Moonrise

MARE NUBIUM

“Magnificent desolation.”

Paul Scavenger always spoke those words whenever he stepped out onto the bare dusty surface of the Moon. But this time it was more than a quotation: it was a supplication, a prayer.

Standing at the open hatch of the airlock, he looked through his tinted visor at the bare expanse of emptiness stretching in every direction. Normally the sight calmed him, brought him some measure of peace, but now he tried to fight down the churning ache in his gut Fear. He had seen men die before, but not like Tinker and Wojo. Killed. Murdered. And he was trying to get me. The poor bastards just happened to be in his way.

Paul stepped out onto the sandy regolith, his boots kicking up little clouds of dust that floated lazily in the light lunar gravity and slowly settled back to the ground.

Got to get away, Paul said to himself. Got to get away from here before the damned bugs get me, too.

Twenty miles separated this underground shelter from the next one. He had to make it on foot. The little rocket hopper was already a shambles and he couldn’t trust the tractor; the nanobugs had already infected it. For all he knew, they were in his suit, too, chewing away at the insulation and the plastic that kept the suit airtight.

Well, he told himself, you’ll find out soon enough. One foot in front of the other. I’ll make it on foot if I make it at all.

Twenty miles. On foot. And the Sun was coming up.

“Okay,” he said, his voice shaky. “If it is to be, it’s up to me.”

The sky was absolutely black, but only a few stars showed through the heavy tint of his helmet’s visor. They stared steadily down at Paul, unblinking, solemn as the eyes of God.

Turning slightly as he walked, Paul looked up to see a fat gibbous Earth, blue and gleaming white, hanging in the dark sky. So close. So far. Joanna was waiting for him there. Was Greg trying to kill her, too? The thought sent a fresh pang of fear and anger through him.

“Get your butt in gear,” he muttered to himself. He headed out across the empty plain, fleeing death one plodding step at a time. With all the self-control he still possessed he kept himself from running. You’ve got to cover twenty miles. Pace yourself for the long haul.

His surface suit held the sweaty smell of fear. He had seen two men die out here; it had been sheer luck that the berserk nanomachines hadn’t killed him, too. How do you know they haven’t infested the suit? he asked himself again. Grimly he answered, What difference does it make? If they have, you’re already dead.

But the suit seemed to be functioning okay. The real test would come when he stepped across the terminator, out of the night and into the blazing fury of daylight. Twenty miles in that heat, and if you stop you’re dead.

He had calculated it all out in his head as soon as he realized what had happened in the shelter. Twenty miles. The suit’s backpack tank held twelve hours of oxygen. No recycling. You’ve got to cover one and two-thirds miles per hour. Make it two miles an hour, give yourself a safety margin.

Two miles an hour. For ten hours. You can make that Sure you can.

But now as he trudged across the bleak wilderness of Mare Nubium, he began to wonder. You haven’t walked ten hours straight in… Christ, not since the first time you came up here to the Moon. That was twenty years ago, almost Twenty pissing years. You were a kid then.

Well, you’ll have to do it now. Or die. Then Greg wins. He’ll have murdered his way to the top.

Even though it was still night, the rugged landscape was not truly dark. Earthglow bathed the rolling, pockmarked ground. Paul could see the rocks strewn across the bare regolith, the rims of craters deep enough to swallow him, the dents of smaller ones that could make him stumble and fall if he wasn’t careful.

Nothing but rocks and craters, and the sharp uncompromising slash of the horizon out there, like the edge of the world, the beginning of infinity. Not a blade of grass or a drop of water. Harsh, bare rock stretching as far as the eye could see in every direction.

Yet Paul had always loved it. Even encased in a bulky, cumbersome surface suit he had always felt free up here on the surface of the Moon, on his own, alone in a universe where he had no problems at all except survival. That’s what the Moon gives us, he told himself. Brings it all down to the real question, the only question. Are you going to live or die? Everything else is bullshit. Am I going to live or die?

But then he thought of Joanna again, and he knew that there was more to it. Would she live or die? Was Greg crazy enough to kill her, too? It’s more than just me, Paul realized. Even here, a quarter-million miles from Earth and its complications, he was not alone. Even though there was not another living human being — not another living thing of any kind — this side of the mountains that marked the Alphonsus ringwall, Paul knew that other lives depended on him.

Joanna. Mustn’t let Greg get to Joanna. Got to stop him.

He stopped, puffing hard. The visor of his helmet was fogging. A flash of panic surged through him. Have the nanobugs gotten to this suit? He held up his left arm to check the display panel on the suit’s forearm, trembling so badly that he had to grasp his wrist with his right hand to steady himself enough to read the display. Everything in the green. He tapped the control for the air-circulating fan in his helmet and heard the comforting whine of its speeding up.

Okay, it’s still working. The suit’s functioning okay. Settle down. Keep moving.

Turning to see how far he’d come from the underground shelter that Greg had turned into a death trap, Paul was pleased to see that its gray hump of rubble was just about on the horizon. Covered a couple of miles already, he told himself.

His boot prints looked bright, almost phosphorescent, against the dark surface of the regolith. In a couple thousand years they’ll turn dark, too; solar ultraviolet tans everything. He almost laughed. Good thing I’m already tanned.

Paul started out again, checking his direction with the global positioning system receiver built into the suit’s displays. He hadn’t had the luxury of timing his exit from the shelter to coincide with one of the GPS satellites’ passing directly overhead. The only positioning satellite signal his suit could receive was low on the horizon, its signal weak and breaking up every few minutes. But it would have to do. There were no other navigational aids, and certainly no road markers on Mare Nubium’s broad expanse.

The other shelters had directional beacons planted in the ground every mile between them. And they were no more than ten miles apart, all the way to the ringwall. Greg had planned it well; turned the newest of the temporary shelters into his killing place.

He plodded on, wishing the suit radio had enough juice to reach the tempo he was heading for, knowing that it didn’t There’s nobody there, anyway, he thought It’s just a relay shelter. But it ought to be stocked with oxygen and water. And its radio should be working.

Suddenly, with an abruptness that startled him, Paul saw the horizon flare into brilliance. The Sun.

He checked his watch and, yes, his rough calculations were pretty close to the actualities. In a few minutes the Sun would overtake him and he’d have to make the rest of the trek in daylight.

Christ he thought, if the visor fogged up when it was two hundred below zero outside the suit what’s going to happen when it goes over two-fifty above, and the damned suit can’t radiate my body heat away?

A sardonic voice in his head answered, You’ll find out real soon now.

The sunrise line inched forward to meet him, undulating slowly over the uneven ground, moving toward him at the pace of a walking man.

Despite the fear gnawing inside him, Paul thought back to his first days on the Moon. The excitement of planting boot prints where no one had ever stepped before; the breathtaking grandeur of the rugged landscape, the silence and the dramatic vistas.

That was then, he told himself. Now you’ve got to make it to the next shelter before you run out of oxy. Or before the Sun broils you. Or the damned bugs eat up your suit.

He forced himself forward, dreading the moment when he stepped from the night’s shadow into the unfiltered ferocity of the Sun.

Yet even as he walked toward the growing brightness, his mind turned back to the day when all this had started, back to the time when he had married Joanna so that he could take control of Masterson Aerospace. Back to the moment when Greg Masterson had begun to hate him. It had all been to save Moonbase, even then. Paul realized that he had given most of his life to Moonbase. “Most of it?” he asked aloud. “Hell, there’s a pissin’ great chance I’m going to give all of it to Moonbase.”

SAVANNAH

They had spent the afternoon in bed, making love, secure in the knowledge that Joanna’s husband would be at the executive committee meeting.

At first Paul thought it was only a fling. Joanna was married to the head of Masterson Aerospace and she had no intention of leaving her husband. She had explained that to him very carefully the first time they had made it, in one of the plush fold-back chairs of Paul’s executive jet while it stood in the hangar at the corporation’s private airport.

Paul had been surprised at her eagerness. For a while he thought that maybe she just wanted to make it with a black man, for kicks. But it was more than that. Much more.

She was a handsome woman, Joanna Masterson, tall and lithe, with the polished grace that comes with old money. Yet there was a subtle aura of tragedy about her that Paul found irresistible. Something in her sad gray-green eyes that needed consolation, comforting, love.

Beneath her veneer of gentility Joanna was an anguished woman, tied in marriage to a man who slept with every female he could get his hands on, except his wife. Not that Paul was much better; he had done his share of tail chasing, and more.

Screwing around with the boss’s wife was dangerous, for both of them, but that merely added spice to their affair. Paul had no intention of getting emotionally wrapped up with her. There were too many other women in the world to play with, and an ex-astronaut who had become a successful business executive did not have to strain himself searching for them. The son of a Norwegian sea captain and a Jamaican school teacher, Paul had charm, money and an easy self-confidence behind his gleaming smile: a potent combination.

Yet he had stopped seeing anyone else after only a few times of lovemaking with Joanna. It wasn’t anything he consciously planned; he simply didn’t bother with other women once he became involved with her. She had never taken a lover before, Joanna told him. “I never thought I could,” she had said, “until I met you.”

The phone rang while they lay sweaty and spent after a long session of lovemaking that had started gently, almost languidly, and climaxed in gasping, moaning passion.

Joanna pushed back a tumble of ash-blonde hair and reached for the phone. Paul admired the curve of her hip, the smoothness of her back, as she lifted the receiver and spoke into it.

Then her body went rigid.

“Suicide?”

Paul sat up. Joanna’s face was pale with shock.

“Yes,” she said into the phone. “Yes, of course.” Her voice was steady, but Paul could see the sudden turmoil and pain in her wide eyes. Her hand, gripping the phone with white-knuckled intensity, was shaking badly.

“I see. All right. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

Joanna went to put the phone down on the night table, missed its edge, and the phone fell to the carpeted floor.

“He’s killed himself,” she said.

“Who?”

“Gregory.”

“Your husband?”

“Took a pistol from his collection and… committed suicide.” She seemed dazed. “Killed himself.”

Paul felt guilt, almost shame, at being naked in bed with Hier at this moment. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. Joanna got out of bed and headed shakily for the bathroom. She stopped at the doorway for a moment, gripped the doorjamb, visibly pulled herself together. Then she turned back toward Paul.

“Yes. I am too.” She said it flatly, without a trace of emotion, as if rehearsing a line for a role she would be playing.

Paul got to his feet. Suddenly he felt shy about getting into the shower with her. He wanted to get to his own condo. “I’d better buzz out of here before anybody arrives,” he called to Joanna.

“I think that would be best. I’ve got to go to his office. The police have been called.”

Searching for his pants, Paul asked, “Do you want me to go with you?”

“No, it’s better if we’re not seen together right now. I’ll phone you later tonight.”

Driving along Savannah’s riverfront toward his condo building, Paul tried to sort out his own feelings. Gregory Masterson II had been a hard-drinking royal sonofabitch who chased more, tail than even Paul did. Joanna had sworn that she had never had an affair before she had met Paul, and he believed her. Gregory, though, he was something else. Didn’t care who knew what he was doing. He liked to flaunt his women, as if he was deliberately trying to crush Joanna, humiliate her beyond endurance.

Hell, Paul said to himself, you should talk. Bedding the guy’s wife. Some loyal, trusted employee you are.

So Gregory blew his brains out. Why? Did he find about Joanna and me? Paul shook his head as he turned into the driveway of his building. No, he wouldn’t commit suicide over us. Murder, maybe, but not suicide.

As he rode the glass elevator up to his penthouse condo, Paul wondered how Joanna’s son was taking the news. Gregory Masterson III. He’ll expect to take over the corporation now, I’ll bet. Keep control of the company in the family’s hands. His father nearly drove the corporation into bankruptcy; young Greg’ll finish the job. Kid doesn’t know piss from beer.

Paul tapped out his code for the electronic lock, stepped into the foyer of his condo, and headed swiftly for the bar. Pouring himself a shot of straight tequila, he wondered how Joanna was making out with the police and her husband’s dead body. Probably put the gun in his mouth, he thought. Must be blood and brains all over his office.

Feeling the tequila’s heat in his throat, he walked to the big picture window of his living room and looked out at the placid river and the tourist boats plying up and down. A nearly-full Moon was climbing above the horizon, pale and hazy in the light blue sky.

A sudden realization jolted Paul. “What are they going to do about Moonbase?” he asked aloud. “I can’t let them shut it down.”

NEW YORK CITY

Paul flew his twin-engined executive jet to New Yoik’s JFK airport, alone. He hadn’t seen Joanna in the three weeks since Gregory Masterson’s suicide. He had phoned her and offered to take Joanna with him to New York, but she decided to go with the company’s comptroller in her late husband’s plane. This board meeting would decide who the new CEO of Masterson Aerospace would be, and Paul knew they would elect young Greg automatically.

He also knew that Greg’s first move as CEO would be to shut down Moonbase. The corporation had run the base under contract to the government for more than five years, but Washington had decided to stop funding Moonbase and ‘privatize’ the operation. Masterson Aerospace had the option of continuing to run the lunar base at its own expense, or shut it all down.

The chairman of the board was against keeping the lunar operation going, and Greg was hot to show the chairman and the rest of the board that he could cut costs. Paul had to admit that Moonbase was a drain on the corporation and would continue to be for years to come. But eventually… If only I can keep Moonbase going long enough to get it into the black.

It’s going to be tough once Greg’s in command. Impossible, maybe. He spent the entire flight to New York desperately wondering how he could convince Greg to give Moonbase a few more years, time to get established well enough to start showing at least the chance of a profit downstream.

It’s the corporation’s future, he told himself. The future for all of us. The Moon is the key to all the things we want to do in space: orbital manufacturing, scientific research, even tourism. It all hinges on using the Moon as a resource base. But it takes time to bring an operation like Moonbase into the black. Time and an awful lot of money. And faith. Greg just doesn’t have the faith. He never has, and he probably never will.

Paul did. It takes a special kind of madman to push out across a new frontier. Absolute fanatics like von Braun, who was willing to work for Hitler or anyone else, as long as he got the chance to send his rockets to the Moon. It takes faith, absolute blind trusting faith that what you are doing is worth any price, any risk, worth your future and your fortune and your life.

I’ve got that faith, God help me. I’ve got to make Greg see the light the way I do. Somehow. Get him to listen to me. Get him to believe.

JFK was busy as always, the traffic pattern for landing stacked twelve planes deep. Once he had taxied his twin jet to the corporate hangar and climbed down the ladder to the concrete ramp, the howl and roar of hundreds of engines around the busy airport made Paul’s ears hurt.

As he walked toward the waiting limousine, suit jacket slung over one arm, the ground suddenly shook with a growling thunder that drowned out all the other sounds. Turning, Paul saw a Clippership rising majestically on its eight bellowing rocket engines, lifting up into the sky, a tapered smooth cone of plastic and metal that looked like the most beautiful work of art Paul had ever seen.

He knew every line of the Clippership, every detail of its simple, elegant design, every component that fit inside it A simple conical shape with rockets at the flat bottom end, the Clippership rose vertically and would land vertically, settling down softly on those same rocket exhaust plumes. Between takeoff and landing, it could cross intercontinental distances in forty-five minutes or less. Or make the leap into orbit in a single bound. Everything seemed to stop at the airport, all other sounds and movement suspended as the Clippership rose, thundering slowly at first and then faster anil faster, dwindling now as the mighty bellow of its rockets washed over Paul like a physical force, wave after wave of undulating awesome noise thai blanketed every frequency the human ear could detect anc much more. Paul grinned and suppressed the urge to fling a salute at the departing Clippership. The overpowering sound of those rockets hit most people with the force of a religious experience. Paul had converted four members of the board of directors to supporting the Clippership project by the simple tactic of bringing them out to watch a test launch. And hear it And feel it.

Laughing to himself, Paul ducked into the limousine dooi that the chauffeur was holding open. He wondered where the Clippership was heading. There were daily flights out of New York to Tokyo, Sydney, Buenos Aires and Hong Kong, he knew. Soon they would be adding more cities. Anywhere on Earth in forty-five minutes or less.

The Clipperships had pulled Masterson Aerospace out of impending bankruptcy. But Paul knew that he had pushed for them, fought for them, was willing to kill for them not merely because they made Masterson the leader in the new era of commercial transport. He went to the brink of the cliff and beyond for the Clipperships because they could fly into orbit in onehop, and do it more cheaply than any other rocket vehicle. The Clipperships would help to make Moonbase economically viable. That was why Paul rammed them past Masterson’s board of directors — including the late Gregory Masterson II.

The Clipperships would help Moonbase to break into the black, if Greg Masterson III didn’t kill Moonbase first.

But as the cool, quiet limousine made its way out of the airport and onto the throughway, crowded with the world’s most aggressive drivers, Paul realized that the Clipperships meant even more to him than Moonbase’s possible salvation. He had made the Clippers a success, true enough. But they had made a success of him, as well. Paul’s skin was no darker than a swarthy Sicilian’s, but he was a black ex-astronaut when he started at Masterson, all those years ago. With the accent on the black. The success of the Clipperships had elevated him to the exalted level of being the black manager of Masterson’s space operations division, in Savannah, and a black member of the board of directors.

And the black lover of the dead boss’s wife, he added wryly to himself.

Paul had never liked New York. As his limo headed through the swarming traffic along the bumpy, potholed throughway toward the bridge into Manhattan, Paul thought that New York wasn’t a city, it was an oversized frenetic anthill, always on the verge of explosion. Even twenty years after the so-called Renaissance Laws, the place was still overcrowded, noisy, dangerous.

Electricity powered all the cars, trucks and buses bound for Manhattan. Old-style fossil-fueled vehicles were not allowed through the tunnels or over the bridges that led into the island. That had cleaned the air a good bit, although hazy clouds of pollution still drifted in from New Jersey, across the Hudson.

Police surveillance cameras hung on every street corner and miniaturized unmanned police spotter planes were as common in the air as pigeons. Vendors, even kids who washed windshields when cars stopped for traffic lights, had to display their big yellow permits or be rousted by the cops who rode horseback in knots of threes and fives through the crowded streets.

Yet the streets still teemed with pitchmen hawking stolen goods, kids exchanging packets of drugs, prostitutes showing their wares. All that the Renaissance Laws had accomplished, as far as Paul could see, was to drive violent crime off the streets. There was still plenty of illicit activity, but it was organized and mostly non-violent. You might get propositioned or offered anything from the latest designer drugs to the latest designer fashions, fresh off a hijacked truck. But you wouldn’t get mugged. Probably.

Still, the limo had to thread its way across the ancient bridges and along the narrow, jampacked streets. The windshield got washed — partially — four different times, and the chauffeur had to slip a city-issued token through his barely-opened window to the kids who Splashed the brownish water onto the car.

He must use up the whole tank of windshield cleaner every trip, Paul thought as the limo inched downtown, wipers flapping away.

At one intersection a smiling trio of women tapped on Paul’s window, bending low enough to show they were wearing nothing beneath their loose blouses. Kids, Paul realized. Beneath their heavy makeup they couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. A trio of mounted policemen watched from their horses, not twenty yards away.

Paul shook his head at the whores. I’ve gotten this far in life without killing myself, he thought. The girls looked disappointed. So did the cops. Then the traffic light went green and the limo pulled away.

By the time he got to the corporate offices in the Trade Towers, Paul needed a drink. The walnut-panelled board room had a bar and a spread of finger foods set up in the back, but neither a bartender nor waitress had shown up yet. Paul did not see any tequila. He settled for a beer, instead.

Paul had always been one of the early ones at board meetings, but this time apparently he was the first. The opulent room was empty, except for him. Glancing at his wristwatch, Paul saw that the meeting was scheduled to start in less than fifteen minutes. Usually more than half the directors would be already here, milling about, exchanging pleasantries or whispering business deals to one another, drinking and noshing.

Where is everybody? Paul wondered.

He paced the length of the long conference table, saw mat each place was neatly set with its built-in computer screen and keyboard.

He went to the long windows at the head of the conference room and gazed out at the towers of Manhattan, thinking how much better it was on the Moon, where all a man had to worry about was a puncture in his suit or getting caught on the surface during a solar flare. He craned his neck to see JFK, hoping to catch another Clippership takeoff or, even more spectacular, see one landing on its tail jets.

“Paul.”

Startled, he whirled around to see Joanna standing in the doorway, looking cool and beautiful in a beige miniskьted business suit. He hadn’t seen her since the day of her husband’s suicide.

“How are you?” he asked, hurrying toward her. “How’ve you been? I wanted—”

“Later,” she said, raising one hand to stop him from embracing her. “Business first”

“Where’s everybody? The meeting’s scheduled to start in ten minutes.”

“It’s been pushed back half an hour,” Joanna said, “Nobody told me.”

She smiled coolly at him. “I asked Brad for a half-hour delay. There’s something I want to discuss with you before the meeting starts.”

“What?”

Joanna went to the conference table and perched on its edge, crossing her long legs demurely. “We’re going to elect a new president and CEO,” she said. , Paul nodded. “Greg. I know.”

“You don’t sound happy about it”

“Why should I be?”

“Who else would you recommend?” she asked, with that same serene smile.

“Greg doesn’t know enough to run a corporation,” Paul said, keeping his voice low. But the urgency came through. “Okay, we’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, I know, but his father nearly drove this company into the ground.”

“And you saved it.”

Paul felt uncomfortable saying it, but he agreed. “I had to practically beat your husband over the head before he saw the light”

Every major airline in the world began clamoring for Masterson Clipperships, once Paul pushed the project dirough its development phase. Yet Gregory Masterson II had almost ruined Masterson Aerospace, despite the Clippership’s success. Maybe because of it, Paul how thought.

And his son was eager to follow in his father’s mistaken footsteps.

“He wants to shut down Moonbase,” Joanna said quietly. “He told me so.”

“You can’t let him do that!”

“Why not?” she asked.

“It’s the future of the company — of the nation, the whole goddamned human race!”

She sat on the edge of the conference table in silence for a moment, her eyes probing Paul. Then Joanna said, “The first order of business in today’s meeting will be to elect me to the board to fill Gregory’s seat.”

“And then they’ll elect young Greg president and CEO,” Paul said, surprised at how much bitterness showed in his voice.

“They’ll have to have nominations first”

“Brad’s going to nominate him.”

“Yes. But I intend to nominate you,” said Joanna.

He blinked with surprise. A flame of sudden hope flared through him. Then he realized, To show there’s no nepotism.”

Joanna shook her head. “I know my son better than you do, Paul. He’s not ready to head this corporation. He’d ruin it and himself, both.”

“You mean you really want me to be CEO?”

“I want it enough,” Joanna said, slipping off the table to stand before him, “that I want us to get married.”

Paul’s insides jolted. “Married?”

Joanna smiled again and twined her arms around Paul’s neck. “I like being the wife of the CEO. I just didn’t like the CEO very much. With you, it will be different, won’t it? Very different”

Paul’s mind was racing. CEO. Married. She doesn’t love me, not really, but if we’re married and I’m CEO we can keep Moonbase going until it starts making a profit but she’s probably only doing this so Greg can grow up some and then she’ll want to turn the corporation over to him sooner or later.

Joanna kissed him lightly on the lips. “Don’t you think marriage is a good idea? Like a corporate merger, only much more fun.”

“You’d marry me?” Paul asked.

“If you ask me.”

“And nominate me for CEO?”

“You’ll be elected if I nominate you.”

She’s right Paul realized. If she doesn’t back her own son the rest of the board will turn away from him. Hell, I’m one of the corporation’s leaders. Saved the outfit from bankruptcy. Making them all rich with the Clippership profits. Half of ’em would be afraid to vote against a black man; afraid it’d look like discrimination. And I could protect Moonbase from Greg and Brad. I could keep them from shutting it down.

“Okay,” he said, surprised at the tightness in his throat. “Will you marry me?”

Joanna laughed out loud. “How romantic!”

“I mean — well, will you?”

“Of course I will, Paul. You’re the only man in the world for me.”

Paul kissed her, knowing that neither one of them had used the word love.

MARE NUBIUM

The edge of the sunlit day came up to meet Paul with the inevitability of a remorseless universe. One moment he was ь shadow, the next in full glaring sunlight. The sky overhead was still black but now the glare reflecting from the ground washec away the few stars that he had been able to see before.

A pump somewhere in his backpack gurgled, and the air fan in his helmet whined more piercingly. He thought he heard metal or plastic groan under the sudden heat load.

Paul looked down and, sure enough, the ground was breaking into sparkles of light, like a whole field of jewels glittering for hundreds of meters in front of him. The sunshine triggered phosphorescence in the minerals scattered in the regolith’s surface layer. The effect disappeared after a few minutes, but plenty of the earliest workers on the Moon had actually thought they’d found fields of diamonds: the Moon’s equivalent of fool’s gold.

There was real wealth in the regolith, but it wasn’t gold or diamonds. Oxygen. The opiate of the masses. Habit forming substance; take one whiff and you’re hooked for life.

Cut it out, Stavenger, he railed at himself. You’re getting geeky in your old age. Straighten up and concentrate on what you’re doing.

He plodded doggedly ahead, but his mind wandered to the first time his eyes had opened to the grandeur of the Moon. At the planetarium, he remembered. Couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven. The videos of astronauts walking on the Moon, jumping in low-gravity exhilaration while the lecturer told us that one day we kids could go to the Moon and continue the exploration.

Levitt, Paul remembered. Old Dr. Levitt. He knew how to open a kid’s mind. The bug bit me then, Paul realized. He had gone up to the lecturer after the show and asked if he could stay and see it again. A round-faced man with a soft voice and big glasses that made his face look like an owl’s, Dr. Levitt turned out to be the planetarium’s director. He took Paul to his own office and spent the afternoon showing him books and tapes about space exploration.

Paul’s father was away at sea most of the time. His classmates at school were either white or black, and each side demanded his total loyalty. Caught between them, Paul had become a loner, living in his own fantasy world until the bigger dream of exploring the Moon engulfed him. He haunted the planetarium, devoured every book and tape he could find, grew to be Dr. Levitt’s valued protege and, eventually, when he reached manhood, his friend. It was Lev who secured a scholarship for Paul at MIT, who paved the way for his becoming an astronaut, who broke down and wept when Paul actually took off from Cape Canaveral for the first time.

Paul was on the Moon when the old man died, quietly, peacefully, the way he had lived: writing a letter of recommendation for another poor kid who needed a break.

I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Lev, Paul knew. Even if I die here, I’ll still owe him for everything good that’s happened in my life.

He knew it was psychological more than physical, yet with the Sun pounding on him Paul felt as if he had stepped from an air-conditioned building onto a baking hot parking lot. Some parking lot, he told himself as he pushed on. The dusty, gray regolith looked like an unfinished blacktop job, pockmarked and uneven. Mare Nubium, he thought. Sea of Clouds. The nearest body of water is a quarter-million miles away.

Still, it did look a little like the surface of the sea, the way the ground undulated and rolled. A sea that was frozen into rock. I guess it was a sea once, a sea of red-hot lava when the meteoroid that carved out this basin slammed into the Moon.

How long ago? Three-and a half billion years? Give or take a week.

He plodded on, one booted foot after another, trying not to look at the thermometer on his forearm displays.

His mind started to drift again.

I never told her that I loved her, Paul remembered. Not then Guess, I was too surprised. Marry me and I’ll make you CEO She never said she loved me, either. It was a business deal.

He almost laughed. Marriage is one way of ending a love affair, I guess.

But Greg didn’t laugh about it. Not then, not ever. I don’ think I’ve ever seen him smile, even. Not our boy Greg.

BOARD MEETING

The other board members filtered into the meeting room in twos and threes. Greg Masterson walked in alone, his suit a funereal black, the expression on his face bleak. He was a handsome man of twenty-eight, tall and slim, his face sculpted in planes and hollows like a Rodin statue. He had his father’s dark, brooding looks: thick dark hair down to his collar and eyes like twin gleaming chunks of jet.

But where his father had been a hell-raiser, Greg had always been a quiet, somber introvert. As far as Paul knew, he might still be a virgin. He had never heard a breath of gossip about this serious, cheerless young man.

Reluctantly, feeling guilty, Paul made his way across the board room to Greg.

“I’m sorry about your father,” he said, extending his hand.

“I bet you are,” Greg said, keeping his hands at his sides. He was several inches taller than Paul, though Paul was more solidly built.

Before Paul could think of anything else to say, Bradley Arnold bustled up to Greg and took him by the arm.

“This way, Greg,” said the board chairman. “I want you to sit up beside me today.”

Greg went sullenly with the chairman of the board. Arnold was the whitest man Paul had ever seen. He looked like an animated wad of dough, short, pot-bellied, wearing a ridiculous silver-gray toupe that never seemed to sit right on his head; it looked so artificial it was laughable. Eagerly bustling, he led Greg up to the head of the table and sat the younger man on his right Arnold’s face was round, flabby, with hyperthyroid bulging frog’s eyes.

Sixteen men and three women, including Joanna, sat around the long polished table. Paul took a chair across the table from Joanna, where he could see her face. The symbolism of Arnold’s seating Greg next to him was obvious. Paul waited to see how the board would react to Joanna’s less-than-symbolic nomination.

Arnold played the meeting for all the drama he could squeeze out of it. He began by asking for a moment of silence to honor the memory of their late president and CEO. As Paul bowed his head, he glanced at Melissa Han, sitting down near the bottom of the table.

Silky smooth, long-legged Melissa, with skin the color of milk chocolate and a fierce passion within her that drove her mercilessly both at work and play. Most board members thought of her as an affirmative action ‘twofer:’ black and female. Or a’threefer,” since she represented the unions among the corporation’s work force. Paul knew her as a fiery bed partner who was furious with him for dropping her in favor of Joanna.

She had been sleeping with Gregory Masterson before Paul, everyone knew. That was how she got on the board of directors, they thought. Now, as Paul glanced her way, she did not look terribly grieved. Instead, she glared angrily at him.

Arnold next asked for a vote to accept the minutes of the last meeting, then called for reports from the division heads while the board members fidgeted impatiently in their chairs.

When it came to Paul’s turn, he gave a perfunctory review of the Clippership’s profits and the firm orders from airlines around the world. Paul referred to them as aerospace lines, even the ones that were not doing any true business in orbit, because the Clipperships spent most of their brief flight times far above the atmosphere. “The way to make money,” Paul had told every airline executive he had ever wined and dined, “is to keep your Clipperships in space more than they’re on the ground.”

Ordinarily, at least a few of the board members would ask nit-picking questions, but everyone wanted to move ahead to the election of the new CEO.

Almost everyone.

“What’s this I hear about your people making giant TV screens up there in the space station?” asked Alan Johansen.

He was one of the newest board members, a handsomely vapid young protege of Arnold’s with slicked-back blond hair and the chiselled profile of a professional model.

Surprised, Paul said, “It’s still in the developmental stage.”

“Giant TV screens?” asked one of the women.

“Under the weightless conditions in orbit,” Paul explained, “we can make large-crystal flat screens ten, fifteen feet across, but only a couple of inches thick.”

“Why, you could hang them on a wall like a painting, couldn’t you?”

“That’s right,” said Paul. “It might make a very profitable product line for us.”

“Wall screens,” said Johansen.

“One of our bright young technicians came up with the name Windowall.”

“That’s good!” said Johansen. “We should copyright that name.”

Bradley Arnold turned, slightly sour-faced, to the corporate legal counsel. “See that we register that as a trade name.”

“Windowall, right,” said the lawyer. “How do you spell it?”

Paul told him.

“Now before we get to the highlight of this meeting,” Arnold said in his rumbling bullfrog voice, “we have to consider filling the seat left vacant by the sudden demise of our lamented late president and CEO.” Far from showing grief, Arnold’s bulging brown eyes seemed to be sparkling with pleasure.

“I nominate Joanna Masterson,” said Greg immediately.

“Second,” came a voice from farther down the table.

Then silence.

Arnold looked up and down the table. “Any other nominations?”

Melissa looked as if she wanted to speak, but before she could make up her mind Arnold said, “All right then, the nominations are closed. All in favour”

“Don’t the rules call for a secret ballot?” one of the board members asked.

A brief flicker of annoyance ticked across Arnold’s fleshy face. “If the board wants it,” he said testily. “In this instance I think a simple show of hands will do. All in favor?”

It was unanimous, Paul saw, although Melissa’s was the last hand raised.

“Congratulations, Joanna,” Arnold said warmly, “and welcome aboard.” He pushed himself to his feet and started clapping his hands. The entire board rose and applauded. Joanna remained seated, smiling politely and mouthing ‘Thank you’ to them all.

“Now then,” Arnold said once they were all seated again, “to the major business of this meeting: electing the new president and chief operating officer of Masterson Aerospace Corporation.”

Paul felt suddenly nervous. What Joanna was going to do would not only cause a rift in the board, it would shatter her son, who expected to be elected unanimously. And marriage? Paul wondered. If I don’t get elected will she still want to marry me? Do I really want to marry her?

“This great corporation was founded, as you all know, in the dark years of the Second World War by Elliot Masterson,” Arnold was droning in his sonorous, soporific voice. “His son, the first Gregory Masterson took over at Elliot’s retirement…”

In all his years as an astronaut and then a corporate executive, the idea of marriage had never entered Paul’s mind. Women were plentiful, and there was no time to get hung up over one. Paul was driven by the urge to succeed. Not merely to be the best, but to get the others to acknowledge that he was the best. To get to the Moon. To make Moonbase viable. To make a success where everyone else said it was impossible.

