"I like it, I really do. It's not as exciting as being a foreign correspondent, but you do get hooked into the research. You find one piece here and another there and pretty soon you don't know where the hours went. Then, too, the vacations are nice and long. Most summers I go out west and help a friend of mine run a wilderness company for tourists-Whitewater rafting, survival hikes, sissy climbing, that kind of thing. I should be out there now, instead of screwin' around here. But I really wanted to see China. Five cities, twenty-one days."

"Yeah, everybody ought to see it. Once. I wish I had-shh… "

McCarthy waved for silence and Stratton heard a familiar litany lancing through static.

"… off the wall into the corner… Remy is in and Evans is around third… throw is to second but Rice is safe with a stand-up double… That'll be all for… "

"A baseball game?"

McCarthy laughed "Last night's game. We're thirteen hours ahead of the East Coast, remember.

There's a game on almost every morning-Armed Forces radio."

"Pretty nice, if you're a fan."

"Naw, not me. Only been to one game in my life. My father took me to Briggs Stadium when I was a kid. About the third inning there was this foul ball and I reached up to catch it, you know, like on television. Broke two fingers. Never went back."

"If you're not a fan, why do you listen?" Stratton teased.

McCarthy heaved himself upright and planted both feet on the floor. Stratton, from the other side of the desk, imagined without seeing the spurts of dust.

"It's China, baby. In China, I'm a baseball fan because it helps kill the morning. In China, I read five or six newspapers a day and cut out things I might use six months from now, but probably never will. Savin' bits of string, but never finding the spool. For correspondents, China is purgatory, baby. The thing about this place that drives you crazy is that there are no facts; a billion people and not one goddamned fact. Did you know that everything here is a secret until it is published, even the fucking weather forecast?"

"Then what do you do for news?"

"I worry a lot." McCarthy grinned. "Particularly on Thursdays; that's when stories for the weekend paper are due. Today they want a political piece, ugh. I don't understand what's goin' on-that's normal-but I have reached the solemn conclusion that neither do the Chinese."

"Like how?"

"Like something big is bubbling beneath the surface. There are lots of little signs: people being suddenly reassigned or demoted, or simply disappearing-they could be forcibly retired, or dead-nobody knows. No one will talk about it."

"A power struggle," Stratton offered.

"Don't you know it. This place has been a circus since Mao died; probably before, too. When Deng came in with his pragmatists, the old hard-line Maoists got pushed aside. Now I'd say that the hard-liners were getting their own back."

"Most of the people who are being knocked down are the ones that Deng made respectable again?"

"That, for sure. But more than that." McCarthy lit a cigarette. "There's a hard-ass campaign under way right now against Chinese having anything to do with foreigners. You know the old song: 'We welcome your technology, but no blue jeans, please.' The idea that the decadent West will contaminate the heroic masses has been around for a long time, but now it's worse-ten times worse-than I've ever seen it."

Stratton was surprised.

"People have certainly been very nice to us. I've seen no hostility at all," he said.

McCarthy nodded.

"Right. The average guy is more interested in Western ideas and culture than ever. He hears the Party's antiforeign line and says to hell with it. But the guys who are getting axed are those whose jobs require the most contact with foreigners. They're falling like tenpins." McCarthy threw up his hands in mock despair. "Who's doing it? Does it means some sort of new madness like the Cultural Revolution is brewing? That's what my editors ask. And all I can do is to quote Confucius' greatest line."

"What's that?"

" 'It beats the shit out of me, baby.' "

Stratton laughed.

"I'll get out of your hair, but let me ask a quick question. I was supposed to meet a friend of mine today, a Chinese-American professor who's here on a personal visit. He never showed up. How do I go about tracking him down?"

"You sure he's here in Peking?"

"Almost. He was supposed to come back yesterday from Xian."

"Plane probably didn't fly. The national airline only flies when the weather is good. No joke."

"That's probably it. Still, I'd like to try. He's a very old friend of mine and I'd hate to miss connections."

"I could have the interpreter call the hotels, but it would be a waste of time.

The one constructive suggestion I can make is that you ask about your friend at the American Embassy. If he's an academic type, they should have some record of him, an itinerary."

"Who could I ask?"

"The culture vultures would be most likely to know, but they are turds to a man.

Try the consul, Steve Powell. He won't know, but he's the kind of guy who could find out."

"At the consulate?"

"Never on Thursday mornings. Steve plays tennis every Thursday. Over at the International Club, the courts they call the Rockpit. Do you know where it is?"

"I've passed it."

"I have to go out, but you're welcome to use the corporate bicycle."

"Corporate bicycle?"

"No correspondent is complete without one," said McCarthy, fishing a small key off a large ring. "Downstairs at the bike rack, license number oh-oh-two-seven-two. It's black, like all the rest of them. Do you know how to get there?"

"I have a map, thanks. Do you ride much?"

"Only in the line of duty."

Seen from a hotel window or a tourist bus, the infinite procession of bicycles is one of China's most impressive sights. On every major street, broad lanes are reserved for bicycles. Even in downtown Peking they outnumber the trucks and cars by a thousand to one. Alice and her friends rhapsodized about the bicycles.

They could talk for hours, insulated in the air-conditioned bus, of the silent, measured stream, as massive and as unstoppable as the Yangtze. They found in the bicycles a symbol of the progressive New China. At faculty teas it would, no doubt, sound quite profound.

Stratton learned some different things before he had wobbled two blocks. For one thing, the Chinese bicycle, copy of old English Raleigh though it may be, is more tank than scooter. It weighs a ton, steers hard and pedals harder.

McCarthy's corporate bike had no gears, and by the time Stratton passed the old imperial observatory he was sweating. What astonished him most, though, was the chaos into which he had plunged. Bicycles, he decided, as a pert young thing nonchalantly cut him off and he swerved to avoid a three-horse cart, were the ultimate bastion of Chinese individualism. To outsiders, the cyclists might look like an army of blue ants. To somebody who pedaled among them, the Chinese all had fangs. They veered without warning. They knifed through lanes of cross traffic with terrifying, expressionless elan. Chinese flirted as they rode. They hawked and spat. They sang and cursed.

The left turns were worst of all. The first time Stratton tried to make one he found he could not maneuver into the left segment of the bike lane in time. The second time he saw no way of getting across the oncoming flux of trucks and bikes. The third time he tensely negotiated the turn in the protective shadow of an old man who looked only straight ahead and miraculously emerged unscathed.

Twenty-five minutes later, Stratton pedaled past the iron gates of the International Club. He locked McCarthy's bike near a willow tree and walked to the tennis courts. Two players volleyed steadily on a pocked asphalt surface that looked as if it had not been repaved since Peking's last earthquake.