The filters in his nostrils were giving Dan a headache; they felt as big as shotgun shells. He had come back to Earth reluctantly for this quarterly meeting of his board of directors. Dan always felt he could run Astro Manufacturing just fine if the double-damned board would simply stay out of his way. But they always had to poke their noses into the corporation’s operations, complaining about this, asking about that, insisting that he follow every crack-brained suggestion they came up with.
It was all so unnecessary. Dan held a controlling interest of the corporation’s outstanding stock; not an absolute majority of the shares, but enough to outvote the other board members if he had to. The board could not throw him out of his seat as corporate president and chief executive officer. All they could do was nibble away, waste his time, drive up his blood pressure.
To top it off, now Martin Humphries had joined the board, smiling, making friends, chatting up the other members as they milled around the sideboard scarfing up drinks and tea sandwiches before sitting in their places at the long conference table. Humphries was out to get an absolute majority, that was as clear to Dan as a gun aimed at his head.
Through the sweeping window that ran the length of the board room Dan could see the surging waters of the Caribbean sparkling in the morning sun. The sea looked calm, yet Dan knew it was inching ever higher, encroaching on the land, patiently, inexorably. Humphries kept his back to the window, deep in intense discussion with a trio of elderly directors. Dan had flown back to La Guaira specifically for this meeting. He could have stayed in Selene and chaired the meeting electronically, but that three-second lag would have driven him crazy. He appreciated how Kris Cardenas felt, dealing from the Moon every day with Duncan and his team in Scotland.
Dan stood at one end of the sideboard, beneath the big framed photograph of Astro’s first solar-power satellite, glinting in the harsh sunlight of space against the deep black background of infinity. He sipped on his usual aperitif glass of Amontillado, speaking as pleasantly as he could manage with the people closest to him. Fourteen men and women, most of the men either gray or bald, most of the women looking youthful, thanks to rejuvenation treatments. Funny, he thought: the women are taking rejuve therapy but the men are holding back from it. I am myself, he realized. The ultimate machismo stupidity. What’s wrong with delaying your physical deterioration? It’s not like a face-lift; you actually reverse the aging of your body’s cells.
“Dan, could I speak to you for a moment?” asked Harriett O’Banian. She’d been on the board for more than ten years, ever since Dan had bought out her small solar-cell production company.
“Sure, Hartie,” he said, walking her slowly to the far corner of the big conference room. “What’s on your mind?”
Hattie O’Banian was a trim-looking redhead who had consummated her buyout by Astro Manufacturing with a month-long affair with Dan. It had been fun for them both, and she’d been adult enough to walk away from it once she realized that no matter who shared his bed, Dan Randolph was in love with former President Jane Scanwell.
Glancing over her shoulder to make certain no one was within eavesdropping range, O’Banian half-whispered, “I’ve been offered a damned good price for my Astro shares. So have half a dozen other board members.”
Dan’s eyes flicked to Humphries, at the other end of the room, still chatting with the directors gathered around him.
“Who made the offer?” he asked.
“A straw man. Humphries is the real buyer.”
“I figured.”
“The trouble is, Dan, that’s it’s a damned good offer. Five points above the market price.”
“He’s gone up to five, has he?” Dan muttered.
“With the stock in free-fall the way it is, the offer is awfully tempting.”
“Yep, I can see that.”
She looked up at him and Dan realized that her emerald green eyes, which could be so full of delight and mischief, were dead serious now.
“He can buy up enough stock to outvote you,” O’Banian said.
“That’s what he’s trying to do, all right.”
“Dan, unless you’re going to pull some rabbit out of your hat at the meeting today, half your board is going to cash out.”
Dan tried to grin. It came out more as a grimace. “Thanks for the warning, Hattie. I’ll see what kind of rabbits I’ve got for you.”
“Good luck, Dan.”
He went to the head of the conference table, tapped the computer stylus against the stainless steel water tumbler there, and called the meeting to order. The directors took their seats; before he sat down, Humphries complained of the glare from the window and asked that the curtains be closed.
The agenda was brief. The treasurer’s report was gloomy. Income from the company’s final solar-power satellite construction project was tailing off as the project neared completion.
“What about the bonus for finishing the job ahead of schedule?” asked a florid-faced graybeard. Dan thought of him as Santa Claus with hypertension.
“That won’t be paid until the sunsat is beaming power to the ground,” said the treasurer.
“Still, it’s a sizeable amount of money.”
“It’ll keep us afloat for several months,” Dan said, waving the treasurer to silence.
“Then what?”
“Then we have to live off the income from existing operations. We have no new construction projects.”
“That’s the last of the power satellites?” asked the board member that Dan had privately nicknamed Bug Eyes. His eyes were even wider than usual, as if this was the first time he’d heard the bad news.
Dan clasped his hands as he answered carefully, “Although there are several orbital slots still available to accommodate solar power satellites, the GEC refuses to authorize any new construction.”
“It’s those damned Chinese,” growled one of the older men.
“China is not alone in this,” said a plump oriental woman sitting halfway down the table. Dan’s name for her was Mama-San. “Many nations prefer to build power stations on their own ground rather than buy electrical power from space.”
“Even though the price for that electricity is more than twice as high as our price,” Dan pointed out. “And even higher, if you count the costs of sequestering their greenhouse gas emissions.”
“Their governments subsidize the greenhouse amelioration,” the treasurer pointed out.
“The people still have to pay for it, one way or another.”
“What about beaming power from the Moon?”
“You wouldn’t need the GEC to allocate any orbital slots for that, by god!” Santa Claus thumped the table with his fist.
“It’s a possibility,” Dan admitted, “and we’ve talked about it with the officials of Selene -”
“Selene doesn’t own the whole damned Moon! Go off and build solar energy farms in the Ocean of Storms. Cover the whole expanse with solar cells, for god’s sake!”
“We’ve looked into it,” Dan said.
“And?”
“The problem is that no matter where the electricity is generated, it’s got to be beamed to the ground here on Earth.”
“We know that!”
Holding on to his temper, Dan went on, “The Pan-Asia bloc doesn’t want to import energy, whether it comes from orbit or the Moon or the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. They won’t allow us to build receiving stations on their territory. The Europeans have gone along with them and, between the two blocs, they have the GEC all wrapped up.”
“How can we generate electricity from the Lesser Magellanic Cloud?” asked Bug Eyes. “That’s quite a long distance away, isn’t it?”
Give me strength, Dan prayed silently.
He got them through the various departmental reports at last, fielding what seemed like seventeen thousand questions and suggestions - most of them pointless, several absolutely inane-and went on to new business.
“At least here I have something positive to report,” Dan said, smiling genuinely. “Our prototype fusion drive has been assembled in lunar orbit and test-flown successfully.”
“You are ready to go to the Asteroid Belt?” asked Mama-San.
“As soon as we get the required crew-rating from the IAA.”
From the far end of the table, Humphries spoke up. “We should have IAA approval in two to three weeks, barring any unforeseen setbacks.”
“Setbacks?”
“An accident,” Humphries said lightly. “Failure of the equipment, that sort of thing.”
Or an IAA inspector on the take, Dan added silently. It happened only rarely, but it happened.
“How much is this mission to the asteroids costing us?” asked the sprightly, dapper Swiss gentleman whom Dan had dubbed The Banker.
“The mission is being fully funded by Starpower, Limited,” Dan replied.
“Astro owns one-third of Starpower,” Humphries pointed out.
“And you own the rest?” The Banker asked.
“No, Humphries Space Systems owns a third, and the other third is owned by Selene.”
“How can a city own part of a corporation?”
“All the details are in the reports before you,” Dan said, tapping his stylus against the computer screen built into the tabletop.
“Yes, but-”
“I’ll explain it after the meeting,” Humphries said, full of graciousness.
The Banker nodded but still looked unsatisfied.
“The point is,” Dan told them, “that once this flight to the Asteroid Belt is accomplished, Astro’s stock is going to rise. We’ll have taken the first step in opening up a resource base that’s enormous-far bigger than all the mining operations on Earth.”
“I can see that Starpower’s stock will go up,” Santa Claus challenged.
“Astro’s will, too,” Dan said. “Because we have the corner on building the fusion engines.”
“Not Humphries Space Systems?” They all turned to Humphries.
He smiled gently, knowingly. “No, this is going to be Astro’s product. My corporation is merely supplying the capital, the funding.”
Dan thought that Humphries looked like a cat eyeing a helpless canary.
So there you have it,” Dan said to the IAA inspector. “The system performs as designed.” They were sitting in Starpower, Ltd’s one and only conference room, a tiny cubicle with an oval table that felt crowded even though only five people were sitting around it. The display screens on all four smartwalls showed data from the test flights of the fusion drive. The first half-dozen flights had been run remotely from the control center underground in Armstrong spaceport. The second string of six flights had been piloted by Pancho and Amanda.
Pointing to the screens, Dan said, “We’ve demonstrated acceleration, thrust, specific impulse, controllability, shutdown and restart... every facet of the full test envelope.”
The inspector nodded solemnly. He was a young man with Nordic fair skin and pale eyes, dressed rather somberly in a plain gray pullover shirt and darker slacks. His hair was a thick dirty-blond mop that he wore long, almost down to his shoulders. Despite his conservative outfit, though, he wore several small silver earrings, silver rings on his fingers, a silver bracelet on his right wrist, and a silver chain around his neck. There was a pendant of some sort hanging from the chain but most of it was hidden beneath his shirt.
Pancho and Amanda sat flanking Dan; Humphries was on the other side of the small oval table, next to the inspector. For some long moments there was silence in the conference room. Dan could hear the background hum of the electrical equipment and the soft breath of the air circulation fans.
At last, Dan asked, “Well, what do you think, Mr. Greenleaf?”
“Dr. Greenleaf,” the IAA inspector replied. “I have a doctorate in sociology.”
Dan felt his brows hike up. Why would the IAA send a sociologist to check out a new spacecraft propulsion system? And why this particular little prig of a sociologist?
Greenleaf steepled his fingers in front of him. “You’re surprised that a sociologist is evaluating your test data?”
“Well... yes, actually I am,” Dan said, feeling decidedly uncomfortable.
“I can assure you, Mr. Randolph-”
“Dan.”
“I can assure you, Mr. Randolph, that your data has been examined by the best engineers and physical scientists that the IAA has at its command,” Greenleaf said. “We are not taking your application lightly.”
“I didn’t mean to imply anything like that,” Dan said, thinking, This guy is out for blood.
Greenleaf shifted his gaze from Dan to the wall screen before him. “I can see that your device has performed within your design criteria quite reliably.”
“Good,” said Dan, relieved.
“Except in one respect,” Greenleaf went on.
“What? What do you mean?”
“Long-term reliability,” said Greenleaf. “The longest flight in your testing program was a mere two weeks, and even then it was at low power.”
“I wouldn’t call a constant acceleration of one-tenth g low power,” Dan said, testily. “And the IAA seemed very happy with the data we got from that test flight.”
Pancho and Amanda had flown the test rig on a parabolic trajectory that took them around Venus. The ship carried a full panoply of instrumentation for making observations of the planet as it flew by a scant thousand kilometers above Venus’s glowing clouds. A team of planetary astronomers had provided the equipment and monitored the flight, all of them from universities that belonged to the IAA, all of them ecstatically happy and grateful for the data that the flight brought back-for free.
“Two weeks is not a sufficient endurance test,” Greenleaf said flatly.
Pancho snapped, “It’s long enough to get us to the Belt.”
“Under full power.”
“What else?”
“I cannot authorize a crewed flight to the Asteroid Belt until you have demonstrated that your propulsion system can operate reliably at full power for the time it would take to complete the mission.”
Dan felt burning anger rising in his throat. Pancho looked as if she wanted to reach across the table and sock the guy. But then he realized that Amanda was looking not at Greenleaf, but at Humphries, who sat calmly in his chair, his face as expressionless as a professional card shark, his hands in his lap.
“Even your flight past Venus was an infraction of IAA regulations,” Greenleaf said, as if justifying himself.
“We filed the flight plan with the IAA,” Dan responded hotly.
“But you didn’t wait for authorization, did you?”
“It was a test flight, dammit!”
Greenleaf’s face flashed red. And Dan finally realized what he was up against. Oh, by all the saints in New Orleans, he said to himself, he’s a New Morality bigot. They’ve infiltrated the IAA.
“I am not going to argue with you,” Greenleaf said flatly. “You will be required to fly your device for four weeks at full power before you can receive approval for a crewed mission to the Asteroid Belt.”
He pushed his chair back and got to his feet, stumbling in the low lunar gravity despite the weighted boots he wore.
“Four weeks!” Dan blurted. “We can fly to the Belt and back in four weeks under full power.”
“Then do so,” said Greenleaf, smugly. “But do it under remote control. Without any crew.”
He headed for the door, leaving Dan sitting at the table, angry, stunned, and feeling betrayed.
“I’d better go after him,” Humphries said, getting up from his chair. “We don’t want him angry at us.”
“Why the hell not?” Dan grumbled.
Humphries left the conference room. Dan sagged back in his chair. “Flying an uncrewed mission to the Belt doesn’t make a dime’s worth of sense,” he muttered. “It’s just an exercise that costs us four weeks’ time and almost as much money as a crewed mission.”
Pancho said, “Four weeks isn’t so bad. Is it?”
“It’s four weeks closer to bankruptcy, kid. Four weeks closer to letting that Humper take over my company.”
In a very small voice, Amanda said, “It’s my fault, actually.”
Dan looked at her.
“Martin...” she hesitated, then said, “Martin doesn’t want me to go on the mission. I’m sure he’s had some influence on Dr. Greenleaf’s position.”
Pancho explained, “He’s bonkers about Mandy.”
Dan asked, “And how do you feel about him, Amanda?”
“Trapped,” she replied immediately. “I feel as though there’s nowhere on Earth I can go to get away from him. Or the Moon, for that matter. I feel like a trapped animal.”
Dan left the two women and went to his office. As he slipped into his desk chair he commanded the phone to locate his chief counsel, the woman who headed Astro’s corporate legal department.
The phone computer system found her on the ski slopes in Nepal. Her image was faint and wavered noticeably. She must be holding her wrist communicator in front of her face, Dan thought. He could see a bit of utterly blue sky behind her. She was in ski togs, polarized sun goggles pushed up on her forehead, and not at all happy about being buzzed by the boss.
