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and some landed on the window ledge.
    He wondered if he had been a fool. He should have thrown the pamphlet away before arriving in Uppsala, or he could have said he had picked up the book in the station, and let it go at that. He had begun to realize, though, as he told the story and as he watched Tracy and Aaronson, their expressions so rapt and intense, interested beyond the normal degree of polite attention, that his encounter on the train was more than happenstance, that the actions of the proselytes of the church held some significance that Tracy and Aaronson had decided, for the moment, to keep to themselves. Perhaps the encounter had been a test. If so, had he passed?

2
    As a child growing up in the suburbs of Washington, Spiegel felt as if he had been groomed, bred, perhaps destined someday to take his place among the gray-suited, fedora-topped herds of men who migrated each morning into the city and returned home in the evenings, haggard and weary, their briefcases bulging with typescripts and carbons, the Post or the Star folded neatly and wedged under the arm. His father was one of these men: vanished before daybreak, a stern and silent presence at home, whose weekend pleasures consisted of guiding the power mower in geometric patterns through the patch of yard and then implanting himself, recumbent, before the flickering light of the television. When he was young, Spiegel knew nothing about his father’s work except that he worked for “the government.” As he got older, he learned a little more, but not much. He learned to say, when pressed for specifics, that his father was in the “foreign service,” and after he had learned that his father was an expert on languages and codes he would say, dismissively, a sort of in-joke among his jaded friends whose fathers were judges, undersecretaries, and senior staff aides, that his father was a “crypto-bureaucrat.” At that time he knew only that his father wrote papers and reports that required at first a great deal of research and time away from home at nights and on weekends and, later, when Spiegel was in high school, an ever-increasing amount of travel overseas. Spiegel, immersed in the pressures and passions of his own life, thought little about his father’s absences and his mother’s consequent long engagements with bridge, tennis, cigarettes, gin, and dinners at the club. Her marriage, her life, was coming apart, and Spiegel’s mind was thankfully— or perhaps necessarily—elsewhere.
    He went off to college set on learning the rudiments of knowledge and behavior that would earn him a station at the entryway to his father’s world. Barely a month into his freshman year, that world changed forever when his father announced, in a telegram, one of his favorite modes of communication, that Spiegel’s mother had been diagnosed with cancer, whose symptoms of pallor and emaciation she had evidently masked, or concealed even from herself, so successfully that, without medical detection, the disease had more or less consumed her unhindered and at leisure while she had fixed a lipstick smile on her pain-wracked face and dealt innumerable hands of cards. Spiegel went home anticipating a tearful, reconciliatory visit, but his mother, numbed beneath sedatives and enmeshed in the strands of clear plastic tubing that dripped the final spirits of life into her veins, had drifted out to the sea beyond the horizon of the conscious world. Shortly after she died, Spiegel’s father put in for a transfer to the directorate of operations, and while Spiegel was studying for final exams his father sold the house in Silver Spring and disembarked for a post in Africa. Spiegel took refuge in his work, determined to focus on his studies and, through excellence and achievement, to fill the void left by his mother’s death and his father’s absence.
    And then—the sixties hit Spiegel like a wave and knocked him over. Anything that came along, he inhaled, ingested, and, at