Frigid Fracas by Mack Reynolds

Although in actuality working on a private mission for Philip Holland, Frank Hodgson and the others high in government responsibility who were planning fundamental changes in the West-world, Joseph Mauser was ostensibly a military attaché connected with the West-world Embassy to Budapest. As such, he spent several days meeting embassy personnel, his immediate superiors and his immediate inferiors in rank. He was, as a newcomer from home, wined, dined, evaluated, found an apartment, assigned a hover-car, and in general assimilated into the community.

Not ordinarily prone to the social life, Joe was able to find interest in this due to its newness. The citizen of the West-world, when exiled by duty to a foreign land, evidently did his utmost to take his native soil with him. Even house furnishings had been brought from North America. Sov food and drink were superlative, particularly for those of Party rank, but for all practical purposes all such supplies were flown in from the West. Hungarian potables, not to mention the products of a dozen other Sov political divisions including Russia, were of the best, but the denizens of the West-world Embassy drank bourbon and Scotch, or at most the products of the vines of California. The styles of Budapest rivaled those of Paris and Rome, New York and Hollywood, but a feminine employee of the embassy wouldn't have been caught dead in local fashions. It was a home away from home, an oasis of the West in the Sov-world.