SAN JOSE

The manager of the nanotech division was barely out of her thirties, young and intense and obviously nervous. Yet she seemed to be the oldest person that Paul could see anywhere in the plant. Her skirted suit of charcoal gray looked as if she hadn't worn it since her first job interview. She looked uncomfortable in it, as if she longed to be in a t-shirt and jeans, as almost everyone else was.

Paul felt like an old and stuffy grandfather in his light whipcord slacks and tan sports jacket. Good thing I didn't wear a tie, he said to himself. These kids'd think I came from Mars.

"Mr. Masterson was here last week, y'know," the manager was saying, "and he said he was very satisfied with the progress we've made in the past six months."

So that's it, Paul realized as they looked through the thick window into a clean room where white-smocked technicians were bent over laboratory benches. Paul saw that the techs wore white caps over their heads and even had white booties over their shoes. Or sandals, he thought, glancing at the manager's bare unpainted toes.

"Look," he said to her, "I'm not here to swing a hatchet, you know."

The manager's expression clearly said she didn't believe Paul. The ID badge pinned to her jacket said Kris Cardenas. She didn't look Hispanic, though. To Paul she looked like a California surfer chick: an attractive kid with softly curled sandy hair, a swimmer's broad shoulders, wide sincere cornflower blue eyes and a deep tan. And enough brains in her head to rise to the top of this very competitive high-tech division.

Making a smile for her, Paul explained, "You've probably heard that Greg Masterson and I are enemies, haven't you?"

She nodded warily.

"Well, even if we are that doesn't mean I want to kill this division just because he's backing it. From what I can see, you're doing a good job here."

Cardenas seemed to be holding her breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

"What I'd like to know," Paul went on, "is whether or not you're at a stage of development where we can try some practical tests of nanotechnology."

"We were ready to try clinical tests of tumor killers," Cardenas said, "but the government ruled that anything intended to go inside human patients has to go through the FDA's approval procedure, and that takes years'

"I know," Paul said. Washington's decision had sent the entire nanotechnology industry into a tailspin. It wiped out any hope of profitability for this division for years to come.

"I can show you the animal tests we've done," Cardenas said, starting down the corridor. "We can destroy tumors with better than eighty percent efficiency—and no collateral damage to healthy tissue, y'know."

Following her, Paul said, "In animals."

She nodded vigorously. "Pigs, rhesus monkeys, even chimps. There's no reason why the bugs shouldn't work just as well in humans. There's just no sense to the government's restrictions!"

With a world-weary shrug, Paul said, "I agree, but they've made their decision and we've got to live with it." Or die with it, he added silently.

"It's stupid," Cardenas insisted.

"I was wondering, though, could you adapt nanotechnology to other applications?"

"Oh, sure," she said easily, pronouncing the word shirr.

They had reached a set of big double doors. Cardenas pushed one open and they stepped through into a large room filled with animal cages. The walls and floor were tiled in white. The smell of animal fur and excrement was enough to make Paul's eyes water.

"Careful," Cardenas warned. "These floor tiles get kind of slick, y'know. The handlers have to wash them down a lot."

I'll bet," said Paul.

As she led Paul past a row of cages filled with hairless lab rats, Cardenas told him, "We're already adapting what we've developed here for other applications."

One of the monkeys yipped at them and within half a second all of them were howling and shrieking. The din was overpowering, echoing off the tiled walls like shock waves pounding on Paul's ears.

Looking worried, Cardenas shouted over the noise, "Maybe we'd better go someplace quieter."

"Amen to that," Paul yelled back.

Once they were out in the corridor again, with the heavy doors muffling most of the noise, Cardenas said, "Just about every one of those monkeys had cancerous tumors. Y'know, really nasty carcinomas and stuff like that. The nanobugs found them inside their bodies and disassembled them, molecule by molecule."

"So once you finally get FDA approval this division ought to be worth a good-sized fortune," Paul said reassuringly.

"For sure."

"In the meantime, though…' Paul let the thought dangle in the air between them.

"In the meantime," she said, leading him farther down the corridor, "we're trying to spin off the medical work into toxic waste cleanup."

"You can program the bugs to eat toxic wastes?"

Cardenas nodded vigorously. "It's pretty simple, really, compared to the tumor work. They can go through a waste dump, find the molecules you want to get rid of, and take them apart. Nothing left but carbon dioxide, water, and pure elements—which you can recycle."

"Sounds good," Paul said.

"We're trying to get the state environmental agency to participate in a demonstration we ve set up."

"Not the federal EPA?"

Cardenas wrinkled'her nose. "The feds are real assholes. My strategy is to get the state environmental guys on our side and let them convince the feds."

Paul remembered the first man he had worked for, when he had started at Masterson Aerospace. "Make the customer a party to the crime," he had advised. "Get them on your side and they'll do half your work for you." His respect for Cardenas went up a notch.

She stopped at a locked door with a RESTRICTED ACCESS sign over it. "At least this area will be quieter than the animal pens."

A few taps at the electronic lock and the door swung open. Paul followed her into a small, stuffy, windowless room crammed with consoles and instrumentation. The only lights came from the display screens on the consoles. The room felt overly warm, uncomfortably so.

As Paul peeled off his jacket, Cardenas leaned over one of the keyboards and typed out a single command. A shutter slid back from the blank wall on Paul's right and he saw a window that looked into another room.

An ancient Cadillac sat in there, one of those old monsters heavy with chrome and tailfins. Bright red, where there was paint still on it. Almost half the side that Paul could see was dull bare metal. The car was up on blocks, although the rear tire was still on its hub. The front tire was gone. The hood was propped up part-way; the windshield wipers were gone.

"What's this?" Paul asked. "A pop art exhibit?"

Cardenas grinned at him. "It's our toxic waste exhibit. What do you think of it?"

Paul turned back to stare at the Cadillac through the thick window. "Nanobugs are taking it apart?"

She nodded happily. "We've got four different types of specialized gobblers in there."

"Gobblers?"

"Nanomachines specifically designed to attack certain molecules, break them apart into their constituent atoms."

"Gobblers," Paul repeated.

"One set's taking out the paint," Cardenas explained. "Another is reducing the organic molecules in the tires to carbon dioxide, methane, and whatnot The third is working on the engine, separating out all the tungsten and platinum in the steel alloys."

"Tungsten and platinum?"

"They're valuable metals, y'know. We want to separate them out so we can recycle them."

"I see," said Paul.

"And the fourth set of nanos is gobbling the plastics in the dashboard, steering wheel, seat covers and such."

Paul could see the sheer fervor of achievement radiating from her face. A muffled bang made him snap his attention back to the Cadillac. The one tire remaining had just blown out and now hung limply on its hub. Paul thought he could see it twitching like something alive being devoured by parasites.

"Why do you keep the car in a sealed chamber?" he asked.

"To keep the bugs from spreading, of course," Cardenas answered. "We keep the chamber at ten below zero, Celsius. The bugs are programmed to stop at any temperature above zero."

"But why—"

"To make sure they won't start gobbling people!"

"Oh." Paul hadn't thought of that

Cardenas didn't seem the least bit condescending as she explained, "The bugs don't see any difference between your molecules and the Cadillac's, y'know. Except temperature. We design them to immobilize themselves 'way before they get to human body temperature."

Paul nodded slowly. "Then how do you expect to use them in toxic waste dumps if you're worried that they might attack people?"

Her smile faded slightly. "We're working on that problem. We've got to make them much more specific than they are now.

Much more specific. Tailor them to distinctive molecules, so they'll gobble those molecules and nothing else."

"Can you do that?"

"In time," she replied.

Time costs money, Paul knew. It was the old story: an exciting new possibility that could make fortunes of profit, but first you have to sink fortunes of investment into it and pray that it eventually succeeds.

"What else do you have?" he asked.

Cardenas went back to the control console, flicked her fingers across a different keyboard. Another section of shutters slid back, this time on Pauls left.

"Nanomachines can build things, too, y'know," Cardenas said.

At first Paul thought he was looking at a child's sand castle, the kind that kids build on the beach. The chamber he was looking into was hardly larger than a phone booth, dimly lit by a single bare bulb in the ceiling. Its floor was covered with sand or a grayish brown powder of some sort. In the middle of it stood a half-built tower.

"Here we've got assemblers at work," Cardenas said, her voice low, almost a reverential whisper.

Paul studied the tower. It was about three feet tall. It wasn't made of sand, he realized. It was gray, almost the same color as the stuff strewn over the floor, but it looked smoother, metallic.

"What is this?"

In the dim light from the display screens Cardenas' expression was difficult to read. But her voice was vibrating with barely-suppressed excitement.

"Last week Mr. Masterson phoned me with a special request. This is the result."

"What'd Greg want?"

"That sand is from the Moon," Cardenas said. "We've put in a few simple assemblers and the tower is what they're building."

"Assemblers? You mean nanomachines?"

She nodded eagerly. "Actually, we put one hundred assemblers into the sand, five days ago."

"And they've built the tower," Paul said.

"They're still building it. Watch real careful and you can see new features being added."

Paul turned and stared at the tower rising out of the lunar sand. It rose perpendicularly from a wide, low base, its flanks smooth and featureless except for small setbacks every foot or so.

"Nothing seems to be happening," he said.

Cardenas peered at the tower. "They stop every once in a while, like they're taking a coffee break. Then they get busy again."

"Don't you know why they stop?"

"For sure." She grinned. "Each time they reach a change in the blueprint we've programmed into them, they stop until the proper members of the team are in the right position to start the new phase of the building."

Paul's eyes widened. "You make them sound as if they're intelligent."

"About as intelligent as bacteria," Cardenas replied.

Paul grunted.

"The assemblers spent the first four days building more of themselves out of the aluminum and silicon in the sand. Yesterday that tower wasn't here."

"No shit," Paul breathed.

"The tower is mainly titanium, y'know. The assemblers are taking titanium atoms preferentially from the sand and using them to build the tower."

"How do they know—"

"It's all programmed into them," Cardenas said. "We did this sort of thing last year, as a demonstration for Mr. Masterson and his father, when they visited here. We didn't use lunar sand then; just beach sand. We built a really neat castle for them."

Paul looked at her. "Could you build more complex stuff?"

Without an eyeblink's hesitation, Cardenas said, "We could build a whole base on the Moon for you, if you give us the time to program the assemblers."

Paul saw that there were a couple of little wheeled typist's chairs by the consoles. He 'pulled one up and sank onto it Cardenas took the other one facihg him.

"Instead of sending tons and tons of heavy machinery to the Moon," she said, leaning toward him, "all you'd have to do is send a sampling of the necessary assemblers. They'll build more of themselves out of the raw materials in the Moon's soil—"

"Regolith," Paul corrected automatically.

"-and then they'll construct your base out of the regolith, " she stressed the word, "all by themselves."

"One shipload of nanomachines," Paul mused.

"Could build your whole base for you," she said.

"How long would it take you to develop the nanomachines? Specifically for Moonbase, I mean."

She waved her hands in the air. "Simple tasks, like building airtight shelter shells and other construction forms, that's pretty easy. When you get down to complicated equipment, like air regenerators and pressure pumps, we'll need a while to program the assemblers."

"A while? How long?"

"Months. Maybe years. We've never tried to build anything very complicated. Not yet It'll take some time."

A new thought struck Paul. "Most of the compounds in the regolith are oxygen-bearing. And there's hydrogen imbedded in the top layers of the regolith, blown in on the solar wind. Could your machines—"

"Produce water out of those atoms? For sure. That's no problem!"

"Jesus H. Christ on a motorcycle."

"You want a motorcycle, we'll build you a motorcycle." Cardenas laughed.

"Maybe we ought to be talking with Harley," Paul kidded back.

"Or General Motors." She was suddenly completely serious.

INFLIGHT

Paul was in the company helicopter heading back to San Francisco International Airport when his pocket phone beeped.

It was Melissa. "Delta's flight's been cancelled," she said, "and there's nothing connecting to Savannah until late tonight. Can I ride back with you?"

"Sure," Paul said, knowing it was a mistake, not knowing how to say no without feeling like a jerk.

Melissa was waiting for him in the hangar where his twin-engined jet was sheltered. The same plane in which he and Joanna had made love for the first time. Melissa was standing beside the plane, looking slightly forlorn in a baggy pair of tan slacks and a light sweater that hung loosely on her.

"Sorry to impose on you," she said as soon as Paul got to within arm's reach. I'd have to fly the redeye to Atlanta and then make a connection at six tomorrow morning, otherwise."

"It's okay," Paul said. Last night they had been in bed together. But that was last night

Melissa picked up her single garment bag. "I know I look a mess. This is my airline outfit. It's for comfort, not looks."

He made a smile for her. "You look fine, kid.

As he walked toward the plane beside Melissa, Paul remembered his elderly grandfather on the day the news broke that the first black president of the United States had been caught in the sack with a woman who was not his wife.

His grandfather had shaken his head mournfully. "See the trouble a man's cock can get him into?"

Yeah, I see, Gramps. But Seeing ain't the same thing as doing.

Paul let Melissa sit in the co-pilot's seat as he slipped on the headset and checked out the plane's instruments. She did not say a word to him as he taxied out to the runway, got clearance for takeoff, and then shoved the throttles forward.

The engines howled joyfully and the plane surged down the runway, faster, faster, the ground blurring as Paul watched the digital airspeed display, then pulled back with an artist's delicate touch to rotate the nose wheel off the concrete. The plane seemed to leap into the air and Paul's heart soared with it.

Once they cleared the airport traffic and Paul put the twin-jet on course eastward, he slipped his earphones down around his neck and turned to Melissa.

"Too bad there's no Clippership service to Savannah," he said.

"When will we get there?"

"Eleven-thirty, eastern time, the way things look now. We'll have to make a pit stop in Amarillo. Gas up."

Melissa nodded. "Beats the redeye."

For a while neither of them said anything. Paul watched the shadows lengthening below as they flew over the mountains with the sun setting behind them.

"Lake Tahoe," he said.

"Uh-huh."

Time went by in silence. Then he pointed out the Grand Canyon, barely visible off in the distance in the twilight haze.

Melissa stared out the window on her side of the cockpit until a cloud bank obscured the ground altogether.

Finally, Paul said hesitantly, "About last night

Melissa turned sharply toward him. "Forget it," she said.

"Forget it?"

"It never happened."

Paul felt puzzled. "What d'you mean?"

"You're a married man and you're worried I'm going to shoot my mouth off to Greg or somebody. Well, don't worry about it."

"That's not what I meant."

"Isn't it?"

"Shit, Mel, I wasn't thinking you were a spy for Greg."

"The hell you weren't."

"You told me you two had broken up."

"Yes. That's right."

Paul's befuddlement deepened. Melissa seemed irritable, almost angry.

"Look," he said. "I'm sorry about last night. I shouldn't have done it. I am a married man and—"

"Oh, Paul, it's not your fault. I…" She seemed to want to say more, but stopped.

Paul didn't know what to say. If anything. It was a stupid thing to do, he told himself. If Joanna finds out I'll have hurt her just as bad as Gregory hurt her in the past.

"Do you know why Greg and I broke up?" Melissa asked, her voice so low Paul had to strain to hear her over the muted rumbling of the engines.

"You said it was because of Joanna."

Melissa shook her head slowly. "That's only part of it. I mentioned the magic word, and that drove him off the deep end."

"The magic word?"

"Baby."

Paul wasn't certain he had heard her correctly.

"I told Greg that I wanted his baby," Melissa said sorrowfully. "I told him that when a man and a woman love each other they make a baby together."

"He didn't like the idea."

"I thought he was going to punch me out."

"If he ever lays a hand on you—"

Melissa silenced Paul by laying a slender finger on his lips. "I can take care of myself," she said. "You've got a wife to think about. You can't go around fighting my battles."

But Paul pictured Greg hitting Melissa. Just like the spoiled sonofabitch, he thought. He doesn't love anybody except himself. If he ever touches her I'll punch out his lights, but good.

After they stretched their legs in Amarillo and took off again, Melissa curled up in one of the capacious reclining seats in the plane's cabin and fell asleep. Paul put the plane on autopilot, but flayed in the cockpit, awake, his mind churning with thoughts of Greg and Melissa and Joanna and the nanomachines that could make Moonbase a going proposition if only he could hammer the idea through the board of directors. But Greg was going to use the next meeting to accuse him of murder, or at least fornication. How can he attack me without attacking his mother? Then Paul realized that Greg was so furious with blind hate that he wanted to hurt Joanna, punish her for falling in love with a black man.

It was almost midnight when Paul finally put the twin-jet down on the company's airstrip, a few miles from Savannah. He was tired, drained physically and emotionally. Gratefully, he saw that the limo was there at the apron in front of the hangar, waiting for him.

