Like a lot of weird noises. She says speaking it is like working a _Times_ crossword and trying to imitate birdcalls at the same time. " I laughed and took the cigarette.

Fist-of-God had cremated all life over a region comfortably larger than the Earth. Far far away a hundred thousand miles away the blue of distance became the blue of sea; and only Needle's thousand-mile height let them see that far. "Get us moving ". cheap effexor xr Ominous whiffs of burning insulation. Korolev's sleep had been broken by the hollow thud of a departing Soyuz lander. Glushko and his wife he supposed. During the past forty-eight hours Yefre- mov had supervised the evacuation of the crew members who had refused to join the strike. The gun crew kept to the gun room and their barracks ring where they still held Nikita the Plumber. Grishkin's Salyut had become strike headquarters. None of the male strikers had shaved and Stoiko had contracted a staph infection that spread across his forearms in angry welts. Surrounded by lurid pinups from American television they resembled some degen- erate trio of pornographers. The lights were dim; Kos- mograd ran on half-power. "With the others gone " Stoiko said "our hand is strengthened. " Grishkin groaned. His nostrils were festooned with white streamers of surgical cotton. He was convinced that Yefremov would try to break the strike with beta- carboline aerosols. The cotton plugs were just one symptom of the general level of strain and paranoia. Before the evacuation order had come from Baikonur one of the technicians had taken to playing Tchaikov- sky's 1812 Overture at shattering volume for hours on end. And Glushko had chased his wife naked bruised and screaming up and down the length of Kosmograd. Stoiko had accessed the KGB man's files and Bychkov's psychiatric records; meters of yellow printout curled through the corridors in flabby spirals rippling in the current from the ventilators. "Think what their testimony will be doing to us groundside " muttered Grishkin. "We won't even get a trial. Straight to the psikuska. " The sinister nickname for the political hospitals seemed to galvanize the boy with dread. Korolev picked apathetically at a viscous pudding of chiorella. Stoiko snatched a drifting scroll of printout and read aloud. "Paranoia with a tendency to overesteem ideas! Revisionist fantasies hostile to the social sys- tem!" He crumpled the paper. "If we could seize the communications module we could tie into an American comsat and dump the whole thing in their laps. Perhaps that would show Moscow something about our hostil- ity!" Korolev dug a stranded fruit fly from his algae pud- ding. Its two pairs of wings and bifurcated thorax were mute testimony to Kosmograd's high radiation levels. The insects had escaped from some forgotten experi- ment; generations of them had infested the station for decades. "The Americans have no interest in us " Korolev said. "Muscow can no longer be embarrassed by such revelations. " "Except when the.