Eclipses weren’t all that dark, it turned out, and el presidente’s three jet fighters could chop up this ancient Seabee in seconds, ending the Revolution of the Best, or at least the contribution to it of the self-proclaimed lineal descendant of the original William Walker who had filibustered in Nicaragua in the 1850’s.

If he did manage to bail out, they would capture him. He didn’t think he could stand an electric bull prod except by turning into a three-year-old.

Too much light, too much light! “You’re a typical lousy bit-player,” Don Guillermo shouted up at the brazen moon. “You don’t know how to efface yourself!”

Two thousand miles east of Wolf Loner and his cloudbank, Dai Davies, Welsh poet, vigorous and drunk, waved good night from near the dark loom of the Severn Experimental Tidal Power Station to the sooty moon sinking into the cloudless Bristol Channel beyond Portishead Point, while the spreading glow of dawn erased the stars behind him.

“Sleep well, Cinderella,” he called. “Wash your face now, but be sure to come back.”

Richard Hillary, English novelist, sickish and sober, observed finically, “Dai, you say that as if you were afraid she wouldn’t.”

“There’s a first time for everything, Ricky-bach,” Dai told him darkly. “We don’t worry enough about the moon.”

“You worry about her too much,” Richard countered sharply, “reading a veritable vomit of science fiction.”

“Ah, science fiction’s my food and drink — well, anyhow my food. Vomit, now — you were maybe thinking of the book-vomiting dragon Error in The Faerie Queene and fancying her spewing up, after all of Spenser’s musty hates, the collected works of H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, and Edgar Rice Burroughs?”

Hillary’s voice grew astringent. “Science fiction is as trivial as all artistic forms that deal with phenomena rather than people. You should know that, Dai. Aren’t the Welsh warmhearted?”