“You can’t see them, Mr. Randolph.” Dan was startled by Douglas Stavenger’s words. “I was staring, wasn’t I?” he admitted. Stavenger smiled patiently. “Most people do, when they first meet me. But the nanomachines are all safely inside me. You can’t get infected by them.”
The two men were sitting in Stavenger’s spacious office, which looked more like a comfortable sitting room than a business center. Wide windows made up two of the room’s walls. No desk, not even a computer screen in sight; only upholstered chairs and a small sofa off to one side of the room, with a few low tables scattered here and there. Dan had to remind himself that the windows were really transparent, not holoviews. They looked out on Selene’s Grand Plaza, the only public greenspace within nearly half a million kilometers.
Douglas Stavenger’s office was not buried deep underground. It was on the fifteenth floor of one of the three office towers that also served as supports for the huge dome that covered the Grand Plaza. Masterson Aerospace Corporation’s offices took up the entire fifteenth floor of the tower.
Spread out beyond those windows was the six-hundred-meter-long Plaza itself, a grassy expanse with paved footpaths winding through it, flowered shrubbery and even small trees here and there. Dan could see people walking along the paths, stopping at the shopping arcades, playing lunar basketball in the big enclosed cage off by the orchestra shell. Kids were doing fantastically convoluted dives from the thirty-meter platform at one end of the Olympic-sized swimming pool, twisting and somersaulting in dreamlike slow motion before they splashed languidly into the water. A pair of tourists soared past the windows on brilliantly colored plastic wings, flying like birds on their own muscle power in the low lunar gravity.
“It’s a pleasant view, isn’t it?” Stavenger said.
Dan nodded his agreement. While most people on the Moon instinctively wanted to live as deep underground as possible, Stavenger stayed up here, with nothing between him and the dangers of the surface except the reinforced lunar concrete of the Plaza’s dome, and a meter or so of rubble from the regolith that had been strewn over it.
And why not? Dan thought. Stavenger and his family had more or less created the original Moonbase. They had fought a brief little war against the old United Nations to win their independence-and the right to use nanotechnology even though it had been banned on Earth.
Stavenger was filled with nanomachines. Turning his gaze back to him, Dan saw a good-looking young man apparently in his thirties smiling patiently at him. Stavenger wasn’t much bigger than Dan, though he appeared more solidly built. Smooth olive complexion, sparkling blue eyes. Yet Douglas Stavenger was at least his own age, Dan knew, well into his sixties. His body was filled with nanomachines, tiny, virus-sized mechanisms that destroyed invading microbes, kept his skin smooth and young, took apart plaque and fatty deposits in his blood vessels atom by atom and flushed them out of his body.
The nanomachines apparently kept him youthful as well. Far better than any of the rejuvenation therapies that Dan had investigated. There was only one drawback to the nanos: Douglas Stavenger was forbidden to return to Earth. Governments, churches, the media, and the mindless masses feared that nanomachines might somehow get loose and cause unstoppable plagues or, worse, might be turned into new genocidal bioweapons.
So Stavenger was an exile who lived on the Moon, able to see the bright beckoning Earth hanging in the dark lunar sky but eternally prohibited from returning to the world of his birth.
He doesn’t look upset about it, Dan thought, studying Stavenger’s face.
“Whatever they’ve done for you,” he said, “you look very healthy and happy.”
Stavenger laughed softly. “I suppose I’m the healthiest man in the solar system.”
“I suppose you are. Too bad the rest of us can’t have nanos injected into us.”
“You can!” Stavenger blurted. Then he added, “But you wouldn’t be able to go back Earthside.”
Dan nodded. “We can’t even use nanomachines to help rebuild the damage from the flooding and earthquakes. It’s outlawed.”
Stavenger hunched his shoulders in a slight shrug. “You can’t blame them, really. More than ten billion people down there. How many maniacs and would-be dictators among them?”
“Too damned many,” Dan mumbled.
“So you’ll have to rebuild without nanotechnology, I’m afraid. They won’t even allow us to sell them machinery built with nanos; they’re frightened that the machinery is somehow infected by them.”
“I know,” said Dan. Selene built spacecraft of pure diamond out of piles of carbon soot, using nanomachines. But they were allowed no closer to Earth than the space stations in low orbit. Stupid, Dan said to himself. Nothing but ignorant superstition. Yet that was the law, everywhere on Earth.
It also made more jobs for people on Earth, he realized. The spacecraft that Astro used to fly from Earth’s surface into orbit were all made basically the same way Henry Ford would have manufactured them; no nanotechnology allowed. Typical politician’s thinking, Dan thought: bow to the loudest pressure group, keep outmoded industries alive and turn your back on the new opportunities. Even with the greenhouse warming wiping out half Earth’s industrial base, they still think the same old way.
Leaning back in his easy chair, Stavenger said, “I understand you’re trying to raise the capital to develop a fusion drive.”
Dan smiled crookedly at him. “You’re well informed.”
“It doesn’t take a genius,” Stavenger said. “You’ve had talks with Yamagata and most of the major banks.”
“Plus the double-damned GEC.”
Stavenger’s brows rose slightly. “And now you’re talking to me.”
“That I am.”
“What can I do for you, Mr. Randolph?”
“Dan.”
“Dan, okay.”
“You can help me save those ten billion people down there on Earth. They need all the help they can get.”
Stavenger said nothing. He merely sat there, his face serious, waiting for Dan to go on.
“I want to open up the Asteroid Belt,” Dan said. “I want to move as much of Earth’s industrial base into orbit as we can, and we need the re-sources from the Belt to do that.”
Stavenger sighed. “It’s a pretty dream. I believed in it myself, once, but we found that it costs more than it’s worth.”
“Selene’s sent spacecraft to the NEAs,” Dan pointed out.
“Not for many years, Dan. It’s just too expensive. We decided a long time ago that we can live on the resources that the Moon provides. We have to. No asteroids.”
“But with fusion, it becomes economically feasible to extract resources from the NEAs. And even the Belt.”
“Are you certain of that?” Stavenger asked softly.
“Positively,” Dan agreed. “Same situation as the Clipperships. Your Clipperships brought down the cost of going into orbit to the point where it became economically feasible to build space stations and solar power satellites and full-scale factories.”
“They’re not my Clipperships, Dan.”
“Masterson Corporation is your family’s outfit, isn’t it?”
Stavenger shifted uneasily in his chair, his smile fading. “Masterson was founded by my family, true enough. I still own a big slice of its stock, but I’m only the Chairman Emeritus. I’m not really involved in the company’s operations any longer.”
“But they still listen to you.”
The smile returned, but it was more guarded now. “Sometimes,” Stavenger said.
“So how would Masterson like to come in with me on this fusion system? It’ll be a gold mine.”
Stavenger hesitated before replying, “I’ve been told that Humphries Space Systems is backing your fusion program.”
“Martin Humphries has offered to, that’s true,” Dan admitted.
“But you’re not satisfied with his offer?”
“I don’t know if I can trust him. He comes waltzing into my office and drops this fusion deal in my lap. Why? Why didn’t he do it for himself? What’s he want me for?”
“Maybe it’s Astro Manufacturing that he wants,” Stavenger said.
Dan nodded vigorously. “Yep, that’s what scares me. The man has a reputation for being a grabber. He’s built Humphries Space Systems by swallowing up other companies.”
Again Stavenger hesitated. At last he said, “He’s on the verge of acquiring a majority of Masterson’s stock.”
“What?” A jolt of surprise flashed through Dan.
“I’m not supposed to know, really,” Stavenger said. “It’s all been very hush-hush. Humphries is on the verge of buying out two of our biggest shareholders. If he’s successful, he’ll have enough clout to load the board of directors with his own people.”
“Damn,” grumbled Dan. “Double dammit to hell and back.”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to play with Humphries whether you like it or not. In his court.”
Suppressing an urge to get up and pound on the walls, Dan heard himself say, “Maybe not.”
“No?”
“There’s one other possibility.”
“And what might that be?” Stavenger was smiling again, as if he knew precisely where Dan was heading.
“Selene.”
“Ahh,” said Stavenger, leaning back in his cushioned chair. “I thought so.”
“Selene has trained technical personnel and manufacturing facilities. I could bring my fusion people up here and we could build the prototype together.”
“Dan,” said Stavenger gently, “who would pay Selene’s technical personnel? Who would pay for using our facilities?”
“We could share the cost. I can divest a couple of Astro’s operations and raise some cash that way. Selene could donate -”
The expression on Stavenger’s face stopped him. It reminded Dan of the look that his geometry teacher would give him, back in high school, when he went off on the wrong tangent.
“You know something that I don’t,” Dan said.
Stavenger laughed gently. “Not really. You know it, too, but you’re not thinking of it. You’re overlooking the obvious.”
Dan blinked, puzzled.
“You are staring at the solution to your problem,” Stavenger prompted.
“I’m looking at you and you say that I’m-” The light finally dawned in Dan’s mind. “Oh for my sweet old Aunt Sadie! Nanomachines.”
Stavenger nodded. “Nanotechnology can build your fusion engine for you, and do it faster and cheaper than the orthodox way.”
“Nanotechnology,” Dan repeated.
“It would mean your spacecraft could never get any closer to Earth than low orbit.”
“So what?” Dan exclaimed. “The double-damned ship is for deepspace operations. It’ll never touch down on Earth or any other planetary surface.”
“Then you should have no problem,” said Stavenger.
“You mean Selene will back us?”
Very carefully, Stavenger replied, “I believe the governing council will allocate personnel and facilities to demonstrate that a prototype fusion engine can be built by using nanotechnology.”
Dan grinned widely. “Yep, and once the prototype proves out, Selene will have a major new product line to manufacture: fusion drives.”
“And access to the asteroids.”
“Damned right! And any comets that come waltzing by, too.”
“Selene and Astro Manufacturing will be partners,” Stavenger said.
“Partners!” Dan agreed, sticking out his hand. Stavenger gripped it firmly and they shook on the deal.
It had started as a temporary storage section, just off Selene’s small hospital, up by the main airlock and the garage that housed the tractors and other equipment for work on the surface.
Bodies were stored along the blank corridor walls, sealed into protective metal canisters to await transport back to Earth. In earlier days, most of the people who died on the Moon were workers killed in accidents, or visitors who made fatal mistakes while outside on the surface. Hardly anyone died of natural causes until later, when people began settling at Selene to live out their lives.
So the bodies awaiting shipment back Earthside were stored in the corridor between the hospital and the garage, convenient to the tunnel that led to the spaceport.
Eventually, of course, people who had spent their lives on the Moon wanted to be buried there, usually in the farms that provided food and fresh oxygen for the community. But often enough families back Earthside demanded the bodies of their deceased loved ones, despite the deceased’s wishes. Some legal wrangles took years to unravel. So the bodies were put into metal dewars filled with liquid nitrogen, frozen solid at cryogenic temperature while the lawyers argued and ran up their fees.
It took several years for Selene’s governing council to realize that a new trend had started. Cryonics. People were coming to Selene to be declared legally dead, then frozen into suspended animation in the hope that they could one day be cured of the disease that killed them, thawed, and returned to life once more.
Cryonics had been banned in most of the Earth’s nations. The faithful of many religions considered it an affront to God, an attempt to evade the divinely-mandated limits on human lifespan. While rejuvenation therapies could be done in relative secrecy, having one’s body preserved cryonically was difficult to hide. With global warming causing catastrophes all over the world and many nations barely able to feed their populations, attempts to forestall death and elongate lifespan were frowned upon, if not banned altogether.
So those who wanted to avoid death, and had the money to reach the Moon, came to Selene for their final years, or months, or days. Thus the catacombs grew, row upon row of gleaming stainless steel dewars, each filled with liquid nitrogen, each holding a human body that one day might be revived.
Pancho Lane had brought her sister to Selene, back when the teenager had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. Sis was losing her memory, losing control of her body functions, losing her ability to speak or smile or even to think. Pancho had given Sis the final injection herself, had watched her younger sister’s inert body being slid into the cold bloodless canister, watched the medical team seal the dewar and began the long, intricate freezing process, her tears mingling with the cold white mist emanating ghostlike from the hoses.
Six years ago, Pancho thought as she walked slowly along the quiet corridor, looking for her sister’s name on the long rows of metal cylinders resting along the blank stone walls.
She had heard rumors that a few people had actually been revived from cryonic immersion, thawed back to life. And other rumors, darker, that claimed those revived had no memories, no minds at all. They were like blank-brained newborns; they even had to be toilet-trained all over again.
Doesn’t matter, Pancho said to herself as she stopped in front of Sis’s dewar. I’ll raise you all over again. I’ll teach you to walk and talk and laugh and sing. I will, Sis. No matter how long it takes. No matter what it costs. As long as I’m alive, you’re not going to die.
She stared at the small metal nameplate on the dewar’s endcap. SUSAN LANE. That’s all it said. There was a barcode next to her name, all Sis’s vital information in computer-readable form. Not much to show for a human lifetime, even if it was only seventeen years.
Her wristwatch buzzed annoyingly. Brushing at the tears in her eyes, she saw that the watch was telling her she had one hour to get cleaned up and dressed and down to Humphries’s place.
With Amanda.
Mandy wore virginal white, a sleeveless mandarin-collared dress with a mid-thigh skirt that clung lovingly to her curves. She’d done her hair up in the latest piled-high fashion: some stylist’s idea of neoclassical. Pancho had put on her best pantsuit, pearl gray with electric blue trim, almost the same shade of blue as Elly. Next to Amanda, though, she felt like a walking corpse.
She’d phoned Humphries several times to tell him she was bringing Amanda, and gotten the answering machine each time. It wasn’t until she’d been on her way to the catacombs that Humphries had returned her calls, angrily demanding to know who this Amanda Cunningham was and why Pancho wanted to bring her to their meeting.
It was tough holding a reasonable conversation through the wrist-phone, but Pancho finally got across the information that Amanda was going to be her co-pilot on the mission and she’d thought he might be interested in recruiting her to help Pancho’s espionage work.
In the wristphone’s tiny screen it was almost impossible to judge the expression on Humphries’s face, but his tone was clear enough.
“All right,” he said grudgingly. “Bring her along if you think she might be able to help us. No sweat.”
Pancho smiled sweetly and thanked him and clicked the phone off. No sweat, huh? she thought, laughing inwardly. He’ll change his mind once he gets a look at Mandy. He’ll sweat plenty.
Pancho spent the time on the electric stairways to Selene’s lowest level telling Mandy everything she knew about Humphries. Everything except the fact that he’d hired her to spy on Dan Randolph.
“He’s actually a billionaire?” Amanda’s big blue eyes went wider than ever when Pancho described Humphries’s underground palace.
“Humphries Biotech,” Pancho replied. “The Humphries Trust, lord knows what else. You can look him up in the financial nets.”
“And you’re dating him!”
Frowning slightly at her incredulousness, Pancho replied, “I told you, it’s strictly business. He’s... eh, he’s tryin’ to hire me away from Astro.”
“Really?” A suspicious, supercilious tone dripped from the one word.
Pancho grinned at her. “More or less.”
Once they stepped through the airlock-type door and into Humphries’s underground garden, Amanda gasped with awe. “It’s heavenly!”
“Pretty neat,” Pancho agreed.
Humphries was standing at the open door to the house, waiting for them, eying Amanda as they came up the walk.
“Martin Humphries,” Pancho said, as close to a formal introduction as she knew, “I would like you to meet-”
“Ms. Amanda Cunningham,” Humphries said, all smiles. “I looked up your dossier when I got Pancho’s message that you were joining us this evening.”
Pancho nodded, impressed. Humphries can tap into Astro’s personnel files. He must have Dan’s offices honeycombed with snoops.
Humphries took Amanda’s extended hand and bent over it, his lips barely touching her satiny white skin. Amanda looked as if she wanted to faint.
“Come in, ladies,” Humphries said, tucking Amanda’s arm under his own. “Come in and welcome.”
To Pancho’s surprise, Humphries didn’t come on to Amanda. Not obviously, at least. A human butler served aperitifs in the library-cum-bar and Humphries showed off his collection of first editions.
“Pretty rare, some of them,” he boasted mildly. “I keep them here because of the climate control system. Back home in Connecticut it would cost a considerable sum to keep the old family home at a constant temperature and humidity. Here in Selene it comes automatically.”
“Or we breathe vacuum,” Pancho commented. Amanda gave her a knowing look.
The butler showed them to the dining room, where the women sat on either side of Humphries. A pair of squat, flat-topped robots trundled back and forth from the kitchen carrying plates and glasses. Pancho watched intently as the robots’ padded claws gripped the chinaware and crystal. They didn’t drop a thing, although while clearing the salad plates one of them missed Pancho’s dish by a fraction of a millimeter and almost knocked it off the table. Before anyone could react, though, it recovered, grasped the plate firmly and tucked it into its recessed storage section.
“That’s a pretty good optical recognition system they’ve got,” Pancho said.
“I don’t believe it’s optical,” Amanda countered. To Humphries she asked, “Is it?”
“Very sharp, Amanda,” he said, impressed. “Very sharp. The dishes have monomolecular beacons sprayed on their bottoms. The robots sense the microwave signals.”
Pancho lifted up her water tumbler and squinted at its bottom.
“The chip’s too small to see with the naked eye,” Humphries said.
“What powers ‘em?”
“The heat from the food or drink. They have trouble with iced drinks... and your salad.”
