MANHATTAN

It was more like a comfortable little lounge than a conference room, thought Carlos Quintana. Richly appointed and furnished with quiet, understated elegance. These diplomats do all right for themselves, he reminded himself.

The Secretary-General gestured him to sit beside her on the bottle green leather sofa. Quintana had known the woman since before she had been Ecuador's ambassador to the U.N., back when she had been a shy and frightened newcomer to the world of international politics.

She introduced him to the acting president of the Security Council and the chairwoman of the General Assembly, a comely African whose skin glowed like burnished ebony. The Security Council president was from Bangladesh, one of the poorest nations on Earth, yet he was quite overweight and his thick fingers were heavy with jewelled rings.

Nothing is done swiftly among diplomats, Quintana already knew. The four of them had a drink, chatted amiably, and only gradually got down to the reason for which the meeting had been arranged.

"Yes," Quintana said quietly, once he had been asked, "I am a beneficiary of nanotherapy. I had lung cancer. Now it is gone."

"You had the therapy illegally?" asked the General Assembly chairwoman.

Quintana smiled. "It is a gray area. Nanotherapy is illegal in many nations, including Mexico. But in Switzerland apparently the authorities allow it to continue."

"Not for Swiss citizens, however," said the Security Council president, who had been a lawyen He had rolls of fat instead if a neck, the glistening skin of his face seemed stretched tight like an over-inflated balloon.

"But you did it anyway," said the Secretary-General.

Still smiling, Quintana said, "It seemed better than surgery or radiation treatments."

"Or chemotherapy."

"Or death," Quintana added wryly.

For a moment they were silent. Then the Secretary-General smoothed her skirt and said, "So you are a supporter of nanotechnology, then."

"Yes. Very much."

"And you would speak against the current treaty being negotiated?"

"To outlaw all nanotechnology research? Yes, I am against it."

"Would you speak publicly against it?"

"If I must."

"Wouldn't that involve some element of danger for you, personally?"

Quintana shrugged. "There is always the chance of some fanatic. I can hire bodyguards."

The Security Council president cleared his throat ostentatiously. All eyes turned to him.

"Isn't it true," he asked, in an accusing voice, "that you are a member of the board of directors of Masterson Aerospace Corporation?"

"That's no secret," Quintana said evenly.

"And isn't it true that Masterson Corporation will suffer greatly if all nanotechnology work is prohibited?"

Quintana nodded. "It would mean the end of their base on the Moon. They could not survive up there without nanomachines to process oxygen for them and maintain their solar power farms."

"It is also true, is it not," the president continued, "that your corporation stands to make indecently enormous profits from nanotechnology manufacturing."

"If we manufacture any salable products with nanomachines, the manufacturing will most likely be done in space, not on Earth."

"The profits will be made on Earth."

"Yes, certainly."

"So you are not exactly unbiased in this matter."

Quintana put his glass down on the marble-topped coffee table. "I am a living example of what nanotherapy can accomplish. As you can see, I am not a monster and the nanomachines that were put into my body have done me nothing but good."

"But—"

"But nanotechnology can do more than heal the sick, that is true," Quintana went on. "Nanomanufacturing can bring a new era of prosperity to Earth. I should think that nations such as Bangladesh and Zaire would welcome such an opportunity."

"At the cost of ruining our existing industries!"

Quintana laughed disdainfully. "Your existing industries are keeping your people poor. If I were you, sir, I would embrace nanotechnology instead of trying to outlaw it."

The president said nothing. Silence hung in the elegant little room for many heavy moments.

At length, the Secretary-General said, "Thank you for sharing your views with us, Carlos."

Knowing he was being dismissed, Quintana got to his feet, bowed slightly to her. "Thank you for inviting me."

He got as far as the door, then turned back to them. "Take my advice. Don't fight nanotechnology. The best thing you could do, right now, would be to buy Masterson stock."

And, laughing, he left the three of them sitting there.

He was still smiling as he stepped out of the elevator at the U.N. complex's underground garage level. He walked to the dispatcher and asked him to call his limousine.

As he lit up a thin cigar, a man in grimy coveralls stepped up to him and pushed the muzzle of a nine-millimeter automatic into Quintana's midsection.

"Antichrist," he snarled. And he emptied the gun's magazine into Quintana's midriff and chest, smashing him back against the dispatcher's booth. The shots rang deafeningly through the garage.

Quintana felt no pain, but the world seemed to tilt into crazy lopsided scenes of concrete ceiling and staring faces. The man with the gun stood calmly over him.

"Let's see your devil's bugs cure you of that.' And he spat on Quintana's shattered, bleeding body.

MOONBASE DIRECTOR'S OFFICE

"This nanotech treaty has got to be stopped!" Joanna said.

Greg nodded tightly. He had been director of Moonbase for slightly more than six months. What had been Jinny Anson's office was now his, and he had transformed it considerably. His desk was an ultramodern curved surface of gleaming lunar glassteel, a new alloy from Moonbase's labs that was as transparent as crystal yet had the structural strength of high-grade concrete. A long couch of lunar plastic sat against one wall and comfortable webbed chairs were scattered across the floor, which was covered with soft, sound-absorbing tiles manufactured in one of Masterson Corporation's space station factories in orbit around Earth.

The air in the room was pleasantly cool, like an air-conditioned office of a major corporation back on Earth. Greg had insisted on paving a large section of Alphonsus' floor with new radiators that allowed the environmental control system to work more efficiently and made all of Moonbase's underground facilities much more comfortable. It was his major accomplishment, to date.

The office walls were lined with precisely spaced Windowall display screens. Most of them showed artwork from the world's great museums, although Greg could, at the touch of a keypad, turn them into views of virtually any part of Moonbase or the surface of Alphonsus' crater floor.

Behind Greg was a giant Windowall that presently showed a restful silk scroll landscape of mountains and mist by the thirteenth-century Chinese 'master Kao K'o-Kung. It lent the office an air of serenity that neither Joanna nor her two sons felt.

"Will the United States sign the treaty?" Doug asked, from his seat on the couch against the far wall.

Joanna, sitting on the webbed chair closest to Greg's curved desk, had noticed that Doug always picked that couch to sit on. It was farthest from his brother.

"Yes, of course they will," Greg said, frowning darkly. "The whole idea of the treaty came from Washington."

"But they can't outlaw nanotechnology completely," Joanna said. "Not entirely."

"Yes they can," said Doug. Joanna knew he was just as concerned as his older brother, yet Doug looked at ease, relaxed, lounging back in the long couch as if this were nothing more than a computer game. She almost expected him to put his feet up and stretch out for a nap.

"But if they do, they'll want us to stop using nanomachines here at Moonbase, too. We can't allow that." .

Greg shook his head. "If and when the U.S. signs the treaty, its provisions will be like federal law. And we'll be bound by them just like any flatlander down Earthside."

"You'll have to stop work on the mass driver," Joanna said.

With a tight nod, Greg said, "We'll have to stop everything that we use nanomachines for."

"That means closing Moonbase," she said.

Greg started to nod but Doug interrupted with, "As long as we remain an American corporation."

"I've thought about that," Joanna said. "But Venezuela, Ecuador, all the European nations—they're all going to sign the treaty."

"What about Kiribati?"

Greg looked sharply at his brother. "Kiribati?"

"Don't you have enough clout with them to keep them from signing, Greg?" Doug asked.

"What good would that do?" Greg almost growled the words.

Joanna turned to her elder son hopefully. "We could transfer our articles of incorporation to Kiribati."

Greg shook his head dismissively. "And get half a dozen federal agencies jumping all over us. They'd take us to court and the courts would decide against us. We'd be in real trouble.

They'd send federal marshals up here to shut down all our nanomachines."

Doug still looked strangely unperturbed. "Suppose we start up a new corporation," he suggested. "In Kiribati. And Masterson sells the Moonbase operation to them."

Greg's somber face paled. "Sell Moonbase to them?"

Doug was grinning now. "Sure. Moonbase and all our Earth-orbital stations."

"All the corporation's space operations?"

"That could work," said Joanna.

"It's an obvious attempt to circumvent the treaty," said Greg.

"But it's legal," Doug replied. "I checked it out with both the federal and international law programs."

"Did you?" Greg grumbled.

Joanna smiled a little. "Rashid won't like living in Tarawa, though."

Doug replied, "He can stay in Savannah and be in Tarawa with a virtual reality connection any time he wants to. Just the same as you attend board meetings without leaving here, Mom."

Greg objected, "The board of directors would never go for it."

"Setting up a dummy corporation and selling the space division to it," Joanna mused. "It would take some explaining."

"It'll never work," said Greg.

"Why not?" Doug challenged. "You spent all those years out there in Kiribati. Don't you think you can get them to play along with us?"

"Of course I could, but—"

Joanna interrupted with newfound enthusiasm. I'll call Carlos right away."

"Why not the board chairman?" Doug asked.

Greg answered sourly, "Because Quintana is the real power on the board—present company excepted, of course."

"Of course," Joanna agreed. "Can you put the call through for me, please?"

Frowning slightly, Greg touched the keyboard built into his desk with one long slim finger and said merely, "Carlos Quintana." The comm system's voice recognition circuitry searched automatically for Quintana's number and made the connection.

"Johansen is just a figurehead," Joanna was explaining to Doug as the communications computer established the link with Savannah. "He looks good for public relations, but he's—"

The wall screen showing Monet lilypads changed abruptly to display a harried-looking young woman brushing at her dishevelled hair.

"I want to talk to Carlos," Joanna snapped, unaccustomed to having underlings answer her calls.

"He's dead!" the young woman bawled, bursting into tears. "He's been shot!"

Joanna fell back against her chair's webbing, feeling almost as if a bullet had hit her heart.

Ibriham al-Rashid felt perspiration beading his brow and upper lip despite the nearly-frigid air conditioning of the small control room.

Beyond that window, he knew, inside that gleaming metal sphere is a small man-made star, so hot and dense that its very atomic nuclei are being fused together.

The plasma physicist tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to the power gauges lining the control room's side wall. Rashid nodded, too awed to speak.

The control room was almost silent Nothing but the faint electrical hum from the monitoring consoles.

"How long has it been running?" Rashid asked in a whisper. It seemed the proper tone of voice, this close to a miracle.

"Tomorrow will make four months, exactly," said the plasma physicist. Even he kept his voice hushed.

He was a fellow Moslem, even a fellow native of Baltimore; a man Rashid had known in his youth. Now he was a paunchy overweight academic with thinning hair and a light brown beard and eyes that blinked behind oversized, tinted glasses. Now he was a plasma physicist at Johns Hopkins University who just happened to have invented the world's first practical nuclear fusion generator.

"And it has been producing power like this for all that time?" Rashid whispered.

The plasma physicist nodded. "As long as we keep it supplied with helium-three."

Rashid stroked his beard and turned back to stare through the safety glass at the small metal sphere. It was almost hidden inside a maze of magnet coils and cooling pipes and heavy tangles of multi-colored electrical wires. In his imagination, Rashid could see inside tüe sphere, see the blinding hot plasma that was fusing atomic nuclei together, forcing mass to transmute into energy, imitating the processes that made the stars shine.

By the Prophet, Rashid thought, Allah is offering us a gift beyond price.

But not beyond cost.

The plasma physicist gestured toward the door and, once out in the laboratory's hallway again, Rashid drew a deep breath. "It really works," he said, almost in a normal tone.

"It really works," the plasma physicist echoed. "And much better—and cheaper—than that monstrosity up in Princeton."

"But it requires helium-three for fuel, which the Princeton machine does not."

"The Princeton machine is designed to produce new Ph.D.s," the plasma physicist grumbled. "My generator is designed to produce megawatts."

The plasma physicist led him up the hallway toward his own cluttered office. "Helium-three and deuterium," he said. "The deuterium is easy to get from ordinary water. There's enough deuterium in an eight-ounce drinking glass of water to equal the energy in half a million barrels of oil."

Rashid smiled wanly. "Our brothers in OPEC will not be happy with you."

The plasma physicist shrugged his soft shoulders. "They're busy building receiving farms for the solar power satellites. The deserts will still be energy centers."

"But once fusion comes on line…"

"It never will."

"What? Your work—"

They reached his open office door. The room looked just as chaotic as when they had left it, an hour earlier.

"My work may win me a Nobel Prize," the plasma physicist said, plopping himself in his creaking desk chair, "although the Princeton people will try to sabotage that."

Rashid took the only other chair that didn't have piles of journals or reports on it.

"But my fusion system will be nothing but a laboratory curiosity, I'm afraid."

"Why? How?"

"For two reasons." The plasma physicist raised two chubby fingers. Rashid noticed that his nails were dirty.

"First," he said, "is the matter of the fuel. Helium-three is vanishingly rare. We have to produce it in nuclear accelerators, which makes it cost more than the power that the fusion generator produces."

"Helium-three exists on the Moon," Rashid said.

"So I've been told," said the plasma physicist, as if Rashid had said he could produce helium-three by rubbing a magic lamp. "But there's a second problem."

"What is that?"

"Energy conversion." When he saw the puzzled expression on Rashid's face, the plasma physicist added, "Converting the heat and particle energy of the fusion reaction to electricity. It's electricity you want, not hot plasma and energetic neutrons."

His brows knitted, Rashid said, "But the gauges in your control room; weren't they measuring electrical energy?"

The plasma physicist smiled slyly. "The gauges are something of a trick, They show how much electrical energy the generator would produce, based on an algorithm I devised from the amount of heat and kinetic energy inside the reactor."

Rashid felt as if he'd been pushed out of an airplane without a parachute. "You mean that there's no way for your generator to produce electricity? Then what good is it?"

Raising a single finger this time, the plasma physicist said, "I invited you here because I think there is a way. Magnetohydrodynamic power conversion is perfect for this task."

"Mag… what?"

"Call it MHD," said the plasma physicist.

"Tell me about MHD, then."

Hunching over his desk enthusiastically, the plasma physicist began, "Those dolts up in Princeton and the bigger dolts funding them in Washington, they're all trying to make a conversion system based on turbines. Turbines! Just like Edison did, a century and a half ago."

"I don't understand," said Rashid.

Impatiently, the plasma physicist answered, "They want to use the heat energy from fusion to boil a fluid, probably liquid sodium, Allah protect us. That would keep the overall efficiency of the system down below forty percent; no better than a uranium-fueled generator and not even as good as a coal-fired one!"

Struck with new understanding, Rashid blurted, "That's why their fusion system is more expensive than ordinary power plants!"

"Yes, exactly. They are using a man-made star as a tea kettle."

For hours the plasma physicist rattled on, jumping out of his chair to rummage through bookshelves for old reports, grabbing chalk to draw schematic diagrams on his board, making the chalk shriek so often that Rashid winced and felt his blood running cold.

But slowly, Rashid began to see the picture. The fusion generator could produce electrical power with sixty percent efficiency or even better if it could be teamed with an MHD conversion system. And if it could obtain helium-three fuel….Rashid thanked his boyhood friend and promised him he would carefully consider funding his effort to match an MHD power converter to his fusion generator.

"Keep this as quiet as you can," his friend pleaded as he walked Rashid out to his waiting limousine. "I may have to leave the university once they find that I'm being funded by your corporation."

Rashid raised his brows questioningly.

The plasma physicist smiled unhappily. "Oh yes, there are lots of knives in the dark here. Even the New Morality people have questioned what I'm doing. They say it's against God's will to try to imitate the stars."

Rashid snorted disdainfully. "What do they know of the One God?"

"Believe it or not, there are Moslems among them."

Shaking his head, Rashid promised that he would keep very quiet about what he had seen and heard.

