He Fell Among Thieves

CHAPTER VI

BERIA glanced briefly at each of the tall dark men, shook his head irritably. He started to smile again when he saw Skinner, and he said, quietly, “That’s the man. Search him for weapons, but do not hurt him. I want him alive.”

Skinner darted back toward the fringes of the mob, toward the eager sea of faces which stared at him, but someone stuck out a foot and tripped him. When he got up, crossed bayonets barred his path. Rashevsky slapped him smartly across the face, backhanded, and he reeled with the blow. The Colonel lumbered forward to give him more, but Beria stood between them. “That is quite enough, Boris,” he said. “You will get your chance later.”

They disarmed him, cleared a path through the crowd, led him out through it to the platform atop Lenin’s tomb. From all sides, the faces stared at him more with curiosity than with hatred, and even here in the heart of Soviet Russia, Skinner guessed that the masses felt something less than adoration for their rulers. But what did it matter? He’d failed miserably. The clock chimed the quarter hour. Fifteen minutes after twelve. He’d delayed them that long. For fifteen minutes. But the cosmic radiation which hovered over American cities was in no hurry,and when it acted, it would act instantly.

They took Skinner behind the platform to where a flight of wooden stairs climbed its side, and in another moment they ascended. Until they prodded him forward, until Rashevsky pushed him with a big ham of a hand, Skinner stood, mouth agape, staring at the golden saucer from space.

There didn’t seem to be a seam on if, nor a bolt, nor a rivet. All of one piece of metal, polished until its surface almost mirrored the Communist brass hats as clearly as a looking glass. Idly, Skinner realized that the green creature had, disappeared. Probably he was busy within his saucer; inside the glass bubble, perhaps. But when he faced the dome, Skinner caught a vague glimpse of complex machinery behind it—and that was all. Then did the space-being wait deep inside his ship?

Skinner hardly had time to consider. He began to smile in spite of his predicament. Here he stood on a platform with the men who ruled the Soviet world with absolute authority, arid his thoughts wrapped themselves around a little green creature who’d come to Earth from the unknown depths of space.

BERIA strode to Stalin, whispered in the little man’s ear. Close up, the dictator presented an ugly appearance. Small, except for his belly which the double-breasted military uniform failed to hide, he stood with one shoulder higher than the other, a plain, coarse man with a pock-marked, ugly face. Skinner found it hard to believe that half the world kowtowed to this small man from Georgian Russia—but there it was.

Stalin turned to face the American after Beria assured him Skinner was unarmed. The dictator sighed, jabbed a finger at Skinner’s chest. “Commissar Beria tells me your mission here was to discover what the People’s Government of the U.S.S.R. had developed to replace atomic power. You have seen, is it not so?”

Skinner grunted something under his breath.

“You will see more! We will hold you here, on this platform. You will watch the video screens as our friend from the sky makes ready to open the way for—what’s the term, Commissar Vishinsky?”

“Cosmic radiation.”

“For cosmic radiation. Do you believe this is fitting punishment for you, forcing you to see your country destroyed?”

“I don’t have much choice in the matter, do I?”

“If you put it that way, no. And after all this is over, Commissar Beria informs me that one of his men has some business to settle with you. Well, that is their affair. Meanwhile,” Stalin rubbed his fat hands together, “in a very few moments we shall stand shoulder to shoulder, Mr. American Spy, and watch how the people die in all the cities of your land.

“I expect to dictate terms to the remaining peasants and townsfolk next week, in Washington, There will of course be land reform, giving the land to the Soviets of peasants which will rise in the United States—with the Soviets themselves coming from Russia, naturally. Before long, decadence will leave the North American continent and the glorious New Order will replace it. How does that sound?”

My God, Skinner thought, he’s like Hitler and Napoleon rolled into one.

Aloud, he said: “Go to hell.”

STALIN laughed’ nervously, but Skinner’s mild profanity paled before Vishinsky’s tirade. It seemed that he, Skinner, couldn’t talk to the Premier like that. It seemed that no one could. Loyal Commies had been interned in Lubianka and then killed for less. Didn’t Mr. American Spy know when he was well off? Didn’t he want to cherish his last few remaining hours of freedom, before the M.V.D. got him again?

