ext to the station. "There you are.
Women doing manual labor."

Char said, "I'm from the Western states, it doesn't impress me. Have
you ever seen fruit pickers, potato diggers, or just about any type of
itinerant harvest workers? There is no harder work and women, and
children for that matter, do half of it at home."

He looked at the husky, rawboned women laborers working shoulder to
shoulder with the men. "I still don't like it."

Char shrugged. "Who does? The sooner we devise machines to do all the
drudgery the better off the world will be."

To his surprise, Hank found Moscow one of the most beautiful cities he
had ever observed. Certainly the downtown area in the vicinity of the
Kremlin compared favorably with any.

The buses whisked them down through Lermontovskaya Square, down Kirov
Street to Novaya and then turned right. The Intourist guide made with
a running commentary. There was the famous Bolshoi Theater and there
Sverdlova Square, a Soviet cultural center.

Hank didn't know it then but they were avoiding Red Square. They
circled it, one block away, and pulled onto Gorky Street and before a
Victorian period building.

"The Grand Hotel," the guide announced, "where you will stay during
your Moscow visit."

Half a dozen porters began manhandling their bags from the top of the
bus. They were ushered into the lobby and assigned rooms. Russian
hotel lobbies were a thing apart. No souvenir stands, no bellhops, no
signs saying _To the Bar_, _To the Barber Shop_ or to anything else. A
hotel was a hotel, period.

Hank trailed Loo and Paco and three porters to the second floor and to
the room they were assigned in common. Like the Astoria's rooms, in
Leningrad, it was king-sized. In fact, it could easily have been
divided into three chambers. There were four full sized beds, six arm
chairs, two sofas, two vanity tables, a monstrous desk--and one wash
bowl which gurgled when you ran water.

Paco, hands on hips, stared around. "A dance hall," he said.
"Gentlemen, this room hasn't changed since some Grand Duke stayed in
it before the revolution."

Loo, who had assumed his usual prone position on one of the beds,
said, "From what I've heard about Moscow housing, you could get an
average family in this amount of space."

Hank was stuffing clothes into a dresser drawer. "Now who's making
with anti-Soviet comments?"

Paco laughed at him. "Have you ever seen some of the housing in the
Harlem district in New