Pancho felt an old excitement bubbling up inside her as she wormed her arms through the spacesuit’s sleeves. After more than five days of being cooped up in the ship, she was going outside. It was like being a kid in school when the recess bell rang.
Standing by the inner airlock hatch where the spacesuits were stored, she popped her head up through her suit torso’s neck ring, grinning happily to herself. This is gonna be fun, she thought.
Dan looked uptight, though, as he held her helmet in his arms and watched her pull on the gloves and seal them to the suit’s cuffs. “Jealous?” she teased.
“Worried,” he replied. “I don’t like the idea of you going out alone.”
“Piece of cake, boss,” Pancho said. “I ought to go with you. Or Amanda, maybe.” With a shake of her head, Pancho countered, “Mandy’s gotta stay at the controls. Shouldn’t have both pilots out at the same time, if you can help it.”
“Then I’ll suit up-”
“Whoa! I’ve seen your medical record, boss. No outside work for you.”
“The safety regs say EVAs should be performed by two astronauts-”
“Whenever possible,” Pancho finished for him. “And since when did you start quotin’ IAA regulations?”
“Safety is important,” Dan said.
Inside the spacesuit, with its hard-shell torso and servomotor-amplified gloves, Pancho felt like some superhero out of a kids’ video confronting a mere mortal.
“I’ll be fine,” she said as she took the helmet from Dan’s hands. “Nothin’ to worry about.”
“But if you run into trouble...”
“Tell you what, boss. You suit up and hang out here at the airlock. If I run into trouble you can come on out and save my butt. How’s that?”
He brightened. “Okay. Good idea.”
They called Amanda down from the bridge as Dan struggled into the lower half of his suit and tugged on the boots. By the time he was completely suited up, backpack and all, except for the helmet, Pancho was feeling antsy.
“Okay,” she said as she pulled the bubble-helmet over her head and sealed it to the neck ring. “I’m ready to go outside.”
Amanda hurried back to the bridge while Dan stood there grinning lopsidedly at her, his head sticking out of the hard suit like some kid posing for a photograph from behind a cardboard cutout of an astronaut.
Pancho opened the inner hatch of the airlock and stepped through. The airlock was roomier than most, big enough to take two spacesuited people at a time. Through her helmet she heard the pump start to clatter, and saw the telltale on the control panel switch from green to amber. The sound dwindled to nothing more than a slight vibration she felt through her boots as the air was pumped out of the chamber. The light flicked to red.
“Ready to open outer hatch,” she said, unconsciously lapsing into the clipped argot of flight controllers and pilots.
Amanda’s voice came through the tiny speaker set into her neck ring, “Open outer hatch.”
The hatch slid up and Pancho stared out at an infinite black emptiness. The helmet’s glassteel was heavily tinted, but within a few seconds her eyes adjusted and she could see dozens of stars, then hundreds, thousands of them staring solemnly at her, spangling the heavens with their glory. Off to her left the bright haze of the zodiacal light stretched like a thin arm across the sky.
She turned her back to the zodiacal light’s glow and attached her safety tether to one of the rungs just outside the hatch.
“Goin’ out,” she said.
“Proceed,” Amanda replied.
“Gimme the location of the leak,” Pancho said as she clambered out and made her way up the handgrips set into the crew module’s side.
“On your screen.”
She peered at the tiny video screen strapped to her left wrist. It showed a schematic of the module’s superconducting network of wires, with a pulsating red circle where the leak was.
“Got it.”
Although she knew the ship was under acceleration and not in zero-g, Pancho still felt surprised that she actually had to climb along the handgrips, like climbing up a ladder, toward the spot marked on the schematic. Deep in her guts she had expected to float along weightlessly.
“Okay, I’m there,” she said at last.
“Tether yourself,” Dan’s voice commanded sternly.
Pancho was still tethered to the rung next to the airlock hatch. Grinning at Dan’s fretfulness, she unreeled the auxiliary tether from her equipment belt and clipped it to the closest grip.
“I’m all tucked in, Daddy,” she quipped.
Now to find the leak, she thought. She bent close and played her helmet lamp on the module’s skin. The curving metal was threaded with thin wires running along the module’s long axis. There was no obvious sign of damage: no charred spot where a micrometeor might have hit, no mini-geyser of escaping nitrogen gas.
It can’t be more than a pinhole leak, Pancho told herself.
“Am I at the right spot?” she asked.
No answer for a few moments. Then Amanda replied, “Put your beacon on the wire you’re looking at, please.”
The radio beacon was strapped to Pancho’s right wrist. She laid her right forearm on the wire.
“How’s that?”
“You’re at the proper spot.”
“Can’t see any damage.”
“Replace that section and bring it in for inspection, then.”
She nodded inside her helmet. “Will do.”
But she felt silly, cutting out what looked to be a perfectly good length of wire. Something’s wonky here, Pancho thought. This ain’t what we think it is, I bet.
Behind his unkempt beard, Big George was frowning with worry as he sat at one of the consoles in the spaceport’s control center. This little cluster of desks was occupied by Astro employees, monitoring Starpower 1’s flight. They sat apart from the regular Selene controllers, who handled the traffic to and from Earth.
George wanted to send his message to Dan in complete privacy. The best the Astro controllers could do was to hand him a handset and tell him to keep his voice down.
Wishing they had worked out a code before Dan had impetuously sailed off, George pulled the pin-mike to his lips and said hurriedly, “Dan, it’s George. Dr. Cardenas has disappeared. She told me last night she was worried that Humphries wants to kill you. When I called her this morning she wasn’t in her office or in her quarters. I can’t find her anywhere. I haven’t told Selene security about it yet. What do you want me to do?”
He pulled off the headset and nudged the controller who had given it to him. The man had been studiously keeping his back to George.
He swiveled his chair to face the Aussie. “Finished so soon?”
“How long will it take to get an answer?”
The controller tapped at his keyboard and squinted at the display on his console’s central screen. “Seventeen minutes and forty-two seconds for your message to reach them. Same amount of time for their answer to get back here, plus a couple additional seconds. They’re moving pretty damned fast.”
“Thirty-five minutes,” George said.
“Got to allow some time for them to hear what you’ve got to say and decide what to say back to you. Probably an hour, at least.”
“I’ll wait.”
Martin Humphries unconsciously licked at the thin sheen of perspiration beading his upper lip. He hated talking with his crotchety sour-faced father, especially when he had to ask the old man for advice.
“You kidnapped her?” W. Wilson Humphries’s wrinkled face looked absolutely astonished. “A Nobel Prize scientist? You kidnapped her?”
“I’ve brought her here, to my home,” Humphries said, holding himself rigidly erect in his chair, exerting every gram of willpower he possessed to keep from squirming. “I couldn’t let her warn Randolph.”
The conversation between father and son was being carried by a tight laser beam, directly from Humphries Space System’s communication center on the top of Alphonsus crater’s ringwall mountains to the roof of the senior Humphries’s estate in Connecticut. No one could eavesdrop unless they tapped into the laser beam itself, and if someone did, the drop in the beam’s output at the receiver would be detectable.
“Killing Randolph isn’t bad enough,” grumbled the old man. “Now you’re going to have to kill her, too.”
“I haven’t killed anybody,” Humphries said tightly. “If Randolph has any brains at all he’ll turn back.”
It took nearly three seconds for his father’s reply to reach him. “Sloppy work. If you want to remove him, you should have done it right.”
Humphries’s temper flared. “I’m not a homicidal maniac! Randolph is business, and anyway, if he dies it will look like an accident. His ship fails out there in the Belt and he and his crew are killed. Nobody will know what happened and nobody will be able to investigate, not for months, maybe years.”
He tried to calm himself as he waited for his father’s response.
“Gaining Astro Manufacturing is worth the risk,” the old man agreed. “Especially since no one can connect you with the... uh, accident.”
“She can.”
Humphries knew what his father was going to say.
“Then you’ll have to get rid of her.”
“But that doesn’t mean I have to kill her. I don’t want to do that. She’s a valuable asset. We can use her.”
It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision, Humphries told himself. Dr. Cardenas and her knowledge of nanotechnology had been part of his long-range plan all along. It’s just that this crisis has forced me to move faster than I’d originally planned to, he told himself.
“Use her?” his father snapped. “How?”
Waving a hand in the air, Humphries said vaguely, “Nanotechnology. She’s the top expert. Without her it would’ve taken years to build that fusion rocket.”
His father cackled. “You don’t have the guts to take her out.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Dad! She’s much more valuable to me alive than dead.”
“You want her to be part of your team, then,” his father replied.
“Yes, of course. But she’s having this goddamned attack of integrity. She’s got cold feet about Randolph, and if I don’t stop her, she’ll tell everyone about the sabotage, even though she’s a party to it.”
The old man chuckled when he heard his son’s complaint. “An attack of integrity, eh? Well, there are ways to get around that.”
“How?”
It was maddening to have to wait nearly three seconds for his father’s response.
“Make her an offer that she can’t accept.”
“What?”
Again the interminable wait. Then, “Offer her something that she really wants, but can’t agree to. Make her an offer that really tempts her, but she’ll have to reject. Then you’ve shown yourself to be reasonable, and she’s being the difficult one. Then she’ll be more willing to agree to your next offer.”
Humphries was impressed. “That’s... Machiavellian.”
When his father answered, his seamed, sagging face was strangely contorted, as if he were suppressing a guffaw. “Yes, it is, isn’t it? And it works.”
Humphries could only sit there and admire the old bastard.
More thoughtfully, his father asked, “What’s her weak point? What does Cardenas want that she can’t get unless you give it to her?”
“Her grandchildren. They’ll be our hostages. Oh, I’ll do it in a nice, elegant manner. But I’ll let her know that either she works for me or her grandchildren suffer. She’ll do what I want.”
“You really want to be emperor of the world, don’t you, Martin?”
Humphries blanched. “Your world? God forbid. Earth is a shambles and it isn’t going to get any better. You can have it. You’re welcome to it. If I make myself emperor, it’ll be up here: Selene, the Moon, the asteroids. That’s where the power is. That’s where the future lies. I’ll be emperor of these worlds, all right. Gladly!”
For long moments his father said nothing. At last the old man muttered, “God help us all.”
Lars Fuchs was scowling as he peered at the display screen. “Well?” Dan prompted.
The two men stood in the cramped sensor bay, where Fuchs had rigged a makeshift laboratory by yanking one of the ship’s mass spectrometers from its mounting and putting it on the repair bench where he was using it to examine the sample of dull gray wire that Pancho had brought in. A thin sky-blue coolant tube lay alongside the wire. Dan knew the wire had originally run through the tube, like an arm in a sleeve.
“There is no leak in the coolant line,” Fuchs said. “I drove pressurized nitrogen through it and it didn’t leak.”
Dan felt puzzled. “Then what’s causing the hot spot?”
Pointing to the tangle of curves displayed on the screen, Fuchs said, “The composition of the wire seems to match the specifications quite closely: yttrium, barium, copper, oxygen-all the elements are in their proper proportions.”
“That doesn’t tell us diddley-squat,” Dan groused.
Fuchs’s frown deepened as he studied the display. “The copper level seems slightly low.”
“Low?”
“That might be a manufacturing defect. Perhaps that’s the reason for the problem.”
“But there’s no leak?”
Fuchs rubbed his broad, square chin. “None that I can detect with this equipment. Really, we don’t have the proper equipment for diagnosing this. We would need a much more powerful microscope and-”
“Dan, we’re receiving a call for you,” Amanda’s voice came through the speaker in the sensor bay’s overhead. “It’s from George Ambrose, marked urgent and confidential.”
“I’d better get back up to the bridge,” Dan said. “Do the best you can, Lars, with what you’ve got.”
Fuchs nodded unhappily. How can a man accomplish anything without the proper tools? he asked himself. With a heavy sigh, he turned back to the display screen while Randolph ducked through the hatch and headed forward.
What other sensors can I take from the set we have to examine this bit of wire? Everything we have here has been designed to measure gross chemical composition of asteroids, not fine details of a snippet of superconducting wire.
With nothing better that he could think of, Fuchs fired up the mass spectrometer again and took another sampling of the wire’s composition. When the curves took shape on the display screen his eyes went wide with surprised disbelief.
George held one meaty hand over the earphone clamped to the side of his head, listening intently to Dan Randolph’s tense, urgent voice. There was no video transmission; Dan had sent audio only.
“... you go with Blyleven to Stavenger himself and tell him what’s happened. Stavenger can bypass a lot of red tape and get Selene’s security people to turn the place upside down. You can’t hide much in a closed community like Selene. A really thorough search will find Dr. Cardenas... or her body.”
George nodded unconsciously as he listened. Once, ten years earlier, he had lived as a fugitive on the fringes of Selene, an outcast among other outcasts who called themselves the Lunar Underground. But they had survived principally on the sufferance of Selene’s “straight” community. They could exist on the fringes because nobody cared about them, as long as they didn’t make nuisances of themselves.
George agreed with Dan, up to a point. If Selene’s security cops wanted to find a person, there wasn’t much chance of hiding. But a dead body could be toted outside, concealed in a tractor, and dumped in the barren wilderness of the Moon’s airless surface.
“Okay, Dan,” he half-whispered into the pin-mike at his lips. “I’ll get to Stavenger and we’ll find Dr. Cardenas, unless she’s already dead.”
Frank Blyleven was head of Astro corporate security. A round, florid-faced, jovial-looking man with thinning straw-colored hair that he wore down to his collar, Blyleven seemed to have a grandfatherly smile etched permanently on his face. It unnerved George to see the security director smiling as he explained about Dr. Cardenas’s disappearance.
“This is way out of our league,” he said, without the slightest change in expression. “I mean, I only have half-a-dozen people in my group. We chase down industrial espionage and petty theft, for the lord’s sweet sake, not kidnappings.”
George knew how well Astro’s security team chased down petty theft. The Lunar Underground lived on small “borrowings” from corporate storerooms.
“Dan said we should go to Stavenger,” said George.
Nodding cheerfully, Blyleven turned to his desktop phone and asked for Douglas Stavenger.
When George and Blyleven were ushered into Stavenger’s office, up in the Grand Plaza, a fourth man was sitting in front of Stavenger’s broad, glistening desk. Stavenger introduced him as Ulrick Maas, director of security for Selene. Maas looked like a real cop to George: muscular build, dark, suspicious eyes, scalp shaved bald.
“You realize that this may be nothing to get alarmed about,” Stavenger said once all four men were seated. “But Kris Cardenas isn’t the kind of woman who suddenly goes into hiding, so I think we ought to try to find her.”
“She’s in Humphries’s place, down at the bottom level,” George said flatly.
Stavenger leaned back in his desk chair. Maas stared at George through narrowed eyes; Blyleven looked as if he were thinking about much more pleasant things. Through the office windows George could see the broad expanse of the Grand Plaza. A couple of kids were flying above the greenspace like a pair of birds, flapping their brightly-colored rented plastic wings.
Grimacing, Stavenger asked, “You’re certain of that?”
“It’s Humphries she was scared of,” George replied. “Where else would he stash her?”
“That area down there is the property of the Humphries Trust,” Maas pointed out. “Selene doesn’t have legal authority to go in and search it.”
“Not even if her life’s on the line?” George asked.
Stavenger said to Maas, “Rick, I think you’ll have to initiate a search.”
“Of Humphries’s place?” George asked.
“Of all of Selene proper,” Stavenger said. “Humphries’s place is a different matter.” He turned to the phone and asked it to connect him with Martin Humphries.
“Dr. Cardenas?” Martin Humphries said to Stavenger’s image on his patio wallscreen. “You mean the scientist?”
“Yes,” said Stavenger, looking strained. “She’s missing.”
Humphries got up from the chaise longue on which he’d been reclining while he reviewed his father’s holdings in Libya.
“I don’t understand,” he said to Stavenger’s image, trying to look puzzled. “Why are you telling me about this?”
“The security office has initiated a search for her throughout Selene. I’d appreciate it if you allowed them to search your premises, as well.”
“My home?”
“It’s just a formality, Mr. Humphries,” Stavenger said, with an obviously false smile. “You know security types: they want to dot every eye and cross every tee.”
“Yes, I suppose they do,” Humphries replied, smiling back. “I suppose someone could hide out in the gardens, couldn’t they?”
“Or inside the house. It’s rather large.”
“H’mm, yes, I suppose it is-by Selene standards.” He took a breath, then said reluctantly, “Very well, let them send a team down here. I have no objections.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“You’re welcome,” said Humphries. He snapped his fingers to shut down the connection. Then he went into the house, walking swiftly to his office.
He snapped his fingers as he entered the office. The phone screen lit up. “Get Blyleven down here on the double. I’ve got a job for him.”
The tractor plodded slowly along the bleak, empty expanse of Mare Nubium, heading away from the ringwall mountains that marked Alphonsus and the site of Selene.
Kris Cardenas fought to keep the terror from overcoming her. She could feel it, trembling deep inside her, crawling up into her throat, making her heart race so hard she could hear its pulse thundering in her ears.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked, her voice muffled by the helmet of the spacesuit they had put her into.
No response from the driver. Of course, Cardenas thought. They’ve disabled my suit’s radio. A neat, high-tech way of gagging me.
The two goons who had picked her up the night before had brought her down to Humphries’s extravagant place in Selene’s lowest level. Martin Humphries had not deigned to meet her, but she knew whose place it was. The servants had been very polite, offering her food and drink and showing her to a comfortable guest suite where she’d spent the night. The door to the corridor had been locked, of course. She was a prisoner and she knew it, no matter how sumptuous her cell.
Strangely, she slept well. But thinking over the situation the next morning, after a maid had brought a breakfast tray into her sitting room, Cardenas reasoned that Humphries was going to murder her. He’ll have to, she thought. He can’t let me go and let me tell everyone that he’s killed Dan Randolph.
With my help, she added silently. I’m an accomplice to murder. A blind, stupid, stubborn fool who didn’t see what she didn’t want to see. Not until it was too late.
And now I’m going to be murdered, too. Why else would they be taking me all the way out into the godforsaken wilderness?
The thought of being killed frightened her, intellectually, in the front lobe of her brain. But being outside on the surface of the Moon, out in the deadly vacuum with all the radiation sleeting in from deep space, out here where humans were never meant to be-that terrified her deep in her guts. This tired little tractor had no pressurized cabin, no crew module; you had to be in a spacesuit to survive for a minute out here.
