Moonrise

FILE: GREGORY MASTERSON III

The subject is a twenty-eight-year-old male in good physical health. He is deeply disturbed and potentially violent, although like many schizophrenics he can cloak his misapprehensions and delusions with extremely logical and plausible-sounding rationalizations. He is in private care at the home of his mother. Deep hypnotherapy is recommended, together with chemosuppressants to regulate his mood swings.

After two years of hypnotherapy the inescapable conclusion is that the primary focus for the subject’s neurosis is the morbid fear of losing his mother. Although the Freudian concept of an Oedipus Complex has long been discredited, the subject sees his mother as a symbol of safety and well-being, hence an object of intense desire. While this desire is primarily connected to his fear of loss of maternal protection, there is also decidedly a sexual component involved.

The subject is now thirty-five years old and freely able to admit that he has harbored murderous rages against the men with whom he was forced to share his mother’s affection: i.e., his father and his step-father, both of whom are now deceased. Even in deep hypnotherapy sessions he evades any mention of his seven-year-old half-brother who, quite obviously, has also taken a share of his mother’s attention and affection.

SAN JOSE

“I don’t like the looks of this,” said Kris Cardenas.

She was standing on the roof of the two-story nano-technology building, her chief of security beside her, watching the stream of picketers being whipped up into an angry mob.

At the security chiefs earnest suggestion, she had sent most of the working staff home when the mob began to gather outside the main gate. She hadn’t really believed him when he warned her there was going to be trouble; now, hours later, she realized that she hadn’t wanted to believe.

From up on the roof, with the warm wind at her back, she couldn’t hear what the woman with the bullhorn was telling the picketers, but by the way they surged around her and roared incoherently every few minutes Cardenas knew she was working them up into a frenzy.

And more demonstrators were arriving, cars and minivans and even busloads of them.

“This is organized as all hell,” Cardenas muttered.

Her security chief scanned the growing crowd with electronically-boosted binoculars, his mouth set in a grim line.

“Take a look,” he said, looping the strap of the binoculars around Cardenas’ neck. Then he fished a palm-sized phone out of his shirt pocket.

“Got those fire hoses ready?” he asked into the phone.

Cardenas searched through the placards that bobbed drunk-enly in the sea of bodies. Professionally printed, she saw.

Jesus, she thought, this isn’t just one gang of nut cases. They’ve got organized labor, religious zealots — it’s a coalition of pressure groups.

“Look!” the security chief shouted.

Cardenas lowered the binoculars to see where he was pointing. A black pickup truck was speeding across the nearly empty parking lot, straight for the crowd. The people parted like the Red Sea, on cue she thought, and the truck raced straight up to the main gate of the wire security fence and crashed through. One of the uniformed guards was knocked down as the truck roared by without slowing, jounced over the circular plot of flowers in front of the building’s front entrance and smashed into the glass doors of the building’s lobby.

The crowd poured through the open fence, roaring like a white-water river.

“Get the fire hoses on ’em!” the security chief screamed into his phone.

Cardenas’ legs felt rubbery. If that truck had been filled with explosives it would’ve killed us all!

Streams of high-pressure water were spraying the oncoming crowd, knocking people off their feet, pushing them back away from the shattered entrance to the building. But other groups were skirting around the sides of the building, flanking movements. Cardenas knew that the back doors and the loading gates were not protected as well as the front entrance.

She shook herself. It’s a battle now, she realized. A battle to save the labs.

They lost the battle. Police helicopters eventually arrived to evacuate Cardenas and the few remaining security people from the roof. The building was gutted: lab equipment smashed, computers professionally destroyed by magnetized wipers that jangled disk memories into useless hash, offices torn apart.

The news headlines that evening concentrated on the three demonstrators who were injured by the streams from the fire hoses. Masterson Aerospace was going to be sued for police brutality and excessive force? The security guard who died as a result of being hit by the pickup truck was hardly mentioned at all.

FILE: GREGORY MASTERSON III

It has become possible — and even desirable — to transfer at least part of the subject’s feelings for his mother to a desire for security and self-esteem through success in the world of business and commerce. Therefore he has been encouraged to restart his career in Masterson Aerospace Corporation and to establish his own residence near his place of employment.

At age forty, this sublimation procedure is proceeding with apparent proficiency, although careful watch must be maintained since the subject is intelligent enough to know what his therapists desire and to parrot the responses they wish to observe — even under hypnotherapy.

However, his relationship with his twelve-year-old half-brother has apparently stabilized. The subject spent the Christmas holidays at home with his mother and sibling. Post-holiday interviews and testing showed no outward manifestations of hostility, although latent resentment is of course still present.

It has been four years since the subject’s last hypnotherapy encounter. As expected, his success in the corporate world has enabled him to build a new structure of self-esteem. His sexual feelings for his mother have not been eradicated, of course, but now he is able to usefully channel such feelings into accomplishment and respect from his peers. Although he still has some difficulties in forging relationships with peers, it is recommended that all therapy sessions be discontinued, and the subject merely visit this practitioner on a semi-annual basis.

Two years of semiannual visits have convinced this practitioner that the subject can function adequately in society. He is still something of a ‘loner,’ and will undoubtedly need more time to adjust his feelings toward women who might be sexual partners, but it is apparent that he is now a competent, even quite extraordinarily competent, fully functional adult. His relationship with his mother is, at least outwardly, quite normal. His relationship with his eighteen-year-old half-brother, while strained, is apparently no worse than most family relationships under similar circumstances.

MOONBASE

Douglas Stavenger visited Moonbase for the first time on his eighteenth birthday.

His mother had been against it. She would not say why, but Doug knew her reason. His father had died on the Moon before he had been born. It was an accident, as far as Doug knew, a freak accident involving nanomachines that had been improperly programmed.

“That was eighteen years ago,” Doug pleaded with his mother. “And besides, I won’t be using nanobugs. I just want to see Moonbase with my own eyes.”

Joanna offered him a trip around the world, instead. But Doug insisted on Moonbase.

Not that he had quarrelled with his mother. Doug never quarrelled. Since elementary school he had made his smiling way through bullies among the students and the faculty alike, never fighting, never raising his voice, never losing his temper. He seemed to lead a charmed life. Everything came his way, seemingly without his needing to raise even a finger. People wanted to please him.

It wasn’t merely the fact that he was extremely wealthy. Everyone he knew came from wealthy families and most of them were miserably unhappy, absolutely no fun to be with. Like his brother Greg. Half-brother, actually. No matter how hard Doug tried, ever since childhood Greg had been a dark, sullen shadow across his life. He saw his half-brother only rarely, yet the room chilled when Greg was in it. Doug could feel the tension pulling between his mother and her other son. There seemed to be some deep, dreadful secret between them, a secret that neither of them chose to share with him.

Doug accepted it as a fact of his life, something that hac always been there. Someday he would find out what it was why his mother add half-brother were so guarded and uptight In the meantime, he had his own life to live.

Doug got along well with almost everyone simply because he thought farther ahead than the rest of them, and saw options that no one else considered. He was very bright and very adventurous. He had inherited his father’s compact, solid build and quick reflexes, his mother’s intelligence and endurance.

Captain of his prep school’s fencing team, shortstop on the baseball squad, Doug also discovered the thrills of jetbiking. When his mother objected he smilingly turned his fancy to rocket-boosted gliders that surfed the stratosphere’s jet streams. He took risks, plenty of them, but only after he had calculated all the odds and convinced himself that the risks were survivable. He knew he sometimes worried his mother, but he did not think he was foolhardy.

Still he did well enough academically to win acceptance by the top universities. His mother chose the University of Vancouver, where Kris Cardenas now headed the nanotechnology department. He accepted her decision, with the proviso that she allow him to visit Moonbase.

“Just for a few days,” he urged. “A weekend, even,”

Reluctantly, she gave in.

Doug had visited Masterson’s factories in Earth orbit He had experienced zero gravity before. But in preparation for his Moonbase jaunt he spent a week in Houston, at the corporation’s lunar simulator, teaching himself how to walk in one-sixth gee without stumbling and bouncing and making a fool of himself.

He was prepared for everything to be expected at Moonbase. Everything except meeting Foster Brennar.

His visit was something like a command performance. The son of the corporation’s board chairwoman was given a thorough tour of the base.

“Moonbase is built into the flank of the mountainous Ringwall of the crater Alphonsus,” his tour guide recited. She was a sloe-eyed brunette with a soft Savannah accent, an assistant to the base director. Like all the other base personnel, she wore a utilitarian one-piece zippered jumpsuit. The only differences in clothing Doug could see were the color codes that marked the four main departments. Her coveralls were sky blue, for management. So were his.

“The base consists of four parallel tunnels,” she continued as they walked along. “The tunnels have been carved out of the basaltic rock of the ringwall mountain by plasma torches—”

“You didn’t use nanomachines to dig out the tunnels?” Doug asked.

The young woman blinked at him as if coming out of a trance. “Nanomachines? Uh, no… nanobugs are only used out on the crater floor, to harvest hydrogen out of the regolith and, um, to process regolith silicon into solar cells for the energy farms.”

“Then these tunnels were burned out of the mountain by plasma torches? That must’ve been something to see!”

She nodded, frowning slightly as she tried to pick up her interrupted recitation. Once she remembered where she’d been stopped she resumed, “Living quarters, offices, laboratories and work stations have all been carved out of the rock…”

She walked Doug through each of the four tunnels, opening almost every door along the way. Junior technicians and engineers took time off from their normal duties to show him every laboratory, every control station, the intricate plumbing of the plant where water was manufactured out of lunar oxygen and hydrogen, the humming pumps of the environmental control center where oxygen was combined with nitrogen imported from Earth to make breathable air at normal pressure, the hydroponics farm where food crops — mostly rows of soybeans — were grown under precisely controlled conditions, even the waste processing center where precious organic chemicals were extracted from garbage and excrement for recycling.

“When do I go outside?” he asked his guide after several hours of trudging through the underground faculties.

“Outside?’She looked alarmed.

“Yes,” he said pleasantly. “I want to see what it’s like out on the surface.”

It took some doing. Apparently the word had been sent up from Savannah to be especially careful with their young visitor, to take no chances with his safety. But the word had also been to show him whatever he wanted to see, and treat him with every courtesy. So his tour guide referred Doug’s request straight to Moonbase’s safety chief and the chief spent fifteen minutes trying to talk Doug out of a surface excursion.

“You can see anything you want to on the monitors at the control center,” the chief said. He looked quite old to Doug, a little gray mouse of a man who had once been a little dark mouse of an astronaut.

“I could do that back on Earth,” Doug replied gently, standing relaxed in front of the safety chiefs desk. “I’ve come a quarter of a million miles; I don’t want to go back home without putting my boot prints on the lunar surface.”

Wishing that the kid would go away, or at least sit down like a normal person, the chief answered, “Oh. I see.” He ran a hand through his thinning, close-cropped iron gray hair and took a deep sighing breath. At last he said, “Well, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to let you walk around a bit on the crater floor.”

Doug broke into a pleased grin.

“With somebody escorting you, of course,” added the chief.

The safety chief personally led Doug out to the garage where the tractors were housed and maintained. It looked like a big cave to Doug, which is what it had once been. The garage was fairly quiet; most of the tractors were out on the surface, working. Only off in a far comer was there a knot of technicians tinkering with a pair of the spindly-wheeled machines.

“That’s the main airlock.” The chief pointed to a massive steel hatch, big enough to drive a fully-loaded tractor through. Off to one side Doug saw a row of spacesuits hanging on a rack, with a row of gas cylinders standing behind a long bench.

Somehow the bench didn’t look strong enough to support a man’s weight; its legs were frail and spaced too far apart. Then Doug grinned to himself and realized that a two-hundred pound man weighed only thirty-four pounds here.

They selected a spacesuit for Doug from the rack of suits waiting empty by the airlock. Although all the suits were white, they looked grimy and hard-used, their helmets scratched and pitted. It took an hour for Doug to suit up and then prebreath the low-pressure mix of oxygen and nitrogen that the suits used. The safety chief explained the need for prebreathing in minute detail, eloquently describing the horrors of the bends, despite Doug’s telling him that he understood the situation.

A taller figure already suited up clumped toward them in thick-soled boots. His visor was up, so Doug could see the man’s face and piercing electric blue eyes. His spacesuit looked brand new, sparkling white with red stripes down the sleeves and legs, like a baseball uniform.

“Oh, Foster, there you are,” said the chief. “This is Douglas Stavenger.”

With the breathing mask still clamped over his lower face, Doug got up from the bench where he’d been sitting and extended his gloved hand. The spacesuited man was almost a full head taller than he.

“Foster Brennart,” he said, in a surprisingly high tenor voice. Then he turned to the safety chief. “Okay, Billy, I’ll take it from here.”

Foster Brennart! thought Doug. The greatest astronaut of them all! The first man to traverse Mare Nubium in a tractor; leader of the first mission across the rugged uplands to visit Apollo 11’s Tranquility Base; the man who rescued the European team that had gotten itself stranded inside the giant crater Copernicus.

I’m pleased to meet you,” Doug managed to say from inside his breathing mask. It was like saying hello to a legend. Or a god.

Brennart shook Doug’s hand without smiling, then reached behind the bench to take one of the breathing masks resting atop the gas cylinders and held it to his face.

“It’s okay, Billy,” he said to the chief through the mask. I’ll take him out as soon as we’re done prebreathing. You can go back to your office now.”

The little man nodded. “Right. See you in an hour or so.”

Doug realized it was the chiefs way of telling Brennart to make their surface excursion a short one.

“Or so,” said Brennart casually.

As the safety chief walked hurriedly toward the hatch that led back to the offices and living quarters, Brennart asked Doug, “How much longer do you have to go?”

Feeling confused, Doug asked, “Go where?”

“Prebreathing.”

“Oh!” Glancing at the watch set into the panel on his suit’s left forearm, Doug said, “Twelve minutes.”

Brennart nodded inside his helmet. “That ought to be enough for me, too.”

“Only twelve minutes?”

“I’ve been outside all day, kid. There’s not enough nitrogen in my blood to pump up a toy balloon.”

The time crawled by in silence with Doug wanting to ask a half-million questions and Brennart standing over him, holding the plastic breathing mask to his face, sucking in deep, impatient breaths.

At last Doug’s watch chimed. Brennart pulled his mask away and slid his visor down, then helped Doug to take off his mask and fasten his visor shut.

“Radio check,” Doug heard in his helmet earphones. He nodded, then realized that Brennart couldn’t see it behind the heavily-tinted visor.

“I hear you loud and clear,” Doug said.

“Ditto,” said Brennart. Then he took Doug by the shoulder and turned him toward the personnel hatch set into the main airlock. “Let’s go outside,” he said.

Doug’s heart was racing so hard he worried that Brennart could hear it over the suit-to-suit radio.

SAVANNAH

The years had been kind to Joanna Masterson Stavenger. Eighteen years older, she still was a handsome, vibrant woman, her hair had always been ash blonde, she joked, so the gray that came with chairing the board of directors of Masterson Aerospace Corporation hardly even showed. She had put on a few pounds, she had undergone a couple of tucks of cosmetic surgery, but otherwise she was as lithe and beautiful as she had been eighteen years earlier.

I’m not ready for nanotherapy yet,” she often quipped, even when assured that exclusive spas in Switzerland were quietly using specialized nanomachines that could scrub plaque from her arteries and tighten sagging muscles without surgery. Such therapy was impossible almost anywhere else on Earth; public fear of nanomachines had led to strict government regulation.

Yet she remained close to Kris Cardenas, even after the former head of Masterson’s nanotech division had left the corporation in frustration at the red tape imposed by ignorant bureaucrats and the increasingly violent public demonstrations against nanotechnology. Cardenas had accepted an endowed chair at Vancouver and from there won her Nobel Prize.

Joanna’s office had changed much more than she in the eighteen years since she had become Masterson Aerospace’s board chairperson.

There was no desk, no computer, no display screen in sight The office was furnished like a comfortable sitting room, with small Sheraton sofas and delicate armchairs grouped around Joanna’s reclinable easy chair of soft caramel brown. The windows in the corner looked out on the shops and piers of Savannah’s river front. The pictures on the walls were a mix of ultramodern abstracts and photographs of Clipperships and astronomical scenes.

At the moment, the room’s decor was a cool neocolonia classicism: muted pastels and geometric patterns. At the toucl of a button the hologram systems behind the walls could switch to bolder Caribbean colors or any of a half-dozen other decoration schemes stored in their computer memory The pictures could be changed to any of hundreds catalogued in electronic storage or be transformed into display screens Even the room’s scent could be varied from piney forest tc springtime flowers to salt sea tang, at Joanna’s whim.

Sitting comfortably in her chair, Joanna could be in touch with any part of the Masterson corporation, anywhere in the world or beyond.

But her mind was on her sons. Greg was getting along well enough, running the corporation’s Pacific division out in the island nation of Kiribati. It wasn’t exile so much as one more test to see if he really could function, really could build a halfway normal life for himself. So far, Greg was doing fine. But she always found herself using that term so far wherever Greg was concerned.

It was her younger son, Douglas, who worried her. Joanna realized that Doug was at the age where he sought a quest, a way of proving his manhood. Naturally enough, he looked to the Moon.

An adventurous eighteen-year-old never thinks that pain or injury or death can reach him. When she found that he was planning to jetbike all the way to Seattle she absolutely forbade it.

“Come on, Mom,” Doug replied with his father’s winning smile. “I’ll be all right. What can happen to me?”

During his first visit to Vancouver she learned that he had taken part in a power surfing jaunt to Victoria. “What could have happened to me?” he asked when she phoned, appalled at the risks he blithely took on.

She hoped that attending the university, under Cardenas’s tutelage, would calm Doug down. Lately he had taken to flying rocket-boosted soarplanes. “Riding the jet stream!” he chirped happily, all eagerness and enthusiasm. “What a blast!”

And now he was at Moonbase, celebrating his eighteenth birthday a quarter-million miles from home. From her.

How like his father Doug was, she thought. The same burning drive, the same restless urge to break new ground, to push the edges of the envelope. He had his father’s radiant smile and quick wit. His skin was lighter than Paul’s had been: a smooth olive complexion, with blue eyes that sparkled youthfully.

Paul must have been just like that at eighteen, Joanna realized; impatient to prove himself. Willing to take on risks because he doesn’t think for an instant that he could be harmed. The impervious confidence of youth.

And now he’s on the Moon, just as Paul was. Why? she asked herself. What is it about that harsh unforgiving country that draws men like that?

Joanna had never told Doug all the details of his father’s death. Nor anyone else. As she pictured her younger son’s eagerly beaming face, she was wondered again if she had been right to keep the truth from him.

ALPHONSUS

The outer airlock hatch swung open at last and Doug stepped out onto another world.

He forgot about the pounding of his heart, forgot about Foster Brennart standing beside him, forgot about everything except the eerie grandeur that now stretched before his hungry eyes.

He forgot about making bootprints in the lunar dust. If Brennart said anything, he didn’t hear it. If he himself spoke or made any sound at all he was unaware of it. His whole being filled with the vision of the lunar landscape: stark, somber, silent. The ground before him was flat, pockmarked with little craters, glaring brightly in the unfiltered light of the Sun. The mountains that marched off to the sudden horizon on either side of him looked somehow soft, rounded, old and tired. Easy to climb, Doug thought. Their folds and slopes made shadows that were impenetrably dark, utter blackness side-by-side with the bright glitter of their sunlit flanks.

The horizon was sharp as a knife edge, cutting off the world where it met the infinity of space. Gray and black, Doug saw. The Moon was a hundred shades of gray, from gleaming bright almost-white to the somber charcoal of the pitted ground beneath his booted feet And black, shadows darker than the deepest pits of Earth, and the even blacker expanse of endless space. An uncompromising world, Doug thought: brilliantly bright in sunlight or unconditionally dark in shadow, sharp and clear as the choice between good and evil.

The only touches of color Doug could see were the dayglo-painted tractors working silently at their tasks: bulldozers scraping up the regolith, backhoes piling the dirt into waiting trucks, which carried it to a small man-made hill. That’s where the nanomachines extract oxygen and hydrogen from the regolith, Doug told himself. On Earth they’d be roaring and grunting, their gears would be grinding away. Here on the Moon they do their jobs in perfect silence.

It’s quiet here, he thought. Peaceful. A man can hear himself think.

He turned and looked out toward the horizon once again, framed by the curving ringwall mountains and dimpled almost exactly in its middle by the tips of the crater’s central peaks, barely visible above the slash that separated sunlit ground from the endless void of space. Doug strained his eyes, but couldn’t see any stars at all.

“I thought there’d be stars even in the daytime,” he said.

“Slide up your outer visor,” Brennart told him, “but be careful not to look at the Sun.”

Doug did it, yet the sky remained dark and empty.

“Cup your hands around your eyes. Cut off the ground glare.”

Doug pressed his cupped hands to his visor, but nothing changed.

“Give it a few seconds.”

And there they were! Stars appeared out of the darkness, not merely the pinpoints of light that Doug was accustomed to, but swarms of stars, oceans of stars, stars strewn so thickly across the heavens that the darkness was banished. Doug tottered as he stared out at the universe, felt himself getting dizzy.

“When I behold your heavens, O Lord,” he whispered, “the work of your fingers…”

“I know that one,” Brennart said. “Some psalm from the Bible, isn’t it”

“Yes,” Doug said.

“You’re Paul Stavenger’s son, aren’t you?”

“You knew my father?”

“Knew him?” Brennart laughed, a high-pitched giggle. “Like the man says, we were practically hatched from the same egg. The times we had up here! And back Earthside!”

“What was he like?” Doug asked.

“You look a lot like him,” saidBrennart. “Come on, I want to show you something.” And he took off in long, loping, low-gravity strides across the crater floor.

As Doug followed him, the two of them galloping along like a pair of tailless kangaroos, Brennart began happily relating tales of the days when he and Paul Stavenger and a handful of others were digging the first temporary shelters of Moonbase.

“Would you believe old Billy-boy was one of us, then? A real hell-raiser, too.”

“The safety chief?” Doug guessed.

“Yep. He changed an awful lot once they put him behind a desk. You’re never going to see me vegetate like that!”

They were skirting the edge of the solar energy farms now, where the ground gleamed with acre after acre of glassy solar cells. Along the far edge of the glittering field Doug could see a dark oily film; it looked alien, out of place, almost hostile. Nanomachines, he realized, working ceaselessly to convert lunar regolith into more solar cells.

“Up there…’ Brennart was puffing; Doug could hear his labored breathing in his earphones.

Up ahead was a machine of some sort: a big, boxy, heavy metal contraption resting on what looked like caterpillar treads. It had once been painted white, Doug saw, but now it was streaked with smears of dusty dead gray.

“What is it?”

Brennart slowed to a walk as they approached the abandoned machine. He seemed to twist inside his suit, adjusting the bulky life-support pack on his back. “Damned LSPs never stay in place like they should,” he muttered.

“What is this thing?” Doug asked again. Now that they were close enough to touch it, he saw that the machine was really massive, taller than even Brennart himself.

“This poor dumb beast,” said Brennart, “is what we used in the old days to make the solar farms, before we had nanomachines to do the work.”

“It must weigh fifty tons,” Doug said.

Forty-two, on Earth.’,

“That’s a lot to lift.”

“Yep. The nanobugs are a lot better. But once upon a time, my boy, this beast was the height of modern technology. A tele-operated, self-sufficient, solar powered mechanical cow. Grazed on the regolith. Took in silicon, aluminum, et cetera in its front end, digested them and put them together, and shat solar cells out its backside.”

“And that’s how the first solar energy farms were made.”

“More or less. Damned dumb beasts kept breaking down, of course. Nobody knew how bad a problem the dust was, back then. We spent more time repairing these stupid cows than anything else.”

“Out here in the open?”

“Sure. Didn’t make any sense to trundle ’em all the way back to one of the tempos? Anyway, we didn’t have a garage in those days, so we’d have to work in the open one way or the other.”

“What about the radiation?”

“That’s why we’re all prematurely gray,” Brennart said. “Even your dad, although on him it looked good. He was a “handsome devil. The women flocked around him.”

“Really?” Doug had never heard that before.

“I could tell you stories…’ Brennart broke into a low chuckle.

“What happened to the other cows?” Doug asked.

“Scrapped them. We left this one out here and converted it into an emergency shelter.”

Doug turned, frowning, and saw that the airlock in the ringwall mountains was hardly a half-mile away.

“We also use it for other purposes,” Brennart added, before Doug could ask. “It’s fitted out with a double bunk inside and certain other, ah… amenities.”

Doug saw that someone had scrawled in luminescent red just above the machine’s hatch If this van’s rocking, don’t come knocking.

“Oh!” he said, with sudden understanding. “This is the Moonbase Motel.”

Brennart guffawed. “Pree-cisely!”

He started walking again, but at an angle away from the carcass of the mechanical cow and the glittering solar farms.

“So what’re you” doing up here, kid? Why’d you come to Moonbase?”

Doug almost shrugged, but the spacesuit made it too difficult. “I wanted to see it firsthand. All my life I’ve heard about Moonbase, and how my father worked to make it viable. He died here.”

“He let himself die in order to protect the base.”

“Yeah.” Doug was surprised at the lump in his throat. “Sol … I had to see the place.”

“Now that you’ve seen it, what do you think?”

“The inside’s a lot smaller than I thought it’d be,” Doug replied. “But the outside…’ He stretched his arms out to the horizon. “This is — well, it’s terrific!”

“You like it out here, do you?”

“It’s like all my life I’ve waited to get here and now that I’m here, I’m home.”

For a moment Brennart did not reply. Then, “Are you running away from something, son, or running toward something?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you running away from your father’s ghost, or maybe trying to get away from your mother? Is that why you came here?”

Doug thought it over. “No, I don’t think it’s that”

“Then what?”

He hesitated another moment, sorting out his feelings. “All my life I’ve heard about my father and Moonbase. Now that I’m here, I can see what he saw, I can understand why he’d give his life for it.”

“Why?”

Looking around at the barren landscape one more time, Doug answered simply, “This is the future. My future. Our future. The whole human race. This is the frontier. This is where we grow.”

He could sense Brennart nodding approvingly inside his helmet. “That’s exactly how your dad felt.”

“This is where we grow,” Doug repeated, convinced of the truth of it.

Brennart said, “Now let me tell you about something even more exciting.”

“What?”

“The most valuable real estate on the Moon — in the whole solar system, in fact. It’s down by the south pole…”

They walked side by side farther out into the giant crater’s floor, out toward the area where sinuous rilles cracked the surface, Brennart talking nonstop.

“There’s a mountain down there that’s in sunlight all the time, twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year.”

“ That’sthe place for a solar farm!” Doug said excitedly.

“And there’s fields of ice down in the valleys between the mountains,” Brennart went on. “Water ice.”

Doug’s breath caught. He calmed himself, then asked, “That’s been confirmed?”

“It’s top secret corporate information, but, yes, it’s been confirmed.”

“Then we could—”

“Look out!”

Doug felt Brennart clutch at his shoulders and yank him backwards from the edge of the rille he was about to step over. As the two men staggered backward several steps Doug could see that the rille — a snaking crack in the ground — was crumbling along its edge, just where he was about to plant his boot.

“Didn’t mean to scare you,” Brennart muttered.

“What’s happening?”

“I’m not sure, it might — Look!”

Thousands of fireflies seemed to burst upward, out of the rille. Glittering coldly blue and bright green, the cloud of glistening light expanded in the sunlight, twinkling, gleaming, filling Doug’s vision with ghostly light. He was surrounded by the sparkling lights; it was like being inside a starry nebula or a heaven filled with angels.