“What in the nine billion names of God are you doing in Nepal?” Dan asked, irritated. Then he had to sit, fuming, for the few seconds it took for his message to reach the lawyer and her reply to get back to him.
“Trying to get in some skiing while there’s still snow left,” she snapped, equally irked.
“Skiing?”
“I do get some vacation time now and then,” she said, after the usual pause. “This is the first time I’ve taken any since lord knows when.”
Through gritted teeth, Dan explained the IAA inspector’s decision to her.
“You could appeal,” she said, once she understood the situation, “but that would take longer than running the uncrewed test flight he wants you to do.”
“Couldn’t we ask for another hearing, a different inspector?” Dan demanded. “This guy’s a New Morality fanatic and they’re dead-set against space exploration.”
The lawyer’s face hardened when she heard Dan’s words. “Mr. Randolph,” she said, “I am a member of the New Morality and I’m not a fanatic. Nor am I against space exploration.”
Feeling surrounded by enemies, Dan said, “Okay, okay. So I exaggerated.”
She said nothing.
“Can we claim an asteroid with an uncrewed spacecraft?”
“No one can claim ownership of any body in space,” her reply came back. It was what Dan had expected. Then she went on, “No planet, moon, comet, asteroid-no celestial body of any kind. That’s been international law since the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, and subsequent amendments and protocols.”
Trust a lawyer to use two dozen words when one will do, Dan groused to himself.
She went on, “Individuals are allowed to have exclusive use of part or all of a celestial body, for the purpose of establishing a human habitation or extracting natural resources. In that instance, corporations are regarded as individuals.”
“So could Astro Corporation claim use of an asteroid that an uncrewed spacecraft rendezvouses with?”
Nearly three seconds later she replied, “No. Such a claim can only be made by humans on the scene of the claim itself.”
“But the double-dipped spacecraft would be under human control, remotely, from Selene.”
Again the lag, and again the answer, “No, Dan. It’s not allowed. Otherwise corporations would be able to send miniprobes all over the solar system and claim everything in sight! It would be like the efforts to patent segments of DNA and living organisms, back around the turn of the century.”
“So an uncrewed test flight wouldn’t do us any good at all,” he said.
Once she heard his question, the lawyer answered, “That’s a decision that you’ll have to make, Dan. I’m just a lawyer; you’re the CEO.”
“Thanks a lot,” Dan muttered.
Martin Humphries had not bothered to chase after the IAA inspector. What was the point? The young bureaucrat had done precisely what Humphries had wanted. Barely able to hide his satisfaction, he rode the moving stairs down to his home deep below the Moon’s surface.
It’s all working out very neatly, he congratulated himself as he walked along the corridor toward the cavern. Just enough delay to break Randolph’s back. Astro’s stock is in the toilet, and the other major shareholders will be glad to sell once they hear that the asteroid mission has to be postponed for more testing. By the time they finally get the mission going, I’ll own Astro and Dan Randolph will be out on his ass.
And better yet, he thought, once I’m in charge I’ll make certain that Amanda stays here on the ground. With me.
She looks better now, doesn’t she?” Dan asked as their jumper coasted toward the fusion-powered spacecraft. Pancho nodded her agreement. The ship was still utilitarian, not sleek, but now the starkness of the bare engine system by itself was dwarfed by six huge, gleaming spherical propellant tanks. Big white letters stenciled along the cylindrical crew module identified the craft as STARPOWER 1; the logos of Astro Corporation, Humphries Space Systems and Selene adorned one of the propellant tanks. The jumper was little more than an ordinary lunar transfer buggy with an extra set of tankage and a bigger rocket engine for ascents from the Moon’s surface into lunar orbit and descents back to the ground again. Dan and Pancho wore tan Astro coveralls as they rode in the bulbous glassteel crew module, standing with their booted feet anchored in floor loops because seats were not needed for this brief, low-g flight. An instrument podium rose at the front of the module, its controls standing unused, since the vessel was being handled by the flight controllers back at Armstrong. Still, Dan felt good that Pancho was a qualified pilot. You never know, he thought.
As they approached the fusion-powered vessel, Pancho whistled at the size of the propellant tanks. “That’s a lot of fuel.”
“Tell me about it,” Dan said ruefully. “I’ve had to default on two helium-three contracts with Earthside power utilities to fill those double-damned tanks.”
“Default?”
Nodding, Dan said grimly, “Two steps closer to bankruptcy.”
Pancho decided to change the subject slightly.
“So what’ve you decided to do about the long-duration test?” Pancho asked.
Dan shook his head. “I’ve spent the past four days pulling every wire I know.”
“And?”
“Nothing so far. Zip. Nobody’s going to lift a finger to go against the IAA.”
“So you’ll have to do the test flight?”
Running a finger across his chin, Dan said reluctantly, “Looks that way.”
“Then why are we takin’ this ride?”
The shadow of a smile crossed Dan’s face. He was thinking of the time, many years earlier, when he had briefly become a privateer, a pirate, hijacking uncrewed spacecraft for their cargoes of ore. It had started as a desperation ploy, the only way a frustrated Dan Randolph could force open the space markets that had been closed by monopolists. He had won his war against monopoly and opened the solar system to free competition among individuals, corporations and governments. But at a price. His smile faded as he remembered the people who had died fighting that brief, unheralded war. He himself had come to within a whisker of being killed.
“So?” Pancho prodded, “Is this a joyride or what?”
Putting his thoughts of the past behind him, Dan replied, “I want to see the crew module for myself. And we’re going to meet the planetary geologist that Zack Freiberg’s picked out for us.”
“The asteroid specialist?”
“Yep. He’s aboard the ship now. Came up to Selene yesterday and went straight to the ship. He slept aboard last night.”
Pancho huffed. “Eager beaver. College kid, I bet.”
“He’s got a mint-new degree from Zurich Polytech.”
The flight controllers brought the jumper to a smooth rendezvous with Starpower 1. While Dan and Pancho stood watching, the little transfer buggy linked its airlock adapter section to the hatch of the bigger vessel. They floated through the womb-like adapter to the fusion ship’s airlock hatch.
The airlock opened into the midsection of the crew module. To their left, Dan saw the accordion-fold doors of a half-dozen privacy compartments lining the passageway. Further up were the galley, a wardroom with a table and six small but plush-looking chairs, and-past an open hatch-the bridge. To their right was the lavatory and a closed hatch that led to the equipment and storage bays.
Dan headed left, toward the galley and the bridge.
“Chairs?” Pancho asked, looking puzzled, as they pushed weightlessly past the wardroom, floating a few centimeters above the deck’s carpeting.
“You’ll be accelerating or decelerating most of the way,” Dan pointed out. “You won’t be spending much time in zero-g.”
She nodded, looking disappointed with herself. “I knew that; it just didn’t latch.”
Dan understood how she felt. He’d seen the layout of the crew module hundreds of times, viewed three-d mockups and even walked through virtual reality simulations. But being in the real thing was different. He could smell the newness of the metal and fabric; he could reach his hand up and run his fingers along the plastic panels of the overhead. The bridge looked small, but shining and already humming with electrical power.
“Where’s our college boy?” Pancho asked, looking around.
“That would be me, I suppose,” said a reedy voice from behind them.
Turning, Dan saw a husky-looking young man gripping the edges of the open hatch with both hands. He was a shade shorter than Dan, but broad in the shoulders, with a thick barrel chest. The build of a wrestler. His face was broad, too: a heavy jaw with wide, thin lips and small, deepset eyes. His hair was cropped so close to his skull that Dan couldn’t be sure of its true color. He wore a small glittering stone in his left ear-lobe, diamond or zircon or glass, Dan could not tell.
“I heard you enter. I was in the sensor bay, checking on the equipment,” he said in a flat midwestern American accent, pronounced so precisely that he had to have learned it in a foreign school.
“Oh,” said Pancho.
“I am Lars Fuchs,” he said, extending his hand to Dan. “You must be Mr. Randolph.”
“Pleased to meet you, Dr. Fuchs.” Fuchs’s hand engulfed his own. The young man’s grip was strong, firm. “This is Pancho Lane,” Dan went on. “She’ll be our pilot on the flight.”
Fuchs dipped his chin slightly. “Ms. Lane. And, sir, I am not Dr. Fuchs. Not yet.”
“That’s okay. Zack Freiberg recommends you highly.”
“I am very grateful to Doctor Professor Freiberg. He has been very helpful to me.”
“And my name is Dan. If you call me Mr. Randolph it’ll make me feel like an old man.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t want to offend you, sir!” Fuchs said, genuinely alarmed.
“Just call me Dan.”
“Yes, sir, of course. And you must call me Lars.” Turning to Pancho, he added, “Both of you.”
“That’s a deal, Lars,” said Pancho, sticking out her hand.
Fuchs took it gingerly, as if not quite sure what to do. “Pancho is a woman’s name in America?”
She laughed. “It’s this woman’s name, Lars old buddy.”
Smiling uneasily, Fuchs said, “Pancho,” as if testing out the name.
“You handle weightlessness very well,” Dan said. “From what Zack told me, this is your first time off-Earth.”
Fuchs said. “Thank you, sir... Dan. I came up last night so I could adapt myself to microgravity before you arrived here.”
Pancho smiled sympathetically. “Spent the night makin’ love to the toilet, huh?”
Looking flustered, Fuchs said, “I did retch a few times, yes.”
“Ever’body does, Lars,” she said. “Nothin’ to be ashamed of.”
“I am not ashamed,” he said, his chin rising a notch.
Dan moved between them. “Have you picked out which cabin you want for yourself? Since you were first aboard you get first pick.”
“Hey,” Pancho griped, “I’ve been aboard this buggy before, you know. So has Amanda.”
“The privacy compartments are all exactly alike,” Fuchs said. “It doesn’t matter which one I get.”
“I’ll take the last one on the left,” Dan said, peering down the passageway that ran the length of the module. “It’s closest to the lav.”
“You?” Pancho looked surprised. “Since when are you comin’ on the mission?”
“Since about four days ago,” Dan said. “That’s when I made up my mind... about a lot of things.”
“So here’s my plan,” Dan said, with a grin. He and Pancho were hunched over one of the postage-stamp-sized tables in the farthest corner of the Pelican bar, away from the buzzing conversations and bursts of laughter from the crowd standing at the bar itself. Their heads were almost touching, leaning together like a pair of conspirators.
Which they were. Inwardly, Dan marveled at how good he felt. Free. Happy, almost. The double-damned bureaucrats have tried to tie me up in knots. Humphries is behind it all, playing along with the IAA and those New Morality bigots. Those uptight psalm-singers don’t want us to reach the asteroids. They like the Earth just the way it is: miserable, hungry, desperate for the kind of order and control that the New Morality offers. This greenhouse warming is a blessing for them, the wrath of God smiting the unbelievers. Anything we do to try to help alleviate it, they see as a threat to their power.
Vaguely, Dan recalled from his childhood history lessons something about a group called the Nazis, back in the twentieth century. They came to power because there was an economic depression and people needed jobs and food. If he remembered his history lessons correctly.
So the New Morality has its tentacles into the IAA now, Dan thought. And the GEC too, I’ll bet. And Humphries is playing them all like a symphony orchestra, using them to stymie me long enough so he can grab Astro from me.
Well, it’s not going to be that easy, partner. “What’s so funny?” Pancho asked, looking puzzled. “Funny?”
“You say, ‘Here’s my plan, ‘ and then you start grinnin’ like a cat in a canary’s cage.”
Dan took a sip of his brandy and dry, then said, “Pancho, I’ve always said that when the going gets tough, the tough get going-to where the going’s easier.”
“I’ve heard that one before.”
“So I’m going with you.”
“You?”
“Yep.”
“To the Belt.”
“You need a flight engineer. I know the ship’s systems as well as anybody.”
“Lordy-lord,” Pancho muttered.
“I’m still a qualified astronaut. I’m going with you.”
“But not until we do the uncrewed test flight,” she said, reaching for her beer.
Leaning across the table even closer to her, Dan said in a hoarse whisper, “Screw the test flight. We’re going to the Belt. You, Amanda, Fuchs and me.”
Pancho nearly choked on her mouthful of beer. She sputtered, coughed, then finally asked, “What’re you drinkin’, boss?”
Happy as a pirate on the open sea, Dan said, “We’ll let ‘em think we’re doing exactly what they’ve told us to do, except that the four of us will happen to be aboard the bird when she breaks orbit.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that. We’ll calculate a new flight plan once we’re underway. Instead of accelerating at one-sixth g, as we’ve planned, we’ll goose her up to one-third g and cut the flight time by more than half.”
Pancho looked unconvinced. “You better bring an astrogator aboard.”
“Nope.” Pointing a finger at her, Dan said, “You’re it, kid. You and Amanda. I’m not bringing anybody into this that we don’t absolutely need.”
“I’m not so sure about this,” Pancho said warily.
“Don’t go chicken on me, kid,” Dan said. “You two have been studying this point-and-shoot technique for a lot of weeks. If you can’t do it, I’ve been wasting money on you.”
“I can do it,” Pancho said immediately.
“Okay, then.”
“I’d just feel better if you had a real expert on board.”
“No experts. Nobody else except the four of us. I don’t want anybody tipped off about this. And that includes Humphries.”
Pancho waved a hand nonchalantly. “He hasn’t said a word to me since we moved Sis.”
“I don’t think he knows were we stashed her,” Dan said, reaching for his drink.
“He knows about ever’thing.”
“Not this flight,” Dan said firmly. “Nobody is going to know about this. Understand me? Don’t even tell Amanda or Fuchs. This is just between you and me, kid.”
“And the flight controllers,” Pancho muttered.
“What?”
“How’re you goin’ to get the flight controllers to go along with this? You can’t just waltz aboard the Starpower and light her up without them knowin’ it. Hell’s bells, Dan, you won’t even be able to hop up to the ship if they don’t let you have a jumper and give you clearance for takeoff.”
Sipping at his brandy-laced ginger beer, Dan admitted, “That’s a problem I haven’t worked out yet.”
“It’s a toughie.”
“Yep, it is,” Dan said, unable to suppress a grin.
Pancho shook her head disapprovingly. “You’re enjoying this.”
“Why not?” Dan replied. “The world’s going to hell in a handbasket, the New Morality is taking over the government, Humphries is trying to screw me out of my own company-what could be more fun than hijacking my own spacecraft and riding it out to the Belt?”
“That’s weird,” Pancho murmured.
Dan saw that his glass was empty. He pressed the button set into the table’s edge to summon one of the squat little robots trundling through the crowd.