Pancho thought it over for half a second. “Dishes pick up residual heat when we handle them, huh?”
“That’s right.”
Pancho smiled as the other robot placed a steaming plate of frogs’ legs before her. Don’t want Humphries to think Mandy’s the only smart one here, she told herself.
All through dinner Humphries was charming, solicitous, all smiles. He paid almost as much attention to Pancho as he did to Amanda, up to the point where he encouraged Mandy to tell them about her early life. She began to talk, hesitantly at first, about growing up in London, winning a scholarship to the International Space University.
“It wasn’t easy,” Amanda said, with almost childlike candor. “All the men seemed to think I was better suited to be a photographer’s model than an astronaut.”
Humphries made a sympathetic murmur. Pancho nodded, understanding all over again that Mandy’s good looks had been as much of a problem for her as an advantage.
“But I made it,” she finished happily, “and here we all are.”
“Good for you,” said Humphries, patting her hand. “I think you’ve done wonderfully well.”
As dessert was being served-fresh fruit from the botanical garden outside with soymilk ice cream-Amanda asked where the lavatory was.
Once she had left the room Pancho leaned closer to Humphries and asked in a lowered voice, “Well, whattaya think?”
He frowned with annoyance. “About what?”
“About Mandy.” She almost added, lunkhead, but stopped herself just in time.
“She’s wonderful,” Humphries said, beaming. “Beautiful but brainy, too. You don’t see that very often.”
Pancho thought, Women don’t let you see their brains very often, not if they can get by on their looks.
Aloud, she asked, “So d’you think she’d be any good cozyin’ up to Dan Randolph?”
“No!” he snapped.
“No?” Pancho was astonished. “Why not?”
“I don’t want her anywhere near Randolph. He’ll seduce her in a hot second.”
Pancho stared at the man. I thought that was the whole idea, she said to herself. Get Mandy into Randolph’s bed. I thought that’s what he’d want.
“She’s much too fine a woman to be used that way,” Humphries added.
Oh, for cryin’ out loud, Pancho realized. He’s fallen for her! This guy who picks up women like paperclips and dumps ‘em when he feels like it, he doesn’t just have the hots for Mandy. He’s fallen in love with her. Just like that!
Dan couldn’t help contrasting in his mind this meeting of Selene’s governing council with the meeting of the GEC’s executive board he’d attended a few weeks earlier in London.
The meeting took place in Selene’s theater, with the council sitting at student’s desks arranged up on the stage in a semi-circle. Just about every seat on the main floor and the balconies was taken, although the box seats on either side of the stage were all empty. Maybe they’ve been roped off for some reason, Dan thought. Must be two thousand people out there, he thought as he peeked out at the audience through the curtains screening the stage’s wings. Just about every voting citizen in Selene’s showed up for this meeting.
As he stood in the wing of the stage, the council members filed past him, taking their seats. For the most part they looked young, vigorous. Six women, five men, none with white hair. A couple of premature baldies among the men; they must be engineers, Dan thought. He knew that membership on the council was a part-time task assigned by lottery; no one was allowed to duck their public service, although they could take time off their regular jobs to attend to their extra duties.
“Nervous?”
Dan turned at the sound of Doug Stavenger’s voice. Smiling, he answered, “When you’ve had to sit through as many board meetings as I have, you don’t get nervous, you just want to get it the hell over with.”
Stavenger patted Dan lightly on the shoulder. “This one will be different from all the others, Dan. It’s more like an old-fashioned New England town meeting than one of your board of directors’ get-togethers.”
Dan agreed with a brief nod. Often in his mind he’d spelled it b-o-re-d meeting. This one would be different, he felt sure.
It was.
Stavenger served as non-voting chairman of the governing council, a largely honorary position. More pomp than circumstance, Dan thought. The chairman stood at the podium set up at one end of the stage, only a few meters from where Dan stood waiting for his turn to speak. The meeting agenda was displayed on a wallscreen along the back of the stage. Dan was dismayed to see that he was last on a list of nine.
The first five items went fairly quickly. The sixth was a new regulation tightening everyone’s water allotment. Several people from the audience shot to their feet to make their opinions heard in no uncertain terms.
One of the council members was chairman of the water board, a chubby, balding, red-faced man wearing the coral-red coveralls of the Tourism Department. The student’s desk at which he sat looked uncomfortably small for him.
“There’s no way around it,” he said, looking flustered. “No matter how efficiently we recycle our water, it’s not a hundred percent and it never will be. The more people we allow in, the less water we have to go around.”
“Then why don’t we shut down tourism,” came an angry voice from the floor.
“Tourism’s down to a trickle anyway,” the water chairman replied. “It’s less than five percent of our problem. Immigration is our big difficulty.”
“Refugees,” someone said in a harsh stage whisper.
“Don’t let ‘em in!” an angry voice snapped.
“You can’t do that!”
“Why the hell not? They made the mess on Earth. Let ‘em stew in their own crap.”
“Can’t we find new sources of water?” a citizen asked.
Stavenger answered from the podium, “Our exploration teams have failed to locate any other than the polar ice fields we’ve been using all along.”
“Bring up a few loads from Earthside,” someone suggested.
“Yeah, and they’ll gouge us for it.”
“But if we need it, what else can we do?”
The audience stirred restlessly. A dozen conversations buzzed through the theater.
The water board chairman raised his voice to be heard over the chatter. “We’re negotiating with the GEC for water shipments, but they want to put one of their own people onto the water board in return.”
“Hell no!”
“Never!”
“Those bastards have been trying to get control of us since day one!”
The audience roared its angry disapproval.
Stavenger, still standing at the podium, pressed his thumb on a button set into its control panel and a painfully loud hooting whistle rang through the theater, silencing the shouters. Dan covered his ears until the shriek died away.
“We’ve got to maintain order here,” Stavenger said in the numbed silence. “Otherwise we’ll never get anywhere.”
Reluctantly, they accepted the fact that water allotments would be decreased slightly. Then the water board chairman held out a potential carrot.
“We’ll have the new recycling system on-line in a few months,” he said, drumming his fingers nervously on his desktop. “If it works as efficiently as the simulations show it should, we can go back to the current water allotments-at least for a year or so.”
“And what happens if this recycling system fails?” asked a stern-faced elderly woman.
“It’s being thoroughly tested,” the water chairman answered defensively.
“This is just a way for the people running the damned hotel to put up their own swimming pool and spa,” grumbled a lanky, longhaired citizen. He looked like a physicist to Dan. “Tourism is down so they want to fancy up the hotel to attract more tourists.”
Dan wondered about that. Tourism is down because the world’s going down the toilet, he thought. Then he admitted, but, yeah, people running tourist facilities will try their damnedest to attract customers, no matter what. What else can they do, except go out of business altogether?
In the end, the council decided to accept the water allotment restrictions until the new recycling system had been in operation for three continuous months. Then they would have a new hearing to decide on whether they could return to the old allotments.
Two more items were swiftly disposed of, then at last Stavenger said, “The final item on our agenda tonight is a proposal by Dan Randolph, head of Astro Manufacturing.” He turned slightly and prompted, “Dan?”
There was some scattered applause as Dan stepped up to the podium. Astro employees, Dan thought. Stavenger moved off-stage.
He gripped the edges of the podium and looked over the crowd. He had no notes, no visual aids. For several moments he merely stood there, thinking hard. The audience began to murmur, whisper.
Dan began, “Halley’s Comet will be returning to the inner solar system in a few years. Last time it came by, Halley’s blew out roughly thirty million tons of water vapor in six months. If I remember the numbers right, the comet lost something like three tons of water per second when it was closest to the Sun.”
He waited a heartbeat, then asked, “Do you think you could use that water?”
“Hell yes!” somebody shouted. Dan grinned when he saw that it was Pancho Lane, sitting up in the first row of the balcony.
“Then let’s go get it!” Dan said.
He spent the next fifteen minutes outlining the fusion rocket system and assuring them that it had performed flawlessly in all its tests to date.
“A fusion-driven spacecraft can bring in all the water you need, either from hydrate-bearing asteroids or from comets,” Dan said. “I need your help to build a full-scale system and flight test it.”
One of the women councilors asked, “Are you asking Selene to fund your corporation? Why can’t you raise the money from the regular sources?”
Dan made himself smile at her. “This project will cost between one and two billion international dollars, Earthside. None of the banks or other funding sources that I’ve approached will risk that kind of money. They’re all fully committed to rebuilding and mitigation programs. They’ve got their hands full with the greenhouse warming; they’re not interested in space projects.”
“Damned flatland idiots,” somebody groused.
“I agree,” Dan said, grinning. “They’re too busy doing what’s urgent to even think about what’s important.”
“Out of all the corporations on Earth,” someone called out, “surely you can make a deal or two to raise the capital you need.”
Dan decided to cut the discussion short. “Listen. I could probably put together a deal that would raise the money we need, but I thought I’d give you a chance to come in on this. It’s the opportunity you’ve been waiting for.”
“Selene doesn’t have that kind of money at its disposal,” said one of the councilmen.
“No,” countered Dan, “but you have the trained people and the facilities to build the fusion rocket with nanomachines.”
A hush fell over the theater. Nanotechnology. They all knew it was possible. And yet...
“Nanomachines aren’t magic wands, Mr. Randolph,” said the councilor seated closest to Dan, a lean, pinch-faced young man who looked like a jogging fanatic.
“I understand that,” said Dan.
“At one time we thought we could develop nanomachines to produce water for us by taking hydrogen from the incoming solar wind and combining it with oxygen from the regolith. It was technically feasible but in practice a complete failure.”
Recognizing the councilman as one who loved the sound of his own voice, Dan said curtly, “If nanomachines can build entire Clipperships they can build fusion drives.”
Another woman councilor, with the bright red hair and porcelain-white complexion of the Irish, spoke up. “I’ve been stuck with the job of treasurer for the council, the thanks I get for being an honest accountant.”
Dan laughed, along with most of the audience.
“But it’s a sad fact that we don’t have the funds to spare on your program, Mr. Randolph, no matter how admirable it may be. The money just isn’t in our hands.”
“I don’t want money,” Dan said.
“Then what?”
“I want volunteers. I need people who are willing to devote their time to the greatest challenge of our age: developing the resources of the entire solar system.”
“Ah, but that boils down to money, now, doesn’t it?”
“No it doesn’t,” said a deep voice from the middle of the theater. Dan saw a squat, heavily-built black man get to his feet.
“I’m Bernie James. I retired from the nanotech lab last year. I’m only a technician, but I’ll work with you on this.”
A few rows farther back, a taller man, blond hair cropped short, got to his feet. “Rolf Uhrquest, Space Transportation Department,” he said, in a clear tenor voice. “I would be willing to take my accumulated vacation time to work on this fusion project.”
Dan smiled at them both. “Thank you.”
“And I believe,” Uhrquest continued, “that Dr. Cardenas would be interested also.” Turning slightly, he called, “Dr. Cardenas, are you here?”
No one answered.
“I will find her,” Uhrquest said, very seriously. “It is a shame she is not present today.”
Dan looked expectantly out at the audience, but no one else stood up. At last he said, “Thank you,” and stepped away from the podium, back into the wings of the stage. Stavenger gave him a quick thumbs-up signal and returned to the podium for the final item on the meeting’s agenda: a request from a retired couple to enlarge their living quarters so they could have enough space to start a new business for themselves.
Once the meeting broke up, Stavenger said, “If Kris Cardenas had been anywhere in Selene I would have introduced you to her. Unfortunately, she’s in a space station in near-Earth orbit, working on developing nanomachines to bring down the costs of the Mars exploration centers.”
“Which station?” Dan asked.
“The one over South America.”
Dan grinned at him. “Nueva Venezuela. I helped build that sucker. Maybe it’s time for me to pay a visit there.”
Pancho watched the safety demonstration very carefully. No matter that she had put on a spacesuit and done EVA work dozens of times; she paid patient attention to every word of the demo. This was going to be on the surface of the Moon, and the differences between orbital EVAs and a moonwalk were enough to worry about.
The tourists in the bus didn’t seem to give a damn. Hell, Pancho thought, if they’re stinky-rich enough to afford a vacation jaunt to the Moon, they must have the attitude that nothing bad’ll happen to them, and if it does they’ll get their lawyers to sue the hell out of everybody between here and Mars.
They had all suited up in the garage at Selene before getting onto the bus. It was easier that way; the bus was way too tight for fourteen tourists to wriggle and squeeze into their spacesuits. They rode out to the Ranger 9 site in the hard-shell suits, their helmets in their laps.
After all these years, Pancho thought, they still haven’t come up with anything better than these hard-shell suits. The science guys keep talking about softsuits and even nanomachine skins, but it’s still nothing more’n talk.
Even the teenagers went quiet once they cleared the garage airlock and drove out onto the cracked, pockmarked surface of Alphonsus. A hundred and eight kilometers across, the crater floor went clear over the horizon. The ringwall mountains looked old and weary, slumped smooth from eons of being sandpapered by the constant infall of meteoric dust. It was the dust that worried Pancho. In orbital space you were floating in vacuum. On the surface of the Moon you had to walk on the powdery regolith, sort of like walking on beach sand. Except that the “sand” billowed up and covered your boots with fine gray dust. Not just your boots, either, Pancho reminded herself. She’d heard tales about lunar dust getting into a suit’s joints and even into the life-support backpack. The dust was electrostatically charged from the incoming solar wind, too, and this made the freaking stuff cling like mad. If it got on your visor it could blind you; try to wipe it off with your gloves and you just smeared it worse.
They’d had some trouble finding Pancho a suit that would fit her comfortably; in the end they had to break out a brand new one, sized long. It smelled new, like pristine plastic. When the bus stopped and the guide told the tourists to put on their helmets, Pancho sort of missed the familiar scents of old sweat and machine oil that permeated the working suits she’d worn. Even the air blowing gently across her face tasted new, unused.
The tour guide and the bus driver both checked out each tourist before they let the visitors climb down from the bus’s hatch onto the lunar regolith. Pancho’s helmet earphones filled with “oohs” and “lookit that!” as, one by one, the tourists stepped onto the ancient ground and kicked up puffs of dust that lingered lazily in the gentle gravity of the Moon.
“Look how bright my footprints are!” someone shouted excitedly.
The guide explained, “That’s because the topmost layer of the ground has been darkened by billions of years of exposure to hard radiation from the Sun and deep space. Your bootprints show the true color of the regolith underneath. Give ‘em a few million years, though, and the prints will turn dark, too.”
For all the years she’d worked in space, Pancho had never been out on a Moonwalk. She found it fascinating, once she cut off the radio frequency that carried the tourists’ inane chatter and listened only to the prerecorded talk that guided visitors to the Ranger 9 site.
To outward appearances she was just another tourist from one of the three busloads that were being shepherded along the precisely-marked paths on the immense floor of Alphonsus. But Pancho knew that Martin Humphries was in one of the other buses, and her reason for being here was to report to him, not to sightsee.
She let the cluster of tourists move on ahead of her while she lingered near the parked buses. The canned tourguide explanation was telling her about the rilles that meandered near the site of the old spacecraft crash: sinuous cracks in the crater floor that sometimes vented out thin, ghostlike clouds of ammonia and methane.
“One of the reasons for locating the original Moonbase in Alphonsus’s ringwall mountains was the hope of utilizing these volatiles for-”
She saw Humphries shuffling toward her, kicking up clouds of dust as if it didn’t matter. It had to be him, she thought, because his spacesuit was different from the ones issued to the tourists. Not different enough to be obvious to the tenderfeet, but Pancho recognized the slightly wider, heavier build of the suit and the tiny servo motors at the joints that helped the wearer move the more massive arms and legs. Extra armor, she thought. He must worry about radiation up here.
Humphries had no name tag plastered to the torso of his suit, and until he was close enough to touch helmets she could not see into his heavily-tinted visor to identify his face. But he walked right up to her, kicking up the dust, until he almost bumped his helmet against hers. She recognized his features through the visor: round and snubby-nosed, like some freckle-faced kid, but with those cold, hard eyes peering at her.
Pancho lifted her left wrist and poised her right hand over the comm keyboard, asking Humphries in pantomime which radio frequency he wanted to use. He held up a gloved hand and she saw that he was holding a coiled wire in it. Slowly, with the deliberate care of a person who was not accustomed to working in a spacesuit, he fitted one end of the wire into the receptacle built into the side of his helmet. He held out the other end. Pancho took it and plugged into her own helmet.
“Okay,” she heard Humphries’s voice, almost as clearly as if they were in a comfortable room, “now we can talk without anyone tapping into our conversation.”
Pancho remembered her childhood, when she and some of the neighborhood kids would create telephone links out of old paper cups and lengths of waxed string. They were using the same principle, linking their helmets with the wire so they could converse without using their suit radios. This’ll work, Pancho thought, as long as we don’t move too far apart. She judged the wire connecting their helmets to be no more than three meters long.
“You worried about eavesdroppers?” she asked Humphries.
“Not especially, but why take a chance you don’t have to?”
That made sense, a little. “Why couldn’t we meet down at your place, like usual?”
“Because it’s not a good idea for you to be seen going down there so often, that’s why,” Humphries replied testily. “How long do you think it would be before Dan Randolph finds out you’re coming to my residence on a regular basis?”
Teasingly, Pancho said, “So he finds out. He’ll just think you’re inviting me to dinner.”
