"A baseball game?"

McCarthy laughed "Last night's game. We're thirteen hours ahead of the East Coast, remember.

There's a game on almost every morning-Armed Forces radio."

"Pretty nice, if you're a fan."

"Naw, not me. Only been to one game in my life. My father took me to Briggs Stadium when I was a kid. About the third inning there was this foul ball and I reached up to catch it, you know, like on television. Broke two fingers. Never went back."

"If you're not a fan, why do you listen?" Stratton teased.

McCarthy heaved himself upright and planted both feet on the floor. Stratton, from the other side of the desk, imagined without seeing the spurts of dust.

"It's China, baby. In China, I'm a baseball fan because it helps kill the morning. In China, I read five or six newspapers a day and cut out things I might use six months from now, but probably never will. Savin' bits of string, but never finding the spool. For correspondents, China is purgatory, baby. The thing about this place that drives you crazy is that there are no facts; a billion people and not one goddamned fact. Did you know that everything here is a secret until it is published, even the fucking weather forecast?"

"Then what do you do for news?"

"I worry a lot." McCarthy grinned. "Particularly on Thursdays; that's when stories for the weekend paper are due. Today they want a political piece, ugh. I don't understand what's goin' on-that's normal-but I have reached the solemn conclusion that neither do the Chinese."

"Like how?"

"Like something big is bubbling beneath the surface. There are lots of little signs: people being suddenly reassigned or demoted, or simply disappearing-they could be forcibly retired, or dead-nobody knows. No one will talk about it."

"A power struggle," Stratton offered.

"Don't you know it. This place has been a circus since Mao died; probably before, too. When Deng came in with his pragmatists, the old hard-line Maoists got pushed aside. Now I'd say that the hard-liners were getting their own back."