SAVANNAH

"The expedition took off at fifteen-twenty-two, Eastern time."

Jinny Anson's image on Joanna's wall screen looked tired and tense. She's lost enough weight over the past few months for it to show in her face, Joanna thought. Is she ill?

"The two crewed ships landed safely in the Mt. Wasser area," Anson went on, "but one of the freighters crashed on landing."

"What?" Joanna nearly came out of her chair.

Anson had not waited for her reply. She continued without a break, "About half of the cargo was damaged or destroyed in the crash. Mostly scientific instruments and life-support supplies. We will have to either cut the mission short or resupply much sooner than anticipated in the mission plan."

Almost as an afterthought she added, "There were no injuries to the expedition personnel."

Joanna relaxed a little. "I want to be included in the decision on cutting the expedition short or resupplying."

She could see that Anson was waiting for her response. When it came, the base director nodded as if she had expected it. "Of course. We'll need to talk it over with all the top division management, as well."

"How did the crash happen?" Joanna asked.

They discussed the situation haltingly, impeded by the three-second lag between Earth and Moon. Joanna had always found the communications lag annoying; this day it was maddening. Doug was out there in the open, more than a thousand miles from shelter, and the expedition was already in trouble the instant it touched down.

"Jinny' she said finally, "1 have a favor to ask of you."

Anson's normally pert face, now drawn and weary, showed a sudden flicker of curiosity once Joanna's words reached her. "A favor?"

I'd like you to stay on a few weeks longer up there. Until the expedition returns. I don't think it's a good idea to change base directors while that team's down at the south pole."

Anson's expression went from curiosity to alarm. "I'm afraid I can't do that, Mrs. Stavenger."

Surprised, irritated, Joanna snapped, "Why not?"

For three infernally long seconds she waited for the answer. "I'm getting married. All the arrangements are made."

"Is that all?" Joanna eased back in her chair. "The arrangements can be changed. I'll personally pay for whatever it costs you. I want you at Moonbase until the expedition safely returns."

I can't have Greg up there while Doug's out in the wilderness, she told herself. It's a chance I won't take.

But Anson replied firmly, "Mrs. Stavenger, it's not my fault that the expedition departed nearly three weeks late. I'm going to get married in San Antonio two weeks from tomorrow. I am leaving Moonbase on the first of the month, eight days from now, as planned. I'm afraid I can't change those plans."

Her temper flaring, Joanna replied, "As long as you're an employee of Masterson Aerospace you will follow the directives of your superiors. I want you at Moonbase until that expedition comes back!"

The two women stared at each other from a quarter-million-mile distance until Anson's image on the wall screen stiffened noticeably.

She took a visible breath before replying. Then, with deliberate calm, she answered, "Mrs. Stavenger, if I have to resign from Masterson Aerospace, I will. I'm getting married on the seventh of next month in San Antonio, in the Alamo, and nothing is going to stop my wedding."

Joanna's immediate instinct was to tell the ungrateful little snot that if she thought she was going to travel back to Earth for her stupid wedding on a Masterson spacecraft she had another think coming. But Joanna stifled that response. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, she told herself.

"I would appreciate it very much," she said to the image on the wall screen, "if you would reconsider your position. I will be happy to get you the Alamo for a future date. Or the Grand Canyon or the Taj Mahal, if you prefer. And I will of course want to give you and your husband a substantial wedding gift, since you are such a loyal and valued employee of this corporation. Please think it over."

Before Anson's stubborn-faced image could reply, Joanna clicked off the connection. I'll give her a wedding gift, she said to herself grimly. And then I'll send her to our African division and let her play with the tse-tse flies for the rest of her career.

She didn't have to call up the list of waiting messages to know that Greg was impatient to talk with her. He had flown in from Kiribati, fully expecting his mother to name him the new director of Moonbase. Greg has his own sources inside the board of directors, Joanna realized. He knows I've been planting the seeds for him.

Over the years, the space operations division had become the tail that wagged the corporate dog. Sales of new Clippership models were the mainstay of the corporation's profits. When Clippership sales were strong, the stockholders received dividends. When Clippership sales sagged, workers were laid off. But the orbital manufacturing end of the space division had never broken clearly into the black. Even with raw materials supplied by Moonbase, the metal alloys and Pharmaceuticals produced in the space stations were still too expensive to compete in the marketplace, except for the Windowalls, and even their profits were declining as the market for them saturated.

Joanna and the board of directors had looked into several reorganization plans that would separate the Clippership production from the orbital manufacturing work. A dozen bright young executives wanted to be named head of the Clippership program; nobody wanted to be stuck with orbital manufacturing.

Well, Joanna told herself, if Greg can actually find the strength to shut down Moonbase, all our orbital manufacturing will go down the drain with it, except for the Windowalls, and their costs will jump. Paul's dream will be dead. But maybe it will be for the best. I've given it nearly twenty years; how long can I keep on hoping for a miracle?

And there was even more trouble with the nanotechnology division, which was also tottering on the brink of collapse. Nanomachines were used on the Moon to produce water and build solar cells, but their uses on Earth had been slowed to a crawl by government regulations and a massive public relations campaign of demonstrations and protests, based on ignorance and hysterical fear, in Joanna's view. Medical applications of nanomachines had been brought to a standstill by so-called safety regulations, although those who were rich enough went to nations such as Switzerland; the Swiss government's regulations did not apply to foreigners, especially very rich foreigners, who quietly bought their nanotherapies there.

Joanna herself had been toying with the idea of accepting nanomachines to keep her arteries clear of plaque. And there was always the temptation to use the bugs to tighten up sagging muscles, renew wrinkled skin, even break up fatty deposits and harmlessly flush them out of the body.

Kris Cardenas had gotten herself into legal hot water by using nanobugs on herself to restore her failing eyesight. No glasses, no contact lenses, no surgery. The bugs restored her natural lenses to their youthful flexibility and strengthened the muscles that controlled them. Twenty-twenty vision, from only a few injections over a three-week period. Followed by three years of hounding by government lawyers and endless hearings in courts and the Canadian parliament. And Cardenas had all the prestige and authority of a Nobel Prize backing her.

Joanna shook all that out of her thoughts as she phoned the chief of the Space Operations division and asked him to come to her office.

"Why not use the virtual reality system?" Ibriham Rashid asked playfully.

Joanna was not amused. "Omar, you're no more than fifty yards down the hall from me. Get your butt over here. In person."

"Now?" he teased.

"At your earliest convenience," Joanna answered, with as much sarcasm as she could muster.

"Harkening and obedience," said Rashid.

Ibriham Muhammed al-Rashid had been born in Baltimore, third son of second-generation Palestinian-Americans. For all of his forty-two years he had balanced a firm belief in Islam with a firm belief that science and technology were gifts of Allah to help men in their struggle for existence. From his earliest childhood it was apparent that he was extremely intelligent and even more extremely motivated to rise high in the world. Johns Hopkins and MIT honed his intelligence. And his diplomatic skills. At school he was quickly dubbed 'Omar the Tentmaker." Instead of becoming angry at the derogatory nickname, Rashid turned it into a badge of honor.

His career with Masterson Aerospace had been little short of meteoric. As head of the space operations division, he knew that the corporate knives were being sharpened behind his back. Space operations was the corporation's largest division, thanks to the Clipperships, a profitable cash cow that various reorganization plans sought to carve up into smaller sections and remove from Rashid's control. He resisted those attempts with a mixture of deft corporate maneuvering and unfailing loyalty from his division staff. He also used his urbane charm wherever it would do the most good—especially with the chairwoman of the board.

Joanna enjoyed his attentions, as she did those of Carlos Quintana and several others. It amused her to watch the male ego at work, and to manipulate their testosterone-driven ambitions toward goals of her own choosing.

Rashid stepped into Joanna's office and looked around appreciatively. He was short and compact in build, rather like Paul, thought Joanna, although slimmer. A trim black beard framing his oval face, Rashid had movie-star looks: huge soulful dark brown eyes and a smile to die for. He was smiling now as he sat in the delicate little loveseat, facing Joanna's personal chair.

"Desert golds and tans," he said, noticing the decor. "And a scent of jasmine. Are you trying to make me homesick?"

Joanna laughed, "for Baltimore?"

"Racial memory," Rashid bantered. "Jung claimed that we all have primitive memories stored in our subconscious minds."

"Maybe my ancestry goes back to the desert," Joanna said. "I like this color scheme. And I love the Southwest."

"Arabs prefer cities. My people are great architects."

Joanna decided they had chatted enough. Time to get down to business. "Omar, how would you feel if I suggested that my son Greg be the next director of Moonbase?"

Rashid did not seem surprised. He eased one arm across the back of the loveseat and crossed his legs. "O'Rourke is slated for that position."

"I know, but…' She let the sentence dangle.

"O'Rourke is very competent. Unimaginative, true, but very competent."

"I asked Jinny if she'd stay on until the polar expedition came back and she refused," Joanna said.

The slightest of tics twitched at the comer of Rashid's mouth. "You should have spoken to me first. I would have told you she'd refuse. She's going to be married." His voice was soft, yet Joanna heard his disapproval. She had gone over his head to speak directly to Anson.

"My other son's out there at the south pole with Brennart."

"Yes, I am aware of that."

"I don't like the idea of changing base directors while the expedition's out there."

Rashid shrugged elaborately. "It really makes almost no difference whatsoever. The base director is in no position to help or harm the expedition."

"Really?"

"The expedition is rather self-sufficient. Brennart knows what he's doing."

"Even with one of the cargo ships crashed?"

Again the shrug. "They'll resupply earlier than scheduled. It's not a major problem."

"So you don't think Anson's leaving will be a problem?"

"Of course not. If I did, she wouldn't be leaving, believe me."

Joanna studied his handsome face. Rashid seemed completely at ease, totally confident.

"Then allowing Greg to take over…?"

Hespread his hands. "It shouldn't be a problem. O'Rourke has more experience, but your son has shown quite remarkable leadership qualities."

Almost, Joanna blurted her fear that Greg still hated his younger half-brother. You're being irrational, Joanna told herself sternly. Yet the fear was still there, gnawing inside her.

"This must be a very difficult decision for you," Rashid said softly, smiling at her from an arm's length away.

Joanna's thoughts snapped back to the here-and-now.

"No," she said. "No, it isn't difficult at all. Unless you are actively opposed, Greg Masterson will replace Jinny Anson as the director of Moonbase."

"Effective on the first of the month?" Rashid asked.

"Yes. But I want Greg to get up there right away and spend Jinny's final days at Moonbase getting oriented."

"How soon…?"

"Today," Joanna snapped.

Rashid dipped his head slightly. "Harkening and obedience."

MOONBASE

Jinny Anson felt her teeth grinding together as she looked over the graph on her desktop screen.

"Solar flare," she said, almost accusingly.

The technician who had been monitoring the astronomical instruments in Bianca Rhee's absence nodded unhappily.

"And it's going to be a big mother, is it?"

"Class Four flare. Maybe a Five."

Anson leaned back in her creaking plastic chair and glared at the young tech. "How soon?" she snapped.

The technician was barely into his twenties, still an undergraduate student who had taken a year off to make money by working at Moonbase. Standing in front of Anson's desk in his baggy, frayed coveralls, he shuffled his feet uncertainly.

"Hard to say," he replied. "I've checked with Tucson. Next twenty-four hours, for sure. Could be a lot sooner, though."

"Great. I'll have to alert the surface crews."

"And, uh—Brennart's people?"

"Yes, them too. They should have their shelters dug in by now. Will the radiation hit them?"

The young man looked miserably unsure of himself. "Hard to say," he repeated. "Oh, they'll get the first pulse sure enough: the ultraviolet and x-rays. But the heavy stuff -that depends on how the interplanetary magnetic field's twisted up."

Rankled, Anson said, "So you don't know when the particle cloud will hit or how heavy it'll be."

"Nobody could tell you that," the kid said defensively. "Not this far in advance."

"Okay," Anson squinted at his nametag, "Albertson. Thanks for the bad news."

The kid fled her office as if afraid for his life.

A Class Four solar flare, she thought Maybe a Five. Just what we need. Angrily she punched her keyboard to call up the communications center. Got to get all the surface workers inside. And warn Brennart's people.

As she spoke to the comm center, Anson pictured in her mind what they were going to be facing. The most violent event the solar system can produce, an explosion on the Sun with the force of a hundred billion megatons of TNT. More energy than the whole world consumes in fifty thousand years. Hardly a quarter-second's worth of the Sun's total energy output, but enough to kill anyone caught in its lethal plasma cloud. Enough to wreck unprotected equipment.

"What about cislunar traffic?" the comm technician asked.

"What's it look like?" Anson asked back.

The tech's face disappeared from her desktop screen and a visual display of the Earth-Moon traffic showed four green arrows representing unmanned freighters heading for the factories in Earth orbit and a single violet arrow of a passenger vehicle on its way to the Euro-Russian base at Grimaldi. There were three yellow arrows, as well: Yamagata spacecraft, two inbound, one heading Earthward.

