was off, he slipped out of his seat, started back. Gracious Lady's smile became even more gracious; he could swear that her fingers were curving themselves to hold an autograph pen.
It was too bad that he couldn't take time to see her face when he disregarded her to lean across to Sarah.
He was too enraged to be tactful. He said: "What in hell's name are you doing here?"
Sarah smiled at him calmly. "Believing in you, Michael."
It was a frightful effort to keep his voice down to a whisper. "Now, you listen to me, and listen well. Keep away from me. Don't talk to me."
Gracious Lady was beginning to make hmphing noises. He had better make it snappy; G.L. didn't seem the sort to mind calling attention to herself by complaining to the stewardess.
Sarah was still smiling. "It's a nice day for flying, isn't it?"
Michael swallowed desperately. Maybe if he had had time to take acting lessons from Gracious Lady he would be more convincing. He put a growl into his voice: "Sarah, don't even leave the airport. Book yourself on the first plane west or back to Denmark, or anyplace, and get on it just as soon as they'll let you. You hear me?"
"Loud and dear, Michael Four by four, or three by three or whatever they say. And now you listen to me!"
Gracious Lady was getting so interested that she was forgetting to be suspicious and miffed. She almost patted Sarah's hand for encouragement
Sarah said, "Where you go, I go. What you do, I do."
"The hell, Sarah, I--" He broke off; what could he say?
"That's love," Sarah said, "Now go sit down before the plane bumps and hurts you."
Half the passengers were craned around, trying to listen. He shrugged and went back to his seat.
The plane gradually quieted down. The stewardess served coffee and sandwiches and little cakes, and distributed souvenir postcards. Michael did not feel like snacking or mailing pictures home.
Michael felt like hell.
Eventually the No-Smoking-Fasten-Seatbelts light went on. The motors changed in pitch, and the big ship slowly banked around and started coming down.
A little voice inside his head was saying: "Now, now, now," and his memory was desperately trying to remember the name of the bridge that Caesar burned behind him. Somehow or other, if he could remember that, he would feel better, but he had always been weak on the classical side of the curriculum.
He still hadn't remembered when the wheels hit earth and the harsh surface and unlit landing lights of the airport went flying by. Then the plane was turning, taxiing, and the loudspeaker system was telling everybody to keep their seat belts fastened till the doors were opened.
When they were, an official in a uniformed cap came in, said something to the stewardess, who pointed at Michael. The officer--whatever he was, police, airline, airport management--came down the aisle, elbowing his way through the departing passengers, and said: "Dr. Armstrong?"
Michael nodded.
The man said: "You will wait till everyone else is off." No "please," no "will you?" Just a direct order. It was a foretaste of his life from now on.
Michael nodded, swung his legs so that his seatmate could get out. The official stood in the aisle, pushed now and then by passengers, but not yielding anymore than he had to; a German with a little authority.
Sarah went by without even glancing at him; Gracious Lady was the last one off, making an exit or making an entrance to the airport, one or the other.
The German said, "Now, Dr. Armstrong." Michael stood up. The man said: "Give me your baggage checks, please," the first little touch of courtesy he had shown.
Michael turned them over, went down the aisle ahead of the officer, took his overcoat and hat from the stewardess and thanked her. She looked a little surprised; probably she thought he was being arrested.
Two men with caps like his guide--or arresting officer--were holding back a crowd of obvious journalists. Gracious Lady was walking directly toward them, her back, from hat through fur to girdle, radiating cheer, charm and confidence.
The two officials let them go, and they trotted toward G.L., broke around her like hounds around an oak tree, and came on for Michael.
As Gracious Lady disappeared her back was expressing bewilderment and disappointment
From behind Michael, Karl Manfred said: "I will take over, Lieutenant."
He spoke in German, which Michael understood well. The official faded away.
Manfred said: "I rode in the pilot's compartment. The advantage of a monolithic government, no? You don't have to say anymore to the reporters than you want to. Even if there are no Americans among them, there are sure to be Canadians and English."
One of the officers who had held back the crowd now came around it at a dog trot, and whispered something in Manfred's ear. The reporters were already yapping at Michael, but they were drowning each other out so badly that he didn't have to talk yet.
Manfred grabbed Michael's arm and pulled him around so that his back was to the press. Michael's lieutenant and the other two men were pushing the reporters back, trying to get some order among them.
"Miss Sherman is here, she insists on coming out for your press interview."
"She would," Michael said.
"You had her with you on the plane?"
"She was on the plane, but not with me. She must have followed me."
Manfred said: "I do not know if this is a good thing, or a very bad thing. She knows nothing?"
"Less than that," Michael said.
Manfred turned and shouted something at the lieutenant, who left his colleagues to struggle with the wayward press and trotted off. "Better to have her here where we have a little control over her. You know about her father, Armstrong?"
"Of course I do. I told you, we were planning on getting married."
The lieutenant came back, holding Sarah by her upper arm. Manfred waved him away. Sarah said: "Whatever in the world is happening?"
Manfred said: This is entirely Professor Armstrong's doing, not mine."
Sarah said: "Michael..."
But the press conference had been brought to some sort of order; a mike was put in front of Michael, an interpreter stood by with another one, hand-held.
Michael said: "I will make a short statement, and answer no questions. I have decided to work for the German Democratic Republic. I was engaged on a very important project which my own government decided to cancel. East Germany has offered me facilities and money to finish that project"
He did not look at Sarah, but at Manfred, who said: "There is more, Armstrong. Here is the Vice-Minister of our country, who wishes to make your welcome official."
Official and final, Michael thought, and stood stiffly, while Manfred said his name and the Vice-Minister's; then they shook hands squarely, and the lieutenant shoved a microphone in front of the Vice-Minister's mouth. "Welcome to the German Democratic Republic, Herr Professor Doktor Armstrong. Welcome to the world in which scientists of your stature receive proper respect. Congratulations on your escape from the decadent West."
This was in German; the interpreter was repeating it in English over another mike, though there seemed little chance that anyone there did not speak German.
Then the reason became clear. Manfred whispered: "Answer. Thank the Vice-Minister."
What you have to do, you do. Michael said slowly: "Because of bureaucratic decisions in my native country, my work became impossible. So I have decided to work for the German Democratic Republic."
He spoke in German. The Vice-Minister, the lieutenant, and Manfred were all glaring at him. The lieutenant's fingers ground into Michael's biceps. "In English, bitte schon."
Michael repeated it in English.
What you have to do, you do.
Then he was hurried off, through the throng of correspondents. One of the reporters called: "Associated Press, Professor. I want to ask you a question."
But the lieutenant's two men were there, holding the press back, and the lieutenant was holding Michael, and pushing him toward a building with a sign, "Airport Police."
As they went through the door, Michael managed to look back. Manfred was with Sarah, talking to her. She looked like death warmed over, as a grand-aunt of his used to say.
Michael had never seen a more apt scene for that phrase.

7

The men behind the counters in the building wore the same official caps the lieutenant had on; but the man in the office marked "Chief, Airport Police," was in plain clothes, the stiff dark gray ones favored by Soviet officials and envoys, and therefore by their admirers in all the satellite countries.
The lieutenant came to attention, snapped his heels, said, "Professor Armstrong, Herr Gerhard, head of the People's Security Police."
Gerhard was seated behind a desk. He nodded wearily and said, "Thank you, Lieutenant And thank you for the use of your office, too."
It was obviously a dismissal; Gerhard did not even bother to look at the officer when he said it. The airport cop snapped his heels again, saluted, and was gone.
Gerhard said, “Take a seat, Professor Armstrong. I am Heinrich Gerhard, State Security. You have heard of my famous-infamous organization?"
Michael sat down in the chair that the tired hand waved at. For the first time he noticed another man in the small office, a balding, rather burly man, sitting very straight on an armless chair in the corner. Since Gerhard ignored him, Michael did, too.
"Now that you are on this side of famous-infamous Iron Curtain," Gerhard went on, "you may smoke Cuban tobacco." He proffered a cigar case.
Michael shook his head, took out his cigarettes. Both men lit up.
Gerhard half swung around so he could look out the window behind him. There wasn't much to see: a stretch of asphalt, a red-painted aircraft hangar against a gray sky. "Berlin in winter," Gerhard said. "You have experienced it before?"
Michael said: "Twice, briefly."
"And what do you think of our weather?"
"It is famous-infamous," Michael said, not smiling.
Gerhard broke into chuckles. "The famous-infamous American sense of humor," he said. "It is a fine expression for a secret agent; what you are thinks a thing is famous; what you are supposed to be must regard it as infamous. Isn't it so?"
"I don't know," Michael said. "I've never been a secret agent"
For just a moment Gerhard's mask of worldly geniality slipped, and the cruelty necessary in a chief of security police shone through. "No?" Gerhard said. He shrugged. "I have. From the time I was twenty I was in the underground against the Gestapo. That was not easy work, Dr. Armstrong."
"I should imagine not," Michael said, thinking hard. It was possible that on Saturday nights from, say, eleven-fifteen till eleven-thirty, Gerhard relaxed and spoke without purpose; it was certain that he did not do so during office hours and in conversation with a suspect alien.
So the autobiographical remark had a purpose. The scientific mind chose and rejected, and finally decided that Gerhard meant to remind Michael that the Communists and the Americans had once been allies against the Nazis; and the only purpose of that reminder would be to make Michael's defection easier for Michael to bear.
It was a kindly purpose; Michael smiled.
Correct; Gerhard nodded, satisfied. He puffed at his cigar, removed it from his mouth, examined the flame. The man in the corner produced a cigarette lighter, flicked the wheel. Gerhard shook his head, and the lighter vanished into the anonymous man's pocket.
Gerhard said: "That is Mr. Gromek, Professor. He will be your personal guide. Anything you need, he will provide it"
"Like an extra shadow?"
Gerhard laughed heartily at the unfunny question. "Oh, you'll find that Mr. Gromek grows on one. Eh, Mr. Gromek?"
Gromek's face grew as bright as a police switch-board in a riot call. "I live many years in United States," he said, in a pure Liederkranz accent
"Nevertheless, well talk German," Michael said quickly. "So I can practice."
This was a tame cop. He said: "At your service. I lived in New York, Eighty-sixth Street and Sixth Avenue. You know it?”
Hardly, since Sixth Avenue did not go that far north; the corner Gromek was talking about would be in the middle of Central Park. "I know it well," Michael said. "There's a pizza parlor on the corner, isn't there?"
"How it all comes back to me," Gromek said. "Lots of fun in that joint."
This gemutlich old-home-week business was boring Gerhard. He waved a finger, and Gromek went back into his corner and his silence. Gerhard's expression now was quizzical. "They tell me you brought a little excess baggage, Doctor."
"Oh!"
"Sarah Louise Armstrong," Gerhard said.
Michael frowned: "Louise?"
"You didn't know? That is saying much for my men, isn't it? Whatever made you change your mind about this young woman? In all your talks with my agents, you never once mentioned it."
"I didn't bring her," Michael said. "She came. I told her the agreed-on cover story in Copenhagen, but I guess I'm not a very practiced liar."
Gerhard's expression changed again; it became as anonymous as Mr. Gromek. "Then it is not true that you are affianced to this young woman."
"Yes. I mean, yes, it is true."
Gerhard said, "And just what did you expect her to do? Marry the man who will get your job at the university? Marry the boy next door back home? Enter a convent?”
The tightrope was stretched till it thinned down to a cobweb. Very carefully Michael said, "I guess I hoped--maybe I wasn't facing reality--that when she thought it over, saw why I did what I have done, she'd join me here."
Gerhard assumed a fatherly look. "And all this happened a little soon, eh? We will have her in now."
At once Mr. Gromek jumped up and opened the outer door.
Manfred and Sarah were sitting on a bench out there. The German scientist put his hand under the girl's elbow, and they both stood up and came into the office. Mr. Gromek went out and returned with a straight chair in each hand; the ease with which he carried them showed an unexpected strength. He put one down behind Sarah and tie other in back of Manfred; they both sat down. Mr. Gromek went back to his corner and his effort to become invisible.
Gerhard added a touch of lechery to his fatherly beam. "Congratulations," he said to Michael. He peered over the desk at Sarah's legs, let his eyes slowly travel up her body to her face. "Yes, Professor, congratulations."
Sarah was blushing. Michael tried to put her at ease with a smile; she didn't smile back.
Gerhard turned on a grave look. "Miss Sherman, what are we going to do with you?"
Sarah was more nervous than Michael had ever seen her. She tugged at her skirt, trying to cover her knees; but the year's fashions didn't allow that. She said, "Well, Mr. Gerhard, what do you suggest?"
Gerhard said: "Does your father know where you are?"
Sarah just shook her head.
"Is she a good assistant?" the security chief asked Michael.
Michael said, "Yes," as crisply as he could.
"And a good fiancé?"
There didn't seem to be any answer to that Michael felt his face reddening, his lips tightening. Then he heard his own voice angrily ask, "What the hell kind of question is that?"
Gerhard didn't bother to put on a new face. He just murmured, "Sorry," and went on with his goading. "You wish to stay with the professor, Miss Sherman?"
"I've gone to a lot of trouble to get here," she said.
"Trouble for you, trouble for Dr. Armstrong, trouble for me," Gerhard agreed. "But that is no answer."
"I don't know," she blurted. "I just don't know."
"Please, please, no tears. You would not believe what tears, a pretty woman's tears, do to me. So you want time to talk to Dr. Armstrong alone?"
"Oh, yes, thank you."
"You see, I am not so hardhearted. But first we must remember there is the international press waiting for us. Never keep a reporter waiting, eh, Mr. Gromek?"
Mr. Gromek was so startled at being addressed jocularly that he jumped to attention and looked around wildly for some service to render his chief. Desperate at not finding a task to his hand, he crossed to the door and held it open.
"Exactly," Gerhard said. "You see, Dr. Armstrong? Mr. Gromek is a mind reader. He will anticipate your every need. Did I not say he would grow on you?"