“Don’t worry about the flight controllers,” he said casually. “We’ll figure out a way around them.”
“We?”
“You and me.”
“Hey, boss, I’m a pilot, not a woman of intrigue.”
“You made a pretty good spy.”
“I was lousy at it and we both know it.”
“You hacked into Humphries’s files.”
“And he found out about it in half a minute, just about.”
“We’ll think of something,” Dan said.
Pancho nodded, then realized that she had already thought of something.
“I’ll fix the flight controllers,” she said.
“Really?” Dan’s brows rose. “How?”
“Better that you don’t know boss. Just let me do it my way.”
Dan looked skeptical, but he shrugged and said nothing.
The timing had to be just right.
Nervous despite being invisible, Pancho edged cautiously into the Armstrong spaceport’s mission control center. It was nearly two a. m. The center was quiet, only two controllers on duty and both of them were relaxed, one leaning back in his chair while the other poured coffee at the little hotplate off by the door to the lav. Pancho hadn’t told anyone about this caper. She thought it best to borrow the stealth suit and get the job done without bringing anyone else into the picture, not even Dan Randolph. The fewer people who knew about the stealth suit, the better.
No landings or takeoffs were scheduled at this hour; the skeleton crew was in the control center strictly because prudent regulations required that the center always be manned, in case an emergency cropped up.
How could there be an emergency? Pancho asked herself as she slowly tiptoed to the console farthest from those being used by the pair of controllers. Spacecraft don’t just zoom in on the spur of the moment; even a max-thrust flight from one of the space stations orbiting Earth takes six hours to reach the Moon. Plenty time to rouse the whole crew of controllers if they were needed. The only possible emergency would be if one of the teams at a remote outpost on the lunar surface ran into a jam. Maybe if an astronomer at the Farside Observatory suddenly developed a case of appendicitis and their radio was out so they sent the poor boob on a ballistic lob to Selene without being able to alert anybody first. That was just about the only emergency Pancho could think of.
Or if an invisible woman sneaked in and jiggered the flight schedule for tomorrow’s launches. No, Pancho thought, not tomorrow’s. It’s already past two in the morning. Today’s schedule.
She sat at one of the unattended consoles, as far from the human controllers as possible, and waited for the woman at the coffee urn to return to her post. The overweight guy sitting at his console looked half asleep, feet up on the consoles, eyes closed, a pair of earphones clamped over his head. They weren’t the regulation earphones, either. The guy was listening to music; Pancho could see the rhythmic bobbing of his head.
Hope it’s a lullaby, she said to herself.
The woman controller took a sip of her coffee and made a sour face. Then she looked straight at Pancho. Inside the stealth suit, Pancho froze. The moment passed. The woman’s gaze shifted and she started back toward her console, her steaming coffee mug in one hand. Pancho began to breathe again.
The woman came back to her console, next to the guy, gave him a disapproving frown, then sat down and clapped a regulation earphone and pin-mike set to her head.
Good, thought Pancho. The big chamber was too quiet to suit her. Normally the rows of consoles would be filled with controllers talking to the traffic coming in and out of Selene. There would be plenty of background chatter to hide her pecking at a keyboard. But then there wouldn’t be any empty consoles to use; they’d all be occupied during normal working hours.
Pancho tentatively tapped on the keyboard before her, once to silence the voice system, then again to call up the status board. The woman at her console did not hear the faint clicks. Or if she did, she paid no notice. The guy was definitely asleep, Pancho thought, his head lolling on his shoulders now, his bulging belly rising and falling in deep, slow breathing.
Only one craft on the schedule, Pancho saw from the status display. Due to land in five hours. Plenty of time for her to do what she had to and get out before more controllers began filing in for the morning shift.
Slowly, cautiously, with one eye on the bored woman sitting on the other side of the room, Pancho tapped out a set of instructions for the morning’s schedule. Then she got up, quietly left the control center, and returned the stealth suit to Ike Walton’s locker up in the storage area near the catacombs. She wondered if she’d ever need it again. Maybe I ought to keep it, she thought. But then Ike would discover it was gone, sooner or later, and that would raise a stink. Better to let it stay here and just hope Ike doesn’t change the combination on the lock.
Sudden panic hit Pancho. Elly was not in the locker, where she had left her. Pancho had thought that the krait would snooze away in the chilly air of the storage area; she had fed Elly a mouse only a day earlier, and that usually left the snake in a pleasantly drowsy state of digestion. But moving her to Walton’s locker must have disturbed Elly’s torpor. The snake had slithered through one of the air slits in the bottom of the locker door.
For several frantic minutes Pancho searched for the krait. She found her at last, curled on the floor in front of a heating vent. But when she tried to pick Elly up, the krait reared and hissed at her.
Pancho got down on both knees and frowned at the snake. “Don’t you go hissy on me,” she said sternly. “I know I disturbed your nap, but that’s no reason to get sore.”
The snake’s tongue flicked in and out, in and out.
“That’s right, take a good sniff. It’s me, and if you’ll just calm yourself down, I’ll wrap you around my nice warm ankle and we can get back home. Okay?”
Elly relaxed and sank back into a tight little coil of glittering blue. Pancho slowly extended her hand and when Elly didn’t react, she stroked the krait’s head gently with one finger.
“Come on, girl,” she crooned, “we’re gonna take you home where you can sleep nice and comfy.”
But not for long, Pancho added silently.
Martin Humphries was awakened from a dream about Amanda by the insistent shrill of his personal phone.
It wasn’t a sexual dream. Strangely, when he dreamed of Amanda it was never sexual. They were on a yacht this time, sailing across a calm azure sea, standing up by the prow and watching dolphins leaping across the ship’s bow wave. He felt nervous on the water, unable to shake the fear of drowning even in this idyllic setting.
Amanda stood by the rail, wearing a lovely pale blue dress, the soft breeze tousling her hair. She gazed at him with sad eyes. “I’ll be leaving soon,” she said unhappily.
“You can’t leave me,” Humphries said to her. “I won’t let you leave.”
“I don’t want to, darling. But they’re forcing me to. I must go. I have no choice.”
“Who?” Humphries demanded. “Who’s forcing you?”
“You know who, dearest,” said Amanda. “You know. You’re even helping him.”
“It’s Randolph! He’s taking you away from me!”
“Yes,” Amanda said, her eyes pleading with him to help her. To save her.
And then the damned phone woke him up.
He sat up in his bed, blazingly angry. “Phone!” he called out. “On the art screen.”
A reproduction of a Picasso cubist nude disappeared to reveal the somber face of his security chief.
“Sorry to wake you, sir,” the man said, “but you said you wanted to be personally informed of Ms. Cunningham’s movements.”
With a glance at the digital clock on the nightstand, Humphries demanded, “Where’s she going at four in the fricking morning?”
“She’s apparently asleep in her room, sir, but-”
“Then what are you bothering me for?” Humphries bellowed.
The security man swallowed visibly. “Sir, her name has just appeared on a flight manifest.”
“Flight manifest?”
“Yessir. She and three other people are scheduled to go to the Star-power ship, up in orbit.”
“Now? Today?”
“Scheduled for eight this morning, sir.”
Four hours from now, Humphries realized. “And this flight manifest just came up on the launch schedule?”
“About an hour ago, sir.”
“Why are they going to Starpower 1?” Humphries wondered aloud.
“That vessel is scheduled for launch on a test flight at nine o’clock, sir.”
“I know that,” Humphries snapped. “It’s an unnamed long-duration flight.”
“Perhaps they’re going up for a last-minute checkout, before the ship is launched out of orbit.”
“Three other people going with her, you say? Who are they?”
The security chief read off the names. “P. Lane, command pilot; L. Fuchs, mission scientist; and C. N. Barnard, flight surgeon.”
“I know Lane,” Humphries said. “Who are the other two?”
“Fuchs is a graduate student from Zurich Polytechnical Institute. He just arrived in Selene a few days ago. Barnard is apparently a medic of sort.”
“Apparently?”
Looking uncomfortable, the security chief replied, “He’s an Astro employee. We have no background data on Barnard, sir. No ID photo, either. All that we’ve been able to pull up from Astro’s files are his name, his position, and his fingerprints and retinal scan.”
“Dan Randolph,” Humphries growled. “It’s an alias for Randolph!”
“Sir?”
“Check those prints and retinal scan against Dan Randolph’s file.”
“Yessir.”
“And send a couple of men to Amanda Cunningham’s quarters. Bring her here, to me.”
“Right away, sir.”
The wall screen went blank for an instant, then the Picasso image reappeared. Humphries paid no attention. He leaped out of bed, snarling aloud, “That fucking Randolph thinks he’s going to zip off to the Belt and take Amanda with him. Like hell he will!”
Dan was already up and dressed in a white flight suit, the kind of coveralls worn by members of Selene’s medical staff. “C. N. Barnard” was one of the extra identities he had stored in Astro’s personnel files, a hangover from the days when he’d been up to his armpits in international skullduggery. He still had modest bank accounts scattered here and there on Earth under various aliases, just in case he ever needed to disappear for a while.
He grinned to himself as he started for the tunnel that led to the spaceport. I’m going to disappear for a while, all right. Completely out of the Earth-Moon system. Past Mars. Out to the Asteroid Belt. The IAA will go apeshit when they find out we’re on board Starpower 1. Humphries’ll have a fit.
And Astro’s stock ought to shoot up when we claim mining rights to a nice, rich asteroid or three. The lawyers may squabble over the details, but a few billion dollars worth of high-grade ores will start a feeding frenzy among the brokers. And the publicity will help, too.
His grin disappeared as he reached the entrance to the tunnel. An electric cart sat waiting to take him to the spaceport, but neither Pancho nor Amanda was in sight. Dammitall to hell and back, Dan fumed. They were supposed to meet me here at five sharp. Women!
“Come on, Mandy,” Pancho urged. “Dan’s prob’ly waitin’ for us already!”
“One more minute,” Amanda said, from the lav. “I’ve just got to -”
Somebody pounded impatiently on the door.
“Oh, hell!” Pancho said.
Amanda came out of the lavatory. “I’m ready, Pancho. Sorry to keep you waiting.”
Pancho opened the door. Instead of Dan Randolph, two strangers stood out in the corridor. Both were men, wearing identical dark gray business suits. One with long blond hair and a nice full moustache, the other a taller, darker man with a military crew cut. Both were big-shouldered and stone-faced. They looked like cops to Pancho.
Shit! Pancho thought. They know I hacked into the flight schedule.
But the blond said, “Amanda Cunningham? Come with us, please.”
Pancho hiked a thumb over her shoulder. “That’s her. And she’s not goin’ anywhere with you. We’re late for work already.”
They pushed past Pancho and entered the room. “You’ll have to come with us, Ms. Cunningham,” the blond said.
“Why? On whose authority?”
“Mr. Humphries wants to see you,” the buzz cut said. His partner frowned at him.
Pancho said, “Now wait a minute-”
“Don’t interfere,” the blond said sharply. “Our orders are to bring Ms. Cunningham to Mr. Humphries’s residence. That’s what we’re going to do.”
“Call security, Mandy,” Pancho said. “These guys are workin’ for Humphries.”
Amanda started around the bed to the phone on the night table between their two beds, but the blond moved faster and blocked her way.
“We don’t want to get physical,” he said to Amanda, “but we’ve got a job to do and we’re going to do it.”
“How rough we get depends on you,” said the darker man, grinning at Amanda.
She stared at them, wide eyed, somewhere between confusion and terror.
The blond took another step toward Amanda. “Come along now, honey. We don’t want to hurt anybody.”
Mandy stumbled back, away from him. Pancho saw that both men were focused on her. She swiftly bent down and peeled Elly from her ankle.
“Here, wiseass,” Pancho said as she hurled the bright blue snake at the blond.
He turned just fast enough to see the krait sailing in lunar slow motion toward his face. Instinctively he raised his arm to shield himself.
“What the hell!”
Elly bounced off the guy’s arm and fell to the floor. She reared up, hissing angrily.
“Jesus Christ, what is it?”
The buzz cut was tugging at something inside his jacket. Pancho chopped at the back of his neck and he sagged to the floor. Elly slithered toward him. The blond seemed frozen with fright, staring at the snake.
Pancho gestured to Amanda, who stepped past the goggle-eyed blond and came to her side.
The guy on the floor pushed himself up on one elbow and saw the snake rearing a bare ten centimeters in front of his face, its beady eyes staring at him.
“Aaaggh,” he moaned.
The blond pulled a small pistol from the holster beneath his jacket. Pancho saw that his hand was shaking badly.
“Loud noises annoy her,” she said. “Just be quiet and don’t move.”
The blond glanced at her, then returned his stare to the snake. The buzz cut was sweating as Elly stood before him, her tongue flicking in and out.
“D-do something,” he whispered hoarsely.
“Better drop your gun on the bed,” said Pancho to the blond. “If you shoot and miss her, she’ll bite him for sure.”
The blond tossed the gun onto the bed. “Get it out of here,” he pleaded.
Pancho started to lean forward, slowly, carefully, bending toward Elly. But the buzz cut’s nerve broke. He swung blindly at the snake and tried to scramble to his feet. Elly sank her fangs into the meaty side of his hand.
He screamed and sagged back to the floor, unconscious. Pancho bent over and scooped Elly up, careful to hold her so the krait couldn’t twist and bite her.
“He’ll be dead in an hour ‘less you get the antiserum into him,” Pancho said quickly.
The blond stared at his partner helplessly.
“Take him to the hospital!” Pancho shouted.
She headed for her travel bag, still on her bed, next to the blond’s discarded gun. Still holding Elly, she rummaged in the bag until she found the vial of antiserum and tossed it to the blond.
“Get him to the hospital! Now! Tell ‘em what happened and give ‘em this. It’s the antiserum.”
Then she grabbed her still-open travel bag and headed for the door. Amanda came right behind her, then rushed back in to get her own bag. As they hurried down the corridor together, Pancho glanced back over her shoulder and saw the blond lugging his unconscious partner in the other direction, toward the hospital.
“Good girl, Elly,” she said. The krait had wrapped itself contentedly around Pancho’s wrist.
When they got to the spaceport tunnel Dan Randolph was pacing angrily.
“Where the hell have you been? We’re running late.”
“I’ll tell you all about it, boss,” Pancho said as they climbed aboard the cart.
“It’s Martin,” Amanda said, her voice low.
“Humphries?” asked Dan.