As she watched, Anson saw a new red arrow appear on the screen. A passenger-carrying craft was leaving Earth orbit, heading for Moonbase.

"What's that new blip?" she asked. "I don't recall anything scheduled today."

The technician's voice answered, "Message just came in; it's in your voice mail. Your replacement is on his way.

"O'Rourke's coming now?" Anson felt puzzled, annoyed.

"It's not O'Rourke," the tech's voice replied. "It's Gregory Masterson III." The technician pronounced the three-part name with appropriate awe in her voice.

"Shit on a shingle!" Anson exploded. "Get that poor dumb boob on the horn and tell him to abort his flight and get his butt back home where it's safe. That's all I need, having the boss's son fried!"

"It's ice, all right, but I'm afraid it's pretty thin," said Roger Deems.

He, Brennart, Killifer and Doug Stavenger were jammed into the analysis lab of the expedition's main shelter. Deems was still in his cumbersome spacesuit, minus only its helmet, which made the little cubicle even more crowded. The only light came from one of the computer screens.

Doug could hear the grating patter of regolith rubble being piled on the shelter's curving roof. Outside, the expedition's minitractors were struggling to dig up enough surface dirt to provide the necessary coverage for radiation protection and thermal insulation. The regolith here in the south polar highlands was thin and hard, its normally powder-like texture vacuum welded into the consistency of concrete. The remotely-operated little tractors were having a hard time digging up enough of it to cover the expedition's four shelters. Brennart had to send people out to jury-rig some of their aluminum and oxygen rocket propellants to burn into the hard rock and break it into manageable chunks.

"We should've brought a couple tons of plastic explosives," one of the tractor operators grumbled.

Deems's job, immediately upon landing, had been to lead a team to the ice field that the unmanned probes had identified and take samples.

Peering at the computer screen where the spectrograph's analysis of the ice was displayed, Brennart said heartily, "Looks good enough to drink!"

"A lot of dissolved minerals," Doug said, tracing a calcium line with his outstretched finger.

"You could say the same about Perrier!" Brennart snapped.

Killifer said nothing, standing between Brennart and Doug, his face in shadow.

Turning to Deems, Brennart asked, "Did you get a chance to map any of the ice field?"

"We didn't do any mapping," Deems said, almost apologetically. "Our mission plan called for digging some preliminary cores and bringing back the samples taken. Mapping comes later."

"I know the mission plan," Brennart said impatiently. "I wrote it."

Deems glanced at Killifer, who said nothing.

"So?" Brennart demanded. "What about the cores you dug?"

"We drilled three cores. You see the analysis of the ice. It's water, all right."

"Is it drinkable as is, or will we have to treat it?" Doug asked.

"Looks perfectly drinkable to me," said Brennart.

"The ice is only ten centimeters deep," Deems said. Then he added, "Where we dug."

"Which is at the edge of the field, right?" Brennart said.

"A hundred meters from the edge," said Deems. "That's what we figured was a safe walk-back distance, what with the darkness and the slick surface—even with the dust on it, there's not much traction to walk with."

"That field is more than ten kilometers across, isn't it?" Brennart said, more of a statement than a question. "And there are a dozen or more other ice fields scattered about the area."

Deems nodded. "That's right."

"But how deep does it go?" Doug wondered aloud.

"That's what we're here to find out," Brennart said.

"Right," said Killifer.

Brennart straightened up, his golden hair almost brushing the curving roof of the shelter. "All right, we've made a good start. Jack," he turned to Killifer, "I want a complete inventory of the supplies we lost in the crash on my screen by the time I come back in for supper."

"No problem," said Killifer.

"I'm going outside to set a little fire under the digging. Roger, you did well out there. I'm pleased."

Deems's normally half-frightened expression slowly evolved into a shy, delighted smile.

"Doug," Brennart snapped, "shouldn't you be registering our time of arrival and summary of activities?"

"I've already done that," Doug replied, biting back the instinct to add, sir.

"And our schedule-for tomorrow?"

I'm set to transmit that as soon as we send out the nanotech team tomorrow morning."

Brennart looked down on Doug with something approaching displeasure. "Do it now. Right now."

"But legally—"

"Get it into the record!" Brennart insisted. "Tell them you'll send confirmation when the team actually starts out tomorrow. Exact time and all that."

"Very well," said Doug.

They squeezed out of the analysis cubicle like four men getting out of a phone booth. This is no place for a claustrophobe, Doug thought as they marched single file up the narrow central aisle of the shelter.

The cylindrical shelter was divided by thin plastic internal walls that could be load-bearing only in the gentle gravity of the Moon. Brennart and Deems headed for the airlock; Brennart to suit up for the surface, Deems to put his helmet back on and go to a well-deserved rest break in the shelter that housed his bunk. The digging team had not yet linked the four shelters with connecting tunnels.

Doug followed Killifer to the comm center, another cubicle that was hot and overcrowded with two people in it. The communications technician was at his post, headphone clamped to his ear.

I'll take over," Killifer said. "Go take a leak."

The guy grinned appreciatively and surrendered his flimsy plastic chair to Killifer, who took the headset and slipped it around his neck.

"Anything expected in?" Killifer asked his departing back.

"Nope," said the technician as he squeezed past Doug. "Everything's quiet until the next satellite comes over."

The expedition included six miniature communications satellites in polar orbit, following one another endlessly like soldiers on perpetual parade. Moonbase's regular commsat, hovering at the L-l libration point above the lunar equator, could not'see' the deep valleys of the mountainous south polar region, so the polar orbiting minisats were necessary.

Doug had suggested twelve satellites, so there would be continuous coverage, but Savannah had decided that the expedition could do with fifteen-minute breaks between satellites, and doubling their communications costs was not worth the additional coverage.

While Killifer began punching up the inventory of supplies and equipment carried aboard the crashed lander, Doug sat at the other display and tapped out his legal report for Moonbase and the World Court at The Hague. He could feel the heat that their bodies and the computers and communications sets were generating. Sweat trickled down his ribs.

They were sitting close enough to be touching shoulders, but for nearly half an hour neither of them said a word. Doug finished his task and set up tomorrow's work, then—for lack of anything else to do—called up the inventory Killifer was working on.

"You checking up on me?" Killifer snapped.

Startled, Doug said, "No. Of course not."

"Then why're you looking over my shoulder?"

With a shrug, Doug answered, "I don't have much of anything else to do at the moment."

"Then get outta here and give me some space."

Doug stared at the older man. "You don't like me much, do you?"

"Why should I?"

"What do you mean?"

"You were stuck into this mission on orders from Savannah. Your so-called job could be done by a trained baboon. You're nothing but a snoop from corporate headquarters."

"A snoop?" Doug wanted to laugh. "What's there to snoop about? I'm here because I thought this expedition would be exciting."

Killifer glared at him. "Exciting? You must be crazy."

Doug waved a hand. "Don't you find all this exciting? The first people here at the south pole and all that?"

"Christ, you're worse than a snoop. You're a frigging dilettante."

"Well," said Doug 'I'm sorry you think so. I hope to be as helpful as I can."

"Oh great. Just stay out of the way and we'll get along fine."

With a laugh, Doug replied, "It's not going to be easy to stay out of each other's way, cooped up in these tin cans."

"Then why don't you go outside and take a nice long walk?"

Getting to his feet, Doug said, "That's not a bad idea." And he left Killifer alone in the comm cubicle.

Killifer watched him leave, then turned back to his tedious inventory task. He heard a piercing note from the earphone on the headset draped around his neck and quickly clapped the set over his close-cropped hair.

"Moonbase to Brennart. Emergency notification. A major solar flare is expected in the next twenty-four hours. We don't know if it will impact your area or not, but you should take all safety precautions."

It was a recorded message, transmitted by the minisat that had just come up over their horizon. Killifer duly noted it into the computer log and then started to call Brennart, out on the surface.

His fingertip hovered over the keypad. I'll tell Brennart when he gets back in. No sense shaking him up right now. Plenty of time before there's any danger.

Too bad it won't hit while the Stavenger kid is outside, he thought.

LUNAR TRANSFER VEHICLE

Before this flight to the Moon, Greg had never been farther than the space stations in Earth orbit. He had been nervous about spending a couple of days in weightlessness, but so far the medication patch behind his right ear seemed to be working: he felt a little queasy, but under control.

The lunar transfer vehicle was basically a freight carrier; the maintenance gang at the space station had added a crew module especially for him. It was a small bubble of alloy and plastiglass, barely big enough for the mandatory human pilot and co-pilot and a pair of passengers.

The bubble was pressurized, but safety regulations required the humans to stay in spacesuits for the duration of the two-day flight. If a stray meteoroid punctured the module's skin they could slide their visors down and ride the rest of the way buttoned up in their suits.

The other 'passenger," tightly strapped in to the seat next to Greg, was a drum of lubricating oil. Not romantic, but very necessary for the machinery at Moonbase. With the bulky steel-gray drum beside him and the two pilots sitting in front of him, Greg's main view was overhead. He cranked his seat back as far as it would go, and realized that in zero-gee 'overhead' was a matter of opinion. He felt almost as if he were standing and looking straight ahead.

What he saw was the Earth, glowing blue and white against the empty blackness of space, dwindling imperceptibly as the lunar transfer vehicle coasted toward the Moon. Two days inside this spacesuit, Greg thought. We're going to smell ripe when we finally put down at Alphonsus. Staring at the Earth, he realized with the force of a physical sensation that he was leaving the world and heading for a place that had no air or water or life of its own. He shuddered inwardly at the thought.

"Mr. Masterson, sir?"

Greg could not tell whether it was the pilot or co-pilot speaking to him. Their voices sounded virtually identical in his helmet earphones.

"We have a problem, sir. Ground control reports an imminent SFE. We're ordered to reverse course and return to the station."

Astronauts and their jargon, Greg thought. "What's an SFE?"

"Solar flare event. Extremely high levels of ionizing radiation. Very dangerous."

"Lethal," said the other astronaut.

Alarmed, Greg asked, "How much time do we have?"

"Unknown, sir. The flare could burst out any time within the next twenty-four hours."

"The radiation could increase to killing levels within a few hours afterward," the other astronaut said.

It was annoying to be talking to the backs of two helmets. Greg still could not tell from the voices in his earphones which astronaut was speaking.

"Can't we get to Moonbase before the flare erupts?" he asked.

"Standard safety procedure is to return to the orbital station we started from."

"The space stations orbit below the geomagnetosphere," said the other voice.

"What's that got to do with it?" Greg demanded.

"The geomagnetosphere is like a magnetic umbrella, sir. It offers protection from the heaviest levels of radiation."

"Still, all personnel on each station have to evacuate to the ECPM during the peak radiation influx."

Before Greg could ask, the other astronaut explained, "Emergency Crew Protection Module, that is."

"I see," said Greg. "But if the flare is still a day or so away, why can't we go on to Moonbase?"

"There's no telling when the flare will burst out"

"Could be in another few minutes."

"But even so," Greg insisted, "you said it would be several hours after that before the radiation levels got dangerous."

They hesitated before one of them answered, "That's true, but standard procedure—"

"Can't we juice this vehicle and get to Moonbase sooner?"

Again they hesitated. Then, "We'd have to re-light the main engine."

"But that would actually cost us less delta-vee than reversing back to LEO."

Greg tried to sort out their jargon. "You're saying that it would be easier to speed up and get to Moonbase?"

"Yessir."

"But we'd have to file a new flight plan and get it approved by traffic control."

"And undergo another three or four gees of thrust for a few minutes."

The takeoff from Earth had been slightly less than three gees for several minutes, Greg recalled.

"I can crunch the numbers and then check 'em out with ground control."

"Do that," Greg commanded.

For several minutes the two astronauts hunched their helmeted heads together, fingers flicking over the keyboards in their control panel. Greg realized they were talking to ground control, back at Savannah. He tapped the channel selector on the wrist of his suit until he found their frequency. Listening in on their chatter was pretty much a waste of time, though: Greg could barely understand half of their technospeak.

But at last he heard, Trajectory alterations are approved. You are cleared for high-thrust bum to Moonbase."

"Cleared for Moonbase. Roger," said the pilot

Greg heard the radio link click off. Then, "Yahoo!" yelled one of them, loud enough to make Greg's ears ring.

"Light 'er up and move 'er out!"

As a heavy hand of acceleration pressed Greg back in his seat, he realized that the astronauts were more than happy with his insistence on pushing ahead to the Moon.

Killifer's main assignment was to remain inside the headquarters shelter of the expedition's base camp and monitor all surface activities. Thus the communications center was his principal station.

He had quite deliberately erased Moonbase's warning message from the comm system's computer memory. He waited calmly underground until Brennart came in. Then Killifer hurried to the airlock, where Brennart was carefully removing his suit and vacuuming the dust from it.

Sitting on the slim-legged bench next to Brennart, he spoke just loudly enough to be heard over the buzz of the hand vacuum.

"We got a warning of an imminent solar flare."

