I wondered what sort of freedom Merrick hadn't got. It was no good asking him: he wouldn't know; it'd be below the conscious level. But he'd tell me, if I listened. I said: 'You've made friends there too?' 'In Warsaw?'

'Yes.'

'A few. A few friends.'

'They in the underground?'

'Well, I mean almost everyone's in the underground, people of that age. My age.'

'Students?'

'Oh no. Well, a few. But they're mostly engineers or shop assistants, people like that. You have to work, you see, if you want to eat. Some of them have more than one job, doing night shifts as well, just to get enough money for food and clothes, especially in winter — '

'What's the general drift of things out there, Merrick?'

He leaned forward, his long hands chopping at the air. 'There's been tension ever since the Prague Spring — there was a lot of sympathy for the Czechs of course — and now the underground forces are becoming quite organised. This is known, and a few months ago the authorities started trying to soften up the workers by leniency all round — less checking of sickness reports at the factories, smaller fines for indiscipline, lighter sentences for stealing state property, that kind of thing.' A shade triumphantly he said with another chop of his hands: 'Well it didn't work.'

'What's the aim of these candlelight crusaders you've been running with? Wreck the talks?'

He drew back into his chair. 'They're not just a lot of irresponsible students. Their aim is to bring Russia to the brink. That's quite a — serious intention, don't you think?'

'Could be serious, yes. For them. The other side of any brink is a long drop and if Russia goes down she'll take Poland with her, don't they know that?'

'Their aim,' he said slowly, reading from the dog-eared manifesto they'd been waving at him in the cellars out there, 'is to overthrow the present regime and set up a truly national government in time for the East-West talks to take place in a free Poland.'