Doug saw nothing but the lights, heard nothing but his own gasping breath. Tears filled his eyes.

“An eruption,” he heard Brennart say, his voice filled with awe.,

“What is it?” Doug managed to whisper.

“Ammonia, methane. From down below. It seeps up through the rilles every now and then. Someday we’ll mine the stuff.”

The cloud grew and grew, enveloping them in its flickering light. Then it dissipated. As quickly as it had arisen it disappeared, wafted away into nothingness. The landscape went back to its dead grays and blacks.

“I’ve been coming up here more than twenty years,” said Brennart, his voice hollow, “and I’ve never seen an eruption before.”

Doug could not reply. He was thinking that it was an omen, a sign. My welcome to the Moon, he said to himself.

“You must lead a charmed life, kid.”

“It was… beautiful,” Doug said lamely.

“That it was. It certainly was.”

For long moments they stood in silence, each secretly hoping a that another seepage of gas would envelope them in the colorful fireflies once again.

“I hope the monitoring cameras caught that,” Brennart said at last. “The science people’ll want spectra and all that.”

“The cameras run all the time?”

“Right.”

At last Doug gave it up. There would be no more. Strange, he thought, how sudden elation can give way to disappointment so quickly.

“Guess we should start back to the base,” Brennart said. He sounded dismayed, too.

“Tell me more about this south pole business,” Doug said, as much to cheer their conversation as any other reason.

“We’ve got to claim that territory,” Brennart said, his tone brightening immediately. “I want to lead an expedition down there and…”

SAVANNAH

“There’s ice down there at the pole!” Doug said, brimming with enthusiasm. “Water ice! Mr. Brennart wants to lead an expedition there and claim it for us.”

“I’ve seen his proposals,” Joanna said, feeling weary at her son’s insistence. She leaned back in her reclining chair. ” Brennart’s deluged me, , with video presentations, reports, survey data.”

“I want to go with him,” Doug said.

Joanna had known he would. Of course he would. That was why she had hesitated, ever since her son had returned from his brief visit to Moonbase, bubbling with excitement about joining Brennart and trekking off to the south lunar pole. Now he sat in her office, facing her, burning with enthusiasm, hardly able to sit still as they waited for Brennart to show up. She saw Paul’s features in her son’s face, Paul’s boundless energy and drive. And she remembered that Paul had died on the Moon.

Brennart’s proposed expedition to the lunar south pole had worked its way up through the corporate chain of command and now sat on Joanna’s desk. She could approve it or kill it. She knew that if she approved it, her son would stop at nothing to be included in the mission.

Misunderstanding her silence, Doug said, “Mom, all my life I’ve heard about my father and Moonbase. I want to carry on in his footsteps. I’ve got to!”

“Your freshman classes start in September.”

“We’ll be back by then. It’s my legacy, Mom! All my life I’ve wanted to get to Moonbase and continue what he started.”

All his life Joanna, thought: All eighteen years of his life.

“It’s the frontier,” he told her Excitedly. “That’s where the action is.”

Joanna countered, “Moonbase is a dreary little cave that’s only barely paying its own way. I’ve come close to shutting it down a dozen times.”

“Shutting it down? You can’t shut it down, Mom! It’s the frontier! It’s the future!”

“It’s a drain on this corporation’s resources.”

Doug started to reply, then hesitated. With a slow smile he said, “Mom, if you won’t allow me to go to Moonbase, I’ll get a job with Yamagata Industries. They—”

“Yamagata!”

“They’re looking for construction workers,” Doug said evenly. “I’ll get to the Japanese base at Copernicus.”

That was when Joanna realized how utterly serious her son was. Behind the boyish enthusiasm was an iron-hard will. Despite his pleasant smiling way, he was just as intent as his father had been.

“Douglas,” she said, “there’s much more at stake here than you understand.”

He jumped to his feet, startling her. Pacing across the office, Doug replied, “Mom, if we can get water from the ice fields down at the south pole we can make Moonbase profitable. We can even sell water to Yamagata and the Europeans.”

“No one’s ever gone to the south pole. It’s mountainous, very dangerous—”

Doug grinned at her. “Come on, Mom. Foster Brennart’s going to head the expedition. Foster Brennart! He’s a living legend. He’s like Daniel Boone and Charles Lindbergh and Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins all wrapped up in one!”

Joanna knew Foster Brennart quite well. On the Moon Brennart had distinguished himself as a pioneer trailblazer: he had been there from Moonbase’s earliest beginnings, side by side with Paul. On Earth, especially here at corporate headquarters, Brennart was a constant aggravation. He always had some wild scheme to promote, some adventure that he swore was crucial to the survival of Moonbase and the profitability of Masterson Aerospace Corporation. More often than not, his treks into the unknown cost far more than they could ever return. And he was getting wilder, more adventurous with the years. Reckless, Joanna thought. Brennart took chances that seemed outright foolish to her.

Now he was pushing for an expedition to the lunar south pole. He had been at it for nearly two years, wheedling and cajoling every time he visited Savannah. And now he had enlisted Doug in his campaign. Joanna felt simmering anger at that. Brennart had taken advantage of the eighteen-year-old’s natural enthusiasm and now Doug was as frenzied as a religious convert. Brennart had made the Moon’s south pole into a holy grail, in Doug’s young eyes.

The trouble was, this time Brennart seemed to be right. The more Joanna studied the possibilities, the more inevitable the idea looked to her. Still, it was chancy — even dangerous.

I can’t keep Doug on a leash, Joanna told herself. But it all sounds so damnably dangerous.

Doug couldn’t sit still. He paced between the two little Sheraton loveseats to the window, glanced out at the cloudy afternoon, then turned expectantly toward the door.

“He ought to be here any minute,” he said.

“Relax. Foster’s never been late for a meeting,” said Joanna. “I’m sure he’ll be on time for this one.”

Her intercom chimed. “Mr. Brennart here to see you,” said her private secretary.

“Send him right in,” Joanna said, leaning back in her chair. Doug was practically quivering as he stood by the window.

Foster G. Brennart was accustomed to dominating any room he entered. Tall, athletically lean, he had a thick mane of curly golden hair that he allowed to flow to his shoulders. His eyes were pale blue, and although they often seemed to be gazing at a distant horizon that only he could see, when they focused on an individual, that person felt the full intensity of Brennart’s powerful Character.

He wore a simple sky blue velour pullover shirt and pale blue slacks. Joanna noticed that he was shod only in leather sandals; no socks.

“Foster,” she said with a gesture toward Doug, “You’ve already met my son—”

“Hello, Doug,” said Brennart, extending a long arm. “Good to see you again.”

Doug was surprised by Brennart’s sweet high tenor all over again. He somehow expected the lanky six-footer to sound deeper, more manly. Still, Doug smiled with pleasure as he shook Brennart’s hand. The older man sat in the loveseat facing Joanna.

“I presume the subject of this meeting is the south polar expedition,” he said.

“Of course,” said Joanna.

“The Aitken Basin down there is most valuable real estate on the Moon,” Brennart said.

“I’ve watched your proposal disks several times,” Joanna said. “And read all the tons of material you’ve sent”

Turning toward Doug, still standing by the window, Brennart touted, “There’s a mountain down there — Mt. Wasser — that’s in daylight all the time. We can generate electrical power on its summit constantly, twenty-four hours a day. And use the power to melt the ice down in the valleys and pump the water back to Moonbase.”

“We’re producing enough water for Moonbase with the nanomachines,” Joanna said.

“Barely,” said Doug.

Brennart smiled at the lad. “At Moonbase you have to build twice the solar power capacity that you really need, because the area’s in night for two weeks at a time. At Mt. Wasser we can provide electrical power constantly.”

“Once you put up the solar panels,” said Joanna.

“We can use nanomachines to build a power tower on the mountaintop.”

“And transmit the energy back to Moonbase by bouncing a microwave power beam off a relay satellite,” Doug added eagerly.

Shaking her head slightly, Joanna said, “Moonbase is only marginally profitable. This expedition—”

“Can put Moonbase solidly into the black,” said Brennart.

“There’s enough power and enough water at the south pole to allow Moonbase to grow and prosper.”

“But the cost.”

“Mom,” Doug said, “if we don’t claim the polar region somebody else will.”

Joanna started to reply, then hesitated.

“He’s right,” said Brennart. “Yamagata’s planning an expedition, we’re pretty certain. And the Euro-Russians aren’t fools, they know the value of that territory.”

No corporation could claim it owned any part of the Moon. No nation could claim sovereignty over lunar territory. Treaties signed almost a century earlier prevented that But, after people had actually begun building bases on the Moon and digging up lunar resources, the earthbound lawyers had to find some legal method of assuring some form of property rights. They cloaked their decisions in clouds of legalistic verbiage, but what it boiled down to was that any ’entity’ (which was defined as an individual or a combination of individuals) which could establish that it was utilizing the natural resources of a specific part of the Moon’s surface or subsurface was entitled to exclusive use of that territory. It was not first-come-first-served, exactly; it was the first to show utilization of a chunk of lunar real estate who could expect legal protection against others who wanted to use the same area.

“Well,” said Brennart as he sat facing Joanna, “like the man says, there it is. We can reach the Aitken Basin first and use those resources to make Moonbase a real city. Think of what we can do! A year’s worth of tourist income would more than pay for the expedition.”

“Tourists?” Joanna snapped. Tourism destroyed Lunagrad.”

“Aw, Mom, that was years ago,” Doug replied. “Tourists go to the space stations, don’t they? If we could build reasonable facilities for them, they’d spend their money at Moonbase.”

“They could plant their bootprints where no one has ever stepped before,” Brennart said. “If we built a big-enough enclosure and filled it with air at Earth-normal pressure, they could fly like birds.”

“On plastic wings that we rent to them,” Doug added.

Suppressing an urge to laugh* Joanna said, “That’s all in the future.”

“Yes,” said Brennart, “but the future starts now. The resources at the south pole can make Moonbase into a true city. Or maybe Yamagata or the Europeans will get there first, and Moonbase will never be able to grow much beyond where it is now.”

Joanna recognized the threat “There’s only one detail that still bothers me.”

Brennart leaned forward slightly and fixed his pale blue eyes on her. “And what might that be?”

Turning slightly, Joanna said, “My son, here. He wants to go along with you.”

Brennart looked over at Doug and smiled broadly. “You do, eh?”

“You bet!” said Doug. “I’ve been spending every minute I can in lunar simulators. I can handle a tractor or a hopper and I’ve got the rest of the summer free.”

Brennart laughed his high-pitched giggle. “You want toi come along to the lunar south pole for your summer vacation?”

Grinning back at him, Doug said, “I know it won’t be a vacation. But, yes, I very much want to go.”

“He wants to go so much,” Joanna said, unsmiling, “that he’s threatened to go to Japan and take a job with Yamagata Industries.”

Sobering, Brennart said, “Yamagata’s people don’t give soft jobs to Americans, you know. Only the dog work, basic construction labor, stuff like that.”

“I know,” said Doug. “But it’ll be on the Moon.”

“You want to get to the Moon that bad?”

“I want to be at the frontier. I want to go places where no one’s been before.”

With a solemn nod, Brennart admitted, “I know the feeling.”

“If I approve your planned expedition,” Joanna asked, “will you take Doug with you?”

“If I say no, will you still approve the expedition?”

She looked into those ice-blue eyes, then said, “I might approve it more easily if you say no.”

“I mean it, Mom,” Doug said. I’ll go to Yamagata.”

Brennart smiled again. “I like his spirit. Reminds me of his father.”

“If I approve,” Joanna cut off any reminiscences, “I want Doug under your direct supervision. I want you to keep your eyes on him every moment. Both eyes, Foster.”

Brennart hesitated a moment, as if marshalling his thoughts. “We’ll have to find some useful task for him. There’ll be no room on the expedition for anyone who can’t pull his own weight.”

“I can be the legal recorder,” said Doug. “You don’t have anyone in your group who’s responsible for recording the corporation’s legal claim to the polar region. I can do that for you.”

Brennart rubbed his chin. “We were going to take turns recording everything with vidcams, but I suppose it makes some sense to have somebody assigned that responsibility specifically.”

Joanna said nothing, but she realized that Doug had thought all this out very carefully.

Grinning, Brennart asked, “You’ve really put in time in lunar simulators? You’re certified for tractor operation? And hoppers?”

“Nearly fifty hours!” said Doug.

With a shrug, Brennart said, “I’ve got no objections to your coming with us.”

“Then I can go?”

Joanna sank back in her chair and closed her eyes briefly. “Yes,” she said reluctantly, “you can go.”

But she sat up straight again and levelled a finger at Brennart. “He’s your responsibility, Foster. I don’t want him out of your sight.”

Brennart nodded easily. I’ll treat him as if he was my own son.”

“Don’t worry, Mom,” said Doug, almost dancing with excitement. I’ll be fine. What can happen to me?”

Joanna stared at Doug, grinning from ear to ear. Just like his father. Who died on the Moon.

MOONBASE

“I hate his guts,” said Jack Killifer.

“Who? Brennart?”

“Naw. Little Douggie.”

“Doug Stavenger?”

“That’s right,” Killifer said sourly. “Mama’s boy.”

“How can you hate him? You haven’t even seen him yet He’s not due to arrive until—”

“I don’t have to see him,” Killifer snapped. “The little pissant’s already screwed me over.”

Killifer and Roger Deems were sitting in Moonbase’s galley, a cavern large enough to hold the entire regular staff of fifty, plus a dozen or so visitors. At the moment, in the middle of a work morning, they were the only two people seated at the tables. A few others drifted in now and then, made their way down the line of automated dispensing machines, then headed back to their offices or workplaces.

Known to the regular Lunatics as The Cave, the galley had been carved out of the rock of Alphonsus’s ringwall mountains by the same plasma-torch crews who had dug the tunnels that now served as living quarters, laboratories, offices and workshops for Moonbase.

They had left The Cave’s ceiling rough-hewn, unpolished rock: hence its name. The walls were smooth, though, and the floor was planted with the toughest species of grasses that could be found on Earth. Twelve square plots of grass, forbidden to step upon, tended constantly and lovingly by the agro team, formed a green counterpoint to the tables and chair scattered across The Cave’s floor.

Full-spectrum lamps spanned the rock ceiling, keeping The Cave as bright as noontime on an Iowa summer day. The Lunatics joked that you could tell how much time a person spent in The Cave by how tanned he or she was. Ceiling, walls, and the smooth rock walkways and floor beneath the tables were all sprayed with clear airtight plastic.

“Why’re you pissed with the kid?” asked Roger Deems.

He was sitting across the small table from Killifer. Both men had mugs of what was supposed to be vitamin-enriched fruit juice before them. Both had laced their drinks liberally with ’rocket juice’ from Moonbase’s illicit travelling still.

The two men were a study in contrasts. Killifer was lean, lantern-jawed, his face hard and flinty. His light brown hair was shaved down almost to his scalp. His eyes were deepset, piercing, suspicious. Deems was large, round, plump, his dark locks curling down to his shoulders, his soft brown eyes wide.

He always seemed startled, like a deer caught in a car’s headlights.

Killifer took a long sip from his mug, then placed it down I on the table. I’m supposed to be second-in-command on this expedition, right?”

“Right.”

“Yeah, but Brennart’s put this snotnosed Douglas Stavenger in ahead of me.”

“But Douggie’s only aboard as an observer,” Deems protested. “And Brennart had to bring him in. Orders from Savannah!”

“Yeah, I know. Orders from Mama. She’s the real pain in my ass.”

“She’s the boss.”

“Damned bitch.”

Deems tried to make light of his companion’s mood. “Hey, you don’t know her well enough to call her names like that.”

“I know her,” Killifer muttered. “How d’you think I came up here to the Moon in the first place?”

Deems blinked uncertainly.

“She sent me. Fuckin’ exiled me. Five years I had to spend up here before she’d let me come back. Just because I tried to help her son.”

Now Deems was very confused. “Tried to help Douggie?”

“His half-brother. Greg.” With great disgust Killifer explained, “It was eighteen years ago. I was working for the San Jose division then, not much more than a kid myself. Greg Masterson — his father was the bitch’s first husband — he asked me for a favor.”

“What kind of a favor?”

Killifer shrugged his bony shoulders. “He wanted a sample of nanomachines. He was a big mucky-muck with the corporation, the president’s son, for chrissakes. So I gave him a sample like he asked for and it turned out bad, her new husband got killed up here. And I got blamed for it.”

“I didn’t know,” Deems said, awe in his voice.

“She said I could work on the Moon until she was ready to let me come back or she’d fire me and sic the police on me. I was too scared to realize that she couldn’t rat me out without turning in Greg, too. So I spent five years digging tunnels.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. By the time she was willing to let me come back Earthside I was so adapted to one-sixth gee I had to spend another six months doing special exercises to build up my muscles and bones. My heart, too.”

“But you made it back okay?”

“Yeah. Except the everything I had on Earth was gone by then. My girl had married somebody else. My parents died within a couple of years. My career in nanotech — forget it!” Killifer snapped his fingers. “Nanotech was dead in the States and everywhere else except a few universities. And you don’t lose five years in a field like that and then boogie back in get a university slot. I came back here. Been a Lunatic ever since, a rock jock.”

“No wonder you’re pissed.”

Killifer leaned across the little table menacingly. “I don’t want you telling anybody else about this, understand? Not a word.”

“Okay, okay.” Deems backed away slightly. Smoothing the front of his wrinkled jumpsuit, he said, “But it seems a shame to take it out on little Douggie.”

“Who cares? He’s his mother’s son.”

“Still…”

.’She’sthe one who forced Brennart to take the kid along. Stuck him on top of me.”

“He’s not on top of you. He’s just an observer. On the org chart—”

“He’s a snoop from Mama in Savannah,” Killifer growled. “Little bastard’s only eighteen years old and they put him in ahead of me.”

“But—”

“Don’t try to bullshit me, pal! He’s the boss’s son, for chrissakes. Everybody’ll be falling all over themselves to be on his good side.”

Deems shrugged. “I talked to him yesterday. He seems like a nice-enough kid.”

“See what I mean?”

Looking more startled than usual, Deems shook his head in denial and disbelief.

I’ll fix him,” Killifer grumbled. “Put the kid ahead of me, huh? She’ll pay for that. And everything else she’s done to me.”

Doug Stavenger knew that his mother was worried about him. She thinks I’m just a kid, he knew. She thinks an eighteen-year-old isn’t smart enough to take care of himself.

But my father wasn’t much older than that when he flew his first solo. And what’s age got to do with it, anyway.

As soon as Doug arrived in his quarters at Moonbase — a standard cell along one of the tunnels carved out of the rock, not even as large as the smallest compartment aboard a cruise ship — he put in a call to his mother in Savannah.

At first he merely assured her that he was all right and the trip to the Moon had been safely uneventful. Soon enough, though, they began to talk about the coming expedition to the south polar region.

“I’m going to make a point of meeting everyone who’s going on the mission,” he was saying.

“Douglas, I don’t want you taking unnecessary risks,” she said sharply to her son.

Doug’s image in her phone screen grinned at her as soon as her words reached him.

“Trying to sound business-like, Joanna said to her son’s smiling image, “You’re going along on this expedition for one reason only: to make certain that all the proper claims are made and all the legal forms filled out exactly right. That’s your job. I don’t want you traipsing around on some adventure when you should be tending to the legal formalities of this expedition.”

His smile did not fade an iota while he waited for her words to reach him on the Moon.

“I know, Mom. Don’t worry about it. Masterson Aerospace will have a full and legal claim to operate in the Basin, don’t worry about it.”

“We’re not the only ones interested in that region,” Joanna warned.

But Douglas had not waited for her reply to him. He kept right on, “And we’ll be the first group there, don’t worry about it. Nobody else is going to contest our rights.”

“Don’t take foolish risks,” she said, sounding more like a worried mother than she wanted to.

This time he listened, then replied, “I’ll be okay. Mr. Brennart is about as experienced as they come. He’s a living legend, really. We’ll be in good shape, don’t worry. What can happen to us?”

But even as she promised her son that she wouldn’t worry, Joanna wanted to reach out across the quarter-million miles separating them and bring him back safely to her side. She worried about Brennart. It seemed to her that the man was working too hard at increasing his reputation, taking risks needlessly.

Doug said good-bye to her at last, and she blanked the phone screen, then sank back into her caramel brown chair. It subtly molded its shape to accommodate her. In its armrests were controls that could massage or warm her, if Joanna wanted.

All she really wanted was her son safely by her side. Both her sons.

Trying to drive away her fears and apprehensions, Joanna concentrated on her work for hours. Long after darkness fell, long after the corporate headquarters building had emptied of everyone else except its lone human guard monitoring the security sensors and the robots patrolling the hallways, Joanna remained in her office, studying reports, scanning graphs, speaking with Masterson employees scattered all around the globe and aboard the corporation’s space facilities in orbit.

It was almost one in the morning when she wearily got up from her chair and went to the closet next to her personal lavatory. Joanna felt growing tension as she took off her dress and stripped down to her bra and panties. She reached into the closet and pulled out the sensor suit. It hung limp and lifeless, gray and slightly fuzzy-looking, in her hands.

He always called precisely on time, and she was slightly behind schedule. Quickly, Joanna stepped into the full-body suit and pressed closed the Velcro seals at its cuffs, ankles, and running down its front. The suit felt itchy on her skin, as it always did.

Taking the helmet from its shelf in the closet, she went back to her recliner chair and sat down. As she plugged the virtual reality suit into the chair, her wristwatch announced that she had one minute to spare. One minute to try to calm down a little.

She pulled the helmet over her coiffure, but left the visor up. This must be what a spacesuit’s helmet is like, she thought. Or a biker’s.

The phone’s chime sounded in her earphones. Joanna slid the visor down and said, “Hello, Greg.”

Her son had not changed much outwardly in the eighteen years since Paul’s death. Still darkly handsome, pale skin stretched over high cheekbones and strong, stubborn jaw. Eyes as dark and penetrating as glittering obsidian. Just a touch of gray at his temples; it made him look even more enticing, in her eyes.

“Hello, Mom,” he said somberly.

Even on this tropical Pacific beach he wore dark slacks and a starched shirt. His shoes and slacks will be soaked by the surf, Joanna thought, then reminded herself that Greg was actually in his own office, quite dry and probably amused at the flowered wraparound pareo and oversized mesh shirt mat she had programmed into her virtual reality costume.

They were standing on the white sand beach on the lagoon side of Bonriki. The airport was hidden by the high-rise office towers of the town, but out in the lagoon Joanna could see the floating platforms and work boats of the sea-launched rocket boosters. Almost on the equator, Tarawa lagoon was an ideal launch point for Pacific traffic into orbit. The island nation of Kiribati was getting rich on its royalties from Masterson Aerospace.

“Happy birthday, Greg,” Joanna said. She embraced her son and felt his arms fold around her briefly. I’m sorry I couldn’t come in person.”

“That’s okay,” he replied, trying to smile. “VR’s the next best thing.”

“How are you?” she asked.

“Fine. The operation here is going very well. They’re even talking about setting up an amusement park to draw in tourists.”

Joanna shook her head. “That’s a good way for them to lose money.”

Greg laughed. “The more they blow, the more dependent they’ll be on us. I’m already working out better terms for our contract renewal.”

“I’m very proud of what you’ve accomplished here,” Joanna said.

“Thanks, Mom.”

Neither of them spoke of what stood between them. Greg had gone through years of intensive therapy after his maniacal rage had led him to murder. For years Joanna had watched him every day, trusting him only as far as she could see him, protecting him against the pain and pressures of the world beyond the walls of their home.

Only gradually, when it became clear that the focus of his murderous fury had abated, did she allow him to return to the real world. Greg learned to control himself, learned to calm the bitter tides that surged through him, learned even to accept the fact that he had to share his mother with his younger half-brother.

In time, Joanna allowed him to return to the corporation. Gradually, slowly, the leash on which she kept her son grew longer, more flexible, until now he lived thousands of miles away and directed an important new operation of the corporation.

Yet despite his outward calm Joanna always felt the volcano seething beneath Greg’s surface. Even in the tropical tranquility of this Pacific atoll he was all tension and wary-eyed pain. Even in the relaxed mores of Micronesia he had not taken a lover; as far as Joanna could determine he did not even have a steady girlfriend, neither native nor corporate. He doesn’t even have a tan, she realized. He’s in his office all the time, driving himself constantly. The only time he gets to the beach is in VR simulations for meetings with me.

Joanna had kept Greg and his half-brother Douglas separated as much as possible. Over the years it began to seem almost normal that Doug would be away when Greg visited home, and Greg would not be there when Doug was. It was as if she had two different families, one son in each. There were holidays when the three of them were together, briefly, but they were always filled with tension and the fear that Greg might suddenly explode.

He never did. And Doug learned to get along with his older half-brother. It was difficult to dislike Doug; he had his father’s charm. Greg could even laugh with Doug, on rare occasions.

Now, as Joanna and Greg walked ankle-deep in the gentle virtual surf of the lagoon, with the dying sun painting the towering cumulus clouds fabulous shades of pink and orange, Greg seemed lost in thought.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, looking up into his somber eyes.

Greg let out a sigh, like a man in pain.

“What is it, dear?” Joanna repeated.

He stopped and turned to face her, his back to the glorious sunset. “Have I done an adequate job here?”

Joanna had to shade her eyes to look up at him. “More than adequate, Greg. You’ve made me proud of you.”

“All right,” he said. “Then I want to move up to the next challenge.”

“The next…?”

“Moonbase,” Greg said.

For a moment Joanna wasn’t certain that she had heard him correctly.

“I want to be put in charge of Moonbase,” he said, his voice calm. But she could sense the depth of his desire, even through the virtual reality interface.

“Moonbase,” she repeated, stalling for time to think.

“Anson’s due to rotate back to Savannah when her tour is finished,” Greg said. “I’d like to be named to replace her for the next year.”

Doug is on the Moon, Joanna thought swiftly. But he’ll be coming back once Brennart’s expedition establishes an operational facility at the south pole.

“Mom? Did you hear me?”

“Yes, of course I heard you. It’s just… unexpected. You’ve caught me by surprise, Greg.”

He broke into a cheerless smile. “That’s the first time that’s happened!”

“I never thought you’d want to go to Moonbase,” she said.

“It’s the next logical step, isn’t it? A year at Moonbase and then I can move up to head the entire space operations division.”

Joanna made herself smile back at him. “Director of Moonbase is a big responsibility.”

His smile evaporated. “You don’t trust me.”

“Of course I trust you!” she blurted.

“But not enough.”

“Oh, Greg—”

“I know. You’ve got every reason not to trust me. But it’s not like I’m looking to be made CEO, or even asking for my old seat on the board of directors.”

“There’s going to be a vacancy on the board next year,” Joanna said. “I was planning to nominate you.”

If that pleased him, Greg did not show it ’Mom, I want to earn my way. Moonbase is always tottering on the brink of collapse. I want to spend a year there and make the tough decision.”

“The tough decision?”

“To close it down, once and for all.”

“You, can’t do that!”

“Somebody has to,” he snapped. “We can’t let Moonbase keep draining the corporation, year after year.”

“But it’s making a profit…”

Greg’s expression turned sour. “You know that’s not true, Mom. Oh, sure, the bookkeeping shows a small profit, but when you figure in all the seed money we’ve put in for research that’s off the bqpks and all the other hidden costs, Moonbase is an expense we can’t afford.”

Joanna drew in her breath. That’s what he’s really after. He wants to kill Moonbase. He wants to put an end to Paul’s dream.

“Let me put in a year up there,” Greg insisted. “I’ll do my best to find a way to make the base really profitable, without bookkeeping tricks. But if I can’t, after a whole year, then I’ll recommend we close the operation for good.”

