Mary-Ellen's face filled the tiny display screen on his desk. "Hello, Chet! How are you feeling this morning?"

"Okay, I guess. It was a good party. Aspirin helps."

She smiled ruefully. "I've got to get this place into some semblance of order for a dinner party tonight."

"Uh, Mary—I've got to bug out of here and get to the hearings. Is Diane there?"

Her face clouded briefly. "I don't think she's awake yet."

Dammitall! "Look . . . when she gets up, would you ask her to meet me at the hearings at noon? I've got to talk with her. It's important."

Mary-Ellen nodded as if she understood. "Certainly, Chet. I don't know if she'll be free, but I'll tell her."

"Thanks."

The District Metro connected the Pentagon with the 189

Capitol, so Kinsman did not have to go out into the bleak morning again. The subway train was bleak enough: crowded, noisy, dirty with graffiti and shreds of refuse. It was hot and rancid in the jam-packed train. Smells of human sweat, a hundred different breakfasts, cigarettes, and the special steamy reek of rain-soaked clothing.

The morning's hearing was given over to an antimilitary lobby consisting of, it seemed to Kinsman, housewives, clergymen, and public relations flaks. The old rococo hearing chamber was buzzing with witnesses and their friends, pho- tographers, reporters, senators and their scurrying aides. TV cameras were jammed into one side of the chamber, their glaring hot lights bathing the long green-topped table where the committee members sat facing the smaller table for witnesses.

Who signs the TV stations' energy permits? Kinsman wondered idly as a middle-aged woman with too much makeup on her face read from a prepared statement in a penetrating voice that jangled with New York nasality:

"We are not against the development of useful programs that will benefit the American taxpayer. We support and endorse the efforts of American industry to develop Solar Power Satellites and thereby provide new energy for our nation. But we cannot support, nor do we endorse, spending additional billions of tax dollars on military programs in space. Outer space should be a peaceful domain, not a place in which to escalate the arms race."

Kinsman slouched on a bench in the rear of the crowded hearing chamber, watching the TV monitors because they gave him a better view of the witness. He wished that he did not agree with her.

The woman looked up from her prepared text and said, "Let us never forget the words that we left on the Moon, engraved on the Apollo 11 landing craft: 'We came in peace for all humankind.'"

The crowd she had brought with her applauded, as did several of the senators. Kinsman snorted at the misquotation. Feminist revisionism. He saw that McGrath was smiling at the woman as she got up from the witness's chair, but not applauding her.

An aide came to McGrath's side, appearing magically 190 from behind the Senator's high-backed chair and whispering into McGrath's ear. He looked up, shading his eyes against the TV lights, and scanned the room. Then he spoke briefly to the aide, who disappeared as magically as he had arrived.

The next witness was a minister and former Army chaplain who now headed his own church in Louisiana. As he was being introduced McGrath's aide suddenly popped up beside Kinsman.

"Major Kinsman?"

Kinsman jumped as if a cop had suddenly clapped him on the shoulder.

"Yes," he whispered.

Wordlessly the young man handed him a note which read: See you in the corridor when the session ends. Diane.

It was neatly typed, even the signature. She must have phoned Neal's office. Kinsman realized. By the time he looked up from the yellow paper the aide was gone.

Kinsman sat through two more witnesses, both university professors. The first one, when he was not toying with his mustache, was an economist who showed charts which he claimed proved that private investment in space industries would help the national economy greatly, but government investment in space would only increase the inflation rate. The other, an aging, grossly overweight biophysicist, insisted that space development of any kind was unsound ecologically.

"It will cost more in energy and environmental degrada- tion," he intoned in a deep, shaking, doomsday voice, "to place large numbers of workers into space than those workers will ever be able to return to the people of this Earth in the form of energy or usable goods. Space is only good for the very rich, and it will be the poor peoples of the Earth who will pay the price for the privileged few."