"When?"

"About two hours ago. I didn't say anything about it; didn't want to shake up the team."

Brennart looked down at him, his brows knit in thought. They made an odd pair: the tall, golden-haired leader and his dark, lantern-jawed aide.

"I might have exceeded my authority," Killifer confessed. "I erased the warning from the log."

"Why?"

"I didn't want anyone but you to know about it. You're the expedition commander. You should be the one who makes the decision on what to do. If the comm tech or Doug Stavenger or somebody else found out about the warning, they'd be blabbing it to everybody and nobody'd want to be outside."

Brennart nodded slowly. "That's true enough."

"I hope I did the right thing," Killifer said, with as much humility as he could muster.

"Yes, you did. A warning of an imminent flare poses no immediate danger and we still have a lot of digging to do out there."

"The connectors?"

With a shake of his head, Brennart said, "We're behind schedule, I know. You don't have to remind me. The ground out there is all rock. Hardly any regolith over it at all."

Without the tunnels to connect them, the expedition members would be stuck in the four separate buried shelters when the flare's radiation reached them.

"What do you plan to do, then?" Killifer asked.

Frowning, Brennart said, I'd better put everybody into the digging. We don't even have enough rubble to adequately shield the four shelters yet, let alone the connecting tunnels."

For the first time, Killifer felt alarmed. But he hid it and said merely. "You always know what's best."

It was dark out on the surface, menacingly, cryogenically dark with the high mountains blocking out any chance of light or warmth. Yet Doug found it thrilling. More than thrilling; it was the most exciting thing he had ever known. To put your bootprints down where no human being has ever stood before. To see what no human eyes have ever gazed on. Danger and wonder and the lure of the unknown, all mixed together. That's what the frontier is all about Doug told himself. God, it must be habit-forming, like a drug.

He took a deep breath of canned air, realizing with a grin that it was an artificial mixture of oxygen and nitrogen at unnaturally low pressure. Every breath we take, every step we make, all depends on the machines we've developed.

So what? he asked himself. How long do you think humans would've survived on Earth if they hadn't developed fire and tools? We're machine makers, and with our machines we can expand throughout the universe.

Then he chuckled to himself. Throughout the universe, huh? Maybe you ought to just concentrate on this little base camp you're building here at the south pole of the Moon. Get that done before you start challenging the rest of creation.

Starlight guided his steps across the rocky ground. The hard unblinking stars were strewn across the black sky like dust; even through his heavily tinted visor Doug could see thousands of them staring back at him. They lit the ground like pale moonlight on Earth.

He walked to the edge of the ice field. Staring at its dark flat expanse, Doug felt disappointed that the dust-covered ice did not reflect the stars. It looked almost like a dead calm sea, flat and still and gleaming slightly, as if lit from within. Then he looked up as high as he could from inside his helmet and realized that he could not see the Earth. From Moonbase the Earth was always hanging overhead, warm, beckoning, friendly. The sky down here was empty, lonely.

Turning, he saw Mt. Wasser, its flat-topped curving peak bathed in glowing sunlight, shining against the darkness like a disembodied beacon. Tomorrow we start up the mountain, Doug told himself. With the nanomachines. With any luck, we'll be building the power tower within thirty-six hours.

We're making history here! The thought exhilarated him. Kids will read about this expedition in their schoolbooks.

He looked out at the ice field again and suddenly, without even deciding consciously to do it, he ran to the edge of the softly gleaming ice with long, loping lunar strides; almost like flying. Then he felt his boots on the ice and he glided along like a skater, spinning and turning, laughing inside his helmet like a boy at play.

His earphones chirped. Then he heard Brennart's unmistakable voice, "This is your expedition commander. I want every person suited up and outside to help dig the connector tunnels. The only personnel excluded from this order are the second-in-command and the communications technician now on watch. Everybody else get to the digging. This includes you, Mr. Stavenger. Get moving. Now!"

MOONBASE

"A peasant," muttered Lev Brudnoy to himself. "That's what I am. Nothing but a dolt of a peasant."

He was kneeling between rows of fresh light green shoots that would become carrots, if all went well, bent over the dismantled pieces of a malfunctioning pump. Stretched all around him for a full hectare, one hundred meters on a side, were neatly aligned hydroponic troughs in which carrots, beans, lettuce and black-eyed peas were growing. And row after row of soybeans. Plastic hose lines ran above the troughs, carrying water enriched with the nutrients the plants needed to grow. Strips of full-spectrum lamps lit the underground chamber with the intensity of summer noon.

Off in a corner of the big cavern was a carefully boxed-in plot of lunar sand, dug up from the regolith outside and turned into a garden of brightly-hued roses, geraniums, daffodils and zinnias—all lovingly pollinated by Brudnoy's own hand. Moonbase's agrotechnicians and nutritionists were responsible for the hydroponics crops; the plot of soil-grown flowers was Brudnoy's alone.

Sweating, Brudnoy sat on the rock floor amid the strewn pieces of the pump. For the life of him, he could not see what had gone wrong with it. Yet the pump had stopped working, threatening the farm's carrot crop with slow withering death. Brudnoy had wanted to fix the pump before the agrotechs realized it had malfunctioned. Now, instead of becoming a hero, he felt like a dunce.

"Lev!" a voice rang off the farm's rock walls. "Lev, are you in here?"

He scrambled to his feet. Two of the biologists were standing uncertainly at the airlock, several rows away. They started toward him.

"I thought you were leaving today," Brudnoy said as they approached.

"Flight's cancelled. Solar flare coming up," said Serai N'kuma.

"Oh."

"So we thought we'd take you out to dinner," Debbie Paine added.

N'kuma was tall, leggy, lean as a ballet dancer, her skin a glistening deep black. Paine was blonde and petite, yet with an hourglass figure that strained her coveralls. Brudnoy had fantasized about the two of them ever since they had first arrived at Moonbase, even after he realized that they preferred each other to men.

"I can't leave here until this wretched pump is fixed," Brudnoy said. Spreading his arms, he added, "You see before you a true peasant, chained to his land."

The women ignored his heartfelt self-pity. "What's wrong with the pump?" Paine asked.

Shrugging, Brudnoy replied, "It won't work."

"Let's take a look at it," said N'kuma, dropping to her knees to examine the scattered pieces.

"I've taken it apart completely. Nothing seems wrong. Yet it refuses to do its job."

"Engineer's hell," Paine said, grinning. "Everything checks but nothing works."

"In the old days we would have it shot," Brudnoy grumbled.

"And then you'd have no pump at all," N'kuma said, from her kneeling position.

Paine ran a finger along the hose that carried the water and nutrients. "Is the pump getting electricity okay?"

"There's nothing wrong with the electrical power," Brudnoy said.

Plucking at the wire that ran along the hose, Paine said, "Except that the insulation on this wire is frayed and the bare aluminum is touching the metal pipe fitting here."

N'kuma popped to her feet. "It's shorting out."

Peering at the slightly scorched metal fitting, Brudnoy said, "1 don't think the wire we make here at the base is as good as the copper stuff they make Earthside."

"Didn't you smell the insulation burning?" Paine asked.

Brudnoy scratched his thatch of graying hair. "Now that you mention it. there was a strange smell a while ago. I changed my coveralls the next day and the smell went away."

Both women guffawed. In short order Brudnoy produced a new length of wire, Paine spliced it into the line while N'kuma reassembled the pump with hands that were little short of magical. Brudnoy watched them admiringly.

Once they were finished he insisted, "Now I will take you to dinner. It's all on me! My treat."

They laughed together as they left the farm. Meals at the galley were free, part of the corporation's services for Moonbase's employees.

Brudnoy laughed the hardest. Hardly anyone in the base knew that these two young women were lovers. All the men will choke on their food when they see me with these young lovelies on my arms. Some of the women will, too. Not bad for an old man, he thought.

"Welcome to Moonbase," said Jinny Anson.

Greg Masterson's nose wrinkled at the strange smell of the place: human sweat mixed with machine oil and a strange sharp burnt odor, as if someone had been firing a gun recently.

But he made himself smile and took Anson's proffered hand. "Thanks. It's good to get here ahead of the flare."

Anson had gone down to the receiving area dug into the floor of Alphonsus adjacent to the rocket port. Little more than a rough-hewn cavern beneath the crater's floor, the place was called 'The Pit' by veteran Lunatics. It was connected to the main section of the base by a single tunnel, nearly two kilometers long. There were plans to put in an electrified trolley line along the tunnel; for now, a stripped down tractor did the job, its finish dulled and dented from years of work on the surface.

She kept a hand on his, arm as Greg hip-hopped like any newcomer to the Moon.until he was safely seated in the tractor.

"I brought you a present," she said, climbing into the driver's seat next to him"

"A present?"

Reaching behind the seat, Anson pulled out a worn-looking pair of boots. "Moon shoes. They've got weights built into them so you won't go bouncing around when you try to walk. Remove one weight per day while you're here, and inside of five days you'll be walking like a native."

It was a standard line among the Lunatics. So far there were no natives of the Moon. Women got pregnant occasionally; they were gently but firmly transferred back Earthside as soon as their condition was discovered.

"I was surprised to see a working elevator," Greg said as he took off his slippers and pulled on the weighted boots.

The tractor was programmed to run the straight tunnel without human guidance. Anson hit the starter button and its aged superconducting electric motor whined to life.

"We just put it into operation last week," she said. "Makes it much easier to load and unload cargo, once you get the crates through the airlock."

"Takes a lot of electrical power, though," Greg said as the tractor jolted to a start.

Anson waved a hand in the air. "Electricity's cheap. The nanomachines chomp up the regolith and lay down solar cells. Our solar farms are constantly getting bigger."

"I've seen the reports," Greg said. "And the projections."

"Good." They were tooling along the tunnel now at nearly twenty miles per hour. The overhead lamps flicked past, throwing shadows across Greg's sculpted face like phases of a moon hurtling by.

He's really a handsome devil, Anson told herself. But there's something unsettling about him. The eyes? Something. He looks… she struggled to define what was bothering her. At last she thought, He looks as if he could be cruel.

Miyoko Homma felt that she should be standing at attention, like a soldier. As it was, she had bowed deeply to the chief manager of Nippon One upon entering his cubicle and then remained standing with her arms rigidly at her sides and her face as blank as she could make it.

"The solar flare that you predicted has not come," said the head chief. He was old for Nippon One, in his forties. His belly was beginning to round out, although his face was still taut and his eyes piercing.

"Sir, it will come," Miyoko said flatly. "It is only a question of time."

"How much time?" the chief demanded. "We have kept everyone inside. The work that must be done on the surface is suspended because of this flare that was supposed to erupt. It's been more than twelve hours now! Twelve hours of lost work! How much longer must we wait?"

Miyoko took a small breath before answering, "I do not know, sir."

"But you are our astronomer! It is your job to know!"

"Sir, no one can predict the eruption of a solar flare with such precision. The configuration of magnetic field lines that I saw when I first issued the warning was typical of an imminent flare, one that would burst out in twenty-four hours or less."

"Twelve hours have gone by," said the chief. With a glance at the digital clock on his desk he added, "Twelve hours and eighteen minutes."

Miyoko felt like a small mouse trembling between the paws of a very large cat. "Sir, I can only report to you what my instruments show. Any other astronomer in the world would have reported exactly the same as I did. It is unfortunate that the Sun is not cooperating with us."

The chief settled back in his chair and rubbed his stubbled chin. "The Americans are apparently not afraid of your flare. Our reconnaissance satellite shows them working very busily on their base."

"But they must know!" Miyoko blurted.

"Or they know better."

Miyoko clamped her lips shut.

The chief stared hard at her. "It is a great problem. Do I send the surface crews back to work or not? It is most inefficient to have them sitting cooped up in here when they should be working on the surface. Yet…"

"Sir, may I make a suggestion?"

He nodded assent.

"When the flare actually erupts there will be at least an hour before the heavy particle radiation begins to build up. If the surface crews are willing to accept the first burst of relatively light radiation, it should be possible to get them inside to safety before the truly dangerous radiation builds up."

Immediately the chief said, "Tell me about this first burst of relatively light radiation." Miyoko could detect no trace of sarcasm in his words.

She said, "When the flare erupts it throws out a burst of high-frequency radiation—mostly ultraviolet and x-rays. This arrives in our vicinity within eight point three minutes, since it travels at the speed of light."

"How serious is this radiation?"

"To a person already protected by a spacesuit it is not dangerous. In Tokyo the radiation from space averages about four-tenths of a rad per year. On the Moon's surface it is closer to twenty-five rads per year. The initial burst from a solar flare will increase this dose by a factor of ten."

"H'mmm," said the chief. Miyoko thought he was trying to hide the fact that he did not know what a rad was, nor how dangerous it could be.

"When the flare's plasma cloud arrives, however," she went on, "the radiation will increase to more than a thousand rads in a few hours. Worse than the radiation dose at Hiroshima."

That startled the chief. "Worse than Hiroshima?"

"Yes."