Once in his plane and heading back to Savannah, Rashid smiled to himself. Very quiet indeed. I could channel some of my discretionary funding to him, to get him started on this MHD business while I begin to prepare the board of directors for a full-scale fusion development program.

Helium-three, he mused. It's imbedded in the lunar regolith, just like the hydrogen atoms they take up to make water. We could set up nanomachines to harvest helium-three and ship it to Earth easily enough. My division could open an entirely new line for the corporation: fusion power systems.

Instead of simply supplying raw lunar materials to the corporations that want to build solar power satellites, we could have a monopoly on the fuel for fusion power.

All the way back to Savannah Rashid dreamed about turning Masterson Aerospace into the world's leading energy company. Fusion power. Enough energy to irrigate the world's deserts, to light the world's cities, to bring the poorest of the poor into the glow of the modern world. All based on helium-three from the Moon. All developed by Masterson Corporation's space operations division. By me.

He pictured himself as president and CEO of Masterson Aerospace. As the most important and powerful man in America; in the world; in the whole Earth-Moon system.

One small cloud troubled his vision. The helium-three would be produced by nanomachines, and there was enormous resistance to anything touched by nanotechnology. Still, Rashid assured himself, if we have to we can extract the helium-three by older methods. It will raise the price somewhat, but not. too much.

He smiled again, satisfied that even the New Morality could not stop his inevitable rise to wealth and fame and power.

Doug left the meeting with Greg and his mother in a turmoil of conflicting emotions. They shot Quintana. Some New Morality fanatic gunned him down at the U.N. building. Because he was against the treaty. Or was it because he was living proof that nanotherapy can cure cancer? Maybe both reasons. Probably both.

As he strode down the tunnel he realized all over again that he could not return to Earth. Even if they let me through customs I'd be a marked man. Every nutcase in the world would come after me.

With a shake of his head, he tried to clear his mind of Quintana's assassination and think through the idea of moving Moonbase's legal ownership to Kiribati. With a half-bitter smile, Doug remembered an economics professor from his first year at Caltech telling the class, "Figures don't lie, but liars sure can figure."

Let them make their treaty; we'll find a way around it Kiribati will have the highest per-capita income on Earth, just from the bribes Mom and Greg will spread around.

We can't let them stop us from using nanomachines here. We can't! It would be like stopping New York City from using elevators. The city would die.

One way or another we've got to keep on using our nanomachines. Otherwise we'll have to shut down Moonbase. And then what about me? They'd have to let me come back Earthside. But if I do I'll be a target for every brain-dead New Morality zealot who can get his hands on a gun.

Doug tried to push that fear out of his mind and concentrate on what had to be done.

For the past six months Doug had worked on the Mt. Wasser power tower project and building the pipeline from the ice fields at the south pole back to Moonbase. Negotiations were under way to sell water to Yamagata's Nippon One and the Euro-Russian base over at Grimaldi.

But Doug knew that the ice fields were limited. He had helped to map them, down in the perpetual shadows of the polar mountains, and to probe their depths. There's enough water there to provide for all three of the bases on the Moon; with recycling, the water should last for decades, maybe half a century, even. But there's not enough to allow us to grow! That's the problem. It's a no-growth solution—which means no solution at all. Moonbase has got to grow. Or eventually die. Somehow, we've got to figure out how to get water and the other life-support volatiles we need from elsewhere in the solar system.

Grow or die. Just like any living organism, any society. You either grow or you wither away and disappear.

He realized his fists were clenched as he marched along the tunnel. Passersby were giving him strange looks. Doug tried to smile at them, tried to appear relaxed. But inside he was stretched tight.

There's going to be a split with Earth, Doug knew. This nanotech treaty is just the beginning. They must know, down there, that we can't exist without nanomachines. It would've taken years to build a pipeline from the south pole, instead of months. The cost of building the power tower would have been out of sight if we didn't have nanomachines to do the work.

How can we prevent the split? How can we keep connected with Earth, at least until we're fully self-sufficient?

He pushed back the door to his room, forming a scenario in his mind: Okay, we establish the legalities that we're a corporation based in Kiribati and the Kiribati government doesn't sign the nanotech treaty. But suppose the U.N. or the World Court doesn't accept that? Suppose they insist that we've got to give up our nanomachines? And we can't, of course. Suppose they send Peacekeeper troops up here to enforce their demands!

Doug sagged onto his bunk. Jeez, we've got to figure out a way to prevent that from happening. But how?

Without thinking consciously about it, he flicked on the Windowall screen hanging opposite his bunk. Instantly the screen seemed to turn into a big picture window that looked out at the floor of Alphonsus. Doug stared out at the scene for a few moments, then went to his desk and pecked at his keyboard. The 'window' showed Victoria Falls, then an underwater scene from a tropical reef. Not satisfied, Doug finally got a live view from the top of Alphonsus' ringwall mountains that looked out across Mare Nubium.

"Magnificent desolation," he murmured. The barren plain was empty, not a sign that a human being had ever set foot on it, except for the faint glow of a handful of red beacons that marked the sites of the old temporary shelters marching off to the sudden horizon.

If Greg looked out there, Doug thought, he'd see nothing but barren wilderness. But I see beauty. I see freedom. I see the opportunity to explore and learn and grow and build the future. How can I make Greg see it the way I do?

He was still wondering about the problem as he put on his VR helmet and data gloves, booted up his computer and linked with his afternoon class from Caltech.

ROCKET PORT

Doug always asked permission to come into the rocket port's flight control center. It was a tiny cubbyhole burned out of the lunar rock by plasma torches back in the earliest days of Moonbase, barely large enough for two controllers sitting shoulder to shoulder at their consoles. It always reminded Doug of an old-time submarine's command compartment, compact and crowded, jammed with equipment that hummed and glowed and gave off heat. Despite Greg's swath of new radiators, the flight control center was stuffy and sweaty.

It even had a conning tower, sort of. There was a vertical tunnel that led up to a minuscule observation bubble, barely big enough for a person to stick his head up above the surface of the crater floor for a visual inspection of the rocket pads outside.

The controllers had never refused Doug permission to come into the center, tight though it was. Usually Doug clambered up the ladder to the observation bubble, leaving the controllers to huddle over their glowing display screens.

Traffic was seldom heavy. The lunar transfer vehicles plied the route between Earth orbit and Moonbase on a monotonously steady schedule. Rarely were there two spacecraft on the pads at the same time, even though Moonbase boasted four pads for LTVs to land on, spaced equidistantly from the observation bubble.

Standing on the narrow platform of the observation bubble, his chin barely above the crater floor's surface and his hair brushing the transparent dome, Doug watched the lander come down slowly, silently, its dirty-white rocket exhaust splashing on the smoothed rock pad, blowing dust and pebbles that rattled against the bubble's glassteel dome. Doug could barely see the actual touchdown, when the big ungainly lunar transfer vehicle settled on its outstretched spindly legs like an old, old man sinking into a favorite easy chair.

From below he heard the chatter of the controllers as they remotely manipulated the access tunnel to lock against the LTV's personnel hatch. To Doug it looked like a giant gray worm blindly groping for its prey.

The spacecraft that transited between Earth orbit and Moonbase had a human pilot aboard only when they were carrying passengers. Even so, the pilot was merely a redundancy required by archaic safety regulations. The controllers landed the craft remotely, as they did all the unmanned cargo carriers.

Once the access tunnel was connected and pumped up with air Doug slid down the ladder in dreamy lunar slow motion, without touching his feet to its rungs, and landed softly behind the two controllers.

"Thanks, guys," he said, despite the fact that they both happened to be women on this shift. Without waiting for them to reply, he ducked through the hatch and padded quickly in his softboots down the tunnel that led to The Pit, the receiving area.

The airlock's inner hatch was just swinging open as he got there. Two men stepped over the hatch's steel lip, both dressed in me olive green coveralls of the mining and manufacturing group. The next, another man, wearing the pumpkin orange of the science and exploration group, tripped over the coaming. A newcomer, Doug realized. Despite his weighted boots he stumbled and floundered, arms flailing. Doug went to him, grabbed him, straightened and steadied him.

"I'm okay," the man said. Like most of the short-timers, he was in his twenties.

"It's a little strange, your first time," Doug said. "Especially after a couple days of zero-gee."

"I'm okay," he repeated, scowling as he pulled free of Doug's supportive grasp.

Doug watched him walk awkwardly away, as if he were stepping on land mines. He'll never make it here, Doug said to himself. Too uptight to accept help; probably too self-centered to give help when it's needed.

Turning back to the hatch, he saw Bianca step carefully through, also in orange. Her round face broke into a wide grin at the sight of Doug.

"Welcome back!" Doug said, striding up to her, arms outstretched.

"Hi!" she said, shifting her travel bag so they could embrace in a welcoming hug.

Half an hour later they were in The Cave, sipping fruit punch and catching up on the months since Rhee had last been at Moonbase.

"I'm not just a grad student slave this time," she said proudly from across the narrow table. "I'm here to do my thesis work."

"No kidding?"

"If I don't run into any snags, I'll be Doctor Rhee this time next year."

"Terrific," said Doug.

He liked Bianca. Ever since their experience together on the first south polar expedition—which was known now as the Brennart Expedition—Doug had felt that Bianca Rhee was one of his best friends. She had come to Moonbase twice in the past six months, for a month each time. They had eaten together, joined others for parties or meals, talked endless hours about their hopes and plans for the future. Nothing more. Sometimes Doug got the feeling that Bianca might be feeling lonely at Moonbase; sometimes he thought he saw something in her eyes, in her voice, that made him feel as if she was—what? Disappointed? Sad? Uncertain?

Maybe she's a frustrated ballerina, Doug thought, remembering her shy confession about dancing. She had never brought up the subject again, so he hadn't asked about watching her dance.

Doug couldn't figure it out, and didn't feel that he wanted to probe Bianca's psyche that deeply. Is it sex? he wondered.

But she's older than I am and she's got her own life back Earthside. Probably boyfriends or lovers. Maybe her family's already picked out a husband for her. She's never brought up the subject and it's none of my business. We're friends and that's fine; no sense getting it all tangled up with sex.

Doug was not a virgin, but he was far from experienced. He had dated now and then during his year on the Caltech campus. Despite the so-called New Morality that the politicians, the media, and even the university administration constantly drummed on, several times his dates had ended in bed. He had never had to push it, he just went along with the tide. He never considered that being good-looking, athletic, easy-going—and extremely wealthy—made him attractive to young women. Doug simply did what came naturally.

At Moonbase it was the same, yet different. There was a core of some two hundred long-term Moonbase employees, plus a couple of permanent residents such as Lev Brudnoy and his mother. The long-term Lunatics tended to form solid, long-term relationships, for the most part, although there were a couple of loose cannons of both genders. Rumor had it that Brudnoy himself was quite a Romeo, or had once been.

It was among the short-timers, the men and women who visited Moonbase for a month or so at a time, that most of the action took place. Doug had enjoyed a couple of flings, nothing major, nothing more than fun and games.

"So what's your thesis about?" he asked.

"Well, originally I was going to do it on brown dwarfs; you know, superlarge planets that're almost real stars. With the equipment up here I've been able to do a real thorough search for them."

"Have you found any?"

"I've got six candidates, but I'd need some ultrasensitive infrared equipment to definitely identify them as brown dwarfs. They've got to be radiating at the wavelengths predicted by Chartrand's theory."

"Sounds heavy," said Doug.

She grinned again. Too heavy. Too big a subject My thesis advisor wouldn't let me tackle it"

"So?"

She took a quick breath arid then said, delightedly, "So I'm going to analyze the chemical compositions of the Earth-crossing asteroids, using the observatory here at Moonbase."

Doug was immediately interested. "Now that's something we can use right here. One of these days we're going to want to go out and grab an asteroid that's rich in carbon—"

"I remember you talking about mat last time I was up here," Rhee said. "That's one of the reasons I picked that topic. I thought it might help you."

"It'd be a terrific help, Bianca. When we actually start the project, you could be part of our team."

She beamed at him.

"If we ever start it," he added, more soberly.

"If?"

"I'm learning economics the hard way," Doug said. "I want to get an asteroid and mine it so we can use nanomachines to build Clipperships from asteroid carbon, make them out of pure diamond."

"Diamond?"

Nodding eagerly, Doug said, "Diamond's got a strength-to-density ratio fifty times better than the aluminum alloys we make at the space stations."

"And nanobugs can produce pure diamond?"

"Out of the carbon we mine from the asteroid, sure: atom by atom."

"Wow!" Rhee said. "That's brutal!"

"But it takes money to get started. Capital investment And Moonbase isn't making enough profits to swing it"

"Won't the corporation—"

Doug interrupted, "The board of directors won't sink any risk capital into Moonbase, not with the U.N. working up an international treaty that'll ban nanotechnology completely."

"That would shut Moonbase down!" Rhee said, alarmed.

"Maybe," Doug replied. "But whether it does or not, the corporation isn't going to provide the capital we need for the asteroid project."

Rhee stared glumly at her half-finished drink. "And I was ready to come up here full time."

"Full time? Really?" Doug asked. "I mean, I know you've got family and school and everything back Earthside."

"There aren't that many jobs for astronomers back there," she said. "I couldn't even get a teaching assistant's position this semester."

"Well, I'm sure we could fit you in here." Then he added, "If this flipping nanotech treaty doesn't shut us down completely."

"You don't think that could happen, do you?"

Doug smiled reassuringly. "No way. We'll keep Moonbase going and we'll use our nanomachines no matter what laws they pass down there." Then he added, "I hope."

"It's really getting sick back home, you know," she said, suddenly glum. "The New Morality people keep passing new laws and the Supreme Court lets them get away with it. They've even shut down the national art museum in Washington!"

But Doug's mind was looking outward. "If only we could start the asteroid program now. If there was only some way I could get Greg to go for it."

"I could stay here," Bianca said. "I wouldn't mind staying here with you indefinitely."

"You want to become a real Lunatic?"

"Why not?"

"You're sure?"

She nodded gravely. I'm positive."

Again Doug caught a hint of something more going on than her words revealed. But he pushed that out of his thoughts. How can we can get the asteroid-grabbing program started right now? he asked himself.

Looking up, he saw that people were filing into The Cave, lining up at the food dispensers for their evening meals. He spotted Lev Brudnoy's tall, gangly form meandering through the rapidly-filling tables, a tray of food in his hands and a bemused, almost puzzled look on his grizzled face.

"Mr. Brudnoy," Doug called out, getting to his feet. "Would you care to join us?"

"Why? Are you falling apart?"

"Huh?'"

Brudnoy smiled sheepishly as he approached their table. "Forgive me. It's an gld Groucho Marx line and it's become something of a conditioned reflex in my silly little brain."

Doug didn't quite understand. "Marx? Like, with Lenin?"

With a sigh, Brudnoy said, "Please ignore my foolishness. And, yes, I would like to join you. I hate to eat alone."

"You were an astronaut, weren't you?" Doug asked as Brudnoy put his tray down on the table and folded his lanky frame into the chair between himself and Rhee.

"A cosmonaut," Brudnoy corrected. "The same thing, but in Russian."

"What do you think of the possibilities of going out and finding a carbonaceous asteroid and moving it into an orbit around the Moon?"

Brudnoy slumped back in his chair and puffed out his cheeks, then let out a long, slow whistle. "Ambitious. It would take a lot of delta vee."

"Change in velocity," Doug explained before Rhee could ask.

"I know that!" she hissed.

"Even for the Earth-crossing asteroids," Brudnoy said, half musing, "you would need a tremendous expenditure of propellant to change their momentum into a lunar orbit"

"Suppose we use the asteroid's own materials as propellant?" Doug challenged.