Paul helped Melissa down the little metal ladder to the concrete of the apron. When he turned back toward the limousine, he saw that Joanna was standing beside it, staring at them.

MARE NUBIUM

Do I have enough oxygen to make it? Paul asked himself that question again and again as he struggled across the rocky undulating lunar plain, trying to make up for the time and distance he had lost by straying so far off course.

He pushed himself harder. "Gotta get smokin' now," he told himself. "Gotta get there before the oxy runs out."

Somewhere in the back of his mind he remembered an equation that showed how oxygen consumption is related to the amount of physical work the body is doing. From some aerobics class he had taken back when he was in astronaut training, a thousand years ago. Shaking his head inside his helmet, Paul tried to forget about the equation. Just keep pumping along, he told himself. Go, go, go.

At least he had the GPS signal to keep him company. Cheerful little chirp in his earphones, almost like a songbird but nowhere near as melodious. Just a monotonous steady set of peeps, repeating over and over again.

Hey, don't knock it, he told himself. Long as you can hear that boring little song you're on the right track. You can listen to Wynton Marsalis some other time.

Through his dust-smeared visor Paul could make out the bulky shape of a massive boulder rising up on the horizon ahead of him, like a ship coming in from some far-off land. Boulder big as a house, Paul thought. As he got closer to it he saw that it was as big as a shopping mall.

Got to go around it. Damn! Pissin' chunk of rock's gonna force me ten-twenty minutes outta my way.

Squinting through his dust-covered visor, Paul saw that the huge boulder was pitted and rough, with a fairly flat top. Maybe I can climb over it. Be faster than walking all the way around it.

But a voice in the back of his mind warned, You got enough troubles out here without rock-climbing. Stay on the flat ground and walk around the damned rock.

Still, Paul studied the boulder as he came closer to it. I could climb up this side. Looks easy enough.

And rip your suit? And how do you know what the othei side's like? Once you get up on top of it, you gotta climb down again.

I can do it, he insisted silently.

Don't.

"It'll save me almost half an hour," Paul said aloud, trying to convince himself.

The voice in his head reminded him, There are old astronauts and there are bold astronauts, but there are no old, bold astronauts.

Paul reached the rock. It towered over him as he put out a gloved hand and touched its rough surface. He took a deep breath, then started climbing.

SAVANNAH

Through the whole ride back to their house, Joanna stayed coldly silent. A perfunctory peck on the cheek as Paul got into the limo, then not a word. Paul could feel icicles growing from the roof of the car. She can't be pissed off just because she saw Mel rode back here with me. Somebody's told her about last night. Who? Who could possibly know? Unless it was all a setup! He felt his stomach go hollow, the way it does the first few minutes in weightlessness.

A setup. Melissa came on to me deliberately, and she must have reported right back to—who? Greg, most likely. Or maybe Brad; be just like the sneaky little sonofabitch to pull a trick like this.

Paul waited until they were in the bedroom. He flopped his travel bag on the king-sized bed as Joanna went around to her dresser and sat in front of its triple mirror.

"I did something I'm ashamed of," he began, staying on his side of the bed.

Joanna looked at him in the mirror. Paul could see her face-on, and both profiles. She looked calm, unsmiling but not scowling either. If she was angry she wasn't showing it on her face. Just sat there, the ice queen: regal and cold, staring at him through the mirror, her back to him.

"I went to bed with Melissa last night," Paul said, hoping that confession would ease the tension.

Her chin went up; her eyes flared.

"It was a stupid thing to do," he went on. "I had more to drink than I should have." No, he commanded himself. Don't hide behind an excuse.

"Did you enjoy it?" Joanna asked coldly.

"Not once I woke up."

She turned to face him. "Paul, I want the absolute truth from you."

"You're getting it."

"Is this the first time you've done this?"

Instantly he replied, "I haven't slept with another woman since we first went to bed together, Joanna. Until last night."

"You had an affair with Melissa before, hadn't you?"

"We were together when I met you. I left her for you."

"And now you've gone back to her."

He stepped around the bed, then sat on its edge, on her side, close enough to Joanna to reach out and touch her. Yet he kept his hands on his knees.

"Joanna, it wasn't her. It could've been anybody. I was alone. We haven't made love since we went to the space station. It—"

"So it's my fault?"

"No," he said quickly. "Nobody's fault but mine. Not even Melissa's, really. I should've kept my wick in my pants."

"Your wick?" Despite herself Joanna smiled a little. "I've never heard it called that before."

"It was a rotten thing to do," he said. "It won't happen again. I promise you."

She sighed wearily. "So did Gregory."

Paul gritted his teeth. You knew that was going to come up, he said to himself.

"I'm not Gregory," he said tightly.

Joanna's shoulders slumped. "Maybe it's me," she murmured. "Maybe I do something to cause this sort of thing to happen. Maybe I pick out men who'll betray me."

Paul reached out and took both her hands in his. "Christ, Jo, it's not your fault! I'm the guilty party here."

She wouldn't look into his eyes.

"You knew about it, didn't you?" Paul asked. "You knew about it before I landed."

"Greg told me that you and Melissa were travelling together."

"Greg."

"I told him I didn't believe it, but he said I could check with the travel office. So I did."

"She was in several of the same cities I was. I only saw her in the offices, though. We weren't travelling together. We -weren't shacking up."

"Until last night."

"That was a mistake that won't be repeated."

Joanna said nothing. She still would not meet his eyes.

"I think Greg sent her to nail me," Paul said. "The bitch did this just to cause trouble between us." With a weary shake of her head, Joanna replied, "Greg is finished with her. They broke up. He can't stand the mention of her name."

"That's an act he puts on."

"No," she said. "I know my son better than that. He hates the sound of her name."

"Then it had to be Brad who set me up."

"Why does it have to be a trap?" Joanna asked. "Why can't you accept the fact that you've made a mess of our marriage?"

"Don't say that! I don't want our marriage to be hurt."

"It's been hurt, Paul. You've hurt it."

"Okay. I know that. But—"

"I'm pregnant."

It hit him like a physical blow. Paul sat there, hunched forward, holding both Joanna's hands tightly in his. He blinked several times.

"Pregnant?" In his own ears his voice sounded a full octave higher than normal.

Joanna nodded. "It wasn't just the weightlessness that was making me sick on the space station. I've been sick every morning for—"

"We're going to have a baby?" Suddenly everything was swept away. A baby! Paul had never even considered the possibility. At his age, at Joanna's age…

"Will you be okay? Can you do it without endangering your health?"

Joanna smiled patiently at him. "It's not an illness, Paul."

"Yeah, I know. Put I mean, isn't it kind of late in the game for you?"

"The obstetrician says I'm in fine condition and there reason why I can't bring the baby to term."

"A baby." Paul glowed with the wonder of it. "I never thought I'd be a father."

Her smile widened. "It does happen, you know."

He pulled her to him, sat her beside him on the edge of the bed and kissed her on the lips. "We've got to take extra-special good care of you."

But Joanna had not forgotten anything. "Paul—about this thing with Melissa."

"That was finished this morning," he said quickly. "And nothing like it is going to happen again. Ever."

"I want to believe you."

"Believe it."

"It's just that—Gregory started womanizing when I was pregnant with Greg."

"I'm not Gregory," he said firmly. "I told you that and I meant it"

For several moments Joanna did not reply. Then, "All right, Paul. I'll believe you."

For now, she added silently. I'll trust you as far as I can watch you. Maybe it will all work out all right, but I'm not going to sit by and watch my second husband humiliate me the way my first one did.

And Paul was thinking, This changes everything. I'll have a kid to take care of. A son, maybe. I can't let Greg gets his hands on the corporation. Not now. It's going to be my child's inheritance. A son. I want it to be a son.

Ed McPherson was a chubby, moonfaced, baldheaded make-believe Texan who dressed like a cowboy instead of the head of a major corporation's extensive legal department. Bom in New Jersey, educated at Princeton and Harvard Law, he cultivated a handlebar moustache and made a fetish of wearing cowboy boots, suede jackets and bolo ties. Word was around the office that the only time he wore a business suit was when he appeared before the Supreme Court of the United States.

Which was never. McPherson rarely strayed farther from the headquarters of Masterson Corporation than the corporation's Wall Street offices in New York.

Paul was in his office in Savannah when McPherson's call came through. He put the lawyer's image on the display screen of his desktop computer.

"Gregory had prostate cancer," McPherson said, with no preliminary. "Terminal."

Paul sank back in his swivel chair. "You're certain?" McPherson hardly ever smiled. He tried to keep a stony, hard-bitten look on his face. It was difficult for him, despite the luxurious moustache he sported; his round cheeks and bald dome did not lend themselves to a gunslinger's beady-eyed glare.

"The agency I hired tracked down the doctor who diagnosed -him. It was so advanced that no treatment was possible." 'Christ," Paul muttered.

"He'd been seeing half a dozen different doctors over the previous five years or so," McPherson went on. "He knew about the cancer, looks like, but refused to do anything about it until it was too late."

"But there are treatments for prostate cancer," Paul objected. McPherson made a sour face. "You run the risk of incontinence. And impotence. I doubt that Gregory worried much about peeing his pants, but impotence would have been a big problem to him."

"So he just let the cancer go."

"And it killed him. Or rather, he killed himself when he found out it was terminal. Must have been giving him a lot of pain."

Paul thought for a moment. "You're certain about all this? You've got documentary evidence?"

McPherson brushed an index finger across his moustache. "I can get written statements from each of the doctors, plus all of Gregory's medical records, if Joanna will sign a form demanding them."

I'll talk to her about it. Thanks. That was good work."

"Wait 'I'll you see the bill," McPherson said, cracking one of his infrequent smiles.

Paul blanked the screen, then sat thinking, Will Joanna be willing to sign such a form? Should I bother her with this? She's got enough on her mind, and I shouldn't be upsetting her with old stories about Gregory.

It'll come up in the board meeting, Paul told himself. There's no way I can shield her from Greg's showing that damned videodisk to the board.

But now I know what Gregory was muttering about in the video. It wasn't us. It wasn't our fault. It was the cancer that was killing him, and the gun was going to protect him from the pain. He was pissed off with the doctors, not us. He knew he was a dead man anyway; he just stopped the pain for himself.

I've got to tell Joanna. She shouldn't feel any guilt about this.

Paul nodded to himself, satisfied that he had all the necessary pieces to the puzzle.

One puzzle, he remembered. There's still the question of who got Melissa to set me up. Was it Brad? And if it was, how can I prove it?

He shook his head slowly. It's gonna be one helluva board meeting. One helluva meeting.

OVER THE ATLANTIC

Supersonic aircraft were not allowed to fly above Mach 1 over populated areas, because their sonic booms disturbed people and rattled their homes. Fanners complained of milk cows gone dry because of sonic booms. Environmentalists protested against sonic pollution.

So Bradley Arnold's flight angled out over the Atlantic after taking off from the corporation's private airstrip outside Savannah. Alone in the passenger compartment, sitting in one of the plane's luxurious padded chairs, Arnold had no time to admire the procession of deep swells on the steel-gray ocean far below him. He had expected Paul and Joanna to come with him to New York, but Stavenger had backed out at the last pünute.

"We'll fly up in my plane," Paul had told the board chairman.

"But I thought we would all be going together," Arnold had said.

"I've got a few things to do here this afternoon. We'll fly up overnight."

What Paul did not tell Arnold was that he wanted to tell Joanna what McPherson had dug up about Gregory's cancer. Paul had no intention of letting the board chairman in on the news, not until the directors' meeting, when he would spring it on all of them, including Greg.

Disappointed, Arnold had grumbled, "This is going to be an extremely important meeting, Paul. We could use the time to get our strategy ironed out"

But Paul had insisted that he could not fly with Arnold to New York, He had other things to do. More important than strategy session with me, Arnold groused to himself.

He doesn't trust me. Arnold frowned with the realization that despite everything he had said to Scavenger, the new CEO still did not trust him. That's Joanna's doing, he thought. She' never liked me. All the years I tried to help her husband, and all the help I've given to young Greg, and she still hates the sight of me.

Well, it's too bad for them, he said to himself as he swung out the keyboard set into the swivel table built into the plane bulkhead beside him. He stabbed at the telephone key and a soon as the computer's smoky female voice asked, "How may I help you, sir?" he told the phone to get Greg Masterson. "His private line," he added.

Greg's face appeared on the screen almost instantly, but i was only his recorded answer. With a grave smile his image said, "I am unable to take your call right now, but please leave your name and I'll get back to you as soon as I can Thank you."

Nettled, fuming, Arnold blurted, "Greg, it's me. Arnold. I need to talk to you now! Wherever you are, call me right—"

The smiling image was replaced by a more serious Gregory Masterson III. He was sitting in front of a window that looked out on Central Park and the towers of midtown Manhattan.

"Brad? Where are you?"

I'm on my way to New York, " Arnold replied testily. "Where else would I be?"

"Oh. Of course." Greg looked relieved.

"I have some upsetting news."

Greg looked more amused than worried. "Really?"

"McPherson's come up with evidence that your father was dying of prostate cancer."

Greg's slightly smug smile winked off like a light turned out.

"It looks as if he committed suicide, after all."

"No," Greg snapped. "That's crazy. Prostate cancer can be treated. My father wouldn't allow the cancer to go so far that it was going to kill him."

"My source in McPherson's office tells me that Paul's getting statements from half a dozen doctors who either examined your father or counselled him."

"With enough money you can get anyone to say anything."

"But Paul's going to use these medical statements at the board meeting tomorrow, to show that your father killed himself, after all."

Greg fell silent. He glanced at his wristwatch. Then he said, "He wants to use these statements to counterbalance the videodisk, is that it?"

Nodding, Arnold said, "I think he's outmaneuvered us."

Greg's expression hardened. "Even if my father had cancer he could still have been murdered."

"That doesn't make much sense."

"Doesn't it?"

"I don't think so," Arnold said. "It doesn't seem reasonable."

"My father would never commit suicide, Brad. I know that. And so do you."

"What do you mean?"

"Whoever killed my father deserves to die."

"But you don't know that he was murdered," Arnold said.

"I know enough," said Greg. "I may not be entirely certain of who the murderer is, but I know enough to act."

"You mean at tomorrow's meeting? What do you plan to do?"

Greg looked at his wristwatch again. "Thanks for the information, Brad. It was good of you to call."

"What? Is that all you've got to say?"

"That's all you've got time for," said Greg.

Arnold blinked his frog's eyes, puzzled. "What are you talking about? We've got to figure out some way—"

The plane lurched so hard that Arnold was hurled out of his seat and banged against the tabletop keyboard. The sudden pain in his middle made him feel he'd been carved in two. For an instant he hung there, then the plane pitched up sharply anc he was thrown back into his chair.

"Seatbelts!" the pilot's frantic shout came over the intercom 'We've lost power on—"

Another staggering tumble, and the plane plunged downward.

"Mayday! Mayday!" the intercom was blaring. "Lost power on both engines. Going down!"

Horrified, pinned in his seat, unable even to lift his arms! Arnold saw the steel gray Atlantic rushing up toward him Then a frightful shriek of tortured metal and part of the wing ripped away.

He was too terrified to scream. But Greg's face on the little screen smiled grimly and said, "Goodbye, Brad."

The screen went blank and then the plane hit the water and exploded.

MARE NUBIUM

Paul pulled himself onto the flat top of the huge boulder and lay on his belly panting and sweating for long minutes.

Like when we used to climb up onto the roofs of the warehouses, when we were kids, he thought. But he knew the difference. Back then he could scramble up the warehouse walls like a monkey and then spend the rest of the day running races across the flat roofs or playing hide-and-seek with his bro's among the cooling towers and other structures on the roofs. He remembered the chicken game they played, jumping from one roof to the next across the alleyways separating the buildings. One slip and it was the morgue or the hospital. And the police.

Good thing everything weighs one-sixth here, Paul thought. I'm sure in no shape to play tag now.

Slowly, carefully, he forced himself to his knees, and then to his feet. The GPS signal was still coming through loud and clear. No tears in the suit. Probably saved half an hour, at least, he told himself.

He walked across the big rock. Its top was not as flat as it had looked. It was pitted here and there with small, sharp craters, almost like bullet holes.

Then Paul got to the far side. He peered over the boulder's edge. This side was much steeper than the other had been. Looks like the pissin' rock was sheared off with a big cleaver. How the hell am I gonna get down there? There's hardly anyplace for a toehold.

