"Okay, sure."

"We're risking the safety of this entire base and everybody in it," Stavenger said. "If the nanobugs infesting your suit get inside we'll all be dead."

Edith blinked with surprise. He really means it! He's putting the whole base in jeopardy to save my neck.

The hissing and chugging noises stopped, and for a long moment she stood alone and still in the metal sarcophagus.

Then the inner door slid open and a lanky, grave faced old man with a ratty gray beard stepped inside. Behind him was a shorter Afro-American, solidly built. He looked somber, too.

"Welcome to Moonbase," said the old man, breaking into a boyish smile. "It is my pleasant duty to help you take off your clothes."

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 3 HOURS 25 MINUTES

Wilhelm Zimmerman scowled at the woman. She was pretty, in an All-American, blonde, coltish way. And completely stupid.

"You came this close to killing yourself," he growled at Edith, holding his thumb and forefinger a bare millimeter apart.

Sitting on the examination table, wrapped in nothing but a thin sheet, Edith nodded somberly. "I didn't realize I'd be putting the whole base at risk."

"You think perhaps all this is a game?"

"Not hardly."

Zimmerman locked his hands behind his back and stared at the readouts on the display screens lined above the exam table. Everything looked normal. The UV lamps had deactivated the nanomachines infesting her boots. None of them had penetrated to the inner soles. This woman was clean of nanobugs. Her boots and the rest of her spacesuit were in the nanolab, down in the old section of Moonbase. Zimmerman wanted to inspect those boots personally, to see how much damage the gobblers had done to them. He intended to play back the video of the reporter's dash through the garage and establish a time-line to determine the rate at which the nanobugs ate through the plastic of the boots.

"When can I get my clothes back?" Edith asked, clutching the sheet under her chin.

Startled out of his thoughts, Zimmerman waved a pudgy hand in the air. "Now. They were not contaminated."

With a shy smile, she asked, "Then where are they?" Zimmerman scowled again. "Am I your valet? How should I know where they are?"

Hansen had returned to the Clippership and spent a weary hour discussing the situation with his superiors. He started with his commanding officer at the Peacekeeper base in Corsica, then was bucked up to Peacekeeper headquarters in Ottawa and finally to the U.N. secretary-general, Georges Faure himself.

Patiently he explained how Captain Munasinghe had been killed. Faure listened, a strange little smile playing about his lips.

"The captain died in battle against the rebels, then.' Faure made it a statement, not a question.

"He killed himself accidentally," Hansen corrected.

Faure's expression hardened once he heard the lieutenant's words. "No, no, no. He died in battle. How it happened is of little consequence. If the Moonbase rebels had not resisted, he would not have been killed."