Brudnoy's shaggy brows went up. "It would have oxygen, wouldn't it."

Rhee said, "Carbonaceous chondrites contain water."

"Yes, of course."

"Hydrates," she said, "chemically linked to the rock."

"It would take energy to get the water from the rock."

"There's plenty of solar energy," Doug said. "And we can use nanomachines to do the separation."

"I see. Once you have water, of course, you have hydrogen and oxygen for rocket propellants."

"Right." Doug nodded eagerly.

"Of course, the trick is not to use up all the asteroid's valuable chemicals merely to get it into an orbit around the Moon. You want its water for us to use here, don't you?"

"And its carbon," said Doug.

"Carbon?" Brudnoy's shaggy brows rose. "For life support?"

"For making spacecraft out of diamond, using nanomachines," Doug said.

"Diamond," Brudnoy whispered.

"Stronger, lighter, more heat-resistant," said Doug. "And cheaper to manufacture, with nanomachines."

Brudnoy nodded, deep in thought, his dinner tray untouched. At last he asked, "Why bring the asteroid into lunar orbit?"

"So we can mine it," Doug said.

"You can mine it while it remains in its own orbit around the Sun. Then all you need to bring back here are the materials you really want. Why drag the entire asteroid here? It's inefficient."

Doug thought about it for a moment. "Yes… that could work."

"You see, my young friend, in space distance is not so important as the amount of energy you must expend to get the job done."

Doug nodded agreement. "And it would take much less energy to bring the raw materials we want from the asteroid to Moonbase than it would to move the whole asteroid into a lunar orbit. I see."

"Much less energy," said Brudnoy, smiling approvingly at Doug. "Which means much less rocket propellant."

"Which means much less money," said Doug.

Brudnoy patted Doug's shoulder. "You understand it very well."

Rhee pointed to Brudnoy's tray. "Your dinner's getting cold."

Glancing down at the plastic dishes, Brudnoy said, "It's almost criminal how the cooks take the fruits of all my hard labor and turn it into unappetizing mush."

"Maybe we need a good chef up here," Rhee said, grinning.

Brudnoy nodded dolefully: ''We certainly need someone who can create something better than this. Look, even the salad is soggy and lifeless."

But he stuck a fork into it anyway. "I raised these sad little leaves. They were crisp and cheerful when I handed them over to the cooks."

Doug had never given much thought to the quality of the meals. He ate what was available.

Munching thoughtfully, Brudnoy swallowed and asked, "What will you use for a spacecraft?"

"Adapt a lunar transfer ship, I suppose," Doug replied.

"You will need a team of engineers and technicians."

"We already have an astronomer to pick out the most likely asteroid." Doug jabbed a thumb in Rhee's direction.

"Congratulations." Brudnoy lifted his tea mug to her. "But if you don't mind my saying so, you're going to need more than the three of us to accomplish this task."

"Three of us? You mean you're willing to help us?"

"Of course."

"Terrific!" said Doug, tremendously pleased.

They clinked their cups together.

"We'll take one of the LTVs and have it modified for the mission," Doug said, his insides beginning to tremble with growing excitement

"Do you have the facilities for modifying spacecraft here?" Rhee asked.

"No, but the corporation has space stations that can do that kind of work. In Earth orbit."

Brudnoy's enthusiasm was muted. "Why do it at a space station?" he asked, jabbing at another piece of salad on his tray. "Why not do it here?"

"We don't have the facilities here," Doug said.

"We could adapt what we do have," said Brudnoy. "We have the talent, too, if we use our people properly."

Doug gaped at him. "Modify the LTV here," he muttered.

"Do the entire job here at Moonbase," Brudnoy said firmly.

"Do you think we could build the Clipperships here at Moonbase?" Doug asked.

"Why not? The nanomachines don't care where they are."

"That would mean turning Moonbase into a major manufacturing center."

"Why not?" the Russian repeated, smiling patiently. "After all, I can feed you lapin a la Brudnoy now, although I shudder to think of what the cooks would do with it. Why not take the next step forward?"

"From a mining center to a manufacturing center," Doug mused.

"A natural step in the evolution of a frontier settlement. It will allow us to expand from a town into a city."

"Wow," said Rhee. "This is getting awesome."

But Doug sagged back in his chair. "We'd need a lot of additional capital investment."

"Of course."

Rhee sensed Doug's sudden change of mood. "The corporation won't put up the money?"

"Not with this nanotech treaty hanging over us. The whole scheme depends on nanotechnology."

"But you said we'd keep on using nanotechnology regardless of the treaty."

"If we can. We'll have to fight Washington over it."

"And Moscow," said Brudnoy. "And London and all the other world capitals. Even in Paris the couturiers must submit their fashion designs to a censorship board before they are allowed to go ahead with them."

Doug began to wonder if Kiribati could withstand the international pressure, despite the best Greg could do.

"Could we do this without the corporation knowing about it?" Rhee asked.

Doug began to shake his head.

But Brudnoy said, "Perhaps it would be possible to "retire" one of the older transfer craft and then modify it."

"We'd have to take people off other jobs to do it," Doug said. "It would show up in the base's bookkeeping."

"There is a technique," said Brudnoy, "known as midnight requisitioning. You must learn to be as creative in your bookkeeping as you are in your engineering."

"Moonlight the whole project?! Rhee asked.

"Why not?" Brudnoy replied. "O perhaps we should call it Earthlighting, considering where we are."

"Instead of capital investment from the corporation," Doug mused, "we get people to invest their own time and talents into helping us. That's a form of capital that doesn't involve money."

"Or the company's bookkeepers," Brudnoy added.

Doug said, "Greg would have to be in on this. We couldn't hide it from him."

A sly smile crept across Brudnoy's bearded face. "Fort Apache," he muttered.

"What?"

"Oh, nothing," said Brudnoy. "I was just recalling a conversation I had with your brother when he first came up here."

"What we're proposing is to bring Moonbase up to the next step toward self-sufficiency," Doug said.

"By mining an asteroid?" asked Rhee.

"If this scheme succeeds, Moonbase will have developed the means of supplying itself with carbon and nitrogen and all the other volatiles we now import from Earth," Doug said, feeling the excitement rising in him again.

"If we succeed," Rhee said.

"But if we can do it," said Doug, "then it won't matter what treaties or laws they pass Earthside. We can survive without them."

"By mining asteroids," Rhee repeated.

"By lifting ourselves up by our own bootstraps," said Brudnoy.

"Operation Bootstrap," Doug said, breaking into a huge grin. "We do it without letting Savannah know what we're up to."

"Can we get away with it?" Rhee asked.

"Why not?" said Brudnoy.

"We'll need Greg's help," Doug said. "And my mother's."

The other two fell silent

Doug pushed his chair back from the table. "They'll help," he said, with a confidence he did not truly feel. "I'm going to tell them about it right now."

JOANNA'S QUARTERS

All employees were treated equally as far as their living space in Moonbase was concerned. Even the director, who had a two-room suite, received no more living space than anyone else: the director merely had an office that connected to the living quarters, which were no larger than any other one-room dwelling space within the tolerances of practical lunar architecture.

It took energy and manpower to carve out new quarters with plasma torches that vaporized the lunar rock. No one was going to get a bigger living space than anyone else. Utilitarian rules prevailed. Besides, standard-sized quarters prevented jealous comparisons and arguments.

However, Joanna Masterson Stavenger was not a Masterson employee. So while everyone was treated equally, Joanna was more equal than anyone else. Her quarters were a two-room suite; two ordinary living spaces that had been connected by a plasma-torched doorway.

At her own expense, Joanna had brought up furniture from her home in Savannah and turned one of her cubicles into a crowded little sitting room, the other into the most luxurious bedroom in Moonbase, with a real bed of actual wood -polished lustrous rosewood—and a thick cushiony mattress with pillows and flowered sheets and even a comforter that was strictly for ostentation in the climate-controlled environs of the underground base.

There was no space in the bedroom for the two massive wardrobes full of clothes that Joanna had brought with her; there was barely enough space to inch around the massive bed. So Joanna had requisitioned a pair of technicians to build storage space under her bed; the drawers formed a son of platform that was high enough to require steps to get up onto the bed itself.

The bed on its'throne'—and who might be sharing it with the 'queen'—quickly became the most talked-about item in Moonbase.

"You must tell Greg about this," Joanna said to Doug as she reclined on the smaller of the two couches in her sitting room. She was wearing casual pale green silk slacks and a loose cashmere sweater of slightly darker green.

Doug had noticed that some of the women among the long-term Lunatics had taken to wearing more stylish clothes since his mother had come to Moonbase. Some women had started modifying their coveralls, snipping out pieces along the sleeves or shoulders or legs, adding trinkets or decorative patches. Eye candy, one of the guys called it.

Doug enjoyed the fashion trend. The women were adding color to the drab underground surroundings. Like the flowers that Brudnoy grew and the pictures that the Windowalls offered. Women wore perfume more often now, too. Even Bianca had added a trio of tiny gold pins to her collar as soon as she had arrived from Earthside: two cats on one side and some kind of fish on the other.

Doug remembered how Brennart had decorated his coveralls with mission patches and emblems. Yet none of the men had followed his lead. Doug himself wore his plain sky blue coveralls as he sat on the spindly armchair next to his mother's delicate little upholstered couch, leaning forward intensely, elbows on knees.

"I wanted to run it past you first," he said, "to make certain there aren't any obvious holes in the plan."

The corners of Joanna's lips curled slightly. "I might even detect a subtle flaw, if there are any."

Doug grinned sheepishly. "Aw, Mom, you know what I mean."

"What you're trying to do is to make Moonbase as self-sufficient as possible."

"And as soon as possible."

"Without letting the corporate management know what you're doing."

"Or the board of directors," Doug added.

.Joanna studied her son for a long moment. Then she said, "The board's in a turmoil since Carlos' assassination. They're all jockeying for power down there."

"Will it affect you?"

She smiled grimly. "Of course it will. The trick is to make certain it enhances my position on the board rather than detracting from it."

"Will you have to go back Earthside?"

"I don't think so," Joanna answered slowly. "The VR link's been good enough—so far."

Doug saw the shadow of uncertainty on her face. "I don't want to start new problems for you, but—"

"No, I think your scheme could be a good insurance policy for us, in case they really do try to stop us from using nanomachines."

Doug nodded.

"In fact," Joanna said, smiling slightly, "if all the other major corporations are prevented from using nanotechnology by the treaty, Masterson could become very wealthy. Extremely wealthy." Her smile widened. "We should support the nanotech treaty!"

"We can't do that," Doug snapped. "It'd be immoral."

With a small shrug, Joanna said. "I suppose so. But still . . ."

"Will Greg go along with us?"

Joanna's smile vanished. "Well," she said carefully, "it's a lot to swallow in one bite, for him."

"He wants to shut down Moonbase, doesn't he?" Without waiting for his mother's response, Doug went on, "And I want to enlarge it, turn it into a manufacturing center, make it profitable so it can grow and prosper. That's what Operation Bootstrap is all about…"

Joanna saw the intensity in her son's face. Operation Bootstrap, she thought. A theatrical name for a pretty daring idea.

We've been talking about making Moonbase self-sufficient for years. Paul wanted to do it, even back then. And now Doug's found the way to do it, if we can only get it started. Greg will be dead-set against this, though.

Aloud, she told her son, "Let me talk to Greg about it first. Alone."

Doug nodded as if that was what he had expected. Maybe what he had hoped she would say.

"I think he'll take it better if he hears it from you, Mom."

Joanna sighed. "I think so too."

Doug got to his feet and Joanna stood up beside her son. It always surprised her that Doug was so much taller than she, taller than his father had been. He looks so much like Paul, she thought, solid and compact. But he's really much bigger. Almost Greg's height.

And he's still growing, she realized. Mentally. He's challenging Greg already, although he doesn't really understand that. Greg does, though. Greg will see exactly what this means.

I mustn't let them clash over this Operation Bootstrap. I've got to get them to work together, not against one another.

Wilhelm Zimmerman almost toppled off his bar stool as he flinched away from his friend's blazing anger. His huge bulk teetered on the swivelling stool. He had to grab the edge of the bar with both hands to steady himself.

Verban took no notice of his obese friend's struggle to stay on the stool.

"Are you mad?" Verban hissed, his teeth showing. "Do you want to ruin us all?"

The bar was of the American type, in the old Osborne Hotel where the tourists stayed. Verban had insisted on their meeting there, rather than the ratskeller next to the campus where they usually had their seidels of beer.

It was late in the afternoon, yet the place was almost empty. Muted bland music issued thinly from the speakers in the ceiling. A few elderly couples, obviously tourists from Japan or one of the Asian rim tigers, sat together at one circular table, their heads together over a vidcam as they viewed their day's videodiscs.

Verban had suggested this hotel bar as a place where they would not be seen. Zimmerman thought they looked as obvious as a syphilitic chancre on a nun's face. How much better he would have felt in the noisy fellowship of the beer hall!

Zimmerman steadied himself, then said, "No one is going to be ruined just because I occasionally help a wealthy foreigner." He whispered in the quiet, almost deserted bar.

"Madness!" Verban repeated. "Sheer madness."

Zimmerman had known the man for nearly thirty years. Verban had always been the jittery type, scarecrow thin, nervous, given to smoking illicit cigarettes when he thought no one was watching. He was a professor in the university's law school, on the verge of graduating into the bliss of a professor emeritus' well-earned retirement.

"I've been doing it for so many years," Zimmerman said. "Why does it upset you now?"

"Because the pressures are stronger now than ever! Don't you watch the news? Don't you see what's going on around you—all over the world!"

"You mean that assassination in New York?"

"That's only part of it."

"And the treaty that the United Nations is sponsoring." Zimmerman smiled at his old friend. "You see, I do keep an eye on events outside my laboratory."

"Switzerland will sign the treaty."

Zimmerman shrugged and reached for his glass of beer, a delicate thing that held only a fraction of a seidel's worth. It was almost empty. At their favorite haunt the barmaids always made certain that the mugs were topped off regularly.

"So Switzerland will sign the stupid treaty. So what? The authorities have never bothered me."

"They will now," Verban whispered harshly. "They will close your laboratory entirely."

"No, they won't stop research—"

"Yes they will! And they'll come looking for you first of all, you with your proud announcement that you saved that boy's life on the Moon with nanckherapy."

"But it's true," Zimmerman insisted. "I did."

"And you had to tell the world about it?"

"I had to tell the world that nanotherapy is useful, therapeutic, and—used properly—it isn't harmful."

"So now you are a marked man. They will close your laboratory."

Feeling sudden panic, Zimmerman blurted, "But what am I to do?"

"Retire as gracefully as you can. You certainly have enough money to live well.

He shook his fleshy head. "Not really. Most of my income I spent on new research, once the university stopped funding nanotechnology work."

"It's over, Willi," Verban said, half annoyed, half sorrowful. "You mustn't fight against them. Just take this peacefully and go off into retirement."

"Never!"

"You'll get the entire university shut down, you fool! Don't you understand what kind of power they have?"

Zimmerman wanted to laugh. "They can't shut down the entire university."

"They can and they will, if you try to struggle against them."

"But…' Zimmerman's words died in his throat. He stared at his old friend. Verban was terrified. If the university shut down, who would pay out his pension?

His voice suddenly heavy, Zimmerman said, "What they are doing is terribly, terribly wrong."

"Yes, I know it," said Verban. "But they have the power. And they will use it mercilessly."

"I can't stop my life's work. I won't! There must be some university, somewhere. Perhaps in America."

"Hah!"

"Or Canada?" Zimmerman asked hopefully.

Verban shook his head.

