"You can."
"It's not that easy. Admitting it to you—even admitting it to Pete—won't exorcise the demon."
Diane put her hand on his cheek. It felt cool and soft to him. "It will always be with you, Chet," she said. "You'll never get rid of it completely. But you can't let it stand in your way. You have important things to do, and you can't let this keep you from doing them."
He knew she was right. Still, it scared him,
Pierce's request for a transfer was on Kinsman's desk when he got to his office that morning. He called the communications chief and tried briefly, perfunctorily, to argue him out of it. Pierce was politely adamant. And he recommended Diane Lawrence to take over his position.
Tight-lipped, Kinsman agreed. Pierce smiled and thanked him.
Leaning back in his desk chair. Kinsman punched a button on his desktop keyboard and an Earthside newscast filled the main wall screen. The view was of the speaker's podium in the General Assembly chamber of the UN building in New York. The Soviet delegate was fulminating, glaring at the Americans sitting in the front row, his brows knit angrily, arms gesticulating. The interpretation was being spoken in a 368 young woman's British voice as calm and flatly unemotional as Selene's computer:
"... the capitalist imperialists were obviously guilty of invading territory that was clearly marked by representatives of the USSR, thereby deliberately provoking the incident. This aggression was rightfully repelled, as American aggres- sion has been repelled by freedom-loving peoples all over the globe."
There was a commotion and the TV camera swung to the American desk, where the chief delegate was on his feet bellowing, "Mr. Chairman, how long must we listen to this pack of lies and distortions? There can be no meaningful resolution . . ."
The Russian speaker pounded the podium with his fists and shouted something unintelligible. The entire American delegation came to its feet, yelling.
Kinsman watched, stunned, while the cameras panned across the huge chamber. It looked as if a riot was about to break out. Shouting, screaming, arm-waving. The only per- son who remained in his seat was the Chairman, up at his desk above the podium. A slim, dark Latin American with big sad eyes, he merely sat there shaking his head.
The last, best hope of mankind, Kinsman thought. He snapped off the newscast and sat staring at the blank screen for a moment. Then he got up from his desk.
Better make the rounds, he told himself. He decided to start with the water factory.
He spent half the morning there, listening to Ernie Waterman complaining about how difficult everything was, over the noise of the construction crews. Yet they were making considerable progress, Kinsman saw. The dour-faced engineer was cautious to the point of being morose, but Kinsman knew that Selene would have plenty of water for all its needs, even if those needs suddenly doubled.
The water factory was actually half an ore-processing plant and half a water-purification facility. The rock crushers dwarfed human scale, taking in fresh loads of ore from the mining crawlers that came from as far north as the Straight Wall and as far south as Fra Mauro. Kinsman clambered over the big crushers, feeling the rumble of their heavy machinery in his bones. This was the most expensive equipment in 369
Selene, hauled up from Earthside over a three-year period. Selene's technicians could maintain and repair them but it would be years before they could even attempt to build such machines on their own.
Following the clattering conveyor belts that carried the pulverized rock, Kinsman came to the electric arcs humming steadily inside their stainless steel jackets. From here onward the factory was a maze of plumbing: pipes overhead, under- foot, lining kilometers of tunnels, sweating beads of precious ice-cold water no matter how much insulation the engineers put on them. Kinsman stepped over, ducked under, squeezed between the pipelines that carried Selene's lifeblood.
Waterman dogged behind him, leaning on his canes, unhappily cataloging his real and projected problems all the way through the factory. Finally, as they walked through the relatively quiet corridors of the factory's office and control area, Waterman said:
"I still don't see what all the rush is about. I wish you'd let me ease off; some of these guys have been working double shifts. They're getting tired enough to start causing acci- dents."
Kinsman stopped in front of the window that looked in on the computer control section. Watching the nearly unat- tended machine's lights nickering in some internally meaning- ful pattern, he answered, "Ernie, we've got a yellow alert slapped on us. We've got to be prepared for a real emergency. Earthside might suddenly need double, triple the rocket fuels we send them now."
