Assignment - Mara Tirana (2 page)

“No. It’s not for you,” he interrupted grimly.

“Then let me go.”

“I can’t do that, either, Dee.”

She spoke quietly. “Then I must do it for us.”

He stared at her, feeling a wild sense of sudden loss. She was free to make her choice, of course. He would not change his mind. Her hair shone with dark light in the sunshine beside the pool. The shouts and laughter of the tourists around the motel patio seemed faraway and remote, detached from the reality of what was happening between them.

“You've been seeing a lot of Stepanic,” he said abruptly.

“Yes.”

“He’s fallen hard for you, Deirdre.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Can he give you more than I? A man who may be shot up into space and never come back?”

“And will you come back from your next assignment, Sam?”

“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “My chances are probably worse. But is Adam your choice, then?”

“I want to stay here and find out,” she said. . . .

Almost a year later, Adam Stepanic rode in a capsule in the nose cone of a ballistic missile and went into orbit, in the U.S.’s first successful attempt to overtake the Soviets in space competition. The newspapers ran black banner headlines for the first twenty-four hours. Then for several editions there was silence, leading to speculation, and finally the terse announcement that something had gone wrong with the re-entry calculations and, although Major Adam Stepanic had come down out of space, he was lost on the tracking radar screens that had followed him up to that point.

The headlines were bigger and blacker.

The Soviet press claimed the capsule had burned up in the atmosphere, incinerating its human pilot.

The United States insisted the capsule had landed behind the Iron Curtain, lost on radar tracking screens because of violent thunderstorms at the time of re-entry over Central or Eastern Europe.

The Moscow papers promptly denied this possibility.

Washington demanded the return of the capsule and the pilot.

Moscow again denied all knowledge of the landing.

Twenty-two hours after the last impasse, Durell flew from Bayou Peche Rouge, where he had been waiting for another assignment, and went to see Deirdre Padgett at her home in Prince John.

She was gone.

He went to No. 20 Annapolis Street and learned that Harry Hammett had been assigned to go behind the Iron Curtain, on certain information received from the CIA drop in Vienna, to rescue Adam Stepanic.

Durell returned to Prince John with Sidonie then, to confirm what he was reasonably certain about already. . . .

Night had fallen over the Chesapeake. The lights of an oil tanker plodding up to Baltimore glimmered on the bay, and inside Deirdre’s house, Durell finished the drink Sidonie had fixed for him.

“Tell me the truth,” he said quietly. “Didn’t Deirdre tell you anything about her plans?”

“Sam, you know the kind of person Deirdre is—” “Look at me. And don’t lie any more to me, Sid.”

“I won’t. Adam Stepanic was in love with her; or still is. Deirdre wants to be as close to him as she can be.” “So she went with Harry Hammett?”

“She isn’t going all the way, of course.”

“How far?” he demanded.

“To Vienna,” Sidonie said reluctantly. “She’ll wait for Harry at the Bristol there, hoping he can bring Adam back.” Her voice was gentle. “She saw a lot of Adam in the last few months, while you were abroad. She—she’d made up her mind, Sam. I’m sorry. And now she feels it’s necessary for her to be with Adam as soon as possible, if he’s still alive. If Harry can get him out, that is.”

Durell said flatly: “Adam Stepanic must be dead.”

“She won’t believe that until it’s confirmed.”

“Dead, or a prisoner somewhere, being milked of all the information he got on his flight. Harry won’t get him out.”

“That’s his job,” Sidonie said. “He’ll do it, or—”

“Yes. . . or.”

“She’ll be perfectly safe in Vienna, Sam.”

“I don’t think so,” Durell said. “I don’t think so at all.”

Adam Stepanic heard the old woman's voice through his dream. He knew exactly what she looked like, exactly where he was. Yet he kept falling through the cosmos of his dream, and the stars tumbled in giant arcs around his head. It was terrifying. He trembled and groaned when the old woman spoke to him, and strangely, he understood her.

“Can you hear me, Adam?” she said.

He could not reply.

