MARE NUBIUM

"Magnificent desolation."

Paul Scavenger always spoke those words whenever he stepped out onto the bare dusty surface of the Moon. But this time it was more than a quotation: it was a supplication, a prayer.

Standing at the open hatch of the airlock, he looked through his tinted visor at the bare expanse of emptiness stretching in every direction. Normally the sight calmed him, brought him some measure of peace, but now he tried to fight down the churning ache in his gut Fear. He had seen men die before, but not like Tinker and Wojo. Killed. Murdered. And he was trying to get me. The poor bastards just happened to be in his way.

Paul stepped out onto the sandy regolith, his boots kicking up little clouds of dust that floated lazily in the light lunar gravity and slowly settled back to the ground.

Got to get away, Paul said to himself. Got to get away from here before the damned bugs get me, too.

Twenty miles separated this underground shelter from the next one. He had to make it on foot. The little rocket hopper was already a shambles and he couldn't trust the tractor; the nanobugs had already infected it. For all he knew, they were in his suit, too, chewing away at the insulation and the plastic that kept the suit airtight.

Well, he told himself, you'll find out soon enough. One foot in front of the other. I'll make it on foot if I make it at all.

Twenty miles. On foot. And the Sun was coming up.

"Okay," he said, his voice shaky. "If it is to be, it's up to me."

The sky was absolutely black, but only a few stars showed through the heavy tint of his helmet's visor. They stared steadily down at Paul, unblinking, solemn as the eyes of God.

Turning slightly as he walked, Paul looked up to see a fat gibbous Earth, blue and gleaming white, hanging in the dark sky. So close. So far. Joanna was waiting for him there. Was Greg trying to kill her, too? The thought sent a fresh pang of fear and anger through him.

"Get your butt in gear," he muttered to himself. He headed out across the empty plain, fleeing death one plodding step at a time. With all the self-control he still possessed he kept himself from running. You've got to cover twenty miles. Pace yourself for the long haul.

His surface suit held the sweaty smell of fear. He had seen two men die out here; it had been sheer luck that the berserk nanomachines hadn't killed him, too. How do you know they haven't infested the suit? he asked himself again. Grimly he answered, What difference does it make? If they have, you're already dead.

But the suit seemed to be functioning okay. The real test would come when he stepped across the terminator, out of the night and into the blazing fury of daylight. Twenty miles in that heat, and if you stop you're dead.

He had calculated it all out in his head as soon as he realized what had happened in the shelter. Twenty miles. The suit's backpack tank held twelve hours of oxygen. No recycling. You've got to cover one and two-thirds miles per hour. Make it two miles an hour, give yourself a safety margin.

Two miles an hour. For ten hours. You can make that Sure you can.

But now as he trudged across the bleak wilderness of Mare Nubium, he began to wonder. You haven't walked ten hours straight in… Christ, not since the first time you came up here to the Moon. That was twenty years ago, almost Twenty pissing years. You were a kid then.

Well, you'll have to do it now. Or die. Then Greg wins. He'll have murdered his way to the top.

Even though it was still night, the rugged landscape was not truly dark. Earthglow bathed the rolling, pockmarked ground. Paul could see the rocks strewn across the bare regolith, the rims of craters deep enough to swallow him, the dents of smaller ones that could make him stumble and fall if he wasn't careful.

Nothing but rocks and craters, and the sharp uncompromising slash of the horizon out there, like the edge of the world, the beginning of infinity. Not a blade of grass or a drop of water. Harsh, bare rock stretching as far as the eye could see in every direction.

Yet Paul had always loved it. Even encased in a bulky, cumbersome surface suit he had always felt free up here on the surface of the Moon, on his own, alone in a universe where he had no problems at all except survival. That's what the Moon gives us, he told himself. Brings it all down to the real question, the only question. Are you going to live or die? Everything else is bullshit. Am I going to live or die?

But then he thought of Joanna again, and he knew that there was more to it. Would she live or die? Was Greg crazy enough to kill her, too? It's more than just me, Paul realized. Even here, a quarter-million miles from Earth and its complications, he was not alone. Even though there was not another living human being—not another living thing of any kind—this side of the mountains that marked the Alphonsus ringwall, Paul knew that other lives depended on him.

Joanna. Mustn't let Greg get to Joanna. Got to stop him.

He stopped, puffing hard. The visor of his helmet was fogging. A flash of panic surged through him. Have the nanobugs gotten to this suit? He held up his left arm to check the display panel on the suit's forearm, trembling so badly that he had to grasp his wrist with his right hand to steady himself enough to read the display. Everything in the green. He tapped the control for the air-circulating fan in his helmet and heard the comforting whine of its speeding up.

Okay, it's still working. The suit's functioning okay. Settle down. Keep moving.

Turning to see how far he'd come from the underground shelter that Greg had turned into a death trap, Paul was pleased to see that its gray hump of rubble was just about on the horizon. Covered a couple of miles already, he told himself.

His boot prints looked bright, almost phosphorescent, against the dark surface of the regolith. In a couple thousand years they'll turn dark, too; solar ultraviolet tans everything. He almost laughed. Good thing I'm already tanned.

Paul started out again, checking his direction with the global positioning system receiver built into the suit's displays. He hadn't had the luxury of timing his exit from the shelter to coincide with one of the GPS satellites' passing directly overhead. The only positioning satellite signal his suit could receive was low on the horizon, its signal weak and breaking up every few minutes. But it would have to do. There were no other navigational aids, and certainly no road markers on Mare Nubium's broad expanse.

The other shelters had directional beacons planted in the ground every mile between them. And they were no more than ten miles apart, all the way to the ringwall. Greg had planned it well; turned the newest of the temporary shelters into his killing place.

He plodded on, wishing the suit radio had enough juice to reach the tempo he was heading for, knowing that it didn't There's nobody there, anyway, he thought It's just a relay shelter. But it ought to be stocked with oxygen and water. And its radio should be working.

Suddenly, with an abruptness that startled him, Paul saw the horizon flare into brilliance. The Sun.

He checked his watch and, yes, his rough calculations were pretty close to the actualities. In a few minutes the Sun would overtake him and he'd have to make the rest of the trek in daylight.

Christ he thought, if the visor fogged up when it was two hundred below zero outside the suit what's going to happen when it goes over two-fifty above, and the damned suit can't radiate my body heat away?

A sardonic voice in his head answered, You'll find out real soon now.

The sunrise line inched forward to meet him, undulating slowly over the uneven ground, moving toward him at the pace of a walking man.

Despite the fear gnawing inside him, Paul thought back to his first days on the Moon. The excitement of planting boot prints where no one had ever stepped before; the breathtaking grandeur of the rugged landscape, the silence and the dramatic vistas.

That was then, he told himself. Now you've got to make it to the next shelter before you run out of oxy. Or before the Sun broils you. Or the damned bugs eat up your suit.

He forced himself forward, dreading the moment when he stepped from the night's shadow into the unfiltered ferocity of the Sun.

Yet even as he walked toward the growing brightness, his mind turned back to the day when all this had started, back to the time when he had married Joanna so that he could take -control of Masterson Aerospace. Back to the moment when Greg Masterson had begun to hate him. It had all been to save Moonbase, even then. Paul realized that he had given most of his life to Moonbase. "Most of it?" he asked aloud. "Hell, there's a pissin' great chance I'm going to give all of it to Moonbase."

SAVANNAH

They had spent the afternoon in bed, making love, secure in the knowledge that Joanna's husband would be at the executive committee meeting.

At first Paul thought it was only a fling. Joanna was married to the head of Masterson Aerospace and she had no intention of leaving her husband. She had explained that to him very carefully the first time they had made it, in one of the plush fold-back chairs of Paul's executive jet while it stood in the hangar at the corporation's private airport

Paul had been surprised at her eagerness. For a while he thought that maybe she just wanted to make it with a black man, for kicks. But it was more than that. Much more.

She was a handsome woman, Joanna Masterson, tall and lithe, with the polished grace that comes with old money. Yet there was a subtle aura of tragedy about her that Paul found irresistible. Something in her sad gray-green eyes that needed consolation, comforting, love.

Beneath her veneer of gentility Joanna was an anguished woman, tied in marriage to a man who slept with every female he could get his hands on, except his wife. Not that Paul was much better; he had done his share of tail chasing, and more.

Screwing around with the boss's wife was dangerous, for both of them, but that merely added spice to their affair. Paul had no intention of getting emotionally wrapped up with her. There were too many other women in the world to play with, and an ex-astronaut who had become a successful business executive did not have to strain himself searching for them. The son of a Norwegian sea captain and a Jamaican school teacher, Paul had charm, money and an easy self-confidence behind his gleaming smile: a potent combination.

Yet he had stopped seeing anyone else after only a few times of lovemaking with Joanna. It wasn't anything he consciously planned; he simply didn't bother with other women once he became involved with her. She had never taken a lover before, Joanna told him. "I never thought I could," she had said, "until I met you."

The phone rang while they lay sweaty and spent after a long session of lovemaking that had started gently, almost languidly, and climaxed in gasping, moaning passion.

Joanna pushed back a tumble of ash-blonde hair and reached for the phone. Paul admired the curve of her hip, the smoothness of her back, as she lifted the receiver and spoke into it.

Then her body went rigid.

"Suicide?"

Paul sat up. Joanna's face was pale with shock.

"Yes," she said into the phone. "Yes, of course." Her voice was steady, but Paul could see the sudden turmoil and pain in her wide eyes. Her hand, gripping the phone with white-knuckled intensity, was shaking badly.

"I see. All right. I'll be there in fifteen minutes."

Joanna went to put the phone down on the night table, missed its edge, and the phone fell to the carpeted floor.

"He's killed himself," she said.

"Who?"

"Gregory."

"Your husband?"

"Took a pistol from his collection and… committed suicide." She seemed dazed. "Killed himself."

Paul felt guilt, almost shame, at being naked in bed with Hier at this moment. "I'm sorry," he mumbled. Joanna got out of bed and headed shakily for the bathroom. She stopped at the doorway for a moment, gripped the doorjamb, visibly pulled herself together. Then she turned back toward Paul.

"Yes. I am too." She said it flatly, without a trace of emotion, as if rehearsing a line for a role she would be playing.

Paul got to his feet. Suddenly he felt shy about getting into the shower with her. He wanted to get to his own condo. "I'd better buzz out of here before anybody arrives," he called to Joanna.

"I think that would be best. I've got to go to his office. The police have been called."

Searching for his pants, Paul asked, "Do you want me to go with you?"

"No, it's better if we're not seen together right now. I'll phone you later tonight."

Driving along Savannah's riverfront toward his condo building, Paul tried to sort out his own feelings. Gregory Masterson II had been a hard-drinking royal sonofabitch who chased more, tail than even Paul did. Joanna had sworn that she had never had an affair before she had met Paul, and he believed her. Gregory, though, he was something else. Didn't care who knew what he was doing. He liked to flaunt his women, as if he was deliberately trying to crush Joanna, humiliate her beyond endurance.

Hell, Paul said to himself, you should talk. Bedding the guy's wife. Some loyal, trusted employee you are.

So Gregory blew his brains out. Why? Did he find about Joanna and me? Paul shook his head as he turned into the driveway of his building. No, he wouldn't commit suicide over us. Murder, maybe, but not suicide.

As he rode the glass elevator up to his penthouse condo, Paul wondered how Joanna's son was taking the news. Gregory Masterson III. He'll expect to take over the corporation now, I'll bet. Keep control of the company in the family's hands. His father nearly drove the corporation into bankruptcy; young Greg'll finish the job. Kid doesn't know piss from beer.

Paul tapped out his code for the electronic lock, stepped into the foyer of his condo, and headed swiftly for the bar. Pouring himself a shot of straight tequila, he wondered how Joanna was making out with the police and her husband's dead body. Probably put the gun in his mouth, he thought. Must be blood and brains all over his office.

Feeling the tequila's heat in his throat, he walked to the big picture window of his living room and looked out at the placid river and the tourist boats plying up and down. A nearly-full Moon was climbing above the horizon, pale and hazy in the light blue sky.

A sudden realization jolted Paul. "What are they going to do about Moonbase?" he asked aloud. "I can't let them shut it down."

NEW YORK CITY

Paul flew his twin-engined executive jet to New Yoik's JFK airport, alone. He hadn't seen Joanna in the three weeks since Gregory Masterson's suicide. He had phoned her and offered to take Joanna with him to New York, but she decided to go with the company's comptroller in her late husband's plane. This board meeting would decide who the new CEO of Masterson Aerospace would be, and Paul knew they would elect young Greg automatically.

He also knew that Greg's first move as CEO would be to shut down Moonbase. The corporation had run the base under contract to the government for more than five years, but Washington had decided to stop funding Moonbase and 'privatize' the operation. Masterson Aerospace had the option of continuing to run the lunar base at its own expense, or shut it all down.

The chairman of the board was against keeping the lunar operation going, and Greg was hot to show the chairman and the rest of the board that he could cut costs. Paul had to admit that Moonbase was a drain on the corporation and would continue to be for years to come. But eventually… If only I can keep Moonbase going long enough to get it into the black.

It's going to be tough once Greg's in command. Impossible, maybe. He spent the entire flight to New York desperately wondering how he could convince Greg to give Moonbase a few more years, time to get established well enough to start showing at least the chance of a profit downstream.

It's the corporation's future, he told himself. The future for all of us. The Moon is the key to all the things we want to do in space: orbital manufacturing, scientific research, even tourism. It all hinges on using the Moon as a resource base. But it takes time to bring an operation like Moonbase into the black. Time and an awful lot of money. And faith. Greg just doesn't have the faith. He never has, and he probably never will.

Paul did. It takes a special kind of madman to push out across a new frontier. Absolute fanatics like von Braun, who was willing to work for Hitler or anyone else, as long as he got the chance to send his rockets to the Moon. It takes faith, absolute blind trusting faith that what you are doing is worth any price, any risk, worth your future and your fortune and your life.

I've got that faith, God help me. I've got to make Greg see the light the way I do. Somehow. Get him to listen to me. Get him to believe.

JFK was busy as always, the traffic pattern for landing stacked twelve planes deep. Once he had taxied his twin jet to the corporate hangar and climbed down the ladder to the concrete ramp, the howl and roar of hundreds of engines around the busy airport made Paul's ears hurt.

As he walked toward the waiting limousine, suit jacket slung over one arm, the ground suddenly shook with a growling thunder that drowned out all the other sounds. Turning, Paul saw a Clippership rising majestically on its eight bellowing rocket engines, lifting up into the sky, a tapered smooth cone of plastic and metal that looked like the most beautiful work of art Paul had ever seen.

He knew every line of the Clippership, every detail of its simple, elegant design, every component that fit inside it A simple conical shape with rockets at the flat bottom end, the Clippership rose vertically and would land vertically, settling down softly on those same rocket exhaust plumes. Between takeoff and landing, it could cross intercontinental distances in forty-five minutes or less. Or make the leap into orbit in a single bound. Everything seemed to stop at the airport, all other sounds and movement suspended as the Clippership rose, thundering slowly at first and then faster anil faster, dwindling now as the mighty bellow of its rockets washed over Paul like a physical force, wave after wave of undulating awesome noise thai blanketed every frequency the human ear could detect anc much more. Paul grinned and suppressed the urge to fling a salute at the departing Clippership. The overpowering sound of those rockets hit most people with the force of a religious experience. Paul had converted four members of the board of directors to supporting the Clippership project by the simple tactic of bringing them out to watch a test launch. And hear it And feel it.

Laughing to himself, Paul ducked into the limousine dooi that the chauffeur was holding open. He wondered where the Clippership was heading. There were daily flights out of New York to Tokyo, Sydney, Buenos Aires and Hong Kong, he knew. Soon they would be adding more cities. Anywhere on Earth in forty-five minutes or less.

The Clipperships had pulled Masterson Aerospace out of impending bankruptcy. But Paul knew that he had pushed for them, fought for them, was willing to kill for them not merely because they made Masterson the leader in the new era of commercial transport. He went to the brink of the cliff and beyond for the Clipperships because they could fly into orbit in onehop, and do it more cheaply than any other rocket vehicle. The Clipperships would help to make Moonbase economically viable. That was why Paul rammed them past Masterson's board of directors—including the late Gregory Masterson II.

