in Russia's manipulative economy. Were you to trace the movement of blood through the human body, you'd soon know its every tissue. Just so, by tracing the flow of wealth through the USSR, we can discover precisely what's going on over there. We have overt means of observation, such as the Soviet studies published in Industriia, Sovetskaya Metallurgiia, Voprosy Ekonomiki, and other journals; and we have our clandestine sources as well."

"Do you read Russian?" I asked, feeling a little more respect for this miss with the PhD.

"Russian, Polish, German, and French," she said impatiently. "I was born in Gdansk, née Danzig, a community where being a polyglot is simple self-preservation. But I'd best get on. My time is running low."

"Take ten minutes," I said grandly. "Fifteen. But where do I come in?"

She lit a cigarette and went on. "This office is concerned with the economic processes taking place within the Tuvinian Autonomous Region of the RSFSR, an area that makes the Dakota Bad Lands look like Miami Beach. The capital city of this region is Kysyl Khoto. We have a tourist there."

"Tourist?" I asked.

"A covert source of information," Dr. von Munger explained. "If I keep giving you secrets, you'll have to stay here."

"I know all about this cloak-and-dagger stuff," I told her. "I read 'The Gold Bug' when I was twelve."

"Our informant recently transmitted this message," she said, handing me a sheet of paper. On it were typewritten six Russian words and a number. I'd remembered enough from my Conversational Russian 101 to coax this Cyrillic puzzle into English. "Kysyl," I read aloud. "That must be a proper name. Railhead. K. E. Ziolkovsky. 5000 meters/second. Luna." I handed the paper back to the good-looking Dr. von Munger. "The boy who sent this note takes the brass cup for brevity. What's it all mean?"

"Luna is in Russian what it was in Latin," she explained, just in case I'd missed that point. "Do you know who Ziolkovsky was?"

"Sure," I said. "Konstantin Edouardovitch Ziolkovsky hatched the notion of spaceships, back about 1900. The Reds must be naming their bird in his honor. Dr. von Munger, you're beginning to get through to me." I took the paper back from her to check it. "Five thousand meters per second. If that's delivered exhaust-velocity, the mass-ratio would be twenty-six lifted 

 Prev. P 3/11 next