Magda was staring, fascinated, although Lora was leaning back in her chair with her eyes half-closed and Danty was bestowing only casual glances on each successive picture. Suddenly irritated by his lack of interest, Sheklov let his tone grow sharper.

“Next is this one, a plain circle. That puzzled us terribly. But the logical conclusion is that it's the Earth again, wiped out by clouds of dust and smoke. Because here . . .” He reached for the last two drawings.

“This is fire. No mistake about it. Something burning violently. And last of all there's-this.”

He laid down the caveman picture, the figure draped in skins waving a stone axe. And sat back.

There was a dead silence.

Eventually Danty picked up the drawings, like Magda gathering her tarot cards, and reversed them. He laid them out again on the table in the opposite order, turning each around as he set it down so as to be the correct way up from Sheklov's viewpoint the other side of the table.

“No,” he said. “This way.”

For a long moment Sheklov stared at them. Then he raised his eyes to Danty's calm, amused face.

“Are you-sure?” he said huskily.

“As sure as I am that we're going to find a way over the border. dodge the guards. dodge the mines, get to safety. And that's close to 100 per cent. I only got one life, Vassily, and I'm fond of it in spite of everything.”

Sheklov sat frozen. In his mind he could hear words, as clear as though someone were uttering them aloud:

The last shall be first, and the first . . .

“Right,” Danty said with a chuckle. “Let's move on.” . xacvn . “But he was wrong,” Bratcheslavsky murmured, taking from its.pack yet another of his endless series of papyrosi and bending its cardboard tube to a right angle preparatory to lighting it at the flame of the hanging brass lamp that swung from the centre of the small room's white ceiling.

Standing by the window that gave such a fine view of the city of Alma-Ata, shrouded at the moment in the pale gray mists of early evening, Sheklov said without looking around, “Of course he wasn't He was simply lying.”

He sighed and helped himself to a cigarette from the pack, then came to join Bratcheslavsky on the cushions piled here and there across the floor, not randomly but with the imprecise symmetry of a Japanese sand-garden.

“But you knew the whole border was heavily beset with patrols. And the farther the frontier zone from a major city and major roads-in North Dakota, for example, where you were heading for-the more it's likely to be infested with these 'private' defence forces. You must have realized thatl”

“Naturally I did.” Savouring the aromatic tobacco, Sheklov let a puff of smoke drift into the updraught from the lamp-Same. Glints of light flashed on its supporting chains.

“And you didn't try to argue with him? Not at all?”

“I was past the stage of disbelieving-hirn,” Sheklov said after a short pause. “I'd been convinced, long before, that he was possessed of a talent I'd barely dreamed of.”

“And it's lostl” Bratcheslavsky barked, jumping to his feet in the first access of honest rage Sheklov had ever seen from him. “When I think what use we could have made of him-ach!”

Sheklov remained squatting on his cushions, gazing up at the old man who had been his mentor for so long, seeing him with curiously different eyes. He felt that his mission, brief as it had been, had altered him. Aged him? Yes, possibly it was only that . . . yet he felt it reached deeper into his personality. He felt not simply that he had crammed a great many years into the space of a few weeks, but also that he'd been educated.

Educated? Enlightened? No, that still wasn't the precise turn of phrase he was after. He cogitated, and suddenly he had it.

Made more wise.

Yes. Yes, exactly. He had had his entire perspective on the world, the human condition, the universe, turned upside-down-and the new version was no less real than the traditional one. He was in the predicament of a savage shown a mirror for the first time, who has painfully to learn the truth that a man's right hand reflected in a mirror is his left.

But all that had been present in his mind while he was in Canada, arranging his onward journey to Russia with the aid and connivance, of the company whose representative he had nominally been during his time in the States. So now it had flashed back to his awareness in less than the blink of an eye, and Bratcheslavsky was still talking.

“Not only that, what's morel Not just a man with a talent we'd give our eye-teeth to controll But very likely Turpin too, who's been a mainstay of human survival for a quarter of a centuryl”

“But they don't suspect him of being an agent, do they?” Sheklov demanded. “Only of-uh-contact with subversives!”

“There's too damned good a chance of his being tried for treason.” Curtly. “The Navy has jumped into the mess with both feet, and every corporation that's jealous of Energetics General is demanding a chance to take over the defence contracts, and all in all you never saw anything more like the Byzantine Empire in your life! I wouldn't bet against the possibility of the President being deposed, I swear I wouldn'tl”

..By an Army coup?"

“Yes, of course. It's inevitable, you know, once you let the armed forces take over key organs of your government. Simply because they can impose rigid discipline on their 'members, whereas the loose, inchoate mass of the public is uncontrollable, they're bound to wind up giving the orders. Didn't we come perilously close to it ourselves a couple of times? And it wasn't good judgment that saved us, only luckl”

Bratcheslavsky tore the. cigarette from his mouth and gave it a rearing glare; he had bitten completely through its cardboard tube. Tossing it into a sandbowl with an oath. he lit another.

“But surely, even if we do lose Turpin,” Sheklov countered, “this process will bear out what Marxism has always prophesied: the dissolution of the capitalist state into a brutal internal power-struggle. There'll be so many factions we'll be able to feed in spies, saboteurs, subversives, anyone we choose. All we'll have to do is identify those of the competing parties that are prepared to sell out in order to do down their rivals. Ten years, of that; and America will never be a menace to the world again.”

“You're an optimist there days!” Bratcheslavsky grunted.

“I have good reason. I found things over there I wasn't expecting, would have assumed not to exist. Admittedly, they are neither officially admitted nor properly understood, but they exist, and I'm here because they do.”

He drew a deep breath.

“Lookl My stay there was measured in daysl I don't believe I could have run across what I did unless thesethese virtues and talents are widespread. Just considerl” He raised a finger. “First, I encountered someone with a talent we'd never imagined to be real, only it was real and I had proof. What's more, he . . . well, it's an unfashionable virtue, but it is one.”

“Self-sacrifice,” Bratcheslavsky said.

“Yes.”

There was a long, cold pause. During it Sheklov felt himself carried back in space and time, to the train he had taken over the Canadian border on Danty's instructions. None of them had the mind to question his orders by that stage. No one had suspected the genuinepess of his Canadian passport; for him it had been easy. For Lora and Magda, somewhat harder . . . but there was a wellestablished underground railway into Canada, had been for over a generation, and it had been surprisingly simple to obtain advice and even a guide. (Of course he'd only heard the details afterwards.)

For Danty, though. .

He'd looked out of the train's window, and seen that car racing down one of the blocked stub-ends of dirt road heading north, and behind a mask of trees he'd seen that rose of flame. Just for a moment, a second or two.