"Batenin," the Soviet ambassador was shouting. "How do we get him down? Tell us!"
"Blind. I am blind," Yuli repeated dazedly. "Help me. I want to go home. Take me back to Moscow."
"Open your eyes," he was told sternly.
"Blind!" Batenin sobbed.
"Open them!" Then he felt a hard smack against his cheek. Startled, his eyes flew open.
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"Blind!" he repeated. But when he blinked, he could see again. "See! I can see. I am not blind!" he shouted happily.
"Get hold of yourself, Major. We need your knowledge. He is your man. How do we get him down?"
"Who? How?" Batenin asked shakily as he steadied himself against his desk.
He became aware of others in the room. They were standing in one corner of his office, broomsticks and desk blotters in their hands. They were swatting the air, as if at a pesky fly.
But it was not a fly that excited the embassy staff, Yuli saw to his horror.
For floating silently above the ducking and weaving heads of the embassy staff was a faintly luminous apparition.
"Brashnikov!" Batenin cried hoarsely.
"We cannot make contact with him, Batenin," the ambassador bit out. "And he is floating toward the wall. What can we do?"
Yuli Batenin pushed the ambassador aside as he stepped under the floating figure, his left knee wobbly with pain.
"Give me that," he ordered his secretary, relieving her of a broomstick.
He flipped the broomstick around until he had the straw end up in the air. He poked it at Brashnikov's eerily silent form.
The straw disappeared into Brashnikov's chest, as if swallowed by a cloud of milk.
"Is it ghost?" his secretary asked, horror in her voice.
Batenin withdrew the broom. Brashnikov's blisterlike face was distended like a clam's stomach. It neither contracted nor expanded. Brashnikov was not breathing. His arms and legs were splayed like a dead swimmer's. He floated on his stomach, just under the ceiling.
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As Batenin watched, Brashnikov seemed to be drifting toward one wall. It was an outer wall.
"We must stop him!" Batenin suddenly cried. "If he floats away, it will be as if we raised flag over official Washington proclaiming Soviet responsibility for their technological losses."
"How?" the ambassador demanded. "We have tried everything."
"Have you tried blowing at him?"
"What?"
"He is floating like balloon. Let us all get under him and blow mightily."
It took a moment for the thought to register, but finally the ambassador shrugged as if to say: What have we to lose?
The embassy staff stooped down under Brashnikov's silent, hovering body, their backs to the outer wall.
"Everyone," Batenin ordered, "take deep breath. Ready? Now . . . exhale!"
They all blew hot streams of air at the body. But there was no perceptible reaction.
"Again!" Batenin called.
They tried again. They huffed and they puffed, until their faces grew purple and some of them became dizzy from oxygen deprivation.
They ended up sprawled on the rug, out of breath. Batenin looked up dazedly. If anything, Brashnikov had inched closer to the outer wall. In another few minutes his left hand would drift into the wall itself.
"He is dead?" the ambassador wheezed.
"Da," Batenin gasped. "He breathes not."
"Then there is nothing we can do to stop him?"
"Nyet. Perhaps he will float out to sea."
"Moscow will not be happy that we have lost the suit."
Yuli Batenin looked up helplessly. If only there was a way . . .
And then he saw something that, had he not been
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so soul-shocked by the events of the last half-hour, he would have noticed long before this.
"Oh, God, no," Yuli breathed.
"What . . . what is wrong?"
"His belt light," Yuli said, pointing shakily. "It is red."
"Da," the ambassador said. "So?"
"It means that he is on emergency power supply." Batenin looked at his watch. "There is less than a half-hour until the suit shuts itself off."
The ambassador's dour face brightened.