Adam, Adam, he thought. His name was Adam, and he was the first man, the first of his kind. The stars wheeled and plunged around him. He drowned in emptiness. Everything had gone wrong, and he was afraid and alone with his fear, more alone than that first Adam, he thought, because that one had his Garden, and then Lilith, and then Eve. But he had nothing but the thin shell of an egg to protect him from the violence of the plunging, arching stars.

“He cannot hear me, Jamak,” the old woman said.

“I think he does,” a man said.

“Is he going to die?”

“He will die, or not die, as it will happen, Jelenka. We may all die with him."

“Are you afraid, too, Jamak?”

“We will know better,” said the man’s voice, “when Lissa returns.”

Adam floated away, almost drowning, in a sea of pain. In his dream he saw the earth fall dizzyingly from him, to become a giant orb that drifted in sweet green mist against all his horizon. Exaltation filled him like a mystic rapture. Everything had started off so well. He was not afraid to be alone up there. He had been chosen from among so many; he would succeed where others had tried and failed and died.

He would live. He wanted desperately to live.

He had been given the best training; he was picked for his natural aptitudes, psychological presence, technical background, physical fitness. He, after the others, would not fail.

And then the dream began.

The old woman hovered over him like some old crone out of a medieval tale. He heard her voice from a far distance.

“Help is coming, boy,” she said. “We have sent for help. Lissa will be here, and you must stay alive until she comes. But it is difficult. Can you hear me?”

She spoke in the Slavic tongue of his grandmother that rang dim, faraway bells in the corridors of his memory. He did not reply. He dreamed.

He began to fall again, but this Adam’s fall was not like the fall of that other, that first man in his Eden. This was a bestial primordial terror, this sensation of falling that was universal to all the children of man. He laughed to himself. The apeman fell from his high, leafy bough, and afterward his children were haunted by the nightmare. And he, this Adam, had fallen from the stars.

He awoke and dreamed and awoke again. He was not sure how many times this happened. Past and present were confused in those hours. He knew he had crashed, and he remembered being carried by the old man, Jamak, to this stone hut in the mountains. But he kept passing out, falling into the dream again. He remembered one time when the old woman called his name.

“Adam?” she had said. “Adam?”

“Yes,” he answered.

“Ah. Ah. You can hear me?”

“Yes, old woman.” His voice echoed and rang among the stars.

“You have pain, I know, but we cannot help you with it. We have no medicine, but we have sent for Lissa. If the pain is very bad, we can get a doctor. But if we call a doctor, the police will know. Do you understand?”

“No doctor,” he said. “Have you told anyone else about me?”

“No. Then you know where you are?”

He waited, and the old woman told him, and he knew he was a long way from safety. All the calculations for his orbit had reckoned on his landing where his information could be rushed back to Washington. But if he were found here, anything could happen, and everything he had suffered would be wasted.

“We have sent for help from your own people,” the old woman said. “My Gija has gone for help, and surely someone will come soon and help you to escape from this country. Are you listening? Can you open your eyes?”

He kept his eyes shut. “I hear you.”

“It has been two days since you came to us. We sent Gija away at once. It will not be long now. Your friends will come and slip you away from here and it will be done in secret. It must be secret, or you know what will happen.” 

“I thank you, old woman,” he said.

He wondered if his leg was broken. It felt hot and swollen. There was no such thing as penicillin in these silent, looming mountains where he had fallen from the stars. He could not move. Perhaps his back was broken, too. Something seemed wrong with his spine. No matter. A man died, one way or another. You fall from the stars, from life itself, into a black, dead net of the past.

They meant to be kind, the old man, Jamak, and the old woman, Jelenka, in their stone hut in the mountains, with their pigs and two cows and the silent, wild Balkan gorges and tall pines all around. He thought the Turks had denuded all the forests during their long hegemony over this part of the world. But forests grow up again, Adam thought. The earth is always renewed after man’s devastation. But not he. He would never be whole again.

He slept, and the dream went on.

The rapture of the stars ended when the tumbling and the falling began. He rode in silence, the thundering trail of flame long dead behind him. Then the stars began to reel as if the entire universe had suddenly gone drunk or mad. He did not know what went wrong. Everything had been so precisely calculated and adjusted. The tumbling of the capsule that held him like an embryo in an egg could not be controlled. And then he fell.

