"We are on schedule," Giap informed the junior officer. "All my vehicles will be at their assigned base camp positions within two hours."

"Very well," came the woman's voice, through hissing static. "Missile launch will proceed on schedule unless you order otherwise."

"Yes, launch on schedule," said Giap, wondering how firm a comm link they would have once his vehicle was parked up close to the ringwall mountains.

THE WHITE HOUSE

"Mrs President, you've got real troubles with this Moonbase business."

The President gave her staff chief a chilling look, the kind that had been known to cause lesser men to write out their resignations.

The chief of the White House staff was an old hand at this kind of thing, though; he had been with the President since she had first run for the Senate, many elections earlier.

"I mean," he said, hunching forward in the Kennedy rocker in front of her broad, modern desk,'the poll numbers are changing so fast we can't keep up with them."

"The trend?" she snapped.

"Swinging steadily in favor of Moonbase. Those news broadcasts Global's airing are turning the public's opinion around a hundred eighty degrees."

The President turned her chair away from this man she knew so well, away from his earnest, worried face and the problems that slumped his shoulders. She looked out through the long windows to the flower garden that had soothed both Roosevelts and everyone else who had sat at this apex of power in the Oval Office.

"I mean it, Luce," her staff chief said,'this has turned into real trouble."

"What about the New Morality?" she asked, still without looking at him.

He did the unthinkable. He got up from the rocking chair and walked around her desk, forcing her to face him.

Bending his knees slightly and leaning his liver-spotted hands on them so his eyes were on the same level as hers, he said gently, "They're not going to be enough, Luce. The public's demanding that you do something."

She glared at him and swung back to the desk. He returned to the rocking chair.

"Are you telling me that O'Conner and Previs and all the other New Morality leaders are abandoning me on this?"

"No, not at all," he said, raising his hands. "The hard core of the Faithful are with you as much as they've ever been. They see this fight on the Moon as the battle between the forces of good and the evils of nanotechnology."

"So where's my problem?"

"It's the peripherals," he said with a sigh. "You've got the hard core, they're solidly with you. But the hard core isn't that many votes, Luce! The New Morality's real strength has been in its numbers, yeah, but most of those numbers aren't fanatics. They're ordinary folks who think the New Morality's ideas about cleaning up crime and vice are pretty good."

"And now?"

"Now they're looking at their television screens and seeing the big, bad U.N. attacking poor little Moonbase. And most of those people at Moonbase are Americans."