I could jump, he thought. Only about thirty feet. But he knew that, lunar gravity or not, a man could break bones jumping that far. Paul recalled a couple of wise asses who disregarded the safety regs when they had first started working on the Moon. One broke his leg. The other, his neck. How surprised the poor sonofabitch looked, even through the visor of his helmet. Died before they could get a medical team to him.

So I won't jump, Paul concluded. But how the hell do I get down? Could go back the way I came, but that'd mean I'd have to walk all the pissin' way around this damned rock, just as if I never climbed up here in the first place. I'll lose an hour or more and there's not that much oxygen left.

He rummaged through the pockets on the thighs of the suit, and in the pouches on the belt around his waist, looking for anything that might serve as a rope. All he found was a lot of useless junk, and a ten-foot length of hair-thin wire. It was used to plug the suit's microcomputer into more powerful units, when necessary.

Too short and too frail, Paul thought But it'll have to do.

He jammed one end of the wire into the craterlet closest to the rock's edge, then wedged it with pebbles and bigger stones until it looked like a miniature caim. Might mark my grave, after all, he told himself.

"Okay," he said aloud. "Down we go—one way or another."

The wire held his weight, but as Paul cautiously edged his way down the sheer face of the boulder, he could feel the wire slipping out from under the rocks he had used to weight it down. He thought about rappelling, but figured that would just tear the wire loose even faster.

The worst part was that he couldn't see the ground from inside his helmet. He'd have to bend over almost double to look down and he didn't have the time or the inclination to try.

The wire felt as if it were really slithering loose. Gotta jump, Paul told himself. If I don't-

The toe of his left boot struck a projection. A ledge, only a few inches wide, but it felt like an interstate highway and international jetport runway put together.

He found the ledge with his other boot and rested there for a moment, taking the strain off the wire.

If I can just turn around, he thought. Slowly, with infinite care, he twisted his body around in a clumsy, sweaty pirouette, never letting go of the wire dangling above his head. He only got halfway turned around. The bulky backpack of his suit stopped him from going further.

Still, it was enough. He leaned over slightly, judged his distance from the ground. Still hard to see; the dust was still clinging to his visor. Looks like more than twenty feet.

Paul turned around again until he was facing the boulder once more. He felt the wire with both gloved hands. Only another foot or so of it left.

"Okay," he said to no one. "Just like you're jumpin' off the warehouse roof."

He let go of the wire, got down on one knee, planted both his hands on the ledge, then lowered his other leg over its edge. He let himself dangle for a moment, hanging onto the ledge with his fingers while he swung his boots to touch the boulder's face. Then he pushed off.

And fell.

It was like a dream, he fell so slowly. He had time to calculate, I'm almost six feet tall and the ledge was twenty feet ' above the ground so I'm really only dropping about fourteen feet and in the one-sixth gee it ought to be okay if I don't hit another ledge or a bump or projection or- 'His boots slammed onto the ground. Like a parachutist, " Paul let his knees bend deeply, using all his legs to absorb the impact. He whoofed out a big grunt of air, clouding his visor with his breath.

But he was standing on the ground again. No broken bones. Just a little twinge in his right ankle. Otherwise everything was okay.

He took a deep breath, turned up his helmet fan to clear the fog from his visor, and started out across the plain once again.

I must've saved at least fifteen minutes, he told himself, not daring to look at his watch or make an estimate of how much oxygen might be left in his backpack tank.

The ankle hurt enough to make him limp.

BOARD MEETING

Paul's personal jet was subsonic, so he expected to arrive in New York hours later than Bradley Arnold. He had rushed from his office to the corporation's airstrip, where Joanna was waiting for him, eager to tell her about what McPherson had learned.

But before he could start to break the news to her, Joanna asked, "Aren't all these personal planes an expense we can cut down on?"

She was buckling herself into the co-pilot's seat, on Paul's right.

"You can bring it up as new business at the meeting," he answered, watching over the plane's stubby nose as the ground crew disconnected the towing tractor from the nose wheel.

"Perhaps I should," Joanna said.

Paul ran up the engines, his eyes on the indicators of the control panel, amused at the no-nonsense tone of Joanna's voice. She was taking her responsibilities as a board member seriously.

"Before you do," he said over the muted howl of the jets, "you ought to check out the efficiency study we commissioned last year."

He eased off the brake pedals and the plane rolled forward, Paul slipped on his headset as he maneuvered the plane toward the end of the runway. He got his clearance from the tower, pushed the throttles to full power, and the twin-jet hurtled down the runway and arrowed into the sky.

Once they were on course for LaGuardia, Paul slipped the headset down over his neck.

"I presume," Joanna said, "that the efficiency report says your personal planes are the only thing standing between us and utter bankruptcy."

He grinned at her. "Not quite. But the report does endorse the planes. Saves the top executives a lot of time, and time is our most precious commodity."

Joanna looked unconvinced. "Another report that says exactly what its readers want to hear."

"The best consultants money can buy," Paul said.

I'm sure."

More seriously, Paul said, "I got a report from McPherson this afternoon."

"About Gregory?" Joanna tensed visibly.

"He had terminal cancer of the prostate," Paul told her. "That's why he killed himself."

She was silent for a long time. Paul let her absorb the information, sort out her feelings. He looked out at the clouds below, like a range of massive white mountains, but alive, dynamic, billowing up and reaching toward them. Above the clouds everything always seemed so much better, cleaner. The sun was always shining up here. The sky was always bright blue.

"Then he didn't know about us, after all," Joanna said at last.

"Or didn't care. He had other problems."

"He never had much of a tolerance for pain," Joanna murmured, so low that Paul could hardly hear her over the engines. "His own pain, that is."

"He killed himself to end his pain," Paul said.

Joanna nodded, her face unreadable.

Paul heard a sudden burst of chatter in his earphone. He pulled the headset back on. "Masterson one-oh-one," he said crisply into the pinhead microphone. "Repeat, please."

"One-oh-one, mis is Masterson base. Paul, we just got word that Mr. Arnold's plane has gone down."

"What?"

Automatically, Paul reached for the intercom switch on the control panel and flicked it on, so Joanna could hear the radio transmission, too.

"Arnold's plane is down. Over the Atlantic. Coast Guard's sent out search planes, but they don't expect any survivors."

"What happened?" Paul demanded.

"Dunno. Got one Mayday transmission that said they'd lost power on both engines."

"Holy God."

They flew in silence for a while, Paul's mind churning. Brad's gone. That supersonic blowtorch of his has the glide ratio of a grand piano. Must have hit the water like a bomb. Gripes, what a blow!

But a part of his mind was thinking that with Arnold out of the way Greg had no one of real importance backing him on the board of directors. This strengthens my hand. A lot, he told himself.

He looked over at Joanna. She seemed lost in thought, also. Weighing the odds, he knew. Trying to figure out how the balance of power has shifted.

Just like I am.

The board meeting went on anyway. Most of the directors had come from considerable distances to attend the emergency meeting. The old days when the rich and powerful lived in or near New York were long gone. Now the directors came from Tucson and Aspen, Houston and Sarasota, Seattle and Hilo. Several had flown in from Europe and the Asian rim.

The vice chairperson, a white-haired superannuated woman who had once been the corporation's director of personnel, seemed staggered when Paul told her that Arnold was dead.

"First Gregory and now Brad," she whispered.

She easily agreed to let Paul run the meeting. Paul thought she was eager to escape the responsibility.

Leaving Arnold's seat at the head of the table vacant, Paul convened the meeting and broke the news to the stunned board.

"My God," said one of the older directors, his hair white, his skin gray. "Who's next?"

"I move that we observe a minute of silence for our late chairman," said Greg. He sat halfway down the table, wearing his usual black business suit. He had not even glanced at Melissa, sitting at the end of the table. Paul thought that either he really did hate her now, or they were putting on a damned good act.

Once the minute of silence ended, Paul said, "I suppose we should elect a new chairman right away."

Heads bobbed agreement. Directors turned in their chairs, murmured to one another.

"I suggest we take a fifteen-minute break," Paul said, "then reconvene to hear nominations."

They didn't even bother to vote; just pushed their chairs back and headed for the bar and snacks at the back of the meeting room. Paul saw that the directors clumped into knots of threes and fours. Plenty of whispered conversations. Plenty of sudden, desperate politicking.

Joanna came up to his side. "Do you have a nominee in mind?" she asked.

Surprised, Paul admitted, "No. I haven't even thought about it."

Before Joanna could say anything more, Greg stepped between them. "I need to talk to you," he said to Paul, pointedly turning his back to his mother.

"You can talk to both of us," Paul said, shifting sideways a step so that he was once more side by side with Joanna.

"Certainly," Greg said tightly.

"So?" Paul prompted.

"You were out at the nanotech division, right?"

Paul nodded.

"Several board members want to shut it down."

Joanna said, "It's going to be years before it has any hope of showing a profit"

"Just like Moonbase," Greg snapped.

"What're you driving at?" Paul demanded.

"Just this. You vote to keep the nanotech division going and I'll vote to keep Moonbase going."

Paul blinked with surprise. "You'll back Moonbase?"

"If you'll back the nanotech division."

Glancing at Joanna, Paul thought, This is the way a corporation goes broke; everybody's got his own pet project that he wants to keep alive, so nobody kills anything and we all go down the tubes.

Almost as if he could read Paul's thoughts, Greg said, "Kris Cardenas showed you the lunar construction demo, didn't she?"

"That's right."

"Well, why don't we pool our interests and set up a demonstration on the Moon?"

"Demonstration of what?" Joanna asked.

"Nanotech construction," Greg told his mother. "Set up a construction task for the nanomachines at Moonbase. Use it to prove that we can build lunar facilities at a fraction of today's costs."

"I don't understand," Joanna said.

Feeling suddenly enthusiastic, Paul jumped in, "We can send a handful of nanomachines up to Moonbase and have them construct new facilities out of regolith materials."

"Right," said Greg.j

"Can that be done? I mean, now? Today?"

"In a few months," Greg replied.

Paul said, "If the demonstration works, we can cut the costs of Moonbase by half or more."

"And prove to the world that nanotechnology has useful applications here and now," Greg added.

Joanna looked from her son to her husband, then back again. "Greg, that's—beautiful!"

"I think it can work," Greg said. "I'm certain it could work."

"You might be right," Paul admitted. "Gripes, we could build a viable Moonbase right away and start making a profit off it within a couple of years."

"Or sooner," said Greg.

Joanna smiled happily. "This is a fine idea, Greg."

"You're right," Paul agreed.

Greg put his hand out. "Can we work together on this? You and me, Paul?"

Grabbing his proffered hand in his own, Paul said, "Damned right."

"Good," said Greg, beaming. "And once the meeting reconvenes, I've got another little surprise for you."

Paul looked at his wristwatch. "Hey, we'd better get them back to work."

It took a few minutes to get the directors settled back in their chairs around the long conference table.

"All right," Paul said. "Before we get into the regular agenda, we should take nominations for the new chairman of the beard."

Greg spoke up immediately. "I nominate Joanna Masterson—er, Stavenger." Paul stared at him.

"Second," said the elderly woman vice-chair. She's happy with the title she's got, Paul thought; she doesn't want any real responsibility.

"Move we close the nominations," Greg said.

"Second."

Numb with surprise, Paul looked at Joanna, sitting acrossthe table from him. She seemed just as shocked as he was. "Automatically, he called for discussion.

"Let's go straight to a vote," said the old man at Paul's right.

"Let's make it by acclamation," said the vice-chair.

"Hear, hear!"

Paul broke into a grin and got to his feet. The entire board stood up and applauded their new chairperson. Paul went around to Joanna and ceremonially guided her to the empty chair at the head of the table.

The board members sat down, obviously expecting Joanna to make a little acceptance speech. Standing there at the head of the table, she glanced at Paul, then looked at Greg.

"Thank you," she said, her eyes still locked on her son. "This is totally unexpected and a little scary."

Paul noticed that Joanna was resting her fingers lightly on the table top. Her hands were steady, her voice firm.

"I want you to know that I will do my very best to serve you as chairperson of this board. I will do everything I can to fulfill the trust you've shown in me."

Greg's eyes were on his mother, his face blank, emotionless.

"The first order of business I would like to address," Joanna went on, "is unity. I'know my late husband's death has upset many members of this board. And Brad Arnold's, too. But I ask you now—all of you—to put these deaths behind us and work together for a stronger, more productive company."

"Hear, hear," muttered one of the older men.

"I expect no recriminations and no accusations," Joanna said, still looking at Greg. "I want cooperation and harmony. It's useless to dwell on the past; we must look to the future."

They all applauded, Greg the loudest of all. Paul noticed that Joanna said not another word about Bradley Arnold, nor did any of the other board members. Sic transit gloria mundi, he said to himself. Gone and forgotten.

SAVANNAH

The next three months were the happiest Joanna had ever known. Her son and her husband were working together, forging a bond between them, learning to know and respect one another.

Greg dined frequently at the house. He gave up his apartment in Manhattan to live full-time in his Savannah condo. He and Paul travelled together frequently to San Jose to check the progress of the nanotech program. They had agreed that the first goal would be to have the nanomachines build a complete shelter out on Mare Nubium totally out of local raw materials from the lunar regolith.

"I think we should put the site pretty far out on the mare," Greg suggested at one of their meetings.

Kris Cardenas arched a questioning eyebrow. The three of them were in her cubbyhole of an office, hunched around the tiny circular table she used instead of a desk.

"If anything goes wrong," Greg explained, "we don't want the bugs infesting any of the existing shelters."

"What could go wrong?" Cardenas demanded.

Paul intervened. "I think Greg is right. This is the first time we're trying this. No harm in being a little on the conservative side."

"But we've already programmed a temperature limit into the bugs. They won't operate at an ambient higher than thirty degrees."

"Celsius," Paul said.

"That's what—ninety degrees Fahrenheit?" Greg asked.

"Eighty-six," said Cardenas. "So the bugs can't work or multiply on the surface during- the lunar daytime. Even if they somehow started to spread, you'd have two weeks of lunar night to dig 'em up and get rid of them."

"Still," Greg insisted, "we ought to put the demonstration some distance away" from existing facilities. Don't you think so, Paul?"

"I guess so. No harm being careful."

Cardenas looked more angry than hurt. "You guys act as if we're in a Frankenstein mode. We're using assemblers here, y'know, not gobblers."

"Still," Paul said, "the test site ought to be remote enough so that if anything does go wrong—"

"It won't," she snapped.

"If something unforeseen happens," Paul went on, "it'll happen far enough out in the boondocks so none of the existing tempos'll be threatened."

"Tempos?" Cardenas asked.

"That's what the shelters are called," Greg explained. "They're supposed to be temporary shelters."

She blinked those deeply blue eyes. "They've been in use for nearly ten years, some of them, haven't they?"

"That's right," Paul said.

"Some "temporary.""

With a tight smile, Paul said, "When the history of Moonbase's first hundred years gets written, you'll see that they're temporary."

"I should live so long," Cardenas muttered.

"I thought your nanobugs were going to allow you to live a thousand years or so," Paul teased.

"Once the friggin' FDA lets us start using them in human patients, they will."

Greg leaned back in his chair and steepled his long, sensitive fingers in front of his face. "Do you mean that you wouldn't inject nanomachines into yourself if you thought they could improve your medical condition, just because the FDA hasn't approved them?"

"If we had bugs that I knew would protect me from tumors or keep my arteries from clogging I'd swallow 'em in a hot second," she said. "But we haven't progressed that far yet, and we can't make much more progress on the medical end until we get an FDA okay to do human trials on the simple stuff we have developed, y'know."

Greg looked thoughtful. "So the medical work is on hold."

"Right."

"But you're making progress on the toxic waste bugs."

"The gobblers? For sure."

Greg nodded as if satisfied.

That evening Paul invited Cardenas and Greg to dinner at the Stanford Court, in San Francisco. She showed up with her husband, whom she introduced as the finest neurosurgeon in the Bay area.

Paul shook hands with Pete Cardenas. He was as slim as a dancer, his skin a shade darker than Paul's own. His given name must really be Pedro, Paul thought.

"So this is where you get your medical inputs," Paul said.

"Is that supposed to be a pun?" Kris asked, pretending suspicion.

Paul felt his mouth drop open. "I didn't mean—"

Greg guffawed. It was the first time Paul had seen his step-son actually relaxed enough to laugh out loud. And it has to be at my expense, he groused inwardly. But it was good to see that the kid at least knew how to laugh.

Greg had come into the dining room alone, even though Paul had urged him to bring a date. They had talked about it during the helicopter ride from San Jose.

But Greg had said, "You're not bringing a date, are you?"

"Hey, I'm a married man," Paul had replied.

"Yes," Greg had said. "That's right, isn't it?"

