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on the lugger, so we’ll try to get you up on the beach. You understand?’
    Tap
    It took only a few moments to secure the rope; now he had better get clear before the Arafura started to lift. But there was something he had to do first.
    ‘Hello!’ he shouted. ‘I’ve fixed the rope. We’ll lift in a minute. D’you hear me?’
    Tap
    ‘Then you can hear this too. You’ll never get there alive. I’ve fixed that as well.’
    Tap, tap
    ‘You’ve got five hours to die. My brother took longer than that, when he ran into your mine field. You understand? I’m from Budapest. I hate you and your country and everything it stands for. You’ve taken my home, my family, made my people slaves. I wish I could see your face now—I wish I could watch you die, as I had to watch Theo. When you’re halfway to the island, this rope is going to break where I cut it. I’ll go down and fix another—and that’ll break, too. You can sit in there and wait for the bumps.’
    Tibor stopped abruptly, shaken and exhausted by the violence of his emotion. There was no room for logic or reason in this orgasm of hate; he did not pause to think, for he dared not. Yet somewhere far down inside his mind the real truth was burning its way up toward the light of consciousness.
    It was not the Russians he hated, for all that they had done. It was himself, for he had done more. The blood of Theo, and of ten thousand countrymen, was upon his own hands. No one could have been a better Communist than he had been, or have more supinely believed the propaganda from Moscow. At school and college, he had been the first to hunt out and denounce ‘traitors’. (How many had he sent to the labour camps or the AVO torture chambers?) When he had seen the truth, it was far, far too late; and even then, he had not fought—he had run.
    He had run across the world, trying to escape his guilt; and the two drugs of danger and dissipation had helped him to forget the past. The only pleasures life gave him now were the loveless embraces he sought so feverishly when he was on the mainland, and his present mode of existence was proof that these were not enough. If he now had the power to deal out death, it was only because he had come here in search of it himself.
    There was no sound from the capsule; its silence seemed contemptuous, mocking. Angrily, Tibor banged against it with the hilt of his knife.
    ‘Did you hear me?’ he shouted. ‘Did you hear me?’
    No answer.
    ‘Damn you! I know you’re listening! If you don’t answer, I’ll hole you and let the water in!’
    He was sure that he could, with the sharp point of his knife. But that was the last thing he wanted to do; that would be too quick, too easy an ending.
    There was still no sound; maybe the Russian had fainted. Tiber hoped not, but there was no point in waiting any longer. He gave a vicious parting bang on the capsule, and signalled to his tender.
    Nick had news for him when he broke the surface.
    ‘T. I. radio’s been squawking,’ he said. ‘The Ruskies are asking everyone to look out for one of their rockets. They say it should be floating somewhere off the Queensland coast. Sounds as if they want it badly.’
    ‘Did they say anything else about it?’ Tibor asked anxiously.
    ‘Oh yes—it’s been round the moon a couple of times.’
    ‘That all?’
    ‘Nothing else that I remember. There was a lot of science stuff I didn’t get.’
    That figured; it was just like the Russians to keep as quiet as they could about an experiment that had gone wrong.
    ‘You tell T. I. that we’d found it?’
    ‘Are you crazy? Anyway, the radio’s crook; couldn’t if we wanted to. Fixed that rope properly?’
    ‘Yes—see if you can haul her off the bottom.’
    The end of the rope had been wound round the mainmast, and in a few seconds it had been drawn taut. Although the sea was calm, there was a slight swell, and the lugger was rolling ten or fifteen degrees. With each roll, the gunwales would rise a