Absolute calm, though not absolute stillness. The sea shifted lazily against the sandy beach, its motion indexed not by the white crests of ripples-the water was too oily for waves to break-but by the pale spots of imperishable plastic rubbish.

Tangled greenery grew down to within a short distance of the tide-mark.

Night. The sky was almost clear of cloud. There was no natural moon, but as though Phobos and Deimos had been transported from Mars-two small man-made moons arced between the stars.

Silence. Only branches rustling and the sound of the sea.

Less than a mile off-shore, a smear of white obtruded on the glassy water. It could have been due to a partly submerged rock. It was not. It lasted two minutes and disappeared.

Something fractionally blacker than the black ocean began to approach the land.

A shadow among shadows, Danty Ward crept through the underbrush. He felt his footing at each step so that he did not break the night-quiet; nonetheless he managed to move rather swiftly. He wore a dark jersey and dark pants, and he had paused by a puddle to smear mud on the highlights of his cheekbones and forehead. Gilding the lily in reverse. He was not following a trodden path, but he was keeping parallel to and a few yards from a dirt road that few people traveled. Indeed, hardly anyone came to this stretch of shore at all. It was most inadvisable to try. There were complex alarms and boobytraps, not to mention an electronic fence. Beyond these, hidden among trees and thickets, were highly efficient radar antennae. There were also silos in which were sunk short-range missiles with nuclear warheads of about quarter-megaton capacity. Back near the superway he had passed posters that showed a clenched fist hammering a city into ruins. Underneath captions said: PART OF THE WORLD'S MOST PERFECT DEFENSIVE SYSTEM. He had taken the precaution of turning everything off.

Somewhere nearby came the scrunching sound of a foot moving in gravel. Danty halted stock-still to feel the world, then stealthily made towards the road he had been avoiding. Parting the fronds of a flowering bush he saw a car on the other side of the track. about twelve feet away. A man leaned against it, his left wrist held close to his face as if he were trying to read his watch in the thin before dawn light.

With a little nod of satisfaction Danty slipped back into nowhere.

He passed on now towards the beach. coming soon to the point at which the greenery thinned and left only tough dune grasses. courtesy of the Federal Erosion Commission. "Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea . . . "

Like living on a melting iceberg.

A few yards farther on. a boulder stuck its blunt snout up from the sand. Danty looked both ways along the beach, then darted into shelter beside the rock. His back against it, he relaxed, invisible until daylight.

If he was right. though. he would be gone by then.

He stared seaward. Straining his eyes. he discerned something more coherent than a chance assembly of weed or garbage being carried inshore. Matt-dark but a little shiny because it was wet. Purposively shaped. A man in a survival suit.

Danty allowed himself a grunt of self-approbation, and concentrated on making his relaxation still more complete.

Vassily Sheklov, on the other hand, was tense. He had no qualms about the suit he was wearing-it was a very advanced model, and he would cheerfully have bet on it to carry him through hell-fire. It could not, however, protect him from the oppressive weight of knowledge about his situation, which bore down on his skull as though the dome of the night sky were leaning its entire burden on his head. He had unwisely allowed the submarine captain to press a last glass of vodka on him, by way of a toast to the success of his mission. The liquor-and his careful

yoga exercises-had sustained him during the nerve-racking period while they were inching towards the coast, sometimes within a meter of grounding on the bottom; to duck beneath the sweep-pattern of the radar they knew to be located hereabouts. they had to break surface not more than a kilometer from the beach. where the water was ridiculously shallow for such a big vessel. But now he was out here on his own he was horribly aware of what the slug of alcohol might have done to the speed of his reflexes.

Landing in a spot that was as thick with nuclear missiles as a porcupine's back with spines! He had to keep . reminding himself that the paradoxical advice had come ., from Turpin, who ought to be reliable if anyone was. Ac– -. cording to him a reserved area was the safest choice pro– vided the submarine didn't trigger the automatic firing . mechanisms, because Americans were almost superstitious about such places and nobody would be within miles.

Thus far the advice had proved sound. Sheklov noted the fact in the tidy mental card-index of data about Turpin that he was compiling.

His knees touched bottom. He found his footing, and abruptly the buoyancy of his suit converted into weight: Not a great weight. He stood up with sea around his legs and looked the scene over.

Nothing moved except branches and man-made litter bobbing on the wavelets.

He went up the sand looking for the tidemark, and found that the full tide. due soon after dawn, would erase all but a few of his footprints. When he gained the protection of the first bushes, he opened his suit and peeled it off. Underneath he wore authentic American leisure clothing, smuggled via Mexico or Canada.

He laid the suit down in a wind-sculpted hollow and hit the destruct switch on its shoulder. Faint smoke drifted up, and the plastic began to deliquesce.

Waiting for the process to go to completion, he used a fronded branch to scuff over the three footprints he had left above the high-water mark. On his return to the suit: he found only a puddle of jelly, already beginning to soak into the sand. He shoveled more sand over it with a bit, of jetsam and tossed miscellaneous garbage on top of the' little pile. Then, with a final glance out to sea to confirm that the submarine had vanished, he headed inland.

Danty rose from his boulder and faded into the undergrowth again. He kept pace, discreetly.

Sheklov found the dirt road easily. The captain had been laudably precise in his navigation. He walked by its edge-carefully, because it had rained here within the past few hours and the ground was soft-until he came within sight of a car: an expensive make that he recognized from his briefing. Waiting beside it, a man raised his arm in hesitant greeting.

Continuing at a neutral pace, Sheklov studied him. He wore a dark jacket and pants, by Russian standards rather old-fashioned. He was about fifty, above medium height, plump-cheeked. paunchy, sweating a little-from nervousness, presumably, because the night was cool. . . Yes, this was Turpin okay. Either that, or someone had gone to a lot of trouble to prepare a duplicate.

Now the man spoke in a wheezy whisper, saying, “Holtzer?”

Sheklov nodded. For the time being, he was indeed Holtzer.

Turpin let go a gusty sigh and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. “Sorry,” he said, the word muffled by its folds. “The strain of waiting was beginning to get to me. Uh-did you have a good trip?”

“Well, the water was pretty dirty,” Sheklov said, and tensed for the answer. It was conceivable something had gone wrong, at the receiving if not at the delivering end. But Turpin's response was word-perfect.

“Still, the air around here isn't too bad.”