With the two men in her life working shoulder-to-shoulder, Joanna put her energies into her new position as chairwoman of the board of Masterson Aerospace Corporation.

To her surprise she found that she enjoyed the work. And the newfound respect that Masterson's employees gave her. Before, when she happened to visit the corporate offices, she was the boss's wife. Now, she was chairwoman of the board.

She couldn't .exactly fire people; but she could see to it that they were fired by others.

All her life she had been the reflection of the men around her. As her father's daughter she had been one of the brightest young lights in Savannah's social scene: a fine catch for some worthy young man. Her father had married her off to Gregory Masterson II, who had a bright future ahead of him as the heir to Masterson Aerospace. Joanna's marriage saved her father's failing fortune; Masterson money propped up the old man's final years.

Then she had been the wife of Gregory Masterson, outwardly a happily-married woman with not a trouble in the world. Except that her husband drank and whored and had the business sense of a butterfly combined with the stubbornness of a jackass. And a mean streak that could cut deep without ever raising a hand. Joanna was a leader of Savannah society—but she knew the whispers that trailed behind her back. Gregory slept with any and every woman he could get his hands on. She bore it with as much dignity as she could pretend to, not knowing what else she could do.

She was the mother of Gregory Masterson III, and the thought of how devastating to her son would be a bitterly-contested divorce stayed her hand for years, for decades. She lived for her son and tried to raise him to be the kind of man she had hoped her husband would be.

And then she met Paul Stavenger and her life turned upside-down. For the first time she let herself be loved, wonderfully, excitingly, foolishly loved by another man.

It had almost turned to ashes. Gregory's suicide and Greg's almost insanely jealous accusations had nearly torn her apart. But now Greg and Paul were working harmoniously together. Greg had finally accepted his father's suicide and his mother's new marriage.

Joanna hesitated to tell Greg that she was expecting a baby. Paul's son. Several times she had been on the verge of telling him, and each time she refrained. Wait, she told herself. Give his relationship with Paul a little more time to ripen. The two men are getting along so well together, don't throw this at Greg. Not yet.

In the meantime, she found that she enjoyed being chairwoman of Masterson's board of directors. She was a person in her own right now. Not a wife or a mother but chairwoman of the board. She was determined to be the best board chairperson Masterson had ever known.

Joanna threw herself into a complete review of the corporation's product lines. The Clipperships were the only profitable products Masterson had, although the prospects for the Windowall TV screens looked extremely bright. Still, she could see from the marketing department's forecasts that there was a disaster curve looming about three years ahead. New orders for the rocket vehicles were going to taper off dramatically in three years.

Sales of the Clipperships will have saturated the market by then, the reports told her. The corporation will have sold as many as the world's airlines wanted or felt they needed. Sales would dwindle terribly.

What then? Joanna asked herself. The other divisions -commercial aircraft, electronics, and satellite manufacturing—were barely holding their own in very competitive markets. The Windowall development might be the salvation of the orbital manufacturing group, but the nanotechnology division and Moonbase were deeply in the red and showed no prospects of profitability for years to come.

Unless Greg and Paul can pull a rabbit out of the hat with their lunar nanotech demonstration. She knew Paul's reasoning by heart. If Moonbase can be developed into a viable resource center, the costs of orbital manufacturing will drop by a factor of twenty. The two will be synergistic: as the manufacturing facilities in Earth orbit grow more profitable, their demand for raw materials will make Moonbase more profitable, too.

She looked up from the charts on her computer screen. And if we can use nanotechnology to build Moonbase faster and more cheaply, the nanotech division will begin to find markets on Earth, as well.

But it's such a gamble, Joanna knew. It's piling one shaky bet on top of another and even a third. With that disaster curve waiting for us, just three years ddwn the road.

She spent weeks thinking about the problem, discussing it with division managers and other members of the board of directors. She consulted experts from outside the company in finance, marketing, even forecasters of technological trends.

She did not tell either Paul or Greg what she was doing. They were happily working together and she had no intention of interfering or upsetting them.

Slowly, over many weeks, she gathered together a picture of what a prudent corporate leader would do. Sell off the divisions that were still marginally profitable, divisions that still had some market value. Drop the divisions that were not profitable. Lay off as many employees as you had to and downsize the corporation.

The only viable market that we can depend on, three years from now, is selling parts and maintenance services for the CUpperships. Maybe the Windowalls, but it's too early to bank on that. We should be preparing the corporation for a smaller market, trim off all the excess fat and get ready for some leaner years. Ten years from now there will be a market for Clipperships again: new, bigger, more efficient Clipperships. But we've got to be able to last through the lean times in between then and now.

She knew Paul would never go for it. Would Greg? A few months ago he would, but now he seems completely on Paul's side, ready to risk everything for the sake of this nanotech demonstration on the Moon.

Joanna mentally counted up the votes on the board of directors. If I suggest a downsizing plan it would pass, she realized. It would also break Paul's heart and ruin our marriage.

But it would save Masterson Aerospace Corporation.

MARE NUBIUM

The damned ankle really hurts.

Paul limped along, trying to make up for the time he had lost by drifting off course. Like being on a pissin' treadmill, he grumbled to himself. You keep humpin' along but you aren't getting anywhere. That's why he had never liked gyms or exercise equipment, even when he had first pulled duty on the old space stations that hung in zero gee and exercise was required every day.

Get my exercise in bed, Paul had bragged. Keep my heart in good shape nature's way. Keep my whole system pumpin' good. Yeah.

He was panting now and that was a bad sign. Exhaustion. How long have I been out here? He lifted his left arm as he staggered along, but between the dust clinging to his visor and the blurriness of his vision he could not see the figures on the digital clock clearly.

Long enough, he said to himself. Too long.

One foot in front of the other. But the ankle really hurts. Can't be a fracture, I wouldn't be able to put any weight on it. Chipped bone, maybe. More likely a sprain. But a sprain shouldn't hurt so much when you walk on it, should it? At least it makes me stop fussin' the chafed heel on the other foot.

He remembered his grandfather's grumbling remedy for a headache: 'Drop an anvil on your toes."

It's really hot. Pissin' suit's cooling system must be breaking down. Feels like I'm draggin' my ass across the Sahara Desert. Worse. At least there you have air to breathe.

A pang of fear raced through him like an electrical current. How much oxygen is left? How much time do I have?

He coughed. His throat was dry and scratchy as sandpaper. No more water left. Oxygen running out Suit's filling with carbon dioxide. I'm gonna choke to death on my own pissin' fumes.

Keep moving! he screamed at himself. Long as you can move you've got a chance. You must be getting close to the! tempo. It's gotta be near here. Keep pushing.j

The only good news was the chirping of the GPS signal in his earphones. Guide me in, you noisy little bird, Paul prayed silently. Keep talkin' to me, you pile of germanium. Sing me a song.

He coughed again. Gettin' hotter in here. No water left.

He stumbled on a loose rock and went down face first. Long years of training and experience took over and Paul put out his gloved hands, let his arms flex when they touched the dusty ground, and pushed himself to a standing position again. And saw, through his fogged and dust-smeared visor, a' single red light glowing just above the abrupt horizon.

It's a mirage, he told himself. You want to see it so pissin' bad your brain is painting stupid pictures for you.

But then he thought, there's no mirages on the Moon. Least, I never heard of one.

Blinking, limping, he stared at the red beacon. That's the kind of light they put on top of an antenna mast at the tempos.

"That's the tempo!" he shouted, his voice cracking into a choking, hacking cough.

He heard somebody cackling weirdly. Funniest thing in the world if you ran out of oxygen within sight of the tempo. Funniest thing in two worlds. Man, you could die laughing.

SAVANNAH

Looking back on it, Joanna realized it was inevitable that Paul would insist on going to the Moon for the nanotech demonstration.

"You don't have to be physically there," she told her husband, time and again.

"But I want to be," Paul always countered.

Joanna tried every tactic she knew.

"You are much to valuable to the corporation to go running off to the Moon just to watch a demonstration project."

Paul grinned at her. "Don't worry. Madam Chairperson; I'm well insured. The corporation won't get hurt financially if something happens to me."

"But what about me? What about our baby?"

He hesitated at that. But then, "This is for the baby. Don't you see? I want this demonstration to succeed. It's got to succeed! The whole future of the corporation depends on it."

"It will succeed or fail whether you're there or not," Joanna insisted.

"Maybe."

"You've got a God complex!" she accused.

He shook his head, very seriously. "If I stay here and the demo screws up, I'll blame myself for not being there to make sure it goes right."

"That's a God complex," Joanna pointed out

"That's an experienced executive," Paul retorted. "The crew always works better when the captain is on the bridge. Don't you know that?"

"Sheer machismo."

Since Greg was working so well with Paul, she turned to her son for support.

To her surprise, Greg agreed with Paul. "I think he ough to be there. This is a crucial experiment and we've got to do everything we can to make sure it comes out right."

His newfound professional demeanor surprised and pleased her—except that his position on the matter was opposed to her own.

At dinner one evening at the house, Paul suggested that he go to Moonbase with him. "You've never been up there. You ought to see it."

"You want me to go with you?" Greg asked. He looked a: surprised as Joanna felt.

"Sure," said Paul. "Why not?"

"Oh no!" Joanna said. Firmly.

Paul was bubbling with preparations for the coming trip to Moonbase. He wants to go sobadly, Joanna understood at last His heart is there, in that godforsaken barren desolation. No here. Not with me.

Greg, she saw, was nowhere near as enthusiastic about travelling to the Moon as Paul was.

"I'm not going to have both of you out there at the same time," Joanna said. "That's too much."

Paul gave her a strange expression. Only later, much later, did she realize that he felt she was willing to let him risk his life on the Moon, even though reluctantly, but she absolutely would not tolerate her son taking the same risk.

"I'm going to Moonbase," Paul said flatly.

"Greg stays here," she answered.

Dinner was served in cold silence.

Days later, Greg took Paul aside at the corporate offices and said, "I'd really like to go with you, but I can't worry my mother so much. She'd be frantic."

Paul looked at his wife's son. He had a difficult time picturing Joanna being frantic over anything.

But he said, "Yeah, I suppose you're right I'll go, you stay and hold her hand."

"I can keep in touch with you through the VR system," Greg suggested.

With a wan smile, Paul said, "Good as it is, virtual reality isn't the same as being there."

Greg shrugged his shoulders. "I agree. But it'll have to do." ;'Yeah," said Paul.

Greg and, Joanna went to the company airstrip to watch Paul depart for Florida and the Clippership launch to the space station that was the first step on his trip to Moonbase. A contingent of San Jose technicians were waiting for him at Cape Canaveral, and a man-sized container of nanomachines rested in the rocket's cargo hold.

"You're crying," Greg said as he and Joanna watched Paul's plane take off.

"It's just the dust," Joanna insisted, turning from the ramp toutside the hangar toward the limousine that was waiting to take them home: Joanna to her house, Greg to his condo in town.

She actually saw more of her husband over the next few days than she had for weeks: Paul called her regularly from the space station and even from the transfer rocket that took him from the space station to the clutch of buried shelters that he called Moonbase.

"Well, I'm here," Paul's image said to her from the display screen in her bedroom. "Landed half an hour ago."

"I was wondering when you'd call." Joanna was sitting up in bed, a small mountain of pillows behind her. She had been waiting for his call for more than an hour, staring at the schedule for Paul's flight when his call finally came through, telling herself that it takes some time to get out of the landing vehicle and into the living quarters of the underground shelter, so it was silly to worry about him.

"Must be after midnight, your time, right?"

"It doesn't matter," she said to the screen. "I'm just glad you got there safely."

There was nearly a three-second lag while her words hurtled to the Moon at the speed of light and his response raced back to her.

Paul broke into a big grin. "Hey, it's a lot safer here than it is in New York."

Joanna forced a laugh. "I suppose so. I'm glad you're all right, though."

Again the lag. Then, "Well, I'll be here for a couple of days getting things set up. Then we go out to the remote site."

"You'll be travelling by hopper?"

She noticed, while waiting for his reply, a good-looking young woman in the background of the crowded underground shelter. For an instant she thought it was Melissa, but no, this woman was younger and either white or Hispanic.

"By tractor. We've got too much cargo to haul for a hopper to lift. Had to throw my weight around to get one," Paul said. "They're all in pretty constant use."

"The oxygen plant?"

Were there other women up there? Joanna wondered. She'd have to check the files, she decided, and see who was with Paul in those intimate quarters. Vaguely she recalled hearing jokes about living conditions at Moonbase: something about spacesuits built for two.

"Seems funny," Paul was saying. "The crew here is breakin' their humps putting this oxygen facility together, and if the nanobugs work right, we'll be able to pull oxy directly out of the rocks and even make water with it."

They chatted for nearly half an hour, always with that annoying little delay between them. Paul looks so happy, Joanna thought He's in his element. He loves being there. He's only playing at corporate business down here; what he really wants is to be on the Moon. He feels free there.

Free of me, she thought. Free to sample the younger women who have the same love for that frontier as he does.

Finally she said goodnight, pleading a full schedule and the need to get up early the next morning.

"Yeah," Paul said, once her words reached him. "We're gonna have a busy day, too. Goodnight, Joanna." Then he hunched closer to the screen and lowered his voice. "I love you, baby." And Joanna found that her eyes were misting again.

The following evening Joanna asked Greg to come to the house and have dinner with her.

I'd love to," her son replied. He arrived at the house with a big bouquet of flowers. To brighten up the place," he said.

Faced with the choice of eating in the ormal dining room or the kitchen's breakfast nook, Joanna chose the dining room. The butler used Greg's bouquet as a centerpiece on the long, polished cherrywood table, and set their two places with Joanna at the head of the table and Greg at her right.

"So how's he doing up there?" Greg asked as they spooned their soup.

"I haven't heard from him all day."

"He must be awfully busy."

"Yes. Of course."

"He'll call later. They're on Greenwich time up there. All the space facilities are."

"I know."

"So it's…' Greg pressed a stud on his wristwatch, ". . . God, it's almost one in the morning there!"

Joanna's eyes widened briefly.

Quickly, Greg said, "If he's out at the remote site, maybe the communications link isn't there for a transmission to Earth."

"He could relay a call through," Joanna said.

"If anything had happened, we'd hear about it right away," Greg said. "There's nothing to worry about, really."

With a weary sigh, Joanna said, "He knows I worry about him every time he goes into space. To him it's fun, exciting. But it frightens me so!"

"He should have called you," Greg agreed. "It's not very sensitive of him to leave you here worrying about him."

Joanna studied her son from across the dining table. Greg's a grown man, she told herself. He's matured so much in the past few months. Could he take the reins of the company if anything happened to Paul? Could the two of us handle all that responsibility?

"There's no reason to be frightened," Greg was saying. "After all, Mom, you went to the space station with him, didn't you?"

"Once," she said.

"It wasn't so terrible, was it?"

"I was sick as a dog every minute," Joanna said.

Greg laughed. "Really? I heard rumors about that but I didn't believe them. I guess it wasn't much of a honeymoon for you, then."

"Did you tell Melissa to seduce Paul?" Joanna blurted, surprised to hear herself ask.

Greg flinched with surprise. "Tell Melissa? Me? I wouldn't even speak to the bitch."

"Do you really hate her that much?"

His face twisting, Greg snarled, "She was one of Dad's concubines. Did you know that? Then she switched to Paul. And then she came on to me. She's nothing but a slut."

"You told me that she wanted your baby," Joanna said. "Perhaps she really loved you."

"Love? What's love got to do with it? It's nothing but her biological clock ticking. She'll have a baby with whoever she can talk into bed. Maybe she'll have Paul's baby."

"I'm having Paul's baby," Joanna whispered.

His mouth dropped open. His eyes flared. "What did you say?"

"I'm pregnant. You're going to have a brother."

Greg's face went white. Trembling visibly, he pushed his chair away from the table and tried to stand up. The effort seemed too much for him.

"You… you're going to have his baby?" Greg was panting as if he had run a thousand meters. "His baby?"

Joanna nodded solemnly.

"Abort it! Get rid of it!"

"I can't do that."

"You can't have his baby," Greg seemed about to dissolve in tears. "Don't you see? It's the last straw! The final nail in my coffin."

"No," Joanna said. "It won't be like that."

"The hell it won't! He'll want to give the corporation to his own son, not to me!" Greg howled. "He'll push me out of the way, and you'll help him!" Just then the butler came in with the main course.

"Get out!" Greg screamed at him. "Get out of here!"

Wide-eyed, the butler looked to Joanna. She nodded and he disappeared back into the kitchen.

"Greg, dear," she said soothingly, "try to calm down. This isn't going to change anything between us."

