The door slammed shut, and I was left in a stranger's apartment-alone with an amplifier that was switched on, a half-sliced stick of salami, and three huge, empty refrigerators.

Well, how about that! I would never have expected the easygoing social relations of a friendly communal apartment-or a student hostel-to exist inside buildings like this.

You use my toilet, and I'll get washed in your shower… And Pyotr Petrovich has a refrigerator, and Ivan Ivanovich promised to bring some vodka-he trades in the stuff, and Semyon cuts the sausage for the snacks very neatly, with loving care…

Probably the majority of the people with apartments there had bought them "for posterity." Using every last bit of money they could earn-and beg, steal, or borrow. And it was only afterward that the happy owners had realized that an apartment that size also required major finishing work. That any construction firm wouldn't think twice about ripping off someone who had bought a home here. That they still had to pay every month for the massive grounds, the underground garages, the park, and the embankments.

So the huge building was standing there half-empty, very nearly deserted. Of course, it was no tragedy if someone was a bit short of cash. But for the first time I could see with my own eyes that it was at least a tragicomedy.

How many people really lived in the Assol complex? If I was the only one who had come in response to a bass guitar growling in the middle of the night, and before that the strange bard had made his racket entirely unchallenged?

One person on each floor? It seemed like even less than that…

But then who had sent the letter?

I tried to imagine Las cutting letters out of the newspaper Pravda with nail scissors. I couldn't. Someone like him would have come up with something a bit more imaginative.

I closed my eyes and pictured the gray shadow of my eyelids falling across my pupils. Then I opened my eyes and looked around the apartment through the Twilight. Not the slightest trace of any magic. Not even on the guitar, although a good instrument that has been in the hands of an Other or a potential Other remembers that touch for years.

There was no trace anywhere of blue moss, that parasite of the Twilight that feasts on negative emotions. If the owner of the apartment ever fell into a depression, then he did it away from home. Or else he had such a frank and unashamed good time that it burned away the blue moss.

I sat down and started carving the rest of the salami. To be on the safe side, I checked through the Twilight to see if it was really a good idea to eat it. The salami turned out to be all right. Gesar didn't want his agent to go down with food poisoning.

"Now that's the right temperature," said Las, removing the wine thermometer from the open bottle. "We didn't leave it in for too long. Some people cool vodka to the consistency of glycerine, so that drinking it's like swallowing liquid nitrogen… Here's to our acquaintance!"

We drank a glass and followed it with salami and biscotti. Las had brought them from my apartment-he explained that he hadn't bothered to get any food in that day.

"The entire building lives like this," he explained. "Well no, of course there are some people who had enough money to finish their places and furnish them as well. Only just imagine how wonderful it is living in an empty building. There they are, waiting for the petty riffraff like you and me to finish our places off and move in. The cafes aren't working, the casino's empty, the security men are freaking out from sheer boredom… two of them were sacked yesterday-they started shooting at the bushes in the yard. Said they'd seen something horrible. They probably did too-they were as high as kites."

After he finished speaking, Las took a pack of Belomor cigarettes out of his jacket pocket and gave me a cunning look. "Like one?"

I hadn't been expecting a man who poured vodka in such good style to fool around with marijuana… I shook my head and asked, "Do you smoke many?"

"This is the second pack today," Las sighed. And then he suddenly realized. "Hey, come on, Anton! These are Belomor! Not dope! I used to smoke Gitanes before, until I realized they were no different from our very own Belomor!"

"Original," I said.

"Ah, what's that got to do with anything?" said Las, offended. "I'm not trying to be original. All you have to do is be some other"-I started, but Las went on calmly "-kind of guy, a bit different from the rest, and right away they say you're putting on a show. But I like smoking Belomor. If I lose interest a week from now-I'll give up!"

"There's nothing bad about being different, some other kind of guy," I said, putting out a feeler.

"But really becoming different is hard," Las replied. "Just a couple of days ago I had this idea…"

I pricked my ears up again. The letter had been sent two days earlier. Could everything really have come together so neatly?

"I was in this hospital, and while I was waiting to be seen, I read all the price lists," Las went on, not suspecting a trap. "And what they do there is serious stuff, they make artificial body parts out of titanium to replace what people have lost. Shin-bones, knee joints and hip joints, jawbones… Patches for the skull, teeth, and other small bits and pieces… I got my calculator out and figured out how much it would cost to have all your bones totally replaced. It came out at about one million seven hundred thousand bucks. But I reckon on a bulk order like that you could get a good discount. Twenty-thirty percent. And if you could convince the doctors it was good publicity, you could probably get away with half a million!"

"What for?" I asked. Thanks to my hairdresser, my hair hadn't stood up on end-there was nothing left to stand up.

"It's just a fascinating idea!" Las explained. "Imagine you want to hammer in a nail! You just raise your fist and smash it down, and the nail sinks into concrete. Those bones are titanium! Or say someone tries to punch you… nah, of course, there are a number of drawbacks. And artificial organs aren't coming on too well yet. But I'm pleased with the general trend of progress."

He poured us another glass each.

"It seems to me the trend of progress lies in a different direction," I went on, sticking to my guns. "We need to make greater use of the potential abilities of our organisms. All those amazing things that lie hidden inside us! Telekinesis, telepathy…"

Las looked a bit sad. I was getting morose too, trying to play the idiot.

"Can you read my thoughts?" he asked.

"Not right now," I confessed.

"I don't think we ought to invent any extra dimensions of reality," Las explained. "We've already known for a long time what man is capable of. If people could read thoughts, levitate and do all that other nonsense, there'd be some proof."

"If someone suddenly acquired abilities like that, they'd hide them from everybody else," I said, and took a look at Las through the Twilight. "A really different, Other kind of being would provoke the envy and fear of people around him."

Las didn't betray the slightest sign of excitement. Just skepticism.

"Well, surely this miracle worker would want to give the woman he loves and his children the same kind of abilities? They'd gradually take over from us as a biological species."

"But what if the special abilities couldn't be inherited?" I asked. "Or they weren't necessarily inherited? And you couldn't transmit them to anyone else either? Then you'd have the people and the Others existing independently. And if there weren't many of the Others, then they'd hide their abilities from everybody else…"

"Seems to me like you're talking about a random mutation that produces extrasensory abilities," Las said, thinking out loud. "If that mutation is random and recessive, it's absolutely no use to us. But you can actually have titanium bones installed right now!"