Stepping Stones: Evolving the Earth and Its Life
... some men have already embarked on a bold new adventure, the conquest of outer space. This is a healthy sign, a clear indication that some of us are still feral men, unwilling to domesticate ourselves by any kind of bondage, even that of the spatial limitations of our planet’s surface.
Carleton S. Coon The Story of Man (Third Edition)
“Jesus,” the pilot kept murmuring. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
The helicopter was racing north, bucking, jolting between the shattered land below and the thick dark gray clouds scudding just above, trying to follow Interstate 55 from the Memphis International Airport to what was left of the devastated city. You could not see the highway; it was carpeted from horizon to horizon with refugees, bumper to bumper traffic inching along, an un-ending stream of cars, trucks, vans, busses, people on foot swarming like ants, trudging painfully along the shoulders of the road in the driving, soaking rain, women pushing baby carriages, men and boys hauling carts piled high with whatever they could salvage from their homes. Flood water was lapping along the shoulder embankment, rising, still rising, reaching for the poor miserable people as they fled their homes, their hopes, their world in a desperate attempt to escape the rising waters.
Dan Randolph felt the straps of his safety harness cutting into his shoulders as he stared grimly out the window from his seat behind the two pilots. His head throbbed painfully and the filter plugs in his nostrils were hurting again. He barely noticed the copter’s buffeting and jouncing in the choppy wind as he watched the swollen tide of refugees crawling sluggishly along the highway. It’s like a war zone, Dan thought. Except that the enemy is Mother Nature. The flooding was bad enough, but the earthquake broke their backs.
Dan put the electronically-boosted binoculars to his eyes once again, searching, scanning the miserable, soaking wet throng below for one face, line individual, the one woman he had come to save. It was impossible.
There must be half a million people down there, he thought. More.
Finding her will take a miracle.
The chopper bounced and slewed wildly in a sudden gust of wind, banging the binoculars painfully against Dan’s brow. He started to yell something to the pilot, then realized that they had run into another blustery squall. Fat, pounding raindrops splattered thickly against the copter’s windows, cutting Dan’s vision down almost to nothing.
The pilot slid back the transparent sanitary partition that isolated Dan’s compartment. Dan suppressed an angry urge to slam it back. What good are sterile barriers if you open them to the outside air?
“We’ve got to turn back, sir,” the pilot yelled over the thrumming thunder of the engines.
“No!” Dan shouted. “Not till we find her!”
Half turning in his seat to face Dan, the pilot jabbed a finger toward his spattered windscreen. “Mr. Randolph, you can fire me when we land, but I ain’t going to fly through that.”
Looking past the flapping windscreen wipers, Dan saw four deadly slim dark funnels writhing across the other side of the swollen Mississippi, dust and debris flying wherever they touched the ground. They looked like coiling, squirming snakes thrashing across the ground, smashing everything they touched: buildings exploded, trees uprooted, autos tossed into the air like dry leaves, homes shattered into splinters, RV parks, housing developments, shopping malls all destroyed at the flick of the twisters’ pitiless, mindless malevolence, blasted as completely and ruthlessly as if they had been struck by an enemy missile attack.
The enemy is Mother Nature, Dan repeated silently, numbly, as he stared at the advancing tornadoes. There was nothing he could do about them and he knew it. They couldn’t be bought, bribed, flattered, seduced, or threatened into obedience. For the first time since he’d been a child, Daniel Hamilton Randolph felt totally powerless.
As he locked the partition shut again and fumbled in his pockets for his antiseptic spray, the chopper swung away, heading back toward what was left of the international airport. The Tennessee National Guard had thrown a cordon around the grounds; the airport was the Memphis region’s last link with the rest of the country. The floods had knocked out electrical power, smashed bridges, covered roads with thick muddy brown water. Most of the city had been submerged for days.
Then came the earthquake. A solid nine on the Richter scale, so powerful that it flattened buildings from Nashville to Little Rock and as far north as St. Louis. New Orleans had already been under water for years as the rising Gulf of Mexico inexorably reclaimed its shoreline from Florida to Texas. The Mississippi was in flood all the way up to Cairo, and still rising.
Now, with communications out, millions homeless in the never-ending rains, aftershocks strong enough to tumble skyscrapers, Dan Randolph searched for the one person who meant something to him, the only woman he had ever loved.
He let the binoculars drop from his fingers and rested his head on the scat back. It was hopeless. Finding Jane out there among all those other people-
The copilot had twisted around in his seat and was tapping on the clear plastic partition.
“What?” Dan yelled.
Instead of trying to outshout the engines’ roar through the partition, the copilot pointed to the earpiece of his helmet. Dan understood and picked up the headset they had given him from where he’d dumped it on the floor. He had sprayed it when they’d first handed it to him, but now he doused it again with the antiseptic.
As he clamped it over his head, he heard the metallic, static-streaked voice of a news reporter saying,”... definitely identified as Jane Scan-well. The former President was found, by a strange twist of fate, on President’s Island, where she was apparently attempting to help a family of refugees escape the rising Mississippi waters. Their boat apparently cap-sized and was swept downstream, but snagged on treetops on the island.
“Jane Scanwell, the fifty-second President of the United States, died living to save others from the ravages of flood and earthquake here in what remains of Memphis, Tennessee.”
It was raining in Venezuela, too, when Dan Randolph finally got back to his headquarters. Another hurricane was tearing through the Caribbean, lashing Barbados and the Windward Islands, dumping twenty-five centimeters of rain on the island of La Guaira and Caracas, on the mainland, with more to come.
Dan sat behind his big, bare desk, still wearing the rumpled slacks and pullover that he had travelled in from the States. His office smelled musty, mildewed from the incessant rain despite its laboring climate control system. He wasn’t wearing the protective nose plugs; the air in his office was routinely filtered and run past intense ultraviolet lamps.
Leaning back into the softly yielding caramel brown leather of his swivel chair, Dan gazed out at the windswept launch complex. The rockets had been towed back into the assembly buildings. In this storm they could not dare to launch even the sturdy, reliable Clipperships. The launch towers were visibly shaking in the gale-force wind, lashed by horizontal sheets of rain; roofs had already peeled off some of the smaller buildings. Beyond the launch towers, the sea was a wild madhouse of frothing whitecapped waves. The wind howled like a beast of prey, rattling even the thick double-paned windows of Randolph’s office.
Third storm to hit us and it’s not even the Fourth of July yet. Business isn’t lousy enough; we’ve got these double-damned hurricanes to deal with. At this rate I’ll be broke by Labor Day.
We’re losing, Dan thought. We’re in a war and we’re losing it. Hell, we’ve already lost it. What’s the sense of pretending otherwise?
The dampness made him ache deep in his bones, an arthritic-like reminder of his age and the dose of radiation sickness he’d contracted years earlier. I ought to get back to Selene, he told himself. A man with a broken-down immune system shouldn’t stay on Earth if he doesn’t have to.
Yet for hours he simply sat there, staring out at the pounding storm, seeing only the face of Jane Scanwell, remembering the sound of her voice, the touch of her fingers, the soft silkiness of her skin, the scent of her, the way she brightened a room, they way she had filled his life even though they were never really together, not more than a few quick hours now and then before they fell into bitter argument. There was so much separating them. After she had left the White House, they had managed to spend a couple of days together on a tropical atoll. Even that had ended in a quarrel.
But for once they had seen things the same way, had the same goal, fought the same fight on the same side. The greenhouse cliff meant war, a war pitting humankind’s global civilization against the blind forces of nature. Jane understood that as well as Dan did. They were going to fight this war together.
And it killed her.
Should I go on? Dan asked himself. What’s the use of it? What’s the sense of it? He wanted to cry, but the tears would not come.
Dan Randolph had always seemed larger than his actual physical size. He was a solidly-built welterweight, still in trim physical shape, although now, in his sixties, it took grueling hours in the gym to maintain his condition. His once-sandy hair was almost completely gray now; his staff people called him “the Silver Fox” behind his back. He had a fighter’s face, with a strong stubborn jaw and a nose that had been flattened years ago by a fist, when he’d been a construction worker in space. Despite all the wealth he’d amassed since those early days, he’d never had his nose fixed. Some said it was a perverse sense of machismo. His light gray eyes, which had often glinted in amusement at the foolishness of men, were bleak and saddened now.
A chime sounded, and the sleek display screen of his computer rose lowly, silently out of the desktop surface.
Dan swiveled his chair to see the screen. His administrative assistant’s young, somber face looked out at him. Teresa was a native of Caracas, tall, leggy, cocoa-cream complexion, deep brown almond eyes and thick lustrous midnight dark hair. Years earlier Dan would have tried to bed her and probably succeeded. Now he was simply annoyed at her intrusion into his memories.
“It’s almost dinnertime,” she said.
“So what?”
“Martin Humphries has been waiting all day to see you. He’s the man Zack Freiberg wants you to meet.”
Dan grimaced. Zack had been the first one to warn Dan of the impending greenhouse cliff.
“Not today, Teresa,” he said. “I don’t want to see anybody today,”
The young woman hesitated a heartbeat, then asked, softly, almost timidly, “Do you want me to bring you a dinner tray?”
Dan shook his head. “I’m not hungry.”
“You have to eat.”
He looked at her image on his screen, so intent, so young and concerned and worried that the boss was going off the deep end. And he felt anger rising inside him, unreasoning blind blazing rage.
“No, goddammit to hell and back,” he snapped. “You have to eat. I can do any goddamned thing I want to, and if you want to keep drawing your paycheck you’d better leave me the hell alone.”
Her eyes went wide. Her mouth opened, but she said nothing. Dan snapped his fingers and the screen went blank. Another snap and it folded back into its niche in the desk’s gleaming rosewood top.
Leaning back in his chair, Dan closed his eyes. He tried to close his mind against the memories, but that was impossible.
It was all going to be so damned great. Okay, a century or two of global warming would lead to a greenhouse cliff. Not a gradual warmup but a sudden, abrupt change in the world’s climate. All that latent heat stored in the oceans would pour into the atmosphere. Ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica melting away. Sea levels shooting up over a decade or two. Big storms and lots of them. Climate shifts turning croplands into deserts.
So what? We’ll use the resources of space to solve all those problems. Energy? We’ll build solar power satellites, beam energy from space to wherever it’s needed. Raw materials? We’ll mine the Moon and the asteroids; there’s more natural resources in space than the whole Earth can provide. Food production?
Well, that would be a tough one. We all knew that. But with enough energy and enough raw materials we could irrigate the croplands that were being desiccated by the climate shift.
Yeah, sure. And when half the world’s major cities got flooded out, what did we do? What could we do? When the electrical power grid got shattered, what did we do? When earthquakes and tsunamis wiped out the heart of Japan’s industrial capacity, what did we do? Diddley-squat. When this quake flattened the midwest, what did we do? We tried to help the survivors and Jane got herself killed in the attempt.
The office door banged open and a huge, red-bearded man pushed in, carrying an ornately-carved teak tray laden with steaming dishes. In his massive hands the tray looked like a little child’s toy.
“Teresa says you’ve got to eat,” he announced in a high, sweet tenor as he set the tray on Dan’s desk.
“I told her I’m not hungry.”
“You can’t fookin’ starve yourself. Eat something.”
Dan glanced at the tray. A steaming bowl of soup, a salad, a main course hidden under a stainless steel dome, a carafe of coffee. No wine. Nothing alcoholic.
He pushed the tray toward the red-haired giant. “You eat it, George.”
Pulling one of the upholstered chairs up close to the desk, Big George looked his boss in the eye and pushed the tray back toward Randolph.
“Eat,” he said. “It’s good for ya.”
Dan stared back at George Ambrose. He’d known Big George since he’d been a fugitive on the Moon, hiding out from the Selene City authorities with a handful of other free souls who styled themselves the Lunar Underground. Big George was Dan’s personal bodyguard now; he wore custom-tailored suits instead of patched coveralls. But he still looked like a barely-tamed frontiersman: big, shaggy, the kind of man who could gleefully pound your head down into your ribcage with no personal malice at all.
“Tell you what,” Dan said, feeling a reluctant smile bend his lips a little ‘I’ll split it with you.”
George grinned back at him. “Good thinking, boss.”
They ate in silence for several minutes, George gobbling the entire main course, which turned out to be a thick slab of prime rib. Dan took a few spoonfuls of soup and nibbled at the salad.
“Better than the old days, huh?” George said, still chewing prime rib. Fookin’ soyburgers and recycled piss for water.”
Dan ignored the younger man’s attempt to jolly him. “Has Teresa gone home?” he asked.
“Nope.”
Nettled, Dan glanced at his wristwatch. “She’s not my nursemaid, double-damn it. I don’t want her hovering over me like-”
“That Humphries bloke is still waitin’ to see you,” George said.
“Now? He’s out there now? It’s almost nine o’clock, for chrissakes. What’s wrong with him? Is he stuck here because of the storm? Doesn’t Teresa have the smarts to put him up in one of the guest suites?”
George shook his shaggy head. “He said he’ll wait until you’re ready to see ‘im. He did have an appointment, y’know.”
Dan let his breath out in a weary sigh. I just got back from the funeral and they expect me to stick to a schedule made out weeks ago.
“Teresa says he’s makin’ her nervous.”
“Nervous?”
“He’s comin’ on to her. I can see it meself.”
Frowning, Dan muttered, “Teresa can take care of herself.”
“The voice of experience?” George grinned.
“He’s been hitting on her all the time he’s been waiting for me?”
“Want me to shoo ‘im off?” George asked.
For a moment Dan relished the image of George hustling his visitor out of the building. But then he realized that the man would simply come back tomorrow. I’ll have to get back to business, he told himself. Can’t avoid it forever.
“Take the tray out,” he said to Big George,” and show this Humphries guy in.”
George smacked his lips. “I can bring in dessert and coffee.”
“Fine,” Dan said, unwilling to argue. “Do that.”
Grinning, George scooped up the crumb-littered tray in one hand and started for the door. Dan saw that the desktop was sprinkled with crumbs, too. Annoyed, he brushed them to the carpet.
Teresa appeared at the door. “Mr. Martin Humphries,” she announced. She looked tense, Dan thought. Humphries must have really rattled her.
Martin Humphries looked quite young. He was on the small side, a couple of centimeters shorter than Teresa, and he seemed soft, with rounded shoulders and a waistline that was already getting thick, despite the careful drape of his burgundy blazer. He seemed to radiate energy, though, as he strode confidently across the office toward Dan’s desk.
Dan got to his feet and extended his hand across the desk.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said, making himself smile.
Humphries took Dan’s hand in a firm grip. “I understand,” he replied. “I’m sorry to intrude on your grief.”
His eyes told Dan that the words were nothing more than an expected ritual. Martin Humphries’s face was round, almost boyish. But his ryes were diamond-hard, cold and gray as the storm-lashed sea outside the window.
As they sat down, George re-entered the office bearing a tray of pastries and the same carafe of coffee, with a pair of china cups and saucers alongside it. For all his size, Big George walked with the lightfooted step of a dancer-or a cat burglar. Neither Dan nor Humphries said a word as George deftly deposited the tray on the desk and swiftly, silently left the office.
“I hope I haven’t kept you from your dinner,” Dan said, gesturing to the pastries.
Humphries ignored the tray. “No problem. I enjoyed chatting with your secretary.”
“Did you?” Dan said thinly.
“She’s quite a piece of work. I’d like to hire her away from you.”
“Not a chance,” Dan snapped.
With a careless shrug, Humphries said, “That’s not important. I came here to talk to you about the current situation.”
Dan waved toward the window. “You mean the greenhouse cliff?”
“I mean the way we can help the global economy to recover from the staggering losses it’s sustained-and make ourselves a potful of profits while we’re doing it.”
Dan felt his brows hike up. He reached for one of the delicate little pastries, then decided to pour himself a cup of coffee first. Dan’s firm, Aslio Manufacturing Inc., was close to bankruptcy and the whole financial community knew it.
“I could use a potful of profits,” he said carefully.
Humphries smiled, but Dan saw no warmth in it.
“What do you have in mind?” he asked.
“The Earth is in chaos because of this sudden climate shift,” said Humphries.
“The greenhouse cliff, yes,” Dan agreed.
“Selene and the other lunar communities are doing rather well, though.”
Dan nodded. “On the Moon there’s no shortage of energy or raw materials. They’ve got everything they need. They’re pretty much self-sufficient now.”
“They could be helping the Earth,” said Humphries.” Building solar power satellites. Sending raw materials to Earth. Even manufacturing products that people down here need but can’t get because their own factories have been destroyed.”
“We’ve tried to do that,” Dan said. “We’re trying it now. It’s not enough.”
Humphries nodded. “That’s because you’ve been limiting yourself to the resources you can obtain from the Moon.”
“And the NEAs,” Dan added.
“The Near-Earth asteroids, yes.” Humphries nodded as if he’d expected that response.
“So what are you suggesting?”
Humphries glanced over his shoulder, as if afraid that someone might be eavesdropping. “The Belt,” he said, almost in a whisper.
Dan looked at Humphries for a long, silent moment. Then he leaned his head back and laughed, long and loud and bitterly.
They were gaining on her.
Still wearing the spacesuit, Pancho Lane zipped weightlessly through the lab module, startling the Japanese technicians as she propelled herself headlong down its central aisle with a flick of her strong hands against the lab equipment every few meters. Behind her she could hear the men yelling angrily. It any of those dip-brains have the smarts to suit up and go EVA to head me off, she thought, I’m toast.
It had started out as a game, a challenge. Which of the pilots aboard the station could breathe vacuum the longest? There were six Astro Corporation rocket jockeys waiting for transport back to Selene City: four guys, Pancho herself, and the new girl, Amanda Cunningham.
Pancho had egged them on, of course. That was part of the sting. They’d all been hanging around the galley, literally floating when they didn’t anchor themselves down with the footloops fastened to the floor around the table and its single pipestem-slim leg. The conversation had gotten around to vacuum breathing: how long can you hold your breath in space without damaging yourself?
“The record is four minutes,” one of the guys had claimed. “Harry Kirschbaum.”
“Harry Kirschbaum? Who the hell is he? I never heard of him.”
“He died young.” They all had laughed.
Amanda, who had just joined the team fresh from tech school in London, had the face of an angelic schoolgirl with soft curly blonde hair and big innocent blue eyes; but her curvaceous figure had all the men panting. She said, “I had to readjust my helmet once, during a school exercise in the vacuum tank.”
“How long did that take?”
She shrugged, and even Pancho noticed the way it made her coveralls jiggle. “Ten seconds, perhaps. Fifteen.”
Pancho didn’t like Amanda. She was a little tease who affected an upperclass British accent. One look at her and the men forgot about Pancho, which was a shame because a couple of the guys were really nice.
