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honest to buy. We need some angle on him."
    "Stick at it, Lips." Meyer sounded a lot better now that the decision on Mesurier had been made. "I'll get the message back out to the Cook Islands. Rocky Courtelle's the right man to deliver it, he looks as though he'd kill his mother for a good cigar. What's the launch date going to be?"
    "Two months from now. We've got the boosters for the upper stage, and we'll be taking the first work crew out there on the second mission. I'll be ready to brief the Council in two weeks, but I can already tell you that a lot of the usual production problems will disappear when we've got the Lungfish Station running smoothly. Then I want to hit them with the next step."
    "Next step! I thought we were in business with Lungfish. "
    "You'll be all right, Sal. We'll have you up there as soon as there's a medical facility running. But I mean the next big step. I want Council approval for a Lunar Base."
    "On the Moon! What the hell are you talking about, Lips. You'll never sell them on that."
    "Want a little bet on it, Sal? A hundred thousand, and I'll give you five to one odds."
    "But why, for God's sake? We've got all the production capacity we'll need on Lungfish Station for twenty years."
    "Capacity, but not total security. We'll have that when we have a Lunar Base, once we dig in there we'll be out of reach of anybody. We can set up a bigger facility and we'll be able to get the Arabs into the Casino. They say that the Lungfish Station is bad, it's where Mohammad's coffin is supposed to be—but they don't mind the Moon at all. How'd you like to get your hands on a few of those four hundred billion a year petrodollars? We'll make the fanciest Casino in the universe."
    "You think you'll get Arabs to go all the way to the Moon to gamble, when they could be doing it at home? Lips, I hate to say this, but you sound all screwed up."
    Len grinned. "Wait and see, old man. Wait and see. They'll go. Don't you understand, the Moon isn't part of the Moslem earthly universe—it's a place where all the rules can be broken without offending the religion. As far as they're concerned, it'll be janat, the garden of paradise. All the vices and none of them forbidden."
    "On the goddammed Moon? "
    "Why not? You've never been to the Empty Quarter in southern Arabia. After that desert you'd find the lunar surface a pleasant change. Here, before you cut out let me show you my first design. The more you know about this, the easier it'll be to come in hard on my side with the Council."
    Twenty minutes of coaxing, explaining, and summarizing didn't convince Sal Meyer. The financial analysis did that, as soon as Meyer looked over the basic budget and projected returns.
    He shook his head as he finally cut the connection. "Damned persuasive, Lips. And you know what? It's not even an illegal operation."
    "Never mind, Sal. You can't have everything. Who's going to tax us for money we make on the Moon? We don't have to be illegal to avoid the tax bite up there."
    Like the Arabs, Sal Meyer had the sudden look of one to whom Paradise has become just a Shuttle ride away.
    * * *
    Len Martello was mortal. Like any mortal he couldn't cover all the bases. Development operations had been spread over a hundred separate corporations in thirty countries. Each company had become the instrument that cleared some roadblock standing in the way of Lungfish 's conversion to production and use. But there were connections between corporations, and that network—given enough time and patience—could be traced. On the day that Sal Meyer made a minimal acceleration ascent to the Lungfish medical facility (five thousand dollars a day; Meyer might feel the pinch if he had to stay there more than fifty years) late that same afternoon Len Martello felt the first thread of the noose.
    "Len." The call was voice only, Garry Scanlon from Washington. "I can't talk long now but you've got problems."
    "You bet I've got problems." Len was lying back in a