"Captain Kinsman?" The motel's night clerk.

"Yes," he whispered back, squinting at the luminous digits of his wristwatch. Two twenty-three.

"I'm awfully sorry to disturb you, Captain, but Colonel Murdock himself called ..."

"How the hell did he know I was here?"

"He doesn't. He said he was phoning all the motels around the base. I didn't admit that you were here. He said when he found you he needed you to report to him in person at once. Those were his words, Captain: in person, at once. Something about a General Hatch."

Kinsman frowned in the darkness. "Okay. Thanks for playing dumb."

"Not at all, Captain. Hope it isn't trouble."

"Yeah." Kinsman hung up. For a half-minute he sat on the edge of the king-size bed. Murdock's making the rounds of the motels at two in the morning, Hatch is coming to the base, and the clerk hopes it isn't trouble. Funny.

He stood up, stretched his lanky frame, and glanced at the blonde wrapped obliviously in the bed's tangled sheets. With a wistful shake of his head Kinsman padded to the bathroom.

He shut the door softly and flipped the light switch, wincing. He turned on the coffee machine that hung on the wall above the light switch. It's lousy but it's coffee. Almost. As the machine started gurgling he rummaged in his travel kit for his electric razor. The face that met him in the mirror was lean and long-jawed and just the slightest bit bloodshot. He kept his hair at a length that made Murdock uncomfortable: slightly longer than regulations allowed, not long enough to call for a reprimand.

Within a few minutes he was shaved, showered, and back in Air Force uniform. He left a scribbled note on motel stationery propped against the dresser mirror, took a final long look at the blonde, wishing he could remember her name, then went out to his car.

The new fuel regulations had put an end to fast driving. The synfuels were too expensive to waste, and when you tried to get some speed out of them they began to eat out the engine's guts. There were even those who insisted that the synfuels were specially doctored to tear up an engine's innards at anything over fifty: Washington's way of enforcing energy conservation.

His hand-built convertible was ready to burn hydrogen fuel, if and when the government made the stuff available. For now, he had to go with a captain's monthly allotment of synfuel. It was enough to keep him moving—cautiously —through the predawn darkness.

Some instinct made him turn on the car radio. Diane's haunting voice filled the starry night:

"... and in her right hand There's a silver dagger, That says I can never be your bride."

Kinsman listened in dark solitude as the night wind whistled past. Diane Lawrence was a major entertainment star, with scant time for an Air Force captain who spent half his life in space. How long has it been since I've seen her? he asked himself. Could it be more than a year?

A limousine and an official Air Force car with a general's flag fluttering from its antenna zoomed past him, doing at least eighty, heading for the base. No fuel scarcity for them. Their engines whined and faded into the distance like wailing ghosts. There was no other traffic at this hour. Kinsman held to the legal limit all the way to the base's main gate, but he could feel the excitement building up inside him.

Half a dozen Air Policemen were manning the gate. looking brisk and polished, instead of the usual sleepy pair.

"What's the stew. Sergeant?" Kinsman asked as he 104 pulled his car up to the gate.

The guard flashed his hand light on the badge Kinsman held in his outstretched hand.

"Dunno, sir. We got the word to look sharp."

He flashed the light full in Kinsman's face, checking the picture on the badge. Painfully sharp. Kinsman groused to himself.

The guard waved him on.

There was that special crackle in the air as Kinsman drove to the administration building. The kind that only comes when a manned launch is imminent. As if in answer to his unspoken hunch, the floodlights of Complex 204 bloomed into life, etching the tall silver booster standing there em- braced by the dark spiderwork of the gantry tower.

People were scurrying in and out of the administration building. Some were sleepy-eyed and disheveled, but their feet were doing double time. Colonel Murdock's secretary was coming down the hallway as Kinsman signed in at the security desk.