Humphries grunted. Pancho knew that he had invited Amanda to dinner at his home twice since they’d first met. And he’d stopped asking Pancho to report to him down there. Now they met at prearranged times and places: strolling in the Grand Plaza, watching low-gravity ballet in the theater, doing a tourist moonwalk on the crater floor.
Pancho would have shrugged if she hadn’t been encased in the suit. She said to Humphries, “Dan made his pitch to the governing council.”
“I know. And they turned him down.”
“Well, sort of.”
“What do you mean?” he snapped.
“A couple of citizens volunteered to work on Dan’s project. He’s goin’ down to the Venezuela space station to try to get Dr. Cardenas to head up the team.”
“Kristine Cardenas?”
“Yup. She’s the top expert at nanotech,” Pancho said.
“They gave her the Nobel Prize,” Humphries muttered, “before nanotechnology was banned on Earth.”
“That’s the one he’s gonna talk to.”
For several long moments Humphries simply stood there unmoving, not speaking a word. Pancho thought he looked like a statue, with the spacesuit and all.
At length he said, “He wants to use nanomachines to build the rocket. I hadn’t expected that.”
“It’s cheaper. Prob’ly better, too.”
She sensed Humphries nodding inside his helmet. “I should’ve seen it coming. If he can build the system with nanos, he won’t need my financing. The sonofabitch can leave me out in the cold-after I gave him the fusion idea on a silver fucking platter!”
“I don’t think he’d do that.”
“Wouldn’t he?” Humphries was becoming more enraged with every word. “I bring the fusion project to him, I offer to fund the work, but instead he sneaks behind my back to try to raise funding from any other source he can find. And now he’s got a way to build the fucking rocket without me altogether! He’s trying to cut my balls off!”
“But-”
“Shut up, you stupid bitch! I don’t care what you think! That prick bastard Randolph thinks he can screw me out of this! Well, he’s got another think coming! I’ll break his back! I’ll destroy the sonofabitch!”
Humphries yanked the wire out of Pancho’s helmet, then pulled the other end out of his own. He turned and strode back to the bus that had carried him out to the Ranger 9 site, practically boiling up a dust storm with his angry stomping. If he hadn’t been in the heavy spacesuit, Pancho thought, he’d hop two meters off the ground with each step. Prob’ly fall flat on his face.
She watched as he gestured furiously to the bus driver, then clambered aboard the tourist bus. The driver got in after him, closed the hatch, and started off for the garage back at Selene.
Pancho wondered if Humphries would allow the driver to come back out and pick up the other tourists, or would he leave them stranded out here? Well, she thought, they can always squeeze into the other buses.
She decided there was nothing she could do about it, so she might as well enjoy what was left of her outing. As she walked off toward the wreckage of the tiny, primitive Ranger 9, though, she thought that she’d better tell Dan Randolph about this pretty damned quick. Humphries was sore enough to commit murder, it seemed to her.
It was almost like coming home for Dan. Nueva Venezuela had been one of the first big projects for the fledgling Astro Manufacturing Corp., back in the days when Dan had moved his corporate headquarters from Texas to La Guaira and married the daughter of the future president of Venezuela.
The space station had lasted much better than the marriage. Still, the station was old and scuffed-up. As the transfer craft from Selene made its approach, Dan saw that the metal skin of her outer hulls was dulled and pitted from long years of exposure to radiation and mite-sized meteoroids. Here and there bright new sections showed where the maintenance crews were replacing the tired, eroded skin. A facelift, Dan thought, smiling. Well, she’s old enough to need it. They’re probably using cermet panels instead of the aluminum we started with. Lighter, tougher, maybe even cheaper if you consider the length of time they’ll last before they need replacing.
Nueva Venezuela was built of a series of concentric rings. The outermost ring spun at a rate that gave the occupants inside it a feeling of normal Earthly gravity. The two other rings were placed where they would simulate Mars’s one-third g and the Moon’s one-sixth. The docking port at the station’s center was effectively at zero gravity. The tech guys called it microgravity, but Dan always thought of it as zero g.
A great place to make love, Dan remembered. Then he chuckled to himself. Once you get over the heaves. Nearly everybody got nauseous their first few hours in weightlessness.
Dan went through customs swiftly, allowing the inspector to rummage through his one travelbag while he tried to keep himself from making any sudden movements. He could feel his sinuses starting to puff up as the liquids in his body shifted in response to weightlessness. No postnasal drips in zero g, Dan told himself. But you sure can get a beaut of a headache while the fluids build up in your sinuses before you adapt.
The main thing was to make as few head motions as possible. Dan had seen people suddenly erupt with projectile vomiting from merely turning their heads or nodding.
The inspector passed him easily enough and Dan gratefully made his way along the tube corridor that led “down” to the lunar-level wheel.
He dumped his bag in the cubbyhole compartment he’d rented for this visit, then prowled along the sloping corridor that ran through the center of the wheel, checking the numbers on each door.
Dr. Kristine Cardenas’s name was neatly printed on a piece of tape stuck above her door number. Dan rapped once, and opened the door.
It was a small office, hardly enough room for the desk and the two plain plastic chairs in front of it. A good-looking young woman sat at the desk: shoulder-length sandy hair, cornflower blue eyes, broad swimmer’s shoulders. She wore an unadorned jumpsuit of pastel yellow; or maybe it had once been brighter, but had faded after many washings.
“I’m looking for Dr. Cardenas,” said Dan. “She’s expecting me. I’m Dan Randolph.”
The young woman smiled up at him and extended her hand. “I’m Kris Cardenas.”
Dan blinked. “You... you’re much too young to be the Dr. Cardenas.”
She laughed. Motioning Dan to one of the chairs in front of the desk, she said, “I assure you, Mr. Randolph, that I am indeed the Dr. Cardenas.”
Dan looked into those bright blue eyes. “You too, huh? Nanomachines.”
She pursed her lips, then admitted, “It was a temptation I couldn’t resist. Besides, what better way to test what nanotechnology can do than to try it on yourself?”
“Like Pasteur injecting himself with the polio vaccine,” Dan said.
She gave him a sidelong look. “Your grasp of the history of science is a bit off, but you’ve got the basic idea.”
Dan leaned back in the plastic chair. It creaked a little but accommodated itself to his weight. “Maybe I ought to try them, too,” he said.
“If you don’t have any plans to return to Earth,” Cardenas replied, with a sudden sharpness in her voice.
Dan changed the subject. “I understand you’re working with the Mars exploration program.”
She nodded. “Their budget’s being slashed to the bone. Beyond the bone, actually. If we can’t develop nanos to take over the life-support functions at their bases, they’ll have to close up shop and return to Earth.”
“But if they use nanomachines they won’t be allowed to come back home.”
“Only if they use nanomachines in their own bodies,” Cardenas said, raising a finger to emphasize her point. “The IAA has graciously decided they can be allowed to use nanotechnology to maintain and repair their equipment.”
Dan caught the sarcasm in her tone. “I’ll bet the New Morality was thrilled with that decision.”
“They don’t run the entire show. At least, not yet.”
Dan huffed. “Good reason to live off Earth. I’ve always said, When the going gets tough, the tough get going-”
“-to where the going’s easier,” Cardenas finished for him. “Yes, I’ve heard that.”
“I don’t think I’d be able to live off-Earth forever,” Dan said. “I mean... well, that’s home.”
“Not for me,” Cardenas snapped. “Not for a half a dozen of the Martian explorers, either. They’ve accepted nanomachines. They have no intention of returning to Earth.”
Surprised, Dan said, “I didn’t know that.”
“There hasn’t been much publicity about it. The New Morality and their ilk have a pretty tight grip on the news media.”
Dan studied her face for a long, silent moment. Dr. Cardenas was physically youthful, quite attractive, a Nobel laureate, the leader in her chosen field of study. Yet she seemed so indignant.
“Well, anyway,” he said, “I’m grateful that you’ve taken the time to see me. I know you’re busy.”
She broke into a pleased smile. “Your message seemed kind of...” she fished for a word,”... mysterious. It made me wonder why you wanted to see me in person, rather than by phone.”
Dan grinned back at her. “I’ve found that it’s always easier to discuss matters face-to-face. Phones, mail, even VR meetings, they can’t replace person-to-person contact.”
Cardenas’s smile turned knowing. “It’s more difficult for someone to say ‘no’ to your face.”
“You got me,” Dan replied, raising his hands in mock surrender. “I need your help and I didn’t want to tell you about it long-distance.”
She seemed to relax somewhat. Easing back in her chair, she asked, “So what’s so important that you came up here to see me?”
“Down here. I came in from Selene.”
“What’s your problem? I’ve been so wrapped up with this Mars work that I haven’t been keeping up with current events.”
Dan took in a breath, then started, “You know I’m the head of Astro Manufacturing.”
Cardenas nodded.
“I’ve got a small team ready to build a prototype fusion rocket, using nanomachines.”
“A fusion rocket?”
“We’ve tested small models. The system works. Now we need to build a full-scale prototype and test it. We’re planning a mission to the Asteroid Belt, and-”
“Spacecraft have gone to the Belt on ordinary rockets. Why do you need a fusion system?”
“Those were unmanned vehicles. This mission will carry a crew of four, maybe six.”
“To the Asteroid Belt? Why?”
“To start prospecting for the metals and minerals that the people of Earth need,” Dan said.
Cardenas’s face turned stony. Coldly, she asked, “What are you trying to accomplish, Mr. Randolph?”
“I’m trying to save the Earth. I know that sounds pompous, but if we don’t-”
“I see no reason to save the Earth,” Cardenas said flatly.
Dan gaped at her.
“They got themselves into this greenhouse mess. They were warned, but they paid no attention. The politicians, the business leaders, the news media... none of them lifted a finger until it was too late.”
“That’s not entirely true,” Dan said softly, remembering his own struggles to get the world’s leaders to recognize the looming greenhouse cliff before it struck.
“True enough,” Cardenas replied. “And then there’s the New Morality and all those other ultraconservative cults. Why do you want to save them?”
“They’re people,” Dan blurted. “Human beings.”
“Let them sink in their own filth,” Cardenas said, her words dripping acid. “They’ve earned whatever they get.”
“But...” Dan felt completely at sea. “I don’t understand...”
“They exiled me.” She almost snarled the words. “Because I injected nanomachines into my body, they prevented me from returning to Earth. Their fanatics assassinated anyone who spoke in favor of nanotechnology, did you know that?”
Dan shook his head mutely.
“They attacked Moonbase, back before it became Selene. One of their suicide killers blew up Professor Zimmerman in his own lab. And you want me to help them?”
Shocked by her vehemence, Dan mumbled, “But that was years ago...”
“I was there, Mr. Randolph. I saw the mangled bodies. And then, when we won and even the old United Nations had to recognize our independence, those hypocritical ignoramuses passed laws exiling anyone who had accepted nanomachines into her body.”
“I understand that, but-”
“I had a husband,” she went on, blue eyes snapping. “I had two daughters. I have four grandchildren in college that I’ve never touched! Never held them as babies. Never sat down at the same table with them.”
Another woman might have burst into tears, Dan thought. But Cardenas was too furious for that. How the hell can I reach her? he wondered.
She seemed to recover herself. Placing both hands on her desktop, she said more mildly, “I’m sorry for the tirade. But I want you to understand why I’m not particularly interested in helping the people of Earth.”
Dan replied, “Then how about helping the people of Selene?”
Her chin went up a notch. “What do you mean?”
“A working fusion drive can make it economical to mine hydrates from the carbonaceous asteroids. Even scoop water vapor from comets.”
She thought about that for a moment. Then, “Or even scoop fusion fuels from Jupiter, I imagine.”
Dan stared at her. Twelve lords a-leaping, I hadn’t even thought of that. Jupiter’s atmosphere must be loaded with hydrogen and helium isotopes.
Cardenas smiled slightly. “I presume you could make a considerable fortune from all this.”
“I’ve offered to do it at cost.”
Her brows rose. “At cost?”
He hesitated, then admitted, “I want to help the people of Earth. There’s ten billion of them, less the millions who’ve already been killed in the floods and epidemics and famines. They’re not all bad guys.”
Cardenas looked away from him for a moment, then admitted, “No, I suppose they’re not.”
“Your grandchildren are down there.”
“That’s a low blow, Mr. Randolph.”
“Dan.”
“It’s still a low blow, and you know it.”
He smiled at her. “I’m not above a rabbit punch or two if it’ll get the job done.”
She did not smile back. But she said, “I’ll spin this Mars work off to a couple of my students. It’s mostly routine now, anyway. I’ll be back in Selene within the week.”
“Thanks. You’re doing the right thing,” Dan said.
“I’m not as sure of that as you are.”
He got up from his chair. “I guess we’ll just have to see where it all leads.”
“Yes, we will,” she agreed.
Dan shook hands with her again and then left her office. Don’t linger once you get what you want. Never give the other side the chance to reconsider. He had Cardenas’s agreement, no matter that it was reluctant.
Okay, I’ve got the team I need. Duncan and his crew can stay Earth-side. Cardenas will direct the construction job.
Now to confront Humphries.
And he’s madder’n hell,” Pancho finished. Dan nodded somberly as they rode an electric cart through the tunnel from the spaceport to Selene proper. Pancho had been at the spaceport to meet him on his return flight from Nueva Venezuela, looking worried, almost frightened about Humphries. “I guess I’d be ticked off, too,” he said, “if our positions were reversed.”
The two of them were alone in the cart. Dan had deliberately waited until the four other passengers of the transfer ship had gone off toward the city. Then he and Pancho had clambered aboard the next cart. The automated vehicles ran like clockwork along the long, straight tunnel. “What do you want to do?” Pancho asked. Dan grinned at her. “I’ll call him and arrange a meeting.”
“At the O. K. Corral?”
“No,” he said, laughing. “Nothing so grim. It’s time he and I talked about structuring a deal together.”
Frowning, Pancho asked, “Do you really need him now? I mean with the nanotech and all? Can’t you run this show yourself and keep him out of it?”
“I don’t think that would be the smart thing to do,” Dan replied. “After all, he did start me off on this fusion business. If I tried to cut him out altogether he’d have a legitimate gripe.”
“That’s what he expects you to do.”
Dan watched the play of shadows over her face as the cart glided silently along the tunnel. Light and shadow, light and shadow, like watching a speeded-up video of the Sun going across the sky.
“I don’t play the game the same way he does,” he said at last. “And I don’t want this project tied up by lawyers for the next ninety-nine years.” Pancho grunted with distaste. “Lawyers.”
“Humphries brought the fusion project to me because he wants to get into Astro. I know how he works. He figures that he’ll finance the fusion work in exchange for a bloc of Astro’s stock. Then he’ll finagle some more stock, put a couple of his clones on my board of directors, and sooner or later toss me out of my own company.”
“Can he do that?”
“That’s the way he operates. He’s snatched half-a-dozen corporations that way. Right now he’s on the verge of taking over Masterson Aerospace.”
“Masterson?” Pancho looked shocked.
Dan said, “Yep. Half the world drowning and the rest cooking from this double-damned greenhouse, and he’s using it to snatch and grab. He’s a goddamned opportunist. A vampire, sucking the life out of everything he touches.”
“So what are you gonna do?”
“Keep his investment in the fusion project to a minimum,” Dan said. “And keep the fusion project separate and apart from Astro Corporation.”
“Good luck,” she said glumly.
Dan grinned at her. “Hey, don’t look so worried. I’ve been through this kind of thing before. This is what the corporate jungle is all about.”
“Yeah, maybe, but I think he’ll get rough if he doesn’t get his way. Real rough.”
With a brash shrug, Dan replied, “That’s why I keep Big George around.”
“Big George? Who’s he?”
Dan had made his quick trip to Nueva Venezuela without George. He didn’t feel the need for a bodyguard once he was off-Earth. In fact, he hadn’t seen the Aussie since they’d arrived together in Selene for his meeting with Doug Stavenger.
“I’ll have to introduce you to him.”
The cart reached the end of the tunnel and stopped automatically. Dan and Pancho got off; he grabbed his travel-bag and they walked to the customs inspection station. Dan saw that the two uniformed inspectors were still checking the quartet of people who had arrived on his flight. On the other side of the area, by the entrance gate, an elderly couple was saying goodbye to a young family with two children, one of them a tot squirming in her mother’s arms.
“So whattaya want me to tell Humphries?” Pancho asked. “He’ll wanna know how you did with Dr. Cardenas.”
“Tell him the truth. Cardenas is joining the team. She’ll be here in a few days.”
“Should I tell him you want to set up a meeting with him?”
Dan thought it over as they stepped up to the customs desk. “No,” he said at last. “I’ll call him myself as soon as we get down to our quarters.”
Humphries seemed surprised when Dan called him, but he quickly agreed to a meeting the very next morning. He insisted on having the meeting in the Humphries Space System’s suite of offices, up in the same tower on the Grand Plaza that housed Doug Stavenger’s office.
Dan accepted meekly enough, laughing inwardly at Humphries’s gamesmanship. He tried to phone Big George, got only his answering machine, and left a message for George to call him first thing in the morning. Then he undressed, showered, and went to bed.
He dreamed about Jane. They were together on Tetiaroa, completely alone on the tropical atoll beneath a gorgeous star-strewn sky, walking along the lagoon beach while the balmy wind set the palm trees to rustling softly. A slim crescent of a Moon rode past scudding silvery clouds. Jane was wearing a filmy robe, her auburn hair undone and flowing past her shoulders. In the starlight he could see how beautiful she was, how desirable.