"It changes everything!" he snapped. "I got Brad out of the way just to make sure. But what good is that now?"

"What do you mean? What are you talking about?"

"His baby! You're going to give him a son so he can get rid of me once and for all. He murdered my father and now you're helping him to kill me! Even after he's dead he'll still be killing me!"

Greg lurched to his feet, swung one fist across the table and knocked china and glassware crashing to the floor. Joanna jerked with sudden fear. Her son was standing over her, fists clenched, murderous rage boiling through him.

"I knew he was out to get me, but I didn't think you would help him!"

"No one's out to get you, Greg," Joanna said, fighting to keep her voice calm. "Now sit down and—"

"You're all against me! All of you! Brad, him, even you. But you'll see. I'm smarter than he is. Smarter than all of you. He'll never come back to you. Never! I'm going to be the master here, not him!"

He reached over the table and grabbed the vase with his flowers. "I'm going to destroy him. Like this!" And, raising the glass vase over his head, he smashed it on the table top. It shattered into bits, water and flowers exploding from it

Joanna sat there, paralyzed with shock and fear. Greg's insane, she thought. He's homicidal.

Shaking his fist at her, Greg bellowed, "He's not coming back to you. He'll never leave the Moon. Never!"

Terrified, Joanna gasped, "What are you talking about?"

"You'll see," he repeated. "You're either with me or agains me now. You've got to decide. You get rid of my little brother and we can live just as happy as we were before Paul took you away from me. Otherwise…"

Joanna stared at her son, barely recognizing this wild-eyei maniac who stood over her so threateningly.

Abruptly, Greg strode out of the dining room, turning at the doorway to shout, "It's your decision. Him or me. Then he left.

Joanna realized the butler was standing at the doorway to the kitchen, white-faced. She shooed him back into the kitchen.

What have I done? Joanna asked herself, looking over the dripping shambles of the dining table. I worked so hard to bring them together and now…

Greg's gone insane. He hates me because I'm going to have Paul's baby.

Paul wants to be on the Moon and Greg hates the sight of me, Joanna said to herself. I'm all alone. They'll both leave me and I'll be all alone.

No, she realized. Not alone. I have a new life within me. I'm not alone.

MARE NUBIUM

Like a madman Paul tottered on toward the glowing red beacon atop the tempo's communications mast. Dragging his bad leg, staggering, gasping the last fumes of oxygen left in his tank, he pushed himself single-mindedly toward the safety that lay so tantalizingly just beyond the short lunar horizon.

It's just over the horizon, he told himself. You can make it. Just over the horizon.

You know what the horizon is? taunted a voice in his head. An imaginary line that recedes as you approach it.

World peace is just over the horizon. Fusion energy is just over the horizon. The answer to all your prayers—just over the pissin' horizon.

Through his smeared, fogged visor Paul saw that beckoning red eye rising higher and higher. He could not make out the mast itself against the black lunar sky, but he knew that with each step he was closer to safety.

Unless it's a pissin' star, that sardonic voice jeered at him. You could be heading for Mars, for all you know.

No, dammit, it's the tempo. Gotta be.

Gotta be.

The ground was rising slightly. His right leg collapsed under him and he pitched forward again. This time he put out his hands as usual, but didn't bother to push himself up to a standing position. Crawl, man. Like a little baby, down on all fours. You can make it. Just crawl right along.

He was getting dizzy, his vision blurring. Man, what I wouldn't give for just a ten-minute break. Even five minutes.

Wouldn't work, though'. Not unless you can hold your breath for five minutes. .

Suddenly he wanted to laugh, remembering a conversation with McPherson back when he had first become a division manager. Hie lawyer wanted Paul to make out a will. He seemed surprised that Paul had never had one.

"You've got to make arrangements for handling your estate," McPherson had said, very serious.

"That's easy," Paul had told him. "I want to spend my last cent with my last breath."

Coming up on your last breath pretty soon, he knew. If you're lucky—damned motherhumpin' shitfaced lucky—you'll suck up the last oxygen molecule in the tank the instant you get inside the tempo's airlock.

It almost worked out that way.

Paul looked up from his crawling and saw the mound of rubble that marked the buried shelter. He could even see the comm mast, he was so close. No hopper, though. Only a tractor sitting outside the airlock on four ludicrously thin, springy wheels.

Who gives a flyin' fuck? he said to himself as he pushed himself to his feet and staggered, limped, hopped on his one good foot, holding his breath, reaching out with both hands and flopped into the open airlock that stood in front of the buried shelter.

He pounded the yellow-glowing phosphorescent button that activated the lock. The outside door creaked shut, although Paul could hear no sound in the lunar vacuum. He imagined the creaking as the curving door slid shut on its track, grinding stray dust particles in its path.

Bracing himself inside the phonebooth-sized airlock, Paul heard the hissing of air and even the chug of the pump. Most beautiful sounds in the world, he thought Beats Duke Ellington any day.

The overhead light went on and the indicator panel's green light glowed to life. Trembling, hoping this wasn't the last hallucination of a man dying of oxygen deprivation, Paul fumbled with the catch of his visor and slid it up. Sweetest air in two worlds.

He took deep lungfuls of the stuff. Next sonofabitch complains about canned air is gonna get my knuckles in his mouth, Paul promised himself.

The indicator pad told him the pressure in the airlock was high enough for him to open the inner hatch. He knew he should clean the suit first. Must be carrying six hundred pounds of dust on me.

But he was too tired, too exhilarated, too anxious to get inside the shelter and out of this foul-smelling suit even to begin vacuuming.

He opened the inner hatch, clumped in his boots down the steps into the shelter's single compartment, wincing every time he stepped with his right foot.

It was a typical temporary shelter. A long aluminum cylinder'tthat had been laid down in a trench scooped out by a bulldozer and then buried beneath a couple of feet of loose regolith rubble to protect it from the meteoroids that pelted the Moon's surface and the harsh swings of temperature from daylight to Anight. And from the radiation pouring in unimpeded from deep space.

Radiation. Paul wanted desperately to flop on one of the lovely, beckoning bunks that lined the far end of the shelter, I but he knew he had to worm himself out of his suit first. And check his radiation patch.

It seemed to take hours, removing the helmet, then the backpack, the gloves, boots, leggings and finally wriggling out of the suit's torso. The dust was thick enough to make him cough. Hope it doesn't foul up the air vents, Paul thought

His radiation patch had turned yellow. Not good, but not as bad as red would have been.

Hey, you're alive and safe with nothing worse than a sprained ankle and a radiation dose that'll take a year or so off the ass end of your life. Count your blessings, man.

He limped to the nearest bunk and flopped onto it But before he could close his eyes he thought of Greg.

I'm not home free yet He might still win this.

I should have known he'd try to kill me. All those weeks of his smiling and working with me. Started when I agreed to the nanotech demonstration. He's hated me all along, every inch of the way. I should have known.

Ought to call the base, get them to patch me through to Joanna. The kid's tried to kill me. Already murdered Tink and Wojo. I ought to warn Joanna. He might turn on her, try to kill my child.

But he was too exhausted to do anything but close his eyes and sleep.

ALPHONSUS

Paul had been in good spirits when he arrived at Moonbase. The transfer spacecraft that took him from the space station in low Earth orbit to the giant crater Alphonsus was an ungainly collection of tankage, antennas, cargo containers and a spherical passenger module with two bulbous observation ports. With its spindly, spraddling legs the craft looked like a huge metallic spider about to pounce on some hapless insect.

As the lander literally fell toward the Moon's surface, Paul commandeered a spot at one of the observation ports and hung there weightlessly, watching Alphonsus rush up at him. The crater's ringwall mountains looked deceptively soft, tired and slumped from eons of erosion by dust-sized meteorites that sandpapered their slopes to almost glassy smoothness.

It was hard to get any sense of scale staring out at the barren, pockmarked face of the Moon. He knew Alphonsus was more than seventy miles across, a crater big enough to swallow all of Greater New York, from Newark to Bridgeport. But as he hovered in free fall, watching, it merely looked like a big circle of mountains with a dimple in its middle.

The floor of the crater was cracked, criss-crossed with sinuous rilles. Once in a while a whiff of ammonia or methane or one of the noble gases would seep out from the Moon's deep interior through those cracks. It was one of the reasons Moonbase had been sited inside Alphonsus's circling mountains: one day they would drill for the methane and ammonia, valuable sources of life-supporting volatiles.

Paul saw the unfinished oxygen plant and a crew of construction technicians milling around it like spacesuited ants.

Oxygen was the most valuable resource of them all, in space. If Moonbase ever became profkable, it would be by selling oxygen to the factories and other facilities in Earth orbit.

The spacecraft tilted over so that it could land on its rocket exhausts, and the/funar landscape shifted out of Paul's view. Clasping the handgrips on either side of the port, he felt the slightest of pressures, just a gentle nudge. And then the soft thump of landing. Weight returned, but it was only a sixth oi the weight he felt on Earth. This was the Moon. Paul felt as if he were returning home.

It took less than ten minutes for the spacesuited ground crew to connect the flexible tunnel to the lander's hatch. I wish the ground crews at commercial airports worked so fast, Paul thought as he made his way, slightly bent over, through the ribbed tunnel and into the main entrance of Moonbase.

It was hardly grand. Moonbase consisted of a dozen 'temporary' shelters, each buried beneath piles of regolith rubble and interconnected by tunnels barely high enough to stand in. The tempos, developed out of modules for space stations, reminded Paul of mobile homes: long and narrow cramped and confining, buzzing with electrical machinery and the constant rattle of air pumps, lit by ghastly overhead fluorescents that made everyone's complexion look sickly, smelling of sweat and machine oil and microwaved fast food and too many people crowded too close together.

Paul loved it.

Wojo was at the receiving desk, checking out the cargo that the lander was unloading, his computer screen split between the invoice list and a camera view of the spacesuited ground crew hauling out the crates from the lander's cargo platforms.

"So you've decided to come live with the proletariat for a while," Wojo said pleasantly. He was a bulky man, big in the shoulders, with a beer gut and the glittering eyes of a seeker after truth. Roughly Paul's age, Wojo's hair and ragged beard were already dead white and thinning. He insisted that it was from the radiation dosage he received when he worked out on the lunar surface.

"How're you doing, Wojo?" Paul asked, sliding his one travelbag from his shoulder and letting it thump softly on the plastic flooring.

"Still trying to get those narrow-minded bean counters in the insurance office to admit that the company owes me premium pay," Wojo grumbled, not taking his eyes from his display screen.

It was an old, old argument. Wojo demanded compensation for his tractor maintenance work out on the surface, over and above the hazardous duty pay called for in his employment contract.

Paul had steered clear of the fight while he'd been Wojo's division manager. Now that he was CEO he feared the man would ask him to intervene.

But Wojo had not done that, so far. "They got a new manager in the so-called human resources department. A man so narrow-minded he can look through a keyhole with both eyes.

Paul laughed. "You don't like him?"

Wojo looked up and gave Paul a withering glance. "He tells lies, his feet stink, and he don't love Jesus."

"Yeah," Paul said. "You don't like him."

"He'll make a ton of money for you. He's so tight-fisted his palms have never seen the light of day."

Paul made his way past the receiving desk before Wojo could ask for any favors. Jinny Anson, pert and blonde and feisty, directed him through the tunnels to the sleeping quarters they had reserved or him.

"I tried to find you a corner that's at least a little quieter than most. No snorers on either side of you, and you can barely hear the pumps."

"Thanks," Paul said. "I appreciate the special treatment."

"Nothing but the best for our new CEO."

"You're just trying to butter up the boss," he kidded. Yet he realized that this was the first time the CEO had visited Moonbase.

Jinny led him through two of the interconnected shelters, down another tunnel, and along the narrow central passageway of a third tempo: She's a chipper little handful, Paul thought. Fills out her coveralls in all the right places. Then he frowned inwardly. Cut that out. You made a promise to Joanna and you're gonna keepit. Yeah, he agreed silently. But it won't be easy.

"How's the air recycling plant going?" Paul asked, trying to put his focus on business.

"Humming along fine," Jinny replied. "Getting close to eighty percent efficiency. Gimme another few months and I'll have the loop closed good, I betcha."

"Really?"

"Uh-huh. Then we'll only need new oxy for what leaks through the airlocks, little stuff like that."

"Good."

They stopped at the last partition; Paul saw his name neatly printed on the card alongside the doorway. And Lev Brudnoy's name on the partition across the narrow corridor.

He doesn't snore, Paul thought, but he grunts a lot during the mating season. Which is always, for him.

"Not quite an executive suite, huh?" Jinny said, pulling back the accordion-fold partition to reveal a standard habitation compartment, one hundred ninety-six cubic feet that had to serve as sleeping quarters and office. No bigger than anyone else's quarters.

On a space station, in zero gee, a hundred ninety-six cubic feet was almost generous. Here on the Moon it came close to inducing claustrophobia.

Paul shrugged and gave the standard line, "Beats sleeping outside."

"Not by much," Jinny replied with the standard counter.

He could smell a soft flowery fragrance. "How do you stay so fresh in these sardine cans?"

She smiled prettily. "I just took my weekly shower a couple of hours ago. In your honor. Ask me again in a few days."

A vision of her lithe body glistening with sweat filled Paul's mind for an instant. "Pheromone heaven," he muttered.

"More like pheromone hell," Jinny said. "Head colds are a blessing around here."

Paul mumbled, "Yeah. Maybe so."

"My cubbyhole's at the other end of this row," she said, grinning. "In case you get lonely."

"I'm a married man," Paul said quickly, thinking as he spoke that it sounded terribly nerdy.

Jinny's grin turned saucy. "Well, just in case…"

Paul thanked her for the escort service and shooed her off, then went into his compartment, dropped onto the bunk, and immediately went to the desktop computer to call Joanna. But he was thinking of how pleasing it would be if Jinny really buttered up the boss; or vice versa.

"I just don't trust machines I can't see," Wojo grumbled.

Paul and the tractor teleoperator were sitting in the galley, hunched over Paul's hand-sized computer.

"If these things work we can let them do all the construction out on the surface and you can sit down here in comfort and count your insurance benefits."

Wojo fixed him with a baleful stare. The man's breath smelled terrible. Like the exhaust fan from a brewery, Paul thought. But where in the hell would he get beer up here?

"Just how smart are these slime-sucking bugs?" Wojo asked.

"Like ants," said Paul.

Wojo scratched at his shaggy beard. "Read a book once—"

"No!" Paul pretended shock.

With a small grin, Wojo said, "You'd be surprised what I'm capable of. Anyway, this book was about army ants in South America. Every once in a while they run amok and strip the whole festering jungle right down to the bark and bone. Don't leave anything alive in their path."

"These bugs aren't like that," Paul said.

"How do you know?"

Paul had to think a moment. "Well, for one thing, they're programmed to stop functioning at temperatures above thirty degrees."

Wojo heaved his bulk up from the spindly chair and trudged over to the thermostat on the curving wall of the galley. "It's twenty-seven degrees in here right now. Just a smidge over eighty, Fahrenheit."

"I thought it felt warm in here."

Walking back to the long, narrow table and settling ponderously into the little chair across from Paul, Wojo complained, "We need more radiator surface outside. Only way to get rid of heat is to radiate it away. You know that. I know that. But your pus-infested, maggot-brained, excrement-eating systems engineers sitting comfy and cool in their air-conditioned offices in Savannah haven't seen fit to honor our humble requests for more radiators."

"But thermal conduction—"

"Isn't worth a thimbleful of warm spit," Wojo said. "We're dug in nice and deep. The rock outside our shells conducts heat about as well as a politician tells the unvarnished truth."

"So turning the thermostats down won't help?"

With a massive shake of his shaggy head, Wojo said, "All you'd do is put an extra load on the air conditioners and the radiators. Which we need about as much as a prostitute needs an honest cop."

I'll get you more radiators," Paul said.

"Thank you kindly, sir," said Wojo. "Now, to get back to these mechanical viruses you brought up here with you—you say they're programmed to shut down at thirty Cee?"

"That's right."

"All that means is that they won't work out on the surface in daylight. Even at our current level of discomfort, they could be doing whatever it is they're programmed to do in here right now. How would we stop 'em?"

"Each set of the nanomachines is programmed to utilize one type of atom or molecule. When they run out of that material, they stop functioning."

"And what materials are these bugs programmed to use?"

Paul punched up the list on his computer.

Squinting at the small screen, Wojo mumbled, "Titanium, aluminum, silicon—for the love of sweet Jesus, they could munch their way right through the whole body of the Moon and come out the other side!"

"No, no," Paul insisted. "We have other safeguards."

