"Hey, watch that!" Harriman snapped, frowning.
Marrett raised his beer bottle in salute. "Present compa- ny excepted."
Harriman kept his stern visage. "There's a lot of nasty comments I could make about engineers."
"I'm a meteorologist."
Harriman glanced heavenward. "The Lord has delivered him unto my hands!"
Landau pulled up a chair and reached for one of the few remaining sandwiches.
"You think we got our message across to them?" Kins- man asked Marrett.
"Yep. They knew the story before they came in here. De Paolo's seen to that. They just had to meet you, size you up, and play their estimation of you against their estimates of what they stand to gain or lose by going along with De Paolo's scheme."
Kinsman shook his head once and got a fresh lance of pain from the servomotors whining just behind his ears. "I wonder about De Paolo's plan," he said. "He claims that he's not aiming at a world dictatorship . . ."
"You want to know if you can trust him?" Marrett asked. "He's honest. He means what he says."
"But what about the people around him?" Kinsman wondered. "And the people after him?"
Marrett started to shrug, but Harriman said, "What the hell did you expect, Chet?"
"What do you mean?"
With a shake of his head, Harriman explained, "Don't you see that De Paolo's plans are the logical extension of your own? Follows as the night the day. All he's doing is building a permanent structure where you've been improvising lean-tos and pup tents. De Paolo sees further than you do, my boy. What he wants is a solid edifice."
"You mean a jail?"
Harriman made a sour face. "Don't be such a muddle- brain! The only way you can prevent nuclear war is by producing a force that's stronger than nations. Selene by itself can't be that strong. But De Paolo's moving toward a real world government—with muscle. It's what we need. Hell, Woodrow Wilson recognized that! But up until now no international organization has had the muscle to make the nations toe the line. Well, now we do. Or we will."
"Damned right," Marrett agreed. "We're gonna build a whole new thing out of all this. A real world government. The age of nationalism is over, finished. Has been, ever since Sputnik. We're just trying to build something effective in its place to hold the world together."
Marrett took a long, thoughtful pull on his beer. Putting the bottle down, he said, "Listen. A world government isn't gonna solve all the world's problems overnight. And there's always the danger of a dictatorship on a global scale. But compared to what we've got today, a world government looks damned good to me."
Harriman added, "Chet, it's a question of quid pro quo. If we want these nations to recognize Selene, if we want to be admitted to the United Nations, to get the United States and 542 the Soviet Union off our backs, then we've got to play along with De Paolo. There's no choice. It's a question of political reality. Help De Paolo get what he wants and he'll help us to get what we want. Quid pro quo."
"While the whole fucking human race hangs in the balance," Marrett added.