“Do you think you can make that decision?”

“After a year of hands-on management up there, yes.”

“What do you see as a potential profit-maker?” Joanna asked. “If anything.”

“I don’t know!” he said, agitated. “They’ve been using nanotechnology up there. Maybe we can turn Moonbase into a nanotech research center.”

“We’ve been through this before, Greg,” Joanna objected. “The public resistance to nanotechnology is too strong. People are frightened of it. The San Jose labs were trashed. We even had to close down the nanofactory in Austin because of the public pressure.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” Greg said impatiently. “And I heard the Vice President’s speech last week, too.”

“He’s asking for a U.N. treaty to ban all nanotechnology all over the world!” Joanna said.

“He’ll be president after November,” said Greg gloomily. “He’s certain to win!”

“A man like that in the White House.”

With a sardonic smile, Greg said, “He won’t be the first ignoramus to get there.”

“But he’s violently opposed to nanotechnology; he’s making it a religious issue.”

Joanna did not add that the deaths on the Moon caused by ’runaway’ nanomachines were still prime ammunition for the anti-nanotech Luddites. She did not have to.

“Ambitious politicians always play to the peoples’ fears,” Greg replied impatiently. “Since when do we let that determine corporate policy?”

Joanna shook her head. “It’s like the fear the public had of the old nuclear power plants. It’s irrational, but it’s very real. It generates political power, more power than we can challenge.”

“I don’t agree.”

“We can’t invest major resources in nanomanufacturing, Greg. We haven’t even been able to put medical nanoproducts on the market, and they’ve been proved to save lives. The government, the public, the media — they’ve stopped us every time we’ve tried.”

Greg countered, “But maybe if we do it in space… on the Moon or in orbit. Everybody’s afraid of nanobugs getting loose and running wild, so we do it all in space where they can’t get loose.”

“But what will they build? What can you make in space that we can sell here on the ground?”

“I don’t know,” Greg admitted. “Not yet. That’s why I want to spend a year at Moonbase, to see what they can do.”

Joanna stared at her son. He was serious, intent, perhaps even confident. Even though she was afraid of his unconscious desires, she couldn’t refuse him.

“If you can find a product that could make Moonbase profitable,” Joanna said slowly, “or even if you have the strength to recommend closing the base — you’ll have earned your place on the board of directors.”

“You mean you’d nominate me?”

She could see all the hope, all the need in him. He’s been through so much, Joanna thought. But another part of her mind asked. Can you really trust him? Do you dare to let him shoulder so much responsibility? Can he handle it without breaking down?

“Let me talk with a few people,” she temporized. “In the meantime, I’ll see about getting you the Moonbase job.”

“That’s the best birthday present you could give me,” Greg said.

Doug is at Moonbase, Joanna reminded herself. I don’t want them both up there at the same time.

“I love you, Mom.”

Joanna felt sudden tears blurring her vision. “I love you too, Greg.”

She knew that she meant it with every fiber of her being. She hoped that Greg meant his words, too. Yet she was always — afraid that he still didn’t understand what love really was.

He had been so sick, so terribly mixed up. He had never seen a loving relationship in his home until I met Paul, and then…

Joanna shut her eyes inside the VR helmet and refused to cry. This is a step in Greg’s recovery, she told herself. I can’t refuse to let him go to Moonbase.

Then she realized, If we close Moonbase it will be the end of all Paul’s dreams. Greg will be killing him all over again. And I’ll be helping him.

MOONBASE

It was easy for experienced Lunatics to spot newcomers to the Moon. They walked funny. Unaccustomed to the one-sixth lunar gravity, they stumbled or even hopped when they tried to take a step.

But not Doug Stavenger. Even though he had already been to Moonbase once, briefly, he left Savannah a week early and spent the time at the main Masterson space station, in orbit around the Earth, living in the wheel that spun to simulate lunar gravity. So when he arrived at Moonbase he did not need weighted boots. Once in a while he forgot himself and went soaring off the floor when he merely wanted to take a long stride. But by and large he fit into the underground life of Moonbase quite smoothly.

Until he ran into the linear football game.

It was almost midnight. Although most of the offices and labs were closed for the night, the tunnels remained as brightly lit as always. Doug had spent the evening in the workshop that Foster Brennart had converted into his office, going over details of the expedition. Brennart was a stickler for detail; he seemed to know every part and piece and item of equipment that had been assembled for the trek to the south pole. He could account for every gram of food, oxygen, water, even the aluminum chips that were used as fuel for the expedition’s rocket craft.

Doug was determined that he would know as much about the expedition as Brennart did; especially the people. He copied all the personnel files and now, carrying the microdisks in his coverall pockets, he was heading for his own quarters and some sleep before setting out to meet each person slated to go on the expedition.

He heard shouting from down the tunnel. And scuffling. A fight?

The tunnels curved slightly, and had emergency air-tight hatches every twenty yards that remained open unless the sensors detected a drop in air pressure. Stepping through one of the open hatches, Doug jogged along the tunnel until he saw a half-dozen men and women tussling, pushing, kicking — and laughing.

“Outta the way, tenderfoot!” one of the group hollered as he kicked a small round object in Doug’s direction. It was flat and black, like a hockey puck. As it skittered toward him, Paul saw that it was the plastic top from a container.

It bounced off a wall and the whole gang of men and women raced after it.

“Watch out!” yelled a young Asian woman, short and stocky, grinning toothily.

The commotion boiled right into Doug. They were all young people, he saw, not much more than his own age. The coveralls they wore were mostly the pumpkin orange of the science and exploration group, although there was a medical white and even a management blue among them, the same as Doug’s own jumpsuit. One of the guys brushed past him, pushing him into the rock wall.

“Linear football,” the young woman gasped, by way of explanation. Then they were past him, kicking the black plastic lid down the corridor.

Doug trotted after them. The game seemed to have no rules. Everybody tried to kick the lid; they all scrambled to reach it, pushing and elbowing and laughing every inch of the way. Somebody kicked it into the slight niche of a doorway and they all whooped wildly. In an instant, though, the game continued down the tunnel.

Doug followed them and before he knew it he was part of the game, too. It became obvious that the object was to kick the lid into a doorway. There were no teams, though; it was all against each. And the scorekeeping was casual, at best.

“That’s eight for me!”

“The hell it is!”

“You’ve only got six.”

“No, eight.”

“What’s the difference? Are we playing or doing arithmetic?”

The tunnel ended at the closed hatch that led into the main garage, where the surface tractors were stored and serviced. The six men and women collapsed against the walls and slid to the floor, panting, sweating, all grins. Doug sank into a crouch with them.

“You’re Doug Stavenger, aren’t you?” asked the Asian woman.

He nodded, trying to catch his breath.

One of the young men puffed, “For a tenderfoot…you run … pretty good.”

Doug said, “Thanks.”

After a few minutes, one of the women said, “Hey, it’s past midnight already. I’ve got to be on the job at oh-eight hundred.”

“That’s where you sleep, isn’t it?”

“A comedian, yet.”

Slowly, laboriously, they clambered to their feet and started trudging back toward the living quarters.

“I’m Bianca Rhee,” the Asian woman said. Built like a fireplug, she barely came up to Doug’s shoulder. “The brilliant and beautiful Eurasian astrophysicist.”

Doug must have gaped at her, because she laughed out loud. Soon they were talking like old friends as they walked along the tunnel.

“Doesn’t anybody complain about the noise you guys make?” Doug asked. “People are sleeping on the other side of some of those doors.”

“Oh, we wake them up, I guess. But the game moves past them so fast that by the time they’re really awake we’ve moved down the tunnel.”

“Nobody’s ever complained?”

“Oh, sure. But we don’t get up a game every night.”

They walked in silence for a while. “You’re an astrophysicist, you said?”

Bianca nodded. She had often used that ’beautiful Eurasian’ line to see what kind of reaction it would cause. In truth, her beauty was not physical. Short, thick-waisted, with a face as round and flat as a pie pan, Bianca was the daughter of a Korean-American father and Italian-American mother. She claimed that she grew up on sushi parmigiana.

She was bored with the astronomical work she was doing at Moonbase. It was strictly routine photometry, using the wide-field Schmidt telescope to make painstakingly accurate measurements of the positions of galaxies. Adding another decimal point or two to the details. The kind of work that they stick graduate students with, while the major players get to do the exciting stuff, like scoping out black holes in galactic cores or searching for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Her work was so routine that she had set up a computer program to run the telescope and catalogue the results, and began to spend her time calculating how to build a giant telescope using liquid mercury for its mirror. And — when she was sure no one else could see her — practicing ballet in the low lunar gravity.

But suddenly, with Douglas Stavenger walking beside her, she got another idea.

“You know,” she said, “I could use your help.”

“Mine?”

“I’d like to come along on Brennart’s expedition.”

Doug stopped walking and looked at her. “Why?” he asked. “Why should Brennart take an astrophysicist along? What good would that do for the expedition? Or for you, for that matter?”

Bianca answered with one word. “Farside.”

Before she could start to explain, he said, “You want to set up an astronomical observatory on the farside, and the expedition to the south pole can be a sort of training mission. Is that it?”

“Exactly!” She was impressed with how quickly he grasped the idea.

With a slow grin, Doug went on, “That’s a pretty flimsy excuse, don’t you think?”

Damn! she thought. He sees right through me. But she found herself grinning back and admitting, “True. But it’s the only one I could think of.”

By the time they reached her door Doug had promised he would speak to Brennart about her. Bianca wanted to kiss him, but decided it was too soon for that. Sternly, she reminded herself that this good-looking young man was five years her junior. She also remembered that men attain the peak of their sexual potency around the age of eighteen.

Doug did not seem to have any romantic intentions. So they merely shook hands, and then he headed down the tunnel toward his own quarters. She dreamed about him that night. She dreamed she was a slender and graceful ballerina and he was hopelessly in love with her.

Almost everyone in Moonbase wore utilitarian coveralls with nametags pinned to their chests. Yet even though Brennart wore a one-piece jumpsuit just as most others did, he needed no nametag. Although he belonged to the exploration and research group, he insisted on wearing pure white coveralls, clean and crisp as if they had just been laundered and pressed, and decorated with shoulder patches and chest emblems from the dozens of missions he had undertaken during his years as an astronaut and lunar explorer.

Doug Stavenger did not consciously think of Brennart as a father figure, but the older man’s single-minded drive to establish a working base in the south polar region of the Moon impressed Doug forcefully.

“Do you really think Yamagata’s planning an expedition to Aitkin Basin, too?” Doug asked.

“No doubt in my mind about that,” said Brennart, in his sweet tenor voice. “They’d be damned fools not to.”

It was the morning after the football game, and Doug’s meeting Bianca Rhee. He and Brennart were hunched over a display table in Brennart’s workshop/office, studying the latest satellite photos of the Mt. Wasser area.

“After all,” Brennart went on, “we’re going out there, aren’t we? The Japanese are just as smart as we are. That’s why we’ ve got to get there first Like the man said, the side that wins is the one that gets there firstest with the mostest.”

Doug nodded as he straightened up. Brennart’s office was one of the largest rooms in Moonbase, but still it felt hot and cramped. Most of the equipment that jammed the office was already crated and ready to be loaded on the ballistic Jobbers. Doug saw a tousled cot in one corner, and realized that Brennart was sleeping in this room, too.

Brennart tapped the satellite display with a fingernail. “This is where we’ll put down. Right here, at the foot of the mountain. Close as lovers in a spacesuit built for two.”

Doug looked down again. “It’s hard to make out details of that area. It’s too heavily shadowed. “It’s an ice field,” Brennart said.

Doug stepped over to the end of the table and worked the keyboard. False-color infrared imagery of the region appeared over the satellite picture.

“Not ice,” he murmured. “The spectrographic data shows anorthosite rock. Typical highlands profile.”

Brennart straightened up and stretched his arms over his head. His hands bumped the smoothed rock ceiling. “Been coming up here more than twenty years and I still can’t get used to how low the ceilings are,” he muttered.

“That area might be too rough for a landing,” Doug suggested. “But over here—”

“We want to be as close to the mountain as possible,” Brennart interrupted. “We land where I said we’ll land.”

Doug looked up at the older man. There was iron in his tone. Brennart seemed totally convinced of his decision and completely unwilling to consider any alternatives.

Then he smiled down at Doug. “I know you’re concerned about safety, son. So am I. Be a fool not to. Like the man said, there are old astronauts and bold astronauts, but there are no old, bold astronauts.”

“Uh-huh,” Doug mumbled, for lack of anything better to say.

“I’m an old astronaut, son. If the landing area looks too spooky as we approach it, I’ll simply goose the Jobber a bit and land in the clear field, a little further from our goal.”

Returning his smile, Doug said, “I see. Okay. I should have thought of that.”

“Nothing to worry about,” said Brennart. Then he added, “Except coming in second to the Japanese.”

A little later, Doug asked Brennart about taking Bianca Rhee along with them.

“An astrophysicist?” Brennart seemed startled at the suggestion. “Why on earth should I take an astrophysicist along? This isn’t a tourist excursion, you know.”

“We have room for her,” Doug said. “I’ve checked the logistics program and we could handle six more people, if we needed them.”

“Yes,” Brennart said, “but I need an astrophysicist like a nun needs condoms.”

“She could be useful,” Doug said.

“Doing what?”

“She’s a good technician. I’ve looked up her personnel profile and she’s qualified for electrical, electromechanical, and computer repairs and maintenance.”

“I already have all the technicians I need.”

“But think of the longer-range situation,” Doug said.

Brennart glanced down at him. “What longer-range situation?”

“Somebody’s going to build an astronomical center on the farside, sooner or later. She could help you get the experience you need to lead that mission, when the time comes.”

Brennart pursed his lips. “Farside.” His eyes looked off into the future.

“Farside,” Doug repeated, knowing he had won Bianca a spot on the team.

They celebrated that night with as festive a dinner as could be obtained at Moonbase: prepackaged turkey with holiday trimmings, microwaved somewhat short of perfection. Bianca invited all her friends, and they pushed tables together in The Cave, careful not to tread on the semi-sacred grass.

Although there was talk around the table of a mysterious still that produced ’rocket juice,” the high spirits of the gang did not come from alcohol. When at last the crowd broke up, Doug escorted Bianca to her quarters. She gave him a peck on the cheek and then swiftly went inside and slid the accordion-fold door shut.

He’s too young, she told herself. Probably a virgin. No, she contradicted herself immediately. Not with those looks. But why should he be interested in you? He’s the son of the corporation’s chairwoman. He’s young and good-looking and rich and kind and…

She stared at her image in the full-length aluminum mirror on the rock wall of her room. You used him and he was kind enough to let you do it. He’s not interested in you sexually. Who would be?

Bianca did not cry. But she wanted to.

Doug was too keyed up to go back to his quarters and go to sleep. Instead, he jogged up the tunnel to the main garage and asked the security guard on duty for permission to go up to the surface.

The garage was quiet and shadowy, tractors parked in precise rows along the faded yellow lines painted on the rock floor, barely visible in the dim nighttime lighting.

The guard cocked a doubtful eye at him, then checked Doug’s record on his display screen.

“You’ve been here three days and you’ve already spent six hours on the surface?”

“Yes, that sounds about right,” said Doug.

“You some kind of scientist?”

Shaking his head, Doug said, “No. Not yet, at least.”

“Says here you’re okay to go out alone,” the guard said, still dubious. “But you stay inside camera range, understand? If I’ve gotta wake up a team to go out and find you, your ass is gonna be in deep glop. Understand?”

“Understood,” said Doug, grinning. Obviously the guard thinks I’m some kind of freak, going out alone in the middle of the night. Even though it’s full daylight outside.

Doug went down the row’of lockers where the surface suit hung like empty suits of armor, looking for one his size. Afte he got it all on, Doug spent an hour reading through the logistics list for the expedition on his hand computer whil he pre-breathed the suit’s low-pressure mix of oxygen and nitrogen. Finally the security guard came out of his cubicle long enough to check out the suit’s seals and connections.

“Your suit malfunctions, it’s my ass,” he muttered. Once he completed the checklist, though, he pointed Doug to the personnel airlock and said cheerfully, “Okay kid, now you’re on your own.”

Through the sealed visor of his helmet Doug said, “Thanks for your help.”

The guard simply shook his head, obviously convinced this strange young visitor was crazy, even though his record said he was qualified for solo excursions on the surface.

The massive steel hatch for the vehicles was tightly closed; Doug used the smaller personnel airlock set into the rock wall beside it and stepped into the brilliant glare of sunlight. The cracked, pockmarked floor of Alphonsus stretched out before him all the way to the strangely close horizon. The worn, rounded ringwall mountains slumped on both sides like tired old men basking in the sun.

Doug smiled. “Magnificent desolation,” he muttered, remembering Aldrin’s words. But he did not see desolation in this harsh lunar landscape. Doug saw unearthly beauty.

And more.

He paced out across the dusty crater floor, carefully counting his steps, knowing that the safety cameras were watching him. At one hundred paces he stopped and turned back to face the cameras, the airlock hatch, Moonbase.

Off to his left the ground was scoured bare and blasted by rocket exhausts. The expedition’s four ungainly-looking ballistic Jobbers stood on the base’s four landing pads, the most visible mark of human habitation. The base itself was barely discernible. Just a few humps of rubble marked the various airlocks. Most of the base was dug into the mountain wall, of course.

Mt. Yeager. Doug looked up to its summit, gleaming in the sunlight. More than twelve thousand feet to the top, Doug knew. I’ll have to climb it before I go back home.

He turned a full circle, there alone on the crater floor except for the automated tractors patiently scooping up regolith sand and the distant glistening slick of the tiny, invisible nanomachines quietly building new solar cells out of the regolith’s silicon and trace metals.

Doug saw the future.

Where I’m standing will be just about a tenth of the way along the main plaza, Doug said to himself. The plaza floor will be dug in below the surface, of course, but its dome will rise more than a hundred feet over my head. We’ll plant it with grass and trees, get it landscaped with walking lanes through the shrubbery and even a swimming pool.

It’ll be a real city, he thought. With permanent residents and families having babies and everything. We’ll set up a cable car system over Mt. Yeager, out to Mare Nubium. That’ll be easier than trying to tunnel through the mountain, especially in this gravity. We’ll have to move the rocket port further out, but we’ll connect it with tunnels.

For more than two hours Doug paced out the structures he visualized, the city that Moonbase could become. We can do it, he told himself. If I can get Mom to agree…

Then reality intruded on his dream. “Mr. Stavenger, this is security. You’ve been outside for two hours. Unless you have some specific duties to perform, standard regulations require that you return to the airlock.”

Doug nodded inside the helmet of his spacesuit. “Understood,” he said. I’m coming back in.”

But he brought his dream with him.

BRUDNOY

They had disconnected all the life-support tubes and wires. Lana Goodman knew she was dying and she was tired of fighting it. She was nothing but a shell of a creature now, fragile, shrivelled, each breath a labor.

Lev Brudnoy sat at her bedside in Moonbase’s tiny infirmary, his expressive face a picture of grief. Behind him stood Jinny Anson, gripping the back of Brudnoy’s chair with white-knuckled intensity.

“You know the one thing I regret?” Goodman’s voice was a harsh, labored whisper.

Brudnoy, tears in his eyes, shook his head.

“I regret that you never made a pass at me, Lev.”

For once in his life, Brudnoy was stunned into silence.

“You came on to just about every other woman in Moon-base,” Goodman wheezed, “except me.”

Brudnoy gulped once and found his voice, “Lovely woman,” he said softly, “I was too much afraid of being rejected. You have always been so far above me…”

Goodman smiled. “We could have had some times together.”

“Never in my wildest fantasies could I hope that you would be interested in a foolish dog like me,” Brudnoy muttered, letting his head sink low.

“You’re a good old dog, Lev. No fool.”

He spread his hands. “I’m nothing but a peasant I spend all my time in the farm now.”

“I know,” Goodman whispered. “The flowers… they cheered me up.”

“The least I could do.”

“I want you to bury me in your farm,” Goodman said.

“Not return to Earth?”

“This is my home. Bury me here. In the farm. Where what’s left of me can do some good.”

Brudnoy turned toward Jinny Anson. “Is that allowed? Is it legal?”

I’m a witness,” Anson said. “I’ll see that the forms are properly filled out.”

“In the farm.” Goodman’s voice was so faint now that Brudnoy had to bend over her emaciated form to hear her. “Always did believe in ecology. Recycle me.”

Then she sighed and closed her eyes. For a moment Brudnoy thought she had fallen asleep. But then the remote sensors started shrilling their single note.

A doctor appeared at the foot of her bed. Brudnoy struggled to his feet, a big lumbering man, weathered but still handsome, slightly paunchy, his shoulders slumped and his hair graying. There seemed to be new lines in his face every year; every day, he sometimes thought. A ragged gray beard covered his chin.

He felt Anson’s hand on his arm as he shambled out of the infirmary, leaving behind its odor of clean sheets and implacable death.

The tunnel was bright and cheerful, by contrast. People strode by as if nothing had happened on the other side of the infirmary’s doors. Young people, Brudnoy realized. All of them younger than I. Even Jinny.

“Well,” he said, trying to straighten up, “now I’m the oldest resident of Moonbase. I suppose I’ll be the next to go.”

Anson smiled up at him. “Not for another hundred years, at least.”

“At least,” Brudnoy murmured.

“Come on, let me buy you a drink. We could both use some rocket juice.”

“You?” Some of the old playfulness sparkled in Brudnoy’s sky-blue eyes. “You, the base director? You speak of illegal alcoholic drinks?”

Anson grinned wickedly at him. “What kind of a director would I be if I didn’t know about the still? Besides, I won’t be director much longer. My relief is due in another two weeks.”

She led Brudnoy to her own quarters, where she uncovered her stash of ’rocket juice’ a gallon-sized thermos jug she kept under her bunk. She and Brudnoy had shared that bunk more than once; but that was years ago.

Now, as they sat on the springy wire chairs that Anson had made from scrap metal, Brudnoy sipped the homebrew thoughtfully.

“Is it legal?” he asked.

“The booze? Of course not. But as long as people don’t drink during their work shifts, there’s no sense trying to find the still and knock it apart. Damn little else to do for entertainment around here.”

Brudnoy shook his head. “I meant Lana’s request to be buried in the farm.”

Anson said, “As long as I’m in charge here we’ll honor her last request. There’s probably some relatives back Earthside; if they want her they’ll have to get a court order.”

I’ll see to the burial, then,” Brudnoy said.

“How soon?”

I’ll talk with the medical people. Tomorrow, I imagine, would be good enough.”

I’ll be there. I’ll get the word out, a lot of the old-timers will want to come.”

“Old-timers,” Brudnoy echoed. “Yes, that’s what we’ve become.”

Anson quickly changed the subject. “How’s the farm doing?”

“Lunar soil is very rich in nutrients,” Brudnoy said. “What we need is more earthworms and beetles.”

She took a sip of her drink, then replied slowly, “We’ve got to be very careful about introducing any kind of life forms here. That’s why I brought that team of biologists up here. I don’t want any runaway populations of any kind.”

Brudnoy sipped also. “Your biologists spend more time at my little farm than I do.”

“That’s what they’re paid to do.”

“All I wanted was to grow some beautiful flowers.”

“Yeah, but we should be growing more of our own food.”

“Someday.” He winked mischievously. “Once we have enough worms and beetles.”

“Ugh,” said Anson.

“How long will you be Earthside?” he asked.

Anson took a breath. “I don’t think I’ll be coming back, Lev.”

“No? Why not?”

“I’m going to get married,” she said. “Would you believe it?”

“You mean you’ve been carrying on a romance Earthside? For how long?”

Two years now.”

“Two years! And you never told me.”

“You’re the first one I have told,” Anson said. “It’s time for me to settle down. No more gypsying. He’s a university professor with two daughters from his first marriage. Very stable guy.”

“Well… good luck.” Brudnoy said it with enormous reluctance.

“Thanks.” She took a larger swallow from her cup. “I just wish this Brennart trip had started sooner. Hate to leave while they’re out on their own.”

“Who will your replacement be?”

She shook her head. “Should be O’Rourke.”

Brudnoy made a sour face.

“He’s good at his job,” Anson said.

“Yes,” Brudnoy said. “And about as much fun as a flat rock.”

Anson laughed. “He’s not a high-flier, that’s for sure.”

“Perhaps you should stay until the expedition returns,” Brudnoy suggested.

“No can do,” said Anson. I’ve got a husband to catch.”

“Ahhh,” Brudnoy sighed. “Too bad. We used to have such good times together.”

“Well,” she said, drawing the word out languidly, “we have two weeks before I have to leave.”

Brudnoy’s brows shot up. “But you’re about to be married!”

“For old times’ sake,” Anson said, leaning toward him. “Besides, I don’t want to be out of practice.”

It was more than an hour later when Brudnoy finally left her quarters. Out in the tunnel, blinking in the overhead lights, he smiled to himself. For an old dog you performed rather well. But then he saw that the people striding along the tunnel all looked so young. So fresh. When Jinny leaves I’ll be the only old dog left here. He realized that there were hardly any people left in Moonbase that he knew very well. All the old friends have gone, Brudnoy said to himself.

He felt very old and tired as he walked slowly toward the farm.

“We leave tomorrow,” Doug said happily.

Even from a quarter-million miles away, Joanna could see his excitement. She leaned back in her embracing leather chair and studied her young son’s smiling face.

“The expedition shouldn’t take longer than two weeks,” he was saying, not waiting for her to reply. “We’ve got the nanobugs all set, all the equipment’s checked out. Of course, we’re carrying supplies for a month, just in case. And we can always be resupplied by rocket Jobber.

As he prattled on eagerly, Joanna wondered if it would be wise to tell him about Greg now or wait until he was safely back from the polar expedition.

“… so this time tomorrow we’ll be at the south pole,” Doug finished.

“Your brother’s coming up to Moonbase,” Joanna heard herself say. “He’s going to be the new director when Anson leaves.”

Then she held her breath for three seconds until her words reached him.

Doug’s eyes widened slightly. “Greg? The new director?”

“Yes,” said Joanna. “He asked for the position and I think he’s earned it”

She could see the wheels spinning in Doug’s head. “He’s coming up here to close down Moonbase, isn’t he?”

No sense trying to lie to him, she thought. “He’s going to spend the coming year trying to find some way to make Moonbase truly profitable. But if he can’t, then, yes, we’ll have to shut it down.”

Doug’s smile had faded but not disappeared. He seemed to be mulling over the possibilities. “If we can come up with a profitable product, then he’ll keep the base open?”

“Yes, of course.”

In the three seconds it took for her reply to reach him, Doug seemed to brighten. “Clipperships are still the corporation’s most valuable product, aren’t they?”

“They’re just about our only profitable product,” Joanna admitted. “And the Windowalls, of course.”

But Doug didn’t wait for her answer. He went on, “Then why don’t we start to build the next generation of Clipperships here at Moonbase?”

“That’s foolishness, Doug,” she said. “Why build the ships on the Moon when we can build them perfectly well at our plants here in Texas and Georgia?”

He waited, grinning, as if he knew what she would say. Then he replied, “Because here we can build them out of pure diamond, using nanomachines.”

“Diamond?”

“Diamond is lighter, stronger than any metal alloy,” he said, without pausing. “We can build Clipperships that will outperform anything you can make on Earth, at a fraction of your manufacturing costs.”

“Using nanomachines,” Joanna murmured. Then she thought aloud, “But to make diamond you need carbon. There isn’t any carbon on the Moon, is there?”

“Not much,” Doug admitted. “Nowhere near enough. We’ll have to snag one of the Earth-crossing asteroids and mine it for carbon.”

