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toxic dressing was all mixed in with seed grain and planted?”
    “Yes, Comrade.”
    Two minutes later the professor was dismissed, to his privacy and his oblivion. Vishnayev turned to Komarov.
    “Forgive my ignorance, Comrade, but it would appear you had some foreknowledge of this affair. What has happened to the functionary who produced this ... cockup?” (He used a crude Russian expression that refers to a pile of dog mess on the pavement.)
    Ivanenko cut in.
    “He is in our hands,” he said, “along with the analytical chemist who deserted his function, the warehouseman, who is simply of exceptionally low intelligence, and the maintenance team of engineers, who claim they demanded and received written instructions to wind up their work
    before they had finished.”
    “This functionary, has he talked?” asked Vishnayev.
    Ivanenko considered a mental image of the broken man in the cellars beneath the Lubyanka. “Extensively,” he said.
    “Is he a saboteur, a fascist agent?”
    “No,” said Ivanenko with a sigh. “Just an idiot; an ambitious apparatchik trying to overfulfill his orders. You can believe me on that one. We do know by now the inside of that man’s skull.”
    “Then one last question, just so that we can all be sure of the dimensions of this affair.” Vishnayev swung back to the unhappy Komarov. “We already know we will save only fifty million tons of the expected hundred million from the winter wheat. How much will we now get from the spring wheat this coming October?”
    Komarov glanced at Rudin, who nodded imperceptibly.
    “Out of the hundred-forty-million-ton target for the spring-sown wheat and other grains, we cannot reasonably expect more than fifty million tons,” he said quietly.
    The meeting sat in stunned horror.
    “That means a total yield over both crops of one hundred million tons,” breathed Petrov. “A national shortfall of one hundred forty million tons. We could have taken a shortfall of fifty, even seventy million tons. We’ve done it before, endured the shortages, and bought what we could from elsewhere. But this ...”
    Rudin closed the meeting.
    “We have as big a problem here as we have ever confronted, Chinese and American imperialism included. I propose we adjourn and separately seek some suggestions. It goes without saying that this news does not pass outside those present in this room. Our next meeting will be a week from today.”
    As the thirteen men and the four aides at the top table came to their feet, Petrov turned to the impassive Ivanenko.
    “This doesn’t mean shortages,” he muttered, “this means famine.”
    The Soviet Politburo descended to their chauffeur-driven Zil limousines, still absorbing the knowledge that a weedy professor of agronomy had just placed a time bomb under one of the world’s two superpowers.

    Adam Munro’s thoughts a week later as he sat in the circle at the Bolshoi Theater on Karl Marx Prospekt were not on war but on love—and not for the excited embassy secretary beside him who had prevailed on him to take her to the ballet.
    He was not a great fan of ballet, though he conceded he liked some of the music. But the grace of the entrechats and fouettés—or as he called it, the jumping about—left him cold. By the second act of Giselle , the evening’s offering, his thoughts were straying back again to Berlin.
    It had been a beautiful affair, a once-in-a-lifetime love. He was twenty-four, turning twenty-five, and she nineteen, dark and lovely. Because of her job they had had to conduct their affair in secret, furtively meeting in darkened streets so that he could pick her up in his car and take her back to his small flat at the western end of Charlottenburg without anyone’s seeing. They had loved and talked, she had made him suppers, and they had loved again.
    At first, the clandestine nature of their affair, like married people slipping away from the world and each other’s partners, had added spice, piquancy to the