He Fell Among Thieves

CHAPTER V

SKINNER waved the man with the coats away. Suave Laurenti Beria had the poker face to end all poker faces, and the way he made that, statement, he might have, been talking about tomorrow’s weather. Something was cooking, all right. Something so big that Soviet production of atomic bombs had fallen by the wayside. But this bland statement…

“Go on. Keep talking.”

Beria smiled coolly. “Who said I wanted to tell you more?”

“I said. Unless you’d like to settle for a bullet instead. I don’t expect to get out of this alive, Beria, so I can kill you now as well as later.”

“Better make it now,” said Beria, “for I won’t talk.”

“You’d better! You—”

“You’re acting like a hysterical school girl, Mironov. Is that what they teach you in the American Secret Service? Don’t you think I know you won’t shoot me now? First, you need me to get out of here. Second, you would like to hear more of my story. Third—but must I go on?”

Wearily, Skinner shook his head, then motioned for the man to come forward with his winter garments.

TUMANOV pulled the fur collar up around his ears.

“Wait,” Sonya called to him. “It’s hopeless, Tuman. You just can’t walk down Lubianka Street, and—”

Tumanov shrugged boney shoulders under the great coat. “I have no choice. Your Colonel tells you they have Nick Skinner. Very well. If we find out what the Kremlin has up its sleeve, what better way to pass that information along to where it will be useful than through an, American agent? Even if we somehow did get across the frontier, assuming we found out what’s going on, who is to say that the Americans will believe us? Skinner they will believe. I will get Skinner.”

“Just like that. How, Tuman? How?”

“I will get him,” said Tumanov, pushing the door out against the fierce wind, “or I will die trying….”

SKINNER found it difficult climbing into the heavy garments while he kept his gun trained on Laurenti Beria. He faltered once or twice, almost dropped the weapon. He could see the Red Soldiers watching eagerly, if he made one slip, just one small slip, it would be his last…

Finally, it was done. He told the captain to open the big oak door, motioned Beria out through the portal ahead of him. The Russian Winter closed in….

Ten steps. Twenty. Pulling one booted foot out of the snow and pushing it forward. Still, the eerie feeling remained a bullet might crash into his back at any moment, putting an abrupt end to the whole wild adventure. Well, he would take Beria with him if they fired. Perhaps Beria, stalking through the snow ahead of him, had the same tingling sensation up and down his spine.

There in the snow ahead of them, a figure. Tall and thin even in the overcoat. So tall and so thin that it didn’t seem possible, and yet—

“Tuman! I’ll be damned! ”

“Tovaritch! Comrade! Comrade Nick…”

The old Cossack shuffled forward through the snow, a great grin spreading across his battered face like the spring thaw. He embraced Skinner with long, snake-like arms.

Beria grunted, started to bolt away. But Skinner pushed himself clear of the Cossack, cocking his pistol. “Hold on, Beria! Take one more step, and—”

The leader of the M.V.D. halted, turned and faced them.

Tumanov roared his laughter. “But this is rich! Not only do you escape, but you take Commissar Laurenti Beria with you. Comrade Nick, maybe there is something to this American way of life!”

Skinner smiled, “Can you get us away from here so that the M.V.D. won’t be able to follow?”

“Comrade, you insult me! I am a rat, a quick gray rat, and all Moscow is my burrow. Come, and you will see.”

Tumanov was as good, as his word. Half a block down, then a flight of stairs hidden in an alley, buried under snow. A dark, wet passageway. “Air-raid shelter from the late war,” Tumanov grunted, leading them.

Another alley, where you had to fight your way through the drifts of snow. Still another, and underground again. Tumanov must have had the eyes not of a rat, but of a cat.

Out into the snow once more. Shuffle along through it, knife your body into the wind. Down into a pit, through a tunnel, long and winding. Tumanov ahead, rapping on a door above his head. An answering knock, a loud squeaking, a shaft of light cutting down.

