He should be getting home, he knew. He should have left long ago. The kids would be in bed by now, but Cheryl would be waiting up for him.

To the east, almost beyond the angle of his vision, glowing by reflected light, he could see the ghost-like whiteness of the shaft that rose beside the river in honour of the first astronauts, who had gone out more than five hundred years ago to circle Earth in space, boosted there by the raw, brute power of chemical reaction.

Washington, he thought, a town of mouldering buildings, and filled with monuments — a tangle of marble and of granite, and thick with the moss of old associations, its metal and its stone veneered with the patina of ancient memories and with the aura of once-great power still hanging over it. Once the national capital of an old republic, now no more than a seat of provincial government, it still held an air of greatness draped about it like a cloak.

And it was best, he thought, at a time like this, when a soft, wet night had fallen over it, creating an illusive background through which old ghosts could move.

The hushed sounds of a hospital at night whispered in the room — the soft padding of a nurse going down the corridor, the muted rumble of a cart, the low buzzing of a call bell at the station just across the hail.

Behind him someone opened the door. Daniels swung around.

'Good evening, Gordy, he said.

Gordon Barnes, a resident, grinned at him. 'I thought you'd be gone by now, he said.

'Just about to. I was going over that report.

He gestured at the table in the centre of the room.

Barnes picked up the file of papers and glanced at it.