Skinner said he was sorry if he had hurt anyone’s feelings, but Mr. Vishinsky could go to hell too. Actually, he knew that wasn’t helping matters any, but a terrible wrath had filled his insides and even now threatened to overflow. Mostly, he felt it for himself. He’d come close, so close to success, and then failed utterly. Result: destruction waited for the United States in the hands of a four-armed green midget….

The bubble atop the saucer stirred, rolled back. Out came the little creature, vaulting the rim of the open bubble gracefully and landing, almost at Skinner’s feet. The American almost wanted to laugh. Here was the agent of disaster, and the top of his shining, green dome hardly reached above Skinner’s knees.

“This is the American?” demanded the green man in a high, childish treble.

Laurenti Beria nodded.

“Do they all scowl so?”

“It is a national trait,” Molotov assured him.

Skinner slumped dejectedly. “I also eat little children.”

“Really?” The green, man rubbed his dome with one of his upper arms. “No one told me that.”

Molotov smiled sagely. “He is lying. Again an American trait.”

“Umm-mm, they must be terrible,” said the green man. “I’m so glad my ship got lost in space. It gave me an opportunity to land here and right a wrong. Well, I suppose I can get started—”

“Of course,” said Stalin, still rubbing his hands together.

Skinner’s head whirled. Such a completely naive creature! Naive, yes—but ten thousand generations of science stood behind him and his ignorance of Earth played right into Soviet hands. A happy accident for the Commies, bent on world domination, but doom for the free peoples of the planet.

THE GREEN man danced around for a time, flexing tiny muscles. “Whole banks of dials and levers to work,” he mumbled, half to himself. “I do wish I had a little more time.”

“Please! “ Molotov pleaded. “The! decadent capitalists of the West, may decide to unleash their atomic bombs at any moment.”

“Is that so? Even with their Mr. American spy here—that is his name, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” agreed Molotov. “Even with him here. They’d sacrifice anything to conquer our free land.”

“Very well,” the creature nodded doubtfully. But he still jumped up and down, flexing diminutive muscles.

It was then that Skinner acted. He had no plan—nothing. But another moment or two might be too late, for once the green man closed the bubble over his shining dome…

All eyes on the platform watched the creature from space, and Skinner got to Boris Rashevsky first. Poor Rashevsky, the American thought, astounded at his own objectivity in what must surely be the moment of death. Poor Rashevsky! Probably he’d cut quite a swaggering figure. But Skinner had cut him down to size once, and now as the Colonel gaped at the green creature. Skinner could do it again.

He stepped quickly toward the M.V.D. Colonel, reached out, plucked the long black pistol from its holster. Rashevsky almost fell on his back in surprise, but some of the soldiers down below had seen the action, and they cocked their’ own rifles.

“Don’t shoot! “ Molotov wailed into the microphone. “You’re liable to hit the Premier!”

The rifles lowered. A roaring, surging sea of sound swept up from Red Square, as more people saw an American loose among their rulers, a gun in his hand.

Slowly, Rashevsky’s face turned purple. “You will give me that gun, Mironov.” He spit the words out, one slow syllable at a time: “I don’t care if I die, not now. You have shamed me, and anyway, they would kill…” Slowly, one small motion at a time, he advanced on Skinner.

From the corner of his eye, the American saw Laurenti Beria creeping up behind him. This would never do. In another moment it would be an abortive one-man war, and he’d lie dead atop Lenin’s tomb. He could get Rashevsky, but could he swing around in time, to ward off Beria?

Abruptly, he ducked in under Rashevsky’s flailing arms as the man reached him, caught the Russian’s midsection with his shoulder, and, still holding the gun, swung him up into the air. Bellowing, Rashevsky clawed at his face. From, somewhere off in the crowd a rifle barked once, and the Field Marshall, standing near Molotov, pitched forward on his face.

Skinner spun around rapidly, half a dozen times and then again. Centrifugal force flung Rashevsky’s limbs out straight, held him helplessly atop Skinner’s shoulder. He bellowed and roared, but the noise of the crowd made it sound more like, a whimper.

