"What?"

"Or Christmas Day. Get Kinsman to accept the first flight of immigrants to the Moon on Christmas Day."

"Impossible!" Cianelli shook his head. "We can't pick shock troops and train them for this mission and modify a shuttle by tomorrow or the next day."

Colt frowned. "Kinsman's a sentimentalist, a romantic. He would buy the Christmas thing."

"What about New Year's?" Sullivan asked.

The three of them looked at Colt, waiting for his reaction. "New Year's Eve," he said. "That way they can start the first day of the new century, the new millennium, aboard the space station in their new nation."

"Didn't I read somewhere that the new millennium doesn't really start until the next year—2001? Is that right?" Sullivan wondered.

"Doesn't matter," Colt countered. "Kinsman will buy the New Year's Eve bit. And everybody counts the change from 1999 to 2000 as the millennium. Nobody gives a crap about the purists." Colt used the slight profanity very deliber- ately. No one reacted to it at all. You got 'em, baby! he told himself.

"New Year's Eve it will be, then," said the burly man.

Before the sun set that day Colt's guards disappeared. He was ushered into plush quarters and a big office where he found a pair of silver colonel's eagles on his gleaming new desk, together with the paperwork for the promotion.

"They work fast," he muttered to himself. Fingering the eagles, "Only two pieces of silver. Judas got thirty."

He looked out the window of his new office, and he could see the pale outline of the Moon rising over the low hills in the still-bright sky.

"I ain't gonna hang myself, though." His voice sounded bitter, even to himself.

Saturday 25 December 1999:

1612 hrsUT

"IT'S BEEN A busy day," Kinsman said.

"Haven't they all?" replied Diane.

They were sitting in the living room of his quarters, watching the start of the buggy race on the big wall screen across from the sofa.

"I guess they have, at that," Kinsman admitted. He had not seen Diane since the night of his return from Alpha, except for brief business talks in his office. He had appointed her Deputy Director of Personnel for Selene, under a former Russian psychologist.

Selene's first Christmas of independence had been cele- brated by a huge dinner in the central plaza, with everyone bringing their own food plus something extra for the commu- nal buffet. More than a thousand people sat on the grass and ate picnic style, celebrating the holiday together regardless of nationality, religion, or politics. After three hours of feasting, the buggy race had begun. Kinsman and Leonov officiated at the countdown, up in the main dome. Then Kinsman had invited Diane to have a drink with him.

Now they watched the ungainly lunar buggies lumbering across the uneven ground at speeds of up to thirty kilometers per hour, heading for the crater Opelt. It would take them more than a whole day to complete the nine-hundred- kilometer round trip.

The racing buggies had all started life as standard lunar surface rovers, but now they were barely recognizable as such. They all had bubble-shaped canopies up front where the crew sat: bulging cockpits that looked like insects' eyes and gave the term "buggy" a double meaning. There the similari- ties ended and individual inventiveness took over. Some of the buggies were wheeled, others tracked. One walked stiffly 506 on sharply angled praying mantis legs that ended in spongy- looking hooves. Several had weird multicolored wings sprout- ing from them: solar panels designed to intercept different wavelengths of sunlight and convert them into the electricity that ran the motors. Some had boxy collections of fuel cells running their lengths, and one buggy had a steam generator and a solar mirror atop it just behind the cockpit. Their colors were all garish, and not for esthetic reasons alone. Each crew wanted to be easy to spot by searchers if their buggy broke down on the desolate lunar plain.

Kinsman sat on the sofa with a drink in his hand and Diane beside him, watching the slow-motion race. The bug- gies scrabbled toward the nearby horizon, climbing laborious- ly over the rises in the undulating ground and wallowing in the shallow spots like turtles seeking the sea. His mind flashed a memory of roaring balls-out in an F-18 thirty meters above the Mojave floor, throttle to the firewall, afterburners screeching, scrub and rocks and sand blurring into one continuous barely seen swatch of gray-brown as he focused his eyes on the hills rising in front of him. Then barely a nudge of the stick and she stood on her tail and hurtled skyward while the safety suit hissed and squeezed at him and he flipped her into a tight barrel roll just for the sheer hell of it.

Nevermore. He shook his head.

"Chet?" Diane broke into his reverie.