The Clipperships would help Moonbase to break into the black, if Greg Masterson III didn't kill Moonbase first.

But as the cool, quiet limousine made its way out of the airport and onto the throughway, crowded with the world's most aggressive drivers, Paul realized that the Clipperships meant even more to him than Moonbase's possible salvation. He had made the Clippers a success, true enough. But they had made a success of him, as well. Paul's skin was no darker than a swarthy Sicilian's, but he was a black ex-astronaut when he started at Masterson, all those years ago. With the accent on the black. The success of the Clipperships had elevated him to the exalted level of being the black manager of Masterson's space operations division, in Savannah, and a black member of the board of directors.

And the black lover of the dead boss's wife, he added wryly to himself.

Paul had never liked New York. As his limo headed through the swarming traffic along the bumpy, potholed throughway toward the bridge into Manhattan, Paul thought that New York wasn't a city, it was an oversized frenetic anthill, always on the verge of explosion. Even twenty years after the so-called Renaissance Laws, the place was still overcrowded, noisy, dangerous.

Electricity powered all the cars, trucks and buses bound for Manhattan. Old-style fossil-fueled vehicles were not allowed through the tunnels or over the bridges that led into the island. That had cleaned the air a good bit, although hazy clouds of pollution still drifted in from New Jersey, across the Hudson.

Police surveillance cameras hung on every street corner and miniaturized unmanned police spotter planes were as common in the air as pigeons. Vendors, even kids who washed windshields when cars stopped for traffic lights, had to display their big yellow permits or be rousted by the cops who rode horseback in knots of threes and fives through the crowded streets.

Yet the streets still teemed with pitchmen hawking stolen goods, kids exchanging packets of drugs, prostitutes showing their wares. All that the Renaissance Laws had accomplished, as far as Paul could see, was to drive violent crime off the streets. There was still plenty of illicit activity, but it was organized and mostly non-violent. You might get propositioned or offered anything from the latest designer drugs to the latest designer fashions, fresh off a hijacked truck. But you wouldn't get mugged. Probably.

Still, the limo had to thread its way across the ancient bridges and along the narrow, jampacked streets. The windshield got washed—partially—four different times, and the chauffeur had to slip a city-issued token through his barely-opened window to the kids who Splashed the brownish water onto the car.

He must use up the whole tank of windshield cleaner every trip, Paul thought as the limo inched downtown, wipers flapping away.

At one intersection a smiling trio of women tapped on Paul's window, bending low enough to show they were wearing nothing beneath their loose blouses. Kids, Paul realized. Beneath their heavy makeup they couldn't have been more than fifteen years old. A trio of mounted policemen watched from their horses, not twenty yards away.

Paul shook his head at the whores. I've gotten this far in life without killing myself, he thought. The girls looked disappointed. So did the cops. Then the traffic light went green and the limo pulled away.

By the time he got to the corporate offices in the Trade Towers, Paul needed a drink. The walnut-panelled board room had a bar and a spread of finger foods set up in the back, but neither a bartender nor waitress had shown up yet. Paul did not see any tequila. He settled for a beer, instead.

Paul had always been one of the early ones at board meetings, but this time apparently he was the first. The opulent room was empty, except for him. Glancing at his wristwatch, Paul saw that the meeting was scheduled to start in less than fifteen minutes. Usually more than half the directors would be already here, milling about, exchanging pleasantries or whispering business deals to one another, drinking and noshing.

Where is everybody? Paul wondered.

He paced the length of the long conference table, saw mat each place was neatly set with its built-in computer screen and keyboard.

He went to the long windows at the head of the conference room and gazed out at the towers of Manhattan, thinking how much better it was on the Moon, where all a man had to worry about was a puncture in his suit or getting caught on the surface during a solar flare. He craned his neck to see JFK, hoping to catch another Clippership takeoff or, even more spectacular, see one landing on its tail jets,

"Paul."

Startled, he whirled around to see Joanna standing in the doorway, looking cool and beautiful in a beige minisküted business suit. He hadn't seen her since the day of her husband's suicide.

"How are you?" he asked, hurrying toward her. "How've you been? I wanted—"

"Later," she said, raising one hand to stop him from embracing her. "Business first"

"Where's everybody? The meeting's scheduled to start in ten minutes."

"It's been pushed back half an hour," Joanna said, "Nobody told me."

She smiled coolly at him. "I asked Brad for a half-hour delay. There's something I want to discuss with you before the meeting starts."

"What?"

Joanna went to the conference table and perched on its edge, crossing her long legs demurely. "We're going to elect a new president and CEO," she said. , Paul nodded. "Greg. I know."

"You don't sound happy about it"

"Why should I be?"

"Who else would you recommend?" she asked, with that same serene smile.

"Greg doesn't know enough to run a corporation," Paul said, keeping his voice low. But the urgency came through. "Okay, we're not supposed to speak ill of the dead, I know, but his father nearly drove this company into the ground."

"And you saved it."

Paul felt uncomfortable saying it, but he agreed. "I had to practically beat your husband over the head before he saw the light"

Every major airline in the world began clamoring for Masterson Clipperships, once Paul pushed the project dirough its development phase. Yet Gregory Masterson II had almost ruined Masterson Aerospace, despite the Clippership's success. Maybe because of it, Paul how thought.

And his son was eager to follow in his father's mistaken footsteps.

"He wants to shut down Moonbase," Joanna said quietly. "He told me so."

"You can't let him do that!"

"Why not?" she asked.

"It's the future of the company—of the nation, the whole goddamned human race!"

She sat on the edge of the conference table in silence for a moment, her eyes probing Paul. Then Joanna said, "The first order of business in today's meeting will be to elect me to the board to fill Gregory's seat."

"And then they'll elect young Greg president and CEO," Paul said, surprised at how much bitterness showed in his voice.

"They'll have to have nominations first"

"Brad's going to nominate him."

"Yes. But I intend to nominate you," said Joanna.

He blinked with surprise. A flame of sudden hope flared through him. Then he realized, To show there's no nepotism."

Joanna shook her head. "I know my son better than you do, Paul. He's not ready to head this corporation. He'd ruin it and himself, both."

"You mean you really want me to be CEO?"

"I want it enough," Joanna said, slipping off the table to stand before him, "that I want us to get married."

Paul's insides jolted. "Married?"

Joanna smiled again and twined her arms around Paul's neck. "I like being the wife of the CEO. I just didn't like the CEO very much. With you, it will be different, won't it? Very different"

Paul's mind was racing. CEO. Married. She doesn't love me, not really, but if we're married and I'm CEO we can keep Moonbase going until it starts making a profit but she's probably only doing this so Greg can grow up some and then she'll want to turn the corporation over to him sooner or later.

Joanna kissed him lightly on the lips. "Don't you think marriage is a good idea? Like a corporate merger, only much more fun."

"You'd marry me?" Paul asked.

"If you ask me."

"And nominate me for CEO?"

"You'll be elected if I nominate you."

She's right Paul realized. If she doesn't back her own son the rest of the board will turn away from him. Hell, I'm one of the corporation's leaders. Saved the outfit from bankruptcy. Making them all rich with the Clippership profits. Half of 'em would be afraid to vote against a black man; afraid it'd look like discrimination. And I could protect Moonbase from Greg and Brad. I could keep them from shutting it down.

"Okay," he said, surprised at the tightness in his throat. "Will you marry me?"

Joanna laughed out loud. "How romantic!"

"I mean—well, will you?"

"Of course I will, Paul. You're the only man in the world for me."

Paul kissed her, knowing that neither one of them had used the word love.

MARE NUBIUM

The edge of the sunlit day came up to meet Paul with the inevitability of a remorseless universe. One moment he was ü shadow, the next in full glaring sunlight. The sky overhead was still black but now the glare reflecting from the ground washec away the few stars that he had been able to see before.

A pump somewhere in his backpack gurgled, and the air fan in his helmet whined more piercingly. He thought he heard metal or plastic groan under the sudden heat load.

Paul looked down and, sure enough, the ground was breaking into sparkles of light, like a whole field of jewels glittering for hundreds of meters in front of him. The sunshine triggered phosphorescence in the minerals scattered in the regolith's surface layer. The effect disappeared after a few minutes, but plenty of the earliest workers on the Moon had actually thought they'd found fields of diamonds: the Moon's equivalent of fool's gold.

There was real wealth in the regolith, but it wasn't gold or diamonds. Oxygen. The opiate of the masses. Habit forming substance; take one whiff and you're hooked for life.

Cut it out, Stavenger, he railed at himself. You're getting geeky in your old age. Straighten up and concentrate on what you're doing.

He plodded doggedly ahead, but his mind wandered to the first time his eyes had opened to the grandeur of the Moon. At the planetarium, he remembered. Couldn't have been more than ten or eleven. The videos of astronauts walking on the Moon, jumping in low-gravity exhilaration while the lecturer told us that one day we kids could go to the Moon and continue the exploration.

Levitt, Paul remembered. Old Dr. Levitt. He knew how to open a kid's mind. The bug bit me then, Paul realized. He had gone up to the lecturer after the show and asked if he could stay and see it again. A round-faced man with a soft voice and big glasses that made his face look like an owl's, Dr. Levitt turned out to be the planetarium's director. He took Paul to his own office and spent the afternoon showing him books and tapes about space exploration.

Paul's father was away at sea most of the time. His classmates at school were either white or black, and each side demanded his total loyalty. Caught between them, Paul had become a loner, living in his own fantasy world until the bigger dream of exploring the Moon engulfed him. He haunted the planetarium, devoured every book and tape he could find, grew to be Dr. Levitt's valued protege and, eventually, when he reached manhood, his friend. It was Lev who secured a scholarship for Paul at MIT, who paved the way for his becoming an astronaut, who broke down and wept when Paul actually took off from Cape Canaveral for the first time.

Paul was on the Moon when the old man died, quietly, peacefully, the way he had lived: writing a letter of recommendation for another poor kid who needed a break.

I wouldn't be here if it weren't for Lev, Paul knew. Even if I die here, I'll still owe him for everything good that's happened in my life.

He knew it was psychological more than physical, yet with the Sun pounding on him Paul felt as if he had stepped from an air-conditioned building onto a baking hot parking lot. Some parking lot, he told himself as he pushed on. The dusty, gray regolith looked like an unfinished blacktop job, pockmarked and uneven. Mare Nubium, he thought. Sea of Clouds. The nearest body of water is a quarter-million miles away.

Still, it did look a little like the surface of the sea, the way the ground undulated and rolled. A sea that was frozen into rock. I guess it was a sea once, a sea of red-hot lava when the meteoroid that carved out this basin slammed into the Moon.

How long ago? Three-and a half billion years? Give or take a week.

He plodded on, one booted foot after another, trying not to look at the thermometer on his forearm displays.

His mind started to drift again.

I never told her that I loved her, Paul remembered. Not then Guess, I was too surprised. Marry me and I'll make you CEO She never said she loved me, either. It was a business deal.

He almost laughed. Marriage is one way of ending a love affair, I guess.

But Greg didn't laugh about it. Not then, not ever. I don' think I've ever seen him smile, even. Not our boy Greg.

BOARD MEETING

The other board members filtered into the meeting room in twos and threes. Greg Masterson walked in alone, his suit a funereal black, the expression on his face bleak. He was a handsome man of twenty-eight, tall and slim, his face sculpted in planes and hollows like a Rodin statue. He had his father's dark, brooding looks: thick dark hair down to his collar and eyes like twin gleaming chunks of jet.

But where his father had been a hell-raiser, Greg had always been a quiet, somber introvert. As far as Paul knew, he might still be a virgin. He had never heard a breath of gossip about this serious, cheerless young man.

Reluctantly, feeling guilty, Paul made his way across the board room to Greg.

"I'm sorry about your father," he said, extending his hand.

"I bet you are," Greg said, keeping his hands at his sides. He was several inches taller than Paul, though Paul was more solidly built.

Before Paul could think of anything else to say, Bradley Arnold bustled up to Greg and took him by the arm.

"This way, Greg," said the board chairman. "I want you to sit up beside me today."

Greg went sullenly with the chairman of the board. Arnold was the whitest man Paul had ever seen. He looked like an animated wad of dough, short, pot-bellied, wearing a ridiculous silver-gray toupe that never seemed to sit right on his head; it looked so artificial it was laughable. Eagerly bustling, he led Greg up to the head of the table and sat the younger man on his right Arnold's face was round, flabby, with hyperthyroid bulging frog's eyes.

Sixteen men and three women, including Joanna, sat around the long polished table. Paul took a chair across the table from Joanna, where he could see her face. The symbolism of Arnold's seating Greg next to him was obvious. Paul waited to see how the board would react to Joanna's less-than-symbolic nomination.

Arnold played the meeting for all the drama he could squeeze out of it. He began by asking for a moment of silence to honor the memory of their late president and CEO. As Paul bowed his head, he glanced at Melissa Han, sitting down near the bottom of the table.

Silky smooth, long-legged Melissa, with skin the color of milk chocolate and a fierce passion within her that drove her mercilessly both at work and play. Most board members thought of her as an affirmative action 'twofer:' black and female. Or a'threefer," since she represented the unions among the corporation's work force. Paul knew her as a fiery bed partner who was furious with him for dropping her in favor of Joanna.

She had been sleeping with Gregory Masterson before Paul, everyone knew. That was how she got on the board of directors, they thought. Now, as Paul glanced her way, she did not look terribly grieved. Instead, she glared angrily at him.

Arnold next asked for a vote to accept the minutes of the last meeting, then called for reports from the division heads while the board members fidgeted impatiently in their chairs.

When it came to Paul's turn, he gave a perfunctory review of the Clippership's profits and the firm orders from airlines around the world. Paul referred to them as aerospace lines, even the ones that were not doing any true business in orbit, because the Clipperships spent most of their brief flight times far above the atmosphere. "The way to make money," Paul had told every airline executive he had ever wined and dined, "is to keep your Clipperships in space more than they're on the ground."

Ordinarily, at least a few of the board members would ask nit-picking questions, but everyone wanted to move ahead to the election of the new CEO.

Almost everyone.

"What's this I hear about your people making giant TV screens up there in the space station?" asked Alan Johansen.

He was one of the newest board members, a handsomely vapid young protege of Arnold's with slicked-back blond hair and the chiselled profile of a professional model.

Surprised, Paul said, "It's still in the developmental stage."

"Giant TV screens?" asked one of the women.

"Under the weightless conditions in orbit," Paul explained, "we can make large-crystal flat screens ten, fifteen feet across, but only a couple of inches thick."

"Why, you could hang them on a wall like a painting, couldn't you?"

"That's right," said Paul. "It might make a very profitable product line for us."

"Wall screens," said Johansen.

"One of our bright young technicians came up with the name Windowall."

"That's good!" said Johansen. "We should copyright that name."

Bradley Arnold turned, slightly sour-faced, to the corporate legal counsel. "See that we register that as a trade name."

"Windowall, right," said the lawyer. "How do you spell it?"

Paul told him.

"Now before we get to the highlight of this meeting," Arnold said in his rumbling bullfrog voice, "we have to consider filling the seat left vacant by the sudden demise of our lamented late president and CEO." Far from showing grief, Arnold's bulging brown eyes seemed to be sparkling with pleasure.

"I nominate Joanna Masterson," said Greg immediately.

"Second," came a voice from farther down the table.

Then silence.

Arnold looked up and down the table. "Any other nominations?"

Melissa looked as if she wanted to speak, but before she could make up her mind Arnold said, "All right then, the nominations are closed. All in favour"

"Don't the rules call for a secret ballot?" one of the board members asked.

A brief flicker of annoyance ticked across Arnold's fleshy face. "If the board wants it," he said testily. "In this instance I think a simple show of hands will do. All in favor?"

It was unanimous, Paul saw, although Melissa's was the last hand raised.

"Congratulations, Joanna," Arnold said warmly, "and welcome aboard." He pushed himself to his feet and started clapping his hands. The entire board rose and applauded. Joanna remained seated, smiling politely and mouthing 'Thank you' to them all.

"Now then," Arnold said once they were all seated again, "to the major business of this meeting: electing the new president and chief operating officer of Masterson Aerospace Corporation."