“Mine an asteroid?”

Doug rolled right along, hardly drawing a breath. “We can convert one of the transfer ships to make a rendezvous with a carbon-bearing asteroid. There’s plenty of them in orbits that come close to the Earth/Moon system; no need to go out to the asteroid belt, that’s ’way out past Mars.”

“Do you really think you can build Clipperships out of diamond?” Joanna asked.

When her question reached him, Doug replied easily, “Why not? It’s just a matter of programming nanomachines.”

“And a diamond ship will be better than the ones we’re manufacturing now?”

Doug waited patiently, then answered, “They’ll be lighter, much stronger, capable of carrying heavier payloads with the same rocket thrust, safer, more durable. What else can you ask for?”

“Cheaper to manufacture,” Joanna replied.

He nodded once he heard her response. “Not only cheaper to manufacture, but the aerospace lines will be willing to pay more for them, since they’ll perform so much better than today’s ships.”

Despite herself, Joanna felt almost breathless at the sweep of Doug’s vision. “We could use nanomachines to manufacture other things, too, couldn’t we?”

“Aircraft,” Doug said.

“Automobiles!”

“Houses,” Doug added, grinning hugely.

“All by using nanomachines for manufacturing,” said Joanna.

“Masterson Corporation could become the biggest, most powerful company in the solar system.”

Joanna felt the same excitement her son did. But then she remembered the realities. “People are afraid of nanotechnology, Doug. There are powerful forces opposing it”

His cheerful grin didn’t shrink by a millimeter when he heard her doubts. “But don’t you see, Mom? This will show everybody that nanotechnology works! It’ll knock the opposition flat!”

“And it will save Moonbase,” Joanna said.

“Right!”

If it works, Joanna thought If the nanoluddites don’t prevent us from doing it If Greg doesn’t try to stop his brother from trying.

BALLISTIC VEHICLE 1

The liftoff wasn’t exactly silent. When the rocket ignited Doug could feel a surge of vibration in his bones that rumbled in his ears almost like sound. Still, the lack of thundering noise made Doug feel slightly eerie. And of course the thrust he felt was minuscule compared to a Clippership liftoff from Earth.

The excitement of the previous night’s conversation with his mother hadn’t worn off, exactly. The thought of going out to capture an asteroid and then using its carbon to build Clipperships out of diamond still tingled in the back of Doug’s mind. But that was for the future. This flight to the Moon’s south pole was now.

He had spent an hour in the main airlock, big enough to accommodate full-sized tractors and dozens of people, prebreathing the oxygen-nitrogen mixture that they would be using throughout the expedition. Moonbase ran on ’normal’ air: almost eighty percent nitrogen and twenty oxygen, with traces of carbon dioxide and water vapor, all at 14.7 pounds per square inch, almost exactly like the clean dry atmosphere of a desert region on Earth. The surface suits still worked at five psi, with a 72/28 ratio of oxygen to nitrogen.

Moonbase safety regulations called for prebreathing the spacesuit mix for an hour before going outside, to get the excess nitrogen out of the blood stream and prevent the bends.

Now, strapped into the bare metal seat in the ballistic lobber, his suit buttoned up tight, Doug felt weird as the rocket engines blasted them off the floor of Alphonsus in almost total silence.

The lobbers were modified versions of the transfer spacecraft that shuttled passengers and freight from Earth orbit to the Moon. There was nothing aerodynamic about them, since they never flew in an atmosphere. They were utilitarian assemblies of silvered tankage, rocket engines, bulky cargo containers, pressurized personnel pods, and spindly legs that jutted out from the four corners of the spacecraft’s main platform.

Doug felt the rockets’ vibration through the metal frame of the vehicle; it was almost sound, like a thunder so distant and faint you wonder if you’ve heard anything at all. The spacecraft rose quickly enough; Doug could see through the transparent bubble of the passenger pod the slumped mountains of the ringwall whiz past and then nothing but the darkness of space. But there was hardly any palpable acceleration, none of the heavy forces that pushed you down in your seat when you lifted off from Earth.

And then all sense of thrust disappeared. The vibration ceased, too. Engines have cut off, Doug knew. We’re coasting on a ballistic trajectory now, like an artillery shell.

His suit helmet cut off his view of Bianca Rhee, sitting beside him. There were four others crowded into the plastiglass bubble of a passenger module, plus Brennart and Killifer up in the cockpit module. The eight other expedition members were in the second lobber. The other two rocket vehicles carried only cargo; unmanned, they were guided remotely.

“How do you like it?” he asked Bianca.

Her voice in his helmet earphones sounded strained. “If I could walk, I’d do it.”

Doug laughed. “This is a lot easier than walking. And safer.”

“It’s the free-fall,” said Bianca. “Makes my stomach want to turn inside out.”

“Well, try to relax. We’ll be back on the ground in about half an hour.”

“Can’t be too soon.”

The spacecraft tilted forward a few degrees, enough so that they could look down at the cratered mountains sliding below them, dwindling as the lobber headed for the peak of its ballistic trajectory. Bianca groaned aloud.

“Isn’t that Tycho?” Doug said, tapping a gloved finger against the plastiglass canopy. “Over there, near the horizon.”

The crater was unmistakable: big and sharp, with bright rays of debris streaking out of it for hundreds of miles. One of the newest big craters on the Moon, Doug said to himself. Not even a billion years old.

“Tycho,” Bianca said, awed. “Wow, I’ve never seen it so close.”

“It’ beautiful, isn’t it?” said Doug.

“Sure is.”

She leaned over until her helmet visor was touching the canopy’s plastiglass. Doug knew that Tycho marked the midpoint of their half-hour flight. He hoped it would keep Bianca fascinated long enough to make her forget about barfing.

Foster Brennart sat up in the Jobber’s cockpit, a separate and smaller bubble that projected out to one side of the lobber. Jack Killifer was in the co-pilot’s seat. Panels of instruments and controls surrounded them at waist height. Above the panel the bubble was clear plastiglass.

Killifer took a wire from one of the pouches in his spacesuit’s belt, plugged it into an access port in the side of his helmet, then plugged the other end into the similar port in Brennart’s helmet. Now they could talk to one another without using their suit radios, which might be overheard.

“Smooth liftoff,” Killifer said.

If Brennart was flattered by the praise, his tone failed to show it. “Check the other craft, see how their takeoffs went.”

“Right”

Killifer dutifully called the second ballistic craft as he checked the instrument readouts for the two unmanned vehicles.

“No problems. Just like four tennis balls,” Killifer said to the expedition commander.

“Tennis balls?” Brennart sounded puzzled.

“That’s where the term Lobber comes from, Foster. These ballistic birds go like a tennis ball that’s been lobbed up in the air.” He gestured with his gloved hand. “Up, up, up, and then down, down, down.”

Brennart was silent for a few moments. “Never played tennis,” he said at last. “Never had the time.”

“I used to, a little,” said Killifer. “Back when I was in California.”

The memory ached in his gut. Nanotechnology had not expanded much in the eighteen years since he’d been forced out of the field. Still, he told himself, I could’ ve been an executive, a rich man, a leader in the field. I could have taken Cardenas’ spot when she left the corporation. Instead, here I am, a quarter-million miles from anything worthwhile, second-in-command on a loony expedition to the ass end of nowhere. With Joanna Stavenger’s son stuck into the pecking order ahead of me.

Deftly, Brennart fired the attitude control jets, just a slight puff to tilt the craft enough so they could see the ground sliding by far below them. Rugged mountains, peppered with craters.

“No one’s ever set foot on that territory,” Brennart said. “Not yet.”

Killifer grunted. He was still thinking about his younger days in California.

“We’ve only begun to explore the Moon. There’s a whole world waiting for us to put our bootprints on it,” said Brennart.

Killifer smiled inside his helmet. “Wasn’t this expedition your idea?”

“It certainly was,” Brennart answered immediately. “It took the better part of two years to convince Mrs. Stavenger to let us go. It wasn’t until I showed her that Yamagata’s preparing an expedition that she finally gave her okay.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Brennart turned toward him. In the spacesuit it required him to move from the waist, torso and shoulders, so he could look at his second-in-command. What he saw was the reflection of his own helmet in Killifer’s visor.

“You know how hard I worked to convince her. Of course this expedition is my idea. Who else’s?”

“Nobody,” Killifer replied. “Only…”

“Only what?”

“Why’d she send her kid along?”

“Douglas?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s like a kid with a new toy, all excited about being on the Moon and working with me,” Brennart said happily.

“Oh,” said Killifer. “Yeah.”

It only took a couple of seconds for Brennart to ask, “Why, are you worried about the kid?”

“Not about him.” Killifer put just the slightest stress on the word him.

“Who, then?”

“Aw, nobody. Forget it. I’m just being a geek.”

“What do you mean?” Brennart insisted. “What’s eating you?”

“It’s just that — well, do you think the Stavenger woman would send her son up here just to do a job that any brain-dead clerk could do?”

Brennart did not answer for a while. Then, “Why else?”

Killifer took a breath, then, with apparent reluctance, he answered, “Well… maybe, I don’t know…”

“What?” Brennart demanded.

“Maybe she wants him to get the credit for your work. Her son, I mean.”

“Get the credit?”

“Once we’ve established legal priority and we set up the power tower and everything,” Killifer said in a rush, ’he’ll get all the credit with the board of directors. And the news media. You do the work but he’ll be the hero.”

“That’s crazy,” Brennart snapped.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“How could he get the credit for what I do? I’m the mission commander. I’m in charge.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“He can’t take the credit away from me. That’s impossible.”

“Sure,” said Killifer.

Brennart lapsed into silence. After a few moments he muttered, “So that’s why he was so hot to get up here with me.”

“Maybe it’s not him,” Killifer said. “Maybe it’s all his mother’s idea’.

“Either way,” Brennart growled. “Either way.”

Killifer smiled behind his helmet visor. He thought he could see smoke rising from his commander’s spacesuit.

Joanna cast a knowing eye over the guests who filled her spacious living room. The party was going well; she could tell that with her eyes closed: the chatter of conversations and laughter filled the room and spilled over into the hallway and the library, as well. The clink of ice cubes added a background counterpoint.

Joanna had been nursing the same tall fluted glass of champagne for almost an hour now. Gowned in a magnificent silver and taupe brocade jacket over a filmy chiffon skirt, she searched the crowded room. Men in immaculate white dinner jackets, women in glittering jewels and the latest fashions. But the one man she wanted to find was nowhere to be seen.

Slowly she made her way through the crowd, chatting briefly with a couple here, smiling as she passed a group there. Across the hallway and into the library she went. Still no sight of Quintana. He wouldn’t have left so early, she thought, especially without saying good night to his hostess.

Through the French windows of the library she saw a solitary figure out on the patio, the gleam of a cigar smoldering in the dark Georgia night. Quintana. Still smoking, despite all the laws against it.

Joanna slipped through the open doorway and approached Quintana, her high heels clicking on the patio tiles.

“What you’re doing is illegal, Carlos,” she said softly, smiling as he turned toward her.

He smiled back. “In Mexico we have much more freedom.”

“You also have much more pollution. And cancer.”

Quintana waved his long, slim cigar. “The price of freedom. Will you call the police?”

Laughing, Joanna said, “No. But I’d prefer that you throw that thing away.”

“It’s barely started.” Quintana examined his cigar like a man admiring a fine work of art. “But for you, beautiful one, I make the sacrifice.” He let the cigar drop to the patio floor and ground it out with the heel of his highly-polished shoe.

Even in the shadows of the night Joanna could see his gleaming smile. Carlos Quintana was the kind of man for whom the word dashing had been coined. A mining engineer who parleyed intelligence and daring into a considerable fortune, he was a champion polo player, a yachtsman of note, and a key member of Masterson Aerospace’s board of directors. Handsome, suave, he had the kind of classic Latin male good looks that would remain virtually untouched all his life. No one knew his true age; the guesses ran from forty-five to seventy.

“My party bored you?” Joanna asked as they strolled side by side toward the garden. Overhead a sliver of a Moon was rising and stars glittered in the dark sky.

“No, I just felt the need for some nicotine,” Quintana said. “And I knew that as soon as I lit up you would come running at me with a fire extinguisher.”

“You’re hopeless,” she said, laughing again.

“On the contrary, I am a man filled with hope.” His voice was soft, gentle, easy to listen to.

Joanna arched a brow at him. “Hope springs eternal?”

“Why not? The world is young, the night is beautiful, and I adore you.”

“I’m not young, Carlos. Neither are you.”

“I feel young,” he said. “You make me feel rejuvenated.”

Joanna wished she could say the same to him. Instead, she changed the subject ’I’d like your advice about something, Carlos.”

“Anything.”

“You know my son Greg?”

“I’ve met him once or twice.”

“It’s time to appoint a new director for Moonbase.”

He hesitated only a heartbeat ’I thought that decision has already been made.”

“I’m reconsidering it. Greg has asked for the job.”

“Ahh.”

“What do you think about it?”

This time Quintana’s hesitation was considerably longer. “There are several people on the board who would like to close Moonbase.”

“I know.”

“You’ve always fought to keep it going, even though it’s a drain, financially.”

“Moonbase is in the black,” she said firmly.

“Barely,” Quintana answered easily. “And when you consider all the little extras that somehow get put into the pot…’ He sighed. “Joanna, you know I support you unstintingly, but if we did an honest bookkeeping job, Moonbase would be in the red.”

“Perhaps,” she murmured.

“So you want to send your son there to make certain we keep it going.”

“Quite the contrary, Carlos. Greg wants to spend his year there deciding whether or not to shut the base down.”

“Really?” In the darkness she couldn’t see his brows rise, but she heard it in his voice.

“He wants to make a thorough, unbiased assessment of the base’s prospects and then make a recommendation to the board, one way or the other.”

It was several moments before Quintana replied, “Well, he’s certainly got the qualifications, based on the work he’s done with the Pacific division.”

“Yes, I think so too.”

“Would he really recommend closing the base? And if he did, would you agree to it?”

Now Joanna hesitated. But she finally said softly, “Yes, to both.”

“Isn’t he a little old for Moonbase? Most of the personnel we send there are quite a bit younger.”

“He’s forty-six.”

Quintana glanced up at the crescent Moon, just clearing the sycamore trees. “There’s always seemed to be — some sort of shadow on his history. Some scandal or something that everyone knows is there, but no one knows what it is. A family disagreement?”

Tensing, Joanna answered, “You might say that”

“It must have happened before I joined your board of directors.”

“Yes. A long time before.”

“That’s why he’s been kept off the board and away from headquarters all these years?”

“I think,” Joanna said, “that it’s time to put all that in the past. As you say, it’s family history and it doesn’t necessarily involve the corporation at all.”

“Doesn’t necessarily involve the corporation?” Quintana’s voice was filled with questions.

“Carlos, I’m his mother. I think I know Greg’s limitations and his capabilities. I think he can handle the Moonbase job. But I might be too emotionally close to be seeing clearly.”

“I understand,” Quintana replied. “I think I am too emotionally close to you to render an unbiased judgment.”

“But if you can’t help me, who can I turn to?”

He sighed again. “Joanna, I have always considered your intelligence to be of the highest order. Do what you think is best. I will certainly back you on the board, whatever you decide.”

“Thank you, Carlos,” Joanna said. But she was thinking that unqualified support was no real help at all.

MT. WASSER

“There it is! Look!” Doug cried out.

Turning awkwardly in her spacesuit to follow his pointing hand, Bianca Rhee saw a tall, wide pinnacle of rock jutting up into sunlight from the rugged shadowed mountain range below their ballistic lobber.

“That’s Mt. Wasser?” she asked,

“Got to be,” Doug said, nodding inside his helmet. He studied the sunlit jut of rock carefully. Slightly taller than Everest, Mt. Wasser just happened to be situated so close to the south pole that its uppermost reaches were always in sunlight.

And down below, in those shadows, there’re fields of ice, Doug knew. Areas that are always in shadow, where the temperature is always at least a hundred below zero. Water, covered with dust from the infalling meteoroids, kept frozen in the cryogenic dark.

Water and sunlight. The two most important resources of the Moon. Water for life. Sunlight for electrical power. Brennart is right, Doug told himself. That’s the most valuable real estate on the Moon, down there. He felt the excitement building in him all over again.

In the Jobber’s cockpit, Brennart was scanning the readouts on his panel displays.

“What are the others doing?” he asked Killifer.

“Right on track. Following us like nice little puppies.”

“Superb.” Brennart’s gloved fingers flicked along the control panel. “Okay. We’re going in.”

The lobber tilted back to its original vertical orientation.

Killifer punched up the camera view of the ground on the main display screen.

“Awful dark down there,” he muttered.

“Infrared,” Brennart snapped.

The image on the display screen did not change much: still dark, with vague suggestions of shapes looming in the shadows.

“Braking in ten seconds,” Killifer read from the flight plan display.

“I know.”

“Altitude twenty.”

“I know!”

Killifer realized that Brennart was jumpy. They both peered hard at the camera display.

“Lights,” Brennart ordered.

Too high to do much good,” Killifer muttered, but he turned on the powerful lamps that had been installed on the underside of the lobber’s main platform.

Brennart’s gloved thumb hovered over the keypad that would override the rockets’ firing. The shadowy ground was rushing up toward them. Killifer could see a jumble of shapes glittering in the reflected light of the landing lamps.

“Boulders!” he yelped. “Big ones.”

Smoothly Brennart ignited the main rocket thrusters. Killifer felt a sudden surge of weight, but before he could even take a breath it disappeared and they were falling again.

“Goldman!” Brennart called into his helmet microphone. “Jump the boulder field. Follow me!”

“Following,” came Goldman’s voice in their earphones, professionally unperturbed.

“Reset the braking program,” Brennart commanded.

Killifer tapped the keyboard. “Reset.”

The camera view showed a smoother stretch of ground beneath them. Still a great deal of rocks strewn across the area, but they were smaller, less dangerous.

The hard stony ground rushed up at them, stopped momentarily, then came at them again. The image on the display screen blurred; rocket exhaust, Killifer knew. Then he felt a thump and the familiar sensation of weight returned.

“We’re down’ he said to Brennart And realized he was sweating inside his suit . “Number two?” Brennait called into his helmet mike.

“Hundred-twenty… seventy… touchdown. We’re about fifty meters off your left rear. About seven o’clock in relation to your cockpit.”

Both men turned in their seats but could not see the second spacecraft from their position.

“The drones,” Brennart said.

The two unmanned vehicles were programmed to follow Brennart’s craft at a preset distance, and to land a hundred meters on either side of it.

Killifer glanced at the radar display. “Coming in now,” he said, pointing to the blips their beacons made.

They could see one of the robot craft descending, its braking rockets winking on and off against the dark shadows of the mountains.

“Override!” Brennart snapped. “It’s coming down in the boulder field.”

But it was too late. The unmanned lobber touched one of its outstretched legs on a boulder almost as big as the vehicle itself. The other three landing pads were still a good ten meters above the ground. The attitude-control thrusters tried to keep the vehicle from tipping over for several wobbling, twitching seconds, but they gave out and the spacecraft tilted, tilted and finally struck the ground with a soundless crash. Killifer saw the landing legs crumple and the cargo pods split open; an oxygen tank blew apart in a silent burst of frost-glittering chunks.

From the passenger module, Doug saw the crash. His first reaction was, My God, that could’ve been us! Then he wondered how much equipment they had lost.

“Well, we’re down safely, at least,” he said to the others in the bubble.

They muttered replies, voices hushed, subdued.

“I think my telescope was in the pod that broke open,”

Bianca said worriedly. I’ll have to go over and see if it survived the crash.”

By the time the six of them unstrapped from their seats and wormed through the hatch to stand on the ground, Brennart was already striding toward the crashed craft. Everybody’s spacesuit was basically white, although some of them had been used so hard they were gray with imbedded lunar dust. But Brennart was easy to spot, even in a suit. His was sparkling new, gleaming white, and had red stripes down the arms and legs. For recognition, he had said.

Doug followed Brennait and his second-in-command, Killifer. He caught up with them as they reached the edge of the wreckage. It was impossible to see their faces, behind their heavily-tinted visors, but Brennart clearly radiated disgust, fists clenched on his hips.

“See whose equipment’s on this ship and get them to check out this mess,” Brennart commanded. “Determine if any of it’s still usable.”

“Right,” said Killifer.

“Is there anything I can to help?” Doug asked.

Brennart wheeled and leaned down slightly to read the name tag printed on the breast of Doug’s suit.

“Oh. Doug. I suppose you’re going to remind me that you wanted to land farther out aren’t you?”

Surprised at the sarcasm in the older man’s voice, Doug said, “No sir, it hadn’t entered my mind.”

“No,” Brennart said. “Of course not”

“Were any of our life-support supplies on this ship?” Doug asked.

Brennart huffed. “Of course there were! The only question is how much of it have we lost. Jack, check it out”

“Right,” said Killifer.

“What can I do to help?” Doug asked again.

“Just keep out of the way,” Brennart snapped. “Like the man said, leave the real work to the professionals.” Then he started walking back toward the first spacecraft, leaving Doug puzzled and feeling more than a little hurt.

The base that Yamagata Industries established at the beautiful and prominent crater Copernicus, on the Sea of Rains, was called Nippon One. Admittedly, this was an unimaginative name of no intrinsic grace, and would be changed to something more poetic in time. For now, however, its utilitarian nature mirrored the character of the base itself. Nippon One was small, crowded, and unlovely: little more than a collection of huts buried beneath protective regolith rubble, much as Moonbase had been nearly twenty years earlier.

The worst part of serving at Nippon One was the lack ol water for bathing. Even with nanomachines to ferret out atoms of hydrogen imbedded in the regolith and combine them with lunar oxygen, water was scarce and precious. Yamagata engineers had developed an ultrasonic device which, they claimed, cleaned the skin more efficiently than detergent and water. Nippon One’s inhabitants complained that its ultrasonic vibrations gave them headaches, its vacuum suction sometimes plucked hair painfully from one’s body, and it did nothing to relieve the body odors that made lunar living so unpleasant.

Still, it was a great honor to be assigned to serve at Nippon One, even if only for a few months. Yamagata’s brightest young men and women eagerly sought lunar postings; this new frontier was the key to rapid advancement up the corporate ladder.

Miyoko Hornma was the daughter of an old and honored Japanese family. Trained in astronomy and mathematics, she was determined to prove to her elders that a woman can add luster to the family name, just as a man can. She had jumped at the chance to work at Nippon One.

That was four months ago. Now, sitting in a cramped cubicle, feeling sweaty and filthy in fatigues that she had been wearing for several days on end, all she truly wished for was a steaming hot bath and just a bit of privacy.

She was checking the telescopes sitting up on the surface of Mare Imbrium, a chore she did daily, patiently studying the images they showed on her display screen as she ran each instrument through its checkout procedures to make certain that it was operating within its designated parameters. Her mind was wandering, though, to thoughts of home and comforts that she would not know for another two months.

Sitting next to her, close enough to touch shoulders, was Toshihara Yamashita, one of the communications technicians, headphone clamped to his ear.

“Have you heard the news?” Toshi asked. “The Americans have sent an expedition to the south pole.”

That jolted Miyoko out of her reverie. “No!” she said.

“It’s true. The chiefs are trying to decide if we should put up a reconnaissance satellite to watch them.”

“But we’re sending a team to the pole, aren’t we? I’ve heard about the preparations for weeks now.”

“The Yanks have beaten us to it,” said Toshi. “Somebody’s head will roll.”

“Have they gone to the Bright Mountain?” Miyoko asked.

“Where else?”

“Ah, that’s too bad. Now they’ll set up a base there, won’t they?”

“Of course. That’s what we wanted to do.”

“And there’s water ice there, too,” Miyoko murmured. “Now the Americans will claim it all.”

Toshi leaned back in his spindly chair, shrugging. “If the ice fields are big enough we can send a crew out there and stake our own claim. Maybe there’s enough for more than one.”

Miyoko felt doubtful. “Even if there is, the Americans will want it all, they’re so greedy.”

Laughing, Toshi replied, “We would too, if we got there first.”

“I don’t believe-’ The image on Miyoko’s screen suddenly caught her eye. Glancing down at the monitor displays, she saw that she was looking at a real-time image of the solar x-ray telescope.

“Look at that,” she said.

Toshi glanced at the screen. “At what? It looks like a bunch of noodles, all twisted together.”

“That’s a sunspot field,” Miyoko said. “It’s gaining energy very rapidly. Ill bet there’s going to be a solar flare eruption within a day or so.”

“So what?” Toshi said carelessly. “We’re safe down here.”

“Yes, of course… But no one should be out on the surface if the flare’s plasma cloud reaches the Moon.” Toshi’s face grew serious. “The Americans.” ’Someone should warn them.” ’They have their own observers, don’t they?” ’Yes, I think so. Still…”

“You’d better let the chiefs know. Let them decide what to do.”

SAVANNAH

“The expedition took off at fifteen-twenty-two, Eastern time.”

Jinny Anson’s image on Joanna’s wall screen looked tired and tense. She’s lost enough weight over the past few months for it to show in her face, Joanna thought. Is she ill?

“The two crewed ships landed safely in the Mt. Wasser area,” Anson went on, “but one of the freighters crashed on landing.”

“What?” Joanna nearly came out of her chair.

Anson had not waited for her reply. She continued without a break, “About half of the cargo was damaged or destroyed in the crash. Mostly scientific instruments and life-support supplies. We will have to either cut the mission short or resupply much sooner than anticipated in the mission plan.”

Almost as an afterthought she added, “There were no injuries to the expedition personnel.”

Joanna relaxed a little. “I want to be included in the decision on cutting the expedition short or resupplying.”

She could see that Anson was waiting for her response. When it came, the base director nodded as if she had expected it. “Of course. We’ll need to talk it over with all the top division management, as well.”

“How did the crash happen?” Joanna asked.

They discussed the situation haltingly, impeded by the three-second lag between Earth and Moon. Joanna had always found the communications lag annoying; this day it was maddening. Doug was out there in the open, more than a thousand miles from shelter, and the expedition was already in trouble the instant it touched down.

“Jinny’ she said finally, “1 have a favor to ask of you.”

Anson’s normally pert face, now drawn and weary, showed a sudden flicker of curiosity once Joanna’s words reached her. “A favor?”

I’d like you to stay on a few weeks longer up there. Until the expedition returns. I don’t think it’s a good idea to change base directors while that team’s down at the south pole.”

Anson’s expression went from curiosity to alarm. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Mrs. Stavenger.”

Surprised, irritated, Joanna snapped, “Why not?”

For three infernally long seconds she waited for the answer. “I’m getting married. All the arrangements are made.”

“Is that all?” Joanna eased back in her chair. “The arrangements can be changed. I’ll personally pay for whatever it costs you. I want you at Moonbase until the expedition safely returns.”

I can’t have Greg up there while Doug’s out in the wilderness, she told herself. It’s a chance I won’t take.

But Anson replied firmly, “Mrs. Stavenger, it’s not my fault that the expedition departed nearly three weeks late. I’m going to get married in San Antonio two weeks from tomorrow. I am leaving Moonbase on the first of the month, eight days from now, as planned. I’m afraid I can’t change those plans.”

Her temper flaring, Joanna replied, “As long as you’re an employee of Masterson Aerospace you will follow the directives of your superiors. I want you at Moonbase until that expedition comes back!”

The two women stared at each other from a quarter-million-mile distance until Anson’s image on the wall screen stiffened noticeably.

She took a visible breath before replying. Then, with deliberate calm, she answered, “Mrs. Stavenger, if I have to resign from Masterson Aerospace, I will. I’m getting married on the seventh of next month in San Antonio, in the Alamo, and nothing is going to stop my wedding.”