8

The terminal lounge of the S.A.S. had been set up as a press-conference room; a buffet at one side carried all the usual Eastern European goodies, sturgeon and caviar, salmon and cold beef. Drinks, of course: Scotch and vodka, slivovitz and German brandy, the stinging Branntwein.
But when Gerhard led in Michael and Sarah, the press stopped eating and drinking and went to work; flashbulbs popped and mikes were shoved forward, and a newsreel camera started whirring busily.
A gray-haired man shoved through the tangle of his colleagues and so confronted Michael in an unmistakably Middle Western accent: "Is it true you're defecting?”
“I’m going to explain that."
An interpreter bawled over a public-address system: "There will be a statement in English and German with copies for one and all." He repeated it in German.
But the American correspondent said: "I'm the Chicago Tribune, Armstrong. Is it true you defected because Washington abandoned your antimissile program?"
"The Gamma Five is--"
But Michael was not given a chance to finish his remark. An English voice from the back called: "Is it true that you said your Gamma Five could make nuclear war obsolete?"
Mr. Gromek was in front of Michael now, pushing the reporters back; the interpreter was yelling into his microphone; more flashbulbs were going off; and then, suddenly, Gerhard raised his voice and barked, "No questions!" and the lounge got deathly still.
Through the silence, an American voice, female, asked: "Is that an American girl?"
"No questions," the interpreter said on the P.A.
Michael took the statement Manfred handed him. He glanced through it carefully, making sure it was the one he and Manfred had composed and agreed to on the ship; these people were capable of ringing in a substitute.
It was all right. He started reading:
"Today, in my country--the United States-there are people in high places who do not want to see atomic war abolished. Because of this, the project on which I worked for six years has been canceled by my government. My work is more important than any personal considerations of loyalty to any one country, and, for that reason, I have decided to offer my services to your University at Leipzig. There, I hope to work with Professor Gustav Lindt, a leading authority in my field. Together with Professor Lindt, I expect to produce a defensive weapon which will make all nuclear offensive weapons completely harmless and, thus, abolish the terror of nuclear war. Thank you."
He finished, and stood there, while the interpreter put the German version out over the P.A. At once the gray-haired American reporter shouted, "A question, Dr. Armstrong!"
"No questions!" Gerhard yelled.
The airport policemen were pushing the correspondents out; the television cameras were turning their lights off; the local and satellite and Russian news people were leaving docilely. But the American and English and Frenchmen were hanging on, resisting the politely firm cops.
A woman got around the lieutenant himself and pushed forward to Sarah. "You're Miss Sherman, aren't you? Senator Sherman's daughter? Right?" She had a voice that sounded as if she had been born to the union of a fire engine and a machine gun.
Gerhard bawled, "No questions!" and Manfred grabbed Sarah's arm and hurried her out of the lounge and back into the office corridor.
The strident lady writer called after her: "Does the senator know you're here, Miss Sherman?"
Mr. Gromek had Michael's arm, was rescuing him from the gray-haired reporter and the rest of the Free World press; Gerhard and the policemen closed in, and Michael found himself in the police office again without having to answer any of the questions that he would have been completely unable to answer.
Sarah was there, weeping bitterly. Manfred had his back to her, trying not to notice. Michael went over and put his arm around her shoulders, but she shrugged it off. He took the big clean handkerchief from his breast pocket, and she accepted that
Manfred said, "Is the car ready, Mr. Gromek?"
Mr. Gromek beamed. "All okay, Doc." He turned to Michael. "Some reception, huh? A big deal. You still say that in the U.S. of A.? Big deal?"
Gerhard had gone off to fry other fish. Manfred now seemed to be in charge, and it was obvious that Mr. Gromek was not afraid of Manfred. The guide said, "How do you like my English, Miss Sherman? Pretty nifty, huh?"
Sarah blew her nose; to distract Mr. Gromek, Michael asked, "What did you work at in New York?"
"I was a dealer in the pizza parlor at the corner of Eighty-sixth and Sixth," Mr. Gromek said.
Apparently he thought pizza was some sort of gambling game. But he certainly had a good memory; Michael's remark about the pizza parlor had been barely muttered.
Manfred said, "Let's go. There's a back entrance, and the Vopos will have the area around it cleared."
"Vopos?"
"People's Police," Mr. Gromek said. "Volkspolizei. The airport cops are one section of it"
He held the door. Sarah took Manfred's arm, and they went out. Michael started to follow them. "And you're in another section, Mr. Gromek."
"No. I'm Security, much higher, more important Hot dog!"
They got the car all right, a big limousine. Mr. Gromek sat by the driver, the other three sat in the back, Sarah, by choice, putting Manfred between her and Michael.
Dark was falling; the early, bitter darkness of winter in Berlin. The street lights were far apart, and some of them were broken; the pools of light that the working ones threw were glistening with hoar frost.
There were few people on the streets, few cars; a Vopo stood on the grating in front of a bakery, beating his gloved hands together, enjoying the heat that came up from the basement ovens.
"They have rooms for us at the Hotel Berlin," Manfred said. "I would like to invite both of you to dinner in my room. More privacy than the dining room downstairs. Tomorrow, maybe, we go to Leipzig."
“I’m not hungry," Sarah said.
"Some hot soup, and you will feel better, you will have appetite. We eat well, we scientists. The Democratic Republic appreciates us."
"And the people?" Sarah asked. "How do they eat?"
Michael was glad she could get enough fire up to ask anything. He had never seen her so exhausted and dispirited. He felt like a man who had inadvertently stepped on and crushed a little child's toy. But what you have to do, you do.
Manfred was saying that perhaps the common people of East Germany did not eat so well, but that every year things got a little better.
"That's all you can ask," Michael said.
Sarah turned her head and stared out at the cheerless city.
Trust the press; they were waiting at the Hotel Berlin. Mr. Gromek swore under his breath, and turned his square head toward the back seat. "Wait until I get out and clear a lane. The doorman will help me."
"Is he a policeman, too?" Michael asked, and then wished he hadn't
But nobody took offense. Mr. Gromek shrugged, and Manfred said, "It is not called the People's Police for nothing. In a monolithic state, all are members of the state to the same degree. You will get used to it."
The car stopped, and Mr. Gromek slid out of the front door; the chauffeur reached over and relocked the door. But the reporters' faces could be seen through the glass, and their voices came dimly through to Michael.
"Professor Armstrong, has the East German Government guaranteed international use of Gamma Five?" "Miss Sherman, Miss Sherman, have you told your father that you're defecting?" "Are you defecting, Miss Sherman?"
That last was, of course, the machine-gun lady reporter. Michael said, "If I weren't engaged, I might grow to love that dame." But neither Manfred nor Sarah showed that they had heard him. He added, "Joke, joke."
Mr. Gromek was back on the sidewalk, with a uniformed doorman, a concierge, and four of the biggest bellboys anyone ever saw. All police, no doubt; flowers blooming on the monolithic state.
Now the chauffeur got out, too, and the eight men formed a double lane across the sidewalk. The reporters couldn't get past the strong clasped hands. Manfred reached out and opened the door, and the chorus rose: "Are you taking them to Leipzig, Dr. Manfred? Dr. Armstrong, when you get out, smile this way, will you? Miss Sherman, wait for a picture."
There were many mouths there, but only one voice. Manfred trotted across the sidewalk and into the lobby of the hotel, and Sarah ran with her head down in her overcoat collar, Michael's hand under her elbow.
The lobby was better lighted than the street, but not by much. The ornately carved furniture looked dull and untended; a sign on the elevator said it was out of order. Frills could wait for later, in the monolithic state.
Manfred leading, they went up the stairs; looking back he could see that the big doorman had broken away from the other officers and was standing outside, back to the hotel's double doors.
Manfred seemed to know where he was going; on the second floor he slowed to a walk, puffing slightly, and then led them down the corridor to where keys were sticking out of three keyholes.
"My room," he said at the first, but he didn't stop. He opened the second door, said, "Miss Sherman." Sarah took the key from the door and went in; they heard the lock grate, and Manfred shrugged, and waved toward the third door. "Yours of course, Professor."
Michael said, "Thanks. Miss Sherman's arrival must have upset a lot of plans."
"I wired from Copenhagen that she was on her way."
"Your intelligence is famous-infamous."
"Gerhard must like you," Manfred said. "He always uses that phrase when he thinks people are his intellectual equals."
Michael let him make what he could out of a smile, unlocked the third door and went in.
The room's closet was open a little way, he could see that his clothes had been unpacked and hung up. He opened a bureau drawer; his shirt and underwear were neatly stacked.
He went into the bathroom, ran the water till it was hot, washed his face and hands; his eyes felt gritty and strained.
He wanted a drink badly, and he was not usually a drinking man. But he doubted that the hotel had room service. He kicked off his shoes and lay on the bed, his hands folded under his head.
He wondered where the hidden mikes were in the room.
They had probably had to work fast to bug an extra room when they heard Sarah was on the plane. Or maybe they had all the rooms bugged all the time.
He was tired, but he couldn't rest. Still in his stocking feet, he started walking up and down. The carpet was worn, and it didn't feel clean, and the floor was cold. He sat on the edge of his bed and put his shoes back on.
There was a door in the side wall opposite the closet. Undoubtedly it led into Sarah's room. But Sarah didn't want to see him, and they could hardly talk in the Hotel Berlin, with a mike behind every piece of molding.
So he walked around his room, feverishly nervous, but he tried to walk around the end away from Sarah's door. Only, somehow, each trip took him nearer to that door.
And then--it wouldn't do any harm to see if the door was locked, because if it was, that would settle it, because Sarah surely wouldn't unlock it, because--he tried the knob.
The door was unlocked. East German Security had thought of everything to comfort the defecting physicist. He was used to Sarah's company, he would get Sarah's company.
Which was a pretty fancy euphemism for what he wanted of Sarah.
He knocked, his hand on the knob, and waited; there was no answer, so he knocked again and went in.
Sarah was sitting near the window, looking out at the dismal city. A distant glow in the sky was Western Berlin, with its genial giant of a mayor, its American troops, its Allied tanks, its--all right, he was sentimental--its American flags.
Sarah was in her slip and stocking feet. He went over and pulled the curtains, and turned back to her. She had put one hand over the cleavage that showed above the top of the slip, which was curious, considering that they had been lovers for over a year.
He said: “Iwant to talk to you."
The face turned up to him still showed signs of tears and of awful strain. "Isn't it a little late for that?"
"You told Gerhard you wanted to talk things over with me. I heard you."
“It's rather late for that, too."
He looked around the room desperately. But even if he could find a hidden mike, there was sure to be another one he didn't find; and if they all went off, the listeners would know what he had done, and why.
So he said what he had to say: "You've got to go back, Sarah. Tell Gerhard that you've thought it over, and you want to go home." He opened the curtain, pointed at the red glow on the sky. "Between here and there is--what do they call it?--Checkpoint Charley. Gerhard’ll see you there, and that'll be that."
"Tonight?"
"Right now. Go down to Manfred's room, tell him you want to talk to Gerhard."
She made a vulgar gesture at the bed. "How about your severance pay? One more night with good old Sarah. Sarah the--"
He cut in, his voice sharp in his throat "I'm trying to help you."
It had been the wrong thing to say. She jumped up from the chair to face him; as always when a girl takes off her heels, she looked small and defenseless. But her face was red with emotion, her eyes bright with anger: "Help me, help me! After all the lies you've told me, after all the deception, you have the nerve to say you want to help me?"
Michael said softly, "I thought it would be better for both of us if you didn't know what I was planning."
"You're right," she said. "I'd have had you locked up as a lunatic." She flung herself over to the bed and sat down. The tight fabric of the slip--silk, nylon?--didn't do anything to hide her figure; she'd never looked more desirable. When she spoke again, she'd gotten her voice under control. "You're a pretty cool customer, aren't you? You must have been planning this for weeks. It's what Manfred was in the United States for, isn't it?"
Michael said, "I'm sorry." It was pretty lame, but he couldn't think of anything else to say.
Sarah was on her feet again. She flung across the room to the wardrobe, jerked a light pink sweater off its hanger, draped it over her shoulders, started striding around the room as furiously as he had next door. "Oh, well, you should have said you were sorry sooner. It makes things easier. I can just go right home and take space in the Washington Post. 'Miss Sarah Sherman's marriage to Professor Michael Armstrong will not take place owing to the fact that he's gone over to the Communists. However, Professor Armstrong states that he is sorry.'"
"Sarah--"
"Good-bye love, good-bye trust, good-bye working together. Good-bye house on the campus. You've made me feel like a whore."
"Sarah."
"But I'd rather be that than a traitor."
Despite himself, he winced.
"Traitor, traitor, traitor," she said. And then her face twisted up, and she flung herself against him, he had his arms around her, his hands stroking her smooth shoulders, and she was saying, "Oh, Michael, darling, take me home."
There was nothing to say but, "I can't."
"I want to go home."
Over her head, his eyes were jerking from side to side. If he could find the mikes, cover them for just a moment--he tried to think what a spy hero in fiction would do, but he was not much of a hand for reading stuff like that. They should have prepared him for this job by a course in current novels.
He said, "I hate to sound melodramatic, but the future of humanity could just about depend on what I'm doing here." It was the first true thing he had said in so long that it sounded more insincere than anything else he had said; he was out of the habit of telling the truth.
Sarah stared at him. Then she slipped out of his arms. In quite a calm voice, she asked, "Is my hair a mess? My worst problem this morning was finding out how to wash it. When I found out you were coming here instead of Stockholm, I almost couldn't speak to get my ticket. Then I didn't see you on the plane, and I thought I'd been crazy, believing the travel agent who told me, and then you looked around, and Michael, you looked as if you hated me."
"I hated your being on the plane," he said. Another line of truth. Things were picking up. He'd better get back to where he was. "I'm not particularly proud of what I'm doing, but like all scientists, I believe that science has no nationality. If this was the only place I could finish Gamma Five, this is the place I have to be."
She said slowly, "You've gone insane. There's no use talking to insane people, you know; they hear, but it doesn't mean anything to them."
Saved by the bell. Someone was rapping sharply on his door. The voice of his new masters. He went through the connecting door, closed it after him, not wanting to look back to see Sarah's face; she would be amazed at how fast he jumped when the whip was cracked.
He'd always taken such pride in his independence, she'd always admired him for it. Pretty soon she was going to think he was a changeling, some other man using Michael Armstrong's body, as in another kind of novel he didn't read much of.
Manfred was at the door. "Ah, Professor. Everything all right? You are comfortable?"
Michael said: "Everything's fine."
The door from Sarah's room opened, and she came in, wearing a housecoat. She had touched up her face, smoothed her hair.
Manfred said, "I have come to invite you--both of you--to have dinner with me in the dining room. So?"
Sarah said, "I'm not hungry."
Manfred said, "Well, it has been a long day for a small girl, yes?" If elephants smiled, they would do it like Manfred. "There is room service here. May I send something up to you?"
"That's a fine idea," Michael said too heartily. "Karl here and I will eat downstairs, and you rest and have something warm in your room."
Now he got the look he had spared himself by dashing to answer the door, the look of utter amazement because he was so willing to abandon her.
He walked down the corridor with Manfred, who was talking about taking him on a sightseeing tour the next morning.
A waiter came out of the elevator and carried a tray of sandwiches and bottled beer past them. Idly Michael turned his head to watch him. The waiter knocked on a door and opened it without waiting. Inside Mr. Gromek was sitting with a headphone on.
Michael started to laugh. Manfred, startled, turned and saw what Michael had seen; then the door closed.
Manfred began to laugh, too. He said, "That is the way it is, Michael. With us, too; the Security does not consider anybody above suspicion."
It was the first time he had called Michael by his first name.

9

After Michael had left, Sarah stared at the door. But no magic or holy words appeared there to enlighten her; finally she moved to the room phone. She'd order some sort of food and a couple of good strong drinks and--
Just as she reached for the instrument it rang. The way her hand jumped away was an indication of the shape she was in.
The operator, presumably in the hotel, said that she had a call for Miss Sherman; she said it in English, hardly accented at all. Then a series of other operators reported cheerily to each other that they had East Berlin, and finally she learned where the call had originated: Washington.
Well, it was not likely to be either the President or the Washington Zoo. It would be her father, United States Senator Linus Sherman, who was not only her male parent, but was also a man of great seniority and influence and chairmanships in the most august body in the United States, or perhaps anywhere.
The connection was lost again, and New York was talking to Berlin and Berlin was talking to Frankfurt, and then New York was talking to Washington, and then there was Daddy, loud and clear. "Sarah, Sarah is that you?"
"Yes, Daddy. How's Mother?"
The voice that had caused presidents to think twice and was reportedly feared even by de Gaulle in his day, burst loudly in her ear: "What do you mean, how's Mother? I've got reporters beating my door down, and you want to make social talk! Mother's better than Father, for what that's worth. Now, listen to me, Sarah. You tell those people who've got you that Senator Linus Sherman says that if you aren't at Checkpoint Charley in twenty minutes, the United States--"
"Daddy, for heaven's sake. I'm grown up."
"All right, all right. That idiot Armstrong put you up to this, I know. You think you love him, but that's no reason to completely check your brains at the door!"
Sarah sighed and said: "Daddy--"
"Do you have any idea who you are?" Daddy was a great one for answering his own questions; he answered this one: "You are the daughter of the senior United States senator from our state, that's who. Are you aware that you're not only threatening the prestige of the United States of America, but you're jeopardizing my political future, as well?"
He wasn't as bad as he sounded, Sarah thought; talking that way was just a habit with him. Actually he was pretty smart, and very lovable; more so now than usual, because he was really worried about her.
"On second thought," he said, "stay in the hotel; right in your room. I'll call West Berlin, and they'll send people over for you."
"Daddy, will you please listen to me?"
"Listen? You do the listening. From West Berlin, go right to Paris, I'll phone the Henrys, and you lie low in the place, where the reporters can't get at you. Don't worry; I’ll fix everything."
Sarah tried a device she hadn't used since she was thirteen. She whistled shrilly into the phone. While her father was still in shock she said: "I'm not going anywhere. I'm staying right here till I make up my own mind about this."
The cartoon-type senator went away, and the brilliant Senator Sherman took his place. Her father said: "Sarah, when you accepted a top security clearance card from this government--the government of the country in which you were born and are a citizen--you stopped having a mind of your own. Your mind belongs to the United States."
"Oh."
"Makes you stop and think, doesn't it? Don't think those Communists don't know it. Get away from there, and fast; they'll do anything to keep you. You know too much for your own good."
Sarah said: ''Daddy, you make complete sense. But Michael doesn't; and I happen to love Michael. I'm going to try and get him out of this. Call me Joan of Arc, but that's what I'm going to do."
"Sarah, baby--"
She was about to cry. So she said, "Good night" into the phone and hung it up quickly and flung herself on the bed.
After a long time she got up again and ordered a double Scotch highball from room service; no food. When the drink came she used it to wash down two aspirins and then took a hot bath and got into bed.
After a long while she fell asleep.
When she woke up it was morning; watery sunshine came in through the curtains that shut out East Berlin, and steam was clanking and banging in the radiator.
And someone was clanking and banging on the door.
She slid out of bed, gave her hair a couple of quick swipes with the turquoise-set hairbrush Michael had brought back from Alamogordo, and then slipped into the housecoat she had worn the night before; she was still zipping it up as she opened the door.
But it wasn't Michael, it was Karl Manfred, the good gray Communist
Manfred said, "Oh, excuse me."
"No harm. I'm decent." She stepped back into the room, flipped the covers on the bed up, kicked her girdle under the bed; a well-brought-up young lady doesn't display her sleeping arrangements to a strange gentleman.
Manfred stood uncertainly in the door, then stepped in. Looking down he saw a white oblong envelope on the floor, picked it up and handed it to her. "A billet-doux from an unknown admirer, I'm sure," he said, ponderously playful.
"Oh, yes, I get them every morning, usually in bushel baskets." She smiled apologies, and ripped the envelope open. It was from Michael--who else?--and it said: "Have gone for walk. GO HOME," and it was signed with his first name.
Manfred had just asked her for breakfast downstairs. She apologized, saying she only took coffee, and she'd order it up here.
This was a persistent elephant. It said, "Then I will call for you in, say, an hour. There is much to see in East Berlin. It is not so grim as your papers say. The sun is out, we will walk and be happy."
Sarah crumpled up the letter, threw it in the wastebasket It had undoubtedly been read by the Security Police already; now they could fish it out of the basket and file it in her dossier. She said, "I'm not in the mood for sightseeing," and then at once added, "I'm sorry." After all she was a lady.
Manfred said, "Although it would be an honor and a pleasure to show you Berlin, my motive was not completely idle. I must talk to you. Perhaps in the lobby."
Sarah managed a smile. "As soon as I can get bathed and dressed, of course, Professor Manfred."
"Karl," he said. "Please, Karl. Michael already calls me that."
"In less than an hour, then, Karl."
He seemed radiantly happy as he left. She had never been loved by an elephant before; snakes, wolves, owls (Nyctea academicus), lizards and a whole zoo of other animals had pursued her, each according to the habits of his species, but Manfred was her first elephant-swain.
The rather collegiate joke failed to amuse her. She went in and turned on a bath; something had happened and the water that had gushed so eagerly the night before now just trickled, a little rustily.
It was going to be a lovely, lovely day.

10

At about the same time Michael, out on his stroll, finally shook off Mr. Gromek. It was another of those occasions on which the physicist wished he had read more spy stories; he had used the few dodges he knew, such as going in one door of a department store and out the other, without success.
Finally he got away by sheer luck; the little motorcycle on which Mr. Gromek followed him stalled as Michael got into a cab. So he simply had himself driven till they passed a taxi stand by a block; then he got out, paid, and walked back to take a fresh car and a new driver. He had this one drive him to the museum.
He got a third cab there, and showed him the address he had copied out of the pinpricked children's book in Copenhagen. The driver glanced at it. It is far.
"Seven kilometers."
The driver nodded. He named a price and they dickered halfheartedly for a minute or so, and then took off. The taximan had an incurious, pleasantly stupid face; Michael felt he was in luck.
As they went east through the dirty streets and out toward the country, Michael looked back once in a while and was relieved to see no one was following. He hoped they would be very hard on Mr. Gromek, post him in the East Berlin version of a Staten Island beat; the fake New York reminiscence soon got boring.
The cab was not in very good shape, but the traffic was thin; they got to where they were going in about twenty minutes. It turned out to be a small farmhouse out on the bleak plains of North Germany. Smoke was coming out of a brick chimney, and a tractor was ploughing a quarter of a mile behind the house.
He told the driver to wait and then went and knocked on the well-scrubbed farmhouse door. Inside he could hear heavy footsteps coming toward him, and then the door opened.
The person inside was just through with being a girl and accustoming herself to being a woman; she was quite tall, very blonde, and unmistakably German. She stared at him calmly.
He drew something in the yard dust with the toe of his shoe. Then he looked down; so did the woman. Still without saying anything, she pointed out across the plains to the tractor, busily churning up the winter earth.
Michael said, "Danke schon."
The door closed silently in his face.
He glanced over at the taxi. The driver was behind the wheel, staring uninterestedly at the landscape. Michael started out across the loamy black earth.
It was hard walking in his city shoes, but the physical effort made him feel better than he had since he had left Copenhagen--better, in fact, than he had felt since he had known he was going to have to go to Copenhagen.
The driver stopped his tractor and climbed down to come meet him. Behind him the diesel motor continued to turn over, sending out a thin cloud of gray smoke.
The fanner was wearing a filthy sheepskin coat; he sported a heavy Russian-type mustache. Michael would have taken him for a Russian, but Michael didn't speak Russian, so he said: "Guten Tag."
"Hello," the fanner said. "You're Mr. Armstrong, I reckon." The accent was pure lower-class Southern.
Michael must have shown his surprise, because the farmer said, "I'm not German, mister. Just half-German; you know what a half-German is? Just a fella both of whose parents was German. How's Freddy?"
"Freddy?"
"C'mon, git on the tractuh with me. Fella from the road can't always tell is there one man or two on a tractuh. Freddy runs the bookstore in Copenhagen."
"Oh. He's fine. But it took me two hours and a half for my eyesight to figure out all the message in the book."
"You've got a high I.Q., too." The fanner climbed up on the metal tractor seat; he had padded it with old gunnysacks against the cold. Michael climbed up after him. The fanner said, "Can see yo're no farmboy. Well, what's your problem?"
"My girl. My lab assistant and fiancee. She's followed me to Berlin, and I can't get her to go home."
The fanner put the tractor into gear and they went clanking across the field. "Soil's good here, but drier than a buzzard's hind leg in a drought. If you figgered out all the message in that book, it said not to come out here except in dire emergency. This seem dire to you, Armstrong?"
"Dire as hell."
The farmer chuckled. "You could git us all into real trouble."
"I know. But with her here, what happens to the escape plan?"
The fanner reached the end of the row, swung the tractor around. "Aim on planting winter wheat, then following it up with sugar beet. Ought to do good."
"You must plan on being here a long time."
The man thought this over. "Don't matter if I'm around or not. Good land deserves to be used, and used right The getaway plan's none of yore bee's wax, Armstrong, like we said when we was kids. Yo're here to get information, and I'm here to get you out again, and let us leave each fella to tend his own department They got a good PI outfit in Leipzig; I'll talk to 'em. The girl know why you're here?"
"No. She thinks I'm defecting, a traitor, and she's the angel who's going to show me the light."
“Thank God for small favors." The man spat off to one side, said, "There's a. little water for you, dirt." He said: "Better cut this short. The name who'll see you in Leipzig is Cauro Kostka. Git out of Berlin fast, tell 'em yo're anxious to git to work, tell 'em anything. Kostka, can you remember that?"
"Sure."
"Must be nice to have a high I.Q. How's it feel to be a defector?"
Michael thought that over. "You know, better than it did running around back home giving ban-the-bomb speeches I didn't believe in."
The farmer snorted. "It's hard times and few to the row these days. Each man's got to do what he kin. Believe you me, Perfessor, I didn't like the idea of usin' an amachoor; but one of my old pros, you get him in where yo're goin', he wouldn't know did he get what we want or not. So we got to use a tremblin' amachoor."
"Don't you old pros ever tremble?"
"Ever' mawnin'. Like a leaf, Perfessor, like a leaf. Better go now; remember, Kostka."
"Kostka," Michael said, and dropped off the moving tractor, jumping wider than he had to, and landing with enough force to sink his low shoes in the freshly ploughed loam.
Behind him he heard a laugh. He walked away, back toward the house.
He was almost there when he saw that a new actor had entered the scene; a man on a light motorcycle, well-bundled up against the country weather in a raincoat, a long muffler, and a hat that Michael had last seen on Mr. Gromek's head.
Michael hesitated; but the motorcycle and its rider were between him and the taxi. He went on toward the house, walking as fast as he could. Mr. Gromek was heading that way, too.
Michael got in first, without knocking. The woman was stirring something or other on the stove; it smelt salty and pungent. Michael said, "Is there a back door?"
She looked around from the stove, her brows wrinkled.
Too late; the door opened again, and Mr. Gromek came in, smiling his idiot's smirk, cocking a mittened finger at Michael playfully, "I'm gonna report you."
Michael stared aghast.
"Going to our museum, and not even looking at the stuff there," Mr. Gromek chortled. "Oh, boy, is the Director of Culture gonna do a slow burn?" The foolish laugh filled the room. The woman shrugged, turned back to stirring her dinner on the stove. "Do they still say 'slow burn,' Prof? We usta say it all the time, around Eighty-sixth and Sixth."
"They still say it," Michael said. He tried to smile, without success.
Mr. Gromek said, "Well, who's the lady, pal? You don't mind my calling you pal, do you, Prof?"
The only thing that had changed was a marked diminution in Mr. Gromek's respect for Michael.
Michael said, "A relative on my mother's side. I'm not sure she knows it, though; my German doesn't seem as good as your English."
"Yeah, yeah, your Deutsch is too highbrow, my English too lowbrow. But we got one thing in common; lots an' lots of relatives. Boy, no matter where I go, aunts, uncles, cousins, and all of 'em poor, all of 'em with their hands out, expecting presents." While he had been talking, Mr. Gromek had been pulling off his bulky knitted gloves. Now he shoved them in his pocket, and kept his hand under his coat as his voice changed and his grin faded. "Where's the present, Prof? It's not good manners to call on poor relatives without a present."
"I meant to pick something up in Copenhagen, then I forgot. A signed traveler's check’ll probably do, don't you think?"
Mr. Gromek said, "You do the thinking, you got the education. Come here a minute, Doc."
From Professor to Prof to Doc was pretty fast falling. But Mr. Gromek was at the door, opening it; and Mr. Gromek still had a hand under his coat. Michael moved slowly toward the door.
The woman went on stirring her soup or stew or whatnot. It was quite possible that she was a deaf-mute; certainly Michael had not yet heard her say anything.
Mr. Gromek stood close behind Michael and pointed out the door at the ground. "You got the education," he said again. "Read me that."
Michael said slowly, "It looks like a Greek letter."
"Yeah? Funny thing to find outside a peasant hut Which letter?"
"The sixteenth one in the Greek alphabet. Pi. P-I."
Mr. Gromek stepped back a little. "No fooling. I know that one. You multiply the diameter of a circle by Pi to get the circumference, and the area is Pi r squared. Right?"
Michael could run for it. Where? Try and steal Mr. Gromek's motorcycle, and start it while Mr. Gromek's hand came out from under his coat and fired at him? Or run for the cab, and have a long debate with the driver about whether something was wrong or not?
Michael said, "You're well educated, Mr. Gromek. Most linguists aren't mathematicians."
"I went to night school," Mr. Gromek said. "Night police school, ha, ha. And you know something I learned there?"
In the distance the tractor was going back and forth. No help there. No help anyplace, unless the First Airborne Cavalry Division, U.S.A., suddenly came out of the sky. But there was no noise in the world but the distant noise of the tractor. Michael said, "What did you learn, Mr. Gromek?"
"That P.I. stands for a dirty little two-bit organization that gets spies in and out of our country. You shouldn't be playing in the small time, Doc; you shoulda held out for better."
He pushed Michael away from the door, which he shut. There was a wooden bar to keep it shut; he dropped it in its slots.
He went toward the old-fashioned-looking wall phone. He said, "Hey, you gotta crank this?" and then repeated the question in his Plattdeutsch,
The woman just went on stirring.
"She deef?" Mr. Gromek asked.
"I don't know," Michael said. "I haven't heard her say anything. I think maybe she is a deaf-mute."
"That'll help her," Mr. Gromek said. "You, you'll get life in the Big House, along with Jim Cagney and Edward G. Robinson."
He peered at the phone with one eye; the other never left Michael, no mean feat for a man who wasn't naturally cross-eyed. "Yeah, I see how to work this gadget."
"Where did you learn your English?" Michael asked.
"I told ya, New York."
"There's no Sixth Avenue up around Eighty-sixth Street."
Mr. Gromek had been about to use the queer telephone. He was so surprised that he stopped. "No? Well, thanks for the tip. I’ll get a street map and study it. I listened to a lot of American radio, saw American movies over and over again. I was about to infiltrate when they pulled me off to guardian you."
He was obviously taken back. He scratched at his jaw. "Boy, I could have gotten into the hoosegow, making a mistake like that in New York. Yeah, I better--A ladleful of hot vegetable soup bit one side of his face. It was steaming hot, and some of it went in his right eye; carrots and greens and onions and turnips clung damply to his coat.
But Mr. Gromek was tough. The gun came out in his right hand, while his left clawed at the pottage on his face. He turned and leveled on the woman.
Michael jumped and landed on Mr. Gromek's back, one arm under the cop's chin, the other hand grabbing the gun wrist and pointing the weapon straight at the ceiling.
The woman went past them and ripped the phone from the wall, wires and all.
Mr. Gromek was strangling, but the muscles in his neck must have been terribly strong; he could still talk: "Cut it out. I can take you easy, pal. I got judo training!"
Slowly the gun arm came down.
The woman ran to the cupboard, opened a drawer, pulled out a weird-looking clasp knife, its sides inlaid with silver dolphins and mermaids. She flipped it open with one hand--the spring must have been worn out--and swung, underhand. The knife went in under Mr. Gromek's jaw, just above Michael's straining arm.
She didn't pull back for another swing; instead she put both hands on the inlaid grip and sawed. The noise the blade made against bone was horrible, and the blade snapped.
Mr. Gromek began to sag.
Blood was soaking the sleeve of Michael's overcoat. He let go, breathing hard, half-nauseated.
Then, horribly, Mr. Gromek turned, still grinning; the sag had been a feint, he seemed in fine shape--with his head half cut off.
He jabbed at Michael's solar plexus with the stiffened fingers of his right hand, while his left knifed at Michael's neck. All the time the blood was spurting from his neck in gouts.
Michael ducked and made a grab for the bloody, soup-stained hands; they evaded him easily.
Michael had been a second-string player on his class football team, long years before. He crouched low and tackled; he and Mr. Gromek went rolling over and over together.
All he had to do was hold out, Michael thought; no man could bleed like that and live.
But there seemed to be no lessening of the German's terrible strength; he had Michael in a bear hug and was holding on. They rolled against the wall opposite the stove, started rolling back again.
They ended up against the stove.
But the woman had opened the oven door, turned the gas jet on; she spoke for the first time: "His head. In the stove." Her English was clear but heavily accented.
A good deal easier said than done. Michael did manage to get one hand loose and under Mr. Gromek's head; but the cut neck was still stronger than Michael's arm.
Then the woman took a hand; she grabbed Gromek's hair with both her large hands, and the head went up and into the oven.
Gromek gave up bunny-hugging Michael and grabbed for the throat; he connected, but Michael hung on, grinding his fist into Gromek's face, making sure that the head above the spurting neck stayed in the oven, and slowly the grip on Michael's neck let go, and the East German cop was dead.
"All right," the woman said. "All right, now."
Michael stood up, slowly, and staggered toward the old-fashioned rocker that was in front of a cold fireplace. He started to drop into it, but the woman made a sort of harsh cry in her throat, and he stopped. She came over to him and stripped off his bloodstained overcoat, unbuttoning it and peeling it down over his arms with an impersonality that was as horrifying as anything she had done.
Then she brought a damp dish towel and mopped his filthy hands off for him. When that was done, she looked him over critically and then pushed him down in the chair.
Far, far away the tractor clanked back and forth. The woman was at the sink, rinsing out the dish towel and washing her own hands at the same time.
Michael was getting his breath back. He said, "Is that your husband out there in the field?"
The woman nodded.
"Get him. He and I--"
"Go," the woman said. "Go back to Berlin."
"I want to help--"
Her face was expressionless. "Help? You help when you do what you came to Germany for. What we risk our lives for you to do. Go. Go to Berlin."
Michael said, "I'm sorry." It sounded weak and almost childish; the woman gave it the reaction it deserved: none.
He went to the door, put his hand on the knob, turned it. The woman crossed to him and raised the wooden bolt. He said: "Good-bye. Auf Wiedersehn."
She had gone back to being a deaf-mute.
Outside his taxi driver had gotten out, was walking up and down, beating his arms around himself. When he saw Michael he got back in the front seat of the cab; Michael got in the back, and the motor coughed itself into running and they headed back for East Berlin.
The back, the neck, the ears of the driver all showed complete indifference to anything that had happened at the farm.