"But the first pulse is not so bad?"

"The surface crews can be brought inside after the first pulse hits," Miyoko said again.

"We have a full hour before the heavy radiation builds up?"

"At least an hour, sir." She hesitated a moment, struggling with her own conscience, then added, "In truth, sir, we have no way of knowing whether the heavy radiation will strike us at all, even after the flare bursts forth. The plasma cloud that carries the radiation may miss us entirely."

"Miss us entirely? Is that possible?"

"Yes, sir. But we have no way of predicting that quickly enough to save men working on the surface. That is why we must get them all inside once the flare erupts."

The chief sat muttering to himself for several moments. Then a slow smile of understanding spread across his normally-scowling features.

"This is like predicting the path of a typhoon, isn't it? You know the storm is approaching, but you cannot tell exactly where it will strike."

"Yes, sir." Miyoko jumped at his analogy, feeling a rush of relief. "Very much like a, typhoon. An invisible typhoon that cannot be felt, but can kill a person just as swiftly."

MT. WASSER

"What's the latest word on this flare?" Brennart asked.

Killifer pushed his little wheeled chair away slightly from the comm console. "No word. The flare hasn't appeared yet"

The two men were alone in the comm cubicle. Brennart was on, his feet, towering over the seated Killifer. Every other member of the expedition was out digging, even the ostensible communications technician. Brennart knew the mission schedule was in a shambles but he would sort that out and get things going properly again as soon as this flare threat was over.

"What does Moonbase say about it?" he asked Killifer.

His aide made a sour face. "They say the flare ought to have popped by now. Could pop any minute. They just don't know."

"With that and five dollars I could buy a cup of coffee."

"They also say," Killifer added caustically, "that their regular astronomer is here in the boondocks with us, instead of at her instruments at the base."

Brennart glowered. "That was Stavenger's idea, bringing her along with us."

Killifer said nothing, but his sardonic smile spoke volumes.

"We can't just sit here and wait for a flare that might not even happen," Brennart muttered.

Nodding, Killifer said, "Oh, by the way, Moonbase reported that Yamagata sent up a recce satellite six hours ago. It's in a very eccentric polar orbit"

"With its longest dwell time right over us," Brennart guessed.

"Right."

"Damn! They'll be sending a team down here to make a claim on the mountain before we can."

"I don't see how—"

"They could drop a kamikaze crew on the other side of the mountain and use hoppers to get up to the top," Brennart growled angrily. "Stick a sheet of solar panels up there and claim first use. Then we're screwed."

"But aren't they just as worried about the flare as we are?"

Brennart looked down at his aide with a withering expression. "You don't know what kamikaze means, do you?"

"Something from history, isn't it? Last century?"

"Right. History."

Killifer sat on the uncomfortable little chair and craned his neck to look up at his boss. Brennart liked to be known for making decisions, but now he seemed hesitant, caught on the horns of a dilemma, hung up with uncertainty.

"If only we knew when the flare will erupt," he muttered, kneading his right fist into the palm of his left hand.

"Or if it will erupt at all," Killifer suggested.

Brennart whirled on him. "If? You think the whole thing might be a false alarm?"

"I don't know. I'm not an astronomer."

"The goddamned astronomer's out here digging ditches instead of at her post with her instruments!"

Killifer shrugged. "Douggie wanted her along."

"The flare should have erupted by now, if there's going to be one," Brennart thought out loud.

"Even if the flare does come, isn't there a couple of hours before the radiation really gets serious?" Killifer knew the answer to his question.

"Yes, that's right," Brennart said.

"Enough time to get down off the mountain, using our hoppers?"

Brennart stopped his frustrated kneading and sat on the chair next to his aide. "We could jump up to the summit of Mt. Wasser, plant the flag and start the nanobugs working on the power tower, and get down again .before the radiation buildup even begins.'"

"Christ, that's brilliant," Killifer said.

I'm going to suit up," Brennart said.

"You?"

"I can't ask my people to do something that I'm not prepared to do myself. I take the same risks they do."

"Yeah, but—"

"How many people will we need for a dash to the summit?"

Killifer swivelled his chair to the screen and tapped on the keyboard. "Mission plan calls for six."

"Strip it down. How many do we actually need?"

Studying the list on his screen, Killifer said. Two to handle the nanobugs, one to pilot the hopper."

"Martin and Greenberg are the nanotechs," Brennart said.

Thinking swiftly, Killifer said, "Maybe we oughtta leave one of them here. No sense taking both of them up to the summit."

"One person can't physically handle the task," Brennart objected.

"All you need is an extra pair of hands. A warm body will do. Either Greenberg or Martin can direct the warm body, and you haven't risked both your nanotechs."

Brennart pondered it for all of three seconds. "Right. I'll take Greenberg. He's the more experienced of the two. Who can we spare to help him?"

"The astronomer?" Killifer suggested.

"Put her to some useful work," Brennart muttered.

"You oughtta take Stavenger, too," Killifer pointed out 'Let him make a legal record of the claim."

"Perfect!"

Killifer stayed in the conun cubicle as Brennart inarched off to the airlock, where the spacesuits were stored. With a little luck, he said to himself, they'll all break their friggin' necks.

Doug felt excited when Brennart came out and told him they were making a dash to the summit of Mt. Wasser. He had been spraying plastic sealant along the tunnel walls just dug out by the others; the sealant made the tunnel airtight. It was dull and clumsy work, inside his spacesuit, with no light except from his helmet lamp. The sealant was doped with a weakly glowing phosphor, so that any gaps in its application would be easily seen.

It was the safest job Brennart could find for him. The more experienced expedition members were handling the flammable aluminum/oxygen propellant mixture out on the surface, desperately working to break up the rock-hard ground enough to allow the tractors to scoop it up and dump it on the shelters and tunnels.

Scrambling out of the tunnel at Brennart's command, Doug checked the equipment pouches on his belt while two of the other expedition members topped off his oxygen tank from the supply on the undamaged cargo ship. Yes, the miniature vidcam was there. Doug pulled it out and checked that its battery was fully charged. Not that he had used it, digging tunnels and sealing them.

He was surprised to see a short, stocky spacesuited figure join Brennart and Greenberg. Sure enough, the name stencilled on the chest of her suit was Rhee.

"We're making a dash to the summit," Brennart told them as they lifted the spindly-legged little hopper from its hold in the cargo ship. "Rhee, you assist Greenberg here. I'll pilot the hopper."

"What's my assignment?" Doug asked.

"Official record keeper," said Brennart. "Unless you know how to handle a hopper."

Why is he so hostile to me? Doug asked himself. Aloud, he replied, "I've never actually flown one, but I've put in a lot of hours in simulators."

"Fine," Brennart snapped. "You can be my co-pilot. Just don't touch anything."

Doug helped Greenberg and Bianca Rhee to wrestle the tall canister of nanomachines onto the platform of the little hopper. Then they began strapping it down. The rocket vehicle looked too frail to take the four of them, Doug thought, even in the Moon's light gravity. This hopper was little more than a platform with a podium for its controls and footloops to anchor a half-dozen riders. There was a fold-down railing, too, with attachments for tethers.

To Doug it looked like a great way to break your neck. Racing jetcycles seemed safer.

"Come on, come on," Brennart urged, pushing between Rhee and Greenberg to help finish the strapdown. "We don't have a moment to lose."

"Why the sudden rush?" Doug asked. "This isn't on the mission schedule."

"No, it's not," Brennart snapped. "But maybe Yamagata isn't waiting for our schedule."

"Yamagata? They've got a team here too?"

"On its way," Brennart said.

"You're certain?" Doug probed.

"Certain enough."

"Has it been confirmed by—"

"Who's in charge of this expedition, Stavenger? You or me?" Brennart bellowed.

His ears ringing, Doug said, "You are, of course."

"Then climb aboard and let's get going."

Doug dutifully stepped up the rickety little ladder and started to slide his boots into the foot loops alongside Brennart

"Lift up the railings," Brennart ordered, "and see that everyone's safely tethered to them."

"Aye-aye, sir," said Doug snidery. Brennart paid no attention.

The tethers won't be much help if we crash, Doug thought as he snapped the flimsy railings into place. By the time he returned to Brennart's side and clicked his own tether to the rail, Brennart had powered up the hopper's systems. All the controls showed green, Doug saw.

"Ready for takeoff," Brennart said.

Doug heard Killifer's answer in his earphones. "You are cleared for takeoff."

Brennart nudged the T-yoke of the throttle forward a bit. The platform beneath Doug's boots quivered and leaped upward.

There was no sound, no wind, but the dark, rocky land fell away from them so rapidly Doug felt his breath gush out of him.

Their little base dwindled quickly: four humps of shelters surrounded by spacesuited figures and a pair of minitractors, all digging tunnels and pushing rubble over the shelters like busy, scurrying ants. The brief flare of propellants burning into the rock strobed like a miniature lightning stroke.

Looking upward he saw the bare flank of Mt. Wasser coming near, sliding past dizzyingly as the hopper continued to rise. The rock face of the mountain looked glassy smooth, sandpapered by dust-mote-sized micrometeoroids for billions of years.

Suddenly they were in sunlight, brilliant, almost overpowering sunlight. The mountainside glittered like glass, like crystal, as it rushed by. Doug heard his suit fans whir faster, and something in his backpack groaned under the sudden heat load. He gripped the railing with both gloved hands.

"This is flying!" he said appreciatively. "Like being on a magic carpet."

He heard Brennart chuckle softly. "You like it, eh?"

"It's terrific!"

Neither Greenberg nor Rhee said a word. Doug wondered how Bianca was taking the flight. At least they weren't weightless for more than a few seconds at a time; Brennart kept goosing the little rocket engine, pushing them higher in short spurts. But the lurching, spasmodic flight was starting to make Doug's stomach gurgle.

Brennart took the little hopper up above Mt. Wasser's flat, U-shaped summit, looking for a safe place to land, checking the actuality against the satellite photos they had studied.

"Flat area over to the left," Doug said. "About ten o'clock."

"I see it," said Brennart.

A minuscule puff of thrust from two of the maneuvering jets set along the corners of the platform and they slid over sideways until they were just above the relatively flat area. It was clear of boulders, although Doug saw the sharp-rimmed edge of a crater big enough to' swallow their hopper, clearly etched in the harsh sunlight.

His stomach told him they were falling. Then a burst of thrust. Falling again. Another burst, lighter, and Brennart put them down deftly oirihe bare rock.

It was like being on the top of the world. Doug unhooked his tether and pulled loose of his foot restraints, then turned around in a full circle. All around them stretched peaks of bare rock, as far as the eye could see. They seemed to be floating on a sea of darkness, the land below them in perpetual cryogenic night.

"We made it." Bianca's voice sounded breathless in Doug's helmet earphones.

We're up higher than Mt. Everest, Doug thought.

"Let's get to work," Brennart ordered. "Stavenger, I want you to record every move we make. Hop down and start taping us as we unload the nanobugs."

"Right," said Doug. He slapped down the railing and jumped from the hopper's platform, floating gently to the bare rock. His boots slid; the rock was smooth as glass.

Pulling out his vidcam, Doug put its eyepiece to his visor and was just starting to record when Killifer's voice grated in his earphones:

"Killifer to Brennart. We just received word that a solar flare broke out at seventeen-twenty-six and forty-one seconds. Moonbase advises all surface activity be stopped and all personnel seek shelter immediately."

MOONBASE

Greg asked, "Are they going to be all right?"

"Brennart's as experienced as they come," said Jinny Anson. "He knows how to take care of himself and his people." But the worried frown on her face belied her confident words.

They were in the base control center, a big low-ceilinged room crammed with control and communications consoles. Every pump, valve, airlock hatch, air fan, sensor, heater, motor, and other piece of equipment in the base and outside on the surface was monitored from the consoles and could be manually controlled whenever it was necessary to override the automatic programming. One whole wall of the darkened, intensely quiet control center was an electronic schematic map of Moonbase, glowing with colored lines and symbols that showed everything in the base and its environs.

Anson had rushed down the tunnel from her office, with Greg in tow, the instant she heard that the flare had erupted. The focus of the center was a U-shaped set of communications consoles, with a trio of operators sitting within fingertip touch of a dozen different display screens. On those screens Greg saw several sections of the underground base, mostly labs and workshops, a lot of plumbing and pumps, and one chamber that looked like a hydroponics farm. There were also views of the surface outside on the floor of Alphonsus. The transfer rocket that had brought Greg to the Moon still sat out there, unattended. Tractors were pulling into the main airlock, trundling slowly across the crater floor to get into the garage and safely sheltered from the expected radiation cloud.

One screen seemed to be looking in on an office Earthside.

Greg could see a window with trees outside, behind an earnest-looking middle-aged man »n a tweed jacket.

Anson pulled up a spindly wheeled chair at one end of the consoles and worked the keyboard there. Hie tweedy graying man's face appeared on her screen.