This is a dead world, she thought as she looked through her helmet visor. The gray ground was absolutely dead, except for the cleated trails of other tractors that had come this way. No wind or weather would disturb those prints; they would remain in place until the Moon crumbled. Behind them, a lazy rooster tail of dust floated in the soft lunar gravity.
And beyond that, nothing but the gently undulating plain of barren rock, pockmarked with craters, some the size of finger-pokes, some big enough to swallow the tractor. Rocks strewn everywhere, like the playroom toys of careless children.
The horizon was too close. It made Cardenas feel even jumpier. It felt wrong, dangerous. In the airless vacuum there was no haze, no softening with distance. That abrupt horizon slashed across her field of view like the edge of a cliff.
She saw that the ringwall mountains of Alphonsus were almost below the horizon behind them.
“Where are we going?” she asked again, knowing it was useless.
Beside her, Frank Blyleven was no longer smiling. He sweated inside his spacesuit as he drove the tractor. When he’d made his deal with Martin Humphries, it had been for nothing more serious than allowing Humphries to tap into Astro Corporation’s communications net. A good chunk of money for practically no risk. Now he was ferrying a kidnapped woman, a Nobel scientist, for the lord’s sweet sake! Humphries was going to have to pay extra for this.
Blyleven had to admit, though, that Humphries had smarts. Stavenger wants to search for Dr. Cardenas? Okay. Who better to spirit her out of Selene for a while than the head of Astro’s security department? Nobody asked any questions when he showed up at the garage already suited up, with another spacesuited person alongside him.
“Got to inspect the communications antennas out on Nubium,” he told the guard checking out the tractors. “We’ll be out about six hours.” Sure enough, three hours into his aimless wandering across the desolate mare, he got a radio signal from Humphries’s people. “Okay, bring her back.”
Smiling again, he leaned his helmet against Cardenas’s so she could hear him through sound conduction.
“We’re going back now,” he said. “They’ll have a team to meet you. You behave yourself when we get to the garage.”
Kris Cardenas felt a huge surge of gratitude well up inside her. We’re going back. We’ll be safe once we’re back inside.
Then she realized that she was still Humphries’s prisoner, and she wasn’t really safe at all.
Dan felt simmering anger as he watched George’s report on the wall-screen of the ship’s wardroom.
“I was in on th’ search of Humphries’s place. It’s big enough to hide a dozen people. We din’t find Dr. Cardenas or any trace of her,” George ended morosely.
“She must still be alive, then,” Dan said. Then he blew out an impatient huff of breath as he realized that George wouldn’t hear his words for another twenty minutes or so.
Pancho was sitting beside him in the wardroom, looking more puzzled than worried as George’s image faded from the wallscreen.
“If they haven’t found her body,” Dan said to her, “it means she’s probably still alive.”
“Or they’ve stashed the corpse outside,” Pancho suggested.
Dan nodded glumly.
“Why would Humphries want to kill Dr. Cardenas?” Pancho asked.
“Because she found out something that she wanted to tell me; something that Humphries doesn’t want me to know.”
“What?”
“How should I know?” Dan snapped.
Pancho grinned lamely. “Yeah, I guess that was a pretty dumb question.”
Dan rubbed his chin, muttering, “Humphries knew the security people were coming to search his place so he just moved her somewhere else until the search was over. I’ll bet a ton of diamonds she’s back inside his house now. He’ll want to keep her close.”
“Prob’ly,” Pancho agreed.
“I wish there was a way we could get somebody into Humphries’s place without him knowing it,” Dan mused.
Pancho sat up straighter “There is,” she said, with a sly smile.
George counted it as a sign of Doug Stavenger’s respect for Dr. Cardenas that he agreed to a private meeting.
“Invisible?” Stavenger looked shocked. “A cloak of invisibility?”
“I know it sounds nutty,” George said, “but Dan told me that-”
“It’s not nutty,” Stavenger murmured, steepling his fingers before his face. “I’m stunned, though, that Ike Walton told anyone about it.”
“You mean it’s real? A cloak of invisibility?” Stavenger eyed the big Aussie from behind his desk. “It’s real, all right. But I doubt that it comes in your size. We’re going to have to put the loose-lipped Mr. Walton back to work.”
The worst part about this, Dan fumed silently, is being so far apart that we can’t talk in real time.
He had paced the length of the crew module several times, from the bridge where Pancho and Amanda chatted amiably while monitoring the ship’s highly automated systems to the sensor bay at the far end of the passageway, where Fuchs was bent over the sample of superconducting wire.
George’s last message had an almost fairy-tale quality to it. “Stavenger’s got the guy who made the cloak enlarging it to fit me. He’s over in th’ nanotech lab now, doin’ it. He says I’ll be able to sneak into Humphries’s place sometime tomorrow morning, if he doesn’t run into any snags.”
Rumpelstiltskin, Dan thought as he prowled along the passageway. No, he was the guy who spun straw into gold. Who had the cloak of invisibility?
Pancho, he answered himself. Of all the sneaky con artists in the solar system, she’s the one who comes up with a cloak of invisibility. Well, chance favors the prepared mind, they say. Pancho was smart enough and fast enough to use what chance offered her.
He found himself at the sensor bay again. There wasn’t room for a chair. Fuchs was standing, staring at the same display screen he’d been staring at the last time Dan had looked in at him.
“Anything interesting?” Dan asked him.
Fuchs stirred as if being awakened from a dream. But from the worried expression on his face, Dan thought it might have been a nightmare.
“What is it, Lars?”
“I’ve found what created the hot spot in this section of wire,” Fuchs said, his voice grave, solemn.
“Good!” said Dan.
“Not good,” Fuchs countered, shaking his head.
“What is it?”
Pointing to the curves traced across the display screen, Fuchs said, “The amount of copper in the wire is diminishing.”
“Huh?”
“The wire is superconducting only if its composition remains constant.”
“And it stays cooled down to liquid nitrogen temperature,” Dan added.
“Yes, of course. But this length of wire... its copper content is diminishing.”
“Diminishing? What do you mean?”
“Look at the curves!” Fuchs said, with some heat. Rapping his knuckles on the display screen he said, “In the past two hours the copper content has gone down six percent.”
Dan felt baffled. “How could-”
“As the copper content dwindles, the wire goes from a superconducting state to a normal state. It begins to heat up. The hot spot boils off some of the nitrogen coolant. The hot spot grows. It was only microscopic at first, but it eventually became large enough for the monitoring sensors to detect it.”
Dan stared at him.
“There is only one agency that I can think of that could selectively remove copper atoms from the wire.”
“Nanomachines?” Dan squeaked.
Fuchs nodded solemnly. “This length of wire was seeded with nanomachines that remove copper atoms and release them into the liquid nitrogen coolant. Even now they are removing copper atoms and letting them flow into the air of this compartment.”
“Jesus H. Christ on a bicycle,” Dan said, his insides suddenly hollow. “That’s why Humphries grabbed Cardenas. She’s the nanotech expert.”
“We are infected,” Fuchs said.
“But you caught it in time,” Dan countered. “It’s only this one length of wire that’s infected.”
“I hope so,” Fuchs said. “Otherwise, we’re all dead.”
George stood to one side of the walkway leading into Humphries’s house. It had been eerie, riding down the escalators wearing the enlarged stealth suit that Ike Walton had cobbled together for him. George couldn’t see his own feet. At one point, he nearly tripped and tumbled down a flight of escalator stairs.ÿÿÿÿÿ Walton had looked like a naughty little kid caught peeking at dirty pictures when Stavenger had confronted him in his office and ordered him to enlarge the stealth suit to fit George.
Red-faced, Walton had stammered that he’d need help from the nanolab technicians, and that would ruin the secrecy that had shrouded the stealth suit since he’d first invented it.
“That can’t be helped,” Stavenger had replied tightly. “Secrecy’s already been breached.”
In the end, Stavenger himself went with Walton and George to the nanolab and asked the chief technician to clear out the lab and work with Walton by herself. In total secrecy. Once she understood that Dr. Cardenas’s life might be at stake, she quickly agreed.
“I’d heard rumors about a stealth suit, off and on,” she marveled, once Walton explained what was needed. “Don’t add to them,” Stavenger pleaded.
Walton had the programs for the nanomachines buried in his personal files. Within hours, he and the chief technician were watching a spread of darkly-glittering stealth cloth growing on a lab table. George stood slightly behind them, eyes goggling as the invisible virus-sized machines busily turned bins of metal shavings into his new suit.
Now he stood at the entrance to Humphries’s house at high noon, trying to figure out a way to get through the front door without being detected. The huge cavern was in its daylight mode, long strips of full-spectrum lamps shining brightly. Wondering if the people inside the house came out for lunch, George edged closer to the door.
It swung open, surprising him, and a pair of Humphries’s research scientists came out, deep in earnest conversation. George knew they were scientists from their costumes: the guy wore a shapeless open-necked shirt and faded jeans; he had a long ponytail down his back as well. The woman was in a light sweater and loose, comfortable slacks. They were talking about the life cycle of some Latin-named species.
George slipped behind them as the door started to close and held it halfway open with one extended arm. The two scientists went on their way, chattering intently. George pushed the door open a little more and peered inside. Two hefty men in blue security uniforms stood inside, looking bored. George slipped through the door and then let it swing shut. The two guards never noticed. They were talking about last night’s football tournament, videoed live from Barcelona.
An older man in a dark suit came out of a doorway halfway down the hall. He had the frozen-faced expression of a trained butler. George tiptoed past the guards, peeking into each open doorway as he went. He could hear voices from his left, and found a doorway that opened onto a long corridor, with plenty of people shuttling from one office to another along its length. That must be where the research staff works, he thought. Don’t they break for lunch?
It was difficult to pick up odors from inside the suit’s face mask, but George caught the unmistakable scent of steaks on the griddle, something he hadn’t smelled since he’d been on Earth. Steaks! he thought. Humphries doesn’t mind spendin’ his fookin’ money on hauling steaks up here.
The hallway ended in a busy, stainless-steel kitchen big enough to keep a good-sized restaurant going. The staff eats in, George realized. At least they do for lunch. Cooks and assistants were scurrying back and forth, pots were boiling steam, and an industrial-sized grill was sizzling with thick steaks. George counted eleven of them. A banker’s dozen, he said to himself.
One of the dark-uniformed maids was putting together a much more modest meal on a large teak tray: a crisp salad, a small sandwich, a slice of melon and a pot of tea. A woman’s lunch, George thought.
He followed the maid as she carried the tray past him, down the hallway, and up the stairs to the second floor. One of the doors along the upstairs hall was guarded by a bored-looking young man in a gray business suit. He saw the maid approaching and opened the bedroom door.
“Lunch is here, Dr. Cardenas,” he said.
George stopped as the maid went through the bedroom door and came out again less than a minute later, the tray empty at her side. She closed the door. George heard the lock click. The guard gave her a smile and she smiled back, but neither of them said anything as she headed back for the stairs.
George leaned against the wall a half-dozen meters from the lethargic guard, who sat on a wooden chair and pulled a palmcomp from inside his jacket. From the beeps and peeps, George figured the guy was playing a game to pass the time.
Okay, George said, folding his arms across his chest. Cardenas is in there. She’s still alive. Now how do I get her out-alive?
He spent the better part of an hour prowling along the upstairs hall, checking out the stairway, studying the lone guard. Humphries apparently insisted on a dress code for his servants: the guards wore suits, the maid and the kitchen help wore uniforms. The scientists stayed on the other side of the house. They’d be no problem, George decided.
The maid returned with the empty tray, went into Cardenas’s room, and came out with the lunch dishes. George thought Cardenas might be on a hunger strike; she had hardly eaten anything.
Shortly afterward, Humphries himself came up the hall. He was dressed casually: a white velour pullover and navy blue well-creased slacks. The guard snapped to his feet and stuffed his still-beeping palmcomp into his side pocket. Humphries frowned at him and motioned impatiently for him to open the door.
The door’s kept locked, George realized, as Humphries stepped into the room. He waited until the door was almost shut, then tiptoed to it and pushed it slowly open. The guard paid no attention, engrossed once more in his video game. George let the door swing halfway open, then deftly slipped into the room.
Humphries noticed it. Frowning, he marched to the door and snapped at the guard. “Can’t you close a goddamned door properly?” Then he slammed it shut.
Suppressing a chuckle, George edged into a corner of the room. Dr. Cardenas was standing tensely by the only window. It was a super room, George thought: big pieces of furniture made from real wood. Hauling it up to Selene must have cost more than the whole kitchen staff’s salaries for ten years.
“How do you feel today?” Humphries asked Cardenas, crossing the oriental carpet toward her.
“I want to go home,” she said flatly, as if it were a request that they both knew would be ignored.
Sure enough, Humphries acted as if he hadn’t heard her. “I’m sorry that we had to take you outside. I understand that you don’t like that.”
“I want to go home,” Cardenas repeated, stronger. “You can’t keep me locked up here forever.”
“I have a proposition to offer you. If you agree to it, you could go back to Earth and be with your grandchildren.”
She closed her eyes wearily. “I simply want to go back to my quarters here at Selene. Let me go. Now.”
Humphries sighed dramatically and sat on the upholstered chair near the window. “I’m afraid that’s impossible, at this precise moment. Surely you can understand why.”
“I won’t say a word to anyone,” Cardenas replied, walking uncertainly toward the sofa that faced his chair. “I simply want to return to my normal life.”
“Without warning Randolph?”
“It’s too late to warn Dan by now,” she said. “You know that.”
Humphries spread his hands. “Really, the best option for you is to return to Earth. You’ll be in very comfortable quarters and I’ll personally guarantee that your daughters and grandchildren will be brought to you.”
“The way I was brought here?”
“You haven’t been harmed, have you? You’ve been treated with great care.”
“I’m still a prisoner.”
It seemed to George that Humphries was working hard to control his temper. “But if you’ll only do what I ask,” he said, tightly, “you can return to Earth and be with your family. What more could you ask for?”
“I don’t want to go to Earth!” Cardenas burst. “I won’t be a part of your scheme!”
“You haven’t even heard what my... scheme, as you put it, is.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want to hear it.”
“But it will stop the greenhouse warming. It will save the Earth.”
“Nothing can save the Earth and you know it.”
He hung his head for a moment, as if trying to find the right words. At last he looked up at her again. “You can save the Earth, Dr. Cardenas. That’s the real reason why I brought you here. I need you to run the operation. I need the absolute best person there is. That person is you. No one else could make it work.”
“Whatever it is, I won’t do it,” Cardenas said flatly.
“Not even to save the Earth?”
She gave him a withering look. “What makes you think I want to save the Earth?”
“Not even to save your grandchildren?” He said it with a smile.
Cardenas gasped when she realized what he meant. “You’re threatening my family?”
He put on an innocent air. “Did I make a threat?”
“You’re despicable!”
Humphries slowly got to his feet, like a man weary of dealing with an obstinate child. “Dr. Cardenas,” he said slowly, “your options are few. Please hear me out.”
“I won’t say a word to anyone.”
“I’m not talking about that now.”
She started to reply, then thought better of it.
“At least listen to what I have to say.”
She stared at him.
“Think of your grandchildren back there on Earth,” Humphries coaxed. “Their future is in your hands.”
Still without saying a word, Cardenas slowly sat on the sofa, facing Humphries.
“That’s better,” he said smiling. “We’re both reasonable people. I’m sure we can work this out.”
George walked softly toward them, listening intently.
Sitting in her command chair on the bridge, Pancho asked, “How do we know the bugs ain’t chewin’ away at us now?” Dan had never before seen Pancho look morose. Her long, lantern-jawed face was deadly serious now; her usual cocky grin had vanished. “They were eating copper,” Dan replied. “We got rid of the wire sample. The bugs went out the hatch with it.”
“You hope.”
“Fervently,” said Dan.
“Well, the ship’s wiring doesn’t use any copper,” Pancho said hopefully.
“It’s all fiber optic. I know.”
“There’s plenty of copper here and there, though,” Pancho went on. “Maybe only trace amounts, but if we got nanobugs eatin’ copper, they could knock out half the microprocessors on board.”
“That’s great,” Dan groused.
“The MHD channel!” she blurted. “It’s got a superconducting magnet wrapped around it!”
“Holy Christ!”
“If that goes, the magnet’ll dump all its energy-”
“It’ll explode?”
“Like a frickin’ bomb,” Pancho said.
“Great. Just perfect,” Dan muttered. “And there’s not a double-damned thing we can do about it, is there?”
She shook her head. “Just hope it hasn’t been infected.” Dan felt shaky inside. He had to swallow before he could speak. “Not much we can do if it has been.”
“Could be worse,” Pancho said, with false jollity. “If we had bugs that ate carbon, they’d be chewin’ on us.”
Dan saw no humor in that. “Where’s Amanda?” he asked, pointing to the empty co-pilot’s chair. “Shouldn’t she be on duty up here?”
“She’s back with Lars.”
“In the sensor bay?”
“Yup. He’s tryin’ to jury-rig the electron microscope to get nanometer resolution.”
“So he can see nanobugs?”
“If there’re any to be seen, right.”
“Those two seem to spend a lot of time together,” Dan grumbled.
“Come to think of it, that’s true.”
Dan said nothing. He didn’t like the idea of Amanda and Fuchs playing around together, but he had no evidence that they were. Fuchs seemed like a pretty stiff straight arrow. But you never know, Dan said to himself. Amanda certainly seems to enjoy being with him.
Pancho jabbed a finger toward one of the touchscreen displays. “Well, at least the magnetic shield’s holdin’ up okay. We’re safe from radiation storms... for th’ time being.”
For the time being, Dan echoed silently.
“And the MHD channel?”
She tapped at a screen. “Normal as pie.”
“The bugs haven’t infected it, then.”
“Maybe not.”
“I think I’ll go back to the sensor bay,” Dan muttered. “See how those two are getting along.”
“Gonna be their chaperon?” Pancho teased.
“Am I that obvious?”
“You sure are, boss. A real worrywart.”
“Do you think they need a chaperon?”
“Prob’ly not. Mandy can take care of herself. Lars isn’t like Humphries.”