But he could not speak a word. Somehow, no matter how hard he tried, no sound would come out of his mouth. This is stupid, Dan raged at himself. How can you tell her you love her if you can’t talk?
The clouds thickened, darkened, blotted out the Moon and stars. Beyond Jane’s shadowy profile Dan could see the ocean stirring, frothing, an enormous tidal wave rising up higher, higher, a mountain of foaming water rushing down on them. He tried to warn her, tried to shout, but the water crashed down on them both with crushing force. He reached for Jane, to hold her, to save her, but she was wrenched out of his arms.
He woke, sitting up and drenched with sweat. His throat felt raw, as if he’d been screaming for hours. He didn’t know where he was. In the darkness of the bedroom all he could see was the green glowing numerals on the digital clock on the night table. He rubbed at his eyes, working hard to remember. Selene. I’m in the company suite in Selene. I’m going to see Humphries first thing in the morning.
And Jane’s dead.
“You’ve been quite a busy fellow,” Humphries said, with obviously false joviality.
Instead of meeting in his personal office, he had invited Dan to a small windowless conference room. Not even holoviews on the walls, only a few paintings and photographs of Martin Humphries with celebrities of various stripes. Dan recognized the current President of the United States, a dour-faced elderly man in black clerical garb, and Vasily Malik of the GEC.
Leaning back relaxedly in the comfortable padded chair, Dan said, “I guess I have been on the go quite a bit since we last met.”
Sitting across the table from Dan, Humphries clasped his hands together atop its gleaming surface. “To tell you the truth, Dan, I get the feeling you’re trying to screw me out of this fusion operation.”
Laughing, Dan said, “I wouldn’t do that, Marty, even if I could.”
Humphries laughed back at him. It seemed more than a little forced to Dan.
“Tell me something,” Dan said. “You didn’t stumble across Duncan by accident, did you?”
Humphries smiled more genuinely. “Not entirely. When I started Humphries Space Systems I went out and backed more than a dozen small, long-shot research groups. I figured that one of them was bound to come through with something. You ought to see some of the kooks I had to deal with!”
“I can imagine,” Dan said, grinning. He’d had his share of earnest zanies trying to convince him of one wild scheme or another over the years.
“I got lucky with Duncan and this fusion rocket,” Humphries went on, looking pleased with himself.
“It was more than luck,” Dan said. “You were damned smart.”
“Maybe,” Humphries agreed. “It only takes one swing to hit a home run.”
“And it doesn’t cost much, either, at the laboratory stage.”
Nodding, Humphries said, “If more people backed basic research we’d get ahead a lot faster.”
“I should’ve done it myself,” Dan admitted.
“Yes, you should have.”
“My mistake.”
“Okay then, where do we stand?” Humphries asked.
“Well... you financed Duncan’s original work.”
“Including the flight tests that you saw,” Humphries pointed out.
Dan nodded. “I’ve been trying to put together the financing for building a full-scale spacecraft and sending a team out to the Belt.”
“I can finance that. I told you I’d put up the money.”
“Yep. But it’d cost me a good chunk of Astro Corporation, wouldn’t it?”
“We can negotiate a reasonable price. It won’t cost you a cent out of pocket.”
“But you’d wind up owning Astro,” Dan said flatly.
Something flashed in Humphries’s eyes for a moment. But he quickly put on a synthetic smile. “How could I take over Astro Manufacturing, Dan? I know you wouldn’t part with more than fifteen-twenty percent of your company.”
“More like five or ten percent,” Dan said.
“Even worse, for me. I’d be a minority stockholder. I wouldn’t even be able to put anybody on the board-except myself, I imagine.”
Dan said, “H’mm.”
Hunching closer, Humphries said, “I hear you’re going the nanotech route.”
“You hear right,” Dan replied. “Dr. Cardenas is returning to Selene to head up the job.”
“I hadn’t thought about using nanomachines. Makes sense.”
“Brings the cost down.”
“Makes my investment smaller,” Humphries said, straight-faced.
Tired of the fencing, Dan said, “Look, here’s the way I see this. We bring Selene in as a third partner. They provide the facilities and nanotech personnel.”
“I thought you were recruiting retirees,” Humphries said.
“Some,” Dan admitted, “but we’ll still need Selene’s active help.”
“So we’ve got a third partner,” Humphries said sullenly.
“I want to form a separate corporation, separate and apart from Astro. We’ll each be one-third owners: you, me, and Selene.”
Humphries sat up straighter. “What’s the matter, Dan, don’t you trust me?”
“Not as far as I can throw the Rock of Gibraltar.”
Another man might have laughed grudgingly. Humphries glared at Dan for a moment, his face reddening. But then he got himself under control and shrugged nonchalantly.
“You don’t want to let me have any Astro stock, do you?”
“Not if I can help it,” Dan said pleasantly.
“But then what are you bringing into this deal? I’ve got the money, Selene’s got the personnel and facilities. What do you offer?”
Dan smiled his widest. “My management skills. After all, I’m the one who came up with the nanotech idea.”
“I thought it was Stavenger’s idea.”
Dan felt his brows hike up. And his respect for Humphries’s sources of information. He didn’t get that from Pancho; I didn’t tell her. Does he have Stavenger’s office bugged? Or infiltrated?
“Tell you what,” said Dan. “Just to show you that I’m not such a suspicious sonofabitch, I’ll chip in five percent of Astro’s stock. Out of my personal holdings.”
“Ten,” Humphries immediately shot back.
“Five”
“Come on, Dan. You can’t get out of\this so cheaply.” Dan looked up at the paneled ceiling, took a deep breath, looked back into Humphries’s icy gray eyes. Finally he said, “Seven.”
“Eight.”
Dan cocked his head slightly, then murmured, “Deal.” Humphries smiled, genuinely this time, and echoed, “Deal.” Each man extended his hand across the table. As they shook hands,
Dan said to himself, Count your fingers after he lets go.
Dan was watching intently as Kris Cardenas manipulated the roller dial with one manicured finger, her eyes riveted on the scanning microscope’s display screen. The image took shape on the screen, blurred, then came into crisp focus.
The picture was grainy, gray on gray, with a slightly greenish cast. Dan could make out a pair of fuel tanks with piping that led to a spherical chamber. On the other side of the sphere was a narrow straight channel that ended in the flared bell of a rocket nozzle.
“It’s the whole assembly!” he blurted.
Cardenas turned toward him with a bright California smile. “Not bad for a month’s work, is it?”
Dan grinned back at her. “Kinda small, though, don’t you think?”
They were alone in the nanotech lab this late at night. The other workstations were empty, all the cubicles dark, the ceiling lights turned down to their dim nighttime setting. Only in the corner where Dan and Cardenas sat on a pair of swivel stools were the overhead lights at their full brightness. The massive gray tubing of the scanning microscope loomed above them both like a hulking robot. Dan marveled inwardly that the big, bulky machine was capable of revealing individual atoms.
Cardenas said, “Size isn’t important right now. It’s the pattern that counts.”
“Swell,” said Dan. “If I want to send a team of bacteria to the Belt, you’ve got the fusion drive all set for them.”
“Don’t be obtuse, Dan.”
“I was trying to be funny.”
Cardenas did not appreciate his humor. Tapping a bright blue-polished fingernail against the microscope’s display screen, she said, “We’ve programmed this set of nanos to understand the pattern of your fusion system: the tankage, the reactor chamber, the MHD channel, and the rocket nozzle.”
“Plus all the plumbing.”
“And the plumbing, yes. Now that they’ve learned the pattern, it’s just a matter of programming them to build the same thing at full scale.”
Dan scratched his chin, then said, “And the full-scale job will be able to handle the necessary pressures and temperatures?”
“Most of it’s built of diamond.”
That wasn’t an answer to his question, Dan realized. Okay, so the virus-sized nanomachines could take individual atoms of carbon from a pile of soot and put them together one by one to build structures with the strength and thermal properties of pure diamond.
“But will that do the job?” he asked Cardenas.
Her lips became a tight line. She was obviously unhappy about something.
“Problem?” Dan asked.
“Not really,” Cardenas said, “But...”
“But what? I’ve got to know, Kris. I’m hanging my cojones out in the breeze on this.”
Raising both hands in a don’t-blame-me gesture, she said, “It’s Dun-can. He refuses to come up here. None of his team will leave Earth.”
Dan had known that Duncan, Vertientes, and the rest of the team had opted to remain Earthside and communicate with Cardenas and her nanotech people electronically.
“You talk to him every day, don’t you?”
“Sure we do. We even have interactive VR sessions, if you can call them interactive.”
Feeling alarmed, Dan asked, “What’s wrong?”
“It’s that damned three-second lag,” Cardenas said. “You can’t really be interactive, you can’t even have a normal conversation when there’s three seconds between your question and their answer every blasted time.”
“Is it actually hindering your work?”
She made a face somewhere between a grimace and a pout. “Not hindering, exactly. It’s just so damned inconvenient! And time-consuming. Sometimes we have to go over a thing two or three times just to be sure we’ve heard them right. It soaks up time and makes everybody edgy.”
Dan thought it over. “Maybe I can talk them into coming up here.”
“I’ve tried to, god knows. Duncan won’t budge. Neither will any of his people. They’re terrified of nanomachines.”
“No!”
“Yes. Even Professor Vertientes. You’d think he’d know better, at his age.”
“They’re scared of nanomachines?”
“They won’t admit it, of course,” said Cardenas. “They say that they might not be allowed to return to Earth if the authorities know that they’ve been working with nanomachines. I think that’s a crock; they’re just plain scared.”
“Maybe not,” Dan said. “Those Earthside bureaucrats get wonky ideas, especially about nanotechnology. I sure haven’t told anybody that I’m dealing with nanomachines.”
Her brows shot up. “But everybody knows-”
“Everybody knows that you and your staff are building a fusion rocket with nanos. As far as the general public is concerned, I don’t come near ‘em. I’m a bigshot tycoon, I don’t get involved in the dirty work. I’ve never even been in your lab.”
Cardenas nodded with newfound understanding. “That’s why you sneak in here late at night.”
“I don’t sneak anywhere,” Dan said, with great dignity. “I’ve never been here. Period.”
She laughed. “Of course.”
“Kris,” he said, more seriously, “I think Duncan and the rest of them have legitimate reasons to be scared of coming up here and working with you. I’m afraid you’re going to have to live with that three-second lag. It’s their safety net.”
Cardenas took a deep breath. “If I have to.”
“You’ve accomplished a helluva lot in just four weeks,” Dan pointed out.
“I suppose that’s true. It’s just... it’d be so much easier if we could all work together under the same roof.”
Smiling gently, Dan said, “I never promised you a rose garden.”
She was about to reply when the door to the corridor banged open, all the way across the mostly-darkened laboratory. Instinctively, Dan started to duck behind the big microscope tube, like a boy hiding from his mother.
Then he recognized the hulking, shaggy, red-bearded figure of Big George Ambrose.
“That you, Dan?” George called as he strode between workstations toward them. “Been lookin’ everywhere for you, y’know.”
Despite his size, George moved gracefully, light on his feet and perfectly at home in the low lunar gravity.
“I’m not here,” Dan growled.
“Right. But if you were, I’d hafta tell you that Pancho Lane’s missin’.”
“Missing?”
“Not in her quarters,” George said as he approached. “Not in any of the Astro offices. Not in the spaceport or the Grand Plaza. Not anyplace I’ve looked. Blyleven’s worried about her.”
Frank Blyleven was chief of Astro’s security department. Dan glanced at Cardenas, then said to George, “She could be in someone else’s quarters, you know.”
George looked surprised at the idea. “Pancho? She doesn’t have a guy and she doesn’t sleep around.”
“I wouldn’t worry-”
“She didn’t show up at the office t’day. She’s never missed an hour of work, let alone a whole day.”
That worried Dan. “Didn’t show up at all?”
“I asked everybody. No Pancho, all day. I been lookin’ for her all night. Nowhere in sight.”
“Did you ask her roommate?”
“Mandy Cunningham? She was out havin’ dinner with Humphries.”
“She should be back by now.”
George made a leering smirk. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
Turning to Cardenas, Dan said, “I’d better look into this. George is right, Pancho’s had her nose to the grindstone ever since she came up here.”
“So maybe she’s taking a little r and r,” Cardenas said, unruffled.
“Maybe,” Dan admitted. But he didn’t think so.
Pancho had spent the entire day being invisible. The night before, she had gone to the Pelican Bar for a little relaxation after another long, grueling day of study and simulation runs in the Astro office complex.
The incongruously-named Pelican Bar had been started by a homesick Floridian who had come to Selene back in the days when the underground community was still known as Moonbase. Hired to be the base’s quartermaster, he had developed a case of hypertension that kept him from returning to Earth until a regime of exercise and medication brought his blood pressure under control.
He took the pills, largely ignored the exercise, and started the bar in his own quarters as a clandestine drinking club for his cronies. Over the years he had grown into a paunchy little barrel of a man, his bald head gleaming under the ceiling fluorescents, a perpetual gap-toothed smile on his fleshy, tattooed face. He often told his patrons that he had found his true calling as a bartender: “A dispenser of cheer and honest advice,” as he put it.
The bar was several levels down from the Grand Plaza, the size of two ordinary living suites, carved out of the lunar rock. And quiet. No music, unless someone wanted to sit at the synthesizer that lay dusty and rarely touched in the farthest, most shadowy corner of the room. The only background noise in the place was the buzz of many conversations. Pelicans were everywhere. A holographic video behind the bar showed them skimming bare centimeters above the placid waters of the Gulf of Mexico against a background of condo towers and beachfront hotels that had long since gone underwater. Photos of pelicans adorned every wall. Statues of pelicans stood at each end of the bar and pelican mobiles hung from the smoothed-rock ceiling. A meter-tall stuffed toy pelican stood by the bartender’s computer, dressed in garish, outlandish
Florida tourist’s garb and peering at the drinkers through square little granny sunglasses.
Pancho liked the Pelican Bar. She much preferred it to the tidy little bistro up in the Grand Plaza where the tourists and executives did their drinking. The Pelican was a sort of home away from home; she came often enough to be considered one of the steady customers, and she usually bought as many rounds as any of the drinkers clustered around the bar.
She exchanged greetings with the other regulars while the owner, working behind the bar as usual, broke away from an intense conversation with a despondent-looking little redhead to waddle down the bar and pour Pancho her favorite, a margarita with real lime from Selene’s hydroponics fruit orchard.
Although a set of booths lined the back wall, there were no stools at the bar itself. You did your drinking standing up, and when you could no longer stand your buddies took you home. House rules.
Pancho had wedged herself into the crowd in between a total stranger and a retired engineer she knew only as a fellow Pelican patron whose parents had hung the unlikely name of Isaac Walton around his neck. The word was he had originally come to the Moon to get away from jokes about fishing.
Walton’s face always seemed slightly askew; one side of it did not quite match the other. Even his graying hair seemed thicker on one side than the other. Normally a happy drinker, he looked morose as he leaned both elbows on the bar and stared into his tall, frosted drink.
“Hi, Ike,” Pancho said brightly. “Why the long face?”
“Anniversary,” Walton mumbled.
“So where’s your wife?”
He gave Pancho a bleary look. “Not my wedding anniversary.”
“Then what?”
Walton stood up a little straighter. He was about Pancho’s height, stringy and loose-jointed. “The eighth anniversary of my being awarded the Selene Achievement Prize.”
“Achievement Prize?” she asked. “What’s that?”
The bartender broke into their conversation. “Hey, Ike, don’t you think you’ve had enough for one night?”
Walton nodded solemnly. “Yup. You’re right.”
“So why don’t you go home to your wife,” the bartender suggested.
Pancho heard something more than friendliness in his tone, an undercurrent of-jeeps, she thought, he almost sounds like a cop.
“You’re right, pal. Absolutely right. I’m going home. Whatta I owe you?”
The bartender waved a meaty hand in the air. “Forget it. Anniversary present.”
“Thank you very much.” Turning to Pancho, he said, “You wanna walk me home?”
She glanced at the bartender, who still looked unusually grim, then shrugged and said, “Sure, Ike. I’ll walk you home.”
He wasn’t as unsteady on his feet as Pancho had thought he’d be. Once outside the bar Walton seemed more depressed than drunk. Yet he nodded or said hello to everyone they passed.
“What’s the Achievement Prize?” Pancho asked as they walked down the corridor.
“Kind of a secret.”
“Oh.”
“I did the impossible for them, y’see, but I did it too late to be of any use and they don’t want anybody to know about it so they gave me the prize as hush money and told me to keep my trap shut.”
Confused, Pancho asked, “About what?”
For the first time that evening, Walton broke into a smile. “My cloak of invisibility,” he answered.
Little by little Pancho wormed the story out of him. Walton had been working with Professor Zimmerman, the nanotech genius, when the old U. N. had sent Peacekeeper troops to seize Moonbase.
“Stavenger was in a sweat to develop nonlethal weapons so we could defend ourselves against the Peacekeepers when they got here without killing any of them,” Walton said, growing steadier and gloomier with each step along the corridor. “Zimmerman promised Stavenger he’d come up with a way to make our guys invisible, but the bastards killed him when they attacked. Suicide bomber got down to his lab and blew the old man to smithereens.”
“Himself, too?” Pancho asked.
“I did say ‘suicide, ‘ didn’t I? Anyway, the so-called war ended pretty quick and we got our independence. That’s when we changed the name from Moonbase to Selene.”