11

Michael dismissed the cab a block from his hotel, and tipped the driver judiciously: enough to keep him from grumbling, not so much that the man would tell all his friends about his windfall. Working in foreign currency, and in a field of activity so completely outside the laboratory, Michael felt his brain creaky and stiff; he hoped he was successful, but the cabdriver was almost as deadpan as the peasant woman who was Michael's co-murderer.
He walked the last block to the hotel, thinking that he would have to buy an overcoat. Well, no; he had a lined trenchcoat that would do to turn the East German winter wind; it was not a country of snappy dressers.
He was almost to the door of the hotel when a man stepped out of a car at the curb and stood in front of him at semimilitary attention. "Professor Armstrong." It was not a question.
Michael nodded slightly.
"If you will get in the car, Professor. Mr. Gerhard wishes to see you."
Michael got in. What do you do when the head of the Security Police sends a man to fetch you? Scream like someone's old maid aunt? Spit in the messenger's eye? Sulk and chew your thumb? You get in the car.
It was a limousine, and heated a good deal better than the old taxi had been. Michael, no hot rodder, had no idea what kind of car it was; he had heard, vaguely--as he heard most things not having to do with science or Sarah--that there was a very extra-special, super-super sort of Russian limousine and this might be one of them.
The messenger sat in front, next to the driver, a glass separating them from the passenger. Both men wore dark gray business suits and snap-brimmed hats, very much like security men--F.B.I., C.I.A., G-2--in the United States. A new international race, a mutation like wingless fruit flies.
But to have a mutation made permanent, you had to have both males and females. What would security men mate with? In all the years that he had been a top-clearance physicist, Michael had never been checked out or questioned by a security woman; he didn't think there were any.
Airline hostesses, that was the thing. They, also were international; a Swedish stewardess looked more like a Turkish one than she looked like ordinary girl-on-the-street Swedes.
Neither man seemed interested in him; they rode looking straight ahead, their trained, lithe muscles relaxed under their unpadded coats. But of course, they probably had mirrors that showed them everything in the backseat, mike systems that told them how their pickup breathed and whether his blood pressure indicated consciousness of guilt
No. He must think of another nonsensical subject, like the mating habits of F.B.I. men, to fill his mind. His only chance of fooling Gerhard was not to have anything on his mind that Gerhard could dig out.
It was a certainty that the Security people did not know about poor Mr. Gromek; if they had, he would not be riding in a luxury car, he would not have been picked up in such a courteous manner.
Or would he? The East Germans and their masters were most anxious to use his defection for propaganda; they'd milk it as long as they dared after they learned it was a phony deal.
Fruit flies, chess problems, the electric hookup of old-fashioned trolley cars--anything but what he was thinking.
He started plotting catenary curves in his head; that was harmless enough. One summer he had strung wire for a railroad that was electrifying a stretch of interurban track; it was work that paid well for a man who had chosen a profession that kept him in college several years over the minimal four. Good, healthy summer work, and in a way connected with physics, in about the same sense that glass-blowing is connected with chemistry.
He decided to remember all the songs popular that summer; the crew of college-boy helpers to the regular high-line men bunked together, and several of them had brought record players to tell country evenings.
But it was amazing how college girls showed up when a bunch of college men bunked out on the prairie; anyone who wanted to dance or drink beer or neck cosily could always find an available girl.
But Michael was studying most evenings and--
The car had stopped; the cop who had spoken to him hopped out and opened the door for Michael, very politely. Well, not so damned politely when you saw that it was necessary; there were no door handles on the inside.
Don't think about that, try and remember the names of all the girls your bunky thought he was in love with that summer. Plot another catenary curve in your head; how many men can do that without paper or pencil? Hook up an analog computer with seven memory banks; eliminate resistance till you get a 99.99 percent accuracy.
He did that as he followed his guide up marble stairs, rather dished from age, and through a secretary's office--two males and one plain female secretary--and past a carved oak door held by his guide, who then disappeared.
Gerhard did himself well. There was the carved Spanish cedar desk behind which he lounged in a morocco-covered swivel chair; but there were no filing cabinets or any other appurtenances of an office; the rest of the room was fitted out as a comfortable living room, with deep chairs and coffee tables and brightly colored abstract paintings on the wall. Pictures of Walter Ulbricht and Lenin were not abstract, however.
Sarah sat behind one of the coffee tables, her legs uncomfortably pressed back against the edge of a red leather couch; Karl Manfred sat on the edge of one of the deep club chairs.
Both of them looked uncomfortable, but not scared.
Gerhard's first question was a shocker, "Tell me, Professor, what are we going to do about Gromek?"
Biology, girls' names, catenary curves, and all the rest of the nonsense were wiped out as water is when a squeegee clears a windowpane.
Michael hoped his face showed nothing; he was sure his voice didn't as he stalled: "Depends on what the problem is."
"We are not monsters of indelicacy. We try to conduct our very necessary affairs with a maximum of tact, we of Security. But how can poor Mr. Gromek perform his duties without intruding upon your private affairs?"
Michael said, "I don't quite understand."
Gerhard said, "Oh, come now. Here we are all grown people. This is not the age of the good, gray Victoria. Nowadays, when young people are affianced, it is expected of them that they wish privacy on their occasions. Right?"
"Sure, but--"
"I am referring, of course, to the fact that Miss Sherman wishes to join our side in this matter of peace, which means, of course, that she will be working as your assistant, and living as your fiancé, as before."
Michael swallowed his astonishment. He said, "Sarah, you're coming to work with me here?"
"You didn't know?" Gerhard asked. "Oh, this is colossal! You mean, you failed to convince the young lady, and it was Manfred here--Oh, this is wonderfull"
Careful, careful, careful. "We talked it over, of course," Michael said. "I advised her to go home. This decision is my own; I am a career physicist. Sarah is not really committed to a lifetime of science."
Karl Manfred said, "But she could be. She has the ability, and the background, and, frankly, a few like her would make scientific congresses much more bearable."
Sarah said, "I haven't changed my mind about that. When I get married, my career ends. But I wanted to be with you, Michael, it's as simple as that."
"I won't insult you by asking if you've thought this through. Your father--"
“It is a scientific fact that all the fathers of grown girls are big boys."
Only Manfred chuckled; Gerhard contented himself with a smile. Michael was trying to figure out just how he could protest; if he did too good a job, bis own defection would be shown up as phony.
The best thing to do was the natural thing, after all. He said, "If you've made up your mind, there's no use arguing." Which was true. Short of telling Sarah what he was really up to, he'd never get her to abandon him. And if he told her, it would be doing her no favor. He'd practiced months for this role he was playing and he knew how impossible it would be for her to walk around among the enemy with that awful knowledge in her head.
Gerhard was beaming. "Wise, wise, not to argue with a woman. Manfred, you should have a medal. You brought us not one scientist, but two."
Manfred shrugged. "Little honor to me. I was merely the go-between; Professor Armstrong made up his own mind months ago; together we simply worked out the mechanics."
Michael felt Sarah's eyes on him. They had been close all through those months--co-workers, friends, lovers. She'd never trust him again.
The loss was unexpectedly appalling. He'd heard people say they would give a right hand for this thing or person; this was far worse than the loss of a limb.
But what you have to do, you do. Gerhard was pouring cognac into tiny glasses, Czech ware. "To the wonderful work you are going to do at Leipzig, Miss Sherman and Professor." He handed the glasses around; he and Manfred raised theirs.
Gerhard pressed a concealed button on his desk and said, "Send Gromek in," in German. A voice came from no place and said: "Jawohl."
No reaction. Show no reaction. Deadpan it through. Michael raised his tiny glass and admired the light that came through its iridescence. "To the peace of the world," he said, knowing as he said it that he had been expected to toast the Democratic Republic. But if he had, Sarah would not have drunk, and Gerhard would surely have noticed it
There were no more toasts. The men sipped their cognac, Sarah gulped hers down in one swallow; but thank God she was keeping her shock to herself.
Gerhard said, "Now you three go to Leipzig and into the realm of thought where I cannot follow you."
Manfred said, "My dear Gerhard, I should be glad to explain."
Gerhard glared at the German physicist. The head of Security was genial, but he was still head of Security; he made the jokes.
He said, "The car is on the way for you now."
Sarah said, "But I am not packed!"
Gerhard laughed. "We treat our scientists like scientists, not like porters. Mr. Gromek will take your luggage to Leipzig; the chambermaid at the university will unpack it for you."
"Service," Sarah said.
"With a smile," Gerhard said.
The disembodied voice spoke. "Herr Direcktor Gerhard."
"Was gibt es?"
The voice said that they could not find Gromek. Gerhard told them to keep on looking, and turned to Michael. "Your friend has been mislaid, Professor."
Michael smiled. "Oh, I'm sure there are lots more where he came from. But I shall miss him; as you said, he grows on one."
He thought he'd done it very well, but Gerhard looked at him strangely. Maybe that was just guilt. Manfred let several seconds go by before he gave his characteristic shrug. "Never mind," he said. "We'll dig Gromek up."

12

The cab they went in was another of the black limousines; but it had inside door handles, so it wasn't the same one. But the man driving it had the snap-brim hat and the inconspicuous gray suit--another Security man.
The glass was down between the front seat and the back; Karl Manfred sat beside the driver with his arm dangling over the back of the seat. "You will like Leipzig," he said. "A fine town. You have been there?"
Michael shook his head. Beside him Sarah seemed to have gone into catatonic shock; he had taken her hand under the fur lap rug, but she had not returned his pressure; it was like holding the hand of a warm corpse, and he pulled away and lit a cigarette.
"The university was founded more than five hundred years ago," Manfred said. "The city is very, very fine, old and handsome. And nearby there are mountains. Almost all of Saxony is mountainous, if you like skiing. And the river Elster, it is lovely in the spring."
"You missed your calling, Karl. You should have been a travel guide."
Manfred laughed. "And in the evening, the old-maid school teachers would buy me drinks while I told them lies about my travels. A nice life, eh, Michael?"
The car ran south, fast. Other cars pulled over to let it go by; there was no insignia on the limousine, but anything that big means heavy government influence in the Soviet satellites.
"Oh, I'd be no good with the old maids," Michael said. "I don't have your gift of gab, Karl."
Manfred said, "You know, Gerhard does not talk for nothing, though he certainly does have the gift of gab. He hinted that I might get a medal for my part in this, Michael."
"Congratulations."
"Oh, I do not work for medals, any more than any other scientist. But they are nice."
"The President is certainly not going to pin the Medal of Honor on me," Michael said.
It was the wrong thing to say. Karl Manfred's face got expressionless; this would be reported to Gerhard: subject shows pangs of conscience.
Karl Manfred took a deep breath. He said, "We shall set up a seminar as soon as possible; the whole physics-mathematics department at the university will want to hear about your work on Gamma Five. And you were in it all along. Miss Sherman?"
Sarah came back from whatever drear plain her imagination wandered on, and said, "Eh? What?"
"I'm sorry," Karl Manfred said. Plainly he was in love with Sarah, or at least on the make for her. "I didn't know you were asleep. I was asking, were you with Gamma Five from the time it was born?"
Sarah said, "No. Just in the second stage, when Michael switched to solid fuel."
"This I did not know," Manfred said. "Our reports said that Gamma Five used liquid fuel at all times."
Sarah said, "Oh, no. You see, the liquid fuel gave a problem of weight and recoil that made it almost impossible--"
Michael cut in quickly and, he hoped, tactfully. "Karl, I'm starving. Aren't there any restaurants along this road?"
"Something much better," Karl Manfred said. "A restaurant with a truly fine canteen. In this country, to eat well, eat with the workers." He turned to the driver and started giving him directions about stopping.
Michael wriggled around as though restless, got his lips close to Sarah's ear, and whispered: "Don't tell any more than you have to."
He was taking a chance; there might be a mike and a tape recorder back here by the passengers. But what you have to do, you do.
The reward was startling. Sarah pushed against him, warmly; and when he put his hand under the lap rug she grabbed it and held it in both of hers, exactly and precisely as--he imagined--a drowning man would cling to a straw. Sometimes an old saw was the only thing that applied to a situation.
The car was slowing down. Ahead of them one of the modern glass-aluminum-stainless steel-tile factories rose out of the plains. Manfred was saying that the manager of the factory was an old friend of his. "I think you will find a workers' factory interesting. Very different from the old days, certainly."
But except for one or two things, it was very much like any defense plant in Texas or California; one of the things that was different was the wintry landscape outside. The United States put its plants where the climate was good, and let the wandering labor force come to them. East Germany really had no place where the climate was good.
The other outstanding difference was the tables in the workers' canteen. In America they would have been small ones, for four or six or at most eight; and in all probability the workers would have served themselves, cafeteria style.
But here people ate at long refectory tables, and sat on long benches.
The manager's table was shorter than the others and set at right angles to them; the short table had chairs instead of benches. The manager was not very pretty, an ascetically thin man with tiny spectacle lenses held on a narrow nose by gold frames.
He was coldly effusive at meeting the defecting Americans about whom the radio had been spouting. Every time his bony frame jerked out a sentence, some sort of medal pinned to the right lapel of his business suit jerked and flapped.
Sarah, now that she suspected that Michael was not really a defector, was a little too bouncy. She tried to put the manager in his place by saying: "Shouldn't you eat at the long table with your workers? This arrangement doesn't seem very democratic.''
"In the Democratic Republic," the thin man said coldly, "we waste no time. While the people are at their meal, we usually have a speaker. With chairs, one person can stand at a time and talk; with the table set so, all can hear him."
Manfred was looking at Sarah oddly. Michael distracted him by whispering, "I didn't get our friend's name when you introduced us, Karl."
"Rudolph Gunter. We are very old comrades."
"He must be clever to head such a large factory."
"Very clever."
Then they were seated. Down at one of the long tables Michael saw their chauffeur, yakking rather intimately with two men and a woman. The men had the same G-man air about them; Michael studied the woman, almost certain he had finally isolated a G-woman.
Yep, she looked like an airline hostess, or at least an ex-hostess; she was close to forty.
The meal was very good: lentil soup, and then boiled spareribs with sauerkraut and dumplings. Dessert was tapioca pudding, but it was well flavored and served with little cookies that tasted of anise. Michael looked at the workers' tables from time to time; their fare seemed identical
The coffee was hot and strong.
Karl Manfred said, "Now Gunter introduces you, Michael."
The manager stood up, pushed his chair away, and began a long, dull talk in German. Michael could read that language better than he could understand it; and anyway it was the sort of speech that didn't say anything.
He turned to Sarah and said shortly, "So you've settled for the sauerkraut-and-dumpling life?"
"I hope they're low-calorie dumplings."
"Next you'll turn into a beer drinker."
"The price for being in love with a defector."
He dropped his voice even lower, saying, "Very, very careful, baby. And you don't know a thing."
"I'm a hell of a good guesser."
The manager was coming to the end of his droning discourse, apparently. Yes. He was telling them how unhappy Michael had been, working for the warmongers. Michael said, "Sarah, guessing is very unscientific."
She laughed, and Karl Manfred turned his head, frowning. Sarah folded her hands in her lap like a scolded kid in school.
Michael put on his best listening expression, but his eyes wandered out over the workers, listening at their long tables, hunched forward on their uncomfortable benches. When he had to talk, he'd make it short.
He started marshalling a little German in his head. The Germans weren't as bad as the French about foreigners speaking their language perfectly; the effort counted more than the smoothness.
Then his mind went dead, his stomach stopped digesting, his breathing almost stopped, too.
Mr. Gromek was leaning back from one of the tables so as to get an unblocked view of Michael; he was grinning broadly, right into Michael's face.
It couldn't be. Gromek was gone, done for, disposed of. Probably the Southern farmer had used his tractor to bury him; Michael could imagine the phony German peasant grinning at the idea that the agent would make good fertilizer.
Gromek was gone, but there he was.
No. Blood started circulating again; that wasn't Gromek. This man was balder, and he seemed older.
A brother, certainly; but what was he grinning about? His brother was dead, which was no laughing matter.
But, of course, this factory-Gromek couldn't know that the Security-Gromek was dead. With luck--an awful lot of it--and brains--at least a modicum of those--Michael would be out of East Germany before anyone knew that Mr. Gromek was dead.
Michael came to with a start. Apparently Karl Manfred had been trying to get his attention to respond to the factory manager's speech; the manager was back in his chair.
And apparently they had given up trying to get Michael's attention, because Sarah was standing and talking.
She did all right She said that on the part of Professor Armstrong and herself they were very glad to be in the Democratic Republic, and that they hoped to do the sort of work here that would make the world a safer and better place for workers everywhere. She sat down to heavy applause; under cover of it Michael heard her mutter, "Father, forgive me," and knew she was not blaspheming; it was not the heavenly father that she meant.
Now the workers were getting up, lighting cigarettes and pipes, strolling around. The manager was explaining to Karl Manfred that this was the hour for committee meetings. "We have a dramatic club, a political-science study group, creative-writing and art groups, everything."
Except union committees. Some sort of Labor Front would be appointed by the government, and would decide when the workers had a grievance and when they didn't
Then a strong hand was gripping Michael's forearm, heels were clicking in the Central European manner, a bald head was dipping in a bow. "Gromekl"
Michael was startled for a moment, then pulled his wits together. This was how a stranger greeted you in this part of the world.
He bowed, clicked his own heels inexpertly, and said, "Armstrong."
"Jawohl" the brother said. "We have seen Emil's picture with yours in the news. It is a great honor for him and for all our family. He is not here today?"
Careful, careful. "He is taking the luggage to Leipzig. Or so I was told by Mr. Gerhard."
Very good. The name of the head of Security did it. This Gromek stepped back a little, his face lost some of its geniality; he had been about to question an order of the dread Gerhard's, and had only been saved by Michael's quick talking.
Michael helped him further. "You work here, Mr. Gromek?"
"Yes, I am foreman of the fitting shop for five years now."
"Very good. I’ll tell your brother when I see him at Leipzig." And that will be a long, hot day in Germany in winter.
"Oh, he knows what I do. We are a very tight family. Here, look, is a picture of me at the seashore last summer, with all of Emil's children. He was on duty, so I took the little ones on their holiday."
Michael stared through a red haze. Mr. Gromek was a family man; Mr. Gromek was loved; Mr. Gromek had--had had--four kids, three girls and a boy.
He stared at the picture, and then he was aware that Karl Manfred was staring at him. He swallowed and handed the snapshot back.
Gromek gave his little bow again. "Would it be asking too much, Professor, for you to take a present to Emil?"
"Of course not, of course not."
"How happy he will be tonight in Leipzig. This is a special treat, since he was a little boy, garlic sausage has been a passion with him. Here, at our workers' canteen, it is particularly tasty."
The worker-Gromek bowed and was gone. Michael watched him push his way through a crowd of his fellow workers buying things at a counter at one side of the mess hall.
Apparently the workers bought the material for their evening meals at the factory; apparently the factory was the center of all their activities. But worker-Gromek must have told them that he was on an errand of international importance, because they parted to let him through.
He was back in a couple of minutes, brandishing a chunk of sausage that looked like salami to Michael, but undoubtedly wasn't. In his other hand Gromek waved a piece of butcher's paper. "I have told the canteen clerk that I will wrap it myself, so you can taste what a joy this sausage will be to my dear brother."
Holding sausage and paper in one hand, worker-Gromek reached in his pocket and pulled out a clasp knife.
Like the peasant woman's, it opened at a flick; like hers its handle was inlaid in silver.
This time the shock hit Michael's lungs rather than his stomach. He felt his breathing stop, his face grow pale.
But Manfred was still watching him. And now their chauffeur had left his Security pals and rejoined the group he was traveling with; he was watching, too.
Michael managed to chew the slice of sausage, dry; managed to swallow it; managed to say, "Delicious. Gromek will be overjoyed."
Worker-Gromek beamed, and the group moved away and out toward the car.
The manager went with them, and shook hands all around, and they were on their way, Michael carrying the wrapped garlic sausage.
The taste of the slice he had eaten was still with him when they stopped in front of the ancient main building of the University of Leipzig.