Nodding his agreement with Pancho’s assessment of the situation, Dan said, “So I’ll see how he’s doing with the electron microscope.”
“Good excuse,” Pancho said, laughing.
Wishing he could forget his fears of the nanobugs, Dan left the bridge, poured himself a mug of coffee in the wardroom, and then headed along the passageway to the sensor bay. He could see them through the open hatch to the cramped little compartment, standing amid the humming instruments and flickering display screens, deep in earnest conversation.
My god, they look like Beauty and the Beast, Dan thought. Even in rumpled tan coveralls, with her shining blonde hair pinned up in a sensible, no-nonsense fashion, Amanda looked gorgeous. Her big blue eyes were totally focused on Fuchs. In his usual dead-black pullover and slacks, his barrel-chested thickset body made him look like a feral animal out of some wildlife vid: a boar or a black bear. But he wasn’t growling or snarling at Amanda. Far from it.
“How’s it going?” Dan asked as he stepped through the open hatch.
They looked startled, as if they hadn’t seen him approaching.
Pointing to the gray tube of the miniaturized electron microscope, Dan forced a grin and asked, “Find any nanobugs?”
Fuchs turned away from Dan, toward the microscope. “No, it’s hopeless. This machine will never resolve nanometer objects.”
Dan wasn’t surprised. “It wasn’t designed to.”
“I had thought perhaps I could boost its power,” Fuchs went on, “but that was an idle hope.”
“We’ve been reviewing the long-range sensor data,” Amanda said, her cheeks slightly red. “Looking for a suitable asteroid, you know.”
“And?”
Fuchs broke into a happy grin. It was so unusual that Dan was taken aback.
“We have an embarrassment of riches,” he said, tapping at one of the touchscreens. “There are more than a dozen metal-rich bodies within a day’s flight of us, or less.”
Amanda said, “We’ve been trying to decide which one we should aim for.”
Dan smiled at her. “That’s easy. Go for the biggest one.”
George held his breath as he edged closer to the corner of the big bedroom where Humphries and Dr. Cardenas sat. They both looked tense, although he seemed strung high with anticipation, while fear and anger glowered clearly on Cardenas’s face.
George knew that they couldn’t see him, yet he felt anxious, almost frightened to be this close to them, invisible or not. Don’t sneeze, he warned himself. Don’t fookin’ breathe.
“All right,” Cardenas said tightly. “I’m listening.”
Leaning slightly toward the soft on which Cardenas sat, Humphries clasped his hands together and began, “Suppose I set you up in your own laboratory in some remote location on Earth. My father has holdings in Libya, for example. We could bring your grandchildren there, to be with you.”
“And what would I be expected to do at this remote laboratory?” Cardenas asked. Her voice was without inflection, like an automaton’s, her face a frozen mask.
“Nanomachines could be made to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, can’t they? Break the molecules down into carbon and oxygen atoms. The carbon could be buried, the oxygen released back into the air or sold as an industrial gas, whatever. That could stop the greenhouse warming in a year or two!”
Cardenas’s expression did not change. “Nanotechnology is banned, you know that. No matter how you want to use it, you can’t make nanomachines anywhere on Earth. You’d have the GEC, the world government, every religious nut on Earth going crazy if you even hinted that you’re thinking of using nanotechnology.”
Humphries smiled patiently. “We won’t tell them, for god’s sake. We just start doing it. In secret. Out in the Sahara or the middle of the ocean or Antarctica, anywhere. In a year or maybe even less, they’ll start noticing the carbon dioxide levels going down. We can take out the other greenhouse gases, as well. They’ll see that the greenhouse warming is lessening. Then we’ll have them all by the balls! They’ll have to accept what we’re doing. They’ll have no choice.”
“And what happens if these nanomachines don’t work exactly right? What happens if they start taking other carbon compounds apart? Like you, for instance. You’re made of carbon atoms, aren’t you?”
“That won’t happen.”
“I know it won’t happen,” she said. “Because I won’t do it. It’s an absurd scheme.”
“What’s absurd about it?” Humphries demanded.
A slight, sardonic smile cracked Cardenas’s facade. “You don’t have any idea of how enormous Earth’s atmosphere is. Do you know how many tons of carbon dioxide you’d have to remove? Billions! Tens of billions, at least! You’d have to cover Africa with nanomachines to remove that much carbon dioxide!”
“I’m sure that’s an exaggeration,” Humphries muttered, scowling.
Cardenas shot to her feet, startling George. “All right, you’d merely have to cover the Sahara desert. It’s still beyond belief!”
“But-”
“And you’d never be able to keep it secret. Not a program of that scale.”
“But it could be done, couldn’t it?”
“It could be started,” she admitted. “Until some fanatic drops a nuke on us. Or laces our drinking water with plague bacillus.”
“I can protect you against terrorists,” Humphries said.
Cardenas paced to the window, obviously thinking furiously. Turning back to Humphries, she said, “Using nanomachines on that scale is an invitation to disaster. Some fruitcake could steal a handful and re-program them to take apart... plastics, for example. Or petroleum. Or use them as assassination weapons. You’re talking about gobblers, for Christ’s sake!”
“I know that,” Humphries said coldly.
Cardenas shook her head. “It won’t work. Aside from the sheer physical scale of the project, the authorities on Earth would never grant approval for using nanomachines. Never! And I can’t say that I’d blame them.”
Humphries slowly got to his feet. “You refuse to even try?”
“It’s a hopeless task.”
He sighed theatrically. “Well, I’ve tried to be reasonable. I thought we might be able to work something out.”
“Let me go,” Cardenas said, with a pleading note in her voice.
“I thought it would be a way for you to be with your grandchildren, as you want to be.”
“Just let me go.”
He gave her a sad look. “You know I can’t do that. It’s too great a risk for me.”
“You can’t keep me here forever!”
With a small shrug, Humphries asked, “What do you propose as a way out of this impasse?”
She stared at him, open-mouthed.
“I mean, you can see my problem. I know you can. How can I let you go when there’s every chance that you’ll tell people that I’m responsible for Dan Randolph’s death?”
“But I’m responsible, too.”
“Yes, I know. But you’d confess to it, wouldn’t you?”
“I...” she hesitated, then said in a low, defeated voice, “I suppose I would, sooner or later.”
“There you are,” Humphries said softly. “The problem remains.”
“You’re going to have to kill me.”
“I don’t want to do that. I’m not a cold-blooded murderer. In fact, I’d like to see you reunited with your grandchildren, if it’s at all possible. There must be some way we can work together, some way we can find around this problem.”
“I don’t see any,” Cardenas whispered.
“Well, think it over,” Humphries said, heading for the door. “I’m sure you can come up with a solution, if you just put your mind to it.”
He smiled as he opened the door and left. George saw the guard standing out in the hallway before Humphries closed the door and its lock clicked shut.
As he strode down the hallway, Humphries mused to himself, It could work! If we could spread enough nanomachines I could break the greenhouse warming in a couple of years. They’d be on their knees with gratitude.
He decided to put a small team of experts together to study the possibilities dispassionately. Cardenas isn’t the only nanotechnology guru in Selene, he assured himself.
Kris Cardenas stared at the locked door for several silent moments after Humphries left, then she suddenly broke into racking sobs. Face buried in her hands, body bent, she stumbled to the bed and threw herself onto it, crying inconsolably. George stood uncertainly in the far corner of the bedroom, wondering what he should do. She’s already hysterical, he said to himself. If I go and tap her on the shoulder and say, “Hi! I’m an invisible man!” she’ll probably freak out altogether.
So he waited, fidgeting unhappily, until Cardenas stopped crying. It didn’t take long. She sat up on the bed, took a deep breath, then got to her feet and went to the lavatory. When she came out again, it was obvious to George that she had washed her face and put on some makeup. But her eyes were still red, puffy.
Well, you can’t stand here like a fookin’ idiot forever, George told himself. Do something!
Before he could decide what to do, Cardenas walked to the window and pressed her fingers against the glass. Then she turned and seemed to survey the room. With a slight nod, she walked to the bare little desk and picked up its wooden, cushioned chair. It seemed heavy for her, but she carried it, tottering slightly, to the window.
She wants to crash the window and jump out of here, George realized. She’ll just end up hurting herself.
He touched her arm lightly and whispered, “Excuse me.” Cardenas flinched and let the chair thump to the carpeting. She blinked, stared, saw nothing.
“Excuse me, Dr. Cardenas,” George whispered. She spun around in a complete circle, eyes wide. “Who said that?”
George cleared his throat and replied, a little louder, “It’s me, George Ambrose. I’m-”
“Where the hell are you?”
George felt slightly embarrassed. “I’m invisible.”
“I’m going crazy,” Cardenas muttered. She sank down onto the chair, right there in the middle of the room.
“No you’re not,” George said, still keeping his voice low. “I’m here to get you out of this place.”
“This is a trick.”
“Is this room bugged? Do they have any cameras in here?”
“I... don’t think so...”
“Look,” George said, then immediately realized it was a foolish term to use. “I’m gonna take off me hood so you can see me face. Don’t get scared now.”
Cardenas looked more suspicious than frightened. George yanked the hood off his head and pulled off his face mask. It felt good to feel cool air on his skin.
She jumped out of the chair. “Christ almighty!”
“No, it’s just me,” he said, with a slight grin. “George Ambrose. I work for Dan Randolph, y’know.”
Comprehension lit her eyes. “Walton’s stealth suit! He didn’t destroy it, after all.”
“You know about it.”
“Me, and four other people.”
“There’s a few more now,” George said.
“How in the world did you ever-”
“No time for that now. We’ve got to get you out of here.”
“How?”
George scratched at his beard. “Good question.”
“You didn’t bring along a suit for me, did you?” Cardenas said.
“Should have, shouldn’t I? We just didn’t think of it. We weren’t certain where you were.”
“So what do we do?”
George thought it over for a few moments. “They keep you in this room all the time?”
Cardenas nodded.
“Door’s locked, isn’t it?”
“Yes. And there’s a guard outside... at least, every time they’ve brought a meal in to me there’s been a guard out in the hall. I imagine he’s armed.”
George’s face lit up. “When do they bring you meals? When’s the next one coming?”
Several hours later there was a single rap on the door, and then Cardenas heard the lock click. She glanced swiftly about the room but could no longer see George.
The door opened and the same silent, sour-faced woman in dark uniform came in, carrying a dinner tray. Cardenas could see a wiry young man standing on the other side of the doorway. The woman deposited the tray wordlessly on the coffee table in front of the sofa and then departed, still silent and dour. The guard closed the door and locked it again.
Cardenas sat on the sofa. For the first time in days she had an appetite. She felt George’s bulk settling on the cushions beside her.
“Smells good,” George said.
She took the lid off a platter of fish fillets and vegetables.
“Looks good, too,” George added.
“You’re hungry,” she said.
“Haven’t eaten since breakfast.”
“Help yourself.”
George didn’t wait to be coaxed. He lifted off his face mask again and dug in. Cardenas watched as fork and knife moved seemingly by themselves and chunks of dinner rose to his face, which seemed to be floating in midair. She found that if she looked hard enough, directly at him, she could see a faint flickering glitter, almost subliminal. Reflection of the ceiling lights scattered by the chips, she thought. But you have to know he’s there to see it, and even then it’s almost below the perception level.
“Don’t you want any?” George asked.
“No, you go ahead.”
“Eat the veggies, at least.”
“I’ll take the salad.”
The meal was finished in a few minutes. George put his mask on again and completely disappeared.
“D’you tell ‘em you’re finished or do they send the maid back for the tray automatically?”
“I tell the guard. He sends for the maid.”
“Okay. Tell the guard you’re finished and ask him to take the tray.”
“He’ll send for the maid.”
“Tell ‘im you don’t want to wait for her. Make some excuse.”
Cardenas nodded, got up from the sofa, and went to the door. She could sense George’s body warmth as he padded along beside her.
She banged on the door with the flat of her hand. “I’m finished. Could you please take the tray?”
“I’ll call the kitchen,” came the guard’s muffled voice.
“I can’t wait! I’ve got to get to the toilet right away! I’m sick to my stomach. Please take the tray.”
A moment’s hesitation, then they heard the lock click. The door swung open and the guard stepped in, looking concerned.
“What’s the matter? Something in the -”
The punch sounded like a melon hitting the pavement from a considerable height. The guard’s head snapped back and his eyes rolled up. He crumpled to the floor. Cardenas saw his arms yanked up into the air and his body dragged into the room.
“Come on, now,” George whispered to her.
They stepped out into the hallway. The door shut, seemingly by itself, and locked. She felt his hand engulf half her upper arm as George let her down the hallway to the stairs. The house seemed quiet at this hour, although a glance out the windows showed that the cavern outside was still lit in daytime mode.
The downstairs hall was empty, but Cardenas could hear the sounds of conversation floating through from somewhere. Neither of the voices sounded like Humphries’s to her. They got to the foyer just inside the front door. Two young men in gray suits looked surprised to see her approaching them.
Frowning, the taller of the two said, “Dr. Cardenas, what are-”
George’s punch spun him completely around. The other guard stared, frozen with surprise, until he was lifted off his feet by a blow to the midsection. Cardenas heard a bone-snapping crunch! and the guard fell limply to the tiled floor.
The front door jerked open and George hissed, “Come on, then!”
Cardenas ran out of the house, up the path that wound through the garden, and through the hatch that opened into Selene’s bottommost corridor. She could hear George panting and puffing alongside her. Once they were through the hatch, George’s hand on her arm brought her to a stop.
“I don’t think anybody’s followin’ us,” he said.
“How long do you think it will take for them to realize I’m gone?” she asked.
She sensed him shrugging. “Not fookin’ long.”
“What now, then?”
“Lemme get outta this suit,” George muttered. “Hot enough inside here to cook a fella.”
His face appeared, then his entire shaggy head. Within a minute he stood before her, sweating and grinning, a big red-haired mountain of a man in rumpled, stained olive-green coveralls.
“That’s better,” George said, taking a deep breath. “Could hardly breathe inside that suit.”
As they started walking swiftly along the corridor toward the escalator, Cardenas asked, “Where can I go? Where will I be safe? Humphries will turn Selene upside-down looking for me.”
“We could go to Stavenger and ask him to take care of you.”
She shook her head. “Don’t put Doug in the middle of this. Besides, Humphries probably has his own people planted in Selene’s staff.”
“H’mm, yeah, maybe,” George said as they reached the escalator. “Inside Astro, too, for that matter.”
Suddenly frightened at the possibilities, Cardenas blurted, “Where can I go?”
George smiled. “I got the perfect hideout for ya. Long as you don’t mind sharin’ it with a corpsicle, that is.”
BONANZA
“It’s a beauty,” Dan breathed, staring at the image on the control panel’s radar screen.
“Purty ugly-lookin’ beauty,” Pancho countered. The radar image showed an elongated irregular lump of an asteroid, one end rounded and pitted, the other dented by what looked like the imprint of a giant mailed fist. “It looks rather like a potato,” said Amanda, “don’t you think?”
“An iron potato,” Dan said.
Fuchs came through the hatch, and suddenly the bridge felt crowded to Dan. Lars isn’t tall, he said to himself, but he fills up a room. “That is it?” Fuchs asked, his eyes riveted to the screen.
“That’s it,” Pancho said, over her shoulder. She tapped at the keyboard on her left and a set of alphanumerics sprang up on the small screen above it. “Fourteenth asteroid discovered this year.”
Amanda said, “Then its official name will be 41-014 Fuchs.”
“How’s it feel to have your name on an asteroid, Lars?” Pancho asked. “Very fine,” Fuchs said.
“You’re the first person to have his name attached to a newly-discovered asteroid in years,” Amanda said. She seemed almost aglow, to Dan.
“Most of the new rocks have been found by the impact searchers,” Pancho said. “Those li’l bitty probes don’t get their names into the record.”
“Asteroid 41-014 Fuchs,” Amanda breathed.
He smiled and shrugged-squirmed, almost, as if embarrassed by her enthusiasm.
“The official name’s one thing,” Dan said. “I’m calling her Bonanza.”
“Her?” Fuchs asked.
“Asteroids are feminine?” Pancho challenged.
Dan held his ground. “Hey, we speak of Mother Earth, don’t we? And they call Venus our sister planet, don’t they?”
“What about Mars?” Pancho retorted.
“Or Jupiter,” said Amanda.
Pointing to the lump imaged on the radar screen, Dan insisted, “Bonanza’s going to make us all rich. And very happy. She and her sisters are going to save the world. She’s a female.”
“Sure she’s female,” Pancho said laconically. “You want to dig into her, don’t you?”
Fuchs sputtered and Amanda said, “Pancho, really!”
Dan put on an innocent air. “What a dirty mind you have, Pancho. I admire that in a woman.”
Within three hours they were close enough to Bonanza to see it for themselves: a dark, deformed shape glinting sullenly in the wan light of the distant Sun. The asteroid blotted out the stars as it tumbled slowly end over end in the cold empty silence of space.
“... eighteen hundred and forty-four meters along its long axis,” Amanda was reading out the radar measurements. “Seven hundred and sixty-two meters at its maximum width.”
“Nearly two kilometers long,” Dan mused. He hadn’t left the bridge all during their approach to the metallic asteroid.
“Killing residual thrust,” Pancho said, her attention focused on the control displays.
“Throttling down to zero,” Amanda confirmed.
The asteroid slid out of view as the pilots established a parking orbit around it. Dan felt what little weight remaining dwindle away to nothing. He floated up off the deck, stopped himself with a hand against the overhead.
He felt Fuchs come through the hatch behind him.
“Lars, we’re going to be in zero g for a while,” Dan said.
“I know. I think I’m getting accustomed to it.”
“Good. Just don’t make any sudden head movements and you’ll be fine.”
“Yes. Thank-mein gott! There it is!”
The dark lopsided bulk of Bonanza rose in front of the bridge windows like some pitted, pockmarked monster, huge, overawing, menacing. Despite himself, Dan felt a wave of unease surge through him. It’s like confronting an ogre, he thought, a giant beast from a fairy tale.
“Look at those striations!” Fuchs said, his voice vibrant with excitement. “This must have been broken off from a much larger body, perhaps a planetesimal from the early age of the solar system! We’ve got to get outside and take samples, drill cores!”
