‘I’m sorry, Charles,’ Ward said as they walked back to the car. ‘I should have said goodbye to you but I thought I’d better not.’

Kandinski’s expression was subdued but puzzled. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘I don’t understand.’

Ward shrugged. ‘I’m afraid everything here has more or less come to an end for me, Charles. I’m going back to Princeton until the spring. Freshman physics.’ He smiled ruefully at himself. ‘Boyle’s Law, Young’s Modulus, getting right back to fundamentals. Not a bad idea, perhaps.’

‘But why are you leaving?’ Kandinski pressed.

‘Well, Cameron thought it might be tactful of me to leave. After our statement to the Secretary-General was published in The New York Times I became very much persona non grata at the Hubble. The trustees were on to Professor Renthall again this morning.’

Kandinski smiled and seemed relieved. ‘What does the Hubble matter?’ he scoffed. ‘We have more important work to do. You know, Ward, when Mrs Cameron told me just now that you were leaving I couldn’t believe it.’

‘I’m sorry, Charles, but it’s true.’

‘Ward,’ Kandinski insisted. ‘You can’t leave. The Primes will be returning soon. We must prepare for them.’

‘I know, Charles, and I wish I could stay.’ They reached the car and Ward put his hand out. ‘Thanks for coming to see me off.’

Kandinski held his hand tightly. ‘Andrew, tell me the truth. Are you afraid of what people will think of you? Is that why you want to leave? Haven’t you enough courage and faith in yourself?’

‘Perhaps that’s it,’ Ward conceded, wishing the train would start. He reached for the rail and began to climb into the car but Kandinski held him.

‘Ward, you can’t drop your responsibilities like this!’

‘Please, Charles,’ Ward said, feeling his temper rising. He pulled his hand away but Kandinski seized him by the shoulder and almost dragged him off the car.

Ward wrenched himself away. ‘Leave me alone!’ he snapped fiercely. ‘I saw your space-ship, didn’t I?’

Kandinski watched him go, a hand picking at his vanished beard, completely perplexed.

Whistles sounded, and the train began to edge forward.

‘Goodbye, Charles,’ Ward called down. ‘Let me know if you see anything else.’

He went into the car and took his seat. Only when the train was twenty miles from Mount Vernon did he look out of the window.

End-Game

After his trial they gave Constantin a villa, an allowance and an executioner. The villa was small and high-walled, and had obviously been used for the purpose before. The allowance was adequate to Constantin’s needs — he was never permitted to go out and his meals were prepared for him by a police orderly. The executioner was his own. Most of the time they sat on the enclosed veranda overlooking the narrow stone garden, playing chess with a set of large well-worn pieces.

The executioner’s name was Malek. Officially he was Constantin’s supervisor, and responsible for maintaining the villa’s tenuous contact with the outside world, now hidden from sight beyond the steep walls, and for taking the brief telephone call that came promptly at nine o’clock every morning. However, his real role was no secret between them. A powerful, doughy-faced man with an anonymous expression, Malek at first intensely irritated Constantin, who had been used to dealing with more subtle sets of responses. Malek followed him around the villa, never interfering — unless Constantin tried to bribe the orderly for a prohibited newspaper, when Malek merely gestured with a slight turn of one of his large hands, face registering no disapproval, but cutting off the attempt as irrevocably as a bulkhead — nor making any suggestions as to how Constantin should spend his time. Like a large bear, he sat motionlessly in the lounge in one of the faded armchairs, watching Constantin.

After a week Constantin tired of reading the old novels in the bottom shelf of the bookcase — somewhere among the grey well-thumbed pages he had hoped to find a message from one of his predecessors and invited Malek to play chess. The set of chipped mahogany pieces reposed on one of the empty shelves of the bookcase, the only item of decoration or recreational equipment in the villa. Apart from the books and the chess set the small six-roomed house was completely devoid of ornament. There were no curtains or picture rails, bedside tables or standard lamps, and the only electrical fittings were the lights recessed behind thick opaque bowls into the ceilings. Obviously the chess set and the row of novels had been provided deliberately, each representing one of the alternative pastimes available to the temporary tenants of the villa. Men of a phlegmatic or philosophical temperament, resigned to the inevitability of their fate, would choose to read the novels, sinking backwards into a self-anaesthetized trance as they waded through the turgid prose of those nineteenth-century romances.

On the other hand, men of a more volatile and extrovert disposition would obviously prefer to play chess, unable to resist the opportunity to exercise their Machiavellian talents for positional manoeuvre to the last. The games of chess would help to maintain their unconscious optimism and, more subtly, sublimate or divert any attempts at escape.

When Constantin suggested that they play chess Malek promptly agreed, and so they spent the next long month as the late summer turned to autumn. Constantin was glad he had chosen chess; the game brought him into immediate personal involvement with Malek, and like all condemned men he had soon developed a powerful emotional transference on to what effectively was the only person left in his life.

At present it was neither negative nor positive; but a relationship of acute dependence — already Malek’s notional personality was becoming overlaid by the associations of all the anonymous but nonetheless potent figures of authority whom Constantin could remember since his earliest childhood: his own father, the priest at the seminary he had seen hanged after the revolution, the first senior commissars, the party secretaries at the ministry of foreign affairs and, ultimately, the members of the central committee themselves. Here, where the anonymous faces had crystallized into those of closely observed colleagues and rivals, the process seemed to come full circle, so that he himself was identified with those shadowy personas who had authorized his death and were now represented by Malek.

Constantin had also, of course, become dominated by another obsession, the need to know: when? In the weeks after the trial and sentence he had remained in a curiously euphoric state, too stunned to realize that the dimension of time still existed for him, he had already died a posteriori. But gradually the will to live, and his old determination and ruthlessness, which had served him so well for thirty years, reasserted themselves, and he realized that a small hope still remained to him. How long exactly in terms of time he could only guess, but if he could master Malek his survival became a real possibility.

The question remained: When?

Fortunately he could be completely frank with Malek. The first point he established immediately.

‘Malek,’ he asked on the tenth move one morning, when he had completed his development and was relaxing for a moment. ‘Tell me, do you know — when?’

Malek looked up from the board, his large almost bovine eyes gazing blandly at Constantin. ‘Yes, Mr Constantjn, I know when.’ His voice was deep and functional, as expressionless as a weighing machine’s.

Constantin sat back reflectively. Outside the glass panes of the veranda the rain fell steadily on the solitary fir tree which had maintained a precarious purchase among the stones under the wall. A few miles to the south-west of the villa were the outskirts of the small port, one of the dismal so-called ‘coastal resorts’ where junior ministry men and party hacks were sent for their bi-annual holidays. The weather, however, seemed peculiarly inclement, the sun never shining through the morose clouds, and for a moment, before he checked himself, Constantin felt glad to be within the comparative warmth of the villa.