"What the hell is at stake?" she asked.

"I can't tell you all of it . . ."

"Is this room bugged?"

He shook his head in the shadows. "No, I go over the 207 place pretty thoroughly every few days. And I've got a couple of friends in the Pentagon who keep track of who's listening to whom. My conversations with Neal are monitored, but I'm not important enough to have my apartment wired."

He could not see her face too well in the flickering candlelight, but Diane's voice was high with concern. "Is Neal always watched? Is his office wired, or . . ."

"His office must be. And his home was during the party. They spot-check his phones, I'm sure. That's pretty standard procedure for a senator. He knows about it; they all do. And they know how to protect themselves from it. But it means that I can't tell him everything that he needs to know."

"Just what is it he needs to know?"

Instead of answering, Kinsman got up and padded to the kitchenette for the scotch.

Almost an hour later, after two more beers for Diane and several long pulls of scotch for himself, he was saying, ". . . and that's the politics of it. I can't tell you what the other program is all about, but Marcot and the White House will clobber Neal if they get the chance. Unless, of course, he goes along with the Moonbase program."

Diane asked, "But what about you, Chet? Where do you stand in all this?"

"Right in the middle. I want Moonbase because I want to be there. I want to live on the Moon. I want to set up that new world I was telling you about."

"But if it's a military base ..."

"Yeah, I know. Even if we start out as a hospital, even if we work jointly with the Russians, there's always the chance that the brass will start turning it into a supply center for a real military effort."

"They could do that?"

"Sure. Mine the lunar ores and build military satellites out of them, then place them in orbit around the Earth. Just like the corporations want to build their solar power satel- lites."

"But the Russians will be there too, won't they?"

Kinsman nodded. "And they'll do the same thing, once they see us do it."

"And you're caught in the middle of all this."

"Yeah, they've got me surrounded." He leaned his head 208 back against the wall and heard himself go on, "But that doesn't matter. It's where I've got to be if I'm ever going to make it back there."

"There?"

"To the Moon."

"It's like an obsession with you," Diane said.

He smiled at her. "Leonardo da Vinci."

"What?"

"He built gliders and tried them out himself. They never worked too well, but it was enough to make him write, 'Once you have tasted flight, you will walk the Earth with your eyes turned skyward. For there you have been, and there you long to return.'"