Joanna’s immediate instinct was to tell the ungrateful little snot that if she thought she was going to travel back to Earth for her stupid wedding on a Masterson spacecraft she had another think coming. But Joanna stifled that response. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, she told herself.

“I would appreciate it very much,” she said to the image on the wall screen, “if you would reconsider your position. I will be happy to get you the Alamo for a future date. Or the Grand Canyon or the Taj Mahal, if you prefer. And I will of course want to give you and your husband a substantial wedding gift, since you are such a loyal and valued employee of this corporation. Please think it over.”

Before Anson’s stubborn-faced image could reply, Joanna clicked off the connection. I’ll give her a wedding gift, she said to herself grimly. And then I’ll send her to our African division and let her play with the tse-tse flies for the rest of her career.

She didn’t have to call up the list of waiting messages to know that Greg was impatient to talk with her. He had flown in from Kiribati, fully expecting his mother to name him the new director of Moonbase. Greg has his own sources inside the board of directors, Joanna realized. He knows I’ve been planting the seeds for him.

Over the years, the space operations division had become the tail that wagged the corporate dog. Sales of new Clippership models were the mainstay of the corporation’s profits. When Clippership sales were strong, the stockholders received dividends. When Clippership sales sagged, workers were laid off. But the orbital manufacturing end of the space division had never broken clearly into the black. Even with raw materials supplied by Moonbase, the metal alloys and Pharmaceuticals produced in the space stations were still too expensive to compete in the marketplace, except for the Windowalls, and even their profits were declining as the market for them saturated.

Joanna and the board of directors had looked into several reorganization plans that would separate the Clippership production from the orbital manufacturing work. A dozen bright young executives wanted to be named head of the Clippership program; nobody wanted to be stuck with orbital manufacturing.

Well, Joanna told herself, if Greg can actually find the strength to shut down Moonbase, all our orbital manufacturing will go down the drain with it, except for the Windowalls, and their costs will jump. Paul’s dream will be dead. But maybe it will be for the best. I’ve given it nearly twenty years; how long can I keep on hoping for a miracle?

And there was even more trouble with the nanotechnology division, which was also tottering on the brink of collapse. Nanomachines were used on the Moon to produce water and build solar cells, but their uses on Earth had been slowed to a crawl by government regulations and a massive public relations campaign of demonstrations and protests, based on ignorance and hysterical fear, in Joanna’s view. Medical applications of nanomachines had been brought to a standstill by so-called safety regulations, although those who were rich enough went to nations such as Switzerland; the Swiss government’s regulations did not apply to foreigners, especially very rich foreigners, who quietly bought their nanotherapies there.

Joanna herself had been toying with the idea of accepting nanomachines to keep her arteries clear of plaque. And there was always the temptation to use the bugs to tighten up sagging muscles, renew wrinkled skin, even break up fatty deposits and harmlessly flush them out of the body.

Kris Cardenas had gotten herself into legal hot water by using nanobugs on herself to restore her failing eyesight. No glasses, no contact lenses, no surgery. The bugs restored her natural lenses to their youthful flexibility and strengthened the muscles that controlled them. Twenty-twenty vision, from only a few injections over a three-week period. Followed by three years of hounding by government lawyers and endless hearings in courts and the Canadian parliament. And Cardenas had all the prestige and authority of a Nobel Prize backing her.

Joanna shook all that out of her thoughts as she phoned the chief of the Space Operations division and asked him to come to her office.

“Why not use the virtual reality system?” Ibriham Rashid asked playfully.

Joanna was not amused. “Omar, you’re no more than fifty yards down the hall from me. Get your butt over here. In person.”

“Now?” he teased.

“At your earliest convenience,” Joanna answered, with as much sarcasm as she could muster.

“Harkening and obedience,” said Rashid.

Ibriham Muhammed al-Rashid had been born in Baltimore, third son of second-generation Palestinian-Americans. For all of his forty-two years he had balanced a firm belief in Islam with a firm belief that science and technology were gifts of Allah to help men in their struggle for existence. From his earliest childhood it was apparent that he was extremely intelligent and even more extremely motivated to rise high in the world. Johns Hopkins and MIT honed his intelligence. And his diplomatic skills. At school he was quickly dubbed ’Omar the Tentmaker.” Instead of becoming angry at the derogatory nickname, Rashid turned it into a badge of honor.

His career with Masterson Aerospace had been little short of meteoric. As head of the space operations division, he knew that the corporate knives were being sharpened behind his back. Space operations was the corporation’s largest division, thanks to the Clipperships, a profitable cash cow that various reorganization plans sought to carve up into smaller sections and remove from Rashid’s control. He resisted those attempts with a mixture of deft corporate maneuvering and unfailing loyalty from his division staff. He also used his urbane charm wherever it would do the most good — especially with the chairwoman of the board.

Joanna enjoyed his attentions, as she did those of Carlos Quintana and several others. It amused her to watch the male ego at work, and to manipulate their testosterone-driven ambitions toward goals of her own choosing.

Rashid stepped into Joanna’s office and looked around appreciatively. He was short and compact in build, rather like Paul, thought Joanna, although slimmer. A trim black beard framing his oval face, Rashid had movie-star looks: huge soulful dark brown eyes and a smile to die for. He was smiling now as he sat in the delicate little loveseat, facing Joanna’s personal chair.

“Desert golds and tans,” he said, noticing the decor. “And a scent of jasmine. Are you trying to make me homesick?”

Joanna laughed, “for Baltimore?”

“Racial memory,” Rashid bantered. “Jung claimed that we all have primitive memories stored in our subconscious minds.”

“Maybe my ancestry goes back to the desert,” Joanna said. “I like this color scheme. And I love the Southwest.”

“Arabs prefer cities. My people are great architects.”

Joanna decided they had chatted enough. Time to get down to business. “Omar, how would you feel if I suggested that my son Greg be the next director of Moonbase?”

Rashid did not seem surprised. He eased one arm across the back of the loveseat and crossed his legs. “O’Rourke is slated for that position.”

“I know, but…’ She let the sentence dangle.

“O’Rourke is very competent. Unimaginative, true, but very competent.”

“I asked Jinny if she’d stay on until the polar expedition came back and she refused,” Joanna said.

The slightest of tics twitched at the comer of Rashid’s mouth. “You should have spoken to me first. I would have told you she’d refuse. She’s going to be married.” His voice was soft, yet Joanna heard his disapproval. She had gone over his head to speak directly to Anson.

“My other son’s out there at the south pole with Brennart.”

“Yes, I am aware of that.”

“I don’t like the idea of changing base directors while the expedition’s out there.”

Rashid shrugged elaborately. “It really makes almost no difference whatsoever. The base director is in no position to help or harm the expedition.”

“Really?”

“The expedition is rather self-sufficient. Brennart knows what he’s doing.”

“Even with one of the cargo ships crashed?”

Again the shrug. “They’ll resupply earlier than scheduled. It’s not a major problem.”

“So you don’t think Anson’s leaving will be a problem?”

“Of course not. If I did, she wouldn’t be leaving, believe me.”

Joanna studied his handsome face. Rashid seemed completely at ease, totally confident.

“Then allowing Greg to take over…?”

Hespread his hands. “It shouldn’t be a problem. O’Rourke has more experience, but your son has shown quite remarkable leadership qualities.”

Almost, Joanna blurted her fear that Greg still hated his younger half-brother. You’re being irrational, Joanna told herself sternly. Yet the fear was still there, gnawing inside her.

“This must be a very difficult decision for you,” Rashid said softly, smiling at her from an arm’s length away.

Joanna’s thoughts snapped back to the here-and-now.

“No,” she said. “No, it isn’t difficult at all. Unless you are actively opposed, Greg Masterson will replace Jinny Anson as the director of Moonbase.”

“Effective on the first of the month?” Rashid asked.

“Yes. But I want Greg to get up there right away and spend Jinny’s final days at Moonbase getting oriented.”

“How soon…?”

“Today,” Joanna snapped.

Rashid dipped his head slightly. “Harkening and obedience.”

MOONBASE

Jinny Anson felt her teeth grinding together as she looked over the graph on her desktop screen.

“Solar flare,” she said, almost accusingly.

The technician who had been monitoring the astronomical instruments in Bianca Rhee’s absence nodded unhappily.

“And it’s going to be a big mother, is it?”

“Class Four flare. Maybe a Five.”

Anson leaned back in her creaking plastic chair and glared at the young tech. “How soon?” she snapped.

The technician was barely into his twenties, still an undergraduate student who had taken a year off to make money by working at Moonbase. Standing in front of Anson’s desk in his baggy, frayed coveralls, he shuffled his feet uncertainly.

“Hard to say,” he replied. “I’ve checked with Tucson. Next twenty-four hours, for sure. Could be a lot sooner, though.”

“Great. I’ll have to alert the surface crews.”

“And, uh — Brennart’s people?”

“Yes, them too. They should have their shelters dug in by now. Will the radiation hit them?”

The young man looked miserably unsure of himself. “Hard to say,” he repeated. “Oh, they’ll get the first pulse sure enough: the ultraviolet and x-rays. But the heavy stuff — that depends on how the interplanetary magnetic field’s twisted up.”

Rankled, Anson said, “So you don’t know when the particle cloud will hit or how heavy it’ll be.”

“Nobody could tell you that,” the kid said defensively. “Not this far in advance.”

“Okay,” Anson squinted at his nametag, “Albertson. Thanks for the bad news.”

The kid fled her office as if afraid for his life.

A Class Four solar flare, she thought Maybe a Five. Just what we need. Angrily she punched her keyboard to call up the communications center. Got to get all the surface workers inside. And warn Brennart’s people.

As she spoke to the comm center, Anson pictured in her mind what they were going to be facing. The most violent event the solar system can produce, an explosion on the Sun with the force of a hundred billion megatons of TNT. More energy than the whole world consumes in fifty thousand years. Hardly a quarter-second’s worth of the Sun’s total energy output, but enough to kill anyone caught in its lethal plasma cloud. Enough to wreck unprotected equipment.

“What about cislunar traffic?” the comm technician asked.

“What’s it look like?” Anson asked back.

The tech’s face disappeared from her desktop screen and a visual display of the Earth-Moon traffic showed four green arrows representing unmanned freighters heading for the factories in Earth orbit and a single violet arrow of a passenger vehicle on its way to the Euro-Russian base at Grimaldi. There were three yellow arrows, as well: Yamagata spacecraft, two inbound, one heading Earthward.

As she watched, Anson saw a new red arrow appear on the screen. A passenger-carrying craft was leaving Earth orbit, heading for Moonbase.

“What’s that new blip?” she asked. “I don’t recall anything scheduled today.”

The technician’s voice answered, “Message just came in; it’s in your voice mail. Your replacement is on his way.

“O’Rourke’s coming now?” Anson felt puzzled, annoyed.

“It’s not O’Rourke,” the tech’s voice replied. “It’s Gregory Masterson III.” The technician pronounced the three-part name with appropriate awe in her voice.

“Shit on a shingle!” Anson exploded. “Get that poor dumb boob on the horn and tell him to abort his flight and get his butt back home where it’s safe. That’s all I need, having the boss’s son fried!”

“It’s ice, all right, but I’m afraid it’s pretty thin,” said Roger Deems.

He, Brennart, Killifer and Doug Stavenger were jammed into the analysis lab of the expedition’s main shelter. Deems was still in his cumbersome spacesuit, minus only its helmet, which made the little cubicle even more crowded. The only light came from one of the computer screens.

Doug could hear the grating patter of regolith rubble being piled on the shelter’s curving roof. Outside, the expedition’s minitractors were struggling to dig up enough surface dirt to provide the necessary coverage for radiation protection and thermal insulation. The regolith here in the south polar highlands was thin and hard, its normally powder-like texture vacuum welded into the consistency of concrete. The remotely-operated little tractors were having a hard time digging up enough of it to cover the expedition’s four shelters. Brennart had to send people out to jury-rig some of their aluminum and oxygen rocket propellants to burn into the hard rock and break it into manageable chunks.

“We should’ve brought a couple tons of plastic explosives,” one of the tractor operators grumbled.

Deems’s job, immediately upon landing, had been to lead a team to the ice field that the unmanned probes had identified and take samples.

Peering at the computer screen where the spectrograph’s analysis of the ice was displayed, Brennart said heartily, “Looks good enough to drink!”

“A lot of dissolved minerals,” Doug said, tracing a calcium line with his outstretched finger.

“You could say the same about Perrier!” Brennart snapped.

Killifer said nothing, standing between Brennart and Doug, his face in shadow.

Turning to Deems, Brennart asked, “Did you get a chance to map any of the ice field?”

“We didn’t do any mapping,” Deems said, almost apologetically. “Our mission plan called for digging some preliminary cores and bringing back the samples taken. Mapping comes later.”

“I know the mission plan,” Brennart said impatiently. “I wrote it.”

Deems glanced at Killifer, who said nothing.

“So?” Brennart demanded. “What about the cores you dug?”

“We drilled three cores. You see the analysis of the ice. It’s water, all right.”

“Is it drinkable as is, or will we have to treat it?” Doug asked.

“Looks perfectly drinkable to me,” said Brennart.

“The ice is only ten centimeters deep,” Deems said. Then he added, “Where we dug.”

“Which is at the edge of the field, right?” Brennart said.

“A hundred meters from the edge,” said Deems. “That’s what we figured was a safe walk-back distance, what with the darkness and the slick surface — even with the dust on it, there’s not much traction to walk with.”

“That field is more than ten kilometers across, isn’t it?” Brennart said, more of a statement than a question. “And there are a dozen or more other ice fields scattered about the area.”

Deems nodded. “That’s right.”

“But how deep does it go?” Doug wondered aloud.

“That’s what we’re here to find out,” Brennart said.

“Right,” said Killifer.

Brennart straightened up, his golden hair almost brushing the curving roof of the shelter. “All right, we’ve made a good start. Jack,” he turned to Killifer, “I want a complete inventory of the supplies we lost in the crash on my screen by the time I come back in for supper.”

“No problem,” said Killifer.

“I’m going outside to set a little fire under the digging. Roger, you did well out there. I’m pleased.”

Deems’s normally half-frightened expression slowly evolved into a shy, delighted smile.

“Doug,” Brennart snapped, “shouldn’t you be registering our time of arrival and summary of activities?”

“I’ve already done that,” Doug replied, biting back the instinct to add, sir.

“And our schedule-for tomorrow?”

I’m set to transmit that as soon as we send out the nanotech team tomorrow morning.”

Brennart looked down on Doug with something approaching displeasure. “Do it now. Right now.”

“But legally—”

“Get it into the record!” Brennart insisted. “Tell them you’ll send confirmation when the team actually starts out tomorrow. Exact time and all that.”

“Very well,” said Doug.

They squeezed out of the analysis cubicle like four men getting out of a phone booth. This is no place for a claustrophobe, Doug thought as they marched single file up the narrow central aisle of the shelter.

The cylindrical shelter was divided by thin plastic internal walls that could be load-bearing only in the gentle gravity of the Moon. Brennart and Deems headed for the airlock; Brennart to suit up for the surface, Deems to put his helmet back on and go to a well-deserved rest break in the shelter that housed his bunk. The digging team had not yet linked the four shelters with connecting tunnels.

Doug followed Killifer to the comm center, another cubicle that was hot and overcrowded with two people in it. The communications technician was at his post, headphone clamped to his ear.

I’ll take over,” Killifer said. “Go take a leak.”

The guy grinned appreciatively and surrendered his flimsy plastic chair to Killifer, who took the headset and slipped it around his neck.

“Anything expected in?” Killifer asked his departing back.

“Nope,” said the technician as he squeezed past Doug. “Everything’s quiet until the next satellite comes over.”

The expedition included six miniature communications satellites in polar orbit, following one another endlessly like soldiers on perpetual parade. Moonbase’s regular commsat, hovering at the L-l libration point above the lunar equator, could not’see’ the deep valleys of the mountainous south polar region, so the polar orbiting minisats were necessary.

Doug had suggested twelve satellites, so there would be continuous coverage, but Savannah had decided that the expedition could do with fifteen-minute breaks between satellites, and doubling their communications costs was not worth the additional coverage.

While Killifer began punching up the inventory of supplies and equipment carried aboard the crashed lander, Doug sat at the other display and tapped out his legal report for Moonbase and the World Court at The Hague. He could feel the heat that their bodies and the computers and communications sets were generating. Sweat trickled down his ribs.

They were sitting close enough to be touching shoulders, but for nearly half an hour neither of them said a word. Doug finished his task and set up tomorrow’s work, then — for lack of anything else to do — called up the inventory Killifer was working on.

“You checking up on me?” Killifer snapped.

Startled, Doug said, “No. Of course not.”

“Then why’re you looking over my shoulder?”

With a shrug, Doug answered, “I don’t have much of anything else to do at the moment.”

“Then get outta here and give me some space.”

Doug stared at the older man. “You don’t like me much, do you?”

“Why should I?”

“What do you mean?”

“You were stuck into this mission on orders from Savannah. Your so-called job could be done by a trained baboon. You’re nothing but a snoop from corporate headquarters.”

“A snoop?” Doug wanted to laugh. “What’s there to snoop about? I’m here because I thought this expedition would be exciting.”

Killifer glared at him. “Exciting? You must be crazy.”

Doug waved a hand. “Don’t you find all this exciting? The first people here at the south pole and all that?”

“Christ, you’re worse than a snoop. You’re a frigging dilettante.”

“Well,” said Doug ’I’m sorry you think so. I hope to be as helpful as I can.”

“Oh great. Just stay out of the way and we’ll get along fine.”

With a laugh, Doug replied, “It’s not going to be easy to stay out of each other’s way, cooped up in these tin cans.”

“Then why don’t you go outside and take a nice long walk?”

Getting to his feet, Doug said, “That’s not a bad idea.” And he left Killifer alone in the comm cubicle.

Killifer watched him leave, then turned back to his tedious inventory task. He heard a piercing note from the earphone on the headset draped around his neck and quickly clapped the set over his close-cropped hair.

“Moonbase to Brennart. Emergency notification. A major solar flare is expected in the next twenty-four hours. We don’t know if it will impact your area or not, but you should take all safety precautions.”

It was a recorded message, transmitted by the minisat that had just come up over their horizon. Killifer duly noted it into the computer log and then started to call Brennart, out on the surface.

His fingertip hovered over the keypad. I’ll tell Brennart when he gets back in. No sense shaking him up right now. Plenty of time before there’s any danger.

Too bad it won’t hit while the Stavenger kid is outside, he thought.

LUNAR TRANSFER VEHICLE

Before this flight to the Moon, Greg had never been farther than the space stations in Earth orbit. He had been nervous about spending a couple of days in weightlessness, but so far the medication patch behind his right ear seemed to be working: he felt a little queasy, but under control.

The lunar transfer vehicle was basically a freight carrier; the maintenance gang at the space station had added a crew module especially for him. It was a small bubble of alloy and plastiglass, barely big enough for the mandatory human pilot and co-pilot and a pair of passengers.

The bubble was pressurized, but safety regulations required the humans to stay in spacesuits for the duration of the two-day flight. If a stray meteoroid punctured the module’s skin they could slide their visors down and ride the rest of the way buttoned up in their suits.

The other “passenger,” tightly strapped in to the seat next to Greg, was a drum of lubricating oil. Not romantic, but very necessary for the machinery at Moonbase. With the bulky steel-gray drum beside him and the two pilots sitting in front of him, Greg’s main view was overhead. He cranked his seat back as far as it would go, and realized that in zero-gee ’overhead’ was a matter of opinion. He felt almost as if he were standing and looking straight ahead.

What he saw was the Earth, glowing blue and white against the empty blackness of space, dwindling imperceptibly as the lunar transfer vehicle coasted toward the Moon. Two days inside this spacesuit, Greg thought. We’re going to smell ripe when we finally put down at Alphonsus. Staring at the Earth, he realized with the force of a physical sensation that he was leaving the world and heading for a place that had no air or water or life of its own. He shuddered inwardly at the thought.

“Mr. Masterson, sir?”

Greg could not tell whether it was the pilot or co-pilot speaking to him. Their voices sounded virtually identical in his helmet earphones.

“We have a problem, sir. Ground control reports an imminent SFE. We’re ordered to reverse course and return to the station.”

Astronauts and their jargon, Greg thought. “What’s an SFE?”

“Solar flare event. Extremely high levels of ionizing radiation. Very dangerous.”

“Lethal,” said the other astronaut.

Alarmed, Greg asked, “How much time do we have?”

“Unknown, sir. The flare could burst out any time within the next twenty-four hours.”

“The radiation could increase to killing levels within a few hours afterward,” the other astronaut said.

It was annoying to be talking to the backs of two helmets. Greg still could not tell from the voices in his earphones which astronaut was speaking.

“Can’t we get to Moonbase before the flare erupts?” he asked.

“Standard safety procedure is to return to the orbital station we started from.”

“The space stations orbit below the geomagnetosphere,” said the other voice.

“What’s that got to do with it?” Greg demanded.

“The geomagnetosphere is like a magnetic umbrella, sir. It offers protection from the heaviest levels of radiation.”

“Still, all personnel on each station have to evacuate to the ECPM during the peak radiation influx.”

Before Greg could ask, the other astronaut explained, “Emergency Crew Protection Module, that is.”

“I see,” said Greg. “But if the flare is still a day or so away, why can’t we go on to Moonbase?”

“There’s no telling when the flare will burst out”

“Could be in another few minutes.”

“But even so,” Greg insisted, “you said it would be several hours after that before the radiation levels got dangerous.”

They hesitated before one of them answered, “That’s true, but standard procedure—”

“Can’t we juice this vehicle and get to Moonbase sooner?”

Again they hesitated. Then, “We’d have to re-light the main engine.”

“But that would actually cost us less delta-vee than reversing back to LEO.”

Greg tried to sort out their jargon. “You’re saying that it would be easier to speed up and get to Moonbase?”

“Yessir.”

“But we’d have to file a new flight plan and get it approved by traffic control.”

“And undergo another three or four gees of thrust for a few minutes.”

The takeoff from Earth had been slightly less than three gees for several minutes, Greg recalled.

“I can crunch the numbers and then check ’em out with ground control.”

“Do that,” Greg commanded.

For several minutes the two astronauts hunched their helmeted heads together, fingers flicking over the keyboards in their control panel. Greg realized they were talking to ground control, back at Savannah. He tapped the channel selector on the wrist of his suit until he found their frequency. Listening in on their chatter was pretty much a waste of time, though: Greg could barely understand half of their technospeak.

But at last he heard, Trajectory alterations are approved. You are cleared for high-thrust bum to Moonbase.”

“Cleared for Moonbase. Roger,” said the pilot.

Greg heard the radio link click off. Then, “Yahoo!” yelled one of them, loud enough to make Greg’s ears ring.

“Light ’er up and move ’er out!”

As a heavy hand of acceleration pressed Greg back in his seat, he realized that the astronauts were more than happy with his insistence on pushing ahead to the Moon.

Killifer’s main assignment was to remain inside the headquarters shelter of the expedition’s base camp and monitor all surface activities. Thus the communications center was his principal station.

He had quite deliberately erased Moonbase’s warning message from the comm system’s computer memory. He waited calmly underground until Brennart came in. Then Killifer hurried to the airlock, where Brennart was carefully removing his suit and vacuuming the dust from it.

Sitting on the slim-legged bench next to Brennart, he spoke just loudly enough to be heard over the buzz of the hand vacuum.

“We got a warning of an imminent solar flare.”

“When?”

“About two hours ago. I didn’t say anything about it; didn’t want to shake up the team.”

Brennart looked down at him, his brows knit in thought. They made an odd pair: the tall, golden-haired leader and his dark, lantern-jawed aide.

“I might have exceeded my authority,” Killifer confessed. “I erased the warning from the log.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t want anyone but you to know about it. You’re the expedition commander. You should be the one who makes the decision on what to do. If the comm tech or Doug Stavenger or somebody else found out about the warning, they’d be blabbing it to everybody and nobody’d want to be outside.”

Brennart nodded slowly. “That’s true enough.”

“I hope I did the right thing,” Killifer said, with as much humility as he could muster.

“Yes, you did. A warning of an imminent flare poses no immediate danger and we still have a lot of digging to do out there.”

“The connectors?”

With a shake of his head, Brennart said, “We’re behind schedule, I know. You don’t have to remind me. The ground out there is all rock. Hardly any regolith over it at all.”

Without the tunnels to connect them, the expedition members would be stuck in the four separate buried shelters when the flare’s radiation reached them.

“What do you plan to do, then?” Killifer asked.

Frowning, Brennart said, I’d better put everybody into the digging. We don’t even have enough rubble to adequately shield the four shelters yet, let alone the connecting tunnels.”

For the first time, Killifer felt alarmed. But he hid it and said merely. “You always know what’s best.”

It was dark out on the surface, menacingly, cryogenically dark with the high mountains blocking out any chance of light or warmth. Yet Doug found it thrilling. More than thrilling; it was the most exciting thing he had ever known. To put your bootprints down where no human being has ever stood before. To see what no human eyes have ever gazed on. Danger and wonder and the lure of the unknown, all mixed together. That’s what the frontier is all about Doug told himself. God, it must be habit-forming, like a drug.

He took a deep breath of canned air, realizing with a grin that it was an artificial mixture of oxygen and nitrogen at unnaturally low pressure. Every breath we take, every step we make, all depends on the machines we’ve developed.

So what? he asked himself. How long do you think humans would’ve survived on Earth if they hadn’t developed fire and tools? We’re machine makers, and with our machines we can expand throughout the universe.

Then he chuckled to himself. Throughout the universe, huh? Maybe you ought to just concentrate on this little base camp you’re building here at the south pole of the Moon. Get that done before you start challenging the rest of creation.

Starlight guided his steps across the rocky ground. The hard unblinking stars were strewn across the black sky like dust; even through his heavily tinted visor Doug could see thousands of them staring back at him. They lit the ground like pale moonlight on Earth.

He walked to the edge of the ice field. Staring at its dark flat expanse, Doug felt disappointed that the dust-covered ice did not reflect the stars. It looked almost like a dead calm sea, flat and still and gleaming slightly, as if lit from within. Then he looked up as high as he could from inside his helmet and realized that he could not see the Earth. From Moonbase the Earth was always hanging overhead, warm, beckoning, friendly. The sky down here was empty, lonely.

Turning, he saw Mt. Wasser, its flat-topped curving peak bathed in glowing sunlight, shining against the darkness like a disembodied beacon. Tomorrow we start up the mountain, Doug told himself. With the nanomachines. With any luck, we’ll be building the power tower within thirty-six hours.

We’re making history here! The thought exhilarated him. Kids will read about this expedition in their schoolbooks.

He looked out at the ice field again and suddenly, without even deciding consciously to do it, he ran to the edge of the softly gleaming ice with long, loping lunar strides; almost like flying. Then he felt his boots on the ice and he glided along like a skater, spinning and turning, laughing inside his helmet like a boy at play.

His earphones chirped. Then he heard Brennart’s unmistakable voice, “This is your expedition commander. I want every person suited up and outside to help dig the connector tunnels. The only personnel excluded from this order are the second-in-command and the communications technician now on watch. Everybody else get to the digging. This includes you, Mr. Stavenger. Get moving. Now!”

MOONBASE

“A peasant,” muttered Lev Brudnoy to himself. “That’s what I am. Nothing but a dolt of a peasant.”

