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Brainiac cast a quick glance at the prosecutor and immediately looked away. “Mm… uh… yes,” he said, biting his lip and clearing his throat. “Um… In just a moment… um… they’ll bring the tea…”

“He asked you to give him a call,” the prosecutor said even more casually.

“What? Uhhh… OK… The tea today will be quite exceptional. My new secretary is a genuine connoisseur of teas… That is…”—he cleared his throat again—“…where should I call him?”

“I don’t understand,” the prosecutor said.

“No, well, it’s just that… um… in order to call him, I have to know the… the telephone number… but he never leaves a number…” Brainiac suddenly started fussing about, blushing in his distress, and slapping his hands around on the table. He found a pencil and asked, “Where did he say I should call?”

The prosecutor backed off. “I was joking,” he said.

“Eh? What?” A range of suspicious expressions instantly started flickering across Brainiac’s face in rapid succession. “Ah! Joking?” He guffawed in sham laughter. “You really caught me there… How amusing. And I was thinking… Ha-ha-ha! And here’s the tea!”

The prosecutor accepted a glass of hot, strong tea from the pampered hands of the pampered secretary and said, “OK, I was just joking, enough of that. There’s not much time. Where’s your piece of paper?”

After performing a whole heap of unnecessary movements, Brainiac extracted the draft of a certified report of inspection from the desk. If the way in which he shrank and cringed as he did this was anything to go by, the draft simply had to be crammed absolutely full of false information that was intended to lead the inspector astray, and in general must been composed with subversive intentions.

Riiight then,” said the prosecutor, smacking his lips on a small lump of sugar. “What’s this you have here? ‘Report of Verificatory Investigation’… Riiight… The interference phenomena laboratory… the spectroscopic research laboratory… the integral radiation laboratory… I don’t understand a thing, can’t make head or tail of it. How do you make any sense out of all this?”

“Well, I… hmm… You know, I don’t really know anything about it either—after all, my professional background is as… a manager, I don’t interfere in these matters.” Brainiac kept hiding his eyes, biting on his lip, and vigorously ruffling up his hair, making it absolutely clear beyond the slightest possible doubt that he wasn’t any kind of manager but a Hontian spy with specialized higher education. Well, what a character!

The prosecutor turned his attention back to the report. He made a profound remark about the excessive expenditure of the power amplification group, asked who Zoi Barutu was, and whether he was related to Moru Barutu, the well-known propaganda writer, passed a reproachful comment with regard to the lensless refractometer, which had cost absolutely crazy money although they hadn’t even gotten a handle on it yet, and summed up the work of the radiation research and improvement sector by saying that there was no substantial progress to be observed (and thank God, he added to himself), and that his opinion on this point definitely must be included in the final draft of the report.

He looked through the section of the report dealing with protection against radiation even more casually. “You are merely marking time,” he declared. “In terms of physical protective measures, absolutely nothing had been achieved, and in terms of physiological protective measures, even less than that… In any case, physiological measures aren’t what we need at alclass="underline" why would I want to let myself be hacked to pieces, you could reduce me to an idiot… But the chemists have done well—they’ve won us another minute. A minute last year, and a minute and a half the year before last… What does that mean? It means that now I can take a pill, and instead of thirty minutes, I’ll be in agony for twenty-two. Well, now that’s not bad. Almost thirty percent… Make a note of my opinion: increase the tempo of work on physical protection and pay the staff of the chemical protection division an incentive bonus. That’s all.”

He tossed the sheets of paper across to Brainiac. “Have a clean copy typed out… and my opinion too… And now, strictly pro forma, show me around… well now, let’s say… uh… I visited the physicists last time, take me to see the chemists, I’ll have a look at what they’re up to.”

Brainiac jumped to his feet and pressed more buttons, and the prosecutor got up with an air of extreme exhaustion.

Accompanied by Brainiac and his own day secretary, the prosecutor took a leisurely stroll through the laboratories of the division of chemical protection, politely smiling at people with a single chevron on the sleeve of their white coats, sometimes slapping on the shoulder those who didn’t have any chevrons, and halting beside those who had two chevrons to shake their hands, sagely nod his head, and inquire if they had any complaints.

There weren’t any complaints. They were all apparently working, or pretending to work—in this place you couldn’t tell. Little lights were blinking on various instruments, liquids were boiling in various vessels, there was a smell of some kind of garbage, and in some places they were torturing animals. Everything here was clean, bright, and spacious, the people looked well fed and calm, and they didn’t manifest any enthusiasm, behaving perfectly correctly with the inspector—but without any warmth at all, and in any case without the appropriate obsequiousness.

And hanging in almost every room—whether it was an office or a laboratory—was a portrait of Wanderer: above a desk, beside tables of figures and graphs, above a door, sometimes under glass on a desk. The portraits were amateur photographs and pencil or charcoal sketches, and one of them was even painted in oils. In this place you could see Wanderer playing ball games, Wanderer giving a lecture, Wanderer gnawing on an apple, Wanderer looking severe, thoughtful, weary, or infuriated, and even Wanderer laughing his head off. These sons of bitches even drew cartoons of him and hung them in the most obvious places!… The prosecutor imagined himself walking into the office of the junior counselor of justice, Filtik, and discovering a caricature of himself there. Massaraksh, it was unimaginable, absolutely impossible!

He smiled, slapped shoulders, and shook hands, but all the time he was thinking that this was the second time he had been here since last year, and everything seemed to be the same as before, but previously he somehow hadn’t taken any notice of it all… But now he had. Why only now?

Ah, that was why! What was Wanderer to me a year or two years ago? Formally, he was one of us, but in actuality he was merely an armchair presence who had no influence on politics, no place of his own in politics, and no goals of his own in politics. However, since then Wanderer had succeeded in doing a great deal. The statewide operation for the elimination of foreign spies was his initiative. The prosecutor had conducted those trials himself and had been astounded at the time to find that he was not dealing with the usual sham degenerate spies but with genuine, seasoned intelligence agents, planted by the Island Empire to gather scientific and economic information. Wanderer had fished them all out, every last one, and after that he had become the regular chief of special counterintelligence.

And moreover, it was Wanderer who had exposed the conspiracy led by bald Blister, an appalling character, who had been very firmly entrenched and vigorously and dangerously undermined Wanderer’s stewardship of counterintelligence. And he had whacked Blister himself—he didn’t trust anybody else to do it. He always acted openly, never used any kind of camouflage, and only acted alone—no coalitions, no unions, no temporary alliances. In this way he had brought down three heads of the Military Department, one after another—they were summoned to the top before they even had an inkling of what was happening—and then managed to get Twitcher, a man whose fear of war amounted to panic, appointed…