"Can you imagine?" his sister had wondered. "From a foreign land, a cat?"

Only with difficulty, Yang thought, trying to reconcile in his mind such ironies as rude reactionaries and free cats and false tombs. For example, it had always been an irony to him that these fengs, the forced effort of thousands of slaves thousands of years ago, afforded him the loftiest feelings of freedom he had ever known. Except for running. If you ran far enough you could get free for a while. Truly free. Another irony. It seemed that freedom came as a result of forced effort, as though the brain needed the minions of the legs and lungs and heart to build for it the solitude of separation.

Suddenly his reverie was shattered by an explosion, then two more, then a final blast. He was on his feet, scanning the rows and ditches below. Early Nation Day firecrackers? The backfire of a tractor working late?

He saw the three hunters, running along the base of his feng, laughing and shouting and waving their guns. The leader, the oldest, with the longest hair and the biggest gun, bent to the cotton rows and lifted his prize high by the ears. The hindquarters were blown entirely away but the animal still lived, uttering long thin whistles and pawing the air to the delight of the younger hunters. The girls turned away in horror and Yang sat back to wait for the men to leave. He wrapped his arms around his stomach, shivering.

It was all extremely difficult to reconcile.

In the customs terminal of the Beijing Airport, the American journalists fidgeted nervously through the forms and waited for their bags to be examined, feeling that sudden gulp of realization that Yanks always get along with their first breaths of communist atmosphere – that "They-can-getcha-and-keep-ya!" gulp-wondering and worrying about the copy of Oriental Hustler among the shirts, the stashed gold Krugerrands and crank in the shaving bag, when out of nowhere, to their rescue and relief, came an ominous Chinese drugstore cowboy with a tight smile and a wallet full of official cards. He introduced himself as Wun Mude, from China Sports Service, and gave them each a stiff handshake and a sheaf of diplomatic documents. He rattled a few phrases in Chinese to the brown-suited Red Guards, and the bags were snapped shut and the three journalists whisked past the long line and the immigration officer, and they were outside.

"Always good to know somebody at city hall," the editor observed. Mude merely smiled and motioned toward a waiting van.

The athletes had been arriving from their parts of the world for days, according to their respective countries' budgets. The poorer were to fly in, run, and fly out. The better heeled got there a few days early to acclimatize.

The American runners had been in Beijing for nearly a week, wishing their budgets had been a little less well-heeled. The Oriental food had loosened their lower intestines and the Beijing air had plugged their lungs: "When you run into the wall in this venue," observed Chuck Hattersly of Eugene, Oregon, when he came in from a light workout, wheezing and spitting, "you get to see what it's made of!"

The Americans were quartered in the modern Great Wall Hotel, complete with elevator Muzak and hot-and-cold running houseboys assigned to each room. The visiting Orientals, the Japanese and Koreans, were in the Beijing Hilton. The Europeans were scattered between. The Chinese were in a large compound dorm with most of the other Third World entries. The day before the race, everybody had arrived except the Tanzanian, Magapius Dasong.

In his tiny double room at the compound, Yang lay exhausted and sleepless after the day's flight in the old Russian turboprop. It had not been the lofty joyride he had expected, this first trip off the earth. The old airplane had been noisy and drafty, the seats confining, and the windows too small. At first he had been thrilled by the great mountains, so steep and terrible looking, but when he examined the range through the field glasses passed him by his father's colleague, he saw that the wild slopes had been tamed. Centuries of hungry toil had chiseled them into steps, thousands of descending agricultural terraces.

Tossing now in his narrow bed, he wished he had never looked. Every time he closed his eyes to try to sleep, he saw those terraced mountainsides, each few feet of retaining wall and few inches of soil the effort of so many hands and years, for another precious ton of corn, another trailer of cabbage.

It had always been a peculiar thing to Bling, his first name. His father had called him Ling Wu, after his father the stone mason, and his mother had called him Bill, after her father the missionary. So his name had never really been William.

Yet from his first day of school in Pittsburgh he had been called William by his sixth-grade teacher. By his classmates, Willy Wu, as though it were all one word, an American Indian word perhaps, certainly not half-Irish, half-Chinese-an Indian name for an uncertain wind: Willawoo.

Then when he wearied of Yankee gook wars abroad and left-wing American breastbeating at home and transferred from the University of Pittsburgh back to his birthplace at the University of Beijing, his teachers had called him Bee. Bee Ling Wu. Because he had used the letter B as his first initial on his application. This name had in turn become, to the members of his track team, Bee Wing Lou, thanks largely to the persistence of the only other English-speaking member of the ragtag squad, a girl from Sydney. "Bee Wing Louie, as yer such a dashing little black-eyed bug," she had explained with the typical Australian love of wordplay, "yer more the sprint from-flower-to-flower sort, it looks to me, than a long-runner."

Indeed, his position on the Pittsburgh team had been in the 100 and the 200 around-the-bend. No world-beater there, either. He had moved to the distances as age and embarrassment forced him out of the dashes. He found a whole new track career in China. Modern Yankee know-how in the form of vitamins, shoes, and training techniques had made him the top 1,500-meter man in all of the eastern provinces. Times that would have been barely mediocre in the States won him in China ribbons and respect. From all but the saucy Aussie.

"Go it!" she would shout at him around the last turn of the 1,500, waving her watch in the air. "Yer pressin' Mary Decker's time me little Bee Winger, go it!"

And now the American journalists, after he had been introduced to them as Mr. B. Ling, were calling him Bling.

Bling Clawsby.

"Have your droll yucks," he admonished the trio, "before I tip them you're all KGB agents."

The photographer shook his head. "Nobody'll go for it, Bling. Mr. Mude told us we have the unmistakable landlord look of American capitalists."