They clarnbered up a rickety ladder—and Sonya Fyodorovna Dolohov waited for them in a cozy living room. “You got him, Tumanov! I take it back, all back, Tuman! Men are wonderful, you big, handsome, grinning ape. And who? Oh, no! The prize catch of them all, Beria. Tuman, I love you passionately….”

“Please be quiet,” the Cossack grumbled. “I rescued no one, captured no one. Tovaritch Nick did all the work. I hope you have some tea ready. Yes? Splendid.”

“SO, SAID Skinner, starting on his third cup of strong dark tea, “that’s about it. Now it’s your turn, Beria. Tell them what you told me;”

“Simple. I merely said that tomorrow, precisely at noon, the United States of America will be destroyed.”

Sonya crossed to a cupboard, came back with pipes, gave one each to

Skinner and the Cossack. “We have heard rumors,” she said. “So many rumors. Yes, there is something new, something terrible. But we don’t know what. We have no idea—”

“You’ll not get it from me,” Beria said. “One way or the other, you will kill me, is it not so? So why should I talk?”

Tumanov grinned coldly. “Commissar Beria, I have heard of your refined tortures on Lubianka Street.” He shrugged. “They… have their value. But we Cossacks are more primitive. There is a sliver of burning wood under the fingernails, a beating on the soles of your feet, the slow application of heat to your eyes, a tearing of the ears, the leash of a wild pig attatched to your— But do I make myself clear? It is a question of how you would prefer to die.”

Tumanov went’ back to, sipping his tea noisily. Beria looked at him, paled. Smiling cheerfully, Tumanov got up, stretched, lit a fire on the stove. “I will talk,” Beria whispered. “What’s the difference? There isn’t a thing you can do anyway.”

Tumanov sighed his disappointment, but Skinner said the one word: “Talk.”

“You’re an American,” Beria said.

“You have read, the American news papers with their sporadic accounts of—what is it you call them?—flying saucers.”

*’Sure. Mass hysteria, probably.”

“Bah! You Americans make me laugh with your smugness. You can’t explain it and so you write it off as simply as that. Do you think we closed all our atomic factories because of mass hysteria? Do you also think that the American continent alone was visited by these… flying saucers? Do you?”

“Go on.” The man’s crazy, Skinner thought. And yet…

“One landed here, Mironov. East of the Ural Mountains. In it was a creature. Our science, yes, even the Soviet science, is as dust at its feet. Why not, Mironov? It is a vast universe. Far out in each direction, as far as our telescopes can see, horde after horde of galaxies, a hundred million stars in each. The creature gestures vaguely. It is from somewhere out there. We don’t know where. We don’t care!

“Earth, what is Earth? The prick of a pin on the carcass of an elephant. Less. A virus on the body of a bacterium on the leg of a flea. Do I make myself clear? The creature is from somewhere else, and it happens that its world is a million years further along the road of evolution than is our planet. Fission bombs, fusion bombs, nerve-gas, germ warfare—bah! What are these beside its science? The puny, stumbling, instinctive crying of a new-born babe! It has science, Mironov. Science….

“I have seen samples. I have—but no matter. It also has a cold hatred of evil, Mironov. Not emotional, that hatred goes beyond emotions. An intellectual hatred. We took it to Moscow, gave it over to the Cominform, the Foreign Office, my own M.V.D. We showed it the good life, the Russian life. We showed it motion pictures, read it speeches, fed it books. Then we demonstrated the evils of your decadent Western world.

“In short, the creature is indoctrinated. You are no fool, Mironov, and so I imagine you realize our tutelage was… shall we say a trifle biased? The creature believes—firmly, very firmly—that the West is bent on conquest, on enslavement, on destruction. Specifically, the United States. We have fed wood to the fire, have kindled the flames of its wrath.

“In short, Mironov, the creature which stepped out of a flying saucer in the Ural Mountains shall be on demonstration in Red Square tomorrow, shall stay there, unmoving, and shall, precisely at twelve o’clock noon, destroy the United States.”

