iatively, back at Hank and said, "Ah, ha.
You are quite a dog after all, eh?"
Char Moore's face was blank. She mumbled something to the effect of,
"See you later," directed seemingly to both of them, and went on to
her room.
Hank said, "Damn!"
Paco closed the door behind him. "What's the matter, my friend?" he
grinned. "Are you attempting to play two games at once?"
* * * * *
The morning tour was devoted to Red Square and the Kremlin.
Immediately after breakfast they formed a column with two or three
other tourist parties and were marched briskly to where Gorky Street
debouched into Red Square. First destination was the mausoleum, backed
against the Kremlin wall, which centered that square and served as a
combined Vatican, Lhasa and Mecca of the Soviet complex. Built of dark
red porphyry, it was the nearest thing to a really ultramodern
building Hank had seen in Moscow.
As foreign tourists they were taken to the head of the line which
already stretched around the Kremlin back into Mokhovaya Street along
the western wall. A line of thousands.
Once the doors opened the line moved quickly. They filed in, two by
two, down some steps, along a corridor which was suddenly cool as
though refrigerated. Paco, standing next to Hank, said from the side
of his mouth, "Now we know the secret of the embalming. I wonder if
they're hanging on meathooks."
The line emerged suddenly into a room in the center of which were
three glass chambers. The three bodies, the prophet and his two
leading disciples flanking him. Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev. On their
faces, Hank decided, you could read much of their character. Lenin,
the idealist and scholar. Stalin, utterly ruthless organization man.
Khrushchev, energetic manager of what the first two had built.
They were in the burial room no more than two minutes, filed out by an
opposite door. In the light of the square again, Paco grinned at him.
"Nick and Joe didn't look so good, but Nikita is standing up pretty
well."
Trailing back and forth across Red Square had its ludicrous elements.
The guide pointed out this and that. But all the time his charges had
their eyes glued to the spaceship, settled there at the far end of the
square near St. Basil's. In a way it seemed no more alien than so much
else here. Certainly no more alien to the world Hank knew than the
fantastic St. Basil's Cathedral.
A spaceship from the stars, though. You still had
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