"You better show 'em to me."

Tapping on the miniaturized keyboard, Paul said, "See, a polarizing current can shut them all down immediately."

"Long as you can get the current to them."

Paul looked at Wojo's grizzled face. He's being extra cautious, and he's right to look at it that way. This is so new that nobody's had any experience with it.

But he said, "Look, Wojo, if these nanobugs work we can turn this set of tin cans into a regular palace in a couple of years. Moonbase can start making profits right away."

"But if it doesn't work—"

"That's why we're conducting the demonstration at a remote site," Paul said, with growing irritation. "If anything goes wrong, it'll go wrong out there and won't threaten the base here."

Wojo nodded solemnly. "It'll go wrong out there, all right. With you and me twenty miles from help."

"We'll have a hopper, for chrissake," Paul snapped. "We could jump all the way back here in fifteen minutes, if we had to."

Wojo nodded. "I suppose that's true," he said. But he didn't sound as if his heart was in it.

Nettled by Wojo's worries, Paul spent that whole afternoon deep in conference with Kris Cardenas, back at San Jose.

Sitting on his bunk, Paul said to her image in his laptop screen, "You can see why some of the people here are scared of the whole idea."

"Well," she admitted grudgingly, "the nanomachines are the size of viruses. They can be carried by air currents and float around. But the Moon's airless, so—"

"The interiors of our habitation modules aren't airless," Paul pointed out.

"Yes, but you're not using the bugs in your habitation modules, are you?" Cardenas replied sharply, her blue eyes snapping. "You're only using them out in the remote site, twenty miles from the nearest existing shelter."

"That's true, "Paul agreed.

"So there shouldn't be any trouble. Even if there is, once daylight comes up the bugs will overheat and shut down."

"Can they last fourteen days in a dormant condition?"

"For sure," she said. "But in fourteen days you ought to be able to sweep them all up."

"Paul nodded. "I guess so."

Cardenas smiled prettily. "Believe me, Mr. Stavenger, we've gone through every possible scenario in our simulations. We even rented the big vacuum chamber over at Ames to simulate the lunar environment. Nothing's going to go wrong."

"I guess so," Paul said again.

"Mr. Masterson has been here half a dozen times, checking out every facet of the experiment," she added.

"Greg?"

"Yes. He's triple-checked everything. And then some."

"That's good," Paul said lamely, adding to himself, I suppose.

But he went hunting through the underground shelters for Lana Goodman. Moonbase's so-called permanent resident was a smart scientist, Paul knew, and had no axe to grind in the matter of nanotechnology.

He found her in the photo lab that she had crammed into the minimal space between the laundry and the shower facility.

"Nanomachines?" Goodman was peering at a strip of film through a magnifying glass. Paul saw her elfin features in profile. With the light behind her, her thinning gray hair looked almost like a halo.

Paul explained what he was trying to do, and Wojo's apprehensions.

Goodman put the film down and turned her full attention to him. "I don't know the details, but I've heard a lot about nanotechnology. Mostly wild claims by enthusiasts and equally wild predictions of disaster by opponents."

Spreading his hands, Paul said, "Well, that's what I'm faced with: either the salvation of Moonbase or a disaster. I'd like your opinion on which to expect."

"Most of what I've read about deals with the medical applications," Goodman said, threading the film into the developing machine.

"Medical?"

"You know, an old lady like me gets interested in nano-machines that can keep the estrogen flowing." She winked broadly.

"Oh," said Paul. "I get it."

More seriously, she asked, "If these nanomachines don't work, are you going to close down Moonbase?"

"I don't want to do that," Paul said.

"I don't want to go back Earthside," said Goodman. "So maybe I'm not as unbiased in this matter as you think."

Scientists! Paul fumed inwardly. They never give you a straight answer. Always hedging everything with all kinds of qualifications and escape hatches. He remembered a professor of economics who complained that the government always looked for 'one-armed' advisors: those who wouldn't qualify everything by saying, "On the other hand…"

"Look," he said, "all I want is your honest opinion about'twhether or not it's safe to try this demonstration."

Goodman looked up at him. "Twenty miles out on the other side of the ringwall?"

"Twenty-five miles, actually. The site is twenty miles out on the mare from Tempo Nineteen."

"That should be far enough," Goodman said. "If anything does go wrong, it shouldn't affect us here."

That was what Paul wanted to hear.

But before he could thank her, Goodman said, "Let me think about it, though. Ask some people I know about it. If I come up with any problems, I'll let you know."

"We're leaving tomorrow morning," Paul said.

"Who's going with you?"

"Wojo."

Goodman grinned maliciously. "Good. He's a cantankerous old brute."

"You two don't get along?"

"I've been chasing his bod for months now, and he keeps eluding me. I think he's scared of me."

"Wojo?"

"Maybe he's still a virgin."

Paul stared at her for a stunned moment, not knowing whether she was serious or joking.

"Life's not easy up here for a horny old lady," Goodman said, with only the slightest of smiles. "Lots of nice young men, but they look on me like their grandmother. Wojo's more my age."

"Yeah," Paul said weakly. "I suppose he is."

Then he beat a hasty retreat, leaving Goodman grinning at his departing back.

TRACTOR FOUR

Paul was surprised to see Hi Tinker suiting up in the preparation chamber next to the airlock.

Three walls of the cubicle were lined with spacesuits standing on racks like displays of medieval armor. Helmets rested on shelves just above the empty suit torsos, boots on the plastic flooring next to the leggings.

Tink was already in his leggings and boots when Paul came in. He was an amiable Canadian from Toronto, lean and lantern-jawed, with a dry sense of humor and a maddening propensity for puns.

With a lopsided smile he told Paul, "Wojo's outside already, checking out the tractor."

"Good," said Paul, going to the medium-sized suits.

"These nanomachines really worry him, you know." Before Paul could reply he went on, "You might say the bugs are bugging him."

Paul ignored the pun. No sense encouraging the man. "What're you suiting up for?" he asked, stepping into the leggings of the newest-looking suit he could find in his size.

I'm going with you"

"You are?"

Tinker nodded. "You can use a third set of hands to set things up, and I want to scout the territory out on the mare for a telescope site."

"What's wrong with siting a telescope here, inside the ringwall?"

"Too much radio chatter in here. I've got a grant from Caltech to look into developing a major radio telescope facility up here. It'll need someplace nice and quiet in the radio frequencies. A dome away from home."

Why wasn't I told about this? Paul asked himself. Tinker was a consultant, not a regular corporate employee. He came up to Moonbase every three months to check out the astronomical equipment that the base operated for a consortium of universities. Still, Paul thought, if he's won a grant from Caltech I should have been informed.

Then he realized that he was the CEO now, too far above the ranks to be involved in such details. The thought stung him. Paul wanted to know every detail about Moonbase.

Aloud, he said, "Farside would be the best place for radio quiet."

Lifting his suit's torso over his head, Tinker wormed his arms into its sleeves and popped his head up through the metal ring of its collar.

With a grunt that might have been part laugh, he said, "You know that, and I know that, and even Wojo knows that But find me a university that's got the money to build a base on the farside."

"What about the consortium?" Paul asked.

Tink shook his head sadly. "Not even the entire International Astronomical Union can raise that kind of cabbage. When it comes to finances, astronomers are at the end of the line."

Paul nodded, realizing that Tinker didn't make puns about his work. Be thankful for small mercies, he thought

The two men checked out each other's suits and backpacks, then Paul followed Tink through the airlock and out onto the surface of the crater Alphonsus.

"Magnificent desolation," Paul murmured, as he always did when he went outside.

The tired, worn ringwall mountains rose above them as far as the eye could see. Alphonsus was so wide that Paul could barely make out the tops of the peaks at the center of the crater poking above the horizon. The crater floor, cracked and rilled, seemed as dead and untouched as the first time Paul had landed here. Except for the humps of rubble marking the buried modules of the base and the angular metal framework of the oxygen plant off to the right. The ground was welted with bright cleated trails that the tractors left.

As Paul stood there, though, he saw what Moonbase could become: a whole city, domed and covered with protective rubble, to be sure, but a real city of thousands of people with open spaces beneath its wide dome and green trees and plants and grass, soaring pillars and winding footpaths and broad windows so you could look outside and see the solar energy farms and the factories open to vacuum and the spaceport where ships landed and took off on a regular schedule.

"We're ready whenever you are, boss-man."

Wojo's voice in his earphones startled Paul out of his daydream. Turning, he saw the man standing by the tractor hatch. Wojo's spacesuit looked hard-used, grimy, its helmet scratched and dulled.

"Yeah," he said tightly. "Let's get going."

It was considerably less than comfortable sitting squeezed together in the tractor's cab inside their cumbersome space-suits, but Paul knew that a stray meteoroid could crack the canopy and the cab would lose its air in seconds.

The tractor's cab was a bubble of tempered plastiglass, pressurized to the same five pounds per square inch as the spacesuits, so that in an emergency the occupants could slam down their visor helmets and go to their suit life-support systems without needing time to prebreathe low-pressure oxygen to avoid the bends.

The underground shelters also ran at five psi, for the same reason. The 'air' that the Moonbase inhabitants breathed with seventy-two percent oxygen, twenty-eight percent nitrogen. The oxygen came from the lunar regolith; until they drilled successfully for ammonia the nitrogen had to be carried up from Earth.

One of the ongoing research efforts at the base was aimed at producing a metallic glass that had the transparency of good crystal and the structural strength of steel. Someday we'll be able to ride these buggies in our shirtsleeves, Paul told himself. In the meantime, it felt reassuring to have the bulk of the spacesuit protecting him, comfort be damned. There was only one chance in a trillion of being hit by a meteoroid big enough to crack the canopy, but Paul had no desire to test the odds.

The tractor climbed laboriously up the ringwall mountain over the easiest slope, which Wojo insisted on calling 'Wodjohowitcz Pass."

"Your name is too tough to spell for it to be used on maps," Tinker said archly. "It'll never pass the spelling test."

Paul groaned. Wojo muttered.

Paul took over the driving chores once they got down onto the flat of Mare Nubium. Wojo stopped the tractor so they could shift places, then when they were underway again he reached carefully behind their seats and pulled out three prepackaged lunches.

"Best sandwiches this side of Chattanooga," Wojo said proudly. "Made 'em myself."

Paul had to admit that they were good. One thing he had insisted on for Moonbase was top-quality food. We have to breathe recycled air and drink recycled water, but by God we'll eat decently, at least.

"Sandwiched the lunch chore in between your other duties?" Tinker punned.

It's going to be a long three days, Paul thought. Very long.

"Coming up on Shelter Nineteen," Wojo called out, one gloved finger on the map readout glowing in the control panel's main display screen.

The man's breath stinks, Paul said to himself.

Looking straight ahead, searching for the red light atop the antenna that marked the heaped rubble mound of the shelter, Paul asked, "What the hell are you drinking, Wojo?"

"What do you mean?"

"Water wouldn't give you a breath like that."

With great dignity, Wojo asked, "Are you implying that I have imbibed an alcoholic beverage?"

Tinker piped up, "Now that you mention it, there's been a rumor about somebody running a still back at the base."

"A still?" Paul snapped.

"An active still," Tinker replied.

"Nothing but rumor," said Wojo. "Where would somebody hide a still?"

Paul had to turn almost sideways to peer around the edge of his helmet and look at Wojo's face. The man avoided his gaze.

"What do you use for ingredients?" he asked.

"Search me," Wojo replied innocently. "I'm no chemist"

"There's plenty of exotic chemicals available," Tinker said, "from the labs and the pharmacy. From what I've heard, they might even be using some of the residual rocket propellants left in the landers' tanks."

"This had better be a joke," Paul muttered. "Making booze and stealing rocket propellants isn't just criminal, it's goddamned dangerous."

"It's a joke," Wojo assured him.

Tinker laughed. "We got you that time, boss boss."

Paul made himself laugh with them. But he was thinking that a drunk could kill a lot of people very suddenly at Moonbase. Better look into this joke when I get back.

It was night and would remain so for seventy-five hours more. Yet the broad rock-strewn plain of Mare Nubium was clearly lit by Earthglow. Once Wojo resumed the driving chore Paul leaned as far back as he could and watched the big blue and white crescent of Earth hanging in the dark cold sky. It was in the gibbous phase, fatter than a half-Earth, glowing warm and beautiful out there.

When the Earth was in its 'new' phase, Paul could trace out the cities and highways from the lights shining in the darkened globe. But now the glare from its daylit side drowned out the night lights.

Anyway, Paul said to himself, we've got work to do. We're not here for the sightseeing.

"There's the spot," Wojo said, slowing the tractor to a stop.

Paul looked at the electronic map on the control panel. The blue dot marking their location was touching the red dot marking the test site.

"Check it out with the GPS signal," Paul said.

"Already did," Wojo answered* 'Last fix we'll get for a while. Feeble-minded little satellite's sinking below the horizon and there won't be another in sight for a couple hours."

Tinker helped them offload the equipment and while he and Paul set up a plastic bubble tent for their quarters, Wojo used the tractor's front blade to dig a trench big enough to hold a full-sized shelter.

"Now we see what these teeny bugs can do," Wojo said. There were three sets of nanomachines, each sealed in an insulated cylindrical container that looked to Paul like a high-tech metallic thermos bottle. Using the tractor's communications system he established a link with Cardenas in San Jose, beaming a signal directly to a commsat in synchronous orbit above the Pacific.

The signal was weak, but Paul had Cardenas on-line as Wojo pried open the first container and gingerly carried it to the trench.

"Feel kinda like Aladdin," Wojo muttered. "Where's the puff of smoke and the genie?"

Cardenas took him seriously. "You won't see anything for at least two hours," she said. "Just drop the container into the trench." Paul could see tension in her face. And excitement.

Tinker spent the next two hours checking out the ambient levels of microwave radiation in the area, setting out a series of pocket-sized detectors on the dusty regolith. Wojo hauled equipment off the tractor and set up their quarters inside the plastic bubble tent.

Paul watched the trench. "Nothing seems to be happening," he said.

Three seconds later Cardenas's streaky image replied, "The nanomachines are reproducing themselves. Everything's going according to the program."

Carrying a portable communicator in his gloved hand, Paul walked over to the edge of the trench. Nothing was stirring. It's going to be a long two hours, he told himself.

Wojo came up beside him. Paul was staring so intently into the empty trench that he only noticed Wojo's presence when he heard the man's labored breathing through his earphones.

"You're out of condition," Paul said.

"Easy thing to do, up here," Wojo admitted.

"Better check with the medical people, let them set up an exercise routine for you." It was a requirement in every employee's contract; if an employee did not follow the medical department's prescribed exercise regimen, it was grounds for return to Earth and perhaps even dismissal from the company.

"Right." There were a thousand ways to evade the exercising, both Wojo and Paul knew.

Tinker joined them. "I'm all finished with my work. Can we go home now?"

Paul ignored him.

At first he wasn't certain he actually saw it. Paul wanted to rub his eyes, but inside the spacesuit and helmet he couldn't. Yet it looked as if a tiny pool of something shiny had formed on the bottom of the trench, right where the opened container was lying. A puddle that looked almost like glassy, shining liquid mercury.

"Am I seeing straight?" Wojo asked.

"Yeah," said Paul. "Look! It's spreading."

A glassy smooth film of titanium was growing across the bottom of the trench. And its sides. Fascinated, Paul watched for hours as the titanium shell slowly arched above the surface of the regolith to form a complete cylinder. Then its ends began to close.

"The next set of bugs is the real test," Cardenas said, looking much happier and more relaxed now.

"The airlock," Paul said. If they can build a whole airlock by themselves, they can build just about anything, he thought

Wojo carried the second cylinder to the open doorway of the titanium shelter with a good deal more confidence than he had borne the first.

They took turns going inside the pressurized bubble tent to grab a bite of dinner. Paul could hardly tear himself away from watching an, airlock assemble itself, as if by magic, literally from the ground up.

Now give them a few hours to fill the shelter with oxygen," Cardenas said, positively glowing once the airlock was finished, "and you'll have a complete prefabricated, ready-to-use shelter built entirely out of native materials by my nanomachines."

The three men slept inside the pressurized tent, in their suits. It was uncomfortable. They could not lie down; the best they could do was to lean back against rests they had brought with them, reclining at roughly a forty-five degree angle. If the tent were suddenly ruptured they could snap down their visors and turn on their backpack life support systems in a second or two.

To make it worse, Tinker either would not or could not stop making puns. Paul groaned and Wojo threatened the astronomer's life, but no matter what either of them said, Tink turned it into a maddening pun. They became very elaborate as the men prepared for sleep, climaxing with a pun based on the fact that making bowel movements in a spacesuit is a complex and miserable business.

