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totality. Feinberg had seen the phenomenon before, an utter lack of respect for what was happening, people who had dropped by the observatory on the way to a supermarket. Then the last of the light ran off the screen. Bright spikes and beads flashed into existence, haloing the dark disk. The diamond ring effect. A few people cheered, as if someone were about to score a touchdown. He sighed and concentrated on the event, shutting out the rest of the world. How unlikely, and how fortunate, that Sun and Moon were the same apparent size! No other world in the solar system could experience an event even remotely like this. If he , Wesley M. Feinberg, had been designing the system, this was exactly the sort of spectacular effect he would have wanted to create for the one intelligent species among the worlds. And he wasn’t sure he’d have thought of it.
    A noise in the auditorium recalled him to the present. The voice was male, filled with impatience: “ I’ll wait in the car .” How dull and unimaginative the general population was.
    “Professor Feinberg?”
    He looked away from the screen. One of the observatory’s interns, a very young man who seemed intimidated in his presence, held out a piece of paper. “Sorry to disturb you, Professor. This just came for you.”
    He took it, nodded, pushed it unread into his pocket, and went back to the eclipse. The solar corona was magnificent: Plumes and streamers a million miles long blazed out of the darkened disk. The spectacle rose and fell with mathematical precision, a cosmic symphony in light and power. He watched, hearing now only his own heartbeat, willing himself closer, trying to grasp the enormity of what he was seeing.
    “Professor. I think there’s some urgency.” A new voice this time. Hoxon. At first Feinberg wasn’t sure what the man was talking about. Then he remembered the message. He fished it out of his pocket.
    It was from the Orbital Lab:
    WES ,
    ANOMALOUS OBJECT REPORTED BY ST. LOUIS AREA OBSERVER. PLEASE VERIFY .
    At the bottom of the page, in a box, there was a set of coordinates. The object was square in the middle of Pisces.
    “I’ll be back,” he told Hoxon. He wanted to be out in the eclipse anyhow, away from the crowd, away from the auditorium. He wanted to wrap himself in the event, taste it, draw it into his soul.
    He buttoned his sweater and hurried quickly across the parquet floor and out into the parking lot. It was unseasonably cold, and he pushed his hands into his pockets. The observatory was located in a nature center. The walkways and lawns were deserted. Feinberg picked out Van Maanen’s Star, looked to its left, and saw a light that shouldn’t be there. He cackled and pumped his right arm in the air with pure pleasure.
    3.
    Moonbase, Grissom Country. 12:49 P.M.
    Sam Anderson had been agent in charge of the vice president’s Secret Service detail for six months. He was not happy. The assignment should have been relatively straightforward. They were in a limited-access zone. Residents of Moonbase had all passed psychological screenings to eliminate nut cases, and the visitors were VIPs who, in a less restricted area, would havebeen traveling with their own security units.
    Nevertheless, it was not a comfortable situation. Of course, on assignment, Sam was never comfortable. He always assumed that a potential assassin existed, looking only for the opportunity. And Moonbase put him at several distinct disadvantages.
    People here tended to live and work in close proximity to one another. In the corridors and meeting rooms, it was literally impossible to maintain a ring around “Teddy,” their code-name for Haskell. It was, of course, a reference to the TR sketches and memorabilia that the vice president kept in his office. Sam’s favorite was a doctored photo showing Theodore Roosevelt and Charlie Haskell, both in buckskin, standing together outside the Dakota Saloon in the Badlands.
    Firearms were prohibited at Moonbase. No