Cudyk felt the night breeze freshening. He glanced upward once at the frosty blaze of stars, then pulled his head back inside the window. He closed the shutters, turning to the lamp-lit table with its hopeless clutter of books, pipes and dusty miscellany.
Cudyk was a man of middle height, heavy in the shoulders and chest, blunt-featured, with a shock of greying black hair. He was fifty-five years old; he remembered Earth.
A drunk stumbled by in the street below, cursing monotonously to himself, paused to spit explosively into the gutter, and faded into the night.
Cudyk heard him without attention. He stood with his back to the window, looking at nothing, his square fingers fumbling automatically for pipe and tobacco. Why do I torture myself with that look out the window every night? he asked himself. It's a juvenile sentimentalism.
But he knew he would go on doing it.
Other noises drifted up to his window, faint with distance. They grew louder. Cudyk cocked his head suddenly, turned and threw open the shutters again. That had been a scream.
He could see nothing down the street; the trouble must be farther over, he thought, on Kwang-Chow-fu or Washington. The noise swelled as he listened: the unintelligible wailing of a mob.
Footsteps clicked hurriedly up the stairs. Cudyk went to the door, made sure it was latched, and waited. There was a light tapping on the door.
"Who is it?" he said.
"Lee Far."