Pancho was lean and stringy, with the long slim legs of her African heritage. Her skin was no darker than a good tan would produce back in west Texas, but her face was just plain ordinary, with what she considered a lantern jaw and squinty little commonplace brown eyes. She always kept her hair cut so short that the rumor had gone around that she was a lesbian. Not true. But she had a man’s strength in her long, muscled arms and legs, and she never let a man beat her in anything-unless she wanted to.
The transfer buggy that was slated to take them all back to Selene was running late. Cracked nozzle on one of the thrusters, and the last thing the flight controllers wanted was a derelict transfer vehicle carrying six rocket jocks; they would be rebuilding the buggy forty-five ways from Sunday while they coasted Moonward.
So the six of them waited in the galley and talked about vacuum breathing. One of the guys claimed he’d sucked vacuum for a full minute.
“That explains your IQ,” said his buddy.
“Nobody’s made it for a full minute.”
“Sixty seconds,” the man maintained stubbornly.
“Your lungs would explode.”
“I’m telling you, sixty seconds. On the dot.”
“No damage?”
He hesitated, suddenly shamefaced.
“Well?”
With an attempt at a careless shrug, he admitted, “Left lung collapsed.”
They snickered at him.
“I could prob’ly do it for sixty seconds,” Pancho announced.
“You?” The man nearest her guffawed. “Now, Mandy here, she’s got the lung capacity for it.”
Amanda smiled shyly. But when she inhaled they all noticed it.
Pancho hid her anger at their ape-man attitude. “Ninety seconds,” she said flatly.
“Ninety seconds? Impossible!”
“You willin’ to bet on that?” Pancho asked.
“Nobody can stand vacuum for ninety seconds. It’d blow your eyeballs out.”
Pancho smiled toothily. “How much money are you ready to put against it?”
“How can we collect off you after you’re dead?”
“Or brain-damaged.”
“She’s already brain-damaged if she thinks she can suck vacuum for ninety seconds.”
“I’ll put my money in an escrow account for the five of you to withdraw in case of my death or incapacitation,” Pancho said calmly.
“Yeah, sure.”
Pointing to the phone on the wall, next to the sandwich dispenser, she said, “Electronic funds transfer. Takes all of two minutes to set up.”
They fell silent.
“How much?” Pancho said, watching their eyes.
“A week’s pay,” snapped one of the men.
“A month’s pay,” Pancho said.
“A whole month?”
“Why not? You’re so freakin’ sure I can’t do it, why not bet a month’s pay? I’ll put five months worth of mine in the escrow account, so you’ll each be covered.”
“A month’s pay.”
In the end they had agreed to it. Pancho knew that they figured she’d chicken out after twenty-thirty seconds and they’d have her money without her killing herself.
She figured otherwise.
So she used the galley phone to call her bank in Lubbock. A few taps on the phone’s touchtone keypad and she had set up a new account and dumped five months’ pay into it. All five of the other jocks watched the phone’s tiny screen to make certain Pancho wasn’t playing any tricks.
Then each of them in turn called their banks and deposited a month’s pay into Pancho’s new account. Pancho listened to the singsong beeping of the phone as she laid her plans for the coming challenge.
Pancho suggested they use the airlock down at the far end of the maintenance module. “We don’t want some science geek poppin’ in on us and gettin’ so torqued he punches the safety alarm,” she said.
They all agreed easily. So they floated through two lab modules and the shabby-looking habitat module where the long-term researchers were housed and finally made it to the cavernous maintenance unit. There, by the airlock, Pancho chose a spacesuit from the half-dozen standard models lined up against the bulkhead, size large because of her height. She quickly wriggled into it. They even helped her put on the boots and check out the suit’s systems.
Pancho pulled the helmet over her head and clicked the neck seal shut.
“Okay,” she said, through the helmet’s open visor. “Who’s gonna time me?”
“I will,” said one of the guys, raising his forearm to show an elaborate digital wristwatch.
“You go in the lock,” said the man beside him, “pump it down and open the outside hatch.”
“And you watch me through the port,” Pancho said, tapping the thick round window on the airlock’s inner hatch with gloved knuckles.
“Check. When I say go, you open your visor.”
“And I’ll time you,” said the guy with the fancy wristwatch.
Pancho nodded inside the helmet.
Amanda looked concerned. “Are you absolutely certain that you want to go through with this? You could kill yourself, Pancho.”
“She can’t back out now!”
“Not unless she wants to forfeit five months’ pay.”
“But seriously,” Amanda said. “I’m wiling to call off the bet. After all-”
Pancho reached out and tousled her curly blonde hair. “Don’t sweat it, Mandy.”
With that, she stepped through the open airlock hatch and slid down her visor. She waved to them as they swung the hatch shut. She heard the pump start to clatter; the sound quickly dwindled as the air was sucked out of the metal-walled chamber. When the telltale light by the inner hatch turned red, Pancho touched the button that slid the outer hatch open.
For a moment she forgot what she was up to as she drank in the overwhelming beauty of the Earth spread out before her dazzled eyes. Brilliantly bright, intensely blue oceans and enormous sweeps of clouds so white it almost hurt to look upon them. It was glorious, an overwhelming panorama that never failed to make her heart beat faster.
You’ve got work to do, girl, she reminded herself sternly.
Turning to the inner hatch, she could see all five of their faces clustered around the little circular port. None of them had the sense to find a radio, Pancho knew, so she gestured to her sealed helmet visor with a gloved finger. They all nodded vigorously and the guy with the fancy wristwatch held it up where Pancho could see it.
The others backed away from the port while the guy stared hard at his wristwatch. He held up four fingers, then three...
Counting down, Pancho understood.
... two, one. He jabbed a finger like a make-believe pistol at Pancho, the signal that she was to lift her visor now.
Instead, Pancho launched herself out the airlock, into empty space.
Martin Humphries looked irked. “What’s so funny about the Asteroid Belt?”
Dan shook his head. “Not funny, really. Just... I didn’t expect that from you. You’ve got a reputation for being a hard-headed businessman.”
“I’d like to believe that I am,” Humphries said.
“Then forget about the Belt,” Dan snapped. “Been there, done that. It’s too far away, the costs would outweigh the profits by a ton.”
“It’s been done,” Humphries insisted.
“Once,” said Dan. “By that nutcase Gunn. And he damned near got himself killed doing it.”
“But that one asteroid was worth close to a trillion dollars once he got it into lunar orbit.”
“Yeah, and the double-damned GEC took control of it and bankrupted Gunn.”
“That won’t happen this time.”
“Why not? You don’t think the GEC would seize any resources we bring to Earth? That’s the reason the Global Economic Council was created-to control the whole twirling Earth’s international trade.”
Humphries smiled coldly. “I can handle the GEC. Trust me on that one.”
Dan stared at the younger man for a long, hard moment. Finally he shook his head and replied, “It doesn’t matter. I’d even be willing to let the GEC run the show.”
“You would?”
“Hell yes. We’re in a global emergency now. Somebody has to allocate resources, control prices, see to it that nobody takes advantage of this crisis to line his own pockets.”
“I suppose so,” Humphries said slowly. “Still, I’m convinced there’s a lot of money to be made by mining the Belt.”
Nodding, Dan agreed, “There’s a lot of resources out there, that’s for sure. Heavy metals, organics, resources we can’t get from the Moon.”
“Resources that the Earth needs, and the GEC would be willing to pay for.”
“Mining the asteroids,” Dan mused. “That’s a major undertaking. A major undertaking.”
“That’s why I’m here. Astro Manufacturing has the resources to do it”
“Astro Manufacturing is just about broke and you know it.”
“I wasn’t talking about financial resources,” Humphries said, waving a hand in the air almost carelessly.
“Oh no?”
“No.” Pointing a finger toward the window and the storm-battered launch facility outside, Humphries said, “You’ve got the technological know-how, the teams of trained personnel, the rockets and infrastructure to get us into space.”
“And it’s bleeding me white because there’s less and less of a market for launch services. Nobody can afford to buy electronics manufactured on the Moon, not when they’re being driven from their homes by floods and earthquakes.”
Humphries’s brows rose questioningly.
“I know, I know,” Dan said. “There’s the energy market. Sure. But how many solar-power satellites can we park in orbit? The double-damned GEC just put a cap on them. We’re building the next-to-last one now. After those two, no more powersats.”
Before Humphries could ask why, Dan continued, “The goddamned Greater Asia Power Consortium complained about the powersats undercutting their prices. And the double-damned Europeans sided with them. Serve ‘em all right if they freeze their asses off when the Gulf Stream breaks up.”
“The Gulf Stream?” Humphries looked startled.
Dan nodded unhappily. “That’s one of the projections. The greenhouse warming is already changing ocean currents. When the Gulf Stream breaks up, Europe goes into the deep freeze; England’s weather will be the same as Labrador’s.”
“When? How soon?”
“Twenty years, maybe. Maybe a hundred. Ask five different scientists and you get twelve different answers.”
“That’s a real opportunity,” Humphries said excitedly. “Winterizing all of Europe. Think of it! What an opportunity!”
“Funny,” Dan retorted. “I was thinking of it as a disaster.”
“You see the glass half empty. To me, it’s half full.”
Dan had a sudden urge to throw this young opportunist out of his office. Instead, he slumped back in his chair and muttered, “It’s like a sick Greek tragedy. Global warming is going to put Europe in the deep-freezer. Talk about ironic.”
“We were talking about the energy market,” Humphries said, regaining his composure. “What about the lunar helium-three?”
Dan wondered if his visitor was merely trying to pump him. Warily, he answered, “Barely holding its own. There’s not that many fusion power plants up and running yet-thanks to the kneejerk anti-nuke idiots. And digging helium-three out of the lunar regolith ain’t cheap. Fifty parts per million sounds good to a chemist, maybe, but it doesn’t lead to a high profit ratio, let me tell you.”
“So you’d need an injection of capital to start mining the asteroids,” Humphries said.
“A transfusion,” Dan grumbled.
“That can be done.”
Dan felt his brows hike up. “Really?”
“I can provide the capital,” Humphries said, matter-of-factly.
“We’re talking forty, fifty billion, at least.”
Humphries waved a hand, as if brushing away an annoyance. “You wouldn’t need that much for a demonstration flight.”
“Even a one-shot demo flight would cost a couple bill,” Dan said.
“Probably.”
“Where are you going to get that kind of money? Nobody’s willing to talk to me about investing in Astro.”
“There are people who’d be willing to invest that kind of money in developing the asteroid market.”
For an instant Dan felt a surge of hope. It could work! Open up the Asteroid Belt. Bring those resources to Earth’s needy people. Then the cost figures flashed into his mind again, as implacable as Newton’s laws of motion.
“You know,” he said wearily, “if we could just cover our own costs I’d be willing to try it.”
Humphries looked disappointed. “Just cover your own costs?”
“Damned right. People need those resources. If we could get them without driving ourselves into bankruptcy, I’d go to double-damned Pluto if I had to!”
Relaxing visibly, Humphries said, “I know how we can do it and make a healthy profit, besides.”
Despite himself, Dan felt intrigued. “How?”
“Fusion rockets.”
By the seven cities of Cibola, Dan thought, this guy’s a fanatic. Worse: he’s an enthusiast.
“Nobody’s made a fusion rocket,” he said to Humphries. “Fusion power generators are too big and heavy for flight applications. Everybody knows that.”
With the grin of a cat that had just finished dining on several canaries, Humphries replied, “Everybody’s wrong.”
Dan thought it over for all of half a second, then leaned both his hands on his desktop, palms down, and said, “Prove it to me.”
Wordlessly, Humphries fished a data chip from his jacket pocket and handed it to Dan.
Leaving her five fellow astronauts gaping dumbfounded at the airlock in the maintenance module, Pancho sailed weightlessly to the metal arm of the robotic cargo-handling crane jutting out from the space station. It was idle at the moment; with no mass of payload to steady it, the long, slim arm flexed noticeably as Pancho grasped it in both hands and swung like an acrobat up to the handgrips that studded the module’s outer skin.
Wondering if the others had caught on to her sting, Pancho hand-walked along the module’s hull, clambering from one runglike grip to the next. To someone watching from beyond the space station it would have looked as if she were scampering along upside down, but to Pancho it seemed as if the space station was over her head and she was swinging like a kid in a zero-gee jungle gym.
She laughed inside her helmet as she reached the end of the maintenance module and pushed easily across the connector section that linked to the habitation module.
“Hey Pancho, what the hell are you doing out there?”
They had finally gotten to a radio, she realized. But as long as they were puzzled, she was okay.
“I’m taking a walk,” she said, a little breathless from all the exertion.
“What about our bet?” one of the men asked.
“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” she lied. “Just hang tight.”
“What are you up to, Pancho?” asked Amanda, her voice tinged with suspicion.
Pancho fell back on her childhood answer. “Nothin’.”
The radio went silent. Pancho reached the airlock at the end of the lab module and tapped out the standard code. The outer hatch slid open. She ducked inside, sealed the hatch and didn’t bother to wait for the lock to fill with air. She simply pushed open the inner hatch and quickly sealed it again. A safety alarm shrilled automatically, but cut off when the module’s air pressure equilibrated again. Yanking off the space-suit’s cumbersome gloves, Pancho slid her visor up as she went to the wallphone by the airlock hatch.
Blessed with perfect pitch and a steel-trap memory, Pancho punched out the numbers for each of the five astronauts’ banks in turn, followed by their personal identification codes. Mother always said I should have been a musician, Pancho mused as she transferred almost the total amount of each account into her own bank account. She left exactly one international dollar for each of them, so the bank’s computers would not start the complex process of closing down their accounts.
As she finished, the hatch at the other end of the habitation module swung open and her five fellow astronauts began to push through, one at a time.
“What’s going on?” demanded the first guy through.
“Nothin’,” Pancho said again. Then she dived through the hatch at her end of the long narrow module.
Into the Japanese lab module she swam, flicking her fingers along the equipment racks lining both sides of its central aisle, startling the technicians working there. Laughing to herself, she wondered how long it would take them to figure out that she had looted their bank accounts.
It didn’t take very long. By the time Pancho had reached the galley once again, they were roaring after her, the men bellowing with outrage.
“When I get my hands on you, I’m gonna break every bone in your scrawny body!” was one of their gentler threats.
Even Amanda was so furious she lapsed back to her native working-class accent: “We’ll ‘ang you up by your bloody thumbs, we will!”
As long as I can stay ahead of them, I’m okay, Pancho told herself as she skimmed through the European lab module and into the observatory section, ducking under and around the bulky telescopes and electronics consoles. They were still yelling behind her, but she wondered if all five of them were still chasing. By now there’d been plenty of time for one or more of them to pop into a suit and cut across the top of the tee-shaped station to cut her off.
Sure enough, when she barged into the Russian lab module, two of the guys were standing at the far end in spacesuits, visors up, waiting for her like a pair of armored cops.
Pancho glided to a halt. One of the privacy unit screens slid back and a stubbled, bleary, puffy male face peered out, then quickly popped back in again and slid the screen shut with a muttered string of what sounded like Slavic cursing.
The other three-Amanda and two of the men-came through the hatch behind her. Pancho was well and truly trapped.
“What the fuck are you trying to pull off, Pancho?”
“You cleaned out our bank accounts!”
“We oughtta string you up, damn you!”
She smiled and spread her hands placatingly. “Now fellas, you can’t hang a person in microgee. You know that.”
“This isn’t funny,” Amanda snapped, back to her faux-Oxford enunciation.
“I’ll make restitution, okay?” Pancho offered.
“You damned well better!”
“And you lost the bet, too, so we each get a month’s pay from you.”
“No,” Pancho said as reasonably as she could. “We never went through on the vacuum breathing, so the bet’s off.”
“Then we want our money back from your goddamned escrow account!”
“Sure. Fine.”
Amanda pointed to the wallphone by the hatch. “You mentioned restitution,” she said.
Meekly, Pancho floated to the phone and tapped out her number. “You’ll have to give me your account numbers,” she said. “So I can put the money back in for you.”
“We’ll punch in the account numbers ourselves,” Amanda said firmly.
“You don’t trust me?” Pancho managed to keep a straight face, but just barely.
They all growled at her.
“But it was only a joke,” she protested. “I had no intention of keeping your money.”
“Not much you didn’t,” one of the guys snapped. “Good thing Mandy figured out what you were up to.”
Pancho nodded in Amanda’s direction. “You’re the brightest one around, Mandy,” she said, as if she believed it.
“Never mind that,” Amanda replied tartly. To the men she said,
“Now we’ll all have to change our ID codes, since she’s obviously figured them out.”
“I’m going to change my account number,” said one of the guys.
“I’m gonna change my bank,” another said fervently.
Pancho sighed and tried her best to look glum, chastised. Inwardly, she was quivering with silent laughter. What a hoot! And none of these bozos realizes that the half hour or so they’ve spent chasing me means half an hour’s worth of interest from each of their accounts into mine. It’s not all that much, but every little bit helps.
She just hoped they wouldn’t figure it out while they were all cooped up in the transfer buggy on the way to the Moon.
Well, she thought, if they try to get physical I’ll just have to introduce them to Elly.
Dan had to shout through his sanitary mask to make himself heard over the din of construction. “All I’m asking, Zack, is can he do it or can’t he?” He’d known Zack Freiberg for more than twenty years, since Zack had been an earnest young planetary geochemist intent on exploring asteroids and Dan had hired him away from his university post. Freiberg had taken flak from his friends in academia for joining big, bad Dan Randolph, the greedy capitalist founder and head of Astro Manufacturing. But over the years a mutual respect had slowly developed into a trusting friendship. It had been Zack who’d first warned Dan about the looming greenhouse cliff, and what it would do to the Earth’s climate. The greenhouse cliff had arrived, and the Earth’s politicians and business leaders had sailed blindly over its edge as the planet plunged into catastrophic warming. Zack was no longer the chubby, apple-cheeked kid Dan had first met. His strawberry hair had gone iron gray, although it was still thick and tightly curled. The past few years had toughened him, made him leaner, harder, boiled away the baby fat in his body. His face had hardened, too, as he watched his equations and graphs turn into massive human suffering.
The two men were standing on the edge of a denuded ridge, looking out across a barren coal-black valley where thousands of Chinese workers toiled unceasingly. By all the gods, Dan thought, they really do look like an army of ants scurrying around. In the middle of the valley four enormously tall smokestacks of a huge electricity-generating plant belched dark gray fumes into the hazy sky. Mountainous piles of coal lay by the railroad track that ran alongside the power plant. Off on the horizon, beyond the farther stripped-bare ridge, the Yangzi River glittered in the hazy morning sunshine like a deadly boa constrictor slowly creeping up on its prey. A sluggish warm breeze smelled of raw coal and diesel fumes.
Dan shuddered inwardly, wondering how many billions of microbes were worming their way through his sanitary mask and nose plugs, eager to chew past his weakened immune system and set up homes for themselves inside his body.
