"_Scusi, signore_," the big man said with exaggerated politeness, "_ma se lei e veramente italiano, non" e l"uomo che cerchiamo._"
Lenny"s Italian was limited to a handful of words. He know he was trapped, but he faced the situation with aplomb. "Thatsa lie! I was inna Chicago that night!"
"_Ah! Cose credero. Avanti, saccentone._" He jerked his thumb toward the gate. "Let"s go."
Lenny muttered something that the big man didn"t quite catch.
"What"d you say?"
"Upper United States--the northern United States," Lenny said calmly shoving his four hundred fifty dollars into his pocket. "That"s where Chicago is. Never mind. Come in, boys; back to the drawing board."
The two men escorted Lenny to a big, powerful Lincoln; he climbed into the back seat with the big one while the other one got behind the wheel.
As soon as they had left the racetrack and were well out on the highway, the driver said: "You want to call in, Mario? This traffic is pretty heavy."
The big man beside Lenny leaned forward, over the back of the front seat, unhooked the receiver of the scrambler-equipped radiophone, and sat back down. He thumbed a b.u.t.ton on the side of the handset and said: "This is Seven Oh Two." After a short silence, he said: "You can call off the net.
You want him brought in?" He listened for a moment. "O.K. Are we cleared through the main gate? O.K. Off."
He leaned forward to replace the receiver, speaking to the driver as he did so. "Straight to the Air Force base. They"ve got a jet waiting there for him."
He settled back comfortably and looked at Lenny. "You could at least tell people where you"re going."
"Very well," said Lenny. He folded his arms, closed his eyes, and relaxed.
"Right now, I"m going off to dreamland."
He waited a short while to see if the other would say anything. He didn"t, so Lenny proceeded to do exactly what he had promised to do.
He went off to dreamland.
He had not been absolutely sure, when he made the promise, that he would actually do just that, but the odds were in favor of it. It was now one o"clock in the morning in Moscow, and Lenny"s brother, Raphael, was a man of regular habits.
Lenny reached out. When he made contact, all he got was a jumble of hash.
It was as though someone had made a movie by cutting bits and snippets from a hundred different films, no bit more than six or seven frames long, with a sound track that might or might not match, and projected the result through a drifting fog, using an ever-changing lens that rippled like the surface of a wind-ruffled pool. Sometimes one figure would come into sharp focus for a fraction of a second, sometimes in color, sometimes not.
Sometimes Lenny was merely observing the show, sometimes he was in it.
_Rafe! Hey, Rafe! Wake up!_
The jumble of hash began to stabilize, becoming more coherent--
Lenny sat behind the far desk, watching his brother come up the primrose path in a unicycle. He pulled it to a halt in front of the desk, opened the pilot"s canopy, threw out a rope ladder, and climbed down. His gait was a little awkward, in spite of the sponge-rubber floor, because of the huge flowered carpetbag he was carrying. A battered top hat sat precariously on his blond, curly hair.
"Lenny! Boy, am I glad to see you! I"ve got it! The whole trouble is in the wonkler, where the spadulator comes across the trellis grid!" He lifted the carpetbag and sat it down on the lab table. "Connect up the groffle meter! We"ll show those pentagon pickles who has the push-and-go here!"
"Rafe," Lenny said gently, "wake up. You"re dreaming. You"re asleep. I want to talk to you."
"I know." He grinned widely. "And you don"t want any back talk from me!
Yok-yok-yok! Just wait"ll I show you!"
In his hands, he held an object which Lenny did not at first understand.
Then Rafe"s mind brought it into focus.
"This"--Rafe held it up--"is a rocket motor!"
"Rafe, wake up!" Lenny said.
The surroundings stabilized a little more.
"I will in just a minute, Lenny." Rafe was apologetic. "But let me show you this." It did bear some resemblance to a rocket motor. It was about as long as a man"s forearm and consisted of a bulbous chamber at one end, which narrowed down into a throat and then widened into a hornlike exhaust nozzle. The chamber was black; the rest was shiny chrome.
Rafe grasped it by the throat with one hand. The other, he clasped firmly around the combustion chamber. "Watch! Now watch!"
He gave the bulbous, rubbery chamber a hard squeeze--
"_SQUAWK!_" went the horn.
"Rafe!" Lenny shouted. "Wake up! WAKE UP!"
Rafe blinked as the situation clarified. "What? Just A Second. Lenny.
Just...."
"... _A second._"
Raphael Poe blinked his eyes open. The moon was shining through the dirty windows of the dingy little room that was all he could call home--for a while, at least. Outside the window were the gray streets of Moscow.
His brother"s thoughts resounded in his fully awake brain. _Rafe! You awake?_
_Sure. Sure. What is it?_
The conversation that followed was not in words or pictures, but a weird combination of both, plus a strong admixture of linking concepts that were neither.
In essence, Lenny merely reported that he had taken the day off to go to the races and that Colonel Spaulding was evidently upset for some reason.
He wondered if Rafe were in any kind of trouble.
_No trouble. Everything"s fine at this end. But Dr. Malekrinova won"t be back on the job until tomorrow afternoon--or,_ this _afternoon, rather._
_I know_, Lenny replied. _That"s why I figured I could take time off for a go at the ponies._
_I wonder why they"re in such a fuss, then?_ Rafe thought.
_I"ll let you know when I find out_, Lenny said. _Go back to sleep and don"t worry._
[Ill.u.s.tration]