"They're up today. Yesterday they'll -" watch it! "Be boiling over. Look, if you think you're going to -"

"Why are you still in Berlin?" There was an edge on the tone for the first time.

"The new generation is making its breakthrough to a kind of music that has never been heard before. A ballet of intricate patterns that bespell the eye. Try me on -"

"We thought you were flying out -"

"Pigs might fly, phoenixes fly, the higher they fly -"

"Phoenix? Phoenix, yes. How did you hear about Phoenix?"

"Phone, you tapped my phone, you sods. Listen, there's no talk, no turkey -"

"What was Solly's mission?"

"My fault – my fault -"

"What was he researching on?"

"German war, it wasn't fair -"

"Germ warfare? Oh, we know that. But what will your man in Barcelona do with that container?"

Say nothing. Still dangerous: the answers were coming out mixed up because of the need to inhibit them at source, but he was piecing the images together like an expert. He had to open me up soon or it'd be too late and he knew that – some of the questions were even direct: what was I doing in Berlin, so forth. Showed he was fighting hard, gloves off.

Coming down the far side now. Worst over. The tingling on the skin had stopped. Sweat drying on me. Anxiety on the wane, normal lucidity returning (more real than the glaring superlucidity of the hepped phase).

He said: "We've just had a call from your Control and you are ordered to make an immediate report. Begin, Quiller."

Then I was out again, whole, and still sane.

There is a dawn area coming between the nightmare roller-coaster phase and the daylight of normalcy, and I was in it now, and knew it.

"Begin your report, Quiller!"

Physically I was all right: a shoulder bruise and some thirst, that was all. Psychically stable: disinclination to plan anything, sense of loss (psychic contents had been spilling), nothing worse.

I could make a check now, and defeat the last enemy, my own disinclination to plan anything. I had to plan. If I were going to live, it'd be on my wits.

The guards were still strung across the far end of the room with their guns out of sight. Oktober hadn't moved. I got a look at the gold wrist-watch as Fabian turned to him. 10.55. It had been a ninety-minute ride, then.

Start thinking. Why had Fabian turned to look at Oktober? They were both moving away from me to stand half-way down the room. I heard them murmuring. Nothing intelligible. So they'd given it up. Fabian had been reduced, in the end, to trying simple extortion: Begin your report! Hoping to tap some remnant source of psychic response. No go.

The room was still and no one moved. The murmuring went on. The smell of ether was on the air, and the taint of the guard's vomit. I wasn't thinking about anything. But I must. Make an effort. Why wasn't I thinking about anything?

Because I knew.

It was the only thing they could do.

Oktober had turned and was coming towards me. He stopped and stood looking down at me. His hands were clasped behind him and the eyes had the stare of glass; and I remembered a man who had stood like this, neatly-tailored in black, his hands behind him, saying, I am due back inBrucknerwald in one hour, for luncheon. The stamp was on all of them, and it was most marked when they were about to do what this one was to do now.

He said thinly: "You have wasted my time. That is unforgivable."

I watched him turn and go down towards the line of guards. He didn't raise his voice but I heard what he was saying to them. "Schell. Braun." Two of them stepped forward. "He will be given a final injection. When he is unconscious, you will take him by car to the Grunewald Bridge, shoot him in the back of the neck, and drop him over."

13: THE BRIDGE

There was a bar still open in the Moller-strasse and I went in and sat with a rum grog, cupping my hands round the glass and watching the steam. The kellner had gone back behind the bar and looked at me over the coffee-machine for a few minutes before giving it up.

I pressed the long spoon against the slice of lemon, watching the bubbles. The scent of the rum was heady and I breathed it in. Over in the corner a couple of kids sat canoodling, and a thin man was drooped across a table by the window trying to outstare his despair. There was no one else. At this hour of a winter night the bar was a refuge for lovers and the lost, and being neither, I was the only stranger here. When it was cool enough not to scald my lips I swallowed the grog and asked for another.

The worst of the shivering had stopped. Every time it tried to set up again I damped it out and sat slack with every muscle relaxed. There was a lot to think about and my body would have to stop demanding my attention; it could count itself lucky to be alive anyway.

My soaked clothes steamed on me.

I was unconscious before they took me from the house. There had been no way of avoiding the last injection because my hands and feet were strapped to the chair. The shot took half a minute to work and I sat there watching them.

Oktober stood looking down at me. The two guards came the length of the room and halted near him, waiting for me to slump. In those thirty seconds I did all I could against the drug, knowing that if I let it win my last hope would go. The anaesthetist came round the chair and eyed me impatiently and I knew that the reaction-time must be five or ten seconds. I'd stretched it to thirty and he was worried. Then the dark came down, on a final consoling thought: there's nobody who'll miss me.

Period of total blank.

Death is black and cold and I knew I had died. The waters of Lethe lapped at my feet. But life, returning, was worse, because of the cold. It was colder than death. My face was pressed to the earth and I lifted it and saw the lights along the bridge. A few sick seconds of irrational thought: then there's a life after death and it looks just the same, so forth, then the shivers began and I lay there shaking and clawing at the earth. Inside every dying man there's a live one trying to get out.

The bullet still hurt and I couldn't turn my head. When I'd crawled far enough to get my legs out of the icy water I raised one hand and felt for the neck-wound. There wasn't one. The pain began fading, once I realised that it was imaginary. "Shoot him in the back of the neck," he'd said, and the subconscious had brooded about it, taking the word for the deed.

Short period of nausea. Lay there panting and shaking with the breath hissing against the frosted soil: life, however cheap, comes as a gift when you think you've lost it, and the mind has to make the effort of acceptance.

Ten minutes hard thinking. I decided to go back among the living as unobtrusively as I could. They had driven me here in the VW and it stood not far off; they had run it clear of the road across the grass. I crawled along the bank of the lake, away from the car, and stood up in the shadow of the bridge. There was no point in checking the speedo-trip because I'd been too dopey to take a reading when the man had climbed in and said he would drive, and even if I'd taken a reading it wouldn't tell me anything: they could have made a detour to the house and/or a detour coming away from it. The most accurate trip-check would tell me only that the house lay within an area of a given number of square kilometres, useful enough in the Black Forest but no good in Berlin.

Tried running-on-the-spot to make warmth but found I was limping. No pain in the leg. Discovery: shoe missing. Limped under the bridge and along the bank on the other side, shaking like a marionette, hands blue in the lamplight.

The rum was spreading through me. It had saved lives at sea and it saved mine now. The kellner had stopped watching me. I'd told him I had slipped on the ice and fallen into the lake but he didn't believe me because I didn't look drunk, just half-drowned. Unfortunately he had small feet, otherwise I would have made him an offer for a pair of shoes.