The air jets that were supposed to control such an emergency did not work. He pushed and pulled at the levers as he lay on his cushioned back, and through the periscope he saw the stars reel, he saw the vast floating globe of the green earth fill the universe and stagger away. He knew only panic. All the training of the arduous months behind him meant nothing, because he was going to die.

The electronic tapes whirred, clicked and chuckled. Geiger counters recorded radiation, sensitive plates noted the impact of meteoric dust, and the cameras hummed. He was trapped in a steel cocoon, a mechanism designed to kill him.

The tumbling could not be ended. The erratic orbit had begun when the monster Atlas rocket, with its second-stage Thor-Able, failed in one of its hundreds of thousands of components, somewhere on the roaring, fiery way up from Canaveral. All the ingenuity of man that had gotten him up here among the stars was useless now.

When the retro-rockets began firing, he knew it was too soon, off schedule. Only twenty orbits had been completed of a planned pattern of twenty-six.

He wondered what announcements were being made on earth. Perhaps the whole teeming, hungry-complacent, angry-peaceful, man-woman, rich-poor millions on earth were watching, hushed and curious and awed, resentful or jealous, as he staggered through his starry path around home.

He wept, and his tears were trapped inside the globe of his helmet. He did not know what was wrong with him. He knew about the rapture of the deep, that deadly euphoria suffered by skin-divers who went down into the sea too far. Perhaps space had a similar effect on the emotions. He did not think about it too clearly.

Later, when the capsule hit the atmosphere for reentry, his memory became jumbled. He felt the jolts of the retro-rockets, knew the outer skin peeled off in a temperature of twelve hundred degrees, and felt the heat rise in the capsule. But this, at least, was securely planned. The air-conditioning functioned smoothly. The tumbling went on until the first series of parachutes opened and cut the rate of descent a trifle, tore free, and another series bloomed. He could see none of this. He had no idea where he was landing. Radar, and the automatic tracking signals, ought to help him. Even if he landed in the sea, the capsule would float long enough—he hoped—for someone to find him and pick him up.

But this, too, did not go as planned. The capsule struck a mountainside at night—he did not know where—and then slid off a cliff and rolled and crashed down several hundred more feet. Only the crash padding saved him. As it was, the straps finally burst and he was aware of a vast gush of pain in his back and his legs, and then it was all blotted out.

His first clear memory afterward was of the hut.

The hut was small and crudely built, with a dirt floor and a Russian-style tiled stove that gave off a welcome heat in the chill mountain night. The only light was the light of the moon that came through two small windows. Adam lay still and listened and looked. On that first awakening, fortunately, the pain was slow in coming.

His first reaction was one of enormous gratitude that he had come down alive. But that was before he realized that his legs were wounded and wondered if he was paralyzed with a broken back.

The hut was no more than twenty by fifteen feet. There was an ikon in one comer, and he thought he might be in Russia, and then he saw a poster tacked to the wall and the language was in the Cyrillic script of Rumania. The man’s face on the poster was that of a politician who, Adam vaguely remembered, had been executed for rightist deviationism in Bucharest about two years ago.

He put the pieces together slowly.

His capsule had come down somewhere in the foothills of the Transylvanian Alps, well behind the Iron Curtain. He was certainly not in a city, nor anywhere near a city, to judge by the lack of electric power and rudimentary facilities in the cabin. Most of the furniture, the crude chairs and huge bed, was hand-made.

Two people slept in the bed across the room from his pallet, making small noises.

“Hello,” Adam had called softly.

The burly old man awoke at once; the woman was a little slower. She said something in a querulous voice, and the. old man hushed her and spoke to her in that curious, half-forgotten tongue that Adam remembered from his grandmother’s house in Pittsburgh.

Then the old man came to him and said in English: “You are awake, American? That is good. Very good. How do you feel?”

“What place is this?” Adam whispered.

“We are forty miles from the Danube. The nearest village is called Viajec.”