Quraqua, with its functioning ecosystem, its near-terrestrial gravity, its abundance of water, its lack of an owner, was a godsend to the harried human race. It was inevitable that the first full-scale terraforming effort would take place here. This was the Second Chance, an opportunity to apply lessons learned painfully on Earth. It would be home to a new race of humans.

Idealists had created an abundance of plans to ensure that the children of Quraqua would treat this world, and each other, with respect. There would be no nationalism exported to the stars, no industrial exploitation. Poverty and ignorance would not be permitted to take root. The various races and faiths would live in harmony, and the ideologies that had fostered divisiveness in the bad old days would find rocky soil.

lan Helm, like a multitude of others, would believe it when he saw it.

Quraqua might work, but it would be on its own terms. It would never be the Utopia its proponents promised. He knew that. The fact that so many of the people making the Project's decisions apparently did not led him to question either their competence or their integrity.

Project Hope had not reached the brink of this first phase of its existence easily. Environmentalists had decried the diversion of funds from desperately needed efforts at home; the People of Christ had denounced any notions of moving off-world as not in accord with God's plan and therefore sacrilegious; nationalist and racial activists demanded exclusive rights to the new world. Moralists railed against the annihilation of entire species that would inevitably result from terraforming. There were serious doubts that the political will, or the money, would be available over the long term to ensure even a chance of success.

Still, Helm was prepared to concede that he had no better idea. Deforestation, pollution, urbanization, had all progressed so far now that various points of no return had been passed. There was reason to believe that if every human being disappeared tomorrow, the Earth would still require millennia to return to what it had been.

There was a positive side to all this: Helm had built a lucrative, and satisfying, career out of his specialty. He was a planetary engineer, had got his degree in the late sixties, when only astronomers were thinking seriously about the stars. He had done his graduate work on the Venusian problem, where estimates for creating a habitable world ranged into the centuries. (Mars, of course, was out of the question, since there was no way to overcome its crippling light gravity.)

Nok was a second candidate. But it was inhabited. And while there was a movement that favored settlement and exploitation of that garden planet, nonintervention would continue for the foreseeable future.

One more reason why Project Hope had to be made to succeed.

Almost forty percent of Quraqua's water was frozen at the poles. The initial phase of Project Hope was directed at releasing that water. The oceans would fill, new rivers would spread across the land, and, with proper management, climate modification would begin.

Helm often reflected on the fact that other men had controlled more sheer firepower than he, but none had ever used it. No one had ever made a bigger bang than lan Helm would deliver when, in three days, he activated his arsenal of nuclear weapons, and on-site and orbiting particle beam projectors. Even Harding, at the other pole, would be outclassed. This was true even though the reconfiguration systems were allocated equally. But the ice sheets in the south were unstable atop their narrow strips of land, and the ocean floor was saturated with volcanoes. Helm believed he could coax some of the volcanoes to contribute their own energy to the effort.

The caps were to be melted simultaneously. No one was sure what might happen to rotation if weight were suddenly removed from one pole and not from the other.

Helm returned to his headquarters from a field survey at about the same time Janet Allegri was taking a wrench to the strider. He was satisfied with his preparations, sanguine that the ice sheets would melt on signal.

He drifted in aboard his CAT, circling the half-dozen red-

stained shacks and landing pads that made up Southern Hope. The snowfields rolled out flat in all directions. The sky was hard and clear, the sun beginning to sink toward the end of its months-long day.

He descended onto his pad, climbed out, and cycled through the airlock into the operations hut.

Mark Casey sat alone among the displays and communications equipment, talking to his commlink. He raised a hand in his boss's general direction and kept talking.

Helm sat down at his desk to check his In box. He could overhear enough of Casey's conversation to know that his Ops officer wasn't happy.

Casey was a tall, narrow, spike of a man, hard and sharp, given neither to superfluous gesture or talk. His thin hair was combed over his scalp, and he wore a manicured beard. His eyes found Helm, and signaled that the world was full of incompetents. "Another dead core," he said, after he'd signed off. "How was your trip?"

"Okay. We'll be ready."

"Good. Everybody's checked in." Casey scratched a spot over his right eyebrow with an index finger. "If we keep burning up cores, though, we'll have a problem. We have one spare left."

"Cheap goddam stuff," said Helm. "Somebody in Procurement's making a buck."

Casey shrugged. "It's forty-five below out there. Amazes me anything works."

An electronic chart of the icecap was mounted across the wall opposite the airlock. Colored lamps marked nuke sites, red where weapons had been placed inside volcanoes, white where placed within the ice sheets themselves, and green for those locations where teams were still working. There were five green lights. "Anything else I should know about, Mark?"

"Jensen called in just before you came. They've been having equipment problems too, and she says she's running behind. About eight hours. It's not on your board yet."

Helm didn't like that. His intention was to be set up and ready to go with thirty hours to spare. That would allow time for things to go wrong and still leave a decent safety margin to extract the teams. Jensen directed the 27 group, which was tasked with sinking a nuke into the ice on the far side of the pack. Eight goddam hours. Well, he could live with it. But if it got worse, he would have her head.

He thumbed through his traffic. One message caught his attention:

TO: DIRECTOR, NORTHCOM DIRECTOR, SOUTHCOM CHIEF PILOT

FROM: DIRECTOR, PROJECT HOPE SUBJECT: ADMINISTRATIVE PROCEDURES WE ARE INVOLVED IN AN ENDEAVOR THAT IS BOTH UNPRECEDENTED AND COMPLEX. STATUS REPORTS WILL NOW BE UPGRADED AS PROVIDED IN MANUAL SECTION 447112.3(B). REQUESTS FOR SPECIAL ASSISTANCE WILL BE CHANNELED THROUGH OPCOM AS PROVIDED. WE STAND READY TO HELP WHERE NEEDED. IN ADDITION, ALT. DETONATION PROCEDURES ARE TO BE DESIGNED TO PERMIT INTERVENTION UNTIL THE VERY LAST INSTANT. ACK.

TRUSCOTT

Helm read it through several times. "You see this, Mark?

'The very last instant'?"

Casey nodded. "I've already sent the acknowledgment." "She knows we built that in as a matter of course. What the hell is this all about?" "Got no idea. I just work here. CYA, probably." "Something's happened." Helm's eyes narrowed. "Get her on the circuit, Mark."

Melanie Truscott's image blinked on. She was in her quarters, seated on a couch, a notepad open on her lap, papers scattered across the cushions. "lan," she said, "what can I do for you?"

Helm didn't like Truscott's regal manner. The woman loved to flaunt her position. It was in her smile, in her authoritarian tone, in her refusal to consult him before formulating policy or issuing directives. "We're ready to cancel at a moment's notice," he said.