13

These East Germans were great on receptions; there were a half dozen professors and rectors and provosts to greet Michael and Sarah at the University.
There were drinks--vodka this time--in the vice-rector's office; there were complimentary little speeches. With the taste of garlic still in his mouth--maybe it would be there forever--Michael responded.
There were faculty wives, hastily summoned so that Sarah would not be the only woman at the little ceremony. More introductions. More speeches. The small glasses were refilled a second time, a third.
Then everyone was going away, and a tall man in a dark gray suit was bowing to Michael. "Otto Haupt, at the service of the professor. I am your new Security guide."
Michael almost said something like: "Of course." Then he checked himself. "Oh? What happened to Gromek? He and I got along fine."
"Gromek is missing, Herr Professor. Herr Direktor Gerhard is worried."
Michael let him make what he could out of a frown. One of the faculty wives had led Sarah away; he and this agent were all alone. "Gromek looked like a man who could take care of himself."
Otto Haupt said, "No one can look after himself in the East Berlin traffic. Of course, in West Berlin it is even worse."
He made it sound as though a shortage of cars was a great virtue. This was a completely hard, completely devoted guard. There had been human elements in Gromek; Haupt was going to be harder to shake when the time came. Well, that was the work of the PI, not of Michael Armstrong.
Haupt held the door for him; Michael went out into the corridor and started up a flight of stairs indicated by the guard's courteous wave. The staircase turned at a window; he put the package of garlic sausage on the window ledge, quickly and, he hoped, unobtrusively.
But as he finished the turn, Karl Manfred was coming down. Michael smiled in passing, and then listened. Manfred's footfalls stopped at the window, were quiet for a long moment, and then went on.
At the top of the stairs, Haupt said, "Your office will be down that way, Professor Armstrong; I will show you to your sleeping apartment. If you will come this--"
Michael was passing a door at the head of the stairs. The door opened a crack and a foot came out; woman's foot, black patent leather pump, nylon ankle.
He saw that, and then saw that the foot was going to trip him, but he saw it too late to save himself. He tripped, and was falling down the marble steps, grabbing desperately at the banister, windmilling his arms to get balance. No good; he landed on his head and blacked out, the last thing he heard was Haupt's voice, shouting.
He came to with the cooling feel of a wet cloth on his forehead. A woman's voice said in accented English: "You are all right. Nothing serious."
Ridiculously he said, “I speak German."
"Good, then. I tripped you. It was the only thing to do."
He opened his eyes. A woman with a white duster on over her dark dress was bandaging him, swabbing at his head. She was in early middle age, not bad-looking.
Somewhere in the background a viola was playing Bach. Michael had never cared for Bach, though the composer is supposed to be a favorite with all mathematicians.
"I am the university doctor," the woman said. "I had to see you alone, so I tripped you and inflicted a minor injury. I have sent your Vopo to get the director. Injuries to their valuable American must be reported at once."
“Their?”
"I am Dr. Kostka."
"Kostka?" His head was clearing. "Oh. The farmer, outside Berlin. I thought you'd be a man."
The doctor shook her head. "He should have told you. That is my second daughter practicing her Bach. My husband-died--last year. He was, like you, a physicist"
"I've heard of him," Michael lied.
"I doubt it, but there is very little time for socializing. The farmer tells me there will be two of you to get out."
Michael sat up. He had been lying on a white-enamel examination table, very uncomfortable. He dangled his legs off the edge; they just touched the floor. "That going to make it much harder?"
Dr. Kostka raised her eyebrows. "That is up to us. The big thing is, how long do you have to stay in Leipzig? These people are not fools; every hour you are here increases the risk of discovery."
She could have been a housewife griping about the increasing cost of lettuce; or, more accurately, a family doctor giving the routine advice to lose five pounds, and you'll feel better.
The viola hit a sour note, hesitated, then went ahead. "My daughter thought someone was going to come in, but they went on," the doctor said.
"There's only one man I have to see here," Michael said. "Professor Lindt. There's only one thing--one formula--I have to get out of him. I don't know how long that will take; long enough to get his confidence, I suppose."
"Instruments to measure such an amount of .time are not made for my discipline, or, I suppose, yours," Dr. Kostka said. "It will depend on such variables as your powers of persuasion, your skill as an actor. Tell me, Professor, when will the world again be sane, so you and I can do what we were trained for?"
There was no answer.
She went on more briskly. "Professor Lindt is due to go to Moscow. You will probably have to wait till he gets back. It increases the risk."
"I'm fair-haired boy around here just now," Michael said. "If you're familiar with the expression. Maybe I can put on a little pressure."
The doctor patted his hand. "Get up, now," she said. "You'll have a little bruise on your forehead, nothing, really." The viola went off tune again. "Someone coming. Don't see me again until you are ready to leave. Or if you get really ill--which I do not advise." She laughed drily, and he went out, just as his Security man, Otto Haupt, came up the stairs with the vice-chancellor of the university.

14

Faculty Interrogation Room read the sign on the door; Michael had never seen anything like it in any university in the Western world. He paused, and read it again, not sure of his German.
Karl Manfred, at his elbow, said, "Formerly a seminar room. Now usually used by the Security people; but today, everyone present--except the tape recorders--will be of the learned faction."
"Is there a Student Interrogation Room, too?" Sarah asked.
"Several," Karl Manfred said without expression. "Security clearance is not a a permanent thing with us; it is renewed periodically." He smiled. "Miss Sherman, will you wait here in the hall? You have cigarettes?"
Sarah smiled. "I’ll be here if you want me."
Karl Manfred opened the door and ushered Michael in.
Three men sat behind the conference table, in swivel chairs. They were all university types--Michael had already met one of them, Dr. Gutman, Vice-Rector--but the way they sat gave them a strong resemblance to criminal judges. Gutman waved Michael to a straight chair in front of the table, and Karl Manfred took another one at the end.
The other two judges were not introduced. The whole thing carried Michael back to the distant day when he had taken his oral examination for the Ph.D. in Pasadena; the judging committee then had done its best to put him at ease, with a complete lack of success; perhaps this cold method was better.
Gutman read off Michael's degrees and honors in an impersonal voice; the old man on his left seemed to sleep through this, and the youngish man on his right spent the time inspecting his fingernails, which seemed to absorb him.
No doubt this was for the invisible tape recorders, a matter of record.
Finished, Gutman turned to Manfred, who sat up a little straighter, and said, "Professor Armstrong, I have been asked by this committee to put to you some questions. It has been requested that I point out to you that your answers will be analyzed in great detail."
If he did not show a sense of his own importance, he'd never get through to Lindt. Michael answered sharply, "I have been a scientist for some years. I don't know how it is in your country, but I have been trained not to answer any professional questions carelessly."
"I apologize," Karl Manfred said. "It is only a matter of form and reg--"
"Get on with it," Dr. Gutman said. "Mach schnell!”
The command to hurry up, without a "please" attached to it, was rude, as though used to a dog or a low servant in old Germany. Karl Manfred flushed, shut his lips tight for a moment, and then said, "Very well. First, will you describe the progress of the United States experiments with the antimissile Gamma Five?"
This was the one thing Michael could do readily, almost glibly; this was the question for which he had been briefing himself for months back in the United States. He must now feed out accumulated data, so slightly skewed that he could get out of East Germany before the greatest minds in his profession could detect the skewing.
"First," Michael said, "I must give you the broad general background of my thinking that led me to explore a line of experimentation that does not grow out of anything previously done, at least to my knowledge. In other words, I started all over again, as though there had never been any antimissile work done."
"Proceed," Dr. Gutman said. The very old man next to him was still pretending to sleep, but there was a glint of blue between his eyelids; Michael had the suspicion that he was being watched by a pair of very sharp old eyes.
He said, "It seemed to me that too much attention was being paid to the fourth dimension, to the element of time in the formula of where a hostile missile would be at any given point in the quadratic formula that determines its position. Instead, I proposed to base my formula on the element of distance, making the other three factors subordinate. Now, how to go about this was the next, problem; I carefully removed from my thinking anything Planckian, indeed, anything Einsteinian, knowing I could come back to these later."
He paused. Karl Manfred poured a glass of water from a carafe at the end of the table, pushed it toward Michael, who drank. The water was warm. He said, "Of course, if you have questions, I'll be glad to answer them, but I'd rather wait till later."
The three judges made no response. "Determining depth, in other words distance, is no problem if you use triangulation; artillery second lieutenants and even sergeants do it every day. But if there was no triangle, the distance factor would have to be a matter of gravitational pull, based on--"
The door to the corridor opened abruptly. Dr. Gutman glared angrily at it, and raised a peremptory hand to Michael to stop talking.
The newcomer was Security Officer Otto Haupt; assigned to "guide" Michael in Leipzig. His heels rang loud on the uncarpeted floor as he hurried behind the table and bent over to whisper in Dr. Gutman's ear.
Gutman raised his eyebrows and shoulders. Then he nodded, and with Haupt standing almost at attention behind him, he said, "Before the scientific interrogation proceeds, Herr Haupt wishes to ask some things."
Haupt had a military snap to his voice. Surely, in the old days, he had been S.S. or Gestapo; he was the right age, about forty-five. Without any land of salutation or title, he asked, "Did you visit a farm before you left Berlin?" He spoke in English.
Michael ran a hand over his eyes, sighed. "Sorry," he said. "I was quite a ways away from here, back in my lab in Chicago. Dr. Gutman, is this in order? I am all set up for a scientific interrogation."
Gutman said, "Orders from Security Director Gerhard in Berlin. Answer."
Michael said, "You're the boss. Yes. I visited a farm to look up some relatives. Anything wrong with that?"
“Did you meet Herr Gromek at that farm?"
"Gromek? No. The last time I saw him that day was in the city."
The military voice snapped, "You are sure?"
Michael said, "Yes."
Haupt bent from the waist and again whispered in Gutman's ear. Gutman rapped lightly on the table with his knuckles. "This meeting is postponed. Herr Armstrong's answer is unsatisfactory."
Time to be indignant Michael said, "This is ridiculous. I've given up a lot, I've come thousands of miles to work here, specifically with Professor Lindt, whom I consider the finest non-Euclidean, non-Planckian mathematician in the world. And what I've gotten is a whole litter of little receptions and press appearances and official functions. A waste of time. I demand to meet Dr. Lindt at once."
The old man next to Gutman stirred. He fumbled in the pocket of his rather dingy vest, got out a battered brass box, opened it, and took a pinch of something, put it to his nose, sniffed.
Everyone, even Haupt, watched fascinated. Michael had never seen anyone inhale snuff before, though some of the Swedish high-line men on his summer job had chewed the stuff.
The old professor finally sneezed, a great relief to one and all. Then he opened his blue eyes wide, and said, "I am Lindt"
It was no great surprise. Michael grinned broadly at the wonderfully hammy performance, and Professor Lindt winked at him, and said: "What is all this rubbish about police? In the time this--this Vopo--is wasting, I could perhaps contrive an antipolice formula, for which the world would thank me."
Gutman, very perturbed, said, "Please, please, Professor Lindt. The order is from Security Director Gerhard, in Berlin."
"I have never heard of this Mr. Gerhard," Dr. Lindt said. The hand that held the snuffbox waved Mister Gerhard out of existence. "I have heard of Herr Professor Dr. Armstrong." He pointed a finger over his shoulder in the general direction of Otto Haupt. "Get that Dummkopf out of here, and let us continue. I am supposed to be in Moscow right now. Today. Does Mister Gerhard know this? And I must know about Gamma Five before I go."
Haupt spoke in incisive German: "I have my orders, gnadiger Herr."
"Hochwohlgeboren," Lindt promoted himself. "Your orders! Orders from one cop to--Wait a minute. The great brain of Lindt has an idea."
This was really a character, Michael thought This was a relic of the old days of the eccentric genius, before physicists took to driving sports cars and wearing porkpie hats.
Lindt said, "You have your assistant with you, Professor Armstrong?" "Yes. Miss Sherman."
"And she hasn't done anything evil, like visiting farms?"
"No, sir," Haupt said.
"Good," said Lindt. "I like better to talk to young ladies than to professors, anyway. Prettier, you know. So have her in, and I shall question her."
Gutman and the other judge and Haupt put their heads together and muttered gutturally. Dr. Lindt said, "Cluck, cluck, cluck," in pretty good imitation of a laying hen. "The day has come when our universities are staffed from the barnyard. Pigs teach Greek, horses teach German, and chickens teach physics. A great age."
The huddle broke up, with Karl Manfred apparently in possession of the ball; he went to the door, opened it, said Sarah's name and then bowed her into the room. She took his chair, and he went to stand behind the committee of judges, interrogators, or whatever they were.
He said, "Miss Sherman, the committee has the desire to--"
"Quiet in the barnyard!" Lindt barked, in his aged, cracked voice. "Fraulein, you assisted Dr. Armstrong in Chicago?"
Sarah nodded, her lipstick the only color in her face. Well, there were blue circles under her eyes; Michael was sure that they were not eye shadow.
"Was the experiment on Gamma Five successful?" Lindt asked.
Sarah stared straight ahead. The lipstick line narrowed as she pressed her lips together firmly, almost fiercely.
The silence was prolonged until it was unbearable; Gutman broke it. "What is this, Manfred? You said she would cooperate."
Manfred said, "Dr. Armstrong, please tell Miss Sherman to talk."
"I've been forbidden to say anything," Michael said. Then he reset his own lips.
"You may speak to Miss Sherman," Gutman said.
Lindt growled, "Does no one in this bird-brained country realize what my time is worth?"
Michael said, "Tell them what they want to know, Sarah."
Sarah relaxed her lips. She turned to Michael. "You tell them, Professor Armstrong. You joined them. You're the one who sold out! I'm just along for the ride, and I wish I wasn't"
Michael turned to the committee, his hands flung out. "Give me five minutes alone with her. After all, she's my girl."
"You can put that in the past tense," Sarah said.
Michael stood up. "This is getting no one any place at all." He looked out the window. A deserted stretch of the campus ran to the next building. It was covered with brown grass, and fully open to view from all sides. "Come on," Michael said, "well walk around out there. You gentlemen can see us from the window; Haupt can shoot me if I try and run for it, which I won't."
Gutman said, "Security--"
Michael's impatience, his anger were no longer faked. He shouted, “To hell with Security! Call them in Berlin, and by the time you hang up I’ll have broken this damned deadlock."
He tugged Sarah to the door. Gutman said, "Haupt, Manfred, follow them."
"Keep out of earshot, for God's sake," Michael said. "I'm a physicist, not a television actor."
Haupt said, "I will have to phone Herr Gerhard."
As Michael and Sarah got away, he heard Gutman say, "Manfred, you then."
He marched Sarah to the middle of the wintery lawn. There could be no mikes here; it was the last place in Germany the Security would think of bugging. He let go of her, and stood staring into her face.
Sarah said, "I've changed my mind again. I want to go home."
"Shut up!"
She was so startled that she obeyed him.
He said, "Listen, pal. Listen, hard. You're such a great baseball fan; can you remember the inning by inning of the last game we went to?"
"Of course. The Dodgers and the--" She looked like she was going to yell for the fellows in the white coats.
"All right. Give them the ultimate Gamma Five formula--and keep looking like you're mad at me. Manfred's watching. Give them the final formula, there are only eighteen stages in it, and add--or subtract if you feel like it--the hits for each half inning to each equation. Got it?"
"Michael!"
"You damned fool, was I getting any place? I need Lindt to answer one question, and it'll save us years."
"Michael!"
"That's my name, of course. But I must say your vocabulary's rather limited."
She said, "Come here, you big dope. I want to hug you."
"Manfred's watching. Save it for after the wedding."
But she came toward him, the crisp grass crackling under her feet. He said, "Hold it awhile, we're still mad; I'm still persuading you. This isn't any game. I had to kill Gromek when he tumbled wise."
"Oh, poor Michael." But it stopped her in her amorous stalk.
"Poor Gromek, I'd say. Now, get this all at once. Gamma Five was successful, we weren't stopped. As long as they think that, they won't bump us off. The last inning's the one they've got."
“The Dodgers won."
"Right. So now we're Dodgers."
She said, "No Dodger would mind Manfred," and pressed herself against Michael, her arms around him.
It felt good. It felt better than anything that had happened to him since Copenhagen. He said, "Let's start walking back, now that we're reconciled. I'll tell you exactly what to say, and what not; we've got to hold back enough so Lindt will want to talk to me. Unless you think you could memorize the equation I want him to straighten out"
"Golly, no.. .. Michael, if we get away--"
"When, baby, when."
"When we get away, people will still think you're a traitor."
"Let's open that can when we run out of beans; which we're not yet."
She said, "Oh, I want to hold you again."
"Manfred's getting an eyeful."
"Oh, foops to Manfred."
And foops it was.