“He wants Mandy, and I think he knows we’re tryin’ to get out of here.”
“What the hell happened?” Dan demanded.
Pancho told him as the automated cart rode down the tunnel to the spaceport.
Martin Humphries sat at his desk, staring coldly at the frightened, worried face of the blond security agent. The man was sweating and nervously brushing at his moustache with a fingertip.
“So you let her get away,” Humphries said, after the man had explained his failure for the third time.
“My partner was dying!” the blond said, his voice ragged. “That motherfucking snake bit him!”
“And you let Ms. Cunningham get away,” Humphries repeated, icily.
“I had to take him to the hospital. He would’ve died otherwise.”
“You didn’t phone me, or security, or anyone who might have prevented her leaving.”
“I’m phoning you now,” the blond said, with some heat. “They’re just about making their rendezvous with the Starpower ship. You can call the control center and have them abort the mission.”
“Can I?”
“There’s still time.”
Humphries clicked off the connection. Stupid clod, he thought. I send him to do one simple thing and he fucks it up completely.
“Abort the mission,” he said aloud. Then he shook his head. I should call the control center and tell them that Dan Randolph is hijacking my vessel and taking the woman I love alone with him. That would be a lovely item for the scandal nets. Everyone would laugh themselves sick at me.
He leaned back in his contoured chair, but its softly yielding padding failed to soothe him. Amanda’s running off with Randolph. He’s probably been hot for her all the time, just waiting to get her away from me. Well, now they can be together. She prefers him to me. So she can die with him.
His teeth hurt. With some surprise, Humphries realized that he’d clamped his jaw so tight it was making his whole head ache. His neck and shoulders were painfully stiff with tension. His fists were clenched so tightly he could feel his fingernails cutting into his palms.
Amanda’s gone off with him. I’ll acquire Astro, but I’ve lost her forever. They’ll die together. It’s not my fault. I didn’t want to kill anybody. They’re doing it to themselves. She’s killing herself.
He wished he could cry. Instead, he glanced at the list of major Astro stockholders that was displayed on his desktop screen. And he punched his right fist into the screen, exploding it in a shower of sparks and plastic shards.
Fuchs met them at the spaceport, wondering why the four of them were going to the ship a bare hour before it was due to leave orbit and head out to the Belt.
“There’s been a change in plans, Lars,” Dan told him. “We’re going along, too.”
The young man’s dark brows lifted halfway to his scalp. “The IAA has approved this?”
“That doesn’t make any difference,” Dan said as Amanda and Pancho clambered into the tractor waiting to take them to the jumper out on the launch pad. “We’re going.”
Fuchs hesitated, standing in the open airlock hatch of the tractor.
“We’re going,” Dan repeated. “With you or without you.”
A slow smile spread across Fuchs’s broad face. “With me,” he said, and hopped up into the tractor, clearing its six steps with ease.
Dan grinned and resisted the urge to imitate the younger man’s athleticism. Amanda and Pancho had taken the two rear seats, Fuchs the one next to the hatch. Dan sat behind the driver’s seat as the driver herself closed the airtight hatch and then checked out the cab’s pressurization. She got behind the wheel and slipped on her headset.
She’s waiting for authorization from the controller to go out, Dan knew. If they’re going to stop us, this’d be the easiest time for them to do it.
But after a few moments’ wait, she put the tractor in gear and rolled to the garage’s airlock. A few minutes later they were at the jumper, connecting the flexible access tube from the tractor’s hatch to the airlock hatch on the jumper’s crew module. In their flight coveralls, the four of them stepped carefully along the springy plastic of the narrow tube, hands touching the walls, heads bent slightly to keep from brushing the low ceiling.
Small as it was, the jumper’s lab module was better than the claustrophobic tube. It was little more than a few square meters of metal deck enclosed in a glassteel bubble. A control console stood up front on a waist-high pedestal. Pancho went to the control console and pulled on one of the headsets hanging there; Amanda took up her post on Pancho’s right.
“Better use the foot loops,” Dan said to Fuchs. “We’ll be in zero-g for a few minutes.”
Fuchs nodded. He looked tense, expectant, his thin lips tightly closed.
They can stop us at any time, Dan told himself. But as each second ticked by, he felt better and better.
“Five seconds and counting,” Pancho told them. She hadn’t bothered to turn on the speaker built into the console.
Just as Dan reached out to clasp one of the handgrips along the curving inner surface of the bubble, the jumper leaped off the ground with a single short, sharp bang of its ascent rocket. Dan’s knees flexed, but Fuchs nearly buckled. Dan grabbed his arm to steady him.
“I... I’m sorry,” Fuchs apologized. “I didn’t expect it.”
“It’s okay,” said Dan, impressed by the hard muscle he felt. “This is only your second launch, isn’t it?”
Fuchs looked pale. “My second from the Moon’s surface. I also rode the shuttle from the Zurich aerospace port.”
Dan saw that zero-g was making Fuchs queasy. “Are you going to be okay?” he asked. Nothing worse than having the guy next to you upchucking all the way to rendezvous.
With a weak smile, Fuchs pointed to his well-muscled biceps. “I took the precaution of wearing a medicinal patch.”
“Good,” Dan said.
“And also these.” He pulled a thick wad of retch bags from the thigh pocket of his coveralls.
“Smart man,” Dan said, hoping that Fuchs wouldn’t have to use them.
Under control from the ground, the jumper made rendezvous with Starpower 1 and docked with the fusion ship’s main airlock hatch. Dan felt the slightest of thumps as the jumper’s adapter section locked onto the ship’s hatch.
“Confirm docking,” Pancho said into her pin-mike. “You guys did a good job. I didn’t have to touch the controls once.”
Whatever the controller said back to her made Pancho laugh. “Yeah, I know; that’s why you drag down the big bucks. Okay, we’re goin’ aboard now.”
Turning to Dan, Pancho said, “I’ll set her up for automatic separation and return to Selene.”
“Right,” said Dan, lifting free of his foot restraints and floating to the hatch. As far as the controllers back at Armstrong spaceport were concerned, the four of them were to be aboard Starpower 1 only for a final checkout before the ship was launched out of orbit. They were expected to return to Selene on the jumper.
“They’re gonna be kinda surprised when this li’l buggy lands and nobody’s in it,” Pancho said with a mischievous grin.
Dan went through the jumper’s hatch and into the coffin-sized adapter section. He tapped out the entry code to open the fusion ship’s airlock hatch.
“Okay,” he said, once the hatch had swung open. “Let’s get aboard the Beltline express.”
“You first, boss,” said Pancho. “You’re the owner.”
He grunted. “One-third owner. I imagine at least one of the other two is going to be mighty slammed once he figures out what we’re doing,”
“But he must have figured that out already,” Amanda said.
“Right,” Pancho agreed. “Why else would he send those goons after Mandy?”
Dan felt his brow furrow. “Then why isn’t he raising a howl? Why isn’t he trying to stop us?”
Fuchs looked back and forth from Amanda to Pancho to Dan, clearly baffled by their conversation.
“Well, let’s get aboard before he does start hollerin’,” Poncho said, making a shooing motion toward Dan with both her hands.
Feeling suddenly uneasy, Dan sailed through the hatch and entered Starpower 1. He hovered at the airlock’s inner hatch as Pancho came through and pushed off straight toward the bridge. Amanda started through the hatch, but stumbled slightly. Fuchs grasped her by the shoulders, steadying her.
“Thank you, Lars,” Amanda said.
Dan thought the kid’s face turned red for a moment. He let her go and Amanda sailed through both hatches without needing to use her hands or feet. Fuchs, still a newcomer to zero-g, gripped the edges
of the hatch with both his meaty hands and cannonballed through. He thumped painfully against the far bulkhead. Dan said nothing, suppressing his laughter at the young man’s attempted display of athletic prowess.
But as he sealed the hatches Dan’s mood darkened. I warned Amanda about coming on to a guy. He realized that she was wearing ordinary coveralls, but still - I’ll have to play chaperon between her and Fuchs, Dan told himself.
He headed up to the bridge, “swimming” in zero gravity by flicking his fingertips against the passageway bulkheads to propel himself weightlessly forward.
Pancho had strapped herself into the command pilot’s chair, busily working both hands across the control board. Through the wide glassteel ports above the board, Dan could see the dead gray curve of the Moon’s limb and, beyond it, the beckoning bright crescent of the glowing Earth.
“I just disconnected ground control,” she said. “They oughtta start squawkin’ about it just about... now.”
“Put them on the speaker,” said Dan.
Amanda glided into the co-pilot’s chair and buckled the safety harness. Fuchs came up behind her and slid his feet into the restraint loops on the floor.
“We have a disconnect signal, S-l,” came a man’s voice from the speaker. He sounded more bored than annoyed.
Pancho looked over her shoulder toward Dan, who placed a finger before his lips. “Run silent, run deep,” he whispered.
Cupping her pin-mike with one hand, Pancho said, “I’m ready to separate the jumper.”
“Do it,” Dan replied.
“Jumper separation sequence initiated,” Pancho said into her mike.
“Are you aboard the jumper?” asked the controller. “We can’t launch S-l as long as that disconnect is in effect. We’ve lost command of the vehicle.”
A red light flashed on the control panel, then winked off.
“Jumper separated,” Pancho said.
“Repeat, are you aboard that jumper?” the controller asked, his voice rising with irritation.
“Where else would we be?” Pancho asked innocently. And she disconnected the radio link with Selene.
Amanda worked on the launch sequence program, her manicured fingers tapping dexterously on the touchscreen.
“Three minutes to launch,” she said calmly.
“Gotcha,” said Pancho.
Despite himself, Dan felt his palms go sweaty. Standing there behind the two pilots, ready to ride a man-made star out farther than any sane man had ever gone before, he said to himself, Everything I’ve got is riding on this bird. If we don’t make it, I’ve got nothing to come back to. Not a double-damned thing.
He looked at Fuchs. The kid was smiling fiercely, like an old-time warrior watching the approach of an enemy army, waiting for the battle to begin, eager to get into it. He’s got guts, Dan thought admiringly. We picked the right guy.
“Two minutes,” Amanda called out.
“They must be goin’ apeshit down there by now,” Pancho said, grinning.
“Nothing they can do about it,” said Dan. “They can’t shoot us down.”
“Couldn’t they send a Peacekeeper vessel after us?” Fuchs asked.
“Once we light the fusion rocket,” Dan answered, “nothing in the solar system will be able to catch us.”
“Till we come back,” said Pancho.
Dan frowned at the back of her head. Then he relaxed. “When we come back, we’ll be rich.”
“You’ll be rich, boss,” Pancho said. “The rest of us’ll still be employees.”
Dan laughed. “You’ll be rich, too. I’ll see to that. You’ll be rich.”
“Or dead,” Pancho countered.
“One minute,” Amanda said. “I really think we should pay attention to the countdown.”
“You’re right,” said Pancho.
Dan watched it all on the displays of the control board. The fusion reactor lit up as programmed. Star-hot plasma began generating energy. Through the MHD channel it roared, where a minor fraction of that heat energy was turned into electrical power. The ship’s internal batteries shut off and began recharging. Cryonically-cold liquid hydrogen and helium started pumping through the rocket nozzles’ cooling walls. The hot plasma streamed through the nozzles’ throats.
“Ignition,” Amanda said, using the traditional word even though it was now without physical meaning.
“Thrust building up,” Pancho said, Dan watched the curves rising on the thrust displays, but he didn’t need to; he could feel weight returning, feel the deck gaining solidity beneath his feet.
“We’re off and running,” Pancho announced. “Next stop, the Asteroid Belt!”
Flanked by his chief of security and the head of his legal department, Martin Humphries arrived at the spaceport just in time to see Starpower 1 light up and break orbit.
He stood at the rear of the control center, arms folded across his chest, and watched the telescopic view of the fusion ship displayed on the main wallscreen. It was not a spectacular sight: Starpower 1’s four rocket nozzles glowed slightly, and the ship drifted away so slowly that Humphries had to check the numbers running along the right edge of the screen to be certain that it was moving at all.
A smaller screen on the side wall showed a lunar jumper approaching the spaceport.
Four rows of consoles took up most of the control center; only three of the consoles were occupied, but Humphries could sense the consternation and confusion among the controllers.
“Jumper Six, answer!” the controller on the left was practically shouting into his headset mike.
The ponytailed, bearded man sitting in the middle of the trio was whispering heatedly with the woman on his other side. Then he whipped around in his swivel chair and grabbed his own headset from the console.
“Pancho!” he yelled in a rumbling basso voice. “Where the hell are you people? What’s going on?”
Humphries knew perfectly well what was going on.
The woman controller looked up and saw Humphries standing there. She must have recognized him. Her face went white and she jabbed the chief controller’s shoulder, then pointed in Humphries’s direction.
The chief literally jumped out of his chair, sailing high enough almost to clear the console behind his station. But not quite. He banged his shins painfully on the top edge of the console and went sprawling in lunar slow motion into the unoccupied chair behind it, ponytail flying. He was enough of a lunik to reflexively put out his hands and grab the chair’s arms to break his fall. But the chair rolled backward into the last row of consoles, and the chief controller crashed ungracefully to the floor with a loud thud and an audible, “Ooof!”
Humphries’s security chief instinctively hustled down to the fallen controller and yanked him to his feet while Humphries himself and his lawyer stood impassively watching the idiotic scene.
The security man half-dragged the controller, limping, to Humphries.
“Mr. Humphries,” the controller babbled, “we don’t know what’s going on-”
“Isn’t that Starpower 1 accelerating out of its orbit?” Humphries asked frostily.
“Yessir, it is, but it wasn’t scheduled to launch for another half-hour yet and I think Pancho Lane and three other people are aboard it and they don’t have the authorization for a crewed flight. The IAA is going to-”
“Is there any way to get them back?” Humphries asked, deadly calm.
The chief controller scratched his beard, blinking rapidly.
“Well?”
“Nosir. No way in hell, Mr. Humphries.”
“Who else is aboard her?”
“That’s just it, we don’t know if they’re aboard the vessel! They might be on the jumper but they’re not answering our calls. Maybe their radio broke down.”
“They are aboard Starpower 1” Humphries said flatly. “Who else was with Pancho Lane?”
“Um...” The chief controller turned to his two assistants, wincing.
The woman called, “Amanda Cunningham, co-pilot; Lars Fuchs, planetary astronomer; and C. N. Barnard, flight surgeon.”