Paul felt suddenly nervous. What Joanna was going to do would not only cause a rift in the board, it would shatter her son, who expected to be elected unanimously. And marriage? Paul wondered. If I don't get elected will she still want to marry me? Do I really want to marry her?

"This great corporation was founded, as you all know, in the dark years of the Second World War by Elliot Masterson," Arnold was droning in his sonorous, soporific voice. "His son, the first Gregory Masterson took over at Elliot's retirement…"

In all his years as an astronaut and then a corporate executive, the idea of marriage had never entered Paul's mind. Women were plentiful, and there was no time to get hung up over one. Paul was driven by the urge to succeed. Not merely to be the best, but to get the others to acknowledge that he was the best. To get to the Moon. To make Moonbase viable. To make a success where everyone else said it was impossible.

I never really thought about marriage, Paul was saying to himself. Maybe it's time to settle down. Enough tail chasing. I haven't really wanted to, anyway, since I met Joanna. Maybe that means I really love her. But does she love me or is this just going to be a business deal? Marriage for Moonbase. Some deal'… and now that Gregory Masterson II is no longer among us," Arnold went on, "I believe it is in accord with the finest traditions of this great corporation that we ask his son, Gregory Masterson III, to accept the weighty responsibilities of president and chief operating officer of Masterson Aerospace Corporation."

"Second the nomination."

Paul swivelled his head. Melissa had seconded Greg's nomination with the swiftness of an automaton. That was a surprise.

Grinning coyly, Arnold asked, "Any other nominations?"

"I nominate," said Joanna, "Paul Stavenger."

A shock wave flashed along the table. Greg's face went white. He looked as if his mother had just slapped him. Arnold's mouth dropped open.

"Second that," said the man at Paul's left, the corporation's comptroller.

Arnold blinked several times, looking more like a perplexed frog than ever. Finally he said, in a low angry voice, "Any other nominations?"

None.

"Discussion?"

Joanna said, "I don't want to give the board the impression that I have no confidence in my son. I simply feel that Paul has earned the right to be CEO. He pushed the Clippership program to its current highly successful status. Without the Clipperships this corporation would be in receivership."

"That's something of an overstatement!" Arnold sputtered.

Joanna made a smile for him. "Perhaps. But Paul's shown he can be an effective CEO. My son is young enough to wait a few years. With a little patience, he'll make a fine CEO one day."

Greg said nothing. He glowered at his mother in silent hatred.

Paul knew what was irking Arnold. Old frog-face thought that he could control Greg. With Greg as CEO, Arnold would effectively be running the corporation his way. He had no desire to see a strong independent CEO elected.

His face florid, Arnold said to Joanna, "But this corporation has always had a Masterson at its head. I thought that we all wanted to keep control in the family's hands."

Joanna's smile turned slightly wicked. "Oh, it will be in the family's hands. Paul and I are going to be married."

Greg bolted up to his feet so hard he knocked his heavy padded chair over backwards. "Married!" he shouted. "To -to him.''

Before his mother could reply, Greg pushed past his overturned chair and stamped out of the meeting room, slamming the heavy door as he left.

Christ, Paul thought, she hadn't told him anything about this. He's just as shocked as the rest of them.

"I'm afraid," Joanna said calmly, "that Greg allows his emotions to overwhelm him, sometimes."

Paul stared at her. She's like an iceberg, he thought. Implacable, unmovable. And cold as ice.

The other board members were muttering to one another. Arnold rapped his knuckles on the table to restore order. Paul saw beads of perspiration on the chairman's brow and upper lip. His hairpiece was slightly askew.

"I think, in light of this unexpected turn of events," he said hesitantly, "that we should postpone the election of our new CEO until we have all had a chance to think and consider carefully—"

"I disagree," interrupted the comptroller. He was older than Paul, not as old as Arnold; a trim little man, dapper, always impeccably dressed. With just a trace of an Irish accent he said, "We all know each other here, and we all know both young Greg and Paul Stavenger. I don't see why we should wait at all."

Arnold started to say, "But I—"

"Let's vote," said another board member.

"Call for the vote," said still another.

Visibly defeated, Arnold said, "Very well, if that is the sense of the board. Shall we use the secret ballot?"

"I'm willing to let everyone see my hand raised," the comptroller said.

"Then let us take a fifteen-minute recess before we vote," said Arnold. "I want to make sure that Greg is with us when hands are raised."

The tension eased a little as everyone got to their feet. The comptroller patted Paul's shoulder and said loudly enough for all to hear, "I'm sure you're going to make a grand CEO, my boy."

Paul mumbled his thanks and made his way around the table toward Joanna. He passed Melissa, who kept her face frozen.

Joanna was walking slowly toward the big windows at the front of the meeting room. As if by instinct, the other board members drifted away from her, allowing Paul to be alone with her.

"You didn't tell Greg first?" he whispered urgently to her.

She looked up at him, her eyes tired, almost tearful. "I tried to," she said. "He didn't show up until just a few moments before the meeting began."

"But… before the meeting. Christ, you two live in the same house!"

"Not any more. Greg took an apartment here in New York. Just after his father's death. Didn't you know?"

Paul shook his head. "Still… breaking it to him like that, in front of the rest of the board…"

Joanna turned to the windows. "The Clippership from Hong Kong should be arriving in a few moments."

"Never mind that. You should've told him! Warned him, at least."

"I couldn't," she said, still staring out beyond the towers of Lower Manhattan, the harbor, the gray expanse of Brooklyn and Queens. "He hasn't spoken to me in more than a month. Not since he found out about us."

"He knows?"

Joanna breathed out a shuddering sigh. "He knows."

"Then—his father must've known." Paul was jolted by the thought.

"He probably did."

"God almighty."

Joanna said nothing.

"Do you think that's why he killed himself?" Paul asked her.

Joanna did not answer for a long moment. Then, "I can't picture Gregory blowing his brains out over his wife's infidelity. Not when he'd already turned infidelity into a lifetime career."

She sounded bitter. But Paul knew that a man like Gregory had a totally different set of values when it came to his wife's faithfulness. Still, he never would have thought that Gregory would kill himself, for any reason.

"Look!" Joanna pointed. "There it is!"

A pinpoint high in the sky, a flare of rocket flame against the gray-blue background. Paul watched the tiny dot grow into a discernible shape as the Clippership seemed to halt in midair, slide sideways slightly, then slowly descend on a pillar of flaming rocket exhaust toward the ground until it was lost to their view.

"I still get a thrill every time I see it," Joanna said.

And Paul thought that maybe he did love her, after all.

"Please be seated," Arnold called from the head of the table. Looking around, Paul saw that Greg was still gone. Unable to face the music, Paul wondered, or too torn up by his mother's betrayal?

He knew about us, Paul told himself as he went back to his chair. He knew that I was fucking his mother. And if he knew, his father did, too.

Eighteen board members took their places around the long table. Arnold called for discussion of the nominations. The board members shifted uneasily in their chairs, looked at one another. No one wanted to be first.

"I presume," Arnold said, seizing the initiative, "that you are still in favor of keeping Moonbase going, Paul?"

Nodding solemnly, Paul replied, "The future of this corporation is in space, and Moonbase holds the key to profitable space commerce."

"But the government's backed away from it," Arnold pointed out. "If they won't do it, why should we? After all, they can print money; we have to earn it." He made a rictus of a smile to indicate humor.

Paul hesitated, as if carefully considering his answer, even though he knew exactly what he wanted to say. After a couple of heartbeats he began, "Washington is giving us an opportunity to develop this new frontier without a lot of government red tape tying our hands. The politicians have finally realized that they can't run anything at a profit. But we can! And we will—eventually."

"How long is eventually?" one of the older board members asked. "I don't have all that much time to wait."

Paul smiled patiently. "Several years, at least. We're talking about developing a new frontier here. How long did it take Pittsburgh to become the steel center of the world? How long did it take to make air travel profitable?"

"It's still not profitable!"

"The Clipperships are profitable," Paul pointed out.

No one contradicted him.

"I know it's asking a lot to back Moonbase on our own, but believe me, this is the key to our future. I believe that, as firmly as I believed that the Clipperships would make money for us."

Joanna asked, "Isn't the government willing to pay whoever operates Moonbase to keep the scientific work going?"

Nodding, Paul replied, That's right. Washington's willing to support six scientists at Moonbase. It's not very much money, but it's a baseline commitment.

"And if we decide not to continue with Moonbase," one of the other directors asked, "what happens to those scientists?"

"Moonbase operations will be offered to any other corporation that wants to bid on the base. If nobody bids, the base is shut down and all work on the Moon comes to an end."

"You're fully committed to keeping Moonbase open?" Joanna asked him.

"Totally," said Paul. "Take me, take Moonbase with me. One and inseparable."

"Now and forever," muttered a voice further down the table,

The vote was an anticlimax. Arnold claimed that he had Greg's proxy. The only other vote for Greg came from Melissa Hart. Paul Scavenger was elected president and chief operating officer of Masterson Aerospace Corporation by a vote of sixteen to three.

"Congratulations," smiled the comptroller. "Now when is the wedding going to take place?"

MARE NUBIUM

Some wedding, Paul said to himself as he sweated across the lunar regolith. Like another pissing board meeting, only bigger. The biggest society bash in Savannah. They all came out of curiosity. Too soon after Gregory's death, they all whispered. Bad taste. But they all came and sipped the champagne and ogled at the daughter of one of the oldest families in Georgia actually marrying a black man. Lawdy, lawdy, what would Miz Scarlett say?

The whole board of directors showed up for the wedding. All except Greg. And Melissa. Joanna planned every detail, even picked the comptroller to be my best man. So what? I had enough on my dish. Pissing company was in even worse shape than I'd thought. I could see right at the outset that saving Moonbase was going to be a bitch and a half.

It was always there, the race thing. Even at MIT the blacks had their own clubs and cliques. Had to. Nobody hung WHITES ONLY signs in the halls, but everybody knew who was who and what was what. The classes and labs were one thing: performance counted there. It was the social life where they cut you. And Paul got cut both ways. He wasn't black enough to suit the militants; he was too black to please most of the whites. Especially when he dated white women.

Learning tp fly was something else, though. Alone in a plane Paul could get away from everything and everyone, at least for a couple of hours. More than once he would squint up at the blue sky and see the pale ghost of the Moon riding out beyond his wing tip.

I'm on my way, he would say to the distant Moon. I'll be with you in a few years."

Something was wrong with his left boot It was rubbing his heel raw. A pang of fear burned through his gut. He saw Wojo again, screaming as the nanobugs ate his suit and his flesh. And Tink, screeching like a terrified monkey in a leopard's jaws. Forget about the pissin' nanobugs! Paul raged silently. It's nothing but a lousy fitting boot, he insisted to himself.

He was trying not to limp, despite the pain in his left heel every time he set his foot down. It felt awkward, walking that way.

And then his boot slipped.

If he had fallen forward, just tripped and gone down face-first, he would have had plenty of time to put out his hands, stop the fall, and push himself up to his feet again. Even in the cumbersome surface suit, the Moon's gravity was so slight that he could have done that. It was an old trick among the 'Lunatics," done to impress newcomers: pretend you're going to go splat on your face, then push yourself up to a standing position before the tenderfoot can holler, "Look out!"

But Paul's foot skidded out from under him on a suddenly slick piece of exposed rock and he fell over backward, onto his life-support backpack and oxygen tank, banged down heavily and skidded, yowling sudden pain and fear, down a slope so gradual he hadn't even noticed it a moment before.

His head banged inside his helmet, his vision blurred. He tasted blood in his mouth. For long moments he lay panting, dizzy, blinking to clear his eyes. Gradually he took stock. He was lying on his right side, his arm pinned under him, the bulky backpack and oxygen tank pressing against the back of his suit.

Shakily he lifted his left arm to look at the displays. No red lights. Everything still in the green. He listened carefully. Nothing but the air fans whining and his own labored breathing. No hisses. No leaks. He hoped.

He pushed himself up to a sitting position, grateful that he weighed only one-sixth of what he would on Earth.

He was at the bottom of a shallow pit with sides sloped so gradually that you had to be inside it to realize it was a depression at all. Absently, he ran a gloved hand along the stony ground. Smooth as glass. Must be an old crater; a really old one, smoothed down by the infalling meteoric dust for Christ knows how long.

It was a struggle to get to his feet. Once erect, he saw that the pit was slightly deeper than his own height and some forty-fifty feet across. Got to get up this slippery slope, he told himself. Not going to be easy.

Shifting the backpack's weight on his shoulders, Paul crouched over and placed his gloved hands on the bare rock. Four legs are better than two for this, he told himself. Slowly, with enormous care, he picked his way up the gradual slope. It felt like walking on glass. Or ice. For a crazy moment Paul thought back to his one and only ice-skating lesson, when he'd been a teenager. Split his eyebrow open in a fall that ended his interest in skating forever.

Easy now, he commanded himself. Don't slide down. You don't have any time to waste playing around in here.

His boots slipped and skidded, barely providing any traction at all. Paul bent his face closer to the stone, looking for rough patches, bumps, anything that could provide purchase. He was grateful that the Sun was still low enough in the sky to throw long shadows; made it easier to see where he could plant his feet and get something to push against.

Just as he reached one hand across the rim of the crater his foot slipped and he started to slide backward. He clung desperately to the slightly raised edge of the crater, grabbed with his other hand and hung on to keep himself from sliding all the way back to the bottom.

For several moments he stayed there, strung out, gasping, while his booted feet searched for something to hold them. He gave it up and hauled himself upward, letting his legs go limp. He got his belly over the edge, trying not to think of what would happen if he tore the fabric of his suit. One leg over the rim. Then the other.

At last he climbed to his feet. Wish I had a marker beacon, he thought. There ought to be a warning here.

Okay, get moving. Enough time wasted.

But which direction? He turned a full three hundred sixty degrees. Mare Nubium looked the same in all directions. Flat bare plain of dust-covered rock. The hump that marked the shelter he had fled was nowhere in sight now, but neither was the next shelter, nor the ringwall mountains of Alphonsus.

"Talk about the middle of nowhere," Paul said aloud.

He checked the GPS receiver on his suit's forearm. Nothing. The display was dark. No signal chirped in his earphones. Satellite's too low for my suit antenna to pick up the signal.

Paul stared out at the horizon. For the first time he felt truly afraid. He was alone and lost and miles from any possibility of help.

SAVANNAH

"Murder?" Paul felt his insides go hollow.

"That's what Greg said," Melissa Hart told him.

It was Paul's first day in his new office as CEO of Masterson Aerospace. He had been in the midst of setting up his personal mementos on his broad ebony desk: a fist-sized chunk of Moon rock; a solid mahogany model of a Clippership in the red, white and blue colors of American Airlines; a framed photograph of Joanna smiling at him from beneath a wide-brimmed straw hat.

It had taken more than a week to get his new office suite squared away. Paul had wanted to stay at his old office, but it was in the manufacturing plant out where I-16 intersected with I-95. Corporate headquarters was in the old historic section of Savannah, down by the riverfront, where the docks and warehouses had been largely replaced by tourist hotels and upscale restaurants. At least he could walk to work, just a few blocks along Bryan Street.

He had felt uneasy about taking over Gregory's suite, but finally decided he shouldn't let old guilts stand in the way of doing his new job. So he had his secretary totally redecorate the office; a chore she delighted in, for six whirlwind days of painters and carpet installers and electricians and decorators.

And now Melissa had walked unannounced into his office, so spanking new it smelled of paint and freshly-sawn wood. She stood before his desk, arms clasped tightly across her chest, looking wired tight.

Paul sank into his stylishly modern caramel leather swivel chair, staring open-mouthed at Melissa.

"Murder?" he repeated.

She pulled up the upholstered chair in front of his desk. "Greg's got a videodisk that his father made just before he died. He says it proves Gregory didn't commit suicide. He was murdered."

"Holy shit," Paul groaned.

Melissa said nothing.

"Did you see this videodisk?"

"Greg played it for me," she said.

"What's on it?"

"Gregory's sitting at his desk. Right here in this office. It must've been late afternoon, right before he was killed."

He was supposed to have been at the executive committee meeting, Paul remembered. But Gregory had walked out on the rest of the committee halfway through the agenda and returned to his office. Nothing unusual in that; he had done it often enough in the past. Meetings usually made him more irritable than usual, especially when there were unpleasant decisions to be made that he wanted to avoid.

