If the most experienced analysts are correct, Mr David Trimble will carry the day at this morning's meeting of the Ulster Unionist Council at Belfast's Waterfront Hall. The party's ruling body will elect to go back into the devolved executive, sharing power with nationalists and republicans. Ministers could be sitting at their desks by the middle of next week. But if the analysts have got it wrong - if the vote runs against Mr Trimble - the institutions provided for in the Belfast Agreement will remain in abeyance; London and Dublin will advance other aspects of the Agreement; and it could well be the end of Mr Trimble's leadership.
A dispassionate observer would say that only a political death-wish by the unionists could bring them to the latter outcome. The full implementation of the Agreement will yield them security and assurances such as they have not had for 30 years. The Republic's territorial claim is gone. The IRA's campaign of violence has been stopped. The sovereignty of Northern Ireland is British and its future status rests solely in the hands of its majority electorate. Why would any rational body of men and women throw this away - and reject the leader who has made it possible?
That question can only be answered by an understanding of how far unionism has had to come in a few short years. There is a ready recognition of the distance travelled by the republican movement and of the enormous success of the Sinn Fein leadership in its sponsorship of that process. But it is important to recognise also the extent to which so many of the unionists have been drawn out of their traditional larger mentality. And it is necessary to understand their residual fears and apprehensions. It would be difficult to overstate the sense of outrage and foreboding among rank-and-file unionists at the reality of Sinn Fein ministers in power; at the loss, as they see it, of their police force; at the release of hundreds of persons convicted of barbarous crimes; at the apparent gradual slide of Northern Ireland into the embrace of the Republic.
In the face of these visceral fears, David Trimble and his supporters have sought to persuade the middle ground of unionism to find its confidence and its courage in order to step into a partnership relationship with Irish nationalism. It is, in some respects, comparable with what FW De Klerk asked of white South Africans in coming to terms with majority rule or what Yitzhak Rabin asked of Israelis in constructing an accommodation with the Palestinians.
There are those who are prepared to take the risk of stepping forward to new realities. But there are also those who believe that any flexibility is merely to play into the hands of those who will not stop until they have secured complete domination in their own interests.
This morning, at the Waterfront Hall, middleground unionism is to be put to the test. Mr Trimble and his close lieutenants know that the republican movement, notwithstanding the restraints and impediments created by its own mythology, has compromised significantly on the issue of decommissioning. They know that if unionists fail to respond to the opportunity which is now before them, they will lose virtually all of the international goodwill and support which has been garnered, with difficulty, over recent years. And they know that the unionist people will be throwing away what may be their last real chance directly to shape and influence their own political and constitutional future.
There will be delegates this morning who are angry at the renaming of the police and at the loss of its badges and symbols. There will be delegates who feel that the IRA's offer to put guns "verifiably beyond use" falls far short of actual decommissioning. They have, nonetheless, a stark choice before them. To go with Mr Trimble into a future where even though there is mistrust and unhealed wounds, there is hope. Or to turn back to a barren past of despair, hatred, and isolation.