“I know.”
“For a while there I didn’t have anything to do. I’d been Zimmerman’s assistant and now the old man was gone.”
Walton had doggedly kept working on Zimmerman’s idea of finding a method for making a person invisible. And eventually he succeeded.
“But who needs to be invisible?” Walton asked. Before Pancho could answer he went on, “Only somebody who’s up to no damn good, that’s who. Spies. Assassins. Crooks. Thieves.”
Selene’s governing council decided to mothball Walton’s invention. Bury it so that no one would even know it existed.
“So they gave me the big fat prize to keep me quiet. It’s a pension, really. I can live in comfort-as long as I stay in Selene and keep my mouth shut.”
“Sounds cool to me,” Pancho said, trying to cheer him up.
But Walton shook his head. “You don’t understand, Pancho. I’m a freaking genius and nobody knows it. I’ve made a terrific invention and it’s useless. I’m not even supposed to mention it to anybody.”
Pancho said, “Aren’t you taking a chance, talking to me about it?”
He gave her a sidelong glance. “Aw, hell, Pancho, I hadda tell somebody tonight or bust. And I can trust you, can’t I? You’re not gonna steal it and go out and assassinate anybody, are you?”
“ ‘Course not,” Pancho answered immediately. But she was thinking that it might be a hoot to be invisible now and then.
“Wanna see it?” Walton asked.
“The invisibility dingus?”
“Yeah.”
“If it’s invisible, how can I see it?”
Walton broke into a cackle of laughter. Clapping Pancho on the back, he said, “That’s what I like about you, Pancho ol’ pal. You’re okay, with a capital oke.”
Walton turned down the next cross-corridor and led Pancho up to the level just below the Grand Plaza, where most of Selene’s life-support machinery chugged away, purifying the air, recycling the water, rectifying the electrical current coming in from the solar farms. Pumps clattered. The air hummed and crackled. The ceilings of these chambers were rough, unfinished rock. Pancho knew that on their other side was either the manicured lawn of the Grand Plaza or the raw regolith of the
Moon’s surface itself. And along a corridor not far from where they walked lay the catacombs.
“Isn’t the dingus under lock and key?” Pancho asked as Walton led her past a long row of metal lockers.
“They don’t even know it exists. They think I destroyed it when they gave me their lousy prize. Destroy it, hell! I’ll never destroy it. It’s the only one in the whole wide solar system.”
“Wow.”
He nodded absently. “And it’s not a ‘dingus’, it’s a stealth suit.”
“Stealth suit,” Pancho echoed.
“Like a wetsuit, covers you from head to toe,” he explained in a hushed voice, as if afraid someone would hear him. Pancho strained to listen to him over the background hum and chatter of the machinery.
Pancho followed Walton down the long row of metal lockers. The corridor smelled dusty, unused. The overhead lights were spaced so far apart that there were shadowy pools of darkness every few meters. Walton stopped in front of a locker identified by a serial number. Pancho saw that it had an electronic security lock.
Feeling uneasy, Pancho asked, “Don’t they have any guards patrolling up here?”
“Nah. What for? There’s cameras at the other end of the corridor, but this old tunnel’s like an attic. People store junk up here, personal stuff they don’t have room for down in their quarters.”
Walton tapped out the security code on the electronic lock and pulled the metal door open. It squealed slightly, as if complaining.
“There it is,” he said in a hushed voice.
Hanging inside the locker was a limp bodysuit, deep black.
“Ain’t she a beauty?” Walton said as he carefully, lovingly, took the suit from the locker and held it up by its hanger for Pancho to admire.
“Looks almost like a wetsuit,” Pancho said, wondering how it could make someone invisible. It glittered darkly in the feeble light from the overhead fluorescents, as if spangled with sequins made of onyx.
“The suit’s covered with nanocameras and projectors, only a couple of molecules thick. Drove me nuts getting ‘em to work right, lemme tell you. I earned that prize money.”
“Uh-huh,” Pancho said, fingering one of the gloved sleeves. The fabric felt soft, pliable, yet somehow almost gritty, like grains of sand.
“The cameras pick up the scenery around you,” Walton was explaining. “The projectors display it. Somebody standing in front of you sees what’s behind you. Somebody on your left sees what’s on your right. Just like they’re looking through you. To all intents and purposes you’re invisible.”
“It really works?” she asked.
“Computer built into the belt controls it,” Walton said. “Batteries are probably flat, but I can charge ‘em up easy enough.” He pointed to a set of electrical outlets on the smoothed-rock wall of the corridor, opposite the lockers.
“But it really works?” she repeated.
He smiled like a proud father. “Want to try it on?”
Grinning back at him, Pancho said, “Sure!”
While Pancho wriggled into the snug-fitting suit Walton plugged the two palm-sized batteries into the nearby electrical outlet. By the time she had pulled on the gloves and fitted the hood over her head, he was snapping the fully-charged batteries into their slots on the suit’s waist.
“Okay,” Walton said, looking her over carefully. “Now pull the face mask down and seal it to the hood.”
Narrow goggles covered Pancho’s eyes. “I must look like a terrorist, Ike,” she muttered, the fabric of the mask’s lining tickling her lips.
“In a minute you won’t look like anything at all,” he said. “Unlatch the safety cover on your belt and press the pressure switch.”
Pancho popped the tiny plastic cover and touched the switch beneath it. “Okay, now what?” she asked.
“Give it fifteen seconds.”
Pancho waited. “So?”
With a lopsided grin, Walton said, “Hold your hand up in front of your face.”
Pancho lifted her arm. A pang of shock bolted through her. “I can’t see it!”
“Damn right you can’t. You’re invisible.”
“I am?”
“Can you see yourself?”
Pancho couldn’t. Arms, legs, booted feet: she could feel them as normally as always but could not see them.
“You got a full-length mirror in your locker?” she asked excitedly.
“Why the hell would I have a full-length mirror in there?”
“I want to see what I look like!”
“Cripes, Pancho, you don’t look like anything. You’re completely invisible.”
Pancho laughed excitedly. She made up her mind at that moment to borrow Ike’s stealth suit. Without telling him about it, of course.
Covered from head to toes in the stealth suit, Pancho crept slowly, silently along the corridor of Martin Humphries’s palatial underground house. She had come down to the mansion with Amanda, although Mandy didn’t know it. For weeks Pancho had been dying to root around in Humphries’s mansion. The man was so stinky rich, so ruthlessly powerful and sure of himself, Pancho figured that there must be plenty of dirt under his fingernails. Maybe she could find something that would help Dan. Maybe she could find something that would profit her. Or maybe, she thought, burglarizing Humphries’s house would just be a hoot, a refreshing break from the endless hours of study that she and Mandy were grinding through. Besides, it’d be fun to wipe that smug smile off the Humper’s face.
So she had borrowed the stealth suit from Walton’s locker the very next morning after he’d shown it to her. Pancho had gone to bed that night arguing with herself over whether or not she should ask Ike’s permission to use the suit. She had awakened firmly convinced that the less Ike knew the better off each of them would be. So, with a tote bag swinging from her shoulder, she’d gone to the catacombs instead of to work with Mandy, then detoured to the dusty, seldom-used corridor where Walton had stashed the suit. She remembered the singsong of the locker’s electronic security code and tapped it out without a flaw.
With a glance at the tiny red eye of the security camera on the ceiling at the far end of the corridor, Pancho quickly bundled the suit into her tote bag. Security people can’t watch every screen every minute, she told herself. Besides, even if one of em’s watchin’, I ain’t doin’ anything to rouse an alarm.
Pancho then went back to her quarters. Amanda was busily at work in the simulations lab; Pancho had the apartment to herself. Immediately she started putting on the stealth suit.
Once she got it on-and saw in the bedroom’s full-length mirror that she was truly invisible -she went out to test the suit. It worked wonderfully well. Pancho walked slowly, carefully, through Selene’s corridors, threading her way through the pedestrian traffic. Now and then someone would glance her way, as if they’d seen something out of the corner of their eyes. A stray reflection from the overhead lights, Pancho thought, an unavoidable momentary glitter off the array of nanocameras and projectors. But no one really saw her; she drifted through the crowds like an unseen phantom.
She spent the day wandering ghostlike through Selene, gaining confidence in the suit and her ability to use it. The suit fit her snugly, but the boots attached to its leggings were Ike’s size, not her own. Pancho had solved that problem by wadding stockings into the boots. They weren’t exactly comfortable, but she could walk in them well enough.
For kicks she lifted a soyburger from the counter of the fast-food cafeteria up in the Grand Plaza when no one was working the place except a dumbass robot. She immediately realized, though, that if anyone saw a soyburger floating in midair it would cause a fuss, so she dropped it into the recycler at the end of the counter before anyone noticed her.
By mid-afternoon Pancho returned briefly to her quarters, took off the suit, and dashed out for a quick meal. She was famished. Being invisible makes you hungry, she joked to herself. By the time Amanda returned from her day’s work and began dressing for her dinner with Martin Humphries, Pancho was back in the stealth suit, standing quietly in a corner of the bedroom, waiting for Amanda to finish her damned primping and go out.
A cloak of invisibility, Pancho thought as she rode the escalators a few steps ahead of Amanda, down to Selene’s bottom layer. What did they call those fancy suits the toreadors wear? A suit of lights, she remembered. Well, I’m wearing a suit of darkness. A cloak of invisibility.
She had to keep her distance from everyone. If somebody jostled into her they’d know she was there, invisible or not. Pancho felt glad that Selene did not allow pets. A dog would probably have sniffed her out easily.
The escalators got less and less crowded as she went down level after level. By the time she was riding down to the last level, she and Amanda were alone on the moving stairs. Once at the bottom, she waited for Amanda, then fell into step behind her. Mandy was heading for a private little dinner with Humphries. Just the two of them, they thought. Pancho smiled to herself. If the Humper tries anything Mandy doesn’t like, I’ll coldcock him. I’ll be her guardian angel. Then she wondered just how far Mandy was willing to go with Humphries-and how far she could tease him without getting herself into real trouble. Well, she shrugged to herself, Mandy’s a grownup, she knows what she’s doing. Or she ought to.
Mandy looked like a princess in a fairy tale, wearing a short-sleeved frock of baby blue with a knee-length fringed skirt. Modest enough, Pancho thought, although on Mandy nothing could look really modest. Not in the eyes of a man like Humphries, anyway. Pancho couldn’t recall seeing the dress before; Mandy must have bought it in one of Selene’s shops. Everything cost a fortune there, except for stuff actually made on the Moon. Is Humphries buying her clothes? Pancho wondered. He hadn’t given Mandy any jewelry, she was sure of that. Mandy would have showed it off if he had.
Amanda walked purposively down the length of the corridor and into the grotto that housed the Humphries Trust research garden and house. Humphries was at the front door to greet her, all smiles. Pancho slipped in behind her, nearly brushing Humphries’s hand as he pulled the door shut. If the Humper felt anything, he didn’t show it. Pancho was in the house and he didn’t know it.
As Humphries guided Amanda off to the bar, Pancho stood stock-still in the foyer. A man like Humphries would have a state-of-the-art security system in his home, she reasoned. No matter that the house was in Selene; Humphries would insist on topflight security. He might give the human staff the night off for his dates, but he wouldn’t turn off his alarm systems. Motion sensors were her big worry. Humphries obviously wouldn’t have any working in the residential wing of the house. But the offices would be another thing altogether. She could see the long, spacious living room and the corridor that led to the formal dining room and, beyond it, the library/bar. That was the direction Humphries and Amanda had gone.
On the other side of the foyer was a single closed door. Pancho guessed that it opened onto the suite of offices and laboratories that the ecologists used. Would he have motion sensors set up in there? Probably not, she thought, but if he did...
There must be a central control for the security system. Most likely in Humphries’s own bedroom or his office. His bedroom? Pancho grinned at the thought. That’s one room in the house where he’d have any motion sensors definitely turned off!
Slowly, on tiptoes despite the thick carpeting, Pancho made her way up to the second floor. The master bedroom was easy to find: beautifully-carved double doors at the end of the hallway. She eased the door open. No sirens, no hooting klaxons. Could be silent alarms, she told herself, but if he’s dismissed the servants for the night he’ll have to come up here his own self, and I can handle that, easy.
The room was sumptuous, and Humphries’s bed was enormous, like a tennis court. That bed could handle a whole squad of cheerleaders, she thought. Prob’ly has, Pancho told herself.
Through a half-open door she saw a desktop computer, its screen saver showing some old master’s painting of a nude woman. As Pancho cautiously approached the door and eased it all the way open, the screen’s image dissolved into another painting of another nude. Huh! she grunted. Some art lover.
Pancho sat at the desk and saw that the computer had a keyboard attached to it. Tentatively, she pecked at the ENTER key. The artwork vanished, and a honey-warm woman’s voice said, “Good evening, Mr. Humphries. The time is eight-twelve and I’m ready to go to work anytime you are.”
Frowning, Pancho turned the audio down to zero. The screen displayed a menu of options. Hell, he doesn’t have any protection on his programs at all. She pictured Humphries at his computer, too impatient to deal with code words and security safeguards. After all, who’d have the balls to break into his home, his own bedroom?
Grinning from ear to ear, Pancho delved into Martin Humphries’s computer files.
It turned out that most of the individual file names were indeed coded and incomprehensible to her. So he does have some security built into his programs, she realized. Many of the files required special keywords. One, though, was labelled BED. Curious, Pancho called it up. The screen went blank, except for the words INITIATING HOLOTANK. An eye-blink later the screen announced STARTING HOLOTANK. Then the screen went to a blank gray, except for a bar across its bottom that bore video commands.
Puzzled, Pancho saw a blur of color reflected off the blanked screen. Turning slightly in the desk chair, she saw that what had appeared to be a cylindrical glass objet d’art had metamorphosed into a hologram, a full-color three-dimensional moving picture of Humphries naked in bed with some woman.
Son of a bitch, Pancho said to herself. He vids his own sex life. She watched for a few moments. They weren’t doing anything that unusual, or thrilling, for that matter, so Pancho touched the fast-forward button on the screen.
It was downright funny watching Humphries and his women in fast-forward. He’s a Humper, all right, Pancho thought as she watched a succession of beautiful naked women performing arduously with him. She recognized the redhead from her first visit to the house. I wonder if they know they’re being videoed, she asked herself.
After a half-dozen of Humphries’s home videos, Pancho got a little bored. She cut the program and returned to the screen’s menu of options, but she had new respect for the program labelled VR - PERSONAL. She looked into just one of its files for a few minutes, then angrily clicked it off, revolted.
The nasty S. O. B. uses his bedmates as models for his virtual reality fantasies, she realized. What he can’t get them to do in real life he has them doing in his VR wet dreams. Creep!
With a disgusted shake of her head she decided to leave Humphries’s sex life alone and started hacking into the other files.
When she glanced at the digital clock in the corner of the screen, Pancho was shocked to realize that nearly two hours had elapsed. It had been a fruitful time, though. The Humphries Trust was now paying the rent on Susan Lane’s cryonic storage unit, a big burden off Pancho’s shoulders and a picayune pinprick in the Trust’s multibillion funds.
Most of the files were incomprehensible to Pancho; some were technobabble and equations, lots of them were stock manipulations and business deals encoded in so much jargon and legalese that it would take a team of lawyers to decipher them. But now they all contained a new subroutine that allowed Pancho to tap into the files from a remote site. Codeword: Hackensack. Which was just what Pancho was preparing to do.
Got to be careful, though, she warned herself. Don’t get greedy enough for him to recognize he’s being hacked. A man like Humphries’ll have you slapped into the slammer so fast it’ll break the sound barrier. Or he’ll just have somebody pay you a visit and rip out your arms.
Satisfied with her work, Pancho closed down the computer and left Humphries’s office, careful to leave the door ajar just the way she’d found it. As she made her way downstairs, she wondered if Mandy and Humphries were still at dinner, after all this time.
They were. Peeking in on the dining room, Pancho saw the remains of some fancy dessert melting in their dishes, and half-empty flutes of champagne sparkling in the subdued light from the crystal chandelier above the table.
Mandy was saying, “... it’s certainly beautiful, Martin, and I appreciate your thoughtfulness, but I can’t accept it. Really, I can’t.”
Pancho crept closer, staring. Humphries held an open jewelry case in one hand. It contained a stunning sapphire necklace.
“I got it specially for you,” he was saying, his voice almost pleading. “Martin, you’re a dear man, but I can’t get myself involved in a relationship now. You of all people should understand that.”
“But I don’t understand,” he said.
“Why not?”
“I’ll be heading off on the mission in a few months. I might never come back.”
“All the more reason to grab whatever happiness we can now, while we can.”
Amanda looked genuinely distressed. Shaking her head, she said, “I simply can’t, Martin. I can’t.”
In a gentle whisper he said, “I could have you removed from the mission. I could see to it that you stay here, with me.”ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ “No. Please...”
“I could,” he repeated, stronger. “By god, that’s what I’ll do.”
“But I don’t want you to,” Amanda said, alarmed. “You don’t have to go through with it,” Humphries insisted. “I know it’s dangerous. I had no idea that you’re afraid of-”
“Afraid!” Mandy snapped. “I’m not afraid! Simply because I understand the risks involved does not mean that I’m afraid.”
Humphries puffed out an exasperated breath. “Then you’re using the mission as an excuse to keep your distance from me, is that it?”
“No!” Amanda said. “That’s not it at all. I simply...” Her voice trailed off into silence.