Dan broke into laughter. Fuchs turned toward him, looking confused. Even Pancho glanced over her shoulder.
“What so funny, boss?”
“Nothing,” Dan said, trying to sober himself. “Nothing.” Inwardly, though, he marveled that the same sight that brought back to him memories of childhood dread stirred Fuchs into a frenzy of scientific curiosity.
“Come on,” Fuchs said, ducking past the hatch. “We’ve got to suit up and go outside.”
Dan nodded his agreement and followed the scientist. He’s forgotten about zero-g, Dan realized. He’s not worried about upchucking now, he’s got too much work that he wants to do.
Amanda remained on the bridge as Pancho followed Dan down to the airlock.
“You’re not thinkin’ of goin’ EVA, are you?” she asked Dan.
“I’ve been a qualified astronaut since before you were born, Pancho.”
“You’ve been redlined. You can’t go outside.”
“And rain makes applesauce.”
“I mean it, Dan,” Pancho said, quite seriously. “Your immune system can’t take another radiation dose.”
“Fuchs can’t go out there by himself,” he countered.
“That’s my job. I’ll go with him.”
“Nope. You stay here. I’ll babysit him.”
“I’m the captain of this craft,” Pancho said firmly. “I can order you to stay inside.”
He gave her a crooked grin. “And I’m the owner. I can fire you.”
“Not till we get back to Selene.”
Dan huffed out an impatient sigh. “Come on, Pancho, stop the chickenshit.”
“Your medical records say-”
“Dammitall to hell and back, I don’t care what the medical records say! I’m going out! I want to see this sucker! Touch her with my own hands.”
“No gloves?”
They had reached the airlock, where the spacesuits hung in racks like suits of armor on display. Fuchs was sitting on the bench that ran in front of the racks, already into the lower half of his suit, sealing the boots to the cuffs of his leggings. Dan reached for the suit that bore his name stenciled on its chest.
“I thought you were scared of the radiation,” Pancho said.
“I’ll be okay inside the suit,” Dan said. “The weather’s calm out there; no radiation storm.”
Fuchs looked up at them, said nothing.
“The regulations say-”
“The regulations say you’re not supposed to bring pets aboard,” Dan said, grinning again as he pulled the lower half of his suit from its rack and sat down beside Fuchs. “But I’ve got to look into my shoes every morning to make sure your damned snake isn’t curled up inside one of them.”
“Snake?” Fuchs yelped, looking alarmed.
Pancho planted her fists on her hips and glared down at Dan for a long moment. Then she visibly relaxed.
“Okay, boss,” she said at last. “I guess I can’t blame you. But I’m gonna monitor your vitals back on the bridge. If I say come in, you come in. Right then. No arguments. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Dan replied instantly. A voice in his head was laughing mockingly. Are you satisfied? the voice asked. You’ve shown her that you’re not a sick old man. Big deal. How are you going to feel when the cold clamps down on you and your bones start hurting again?
Doesn’t matter, Dan answered himself. I’m not going to stay cooped up in here like a cripple. To hell with it; I don’t really give a damn. If I’ve got to die, I’d rather wear out than rust out. What difference does it make?
“Clear for EVA.” Amanda’s voice came through the speaker in Dan’s helmet.
He was in the airlock, sealed in his suit, feeling like a robot in a metal womb.
“Opening outer hatch,” he said, pressing a gloved finger on the red light of the control panel.
“Copy, outer hatch.”
The hatch slid open and Dan felt his pulse start to quicken. How long has it been since I’ve been outside? he asked himself. That sardonic voice in his head answered, Not since you got the radiation overdose, jiggering commsats in the Van Alien Belt.
Ten years, Dan realized. That’s a long time to be away from all this.
He pushed himself through the hatch and floated in emptiness. The universe hung all around him: stars solemn and unwinking, staring at him even through the heavy tinting of his fishbowl helmet. Turning slowly, he saw the Sun, strangely small and pale, with its arms of faint zodiacal light outstretched on either side of it.
Freedom. He knew he was confined inside the spacesuit and he couldn’t survive for a minute without it. Yet hanging there weightlessly in the silent emptiness of infinity, Dan felt free of all the world, alone with the cosmos, in tune with the ethereal music of the spheres. Glorious freedom. Radiation be damned; he felt he could soar out into the universe forever and leave the petty lusts and hates of humankind far behind. It wouldn’t be a bad way to die.
Then the asteroid slid into his view. Massive, ponderous, an enormous pitted dark looming reality hanging over him like an ominous cloud, a mountain floating free in space. Starpower 1 looked pitifully small and helpless alongside the two-kilometer-long asteroid; like a minnow next to a whale. Dan suddenly understood how Jonah must have felt.
You can’t scare me, he said to the asteroid. You’re two kilometers of high-grade iron ore, pal. You’re going to look beautiful to a lot of people on Earth. Money in the bank, that’s what you are. Jobs and hope for millions of people. Bonanza: that’s your name and that’s just what you are.
“Ready for EVA.” Fuchs’s voice broke into Dan’s silent monologue.
“Clear for EVA. Lars,” he heard Amanda reply.
Dan squeezed the right handgrip on his maneuvering controls with the lightest of touches. The cold gas jet on the backpack squirted noiselessly and he turned enough to be looking back at the ship. Starpower 1 glinted nicely in the starlight. She still looked brand-new, shining, not a pit or a scratch on her. The airlock hatch slid open and a spacesuited figure stood framed in it.
“Exiting the airlock,” Fuchs said, his voice trembling slightly.
“Come on, Lars,” Dan called. “Isn’t she a beauty?”
Fuchs jetted toward him. Dan saw that his suit was bristling with hammers and drills and all sorts of equipment.
“It’s enormous!” He sounded awestruck.
“She’s just an average-sized chunk of metal,” Dan said. “And as soon as you chip a piece off her, we can claim her.”
Fuchs showed no hesitation at all, although he seemed a bit clumsy working the controls of his maneuvering thrusters. For a moment Dan thought he was going to ram into the asteroid, but at the last instant Fuchs fired a braking blast and hovered a scant few meters above its pitted, pebbly surface.
Dan jetted toward him, and with a bare touch of the handgrip controls lowered himself to the surface of the asteroid. He felt his boots make contact and then recoil slightly. Not much gravity, he thought, as he puffed down again and finally stood on the surface of Bonanza. Clouds of dust rose where his boots made contact with the surface; they just hung there, barely moving in the minuscule gravity.
It took Fuchs three tries to get firmly onto the surface; he kept coming down too hard and bouncing off. In the end, Dan had to reach out and yank him down.
“Don’t try to walk,” he told Fuchs. “The gravity’s so light you’ll float up and away.”
“Then how-”
“Slide your boots along.” Dan demonstrated a couple of steps, shuffling up even more dust. “Like you’re dancing.”
“I don’t dance very well,” Fuchs said.
“This isn’t the smoothest dance floor in the solar system, either.”
The asteroid’s surface was rough and uneven, covered with a powdery coating of dust, much like the surface of the Moon. Dan thought it was more like standing on the deck of a boat, though, than on solid ground. There wasn’t really a horizon; the rock just ended. Pinhole craters peppered the surface, pebbles and fist-sized rocks littered it, and out along its far end, Dan could see a more sizeable crater, a big depression with a raised rim all around it.
“How much iron do you think we’ve got here?” Dan asked.
“We’ll have a good measure of its mass by the time we return to the ship,” Fuchs said. “With the ship orbiting the asteroid we have a classic two-body system. It’s simple Newtonian physics.”
Dan thought to himself, He’s a scientist, all right. Ask him a simple question and you get a dissertation. Without the answer to your question.
“Lars,” he said patiently, “can’t you give me some idea of this lump’s mass?”
Fuchs spread his hands. In the spacesuit, he looked like a bubble-topped fireplug with arms.
“A back-of-the-envelope guesstimate?” Dan coaxed.
“Oh... considering its dimensions... nickel-iron asteroids are typically no more than ten percent nickel... it must be somewhere in the neighborhood of seven or eight billion tons of iron and eighty million tons or so of nickel.”
Dan’s eyes went wide. “That’s five or six times the world’s steel production in its best year! Before the floods and all!”
“There are impurities, of course,” Fuchs warned. “Platinum, gold and silver, other heavy metals.”
“Impurities, right,” Dan agreed, cackling. His mind was spinning. One asteroid is enough to supply the world’s steel industry for years and years! And there are thousands of these chunks out here! It’s all true! Everything I hoped for, all those wild promises I made-they’re all going to come true!
Fuchs seemed oblivious to it all. “I want to look at those striations,” he said, turning toward the far end of the asteroid. His effort made him rise off the surface and Dan had to yank him down again.
“Take a sample here, first,” Dan said. “Then we can claim it.”
The light was so dim that Dan could see Fuchs’s head outlined inside his bubble helmet. He nodded and slowly, very slowly, got down into a kneeling position. Then he pulled a rock hammer from his equipment belt and chipped off a bit of the asteroid. The effort raised more dust and lifted him off the surface again, but this time he clawed at the ground with one gloved hand and pulled himself back down.
“Anchor yourself, Lars,” Dan said. “Hammer a piton in and tether it to your belt.”
“Yes, of course,” Fuchs answered, fumbling with the equipment clipped to his waist.
Dan said, “Record this, Amanda, and mark the time. Starpower Limited has begun taking samples of asteroid 41-014 Fuchs. Under the terms of the International Astronautical Authority protocol of 2021, Star-power Limited, claims exclusive use of the resources of this asteroid.”
“I’ve got it,” Amanda’s voice replied. “Your statement is being beamed to IAA headquarters on Earth.”
“Good,” Dan said, satisfied. He recalled from his school days the story of the Spanish explorer Balboa first sighting the Pacific Ocean. From what he remembered of the tale, Balboa waded out into the surf and claimed the whole bloody ocean and all the lands bordering on it for Spain. They thought big in those days, Dan said to himself. No pissant IAA to worry about.
Fuchs got the knack of shuffling along the surface of the asteroid, and started chipping out samples and making stereo videos. Dan worried about the dust they were kicking up. It could get into the joints of our suits, he thought. Damned stuff just hangs there; must take a year for it to settle back again.
He saw a bulge off to his right, like a small knoll or a rounded hill. That must be the tail end of this rock, Dan told himself. Looking back at Fuchs, he saw that the scientist had finally anchored himself to the ground and was busily chipping away, raising lingering clouds of dust.
“I’m going to go up to that ridge,” he told Fuchs, pointing, “and see what’s on the other side.”
“Very well,” said Fuchs, still bent over his sampling.
Dan shuffled carefully along, worrying about the dust. On the Moon, dust raised from the ground was electrostatically charged; it clung stubbornly to the suits and helmet visors. Probably the same thing here.
He started up the slight rise. Something didn’t feel right. Suddenly his boots slid out from under him and he tumbled, in dreamlike slow motion, face forward. His fall was so gentle that he could put out his hands and stop himself, but he bounced off the dusty ground and found himself floating up the rise like a hot-air balloon gliding up the side of a mountain.
Dan’s old astronaut training took over his reflexes. In his mind he saw clearly what was happening. The gravity on this double-damned rock is so low that I’m floating off it! He saw the bulbous end of the asteroid sliding slowly beneath him and, beyond it, the star-strewn infinity of space.
Twisting his body so that he pointed himself back toward the asteroid’s bulk, Dan squirted his maneuvering jets and lurched back to the asteroid. Gently, tenderly, he touched down again on its surface. Fuchs was still tapping away with his sampling hammer, rising off the ground with every blow, his anchored tether pulling him back again for another crack.
Dan was breathing hard, but otherwise no worse the wear for his little excursion. With even greater care than before he shuffled back to stand beside Fuchs and help bag the samples he’d chipped out.
At last Pancho said sternly, “Time to come in, guys.”
“Just one more sample,” Fuchs replied.
“Now,” Pancho commanded.
“Aye-aye, cap’n,” said Dan. He rapped his gloved knuckles on Fuchs’s helmet. “Come on, Lars. You’ve done enough for one day. This rock isn’t going to go away; you can come back another time.”
Amanda was at the airlock to help them take off their backpacks and dust-spattered spacesuits. Dan caught a strange, pungent smell once he removed his helmet. Not like the sharp firecracker odor of the lunar dust; this was something new, different.
Before he had time to puzzle out the dust’s odor, Pancho came down to the airlock area, looking so somber that Dan asked her what was the matter.
While Fuchs chattered happily with Amanda, Pancho said, “Bad news, boss. Another section of the superconductor is heating up. If it goes critical it could blow out the whole magnetic shield.”
Dan felt his jaw drop open. Without the shield they’d be cooked by the next solar radiation storm.
“We’ve gotta get back to Selene pronto,” Pancho said. “Before another flare breaks out.”
“What’re our chances?” Dan asked, his throat dry.
She waggled a hand. “Fifty-fifty... if we’re lucky.”
We won’t have to go outside, will we?” Cardenas asked nervously.
She was following George through the maze of pumps and generators up on the topmost level of Selene. Color-coded pipes and electrical conduits lined the ceiling; Cardenas wondered how anyone could keep track of which was which. The air hummed with the subdued sounds of electrical equipment and hydraulic machinery. On the other side of the ceiling, she knew, was the grassy expanse of the Grand Plaza-or the bare dusty regolith of the Moon’s airless surface.
“Outside?” George echoed. “Naw, there’s a shaft connectin’ the tempo to the tunnel... if I can find th’ fookin’ tunn-ah, there it is!”
He pulled a small hatch open and stepped over its coaming, then reached a hand back to help Cardenas. The tunnel was dark, lit only by the hand-torch George carried. Cardenas expected to see the evil red eyes of rats in the darkness, or hear the slithering of roaches. Nothing. Selene is clean of vermin, she thought. Even the farmlands have to be pollinated artificially because there aren’t any insects here.
Not yet, she thought. Sooner or later, though. Once we start allowing larger numbers of people up here, they’ll bring their filth and their pests with them.
“Here we are,” George said.
In the circle of light cast by his torch, she saw the metal rungs of a ladder leading up along the wall of the tunnel.
“How much farther does the tunnel go?” she asked in a whisper, even though she knew there was no one else there.
“Another klick or so,” George answered. “Yamagata people wanted to drill all the way through the ringwall and out to Mare Nubium. Got too expensive. The cable car over the top was cheaper.”
He scampered up the ladder, light and lithe despite his size. Cardenas started to follow him.
“Wait a bit,” George called down to her. “Got to get this hatch unstuck.”
She heard metal groan. Then George said, “Okay, up with you, now.”
The ladder ended in an enclosed area about the size of her apartment unit down inside Selene. It was a cylindrical shape, like a spacecraft module.
“We’re on the surface?” Cardenas asked, trying to keep her voice from shaking.
“Buried under a meter of dirt from the regolith,” George said happily. “Safe as in church.”
“But we’re outside.”
“On the slope of the ringwall. Just below the cable-line. The original idea was, if there’s an emergency with the cable-trolley, people could stay in here till help arrives.”
She looked around the shelter warily. A pair of double-decker bunks stood at the far end, the hatch of an airlock at the other. Inbetween was a small galley with a freezer, microwave oven, and sink; some other equipment she didn’t recognize; two padded chairs; a desk with a computer atop it and a smaller chair in front of it...
And a big metal cylinder sitting in the middle of the floor, crowding the already-cramped quarters. One end of the cylinder was attached to a large pair of tanks and a miniaturized cryostat.
“Is that a dewar?” Cardenas asked.
George nodded. “Had to hide the woman inside it from Humphries.”
“She’s dead?”
“Preserved cryonically,” George said. “There’s hopes of reviving her.”
“She won’t be much company.”
“’Fraid not. But I’ll pop back here every few days, see that you’re okay.”
Stepping toward the desk, trying to hide her anxiety, Cardenas asked, “How long will I have to stay here?”
“Dunno. I’ll have a chat with Dan, see what we should do.”
“Call Doug Stavenger,” she said. “He’ll protect me.”
“I thought you didn’t want to put him in the middle of this scrape.”
She wrapped her arms around herself, trembling with cold fear. “That’s before I knew you were going to put me out here.”
“Hey, this isn’t so bad,” George said, trying to sound reassuring. “I useta live in tempos like this for months at a time.”
“You did?”
“Yup. Me and my mates. This is like home-sweet-home to me.”
She looked around the place again. It seemed smaller than her first view of it. Closing in on her. Nothing between her and the deadly vacuum outside except the thin metal of the shelter’s cylinder and a heaping of dirt over it. And a corpse in the middle of the floor, taking up most of the room.
“Call Stavenger,” she pleaded. “I don’t want to stay here any longer than I have to.”
“Sure,” said George. “Lemme talk to Dan first.”
“Make it quick.”
“The magnetic shield is going to blow up?” Dan asked, for the thirtieth time.
Pancho sat across the table from him in Starpower 1’s wardroom. Amanda was on the bridge as the ship raced at top acceleration back toward Selene. Fuchs was in the sensor bay, assaying the samples he’d chipped from Bonanza.
“You know how superconductors work,” Pancho said, grimly. “They have to stay cooled down below their critical temperature. If they go above that temperature all the energy in the coil gets dumped into the hot spot.”
“It’ll explode,” Dan muttered.
“Like a bomb. Lots of energy in the superconductor, boss. It’s a dangerous situation.”
“There’s more than one hot spot?”
“Four of ‘em so far. Wouldn’t be surprised if more of ‘em crop up. Whoever bugged this ship didn’t want us to get back home.”
Dan drummed his fingers on the table top. “I can’t believe Kris Cardenas would do this to me.”
“It’s Humphries, pure and simple,” said Pancho. “He could kill you with a smile, any day.”
“But he’d need Kris to do this.”
“Look,” Pancho said, hunching forward in her chair. “Doesn’t matter who spit in whose eye. We got troubles and we’ve gotta figger out how to save our necks before that magnetic coil goes up like a bomb.”
Dan had never seen her look so earnest. “Okay, right. What do you recommend?”
“We shut down the magnetic field.”
“Shut it down? But then we’d have no radiation shield.”
“Don’t need it unless there’s a flare, and we can prob’ly get back to Selene before the Sun burps another one out.”
“Probably,” Dan growled.
