AMIDST ALL THE SKATERS WHO HOVERED ELECTROMAGNETICALLY ATOP THE TRACKS, KITTY WAS AS EASY TO FIND AS A ROSE AMONG NETTLES

On that day of the week and at that time of day people of one set, all acquainted with one another, used to meet on the skate-maze. In skates with razor-thin, magnetized blades, revelers navigated the miles of interweaving tracks, the positive charge of the maze surface gently repelling the positive charge of the skates, so everyone glided along, elevated precisely one quarter inch above the track. There were crack skaters there, showing off their skill: happily they whooshed forward, weaving their way across the metal maze, greeting each other gaily, leaping up with bold tricks, skating forward and (when the track vectors were reversed by the II/Skatemaster/490) skating backward.

There were, too, learners clinging to chairs with timid, awkward movements, and elderly noblewomen skating slowly, leaning for support on their Class IIIs. All seemed to Levin an elect band of blissful beings because they were here, near her. All the skaters, it seemed, with perfect self-possession, skated toward her, skated by her, even spoke to her, and were happy, quite apart from her, enjoying the capital ice and the fine weather.

She was in a corner, and turning out her slender feet in their high boots with obvious timidity, she skated toward him.

“Be calm! Be calm becalmbecalmbecalm…,” urged Socrates.

As she approached, a young boy skating down a track some distance away pitched head over heels, tumbling abruptly off the track and onto the frozen ground. This kind of accident was most unusual, even for the most unsteady skaters, given the self-correcting mechanisms built into the magnetic-repulsion skate technology. Konstantin Dmitrich had no time or inclination to ponder this event, had he even noticed it; his eyes, along with his heart, were focused only and entirely upon the slim pleasing figure of Kitty Shcherbatskaya.

“Have you been here long?” she said, giving him her hand and nodding pleasantly to Socrates.

“I? I’ve not long… yesterday… I mean today… I arrived,” answered Levin, in his emotion not at once understanding her question. Directly behind where they were talking, a stout middle-aged man flew off the track and onto the ground, just as the boy had, landing with an audible thump. “I was meaning to come and see you,” Levin continued, and then, recollecting with what intention he was trying to see her, he was promptly overcome with confusion and blushed.

Before he could recover his composure, suddenly, without warning, Kitty’s body jerked violently backward and flew down the track like a rag doll hurled by a willful child. In the space of an instant, she was a dozen yards away, her body accelerating at an alarming rate from where Levin and Socrates stood, astounded. Worse, she was flying toward another skater, a mustachioed Moscow dandy, who was mysteriously shooting forward as rapidly as Kitty was speeding backward.

“Socrates!” shouted Levin desperately. “They shall collide!” and the Class III launched himself forward, his long springy legs telescoping open to become still longer as he leapt forward toward the impending collision. The bearded yellow machine-man, his massive bristle of springs and cogs bobbling, caught Kitty about the waist, pulling her off the track just before the mustachioed man would have caromed into her.

All over the maze, similar scenes of havoc unfolded. Some skaters flew backward down the track, others forward, while still others were stuck in place, gyrating violently in their skates. No one, it seemed, was any longer in control of his own feet; the electromagnetic whims of the skates, or of the track, or of both together, had taken control. As Levin watched, an old matron, whom he had seen moments earlier, plodding steadily forward on the track reserved for slower skaters, rocketed forward at a dizzying speed until she was hurled entirely off the course, over the side of a hill and down a snow-crusted embankment.

After satisfying himself that Kitty was out of danger, Levin ran about the perimeter of the skate-maze, saving those he could with a series of flying tackles that intercepted the terrified skaters and flung them off the grid. Socrates sprinted off in the opposite direction and did his part as well, plucking from his beard a powerful handheld destabilizer and using it to short-circuit the magnetic force in patches along the track, disrupting its power long enough to let skaters jump to freedom.

“UnConSciya,” said Levin gravely to his Class III when they reconvened at the entrance to the park, where Kitty Shcherbatskaya sat beneath a snow-dusted aspen tree, shaken but unhurt.

“Who but they?” Socrates agreed bitterly. None but the rogue scientists in the so-called Union of Concerned Scientists had the technological ability or the anarchic spirit to launch such a terrible attack. Frustrated by the slow pace of scientific progress, even in the face of all that had been accomplished since the discovery of groznium, the futurists who had quit the government service and established UnConSciya were hellbent on bringing down the Ministry at all costs.

Today, mercifully, the chaos was short-lived; already, Levin heard the klaxon bell of the Tower ringing out as troops of 77s marched in. The wounded wailed, here and there a broken body lay in the snow, and those who had emerged unscathed were upset and terrified, exactly as the terrorists of UnConSciya wanted them to be.

In the aftermath, Levin and Kitty stood panting next to each other, recovering their breath. He wrapped her in his coat, and then, summoning his courage, Levin signaled Socrates into Surcease and grabbed at an excuse to say something, anything that might lead him back to that declaration which even now, after such chaos all around, threatened to burst from his lungs with more violence than any UnConSciya attack could ever muster.

“I didn’t know you could skate, and skate so well,” he said to Kitty.

“Your praise is worth having. The tradition is kept up here that you yourself are the best of skaters,” she said. For a moment, then, both were silent, lowering their eyes respectfully as a corpse, wrapped in rough burlap, was loaded onto a carriage.

After a discreet pause, Levin replied simply: “Yes, I once used to skate with passion; I wanted to reach perfection.”

“You do everything with confidence, I think,” she said.

“I have confidence in myself when you are near me,” he said, but was at once panic-stricken at what he had said, and blushed. And indeed, no sooner had he uttered these words, when all at once, like the sun going behind a cloud, her face lost all its friendliness, and Levin detected the familiar change in her expression that denoted the working of thought; a crease showed on her smooth brow.

“Is there anything troubling you? Which is to say, besides…” He indicated with a meaningful gesture the sad scene lying on the skate-maze before them. “Though I’ve no right to ask such a question,” he added hurriedly.

“No, I have nothing to trouble me, beyond this latest diabolical assault on our beloved Moscow,” she responded coldly. Levin cursed internally; there was no discounting that this horrid event had cast a pall over his intentions, and he could feel Kitty shying away from him. When she looked back at him, her face was no longer stern; her eyes looked at him with the same sincerity and friendliness, but Levin saw that in her friendliness there was a certain note of deliberate composure. And he felt depressed, even as she questioned him about his life.

“Surely you must be dull in the country in the winter, aren’t you?” she said.

“No, I’m not dull, I am very busy,” he said, feeling that she was holding him in check by her composed tone, which he would not have the force to break through. Around them, the injured and dead had been removed, and, as was the common practice, the skate-maze would be reopened as quickly as possible; it only remained for the 77s to conclude their safety-scan of the park. The machine-men, supervised by a gold-uniformed Caretaker, moved swiftly on that mission, overturning benches and lifting up sections of track, their sensors glowing purposefully.