Zimmerman realized he was perspiring. A fear reflex, he knew. They're making me afraid. He felt a sudden surge of hatred for the faceless people who ladled out fear as part of their power.

Verban said, "It's all finished, Willi. Nanotechnology—even theoretical research on the subject will be outlawed once the treaty goes into effect."

"There must be someplace…' Zimmerman muttered.

"Nowhere on Earth," said Verban sadly.

Zimmerman heaved an enormous sigh. But then he remembered that his protege, Kris Cardenas, was now living in Canada. Vancouver, he recalled. Perhaps she can help; after all, she won the Nobel Prize. She must have some influence.

CHELSEA, MASSACHUSETTS

She was good-looking. Older than Killifer would've liked, but a real stunner despite her age. Skinny, though. Her arms were rail-thin and he guessed her legs were, too, beneath the tight ankle-length skirt she wore. No way of telling how much of a figure she had under that severe outfit. It was plain dull gray from the choker collar down to her plain dull gray shoes. Killifer almost wondered why she didn't wear gloves, every other part of her body was covered. No jewelry at all.

But her face was enough to kill for. A sculptor's dream. The kind of face video stars wished they had. A black Venus, a chocolate-cream-colored goddess of beauty.

As she walked up to Killifer, he was totally unable to stop himself from staring at her. Automatically he got up from the bench where he had been waiting. But then he saw something in her eyes that almost frightened him. Her eyes were pained, haunted, rimmed with red like the fires of hell.

"Jonathan Killifer?" she asked needlessly. Her voice was smokey, low, inviting.

"Jack," he managed to choke out.

"I'm Melissa Hart. Pleased to meet you, Jack." Without a smile, without any change in those burning eyes. "Would you follow me, please?"

Killifer wanted to tell her he would follow her off the edge of a cliff, but her eyes stopped him. In silence he walked beside her down the busy corridor. He noticed that all the people here dressed in gray, men and women alike, the only difference was that the men wore trousers while all the women wore tight ankle-length skirts. Well, Killifer thought, they sure can't run away from you in those hobbles.

He expected her to lead him into her office, or maybe a conference room. Instead he followed her to the end of the hallway, up a narrow flight of stairs, and then through a metal door out onto the building's roof. The open sunlight made Killifer's eyes water.

"We can speak freely here, Jack," she said.

That worried him. Wiping at his eyes, he asked, "Whattaya mean? Is your office bugged?"

Melissa gave him a cool smile. "Jack, the Urban Corps doesn't believe in private offices, not even for General O'Conner. I thought that we could have our first chat here, without anyone else to bother us."

"How'd you find me?" Killifer asked.

"We have sources of information." She walked slowly toward the brick parapet along the roofs edge. "Isn't it a beautiful day?"

Following her, Killifer could see that the building was on a hill and the whole city of Boston was laid out before them, beneath the bright cloudless sky. After so many years at Moonbase, the deep clear blue almost hurt. Everything was so dazzling: the green of the trees, the red brick buildings, the glittering glass facades of the soaring downtown high-rises.

Killifer took in a deep breath of real air. It smelled great, with the salt tang coming in off the harbor. He could almost taste it.

"You were born in Boston, weren't you?" Melissa asked him.

He nodded and pointed. "Winthrop. Out there by the old airport."

A Clippership took off from the airport, like a toy at this distance, the thunder of its rocket engines nothing more than a muted rumble.

"Do you remember what Chelsea used to be when you were growing up in Winthrop, Jack?"

Killifer grinned sourly. "A dump. We used to make jokes about Chelsea. It was the bottom of the barrel."

"That's right," said Melissa Hart, like a schoolteacher pleased with her student's answer. "For generations Chelsea was the bottom of the barrel."

"And now?"

"Now it's a model community. The Urban Corps has transformed Chelsea. We brought new industry into the community, new businesses. People have jobs now. They have hope. Crime is down. The schools are turning out model citizens."

"I thought it was the New Morality did that."

"We're part of the New Morality. The Urban Corps, the Angels of God, the Disciples of Allah, St. Michael's Battalion- there are dozens of organizations within the New Morality structure."

"Uh-huh."

"We want your help, Jack."

"Mine? What for?"

"You've worked for years at Moonbase. We need to know all about Moonbase, what they're doing up there, how they operate, what they're planning."

"Why?"

Melissa looked disappointed. "Jack, they work with nanomachines at Moonbase, don't they?"

"They've got to," he said.

"Nanomachines will soon be illegal," she said. "We've got to know how the people at Moonbase will react to the new law."

Killifer turned away from her and looked out at the city again. It was so shining and lush it almost looked unreal. It all seemed clean and fresh. And quiet. Hardly any noise from street traffic. No boom boxes blasting away. No voices raised.

"What's in it for me?" he asked, still without looking at her.

If his self-centered questioned bothered her, Melissa Hart gave no hint of it. She immediately answered, "We'll hire you as a consultant at fifteen hundred a day, with a guarantee of a minimum of one hundred consulting days per year."

A hundred-fifty thousand per year, Killifer realized.

"That should augment your Masterson Corporation pension very nicely," she added.

"My pension, yeah." He wanted to spit.

"It's a very generous offer, Jack."

"For how many years?"

Sounding slightly disappointed again, she replied, "Oh Jack, I can't promise you more than this one year. If everything goes the way we expect it to, Moonbase will be shut down by the end of that time."

"And then what happens to me?"

"We'll see," she said simply. With a glowing smile. But her eyes still radiated pain.

Killifer thought it over briefly. "What the hell," he said. "Why not?"

"Then you agree?"

"If you'll come to dinner with me."

She seemed to think it over with great care. At last Melissa said, "I'd be happy to have dinner with you, Jack. But only dinner."

"Sure," he said. "Just dinner." It was a lie and he knew that she knew it.

The North End of Boston had once been an Italian preserve, but over the decades it had evolved into Little Asia. Vietnamese, Malay, Thai, Indian and a dozen varieties of Chinese now occupied the narrow twisting streets where once a patriot had climbed the Old North Church bell tower to signal Paul Revere.

Over spicy Hunan platters Killifer found himself spinning out his life story to this beautiful black woman with the haunted eyes. As if he couldn't stop himself, he spilled out the bitterness, the rage and frustration of his wasted life.

"But why did you spend all those years in Moonbase," Melissa asked sweetly, chopsticks held gracefully in her long slim fingers, "when you had such a promising career in nanotechnology?"

'She did it," he growled. "Masterson's widow. Then she married Stavenger. She stuck me in Moonbase."

"But you could have resigned and come back to Earth, couldn't you?"

He hadn't intended to tell her about the nanobugs and Greg Masterson and Paul Stavenger's murder. He had never intended to speak of that at all. But by the time dinner was finished and they were walking the crowded, brightly-lit streets, he had revealed himself to her almost completely.

"Greg Masterson murdered his stepfather?"

There was something in the way she said it that brought Killifer up short. Something in her voice.

"You know Greg Masterson?"

She nodded. In the harsh glare of the street lamp her face looked like frozen stone. "I knew him. Long ago."

They walked in painful silence down to the waterfront, where the streets were emptier. And darker.

"My apartment's up there." Killifer pointed to an apartment block across the street from the piers.

"You must have a nice view," Melissa said absently, sounding as if her thoughts were a quarter-million miles away.

"Come on up and see it," he suggested, taking her by the arm.

She disengaged effortlessly. "No, Jack," she said. "It doesn't work that way."

"Come on," he wheedled. "Just have a drink with me."

With a smile that might have been sad, or perhaps pitying, Melissa said, "You don't understand, Jack. I'm celibate."

"You're what?"

"I've been celibate since I met General O'Conner, many years ago."

"Celibate?"

"It's part of our creed."

"You mean everybody I saw in your building…?"

She nodded.

"That's hard to believe."

"Believe it, Jack. Celibacy removes one of the great causes of pain in this life."

"But… but you're so beautiful! It's a damned shame. A waste."

Her eyes flared. "No, it's not a waste. I know what pain can be caused by the attractions of sex. I was caught in that web, once, years ago. It led to nothing but pain and evil, drugs and self-destruction. I nearly killed myself before General O'Conner found me."

"General O'Conner."

"He, wasn't the general then; he hadn't even founded the Urban Corps yet. But he saved my life. He made me dedicate my life to the New Morality and all that it stands for."

"And you've gotta be celibate?"

"It simplifies your life, Jack. It allows you to concentrate your energies on the things that really matter."

"Still seems like a damned waste to me," Killifer grumbled.

"No, Jack. It makes life so much easier. Cleaner. Come back to the office tomorrow, Jack. I want you to join us. We need your help."

Killifer thought, Maybe this celibate crap is just her excuse. After all, we just met this afternoon. Give it time, she'll pull her pants down sooner or later.

"Okay," he said lightly. "See you tomorrow morning."

"Nine sharp," said Melissa.

"Right."

He left her at the street corner and went into his apartment building. She didn't seem to have the slightest fear of being alone on the dark street.

Jinny Anson stared at her husband. "What do you mean?" she demanded.

"Just what I said," he replied calmly, his teeth clamped on his favorite briar pipe.

"You've got to submit your syllabus to a freakin' committee?"

His studied composure irritated her. "It's not as if this is the first time," he said.

"But this committee's got nothing to do with the university," she said.

Her husband shrugged. "It's a local citizens' group. They call themselves the Moral Watchdogs or something like that."

"Moral dipshits," Anson 'muttered.

Her husband gave her a disapproving frown. He was obviously afraid his young daughters might hear her language, even though the door to their bedroom was firmly shut and the kids were down in the rec room watching video on their new wall-to-wall Windowall screen.

Quentin Westlake was a sweet, gentle professor of English literature at the University of Texas. It had taken him ten years to work his way from various outlying campuses in the vast hinterlands of the state to the main campus at Austin. Along the way he had married, fathered two daughters, and divorced when his first wife fell in love with an investment broker from Chicago.

Jinny Anson had met him at a seminar in Lubbock, where she had been invited to participate in a panel discussion of 'Literature in the Space Age." Jinny had been the only panel member who was not an English lit professor and Quentin had been the only one among them who had treated her with kindness.

It was a different kind of romance, with Jinny commuting every few months from Moonbase to Texas, and Quentin trying to convince his two pre-pubescent daughters that he wouldn't marry anyone who would turn into a wicked stepmother. When Jinny took her regular annual leave from the directorship of Moonbase the commute became easier: merely from Savannah to Austin. By the time she returned to the Moon they had decided to get married.

Their wedding was at the Alamo, as scheduled, with Quentin's two daughters serving as bridesmaids and Joanna Stavenger among the guests. Joanna's best wedding present was to allow Jinny to transfer to the corporation's manufacturing facility in Houston; she could commute to work now on the high-speed levitrain from Austin. In addition to her regular duties, Jinny was supervising construction of a model water recycling center for the city of Houston, based on the technology perfected at Moonbase. It made for very long days, but at least she was home each night with her husband. Most nights.

For nearly six months, now Jinny had lived in his three-bedroom ranch-style house in suburban Austin, getting acclimatized to raising two half-grown daughters and to the intricate jealousies and competitions of a major university's faculty. She quickly fell in love with the girls; the other faculty wives and women professors—and administrators—she felt she could gladly do without.

Now, as they were undressing for bed, Quentin told her about the new committee that would be reviewing his work. She knew he was concerned about it, despite his easy-going attitude. He wouldn't have brought up the subject if it didn't bother him.

"But what right does a self-appointed gaggle of uptight New Morality people have to pass judgment on your syllabus?" Jinny asked, aggrieved.

Quentin smiled wearily and rubbed the forefinger of his right hand against its thumb. "Money talks, sweetheart. Some of those committee members are among the biggest contributors to the university."

"It's an invasion of academic freedom!" Jinny snarled.

"Sure it is," he agreed amiably. "But what can I do about it? The Jews don't like "The Merchant of Venice," the Africans don't like "Othello." The Baptists say "Hamlet" is smutty and the feminists complain about "Macbeth," for lord's sake! What can I do?"

That stopped her. What could they do about it if the university administration and the faculty leaders permitted it? Probably a lot of New Morality members among them, she realized.

"You know the old Chinese advice about getting raped," Quentin said softly, as he took off his trousers.

"You shouldn't relax," she said, from her side of the bed. "And you sure as hell shouldn't enjoy it."

Naked, he flopped onto the bed. "Ah, love, let us be true to one another, for this world has neither certitude nor peace nor help for pain," he misquoted slightly.

Jinny sat on the bed beside him. "This world," she replied.

DIRECTOR'S OFFICE

"Operation Bootstrap?" Greg echoed, from behind his desk. "Are you joking?"

"No," said Doug. "It's not a joke."

The two of them were alone in Greg's office: Doug in his usual spot on the couch by the door, Greg sitting upright behind his desk.

With a shake of his head, Greg said to his brother, "When Mom told me about it I thought perhaps it was some kind of prank you and Brudnoy had cooked up."

"Greg, it's something we have to do," Doug said earnestly.

"Really?"

"Sooner or later."

"It won't be sooner."

For all the urgency in his words, Doug looked calm and relaxed, almost insolently at ease, Greg thought His young half-brother slouched back in the couch all the way across the office. He expects me to get up from my desk and go over to him, Greg told himself. No way.

I'm the director of Moonbase. I called him here into my office; he's not going to make me jump through his hoops.

"Look, Doug, I asked you to come here without Mom so we could talk over this crazy idea of yours—"

"It's not a crazy idea," Doug said.

"Come on, now

"I've worked out the numbers, Greg. We can build Clipper-ships that'll outperform anything that's ever flown. And that's just the beginning. There's aircraft, automobiles—we can transform the whole world!"

Greg frowned at his half-brother. "Pie in the sky. Nothing but pipedreams."

"Look at the numbers!" Doug urged. "I can bring them up on your computer."

"I'm sure you can put numbers on a screen that say anything you want them to say," Greg replied, acidly. "But that doesn't mean I'm going to get as crazy as you are."

"It's not crazy!"

"Operation Shoelace," Greg sneered.

Doug jolted to his feet and strode up to the curving desk. Greg had to look up at his younger half-brother, leaning both fists on the desk top menacingly.

"Operation Bootstrap will not only save Moonbase, Greg," Doug said, as calm and implacable as a brick wall, "it'll make Masterson Aerospace the most powerful corporation on Earth.''Sit down," Greg snapped.

Doug pulled up the nearest webbed chair and sat in it.

"Now listen to the realities," Greg said, tapping a fingernail on his desk top.

Doug smiled slightly. "Okay, I'm listening."

"I've spent the past six months searching for a way to keep this base afloat—"

"Operation Bootstrap is the way to do it!"

"All that you'll accomplish," Greg countered annoyedly, "is to push Moonbase into the red deeper and faster. It's nonsense! Absolute nonsense!"

"But it's not—"

"For chrissake, Doug, we can't even get the mass driver finished!"

"I know that."

"It's taking every bit of energy and manpower that I can spare. I've got to get the mass driver built and still show a profit every quarter. Do you know how tough that is? Do you have any idea of the pressures I'm under?"

"Okay," Doug said, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. "Forget everything I just said, then."

"Good."

"But we've got to do Operation Bootstrap if we're going to keep Moonbase alive."

"Moonbase is a continuing drain on the corporation's finances."

"Greg, this isn't about money! It's much more-' >

"Don't be childish," Greg snapped. "It's always about money. There isn't anything else."

"But—"

"But nothing! If I don't show a profit the board will shut us down, just like that." Greg snapped his fingers. "Is that what you want?"

"No," said Doug quietly. "But it's what you want, isn't it?"

Greg stared at him.

"You didn't take the directorship here to save us, Greg. You came up here to kill Moonbase."

