Stratton shook his head at the memory and sipped his tea.

That night he skipped the acrobatic performance. Too bad about little Miss Sun.

Once Stratton was sure his tour mates had left in the green-and-white Toyota minibus in which all tourists in China seemed to live, he went looking for dinner. On the way, he conducted prolonged negotiations with the white-jacketed floor attendants. If there was a telephone call for Professor Stratton, could they transfer it to the restaurant? It might work. Even if it didn't, it was not crucial. If punctilious David Wang called once unsuccessfully, he would either leave his number or call again.

The restaurant-foreigners only-was a purely functional place of round tables, soiled tablecloths, spotted silverware and spicy food in the inevitable blue-and-white crockery. The tour group ate three meals a day there, Western for breakfast and Chinese for the other two-a procession of savory dishes that appeared unordered.

Stratton settled into a small table and began leafing through a purple-covered issue of the Peking Review. About two paragraphs into the cover story, a gob of wet white rice caromed off the red plastic sign that proclaimed his table 37.

From two tables away, Stratton's assailant grinned evilly, gap-toothed and green-eyed. He was about seven years old and his chopstick catapult was poised for another round. A second child carefully probed the innards of the sugar bowl with a spoon. There were two, no, three, others in tenuous custody of a pretty woman in her thirties and a great bear of a man with a bushy red beard. Stratton intercepted the next gob with his menu.

"Kevin!" the woman jerked the missile commander around to face his dinner.

"I'm sorry," she told Stratton. It was something she had said before.

The bearded man looked up from a dam of napkins that encircled a lake of spilled soy sauce.