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vote?”
    “No, indeed, God be thanked!” Her negative enthusiasm seemed genuine enough.
    I swallowed the remainder of the buttered and honeyed croissant and finished the coffee. They seemed to have a soporific effect. I barely had the energy to put another question.
    “You are aware, are you not, of an anti-Prince Opposition? In fact, a terrorist group that blows up buildings in New York to get attention for its cause? The Sebastiani Liberation Front?”
    Olga smiled prettily at me throughout my questions, in that fashion in which the questioned seems amused by some ad hominem reflections on the questioner and gives little heed to what is being asked. I wondered whether she was a nymphomaniac or merely weak-minded: I had known both sorts, sometimes even in combination, but never had they been so magnificently salubrious. I confess that Olga had an odd effect on me at this point: I would rather have trained her for some sporting event than taken her to bed.
    I waved my hand before her eyes. “Did you hear me?”
    She filled her great bosom with air and released it in a happy kind of gasp. “I am too beautiful for such matters. I vas selected for the job I have now soon after my breasts began to grow.”
    The gentle gong-sound that accompanies the seat-belt sign was heard, and Olga informed me that the airplane was about to land. She went to the little fold-down perch beside the door to the cockpit, giving me another vista of her breathtaking thighs. I reluctantly turned from this spectacle to the view from the window. I saw some neat checkerboarded farmland below, in various shades of earth colors, and then soon enough we were over clustered dwellingplaces, crooked streets, and free-form shapes of greenery, several of which surrounded bodies of water that reflected the cerulean sky, and on a higher elevation what seemed to be a crenellated stone fortress, and then the airplane made a great sweeping, banking turn and smoothly descended onto a very simple blacktopped landing strip, coming to rest nowhere near the terminal building, which in any event was too small to be equipped with an extensible gangway.
    Olga opened the door, and I went to join her. To see outside, I had to lean around this magnificent specimen of young-womanhood, who was at least as tall as I. Beyond the airfield in that direction the farmland began, and in the distance I saw a blue range of mountains. I knew no more of the geography of this part of the world than I knew of its language, politics, history, or culture. Why Rasmussen felt it necessary to hustle me off so quickly, with no preparation or opportunity for research, made no sense, unless it could be explained by calling him a bureaucratic scoundrel and having done with it.
    At this point a fairhaired functionary on the ground outside began to maneuver a portable stairway into place at the door of the aircraft.
    “Good-bye, sir,” said Olga. “I hope you did enjoy the flight anyway.”
    “Good-bye, Olga. You’re a nice girl.” On an impulse I added, “I regret not being in the mood to screw this morning. Perhaps another time.”
    “When you want!” she answered ebulliently, performing a little curtsy.
    I went down the metal stairs and stepped onto the tarmac. The man who had wheeled the stairway into place was gone. Olga was still the only person I had seen since the night before, and no one was in sight on the airfield. The terminal building was a good half mile away from where I stood. Just as I decided that I would have to hike for it, I heard the distant racket of a noisy engine, and a vehicle came onto the field and rapidly approached me. When it got nearer I recognized it as an ancient station wagon of American make, a vintage model with a body of real wooden panels. It had been indifferently maintained: black smoke gushed from its tailpipe, and much of the wooden paneling was in a sorry condition, rotting or splintered. The windshield was cracked, the tires were bald, the front