“Dan, I really don’t have time for this,” Freiberg hollered over the roar of a huge truck carrying twenty tons of dirt and rubble down into the valley on wheels that dwarfed both men.
“I just need a few hours of your time,” Dan said, feeling his throat going hoarse from his shouting. “Jeez, I came all the way out here to get your opinion on this.”
It was a sign of the Chinese government’s belated realization that the greenhouse warming would decimate China as well as the rest of the world that they had asked Freiberg to personally direct their massive construction program. At one end of the valley, Chinese engineers and laborers were building a dam to protect the electrical power-generating station from the encroaching Yangzi. At the other end, a crew from Yamagata Industries was constructing a complex pumping station to remove the carbon dioxide emitted by the power station’s stacks and store it deep underground, in the played-out seams of the coal bed that provided fuel for the generators.
With an exasperated frown, Freiberg said, “Listen, I know I still get my paycheck from Astro, but that doesn’t mean I can jump whenever you blow the whistle.”
Dan looked into the other man’s light blue eyes and saw pain there, disappointment and outright fear. Zack blames himself for this catastrophe, Dan knew. He discovered the greenhouse cliff and he acts as if it’s all his fault. Instead of some fathead king shooting the messenger, the messenger wants to shoot himself.
“Look, Zack,” he said, as reasonably as he could manage, “you have to eat a meal now and then, don’t you?”
Freiberg nodded warily. He’d been sweet-talked by Dan into doing things he hadn’t wanted to do often enough in the past.
“So I brought you lunch,” Dan said, waving his arm in the direction of the oversized mobile home he’d arrived in. Its roof glittered with solar panels. “When the noon whistle blows, come in and break some bread with me. That’s all I’m asking.”
“You want me to look at this proposal over lunch? You think I can make a technical decision about this in an hour or less?”
Dan shrugged disarmingly. “If you can’t, you can’t. All I’m asking is that you give it a look.”
Freiberg gave Dan a look that was far from happy.
Yet five minutes after noon he climbed up through the open door of Dan’s big mobile home.
“I might have known,” he muttered as he stepped past Big George, standing by the doorway.
The van was luxuriously fitted out. George was Dan’s major domo and bodyguard. An attractive young Japanese woman, petite and silent, was stirring steaming vegetables in an electric wok. Dan was sitting in the faux-leather couch that curved around the fold-down dinner table, a suede jacket draped over his shoulders even though the van felt uncomfortably warm to Freiberg. Zack could see the crease across Dan’s face that the sanitary mask had left.
“Drink?” Dan asked, without getting to his feet. A half-empty tumbler of something bubbly sat on the table before him.
“What are you having?” Freiberg asked, sliding into the couch where it angled around the table’s end. The table was already set for two.
“Ginger beer,” said Dan. “George turned me on to it. Non-alcoholic and it’s even good for the digestion.”
Freiberg shrugged his rounded shoulders. “Okay, I’ll have the same.”
George quickly pulled a brown bottle from the refrigerator, opened it, and poured Freiberg a glass of ginger beer.
“Goes good with brandy, y’know,” he said as he handed the glass to Freiberg.
The scientist accepted the glass wordlessly and George went back to his post by the door, folding his heavy arms over his massive chest like a professional bouncer.
After a sip of his drink, Dan asked, “Might have known what?”
Freiberg waved a hand around the compartment. “That you’d be living in the lap of luxury, even out here.”
Dan laughed. “If you’ve got to go out into the wilderness, you might as well bring a few creature comforts with you.”
“Kind of warm in here, though,” Freiberg complained mildly.
Dan smiled gauntly at him. “You’re accustomed to living in the wild, Zack. I’m not.”
“Yeah, guess so.” Freiberg glanced at the painting above Dan’s head: a little girl standing by a banyan tree. “Is that real?”
“Holoprint,” said Dan. “A Vickrey.”
“Nice.”
“What’re you living in, out here?”
“A tent,” said Freiberg.
Nodding, Dan said, “That’s what I thought.”
“It’s a pretty good tent, as tents go, but it’s nothing like this.” His eyes swept the dining area appreciatively. “How many other rooms in here?”
“Just two: office and bedroom. King-sized bed, of course.”
“Of course.”
“You like it, it’s yours.”
“The holoprint?”
“The van. The whole shebang. I’ll be leaving later this afternoon. If you can find somebody to drive George and me to the airstrip you can keep this for yourself.”
Surprised, Freiberg blurted, “Can you afford to give it away? From what I’ve heard-”
“For you, Zack,” Dan interrupted, “my last penny. If it comes to that.”
Freiberg made a wry face. “You’re trying to bribe me.”
“Yep. Why not?”
With a resigned sigh, the scientist said, “All right, let me see this proposal you want me to look at.”
“Hey George,” Dan called, “bring me the notebook, will you?”
Almost an hour later, Freiberg looked up from the notebook’s screen and said, “Well, I’m no rocket engineer, and what I know about fusion reactors you could put into a thimble, but I can’t find anything obviously wrong with this.”
“Do you think it’ll work?” Dan asked earnestly.
“How the hell should I know?” Freiberg snapped irritably. “Why in hell did you come all the way out here to ask my opinion on something you know is outside my expertise?”
Dan hesitated for several heartbeats, then answered, “Because I can trust you, Zack. This guy Humphries is too slick for me to believe. All the experts I’ve contacted claim that this fusion rocket is workable, but how do I know that he hasn’t bought them off? He’s got something up his sleeve, some hidden agenda, and this fusion rocket idea is just the tip of the iceberg. I think he wants to get his paws on Astro.”
“That’s a helluva mixture of metaphors,” Freiberg said, grinning despite himself.
“Never mind the syntax. I don’t trust Humphries. I do trust you.”
“Dan, my opinion doesn’t mean a damned thing here. You might as well ask George, or your cook.”
Hunching forward over the table, Dan said, “You can talk the talk, Zack. You can contact the experts that Humphries has used and sound them out. You can talk to other people, the real specialists in these areas, and see what they think. They’d talk to you, Zack, and you’d understand what they’re saying. You can -”
“Dan,” Freiberg said icily, “I’m working twenty-six hours a day already.”
“I know,” Dan said. “I know.”
Freiberg had thrown himself totally into the global effort to cut down on the greenhouse gas emissions given off by the world’s fossil-fueled power-generating stations, factories, and vehicles.
Faced with disastrous shifts in climate due to the greenhouse warming, the nations of the world were belatedly, begrudgingly, attempting to remedy the cataclysm. Led by the Global Economic Council, manufacturers around the world were desperately trying to convert automobiles and other vehicles to electrical motors. But that meant trebling the global electricity-generating capacity, and fossil-fueled power plants were faster and cheaper to build than nuclear plants. There was still plenty of petroleum available, and the world’s resources of coal dwarfed the petroleum reserves. Fission-based power plants were still anathema because of the public’s fear of nuclear power. The new fusion generators were costly, complex, and also hindered by stubborn public resistance to anything nuclear.
So more and more fossil-fueled power plants were being built, especially in the rising industrial nations such as China and South Africa. The GEC insisted that new plants sequester their carbon dioxide emissions, capture the dangerous greenhouse gas and pump it safely deep underground.
Zachary Freiberg had devoted his life to the effort to mitigate the greenhouse disaster. He had taken an indefinite leave of absence from his position as chief scientist of Astro Manufacturing and criss-crossed the world, directing massive construction projects. His wife had left him, he had not seen his children in more than a year, his personal life was in tatters, but he was driven to do what he could, what he had to do, to help slow the greenhouse warming.
“So how’s it going?” Dan asked him.
Freiberg shook his head. “We’re shoveling shit against the tide. There’s just no way we can reduce greenhouse emissions enough to make a difference.”
“But I thought-”
“We’ve been working our butts off for... how long has it been? Ten years? Not even a dent. When we started, fossil fuel burning pumped six billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air every year. Know how much we’re putting out now?”
Dan shook his head.
“Five point three billion tons,” Freiberg said, almost angrily.
Dan grunted.
Pointing through the van’s window to the massive trucks rumbling by, Freiberg grumbled, “Yamagata’s trying to convert their whole fleet of trucks to electricity, but the Chinese are still using diesels. Some people just don’t give a damn! The Russians are starting to talk about cultivating what they call the Virgin lands’ in Siberia, where the permafrost is melting. They think they can turn the region into a new grain belt, like the Ukraine.”
“So something good might come out of all this,” Dan murmured.
“My ass,” Freiberg snapped. “The oceans are still warming up, Dan. The clathrates are going to break down if we can’t stop the ocean temperature rise. Once they start releasing the methane that’s frozen in them...”
Dan opened his mouth to reply, but Freiberg kept right on agonizing. “You know how much methane is locked up in the clathrates? Two limes ten to the sixteenth tons. Twenty quadrillion tons! Enough to produce a greenhouse that’ll melt all the ice in Greenland and Antarctica. Every glacier in the world. We’ll all drown.”
“All the more reason,” Dan said, “for pushing out to the Asteroid Belt. We can bring in all the metals and minerals the Earth needs, Zack! We can move the world’s industrial operations into space, where they won’t screw up the Earth’s environment.”
Freiberg gave Dan a disbelieving look.
“We can do it!” Dan insisted. “If this fusion rocket can be made to work. That’s the key to the whole damned thing: efficient propulsion can bring the cost of asteroid mining down to where it’s economically viable.”
For a long moment Freiberg said nothing. He merely glared at Dan, half angry, half sullen.
At last he mumbled, “I’ll make a few calls for you, Dan. That’s all I can do.”
“That’s all I ask,” Dan replied, forcing a smile. Then he added, “Plus a ride to the airstrip for George and me.”
“What about your cook?”
With a laugh, Dan said, “She goes with the van, old buddy. She only speaks Japanese, but she’s terrific in the kitchen. And the bedroom.”
Freiberg flushed deep red. But he did not refuse Dan’s gift.
The customs inspector looked startled when he saw the plastic cage and the four live mice huddled in it among the loose food pellets. He set his face into a scowl as he looked up at Pancho. “You can’t bring pets into Selene.”
The other astronauts had sailed through the incoming inspection without a hitch, leaving Pancho to face the grim-faced inspector alone. They had cruised to the Moon without incident, none of the others realizing that Pancho had milked each of their bank accounts for a half-hour’s interest. Pancho figured that even if they eventually discovered her little scam, the amount of money involved was too small to fight over. To her, it wasn’t the amount so much as the adroitness of the sting.
“They’re not pets,” she said coolly to the inspector. “They’re food.”
“Food?” The man’s dark eyebrows hiked halfway to his scalp line.
“Yeah, food. For my bodyguard.” Most of the customs inspectors knew her, but this guy was new; Pancho hadn’t encountered him before.
Not bad-looking, she thought. His dark blue zipsuit complemented his eyes nicely. A little elderly, though. Starting to go gray at the temples. Must be working to raise enough money for a rejuve treatment.
As if he knew he was being maneuvered into giving straight lines, the customs inspector asked, “Your bodyguard eats mice?” Pancho nodded. “Yes, sir, she does.” The inspector huffed. “And where is this bodyguard?” Pancho lifted a long leg and planted her softbooted foot on the inspector’s table. Tugging up the cuff of her coverall trouser, she revealed what looked like a bright metallic blue ankle bracelet.
While the inspector gaped, Pancho coaxed Elly off her ankle and held her out in front of the man’s widening eyes. The snake was about thirty-five centimeters long from nose to tail. It lifted its head and, fixing the inspector with its beady, slitted eyes, it hissed menacingly. The man flinched back nearly half a meter.
“Elly’s a genetically-modified krait. She’ll never get any bigger’n this. She’s very well-behaved and wicked poisonous.”
To his credit, the inspector swiftly recovered his composure. Most of it, at least.
“You... you can’t bring a snake in,” he said, his voice quavering only slightly. “That’s against the regulations and besides-”
“There’s a special exception to the regulations,” Pancho said calmly. “You can look it up. Paragraph seventeen-dee, subclause eleven.”
With a frown, the inspector punched up the relevant page on his palmcomp. Pancho knew the exception would be there; she had gone all the way up to the Selene health and safety executive board to get it written into the regs. It had cost her a small fortune in time and effort; many dinners with men old enough to be her grandfather. Funny thing was, the only overt sexual pass made at her was from the woman who chaired the executive board.
“Well, I’ll be dipped in...” The inspector looked up from his handheld’s tiny screen. “How in hell did you get them to rewrite the regs for you?”
Pancho smiled sweetly. “It wasn’t easy.”
“That little fella is poisonous, you say?”
“Her venom’s been engineered to reduce its lethality, but she’s still fatal unless you get a shot of antiserum.” Pancho pulled a slim vial from her open travelbag and wagged it in front of the inspector’s bulging eyes.
He shook his head in wonder as Pancho coaxed the snake back around her ankle. “And he eats mice.”
“She,” Pancho said as she straightened up again. “When I stay up here for more than a month I have to send Earthside for more mice. Costs a bundle.”
“I’ll bet.”
“The mice never get out of their cage,” Pancho added. “Once every other week I put Elly in with them.”
The inspector shuddered visibly. He took Pancho’s entry forms and passed them in front of the electronic reader. The machine beeped once. Pancho was cleared. The inspector put the transparent mouse cage back into her flight bag and zipped it shut.
“You’re okay to enter Selene,” he said, almost as if he didn’t believe it himself.
“Thank you.”
Before she could hoist her bag onto her shoulder, he asked, “Uh... what’re you doing for dinner tonight?”
Pancho smiled her sweetest. “Gee, I’d love to have dinner with you, but I already have a date.”
Dressed in a crisp white pantsuit set off by the flowery scarf she’d tied around her neck, Pancho followed the directions Martin Humphries had videomailed to her.
In Earthside cities, height meant prestige. In hotels and condo towers, the higher the floor, the higher the price. Penthouses were considered the most desirable, and therefore were the most expensive. On the Moon, where human settlements were dug into the ground, prestige increased with depth. The airless lunar surface was dangerous, subject to four-hundred-degree temperature swings between sunlight and shadow, bathed in hard radiation from deep space, peppered with meteoric infall. So in Selene and the other communities on the Moon, the deeper your living quarters, the more desirable it was, and the more expensive.
Martin Humphries must be rotten rich, Pancho thought as she rode the elevator down to Selene’s lowest level. According to the biofiles on the nets Humphries was supposed to be one of the wealthiest men in the Earth/Moon system, but that could be public relations puffery, she thought. The tabloids and scandal sites had more on him than the biofiles. They called him “Hump,” or “the Humper.” He had a reputation as a chaser, married twice and with lots of media stars and glamour gals from the upper crust to boot. When Pancho looked up the pix of his “dates” she saw a succession of tall, languid, gorgeous women with lots of hairdo and skimpy clothes.
Pancho felt completely safe: the Humper wouldn’t be interested in a gangly, horse-faced tomboy. Besides, if he tried anything Elly would protect her.
He had called her personally. No flunky; Martin Humphries his own self had phoned Pancho and asked her to come to his home to discuss a business proposition. Maybe he wants to hire me away from Astro, she thought. Astro’s been a good-enough outfit, but if Humphries offers more money I’ll go to work for him. That’s a no-brainer. Go where the money is, every time.
But why did he call me himself, instead of having his personnel office interview me?
There were only a few living units carved into the rock this far underground. Big places, Pancho realized as she glided along the well-lit corridor in the practiced bent-kneed shuffle that you had to use to walk in the Moon’s low gravity. The walls of the corridor were carved with elaborate low-relief sculptures, mostly astronomical motifs, but there were some Earthly landscapes in with the stars and comets. She counted about a hundred strides between doors, which meant that the living units on the other sides of the corridor walls were bigger than a whole dorm section on the floors above. The doors were fancy, too: most of them were double, all of them decorated one way or another. Some of them looked like real wood, for crying out loud.
But while all this impressed Pancho, she was totally unprepared for Martin Humphries’s home. At the very end of the corridor was a blank metal door, polished steel from the look of it. More like an airlock hatch or a bank vault than the fancy-pants door she’d passed along the corridor. It slid open with a soft hiss as Pancho approached within arm’s length.
Optical recognition system, she thought. Or maybe he’s got somebody watching the corridor.
She stepped through the open doorway and immediately felt as if she’d entered another world. She found herself in a wide, high-ceilinged cavern, a big natural cave deep below the lunar surface. Flowers bloomed everywhere, reds and yellows and green foliage spread out on both sides of her. Trees! She gaped at the sight of young alders and maples, slim white-boled birches, delicately fronded frangipani. The only trees she’d seen in Selene were up in the Grand Plaza, and they were just little bitty things compared to these. After the closed-in gray sameness of Selene’s warren of corridors and tightly-confined living quarters, the openness, the color, the heady scent of flowers growing in such profusion nearly overwhelmed Pancho. Boulders jutted here and there; the distant walls of the cave and the ceiling high above were rough bare rock. The ceiling was dotted with full-spectrum lamps, she saw. Jeez, it’s like being in Oz, Pancho said to herself.
Like Oz, there was a path winding through the shrubbery, littered with flower petals. Pancho liked that much better than yellow bricks.
She realized that there were no birds singing in the trees. No insects buzzed among the flowers. There was no breeze sighing past. This ornate garden was nothing more than a big, elaborate hothouse, Pancho decided. It must cost a freaking fortune.
She glide-walked along the path until a final turn revealed the house set in the middle of the cavern, surrounded by still more trees and carefully-planted beds of roses, irises and peonies. No daisies, Pancho noted. No marigolds. Too ordinary for this layout.
The house was enormous, low but wide, with a slanted roof and walls of lunar stone, smoothed and glazed over. Big sweeping windows. A wide courtyard framed the big double doors of the front entrance, with a fountain gurgling busily in its center. A fountain! Pancho approached the door slowly, reached out her hand to touch its carved surface. Plastic, her fingertips told her, stained to look like wood. For several moments she stood at the door, then turned to look back at the courtyard again, the gardens, the trees, the fountain. What kind of a man would spend so much money for a private palace like this? What kind of a man would have that much money to spend?
“Welcome, Ms. Lane.”
The sound of his voice made Pancho flinch. He had opened the door silently while her back had been turned as she surveyed the greenery. She saw a man apparently about her own age, several centimeters shorter than she, a little on the pudgy side. He was wearing an open-necked pale yellow tunic that came down to his hips. His slacks were cinnamon brown, perfectly creased. His feet were shod in fancy tooled leather boots. His skin was doughy white, his hair dark and slicked back.
“I’m here to see Mr. Humphries,” she said. “I’ve been invited.”
He laughed lightly. “I’m Martin Humphries. I gave my staff the night off.”
“Oh.”
Martin Humphries gestured Pancho to come into his house. Knowing Elly was comfortably wrapped around her ankle, Pancho stepped right in.
