They laughed together and got up and went to the bar for another drink. As they walked slowly back toward the window that looked out on the stars, Kinsman said:

"I've been thinking ... let me ask you a hypothetical question."

"Shoot."

Kinsman put out his free hand and touched the plasti- glass. It was cold. Space cold. Death cold. He could feel it drawing the heat out of him, pulling his soul into space.

He yanked his hand away and said to Dreyer, "Suppose the government was willing to sink a few billion dollars into building a mining facility on the Moon. Would your board of directors be interested in putting some of your own money into the operation?"

"Sure!" Dreyer answered immediately. "If Uncle Sugar is taking most of the risk, why the hel! not?"

"That's what I thought," Kinsman said.

"You talking about a space colony now or something else?"

"Not a colony. Just the lunar mining facilities. And factories, either on the Moon or in orbit."

"To build solar power satellites?"

"No. Something else."

Dreyer said nothing for a long moment. Then, "Just what do you have in mind?"

Kinsman shook his head.

With a knowing grin, Dreyer said, "There used to be talk about building the Star Wars satellites in space, out of lunar raw materials."

Kinsman answered, "So I've heard."

Dreyer's grin spread. "We'd be happy to work on that kind of project. With the government providing the invest- ment capital and the Aerospace Force behind it, it would be a project we could depend on. We'd be willing to sink a helluva lot of our own discretionary funds into it, too."

"Do you think the other industrial contractors would feel the same way?"

"Why the hell wouldn't they?" Dreyer said. Then he started laughing again. "I'd like to see the look on Alexan- der's face when he finds out that his precious idea for building colonies in space has been bumped by factories for turning out military hardware!"

Kinsman nodded and tried to smile back at the man, but he could not.

He sat once again next to Jinny Woods on the shuttle's return flight to Florida, but Kinsman's mind was a quarter- million miles away.

"I didn't see you hardly at all," the woman was saying, "once we got up there. You were always in deep dark conversations with somebody or other. Who were all those people anyway? Wasn't one of them Senator McGrath? I saw him on television, one of those late-night talk shows. He's so handsome!"

Kinsman made noncommittal noises at her while his mind raced:

Is this the way history gets made? Somebody wants to find a retreat, a place to hide, and we get a lunar base out of it? Somebody wants to make a buck, open a new trade route, get the tax collectors off his back. That's what makes the world go 'round?

"... and the way she sang! I'll bet you didn't even hear her, did you? I looked for you but you weren't anywhere in sight. You missed the dancers, too. They took us down to the low-gravity section ..."

I'll have to spring it on Murdock first. No, first I'll tell 237