erraced rows of tropical plants, a bearded dwarf in a
green coat crouched before an earthen tray of lilies of the valley,
tranquilly puffing up a massive, tobacco-stained meerschaum. He did not
look up at the sound of the intruder, for he was engaged in a delicate
business, the transfer of pollen from corolla to corolla with a
toothpick.

"So you are, after all, only a minor god," Colonel Glinka said.

"I heard your plane and I watched you come up the path," the black
bearded little man said. "Glinka, is it not?"

"You remembered me!" Colonel Glinka, quite affectedly, removed his
goggles and dabbed at his eye with a perfumed handkerchief. "A humble
policeman, a fat little nobody, to be remembered by the great Dr.
Stefanik who was once our greatest scientist--yes, our most brilliant
geneticist--do not shake your head. Let me see, was it Ankara where last
we met? Yes, eight years ago in Ankara. You got away from me in Ankara.
I was so ashamed, Comrade, that I cried."

"Nine years," the other corrected. "For one remembers a mad dog. And do
not call me 'comrade,' Comrade. You know that I was never anything other
than a simple Cossack."

"And, as such, invariably troublesome to us," Colonel Glinka said. "Yet
you were our white hope, Comrade Stefanik. We might have led the world,
I am told, in organics as we now lead in physics. I have read all of
your books upon the fascinating subject of chromosomic change and the
morphology of rats. It was required reading for those of us who were
assigned to you. Most interesting, though I confess I did not understand
all of it."

* * * * *

Dr. Stefanik got slowly to his feet. His back was now revealed to be so
cruelly deformed that his black beard curled against his smock, and he
walked with a shuffling, crablike motion as he limped over to pick up a
small rubber irrigation hose.

"Why did you leave us, Comrade Stefanik?" asked Colonel Glinka. "Why
shame us, discredit your government, by running away?"

"I did not like it there," Dr. Stefanik said.

"We knew, of course, that you were on the verge of some great discovery,
some new process, perhaps, of controlling human development. A genetical
means, our biologists tell me, which might have made us all supermen,
tall and brilliant, and immune to disease. A race of Pavlovs and
Stakhanovs. Do you deny this?"

Dr. Stefanik merely sucked upon his pipe calmly, twisted a valve half
hidden in the gre