Doug saw his brother flinch at the word 'kill." I shouldn't have said it, he told himself. But it's too late now.

"Moonbase is Mom's pet project," Greg said slowly, his voice low and trembling. "She's been nursing it along for more than twenty years now. But there's no rationale to keep it going. It's a drain on the corporation."

With a shake of his head, Doug replied, "There's more involved here than the quarterly profit-and-loss statement, Greg."

"You still don't see—"

"No, you don't see," Doug said, raising his voice slightly. "Moonbase has been tottering on the brink of extinction ever since it started. I know that. I also know that if we're limited to supplying raw materials for the orbital factories we'll always be on the ragged edge. Always!"

"What do you mean, limited?"

"We've got to expand our operations! We've got to make ourselves self-sufficient and move beyond just being a mining operation. Being self-sufficient means more than just having enough water to go around, Greg. We've got to be able to manufacture everything we need, right here at Moonbase, without needing imports from Earthside."

"In your dreams," Greg muttered.

"We can do it! I know we can! But we've got to start now. We've all got to work together on this."

Is he really that naive, Greg wondered, or is he just trying to manipulate me?

Taking a deep breath and sitting up straighter, Greg said firmly, "When my term here is over, I'm going to recommend to the board that Moonbase be shut down."

"But we can turn things around," Doug urged.

Exasperated, Greg burst out, "Do you have any idea of what you'd need to mine an asteroid? This isn't some game! Get real!"

Strangely, instead of getting angry, Doug smiled. "Greg, I've calculated every detail of the job. I've run it through our logistics and engineering programs. I can even tell you the exact date on which we'll make rendezvous with 2015-eta."

"With what?"

"That's the best asteroid for our purposes. When you trade off its nearest-approach distance against the eccentricity and inclination of its orbit—"

Doug blathered on about the asteroid while Greg sat, seething. I didn't want Mom here, he reminded himself, because she'd side with him and not me. I wanted to confront him face-to-face, all by ourselves. But now he's pulling out all this technical garbage to show how much more he knows than I do.

"Hold it!" Greg snapped.

Doug stopped in mid-sentence.

"Now listen to this and believe it: Nothing new is getting started at this base. I'm willing to let the mass-driver job continue, but that's just because we might be able to sell the facility to the Japanese once it's finished."

"Sell it?"

"Or sell the know-how. Yamagata could buy the nanobugs and build their own mass driver for themselves."

"Maybe Yamagata will want to buy Moonbase," Doug thought aloud. "The whole base."

"Maybe," Greg agreed, with a cold smile. "I hadn't thought of that possibility. They just might be fanatic enough."

"But otherwise you'll shut'down Moonbase."

"What choice do we have? The U.N.'s nanotech treaty will wipe out the base anyway."

"So the deal with Kiribati is just a fake?" Doug asked.

"I'll take care of the Kiribati deal. You don't have to worry about it."

"You're just doing it to keep Mom happy."

I'm doing it," Greg said icily, "so that we'll have a place to continue nanotech work, despite the U.N. treaty." Before Doug could reply he added, "We don't need Moonbase or even space stations to use nanotechnology. I can make Kiribati a very wealthy nation, using nanotechnology."

"If the U.N. doesn't pressure them into quitting," Doug said. "Or the New Morality doesn't bomb the islands."

Greg glared at him.

"So you're really going to shut down Moonbase," said Doug.

"That's right. And you can run to Mom and tell her all about it. I don't care. My mind's made up."

"You're making a mistake, Greg. A horrible mistake."

Raising his voice nearly to a shout, Greg insisted, "Doug, I won't have it! Stop this crap here and now! Moonbase is history! It's dead!"

Doug looked shocked. For the first time since he'd sauntered into the office, he looked upset, almost fearful. Greg nodded, satisfied. That wiped the self-satisfied smile off his face.

"I've made my decision and that's it," Greg said. "Moonbase is history and there's nothing you or Mom or anyone else can do to save it."

Doug studied his older brother's face for several silent moments. There's no sense arguing with him, he realized. His mind's made up. He's in no mood to consider the facts.

"All right." Slowly, Doug got up from the web chair. "You're the boss."

Greg's smile widened slightly. "I'm glad you understand that."

Doug walked to the door. He knew he shouldn't, but he turned back and said, "But if Moonbase is dead, it's because you've murdered it."

Greg wanted to scream at the impudent young snot, but for just a flash of a second he thought he saw Paul Stavenger standing at the door and not his son. Looking at him accusingly. Greg blinked and it was Doug again. With the same accusing stare.

Before Greg could reply, Doug opened the door and stepped through.

"It's always darkest just before the dawn," Doug muttered to himself. It didn't cheer him one bit.

Surprised and stung by Greg's stubborn refusal to listen to reason, Doug did what he often did when he felt troubled. He went to the main airlock, pulled on a space suit, and went out for a walk on the crater floor.

The Sun was down; dawn would not come for another several hours, but it was never truly dark at Alphonsus' latitude. The Earth hung up in the sky, glowing warm and bright, deep blue oceans and swirls of clean white clouds. Doug saw mat Earth was nearly at its full phase. He could clearly see the southwestern U.S. desert and the cloud-shaded California coast. On the other side of the Pacific the tight spiral of a powerful typhoon was approaching the Philippines.

Greg's acting like he's brain-dead, Doug told himself. He's made up his mind and he doesn't want to be bothered with the facts.

A tractor trundled past him, kicking up dust.

"Need a lift?" Doug heard in his helmet earphones.

"Thanks, no."

The tractor lumbered past him, on its way out to the mass driver site. Doug walked slowly in that direction, thinking that up until a few months ago you could walk almost anywhere you wanted to out here on the crater floor and be happily alone. Except for the rocket port, of course, but you could avoid that easily enough if you wanted to.

Not anymore, he saw. The mass driver project was turning this part of the crater floor into a busy, bustling conglomeration of tractors and nanotech crews in dust-spattered space suits.

The mass driver. An electric catapult more than two miles long that accelerates packets of lunar ore to more than a hundred gees injffew seconds. With luck, they'll finish it just in time to close down the whole base.

Tractors with bulldozer blades on their fronts were smoothing a road between the main airlock and the mass driver site, scraping aside the dark top layer of the regolith to reveal the bright, new-looking stuff beneath. Doug followed the churned-up turmoil of their tracks until he could clearly see the driver itself rising from the dusty, pockmarked ground like a low metal finger pointed at the horizon.

They were having trouble with the nanomachines, Doug knew. Not enough iron in the regolith to process into the structural steel they needed. And every atom imported from Earth raised hell with Greg's quarterly profit-and-loss figures.

What a waste, Doug thought sadly. Finish the job so we can sell it to Yamagata. What would the men and women working on this mass driver think if I told them Greg's going to close the base? That all their work is for nothing. That the best they can hope for is to sell the fruit of their labor to Yamagata.

It's not right, he knew. It's just not right. We ought to be building for the future, reaching out to the asteroids, the other planets, eventually to the stars. Not retreating, not slinking back to Earth as if we can't meet the challenges out here.

Briefly Doug wondered what it'd be like to be launched off the Moon by the mass driver. A hundred gees. He laughed to himself. In the first second you'd be smeared into a thin bloody pulp. Take the nice slow rocket; it's safer.

He could see the driver clearly now, its dark metal bulk marching straight as an arrow off into the distance while machines and spacesuited figures crawled over and around it like mechanical acolytes at some vast alien altar.

Greg doesn't have the vision, Doug knew. He just doesn't see the future at all. To him, tomorrow's just like today. He's making the deal with Kiribati so the corporation can become more profitable by using nanotechnology on Earth. He doesn't even see the forces down there that'll try to crush him and nanotechnology, together.

Okay, Doug said to himself. Do you see the future? Are you so dead-certain that you know what's right?

He answered himself immediately. Yes. I know what we've got to do. I can see the path the human race has to take. Grow or die. It's that simple, that stark. If we don't grow beyond the confines of Earth we're going to'sink into an overcrowded, overpolluted fishbowl of a world without freedom, without hope, a world of poverty and despair and global dictatorship.

As he trudged along the dusty crater floor, Doug tapped a gloved finger into the palm of his other hand, ticking off the points he wanted to make.

The mass driver's important. It can lower our launch costs and make us profitable. But only if the factories in Earth orbit can build products that we can sell.

We've got to get out to that asteroid. We've got to show them that we can make Clipperships of diamond and revolutionize the aerospace industry. More than that, we'll be producing a product with nanotechnology that everyone on Earth will want. We'll be striking a blow against the nanoluddites and the New Morality. And even more than that, we'll be moving Moonbase from a mining operation to a manufacturing center. From a marginal town to a growing city. That's the most important thing.

That's what we've got to do! We've got to! And we've got less than six months to do it.

Doug stared off into the dark endless sky. I can't let Greg shut down Moonbase. I've got to get Operation Bootstrap going despite him. Behind his back, over his head, any way I can. We've got to push Operation Bootstrap whether Greg likes it or not.

But how? How can I mobilize the people here when Greg's dead-set against it? How can I move us toward the asteroid mining effort if the base director won't permit anyone to work on the program? It'll be a direct challenge to Greg, almost a mutiny.

Can I really fight him? Mom wants us to work together, but Greg doesn't want that. He just doesn't see what we have to do. He doesn't have the visions He's acting as if he's still sitting in Savannah or New York. That's where his mind is. That's where his attitudes are.

Doug turned away from the busy work scene stretching out along the miles-long track of the mass driver, turned his back to all that and looked across the emptiness of the pockmarked crater floor toward the softly rounded old mountains of the ringwall.

"It's always darkest before the dawn," he repeated to himself. Scant consolation, he thought.

It certainly was dark out there. With the Earth behind him, the airless sky looked black as infinity, specked here and there by a few stars bright enough to see through the heavy tinting of his helmet visor.

Dark and empty, Doug thought.

But as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Doug realized that there was a faint glow rising above the tired old mountain that poked its head up in the middle of the giant crater. Out beyond the brutally close horizon, the sky was slowly brightening.

They're wrong! Doug told himself. They're all wrong! It's not darkest just before the dawn. Not on the Moon, at least.

For out in the star-flecked blackness beyond the weary mountains, a pale hazy glow was beginning to light the predawn hours. The zodiacal light, Doug knew. Sunlight reflected off dust particles floating in space, the leftovers from the creation of the solar system. Here in the airless sky of Moonbase they light up the heavens long before the Sun comes into view.

Doug raised his arms to the ancient motes of dust that brightened the predawn hours. They're like friendly little fireflies out there in space, he told himself. They bring us the message, the promise that the light is on its way, the Sun will rise, a new day will dawn. Have hope. The darkness will end. It's a good omen.

Feeling excited again, energized, he said to himself, I've got to talk with Brudnoy again. And Bianca. Maybe they can get me together with a few people who can get Operation Bootstrap started.

And Mom? Doug wondered about that as he started trudging back toward the main airlock. No, Mom will side with Greg. She's a businesswoman, and Greg can make a stronger case for the bottom line than I can.

Still, Doug broke into a broad grin as he hurried back toward Moonbase. Greg's got profit-and-loss statements and projections of inventories and all that puke. All I've got is a broken-down former cosmonaut and maybe a few other people who might want to help me with Operation Bootstrap.

And a vision for the future.

He began to leap across the barren dusty ground, soaring in twenty-yard strides across the crater floor.

"Hey, where you goin' in such a hurry?" a construction worker's voice called in his earphones.

"Into the future!" Doug sang back.

BIANCA'S QUARTERS

"All right, quiet down!" Bianca Rhee shouted.

They all stopped talking and looked at her expectantly. Doug counted fourteen people crammed into Bianca's quarters, five of them squeezed on the bunk, the others crowded on the floor. Most of them were long-termers, men and women on year-long work contracts. Several had been working at Moonbase for many years, shuttling back and forth to Earth.

Lev Brudnoy had appropriated the desk chair and placed one of the female student-workers on his lap. He sat there with a satisfied smile on his grizzled face, one long arm around the young woman's waist, his other hand grasping an insulated flask of rocket juice. The others clutched a motley assortment of cups, glasses, bottles, even zero-gee squeeze bulbs. It was a BYOB party.

The ostensible reason for the party was to show off the new wallscreen that Doug had bought for Bianca. It almost filled the wall opposite her bunk, turning the blank stone into a window that could look out on the world, wherever vidcams could go. For the first hour of the party they had hooted and catcalled through a production of a Masterson Corporation-sponsored drama set on a corporate space station where romance and intrigue flourished in zero gravity.

Now the video was finished and the Windowall showed a satellite view of the great rift valley of Mars. Bianca perched herself on the desktop, her legs too short to reach the floor. She asked Doug to come up and sit beside her. They all wore workers' coveralls, color-coded to show their departments. Doug saw mostly the pumpkin orange of the research department and the olive green of mining, although there were a couple of medical whites in the crowd; one of the women medics wore hers unbuttoned almost to the waist, showing plenty of cleavage. He wore the only management blue.

Seeing that she had their attention, Bianca said more softly, "Doug's got something important to tell you." And with that, she turned to him, grinning.

"Thanks for the glowing introduction," Doug joked weakly. A few chuckles from the people looking up at him. He knew most of them, at least the long-termers. Of course, each coverall carried a nametag.

"I need your help," Doug began. "I want to start moving Moonbase along the road to self-sufficiency as rapidly as we can manage it."

As he began to outline his plans for Operation Bootstrap, Doug studied their faces. At first they looked amused, as if they expected this to be an elaborate joke of some kind. But then they started getting interested, and began asking questions.

"You really expect us to modify an LTV in our spare time?"

Doug answered, "A couple of extra hours a day from five technicians who know what they're doing can get the job done in ten weeks, from what the computer estimates tell me."

"But we won't get paid for the extra work."

"No, it'll be strictly voluntary. Your pay will come as a share of the profit we make from the asteroid ore."

"Work first, pay later. Huh!"

Bianca said, "Hey, you're always complaining there's nothing to do up here except drink and screw around."

"What's wrong with that?" one of the guys piped up.

Everyone laughed.

But Doug went on seriously, "I know it's a lot to ask, and you might put in a lot of work for nothing if the mission isn't successful. But if we do succeed…"

"How much money we talking about?"

"The calculations work out to about five times your hourly wage, if we get the amount of ore we're hoping for."

"And the corporation'll give us this money as a bonus?"

"Right."

"But the corporation doesn't even know we're doing this . . . this Bootstrap thing? How does that work?"

Doug replied, "We're all taking a chance. You're risking your time. Once we've got the ore from the asteroid, though, the corporation will pay you a bonus along the lines I've calculated."

"How can we be sure of that?"

"You have my word on it," Doug said.

"No offense, pal, but how much weight does your word have with the management?"

Doug smiled. "Good question. Let me put it this way: If the corporation won't come up with the money, then I will. Personally."

"Or we can sell the ore to Yamagata," one of the women said.

No one laughed.

Lev Brudnoy said, "I hate to be the bearer of evil tidings, but there is a rumor that the base will be shut down at the end of this director's term."

"Yeah, I've heard that buzz."

Several others nodded.

Doug had to admit it. "That's the director's current plan. I'm hoping we can make him change his mind."

"He's your brother, isn't he?"

"My half-brother."

"Does that mean he's only half as heavy?" asked one of the women. "You know, "He ain't heavy, he's my brother."

Doug made a rueful grin for her. "He's twice as heavy, believe me."

"So you want us to stick our necks out when the base director's ready to shut down the whole humpin' operation?"

"I want to save Moonbase," Doug replied.

"Wait a minute. Where are you going to get an LTV to modify?"