“And you allowed them to go aboard my ship?” Humphries asked, his voice sharp as an icepick.
“They had proper authorization,” the chief controller said, sweating noticeably. “IAA approval.” The other two controllers, still standing at their stations, nodded their agreement.
“Amanda Cunningham was definitely with them?”
All three nodded in unison.
Humphries turned and started out of the control center. The chief controller exhaled a relieved sigh. His coveralls were stained with sweat.
But Humphries stopped at the doorway and turned back toward him. “I want you to know that the so-called Dr. Barnard is actually Dan Randolph.”
All three of the controllers looked stunned.
“You never bothered to check their identifications, did you?”
“We never...” The controller’s deep voice dwindled into silence under Humphries’s furious glare.
“I know you work for Selene, and not for me. But I’m going to do my best to see to it that you three incompetent morons never get within a thousand kilometers of a control center again.”
Then he went through the door and headed for the tunnel that led back to Selene proper.
“Shall I start the proceedings for the Astro takeover?” Humphries’s lawyer asked him.
He nodded grimly.
With a satisfied smile, the lawyer said,”He won’t have any part of the corporation by the time he gets back here.”
“He’s not coming back,” Humphries said darkly. “None of them are.”
Sitting in the tiny wardroom behind Starpower’s bridge, Dan Randolph felt truly relaxed for the first time in months. The ship was accelerating smoothly. Fuchs looked a lot better now, with the feeling of weight that came from the acceleration. No more floating in zero-g; they could sit in chairs without having to strap themselves down.
He marveled at his good mood. The Earth’s melting down, your corporation is going broke, you’ve busted every regulation the IAA ever wrote, Humphries is after your scalp, you’re heading out for parts unknown, and you’re sitting here with a grin on your face.
He knew why.
I’m free, he told himself. Maybe for only a couple of weeks, but I’m free of all of them, free of all their crap. We’re on our own and nobody can bother us.
Until we come back.
Pancho ducked through the hatch and went straight to the juice dispenser.
“How’s it going?” Dan asked casually.
“All systems working jus’ fine,” she said, filling a mug and coming to the table to sit next to Dan.
“Must be okay if you feel good enough to leave the bridge.”
“Mandy’s up there, keepin’ an eye on ever’thing. The bird will actually fly on her own; we don’t need to be on the bridge every minute of the day.”
“Any incoming calls?” Dan asked.
She shrugged. “Only about six or seven million. Ever’body from Doug Stavenger to the Global News Network wants to talk to you.”
“Global News?” Dan’s ears perked up.
“Lots of news media. They all want to interview you.”
Dan stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Might not be a bad idea. If we’re going to do an interview it’ll have to be before we get so far away the time lag makes it impossible to have a real-time conversation.”
“Better do it quick, then,” Pancho said. “Once we goose this bird to one-third g, we’ll really be sprintin’ fast.”
Dan nodded his agreement. Pointing to the phone console built into the bulkhead, he asked, “Can you patch me through?”
“Easy.”
“Okay... lemme talk to La Guaira.”
The head of Astro’s corporate public relations staff was a sweet-faced brunette who was older-and much tougher-than she looked. Dan asked her if she could arrange a news conference with the world’s major news networks.
“It has to be today,” he pressed. “We’re zipping out so fast that by tomorrow we won’t be able to talk back and forth without a four-to-five-minute lag.”
“Understood,” said the PR woman.
“Can you do it?”
She arched a carefully-drawn brow. “Arrange a major news conference with the man who’s hijacked his own superduper spaceship to go out past Mars and start mining the asteroids? Just get off the line, boss, and let me get to work.”
Dan laughed and obliged. He was glad that he had decided to keep his public relations team intact, despite the layoffs in other corporate departments. Fire the accountants and the lawyers, he reminded himself. Get rid of the paper shufflers and bean counters. But keep the people who polish your public image. They’re the last to go -except for the people who do the real work: the engineers and scientists.
Pancho watched him as she sipped at her juice. When Dan ended his call to La Guaira, she asked, “So now what happens?”
“Now we wait while my PR people do their jobs.”
“Uh-huh. How long do you think it’ll take?”
“We’ll know in an hour or so,” Dan said. “If it takes longer than that, it’s not going to go down.”
Pancho nodded. “I could hear it. The lag between you and her’s already longer than the usual Earth-Moon delay.”
Dan got to his feet and went to the coffee dispenser. He really wanted a pleasant glass of Amontillado, but there was no alcohol on the ship.
Remembering the story the two women had told him about the goons Humphries had sent after Amanda, Dan asked, “Whatever happened to your snake?”
“Elly?”
“Is that the snake’s name?”
“Yup.”
“So what’d you do with her?”
Pancho reached down to her ankle and came up with the glittering blue krait.
Dan flinched back. “You brought that thing aboard?”
Shrugging, Pancho said, “I was gonna leave it with Pistol Pete, he’s the guy who owns the Pelican Bar. But with those goons and all, I didn’t have the time.”
“We’ve got a poisonous snake on the ship!”
“Relax, boss,” Pancho said easily. “I’ve got four mice in my travel bag. That’s enough to keep Elly fat and happy for more’n a month.”
Dan stared at the snake. Its beady eyes stared back at him.
He started to shake his head. “I don’t want that thing on this ship.”
“Elly won’t be a problem,” Pancho insisted. “I’ll keep her in a nice, cool spot. She’ll sleep most of the time.” Then, with a smirk, she added, “And digest.”
“But if something should happen...”
Pancho’s face went deadly serious. She seemed to Dan to be struggling with herself.
He suggested, “Maybe we could freeze the snake for the duration of the flight. Thaw her out when we get back to Selene.”
“She’s not poisonous,” Pancho blurted.
“What?”
“I don’t like to admit it, but Elly’s not really poisonous. I just tell people that to keep ‘em respectful. You think Selene’s safety board would let a poisonous critter into the city?”
“But you said...”
Looking almost apologetic, Pancho said, “Aw, you can’t believe ever’thing I say, boss. A gal’s got to protect herself, doesn’t she?”
“But what about that guy she bit?”
“Elly was gengineered. They modified her toxin so she produces a tranquillizer, not a lethal poison.”
Dan gave her a hard look. Can I believe anything she says? he wondered.
“The science guys wanted to use Elly to trank animals in the wild that they wanted to study. It never worked.”
“And you got the snake for a pet.”
“A bodyguard,” Pancho corrected.
“What about the antiserum?”
She laughed. “Saline solution. Just a placebo. The guy would’ve woke up whether they used it or not.”
Dan broke into a chuckle, too. “Pancho, you’re something of a con artist.”
“I suppose,” she admitted easily.
Amanda’s voice came through on the intercom. “I’ve got an incoming call from La Guaira.”
“I’ll take it here,” Dan said.
It took several frenzied hours, but Dan’s PR director finally set up an interactive news conference with reporters from virtually every major media network on Earth, plus Selene’s own news director, Edith Elgin, who happened to be Mrs. Douglas Stavenger when she wasn’t on the air.
Dan sat back in the little plastic chair in Starpower’s wardroom and smiled into the camera of the phone console set into the bulkhead. His PR director acted as moderator, choosing which reporter was allowed to ask a question, and a backup. Dan found that the time lag from the ship to Earth worked in his favor; it gave him time to think before the next question arrived.
It’s always smart to think before you talk, he told himself. Engage brain before putting mouth in gear.
Cable News: Why did you hijack your own ship?
Dan Randolph: How can you call it a hijacking if it’s my own ship? And it’s only partially mine, by the way. Starpower 1 is owned by Starpower, Ltd., which in turn is owned by three organizations: Humphries Space Systems, Astro Manufacturing, and the people of Selene. Far as I know, neither Humphries nor Selene is complaining, so I don’t see this as a hijacking.
Cable News: But the International Astronautical Authority says you have no right to be aboard Starpower 1.
Dan Randolph: Bureaucratic [DELETED]. There’s no reason why a human crew can’t ride in this vessel. The IAA is just trying to strangle us in red tape.
BBC: Why do you think the IAA refused to give permission for a human crew to fly in your vessel?
Dan Randolph: I’ll be double-dipped in hot chocolate fudge if I know. Ask them.
BBC: Surely you have some opinion on the matter.
Dan Randolph: Paper shufflers tend to be conservative souls. There’s always a risk in allowing somebody to do something new, and bureaucrats hate risk-taking. Much safer for them to say no, you need more testing or another round of approvals. Buck the responsibility upstairs and don’t stick your own neck out. If the IAA had been running America’s expansion westward back in the nineteenth century, they’d still be trying to decide whether to build Chicago or St. Louis.
Nippon News Agency: What do you hope to achieve by this flight?
Dan Randolph: Ah, a substantive question for a change. We intend to stake out a claim to one or more asteroids. Our goal is to open up the vast resources of the Asteroid Belt for the human race.
Nippon News Agency: Have you determined which asteroids you will investigate?
Dan Randolph: Yes, but I’m not at liberty to reveal which they are. I don’t want anyone or anything to cloud our claim.
Several questioners simultaneously: What do you mean by that? What are you afraid of? Who would make a rival claim?
Dan Randolph: Whoa! Hey, one at a time. Basically, I fear that if I announce that we’re aiming for a certain asteroid, the IAA will find a reason to declare it off-limits to development, just as they’ve declared the Near-Earth Asteroids and the moons of Mars closed to development.
Network Iberia: But the NEAs have been closed to development because there is the chance that their orbits could be perturbed and they would crash into the Earth, isn’t that so?
Dan Randolph: That’s the IAA’s excuse for keeping the NEAs off-limits, right. Bureaucrats can always find a good excuse to prevent progress.
Network Iberia: Are you saying, then, that the IAA has other motives in this? A hidden agenda?
Dan Randolph: If they do, their agenda isn’t hidden terribly well. They’ve denied the resources of the NEAs to the needy people of Earth. If they could, they’d deny the resources of the Belt, as well. Why? Ask them, not me.
Lunar News: You seem to be implying that the IAA is working against the best interests of Earth.
Dan Randolph: I’m not implying it, I’m saying it loud and clear: The IAA is working against the best interests of Earth.
Lunar News: If that’s the case, who do you think they are working for?
Dan Randolph: The status quo, of course. That’s what bureaucrats always support. Their goal is to keep tomorrow exactly like today, or yesterday, even - no matter how lousy today or yesterday may have been.
Pan Asia Information: You cast yourself in the position of helping the needy people of Earth. Yet isn’t your true goal to make billions in profits for your corporation?
Dan Randolph: My true goal is to open up the resources of the Asteroid Belt. We are running this mission on a shoestring; we don’t intend to make a profit from this flight.
Pan Asia Information: But you hope to make profits from future missions, don’t you?
Dan Randolph: Certainly! But more important than that, we’ll have shown that the people of Earth can tap the enormous treasures of resources waiting for us in the Belt. We’ll be glad to see other companies coming out to the Belt to find and develop those resources.
Columbia Broadcasting: You’d be glad to see competitors going to the Belt, but only after you yourself have claimed the best asteroids.
Dan Randolph: That’s real flatland thinking. There are millions of asteroids in the Belt. Hundreds of millions, if you count the boulder-sized ones. We could claim a thousand of them and that wouldn’t even begin to put a dent into the total number available.
Columbia Broadcasting: You say “claim” an asteroid. But isn’t it illegal to claim any object in space?
Dan Randolph: It’s been illegal since 1967 to claim sovereignty over any body in space. But since the founding of Selene, it has been perfectly legal to claim use of the natural resources of a celestial body.
Euronews: Weren’t you accused of piracy at one time? Didn’t you hijack shipments of ore on their way from the Moon to factories in Earth orbit?
Dan Randolph: That was a long time ago, and all those legal issues have been resolved.
Euronews: But aren’t you doing the same thing now? Stealing a ship and going out to claim resources that rightfully belong to the entire human race?
Dan Randolph: Look, pal, I own this ship, One-third of it, at least. And those resources out in the Belt won’t do the entire human race one diddley-squat [DELETED] iota’s worth of good if somebody doesn’t go out there and start developing them.
Anzac Supernet: Is it true that Starpower 1 runs on fusion rockets?
Dan Randolph: Yes. For more about the Duncan Drive you should talk to Lyle Duncan, who headed the team that built this propulsion system. He’s at the university in Glasgow.
Anzac Supernet: Are you really going to be able to reach the Asteroid Belt in two weeks?
Dan Randolph: If we accelerate at one-sixth g halfway and then decelerate to our destination, yes, two weeks.
Global News: Do you think this stunt will help the price of Astro Manufacturing stock?
Dan Randolph [grinning]: You must be a stockholder. Yes, if we’re successful I think Astro’s price should climb considerably. But that’s just my guess. I’m in enough trouble with the IAA; I wouldn’t want the GEC’s regulators on my back, too.
Global News: How many people are on the ship with you? Could you introduce them?
Leaning back in his reclining chair as he watched the interview, Martin Humphries felt whipsawed by emotions. Try as he might to remain calm, he seethed inwardly with cold fury at Dan Randolph and Amanda Cunningham.
Yet when Amanda appeared on the wallscreen, sitting at the ship’s control panel alongside Pancho Lane, looking properly businesslike in her flight coveralls and her hair pinned up, his anger melted in the light from her eyes.
How could you? He silently asked Amanda. I offered you everything and you turned your back on me. How could you?
After hardly a minute of seeing her on-screen he abruptly snapped the broadcast off. The wallscreen went blank.
It’s over and done with, he told himself as he called up his appointments calendar on his desk screen. Put it behind you. Grimly he searched for the date of the next quarterly meeting of Astro Manufacturing’s board of directors. He marked the date in red. Randolph will be dead by then. I’ll be able to pick his bones and snap up Astro for a song. They’ll all be dead by then. Her too.
Furious at the way his hands trembled, Humphries called up his most reliable dating service and began scrolling through the videos of the women who were available and ready to please him.
None of them were as desirable as Amanda, he realized. But he began making his choices anyway.
An adenoidal woman lamented lost love as country music twanged softly in the bridge of Starpower 1. “That was some performance you put on,” said Pancho. She was sitting in the command-pilot’s seat at the instrument panel. Dan was in the right-hand seat, beside her, separated by a bank of control knobs and rocker switches. He saw that half the touchscreens on the panel had been personalized by Pancho: they showed data against backgrounds of the Grand Canyon, sleek acrobatic aircraft, even muscular male models smilingly reclining on sunny beaches.
