Having braced himself, he tried, by all means, to curb his usual human passions to be ready for the most important meeting. The gorillas noised a little bit and pushed into the middle of the circle a very frightening giant.

- Where do such people come from? – thought Colonel.

It was a thundering cocktail called "Mother Earth." There was a Spanish beard on his swarthy face. He had a crooked aquiline nose, and lackluster brown Asian eyes, which were throwing angry glances. Relief biceps were bigger than Dux’ legs and from behind his figure was slim and chiseled as the best representatives of the black continent have.

He remembered the captain’s Klubov words.

- Do you think the war will never happen? You're wrong. The war is always and everywhere.

At training, at the firing ground the boys were given wooden imitation of knives and guns. The instructor captain Klubov, bypassing the strict instructions gave military knives, guns with live cartridges and ready for shooting and the AK-47. The modern war is too transient. You either already dead or you survived and killed everyone. How you did it, it is not very interesting. Of course, the constant training on the firing ground is very important but it is for the second time. To survive and to win the battle, you have to have something else.

The self-styled referee brought together the opponents, but they didn’t shake their hands. The battle began.

Frankly speaking, Colonel didn’t even know what was waiting for him. That’s why, just in case, he was jumping around the enemy at a short distance, waving his fists for appearances' sake. A moment later, the Terminator turned Dux left, leaving behind him. Colonel jumped from that mad monster.

- Ooty, Ooty, a dog! - whispered Dux.

However, his nose was already broken and blood was spread on his face. The gorillas happily buzzed and enjoyed it.

- Maybe he's twice champion in some kind of Aikido? I couldn’t even understand how he punched me strongly in the nose. I was lucky to break away! Colonel went on funny jumping back, but with any approach that monster painfully pinching and punching with three long fingers in the opponent's body, who was screaming of pain, to the joyful fans pleasure.

- Other such pinches, and I will be dead - he thought.

All enemy’s movements were perfected to the highest level. The place this type had touched was already pulsed with blood.

But he couldn’t understand some thin thread.

Something was wrong, and he felt bad. Maybe these devastating strange eyes? This machine of death can kill me without pathos just as a recycle machine does its job.

- I stake everything - he thought - A la guerre, comme a la guerre. They obviously want this?

He remembered once fighting with the master of Judo. Then he was told that the judoist was very angry because he couldn’t understand how he had lost. Colonel cared a straw. He allowed the freak to snatch at his shoulder, trying not to hurt his throat and gave him, as a leech, the opportunity to snatch at the body. The monster lost a bit freedom. It was enough for Colonel to turn his program of death on. With terrible punches in the groin, throat and neck, he tried to turn off the enemy. But the last compressed Dux’ head with a superhuman force. His face turned into a blood mask. Then Colonel moved slightly to the side and with the final punch crushed his Adam's apple, breaking his cervical vertebra.

The spectators darkened. Their furious evil eyes were very expressive. Each of spectators wanted to roast Colonel for a breaded cutlet.

Dux, covered with blood, intuitively felt the glances of the silent crowd. He looked the gym around and saw black shiny eyes of Skull, who was surrounded by dozen of bodyguards.

Colonel’s fate of the life and death was at stake at that moment.

*

Shadow was sitting on a stone bench of two feet length. A capital building, closed up with the metal sheet with small holes for air and a grating was depicted by the window. The walls of one meter wide, mixed on the raw eggs, built by great ancestors, didn’t allow blowing them up even with strong howitzers. There was a stinking close-stool and a wash basin from the all facilities. It was forbidden to lie down.

For the whole week, Shadow has been sitting in the pre-trial prison of the Federal Budget Institution of the Correctional Facility No. 90 seven kilometers away from Rybinsk. Surprisingly, that he took part of his life, as the inevitable and did not suffer. He imbibed the sounds of the prison with his mother's milk because he was born in a prison in Siblag in nineteen forty-seven. He has been dreaming for the whole his adult life to get his maternity hospital-prison somewhere in the Narym region, but he was afraid. He remembered as his mother has been crying a lot for the last days, and then she was taken away somewhere forever. Shadow has always treated to his compatriot with some merry sarcasm and a peppercorn, especially to those in the uniform. Life in orphanages in vast Sibera, army for two years in the construction battalion comparable by savageness to hard labor. When he entered the Bauman Moscow State Technical University he hardly fit into the life of those Moscow pupils. Shadow looked a bit older. But inside he felt thousand years old. He knew what the Motherland was and if you were under distribution, you could be saved only by case or something else, but not logic or reason. The perfected system easily reduced million human lives and turned them into camp dust, and again confirming the phrase "do not believe, do not fear, do not ask." So Shadow, finally, decided to have a rest. He was falling into drowsiness between exhausting interrogations, trying to sleep. And when he had some powers and pain, fear and worries about his strange unsettled life left him, he began thinking.

*

A black Siberian night was full of countless stars from the Milky Way in the form of the Delta, he peered into the infinite, trying to penetrate into the depths of the world. Sitting on the stove in the village house, a school and a village library, in the Golitsins’ underground, where were hidden French original manuscripts, he avidly read hundreds of books, swallowed piles of German books in the storeroom at Aunt Rose, trying to establish contact with the Universe. He intuitively felt that infinite space wasn’t empty, but it was alive, full of inexhaustible life.

Once, when he was fourteen, he came closely the discovering of the global triad: Space, Light and Darkness. It was winter, it was minus forty-two degrees of Celsius outdoor. The village sighed and creaked with the sharp frost. That night, the dogs, one by one were barking and he had no place to spend the night. He got into the depths of odorous stack, so only his head was sticking out of it. He remembered it was two am. There was no moon, the air was clean, as it was in the Siberian foothill areas. Shadow was observing thousands of stars and suddenly a compound winded basis of the universe triad came to his mind, it was hovering above him, and his heart trembled and paralysed with terror, unknown to mortals.

At four AM the inspiration, eventually released him. All his rest life was a semblance of enlightenment. Once, having got into the academic environment of the Institute, Shadow plunged into the science, sat in the libraries searching the same free-thinkers like Diogenes. Surprisingly, most of people were suppressed by the dead truths. They got into a very musty atmosphere, cramped by the petrified ideas fetters, like drying coral islands. Searching for the philosopher's stone, he shoveled the libraries. His friends were Henri de Régnier, Montaigne and Goethe. Unexpected meetings with teachers were an outlet for him. At night, he ate raw potatoes at the neighbors in the dormitory and at three AM he was telling strange truth to the lonely smart students who left their rooms just to hear him.