"What we need is a special container, maybe two pints in capacity," Tink merrily chattered away. "I think I'll enter a class-action suit to force the corporation to supply us with special bottles for manure storage."

"Tink…' Wojo growled menacingly.

Undeterred, the astronomer concluded, "Yes, sir, that's what I'll do. Bring my request to a judge and see if he'll demand ordure in the quart."

Before Wojo could throw anything, Paul said, "Okay, Tink. That's enough. Not another word out of you."

Tinker looked from Paul to Wqjo and back again. The self-satisfied grin on his face faded a little. His eyes lit up as if he had thought of still another pun.

"No!" Paul said sharply, the way he would to a baby he was trying to train. Or a dog.

Tink nodded inside his helmet and pressed an upraised finger to his lips. Wojo, still looking grim, nodded his thanks to Paul.

Paul thought he would be unable to sleep, propped up inside the suit and excited about the nanomachines working away, silent and invisible out there. But he drifted off almost as soon as he closed his eyes, and if he dreamed at all he remembered none of it when he awoke a few hours later, long before his suit's alarm was set to go off.

Wojo was snoring like an asthmatic ox and Tinker was muttering in his sleep. Paul quietly refilled his backpack oxygen supply from the tanks in the tent, then slid his visor down and stepped through the tent's minimal airlock.

The shelter gleamed slightly in the Earthlight, its curved top uncovered as yet by protective dirt. Paul grappled one of the nitrogen tanks from the tractor's back and hauled it to the shelter. He examined the airlock's control panel. It was mechanical rather than electronic; rather crude but a good-enough test of the.nanomachines' abilities. Cardenas had a team working on electronic assemblies, but Greg had wanted to go ahead with this test as quickly as possible and Paul had agreed with him.

He slid the outer hatch open, lugged the nitrogen cylinder inside and then stepped in himself and pulled the hatch closed. A set of four knobs projected from one side of the inner hatch. Paul turned the top one and soon heard the reassuring hiss of gas filling the airlock. Once the sound stopped he took a pressure gauge from his belt. Less than two psi, but holding steady. Oxygen pressure wasn't as high as it should be, not yet, but at least the airlock didn't seem to be leaking.

Is it really oxygen? Paul asked himself. The little portable mass spectrograph was still in the tractor. He'd have to assume the bugs were doing their work properly. For now.

Opening the inner airlock hatch, Paul stepped inside the shelter. In the light from his helmet lamp, the curving walls glistened almost as if they were wet. The pressure gauge held steady. The shelter was airtight. Paul dragged the nitrogen cylinder into the empty shelter and opened its valve. By noon tomorrow we'll be able to sit in here in our shirtsleeves, he thought happily.

"We'll eat lunch in here," he promised himself aloud. Paul and Tink spent the morning hauling equipment into the new shelter, while Wojo worked the tractor, carefully piling up rubble over its curving roof.

At last, a few minutes after noon, the three of them entered the shelter.

For a long moment they simply stood inside the cylindrical space. The walls still glistened as if newborn. The bunks, table and equipment they had carried in looked shiny new, never; used. Tinker held the mass spectrometer in his gloved hands.

"Well?" Paul asked him.

Peering at the readout display, Tinker said, "Seventy-six percent oxygen, twenty-four nitrogen."

"Good enough," Paul said.

"Pressure's just a tad over five psi," Wojo said.

"Okay." Paul slid his visor up and took a deep breath. "It's not the Garden of Eden, but it'll do."

With great relief they peeled themselves out of their spacesuits, although the stench of bodies confined inside the suits for several days was less than pleasant.

"I won't mention yours if you don't mention mine," Wojo said, pinching his nose with forefinger and thumb.

"Okay," Tinker answered happily. "Let's not make a stink about it."

Paul understood how a man could be driven to murder.

They ate lunch in their coveralls at the small table they had carried in, after heating the prepackaged meals in the microwave cooker. Tinker seemed very impressed with the nanomachines' achievement.

"We could build a radio telescope facility on the farside!" he said enthusiastically. "These bugs are going to change everything we do up here!"

Wojo chewed his soyburger thoughtfully, then replied, "Better make sure this shelter really works right before you go prancing off to the farside."

"Oh, you want to work the bugs out of it?" Tinker asked, delightedly.

Wojo looked as if he wanted to spit

After lunch Paul checked in with Kris Cardenas to assure her that all was going well. Then he patched through a call to Joanna. She was at home, in her sitting room.

"Are you okay?" were the first words out of Paul's mouth when he saw her stretched out on the chintz-covered chaise longue.

It took three seconds for her to smile. "Of course I'm all right."

"Oh, I thought maybe you didn't feel well."

Again the delay. Then, "Paul, it's seven-thirty in the morning here. I've been trying to call you for more than an hour."

"Call me? Why?"

Joanna's face clouded once Paul's question reached her. "It's Greg… I told him about the baby last night."

"He wasn't pleased, I guess."

"He got hysterical. He frightened me."

Paul felt his insides tensing.

Joanna went on, "He started raving about how we're trying to get rid of him, push him out of the corporation. Lord, he sounded like his father."

"I'm not trying to push him out," Paul said.

Joanna continued, "He said something about getting rid of Brad. As if he did it deliberately."

"Brad?"

Without a pause, she went on, "And he's furious with you. He said he's going to destroy you. He said you'd never come back from the Moon."

Paul saw the anguish in her face. The fear. For which of us? he wondered. Is she scared for me or is she scared that Greg's getting beyond her control?

"Paul, he's violent!"

"He didn't hurt you, did he?"

The three-second lag seemed like an infinity. At last Joanna shook her head wearily. "No, but he was boiling with anger about you. And the baby. It was frightening."

So all Greg's smiles and cooperation were just a front, after all, Paul thought. He said to his wife, "As long as he's not threatening you, it's okay."

"He wants to kill you!" she blurted.

Paul made himself smile reassuringly. "Well, he'll have to wait until I get back for that, won't he? He can't reach me up here."

Joanna nodded, but she still looked fearful.

TEMPO 20(N)

Later that afternoon Paul got two warnings of danger simultaneously.

He had officially'dedicated' their new shelter while they ate lunch, using a sprinkle of water instead of champagne to dub it Tempo 20(N): the twentieth'temporary' shelter erected by Moonbase. The (N) designated that it had been built by nanomachines.

The three men spent the rest of the afternoon checking every square millimeter of the shelter. It was airtight. Radiation levels were well below minimums. Temperature hovered at twenty-five degrees Celsius.

They still had to use the tractor's communications gear to contact Moonbase and San Jose. There hadn't been enough capacity in the tractor to hold all the comm equipment that a shelter normally had, mainly because they had hauled the rocket hopper along with them.

Little more than a railed platform with a rocket motor beneath it, the hopper was a safety tactic, a hedge against danger. It could lift three men—and practically nothing else—as far as the next shelter, twenty miles away.

Paul was sitting on one of the bunks inside the shelter, sending the results of their checkout to San Jose, patching the link from his hand-held communicator through the tractor's comm unit. Kris Cardenas' image on the tiny screen was streaked with white hashes of snow. Suddenly it winked off altogether. Paul's portable went dead.

At that moment, Tinker came in through the airlock. He had gone outside to gather up his microwave detectors.

Sliding up the visor of his helmet, Tink said," Wojo''shaving some trouble with the tractor

Annoyed and puzzled at his communicator's failure, Paul looked up at the astronomer. "What?"

"He's out there turning the vacuum blue," Tink said, not looking particularly worried. "Something's wrong with the tractor. I tried to give him some help, but I don't know enough about cryogenic motors."

A tendril of fear wormed along Paul's spine. "Maybe he needs a hand." He got up and went for his suit.

"I think he'll need more than applause," Tinker punned.

The suit still smelled ripe, but Paul barely noticed as he pulled it on, piece by piece. Tinker helped him into the backpack and checked all the connections.

"You are go for surface excursion," said Tink, patting the top of Paul's helmet. The standard line sounded strange, coming from him.

Paul powered up his suit radio as he stepped into the airlock. He could hear Wojo's fervent litany of methodical, dispassionate cursing.

"… slime sucking, pus eating, dung dripping misbegotten son of a promiscuous Albanian she-goat and a syphilitic refugee from a leper colony…"

"What's the matter, man?" Paul asked, loping across the dusty ground in the gliding long low-gravity strides of the experienced lunar worker.

"Would you believe," Wojo replied, still bent over the tractor's electric motor compartment, "that this miserable excuse of an electrician's wet dream is completely shorted out?"

Paul had to lean far over to see the motor, inside its insulated compartment. In the light of their two helmet lamps, the aluminum coils looked blackened; some of them appeared to be bent, as if they had been pulled apart

"What in hell…?"

Wojo held up a length of narrow plastic tubing. "Seals are eaten through. Each and every blessed seal is leaking like a busted sieve. All the nitrogen coolant's evaporated."

"How could that happen?"

Wojo must have shaken his head inside his helmet. "Don't know how, but it must've happened while we were sleeping. Mother-lusting motor worked fine yesterday."

"And the back-up?"

"Same goddamned thing."

That was the first time Paul had ever heard Wojo actually resort to blasphemy, however mild. He must be really worked tip, Paul thought.

"Goodthing we brought the hopper," he said.

"Yeah," Wojo agreed.

But the hopper was useless, too. The tubing connecting its propellant tanks to the rocket's combustion chamber was eaten through.

"It looks like it's corroded," Paul said, completely puzzled. "Like an iron pipe that's been left underwater for years."

"It ain't iron and it hasn't been underwater," Wojo muttered. "This tubing is high-strength plastic and it looks like something's just chewed right through it."

Gobblers! Paul's knees went weak with the realization.

"Jesus," he moaned.

"What is it?"

"Put the tubing down!" Paul snapped. "Drop it!"

Wojo let it fall. The length of tubing tumbled slowly and bounced when it hit the ground.

"Get away from here. Move away!"

"What's the matter, boss?" Wojo asked, his voice more flustered than fearful. "What is it?"

"I'm not sure, but we—"

"Hey!" Wojo shouted. "I got a leak!"

"Where?" Paul reached for the pocket in the thigh of his suit, where patches were kept.

"I can't-' Wojo's voice cut off. He started coughing.

In the light of Earthglow Paul could see the fabric of Wojo's gloves rotting away, dissolving, melting. The inner lining of metal mesh was showing through on most of his fingers.

"Get into the shelter!" Paul yelled. "Run!"

Wojo stumbled for the airlock hatch as Paul stood between the tractor and the hopper, immobilized by fear and the realization of what was happening.

Gobblers. Somehow gobblers have been mixed in with the nanobugs. They're eating up anything with carbon molecules in them.

Wojo was two steps from the airlock hatch when he screamed and fell face-forward to the ground. He writhed as if something was eating him alive, his screams higher and higher until abruptly they stopped altogether and he became still.

"Wojo!" Paul yelled. "Wojo!"

The airlock hatch slid open and Tinker stepped out, fully suited.

"What the hell's going—"

He stopped and bent forward slightly to stare at Wojo, lying two paces before him.

"Did you handle any of the tubing from the tractor?" Paul shouted into his helmet microphone.

"What happened to Wojo?" Tinker started to bend down beside the fallen man.

"Get away from him!" Paul shrieked.

Tinker jerked back, staggered slightly and bumped against the open hatchway of the airlock.

Frantic, Paul demanded, "Did you handle anything from the tractor?"

"What're you talking about? What's happened to Wojo?"

"He's dead, dammit!"

"Dead?"

Paul felt as if he had stumbled into a leper colony. He didn't want to touch anything, get near anyone.

Forcing himself to be as calm as possible, he said to Tinker, "Something's gone wrong with the nanobugs. They've infected Wojo's suit and eaten away the insulation."

"His suit failed?" Tinker's voice went hollow with sudden fear.

The goddamned bugs are chewing up his body, Paul knew. But there was no sense scaring Tinker more than he had to.

"Did you handle anything from the tractor?" Paul asked again. "Or the hopper?"

Sounding confused, Tink said, "I looked over Wojo's shoulder—God, is he really dead?"

"Did you touch anything?"

"He… he showed me a piece of tubing that had broken down. I looked it over."

"Did you touch it?"

"Yes! Of course I touched it."

"Get back inside the shelter and get out of that damned suit as fast as you can," Paul commanded. "Shove the suit into the airlock and stay inside the shelter until I can get some help here."

"I don't understand," Tinker said.

"Your suit's infected with nanobugs that attack carbon-based molecules," Paul said, annoyed with the astronomer's obtuseness. "Now move!'

"Carbon-based molecules? That includes me!"

"Damned right! Get out of that fuckin' suit as fast as you can!"

Tinker ducked back through the airlock at last. Paul stood frozen with terror, staring at Wojo's fallen body. His spacesuit was disintegrating before his eyes. In the soft light from Earth overhead, Paul watched as the arms of Wojo's suit slowly disappeared, layer by layer: fabric, insulation, the neoprene gaslight bladder. They'll be down to his skin and flesh; like maggots.

Tinker's first scream turned Paul's blood cold. Tink either hadn't taken off his helmet, or he had left his suit radio on while he was getting out of the spacesuit. Either way, Paul heard him screaming and screaming and screaming. Wojo had died of decompression when the bugs had eaten through his suit. Tinker was devoured alive, screaming until his voice went hoarse.

Paul stood alone out on Mare Nubium, his two companions dead, the area infested with killing nanobugs, the nearest shelter twenty miles away.

Greg, he knew. Greg's done this. He's the only one who would even think of it Slipped a sampling of gobblers in with the assemblers. He's trying to murder me. He's killed Wojo and Tink. I'm next. If I let him.

SHELTER 19

Paul was struggling with an invisible demon. He couldn't see it, but he could feel it clutching at his throat, tearing at his flesh. He thrashed madly, grappling with it, trying with every ounce of strength in him to push it away, to get it off him.

His eyes snapped open. Above him curved the rounded ceiling of Tempo 19. Air circulation fans hummed softly and a pump chugged faithfully in the background.

I'm safe, he told himself, lying in his sweaty coveralls on the bunk. I'm okay. For how long?

"Long enough," he said, his voice a grating, harsh rasp. Wincing when he put his weight on his right foot, he limped to the food freezer and microwave oven that comprised the shelter's galley. The sink was beside it. Paul took a plastic cup from the rack over it and filled it with water. He drank it down slowly; it was warm and flat and the best drink he had ever tasted. He savored it, relished it, gloried in the way it eased the sandpaper feeling in his throat.

He pulled out a plastic container of frozen soup and popped it into the microwave. Then he limped to the communications console and called Moonbase.

Impatiently he reported the deaths of Wojo and Tinker. The guy on comm duty quickly called the base's director, and Paul had to repeat the news to her.

"The nanomachines killed them?" her hard-bitten face radiated surprise, disbelief.

"And damned near killed me, too," Paul said wearily. "Now patch me through to Savannah. I want to talk to my wife."

"Just a minute," said the base director. "I need to know a lot—"

"Later," said Paul, putting iron into it. "I want to talk to my wife. Now. On a private link."

"Okay," the director said. I'll put together a team to go out there and get the bodies."

"No! Nobody goes anywhere near that site until I've had a talk with the San Jose troops. That whole area is quarantined as of now,"

The director's eyes went wide for a moment. Then she nodded. "Understood."

Paul was glad that Joanna was in her office at corporate headquarters. From the looks of the little urban park outside her window it must have been late afternoon.

She was smiling as her face appeared on the tabletop display screen before Paul, but her smile froze the instant she saw his haggard, bleary-eyed face.

"Paul, what's happened?"

He had spent twenty minutes setting up a direct laser link to Savannah. Anybody at Moonbase could tap into his transmission from the shelter, if they dared, but from Moonbase's laser to the receiver on the roof of the headquarters building, no one could eavesdrop.

"Greg tried to murder me," he said, then waited three seconds for the shock to register in her face.

"Greg? How…?"

"He put a mix of gobblers in with the nanobug assemblers. Two men were killed and he damned near got me."

"Gobblers?" Joanna echoed.

"Nanobugs that take molecules apart. Long-chain carbon molecules. Like spacesuit materials. Like human flesh."

Joanna gasped, "Oh no."

"There's a tractor outside this shelter. I'm going to ride back to Moonbase and then head home."

He could see the conflicting emotions battling within her. "What should I do? About Greg, I mean?"

"Nothing!" Paul snapped. "Stay away from him. He's a murderer and I don't want him anywhere near you."

Joanna did not reply, hut Paul saw what she was thinking. He's my son.