I never really thought about marriage, Paul was saying to himself. Maybe it’s time to settle down. Enough tail chasing. I haven’t really wanted to, anyway, since I met Joanna. Maybe that means I really love her. But does she love me or is this just going to be a business deal? Marriage for Moonbase. Some deal’… and now that Gregory Masterson II is no longer among us,” Arnold went on, “I believe it is in accord with the finest traditions of this great corporation that we ask his son, Gregory Masterson III, to accept the weighty responsibilities of president and chief operating officer of Masterson Aerospace Corporation.”

“Second the nomination.”

Paul swivelled his head. Melissa had seconded Greg’s nomination with the swiftness of an automaton. That was a surprise.

Grinning coyly, Arnold asked, “Any other nominations?”

“I nominate,” said Joanna, “Paul Stavenger.”

A shock wave flashed along the table. Greg’s face went white. He looked as if his mother had just slapped him. Arnold’s mouth dropped open.

“Second that,” said the man at Paul’s left, the corporation’s comptroller.

Arnold blinked several times, looking more like a perplexed frog than ever. Finally he said, in a low angry voice, “Any other nominations?”

None.

“Discussion?”

Joanna said, “I don’t want to give the board the impression that I have no confidence in my son. I simply feel that Paul has earned the right to be CEO. He pushed the Clippership program to its current highly successful status. Without the Clipperships this corporation would be in receivership.”

“That’s something of an overstatement!” Arnold sputtered.

Joanna made a smile for him. “Perhaps. But Paul’s shown he can be an effective CEO. My son is young enough to wait a few years. With a little patience, he’ll make a fine CEO one day.”

Greg said nothing. He glowered at his mother in silent hatred.

Paul knew what was irking Arnold. Old frog-face thought that he could control Greg. With Greg as CEO, Arnold would effectively be running the corporation his way. He had no desire to see a strong independent CEO elected.

His face florid, Arnold said to Joanna, “But this corporation has always had a Masterson at its head. I thought that we all wanted to keep control in the family’s hands.”

Joanna’s smile turned slightly wicked. “Oh, it will be in the family’s hands. Paul and I are going to be married.”

Greg bolted up to his feet so hard he knocked his heavy padded chair over backwards. “Married!” he shouted. “To— to him.”

Before his mother could reply, Greg pushed past his overturned chair and stamped out of the meeting room, slamming the heavy door as he left.

Christ, Paul thought, she hadn’t told him anything about this. He’s just as shocked as the rest of them.

“I’m afraid,” Joanna said calmly, “that Greg allows his emotions to overwhelm him, sometimes.”

Paul stared at her. She’s like an iceberg, he thought. Implacable, unmovable. And cold as ice.

The other board members were muttering to one another. Arnold rapped his knuckles on the table to restore order. Paul saw beads of perspiration on the chairman’s brow and upper lip. His hairpiece was slightly askew.

“I think, in light of this unexpected turn of events,” he said hesitantly, “that we should postpone the election of our new CEO until we have all had a chance to think and consider carefully—”

“I disagree,” interrupted the comptroller. He was older than Paul, not as old as Arnold; a trim little man, dapper, always impeccably dressed. With just a trace of an Irish accent he said, “We all know each other here, and we all know both young Greg and Paul Stavenger. I don’t see why we should wait at all.”

Arnold started to say, “But I—”

“Let’s vote,” said another board member.

“Call for the vote,” said still another.

Visibly defeated, Arnold said, “Very well, if that is the sense of the board. Shall we use the secret ballot?”

“I’m willing to let everyone see my hand raised,” the comptroller said.

“Then let us take a fifteen-minute recess before we vote,” said Arnold. “I want to make sure that Greg is with us when hands are raised.”

The tension eased a little as everyone got to their feet. The comptroller patted Paul’s shoulder and said loudly enough for all to hear, “I’m sure you’re going to make a grand CEO, my boy.”

Paul mumbled his thanks and made his way around the table toward Joanna. He passed Melissa, who kept her face frozen.

Joanna was walking slowly toward the big windows at the front of the meeting room. As if by instinct, the other board members drifted away from her, allowing Paul to be alone with her.

“You didn’t tell Greg first?” he whispered urgently to her.

She looked up at him, her eyes tired, almost tearful. “I tried to,” she said. “He didn’t show up until just a few moments before the meeting began.”

“But… before the meeting. Christ, you two live in the same house!”

“Not any more. Greg took an apartment here in New York. Just after his father’s death. Didn’t you know?”

Paul shook his head. “Still… breaking it to him like that, in front of the rest of the board…”

Joanna turned to the windows. “The Clippership from Hong Kong should be arriving in a few moments.”

“Never mind that. You should’ve told him! Warned him, at least.”

“I couldn’t,” she said, still staring out beyond the towers of Lower Manhattan, the harbor, the gray expanse of Brooklyn and Queens. “He hasn’t spoken to me in more than a month. Not since he found out about us.”

“He knows?”

Joanna breathed out a shuddering sigh. “He knows.”

“Then — his father must’ve known.” Paul was jolted by the thought.

“He probably did.”

“God almighty.”

Joanna said nothing.

“Do you think that’s why he killed himself?” Paul asked her.

Joanna did not answer for a long moment. Then, “I can’t picture Gregory blowing his brains out over his wife’s infidelity. Not when he’d already turned infidelity into a lifetime career.”

She sounded bitter. But Paul knew that a man like Gregory had a totally different set of values when it came to his wife’s faithfulness. Still, he never would have thought that Gregory would kill himself, for any reason.

“Look!” Joanna pointed. “There it is!”

A pinpoint high in the sky, a flare of rocket flame against the gray-blue background. Paul watched the tiny dot grow into a discernible shape as the Clippership seemed to halt in midair, slide sideways slightly, then slowly descend on a pillar of flaming rocket exhaust toward the ground until it was lost to their view.

“I still get a thrill every time I see it,” Joanna said.

And Paul thought that maybe he did love her, after all.

“Please be seated,” Arnold called from the head of the table. Looking around, Paul saw that Greg was still gone. Unable to face the music, Paul wondered, or too torn up by his mother’s betrayal?

He knew about us, Paul told himself as he went back to his chair. He knew that I was fucking his mother. And if he knew, his father did, too.

Eighteen board members took their places around the long table. Arnold called for discussion of the nominations. The board members shifted uneasily in their chairs, looked at one another. No one wanted to be first.

“I presume,” Arnold said, seizing the initiative, “that you are still in favor of keeping Moonbase going, Paul?”

Nodding solemnly, Paul replied, “The future of this corporation is in space, and Moonbase holds the key to profitable space commerce.”

“But the government’s backed away from it,” Arnold pointed out. “If they won’t do it, why should we? After all, they can print money; we have to earn it.” He made a rictus of a smile to indicate humor.

Paul hesitated, as if carefully considering his answer, even though he knew exactly what he wanted to say. After a couple of heartbeats he began, “Washington is giving us an opportunity to develop this new frontier without a lot of government red tape tying our hands. The politicians have finally realized that they can’t run anything at a profit. But we can! And we will — eventually.”

“How long is eventually?” one of the older board members asked. “I don’t have all that much time to wait.”

Paul smiled patiently. “Several years, at least. We’re talking about developing a new frontier here. How long did it take Pittsburgh to become the steel center of the world? How long did it take to make air travel profitable?”

“It’s still not profitable!”

“The Clipperships are profitable,” Paul pointed out.

No one contradicted him.

“I know it’s asking a lot to back Moonbase on our own, but believe me, this is the key to our future. I believe that, as firmly as I believed that the Clipperships would make money for us.”

Joanna asked, “Isn’t the government willing to pay whoever operates Moonbase to keep the scientific work going?”

Nodding, Paul replied, That’s right. Washington’s willing to support six scientists at Moonbase. It’s not very much money, but it’s a baseline commitment.

“And if we decide not to continue with Moonbase,” one of the other directors asked, “what happens to those scientists?”

“Moonbase operations will be offered to any other corporation that wants to bid on the base. If nobody bids, the base is shut down and all work on the Moon comes to an end.”

“You’re fully committed to keeping Moonbase open?” Joanna asked him.

“Totally,” said Paul. “Take me, take Moonbase with me. One and inseparable.”

“Now and forever,” muttered a voice further down the table.

The vote was an anticlimax. Arnold claimed that he had Greg’s proxy. The only other vote for Greg came from Melissa Hart. Paul Scavenger was elected president and chief operating officer of Masterson Aerospace Corporation by a vote of sixteen to three.

“Congratulations,” smiled the comptroller. “Now when is the wedding going to take place?”

MARE NUBIUM

Some wedding, Paul said to himself as he sweated across the lunar regolith. Like another pissing board meeting, only bigger. The biggest society bash in Savannah. They all came out of curiosity. Too soon after Gregory’s death, they all whispered. Bad taste. But they all came and sipped the champagne and ogled at the daughter of one of the oldest families in Georgia actually marrying a black man. Lawdy, lawdy, what would Miz Scarlett say?

The whole board of directors showed up for the wedding. All except Greg. And Melissa. Joanna planned every detail, even picked the comptroller to be my best man. So what? I had enough on my dish. Pissing company was in even worse shape than I’d thought. I could see right at the outset that saving Moonbase was going to be a bitch and a half.

It was always there, the race thing. Even at MIT the blacks had their own clubs and cliques. Had to. Nobody hung WHITES ONLY signs in the halls, but everybody knew who was who and what was what. The classes and labs were one thing: performance counted there. It was the social life where they cut you. And Paul got cut both ways. He wasn’t black enough to suit the militants; he was too black to please most of the whites. Especially when he dated white women.

Learning tp fly was something else, though. Alone in a plane Paul could get away from everything and everyone, at least for a couple of hours. More than once he would squint up at the blue sky and see the pale ghost of the Moon riding out beyond his wing tip.

I’m on my way, he would say to the distant Moon. I’ll be with you in a few years.”

Something was wrong with his left boot It was rubbing his heel raw. A pang of fear burned through his gut. He saw Wojo again, screaming as the nanobugs ate his suit and his flesh. And Tink, screeching like a terrified monkey in a leopard’s jaws. Forget about the pissin’ nanobugs! Paul raged silently. It’s nothing but a lousy fitting boot, he insisted to himself.

He was trying not to limp, despite the pain in his left heel every time he set his foot down. It felt awkward, walking that way.

And then his boot slipped.

If he had fallen forward, just tripped and gone down face-first, he would have had plenty of time to put out his hands, stop the fall, and push himself up to his feet again. Even in the cumbersome surface suit, the Moon’s gravity was so slight that he could have done that. It was an old trick among the “Lunatics,” done to impress newcomers: pretend you’re going to go splat on your face, then push yourself up to a standing position before the tenderfoot can holler, “Look out!”

But Paul’s foot skidded out from under him on a suddenly slick piece of exposed rock and he fell over backward, onto his life-support backpack and oxygen tank, banged down heavily and skidded, yowling sudden pain and fear, down a slope so gradual he hadn’t even noticed it a moment before.

His head banged inside his helmet, his vision blurred. He tasted blood in his mouth. For long moments he lay panting, dizzy, blinking to clear his eyes. Gradually he took stock. He was lying on his right side, his arm pinned under him, the bulky backpack and oxygen tank pressing against the back of his suit.

Shakily he lifted his left arm to look at the displays. No red lights. Everything still in the green. He listened carefully. Nothing but the air fans whining and his own labored breathing. No hisses. No leaks. He hoped.

He pushed himself up to a sitting position, grateful that he weighed only one-sixth of what he would on Earth.

He was at the bottom of a shallow pit with sides sloped so gradually that you had to be inside it to realize it was a depression at all. Absently, he ran a gloved hand along the stony ground. Smooth as glass. Must be an old crater; a really old one, smoothed down by the infalling meteoric dust for Christ knows how long.

It was a struggle to get to his feet. Once erect, he saw that the pit was slightly deeper than his own height and some forty-fifty feet across. Got to get up this slippery slope, he told himself. Not going to be easy.

Shifting the backpack’s weight on his shoulders, Paul crouched over and placed his gloved hands on the bare rock. Four legs are better than two for this, he told himself. Slowly, with enormous care, he picked his way up the gradual slope. It felt like walking on glass. Or ice. For a crazy moment Paul thought back to his one and only ice-skating lesson, when he’d been a teenager. Split his eyebrow open in a fall that ended his interest in skating forever.

Easy now, he commanded himself. Don’t slide down. You don’t have any time to waste playing around in here.

His boots slipped and skidded, barely providing any traction at all. Paul bent his face closer to the stone, looking for rough patches, bumps, anything that could provide purchase. He was grateful that the Sun was still low enough in the sky to throw long shadows; made it easier to see where he could plant his feet and get something to push against.

Just as he reached one hand across the rim of the crater his foot slipped and he started to slide backward. He clung desperately to the slightly raised edge of the crater, grabbed with his other hand and hung on to keep himself from sliding all the way back to the bottom.

For several moments he stayed there, strung out, gasping, while his booted feet searched for something to hold them. He gave it up and hauled himself upward, letting his legs go limp. He got his belly over the edge, trying not to think of what would happen if he tore the fabric of his suit. One leg over the rim. Then the other.

At last he climbed to his feet. Wish I had a marker beacon, he thought. There ought to be a warning here.

Okay, get moving. Enough time wasted.

But which direction? He turned a full three hundred sixty degrees. Mare Nubium looked the same in all directions. Flat bare plain of dust-covered rock. The hump that marked the shelter he had fled was nowhere in sight now, but neither was the next shelter, nor the ringwall mountains of Alphonsus.

“Talk about the middle of nowhere,” Paul said aloud.

He checked the GPS receiver on his suit’s forearm. Nothing. The display was dark. No signal chirped in his earphones. Satellite’s too low for my suit antenna to pick up the signal.

Paul stared out at the horizon. For the first time he felt truly afraid. He was alone and lost and miles from any possibility of help.

SAVANNAH

“Murder?” Paul felt his insides go hollow.

“That’s what Greg said,” Melissa Hart told him.

It was Paul’s first day in his new office as CEO of Masterson Aerospace. He had been in the midst of setting up his personal mementos on his broad ebony desk: a fist-sized chunk of Moon rock; a solid mahogany model of a Clippership in the red, white and blue colors of American Airlines; a framed photograph of Joanna smiling at him from beneath a wide-brimmed straw hat.

It had taken more than a week to get his new office suite squared away. Paul had wanted to stay at his old office, but it was in the manufacturing plant out where I-16 intersected with I-95. Corporate headquarters was in the old historic section of Savannah, down by the riverfront, where the docks and warehouses had been largely replaced by tourist hotels and upscale restaurants. At least he could walk to work, just a few blocks along Bryan Street.

He had felt uneasy about taking over Gregory’s suite, but finally decided he shouldn’t let old guilts stand in the way of doing his new job. So he had his secretary totally redecorate the office; a chore she delighted in, for six whirlwind days of painters and carpet installers and electricians and decorators.

And now Melissa had walked unannounced into his office, so spanking new it smelled of paint and freshly-sawn wood. She stood before his desk, arms clasped tightly across her chest, looking wired tight.

Paul sank into his stylishly modern caramel leather swivel chair, staring open-mouthed at Melissa.

“Murder?” he repeated.

She pulled up the upholstered chair in front of his desk. “Greg’s got a videodisk that his father made just before he died. He says it proves Gregory didn’t commit suicide. He was murdered.”

“Holy shit,” Paul groaned.

Melissa said nothing.

“Did you see this videodisk?”

“Greg played it for me,” she said.

“What’s on it?”

“Gregory’s sitting at his desk. Right here in this office. It must’ve been late afternoon, right before he was killed.”

He was supposed to have been at the executive committee meeting, Paul remembered. But Gregory had walked out on the rest of the committee halfway through the agenda and returned to his office. Nothing unusual in that; he had done it often enough in the past. Meetings usually made him more irritable than usual, especially when there were unpleasant decisions to be made that he wanted to avoid.

“He looked drunk to me,” Melissa went on. “Smashed. Muttering into the camera. He must’ve set it up on his desk.”

“What did he say?”

She made a little shrug. “Most of it was hard to understand. He did a lot of mumbling. But he had that Magnum on his desk and he said something about somebody trying to kill him. “The gun’s for protection,” he said. “This gun’s going to save me.’”

“And?”

“That’s about it. A lot of it was incomprehensible. Greg says he’s going to get some experts to go over the disk and extract as much from it as they can.”

“Has he shown it to the police?”

“Not yet. He just got it himself; it was delivered through the interoffice mail.”

“It took more than a month to get a videodisk fifty feet down the hall?”

Melissa almost smiled. “Greg’s been in New York all this time. He just got back yesterday and started going through his mail.”

“Oh. I see.” Paul looked out the picture window toward the riverfront, then turned back to Melissa. She seemed tense, wary. But not angry, the way she’d been at the board meeting.

He asked her, “Why are you telling me this?”

“Figured you ought to know.”

“You’re not sore at me? About Joanna, I mean?”

A flicker of something crossed her face, but she regained her self-control almost immediately. “It hurt when you dumped me, Paul.”

Feeling flustered, he spread his hands and said defensively, “I didn’t exactly dump you, did I?”

Her voice deathly calm, Melissa replied, “Call it what you want. Soon’s you started after the boss’s wife you didn’t have any time for me.”

“I fell in love,” Paul said.

Melissa swept her almond eyes around the big office in a long, exaggerated inspection. “Yeah,” she said finally. “I can see that.”

Paul wished he could get angry at her, but he was terribly afraid that she was right.

“Well, anyway, thanks for the news.”

“Sure.” She got up to leave and for the first time Paul noticed the forest green miniskirt that clung to her hips and her long slim legs encased in patterned green stockings.

“Who in the hell would want to kill Gregory?” he muttered as she headed for the door.

Melissa turned back toward him. “Maybe it was the guy who took over his job. And his wife.”

Paul sagged back in his chair, stunned. “You don’t mean that!”

She shrugged again. “That’s what Greg thinks. That’s what he’s going to tell the police.”

For a long while Paul sat at his desk, staring out the window, looking at nothing. In his mind’s eye he saw Gregory sitting in this same room, with a Smith Wesson .357 Magnum from his gun collection in the wall cabinet sitting on the desk in front of him and a half-empty decanter of Gentleman Jack beside it.

He put the gun in his mouth and blew his head off, Paul told himself. Nobody murdered him. The bastard committed suicide, but first he made that pissing disk to leave as much trouble behind him as he could. He knew about Joanna and me. The disk’s his revenge on us.

But why did Joanna have his body cremated? You can’t exhume a cremated body and look for evidence of murder.

Paul shook his head, trying to clear the suspicions away. Slowly he got up from his chair and walked to the big window overlooking the riverfront. He glanced at his wristwatch, then. looked past the docks and boats, past the river itself, out into the clear blue sky, just starting to darken with twilight.

And there it was, a bright gleaming star moving rapidly from west to east, cutting across the sky in silent purposefulness. The Rockledge space station. It seemed to beckon Paul like a steady, unwavering hope.

Tonight, Paul said to himself. I’ll be up there tonight. I’ll leave all this shit behind me and be up there where everything’s clean and uncomplicated.

He had decided that, as the new CEO, he should visit all the corporation’s operating divisions, starting with the research labs and prototype factory facility that Masterson rented aboard the Rockledge Corporation’s space station. He had wanted to go on to the scattering of underground shelters on the lunar surface that was Moonbase, but the pressures of his new responsibilities had forced him to postpone that pleasure.

Instead, he decided to take Joanna to the space station with him.

“A honeymoon in zero gravity,” he had told her.

“Aboard a space station?” Joanna had seemed startled at the idea.

“You’ll love it,” Paul had coaxed. “Zero gravity is better than waterbeds.”

She had finally agreed. Reluctantly, it seemed to Paul.

The intercom buzzer yanked his thoughts back to the present.

“What?” he called from the window.

“Mr. Arnold to see you, sir.”

Paul turned back toward the desk. “Send him right in.”

He started for the door, wondering why his secretary allowed Melissa to waltz in unannounced but held up the chairman of the board.

Bradley Arnold came smiling into the office, looking around at the new decor appreciatively. “I wouldn’t recognize the place, “Jie said in his heavy croaking voice.

Paul showed him to the round conference table in the corner, next to the built-in bar.

“Ah, this corner I do recognize,” Arnold said, lowering his chunky form into one of the chairs slowly, painfully. “Gregory was here more than at his desk, his last few months.”

“Would you like something…?” Paul asked.

“No, no, no,” Arnold replied, waving both hands vigorously in front of his face.

He protests too much, Paul thought. But he pulled out the chair next to the chairman’s and sat in it.

“You’re scheduled for a flight to the space facilities this evening, aren’t you?” Arnold asked.

Paul nodded. “Joanna and I are set to leave in about an hour.”

Arnold’s bulging eyes widened slightly. “Joanna’s going with you?”

Forcing a smile, Paul said, “A sort of honeymoon. Only three days, but that’s all I can squeeze in.”

“A honeymoon in space,” Arnold murmured. “Leave it to a former astronaut to think of that.”

“You ought to try it — a trip into orbit, I mean.”

“Me?” Arnold looked genuinely startled. “In space? No thank you! I’ll stay right here with my feet on solid ground. I don’t even like to go to California, the ground shakes too often.”

“Do wonders for your arthritis,” Paul said. “Zero gee can be very therapeutic.”

Shaking his head hard enough to make his toupee jiggle, Arnold said, “I’m doing fine here on Earth.”

Paul was tempted to say that the chairman wouldn’t have to worry about his weight in zero gravity, but he bit it back.

Arnold was sensitive about his poundage. In-between meals and snacks, Paul thought.

I’ll come straight to the point, Paul,” the old man said. “You’ve heard about this disk that young Greg has?”

All thoughts of levity vanished from Paul’s mind. He nodded in silence.

“Have you seen it?”

“No.”

“Neither have I.”

That surprised Paul. He said, “I’ve heard what’s on it. Gregory says somebody was out to kill him.”

“Yes, that’s what I heard.”

“I guess Greg will be taking it to the police.”

Arnold’s frog eyes narrowed. “Eventually, I suppose. Don’t know how believable it is. The ravings of an obviously drunken man. He was getting quite paranoid, you know.”

“Was he?” Paul said carefully.

“Yes. He had all sorts of suspicions. About everyone around him.”

Arnold did not have to say that Gregory knew his wife was having an affair with Paul. The implication was perfectly clear.

“Well,” Paul said, “I’m not sure of what I ought to do about this. Ask Greg about it, I suppose.”

“I’d speak with McPherson first.”

The corporation’s counsel. “You really think I should talk to the lawyers?” Paul asked.

Arnold started to nod, but broke it off to say, “Paul, you know that I nominated Greg for CEO only out of family loyalty. That’s all it was, believe me. I had no idea that you and Joanna were going to be married. I was merely being loyal to the family.”

Before Paul could reply, Arnold rushed on, “I want you to know that I’m one hundred percent behind you, Paul. One hundred percent! I think you’re going to make a fine CEO and I’ll do whatever I can to help and support you. Even if it comes down to a murder investigation.”

Paul looked into the chairman’s earnest, florid face and did not believe a word of what he said. You’ll be right behind me, all right, Paul thought. With a hatchet.

But he made himself smile and clasped his hands together in front of his face and said mildly, “I appreciate that Brad. I really do.”

Arnold looked satisfied. “I merely wanted you to go off to the space station with as clear a mind as possible. Don’t worry about Greg at all. I’ll hold the fort while you’re gone.”

I’ll be back by Friday.”

“Good,” said Arnold. “Don’t worry about a thing while you’re up there.”

“Sure. Thanks a lot.”

“Why did Greg show the disk to Melissa?” Joanna wanted to know.

They were in the limousine, heading for the company airfield, where a Clippership was waiting to boost them to the Rockledge space station. They both wore utilitarian coveralls: Paul’s were drab green; Joanna’s coral red. And form-fitting.

Paul blinked with surprise at his wife’s question. “I never even thought to ask.”

Joanna said, I’d have thought he’d bring it to Brad Arnold. Or straight to the police.”

“Brad hasn’t seen it.”

“So he says,” Joanna muttered.

“Greg’s having the disk analyzed,” Paul said. “Wants to’sextract all the information he can. Make sense out of Gregory’s mumblings, if he can.”

“He’s not turning it over to the police?” she asked sharply.

“Not yet.”

With a shake of her head, Joanna said, “It’s going to be useless as evidence, then. Once he lets anyone tamper with it—”

“They’re not tampering.”

“Legally, the disk will be compromised. The technicians can make it show or say anything they want, once they get their hands on the original.”

With a feeble smile, Paul said, “That’s your expert legal opinion, is it?”

“I could have taken a law degree,” Joanna said, straight-faced. “I’ve spent enough time with lawyers, god knows.”

They drove on in silence through the deepening twilight, Paul playing his wife’s question over and over in his head. Why did Greg show the disk to Melissa and not to Arnold? The chairman of the board would be a natural ally for Greg in this. What’s the kid up to? And what’s Brad up to? Are the two of them working together on this?

Then a new thought struck him: Is Melissa sleeping with Greg now? Somehow that idea bothered him.

“You have to be careful of Brad,” Joanna warned.

“I know.”

“He had just about taken over the whole corporation,” she went on, “during Gregory’s last few months. That’s why he wanted Greg to be CEO; he thought he could run everything and have Greg sitting there as a figurehead.”

“Maybe he’s the one Gregory was mumbling about, then,” said Paul. “On the disk.”

“Gregory? Afraid that Brad was trying to kill him?”

“Not physically. Business-wise.”

“Then why the gun?” Joanna asked.

Paul shrugged. He had no answer for that.

“You just be careful of Brad,” she repeated. “If he says he wants to be your friend, you don’t need an enemy.”

The limo slowed at the security gate, then headed toward the airfield’s terminal building. In the distance Paul could see the graceful conical shape of the Clippership outlined in spotlights against the darkening evening sky, a wisp of white vapor drifting from its liquid oxygen feed line.

Trying to summon up a confidence he didn’t feel, Paul said to Joanna, “Well, let’s forget about it for now.”

“Forget about it?”

“We’re on our way to our honeymoon, remember? And besides, there’s not much we can do about all this. The ball’s in Greg’s court”

Joanna nodded tightly. “That’s what bothers me.”

They rode the open-cage elevator to the Clippership’s hatch, ducked through and climbed the ladder between the passenger rows to their reclining seats. Only six passengers this trip; Paul recognized four of them, including Hiram Tinker, the astronomer who tended the orbital telescopes that the corporation operated on contract from a consortium of universities.

“Hi, Hi!” Paul said brightly as he helped Joanna into her chair. Everyone called the man Tink, but Paul always made a pun out of his first name, even though he dreaded the flood of puns Tinker poured out in return.

“Hello boss boss.”

Paul slid into his own chair, across the ladderway from Joanna, and started strapping in before lowering the chair to its full reclining position. “Boss boss?” he asked Tinker, over his shoulder. “You stuttering?”

Tink had always called Paul the boss, since he worked in Paul’s space operations division.

“Well, now you’re my new boss’s boss, aren’t you?” Tink countered. “That makes you boss boss.”

“Boss squared,” said one of the other technicians, from a back row.

“Running dog capitalist expropriator of the workers,” came another voice. Paul knew whose, without having to turn around: Alex Wodjohowitcz, tractor teleoperator and technician, on his way to a three-month tour of duty on the Moon.

Paul jabbed a finger toward Joanna. “Here’s the real boss,” he said. Then wondered how humorous the remark really was. Joanna cocked an eyebrow at him, barely smiled. Once he was settled in the seat next to her, Joanna leaned I across the aisle separating them to ask in a whisper, “Who are those people?”

“Our employees,” Paul whispered back. “Some of the best people in the world. In the whole Earth-Moon system, as a matter of fact.”

“And that one who called you a running dog? Why do you let him speak to you like that?”

“Wojo?” Paul laughed. “Wojo’s the most creative cusser I’ve ever met. I’ve known him more than six years now and I’ve never heard him resort to profanity or repeat himself. But he sure can bum your ears off.”

“Liftoff in two minutes,” came a voice from the cockpit, over the intercom speakers.

Paul knew that the astronaut pilot and co-pilot were in the cockpit strictly as redundancies. The Clippership was preprogrammed and monitored from the ground, just as it would be if it were carrying all freight and no people at all. Only if something went disastrously wrong would the human crew have anything to do. And then, Paul thought, it would probably be too late. But the government agencies had insisted on a human crew when human passengers were going aloft. Takes two paying seats out of our cash flow, Paul fumed whenever he thought about the outmoded regulation.

Then one of the astronauts came clambering down the ladder to check that all the passengers were properly strapped in and had cranked their seats back to the full reclining position for takeoff. He said a brief hello to Paul, smiled at Joanna, and then climbed back up into the cockpit and closed the hatch above Paul’s head.

Paul glanced across the narrow aisle and saw that Joanna looked pale. She’s never been in space before, he knew. He reached out his hand and touched her shoulder. She clasped his hand in hers. Her palm felt cold, clammy.

Grinning at her, Paul whispered, “You’ll love it.”

She nodded, but looked extremely dubious.

LANA GOODMAN

She was the first person to suffer a heart attack on the Moon.

Dr. Lana Goodman was a tiny wisp of a woman, a brilliant fifty-two-year-old with degrees in medicine, physiology, and biophysics. She was rumored to be on track for a Nobel, and could have had her pick of any university in the world. Indeed, she was teaching and conducting research in low-gravity physiology at Johns Hopkins when she applied for a position with Masterson Aerospace.

“I want to go to the Moon,” she told the corporation’s astonished personnel director. “I’ve always wanted to go there. I’ve had experience aboard space stations, but I haven’t gotten to the Moon yet and I want to do it before I get too old.” : Masterson took her on as a consultant, making maximum public relations mileage out of it, and sent her on a well-publicized tour of duty at Moonbase.

Dr. Goodman was expected to look after the medical needs of the twenty-eight men and women who happened to be working at Moonbase at the time, as well as continue her own research on how the human body adapts to low gravity. Her heart attack was totally unexpected, caused by a clot thatlodged in one of the smaller coronary arteries. She was eating breakfast when she felt a terrific pain in her chest, vomited up everything in her stomach, and half-collapsed on the galley table. Her skin turned gray and sweaty.

Since she was Moonbase’s resident doctor at the time, she was attended by two of the base’s paramedics — both of them engineers with other duties who stood by for medical emergencies. They slapped an oxygen mask over her nose; one of them shot a load of clot-busting tissue plasminogen activator into her arm, while the othef pushed aspirin and nitroglycerin tablets through her pain-clenched teeth.

The paramedics contacted Masterson’s medical staff in Savannah, who plugged them in to the finest cardiac centers in Boston, Houston and even Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Within hours Dr. Goodman was out of danger, thanks mainly to the clot-dissolving properties of the TPA.

Within three days she could walk around almost normally, in the gentle gravity of the Moon.

But she could not return to Earth.

Part of the problem was the acceleration of the rocket boost from the lunar surface, she knew, although that was only a minor part of it, since the liftoff was much less stressful than a takeoff from Earth would have been. There were gee stresses in re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, too. They were greater, but she felt confident that she could handle them.

The real problem was the condition of her heart, weakened by weeks of living in low gravity and now damaged by the infarction. She feared that she would be a cardiac cripple on Earth, with its high gravity.

After days of consulting with her Earthbound medical colleagues, Goodman decided she would have to stay on the Moon for weeks, perhaps months, while slowly building up her cardiac strength through exercises specially designed to strengthen her heart muscle.

She wanted to resume her medical duties, but the corporation had sent up a strapping young M.D. to replace her as medical officer — and to watch over her while she recuperated. Looking more like a football hero than a physician, the young man supervised her exercise regimen with ruthless tenderness.

Dr. Goodman continued her research, but this was not enough to fill her increasingly boring days in the cramped underground warrens of Moonbase. She had brought her camera with her, though, and started taking photographs. Not of the busy, harried, sweaty people who lived cheek-by-jowl in Moonbase. She got into a spacesuit and went out on the surface to take photos of the grandeur of the Moon itself.

She had no intention of showing her work to anyone but her fellow Moonbase residents. But one of them electronically relayed back to Savannah a few choice shots of the Sun rising over Alphonsus’s ringwall mountains. A minor executive in the public relations department showed them to an editor of a photography magazine. Within a month several other magazines were asking for her work.

She had started with ordinary color film, but soon asked her new-found friends in the world of photography to send her black-and-white film, instead. It seemed made to order for the black-and-gray world of the Moon.

With dizzying suddenness, Lana Goodman became an artist of global renown. Her photos of the Moon showed all the barren splendor of this new world in its rugged challenge. Her work adorned the covers of newsmagazines. Media personalities clamored to interview her, live, from the Moon. — The handsome young football hero of a physician left after his three-month tour ended. The next doctor was a woman, just as qualified, just as determined to see that Goodman continued her exercise routine, but nowhere near as emotionally interesting.

When medical tests showed she was physically able to return to Earth, she asked for a postponement. I’m not ready, she said. Psychologically, I’m not prepared to face the return trip.

On the first anniversary of her heart attack she decided to quit the subterfuge and asked her contacts in the corporation’s personnel office to allow her to stay on the Moon indefinitely.

The decision went all the way up to Paul Stavenger, head of Masterson’s space division. In full sympathy with her desire, and prodded by the corporate public relations director, he decided to allow Lana Goodman to stay at Moonbase as long as she wished.

She never returned to Earth.

Lana Goodman become the first person to live on the Moon permanently.

