is nothing unusual
about an old man taking a short nap.

When he got up again, Spencer Candron was thoroughly familiar with the
room. It was home, and he loved it.

Nightfall found the honorable Mr. Ying a long way from his hotel. He
had, as his papers had said, gone to do business with a certain Mr. Yee,
had haggled over the price of certain goods, and had been unsuccessful
in establishing a mutual price. Mr. Yee was later to be able to prove
to the People's Police that he had done no business whatever with Mr.
Ying, and had had no notion whatever that Mr. Ying's business
connections in Nanking were totally nonexistent.

But, on that afternoon, Mr. Ying had left Mr. Yee with the impression
that he would return the next day with, perhaps, a more amenable
attitude toward Mr. Yee's prices. Then Mr. Ying Lee had gone to a
restaurant for his evening meal.

He had eaten quietly by himself, reading the evening edition of the
Peiping _Truth_ as he ate his leisurely meal. Although many of the
younger people had taken up the use of the knife and fork, the venerable
Mr. Ying clung to the chopsticks of an earlier day, plied expertly
between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. He was not the only
elderly man in the place who did so.

Having finished his meal and his newspaper in peace, Mr. Ying Lee
strolled out into the gathering dusk. By the time utter darkness had
come, and the widely-spaced street lamps of the city had come alive, the
elderly Mr. Ying Lee was within half a mile of the most important group
of buildings in China.

The Peiping Explosion, back in the sixties, had almost started World War
Three. An atomic blast had leveled a hundred square miles of the city
and started fires that had taken weeks to extinguish. Soviet Russia had
roared in its great bear voice that the Western Powers had attacked, and
was apparently on the verge of coming to the defense of its Asian
comrade when the Chinese government had said irritatedly that there had
been no attack, that traitorous and counterrevolutionary Chinese agents
of Formosa had sabotaged an atomic plant, nothing more, and that the
honorable comrades of Russia would be wise not to set off anything that
would destroy civilization. The Russian Bear grumbled and sheathed its
claws.

The vast intelligence system of the United States had reported that (A)
the explosion had been caused by carelessness, not sabotage, but the
Chinese had had to save face, and (B) th