Free Not This August by C.M. Kornbluth Page B

plutonium. And I know it isn’t gold or lead.
    “The farm salesman came by. I looked in the barn—no package. You’re in it, Justin. You’ve got to help me. I can’t help myself. Five thousand of them! And then, of course, I couldn’t pull the second half of the job. Clardy was right…”
    He stood up, swaying a little. “Come along, Justin. You’ve got to do something for me.”
    Gribble lurched through the doorway, past the latched-back screen door, down the cement walk to the road.
    Justin followed slowly. “It’s about fifteen miles,” Gribble said over his shoulder.
    I’ve got to go along, Justin told himself. The little man’s guessed—and he’s right—that I’m a traitor to the People’s Democratic Republic. He might tell anybody if it takes his fancy. Perhaps, he bleakly thought, I’ll have to kill him. Meanwhile he doesn’t get out of my sight.
    “What do you want me to do, exactly?” he asked Gribble in a calm, reasonable voice.
    The little man said abruptly: “Open a door.”

CHAPTER EIGHT
    They walked for two hours, Gribble in the lead and mumbling.
    Justin tried at first to get him to make sense, then to at least accept a cover story. “We’re going to Bert Loughlin’s about a calf, Gribble. O.K.? Will you tell them that if we get stopped? Bert Loughlin’s about a calf—”
    “Cobalt,” Gribble said, preoccupied.
    Six miles along the road they were overtaken by a wagon, Eino Baaras at the reins. He was returning from Clayboro to Glencairn—“Little Finland”—with locust poles. He scowled at them and offered a ride.
    “Thanks,” Gribble said. “We’re going to see Bert Loughlin about a calf.”
    Baaras shrugged and waited for them to get up before he said: “Loughlin ain’t got no calf.” He touched up the team and the wagon rolled.
    “Selling, not buying,” Justin said.
    “Loughlin ain’t got no money,” Baaras said unconcernedly.
    “Maybe something to swap,” Justin said. He was clenching his fists. What came next? Loughlin ain’t got nothing to swap. Where you really headed, Yustin? But Baaras just dipped some snuff, spat into the dust, and said nothing.
    Silent Finns, Justin thought suddenly, drowsy with the afternoon heat. Worse for them than for us. They’ve been followed halfway around the world by the neighbors they fled while we sat and waited and perhaps were happy in our blindness…
    He dozed for a while; Gribble shook him awake. “We get off here, Mr. Justin.” The wagon had stopped and Baaras was sardonically waiting.
    “Thanks,” he said to the Finn, and looked uncertainly at Gribble for a lead. The little man started up a rutted and inconsiderable wagon track that angled from the blacktop. Justin followed him, disoriented for a moment. Then he realized that they were on the west side of Prospect Hill and heading up it.
    Baaras looked at them, shrugged, and drove on. Justin thought flatly: A total botch. I said the wrong thing, we got off at the wrong place. I couldn’t have botched it worse if I’d been waving a flag with TRAITOR embroidered on it. The only thing to do now is wait and hope. Baaras is going to talk about my peculiar goings on, and the people he talks to will talk. Eventually it’ll get to somebody like Croley and that means I’m dead.
    Meanwhile you keep climbing Prospect Hill.
    The Hill was about 2,500 feet high and heavily wooded. It was supposed to be owned by one of the great New York real-estate fortunes. Farmers who tried to buy small pieces adjoining their fields for woodlots were rebuffed. A fair-sized local mutual insurance company which tried once to buy a big piece for development got an interview in New York City and a courteous explanation that the Hill was being held against the possibility that the area would experience major growth. The president of the company considered that interview one of the high points of his life, and Justin had heard all about it. So had practically everybody who’d spent ten