The house was just as luxurious as the grounds around it, perhaps even more so. Big, spacious rooms filled with the most beautiful furniture Pancho had ever seen. A living room long enough to hold a hockey rink, sofas done in gorgeous fabrics, holowindows showing spectacular Earth-side scenery: the Grand Canyon, Mt. Fujiyama, Manhattan’s skyline the way it looked before the floods.
The dining room table was big enough to seat twenty, but it was set for just the two of them: Humphries at its head, Pancho at his right hand. Humphries walked her past it, though, and into a book-lined library where the single holowindow showed the star-strewn depths of space.
There was a bar along one side of the library.
“What would you like to drink?” Humphries asked, gently guiding her to one of the plush-cushioned stools.
“Whatever,” Pancho shrugged. A good way to judge a man’s intentions was to let him select the drinks.
He looked at her for a fleeting, intense moment. Like being x-rayed, Pancho thought. His eyes were gray, she noted, cold gray, like lunar stone.
“I have an excellent champagne,” he suggested.
Pancho smiled at him. “Okay, fine.”
He pressed a button set into the bar’s surface, and a silver tray bearing an opened bottle of champagne in a refrigerated bucket and two tall fluted glasses rose up to serving height with a muted hum of an electrical motor. Humphries pulled the bottle from its bucket and poured two glasses of champagne. Pancho noticed that the ice-cold bottle quickly beaded with condensation. The glasses looked like real crystal, prob’ly made at Selene’s glass factory.
The bubbles tickled her nose, but the wine was really good: crisp and cold, with a delicate flavor that Pancho liked. Still, she merely sipped at it as she sat beside Martin Humphries on the softly-cushioned bar stool.
“You must be awful rich to have this place all to yourself,” she said.
His lips edged into a thin smile. “It’s not mine, really.”
“It’s not?”
“Legally, this building is a research center. It’s owned by the Humphries Trust and operated jointly by a consortium of Earthside universities and the Selene executive board.”
Pancho took another sip of champagne while she sorted that out in her mind.
Humphries went on, “I live here whenever I’m at Selene. The research staff uses the other end of the house.”
“But they don’t live here.”
He laughed. “No, they live a few levels up, in... um, more ordinary quarters.”
“And you get the whole place rent-free.”
With a waggle of his free hand, Humphries said, “One of the advantages of wealth.”
“The rich get richer.”
“Or they lose what they’ve got.”
Nodding, Pancho asked, “So what do they research down here?”
“Lunar ecology,” Humphries replied. “They’re trying to learn how to build Earthlike ecologies here on the Moon, underground.”
“Like the Grand Plaza, up topside.”
“Yes. But completely closed-cycle, so you don’t have to put in fresh supplies of water.”
“That’s what all the flowers and trees are about.”
“Right. They’ve been able to make a lovely garden, all right, but it’s incredibly expensive. Very labor-intensive, with no birds or insects to pollinate the plants. The idiots running Selene’s environmental safety department won’t let me bring any up here. As if they could get loose! They’re so stupidly narrow-minded they could look through a keyhole with both eyes.”
Pancho smiled at him, remembering how hard it had been for her to get the approval to bring Elly and her food into Selene. I must be smarter than he is, she thought. Or maybe Selene’s execs just don’t like megazillionaires trying to push them around.
“And those full-spectrum lamps cost a fortune in electricity,” Humphries went on.
“Electricity’s cheap, though, isn’t it?”
Humphries took a long draft of his champagne, then answered, “It’s cheap once you’ve built the solar energy farm up on the surface... and the superconducting batteries to store electrical energy during the night. High capital costs, though.”
“Yeah, but once you’ve got the equipment in place the operating costs are pitiful low.”
“Except for maintenance.”
“Keeping the solar farms clean, up on the surface, you mean. Yeah, I guess that ain’t cheap.”
“Any work on the surface is damned expensive,” he grumbled, bringing his champagne flute to his lips.
“So how rich are you?” she asked abruptly.
Humphries didn’t sputter into his champagne, but he did seem to swallow pretty hard.
Pancho added, “I mean, do you own any of this or are you just livin’ in it?”
He thought a moment before answering. Then, “My grandfather made his fortune in the big dot-corn boom around the turn of the century. Gramps was smart enough to get into the market while it was still rising and get out before the bubble burst.”
“What’s a dot-corn?” Pancho asked.
Ignoring her question, Humphries went on, “My father took his degrees in biology and law. He bought into half a dozen biotech firms and built one of the biggest fortunes on Earth.”
“What’re your degrees in?”
“I have an MBA from Wharton and a JD from Yale.”
“So you’re a lawyer.”
“I’ve never practiced law.”
Pancho felt alarm signals tingling through her. That’s not a straight answer, she realized. But then, what do you expect from a lawyer? She recalled the old dictum: How can you tell when a lawyer’s lying? Watch his lips.
“What do you practice?” she asked, trying to make it sound nonchalant.
He smiled again, and there was even some warmth in it this time. “Oh... making money, mostly. That seems to be what I’m best at.”
Glancing around the luxurious library, Pancho replied, “I’d say you’re purty good at spendin’ it, too.”
Humphries laughed aloud. “Yes, I suppose so. I spend a lot of it on women.”
As if on cue, a generously-curved redhead in a slinky metallic sheath appeared at the doorway to the dining room, a slim aperitif glass dangling empty from one manicured hand. “Say, Humpy, when is dinner served?” she asked poutily. “I’m starving.”
His face went white with anger. “I told you,” he said through clenched teeth, “that I have a business meeting to attend to. I’ll be with you when I’m finished here.”
“But I’m starving,” the redhead repeated.
Glancing at Pancho, Humphries said in a low voice, “I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”
The redhead looked Pancho over from head to toe, grinned, and flounced off.
Visibly trying to contain his fury, Humphries said, “I’m sorry for the interruption.”
Pancho shrugged. So I’m not invited for dinner, she realized. Should’ve known.
“Is that your wife?” she asked coolly.
“No.”
“You are married, aren’t you?”
“Twice.”
“Are you married now?”
“Legally, yes. Our lawyers are working out a divorce settlement.”
Pancho looked straight into his icy gray eyes. The anger was still there, but he was controlling it now. He seemed deadly calm.
“Okay,” she said, “let’s finish up this business meeting so y’all can get down to dinner.”
Humphries picked up his glass again, drained it, and placed it carefully back on the bar. Looking up at Pancho, he said, “All right. I want to hire you.”
“I already have a job,” she said.
“As a pilot for Astro Manufacturing, I know. You’ve been working for them for more than six years.”
“So?”
“You won’t have to quit Astro. In fact, I want you to stay with them. The task I have in mind for you requires that you keep your position with Astro.”
Pancho understood immediately. “You want me to spy on them.”
“That’s putting it rather crudely,” Humphries said, his eyes shifting away from her and then back again. “But, yes, I need a certain amount of industrial espionage done, and you are ideally placed to do it.”
Pancho didn’t think twice. “How much money are we talkin’ about here?”
Dan Randloph felt a wave of giddiness wash over him as he stood at his hotel window and looked down into the rugged gorge of the Jucar River.
This is stupid, he told himself. You’ve been in high-rises a lot taller than this. You’ve been on top of rocket launch towers.ÿÿÿÿÿÿ You’ve been to the Grand Canyon, you’ve done EVA work in orbit, for god’s sake, floating hundreds of miles above the Earth without even an umbilical cord to hold onto.
Yet he felt shaky, slightly light-headed, as he stood by the window. It’s not the height, he told himself. For a scary moment he thought it was one of the woozy symptoms of radiation sickness again. But then he realized that it was only because this hotel was hanging over the lip of the gorge, six stories down from the edge.
The old city of Cuenca had been built in medieval times along the rim of the deep, vertiginous chasm. From the street, the hotel seemed to be a one-story building, as did all the buildings along the narrow way. Inside, though, it went down and down, narrow stairways and long windows that looked out into the canyon cut by the river so far below.
Turning from the window, Dan went to the bed and unzipped his travel bag. He was here in the heart of Spain to find the answer to the world’s overwhelming problem, the key to unlock the wealth of the solar system. Like a knight on a quest, he told himself, with a sardonic shake of his head. Seeking the holy grail.
Like a tired old man who’s pushing himself because he doesn’t have anything else left in his life, sneered a bitter voice in his head.
The flight in from Madrid had turned his thoughts to old tales of knighthood and chivalrous quests. The Clippership rocket flight from La Guaira had taken only twenty-five minutes to cross the Atlantic, but there was nothing to see, no portholes in the craft’s stout body and the video views flashing across the screen at his seat might as well have been from an astronomy lecture. The flight from Madrid to Cuenca, though, had been in an old-fashioned tiltrotor, chugging and rattling and clattering across a landscape that was old when Hannibal had led armies through it.
Don Quixote rode across those brown hills, Dan had told himself. El Cid battled the Moors here.
He snorted disdainfully as he pulled his shaving kit from the travel bag. Now I’m going to see if we can win the fight against a giant bigger than any windmill that old Don Quixote tackled.
The phone buzzed. Dan snapped his fingers, then realized that the hotel phone wasn’t programmed for sound recognition. He leaned across the bed and stabbed at the ON button.
“Mr. Randolph?”
The face Dan saw in the palm-sized phone screen looked almost Mephistopholean: thick black hair that came to a point almost touching his thick black brows; a narrow vee-shaped face with sharp cheekbones and a pointed chin; coal-black eyes that glittered slyly, as if the man knew things that no one else knew. A small black goatee.
“Yes,” Dan answered. “And you are... ?”
“Lyall Duncan. I’ve come to take you to the test site,” said the caller, in a decidedly Highland accent.
Dan puffed out a breath. They certainly aren’t wasting any time. I’m not even unpacked yet.
“Are you ready, sir?” Duncan asked.
Dan tossed his shaving kit back onto the bed. “Ready,” he said.
Duncan was short, rail-thin, and terribly earnest about his work. He talked incessantly as they drove in a dusty old Volkswagen van out into the sun-drenched countryside, past scraggly checkerboards of farms and terraced hillsides, climbing constantly toward the distant bare peaks of the Sierras. The land looked parched, poor, yet it had been under cultivation for thousands of years. At least, Dan thought, it’s far enough from the sea to be safe from flooding. But it looks as if it’s turning into a brown, dusty desert.
“... tried for many a year to get someone to look at our work, anyone,” Duncan was saying. “The universities were too busy with their big reactor projects, all of them sucking on one government teat or another. The private companies wouldn’t even talk to us, not without some fancy university behind us.”
Dan nodded and tried to stay awake. The man’s soft Scottish burr was hypnotic as they drove along the winding highway into the hills. There were hardly any other cars on the road, and the hum of the tires on the blacktop was lulling Dan to sleep. Electric motors don’t make much noise, he told himself, trying to fight off the jet lag. He remembered that auto makers such as GM and Toyota had tried to install sound systems that would simulate the vroom of a powerful gasoline engine, to attract the testosterone crowd. The GEC had nixed that; silent, efficient, clean electrical cars had to be presented as desirable, not as a weak second choice to muscle cars.
“... none of them wanted to see that a compact, lightweight, disposable fusion generator could work as well as the behemoths they were building,” Duncan droned on. “No one paid us any attention until we caught the ear of Mr. Martin Humphries.”
Dan perked up at the mention of Humphries’s name. “How did you reach him? He’s pretty high up in the corporate food chain.”
Duncan smiled craftily. “Through a woman, how else? He came to Glasgow to give a speech. The anniversary of his father’s endowment of the new biology building, or something of that sort. He took a fancy to a certain young lady in our student body. She was a biology major and had quite a body of her own.”
With a laugh, Dan said, “So she did the Delilah job for you.”
“One of the lads in our project knew her-in the biblical sense. He asked her if she’d help the cause of science.”
“And she agreed.”
“Willingly. ‘Tisn’t every day a lass from Birmingham gets to sleep with a billionaire.”
“Oh, she was English?”
“Aye. We couldn’t ask a Scottish lass to do such a thing.”
Both men were still laughing as the car pulled into the test site’s parking lot.
It wasn’t much of a site, Dan thought as he got out of the car. Just a flat, open area of bare dirt with a couple of tin sheds to one side and a rickety-looking scaffolding beyond them. Rugged hills rose all around, and in the distance the Sierras shimmered ghostlike in the heat haze. The sun felt hot and good on his shoulders. The sky was a perfect blue, virtually cloudless. Dan inhaled a deep breath of clean mountain air; it was cool and sharp with a tang of pines that even got past his nose plugs.
Dan thought about taking them out; it would be a relief to do without them. But he didn’t remove them.
There were six people in the “office” shed, two of them women, all hut one of them young, wearing shabby sweaters and slacks or jeans that hadn’t known a crease for years. Dan felt overdressed in his tan slacks and suede sports jacket. One of the women was tall, with long, lank blond hair that fell past her broad shoulders. She looked like a California surfer type to Dan. Or maybe a Swede. The other was clearly Japanese or perhaps Korean: short and chunky, but when she smiled it lit up her whole face.
They all looked eager, excited to have Dan Randolph himself here to see their work, yet Dan caught a whiff of fear among them. Suppose it doesn’t work today? Suppose something goes wrong? Suppose Randolph doesn’t understand its value, its importance? Dan had felt that undercurrent in research labs all around the world; even on the Moon.
The one older man looked professorial. He wore baggy tweed trousers and a matching vest, unbuttoned. His long face was framed by a trim salt-and-pepper beard. Duncan introduced him as “Dr. Vertientes.”
“I am delighted to meet you, sir,” Dan said, automatically lapsing into Spanish as he took the man’s hand.
Vertientes’s brows rose with surprise. “You speak Spanish very well, sir.”
“My headquarters is in Venezuela.” Dan almost added that he’d once been married to a Venezuelan, but that had been too brief and too painful to bring into the conversation.
“We are a multinational group here,” Vertientes said, switching to British English, overlaid with a Castilian accent. “We speak English among ourselves.”
“Except when we curse,” said the Japanese woman.
Everyone laughed.
Much to Dan’s surprise, Duncan was the leader of the little group. The tall, distinguished Vertientes turned out to be the group’s plasma physicist. Duncan was the propulsion engineer and the driving force among them.
“You know the principle of nuclear fusion,” the Scotsman said as he led the entire group out of the office shack and toward the slightly larger shed that served as their laboratory.
Nodding, Dan said, “Four hydrogen atoms come together to form a helium atom and release energy.”
“Nuclei,” Duncan corrected. “Not atoms, their nuclei. The plasma is completely ionized.”
“Yep. Right.”
“Seven-tenths of one percent of the mass of the four original protons is converted into energy. The Sun and all the stars have been running for billions of years on that seven-tenths of one percent.”
“As long as they’re fusing hydrogen into helium,” Dan said. To show that he wasn’t entirely unlettered, he added, “Later on they start fusing helium into heavier elements.”
Duncan gave him a sidelong glance from beneath his deep black brows, then said, “Aye, but it’s only hydrogen fusion that we’re interested in.”
“Aye,” Dan murmured.
The laboratory shed wasn’t large, but the equipment in it seemed up-to-date. It looked more like a monitoring station to Dan’s practiced eye than a research laboratory. Beyond it was a bigger building that couldn’t be seen from the parking lot. The group trooped through the lab with only a perfunctory glance at its equipment, then went on to the other building.
“This is where the dirty work gets done,” Duncan said, with his devilish grin.
Dan nodded as he looked around. It was a construction shack, all right. Machine tools and an overhead crane running on heavy steel tracks. The sharp tang of machine oil in the air, bits of wire and metal shavings littering the floor. Yes, they worked in here.
“And out there,” Duncan said, pointing to a dust-caked window, “is the result.”
It didn’t look terribly impressive. Even when they stepped outside and walked up to the scaffolding, all Dan could see was a two-meter-wide metal sphere with a spaghetti factory of hoses and wires leading into it. The metal looked clean and shiny, though.
Dan rapped on it with his knuckles. “Stainless steel?”
Nodding, Duncan said, “For the outside pressure vessel. The containment sphere is a beryllium alloy.”
“Beryllium?”
“The alloy is proprietary. We’ve applied for an international patent, but you know how long that takes.”
Dan agreed glumly, then asked, “Is this all there is to it?”
With a fierce grin, Duncan said, “The best things come in the smallest packages.”
They went back to the lab and, without a word, the six men and women took their stations along the bank of consoles that lined two walls of the shed. There was an assortment of chairs and stools, no two of them alike, but no one sat down. Dan saw that they were nervous, intense. All except Duncan, who looked calmly confident. He cocked a brow at Dan, like a gambler about to shuffle cards from the bottom of the deck.
“Are you ready to see wee beastie in action?” Duncan asked.
Tired from traveling, Dan pulled a little wheeled typist’s chair to the middle of the floor and sat on it. Folding his arms across his chest, he nodded and said, “You may fire when ready, Gridley.”
The others looked slightly puzzled, wondering who Gridley might be and what his significance was. Duncan, though, bobbed his head and grinned as though he understood everything.
He turned to Vertientes and said softly, “Start it up, then.”
Dan heard a pump begin to chug and saw the readout numbers on Vertientes’s console start to climb. The other consoles came to life, display screens flickering on to show multi-colored graphs or digital readouts.
“Pressured approaching optimum,” sang out the blonde. “Density on the curve.”
“Fuel cells on line.”
“Capacitor bank ready.”
Duncan stood beside Dan, sweeping all the consoles with his eyes.
“Approaching ignition point,” said Vertientes.
Leaning slightly toward Dan, Duncan said, “It’s set to ignite automatically, although we have the manual backup ready.”
Dan got to his feet and stared out the window at the stainless steel sphere out in the scaffold. There was a crackling air of tension in the lab now; he could feel the hairs on the back of his neck rising.
“Ignition!” Vertientes called.
Dan saw nothing. The metal sphere outside didn’t move. There was no roar or cloud of smoke, not even a vibration. He looked at Duncan, then over to the six others, all of them standing rigidly intent at their consoles. Numbers flickered across screens, curves crawled along graphs, but as far as Dan could see or feel nothing was actually happening.
“Shutdown,” Vertientes said.
Everyone relaxed, sagged back a bit, let out their breaths.
“Thirty seconds, on the tick,” someone said.
“Power output?” Duncan asked.
“Design maximum. It reached fifty megawatts after four seconds and held it there right to cutoff.”
Vertientes was beaming. He turned and clutched Duncan by both shoulders. “Perfecto! She is a well-behaved little lady!”
“You mean that’s it?” Dan asked, incredulous.
Duncan was grinning too. They all were.
“But nothing happened,” Dan insisted.
“Oh no?” said Duncan, grasping Dan’s elbow and turning him toward the row of consoles. “Look at that power output graph.”
Frowning, Dan remembered a scientist once telling him that all of physics boiled down to reading a bloody gauge.
“But it didn’t go anywhere,” Dan said weakly.
They all laughed.
“It isn’t a rocket,” Duncan said. “Not yet. We’re only testing the fusion reactor.”
