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find out in a few minutes. Let’s deal with this other problem first.” He turned back toward the hatch.
    Rahman said, “Are you kidding ?” Tableau moment, then she turned and went bounding down the stairway.
    Zeq looked at him, face framed in his helmet faceplate, then said, “I’ll stay with her.” Turning away as well.
    What? Order them back? Military discipline and all that? No. Deal with the problem yourself. Let them do what they came here to do. He watched them go down, watched them disappear into the shrubbery with a twinge of unease, turned back toward the hatch, regretting its necessity.
    Turning my back on... What shall I call this? Magic? Or only typical American nonsense? Sell the sizzle not the steak. Magic fountains in a cold gray moonbase. Maybe Ali Baba will come scurrying from the bushes any moment now...
    o0o
    Rolling across the rugged plain of Peary’s floor, Ling Erhshan felt the makeshift Lunar rover waddling under him, unstable. Unstable, because I’m alone here, an empty seat where my companion should be, but...
    Chang and Da Chai working over their consoles, tuning up the particle beam device, charging its capacitors, or whatever. Getting “ready,” whatever that meant.
    “You go on over to the base and talk to the Arab commander. The American... missile will be here in no time at all. When... Well. When it’s over, we’ll come over on foot. It’s not far.”
    Riding now through a field of debris, crawling up to park beside a newer vehicle. Those squiggly lines must be Arabic...
    Sitting there motionless, staring up at a flat black sky, at brightly lit mountains, low, eroded ringwall mountains, dimensionless, as if painted on black glass. Like a movie set. Rubble of artifacts all around him now. Like an abandoned movie set. And then, sudden exhilaration.
    Because I’m really here . Because I’ve been permitted to see this. With my own eyes. Whatever happens next, or doesn’t happen, there will have been that. A magical thrill I can carry with me from now until the moment of my death. Uneasy stirring, glancing over his shoulder in the direction of a bright crescent Earth. Thinking, A moment that may not be so very far away after all... Vision of a missile streaking down out of that starless sky, striking, exploding, bright flare of nuclear fire, then nothing at all. Black eternity.
    So. If it comes, it comes. No reason to think about it before that last fearful moment arrives.
    He unhooked himself from the seat harness and stood, teetering unpleasantly, getting his footing in the dusty soil, then turning to walk toward the wall, where the outline of a hatchway of some sort was visible. Walking, almost tangling his feet, suddenly remembering patchy old black and white video footage. Kangaroo hop. Use your ankles.
    The hatch swung open, bright yellow-orange incandescent light flooding out, spacesuited figures waiting.
    Inside the dome, beyond the inner airlock door, Ling stood facing his two Arabs, looking in through their faceplates at swarthy Levantine faces, at beetle-browed, primitive-looking men with round black eyes and enormous noses. Wondering, for an inane moment, how they kept those huge brown beaks from smashing into their helmet glass... But they look more like the heroes from my old American science fiction novels than I do. Why did I never picture Dorian Haldane looking like this? Or lovely blond Valetta with a nose like a ripe banana planted in the middle of her face?
    No. My child’s imagination made her a pale northern Chinese woman with long, straight yellow hair and unusually big eyes. And, of course, because I was an adolescent boy, a dense forest of curly yellow pubic hair. Yellow like a grocery-store lemon. And big breasts of course. Breasts the size of cantaloupes. American women always had big breasts. You saw that in all the movies.
    Ling sighed, pushing away silly old memories. I am here. It is now. Focus. Because the UAR program had been conducted so openly,