“The interview?” Dan laughed softly. “I could’ve predicted three-quarters of the questions they asked. Maybe more.”
He stared out at the view through the wide glassteel port that ran the length of the instrument panel and wrapped around its sides. To his left, behind Pancho, was the Sun, its brilliance toned down by the port’s heavy tinting but still bright enough to dominate the sky. It made Pancho look as if she had a halo ringing her close-cropped hair. The zodiacal light stretched out from the Sun’s middle clear across the width of the port; dust motes scattered the sunlight, leftovers from the solar system’s early days of creation. Beyond was darkness, the deep black infinity of space. Only a few of the brightest stars shone through the port’s tinting.
“You really think the stock price’ll go up?” Pancho asked, her eyes shifting back and forth among the displays on the panel.
“Already has, a couple of points,” Dan said. “That’s one of the reasons I did the interview.”
She nodded. “From what I heard afterward, the IAA wants to slap your butt in jail the instant you get back into their jurisdiction.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been in jail,” Dan muttered. “Yeah, but that wouldn’t do the stock any good, would it?”
“Pancho, you talk like a worried stockholder.”
“I’m a stockholder.”
“Are you worried?”
“What, me worry?” she joked. “I got no time for worryin’. But I would like to know exactly where we’re heading.”
“Would you?”
“Come on, boss, you can razzle-dazzle the reporters but I know you got an asteroid all picked out. Maybe a couple of ‘em.”
“I want to get to three of them.”
“Three?”
“Yep. One of each type: stony, metallic, and carbonaceous.”
“How deep into the Belt will we hafta go?”
“We’d better bring Fuchs into this; he’s the expert.”
In a few minutes the four of them were seated around the table in the ship’s wardroom: Amanda and Fuchs on one side, Pancho and Dan on the other. A computer-generated chart of the Asteroid Belt was displayed on the bulkhead screen, a ragged sprinkling of colored dots between thin yellow circles representing the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
“So you can see that the metallic asteroids,” Fuchs was saying, in an almost pedantic drone, “lie mostly in the outer areas of the Belt. This is a region that hasn’t been explored as well as the inner zones.”
“Which is why we haven’t picked a specific metallic rock as yet,” said Dan.
“What’re we talkin’ here?” Pancho asked. “Three A Us? Four?”
“Four astronomical units,” Amanda replied, “give or take a fraction.”
“And you want to head out there and scout around?” Pancho clearly looked incredulous.
“We have enough fuel for some maneuvering,” Dan said.
Pulling her palmcomp from her coverall pocket, Pancho said, “Some maneuvering. But at that distance, not a helluva lot.”
“I need a nice chunk of nickel-iron,” Dan said. “Doesn’t have to be big: a few hundred meters will do just fine.”
Fuchs broke into a smile. It made his heavy-featured, normally dour face light up. “I think I understand. A nickel-iron piece a few hundred meters across would contain enough iron ore to feed the world’s steel industry for a year or more.”
Dan jabbed a forefinger in his direction. “You’ve got it, Lars. That’s what I want to show them, back home.”
Amanda spoke up. “Didn’t someone bring a nickel-iron asteroid into the Earth-Moon vicinity?”
“Gunn did it,” Fuchs answered. “He even named the asteroid Pittsburgh, after the steel-producing center in the United States.”
“Yeah, and the double-damned GEC tossed Gunn off the rock and damned near ruined him,” Dan recalled sourly.
“You simply can’t have people bringing potentially dangerous objects into the Earth-Moon region,” Amanda said. “Suppose this Pittsburgh thing somehow was perturbed into an orbit that would impact Earth? It could have been devastating.”
Dan scowled at her. “It’s been more than four centuries since Newton figured out the laws of motion and gravity. We can calculate orbits with some precision. Pittsburgh wasn’t going to endanger anything. It was just the double-damned GEC’s way of maintaining control.”
Pancho looked up from her palmcomp. “We’ve got fuel enough to maneuver for three days, out at the four AU range.”
“Good enough,” Dan said. “We’ll be scanning all the way out there. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find a nickel-iron baby right away.”
Fuchs shook his head gloomily. “There is vast emptiness out there.” Pointing to the wallscreen display, he went on, “We think of the Belt as crowded with asteroids, but really they are nothing but infinitesimal bits of matter floating in an enormous sea of emptiness. If that chart was drawn to true scale, the asteroids would be too small to see, except in a microscope.”
“A few needles in a tremendous haystack,” Amanda added.
Dan shrugged carelessly. “That’s why we have radar and telescopes and all the other sensors.”
Pancho brought the conversation back to practicality. “Okay, so we have to go huntin’ to find a metallic rock. What about the others you want, boss?”
“Lars has already picked them out.”
Tapping on his own palmcomp, lying on the table before him, Fuchs highlighted two particular asteroids on the wall display. Bright red circles flashed around them. With another touch of his stylus on the palmcomp’s tiny keyboard, the trajectory of Starpower 1 appeared on the display, with the ship’s current position outlined by a flashing yellow circle.
“The closer object is 26-238, an S-type asteroid.”
“Stony,” Amanda said.
“Yes,” Fuchs agreed, smiling at her. “Stony asteroids are rich in silicates and light metals such as magnesium, calcium and aluminum.”
Dan stared at the display. The dot showing Starpower 1’s position was noticeably moving. Christ, we’re going like a bat out of hell. He had known the facts and figures of the fusion-driven ship’s performance, but now, seeing the reality of it on the chart, it began to hit him viscerally.
“Our second objective,” Fuchs was going on, “will be 32-114, a C-type, chondritic object. Chondritic asteroids contain carbon and hydrates-”
“Water,” said Pancho, getting up from the narrow table and heading for the food freezer.
“Yes, water, but not in the liquid form.”
“The water molecules are linked chemically to the other molecules in the rock,” Amanda said. “You have to apply heat or some other form of energy to get the water out.”
“But it’s water,” Dan said, watching Pancho as she pulled a foil-wrapped prepackaged meal from the freezer. “Selene needs water. So does anybody working in space.”
“You will do your work on water,” Amanda murmured. “‘An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ‘im that’s got it. ‘“
“What’s that?” Dan asked, puzzled.
She looked almost embarrassed. “Oh... Kipling. Rudyard Kipling.”
“ ‘Gunga Din’,” Fuchs added quickly. “A very fine poem.”
“By a white European male chauvinist,” Pancho quipped as she slid her meal into the microwave oven.
“How can you be hungry?” Amanda asked. “You had a full meal only a few hours ago.”
Pancho grinned at her. “I don’t have to watch my figure. I burn off the calories just like that.” She snapper her fingers.
“But those prepackaged meals,” Amanda said. “They’re so... prepackaged.”
“I like ‘em,” said Pancho.
“Anyway,” Dan said, raising his voice slightly to cut off any disagreements, “those are the two rocks we’re going after. We’ll take some samples to solidify our claim and then head for the outer region of the Belt and find ourselves a metallic body.”
“I’ve been wondering,” Amanda said slowly, “about the legal status of any claims we make. If the IAA considers this flight to be illegal... I mean, if we’re deemed to be outlaws-”
“They could disallow our claims to the asteroids,” Dan finished for her. “I’ve thought about that.”
“And?”
A single, sharp, clear ping sounded from the open hatch to the bridge. Pancho sprinted from the microwave oven and ducked through the hatch.
She came back into the wardroom a moment later, her face taut. “Solar flare.”
Amanda got to her feet and pushed past Pancho, into the bridge. Fuchs looked concerned, almost alarmed.
Dan said, “I’ll check out the electron guns.”
“Might not hit us,” Pancho said. “The plasma cloud’s still too far away to know if it’ll reach us or not.”
“I’ll check out the electron guns anyway,” Dan said, getting up from his chair. “I’ve taken enough radiation to last me a lifetime. I don’t need any more.”
The instant Martin Humphries saw Kris Cardenas, he realized that she was suffering pangs of guilt. Big time. The scientist looked as if she hadn’t slept well recently; dark circles ringed her eyes, and her face looked bleak.
He rose from his chair as the maitre d’ escorted her to the table and smiled as the dark-clad man held Cardenas’s chair for her while she sat down. Cardenas was not smiling.
Gesturing with an outstretched arm, Humphries said, “The finest restaurant within four hundred million kilometers.”
It was an old joke in Selene. The Earthview was the only true restaurant on the Moon. The other two eateries were cafeterias. Ten years earlier, the Yamagata Corporation had opened a top-grade tourist hotel at Selene, complete with a five-star restaurant. But Yamagata was forced to shut down their restaurant as the greenhouse warming throttled the tourist trade down to a trickle. Now they sent their few guests to the Earthview.
At least Cardenas had dressed properly, Humphries saw. She wore a sleeveless forest-green sheath decorated tastefully with accents of gold jewelry. But she looked as if she were ready to attend a funeral, not an elegant dinner.
Without preamble, she leaned across the table so intently she almost touched heads with Humphries. “You’ve got to warn them,” she whispered urgently.
“There’s plenty of time for that,” he said easily. “Relax and enjoy your meal.”
In truth, the Earthview was a fine restaurant by any standard. The staff were mostly young, except for the stiffly formal maitre d’, who added an air of grave dignity to the establishment. Carved out of the lunar rock four levels below the surface, the restaurant lived up to its name by having broad, sweeping windowalls that displayed the view from the lunar surface. It was almost like looking through windows at the barren, gauntly beautiful floor of the great ringwalled plain of Alphonsus. The Earth was always in the dark sky, hanging there like a splendid glowing blue and white ornament, ever changing yet always present.
There were no robots in sight at the Earthview restaurant, although the menus and wine list appeared on display screens built into the table-tops. Instead of tablecloths, each place setting rested on a small mat of glittering lunar honeycomb metal, as thin and flexible as silk.
Humphries ordered wine from their waiter. As soon as the young man walked away from their table, Cardenas hunched forward again and whispered, “Now! Tell them now! The sooner they know the safer they’ll be.”
He gave her a hard look. Apparently the nanobugs in her bloodstream can’t deal with the effects of too little sleep, he thought. Or maybe she has nightmares. She’s on a royal guilt trip, that’s certain.
“We agreed, Dr. Cardenas,” he said softly, “that we would warn them just as they approached the outer fringes of the Belt. That won’t happen for another day and a half.”
“I want you to warn them now,” she insisted. “I don’t care what we agreed on.”
With the barest shake of his head, Humphries said, “I’m afraid I can’t do that. We must stick to our plan.”
“I was insane ever to agree to this,” Cardenas hissed.
“But you did agree,” Humphries pointed out. “In the long run, you’ll be glad that you did.”
It had been so easy to turn her. Humphries considered that his one major talent was finding the weak spot in other people’s personalities, and then playing on their weaknesses to get what he wanted. It worked with Dan Randolph and his ridiculous crusade to save the Earth. It worked with Dr. Cardenas and her burning anger against the Earth and the people who had separated her from her husband and family.
The wine came. Humphries tasted it and sent it back. There was nothing really wrong with it, but Humphries simply felt like asserting himself. Subtly. Cardenas probably doesn’t understand what’s going on, not at the conscious level, he thought. But down in her guts she’s got to know that I’m the one in charge here. I make the decisions. I mete out the rewards and the punishments.
She sat in stony silence while the embarrassed waiter took away the wine and swiftly returned with another bottle. Humphries sipped at it. Not as good as the first one, really, but he had established his point.
“This is fine,” he murmured. “You may pour.”
They ordered dinner. Cardenas barely picked at hers as, course by course, the dishes came and were taken away again. Humphries ate heartily. He was almost enjoying Cardenas’s discomfort.
At last, after the waiter had left their desserts and walked away from the table, Cardenas said, “Well, if you won’t tell them, I will.”
“That’s not what we agreed on,” Humphries said tightly.
“To hell with what we agreed on! I don’t know why I let you talk me into it.”
“You let me talk you into it because I can get you back to Earth, back to your ex-husband and your children and grandchildren.”
“He’s remarried,” she said bitterly. “There’s no point in messing up his life any more than I have already.”
Humphries almost smiled. She’s really riding the guilt train, he said to himself.
Aloud, he coaxed, “But your grandchildren. You do want to see them, don’t you? If you prefer, I could arrange to have them come up here, you know.”
“I’ve asked them to come up, just for a visit. Begged them,” Cardenas said. “They won’t do it. They’re terrified that they’ll be refused re-entry back to Earth. That they’ll be exiled here, just as I am.”
Smoothly, Humphries said, “I can arrange a visit for them. Outside normal channels. I can guarantee that they’ll be allowed to return to their homes.”
He saw new hope kindled in her eyes. “You could?”
“No sweat.”
She sat in silence while her dessert slowly melted. Humphries spooned his up, watching her, waiting.
“But don’t you understand how dangerous it is?” she blurted at last. “They’re going out past Mars, for god’s sake. There’s no one out there to help them.”
“Randolph’s no fool,” he said sharply. “When the ship’s systems start to fail he’ll turn around and come back here. In a big hurry.”
“I don’t know...”
“And his pilot’s an expert. She won’t do anything foolish.”
Cardenas either wasn’t listening to him or not hearing. “Once those nanos kick in,” she said, “there’s no stopping them. They’ll take the radiation shield apart, atom by atom, and then-”
“They won’t have the time,” Humphries insisted. “You forget how fast Starpower goes. They’ll zip back here in a few days.”
“Still...” Cardenas looked utterly unconvinced.
Trying to sound unconcerned, Humphries said, “Look, I know this is a dirty trick to play on Randolph. But that’s the business world. I want his mission to fail so I can buy out his company on the cheap. I don’t want to kill him! I’m not a murderer.”
Not yet, he added silently. But I’m going to be. And I’m going to have to silence this woman before her guilt trip makes her warn Randolph.
Unbidden, the thought of Amanda came to him. It only hardened his resolve. He’s making me kill her. Randolph deserves to die. He’s forced me to kill Amanda.
As he looked across the table at Kris Cardenas, so troubled, her eyes focused on god-knows-what, Humphries nodded to himself. If I leave her alone she’ll warn Randolph. She’ll ruin everything. I can’t let her do that.
The Apollo missions to the Moon in the mid-twentieth century were timed to avoid periods when the Sun was likely to erupt with a flare that would drench the solar system with killing levels of hard radiation.
Later, spacecraft shuttling between the Earth and the Moon simply scurried for shelter when a solar storm struck. They either returned to the protection that the Earth’s magnetic field provides against the storm’s lashing hail of protons and electrons, or they landed on the Moon and their crews sought shelter underground.