"He looked drunk to me," Melissa went on. "Smashed. Muttering into the camera. He must've set it up on his desk."

"What did he say?"

She made a little shrug. "Most of it was hard to understand. He did a lot of mumbling. But he had that Magnum on his desk and he said something about somebody trying to kill him. "The gun's for protection," he said. "This gun's going to save me.'"

"And?"

"That's about it. A lot of it was incomprehensible. Greg says he's going to get some experts to go over the disk and extract as much from it as they can."

"Has he shown it to the police?"

"Not yet. He just got it himself; it was delivered through the interoffice mail."

"It took more than a month to get a videodisk fifty feet down the hall?"

Melissa almost smiled. "Greg's been in New York all this time. He just got back yesterday and started going through his mail."

"Oh. I see." Paul looked out the picture window toward the riverfront, then turned back to Melissa. She seemed tense, wary. But not angry, the way she'd been at the board meeting.

He asked her, "Why are you telling me this?"

"Figured you ought to know."

"You're not sore at me? About Joanna, I mean?"

A flicker of something crossed her face, but she regained her self-control almost immediately. "It hurt when you dumped me, Paul."

Feeling flustered, he spread his hands and said defensively, "I didn't exactly dump you, did I?"

Her voice deathly calm, Melissa replied, "Call it what you want. Soon's you started after the boss's wife you didn't have any time for me."

"I fell in love," Paul said.

Melissa swept her almond eyes around the big office in a long, exaggerated inspection. "Yeah," she said finally. "I can see that."

Paul wished he could get angry at her, but he was terribly afraid that she was right.

"Well, anyway, thanks for the news."

"Sure." She got up to leave and for the first time Paul noticed the forest green miniskirt that clung to her hips and her long slim legs encased in patterned green stockings.

"Who in the hell would want to kill Gregory?" he muttered as she headed for the door.

Melissa turned back toward him. "Maybe it was the guy who took over his job. And his wife."

Paul sagged back in his chair, stunned. "You don't mean that!"

She shrugged again. "That's what Greg thinks. That's what he's going to tell the police."

For a long while Paul sat at his desk, staring out the window, looking at nothing. In his mind's eye he saw Gregory sitting in this same room, with a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum from his gun collection in the wall cabinet sitting on the desk in front of him and a half-empty decanter of Gentleman Jack beside it.

He put the gun in his mouth and blew his head off, Paul told himself. Nobody murdered him. The bastard committed suicide, but first he made that pissing disk to leave as much trouble behind him as he could. He knew about Joanna and me. The disk's his revenge on us.

But why did Joanna have his body cremated? You can't exhume a cremated body and look for evidence of murder.

Paul shook his head, trying to clear the suspicions away. Slowly he got up from his chair and walked to the big window overlooking the riverfront. He glanced at his wristwatch, then. looked past the docks and boats, past the river itself, out into the clear blue sky, just starting to darken with twilight.

And there it was, a bright gleaming star moving rapidly from west to east, cutting across the sky in silent purposefulness. The Rockledge space station. It seemed to beckon Paul like a steady, unwavering hope.

Tonight, Paul said to himself. I'll be up there tonight. I'll leave all this shit behind me and be up there where everything's clean and uncomplicated.

He had decided that, as the new CEO, he should visit all the corporation's operating divisions, starting with the research labs and prototype factory facility that Masterson rented aboard the Rockledge Corporation's space station. He had wanted to go on to the scattering of underground shelters on the lunar surface that was Moonbase, but the pressures of his new responsibilities had forced him to postpone that pleasure.

Instead, he decided to take Joanna to the space station with him.

"A honeymoon in zero gravity," he had told her.

"Aboard a space station?" Joanna had seemed startled at the idea.

"You'll love it," Paul had coaxed. "Zero gravity is better than waterbeds,"

She had finally agreed. Reluctantly, it seemed to Paul.

The intercom buzzer yanked his thoughts back to the present

"What?" he called from the window.

"Mr. Arnold to see you, sir."

Paul turned back toward the desk. "Send him right in."

He started for the door, wondering why his secretary allowed Melissa to waltz in unannounced but held up the chairman of the board.

Bradley Arnold came smiling into the office, looking around at the new decor appreciatively. "I wouldn't recognize the place, "Jie said in his heavy croaking voice.

Paul showed him to the round conference table in the corner, next to the built-in bar.

"Ah, this corner I do recognize," Arnold said, lowering his chunky form into one of the chairs slowly, painfully. "Gregory was here more than at his desk, his last few months."

"Would you like something…?" Paul asked.

"No, no, no," Arnold replied, waving both hands vigorously in front of his face.

He protests too much, Paul thought. But he pulled out the chair next to the chairman's and sat in it.

"You're scheduled for a flight to the space facilities this evening, aren't you?" Arnold asked.

Paul nodded. "Joanna and I are set to leave in about an hour."

Arnold's bulging eyes widened slightly. "Joanna's going with you?"

Forcing a smile, Paul said, "A sort of honeymoon. Only three days, but that's all I can squeeze in."

"A honeymoon in space," Arnold murmured. "Leave it to a former astronaut to think of that."

"You ought to try it—a trip into orbit, I mean."

"Me?" Arnold looked genuinely startled. "In space? No thank you! I'll stay right here with my feet on solid ground. I don't even like to go to California, the ground shakes too often."

"Do wonders for your arthritis," Paul said. "Zero gee can be very therapeutic."

Shaking his head hard enough to make his toupee jiggle, Arnold said, "I'm doing fine here on Earth."

Paul was tempted to say that the chairman wouldn't have to worry about his weight in zero gravity, but he bit it back.

Arnold was sensitive about his poundage. In-between meals and snacks, Paul thought.

I'll come straight to the point, Paul," the old man said. "You've heard about this disk that young Greg has?"

All thoughts of levity vanished from Paul's mind. He nodded in silence.

"Have you seen it?"

"No."

"Neither have I."

That surprised Paul. He said, "I've heard what's on it. Gregory says somebody was out to kill him."

"Yes, that's what I heard."

"I guess Greg will be taking it to the police."

Arnold's frog eyes narrowed. "Eventually, I suppose. Don't know how believable it is. The ravings of an obviously drunken man. He was getting quite paranoid, you know."

"Was he?" Paul said carefully.

"Yes. He had all sorts of suspicions. About everyone around him."

Arnold did not have to say that Gregory knew his wife was having an affair with Paul. The implication was perfectly clear.

"Well," Paul said, "I'm not sure of what I ought to do about this. Ask Greg about it, I suppose."

"I'd speak with McPherson first."

The corporation's counsel. "You really think I should talk to the lawyers?" Paul asked.

Arnold started to nod, but broke it off to say, "Paul, you know that I nominated Greg for CEO only out of family loyalty. That's all it was, believe me. I had no idea that you and Joanna were going to be married. I was merely being loyal to the family."

Before Paul could reply, Arnold rushed on, "I want you to know that I'm one hundred percent behind you, Paul. One hundred percent! I think you're going to make a fine CEO and I'll do whatever I can to help and support you. Even if it comes down to a murder investigation."

Paul looked into the chairman's earnest, florid face and did not believe a word of what he said. You'll be right behind me, all right, Paul thought. With a hatchet.

But he made himself smile and clasped his hands together in front of his face and said mildly, "I appreciate that Brad. I really do."

Arnold looked satisfied. "I merely wanted you to go off to the space station with as clear a mind as possible. Don't worry about Greg at all. I'll hold the fort while you're gone."

I'll be back by Friday."

"Good," said Arnold. "Don't worry about a thing while you're up there."

"Sure. Thanks a lot."

"Why did Greg show the disk to Melissa?" Joanna wanted to know.

They were in the limousine, heading for the company airfield, where a Clippership was waiting to boost them to the Rockledge space station. They both wore utilitarian coveralls: Paul's were drab green; Joanna's coral red. And form-fitting.

Paul blinked with surprise at his wife's question. "I never even thought to ask."

Joanna said, I'd have thought he'd bring it to Brad Arnold. Or straight to the police."

"Brad hasn't seen it."

"So he says," Joanna muttered.

"Greg's having the disk analyzed," Paul said. "Wants to'sextract all the information he can. Make sense out of Gregory's mumblings, if he can." "'He's not turning it over to the police?" she asked sharply.

"Not yet."

With a shake of her head, Joanna said, "It's going to be useless as evidence, then. Once he lets anyone tamper with it—"

"They're not tampering."

"Legally, the disk will be compromised. The technicians can make it show or say anything they want, once they get their hands on the original."

With a feeble smile, Paul said, "That's your expert legal opinion, is it?"

"I could have taken a law degree," Joanna said, straight-faced. "I've spent enough time with lawyers, god knows."

They drove on in silence through the deepening twilight, Paul playing his wife's question over and over in his head. Why did Greg show the disk to Melissa and not to Arnold? The chairman of the board would be a natural ally for Greg in this. What's the kid up to? And what's Brad up to? Are the two of them working together on this?

Then a new thought struck him: Is Melissa sleeping with Greg now? Somehow that idea bothered him.

"You have to be careful of Brad," Joanna warned.

"I know."

"He had just about taken over the whole corporation," she went on, "during Gregory's last few months. That's why he wanted Greg to be CEO; he thought he could run everything and have Greg sitting there as a figurehead."

"Maybe he's the one Gregory was mumbling about, then," said Paul. "On the disk."

"Gregory? Afraid that Brad was trying to kill him?"

"Not physically. Business-wise."

"Then why the gun?" Joanna asked.

Paul shrugged. He had no answer for that.

"You just be careful of Brad," she repeated. "If he says he wants to be your friend, you don't need an enemy."

The limo slowed at the security gate, then headed toward the airfield's terminal building. In the distance Paul could see the graceful conical shape of the Clippership outlined in spotlights against the darkening evening sky, a wisp of white vapor drifting from its liquid oxygen feed line.

Trying to summon up a confidence he didn't feel, Paul said to Joanna, "Well, let's forget about it for now."

"Forget about it?"

"We're on our way to our honeymoon, remember? And besides, there's not much we can do about all this. The ball's in Greg's court"

Joanna nodded tightly. "That's what bothers me."

They rode the open-cage elevator to the Clippership's hatch, ducked through and climbed the ladder between the passenger rows to their reclining seats. Only six passengers this trip; Paul recognized four of them, including Hiram Tinker, the astronomer who tended the orbital telescopes that the corporation operated on contract from a consortium of universities.

"Hi, Hi!" Paul said brightly as he helped Joanna into her chair. Everyone called the man Tink, but Paul always made a pun out of his first name, even though he dreaded the flood of puns Tinker poured out in return.

"Hello boss boss."

Paul slid into his own chair, across the ladderway from Joanna, and started strapping in before lowering the chair to its full reclining position. "Boss boss?" he asked Tinker, over his shoulder. "You stuttering?"

Tink had always called Paul the boss, since he worked in Paul's space operations division.

"Well, now you're my new boss's boss, aren't you?" Tink countered. "That makes you boss boss."

"Boss squared," said one of the other technicians, from a back row.

"Running dog capitalist expropriator of the workers," came another voice. Paul knew whose, without having to turn around: Alex Wodjohowitcz, tractor teleoperator and technician, on his way to a three-month tour of duty on the Moon.

Paul jabbed a finger toward Joanna. "Here's the real boss," he said. Then wondered how humorous the remark really was. Joanna cocked an eyebrow at him, barely smiled. Once he was settled in the seat next to her, Joanna leaned I across the aisle separating them to ask in a whisper, "Who are those people?"

"Our employees," Paul whispered back. "Some of the best people in the world. In the whole Earth-Moon system, as a matter of fact."

"And that one who called you a running dog? Why do you let him speak to you like that?"

"Wojo?" Paul laughed. "Wojo's the most creative cusser I've ever met. I've known him more than six years now and I've never heard him resort to profanity or repeat himself. But he sure can bum your ears off."

"Liftoff in two minutes," came a voice from the cockpit, over the intercom speakers.

Paul knew that the astronaut pilot and co-pilot were in the cockpit strictly as redundancies. The Clippership was preprogrammed and monitored from the ground, just as it would be if it were carrying all freight and no people at all. Only if something went disastrously wrong would the human crew have anything to do. And then, Paul thought, it would probably be too late. But the government agencies had insisted on a human crew when human passengers were going aloft. Takes two paying seats out of our cash flow, Paul fumed whenever he thought about the outmoded regulation.

Then one of the astronauts came clambering down the ladder to check that all the passengers were properly strapped in and had cranked their seats back to the full reclining position for takeoff. He said a brief hello to Paul, smiled at Joanna, and then climbed back up into the cockpit and closed the hatch above Paul's head.

Paul glanced across the narrow aisle and saw that Joanna looked pale. She's never been in space before, he knew. He reached out his hand and touched her shoulder. She clasped his hand in hers. Her palm felt cold, clammy.

Grinning at her, Paul whispered, "You'll love it."

She nodded, but looked extremely dubious.

LANA GOODMAN

She was the first person to suffer a heart attack on the Moon.

Dr. Lana Goodman was a tiny wisp of a woman, a brilliant fifty-two-year-old with degrees in medicine, physiology, and biophysics. She was rumored to be on track for a Nobel, and could have had her pick of any university in the world. Indeed, she was teaching and conducting research in low-gravity physiology at Johns Hopkins when she applied for a position with Masterson Aerospace.

"I want to go to the Moon," she told the corporation's astonished personnel director. "I've always wanted to go there. I've had experience aboard space stations, but I haven't gotten to the Moon yet and I want to do it before I get too old." : Masterson took her on as a consultant, making maximum public relations mileage out of it, and sent her on a well-publicized tour of duty at Moonbase.

Dr. Goodman was expected to look after the medical needs of the twenty-eight men and women who happened to be working at Moonbase at the time, as well as continue her own research on how the human body adapts to low gravity. Her heart attack was totally unexpected, caused by a clot thatlodged in one of the smaller coronary arteries. She was eating breakfast when she felt a terrific pain in her chest, vomited up everything in her stomach, and half-collapsed on the galley table. Her skin turned gray and sweaty.

Since she was Moonbase's resident doctor at the time, she was attended by two of the base's paramedics—both of them engineers with other duties who stood by for medical emergencies. They slapped an oxygen mask over her nose; one of them shot a load of clot-busting tissue plasminogen activator into her arm, while the othef pushed aspirin and nitroglycerin tablets through her pain-clenched teeth.

The paramedics contacted Masterson's medical staff in Savannah, who plugged them in to the finest cardiac centers in Boston, Houston and even Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Within hours Dr. Goodman was out of danger, thanks mainly to the clot-dissolving properties of the TPA.

Within three days she could walk around almost normally, in the gentle gravity of the Moon.

But she could not return to Earth.

Part of the problem was the acceleration of the rocket boost from the lunar surface, she knew, although that was only a minor part of it, since the liftoff was much less stressful than a takeoff from Earth would have been. There were gee stresses in re-entering Earth's atmosphere, too. They were greater, but she felt confident that she could handle them.

The real problem was the condition of her heart, weakened by weeks of living in low gravity and now damaged by the infarction. She feared that she would be a cardiac cripple on Earth, with its high gravity.

After days of consulting with her Earthbound medical colleagues, Goodman decided she would have to stay on the Moon for weeks, perhaps months, while slowly building up her cardiac strength through exercises specially designed to strengthen her heart muscle.

She wanted to resume her medical duties, but the corporation had sent up a strapping young M.D. to replace her as medical officer—and to watch over her while she recuperated. Looking more like a football hero than a physician, the young man supervised her exercise regimen with ruthless tenderness.

Dr. Goodman continued her research, but this was not enough to fill her increasingly boring days in the cramped underground warrens of Moonbase. She had brought her camera with her, though, and started taking photographs. Not of the busy, harried, sweaty people who lived cheek-by-jowl in Moonbase. She got into a spacesuit and went out on the surface to take photos of the grandeur of the Moon itself.

She had no intention of showing her work to anyone but her fellow Moonbase residents. But one of them electronically relayed back to Savannah a few choice shots of the Sun rising over Alphonsus's ringwall mountains. A minor executive in the public relations department showed them to an editor of a photography magazine. Within a month several other magazines were asking for her work.