“That’s the chance we take. I like those odds better’n letting the coil’s hot spots build up to an explosion that’d rupture the ship’s skin.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Dan said, reluctantly.
“Okay, then.” Pancho got up from the table. “I’m gonna shut it down now.”
“Wait a minute,” said Dan, reaching for her wrist. “What about the MHD channel?”
Pancho shrugged. “No problems so far. Prob’ly hasn’t been bugged.”
“If it goes, we’re dead, right?”
“Well...” She drew the word out. “We could dump the coil’s energy in a controlled shutdown. That wouldn’t affect the thrusters.”
“But we’d lose our electrical power.”
“We could run on the fuel cells and batteries-for a while.”
“Long enough?”
Pancho laughed and headed for the hatch. “Long as they last, boss,” she said over her shoulder.
“Murphy’s Law,” Dan growled after her.
If anything can go wrong, it will: that was Murphy’s Law. Now I can add Randolph’s corollary to it, he thought: If you turn off your radiation shield, you’re certain to be hit by a solar flare.
George shooed everyone out of the mission control center, except for the chief who insisted hotly that the center must have at least one human controller on duty at all times.
If he’d been a man, George would have simply picked him I up and heaved him through the door out into the corridor. Instead, the chief on this shift was a rail-thin, pasty-faced, lank-haired woman with the personality of an Arkansas mule. She would not leave the center.
Restraining the urge to lift her off her feet and carry her out to the corridor, George pleaded, “I’ve got to send a private message to Dan Randolph. I can’t have anybody listenin’ in on it.”
“And why not?” she demanded, hands on hips, narrow nostrils flaring angrily.
“None of your fookin’ business,” George snarled. “That’s why not.” For long moments they glared at each other, George towering over her, but the woman totally unfazed by him.
“It’s Dan’s own orders,” George said at last, stretching the truth a little. “This is ultra-sensitive stuff.”
The woman seemed to think that over for a second, then said more reasonably, “You take the console over there, on the end. I’ll set you up with a private channel. Nobody else in here but you and me, and I won’t eavesdrop. Okay?”
George started to say no, but realized that this was the best he could accomplish, short of physical mayhem.
Before he could agree, though, Frank Blyleven pushed through the double doors, his normally smiling face wrinkled into a puzzled frown. “What’s going on here?” the security chief demanded, walking up the aisle between the consoles. “I got a report that you’re throwing controllers out of the center.”
Heaving an impatient sigh, George explained all over again that he had to get a message through to Dan. “In private,” he said. “Nobody listenin’ in.”
Blyleven crossed his arms over his chest and tried to look authoritative. It didn’t work. To George he looked like a red-faced shopping mall Santa in mufti.
“Very well,” he said. “Send your message. I’ll sit by the corridor door and make certain nobody disturbs you.”
Surprised, George thanked him and headed for the console that the chief controller had indicated. Blyleven went to the last row of consoles and sat down at the one closest to the door. Surreptitiously, he tapped the keyboard a few times. When George finished his message and erased it from the comm system’s memory core, Blyleven had a copy that he could pawn to Humphries.
Dan felt nervous as he watched Pancho and Amanda shut down the radiation shield. Dumping all that electromagnetic energy didn’t bother him; it was the idea that now they had no protection against another solar storm except the thin hull of the ship itself.
“... shutdown complete,” Pancho announced. “Magnetic field zeroed out.”
“Zero field,” Amanda confirmed.
“Naked to mine enemies,” Dan murmured.
“How’s that, boss?” Pancho asked, looking up over her shoulder toward him.
“I feel naked,” Dan said.
“Don’t worry. Sun looks calm enough for the time being. Even if it shoots out a flare, we can always get into our suits and go for a swim in one of the fuel tanks.”
“That wouldn’t be very helpful,” Amanda pointed out, not realizing that Pancho was joking. “The high-energy protons would set off all sorts of secondary particles from the fuel’s atoms.”
Pancho frowned at her. Amanda looked from her to Dan and then back to her control panel.
“I think I’ll go back and see how Lars is doing,” she said, getting up from her chair.
“Have fun,” Pancho said.
Dan watched her step through the hatch, then slid into her vacated chair.
“Don’t look so glum, boss. We’re battin’ along at one-third g with no sweat. Be back in lunar orbit in less’n four days.”
“I had wanted to stop to sample those other two rocks,” Dan said.
“Can’t take the chance. Better to -hold on. Incoming message from Selene. George Ambrose.”
“I’ll take it here,” said Dan. “By the way, have you told mission control that we’ve shut down the shield?”
“Not yet, but they’ll see it on the telemetering. It’s recorded automatically.”
Dan nodded as George’s bushy red-maned face appeared on the screen. Quickly, in a worried whisper, George explained how he’d located Cardenas and spirited her off to the temporary shelter.
“She wants t’see Stavenger,” George concluded. “I told her I’d talk to you first. She’ll be perfectly okay in the tempo for a coupla weeks, if we need to keep her stashed there. So... what d’you want me to do, Dan?”
George’s image on the screen froze. Dan could see that he must have been at the mission control center when he’d sent the message. Good. He must’ve cleared out the place to make sure nobody could eavesdrop.
Now I’ve got to send him a reply that just about anybody can listen to, Dan thought. This is going to be like an old-time mafioso speaking into a tapped telephone.
“George, I think she’s right. Do as she asks... as carefully as you can. She’s important to us; there’s a lot she and I have to talk about when I get back. We’ve got some problems here on the ship and we’re heading back home. If all goes well, we should be back in lunar orbit in less than four days. I’ll keep you informed, and you let me know how things are going there.”
Dan reviewed his own message, decided there was nothing he needed to add to it, then touched the SEND button on the comm panel.
He started to get up from the co-pilot’s seat when the comm unit pinged.
“ ‘Nother message comin’ in,” Pancho said needlessly.
A young man’s face appeared on the screen. He looked annoyed. “General notice to all spacecraft and surface vehicles. A class-four solar flare has been observed by the early-warning sensors in Mercury orbit. Preliminary calculations of the interplanetary field indicate the resulting radiation storm has a ninety percent chance of reaching the Earth-Moon system within the next twelve hours. All spacecraft in cislunar space are advised to return to the nearest safe docking facility. All activities on the lunar surface will be suspended in six hours. Anyone on the surface is advised to seek shelter within six hours.”
Dan sagged back into the chair.
Pancho tried to smile. “You called it, boss: Murphy’s Law.”
Four worried people clustered around the table in Starpower 1’s wardroom. The wallscreen showed a chart of the solar system, with the radiation cloud that the solar flare had belched out appearing as a shapeless gray blob twisted by the interplanetary magnetic field. It was approaching Earth and the Moon rapidly. Deep in the Asteroid Belt a single pulsating yellow dot showed where their ship was.
Dan said to the computer, “Show the projections for the next two days.”
The cloud grew and thinned, but surged out past the orbit of Mars and then engulfed the inner Belt and overran the blinking dot that marked Starpower 1’s position.
Pancho made a sound halfway between a sigh and a snort. “No way around it. We’re gonna get hosed.”
Amanda looked up from her palmcomp. “If we could pump all our remaining fuel into one tank, it could serve as a shelter... of sorts.”
“I thought the secondaries would get us,” Dan muttered.
“They’d be high,” Amanda admitted, “but if we could pressurize the fuel it might absorb most of the secondary particles before they reached us.”
“If we’re plumb in the middle of the tank,” Pancho said.
“Yes. Inside our suits, of course.”
“Can the suits handle the temperature? We’re talking about liquid hydrogen and helium; damned close to absolute zero.”
“The suits are insulated well enough,” Pancho said. Then she added, “But nobody’s ever tried a dunk in liquid hydrogen with ‘em.”
“And we’d have to be dunked for god knows how many hours,” Dan muttered.
Fuchs had not said a word. His head was bent over his own palmcomp.
“How much protection would the fuel give us?” Dan asked glumly.
Amanda hesitated, looked down at her handheld screen, then said, “We’d all need hospitalization. We’d have to set the flight controls to put us into lunar orbit on automatic.”
“We’d all be that sick?” Pancho asked.
Amanda nodded solemnly.
And I’d be dead, Dan thought. I can’t take another radiation dose like that. It would kill me.
Aloud, he tried to sound reasonably hopeful. “Well, it’s better than sitting here with our thumbs jammed. Pancho, start transferring the fuel.”
“How high can we pressurize one of the tanks?” Amanda wondered.
“I’ll check the specs,” said Pancho. “Come on, we’ve got to -”
“Wait,” Fuchs said, looking up at them. “There is a better way.”
Dan looked hard at him. Fuchs’s eyes were set so deep that it was difficult to see any expression in them. Certainly he was not smiling. His thin slash of a mouth looked tight, hard.
“Computer,” Fuchs called, “display position of asteroid 32-114.”
A yellow dot began blinking near the inner edge of the Belt.
“That’s where we must go,” Fuchs said flatly.
“It’s half a day off our course home,” Pancho objected.
“Why there, Lars?” Amanda asked.
“We can use it for a storm shelter.”
Dan shook his head. “Once the cloud runs over us, the radiation is isotropic. It comes from all directions. You can’t hide behind a rock from it.”
“Not behind the rock,” Fuchs said, with growing excitement. “Inside it!”
“Inside the asteroid?”
“Yes! We burrow into it. The body of the asteroid will shield us from the radiation!”
“That would be great,” Dan said, “if we had some deep drilling equipment aboard and a few days to dig. We don’t have either.”
“We don’t need them!”
“The hell we don’t,” Dan shot back. “You think we’re going to tunnel into that rock with your little core sampler?”
“No, no, no,” Fuchs said. “You don’t understand. That rock is a chondritic asteroid!”
“So what?” Pancho snapped.
“It’s porous! It isn’t a rock, not like Bonanza. It’s an aggregate of chondrites-little stones, held together by gravity.”
“How do you know that?” Dan demanded. “We haven’t gotten close enough to-”
“Look at the data!” Fuchs urged, waving a thick-fingered hand at the wallscreen.
“What data?” The screen still showed the chart with the radiation cloud.
Fuchs pointed his palmcomp at the screen like a pistol and the wall display suddenly showed a long table of alphanumerics.
“Look at the data for its density,” Fuchs said urgently. He jumped up from his chair and bounded to the screen. “Look! Its density isn’t much more than that of water! It can’t be a solid object! Not with such a density. It’s porous! An aggregation of stones! Like a...” he searched for a word,”... like a pile of rubble... a beanbag chair!”
Dan stared at the numbers, then looked back at Fuchs. The man was clearly excited now.
“You’re sure of this?” he asked.
“The numbers don’t lie,” Fuchs said. “They can’t.”
Pancho gave out a soft whistle. “Shore wish we had somethin’ more’n numbers to go on.”
“But we do!” Fuchs said. “Mathilde in the Main Belt, and Eugenia-several C-class bodies among the Near-Earth Asteroids - they are all aggregates, not solid at all. Microprobes have examined them, even gone inside them!”
“Porous,” Dan muttered.
“Yes!”
“We can dig into them without drilling equipment?”
“They are probably highly-tunneled by nature.”
Dan stroked his chin, trying to think, trying to decide. If he’s right, it’d be better than dunking ourselves in a pool of liquid hydrogen for hours on end. If Fuchs is right. If we can burrow into the asteroid and use it for a storm shelter. If he’s wrong, we’re all dead.
Pancho spoke up. “I say we go for the asteroid, boss.”
Dan looked into her steady light brown eyes. Is she saying this because she knows I won’t make it otherwise? Is she willing to take the chance with her own life because it’s the only chance we’ve got to save mine?
“I agree,” Amanda said. “The asteroid is the better choice.”
He turned back to Fuchs. “Lars, are you absolutely certain of all this?”
“Absolutely,” Fuchs replied, without an instant’s hesitation.
“Okay,” Dan said, feeling uneasy about it. “Change course for- which one is it?”
“Asteroid 32-114,” Fuchs and Amanda answered in unison.
“Point and shoot,” Dan said.
Dan tried to sleep while Starpower 1 raced to the chondritic asteroid, but his dreams were troubled with faces and visions from the past and a vague, looming sense of dread. He awoke feeling more tired than when he’d crawled into his bunk.
He felt stiff and sore, as if every muscle in his body were strained. Tension, he told himself. But that sardonic voice in his mind retorted, Age. You’re getting to be an old man.
He nodded to his image in the lav mirror. If I live through this I’m going to start rejuve therapy.
Then he realized what he’d said: if I live through this.
He put on a fresh set of coveralls and grabbed a mug of coffee on his way to the bridge. Amanda was in the command chair, with Fuchs sitting at her right.
“Pancho’s sleeping,” Amanda said before Dan could ask. “We’ll be making rendezvous with 114 in...” she glanced at one of the screens,”... seventy-three minutes. I’ll wake her in half an hour.”
“Can we see the rock yet?” Dan asked, peering into the black emptiness beyond the windows.
“Telescopic view,” said Amanda, touching a viewscreen.
A lumpy, roundish shape appeared on the screen. To Dan it looked like a partially-deflated beach ball, dark gray, almost black.
“We’re getting excellent data on it,” Fuchs said. “Mass and density are confirmed.”
“It’s porous, as you thought?”
“Yes, it has to be.”
“It’s certainly no beauty,” Amanda said.
“I don’t know about that,” replied Dan. “It looks pretty good to me. In fact, I think I’ll call it Haven.”
“Haven,” she echoed.
Dan nodded. “Our haven from the storm.” Silently he added, if those numbers for its density mean what Fuchs says they do.
The worst part of being alone in the temporary shelter was the waiting. There was nothing to do in the tempo except pace its length-an even dozen strides for Kris Cardenas-or watch the commercial video broadcasts that the shelter’s antenna pulled in from the relay satellites.
Maddening. And there was the high-tech sarcophagus in the middle of the floor with the frozen woman inside its gleaming stainless steel cylinder. Not much company.
When the hatch in the floor suddenly squeaked open, Cardenas jumped with surprise so hard she nearly banged her head on the shelter’s curving roof. For an instant she didn’t care who was coming through the hatch; even an assassin would be a welcome relief from the boredom of the past night and day.
But she puffed out a big sigh of relief when she saw George Ambrose’s brick-red mane rising through the open hatch. George climbed through and grinned at her.
“Dan says I should take you to Stavenger.” Cardenas nodded. “Yes. Fine.”
Doug Stavenger was not happy to see her. He sat behind his desk and eyed her with raw disappointment showing in his expression. Cardenas sat in the cushioned chair before the desk like an accused criminal being interrogated. George stood by the office door, beefy arms folded across his chest.
“You seeded Randolph’s ship with gobblers?” he said, his voice hollow with shocked disbelief.
“Specifically tailored to take apart copper compounds,” Cardenas admitted, feeling shaky inside. “Nothing more.”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“It was meant to cripple the ship’s radiation shield,” she said defensively. “Once they found out about it they’d abort their mission and return here.”
“But they didn’t find out about it until they were deep in the Belt,” Stavenger said.
George added, “And now they’re sailing into a fookin’ radiation storm without a shield.”
“This could become a murder,” Stavenger said. “Four murders.”
Cardenas bit her lip and nodded.
“And Humphries was behind this scheme,” Stavenger said. It was a statement, not a question.
“He wanted Randolph’s mission to fail.”
“Why?”
“Ask him.”
“He’s a major investor in the project. Why would he want it to fail?”
“Ask him,” she repeated.
“I intend to,” said Stavenger. “He’s already on his way here.”
As if on cue, Stavenger’s phone chimed. “Mr. Humphries here to see you,” said the phone’s synthesized voice.
“Send him in,” Stavenger said, touching the stud on the rim of his desk that opened the door.
George stood aside, clearly glowering through his beard as Humphries walked in. Humphries looked at Cardenas, half turned in her chair, then at Stavenger. With a slight shrug he took the other chair in front of the desk.
“What’s this all about?” he asked casually as he sat down. “What’s going on?”
“It’s about attempted murder,” Stavenger said.
“Murder?”
“Four people are caught in a solar storm out in the Belt without a working radiation shield.”
“Dan Randolph, you mean.” Humphries almost smiled. “That’s just like him, barging ahead like a bull in a china shop.”
Stavenger bristled. “You didn’t get Dr. Cardenas here to seed Randolph’s ship with gobblers?”
“Gobblers?”
“Nanomachines. Disassemblers.”
Humphries glanced at Cardenas, then said to Stavenger, “I asked Dr.
Cardenas if there was any way that Randolph’s ship could be... er; disabled slightly. Just enough to get him to turn back and abort his flight to the Belt.”
Cardenas started to reply, but Stavenger said heatedly, “If they die - if any one of them dies-I’ll have you arraigned for premeditated murder.”
Humphries actually smiled at Stavenger. “That’s so far-fetched it’s ludicrous.”
“Is it?”
“I had Randolph’s ship sabotaged so he would abort his flight and come back to Selene. I admit to that. Any sane man would have turned around and headed for home as soon as he found the sabotage. But not Randolph! He pushed on anyway, knowing that his radiation shield was damaged. That’s his decision, not mine. If there’s a crime in this, it’s Randolph committing suicide and taking his crew with him.”
Stavenger barely held on to his composure. His fists clenched, he asked through gritted teeth, “And just why did you want to sabotage his ship?”
“So the stock in Astro Corporation would drop, why else? It was a business decision.”
“Business.”
“Yes, business. I want Astro; the lower its stock, the easier for me to buy it up. Dr. Cardenas here wanted her grandchildren. I offered to get her together with them in exchange for a pinch of nanomachines.”
“Gobblers,” Stavenger said.
“They weren’t programmed to harm anyone,” Cardenas protested. “They were specifically set to attack the copper compound of the superconductor, nothing more.”
“My father was killed by gobblers,” Stavenger said, his voice as cold and sharp as an icepick. “Murdered.”
“That’s ancient history,” Humphries scoffed. “Please don’t bring your family baggage into this.”
Visibly restraining himself, Stavenger stared at Humphries for a long, silent moment. Electricity crackled through the office. George decided that if Stavenger came around the desk and started beating up on Humphries, he would keep the door closed and prevent anyone from coming to the bastard’s aid.