SPACE STATION

The Clippership took off with a thundering roar that was only slightly muted by the passenger cabin’s acoustical insulation. The ship rattled hard enough to blur Paul’s vision for a moment. Pressed flat against the reclined seat, he turned his head to see how Joanna was taking it. Her eyes were squeezed shut, hands clutching the armrests with whitened knuckles.

The vibration eased off a good deal, but the bellowing thunder of the rocket engines still shook his innards. Then a sharp bang! and the noise abruptly ceased.

Paul felt all sensation of weight disappear. One instant he was flattened against the chair, weighing three times normal, the next he was floating lightly against the restraining seat harness.

Joanna’s arms had lifted off her seat’s rests. Her gray-green eyes were wide open now, looking startled.

Paul grinned at her. “We’re coasting now. Zero gee.”

She smiled back at him, weakly.

Within fifteen minutes the Clippership made its rendezvous with the space station. The ship lurched slightly once, twice, a third time. Then the co-pilot opened the cockpit hatch and announced, “We’re docked. They’re attaching the access tube to the main hatch.”

“Can I come up and take a look?” Paul asked, unstrapping his seat harness.

“Sure, we’re all finished here,” said the co-pilot.

Paul floated up into the ladderway aisle. The other passengers were unbuckling their harnesses, bobbing up out of their chairs, opening the overhead luggage bins to haul out their gear. Straps snaked weightlessly, as if alive; travel bags and equipment boxes hung in mid-air.

Looking down at Joanna, still firmly strapped into her seat, he said, I’ll be right back.”

She tried to smile again.

The cockpit was cramped with two seats for the astronauts shoehorned into wall-to-wall instrumentation. But there was a wide transparent port for Paul to look through.

The space station was still unfinished. Paul could see a spacesuited construction team hauling girders and curved sheets of alloy into place along the station’s outermost section, so far distant that they looked like little toy figures. A welding laser flashed briefly. The construction workers all wore maneuvering backpacks so they would not need tethers to keep them from drifting off into space. The Earth hung off to one side, huge and bright blue with parades of pure white clouds marching across the face of the broad ocean. Paul could see specks of islands and, off at the curving horizon, the wrinkled brown stretch of California’s rugged coastline swinging into view.

The station was built in three concentric wheels with a docking area at the hub. Once the construction was finished the station would be spun up so that people in the widest, outermost wheel would feel a normal Earthly gravity. The inner wheels would provide one-third and one-sixth gee, while the docking hub would be effectively in zero gravity all the time. For now, though, the entire huge structure hung motionless against the utterly black sky. It was all in zero gee.

“They’re making good progress,” Paul said.

“Had an accident yesterday,” the pilot told him. “Boom operator got pinned between one of the girders and a new section of flooring they were installing.”

“Was he hurt bad?”

“She,” said the co-pilot. “Ruptured her suit. She was dead before they could get to her.”

Paul shook his head. “How many does that make?”

“Four this year. Six, altogether.”

“Christ, you think they’d be more careful.”

“It’s the new guys, every time. They start hauling big girder around and they’re weightless so they forget they still got mass. And momentum. Get hit by one and it can still cave in your ribs.”

“There hasn’t been much publicity about it back on th ground,” Paul said.

The co-pilot smiled grimly. “Rockledge has a damned tight public relations operation. No reporters up here at all.”

“Still… you’d think they’d be screaming about it.”

“Nah,” said the pilot. “Rockledge insures the workers, pay off the family plenty. Nobody complains.”

“Not yet,” the co-pilot countered.

“The work’s getting done on schedule and within budget from what I hear.”

Paul asked, “Even with the insurance costs factored in?”

The pilot nodded. “Rockledge must’ve factored in a casualty rate when they decided to build this wheel.”

Yeah, Paul thought, and our rental of space in the station must be helping to pay off their insurance premiums.

“It’s a tradeoff,” the co-pilot said, as if he could read Paul’s face. “The sooner they get this station finished and operating the sooner they can rent out all its space. They must’ve figured that the insurance costs are worth it if they can get the job done fast enough.”

“Pretty damned cold-blooded,” Paul muttered. “I don’t think I’d push an operation that way.”

The pilot grinned at him. “That’s why we work for you boss, instead of Rockledge.”

Masterson Corporation’s space operations division — Paul’s former bailiwick — had rented half the innermost wheel of the space station for research laboratories and an experimental zero-gee manufacturing facility. Once the station was completed and spun up, that innermost wheel would rotate at one-sixth gee: the gravity of the Moon’s surface. The labs would shift from zero-gee to a lunar environment. The manufacturing facility would be removed from the station and hung outside as a ‘free floater,’ where it could remain in the weightless mode.

Part of Masterson’s rented space was living quarters for its employees. Spartan at best, they were meant to house people who would spend no more than a few months aboard the station.

“It’s not exactly the Ritz,” Paul said to Joanna as he slid back the accordion-fold door to their designated quarters.

It was a cubicle about the size of a generous telephone booth. No window, but a small computer terminal built into one bulkhead. Otherwise the walls, floor and ceiling were covered with Velcro and loops for tethering one’s feet. A mesh sleeping bag was stuck to one wall.

“At least we’re close to the toilet and washroom,” Paul said, pointing along the corridor that sloped upward conspicuously in both directions.

Hanging onto the open doorjamb while her feet barely pouched the deck, Joanna lopked bleary-eyed at her honeymoon suite and said wretchedly, “I think I’m going to be sick.”

“It’s not that bad, is it?”

“No, Paul,” she said, her face pasty-white. “I’m really going-’ She clutched at her middle.

Paul grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her toward the toilet area. Joanna moaned and gagged. Pushing her weightlessly down the short length of the corridor, their feet barely touching the deck, Paul slid Joanna sideways through the open doorway. She bumped gently against the wall inside.

“Just let go,” he said to her, leaning over her bowed back to start the toilet’s air suction flow. “This happens to almost everybody. I should’ve realized it’d hit you. I’m sorry, I just didn’t think—”

He kept on talking while Joanna puked her guts into the zero gravity toilet.

“It’s all my fault,” he kept saying. “I’m so damned sorry. I never stopped to think that you’d be sick.” As he spoke and Joanna vomited, Paul fought to hold down the bile rising in his own throat.

Some honeymoon, Paul said to himself. Two days in orbit. two days sick as a dog. Joanna had tried to be brave, tried to fight down the nausea that assailed her, but whenever she moved her head it overpowered her.

I should have known, Paul berated himself over and over She’s never been up here before. It gets everybody, one way or another. Damned idiot! You did your thinking with your balls Honeymoon in zero gravity. Upchuck city.

He spent the entire first day alternating between Joanna miserably sick in their cubicle, and the research labs anc manufacturing facility. The experiments on fabricating thin-film video screens and special alloys in zero gravity and the high vacuum of space were going well.

The director of the manufacturing facility was a sandy-haired bespectacled Australian with degrees in metallurgy and management from the University of Sydney. He patiently took Paul through every step of the zero-gravity smelting and refining system they had built.

There were hardly any other people in the area. The facility took up more than a third of the space station’s inner wheel, but Paul saw only a handful of technicians and other personnel, all in coveralls of one color or another, all of them busily ignoring them as the facility director conducted the mandatory tour for the new CEO.

“The board’s very interested in the Windowall development,” Paul told the director.

“That’s good, I suppose.”

Paul went on, “Better than good. If we can manufacture wall-sized screens on a scale big enough for the TV market, it’ll make this operation very profitable.”

The younger man shrugged. “Thin-film manufacturing is no great problem. Give us the raw materials and we’ll make flat screens the size of Ayer’s Rock, if you want”

Paul laughed. “Ten feet across should do, for now.”

The director remained quite serious. “We can do that. But what I really wanted to show you…” He led Paul to an apparatus that looked something like an oversized clothes drier.

Peering through a thick, tinted observation port, Paul saw an array of fist-sized molten metal droplets glowing red-hot as they hung weightlessly inside a capacious oven heated by concentrated sunlight. Tentatively, he touched the glass with his fingertips. It was hardly warm.

“The vacuum is a fine insulator,” the younger man said, with just a hint of an Aussie accent. “Just open the far side of the oven to space and we don’t have to worry about heat transfer much at all.”

Still, Paul thought it looked damned hot in there. The place smelled hot, liked a foundry or a steel mill. Paul realized it was all in his imagination; his brain was linking what he was seeing to memories associated with blast furnaces and smelting forges. Yet imaginary or not, he felt beads of perspiration trickling down his ribs.

The director looked youthfully cool. No perspiration stained his light tan coveralls.

“By focusing the incoming solar energy,” he was explaining, “we can generate temperatures close to the black-body theoretical limit — better than five thousand kelvins.”

Paul already knew that, but he let himself look impressed. “I’m surprised that you keep the droplets so small. I always pictured a big ball of red-hot metal hanging in the vacuum chamber.”

The youngster smiled tolerantly and nudged his rimless glasses back up his nose. “It’s a lot easier to handle a bunch of small spherules than one big glob. We can spin them up quicker, make them flatten out into sheets.”

“How do you spin them?” Paul asked.

“Magnetic fields. Dope the molten mix with a little iron and we spin the spherules, flatten them out into sheets, meld them together. It’s straightforward and it doesn’t take all that much energy.”

“So you’re using centrifugal force to produce sheets of alloy.”

The kid nodded and his glasses slid slightly down his nose again. “Then we turn off the heat and let the sheets outgas in vacuum. That drives out all the impurities while the alloy’s hardening.”

“All the impurities?” Paul asked.

The director gave him a lopsided grin. “Enough,” he said. “Come on over here, I’ll show you.”

He pushed off the oven wall with one foot and glided past a trio of woriters bent over a piece of equipment that Paul did not recognize. Its access hatch was open and one of the workers — a slim Asian woman — was reaching into its innards while the two men with her muttered in low, exasperated tones. Paul didn’t understand what they were saying, but he knew the tone of voice: something had broken down and they were trying to figure out how to fix it.

“Here’s the final product,” the young director said, coasting to a stop in front of a long workbench. He slid his feet into the restraining loops set into the floor and pulled a thin sheet of metal, about a foot square, from a stack that was tied to the workbench with Velcro straps.

Paul flexed the thin sheet of shining metal in his hands. It bent almost double with ease.

“Higher tensile strength than the best steel alloys made on Earth,” said the director proudly, “yet it weighs less than half of the Earth-manufactured alloys.”

Paul felt impressed. “Detroit’s going to like this,” he said. “With an alloy like this they can make cars that are half the weight of the competition, so their energy efficiency will be double anything else on the road.”

“And the cars will be safer, too,” the youngster said, “because this alloy’s stronger than anything else available.”

“Good,” said Paul, smiling with genuine satisfaction. “Damned good.”

“But there’s a problem.”

Paul’s smile evaporated. “Cost?”

The kid nodded. “When you figure the cost of bringing the raw materials up here to orbit, this alloy costs ten times what groundbased alloys cost.”

Paul looked around the facility. It’s all here, he thought. We’ve got a new industrial base within our grasp. Almost. We can make billions. If…

Turning back to the earnest young director, he said, “Suppose I could provide you with the raw materials at a cost twenty times lower than they cost now?”

The youngster’s eyes widened behind his rimless glasses. “Twenty times cheaper? How?”

“From the Moon.”

The kid looked as if Paul had just offered to put the Tooth Fairy to work for him. “Sure. From the Moon.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know, Mr. Stavenger. Everybody knows you’ve been pushing to set up a mining operation at Moonbase. But that’s years away, at best.”

Paul smiled tightly. “It wasn’t all that long ago that people said we were years away from zero-gee manufacturing.”

“Well, yeah, maybe. But—”

Stopping him with an upraised hand, Paul said, “Orbital manufacturing doesn’t make economic sense if you have to lift the raw materials from Earth. We both know that. But if we can provide the raw materials from the Moon it’ll reduce your costs by a factor of twenty or more.”

The kid made a half-hearted nod. “Okay, so the Moon’s got low gravity and no air and you can shoot payloads off its surface with an electric catapult. That makes it real cheap.”

“And the raw materials are there. Aluminum, silicon, titanium, iron…”

“But how much will it cost to set up a mining operation on the Moon?” the youngster asked. “How long will it take? How much will that electric catapult cost and how soon can I you have it in operation?”

“As soon as I goddamned can,” Paul said. Meaning, As soon fas I can get the board of directors to put up the money I need to get Moonbase up and running.

The younger man nodded, unimpressed.

“In the meantime,” Paul said, “I want you to get the Windowall operation through development and into production. We can make enough money off that to keep your alloy processing going.”

Joanna was still in the sleeping bag when he returned to their quarters. She was awake, though, and looking almost healthy.

“It’s all right if I keep still,” she told Paul. “But as soon as I move my head, even a little bit, everything starts spinning.”

“I guess this was a lousy idea,” he said, hovering a few inches from her. For a moment he felt as if he were floating above her as she lay cocooned in the mesh sleeping bag, and a shudder of erotic heat flashed through him. He forced his feet into the restraining loops on the deck and his perspective shifted immediately; he was standing in front of her and she was pale and despondent.

“No, it was a wonderful idea. I’m just not cut out to be an astronaut.”

Paul disagreed. “It’s only a matter of adjustment. If we stayed up here for a week you’d be fine.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Your body’s already adjusting to zero gee. You’ve grown at least an inch taller.”

“Have I?”

“Look at the cuffs of your pants,” he said. Then quickly, “No, don’t bend your head down. But your sleeves are shorter now, too. See?”

“I really have grown taller,” Joanna said.

“Everybody does in zero gee. The spine unbends and you gain an inch or two. Your waist gets slimmer, too.”

“But my head feels so stuffed.”

“Mine too. The sinuses can’t drain the way they do on Earth. Zero gravity means no post-nasal drip.”

“I wish there was something I could take to make me feel better,” she said.

“The transdermal patches haven’t worked?”

“I don’t think so,” Joanna said, fingering the flesh-colored circular patch behind her ear. “Or maybe they are working and I’d feel even worse without them.”

He sighed. “I could call for a Clippership to take us back tonight.”

“No,” Joanna said firmly. “You’re not going to spend a few million dollars just to pamper me.”

He grinned at her. “Who else should I pamper?”

Before she could answer the phone buzzed. Paul reached across the tiny cubicle to the computer keyboard built into the bulkhead and tapped a key.

Bradley Arnold’sflorid face appeared on the display screen.

“Ah, I got the two of you together,” he said, smiling widely. “Good.”

“What is it, Brad?” Joanna asked. Paul was surprised at the sudden strength in her voice.

“I’ve had a long talk with Greg. Did you know he’s been — ah, seeing — Melissa Hart?”

“Is that why you called?” Paul asked, annoyed.

“No, no, no. Not at all. But Greg and I had a long talk, almost a father-son talk, you might say.” The man is a monument to poor taste, Paul thought.

“How is he?” Joanna asked.

Arnold blinked his frog’s eyes twice. “He seems to be bearing up well. Physically, he’s fine.”

Sure; he’s getting physical therapy from Melissa, Paul growled to himself.

“He wants to have a meeting with you, Paul,” Arnold went on. “To discuss the videodisk.”

“Discuss it? What do you mean?” Paul asked.

“Greg hasn’t decided whether or not to take the disk to the police. He wants to talk it over with you before he makes that decision.”

Paul felt alarmed. There’s more going on here than Brad’s telling us. But Joanna smiled tightly and answered, “We’ll be glad to sit down and talk it over with him. Just as soon as we can. We can leave the station right away, can’t we Paul?”

Paul nodded, thinking that the few million she wouldn’t spend to alleviate her own physical distress wasn’t even a consideration in her mind when it came to trying to patch it up with her son.

MARE NUBIUM

Dead reckoning. Paul tried not to think of the irony in the term.

With no navigational aids to help him, Paul looked across the glassy crater that he had fallen into and lined himself up with his own boot prints, shining bright against the dark lunar regolith. Turning, he looked for a recognizable feature on the sharp horizon.

Okay, he said to himself. You head for that big squarish boulder. March.

He started off again, checking his watch to see how much progress he had made. How the hell can I tell how far I’ve come? he fumed at himself. Pissing suit doesn’t come with an odometer. Three hours since I started. Legs still feel pretty good. No stiffness.

But his left heel hurt worse each time he set the foot down. Wonder if that’s the same heel that did in Achilles?

He struggled on, doggedly aiming for the boulder, big as a fair-sized house. When I get there I’ll take a break, he promised himself. Sit down in the shade and rest a spell. Just a few minutes. Don’t have enough oxygen to sit around for long. Don’t want the legs to stiffen up, either. Got to keep moving. But you’ve earned a little break. Just a little one. Just a couple minutes.

The horizon cut across his view like the edge of a cliff, much closer than on Earth, much sharper in the airless clarity of the Moon. Wonder what Columbus’s crew would’ve thought about the horizon here. They were scared they were gonna fall over the edge when they were sailing across the Atlantic. How’d they like to walk to the edge of this horizon?

Paul turned his head slightly inside his helmet and put his lips to the water nipple. Nothing. Fear flared through him. No, wait. A few drops. He sucked harder. Damn! It was dry.

The suit had a full water tank when I put it on, he told himself. He tried to remember. He had checked out the suit in a panicky hurry, but all the indicators were in the green. He Iooked at the indicators now. Still green.

But no water coming through the nipple. Maybe the tube got bent when I fell down. Banged my head pretty good, might’ve whacked the pipe. It’s only a small plastic tube. Maybe it’s just kinked a little. Just needs to be straightened out. But how the hell can I fix it from inside the suit?

Think! he commanded himself. Don’t make a move until you think it out. Remember what that old cosmonaut Leonov said: In space, think five times before you move a finger. In the meantime, keep moving.

Think. You can pull your arm out of the suit sleeve, you know that. Maybe worm your hand up past the collar ring and try to straighten out the tube. Maybe that’d work.

He closed his eyes to get a better mental picture of the inner workings of the surface suit. Hell, guys have smuggled women into these suits. Take a joyride up on the surface and watch the Earthlight. He remembered the first time he’d seen the night side of Earth, the glowing lights of cities and highways outlining North America. The fantastic shimmering of the aurora’s pale blues, reds and greens. Very romantic.

Keep your mind on your problem, butthead! he raged at himself. The suit’s loose enough to jerk off in, too, but that ain’t gonna help anything.

Wait till you get to the rock. Then lean against it, take some of the weight off your legs, and see if you can worm your hand out of the sleeve and up inside the helmet here. That’s what you’ve got to do.

It seemed as if he’d never get to the boulder. It loomed bigger and bigger, but it still seemed miles away. Until, all of a sudden, he was right in front of it.

Paul reached out and touched its stony side, smoothed by eons of meteoric sandpapering. “Hello, rock’ he said aloud, surprised at how dry and scratchy his throat fek.

He stepped across to the shadowed side of the boulder, then leaned back carefully. Now see if you can wriggle your arm out of the sleeve. Careful! Easy does it.

It felt as if he was wrenching his shoulder out of its socket, but at last Paul got his arm entirely out of the suit’s sleeve and started to work his hand up past the metal ring of the helmet collar.

He was sweating so hard his eyes stung. If you get your hand up here inside the helmet, he thought, first thing you do is wipe your eyes.

Then he realized that all this perspiration was merely draining his body of water. If I don’t get this damned drinking tube fixed I won’t make it much farther.

Slowly, desperately, he tried to worm his fingers up into the helmet.

SAVANNAH

Joanna recovered from her space sickness as soon as the Clippership lit its engines for the return flight from the orbiting space station to Savannah. Once they got home, she phoned Bradley Arnold and insisted that they meet with Greg at her house instead of in the corporate offices.

“It will be much more relaxed,” she said to Arnold’s image in the phone screen. “After all, it’s been his home, too.”

Arnold agreed. “I’ll have him there first thing tomorrow,” he promised.

They were in Joanna’s upstairs sitting room, next to the master bedroom suite. Joanna was reclined on the chaise longue. She reached out wearily to turn off the phone console on the table beside her.

Joanna turned to Paul as the screen went blank. “We’ll resolve everything tomorrow.” She smiled happily.

Sitting alone on the love seat beneath her portrait, Paul muttered, “I hope so.”

They met in the spacious parlor of the house. It had been decorated in what Paul had always thought of as mock Gone With the Wind style: frills and doodads everywhere; long sweeping curtains of heavy silk on the tall windows; overstuffed furniture; patterned wallpaper. The house was only a few years old. Gregory had built it in a fit of conspicuous consumption. The worse the corporate profit-and-loss picture became, the more lavishly he spent, it had seemed to Paul.

So now he sat tensely on the brocade-covered sofa while morning sunlight poured through the windows and Joanna fiddled nervously with the bric-a-brac on the fireplace mantle.

It was a gas-fed fireplace, and the architect’s drawing of the house that hung above the mantfe concealed the room’s big television screen, one of the first thin-film Windowall screens built in orbit.

Paul heard a car pull up on the driveway outside. Joanna stiffened, then hurried to a window.

“They’re here,” she said, looking pleased and apprehensive at the same time. Then her face clouded. “Greg’s brought Melissa Hart with him.”

Paul’s insides wound even tighter. This isn’t going to be a reconciliation, he knew. It’s war.

Greg still wore a black suit and tie. Paul thought his underwear might also be in mourning. Dark circles rimmed his reddened eyes. He looked somber, almost gaunt. Melissa, wearing a knee-length violet skirt and simple white blouse, seemed as tense as Paul felt. Bradley Arnold, in a rumpled gray business suit, was the only one smiling.

Greg had an attache case with him. The videodisk must be in there, Paul thought.

“I’m glad that we could all get together like this,” Arnold said as they sat down on the two sofas that faced each other across the carved cherrywood coffeetable. Greg and the board chairman sat on one sofa, Joanna and Paul on the other. Greg clutched the attache case on his knees. Melissa took the overstuffed armchair by the end of the coffeetable, facing the cold, empty fireplace.

The butler came in, carrying a tray of juices, coffee, tea, and a plate of toast. He deposited the laden tray on the coffeetable, then stood off to one side.

“Have you all had your breakfasts?” Joanna asked mechanically. “Would you like anything from the kitchen?”

They all said no, and Joanna dismissed the butler.

“Now then,” she said as the butler left the room, “I believe you’ve brought the videodisk, Greg?”

“It’s right here,” he said, his voice low.

“Before we do or say anything else, then, I think we should all see it.”

Arnold bobbed his head in agreement. Paul glanced at Melissa. Why did Greg bring her here, except to show me that he’s got her now?

Greg opened the attache case and took out a single, unmarked videodisk, about the size of a credit card. Paul thought it ridiculous to lug around the tooled leather case just to carry one slim disk; like using a heavy-lift booster to put a sugar cube in orbit.

Joanna started to say, “I’ll get the butler—”

But Greg got to his feet with a wintry smile. “I know how to use the TV, mother,” he said. “This has been my home, too, you know.”

Sarcastic bastard, Paul said to himself.

Greg flicked down the hidden access panel in the mantle-piece and powered up the TV. The architect’s drawing faded away and the wide display panel turned soft gray. Then Greg inserted the videodisk and returned to his seat beside Arnold.

Paul stared at the screen. It streaked random colors for a few moments, then Gregory Masterson’s face filled the screen, bloated and distorted because it was almost pressed against the camera lens.

Gregory was mumbling something. Then he leaned back and they could see he was sitting at his desk, his face dark and grim. Paul was startled to realize how much alike father and son looked.

Joanna’s hand reached into Paul’s and gripped tight.

“Fuckin’ sonsabitches,” Gregory muttered. “How the fuck’m I s’posed to know if this piece of crap is in focus? Autofocus my hairy ass…” His voice trailed off into incoherent mumbles.

Paul saw the crystal decanter of whiskey at Gregory’s elbow. He was waving a heavy old-fashioned glass as he grumbled, whiskey sloshing over its rim onto the desk. The Smith Wesson revolver was resting in front of him, big and menacing, polished steel, long ribbed barrel and fine-grained walnut grip.

“It’s killing me,” Gregory said, looking straight into the camera. “What they’ve done to me… what they’re doin’ now… might’s well be dead. Serve ’em right, the goddam’ pricks.”

Paul felt his insides turning to ice. Joanna was staring fixedly at the big screen, where her late husband loomed over her. She seemed transfixed, unmoving as a statue, not even breathing, like a deer that freezes when it’s caught in an automobile’s headlights.

With his free hand Gregory picked up the heavy revolver. “See this? Oughtta blow their fuckin’ heads off with this. Blam! Right between the eyes. Or maybe shoot off their goddam’ balls, see how they like it.”

Their balls? Paul wondered. What’s he talking about?

“Get ’em before they get me,” Gregory muttered darkly. “Only way to do it…’ He lapsed into incomprehensible mumbles again.

Then he put the old-fashioned glass down with exaggerated care and transferred the gun to his right hand. He studied it for long moments, breathing heavily, mouth hanging open. Paul thought he might have been having trouble focusing his eyes.

“Get ’em before they get me,” he repeated thickly. “This gun’s my protection, my insurance policy. Make sure they can’t hurt me anymore. Protect myself…”

Suddenly Gregory’s eyes blazed with fury and he swung the gun madly. The picture abruptly went dead.

For several seconds no one said a word. They all stared at the blank screen.

At last Arnold spoke up. “That’s it”

Paul pulled his eyes away from the screen and saw that Greg was staring at him accusingly.

“It’s pretty much of a jumble,” Joanna said, disengaging her hand from Paul’s. “Is that the original disk or the enhanced version?”

“That’s the enhancement,” Arnold replied.

“The original’s in a bank vault,” Greg said tightly, “with orders to turn it over to the police if anything should happen to me.”

Joanna gave her son a pale smile. “Isn’t that just a trifle melodramatic?”

Paul could see that Greg’s hands were trembling slightly.

“No, it’s not melodramatic, mother,” he answered. “It seems very likely that someone murdered my father. Whoever did it—” he shifted his gaze toward Paul “—might try to kill me to keep this disk out of the hands of the authorities.”

“That’s stupid,” Paul snapped.

“I don’t think so.”

“In the first place,” Paul said, “the disk doesn’t show anything — except that Gregory was blind drunk and had a loaded pistol in his hand.”

“And felt his life was in danger,” Arnold added.

“He said someone was killing him,” Greg said, still staring at Paul. “He felt betrayed.”

Paul started to retort that Gregory was an expert on betrayal, but decided it would only make the situation hotter, so he bit it back.

“Are you saying,” Joanna asked her son, her voice tense, strained, “that Gregory committed suicide because he felt betrayed?”

Greg turned molten eyes to her. “I’m saying that my father was frantic. That his feelings of betrayal drove him to drink—”

“Then he must’ve started feeling betrayed twenty years ago,” Paul snapped.

“And after he passed out from drinking,” Greg went on, glowering, “someone slipped into his office, put that gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.”

“Bullshit,” Paul growled.

Joanna asked, “Who are you accusing, Greg?”

“We all know who stood to gain the most from my father’s death.”

“Paul couldn’t have done it,” Joanna said, so calmly that Paul wondered how she could control herself so well.

“Why not?”

“Because he was here, with me, that afternoon,” she said, her voice low but firm. “We spent the afternoon in bed together. That’s where I was when the phone call came through.”

Greg’s face went white with rage.

“So if you think that Paul murdered your father,” Joanna continued, “then you’re going to have to blame the two of us. I can’t prove that we were here that afternoon. I obviously didn’t want the servants to see us together.”

“I don’t believe you.” Greg said. “You’re trying to protect him.”

Almost triumphantly, Joanna said, “If Paul murdered your father, then I helped him. Go to the police with that!”

“You were sleeping with him!” Greg accused. “You betrayed my father.”

“Your father betrayed me a hundred times and more,” Joanna said, her voice edging higher. “Paul was the only consolation I had.”

“Paul and who else?” Greg snarled. “How many other men have you—”

Paul jumped to his feet and leaned across the coffeetable to haul Greg up by his lapels. “That’s enough! You’d better shut your mouth.”

Greg pulled free, glaring pure hatred. Bradley Arnold, never moving from his place on the sofa, smiled and raised his hands soothingly.

“Gentlemen!” Arnold said. “Please! Let’s not allow our emotions to get the better of our judgment.”

For a long moment Paul and Greg stood confronting each other, the coffeetable between them: Greg tall and slim, Paul a solid welterweight.

“Sit down, both of you,” Joanna commanded.

“Please,” Arnold said. “Let’s try to keep this on a civilized plane.”

Paul took his place beside Joanna again. Greg sat down next to Arnold. Paul saw that Melissa looked alarmed, frightened.

“If we had wanted to go to the police,” Arnold said, “we would have done that days ago.”

We? Paul’s ears perked up. Arnold said we .

“The reason I set up this meeting,” the board chairman went on, “was to try to come to some sort of understanding about all this. Keep it in the family, so to speak.”

“Then why is she here?” Joanna asked, gesturing toward Melissa.

“She’s with me,” Greg said. “If it hadn’t been for Melissa these past few weeks I think I would’ve gone off the deep end.”

You’re already in over your head, kid, Paul said to himself.

“Now, now,” said Arnold. “Let’s try to be reasonable and come up with a solution that makes some sense.”

“I don’t see where the problem is,” Paul said. “Gregory committed suicide. That’s all there is to it.”

“He was murdered,” Greg insisted sullenly.

“Then show your pissin’ disk to the cops and see what they make of it.”

“No!” Arnold boomed. His deep voice seemed to make the heavy window drapes flutter. “We should settle this among ourselves.”

“Settle it how?” Joanna asked.

“Greg will refrain from showing this disk to the board of directors—”

“Refrain?” Paul snapped. “He’s got no business showing that disk to anybody.”

Arnold shook his head disappointedly. “Paul, I’m sure you understand that even though the disk may not constitute the kind of evidence the police could use, it would certainly look very bad for you in the eyes of the board members.”

“Especially,” Melissa pointed out softly, “with Joanna’s alibi for you.”

Paul sank back on the sofa cushions. “You sonsofbitches are going to use this disk to drive a wedge between me and the board?”

“You can resign,” Greg said. “Just quit and leave the company and I won’t have to show the disk to anybody.”

“Resign?”

“You have a golden parachute,” Arnold pointed out. “You won’t be hurting, financially.”

“Quit the company? Is that all you want?”

“No,” said Greg. “There’s one additional thing you’ll have to do.”

“What’s that?”

“Divorce my mother.”

Paul got to his feet again, slbwly this time. “This meeting’s over,” he said through gritted teeth. “There’s the door, Greg. Get out.”

Still sitting, Greg looked up at him sullenly. “You can’t throw me out. This is my house.”

“Not any more.”

Greg’s eyes widened and he looked past Paul to his mother. “I live here, too!”

“Get out,” Paul repeated, pronouncing each word distinctly. “You can send somebody over to clear out your things later. Now get out of here before I throw you through a window.”

Greg shot to his feet. “Mom, are you going to let him do this to me?”

“I think it would be best,” Joanna said. “We obviously can’t live under the same roof anymore. Not now.”

“You’re letting him throw me out of my own home?” Greg’s voice climbed an octave higher.

Arnold lumbered to his feet. “Come on, Greg, you can stay at my house until you find a place of your own.”

The old man pulled at Greg’s jacket sleeve. Looking bewildered, hurt and angry at the same time, Greg let himself be led away toward the door.

Melissa stood up. “For what it’s worth,” she said softly, “I told him this would happen.” Then she left, too.

LEV BRUDNOY

He was a good-will ambassador or a con man, a free spirit or a pariah, depending on your point of view. Levrentь Alexandrovich Brudnoy was a trained fluid dynamicist who somehow managed to wangle a job as a life-support engineer at the ill-starred Russian facility called Lunagrad, and then go on to become its most famous — or infamous — emissary. The Russians had placed their base at the giant crater Aristarchus, up in the area where Mare Imbrium and Oceanus Procellarum merge, nearly a thousand miles northwest of Moonbase.

Like Moonbase, Lunagrad was originally heavily subsidized by the Russian government. After years of supporting the primitive base as basically an outpost for scientific research and further exploration of the Moon, Moscow decided (long before Washington did) to’spin off the base to private enterprise.

While Masterson Aerospace Corporation operated the American Moonbase under government contract, NPO Lunagrad, the corporation hastily formed to run the Russian base, sought investors all over the world. Few were willing to risk their money on a lunar base.

Lev Brudnoy happened to be in Moscow, applying for his second tour of duty at Lunagrad, when the desperate corporate personnel director caught sight of him. Handsome, red-haired, charming, young enough to appear dashing, old enough to appear knowledgeable, Brudnoy would make the ideal ‘image’ of the new Russian space pioneer. After all, the man wanted to return to Lunagrad, no?

Why did he want to return to the Moon? Some said to realized that this new frontier was humankind’s great new challenge and opportunity. Others said it was to make tht extra salary so he could pay his gambling debts. At leas three different women were certain that handsome Lev was running off to the Moon to escape from them (although none of them knew of the other two).

No matter what his reasons, the corporate personnel chief knew a media star when she saw one. She interviewed lca extensively, often in bed, and then unleashed him as the new Russian icon: the space traveller, the lunar explorer, the man of the future.

In his way, Lev helped to raise billions for Lunagrad. He became an international television celebrity. When he went to Lunagrad he brought virtual reality equipment with him so he could ‘escort’ Earthbound visitors through the facility and show them the stark grandeur of the Moon’s harshly beautiful environment.

