Las thought about it. He asked, "Then why don't birds fly around moving trains in the daytime?"

"That's elementary too!" I said, handing him his glass. "Birds are much more stupid animals than mammals. Bats have already guessed how to use trains to get food, but birds haven't figured it out yet. In a hundred or two hundred years the birds will realize how to exploit trains too."

"How come I didn't realize all that for myself?" Las asked in amazement. "It's really all so very simple! Okay, then… here's to common sense!"

We drank.

"Animals are amazing," Las said profoundly. "Cleverer than Darwin thought. I used to have…"

I never got to hear what it was Las used to have-a dog, a hamster, or a fish in an aquarium. He glanced out the window again and turned green.

"It's there again… the bat!"

"Catching the mosquitoes," I reminded him.

"What mosquitoes? It swerved around a lamppost like it wasn't even there! The size of a sheepdog, I tell you!"

Las stood up and resolutely pulled the blind down. He said in a determined voice:

"To hell with it… I knew I shouldn't read Stephen King just before bed… The size of that bat! Like a pterodactyl. It could catch owls and eagles, not mosquitoes!"

That freak Kostya! I realized that in his animal form a vampire, like a werewolf, became dumber than dumb and had little control over his own actions. He was probably getting a kick out of hurtling along beside the train in the night, glancing into the windows, taking a breather on the lampposts. But he ought at least to take elementary precautions.

"It's a mutation," Las mused. "Nuclear tests, leaks from reactors, electromagnetic waves, cell phones… and we just carry on laughing at it all, think it's all science fiction. And the gutter press keeps feeding us lies. So who can I tell-they'll just think I was drunk or I'm lying."

He opened his bottle of cognac with a determined expression.

"What do you think of mysticism?" he asked.

"I respect it," I said with dignity.

"Me too," Las admitted. "Now I do. I never even thought about it before…" He cast a wary glance at the blind over the window. "You live all those years, and then somewhere out in the Pskov peat bogs you suddenly meet a live yeti-and you go right off your rocker. Or you see a rat a meter long. Or…" he waved his hand and poured brandy into the glasses. "What if it turns out there really are witches and vampires and werewolves living right here alongside us? After all, what better disguise could there be than to get your image enshrined in the culture of the mass media? Anything that's described in artistic terms and shown in the movies stops being frightening and mysterious. For real horror you need the spoken word, you need an old grandpa sitting on a bench, scaring his grandkids in the evening: 'And then the Master of the house came to him and said: "I won't let you go, I'll tie you up and bind you tight and you'll rot under the fallen branches!"' That's the way to make people wary of anomalous phenomena! Kids sense that, you know-it's no wonder they love telling stories about the Black Hand and the Coffin on Wheels. But modern literature, and especially the movies, it all just dilutes that instinctive horror. How can you feel afraid of Dracula, if he's been killed a hundred times? How can you be afraid of aliens, if our guys always squelch them? Yes, Hollywood is the great luller of human vigilance. A toast-to the death of Hollywood, for depriving us of a healthy fear of the unknown!"

"I'll always drink to that," I said warmly. "Tell me, Las, what made you decide to go to Kazakhstan? Is it really a good place for a vacation?"

Las shrugged and said, "I don't even know. I suddenly got a yen for something exotic-kumis in milking pails, camel races, ram fights, mutton and sliced dough in a copper basin, beautiful girls with unfamiliar kinds of faces, arboraceous cannabis in the town squares…

"What kind of cannabis?" I asked, puzzled.

"Arboraceous. It's a tree, only it never gets a chance to grow," Las explained, with the same kind of serious expression I'd used for my stories about bats and swallows. "But what do I care? I'm ruining my health with tobacco; I just fancy something exotic…"

He took out a pack of Belomor and lit up.

"The conductor will be here in a minute," I remarked.

"No, he won't. I put a condom over the smoke detector." Las nodded upward. There was a half-inflated condom stretched over the smoke-detector projecting from the wall. Delicate pink, with plastic studs.

"I think you probably have the wrong idea about the exotic fun Kazakhstan has to offer," I said.

"Too late to worry about that-I'm on my way now," Las muttered. "The idea just came to me out of nowhere this morning: Why don't I go to Kazakhstan? I just dropped everything, gave my assistant his instructions, and went to catch the train."

I pricked my ears up at that. "Just upped and left? Tell me, are you always so footloose and fancy-free?"

Las thought about it and shook his head. "Not really. But this was like something just clicked… Okay, it's no big deal. Let's just have one more for the road…"

He started pouring-and I took another look at him through the Twilight.

Even though I knew what to look for, I could barely even sense the vestigial trace-the unknown Other's touch had been so light and elegant. It was already fading, almost cold already.

Simple suggestion, the kind that even the weakest Other could manage. But how neatly it had been done!

"One more for the road," I agreed. "I can't keep my eyes open either… we'll have plenty of time to talk."

But I wasn't going to get any sleep in the next hour. I had a conversation with Edgar coming up-and possibly one with Gesar too.

Chapter 4

Edgar looked sadly at the broken pieces of the flask. Unfortunately, he wasn't dressed appropriately for expressing profound sorrow-loose shorts with a jolly pattern, a baggy undershirt, and his paunch oozing out between the two of them. Inquisitors obviously didn't take great care to keep in good shape- they relied more on the power of their magic.

"This isn't Prague," I said, trying to comfort him. "This is Russia. When bottles don't surrender here, they're exterminated."

"Now I'll have to write an explanatory note," Edgar said gloomily. "Czech bureaucracy is a match for the Russian version any day."

"But at least we know now that Las isn't an Other."

"We still don't know anything," the Inquisitor muttered irritably. "A positive result would have been unambiguous. With a negative one, there's still a chance he's such a powerful Other that he sensed the trap and decided to have a little joke with us."

I didn't try to object. It was a possibility that we really couldn't exclude.

"He doesn't seem like an Other to me," Kostya said in a low voice. He was sitting on his bunk in just his shorts, streaming with sweat and breathing heavily. It looked like he'd spent too long flitting about in the body of a bat. "I checked him out back at the Assol. Every way I could. And just now too… Doesn't look like it."

"I have something else to say to you," Edgar snapped. "Why did you have to fly right outside the window?"

"I was observing."

"Couldn't you just sit on the roof and lean down?"

"At sixty miles an hour? I might be an Other, but the laws of physics still apply. I'd have been blown off!"

"So the laws of physics don't prevent you from flying at sixty miles an hour, but you can't stay on the roof of the car?"

Kostya frowned and stopped talking. He reached into his jacket and took out a small flask full of some thick, dark crimson liquid. He took a mouthful of it.

Edgar frowned. "How soon will you require… food?"