“Then what’s wrong?” Humphries asked. “What’s the problem? Is it me?”
She stared down at the table for a long, miserable, silent moment. Pancho thought she saw tears glistening in Mandy’s eyes. The expression on Humphries’s face was somewhere between bafflement and anger.
“Martin, please,” Amanda said at last. “We’ve only known each other for a few weeks. You’re a very wonderful man in many ways, but I’m not ready for a meaningful relationship. Not now. Not with this mission coming up. Perhaps afterward, when I return, perhaps then.”
Humphries pulled in a deep breath. It seemed obvious to Pancho that he was trying to control his temper.
“I’m not a patient man,” he said, his voice low. “I’m not accustomed to waiting.”
No, Pancho thought. What you’re accustomed to is taking your women up to your bedroom and videoing the whole thing for playback. And then VR games.
“Please bear with me, Martin,” Amanda whispered, her voice husky with tears. “Please.”
If he tries to get rough with Mandy, Pancho told herself, I’ll kick his balls into next week. She wished she’d brought Elly, but the stealth suit was too confining for the snake; she’d left Elly back at her quarters.
Humphries snapped the jewelry case shut with a click that sounded like a gunshot.
“All right,” he said tightly. “I’ll wait. I wish I’d never started this fusion business.”
Amanda made a sad smile. “But then we’d never have met, would we?”
He conceded the point with a hopeless shrug, then got up and led Amanda to the front door of the house.
“Will I see you again?” he asked as he opened the door for her.
“It might be best if we don’t, Martin. Not until after I return.”
He nodded, grim-faced. Then he grasped both her wrists and said, “I love you, Amanda. I really do.”
“I know,” she said, and kissed him swiftly, lightly, on the cheek.
She hurried down the walk away from him so quickly that Pancho almost didn’t make it through the door before Humphries slammed it shut.
Pancho had to sprint up the escalators to get back to the quarters she shared with Amanda before Mandy did. Twice she nearly stumbled and fell; it wasn’t easy to run up moving stairs when you can’t see your own feet.
It was late enough that the corridors were not crowded. Pancho easily dodged around the few people still up and about, leaving a couple of them bewildered as she brushed past them; they felt certain that someone had just rushed by, yet there was no one in sight. She got to their quarters well ahead of Amanda, powered down the stealth suit as soon as she slid the door shut behind her, stripped to her skivvies, and stuffed the suit under her bed. Elly was snoozing comfortably in her plastic cage, actually a box that still smelled faintly of the strawberries it had carried from China to Selene. Pancho had packed it with several centimeters of gritty regolith dirt, stuck in an artificial cactus, and kept a saucer of water in it for Elly’s comfort.
She was kneeling beside the plastic box, pouring fresh water into the saucer when Amanda came in.
Pancho looked up at her roommate. Mandy’s eyes were red, as if she’d been crying.
“How’d your date go?” she asked, innocently. Looking troubled, Amanda said, “Oh, Pancho, I think he wants to marry me.”
Pancho got to her feet. “He’s not the marrying kind.”
“He’s been married. Twice.”
“That’s what I mean.”
Amanda sat on her bed. “He... he’s different from any other man I’ve ever met.”
“Yeah. He’s got more money.”
“No, it isn’t that,” Amanda replied. “He’s...” She searched for a word.
“Horny?” Pancho suggested.
Amanda frowned at her. “He’s powerful. There’s something in his eyes... he almost frightens me.”
Thinking about Humphries’s home videos, Pancho nodded.
“I can’t see him again. I simply can’t.”
She sounded to Pancho as if she were trying to convince herself.
“He’s so accustomed to getting whatever he wants,” Amanda said, more to herself than Pancho. “He doesn’t like being turned away, rejected.”
“Nobody does, Mandy.”
“But he...” Again her words faltered. “Pancho, with other men I could smile and flirt and let it go at that. But Martin won’t be satisfied with that. He wants what he wants, and if he doesn’t get it he can be... I just don’t know what he’d do, but he frightens me.”
“You think he wants to marry you?”
“He said he loves me.”
“Aw hell, Mandy, guys have said that to me, too. All they want is to get into your pants.”
“I think he really believes that he loves me.”
“That’s a strange way to put it.”
“Pancho, I can’t see him again. There’s no telling what he might do. I’ve got to stay away from him.”
Pancho thought that Amanda looked scared. And she’s got plenty to be scared of, she told herself.
First thing the following morning, Pancho phoned Dan Randolph and asked to meet with him. One of Randolph’s assistants, the big beefy-faced guy with the sweet tenor voice, said he’d call her back. In five minutes, he did. Randolph would see her in his office at ten-fifteen.
Astro Corporation’s offices were just down the corridor from the living quarters that the company rented. In most corporations, executive country was conspicuously more luxurious than the regular troops’ territory. Not so at Astro. There was no discernible difference along the length of the corridor. As she walked along the row of doors, looking for Randolph’s name, Pancho decided that she wouldn’t tell him about the stealth suit. She’d returned it first thing that morning to Walton’s locker. Ike knew nothing of her borrowing the suit; if there was any bad fallout, he couldn’t be blamed for anything.
Randolph looked tense when Pancho was ushered into his office by the big Aussie she’d talked to on the phone.
“Hi, boss,” she said brightly.
It was a small office, considering it belonged to the head of a major corporation. There was a desk in one corner, but Randolph was standing by the sofa and cushioned chairs arranged around a coffee table on the opposite side of the room. Pancho saw that the walls were decorated with photos of Astro rockets launching from Earth on tongues of fire and billowing smoke. Nothing personal. No pictures of Randolph himself or anyone else. Pancho grinned inwardly when she saw that Randolph’s desk was cluttered with papers, despite the computer built into it. The paperless office was still a myth, she realized.
Gesturing to the sofa, he said, “Have a seat. Have you had breakfast?”
Instead of sitting down, Pancho asked, “Is that a trick question? Astro employees are up at the crack of dawn every day, boss, and twice on Sundays.”
Randolph laughed. “Coffee? Tea? Anything?”
“Can I use your computer for a minute?” she asked.
He looked puzzled, but said, “Sure, go ahead.” Louder, he called, “Computer, guest voice.”
Pancho went to the desk and leaned over the upright display screen. She gave her name and the computer came to life. Within a few seconds, she waved Randolph over to look at the screen.
He peered at the display. “What the hell’s that?”
“Martin Humphries’s personal menu of programs.”
“Humphries?” Randolph sank into his desk chair.
“Yep. I hacked into his machine last night. You can tap in anytime you want.”
Randolph looked up at Pancho, then back at his screen. “Without his knowing it?”
“Oh, he’ll figger it out sooner or later, I guess. But right now he doesn’t know it.”
“How the hell did you do this?”
Pancho smiled at him. “Magic.”
“H’mp,” Randolph grunted. “It’s a shame you couldn’t do this a few days earlier.”
“How come?”
“We’re partners now.”
“You and Humphries? Partners?”
“Humphries, Selene and Astro. We’ve formed a limited partnership: Starpower, Limited.”
“Hot spit! Where can I buy stock?”
“It’s not public. Duncan and his people will get a block of shares, but otherwise, it’s Humphries, me, and the good citizens of Selene. It should help keep Selene’s taxes down, if it works.”
Feeling a bit disappointed, Pancho grumbled, “Oh, just the big boys, huh?”
Randolph gave her a sly grin. “I suppose,” he said, running a finger across his chin, “that we’ll award a few shares here and there, for exceptional performances.”
“Like piloting a bird to the Belt and back.”
Randolph nodded.
“Okay,” Pancho said, with enthusiasm. “Meanwhile, you can poke into Humphries’s files anytime you want to.”
Randolph cleared the screen with a single, sharp, “Exit.” To Pancho, he said, “You’re wasting your time jockeying spacecraft. You make a mighty fine spy, kid.”
“I’d rather fly than spy,” she said.
Randolph looked at her. He’s got really neat eyes, she thought. Gray, but not cold. Deep. Flecked with gold. Nice eyes.
“I’m not sure that I want to poke into Humphries’s files,” he said.
“No?”
“A man named Stimson was the U. S. Secretary of State back a century or more ago,” Randolph said. “When he found out that the State Department was routinely intercepting the mail from the foreign embassies in Washington he stopped the practice. He said, ‘Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail. ‘ Or something like that.”
Pancho snorted. “Maybe you’re a gentleman, but Humphries sure ain’t.”
“I think you’re half right.”
“Which half?”
Instead of answering, Randolph tapped a button on the phone console. The big Australian came through the door from the outer office almost instantly.
“You two know each other?” Randolph asked. Without waiting for a reply from either of them, he said, “George Ambrose, Pancho Lane.”
“Pleased,” said Big George. Pancho made a quick smile.
“George, who do we have who can download a complete hard drive without letting the hard drive’s owner know it?”
Big George glanced at Pancho, then asked, “You want this done as quiet as possible, right?”
“Absolutely right.”
“Then I’ll do it meself.”
“You?”
“Don’t look so surprised,” George said. “I used to be an engineer, before I hooked up with you.”
“You were a fugitive from justice before you hooked up with me,” Randolph countered.
“Yeah, yeah, but before that. I came to the Moon to teleoperate tractors up on the surface. My bloody degree’s in software architecture, for chrissakes.”
“I didn’t know that,” Randolph said.
“Well now you do. So what needs doing here?”
“I’d like you to work with Pancho here. She’ll explain the problem.”
George looked at her. “Okay. When do we start?”
“Now,” said Randolph. Then, to Pancho, he added, “You can tell George anything you’d tell me.”
“Sure,” Pancho agreed. But in her mind she added, Maybe.
“This is more like it,” said Dan.
He heard Kris Cardenas’s nervous laughter in his helmet earphones.
There were five of them standing on the factory floor, encased in white spacesuits like a team of astronauts or tourists out for a jaunt on the Moon’s surface. Before them, on the broad, spacious floor of the otherwise empty factory, stood a set of spherical fuel tanks, the smaller sphere of a fusion reaction chamber, and the unfinished channel of an MHD generator, all connected by sturdy-looking piping and surrounded by crates of various powdered metals and bins of soot: pure carbon dust. Dan, Cardenas and three of her nanotechnicians stood in a group, encased in their spacesuits, watching the results of the nanomachines ceaseless work.
It was daylight outside, Dan knew. Through the open sides of the factory he saw the brilliant sunlight glaring harshly against the barren lunar landscape. But inside the factory, with its curved roof cutting off the glow from the Sun and Earth, the components of the fusion system looked dark and dull, like the unpolished diamond that they were.
“We start on the pumps next,” Cardenas said, “as soon as the MHD channel is finished. And then the rocket nozzles.”
Dan heard an edge in her voice. She did not like being out on the surface. Despite all her years of living on the Moon-or maybe because of them-being outside bothered her.
Selene’s factories were built out on the Moon’s surface, exposed to the vacuum of space, almost completely automated or run remotely by operators safe in control centers underground. “You okay, Kris?” he asked. “I’d feel better downstairs,” she answered frankly.
“Okay, then, let’s go. I’m sorry I dragged you out here. I just wanted to see for myself how we’re doing.”
“It’s all right,” she said, but she turned and started toward the airlock hatch and the tractor that had carried them to the factory.
“I know that the vacuum out here is great for industrial processing,” she said, apologizing. “It just scares the bejesus out of me.”
“Even buttoned up nice and cozy in a spacesuit?” Dan asked, walking across the factory floor alongside her.
“Maybe it’s the suit,” she said. “Maybe I’m a closet claustrophobe.”
Contamination was something that flatlanders from Earth took for granted. Living on a planet teeming with life, from bacteria to whales, thick with pollution from human and natural sources, and deep within a turbulent atmosphere that transports spores, dust, pollen, smog, moisture and other contaminants everywhere, cleanliness for Earthsiders was a matter of degree. That was why Dan, with his immune system weakened by the radiation doses he’d been exposed to in space, wore filter plugs and sanitary masks when he was on Earth.
In the hard vacuum of the lunar surface, a thousand times better than the vacuum of low Earth orbit, not only was the environment clean of external pollution sources, the contaminants inside most materials could be removed virtually for free. Microscopic gas bubbles trapped inside metals percolated out of the metal’s crystal structure and boiled off into the void. Thus Selene’s factories were out on the lunar surface, open to the purifying vacuum of the Moon.
“We don’t need to go through the carwash again,” Dan said, touching the arm of Cardenas’s suit. “We can go straight to the tractor.”
He walked around the bulky airlock and hopped off the concrete slab that formed the factory floor, dropping in lunar slow-motion three meters to the regolith. His boots puffed up a little cloud of dust that floated lazily up halfway to his knees.
Cardenas came to the lip of the slab, hesitated, then jumped down to where Dan waited for her.
Like all the lunar factories, this one was built on a thick concrete platform to keep the factory floor above the dusty ground. With no winds, there was little danger of contaminants blowing in from the outside. A curving dome of honeycomb lunar aluminum protected the factory from the constant infall of micrometeoroids and the hard radiation from the Sun and deep space.
The most worrisome source of pollution came from the humans who occasionally entered the factories, even though they had to wear spacesuits. Before they were allowed onto the factory floor, Dan and the others had to go through the “carwash,” a special airlock equipped with electrostatic scrubbers and special powdered detergents that removed the traces of oil, perspiration and other microscopic contaminants that clung to the spacesuits’ outer surfaces.
As the tractor slowly trundled back to Selene’s main airlock, Dan thought about what he had just seen. Before his eyes, the MHD channel was growing: slowly, he admitted, but it was visibly getting longer as the virus-sized nanomachines took carbon and other atoms from the supply bins and locked them into place like kids building a Tinkertoy city.
“How much longer?” he asked into the microphone built into his helmet.
Cardenas, sitting beside him, understood his question. “Three weeks, if they go as programmed.”
“Three weeks?” Dan blurted. “Looks like they’re almost finished now.”
“They’ve still got to finish the MHD channel, which is a pretty tricky piece of work. High-current-density electrodes, superconducting magnets and all. Then comes the pumps, which is no bed of roses, and finally the rocket nozzles, which are also complex: buckyball microtubes carrying cryogenic hydrogen running a few centimeters away from a ten-thousand-degree plasma flow. Then there’s-”
“Okay, okay,” Dan said, throwing up his gloved hands. “Three weeks.”
“That’s the schedule.”
Dan knew the schedule. He had been hoping for better news from Cardenas. Over the past six weeks his lawyers had hammered out the details of the new Starpower, Ltd. partnership. Humphries’s lawyers had niggled over every detail, while Selene’s legal staff had breezed through the negotiation with little more than a cursory examination of the agreement, thanks largely to Doug Stavenger’s prodding.
So now it was all in place. Dan had the funding to make the fusion rocket a reality, and he still had control of Astro Manufacturing. Astro was staggering financially, but Dan calculated that the company could hold together until the profits from the fusion system started rolling in.
Still, he constantly pushed Cardenas to go faster. It was going to be a tight race: Astro had already started construction of its final solar power satellite. When that one’s finished, Dan knew, we go sailing over the disaster curve. No new space construction contracts in sight.
“Can’t this buggy go any faster?” Cardenas asked, testily.
“Full throttle, ma’am,” said the imperturbable technician at the controls.
To take her mind off her fears of being out in the open, Dan asked her, “Did you see this morning’s news from Earthside?”
“The food riots in Delhi? Yeah, I saw it.”
“They’re starving, Kris. If the monsoon fails again this year there’s going to be a monster famine, and it’ll spread a long way.”
“Not much we can do about,” Cardenas said.
“Not yet,” Dan muttered.
“They got themselves into this mess,” she said tightly, “breeding like hamsters.”
She’s really bitter, Dan thought. I wonder how she’d feel if her husband and kids had decided to stay on the Moon with her. With a sigh, he admitted, she’s got plenty to be bitter about.
Big George was waiting for Dan in his private office, sitting on the sofa, a sheaf of printouts scattered across the coffee table.
“What’s all this?” Dan asked, sitting in the chair at the end of the coffee table. When George sat on the couch there really wasn’t much room for anyone else.
“Stuff I lifted from Humphries’s files,” George said, his red-bearded face wrinkled with worry. “He’s out for your balls, y’know.”
“I know.”
Tapping a blunt finger on the pile of printouts, George said, “He’s buyin’ every share of Astro stock he can get his hands on. Quietly. No greenmail, no big fuss, but he’s pushin’ his brokers to buy at any price.”
“Great,” Dan grunted. “Maybe the damned stock will go up a little.”
George grinned. “That’d be good. Been in free fall long enough.”
“You’re not thinking of selling, are you?”
With a laugh, George replied, “The amount I’ve got? Wouldn’t make any difference, one way or the other.”
Dan was not amused. “If you ever do want to sell, you come to me first, understand? I’ll buy at the market price.”
“Humphries is buyin’ at two points above the fookin’ market price.”
“Is he?”
“In some cases, where big blocks of stock are involved.”
“Son of a bitch,” Dan said fervently, pronouncing each word distinctly. “He knows I don’t have the cash to buy out the minor stockholders.”
“It’s not all that bad,” George said. “I did a calculation. At the rate he’s acquiring Astro shares, it’ll take him two years to buy up a majority position.”
Dan stared off into space, thinking hard. “Two years. We could be making profits from the Asteroid Belt by then. Should be, if everything goes right.”
“And if it doesn’t go right?”
Dan shrugged. “Then Humphries will take control of Astro and throw me out on my butt.”