At last Stavenger seemed to win his inner struggle. He took a shuddering breath, then said in a low, seething voice, “I’m turning this matter over to Selene’s legal department. Neither of you will be allowed to leave Selene until their investigation is finished.”
“You’re going to put us on trial?” Cardenas asked.
“If it were up to me,” Stavenger said, “I’d put the two of you into leaky spacesuits and drive you out into the middle of Mare Nubium and leave you there.”
Humphries laughed. “I’m glad you’re not a judge. And, by the way, Selene has no capital punishment, does it?”
“Not yet,” Stavenger growled. “But if we get a few more people like you here, we’ll probably change our laws on that point.”
Humphries got to his feet. “You can threaten all you like, but I don’t think your courts will take this as personally as you are.”
With that, he strode to the door. George stepped aside and let him open it for himself. He noticed that there was a thin sheen of perspiration on Humphries’s upper lip as he left the office.
The instant the door closed again, Cardenas broke into sobs. Half doubled over in her chair, she buried her face in her hands.
Stavenger’s icy composure melted. “Kris... how could you do it? How could you let him...” He stopped and shook his head.
Without looking up at him, Cardenas said in a tear-choked voice, “I was angry, Doug. Angrier than you can know. Angrier than I myself knew.”
“Angry? At Randolph?”
“No. At them. The crazies who let this greenhouse cliff ruin the world. The fanatics who’ve exiled us, who won’t let me come to Earth to see my children, my grandchildren. And they won’t come here, not even for a visit. I wanted to punish them, get even with them.”
“By killing Randolph?”
“Dan’s trying to help them,” she said, looking up at him at last, her face streaked with tears. “I don’t want them helped! They made this mess. They shut me out of their lives. Let them stew in their own juices! They deserve whatever they get.”
Stavenger shook his head, bewildered. He handed Cardenas a tissue and she dabbed at her reddened eyes.
“I’m going to recommend that you be placed under house arrest, Kris. You’ll be able to go anywhere in Selene except the nanotech lab.”
She nodded wordlessly.
“And Humphries?” George asked, still standing by the door.
“Same thing, I suppose. But he’s right, the smug slimebag. We don’t have capital punishment; we don’t even have a jail here in Selene.”
“House arrest for him would be a lark,” George said.
Stavenger looked disgusted. But then his chin came up and his eyes brightened. “Unless we take it out on his wallet.”
“Huh?”
With a slow smile spreading across his youthful face, Stavenger said, “If he’s found guilty of murder, or even attempted murder, maybe the court can divest him of his share of Starpower and keep him from taking over Astro Corporation.”
George huffed. “I’d rather punch his ribs in.”
“So would I,” Stavenger admitted. “But I think he’d rather have his ribs punched in than to have to give up Astro and Starpower.”
“There it is,” Pancho sang out. “How’s that for navigation?”
Dan crouched slightly behind the command chair and peered through the window. The asteroid was visible to their naked eyes now against the distant glow of the Sun’s zodiacal light, a dumbbell-shaped dark mass tumbling slowly end over end.
Fuchs stood beside Dan, his hands on the back of Amanda’s chair.
“It’s two bodies in contact,” he said. “Like Castallia and several others.”
“Looks like a peanut,” said Dan.
“A peanut made of rock,” Pancho said.
“No, no,” Fuchs corrected, “a peanut made up of thousands of little stones, chondrules, that are barely holding together in their very weak mutual gravitational attraction.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Look, you can see craters on the surface.”
Dan strained his eyes. How in hell can he see craters on that black slug in this dim lighting?
“They have no rims,” Fuchs went on, talking fast in his excitement. “Smaller objects have collided with the asteroid but they don’t make impact craters as they would on a solid body. They simply burrow into the loose rubble.”
“Same as we’re gonna do,” Pancho said. “Our storm cellar,” Amanda added, glancing up at Fuchs. It’s our storm cellar only if he’s right, Dan added silently. If that chunk out there really is a beanbag and we can dig into it until the storm’s over. Aloud, he asked, “How long before the radiation starts to build up?”
“Four hours, plus a few minutes,” Pancho said. “Plenty of time.” You hope, Dan said to himself.
She established Starpower 1 in a close orbit around the tumbling asteroid, and then the four of them floated weightlessly down to the airlock, where Dan and Fuchs had already assembled six emergency tanks of air. As they wriggled into their spacesuits Fuchs begged to go out the airlock first, but Dan overruled him.
“Pancho goes first, Lars. You’re still a tenderfoot out there.”
Through his fishbowl helmet, Fuchs’s broad face frowned in puzzlement. “But my feet are fine,” he said. “Why are you worried about my feet?”
Dan and Pancho both laughed, but Amanda shot an annoyed glance at Dan and said, “It’s an American expression, Lars. From their western frontier, long ago.”
“Yep,” Dan conceded. “I learned it from Wild Bill Hickok.”
Getting serious, Pancho said, “We can go together, Lars and me- whenever you guys are ready to stop horsin’ around.”
“Aye-aye cap’n,” said Dan, touching his helmet with a gloved hand in a sloppy salute.
Pancho and Fuchs went through the airlock and, once it cycled, Dan and Amanda. While he stood in the cramped metal chamber, listening to the air-pump’s clatter dwindling to silence, he heard Fuchs’s excited voice through his helmet speaker:
“It’s like a sandpile!”
Dan offered a swift thanks to whatever gods there be. Maybe we’ll all live through this, after all.
With Amanda, he went through the airlock and then jetted the hundred meters or so separating the ship from the asteroid. It sure looks solid, Dan thought, staring at the black, slowly tumbling mass as he approached it. And yes, there were craters here and there with no rims to them; just holes, as if some giant had poked his fingers into the asteroid.
Then he saw Fuchs’s helmet and shoulders; the rest of him was in some sort of a pit. He’s digging like a kid in a sandbox, Dan saw.
As he got closer, Dan saw that the surface of the asteroid looked hazy, blurred. Is he stirring up that much dust? Dan asked himself. No, it’s not just where Fuchs is digging. It’s everywhere. The whole surface of the asteroid is blurry. What the hell is causing that?
“Are my eyes going bad or is the surface blurred?” he said into his helmet microphone.
“Dust,” came Fuchs’s immediate reply. “Particles from the solar wind give the dust an electrostatic charge. It makes the dust levitate.”
“That doesn’t happen on the Moon,” Dan objected.
The Moon is a very large body,” said Fuchs. “This asteroid’s gravity is too weak to hold the dust on the surface.”
Just then Dan touched down on Haven. It was like stepping on talcum powder. His boots sank into the dark dust almost up to his ankles even though he came down with a feather light touch. Cripes, he thought, it’s like one of those black sand beaches in Tahiti.
Dan turned and saw Pancho, long and lean even in her spacesuit, gliding across the asteroid’s dusty surface toward him.
“Bring out the air tanks, Mandy,” Pancho said.
Amanda soared weightlessly to Starpower 1’s airlock, then emerged again towing a string of six tall gray cylinders behind her. In her gleaming white spacesuit she looked like a robot nurse followed by a half-dozen unfinished pods.
“Better start diggin’, boss,” Pancho said.
Dan nodded, then realized that she might not be able to see the gesture. There wasn’t all that much light out here, and they had decided to keep their helmet lamps off to save their suit batteries.
“We go with the buddy system,” Dan said as he unlimbered the makeshift shovel he had carried with him. “You and me, Pancho. Amanda, you stay with Lars.”
“Yes, of course,” Amanda replied.
It wasn’t quite like digging at the beach. More like working on a giant, black hunk of Swiss cheese, Dan thought. There were holes in the surface, tunnels that had apparently been drilled by stray chunks of rock hitting the asteroid. There was no bedrock, just a loose rubble of black rounded grains, the largest of them about the size of a small pebble. It’s a wonder they hold together, Dan thought.
“Here’s a ready-made tunnel for two,” Pancho called to him. He saw her slowly disappearing into one of the tunnels.
It was wide enough for the two of them, just barely.
“How far down does it go?” Dan asked as he gingerly slid over the lip of the crater, careful not to catch his backpack.
“Dunno,” Pancho answered. “Deep enough to ride out the storm. Better start fillin’ in the hole.”
He nodded inside his helmet and took a tighter grip on his improvised shovel: it had been a panel covering an electronics console. They had to cover themselves with at least a meter of dirt to protect against the oncoming radiation.
As he dug away at the sides of the sloping tunnel, Dan expected the gritty dirt to slide down into their hole. That’s what would have happened on Earth, or even on the Moon. But Haven’s gravity was so slight that the tunnel walls would not cave in no matter how furiously he dug into them.
In short order he and Pancho, working side by side, had buried themselves as deep as their waists. Not enough, Dan knew. Nowhere near enough, not yet.
“How’re we doing... on time?” he asked Pancho, panting from the exertion of digging.
She straightened up. “Lemme see,” she said, tapping at the keyboard on her left forearm. Dan could see a multi-colored display light up on her bubble helmet.
“Radiation level’s not up much over ambient yet,” she said.
“How soon?” Dan asked impatiently.
The lights on her helmet’s inner face flickered, changed. “Hour and a half, maybe a little less.”
Dan went back to digging, blinking sweat out of his eyes, wishing he could wipe his face or just scratch his nose. But that was impossible inside the suit. Should have worn a sweat band, he told himself. Always did when I went outside. Been so long since I’ve done any EVA work I forgot it. Hindsight’s always perfect.
“Y’know we’re gonna need at least a meter of this dirt over us,” Pancho said, digging alongside him.
“And then dig our way out, after the cloud passes.”
“Yep,” Dan repeated. It was the most he could say without stopping work. His muscles ached from the unaccustomed exertion.
It seemed like hours later when he heard Pancho’s voice in his helmet speaker. “How’re you guys doin’, Mandy?”
“We’re fine. We found a lovely cave and we have it almost completely filled in.”
“Once you’re all covered over it’s gonna degrade our radio link,” Pancho said.
“Yes, I’m sure it will.”
“Got your air tanks in there with you?”
“Yes, of course.”
Dan saw that their air tanks were still lying out on the surface, more than arm’s reach away.
“Okay, keep your radio open. If we get completely cut off, you stay in the hole for fourteen hours. Got that?”
“Fourteen hours, check.”
“Time count starts now.”
“Fourteen hours from now,” Amanda confirmed.
“Have a nice day.”
“We’ll see you in fourteen hours,” Fuchs said.
“Right,” said Dan, silently adding, Dead or alive.
To Pancho, he said, “I’d better drag the air tanks in here.” Before she could object he pushed himself out of the hole and soared up above the dark, uneven ground. Dan glanced around but could not find the shelter that Amanda and Fuchs had dug for themselves. They did a good job, he thought as he tapped his jet thruster controls to push himself back to the surface.
The cylinders weighed next to nothing, but still he was careful with them as he slid them down into the pit. They still have mass, and inertia, Dan knew. I could break open Pancho’s helmet or spring her suit’s joints if I let one of these things bang into her.
By the time he wormed himself back into the pit beside her, Dan was bathed in cold sweat and puffing hard.
“You’re not used to real work, are you, boss?” Pancho teased.
Dan shook his head inside his helmet. “Soon as we get back to Selene I’m going in for rejuvenation therapy.”
“Me too.”
“You? At your age?”
“Sooner’s better’n later, they claim.”
Dan humphed. “Better late than never.”
“Radiation level’s starting to climb,” Pancho said, starting to paw at the sides of their pit again. “We better get ourselves buried or neither one of us’ll get any younger.”
“Or older,” Dan muttered.
Buried alive. This is like something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story, Dan said to himself. He knew Pancho was mere centimeters from him; so were the air tanks. But he could see nothing. They were buried under nearly a full meter of loose rubble, curled fetally, nothing to see or hear or do except wait.
“... are you doing?” He heard Amanda’s voice, scratchy and weak, through his helmet’s speaker.
“We’re okay,” Pancho said. “I’ve been thinkin’ we oughtta organize a square dance.”
Dan suppressed a groan. That’s just we need, he thought, redneck humor. Then, surprisingly, he laughed. He hadn’t heard the term “redneck” since he’d been in Texas, long ages ago. There are no rednecks off-Earth, Dan realized. You don’t get sunburned out here. Cooked, maybe. Fried by radiation. But not tanned, not unless you sit under the sunlamps in the gym at Selene.
He wiggled his right hand through the loose rubble encasing him and felt for the keyboard on his left forearm. By touch he called up the ship’s sensor display. They had programmed the suits to show the displays on the inner surfaces of their bubble helmets. Nothing but streaks of colored hash. Either the pile of dirt atop them or the radiation storm was interfering with their link to the ship. Probably a combination of both, he thought.
“What’s the time?” Dan asked.
At least he could talk with Pancho. Even if the radio link broke down completely, they were close enough to scrunch through the dirt and touch helmets so that they could talk through sound conduction.
“More’n thirteen hours to go, boss.”
“You mean we’ve been down here for less than an hour?”
“Forty-nine minutes, to be exact.”
“Shit,” Dan said, with feeling.
“Take a nap. Best way to spend the time.”
Dan nodded inside his helmet. “Nothing else to do.”
He heard Pancho giggle softly.
“What’s funny?”
“Mandy and Lars. I bet they’re tryin’ to figger out how to get the two of them into one suit.”
Dan laughed, too. “Maybe you and I ought to try that.”
“Boss!” Pancho cried in mock shock. “That’s sexual harassment!”
“Nothing else to do,” he repeated. “I can’t even jerk off inside this double-damned suit.”
“I can,” Pancho teased.
“Now that’s sexual harassment,” Dan grumbled.
“Nope. Just better design.”
Dan licked his lips. He felt thirsty, chilled, yet he was sweating. His stomach was queasy.
“How do you feel, Pancho?”
“Bored. Tired. Too jumpy to sleep. How ‘bout you?”
“The same, I guess. Every part of me aches.”
“How’s your blood pressure?”
“How in hell would I know?”
“You hear your pulse in your ears?”
“No.”
“Then you’re okay, I guess.”
“Thank you, Dr. Pancho.”
“Go to sleep, boss. That’s what I’m gonna try to do.”
“I thought you said you were too jumpy.”
“Yeah, but I’m gonna give it a try. Close my eyes and think pleasant thoughts.”
“Good luck.”
“You try it, too.”
“Sure.”
Dan closed his eyes, but his thoughts were far from pleasant. Opening them again, he fumbled with his wrist keyboard until he got the suit’s radiation sensor displayed on his helmet. The graph was distorted by the curve of his helmet, and blurry. He tried to focus his eyes on it. Looks okay, he said to himself. Curve’s going up, but the slope is low and it’s a far distance from the red zone.
Try to sleep. He was certainly tired enough for it. Relax! Think about what you’re going to do when you get back to Selene. I’d like to personally punch out Humphries’s lights. Dan pictured Humphries’s surprise when he broke his nose with a good straight right.
Somewhere in his mind an old adage sounded: Revenge is a dish best taken cold.
Punching in Humphries’s face would be fun, but what would really hurt the bastard? He’s tried to kill me. He may succeed yet; we’re not out of this. If I die he’ll move in and take over Astro. How can I prevent him from doing that? How can I stop him, even from the grave?
Dan chuckled bitterly to himself. I’m already in my grave, he realized. I’m already buried.
Charley Engles looked worried, upset. He nervously brushed his sandy hair back away from his forehead as he said, “Kris, I’m not supposed to let you in here.” It was well past midnight. Cardenas was surprised that anyone was still working in the lab complex. Selene’s security people hadn’t bothered to change the entry code on the main door; she had just tapped it out and the door had obligingly slid open. But Engles had been working his in cubicle, and as soon as he saw Cardenas striding determinedly past the empty work stations toward her own office, he popped out of his cubbyhole and stopped her.
“We got notified by security,” he said, looking shamefaced. “You’re not allowed in here until further notice.”
“I know, Charley,” she said. “I just want to clear out my desk.” Charles Engles was a young grad student from New York whose parents had sent him to Selene after he’d been crippled in a car crash. Even knowing that he could never return to them once he’d taken nanotherapy, his parents wanted their son’s legs repaired so he could walk again. “The cameras...” Engles pointed to the tiny unwinking red lights in the corners of the ceiling. “Security will send somebody here once they see you.”
“It’s all right,” she said, trying to mask her inner tension. “I’ll only be here a few minutes. You can go back to your work.”
Instead, he walked with her as she headed for her office. “What’s this all about, Kris? Why do they want to lock you out of your own lab?”
“It’s a long story and I’d rather not go into it right now, Charley. Please, I just need a few minutes in my office.”
He looked unhappy, almost wounded. “If there’s anything I can do to help...”
Cardenas smiled and felt tears welling in her eyes. “That’s very kind of you, Charley. Thanks.”
“I mean, I wouldn’t be able to walk if it weren’t for you.”
She nodded and added silently, And now that you can walk you’ll never be allowed to return to Earth.
“Well...” he shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. “If there’s anything you need, anything at all, just let me know.”
“Thanks, Charley. I’ll do that.”
He stood there for another awkward moment while Cardenas wondered how long it would take Security to send someone to apprehend her. Finally he headed reluctantly back to his own cubicle. She walked slowly toward her office.
Once Charley stepped into his cubicle, though, Cardenas swiftly turned down a side passageway toward the rear of the laboratory complex. She passed a sign that proclaimed in red letters AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT. This was the area where newly developed nanomachines were tested. The passageway here was lined with sealed, airtight chambers, rather than the cubicles out front. The door to each chamber was locked. The passageway itself was lined with ultraviolet lamps along its ceiling. Each nanomachine type was designed to stop functioning when exposed to high-intensity ultraviolet light: a safety precaution.
Cardenas passed three doors, stopped at the fourth. She tapped out its entry code and the steel door opened inward a crack. She slipped into the darkened chamber and leaned her weight against the heavy door, closing it. With a long, shuddering sigh, she reset the entry code from the panel on the wall, effectively locking the door to anyone who might try to get in. They’ll have to break the door down, she told herself, and that will take them some time.
By the time the get the door open I’ll be dead.
Dan dreamed of Earth: a confused, troubled dream. He was sailing a racing yacht, running before the wind neck-and-neck with many other boats. Warm tropical sunlight beat down on his shoulders and back as he gripped the tiller with one hand while the boat’s computer adjusted the sails for every change in the breeze.
