Over his head, the sky is streaked and hard as marble. He knows. Weissmann installed the S-Gerät and fired the 00000 somewhere close by. Enzian can’t be far behind. It will be here.

But he has to wait. Once that would have been unbearable. But since Major Marvy dropped out of sight, Tchitcherine has been a little more cautious. Marvy was a key man. There is a counterforce in the Zone. Who was the Soviet intelligence man who showed up just before the fiasco in the clearing? Who tipped the Schwarzkommando off to the raid? Who got rid of Marvy?

He’s been trying hard not to believe too much in the Rocket-cartel. Since his illumination that night, Marvy drunk, Bloody Chiclitz declaiming on the virtues of Herbert Hoover, Tchitcherine has been watching for evidence. Gerhardt von Göll, with his corporate octopus wrapping every last negotiable item in the Zone, must be in it, consciously or otherwise. Tchitcherine last week was on the point of flying back to Moscow. He’d seen Mravenko, one of the VIAM people, briefly in Berlin. They met in the Tiergarten, two officers ostensibly strolling in the sun. Work crews shoveled cold patch into holes in the pavement, banging it flat with shovels. Bicycle riders ratcheted by, skeleton-functional as their machines. Small clusters of civilians and military were back under the trees, sitting on fallen trunks or lorry wheels, stirring through bags and valises, dealing. “You’re in trouble,” Mravenko said.

He’d been a remittance man too, back in the thirties, and the most maniacal, systemless chess player in Central Asia. His tastes ran low enough to include even blindfold chess, which Russian sensibilities find unutterably gross. Tchitcherine sat down at the board each time more upset than the last, trying to be amiable, to jolly the madman into some kind of rational play. Most often he’d lose. But it was either Mravenko or the Semirechie winter.

“Do you have any idea what’s going on?”

Mravenko laughed. “Does anybody? Molotov isn’t telling Vishinsky. But they know things about you. Remember the Kirghiz Light? Sure you do. Well, they found out about that. I didn’t tell them, but they got to somebody.”

“It’s ancient history. Why bring it up now?”

“You’re regarded as ‘useful,’” Mravenko said.

They looked at each other, then, for a long time. It was a death sentence. Usefulness out here ends as quickly as a communiqué. Mravenko was afraid, and not entirely for Tchitcherine, either.

“What will you do, Mravenko?”

“Try not to be very useful. They’re not perfect, though.” Both men knew this was meant to be comfort, and isn’t working too well. “They don’t really know what makes you useful. They go on statistics. I don’t think you were supposed to survive the War. When you did, they had to look at you more closely.”

“Maybe I’ll survive this, too.” And that was when he got the idea of flying to Moscow. But just about then word came in that Weissmann’s battery couldn’t be traced any further than the Heath. And the renewed hope of meeting Enzian stopped him from going—the seductive hope that’s leading him further each day from any chance of continuing on past the other side of that meeting. He never supposed he would. The real question is: will they get him before he gets Enzian? All he needs is a little more time… his only hope is if they’re looking for Enzian too, or the S-Gerät, and using him the same way he thinks he’s using Slothrop… .