Only a clairvoyant would dare make confident predictions about the course of political events in Northern Ireland next week, but even mere mortals can say with absolute certainty that it will be a fateful seven days. If all goes according to the Dublin-London plan, the denouement will be two Sinn Fein representatives as ministers in a government, along with three Ulster Unionists, three SDLP members and two officeholders from the Democratic Unionist Party, not to mention the First and Deputy First Ministers.
It will be an astonishing sight, should it come to pass, and even those of us who have followed every twist and turn of this process will perforce rub our eyes. The DUP will hardly pose for the customary cabinet photograph but it will still be an extraordinary sight to behold if Taylor, McGuinness, Empey and de Brun are lined up for the camera. The Shinners will be smiling, of course, the unionists maintaining a stiff upper lip.
But the last mile is the longest mile and the potential is still there for parties to fall by the wayside and pull out of the race pleading inability to compromise. UUP dissidents were yesterday predicting that Tony Blair would "pull a rabbit out of the hat" to permit the UUP to accept the deal, but nobody yet knows for sure what way David Trimble will jump and whether he can bring his party with him if he decides to take the risk of entering an executive with Sinn Fein. Long-time Trimble-watchers know he will make his decision based on a combination of principle and practicality.
As he said in his Nobel Peace Prize speech in Oslo last December:
"I believe that a sense of the unique, specific and concrete circumstances of any situation is the first indispensable step to solving the problems posed by that situation."
Trimble and his fellow-unionists will need to see the colour of Tony Blair's money when the Bill providing for a failsafe mechanism is circulated in the House of Commons early next week. A stickler for detail, the UUP leader will want to be able to tell his party that "the failsafe is foolproof". He will need to be able to say, in the words of a leader in the Times of London this week, "No Exit, No Entry". In other words, without a guarantee it can be removed, in the absence of decommissioning, Sinn Fein will not be admitted to government.
But no matter how precise the legislation, there will still be an element of risk. Guarantees are not guns. But as Mr Trimble also said in his Oslo speech, still the key to his political persona, peace requires "a willingness at times not to be too precise or pedantic".
The conciliatory noises from Mr Blair to the Unionists have made Sinn Fein distinctly nervous. Mr Gerry Adams put down a marker in his interview with the party paper, An Phoblacht, when he noted the Prime Minister had "made a number of comments which may reflect a British government perspective but which are not part of the Good Friday agreement or of the joint statement released by the two governments".
In his interview, clearly aimed at settling down some of the wobbly elements inside the republican movement, Mr Adams also took a swipe at the Downing Street press office for suggesting that prisoner releases could be looked at. He accused the Prime Minister's spokesman of "pandering to unionism regardless of how this unsettles republicanism". Don't put a landmine under the deal, Tony, was the kernel of his message.
British government sources shrugged their shoulders, saying in effect that realpolitik required the PM to send signals to the unionists that he understood their fears and the unavoidable side-effect was republicans becoming twitchy. What else was new? It is striking how little confidence either nationalists - including both the SDLP and elements in Dublin - or republicans still have that Tony Blair is "for real". The old ingrained suspicion of perfidious Albion survives. During the talks at Stormont, even moderate nationalists thought, when he asked for position papers from the parties after four days of endless meetings, that the Prime Minister was about to roll over, bow to Unionist fears and bring the negotiations to a soft landing.
Mr Blair called off a trip to Poland so he could be on hand at the weekend. His work in other areas has to be suffering because of the prolonged focus on Northern Ireland. But all that will be forgotten if the powersharing inclusive government can be established.
Senior Unionist sources said their decision would be made at "five minutes to midnight" - i.e. probably Wednesday evening when the party executive resumes its deliberations. The events surrounding the Twelfth celebrations will have little direct bearing on the decision, but clearly the calmer the day on Monday, the better the political atmosphere.
The toing and froing over Sinn Fein and the IRA have become somewhat risible. Having for years insisted that Sinn Fein was just the IRA without a mask, the Unionists still wanted the IRA to echo and confirm Sinn Fein's commitment to the principle of decommissioning. This implied that they regarded the two organisations as separate, but when the Taoiseach declared his belief that, yes, they were distinct entities, Unionists rejected this outright. Republican insiders said the best way to obtain a statement from the IRA was to ask for it privately rather than publicly. Sinn Fein was pleased with Mr Ahern's distinction between the two organisations: keeping Sinn Fein happy is the Taoiseach's assigned role in the peace process at the moment and nobody should read too much into apparent differences between "soft-cop" Ahern and "hard-cop" Blair.
While all the sophistry about different republican entities continues, the real political game is going on behind closed doors. Mr Trimble is said to have been pushing hard to secure the strongest possible failsafe legislation. Sinn Fein has been forcefully reminding everyone, especially London, that nothing can be introduced which is outside the terms of the Belfast Agreement. It is a game of poker for very high stakes and we still don't know who is bluffing.
Then there is Plan B. A belief that Dr Mowlam will trigger the d'Hondt procedure for nominating ministers, regardless of what the unionists decide, could concentrate the minds of Trimble's Assembly team. Should the unionists decide they cannot swallow the latest compromise, the executive cannot be formed. In that case, what happens the Assembly? Unionists would wish it to continue. However, Sinn Fein could well walk out, forcing the SDLP to follow suit. We would then be left with a "Fisher-Price Parliament" that could have only a limited shelf-life. The Poker Game would become the Blame Game, with Mr Adams and his colleagues going into overdrive to lay the burden of responsibility on Unionist shoulders. Even if the Unionists make the quantum leap and the executive is nominated on Thursday, there will still be tension and uncertainty as the Unionists wait for decommissioning to occur. If it doesn't, we will back to all the old issues in September, with Mr Trimble invoking the new legislation to ensure Sinn Fein's period in office is a brief one.
The peace process has survived on what an academic observer has called "constructive ambiguities". The resources of the English language have been stretched almost to breaking-point in order to devise formulae which allowed both sides to claim victory. The shooting has stopped but the argument over who was right and who was wrong has still not been settled. Time and again the decommissioning obstacle was overcome by constructively ambiguous language. Even now it is clear the IRA will destroy or abandon its guns only if it does not amount to saying, "We were wrong."