Standing behind her, Greg tried to figure out where on Earth he might be. Then he noticed a saguaro cactus poking its stiff arms into the bright blue sky amid the trees on the hillside beyond that window. It had to be Arizona.

Noticing him behind her, Anson handed Greg a headset.

"… Class Four," he heard the man saying as he slipped on the earphone. "Almost a Class Five."

"Yes," Anson said, "but will it hit the Earth-Moon region?"

"Still hard to tell, Jinny. If we had warning satellites inside Mercury's orbit, as I've been begging for over the past ten years we'd be getting data right now. As it is, we'll have to wait for the plasma cloud to reach Venus's orbit before we get any hard numbers."

"How long will that take?" Anson asked.

"Judging from the microwave measurements, about another two hours."

"It's moving fast, then."

"Faster than a speeding bullet."

"Okay, thanks. Keep us informed, please."

The gray-haired man nodded. "Certainly."

Anson blanked the screen, then turned to Greg. "Well, they've got at least a few hours before the heavy radiation hits. If it hits at all."

Greg asked, "It might miss us altogether?"

"There's a chance. The flare spits out a big cloud of plasma, mostly very energetic protons. Bee ee vee protons."

"Bee ee vee?"

"Billions of electron volts. Killer particles. Fry your butt in a few minutes."

Doug's out there, Greg said to himself. He hardly knew his half-brother. Over the past eighteen years he had seen Doug in person fewer than a dozen times, and then always with their mother between them.

"A couple meters of dirt is enough to stop the particles," Anson was assuring him, "so as long as they're inside the shelters they've dug they'll be fine. Just like we are."

"But you said the cloud might not even reach here."

She nodded vigorously. "The cloud's a plasma; ionized gas. That means it's steered by the interplanetary magnetic field. The field is weird; it gets all looped up and tangled by the Sun's rotation. So until we start getting radiation data from the satellites we've got between us and the Sun we won't really know if the cloud's going to come our way or not"

Greg murmured, "I see," as he watched Anson's face closely. " She was telling him pretty much what he already knew about solar flares, but to her this was no dry astronomical colloquy. This was as real and vital to her as breathable air. "They'llbe okay," Anson said, trying to smile. "Your brother "will come through this fine, I betcha."

"Of course he will," Greg said, wondering if that's what he wanted. Doug's only eighteen, he told himself. He's no threat to me. But another voice in his mind countered, Not yet He's no threat at present. But he's out there on the Moon's surface getting experiences that you've never had. Sooner or later he's going to challenge you for control. Sooner or later. And Mom will be on his side. You know that. She'll be helping him.

"Hey, he's going to be all right!" Anson repeated, mistaking Greg's withdrawn silence. "Really! You'll see."

"Of course," Greg said.

"Come on." Anson got up from her chair. "There's lots more to see around here."

"Now?" Greg asked, surprised. "With the flare and all?"

"Nothing we can do about the flare," Anson said, almost cheerfully. "It either hits or it doesn't. In the meantime there's a lot for you to learn about and not much time to get it all in."

"But I—"

I'm not going to miss my own wedding because you haven't been completely briefed," Anson said. She was smiling, but her tone was far from gentle. "Come on, we can start at the water plant"

Feeling just a little dazed, Greg followed her out of the control center and down the long tunnel.

"We've got to go all the way down to the end and then cut across, Anson said.

Feeling awkward," almost embarrassed in the weighted boots, Greg asked," 'Aren't there any cross tunnels? Besides the one up at the main airlock?"

"Two," replied Anson, "but they're for emergency use only. They carry piping and electrical lines."

Greg glanced up at the color-coded pipes and electrical lines running along the ceiling of the tunnel. "You mean that everybody has to walk the length of one tunnel to get to the next?"

"That's what they're supposed to do. Officially."

"And in reality?"

She grinned at him. "They take shortcuts."

"Then why don't we?" He made himself smile back at her.

"It's kind of cramped."

"I'm not afraid of getting my coveralls dirty," Greg said.

She seemed delighted. They ducked into the first cross-tunnel and Greg saw that it was indeed narrow and low enough to make him keep his head down. But he followed her along its dimly-lit length, noting idly that a fat person would have a difficult time squeezing through. Anson was not fat. She filled out her coveralls very nicely, but she was certainly not overweight.

"The EVC is all the way at the back of the base, as deep inside the mountain as we could put it," she told Greg.

"EVC?"

"Environmental control center," she explained. "That's where we regulate the air's CO2 content, the temperature and humidity and all. It's not a hundred percent closed-loop, though. We have to add oxygen and nitrogen from time to time, keep the balance right."

"Oh," said Greg.

She went on, "We wanted to get the maximum of protection for the EVC. We can go for a couple of days without water, but if the air goes bad—blooey, everybody in the base is dead in an hour or so, I betcha."

"But the water plant's up front, near the main airlock?"

"Yeah," Anson replied. "Plumbing's easier that way. Cost an arm and a leg to dig the EVC in so deep. We had to run big exhaust tunnels through the solid rock. Corporation decided once was enough, so when we built the water plant we put it where we had easy access."

Greg nodded. He knew all about the exorbitant costs of digging new living and working spaces on the Moon.

"I've been talking to some people at the University of Texas." Anson said, "where my husband-to-be teaches. They think our water recycling system might be useful for big cities like Houston and Dallas."

Really?"

"Really." Anson said, with just a hint of sarcasm at Greg's doubting tone. I'll be talking with some people from Houston when I get back Earthside."

Despite himself, Greg was impressed. "You could start a whole new product line for the corporation," he said.

"Water recycling systems for major cities," Anson chirped happily. "We could make a mint on it, I betcha."

Once in the adjacent tunnel she led him to its front end.

"Main airlock is through that hatch." Anson pointed. "That's where we garage the tractors and decontaminate surface equipment."

"Decontaminate?"

"Vacuum off the dust, mostly," she said, leading him away from the hatch. "Freakin' dust gets into everything, especially moving parts. It's a real pain in the butt."

They walked along the front face of the tunnel until they came to another airtight hatch. Greg saw WATER FACILITY stencilled on the smoothed rock wall next to the metal hatch. Beneath the neatly stencilled letters someone had daubed in orange dayglo. You make water; we make water. And over the hatch, another graffito: Recycling is a piss-poor way of life.

"You leave them there?" Greg jabbed a finger at the graffiti.

With a half-smile Anson replied, "We scrub them off every now and then. Matter of fact, I was going to have the whole base cleaned up in your honor, but you got here too quick. These are new, though."

Greg snorted with disdain.

"Don't knock it too much' Anson said. "Graffiti help people let off steam. And cleaning them up takes water that's better used for more important things. Like living."

He kept his silence as Anson showed him through the maze of pipes on the other side of the hatch.

"Everything in here is fully automated, so it's not built for human comfort. Operators monitor the equipment, of course, but it runs by itself most of the time."

"You need access for repair personnel, don't you?" Greg asked.

"Sure. This is it, where we're walking."

The chamber was dimly lit, its ceiling oppressively low. Narrow walkways threaded through the convoluted piping. The place felt cold, but not dank, as a cave on Earth would. The pipes were all wrapped in insulation, Greg saw. Not a molecule of water was being wasted.

"Oxygen from the nanoprocessors comes in there," she stretched an arm toward the shadowed recesses between the largest pipes, anodized green. "It's in gaseous form, of course. Hydrogen comes in along those red lines. They're mixed in those vats and the water is pumped out to the rest of the base along the blue pipes."

"And the yellow pipes?" Greg asked.

"Used water coming in for recycling. Never eat yellow snow and never drink from a yellow pipe."

Greg nodded in the shadowy dimness. Grinning, Anson seemed to be waiting for a reaction from him. After a few moments, though, her grin faded and she resumed her explanations.

"Hydrogen's getting more and more expensive," she said.

"How come? The nanomachines—"

"We have to go farther and farther out from the base to find hydrogen. We've picked the regolith clean of the stuff nearby."

"Really?"

"Hey, we're talking about individual atoms trapped in the regolith. There's just not that much hydrogen out there. One hundredth of a percent, by mass, tops."

"Still, the cost should be negligible."

"Nanomachines ain't cheap," she said. "We have to produce them here and they won't let us build the kind mat can reproduce themselves. Scared of runaways that could eat up the Moon, or some equally buttheaded scenario."

Greg kept silent. He knew all about the reasons for the strict safety regulations.

"So the bugs are designed to operate only during the lunar night. After a few day-night cycles they break themselves down and we have to produce another batch."

"But they can't cost very much. A few kilograms can produce their weight in hydrogen thousands of times over, from the reports I've seen."

Anson waved one hand in the air. "Yeah, but at our current rate of consumption we'll have cleaned out the whole crater floor of hydrogen in another five years. Then it'll be cheaper to import hydrogen from Earthside."

"But you recycle…"

"Sure, but recycling isn't a hundred percent efficient, of course."

Greg thought a moment. "That's why Brennart's mission to the south pole is important."

"Water's valuable, even if it's a thousand klicks away. We can use nanomachines to build a pipeline easily enough."

"I wonder how much water they've found down there," Greg said.

"Enough to last us until we're ready to scoop volatiles from passing comets, I hope."

Greg knew about the comet-scooping idea; it had been relegated to the realm of far-future projects that had neither funding nor anything else except the sketchiest of conceptual drawings.

"Won't that be expensive?" It was the usual question, expected.

Anson laughed. "Sure it will, but then we won't have to depend on Earthside for water. Our goal is to be self-sufficient."

That surprised Greg. "Self-sufficient? When was that made a goal?"

"It's our goal," Anson said, "not the corporation's. The goal of the Lunatics who keep coming back here no matter how many times they return Earthside."

"Self-sufficient," Greg repeated. It was a distant dream, he knew. These people are kidding themselves.

"Self-sufficient," Anson repeated firmly.

"Then why aren't you drilling for ammonia?" Greg asked.

The sudden shift of subject caught Anson by surprise. "Huh? Ammonia?"

"Nitrogen is your biggest import from Earth. The reason this base is sited at Alphonsus is that there have been seepages of ammonia and methane from below the crater floor. If you want to be self-sufficient you should be drilling for the ammonia."

"That's in our long-range plan," Anson said defensively.

"Maybe we should move it up," said Greg. "The methane could provide carbon. And hydrogen, too."

"Not a helluva lot, according to our geological probes."

"Shouldn't you say selenological, rather than geological?"

She planted her fists on her hips. "I hope you're joking."

Greg let a ghost of a smile cross his lips. "Certainly."

"Good. Come on, it's almost time for dinner and we've got a lot of cost comparisons to do."

The Cave was less than half full when they came in and got into line for the meal dispensers. Greg noticed that Anson studied her choices carefully before selecting soyburgers, salad and fruit drink. He punched the same buttons she did, and they carried their trays to a small table off in a corner by a pair of potted ficus trees.

They chewed through numbers with their meal, Anson pulling a palm-sized computer from her thigh pocket to call up data from the base's main files. Greg quickly saw that while her immediate priorities were to keep costs as low as possible, her long-term goal was to make Moonbase independent of life-support imports from Earth.

She may be getting married, Greg thought, but she really intends to come back here. I wonder if her future husband understands that?

"That's the only way to make this rat's nest really profitable," she insisted. "Cut the umbilical from Earthside. Moonbase has got to become self-sufficient."

"Even if you have to go out and scoop volatiles from comets?"

"Hey, don't knock it. Even teeny little comets spew out thousands of tons of water vapor and other volatiles per hour."

"I understand—"

"Less than the cost of imports, once we get the program started. It's the design and test phase that soaks up the money. Operations should be cheap: just the cost of the fuel and the teleoperators in the command center. Peanuts."

"How soon do you see this happening?"

She picked at her salad. "Not for years, of course. Maybe ten or more. Too far out for the corporate five-year plan."

Greg shifted gears again. "When is the mass driver going to be finished?"

She was ready for that one, though. Probably expected it 'When the freakin' corporation bumps its priority up closer to the top. We're not getting much support from Savannah on it, y'know."

"Why not?"

"Rocket fuel's cheap enough. The nanomachines produce enough aluminum and oxygen; we don't need an electrical slingshot."

"A mass driver would reduce launch costs by a factor of ten or better," Greg said. Then he added, "It should have been completed years ago."

Anson scowled across the little table at him. "Sure it should, but with practically no corporate support we have to stooge it along on our own resources."

"Even using nanomachines, it's going so slowly?" Greg asked. It sounded accusatory and he knew it.

"Nanomachines." Anson snorted. "Some people think they're like a magic wand. Just throw in some nanomachines and poof! the job's done for you, like the shoemaker's elves."

Despite himself, Greg smiled at her. "It doesn't work that way?"

"Building something as complex as a mass driver is a tough job, even with nanomachines," she said. "Freakin' job's turned into a nanotechnology research program. We're learning a lot about how to develop the little critters; we're producing a helluva lot of research papers and graduate degrees. But the mass driver's more than a year behind schedule."

"I know," said Greg.

"It'll get done," she promised. "But not on the schedule set up in Savannah."

