Durban's shaggy eyebrows rose a bit. "Well, sometimes you have to put yourself on the line. You guys know that, you've all done it yourselves, one time or another."
"More than once," Leonov murmured.
"We could've taken on the bunch of them," Colt said. "They were brawlers, not trained fighters."
Leonov took a swallow of whisky and said, "I, for one, am glad that the fight did not come about. My training is not in hand-to-hand combat."
You have to put yourself on the line, Kinsman was repeating to himself.
"Maybe you could have taken them all single-handedly, Frank," Durban said. "But I doubt it. Besides, there are better ways of winning what you want than punching people. Much better ways."
"The tongue is mightier than the fist?" Colt jabbed.
"The brain is mightier than the biceps," Durban replied.
Kinsman got to his feet. "I've got to phone Colonel Murdock."
"Bobby? Why?"
"To tell him that I'm not quitting the Air Force. I'm not going to take an honorable discharge or any kind of dis- charge. I'm not quitting."
Colt broke into a wide grin. "Great! And tell him for me what I think of being assigned to training."
Leonov said, "You realize, of course, that if you start a high-priority program to build a hospital complex on the Moon, my superiors will become very suspicious of you."
"That's fine, Piotr," Durban said. "I'll put the idea before the International Astronautical Federation and get them to make this an international cooperative project. Then you can come in on it, too."
"We shall all meet on the Moon," said Leonov. "The sooner the better," Durban agreed. "To the Moon." Colt raised his cup. "I'll be there," said Kinsman.
Age 35
As SOON AS he stepped through the acoustical screen inside the house's front doorway the noise hit Kinsman like a physical blow. He stood there a moment and watched the tribal rites of a Washington cocktail party.
My battlefield, he thought.
The room was jammed with guests and they all seemed to be talking at once. It was an old Georgetown parlor, big, with a high ceiling that sagged slightly and showed one hairline crack along its length. The streets outside had been quiet and deserted except for the police monitors in their armored suits standing at each intersection. They looked like a bitter parody of astronauts in space suits.
But here there was life, chatter, laughter. The people who made Washington go, the people who ran the nation, were here drinking and talking and ignoring the enforced peace of the streets outside. America was on a wartime footing, almost. The oil shock of ten years ago had inexorably pushed the United States toward military measures. The Star Wars strategic defense satellites that could protect the nation against Soviet missiles were being deployed in orbit, despite treaties, despite opposition at home, despite—or because of—the Soviet deployment of a nearly identical system. Unemployment at home was countered by a new public- service draft that placed millions of eighteen-year-olds in police forces, hospitals, public works projects, and the armed services. Dissidence was smothered by fear: fear of dangers real and imagined, fear of government retaliation, fear of T70 ruinous unemployment and economic collapse, and the ulti- mate fear of the nuclear war that hovered remorselessly on the horizon waiting for the moment of Armageddon.