15

By the time they got back to the interrogation room, the atmosphere had relaxed. Otto Haupt said, "I have spoken with Herr Gerhard; the faculty interrogation will continue, so that Professor Lindt can leave for Moscow as soon as possible. The dinner tonight for Professor Armstrong and Miss Sherman will proceed as scheduled."
"Fine," Michael said. He was now a fly they were trying to catch with sugar instead of sulfuric acid; he'd have to be more careful.
Otto Haupt said, "However, I was to tell Dr. Armstrong that Mr. Gerhard himself is going out to the farm to investigate."
And now my face is supposed to show trembling fear, shocking guilt, and the desire to run away. But my face was drilled for months by experts from the C.I.A. and counterespionage and military intelligence. Not to mention the F.B.I. My face will never be the same again.
"Professor Lindt will interview Dr. Armstrong," Gutman announced. "And the committee will interview Miss Sherman."
And then they will check up and see if we both tell the same story. "Just add it all up, Sarah," Michael said. The device of adding the half-inning score to each figure was not his own; he wished he had that sort of mind, but he didn't. He was lacking in deviousness, one of the intelligence agents had said.
Haupt led him and Lindt down the hall to another room, left them alone. Michael dictated the equations quietly; he was pleased to notice that Lindt wrote them all down, clucking with satisfaction. They sounded authentic; and some of them were; several half innings had been scoreless. But the beautiful part of the system was just that; it was impossible for the East Germans to make any sort of orderly progression out of the added elements, even if they found there was one.
As Michael got off the seventeenth step, he braced himself. Now was the time for him to start pumping Lindt. Haupt's presence wouldn't mean a thing, couldn't mean any more than the equations meant to Haupt.
He said, "Dr. Lindt, how would you have--"
"He is asleep," Security Officer Haupt said. "He does that often, they tell me. He is in his ninetieth year."
But still brilliant," Michael said. "Shall we wake him?"
Haupt said, "I think not. You must be tired, Professor Armstrong. Allow me to escort you to your quarters."
"House arrest?" Michael asked.
Otto Haupt shrugged. "I do my duty, Professor. No more."
Apparently the data given by Sarah checked with the data Michael had given to Lindt; at six o'clock, there was a knock on Michael's door, and Haupt answered it, talked briefly to the man in the hall, and then went out. A strange man came in and said, “I am your valet, Professor. I am here to help you dress for the dinner." From the neck down he looked, indeed, like a European manservant: tight black trousers, striped vest, bobtailed black jacket. From there on up, he was all Security man.
No matter. He got out Michael's evening clothes, began wet-brushing them, the valet's method of restoring creases and removing wrinkles. Michael went to shave and shower.
When he got back the valet-agent had shined his shoes, put studs in his shirt; he held it up for Michael's approval. "Fine," Michael said. "Has to be. Only set I have with me. Only set I own."
The valet laughed. He said, "Will the professor want me to hold his trousers; some American gentlemen resent this service."
"Really?" Michael asked. "Do you get to take care of many Americans?"
The face folded in on itself, the gray eyes went slate-flat. The man was still clothed as a servant, but that was all; Security had taken over.
Michael smiled and slipped into his shirt The spy powdered his fingers and fastened the studs for Michael; then he held the trousers carefully off the floor and Michael stepped into them, glad that frequent lecturing in England had gotten him used to being valeted.
Haupt came in without knocking; he was in evening clothes, too. "We go now," he said. "There will be a little reception first."
"There would be," Michael said, and they went out. Behind them Haupt's assistant was straightening up the room. No doubt he would also search all of Michael's belongings again; but what Haupt and Gromek had not yet found was not to be found; there was nothing to find.
Down a corridor, through an arch, up some more stairs, down again; very old university buildings are not too convenient.
The faculty dining room had been converted for the occasion; it was bright with East German and Russian flags, pictures of Walter Ulbricht and Marx and Lenin; what was obviously a student orchestra was playing sentimental German music at one end of the room, and the fact that the waiters were also very obviously students made the valet a very false note indeed. This was the Democratic Republic, full-time servants were not democratic.
Karl Manfred was just inside the door of the dining room; Sarah was next to him, but they didn't seem to have been talking. Michael stopped for a moment, tugging at his clothes, as though preparing himself for a public appearance; he'd seen college presidents and other politicians do that In his case, though, he was just stalling for time.
Otto Haupt stopped, too, patiently.
Michael was thinking about Manfred. There was no doubt that the East German was a bona fide scientist; of course, his name was well known, but there could have been a substitution, except for the fact that Manfred and Michael had talked enough physics for a phony to be shown up.
But it was increasingly plain that Manfred was, much more than any of the other scientists Michael had met at the university, a very special agent of the monolithic government.
A man like Lindt was so lost in his work that he probably didn't think twice a year about whether he was working under a Communist government, an hereditary kingdom, a democracy or a fascist state; Lindt was of the old-fashioned school that did a piece of work, shoved it out the door of the laboratory, and forgot it.
Only the big ones could do that; the little ones went along with their work, trying to give it body English, worrying if it would be properly recognized, counting their honorary degrees like a Sioux brave counting coups.
The even bigger ones--and one in a generation was pretty good going for the human race--were like Einstein, humanitarians as well as scientists, who could disregard their own reputation and worry about the reputation of the whole damned human population of the world.
But the great run of average and just-better-than-average scientists accepted whatever kind of government they were under and became apologists for that kind of government
And, finally, there was the agent, the man who used political connections and political work to better his scientific standing. And Karl Manfred was beginning to look like one of those.
Michael went ahead, his Security shadow still on his flank and slightly to the rear, and as he entered the dining room, Karl Manfred, who had obviously been watching for him, raised an arm, and the student orchestra broke off its music and hit a dramatic fanfare.
Vice-Rector Gutman appeared from behind the dais and climbed on it, while the assembled faculty applauded.
Manfred nodded genially to Michael, and took Sarah's arm firmly above the elbow and started guiding them toward the platform.
And there was a bad, bad catch. Karl Manfred had gotten Michael to East Germany, so far as Manfred--or Gerhard--knew. And Manfred expected a medal for that.
But having done what he was ordered to, and been rewarded for it, Manfred could double-deal, and double-dealing was the business any security agent was in. He could subtly denounce Michael, and do it in such a way that Michael's faults could seem to have developed after he was enticed to East Germany.
In which case there was no doubt that Michael would disappear.
Which would leave Sarah in East German hands--that is, in Karl Manfred's hands. And there was no doubt that Manfred had a hot and beady eye for Sarah.
It was a motive for a cross-up by an expert in the old double X. More grounds for worry.
But worrying was one of the things he was not required to do.
So he walked alongside Manfred to the dais, through the ranks of university people in their evening clothes, which were no more shabby than the evening clothes of university people any place in the world. Faculty ways and faculty salaries did not make for haute couture in Wisconsin, Tokyo or Moscow.
"How Vice-Rector Gutman keeps his youth," Manfred was saying. "He looks twenty years younger than I happen to know he is."
How Karl Manfred keeps his grip on Sarah's arm, Michael thought.
Manfred had to let go when they reached the platform; he stepped modestly into the body of the faculty, and Michael took Sarah's elbow as they went up the short steps. "How does it feel to be a femme fatale?" he whispered in her ear.
"Sticky," she said. "He has sweaty hands."
Gutman made the usual speech; an interpreter had been provided for Sarah's benefit, and there was the double boredom of having to listen to two versions of something that shouldn't have happened in the first place.
Then Sarah said a few words, which were duly translated. Now it was Michael's turn. He said a few sentences about the universality of science, and about the good reputation that the University of Leipzig enjoyed all over the world, and then he finished, and turned to the interpreter and said, in German, "Do not bother to translate. Miss Sherman has heard me talk before."
This got the first laugh of the evening, and the party was under way.
Germans, whether East, West, Imperial, Nazi or prehistoric blue-painted, have always been fond of eating; to this end, the party danced energetically before being served the buffet that would be the high point of the evening.
Sarah danced with Gutman; Michael danced with Frau Gutman. Sarah danced with Manfred; since there was no Frau Manfred, Michael was free for the moment. Before going off--but not before taking Sarah in his arms--Manfred politely offered to find a partner for Michael.
But Michael looked around and said, "Isn't that the doctor who fixed my head today?"
"Dr. Kostka, yes," Karl Manfred said. "She looks more attractive in an evening gown, don't you think?"
"Nice enough to dance with," Michael said.
Manfred chuckled, and gaily danced Sarah over to the lady doctor, who seemed to have found time for a hairdo since leaving her little clinic. Michael followed more sedately and got there in time to hear Manfred--one arm around Sarah--say, "Our distinguished guest wishes to dance with you, Frau Doktor."
Dr. Kostka was a good one; no surprise or anger or fear showed in her face. "All right. I can make a post-treatment diagnosis."
The student orchestra was playing in fast three-quarter time; Michael raised his arms, and Dr. Kostka stepped into them. Manfred was already whirling Sarah around the floor with unacademic vigor.
Dr. Kostka set a sweet smile of enjoyment on her face and said, "The police have been to the farm."
Michael smiled back flirtatiously and asked, "Did they find anything?"
The medical doctor said, "Not yet. But they will. Gerhard himself was there." She chuckled, as though he had said something funny. "The filthy pig."
"What now?"
Dr. Kostka said, "We have to get you and the girl out at once. She is very pretty, Professor. You are lucky--so far."
"It took me months to get this far," Michael said. "I can't drop it. It means too much."
The woman tightened her grip on Michael's hand and back in her intensity. "With you dead and the information inside your head, nothing would be accomplished. The escape plan is all timing. Other people are risking their lives to keep that timetable intact."
Michael said, "I've got to have more time than just overnight. I've come halfway around the world and killed a man, to get this close to Lindt--"
Involuntarily he looked over to where he had caught a glimpse of the old man before, seated--of course--between two of the more attractive faculty women. But Lindt's chair was empty, and, of all people, Manfred was hovering behind the place where Lindt had been.
"Over there," Dr. Kostka said. "Dancing with your woman."
It was true. Lindt and Sarah were going around with the best of them, though it did look as though Sarah was carrying a good deal of the old man's weight on her arm.
"Two hours in the morning?" Michael asked.
Without losing her smile, the doctor made a contemptuous sound in her throat "What can you do in two hours? All right. Ten o'clock at my clinic. Without baggage. Take what you cannot spare in your pockets."
"I didn't bring anything I couldn't spare," Michael said.
"Except your woman," Dr. Kostka said, and the music ended.
Michael walked her back to where he had found her; she introduced him to the other people at her table. Then he walked, as slowly as he could make himself walk, toward Lindt's table, where Sarah was escorting the old genius, rather than the other way around. Karl Manfred still hovered.
The old physicist seemed to have been sampling the wines of the Rhine, and perhaps those of the Moselle as well, if those West German wines got over to East Germany. He was at the giggling stage. "So, Armstrong. You are a free man tonight, eh? You have restrained your criminal instincts to go visit forbidden farms, yes?"
"I've reformed, sir."
Lindt sank into his chair bouncily. The women who had been keeping him company glanced at each other over his head, and then murmured apologies and escaped; they were undoubtedly either members of his department or the wives of members of his department, and the look they exchanged was one Michael had seen on the faces of faculty ladies at every college function he'd been to.
Sarah said, "Michael, use your influence as a visiting fireman; get us another bottle of wine. Dr. Lindt and I are thirsty."
She gave the old man the most openly daring of looks Michael had ever seen her give anyone but himself, and that privately. He almost gaped, and then almost gasped; Sarah was sending him telepathic messages every second.
He snapped his fingers for a waiter, European style, and a boy dashed up with a slope-shouldered bottle; Dr. Lindt's wishes at a party seemed known.
Manfred came hovering. "Michael, you and Miss Sherman are expected at the vice-rector's table."
"Cluck, cluck, cluck," Professor Lindt said. "Someone has left the barnyard gate open again! Begone, offspring of an egg." Sarah poured wine in Lindt's outheld glass; she rested her free hand on his gnarled claw, as though to steady glass and bottle; Lindt beamed and waved his other hand to beat time with the orchestra, which had struck up the "Vienna Waltz." "I must tell you Americans how my sister was knocked down in Vienna by a tram. Very dangerous city, Vienna, alt Wien; I must tell you."
Karl Manfred had not gone back into the egg to which Dr. Lindt had consigned him. He said, "Michael--"
Sarah stood up; she said, "Karl, dance with me. The night is young."
She held out her arms. Manfred stood hesitating. Then his courage came up to record-breaking levels. He said, "Yes, we will dance, lovely Sarah," and said it as though he should have added, "if I am shot for it tomorrow." It was a noble moment; Michael felt that he should stand up, salute, and throw a wreath in the River Elster.
But then Manfred spoiled the moment and saved the wreath by saying, "Doktor Lindt, you really should take Doktor Armstrong to the vice-rector's table."
Professor Lindt said, "The things in which I would ask your advice, Manfred, are very few and limited in scope."
Sarah danced the poor scientist-agent off.
Michael poured wine in his glass and that of the old man. On the dais Gutman and his coterie were looking at them anxiously; Otto Haupt stood against the wall as close as he could get to Lindt and Michael without arousing the old doctor's temper, which seemed to be one of the great landmarks of East Germany.
Michael raised his glass to the dais and gulped the wine; this won him smiles. A drunken American seemed to be a reassuring sight to the anxious East Germans.
Then Michael said, "Did you find anything interesting in what Miss Sherman said about Gamma Five today?”
Lindt looked at Michael confidentially. "I tell you how to be a great success, Armstrong," he said in his battered English. "A very great success! Never discuss work when you are having fun, and never, never, never over the wine, the beer or the schnapps. Never.”
Michael let him make what he could out of a shrug.
Lindt rolled his eyes drunkenly around the gala scene. The student waiters were bringing huge platters of cold and hot food to the tables; in Denmark this would be called a smorredrop supper, in Sweden a smorgasbord, in America a buffet; if Michael had ever known what it was called in German, he had forgotten.
He said, "Did Sarah tell you that I had worked out the formula for the last stage when the project was canceled?"
Lindt said grudgingly, "She said. I would accept it more readily from the scientist than from the Dienerin."
"Sarah's more than a Dienerin," Michael said, using the German--and international--word for a lab assistant. "Yes, we worked it out. Of course, I never got a chance to build it."
Lindt laughed. "Einstein used to say: It is true mathematically. Now let us see if it is true in the world.'"
"Which is why I defected. Which is why I am in Leipzig.''
Lindt nodded gloomily. "Yes. That a man must have. I know." Again his eyes rolled around. The impish look came back to them; he leaned forward and put his mouth to Michael's ear, cupped a hand around his lips conspiratorially.
At once Otto Haupt came forward and Karl Manfred danced Sarah over to them with unseemly haste.
"Joke," Lindt roared. "Big joke."
Haupt and Manfred looked at each other, their shoulders relaxing, their eyes exchanging a clear message: the old man is too drunk to give away or even to remember dangerous secrets.
When the security guards had pulled away again, Lindt said quietly, "Miss Sherman is lovely, but she did not know the final formula. What is it?"
Michael said, "Never over schnapps, Professor, never over schnapps." Haupt and Manfred would be in, the minute Lindt started talking formulae, he was sure.
Lindt ran his hand over his face. "I have too much beard," he said. "Tomorrow at nine-thirty I go to the Kazinski Barber Shop."
"Make it nine," Michael said.
"Jawohl." Lindt pushed away from the table, rose on legs tottering from wine and age. Manfred waltzed up with Sarah. Haupt came forward to assist the old man, who waved him away. "We have had a very interesting talk about farming," Lindt said. He looked at Manfred. "And about the use of a cockerel to guard the manure pile."
Then Lindt wandered away toward Gutman's table, carrying the remnants of the wine in one hand. A student waiter promptly brought Michael a fresh bottle; Gutman and Haupt and Manfred were all wreathed in smiles; the dangerous moment had passed.
Michael half closed one eyelid at Sarah, and settled down to drinking his solitary bottle.

16

Michael woke up the next morning, strangely out of joint from sleeping in the oversoft German featherbed; the sleeping habits of the people who had for so long overvalued the military posture were amazing.
As soon as he turned on the water in his tub, the "valet" from Security was there. "You should have rung for me, sir."
"That's all right," Michael said. He got out his razor and shaving cream, then peered in the mirror. Think I need a haircut?"
"If you say so, dear Sir."
"I say so. How do I get to Kazinski Barber Shop?"
The valet, busy laying out towels and generally fussing around with nothing, let his cover slip for a moment. "I thought you were a stranger in Leipzig?"
"Dr. Manfred said it was the best."
The sound of Manfred's name reassured the agent "Mr. Haupt will go with you. It is not far."
"Okay. If I'm going to get a haircut, I might as well let the barber shave me, too. Did you know that barbers in the United States no longer like to give shaves?"
"If you say so, Herr Professor."
Michael slipped out of his pyjamas and got in the tub. The valet withdrew without offering to scrub his back; lousy service.
The barbershop was only a short walk from the campus; he and Haupt made it in a few minutes. At once Michael saw why Lindt had named this place; the customers sat in a comfortable lounge until they were called; and the men waiting in the lounge could not see into the barbershop.
He and Haupt sat down; he was called after five minutes and taken through the door into the shop proper. He rather imagined that Haupt would have bleed to go along, but the Security man was security-shaved and security-cropped and there was absolutely nothing a barber could do for him.
The chair he was bowed into was next to that of Professor Lindt, who, lathered and stretched back, was muttering curses at his barber.
It occurred to Michael that he had stumbled into another net of disaffected East Germans; Lindt and his barbers and ... ?
Could be, or it could be something else. The first thing that Lindt said was, "I have followed your work for a year, Armstrong."
"Sir?"
"You have a chance of being one of the great ones." Then, because he was Lindt, he added, "I have been among the immortals for years."
"Yes, sir."
"This Gamma Five sounds like what I have long expected from you, if what Miss Sherman tells me is so."
"She's a good technician," Michael said, proceeding very, very cautiously. "But she's weak on theory."
Lindt shrugged, and his barber jumped back in alarm, his razor gleaming. "Please, dear Professor."
"Leave it alone," Lindt said. "I wish to talk."
Another barber had been pulling the robe up around Michael's neck, tucking the towel in around his collar, generally clucking over him, barber fashion. "Haircut and shave," Michael said.
The barber said, "This we can see for ourselves." Michael was not Dr. Lindt.
"That you have solved Gamma Five so soon is fantastic," Lindt said. He snarled at the barber. "Get on with it, get on with it! Do you think my time is worth nothing?"
The barber resignedly started gingerly scraping at Lindt's lather; but it had dried, and he got the brush and cup and started over again.
Lindt said, "But why have you not published, Armstrong?"
"Security," Michael said. "My government would not permit it"
"Governments are fools. Only we matter, we of the brains. You could, though, have published something of a theoretical nature."
Home safe! Michael said, "Like your paper in the Journal of Physics last year?"
"You read that?" Lindt sounded very happy. His barber was darting in and out, shaving a little patch as the elderly jaws rested; Michael's man was snip-snipping through Michael's hair with a soothing rhythm, very restful.
Lindt said, "If you read my paper, you know that I, too, have solved the puzzle of Gamma Five." He said to the barber, "No clippers." The clock on the wall said that it was fifteen minutes past nine. Time was being nibbled away.
Michael said, "Professor Lindt, with all due respect, I think your formula was only true on paper. I think mine is the one that will work. They are different."
"I know they are different in appearance," Lindt ' said. "But I think, from what Miss Sherman told me, they can only arrive at the same place."
Suddenly the old genius sat upright, waving the frightened barber away. "Both of you. Wipe the lather off! Are we tailors' dummies or scientists? Are we tango-parlor cavaliers, that we must look so pretty? Come with me, Armstrong, and I will show you how there can be no proper answer but my answer!"
He jumped out of the chair, ripped off his towel and robe, jumping up and down, squeaking in his anxiety: "Come, Armstrong, corne! I show you."
The barber was trying to put old Lindt's stiff collar and broad, fancy tie back on him. The professor grabbed them and shoved them in his pocket "I will not be pretty, I will not be pretty."
Michael smiled in apology at his barber, stood up, let the man take the wrappings away, shoved some money at him. He retrieved his tie, knotted it through his soft collar, grabbed his coat. "Ready," he said.
Lindt headed for the door into the lounge.
Michael stopped him with a hand on the old arm. “Isn't there a backdoor?"
"Oh," Lindt said. "Your Security man. Yes. They try and prevent us from talking, I know. We live in the dung of a barnyard of Security agents these days. All over the world. Barber?"
The meek and frightened man who had tried to shave Lindt said, "Yes, sir?"
"Find us a backdoor. If there isn't one, cut one with that instrument of torture with which you tried to shave me! It's only fit for cutting wood."
"That way, gentlemen."
Lindt started for the back, Michael tagging along, knowing now how the tail of an efficient kite felt in the sky. The barber pushed past him and tried to get to Lindt, crying, "The bill, the bill."
Michael shoved some Ostmarks at him, and he dropped away; then they were in an alley, two fugitive scientists, like kids who had ditched school. Down the alley, and up a short street, and through an old archway, and then on the campus, and down into a cellar. Lindt said: "I do not like daylight when I work. Here we are, my boy."
He fished a key at least four inches long out of his pocket, and opened the padlock on a door that looked like it led to a janitor's apartment. But it didn't; this was the laboratory of the great Professor Lindt.

