If he were Tansy, he would stay in bed as long as possible.

Maybe she really is still asleep and would prefer to stay that way. His eyes find the welcome mat, a reassuring touch of the ordinary world he can feel already disappearing around him, and he steps up onto the topmost board and knocks on the door.

Everything else is a rationalization he has no choice but to keep moving forward. Then it occurs to him that these doubts mask his real feelings, which have to do with the discomfort the trailer arouses in him. At last he sat down in his old place by the tiller, laying one hand upon it, and looked at Arren. He stood a long time by the mast, with watchful eyes. police to increase the uniformed presence near the PRC's various missions to America, and to arrange a rapid backup should any similar problems develop right here in Washington. This information rapidly found its way to the Diplomatic Protection Service, the State Department agency tasked with the job of securing foreign diplomats and their embassies. That occasioned brief dispatches from American embassies around the world, informing the Department of State that various foreign governments had reacted adversely to the story on CNN, and that various PRC embassies had found demonstrators outside their gates, some of them quite vociferous. Elsewhere in the world, the CNN report from Beijing arrived at breakfast time, causing more than a few people to set their coffee (or tea) cups down immediately before a groan of anger. In the same building, the White House Office of Signals duly made a high-quality tape of the report and had it walked to the Oval Office. Stanley went to the window, then hurried to open the front door as Troy Louden came up the walk. Hey, girl, the one with dark hair says with a Southern accent.What are you doing out at this time of night?Ī little after six, just after the news came on, a taxi pulled up outside and stopped at the curb. He had no reason to hate the guy, except maybe for the robe anyway, it was Catherine who had made the choice. No, for the Ural Mountains in the region of Perchorsk had been for some time far more security-sensitive than even the Baikonur Space Centre in the days of the Sputniks.Įugene grunted, and let the muzzle of the rifle drop a few inches.ĭecker was calming down. Certainly nothing substantial-other than the evidence provided by the satellites-had leaked out of Russia herself nothing, that is, in the way of normal intelligence reporting. In very small, very powerful and highly secretive defence circles throughout the Western World there had been worried discussions about APB (Accelerated Particle Beam)shields, about nuclear- or plasma-powered lasers, even about something called aMagma Motor which might theoretically tap the energy of the small black hole believed by some scientists to lie at Earth's core, simultaneously feeding upon and fuelling the planet but all such discussions had been purely conjectural. What exactly they saw had never been made public or even hinted at outside of higher-echelon and correspondingly low-profile government departments, but it had been sufficient to jolt America's SDI orStar Wars concept into real being. Despite all the USSR's technological camouflaging countermeasures, that test, too, had beenseen by the American spy-satellites.

In an ordinary world