"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 for one delivered. They must be using ozone to get that. If they're using ozone, they've got an inhibiter to hold it stable. If this all means what it seems to, they can make the moon in two steps. And it's about time someone did." Dr. von Munger shook her head. "I'm happy that you derive so great a pleasure from the notion of a flight to the moon," she said, "but you're forgetting that this rocket belongs to the Russians. They won't be inviting any of us Yankees to join them in admiring the view from the rim of Copernicus. We'll be looking up, Dr. Huguenard. They'll be looking down at us, on a five-to-one power gradient. That'll put your Intercontinental Ballistic Missile out in the woodshed behind the washboard, won't it?" "Have you reported to the boys in blue?" I asked. "Not yet," she said. "My chief agrees that we need a rocket specialist to evaluate what we have. That's where you came in from New Mexico, dragging your feet every inch of the way. The chief has given us two weeks to prepare a dossier on the _Konstantin Edouardovitch Ziolkovsky_. Two weeks from now, Dr. Huguenard, you're to have the plans for that ship ready for the Joint Chiefs of Staff." "I couldn't blueprint a row-boat in that short a time," I said. "Not if I had to work on guesses." "They're intelligent guesses, Doctor," she reminded me. "I've got figures for every ton of rail freight shipped from Krasnoyarsk to Abakan, figures sweated out of official Soviet publications. All you've got to do is take the information I give you and use it to build a paper rocket. Okay?"