Orlov's voice was cosmonaut-professional. "There has been no communication with the people from the train. I know they were taken off-- but I don't know about Nikita."

"I believe he's all right," Dogin said confidently. "There's been so much carnage, like in Stalingrad. Yet one or two flowers always survive."

"I hope you're fight," said Orlov.

Dogin took a deep breath, trembled letting it out. "I appear to be one of the casualties. I, General Kosigan, perhaps General Mavik-- the ones who didn't stay to the rear. The only question is who will get to us first, the government, Shovich, or the Colombians who gave the money to him."

"If you go to Zhanin, you can request protection."

"Against Shovich?" Dogin snickered. "In a country where one hundred American dollars can buy an assassin? No, Sergei. My fortunes burned with the train. It's ironic, though. I hated the gangster and everything he stood for."

"Then why, Minister, did you ever get involved with him? Why did so many people have to suffer?"

"I don't know," Dogin replied. "Honestly, I don't. General Kosigan convinced me we could move him aside later, and I wanted to believe that-- though I never did, I suppose." His eyes ranged over the old maps on his walls. "I wanted this so very much… to bring back what we've lost. To return to the time when the Soviet Union acted and other nations reacted, when our science and culture and military might was the envy of the world. I suppose, in retrospect, this was not the way to do it."

"Minister Dogin," said Orlov, "it could not have been done. Had you built this new union, it would have fallen. When I returned to the space center in Kazakhstan last month, I saw the bird droppings and feathers on the staircases, and the boosters covered with plastic that was covered with dust. And I ached for a return to the past as well, to the era of Gagarin and the time when our space shuttles, the Burans, were going to allow us to colonize space. We cannot prevent evolution and extinction, Minister. And once it has occurred, we cannot reverse it."

"Perhaps," said Dogin. "But it is in our nature to fight. When a man is dying, you do not ask if a treatment is too expensive or too dangerous. You do what you feel must be done. Only when the patient has died, and reason has replaced emotion, do you see how impossible the task was." He smiled. "And yet, Sergei-- yet I must admit that for a time I thought I was going to succeed."

"If not for the Americans--"

"No," said Dogin, "not the Americans. It was just one American, an FBI agent in Tokyo who fired at the jet and forced us to transfer the money. Think of it, Sergei. It's humbling to think that one unassuming soul changed the world where the mighty failed."