When I turned away from the portrait he was staring at me so I told him what he wanted to hear. 'Hurrah. Poland is saved.!

'Well they've got to do something, haven't — '

'Christ, they're not expecting a wave of arrests are they by any chance? How many brave little soldiers of freedom d'you think there'll be left to start this «action» of theirs? A week before the talks half the population of Warsaw's going to be in a strict regime camp in the Urals, don't they realise? What's it called, this «action», got a name?'

Numbly he said: 'Just "The Action". Czyn.'

His long scrubbed schoolboy's hands hung by his sides, sticking from his sleeves as if he'd not finished growing out of his suit; but the defiance was still there behind the shine on his glasses and I knew that whatever I said it wouldn't knock the bright god Czyn off his pedestal.

'How did you get into this game, Merrick?'

'I'm not really in it. They're just friends I've made — '

'I don't mean their game. Ours.'

I was watching him and he wasn't bad: they couldn't have had time in a crash course to train him to this pitch of instant reaction concealment and ninety per cent of it must have been in his make-up. Perhaps this was one of the things that had appealed to whoever had wished this boy on to Egerton. There'd been the slightest flicker across the eyes, gone now, and it was only experience that had let me sense that my question had opened a wound. I went on watching.

'I'm not sure,' he said. The tone was all right too, almost steady. But this was why Egerton had told me not to 'break the poor little devil up'. Because it was easy and you could do it without even trying. 'I suppose it's a chance for me to help them, in secret.' Then he was saying quickly as the thought surfaced from below the conscious level — 'Even my father doesn't know.'