The steady vibration of the ship's machinery seemed more noticeable outside the camper. The poorly illuminated deck was a jungle of tightly packed vehicles. I saw people stirring around the cars up forward near one of the big landing doors. They were presumably getting ready to disembark at our next port of call, a small town called Petersburg. We should have docked there around nine, but we'd started late from Prince Rupert and been slowed down still further by the fog: the official ETA was now one A.M.
The Communist agent who'd made up Grant Nystrom's itinerary had apparently been aware that the ferry often ran hours behind schedule, because he'd set no fixed time for the contact. Instead, I was to present myself in the snack bar forty-five minutes before the predicted moment of arrival in Petersburg, as chalked on the purser's blackboard, which I'd checked on my way to Libby's stateroom earlier in the evening.
It was exactly twelve-fifteen when I entered the snack bar, a rather long, narrow, well-lighted room with a newsstand at one end and a hamburger kitchen at the other, both closed for the night. In between was a battery of vending machines, one of which I'd already patronized for coffee, and half a dozen good-sized tables. One table was occupied by a bunch of sleepy-looking, aggressively ragged, grubby, long-haired kids, male and female; the rest were empty.
I stopped by the beverage dispenser, fished out some change, and, deciding that I'd drunk enough coffee, punched the hot-chocolate button. The machine gave birth to a paper cup which it proceeded to fill.
"Hit it again for me, please," said a feminine voice behind me. "Here's the money… Oh, it's the man with the nice doggie!"
She was just as cute and brown-eyed and blond as she had been earlier, and she was still in the short blue linen dress with the trickily pleated modesty-insurance between the legs, but the basic pants-structure of the garment was more obvious now that it had got a bit rumpled from some hours of being slept in, I judged, on a car seat or in one of the ship's chairs. I took the quarter the girl held out, palmed it, and stuck one of my own into the vending machine.
"Thanks," said my contact when I handed her the cup. She glanced at the small watch on her wrist. "I'm supposed to get off at Petersburg, but I guess I've got time to drink this.. – No, let's sit over here, away from the hippies." She gave the long-haired contingent a disapproving look designed, I figured, to go with her rather prissy appearance. She went on, still in character: "I just don't see how people can bear to show themselves in public like that, all hairy and dirty and disgusting!"
"They're rebelling," I said.
"That doesn't really prevent them from getting a bath and a haircut occasionally, does it?"
"Of course it does," I said. "You just don't understand what they're rebelling against. Pay no attention to the guff they spout. They're not really fighting society, or the establishment, or war, or the draft. Not primarily. Their big fight is with all the television commercials commanding them to be clean and smell sweet and have soft shiny hair and bright white teeth and no sweat under the armpits. They're showing the world that they'll sweat if they damn well want to, and that no damn TV announcer is going to tell them what to do."
She laughed. "Well, that's a new slant. I hadn't thought of it exactly that way."
"I hadn't either, until a minute ago," I said, grinning.
"What's your name?" she asked. "I can't keep calling you The-Man-With-The-Dog."
"Nystrom," I said. "Grant Nystrom."
"I'm Ellen Bush," she said, and held out her hand. "It really is Bush. Honest. There is such a name, even though people don't seem to want to believe it. Hi, Grant…
I didn't pay much attention to what her mouth was saying, because her small fingers were talking a different language. For the second time that night I was having an identification routine thrown at me; this time the old fraternity grip of my own-well, Mac's-peculiar organization. It was a sign that meant somewhat more to me than the one I'd got from Libby, because it's known to relatively few people, all carefully selected and highly trained.
Perversely, it made me want to burst out laughing. Signs and countersigns are corny enough at any time; this one made me wonder just how many Communists were actually involved in the nebulous Red spy ring with which I was supposed to be dealing. It had apparently been infiltrated by just about everybody, like some of those legendary subversive groups in which the FBI men finally outnumbered the genuine Marxists.
I made the proper response, searching the pretty little face of Ellen Blish, or whatever her true name might be, for signs of the toughness she'd have to have to be one of ours. But it doesn't always show. I remembered another small, rather delicate-looking blonde of ours-the more common blue-eyed variety-who'd come out of the jungles of southeast Asia and died in my arms beside a back road in southern France…
But it was no time to be thinking of blondes I'd loved and lost, or brunettes or redheads either. "Hi, Ellen," I said, retrieving my hand.
"You're Eric," she said. Her rather high-pitched, sweet-young-thing voice had changed to something lower and more businesslike. "You made a telephone call two days ago to a certain number in Washington," she went on and gave the number. "That's in case you don't have any more faith in fancy recognition signals than I do."
"If I'm Eric," I asked, "who are you?"
"Just Ellen," she said.
"And what do you have for me, Justellen?"
"Information. A warning. It looks as if you may be met at the dock."
"Any particular dock?"
"We haven't been able to determine that. It could happen at Haines, where you get off, or at Juneau, Sitka, or maybe right here in Petersburg. Do you know a brown-faced, black-haired gent, stocky, about two hundred pounds."
"I know him. His name's Pete. What about him?"
"He was seen making contact with Holz. We don't know what was said, but they left Anchorage by plane, heading south, this way. I was told to alert you."
I grinned. "We're always alert, we never-sleeping guardians of democracy. You know that."
"Never-sleeping, hell," said Ellen Blish crudely. "Just what do you claim to have been doing this evening? Well, I guess it wasn't exactly sleeping, at that."
"You are a disgusting little snoop," I said severely. "And why is it that a man's going to bed with one girl-it was strictly in the line of duty, of course-invariably gets all other females in the neighborhood all worked up, even if they have no designs on the guy themselves? Or have you?" When she didn't speak, I went on: "Incidentally, you can tell our friend in Washington that I'm kind of allergic to creeping security. He told me quite definitely that if we had any agents up this way who might possibly be of use to me, I would certainly have been informed at the start. What was the point of his lying about it when we were going to meet anyway? That's the kind of compulsive secrecy that makes me want to lose my lunch."
Ellen said, "It wasn't known when you talked with him that we were going to meet, or that I'd be in a position to be useful to you. I've been working way inland on a problem that seemed to have very little connection with your job, but at the last moment the people I was working with-the group I'd infiltrated, to use the jargon-picked me to make this delivery on the coast. I couldn't very well refuse. It was an honor, I was told, a mark of trust and confidence. Well, maybe. Anyway, I had to scramble like hell to catch this ferry. Do I hear apologies?"
"Sure," I said, "if you want to hear them. And I do have a question. If there's somebody close enough to Holz to watch him, why doesn't the guy just pull the trigger and get the job done?"
"Because that's not his job. He's a watcher, not a trigger-puller; he's not up to tackling the Woodman. You're the specialist in triggers, my friend."