THEN SKINNER dropped quickly to one knee, hurling the man at Beria.

The M.V.D. Commissar ducked, fell forward, and Rashevsky hurtled over his head, tumbling off the flat top of the spaceship and rolling over to the edge of the platform which supported it. He tried to stand up, lost his balance, swung his arms wildly to regain it.

He didn’t make it. Still bellowing,

he tumbled off the platform, striking the ground thirty feet below. From the way he sprawled, with his head hanging limply off to one side, it looked like his neck was broken. But Skinner couldn’t be sure because the crowd swarmed all over him. Perhaps, out of fear more than anything else, the Russian people had bowed under the yoke of their Communist despots, but their hatred for the Secret Police was intense. Like carion they covered Rashevsky…

Skinner turned to Beria. “Stay just where you are, on hands and knees. Don’t try to get up, or I’ll kill you.” He pointed the pistol at Beria’s face.

“This is ridiculous,” Molotov stammered. “You can’t get away with anything. You’re only delaying the end, and—”

The green creature smiled. “It certainly was an interesting demonstration. Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Yes! “ Vishinsky hissed. “Get inside your ship and start your machinery.”

“Better not,” said Skinner.

“Umm-mm. I’m much lighter, than that giant you just threw off the ship. I’ll wager you could throw me a long distance. No, I’d better not. But on the other hand, my bones are not fragile. They don’t break readily. Still, a big brute like you interests me—”

“Hop inside,” Skinner said. “And don’t lock that bubble. I’m coming in after you.”

“Don’t tell me what to do! You know, now that I think of it, that’s what these men were trying to do, and it can get pretty annoying.”

Skinner waved the gun. “If, you want to be temperamental and dead, it’s all right with me. I could smash this whole crazy ship up, and then where would, your Russian friends be?”

“Kill him!” Stalin pleaded, “Someone kill him! Commissar Beria, you’ll wind up in your own Quarters C unless you kill him!”

Beria looked at Skinner, remained on hands and knees.

“You know,” said the green man, “I could like you, Mr. American Spy. That is, if you didn’t come from an evil place. But I could like you because when you try to order me around at least you’re blunt about it. Not my friends, here, though. Oh, no! They’re sly and tricky and they say things which mean other things and—”

“I will be damned!” Skinner roared. “Maybe you can be un-indoctrinated yet. Now, get the hell inside that bubble.”

Tittering, the creature scampered to the edge of the open bubble, dropping through it within the ship.

Skinner whirled and almost dropped his gun. Tuman Tumanov was mounting the stairs behind the platform, his gaunt head peering over the edge. “Hello, everybody,” he said. “It wasn’t hard to get up here, not with air that confusion down below. Need any help, Tovaritch Skinner?”

Laughing, Skinner shook his head. “I don’t think so. But you sure do get around, Tuman. And Sonya, too. My gosh—here comes Sonya!”

Tumanov muttered something, turned for a moment to help the girl onto the platform. Then he strode eagerly toward Stalin, his Premier. “I just thought you’d like to know that I hate your guts, ‘Uncle Joe’. I never had a chance to say this before, but I do. Before the Revolution, things weren’t exactly perfect, but at least I could ride my horse all over the Crimea and come charging all the way down to Yalta if I wanted. Now, I can’t even own a horse, thanks to you and the New Order—”

“…you see,” Sonya was telling Skinner, “Tuman was busy, drinking his tea, and Commissar Beria must have slipped his bonds. First thing I knew, he hit me. When I’ got up and called Tuman, the Commissar was gone. When…”

Skinner was hardly listening. Everything had’ turned in their favor so suddenly. Everything…

“YOU WILL put down your weapon, Mr. American Spy. Or else I will kill you.”

Whirling, Skinner faced the bubble. Perched jauntily on its edge, the little green creature held a thin metal tube in his hand; “It fires an atomic projectile the size of your thumb-nail, Mr. American Spy. Don’t make me use it.”