I'll handle that," said Doug. "None of you has to do a thing or commit yourselves to a minute of extra work unless and until I get an LTV for us."

They glanced at each other, muttering.

"Whatever happens," Biaüca said, without waiting for them to come to a group decision, "this little meeting here ought to be kept secret for the time being."

"Secret? From who?"

"Whom," corrected one of the students.

"From management," said Doug. "I want to present this as a fait accompli before my brother knows what we're doing."

Someone whistled softly.

"Look," Doug said, "we can't expect any support from the corporation. That's why we've got to do this on a volunteer basis and hope to get our payback at the end of the asteroid mission."

"Sounds awfully risky."

"Sounds like a good way to get fired."

"You can't be fired for working overtime on a voluntary basis," Doug said. "Read your employment contracts."

"Well," said Bianca, "I don't know about the rest of you turkeys, but I'm ready to put in a couple of extra hours for this."

Brudnoy said, "It should be more interesting than spending your spare time in The Cave, waiting for the menu to change."

They all laughed. Doug thought maybe half of them would actually volunteer to work on their own time. But this meeting would never be kept a secret. The word about Operation Bootstrap would spread through Moonbase with the speed of sound.

Which was what he was counting on.

"I've never been out this far before," said Brudnoy.

His voice sounded strange in Doug's helmet earphones. Subdued. Almost reverent.

"I hardly ever come out here myself," Rhee said. "Just for these regular maintenance checks."

The astronomical observatory was on the opposite side of Alphonsus' central peak from Moonbase. It had been placed out there to shield it from any stray light or dust or chemical pollution from the spacecraft landing and taking off at the rocket port. This meant a two-hour doctor ride across the crater floor, but Doug and Brudnoy had decided to accompany Rhee to see the instruments she used to track near-Earth asteroids.

Now Rhee led them through a jungle of metal shapes, all pointed skyward. Wide-angle telescopes, spectrometers, infrared and ultraviolet and even gamma-ray detectors. Doug easily recognized the wide dishes of the four radio telescopes off in the distance, but one shape puzzled him: it looked like a huge but stubby wide tub mounted on tracked pivots. It was easily twenty yards across.

"The light bucket?" Rhee said when he asked. "That's the Shapley Telescope, two-thousand-centimeter reflector. The most powerful telescope in the solar system."

"You use it for deep space observations?"

Rhee replied cheerfully, "I don't use it all. It's reserved for the Big Boys back Earthside. But yes, they use it for cosmological work. Quasars and redshifts, stuff like that"

Brudnoy asked, "Wasn't there talk of building an even bigger "light bucket," using liquid mercury instead of a glass mirror?"

"The Shapley's mirror is aluminum," Rhee answered. "No need for glass in this gravity."

"But the mercury telescope?"

"Maybe someday. Probably be easier to make really big mirrors with mercury, but it tends to vaporize into the vacuum."

Doug watched their two spacesuited figures as they spoke: Brudnoy taller than Rhee by more than a helmet's worth.

"Couldn't it be covered with a protective coating?" the Russian asked.

"Sure, but that cuts down on its reflectivity."

"Ah."

Doug asked, "Which ones do you use for tracking the asteroids?

"Over here." Rhee pointed and Doug followed her outstretched gloved hand with his eyes.

"The two big ones are Schmidts," she explained. "Wide field'scopes. Schmidt-Mendells, actually; they've been specially built for lunar work. And those over there are tracking individual asteroids, getting spectrographic data on their compositions."

"For your thesis," Doug realized.

"Right."

"Don't you use radar to detect asteroids?" Brudnoy asked.

Doug could sense her nodding inside her helmet. "Sure. One of the radio telescopes converts to radar sweeps twice a day. When we pick up something new we track it long enough to determine its orbit and then turn one of the spectrographic'scopes on it."

"What happens to all this equipment if Moonbase shuts down?" Doug asked.

"The university consortium will keep them running as long as they can, I guess," Rhee answered. "The data gets piped back Earthside automatically, as it is. Maybe they'll be able to send a maintenance crew up here every six months or so, keep it all going."

"It would be a shame to lose all this," Brudnoy muttered.

Doug nodded agreement even though they couldn't see him do it.

It took three hours for Rhee to complete all her maintenance checks and make the necessary adjustments in the instruments. Then they climbed back into the open tractor and trundled toward Moonbase. Brudnoy and Doug got off at the rocket port and Rhee drove alone back to the main airlock and the garage inside it.

"So this is the one you want to buy," Brudnoy said as they walked slowly to the lunar transfer vehicle sitting on one of the smoothed rock pads.

"It's been in service for ten years," Doug said, looking up at the ungainly spacecraft. "The corporation would sell it for about twice its scrap value, I think."

The LTV looked rather like a pyramidal shaped skeleton. It squatted on four bent, flimsy-looking legs that supported a metal mesh platform. From the platform rose gold-foiled propellant tanks, darker odd-shaped cargo containers, pipes and plumbing with gray electronics boxes wedged in, it seemed, wherever they could-be fitted. Up at the top, some thirty feet above Doug's head, was the empty plastiglass bubble of a passenger/crew compartment

"Well," Brudnoy said, sighing, "we won't need the passenger bubble."

"Replace it with more cargo holds," said Doug.

"No, I think the mining equipment should go there."

"Oh, right," Doug agreed hastily. "I almost forgot we'll need that."

For nearly an hour they clambered over the aging LTV, awkward in their cumbersome surface suits. The spacecraft stood stoically on the pad, like a dignified old gutted building being inspected by skeptical prospective buyers.

"Metal fatigue," Brudnoy muttered time and again. "This whole section must be replaced."

Doug took notes on his hand-held computer.

Finally the Russian was satisfied. "Not as good as I wanted," he said as he and Doug climbed back down onto the scoured ground again. "But not as bad as I feared."

"Can we get into shape?" Doug asked.

"Of course," Brudnoy answered. Then he added, "The question is, how much will it cost to get it into shape?"

"We've got some homework to do," Doug said as they headed for the main airlock.

Once inside, and out of their suits, Doug said, "Come on down to my quarters and we'll start figuring out the cost numbers."

He started striding down the tunnel. Brudnoy lagged behind him.

"I could use a good night's sleep," the Russian said.

Doug saw that Brudnoy's pouchy eyes had dark circles under them. He glanced at his wristwatch. It was nearly midnight.

"Oh. Okay," Doug said as they approached the double-sized hatch of the farm. "Actually, I've got a few hours of studying to do; got an exam tomorrow."

"On what subject?"

"European architecture. I'll have to build either a classical Greco-Roman temple or a Gothic cathedral."

"With your bare hands?" Brudnoy asked.

Grinning, Doug replied, "They'll let me use a computer."

"Very kind of them."

"I've still got to put in a few hours at the screen, though," said Doug.

Brudnoy stopped a moment at the farm's entrance. The airtight hatch was closed, as usual.

"I should check on my rabbits," he said, yawning. "The automatic feeder has been cranky lately."

I'll help you," Doug offered.

"No, not now. I'm too tired. Tomorrow will be good enough." And he started walking down the tunnel again.

Doug slowed his own pace to keep in step with the Russian.

"You never get tired, do you?" Brudnoy asked.

"I don't feel tired, no."

"Is it the natural buoyancy of youth, I wonder? Or do the nanomachines in you give you this preternatural endurance?"

"Preternatural?" Doug laughed.

Just as they reached the cross tunnel, two young women came around the corner. They stopped and stood uncertainly in the tunnel, both in crisp new white coveralls. Doug saw that they were wearing weighted boots. Newcomers.

"Oh!" said the taller of the two. "We're looking for the farm."

She was a good-looking brunette. Her companion was stockier, curly red hair clipped short, with a bosom that strained the front of her jumpsuit.

Brudnoy stroked his bearded chin. "The farm? Why should two such lovely ladies be looking for the farm at this time of night?"

"We just got off our shift," said the brunette.

"And we heard that you keep bunny rabbits down here," said the redhead.

Brudnoy's weariness seemed to disappear. Before Doug's eyes the tired old man turned into a smiling, boyish swain with large, liquid eyes that blinked at the two women longingly.

"Ah, yes, the bunny rabbits. One of them just gave birth, this very afternoon." ,

"Really?" they squealed in unison. "Can we see them?"

"Of course," said Brudnoy. "Right this way."

"It's not too late?"

"For such lovely newcomers to our humble farm, how could it be too late?" Brudnoy glanced at Doug and rolled his eyes.

"I've got to be going," Doug said.

Smiling wolfishly, Brudnoy said, "Then I shall have to show the rabbits to these young ladies all by myself?"

"Well," said Doug, "maybe I can hang around for a little bit."

"If it's not too much trouble," the brunette said.

"No trouble at all," Brudnoy answered grandly. "Just follow me."

Doug laughed to himself as he followed Brudnoy and the two women back toward the farm and the rabbit pens. No wonder Lev likes to keep the rabbits, he said to himself. And here I thought he only had our nutritional needs in mind.

Well, Doug mused, maybe we can recruit these two for Operation Bootstrap. If nothing else.

MT. YEAGER

"Well, what do you think?" Doug asked.

He could hear his mother's excited breathing through the suit radio. From their vantage atop Mt. Yeager they could see almost the entire floor of Alphonsus before the sharp lunar horizon cut off their view. In the other direction, Mare Nubium stretched out like an endless undulating frozen sea of rock, dotted with smaller craters and the glowing red beacon lights of the old temporary shelters.

"You were right, Doug," Joanna said in a hushed, awed voice. "It's breathtaking."

She had never been out on the lunar surface before. Doug quietly insisted that she make an excursion with him; they both knew his motive was to get her alone, away from Greg, so they could talk without interruption, without eavesdropping.

Joanna had been upset and impatient during the hour they spent getting into the spacesuits and prebreathing their low-pressure mix of oxygen and nitrogen. Then Doug had requisitioned a hopper and taken his mother—who made it clear she was frightened half to death—up to the top of the tallest mountain in Alphonsus' ringwall.

"There's the mass driver," Doug said, pointing at the dark line laid out across the crater floor. "And the rocket port. You can see the solar energy farms…"

But Joanna's eyes were turned the other way. She stretched out a gloved hand toward the red beacons marching straight out toward the brutally close horizon.

"Those are the tempos, aren't they?" she asked.

Doug nodded inside his helmet, then grasped his mother's shoulders gently and turned her slightly to the left.

"That's Wodjohowitcz Pass," he said, pointing to a rounded cleft in the ringwall. "That's where my father died."

He heard the breath catch in her throat.

"Would you like to see the plaque there?" Doug asked.

"No," Joanna said, her voice husky. "I know what it says."

"We put one like it at the top of Mt. Wasser," he said. "For Brennart."

"I know."

"We really ought to put up a statue for Brennart," Doug went on. "He deserves it."

"Not until there are tourists to spend money to see it," Joanna replied firmly.

Doug laughed lightly. "Right." More seriously, he added, "Brennart and I were just getting to know each other… respect each other . . ."

"And you lost him."

"We all lost him. Mom, if he were still here he'd be pushing Operation Bootstrap even harder than I am."

"All right," Joanna said. "Tell me what it is that you didn't want to say in front of Greg."

Doug went to scratch his chin, but his gloved hand bumped into his helmet, instead. "Well," he said, only slightly startled, "I need to buy an LTV."

"A lunar transfer vehicle? Buy one?"

"Would the corporation let us modify one of their LTVs for the asteroid mission? Would Greg?"

"No," she said. "Of course not."

"Then I'll have to buy one. I've thought it all through a thousand times," he said, exaggerating only a little. "I've worked it out with Lev Brudnoy and a couple of other people who don't want their names used, not yet, anyway—"

"You've got a real conspiracy going!" Joanna said, sounding shocked.

"A cabal," Doug answered lightly. He immediately added, "But it hasn't done any harm to Moonbase. Or to Greg. No harm at all."

"Really?"

Doug returned to his subject. "We need an LTV to get out to the asteroid."

"But you'll have to modify the spacecraft. You can't use it as-is to make a rendezvous with an asteroid."

"That's right." Doug nodded.

"And where will you make these modifications?"

"I'd like to do it right here."

"At Moonbase?"

"Right."

"Do you have the facilities here?"

"Not really."

The proper personnel?"

"Sort of."

"And how do you propose to get the facilities and people you need without your brother knowing about it?"

Doug spread his arms out wide. "That's the tough part of it. But I figured once we actually acquired an LTV he'd have to let us go ahead and modify it."

"Have to?" Doug could hear the amusement in his mother's voice. "Greg would more likely fire everyone connected with your—what did you call it, cabal?"

"He wouldn't fire anyone if you were on our side," Doug said.

That stopped her. Joanna fell silent. The time stretched and stretched.

"I can't be on your side," Joanna said at last, her voice almost a whisper. "And I can't be on Greg's. I don't want you two to oppose each other."

"I know you don't, Mom," Doug said. "But you're going to have to choose."

"No!"

"You can't avoid it," Doug said firmly, knowing that it was going to come down to this, hating the need but fully certain that there was no other way, there'd never been any other way, she was destined to choose between the two of us since these mountains were raised up, since the beginning of time.

"It's not just Greg or me," Doug explained. "It's Moonbase.

It's the future of humanity. Either Moonbase expands and becomes self-sufficient or it dies. My father knew that. You know it! We've got to move beyond being a mining town and grow into a community that's physically and economically self-sufficient. That's what the diamond Clipperships are all about, but Greg's too close-minded to see the entire picture, to grasp the fullness of the future."

"And you do understand it?"

"I honestly think I do, Mom. Either Moonbase grows or it dies. And if Moonbase dies, if we close this little foothold on the frontier, humankind folds back in on itself. The whole human race will sink into poverty and despair—and the kind of mind-controlling dictatorship that the New Morality is aiming at."

"What about Yamagata and Europeans?"

"They can't open the frontier the way we can. They're government-run, they'll stay small and stick to scientific research."

"I don't see where—"

"Dictatorship is already on the march back Earthside, Mom. It's already happening!" Doug insisted, pleading with her. "Now they want to shut down all nanotechnology. They've been censoring books and video for years. They're taking control of the universities. Don't you see, Mom? They're trying to control the thought centers! Once they've got them under control they can take over governments. And then the corporations."

"But even if that's true, what's it got to do with Moonbase?"

"We can be free of them," Doug said. "And as long as there's one place that's free the rest of the human race has a chance. We can be an example of what people can accomplish when they're free to think and build and grow."

For a few moments Joanna was silent. Doug strained to see her face through her visor, but all he saw was the reflection of his own blank helmet.

"Those are fine words, Doug," she said at last. "And I know you believe them—"

"You believe them, too, don't you?"

"I don't know." She turned away from him, looked out across Mare Nubium again.

"My father believed it," Doug said. "He died for it. So did Brennart."

She stood stock-still, facing the vast Sea of Clouds and the tiny red beacons still glowing out where the old buried shelters stood.

"I need your help, Mom."

"So does Greg."

"Then you'll have to choose between us."

"No," she whispered.

"Yes," Doug insisted. "Him or me. My father's dream, or . . ." Doug found that he couldn't finish the sentence.

But Joanna could. "I either help you build Paul's dream or I help his murderer. That's what you're saying."

"That's where it is, Mom."

She turned back to face him. "Buy your damned LTV," Joanna hissed. "Do what you have to do. I'll try to get Greg to listen to reason."

"Thanks." Doug was surprised by the bitterness in her voice, and even more shocked at the resentful anger he felt welling up inside him.

I've won, he told himself. Why does it feel so awful?

VANCOUVER

"Isn't this city beautiful?" Kris Cardenas asked. "I'm going to hate to leave it."