“I’ll take his head off his fookin’ shoulders first,” George growled.
“A lovely sentiment, pal, but then we’d have to deal with his lawyers.”
George rolled his eyes toward heaven.
This is getting silly, Pancho thought. Humphries doesn’t trust phones or electronic links, too easy to tap, he says. So we have to meet face-to-face, in person, but in places where we won’t be noticed together. And he’s running out of places.
He had stopped inviting Pancho to his home, down at the bottom level. Worried about somebody seeing her down there where she doesn’t belong, he claimed. But Pancho knew he’d stopped inviting her down there once she’d introduced him to Mandy. So his house was now out.
Going outside on tourist jaunts is dumb, she thought. Besides, sooner or later some tourist is gonna recognize the high and mighty Martin Humphries on his bus. And how many times can an Astro employee take an afternoon off to go on a bus ride up on the surface? It’s silly.
So now she was strolling along one of the paved paths that meandered through the Grand Plaza. Lots of grass and flowery shrubs and even some trees. Nothing as lush as Humphries had down at his grotto, but the Plaza was pleasant, relaxed, open and green.
For a town that’s only got about three thousand permanent residents, Pancho thought, there’s an awful lot of people up here sashaying around. The walking paths weren’t exactly crowded, but there were plenty of people strolling along. Pancho had no trouble telling the Selene citizens from the rare tourists: the locals shuffled along easily in the low gravity and dressed casually in coveralls or running suits, for the most part; the few tourists she spotted wore splashy tee-shirts and vacation shorts and hopped and stumbled awkwardly, despite their weighted boots. Some of the women had bought expensive frocks in the Plaza shops and were showing them off as they oh-so-carefully stepped along the winding paths. The Selenites smiled and greeted each other as they passed; the tourists tended to be more guarded and uncertain of themselves. Funny,
Pancho thought: anybody with enough money and free time to come up here for a vacation oughtta be more relaxed.
The outdoor theater was jammed, Pancho saw. She remembered a news bulletin about Selene’s dance club performing low-gravity ballet. All in all, it seemed a normal weekday evening in the Plaza, nothing out of the ordinary.
All the paths winding through the greenery led to the long windows set into the far end of the Plaza dome. Made of lunar glassteel, they were perfectly transparent yet had the structural strength of the reinforced concrete that made up the rest of the dome’s structure. It was still daylight outside, and would be for another two hundred-some hours. A few tourists had stopped to gape out at the cracked, pockmarked floor of Alphonsus.
“It looks so dead!” said one of the women.
“And empty,” her husband muttered.
“Makes you wonder why anyone ever came up here to live.”
Pancho huffed impatiently. You try growing up in Lubbock, or getting flooded out in Houston, see how much better the Moon looks to you.
“Good evening,” said Martin Humphries.
Pancho had not seen him approaching; she’d been looking through the windows at the outside, listening to the tourists’ comments.
“Howdy,” she said.
He was wearing dark slacks with a beige pullover shirt. And sandals, no less. His “ordinary guy” disguise, Pancho thought. She herself was in the same sky-blue coveralls she’d been wearing all day, with an Astro Corporation logo over the left breast pocket and her name stenciled just above it.
Gesturing to a concrete bench at the edge of the path, Humphries said, “Let’s sit down. There are no cameras out here to see us together.”
They sat. A family strolled by, parents and two little boys, no more than four or five. Lunatics. Selenites. The kids might even have been born here, she thought.
“What have you been up to lately?” Humphries asked casually.
Truthfully, Pancho reported, “We’ve started the detailed mission planning. Randolph’s picked out a couple of target asteroids for us to rendezvous with, and now Mandy and me are workin’ out the optimum trajectory, trip times, supply needs, failure modes... stuff like that.”
“Sounds boring.”
“Not when your life hangs on it.”
Humphries conceded the point with a nod. “The construction of the propulsion system is proceeding on schedule?”
“You’d know more about that than I would.”
“It is,” he said.
“That’s what I figured. Dan’d go ballistic if there were any holdups there.”
“Amanda refuses to see me,” he said.
For a moment Pancho was jarred by the sudden change of subject. Recovering quickly, she replied, “Mandy’s got enough on her hands. This isn’t the time for her to get involved with somebody... anybody.”
“I want her off the mission.”
“You can’t do that to her!” Pancho blurted.
“Why not?”
“It’d ruin her career, that’s why. Bounced off the first crewed mission to the Belt: how’d that look on her resume?”
“She won’t need a resume. I’m going to marry her.”
Pancho stared at him. He was serious.
“For how long?” she asked coldly.
Anger flared in Humphries’s eyes. “Just because my first two marriages didn’t work out, there’s no reason to think this one won’t.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
“Besides,” Humphries went on, “if it doesn’t work out she’ll get a very handsome settlement out of me. She’ll never have to work again.”
Pancho said nothing. She was thinking, If it doesn’t work out he’ll use every lawyer he’s got to throw Mandy out into the cold without a cent. If it doesn’t work out he’ll hate her just as much as he hates his first two wives.
“I want you to help convince her to marry me,” Humphries said.
Pancho’s mind was spinning. You gotta be careful here, she warned herself. Don’t get him mad at you.
“Mr. Humphries, that’s something I just plain can’t do. This isn’t a business deal, I can’t talk her into doin’ something she doesn’t want to do. Nobody can. Except maybe you.”
“But she won’t see me!”
“I know, I know,” she said, as sympathetically as she could. “It’s just too much pressure for her, what with the mission and all.”
“That’s why I want her off the mission.”
“Don’t do that to her. Please.”
“My mind’s made up.”
Pancho sighed unhappily.”Well, you’re just gonna have to talk to Dan Randolph about that. He’s the boss, not me.”
“Then that’s what I’ll do,” Humphries said firmly.
“I wish you wouldn’t. Whyn’t you let us go out to the Belt. When we get back Mandy’ll be able to give you her full attention.”
“No.” Humphries shook his head. “You might not get back.”
“We will.”
“You might not. I don’t want to take the chance of losing her.”
Pancho looked into his eyes. They were still cold, unreadable, like the eyes of a professional card shark she’d known once while she’d been supporting herself through the University of Nevada in Las Vegas by working at one of the casinos. Not the eyes of a lovesick swain. Not the eyes of a man whose heart might break.
“Better talk to Randolph, then,” she said.
“I will.”
Feeling weary and more than a little afraid of what was going to happen with Mandy, Pancho got to her feet. Humphries stood up, too, and she noticed that he was several centimeters shorter than she’d thought him to be. Glancing down at his sandals, she thought, the sumbitch must have lifts in his regular shoes.
“By the way,” Humphries said, his voice hard-edged, “someone’s hacked into my private files.”
She was genuinely surprised that he’d found out so quickly. It must have shown on her face.
“Randolph is a lot smarter than I thought he was, but it won’t do him any good.”
“You mean he’s the one who hacked you?”
“Who else? One of his people, obviously. I want you to find out who. And how.”
“I can’t do that!” Pancho blurted.
“Why not?”
“I’ll get caught. I’m not a chip freak.”
His eyes bored into her for a painfully long moment. “You find out who did it. And how it was done. Or else.”
“Or else what?”
With a grim smile, Humphries answered, “I’ll think of something.”
If he finds the account I set up for him to pay the rent on my sister’s dewar I’m toast,” Pancho said as she paced across Dan’s office.
Sitting behind his desk, Dan said, “I’ll get George to scratch the program. Astro can pay the storage fees for your sister.”
Pancho shook her head. “That’ll just call attention to what I did.”
“Not if we erase the subroutine completely. He’ll never know.”
“No!” Pancho insisted. “Don’t go anywhere near it. It’ll tip him off for sure.”
Dan could see how agitated she was. “You just want to leave it there? He might stumble across it any minute.”
“He knows I did it,” Pancho said, crossing the room again in her long-legged strides. “I know he knows. He’s just playin’ cat-and-mouse with me.”
“I don’t think so. He’s not the type. Humphries is more a sledge-hammer-on-the-head kind of guy.”
She stopped and turned toward Dan, her face suddenly white, aghast. “Jesus H. Christ... he might turn off Sis’s life support! He might pull the plug on her!”
Dan knew she was right. “Or threaten to.”
“That’d give him enough leverage to get me to do whatever he wants.”
“What does he want?”
“He wants Mandy. He wants her scrubbed from the mission so he can talk her into marrying him.”
Dan leaned back in his desk chair and stared at the ceiling. He’d had the office swept for bugs only an hour earlier, yet he had the uneasy feeling that Humphries knew everything that he said or did. Pancho’s not the only Astro employee he’s recruited, Dan reminded himself. My whole double-damned staff must be honeycombed with his snoops. Who can I trust?
He snapped forward in the chair and said into the phone console, “Phone, find George Ambrose. I want him here, now.”
In less than a minute Big George came through the doorway from the outer office.
“George, I want this whole suite swept for bugs,” Dan commanded.
“Again? We just did it an hour ago.”
“I want you to do it this time. Yourself. Nobody else.”
Scratching at his shaggy beard, George said, “Gotcha, boss.”
It took a maddening half hour. Pancho forced herself to sit on the sofa while George went through the office with a tiny black box in one massive paw.
“Clean in here,” he said at last.
“Okay,” said Dan. “Close the door and sit down.”
“You said you wanted the outer offices done, too,” George objected.
“In a minute. Sit.”
Obediently, George lowered his bulk into one of the cushioned chairs in front of Dan’s desk.
“I’ve been thinking. Tonight, the three of us are going to move a dewar out of the catacombs,” Dan said.
“Sis? Where-”
“I’ll figure that out between now and then,” Dan said. “Maybe somewhere else on the Moon. Maybe we’ll move her to one of the space stations.”
“You’ve gotta have the right equipment to maintain it,” George pointed out.
Dan waved a hand in the air. “You need a cryostat to keep the nitrogen liquified. Not much else.”
“Life support monitors,” Pancho pointed out.
“Self-contained on the dewar flask,” said Dan.
“Not the equipment,” Pancho corrected. “I mean you need some people to take a look every few days, make sure everything’s running okay.”
With a shake of his head, Dan said, “That’s a frill that you pay extra for. You don’t need it. The equipment has safety alarms built in. The only time you need human intervention is when the flask starts to exceed the limits you’ve set the equipment to keep.”
“Well, yeah... I guess,” Pancho agreed reluctantly.
“Okay, George,” Dan said. “Go sweep the rest of the place. We can all meet here for dinner at...” he called up his appointment screen with the jab of a finger,”... nineteen-thirty.”
“Dinner?” Pancho asked.
“Can’t do dirty work on an empty stomach,” Dan said, grinning mischievously.
“But where are we taking her?” Pancho asked as she disconnected the liquid nitrogen feed line. Despite its heavy insulation, the hose was stiff with a rime of frost. Cold white vapor hissed briefly from its open end, until she twisted the seal shut.
“Shh!” Dan hissed, pointing to the baleful red eye of the security camera hanging some fifty meters down the corridor.
This late at night they were quite alone in the catacombs, but Dan worried about that security camera. There was one at each end of the long row of dewars, and although the area was dimly lit, the cameras fed into Selene’s security office where they were monitored twenty-four hours a day. Pancho figured that, like security guards anywhere, the men and women responsible for monitoring the cameras seldom paid them close attention, except when a warning light flashed red or a synthesized voice warned of trouble that some sensor had detected. That’s why they had hacked into the sensor controls on Sis’s dewar and cut them out of the monitoring loop.
Dan and George were sweating with the effort of jacking up the massive dewar onto a pair of trolleys. Even in the low gravity of the Moon, the big stainless-steel cylinder was heavy.
“Where’re we goin’?” Pancho repeated.
“You’ll see,” Dan grunted.
Pancho plugged the nitrogen hose into the portable cryostat they had taken from one of the Astro labs, several levels below the catacombs.
“Okay, all set,” she whispered.
“How’re you doing, George?” Dan asked.
The shaggy Australian came around the front end of the dewar. “Ready whenever you are, boss.”
Dan glanced once at the distant camera’s red eye, then said, “Let’s get rolling.”
The caster wheels on the trolleys squeaked as the three of them pushed the dewar down the long, shadowy corridor.
“Don’t the security cameras have a recording loop?” Pancho asked. “Once they see Sis’s dewar is missing, they’ll play it back and see us.”
“That camera’s going to show a nice, quiet night,” Dan said, leaning hard against the big dewar as they trundled along. “Cost me a few bucks, but I think I found an honest security guard. She’ll erase our images and run a loop from earlier in the evening to cover the erasure. Everything will look peaceful and calm.”
“That’s an honest guard?” Pancho asked.
“An honest guard,” Dan said, panting with the strain of pushing, “is one who stays bought.”
“And I’ll put an empty dewar in your sister’s place,” George added, “soon’s we get this one settled in.” Pancho noticed he was breathing easily, hardly exerting himself.
“But where’re we takin’ her?” Pancho asked again. “And why’re we whisperin’ if you got the guard bought?”
“We’re whispering because there might be other people in the catacombs,” Dan replied, sounding a bit irked. “No sense taking any chances we don’t need to take.”
“Oh.” That made sense. But it still didn’t tell her where in the hell they were going.
They passed the end of the catacombs and kept on going along the long, dimly-lit corridor until they stopped at last at what looked like an airlock hatch.
Dan stood up straight and stretched his arms overhead until Pancho heard his vertebrae crack.
“I’m getting too old for this kind of thing,” he muttered as he went to the hatch and pecked on its electronic lock. The hatch popped slightly open; Pancho caught a whiff of stale, dusty air that sighed from it.
George pulled the hatch all the way open.
“Okay, down the tunnel we go,” said Dan, unclipping a flashlight from the tool loop on the leg of his coveralls.
The tunnel had been started, he explained to Pancho, back in the early days of Moonbase, when Earthbound managers had decided to ram a tunnel through the ringwall mountains to connect the floor of Alphonsus with the broad expanse of Mare Nubium.
“I helped to dig it,” Dan said, with pride in his voice. Then he added, “What there is of it, at least.”
The lunar rock had turned out to be much tougher than expected; the cost of digging the tunnel, even with plasma torches, had risen too far. So the tunnel was never finished. Instead, a cable-car system had been built over the mountains. It was more expensive to operate than a tunnel would have been but far cheaper to construct.
“I’ve ridden the cable car up to the top of Mt. Yeager,” Pancho said. “The view’s terrific.”
“Yep,” Dan agreed. “They forgot about the tunnel. But it’s still here, even though nobody uses it. And so are the access shafts.”
The access shafts had been drilled upward to the outside, on the side of the mountain. The first of the access shafts opened into an emergency shelter where there were pressure suits and spare oxygen bottles, in case the cable-car system overhead broke down.
“And here we are,” Dan said.
In the scant light from the flashlights that Dan and George played around the tunnel walls, Pancho saw a set of metal rungs leading up to another hatch.
“There’s a tempo just above us,” he said as George started climbing the ladder. “We’ll jack into its electrical power supply to run the dewar’s cryostat.”
“Won’t that show up on the grid monitors?” Pancho asked.
Shaking his head, Dan replied, “Nope. The tempos have their own solar panels and batteries. Completely independent. The panels are even up on poles to keep ‘em out of the dust.”
Pancho heard the hatch groan open. Looking up, she saw George squeeze his bulk through its narrow diameter.
“How’re we gonna get Sis’s dewar through that hatch?” she demanded.
“There’s a bigger hatch for equipment,” Dan said.
As if to prove the point, a far wider hatch squealed open over their heads. Dim auxiliary lighting from the tempo filtered down to them.
Even with the little winch from the tempo, it was a struggle to wrestle the bulky dewar and its equipment up through the hatch. Pancho worried that Sis would be jostled and crumpled in her liquid nitrogen bath. But at last they had Sis hooked up in the temporary shelter. The dewar rested on the floor and all the gauges were in the green.
“You’ll have to come back here once a month or so to check up on everything. Maybe once every six or seven months you’ll have to top off the nitrogen supply.”
A thought struck her. “What about when I’m on the mission?”
“I’ll do it,” George said without hesitation. “Be glad to.”
“How the hell can I thank you guys?”
Dan chuckled softly. “I’m just making certain that my best pilot isn’t blackmailed by Humphries into working against me. And George...”
The big Aussie looked suddenly embarrassed.
“I used to live in one of the tempos,” he said, his tenor voice softer than usual. “Back when I was a fugitive, part of the underground. Back before Dan took me under ‘is wing.”
Dan said, “This is a sort of homecoming for George.”
“Yeah,” George said. “Reminds me of the bad old days. Almost brings a fookin’ tear to my eye.”
Dan laughed and the Aussie laughed with him. Pancho just stood there, feeling enormously grateful to them both.
Dan had offered space in Astro Corporation’s office complex for the headquarters of the fledgling Starpower, Ltd. Humphries had countered with an offer of a suite in his own Humphries Space Systems offices. Stavenger suggested a compromise, and Star-power’s meager offices opened in the other tower on the Grand Plaza, where Selene’s governmental departments were housed. Yet Stavenger had not been invited to this working meeting. Dan sat on one side of the small conference table, Martin Humphries on the other. The room’s windowless walls were bare, the furniture strictly functional.
“I hear you’ve been having some problems with hackers,” Dan said. For just a flash of a second Martin Humphries looked startled. He quickly regained his composure.
“Whoever told you that?” he asked calmly.
