The choreographed dance is almost complete. Time now nearly for the audience to cast its vote. Senator Mitchell will present his final report. And Mr Trimble will go through the motions of consultation with his party officers before announcing his decision to take the peace deal to the Ulster Unionist Council at the Ulster Hall on Saturday week.
For all the appropriate solemnity attending this week's developments, there has been something more than a little absurd about the insistence by Ulster Unionist spokesmen that theirs was a "wait-and-see" approach to the unfolding package, with no decision or commitment made until the final product stood unveiled before them.
The sequencing process agreed in the Mitchell review might have played even better had it not been anticipated. As it is, the battle for the heart and soul of Ulster Unionism is already joined. And Mr Trimble's men are sounding none too clever.
Mr Alan McFarland, the North Down Assembly member, has risen dramatically in the UUP ranks. So much so, indeed, that one colleague said he fancied he could already smell the leather of the waiting ministerial car.
Mr Dermot Nesbitt, an altogether more able member of the team and a certain tip for a top post, has also been treading the boards, talking up the new deal and assuring the doubtful that the captain is firmly at the helm.
Perfectly creditable performers both. But they should beware of basking in the reflected glory of editorial approval for having had "the courage" to do "the right thing". Their party leader himself has in the past placed too much reliance on the might of editorial comment, particularly in Britain. The people who need to be persuaded that Mr Trimble and his small circle of lieutenants have "done the right thing" are the 800 delegates to the Ulster Unionist Council.
And on first and second reading of the texts they are likely to take some persuading. Deaglan de Breadun in this newspaper yesterday detected "Humespeak" in all the published texts. One close observer put it still more harshly: "The unionists certainly appear to have adopted Humespeak. Sinn Fein, as ever, has spoken its own language."
Such observations will doubtless be considered inimical to the spirit of the times, too rooted, perhaps, in a sense of past or passing positions, failing yet to capture the genuine spirit of compromise opening up on all sides.
Yet Mr Trimble must be uncomfortably aware this is how it will appear to many of his rank-and-file. Mr Jeffrey Donaldson is not alone in failing to detect any change, save perhaps in tone, in the Sinn Fein statement. And unionists will search in vain for anything, in terms of the IRA statement, of the kind Mr Trimble has told them to expect these past 16 months.
There is nowhere any actual commitment to "product". There is no "credible and verifiable beginning" to a process of decommissioning guaranteed to end in total disarmament by May 2000.
There is no acceptance, publicly at least, of an obligation to achieve that goal according to timetables and schedules set by Gen de Chastelain. There is no reference actually to decommissioning, save the commitment to appoint an interlocutor "following the establishment of the institutions agreed on Good Friday last year".
This is not to pass any comment on the wisdom of the judgment Mr Trimble has reached during this most protracted negotiation. Nor is it to conclude necessarily that Mr Trimble has abandoned "no guns, no government" as the operative basis and intention of his policy.
But it is to state the blindingly obvious: that the condition for Sinn Fein's entry into government, encapsulated in the phrase "jumping together", most certainly has been abandoned and that this deal requires Mr Trimble to jump solo.
The basis for this dramatic shift clearly lies in the judgments the Ulster Unionist leader has finally made about the bona fides of Mr Adams, Mr McGuinness and the collective republican leadership. All that "looking into the whites of their eyes", we are told, was the clincher. Maybe. But many of his supporters are clearly hoping for something a little less esoteric.
For some Trimbleistas it is simply inconceivable that he would have agreed to jump first without a clear, if private, understanding that a start to decommissioning will swiftly follow the appointment of the executive. Others still in the camp fret and pray it must be so.
Whatever about that, what is not in doubt is that Mr Trimble has concluded the republicans will keep their side of the bargain. It is of the wisdom of that judgment he must now persuade his party's ruling council.
To that end, some feel Mr Trimble is not helped by television appearances of colleagues whose enthusiasm for this new process betrays (albeit unintentionally) a loss of all sense of urgency to see the decommissioning issue actually addressed and dealt with.
That said, Mr Trimble has good grounds for confidence that the Ulster Unionist Council might be prepared to trust his judgment and give him the breathing space necessary to see it tested. The UUC is a conservative body of men and women, with a natural disposition to support the leader.
For all their doubts, many are unimpressed with the qualities of Mr Trimble's opposition, whether internally or from the DUP. They hear the question: "What is the alternative?" They have not forgotten the years of isolation and marginalisation while nationalism alone prospered. They want, instinctively, to feel able to rise to "the challenge of peace".
But they do not want to be taken for fools. And as the internal debate gathers pace, many of them are making it clear that while they might be prepared to trust Mr Trimble one more time they will not permit him to invite a potentially ruinous party split on trust of Mr Adams.
Mr Trimble has long demanded "certainty of achievement" from Sinn Fein and the IRA. His party is now likely to seek the same from him. A sufficient majority may be prepared to trust him (although the dissidents believe they can bring him down) when he tells them to have faith, that the IRA will deliver.
But they will want to know, with a clarity not yet forthcoming, what will happen if his trust ultimately proves misplaced. This is the area of Mr Trimble's greatest vulnerability. Upon his answer could turn the outcome.