“Only!” said the Japanese woman.
“Thirty seconds isn’t much of a test,” Dan pointed out.
“Nay, thirty seconds is plenty of time,” Duncan rebutted.
“The plasma equilibrates in five seconds or less,” said Vertientes.
“But to be useful as a rocket,” Dan insisted, “the reactor’s going to have to run for hours... even weeks or months.”
“Si, yes, we know,” Vertientes said, tapping a finger into the palm of his other hand. “But in thirty seconds we get enough data to calculate the heat transfer and plasma flow parameters. We can extrapolate to hours and weeks and months.”
“I don’t trust extrapolations,” Dan muttered.
The blonde stepped between them. “Well, of course we’re going to build a full-scale model and run it for months. For sure. But what Doc Vee is saying is we’ve done enough testing to be confident that it’ll work.”
Dan looked her over. California, he decided. Maybe Swedish ancestry, but definitely California.
“We intend to mate the reactor with an MHD generator,” Vertientes said, earnestly trying to convince Dan. “That way the plasma exhaust from the reactor can provide electrical power as well as thrust.”
“Magneto...” Dan stumbled over the word.
“Magnetohydrodynamic,” Vertientes finished for him.
The blonde added, “The interaction of electrically-conducting ionized gases with magnetic fields.”
Dan grinned at her. “Thank you.” She’s showing off, he thought. She wants me to know that she’s a smart blonde, despite her surfer chick looks.
Then he caught Duncan watching him with that sly look in his glittering coal-black eyes, and remembered the student from Birmingham who had convinced Humphries to pay attention to their work. He shook his head ever so slightly, to tell Duncan that he wouldn’t need to be convinced that way.
Once he would have scooped up a young available woman and enjoyed every minute of their brief fling together. But not now. He grimaced inwardly at the weird curves fate throws. When Jane was alive I chased every woman I saw, trying to forget her. Now that she’s dead I don’t want anyone else. Not now. Maybe not ever again.
Don’t you intend ever to return to Earth?”
Martin Humphries leaned back in his exquisitely padded reclining chair and tried to hide the dread he felt as he gazed at his father’s image on the wall screen.ÿÿÿ “I’m working hard here, Dad,” he said.
It takes almost three seconds for radio or light waves to make the round-trip between the Earth and the Moon. Martin Humphries used the time to study his father’s sallow, wrinkled, sagging face. Even though the old man had made his fortune in biotech, he still refused rejuvenation treatments as “too new, too risky, too many unknowns.” Yet he wore a snow-white toupee to hide his baldness. It made Martin think of George Washington, although George was alleged never to have told a lie and anyone who had ever dealt with W. Wilson Humphries knew that you had to count your fingers after shaking hands with the old scoundrel. “I need you here,” his father admitted grudgingly. “You need me?”
“Those bastards from the New Morality are pushing more tax regulations through the Congress. They won’t be satisfied until they’ve bankrupted every corporation in the country.”
“All the more reason for me to stay here,” Martin replied, “where I can protect my assets.”
“But what about my assets? What about me? I need your help, Marty. I can’t fight these psalm-singing fundamentalists by myself!”
“Oh, come on, Dad. You’ve got more lawyers than they do.”
“They’ve got the whole damned Congress,” his father grumbled. “And the Supreme Court, too.”
“Dad, if you’d just come up here you’d be able to get away from all that.”
His father’s face hardened. “I’m not going to run away!”
“It’s time to admit that the ship is sinking, Dad. Time to get out, while you can. Up here on the Moon I’m building a whole new organization. I’m creating Humphries Space Systems. You could be part of it; an important part.”
The old man glared at him for much longer than it took his son’s words to reach him. At last he growled, “If you stay up there too long your muscles will get so deconditioned you won’t be able to come back to Earth.”
He hasn’t heard a word I’ve said, Humphries realized. He talks and he never listens.
“Dad, I’m in the middle of a very complicated deal here. I can’t leave. Not now.” He hesitated, then said, “I might never come back to Earth.”
Once he heard that reply, his father’s image went from its normal unhappy scowl to a truly angry frown. “I want you here, dammit! This is where you belong and this is where you’re going to be. That’s final.”
“Father,” said Martin, feeling all the old fear and frustration swirling inside him like a whirlpool pulling him down, drowning him. “Father, come here, come be with me. Please. Before it’s too late.”
His father merely glowered at him.
“Give it up, Dad,” Humphries pleaded. “Earth is finished. Everything down there is going to crash; can’t you understand that?”
The old man sputtered, “Dammit, Marry, if you don’t listen to me...” He faltered, stopped, not knowing what to say next.
“Why can’t you listen to me for a change?” Martin snapped. Without waiting for a response, he said, “I’m trying to build an empire up here, Dad, an empire that’s going to stretch all the way out to the Asteroid Belt and beyond. I’m putting the pieces together right now. I’m going to be the wealthiest man in the solar system, richer than you and all your brothers put together. Maybe then you’ll treat me with some respect.”
Before his father could reply, Humphries sat up in his recliner and pressed the stud set into the armrest to terminate the videophone link.ÿÿÿÿÿ The old man’s face disappeared from the wall, revealing a holowindow that showed a realtime view of Jupiter as seen by the twenty-meter telescope at the Farside Observatory.
For a long moment Humphries simply sat there, alone in the office he had set up for himself in the house deep below the lunar surface. Then he took a long slow breath to calm the furies that raged inside him.
The old man has no understanding of the real world. He’s still living in the past. He’d rather go down with the ship than admit that I’m right and he’s wrong.
Unbidden, the memory of his drowning engulfed him again. Nine years old. His father insisting that the trimaran was in no trouble despite the dark storm winds that heaved the boat so monstrously. The wave that washed him overboard. The frothing water closing over him. Desperately clawing for the surface but sinking, sinking, can’t breathe, everything going dark.
Martin Humphries died at the age of nine. After they revived him, he learned that it had been one of the crew who’d dived into the sound to rescue him. Watching the boy sink out of sight, his father had stayed aboard the trimaran and offered a bonus to any crewman who could rescue his son. Form that moment on, Humphries knew that there was no one in the world he could trust; he was alone, with only his inner fears and yearnings to drive him. And only his money to protect him.
Talking with his father always brought those terrible moments back to mind. And the gasping, choking paralysis that clamped his chest like a merciless vise. He reached into the top desk drawer for his inhalator and took a desperate whiff of the cool, soothing drug.
All right, Humphries thought, waiting for his breathing to return to normal, trying to calm himself. He’s going to stay down there and try to fight the New Morality until they burn him at the stake. Nothing I say will budge him a millimeter. Very well, then.
I’ll stay here in Selene where it’s safe and everything’s under control. No storms, no rain; a world built to suit me in every detail. From here I can pull the strings just as effectively as if I were down in New York or London. Better, really. There’s no reason for me to go Earthside anymore.
Except for the divorce hearing, he remembered. I’m supposed to show up in the judge’s chambers for that. But I can do even that from here, get my lawyers to make the excuse that I can’t return to Earth, I’ve been on the Moon too long, it would be dangerous to my health. I can get a dozen doctors to testify to that. No sweat.
Humphries laughed aloud. I won’t have to be in the same room with that bitch! Good! Wonderful!
He leaned back again and stared up at the ceiling. It was set to a planetarium display, the sky as it appeared above Selene. Briefly he thought about calling up a porno video, but decided instead to put on the latest informational release from the International Astronautical Authority about the microprobes searching through the asteroids in the Belt.
The IAA’s motivation for investigating the asteroids was to locate locks that might one day hit the Earth. They had good tracks on all the hundreds of asteroids in orbits that brought them close. Now they were sorting through the thousands of rocks out in the Belt big enough to cause serious damage if they were ejected from the Belt and impacted Earth.
The good news was that so far they had not found any asteroid in an orbit that threatened the homeworld-although the asteroids in the Belt were always being jostled by Jupiter and the other planets, perturbing their orbits unpredictably. A constant watch was a vital necessity.
The better news was that, as a byproduct of the impacter watch, the IAA was getting detailed data on the composition of the larger asteroids. Iron, carbon, nickel, phosphorus, nitrogen, gold, silver, platinum, even water was out there in vast abundance. Ripe for picking. Waiting for me to turn them into money, Humphries told himself, smiling happily.
Dan Randolph will send a team out to the Belt on a fusion rocket. The first mission will fail, of course, and then I’ll have Randolph where I want him. I’ll take control of Astro Corporation and we can put Randolph out to pasture, where he belongs.
Then a thought clouded his satisfaction. It’s been damned near six months since I hired Pancho Lane to keep an eye on Randolph. Why haven’t I heard from her?
“Aren’t you nervous?” Amanda Cunningham asked. Sitting beside her as the Clippership returned to Earth, Pancho shook her head. “Nope. You?”
“A bit.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I mean... meeting the head of the corporation. It’s rather exciting, don’t you think?”
Pancho and Amanda had been summoned to Astro Manufacturing’s corporate headquarters in La Guaira, on an island across the strait from Caracas. Something about a new assignment that Dan Randolph himself would decide.
“Well, meeting the big boss is important, I guess,” Pancho said as nonchalantly as she could manage.
They were riding the Clippership down from the aging space station Nueva Venezuela to the landing field at La Guaira, riding comfortably in the nearly empty passenger cabin with a sparse handful of paying customers rather than in the cramped cockpit where the crew worked. Amanda reveled in the luxury of spacious seats and entertainment videos; Pancho figured that something important was waiting for them when they landed, something important enough for Astro to undergo the expense of letting them ride deadhead from Selene.
Well, she said to herself, the pilots up in the cockpit are really deadheading, too. Clipperships flew under control from the ground; they didn’t need an onboard crew any more than a ballistic missile did. But even after all these years-decades, really-the politicians refused to allow spacecraft that carried passengers to fly fully automated. The pilots had to go along; there had to be a cockpit and full controls for them even though they had absolutely nothing to do.
Don’t complain, she said to herself. If the aerospace lines didn’t need to hire pilots you wouldn’t have gotten a job in the first place. You’d still be sitting in front of a display screen in some cubicle back in Lubbock doing tech support and barely making enough money to keep Sis alive.
Amanda was flicking through the entertainment channels, eyes locked on her little pop-up screen. Pancho eased back in the comfortable passenger’s chair and closed her eyes.
Why me? she asked herself. Why has the CEO of Astro Manufacturing called me all the way back from Selene to see him in person? Amanda I can understand. One look at her ID vid and the Big Boss prob’ly started panting like a dog in heat. Still, in the six months since they’d first met, Pancho had acquired a healthy respect for Amanda’s piloting skills, boobs notwithstanding. This is her first job and she’s already as good as I am... well, almost. I’m the best pilot Astro’s got, flat out, but what’s that got to do with seeing the CEO? Why does he want to see me?
Does Humphries have anything to do with this? He wants me to spy on Astro, which means he prob’ly wants me to spy on Randolph himself. So maybe he’s worked things out so’s I get to see Randolph face-to-face. Is Humphries pulling strings inside Randolph’s own company?
It never occurred to Pancho that Dan Randolph wanted to see her for reasons of his own.
The Clippership rode smoothly through re-entry, with only a few moments of turbulence as it plunged into the Earth’s atmosphere like a squat, cone-shaped meteor, plummeting so fast that the very air outside the craft heated to incandescence. We’re a falling star, Pancho told herself as she sat tightly buckled into her seat while the ship shuddered and jounced. She could hear the muted howl of the tortured air on the other side of the hull, mere centimeters from her seat. A falling star. Some kid down there’s prob’ly making a wish on our trail.
The shaking and banshee wail of re-entry ended swiftly and the flight smoothed out.
“We’ll be landing in four minutes,” the captain’s rich baritone voice announced over the intercom. “Don’t be alarmed by all the banging and roaring. It’s just the retrorockets and the landing struts deploying.”
Pancho smiled. That’s what we need the crew for: reassuring announcements.
It felt as if they were falling until the retros fired briefly, pushing Pancho deep into her seat. Another drop, so short she barely had time to feel it before the retros roared out a longer blast. Then everything went silent and still.
“We’re on the ground,” the captain said, sounding relieved.
Pancho had expected that she and Amanda would be sent directly to Randolph’s office for their interview with the CEO, or at least to the personnel department for a briefing on what they should expect. Instead, once they cleared the access tunnel they were met in the terminal by a good-looking young Latino in a business suit who led them out to the garage and a sleek-looking sedan.
“Your luggage is being picked up and will be waiting for you in your quarters at the corporate housing center,” he said in impeccable American English, opening the car’s rear door for the two women.
As she and Amanda got into the back seat, Pancho saw there was a driver sitting behind the wheel. The young man slid in beside him.
She grinned. “What, no limo?”
The young man half-turned in his seat and said quite seriously, “Mr. Randolph doesn’t believe in unnecessary frills. This is comfortable enough, isn’t it?”
“Quite,” said Amanda.
By the time they got to the test site Amanda had set up a dinner date for herself with their handsome young escort.
The test site was on the shoulder of a green hillside that sloped down into the warm Caribbean. Late afternoon sunshine slanted down from between massive cumulus clouds that were visibly growing, boiling up into towering thunderheads, getting darker and more menacing by the minute. Pancho smelled the salt tang in the air, heard the surf rolling in gently below, felt the warm steady breeze on her face. A tropical paradise, she thought.
Or it would be, if it weren’t for all that danged hardware squatting in the middle of the field.
Following their Latino escort, they walked from the car to the small knot of people standing around what looked like a set of man-tall dewar flasks crusted with frost, a small crane, lots of plumbing and tubing, a medium-sized truck carrying what looked like a pair of major-league fuel cells on its bed, a smaller truck loaded with a bank of capacitors, and a corrugated-metal shed off to one side. Several automobiles and semivans were parked on the other side of the shed.
As they got closer, Pancho saw that the people were gathered around a small swept-winged aircraft that was resting on a pair of skids. It was an ancient cruise missile; she saw, an unmanned jet airplane. She knew they’d been outlawed by the disarmament treaties. Only the Peacekeepers had such weapons, and this one looked too old to be a Peacekeeper missile. The markings on it were faded, the serial number stenciled on its tail barely legible.
Before she could ask a question, a trim-looking man with silver hair and a rugged fighter’s face stepped out of the crowd around the missile. He wore a light tan wind breaker zippered to the throat despite the warm sunshine, a baseball cap perched jauntily on his head, well-faded jeans, and cowboy boots. Their escort stiffened almost like a soldier coming to attention.
“Senor Randolph,” he said, “may I introduce-”
“You must be Amanda Cunningham,” said Dan Randolph, with a crooked smile. He put his hand out and Amanda took it briefly. “I’m Dan Randolph.”
Then he turned to Pancho. “And you’ve got to be Priscilla Lane.”
“Pancho,” she corrected, taking his extended hand. His grip was firm, friendly. “Priscilla’s too fussy, and anybody calls me Pru or Prissy, I’ll belt him.”
“Pancho,” Randolph said, his smile widening. “I’ll remember that.”
“What’s this all about?” Pancho asked. “Why’ve you brought us here?”
Randolph’s eyes showed momentary surprise at her bluntness, but then he shrugged and said, “You’re going to see some history being made... if this double-damned jury-rigged kludge works right.”
He introduced Amanda and Pancho to Lyall Duncan and the others gathered around the missile. Almost all of them were male, engineers or technicians. One of the women was a tall blonde; competition for Amanda, Pancho thought. Duncan looked like a fierce little gnome, or maybe a troll, even when he smiled.
Puzzled, intrigued, Pancho allowed Randolph to usher her and Amanda to the shed. It was packed with instruments and consoles and one rickety-looking desk with a lopsided chair in front of it.
“You just stay here and watch,” he said, with a curious grin. “If it works, you’ll be witnesses. If it blows up, this ought to be far enough away to keep you from getting hurt.”
The dark-haired troll called Duncan chuckled. “Experimental physics, you know. Always the chance of an explosion.”
The crane was on its own caterpillar tractor. A pair of technicians used it to hoist the missile off the ground and trundle it out almost half a kilometer. They put the missile gently onto the grassy ground, pointing into the wind blowing steadily in from the sea.
Consoles were coming to life in the shed. Engineers were speaking to each other in their clipped jargon. Pancho watched Randolph. The man seemed outwardly relaxed as he stood with both hands jammed into his windbreaker pockets, watching the missile while the crane waddled back toward them.
Duncan buzzed around the shed like a bee in a flower bed. The tension built up; Pancho could feel it radiating from the backs of the crew standing by the consoles.
“Do you think it’s going to rain?” Amanda whispered.
Pancho looked up at the looming thunderheads. “Sooner or later.”
At last Duncan said to Randolph, “We’re ready to launch.”
“Okay,” said Randolph. “Do it before it starts pouring.”
Duncan said crisply, “Launch!”
Pancho turned her attention to the missile sitting out on the grass. For a moment nothing happened, but then its tail-end spurted flame and it lurched forward. Just as she heard the whining scream of the jet engine, another sound cut in: a deeper, more powerful roar. The missile leaped off the ground, angling sharply toward the cloud-filled sky, trailing a billow of smoke.
Something fell away from the climbing missile. A rocket pack, Pancho realized. They used it to get the bird off the ground.
The plane levelled off a scant hundred meters in the air and circled the field once.
“Nominal flight,” one of the engineers called out.
“Fusion drive ready?” Duncan asked.
“Primed and ready.”
“Light it.”
The missile seemed to falter for a moment, as if it had stalled in midair. Pancho saw the slightly smoky exhaust wink out, heard the jet engine’s screech die away. The missile glided for several moments, losing altitude.
Then it seemed to bite into the air, raising its nose and climbing steeply upward as it howled a thin, screeching ethereal wail.
“Programmed flight trajectory,” Pancho heard someone call out. “On the money.”
The bird flew out to sea until it was a barely visible speck, then turned back and rushed toward them, climbing almost to the base of the thunderheads, its ghostly wail barely audible, streaking past, heading inland. Then it turned again and headed seaward once more. Racetrack course, Pancho realized.
Lightning was flickering in the clouds now.
“Coming up on the two-minute mark,” said one of the engineers. “Mark! Two minutes.”
“Bring her in,” Duncan commanded.
“Automatic trajectory,” came the answer.
Pancho watched as the missile turned back toward them once again, dropped its flaps, slowed, and gracefully descended for a landing out in the area where it had taken off. The grass was scorched out there from the takeoff rocket’s hot exhaust.
Turning slightly, she saw that Randolph was standing just outside the door, eyes riveted to the approaching missile, mouth slightly open, fists clenched.
The missile was still moving fast when it touched the ground, bounced into the air again, wobbled back to the ground, and then plowed nose-first into the dirt, throwing a spray of grass clods and pebbles as it flipped over onto its back and banged down so hard one of the wings tore off. It sounded like a junkyard falling out of the sky.
