“No,” she said, “I don’t personally know anyone, but plenty of people have disappeared.”

And we said, “That might very well be true, we don’t know, but can you give us the name of anyone who has disappeared? Do you know anyone who knows anyone who has disappeared?”

And she replied, “Thousands have disappeared.”

And a man with knowing eyebrows and a quizzical look, the same man, in fact, who two years before had given the total battle plans for the invasion of Normandy in the Stork Club, said to us, “Well you must stand in pretty good with the Kremlin or they wouldn’t let you in. They must have bought you.”

We said, “No, not as far as we know, they haven’t bought us. We just would like to do a job of reporting.”

He raised his eyes and squinted at us. And he believes what he believes, and the man who knew Eisenhower’s mind two years ago knows Stalin’s mind now.

An elderly gentleman nodded his head at us and said, “They’ll torture you, that’s what they’ll do; they’ll just take you into a black prison and they’ll torture you. They’ll twist your arms and they’ll starve you until you’re ready to say anything they want you to say.”

We asked, “Why? What for? What purpose could it serve?”

“They do that to everybody,” he said. “Why I was reading a book the other day—”

A businessman of considerable importance said to us, “Going to Moscow, huh? Take a few bombs and drop them on the Red sons-of-bitches.”

We were smothered in advice. We were told the food to take, otherwise we would starve; what lines of communications to leave open; secret methods of getting our stuff out. And the hardest thing in the world to explain was that all we wanted to do was to report what Russian people were like, and what they wore, and how they acted, what the farmers talked about, and what they were doing about rebuilding the destroyed parts of their country. This was the hardest thing in the world to explain. We found that thousands of people were suffering from acute Moscowitis—a state which permits the belief of any absurdity and the shoving away of any facts. Eventually, of course, we found that the Russians are suffering from Washingtonitis, the same disease. We discovered that just as we are growing horns and tails on the Russians, so the Russians are growing horns and tails on us.

A cab driver said, “Them Russians, they bathe together, men and women, without no clothes on.”

“Do they?”

“Sure they do,” he said. “That ain’t moral.”

It developed on questioning that he had read an account of a Finnish steam bath. But he was pretty upset at the Russians about it.

After listening to all this information we came to the conclusion that the world of Sir John Mandeville has by no means disappeared, that the world of two-headed men and flying serpents has not disappeared. And, indeed, while we were away the flying saucers appeared, which do nothing to overturn our thesis. And it seems to us now the most dangerous tendency in the world is the desire to believe a rumor rather than to pin down a fact.