his head, obviously pleased. "If you
think Prague is good, you ought to see Warsaw. It's as free as Paris! I
saw a Tri-D cinema up there about two months ago. You know what it was
about? The purges in Moscow back in the 1930s."

"A rather unique subject," Simonov said.

"Um-m-m, made a very strong case for Bukharin, in particular."

Simonov said, very slowly, "I don't understand. You mean this ... this
film supported the, ah, Old Bolsheviks?"

"Of course. Why not? Everybody knows they weren't guilty." The Czech
snorted deprecation. "At least not guilty of what they were charged with.
They were in Stalin's way and he liquidated them." The Czech thought about
it for a while. "I wonder if he was already insane, that far back."

Had he taken up his mug of beer and dashed it into Simonov's face, he
couldn't have surprised the Russian more.

Ilya Simonov had to take control of himself. His first instinct was to
show his credentials, arrest the man and have him hauled up before the
local agency of Simonov's ministry.

But obviously that was out of the question. He was in Czechoslovakia and,
although Moscow still dominated the Soviet Complex, there was local
autonomy and the Czech police just didn't enjoy their affairs being
meddled with unless in extreme urgency.

Besides, this man was obviously only one among many. A stranger in a beer
hall. Ilya Simonov suspected that if he continued his wanderings about the
town, he'd meet in the process of only one evening a score of persons who
would talk the same way.

Besides, still again, he was here in Prague incognito, his job to trace
the sources of this dry rot, not to run down individual Czechs.

But the cinema, and TV! Surely anti-Party sentiment hadn't been allowed to
go this far!

He got up from the table shakily, paid up for his beer and forced himself
to nod good-bye in friendly fashion to the subversive Czech he'd been
talking to.

In the morning he strolled over to the offices of the Moskvich Agency
which was located only a few blocks from his hotel on Celetna Hybernski.
The Russian car agency, he knew, was having a fairly hard go of it in
Prague and elsewhere in Czechoslovakia. The Czechs, long before the Party
took over in 1948, had been a highly industrialized, modern nation. They
consequently had their own automobile works, such as Skoda, and their
models were locally more popular than the Russian Moskvich, Zim and
Pobeda.

Theoretically, the reason Ily