But the engineers and technicians were all cheering, jumping up and down, pounding each other on the back, yelling and waving like a team that had just scored a gold medal in the Olympics. Randolph yanked off his cap and pegged it out toward the sea.
“Och, what a divot!” Duncan shouted. He raced through the open door to Randolph and launched himself into the older man’s arms, wrapping his legs around Randolph’s middle. Randolph staggered backward and they fell to the ground together, laughing like maniacs.
Pancho looked at Amanda. She seemed just as puzzled as Pancho felt.
With a shrug, Pancho said, “I guess any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.”
Amanda shook her head. “I shouldn’t think you’d walk away from that one if you’d been aboard it.”
Randolph was disentangling himself from Duncan and getting to his feet. Brushing dirt from his windbreaker, grinning hugely, he walked over to Amanda and Pancho while Duncan scampered toward the shed.
“It works!” Randolph said. “You’ve just witnessed history, ladies. The first actual flight of a fusion-powered vehicle.”
“Fusion?” Pancho gaped at him. “You mean that little bird had a fusion engine on her?”
Amanda said, “But I thought fusion generators were great immense things, like power stations.”
Duncan raced back to them, waving a dark bottle in one hand. The rest of the crew gathered around. Pancho wondered why no one went to the poor little aircraft, smashed and crumpled on the grass.
Someone produced paper cups and Duncan began to splash liquor into them. At first Pancho thought it was champagne, but the bottle wasn’t the right shape. Scotch, she realized. Scotland’s gift to the world.
“Hey,” said Randolph, “I need some ice with this.”
Duncan actually shuddered. “Ice? With good whisky? You Americans!”
Pancho took a sip of hers, neat. “Wow!” she managed to gasp.
“To the Duncan Drive,” Randolph toasted, lifting his paper cup.
“To the stars!” Duncan countered. “We’ll ride this engine to Alpha Centauri one day!”
Randolph laughed. “The Asteroid Belt will be far enough, for now.”
A couple of the men quaffed their drinks down in one gulp, then trotted out toward the wrecked cruise missile. Others headed for the shed.
“Check the cameras, too,” Duncan called after them.
Pancho asked Randolph again, “That little ship has a fusion engine in it?”
Nodding, Randolph replied, “In place of its warhead.”
“The engine’s that small?”
“It’s only a wee test engine,” said Duncan. “Just to prove that it can provide controllable thrust.”
“Now we can build one big enough to carry a real payload to the Belt,” Randolph said.
“Once you raise the money,” added Duncan.
With a glance at Amanda, Pancho asked Randolph, “But why did you bring Mandy and me out here? Just to have a couple more witnesses?”
His grin growing even wider, Randolph answered, “Hell no. I wanted you to see this because you two are gong to pilot the first fusion rocket to the Asteroid Belt.”
The Yamagata family estate was set on a rugged hillside high above the office towers and apartment blocks of New Kyoto. Built like a medieval Japanese fortress, the solid yet graceful buildings always made Dan think of poetry frozen into shapes of wood and stone. It had suffered extensive damage in the earthquakes, Dan knew, but he could see no sign of it. The repairs had flawlessly matched the original structures.
Much of the inner courtyard was given to an exquisitely maintained sand garden. There were green vistas at every turn, as well: gardens and woods and, off in the distance, a glimpse through tall old trees of Lake Biwa, glittering in the late afternoon sun.
The tiltrotor plane settled down, turbines screeching, in the outer courtyard. Dan pulled off his sanitary mask and unbuckled his safety belt. He was through the hatch before the pilot was able to stop the rotors. Squinting through the dust kicked up by the downwash, Dan saw Nobuhiko Yamagata waiting at the gate to the inner courtyard, wearing a comfortable kimono of deep blue decorated with white herons, the Yamagata family’s emblem.
For an instant Dan thought he was seeing Saito Yamagata, Nobuhiko’s father, the man who had been Dan’s boss in the old days when Randolph had been a construction engineer on the first Japanese solar power satellite. Nobo had been ascetically slim when he was younger, but now his face and body had filled out considerably. He was tall, though, some thirty centimeters taller than his father had been, even several centimeters taller than Dan himself.
The two men bowed simultaneously, then grasped each other’s shoulders.
“By damn, Nobo, it’s good to see you.”
“And you,” Nobuhiko replied, smiling broadly. “It’s been much too long since you’ve visited here.” His voice was deep, strong, assured.
“You’re looking well,” Dan said as Yamagata led him past the flowering shrubbery of the inner courtyard, toward the wing of the old stone and wood house where the family lived.
“I’m too fat and I know it,” Nobo said, patting his belly. “Too many hours behind a desk, not enough exercise.”
Dan made a sympathetic noise.
“I’m thinking of taking a trip to Selene for a nanotherapy session.”
“Aw, come on, Nobo,” Dan said, “it’s not that bad.”
“My doctors nag me constantly.”
“That’s what the double-damned doctors always do. They learn it in medical school. No matter how healthy you are, they always find something to worry you about.”
They walked along a winding path of stones set across the middle of the carefully-raked sand garden. Dan noticed the miniature olive tree off in one corner of the garden that he had given Nobo’s father many years earlier. It looked green and healthy. Before the greenhouse cliff had struck, even in June the tree would have been covered by a heated transparent plastic dome to protect it from the occasional frost. Now the winters were mild enough to leave the tree in the open all year long.
“What’s your father’s status?” Dan asked as they removed their shoes at the open door to the main house. Two servants stood silently just inside the door, both women, both in carnelian-red robes.
Nobuhiko grimaced as they walked down the hallway lined with shoji screens.
“The medical researchers have removed the tumor and cleaned father’s body of all traces of cancerous cells. They are ready to begin the revival sequence.”
“That can be tricky,” Dan said.
Ten years earlier, Saito Yamagata had had himself declared clinically dead and then frozen in liquid nitrogen, preserved cryonically to await the day when his cancer could be cured and he would be revived.
“Others have been thawed successfully,” Nobo said as they entered a spacious bedroom. It was paneled in teak, with bare floors of bleached pine, and furnished sparely: a western-style bed, a desk in the opposite corner, two comfortable-looking recliner chairs. One wall consisted of sliding shoji screens; Dan figured they covered a closet, built-in drawers, and the lavatory. Dan saw that his one travel bag had already been placed on a folding stand at the foot of the bed.
“Still,” he said, “thawing must be pretty dicey.”
Yamagata turned to face him, and Dan saw Saito’s calm brown eyes, the certainty, the power that a long lineage of wealth and privilege can bring to a man.
“We have followed the research work very thoroughly,” Nobo said. He smiled slightly. “We have sponsored much of the work ourselves, of course. It seems that Father could be revived.”
“That’s great!” Dan blurted. “Sai will be back with us-”
Nobuhiko raised a hand. “Two problems, Dan.”
“What?”
“First, there are very strong political forces opposing revival of any cryonically-preserved person.”
“Opposing... oh, for the love of Peter, Paul, and Peewee Reese. The New Morality strikes again.”
“Here in Japan it’s an offshoot of the New Dao movement. They call themselves the Flowers of the Sun.”
“Flowers of crackpots,” Dan grumbled.
“They have a considerable amount of political power. Enough to get nanotechnology banned in Japan, just as your New Morality people got it banned in the States.”
“And now they’re against reviving corpsicles?”
A reluctant grin cracked Yamagata’s solemn expression. “Delicately put, Dan. My father is a corpsicle.”
Waving a hand, Dan said, “You know I don’t mean any disrespect.”
“I know,” Nobuhiko admitted. “But the unhappy fact is that these Flowers of the Sun are attempting to pass a law through the Diet that would forbid cryonics altogether and make it a crime to attempt to revive a frozen body.”
“Why, for god’s sake? On what grounds?”
Nobuhiko shrugged. “They say the resources should be spent in rebuilding our ravaged cities. They say that we don’t need rich old people to be brought back among us, what we need are healthy young people who can work hard to rebuild Japan.”
“Bullcrap,” Dan muttered. Then he brightened. “Hey, I know how you can get around them! Fly your father up to Selene. They’ll revive him there. They can even use nanomachines if they have to.”
Nobo sat on the bed, his shoulders sagging. “I’ve thought of that, Dan. I’m tempted to do it, especially before the government bars removal of frozen bodies from the country.”
“They can’t do that!”
“They will, before the next session of the Diet is over.”
“Goddammit to hell and back!” Dan shouted, pounding his fist into his palm. “Has the whole stupid world gone crazy?”
“There’s something else,” Nobo said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Something worse.”
“What on earth could be worse?”
“The people who have been revived. Their minds are gone.”
“Gone? What do you mean?”
With a helpless spread of his hands, Nobuhiko repeated, “Gone. The body can be revived, but apparently the freezing process wipes out the brain’s memory system. Those we’ve revived are mentally like newborns. They even have to be toilet trained all over again.”
Dan sank into one of the plush recliners. “You mean Sai’s mind... his personality... gone?”
“That’s what we fear. Apparently the neural connections in the brain break down when the body is frozen. The mind comes out a virtual tabula rasa.”
“Shit,” Dan muttered.
“We have our research scientists working on the problem, of course, but there’s no point to reviving my father until we know definitely, one way or the other, how his mind has been affected by the freezing.”
Dan hunched forward, forearms on his thighs. “Okay. I understand now. But get Sai’s body to Selene. Now! Before these religious fanatics make it impossible to move him.”
Nobuhiko nodded grimly. “I believe you’re right, Dan. I’ve felt that way myself for some weeks now, but I’m glad that you agree.”
“I’m heading up to Selene next week,” Dan said. “If you like, I’ll take him with me.”
“That’s very good of you, but this is a family matter. I’ll take care of it.”
Dan nodded. “Okay. But if you need any help-anything at all, just let me know.”
Nobuhiko smiled again, and for the first time there was real warmth in it. “I will, Dan. I certainly will.”
“Good.”
The younger man rubbed at his eyes, then looked up at Dan again. “Very well, I’ve told you my problem. Now tell me yours. What brings you here?”
Dan grinned at him. “Oh, nothing much. I just need a couple of billion dollars.”
Nobo’s face remained completely impassive for a long moment. Then he said, “Is that all?”
“Yep. Two bill should do it.”
“And what do I get in return for such an investment?”
With a chuckle, Dan replied, “A bunch of rocks.”
Pancho looked up, bleary-eyed, from her desktop screen. Across the room that she and Amanda were sharing, Mandy sat at her desk with virtual reality glasses and earphones covering half her face, peering intently at her own screen.
“I’m goin’ for a walk,” she said, loudly enough to get through Mandy’s earphones. Amanda nodded without taking off the VR glasses. Pancho squinted at the screen, but it was nothing but a jumble of alphanumerics. Whatever Mandy was studying was displayed on her glasses, not the computer screen.
Their dorm room opened directly onto the patio. Cripes, it’s almost sundown, Pancho saw as she stepped outside. The late afternoon was still tropically warm, humid, especially after the air-conditioned cool of their quarters.
Pancho stretched her long arms up toward the cloud-flecked sky, trying to work out the knots in her back. Been settin’ at that stupid ol’ desk too damned long, she said to herself. Mandy can sit there and study till hell freezes over. She’s like a dog-ass computer, just absorbing data like a friggin’ machine.
Dan Randolph had put them to studying the fusion drive and working with the engineering team that was converting a lunar transfer buggy into the ship that would carry them out to the Belt. They saw Randolph rarely. The man was jumping all across the world like a flea on a hot griddle, hardly ever in the same place more than one night. When he was in La Guaira he drove the whole team hard, and himself hardest of all.
Peculiar place for a corporate headquarters, Pancho thought as she walked from the housing complex out past the swaying, rustling palm trees, toward the seawall. La Guaira was more suited to being a tourist resort than a major space launching center. Randolph had settled his Astro
Manufacturing headquarters here years ago, partly because its location near the equator gave rockets a little extra boost from the Earth’s spin, partly because he found the government of Venezuela easier to deal with than the suits in Washington.
Strange, though. Randolph was rumored to have been in love with President Scanwell. There were whispers about their being lovers, off and on, a stormy romance that only ended when the ex-President lost her life in the big Tennessee Valley earthquake.
It all seemed so far away. Pancho followed the winding path toward the seawall, her softboots crunching on the gravel. The Sun was just about touching the horizon, turning the Caribbean reddish gold. Massive clouds were piling up, turning purple and crimson in the underlighting. With the breeze coming off the sea, making the palms bow gracefully, this was as close to a tropical paradise as she could imagine.
But the seawall reminded her of a harsher reality. It was shoulder high, an ugly reinforced concrete barrier against the encroaching waters. It had originally been painted a pastel pink, but the paint had faded in the sun, and the concrete was crumbling here and there where storm tides had pounded against it. The old beaches were all underwater now, except at the very lowest tides. The surf broke out there, long combers tumbling and frothing with a steady, ceaseless growling hiss. And still the sea was rising, a little bit more every year.
“Looks pretty, doesn’t it?”
Startled, she turned to see Randolph standing there, looking glumly out to sea. He was wearing a wrinkled white shirt and dark slacks that had gone baggy from long hours of travel.
“Didn’t see you coming up the path, boss,” said Pancho. “Come to think of it, I didn’t even hear you on the gravel.”
“I walked on the grass,” Randolph said, quite seriously. “Stealth is my middle name.”
Pancho laughed.
But Randolph said gloomily, “When Greenland melts down this will all go under.”
“The whole island?”
“Every damned bit of it. Maybe some of the gantry towers will stick up above the surface. The hilltops. Not much else.”
“Cripes.”
“This used to be part of the mainland, you know. When I first brought the company here, that strait cutting us off from the hills didn’t exist. The sea level’s gone up that much in less than twenty years.”
“And it’s still goin’ up,” Pancho said.
Randolph nodded gloomily, then leaned his arms on the shoulder-high seawall and propped his chin on them.
“How’s the job going?” he asked.
“We’re workin’ at it,” she replied. “It’s a lot to learn, all this fusion stuff.”
With a tired nod, he said, “Yeah, but you’ve got to know every bit of it, Pancho. It anything breaks down out there, you’ve got to be able to diagnose it and fix it.”
“We’ll have an engineer on board,” she said. “Won’t we?”
“Maybe. But whether you do or not, you’ve got to know everything there is to know about the systems.”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“And you’ve got to get the new navigational technique down, too,” he added.
“Point and shoot, yeah. Kinda weird.”
With the thrust and efficiency of the fusion rocket, their spacecraft did not have to travel in an energy-conserving ellipse from Earth orbit to the Belt. Fusion-driven trajectories were almost straight lines: travel times would be days instead of months.
“It’s a lot to learn, I know,” Randolph said.
She saw the weariness in his eyes, and yet there was something else in them, something more. Hope, she thought. Or maybe just plain mulish stubbornness. He wants to make this fusion ship work. And he’s trusting me to drive it. Me and Mandy.
“We could use a weekend off,” she said. “Or even a night on the town.”
The sun had sunk behind the mainland’s mountains. They could see the lights on the mainland beginning to wink on.
“Sorry, kid, no can do,” Randolph said. He started walking along the seawall. “I told you when you agreed to take this assignment, you stay here in the complex.”
“Security, yeah, I know,” Pancho said, following him.
“Your own security, too,” Randolph said. “Not just the company’s. You’re very valuable now. You and Amanda are crucial to this entire operation. I don’t want you running any risks.”
Pancho thought it over. He’s trusting us with this whole operation, right enough. Can’t blame him for being careful. Still...
She looked across the strait again at the lights of the city.
Then a new thought struck her. Does he know I’m supposed to be snooping on him? Is he keeping us bottled up here so’s I can’t get in touch with Humphries?
“Can I ask you somethin’?”
Randolph smiled tiredly at her in the fading light. “Sure, go right ahead.”
“I’ve heard rumbles that you were-well, that Astro’s got money problems.”
Randolph hesitated a moment. Then, “Corporations always have money problems.”
“I mean, like, you’re purty close to broke.”
“Pretty close,” he admitted.
“Then why’re you sinkin’ all this money into the fusion ship?”
The light was dying fast. Pancho could barely see his face. But she heard the determination in his voice.
“Two reasons, kid,” he said. “First, if it works, Astro can get first licks at the Belt. Our stock will zoom up, our profits will skyrocket, and the only money problem I’ll have is how to spend all the cash flowing in.”
Pancho said nothing, waiting for his second reason.
“And also,” Randolph went on, “opening up the Belt is crucial for the human race’s survival.”
“You really think so?”
He stopped walking and turned toward her. “We can’t take much more of this climate warming, Pancho. Millions have died already, tens of millions. But the worst is yet to come. If Greenland goes-”
“And Antarctica,” she interjected.
“And Antarctica,” he agreed. “If they melt down, civilization drowns. Billions will die, not just from the floods but from starvation and disease. We can’t support the Earth’s population now, for god’s sake! There’s famine in half the world, and it’s getting worse, not better.”
“You think the asteroids can help?”
“We need those natural resources. We have to rebuild our industrial base, rebuild our wealth.”
“In space.”
“Yep. Where we should’ve been building for the past half-century.”
Pancho made a low whistle. “That’s a big order, boss.”
“You’re damned right it is. But if we fail, the human race fails. Only a handful of people will live through this, and they’ll be thrown back to a pre-industrial level. Subsistence farming. No electricity. No machinery. No medicines.”
“The Middle Ages.”
“More like the Stone Age,” Randolph grumbled.
“That’s why you’re hangin’ everything on this flight to the Belt.”
She couldn’t see his face in the deepening darkness, but she sensed him nodding.
“Everything I’ve got,” he said flatly.
Everything he has. The enormity of it suddenly hit Pancho like an avalanche. He’s risking everything he has on this flight, his whole company, his whole life. He’s willing to gamble everything he’s worked for and built up over his lifetime on this one mission. And he’s trusting me to fly it for him. Me.
The responsibility felt like the weight of the world on her shoulders.
“Lemme ask you somethin’ else,” Pancho said, her voice trembling slightly. “Why’d you pick me to make this flight? You’ve got lots of other pilots with more experience.”
Randolph chuckled softly. “More experience, sure. But they’ve got families to support. Spouses. Kids.”
I’ve got a sister, Pancho thought. But she said nothing.
“Besides,” Randolph went on, “none of them have your abilities.”
“My abilities?”
“Listen, kid, I went through every scrap of data on every pilot in Astro’s employ and quite a few who aren’t on the company’s payroll. You came out on top. You are the best we’ve got.”
Pancho felt suddenly breathless. Hell, I know I’m good, but am I really that good?
“Before you ask for a raise,” Randolph said, “I’ve got to tell you that my personnel people don’t agree with me. They think you’re a flake.”
“Whattaya mean, a flake?” Pancho demanded.
“The rap on you, kid, is that you’re not serious. You like to take risks, play games.”
“Not with my flyin’.”