THE FOLLOWING morning. Ten o’clock. Skinner imagined himself all the varieties of a gullible idiot rolled into one. A weird, impossible story, but they could not shake Berla away from it as much as one hair’s breadth. And so, cursing impotently, Skinner had left him with Sonya and Tumanov, had set out himself for Red Square.

Yes, Sonya had heard something about a mass meeting in Red Square, but wouldn’t they have to postpone it, with the show still falling? And true, there could be life elsewhere in the Universe. Surely everyone who’d seen a flying saucer in the past few years had not downed one drink too many.

Then, had Beria spoken truth? Skinner knew he’d be taking an unwise gamble if he concluded otherwise, still, what could he do? Inform the American Embassy, watch the courteous diplomats laugh him off politely? He doubted if they could get a message through, to Washington in time, anyway. Find the creature, if the creature existed, and let it know that the Cominform had fed it a bunch of lies? Sure, just like that—undoing in five minutes months’ of careful indoctrination!

Any way he turned, he found no solution. He might as well be batting his head against the Kremlin’s grim brick walls….

He received his first shock as he cut across Kerensky Street and into the Square which faced Lenin’s tomb. All about him, the snow came down, piling up in larger and larger drifts. But it wasn’t snowing in Red Square!

The ground: dry. The air: clear. A curtain of snow arid cold all around the Square, but not within it. And the huge expanse pulsed with a radiance more golden than sunlight, and more pleasant. Midsummer in Red Square, winter for the rest of Moscow.

Perhaps the Russians had made strides toward conquering the elements, perhaps they’d even travelled further in that direction than Western science. But as Skinner peeled off his overcoat and joined the noisy throngs in Red Square, he knew they could not have gone this far. The whole place smacked of an alien science, an alien world…

Laurenti Beria’s claims almost seemed modest!

On the balcony over Lenin’s tomb rested a platform—perhaps a hundred feet square and glossy black in color, an imposing slab of polished jet. From this the golden radiance seemed to emerge, leaping up in a million million tiny motes and creating a great canopy over all of Red Square.

ATOP THE platform rested—something.

Flying saucer, flying disc, spaceship—what did the name matter? The first man who had seen one of these things, back in 1947, had not called it a saucer at all; he’d merely declared that it moved with a saucer-like motion, spinning, scaling, perhaps like a flat rock thrown out over water. But the name had stuck. Skinner knew, and he remembered the vain effort of the Air-Material Command to track down one of the will-o’-the-wisp spacecraft.

This thing, on the jet platform atop Lenin’s tomb almost looked like a saucer! A big golden platter, thirty feet across and certainly no more than six or seven feet thick, with a raised bubble of what looked like glass bulging out from its upper surface.

Around the bubble stood several figures, but from this distance Skinner could not see them clearly. He pushed through the crowd, elbowing the dull-eyed, jostling workers from his path. Closer…

He recognized Stalin first, a small thick-set man whose military uniform failed to hide a generous paunch, whose moustache seemed in life larger than it did in pictures. To the dictator’s left stood plump Molotov, his bald head shining under the golden light, his spectacles reflecting the radiance and hiding his eyes. To Stalin’s right—Vishinsky, white-haired, nervous, fidgety. Grouped around them were a trio of lesser dignitaries, one of them wearing the uniform of a Field Marshal.

The crowd roared hysterically when Stalin raised his hand. More roaring and Stalin smiled, but with the big back moustache protruding down over his upper lip it looked like a leer. Finally the crowd settled back in silence, and scores of Red soldiers in the Square relaxed their grips on bayoneted rifles.

“CITIZENS of the People’s Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” Stalin said into a microphone, “we called you to assembly today, here around the tomb of our illustrious father, Lenin, to reveal a great thing we have fostered.”

The crowd roared.

“We have called down from the sky a friend of the People’s Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to help us in our plight. The decadent Western imperialistic capitalists push in on our land from all sides—”

Molotov initiated a hissing and booing. The whole mob hissed and booed.

