I sat down. Everything went around for a few minutes. Before long they would be stopping the train at Tyn. More policemen would board it, and this time they would wait for the real Evan Tanner to stand up. They would spend perhaps half an hour searching the train before it became apparent to them that I had somehow left it. Then they would blow whistles and draw up plans and begin searching for me.

So there was not a great deal of time. But I could not start searching for Moll or Neumann or Pisek until I could clear my head enough to know which was which. I had to make use of what time I had.

I stretched out on my back, placed my arms at my sides, closed my eyes, and remained that way for twenty minutes.

I had not chosen the ostrich’s method of hiding from danger. The play was one I had borrowed from Yoga, a deep relaxation technique which helped replace sleep for me. I lay very still, contracting and elaborately relaxing each muscle group in turn, then doing what I could to turn off my mind, making it as blank as possible. About twenty minutes had passed when I yawned and stretched and sat up again. I couldn’t be sure of the time – my watch was another casualty of the fall – but that particular regimen generally takes somewhere between eighteen and twenty-three minutes.

I felt much better. The pains were still there but they didn’t get in my way as much. More important, my head was working again. I had to go to the town of Pisek, where a man named Kurt Neumann lived. I would tell Neumann that Heinz Moll had sent me. Pisek, if I remembered the map of Czechoslovakia correctly, was a few miles east of the Vltava and about twenty miles up the river from Tyn. I was probably about ten or twelve miles from Tyn myself.

The sky was overcast, with no stars to offer a clue to directions. I could follow the tracks of the train, but I knew too well where they would lead. They would take me straight into the railroad station at Tyn, and I knew the sort of welcome that awaited me there. And, once they knew I had left the train, it stood to reason that their initial search parties would work their way back along the train’s roadbed.