17

Sarah was in the clinic with Dr. Kostka; the clock was shoving its way toward nine-thirty. Dr. Kostka was walking up and down the clinic, lighting cigarettes, putting them out, lighting new ones; the rank odor of East European tobacco was harsh in the air.
Sarah found herself sitting down, carefully not looking at the clock, then jumping up to face the staring dial on the wall.
The doctor suddenly threw her burning cigarette into the clean corner of the office; sparks scattered all around the imitation cork floor. She went over and stamped viciously on the sparks, then went to the cabinet under the sterilizer, got a cloth, and carefully cleaned up the mess she had made.
"Where in God's name--"
"I don't know."
Kostka said, "I called Lindt's lab. Neither of them is there. Lindt's Diener acted even stupider than usual; the old man picks them for being dumb and obedient."
Sarah shook her head. I will not run up and down, I'll be calm, there's no one in the world smarter than Michael, hell be here on time. "Latakia," she said suddenly.
"What?" The woman doctor whirled as though to strike Sarah.
"The tobacco your cigarettes are made of. I couldn't remember."
"Bah!"
Sarah said, "Last night, when he told me to come here, he said something about a barbershop."
"Barbershop!" It was a guttural, Middle European shriek. "My God, my people are putting their lives on the line to get him out of this pesthole, and he goes to have his whiskers curled and perfumed."
Somehow or other, for all her good resolves, Sarah had gotten to her feet. "That is not fair, and you know it It was a rendezvous with Dr. Lindt"
"Lindt, Lindt! That crazy old man would not know a Security trap if the jaws were pinching his ankle. Well, if he is not here by ten, you go alone."
Sarah grabbed the woman doctor's upper arms and faced her. "No, no, no!" Sarah shrieked. She hardly recognized her own voice. "Never, never, never!"
"You damned fool, if these pigs kill the daughter of a United States senator, it might mean war. European war, not these nasty little jungle scraps. Do you think I care about you? A stupid little American college girl, a laboratory assistant? I spit on your importance."
She shook herself free of Sarah's grip, and went to the other end of the clinic by the instrument case. Absentmindedly she took a large chiffon handkerchief from where it was tucked into her wide leather belt-she wasn't wearing her white clinic coat today-and rubbed at a fingerprint on the case. "I'm sorry, Miss Sherman, Sarah. I am very near out of my mind. We have spent years building this escape apparatus, it is everything to us, my husband gave his life for it; and it is people, real living people, with hopes and fears and blood and futures, and I have never tried it so hard; setting the escape an hour after we hoped to originate it, and now perhaps having to be even later--it is now half-past nine!"
Sarah said, "I keep telling myself not to look at the clock, and then I look."
The doctor nodded as though Sarah had said the wisest thing ever heard inside the old university. "Just so," she said. It seemed impossible for either woman to stop talking.
"What is it like," the doctor asked, "being a college girl in America?"
Sarah said, "Oh, all dates and campus styles, and drinking malts in the afternoon and beer at night and guitars and--do you really want to know?"
"No," Dr. Kostka said.
"Then I'll tell you. Of course there are--if anyone overheard this, we'd both be taken away by the little men in the white coats."
Dr. Kostka's manner changed completely; she became the competent physician, competent counter-government operator. "This clinic is not wired," she said. "There is a very important Soviet representative here who has a disease he does not wish anyone to know about. And I am deemed reliable. He is allergic to penicillin, thank God."
"But your husband--"
"It passed as an ordinary traffic accident. He was fighting for time, for the underground bus to get away."
Sarah said, "Bus? We go by bus?"
Dr. Kostka said, "You'll see. Can't we talk about anything else? Do you know anything about the slave underground in your country before the Civil War? Tell me about it."
Sarah shook her head. "I never took history after high school. Physics major, math minor."
The doctor went over and started snapping the sterilizer switch on and off. "Sometimes I think I know all English, and then somebody says something that is just words, without music."
The phone rang and broke off the inane conversation. The clock said nine-forty. Dr. Kostka crossed to the instrument, and Sarah, well brought up, went to look out the window, the international gesture of a person who wants to pretend he isn't eavesdropping on a phone call
She, of course, didn't have to. The phone call was in German, which she didn't understand; she would have to pass a test in written German before she could apply for her doctorate, but a number of physics Ph.D.'s that she knew could read but not talk the languages necessary for study.
Dr. Kostka said, "Danke" and hung up the phone. She turned to the girl at the window. "Well, now it is ten o'clock or never. Gerhard's people have found Gromek's body. And his motorcycle."
The girl at the window didn't answer. The doctor said, "Did you hear me? You and Armstrong must be--what are you looking at?"
Sarah was frozen at the window, staring as though the horsemen of the Apocalypse were cantering across the Leipzig campus. Dr. Kostka, moving in fear, went to join her. Then she gasped.
Two command cars--open-bodied nine-seaters without doors--were pulled up side by side in front of one of the university buildings. Their crews--Vopo troopers, sergeants, officers--had spread out on either side in front of them. On each flank a trooper kneeled with a ready submachine gun. As they watched, an officer detached himself, and trotted across the brown grass toward the Physics building, a Vopo trotting after him, armed with a carbine and bayonet.

18

Except for the lack of windows, Lindt's laboratory could be Michael's back in Oklahoma, the one Michael had had in Chicago, the one he had used in Washington; a physics lab is a physics lab all over the world.
They say that music is the universal language, Michael thought, but physics-math comes pretty close; no matter what language a physicist talks to his wife, give him a blackboard and a piece of chalk, and he can talk to any colleague any place.
He said, "Now, as to the question you asked me--"
Dr. Lindt said, "First, I show you something very, very interesting." He laughed. "Einstein, the great Einstein--you think he was great, Armstrong?"
"I would certainly put his name right up there with yours," Michael said, diplomatically. "Now, about Gamma Five--"
"Ja, well, perhaps--" Dr. Lindt said. He didn't seem to have heard the hint that they get to business. "Yes, perhaps Einstein was that good--anyway, he said that space was curved, light was curved. Right!"
"Well, of course. None of our space work, or Russia's, would work if that were not true."
"But they do not work," Dr. Lindt said. "They miss, all of them, by ten miles, twenty miles, sometimes by a hundred miles, correct?"
Michael said, "Well, when you deal with such terrific distances. Now, if my Gamma Five gets that close, I'll be quite happy."
"Gamma Five is for short distances, only an antimissile. Look at this."
The fragile old professor skipped across the lab, flipped a dust cover off a bench. The bench was covered with prisms and Lucite rods, hooked up in an impossibly complicated tangle of complications. "Watch."
Lindt flipped on a light "Elliptic," he said. "Light is curved, but very, very slightly elliptically. Come look. This is only preliminary, of course. But, in thirty years I will show the world where Einstein was wrong, just a little wrong, it is true, but enough so one and all will say: 'Lindt, he was the great one.' Is it not so?" He picked up a prism and began polishing it with a silk cloth.
Michael sighed, and looked around the cellar room. Four sides were covered with blackboards--light came from insets in the ceiling--but none of the equations sprawled in Lindt's firm hand applied to Gamma Five.
Thirty years, he thought. Lindt was in his late eighties, at least; in good light he looked a hundred. And he was starting on a thirty-year-long experiment Physicists were all crazy.
There was a good stretch of spare blackboard, recently washed. Michael took up a piece of chalk and began writing an equation.
Back in grade school--maybe primary grades--he and some other angelic little brats had practiced how to make chalk squeak; they found that almost every teacher could be driven slightly crazy that way.
He turned the chalk in his fingers as he wrote out his equation, trying to recall that long-lost art. Suddenly his chalk squeaked.
What had he done? He'd gotten interested in the equation he was sketching, and had for a moment forgotten the chalk. There. It squeaked again.
Behind him there was a soft, rustling noise as Lindt put the dust cover on the preliminary model of his thirty-year project and came to watch Michael's hand. Michael gave up making the chalk squeak; he had the old man's attention. At once the chalk started squeaking and would not stop.
"No, no, no!" Lindt screamed suddenly. His fragile body hit Michael's muscular one and shoved the young man aside. "Nonsense, nonsense." With a quick swipe of a felt eraser, Lindt wiped out the last four facts Michael had fed into his equation, and substituted a single one. "All that trouble for nothing," Lindt said. They were talking straight German now; before, they had wandered in and out of English in the truly international way. In about five short sentences, Lindt showed how Michael had unnecessarily complicated the process of making Gamma Five home.
Then he handed the chalk to Michael, who went on writing out his proposition with a strong feeling of excitement inside him; old Lindt had cut the cost of a Gamma Five prototype by at least ten percent
When the equation was completed, Lindt studied it a long time. Finally he said, "I am afraid, Armstrong, that you have little to offer me."
Time to get mad. Time to show some fire. Michael felt thoroughly ashamed of himself; this was no way for a scientist to behave. But the world was at fault, the world that divided itself up into artificial parcels and told the scientist in one parcel not to talk to those in another.
He said, "Damn it, Professor Lindt, there's nothing wrong with this formula except that the fools I've been working with wouldn't give me the money to make a full-scale prototype."
Lindt shook his head. Then he said, "I have read everything you have published. Your formula is all wrong, but there is nothing wrong with you except you are too young--and you talk too much."
The old man looked at the blackboard. He muttered to himself "Armstrong is not a complete fool." He erased a factor, frowned, then put it back in, intact, nodding to himself, humming a Strauss waltz.
Michael stole a look at his wristwatch. Nine-thirty-two. Cutting it fine, too damned fine. What profit a man if he gain the world's knowledge, and then gets bumped out of this world?
Lindt said, "Something like your formula was tried at Alma-Ata last year. It blew up."
"Something like, yes. But not this one. I tell you, the laboratory model worked." And how I hate myself for lying to this fine man of my own profession.
"Something like," Lindt said.
A loudspeaker system suddenly cleared its throat and barked, and then said: "Professor Armstrong and Miss Sherman are wanted in the vice-rector's office. At once." It went on repeating the message, first in German, than in English.
There was no loudspeaker in Lindt's laboratory; apparently there was no secret microphone, either, or the Vopos and the Security men would have been here long ago. But the summons came clearly through the ceiling or the walls, or some way.
Old Lindt frowned at the ceiling, rubbed his chin, and said again, "Something like, but not quite. The beginning of your equation is very exciting, and quite new, and it would work."
Michael knew that; up until the eighteenth factor the formula was perfect. And he knew that, given time, Lindt would see that, too; it was why Michael was in Germany. But the operative phrase was: given time. Time was exactly what Dr. Kostka had said Michael didn't have, and he believed Dr. Kostka.
Suddenly Lindt stopped humming his waltz and ran to the end of the long formula, and erased, furiously. Not happy, he ran to the sink, wet a cloth, and ran back to wipe out the dust of the erasure.
"There," he said. "There is your fault"
It was the eighteenth component that he had erased.
Now he stepped back, whirling a little, dancing from foot to foot. He wrote a number. Then he wrote a power to the number. Then he made the start of a .pair of parentheses, to contain the factors that the raised number would have to be multiplied against to make Gamma Five work; the bird, as the engineers said, would fly, but it wouldn't home and kill.
Lindt fed a fixed factor, E, into the formula; he raised it to the third power, erased and changed that to the fourth.
He was completely absorbed; Michael stole another look at his wristwatch. Eighteen minutes till ten.
His life was running out in the unheard ticking of his watch, but Lindt absorbed him completely; Michael was being treated to the sight of one of the greatest minds in the world holding, sorting, rejecting, using factors that were a few among the millions possible. The multiplicand grew under the master's chalk as a pot grows on the potter's wheel.
The loudspeakers said: "All students will leave their classrooms and search for Armstrong and Sherman." The titles were now omitted.
Lindt stared absently at the ceiling, and suddenly wrote rapidly and--the formula was complete.
Michael stared, burning the factor into his memory. He had what he had come to East Germany for.
Lindt was looking at him in triumph, and then, slowly, that faded, and the old man was back in the living world, staring at the ceiling and then at Michael and then repeating it.
Professor Lindt said, "Armstrong, I have learned nothing from you, and you have learned everything from me."
You're the most, Michael thought As the kids say. The most, old boy. But I better split out. Or cut out. Or just plain out.
Lindt said, "The whole university is looking for you. What have you done?"
Michael started for the door.
Lindt ran across to his desk, snatched up the Continental phone on it, and started dialing.
Michael slid out the door. He knew he ought to go back and knock the old master out; but he was a scientist--or would be if he ever got out of East Germany--and not an intelligence agent; that short phase of his life was--engineer talk again--phasing out.
He and Lindt had come into the cellar through an outside staircase; but there was an inside one, too.
He trotted up it, convinced he'd find the door at the top locked. But it wasn't, thank the Lord for small favors, and he was in the lobby of the main floor.
Students were milling there, uncertain about the best method of looking for two people whose appearance they didn't know. One young man called to another: "How do I know them when I see them?"; the other shouted back: "Look at their shoes, American shoes are not Czech," and all the kids laughed as college students laugh all over the world.
These people were older than university students in the United States; Michael mixed in the crowd, and hoped he could pass as one of them. Someone stepped on his feet, muttered: "Bitte," and Michael hoped the scuffing would dim the American luster of his footwear.
He milled with a purpose, and finally got to the foot of the stairs leading up to Dr. Kostka's clinic. He went up two steps, his head down to hide his face; but then he looked up for a brief reconnaissance; and there was Manfred coming down.
Karl Manfred had dropped all pretense of being a simple scientist; he was flanked by two Vopos with automatic rifles, and he was obviously in command of them.
Michael stepped back and into the crowd. He dropped his head, then knelt, untying and tying a shoe lace.
Karl Manfred and the Vopos passed within two feet of him, the students parting for the policemen. Michael stood up and watched; Manfred was leading his goons down into the cellar; old Lindt's phone call had gotten through.
Students poured down after the Vopos, and Michael stood up and trotted up the stairs and to the clinic door. He got through the door; the clock on the wall said five minutes to ten.
"Got it!" he said, in lieu of greeting, ran to the doctor's white-enameled desk and wrote the formula hastily on a prescription pad.
Sarah cried, "Oh, Michael, how did--"
"No time!" Dr. Kostka barked. "My God, Armstrong, I've had three heart attacks and bitten all my nails away."
She snatched up two oilcloth bags; Michael had seen diem all over the campus, dangling from the students' hands. These were full of books and notebooks, as were the originals. Thank goodness, you're both young-looking," Dr. Kostka said. "I hope you can ride bicycles."
"Oh, yes," Sarah said happily.
Michael said, "Bicycles? We're about a hundred miles from West Berlin."
"Oh, quiet," the doctor said wearily. "Here, put this thing on." She tossed him a student's cap ornamented with a red star, and started back through the clinic. Way in the rear she opened a door, and there was a long, narrow elevator car there.
"In case they have to bring a stretcher up to the clinic," she explained.
She stood in the front of the car, by the control panel; Michael and Sarah were behind her, and Michael put his arm around Sarah, who pressed close against him, exuding the very essence of relief and joy.
The elevator stopped just inside a concrete dock in an alley; ambulance entrance, no doubt.
There were three bicycles in the alley. Each one had a basket on the front; they put their bookbags in them, as the students did.
Dr. Kostka said, "I forgot a bag for myself." She borrowed a couple of books from each of theirs, and put them loose in her basket "We are two undergraduates and a graduate student after their classes."
"Thank you," Sarah said.
Dr. Kostka said, "Perhaps I meant that Dr. Armstrong was the graduate student. We are almost late, but we must not--you hear me, must not--hurry. Ride slowly. Understood?"
"Understood," Michael said, and mounted. Two of the bikes were girls' models, one was a man's; the PI thought of everything.
They pedaled slowly out of the alley, cut across the corner of the lawn where the Vopo cars were parked; only the kneeling gunners and the drivers were still with them; the flat tones of a radio dispatcher could be heard on the cold air.
The doctor said, "While you were out, Armstrong, I got word from our friends in Berlin. They have made arrangements for you, but just barely; all will work if you are there tonight, nothing will work if you are later. It is a very close thing. It took you so long with Lindt"
"Long!" Sarah said hotly. "I think he was wonderful to be so fast."
Kostka's English, which she was speaking out of courtesy to Sarah, had deteriorated in her weariness. She said, "That you should think he is wonderful is correct."
Michael shot Sarah a warning look.
They pedaled slowly through the campus, along walks, occasionally on motor roads, curved and winding under the winter-bare trees. There was a certain amount of sunlight, noticeable only by its absence when they went under the arched passageways beneath the buildings.
Sarah said, "A place like this makes our college seem so raw."
Dr. Kostka grunted. Then she said, "Yes, it it better if we talk. Looks better, and perhaps keeps one from thinking, too. In America, do students bicycle?"
"Some," Michael said. "Most of them have cars."
"Hot rods," Dr. Kostka said, the word sounding very German in her throat.
"Not all, but some," Sarah said. "Almost every American boy goes through a phase of being an expert mechanic and body repairman. And some girls. When I was fourteen, I spent all one spring helping a seventeen-year-old neighbor boy cannibalize three Model A's into one."
Dr. Kostka said, "Cannibalize?"
"You take the best part of three, and after a while you have a car that will at least run."
"Oh. Sometimes I try and think how it would be to have grown up in the United States, but I cannot. The English, the French, they are not so different from us."
She pointed with her chin and turned her bicycle up an alley. The alley, all the area around it, seemed deserted; three cats talking things over scattered over wooden fences at the far dead end.
"Here I leave you," Dr. Kostka said. "Mr. Jacobi takes you from here."
"Jacobi?" Michael asked.
The chin pointed at a door marked simply, "Garage."
Steadying the bike with one foot on the ground, Dr. Kostka said, "If all goes well, you go out by sea. And I hope that all goes well."
"Thanks for everything," Sarah said.
The woman stared at her. "I did not do it for you," she said, and pedaled away.
Michael went and knocked on the back door of the garage.