“Oh no? Like the time you raced Wally Stinson from Selene to the Farside site?”
“Aw, c’mon, I was only havin’ some fun,” Pancho protested. “Wally let his testosterone do his thinkin’ for him.”
“And this bet a few months ago about vacuum breathing?”
“That was just a hoot.”
He chuckled in the growing darkness, but then said, “You’re a gambler, Pancho. That scared the hell out of the personnel gurus.”
“I won’t gamble with your fusion ship,” she said firmly.
Randolph was silent for a few heartbeats, then he said, “I know you won’t, Pancho. That’s why I picked you to fly her.”
“What about Amanda?” she heard herself ask. “She’s better’n me, isn’t she?”
“She’s got more education, she’s more cautious. But she’s not better than you. Close, but not better. Anyway, if you go, I want you to have another woman pilot with you. Guys get funny ideas after a couple of weeks locked up in an aluminum can.”
The plan was to carry an engineer/technician and at least one geologist or planetary astronomer on the flight. The mission was designed to be more than a mere test of the fusion drive; it was supposed to bring back results. It had to.
“I can handle the guys,” Pancho said.
“Yep, I’m sure you can. But why bring up the problem?”
“You don’t think Mandy’ll cause a problem?”
Randolph laughed softly in the darkness. “I see your point. She can raise temperatures when she wants to.”
“Even when she doesn’t want to.”
“I had a long talk with Amanda yesterday. She’s going to be prim and proper during the flight. No bedroom eyes. No tight uniforms. She agreed to behave herself.”
Pancho was shocked. The little sneak never said a word to me about talking with the boss.
“She’ll be strictly business. She promised.”
“I don’t know if she can help herself,” Pancho said.
“You think I should take her off the mission?”
Pancho blurted, “No, I think you should take me off it.”
“You? Why?”
Don’t do it! She raged at herself. Don’t go blabbing it out to him. He’ll fire your butt out of here like a hot rocket and then make sure nobody’l1 ever hire you again. But he trusts me. He’s hangin’ his whole world on me because he trusts me to get the job done even when his personnel office doesn’t.
“Why should I take you off the mission?” Randolph insisted.
Cursing herself for six kinds of a fool, Pancho said, “Martin Humphries hired me to spy on you.”
“He did, huh?” In the starlit darkness, Randolph sounded much less surprised than she thought he would. “When was this?”
“More’n six months ago,” Pancho said, barely able to get the words out. “Last time I was up at Selene.”
Randolph fell silent and resumed pacing slowly along the seawall. Pancho walked beside him, listening to the sighing of the wind, the grumble of the surf, waiting for him to explode or snarl or say something.
At last he started to laugh. Not loud, joyful laughter. Just a low, cynical snickering. “I knew the sonofabitch would try to plant snoops in my drawers, but I never figured he’d recruit you.”
“You can fire me if you want to.”
“What did he offer you?”
“Money.”
“Is that all you’re after?”
Pancho hesitated a heartbeat. “I got... family to take care of.”
“Your sister, yes, I know.”
“You know?”
“I told you, I went over every nanobit of data about you. I know about your sister.”
“Well...” Pancho had to take a breath before she could repeat, “You can fire me, I guess.” She was surprised at what an effort it was to say the words.
“Why would I do that?” Randolph sounded genuinely puzzled.
“’Cause I’m supposed to be spyin’ on you.”
“That’s all right. No need to panic, kid. Go ahead and spy all you want. I knew he’d plant a few spooks into Astro. I’m glad you told me about it. I appreciate your honesty-and loyalty.”
“But-”
“No, no it’s okay,” Randolph said, his tone almost bantering now. “You go ahead and report everything you’re doing to him. I’ll even make it easier for you. I’ll transfer you and Amanda to Selene. That’s where the sonofabitch is living, isn’t it?”
“I think so, yeah.”
“Good,” Randolph said. “I ought to go there myself. It’s a lot healthier there than here, that’s for sure.”
“Healthier?”
“Climate controlled. Decontaminated air. I don’t need filter plugs stuffed up my nose when I’m there.”
Before Pancho could ask why he needed filter plugs at all, Randolph grasped her by the shoulder and turned her gently to look up into the darkening sky. A half-Moon rode among the scudding clouds, the unwinking brilliant beacon light of Selene visible along its terminator between night and day.
“That’s where you’re going, kid. To Selene.”
Pancho wondered if Randolph was truly pleased with her confession, or if he was exiling her to the most remote spot he could find.
Pancho had no trouble getting through customs this time. The same inspector went through her bags perfunctorily, not even blinking at the mice in their sealed plastic cage.
But he paid elaborate attention to Amanda. Pancho groused to herself as the inspector carefully went through Amanda’s travel bag, alternately grinning at Mandy and reddening as he saw her lacy underclothes.
He’d strip-search her if he could find the slightest excuse, Pancho thought, fuming.
Mandy simply stood on the other side of the table, looking wide-eyed and innocent while she kept up a constant nervous chatter.
“I don’t know why they always go through my bag, Pancho. I really don’t. You’d think that after all these times we’ve come to Selene they would simply let me pass through without all this bother.”
“He went through my bag, too, Mandy,” Pancho replied.
“Yes, but he didn’t paw through your underwear.” Grinning with gritted teeth, Pancho said, “Yours are a lot purtier than mine.”
The inspector kept his head down as he searched diligently through Amanda’s one piece of luggage, but Pancho could see the back of his neck turn beet red.
“All the other passengers have already gone through,” Amanda noticed. “We’re the last ones.”
“The rest of ‘em are either up here to start a long-term work contract or they’re tourists. We come and go all the time, so we could be smugglers.”
“Smugglers?” Amanda looked shocked. “Us? Me?” Pancho reached across the table and tapped the inspector on the shoulder. “Ain’t that right? What’re you looking for, dope or contraband seeds or maybe illegal bottles of air?”
The inspector mumbled something incomprehensible.
At last he finished and pushed the bag back across the table toward Amanda.
“There you go, Ms. Cunningham. Sorry to have delayed you. I’m just doing my job, miss.”
Amanda thanked him politely as she zipped her bag shut and hefted it to her shoulder. Pancho saw that the inspector couldn’t help but stare at Mandy’s expansive chest. Even in a standard-issue flight suit she looked sexy.
Visibly working up his courage, the inspector said, “Um... Ms. Cunningham... could I take you out to dinner some time while you’re here?” He made a sweaty smile. “To, uh, make up for inconveniencing you and all.”
Mandy smiled sweetly at him. “Why, that would be lovely. Call me, won’t you?”
“I sure will!”
Pancho seethed as the two of them left the customs station and headed for one of the electric carts that carried new arrivals through the tunnel from the spaceport into the underground city. He asked me to dinner when I was alone, but with bimbo boobs here he never even saw me. I could’ve carried the Eiffel Tower up here and he wouldn’t have noticed.
The message light was blinking on their phone by the time they got to the quarters they were sharing. When Pancho had first come to work for Astro Manufacturing, six years earlier, pilots still got private quarters when they worked on the Moon. Not any more. The rumor back at La Guaira was that Randolph was going to rent a dormitory area for the spacecraft pilots and crews.
Why not just fire all of us? Pancho wondered. If Randolph had any real sense he’d talk the IAA into getting rid of their stupid regulations about keeping human crews aboard the ships.
Yeah, fine, she answered herself. Then what do you do? Get a job as a mission controller? Fat chance!
As soon as they opened the door to their quarters and saw the phone blinking on the nightstand between their two beds, Amanda dropped her bag on the floor; it landed with a gentle lunar thump as Mandy stretched out on the bed and put the handset to her ear.
With a surprised look on her face, Mandy held the phone out to Pancho. “It’s for you,” she said, as if she didn’t really believe it.
Pancho took the handset and saw on the phone’s tiny console screen that the caller was Martin Humphries. Rather than activate the speaker, Pancho put the handset to her ear.
“Pancho, is that you?” Humphries’s voice said, sounding annoyed. “You’re standing outside the camera view.”
She stepped between the beds and swiveled the phone console. “It’s me,” she said, sitting on the bed opposite the one Mandy lay upon.
“I heard that Randolph sent you up here,” Humphries said. “But I had to learn it from another source. I haven’t heard a peep from you in months.”
With a glance at Mandy, who was watching her with intense curiosity, Pancho replied guardedly. “Well, I’m here now.”
“Who answered the phone? You’re not alone, are you?”
“Nope, I’m here with Mandy Cunningham.”
“She’s an Astro employee too?”
“That’s right.”
Mandy was straining to see Humphries’s face, but Pancho kept the phone turned away from her.
“Well, I’ve got to talk to you. I’ve been paying you for information but so far I’ve gotten nothing from you but a big, fat silence.”
Pancho made a smile. “I’d love to see you, too. I’ve got a lot to tell you.”
Humphries snapped, “All right, get down here right away.”
“You want me to come to dinner?” Pancho replied pleasantly.
“Dinner?” Humphries glanced at his wrist. “All right. In two hours.”
“Tonight?” Pancho cooed. “That’ll be just fine. I’ll see you at nineteen hundred. Okay?”
“Seven o’clock,” Humphries said. “Sharp.”
“I’ll be there.”
Pancho hung up the phone and said to Amanda, “I’ll use the shower first, Mandy. I’ve got a dinner date.”
She left Mandy standing by the bed, staring at her with wide-eyed astonishment.
Martin Humphries clicked his phone off and stretched back in his recliner. Maybe she’s smarter than I gave her credit for. She hasn’t gotten in touch with me before this because she doesn’t want to get caught. Okay, that’s reasonable. She’s being cautious. She’s been surrounded by Randolph’s people all the time. There’s even somebody in her quarters with her.
Humphries broke into a satisfied grin. Randolph’s making his people double up, to save money. He’s on the ropes, and he thinks I’m going to save him from bankruptcy.
He laughed aloud. “Me! The savior of Dan Randolph!”
He was still giggling when he put through his call to Nobuhiko Yamagata.
The head of Yamagata Industries was in his Tokyo office, from the looks of it. Humphries could see through the window behind Yamagata several construction cranes and the spidery steelwork of new towers going up. Rebuilding from the last earthquake. They’d better build stronger, he thought grimly. A lot stronger.
“Mr. Yamagata,” Humphries said, nodding his head once in imitation of a polite bow. “It’s good of you to take the time to talk with me.”
He thought about putting Yamagata’s image on the wallscreen, but that would make the Japanese look too big. He preferred the smaller desktop screen.
“Mr. Humphries,” said Nobo, nearly three seconds later, barely dipping his chin. “It is always a pleasure to converse with you.”
Blasted bullshit, Humphries thought. You can’t come right out and say what you want with these Japs. You have to make polite fucking conversation for half an hour before you can get down to business.
To his surprise, though, Yamagata said, “Dan Randolph has asked me to invest in a new venture.”
“Let me guess,” Humphries said. “He wants to build a fusion rocket system.”
Again the wait for the microwaves to reach Tokyo and return. “Yes, to go out to the Asteroid Belt and begin developing the resources there.”
“And what will your answer be?”
Once Yamagata heard Humphries’s question, his normally impassive face showed a tic of annoyance.
“I will be forced to tell him that Yamagata Industries is fully committed to rebuilding the cities that were damaged so heavily by the tsunamis and earthquakes. We have no funds to spare on space developments.”
“Good,” said Humphries.
Yamagata seemed to freeze into stone. At last he murmured, “It will be as we agreed.”
“You’d like to help him, wouldn’t you?”
The seconds stretched. At last Yamagata said, “He is an old friend.”
“You two were competitors at one time.”
“Yamagata Industries no longer has any operations in space,” the Japanese said slowly. “All of our energies are devoted to terrestrial developments.”
“So I understand.”
“But I agree with Dan. The resources from space can be of vital importance to our rebuilding efforts.”
“I think so, too.”
Yamagata seemed to be searching Humphries’s eyes, trying to penetrate to his secret thoughts. “Then why do you insist that I refuse to help him?”
“You misunderstand me,” Humphries said, putting on an expression of injured integrity. “I want Randolph to succeed. I intend to fund his fusion rocket venture myself.”
“Yes, so I understand,” said Yamagata, once Humphries’s answer reached him. “What I do not understand is why you pressured me to refuse Dan.”
“Could you help him if you wish?”
Yamagata hesitated, but at last replied, “I could put together two billion for him.”
“Without hurting your rebuilding projects?”
The hesitation was longer this time. “There would be some... repercussions.”
“But I can provide the funding and you don’t have to take a penny from your existing projects.”
Yamagata said nothing for many long moments. Then, “You have put considerable pressure on the banks to make certain that I do not fund Dan Randolph. I want to know why.”
“Because I believe the same as you do,” Humphries replied, earnestly, “that all of Japan’s resources of capital and manpower should be devoted to rebuilding your nation. This fusion rocket venture is very speculative. Suppose it doesn’t work? The money will be wasted.”
“Yet you are willing to risk your own money.”
“I have the money to risk,” Humphries said.
After an even longer pause, Yamagata said, “You could invest that two billion in Japan. You could help to house the homeless and feed the hungry. You could assist us to rebuild our cities.”
Humphries worked hard to avoid grinning. Now I’ve got the little bugger, he told himself. To Yamagata he said, “Yes, you’re right. Tell you what I’ll do: I’ll give Randolph one billion only, and invest the other billion in Yamagata Industries. How’s that?”
The Japanese industrialist’s eyes flickered when he heard Humphries’s words. He sucked in a deep, shrill breath.
“Would you be willing to invest your billion in the Renew Nippon Fund?”
“That’s essentially a charity, isn’t it?”
“It is a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping those who have been displaced by our natural disasters.”
This time Humphries hesitated, paused, let Yamagata believe that he was thinking it over before he came to a decision. The damned fool. Thinks he’s so fucking smart, keeping me from putting any money into his own corporation. Okay, keep me shut out from your company. I’ll get you sooner or later.
With as much of a show of concern as he could muster, Humphries said, “Mr. Yamagata, if you think that’s the best way for me to help Japan, then that’s what I’ll do. One billion for Randolph, and one billion for the Renew Nippon Fund.”
Yamagata was actually smiling as they ended their conversation. Once he had switched off the phone, Humphries burst into enormously satisfied laughter.
They’re all so dense! So blind! Yamagata wants to rebuild Japan. Randolph wants to save the whole fricking world. Damned fools! None of them understand that the world is done for. Nothing’s going to save them. The thing is to build a new civilization off-Earth. Build a new society where it’s safe, where only the best people are allowed to live. Build it... and rule it.
The Executive Board of the Global Economic Council met in a spacious conference room on the top floor of the undistinguished neomodern glass-and-steel office tower that served as the GEC’s headquarters. Originally, GEC’s offices had been in Amsterdam, but the rising sea level and pounding storms that raged through the North Sea made that city untenable. The Dutch struggled in vain to hold back the IJsselmeer, only to see their city’s narrow streets and gabled houses flooded time and again as the canals overflowed and the unrelenting sea took back the land that had been reclaimed by centuries of hard work. The GEC fled to London.
Not that London itself was immune to the rampaging storms and flooding. But the Thames was easier to control than the North Sea. And most of London was still above even the new, rising sea level.
Meetings of the Global Economic Council were usually restricted to the nine regular members and the privileged few who were invited to explain their positions or plead their causes. The news media were barred from the meetings, and there was no gallery for the public to attend.
Still, Vasily Malik dreaded this meeting of the Executive Board. Dan Randolph had demanded a hearing, and Randolph always made trouble. Vasily Sergeivitch Malik was handsome enough to be a video star. He was tall for a Russian, slightly over one hundred eighty centimeters, broad-shouldered and heavily muscled. About the same age as Dan Randolph, Malik kept his body in good trim through a rigid schedule of daily exercise-and rejuvenation therapies that he kept secret from everyone except his doctors in Moscow. Most people thought he dyed his once-graying hair; no one knew that injections of telomerase had returned youthful vigor to him. Malik enjoyed his secret. His Arctic blue eyes sparkled with good humor.
Until he thought about Dan Randolph. Once they had been deadly enemies in politics, in business, even in romance. The catastrophic greenhouse cliff had forced them into a reluctant alliance. The old enmities were buried; not forgotten, but put aside while they each strove in their own way to save what remained of Earth’s civilization.
We still don’t think alike, Malik said to himself as he took his chair at the long committee table. He was serving as chairman for this session, so he knew that Randolph’s principal fire would be directed at him. It’s nothing personal, Malik repeated silently over and over. That was finished long ago. Our differences now are differences of attitude, differences of outlook and expectation.
Still, his stomach knotted at the thought of tangling with Randolph again.
The conference room was comfortable without being ostentatious. The carpeting was neutral gray, although thick and expensive. The sweeping windows that extended along one entire wall were discreetly curtained; a long sideboard of polished mahogany stood there, bearing a variety of drinks from spring water to iced vodka, and trays of finger foods. The table at which the board members sat was also mahogany; each place was set with a built-in computer and electronic stylus. The chairs were high-backed, luxuriously padded and upholstered in matte black leather.
Randolph had insisted, however, that the room be sprayed with disinfectant before the meeting began. Malik had been assured that the spray was necessary, and odorless. Still, his nose wrinkled as he took his chair in the exact middle of the table. Once all nine Board members were comfortably seated at the long table, Malik nodded to the uniformed guard at the door to admit the day’s witnesses.
Dan Randolph came through the door and strode straight to the witness table. He looked firm and fit to Malik, dressed in a respectable business suit of dark blue. Randolph’s chin was sticking out pugnaciously. He expects a fight, Malik thought.
Behind Randolph came two others. One was a gnomish, dark-haired man, Randolph’s technical expert. Malik glanced at the agenda notes on the display screen built into the table before him: Lyall Duncan, an engineer. The other person was a tall blond woman who looked too young to be an expert at anything, except perhaps warming Randolph’s bed. A few keystrokes and the display screen identified her as an electronics engineer from California.
Malik caught Randolph’s eye as the American took his seat at the witness table. A slight crease across his face showed he had been wearing a sanitary mask. Randolph’s usual cocky grin was absent. He looked determined, and deadly serious.
Suppressing a groan, Malik called the meeting to order.
They went through the standard agenda items first, while Randolph sat tensely, watching them like a leopard sizing up a herd of antelope. Finally they came to Randolph’s item: Request for funding new space propulsion system.
Malik formally introduced Randolph to the other Board members, most of whom already knew Dan. Then, wishing he were elsewhere, Malik asked Dan to explain his proposal.
Randolph looked up at the Board and surveyed the long table from one end to the other. There were no notes before him, no slides or videos. Nothing on the little table except a silver carafe of water and a single crystal tumbler beside it. Slowly, he got to his feet.
“Ever since the greenhouse cliff hit,” he began, “and our world’s climate began to shift so drastically-no, actually, even before the greenhouse cliff came -it’s been clear that the people of Earth need the resources that exist off-planet. Energy, raw materials, metals, minerals, all of the resources that Earth needs to rebuild its crippled economy lies in tremendous abundance in interplanetary space.”
