"In a sense, it _was_ real. If you killed the American, he will stay
dead."

"Nothing mattered but that world we were in, a fantastic place. Now I
remember everything, all the things I couldn't remember then."

"But your--ah, dream--what happened?"

Sophia rubbed her bruised knees a third time, ruefully. "I knocked him
unconscious with these. I forced his head under water and drowned him.
But--before I could be sure I finished the job--I came back.... Funny
that I should want to kill him without compunction, without reason."
Sophia frowned, sat up. "I don't think I want anymore of this."

The doctor surveyed her coldly. "This is your task on the Stalintrek.
This you will do."

"I killed him without a thought."

"Enough. You will rest and get ready for the second contest."

"But if he's dead--"

"Apparently he's not, or we would have been informed, Comrade
Petrovitch."

"That is true," agreed the second man, who had remained silent until
now. "Prepare for another test, Comrade."

Sophia was on the point of arguing again. After all it wasn't fair. If
in the dream-worlds which were not dream worlds she was motivated by
but one factor and that to destroy the American and if she faced him
with the strength of her Jupiter training it would hardly be a
contest. And now that she could think of the American without the
all-consuming hatred the dream world had fostered in her, she realized
he had been a pleasant-looking young man, quite personable, in fact.
_I could like him_, Sophia thought and hoped fervently she had not
drowned him. Still, if she had volunteered for the Stalintrek and this
was the job they assigned her....

"I need no rest," she told the doctor, hardly trusting herself, for
she realized she might change her mind. "I am ready any time you are."

CHAPTER IX

His name was Temple and it was the year 1960. Hectic end of a decade,
1960. Ancient Joe Stalin was still alive, drugged half senseless
against the tortures of an incurable stomach cancer, although the
world thought he died in 1953. He would hang on grimly another year
and a half, yielding the reins of empire to stout Malenkov who in the
space of a few years would lose them to a crafty schoolteacherish
whiplash called Beria. 1960--eleventh year of the fantastic Korean
situation, in which the Land of the Morning Sun had become, with no
pretentions to the contrary, a glorified training camp for the armies
of both sides.

The Cold War