She had started with ordinary color film, but soon asked her new-found friends in the world of photography to send her black-and-white film, instead. It seemed made to order for the black-and-gray world of the Moon.

With dizzying suddenness, Lana Goodman became an artist of global renown. Her photos of the Moon showed all the barren splendor of this new world in its rugged challenge. Her work adorned the covers of newsmagazines. Media personalities clamored to interview her, live, from the Moon.—The handsome young football hero of a physician left after his three-month tour ended. The next doctor was a woman, just as qualified, just as determined to see that Goodman continued her exercise routine, but nowhere near as emotionally interesting.

When medical tests showed she was physically able to return to Earth, she asked for a postponement. I'm not ready, she said. Psychologically, I'm not prepared to face the return trip.

On the first anniversary of her heart attack she decided to quit the subterfuge and asked her contacts in the corporation's personnel office to allow her to stay on the Moon indefinitely.

The decision went all the way up to Paul Stavenger, head of Masterson's space division. In full sympathy with her desire, and prodded by the corporate public relations director, he decided to allow Lana Goodman to stay at Moonbase as long as she wished.

She never returned to Earth.

Lana Goodman become the first person to live on the Moon permanently.

SPACE STATION

The Clippership took off with a thundering roar that was only slightly muted by the passenger cabin's acoustical insulation. The ship rattled hard enough to blur Paul's vision for a moment. Pressed flat against the reclined seat, he turned his head to see how Joanna was taking it. Her eyes were squeezed shut, hands clutching the armrests with whitened knuckles.

The vibration eased off a good deal, but the bellowing thunder of the rocket engines still shook his innards. Then a sharp bang! and the noise abruptly ceased.

Paul felt all sensation of weight disappear. One instant he was flattened against the chair, weighing three times normal, the next he was floating lightly against the restraining seat harness.

Joanna's arms had lifted off her seat's rests. Her gray-green eyes were wide open now, looking startled.

Paul grinned at her. "We're coasting now. Zero gee."

She smiled back at him, weakly.

Within fifteen minutes the Clippership made its rendezvous with the space station. The ship lurched slightly once, twice, a third time. Then the co-pilot opened the cockpit hatch and announced, "We're docked. They're attaching the access tube to the main hatch."

"Can I come up and take a look?" Paul asked, unstrapping his seat harness.

"Sure, we're all finished here," said the co-pilot.

Paul floated up into the ladderway aisle. The other passengers were unbuckling their harnesses, bobbing up out of their chairs, opening the overhead luggage bins to haul out their gear. Straps snaked weightlessly, as if alive; travel bags and equipment boxes hung in mid-air.

Looking down at Joanna, still firmly strapped into her seat, he said, I'll be right back."

She tried to smile again.

The cockpit was cramped with two seats for the astronauts shoehorned into wall-to-wall instrumentation. But there was a wide transparent port for Paul to look through.

The space station was still unfinished. Paul could see a spacesuited construction team hauling girders and curved sheets of alloy into place along the station's outermost section, so far distant that they looked like little toy figures. A welding laser flashed briefly. The construction workers all wore maneuvering backpacks so they would not need tethers to keep them from drifting off into space. The Earth hung off to one side, huge and bright blue with parades of pure white clouds marching across the face of the broad ocean. Paul could see specks of islands and, off at the curving horizon, the wrinkled brown stretch of California's rugged coastline swinging into view.

The station was built in three concentric wheels with a docking area at the hub. Once the construction was finished the station would be spun up so that people in the widest, outermost wheel would feel a normal Earthly gravity. The inner wheels would provide one-third and one-sixth gee, while the docking hub would be effectively in zero gravity all the time. For now, though, the entire huge structure hung motionless against the utterly black sky. It was all in zero gee.

"They're making good progress," Paul said.

"Had an accident yesterday," the pilot told him. "Boom operator got pinned between one of the girders and a new section of flooring they were installing."

"Was he hurt bad?"

"She," said the co-pilot. "Ruptured her suit. She was dead before they could get to her."

Paul shook his head. "How many does that make?"

"Four this year. Six, altogether."

"Christ, you think they'd be more careful."

"It's the new guys, every time. They start hauling big girder around and they're weightless so they forget they still got mass. And momentum. Get hit by one and it can still cave in your ribs."

"There hasn't been much publicity about it back on th ground," Paul said.

The co-pilot smiled grimly. "Rockledge has a damned tight public relations operation. No reporters up here at all."

"Still… you'd think they'd be screaming about it."

"Nah," said the pilot. "Rockledge insures the workers, pay off the family plenty. Nobody complains."

"Not yet," the co-pilot countered.

"The work's getting done on schedule and within budget from what I hear."

Paul asked, "Even with the insurance costs factored in?"

The pilot nodded. "Rockledge must've factored in a casualty rate when they decided to build this wheel."

Yeah, Paul thought, and our rental of space in the station must be helping to pay off their insurance premiums.

"It's a tradeoff," the co-pilot said, as if he could read Paul's face. "The sooner they get this station finished and operating the sooner they can rent out all its space. They must've figured that the insurance costs are worth it if they can get the job done fast enough."

"Pretty damned cold-blooded," Paul muttered. "I don't think I'd push an operation that way."

The pilot grinned at him. "That's why we work for you boss, instead of Rockledge."

Masterson Corporation's space operations division—Paul's former bailiwick—had rented half the innermost wheel of the space station for research laboratories and an experimental zero-gee manufacturing facility. Once the station was completed and spun up, that innermost wheel would rotate at one-sixth gee: the gravity of the Moon's surface. The labs would shift from zero-gee to a lunar environment. The manufacturing facility would be removed from the station and hung outside as a 'free floater," where it could remain in the weightless mode.

Part of Masterson's rented space was living quarters for its employees. Spartan at best, they were meant to house people who would spend no more than a few months aboard the station.

"It's not exactly the Ritz," Paul said to Joanna as he slid back the accordion-fold door to their designated quarters.

It was a cubicle about the size of a generous telephone booth. No window, but a small computer terminal built into one bulkhead. Otherwise the walls, floor and ceiling were covered with Velcro and loops for tethering one's feet. A mesh sleeping bag was stuck to one wall.

"At least we're close to the toilet and washroom," Paul said, pointing along the corridor that sloped upward conspicuously in both directions.

Hanging onto the open doorjamb while her feet barely pouched the deck, Joanna lopked bleary-eyed at her honeymoon suite and said wretchedly, "I think I'm going to be sick."

"It's not that bad, is it?"

"No, Paul," she said, her face pasty-white. "I'm really going-' She clutched at her middle.

Paul grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her toward the toilet area. Joanna moaned and gagged. Pushing her weightlessly down the short length of the corridor, their feet barely touching the deck, Paul slid Joanna sideways through the open doorway. She bumped gently against the wall inside.

"Just let go," he said to her, leaning over her bowed back to start the toilet's air suction flow. "This happens to almost everybody. I should've realized it'd hit you. I'm sorry, I just didn't think

He kept on talking while Joanna puked her guts into the zero gravity toilet.

"It's all my fault," he kept saying. "I'm so damned sorry. I never stopped to think that you'd be sick." As he spoke and Joanna vomited, Paul fought to hold down the bile rising in his own throat.

Some honeymoon, Paul said to himself. Two days in orbit. two days sick as a dog. Joanna had tried to be brave, tried to fight down the nausea that assailed her, but whenever she moved her head it overpowered her.

I should have known, Paul berated himself over and over She's never been up here before. It gets everybody, one way or another. Damned idiot! You did your thinking with your balls Honeymoon in zero gravity. Upchuck city.

He spent the entire first day alternating between Joanna miserably sick in their cubicle, and the research labs anc manufacturing facility. The experiments on fabricating thin-film video screens and special alloys in zero gravity and the high vacuum of space were going well.

The director of the manufacturing facility was a sandy-haired bespectacled Australian with degrees in metallurgy and management from the University of Sydney. He patiently took Paul through every step of the zero-gravity smelting and refining system they had built.

There were hardly any other people in the area. The facility took up more than a third of the space station's inner wheel, but Paul saw only a handful of technicians and other personnel, all in coveralls of one color or another, all of them busily ignoring them as the facility director conducted the mandatory tour for the new CEO.

"The board's very interested in the Windowall development," Paul told the director.

"That's good, I suppose."

Paul went on, "Better than good. If we can manufacture wall-sized screens on a scale big enough for the TV market, it'll make this operation very profitable."

The younger man shrugged. "Thin-film manufacturing is no great problem. Give us the raw materials and we'll make flat screens the size of Ayer's Rock, if you want"

Paul laughed. "Ten feet across should do, for now."

The director remained quite serious. "We can do that. But what I really wanted to show you…" He led Paul to an apparatus that looked something like an oversized clothes drier.

Peering through a thick, tinted observation port, Paul saw an array of fist-sized molten metal droplets glowing red-hot as they hung weightlessly inside a capacious oven heated by concentrated sunlight. Tentatively, he touched the glass with his fingertips. It was hardly warm.

"The vacuum is a fine insulator," the younger man said, with just a hint of an Aussie accent. "Just open the far side of the oven to space and we don't have to worry about heat transfer much at all."

Still, Paul thought it looked damned hot in there. The place smelled hot, liked a foundry or a steel mill. Paul realized it was all in his imagination; his brain was linking what he was seeing to memories associated with blast furnaces and smelting forges. Yet imaginary or not, he felt beads of perspiration trickling down his ribs.

The director looked youthfully cool. No perspiration stained his light tan coveralls.

"By focusing the incoming solar energy," he was explaining, "we can generate temperatures close to the black-body theoretical limit—better than five thousand kelvins."

Paul already knew that, but he let himself look impressed. "I'm surprised that you keep the droplets so small. I always pictured a big ball of red-hot metal hanging in the vacuum chamber."

The youngster smiled tolerantly and nudged his rimless glasses back up his nose. "It's a lot easier to handle a bunch of small spherules than one big glob. We can spin them up quicker, make them flatten out into sheets."

"How do you spin them?" Paul asked.

"Magnetic fields. Dope the molten mix with a little iron and we spin the spherules, flatten them out into sheets, meld them together. It's straightforward and it doesn't take all that much energy."

"So you're using centrifugal force to produce sheets of alloy."

The kid nodded and his glasses slid slightly down his nose again. "Then we turn off the heat and let the sheets outgas in vacuum. That drives out all the impurities while the alloy's hardening."

"All the impurities?" Paul asked.

The director gave him a lopsided grin. "Enough," he said. "Come on over here, I'll show you."

He pushed off the oven wall with one foot and glided past a trio of woriters bent over a piece of equipment that Paul did not recognize. Its access hatch was open and one of the workers—a slim Asian woman—was reaching into its innards while the two men with her muttered in low, exasperated tones. Paul didn't understand what they were saying, but he knew the tone of voice: something had broken down and they were trying to figure out how to fix it.

"Here's the final product," the young director said, coasting to a stop in front of a long workbench. He slid his feet into the restraining loops set into the floor and pulled a thin sheet of metal, about a foot square, from a stack that was tied to the workbench with Velcro straps.

Paul flexed the thin sheet of shining metal in his hands. It bent almost double with ease.

"Higher tensile strength than the best steel alloys made on Earth," said the director proudly, "yet it weighs less than half of the Earth-manufactured alloys."

Paul felt impressed. "Detroit's going to like this," he said. "With an alloy like this they can make cars that are half the weight of the competition, so their energy efficiency will be double anything else on the road."

"And the cars will be safer, too," the youngster said, "because this alloy's stronger than anything else available."

"Good," said Paul, smiling with genuine satisfaction. "Damned good."

"But there's a problem."

Paul's smile evaporated. "Cost?"

The kid nodded. "When you figure the cost of bringing the raw materials up here to orbit, this alloy costs ten times what groundbased alloys cost."

Paul looked around the facility. It's all here, he thought. We've got a new industrial base within our grasp. Almost. We can make billions. If…

Turning back to the earnest young director, he said, "Suppose I could provide you with the raw materials at a cost twenty times lower than they cost now?"

The youngster's eyes widened behind his rimless glasses. "Twenty times cheaper? How?"

"From the Moon."

The kid looked as if Paul had just offered to put the Tooth Fairy to work for him. "Sure. From the Moon."

"I'm serious."

"I know, Mr. Stavenger. Everybody knows you've been pushing to set up a mining operation at Moonbase. But that's years away, at best."

Paul smiled tightly. "It wasn't all that long ago that people said we were years away from zero-gee manufacturing."

"Well, yeah, maybe. But—"

Stopping him with an upraised hand, Paul said, "Orbital manufacturing doesn't make economic sense if you have to lift the raw materials from Earth. We both know that. But if we can provide the raw materials from the Moon it'll reduce your costs by a factor of twenty or more."

The kid made a half-hearted nod. "Okay, so the Moon's got low gravity and no air and you can shoot payloads off its surface with an electric catapult. That makes it real cheap."

"And the raw materials are there. Aluminum, silicon, titanium, iron…"

"But how much will it cost to set up a mining operation on the Moon?" the youngster asked. "How long will it take? How much will that electric catapult cost and how soon can I you have it in operation?"

"As soon as I goddamned can," Paul said. Meaning, As soon fas I can get the board of directors to put up the money I need to get Moonbase up and running.

The younger man nodded, unimpressed.

"In the meantime," Paul said, "I want you to get the Windowall operation through development and into production. We can make enough money off that to keep your alloy processing going."

Joanna was still in the sleeping bag when he returned to their quarters. She was awake, though, and looking almost healthy.

"It's all right if I keep still," she told Paul. "But as soon as I move my head, even a little bit, everything starts spinning."

"I guess this was a lousy idea," he said, hovering a few inches from her. For a moment he felt as if he were floating above her as she lay cocooned in the mesh sleeping bag, and a shudder of erotic heat flashed through him. He forced his feet into the restraining loops on the deck and his perspective shifted immediately; he was standing in front of her and she was pale and despondent.

"No, it was a wonderful idea. I'm just not cut out to be an astronaut."

Paul disagreed. "It's only a matter of adjustment. If we stayed up here for a week you'd be fine."

"I don't think so."

"Your body's already adjusting to zero gee. You've grown at least an inch taller."

"Have I?"

"Look at the cuffs of your pants," he said. Then quickly, "No, don't bend your head down. But your sleeves are shorter now, too. See?"

"I really have grown taller," Joanna said.

"Everybody does in zero gee. The spine unbends and you gain an inch or two. Your waist gets slimmer, too."

"But my head feels so stuffed."

"Mine too. The sinuses can't drain the way they do on Earth. Zero gravity means no post-nasal drip."

"I wish there was something I could take to make me feel better," she said.

"The transdermal patches haven't worked?"

"I don't think so," Joanna said, fingering the flesh-colored circular patch behind her ear. "Or maybe they are working and I'd feel even worse without them."

He sighed. "I could call for a Clippership to take us back tonight."

"No," Joanna said firmly. "You're not going to spend a few million dollars just to pamper me."

He grinned at her. "Who else should I pamper?"

Before she could answer the phone buzzed. Paul reached across the tiny cubicle to the computer keyboard built into the bulkhead and tapped a key.

Bradley Arnold'sflorid face appeared on the display screen.

"Ah, I got the two of you together," he said, smiling widely. "Good.',

"What is it, Brad?" Joanna asked. Paul was surprised at the sudden strength in her voice.

"I've had a long talk with Greg. Did you know he's been -ah, seeing—Melissa Hart?"

"Is that why you called?" Paul asked, annoyed.

"No, no, no. Not at all. But Greg and I had a long talk, almost a father-son talk, .you might say." The man is a monument to poor taste, Paul thought.

"How is he?" Joanna asked.

Arnold blinked his frog's eyes twice. "He seems to be bearing up well. Physically, he's fine."

Sure; he's getting physical therapy from Melissa, Paul growled to himself.

"He wants to have a meeting with you, Paul," Arnold went on. "To discuss the videodisk."

"Discuss it? What do you mean?" Paul asked.

"Greg hasn't decided whether or not to take the disk to the police. He wants to talk it over with you before he makes that decision."

Paul felt alarmed. There's more going on here than Brad's telling us. But Joanna smiled tightly and answered, "We'll be glad to sit down and talk it over with him. Just as soon as we can. We can leave the station right away, can't we Paul?"