She and Wilhelm Zimmerman were strolling along a curving path through Stanley Park's harborside garden, dazzling with flowers: Above them the sky was a perfect blue, dotted with puffs of cumulus. In the distance the snow-capped peaks of the coastal range floated like blue-white ghosts disconnected from the ground.

"Christchurch is just as beautiful," said Zimmerman, in his wretchedly accented English. "Almost."

"I've been very happy here," Cardenas said wistfully. "Pete's been able to do really useful work among the poor."

"Are you safe here?" Zimmerman asked. "There have been murders, you know."

Cardenas laughed lightly. "Safer than Switzerland, Willi. Canadians are the least violent people on Earth, I think."

"But Canada will sign the U.N.'s treaty," Zimmerman said heavily.

"New Zealand's so far away!"

Although he was not that much older than she, Zimmerman looked to passersby like Cardenas' father or at least a paunchy elder uncle as they walked slowly along the meandering garden path. Puffing away on a foul-smelling cigar that earned him several angry stares, the Swiss biophysicist was sloppy and grossly overweight, his suit jacket flapping in the sea breeze like a loose sail. Cardenas still looked like a California surfer, curly sandy hair and broad in the shoulders, decked in jeans and a light beige sweater.

But her bright blue eyes did not sparkle.

"How does your husband feel about New Zealand?" Zimmerman asked.

She waggled a hand in the air. "A good neurosurgeon can work wherever he goes. That's no problem."

"And the children?"

Cardenas smiled at him. "Grandchildren, Willi."

"No!"

"Of course. What did you expect? My oldest will be thirty in another few months."

Zimmerman puffed hard on his stogie. "How many grandchildren are there?"

"Two, so far. My daughter's expecting in November. That's why I want to stay until the end of the year."

"Well," said Zimmerman bravely, "Christchurch is less than an hour away from here, if-you use the rocket."

Cardenas smiled wanly. "I know. But still…"

"Yes, I know. I understand. I will miss Basel, also. The pastries. And the good beer. More than half of my staff refuse to leave Switzerland. I can't blame them. Some of them worry about their pensions, others have family they don't want to leave."

"It's not an easy choice, Willi."

"For you and me, it is. We go where they allow us to work. As long as New Zealand doesn't sign the verdammt treaty—"

Her phone buzzed. Only the immediate family had access to it, so Cardenas hurriedly pulled the palm-sized instrument from her shoulder purse.

"Yes? Pete?" Zimmerman watched her face relax. She was worried about her pregnant daughter, obviously. "Joanna Stavenger?" She glanced at Zimmerman. "Why in the world would I travel to Moonbase, just to examine her son? That's ridiculous… No, I'll call her myself when we get home."

Her husband said more, and Zimmerman saw Cardenas' jaw clench. "Oh no! Oh my god."

He waited as patiently as he could, standing there in the winding garden pathway as couples and families passed them, casting frowns at his cigar, while Cardenas' face grew whiter.

At last she folded the phone and put it back in her shoulder bag.

"Bad news?"

"New Zealand's just announced that they'll sign the treaty, after all."

"No!"

"Their government is under tremendous pressure from the party that's backed by the New Morality movement. To stay in power, they've decided to sign the treaty."

Zimmerman flung his cigar butt to the brick walk and stamped on it, swearing in German. Cardenas couldn't understand the words but she recognized the tone easily enough.

"Well," she said, her breath fluttering, "Pete really didn't want to leave Vancouver anyway. And the kids are all here…' Her voice tailed off.

"The only concession you must make is to give up your career," Zimmerman said scornfully. "That's all."

There were tears in her eyes. "You too, Willi. They've stopped us both."

"Never! I do not stop."

"Where are you going to go?" Cardenas asked rhetorically. "There's only a couple of tiny nations that won't sign the treaty and they don't have the facilities or the trained personnel you need."

"Where will I go?" Zimmerman grasped her by the shoulders and turned her to face toward the distant mountains. The pale curve of the Moon hung above the bluish snow-clad peaks.

"There!" said Zimmerman firmly. "I will give up wiener schnitzel. Sausage and pastries and even beer I will give up. Even cigars! But not my work. Never! I will not give up my work, even if I have to live like a cave man!"

MOONBASE CONTROL CENTER

"The first day or so when I came up here," Greg was telling his mother, "I spent more time in this spot than anyplace else."

"I remember," Joanna said.

"The radiation storm."

"You told me they had a big party going on in The Cave."

Greg nodded as he walked along the row of consoles. Each was occupied by a man or woman; they all had earphones clamped to their heads, but there was no tension in the room, no excitement. Most of the technicians looked bored as they watched their screens.

The big electronic map of Moonbase that covered one wall of the control center glowed softly. No red lights and only a few amber ones. Everything was under control; no major problems in sight. The base was functioning smoothly.

"We haven't had a big flare like that one since then," Greg said. "We're about due for one."

Greg made his rounds of the base once each day, walking from his office out to the main airlock, then down the ladder that led to the tunnel that went past the farm, then back along the next tunnel to The Cave, and finally to the control center. The fourth tunnel was entirely living quarters, and Greg saw no need to inspect it every day, although he strolled its length at least once a week, just to check things out.

The control center was the nerve nexus of Moonbase, of course. From its consoles every electronic circuit, every valve, every pump and drop of water and whiff of air was monitored both by the base's mainframe computer and the human technicians who constantly watched the display screens and the big glowing wall map.

Joanna was following him on this afternoon's inspection tour, seeking a way to tell him of what Doug wanted to do without causing an explosion.

"So what did you and Doug talk about out there on the mountaintop?" Greg asked, making it sound so casual that she knew he was blazing with curiosity. Or more.

"Operation Bootstrap," she replied honestly.

"Is he still harping on that nonsense?" Greg complained as he strolled slowly along the row of consoles. "I wish he'd grow up."

"I think Doug—"

"Do you know what he's doing?" Greg interrupted, a sly smile on his lips. "He and Brudnoy want to get their hands on one of our old LTVs and convert it for this idiotic asteroid mission he's dreamed up. He's behaving like a sneaky little kid."

"Do you think Brudnoy's behaving childishly, too?" Joanna asked mildly.

Instead of answering, Greg stopped and bent over one of the technicians' shoulders to look closely at the monitor display. Joanna wondered if he actually were interested in the display or just doing it for effect.

When Greg straightened up and resumed pacing behind the seated technicians, Joanna said, "I think Doug has a good idea—it's too good to throw away."

"Not you too!"

She stopped, forcing him to stop too and turn to face her.

"Greg, we've got to move on this while we still can. If we wait, the U.N. or the New Morality or somebody might try to stop us."

With exaggerated patience, Greg said, "Mom, look: I've lined up Kiribati for us. We'll be able to continue developing nanotechnology there in the islands. You ought to be making certain that the board is solidly behind us on this maneuver."

"Don't worry about the board."

"Then we can forget about this Bootstrap business, can't we? We can forget about Moonbase altogether. We won't need it as long as Kiribati is cooperative."

"And how long will that be?"

"Long enough for me to build the first diamond ship," Greg said.

Shocked, Joanna blurted, "What?"

Smiling icily, Greg said, "We have plenty of carbon on Earth, Mother. We don't have to build Doug's dream ships up here. We can do it in Kiribati; much more cheaply, too. And once I demonstrate the prototype to the major aerospace lines, they'll clamor to buy them, treaty or no treaty."

"But what about your brother? What about Moonbase?"

"Doug will have to return to Earth when I shut this base down."

Joanna took a breath. "But Doug can't return to Earth! They'll kill him just like they killed Carlos!"

"He can live in the islands. We can protect him there."

Glancing at the men and women attending the consoles, Joanna said, "Greg, we shouldn't be discussing this here."

But he planted his fists on his hips and demanded, "Why not? I'm going to recommend to the board that we shut down Moonbase for good. There's nothing we're doing up here that we can't do in Kiribati and you know it!"

My god, Joanna thought, his mind's made up and he won't listen to any alternatives. He doesn't care what happens to Doug. He doesn't care about anything at all.

She heard herself reply, "Very well, then, Greg. I'll fight you every inch of the way on this. And in the meantime I'm going to buy an LTV and pay for adapting it for the asteroid rendezvous."

The blood seemed to drain from Greg's face. "You're going … to buy…' He couldn't choke out the rest of the words.

"With my own money," Joanna said. "It'll be a private venture."

"You can't…"

"Yes I can," said Joanna, trying to keep her voice down, hating having to say this within earshot of so many strangers.

"And I can rent space from Moonbase for doing the necessary refurbishing work on the LTV."

Greg visibly struggled to regain control of himself. Some color returned to his cheeks. His eyes seemed to calm down somewhat.

"It's your money," he said. Then he pushed past his mother and strode back toward the door to the control center, leaving Joanna standing there.

Spend Christmas on Christmas Island, Ibriham al-Rashid grumbled to himself. Only an advertising executive who's never left Manhattan could come up with such an idiotic idea.

It had been three months since Rashid had been named chief operations officer of the new Kiribati Manufacturing and Entertainment Corporation, a weirdly structured company that included luxury vacation centers alongside all of Masterson Corporation's former space operations division, including Moonbase.

Just like that, with little more than a few strokes on a keyboard, he had been removed from his directorship of Masterson's space division and made chief operating officer of this ridiculous new corporation. His work with the fusion energy system was put on hold. "No need for that if we can still use nanotech in space, or out there on the islands," the corporate president told him. "Don't look so grim! This is a promotion for you."

A promotion, Rashid thought bitterly. They're throwing away the fusion development and sticking me here on this miserable little island. I've been destroyed by corporate politics.

As part of their deal with Kiribati, Masterson Corporation was setting up the new company with seats on the board of directors for each of the council chiefs. In addition to transferring Moonbase and the entire space operations division to the new corporation, Masterson was funding construction of two major tourist complexes, with hotels and casinos and all the amenities, one on Tarawa and another on Kiritimati—the atoll that Westerners still called Christmas Island. "Spend your holidays on Christmas Island," was going to be their advertising slogan.

Rashid stood on the atoll's highest point, Joe's Hill, all of twelve meters high, and stared at the devastation that last week's typhoon had left. The sandy islands had been scrubbed clean by the ferocious winds and a storm-driven tide that had surged completely across them, leaving nothing standing but a few battered palm trees.

The islanders had been moved to safety days before the storm struck, of course, and now were trickling back from the shelters to which they had scattered, most of them thousands of miles away, across the broad Pacific.

There were more construction workers than natives on the atoll now, and Rashid's ears rang with the grating whine of power saws and the incessant thumping of electric staple-drivers. Huge trucks groaned and rumbled all over the tiny island.

They were building a luxury casino hotel, an amusement center, and an airfield that could handle Clippership rockets as well as supersonic jets. International relief crews would be arriving soon to start helping the returning natives to rebuild their homes, but the corporate task of turning this smashed atoll into a vacation paradise was moving ahead without delay. Every gram of building materials had to be flown in. Four thousand palm trees were due to arrive today, Rashid knew. Tomorrow's Clippership cargo would include enough sod to grass over the 'championship eighteen-hole golf course' that the advertising brochures promised.

It would almost be as easy to build a resort complex at Moonbase, Rashid thought sourly.

Construction had been behind schedule when the typhoon struck. Now it was seriously lagging. Rashid, who hated to leave Savannah, and actually preferred New York, had rocketed out to Tarawa once the storm had spun away, and then flown on a corporate jet to what was left of Christmas Island.

Not this Christmas, he knew. There'd be no tourists visiting this atoll for many months to come.

His only consolation on this trip was the new assistant he had hired, a tall, sleek dark woman named Melissa Hart who had gladly accompanied him on this depressing journey to this miserable little lonely island.

Rashid had been impressed with her good looks and smooth self-confidence when she had first appeared at his office seeking a job on his staff. Her personnel file said that she had been a faithful Masterson employee for more than ten years, with an excellent record.

She was older than the women Rashid usually went after. And rather too thin for his taste. Yet she was alluring: cool yet tempting, proper in dress and demeanor while her smile seemed to suggest everything a man could desire. She spoke modestly, worked efficiently, and smiled deliciously. When she agreed to accompany him as his assistant on this trip to the Pacific, Rashid's fantasies kept him awake and sweating for the entire flight.

Now, with the sun setting and the infernal racket of the trucks and construction crews beginning to ease off, Rashid walked along the sandy beach toward the little tent city that had been put up to house the workers. The largest tent of all had been erected for him. Melissa slept in a tent with three other women, all construction workers, all bigger, more muscular, and much tougher-looking than Rashid himself.

Yet he grinned as he walked along the curving beach. At least now that the construction crews were knocking off for the evening he could hear the hiss and boom of the surf. There would be a moon tonight. Very romantic, looking out across the lagoon at the night sky.

And Melissa had agreed to have dinner with him. In his tent. Just the two of them, alone. Rashid felt like a sheik of old as he prepared his mind for the night's pleasure.

Melissa Hart had not been surprised at how easy it was to get close to Rashid. New Morality cohorts in Masterson's personnel department had faked a record for her, and Rashid hadn't bothered to check any of the recommendations that were signed by department heads from across the continent.

No, the man had taken one look at her and hired her with a wolfish smile.

Sex is a weapon, Melissa told herself. But a weapon is powerful only when it's used wisely. Keeping Rashid wanting her was the important thing; as long as his desire was alive, she had the power. Allowing him to have her would diminish that power she knew. She would give Rashid smiles and glances, even kisses and fondling. But they would consummate his lust only when it suited Melissa's goal.

Tonight we have dinner in his tent, she told herself as she clipped on a pair of faux pearl earrings. One of them was a microminiaturized radio that would transmit every word of their conversation to the solid-state recorder hidden beneath her cot.

"Big night with the big shit boss, huh?" said one of the construction workers with whom Melissa shared the tent. She was a short, burly woman with a good-natured laugh and a vocabulary from the docks. The other two had not come in yet.

Melissa nodded as she studied her image in the only mirror she had, a small hand-sized one.

"How do I look?" she asked.

The woman eyed her critically. Melissa was wearing flowing light pink silk harem pants slitted from hip to cuff, with a loose long-sleeved overblouse.

"Good enough to eat," the construction worker said, grinning.

Melissa smiled back at her. The woman began to pull off her grimy tee-shirt. "Watch out for him," she warned. "He's got ideas about you."

"Don't worry about me," said Melissa. "I've handled men like him before."

"Sure." And the woman made an up-and-down movement with her fist.

Melissa laughed at the crudity. I should give her a lecture on morality, she thought, but I don't have the time.

As she started out of the tent, the woman said, "I'm damned fuckin' jealous, you know."

Surprised, Melissa blurted, "You'd want to have dinner with the boss?"

"Uh-uh," she replied. "I'd rather have you."

"Oh," was all that Melissa could think to reply. But as she left the tent she thought that she would certainly have to give her a morality lecture. Then she wondered if she'd be safer in Rashid's tent overnight than with the three other women.

Joanna felt miserably alone as she walked along the tunnel toward her quarters.

Instead of bringing them together I'm driving them further apart, she said to herself. I want Greg and Doug to work in harmony, and here I've as much as told Greg I don't trust his judgment and I'm siding with Doug.

But what else can I do? Doug's right and Greg's simply refusing to pay attention to what he's trying to accomplish. This whole Kiribati business could blow away at any time; Greg thinks he's being so clever in setting it up, yet it could be a house of straw.

Well, she thought as she slid open the door to her suite, it's done. I've told Greg what I'm going to do. Now I'd better tell Doug. At least he'll be happy about it. I hope.

The message light on her computer was blinking. Joanna closed her door, then said in a clear, firm voice, "Computer, read messages."

