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you?”
    Don’t, he thought. Don’t let that sense of pity come, prevent that simple extension of humanity. But what could you do? There were times when the protective veneer he was supposed to wear like a suit of armor simply cracked open; and when he looked at Hua Tse-Ling he saw more than a laboratory study, he saw a man whose death warrant had already been signed. He wished he could reach inside the skull, understand the lacerations of consciousness; but there was inaccessibility—the very nature of the thing you studied was elusive as your own shadow: a whole box of tricks you could not open.
    â€œNo,” he said. “It doesn’t surprise me.”
    â€œWhat does?” she asked. She put one hand up to her brown hair, an imaginary curl. “Doesn’t the success of this surprise you?”
    Andreyev thought of success: Hua Tse-Ling had crossed the river—and at what cost? Was it just a freak show? After all, was it just that? Then he was thinking, despite himself, of how power operated, the ways in which it would try to make use, for one vicious reason or another, of all this success —a concussion of forces, the military and the scientific in a lamentable collision. It’s the way of things , he thought. A simple justification: the way of things. What could one do? You could not live your life in a preserve jar, could you? It was important to go on, to continue work and ignore that other world—let it all slide away from your mind, the Kremlin summonses, the quickened interest in the eyes of generals, the inquisitions of the KGB. Let it all slide, it was the way of things: what could you do?
    He heard his name being paged on the intercom. It surprised him: Professor Andreyev . He remembered where he was, a building in the center of a wasteland, a snowy wilderness. He went to the nearest telephone.
    It was the Physician.
    â€œHow is she?” Andreyev asked.
    â€œWhat do you expect me to say?” The Physician’s voice was harsh; for that reason Andreyev thought of his childhood and how the crying of rooks would awaken him on summer mornings—barking birds, he had thought then, winged dogs whose noises rolled and rolled through the trees around the house in Kaluga.
    â€œYou can’t go on exhausting her,” the Physician said. “I can’t let you—”
    Andreyev said, “It’s not my decision, you know. Do you think I have a say in what happens to her? You’re being naïve if you think I can stop all this with a wave of my hand—”
    The Physician, calmer now, said, “She’s seventy years of age, Professor. Does that put you in the picture?”
    And then the line was dead. Andreyev held the receiver a moment, and when he set it back he noticed the initials PVS carved into the white wall above the instrument. They had been cut deep and they looked to him like fresh wounds.
    â€œI don’t think we can do anything else,” Katya said.
    Andreyev looked once more at Hua Tse-Ling, then at the window of the room they were in—at the black glass against which, with increasing violence, the wind drove crystals of snow.
    4.
    Hua Tse-Ling—thirty-six years of age, according to his ID papers—was taken from the hospital and had his hands tied behind his back by his executioners—six infantrymen and a sergeant. The Colonel, the KGB man, and the Politician watched the proceedings in a neutral way. What did the death of one miserable Chinaman matter, the latter had asked, laughing, when you had more than eight hundred million of the bastards to worry about?
    Hua was led to the wire fence around the compound—pushed rather than led, his limbs stiff, his head held at a forward angle.
    The KGB man said, “What do you make of this experiment, Colonel?”
    The Colonel drew up the collar of his coat and shivered. “Interesting.”
    â€œInteresting?” The KGB man lifted one hand and,