working late every evening for the next two weeks." She nodded, pressed the button that popped the blonde in from the reception room, and smiled in a way that suggested that she'd next smile when my complete report lay on her desk.

The blonde took me in tow to a desk equipped with a file-drawer full of Russian-language clippings, folders marked Secret, and my own little safe to keep these goodies in. I had a shelf of Russian-English dictionaries and an adding machine to help me bring chosmos out of chaos. The files looked like a well-stirred newspaper morgue. In Russian, yet. After the blonde had left I noticed that my desk, too, had a button mounted to one side. I pushed it experimentally. The blonde reappeared. I waved my hand at the clippings on my desk. "Will I have any help in translating this stuff?" I asked her. "My Russian is of the 'Hands up! Me American!' variety."

Secret

"I'm to help you with that," the blonde told me. "Just call for me—Joyce—when you've got something you can't make out. I used to be a UN interpreter." She smiled and left me to my sorrows.

I felt like a dirty cigar-smoking male illiterate. Probably half the stenos here had been engineers at Peenemunde. I needed a dumb girl-friend, I decided, just to protect me from the acute inferiority feelings these distaff Einsteins were giving me. I soothed my ego by going to work.

I began with the journal-clippings. Most of these had little tags attached, giving in English translation abstracts of material dealing with the Tuvinian Autonomous Region. There was a detail map of Kysyl Khoto, complete with the names of the bars the engineers drank their vodka in. I had notes on how many pounds of Turkish tobacco (1,250) had been used there in 1955, and how many bathtubs shipped there that year (714). I wondered how many of those bathtubs they'd have aboard the Konstantin Edouardovitch Ziolkovsky. Let 'em take showers, I decided.

By the end of the week I'd sifted the information I thought pertinent to the KEZ from the incidental chaff of Tuvinian life, like those bathtubs. This whole business was like juggling invisible balls. The very fact that Kysyl Khoto had been reached by a spur track of the Yuzsib Railroad had been lifted from only two lines in Stal's midsummer issue, supported, of course, by the laconic note of Dr. von Munger's mysterious Central Asian correspondent.

A two-step rocket was the thing to build, that was evident from the reported 

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