The Lunagrad that he showed was mostly a television studio’s carefully prepared set, a heavily cosmeticized version of the grubby reality of the cramped, stuffy, overheated and underfinanced underground shelters that composed the true Lunagrad.

Money flowed in for Lunagrad. Not enough to really expand the base, but enough to keep it staggering along. Scientists came to the Moon and departed. Geologists and metallurgists explored the wide expanses around Lunagrad. In Moscow the board of directors, chaired now by the woman who had been personnel director, published glowing full-color brochures of the glorious future of Lunagrad.

Like many tragedies, Brudnoy’s success came crashing down when he went one single step too far. He shuttled back and forth to Lunagrad so often that he became known world-wide as ‘The Moon Man.’ Inevitably, on a certain global television broadcast, he was asked the fateful question: When will tourists be allowed to visit Lunagrad?

“Why not now?” was his immediate, unthinking reply.

Within hours the offices of NPO Lunagrad were deluged with requests for visits to the base on the Moon. For the first time in ages, the Russians had scored a public relations triumph over the West. Tourists to the Moon! It was fantastic. But it promised to be profitable. Even at a cost of millions, there were wealthy individuals who — bored with the Great Wall of China and Antarctica and the space stations in low Earth orbit — simply had to see the Moon firsthand.

Brudnoy led the first contingent himself. Their complaints started even before the booster rocket took off from Baikanour. There were no hotels! They were expected to sleep in barracks, like… like… well, like cosmonauts or scientists. Lunagrad was small, crowded, smelled bad. The food was awful. There weren’t enough spacesuits for everyone to go out for a walk on the Moon’s surface at the same time; they had to take turns. And the suits stank!

On and on, a litany of complaints that went all the way back to Mother Russia and over the television networks to the rest of the world.

Lunar tourism was set back twenty years. Lunagrad was exposed as a dirty, dangerous, crowded and unwholesome frontier outpost. Lev Brudnoy was accused of fronting for a fraud. Lawsuits were actually started by several of the American tourists, although the Russian government quietly quashed them — with Washington’s even quieter acquiescence.

Lev Brudnoy became a pariah. He was no longer welcome in the Moscow offices of NPO Lunagrad, nor in the beds of women who had adored him only weeks earlier.

Then came the most tragic blow of all. Their finances ruined, NPO Lunagrad declared bankruptcy. Lunagrad would shut down. Permanently.

Lev was at Lunagrad when the terrible news came. Most of the skeleton crew of scientists and cosmonauts did not blame him, exactly, but they did not console him either.

Deep in his heart, Lev knew he had done nothing truly wrong. And he wanted to continue his life as a ‘lunik.’ So he commandeered one of the last rocket vehicles left at Lunagrad, reprogrammed its guidance computer with his own hands, and flew it in one long ballistic arc to Moonbase, where he asked for asylum.

The people at Moonbase had seen Lev on television, of course. They immediately took a liking to the big, lovable redheaded Russian. Besides, they had no way to get him back to Lunagrad; Lev’s rocket transport could be refueled of course, but somehow its guidance computer had broken down as soon as the craft had landed at Moonbase.

After somewhat frenzied discussions with Savannah, Moscov and Washington, it was decided that Lev could become a Masterson Corporation employee without losing his Russian citizenship. But it was all kept very quiet. Lev’s days as a television idol were over. He became a regular visitor to Moonbase, working there six months at a time, then spending a month Earthside.

He even returned to Moscow, but only briefly. Too many women were waiting for him there.

MARE NUBIUM

A part of his mind wanted to giggle. I must be going crazy, Paul thought. Yet it was slightly ludicrous, leaning against the massive boulder, alone on the desolate lunar plain, miles from shelter, running out of oxygen while the fingers of his right hand wiggled pitifully around the metal collar of his surface suit, trying to reach the water tube.

Suppose I die like this. When they finally find me they’ll think I strangled myself.

He wanted to laugh but his throat was too dry for it. Sweat stung his eyes, though. I’m not dehydrated. Not yet.

There! His thumb and forefinger grasped the slim plastic tube. It was just below his chin, out of his field of vision. Blinking the sweat away, Paul slowly, carefully slid his fingers along the tube. He could not feel a kink in it. The tube went into the metal collar ring, where it connected with the piping that ran inside the suit, across the left shoulder to the water tank in the life-support backpack.

Maybe when I fell I dislodged the connection in the collar, he guessed. Don’t feel any wetness. The tube’s not ruptured. He spent several precious minutes searching for kinks in the slim tube, finding none.

Must be the connection inside the collar ring, he told himself. No way to get to it.

He pushed himself up to a standing position and stared out at the sharp horizon, blazing in unfiltered sunlight. Must be at least another ten miles to go. Without water I won’t make it. He held up his forearm display panel. In the shade of the boulder the temperature was a hundred eighty below zero. But just a foot away, in the sunlight, it was over two hundred above, to knew. And still rising.

His mouth was parched. Can’t go ten more miles it the sunshine without drinking water. You’ll dehydrate and collapse.

Okay, he said to himself. If it is to be, it’s up to me. You know what you’ve got to do. Make it quick and do it right You won’t get two chances.

If the water tube was no longer properly connected insidi the collar ring, the only way to fix the problem was to re-seal the collar. Inside a shelter, or even in an airlock, Paul would have unlocked the collar seal, taken off his helmet, checked the connection to make certain it wasn’t blocked or broken then put the helmet back on and sealed it tight again.

Out here in the vacuum of the lunar surface he didn’t have that luxury. But I can do most of it, he told himself. If I’m quick enough.

Painfully he wormed his arm back into its sleeve and wriggled his fingers back into the glove. Then, still, breathing hard, swiftly going through the emergency procedure in his mind. It works in the procedures he told himself. Now let’s see if it works for real.

He took one long, last breath, then exhaled slowly. Holding: his breath, he clicked open the seal of the collar ring and slid the helmet half a turn, as if he were going to take it off. A slight hiss of air made every nerve in his body tighten. But he held the helmet for a moment that seemed years long, then twisted it back to the closed position and snapped the seal shut again.

The hissing stopped and Paul took a big, grateful gulp of oxygen.

Then he turned his head to the left and found the nipple of the water tube with his lips. Carefully he sipped.

Water. Just a dribble, and it was warm and flat. But it tasted better than champagne to him.

He took another sip. Still had to suck hard, but at least some water was flowing now. The connection had been dislodged when he fell and now it was back in place. Okay.

“Okay,” he said aloud, his throat not so parched now. “Let’s get on with it.”

He started off again, still using the trail of his own boot prints to point him in the right direction. The glare of the sun made him want to squint, even behind the heavily tinted visor.

Ten more miles,” he said. “Okay, maybe twelve. Could be less, though. Hard to tell.”

He trudged on, boots kicking up soft clouds of dust that fell languidly in the gentle gravity of the Moon. His mind turned back to Greg. Nanomachines. The sonofabitch turned them into a murder weapon. Kid’s brilliant. Crazy but brilliant. Will he turn on Joanna? Will he try to kill his own mother? How crazy is he? Or is it all a very clever scheme to get what he’s always wanted — total control of the corporation. Total control of his mother. Total control of Melissa, too.

Melissa. Paul thought about her as pushed himself across the barren rocky plain. Sweet silky Melissa. I knew she’d be my downfall. I knew it, but I let it happen anyway.

SAN FRANCISCO

Paul’s tour of the corporation’s divisions took him to Houston Denver, Los Angeles and finally to the struggling nano technology division in San Jose, squarely in the dilapidated heart of what had once been called Silicon Valley.

Joanna stayed in Savannah. They had not made love since the ill-starred trip to the space station. The night after Greg’s confrontation over the videodisk, Joanna had flinched when Paul had touched her in bed.

“Not now,” she said. “I just can’t.”

Trying not to feel angry, Paul leaned against the pillows and grumbled, “You’re acting as if I did kill Gregory.”

Joanna turned to face him. “Maybe we did, Paul. In a way.”

Paul started to shake his head.

“He found out about us,” Joanna said. “That might have driven him to kill himself. We’re responsible.”

The hell we are.”

“Why else would he do it?” she asked, her voice filled with anxiety. Yet her eyes were dry and clear. “Unless Greg’s right and somebody actually did murder him?”

“He blew his own brains out,” Paul insisted.

“But why?”

Paul thought a moment. “Good question. I’ll ask McPherson to look into it.”

“What do you mean?”

“There must have been some reason for Gregory’s suicide. And I don’t mean us. Let McPherson hire some investigators. There’s a lot about Gregory’s life that we don’t know about.”

Joanna’s face hardened. “There’s a lot about his life that I don’t want to know about. Not the details.”

“Okay. But I want to know the details. I want to know if there’s anything there that could be a reason for his killing himself.”

“Such as?”

“How the hell would I know? Let McPherson look into it.”

Joanna agreed — hesitantly, Paul thought. But they didn’t make love that night, nor any night afterward until Paul left on his swing of visits to the corporation’s facilities across the country.

Paul was surprised to see Bradley Arnold at the Houston division. The chairman of the board was sitting in the division manager’s office when Paul arrived. He looked uneasy, his bulging frog’s eyes darting back and forth between Paul and the division chief, who was coming around his desk, his hand extended to Paul.

“I didn’t know you were coming here, Brad,” Paul said as he shook hands with the youthful division manager. “I could have flown you out in my plane.”

“I’m on my way to a meeting in Tokyo,” Arnold said, fiddling with his ill-fitting toupee nervously.

“Tokyo? By way of Houston?” Paul forced himself to chuckle as he sat beside the chairman in front of the manager’s desk. Arnold refused to fly in the Clipperships. He would take all day to get from Savannah to Tokyo on his private supersonic jet rather than make the jump in forty minutes aboard a Clippership.

“I wanted to stop off here and talk with you,” Arnold replied. Turning to the manager, he added, “In private.”

The manager took the hint and excused himself. Once he shut the office door behind him, Paul asked, “What’s this all about, Brad?”

Radiating earnestness out of his florid face, Arnold said, “I know it looked as if I were on Greg’s side, back there at the house—”

“It sure did,” said Paul.

“But I’m on your side, Paul. I want you to understand tha and believe it.”

Yeah, Paul said to himself. And Brutus loved Caesar so much he stabbed him.

“I wanted that meeting to be a reconciliation between you two. I had no idea Greg was going to make the demand he did.”

“You didn’t seem terribly surprised,” Paul said.

“Oh, but I was!”

“If I remember correctly, you told me that you were going to play Greg’s videodisk for the rest of the board members.”

“I had no choice!” Arnold pleaded. “Greg’s going to do it anyway, so I went along with him. How can I act as a mediate between the two of you if he doesn’t trust me?”

Paul looked into Arnold’s hyperthyroid eyes and saw nothing but ambition. He’s playing both sides of the street or trying to. If Greg can shove me out of the corporation, Brad runs the show. Greg’ll be CEO but Brad will be pulling the kid’s strings. If I hang in and beat Greg, the bastard wants me to believe that he’s been on my side all along.

“All right,” Paul said calmly. “What are you going to do about the disk?”

Arnold spread his chubby hands in a gesture of helplessness. “What can I do? Greg’s determined to show it to each and every member of the board. All I can do is try to downplay it, tell them that Gregory had turned into a paranoid alcoholic and committed suicide.”

Pouncing on that, Paul demanded, “You’ll say that to the board?”

Arnold nodded.

“In front of Greg?”

“Yes.”

Thinking swiftly, Paul said, “All right, then. Can you call an emergency meeting of the board as soon as I get back from this trip? Let’s get this out in the open and finish it, once and for all.”

Bobbing his head up and down, Arnold said, “The quarterly meeting is due—”

“I don’t want to wait for the quarterly meeting,” Paul snapped. “Call a special meeting and play the videodisk for them all at the same time, before Greg can get to them.”

“I think he’s trying to meet each board member individually,” Arnold said, “and show the disk to each of them in private.”

“All the more reason for speed, then. Set up an emergency meeting right now.” Paul pointed to the phone console on the manager’s desk.

“Yes, good thinking.” The board chairman pushed himself out of his chair and went to the phone.

Nodding, satisfied, Paul got up and headed for the door. “Thanks, Brad,” he called over his shoulder. “Have a good meeting in Tokyo.”

Arnold waved to Paul, the phone receiver in his other hand. But as soon as Paul left him alone in the office, he phoned Gregory Masterson III in Savannah.

Melissa Hart was also at the Houston plant. She told Paul she had come to help negotiate new work rules for the factory that was being converted from making commercial airliners to building Clipperships.

She was at the Los Angeles facility, too. And then, when he got to San Francisco, Paul saw her walk into the lounge at the Stanford Court.

No one who could afford to avoid it stayed overnight in San Jose: despite all the efforts at rebuilding the area after the economic collapse that had swept the American computer industry at the turn of the century, the slums were still dangerous and dirty. The corporation’s travel office booked Paul into the Stanford Court Hotel in the heart of San Francisco.

The nanotechnology division was Greg’s special baby; his father had let Greg pump money into a nascent technology even though any hope of profitability was years, maybe decades, away. The board of directors had tried more than once to admit defeat and close the division down. Then they wanted to move it away from San Jose, to a’safer’ location in Nevada.

Paul had led the fight to keep the nanotech division in San Jose; he had convinced the board of directors that the corporation had a responsibility to keep as many jobs in the region as possible. His strong moral stand — and a stiff helping of government subsidies — swayed the board to do the right thing. And take every public relations advantage of it that they could.

It was late afternoon. Paul had just arrived in San Francisco; tomorrow morning a limousine would take him to the waterfront, where a helicopter was set to fly him to San Jose for the day’s meetings and inspections of the labs and prototype factory. Then, back to the airport and home to Savannah. And Joanna. And Greg.

He stopped off in the lounge for a soothing shot of mellow golden tequila. Cool and dimly lit, with soft music purring in the background, the lounge was less than half full; mostly businessmen and women finishing their day with a drink and some chat.

Then Melissa walked in, tall and beautiful. Men and women both, they all looked her over, from her slick pageboy hairdo to her slitted ankle-length skirt that opened to reveal her long shapely legs as she walked to the bar.

She went straight to the chair beside Paul.

“You following me?” he asked as she swivelled the chair and sat on it.

“I was going to ask you the same question,” she said, smiling slightly.

“I don’t know of any labor negotiations set for the San Jose division,” he said.

“My office has a few complaints of discrimination,” Melissa replied. “Thought I’d try to defuse them before they get serious.”

The bartender came by. She ordered a glass of chardonnay. Paul got a refill on his Tres Generacidns.

“Discrimination?” Paul asked. “Against who?”

Melissa took a sip of wine, then answered, “The usual: Asians claiming the Hispanics are picking on them; Hispanics claiming the Asians won’t promote them. Small stuff, but it could get nasty if we don’t take care of it right away.”

A faint hint of her perfume reached him: subtle, suggestive, it reminded him of the times they had shared.

“So you’re not following me, after all.”

Melissa shook her head.

“Greg didn’t ask you to keep tabs on me?”

Her eyes widened with surprise. “Greg and I are finished. Didn’t you know that?”

“Finished?”

“He dumped me. Just like you did.”

“I didn’t—”

“And for the same reason,” Melissa said bitterly. “Joanna.” —

“What?”

“He’s jealous of you, Paul. And not just over the CEO job. He doesn’t want you with his mother.”

Paul downed half his tequila in one gulp. Feeling it burning tinside him, he muttered, “The kid’s crazy.” …’He needs help, I agree,” Melissa said. “He might do something violent.”

“Violent?”

“It was scary,” she said. “I thought he was going to turn ton me.”

“Why didn’t you leave him?”

She stared down into her wine. “I… To tell you the truth, Paul, I was afraid to. I was almost glad when he told me he wanted to end it.”

Jesus, Paul thought Her job is to handle cases of discrimination and sexual harassment, and she can’t even take care of herself.

“He had to get real teed off about it,” she went on, almost in a whisper. “He couldn’t just tell me he wanted to end it He had to get raving and yelling like some monster. I thought he was going to belt me.”

“Greg?” Paul couldn’t believe what she was saying.

But Melissa nodded solemnly. “Underneath all that self control he’s a wild man. He’s like a bomb, all wound up tight and ready to explode.”

“Maybe we ought to get the company shrink to look him over,”

“You’d have to tie him hand and foot first.”

Paul finished his tequila and motioned to the bartender foi another. Inevitably he invited Melissa to have dinner with him, and they made their way — Paul just a bit unsteadily — down the stairs to the venerable Fourneau’s Ovens.

“Like old times,” Melissa said, smiling at him.

“’Yeah,” Paul agreed. Old times. Life was a lot simpler then. No ties, no responsibilities.

As they sat across the table from each other Paul thought, It was a mistake to get married. Joanna doesn’t love me. She just wants me to run the company for her until Greg’s old enough to take over. Marrying me kept it in the family, put me under her control. She doesn’t love me at all. We had better sex when we were sneaking around behind Gregory’s back.

Do I love her? The question startled him. He stared at Melissa, coolly beautiful, just an arm’s length away. The street outside was darkening into evening, people were walking by, the sky was fading from pink to violet. He remembered their times in bed together. No holds barred; no questions asked. Just pure physical pleasure.

Do I love Joanna? he asked himself again. If you have to ask, the answer must be no. What the hell is love, anyway? Then why did you marry her? He knew the answer, or at least he thought he did. To take control of the corporation. To keep them from scrapping Moonbase.

But you must have loved her, he insisted to himself. You were wild about her. Yeah, before we got married. Before all this corporate crap got in the way. Before this mess with Greg came up.

I did love her. Maybe I still do. But Greg’s between us now.

And then Paul realized the truth. I don’t know if she cares more about him than me. If we get right down to the crunch, would she take me over her son?

No, he realized. Never. She picked me as a stand-in to hold things together until Greg’s ready to take over. She didn’t realize that he’d challenge me right off the bat. And now that he has challenged me, will she back me or him?

Paul thought he knew the answer.

And here’s Melissa sitting close enough to touch, smiling and sad at the same time, talking about old times and looking at me like she needs me again. And I need her. I really do. I need somebody. I’m all alone in this.

“You’re awful far away,” Melissa said softly.

Paul drank the last of his wine. “Got a lot on my mind, Mel.”

She closed her eyes briefly. Then, “You know what I wish?”

“What?”

“I wish we had a time machine.’He wanted to laugh.

“A time machine.”

“Yes. So we could back one year.”

One year ago he and Melissa were in the midst of their affair.

“You know,” she said softly. “Before all this other shit happened. When it was just you and me.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “That’d be nice.”

Neither of them said another word about it, but once they finished dinner Paul brought Melissa to his suite and slowly, deliciously took off her clothes while she nuzzled him and crooned softly and smiled as he lifted her naked body in his arms and brought her to his bed.

— When Paul woke the next morning to the buzzing of the alarm clock she was gone. Not a trace of her left, except the slight musky smell of her on the pillow he had slipped beneath her hips.

That was pretty stupid, Paul told himself. If Joanna finds out — Suddenly he realized that he had done to Joanna exactly what Gregory had done. Betrayed her.

For somebody who doesn’t really love her, he thought, you feel pretty damned shitty this morning.

SAVANNAH

Joanna could hear the thumping and banging from Greg’s rooms, even from all the way down the hall. She had gone up to her own sitting room, part of the master bedroom suite, when Greg had shown up with two husky movers and a small van to clean out his rooms.

“I’m taking all my belongings,” Greg said tightly to his mother. “That includes my furniture.”

Joanna simply nodded and fled upstairs to her sitting room, not wanting to be in her son’s way, not daring to let him see how miserable it made her to see him moving out.

But there was no other option. Greg and Paul could not live under the same roof.

After what seemed like hours, the noise stopped. Joanna looked up from the hand-held screen of her cyberbook reader. It was only midday; Greg had taken less than an hour to remove his belongings — and the furniture that she had bought for him.

He can’t leave without saying goodbye, she thought. Should I go out and see him before they drive away?

Then she heard his tap on her door. It hadn’t changed since he’d been a little boy. A single gentle tap. She had always responded to it immediately.

“Come in, Greg,” she called, shutting down the screen and placing the cyberbook reader on the end table beside her.

He looked tense, quivering with suppressed anger. Yet his shirt and slacks were neatly pressed, no perspiration stains. If he had physically helped with the moving, it did not show.

Joanna remained seated in the comfortable armchair as Greg crossed the room toward her.

“Did you get everything?” she asked.

“Yes. I think so.”

“There’s quite a lot of things in the basement. Mostly old toys and school papers.”

He shook his head. “I won’t have room for that. My condo’s too small.”

I’ll keep it all here for you.”

Greg swallowed hard. “I— I suppose it’s time that I moved into a place of my own.”

Smiling as gently as she could, Joanna said, “Greg, dearest, you’ve had a place of your own in New York for quite a while now.”

“I mean… moving out of this house.” His voice almost broke. “My home.”

She held her arms out to him and he dropped to his knees and let her embrace him.

“Oh, Greg, I’m so sorry that things have worked out this way. I didn’t want it to happen like this.”

“I know,” he said, his head on her lap. “It’s not your fault.”

“It’s not anyone’s fault.

“It’s his!” Greg snarled, looking up from his mother’s lap, his eyes red and burning. “He’s done this to us!”

“If you mean Paul—”

“He murdered my father!”

Joanna stroked his midnight hair, trying to soothe him. “Greg, I told you… I was with Paul all that afternoon. I really was.”

Shaking his head stubbornly, Greg insisted, “He didn’t have to do it himself. He could have hired someone.”

“He couldn’t have.”

Greg looked into his mother’s eyes. “You have no idea of how low he really is, do you?”

“Now, Greg, I won’t listen—”

“You think he loves you? He loves the corporation! He loves that stupid Moonbase!”

“He’s my husband,” Joanna said.

“Right Sure. And last night he was in bed with Melissa Hart. Some husband.”

Joanna’s could feel her face flame. “That’s not true!”

“Isn’t it? Do you think it’s a coincidence that Melissa’s been at the Houston and L.A. divisions the same time he’s been there? Is it an accident that they both booked the same hotel in San Francisco?”

Joanna’s breath caught in her chest. She could not answer.

“Why shouldn’t he take his pick of younger women?” Greg went on. “He’s the top dog now, isn’t he? He’s an important man, thanks to you. He can have any woman he wants.”

“You’re lying!”

“Check with the travel office. The two of them have been travelling across the country together. Your black CEO and his black mistress.”

“But I thought Melissa…’ Joanna ran out of words. Her thoughts were tumbling through her head.

“Melissa’s a slut who’ll sleep wherever the power is. You gave Paul the power so she’s gone back to him.”

“No…’ she said weakly.

“He murdered my father and he’ll spit on you now that he’s got what he wants.”

“No,” Joanna repeated desperately. “Paul’s not like that. He isn’t!”

“He’s a cheat and a murderer.”

“No!”

“He is! I know he is! He murdered my father and now he’s cheating on you.”

“But why? Why would he murder your father?”

“To get you!” Greg blurted. “To get control of the corporation. To save his precious Moonbase.”

Trying to drive thoughts of Paul in bed with Melissa out of her mind, Joanna shook her head stubbornly.

“But he already had me, Greg. I loved him and he loved me. We were going to tell your father, sooner or later. I was going to get a divorce.”

“But if you divorced Dad, then Paul could never hope to get control of the corporation. He had Dad murdered so he could make himself CEO.”

Joanna said again, “No, Greg. Paul had no idea that he could become CEO. He was shocked when I told him I was going to nominate him.”

“But—”

“And that was just a few minutes before the board meeting started,” Joanna continued. “You were there. Didn’t you see how stunned he looked?”

“I was there, all right,” Greg growled.

“I know, it was a shock to you, too, dear. But I had to make Paul take over the company. I’m sorry I couldn’t explain it to you beforehand.”

“He forced you into it, didn’t he?”

“No, dear. He didn’t know anything about it until just before the meeting started.”

“You didn’t trust me to run the corporation. You still don’t.”

Patiently, trying her best to mollify her son, Joanna explained, “Greg, dearest, you’re not ready yet.”

I’m twenty-eight years old. Dad wasn’t much older when he took over from his father.”

Joanna remembered. Gregory hadn’t been ready, either. And he never really learned how to make the corporation profitable. Under his direction Masterson Aerospace staggered along from one crisis to another: Until Paul pushed through the development of the Clipperships. That saved us, she thought.

“Greg,” she said to her son, “I know that Brad Arnold has been telling you he thinks you’re capable of running the corporation, but Brad’s merely flattering you.”

“Flattering?”

“Brad thinks that he can control you, and through you control the company. That’s why I had to put Paul in charge. To stop Brad.”

“He couldn’t control me.”

“He’s very clever,” Joanna said. “And much more experienced in this kind of infighting.”

“He could never control me.”

Joanna hesitated. Then she said, “Now that I think of it, the only one who could possibly havte thought he’d benefit from your father’s death is Brad.”

Greg’s body twitched as if a live electric wire had touched him. He looked into his mother’s eyes. “Brad?” he whispered, unbelieving.

“Paul had no idea I’d nominate him,” Joanna repeated slowly, thinking out loud. “But Brad would have known that if your father died, he could make you CEO and run the whole company through you.”

“I told you he couldn’t control me!” Greg snapped.

“Yes, yes, I know,” Joanna said quickly, stroking his hair again. “But Brad thought otherwise, I’m certain.”

For several moments Greg remained still, his head in his mother’s lap, as she stroked him soothingly.

At last he said, “Do you really think Brad murdered my father?”

“No,” Joanna said softly. “I think your father committed suicide.”

But you said—”

“I said that the only one who would have profited from your father’s death was Brad.” Before her son could insist he couldn’t be controlled again, she added, “At least, he was the only one who thought he might have profited.”

“Brad,” Greg breathed.

He stayed there kneeling at his mother’s feet until the butler rang from downstairs to say that the moving men were waiting in their van for Greg to direct them to his new home.

Then he kissed his mother’s cheek and left the house.

Joanna sat alone for most of the afternoon, trying to keep herself from phoning the travel office to see if Greg’s accusation was true. Her son’s voice kept ringing in her ears, half triumphant, half sneering: Why shouldn’t he take his pick of younger women? He’s the top dog now, isn’t he? He’s an important man, thanks to you. He can have any woman he wants.

MARE NUBIUM

The Moon turns very slowly on its axis: one complete revolution in just under twenty-eight days. That’s why Paul did not have a GPS signal to guide him as he pushed himself across the mare, hoping that he was heading for the ringwall mountains of the giant crater Alphonsus.

On Earth, two dozen global positioning satellites are enough to provide pinpoint locating fixes for virtually any spot on the globe. The satellites’ orbits are fixed in space while the Earth spins below them. No matter where on Earth you are, there are always at least two satellites above your horizon to give you a precise navigational fix.

To get the same kind of coverage on the Moon, with its slow rotation rate, takes many more satellites. The consortium of private companies and government agencies that had cooperatively set up the lunar GPS system had tried to strike a careful balance between practicality and cost. They had started with a network of six positioning satellites and were adding to the web from time to time.

Just my luck to be out here at a time when the two closest satellites are both too low on the horizon for my suit radio to pick up their signals, Paul grumbled. Maybe it isn’t luck. Maybe Greg timed it all. Is the kid that smart?

What difference does it make? he asked himself as he plodded across the barren lunar plain. Every few minutes he stopped to turn and see if his path remained straight, but he knew that was only the roughest of guides. You could be drifting off to one side or the other and never know it.

He sucked up a mouthful of water, sloshed it around his teeth and then swallowed it:

“Hell,” he muttered, “for all you know you’re heading for the pissin’ south pole by now.”

One of the GPS signals oughtta come through pretty soon. I’ll straighten out my course then. In the meanwhile, keep: pushing ahead.

In the back of his mind Paul knew, as every astronaut knew that what killed people on the Moon was fatigue. More than equipment failure or ignorance or even bad judgment, simple fatigue could wear you down to the point where you forgot just one little, vital thing. And then you were dead.

Paul forgot about the dust.

That powdery, fine dust, like beach sand underfoot, was electrically charged by the constant infall of ionized particles from the solar wind. No matter how carefully you stepped, your boots stirred up little clouds of dust, and some of the stuff inevitably clung electrostatically to your suit.

Through hard experience the men and women who worked on the Moon had learned to include a hand vacuum cleaner in the airlocks of their buried shelters. After an hour or so out on the surface, the suit needed a thorough cleaning. Otherwise the dust would get into everything inside the shelter itself.

It was more than an annoyance. Gritty dust particles worked their way into the hinges of space suits. If enough dust clogged the knees or other joints the suit would stiffen up just like the Tin Woodsman of Oz, left out in the rain. The experienced astronaut listened carefully for grating noises in his suit; kept sensitive to whether or not the joints of his suit were moving smoothly.

When they weren’t too tired to remember.

Paul plodded along. He knew that he had been down on all fours back at the glass-smooth crater that he had slid into. He knew, if he had thought about it consciously, that his gloves probably had a thin sheen of lunar dust clinging to them electrostatically.

But he was too tired to be wary of the dust.

Wish I had a headband, he said to himself as he tried to blink the sweat out of his eyes. He didn’t want to look at the thermometer on his forearm panel, didn’t want to know how hot it really was. The Sun was broiling him, he knew that and it was enough.

The bleak plain stretched in every direction around him, nothing but rocks and dusty regolith and more rocks. In his helmet earphones he heard nothing but the precisely timed beep of his suit radio’s plaintive call to the GPS satellites that were not there to answer. Like a Chinese water torture, Paul groused. Beep. Then wait. And then another beep. Where the fuck’s the answering signal? At least one of the pissing satellites ought to be in range by now.

But he heard only his suit radio’s patient, maddening call signal.

One foot in front of the other, Paul told himself as he pushed along. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other and you’ll get there sooner or later.

His vision blurred and without thinking he wiped at his helmet visor. A film of gray smeared across the visor.

Oh crap! Just what I need; Paul grumbled to himself. The upper half of the visor was covered with dust. He had to peer through the lower half to see where he was going.

Without stopping, he fumbled in the pocket on the right thigh of his suit for an electrostatic cloth. Got to be one in there, he said to himself. If they kept the suit supplies topped off. If the cloth hasn’t already been saturated.

It was almost impossible to feel anything as thin as the cloth with his gloves on, but at last Paul pulled a bright green square from the pocket. He held it up in front of his visor and inspected it as best as he could through the smear of dust. Looks good enough. Most of it was still bright green, although one corner of the cloth had turned gray. It had been used before.

Carefully folding the cloth so that the gray, used section was out of the way, Paul wiped slowly at his visor. It seemed to help, but only a little.

Ought to have windshield wipers on the damned helmets, he thought. The cloth was not doing the job it should have done. Must’ve lost some of its electrostatic charge while it was sitting in the pocket. It’s been used before, too. Christ, it’s just not working!

The gray smear seemed a bit thinner now, not as opaque. Paul could see through it as if it were a frosted window: blurry shapes and shadows, not much more.

He refolded the cloth and tried again. No improvement. All he managed to do was to smear the dust a little further across his visor.

In disgust he tossed the cloth away. It soared like a rigid sheet of thin metal in the airlessness of the Moon, spinning lazily until it sailed out of his range of vision.

“Okay,” Paul muttered. “Now we play pissin’ blind man’s bluff all the way to the next tempo.”

Then he heard a sudden chatter of beeps in his earphones: the signal from a GPS satellite. I’ll play it by ear,” he said aloud, and began to laugh wildly at his pun.

But he needed to look at the displays on his forearm panel to make sense of the GPS navigational signal. His laughter died as he squinted through the dust filming his visor. If he was reading the instruments correctly, he had drifted more than six miles off his course to the next underground shelter.

SAN JOSE

The manager of the nanotech division was barely out of her thirties, young and intense and obviously nervous. Yet she seemed to be the oldest person that Paul could see anywhere in the plant. Her skirted suit of charcoal gray looked as if she hadn’t worn it since her first job interview. She looked uncomfortable in it, as if she longed to be in a t-shirt and jeans, as almost everyone else was.

Paul felt like an old and stuffy grandfather in his light whipcord slacks and tan sports jacket. Good thing I didn’t wear a tie, he said to himself. These kids’d think I came from Mars.

“Mr. Masterson was here last week, y’know,” the manager was saying, “and he said he was very satisfied with the progress we’ve made in the past six months.”

So that’s it, Paul realized as they looked through the thick window into a clean room where white-smocked technicians were bent over laboratory benches. Paul saw that the techs wore white caps over their heads and even had white booties over their shoes. Or sandals, he thought, glancing at the manager’s bare unpainted toes.

“Look,” he said to her, “I’m not here to swing a hatchet, you know.”

The manager’s expression clearly said she didn’t believe Paul. The ID badge pinned to her jacket said Kris Cardenas. She didn’t look Hispanic, though. To Paul she looked like a California surfer chick: an attractive kid with softly curled sandy hair, a swimmer’s broad shoulders, wide sincere cornflower blue eyes and a deep tan. And enough brains in her head to rise to the top of this very competitive high-tech division.

Making a smile for her, Paul explained, “You’ve probably heard that Greg Masterson and I are enemies, haven’t you?”

She nodded warily.

“Well, even if we are that doesn’t mean I want to kill this division just because he’s backing it. From what I can see, you’re doing a good job here.”

Cardenas seemed to be holding her breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“What I’d like to know,” Paul went on, “is whether or not you’re at a stage of development where we can try some practical tests of nanotechnology.”

