The dark summer streets bustled with life. Where puny street lamps cast wan patches of light, people gathered in loose, friendly groups to escape the heat. Almost all were men, in old-fashioned undershirts. They squatted to gossip or to play cards. The few cars rode with parking lights only, wary of the swirling stream of hard-to-see bicyclists, who used no lights at all. A young couple conducted public courtship on the stone steps of a government office building. From one alleyway, Stratton heard the muffled click of mah jongg tiles, and from a window, the beat of Western rock music from a cheap tape deck. Like headlights, mah jongg and rock music were forbidden in Peking that summer; the headlights so that bicyclists would not be blinded, the ancient game and the music because they were decadent. It pleased Stratton to realize that people still pursued their own muses on summer nights, and to hell with the Party and its rules.

The aim of Stratton's walk was a downtown park built on an artificial hill. The park itself was nothing special, but the circumstances of its construction were testimony to the siege mentality of Chinese communism. Perhaps forty feet high and a quarter mile around, the hill had been built entirely by hand, one bucket at a time, by volunteer workers who had scooped it from underneath the foundations of the city. In every shop, every factory, every school, Stratton had read, a well-oiled door led down to a network of tunnels. It was the most elaborate bomb shelter in the world, and it had taken more than thirty years to finish.

Bombshelter Park, as Stratton had silently dubbed it, was closed. As he strolled back toward the hotel, he thought of David Wang.

He owed much to the old professor. Wang had sensed the disillusion, no, the despair, that Stratton had brought with him to the tiny college in rural Ohio.