19

Mr. Jacobi was tall, stooping, with a row of fountain pens and automatic pencils sticking out of the breast pocket of his coat; he had the smile of a used-car salesman or of a butcher with a faulty scale.
He watched them wheel their bikes into his garage, then he promptly shut the door. He took the bookbags out of the bicycle baskets, and stowed them in a cupboard under a greasy workbench that ran all along one side of the garage.
Mr. Jacobi gave his brilliant, unconvincing smile and carefully started going around the garage, turning off lights. "Electric is very expensive in our country, you know."
When the last light was out, he beckoned with a crooked finger, and they rolled the bicycles out to the street in front of the garage. This was almost as deserted and bleak as the alley had been.
Mr. Jacobi looked all around. Then he asked Michael for his student-korps cap, tossed it carelessly on the greasy bench.
"We wait," he said.
They didn't have to wait long. A large cross-country bus, obviously modeled on the American Greyhound type, came around the corner and stopped in front of the garage. A uniformed bus driver hopped down, took the two bicycles and loaded them into the bus. They could see him through the window, pushing them down the aisle to the wide back seat, where he stacked them, one on each side.
Then he came back and held out his hand, and Mr. Jacobi gave his some money; in return the driver gave each of them a ticket. Sarah got in first, and then Michael, then Mr. Jacobi; the driver swung into his seat, levered the door shut, and they were off.
There were several vacant seats. Michael and Sarah took a pair; Mr. Jacobi sat down opposite them, next to a thin woman in her late twenties, who immediately started complaining. "We are two minutes behind. Why?"
Mr. Jacobi smiled at her with all the frankness at his command. "We will make up the time, Fraulein Mann. You always worry so."
Michael translated for Sarah. She said, "Do you think the whole bus line is on our side, Michael?"
He asked Mr. Jacobi, who laughed with the sound of almost genuine mirth. "This is the phantom bus. It is a--what shall I say?--inspired, educated copy of the regular one that leaves from Leipzig for Berlin. But ours leaves ten minutes sooner."
Michael turned to tell this to Sarah, but Fraulein Mann's gabble drowned him out "These are not Germans, Jacobi. Who are they?"
"Friends," Jacobi said. "Just friends."
A girl's voice behind them said, in English: "Oh, Americans. How fine! Welcome, Americans, welcome."
Sarah turned to see who had spoken. The seats behind her and Michael were taken by a couple who could have been brother and sister, but were probably husband and wife: a girl with her hair pulled back, a young man whose hair would have looked better that way; both of them wore thick glasses. In the United States they would have been against the government; in East Germany they were against the government
But they were nice, as such people almost always are, well-meaning. Sarah swiveled around in her seat, and reached back and took the girl's hands. "Thanks," she said. "Thank you very much."
The young man swallowed his larynx a couple of times, and then made the effort to say an English sentence: "I addt my vellcome to my vife's."
Michael turned, too. "Surely, everyone on the bus isn't escaping?"
Some of the people, most of the dozen passengers, laughed; Fraulein Mann and a fat man behind her were not amused.
"We are round-trip passengers," Mr. Jacob! said. "We have legitimate reasons for going back and forth; we do it often."
A scholarly-looking man of business--attaché' case, bowler hat, brightly shined shoes--said, "We are like the sun-dappled leaves behind the leopard. You are the leopard. Every week we make the same trip, all or most of us; the Vopos are used to us, they pass the bus with hardly a glance."
"But we have never been so late before," Fraulein Mann said. "One tiny mishap, and the regular bus will be upon us."
"Relax," Mr. Jacobi said. "All will be well, Fraulein Mann."
Two of the more nondescript passengers were obviously brothers; they dressed alike, they looked alike, they reacted alike; when the other passengers had laughed or frowned, they had merely smiled demurely. Now one of them pointed out the window, and said, "Police."
The other one followed the pointing finger with his mild eyes.
Fraulein Mann let out a little shriek.
Vopos and plainclothes Security men were all over the boulevard they had turned into. They were trotting up to doorsteps, rapping on doors, peering into arched alleyways.
Mr. Jacobi was calm. "Good," he said. "We arranged for the Vopos to search this neighborhood while we drove out of town. Very good."
The bus rolled on.
The city thinned out; the neat countryside took its place, bleakly, in the windows. Sarah kneeled backward on her seat, and asked the girl behind her: "Isn't this very dangerous for all of you?"
The girl looked at her husband, repeating the query in German. He moved his thin lips for a second; then in English he said: "Please not to translate. This is a chance fortunate to practice my English listening." He added something in German.
His wife said, "For some people it is more dangerous to stay here, my husband says. We have been married six months."
Michael turned and grinned, and said, "Congratulations."
He got no answering smiles. These were very serious kids, indeed. The female one said, "Here it is a crime to disagree with the authorities. But we cannot help but disagree when we see something that is wrong!"
"Of course you can't," Sarah said hotly, as though she suspected Michael of laughing at her friends, if silently and politely.
Mr. Jacobi reached in the pocket that was guarded by the stockade of writing instruments and pulled out two sets of cards, each fastened together with a brassy paper clip. "Your papers," he said to Michael and Sarah. "The Vopos will be asking."
The bus coasted to a stop as armed Vopos waved tommy guns at the radiator. The driver opened the door and a Vopo sergeant hopped in. He stared through the bus, smiling at one particularly well-dressed girl sitting near the front. Then he hopped down on the step again, and said, "All is correct," in German.
Before the sergeant was on the pavement, the door was closed and the driver had the clutch in and the bus moved off, the gearbox whining as the driver climbed back into high.
Fraulein Mann gave another of her little shrieks. The stout man who had joined her in frowning at Sarah said, "Jacobi, this is not all correct. Carrying foreigners is very, very dangerous."
Jacobi said, "We passed the police line, didn't we? Relax."
Michael translated for Sarah.
Fraulein Mann said, "But what when the second bus comes along?"
Jacobi said, "Faith, Fraulein, have faith. Heinrich is not only a good driver, he is a smart boy. He told them to keep the line formed, that there will be a second bus, an extra one, in a few minutes."
But the party of Fraulein Mann and the fat man was growing. There were growls of discontent from some of the other passengers, too. Michael tried to determine what his own attitude would be if this were America; would he be more willing to risk his life for fellow Americans than for foreigners?
Probably, he thought. Undoubtedly Russians thought more of Russians than they did of East Germans or Poles; it was hopelessly built into the human frame, and too damned bad, but what were you going to do?
You were going to do what you had to do.
He turned to Sarah. Fishing in his pocket, he took out the prescription form he had lifted from Dr. Kostka's clinic desk. "You'd better memorize this."
Sarah stared at the complicated equation. "Gosh."
"I may have to get rid of the written version. It's better that both of us know it."
"You got a lot of faith in my memory, Michael old boy. I can't even remember my own telephone number most of the time."
"I've got a lot of faith in you, Sarah old girl."
She smiled, and then went into a deep study, her lips moving as she read the equation over and over to herself. It was good for her to have something to concentrate on; Fraulein Mann was busy talking to two passengers she had joined in the back, near the bicycles, and the fat man had gone up forward, apparently campaigning; once Michael heard him say, "Foreigners are no concern of our poor, divided country," and someone else said, "Freedom of all is our concern," but there were rumbles of disapproval.
He watched out the window as a peasant woman shook her umbrella at the driver as he swept by her, holding up the fingers of one hand to tell her that another bus would be along in five minutes.
A minute or so after that the bus stopped again; but this time not for Vopos; the gates were down on a railroad crossing.
One of the brothers turned to the other. "The railroad."
His brother agreed. "Yes, the railroad. But usually we are ahead of the train."
"We started late."
"Indeed, yes. And then there was the police barrier."
Michael stared out the window. The crossing tender was a woman, plump, contented-looking, a babushka tied around her graying hair, with high work shoes under woolen stockings and a flowered skirt. She was taking advantage of the moments till the train arrived to clip the hedge around her little cottage; a hedge that looked as though it were barbered by a master coiffeur every day. Two puppies and a hen were happily watching their mistress at work.
Unease was growing in the bus. Some of the people who had smiled at Sarah's naive question were now frowning at the Americans. Fraulein Mann was definitely working up a head of steam.
But it was the fat man whose safety valve popped first. "We will still be sitting here when the regular bus comes along," he said. "Surely the driver will recognize that we are not of the bus company. And then all will be lost, for these--these foreigners."
The serious young man behind Sarah and Michael said, "We have seven minutes head start. We can afford a minute."
Fraulein Mann chimed in: "Heir Jacobi, you should have warned us. I, for one, would not have come if I had known it was Americans we were tending."
The intellectual wife leaned forward and said in Michael's ear, "Many, many Germans lost lives in the American bombing. And then they listen to Russian propaganda; they are anti-Communists, but they hear what the Communists say, nonetheless."
Michael said, "Truth is, I'd as soon move along myself."
The nice young couple laughed. But there wasn't much depth to their laughter.
Mr. Jacobi stood up. He didn't raise his voice, but he commanded everyone's attention. "We are doing what we can to aid the cause we all believe in. If we were held up at the police barrier, so was the other bus."
"The cause we believe in," the stout man said furiously. "The cause we believe in. I, for one, believe in a united Germany. I have only the greatest contempt for both Russians and Americans."
Sarah suddenly stood up. "Michael, I can't understand all they're saying, but I can understand enough. We can't risk all these people's lives just for us."
Michael tried to pull her down again, saying, "Not us. What we have in our heads. The formula."
"There must be some way we could--"
He said, "No."
Fraulein Mann said, "The girl is right. Get off! Go away! You are spies, American spies, and if we are caught with you, it will not just be the labor camp, but death." She had spoken in English; now she repeated the last word in German: "Tod." There is no language in which "dead" sounds so final as it does in German.
Way in the back of the bus a woman, middle-aged, kindly-looking--what used to be called in the Middle West a "cookie-jar neighbor"--stood up, still holding a ball of yam and two knitting needles and a shapeless piece of knitting. She said, "Americans, Russians, Germans, Fiji Islanders. They are human beings, Fraulein Mann. You should be ashamed of yourself."
The stout man said, "If we are to be taken, it should be without American spies."
"They should get off," Fraulein Mann said.
A couple of passengers cried, "Vote, vote!"
Michael said, "Sarah, they are going to vote."
Jacobi raised his hands, as though in despair. "Vote, then." He sighed deeply. "Let me see the hands of those who wish to finish this mission, come what may."
Behind Michael the nice young couple were not content to raise their hands; they were on their feet, both shouting, "Go on, go on!"
Mr. Jacobi counted, "Eins, zwei, drei--"
But Fraulein Mann cut him off: "Seven. Only seven! Out with them."
"And with me, eight," Mr. Jacobi said, in his dead-flat voice. "An even count."
"The driver," the young man behind Michael said. "The driver didn't vote. Let Heinrich vote."
The driver craned around in his seat. He looked straight at Sarah and grinned, and then winked. "I signed on to drive this bus," he said. "I think I'll keep on driving it. And there's the train, and we're still four minutes ahead of the regular schedule."
The lightweight local train clattered down the track and crossed in front of them. The crossing tender took time to pat each of the puppies before she threw the barrier up. The driver clutched into gear and the bus went forward smoothly. Michael couldn't see the driver's face in the rearview mirror, but the back of the young man's head, his ears and neck under the uniform cap, seemed to be grinning.
"Too bad we won't be in Berlin any time," Michael said to Sarah. "I think our friend Heinrich would ask you for a date."
"He's very cute," Sarah said shakily.
Mr. Jacobi leaned across Michael to pat Sarah's shoulder gently. "Rest now. There is a long, long way to go."
Sarah yawned, and rested her head on Michael's shoulder.
Mr. Jacobi said, "When tension is released it is always so." He sounded like a man who knew what he was talking about

20

The trip from Leipzig to Berlin on the bus seemed twice as far as the trip from Berlin to Leipzig had been in the university limousine.
They went into small, neat clumps of woods and out of them, across grain fields and bridges and occasionally through hamlets. Sarah slept gently on Michael's shoulder; behind him the rustling of pages told him that the intelligent young couple were improving themselves by reading.
Then, suddenly, Heinrich was slowing the bus, and crying, "Police!"
Michael sat up straighter; Sarah's head slipped off his shoulder and she woke up, muttering, "What, what?"
Ahead over the driver's shoulder and through the windshield Michael could see men in ragged uniforms, carrying automatic rifles.
"They are not police," Jacobi said. "Russian Army deserters. Very dangerous. What you call holdup men. Quick, everyone. Watches, money. Jewelry."
Amazingly, Fraulein Mann was on her feet, ripping off the horrible black velvet hat she wore, passing it up and down the aisle. The passengers each dropped something in: wristwatches, paper money, coins.
Fraulein Mann herself ripped a cameo off the front of her blouse, and trotted to the front of the bus; as it stopped in answer to the waving of the rifles, Heinrich levered the door open, and Fraulein Mann thrust the hat into the hands of the Russian who was nearest, a tattered giant of a man with drooping blond mustaches, a latter-day Genghis Khan.
The giant looked down at the booty, goggling at how easy and successful the holdup had been. He shouted something to his comrades, presumably in Russian; certainly in no language that Michael knew.
Heinrich shut the door and put his hand on the gear lever.
But one of the Russians suddenly yelled at the giant: Pa-leets-ya." Then he turned and fired a burst up the road toward Berlin.
"Never a dull moment," Michael muttered. "Your boy friend was right, after all."
From the Berlin direction a command truck like the ones they had seen on the campus was bowling toward them. The Vopos in it were standing up and firing at the deserters, who were scattering across the fields toward the nearest clump of trees.
The police car pulled up even with the driver; the Vopos debussed, and started chasing the Russians, firing short bursts from weapons that looked identical to those the outlaws carried.
Heinrich cranked his window down and shouted, "May we go on?"
"In a minute," the Vopo driver said. "Just a minute."
Fraulein Mann, having been a heroine for a moment, sank back into being a hysterical old maid. She began moaning softly.
A Vopo sergeant trotted back to the command car, looked up at Heinrich. The lieutenant sent me back to escort you. There are more of these wood rats ahead. Just follow me."
He climbed in next to the Vopo driver, said something to him, and the command car backed up and started turning.
Fraulein Mann said, "Look, look, I knew it. We are under arrest"
The police car was backing up in front of the bus; the sergeant waved his arm, and the bus started forward. Heinrich called something over his shoulder; it was German, but it was a slang phrase that Michael couldn't make out
Mr. Jacobi started to laugh. They are giving us an escort to Berlin. Oh, this is something a man will tell his grandchildren every Sunday for the rest of his life."
"You have no grandchildren," Fraulein Mann snapped. "You are not even married." Then suddenly, she began laughing, wholehearted laughter without a trace of hysteria in it
Jacobi patted her shoulder as he had Sarah's, and dropped down into his seat. This time it was he who yawned.
They bowled along, but the command car was not so fast as the bus; they were not making the time they had been, it seemed to Michael.
Once Mr. Jacobi looked out the window at a little town they were passing through, and then looked at his wrist; but he had dropped his watch into Fraulein Mann's hat.
From then on the tour manager--or guide, or courier or pastor, or whatever Mr. Jacobi was--was restless. Finally he jumped to his feet and went to the back of the bus and peered out
His sigh could be heard clearly through the whole length of the bus. "Dished," he said. "Done in. Finished. Fertig. The other bus comes."
By now there was a routine to these things. Michael leaped across the aisle and put his hand across Fraulein Mann's mouth. A good piercing shriek could panic the whole nervous cargo of passengers and with a Vopo car right ahead of them, that would not do.
The motherly-looking woman came forward, stowing her knitting in a carpet bag, and said, "I will take care of this, Herr American."
Jacobi came up and said, "Fraulein Mann, I think it will be better if you get off the bus. We will pick you up on the return journey."
The knitting lady took her hand off Fraulein Mann's mouth. The spinster said, "Yes. I think it would be better. I do not have the conviction to risk my life for foreigners."
Jacobi barely let her finish before he had his hand on her upper arm. He virtually pulled her from her seat and dragged her forward to the driver. Heinrich made a rolling stop, the door opening before the bus was still; Fraulein Mann stumbled a little and then walked off to the side of the road and the bus was on its way again.
"Poor woman," Sarah said.
Jacobi shrugged. "Very brave, when it is a matter of Germans. She does not like foreigners."
"I gathered that," Michael said.
But Jacobi was looking to the rear. He said, "We do not have a chance to outrun that bus. You will have to get off."
"But what happens to the rest of you?"
"Oh, we will manage," Mr. Jacobi said. "We are all German. German as Fraulein Mann. But Germans are methodical; the slightest irregularity, and the Vopos will question everyone on the bus; we have a story ready, but they will hear that your lady does not speak German very well."
"Worse than that."
Jacobi smiled politely. But he was worried. He reached up and pulled the bell cord and Heinrich slowed the bus at once and coasted up to a little crossroad.
Michael and Sarah hurried forward. Heinrich had the door open. He said, in English, "Don't worry, I have real papers from the bus drivers' union and a story all ready for the other driver."
Sarah got down, then Michael. Suddenly he stopped. "Mr. Jacobi?"
Jacobi had stayed in the back of the bus looking back through the rearview mirror. He came forward, trotting. Michael said, "Our contact in Berlin."
Jacobi spoke in terrible, tumbling haste. "Albert, Counter Six, Friedrichstrasse Post Office. Got it?"
"Got it," Michael said, and stepped off. Sarah was already walking up the little crossroad; it led toward a distant village, whose church spire was plainly visible.
Heinrich called after him, "See you in America some day, maybe," and as Michael looked back, the driver was getting out and going back to talk to the other bus, now slowing down a half mile in the rear.
Jacobi called after Michael, "Wait, wait," and Michael saw that he and the stout man who had helped Fraulein Mann against the Americans, were unloading the two bicycles. "You'll need these," Herr Jacobi called.
Michael went back to get the bikes. The Vopos in the command car were standing and studying the situation. The sergeant jumped down and went back toward the buses. But he passed Michael, beginning to wheel the two bikes, and went on to the conference between the two bus drivers.
Michael walked down the country road as fast as a man can, wheeling two bicycles. Sarah was around the first bend, sitting on the dry bank of the curve, peering toward him.
She jumped up when she saw him and went to take her wheel
He said, "We'd better hurry."
They mounted, started off. Then, as they got away from the curve, the road climbed a little, and they could look back; worse, they could hear what was behind them, and what that was was firing.
The passengers from their bus had scattered and the Vopos were, shooting after them.
Heinrich's brave, cheerful story had failed.
Sarah said, "Oh, nol"
Michael said, "We've got to get out of here."
Sarah said, "All those people, all those brave people!"
"Don't think of them, we can't think of them."
So they wheeled as fast as they could down the road and into the town; it was not so small as they had thought, and there were alleys and cross streets and finally they saw a sign that said, "Auf Berlin," and they were on a secondary road that seemed to parallel the one the bus had used.
There was no traffic on this road, and Michael, pedaling furiously, had time to look over at Sarah. She was crying as she rode.
There were no guards at the east border of East Berlin; they got into the city without being noticed, and, as they penetrated farther and farther downtown, they were in the comforting shelter of crowds; a few people were traveling in little cars, there were some buses, but a great many East Berliners were cycling, and Michael's shoulders slowly came down to normal; he had not realized that he had been keeping them hunched, as though to make himself smaller.
Sarah said, "I haven't ridden a bike since I graduated from college. I'm beat."
"I'm not exactly at my radiant best," Michael said. A man pedaling past in the other direction looked at him suspiciously, and Michael added loudly, "It is not so cold today," in German.
Sarah said, "Jawohl," staunchly.
They were in front of a large movie house; bicycle racks had been provided for customers who arrived in the proletarian manner. They put their bikes in the rack and straightened up tentatively.
Sarah said softly, "Do we have to keep pedaling, or can we walk? Where do we go now?"
Michael was pretending to study the movie poster, giving an imitation of a man undecided whether the bill was worth the money; he felt it was a very amateur imitation.
"We go to the post office, counter six," he said.
Sarah nodded. Then her eyes widened. Two Vopos were walking toward them, peering at the faces of everyone they passed.
Michael reached for his bike and Sarah reached, for hers and they walked away, wheeling the bikes, acting as though they had just come out of the movie.
People passing gave them a second glance, almost unanimously. Sarah said softly, "Not only don't I speak German, but neither of us looks German at all."
"My grandmother was half German."
"She didn't dress like we do."
"I suppose not, Sarah, Jacobi said a particular post office--and I've forgotten which one."
"Oh, God. Maybe there's only one."
He said, "Maybe," but without much hope. East Berlin would surely have several branches.
Ahead of them a number of women with net shopping bags, little carts, or wicker baskets had lined up at a cheese store; there was nothing to do but ask one of them.
He started forward, but Sarah stopped him. "I'd better. If a strange man accosted one of those Haus-fraus, she might yell. How do you say post office?"
"Postamt."
Sarah went forward to the queue. She picked a woman about her own age, with a rather kindly face; no one in the lineup looked really friendly. "Bitte schon" Sarah said. "Postamt?"
She didn't say it correctly, apparently. The woman stared at her blankly and shunted her shopping bag from one hand to the other. It was a black oilcloth bag, the only one in sight.
Sarah made the gesture of licking an envelope, putting a stamp on it. The woman stepped away a little, as though she felt she was dealing with an idiot.
The woman babbled some German at her, too fast or too colloquial to be understood. Sarah looked at Michael desperately.
He came forward. "Yes," he said in German. "The post office."
"The Friedrichstrasse Post Office is close" the woman said, and Michael's worries decreased at the name. "First street on the left, second on the right."
The woman in front of her turned around. She addressed Michael almost desperately, as though her life depended on his getting to the post office. "No, no," she said. "That is a very long way. Just go down that street there and turn left." She pointed.
"That street is closed," the first woman said. "I attempted to come that way, and the street is closed."
"It was closed, but it is now open."
"It cannot be. There was an excavation--"
A huge woman suddenly turned from the head of the queue and charged back to them. She was one of the most amazing people Michael had ever seen: she wore a man's corduroy jacket with a matching short skirt, a man's hat and several strings of bright glass beads, as though she were embarking on a trading expedition with nineteenth-century Indians.
She was about sixty, and looked as though she should have been committed to a mental institution in the 1920's.
She took Michael by one arm, Sarah by the other, and said, "The Germans do not know how to treat visitors from abroad. I am Polish. I will take you to the post office. It is the civil thing to do."
Balancing a bicycle with one hand, the other clutched by the Polish lady, they were marched away.
"First I take you for coffee, then we go to the post office," she said. "I am the Countess Kuchinska." She said this as though announcing that she was the queen of whatever island she thought she was on.
Her hand was strong on Michael's arm; to get loose he would have had to let the bicycle clatter to the pavement, and that would not do; two of the omnipresent Vopos were coming toward them.
He said, "Please, Countess, we are in quite a hurry."
"Hurry kills. You will have coffee." Her English wasn't bad; but she didn't seem to have learned the word "please."
The Vopos were coming nearer. There wasn't a chance in the world that they weren't looking for Sarah and Michael; word would have come up from Leipzig and here, so close to West Berlin, the police would be sharply alert.
Michael twisted loose and stared into a shop window; Sarah dropped her head to hide her face. The Vopos passed on, the jostling crowd parting to let them through.
"Ah, ha," the Countess said. "Now we go for coffee--Professor Armstrong."
Off the cliff and into the bear trap. Out from under the falling tree and into the icy river. Life seemed a series of frying pans and fires. Michael said, "We would love to have coffee with you."
"I thought you would," the mad woman said.
She took them to a reasonably gaudy coffee shop, a Gaststube; it was on the Friedrichstrasse, but there was no post office in sight Michael wanted to run down the street looking for the office, but he was sure that the crazy woman would shout his name after him if he did.
And there was Sarah.
What the Countess did shout was, “Three coffees," across the room to a waiter, as soon as she barged through the door of the Gaststube, thrusting Michael and Sarah ahead of her.
Then she sat down at a little table, waving to them to join her. Michael looked unhappily through the window at their bicycles, neatly racked outside.
The Countess smiled seraphically at them. "Isn't this nice?" she asked. "Give me an American cigarette."
"I'm afraid I haven't any," Michael said. Sarah was sitting forward on her wire-back chair, a bird about to take flight. He waved at her to relax; the Countess was inevitable.
The waiter was coming toward their table with a tray holding their coffee cups. "No American cigarettes," the Countess said. "What a sadness. Then we smoke Russian ones. All paper and no tobacco, eh, Conrad?"
The waiter said, "Please?"
"I was saying the Russian cigarettes are like everything they do, all air and no substance, nicht wahr?"
"As the Countess pleases," Conrad said, and escaped.
The Countess pleased to laugh; dishes on the shelves shook. "This is very nice, isn't it?" she said again. "I have never had coffee with a spy before."
"Please," Sarah said. "Oh, please."
"No one listens to the old Countess any more. Just an eccentric old fool. And with his picture in all the papers, too. But don't look so worried, dear girl I am not communistical."
She picked up her cup, sipped noisily, "Undrinkable, worse than the cigarettes." Then she turned to Michael "You are wondering why I picked you up, what part I play in your exciting life. I tell you. I am your good fairy."
Michael suppressed a smile. Anything less ethereal than the Countess Kuchinska was hard to imagine.
"Yes, your good fairy. You must help me, and then I grant you a wish."
But her clowning was over; she looked perfectly serious. And she had dropped her voice to a whisper, though it was a whisper louder than most first sergeants' commands.
"Money?" Michael asked.
The Countess snorted. "What is there to buy here with money? No, not money." She snapped her fingers to show how far she rose above money. "A visa to the United States. Now that, that is pure gold."
Michael said, "I am in no way connected with the State Department."
The Countess's bony jaw thrust forward; her eyes glinted. "That is too bad. Then you must go to jail. And, believe me, East German jails are not gemiitlich."
Michael said, "Even if we got you the visa, would the East Germans let you go?"
The ancient laughter rang through the coffee hall. "So now you remember your cousin who is the Secretary of State, or perhaps the head of the Passport Division? Yes, the Russians would let me go. I am an old woman, and no use to them."
Sarah reached out and patted the Countess's gnarled hand.
"But there is la vie left in me," the old buffoon stated. "Lots of la vie. And I wish to spend it in the United States. But I need a visa, and to get a visa, I need sponsors."
Michael nodded. He fished in his pocket, and laid coins on the table for the coffee. "You've got yourself a deal."
Countess Kuchinska reached out and picked up two of the coins, dropped them in her purse. "Too much. Nobody tips in this lazzaretto."
Michael wasn't sure which language that had been; she seemed to move in and out of all the tongues of the world with ease. He stood up, and the old lady jumped up, too.
He said, "First I have to go to the Friedrichstrasse Post Office."
"What a man!" the Countess whooped. "He has you, my dear and now he has me, and he takes time to write cartas de amor to a third girl` Oh, what a rogue you are, my dear Professor."
"Quiet," Sarah said again.
"Oh, everyone in Germany is a professor," the Countess said, and they all trooped out