He was kneeling between rows of fresh light green shoots that would become carrots, if all went well, bent over the dismantled pieces of a malfunctioning pump. Stretched all around him for a full hectare, one hundred meters on a side, were neatly aligned hydroponic troughs in which carrots, beans, lettuce and black-eyed peas were growing. And row after row of soybeans. Plastic hose lines ran above the troughs, carrying water enriched with the nutrients the plants needed to grow. Strips of full-spectrum lamps lit the underground chamber with the intensity of summer noon.

Off in a corner of the big cavern was a carefully boxed-in plot of lunar sand, dug up from the regolith outside and turned into a garden of brightly-hued roses, geraniums, daffodils and zinnias — all lovingly pollinated by Brudnoy’s own hand. Moonbase’s agrotechnicians and nutritionists were responsible for the hydroponics crops; the plot of soil-grown flowers was Brudnoy’s alone.

Sweating, Brudnoy sat on the rock floor amid the strewn pieces of the pump. For the life of him, he could not see what had gone wrong with it. Yet the pump had stopped working, threatening the farm’s carrot crop with slow withering death. Brudnoy had wanted to fix the pump before the agrotechs realized it had malfunctioned. Now, instead of becoming a hero, he felt like a dunce.

“Lev!” a voice rang off the farm’s rock walls. “Lev, are you in here?”

He scrambled to his feet. Two of the biologists were standing uncertainly at the airlock, several rows away. They started toward him.

“I thought you were leaving today,” Brudnoy said as they approached.

“Flight’s cancelled. Solar flare coming up,” said Serai N’kuma.

“Oh.”

“So we thought we’d take you out to dinner,” Debbie Paine added.

N’kuma was tall, leggy, lean as a ballet dancer, her skin a glistening deep black. Paine was blonde and petite, yet with an hourglass figure that strained her coveralls. Brudnoy had fantasized about the two of them ever since they had first arrived at Moonbase, even after he realized that they preferred each other to men.

“I can’t leave here until this wretched pump is fixed,” Brudnoy said. Spreading his arms, he added, “You see before you a true peasant, chained to his land.”

The women ignored his heartfelt self-pity. “What’s wrong with the pump?” Paine asked.

Shrugging, Brudnoy replied, “It won’t work.”

“Let’s take a look at it,” said N’kuma, dropping to her knees to examine the scattered pieces.

“I’ve taken it apart completely. Nothing seems wrong. Yet it refuses to do its job.”

“Engineer’s hell,” Paine said, grinning. “Everything checks but nothing works.”

“In the old days we would have it shot,” Brudnoy grumbled.

“And then you’d have no pump at all,” N’kuma said, from her kneeling position.

Paine ran a finger along the hose that carried the water and nutrients. “Is the pump getting electricity okay?”

“There’s nothing wrong with the electrical power,” Brudnoy said.

Plucking at the wire that ran along the hose, Paine said, “Except that the insulation on this wire is frayed and the bare aluminum is touching the metal pipe fitting here.”

N’kuma popped to her feet. “It’s shorting out.”

Peering at the slightly scorched metal fitting, Brudnoy said, “1 don’t think the wire we make here at the base is as good as the copper stuff they make Earthside.”

“Didn’t you smell the insulation burning?” Paine asked.

Brudnoy scratched his thatch of graying hair. “Now that you mention it. there was a strange smell a while ago. I changed my coveralls the next day and the smell went away.”

Both women guffawed. In short order Brudnoy produced a new length of wire, Paine spliced it into the line while N’kuma reassembled the pump with hands that were little short of magical. Brudnoy watched them admiringly.

Once they were finished he insisted, “Now I will take you to dinner. It’s all on me! My treat.”

They laughed together as they left the farm. Meals at the galley were free, part of the corporation’s services for Moonbase’s employees.

Brudnoy laughed the hardest. Hardly anyone in the base knew that these two young women were lovers. All the men will choke on their food when they see me with these young lovelies on my arms. Some of the women will, too. Not bad for an old man, he thought.

“Welcome to Moonbase,” said Jinny Anson.

Greg Masterson’s nose wrinkled at the strange smell of the place: human sweat mixed with machine oil and a strange sharp burnt odor, as if someone had been firing a gun recently.

But he made himself smile and took Anson’s proffered hand. “Thanks. It’s good to get here ahead of the flare.”

Anson had gone down to the receiving area dug into the floor of Alphonsus adjacent to the rocket port. Little more than a rough-hewn cavern beneath the crater’s floor, the place was called ’The Pit’ by veteran Lunatics. It was connected to the main section of the base by a single tunnel, nearly two kilometers long. There were plans to put in an electrified trolley line along the tunnel; for now, a stripped down tractor did the job, its finish dulled and dented from years of work on the surface.

She kept a hand on his, arm as Greg hip-hopped like any newcomer to the Moon.until he was safely seated in the tractor.

“I brought you a present,” she said, climbing into the driver’s seat next to him”

“A present?”

Reaching behind the seat, Anson pulled out a worn-looking pair of boots. “Moon shoes. They’ve got weights built into them so you won’t go bouncing around when you try to walk. Remove one weight per day while you’re here, and inside of five days you’ll be walking like a native.”

It was a standard line among the Lunatics. So far there were no natives of the Moon. Women got pregnant occasionally; they were gently but firmly transferred back Earthside as soon as their condition was discovered.

“I was surprised to see a working elevator,” Greg said as he took off his slippers and pulled on the weighted boots.

The tractor was programmed to run the straight tunnel without human guidance. Anson hit the starter button and its aged superconducting electric motor whined to life.

“We just put it into operation last week,” she said. “Makes it much easier to load and unload cargo, once you get the crates through the airlock.”

“Takes a lot of electrical power, though,” Greg said as the tractor jolted to a start.

Anson waved a hand in the air. “Electricity’s cheap. The nanomachines chomp up the regolith and lay down solar cells. Our solar farms are constantly getting bigger.”

“I’ve seen the reports,” Greg said. “And the projections.”

“Good.” They were tooling along the tunnel now at nearly twenty miles per hour. The overhead lamps flicked past, throwing shadows across Greg’s sculpted face like phases of a moon hurtling by.

He’s really a handsome devil, Anson told herself. But there’s something unsettling about him. The eyes? Something. He looks… she struggled to define what was bothering her. At last she thought, He looks as if he could be cruel.

Miyoko Homma felt that she should be standing at attention, like a soldier. As it was, she had bowed deeply to the chief manager of Nippon One upon entering his cubicle and then remained standing with her arms rigidly at her sides and her face as blank as she could make it.

“The solar flare that you predicted has not come,” said the head chief. He was old for Nippon One, in his forties. His belly was beginning to round out, although his face was still taut and his eyes piercing.

“Sir, it will come,” Miyoko said flatly. “It is only a question of time.”

“How much time?” the chief demanded. “We have kept everyone inside. The work that must be done on the surface is suspended because of this flare that was supposed to erupt. It’s been more than twelve hours now! Twelve hours of lost work! How much longer must we wait?”

Miyoko took a small breath before answering, “I do not know, sir.”

“But you are our astronomer! It is your job to know!”

“Sir, no one can predict the eruption of a solar flare with such precision. The configuration of magnetic field lines that I saw when I first issued the warning was typical of an imminent flare, one that would burst out in twenty-four hours or less.”

“Twelve hours have gone by,” said the chief. With a glance at the digital clock on his desk he added, “Twelve hours and eighteen minutes.”

Miyoko felt like a small mouse trembling between the paws of a very large cat. “Sir, I can only report to you what my instruments show. Any other astronomer in the world would have reported exactly the same as I did. It is unfortunate that the Sun is not cooperating with us.”

The chief settled back in his chair and rubbed his stubbled chin. “The Americans are apparently not afraid of your flare. Our reconnaissance satellite shows them working very busily on their base.”

“But they must know!” Miyoko blurted.

“Or they know better.”

Miyoko clamped her lips shut.

The chief stared hard at her. “It is a great problem. Do I send the surface crews back to work or not? It is most inefficient to have them sitting cooped up in here when they should be working on the surface. Yet…”

“Sir, may I make a suggestion?”

He nodded assent.

“When the flare actually erupts there will be at least an hour before the heavy particle radiation begins to build up. If the surface crews are willing to accept the first burst of relatively light radiation, it should be possible to get them inside to safety before the truly dangerous radiation builds up.”

Immediately the chief said, “Tell me about this first burst of relatively light radiation.” Miyoko could detect no trace of sarcasm in his words.

She said, “When the flare erupts it throws out a burst of high-frequency radiation — mostly ultraviolet and x-rays. This arrives in our vicinity within eight point three minutes, since it travels at the speed of light.”

“How serious is this radiation?”

“To a person already protected by a spacesuit it is not dangerous. In Tokyo the radiation from space averages about four-tenths of a rad per year. On the Moon’s surface it is closer to twenty-five rads per year. The initial burst from a solar flare will increase this dose by a factor of ten.”

“H’mmm,” said the chief. Miyoko thought he was trying to hide the fact that he did not know what a rad was, nor how dangerous it could be.

“When the flare’s plasma cloud arrives, however,” she went on, “the radiation will increase to more than a thousand rads in a few hours. Worse than the radiation dose at Hiroshima.”

That startled the chief. “Worse than Hiroshima?”

“Yes.”

“But the first pulse is not so bad?”

“The surface crews can be brought inside after the first pulse hits,” Miyoko said again.

“We have a full hour before the heavy radiation builds up?”

“At least an hour, sir.” She hesitated a moment, struggling with her own conscience, then added, “In truth, sir, we have no way of knowing whether the heavy radiation will strike us at all, even after the flare bursts forth. The plasma cloud that carries the radiation may miss us entirely.”

“Miss us entirely? Is that possible?”

“Yes, sir. But we have no way of predicting that quickly enough to save men working on the surface. That is why we must get them all inside once the flare erupts.”

The chief sat muttering to himself for several moments. Then a slow smile of understanding spread across his normally-scowling features.

“This is like predicting the path of a typhoon, isn’t it? You know the storm is approaching, but you cannot tell exactly where it will strike.”

“Yes, sir.” Miyoko jumped at his analogy, feeling a rush of relief. “Very much like a, typhoon. An invisible typhoon that cannot be felt, but can kill a person just as swiftly.”

MT. WASSER

“What’s the latest word on this flare?” Brennart asked.

Killifer pushed his little wheeled chair away slightly from the comm console. “No word. The flare hasn’t appeared yet”

The two men were alone in the comm cubicle. Brennart was on, his feet, towering over the seated Killifer. Every other member of the expedition was out digging, even the ostensible communications technician. Brennart knew the mission schedule was in a shambles but he would sort that out and get things going properly again as soon as this flare threat was over.

“What does Moonbase say about it?” he asked Killifer.

His aide made a sour face. “They say the flare ought to have popped by now. Could pop any minute. They just don’t know.”

“With that and five dollars I could buy a cup of coffee.”

“They also say,” Killifer added caustically, “that their regular astronomer is here in the boondocks with us, instead of at her instruments at the base.”

Brennart glowered. “That was Stavenger’s idea, bringing her along with us.”

Killifer said nothing, but his sardonic smile spoke volumes.

“We can’t just sit here and wait for a flare that might not even happen,” Brennart muttered.

Nodding, Killifer said, “Oh, by the way, Moonbase reported that Yamagata sent up a recce satellite six hours ago. It’s in a very eccentric polar orbit”

“With its longest dwell time right over us,” Brennart guessed.

“Right.”

“Damn! They’ll be sending a team down here to make a claim on the mountain before we can.”

“I don’t see how—”

“They could drop a kamikaze crew on the other side of the mountain and use hoppers to get up to the top,” Brennart growled angrily. “Stick a sheet of solar panels up there and claim first use. Then we’re screwed.”

“But aren’t they just as worried about the flare as we are?”

Brennart looked down at his aide with a withering expression. “You don’t know what kamikaze means, do you?”

“Something from history, isn’t it? Last century?”

“Right. History.”

Killifer sat on the uncomfortable little chair and craned his neck to look up at his boss. Brennart liked to be known for making decisions, but now he seemed hesitant, caught on the horns of a dilemma, hung up with uncertainty.

“If only we knew when the flare will erupt,” he muttered, kneading his right fist into the palm of his left hand.

“Or if it will erupt at all,” Killifer suggested.

Brennart whirled on him. “If? You think the whole thing might be a false alarm?”

“I don’t know. I’m not an astronomer.”

“The goddamned astronomer’s out here digging ditches instead of at her post with her instruments!”

Killifer shrugged. “Douggie wanted her along.”

“The flare should have erupted by now, if there’s going to be one,” Brennart thought out loud.

“Even if the flare does come, isn’t there a couple of hours before the radiation really gets serious?” Killifer knew the answer to his question.

“Yes, that’s right,” Brennart said.

“Enough time to get down off the mountain, using our hoppers?”

Brennart stopped his frustrated kneading and sat on the chair next to his aide. “We could jump up to the summit of Mt. Wasser, plant the flag and start the nanobugs working on the power tower, and get down again .before the radiation buildup even begins.’”

“Christ, that’s brilliant,” Killifer said.

I’m going to suit up,” Brennart said.

“You?”

“I can’t ask my people to do something that I’m not prepared to do myself. I take the same risks they do.”

“Yeah, but—”

“How many people will we need for a dash to the summit?”

Killifer swivelled his chair to the screen and tapped on the keyboard. “Mission plan calls for six.”

“Strip it down. How many do we actually need ?”

Studying the list on his screen, Killifer said. Two to handle the nanobugs, one to pilot the hopper.”

“Martin and Greenberg are the nanotechs,” Brennart said.

Thinking swiftly, Killifer said, “Maybe we oughtta leave one of them here. No sense taking both of them up to the summit.”

“One person can’t physically handle the task,” Brennart objected.

“All you need is an extra pair of hands. A warm body will do. Either Greenberg or Martin can direct the warm body, and you haven’t risked both your nanotechs.”

Brennart pondered it for all of three seconds. “Right. I’ll take Greenberg. He’s the more experienced of the two. Who can we spare to help him?”

“The astronomer?” Killifer suggested.

“Put her to some useful work,” Brennart muttered.

“You oughtta take Stavenger, too,” Killifer pointed out ’Let him make a legal record of the claim.”

“Perfect!”

Killifer stayed in the conun cubicle as Brennart inarched off to the airlock, where the spacesuits were stored. With a little luck, he said to himself, they’ll all break their friggin’ necks.

Doug felt excited when Brennart came out and told him they were making a dash to the summit of Mt. Wasser. He had been spraying plastic sealant along the tunnel walls just dug out by the others; the sealant made the tunnel airtight. It was dull and clumsy work, inside his spacesuit, with no light except from his helmet lamp. The sealant was doped with a weakly glowing phosphor, so that any gaps in its application would be easily seen.

It was the safest job Brennart could find for him. The more experienced expedition members were handling the flammable aluminum/oxygen propellant mixture out on the surface, desperately working to break up the rock-hard ground enough to allow the tractors to scoop it up and dump it on the shelters and tunnels.

Scrambling out of the tunnel at Brennart’s command, Doug checked the equipment pouches on his belt while two of the other expedition members topped off his oxygen tank from the supply on the undamaged cargo ship. Yes, the miniature vidcam was there. Doug pulled it out and checked that its battery was fully charged. Not that he had used it, digging tunnels and sealing them.

He was surprised to see a short, stocky spacesuited figure join Brennart and Greenberg. Sure enough, the name stencilled on the chest of her suit was Rhee.

“We’re making a dash to the summit,” Brennart told them as they lifted the spindly-legged little hopper from its hold in the cargo ship. “Rhee, you assist Greenberg here. I’ll pilot the hopper.”

“What’s my assignment?” Doug asked.

“Official record keeper,” said Brennart. “Unless you know how to handle a hopper.”

Why is he so hostile to me? Doug asked himself. Aloud, he replied, “I’ve never actually flown one, but I’ve put in a lot of hours in simulators.”

“Fine,” Brennart snapped. “You can be my co-pilot. Just don’t touch anything.”

Doug helped Greenberg and Bianca Rhee to wrestle the tall canister of nanomachines onto the platform of the little hopper. Then they began strapping it down. The rocket vehicle looked too frail to take the four of them, Doug thought, even in the Moon’s light gravity. This hopper was little more than a platform with a podium for its controls and footloops to anchor a half-dozen riders. There was a fold-down railing, too, with attachments for tethers.

To Doug it looked like a great way to break your neck. Racing jetcycles seemed safer.

“Come on, come on,” Brennart urged, pushing between Rhee and Greenberg to help finish the strapdown. “We don’t have a moment to lose.”

“Why the sudden rush?” Doug asked. “This isn’t on the mission schedule.”

“No, it’s not,” Brennart snapped. “But maybe Yamagata isn’t waiting for our schedule.”

“Yamagata? They’ve got a team here too?”

“On its way,” Brennart said.

“You’re certain?” Doug probed.

“Certain enough.”

“Has it been confirmed by—”

“Who’s in charge of this expedition, Stavenger? You or me?” Brennart bellowed.

His ears ringing, Doug said, “You are, of course.”

“Then climb aboard and let’s get going.”

Doug dutifully stepped up the rickety little ladder and started to slide his boots into the foot loops alongside Brennart.

“Lift up the railings,” Brennart ordered, “and see that everyone’s safely tethered to them.”

“Aye-aye, sir,” said Doug snidery. Brennart paid no attention.

The tethers won’t be much help if we crash, Doug thought as he snapped the flimsy railings into place. By the time he returned to Brennart’s side and clicked his own tether to the rail, Brennart had powered up the hopper’s systems. All the controls showed green, Doug saw.

“Ready for takeoff,” Brennart said.

Doug heard Killifer’s answer in his earphones. “You are cleared for takeoff.”

Brennart nudged the T-yoke of the throttle forward a bit. The platform beneath Doug’s boots quivered and leaped upward.

There was no sound, no wind, but the dark, rocky land fell away from them so rapidly Doug felt his breath gush out of him.

Their little base dwindled quickly: four humps of shelters surrounded by spacesuited figures and a pair of minitractors, all digging tunnels and pushing rubble over the shelters like busy, scurrying ants. The brief flare of propellants burning into the rock strobed like a miniature lightning stroke.

Looking upward he saw the bare flank of Mt. Wasser coming near, sliding past dizzyingly as the hopper continued to rise. The rock face of the mountain looked glassy smooth, sandpapered by dust-mote-sized micrometeoroids for billions of years.

Suddenly they were in sunlight, brilliant, almost overpowering sunlight. The mountainside glittered like glass, like crystal, as it rushed by. Doug heard his suit fans whir faster, and something in his backpack groaned under the sudden heat load. He gripped the railing with both gloved hands.

“This is flying!” he said appreciatively. “Like being on a magic carpet.”

He heard Brennart chuckle softly. “You like it, eh?”

“It’s terrific!”

Neither Greenberg nor Rhee said a word. Doug wondered how Bianca was taking the flight. At least they weren’t weightless for more than a few seconds at a time; Brennart kept goosing the little rocket engine, pushing them higher in short spurts. But the lurching, spasmodic flight was starting to make Doug’s stomach gurgle.

Brennart took the little hopper up above Mt. Wasser’s flat, U-shaped summit, looking for a safe place to land, checking the actuality against the satellite photos they had studied.

“Flat area over to the left,” Doug said. “About ten o’clock.”

“I see it,” said Brennart.

A minuscule puff of thrust from two of the maneuvering jets set along the corners of the platform and they slid over sideways until they were just above the relatively flat area. It was clear of boulders, although Doug saw the sharp-rimmed edge of a crater big enough to’ swallow their hopper, clearly etched in the harsh sunlight.

His stomach told him they were falling. Then a burst of thrust. Falling again. Another burst, lighter, and Brennart put them down deftly oirihe bare rock.

It was like being on the top of the world. Doug unhooked his tether and pulled loose of his foot restraints, then turned around in a full circle. All around them stretched peaks of bare rock, as far as the eye could see. They seemed to be floating on a sea of darkness, the land below them in perpetual cryogenic night.

“We made it.” Bianca’s voice sounded breathless in Doug’s helmet earphones.

We’re up higher than Mt. Everest, Doug thought.

“Let’s get to work,” Brennart ordered. “Stavenger, I want you to record every move we make. Hop down and start taping us as we unload the nanobugs.”

“Right,” said Doug. He slapped down the railing and jumped from the hopper’s platform, floating gently to the bare rock. His boots slid; the rock was smooth as glass.

Pulling out his vidcam, Doug put its eyepiece to his visor and was just starting to record when Killifer’s voice grated in his earphones:

“Killifer to Brennart. We just received word that a solar flare broke out at seventeen-twenty-six and forty-one seconds. Moonbase advises all surface activity be stopped and all personnel seek shelter immediately.”

MOONBASE

Greg asked, “Are they going to be all right?”

“Brennart’s as experienced as they come,” said Jinny Anson. “He knows how to take care of himself and his people.” But the worried frown on her face belied her confident words.

They were in the base control center, a big low-ceilinged room crammed with control and communications consoles. Every pump, valve, airlock hatch, air fan, sensor, heater, motor, and other piece of equipment in the base and outside on the surface was monitored from the consoles and could be manually controlled whenever it was necessary to override the automatic programming. One whole wall of the darkened, intensely quiet control center was an electronic schematic map of Moonbase, glowing with colored lines and symbols that showed everything in the base and its environs.

Anson had rushed down the tunnel from her office, with Greg in tow, the instant she heard that the flare had erupted. The focus of the center was a U-shaped set of communications consoles, with a trio of operators sitting within fingertip touch of a dozen different display screens. On those screens Greg saw several sections of the underground base, mostly labs and workshops, a lot of plumbing and pumps, and one chamber that looked like a hydroponics farm. There were also views of the surface outside on the floor of Alphonsus. The transfer rocket that had brought Greg to the Moon still sat out there, unattended. Tractors were pulling into the main airlock, trundling slowly across the crater floor to get into the garage and safely sheltered from the expected radiation cloud.

One screen seemed to be looking in on an office Earthside.

Greg could see a window with trees outside, behind an earnest-looking middle-aged man »n a tweed jacket.

Anson pulled up a spindly wheeled chair at one end of the consoles and worked the keyboard there. Hie tweedy graying man’s face appeared on her screen.

Standing behind her, Greg tried to figure out where on Earth he might be. Then he noticed a saguaro cactus poking its stiff arms into the bright blue sky amid the trees on the hillside beyond that window. It had to be Arizona.

Noticing him behind her, Anson handed Greg a headset.

“… Class Four,” he heard the man saying as he slipped on the earphone. “Almost a Class Five.”

“Yes,” Anson said, “but will it hit the Earth-Moon region?”

“Still hard to tell, Jinny. If we had warning satellites inside Mercury’s orbit, as I’ve been begging for over the past ten years we’d be getting data right now. As it is, we’ll have to wait for the plasma cloud to reach Venus’s orbit before we get any hard numbers.”

“How long will that take?” Anson asked.

“Judging from the microwave measurements, about another two hours.”

“It’s moving fast, then.”

“Faster than a speeding bullet.”

“Okay, thanks. Keep us informed, please.”

The gray-haired man nodded. “Certainly.”

Anson blanked the screen, then turned to Greg. “Well, they’ve got at least a few hours before the heavy radiation hits. If it hits at all.”

Greg asked, “It might miss us altogether?”

“There’s a chance. The flare spits out a big cloud of plasma, mostly very energetic protons. Bee ee vee protons.”

“Bee ee vee?”

“Billions of electron volts. Killer particles. Fry your butt in a few minutes.”

Doug’s out there, Greg said to himself. He hardly knew his half-brother. Over the past eighteen years he had seen Doug in person fewer than a dozen times, and then always with their mother between them.

“A couple meters of dirt is enough to stop the particles,” Anson was assuring him, “so as long as they’re inside the shelters they’ve dug they’ll be fine. Just like we are.”

“But you said the cloud might not even reach here.”

She nodded vigorously. “The cloud’s a plasma; ionized gas. That means it’s steered by the interplanetary magnetic field. The field is weird; it gets all looped up and tangled by the Sun’s rotation. So until we start getting radiation data from the satellites we’ve got between us and the Sun we won’t really know if the cloud’s going to come our way or not”

Greg murmured, “I see,” as he watched Anson’s face closely. ” She was telling him pretty much what he already knew about solar flares, but to her this was no dry astronomical colloquy. This was as real and vital to her as breathable air. “They’llbe okay,” Anson said, trying to smile. “Your brother “will come through this fine, I betcha.”

“Of course he will,” Greg said, wondering if that’s what he wanted. Doug’s only eighteen, he told himself. He’s no threat to me. But another voice in his mind countered, Not yet He’s no threat at present. But he’s out there on the Moon’s surface getting experiences that you’ve never had. Sooner or later he’s going to challenge you for control. Sooner or later. And Mom will be on his side. You know that. She’ll be helping him.

“Hey, he’s going to be all right!” Anson repeated, mistaking Greg’s withdrawn silence. “Really! You’ll see.”

“Of course,” Greg said.

“Come on.” Anson got up from her chair. “There’s lots more to see around here.”

“Now?” Greg asked, surprised. “With the flare and all?”

“Nothing we can do about the flare,” Anson said, almost cheerfully. “It either hits or it doesn’t. In the meantime there’s a lot for you to learn about and not much time to get it all in.”

“But I—”

I’m not going to miss my own wedding because you haven’t been completely briefed,” Anson said. She was smiling, but her tone was far from gentle. “Come on, we can start at the water plant”

Feeling just a little dazed, Greg followed her out of the control center and down the long tunnel.

“We’ve got to go all the way down to the end and then cut across, Anson said.

Feeling awkward,” almost embarrassed in the weighted boots, Greg asked,” ’Aren’t there any cross tunnels? Besides the one up at the main airlock?”

“Two,” replied Anson, “but they’re for emergency use only. They carry piping and electrical lines.”

Greg glanced up at the color-coded pipes and electrical lines running along the ceiling of the tunnel. “You mean that everybody has to walk the length of one tunnel to get to the next?”

“That’s what they’re supposed to do. Officially.”

“And in reality?”

She grinned at him. “They take shortcuts.”

“Then why don’t we?” He made himself smile back at her.

“It’s kind of cramped.”

“I’m not afraid of getting my coveralls dirty,” Greg said.

She seemed delighted. They ducked into the first cross-tunnel and Greg saw that it was indeed narrow and low enough to make him keep his head down. But he followed her along its dimly-lit length, noting idly that a fat person would have a difficult time squeezing through. Anson was not fat. She filled out her coveralls very nicely, but she was certainly not overweight.

“The EVC is all the way at the back of the base, as deep inside the mountain as we could put it,” she told Greg.

“EVC?”

“Environmental control center,” she explained. “That’s where we regulate the air’s CO2 content, the temperature and humidity and all. It’s not a hundred percent closed-loop, though. We have to add oxygen and nitrogen from time to time, keep the balance right.”

“Oh,” said Greg.

She went on, “We wanted to get the maximum of protection for the EVC. We can go for a couple of days without water, but if the air goes bad — blooey,everybody in the base is dead in an hour or so, I betcha.”

“But the water plant’s up front, near the main airlock?”

“Yeah,” Anson replied. “Plumbing’s easier that way. Cost an arm and a leg to dig the EVC in so deep. We had to run big exhaust tunnels through the solid rock. Corporation decided once was enough, so when we built the water plant we put it where we had easy access.”

Greg nodded. He knew all about the exorbitant costs of digging new living and working spaces on the Moon.

“I’ve been talking to some people at the University of Texas.” Anson said, “where my husband-to-be teaches. They think our water recycling system might be useful for big cities like Houston and Dallas.”

Really?”

“Really.” Anson said, with just a hint of sarcasm at Greg’s doubting tone. I’ll be talking with some people from Houston when I get back Earthside.”

Despite himself, Greg was impressed. “You could start a whole new product line for the corporation,” he said.

