Seu drank again. His face was fiery red, now, and he was gasping for breath. "I can't get drunk," he said bitterly. "Toxic reaction. I thought I'd try once more, but it's no good. Laszlo, look out, I'm going to be sick." Cudyk led him to the lavatory. When he came out, the Chinese was weak and waxen-pale. Cudyk tried to persuade him to rest on the bed, but he refused. "I've got to get back to my office," he said. "Been gone too long already. Help me down the stairs, will you, Laszlo?" Cudyk walked him as far as Brasil and Washington, where two of Seu's young men took over with voluble expressions of gratitude. Cudyk watched the group until it disappeared into the town hall. He could feel nothing but an arid depression. Even the horror at Rack's mass-murders, even his pity for Seu was blunted, sealed off at the back of his mind. The lives of saints, Cudyk remembered, spoke of "boundless compassion", "infinite pity"; but an ordinary man had a limited supply. When it was used up, you were empty and impotent, a canceled sign in the human equation. Half instinctively, half by choice, Cudyk had chosen his friends among the strongest and most patient, the wise and cynical: the survivors. But he had leaned too much on their strength, he realized now. He had seen Seu crumble; and he felt as if a crutch had broken under his weight. That evening he opened his shutters and looked out at the sky. The familiar constellations were there, unchanged. The light of the nearest star took more than three years to reach Palumbar. But in his mind's eye one glittering pinpoint exploded suddenly into a dreadful blossom of radiance; then another; then a third. And he saw the blackened corpses of planets swinging around each, murdered by that single flash of incredible heat. During the night he dreamed of a black wasteland, and of Rack standing motionless in the center of it, brooding, with his cold grey face turned to the stars. * * * * * It was Cudyk's birthday. He had never told anyone in the Quarter the date, and had all but forgotten it himself. This morning, feeling an idle desire to know what the season was on Earth, he had hunted up a calendar he had last used twenty years ago; it translated the Niori system into Gregorian years, months and days. The result, when he had worked it out with some little trouble, was February 18th. He was fifty-six. Now he was constrained to wonder whether the action had been as random as it seemed. Was it possible that subconsciously he had no need of the calendar--that he had kept track, all these years, and had known when his birthday came? If so, why had he felt it necessary to remind himself in this oblique way? A return to the womb? A hunger for the comforts of the family circle, the birthday cake, candles, the solace of yearly repetition?