"Can you do it entirely out of lunar materials? Even the superconducting magnets?"

"Yeah, sure. And we don't need superconductors. We dropped that in favor of cryogenic aluminum magnets. Keep 'em cool and they're almost as good as superconductors."

"But they draw some current, don't they?"

Anson shrugged. "Not much. And electricity's cheap here. We just set up a few extra acres of solar cells. Keep the magnets shaded from the Sun and the liquid nitrogen stays cold. That's another advantage we've got here."

"Realistically, when do you think the mass driver will be up and working?"

She looked up at the rock ceiling, thinking. "Maybe during your year," she said. "More likely, not until the next director replaces you."

"That's not very good, is it?" Greg criticized.

Anson sighed—almost a huff—and returned her attention to what was left of her soyburger. Then she looked up, her face sad.

"Look," she said, "I know there's great things just waiting to be done here. Tremendous things! But I'm leaving. I'm just an employee and I've had to stay strictly within the limits the corporation's set for Moonbase. You can do a helluva lot better, I know."

"I didn't mean—"

Tears were welling in her eyes. "Don't you think I can see what Moonbase can be, if we really dig in and give it our best? I'm supposed to squeeze a profit out of this place, not plow the profits back in to make it self-sufficient. That's for you to do. That's why your mother's sent you up here, isn't it?"

Greg realized his mouth was hanging open with surprise. Is that why Mom's sent me here? No. It was my idea to come here; she was against it. Or was she, really? Has she been manipulating me all along? Does she think that a few months up here will turn me into an advocate for Moonbase?

Before he could formulate an answer for her, Anson's personal computer chimed. She tapped the comm button and they both heard:

"Word just came up from Tucson. The plasma cloud will engulf cislunar space in less than two hours. Radiation levels will exceed four hundred rads per hour for at least twenty-four to thirty-six hours."

Anson acknowledged the message, then looked at Greg again. "You're in luck. Nothing's going to be moving on the surface for a while. There'll be a flare party starting before long. Hope you brought your dancing shoes."

MT. WASSER

Doug heard Killifer's voice in his earphones, "Word just came in from Moonbase. Radiation cloud's due in less than two hours."

"Radiation cloud?" Doug blurted.

Brennart's spacesuited figure straightened up the way a man does when he's been slapped in the face. "How much less than two hours?" he demanded.

"Unknown. Less than two hours is the best they can give us."

"What radiation cloud?" Doug asked.

"Solar flare," said Brennart.

"A flare?" Rhee's voice sounded shocked, scared. "Why wasn't I told about it?"

"Why?" Brennart snapped. "Could you stop it?"

"But

Ignoring her, Brennart asked Killifer, "How's the digging?"

Killifer replied, "Coverage complete on shelters one and two. About half done on three and four. Tunnels are all complete, but they're not deep enough to be safe without additional rubble on them."

Brennart sighed. "All right, get as much done in the next hour as you can, then get everybody inside. We're going to deploy the nanomachines and then return."

"Right."

Doug turned to look at Greenberg and Rhee, who had just opened the canister in which the nanomachines were stored. Inadvertently, his glance took in the Sun, hanging low above the worn, rounded mountain peaks. His heavily-tinted visor blocked most of the glare, but still the Sun's mighty radiance dazzled him.

"We've got to get back to shelter right away," Rhee was saying. "Flares are dangerous!"

"Don't panic," said Brennart. "We've got an hour, at least."

Doug was trying to remember how much radiation a flare put out. Enough to kill, he knew.

"Get this on tape!" Brennart ordered. "It's the reason we're here."

Dutifully, Doug walked around the slippery rock summit until the Sun was at his back, then aimed the vidcam at Rhee and Greenberg. Bianca was gripping the big canister in her arms as if she were hugging it, while the nanotech carefully slid a long narrow metal tube from its interior. Brennart stepped into the picture to explain what they were doing. And get the credit for it, Doug thought.

The nanobugs they were using here were of a special type, designed to work in the blazing heat of unfiltered sunlight. They would extract silicon, aluminum and trace elements from the mountain's rock and use them to build a tower of solar panels that would be in sunshine perpetually. The tower would provide continuous electrical power for the machines down in the darkness of the ice fields that would grind up the ice, liquify it, and pump it back to Moonbase.

The equipment to extract the ice and pump water would be sent by a follow-up expedition. So would the nanomachines to build the pipeline. Brennart's task was to determine if there was enough ice in the south polar region to be worth the investment—and to make certain that Moonbase established an unshakable legal claim to the territory.

Thus Doug taped the first step in starting the nanomachines' construction of the power tower. Legal precedence. He grimaced as he squinted through the vidcam's eyepiece. If Brennart was correct, Yamagata was also providing a witness to their claim, with their recce satellite.

Greenberg opened the tube and placed several even thinner tubules on the bare rock.

"That's it," the nanotech said. "The first set of nanomachines for construction of Moonbase's solar power tower have been put in place at," he lifted his left arm to peer at his watch, "nineteen hundred hours and eight minutes."

"Got it," said Doug. "The tape has a time and date setting, too, so the timing will be verified."

"Very well," Brennart said. "Transmit the imagery to Moonbase."

Doug switched his suit radio's frequency to the channel for the minisats. No response. Checking the schedule he had taped to his forearm, he went back to the suit-to-suit frequency and said to Brennart, "No commsat over our horizon for another eleven minutes."

He could hear Brennart huff impatiently. "All right," the expedition leader grumbled. "Call in eleven minutes. Now let's get out of here. Quickly."

"Right," said Bianca. "Let's get under shelter."

Bianca sounded frightened, Doug thought. She knows more about flares than any of us; if she's scared she must have good reason to be.

"This is what you do when there's a flare?" Greg asked.

After an intense hour or so in her office, making certain the base was battened down for the incoming radiation storm, Jinny Anson had led Greg back to The Cave. It was already filled with nearly every person in Moonbase. The tables had been pushed to one wall, raucous music was blaring from the overhead speakers, people were laughing, talking, drinking, couples were dancing on the smoothed rock flooring between the squares of grass.

"There's not much else to do," Anson replied, her voice raised to be heard over the thumping beat of the music, "except eat, drink and be merry. Until the radiation outside goes back to normal."

Greg consciously tried to keep from frowning, yet he could feel his brows knitting. Okay, the people who work on the surface ought to be brought safely inside, he told himself. But that's only a handful. Most of the base personnel work indoors; they could go right on with their jobs even though a solar flare is bathing the surface with lethal radiation levels.

"Relax!" Anson said. "This is just about the only excuse for a party we ever get up here."

She led him to the row of food dispensers lined against The Cave's far wall, stainless steel with glass fronts, seven feet tall. Not much of a selection, Greg saw. Most of the offerings were preprocessed soybean derivatives, of one sort or another.

"You mean all work stops while the flare's going on?" Greg heard the brittleness in his own voice as he selected something that looked somewhat like finger sandwiches.

Anson shrugged. "Might as well. All the surface equipment is shut down. Even the scientific instrumentation outside takes a beating from the flare, so a lot of the researchers got nothing much to do."

"What about communications?" Greg asked.

"The comm center is always manned," she said easily, pulling out a soyburger on a bun and heading for the microwave ovens. "Even during a party."

"Doesn't the flare interfere with communications?"

"We can always go to the laser comm system if the microwave gets too hashed up."

"I didn't mean communications with Earth," Greg said. "I meant with the expedition."

Her face went serious. "We've got six minisats in polar orbit. They're hardened, of course, but if the radiation levels exceed their hardening—"

"Then those people are cut off."

"Right," she conceded.

"Then what happens?"

"We've got two more minisats as backups. We send them up after the radiation dies down. Not much more that we can do."

Greg thought hard for a few moments, then had to admit, "I guess you're right."

The microwave pinged and Anson pulled out her steaming soyburger. "Come on, let me introduce you to some of the gang. Are you straight or gay?"

Greg nearly dropped his plastic dish.'What?"

"Gay or straight? Who'd ya like to dance with?" Sex, Greg realized. It all comes down to sex. That's what this party is all about. The solar flare is an excuse for these people to have a gene-pool enrichment. Just like neolithic hunting tribes that came together once a year to exchange virgins.

Anson waslooking at him with a positively impish expression. "Have I embarrassed you?" she asked.

"No…"

"We get pretty close to one another, living cooped up in here for months on end she said. "I forgot that most people Earthside aren't as open as we are. I'm sorry."

"It's okay," Greg said, trying to adjust his outlook. "And I'm straight."

"Great!" Anson said, with seemingly genuine enthusiasm. "Then you can dance with me."

Riding down the mountain was like dropping down a long dark shaft. Brennart fired the hopper's main rocket engine once to lift them off the summit, then used the maneuvering jets to nudge them away from its slope. After that it was a long slow fall into the darkness below.

Doug felt his stomach fluttering and wondered how Bianca was handling it. Brennart stood at the podium, his gloved hands on the controls, like a sea captain of old at the helm of his storm-tossed ship. Instead of a sou'wester he was encased in a bulky spacesuit. And instead of the heaving and rolling of the waves, their hopper was falling smoothly in the shadows of the massive mountains, plummeting swiftly, silently, like a pebble dropped down a deep, deep well. This is what the old-time explorers must have felt like, Doug told himself. Danger and excitement and the thrill of doing things nobody's done before. He grinned inside his helmet. This could become habit forming!

His earphones chirped with the signal from one of the minisats. Quickly, Doug plugged his vidcam into the comm port on the belt of his suit and played the tape at top speed. He heard a brief screeching in his earphones, like a magpie on amphetamines, then a verifying beep from the satellite. The data-compressed signal had been received.

"What about transmitting our claim?" Brennart asked before Doug could report to him.

"Just did it," he said. "Squirted the tape to the minisat. When it comes over Moonbase's horizon it'll transmit the whole scene to the base."

"How soon will that be?"

Doug made a quick mental calculation. "The satellite orbit is one hour. Should be in forty, fifty minutes."

Brennart huffed again. "Plasma cloud might hit by then."

"The commsats are hardened, aren't they?"

"Up to a point."

"Is there a chance the radiation could knock them out before our message reaches Moonbase?"

"Ever heard of Murphy's Law?" Brennart replied.

"Yes, but—"

"It's all a matter of degree. There's no such thing as absolute hardening. The minisats are built to withstand a certain level of radiation. If the plasma cloud's levels are higher, then the satellites will be kaput."

"Then we'd be cut off from Moonbase." Bianca's voice, filled with apprehension.

"Until they pop up more satellites, after the storm is over."

"I wonder how hardened the Yamagata snooper satellite is," Doug mused.

Brennart made no answer and when Doug tried to talk to him he realized that the expedition leader was talking to the ground on a different frequency. Doug switched to that channel.

"… landing lights haven't been set up yet," he heard Killifer's voice, almost whining. "You told me to get everybody inside—"

"Never mind," Brennart snapped. "Turn up the radar beacon to full power. I'd like to have some idea of where the ground is!"

"Right."

Doug knew there were no lights beneath the hopper's platform. We could crash in this darkness, he realized.

The little cluster of instruments on the control podium included a laser altimeter, and Doug saw that its digital readout was falling so fast the numbers were almost a blur. Still Brennart did not fire the rocket to slow their descent It's like parachute jumping, he thought. See how long you cap stay in free-fall before you chicken out and pull the ripcord.

He felt his heart racing as he clutched the flimsy railing with both hands and marveled at Brennart's cool while the hopper plunged deeper and deeper into the eternal darkness.

"Are we there yet?" Bianca's voice bleated in his earphones. She's trying to make light of it, Doug thought, but this long free-fall must be bothering her. I wonder how she did on the trip to Moonbase from Earth? She must have been in misery all the way. Greenberg had said nothing since they'd climbed aboard the hopper and damned little before that Doug realized that the nanotech engineer was as closed-mouthed as anyone he had ever met.

Straining his eyes, Doug peered over the railing into the darkness below. He could make out vague shapes in the darkness, like monsters from a child's nightmare reaching up to snare him.

Then a lurch of thrust nearly buckled his knees and the landscape below was briefly lit by the rocket's silent flame, like a scene suddenly illuminated by a lightning bolt's flash. Before Doug could blink it was inky dark again and they continued to fall.

Then another flash and surge of thrust. Then a gentle bump and Doug felt the comfortable reassurance of weight once more. They were on the ground.

"Don't just stand there," Brennart commanded. "Get off and into the shelter."

For a moment Doug was transfixed, immobilized with admiration for Brennart's piloting. The man really is as good as all the stories about him.

"Move!" Brennart bellowed.

Almost laughing, Doug knocked down the hopper's railing and jumped softly to the ground.

"Which shelter?" Greenberg asked. He had turned on his helmet lamp, Doug saw. So had Brennart. He did the same, then Bianca followed suit.

"Number four," said Brennart, pointing with a long arm. "The others are already occupied."

They trooped to the airlock, Greenberg in the lead. He may not say much, Doug thought, but he sure makes it clear that he wants to get safely inside.