“Water recycling systems for major cities,” Anson chirped happily. “We could make a mint on it, I betcha.”

Once in the adjacent tunnel she led him to its front end.

“Main airlock is through that hatch.” Anson pointed. “That’s where we garage the tractors and decontaminate surface equipment.”

“Decontaminate?”

“Vacuum off the dust, mostly,” she said, leading him away from the hatch. “Freakin’ dust gets into everything, especially moving parts. It’s a real pain in the butt.”

They walked along the front face of the tunnel until they came to another airtight hatch. Greg saw WATER FACILITY stencilled on the smoothed rock wall next to the metal hatch. Beneath the neatly stencilled letters someone had daubed in orange dayglo. You make water; we make water. And over the hatch, another graffito: Recycling is a piss-poor way of life.

“You leave them there?” Greg jabbed a finger at the graffiti.

With a half-smile Anson replied, “We scrub them off every now and then. Matter of fact, I was going to have the whole base cleaned up in your honor, but you got here too quick. These are new, though.”

Greg snorted with disdain.

“Don’t knock it too much’ Anson said. “Graffiti help people let off steam. And cleaning them up takes water that’s better used for more important things. Like living.”

He kept his silence as Anson showed him through the maze of pipes on the other side of the hatch.

“Everything in here is fully automated, so it’s not built for human comfort. Operators monitor the equipment, of course, but it runs by itself most of the time.”

“You need access for repair personnel, don’t you?” Greg asked.

“Sure. This is it, where we’re walking.”

The chamber was dimly lit, its ceiling oppressively low. Narrow walkways threaded through the convoluted piping. The place felt cold, but not dank, as a cave on Earth would. The pipes were all wrapped in insulation, Greg saw. Not a molecule of water was being wasted.

“Oxygen from the nanoprocessors comes in there,” she stretched an arm toward the shadowed recesses between the largest pipes, anodized green. “It’s in gaseous form, of course. Hydrogen comes in along those red lines. They’re mixed in those vats and the water is pumped out to the rest of the base along the blue pipes.”

“And the yellow pipes?” Greg asked.

“Used water coming in for recycling. Never eat yellow snow and never drink from a yellow pipe.”

Greg nodded in the shadowy dimness. Grinning, Anson seemed to be waiting for a reaction from him. After a few moments, though, her grin faded and she resumed her explanations.

“Hydrogen’s getting more and more expensive,” she said.

“How come? The nanomachines—”

“We have to go farther and farther out from the base to find hydrogen. We’ve picked the regolith clean of the stuff nearby.”

“Really?”

“Hey, we’re talking about individual atoms trapped in the regolith. There’s just not that much hydrogen out there. One hundredth of a percent, by mass, tops.”

“Still, the cost should be negligible.”

“Nanomachines ain’t cheap,” she said. “We have to produce them here and they won’t let us build the kind mat can reproduce themselves. Scared of runaways that could eat up the Moon, or some equally buttheaded scenario.”

Greg kept silent. He knew all about the reasons for the strict safety regulations.

“So the bugs are designed to operate only during the lunar night. After a few day-night cycles they break themselves down and we have to produce another batch.”

“But they can’t cost very much. A few kilograms can produce their weight in hydrogen thousands of times over, from the reports I’ve seen.”

Anson waved one hand in the air. “Yeah, but at our current rate of consumption we’ll have cleaned out the whole crater floor of hydrogen in another five years. Then it’ll be cheaper to import hydrogen from Earthside.”

“But you recycle…”

“Sure, but recycling isn’t a hundred percent efficient, of course.”

Greg thought a moment. “That’s why Brennart’s mission to the south pole is important.”

“Water’s valuable, even if it’s a thousand klicks away. We can use nanomachines to build a pipeline easily enough.”

“I wonder how much water they’ve found down there,” Greg said.

“Enough to last us until we’re ready to scoop volatiles from passing comets, I hope.”

Greg knew about the comet-scooping idea; it had been relegated to the realm of far-future projects that had neither funding nor anything else except the sketchiest of conceptual drawings.

“Won’t that be expensive?” It was the usual question, expected.

Anson laughed. “Sure it will, but then we won’t have to depend on Earthside for water. Our goal is to be self-sufficient.”

That surprised Greg. “Self-sufficient? When was that made a goal?”

“It’s our goal,” Anson said, “not the corporation’s. The goal of the Lunatics who keep coming back here no matter how many times they return Earthside.”

“Self-sufficient,” Greg repeated. It was a distant dream, he knew. These people are kidding themselves.

“Self-sufficient,” Anson repeated firmly.

“Then why aren’t you drilling for ammonia?” Greg asked.

The sudden shift of subject caught Anson by surprise. “Huh? Ammonia?”

“Nitrogen is your biggest import from Earth. The reason this base is sited at Alphonsus is that there have been seepages of ammonia and methane from below the crater floor. If you want to be self-sufficient you should be drilling for the ammonia.”

“That’s in our long-range plan,” Anson said defensively.

“Maybe we should move it up,” said Greg. “The methane could provide carbon. And hydrogen, too.”

“Not a helluva lot, according to our geological probes.”

“Shouldn’t you say selenological, rather than geological?”

She planted her fists on her hips. “I hope you’re joking.”

Greg let a ghost of a smile cross his lips. “Certainly.”

“Good. Come on, it’s almost time for dinner and we’ve got a lot of cost comparisons to do.”

The Cave was less than half full when they came in and got into line for the meal dispensers. Greg noticed that Anson studied her choices carefully before selecting soyburgers, salad and fruit drink. He punched the same buttons she did, and they carried their trays to a small table off in a corner by a pair of potted ficus trees.

They chewed through numbers with their meal, Anson pulling a palm-sized computer from her thigh pocket to call up data from the base’s main files. Greg quickly saw that while her immediate priorities were to keep costs as low as possible, her long-term goal was to make Moonbase independent of life-support imports from Earth.

She may be getting married, Greg thought, but she really intends to come back here. I wonder if her future husband understands that?

“That’s the only way to make this rat’s nest really profitable,” she insisted. “Cut the umbilical from Earthside. Moonbase has got to become self-sufficient.”

“Even if you have to go out and scoop volatiles from comets?”

“Hey, don’t knock it. Even teeny little comets spew out thousands of tons of water vapor and other volatiles per hour.”

“I understand—”

“Less than the cost of imports, once we get the program started. It’s the design and test phase that soaks up the money. Operations should be cheap: just the cost of the fuel and the teleoperators in the command center. Peanuts.”

“How soon do you see this happening?”

She picked at her salad. “Not for years, of course. Maybe ten or more. Too far out for the corporate five-year plan.”

Greg shifted gears again. “When is the mass driver going to be finished?”

She was ready for that one, though. Probably expected it ’When the freakin’ corporation bumps its priority up closer to the top. We’re not getting much support from Savannah on it, y’know.”

“Why not?”

“Rocket fuel’s cheap enough. The nanomachines produce enough aluminum and oxygen; we don’t need an electrical slingshot.”

“A mass driver would reduce launch costs by a factor of ten or better,” Greg said. Then he added, “It should have been completed years ago.”

Anson scowled across the little table at him. “Sure it should, but with practically no corporate support we have to stooge it along on our own resources.”

“Even using nanomachines, it’s going so slowly?” Greg asked. It sounded accusatory and he knew it.

“Nanomachines.” Anson snorted. “Some people think they’re like a magic wand. Just throw in some nanomachines and poof! the job’s done for you, like the shoemaker’s elves.”

Despite himself, Greg smiled at her. “It doesn’t work that way?”

“Building something as complex as a mass driver is a tough job, even with nanomachines,” she said. “Freakin’ job’s turned into a nanotechnology research program. We’re learning a lot about how to develop the little critters; we’re producing a helluva lot of research papers and graduate degrees. But the mass driver’s more than a year behind schedule.”

“I know,” said Greg.

“It’ll get done,” she promised. “But not on the schedule set up in Savannah.”

“Can you do it entirely out of lunar materials? Even the superconducting magnets?”

“Yeah, sure. And we don’t need superconductors. We dropped that in favor of cryogenic aluminum magnets. Keep ’em cool and they’re almost as good as superconductors.”

“But they draw some current, don’t they?”

Anson shrugged. “Not much. And electricity’s cheap here. We just set up a few extra acres of solar cells. Keep the magnets shaded from the Sun and the liquid nitrogen stays cold. That’s another advantage we’ve got here.”

“Realistically, when do you think the mass driver will be up and working?”

She looked up at the rock ceiling, thinking. “Maybe during your year,” she said. “More likely, not until the next director replaces you.”

“That’s not very good, is it?” Greg criticized.

Anson sighed — almost a huff — and returned her attention to what was left of her soyburger. Then she looked up, her face sad.

“Look,” she said, “I know there’s great things just waiting to be done here. Tremendous things! But I’m leaving. I’m just an employee and I’ve had to stay strictly within the limits the corporation’s set for Moonbase. You can do a helluva lot better, I know.”

“I didn’t mean—”

Tears were welling in her eyes. “Don’t you think I can see what Moonbase can be, if we really dig in and give it our best? I’m supposed to squeeze a profit out of this place, not plow the profits back in to make it self-sufficient. That’s for you to do. That’s why your mother’s sent you up here, isn’t it?”

Greg realized his mouth was hanging open with surprise. Is that why Mom’s sent me here? No. It was my idea to come here; she was against it. Or was she, really? Has she been manipulating me all along? Does she think that a few months up here will turn me into an advocate for Moonbase?

Before he could formulate an answer for her, Anson’s personal computer chimed. She tapped the comm button and they both heard:

“Word just came up from Tucson. The plasma cloud will engulf cislunar space in less than two hours. Radiation levels will exceed four hundred rads per hour for at least twenty-four to thirty-six hours.”

Anson acknowledged the message, then looked at Greg again. “You’re in luck. Nothing’s going to be moving on the surface for a while. There’ll be a flare party starting before long. Hope you brought your dancing shoes.”

MT. WASSER

Doug heard Killifer’s voice in his earphones, “Word just came in from Moonbase. Radiation cloud’s due in less than two hours.”

“Radiation cloud?” Doug blurted.

Brennart’s spacesuited figure straightened up the way a man does when he’s been slapped in the face. “How much less than two hours?” he demanded.

“Unknown. Less than two hours is the best they can give us.”

“What radiation cloud?” Doug asked.

“Solar flare,” said Brennart.

“A flare?” Rhee’s voice sounded shocked, scared. “Why wasn’t I told about it?”

“Why?” Brennart snapped. “Could you stop it?”

“But—”

Ignoring her, Brennart asked Killifer, “How’s the digging?”

Killifer replied, “Coverage complete on shelters one and two. About half done on three and four. Tunnels are all complete, but they’re not deep enough to be safe without additional rubble on them.”

Brennart sighed. “All right, get as much done in the next hour as you can, then get everybody inside. We’re going to deploy the nanomachines and then return.”

“Right.”

Doug turned to look at Greenberg and Rhee, who had just opened the canister in which the nanomachines were stored. Inadvertently, his glance took in the Sun, hanging low above the worn, rounded mountain peaks. His heavily-tinted visor blocked most of the glare, but still the Sun’s mighty radiance dazzled him.

“We’ve got to get back to shelter right away,” Rhee was saying. “Flares are dangerous!”

“Don’t panic,” said Brennart. “We’ve got an hour, at least.”

Doug was trying to remember how much radiation a flare put out. Enough to kill, he knew.

“Get this on tape!” Brennart ordered. “It’s the reason we’re here.”

Dutifully, Doug walked around the slippery rock summit until the Sun was at his back, then aimed the vidcam at Rhee and Greenberg. Bianca was gripping the big canister in her arms as if she were hugging it, while the nanotech carefully slid a long narrow metal tube from its interior. Brennart stepped into the picture to explain what they were doing. And get the credit for it, Doug thought.

The nanobugs they were using here were of a special type, designed to work in the blazing heat of unfiltered sunlight. They would extract silicon, aluminum and trace elements from the mountain’s rock and use them to build a tower of solar panels that would be in sunshine perpetually. The tower would provide continuous electrical power for the machines down in the darkness of the ice fields that would grind up the ice, liquify it, and pump it back to Moonbase.

The equipment to extract the ice and pump water would be sent by a follow-up expedition. So would the nanomachines to build the pipeline. Brennart’s task was to determine if there was enough ice in the south polar region to be worth the investment — and to make certain that Moonbase established an unshakable legal claim to the territory.

Thus Doug taped the first step in starting the nanomachines’ construction of the power tower. Legal precedence. He grimaced as he squinted through the vidcam’s eyepiece. If Brennart was correct, Yamagata was also providing a witness to their claim, with their recce satellite.

Greenberg opened the tube and placed several even thinner tubules on the bare rock.

“That’s it,” the nanotech said. “The first set of nanomachines for construction of Moonbase’s solar power tower have been put in place at,” he lifted his left arm to peer at his watch, “nineteen hundred hours and eight minutes.”

“Got it,” said Doug. “The tape has a time and date setting, too, so the timing will be verified.”

“Very well,” Brennart said. “Transmit the imagery to Moonbase.”

Doug switched his suit radio’s frequency to the channel for the minisats. No response. Checking the schedule he had taped to his forearm, he went back to the suit-to-suit frequency and said to Brennart, “No commsat over our horizon for another eleven minutes.”

He could hear Brennart huff impatiently. “All right,” the expedition leader grumbled. “Call in eleven minutes. Now let’s get out of here. Quickly.”

“Right,” said Bianca. “Let’s get under shelter.”

Bianca sounded frightened, Doug thought. She knows more about flares than any of us; if she’s scared she must have good reason to be.

“This is what you do when there’s a flare?” Greg asked.

After an intense hour or so in her office, making certain the base was battened down for the incoming radiation storm, Jinny Anson had led Greg back to The Cave. It was already filled with nearly every person in Moonbase. The tables had been pushed to one wall, raucous music was blaring from the overhead speakers, people were laughing, talking, drinking, couples were dancing on the smoothed rock flooring between the squares of grass.

“There’s not much else to do,” Anson replied, her voice raised to be heard over the thumping beat of the music, “except eat, drink and be merry. Until the radiation outside goes back to normal.”

Greg consciously tried to keep from frowning, yet he could feel his brows knitting. Okay, the people who work on the surface ought to be brought safely inside, he told himself. But that’s only a handful. Most of the base personnel work indoors; they could go right on with their jobs even though a solar flare is bathing the surface with lethal radiation levels.

“Relax!” Anson said. “This is just about the only excuse for a party we ever get up here.”

She led him to the row of food dispensers lined against The Cave’s far wall, stainless steel with glass fronts, seven feet tall. Not much of a selection, Greg saw. Most of the offerings were preprocessed soybean derivatives, of one sort or another.

“You mean all work stops while the flare’s going on?” Greg heard the brittleness in his own voice as he selected something that looked somewhat like finger sandwiches.

Anson shrugged. “Might as well. All the surface equipment is shut down. Even the scientific instrumentation outside takes a beating from the flare, so a lot of the researchers got nothing much to do.”

“What about communications?” Greg asked.

“The comm center is always manned,” she said easily, pulling out a soyburger on a bun and heading for the microwave ovens. “Even during a party.”

“Doesn’t the flare interfere with communications?”

“We can always go to the laser comm system if the microwave gets too hashed up.”

“I didn’t mean communications with Earth,” Greg said. “I meant with the expedition.”

Her face went serious. “We’ve got six minisats in polar orbit. They’re hardened, of course, but if the radiation levels exceed their hardening—”

“Then those people are cut off.”

“Right,” she conceded.

“Then what happens?”

“We’ve got two more minisats as backups. We send them up after the radiation dies down. Not much more that we can do.”

Greg thought hard for a few moments, then had to admit, “I guess you’re right.”

The microwave pinged and Anson pulled out her steaming soyburger. “Come on, let me introduce you to some of the gang. Are you straight or gay?”

Greg nearly dropped his plastic dish.’What?”

“Gay or straight? Who’d ya like to dance with?” Sex, Greg realized. It all comes down to sex. That’s what this party is all about. The solar flare is an excuse for these people to have a gene-pool enrichment. Just like neolithic hunting tribes that came together once a year to exchange virgins.

Anson waslooking at him with a positively impish expression. “Have I embarrassed you?” she asked.

“No…”

“We get pretty close to one another, living cooped up in here for months on end she said. “I forgot that most people Earthside aren’t as open as we are. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Greg said, trying to adjust his outlook. “And I’m straight.”

“Great!” Anson said, with seemingly genuine enthusiasm. “Then you can dance with me.”

Riding down the mountain was like dropping down a long dark shaft. Brennart fired the hopper’s main rocket engine once to lift them off the summit, then used the maneuvering jets to nudge them away from its slope. After that it was a long slow fall into the darkness below.

Doug felt his stomach fluttering and wondered how Bianca was handling it. Brennart stood at the podium, his gloved hands on the controls, like a sea captain of old at the helm of his storm-tossed ship. Instead of a sou’wester he was encased in a bulky spacesuit. And instead of the heaving and rolling of the waves, their hopper was falling smoothly in the shadows of the massive mountains, plummeting swiftly, silently, like a pebble dropped down a deep, deep well. This is what the old-time explorers must have felt like, Doug told himself. Danger and excitement and the thrill of doing things nobody’s done before. He grinned inside his helmet. This could become habit forming!

His earphones chirped with the signal from one of the minisats. Quickly, Doug plugged his vidcam into the comm port on the belt of his suit and played the tape at top speed. He heard a brief screeching in his earphones, like a magpie on amphetamines, then a verifying beep from the satellite. The data-compressed signal had been received.

“What about transmitting our claim?” Brennart asked before Doug could report to him.

“Just did it,” he said. “Squirted the tape to the minisat. When it comes over Moonbase’s horizon it’ll transmit the whole scene to the base.”

“How soon will that be?”

Doug made a quick mental calculation. “The satellite orbit is one hour. Should be in forty, fifty minutes.”

Brennart huffed again. “Plasma cloud might hit by then.”

“The commsats are hardened, aren’t they?”

“Up to a point.”

“Is there a chance the radiation could knock them out before our message reaches Moonbase?”

“Ever heard of Murphy’s Law?” Brennart replied.

“Yes, but—”

“It’s all a matter of degree. There’s no such thing as absolute hardening. The minisats are built to withstand a certain level of radiation. If the plasma cloud’s levels are higher, then the satellites will be kaput.”

“Then we’d be cut off from Moonbase.” Bianca’s voice, filled with apprehension.

“Until they pop up more satellites, after the storm is over.”

“I wonder how hardened the Yamagata snooper satellite is,” Doug mused.

Brennart made no answer and when Doug tried to talk to him he realized that the expedition leader was talking to the ground on a different frequency. Doug switched to that channel.

“… landing lights haven’t been set up yet,” he heard Killifer’s voice, almost whining. “You told me to get everybody inside—”

“Never mind,” Brennart snapped. “Turn up the radar beacon to full power. I’d like to have some idea of where the ground is!”

“Right.”

Doug knew there were no lights beneath the hopper’s platform. We could crash in this darkness, he realized.

The little cluster of instruments on the control podium included a laser altimeter, and Doug saw that its digital readout was falling so fast the numbers were almost a blur. Still Brennart did not fire the rocket to slow their descent It’s like parachute jumping, he thought. See how long you cap stay in free-fall before you chicken out and pull the ripcord.

He felt his heart racing as he clutched the flimsy railing with both hands and marveled at Brennart’s cool while the hopper plunged deeper and deeper into the eternal darkness.

“Are we there yet?” Bianca’s voice bleated in his earphones. She’s trying to make light of it, Doug thought, but this long free-fall must be bothering her. I wonder how she did on the trip to Moonbase from Earth? She must have been in misery all the way. Greenberg had said nothing since they’d climbed aboard the hopper and damned little before that Doug realized that the nanotech engineer was as closed-mouthed as anyone he had ever met.

Straining his eyes, Doug peered over the railing into the darkness below. He could make out vague shapes in the darkness, like monsters from a child’s nightmare reaching up to snare him.

Then a lurch of thrust nearly buckled his knees and the landscape below was briefly lit by the rocket’s silent flame, like a scene suddenly illuminated by a lightning bolt’s flash. Before Doug could blink it was inky dark again and they continued to fall.

Then another flash and surge of thrust. Then a gentle bump and Doug felt the comfortable reassurance of weight once more. They were on the ground.

“Don’t just stand there,” Brennart commanded. “Get off and into the shelter.”

For a moment Doug was transfixed, immobilized with admiration for Brennart’s piloting. The man really is as good as all the stories about him.

“Move!” Brennart bellowed.

Almost laughing, Doug knocked down the hopper’s railing and jumped softly to the ground.

“Which shelter?” Greenberg asked. He had turned on his helmet lamp, Doug saw. So had Brennart. He did the same, then Bianca followed suit.

“Number four,” said Brennart, pointing with a long arm. “The others are already occupied.”

They trooped to the airlock, Greenberg in the lead. He may not say much, Doug thought, but he sure makes it clear that he wants to get safely inside.

“Don’t take off your suits,” Brennart commanded. “Go right through the lock and into the shelter. Leave your suits on.”

Doug waited for Bianca to go in, then turned toward Brennart.

“Go on, go on,” the expedition commander shooed impatiently. “We don’t have all damned day.”

Doug ducked through the airlock hatch, waited for it to recycle, then stepped into the shelter. Bianca and Greenberg were sitting awkwardlyspn the edges of two facing bunks, still encased in their bulky spacesuits, looking like a pair of hunchbacked giant pandas. There were no internal partitions in this smaller shelter; it was merely a dugout for sleeping and eating.

The pumps chugged and the inner airlock hatch opened to let Brennart step through. He had to bend over slightly to keep the top of his helmet from scraping the shelter’s curving ceiling.

“Not enough rubble on top of us to provide full shielding,” he explained, “so we stay in the suits until the radiation dies down.”

“That could be days!” Rhee blurted.

“We’ll need the extra shielding the suits provide,” Brennart said calmly. “It’ll be uncomfortable but better than getting fried.”

“And the backpacks?” she asked.

“We can take off the backpacks and breathe the air in here, but otherwise we will stay buttoned up. Like the man says, better safe than sorry.”

“What about eating?” asked Doug.

Brennart turned toward him slowly, his helmet visor staring at him like a blank-eyed cyclops. “We’ll take a quick meal now, before the radiation builds up. After that, I’ll decide when and if it’s safe to open our visors for food.”

After a heartbeat’s span of silence, Brennart added in a more relaxed tone, “A little dieting won’t hurt any of us.”

So they grabbed prepackaged meals from the shelter’s food locker and took turns sticking them in the tiny microwave oven.

“Stand back from the oven. You don’t want to get exposed to any radiation that leaks through,” Greenberg said, so solemnly that Doug couldn’t tell if he was joking or serious.

Brennart raised his visor to eat his meal, and Doug could at last see the man’s face. If Brennart was worried, he didn’t show it. He looked calm; thoughtful, but certainly not jittery.

“That’s our guide,” he said, pointing to the radiation meter built into the airlock control panel. “That, and our suit patches, are the only way we have of telling how high the radiation level is.”

The suit patches were cumulative, Doug knew. They changed color with dosage, going from green through yellow to red. Once they turned red you were supposed to get inside shelter, no matter what you were doing out on the surface. He looked down at the patch on his right arm and was startled to see it had already turned a sickly greenish yellow. Just from the work we’ve done outside today, he thought. What color will it be when the radiation cloud hits?

How can they eat this garbage? Greg wondered as he chewed on the little sandwich. It tasted like sawdust and glue, with a core of hard rubber.

He felt uncomfortable at the flare party, and most of the people around him seemed uncomfortable in his presence. Jinny Anson was perfectly relaxed, apparently, but the others stiffened visibly as he approached mem. They were friendly enough, but Greg saw them put their drinks down or try to hide them behind their backs. Laughter died out as he came up to a knot of party-goers. People became polite, their smiles strained.

The new boss, Greg figured. They know I’ll be in charge here in a week, the board chairwoman’s son, and they don’t know what kind of a boss I’m going to be. Inwardly, Greg frowned at the irony of it. I don’t know what kind of a boss I’m going to be, either. Obviously there’s alcohol in most of those drinks, even though nobody’s offered me any. What else is going down?

He had made a sort of ragged circumnavigation of The Cave, and ended up back near Anson, who was deep in conversation with a tall, ragged-looking old simp with a mangy beard and sad, baggy eyes. Greg left his dish of unfinished finger sandwiches on the nearest table and went toward her.

“Here he is,” Anson said as Greg approached them. She waved Greg toward her, then introduced, “Greg Masterson, Lev Brudnoy.”

The legendary Lev Brudnoy! Greg realized that Brudnoy’s legend was more than twenty years old now. The poor geezer must be pushing sixty, at least.

“How do you do,” said Brudnoy gravely, extending a calloused hand. His coveralls were a faded olive green, splotched here and there with stains. He was about Greg’s own height, though, and wider across the shoulders.

“I’m very happy to meet you,” Greg said perfunctorily. Brudnoy’s grip was strong; Greg got the feeling he could have squeezed a lot harder if he’d wanted to.

“So you are going to be our leader for the next twelve months,” Brudnoy said.

“That’s right.”

“I knew your stepfather, Paul Stavenger. He was a good man.”

Trying not to bristle, Greg said, “I thought it was my father who gave you permission to join Moonbase.”

With a slow smile, Brudnoy answered, “Quite true. But I never met your father. He never came here and I was never invited to meet him when I visited Earthside.”

“Oh. I see.”

“I am most indebted to him, of course. And to your lovely mother — whom I also have never met”

Feeling awkward, Greg tried to change the subject ’I suppose you’ve been here at Moonbase longer than anyone else’ It was inane and he knew it, but Greg couldn’t think of anything else.

“More than twenty years,” Anson said.

“Not all that time has been spent here on the Moon, of course’ said Brudnoy. “I visit Earthside each year, as required by our health regulations”

Greg knew the regulations. They were based on the idea that living on the Moon deconditioned the body for living in Earth’s heavier gravity. Every Moonbase employee was required to undertake an exercise regime to keep muscles and bones strong enough for an immediate return Earthside. ,

“Yet’ Brudnoy went on, almost wistfully, “my trips Earth-side grow shorter and my stays here grow longer. This is my true home. Earth is a distant dream”

With a sardonic smile, Greg said, “The food’s better on Earth”

“Quite true’ Brudnoy agreed.

“What we grow in our farm is for nutrition, not gourmet taste’ Anson snapped.

“Mostly soybeans’ said-Brudnoy. “What little variety we have comes from thjem’ Before Greg could comment, he went on, “And green vegetables, of course. We recently introduced carrots, but they aren’t doing too well”

“Everything else we have to bring up from Earthside’ Anson said defensively. “We have to go for the highest nutritional values per kilo, not taste”

“That’s obvious’ said Greg.

Looking nettled, Anson turned to Brudnoy. “He’ll fit right in here; up here ten minutes and he’s already complaining about the food”

“I can prepare for you a fresh salad’ Brudnoy said, completely serious.

“A salad?”

“After all my years of adventuring, I have become a farmer. My true calling: to be a peasant”

“I’d like to see your farm’ Greg said.

“Lev’s got a green thumb,” said Anson. “He’ll turn us all into vegetarians one of these days”

“Can’t we bring meat animals up here?” Greg asked. “Fresh meat would be good”

“Oh sure’ Anson replied sarcastically. “We’ve got the wide open prairies around here; get some cowboys and a herd of cattle”

Greg felt his face redden. “Maybe something smaller? Chickens?”

