"I mean it, Ernie," he shouted. "As long as you don't work against us you're welcome to live here."
"You'd . . . trust me?"
"Why not? Aren't you an honest man?"
Waterman merely shook his head in wonderment.
Much of the afternoon Kinsman spent going over person- nel lists and combining the American files with Leonov's. The two of them worked in the Russian personnel office, alone except for the Lunagrad computer terminal that sat on a table in the middle of a large room. The Moonbase computer had not yet been fully linked with the Russian machine.
Leonov had to translate the Cyrillic symbols. Kinsman had the American files transferred electronically into the Russian data bank. He frowned as Pat Kelly's file appeared on the display screen. Kelly was still confined to quarters, under a psychiatrist's care. He had requested immediate 492 transfer for himself and his family Earthside.
I failed with him, Kinsman told himself. He worked so close to me, saw everything I saw, everything I did. And yet he couldn't make the Jump, couldn't change his thinking enough to grasp what had to be done. He'd rather see America destroyed than changed.
When he returned to his own quarters, just before dinnertime, he found Frank Colt sitting tensely on his living room couch. Alone.
"I was wondering when you'd show up," Kinsman said as he slid the front door shut.
"Yeah. I steered away from the partying last night. Figured you had earned a celebration without me screwing it up for you."
"I looked for you in the crowd. I wanted to thank you for staying out of mischief while I was away." Kinsman crossed the room and sat on the slingchair next to Colt.
'Took some guts for you to trust me," Colt said, eyeing Kinsman carefully.
"Took some guts for you to accept the responsibility, feeling the way you do."
Colt broke into a grin. "Listen, buddy. That lady of yours would've shot me down like a dog in a microsecond if I had stepped half a millimeter out of line. She's pretty and sweet—and tough."
Kinsman felt his brows knit slightly. He had never thought of Diane as being tough, yet the evidence had been obvious al! along. No one built a successful singing career without inner strength and a steel-hard determination. And even after the government slapped her down, she bounced back and made it to the Moon.
"Do you still feel the same way?" he asked Colt. "That what we're doing is wrong?"
Colt did not answer right away. But when he did it was with a silent nod of his head.
"Even though you can see that the Lunagrad people are with us, and that we're both acting together to save the United States and Russia?"
Hunching forward in the couch, fists on knees, Colt answered, "Okay, okay, vou're a bunch of do-gooders and 493 you've got the best interests of mankind at heart. I still can't buy it. I'm sorry, Chet, that's just the way it is. I want out. I want to go back Earthside."
"But Frank, can't you see—"