The earliest spacecraft to carry humans beyond the Earth-Moon system had no such options available to them, for their transit times to Mars were so long that they would inevitably encounter a solar storm while weeks or months away from a safe haven. Thus they were outfitted with storm shelters, special compartments in which the crew could be protected from the intense radiation spewed out by a solar flare. The first explorers sent to Mars spent days on end cooped up in their spacecraft’s cramped “storm cellar,” until the high-energy particles of the storm’s plasma cloud finally passed them by.
Starpower 1 had no storm cellar. The entire crew module was protected in the same manner that a storm shelter would have been. The module was lined with thin wires of an exotic yttrium-based compound that formed a superconducting magnet which generated a permanent magnetic field around the crew module, a miniature version of the Earth’s magnetic field. Yet the superconductor could not produce a magnetic field strong enough to deflect the solar storm’s most dangerous killers, the high-energy protons.
When faced with a vast cloud of deadly subatomic particles blasted out by a solar flare, the ship was charged to a high positive electrostatic potential by a pair of electron guns. The energetic protons in the cloud were repelled by the ship’s positive charge. The magnetic field was strong enough to deflect the cloud’s lighter, less energetic electrons-and thus keep the negatively-charged electrons from ruining the ship’s positive charge.
Safely cocooned inside the protective magnetic field, the crew of Starpower 1 watched the swift approach of the storm’s plasma cloud.
“Be here in another six hours,” Pancho announced, pulling off her headset as she swiveled the command pilot’s chair to face Dan.
He frowned at the news. “That’s for certain?”
“Certain as they can be. Early-warning spacecraft in Mercury co-orbit have plotted out the cloud. Unless there’s a great big kink in the interplanetary field, it’s gonna roll right over us.”
Nodding, Dan said, “The electron guns are ready to go.”
“Better start ‘em up,” she said. “No sense waitin’ till the last minute.”
“Right.” Dan stepped through the hatch, into the empty wardroom, and headed aft, where the electron guns were housed. Pancho could control them from the bridge, but Dan wanted to be there in case any problems cropped up.
“And send Amanda up here, will you?” Pancho called to him. “I gotta take a break.”
“Right,” Dan shouted back, over his shoulder.
Where is Amanda? He asked himself. The wardroom was empty. The doors to the privacy compartments along the passageway were closed. And where is Fuchs? he wondered, starting to feel nettled.
He found them both in the sensor bay, where Fuchs was explaining something about the x-ray projector.
“It would be more helpful if we could use a small nuclear device,” the planetary astronomer was saying, totally serious. “That would be the most convenient way of generating x-rays and gamma rays all at the same time. But of course, nuclear devices are banned.”
“Of course,” Amanda said, looking just as intent as Fuchs.
“Pancho needs you on the bridge, Mandy.” Dan said.
She looked startled for a flash of a second, then said, “Right.”
As she hurried toward the bridge, Dan asked Fuchs, “What in the name of the nine gods of Sumatra do you want a nuke for?”
“I don’t!” Fuchs said. “They’re illegal, and justly so.”
“But you just said -”
“I was explaining to Amanda about x-ray spectroscopy. How we use xrays to make an asteroid fluoresce and reveal its chemical composition. The x-rays from this solar flare would have been very helpful to us if we were only close enough to the Belt.”
“But a nuke?”
Fuchs spread his hands. “Merely an example of how to produce x-rays and gamma rays on demand. An example only. I have no intention of bringing nuclear explosives into space.”
“I don’t know,” Dan said, scratching his chin. “You might be onto something. Maybe we could talk the IAA into letting us use nukes as sources for spectroscopic studies.”
Fuchs looked aghast. Dan laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. Fuchs saw the joke and grinned weakly back.
Dan’s mood darkened as he edged down the narrow walkway in the aft end of the module. He did not like the thought of being exposed to hard radiation. He had taken a lifetime’s worth of radiation back in his earlier days, working in space. Much more of a dose would kill him, he knew. It wouldn’t be an easy way to go, either.
As he lifted the covers protecting the electron guns’ innards and checked them for the eleventh time since they’d launched out of lunar orbit, Dan thought, Maybe Stavenger’s right. Get a jolt of nanomachines, let them clean up the damage the radiation’s done, rebuild me from the inside. So I won’t be able to go back to Earth. So what? What’s down there that I’d miss so much?
He knew the answer even as he asked the question. Sea breezes. Blue skies and soft sunsets. Birds flying. Flowers. Huge ugly brutal cities teeming with life. Vineyards! Dan suddenly realized that no one had yet tried to grow wine grapes off-Earth. Maybe that’s what I’ll do when I retire: settle down and watch my vineyards grow.
The intercom speaker set into the narrow walkway’s overhead carried Pancho’s voice. “Dan, you ready for me to light up the guns?”
The electron guns were just as good as they’d been all the other times he’d inspected them. Closing the cover on the one on his right, Dan answered, “You may fire when ready, Gridley.”
Pancho retorted, “I don’t know who this Gridley guy is, but I can’t rev up the guns till you close both their covers and seal ‘em right and proper.”
“Aye, aye, skipper,” Dan said.
By the time he made it back to the bridge, Pancho was nowhere in sight. Amanda sat alone in the right-hand seat, and the bridge was rocking to the beat of high-intensity pop music. As soon as she saw Dan come through the hatch, Amanda snapped the music off.
“Pancho’s in the loo,” she said as Dan slid into the command-pilot’s seat.
“How’s the storm?”
“Precisely on track.” Amanda tapped at one of her touchscreens; it displayed a simplified map of the inner solar system, the orbits of Earth and Mars shown as thin lines of blue and red, respectively; the position of Starpower 1 was a blinking bright yellow dot. A lopsided gray miasma was almost touching the dot.
Dan’s mouth went dry. “I hate these things,” he mumbled.
“It missed the Earth completely. Mars, as well.”
“But it’s going to swamp us.”
“Actually,” Amanda said, “we’ll merely be brushed by it. A few hours, that’s all.”
“That’s good.”
“Our own velocity is helping a lot, you know. An ordinary spacecraft, coasting along the way they do, would be in the cloud for days on end.”
Dan had no desire to be in the cloud for even ten minutes. He changed the subject, as much to get away from the fear building up inside him as any other reason. “How friendly are you and Fuchs?”
Amanda’s brows shot up. “Lars? He’s very earnest-about his work. Nothing more.”
“That’s all there is to it?”
“Yes.”
Dan thought it over. Two healthy young people locked in this sardine can for a couple of weeks. Of course, there’s Pancho and me to chaperon them. Dan grinned to himself. Damn, it’s like being a teenager’s father.
Pancho returned to the bridge. “Hey boss, get outta my chair.”
“Yes’m,” said Dan.
The plasma cloud hit them less than an hour later. There was no buffeting, no clanging of alarms, nothing to tell them that they were being engulfed in the cloud of killing radiation except the rising curves of fire-engine red on the radiation monitoring screens.
Pancho did not consider the storm so dangerous that someone had to be on the bridge at all times. She came into the wardroom and joined the others for dinner. Dan ate mechanically, not really tasting his food, not really hearing the conversation. Double-damned radiation, he kept thinking. I hate this. Despite two steaming mugs of coffee, he felt cold inside. But the others seemed completely unfazed by the storm. After the meal Dan said good-night to them all and went to his compartment. He dreamed of floating helplessly in space, slowly freezing as the Sun glowered at him.
Long past midnight, Kris Cardenas sat alone in her office in Selene’s nanotechnology lab. The rest of the lab was empty, darkened to its nighttime lighting level.
She had agreed to have dinner with Martin Humphries because she wanted to get the man to warn Dan Randolph about the nanomachines that she had planted in his vessel, virus-sized disassemblers that once were known as “gobblers.”
They were the reason that nanotechnology was banned on Earth - and under careful supervision at Selene.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? she asked herself. Who will watch the watchmen? Some Roman asked that question more than two thousand years ago, Cardenas knew.
All nanotech work was under very strict control in Selene. No one was allowed to work with gobblers: they had killed people. They had even been used to commit murder. If they ever got loose they could destroy all Selene. The medical work had to be supervised down to the nanometer because the therapeutic nanobugs that took apart plaque in a person’s arteries or destroyed tumors atom by atom were forms of gobblers, nothing less. If they ever got loose, if their programming was ever-so-subtly altered...
That was why Kris Cardenas’s primary duty as head of all nanotech work at Selene was to protect against such a catastrophe. She watched over every aspect of the work done in the nanotech lab.
But who will watch the watchmen? She had produced a microscopic batch of gobblers for Humphries, specifically tailored to damage Starpower 1 enough so Dan would have to turn the ship around and limp back to Selene. Humphries had promised that he would obtain permission for her to visit Earth again, to see her daughters and her grandchildren.
Now he was offering to bring them up here. Even better. But the price! Dan Randolph and the other people on that ship could get killed.
Is that what Humphries really wants? She asked herself. If I warned Dan now he’d have to return to Selene. Flat and simple. But Humphries wants to wait another day or so, let Dan get to the inner fringes of the Belt and then tell him that his ship’s going to fail.
Or maybe he won’t warn Dan at all!
Cardenas sat up straight in her desk chair. That’s it, she told herself. He wants to kill Dan and the rest of the crew. She knew it with the certainty of revealed truth.
What can I do about it?
Warn Dan, she answered her own question. Warn him now.
But how? She wondered. I can’t just pick up a phone and put a call through to him. They’re out past the orbit of Mars by now.
I’ve got to get to someone in the Astro office. Someone who can put me through to Dan. Maybe that big Australian bodyguard of his. What’s his name? George something.
Martin Humphries could not sleep, despite the exertions he’d been through with the raven-haired woman lying beside him. Nominally an environmentalist on the consulting staff of Humphries Trust, the young woman’s favored environment seemed to be a bedroom with plenty of furniture to play on, as far as Humphries could determine.
She was sleeping peacefully. He was wide awake.
Dr. Cardenas. Humphries was worried about her. Even the lure of seeing her grandchildren wasn’t going to outweigh her overdeveloped sense of honor, he thought. She wants to warn Randolph; she’s probably figured out that I want the sonofabitch dead.
He sat up in the bed and glanced at the woman sleeping beside him. Slowly, carefully, he pulled the silk sheet down from her shoulders. Even with no lights in the room except the green glow from the digital clock, he could see that her body was smooth, flawless, perfectly proportioned. Too bad she’s heading back to Earth in a few days.
Cardenas, he reminded himself sternly.
She’s going to try to warn Randolph, he felt certain. Maybe that’s a good thing. If Randolph turns back now, Amanda will come back with him. With him. She won’t be coming back to me. She doesn’t want me, that’s why she ran off with him. If Cardenas warns them, they’ll come back here together to gloat at me.
He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to drive out the mental images of Randolph and Amanda together. I’ve got to think this through carefully. Logically.
For Cardenas to warn Randolph she’ll have to get somebody here in Selene to set up the message for her. She’ll probably go to Astro; that’s where Randolph’s people are. And if she asks them to let her put through a call to Randolph they’ll ask her why. Sooner or later she’ll tell them why: Martin Humphries has bugged the Starpower ship with nanomachines. And then they’ll know all about it.
Conclusion: For my own protection, I’ve got to stop her from talking to anyone at Astro. I’ve got to stop her from even trying to warn Randolph. I’ve got to stop her. Period.
When Dan awoke from his troubled sleep the solar storm had passed. Pancho was in the wardroom when he shambled in, bleary-eyed.
“Top o’ the mornin’, boss,” she said cheerily, hefting a mug of steaming coffee.
“How’s the weather out there?” Dan asked, heading for the juice dispenser.
“Clear and calm, except for a few rocks we should be passin’ by this afternoon.”
That made Dan smile. “We’re at the Belt.”
“Will be, by sixteen hundred hours. Right on shedyule, as Mandy would say.”
“Good. Great. Where’s Fuchs? We’ve got to make some course adjustments.”
Ten minutes later the four of them were seated around the table in the wardroom.
“I want to get a metallic nugget first,” Dan said.
Fuchs lifted his heavy shoulders slightly. “The metallic bodies are more heavily concentrated towards the outer area of the Belt.”
“So we go to the outer edge of the Belt,” Dan replied, “and search for a lump of iron. We can pick up the stony and carbonaceous rocks on the way back.”
“We’ll have to go more than four astronomical units, then,” Amanda pointed out. “No one’s gone that far before.”
Dan said, “We’ve got the supplies for it. And the fuel. Everything’s running all right, isn’t it?”
“No major problems,” said Pancho.
His brows rising, Dan asked, “What are the minor problems?”
She grinned at him. “The coffee’s pretty awful. A couple of li’l maintenance chores to do. You know, a cranky pump, one of the fuel cells is discharging when it shouldn’t. Nigglin’ stuff. Mandy and I are takin’ care of it.”
Amanda nodded. Dan looked from her back to Pancho. Neither woman seemed worried. Well, he thought, if the pilots aren’t worried, no reason for me to sweat.
“The sensor suite is in perfect working order,” Fuchs volunteered. “I’m already recording data.”
“We’ll have to do the turnaround maneuver soon,” said Amanda.
Gesturing vaguely toward infinity, Dan asked Fuchs, “Have you picked a destination point out there?”
“A general area only,” he replied. “The outer Belt has not been mapped well enough to pick a precise asteroid. Most of them are not even numbered yet.”
“Have you given Pancho the coordinates?”
Fuchs’s face colored slightly. “I gave them to Amanda.”
“I’ve put the data into the nav computer,” Amanda said quickly, looking at Pancho.
Pancho nodded. “Okay. I’ll go check it out.”
“Onward and upward,” said Dan, rising from his chair. “We’ll be breaking distance records, if nothing else.”
“Four AUs,” Pancho muttered, getting to her feet also.
She headed for the bridge. Dan followed her, leaving Amanda and Fuchs still sitting at the table.
Pancho slid into the pilot’s chair and tapped on her main touch-screen, the one showing the hunk on the beach. Standing behind her, Dan saw the navigation computer program come up over the muscles and teeth.
But Pancho was looking at one of the smaller screens, where an amber light was blinking slowly.
“What’s that?” Dan asked.
“Dunno,” said Pancho, working the screen with her fingers. “Running a diagnostic... h’mmph.”
“What?”
Without turning her head from the display screens, Pancho muttered, “Says there’s a hot spot on one of the superconducting wires outside.”
