Then I began moving through the Weird white light, lurching against my own shadow that the sun was throwing against the chalk. I could have believed I wasn't alone. It took a minute to reach the edge of the cloud and I was choking a bit. Mixed with the damp-cellar smell of the chalk was the sharpness of molten metal and kerosene. The flame-wave followed me and I had to start running again until I was clear.

The wailing sound got on my nerves and I had to stop and identify it: the birds following the tractor had flown to a group of elms and were still calling in fright at the explosion. The man had left his tractor and was lumbering towards the cloud of burning kerosene as if there were something he could do.

I found the binoculars and went back to the car, turning it towards Westheim. On the way there I realized something. Parkis had known.

Most of the post office staff were still outside and people were telling them what had made the noise, but one man was behind the counter and I gave him the number and hung about for ten minutes until the connection was made. London would get it by the overt intelligence sources in a few hours but they wanted it quicker than that or they wouldn't have sent me here as an observer. They hadn't warned me to use speech-code when reporting so I compromised and just said: 'The fly fell down.'

Chapter Two — BRIEFING

People with Pekingese grow to look like Pekingese.

The Bureau doesn't officially exist, so everyone there has grown to look anonymous. They are flesh and blood but you never quite know whose flesh or whose blood they consist of today: you get the odd feeling that during the night there was enacted an unspeakable rite involving flesh-eating and blood-letting by some refined form of extrasensory transference and that the A-positive you were talking to yesterday is now Rhesus-negative.