Startling him, there came a knock on the apartment door.

With caution, LAN Duncan answered it. He found his neighbour Mr Stone standing there, looking nervous.

‘You weren't at All Souls?' Edgar Stone said. ‘Won't they check and find out?' He held in his hands Ian Duncan's corrected test.

Duncan said, ‘Tell me how I did.' He prepared himself.

Entering the apartment, Stone shut the door after him. He glanced at the TV set, saw Nicole seated with the oceanographers, listened for a moment to her, then abruptly said in a hoarse voice, ‘You did fine.' He held out the test.

‘I passed?'

Duncan could not believe it. He accepted the papers, examining them with incredulity. And then he understood what had happened.

Stone had conspired to see that he passed. He had falsified the score, probably out of humanitarian motives. Duncan raised his head and they looked at each other, neither speaking. This is terrible, Duncan thought. What'll I do now? His reaction amazed him, but there it was.

I wanted to fail, he realized. Why? So I can get out of here, so I would have an excuse to give up all this, my apartment and my job, say fork it and go. Emigrate with nothing more than the shirt on my back, in a jalopy that falls to pieces the moment it comes to rest in the Martian wilderness.

‘Thanks,' he said glumly.

In a rapid voice, Stone said, ‘Y-you can do the same for me sometime.'

‘Oh yeah, be happy to,' Duncan said.

Scuttling back out of the apartment, Stone left him alone with the TV set, his jug and the falsely corrected test papers, and his thoughts.

3

One would have to go back to the year 1994, the year that West Germany entered the Union as the fifty-third of the United States, to understand why Vince Strikerock, an American citizen and an inhabitant of The Abraham Lincoln Apartments, was listening to der Alte on the television set while he shaved, the next morning.