A jolt of alarm surged through Dan. “The superconductor? Our storm shield?”
She glanced up at him. “Don’t get frazzled, boss. Happens all the time. Might be a pinhole leak in the coolant line. Maybe a micrometeor dinged us.”
“But if the coolant goes-”
“The rate of loss ain’t much,” Pancho said calmly. “We’re due for turnaround in six hours. I can angle the ship then so’s that side’s in the shade. If the hot spot doesn’t go away then, Mandy and me will go EVA and fix the leak.”
Dan nodded and tried to feel reassured.
Kris Cardenas marveled at the crowd’s willingness to leave their comfortable homes and jam themselves cheek-by-jowl into the cramped rows of narrow seats of the outdoor theater. A considerable throng of people was flowing into the theater. It was built in the Grand Plaza, “outdoors.” Exactly one thousand seats were set in a shallow arc around the graceful fluted shell that backed the stage.
Even with three-dimensional interactive video and virtual reality programs that were nearly indistinguishable from actuality, people still went to live performances. Maybe it’s because we’re mammals, Cardenas thought. We crave the warmth of other mammals. We’re born to it and we’re stuck with it. Lizards have a better deal.
There was one particular mammal Cardenas wanted to see: George Ambrose. That morning she had phoned the Astro corporate office trying to find him, only to reach his video mail. Late in the afternoon he returned her call. When she said she had to talk to him in person as soon as possible, and preferably in a public place, George had scratched at his thick red beard for a moment and then suggested the theater.
“I’ve got a date comin’ with me,” he said cheerfully, “but we can get together in the intermission and chat for a bit. Okay?”
Cardenas had quickly agreed. Only as an afterthought did she ask what the theater was playing.
George sighed heavily, “some fookin’ Greek tragedy. This date of mine, she’s a nut for th’ classics.”
Usually the theater was sold out, no matter what the production might be. In the days before the greenhouse cliff, when tourism was building up nicely, Selene’s management invited world-class symphony orchestras, dance troupes, drama companies to come to the Moon. Now, most of the performances were done by local amateur talent.
Medea, performed by Selene’s very own Alphonsus Players. Cardenas would have shuddered if it had mattered to her at all. Still, the theater was fully booked. Only Cardenas’s status as one of Selene’s leading citizens wheedled a ticket out of the system, and she had to go all the way up to Doug Stavenger for that. He smilingly admitted that he wasn’t going to use his.
She barely looked at the stage during the first half of the performance. Sitting on the aisle in the fourth row, Cardenas spent most of her time scanning the crowd for a glimpse of George Ambrose’s shaggy red hair.
When the first half ended, she trudged with the slow-moving throng along the central aisle as they chatted about the play and the performances. Cardenas felt surprised to see so many gray and white heads among the theater-goers. Selene is aging, she thought. And very few of our people are taking nanobugs or other therapies to stop it. Finally she saw Big George, like a fiery beacon bobbing head and shoulders above the others.
Once past the last row of seats, most of the crowd scattered to the concession stands spread among the plaza’s flowering shrubbery. A maintenance robot trundled slowly along the periphery of the crowd, patrolling for litter.
George was at the jam-packed bar. Cardenas hung back, waiting for him to get his drink and work his way out of the crowd. When he did, he had a plastic stein of beer decorated with Selene’s logo in one hand and a skinny, hollow-eyed redhead on his other arm. She was pretty, in a gaunt, needy way, Cardenas thought. Nice legs. The drink in her hand was much smaller than Ambrose’s.
Big George spotted Cardenas and, leaving his date standing by a flowering hibiscus bush, walked toward her.
“Dr. Cardenas,” he said, with a polite dip of his head. “What can I do for you?”
“I’ve got to get a message to Dan Randolph,” she said. “As quickly as possible.”
“No worries. Pop over t’ the office tomorrow morning. Or tonight, after th’ show, if you like.”
“Is there some way I could talk to Dan without coming to your offices? I think I’m being watched.”
George looked more puzzled than alarmed. “You could phone me, I suppose, and I’ll patch you through to the radio link.” He took a pull from his stein.
“Can we do it tonight?”
“Sure. Right now, if you like. I wouldn’t mind an excuse to leave this show. Pretty fookin’ dull, don’tcha think?”
“Not now,” she answered. “That would attract attention. After the show. I’ll drop in at friend’s place and call your office from there.”
For the first time, George showed concern. “You’re really scared, are you?”
“I think Dan’s life is in danger.”
“You mean someone’s out to kill ‘im?”
“Humphries.”
George’s face hardened. “You certain of that?”
“I’m... pretty sure.”
“Sure enough to want to warn Dan. From a safe place, where the phone won’t be bugged.”
“Exactly.”
George took a big breath. “All right. Instead of all this pussyfootin’ around, you come with me after the show’s finished and I’ll put you in an Astro guest suite. That way I can protect you.”
Cardenas shook her head. “That’s kind of you, but I don’t think I’m in danger.”
“Then why th’ cloak and dagger stuff?”
“I don’t want Humphries to know that I’m warning Dan. If he knew, then maybe I would be in trouble.”
George thought that over for a few moments, a huge red-maned mountain of a man towering over her, scratching his head perplexedly.
“All right,” he said at last. “Back to Plan A, then. I’ll go to the office after this fookin’ show and you call me there. Okay?”
“Yes. Fine. Thank you.”
“Sure you don’t want some protection?”
She considered his offer for several heartbeats, then said, “Thanks, but I won’t need it. And I’ve got my work to consider. I can’t run the lab from an Astro guest suite.”
“Okay,” said George. “But if you change your mind, just holler.”
Martin Humphries was reclining in his favorite chair, watching a home video of his own performance, when the phone buzzed. Irked, he glanced at the console and saw that it was his emergency line. He snapped his fingers, and the wallscreen lit up to show the woman he’d sent to follow Cardenas. She was a nondescript clerk from Astro Corporation’s communications department who needed extra money to bring her younger sister up from the ravaged ruins of Moldavia.
“Well?” Humphries demanded.
“She talked with George Ambrose and then went back to the show.”
“You have video?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Well let me see it,” he snapped.
The woman’s face was replaced by a slightly jittery video of Cardenas talking earnestly with Randolph’s body-guard, that big Australian.
“They went back to the show together?”
The woman’s face reappeared on the screen. “No, separately. He had another woman with him.”
Glancing at the digital clock on his desk, Humphries asked, “When does the show end?”
“I don’t know.”
Stupid cow, he fumed silently. Aloud, he commanded, “Stay with her. I’m going to send a couple of men to pick her up. Keep your phone on and they’ll home in on the signal. That way, even if they don’t get there before the show’s over they can find you-and her.”
“It is not allowed to keep the phone on during the performance,” the woman replied.
“I don’t care what’s allowed and what isn’t! Keep your phone on and stay with Dr. Cardenas or I’ll have you shipped back to Moldavia!”
Her eyes widened with sudden fear. “Yes, sir,” she said. Sullenly.
“How’s the leak?” Dan asked.
He’d been fidgeting around in the wardroom for hours, trying not to pop into the bridge and bother the pilots. But a leak in the superconductor’s coolant scared Dan. Without the superconductor they could be fried by the next solar storm.
So when Amanda left the bridge, Dan asked about the leak.
She looked surprised at his question. “Leak?”
“In the coolant line.”
“Oh, that. It’s nothing much. Pancho will go EVA after turnaround and patch it.”
“Just Pancho?” Dan asked. “By herself?”
“It’s only a tiny leak,” Amanda said lightly. “Pancho decided it won’t need both of us out there.”
Dan nodded and got up from his chair. “Think I’ll go aft and see what Fuchs is doing.” If I just sit here I’ll turn myself into a nervous wreck, he added silently.
Fuchs was back in the sensor bay, humming tunelessly to himself as he bent over a worktable strewn with parts from an infrared scanner.
“Did it break down?” Dan asked.
Fuchs looked up at him, a pleased smile on his broad face. “No, no,” he said. “I decided to upgrade its sensitivity so we could get better data at long range.”
“We’re going to turn around soon. You’ll have to get all these loose parts stowed away safely or they’ll slide off the table.”
“Oh, I should be finished by then.”
“Really?”
With a glance that was part surprise at having his word questioned, and part pride in his abilities, Fuchs said, “Of course.”
He bent over his work again, stubby thick fingers handling the delicate parts with the precision of a well-trained mechanic. Dan watched him for a while, then quietly left the man to himself. As he started back to his privacy cubicle, he saw Amanda heading along the narrow passage toward him.
“Going to help Pancho suit up?” he asked. “I can -”
“Oh, there’s plenty of time for that,” Amanda said brightly. “I thought I’d pop in on Lars for a few minutes and help him get prepared for turnaround.”
Dan felt his brows inch upward. “Something going on between you two?” he asked.
She looked genuinely surprised. “Lars is a complete gentleman,” Amanda said with great dignity. “And even though you may not believe it, I know how to behave like a lady.”
She brushed past Dan, chin high, radiating disdain.
Dan grinned at her retreating back. Something’s going on, all right, even if Fuchs doesn’t know it yet.
On my mark,” Pancho’s voice came through the intercom, “turnaround in thirty minutes. Mark.” Dan sat up in his bunk. He had just drifted to sleep, it seemed, after staring at the compartment’s overhead for what had felt like hours. We’re well inside the Belt, he thought. The ship’s working fine. We’re heading for the outer reaches to scout around for a good, solid M-type body.
And there’s a leak in the coolant that keeps the superconductor cooled down enough to maintain the magnetic field around us that protects us from the hard radiation of solar storms. Sounds like the house that Jack built, he said to himself, trying to shake the feeling of foreboding that plagued him.
He grabbed a fresh pair of coveralls and marched to the lav. I need a shower and a shave, he thought. And you need to get that leak fixed, a voice in his head reminded.
He wished it didn’t bother him so much. Pancho wasn’t worried about it; neither was Amanda.
Damned good-looking woman, Amanda, he thought. Even in loose-fitting coveralls she’s dynamite. Better make it a cold shower.
The only tricky part of the turnaround maneuver was that they had to shut down the main thrusters. Not the fusion reactor itself; the procedure was to kill the ship’s thrust during turnaround, and use the reactor’s exhaust gases to turn the ship by venting a fraction of the exhaust through maneuvering jets set into the sides of the propulsion module.
Dan headed up to the bridge after his shower. Both pilots were in their places. No music was playing.
“All systems ready for turnaround,” Amanda murmured. “Check, all systems go,” Pancho replied.
Standing behind their chairs, Dan asked, “Where’s Fuchs?”
“Prob’ly still in the sensor bay,” Pancho said, “playin’ with his toys.”
Amanda frowned slightly as she touched the comm screen. “Turnaround in five minutes,” she announced.
Glancing over her shoulder, Pancho said, “Boss, you oughtta find a chair.”
He scowled at her. “I’ve been in micro-g before, kid.” Before you were born, he almost added.
He could see Pancho grinning in her reflection on the port in front of her. “Okay, you’re the boss. Footloops on the deck and handgrips on the overhead.”
“Aye-aye, skipper,” Dan said, grinning back at her.
“Thrust cutoff in two minutes,” Amanda called out.
“Two minutes. Check.”
When the main thrusters cut off, Dan felt completely at ease. The feeling of gravity dwindled away to nothing, and he floated off the deck slightly. Grabbing one of the handgrips, he hung there and watched the pilots working their touchscreens.
“How’s Fuchs doin’ back there?” Pancho asked.
Amanda tapped the central screen and it showed Fuchs strapped into the fold-up chair in the sensor bay, looking a little pasty-faced but otherwise okay.
“Maneuver thrust in two minutes,” Amanda said.
“Check,” Pancho replied.
Dan worked his feet into the loops on the deck without letting go of the overhead handgrips. The maneuvering jets fired and he felt as if somebody suddenly shoved him from one side. He remembered from childhood his first ride in a people-mover at some airport: he’d been standing facing the doors, and when the train lurched into movement he’d nearly toppled over sideways. Only the grownups crowded around him had prevented him from falling.
“Phew,” Pancho said, “this bird turns like a supertanker: slow and ugly.”
“You’re not flying a little flitter now,” Dan said.
“Turn rate is on the curve,” Amanda pointed out, tracing the curve on the touchscreen with a manicured fingertip. Her screen’s background showed the white cliffs of Dover.
“Uh-huh,” said Pancho. “Still feels like we’re pushin’ freight.”
Amanda said, “We are: all that deuterium and helium-three.”
The fuel weighs a lot, Dan realized. Funny. You think of hydrogen and helium as being light, almost weightless. But we’ve got tons of the stuff in our tanks. Dozens of tons.
There was nothing much to see through the port. No panoply of stars swinging past. No asteroids in sight. Nothing but emptiness.
“Where’s the Sun?” Dan heard himself ask.
Pancho chuckled. “It’s there, boss. Hasn’t gone away. We’re just angled up too much to see it through the windshield, that’s all.”
As if in confirmation, a stream of light glowed through the port.
“Sunrise in the swamp,” Pancho called out.
Dan felt another sideways surge of thrust, pushing from the opposite direction.
“Turnaround maneuver complete,” said Amanda.
“Flow to main thrusters,” Pancho said, working the touchscreens.
“Main thrusters, confirmed.”
Weight returned to the bridge. Dan settled back onto the deck.
Amanda smiled happily. “On course and on velocity vector.”
“Hot spit!” Pancho exclaimed. “Now let’s see how that leak is doin’.”
Kris Cardenas almost made it back to her own apartment before two young men in dark business suits caught up with her.
“Dr. Cardenas?”
She turned. The man who had called her name was taller than his partner, slim and lithe, sallow complexion, his dark hair cropped into a buzz cut. The other was huskier, blond, pink-cheeked.
“Come with us, please,” said the dark one.
“Where? Why? Who are you?”
“Mr. Humphries wants to see you.”
“Now? At this hour? It’s-”
“Please,” said the blond, slipping a dead-black pistol from inside his jacket.
“It fires tranquilizing darts,” said the dark one. “But you wake up with a bitching headache. Don’t make us use it on you.”
Cardenas looked up and down the corridor. The only other person in sight was a mousy little woman who immediately turned away and started walking in the opposite direction.
“Now,” said the blond, pointing his pistol at her.
With a resigned droop of her shoulders, Cardenas nodded her surrender. The blond put his gun away and they started along the corridor toward the escalators.
“At least this one doesn’t have a snake,” the blond whispered hoarsely to his partner.
The other man did not laugh.