“We were ready to try clinical tests of tumor killers,” Cardenas said, “but the government ruled that anything intended to go inside human patients has to go through the FDA’s approval procedure, and that takes years’

“I know,” Paul said. Washington’s decision had sent the entire nanotechnology industry into a tailspin. It wiped out any hope of profitability for this division for years to come.

“I can show you the animal tests we’ve done,” Cardenas said, starting down the corridor. “We can destroy tumors with better than eighty percent efficiency — and no collateral damage to healthy tissue, y’know.”

Following her, Paul said, “In animals.”

She nodded vigorously. “Pigs, rhesus monkeys, even chimps. There’s no reason why the bugs shouldn’t work just as well in humans. There’s just no sense to the government’s restrictions!”

With a world-weary shrug, Paul said, “I agree, but they’ve made their decision and we’ve got to live with it.” Or die with it, he added silently.

“It’s stupid,” Cardenas insisted.

“I was wondering, though, could you adapt nanotechnology to other applications?”

“Oh, sure,” she said easily, pronouncing the word shirr .

They had reached a set of big double doors. Cardenas pushed one open and they stepped through into a large room filled with animal cages. The walls and floor were tiled in white. The smell of animal fur and excrement was enough to make Paul’s eyes water.

“Careful,” Cardenas warned. “These floor tiles get kind of slick, y’know. The handlers have to wash them down a lot.”

I’ll bet,” said Paul.

As she led Paul past a row of cages filled with hairless lab rats, Cardenas told him, “We’re already adapting what we’ve developed here for other applications.”

One of the monkeys yipped at them and within half a second all of them were howling and shrieking. The din was overpowering, echoing off the tiled walls like shock waves pounding on Paul’s ears.

Looking worried, Cardenas shouted over the noise, “Maybe we’d better go someplace quieter.”

“Amen to that,” Paul yelled back.

Once they were out in the corridor again, with the heavy doors muffling most of the noise, Cardenas said, “Just about every one of those monkeys had cancerous tumors. Y’know, really nasty carcinomas and stuff like that. The nanobugs found them inside their bodies and disassembled them, molecule by molecule.”

“So once you finally get FDA approval this division ought to be worth a good-sized fortune,” Paul said reassuringly.

“For sure.”

“In the meantime, though…’ Paul let the thought dangle in the air between them.

“In the meantime,” she said, leading him farther down the corridor, “we’re trying to spin off the medical work into toxic waste cleanup.”

“You can program the bugs to eat toxic wastes?”

Cardenas nodded vigorously. “It’s pretty simple, really, compared to the tumor work. They can go through a waste dump, find the molecules you want to get rid of, and take them apart. Nothing left but carbon dioxide, water, and pure elements — which you can recycle.”

“Sounds good,” Paul said.

“We’re trying to get the state environmental agency to participate in a demonstration we ve set up.”

“Not the federal EPA?”

Cardenas wrinkled’her nose. “The feds are real assholes. My strategy is to get the state environmental guys on our side and let them convince the feds.”

Paul remembered the first man he had worked for, when he had started at Masterson Aerospace. “Make the customer a party to the crime,” he had advised. “Get them on your side and they’ll do half your work for you.” His respect for Cardenas went up a notch.

She stopped at a locked door with a RESTRICTED ACCESS sign over it. “At least this area will be quieter than the animal pens.”

A few taps at the electronic lock and the door swung open. Paul followed her into a small, stuffy, windowless room crammed with consoles and instrumentation. The only lights came from the display screens on the consoles. The room felt overly warm, uncomfortably so.

As Paul peeled off his jacket, Cardenas leaned over one of the keyboards and typed out a single command. A shutter slid back from the blank wall on Paul’s right and he saw a window that looked into another room.

An ancient Cadillac sat in there, one of those old monsters heavy with chrome and tailfins. Bright red, where there was paint still on it. Almost half the side that Paul could see was dull bare metal. The car was up on blocks, although the rear tire was still on its hub. The front tire was gone. The hood was propped up part-way; the windshield wipers were gone.

“What’s this?” Paul asked. “A pop art exhibit?”

Cardenas grinned at him. “It’s our toxic waste exhibit. What do you think of it?”

Paul turned back to stare at the Cadillac through the thick window. “Nanobugs are taking it apart?”

She nodded happily. “We’ve got four different types of specialized gobblers in there.”

“Gobblers?”

“Nanomachines specifically designed to attack certain molecules, break them apart into their constituent atoms.”

“Gobblers,” Paul repeated.

“One set’s taking out the paint,” Cardenas explained. “Another is reducing the organic molecules in the tires to carbon dioxide, methane, and whatnot The third is working on the engine, separating out all the tungsten and platinum in the steel alloys.”

“Tungsten and platinum?”

“They’re valuable metals, y’know. We want to separate them out so we can recycle them.”

“I see,” said Paul.

“And the fourth set of nanos is gobbling the plastics in the dashboard, steering wheel, seat covers and such.”

Paul could see the sheer fervor of achievement radiating from her face. A muffled bang made him snap his attention back to the Cadillac. The one tire remaining had just blown out and now hung limply on its hub. Paul thought he could see it twitching like something alive being devoured by parasites.

“Why do you keep the car in a sealed chamber?” he asked.

“To keep the bugs from spreading, of course,” Cardenas answered. “We keep the chamber at ten below zero, Celsius. The bugs are programmed to stop at any temperature above zero.”

“But why—”

“To make sure they won’t start gobbling people!”

“Oh.” Paul hadn’t thought of that.

Cardenas didn’t seem the least bit condescending as she explained, “The bugs don’t see any difference between your molecules and the Cadillac’s, y’know. Except temperature. We design them to immobilize themselves way before they get to human body temperature.”

Paul nodded slowly. “Then how do you expect to use them in toxic waste dumps if you’re worried that they might attack people?”

Her smile faded slightly. “We’re working on that problem. We’ve got to make them much more specific than they are now.

Muchmore specific. Tailor them to distinctive molecules, so they’ll gobble those molecules and nothing else.”

“Can you do that?”

“In time,” she replied.

Time costs money, Paul knew. It was the old story: an exciting new possibility that could make fortunes of profit, but first you have to sink fortunes of investment into it and pray that it eventually succeeds.

“What else do you have?” he asked.

Cardenas went back to the control console, flicked her fingers across a different keyboard. Another section of shutters slid back, this time on Pauls left.

“Nanomachines can build things, too, y’know,” Cardenas said.

At first Paul thought he was looking at a child’s sand castle, the kind that kids build on the beach. The chamber he was looking into was hardly larger than a phone booth, dimly lit by a single bare bulb in the ceiling. Its floor was covered with sand or a grayish brown powder of some sort. In the middle of it stood a half-built tower.

“Here we’ve got assemblers at work,” Cardenas said, her voice low, almost a reverential whisper.

Paul studied the tower. It was about three feet tall. It wasn’t made of sand, he realized. It was gray, almost the same color as the stuff strewn over the floor, but it looked smoother, metallic.

“What is this?”

In the dim light from the display screens Cardenas’ expression was difficult to read. But her voice was vibrating with barely-suppressed excitement.

“Last week Mr. Masterson phoned me with a special request. This is the result.”

“What’d Greg want?”

“That sand is from the Moon,” Cardenas said. “We’ve put in a few simple assemblers and the tower is what they’re building.”

“Assemblers? You mean nanomachines?”

She nodded eagerly. “Actually, we put one hundred assemblers into the sand, five days ago.”

“And they’ve built the tower,” Paul said.

“They’re still building it. Watch real careful and you can see new features being added.”

Paul turned and stared at the tower rising out of the lunar sand. It rose perpendicularly from a wide, low base, its flanks smooth and featureless except for small setbacks every foot or so.

“Nothing seems to be happening,” he said.

Cardenas peered at the tower. “They stop every once in a while, like they’re taking a coffee break. Then they get busy again.”

“Don’t you know why they stop?”

“For sure.” She grinned. “Each time they reach a change in the blueprint we’ve programmed into them, they stop until the proper members of the team are in the right position to start the new phase of the building.”

Paul’s eyes widened. “You make them sound as if they’re intelligent.”

“About as intelligent as bacteria,” Cardenas replied.

Paul grunted.

“The assemblers spent the first four days building more of themselves out of the aluminum and silicon in the sand. Yesterday that tower wasn’t here.”

“No shit,” Paul breathed.

“The tower is mainly titanium, y’know. The assemblers are taking titanium atoms preferentially from the sand and using them to build the tower.”

“How do they know—”

“It’s all programmed into them,” Cardenas said. “We did this sort of thing last year, as a demonstration for Mr. Masterson and his father, when they visited here. We didn’t use lunar sand then; just beach sand. We built a really neat castle for them.”

Paul looked at her. “Could you build more complex stuff?”

Without an eyeblink’s hesitation, Cardenas said, “We could build a whole base on the Moon for you, if you give us the time to program the assemblers.”

Paul saw that there were a couple of little wheeled typist’s chairs by the consoles. He pulled one up and sank onto it Cardenas took the other one facihg him.

“Instead of sending tons and tons of heavy machinery to the Moon,” she said, leaning toward him, “all you’d have to do is send a sampling of the necessary assemblers. They’ll build more of themselves out of the raw materials in the Moon’s soil—”

“Regolith,” Paul corrected automatically.

“-and then they’ll construct your base out of the regolith, ” she stressed the word, “all by themselves.”

“One shipload of nanomachines,” Paul mused.

“Could build your whole base for you,” she said.

“How long would it take you to develop the nanomachines? Specifically for Moonbase, I mean.”

She waved her hands in the air. “Simple tasks, like building airtight shelter shells and other construction forms, that’s pretty easy. When you get down to complicated equipment, like air regenerators and pressure pumps, we’ll need a while to program the assemblers.”

“A while? How long?”

“Months. Maybe years. We’ve never tried to build anything very complicated. Not yet It’ll take some time.”

A new thought struck Paul. “Most of the compounds in the regolith are oxygen-bearing. And there’s hydrogen imbedded in the top layers of the regolith, blown in on the solar wind. Could your machines—”

“Produce water out of those atoms? For sure. That’s no problem!”

“Jesus H. Christ on a motorcycle.”

“You want a motorcycle, we’ll build you a motorcycle.” Cardenas laughed.

“Maybe we ought to be talking with Harley,” Paul kidded back.

“Or General Motors.” She was suddenly completely serious.

INFLIGHT

Paul was in the company helicopter heading back to San Francisco International Airport when his pocket phone beeped.

It was Melissa. “Delta’s flight’s been cancelled,” she said, “and there’s nothing connecting to Savannah until late tonight. Can I ride back with you?”

“Sure,” Paul said, knowing it was a mistake, not knowing how to say no without feeling like a jerk.

Melissa was waiting for him in the hangar where his twin-engined jet was sheltered. The same plane in which he and Joanna had made love for the first time. Melissa was standing beside the plane, looking slightly forlorn in a baggy pair of tan slacks and a light sweater that hung loosely on her.

“Sorry to impose on you,” she said as soon as Paul got to within arm’s reach. I’d have to fly the redeye to Atlanta and then make a connection at six tomorrow morning, otherwise.”

“It’s okay,” Paul said. Last night they had been in bed together. But that was last night.

Melissa picked up her single garment bag. “I know I look a mess. This is my airline outfit. It’s for comfort, not looks.”

He made a smile for her. “You look fine, kid.

As he walked toward the plane beside Melissa, Paul remembered his elderly grandfather on the day the news broke that the first black president of the United States had been caught in the sack with a woman who was not his wife.

His grandfather had shaken his head mournfully. “See the trouble a man’s cock can get him into?”

Yeah, I see, Gramps. But Seeing ain’t the same thing as doing.

Paul let Melissa sit in the co-pilot’s seat as he slipped on the headset and checked out the plane’s instruments. She did not say a word to him as he taxied out to the runway, got clearance for takeoff, and then shoved the throttles forward.

The engines howled joyfully and the plane surged down the runway, faster, faster, the ground blurring as Paul watched the digital airspeed display, then pulled back with an artist’s delicate touch to rotate the nose wheel off the concrete. The plane seemed to leap into the air and Paul’s heart soared with it.

Once they cleared the airport traffic and Paul put the twin-jet on course eastward, he slipped his earphones down around his neck and turned to Melissa.

“Too bad there’s no Clippership service to Savannah,” he said.

“When will we get there?”

“Eleven-thirty, eastern time, the way things look now. We’ll have to make a pit stop in Amarillo. Gas up.”

Melissa nodded. “Beats the redeye.”

For a while neither of them said anything. Paul watched the shadows lengthening below as they flew over the mountains with the sun setting behind them.

“Lake Tahoe,” he said.

“Uh-huh.”

Time went by in silence. Then he pointed out the Grand Canyon, barely visible off in the distance in the twilight haze.

Melissa stared out the window on her side of the cockpit until a cloud bank obscured the ground altogether.

Finally, Paul said hesitantly, “About last night—”

Melissa turned sharply toward him. “Forget it,” she said.

“Forget it?”

“It never happened.”

Paul felt puzzled. “What d’you mean?”

“You’re a married man and you’re worried I’m going to shoot my mouth off to Greg or somebody. Well, don’t worry about it.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Shit, Mel, I wasn’t thinking you were a spy for Greg.”

“The hell you weren’t.”

“You told me you two had broken up.”

“Yes. That’s right.”

Paul’s befuddlement deepened. Melissa seemed irritable, almost angry.

“Look,” he said. “I’m sorry about last night. I shouldn’t have done it. I am a married man and—”

“Oh, Paul, it’s not your fault. I…” She seemed to want to say more, but stopped.

Paul didn’t know what to say. If anything. It was a stupid thing to do, he told himself. If Joanna finds out I’ll have hurt her just as bad as Gregory hurt her in the past.

“Do you know why Greg and I broke up?” Melissa asked, her voice so low Paul had to strain to hear her over the muted rumbling of the engines.

“You said it was because of Joanna.”

Melissa shook her head slowly. “That’s only part of it. I mentioned the magic word, and that drove him off the deep end.”

“The magic word?”

“Baby.”

Paul wasn’t certain he had heard her correctly.

“I told Greg that I wanted his baby,” Melissa said sorrowfully. “I told him that when a man and a woman love each other they make a baby together.”

“He didn’t like the idea.”

“I thought he was going to punch me out.”

“If he ever lays a hand on you—”

Melissa silenced Paul by laying a slender finger on his lips. “I can take care of myself,” she said. “You’ve got a wife to think about. You can’t go around fighting my battles.”

But Paul pictured Greg hitting Melissa. Just like the spoiled sonofabitch, he thought. He doesn’t love anybody except himself. If he ever touches her I’ll punch out his lights, but good.

After they stretched their legs in Amarillo and took off again, Melissa curled up in one of the capacious reclining seats in the plane’s cabin and fell asleep. Paul put the plane on autopilot, but flayed in the cockpit, awake, his mind churning with thoughts of Greg and Melissa and Joanna and the nanomachines that could make Moonbase a going proposition if only he could hammer the idea through the board of directors. But Greg was going to use the next meeting to accuse him of murder, or at least fornication. How can he attack me without attacking his mother? Then Paul realized that Greg was so furious with blind hate that he wanted to hurt Joanna, punish her for falling in love with a black man.

It was almost midnight when Paul finally put the twin-jet down on the company’s airstrip, a few miles from Savannah. He was tired, drained physically and emotionally. Gratefully, he saw that the limo was there at the apron in front of the hangar, waiting for him.

Paul helped Melissa down the little metal ladder to the concrete of the apron. When he turned back toward the limousine, he saw that Joanna was standing beside it, staring at them.

MARE NUBIUM

Do I have enough oxygen to make it? Paul asked himself that question again and again as he struggled across the rocky undulating lunar plain, trying to make up for the time and distance he had lost by straying so far off course.

He pushed himself harder. “Gotta get smokin’ now,” he told himself. “Gotta get there before the oxy runs out.”

Somewhere in the back of his mind he remembered an equation that showed how oxygen consumption is related to the amount of physical work the body is doing. From some aerobics class he had taken back when he was in astronaut training, a thousand years ago. Shaking his head inside his helmet, Paul tried to forget about the equation. Just keep pumping along, he told himself. Go, go, go.

At least he had the GPS signal to keep him company. Cheerful little chirp in his earphones, almost like a songbird but nowhere near as melodious. Just a monotonous steady set of peeps, repeating over and over again.

Hey, don’t knock it, he told himself. Long as you can hear that boring little song you’re on the right track. You can listen to Wynton Marsalis some other time.

Through his dust-smeared visor Paul could make out the bulky shape of a massive boulder rising up on the horizon ahead of him, like a ship coming in from some far-off land. Boulder big as a house, Paul thought. As he got closer to it he saw that it was as big as a shopping mall.

Got to go around it. Damn! Pissin’ chunk of rock’s gonna force me ten-twenty minutes outta my way.

Squinting through his dust-covered visor, Paul saw that the huge boulder was pitted and rough, with a fairly flat top. Maybe I can climb over it. Be faster than walking all the way around it.

But a voice in the back of his mind warned, You got enough troubles out here without rock-climbing. Stay on the flat ground and walk around the damned rock.

Still, Paul studied the boulder as he came closer to it. I could climb up this side. Looks easy enough.

And rip your suit? And how do you know what the othei side’s like? Once you get up on top of it, you gotta climb down again.

I can do it, he insisted silently.

Don’t.

“It’ll save me almost half an hour,” Paul said aloud, trying to convince himself.

The voice in his head reminded him, There are old astronauts and there are bold astronauts, but there are no old, bold astronauts.

Paul reached the rock. It towered over him as he put out a gloved hand and touched its rough surface. He took a deep breath, then started climbing.

SAVANNAH

Through the whole ride back to their house, Joanna stayed coldly silent. A perfunctory peck on the cheek as Paul got into the limo, then not a word. Paul could feel icicles growing from the roof of the car. She can’t be pissed off just because she saw Mel rode back here with me. Somebody’s told her about last night. Who? Who could possibly know? Unless it was all a setup! He felt his stomach go hollow, the way it does the first few minutes in weightlessness.

A setup. Melissa came on to me deliberately, and she must have reported right back to — who? Greg, most likely. Or maybe Brad; be just like the sneaky little sonofabitch to pull a trick like this.

Paul waited until they were in the bedroom. He flopped his travel bag on the king-sized bed as Joanna went around to her dresser and sat in front of its triple mirror.

“I did something I’m ashamed of,” he began, staying on his side of the bed.

Joanna looked at him in the mirror. Paul could see her face-on, and both profiles. She looked calm, unsmiling but not scowling either. If she was angry she wasn’t showing it on her face. Just sat there, the ice queen: regal and cold, staring at him through the mirror, her back to him.

“I went to bed with Melissa last night,” Paul said, hoping that confession would ease the tension.

Her chin went up; her eyes flared.

“It was a stupid thing to do,” he went on. “I had more to drink than I should have.” No, he commanded himself. Don’t hide behind an excuse.

“Did you enjoy it?” Joanna asked coldly.

“Not once I woke up.”

She turned to face him. “Paul, I want the absolute truth from you.”

“You’re getting it.”

“Is this the first time you’ve done this?”

Instantly he replied, “I haven’t slept with another woman since we first went to bed together, Joanna. Until last night.”

“You had an affair with Melissa before, hadn’t you?”

“We were together when I met you. I left her for you.”

“And now you’ve gone back to her.”

He stepped around the bed, then sat on its edge, on her side, close enough to Joanna to reach out and touch her. Yet he kept his hands on his knees.

“Joanna, it wasn’t her. It could’ve been anybody. I was alone. We haven’t made love since we went to the space station. It—”

“So it’s my fault?”

“No,” he said quickly. “Nobody’s fault but mine. Not even Melissa’s, really. I should’ve kept my wick in my pants.”

“Your wick?” Despite herself Joanna smiled a little. “I’ve never heard it called that before.”

“It was a rotten thing to do,” he said. “It won’t happen again. I promise you.”

She sighed wearily. “So did Gregory.”

Paul gritted his teeth. You knew that was going to come up, he said to himself.

“I’m not Gregory,” he said tightly.

Joanna’s shoulders slumped. “Maybe it’s me,” she murmured. “Maybe I do something to cause this sort of thing to happen. Maybe I pick out men who’ll betray me.”

Paul reached out and took both her hands in his. “Christ, Jo, it’s not your fault! I’m the guilty party here.”

She wouldn’t look into his eyes.

“You knew about it, didn’t you?” Paul asked. “You knew about it before I landed.”

“Greg told me that you and Melissa were travelling together.”

“Greg.”

“I told him I didn’t believe it, but he said I could check with the travel office. So I did.”

“She was in several of the same cities I was. I only saw her in the offices, though. We weren’t travelling together. We— weren’t shacking up.”

“Until last night.”

“That was a mistake that won’t be repeated.”

Joanna said nothing. She still would not meet his eyes.

“I think Greg sent her to nail me,” Paul said. “The bitch did this just to cause trouble between us.” With a weary shake of her head, Joanna replied, “Greg is finished with her. They broke up. He can’t stand the mention of her name.”

“That’s an act he puts on.”

“No,” she said. “I know my son better than that. He hates the sound of her name.”

“Then it had to be Brad who set me up.”

“Why does it have to be a trap?” Joanna asked. “Why can’t you accept the fact that you’ve made a mess of our marriage?”

“Don’t say that! I don’t want our marriage to be hurt.”

“It’s been hurt, Paul. You’ve hurt it.”

“Okay. I know that. But—”

“I’m pregnant.”

It hit him like a physical blow. Paul sat there, hunched forward, holding both Joanna’s hands tightly in his. He blinked several times.

“Pregnant?” In his own ears his voice sounded a full octave higher than normal.

Joanna nodded. “It wasn’t just the weightlessness that was making me sick on the space station. I’ve been sick every morning for—”

“We’re going to have a baby?” Suddenly everything was swept away. A baby! Paul had never even considered the possibility. At his age, at Joanna’s age…

“Will you be okay? Can you do it without endangering your health?”

Joanna smiled patiently at him. “It’s not an illness, Paul.”

“Yeah, I know. Put I mean, isn’t it kind of late in the game for you?”

“The obstetrician says I’m in fine condition and there reason why I can’t bring the baby to term.”

“A baby.” Paul glowed with the wonder of it. “I never thought I’d be a father.”

Her smile widened. “It does happen, you know.”

He pulled her to him, sat her beside him on the edge of the bed and kissed her on the lips. “We’ve got to take extra-special good care of you.”

But Joanna had not forgotten anything. “Paul — about this thing with Melissa.”

“That was finished this morning,” he said quickly. “And nothing like it is going to happen again. Ever.”

“I want to believe you.”

“Believe it.”

“It’s just that — Gregory started womanizing when I was pregnant with Greg.”

“I’m not Gregory,” he said firmly. “I told you that and I meant it”

For several moments Joanna did not reply. Then, “All right, Paul. I’ll believe you.”

For now, she added silently. I’ll trust you as far as I can watch you. Maybe it will all work out all right, but I’m not going to sit by and watch my second husband humiliate me the way my first one did.

And Paul was thinking, This changes everything. I’ll have a kid to take care of. A son, maybe. I can’t let Greg gets his hands on the corporation. Not now. It’s going to be my child’s inheritance. A son. I want it to be a son.

Ed McPherson was a chubby, moonfaced, baldheaded make-believe Texan who dressed like a cowboy instead of the head of a major corporation’s extensive legal department. Bom in New Jersey, educated at Princeton and Harvard Law, he cultivated a handlebar moustache and made a fetish of wearing cowboy boots, suede jackets and bolo ties. Word was around the office that the only time he wore a business suit was when he appeared before the Supreme Court of the United States.

Which was never. McPherson rarely strayed farther from the headquarters of Masterson Corporation than the corporation’s Wall Street offices in New York.

Paul was in his office in Savannah when McPherson’s call came through. He put the lawyer’s image on the display screen of his desktop computer.

“Gregory had prostate cancer,” McPherson said, with no preliminary. “Terminal.”

Paul sank back in his swivel chair. “You’re certain?” McPherson hardly ever smiled. He tried to keep a stony, hard-bitten look on his face. It was difficult for him, despite the luxurious moustache he sported; his round cheeks and bald dome did not lend themselves to a gunslinger’s beady-eyed glare.

“The agency I hired tracked down the doctor who diagnosed him. It was so advanced that no treatment was possible.”

“Christ,” Paul muttered.

“He’d been seeing half a dozen different doctors over the previous five years or so,” McPherson went on. “He knew about the cancer, looks like, but refused to do anything about it until it was too late.”

“But there are treatments for prostate cancer,” Paul objected. McPherson made a sour face. “You run the risk of incontinence. And impotence. I doubt that Gregory worried much about peeing his pants, but impotence would have been a big problem to him.”

“So he just let the cancer go.”

“And it killed him. Or rather, he killed himself when he found out it was terminal. Must have been giving him a lot of pain.”

Paul thought for a moment. “You’re certain about all this? You’ve got documentary evidence?”

McPherson brushed an index finger across his moustache. “I can get written statements from each of the doctors, plus all of Gregory’s medical records, if Joanna will sign a form demanding them.”

I’ll talk to her about it. Thanks. That was good work.”

“Wait’ll you see the bill,” McPherson said, cracking one of his infrequent smiles.

Paul blanked the screen, then sat thinking, Will Joanna be willing to sign such a form? Should I bother her with this? She’s got enough on her mind, and I shouldn’t be upsetting her with old stories about Gregory.

It’ll come up in the board meeting, Paul told himself. There’s no way I can shield her from Greg’s showing that damned videodisk to the board.

But now I know what Gregory was muttering about in the video. It wasn’t us. It wasn’t our fault. It was the cancer that was killing him, and the gun was going to protect him from the pain. He was pissed off with the doctors, not us. He knew he was a dead man anyway; he just stopped the pain for himself.

I’ve got to tell Joanna. She shouldn’t feel any guilt about this.

Paul nodded to himself, satisfied that he had all the necessary pieces to the puzzle.

One puzzle, he remembered. There’s still the question of who got Melissa to set me up. Was it Brad? And if it was, how can I prove it?

He shook his head slowly. It’s gonna be one helluva board meeting. One helluva meeting.

OVER THE ATLANTIC

Supersonic aircraft were not allowed to fly above Mach 1 over populated areas, because their sonic booms disturbed people and rattled their homes. Fanners complained of milk cows gone dry because of sonic booms. Environmentalists protested against sonic pollution.

So Bradley Arnold’s flight angled out over the Atlantic after taking off from the corporation’s private airstrip outside Savannah. Alone in the passenger compartment, sitting in one of the plane’s luxurious padded chairs, Arnold had no time to admire the procession of deep swells on the steel-gray ocean far below him. He had expected Paul and Joanna to come with him to New York, but Stavenger had backed out at the last pьnute.

“We’ll fly up in my plane,” Paul had told the board chairman.

“But I thought we would all be going together,” Arnold had said.

“I’ve got a few things to do here this afternoon. We’ll fly up overnight.”

What Paul did not tell Arnold was that he wanted to tell Joanna what McPherson had dug up about Gregory’s cancer. Paul had no intention of letting the board chairman in on the news, not until the directors’ meeting, when he would spring it on all of them, including Greg.

Disappointed, Arnold had grumbled, “This is going to be an extremely important meeting, Paul. We could use the time to get our strategy ironed out”

But Paul had insisted that he could not fly with Arnold to New York, He had other things to do. More important than strategy session with me, Arnold groused to himself.

He doesn’t trust me. Arnold frowned with the realization that despite everything he had said to Scavenger, the new CEO still did not trust him. That’s Joanna’s doing, he thought. She’ never liked me. All the years I tried to help her husband, and all the help I’ve given to young Greg, and she still hates the sight of me.

Well, it’s too bad for them, he said to himself as he swung out the keyboard set into the swivel table built into the plane bulkhead beside him. He stabbed at the telephone key and a soon as the computer’s smoky female voice asked, “How may I help you, sir?” he told the phone to get Greg Masterson. “His private line,” he added.

Greg’s face appeared on the screen almost instantly, but i was only his recorded answer. With a grave smile his image said, “I am unable to take your call right now, but please leave your name and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can Thank you.”

Nettled, fuming, Arnold blurted, “Greg, it’s me. Arnold. I need to talk to you now! Wherever you are, call me right—”

The smiling image was replaced by a more serious Gregory Masterson III. He was sitting in front of a window that looked out on Central Park and the towers of midtown Manhattan.

“Brad? Where are you?”

I’m on my way to New York, ” Arnold replied testily. “Where else would I be?”

“Oh. Of course.” Greg looked relieved.

“I have some upsetting news.”

Greg looked more amused than worried. “Really?”

“McPherson’s come up with evidence that your father was dying of prostate cancer.”

Greg’s slightly smug smile winked off like a light turned out.

“It looks as if he committed suicide, after all.”

“No,” Greg snapped. “That’s crazy. Prostate cancer can be treated. My father wouldn’t allow the cancer to go so far that it was going to kill him.”

“My source in McPherson’s office tells me that Paul’s getting statements from half a dozen doctors who either examined your father or counselled him.”

“With enough money you can get anyone to say anything.”

“But Paul’s going to use these medical statements at the board meeting tomorrow, to show that your father killed himself, after all.”

Greg fell silent. He glanced at his wristwatch. Then he said, “He wants to use these statements to counterbalance the videodisk, is that it?”

Nodding, Arnold said, “I think he’s outmaneuvered us.”

Greg’s expression hardened. “Even if my father had cancer he could still have been murdered.”

“That doesn’t make much sense.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“I don’t think so,” Arnold said. “It doesn’t seem reasonable.”

“My father would never commit suicide, Brad. I know that. And so do you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Whoever killed my father deserves to die.”

“But you don’t know that he was murdered,” Arnold said.

“I know enough,” said Greg. “I may not be entirely certain of who the murderer is, but I know enough to act.”

“You mean at tomorrow’s meeting? What do you plan to do?”

Greg looked at his wristwatch again. “Thanks for the information, Brad. It was good of you to call.”

“What? Is that all you’ve got to say?”

“That’s all you’ve got time for,” said Greg.

Arnold blinked his frog’s eyes, puzzled. “What are you talking about? We’ve got to figure out some way—”

The plane lurched so hard that Arnold was hurled out of his seat and banged against the tabletop keyboard. The sudden pain in his middle made him feel he’d been carved in two. For an instant he hung there, then the plane pitched up sharply anc he was thrown back into his chair.

“Seatbelts!” the pilot’s frantic shout came over the intercom. “We’ve lost power on—”

Another staggering tumble, and the plane plunged downward.

“Mayday! Mayday!” the intercom was blaring. “Lost power on both engines. Going down!”

Horrified, pinned in his seat, unable even to lift his arms! Arnold saw the steel gray Atlantic rushing up toward him Then a frightful shriek of tortured metal and part of the wing ripped away.

He was too terrified to scream. But Greg’s face on the little screen smiled grimly and said, “Goodbye, Brad.”

The screen went blank and then the plane hit the water and exploded.

MARE NUBIUM

Paul pulled himself onto the flat top of the huge boulder and lay on his belly panting and sweating for long minutes.

Like when we used to climb up onto the roofs of the warehouses, when we were kids, he thought. But he knew the difference. Back then he could scramble up the warehouse walls like a monkey and then spend the rest of the day running races across the flat roofs or playing hide-and-seek with his bro’s among the cooling towers and other structures on the roofs. He remembered the chicken game they played, jumping from one roof to the next across the alleyways separating the buildings. One slip and it was the morgue or the hospital. And the police.

Good thing everything weighs one-sixth here, Paul thought. I’m sure in no shape to play tag now.

Slowly, carefully, he forced himself to his knees, and then to his feet. The GPS signal was still coming through loud and clear. No tears in the suit. Probably saved half an hour, at least, he told himself.

He walked across the big rock. Its top was not as flat as it had looked. It was pitted here and there with small, sharp craters, almost like bullet holes.

Then Paul got to the far side. He peered over the boulder’s edge. This side was much steeper than the other had been. Looks like the pissin’ rock was sheared off with a big cleaver. How the hell am I gonna get down there? There’s hardly anyplace for a toehold.

I could jump, he thought. Only about thirty feet. But he knew that, lunar gravity or not, a man could break bones jumping that far .Paul recalled a couple of wise asses who disregarded the safety regs when they had first started working on the Moon. One broke his leg. The other, his neck. How surprised the poor sonofabitch looked, even through the visor of his helmet. Died before they could get a medical team to him.

So I won’t jump, Paul concluded. But how the hell do I get down? Could go back the way I came, but that’d mean I’d have to walk all the pissin’ way around this damned rock, just as if I never climbed up here in the first place. I’ll lose an hour or more and there’s not that much oxygen left.

He rummaged through the pockets on the thighs of the suit, and in the pouches on the belt around his waist, looking for anything that might serve as a rope. All he found was a lot of useless junk, and a ten-foot length of hair-thin wire. It was used to plug the suit’s microcomputer into more powerful units, when necessary.

Too short and too frail, Paul thought But it’ll have to do.

He jammed one end of the wire into the craterlet closest to the rock’s edge, then wedged it with pebbles and bigger stones until it looked like a miniature caim. Might mark my grave, after all, he told himself.

“Okay,” he said aloud. “Down we go — one way or another.”

The wire held his weight, but as Paul cautiously edged his way down the sheer face of the boulder, he could feel the wire slipping out from under the rocks he had used to weight it down. He thought about rappelling, but figured that would just tear the wire loose even faster.

