Kinsman grinned. lie knew it would be later or nothing.

They muttered reluctant agreement and broke up the circle around her. Kinsman took the final few paces and stood before Diane.

He said, “Good to see you again.”

“Hello, Chet.” She wasn’t quite smiling.

“Here Diane, I brought you some punch.” Kinsman turned to see a fleshy-faced young man with a droopy mustache and tousled brown hair, dressed in a violet suit, carrying two plastic cups of punch.

“Thank you, Larry. This is Chet Kinsman. Chet, meet Larry Rose.”

“Kinsman?”

“I knew Chet in the Bay area a few years back, when I was just getting started. You’re still in the Air Force, aren’t you, Chet?”

“Affirmative.” Play the role.

Diane turned back to Larry. “Chet’s an astronaut. He’s been on the Moon.”

“Oh. That must be where I heard the name. Weren’t you involved in some sort of rescue? One of your people got stranded or something and you—”

“Yes.” Kinsman cut him short. “It was blown up out of proportion by the news people.”

They stood there for a moment, awkwardly silent while the party pulsated around them.

Diane said, “Mary-Ellen told me you might be here tonight. You and Neal are both working on something about the space program?”

“Something like that. Organized any more peace marches?”

She laughed. “Larry, did I ever tell you about the time we tried to get Chet to come out and join one of our demonstrations? In his uniform?” Larry shook his head.

“Do you remember what you told me, Chet?”

“No. I remember it was during the Brazilian crisis. You were planning to invade the U.C.L.A. library or something. I had flying duty that day.”

It was a perfect day for flying, breaking out of the coastal haze and standing the jet on her tailpipe and ripping through the clouds until even the distant Sierras looked like nothing more than wrinkles. Then flat out over the Pacific at Mach 5, the only sounds in your earphones from your own breathing and the faint, distant crackle of earthbound men giving orders to other men.

“You told me,” Diane said, “that you’d rather be flying patrol and making sure that nobody bombs us while we demonstrated for peace.”

She was grinning at him. It was funny now; it hadn’t been then.

“Yeah, I guess I did say that.”

“How amusing,” Larry said. “And what are you doing now? Protecting us from the Lithuanians? Or going to Mars?’

You overstuffed fruit, you wouldn’t even fit into a flight crewman’s seat. “I’m serving on a Pentagon assignment. My job is congressional liaison.”

“Twisting congressmen’s arms is what he means,” came Neal McGrath’s husky voice from behind him.

Kinsman turned.

“Hello, Chet, Diane . . . eh, Larry Rose, isn’t it?”

“You have a good memory for names.”

“Goes with the job.” Neal McGrath topped Kinsman’s six feet by an inch. He was red-haired and rugged-looking. His voice was soft, throaty. Somehow the natural expression of his face, in repose, was an introspective scowl. But he was smiling now. His cocktail-party smile, thought Kinsman.

“Tug Wynne tells me I was pretty rough on your boss this morning,” McGrath said to Kinsman. The smile turned a shade self-satisfied.

“Colonel Murdock lost a few pounds, and it wasn’t all from the TV lights,” Kinsman said.

“I was only trying to get him to give me a good reason for funneling money into a permanent Moonbase.”

Kinsman answered, “He gave you about fifty reasons, Neal.”

“None that hold up,” McGrath said. “Not when we’ve got to find money to reclaim every major city in this country, plus fighting these damned interminable wars.”

“And to check the population growth,” Diane added.

Here we go again. Shrugging. Kinsman said, “Look, Neal, I’m not going to argue with you. We’ve been making one-shot missions to the Moon off and on for fifty years now. There’s enough there to warrant a permanent base.”

McGrath made a sour face. “A big, expensive base on the Moon.”

“Makes sense,” Kinsman slid in. “It makes sense on a straight cost-effectiveness basis. You’ve seen the numbers. Moonbase will save you billions of dollars in the long run.”

“That’s just like Mary-Ellen saves me money at department store sales. I can’t afford to save that money. Not this year. The capital outlay is too high. To say nothing of the overruns.”

“Now wait—”

“Come on, Chet. There’s never been a big program that’s lived within its budget. No . . . Moonbase is going to have to wait, I’m afraid.”

“We’ve already waited fifty years.”

A crowd was gathering around them now, and McGrath automatically raised his voice a notch. “Our first priority has got to be for the cities. They’ve become jungles, unfit for sane human life. We’ve got to reclaim them, and save the people who’re trapped in them before they all turn into savages.”

Damn, he’s got a thick hide. “Okay, but it doesn’t have to be either/or. We can do both.”

“Not while the war’s on.”

Hold your temper; don’t fire at the flag. “The war’s an awfully convenient excuse for postponing commitments. We’ve been in hot and cold wars since before you and I were born.”

With the confident grin of a hunter who had cornered his quarry, McGrath asked, “Are you suggesting that we pull our troops out of South America? Or do you want to let our cities collapse completely?”

Do you still beat your wife? “All I’m suggesting,” Kinsman said with, deliberate calm, “is that we shouldn’t postpone building Moonbase any longer. We’ve got the technology—we know how to do it. It’s either build a permanent base on the Moon, or stop the lunar exploration program altogether. If we fail to build Moonbase, your budget-cutting friends will throttle down the whole manned space program to zero within a few years.”

Still smiling, McGrath said, “I’ve heard all that from your Colonel Murdock.”

There was a curious look in Diane’s dark eyes.