"By mistake."

"It wasn’t a mistake. They were hunting for a man who’d been getting people out across the border, and they’d missed him. So it was to..."

"To have something to report to the Central Office." Bruna nodded. "He was about the age you are now," she said. The bus stopped, people climbed on, crowding the aisle. "Since then, twenty-seven years, always since then, it’s been too late. For me. First too stupid, then too late. This time is for you. I missed mine."

"You’ll see," Stefana said. "There’s enough time to go round."

This is history.

This is history. Soldiers stand in a row before the reddish, almost windowless palace; their muskets are at the ready. Young men walk across the stones toward them, singing, "Beyond this darkness is the light, 0 Liberty, of thine eternal day!" The soldiers fire their guns. The young men live happily ever after.

This is biology.

"Where the hell is everybody?"

"It’s Thursday," Stefan Fabbre said, adding, "Damn!" as the figures on the computer screen jumped and flickered. He was wearing his topcoat over sweater and scarf, since the biology laboratory was heated only by a space heater that shorted out the computer circuit if they were on at the same time.

"There are programs that could do this in two seconds," he said, jabbing morosely at the keyboard. Avelin came up and glanced at the screen. "What is it?"

"The RNA comparison count. I could do it faster on my fingers." Avelin, a bald, spruce, pale, dark-eyed man of 40, roamed the laboratory, looked restlessly through a folder of reports. "Can’t run a university with this going on," he said. "I’d have thought you’d be down there." Fabbre entered a new set of figures and said, "Why?"

"You’re an idealist."

"Am l?" Fabbre leaned back, rolled his head to get the cricks out. "I try hard not to be," he said.