The screen lit up with the words as the computer announced in a synthesized contralto voice, "Dr. Kristine Cardenas returned your call at 1435 hours today."

Joanna slid into her desk chair as she asked, "Did she leave a message?"

"Yes."

"Read it, please."

Again, the words spelled on the screen as Kris Cardenas' slightly shaking voice said, "Mrs. Stavenger, I've been thinking about your request that I come to Moonbase to examine your son. Professor Zimmerman is with me, and we would both like to come, if that can be arranged."

"End of message," said the computer.

Joanna sat at the blankly glowing screen, thinking hard. Zimmerman! He swore he'd never come back here again. But Switzerland's going to sign the nanotech treaty. Canada, too. Could it be…?

"Phone," said Joanna. "Call Kristine Cardenas."

Their conversation was brief, cool, and to the point Kris Cardenas and Wilhelm Zimmerman would leave from Vancouver for Moonbase on the next available flight. Joanna checked the schedules and saw that they could get to an Earth-orbiting transfer station on the next day. Then they'd have to wait for four days before an LTV was scheduled to make the weekly run to Moonbase.

She shook her head. They're too important to sit around for four days. The authorities might even try to detain them, especially if they wait in Vancouver instead of the space station.

Joanna ordered a special flight to meet them at the orbital station and take them immediately to Moonbase. They'll be here in three days, she told herself.

The corporate comptroller called an hour later to ask if she knew how much a special lunar flight cost and how thin Moonbase's profit margin was already.

I'll have to clear this with the division head," he said, glowering out from the screen at Joanna. "And he'll probably want to check it out with the director of Moonbase before he okays it."

Joanna sighed. "Put it on my personal account, Lester," she said.

Once her words reached him, his eyes went wide. "You're going to pay for it out of your own pocket?" He looked as if she had threatened some fundamental tenet of his inner faith.

"Yes," Joanna snapped. "And while I've got you on the link, I want to buy a lunar transfer vehicle. A used one, if possible; one that's about to be retired, if there are any such available. But used or new, I want an LTV. Put that on my personal account, too."

She thought the man would faint.

SPACE STATION MASTERSON

Like most of the major complexes in permanent Earth orbit, Masterson was a combination of several purposes: part manufacturing facility, part scientific research laboratory, part observation platform, part maintenance and repair center, and part transfer station for people and cargo heading onward to Moonbase.

Orbiting some two hundred fifty miles above the Earth, at first glance Masterson looked like a disconnected conglomeration of odds and ends, a junkyard floating in space. The modules where personnel were housed spun lazily on opposite ends of a two-mile-long carbon filament tether, like two oversized aluminum cans glinting in the sunlight, connected by a string so thin and dark it was for all practical purposes invisible. Outside the circumference of the housing modules' arc floated the factories, labs, repair shops and transfer center, their angular utilitarian shapes dwarfed by huge wings of solar panels and radiators, massive concave solar mirrors that collected and focused the Sun's heat for smelting and other processing work, and forests of antennas and sensors—all in zero gravity, or the nearest thing to it.

Spacesuited figures bustled from module to module, some of them jetting along in solo maneuvering units, others riding the bare-bones shuttlecraft that the station personnel called broomsticks.

Jinny Anson shook her head as she peered out the observation port. It had been almost nine months since she'd last been in zero gee, and she was testing her reactions. She felt a little woozy, but nothing she couldn't handle.

Not so bad for an old lady, she told herself. Just don't make any sudden moves.

There was a lunar transfer vehicle floating out there next to the repair sheds, she saw. It wasn't the regular LTV, which wasn't due back from its run to Moonbase for another thirty-six hours. As far as Jinny knew, the LTV had no business being there. But a maintenance crew was working on it, and she could see propellant lines feeding into its tanks.

"Are you ready for the inspection tour, Ms. Anson?"

Jinny pushed off the smooth surface of the observation port with her fingertips. The plastiglass felt cold, a reminder that there was nothing on its other side but empty infinity.

Turning toward the earnest young man who was to be her guide through the chemical processing plant, Jinny smiled and resisted the reflex to correct him. I'm still Ms. Anson on the company's files. I'm only Mrs. Westlake in Austin.

"Let's get it done, son," she said.

He pushed off the handgrip projecting from the bulkhead and floated through the hatch. Jinny followed him into the access tube leading out of the observation center, saying, "Take it slow, huh? It's been a while since I've been up here."

The kid grinned over his shoulder at her.

As far as Masterson Corporation was concerned, Jinny was visiting the space station as part of her duties as quality control manager of the Houston division. The station manufactured the alloys and most of the electronics components that Houston used to build Clipperships. The station itself was now the property of the new Kiribati corporation, but its new ownership seemed to make no observable difference on the station staff or the work they did.

There had been a rumor that some day they would start using nanomachines to build the Clippers out of pure diamond, but Jinny discounted that as the usual shop-floor outgassing. If nothing else, the nanotech treaty would scuttle that idea.

Unofficially, Jinny had come to the station to hitch a ride to Moonbase. It wasn't as simple as catching a bus, of course, but for a former director of'the base and a pretty important company official, the rules couldtbe stretched a little. She only wanted to visit Moonbase for a day or so, just long enough to talk with Joanna Stavenger face to face. Jinny was convinced that what she had to ask Joanna couldn't be done any other way. I've got to see the whites of her eyes when I pop the question to her.

"What's that LTV out there doing?" she asked as casually as she could.

The youngster turned lazily as he floated along the access tube so he could look back at her. "Special job," he answered. "Rumble is that there are some big gasbags coming up from Savannah, on their way to Moonbase. Ultra VIP. They pooched out a backup LTV just to take them up to the base, quickie-quick."

"How many?" Jinny asked.

"Dunno," the kid said. "Two or three, from what I heard. Could be more, but not enough to fill a whole passenger pod."

Jinny smiled to herself. There's my ride. Quickie-quick.

It was startlingly easy to talk her way onto the special LTV. Most of the crew at the station knew her; most of the senior crew, at least. There was plenty of spare capacity aboard the nearly-empty LTV, and an extra body visiting Moonbase for a couple of days wouldn't raise too many eyebrows—especially when the body was a former base director.

Jinny was supposed to get permission from the current base director, of course, but she knew how to get around that problem. She simply accessed the proper file from the station's mainframe and okayed her own trip, using the computer codes that hadn't been changed since she'd been running Moonbase. Easy.

I'll say hello to Greg Masterson when I get there, she told herself. See his eyes pop.

There were only two other passengers in the LTV's personnel pod. Jinny recognized the fat old guy as Professor Zimmerman, the nanotech whiz who had saved Doug Stavenger's life after the big solar flare the previous year. The woman with him looked familiar, but Jinny couldn't place her. She had 'California' written all over her sandy-haired, tanned features. They ignored Jinny almost completely, talking to each other with deep seriousness as the LTV's co-pilot ducked in to make sure they were buckled safely into their seats.

Silly safety regulation, Jinny thought. This bucket won't put out enough thrust to slosh the coffee in a cup, even on a high-energy burn to Moonbase. Still, when the red light came on and the rockets lit, she felt herself squeezed back into her seat.

It was impossible to eat, sleep and go to the bathroom over the thirty-six-hour length of their flight without saying anything to the other passengers. When Jinny went past them to get to the meal dispenser, she hovered weightiessly by their seats long enough to say hello to Professor Zimmerman. The old man didn't remember her at first, but when he started to unstrap and politely get up from his chair, his face went pale.

"Please, stay in your seat," Jinny pleaded. "The rules of etiquette are different in zero gee." Inwardly, she wanted to make sure that the flatlander didn't puke all over her.

With an effort to maintain his dignity even while seated, Zimmerman introduced Professor Kristine Cardenas to Jinny.

Soon the three of them were talking together the way passengers on a trip will, strangers yet shipmates. Jinny found that Cardenas was also an expert in nanotechnology and they were both going to Moonbase at the personal request of Joanna Stavenger.

She also learned that their real reason for allowing Joanna to coax them up to Moonbase was almost exactly the same as Jinny's own motivation.

"Perhaps we should pool our resources," Zimmerman said. He was obviously uncomfortable in zero gee; Cardenas looked a little green, too. Jinny had gone to the meal dispenser for them and brought them prepackaged trays. And slow-release anti-nausea patches, which they both stuck behind their ears.

"What do you mean?" Jinny asked. It was impossible to eat in zero gee without spraying crumbs and droplets all around. The compartment's air circulation sucked them up—slowly -into the ventilator grids along the ceiling.

Zimmerman started to gesture with his hands, then thought better of it. "You know the Stavenger woman much better than I or even Kristine. You could help us to convince her to allow us to remain at Moonbase indefinitely."

"I work for her," Jinny said, "but I can't say that I know her very well. Not socially."

Kris Cardenas said, "Still, if we all want the same thing, we ought to present a united front."

Fine by me," said Jinny, delighted to have a Nobel prizewinner and her mentor as unexpected allies.

Greg's face looked like a storm cloud, when he stepped into the reception area beneath the rocket landing pads.

"What's the matter?" Joanna asked him.

"Jinny Anson," he snapped.

"Jinny?"

"She's on the incoming ship, with Cardenas and Zimmerman."

"But she's supposed to be in Houston."

"She's on the ship. She thought she'd sneak in here without my knowing it. Thought I wouldn't bother checking the LTV's manifest."

Joanna immediately recognized the problem. Naturally Greg would be suspicious of having the former director of the base suddenly pop in for a visit. Especially when she hasn't told anyone she's coming or even asked permission to make the trip.

"They'll be corning down in a few minutes," Greg said, in a tight-throated whisper. "Flight control has locked in on them."

Joanna nodded wordlessly, wondering what she could do or say to ease his misery.

"Where's Doug?" Greg asked her.

"He went up to the observation bubble," she said. "He likes to watch the spacecraft land."

Greg made a sour face. Everything's a game to Doug; just a big entertainment. Impatiently he went to the wall panel beside the hatch and flicked on the intercom.

"Fifteen… right down the pipe," said the flight controller's voice. "Ten… five…"

"Green light," a different voice announced. The spacecraft's pilot, Greg assumed.

"Touchdown confirmed."

"Shutting down."

"Base power connected. The snake's on its way."

Greg paced impatiently across the small room. Doug came in through the door from the flight control center.

"Hi, Greg," he said.

His half-brother gave him a dark look in return. Joanna thought how strange it was that they could both wear the same color coveralls, but Doug's sky-blue jumpsuit looked bright and sunny while Greg's seemed somehow darker, more ominous.

"This is your doing, isn't it?" Greg snapped.

"My doing? What?"

"Bringing Anson here."

"Jinny Anson?" Doug looked genuinely surprised. "She's aboard this ship?"

Greg waved a finger in Doug's face. "Don't play innocent with me, Doug. I know what you're doing, you and your Operation Bootblack."

"I didn't know Jinny Anson was coming here until this moment," Doug said evenly.

"You're a liar!"

Joanna's breath caught in her throat. Greg stood red-faced before his half-brother, slightly taller but much slimmer. Doug seemed stunned by the accusation, his face frozen with shock, his hands clenching into fists at his sides.

"That's quite enough," Joanna said, stepping between them. "I won't stand for you two fighting like this."

But Doug smiled and stepped back, his hands relaxing. "Honestly, Greg, I'm just as surprised as you are that Jinny's come here. As for Operation Bootstrap, okay, we're trying to make Moonbase profitable without costing you any cash flow. It's all to your benefit, really."

"Really?" Greg sneered.

"Really," said Doug as pleasantly as a springtime breeze.

The airlock hatch's signal-chikie interrupted them. Joanna and her two sons turned to the heavy metal hatch as the indicator light on its/panel turned from red to amber and one of the mission controllers came hustling into the reception area. She was a petite, almost frail-looking young woman, wearing the gray coveralls of the transportation division. Why do they give the heaviest jobs to the smallest kids? Joanna wondered. The hatch had to be swung open manually, and even though there was a pilot and co-pilot on this flight, standard procedure was for one of the controllers to be on hand to open the hatch from this side, if necessary.

It wasn't necessary. As soon as the indicator light went from amber to green, the heavy metal hatch swung open. Joanna felt a slight stir of air in the reception room; the air pressure on the other side of the hatch had not exactly matched the pressure on this side.

The pilot pushed the hatch all the way open, grinning at the mission controller. "See," he said, "there is a reason for carrying us up from Earth orbit, after all."

"Then you ought to get paid as a doorman," said the controller.

He wasn't all that much bigger than she, Joanna realized. The pilot's eyes widened when he recognized Greg. "Hey," he said to the controller, "don't talk that way in front of the boss."

Greg forced a smile for them as they passed him, on their way to the flight control center. They didn't recognize Joanna, apparently; at least the pilot didn't.

Then Jinny Anson stepped through the hatch. Right behind her came Kris Cardenas and, finally, the lumbering form of Wilhelm Zimmerman.

For an awkward moment no one knew what to say. Greg looked like a smoldering volcano, Doug seemed nonplussed, and Joanna herself wondered what was going to happen.

Then Zimmerman broke the silence. "We seek asylum," he said, with great dignity.

DIRECTOR'S OFFICE

"Let me get this straight," Greg said. "You're seeking political asylum? Here at Moonbase?"

"You are now under the legal jurisdiction of the nation of Kiribati, is that not so?" Zimmerman asked.

"Legally, yes," said Greg.

"So! We seek asylum. Me from Switzerland, she from Canada."

The six of them sat around the circular conference table in Greg's office, where Greg had taken them immediately after their arrival. Joanna sat between her two sons, facing Anson across the table. Cardenas' and Zimmerman's luggage was still at the reception area, out at the rocket port.

"I don't know if it's political asylum or what," said Kris Cardenas, "but we want the freedom to continue our research—"

"And our teaching," interrupted Zimmerman.

Cardenas nodded. "And our teaching."

"And you can't do it Earthside?" Doug asked.

"Not once this treaty goes into effect," said Zimmerman heavily. "All research on nanotechnology will be banned. Teaching also."

Joanna saw the despair in his fleshy face. She had never considered how the nanotech treaty would affect researchers like Zimmerman and Cardenas.

Greg steepled his fingers before his face and looked at Anson. "Jinny, don't tell me you're seeking asylum, too."

She grinned mischievously. "Nope. I just wanted to talk to you—and Mrs. Stavenger—about getting transferred to someplace where my husband can teach without the New Morality on his back."

"What does he teach?" Joanna heard herself ask.

"English literature," Anson replied. "Specializes in Marlowe—the Elizabethan, not the detective."

No one laughed.

"Why don't we invite him here?" Doug asked.

"Here?" Greg demanded. "To Moonbase? We can't afford to carry nonproductive people here. What would we do with an English lit professor?"

"Start a university," said Doug.

"What?"

Gesturing toward Zimmerman and Cardenas, Doug said, "We have two of the world's greatest nanotech researchers, don't we? Let Jinny's husband teach English lit from here. Bring up a few other teachers and researchers. Moonbase can start its own university and people will pay good money to study here."

"But the transportation costs," Joanna pointed out.

Doug gave her a patient smile. "Mom, I'm studying at Caltech and the Sorbonne and the American University in Rome—all without leaving Moonbase. People on Earth can study with our faculty the same way."

"Electronically."

"Virtual reality, when you need it," said Doug.

Greg seemed intrigued despite himself. "You mean we could make a profit out of a university?"

"Of course!" said Zimmerman. "We can make this miserable collection of caves into a great intellectual center!"

Greg turned to his mother questioningly.

Joanna leaned close enough to whisper into his ear, "Don't fight it. Take the credit for it."

He smiled and thought, As long as Kiribati doesn't sign the U.N. treaty, I can start the university here and transfer it to the islands when I close Moonbase.