Forget the present, Holly, reckon on the future. The future is a plate of steel floor covering that creaks and whistles as it is dragged clear of the supports to which it was bolted down thirty years before.

That's the future, Holly.

A steel plate above the stone chippings and wood sleepers that mark the track from Moscow to the East through Kolomna and Ryazan and Spassk-Ryazanski. The chippings are coated in fine snow, and the cold blusters into the carriage through the draught gap. Behind him the men swore softly, breaking their silence.

The train was not running fast. He could sense the strain of the engine far to the front. There was a dawdle in its pace, and there had been times when it had halted completely, other times when it had slowed to a crawl. The daylight was fleeing from the wilderness that he could not see but whose emptiness beyond the shuttered windows he understood.

Barely audible above the new-found noise of the wheels, he heard the sharp step of feet in the corridor and close to the door of their compartment. There was the flap of the food hatch swinging on its hinge one door away from his. Holly pushed the steel plate down, eased the bolt back into its socket with his toe.

The flap of the door flipped jauntily upward. A sneering face gazed at the caged men. Three brown paper bags were pushed through the hatch to tumble to the carriage floor.

The flap fell back. The two men moved at stoat's speed past Holly. One bag into the hand of the man who was gross and white-skinned, a second for the man with the beard. For a fleeting moment he braced himself for confrontation, sus-pecting that they would want all three bags, but they left him his. They darted back to their bunk and behind him was the sound of ripping paper. Animals… poor bastards, pitiful creatures.