The boat knifed through the water, but suddenly it was a car that Dan was driving at breakneck speed through murderously heavy traffic. Dan didn’t know where he was; some city freeway, a dozen lanes clogged with cars and buses and enormous semi rigs chuffing smoke and fumes into the dirty gray, sullen sky. Something was wrong with the car’s air conditioning; it was getting uncomfortably hot in the driver’s seat. Dan started to open his window but realized that the windows had to stay shut. There’s no air to breath out there, he said to himself, knowing it was ridiculous because he wasn’t in space, he was on Earth and he was suffocating, choking, coughing.
He woke up coughing with Pancho’s voice blaring in his ears, “Recharge your backpack, boss! You’re runnin’ low on air.”
Blackness. He couldn’t see a thing. For a moment he felt panic surging through him, then it fell into place. Buried in the asteroid. Time to refill his backpack’s air tank. In the dark. By touch.
“Lemme help you,” Pancho said.
Dan sensed her beside him. The gravelly dirt shifted, crunched. Something bumped into his side.
“Oops. ‘Scuse me.”
Dan pushed one hand through the gritty stuff, remembering where he’d put the cylinders.
“I’ve got the hose,” he said.
“Okay, good. That’s what I was lookin’ for.”
“Groping for, you mean.”
“Whatever. Hand it to me now.”
Dan felt her hand pushing against his side. “I can do it,” he said.
“Better let me,” said Pancho. “YOU’re tired and fatigue makes you sloppy, causes mistakes.”
“I’m all right.”
’Sure. But just lemme do it, huh? Tired astronauts don’t live long.”
“And rain makes applesauce,” he mumbled, pushing the end of the hose into her waiting hand.
“Don’t open it up yet,” Pancho warned. “Don’t want grit or dust contaminating the air.”
“I know,” he groused.
It seemed to take hours. Dan tried to keep from coughing but the air in his suit seemed awfully thick; his chest was hurting. He pictured old pantomime comedy routines as he and Pancho haltingly fumbled with the air hose, working blindly, and refilled each other’s suit tanks. They filled Dan’s backpack first, and within a minute he could take a deep breath again without it catching in his throat.
Once they filled Pancho’s backpack he heard her inhale deeply. “Best canned air in the solar system,” she announced happily.
“What time is it? How long do we have to go?”
“Lemme see... seven and a half hours.”
“That’s how long we’ve been down here?”
“Nope, that’s how long we still have to go,” Pancho answered.
“Another seven and a half hours?”
Pancho laughed. “You sound like a kid in the back seat of a car.”
He huffed, then broke into a chastened grin. “I guess I was whining, wasn’t I?”
“A little.”
A new thought struck Dan. “After the time’s up, how do we tell if the radiation’s really gone down enough for us to get back to the ship?”
“Been thinkin’ about that. I’ll worm my extensible antenna wire up to the top of this rubble heap and see if we can link with the ship. Then it’ll be purty simple to read the ship’s sensors.”
“Suppose the ship’s comm system’s been knocked out by the radiation.”
“Not likely.”
“But what if?”
Pancho sighed. “Then I’ll just hafta stick my head out and see what my suit sensors read.”
“Like an old cowboy video,” Dan said. “Stick your head out and see if anybody shoots at you.”
“Hey, boss, you really did learn a lot from Wild Bill Hickok, didn’t ya?”
This late at night there was only one man on duty monitoring Selene’s security-camera network. He was a portly, balding former London bobby who had spent his life’s savings to bring himself and his wife to the Moon and live in comfortable, low-gravity retirement. He’d found retirement so boring, however, that he pleaded with Selene’s personnel department to allow him to work, at least part-time.
The uniform they gave him wasn’t much; just a set of glorified coveralls with an insignia patch on the left shoulder and his name badge clipped over its breast pocket. But at least he could spend three nights each week sitting alone and content, watching the videos his wife always complained about while still feeling that he was doing something worthwhile. He half-dozed, leaning back in his padded swivel chair, as the twenty display screens arranged in a semicircle around his desk flashed views from Selene’s hundreds of security cameras. Actually, only nineteen of the screens showed the cameras’ scenes; the screen directly in front of the desk was showing the football match from Vancouver, live. But with the sound well-muted, of course.
The computer did all the real work. The toffs in the main office programmed the computer with a long list of things that would be considered questionable or downright illegal. If the computer detected any such activity it sounded an alarm and indicated where and what was going on.
With the score still tied and only four minutes left in the final period, the blasted computer buzzed.
The guard frowned with annoyance. His central screen winked out for an instant, then displayed a ceiling-eye-view of a woman walking through one of the labs. UNAUTHORIZED PERSON blinked in red across the bottom of the screen.
It took a few minutes to coax the information out of the computer, but finally the guard phoned the security chief, waking him of course, with the news that Dr. Kris Cardenas had entered the nanotechnology laboratory. The chief grumbled and cast a bleary eye at the guard, but at least had the good grace to say, “Thanks. I’ll send somebody down there.”
Then he hung up and the guard went back to watching the football game. It was going into overtime.
Try as he might, Dan could not get back to sleep. Pancho had attempted to call Amanda and Fuchs, but there was no response from them.
“Must be a lotta sizzle outside,” she said. Dan thought she sounded worried. Not her usual sassy self. Or maybe she’s just tired. Or bored. How can anybody be bored with this storm only a meter over our heads? Dan asked himself. Some storm. No thunder and lightning. No noise at all, unless you count the crackle and hiss when you try to use the radio.
Quiet. Deadly quiet.
Dan found the water nipple in his suit’s collar and took a sip. Flat and warm. Like recycled piss.
More than seven hours to go. I’ll go bonkers by then: stark, raving nutty.
Then he tasted blood in his mouth.
It was like an electric shock. His entire body flinched. Everything else disappeared from his mind.
Bleeding gums, he thought, trying to fight down the terror rising in him. One of the prime symptoms of radiation sickness.
Or maybe you accidentally bit your tongue, he told himself. Yeah, sure, answered that sardonic voice in his head. You’ve had a bout of radiation sickness before, you know the drill. Only this time there’s no place to go to, nothing to do except sit here in this grave and let the radiation do its job on you.
“Pancho,” he croaked, surprised at how dry his throat was.
“Right here, boss.”
“Can you turn on your suit’s recorder?”
“Yeah, I think so...”
Dan sensed her fumbling in the dirt. This must be the way moles live, he thought, depending on touch instead of sight. His stomach was fluttering, nauseous. Christ, don’t let me toss my cookies inside the double-damned helmet, he begged silently.
Pancho said, “Testing, one, two, three.” A moment later he heard the words repeated.
“Okay, the recorder’s workin’.”
“Good,” said Dan. “Get this down.” He cleared his throat. It felt raw, raspy. Then, in as normal a voice as he could produce, he pronounced:
“I am Dan Randolph, CEO of Astro Manufacturing Corporation. This is my last will and testament. The recording equipment will automatically mark this statement with the date and time.”
“That’s right,” Pancho said.
“Don’t interrupt, kid. Where was I? Oh, right, last will and testament. I hereby bequeath all my stock in Astro Corporation to my friend and loyal employee, Priscilla Lane, together-”
Pancho was so shocked she didn’t even bristle at the use of her proper name. “To me? Are you loco?”
“Don’t interrupt!” Dan snapped. “All my Astro stock to Priscilla Lane, together with all my personal belongings and possessions.” He had to stop and take a few breaths. Then, “And I nominate Priscilla Lane to take my place on the board of directors of Astro Corporation.”
He thought about it for a few moments, then nodded, satisfied. “Okay, that’s it. You can turn off the recorder now.”
“What’d you do that for? How come you-”
“I’m not going to make it, kid,” Dan said tiredly. “The radiation’s getting to me. I want you to take my place on the board of directors and fight that sumbitch Humphries with every gram of strength you’ve got.”
“Me? I’m just a hick engineer... a rocket jock, for cryin’ out loud.”
“You’re my heir, Pancho. Like a daughter. I don’t have any family to leave anything to, and besides, you know Astro as well as anyone does.”
“Not the board of directors.”
Dan laughed weakly. “You’ll roll right over them, kid. The board needs some fresh, young blood. You’ll have to fight Humphries, of course. He’ll want to be made chairman once I’m gone.”
In a quieter voice, Pancho asked, “You’re talkin’ like you’re at death’s door.”
“I think I am. My gums are bleeding. I feel woozy. My ears are ringing. I just hope I don’t get the shits.”
“The storm’s almost over,” she said.
“So am I.”
“Once we get back into the ship we can zip back to Selene in a couple of days. Maybe faster! I can goose her up to maybe half a g.”
“And how will you brake her? Impact? Dive right into Alphonsus?”
Pancho fell silent for several moments. Dan was glad she couldn’t see him. The way his insides felt, his hands would probably be shaking like a palsied old man’s if they weren’t buried in the asteroid’s rubble.
“They can cure radiation sickness back at Selene,” Pancho said at last. “Use nanomachines.”
“If I make it back to Selene.”
“Only about seven hours to go,” she said. “Radiation’s levelin’ off.”
“Not as deep as a well,” Dan quoted, “or as wide as a church door, but it’s enough. It’ll do.”
“You goin’ delirious?”
“No, that’s just Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet.”
“Oh. Yeah, right.”
“I’m going to take a nap, kid. I feel pretty tired.”
“Good idea, I guess.”
“Wake me when it’s over.”
Kris Cardenas was surprised at how her hands trembled as she worked. Programming nanomachines to disassemble carbon-based molecules was a snap, a no-brainer. Just a slight modification to the procedure they used every day to build diamond mechanisms out of bins of soot.
It wasn’t the difficulty of the work. As she sat at the lab bench, peering intently at the desktop screen that displayed what the atomic force microscope was showing, she thought about the consequences.
Gobblers. I’m deliberately creating a batch of gobblers. If they get loose...
Calm down! she scolded herself. Go through this logically, step by step.
Okay, they’ll break in and find me dead. Lying on the floor. I’ll leave a note on the computer screen. Put it in big red letters, so they can’t miss it. I’m only making a microsample of gobblers and I’m disabling their assembly capabilities. They can’t reproduce. They’ll be contained inside my body.
But what if they get outside your body? They’ll be taking you apart from the inside. What’s to stop them from getting out?
Nothing, she told herself. So I’ll turn on the UV overheads before I swallow the bugs. That will destroy them once they get outside my body.
A knock on the door startled her.
“Dr. Cardenas? We know you’re in there. Open up, please.”
She wiped the display from the AFM and began hurriedly typing her suicide note.
“Warning. I have ingested a microgram of nanomachine disassemblers. They are programmed to take apart carbon-based molecules. Do not allow them to go beyond the confines of this laboratory. Disinfect the lab with high-intensity ultraviolet light before moving my body or touching anything in this room. Notify-”
Someone banged on the door, hard. “Kris! It’s Doug Stavenger. You don’t have to do this. Come on out.”
She scanned the red block letters on the display screen and erased the final word; no need to notify Doug, he’s already here.
“Kris, it’s not your fault.” Stavenger’s voice was muffled by the heavy steel door, but she heard the urgency in it well enough. “Come out and talk this over with me.”
She got off the spindly-legged stool and went to the sampling site at the end of the bench. A gleaming cup of lunar aluminum sat there, half full of water that contained the nanomachines that were going to kill her.
“Kris,” Stavenger called, “you’ve spent your life developing nanotechnology. Don’t throw it all away. Don’t give them another reason to say nanomachines are killers.”
She picked up the cup and held it in both hands, thinking, I can’t live with this guilt. I’ve committed murder. I’ve killed four people.
Stavenger was shouting through the locked door, “That’s what they’ll say. You know that. They’ll say that nanomachines killed the foremost researcher in the field. They’ll use it to show how dangerous nanomachines are, how right they’ve been all along to ban them.”
She looked from the cup to the closed, locked door. It was Humphries’s idea, but I did it. Willingly. He pulled my strings and I danced like a blind, obedient little puppet.
“Don’t throw your life away, Kris,” Stavenger pleaded. “You’ll be destroying everything you’ve worked for. You’ll be giving them the excuse they need to come back here and force us to obey their laws.”
Humphries, she thought. Once I’m dead he’ll be able to blame the whole thing on me. His lawyers will talk his way out of it. He’ll walk away from this. From four murders. Five, counting me.
Cardenas carried the cup back to the sampling site and sealed its aluminum top to its rim. Once the top clicked into place she placed the cup in the disposal oven and closed its door. The inner walls of the oven fluoresced as its ultraviolet lamps bathed the cup.
Why should I die for Martin Humphries? she asked herself. Someone’s got to stand up to him. Someone’s got to tell the truth about this. No matter what it costs, I’ve got to face him, face all of them.
“Come on, Kris. Open the door.”
They’re watching me through the security camera, Cardenas knew. She went back to the computer and erased her message. One of the staff people can destroy the gobblers tomorrow, she told herself. They’re safe enough in the oven for now.
Slowly she walked to the door, then stopped at the keypad on the wall next to it.
“Doug?” she called.
“I’m right here, Kris. Open the door, please.”
“This is silly,” she said, feeling stupid, “but I don’t remember the sequence I used to reset the lock.”
A mumble of voices on the other side of the door. Then Stavenger, sounding relieved, replied, “Okay, Kris. Security’s bringing an analyzer down anyway. We’ll have it open in a few minutes.”
“Doug?” she said again.
“Yes.”
“Thanks.”
“Da nada,” he answered.
By the time they got the door unlocked, Cardenas was surprised at how calm she felt. She had looked death in the face and discovered that she was strong enough to go on living.
The passageway outside was crammed with men and women in security coveralls, half-a-dozen of her own nanotech people, several medics in white, and Doug Stavenger.
“Are you all right?” Stavenger asked worriedly.
Cardenas felt herself smile a little. “I am now,” she said.
“C’mon, boss, wake up!”
Pancho’s voice, muffled, distant. Dan’s eyes were gummy, bleary; it took an effort to open them. He tried to wipe them but his hands were still buried in the loose rubble of the asteroid.
“Dan! Wake up!” He heard the urgency in her voice.
“Yeah. Okay...” His stomach heaved.
“Radiation level’s down almost to normal,” Pancho said. “You okay?”
“Sure,” he lied. He felt too weak to move, too tired to care.
“Time to get outta here.” She was scrabbling, clawing through the gravelly dirt. Dan wanted to help her but he could barely move his arms. All he wanted to do was sleep. Then his guts suddenly lurched and a wave of nausea swept over him.
“We’re up, in the open.” Amanda’s voice came through his helmet speaker.
“I’m gonna need some help here,” Pancho replied. “Dan’s in a bad way.”
Dan was concentrating on not vomiting. Get me to a toilet, he begged silently. I don’t want to let loose inside the suit. Even in the depth of his misery, though, somewhere in the back of his mind he laughed bitterly at himself. It all boils down to this, he thought. Everything you’ve done in your life doesn’t amount to a teaspoon of applesauce. All that’s really important is not upchucking or losing control of your bowels.
He sensed somebody digging frantically above him, and then strong arms lifting him, dragging him free of the rubble-filled tunnel. Fuchs. He overdid it, and the two of them went tumbling completely off the asteroid, spiraling crazily in space. Dan saw Starpower 1 slide past his field of view and then an unstoppable surge of bile rose into his throat and he vomited, spattering his stomach’s contents noisomely all over his fishbowl helmet. The stench was overpowering. He groaned and retched again.
“Hang in there, boss,” Pancho said. “I gotcha.”
Dan thought he heard someone else retching, too. Nothing like the sound of vomiting to make you upchuck, too. I could get the whole Vienna Boys Choir tossing their cookies this way.
He wavered in and out of consciousness, thinking, That’s the way they get you. They make you so miserable that you’ll be glad to die. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried not to breathe. He desperately wanted to wipe his face but inside the suit and helmet it was impossible.
“Okay, the lock’s cycling,” he heard Pancho say.
“Bring him inside.” Amanda’s voice.
“Take him to his own bunk.”
“Yes. Careful now.”
He didn’t dare open his eyes. At one point he heard Pancho say, “You get him out of his suit. I gotta see how much damage the storm did to the ship’s systems.”
After a while he felt something cool and soothing wiping his face. Opening his eyes at last, Dan saw a blurred image of Amanda bending over him, with Fuchs beside her. They book looked worried, grim.
“How do you feel?” Amanda asked.
“Lousy,” he croaked.
Fuchs said, “We are under way. Pancho is accelerating to one-third g.”
“The ship’s okay?”
“Some of the sensors were damaged by the radiation,” Fuchs said. “And the communications equipment, too. But the fusion power plant is functioning properly.”
“The nanobugs didn’t get to the MHD generator’s superconductor?” Dan asked. It took most of his strength to get the words out.
“No, they seem perfectly in order,” Fuchs answered. Then he added, “Thank god.”
We’re on our way home, Dan thought. He closed his eyes. On our way home.
“Until you get him here where we can give him proper medical treatment,” Selene’s chief radiation therapist was saying, “there’s nothing you can do for him beyond the chelation pills and antioxidants you’re already giving him.”
Pancho watched the medic’s unhappy image as she sat disconsolately in the command pilot’s chair. It had taken more than an hour to contact Selene. Starpower 1’s high-gain antenna had been knocked out by radiation damage and she’d had to use the backup laser comm system. Otherwise the ship was running okay, some radiation damage here and there; nothing vital. The nanobugs hadn’t gotten to the superconducting coil of the MHD generator, thank whatever gods there be.
But Dan was in a bad way, and the sad-assed medics at Selene couldn’t do any more for him than a bunch of witch doctors. Bring him in as fast as you can. Well, sure! That’s what I’m doin’. But will it be fast enough?
And Elly was dead. Just before they had abandoned the ship she had left the snake in her box and put the box in the refrigerator, knowing the cold would put Elly into a torpor, hoping that the fridge would provide enough shielding to save the krait. I should’ve carried her inside my suit, Pancho berated herself. Even if she bit me, I should’ve brought her with me. The radiation had killed the krait, along with the one remaining mouse.
Her thoughts returned to Dan. He’s got it bad. We all took a dose, we’ll all need medical attention once we get back to Selene. The chelation pills are helping, but Dan might not make it. He looks half-dead already.
Amanda came into the bridge and slipped into the right-hand seat.
