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at Simonov. “And so does poor Boris.” He went back to his hiding place in the rocks and brought out a pocket radio. Extending its aerial, he spoke into the mouthpiece, saying: “Zero, this is Khuv. Get the rescue chopper up here at once. We’re a kilometer up river from the Projekt, on top of the eastern ridge. The pilot will see my torch … Over.”
    â€œZero: at once, Comrade—out,” came back the answer, tinny and with a touch of static. Khuv took out a heavy-duty torch and switched it on, stood it upright on the ground and packed snow around its base. Then he unzipped Simonov’s anorak and began to turn out his pockets. There wasn’t much: the nite-lites, spare clips for the automatic, Russian cigarettes, the slightly crumpled photograph of a slim peasant girl sitting in a field of daisies, a pencil and tiny pad of paper, half a dozen loose matches, an “official” Soviet Citizen’s ID, and a curved strip of rubber half an inch thick by two inches long. Khuv stared at the block of black rubber for long moments. It had indentations that looked like—
    â€œTeeth marks!” Khuv nodded.
    â€œEh?” Karl mumbled. He had come to see what
Khuv was doing. He spoke through a handful of bloody snow with which he staunched the wounds to his nose and lips. “What? Did you say teeth marks?”
    Khuv showed him the rubber. “It’s a makeshift gumshield,” he informed. “I’d guess he puts it in at night—to keep from grinding his teeth!”
    They got down on their knees beside Simonov where Karl could work on his jaws. The unconscious man groaned and twitched a little but finally succumbed to the pressure of the Russian’s huge hands. Karl forced his mouth wide open, said: “There’s a pencil torch in my top pocket.” Khuv fumbled the torch out of the other’s pocket, shone it into Simonov’s mouth. Lower left, at the back, second forward from the wisdom tooth—there it was. A capped tooth at first glance, but on closer inspection a hollow tooth containing a tiny cylinder: Part of the enamel had worn away, showing bright metal underneath.
    â€œCyanide?” Karl wondered.
    â€œNo, they’ve got a lot better stuff than that these days,” Khuv answered. “Instantaneous, totally painless. We’d better get it out before he wakes up. You never know, he might just want to be a hero!”
    â€œTurn his face left-side down on the ground,” Karl grunted. He had put both Simonov’s and Boris’s guns in a huge pocket; now he took them out and used the butt of Simonov’s weapon as a wedge between his jaws. His dead comrade’s gun had a barrel that was long and slender. “This is not going to hurt me more than it hurts him!” Karl grunted. “I think Boris would like it that I’m using his gun.”
    â€œWhat?” Khuv almost shouted. “You’d shoot it out? You’ll ruin his face and the shock might kill him!”
    â€œI would love to shoot it out,” Karl answered, “but that isn’t my intention.” He poised the heel of his free hand over the weapon’s butt.
    Khuv looked away. This part of it was for such as Karl. Khuv liked to think he stood a little above sheer
animal brutality. He looked out over the rim of the ridge, gritted his own teeth in a sort of morbid empathy as he heard Karl’s hammer hand come down with a smack on the butt of the gun. And:
    â€œThere!” said Karl with some satisfaction. “Done!” In fact he’d got two teeth, whole, the one with the cylinder and its neighbour. Now he used a grimy finger to hook them out of Simonov’s bloody mouth. “All done,” Karl said again, “and I didn’t break the cylinder. See, the cap’s still secure on the top. He was just about to wake up, I think, but that bit of additional pain should keep him under.”
    â€œWell