"Don't take off your suits," Brennart commanded. "Go right through the lock and into the shelter. Leave your suits on."

Doug waited for Bianca to go in, then turned toward Brennart.

"Go on, go on," the expedition commander shooed impatiently. "We don't have all damned day."

Doug ducked through the airlock hatch, waited for it to recycle, then stepped into the shelter. Bianca and Greenberg were sitting awkwardlyspn the edges of two facing bunks, still encased in their bulky spacesuits, looking like a pair of hunchbacked giant pandas. There were no internal partitions in this smaller shelter; it was merely a dugout for sleeping and eating.

The pumps chugged and the inner airlock hatch opened to let Brennart step through. He had to bend over slightly to keep the top of his helmet from scraping the shelter's curving ceiling.

"Not enough rubble on top of us to provide full shielding," he explained, "so we stay in the suits until the radiation dies down."

"That could be days!" Rhee blurted.

"We'll need the extra shielding the suits provide," Brennart said calmly. "It'll be uncomfortable but better than getting fried."

"And the backpacks?" she asked.

"We can take off the backpacks and breathe the air in here, but otherwise we will stay buttoned up. Like the man says, better safe than sorry."

"What about eating?" asked Doug.

Brennart turned toward him slowly, his helmet visor staring at him like a blank-eyed cyclops. "We'll take a quick meal now, before the radiation builds up. After that, I'll decide when and if it's safe to open our visors for food."

After a heartbeat's span of silence, Brennart added in a more relaxed tone, "A little dieting won't hurt any of us."

So they grabbed prepackaged meals from the shelter's food locker and took turns sticking them in the tiny microwave oven.

"Stand back from the oven. You don't want to get exposed to any radiation that leaks through," Greenberg said, so solemnly that Doug couldn't tell if he was joking or serious.

Brennart raised his visor to eat his meal, and Doug could at last see the man's face. If Brennart was worried, he didn't show it. He looked calm; thoughtful, but certainly not jittery.

"That's our guide," he said, pointing to the radiation meter built into the airlock control panel. "That, and our suit patches, are the only way we have of telling how high the radiation level is."

The suit patches were cumulative, Doug knew. They changed color with dosage, going from green through yellow to red. Once they turned red you were supposed to get inside shelter, no matter what you were doing out on the surface. He looked down at the patch on his right arm and was startled to see it had already turned a sickly greenish yellow. Just from the work we've done outside today, he thought. What color will it be when the radiation cloud hits?

How can they eat this garbage? Greg wondered as he chewed on the little sandwich. It tasted like sawdust and glue, with a core of hard rubber.

He felt uncomfortable at the flare party, and most of the people around him seemed uncomfortable in his presence. Jinny Anson was perfectly relaxed, apparently, but the others stiffened visibly as he approached mem. They were friendly enough, but Greg saw them put their drinks down or try to hide them behind their backs. Laughter died out as he came up to a knot of party-goers. People became polite, their smiles strained.

The new boss, Greg figured. They know I'll be in charge here in a week, the board chairwoman's son, and they don't know what kind of a boss I'm going to be. Inwardly, Greg frowned at the irony of it. I don't know what kind of a boss I'm going to be, either. Obviously there's alcohol in most of those drinks, even though nobody's offered me any. What else is going down?

He had made a sort of ragged circumnavigation of The Cave, and ended up back near Anson, who was deep in conversation with a tall, ragged-looking old simp with a mangy beard and sad, baggy eyes. Greg left his dish of unfinished finger sandwiches on the nearest table and went toward her.

"Here he is," Anson said as Greg approached them. She waved Greg toward her, then introduced, "Greg Masterson, Lev Brudnoy."

The legendary Lev Brudnoy! Greg realized that Brudnoy's legend was more than twenty years old now. The poor geezer must be pushing sixty, at least.

"How do you do," said Brudnoy gravely, extending a calloused hand. His coveralls were a faded olive green, splotched here and there with stains. He was about Greg's own height, though, and wider across the shoulders.

"I'm very happy to meet you," Greg said perfunctorily. Brudnoy's grip was strong; Greg got the feeling he could have squeezed a lot harder if he'd wanted to.

"So you are going to be our leader for the next twelve months," Brudnoy said.

"That's right."

"I knew your stepfather, Paul Stavenger. He was a good man."

Trying not to bristle, Greg said, "I thought it was my father who gave you permission to join Moonbase."

With a slow smile, Brudnoy answered, "Quite true. But I never met your father. He never came here and I was never invited to meet him when I visited Earthside."

"Oh. I see."

"I am most indebted to him, of course. And to your lovely mother—whom I also have never met"

Feeling awkward, Greg tried to change the subject 'I suppose you've been here at Moonbase longer than anyone else' It was inane and he knew it, but Greg couldn't think of anything else.

"More than twenty years," Anson said.

"Not all that time has been spent here on the Moon, of course' said Brudnoy. "I visit Earthside each year, as required by our health regulations"

Greg knew the regulations. They were based on the idea that living on the Moon deconditioned the body for living in Earth's heavier gravity. Every Moonbase employee was required to undertake an exercise regime to keep muscles and bones strong enough for an immediate return Earthside. ,

"Yet' Brudnoy went on, almost wistfully, "my trips Earth-side grow shorter and my stays here grow longer. This is my true home. Earth is a distant dream"

With a sardonic smile, Greg said, "The food's better on Earth"

"Quite true' Brudnoy agreed.

"What we grow in our farm is for nutrition, not gourmet taste' Anson snapped.

"Mostly soybeans' said-Brudnoy. "What little variety we have comes from thjem' Before Greg could comment, he went on, "And green vegetables, of course. We recently introduced carrots, but they aren't doing too well"

"Everything else we have to bring up from Earthside' Anson said defensively. "We have to go for the highest nutritional values per kilo, not taste"

"That's obvious' said Greg.

Looking nettled, Anson turned to Brudnoy. "He'll fit right in here; up here ten minutes and he's already complaining about the food"

"I can prepare for you a fresh salad' Brudnoy said, completely serious.

"A salad?"

"After all my years of adventuring, I have become a farmer. My true calling: to be a peasant"

"I'd like to see your farm' Greg said.

"Lev's got a green thumb," said Anson. "He'll turn us all into vegetarians one of these days"

"Can't we bring meat animals up here?" Greg asked. "Fresh meat would be good"

"Oh sure' Anson replied sarcastically. "We've got the wide open prairies around here; get some cowboys and a herd of cattle"

Greg felt his face redden. "Maybe something smaller? Chickens?"

"Or rabbits' Brudnoy said. "I remember reading somewhere that rabbits have a high ratio of protein to bone"

"Okay' said Greg. "Rabbits"

"We have to be very careful about what we bring in here' Anson said sternly. "This is a closed ecology and we can't afford to endanger it"

"But rabbits—"

"Look what they did to Australia"

"Jinny, my dear' said Brudnoy, "we would not allow them to run wild and breed at will"

"We could control them, couldn't we?" Greg asked.

Looking completely unconvinced, Anson said, "Well, you're going to be director. You look into it"

Turning to Brudnoy, Greg asked, "Could you look into it?"

"Certainly' said the Russian. "I would be most happy to"

Anson's face eased into a smile. "You're going to be okay, Masterson. Delegating responsibility already. That's the mark of a successful manager"

Greg couldn't tell if she was being sarcastic or sincere.

"Rabbits will be the salvation of Moonbase' Brudnoy said, with a happy grin on his bearded face. "And I have found my calling!"

"You have?" Anson asked, looking askance at the Russian.

"To feed the hungry masses!" Brudnoy said. "To end the dreariness of packaged foods. I will not be a lowly peasant. I will become the master of cuisine for Moonbase"

"A noble calling said Anson.

"Thank you!" Brudnoy said to Greg. "You have given me a new purpose in life"

And he clasped Greg in his long arms with a Russian bear hug.

"Now what can I do for you in return?" Brudnoy asked once he had released Greg from his embrace.

Gasping slightly, more with surprise than anything else, Greg stammered, "I… I don't really know."

"I am yours to command," Brudnoy said. "Call upon me at any hour and I will be at your side"

With a sloppy military salute, Brudnoy turned abruptly and strode off into the crowd.

"Is he for real?" Greg asked.

Anson smiled knowingly. "Lev is as real as they come. If you need any advice about anything, ask him. He's a lot smarter than he lets on."

Greg nodded, not knowing how much he could believe. He looked at the party-goers, still talking and laughing and drinking.

"I didn't know that liquor was allowed in the base," he said.

"It isn't," Anson replied.

"Do you mean to tell me that there's no alcohol in those drinks? Nobody's popping pills or snorting anything?"

"What I'm telling you," Anson said firmly, "is that company regulations do not allow alcohol or any other substances that impair judgment or reflexes. We're even careful with aspirin up here."

Greg smirked at her. "Sure. And if I tested a random sampling of your employees' blood levels—"

"It doesn't work that way," she snapped. "Not here. We judge people by their performance, not by some numbers set down in a book of regulations."

"So you wait for somebody to kill himself. And the people around him."

"Not at all." Anson's voice was calm, reasoned, but benestit it there was stainless steel. "We live and work very close to one another. If somebody sees that someone is too—out of it, let's say—to do his job, then they don't let that person start working."

"They report him sick?"

"They send him back to his quarters. Or her. They call for a replacement."

"And that's all?"

"We pay for performance here. If a person needs a replacement more than twice in a three-month span, we send him back Earthside."

"Or her?"

"Or her," Anson agreed. "It happens now and then, but not often enough to be a real problem."

"And that's the way I'm supposed to handle the situation? No matter what the company regulations say?"

Anson made a small shrug. "That's the way things have been handled here for years. If you want to change it, that's your prerogative. You'll have to do your job in your own way, of course."

"Of course," Greg said. "But your way has been working fine, is that it?"

Anson smiled prettily. "Don't fix it if it ain't broke."

MOONBASE

The party showed not the slightest sign of slowing down. Greg watched, a stranger among the revelers, feeling like a pale and vapid ghost, almost invisible, noticed by the others just enough to make them feel uneasy and move away from him. Even Anson got tired of him and danced off with one of the younger men.

Terribly self-conscious and ill at ease, Greg made his way through the partying throng to the main exit from The Cave. Stepping through the airtight door into the empty tunnel outside was like stepping from bedlam into blissfully peaceful silence. It felt cooler out in the tunnel, easier to breathe.

Greg thought for a moment, then strode toward the control center. Make certain it's really adequately manned, he told himself. Check on the status of the radiation storm, maybe talk with the astronomers back at Tucson.

The control center was quiet. The big electronic map of the base glowed in the darkened room just as it had before the flare erupted. All three positions at the U-shaped set of comm consoles were occupied. Several of the screens were badly streaked with interference, others were altogether blank. But the three communications technicians were at their jobs, sober and quietly intense.

The woman in the middle chair turned and saw Greg standing over her. "What do you think-' Then she saw the nametag on Greg's coveralls. "Oh! Mr. Masterson, it's you. I figured it was too soon for my relief."

"How's the link with Brennart's team?" Greg asked quietly.

"Something coming through now," she said, pointing to one of the working screens.

Bending over her shoulder, Greg saw a pair of spacesuited figures in brilliant sunlight pulling a tube or something from a large gray canister.

While they fiddled with the tube on the bare rocky ground, another figure in a gleaming white spacesuit with red stripes down its arms and legs walked into the picture.

"That's it," one of the spacesuited figures said. "The first set of nanomachines for construction—"

Suddenly the picture on the screen wavered, distorted into wild zig-zags of color, and then broke up completely. The screen dissolved into hissing streaks of black and gray.

"Switch to backup," said the tech on the operator's right.

The screen showed the figures in spacesuits for the briefest flicker of an instant, then broke up into electronic hash.

"Three? Four?"

The technician shook her head. "All gone."

"Five and six?"

"All of 'em."

Greg asked, "Can't you regain contact?"

She pointed to a hash-streaked screen. "Not now. The satellite links are down."

"But there were six satellites, weren't there?"

"Yessir, but the storm's knocked all six of them out. Bing, bing, bing, one right after another. All six gone."

"I have to go to the toilet," said Bianca Rhee.

She whispered the words to Doug, leaning the helmet of her spacesuit against his so she wouldn't have to use the suit radio.

They had been sitting in the half-covered shelter for several hours with nothing much to do except stare at the blank curving walls. Doug knew that the plumbing in the suits was different for women, and the suits were not meant to be worn for more than twelve hours at a time. From what he knew about solar flares, they would be in their suits for at least another twenty-four hours, perhaps considerably longer.

"If your urine collector is full you can void it into the chemical toilet," Doug said to heir, "without getting out of the suit."

"That's not my problem," Rhee said.

"Aren't you wearing—"

"No," she said. "Are you?"

Wonderful, Doug thought. People have been using space-suits for a century and still nobody's come up with anything better than a plastic bag you stick on your bare butt What do they call it? FC-something: fecal containment system? Some system. And you have to slap it in place before you zip up your suit, of course.

