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A sandy-haired eant sat in a pair of sunbleached shorts and a red-flowered aloha shirt and drank a can of beer while a movie cassette tape in the VCR played on a television set He slouched sued from one of the two luxury hotels on the Hawaiian island of Lanai that was being reecoach A virtual-reality headset that he had purchased from a Honolulu electronics store encompassed his head

After connecting the headset into the VCR, he could "enter" the television screen andscenes fro beside John Wayne on the top of the stagecoach during the cli Indians, when a loud buzzer cut into the action

Reluctantly, he removed the set from his head and scanned four security ic areas of the classified facility he guarded Monitor three showed a car approaching over a dirt road leading through a pineapple field to the entry gate The late linted off its front bumper while the rear bumper pulled a trail of dust

After several eant had his routine down to a fine science In the three ed into a neatly pressed uniforate that barred access through a tunnel into the open core of the long-extinct volcano

On closer scrutiny he saw that it was a Navy staff car He stooped and peered in the side

"This is a restricted area Do you have permission to enter?"

The driver, in the whites of a Navy enlisted man, motioned a thumb over his shoulder "Commander Gunn in the back has the necessary entry papers"

Proficient, businesslike, Rudi Gunn had wasted no precious tie dish antenna in thethe convoluted thread through the bureaucracy to track down the agency that held jurisdiction over the antenna and then confronting the department that operated the space co expedition in itself The next chore, an i to take responsibility for allowing the dish to be taken down and temporarily loaned to NUMA

Gunn eli depart requisition for NUMA to relocate the antenna to another site on the Hawaiian island of Oahu for a secret project The docu department, on lines under lofty fictitious titles What nor officially denied, took less than an hour and a half, ti the type

When Gunn, wearing his uniforate outside the tunnel entrance and produced his authorization to diseant in command of the deserted facility was dutifully cooperative He was eventhe exquisite for next to Gunn in the backseat If he had any thought of calling a superior officer for official confire flatbed trucks and a portable crane that followed in the tracks of the staff car Authority for an operation of this nitude must have come from the top of the ladder

"Good to have soets pretty boring up here with nary a soul to talk to while I'm on duty"

"How h the rear

"Only three of us, ht-hour shift"

"What do you do when you're not on guard duty?"

"Lay on the beach irls at the hotels"