Dan smiled knowingly. “Not much happens around here without the grapevine getting wind of it.”
Humphries leaned back in his chair. Dan noticed that it was a personally fitted recliner, unlike the other chairs around the table, which were inexpensive padded plastic.
“The leak’s been fixed,” Humphries said. “No damage done.”
“That’s good,” said Dan.
“Speaking of the grapevine,” Humphries said lightly, “I heard a funny one just this morning.”
“Oh?”
“There’s a story going around that you and a couple of your employees stole a dewar from the catacombs last night.”
“Really?”
“Sounds like something out of an old horror flick.”
“Imagine that,” Dan said.
“Curious. Why would you do something like that?”
Trying to find a comfortable position on his chair, Dan replied, “Let’s not spend the morning chasing rumors. We’re here to set our budget requirements.”
Humphries nodded. “I’ll get one of my people to track it down.”
Or one of my people, Dan grumbled to himself. But it’ll be okay as long as he can’t find Pancho’s sister. Only she and George and I know where we stashed her.
He said to Humphries, “Okay, you do that. Now about the budget...”
They spent the next hour going over every item in the budget that Humphries’s staff had prepared for Starpower, Ltd. Dan saw that there were no frills: no allocations for publicity or travel or anything except building the fusion drive, testing it enough to meet the IAA’s requirements for human rating, and then flying it with a crew of four to the Asteroid Belt.
“I’ve been thinking that it makes more sense to up the crew to six,” Dan said.
Humphries’s brows rose. “Six? Why do we need two extra people?”
“We’ve got two pilots, a propulsion engineer, and a geologist. Two geologists would be better... or a geologist and some other specialist, maybe a geochemist.”
“That makes five,” Humphries said warily.
“I want to keep an extra slot open. Design the mission for six. As we get closer to the launch, we’ll probably find out we need another hand.”
Suspicion showed clearly in Humphries’s face. “Adding two more people means extra supplies, extra mass.”
“We can accommodate it. The fusion system’s got plenty of power.”
“Extra cost, too.”
“A slight increment,” Dan said easily. “Down in the noise.”
Humphries looked unconvinced, but instead of arguing he asked, “Have you picked a specific asteroid yet?”
Dan tapped at his handheld computer, and the wall screen that covered one entire side of the conference room displayed a chart of the Belt. Thousands of thin ellipsoidal lines representing orbital paths filled the screen.
“It looks like the scrawling that a bunch of kindergarten brats would make,” Humphries muttered.
“Sort of,” said Dan. “There’s a lot of rocks moving around out there.”
He tapped at the handheld again and the lines winked out, leaving the screen deep black with tiny pinpoints of lights glittering here and there.
“This is what it really looks like,” Dan said. “A whole lot of emptiness with a few pebbles floating around here and there.”
“Some of those pebbles are kilometers across,” Humphries said.
“Yep,” Dan replied. “The biggest one is -”
“Ceres. Discovered by a priest on New Year’s Day, 1801.”
“You’ve been doing your homework,” Dan said.
Humphries smiled, pleased. “It’s a little over a thousand kilometers across.”
“If that one ever hit the Earth...”
“Goodbye to everything. Like the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.”
“That’s just what they need down there,” Dan muttered, “an extinction-level impact.”
“Let’s get back to work,” Humphries said crisply. “There’s no big rock heading Earth’s way.”
“None has been found,” Dan corrected. “Yet.”
“You know,” Humphries said, musing, “If we were really smart we’d run a demo flight to Mars and do a little prospecting on those two little moons. They’re captured asteroids, after all.”
“The IAA has ruled the whole Mars system off-limits for commercial development. That includes Deimos and Phobos.”
Hunching closer to the conference table, Humphries said, “But we could just do it as a scientific mission. You know, send a couple geologists to chip off some rock samples, analyze what they’re really made of.”
“They already have pretty good data on that,” Dan pointed out.
“But it could show potential investors that the fusion drive works and there’s plenty of natural resources in the asteroids.”
Frowning, Dan said, “Even if we could get the IAA to allow us to do it-”
“I can,” Humphries said confidently.
“Even so, people have been going to Mars for years now. Decades. Investors won’t be impressed by a Mars flight.”
“Even if our fusion buggy gets there over a weekend?”
Firmly, Dan said, “We’ve got to get to the Belt. That’s what will impress investors. Show them that the fusion drive changes the economic picture.”
“I suppose,” Humphries said reluctantly.
“And we’ve got to lay our hands on a metallic asteroid, one of the nickel-iron type. That’s where the heavy metals are, the stuff you can’t get from the Moon or even the NEAs.”
“Gold,” Humphries said, brightening. “Silver and platinum. Do you have any idea of what this is going to do to the precious metals market?”
Dan blinked at him. I’m trying to move the Earth’s industrial base into space and he’s playing games with the prices for gold. We just don’t think the same way; we don’t have the same goals or the same values, even.
Grinning slyly, Humphries said, “We could get a lot of capital from people who’d be willing to pay us not to bring those metals to Earth.”
“Maybe,” Dan admitted.
“I know at least three heads of governments who would personally buy into Starpower just to keep us from dumping precious metals onto the market.”
“And I’ll bet,” Dan growled, “that those governments rule nations where the people are poor, starving, and sinking lower every year.”
Humphries shrugged. “We’re not going to solve all the world’s problems, Dan.”
“We ought to at least try.”
“That’s the difference between us,” Humphries said, jabbing a finger in Dan’s direction. “You want to be a savior. All I want is to make a little money.”
Dan looked at him for a long, silent moment. He’s right, Dan thought. Once upon a time all I was interested in was making money. And now I don’t give a damn. Not anymore. None of it makes any sense to me. Since Jane died-god, I’ve turned into a do-gooder!
Leaning forward again, toward Dan, his expression suddenly intense, earnest, Humphries said, “Listen to me, Dan. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make money. You can’t save the world. Nobody can. The best thing we can do is to feather our own nests and-”
“I’ve got to try,” Dan interrupted. “I can’t sit here and just let them drown or starve or sink into another dark age.”
“Okay, okay.” Humphries raised both hands placatingly. “You go right ahead and beat your head against that wall, if you want to. Maybe the asteroids are the answer. Maybe you’ll save the world, one way or the other. In the meantime, we can clean up a tidy little profit doing it.”
“Yep.”
“If we don’t make a profit, Dan, we can’t do anybody any good. We’ve got to make money out of this or go out of business. You know that. We can’t do this mission at cost. We’ve got to show a profit.”
“Or at least,” Dan countered, “a profit potential.”
Humphries considered the idea for a moment, then agreed, “A profit potential. Okay, I’ll settle for that. We need to show the financial community-”
“What’s left of it.”
Humphries actually laughed. “Oh, don’t worry about the financial community. Men like my father will always be all right, no matter what happens. Even if the whole world drowns, they’ll sit on a mountaintop somewhere, fat and happy, and wait for the waters to go down.”
Dan could barely hide his disgust. “Come on, let’s get back to work. We’ve had enough philosophy for one morning.”
Humphries agreed with a smile and a nod.
Hours later, after Dan had left the conference room, Humphries went back to his own office and sank into his high-backed swivel chair. As he leaned back and gazed up at the paneled ceiling, the chair adjusted its contours to accommodate his body. Humphries relaxed, smiling broadly. He missed it, he said to himself. The numbers are right there in the budget and Randolph went past them as if they were written in invisible ink.
It was so easy to distract Randolph’s attention. Just get him started on his idiotic crusade. He blanks out to everything else. He wants to go to the Belt to save the world. Sounds like Columbus wanting to reach China by sailing in the wrong direction.
Humphries laughed out loud. It’s right there in the budget and he paid no attention to it at all. Or maybe he thinks it’s just a backup, a redundancy measure. After all, it’s not a terribly large sum. Once the nanos have built one fusion system, it only costs peanuts to have them build another one. The real expense is in the design and programming, and that’s all amortized on the first model. All the backup costs is the raw materials and the time of a few people to monitor the process. The nanos work for nothing.
He laughed again. Randolph thinks he’s so fricking smart, sneaking Pancho’s sister out of the catacombs. Afraid I’ll terminate her? Or does he want to keep Pancho under his thumb? I won’t be able to use her anymore, but so what, who needs her now? I’ll be building a second fusion drive and he doesn’t even know it!
Pancho stared across the desolate, blast-scarred expanse of the launch center and wrinkled her nose unhappily. “It sure looks like a kludge.”
Standing beside her in the little observation bubble, Dan had to agree. The fusion drive looked like the work of a drunken plumber: bulbous spheres of diamond that sparkled in the harsh unfiltered sunlight drenching the lunar surface, the odd shapes of the MHD channel, the pumps that fed the fuel to the reactor chamber, radiator panels and the multiple rocket nozzles, all connected by a surrealistic maze of pipes and conduits. The entire contraption was mounted on the platform-like deck of an ungainly, spraddle-legged booster that stood squat and silent on the circular launch pad of smoothed lunar concrete. The observation chamber was nothing more than a bubble of glassteel poking up above the barren floor of Alphonsus’s giant ringwall. Barely big enough for two people to stand in, the chamber was connected by a tunnel to the control center of the launch complex.
“We didn’t build her for beauty,” Dan said. “Besides, she’ll look better once we’ve mated her with the other modules.”
Subdued voices crackled from the intercom speaker set into the smoothed wall of the chamber just below the rim of the transparent blister.
“Pan Asia oh-one-niner on final descent,” said the pilot of an incoming shuttle.
“We have you on final, oh-one-niner,” answered the calm female voice of a flight controller. “Pad four.”
“Pad four, copy.”
Dan looked up into the star-flecked sky and saw a fleeting glint of light.
“Retrorockets,” Pancho muttered.
“On the curve,” said the flight controller.
Another quick burst. Dan could make out the shuttle now, a dark angular shape falling slowly out of the sky, slim landing legs extended.
“Down the pipe, oh-one-niner,” said the woman controller. She sounded almost bored.
It all seemed to be happening in slow motion. Dan watched the shuttle come down and settle on the pad farthest away from the one on which the fusion rocket was sitting, waiting for clearance to take off. The shuttle pilot announced, “Oh-one-niner is down. All thrusters off.”
Pancho let out a puff of pent-up breath.
Surprised, Dan asked, “White knuckles? You?”
She grinned, embarrassed. “I always get torqued up, unless I’m driving the buggy.”
Glancing at his wristwatch, Dan said, “Well, we ought to get clearance to launch as soon as they offload the shuttle.”
With a nod, Pancho said, “I’d better get suited up.”
“Right,” said Dan.
The fusion system itself was the last part of their spacecraft to be launched into orbit around the Moon. The propellant tanks and the crew and logistics modules were already circling a hundred kilometers overhead. Pancho would supervise the assembly robots that would link all the pieces together.
Dan went with her along the tunnel and into the locker room where the astronauts donned their spacesuits. Amanda was already there, ready to help check her out. Dan realized it had been a long time since he’d checked out anyone or donned a spacesuit himself. Spaceflight is so routine nowadays that you can come and go from the Earth to the Moon just like you ride a plane or a bus, he thought. But another voice in his head said, you’re too old to be working in space. Over the years you’ve taken as big a radiation dose as you’re allowed... and then some.
He felt old and pretty useless as he watched Pancho worm into the spacesuit while Amanda hovered beside her, checking the seals and connections. Like Pancho, Amanda was wearing light tan flight coveralls. Dan noticed how nicely she filled them out.
Well, he sighed to himself, at least you’re not too old to appreciate a good-looking woman.
But he turned and headed for the tunnel that connected the space-port to Selene proper, feeling useless, wondering if Humphries was right and he was butting his head against a stone wall.
As he started down the corridor that led to the connector tunnel, he saw Doug Stavenger coming up in the other direction, looking youthful and energetic and purposeful.
Dammitall, he thought, Stavenger’s older than I am and he looks like a kid. Maybe I ought to get some nanotherapy.
“Going to watch the launch?” Stavenger asked brightly.
“Think I’ll go to the launch center and watch it from there.”
“I like to watch from the observation bubble.”
“I was just there,” Dan said.
“Come on; let’s see the real thing instead of watching it on a screen.”
Stavenger’s enthusiasm was contagious. Dan found himself striding along the narrow tunnel again, out to the bubble.
They ducked through the open hatch and into the cramped chamber. Stavenger climbed the two steps and looked out, grinning. Dan squeezed in beside him, nearly bumping his head on the curving glassteel.
“I used to sneak out here when I was a kid to watch the liftoffs and landings,” Stavenger said, grinning. “I still get a kick out of it.”
Dan made a polite mumble.
“I mean, we spend almost our whole lives indoors, underground,” Stavenger went on. “It’s good to see the outside now and then.”
“As long as the glass doesn’t crack.”
“That’s what the safety hatches are for.”
Dan said, “But you’ve got to get through them fast, before they shut themselves.”
Stavenger laughed. “True enough.”
They watched shoulder-to-shoulder in the cramped blister, listening to the flight controllers’ crisp voices clicking off the countdown. Stavenger seemed as excited as a kid; Dan envied him. A little tractor rolled noiselessly across the crater floor to the launch pad. Pancho’s spacesuited figure jumped from it in dreamlike lunar slow-motion, stirring up a lazy puff of gray dust. Then she climbed up the ladder and sealed herself into the booster’s one-person crew module.
“This is just an assembly mission, isn’t it?” Stavenger asked.
“Right,” said Dan. “She not a pilot on this flight, just baby-sitting the robots.”
Strangely enough, Dan felt his palms going clammy as the countdown neared its final moments. Relax, he told himself silently. There’s nothing to this.
Still, his heart began to thump faster.
“... three... two... one... ignition,” said the automated countdown voice.
The spacecraft leaped off the launch pad in a cloud of smoke and gritty dust that evaporated almost as soon as it formed. One instant the craft was sitting on the concrete, the next it was gone.
“We have liftoff,” said one of the human controllers in the time-honored tradition. “All systems in the green.”
Pancho’s voice came through the speaker. “Copy all systems green. Orbital insertion burn in ten seconds.”
It was all quite routine. Still, Dan didn’t relax until Pancho announced, “On the money, guys! I’m cruisin’ along with the other modules. Time to go to work.”
A controller’s voice replied, “Rendezvous complete. Initiate assembly procedure.”
Dan huffed. “She sounds more like a robot than a human being.”
Just then the controller added, “Okay, Pancho. I’ll see you at the Pelican tomorrow night.”
Stavenger grinned at Dan. “Maybe she drinks lubricating oil.”
They walked through the corridor to the tunnel that led back to Selene. As they climbed onto one of the automated carts that plied the kilometer-long tunnel, Stavenger asked, “How soon will you be ready for your flight to the Belt?”
“We’ve programmed a month of uncrewed flight tests and demo flights for IAA certification. Once we get the nod from the bureaucrats we’ll be ready to go.”
“Could your craft reach Jupiter?”
Surprised at the question, Dan replied, “In theory. But we won’t be carrying enough propellant or supplies for that. Jupiter’s almost twice as far as the Belt.”
“I know,” Stavenger murmured.
“Why do you ask?”
Stavenger hesitated. The cart trundled along the blank-walled tunnel smoothly, almost silently, its electrical motor purring softly. At last
Stavenger answered, “Sooner or later we’re going to have to go to Jupiter... or maybe one of the other gas giants.”
Dan saw where he was heading. “Fusion fuels.”
“Jupiter’s atmosphere is rich in hydrogen and helium isotopes.”
“Kris Cardenas mentioned that to me,” Dan remembered.
“She and I have been talking about it. Fusion fuels could be a major trade commodity for Selene. And very profitable for Starpower, Ltd.”
“Mining asteroids is a lot easier than scooping gases from Jupiter’s atmosphere.”
“Yes,” Stavenger admitted, “but your idea of moving large segments of Earth’s industry off the planet is only part of the solution to the greenhouse warming, Dan.”
“I know, but it’s a big part.”
“The other half is to wean them off fossil fuel burning. They’ve got to stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere if they’re going to have any chance of stopping the global warming.”
“And fusion is a way to do that,” Dan muttered.
“It’s the only way,” Stavenger said firmly. “Your solar power satellites can provide only a small fraction of the energy that Earth needs. Fusion can take over the entire load.”
“If we can bring in enough helium-three.”
“There are other fusion processes that could be even more efficient than burning deuterium with helium-three. But they all depend on isotopes that are vanishingly rare on Earth.”
“But plentiful on Jupiter,” Dan said.
“That’s right.”
Dan nodded, thinking, He’s right. Fusion could be the answer. If we could replace all the fossil-fueled electricity-generating plants on Earth with fusion plants we could cut down the greenhouse emissions to almost nothing. Fusion power plants could generate the electricity for electric cars. That’d eliminate another big greenhouse source.
He looked at Stavenger with new respect. Here’s a man who’s exiled from Earth, yet he wants to help them. And he sees farther than I do.
“Okay,” he said. “After the flight to the Belt, we make a run out to Jupiter. I’ll start the planning process right away.”
“Good,” said Stavenger. Then he added, “Will this be a Starpower project or will you keep it for Astro Corporation?”
For a moment Dan was dumbstruck. When he found his voice, it was a shocked whisper. “You want to cut out Humphries?”
“He’s maneuvering to get a stranglehold on asteroidal resources,” Stavenger said, as cold as steel. “I don’t think it would be wise to let him control fusion fuels as well.”
By all the gods that ever were, Dan thought, this guy is ready to go to war with Humphries.