The room is artfully claustrophobic, rectangular and window-less, with dirty green walls and a low, oppressive ceiling from which short-stalked spotlights dangle at the ends of jointed metal arms. The spotlights are trained on the forehead of Roger Buckmaster, who sits uncomfortably slouched in a squat, hard narrow chair with broad aluminum armpieces and a high backrest. Electrodes are taped to Buckmaster’s wrists and temples; their leads disappear into the recesses of the backrest. Buckmaster looks unnaturally pale, sweaty, blotchy-faced; his eyes are glassy; his lips are slack. Clearly Avogadro has been working him over for some while.

Avogadro, who is standing next to Buckmaster as Shadrach enters, looks little better — grim, harried, frayed. “A madhouse,” he mutters. “Fifty arrests in the first hour. We have every interrogation cell full and they’re still coming in. Lunatics, beggars, thieves, all the riffraff of Ulan Bator. And the radicals, of course. I go from cell to cell, cell to cell. And for what? For what?” A rough-edged laugh. “There’ll be plenty of meat for the organ farms before this is over.” Slowly, moving his heavy frame as though doubled gravity drags it down, he turns to the man in the chair. “Well, Buckmaster? You have a visitor. Do you recognize him?”

Buckmaster stares at the floor. “You know bloody well I do.”

“Let me be.”

“Tell me his name,” Avogadro urges in a tone that is tired but menacing.

“Mordecai. Shadrach Bloody Mordecai. Em Dee.”

“Thank you, Buckmaster, Now tell me when you last saw Dr. Mordecai.”

“Last night,” Buckmaster says, his voice a feeble fluting thing, barely audible.

“Louder?”

“Last night.”

“Where?”

“You know where, Avogadro!”

“I want you to tell me yourself.”

“I already have.”

“Again. In front of Dr. Mordecai. Tell me.”

“Why don’t you just carve me up and be done with it?”

“You’re making this hard for yourself, Buckmaster. You’re also making it hard for me.”

“Pity.”

“I have no choice about this,” Avogadro says.

Lifting his head, Buckmaster manages a cold, sullen, furious glare. “Do I? Do I? Oh, I know the game. You’ll question me for a while, you’ll find me guilty of conspiracy, you’ll sentence me to death, and off I go to the organ farm, right? Right? And there I lie, a corpse that isn’t dead, so that whenever Genghis Mao needs a lung, a kidney, a heart, someone can come and cut out mine, right? While I lie there, dead, warm, breathing and meta-metabolizing, part of the stockpile.”

“Buckmaster—”

Buckmaster chuckles. “Genghis Mao thinks the stocks are getting low, and he can’t use the miserable organ-rotted people out there, so he turns on us, he tosses a few dozen of his own people to the farms, right? Very well, take me away! Turn me into cannibal food! But let’s end this farce fast, shall we? Stop asking me idiotic questions.”

Avogadro sighs. “To continue. You saw Dr. Mordecai at—”

“Timbuktu.”

Avogadro lifts his left hand. A security man sitting at a table in the farthest corner does something to a control console in front of him; Buckmaster jerks and twitches and the left side of his face goes into a brief ugly spasm. “You saw him where?”

“Piccadilly Circus.”

Again the left hand, higher. Again the touching of controls; again the facial spasm, much worse. Shadrach Mordecai shifts his weight uneasily from foot to foot. In a low voice he says, “Possibly it isn’t necessary to—”

“It’s necessary, yes,” Avogadro tells him. “The forms must be observed.” To Buckmaster he says, “I’m prepared to keep this up all day. It bores me, but it’s my job, and if I have to hurt you, I’ll hurt you, and if you make me cripple you, I’ll cripple you, because I have no choice. Do you understand? I have no choice. Now, again: you met Dr. Mordecai in—”

“Karakorum.”

“Where in Karakorum?”

“Outside the transtemporalists’ tent.”

“About what time?”

“I don’t know. Late, but it was before midnight.”

“Dr. Mordecai, is this correct? Your answers will be recorded.”

“It’s all correct so far,” Shadrach says.

“Good. Go on, Buckmaster. Tell me what you told me before. You encountered Dr. Mordecai and you said what to him?”

“I spoke a lot of bloody nonsense.”

“What kind of nonsense, Buckmaster?”

“Foolish talk. The transtemporalists jumbled my mind with their drugs.”

“What exactly did you say to the doctor?”

Buckmaster, silent, stares at the floor. The right hand of Avogadro rises almost to his shoulder. The controls are adjusted. Buckmaster leaps in his seal as though speared. His right arm thrashes about like an infuriated snake. “Tell me, Buckmaster. Please.”

“I accused him of doing evil.”

“Go on.”

“I called him a Judas.”

“And a black bastard,” Shadrach says.

Avogadro, with a gentle nudge, indicates to Shadrach that his prompting is unwelcome.

“Specifically, Buckmaster, what did you accuse Dr. Mordecai of doing?”

“Of doing his job.”

“Meaning what?”

“His job is keeping the Chairman alive. I said he’s responsible for keeping Genghis Mao from having died five years ago.”

Avogadro says, “Is that correct, Dr. Mordecai?”

Shadrach hesitates. He doesn’t particularly want to cooperate in sending Buckmaster to the organ farm. But it would be folly to try to protect the little man now. The truth about last night’s incident in Karakorum has already been drawn forth and recorded, he knows. Buckmaster is condemned out of his own mouth. No lie can save him, but only imperil the liar. “It is,” he says.

“So. Buckmaster, do you regret that Genghis Mao didn’t die five years ago?”

“Let me be, Avogadro.”

“Do you? Do you truly want the Chairman to be dead? Is that your position?”

“I had the drug in my head!”

“You don’t have the drug in your head now, Buckmaster. What are your feelings about Genghis Mao at this moment?”

“I don’t know. I simply don’t know.”

“Hostile?”

“Perhaps. Look, Avogadro, don’t force any more out of me. You have me, you’ll give me to the cannibals tonight, isn’t that enough for you?”

“We can end this as soon as you cooperate.”

“Very well,” Buckmaster says. He pulls himself upright, finding some remaining resource of dignity. “I don’t care for the regime of Genghis Mao. I am not in general agreement with the policies of the PRC. I regret having devoted so much effort to their service. I was overwrought last night and I said a lot of foul things to Dr. Mordecai for which I feel shame today. But. But, Avogadro! But I have never done anything disloyal. And I don’t know a thing about the death of Mangu. I swear I had no part in it.”

Avogadro nods. “Dr. Mordecai. did the prisoner mention Mangu last night?”

“I don’t think he did.”

“Can you be more positive about that?” Shadrach considers. “No,” he says finally. “To the best of my recollection, he said nothing about Mangu.”

“Did the prisoner make any threats against the life of Genghis Mao?”

“Not that I recall.”

“Try to remember. Doctor.”

Shadrach shakes his head. “You have to understand, I had just come out of the transtemporaltsts’ tent myself. My mind was still elsewhere during most of Buckmaster’s tirade. He did speak critically of the government, yes, quite strongly, but I don’t think there were any direct threats. No.”

“I should refresh your memory, then,” Avogadro says, gesturing to his assistant in the corner. There is a hissing sound, and then, from an invisible speaker, the sound of a voice, strangely familiar but oddly strange. His own.

This is suicidal, the way you’re carrying on. There’ll be a report of all this on the Chairman’s desk tomorrow, Roger, more likely than not. You’re destroying yourself.

—I’ll destroy him. The bloodsucker. He holds us all for ransom, our bodies, our souls—