“We don’t desire war. We never have desired war. We desire, instead, peace, like the peace our fine friends in China are bringing to their little neighbor, Korea. Or like the peace we ourselves have carried to the now happy countries of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, to the Baltic States, to—but we need not go on. We are sure you know our intentions.

“We have found a way to bring that peace to all the world. It will entail destruction for some millions of decadent, ruthless capitalistic barbarians who dwell in the dictatorship of the United States. We have learned that recently in the United States a high military tribunal from the Pentagon conducted an investigation of the Senators, the so-called ‘people’s representatives’. We have learned that this tribunal found thirty-seven Senators guilty of crimes against the State, that is, they spoke out in their frightened voices that the military dictatorship of the United States was conducting itself poorly. We have learned that, as a result, these thirty-seven poor representatives of the people were lined up against a wall of the Lincoln Memorial and shot. And every one of the millions who voted for them in a so-called ‘secret ballot’ was deprived of his home, of his automobile, of his food allotment, taken away from his wife and children and sent off to a concentration camp in another decadent nation called Canada.”

The people in the Square roared their indignation, and Skinner started to sweat. They believed this, they believed every word of it!

“But we stray from the subject. Our friend from the sky has made a study of the world, and he agrees with us. We can have peace—but we must first destroy the Dictatorship of the United States. Our friend from the sky, an impartial observer, can do this for us. We could, of course, do it for ourselves, but with the idea of peace so strong within our hearts, we could not bring ourselves to that. And thus our friend—although he is lofty in his ideals—is not a pacifist. He hence will destroy the Dictatorship of the United States at twelve o’clock noon today, or, in a very few minutes.”

Wild, frenzied roaring from the crowd.

Skinner craned his neck to see what was happening on the jet platform. The bubble atop the saucer trembled, shook, slid back. Something popped out. Two feet tall, emerald-green in color, two legs, four arms, wearing a jaunty red uniform, fashioned for him by the tailors of the Kremlin, no doubt. His face looked just like a man’s, and just as large, out of all proportion to his spindly body. Like a man’s eyes—but behind the eyes, somehow peering out through them, was a million years of wisdom. What fantastic science might lurk at those twenty tiny fingertips? Skinner did not know, but suddenly Beria’s words came back to him, and he believed. Yes, the creature could destroy the United States. And naive of everything here on Earth, believing the lies the Kremlin had dreamed up for him, he’d do it, too. He had to be stopped, and fast. But how?

Vishinsky barked into the microphone now, his raw, angry voice cut ting through the crowd like a knife. “You will observe around the Square a series of giant screens,” he said.

Skinner looked, and even as the Russian spoke, the screens seemed to slide up out of the pavement, huge shining things. Russian super-science? No! From alien space…

“On each screen you will see an air view of a city. The cities of the Dictatorship of the United States! At noon, the small black dots of people in the streets on those screens will be seen to fall in great bunches, to be destroyed while not one stone of the cities is harmed. How will this come about? As a leader of your glorious People’s Government, I can understand, naturally. But you will not be able to understand at all.

“It is sufficient to say that deadly cosmic radiation waits in space at all times, emanations called cosmic rays. What protects. the Earth from their bombardment is our atmosphere, and over each of these cities, precisely at noon, our friend from the sky will strip a path, a channel, through that atmosphere, allowing the cosmic rays to penetrate.

“In one instant, the tiny dots of people in those streets will be broiled to death by the deadly radiation. The world will be free!”

FASCINATED, Skinner stared at the screens. Pictures swam into view—huge, tri-dimensional, three-color television. Again, not Russian, but alien science!

New York on one screen. Times Square, bustling, alive. Skinner could almost read the news tape on the Times Building. Chicago, Michigan Avenue. The gleaming white Wrigley building. Washington. Pennsylvania Avenue, the mall.