Paul nodded, thinking that the few million she wouldn't spend to alleviate her own physical distress wasn't even a consideration in her mind when it came to trying to patch it up with her son.

MARE NUBIUM

Dead reckoning. Paul tried not to think of the irony in the term.

With no navigational aids to help him, Paul looked across the glassy crater that he had fallen into and lined himself up with his own boot prints, shining bright against the dark lunar regolith. Turning, he looked for a recognizable feature on the sharp horizon.

Okay, he said to himself. You head for that big squarish boulder. March.

He started off again, checking his watch to see how much progress he had made. How the hell can I tell how far I've come? he fumed at himself. Pissing suit doesn't come with an odometer. Three hours since I started. Legs still feel pretty good. No stiffness.

But his left heel hurt worse each time he set the foot down. Wonder if that's the same heel that did in Achilles?

He struggled on, doggedly aiming for the boulder, big as a fair-sized house. When I get there I'll take a break, he promised himself. Sit down in the shade and rest a spell. Just a few minutes. Don't have enough oxygen to sit around for long. Don't want the legs to stiffen up, either. Got to keep moving. But you've earned a little break. Just a little one. Just a couple minutes.

The horizon cut across his view like the edge of a cliff, much closer than on Earth, much sharper in the airless clarity of the Moon. Wonder what Columbus's crew would've thought about the horizon here. They were scared they were gonna fall over the edge when they were sailing across the Atlantic. How'd they like to walk to the edge of this horizon?

Paul turned his head slightly inside his helmet and put his lips to the water nipple. Nothing. Fear flared through him. No, wait. A few drops. He sucked harder. Damn! It was dry.

The suit had a full water tank when I put it on, he told himself. He tried to remember. He had checked out the suit in a panicky hurry, but all the indicators were in the green. He Iooked at the indicators now. Still green.

But no water coming through the nipple. Maybe the tube got bent when I fell down. Banged my head pretty good, might've whacked the pipe. It's only a small plastic tube. Maybe it's just kinked a little. Just needs to be straightened out. But how the hell can I fix it from inside the suit?

Think! he commanded himself. Don't make a move until you think it out. Remember what that old cosmonaut Leonov said: In space, think five times before you move a finger. In the meantime, keep moving.

Think. You can pull your arm out of the suit sleeve, you know that. Maybe worm your hand up past the collar ring and try to straighten out the tube. Maybe that'd work.

He closed his eyes to get a better mental picture of the inner workings of the surface suit. Hell, guys have smuggled women into these suits. Take a joyride up on the surface and watch the Earthlight. He remembered the first time he'd seen the night side of Earth, the glowing lights of cities and highways outlining North America. The fantastic shimmering of the aurora's pale blues, reds and greens. Very romantic.

Keep your mind on your problem, butthead! he raged at himself. The suit's loose enough to jerk off in, too, but that ain't gonna help anything.

Wait till you get to the rock. Then lean against it, take some of the weight off your legs, and see if you can worm your hand out of the sleeve and up inside the helmet here. That's what you've got to do.

It seemed as if he'd never get to the boulder. It loomed bigger and bigger, but it still seemed miles away. Until, all of a sudden, he was right in front of it.

Paul reached out and touched its stony side, smoothed by eons of meteoric sandpapering. "Hello, rock' he said aloud, surprised at how dry and scratchy his throat fek.

He stepped across to the shadowed side of the boulder, then leaned back carefully. Now see if you can wriggle your arm out of the sleeve. Careful! Easy does it.

It felt as if he was wrenching his shoulder out of its socket, but at last Paul got his arm entirely out of the suit's sleeve and started to work his hand up past the metal ring of the helmet collar.

He was sweating so hard his eyes stung. If you get your hand up here inside the helmet, he thought, first thing you do is wipe your eyes.

Then he realized that all this perspiration was merely draining his body of water. If I don't get this damned drinking tube fixed I won't make it much farther.

Slowly, desperately, he tried to worm his fingers up into the helmet.

SAVANNAH

Joanna recovered from her space sickness as soon as the Clippership lit its engines for the return flight from the orbiting space station to Savannah. Once they got home, she phoned Bradley Arnold and insisted that they meet with Greg at her house instead of in the corporate offices.

"It will be much more relaxed," she said to Arnold's image in the phone screen. "After all, it's been his home, too."

Arnold agreed. "I'll have him there first thing tomorrow," he promised.

They were in Joanna's upstairs sitting room, next to the master bedroom suite. Joanna was reclined on the chaise longue. She reached out wearily to turn off the phone console on the table beside her.

Joanna turned to Paul as the screen went blank. "We'll resolve everything tomorrow." She smiled happily.

Sitting alone on the love seat beneath her portrait, Paul muttered, "I hope so."

They met in the spacious parlor of the house. It had been decorated in what Paul had always thought of as mock Gone With the Wind style: frills and doodads everywhere; long sweeping curtains of heavy silk on the tall windows; overstuffed furniture; patterned wallpaper. The house was only a few years old. Gregory had built it in a fit of conspicuous consumption. The worse the corporate profit-and-loss picture became, the more lavishly he spent, it had seemed to Paul.

So now he sat tensely on the brocade-covered sofa while morning sunlight poured through the windows and Joanna fiddled nervously with the bric-a-brac on the fireplace mantle.

It was a gas-fed fireplace, and the architect's drawing of the house that hung above the mantfe concealed the room's big television screen, one of the first thin-film Windowall screens built in orbit.

Paul heard a car pull up on the driveway outside. Joanna stiffened, then hurried to a window.

"They're here," she said, looking pleased and apprehensive at the same time. Then her face clouded. "Greg's brought Melissa Hart with him."

Paul's insides wound even tighter. This isn't going to be a reconciliation, he knew. It's war.

Greg still wore a black suit and tie. Paul thought his underwear might also be in mourning. Dark circles rimmed his reddened eyes. He looked somber, almost gaunt. Melissa, wearing a knee-length violet skirt and simple white blouse, seemed as tense as Paul felt. Bradley Arnold, in a rumpled gray business suit, was the only one smiling.

Greg had an attache case with him. The videodisk must be in there, Paul thought.

"I'm glad that we could all get together like this," Arnold said as they sat down on the two sofas that faced each other across the carved cherrywood coffeetable. Greg and the board chairman sat on one sofa, Joanna and Paul on the other. Greg clutched the attache case on his knees. Melissa took the overstuffed armchair by the end of the coffeetable, facing the cold, empty fireplace.

The butler came in, carrying a tray of juices, coffee, tea, and a plate of toast. He deposited the laden tray on the coffeetable, then stood off to one side.

"Have you all had your breakfasts?" Joanna asked mechanically. "Would you like anything from the kitchen?"

They all said no, and Joanna dismissed the butler.

"Now then," she said as the butler left the room, "I believe you've brought the videodisk, Greg?"

"It's right here," he said, his voice low.

"Before we do or say anything else, then, I think we should all see it."

Arnold bobbed his head in agreement. Paul glanced at Melissa. Why did Greg bring her here, except to show me that he's got her now?

Greg opened the attache case and took out a single, unmarked videodisk, about the size of a credit card. Paul thought it ridiculous to lug around the tooled leather case just to carry one slim disk; like using a heavy-lift booster to put a sugar cube in orbit.

Joanna started to say, "I'll get the butler—"

But Greg got to his feet with a wintry smile. "I know how to use the TV, mother," he said. "This has been my home, too, you know."

Sarcastic bastard, Paul said to himself.

Greg flicked down the hidden access panel in the mantle-piece and powered up the TV. The architect's drawing faded away and the wide display panel turned soft gray. Then Greg inserted the videodisk and returned to his seat beside Arnold.

Paul stared at the screen. It streaked random colors for a few moments, then Gregory Masterson's face filled the screen, bloated and distorted because it was almost pressed against the camera lens.

Gregory was mumbling something. Then he leaned back and they could see he was sitting at his desk, his face dark and grim. Paul was startled to realize how much alike father and son looked.

Joanna's hand reached into Paul's and gripped tight.

"Fuckin' sonsabitches," Gregory muttered. "How the fuck'm I s'posed to know if this piece of crap is in focus? Autofocus my hairy ass . . ." His voice trailed off into incoherent mumbles.

Paul saw the crystal decanter of whiskey at Gregory's elbow. He was waving a heavy old-fashioned glass as he grumbled, whiskey sloshing over its rim onto the desk. The Smith & Wesson revolver was resting in front of him, big and menacing, polished steel, long ribbed barrel and fine-grained walnut grip.

"It's killing me," Gregory said, looking straight into the camera. "What they've done to me… what they're doin' now… might's well be dead. Serve 'em right, the goddam' pricks."

Paul felt his insides turning to ice. Joanna was staring fixedly at the big screen, where her late husband loomed over her. She seemed transfixed, unmoving as a statue, not even breathing, like a deer that freezes when it's caught in an automobile's headlights.

With his free hand Gregory picked up the heavy revolver. "See this? Oughtta blow their fuckin' heads off with this. Blam! Right between the eyes. Or maybe shoot off their goddam' balls, see how they like it."

Their balls? Paul wondered. What's he talking about?

"Get 'em before they get me," Gregory muttered darkly. "Only way to do it…' He lapsed into incomprehensible mumbles again.

Then he put the old-fashioned glass down with exaggerated care and transferred the gun to his right hand. He studied it for long moments, breathing heavily, mouth hanging open. Paul thought he might have been having trouble focusing his eyes.

"Get 'em before they get me," he repeated thickly. "This gun's my protection, my insurance policy. Make sure they can't hurt me anymore. Protect myself…"

Suddenly Gregory's eyes blazed with fury and he swung the gun madly. The picture abruptly went dead.

For several seconds no one said a word. They all stared at the blank screen.

At last Arnold spoke up. "That's it"

Paul pulled his eyes away from the screen and saw that Greg was staring at him accusingly.

"It's pretty much of a jumble," Joanna said, disengaging her hand from Paul's. "Is that the original disk or the enhanced version?"

"That's the enhancement," Arnold replied.

"The original's in a bank vault," Greg said tightly, "with orders to turn it over to the police if anything should happen to me."

Joanna gave her son a pale smile. "Isn't that just a trifle melodramatic?"

Paul could see that Greg's hands were trembling slightly.

"No, it's not melodramatic, mother," he answered. "It seems very likely that someone murdered my father. Whoever did it-' he shifted his gaze toward Paul—'might try to kill me to keep this disk out of the hands of the authorities."

"That's stupid," Paul snapped.

"I don't think so."

"In the first place," Paul said, "the disk doesn't show anything—except that Gregory was blind drunk and had a loaded pistol in his hand."

"And felt his life was in danger," Arnold added.

"He said someone was killing him," Greg said, still staring at Paul. "He felt betrayed."

Paul started to retort that Gregory was an expert on betrayal, but decided it would only make the situation hotter, so he bit it back.

"Are you saying," Joanna asked her son, her voice tense, strained, "that Gregory committed suicide because he felt betrayed?"

Greg turned molten eyes to her. "I'm saying that my father was frantic. That his feelings of betrayal drove him to drink—"

"Then he must've started feeling betrayed twenty years ago," Paul snapped.

"And after he passed out from drinking," Greg went on, glowering, "someone slipped into his office, put that gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger."

"Bullshit," Paul growled.

Joanna asked, "Who are you accusing, Greg?"

"We all know who stood to gain the most from my father's death."

"Paul couldn't have done it," Joanna said, so calmly that Paul wondered how she could control herself so well.

"Why not?"

"Because he was here, with me, that afternoon," she said, her voice low but firm. "We spent the afternoon in bed together. That's where I was when the phone call came through."

Greg's face went white with rage.

"So if you think that Paul murdered your father," Joanna continued, "then you're going to have to blame the two of us. I can't prove that we were here that afternoon. I obviously didn't want the servants to see us together."

"I don't believe you." Greg said. "You're trying to protect him."

Almost triumphantly, Joanna said, "If Paul murdered your father, then I helped him. Go to the police with that!"

"You were sleeping with him!" Greg accused. "You betrayed my father."

"Your father betrayed me a hundred times and more," Joanna said, her voice edging higher. "Paul was the only consolation I had."

"Paul and who else?" Greg snarled. "How many other men have you—"

Paul jumped to his feet and leaned across the coffeetable to haul Greg up by his lapels. "That's enough! You'd better shut your mouth."

Greg pulled free, glaring pure hatred. Bradley Arnold, never moving from his place on the sofa, smiled and raised his hands soothingly.

"Gentlemen!" Arnold said. "Please! Let's not allow our emotions to get the better of our judgment."

For a long moment Paul and Greg stood confronting each other, the coffeetable between them: Greg tall and slim, Paul a solid welterweight.

"Sit down, both of you," Joanna commanded.

"Please," Arnold said. "Let's try to keep this on a civilized plane."

Paul took his place beside Joanna again. Greg sat down next to Arnold. Paul saw that Melissa looked alarmed, frightened.

"If we had wanted to go to the police," Arnold said, "we would have done that days ago."

We? Paul's ears perked up. Arnold said we.

"The reason I set up this meeting," the board chairman went on, "was to try to come to some sort of understanding about all this. Keep it in the family, so to speak."

"Then why is she here?" Joanna asked, gesturing toward Melissa.

"She's with me," Greg said. "If it hadn't been for Melissa these past few weeks I think I would've gone off the deep end."

You're already in over your head, kid, Paul said to himself.

"Now, now," said Arnold. "Let's try to be reasonable and come up with a solution that makes some sense."

"I don't see where the problem is," Paul said. "Gregory committed suicide. That's all there is to it."

"He was murdered," Greg insisted sullenly.

"Then show your pissin' disk to the cops and see what they make of it."

"No!" Arnold boomed. His deep voice seemed to make the heavy window drapes flutter. "We should settle this among ourselves."

"Settle it how?" Joanna asked.

"Greg will refrain from showing this disk to the board of directors—"

"Refrain?" Paul snapped. "He's got no business showing that disk to anybody."

Arnold shook his head disappointedly. "Paul, I'm sure you understand that even though the disk may not constitute the kind of evidence the police could use, it would certainly look very bad for you in the eyes of the board members."

"Especially," Melissa pointed out softly, "with Joanna's alibi for you."

Paul sank back on the sofa cushions. "You sonsofbitches are going to use this disk to drive a wedge between me and the board?"

"You can resign," Greg said. "Just quit and leave the company and I won't have to show the disk to anybody."

"Resign?"

"You have a golden parachute," Arnold pointed out. "You won't be hurting, financially."

"Quit the company? Is that all you want?"

"No," said Greg. "There's one additional thing you'll have to do."

"What's that?"

"Divorce my mother."

Paul got to his feet again, slbwly this time. "This meeting's over," he said through gritted teeth. "There's the door, Greg. Get out."

Still sitting, Greg looked up at him sullenly. "You can't throw me out. This is my house."

"Not any more."

Greg's eyes widened and he looked past Paul to his mother. "I live here, too!"

"Get out," Paul repeated, pronouncing each word distinctly. "You can send somebody over to clear out your things later. Now get out of here before I throw you through a window."

Greg shot to his feet. "Mom, are you going to let him do this to me?"

"I think it would be best," Joanna said. "We obviously can't live under the same roof anymore. Not now."

"You're letting him throw me out of my own home?" Greg's voice climbed an octave higher.

Arnold lumbered to his feet. "Come on, Greg, you can stay at my house until you find a place of your own."

The old man pulled at Greg's jacket sleeve. Looking bewildered, hurt and angry at the same time, Greg let himself be led away toward the door.

Melissa stood up. "For what it's worth," she said softly, "I told him this would happen." Then she left, too.

LEV BRUDNOY

He was a good-will ambassador or a con man, a free spirit or a pariah, depending on your point of view. Levrentü Alexandrovich Brudnoy was a trained fluid dynamicist who somehow managed to wangle a job as a life-support engineer at the ill-starred Russian facility called Lunagrad, and then go on to become its most famous—or infamous—emissary. The Russians had placed their base at the giant crater Aristarchus, up in the area where Mare Imbrium and Oceanus Procellarum merge, nearly a thousand miles northwest of Moonbase.

Like Moonbase, Lunagrad was originally heavily subsidized by the Russian government. After years of supporting the primitive base as basically an outpost for scientific research and further exploration of the Moon, Moscow decided (long before Washington did) to'spin off the base to private enterprise.