"It's not safe to get out of your suit," he said.

"But I've got to!"

"The radiation level's still too high."

"I can't do it in my pants."

Why not? Doug thought. But from the sound of Bianca's voice, even muffled through the helmets, there was no debating the issue.

He turned to Brennart and clicked on his suit radio. "Sir, do we have anything that we can rig up as temporary shielding in the John?"

"What are you talking about?" Irritated.

"Rhee's got to get out of her suit for a few minutes. Can we put up some temporary shielding in the toilet compartment for her?"

For a long moment Brennart didn't reply, and Doug could only guess what was going through his mind. At last he said gruffly, "Pull off the leggings of your suit and hold them on your lap."

This has happened before, Doug realized, almost smiling. Bianca's not the first one with the problem.

"And be quick about it," Brennart added. "Every minute you're out of the suit you're exposed to ten times the radiation you'd get in a year Earthside."

There's no problem of depressurization, Doug knew. They were already breathing the shelter's air. The suits were just for protection from the radiation.

Rhee headed for the toilet compartment, too embarrassed to say anything. Doug thought about asking her if she needed help getting her boots and leggings off, then thought better of it. Funny, she'd rather risk the radiation exposure than mess her pants. She'd rather die of radiation poisoning than embarrassment.

Then Doug realized that before the radiation died down they'd all have to use the toilet."

"Sir, have you been in this kind of situation before?" he asked Brennart.

"Have I?" The expedition leader's voice took on a new tone: lighter, almost eager. "This is a piece of cake compared to the fix we were in back when we were digging the first shelters in Alphonsus. The first time we were hit by a solar storm…"

A quarter-hour later Rhee returned from the toilet. Brennart was still spinning out yarns about the old days. Greenberg slinked to the compartment while Brennart kept on talking. And talking. And talking.

"… so we started vacuum breathing contests; you know, opening the visor of your helmet out on the surface to see how many seconds you could go before you closed it again. See what kind of guts you had. When you felt your eyes starting to pop you sealed up again. Well, one night there were just three of us out there, Jerry Stiles, Wodjohowitcz and me…"

Slowly, Doug realized what Brennart was doing. He's not just helping to pass the time away; he's calming us down, making us realize that he's been through this kind of thing lots of times, telling us that we'll live through it. Doug looked at his spacesuited leader with new respect. That's what leadership is really all about, he thought: keeping the fear at arm's length.

After making certain that communications with Earth were still intact, Greg went to his quarters and called his mother.

His quarters were a standard single cell, no bigger than a third-class stateroom on an ocean liner, since there had been so little time for the Moonbase staff to prepare for his arrival. Once Anson left, Greg would be moved to the director's more spacious suite: two whole rooms, with a private toilet and shower stall.

For now, Greg slouched on his bunk and watched his mother's face in the slightly grainy image on the screen built into the compartment>s smoothed stone wall.

"Has all communication with Brennart's team been cut off?" Joanna was asking.

Nodding, Greg assured her, "For the time being. But they're all safe inside their own shelters. They had plenty of time to dig in."

"Yes," she said once she heard his response. "Of course." But her face belied her words.

She's looking at me, Greg thought, she's talking to me. But she's thinking about Doug.

"How is Anson treating you? Is she being friendly?"

Almost laughing, Greg answered, "She danced with me."

Before his mother received his reply, the phone chimed. Greg tapped his keyboard and the display screen split. Jinny Anson's face appeared on the second half, her brows knit with concern.

"Danced with you?" Joanna started to say. "What do you mean?"

But Greg's attention was on Anson. "What's happened?"

"Thought you ought to know. Nippon One's just launched a ballistic lobber toward the south polar region. Must be a crewed vehicle, I betcha."

"Now? With the radiation storm at its peak?"

"Now," Anson replied flatly.

"Where are you?"

"In my office."

I'll be right down there." He clicked Anson's image off his screen.

"What is it, Greg?" Joanna was demanding. "What's going on?"

"Yamagata's just launched a vehicle toward the pole. We don't know if it's manned or unmanned."

It took three seconds for the news to reach Joanna. When it did, she flinched with shock. "What are they up to?"

"That's what I intend to find out," Greg said. I'll call you when I've learned something."

Brennart was running out of tall tales. Doug wondered if he'd start in on camp songs next. He remembered a counselor, when he'd been six or seven, who knew only a half dozen songs and repeated them endlessly every night around their gas-fed campfire.

"I wonder how the other shelters are doing?" Doug asked when Brennart took a breath.

"They're all right," Brennart said. "One and two are better off than we are; they've got more room and they can sit in their shirtsleeves."

Getting to his feet carefully inside the cumbersome suit, Doug stepped over to the airlock hatch and the cluster of instruments built into its metal frame.

"Radiation level's down slightly," he said. "We might be past the worst of it."

He could sense Brennart shaking his head inside his helmet. "Don't kid yourself, son. The radiation levels will fluctuate up and down for hours. When it starts to tail off you'll see a pretty rapid drop, not those little jiggles."

The voice of experience, Doug said to himself.

"As soon as we can get through to Moonbase," Greenberg said, "we've got to request another shipment of machines."

"Another?" said Brennart.

"You mean more nanomachines?" Rhee asked. "Why?"

"The ones we left on the mountain are all dead by now."

"What?"

The nanotechnician's voice was flat, as unemotional as a surgeon discussing a patient who had died on the table. "Don't you understand? The nanomachines are the size of viruses. They're being bombarded with high-energy protons. At their scale, it's like you or me being clobbered by an avalanche of bowling balls."

"They'll be deactivated," Doug said, feeling suddenly hollow inside, as if he had scaled a rugged mountain only to find higher and steeper peaks ahead of him.

"All of them?" Brennart askett..

"All the ones we exposed on the mountaintop," Greenberg replied calmly. "The ones still in the canister might be okay; the canister's pretty good shielding for them."

"Why didn't you tell me this before we went up there?" Brennart demanded, his voice rising.

Without a flutter, Greenberg answered, "You wanted to get our legal claim in, didn't you? So we got there and did it Nobody told me we were going to be hit by a radiation storm."

"But don't you understand? The legal claim isn't worth a termite fart if the goddamned bugs aren't doing anything!"

"Huh?"

Doug said, "The legal claim is based on utilization of the area. If the bugs are dead, inactive, then we're not using the area and our claim is null and void."

Greenberg was silent for a moment. Then he mumbled, "I'm an engineer, not a lawyer."

"Christ on a surfboard," Brennart growled. "We've got to go up there again and start the other bugs working."

"That's not possible," said Greenberg. For the first time Doug detected a slight nervous waver in his voice.

"What d'you mean, not possible?"

Greenberg took a breath, then explained, "There are nine different sets of nanomachines in the mix, each programmed to do its own part of the job. We put out the first set. If they're dead, the second set won't have the substrate it needs to build on. And the third set, and so on."

"You mean none of them will work?"

"Not until we get replacements for the first set."

"We brought backups with us."

"The backup canister was on the cargo rocket that crashed. The canister split open and the bugs spilled out I deactivated them."

Brennart was close to exploding. "Deactivated our backup?"

"Standard operating procedure, Once they're loose you can't get 'em back in their containers again. And you don't want them chewing up the equipment around them. So I sprayed the area with the UV laser. Standard procedure."

"That's what you were doing," Rhee said. "I thought you were looking for something that you'd lost."

"Nope. Killing loose bugs. You can't see the ultraviolet light from the laser, of course."

Rhee seemed unconvinced. "You mean the bugs can take unfiltered sunlight but a little UV laser can kill them?"

"It's not the power of the beam, it's the intensity. That little laser's ten times brighter than the Sun in that one ultraviolet wavelength."

"Douglas," Brennart asked, "does this really nullify our legal claim?"

Doug let several heartbeats pass before he answered. "I'm afraid it does. I'll check with the corporate legal experts in Savannah as soon as communications are restored, but from what I know of the legalities, if we're not actively using the site we have no valid claim to it"

"Christ on a surfboard," Brennart muttered again. Thinking hard, Doug said, "The only other way to establish a claim is for at least two Masterson employees to be actively working at the site." 'Two?" Brennart pounced on the information. "For how long"

"Length of stay doesn't matter, as long as they're actively engaged in utilizing the site's natural resources—and there's a working device of some sort running at the site when they leave. Either that, or more human employees replace them."

"Two of us," Brennart muttered.

"We've got to be doing something that leads to useful utilization of the area," Doug warned. "We can't just be camping there."

"What in the world could we be doing up there?"

Rhee blurted, "We're not going up to the summit again?"

Two of us are," said Brennart, with no hesitation whatsoever. "As soon as the radiation begins to the down."

"But won't that be risky?"

Brennart chuckled quietly, then said, "Sure it's risky. Like the man said, working out on the frontier is nothing more than inventing new ways to get killed."

RAYBURN HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING

Representative Ray Underwood steepled his fingers in front of his face as he studied the earnest young man sitting on the other side of his desk.

"I'm afraid I don't understand, Mr. Eldridge," he said.

Eldridge smiled pleasantly. "Are we being recorded?"

Underwood feigned indignation. "Certainly not! I wouldn't stand for that kind of thing. It's not only illegal, it's immoral."

"Yes, of course," said Eldridge. He was a bland young man, his sandy hair already receding, his eyes a pale blue. He was dressed casually: lightweight Madras jacket over an open-necked white shirt; inexpensive dark blue slacks; black athletic shoes.

Underwood was twenty years older, but still looked trim and fit in his tan sports jacket and darker brown slacks. There was a touch of gray at his temples, but otherwise his hair was dark, his face taut and tanned from ski vacations back home in Colorado.

"Our conversation will be strictly between us," Underwood assured his visitor. "Absolutely private."

"Good. For your sake, as well as mine."

That took Underwood aback somewhat. "Just what is it that you're after?" he asked. "In plain language, please."

Eldridge hunched forward a little in his chair. "As you know, Congressman, I represent a coalition of religious organizations—"

"The Christian Brethren, I know."

"Not merely the Brethren," said Eldridge. "Not anymore. We have several Orthodox Jewish groups with us now. And the Muslims, as well."

Underwood suppressed a gasp of surprise. Instead, he let himself chuckle. "Well, if you can keep those people together you're a better politician than I am."

"The Lord moves in mysterious ways, Congressman."

"I suppose he does. But what is it that you want?"

"Your support on the nanotech bill."

There. It was finally out in the open. Now I can deal with it, Underwood thought.

"What nanotech bill?" he parried. "I'm not aware of any such bill being considered—"

"There will be, in the next session. After our vice president is elected President of the United States."

Underwood leaned back in his swivel chair and steepled his "fingers again, a tactic he used to gain time. "He's not in my party," he said mildly.

"But he will win the election in November," said Eldridge flatly. "One of his campaign promises is to introduce legislation that will ban all nanotechnology. That's one promise he will keep."

"I'm not against nanotechnology," Underwood said carefully. "From what my aides tell me, a lot of good can come from it."

"I'm sure you know more than your aides tell you," said Eldridge mildly.

Underwood smiled to cover the slight pang of alarm that tingled through him. "And what do you mean by that, Mr. Eldridge?"

"Carter. My first name is Carter."

"Carter."

"You're in remarkably good health for a man who suffered a heart attack just a year ago," said Eldridge.

Damn! Does he know or is he just fishing?

"It was only a mild cardiac arrest. And I've had excellent medical care."

"The best in the world, from what I hear."

"Those people in Bethesda…"

"Don't you mean Basel?"

"Basel?"

"In Switzerland. And your attack was a massive infarction that would have left you a cardiac cripple."

Forcing himself to grin, Underwood waggled a finger at the younger man. "Carter, you've been watching the tabloids! They exaggerate everything."

"You were flown to Basel and operated on by Dr. Wilhehn Zimmerman, one of the few doctors left who still deals with nanotherapy."

"That's not so!"

With a patient sigh, Eldridge asked, "Do you want me to recite the flight number to you? Your room number at the Basel Marriott? The date and hour on which Zimmerman operated on you?"

Underwood growled, "You have no proof of that."

"What further proof do we need? The people who leaked this information to us will be happy to speak to the news media -anonymously, of course."

Underwood could feel his insides sinking.

Leaning forward, Eldridge said, "You had nanomachines injected into your body. They repaired your damaged heart muscle and scrubbed out the plaque in your coronary arteries. Very likely you also had some cosmetic touches done, didn't you?"

The Congressman said nothing.

"You used your position of influence and power to cover up the fact that you obtained for yourself nanotherapy that is illegal in the United States."

"It's not illegal in Switzerland."

"It will be soon," said Eldridge flatly. "But that isn't the point. The point is that you availed yourself of nanotherapy that your constituents can't have."

"I told you I'm not against nanotechnology. That's a matter of public record."

"Yes, but you're about to change your position. On this crucial issue of outlawing all nanotechnology, you are going to vote on the side of the angels."

"Meaning your side."

"You're damned right!" snapped Carter Eldridge.