Hofstader sagged. The Defense Secretary grabbed at his arm, as if to keep him from falling off his chair.

"Now listen, all of you," Kinsman said to the many faces in the screens. "This is no joke and no idle threat. We will stop any rocket launching. No matter where in the world it's launched from. We will not allow the destruction of Ameri- cans, or Russians, or anyone else. There will be no war. Is that clear? No war!"

Kinsman could feel his heart banging wildly, making his ears roar. He took a deep, painful breath and went on, "There is no way that we can hurt you. Our armaments were specifically designed to defend against missile launches. The nation of Selene is no threat to any nation on Earth. But we will not allow missiles to be launched! And if you try to send troops to these space stations to take them away from us, we'll be forced to destroy your troop-carrying rockets. Check with your technical staffs, gentlemen. We can do it. And we will. Now, good night. Ifs been a long and difficult day up here."

He turned and nodded once to the officer beside him. All the display screens went blank.

"Stay in touch with them," he commanded. "Answer their questions. Tell them that we make only one demand: that they refrain from launching any rockets. Tell them we'll shoot anything that moves above the atmosphere."

"Yessir."

Slowly, Kinsman pulled himself to his feet. Like a ninety-year-old, he thought as he made his way back toward the rec area, toward the blessed ease of low gravity.

It was well past midnight by the time he got to bed. His men set him up in the VIP quarters on Level Five. It was jokingly referred to as the honeymoon suite. The low gravity, even less than lunar gee, was considered to be better than a water bed. Kinsman smiled as they showed him the tiny two-compartment suite. He recalled the old Zero Gee Club of bygone days, so many years ago that it seemed like another century. Damned near is another century, he realized as he 472 stretched out gratefully on the bunk. The millennium is almost here.

He knew he should call Selene. He knew he should check on Diane and Colt, and talk with Harriman. He knew he should tell them that he was all right and everything had worked out better than they had any right to expect. But he was too tired. Too tired to talk, to think, even to sleep. I'll never sleep, he told himself, tossing in the bunk. Too keyed up ...

He awoke with a pang of fear burning in his gut. The phone was buzzing. The only lights in the compartment were the yellow 0351 of the digital clock and the pulsing red eye of the phone. He reached over, instantly wide awake, and punched the phone on.

"Yeah?"

A woman tech said, "Station Gamma reports a rocket launch from the Chinese mainland."

He sat up in bed, forgetting his nakedness and the fact that the room's darkness hid it. "When?"

The woman glanced at something off-camera. "T plus one hundred fourteen seconds."

"Lemme see."

The phone's tiny display screen flickered, then showed a telescope view. The brown, cloud-streaked mountain country of western China. A single luminous thread of a rocket exhaust.

A male voice came on. "Trajectory extrapolation gives an impact in the mid-Pacific. Doesn't look heavy enough for an ICBM. Exhaust profile matches a scientific high-altitude sounding rocket more than anything else."

"Burn it," Kinsman snapped.

"We're already tracking it and have programmed a kill as soon as it clears the coastline," the map's voice answered, almost casually. "Got three different satellites lined up on it. If the first one misses ..."

"Good work," said Kinsman. Very practical people, the Chinese. The only ones with sense enough to use a cheap scientific rocket to see if we mean business.

The rocket was too small to be seen visually, even in the best telescopic magnification. Instead, the various satellite sensors were being overlapped to give an optical view of the 473

Earth background and a combined radar-infrared image of the rocket—which looked on the display screen like a reddish blob, slightly longer than it was wide. Suddenly it blossomed into a white glare. Got it! The fireball was much too small for a nuclear explosion but bright enough to see optically. It quickly dissipated.

"Well done," Kinsman grunted. "Now let me get some sleep. Call me only if something critical happens."

The comm tech reappeared on the screen. "Sir," she asked worriedly, "who's to decide what's critical?"

"The Officer of the Day, honey. He's the man on the spot."