it burned away all the blue moss.

I sat down and started carving the rest of the salami. To be on the safe side, I checked through the Twilight to see if it was really a good idea to eat it.

The salami turned out to be all right. Gesar didn't want his agent to go down with food poisoning.

'Now that's the right temperature,' said Las, removing the wine thermometer from the open bottle. 'We didn't leave it in for too long. Some people cool vodka to the consistency of glycerine, so that drinking it's like swallowing liquid nitrogen. Here's to our meeting!'

We drank a glass and followed it with salami and crispbreads, which Las had brought from my apartment – he explained that he hadn't bothered to get any food in that day.

'The entire building lives like this,' he explained. 'Well, of course there are some people who had enough money to finish their places and furnish them as well. Only just imagine how wonderful it is living in an empty building. There they are, waiting for the petty riff-raff like you and me to finish our places off and move in. The cafés aren't working, the casino's empty, the security men are freaking out from sheer boredom . . . two of them were sacked yesterday – they started shooting at the bushes in the yard. Said they'd seen something horrible. They probably did too – they were as high as kites.'

And so saying, Las took a pack of Belomor cigarettes out of his jacket pocket and gave me a cunning look:

'Want one?'

I hadn't been expecting a man who poured vodka in such good style to fool around with marijuana.

I shook my head and asked:

'Do you smoke many?'

'This is the second pack today,' Las sighed. And then he suddenly realised. 'Hey, come on, Anton! These are Belomor! Not dope! I used to smoke Gitânes before, until I realised they were no different from our very own Belomor.'

'Original,' I said.

'What's that got to do with anything?' Las said, offended. 'I'm not trying to be original. You only have to be a bit different, not like the rest, and straight away they say you're putting on airs. But I like smoking Belomor. If I lose interest a week from now, I'll give up.'

'There's nothing wrong with being different,' I said, putting out a feeler.

'But really being different is hard,' Las replied. 'Just a couple of days ago I had this idea . . .'

I pricked my ears up again. The letter had been sent two days earlier. Could everything really have come together so neatly?

'I was in this hospital, and while I was waiting to be seen, I read all the price lists,' Las went on, not suspecting a trap. 'And what they do there is serious stuff, they make artificial body parts out of titanium to replace what people have lost. Shinbones, knee joints and hip joints, jawbones . . . Patches for the skull, teeth and other small bits and pieces . . . I got my calculator out and figured out how much it would cost to have all your bones totally replaced. It came out at about one million seven hundred thousand bucks. But I reckon on a bulk order like that you could get a good discount. Twenty to thirty per cent. And if you could convince the doctors it was good publicity, you could probably get away with half a million!'

'What for?' I asked. Thanks to my hairdresser, my hair wasn't able to stand up on end.

'It's just a fascinating idea,' Las explained. 'Imagine you want to hammer in a nail. You just raise your fist and smash it down, and the nail sinks into concrete. Those bones are titanium. Or say someone tries to punch you . . . nah, of course, there are drawbacks. And artificial organs aren't coming on too well yet. But the general trend of progress looks good to me.'

He poured us another glass.

'It seems to me the trend of progress is in a different direction,' I went on, sticking to my guns. 'We need to make greater use of the potential abilities of our organisms. All those amazing things that lie hidden inside us. Telekinesis, telepathy . . .'

Las looked a bit put out by that. I was getting depressed too, trying to play the idiot.

'Can you read my thoughts?' he asked.

'Not right now,' I confessed.

'I don't think we ought to invent any extra dimensions of reality,' Las explained. 'We've