22

The post office was obviously postwar, since it was modeled on the Stalin Memorial. It was a big post office, and it was doing a big business; there were people lined up at every window.
Wishing that the Countess would let go of his elbow, Michael lined up at the tail of the Counter Six queue, terrified that the old Alice-in-Wonderland character would start booming that some of the other lines were shorter.
But she had other ideas. She let go of his arm and charged to the head of the line. "Please," she shouted in German, "that gentleman back there is a foreigner. Let us show him some German good manners. Put him at the head of the line."
Sarah whispered to Michael, "She's worse than a sound truck."
Michael said, "I can hear the sirens blowing now."
The people in the line were not responsive to the Countess's dramatic plea; they remained stolidly in line. One of the women near the front said, "A foreigner can learn to wait, too."
There were sniffs and grunts of approval.
"Of course, of course," Michael said. "I don't mind waiting."
He could feel Sarah's fingers shaking on his arm; he himself felt tike running madly out the door. Of all places in the world for the old idiot to start yelling about foreigners, a big post office was the worst; some of the people waiting were certainly from public offices; and for all Michael knew, his face might be posted on the wall, as wanted criminals' were in the United States. And two or three of the men waiting were in hotel uniforms; concierges were famous for tip-earning memories for faces, especially foreign ones. But nothing happened. The Countess wandered off to look at travel posters of Russia and the satellite countries; Sarah continued to cling to Michael's arm, and the line slowly moved towards Counter Six.
Then he was there. The clerk was not prepossessing; his gray mustache straggled down both sides of his mouth, handy for gnawing in moments of indecision; his narrow shoulders were stooped under the weight of a jacket spun from the wool of an alpaca dead of old age long before the time of President McKinley.
"Herr Albert?" Michael asked. Sad and almost colorless eyes regarded him from under dusty eyebrows. Michael drew the PI sign on the counter, and looked down at it. Herr Albert looked, too, and still without expression, reached up and fumbled around in some pigeonholes or shelves up there; then he laid a card in front of Michael, and said, "Next"
Michael turned away, Sarah still on his arm, the card sliding into his pocket after a brief glance. It had what looked like the name of a steamship company on it They had told him he would go out by boat, though the Wall was so close; but with an important spy loose, the Wall would be too closely watched.
Sarah said, "Michael, quick." He looked at her and then sharply at what she was looking at.
Two Vopos, a plainclothesman and the uniformed concierge of a hotel, were coming into the post office. The Vopos had their guns out.
Michael and Sarah started heading for a side corridor as fast as they could walk.
A terrible contralto-baritone pursued them; the Countess, bawling, "Wait, wait for your good fairy!"
A genuine baritone barked, "Stop that man."
They can't fire, Michael thought; the post office is too crowded.
There was a set of iron circular stairs going down at the end of the corridor. Michael and Sarah broke into a run for it; behind them, echoing idiotically against the institutional walls, the Countess could be heard screaming hysterically. "No, no, leave them alone. I saw them first, they're mine," and the officer's voice: "Out of our way, crazy one!" and then a scream; one of the Vopos must have thrown the Countess out of the way.
Then there was nothing but confused racket as their feet clattered down the iron stairs, and they were going through a door, and damp fresh air was on their faces.
They were on some sort of loading dock, where mail was delivered to or taken away from the post office; no one was in sight.
They trotted through an alley, and then were on a quiet side street. Through a curtained window someone was playing Beethoven on either a radio or a record player.
Michael stopped and fished the card out of his pocket. It read, "ASTRAREISEBURO. Herrenstrasse 16."
"It's not a shipping line," he said. "It's a travel bureau. We've got to find the Street of the Gentlemen."
"Herrenstrasse?" Sarah asked. "We passed it on the way to the post office. Just follow me."
"To the ends of anything at all."
"You see? I'm quite useful to you."
They walked fast, not taking the direct way, turning corners, circling; it was only by the fraction of a second that they had gotten away from the post office.
They came out on the Herrenstrasse a couple of blocks above No. 16, from the gilt numbers over the doorways. The street was not heavily traveled, but there was a knot of people ahead; as they watched, two Vopo cars pulled up and the athletic young cops did their usual athletic young leaps out of the command cars to the street.
Two plainclothesmen joined them from inside the knot of people. Michael said: "That's just about at sixteen," and pulled Sarah back and into a doorway.
"Police raid," he said.
Behind them from the very depth of the deep entrance a drawling voice said in English: "If you wouldn't break the laws, you wouldn't be afraid of the po-Ieece."
Michael turned, letting his breath out with what he was afraid was a sob. The man behind him was the Southern-talking farmer he had last seen on the tractor outside the city.

23

There was another man with the Dixie spy, a German, judging from the cut of his clothes. The farmer said, "Professor, yo' better change coats with Wolfgang here. That city raincoat of yo'rs is py-oor Hollywood."
Michael slipped out of his lined trenchcoat, handed it to the man named Wolfgang, who silently handed over his own fuzzy, slightly purplish greatcoat.
"Nothin' we kin do about yo', ma'm," the farmer said. "My goodness, we all nearly walked right into thet, didn't we?" He thumbed toward the travel bureau. "If Wolfgang 'n' me hadn't stepped out for a little light refreshment, we'd be in the pokey any minute now. An' you'all would be in the soup."
They came out of the entranceway, started walking away from the travel bureau, four abreast, the farmer on the curb, then Michael, then Sarah and the man named Wolfgang, silently guarding the inside. Night was falling; the street lights came on.
"You've sure caused a lot of trouble," the farmer said to Michael. "Lost some people, an' I had to move off that land jest when it was comin' to something."
"Is your wife all right?" Michael asked.
Wolfgang broke step, skipped and caught up again.
The farmer said quietly, "No, sir, she's not."
Michael felt an invisible hand on his throat They walked along in silence.
Finally, Sarah said, "I hardly dare ask about the people on the bus."
The farmer said, "No, you don't dare. In this business, we don't keep tally. Couldn't go on if we did. I just hope to Gawd that what you came for was worth it."
Quickly, Michael said, "Yes, it was. I got the formula for--"
"Don't tell me." The farmer's voice was harsh. "Don't ever tell me, or any of us! We get taken, less there is in us, less the bastards can get out of us--"
They were passing between a street lamp and a window where television sets for sale flickered feebly and silently. The farmer cleared his throat and said, "Nice night for walking. Water moon rising. Good time for planting, if a man had him a patch of ground." The pain in his voice lessened as he talked, releasing himself; he finished almost calmly. "Now, mister, you and your lady here listen to Wolfgang. He's the one who's goin' to git you out of this darned old country."
His farmer's drawl was completely restored.
Wolfgang, the silent one, cleared his throat. "Here, then, are tickets for the ballet tonight. I will take you to the theater, but the way things are progressing, maybe by the time for the curtain, there will be no me." His German accent was heavy; so was his mood.
"You are going out by sea," he went on. "A ship of the beloved German Democratic Republic. So. The baggage master of the ballet company takes you, in the costume baskets. You go to Sweden, which is all correct, but until you get there, you are not safe; the baggage master takes you only for the money you will pay him, dockside, Tralleborg. He will, of course, try and kill you if he thinks he can get the money that way first. If it is easier to get the money that way, I should say."
"Cheerful," Michael said.
"Hyar's the money," the farmer said. "Hyar's a lil ol' gun if you need it."
Michael pocketed the offerings. Sarah's clutch on his arm was fierce. Suddenly she said, "Couldn't you just show us the way to the Wall and let us take our chances?"
The farmer grunted. Wolfgang said, "If there were any chances to take, this we would much prefer. This we do for you endangers our entire apparatus. But there are no chances, you do not take them. Nothing but death awaits you at the Wall, believe me. No, you go on the ferry to Tralleborg. At the first intermission, go backstage. The baggage master has red hair. In any event, you will not take him for a ballerina, nicht wahr?"
This was a joke, as out of place as a rose in the teeth of a bare skull.
The fanner said, "I can't make any more money here." He turned and walked away down the lonely street, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched over.
Michael looked after him for a moment, then turned front again, his own head hunched down toward the collar of the purplish overcoat.
"He never says good-bye," Wolfgang said. "Perhaps the finest man I have ever known, but he never says good-bye."
Sarah shivered so hard that her hand shook on Michael's sleeve.

24

Cold, hungry, frightened, they slid into their seats in the State Opera at exactly eight o'clock; to have arrived sooner would have meant sitting exposed under the house lights, to have gotten there a minute later would have meant calling to themselves the attention of the people who would have had to rise to let them in.
As they sat down, the house lights dimmed, the orchestra went into the overture, the show was on.
"They make the trains run on time," Michael whispered.
A man behind him said, "Hush."
Michael hushed, and looked the stage area over. The curtain was going up, and chorus men were chasing chorus ladies across the stage, occasionally catching one and throwing her up in the air.
It didn't make much sense, but Michael supposed that it would if he had gone to enough ballet in the past, or maybe even if he were in a better mood to concentrate.
When he got back to the States, he must make a point of broadening himself, going to ballet and maybe opera and reading some novels.
If he got back to the States.
There was a door to one side of the proscenium, surely the door to backstage that Wolfgang had mentioned. As he watched, it opened, and an unmistakably red head of hair could be seen, counting the audience--or looking for Michael and Sarah.
It was a cheering sight; Michael turned to call Sarah's attention to it. But she sat transfixed by something on the stage. He followed the line of her gaze, but he couldn't see anything outstanding; a leading lady of some sort was now turning and leaping among the chorus people, and was occasionally being caught by one of the male dancers, and being thrown up, somewhat higher than the chorus dancers had been.
But for some reason Sarah found the sight fascinating.
Michael whispered, "What?" as softly as he could, because of the husher behind him.
Sarah whispered back, "The woman on the plane. Who sat next to me."
Michael stared. It was, indeed, the show lady over whom he had had to lean to talk to Sarah on the plane from Copenhagen.
The dance went into a new phase. Now, instead of being chased by the chorus men and their leader, who had appeared wearing a tinfoil helmet and a tight white dancing suit, the leading lady came to the footlights, and began turning, mostly on the toes of one foot; she would jerk herself around smartly, smile at the audience for a moment and jerk herself around again.
Each time she held the audience with her brightly made-up face for a split second.
Michael had no idea whether she could see into the audience or not; he had heard vaguely that the footlights blinded performers; he couldn't remember where he had heard it, a stray bit of stage lore seeping into the laboratory.
He began counting the number of rows of people between him and the footlight. Ten. No great distance; but the lights?
If the ballerina could see him and Sarah, she'd recognize them. He remembered her chagrin--remembered it clearly, though he'd hardly noticed it at the time--when the reporters at the airport had passed her up to interview, or try to interview, Michael. And her chagrin, better noticed, when he had spoken to Sarah instead of asking for the Dramatic Lady's autograph.
He wondered when the intermission would come and relieve him from this hard seat to go and be cosy in a costume basket, under a pile of comforting ballet costumes.
The sweat on the dancer's faces was plainly visible from this tenth row. He hoped they used deodorants, rather than perfume. But did the monolithic state bother with such fripperies as deodorants?
He tried to remember where he had picked up a word like "frippery"; he was sure he had never used it before.
Now. The ballerina was bowing, and the audience was applauding, and going off, and Michael got his legs under him, ready for the intermission. But Sarah's hand on his arm warned him to stay still; she was holding up a program. There was another number, some sort of gypsy nonsense, before the first intermission. The orchestra was playing another overture.
He look around, hoping to see a number of people--enough to make a good cover--taking a stretch between numbers. But nobody was getting up.
He did see something else, though. Vopos, with their inevitable guns, were filling the two entrances from the lobby to the orchestra.
And there was Mr. Gerhard, dear old Gerhard, the famous-infamous head of Security, standing between two muscular young Vopos, scanning the audience.
The curtain went up again. This time the chorus, with improbable-looking tatters of red and green over their dancing suits-whatever those were called-were crouched on the stage around flickering gypsy fires. Occasionally one of the ladies would go forward on her hands, as though dry-bobbing for apples, and stretch a leg toward heaven.
If he and Sarah were to marry and spend their lives together, he hoped she would not develop a passion for attending the ballet
The mind in which he felt such pride took hold of the situation. The electric fires that the gypsies were stretching around were not very convincing, but some sort of smoke pots under them were burning incense or something like it.
Michael put back his head and bawled, "Feuer," which is the German word for fire, and sounds very much like it
"Feuer!” he bawled.
Sarah stared at him, astounded. He jerked a thumb back over his shoulder at Gerhard and his Vopo troopers. Sarah took a quick look, and added her soprano to his baritone bawl.
On the stage the gypsies looked astounded; then one of them made the tactical error of jumping up and running into the wings, flatfooted.
Here and there people jumped up as mushrooms, are supposed to do after a heavy rain. Naturally, these upright folk turned toward the rear and the exits; then, seeing the armed Vopos, they began yelling.
There was enough confusion for Michael to pull Sarah to her feet. Volunteers had taken up the cry of "Fire"; people were milling all over the place.
But, determined, Michael hauled Sarah to the stage-door.
When he opened it, he saw Vopos thick in the backstage area; a lieutenant was taking notes from the Dramatic Lady ballerina.
The scientific mind concluded that performers could see through the footlights.
But here was the baggage master, his red head gleaming above black overalls. "This way, and give me two hundred marks. Or some American money."
There were enough street-dressed people backstage to cover them. A man in a dinner jacket pushed through the curtains and then could be heard calling: "There is no fire. Please, you will take your seats. No fire!"
The baggage master led them through the mob on the edge of the stage, through a door, into a hall off which dressing rooms gaped open.
Michael had fumbled some American bills out of his wallet. The baggage master trotted into a dressing room; Michael followed him, Sarah crowding on his heels.
Then they recoiled. There was a Vopo sergeant in the room, a heavy pistol dangling from his hand.
"Give him the money," the baggage master said. "He is my cousin."
Michael, dazed, handed over the bills. The sergeant looked at them and grinned. "In these baskets," the redhead said. "My cousin will seal them as examined."
Michael watched Sarah climb into the big wicker basket, watched the baggage man pile fluffy dresses over her. Then he ducked down into his own basket.
But the baggage master was not through with him. He asked, "You have money left for me?"
"Plenty," Michael said. "In Sweden." The sergeant-cousin laughed out loud.
Michael got into the wicker basket and curled up; it wasn't too uncomfortable. The baggage master started piling costumes on him; they were of some sort of porous, fluffy stuff, and, together with the natural holes in the wickerwork, left plenty of air.
But he had been right; Central European ballet dancers do not use deodorants.

25

Then, really, nothing. He heard the sergeant-cousin report to someone, presumably an officer, that he had already searched the room and the baskets.
Then there was an argument, almost a scolding, of a woman, undoubtedly the Dramatic Lady who was the star of the troupe, about false alarms; the man doing the scolding seemed to believe that she had seen nothing and nobody, and had only reported the American spies in her audience so as to get publicity.
Fine, fine.
Silence, with some distant music; the performance had gone on, apparently.
Then he must have fallen asleep, because he was not aware that the basket had been picked up, but suddenly felt motion; he must be going down a hall on a porter's dolly.
The somebody was rough heaving the basket up onto a truck, which almost at once started off, first smoothly and then jouncily. He wanted to call out to Sarah, to see if she was all right in her basket, but there was no way of knowing if someone was riding in the van with them.
Then the basket was transferred to a train, and the monotonous clickety-clacking put him back to sleep again.
The basket took a good bumping when it landed on the ship, the ferry that ran from Sassnitz to Tralleborg--if Michael's memory of the map of Germany was correct.
Thereafter it was just plain cold. The costume baskets, apparently, were stacked on the open deck, and Michael got as cold as, almost colder than, he had been on the ship going to Copenhagen, when the heating system had failed. He wriggled around and pulled the fluffy costumes all around him, and was reasonably happy in his little nest.
Then he went to sleep again.
He woke up stiff and confused, blinking in the glaring light of day. The red head of the baggage master was bending over him.
"Quick," the man said. He gave Michael a hand, and Michael climbed out, almost falling.
They were in a cave made by stacking costume baskets three high all around them. "Crouch down," the baggage master said. "You are too tall. And give me my money."
Michael crouched, stamping on the steel deck to get some circulation back in his legs. He handed over the packet of money that the farmer had given him--or was it Wolfgang? All that seemed years ago.
While Michael continued his slightly ridiculous war dance, the redheaded man counted the money carefully. "Good," he said. "Enough to buy a little shop in Sweden, and to hell with the German Democratic Republic and its Vopos."
"Including your cousin?"
"Especially my cousin. Come now. We get the young lady out."
When they opened Sarah's basket, her lips were blue with cold. She clung to Michael, her hands and arms under the purplish overcoat Wolfgang had given him. The boat's whistle screamed.
"When I say so," the baggage master said, "we jump over the side, all three of us, and swim like hell." He coughed. "If the young lady will excuse me."
"If the water isn't actually frozen, it will feel warm," Sarah said.
"Hush." The baggage master was listening carefully. "Someone comes. And I go."
He climbed out of the cave, and then his back reappeared, sitting on top of the highest basket, smoking his pipe.
The Dramatic Lady's voice came to them. "I am sure that they are hidden on this boat, Captain. That Vopo lieutenant positively insulted me, but I know what I saw. I have very good eyesight"
For her age, Michael thought. Well, bully and good for her.
The baggage master took his pipe out of his mouth. "I searched the costume baskets as you told me, gracious lady. Nothing but costumes."
"And terrible ones," the ballerina said. "I shall not again appear before such a shabby chorus. If they want me to perform, they must enclose me in a manner suitable to my position in the world of ballet."
Sarah's teeth started to chatter. She crouched over, holding both hands to her jaw. Michael put an arm around her.
A deep German voice said that its owner must leave. "I must be on the bridge while the cargo is unloaded. The first officer will see to the unloading." The captain's feet marched away, in a very military manner.
The boat had stopped. There was the usual noise of a docking; men throwing ropes, catching ropes, shouting at each other. A shadow came over their heads; a cargo net coming down.
The baggage master jumped down and was invisible on the other side of the basket wall. Stevedores ran along the deck, and the net went up again, with four baskets in it; Michael and Sarah crouched lower and the head and shoulders of the baggage master became visible as the top tier of baskets went aloft.
The net came back again in a moment; they could see the redhead pointing at the baskets he wanted to go next.
The second tier was looped away. The baggage master leaned forward, and clearly said, "Good luck," to one of the baskets, and from down the deck a woman screamed as the baskets went aloft. "Bring back those boxes! There are spies in them!"
The baggage master vaulted the remaining baskets and landed next to Michael and Sarah. "Quick. This way."
They jumped off the outport side of the ship; they went feet first, Sarah's skirts and Michael's overcoat ballooning around them. But the parachute effect didn't break the shock. He went way under water, and came to, sputtering. Sarah and the red head were already swimming alongside tie ship, heading for the next pier.
Michael shucked out of his overcoat and struck off after them. Behind them men were shouting in German and what he presumed was Swedish, and shots were ringing out. And the Dramatic Lady was screaming, dramatically.
Under the cover of all that, nobody noticed three swimmers in the winter waters of Sweden.
But when they climbed up the ladder of the vacant pier, there was a policeman there. Teutonically featured and uniformed, but with the blessed crest of neutral Sweden on his buttons.
He took out a whistle on the end of a white lanyard, and blew it.
Over on the pier of the East German ship people were shouting and pointing.
A man in naval uniform trotted down their pier to them. Michael said, "We're American citizens and demand sanctuary."
"I am fugitive from East Germany," the baggage master said quickly, as though not wanting to be thought American, even for a moment.
The officer bowed slightly. "Henborg, Assistant Harbormaster," he introduced himself, in English. "Do you have money? If so, it is required that you pay the East Germans their passage money; it is an international crime to stow away."
Michael brought out his wallet, peeled off some soggy bills. The Swedish officer handed them all back except an American twenty. "Now, if you will go to my office, I will bring you your change there. One krona. Unless you wish to tip the East Germans?"
"No tip," Michael said. He managed to grin.
Then, there is my office, on the mole. There is a fire in the office. You have your passports, of course."
Michael nodded. Sarah said, "I never go swimming without it."
The Swede permitted himself a slight Swedish smile. "Then when I have paid for your passages, I will phone your consul. And all your troubles are over. Isn't that nice?"
"Yes," Michael said, "it is."

THE END

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