“I thought you said you like—”

“I am confused. Very confused. Please, drop your weapon. I will count three numbers, spaced at intervals of a second. By then…”

And so it ended, thought Skinner. He’d drop his gun and the soldiers would mount the stairs, would swarm in on him from all sides, would—

He flipped the gun to Tumanov, who was not so surprised that he could not catch it. “Watch them, Tuman. I don’t think you have to worry about the big boys too much, they’re soft. But watch Beria—”

“One,” said the -little green creature.

“Listen, you midget,” said Skinner, “you’re not only a physical midget, but you’re an intellectual midget as well.”

“What? Two.”

“Oh, stop that stupid counting!” Skinner took a cautious step forward. “You let them tell you a pack of lies, and you believe every word of it. If that’s intelligence, then I’m a braying jackass. I can’t tell you the other side of the story, not in a few seconds, but I could take you where you can get it first hand. Then—”

“Three.”

“Okay. Okay, you gave me three. Now shoot!” Skinner took another step. “Well, what’s the matter? Shoot!”

“I am thinking.”

“It’s about time. They filled your head with a lot of pretty theories, I’ll bet. But they didn’t show you anything, did they? They didn’t show you one example of a happy Russian, living under their glorious New Order. Did they?”

“N-no. But they said—”

Skinner took another step. “Well, I can take you to America and show you some things which will open those eyes of yours so wide they’ll pop right out of your head.” /-

“I don’t think I’ll like that. I—oh, I see, it is just an idiom.”

STILL WALKING slowly, Skinner reached the little creature. He did not try to grab the tube, for one quick movement might be his last. Instead, he stood with hand outstretched and presently the green man dropped the weapon in his palm. “Very well, Mr. American Spy,” he said. “Show me.”

Turning, Skinner heard a wild battle cry from Tumanov. “Hy ypa!” roared the Cossack with an oath that might have been with the Crimean riders for a hundred years. Up and down leaped Tumanov on his long legs. “We have won, Comrade Nick! We have won—”

Skinner, tried to yell a warning, but Tumanov was too busy with his own personal celebration to pay any attention to Beria. The M.V.D. chief leaped at him before he could fire, deflecting the gun with his left arm as he charged. The pistol roared once and then clattered to the metallic surface of the spaceship. Skinner barely had time to see Sonya, who’d been hit by the stray bullet, slumping down near the yawning bubble; then he leaped in toward Tumanov and the Commissar, forgetting all about the strange weapon in his hand.

For a brief instant Vishinsky and Molotov barred his path, but Skinner bowled them over like an All-American tackle making two rapid down-field blocks. Dimly, he was aware of something stirring beneath his feet, but he payed it no heed. Both Vishinsky and Molotov got up, darted for the staircase behind the platform. Stalin followed them, pale and trembling, telling Beria what he must do to the Cossack before he too clambered down the rickety stairs.

Over and over the two men rolled the long, lean underground agent from the Crimea and the no-longer suave chief of the. M.V.D. Three times Skinner tried to break them up, but three times they rolled out of his reach, clawing and cursing and kicking at one another. Finally, Skinner managed to get the back of Beria’s belt in one hand and the collar of his shirt in the other. He heaved mightily, lifting the Commissar off a panting and exhausted Tuman Tumanov and throwing him clear off the ship and out onto the apron of the platform which held it. Beria, crouched there, shaking his fist, but he did not try’ to return.

“Sonya?” Tumanov demanded, getting up.

“I don’t know.” Skinner helped him to his feet.

They found the girl off the ship on the other side of the apron, flat on her back. Her blouse below her right breast was red and wet, but she smiled feebly when she saw Tumanov.

“I tried to watch the fight, Tuman. Did you… win?”

“He won,” Skinner lied.

“Good! All men I have felt are idiots. But—not—Tuman, even though—he—likes tea so much…”

Bullets began to pepper the apron, and some of them clanged against the spaceship’s side. Now that the Communists had fled, Skinner and Tumanov made an inviting target, but so far only a few soldiers had worked their way behind the platform to where they could fire effectively. More would come soon.