The worst part was that he couldn’t see the ground from inside his helmet. He’d have to bend over almost double to look down and he didn’t have the time or the inclination to try.

The wire felt as if it were really slithering loose. Gotta jump, Paul told himself. If I don’t-

The toe of his left boot struck a projection. A ledge, only a few inches wide, but it felt like an interstate highway and international jetport runway put together.

He found the ledge with his other boot and rested there for a moment, taking the strain off the wire.

If I can just turn around, he thought. Slowly, with infinite care, he twisted his body around in a clumsy, sweaty pirouette, never letting go of the wire dangling above his head. He only got halfway turned around. The bulky backpack of his suit stopped him from going further.

Still, it was enough. He leaned over slightly, judged his distance from the ground. Still hard to see; the dust was still clinging to his visor. Looks like more than twenty feet.

Paul turned around again until he was facing the boulder once more. He felt the wire with both gloved hands. Only another foot or so of it left.

“Okay,” he said to no one. “Just like you’re jumpin’ off the warehouse roof.”

He let go of the wire, got down on one knee, planted both his hands on the ledge, then lowered his other leg over its edge. He let himself dangle for a moment, hanging onto the ledge with his fingers while he swung his boots to touch the boulder’s face. Then he pushed off.

And fell.

It was like a dream, he fell so slowly. He had time to calculate, I’m almost six feet tall and the ledge was twenty feet above the ground so I’m really only dropping about fourteen feet and in the one-sixth gee it ought to be okay if I don’t hit another ledge or a bump or projection or— His boots slammed onto the ground. Like a parachutist, Paul let his knees bend deeply, using all his legs to absorb the impact. He whoofed out a big grunt of air, clouding his visor with his breath.

But he was standing on the ground again. No broken bones. Just a little twinge in his right ankle. Otherwise everything was okay.

He took a deep breath, turned up his helmet fan to clear the fog from his visor, and started out across the plain once again.

I must’ve saved at least fifteen minutes, he told himself, not daring to look at his watch or make an estimate of how much oxygen might be left in his backpack tank.

The ankle hurt enough to make him limp.

BOARD MEETING

Paul’s personal jet was subsonic, so he expected to arrive in New York hours later than Bradley Arnold. He had rushed from his office to the corporation’s airstrip, where Joanna was waiting for him, eager to tell her about what McPherson had learned.

But before he could start to break the news to her, Joanna asked, “Aren’t all these personal planes an expense we can cut down on?”

She was buckling herself into the co-pilot’s seat, on Paul’s right.

“You can bring it up as new business at the meeting,” he answered, watching over the plane’s stubby nose as the ground crew disconnected the towing tractor from the nose wheel.

“Perhaps I should,” Joanna said.

Paul ran up the engines, his eyes on the indicators of the control panel, amused at the no-nonsense tone of Joanna’s voice. She was taking her responsibilities as a board member seriously.

“Before you do,” he said over the muted howl of the jets, “you ought to check out the efficiency study we commissioned last year.”

He eased off the brake pedals and the plane rolled forward, Paul slipped on his headset as he maneuvered the plane toward the end of the runway. He got his clearance from the tower, pushed the throttles to full power, and the twin-jet hurtled down the runway and arrowed into the sky.

Once they were on course for LaGuardia, Paul slipped the headset down over his neck.

“I presume,” Joanna said, “that the efficiency report says your personal planes are the only thing standing between us and utter bankruptcy.”

He grinned at her. “Not quite. But the report does endorse the planes. Saves the top executives a lot of time, and time is our most precious commodity.”

Joanna looked unconvinced. “Another report that says exactly what its readers want to hear.”

“The best consultants money can buy,” Paul said.

I’m sure.”

More seriously, Paul said, “I got a report from McPherson this afternoon.”

“About Gregory?” Joanna tensed visibly.

“He had terminal cancer of the prostate,” Paul told her. “That’s why he killed himself.”

She was silent for a long time. Paul let her absorb the information, sort out her feelings. He looked out at the clouds below, like a range of massive white mountains, but alive, dynamic, billowing up and reaching toward them. Above the clouds everything always seemed so much better, cleaner. The sun was always shining up here. The sky was always bright blue.

“Then he didn’t know about us, after all,” Joanna said at last.

“Or didn’t care. He had other problems.”

“He never had much of a tolerance for pain,” Joanna murmured, so low that Paul could hardly hear her over the engines. “His own pain, that is.”

“He killed himself to end his pain,” Paul said.

Joanna nodded, her face unreadable.

Paul heard a sudden burst of chatter in his earphone. He pulled the headset back on. “Masterson one-oh-one,” he said crisply into the pinhead microphone. “Repeat, please.”

“One-oh-one, mis is Masterson base. Paul, we just got word that Mr. Arnold’s plane has gone down.”

“What?”

Automatically, Paul reached for the intercom switch on the control panel and flicked it on, so Joanna could hear the radio transmission, too.

“Arnold’s plane is down. Over the Atlantic. Coast Guard’s sent out search planes, but they don’t expect any survivors.”

“What happened?” Paul demanded.

“Dunno. Got one Mayday transmission that said they’d lost power on both engines.”

“Holy God.”

They flew in silence for a while, Paul’s mind churning. Brad’s gone. That supersonic blowtorch of his has the glide ratio of a grand piano. Must have hit the water like a bomb. Gripes, what a blow!

But a part of his mind was thinking that with Arnold out of the way Greg had no one of real importance backing him on the board of directors. This strengthens my hand. A lot, he told himself.

He looked over at Joanna. She seemed lost in thought, also. Weighing the odds, he knew. Trying to figure out how the balance of power has shifted.

Just like I am.

The board meeting went on anyway. Most of the directors had come from considerable distances to attend the emergency meeting. The old days when the rich and powerful lived in or near New York were long gone. Now the directors came from Tucson and Aspen, Houston and Sarasota, Seattle and Hilo. Several had flown in from Europe and the Asian rim.

The vice chairperson, a white-haired superannuated woman who had once been the corporation’s director of personnel, seemed staggered when Paul told her that Arnold was dead.

“First Gregory and now Brad,” she whispered.

She easily agreed to let Paul run the meeting. Paul thought she was eager to escape the responsibility.

Leaving Arnold’s seat at the head of the table vacant, Paul convened the meeting and broke the news to the stunned board.

“My God,” said one of the older directors, his hair white, his skin gray. “Who’s next?”

“I move that we observe a minute of silence for our late chairman,” said Greg. He sat halfway down the table, wearing his usual black business suit. He had not even glanced at Melissa, sitting at the end of the table. Paul thought that either he really did hate her now, or they were putting on a damned good act.

Once the minute of silence ended, Paul said, “I suppose we should elect a new chairman right away.”

Heads bobbed agreement. Directors turned in their chairs, murmured to one another.

“I suggest we take a fifteen-minute break,” Paul said, “then reconvene to hear nominations.”

They didn’t even bother to vote; just pushed their chairs back and headed for the bar and snacks at the back of the meeting room. Paul saw that the directors clumped into knots of threes and fours. Plenty of whispered conversations. Plenty of sudden, desperate politicking.

Joanna came up to his side. “Do you have a nominee in mind?” she asked.

Surprised, Paul admitted, “No. I haven’t even thought about it.”

Before Joanna could say anything more, Greg stepped between them. “I need to talk to you,” he said to Paul, pointedly turning his back to his mother.

“You can talk to both of us,” Paul said, shifting sideways a step so that he was once more side by side with Joanna.

“Certainly,” Greg said tightly.

“So?” Paul prompted.

“You were out at the nanotech division, right?”

Paul nodded.

“Several board members want to shut it down.”

Joanna said, “It’s going to be years before it has any hope of showing a profit”

“Just like Moonbase,” Greg snapped.

“What’re you driving at?” Paul demanded.

“Just this. You vote to keep the nanotech division going and I’ll vote to keep Moonbase going.”

Paul blinked with surprise. “You’ll back Moonbase?”

“If you’ll back the nanotech division.”

Glancing at Joanna, Paul thought, This is the way a corporation goes broke; everybody’s got his own pet project that he wants to keep alive, so nobody kills anything and we all go down the tubes.

Almost as if he could read Paul’s thoughts, Greg said, “Kris Cardenas showed you the lunar construction demo, didn’t she?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, why don’t we pool our interests and set up a demonstration on the Moon?”

“Demonstration of what?” Joanna asked.

“Nanotech construction,” Greg told his mother. “Set up a construction task for the nanomachines at Moonbase. Use it to prove that we can build lunar facilities at a fraction of today’s costs.”

“I don’t understand,” Joanna said.

Feeling suddenly enthusiastic, Paul jumped in, “We can send a handful of nanomachines up to Moonbase and have them construct new facilities out of regolith materials.”

“Right,” said Greg.

“Can that be done? I mean, now? Today?”

“In a few months,” Greg replied.

Paul said, “If the demonstration works, we can cut the costs of Moonbase by half or more.”

“And prove to the world that nanotechnology has useful applications here and now,” Greg added.

Joanna looked from her son to her husband, then back again. “Greg, that’s — beautiful!”

“I think it can work,” Greg said. “I’m certain it could work.”

“You might be right,” Paul admitted. “Gripes, we could build a viable Moonbase right away and start making a profit off it within a couple of years.”

“Or sooner,” said Greg.

Joanna smiled happily. “This is a fine idea, Greg.”

“You’re right,” Paul agreed.

Greg put his hand out. “Can we work together on this? You and me, Paul?”

Grabbing his proffered hand in his own, Paul said, “Damned right.”

“Good,” said Greg, beaming. “And once the meeting reconvenes, I’ve got another little surprise for you.”

Paul looked at his wristwatch. “Hey, we’d better get them back to work.”

It took a few minutes to get the directors settled back in their chairs around the long conference table.

“All right,” Paul said. “Before we get into the regular agenda, we should take nominations for the new chairman of the beard.”

Greg spoke up immediately. “I nominate Joanna Masterson — er, Stavenger.” Paul stared at him.

“Second,” said the elderly woman vice-chair. She’s happy with the title she’s got, Paul thought; she doesn’t want any real responsibility.

“Move we close the nominations,” Greg said.

“Second.”

Numb with surprise, Paul looked at Joanna, sitting acrossthe table from him. She seemed just as shocked as he was. “Automatically, he called for discussion.

“Let’s go straight to a vote,” said the old man at Paul’s right.

“Let’s make it by acclamation,” said the vice-chair.

“Hear, hear!”

Paul broke into a grin and got to his feet. The entire board stood up and applauded their new chairperson. Paul went around to Joanna and ceremonially guided her to the empty chair at the head of the table.

The board members sat down, obviously expecting Joanna to make a little acceptance speech. Standing there at the head of the table, she glanced at Paul, then looked at Greg.

“Thank you,” she said, her eyes still locked on her son. “This is totally unexpected and a little scary.”

Paul noticed that Joanna was resting her fingers lightly on the table top. Her hands were steady, her voice firm.

“I want you to know that I will do my very best to serve you as chairperson of this board. I will do everything I can to fulfill the trust you’ve shown in me.”

Greg’s eyes were on his mother, his face blank, emotionless.

“The first order of business I would like to address,” Joanna went on, “is unity. I’know my late husband’s death has upset many members of this board. And Brad Arnold’s, too. But I ask you now — all of you — to put these deaths behind us and work together for a stronger, more productive company.”

“Hear, hear,” muttered one of the older men.

“I expect no recriminations and no accusations,” Joanna said, still looking at Greg. “I want cooperation and harmony. It’s useless to dwell on the past; we must look to the future.”

They all applauded, Greg the loudest of all. Paul noticed that Joanna said not another word about Bradley Arnold, nor did any of the other board members. Sic transit gloria mundi, he said to himself. Gone and forgotten.

SAVANNAH

The next three months were the happiest Joanna had ever known. Her son and her husband were working together, forging a bond between them, learning to know and respect one another.

Greg dined frequently at the house. He gave up his apartment in Manhattan to live full-time in his Savannah condo. He and Paul travelled together frequently to San Jose to check the progress of the nanotech program. They had agreed that the first goal would be to have the nanomachines build a complete shelter out on Mare Nubium totally out of local raw materials from the lunar regolith.

“I think we should put the site pretty far out on the mare,” Greg suggested at one of their meetings.

Kris Cardenas arched a questioning eyebrow. The three of them were in her cubbyhole of an office, hunched around the tiny circular table she used instead of a desk.

“If anything goes wrong,” Greg explained, “we don’t want the bugs infesting any of the existing shelters.”

“What could go wrong?” Cardenas demanded.

Paul intervened. “I think Greg is right. This is the first time we’re trying this. No harm in being a little on the conservative side.”

“But we’ve already programmed a temperature limit into the bugs. They won’t operate at an ambient higher than thirty degrees.”

“Celsius,” Paul said.

“That’s what — ninety degrees Fahrenheit?” Greg asked.

“Eighty-six,” said Cardenas. “So the bugs can’t work or multiply on the surface during the lunar daytime. Even if they somehow started to spread, you’d have two weeks of lunar night to dig ’em up and get rid of them.”

“Still,” Greg insisted, “we ought to put the demonstration some distance away” from existing facilities. Don’t you think so, Paul?”

“I guess so. No harm being careful.”

Cardenas looked more angry than hurt. “You guys act as if we’re in a Frankenstein mode. We’re using assemblers here, y’know, not gobblers.”

“Still,” Paul said, “the test site ought to be remote enough so that if anything does go wrong—”

“It won’t,” she snapped.

“If something unforeseen happens,” Paul went on, “it’ll happen far enough out in the boondocks so none of the existing tempos’ll be threatened.”

“Tempos?” Cardenas asked.

“That’s what the shelters are called,” Greg explained. “They’re supposed to be temporary shelters.”

She blinked those deeply blue eyes. “They’ve been in use for nearly ten years, some of them, haven’t they?”

“That’s right,” Paul said.

“Some ‘temporary’.”

With a tight smile, Paul said, “When the history of Moonbase’s first hundred years gets written, you’ll see that they’re temporary.”

“I should live so long,” Cardenas muttered.

“I thought your nanobugs were going to allow you to live a thousand years or so,” Paul teased.

“Once the friggin’ FDA lets us start using them in human patients, they will.”

Greg leaned back in his chair and steepled his long, sensitive fingers in front of his face. “Do you mean that you wouldn’t inject nanomachines into yourself if you thought they could improve your medical condition, just because the FDA hasn’t approved them?”

“If we had bugs that I knew would protect me from tumors or keep my arteries from clogging I’d swallow ’em in a hot second,” she said. “But we haven’t progressed that far yet, and we can’t make much more progress on the medical end until we get an FDA okay to do human trials on the simple stuff we have developed, y’know.”

Greg looked thoughtful. “So the medical work is on hold.”

“Right.”

“But you’re making progress on the toxic waste bugs.”

“The gobblers? For sure.”

Greg nodded as if satisfied.

That evening Paul invited Cardenas and Greg to dinner at the Stanford Court, in San Francisco. She showed up with her husband, whom she introduced as the finest neurosurgeon in the Bay area.

Paul shook hands with Pete Cardenas. He was as slim as a dancer, his skin a shade darker than Paul’s own. His given name must really be Pedro, Paul thought.

“So this is where you get your medical inputs,” Paul said.

“Is that supposed to be a pun?” Kris asked, pretending suspicion.

Paul felt his mouth drop open. “I didn’t mean—”

Greg guffawed. It was the first time Paul had seen his step-son actually relaxed enough to laugh out loud. And it has to be at my expense, he groused inwardly. But it was good to see that the kid at least knew how to laugh.

Greg had come into the dining room alone, even though Paul had urged him to bring a date. They had talked about it during the helicopter ride from San Jose.

But Greg had said, “You’re not bringing a date, are you?”

“Hey, I’m a married man,” Paul had replied.

“Yes,” Greg had said. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

With the two men in her life working shoulder-to-shoulder, Joanna put her energies into her new position as chairwoman of the board of Masterson Aerospace Corporation.

To her surprise she found that she enjoyed the work. And the newfound respect that Masterson’s employees gave her. Before, when she happened to visit the corporate offices, she was the boss’s wife. Now, she was chairwoman of the board.

She couldn’t .exactly fire people; but she could see to it that they were fired by others.

All her life she had been the reflection of the men around her. As her father’s daughter she had been one of the brightest young lights in Savannah’s social scene: a fine catch for some worthy young man. Her father had married her off to Gregory Masterson II, who had a bright future ahead of him as the heir to Masterson Aerospace. Joanna’s marriage saved her father’s failing fortune; Masterson money propped up the old man’s final years.

Then she had been the wife of Gregory Masterson, outwardly a happily-married woman with not a trouble in the world. Except that her husband drank and whored and had the business sense of a butterfly combined with the stubbornness of a jackass. And a mean streak that could cut deep without ever raising a hand. Joanna was a leader of Savannah society — but she knew the whispers that trailed behind her back. Gregory slept with any and every woman he could get his hands on. She bore it with as much dignity as she could pretend to, not knowing what else she could do.

She was the mother of Gregory Masterson III, and the thought of how devastating to her son would be a bitterly-contested divorce stayed her hand for years, for decades. She lived for her son and tried to raise him to be the kind of man she had hoped her husband would be.

And then she met Paul Stavenger and her life turned upside-down. For the first time she let herself be loved, wonderfully, excitingly, foolishly loved by another man.

It had almost turned to ashes. Gregory’s suicide and Greg’s almost insanely jealous accusations had nearly torn her apart. But now Greg and Paul were working harmoniously together. Greg had finally accepted his father’s suicide and his mother’s new marriage.

Joanna hesitated to tell Greg that she was expecting a baby. Paul’s son. Several times she had been on the verge of telling him, and each time she refrained. Wait, she told herself. Give his relationship with Paul a little more time to ripen. The two men are getting along so well together, don’t throw this at Greg. Not yet.

In the meantime, she found that she enjoyed being chairwoman of Masterson’s board of directors. She was a person in her own right now. Not a wife or a mother but chairwoman of the board. She was determined to be the best board chairperson Masterson had ever known.

Joanna threw herself into a complete review of the corporation’s product lines. The Clipperships were the only profitable products Masterson had, although the prospects for the Windowall TV screens looked extremely bright. Still, she could see from the marketing department’s forecasts that there was a disaster curve looming about three years ahead. New orders for the rocket vehicles were going to taper off dramatically in three years.

Sales of the Clipperships will have saturated the market by then, the reports told her. The corporation will have sold as many as the world’s airlines wanted or felt they needed. Sales would dwindle terribly.

What then? Joanna asked herself. The other divisions — commercial aircraft, electronics, and satellite manufacturing — were barely holding their own in very competitive markets. The Windowall development might be the salvation of the orbital manufacturing group, but the nanotechnology division and Moonbase were deeply in the red and showed no prospects of profitability for years to come.

Unless Greg and Paul can pull a rabbit out of the hat with their lunar nanotech demonstration. She knew Paul’s reasoning by heart. If Moonbase can be developed into a viable resource center, the costs of orbital manufacturing will drop by a factor of twenty. The two will be synergistic: as the manufacturing facilities in Earth orbit grow more profitable, their demand for raw materials will make Moonbase more profitable, too.

She looked up from the charts on her computer screen. And if we can use nanotechnology to build Moonbase faster and more cheaply, the nanotech division will begin to find markets on Earth, as well.

But it’s such a gamble, Joanna knew. It’s piling one shaky bet on top of another and even a third. With that disaster curve waiting for us, just three years ddwn the road.

She spent weeks thinking about the problem, discussing it with division managers and other members of the board of directors. She consulted experts from outside the company in finance, marketing, even forecasters of technological trends.

She did not tell either Paul or Greg what she was doing. They were happily working together and she had no intention of interfering or upsetting them.

Slowly, over many weeks, she gathered together a picture of what a prudent corporate leader would do. Sell off the divisions that were still marginally profitable, divisions that still had some market value. Drop the divisions that were not profitable. Lay off as many employees as you had to and downsize the corporation.

The only viable market that we can depend on, three years from now, is selling parts and maintenance services for the CUpperships. Maybe the Windowalls, but it’s too early to bank on that. We should be preparing the corporation for a smaller market, trim off all the excess fat and get ready for some leaner years. Ten years from now there will be a market for Clipperships again: new, bigger, more efficient Clipperships. But we’ve got to be able to last through the lean times in between then and now.

She knew Paul would never go for it. Would Greg? A few months ago he would, but now he seems completely on Paul’s side, ready to risk everything for the sake of this nanotech demonstration on the Moon.

Joanna mentally counted up the votes on the board of directors. If I suggest a downsizing plan it would pass, she realized. It would also break Paul’s heart and ruin our marriage.

But it would save Masterson Aerospace Corporation.

MARE NUBIUM

The damned ankle really hurts.

Paul limped along, trying to make up for the time he had lost by drifting off course. Like being on a pissin’ treadmill, he grumbled to himself. You keep humpin’ along but you aren’t getting anywhere. That’s why he had never liked gyms or exercise equipment, even when he had first pulled duty on the old space stations that hung in zero gee and exercise was required every day.

Get my exercise in bed, Paul had bragged. Keep my heart in good shape nature’s way. Keep my whole system pumpin’ good. Yeah.

He was panting now and that was a bad sign. Exhaustion. How long have I been out here? He lifted his left arm as he staggered along, but between the dust clinging to his visor and the blurriness of his vision he could not see the figures on the digital clock clearly.

Long enough, he said to himself. Too long.

One foot in front of the other. But the ankle really hurts. Can’t be a fracture, I wouldn’t be able to put any weight on it. Chipped bone, maybe. More likely a sprain. But a sprain shouldn’t hurt so much when you walk on it, should it? At least it makes me stop fussin’ the chafed heel on the other foot.

He remembered his grandfather’s grumbling remedy for a headache: “Drop an anvil on your toes.”

It’s really hot. Pissin’ suit’s cooling system must be breaking down. Feels like I’m draggin’ my ass across the Sahara Desert. Worse. At least there you have air to breathe.

A pang of fear raced through him like an electrical current. How much oxygen is left? How much time do I have?

He coughed. His throat was dry and scratchy as sandpaper. No more water left. Oxygen running out Suit’s filling with carbon dioxide. I’m gonna choke to death on my own pissin’ fumes.

Keep moving! he screamed at himself. Long as you can move you’ve got a chance. You must be getting close to the! tempo. It’s gotta be near here. Keep pushing.

The only good news was the chirping of the GPS signal in his earphones. Guide me in, you noisy little bird, Paul prayed silently. Keep talkin’ to me, you pile of germanium. Sing me a song.

He coughed again. Gettin’ hotter in here. No water left.

He stumbled on a loose rock and went down face first. Long years of training and experience took over and Paul put out his gloved hands, let his arms flex when they touched the dusty ground, and pushed himself to a standing position again. And saw, through his fogged and dust-smeared visor, a’ single red light glowing just above the abrupt horizon.

It’s a mirage, he told himself. You want to see it so pissin’ bad your brain is painting stupid pictures for you.

But then he thought, there’s no mirages on the Moon. Least, I never heard of one.

Blinking, limping, he stared at the red beacon. That’s the kind of light they put on top of an antenna mast at the tempos.

“That’s the tempo!” he shouted, his voice cracking into a choking, hacking cough.

He heard somebody cackling weirdly. Funniest thing in the world if you ran out of oxygen within sight of the tempo. Funniest thing in two worlds. Man, you could die laughing.

SAVANNAH

Looking back on it, Joanna realized it was inevitable that Paul would insist on going to the Moon for the nanotech demonstration.

“You don’t have to be physically there,” she told her husband, time and again.

“But I want to be,” Paul always countered.

Joanna tried every tactic she knew.

“You are much to valuable to the corporation to go running off to the Moon just to watch a demonstration project.”

Paul grinned at her. “Don’t worry. Madam Chairperson; I’m well insured. The corporation won’t get hurt financially if something happens to me.”

“But what about me? What about our baby?”

He hesitated at that. But then, “This is for the baby. Don’t you see? I want this demonstration to succeed. It’s got to succeed! The whole future of the corporation depends on it.”

“It will succeed or fail whether you’re there or not,” Joanna insisted.

“Maybe.”

“You’ve got a God complex!” she accused.

He shook his head, very seriously. “If I stay here and the demo screws up, I’ll blame myself for not being there to make sure it goes right.”

“That’s a God complex,” Joanna pointed out.

“That’s an experienced executive,” Paul retorted. “The crew always works better when the captain is on the bridge. Don’t you know that?”

“Sheer machismo.”

Since Greg was working so well with Paul, she turned to her son for support.

To her surprise, Greg agreed with Paul. “I think he ough to be there. This is a crucial experiment and we’ve got to do everything we can to make sure it comes out right.”

His newfound professional demeanor surprised and pleased her — except that his position on the matter was opposed to her own.

At dinner one evening at the house, Paul suggested that he go to Moonbase with him. “You’ve never been up there. You ought to see it.”

“You want me to go with you?” Greg asked. He looked a: surprised as Joanna felt.

“Sure,” said Paul. “Why not?”

“Oh no!” Joanna said. Firmly.

Paul was bubbling with preparations for the coming trip to Moonbase. He wants to go sobadly, Joanna understood at last His heart is there, in that godforsaken barren desolation. No here. Not with me.

Greg, she saw, was nowhere near as enthusiastic about travelling to the Moon as Paul was.

“I’m not going to have both of you out there at the same time,” Joanna said. “That’s too much.”

Paul gave her a strange expression. Only later, much later, did she realize that he felt she was willing to let him risk his life on the Moon, even though reluctantly, but she absolutely would not tolerate her son taking the same risk.

“I’m going to Moonbase,” Paul said flatly.

“Greg stays here,” she answered.

Dinner was served in cold silence.

Days later, Greg took Paul aside at the corporate offices and said, “I’d really like to go with you, but I can’t worry my mother so much. She’d be frantic.”

Paul looked at his wife’s son. He had a difficult time picturing Joanna being frantic over anything.

But he said, “Yeah, I suppose you’re right I’ll go, you stay and hold her hand.”

“I can keep in touch with you through the VR system,” Greg suggested.

With a wan smile, Paul said, “Good as it is, virtual reality isn’t the same as being there.”

Greg shrugged his shoulders. “I agree. But it’ll have to do.” ;’Yeah,” said Paul.

Greg and, Joanna went to the company airstrip to watch Paul depart for Florida and the Clippership launch to the space station that was the first step on his trip to Moonbase. A contingent of San Jose technicians were waiting for him at Cape Canaveral, and a man-sized container of nanomachines rested in the rocket’s cargo hold.

“You’re crying,” Greg said as he and Joanna watched Paul’s plane take off.

“It’s just the dust,” Joanna insisted, turning from the ramp toutside the hangar toward the limousine that was waiting to take them home: Joanna to her house, Greg to his condo in town.

She actually saw more of her husband over the next few days than she had for weeks: Paul called her regularly from the space station and even from the transfer rocket that took him from the space station to the clutch of buried shelters that he called Moonbase.

“Well, I’m here,” Paul’s image said to her from the display screen in her bedroom. “Landed half an hour ago.”

“I was wondering when you’d call.” Joanna was sitting up in bed, a small mountain of pillows behind her. She had been waiting for his call for more than an hour, staring at the schedule for Paul’s flight when his call finally came through, telling herself that it takes some time to get out of the landing vehicle and into the living quarters of the underground shelter, so it was silly to worry about him.

“Must be after midnight, your time, right?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said to the screen. “I’m just glad you got there safely.”

There was nearly a three-second lag while her words hurtled to the Moon at the speed of light and his response raced back to her.

Paul broke into a big grin. “Hey, it’s a lot safer here than it is in New York.”

Joanna forced a laugh. “I suppose so. I’m glad you’re all right, though.”

Again the lag. Then, “Well, I’ll be here for a couple of days getting things set up. Then we go out to the remote site.”

“You’ll be travelling by hopper?”

She noticed, while waiting for his reply, a good-looking young woman in the background of the crowded underground shelter. For an instant she thought it was Melissa, but no, this woman was younger and either white or Hispanic.

“By tractor. We’ve got too much cargo to haul for a hopper to lift. Had to throw my weight around to get one,” Paul said. “They’re all in pretty constant use.”

“The oxygen plant?”

Were there other women up there? Joanna wondered. She’d have to check the files, she decided, and see who was with Paul in those intimate quarters. Vaguely she recalled hearing jokes about living conditions at Moonbase: something about spacesuits built for two.

“Seems funny,” Paul was saying. “The crew here is breakin’ their humps putting this oxygen facility together, and if the nanobugs work right, we’ll be able to pull oxy directly out of the rocks and even make water with it.”

They chatted for nearly half an hour, always with that annoying little delay between them. Paul looks so happy, Joanna thought He’s in his element. He loves being there. He’s only playing at corporate business down here; what he really wants is to be on the Moon. He feels free there.

Free of me, she thought. Free to sample the younger women who have the same love for that frontier as he does.

Finally she said goodnight, pleading a full schedule and the need to get up early the next morning.

“Yeah,” Paul said, once her words reached him. “We’re gonna have a busy day, too. Goodnight, Joanna.” Then he hunched closer to the screen and lowered his voice. “I love you, baby.” And Joanna found that her eyes were misting again.

The following evening Joanna asked Greg to come to the house and have dinner with her.

I’d love to,” her son replied. He arrived at the house with a big bouquet of flowers. To brighten up the place,” he said.

Faced with the choice of eating in the ormal dining room or the kitchen’s breakfast nook, Joanna chose the dining room. The butler used Greg’s bouquet as a centerpiece on the long, polished cherrywood table, and set their two places with Joanna at the head of the table and Greg at her right.

“So how’s he doing up there?” Greg asked as they spooned their soup.

“I haven’t heard from him all day.”

“He must be awfully busy.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“He’ll call later. They’re on Greenwich time up there. All the space facilities are.”

“I know.”

“So it’s…’ Greg pressed a stud on his wristwatch, “…God, it’s almost one in the morning there!”

Joanna’s eyes widened briefly.

Quickly, Greg said, “If he’s out at the remote site, maybe the communications link isn’t there for a transmission to Earth.”

“He could relay a call through,” Joanna said.

“If anything had happened, we’d hear about it right away,” Greg said. “There’s nothing to worry about, really.”

With a weary sigh, Joanna said, “He knows I worry about him every time he goes into space. To him it’s fun, exciting. But it frightens me so!”

“He should have called you,” Greg agreed. “It’s not very sensitive of him to leave you here worrying about him.”

Joanna studied her son from across the dining table. Greg’s a grown man, she told herself. He’s matured so much in the past few months. Could he take the reins of the company if anything happened to Paul? Could the two of us handle all that responsibility?

“There’s no reason to be frightened,” Greg was saying. “After all, Mom, you went to the space station with him, didn’t you?”

“Once,” she said.

“It wasn’t so terrible, was it?”

“I was sick as a dog every minute,” Joanna said.

Greg laughed. “Really? I heard rumors about that but I didn’t believe them. I guess it wasn’t much of a honeymoon for you, then.”

“Did you tell Melissa to seduce Paul?” Joanna blurted, surprised to hear herself ask.

Greg flinched with surprise. “Tell Melissa? Me? I wouldn’t even speak to the bitch.”

“Do you really hate her that much?”

His face twisting, Greg snarled, “She was one of Dad’s concubines. Did you know that? Then she switched to Paul. And then she came on to me. She’s nothing but a slut.”

“You told me that she wanted your baby,” Joanna said. “Perhaps she really loved you.”

“Love? What’s love got to do with it? It’s nothing but her biological clock ticking. She’ll have a baby with whoever she can talk into bed. Maybe she’ll have Paul’s baby.”

“I’m having Paul’s baby,” Joanna whispered.

His mouth dropped open. His eyes flared. “What did you say?”

“I’m pregnant. You’re going to have a brother.”

Greg’s face went white. Trembling visibly, he pushed his chair away from the table and tried to stand up. The effort seemed too much for him.

“You… you’re going to have his baby?” Greg was panting as if he had run a thousand meters. “His baby?”

Joanna nodded solemnly.

“Abort it! Get rid of it!”

“I can’t do that.”

“You can’t have his baby,” Greg seemed about to dissolve in tears. “Don’t you see? It’s the last straw! The final nail in my coffin.”

“No,” Joanna said. “It won’t be like that.”

“The hell it won’t! He’ll want to give the corporation to his own son, not to me!” Greg howled. “He’ll push me out of the way, and you’ll help him!” Just then the butler came in with the main course.

“Get out!” Greg screamed at him. “Get out of here!”

Wide-eyed, the butler looked to Joanna. She nodded and he disappeared back into the kitchen.

“Greg, dear,” she said soothingly, “try to calm down. This isn’t going to change anything between us.”

“It changes everything!” he snapped. “I got Brad out of the way just to make sure. But what good is that now?”

“What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

“His baby! You’re going to give him a son so he can get rid of me once and for all. He murdered my father and now you’re helping him to kill me! Even after he’s dead he’ll still be killing me!”

Greg lurched to his feet, swung one fist across the table and knocked china and glassware crashing to the floor. Joanna jerked with sudden fear. Her son was standing over her, fists clenched, murderous rage boiling through him.

“I knew he was out to get me, but I didn’t think you would help him!”

“No one’s out to get you, Greg,” Joanna said, fighting to keep her voice calm. “Now sit down and—”

“You’re all against me! All of you! Brad, him, even you. But you’ll see. I’m smarter than he is. Smarter than all of you. He’ll never come back to you. Never! I’m going to be the master here, not him!”

