"We could not hold it off for ten months," Leonov said.

"You're right," Kinsman admitted.

"So, my idealistic friend, declaring independence for Selene will achieve nothing. It will change nothing."

Kinsman said, "It will guarantee that more than a thousand human beings will survive the war, without being killed off later by disease or starvation."

Leonov went silent. He turned and paced toward the landing module, then stopped as the American flag came into view from behind its spidery body.

"Do you seriously believe," he asked slowly, without turning back to face Kinsman, "that any of us could watch our homelands being destroyed without going mad? Do you honestly believe that their war will not destroy us, too?"

Forcing his voice to stay calm as he walked to stand beside his friend. Kinsman answered, "We could get through it without fighting. If we tried."

The Russian's voice was infinitely sad. "No, old friend. I 357 might trust you and you might trust me, but to expect a thousand Russians and Americans to trust each other while they watch their families being killed—never,"

Kinsman wanted to scream. Instead he heard himself whisper, "But Pete, what can we do?"

"Nothing. The world will end. The millennium is rushing upon us. A thousand years ago most Christians believed that the world would end at the millennium. They were off by a factor of a thousand years. It will end now. And there is nothing we can do."

The flight back to Selene seemed longer and lonelier than the flight to Tranquility Base. Kinsman tried to blank every- thing out of his mind, think of nothing whatever. Impossible.

The world will end. There is nothing we can do.

Wrong! It had to be wrong. There must be something that can be done. Something!

As he gazed at the richly blue Earth hanging above the horizon the enormity of it struck him. He was ready to rebel against the United States of America, against the mightiest nation the world had ever known, against the three hundred million people he had sworn to defend and protect. Leonov's right, he thought. It's madness.

Kinsman's mind flooded with memories: Thanksgiving dinners, sitting in school watching filmstrips about the Decla- ration of Independence, the maddening bus ride each morn- ing from Crystal City to the dingy old Pentagon, the first time he had ever seen the Grand Canyon, pledging allegiance to the flag as a solemn little kid and then the special flip of saluting the same flag at retreat that first day he wore his shining new gold lieutenant's bars, snap-rolling an F-16 under the Golden Gate Bridge, "Don't Give Up the Ship," "Send Us More Japs," "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death," "Government of the People, by the People ..."

We're the people' he told himself. They've got no right to make us fight their goddamned war.

All that history, all that training, three hundred million programmed people . . . How could Selene hold out against it? Each man, woman, and child in Moonbase trained and indoctrinated since birth, "My Country, Tis of Thee . . ." 358

And then he remembered a line from a physics class, a chalk-dusty little man of a teacher with a pinched face and the same gray suit every day of the semester saying, "Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I can move the Earth."

Is a quarter-million miles long enough? Kinsman won- dered.

To anyone who took notice of such things, Jill Meyers and Alexsei Landau made an incongruous couple: the tall, grave, bearded Russian and the tiny, perky, moonfaced American woman.

At the moment no one was noticing. Jill and Landau stood in the midst of a knot of people watching a TV newscast from Earth. They were in Selene's central plaza, the wide high-domed arcade that had started as a natural cavern, been converted into a quartermaster's depot, and grown into a multitiered complex of privately owned shops that seemed to grow organically around the government-issue outlets.

There was little buying and selling right now. The crowd stood in tense silence in the middle of the arcade, watching the big TV screen set up in the archway at the far end. An Earthside newscaster was grimly narrating the day's events while the screen showed videotapes of the American base at McMurdo Sound, where Lieutenant Commander Richards's flag-draped coffin was being loaded aboard a jet transport plane.

The scene switched to Washington, the old Pentagon, gray and forbidding.

"While no word has yet been received from the White House," the newscaster was intoning, "informed Pentagon officials have hinted that American military units around the world have been alerted for possible action. Satellite moni- tors have identified a Russian task force steaming at top speed for Antarctica from Vladivostok, and East European troop maneuvers continue in Poland and Czechoslovakia, under the guise of winter exercises . . ."

Jill turned to Landau. She had to crane her neck to talk to him, but the inconvenience never entered her mind. "Alex, do you think they're going to do it this time?" 359