Very seriously, she replied, “If you’re going to build a new world, how could I stay away?”

Kinsman felt himself relax for the first time all evening. “Well, I’ll be damned! You can see it!” He started to laugh.

“What’s funny?” McGrath asked.

“I’ve won a convert, Neal. If Diane can see what it’s all about, then we’ve got it made. The idea of a Moonbase, of a permanent settlement on the Moon—if it gets across to Diane, then the kids will see it, too.”

“There are no kids in Congress.”

Kinsman shrugged. “That’s okay. Congress’ll come around sooner or later. Maybe not this year, maybe not until after Murdock retires. But we’ll get it. There’s going to be a permanent settlement on the Moon. In time for me to get there.”

“Chet,” Diane said, “it won’t be fun. It’s going to be a lot of work.”

“I know. But it’ll be worth the work.”

They sat there, eye to eye, grinning at each other.

McGrath slouched back in the sofa. “I guess I’m simply too old to appreciate all this. I don’t see how—”

“Neal,” Kinsman said, “someday the history books will devote a chapter to the creation of man’s first extraterrestrial society. Your name will be in there as one of the men who opposed it—or one of the leaders who helped create it. Which do you want to be put down beside your name?”

“You’re a cunning bastard,” McGrath mumbled.

“And don’t you forget it.” Kinsman stood up, stretched, then reached a hand out for Diane. “Come on, lunik, let’s take a walk. There’s a full Moon out tonight. In a couple years I’ll show you what a full Earth looks like.”

CRISIS OF THE MONTH

“Crisis of the Month” began with my wife’s griping about the hysterical manner in which the news media report on the day’s events. Veteran newscaster Linda Ellerbee calls the technique “anxiety news.” Back in journalism school (so long ago that spelling was considered important) I was taught that “good news is no news.” Today’s media takes this advice to extremes: no matter what the story, there is a down side to it that can be emphasized.

So when my darling and very perceptive wife complained about the utterly negative way in which the media presented the day’s news I quipped, “I can see the day when science finally finds out how to make people immortal. The media will do stories about the sad plight of the funeral directors.”

My wife recognizes an idea when she hears one, even if I don’t. She immediately suggested, “Why don’t you write a story about that?”

Thus the origin of “Crisis of the Month.”

While I crumpled the paper note that someone had slipped into my jacket pocket, Jack Armstrong drummed his fingers on the immaculately gleaming expanse of the pseudomahogany conference table.

“Well,” he said testily, “ladies and gentlemen, don’t one of you have a possibility? An inkling? An idea?”

No one spoke. I left the wadded note in my pocket and placed both my hands conspicuously on the table top.

Armstrong drummed away in abysmal silence. I guess once he had actually looked like The All-American Boy. Now, many facelifts and body remodelings later, he looked more like a moderately well-preserved manikin.

“Nothing at all, gentleman and ladies?” He always made certain to give each sex the first position fifty percent of the time. Affirmative action was a way of life with our Boss.

“Very well then. We will Delphi the problem.”

That broke the silence. Everyone groaned.

“There’s nothing else to be done”, the Boss insisted. “We must have a crisis by Monday morning. It is now  . . . ” he glanced at the digital readout built into the table top, “  . . . three-eighteen p.m. Friday. We will not leave this office until we have a crisis to offer.”

We knew it wouldn’t do a bit of good, but we groaned all over again.

The Crisis Command Center was the best-kept secret in the world. No government knew of our existence. Nor did the people, of course. In fact, in all the world’s far-flung news media, only a select handful of the topmost executives knew of the CCC. Those few, those precious few, that band of brothers and sisters—they were our customers. The reason for our being. They paid handsomely. And they protected the secret of our work even from their own news staffs.

Our job, our sacred duty, was to select the crisis that would be the focus of worldwide media attention for the coming month. Nothing more. Nothing less.

In the old days, when every network, newspaper, magazine, news service, or independent station picked out its own crises, things were always in a jumble. Sure, they would try to focus on one or two surefire headline-makers: a nuclear powerplant disaster or the fear of one, a new disease like AIDS or Chinese Rot, a war, terrorism, things like that.

The problem was, there were so many crises springing up all the time, so many threats and threats of threats, so much blood and fire and terror, that people stopped paying attention. The news scared the livers out of them. Sales of newspapers and magazines plunged toward zero. Audiences for news shows, even the revered network evening shows, likewise plummeted.

It was Jack Armstrong—a much younger, more handsome and vigorous All-American Boy—who came up with the idea of the Crisis Command Center. Like all great ideas, it was basically simple.

Pick one crisis each month and play it for all it’s worth. Everywhere. In all the media. Keep it scary enough to keep people listening, but not so terrifying that they’ll run away and hide.

And it worked! Worked to the point where the CCC (or Cee Cubed, as some of our analysts styled it) was truly the command center for all the media of North America. And thereby, of course, the whole world.

But on this particular Friday afternoon, we were stumped. And I had that terrifying note crumpled in my pocket. A handwritten note, on paper, no less. Not an electric communication, but a secret, private, dangerous seditious note, meant for me and me alone, surreptitiously slipped into my jacket pocket.

“Make big $$$,” it scrawled. “Tell all to Feds.”

I clasped my hands to keep them from trembling and wondered who, out of the fourteen men and women sitting around the table, had slipped that bomb to me.

Boss Jack had started the Delphi procedure by going down the table, asking each of us board members in turn for the latest news in her or his area of expertise.

He started with the man sitting at his immediate right, Matt Dillon. That wasn’t the name he had been born with, naturally; his original name had been Oliver Wolchinsky. But in our select little group, once you earn your spurs (no pun intended) you are entitled to a “power name,” a name that shows you are a person of rank and consequence. Most power names were chosen, of course, from famous media characters.

Matt Dillon didn’t look like the marshal of Dodge City. Or even the one-time teen screen idol. He was short, pudgy, bald, with bad skin and an irritable temper. He looked, actually, exactly as you would expect an Oliver Wolchinsky to look.

But when Jack Armstrong said,” We shall begin with you,” he added, “Matthew.”

Matt Dillon was the CCC expert on energy problems. He always got to his feet when he had something to say. This time he remained with his round rump resting resignedly on the caramel cushion of his chair.

“The outlook is bleak,” said Matt Dillon. “Sales of the new space-manufactured solar cells are still climbing. Individual homes, apartment buildings, condos, factories—everybody’s plastering their roofs with them and generating their own electricity. No pollution, no radiation, nothing for us to latch onto. They don’t even make noise!”

“Ah,” intoned our All-American Boy, “but they must be ruining business for electric utility companies. Why not a crisis there?” He gestured hypnotically, and put on an expression of Ratheresque somberness, intoning, “Tonight we will look at the plight of the electrical utilities, men and women who have been discarded in the stampede for cheap energy.”