While Masterson Aerospace Corporation operated the American Moonbase under government contract, NPO Lunagrad, the corporation hastily formed to run the Russian base, sought investors all over the world. Few were willing to risk their money on a lunar base.

Lev Brudnoy happened to be in Moscow, applying for his second tour of duty at Lunagrad, when the desperate corporate personnel director caught sight of him. Handsome, red-haired, charming, young enough to appear dashing, old enough to appear knowledgeable, Brudnoy would make the ideal 'image' of the new Russian space pioneer. After all, the man wanted to return to Lunagrad, no?

Why did he want to return to the Moon? Some said to realized that this new frontier was humankind's great new challenge and opportunity. Others said it was to make tht extra salary so he could pay his gambling debts. At leas three different women were certain that handsome Lev was running off to the Moon to escape from them (although none of them knew of the other two).

No matter what his reasons, the corporate personnel chief knew a media star when she saw one. She interviewed lca extensively, often in bed, and then unleashed him as the new Russian icon: the space traveller, the lunar explorer, the man of the future.

In his way, Lev helped to raise billions for Lunagrad. He became an international television celebrity. When he went to Lunagrad he brought virtual reality equipment with him so he could 'escort' Earthbound visitors through the facility and show them the stark grandeur of the Moon's harshly beautiful environment.

The Lunagrad that he showed was mostly a television studio's carefully prepared set, a heavily cosmeticized version of the grubby reality of the cramped, stuffy, overheated and underfinanced underground shelters that composed the true Lunagrad.

Money flowed in for Lunagrad. Not enough to really expand the base, but enough to keep it staggering along. Scientists came to the Moon and departed. Geologists and metallurgists explored the wide expanses around Lunagrad. In Moscow the board of directors, chaired now by the woman who had been personnel director, published glowing full-color brochures of the glorious future of Lunagrad.

Like many tragedies, Brudnoy's success came crashing down when he went one single step too far. He shuttled back and forth to Lunagrad so often that he became known world-wide as 'The Moon Man." Inevitably, on a certain global television broadcast, he was asked the fateful question: When will tourists be allowed to visit Lunagrad?

"Why not now?" was his immediate, unthinking reply.

Within hours the offices of NPO Lunagrad were deluged with requests for visits to the base on the Moon. For the first time in ages, the Russians had scored a public relations triumph over the West. Tourists to the Moon! It was fantastic. But it promised to be profitable. Even at a cost of millions, there were wealthy individuals who—bored with the Great Wall of China and Antarctica and the space stations in low Earth orbit—simply had to see the Moon firsthand.

Brudnoy led the first contingent himself. Their complaints started even before the booster rocket took off from Baikanour. There were no hotels! They were expected to sleep in barracks, like… like… well, like cosmonauts or scientists. Lunagrad was small, crowded, smelled bad. The food was awful. There weren't enough spacesuits for everyone to go out for a walk on the Moon's surface at the same time; they had to take turns. And the suits stank!

On and on, a litany of complaints that went all the way back to Mother Russia and over the television networks to the rest of the world.

Lunar tourism was set back twenty years. Lunagrad was exposed as a dirty, dangerous, crowded and unwholesome frontier outpost. Lev Brudnoy was accused of fronting for a fraud. Lawsuits were actually started by several of the American tourists, although the Russian government quietly quashed them—with Washington's even quieter acquiescence.

Lev Brudnoy became a pariah. He was no longer welcome in the Moscow offices of NPO Lunagrad, nor in the beds of women who had adored him only weeks earlier.

Then came the most tragic blow of all. Their finances ruined, NPO Lunagrad declared bankruptcy. Lunagrad would shut down. Permanently.

Lev was at Lunagrad when the terrible news came. Most of the skeleton crew of scientists and cosmonauts did not blame him, exactly, but they did not console him either.

Deep in his heart, Lev knew he had done nothing truly wrong. And he wanted to continue his life as a 'lunik." So he commandeered one of the last rocket vehicles left at Lunagrad, reprogrammed its guidance computer with his own hands, and flew it in one long ballistic arc to Moonbase, where he asked for asylum.

The people at Moonbase had seen Lev on television, of course. They immediately took a liking to the big, lovable redheaded Russian. Besides, they had no way to get him back to Lunagrad; Lev's rocket transport could be refueled of course, but somehow its guidance computer had broken down as soon as the craft had landed at Moonbase.

After somewhat frenzied discussions with Savannah, Moscov and Washington, it was decided that Lev could become a Masterson Corporation employee without losing his Russian citizenship. But it was all kept very quiet. Lev's days as a television idol were over. He became a regular visitor to Moonbase, working there six months at a time, then spending a month Earthside.

He even returned to Moscow, but only briefly. Too many women were waiting for him there.

MARE NUBIUM

A part of his mind wanted to giggle. I must be going crazy, Paul thought. Yet it was slightly ludicrous, leaning against the massive boulder, alone on the desolate lunar plain, miles from shelter, running out of oxygen while the fingers of his right hand wiggled pitifully around the metal collar of his surface suit, trying to reach the water tube.

Suppose I die like this. When they finally find me they'll think I strangled myself.

He wanted to laugh but his throat was too dry for it. Sweat stung his eyes, though. I'm not dehydrated. Not yet.

There! His thumb and forefinger grasped the slim plastic tube. It was just below his chin, out of his field of vision. Blinking the sweat away, Paul slowly, carefully slid his fingers along the tube. He could not feel a kink in it. The tube went into the metal collar ring, where it connected with the piping that ran inside the suit, across the left shoulder to the water tank in the life-support backpack.

Maybe when I fell I dislodged the connection in the collar, he guessed. Don't feel any wetness. The tube's not ruptured. He spent several precious minutes searching for kinks in the slim tube, finding none.

Must be the connection inside the collar ring, he told himself. No way to get to it.

He pushed himself up to a standing position and stared out at the sharp horizon, blazing in unfiltered sunlight. Must be at least another ten miles to go. Without water I won't make it. He held up his forearm display panel. In the shade of the boulder the temperature was a hundred eighty below zero. But just a foot away, in the sunlight, it was over two hundred above, to knew. And still rising.

His mouth was parched. Can't go ten more miles it the sunshine without drinking water. You'll dehydrate and collapse.

Okay, he said to himself. If it is to be, it's up to me. You know what you've got to do. Make it quick and do it right You won't get two chances.

If the water tube was no longer properly connected insidi the collar ring, the only way to fix the problem was to re-seal the collar. Inside a shelter, or even in an airlock, Paul would have unlocked the collar seal, taken off his helmet, checked the connection to make certain it wasn't blocked or broken then put the helmet back on and sealed it tight again.

Out here in the vacuum of the lunar surface he didn't have that luxury. But I can do most of it, he told himself. If I'm quick enough.

Painfully he wormed his arm back into its sleeve and wriggled his fingers back into the glove. Then, still, breathing hard, swiftly going through the emergency procedure in his mind. It works in the procedures he told himself. Now let's see if it works for real.

He took one long, last breath, then exhaled slowly. Holding: his breath, he clicked open the seal of the collar ring and slid the helmet half a turn, as if he were going to take it off. A slight hiss of air made every nerve in his body tighten. But he held the helmet for a moment that seemed years long, then twisted it back to the closed position and snapped the seal shut again.

The hissing stopped and Paul took a big, grateful gulp of oxygen.

Then he turned his head to the left and found the nipple of the water tube with his lips. Carefully he sipped.

Water. Just a dribble, and it was warm and flat. But it tasted better than champagne to him.

He took another sip. Still had to suck hard, but at least some water was flowing now. The connection had been dislodged when he fell and now it was back in place. Okay.

"Okay," he said aloud, his throat not so parched now. "Let's get on with it."

He started off again, still using the trail of his own boot prints to point him in the right direction. The glare of the sun made him want to squint, even behind the heavily tinted visor.

Ten more miles," he said. "Okay, maybe twelve. Could be less, though. Hard to tell."

He trudged on, boots kicking up soft clouds of dust that fell languidly in the gentle gravity of the Moon. His mind turned back to Greg. Nanomachines. The sonofabitch turned them into a murder weapon. Kid's brilliant. Crazy but brilliant. Will he turn on Joanna? Will he try to kill his own mother? How crazy is he? Or is it all a very clever scheme to get what he's always wanted—total control of the corporation. Total control of his mother. Total control of Melissa, too.

Melissa. Paul thought about her as pushed himself across the barren rocky plain. Sweet silky Melissa. I knew she'd be my downfall. I knew it, but I let it happen anyway.

SAN FRANCISCO

Paul's tour of the corporation's divisions took him to Houston Denver, Los Angeles and finally to the struggling nano technology division in San Jose, squarely in the dilapidated heart of what had once been called Silicon Valley.

Joanna stayed in Savannah. They had not made love since the ill-starred trip to the space station. The night after Greg's confrontation over the videodisk, Joanna had flinched when Paul had touched her in bed.

"Not now," she said. "I just can't."

Trying not to feel angry, Paul leaned against the pillows and grumbled, "You're acting as if I did kill Gregory."

Joanna turned to face him. "Maybe we did, Paul. In a way."

Paul started to shake his head.

"He found out about us," Joanna said. "That might have driven him to kill himself. We're responsible."

The hell we are."

"Why else would he do it?" she asked, her voice filled with anxiety. Yet her eyes were dry and clear. "Unless Greg's right and somebody actually did murder him?"

"He blew his own brains out," Paul insisted.

"But why?"

Paul thought a moment. "Good question. I'll ask McPherson to look into it."

"What do you mean?"

"There must have been some reason for Gregory's suicide. And I don't mean us. Let McPherson hire some investigators. There's a lot about Gregory's life that we don't know about."

Joanna's face hardened. "There's a lot about his life that I don't want to know about. Not the details."

"Okay. But I want to know the details. I want to know if there's anything there that could be a reason for his killing himself."

"Such as?"

"How the hell would I know? Let McPherson look into it."

Joanna agreed—hesitantly, Paul thought. But they didn't make love that night, nor any night afterward until Paul left on his swing of visits to the corporation's facilities across the country.

Paul was surprised to see Bradley Arnold at the Houston division. The chairman of the board was sitting in the division manager's office when Paul arrived. He looked uneasy, his bulging frog's eyes darting back and forth between Paul and the division chief, who was coming around his desk, his hand extended to Paul.

"I didn't know you were coming here, Brad," Paul said as he shook hands with the youthful division manager. "I could have flown you out in my plane."

"I'm on my way to a meeting in Tokyo," Arnold said, fiddling with his ill-fitting toupee nervously.

"Tokyo? By way of Houston?" Paul forced himself to chuckle as he sat beside the chairman in front of the manager's desk. Arnold refused to fly in the Clipperships. He would take all day to get from Savannah to Tokyo on his private supersonic jet rather than make the jump in forty minutes aboard a Clippership.

"I wanted to stop off here and talk with you," Arnold replied. Turning to the manager, he added, "In private."

The manager took the hint and excused himself. Once he shut the office door behind him, Paul asked, "What's this all about, Brad?"

Radiating earnestness out of his florid face, Arnold said, "I know it looked as if I were on Greg's side, back there at the house—"

"It sure did," said Paul.

"But I'm on your side, Paul. I want you to understand tha and believe it."

Yeah, Paul said to himself. And Brutus loved Caesar so much he stabbed him.

"I wanted that meeting to be a reconciliation between you two. I had no idea Greg was going to make the demand he did."

"You didn't seem terribly surprised," Paul said.

"Oh, but I was!"

"If I remember correctly, you told me that you were going to play Greg's videodisk for the rest of the board members."

"I had no choice!" Arnold pleaded. "Greg's going to do it anyway, so I went along with him. How can I act as a mediate between the two of you if he doesn't trust me?"

Paul looked into Arnold's hyperthyroid eyes and saw nothing but ambition. He's playing both sides of the street or trying to. If Greg can shove me out of the corporation, Brad runs the show. Greg'll be CEO but Brad will be pulling the kid's strings. If I hang in and beat Greg, the bastard wants me to believe that he's been on my side all along.

"All right," Paul said calmly. "What are you going to do about the disk?"

Arnold spread his chubby hands in a gesture of helplessness. "What can I do? Greg's determined to show it to each and every member of the board. All I can do is try to downplay it, tell them that Gregory had turned into a paranoid alcoholic and committed suicide."

Pouncing on that, Paul demanded, "You'll say that to the board?"

Arnold nodded.

"In front of Greg?"

"Yes."

Thinking swiftly, Paul said, "All right, then. Can you call an emergency meeting of the board as soon as I get back from this trip? Let's get this out in the open and finish it, once and for all."

Bobbing his head up and down, Arnold said, "The quarterly meeting is due—"

"I don't want to wait for the quarterly meeting," Paul snapped. "Call a special meeting and play the videodisk for them all at the same time, before Greg can get to them."

"I think he's trying to meet each board member individually," Arnold said, "and show the disk to each of them in private."

"All the more reason for speed, then. Set up an emergency meeting right now." Paul pointed to the phone console on the manager's desk.

"Yes, good thinking." The board chairman pushed himself out of his chair and went to the phone.

Nodding, satisfied, Paul got up and headed for the door. "Thanks, Brad," he called over his shoulder. "Have a good meeting in Tokyo."

Arnold waved to Paul, the phone receiver in his other hand. But as soon as Paul left him alone in the office, he phoned Gregory Masterson III in Savannah.

Melissa Hart was also at the Houston plant. She told Paul she had come to help negotiate new work rules for the factory that was being converted from making commercial airliners to building Clipperships.

She was at the Los Angeles facility, too. And then, when he got to San Francisco, Paul saw her walk into the lounge at the Stanford Court.

No one who could afford to avoid it stayed overnight in San Jose: despite all the efforts at rebuilding the area after the economic collapse that had swept the American computer industry at the turn of the century, the slums were still dangerous and dirty. The corporation's travel office booked Paul into the Stanford Court Hotel in the heart of San Francisco.

The nanotechnology division was Greg's special baby; his father had let Greg pump money into a nascent technology even though any hope of profitability was years, maybe decades, away. The board of directors had tried more than once to admit defeat and close the division down. Then they wanted to move it away from San Jose, to a'safer' location in Nevada.

Paul had led the fight to keep the nanotech division in San Jose; he had convinced the board of directors that the corporation had a responsibility to keep as many jobs in the region as possible. His strong moral stand—and a stiff helping of government subsidies -swayed the board to do the right thing. And take every public relations advantage of it that they could.

It was late afternoon. Paul had just arrived in San Francisco; tomorrow morning a limousine would take him to the waterfront, where a helicopter was set to fly him to San Jose for the day's meetings and inspections of the labs and prototype factory. Then, back to the airport and home to Savannah. And Joanna. And Greg.

He stopped off in the lounge for a soothing shot of mellow golden tequila. Cool and dimly lit, with soft music purring in the background, the lounge was less than half full; mostly businessmen and women finishing their day with a drink and some chat.

Then Melissa walked in, tall and beautiful. Men and women both, they all looked her over, from her slick pageboy hairdo to her slitted ankle-length skirt that opened to reveal her long shapely legs as she walked to the bar.

She went straight to the chair beside Paul.

"You following me?" he asked as she swivelled the chair and sat on it.

"I was going to ask you the same question," she said, smiling slightly.

"I don't know of any labor negotiations set for the San Jose division," he said.

"My office has a few complaints of discrimination," Melissa replied. "Thought I'd try to defuse them before they get serious."

The bartender came by. She ordered a glass of chardonnay. Paul got a refill on his Tres Generacidns.

"Discrimination?" Paul asked. "Against who?"

Melissa took a sip of wine, then answered, "The usual: Asians claiming the Hispanics are picking on them; Hispanics claiming the Asians won't promote them. Small stuff, but it could get nasty if we don't take care of it right away."

A faint hint of her perfume reached him: subtle, suggestive, it reminded him of the times they had shared.

"So you're not following me, after all."

Melissa shook her head.

"Greg didn't ask you to keep tabs on me?"

Her eyes widened with surprise. "Greg and I are finished. Didn't you know that?"

"Finished?"

"He dumped me. Just like you did."

"I didn't—"

"And for the same reason," Melissa said bitterly. "Joanna." —

"What?"

