"How do you visualize," a fellow club sipper insisted on knowing, "hanging this gig on a hook?So it is not just another dumb road race? I mean what are you hoping to hang it on?"

The sipper was a ranking executive in the business that owned the magazine paying for this journalistic jaunt to China, so everyone acknowledged his right to be a trifle insistent.

"The hook I have in mind," answered the first of the journalists, a big bearded boy who was the editor of said mag as well as originator of the jaunt, "is sport as détente. Remember it wasn't really Nixon or Kissinger that initially broke through the bamboo curtain; it was the Ping-Pong ball. This race is the first international sporting event in China since before World War Two. To me, that has meaning."

Meaning he really had no idea at all what to hang it on. The second journalist, bald, unbearded, bigger and older than the first, muscled his brow in a Brandoesque attitude of heavy consideration.

"Let me think on that a minute," he begged. He turned to the third journalist, absolutely enormous, with big blue eyes and a monstrous camera hanging over his belly. "What about you, Brian? What do you plan to aim at?"

"I can't take any point pictures until my writer comes up with something to make a point with, can I?" was the way the third journalist avoided the question.

The eyes turned back to the second journalist; his knotted brow indicated he nearly had his answer tied down.

"One of the main characteristics," he began, "about a bamboo curtain… is it's so damn thick. The only thing it lets show through is politics. For years no idiosyncrasies, no quirks, no personality has been allowed to show through."

"Until now?" asked the editor, proud of the way his man had wiggled off this hook business.

"Right. Until now. Now they are sponsoring this big marathon with top runners from all over the globe, even though the best Chinese marathoner is slower than the mediocre from the rest of the racing world. This may be the crack in the curtain for us to go angling through."

"Gotcha!" the ranking exec said. "Like ice fishing back in Minnesota: hafta hook something before the hole freezes back." He raised his martini to the trio. "Well, fishermen: here's to a successful trip. Bring us back a biggie -"

" 'Tenshun, Clipper Club membahs," the speaker over the bar drawled, "Pan Am's Clipper flight for Beijing is now available for boarding. Y'all have a nice trip."

In the dew-heavy dawn outside one of Tanzania's 8,000 ujamaa villages, tall handsome Magapius Dasong (best time: 2:20:46) sat beside the road on his wicker suitcase. He was waiting for the local bus that would take him to the central station in Dar-es-Salaam, where he was to meet his coach for the ride to the airport. The Dawn Express Local was already tardy by nearly forty minutes of daylight and Magapius would not be surprised if it became later by twice that time before the bus arrived. By then, his two coaches and three trainers would have proceeded on to China without their athlete.

How like the Tanzania of recent years, he thought; everybody gets in on the race but the runner. Such inefficiency. Such bureaucracy. Poor topheavy Tanzania, swaying and teetering. Even the most avid supporters of President Nyerere's socialistic progress were beginning to admit that the nation's economic strife was caused by more than increased oil prices or the recent droughts and floods. Oil prices had increased for all nations; droughts and floods had always been. And if sweeping socialist reform had increased life expectancy by 20 percent in a decade, it had probably increased the social woes by 30 percent! More thefts and less to steal. More schedules set and less of them met.

This decline of care for time was what most troubled Magapius. His countrymen once were proud of their timing. If a bird was to be netted, the netman would be tossing the net as the bird flew by. It was an appointment to be kept, a pact between netman and bird. A courtesy. What was the joy in a longer life when that tribal respect for time was becoming as rare as the old stylized dream dances?

As much as the race itself, Magapius was looking forward to visiting the People's Republic of revolutionary China. If the dream were to live, reaffirmation must be found there, in that mightiest stronghold of the experiment. Everybody knew there was no juice in Russia any more, no Kunda as the Bantu put it. No baraka, as the Arabs said. And the boatloads hysterical to escape Cuba and Haiti for the capitalistic coasts of Florida did not speak well of Castro's collective. But China… ah, China… surviving Mao's madness as well as Brezhnev's belligerence. Great China. If China could not accomplish it, perhaps it could not be accomplished.

He heard a motor and stood to wave at the approaching headlights. It was not the bus. It was a loaded sisal truck that had encountered the bus miles back, stuck crossways in the middle of the tiny road, front wheels in one ditch, back wheels in the other. The bus had been turning around to return to pick up last week's mail that the driver had again forgotten.

One of the sisal truck's three drivers boosted Magapius's luggage to the top of the load of fiber and invited him to join them for the ride on to the city. He couldn't join them in the cab, however. There was no room. In the nation's battle against rampant unemployment, there were now three drivers required in every vehicle of transport, whether they could drive or not.

Magapius thanked them and climbed the heap of fibers. How particularly Tanzanian – three men in a clean cab in filthy work aprons; one on top in the blowing white fluff in the only suit the family owned, black…

In the cramped kitchen of his uncle's house, Yang was studying mathematics. He had less than a week before the trip to Beijing, and his instructors at school had decided he could best prepare for his absence by staying home and studying on his own. From the adjoining room came the whir of the motorcycle motor as his uncle drilled away at the day's collection of cavities. It was a clever setup. Raised on its kickstand, the rear wheel turned freely against a simple wooden spool that in turn drove the gears that powered the drill cables. The drill speed could be adjusted by the bike's throttle, and the whir of the little two-cycle engine helped blanket the occasional groans his patients made in spite of the bristle of anesthetic needles in their necks and arms.

Yang was seated near the window. If the sun had been out it would have fallen across his high-boned face and bare shoulders, but it was overcast. It had been overcast for weeks. Since before the floods.