He reached over the table and grabbed the vase with his flowers. “I’m going to destroy him. Like this!” And, raising the glass vase over his head, he smashed it on the table top. It shattered into bits, water and flowers exploding from it.

Joanna sat there, paralyzed with shock and fear. Greg’s insane, she thought. He’s homicidal.

Shaking his fist at her, Greg bellowed, “He’s not coming back to you. He’ll never leave the Moon. Never!”

Terrified, Joanna gasped, “What are you talking about?”

“You’ll see,” he repeated. “You’re either with me or agains me now. You’ve got to decide. You get rid of my little brother and we can live just as happy as we were before Paul took you away from me. Otherwise…”

Joanna stared at her son, barely recognizing this wild-eyei maniac who stood over her so threateningly.

Abruptly, Greg strode out of the dining room, turning at the doorway to shout, “It’s your decision. Him or me. Then he left.

Joanna realized the butler was standing at the doorway to the kitchen, white-faced. She shooed him back into the kitchen.

What have I done? Joanna asked herself, looking over the dripping shambles of the dining table. I worked so hard to bring them together and now…

Greg’s gone insane. He hates me because I’m going to have Paul’s baby.

Paul wants to be on the Moon and Greg hates the sight of me, Joanna said to herself. I’m all alone. They’ll both leave me and I’ll be all alone.

No, she realized. Not alone. I have a new life within me. I’m not alone.

MARE NUBIUM

Like a madman Paul tottered on toward the glowing red beacon atop the tempo’s communications mast. Dragging his bad leg, staggering, gasping the last fumes of oxygen left in his tank, he pushed himself single-mindedly toward the safety that lay so tantalizingly just beyond the short lunar horizon.

It’s just over the horizon, he told himself. You can make it. Just over the horizon.

You know what the horizon is? taunted a voice in his head. An imaginary line that recedes as you approach it.

World peace is just over the horizon. Fusion energy is just over the horizon. The answer to all your prayers — just over the pissin’ horizon.

Through his smeared, fogged visor Paul saw that beckoning red eye rising higher and higher. He could not make out the mast itself against the black lunar sky, but he knew that with each step he was closer to safety.

Unless it’s a pissin’ star, that sardonic voice jeered at him. You could be heading for Mars, for all you know.

No, dammit, it’s the tempo. Gotta be.

Gotta be.

The ground was rising slightly. His right leg collapsed under him and he pitched forward again. This time he put out his hands as usual, but didn’t bother to push himself up to a standing position. Crawl, man. Like a little baby, down on all fours. You can make it. Just crawl right along.

He was getting dizzy, his vision blurring. Man, what I wouldn’t give for just a ten-minute break. Even five minutes.

Wouldn’t work, though’. Not unless you can hold your breath for five minutes. .

Suddenly he wanted to laugh, remembering a conversation with McPherson back when he had first become a division manager. Hie lawyer wanted Paul to make out a will. He seemed surprised that Paul had never had one.

“You’ve got to make arrangements for handling your estate,” McPherson had said, very serious.

“That’s easy,” Paul had told him. “I want to spend my last cent with my last breath.”

Coming up on your last breath pretty soon, he knew. If you’re lucky — damned motherhumpin’ shitfaced lucky — you’ll suck up the last oxygen molecule in the tank the instant you get inside the tempo’s airlock.

It almost worked out that way.

Paul looked up from his crawling and saw the mound of rubble that marked the buried shelter. He could even see the comm mast, he was so close. No hopper, though. Only a tractor sitting outside the airlock on four ludicrously thin, springy wheels.

Who gives a flyin’ fuck? he said to himself as he pushed himself to his feet and staggered, limped, hopped on his one good foot, holding his breath, reaching out with both hands and flopped into the open airlock that stood in front of the buried shelter.

He pounded the yellow-glowing phosphorescent button that activated the lock. The outside door creaked shut, although Paul could hear no sound in the lunar vacuum. He imagined the creaking as the curving door slid shut on its track, grinding stray dust particles in its path.

Bracing himself inside the phonebooth-sized airlock, Paul heard the hissing of air and even the chug of the pump. Most beautiful sounds in the world, he thought Beats Duke Ellington any day.

The overhead light went on and the indicator panel’s green light glowed to life. Trembling, hoping this wasn’t the last hallucination of a man dying of oxygen deprivation, Paul fumbled with the catch of his visor and slid it up. Sweetest air in two worlds.

He took deep lungfuls of the stuff. Next sonofabitch complains about canned air is gonna get my knuckles in his mouth, Paul promised himself.

The indicator pad told him the pressure in the airlock was high enough for him to open the inner hatch. He knew he should clean the suit first. Must be carrying six hundred pounds of dust on me.

But he was too tired, too exhilarated, too anxious to get inside the shelter and out of this foul-smelling suit even to begin vacuuming.

He opened the inner hatch, clumped in his boots down the steps into the shelter’s single compartment, wincing every time he stepped with his right foot.

It was a typical temporary shelter. A long aluminum cylinder’tthat had been laid down in a trench scooped out by a bulldozer and then buried beneath a couple of feet of loose regolith rubble to protect it from the meteoroids that pelted the Moon’s surface and the harsh swings of temperature from daylight to Anight. And from the radiation pouring in unimpeded from deep space.

Radiation. Paul wanted desperately to flop on one of the lovely, beckoning bunks that lined the far end of the shelter, I but he knew he had to worm himself out of his suit first. And check his radiation patch.

It seemed to take hours, removing the helmet, then the backpack, the gloves, boots, leggings and finally wriggling out of the suit’s torso. The dust was thick enough to make him cough. Hope it doesn’t foul up the air vents, Paul thought.

His radiation patch had turned yellow. Not good, but not as bad as red would have been.

Hey, you’re alive and safe with nothing worse than a sprained ankle and a radiation dose that’ll take a year or so off the ass end of your life. Count your blessings, man.

He limped to the nearest bunk and flopped onto it But before he could close his eyes he thought of Greg.

I’m not home free yet He might still win this.

I should have known he’d try to kill me. All those weeks of his smiling and working with me. Started when I agreed to the nanotech demonstration. He’s hated me all along, every inch of the way. I should have known.

Ought to call the base, get them to patch me through to Joanna. The kid’s tried to kill me. Already murdered Tink and Wojo. I ought to warn Joanna. He might turn on her, try to kill my child.

But he was too exhausted to do anything but close his eyes and sleep.

ALPHONSUS

Paul had been in good spirits when he arrived at Moonbase. The transfer spacecraft that took him from the space station in low Earth orbit to the giant crater Alphonsus was an ungainly collection of tankage, antennas, cargo containers and a spherical passenger module with two bulbous observation ports. With its spindly, spraddling legs the craft looked like a huge metallic spider about to pounce on some hapless insect.

As the lander literally fell toward the Moon’s surface, Paul commandeered a spot at one of the observation ports and hung there weightlessly, watching Alphonsus rush up at him. The crater’s ringwall mountains looked deceptively soft, tired and slumped from eons of erosion by dust-sized meteorites that sandpapered their slopes to almost glassy smoothness.

It was hard to get any sense of scale staring out at the barren, pockmarked face of the Moon. He knew Alphonsus was more than seventy miles across, a crater big enough to swallow all of Greater New York, from Newark to Bridgeport. But as he hovered in free fall, watching, it merely looked like a big circle of mountains with a dimple in its middle.

The floor of the crater was cracked, criss-crossed with sinuous rilles. Once in a while a whiff of ammonia or methane or one of the noble gases would seep out from the Moon’s deep interior through those cracks. It was one of the reasons Moonbase had been sited inside Alphonsus’s circling mountains: one day they would drill for the methane and ammonia, valuable sources of life-supporting volatiles.

Paul saw the unfinished oxygen plant and a crew of construction technicians milling around it like spacesuited ants.

Oxygen was the most valuable resource of them all, in space. If Moonbase ever became profkable, it would be by selling oxygen to the factories and other facilities in Earth orbit.

The spacecraft tilted over so that it could land on its rocket exhausts, and the/funar landscape shifted out of Paul’s view. Clasping the handgrips on either side of the port, he felt the slightest of pressures, just a gentle nudge. And then the soft thump of landing. Weight returned, but it was only a sixth oi the weight he felt on Earth. This was the Moon. Paul felt as if he were returning home.

It took less than ten minutes for the spacesuited ground crew to connect the flexible tunnel to the lander’s hatch. I wish the ground crews at commercial airports worked so fast, Paul thought as he made his way, slightly bent over, through the ribbed tunnel and into the main entrance of Moonbase.

It was hardly grand. Moonbase consisted of a dozen ‘temporary’ shelters, each buried beneath piles of regolith rubble and interconnected by tunnels barely high enough to stand in. The tempos, developed out of modules for space stations, reminded Paul of mobile homes: long and narrow cramped and confining, buzzing with electrical machinery and the constant rattle of air pumps, lit by ghastly overhead fluorescents that made everyone’s complexion look sickly, smelling of sweat and machine oil and microwaved fast food and too many people crowded too close together.

Paul loved it.

Wojo was at the receiving desk, checking out the cargo that the lander was unloading, his computer screen split between the invoice list and a camera view of the spacesuited ground crew hauling out the crates from the lander’s cargo platforms.

“So you’ve decided to come live with the proletariat for a while,” Wojo said pleasantly. He was a bulky man, big in the shoulders, with a beer gut and the glittering eyes of a seeker after truth. Roughly Paul’s age, Wojo’s hair and ragged beard were already dead white and thinning. He insisted that it was from the radiation dosage he received when he worked out on the lunar surface.

“How’re you doing, Wojo?” Paul asked, sliding his one travelbag from his shoulder and letting it thump softly on the plastic flooring.

“Still trying to get those narrow-minded bean counters in the insurance office to admit that the company owes me premium pay,” Wojo grumbled, not taking his eyes from his display screen.

It was an old, old argument. Wojo demanded compensation for his tractor maintenance work out on the surface, over and above the hazardous duty pay called for in his employment contract.

Paul had steered clear of the fight while he’d been Wojo’s division manager. Now that he was CEO he feared the man would ask him to intervene.

But Wojo had not done that, so far. “They got a new manager in the so-called human resources department. A man so narrow-minded he can look through a keyhole with both eyes.

Paul laughed. “You don’t like him?”

Wojo looked up and gave Paul a withering glance. “He tells lies, his feet stink, and he don’t love Jesus.”

“Yeah,” Paul said. “You don’t like him.”

“He’ll make a ton of money for you. He’s so tight-fisted his palms have never seen the light of day.”

Paul made his way past the receiving desk before Wojo could ask for any favors. Jinny Anson, pert and blonde and feisty, directed him through the tunnels to the sleeping quarters they had reserved or him.

“I tried to find you a corner that’s at least a little quieter than most. No snorers on either side of you, and you can barely hear the pumps.”

“Thanks,” Paul said. “I appreciate the special treatment.”

“Nothing but the best for our new CEO.”

“You’re just trying to butter up the boss,” he kidded. Yet he realized that this was the first time the CEO had visited Moonbase.

Jinny led him through two of the interconnected shelters, down another tunnel, and along the narrow central passageway of a third tempo: She’s a chipper little handful, Paul thought. Fills out her coveralls in all the right places. Then he frowned inwardly. Cut that out. You made a promise to Joanna and you’re gonna keepit. Yeah, he agreed silently. But it won’t be easy.

“How’s the air recycling plant going?” Paul asked, trying to put his focus on business.

“Humming along fine,” Jinny replied. “Getting close to eighty percent efficiency. Gimme another few months and I’ll have the loop closed good, I betcha.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh. Then we’ll only need new oxy for what leaks through the airlocks, little stuff like that.”

“Good.”

They stopped at the last partition; Paul saw his name neatly printed on the card alongside the doorway. And Lev Brudnoy’s name on the partition across the narrow corridor.

He doesn’t snore, Paul thought, but he grunts a lot during the mating season. Which is always, for him.

“Not quite an executive suite, huh?” Jinny said, pulling back the accordion-fold partition to reveal a standard habitation compartment, one hundred ninety-six cubic feet that had to serve as sleeping quarters and office. No bigger than anyone else’s quarters.

On a space station, in zero gee, a hundred ninety-six cubic feet was almost generous. Here on the Moon it came close to inducing claustrophobia.

Paul shrugged and gave the standard line, “Beats sleeping outside.”

“Not by much,” Jinny replied with the standard counter.

He could smell a soft flowery fragrance. “How do you stay so fresh in these sardine cans?”

She smiled prettily. “I just took my weekly shower a couple of hours ago. In your honor. Ask me again in a few days.”

A vision of her lithe body glistening with sweat filled Paul’s mind for an instant. “Pheromone heaven,” he muttered.

“More like pheromone hell,” Jinny said. “Head colds are a blessing around here.”

Paul mumbled, “Yeah. Maybe so.”

“My cubbyhole’s at the other end of this row,” she said, grinning. “In case you get lonely.”

“I’m a married man,” Paul said quickly, thinking as he spoke that it sounded terribly nerdy.

Jinny’s grin turned saucy. “Well, just in case…”

Paul thanked her for the escort service and shooed her off, then went into his compartment, dropped onto the bunk, and immediately went to the desktop computer to call Joanna. But he was thinking of how pleasing it would be if Jinny really buttered up the boss; or vice versa.

“I just don’t trust machines I can’t see,” Wojo grumbled.

Paul and the tractor teleoperator were sitting in the galley, hunched over Paul’s hand-sized computer.

“If these things work we can let them do all the construction out on the surface and you can sit down here in comfort and count your insurance benefits.”

Wojo fixed him with a baleful stare. The man’s breath smelled terrible. Like the exhaust fan from a brewery, Paul thought. But where in the hell would he get beer up here?

“Just how smart are these slime-sucking bugs?” Wojo asked.

“Like ants,” said Paul.

Wojo scratched at his shaggy beard. “Read a book once—”

“No!” Paul pretended shock.

With a small grin, Wojo said, “You’d be surprised what I’m capable of. Anyway, this book was about army ants in South America. Every once in a while they run amok and strip the whole festering jungle right down to the bark and bone. Don’t leave anything alive in their path.”

“These bugs aren’t like that,” Paul said.

“How do you know?”

Paul had to think a moment. “Well, for one thing, they’re programmed to stop functioning at temperatures above thirty degrees.”

Wojo heaved his bulk up from the spindly chair and trudged over to the thermostat on the curving wall of the galley. “It’s twenty-seven degrees in here right now. Just a smidge over eighty, Fahrenheit.”

“I thought it felt warm in here.”

Walking back to the long, narrow table and settling ponderously into the little chair across from Paul, Wojo complained, “We need more radiator surface outside. Only way to get rid of heat is to radiate it away. You know that. I know that. But your pus-infested, maggot-brained, excrement-eating systems engineers sitting comfy and cool in their air-conditioned offices in Savannah haven’t seen fit to honor our humble requests for more radiators.”

“But thermal conduction—”

“Isn’t worth a thimbleful of warm spit,” Wojo said. “We’re dug in nice and deep. The rock outside our shells conducts heat about as well as a politician tells the unvarnished truth.”

“So turning the thermostats down won’t help?”

With a massive shake of his shaggy head, Wojo said, “All you’d do is put an extra load on the air conditioners and the radiators. Which we need about as much as a prostitute needs an honest cop.”

I’ll get you more radiators,” Paul said.

“Thank you kindly, sir,” said Wojo. “Now, to get back to these mechanical viruses you brought up here with you — you say they’re programmed to shut down at thirty Cee?”

“That’s right.”

“All that means is that they won’t work out on the surface in daylight. Even at our current level of discomfort, they could be doing whatever it is they’re programmed to do in here right now. How would we stop ’em?”

“Each set of the nanomachines is programmed to utilize one type of atom or molecule. When they run out of that material, they stop functioning.”

“And what materials are these bugs programmed to use?”

Paul punched up the list on his computer.

Squinting at the small screen, Wojo mumbled, “Titanium, aluminum, silicon — for the love of sweet Jesus, they could munch their way right through the whole body of the Moon and come out the other side!”

“No, no,” Paul insisted. “We have other safeguards.”

“You better show ’em to me.”

Tapping on the miniaturized keyboard, Paul said, “See, a polarizing current can shut them all down immediately.”

“Long as you can get the current to them.”

Paul looked at Wojo’s grizzled face. He’s being extra cautious, and he’s right to look at it that way. This is so new that nobody’s had any experience with it.

But he said, “Look, Wojo, if these nanobugs work we can turn this set of tin cans into a regular palace in a couple of years. Moonbase can start making profits right away.”

“But if it doesn’t work—”

“That’s why we’re conducting the demonstration at a remote site,” Paul said, with growing irritation. “If anything goes wrong, it’ll go wrong out there and won’t threaten the base here.”

Wojo nodded solemnly. “It’ll go wrong out there, all right. With you and me twenty miles from help.”

“We’ll have a hopper, for chrissake,” Paul snapped. “We could jump all the way back here in fifteen minutes, if we had to.”

Wojo nodded. “I suppose that’s true,” he said. But he didn’t sound as if his heart was in it.

Nettled by Wojo’s worries, Paul spent that whole afternoon deep in conference with Kris Cardenas, back at San Jose.

Sitting on his bunk, Paul said to her image in his laptop screen, “You can see why some of the people here are scared of the whole idea.”

“Well,” she admitted grudgingly, “the nanomachines are the size of viruses. They can be carried by air currents and float around. But the Moon’s airless, so—”

“The interiors of our habitation modules aren’t airless,” Paul pointed out.

“Yes, but you’re not using the bugs in your habitation modules, are you?” Cardenas replied sharply, her blue eyes snapping. “You’re only using them out in the remote site, twenty miles from the nearest existing shelter.”

“That’s true, “Paul agreed.

“So there shouldn’t be any trouble. Even if there is, once daylight comes up the bugs will overheat and shut down.”

“Can they last fourteen days in a dormant condition?”

“For sure,” she said. “But in fourteen days you ought to be able to sweep them all up.”

“Paul nodded. “I guess so.”

Cardenas smiled prettily. “Believe me, Mr. Stavenger, we’ve gone through every possible scenario in our simulations. We even rented the big vacuum chamber over at Ames to simulate the lunar environment. Nothing’s going to go wrong.”

“I guess so,” Paul said again.

“Mr. Masterson has been here half a dozen times, checking out every facet of the experiment,” she added.

“Greg?”

“Yes. He’s triple-checked everything. And then some.”

“That’s good,” Paul said lamely, adding to himself, I suppose.

But he went hunting through the underground shelters for Lana Goodman. Moonbase’s so-called permanent resident was a smart scientist, Paul knew, and had no axe to grind in the matter of nanotechnology.

He found her in the photo lab that she had crammed into the minimal space between the laundry and the shower facility.

“Nanomachines?” Goodman was peering at a strip of film through a magnifying glass. Paul saw her elfin features in profile. With the light behind her, her thinning gray hair looked almost like a halo.

Paul explained what he was trying to do, and Wojo’s apprehensions.

Goodman put the film down and turned her full attention to him. “I don’t know the details, but I’ve heard a lot about nanotechnology. Mostly wild claims by enthusiasts and equally wild predictions of disaster by opponents.”

Spreading his hands, Paul said, “Well, that’s what I’m faced with: either the salvation of Moonbase or a disaster. I’d like your opinion on which to expect.”

“Most of what I’ve read about deals with the medical applications,” Goodman said, threading the film into the developing machine.

“Medical?”

“You know, an old lady like me gets interested in nano-machines that can keep the estrogen flowing.” She winked broadly.

“Oh,” said Paul. “I get it.”

More seriously, she asked, “If these nanomachines don’t work, are you going to close down Moonbase?”

“I don’t want to do that,” Paul said.

“I don’t want to go back Earthside,” said Goodman. “So maybe I’m not as unbiased in this matter as you think.”

Scientists! Paul fumed inwardly. They never give you a straight answer. Always hedging everything with all kinds of qualifications and escape hatches. He remembered a professor of economics who complained that the government always looked for ‘one-armed’ advisors: those who wouldn’t qualify everything by saying, “On the other hand…”

“Look,” he said, “all I want is your honest opinion about’twhether or not it’s safe to try this demonstration.”

Goodman looked up at him. “Twenty miles out on the other side of the ringwall?”

“Twenty-five miles, actually. The site is twenty miles out on the mare from Tempo Nineteen.”

“That should be far enough,” Goodman said. “If anything does go wrong, it shouldn’t affect us here.”

That was what Paul wanted to hear.

But before he could thank her, Goodman said, “Let me think about it, though. Ask some people I know about it. If I come up with any problems, I’ll let you know.”

“We’re leaving tomorrow morning,” Paul said.

“Who’s going with you?”

“Wojo.”

Goodman grinned maliciously. “Good. He’s a cantankerous old brute.”

“You two don’t get along?”

“I’ve been chasing his bod for months now, and he keeps eluding me. I think he’s scared of me.”

“Wojo?”

“Maybe he’s still a virgin.”

Paul stared at her for a stunned moment, not knowing whether she was serious or joking.

“Life’s not easy up here for a horny old lady,” Goodman said, with only the slightest of smiles. “Lots of nice young men, but they look on me like their grandmother. Wojo’s more my age.”

“Yeah,” Paul said weakly. “I suppose he is.”

Then he beat a hasty retreat, leaving Goodman grinning at his departing back.

TRACTOR FOUR

Paul was surprised to see Hi Tinker suiting up in the preparation chamber next to the airlock.

Three walls of the cubicle were lined with spacesuits standing on racks like displays of medieval armor. Helmets rested on shelves just above the empty suit torsos, boots on the plastic flooring next to the leggings.

Tink was already in his leggings and boots when Paul came in. He was an amiable Canadian from Toronto, lean and lantern-jawed, with a dry sense of humor and a maddening propensity for puns.

With a lopsided smile he told Paul, “Wojo’s outside already, checking out the tractor.”

“Good,” said Paul, going to the medium-sized suits.

“These nanomachines really worry him, you know.” Before Paul could reply he went on, “You might say the bugs are bugging him.”

Paul ignored the pun. No sense encouraging the man. “What’re you suiting up for?” he asked, stepping into the leggings of the newest-looking suit he could find in his size.

I’m going with you”

“You are?”

Tinker nodded. “You can use a third set of hands to set things up, and I want to scout the territory out on the mare for a telescope site.”

“What’s wrong with siting a telescope here, inside the ringwall?”

“Too much radio chatter in here. I’ve got a grant from Caltech to look into developing a major radio telescope facility up here. It’ll need someplace nice and quiet in the radio frequencies. A dome away from home.”

Why wasn’t I told about this? Paul asked himself. Tinker was a consultant, not a regular corporate employee. He came up to Moonbase every three months to check out the astronomical equipment that the base operated for a consortium of universities. Still, Paul thought, if he’s won a grant from Caltech I should have been informed.

Then he realized that he was the CEO now, too far above the ranks to be involved in such details. The thought stung him. Paul wanted to know every detail about Moonbase.

Aloud, he said, “Farside would be the best place for radio quiet.”

Lifting his suit’s torso over his head, Tinker wormed his arms into its sleeves and popped his head up through the metal ring of its collar.

With a grunt that might have been part laugh, he said, “You know that, and I know that, and even Wojo knows that But find me a university that’s got the money to build a base on the farside.”

“What about the consortium?” Paul asked.

Tink shook his head sadly. “Not even the entire International Astronomical Union can raise that kind of cabbage. When it comes to finances, astronomers are at the end of the line.”

Paul nodded, realizing that Tinker didn’t make puns about his work. Be thankful for small mercies, he thought.

The two men checked out each other’s suits and backpacks, then Paul followed Tink through the airlock and out onto the surface of the crater Alphonsus.

“Magnificent desolation,” Paul murmured, as he always did when he went outside.

The tired, worn ringwall mountains rose above them as far as the eye could see. Alphonsus was so wide that Paul could barely make out the tops of the peaks at the center of the crater poking above the horizon. The crater floor, cracked and rilled, seemed as dead and untouched as the first time Paul had landed here. Except for the humps of rubble marking the buried modules of the base and the angular metal framework of the oxygen plant off to the right. The ground was welted with bright cleated trails that the tractors left.

As Paul stood there, though, he saw what Moonbase could become: a whole city, domed and covered with protective rubble, to be sure, but a real city of thousands of people with open spaces beneath its wide dome and green trees and plants and grass, soaring pillars and winding footpaths and broad windows so you could look outside and see the solar energy farms and the factories open to vacuum and the spaceport where ships landed and took off on a regular schedule.

“We’re ready whenever you are, boss-man.”

Wojo’s voice in his earphones startled Paul out of his daydream. Turning, he saw the man standing by the tractor hatch. Wojo’s spacesuit looked hard-used, grimy, its helmet scratched and dulled.

“Yeah,” he said tightly. “Let’s get going.”

It was considerably less than comfortable sitting squeezed together in the tractor’s cab inside their cumbersome space-suits, but Paul knew that a stray meteoroid could crack the canopy and the cab would lose its air in seconds.

The tractor’s cab was a bubble of tempered plastiglass, pressurized to the same five pounds per square inch as the spacesuits, so that in an emergency the occupants could slam down their visor helmets and go to their suit life-support systems without needing time to prebreathe low-pressure oxygen to avoid the bends.

The underground shelters also ran at five psi, for the same reason. The ‘air’ that the Moonbase inhabitants breathed with seventy-two percent oxygen, twenty-eight percent nitrogen. The oxygen came from the lunar regolith; until they drilled successfully for ammonia the nitrogen had to be carried up from Earth.

One of the ongoing research efforts at the base was aimed at producing a metallic glass that had the transparency of good crystal and the structural strength of steel. Someday we’ll be able to ride these buggies in our shirtsleeves, Paul told himself. In the meantime, it felt reassuring to have the bulk of the spacesuit protecting him, comfort be damned. There was only one chance in a trillion of being hit by a meteoroid big enough to crack the canopy, but Paul had no desire to test the odds.

The tractor climbed laboriously up the ringwall mountain over the easiest slope, which Wojo insisted on calling ‘Wodjohowitcz Pass.’

“Your name is too tough to spell for it to be used on maps,” Tinker said archly. “It’ll never pass the spelling test.”

Paul groaned. Wojo muttered.

Paul took over the driving chores once they got down onto the flat of Mare Nubium. Wojo stopped the tractor so they could shift places, then when they were underway again he reached carefully behind their seats and pulled out three prepackaged lunches.

“Best sandwiches this side of Chattanooga,” Wojo said proudly. “Made ’em myself.”

Paul had to admit that they were good. One thing he had insisted on for Moonbase was top-quality food. We have to breathe recycled air and drink recycled water, but by God we’ll eat decently, at least.

“Sandwiched the lunch chore in between your other duties?” Tinker punned.

It’s going to be a long three days, Paul thought. Very long.

“Coming up on Shelter Nineteen,” Wojo called out, one gloved finger on the map readout glowing in the control panel’s main display screen.

The man’s breath stinks, Paul said to himself.

Looking straight ahead, searching for the red light atop the antenna that marked the heaped rubble mound of the shelter, Paul asked, “What the hell are you drinking, Wojo?”

“What do you mean?”

“Water wouldn’t give you a breath like that.”

With great dignity, Wojo asked, “Are you implying that I have imbibed an alcoholic beverage?”

Tinker piped up, “Now that you mention it, there’s been a rumor about somebody running a still back at the base.”

“A still?” Paul snapped.

“An active still,” Tinker replied.

“Nothing but rumor,” said Wojo. “Where would somebody hide a still?”

Paul had to turn almost sideways to peer around the edge of his helmet and look at Wojo’s face. The man avoided his gaze.

“What do you use for ingredients?” he asked.

“Search me,” Wojo replied innocently. “I’m no chemist”

“There’s plenty of exotic chemicals available,” Tinker said, “from the labs and the pharmacy. From what I’ve heard, they might even be using some of the residual rocket propellants left in the landers’ tanks.”

“This had better be a joke,” Paul muttered. “Making booze and stealing rocket propellants isn’t just criminal, it’s goddamned dangerous.”

“It’s a joke,” Wojo assured him.

Tinker laughed. “We got you that time, boss boss.”

Paul made himself laugh with them. But he was thinking that a drunk could kill a lot of people very suddenly at Moonbase. Better look into this joke when I get back.

It was night and would remain so for seventy-five hours more. Yet the broad rock-strewn plain of Mare Nubium was clearly lit by Earthglow. Once Wojo resumed the driving chore Paul leaned as far back as he could and watched the big blue and white crescent of Earth hanging in the dark cold sky. It was in the gibbous phase, fatter than a half-Earth, glowing warm and beautiful out there.

When the Earth was in its ‘new’ phase, Paul could trace out the cities and highways from the lights shining in the darkened globe. But now the glare from its daylit side drowned out the night lights.

Anyway, Paul said to himself, we’ve got work to do. We’re not here for the sightseeing.

“There’s the spot,” Wojo said, slowing the tractor to a stop.

Paul looked at the electronic map on the control panel. The blue dot marking their location was touching the red dot marking the test site.

“Check it out with the GPS signal,” Paul said.

“Already did,” Wojo answered. “Last fix we’ll get for a while. Feeble-minded little satellite’s sinking below the horizon and there won’t be another in sight for a couple hours.”

Tinker helped them offload the equipment and while he and Paul set up a plastic bubble tent for their quarters, Wojo used the tractor’s front blade to dig a trench big enough to hold a full-sized shelter.

“Now we see what these teeny bugs can do,” Wojo said. There were three sets of nanomachines, each sealed in an insulated cylindrical container that looked to Paul like a high-tech metallic thermos bottle. Using the tractor’s communications system he established a link with Cardenas in San Jose, beaming a signal directly to a commsat in synchronous orbit above the Pacific.

The signal was weak, but Paul had Cardenas on-line as Wojo pried open the first container and gingerly carried it to the trench.

“Feel kinda like Aladdin,” Wojo muttered. “Where’s the puff of smoke and the genie?”

Cardenas took him seriously. “You won’t see anything for at least two hours,” she said. “Just drop the container into the trench.” Paul could see tension in her face. And excitement.

Tinker spent the next two hours checking out the ambient levels of microwave radiation in the area, setting out a series of pocket-sized detectors on the dusty regolith. Wojo hauled equipment off the tractor and set up their quarters inside the plastic bubble tent.

Paul watched the trench. “Nothing seems to be happening,” he said.

Three seconds later Cardenas’s streaky image replied, “The nanomachines are reproducing themselves. Everything’s going according to the program.”

Carrying a portable communicator in his gloved hand, Paul walked over to the edge of the trench. Nothing was stirring. It’s going to be a long two hours, he told himself.

Wojo came up beside him. Paul was staring so intently into the empty trench that he only noticed Wojo’s presence when he heard the man’s labored breathing through his earphones.

“You’re out of condition,” Paul said.

“Easy thing to do, up here,” Wojo admitted.

“Better check with the medical people, let them set up an exercise routine for you.” It was a requirement in every employee’s contract; if an employee did not follow the medical department’s prescribed exercise regimen, it was grounds for return to Earth and perhaps even dismissal from the company.

“Right.” There were a thousand ways to evade the exercising, both Wojo and Paul knew.

Tinker joined them. “I’m all finished with my work. Can we go home now?”

Paul ignored him.

At first he wasn’t certain he actually saw it. Paul wanted to rub his eyes, but inside the spacesuit and helmet he couldn’t. Yet it looked as if a tiny pool of something shiny had formed on the bottom of the trench, right where the opened container was lying. A puddle that looked almost like glassy, shining liquid mercury.

“Am I seeing straight?” Wojo asked.

“Yeah,” said Paul. “Look! It’s spreading.”

A glassy smooth film of titanium was growing across the bottom of the trench. And its sides. Fascinated, Paul watched for hours as the titanium shell slowly arched above the surface of the regolith to form a complete cylinder. Then its ends began to close.

“The next set of bugs is the real test,” Cardenas said, looking much happier and more relaxed now.

“The airlock,” Paul said. If they can build a whole airlock by themselves, they can build just about anything, he thought.

Wojo carried the second cylinder to the open doorway of the titanium shelter with a good deal more confidence than he had borne the first.

They took turns going inside the pressurized bubble tent to grab a bite of dinner. Paul could hardly tear himself away from watching an, airlock assemble itself, as if by magic, literally from the ground up.

Now give them a few hours to fill the shelter with oxygen,” Cardenas said, positively glowing once the airlock was finished, “and you’ll have a complete prefabricated, ready-to-use shelter built entirely out of native materials by my nanomachines.”

The three men slept inside the pressurized tent, in their suits. It was uncomfortable. They could not lie down; the best they could do was to lean back against rests they had brought with them, reclining at roughly a forty-five degree angle. If the tent were suddenly ruptured they could snap down their visors and turn on their backpack life support systems in a second or two.

To make it worse, Tinker either would not or could not stop making puns. Paul groaned and Wojo threatened the astronomer’s life, but no matter what either of them said, Tink turned it into a maddening pun. They became very elaborate as the men prepared for sleep, climaxing with a pun based on the fact that making bowel movements in a spacesuit is a complex and miserable business.

“What we need is a special container, maybe two pints in capacity,” Tink merrily chattered away. “I think I’ll enter a class-action suit to force the corporation to supply us with special bottles for manure storage.”

“Tink…’ Wojo growled menacingly.

Undeterred, the astronomer concluded, “Yes, sir, that’s what I’ll do. Bring my request to a judge and see if he’ll demand ordure in the quart.”