That's the long and the short of it, Paul told himself. I'm her Husband, the father of the child she's carrying. But Greg is her son and she'll try to protect him even if he tries to kill her.

I've got get back there, he realized. Quick as I can. Got to get there and protect her.

Joanna could see the determination in Paul's exhausted face. He wants to get back here so he can accuse Greg. Greg tried to murder him.

Without consciously thinking about it, she tapped the phone console on her desk and called out her son's name. In a few seconds Greg's darkly handsome face appeared on the display screen.

"Could you come over to my office, Greg?" Joanna asked.

"I'm in the middle of—"

"Right now," Joanna snapped. Then she added, "Please."

Annoyance flashed across his features, but he held it in check and answered, "Certainly."

He looked more apprehensive than annoyed when he stepped into Joanna's office. She had hardly changed anything in the big corner room since taking it over from Bradley Arnold. There had been no time; Joanna had been much too busy learning her new responsibilities to deal with interior decorators.

Warily, with the same expression he had worn as a little boy when he'd been caught doing something he shouldn't, Greg walked across the richly patterned Indian carpet and took the leather chair in front of Joanna's desk.

"What's happened?" he asked softly.

"I just got a call from Moonbase," said Joanna.

His brows rose. "Oh?"

"It was Paul. He's still alive, but the two men working with him were killed."

Greg let out a long sigh. "Too bad."

"The nanomachines killed them."

"Yes."

"You know all about it," don't you?"

"Nanotechnology is very new, Mom. Untried. Accidents will happen."

Joanna stared at her son. "Paul thinks you tried to murder him."

"That's just like him."

"Did you use nanomachines to kill Brad?" Joanna heart herself ask.

The hint of a smile ghosted across Greg's lips. "The pompous old fool."

"Did you?"

Greg shifted slightly in the chair. "When I was in San Jose a few months ago I saw a demonstration of what they cal gobblers—nanobugs that can take the platinum atoms out of an old-fashioned automobile's catalytic converter."

"What's that got to do with Brad's death?"

He shrugged carelessly. "I've heard that jet engines have a lot of blades that are coated with platinum and tungsten and other metals. To resist heat, I think. If those metals erode away the engine blades break up."

"And that's what happened to Brad's plane?"

"At supersonic speed a sudden loss of power can be very dangerous," Greg said. Then he added, "So I'm told."

"Paul isn't dead," Joanna said. "He's coming back here and he's going to accuse you of murder."

For the first time something like fear showed in Greg's face. "He's got no proof…"

Joanna said, "Don't you think he'll find proof? Don't you think he'll find someone in the San Jose division who gave you a sampling of nanomachines? What do you call them, gobblers?"

Irritated, Greg answered, "I suppose the corporation's CEO can find employees who'll tell him what he wants to hear."

"Greg, two men have died!"

"Three," he said smugly, "counting Brad. More, come to think of it: there's the crew of his plane, too, isn't there?"

She stared at her son. I did this to him, Joanna thought. It's my fault as much as his. More. I've allowed my happy little boy to turn into a sick, sick man.

"You need help, Greg," she said.

"Yes," he said. "I suppose I do. Are you going to help me, Mom?"

"All that I can."

He leaned forward in his chair. "Then get rid of that monster you're carrying in your belly and get a divorce. You and I can run this corporation. Just the two of us. We don't need him or his spawn."

Shocked by his sudden intensity, Joanna could say nothing except, "I can't do that."

"Then I'll have to kill him."

Joanna studied his face. "Will you kill me, too?" He seemed surprised at the thought. "I could never harm you, "Mom. I've always tried to protect you. Even against Dad."

"Against… your father?"

"He deserved to die. He even wanted to die. But he was too weak to do it himself." Greg smiled the way he had when he brought home good marks from school. "So I helped him."

Joanna sank back in her swivel chair. Bradley Arnold's chair. Her son continued to smile at her as charmingly as the little boy who used to offer her flowers he plucked from their garden.

MARE NUBIUM

Paul was thinking how different everything looked from the driver's seat of the tractor. The barren landscape rolled by not without jounces and bumps, but it was sure easier than walking. The tractor was a small one, without an enclosec cab. He had to keep his suit buttoned up against the vacuum But it beat walking by about a thousand lightyears.

Up ahead he could see the tired old mountains of the Alphonsus ringwall rising to meet him. Too far away to make out the winding ruts that marked Wodjohowitcz Pass, but he'd be there soon enough. The thought of Wojo and Tink tore at his memory. He'll pay for what he did, Paul promised himself. He'll pay if I have to kill him myself. He could feel the muscles of his jaw and neck tense. Whose side is Joanna going to take? Paul knew the answer. She'll protect the kidl all she can.

Some kid. He's a homicidal maniac.

The sudden shrill alarm in his helmet earphones startled him. Looking down at his forearm display he saw a red light blinking. Oxygen supply critical.

How the hell can that be? I topped off the tank before I left Tempo 19.

More annoyed than afraid, Paul followed the standard practice and plugged his auxiliary oxygen line into the tractor's standby tank. The shrilling in his earphones stopped.

What the hell happened to my backpack tank? he wondered. Or is it just a sensor crapped out?

He kept his real fear buried deep in the back of his mind. He knew it was there, knew what it was, but he didn't want to face it, deal with it, admit that it even existed.

For nearly half an hour he continued riding along the bleak, pockmarked plain. The ringwall mountains were really looming before him now. He could see the notch where they had come across on their way out.

The tractor's oxygen supply was okay, he saw with a glance at the control panel. He reached around with one hand to check the hose, from his backpack tank. Maybe it came loose, all the bangin' around I did out there.

The plastic hose fell apart in his gloved hand. Paul felt it crumble, breaking into pieces at his touch.

He pulled his hand back as if it had been scalded. A ragged chunk of plastic was in the palm of his glove, part of the oxygen hose.

It can't be the bugs, he told himself. I didn't touch anything that was infected. Besides, we're still in daylight; it's too pissin' hot for the bugs to work.

Yet his insides trembled and burned.

What else could make a hose fall apart like that? Gotta be the bugs. Desperately, Paul tried to remember if he touched Wojo or anything out there when Wojo was cussing over the infected tractor. What difference does it make? he raged at himself. You're either infected with 'em or you're not.

How to tell?

He reached back again and pulled off another chunk of the plastic hose, about the size of his palm. Keeping one hand on the steering lever, he placed this new chunk of hosing on his thigh, alongside the first piece. They were roughly the same size. Satisfied, Paul placed the new piece atop the dashboard, in full sunlight. The first piece he tossed to the floor of the cab, deep in shadow.

Now we'll see.

Paul had to gear down the tractor as it began climbing the laborious winding trail that threaded through the ringwall mountains. The rounded, worn peaks averaged about ten thousand feet, but the trail notched through at least a thousand feet lower. Paul could see the tracks in the dust left by previous tractors. Like those old pidneer trails across the prairie, he thought. A hundred years later you could still see the ruts their wagons made in the ground.

Someday we'll h|ve a monorail system to cross the ringwall, he told himself. Ormaybe we'll tunnel right through the mountains. Connect the crater floor with Mare Nubium. Someday.

For now, he had to steer the tractor slowly, carefully, up the gentle mountain slope. His tracks of earlier trips faded at the higher elevation, where there was little dust to register them. The rock surface was bare and slick here, almost glassy. Paul geared down again to maintain traction.

It took more than an hour, but at last he reached the crest of the mountains. Peering over the front of his tractor, Paul could see the cluster of humps in the crater's floor that marked the buried shelters of Moonbase.

Automatically he pressed down the accelerator. The tractor surged forward. But then Paul looked down on the floor at the piece of hosing lying in the cold shade.

He stomped on the brake. The tractor slewed slightly as it ground to a stop. With trembling hands Paul reached down and picked up the scrap of plastic. He placed it alongside the other piece, still in sunlight on the dashboard.

The piece from the floor was less than half its original size.

They're here! In the tractor!

He leaned down and pawed at his dust-caked leggings. The outer fabric of his surface suit was already eaten through. His boots, too. Paul could see the metal mesh layer that underlay the fabric.

They can't get through the metal if they're designed to eat carbon molecules, he told himself. Yeah? They got through the metal in Wojo's suit Must be different kinds. Different kinds.

He wanted to run. He felt unclean, infected, his skin crawling and his heart pounding so loud he could hear it in his helmet earphones.

And suddenly the enormity of it hit him. I'm going to die! Even if I get to Moonbase, I'll just be carrying the damned bugs with me. They'll infect the whole base, tear apart everything. Kill everybody.

That's what Greg's been after, all along! Not just me, but everything I stand for. He wants to wipe out Moonbase altogether!

Paul sat there inside his failing suit, blinking at the vision of Moonbase, everything he had worked for, everything he wanted, being utterly destroyed.

Strangely, the realization calmed him. He knew what he had to do now. There were no other options, no excuses, no escape clauses. It was finished.

At least I'm close enough to reach them with the suit radio, he thought.

Jinny Anson was at the communications desk when he called in.

"We'll send a team up to get you!" she said when Paul told her where he was.

"No!" he snapped. "I'm infested with nanobugs and you can't run the risk of bringing them into the base. They'll kill all of you."

"But what can we do? We can't just leave you out there. "You'll…' Jinny's normally chipper voice faltered, went silent.

"It's too late to do anything for me. Call Kris Cardenas in the San Jose division and get her to come up here and personally lead a decontamination team to clean up this mess."

"But what about you?"

Paul said, "Get my wife on the line for me. Private link. No eavesdropping."

Paul could not see Joanna's face, but he pictured it in his mind. She was beautiful. Whether she loved him or not didn't matter now. Whether she placed Greg before her husband didn't matter, either. Not any more.

"Where are you, Paul?" her voice asked. "Why can't we establish a visual?"

"I'm out in a tractor, at the summit of the ringwall."

He waited for her reply. "You're on your way back to the base, then?"

"I was," Paul answered. "BurI'm not going to make it"

The three seconds stretched, sketched. Then, "What do you mean? What are you talking about? How long can you stay outside?"

"For the rest of my life," he said. "The nanobugs are in my suit. They stopped their activity while I was in sunshine, it was too hot for them. But they must've chomped away on my suit while I was in the tempo and I can't bring them into the base; they'll eat up everything."

Joanna was already talking before he finished, "You can't just stay out there until you run out of air! They've got to get you, save you!"

"There's no way to do that," Paul said. "If I go down to the base I'll be killing everybody there."

"No, Paul! No!"

"Listen to me. Be quiet and listen!" he shouted into his helmet microphone. "It's all up to you, now. You've got to keep it all together. Don't let them shut down Moonbase because of this. This isn't an accident; we both know that. Don't let Greg or anybody else use this as an excuse to shut down Moonbase."

He waited for her response. "I understand," Joanna said at last. From the sound of her voice, she was fighting for self-control. I'll… take care of everything."

"Good," he said, feeling suddenly bone-weary, exhausted physically, emotionally.

"Paul, isn't there anything…?"

"I wish there was. I didn't want it to end like this."

That long wait again. Then, "I love you, Paul. I love you." Joanna broke into sobs.

"I love you too, Jo. I guess you're the only woman I've ever really loved."

Instead of waiting for more from her, Paul snapped off his radio. No sense dragging it out, he said to himself. We've said all we have to say. There's nothing left for either of us now but pain.

He got up from the tractor seat and clambered down to the ground. Walking to the edge of the narrow trail he looked down once again at the pitiful heaps of rubble that marked Moonbase.

Like Moses on the pissin' mountain, Paul thought. I can see the promised land but I'll never get to live in it.

He thought again of what Moonbase could become, someday. He saw a future that beckoned, with humankind spreading across this new frontier and heading outward for new worlds. A future that would never happen if Moonbase was destroyed.

Paul sighed. "If it is to be," he said softly, "it's up to me."

With a sudden, quick move he yanked open the visor of his helmet.

Moonrise

SAVANNAH

It had been two days since Joanna last slept. Most of that time she had spent on the videophone with Kris Cardenas in San Jose, making arrangements for a team to be sent to the Moon to deactivate the nanomachines that had killed her husband and the two other men.

And she made other arrangements, as well.

"I want to know who allowed those killer machines to be mixed in with the other nanobugs," Joanna said, as implacable as an ocean tide.

Cardenas' image in the phone screen nodded somberly. "I've already started an investigation. That kind of stupidity verges on the criminal."

"It is criminal," Joanna said. "But I don't intend to press charges or bring the law into this. I just want to know who those people are."

"You won't press charges?" Cardenas brightened.

"No. I want them transferred to Moonbase, once we find out who they are."

Cardenas blinked her cornflower blue eyes. "Why would you send mem to Moonbase?"

Grimly, Joanna replied, "So they can see the consequences of stupidity. So they can live in a place where one little mistake, one moment of stupidity, can kill you."

"How long will they have to stay?"

Joanna shook her head. "Until my husband comes back to life."

She still had not slept when she had her meeting with Greg.

Joanna had decided to meet her son at the house, rather than the office. She sent two hefty security guards to escort him to the meeting.

Greg looked subdued when he stepped into the living room, flanked by the two uniformed men. Joanna dismissed them and told her son to sit on the sofa, facing her.

"You killed Paul," she said, once she was certain that they were alone.

Greg evaded her eyes. "Suppose I did. What of it? It's over and done with. You can't bring him back and that's that."

Joanna studied her son. He seemed tense, but the fury that had exploded in him now was gone, spent, dissipated.

"What do you intend to do now?" Joanna asked calmly.

Greg cocked an eyebrow. "Take my rightful place as president and CEO."

"Really?"

He leaned forward intently, suddenly flushed with prospects for the future. "Don't you see, Mom? Now it's just you and me, the way it ought to be. We can run everything together, just the two of us. It'll all work out, you'll see." He even smiled that same old boyish smile at her.

"But there's not just the two of us," Joanna said.

Greg pulled back from her slightly. "What do you mean?"

"I'm carrying Paul's baby. Paul's son."

"Oh, that." Greg flapped one hand in the air dismissively.

"You don't care anymore?" Joanna asked, caught unprepared for his casual attitude. "A few days ago you wanted me to abort it."

"I was foolish," Greg said. "I wasn't thinking straight."

"Really?"

"By the time he grows up enough to join the corporation I'll be ready to retire," Greg said.

Be careful, Joanna told herself. He knows how to play on your feelings.

"Greg, you're a murderer."

For an instant she saw fear in his eyes. But then his smile returned. "Are you going to turn me over to the police?"

"I'm getting the names of the people who allowed those killer machines to be sent off to'the Moon. They'll implicate you to save themselves."

"So you are going to hand me to the police, after all."

Joanna shook her head. "I should," she said. "But I can't. I can't hurt you more than you've already been hurt."

"I knew it!" he said triumphantly. "It's going to be just the two of us! I knew it would work out this way!"

"Greg…' Joanna took in a deep breath. This is going to be painful, she knew. "Greg, I'm sending you to a place where they can help you."

His brows knit. "Sending me? Where?"

"It's like a hospital. Very private. Very discreet. They'll be able to help you there."

"I don't need anyone's help! I'm not sick!"

"I'm not asking for your opinion," Joanna said firmly. "I'm telling you. You're going there and that's all there is to it"

"I want to be with you!"

Joanna felt her heart clutch within her. "I know, Greg. I know. I'll come and visit you. Often."

"I want to be with you all the time!"

"Later," Joanna said. "When you're better."

He sat there, looking perplexed, for several moments. Then, sullenly, "You want to play with your new baby and forget about me."

"No!" Joanna blurted. "I could never forget you. You're my baby boy and I'll love you forever, no matter what."

"Then don't send me away." Greg fell to his knees in front of his mother and buried his face in her lap. "Please, Mom, don't send me away."

A wild thought raced through Joanna's mind. "What if…' She hesitated, searching for an answer. "Greg, what if you stayed here at the house, with me?"

"Yes!" he said fervently.

"And I can bring the doctors and their assistants here to stay with us."

"Yes! Yes!"

"And we'll be together while they help to make you well again."

"Anything," Greg sobbed, "as long as we can be together."

Joanna stroked her son's midnight dark hair, thinking, That will be the best way. Keep him here, where I can watch him. Bring the medical help to him.

She realized that Greg had fallen asleep with his head cradled in her lap. He probably hasn't slept for the past couple of days, either, Joanna thought.

I can't turn him over to the police. What good would that do? It won't bring Paul back and it will destroy Greg completely. Not the police. No scandal. No one must know what he did.

She sighed. It'll be difficult, especially when the new baby comes. Douglas. She already had his name picked out. Greg will be insanely jealous of the baby. But I can protect him. I can do it. I can take care of both my sons. I can. I will.