"He's jealous of you, Paul. And not just over the CEO job. He doesn't want you with his mother."

Paul downed half his tequila in one gulp. Feeling it burning tinside him, he muttered, "The kid's crazy." ..'He needs help, I agree," Melissa said. "He might do something violent."

"Violent?"

"It was scary," she said. "I thought he was going to turn ton me."

"Why didn't you leave him?"

She stared down into her wine. "I… To tell you the truth, Paul, I was afraid to. I was almost glad when he told me he wanted to end it."

Jesus, Paul thought Her job is to handle cases of discrimination and sexual harassment, and she can't even take care of herself.

"He had to get real teed off about it," she went on, almost in a whisper. "He couldn't just tell me he wanted to end it He had to get raving and yelling like some monster. I thought he was going to belt me."

"Greg?" Paul couldn't believe what she was saying.

But Melissa nodded solemnly. "Underneath all that self control he's a wild man. He's like a bomb, all wound up tight and ready to explode."

"Maybe we ought to get the company shrink to look him over,"

"You'd have to tie him hand and foot first."

Paul finished his tequila and motioned to the bartender foi another. Inevitably he invited Melissa to have dinner with him, and they made their way—Paul just a bit unsteadily—down the stairs to the venerable Fourneau's Ovens.

"Like old times," Melissa said, smiling at him.

"'Yeah," Paul agreed. Old times. Life was a lot simpler then. No ties, no responsibilities.

As they sat across the table from each other Paul thought, It was a mistake to get married. Joanna doesn't love me. She just wants me to run the company for her until Greg's old enough to take over. Marrying me kept it in the family, put me under her control. She doesn't love me at all. We had better sex when we were sneaking around behind Gregory's back.

Do I love her? The question startled him. He stared at Melissa, coolly beautiful, just an arm's length away. The street outside was darkening into evening, people were walking by, the sky was fading from pink to violet. He remembered their times in bed together. No holds barred; no questions asked. Just pure physical pleasure.

Do I love Joanna? he asked himself again. If you have to ask, the answer must be no. What the hell is love, anyway? Then why did you marry her? He knew the answer, or at least he thought he did. To take control of the corporation. To keep them from scrapping Moonbase.

But you must have loved her, he insisted to himself. You were wild about her. Yeah, before we got married. Before all this corporate crap got in the way. Before this mess with Greg came up.

I did love her. Maybe I still do. But Greg's between us now.

And then Paul realized the truth. I don't know if she cares more about him than me. If we get right down to the crunch, would she take me over her son?

No, he realized. Never. She picked me as a stand-in to hold things together until Greg's ready to take over. She didn't realize that he'd challenge me right off the bat. And now that he has challenged me, will she back me or him?

Paul thought he knew the answer.

And here's Melissa sitting close enough to touch, smiling and sad at the same time, talking about old times and looking at me like she needs me again. And I need her. I really do. I need somebody. I'm all alone in this.

"You're awful far away," Melissa said softly.

Paul drank the last of his wine. "Got a lot on my mind, Mel."

She closed her eyes briefly. Then, "You know what I wish?"

"What?"

"I wish we had a time machine.'He wanted to laugh.

"A time machine."

"Yes. So we could back one year."

One year ago he and Melissa were in the midst of their affair.

"You know," she said softly. "Before all this other shit happened. When it was just you and me."

"Yeah," he agreed. "That'd be nice."

Neither of them said another word about it, but once they finished dinner Paul brought Melissa to his suite and slowly, deliciously took off her clothes while she nuzzled him and crooned softly and smiled as he lifted her naked body in his arms and brought her to his bed.

- When Paul woke the next morning to the buzzing of the alarm clock she was gone. Not a trace of her left, except the slight musky smell of her on the pillow he had slipped beneath her hips.

That was pretty stupid, Paul told himself. If Joanna finds out—Suddenly he realized that he had done to Joanna exactly what Gregory had done. Betrayed her.

For somebody who doesn't really love her, he thought, you feel pretty damned shitty this morning.

SAVANNAH

Joanna could hear the thumping and banging from Greg's rooms, even from all the way down the hall. She had gone up to her own sitting room, part of the master bedroom suite, when Greg had shown up with two husky movers and a small van to clean out his rooms.

"I'm taking all my belongings," Greg said tightly to his mother. "That includes my furniture."

Joanna simply nodded and fled upstairs to her sitting room, not wanting to be in her son's way, not daring to let him see how miserable it made her to see him moving out.

But there was no other option. Greg and Paul could not live under the same roof.

After what seemed like hours, the noise stopped. Joanna looked up from the hand-held screen of her cyberbook reader. It was only midday; Greg had taken less than an hour to remove his belongings—and the furniture that she had bought for him.

He can't leave without saying goodbye, she thought. Should I go out and see him before they drive away?

Then she heard his tap on her door. It hadn't changed since he'd been a little boy. A single gentle tap. She had always responded to it immediately.

"Come in, Greg," she called, shutting down the screen and placing the cyberbook reader on the end table beside her.

He looked tense, quivering with suppressed anger. Yet his shirt and slacks were neatly pressed, no perspiration stains. If he had physically helped with the moving, it did not show.

Joanna remained seated in the comfortable armchair as Greg crossed the room toward her.

"Did you get everything?" she asked.

"Yes. I think so."

"There's quite a lot of things in the basement. Mostly old toys and school papers."

He shook his head. "I won't have room for that. My condo's too small."

I'll keep it all here for you."

Greg swallowed hard. "I -1 suppose it's time that I moved into a place of my own."

Smiling as gently as she could, Joanna said, "Greg, dearest, you've had a place of your own in New York for quite a while now."

"I mean… moving out of this house." His voice almost broke. "My home."

She held her arms out to him and he dropped to his knees and let her embrace him.

"Oh, Greg, I'm so sorry that things have worked out this way. I didn't want it to happen like this."

"I know," he said, his head on her lap. "It's not your fault."

"It's not anyone's fault.

"It's his!" Greg snarled, looking up from his mother's lap, his eyes red and burning. "He's done this to us!"

"If you mean Paul—"

"He murdered my father!"

Joanna stroked his midnight hair, trying to soothe him. "Greg, I told you… I was with Paul all that afternoon. I really was."

Shaking his head stubbornly, Greg insisted, "He didn't have to do it himself. He could have hired someone."

"He couldn't have."

Greg looked into his mother's eyes. "You have no idea of how low he really is, do you?"

"Now, Greg, I won't listen—"

"You think he loves you? He loves the corporation! He loves that stupid Moonbase!"

"He's my husband," Joanna said.

"Right Sure. And last night he was in bed with Melissa Hart. Some husband."

Joanna's could feel her face flame. "That's not true!"

"Isn't it? Do you think it's a coincidence that Melissa's been at the Houston and L.A. divisions the same time he's been there? Is it an accident that they both booked the same hotel in San Francisco?"

Joanna's breath caught in her chest. She could not answer.

"Why shouldn't he take his pick of younger women?" Greg went on. "He's the top dog now, isn't he? He's an important man, thanks to you. He can have any woman he wants."

"You're lying!"

"Check with the travel office. The two of them have been travelling across the country together. Your black CEO and his black mistress."

"But I thought Melissa…' Joanna ran out of words. Her thoughts were tumbling through her head.

"Melissa's a slut who'll sleep wherever the power is. You gave Paul the power so she's gone back to him."

"No…' she said weakly.

"He murdered my father and he'll spit on you now that he's got what he wants."

"No," Joanna repeated desperately. "Paul's not like that. He isn't!"

"He's a cheat and a murderer."

"No!"

"He is! I know he is! He murdered my father and now he's cheating on you."

"But why? Why would he murder your father?"

"To get you!" Greg blurted. "To get control of the corporation. To save his precious Moonbase."

Trying to drive thoughts of Paul in bed with Melissa out of her mind, Joanna shook her head stubbornly.

"But he already had me, Greg. I loved him and he loved me. We were going to tell your father, sooner or later. I was going to get a divorce."

"But if you divorced Dad, then Paul could never hope to get control of the corporation. He had Dad murdered so he could make himself CEO."

Joanna said again, "No, Greg. Paul had no idea that he could become CEO. He was shocked when I told him I was going to nominate him."

"But—"

"And that was just a few minutes before the board meeting started," Joanna continued. "You were there. Didn't you see how stunned he looked?"

"I was there, all right," Greg growled.

"I know, it was a shock to you, too, dear. But I had to make Paul take over the company. I'm sorry I couldn't explain it to you beforehand."

"He forced you into it, didn't he?"

"No, dear. He didn't know anything about it until just before the meeting started."

"You didn't trust me to run the corporation. You still don't."

Patiently, trying her best to mollify her son, Joanna explained, "Greg, dearest, you're not ready yet."

I'm twenty-eight years old. Dad wasn't much older when he took over from his father."

Joanna remembered. Gregory hadn't been ready, either. And he never really learned how to make the corporation profitable. Under his direction Masterson Aerospace staggered along from one crisis to another: Until Paul pushed through the development of the Clipperships. That saved us, she thought.

"Greg," she said to her son, "I know that Brad Arnold has been telling you he thinks you're capable of running the corporation, but Brad's merely flattering you."

"Flattering?"

"Brad thinks that he can control you, and through you control the company. That's why I had to put Paul in charge. To stop Brad."

"He couldn't control me."

"He's very clever," Joanna said. "And much more experienced in this kind of infighting."

"He could never control me."

Joanna hesitated. Then she said, "Now that I think of it, the only one who could possibly havte thought he'd benefit from your father's death is Brad."

Greg's body twitched as if a live electric wire had touched him. He looked into his mother's eyes. "Brad?" he whispered, unbelieving.

"Paul had no idea I'd nominate him," Joanna repeated slowly, thinking out loud. "But Brad would have known that if your father died, he could make you CEO and run the whole company through you."

"I told you he couldn't control me!" Greg snapped.

"Yes, yes, I know," Joanna said quickly, stroking his hair again. "But Brad thought otherwise, I'm certain."

For several moments Greg remained still, his head in his mother's lap, as she stroked him soothingly.

At last he said, "Do you really think Brad murdered my father?"

"No," Joanna said softly. "I think your father committed suicide."

But you said—"

"I said that the only one who would have profited from your father's death was Brad." Before her son could insist he couldn't be controlled again, she added, "At least, he was the only one who thought he might have profited."

"Brad," Greg breathed.

He stayed there kneeling at his mother's feet until the butler rang from downstairs to say that the moving men were waiting in their van for Greg to direct them to his new home.

Then he kissed his mother's cheek and left the house.

Joanna sat alone for most of the afternoon, trying to keep herself from phoning the travel office to see if Greg's accusation was true. Her son's voice kept ringing in her ears, half triumphant, half sneering: Why shouldn't he take his pick of younger women? He's the top dog now, isn't he? He's an important man, thanks to you. He can have any woman he wants.

MARE NUBIUM

The Moon turns very slowly on its axis: one complete revolution in just under twenty-eight days. That's why Paul did not have a GPS signal to guide him as he pushed himself across the mare, hoping that he was heading for the ringwall mountains of the giant crater Alphonsus.

On Earth, two dozen global positioning satellites are enough to provide pinpoint locating fixes for virtually any spot on the globe. The satellites' orbits are fixed in space while the Earth spins below them. No matter where on Earth you are, there are always at least two satellites above your horizon to give you a precise navigational fix.

To get the same kind of coverage on the Moon, with its slow rotation rate, takes many more satellites. The consortium of private companies and government agencies that had cooperatively set up the lunar GPS system had tried to strike a careful balance between practicality and cost. They had started with a network of six positioning satellites and were adding to the web from time to time.

Just my luck to be out here at a time when the two closest satellites are both too low on the horizon for my suit radio to pick up their signals, Paul grumbled. Maybe it isn't luck. Maybe Greg timed it all. Is the kid that smart?

What difference does it make? he asked himself as he plodded across the barren lunar plain. Every few minutes he stopped to turn and see if his path remained straight, but he knew that was only the roughest of guides. You could be drifting off to one side or the other and never know it.

He sucked up a mouthful of water, sloshed it around his teeth and then swallowed it:

"Hell," he muttered, "for all you know you're heading for the pissin' south pole by now."

One of the GPS signals oughtta come through pretty soon. I'll straighten out my course then. In the meanwhile, keep: pushing ahead.

In the back of his mind Paul knew, as every astronaut knew that what killed people on the Moon was fatigue. More than equipment failure or ignorance or even bad judgment, simple fatigue could wear you down to the point where you forgot just one little, vital thing. And then you were dead.

Paul forgot about the dust.

That powdery, fine dust, like beach sand underfoot, was electrically charged by the constant infall of ionized particles from the solar wind. No matter how carefully you stepped, your boots stirred up little clouds of dust, and some of the stuff inevitably clung electrostatically to your suit.

Through hard experience the men and women who worked on the Moon had learned to include a hand vacuum cleaner in the airlocks of their buried shelters. After an hour or so out on the surface, the suit needed a thorough cleaning. Otherwise the dust would get into everything inside the shelter itself.

It was more than an annoyance. Gritty dust particles worked their way into the hinges of space suits. If enough dust clogged the knees or other joints the suit would stiffen up just like the Tin Woodsman of Oz, left out in the rain. The experienced astronaut listened carefully for grating noises in his suit; kept sensitive to whether or not the joints of his suit were moving smoothly.

When they weren't too tired to remember.

Paul plodded along. He knew that he had been down on all fours back at the glass-smooth crater that he had slid into. He knew, if he had thought about it consciously, that his gloves probably had a thin sheen of lunar dust clinging to them electrostatically.

But he was too tired to be wary of the dust.

Wish I had a headband, he said to himself as he tried to blink the sweat out of his eyes. He didn't want to look at the thermometer on his forearm panel, didn't want to know how hot it really was. The Sun was broiling him, he knew that and it was enough.

The bleak plain stretched in every direction around him, nothing but rocks and dusty regolith and more rocks. In his helmet earphones he heard nothing but the precisely timed beep of his suit radio's plaintive call to the GPS satellites that were not there to answer. Like a Chinese water torture, Paul groused. Beep. Then wait. And then another beep. Where the fuck's the answering signal? At least one of the pissing satellites ought to be in range by now.

But he heard only his suit radio's patient, maddening call signal.

One foot in front of the other, Paul told himself as he pushed along. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other and you'll get there sooner or later.

His vision blurred and without thinking he wiped at his helmet visor. A film of gray smeared across the visor.

Oh crap! Just what I need; Paul grumbled to himself. The upper half of the visor was covered with dust. He had to peer through the lower half to see where he was going.

Without stopping, he fumbled in the pocket on the right thigh of his suit for an electrostatic cloth. Got to be one in there, he said to himself. If they kept the suit supplies topped off. If the cloth hasn't already been saturated.

It was almost impossible to feel anything as thin as the cloth with his gloves on, but at last Paul pulled a bright green square from the pocket. He held it up in front of his visor and inspected it as best as he could through the smear of dust. Looks good enough. Most of it was still bright green, although one corner of the cloth had turned gray. It had been used before.

Carefully folding the cloth so that the gray, used section was out of the way, Paul wiped slowly at his visor. It seemed to help, but only a little.

Ought to have windshield wipers on the damned helmets, he thought. The cloth was not doing the job it should have done. Must've lost some of its electrostatic charge while it was sitting in the pocket. It's been used before, too. Christ, it's just not working!

The gray smear seemed a bit thinner now, not as opaque. Paul could see through it as if it were a frosted window: blurry shapes and shadows, not much more.

He refolded the cloth and tried again. No improvement. All he managed to do was to smear the dust a little further across his visor.

In disgust he tossed the cloth away. It soared like a rigid sheet of thin metal in the airlessness of the Moon, spinning lazily until it sailed out of his range of vision.

"Okay," Paul muttered. "Now we play pissin' blind man's bluff all the way to the next tempo."

Then he heard a sudden chatter of beeps in his earphones: the signal from a GPS satellite. I'll play it by ear," he said aloud, and began to laugh wildly at his pun.

But he needed to look at the displays on his forearm panel to make sense of the GPS navigational signal. His laughter died as he squinted through the dust filming his visor. If he was reading the instruments correctly, he had drifted more than six miles off his course to the next underground shelter.