New Orleans like a giant pinwheel with its crescent streets. San Francisco and the graceful span of the Golden Gate bridge. Los Angeles, sprawling, white, clean. Richmond, with the yellow trollies struggling up the hill to Main Street. Detroit, Philadelphia, Houston, Minneapolis, Boston…

All our major cities, every one of them. And the people in the streets, in their homes, unsuspecting. Late evening in the United States, perhaps one a.m. in New York, midnight in the Midwest, eleven o’clock further West—all the giant cities ablaze with light, the streets alive with moviegoers, with people strolling. Others—asleep for the night, tucked in the, security of their beds, little dreaming that destruction hovered overhead.

Even as he watched, Skinner knew that cosmic radiation could kill more efficiently and more thoroughly than atom bombs. Strip the atmosphere away momentarily, leave nothing to absorb the rays, and the results would be sheer hell.

Wildly, Skinner tore his gaze away from the screens and sought instead a large clock on the other side of the Square. Ten minutes to twelve! He found himself wondering if the wheels already had been set in motion. Perhaps now there was no way to avert catastrophe. Like a vast, sprawling time-bomb, alien science waited to atomic bombs. Strip the atmosphere above the American cities. Possibly, just possibly, the creature from space still had to activate his mechanisms—

Suddenly, a disturbance on the platform of jet. Another figure had joined the group, snow still melting on his coat. And that meant he’d just come into the golden area from outside, from where the winds of Winter brought snow to Moscow’s streets.

Skinner squinted, almost yelled out loud, Beria!

The M.V.D. man stood talking earnestly with Vishinksy, addressing an occasional remark to Stalin, nodding vigorously every time Molotov spoke.

Finally, Vishinsky turned to the microphone, said: “All soldiers in Red Square, please alert! We have reason to believe an American agent stands in the crowd. He is armed and dangerous. He is tall, broad of shoulders, with close-cropped black hair, prison style. His identification papers will read ‘Nikolay Mironov, a transient worker out of Tula’. Until he is found, the proceedings will be delayed…”

A BREAK, a way out? At least temporarily, Skinner knew, but certainly no more than that. Somehow, Beria had escaped from Sonya and Tumanov. But that didn’t matter. Skinner had to delay his capture, had to lose himself so thoroughly in the milling mob. that he’d, escape detection. It wouldn’t be easy.

All around him the Moscovites gazed suspiciously into one another’s faces. A few scattered fights started. Women screamed. That much Skinner liked, but he saw the Red soldiers stalking through the crowd efficiently, pulling all the tall dark men out and lining them up directly under the brick wall of the Kremlin. Skinner slouched down slumped his shoulders, stared at his feet.

An old woman, her face creased and toothless, cackled in his ear: “You’re tall and dark, eh? Aren’t you? Stop bending like that. There, I thought so! Are you the American?”

Skinner ducked off into the crowd and the old woman tried to follow, but she was cut off from him almost at once by a hundred pressing bodies. Someone else laid a heavy hand at the base of his neck, a big, ponderous peasant.

“Tall and dark-haired, huh? And maybe you speak English—” The man’s fetid breath reeked of decayed food, and Skinner stiff-armed his face away, pulling his hand back quickly when the peasant tried to bite him. Insane mob.

The soldiers came from all sides, observing, seeking. Skinner tried to slouch away, to scowl stupidly, to shuffle his feet like any one of a hundred tired peasants. But abruptly he came face to face with a soldier, and the Red grunted: “All right, Comrade, you fit the description. Come along.”

Holding him by an arm, the soldier led Skinner through the mob and over to the gaunt brick wall of the Kremlin, where he was deposited unceremoniously with a score or so of other men, all tall and dark. More came every moment, some laughing foolishly, others looking frightened. Half a dozen soldiers paced off the area, and the men stayed put.

Finally, after what seemed’ an interminable time and after several hundred men had joined the group at the foot of the brick wall, a squad of soldiers came hurrying through the Square, led by a swaggering, if slightly battered Boris Rashevsky, pushing people from their path, using rifle-butts when necessary.

Behind them, smiling arrogantly, walked Laurenti Beria.