Before Wojo could throw anything, Paul said, “Okay, Tink. That’s enough. Not another word out of you.”

Tinker looked from Paul to Wqjo and back again. The self-satisfied grin on his face faded a little. His eyes lit up as if he had thought of still another pun.

“No!” Paul said sharply, the way he would to a baby he was trying to train. Or a dog.

Tink nodded inside his helmet and pressed an upraised finger to his lips. Wojo, still looking grim, nodded his thanks to Paul.

Paul thought he would be unable to sleep, propped up inside the suit and excited about the nanomachines working away, silent and invisible out there. But he drifted off almost as soon as he closed his eyes, and if he dreamed at all he remembered none of it when he awoke a few hours later, long before his suit’s alarm was set to go off.

Wojo was snoring like an asthmatic ox and Tinker was muttering in his sleep. Paul quietly refilled his backpack oxygen supply from the tanks in the tent, then slid his visor down and stepped through the tent’s minimal airlock.

The shelter gleamed slightly in the Earthlight, its curved top uncovered as yet by protective dirt. Paul grappled one of the nitrogen tanks from the tractor’s back and hauled it to the shelter. He examined the airlock’s control panel. It was mechanical rather than electronic; rather crude but a good-enough test of the.nanomachines’ abilities. Cardenas had a team working on electronic assemblies, but Greg had wanted to go ahead with this test as quickly as possible and Paul had agreed with him.

He slid the outer hatch open, lugged the nitrogen cylinder inside and then stepped in himself and pulled the hatch closed. A set of four knobs projected from one side of the inner hatch. Paul turned the top one and soon heard the reassuring hiss of gas filling the airlock. Once the sound stopped he took a pressure gauge from his belt. Less than two psi, but holding steady. Oxygen pressure wasn’t as high as it should be, not yet, but at least the airlock didn’t seem to be leaking.

Is it really oxygen? Paul asked himself. The little portable mass spectrograph was still in the tractor. He’d have to assume the bugs were doing their work properly. For now.

Opening the inner airlock hatch, Paul stepped inside the shelter. In the light from his helmet lamp, the curving walls glistened almost as if they were wet. The pressure gauge held steady. The shelter was airtight. Paul dragged the nitrogen cylinder into the empty shelter and opened its valve. By noon tomorrow we’ll be able to sit in here in our shirtsleeves, he thought happily.

“We’ll eat lunch in here,” he promised himself aloud. Paul and Tink spent the morning hauling equipment into the new shelter, while Wojo worked the tractor, carefully piling up rubble over its curving roof.

At last, a few minutes after noon, the three of them entered the shelter.

For a long moment they simply stood inside the cylindrical space. The walls still glistened as if newborn. The bunks, table and equipment they had carried in looked shiny new, never; used. Tinker held the mass spectrometer in his gloved hands.

“Well?” Paul asked him.

Peering at the readout display, Tinker said, “Seventy-six percent oxygen, twenty-four nitrogen.”

“Good enough,” Paul said.

“Pressure’s just a tad over five psi,” Wojo said.

“Okay.” Paul slid his visor up and took a deep breath. “It’s not the Garden of Eden, but it’ll do.”

With great relief they peeled themselves out of their spacesuits, although the stench of bodies confined inside the suits for several days was less than pleasant.

“I won’t mention yours if you don’t mention mine,” Wojo said, pinching his nose with forefinger and thumb.

“Okay,” Tinker answered happily. “Let’s not make a stink about it.”

Paul understood how a man could be driven to murder.

They ate lunch in their coveralls at the small table they had carried in, after heating the prepackaged meals in the microwave cooker. Tinker seemed very impressed with the nanomachines’ achievement.

“We could build a radio telescope facility on the farside!” he said enthusiastically. “These bugs are going to change everything we do up here!”

Wojo chewed his soyburger thoughtfully, then replied, “Better make sure this shelter really works right before you go prancing off to the farside.”

“Oh, you want to work the bugs out of it?” Tinker asked, delightedly.

Wojo looked as if he wanted to spit.

After lunch Paul checked in with Kris Cardenas to assure her that all was going well. Then he patched through a call to Joanna. She was at home, in her sitting room.

“Are you okay?” were the first words out of Paul’s mouth when he saw her stretched out on the chintz-covered chaise longue.

It took three seconds for her to smile. “Of course I’m all right.”

“Oh, I thought maybe you didn’t feel well.”

Again the delay. Then, “Paul, it’s seven-thirty in the morning here. I’ve been trying to call you for more than an hour.”

“Call me? Why?”

Joanna’s face clouded once Paul’s question reached her. “It’s Greg… I told him about the baby last night.”

“He wasn’t pleased, I guess.”

“He got hysterical. He frightened me.”

Paul felt his insides tensing.

Joanna went on, “He started raving about how we’re trying to get rid of him, push him out of the corporation. Lord, he sounded like his father.”

“I’m not trying to push him out,” Paul said.

Joanna continued, “He said something about getting rid of Brad. As if he did it deliberately.”

“Brad?”

Without a pause, she went on, “And he’s furious with you. He said he’s going to destroy you. He said you’d never come back from the Moon.”

Paul saw the anguish in her face. The fear. For which of us? he wondered. Is she scared for me or is she scared that Greg’s getting beyond her control?

“Paul, he’s violent!”

“He didn’t hurt you, did he?”

The three-second lag seemed like an infinity. At last Joanna shook her head wearily. “No, but he was boiling with anger about you. And the baby. It was frightening.”

So all Greg’s smiles and cooperation were just a front, after all, Paul thought. He said to his wife, “As long as he’s not threatening you, it’s okay.”

“He wants to kill you!” she blurted.

Paul made himself smile reassuringly. “Well, he’ll have to wait until I get back for that, won’t he? He can’t reach me up here.”

Joanna nodded, but she still looked fearful.

TEMPO 20(N)

Later that afternoon Paul got two warnings of danger simultaneously.

He had officially’dedicated’ their new shelter while they ate lunch, using a sprinkle of water instead of champagne to dub it Tempo 20(N): the twentieth’temporary’ shelter erected by Moonbase. The (N) designated that it had been built by nanomachines.

The three men spent the rest of the afternoon checking every square millimeter of the shelter. It was airtight. Radiation levels were well below minimums. Temperature hovered at twenty-five degrees Celsius.

They still had to use the tractor’s communications gear to contact Moonbase and San Jose. There hadn’t been enough capacity in the tractor to hold all the comm equipment that a shelter normally had, mainly because they had hauled the rocket hopper along with them.

Little more than a railed platform with a rocket motor beneath it, the hopper was a safety tactic, a hedge against danger. It could lift three men — and practically nothing else — as far as the next shelter, twenty miles away.

Paul was sitting on one of the bunks inside the shelter, sending the results of their checkout to San Jose, patching the link from his hand-held communicator through the tractor’s comm unit. Kris Cardenas’ image on the tiny screen was streaked with white hashes of snow. Suddenly it winked off altogether. Paul’s portable went dead.

At that moment, Tinker came in through the airlock. He had gone outside to gather up his microwave detectors.

Sliding up the visor of his helmet, Tink said, “Wojo’s having some trouble with the tractor.”

Annoyed and puzzled at his communicator’s failure, Paul looked up at the astronomer. “What?”

“He’s out there turning the vacuum blue,” Tink said, not looking particularly worried. “Something’s wrong with the tractor. I tried to give him some help, but I don’t know enough about cryogenic motors.”

A tendril of fear wormed along Paul’s spine. “Maybe he needs a hand.” He got up and went for his suit.

“I think he’ll need more than applause,” Tinker punned.

The suit still smelled ripe, but Paul barely noticed as he pulled it on, piece by piece. Tinker helped him into the backpack and checked all the connections.

“You are go for surface excursion,” said Tink, patting the top of Paul’s helmet. The standard line sounded strange, coming from him.

Paul powered up his suit radio as he stepped into the airlock. He could hear Wojo’s fervent litany of methodical, dispassionate cursing.

“… slime sucking, pus eating, dung dripping misbegotten son of a promiscuous Albanian she-goat and a syphilitic refugee from a leper colony…”

“What’s the matter, man?” Paul asked, loping across the dusty ground in the gliding long low-gravity strides of the experienced lunar worker.

“Would you believe,” Wojo replied, still bent over the tractor’s electric motor compartment, “that this miserable excuse of an electrician’s wet dream is completely shorted out?”

Paul had to lean far over to see the motor, inside its insulated compartment. In the light of their two helmet lamps, the aluminum coils looked blackened; some of them appeared to be bent, as if they had been pulled apart.

“What in hell…?”

Wojo held up a length of narrow plastic tubing. “Seals are eaten through. Each and every blessed seal is leaking like a busted sieve. All the nitrogen coolant’s evaporated.”

“How could that happen?”

Wojo must have shaken his head inside his helmet. “Don’t know how, but it must’ve happened while we were sleeping. Mother-lusting motor worked fine yesterday.”

“And the back-up?”

“Same goddamned thing.”

That was the first time Paul had ever heard Wojo actually resort to blasphemy, however mild. He must be really worked tip, Paul thought.

“Goodthing we brought the hopper,” he said.

“Yeah,” Wojo agreed.

But the hopper was useless, too. The tubing connecting its propellant tanks to the rocket’s combustion chamber was eaten through.

“It looks like it’s corroded,” Paul said, completely puzzled. “Like an iron pipe that’s been left underwater for years.”

“It ain’t iron and it hasn’t been underwater,” Wojo muttered. “This tubing is high-strength plastic and it looks like something’s just chewed right through it.”

Gobblers! Paul’s knees went weak with the realization.

“Jesus,” he moaned.

“What is it?”

“Put the tubing down!” Paul snapped. “Drop it!”

Wojo let it fall. The length of tubing tumbled slowly and bounced when it hit the ground.

“Get away from here. Move away!”

“What’s the matter, boss?” Wojo asked, his voice more flustered than fearful. “What is it?”

“I’m not sure, but we—”

“Hey!” Wojo shouted. “I got a leak!”

“Where?” Paul reached for the pocket in the thigh of his suit, where patches were kept.

“I can’t-’ Wojo’s voice cut off. He started coughing.

In the light of Earthglow Paul could see the fabric of Wojo’s gloves rotting away, dissolving, melting. The inner lining of metal mesh was showing through on most of his fingers.

“Get into the shelter!” Paul yelled. “Run!”

Wojo stumbled for the airlock hatch as Paul stood between the tractor and the hopper, immobilized by fear and the realization of what was happening.

Gobblers. Somehow gobblers have been mixed in with the nanobugs. They’re eating up anything with carbon molecules in them.

Wojo was two steps from the airlock hatch when he screamed and fell face-forward to the ground. He writhed as if something was eating him alive, his screams higher and higher until abruptly they stopped altogether and he became still.

“Wojo!” Paul yelled. “Wojo!”

The airlock hatch slid open and Tinker stepped out, fully suited.

“What the hell’s going—”

He stopped and bent forward slightly to stare at Wojo, lying two paces before him.

“Did you handle any of the tubing from the tractor?” Paul shouted into his helmet microphone.

“What happened to Wojo?” Tinker started to bend down beside the fallen man.

“Get away from him!” Paul shrieked.

Tinker jerked back, staggered slightly and bumped against the open hatchway of the airlock.

Frantic, Paul demanded, “Did you handle anything from the tractor?”

“What’re you talking about? What’s happened to Wojo?”

“He’s dead, dammit!”

“Dead?”

Paul felt as if he had stumbled into a leper colony. He didn’t want to touch anything, get near anyone.

Forcing himself to be as calm as possible, he said to Tinker, “Something’s gone wrong with the nanobugs. They’ve infected Wojo’s suit and eaten away the insulation.”

“His suit failed?” Tinker’s voice went hollow with sudden fear.

The goddamned bugs are chewing up his body, Paul knew. But there was no sense scaring Tinker more than he had to.

“Did you handle anything from the tractor?” Paul asked again. “Or the hopper?”

Sounding confused, Tink said, “I looked over Wojo’s shoulder — God, is he really dead?”

“Did you touch anything?”

“He… he showed me a piece of tubing that had broken down. I looked it over.”

“Did you touch it?”

“Yes! Of course I touched it.”

“Get back inside the shelter and get out of that damned suit as fast as you can,” Paul commanded. “Shove the suit into the airlock and stay inside the shelter until I can get some help here.”

“I don’t understand,” Tinker said.

“Your suit’s infected with nanobugs that attack carbon-based molecules,” Paul said, annoyed with the astronomer’s obtuseness. “Now move!’

“Carbon-based molecules? That includes me!”

“Damned right! Get out of that fuckin’ suit as fast as you can!”

Tinker ducked back through the airlock at last. Paul stood frozen with terror, staring at Wojo’s fallen body. His spacesuit was disintegrating before his eyes. In the soft light from Earth overhead, Paul watched as the arms of Wojo’s suit slowly disappeared, layer by layer: fabric, insulation, the neoprene gaslight bladder. They’ll be down to his skin and flesh; like maggots.

Tinker’s first scream turned Paul’s blood cold. Tink either hadn’t taken off his helmet, or he had left his suit radio on while he was getting out of the spacesuit. Either way, Paul heard him screaming and screaming and screaming. Wojo had died of decompression when the bugs had eaten through his suit. Tinker was devoured alive, screaming until his voice went hoarse.

Paul stood alone out on Mare Nubium, his two companions dead, the area infested with killing nanobugs, the nearest shelter twenty miles away.

Greg, he knew. Greg’s done this. He’s the only one who would even think of it Slipped a sampling of gobblers in with the assemblers. He’s trying to murder me. He’s killed Wojo and Tink. I’m next. If I let him.

SHELTER 19

Paul was struggling with an invisible demon. He couldn’t see it, but he could feel it clutching at his throat, tearing at his flesh. He thrashed madly, grappling with it, trying with every ounce of strength in him to push it away, to get it off him.

His eyes snapped open. Above him curved the rounded ceiling of Tempo 19. Air circulation fans hummed softly and a pump chugged faithfully in the background.

I’m safe, he told himself, lying in his sweaty coveralls on the bunk. I’m okay. For how long?

“Long enough,” he said, his voice a grating, harsh rasp. Wincing when he put his weight on his right foot, he limped to the food freezer and microwave oven that comprised the shelter’s galley. The sink was beside it. Paul took a plastic cup from the rack over it and filled it with water. He drank it down slowly; it was warm and flat and the best drink he had ever tasted. He savored it, relished it, gloried in the way it eased the sandpaper feeling in his throat.

He pulled out a plastic container of frozen soup and popped it into the microwave. Then he limped to the communications console and called Moonbase.

Impatiently he reported the deaths of Wojo and Tinker. The guy on comm duty quickly called the base’s director, and Paul had to repeat the news to her.

“The nanomachines killed them?” her hard-bitten face radiated surprise, disbelief.

“And damned near killed me, too,” Paul said wearily. “Now patch me through to Savannah. I want to talk to my wife.”

“Just a minute,” said the base director. “I need to know a lot—”

“Later,” said Paul, putting iron into it. “I want to talk to my wife. Now. On a private link.”

“Okay,” the director said. I’ll put together a team to go out there and get the bodies.”

“No! Nobody goes anywhere near that site until I’ve had a talk with the San Jose troops. That whole area is quarantined as of now,”

The director’s eyes went wide for a moment. Then she nodded. “Understood.”

Paul was glad that Joanna was in her office at corporate headquarters. From the looks of the little urban park outside her window it must have been late afternoon.

She was smiling as her face appeared on the tabletop display screen before Paul, but her smile froze the instant she saw his haggard, bleary-eyed face.

“Paul, what’s happened?”

He had spent twenty minutes setting up a direct laser link to Savannah. Anybody at Moonbase could tap into his transmission from the shelter, if they dared, but from Moonbase’s laser to the receiver on the roof of the headquarters building, no one could eavesdrop.

“Greg tried to murder me,” he said, then waited three seconds for the shock to register in her face.

“Greg? How…?”

“He put a mix of gobblers in with the nanobug assemblers. Two men were killed and he damned near got me.”

“Gobblers?” Joanna echoed.

“Nanobugs that take molecules apart. Long-chain carbon molecules. Like spacesuit materials. Like human flesh.”

Joanna gasped, “Oh no.”

“There’s a tractor outside this shelter. I’m going to ride back to Moonbase and then head home.”

He could see the conflicting emotions battling within her. “What should I do? About Greg, I mean?”

“Nothing!” Paul snapped. “Stay away from him. He’s a murderer and I don’t want him anywhere near you.”

Joanna did not reply, hut Paul saw what she was thinking. He’s my son.

That’s the long and the short of it, Paul told himself. I’m her Husband, the father of the child she’s carrying. But Greg is her son and she’ll try to protect him even if he tries to kill her.

I’ve got get back there, he realized. Quick as I can. Got to get there and protect her.

Joanna could see the determination in Paul’s exhausted face. He wants to get back here so he can accuse Greg. Greg tried to murder him.

Without consciously thinking about it, she tapped the phone console on her desk and called out her son’s name. In a few seconds Greg’s darkly handsome face appeared on the display screen.

“Could you come over to my office, Greg?” Joanna asked.

“I’m in the middle of—”

“Right now,” Joanna snapped. Then she added, “Please.”

Annoyance flashed across his features, but he held it in check and answered, “Certainly.”

He looked more apprehensive than annoyed when he stepped into Joanna’s office. She had hardly changed anything in the big corner room since taking it over from Bradley Arnold. There had been no time; Joanna had been much too busy learning her new responsibilities to deal with interior decorators.

Warily, with the same expression he had worn as a little boy when he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t, Greg walked across the richly patterned Indian carpet and took the leather chair in front of Joanna’s desk.

“What’s happened?” he asked softly.

“I just got a call from Moonbase,” said Joanna.

His brows rose. “Oh?”

“It was Paul. He’s still alive, but the two men working with him were killed.”

Greg let out a long sigh. “Too bad.”

“The nanomachines killed them.”

“Yes.”

“You know all about it,” don’t you?”

“Nanotechnology is very new, Mom. Untried. Accidents will happen.”

Joanna stared at her son. “Paul thinks you tried to murder him.”

“That’s just like him.”

“Did you use nanomachines to kill Brad?” Joanna heart herself ask.

The hint of a smile ghosted across Greg’s lips. “The pompous old fool.”

“Did you?”

Greg shifted slightly in the chair. “When I was in San Jose a few months ago I saw a demonstration of what they cal gobblers — nanobugs that can take the platinum atoms out of an old-fashioned automobile’s catalytic converter.”

“What’s that got to do with Brad’s death?”

He shrugged carelessly. “I’ve heard that jet engines have a lot of blades that are coated with platinum and tungsten and other metals. To resist heat, I think. If those metals erode away the engine blades break up.”

“And that’s what happened to Brad’s plane?”

“At supersonic speed a sudden loss of power can be very dangerous,” Greg said. Then he added, “So I’m told.”

“Paul isn’t dead,” Joanna said. “He’s coming back here and he’s going to accuse you of murder.”

For the first time something like fear showed in Greg’s face. “He’s got no proof…”

Joanna said, “Don’t you think he’ll find proof? Don’t you think he’ll find someone in the San Jose division who gave you a sampling of nanomachines? What do you call them, gobblers?”

Irritated, Greg answered, “I suppose the corporation’s CEO can find employees who’ll tell him what he wants to hear.”

“Greg, two men have died!”

“Three,” he said smugly, “counting Brad. More, come to think of it: there’s the crew of his plane, too, isn’t there?”

She stared at her son. I did this to him, Joanna thought. It’s my fault as much as his. More. I’ve allowed my happy little boy to turn into a sick, sick man.

“You need help, Greg,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose I do. Are you going to help me, Mom?”

“All that I can.”

He leaned forward in his chair. “Then get rid of that monster you’re carrying in your belly and get a divorce. You and I can run this corporation. Just the two of us. We don’t need him or his spawn.”

Shocked by his sudden intensity, Joanna could say nothing except, “I can’t do that.”

“Then I’ll have to kill him.”

Joanna studied his face. “Will you kill me, too?” He seemed surprised at the thought. “I could never harm you, “Mom. I’ve always tried to protect you. Even against Dad.”

“Against… your father?”

“He deserved to die. He even wanted to die. But he was too weak to do it himself.” Greg smiled the way he had when he brought home good marks from school. “So I helped him.”

Joanna sank back in her swivel chair. Bradley Arnold’s chair. Her son continued to smile at her as charmingly as the little boy who used to offer her flowers he plucked from their garden.

MARE NUBIUM

Paul was thinking how different everything looked from the driver’s seat of the tractor. The barren landscape rolled by not without jounces and bumps, but it was sure easier than walking. The tractor was a small one, without an enclosec cab. He had to keep his suit buttoned up against the vacuum But it beat walking by about a thousand lightyears.

Up ahead he could see the tired old mountains of the Alphonsus ringwall rising to meet him. Too far away to make out the winding ruts that marked Wodjohowitcz Pass, but he’d be there soon enough. The thought of Wojo and Tink tore at his memory. He’ll pay for what he did, Paul promised himself. He’ll pay if I have to kill him myself. He could feel the muscles of his jaw and neck tense. Whose side is Joanna going to take? Paul knew the answer. She’ll protect the kidl all she can.

Some kid. He’s a homicidal maniac.

The sudden shrill alarm in his helmet earphones startled him. Looking down at his forearm display he saw a red light blinking. Oxygen supply critical.

How the hell can that be? I topped off the tank before I left Tempo 19.

More annoyed than afraid, Paul followed the standard practice and plugged his auxiliary oxygen line into the tractor’s standby tank. The shrilling in his earphones stopped.

What the hell happened to my backpack tank? he wondered. Or is it just a sensor crapped out?

He kept his real fear buried deep in the back of his mind. He knew it was there, knew what it was, but he didn’t want to face it, deal with it, admit that it even existed.

For nearly half an hour he continued riding along the bleak, pockmarked plain. The ringwall mountains were really looming before him now. He could see the notch where they had come across on their way out.

The tractor’s oxygen supply was okay, he saw with a glance at the control panel. He reached around with one hand to check the hose, from his backpack tank. Maybe it came loose, all the bangin’ around I did out there.

The plastic hose fell apart in his gloved hand. Paul felt it crumble, breaking into pieces at his touch.

He pulled his hand back as if it had been scalded. A ragged chunk of plastic was in the palm of his glove, part of the oxygen hose.

It can’t be the bugs, he told himself. I didn’t touch anything that was infected. Besides, we’re still in daylight; it’s too pissin’ hot for the bugs to work.

Yet his insides trembled and burned.

What else could make a hose fall apart like that? Gotta be the bugs. Desperately, Paul tried to remember if he touched Wojo or anything out there when Wojo was cussing over the infected tractor. What difference does it make? he raged at himself. You’re either infected with ’em or you’re not.

How to tell?

He reached back again and pulled off another chunk of the plastic hose, about the size of his palm. Keeping one hand on the steering lever, he placed this new chunk of hosing on his thigh, alongside the first piece. They were roughly the same size. Satisfied, Paul placed the new piece atop the dashboard, in full sunlight. The first piece he tossed to the floor of the cab, deep in shadow.

Now we’ll see.

Paul had to gear down the tractor as it began climbing the laborious winding trail that threaded through the ringwall mountains. The rounded, worn peaks averaged about ten thousand feet, but the trail notched through at least a thousand feet lower. Paul could see the tracks in the dust left by previous tractors. Like those old pidneer trails across the prairie, he thought. A hundred years later you could still see the ruts their wagons made in the ground.

Someday we’ll h|ve a monorail system to cross the ringwall, he told himself. Ormaybe we’ll tunnel right through the mountains. Connect the crater floor with Mare Nubium. Someday.

For now, he had to steer the tractor slowly, carefully, up the gentle mountain slope. His tracks of earlier trips faded at the higher elevation, where there was little dust to register them. The rock surface was bare and slick here, almost glassy. Paul geared down again to maintain traction.

It took more than an hour, but at last he reached the crest of the mountains. Peering over the front of his tractor, Paul could see the cluster of humps in the crater’s floor that marked the buried shelters of Moonbase.

Automatically he pressed down the accelerator. The tractor surged forward. But then Paul looked down on the floor at the piece of hosing lying in the cold shade.

He stomped on the brake. The tractor slewed slightly as it ground to a stop. With trembling hands Paul reached down and picked up the scrap of plastic. He placed it alongside the other piece, still in sunlight on the dashboard.

The piece from the floor was less than half its original size.

They’re here! In the tractor!

He leaned down and pawed at his dust-caked leggings. The outer fabric of his surface suit was already eaten through. His boots, too. Paul could see the metal mesh layer that underlay the fabric.

They can’t get through the metal if they’re designed to eat carbon molecules, he told himself. Yeah? They got through the metal in Wojo’s suit Must be different kinds. Different kinds.

He wanted to run. He felt unclean, infected, his skin crawling and his heart pounding so loud he could hear it in his helmet earphones.

And suddenly the enormity of it hit him. I’m going to die! Even if I get to Moonbase, I’ll just be carrying the damned bugs with me. They’ll infect the whole base, tear apart everything. Kill everybody.

That’s what Greg’s been after, all along! Not just me, but everything I stand for. He wants to wipe out Moonbase altogether!

Paul sat there inside his failing suit, blinking at the vision of Moonbase, everything he had worked for, everything he wanted, being utterly destroyed.

Strangely, the realization calmed him. He knew what he had to do now. There were no other options, no excuses, no escape clauses. It was finished.

At least I’m close enough to reach them with the suit radio, he thought.

Jinny Anson was at the communications desk when he called in.

“We’ll send a team up to get you!” she said when Paul told her where he was.

“No!” he snapped. “I’m infested with nanobugs and you can’t run the risk of bringing them into the base. They’ll kill all of you.”

“But what can we do? We can’t just leave you out there. “You’ll…’ Jinny’s normally chipper voice faltered, went silent.

“It’s too late to do anything for me. Call Kris Cardenas in the San Jose division and get her to come up here and personally lead a decontamination team to clean up this mess.”

“But what about you?”

Paul said, “Get my wife on the line for me. Private link. No eavesdropping.”

Paul could not see Joanna’s face, but he pictured it in his mind. She was beautiful. Whether she loved him or not didn’t matter now. Whether she placed Greg before her husband didn’t matter, either. Not any more.

“Where are you, Paul?” her voice asked. “Why can’t we establish a visual?”

“I’m out in a tractor, at the summit of the ringwall.”

He waited for her reply. “You’re on your way back to the base, then?”

“I was,” Paul answered. “BurI’m not going to make it”

The three seconds stretched, sketched. Then, “What do you mean? What are you talking about? How long can you stay outside?”

“For the rest of my life,” he said. “The nanobugs are in my suit. They stopped their activity while I was in sunshine, it was too hot for them. But they must’ve chomped away on my suit while I was in the tempo and I can’t bring them into the base; they’ll eat up everything.”

Joanna was already talking before he finished, “You can’t just stay out there until you run out of air! They’ve got to get you, save you!”

“There’s no way to do that,” Paul said. “If I go down to the base I’ll be killing everybody there.”

“No, Paul! No!”

“Listen to me. Be quiet and listen!” he shouted into his helmet microphone. “It’s all up to you, now. You’ve got to keep it all together. Don’t let them shut down Moonbase because of this. This isn’t an accident; we both know that. Don’t let Greg or anybody else use this as an excuse to shut down Moonbase.”

He waited for her response. “I understand,” Joanna said at last. From the sound of her voice, she was fighting for self-control. I’ll… take care of everything.”

“Good,” he said, feeling suddenly bone-weary, exhausted physically, emotionally.

“Paul, isn’t there anything…?”

“I wish there was. I didn’t want it to end like this.”

That long wait again. Then, “I love you, Paul. I love you.” Joanna broke into sobs.

“I love you too, Jo. I guess you’re the only woman I’ve ever really loved.”

Instead of waiting for more from her, Paul snapped off his radio. No sense dragging it out, he said to himself. We’ve said all we have to say. There’s nothing left for either of us now but pain.

He got up from the tractor seat and clambered down to the ground. Walking to the edge of the narrow trail he looked down once again at the pitiful heaps of rubble that marked Moonbase.

Like Moses on the pissin’ mountain, Paul thought. I can see the promised land but I’ll never get to live in it.

He thought again of what Moonbase could become, someday. He saw a future that beckoned, with humankind spreading across this new frontier and heading outward for new worlds. A future that would never happen if Moonbase was destroyed.

Paul sighed. “If it is to be,” he said softly, “it’s up to me.”

With a sudden, quick move he yanked open the visor of his helmet.

SAVANNAH

It had been two days since Joanna last slept. Most of that time she had spent on the videophone with Kris Cardenas in San Jose, making arrangements for a team to be sent to the Moon to deactivate the nanomachines that had killed her husband and the two other men.

And she made other arrangements, as well.

“I want to know who allowed those killer machines to be mixed in with the other nanobugs,” Joanna said, as implacable as an ocean tide.

Cardenas’ image in the phone screen nodded somberly. “I’ve already started an investigation. That kind of stupidity verges on the criminal.”

“It is criminal,” Joanna said. “But I don’t intend to press charges or bring the law into this. I just want to know who those people are.”

“You won’t press charges?” Cardenas brightened.

“No. I want them transferred to Moonbase, once we find out who they are.”

Cardenas blinked her cornflower blue eyes. “Why would you send mem to Moonbase?”

Grimly, Joanna replied, “So they can see the consequences of stupidity. So they can live in a place where one little mistake, one moment of stupidity, can kill you.”

“How long will they have to stay?”

Joanna shook her head. “Until my husband comes back to life.”

She still had not slept when she had her meeting with Greg.

Joanna had decided to meet her son at the house, rather than the office. She sent two hefty security guards to escort him to the meeting.

Greg looked subdued when he stepped into the living room, flanked by the two uniformed men. Joanna dismissed them and told her son to sit on the sofa, facing her.

“You killed Paul,” she said, once she was certain that they were alone.

Greg evaded her eyes. “Suppose I did. What of it? It’s over and done with. You can’t bring him back and that’s that.”

Joanna studied her son. He seemed tense, but the fury that had exploded in him now was gone, spent, dissipated.

“What do you intend to do now?” Joanna asked calmly.

Greg cocked an eyebrow. “Take my rightful place as president and CEO.”

“Really?”

He leaned forward intently, suddenly flushed with prospects for the future. “Don’t you see, Mom? Now it’s just you and me, the way it ought to be. We can run everything together, just the two of us. It’ll all work out, you’ll see.” He even smiled that same old boyish smile at her.

“But there’s not just the two of us,” Joanna said.

Greg pulled back from her slightly. “What do you mean?”

“I’m carrying Paul’s baby. Paul’s son.”

“Oh, that.” Greg flapped one hand in the air dismissively.

“You don’t care anymore?” Joanna asked, caught unprepared for his casual attitude. “A few days ago you wanted me to abort it.”

“I was foolish,” Greg said. “I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“Really?”

“By the time he grows up enough to join the corporation I’ll be ready to retire,” Greg said.

Be careful, Joanna told herself. He knows how to play on your feelings.

“Greg, you’re a murderer.”

For an instant she saw fear in his eyes. But then his smile returned. “Are you going to turn me over to the police?”

“I’m getting the names of the people who allowed those killer machines to be sent off to’the Moon. They’ll implicate you to save themselves.”

“So you are going to hand me to the police, after all.”

Joanna shook her head. “I should,” she said. “But I can’t. I can’t hurt you more than you’ve already been hurt.”

“I knew it!” he said triumphantly. “It’s going to be just the two of us! I knew it would work out this way!”

“Greg…’ Joanna took in a deep breath. This is going to be painful, she knew. “Greg, I’m sending you to a place where they can help you.”

His brows knit. “Sending me? Where?”

“It’s like a hospital. Very private. Very discreet. They’ll be able to help you there.”

“I don’t need anyone’s help! I’m not sick!”

“I’m not asking for your opinion,” Joanna said firmly. “I’m telling you. You’re going there and that’s all there is to it”

“I want to be with you!”

Joanna felt her heart clutch within her. “I know, Greg. I know. I’ll come and visit you. Often.”

“I want to be with you all the time!”

“Later,” Joanna said. “When you’re better.”

He sat there, looking perplexed, for several moments. Then, sullenly, “You want to play with your new baby and forget about me.”

“No!” Joanna blurted. “I could never forget you. You’re my baby boy and I’ll love you forever, no matter what.”

“Then don’t send me away.” Greg fell to his knees in front of his mother and buried his face in her lap. “Please, Mom, don’t send me away.”

A wild thought raced through Joanna’s mind. “What if…’ She hesitated, searching for an answer. “Greg, what if you stayed here at the house, with me?”

“Yes!” he said fervently.

“And I can bring the doctors and their assistants here to stay with us.”

“Yes! Yes!”

“And we’ll be together while they help to make you well again.”

“Anything,” Greg sobbed, “as long as we can be together.”

Joanna stroked her son’s midnight dark hair, thinking, That will be the best way. Keep him here, where I can watch him. Bring the medical help to him.

She realized that Greg had fallen asleep with his head cradled in her lap. He probably hasn’t slept for the past couple of days, either, Joanna thought.

I can’t turn him over to the police. What good would that do? It won’t bring Paul back and it will destroy Greg completely. Not the police. No scandal. No one must know what he did.

She sighed. It’ll be difficult, especially when the new baby comes. Douglas. She already had his name picked out. Greg will be insanely jealous of the baby. But I can protect him. I can do it. I can take care of both my sons. I can. I will.