pro and con in the continuing battle between
Capitalism and Communism. Now he chuckled to himself at getting into
tiffs over the virtues of Russian black bread versus American white,
or whether Soviet jets were faster than those of the United States.

With Char Moore, though she tolerated Hank's company, in fact, seemed
to prefer it to that of whatever other males were aboard, it was
continually a matter of rubbing fur the wrong way. She was ready to
battle it out on any phase of politics, international affairs or West
versus East.

But it was the visitors from space that actually dominated the
conversation of the ship--crew, tourists, business travelers, or
whoever. Information was still limited, and Taas the sole source.
Daily there were multilingual radio broadcasts tuned in by the
_Baltika_ but largely they added little to the actual information on
the extraterrestrials. It was mostly Soviet back-patting on the
significance of the fact that the Galactic Confederation emissaries
had landed in the Soviet complex rather than among the Western
countries.

Hank learned little that he hadn't already known. The Kremlin had all
but laughingly declined a suggestion on the part of Switzerland that
the extraterrestrials be referred to that all but defunct United
Nations. The delegates from the Galactic Confederation had chose to
land in Moscow. In Moscow they should remain until they desired to go
elsewhere. The Soviet implication was that the alien emissaries had no
desire, intention nor reason to visit other sections of Earth. They
had contacted the dominant world power and could complete their
business within the Kremlin walls.

* * * * *

Leningrad came as only a mild surprise to Henry Kuran. With his
knowledge of Russian and his position in Morton Twombly's department,
he had kept up with the Soviet progress though the years.

As early as the middle 1950s unbiased travelers to the U.S.S.R. had
commented in detail upon the explosion of production in the country.
By the end of the decade such books as Gunther's "Inside Russia Today"
had dwelt upon the ultra-cleanliness of the cities, the mushrooming of
apartment houses, the easing of the restrictions of Stalin's day--or
at least the beginning of it.

He actually hadn't expected peasant clad, half starved Russians
furtively shooting glances at their neighbors for fear of the secret
police. Nor a black bread and cabbage diet. Nor long