Declare

city limits he glimpsed German civilians in the rubbled lanes carrying big bundles of twigs in perambulators or on the backs of bicycles, and he realized that coal must be scarce—and he probed his conscience for guilt. But crowding out these immediate scenes were memories of panic in the faces of women and old men in London streets, and of feeling the same expression tightening his own eye sockets, when the throbbing motorcycle-roar of a V-1 rocket suddenly stopped—and of the subsequent ten seconds of scrambling for cover, before the air shook with shotgunning glass fragments as the almighty crack of the detonation seemed to reach right down into whatever corner he crouched in and pry the clawed hands away from his ducked head. He could still recall the chemical stink of high explosives, and the horrifying reek of living blood instantly rendered into a spray as fine as perfume out of an atomizer. And finally he took a bleak solace from the fact that he was able to discover in himself no particular satisfaction, at least, at the plight of these defeated Germans.
    Like apparently all German railroad stations, the Helm stedt station platform was crowded with rootless-looking people sitting on luggage and napping or staring or listlessly eating bread; but at the back of the platform he saw the tall, thin figure of Theodora, and when the now-gray-haired man turned away and walked toward a row of cars on the pavement outside the station, Hale followed at a distance. He lost sight of the spare silhouette between a couple of buses in a row far away from the electric arc lights, and was standing uncertainly on the pavement when a Renault roadster slowed beside him and the passenger door squeaked open.
    Theodora was at the wheel, and Hale climbed in and pulled the door closed.
    “Ready for action at last, Andrew?” asked Theodora with fatigued cheer as he shifted up through the gears. In the headlamp beams Hale could see only rushing pavement between lightless brick buildings. “Oh good God, I say, you can drive an automobile, can’t you?”
    “Yes,” Hale told him, hanging onto the door panel strap. “But the war’s over. You must have read about it.”
    “The real war didn’t start in ’39, my dear, and it surely didn’t end six weeks ago. Listen, the Soviets have taken a third of Germany and apparently mean to keep it. But away out in the middle of that Red sea is Berlin, moored to the rest of the free world by one long autobahn, and though the Russians have the eastern half of the city, we Brits and the Americans and the French have each got a third of the western half. Hah! God knows how long this equilibrium can be maintained—the Russians might close the highway tomorrow, except for outgoing traffic. Who’d do anything more than protest? Truman? Churchill? Attlee? We’ve got a safe house you can sleep at tonight, but tomorrow you go down the hole alone.”
    “Down the hole,” echoed Hale, though he had already guessed what the phrase meant. For the first time since stepping into the sanctuary of the British Embassy in Lisbon three years ago, he had the sensation of having left his heart and lungs and guts somewhere behind, replaced by a durable emptiness, and his hearing and vision seemed more acute.
    “Down the Helmstedt–Berlin Autobahn, a hundred and four miles to Berlin. You’re a London-based scout for an American chemical fertilizers manufacturer, you see, I’ve got a couple of Yank government pamphlets on the subject you can swot up on. In a nutshell, the Berliners are using plain shit to fertilize their fields— all the nitrogen factories were converted to wartime use for explosives manufacture and then properly bombed. The Yanks are making some nitrate fertilizers, but they need to import ammonia from the French Zone, and coal from ours, which we haven’t got any of to spare anyway. The thing is, you’ve got a contract with an American company in an industry the Russians need. They’ll let you pass, into the American sector; we don’t want to trouble our own people with this.”
    “This,” said Hale.
    “Surveying work, actually. The Soviets are going to be installing a bench mark somewhere in the city tomorrow night at midnight— June twenty-second and twenty-third, the summer solstice, when the plane of the ecliptic will be at its northernmost point for the year, and the eventual noon sun will be directly over the Jabrin oasis in Saudi Arabia. The Soviets are going to put down