"We've got to come up with something, and fast" Murdock said, his pudgy little hands fluttering around the desktop. "The General wants us to go with him to the Deputy 187

Secretary's office at three this afternoon."

No wonder he's terrified. Kinsman realized. It's guillo- tine time.

Colt seemed completely unawed. "It seems to me, sir, that there's only one thing we can do."

Murdock's hands clenched into childlike little fists. "What? What is it?"

"Well, sir, of course I'm not in on all the details of the upper echelon's big picture . . ."

He's deliberately drawing it out. Kinsman suppressed a grin as he watched Murdock's wide-eyed, open-mouthed anticipation.

". . . but it seems to me, sir, that Senator McGrath would be much more sympathetic to the entire Aerospace Force program if he were fully briefed on the spaceplane interceptor program."

Sonofabitch! Kinsman almost laughed aloud. You stole that right out of my pocket, Frank.

"No!" Murdock shrieked. "Can't do that! He'd run right to the media with it! We can't let them know we're designing a manned interceptor to knock out the Russians' satellites! McGrath would love to leak that one!"

"But the Senate Appropriations Committee already knows about the program," Colt said. "Sir."

"Only the chairman," Murdock snapped. "Nobody else has been briefed. Nobody!"

"But they all know that the program exists," Kinsman pointed out. "McGrath knows about it, and he's steamed because he hasn't been formally briefed. He is the ranking minority member of the committee."

Murdock shook his head. "There's no connection be- tween our Moonbase program and SDI's interceptor."

"There could be," Colt answered, "There willbe, sooner or later."

'The Moon is not a militarized area," Kinsman said.

"Then why the fuck are we tryin' to set up a base there?" Colt's profanity, like his cool, was carefully planned and judiciously used. Kinsman knew. But Murdock's reaction was a startled gasp.

"We're military men," Colt went on. "We can talk about hospitals and peaceful applications of space technology and 188 even cooperate with the Russians here and there, but we're in this for military reasons. Anything else is just bullshit."

"We are bound by the Space Treaty of 1967," Kinsman said, keeping his voice low, calm. "Military weaponry cannot be put on the Moon."

"You think the Soviets won't put weapons there?"

"No, they won't, because we'll be right alongside them on the Moon. We'll watch each other."

Colt edged forward in his chair. "Listen, man. Both sides are starting to deploy their Star Wars stuff, right? We're developing the spaceplane so we can knock out their ABM satellites as fast as they put 'em in orbit, right? They're gonna be doing the same to us, you can bet on it. There's gonna be a war in orbit, man. Maybe it'll be only the machines that get hurt, but it's gonna be a war, all the same."

"We can't tell people like McGrath that we'll be fighting in space!" Murdock's voice was quaking. "He'd have it all over the media in a hot second. We'd go down in flames."

Kinsman glanced at his wristwatch. "Sir . . . I've got to get over to the Capitol. The committee hearings resume at ten."

He left the Colonel's office like a suburban businessman fleeing a downtown pornography shop, hoping that nobody had seen him there. Once in his own office he squeezed behind his battered metal desk and punched out a phone number.