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and here space is not a problem. This land goes on almost forever. The cowboys learned that the hard way a hundred years or more ago. But the same holds true today. That's our one absolute advantage over the English, the Europeans, the Japanese.''
    "What, our land?"
    "Not the land, per se. But, rather, how having land as a natural resource makes us act and react. And it's our one true link with the Soviets." Bernard Godwin never said Russians. It was always Soviets-and there was a vast difference between the two terms. The Russians were only one people who inhabited the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics along with the Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, the people of the Baltic Republics, the Georgians and the Armenians, the trans-Caucasians, the Ukrainians, not to mention the Moslem minorities, who were part of a whole other microuniverse. Godwin had studied them all in depth. So, of course, had Russell Slade; it was just that his conclusions differed from those of Godwin. As long as the Soviet minorities were a collective thorn in Russia's side, so much the better, he believed. Let the Russian government be distracted and drained by internal problehis for as long as possible. Christ, he thought, why doesn't Bernard see how the minorities bedevil the Russian government? The thought of helping to resolve that immensely difficult issue for the Russians seemed absolutely insane to Slade. Glasnost or no glasnost, an off-balance Russia was, in his opinion, a manageable Russia.
    "The Soviet people are not, thank God, the Russian people,'' Godwin said now, making his way around a carefully bordered semicircle of variegated pansies. "Each Soviet minority is like a fruit shaking itself free of the central tree. It is time for a forest to grow up in the wilderness surrounding that one tree.''
    Russell Slade shook his head. This is a dead issue as far as the Mall is concerned, he thought. Why won't Bernard give it up? He said, ''Does this in any way bring us back to Tori Nunn?''
    Godwin fluttered one rather feminine hand; its ridged back was covered with liver spots. "Tori Nunn was your affair from the beginning. She still is."
    Slade recognized in that one snapped retort the edge of the boundary he had crossed. He took a mental pace backward onto safer ground. He was prepared to take his punishment like a man. He nodded. "All right. I admit that it might have been a mistake to bring her back like that.''
    "It certainly was for Solares."
    "Yes. It was a shame to lose such a valuable agent."
    Godwin said, "Let me remind you this isn't a baseball game. It isn't a run the opposition has scored against us. It's a death in the family."
    So that's why the old man has summoned me to his summer house in the country, Russell Slade thought. Stone and thatch, birds and flowers, all very bucolic. But there isn't anything bucolic about the old man. He's as full of bile as ever.
    Slade looked at Bernard Godwin. If he had ever been under the misapprehension that being made the director of the Mall meant it was his to run, here was the proof it just wasn't so.
    Bernard Godwin, the man who created the Mall, despite rumors of ill-health and even imminent death, was still in the thick of it. his to command were the unknowable routes to power, and this power continued to hum inside him like a vast engine.
    More than anything else, Russell Slade longed to possess this power. Through guile, cunning, and deceit-Godwin's trine of shadow virtues-Slade had risen faster and farther through the labyrinthine ranks of Bernard Godwin's hybrid brainchild-part espionage network, part global think tank-than anyone save the old man himself. There was no one better than Russell to interpret the disjointed data from farflung field operatives and discover the subtle strategies hidden there. Give him one piece of a puzzle, and he would eventually deliver to you the entire picture. Russell was also a gifted administrator, juggling budgets, maximizing men and materiel in a way