Tumanov stood up very straight and the bullets zinged around him. “She is dead,” he said. “Sonya, just like my daughter she was….” Tears welled up in. the old man’s eyes’ and, unashamed, he let them fall. Skinner pulled him away, climbed back up to the spaceship, felt something slam against his shoulder, spinning him halfway around. He tottered on the edge for a moment, looking down over a sheer drop of thirty feet and remembering how Rashevsky had fallen.

Slowly, inch by agonizing inch, he pulled himself up. He lay trembling for a moment on the gleaming metal and then he staggered toward the bubble, aware of Tumanov’s sobs as the old man followed him.

The green creature poked his head out at them. “Come on, Mr. American Spy! I thought you said something about taking me to America!” It was then that Skinner became aware of the stirring, rumbling sound beneath his feet. Apparently the little man had warmed up his motors—or whatever served for motors on a flying saucer from the depths of stellar space. And that could explain the flight of the Commies: they did not want to get caught on the outside of a spaceship, not when it took off.

His left arm numb. Skinner reached the bubble, staggered inside. Tumanov tumbled in after him and, smiling, the green creature slammed it shut. “Shall we go?” he wanted to know.

NO GAS engine. No turbo-jet. Not even rockets. The spaceship simply rose up from its platform, slowly at first, like a helicopter without rotors. Skinner, stared outside through the bubble, saw the oriental towers of the Kremlin dropping away slowly beneath them through the snow, saw—

Hands over the edge of the saucer!

Laurenti Beria chinned himself up, soon lay fill length on the saucer’s surface not a dozen feet from the transparent bubble. “He’ll be killed,” Skinner said. At the’ last minute Beria had gone along for the ride, getting a hand-hold just as the ship took off. But why?

Skinner soon found out. The green creature shrugged wearily. “No, he won’t be killed. We’ll land slowly and let him off.”

Evidently, that was what Beria had in mind. They’d land—and then anything might happen….

Tumanov gritted his teeth. “That Beria! It was Beria who killed my Sonya, forcing, the gun to go off. You!”

“Who, me?” asked the green creature.

“Yes, you. Which one of these things controls our flight?”

“Why, this button here. And this one, and this one…”

Tuhianov grunted, moved over until he crouched near the instrument panel, his head almost scraping the ceiling in the low cockpit. He stuck out long fingers and pressed the studs at random.

The ship dipped, plunged forward, dipped again, like a frail rowboat near the eye of a hurricane. Outside on the smooth surface of the saucer, Beria swayed helplessly, rolled toward one edge and then the other as the ship pitched.

Tumanov pressed a new combination of buttons, then sighed his satisfaction. Skinner felt himself falling, falling. The floor became the ceiling for one wild, instant, and when they had righted themselves and he could look again, the surface of the saucer was empty.

He might have seen a dot dwindling away far astern and below them.

THE SAUCER landed once more inside the Iron Curtain, on a deserted stretch of frontier country within the Pripet Marshes. Tumanov climbed out slowly, shook hands with Skinner. “Perhaps I’ll see you again someday, Tovaritch Nick.”

“I hope so.”

“I still have work to do, a lot of work. Out here on the frontier I can get things ready for the time your people are prepared to bring peace to the world—real peace…”

A tall gangling figure, Tuman Tumanov faded off into the swamp. Skinner stared after him until he could see nothing but the swirling clouds of mist. Then he climbed back inside the bubble atop the saucer, fashioning a sling for his injured arm and settling back while the little green man took off again.

That day which Tumanov sought, which Sonya and Natasha and so many others had died for—that day would come soon.

Skinner could picture the stir a flying saucer would create in Washington. A nationwide tour for the green man from space, an official visit to the United Nations, perhaps an offer to vouch for the value of every product which had ever received a three-second commercial on television.

But in the end the man from space would see the truth. With his cultural heritage telling him he must fight evil wherever he saw it, he would place undreamed of science at the disposal of the United Nations. Because the Commies had seen samples of that science for themselves, it would be a big stick they would be able to understand.

It might—it just might—negate the necessity for war. But if it didn’t, no bookie in the world would place his money on the Commies….

As they winged their way West, Skinner felt very good indeed.