He paused for a heartbeat, then resumed. “In fact, if we have any hope of stabilizing the global climate and avoiding even worse warming than we’ve experienced so far, then a significant portion of the Earth’s heavy industries must be moved off-planet.”
“That’s not possible,” snapped the representative from North America, a dough-faced white-haired professor in an academic’s tweed jacket.
Randolph stared at him bleakly. Once Jane Scanwell had been the North American on the Board.
“It’s not economically feasible today,” he replied softly. “But if you’ll provide the funding, it will be possible within a year.”
“One year?”
“Impossible!”
“How can you-”
Malik tapped lightly on the tabletop with his notebook stylus and their voices fell silent.
Randolph smiled tightly at him. “Thank you, Mr. Chairman.”
“Please explain your statement,” Malik said.
“The key to the economic development of space lies in the costs of acquiring the raw materials in the Asteroid Belt. With the metals and organic minerals from the asteroids, the people of Earth will have access to a pool of natural resources that’s far greater than the entire planet Earth ran provide.”
“The people of the Earth?” questioned the representative from Pan Asia. “Or the corporations that reach the asteroids and begin mining them?”
“The people,” Randolph said flatly. “If you provide the funding necessary for this, my corporation will do the work at cost.”
“At cost?”
“No fees whatsoever?”
“At cost,” Randolph repeated.
“We would certainly want our own accountants examining your cost figures,” said the woman representing Black Africa, very seriously.
“Of course,” Randolph replied with a wan smile.
“Wait a moment,” Malik intervened. “Just what would our money be funding? You haven’t told us what you actually propose to do.”
Randolph took a deep breath, then said, “We have to develop a fusion rocket system.”
Again the Board broke into querulous chatter. Malik had to tap his stylus sharply before they fell silent.
“A fusion rocket system?” he asked Randolph.
“We have developed and tested a small flight model of a fusion rocket,” Randolph said. Turning slightly in his chair, he went on, “Dr. Duncan can explain it, if you like. We sent detailed notes to each of you when we applied for this hearing; I’m sure your own technical experts have gone over them.”
Reluctant nods from the Board.
“I can show you a video of the flight tests we’ve done, if you wish.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Malik said.
“The key to any and all operations in space is the cost of transportation,” Randolph said. “The Clipperships that Masterson Aerospace developed have brought down the costs of going into Earth orbit. They opened up the Earth-Moon system for development.”
“And encouraged Selene to thumb its nose at us,” grumbled the representative from Latin America.
“Why do we need fusion rockets?” Malik asked, raising his voice enough to cut off any possible digression into the politics of the lunar nation’s insistence on remaining independent of the GEC.
“Transportation costs,” Randolph answered quickly. “Fusion rockets will cut the trip times and fuel costs for missions to the asteroids down to the point where they can be practical and profitable.”
“Profitable for whom?”
“For the entire human race,” Randolph snapped, looking slightly irked. “As I’ve already said, I’m willing to develop the fusion system and operate expeditions to the Asteroid Belt at cost.”
“Under GEC management?”
Randolph visibly gritted his teeth. “No. That would be a bureaucratic disaster. But I’ll agree to run the show under GEC oversight. You’ll have complete access to our books. That’s fair enough, I think.”
Malik leaned back in his padded chair and allowed the other Board members to grill Randolph. Most of their questions were trivial, or repeated questions already asked and answered. Most of the Board members talked mainly to hear the beloved sound of their own voices, Malik knew.
He had seen the video of Randolph’s flight tests. He had reviewed the technical data on the fusion rocket with the best scientists and engineers in the world. The Duncan Drive worked. There was no technical reason to believe that it would not work in a full-scale interplanetary spacecraft. It would cut the travel time to the Asteroid Belt from years to weeks, or less.
We should fund it, Malik thought. We should back Randolph to the hilt. But we won’t, of course.
“But what’s the fuel for this rocket?” one of the Board members was asking.
Patiently, Randolph replied, “The same as the fuel for the fusion powerplants that generate electricity here on the ground: isotopes of hydrogen and helium.”
“Like the helium-three that’s mined on the Moon?”
“Right.” Randolph nodded.
“That is very expensive fuel,” muttered the representative from Greater India. “Very expensive.”
“A little goes a long way,” Dan said, with a forced smile.
The representative from the League of Islam said irritably, “Selene has raised the price of helium-three twice in the past year. Twice! I have no doubt they are preparing to raise it again.”
“We can get the fuel from space itself,” Dan said, raising his voice slightly.
“From space itself?”
“How?”
“The solar wind blows through interplanetary space. It’s the solar wind that deposits helium-three and hydrogen isotopes on the lunar soil.”
“You mean regolith,” pointed out the representative from United Europe.
“Regolith, right,” Randolph admitted.
“How can you get the fuel from the solar wind?”
“The same way a jet airplane gets air for its engines,” Randolph replied. “We’ll scoop it in as we go.”
Malik saw that the Scottish engineer, sitting off to Randolph’s side, squirmed uncomfortably in his chair.
“Scoop it in? Really?”
“Sure,” Randolph answered. “We’ll use an electromagnetic scoop... a big funnel-shaped magnetic field. That way we’ll be able to scoop in the fuel we need as we travel.”
“How large a scoop will be necessary?”
Randolph made an exaggerated shrug. “That’s for the tech people to work out. For the first missions to the Belt we’ll carry the fusion fuel in tankage, just like other rockets. But eventually we’ll be able to scoop fuel from the solar wind. That’ll allow us to carry an even bigger payload, per unit of thrust.” Turning slightly in his chair, Randolph asked, “Isn’t that right, Lon?”
Duncan, the engineer, looked dubious, but he knew enough to answer, “Right.”
With a glance at his wristwatch, Malik tapped his stylus again on the tabletop and said, “Thank you, Mr. Randolph, for a most interesting presentation.”
Randolph fixed his gray eyes on Malik. The Russian went on, “The Hoard will discuss the question and inform you of its decision.”
“Time is of the essence,” Randolph said.
“We understand that,” said Malik. “But we must have a full and thorough discussion of this concept before we can decide whether or not to commit any funding to it.”
Reluctantly, Randolph got to his feet. “I see. Well, thanks for hearing me out. You have a tremendous opportunity here... and a tremendous responsibility.”
“We are well aware of that,” Malik said. “Thank you again.”
Randolph nodded and headed out of the conference room, followed by the engineer and the blond Californian.
Malik now had to go through the formality of a discussion with the other Board members, but he already knew what the answer would be. He was framing the Board’s reply to Randolph even while Dan was leaving the conference room:
Dear Mr. Randolph: While your proposal to develop a fusion rocket system appears to be technically feasible, the Global Economic Council cannot devote such a significant portion of its resources to what is essentially a space-born venture. GEC funding is fully committed for the next five years to programs aimed at alleviating the effects of global climate shift and assisting national efforts at rebuilding and resettling displaced population groups.
Dan went by tube train from the GEC Board meeting to the spaceport at old Heathrow. He rode a commercial Clippership to space station Galileo, then hitched a ride on a high-thrust Astro transfer buggy to Selene. He was in the offices that Astro Manufacturing rented in Selene by midnight, Greenwich Mean Time, of the day after the GEC meeting.
Duncan and his electronics engineer had gone back to Glasgow, hoping that the GEC Board would find the money to build at least a prototype spacecraft. Dan thought otherwise. He could see it in Malik’s eyes: the GEC isn’t going to spend diddley-squat on us.
Dan pushed through the empty office suite, ceiling lights flicking on as he entered each area and off as he breezed past, paying scant attention to the unoccupied desks and blank holowindows. He reached the private suite where he bunked down while he was in Selene, peeled off his jacket, tossed his travel bag onto the king-sized bed and stepped into the shower, still dressed in his pullover shirt and micromesh slacks. He kicked off his softboots and banged on the water. It came out at the preset temperature. He popped the plugs out of his nostrils and stripped off the rest of his clothes as the hot, steaming water began to ease the knots of tension in his back and shoulders.
It was an old and very personal indulgence of his: long, hot showers. Back when he’d been a kid working on the early construction projects in orbit and then on the Moon, a hot shower was an incredibly rare luxury. He’d had his nose broken for the second time over the right to a long shower. For years, before Moonbase became the independent nation of Selene, lunar shower stalls were rarer than ten-meter high jumps on Earth. Even when you did find an incredibly luxurious living unit with a real shower, back in those days the water shut of automatically after two minutes, and there was no way to get it to turn back on again until a full hour had elapsed.
Even now, Dan thought as he let the hot water sluice over him, being on Selene’s water board carries more real political clout than being a member of the governing council.
He turned off the water at last and let the built-in jets of hot air dry him. Dan preferred old-fashioned towels, but the air blowers were cheaper.
Naked, he crawled into bed and tried to get some sleep. But his mind kept churning with his hopes, his plans, his frustrations.
Yamagata isn’t going to put up any money, he realized. Nobo would have called me by now if he were going to come in with me. He hasn’t called because he’s reluctant to give me the bad news. Malik and the GEC are a lost cause. I shouldn’t even have wasted the time to appear before them, but at least if and when we get this fusion drive going we can say we offered it to the double-damned bureaucrats and they turned us down. So they’ve got no claim on us whatsoever.
Astro’s hanging on by the skin of its teeth, one jump ahead of the bankruptcy courts, and I need to raise a couple of billion to make this fusion system work. Humphries is dangling the money at me, but he’ll want a big slice of Astro in return. I need somebody else. Who can I turn to? Who the hell else is there?
Selene, he realized. They don’t have the capital, but they’ve got trained people, equipment, resources. If I can talk them into coming in with me...
Then it hit him. Bypass Selene’s governing council. Or, at least, end-run them. Douglas Stavenger still outvotes everybody else up here. And Masterson Aerospace is his family’s company. If he’ll go for this, Master-son will get behind it and Selene’s council will fall in step with him.
Doug Stavenger.
He fell asleep thinking about the possibilities. And dreamed of flying past Mars, out to the Asteroid Belt.
“Who’s your boyfriend?” Amanda asked.
She and Pancho were exercising in Selene’s big gymnasium complex, working up a fine sheen of perspiration on the weight machines. Through the long window on one side of the room Pancho could see two men strapped into the centrifuge, both of them grimacing as the big machine’s arms swung round and round, faster and faster. She knew one of the men, a maintenance tech out at the tractor garage, a thoroughly nice guy.
The gym was packed with sweating, grunting, grimacing men and women working the treadmills, stationary bikes, and weight machines. The only faces that didn’t look miserable were the kids; they scampered from one machine to another, laughing, sometimes shrieking so loud the adults growled at them.
Every person in Selene, adult or child, citizen or visitor, had to follow a mandatory exercise regimen or be denied transport back to Earth. The low lunar gravity quickly deconditioned muscles to the point where facing Earth’s gravity became physically hazardous. Daily exercise was the only remedy, but it was boring.
Pancho wore a shapeless T-shirt and faded old shorts to the gym. Amanda dressed as if she were modeling for a fashion photographer: brand-new gym shoes, bright pink fuzzy socks, and a form-fitting leotard that had men tripping over their own feet to gawk at her. Even the women stared openly.
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” Pancho replied, grunting as she pulled on the weighted hand grips. A favorite gambit of tourists was to have a picture taken while lifting a barbell loaded with enormous weights. What looked superhuman to Earth-trained eyes was merely ordinary in the one-sixth gravity of the Moon.
“You’ve gone out to dinner twice since we arrived here, and you’re going out again tonight, aren’t you?” Without waiting for an answer, Amanda added, “I have the impression it’s been with the same fellow each night.”
Mandy was sitting at the machine next to Pancho, doing pectoral crunches, her arms outstretched with her hands gripping the ends of two metal bars. Then she brought her hands together in front of her, pulling the weighted “wings” and thereby strengthening her chest muscles.
The rich get richer, Pancho thought.
“So?” Amanda insisted. “Who’s your fellow?”
“It’s strictly business,” Pancho said.
“Really? And what business would that be, dear?”
Pancho suppressed a sudden urge to sock Mandy in her smirking face.
“Listen,” she said, with some heat, “you go out just about every damned night, don’t you? What’s the matter with me havin’ a date now and then?”
Mandy’s expression softened. “Nothing, Pancho, really. I’m only curious, that’s all. I think it’s fine for you to have an enjoyable social life.”
“Yeah, sure. You’re just wonderin’ who my date could be, ‘cause you’ve got all the other men in Selene sewed up for yourself.”
“Pancho, that’s not true!”
“Like hell.”
“I can’t help it if men are attracted to me! I don’t do anything to encourage them.”
Pancho laughed out loud.
“Really, I don’t.”
“Mandy, all you have to do is breathe and the men swarm around you like flies on horseshit.”
Amanda’s cheeks flushed at Pancho’s deliberate crudity. But then she smiled knowingly. “Well, it is rather fun to flirt. If men want to take me out to dinner, why not? I just bat my eyes at them and let them tell me how terrific they are.”
“And then you bed down with ‘em and everybody’s happy.”
Amanda flared with sudden anger. She started to reply, but stopped before saying a word. For several moments she stared down at her shoe-tops, then at last said in a lower voice, “Is that what you think?”
“It’s the truth, ain’t it?”
“Really, Pancho, I’m not a slut. I don’t sleep with them, you know.”
“You don’t?”
“Well... once in a while. A great while.”
Pancho looked at Amanda, really looked at her, and saw a very beautiful, very young woman trying to make her way in a world where a woman’s physical appearance still categorized her in men’s eyes. Jeez, she thought, Mandy prob’ly has to spend half her life keeping guys’ hands off her. So she just smiles at them and jollies ‘em along and splits before it gets serious. It’s either that or carry a gun, I guess. Or a snake.
“Maybe we could ugly you up,” Pancho muttered.
Amanda smiled ruefully. “That’s what Mr. Randolph said.”
“Huh? Randolph?”
“He told me that if I want to go on the mission with you I’ll have to stop making myself so attractive to the men that go with us.”
Pancho nodded. “We’ve gotta find you some big, bulky sweatshirts. Or maybe keep you in a spacesuit the whole damn trip.”
The two women laughed together. But after a few moments, Amanda asked again, “So tell me, Pancho, who’s your boyfriend?”
Exasperated, Pancho snapped, “You want to meet him? Come on along tonight.”
“Really? Do you mean it?”
“Sure, why not?” Pancho said. “I bet he’d like to meet you.”
Pancho knew that Humphries would go ballistic over Mandy. Good. The man had been pressuring her to find out more about what Dan Randolph was up to. Humphries had been getting downright nasty about it.
Humphries had snarled at her when they’d had dinner, Pancho’s first night back at Selene. The man had seemed cordial enough when he’d ushered her into that big, formal dining room in the house down at Selene’s lowest level. But once he had started asking Pancho what information she had for him, and she had been forced to reply that she had little to report, his mood swiftly changed.
“That’s it? That’s all you’ve got to tell me?” Humphries had snarled.
With a helpless shrug, Pancho had answered, “He’s had us cooped up in La Guaira, studyin’ the fusion system.”
“I’m paying you a small fortune and I’m not getting a damned bit of information from you! Nothing! A big, fat zero!”
It was a pretty dinky fortune, Pancho thought. Still, she had tried to placate the man. “But Mr. Humphries, other than the flight tests with that beat-up ol’ cruise missile, he hasn’t been doin anything.”
“He’s been flitting all around the fucking world,” Humphries had snapped, “from Kyoto to New York to Geneva to London. He’s been talking to bankers and development agencies-even to the GEC, and he hates the GEC!”
Pancho had tried to be reasonable. “Look, I’m just a rocket jockey. I If says he wants me to test-fly the fusion drive once it’s built but it might be years before that happens.”
“So what does he have you doing in the meantime?” Humphries demanded.
Pancho shrugged. “Nothin’ much. He’s sent me and Mandy here to Selene. His personal orders. We’re supposed to be learnin’ about the asteroids out in the Belt. He’s got an astronomer from the Farside Observatory tutoring us.”
Humphries’s expression grew thoughtful. “Maybe he knows you’re working for me. Maybe he’s just put you on ice for the time being, until he figures out how to get rid of you.”
Pancho didn’t want Humphries to think about the possibility that she had told Randolph everything.
“Wouldn’t it be easier for him just to fire me?” she suggested mildly.
“He’s on his way here right now, you know,” Humphries muttered.
“He is?” Pancho couldn’t hide her surprise.
“You don’t even know where he is?”
“I’m not on the mailing list for his personal itinerary,” Pancho retorted.
“Now you listen to me, lady. I got your name to the top of Astro’s personnel list so that Randolph would take you into this fusion rocket program of his. I’m the one who’s gotten you promoted. I want results! I want to know when Randolph goes to the toilet, I want to know when he inhales and when he exhales.”
“Then get yourself another spy,” Pancho had said, trying to hold on to her swooping temper. “Whatever he’s up to, he hasn’t even been on the same continent with me most of the time. I only saw him that once, at the first flight test in Venezuela. You hired the wrong person, Mr. Humphries. You want somebody who can be his mistress, not a pilot.”
Humphries had glared at her over the dinner table. “You’re probably right,” he had muttered. “Still... I want you on the job. It might take a while, but sooner or later he’s going to use you to test-fly the fusion drive. That’s when you’ll become valuable to me. I just hired you too soon, that’s all.”
He made a forced little smile. “My mistake, I guess.”
Puffing and sweating at the weight machine, Pancho thought, Yep, it’s time for Humphries to meet Mandy. That might solve all my problems.
She laughed to herself. What a setup! Humphries sends Mandy after Randolph and she doesn’t know that I’ve already told Randolph I’m supposed to be spyin’ on him for the Humper. And Mandy would go for it, too; she’d love to have Randolph in her bed.
And meantime, she thought, I can be spyin’ on Humphries for Randolph! Whatta they call that? I’ll be a double agent. Yeah, that’s it. A double agent. Terrific.
But what if Humphries drops me altogether once he sees Amanda?
That’s a possibility. Then you won’t be any kind of an agent; you’ll be out in the cold.
Okay, so what? she told herself. So you won’t be getting the extra money from Humphries, came the answer. So you’ll have to maintain Sis on your Astro salary. Yeah, yeah, she argued back. I’ve been doin’ that for years now, I can keep on doin’ it.
Wait a minute, she said to herself. Humphries can’t fire me. If he tried to, he’d be afraid that I’d tell Randolph everything. The Humper has to keep me on his payroll -or get rid of me altogether.
Pancho got off the weight machine and went to the exercise bike. Pedaling furiously, she thought, The trick is not to get fired by both Humphries and Randolph. I don’t want to be left out in the cold. And I don’t want Humphries to start thinkin’ he’d be better off if I happened to get myself killed. No sir!