“How is he?” Pancho asked.
“We cleaned him up and he’s sleeping now.” She made a strange face. “His hair is coming out. In clumps.”
Pancho fought down the urge to go back to Dan’s compartment. Nothing you can do there, she told herself.
She asked Amanda, “How’s Lars?”
“He seems to be fine.”
“Did he take the pills?”
“Yes, of course. He’s working on the high-gain antenna.”
’That circuitry’s supposed t’be hardened against radiation,” Pancho said angrily. “We oughtta sue the manufacturer when we get back.”
“Oh, Pancho, it was exposed to such a high level of radiation. That was an intense storm.”
She nodded, but said, “Yeah, but still that comm gear has gotta work right.”
“You need a rest,” Amanda said.
“We all do.”
“I’ll take the conn. Go back and catch some sleep.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“Do it, Pancho.”
She looked at Amanda for a brief moment, then made up her mind and slowly got to her feet, surprised at how stiff she felt. “If I’m not back in two hours, wake me up.”
Amanda nodded.
“I mean it, Mandy. Two hours.”
“Yes. I will.”
Satisfied, Pancho made her way back through the wardroom. She hesitated at the door to her privacy compartment, then went a further few steps to Dan’s door.
She slid it open a crack. Dan was still sleeping, lying on the bunk, his body sheened with perspiration, the shorts and tee-shirt they had put on him stained by his sweat. His scalp was dotted with bald spots where tufts of hair had come out. God, he’s in a bad way, she said to herself.
He opened his eyes and focused on her.
“Hi, kid,” he breathed.
“How’re you feelin’, boss?”
“Not good.”
“Anything I can bring you? I could fix some broth or somethin’.”
“I’d just chuck it all over myself,” he said.
“We’ll be in Selene in another day and a half. Just rest yourself and we’ll get the medics -”
“Did you send my last will and testament to them?” Dan asked.
Pancho shook her head. “Havin’ troubles with the main antenna. Lars is workin’ on it.”
“How’s the laser?”
“The backup? It’s okay. We’re usin’ it to-”
“Send my will,” Dan said.
“We don’t hafta do that. You’re gonna be fine.”
“Send it,” he insisted. He tried to raise himself on one elbow and failed. “Send it,” he whispered.
“You sure you wanta leave everything to me?”
“Will you fight Humphries?”
She nodded solemnly. “Yep. That’s a promise, boss.”
“Good.” He smiled weakly. “Send it. Now.”
With a reluctant sigh, Pancho said, “Okay, if that’s what you want.”
“That’s what I want,” he whispered. “And put in our claim to Haven, too.”
She nearly smiled. That’s more like Dan Randolph, she thought.
“One more day,” said Fuchs.
He and Amanda sat side by side in the wardroom. Fuchs was picking halfheartedly at a breakfast of prepackaged eggs and soymeat. Amanda hardly looked at her cereal and fruit.
“One more day,” she repeated glumly.
“You’re not happy.”
“Humphries is in Selene. It will start all over again once we get back.”
“Not if you’re married to me,” Fuchs blurted.
She stared at him. He looked totally serious, almost solemn. But then his thin lips curved slowly into a hopeful smile.
Before she could think of anything to say, Fuchs went on, “I love you, Amanda. I’m not proposing to you merely to protect you from Humphries. I love you, and more than anything in the universe I want you to be my wife.”
“But Lars, we’ve only known each other a few weeks. Not even that long.”
“How long does it take?” he asked. “I’ve fallen hopelessly in love with you. It happened in an instant.”
She felt stunned. This steady, capable, thoughtful, intelligent man was looking at her expectantly, his whole life shining in his pale blue eyes. He loves me? Amanda wondered. We haven’t even kissed and he believes he loves me? Do I love him?
Fuchs licked his lips nervously and asked, “I know I’m only a graduate student and my financial prospects aren’t very wonderful, but could you - I mean to say, do you think...”
He seemed to run out of words. He simply sat there, gazing at her as if afraid to say anything more.
She thought swiftly, never taking her eyes from his. He’s strong. He’s steady. He’s wanted to come on to me, I’ve felt that often enough. Yet he didn’t. He never even touched me, never said a word until now. He’s honorable.
It seemed like an eternity before she heard herself whisper, “Yes, Lars. I’ll be happy to marry you.”
You can learn to love him, Amanda told herself. You know you can trust him, you know he’s gentle and sweet. He’ll protect you from Humphries.
Fuchs leaned toward her and slid a strong arm around her waist. Amanda closed her eyes and they kissed, softly, tenderly at first. But she felt him clutch her to him, felt real strength and passion in the lingering kiss. She wound her arms around his neck.
After several minutes they separated slightly. Amanda felt breathless.
Fuchs was beaming like a thousand lasers. “We’ve got to tell Pancho!” he exclaimed, jumping to his feet. “And Dan!”
Laughing, he took Amanda’s arm as she rose to her feet. He let her duck through the hatch to the bridge, then followed right behind her.
“Pancho, Lars has asked me to marry him!”
Pancho turned halfway around in her command chair and grinned at them.” ‘Bout time,” she said. “I was wonderin’ when you two would figger it out.”
“We’ve got to tell Dan!”
Pancho nodded, scanned the instrument panel and saw that the ship’s systems were performing adequately, then got up and started back with them.
“We oughtta perform the ceremony right here, get you legally hitched before we get back to Selene,” she said.
“Oh! Could you?”
“Is the captain of a spacecraft legally empowered to perform marriages?” Fuchs asked.
“Oughtta be,” Pancho said, shrugging.
They reached Dan’s compartment and softly slid the accordion door back. Dan was lying on his back, his eyes closed, a sweaty sheet covering the lower half of his body.
“He’s sleeping,” Amanda said.
Dan’s eyes popped open. “How can a sick man sleep with all the racket you’re making?” he said, barely above a whisper.
Amanda’s hands flew to her face. Fuchs started to apologize.
Dan waved a feeble hand to silence him. “If you can establish a comm link, you can get somebody on Earth to perform the ceremony.”
“Hey, that’s right,” Pancho said.
Licking his dry, cracked lips, Dan asked, “You want the Pope in
Rome? I’ve got some connections.” Looking at Amanda, he added, “How about the Archbishop of Canterbury?”
“One of the ministers in Selene will do,” Amanda said softly.
“I get it,” Dan said. “You’re in a hurry.”
Fuchs turned red.
“I want to give the bride away,” Dan said.
“Sure. Fine,” said Pancho. “I’ll set up the comm link.” She headed back toward the bridge.
It took longer to make the arrangements than to perform the ceremony, even with a twelve-minute lag between the ship and Selene. Amanda and Fuchs stood by Dan’s bunk with Pancho behind them. They had no flowers, no wedding attire except the coveralls they’d been wearing. The minister appeared on the wall screen opposite Dan’s bunk. He was the pastor of Selene’s interfaith chapel, a Lutheran: an ascetically thin young German with hair so blond it looked nearly white. Amanda could see that he was in his office, not the chapel itself. That didn’t matter, she told herself. He conducted the brief rite in English and with great dignity, despite the time lag between them.
“Do each of you take the other for your lawful spouse?” the young minister asked.
“I do,” said Fuchs immediately.
“I do,” Amanda said.
They stood there feeling foolish and fidgety for the six minutes it took their response to reach the minister and the six additional minutes it took his words to reach them.
At last he said, “Then I pronounce you husband and wife. Congratulations. You may kiss the bride.”
Amanda turned to Fuchs and they embraced. Pancho thanked the minister and cut the electronic link. The wall screen went dark.
They turned to Dan, lying in his bunk.
“He’s fallen asleep,” Amanda whispered. But she stared at Dan’s sweat-stained tee-shirt. His chest didn’t seem to be moving.
Fuchs leaned over the bunk and pressed two fingers against Dan’s carotid artery.
“I don’t feel a pulse,” he said.
Pancho grabbed Dan’s wrist. “No pulse,” she agreed.
“He’s dead?” Amanda asked, feeling tears welling up in her eyes.
Fuchs nodded solemnly.
Pancho’s heart was thumping, and not merely from the heavier gravity of Earth. The quarterly meeting of Astro Corporation’s board of directors was about to begin. Would they follow Dan’s wishes and vote her onto the board? And what if they do? What do I know about directing a big corporation? she asked herself.
Not much, she admitted. But if Dan thought I could do it, then I gotta at least give it my best shot.
She stared at the other directors as they milled around the sideboard of the luxurious meeting room, pouring drinks for themselves and picking out delicate little sandwiches and stuff. They all looked old, and dignified, and wicked rich. Most of the women wore dresses, by jeeps, or suits with skirts. Expensive clothes. Lots of jewelry, too. Pancho felt shabby in her best pantsuit and no adornments except for a bracelet and pendant earrings of lunar aluminum.
They were ignoring her. They clumped together in twos and threes, talking to each other in low voices, not whispers exactly, but little buzzing heads-together conversations. Nobody even looked her way, yet Pancho got the feeling that were all talking about her.
Not even the plump oriental woman in the bright red dress spoke to her. She must know what it’s like to be an outsider, Pancho thought. But she’s keeping her distance, just like all the others.
Martin Humphries strode into the board room, decked out in a sky-blue business suit. Pancho clenched her fists. If he’s in mourning for Dan he sure ain’t showing it, she thought. None of them are.
Humphries nodded here and there, saying hello and making small talk as he made his way past the sideboard toward Pancho. He glanced once out the long window above the sideboard and seemed almost to wince at the view of the sea out there. Then he turned and came toward Pancho. Stopping a meter or so in front of her, Humphries looked Pancho up and down, the expression on his face pretty close to a sneer.
“Do you honestly think we’re going to allow a roughneck grease monkey to have a seat on this board?”
Suppressing an urge to punch him out, Pancho said tightly, “We’ll see purty soon, won’t we?”
“We certainly will.”
He was wearing his lifts, Pancho saw; still, Humphries was several centimeters shorter than she.
“What puzzles me,” she said looking down into his ice-gray eyes, “is how they can allow a convicted murderer t’ stay on the board.”
“I wasn’t convicted of murder!” Humphries snapped, keeping his voice low.
Pancho made a small shrug. “They found you guilty of causin’ Dan Randolph’s death, didn’t they?”
“I pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter. That was the deal my lawyers set up for me.”
“Selene’s court was way too easy on you. I would’ve hanged you. And not by the neck, either.”
“They made me divest my holdings in Starpower!” he snarled. “Made me turn over my one-third to them!”
“And Astro,” Pancho corrected. “You can still make money off Dan’s dead body outta the profits Astro’s gonna be pullin’ in.”
“And they exiled me! Threw me out of Selene. Forbade me from returning for twenty years.” He glanced over his shoulder at the view of the sea through the long sweeping window like a man looking back at something chasing him.
“You got off light,” said Pancho. “Dr. Cardenas got a life sentence. She’ll never be allowed to work in her own nanolab again.”
“She was just as responsible for his death as I was. And so are you, for that matter.”
“Me?”
“You were the captain of the vessel. You could have turned back once you realized the radiation shield was failing.”
“Thanks to you.”
Humphries smirked at her. “If Randolph had brought a proper medical man aboard, if he hadn’t taken the ship before the IAA approved the flight-”
“That’s right,” Pancho growled, “blame the victim for the crime.”
“You didn’t even freeze him once he died. You didn’t even try to.”
“Wouldn’t have done any good,” Pancho said. “We couldn’t’ve got his core temperature down quick enough.”
They had thought about it, she and Mandy and Fuchs. They had even considered putting Dan’s body into a spacesuit and dunking him into one of the fuel tanks. But a quick calculation showed the cryogenic fuel would be used up by the time they reached the Moon and Dan’s body would thaw before they could transfer him to a proper dewar.
Humphries smiled slyly. “Or maybe you wanted him dead, so you could inherit from him?”
Pancho had her right fist cocked before she realized it. Humphries threw his hands up and scuttled several steps back from her. Everything stopped. The board room went absolutely quiet. All faces turned toward them.
With a deep, deliberate breath, Pancho put her hand down. Humphries straightened up, looking sheepish. The other directors turned back to their own conversations, trying to pretend that nothing had happened.
Scowling angrily, Humphries walked away from her. Pancho saw that most of the directors moved out of his way as he approached the sideboard. As if they didn’t want to be close enough to touch him or even have him breathe on them.
“I think we’d better start the meeting,” said a petite red-haired woman in a forest-green skirted suit.
The directors went to the long polished table in the middle of the room and began to take their chairs. Pancho watched uncertainly for a moment, then saw that two chairs were unoccupied: one at the head of the table and another at its foot. Remembering her childhood bible classes, she took the lowest chair. The redhead sat to the right of the empty chair at the table’s head; Humphries sat opposite her, his back to the window.
Everyone looked around, as if wondering what to do next. The redhead slowly got to her feet.
“For those of you who don’t know me,” she said, looking down the table toward Pancho, “my name is Harriet O’Banian. As vice-chair for the board, I guess I’ll have to run this meeting until a new chairperson is elected.”
They all nodded. Pancho saw that a small display screen was built into the gleaming surface of the table in front of each place. It showed an abbreviated agenda.
“I’m going to dispense with the usual formalities,” O’Banian said, “and proceed directly to -”
“May I interrupt?” Humphries asked, holding up his hand like a schoolboy.
O’Banian murmured, “Of course.”
Rising to his feet, Humphries said earnestly, “I wasn’t able to attend the emergency meeting of the board that was called when news of Dan Randolph’s unfortunate death was revealed.”
Unfortunate? Pancho snarled inwardly.
“You all know that his death was partially my own fault. I played too rough, and I’ve seen the consequences. Please believe me, I never wanted to have Dan die.”
The hell you didn’t, Pancho said to herself. Looking along the table, though, she was shocked at the sympathetic expressions on many of the directors’ faces.
“My real crime,” Humphries went on, “was wanting to run Astro Corporation. And I let that ambition override my common sense. I saw Dan driving this fine organization into bankruptcy, and I knew that I could do better.”
He stopped, hung his head for a moment. Pancho thought, The sumbitch should’ve been an actor.
“I’m truly sorry that Dan is dead. I feel a great weight of responsibility for it, even though that is not what I intended. I’ll pay the price for my mistake for the rest of my life.”
Pancho could barely keep herself from throwing something at him. But the other directors seemed calm, accepting.
Humphries wasn’t through. “I know we can pull Astro through its current crisis. Despite Dan’s unfortunate death, the mission to the Asteroid Belt was actually a success. Starpower Limited now has rights to two asteroids that are worth several trillion international dollars on today’s commodities markets. And Astro, of course, owns one third of Starpower.”
“One half,” Pancho snapped.
Humphries stared at her for a long, speechless moment. “One half,” he admitted at last. “That’s right. Astro now owns half of Starpower.”
“And Selene owns the other half,” said Pancho.
Humphries bristled. Pancho grinned at him, thinking, I hope you choke on the money you’ll be makin’.
Hattie O’Banian broke the tension-filled silence. “Thank you, Mr. Humphries. At this time, before we go on to the regular agenda, I would like to welcome Ms. Priscilla Lane to the board.”
Pancho watched Humphries raise an eyebrow. Immediately, the oriental woman, sitting across the table from him, said, “Ms. Lane hasn’t yet been elected to the board.”
“I’m sure we can do that by acclamation,” O’Banian said. “After all, Dan specifically-”
“It’s customary to vote on a new member,” said a florid-faced man with a full gray beard sitting a few chairs down from Humphries. “After all, a position on the board isn’t hereditary,” the florid man grumbled. He reminded Pancho of Santa Claus, except that he was nowhere near being jolly. “You can’t inherit board membership just because a dying man willed it to you.”
Pancho understood the implication. Cripes, they think I was sleepin’ with Dan and that’s why he named me to the board.
O’Banian looked displeased. “Very well, then. In that case, I believe we should allow Ms. Lane to say a few words about herself.”
All faces turned toward Pancho. Thinking furiously, she got slowly to her feet.
In her mind she heard Dan telling her, My personnel people think you’re a flake, Pancho. The rap on you is that you’re not serious. She knew that each member of the board had seen her personnel file. Okay, Pancho, she said to herself, time to grow up and start bein’ serious. You’re in the big leagues now. You gotta show them your best.
She took a deep breath, then started, “I was just as surprised as any of you when Dan Randolph said he wanted me to take his place on this board. I’m an engineer and pilot, not a banker or a lawyer. But Dan said the board needed some fresh blood, and he picked me. So here I am.”
Surveying the men and women watching her, Pancho went on, “I think I know why Dan wanted me here-and it wasn’t for my good looks, either.”
A few chuckles. O’Banian smiled broadly.
“With all due respect to you, I think this board could use somebody who has some practical experience in Astro’s activities. Dan sure did, but I don’t think any of you have been involved in the company’s actual operations. I’ve been flyin’ Astro spacecraft for nearly seven years now. I’ve been out to the Belt and back. That’s where our best chance of makin’ real profits lies: out in the Belt. I know what it takes to get the job done. I think I can help this board to make the right decisions as we start to tap the resources of all those asteroids. Thank you.”
She sat down. No one applauded. Humphries gave her a hard stare, then swept his eyes along the table, trying to fathom the opinions of the other directors.
“Oh, one more thing,” Pancho said, without getting up from her chair. “If you do elect me to the board, I intend to vote for Ms. O’Banian as the new chairman.”
Now Humphries scowled openly.
O’Banian said, “Very well. Let’s vote, shall we? All in favor of Ms. Lane, raise your hands.”
Two hours later, as the meeting broke up, Humphries accosted Pancho.
“Well, now you’re a board member,” he said “By the margin of two votes.”
“And Ms. O’Banian is the chairman of the board.”
Humphries scoffed, “Do you think that’s going to stop me from taking control of Astro?”
“It won’t stop you from tryin’, I know that.”
“I’ll get Astro,” he said firmly. “And Starpower, too, eventually.”
“Maybe,” said Pancho. “And maybe not.”
He laughed at her.
“Lissen, Humpy,” Pancho growled. “I don’t give a shit how your lawyers wiggled you out of it, you killed Dan Randolph. I’m gonna make sure that he haunts you for the rest of your natural days.”
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” said Humphries.
Now Pancho laughed. “You will, Humpy. You surely will.”