“Or rabbits’ Brudnoy said. “I remember reading somewhere that rabbits have a high ratio of protein to bone”

“Okay’ said Greg. “Rabbits”

“We have to be very careful about what we bring in here’ Anson said sternly. “This is a closed ecology and we can’t afford to endanger it”

“But rabbits—”

“Look what they did to Australia”

“Jinny, my dear’ said Brudnoy, “we would not allow them to run wild and breed at will”

“We could control them, couldn’t we?” Greg asked.

Looking completely unconvinced, Anson said, “Well, you’re going to be director. You look into it”

Turning to Brudnoy, Greg asked, “Could you look into it?”

“Certainly’ said the Russian. “I would be most happy to”

Anson’s face eased into a smile. “You’re going to be okay, Masterson. Delegating responsibility already. That’s the mark of a successful manager”

Greg couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or sincere.

“Rabbits will be the salvation of Moonbase’ Brudnoy said, with a happy grin on his bearded face. “And I have found my calling!”

“You have?” Anson asked, looking askance at the Russian.

“To feed the hungry masses!” Brudnoy said. “To end the dreariness of packaged foods. I will not be a lowly peasant. I will become the master of cuisine for Moonbase”

“A noble calling said Anson.

“Thank you!” Brudnoy said to Greg. “You have given me a new purpose in life”

And he clasped Greg in his long arms with a Russian bear hug.

“Now what can I do for you in return?” Brudnoy asked once he had released Greg from his embrace.

Gasping slightly, more with surprise than anything else, Greg stammered, “I… I don’t really know.”

“I am yours to command,” Brudnoy said. “Call upon me at any hour and I will be at your side”

With a sloppy military salute, Brudnoy turned abruptly and strode off into the crowd.

“Is he for real?” Greg asked.

Anson smiled knowingly. “Lev is as real as they come. If you need any advice about anything, ask him. He’s a lot smarter than he lets on.”

Greg nodded, not knowing how much he could believe. He looked at the party-goers, still talking and laughing and drinking.

“I didn’t know that liquor was allowed in the base,” he said.

“It isn’t,” Anson replied.

“Do you mean to tell me that there’s no alcohol in those drinks? Nobody’s popping pills or snorting anything?”

“What I’m telling you,” Anson said firmly, “is that company regulations do not allow alcohol or any other substances that impair judgment or reflexes. We’re even careful with aspirin up here.”

Greg smirked at her. “Sure. And if I tested a random sampling of your employees’ blood levels—”

“It doesn’t work that way,” she snapped. “Not here. We judge people by their performance, not by some numbers set down in a book of regulations.”

“So you wait for somebody to kill himself. And the people around him.”

“Not at all.” Anson’s voice was calm, reasoned, but benestit it there was stainless steel. “We live and work very close to one another. If somebody sees that someone is too — out of it, let’s say — to do his job, then they don’t let that person start working.”

“They report him sick?”

“They send him back to his quarters. Or her. They call for a replacement.”

“And that’s all?”

“We pay for performance here. If a person needs a replacement more than twice in a three-month span, we send him back Earthside.”

“Or her?”

“Or her,” Anson agreed. “It happens now and then, but not often enough to be a real problem.”

“And that’s the way I’m supposed to handle the situation? No matter what the company regulations say?”

Anson made a small shrug. “That’s the way things have been handled here for years. If you want to change it, that’s your prerogative. You’ll have to do your job in your own way, of course.”

“Of course,” Greg said. “But your way has been working fine, is that it?”

Anson smiled prettily. “Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke.”

MOONBASE

The party showed not the slightest sign of slowing down. Greg watched, a stranger among the revelers, feeling like a pale and vapid ghost, almost invisible, noticed by the others just enough to make them feel uneasy and move away from him. Even Anson got tired of him and danced off with one of the younger men.

Terribly self-conscious and ill at ease, Greg made his way through the partying throng to the main exit from The Cave. Stepping through the airtight door into the empty tunnel outside was like stepping from bedlam into blissfully peaceful silence. It felt cooler out in the tunnel, easier to breathe.

Greg thought for a moment, then strode toward the control center. Make certain it’s really adequately manned, he told himself. Check on the status of the radiation storm, maybe talk with the astronomers back at Tucson.

The control center was quiet. The big electronic map of the base glowed in the darkened room just as it had before the flare erupted. All three positions at the U-shaped set of comm consoles were occupied. Several of the screens were badly streaked with interference, others were altogether blank. But the three communications technicians were at their jobs, sober and quietly intense.

The woman in the middle chair turned and saw Greg standing over her. “What do you think-’ Then she saw the nametag on Greg’s coveralls. “Oh! Mr. Masterson, it’s you. I figured it was too soon for my relief.”

“How’s the link with Brennart’s team?” Greg asked quietly.

“Something coming through now,” she said, pointing to one of the working screens.

Bending over her shoulder, Greg saw a pair of spacesuited figures in brilliant sunlight pulling a tube or something from a large gray canister.

While they fiddled with the tube on the bare rocky ground, another figure in a gleaming white spacesuit with red stripes down its arms and legs walked into the picture.

“That’s it,” one of the spacesuited figures said. “The first set of nanomachines for construction—”

Suddenly the picture on the screen wavered, distorted into wild zig-zags of color, and then broke up completely. The screen dissolved into hissing streaks of black and gray.

“Switch to backup,” said the tech on the operator’s right.

The screen showed the figures in spacesuits for the briefest flicker of an instant, then broke up into electronic hash.

“Three? Four?”

The technician shook her head. “All gone.”

“Five and six?”

“All of ’em.”

Greg asked, “Can’t you regain contact?”

She pointed to a hash-streaked screen. “Not now. The satellite links are down.”

“But there were six satellites, weren’t there?”

“Yessir, but the storm’s knocked all six of them out. Bing, bing, bing, one right after another. All six gone.”

“I have to go to the toilet,” said Bianca Rhee.

She whispered the words to Doug, leaning the helmet of her spacesuit against his so she wouldn’t have to use the suit radio.

They had been sitting in the half-covered shelter for several hours with nothing much to do except stare at the blank curving walls. Doug knew that the plumbing in the suits was different for women, and the suits were not meant to be worn for more than twelve hours at a time. From what he knew about solar flares, they would be in their suits for at least another twenty-four hours, perhaps considerably longer.

“If your urine collector is full you can void it into the chemical toilet,” Doug said to heir, “without getting out of the suit.”

“That’s not my problem,” Rhee said.

“Aren’t you wearing—”

“No,” she said. “Are you?”

Wonderful, Doug thought. People have been using space-suits for a century and still nobody’s come up with anything better than a plastic bag you stick on your bare butt What do they call it? FC-something: fecal containment system? Some system. And you have to slap it in place before you zip up your suit, of course.

“It’s not safe to get out of your suit,” he said.

“But I’ve got to!”

“The radiation level’s still too high.”

“I can’t do it in my pants.”

Why not? Doug thought. But from the sound of Bianca’s voice, even muffled through the helmets, there was no debating the issue.

He turned to Brennart and clicked on his suit radio. “Sir, do we have anything that we can rig up as temporary shielding in the John?”

“What are you talking about?” Irritated.

“Rhee’s got to get out of her suit for a few minutes. Can we put up some temporary shielding in the toilet compartment for her?”

For a long moment Brennart didn’t reply, and Doug could only guess what was going through his mind. At last he said gruffly, “Pull off the leggings of your suit and hold them on your lap.”

This has happened before, Doug realized, almost smiling. Bianca’s not the first one with the problem.

“And be quick about it,” Brennart added. “Every minute you’re out of the suit you’re exposed to ten times the radiation you’d get in a year Earthside.”

There’s no problem of depressurization, Doug knew. They were already breathing the shelter’s air. The suits were just for protection from the radiation.

Rhee headed for the toilet compartment, too embarrassed to say anything. Doug thought about asking her if she needed help getting her boots and leggings off, then thought better of it. Funny, she’d rather risk the radiation exposure than mess her pants. She’d rather die of radiation poisoning than embarrassment.

Then Doug realized that before the radiation died down they’d all have to use the toilet.”

“Sir, have you been in this kind of situation before?” he asked Brennart.

“Have I?” The expedition leader’s voice took on a new tone: lighter, almost eager. “This is a piece of cake compared to the fix we were in back when we were digging the first shelters in Alphonsus. The first time we were hit by a solar storm…”

A quarter-hour later Rhee returned from the toilet. Brennart was still spinning out yarns about the old days. Greenberg slinked to the compartment while Brennart kept on talking. And talking. And talking.

“… so we started vacuum breathing contests; you know, opening the visor of your helmet out on the surface to see how many seconds you could go before you closed it again. See what kind of guts you had. When you felt your eyes starting to pop you sealed up again. Well, one night there were just three of us out there, Jerry Stiles, Wodjohowitcz and me…”

Slowly, Doug realized what Brennart was doing. He’s not just helping to pass the time away; he’s calming us down, making us realize that he’s been through this kind of thing lots of times, telling us that we’ll live through it. Doug looked at his spacesuited leader with new respect. That’s what leadership is really all about, he thought: keeping the fear at arm’s length.

After making certain that communications with Earth were still intact, Greg went to his quarters and called his mother.

His quarters were a standard single cell, no bigger than a third-class stateroom on an ocean liner, since there had been so little time for the Moonbase staff to prepare for his arrival. Once Anson left, Greg would be moved to the director’s more spacious suite: two whole rooms, with a private toilet and shower stall.

For now, Greg slouched on his bunk and watched his mother’s face in the slightly grainy image on the screen built into the compartment›s smoothed stone wall.

“Has all communication with Brennart’s team been cut off?” Joanna was asking.

Nodding, Greg assured her, “For the time being. But they’re all safe inside their own shelters. They had plenty of time to dig in.”

“Yes,” she said once she heard his response. “Of course.” But her face belied her words.

She’s looking at me, Greg thought, she’s talking to me. But she’s thinking about Doug.

“How is Anson treating you? Is she being friendly?”

Almost laughing, Greg answered, “She danced with me.”

Before his mother received his reply, the phone chimed. Greg tapped his keyboard and the display screen split. Jinny Anson’s face appeared on the second half, her brows knit with concern.

“Danced with you?” Joanna started to say. “What do you mean?”

But Greg’s attention was on Anson. “What’s happened?”

“Thought you ought to know. Nippon One’s just launched a ballistic lobber toward the south polar region. Must be a crewed vehicle, I betcha.”

“Now? With the radiation storm at its peak?”

“Now,” Anson replied flatly.

“Where are you?”

“In my office.”

I’ll be right down there.” He clicked Anson’s image off his screen.

“What is it, Greg?” Joanna was demanding. “What’s going on?”

“Yamagata’s just launched a vehicle toward the pole. We don’t know if it’s manned or unmanned.”

It took three seconds for the news to reach Joanna. When it did, she flinched with shock. “What are they up to?”

“That’s what I intend to find out,” Greg said. I’ll call you when I’ve learned something.”

Brennart was running out of tall tales. Doug wondered if he’d start in on camp songs next. He remembered a counselor, when he’d been six or seven, who knew only a half dozen songs and repeated them endlessly every night around their gas-fed campfire.

“I wonder how the other shelters are doing?” Doug asked when Brennart took a breath.

“They’re all right,” Brennart said. “One and two are better off than we are; they’ve got more room and they can sit in their shirtsleeves.”

Getting to his feet carefully inside the cumbersome suit, Doug stepped over to the airlock hatch and the cluster of instruments built into its metal frame.

“Radiation level’s down slightly,” he said. “We might be past the worst of it.”

He could sense Brennart shaking his head inside his helmet. “Don’t kid yourself, son. The radiation levels will fluctuate up and down for hours. When it starts to tail off you’ll see a pretty rapid drop, not those little jiggles.”

The voice of experience, Doug said to himself.

“As soon as we can get through to Moonbase,” Greenberg said, “we’ve got to request another shipment of machines.”

“Another?” said Brennart.

“You mean more nanomachines?” Rhee asked. “Why?”

“The ones we left on the mountain are all dead by now.”

“What?”

The nanotechnician’s voice was flat, as unemotional as a surgeon discussing a patient who had died on the table. “Don’t you understand? The nanomachines are the size of viruses. They’re being bombarded with high-energy protons. At their scale, it’s like you or me being clobbered by an avalanche of bowling balls.”

“They’ll be deactivated,” Doug said, feeling suddenly hollow inside, as if he had scaled a rugged mountain only to find higher and steeper peaks ahead of him.

“All of them?” Brennart askett…

“All the ones we exposed on the mountaintop,” Greenberg replied calmly. “The ones still in the canister might be okay; the canister’s pretty good shielding for them.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before we went up there?” Brennart demanded, his voice rising.

Without a flutter, Greenberg answered, “You wanted to get our legal claim in, didn’t you? So we got there and did it Nobody told me we were going to be hit by a radiation storm.”

“But don’t you understand? The legal claim isn’t worth a termite fart if the goddamned bugs aren’t doing anything!”

“Huh?”

Doug said, “The legal claim is based on utilization of the area. If the bugs are dead, inactive, then we’re not using the area and our claim is null and void.”

Greenberg was silent for a moment. Then he mumbled, “I’m an engineer, not a lawyer.”

“Christ on a surfboard,” Brennart growled. “We’ve got to go up there again and start the other bugs working.”

“That’s not possible,” said Greenberg. For the first time Doug detected a slight nervous waver in his voice.

“What d’you mean, not possible?”

Greenberg took a breath, then explained, “There are nine different sets of nanomachines in the mix, each programmed to do its own part of the job. We put out the first set. If they’re dead, the second set won’t have the substrate it needs to build on. And the third set, and so on.”

“You mean none of them will work?”

“Not until we get replacements for the first set.”

“We brought backups with us.”

“The backup canister was on the cargo rocket that crashed. The canister split open and the bugs spilled out I deactivated them.”

Brennart was close to exploding. “Deactivated our backup?”

“Standard operating procedure, Once they’re loose you can’t get ’em back in their containers again. And you don’t want them chewing up the equipment around them. So I sprayed the area with the UV laser. Standard procedure.”

“That’s what you were doing,” Rhee said. “I thought you were looking for something that you’d lost.”

“Nope. Killing loose bugs. You can’t see the ultraviolet light from the laser, of course.”

Rhee seemed unconvinced. “You mean the bugs can take unfiltered sunlight but a little UV laser can kill them?”

“It’s not the power of the beam, it’s the intensity. That little laser’s ten times brighter than the Sun in that one ultraviolet wavelength.”

“Douglas,” Brennart asked, “does this really nullify our legal claim?”

Doug let several heartbeats pass before he answered. “I’m afraid it does. I’ll check with the corporate legal experts in Savannah as soon as communications are restored, but from what I know of the legalities, if we’re not actively using the site we have no valid claim to it”

“Christ on a surfboard,” Brennart muttered again. Thinking hard, Doug said, “The only other way to establish a claim is for at least two Masterson employees to be actively working at the site.” ’Two?” Brennart pounced on the information. “For how long”

“Length of stay doesn’t matter, as long as they’re actively engaged in utilizing the site’s natural resources — and there’s a working device of some sort running at the site when they leave. Either that, or more human employees replace them.”

“Two of us,” Brennart muttered.

“We’ve got to be doing something that leads to useful utilization of the area,” Doug warned. “We can’t just be camping there.”

“What in the world could we be doing up there?”

Rhee blurted, “We’re not going up to the summit again?”

Two of us are,” said Brennart, with no hesitation whatsoever. “As soon as the radiation begins to the down.”

“But won’t that be risky?”

Brennart chuckled quietly, then said, “Sure it’s risky. Like the man said, working out on the frontier is nothing more than inventing new ways to get killed.”

RAYBURN HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING

Representative Ray Underwood steepled his fingers in front of his face as he studied the earnest young man sitting on the other side of his desk.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand, Mr. Eldridge,” he said.

Eldridge smiled pleasantly. “Are we being recorded?”

Underwood feigned indignation. “Certainly not! I wouldn’t stand for that kind of thing. It’s not only illegal, it’s immoral.”

“Yes, of course,” said Eldridge. He was a bland young man, his sandy hair already receding, his eyes a pale blue. He was dressed casually: lightweight Madras jacket over an open-necked white shirt; inexpensive dark blue slacks; black athletic shoes.

Underwood was twenty years older, but still looked trim and fit in his tan sports jacket and darker brown slacks. There was a touch of gray at his temples, but otherwise his hair was dark, his face taut and tanned from ski vacations back home in Colorado.

“Our conversation will be strictly between us,” Underwood assured his visitor. “Absolutely private.”

“Good. For your sake, as well as mine.”

That took Underwood aback somewhat. “Just what is it that you’re after?” he asked. “In plain language, please.”

Eldridge hunched forward a little in his chair. “As you know, Congressman, I represent a coalition of religious organizations—”

“The Christian Brethren, I know.”

“Not merely the Brethren,” said Eldridge. “Not anymore. We have several Orthodox Jewish groups with us now. And the Muslims, as well.”

Underwood suppressed a gasp of surprise. Instead, he let himself chuckle. “Well, if you can keep those people together you’re a better politician than I am.”

“The Lord moves in mysterious ways, Congressman.”

“I suppose he does. But what is it that you want?”

“Your support on the nanotech bill.”

There. It was finally out in the open. Now I can deal with it, Underwood thought.

“What nanotech bill?” he parried. “I’m not aware of any such bill being considered—”

“There will be, in the next session. After our vice president is elected President of the United States.”

Underwood leaned back in his swivel chair and steepled his “fingers again, a tactic he used to gain time. “He’s not in my party,” he said mildly.

“But he will win the election in November,” said Eldridge flatly. “One of his campaign promises is to introduce legislation that will ban all nanotechnology. That’s one promise he will keep.”

“I’m not against nanotechnology,” Underwood said carefully. “From what my aides tell me, a lot of good can come from it.”

“I’m sure you know more than your aides tell you,” said Eldridge mildly.

Underwood smiled to cover the slight pang of alarm that tingled through him. “And what do you mean by that, Mr. Eldridge?”

“Carter. My first name is Carter.”

“Carter.”

“You’re in remarkably good health for a man who suffered a heart attack just a year ago,” said Eldridge.

Damn! Does he know or is he just fishing?

“It was only a mild cardiac arrest. And I’ve had excellent medical care.”

“The best in the world, from what I hear.”

“Those people in Bethesda…”

“Don’t you mean Basel?”

“Basel?”

“In Switzerland. And your attack was a massive infarction that would have left you a cardiac cripple.”

Forcing himself to grin, Underwood waggled a finger at the younger man. “Carter, you’ve been watching the tabloids! They exaggerate everything.”

“You were flown to Basel and operated on by Dr. Wilhehn Zimmerman, one of the few doctors left who still deals with nanotherapy.”

“That’s not so!”

With a patient sigh, Eldridge asked, “Do you want me to recite the flight number to you? Your room number at the Basel Marriott? The date and hour on which Zimmerman operated on you?”

Underwood growled, “You have no proof of that.”

“What further proof do we need? The people who leaked this information to us will be happy to speak to the news media — anonymously, of course.”

Underwood could feel his insides sinking.

Leaning forward, Eldridge said, “You had nanomachines injected into your body. They repaired your damaged heart muscle and scrubbed out the plaque in your coronary arteries. Very likely you also had some cosmetic touches done, didn’t you?”

The Congressman said nothing.

“You used your position of influence and power to cover up the fact that you obtained for yourself nanotherapy that is illegal in the United States.”

“It’s not illegal in Switzerland.”

“It will be soon,” said Eldridge flatly. “But that isn’t the point. The point is that you availed yourself of nanotherapy that your constituents can’t have.”

“I told you I’m not against nanotechnology. That’s a matter of public record.”

“Yes, but you’re about to change your position. On this crucial issue of outlawing all nanotechnology, you are going to vote on the side of the angels.”

“Meaning your side.”

“You’re damned right!” snapped Carter Eldridge.

MOONBASE

As soon as Greg reached Anson’s office she scooted around from behind her desk and led him on a half-run back to the control center. She soared along the tunnel on ten-foot leaps while Greg bounded along after her awkwardly, hopping and stumbling despite his weighted boots.

Too much happening now to pipe through my desktop,” she called over her shoulder as they hurried along the tunnel. “I need to see everything that’s going down.”

Greg was puffing as he skidded to a stop at the control center’s airtight door. Anson slid it open and went through without waiting for him.

She rousted one of the comm techs out of his seat, then took in all the working screens in a swift scan of the U-shaped console assembly.

Tower holding steady?” she asked, punching up a multicolored graph on the screen directly in front of her.

The woman seated in the middle chair nodded, headset clipped across her close-cropped hair. “Fading slowly, but within allowable limits. Power team’s already brought the nuke on-line, just in case solar cell degradation exceeds allowable.”

“Good,” snapped Anson, her attention already turning elsewhere.

Greg had forgotten that there was a standby nuclear power generator buried halfway across Alphonsus. With the high-energy protons of the radiation storm beating up on the solar cells spread across the crater floor, the nuke had to be able to provide electricity without fail or they’d all quickly choke to death.

“All right now,” Anson was saying, “where’s that freakin’ Yamagata lobber?”

The chief tech tapped on her keyboard and Anson’s main screen suddenly showed an image of the Moon with a single red dot winking, slightly northwest of Alphonsus’s position.

“That’s the radar plot from L-l,” said the comm tech. “She’s got a nice bright beacon on her.”

Anson grinned fiercely. “Show me our visual horizon.”

A thin yellow circle appeared on the Moon’s image, centered on Alphonsus. The blinking red dot was well within it.

“Hot spit!” Anson yelped. “We can get the big’scope on her.”

“The telescopes are all working on preprogrammed routines—”

“Screw the astronomers! This is important. I’ve got to see if that lobber’s crewed or not.”

With a sigh of reluctance the chief tech began tapping on her keyboard again.

“Humpin’ astronomers’re all down in The Cave, anyway,” Anson said, to no one in particular. “They can complain to me tomorrow.”

“Here it is,” said the technician.

Greg bent over Anson’s chair to see her main screen better. It showed a smear of streaks, then slowly the streaks settled down into the pinpoint lights of stars. And at the center of the image was the big metal spider of a ballistic rocket, a lobber.

The image enlarged. Greg saw bulbous tanks and other shapes wrapped in reflecting foil. And a single bubble of what looked liked plastiglass glinting in the sunlight.

“Crew module,” Anson said. “I knew it! Yamagata’s sending a team to the pole.”

“In this radiation storm?” Greg couldn’t quite believe it.

Without turning toward him Anson bobbed her head. “In this storm. They’re probably wearing specially armored suits. Yamagata’s people are smart, not suicidal.”

“Maybe the radiation level’s gone down,” Greg thought out loud.

With a short, sharp laugh, Anson said, “I don’t think so.”

And she pointed to one of the screens on the far side of the U.

Greg saw an image of the Earth, half day lit, half in shadow. But something was wrong with the picture: flickering streaks of pale colors were messing up the image of the northern hemisphere.

“That’s the northern lights you’re seeing,” Anson explained.

Shifting glowing pale greens and reds, Greg saw. “It can’t be the aurorae,” he objected. “They’re too far south — almost in Florida, for God’s sake.”

Anson looked up at him smugly. “Still think the radiation level’s gone down?”

Greg stared at the screen. Northern lights glowing all the way down to Florida, just about. It must be a monstrous flare, he realized.

Anson yanked a telephone handset from the console desktop and punched a single number. “Security?” she said into the phone. “Pull Harry Clemens out of The Cave right away and tell him to bring his best team with him. Meet me in my office in three minutes.”

She slammed the phone down and fairly leaped out of her chair. “We’ve got to get a comm link with Brennart right away,” she said to Greg, “and that means launching a shielded minisat.”

She made a dive for the door, calling over her shoulder, “Come on, Greg! We don’t have a second to spare!”

Working out on the frontier is nothing more than inventing new ways to get killed. Brennart’s easy tone belied the truth of his words, Doug thought He’s lived with this kind of danger so long that he’s accustomed to it Maybe he’s even become dependent on it.

“Question is,” Brennart was saying, “what can we do back up at the summit there to preserve our legal claim?”

And he turned his spacesuited figure toward Doug.

Stalling for time to think, Doug said, “You’re assuming that Yamagata’s going to try to dispute our claim, is that it?”

“Of course,” said Brennart ’Always assume the opposition will make the move that’ll hurt you the most. That way you’re never surprised, always prepared.”

Doug saw the reflection of his own helmeted figure in the blank visor of Brennart’s suit He tried to imagine the expression on the older man’s face. He’s enjoying this, Doug thought. This is how he gets his kicks. And Doug had to admit that it was exciting, hanging your butt out on the line, seeing how far you dared to go.

“Sov young Mr. Stavenger,” Brennart called out, “what can two of us do up there at the top of the mountain that will satisfy the Earthside lawyers?”

“If we could set up some kind of solar cells,” Doug mused, “and connect them back down here — even just a few kilowatts…’ He had no details to back the bare idea.

Brennart’s cyclops figure turned toward Greenberg, sprawled in his cumbersome spacesuit on the bunk closest to the toilet.

“Well, Greenie, what about it? Can we jigger your nanobugs to produce solar cells without the rest of the power tower to hold them up?”

“Sure,” answered Greenberg, “if I had a laboratory and a couple weeks to reprogram them. Not here, though.”

A gloomy silence filled the shelter.

Bianca Rhee broke the quiet. “What about the cargo ship that crashed? Didn’t it have a power system? Maybe we could cannibalize it”

“Fuel cells,” Brennart said gloomily. “Not solar panels. They were destroyed in the crash, anyway.”

“What pieces of our equipment do have solar cells?” Doug asked.

He could sense Brennart shaking his head inside his helmet. “Nothing much. We knew the base camp down here would be in shadow all the time. The nanobugs were supposed to build the solar tower up on the summit for our electrical power.”

“You mean there’s nothing?”

“A few portable radio units with standard solar batteries. But they run on milliwatts; you can’t get away with pretending they’re providing power for the base.”

“Wait a minute,” Rhee said. “Why do we have to use the summit for a power station? Why can’t we set up a monitoring station up there?”

“Monitor what?” Brennart asked.

“Solar flux,” said Rhee. “I’ve got the instrumentation for it”

“What good—”

“We can set up an astronomical station at the summit,” Rhee said, excitement raising her tone a notch. “That’d be a legitimate use of the area, wouldn’t it?”

Doug said, “Sure, why not? We could even claim we’re making measurements to determine how much electrical power we could generate with solar cells.”

They both turned to Brennart. “Pretty thin,” he muttered.

“But it’ll hold up until we can get replacement nanomachines to actually start building the power tower,” Doug countered.

“You’re sure?”

“Nothing’s sure where lawyers are involved,” Doug said. “But it’s the best idea I’ve heard so far.”

Brennart muttered, “Lawyers,” as if it was the vilest word he could think of.

“The Yamagata lobber’s landed.”

Anson stared hard at her desktop screen. It was split in half: the right side showed the frenzied activity of Clemens’ launch team as they laser-welded extra sheets of shielding around a grapefruit-sized minisatellite. Behind them a rocket booster stood impassively, little more than a squat tube crammed with powdered aluminum and liquified oxygen. Once the armored minisat was mated inside its nose cone the booster would be winched up the surface and fired toward the south pole.

The chief communications technician’s worried face filled the left side of Anson’s desktop screen.

“Landed?” Anson snapped. “Where?”

“On the other side of Mt. Wasser from where our people are,” replied the tech. “At least, that’s where L-l lost their radar transponder signal. Near as we can make it out, they put down right smack in the middle of the biggest ice field in the region.”

“Shee-yit,” Anson hissed.

Greg was sitting on a flimsy plastic chair alongside her desk, feeling useless as all the activity swirled around him.

Anson turned to him. “Yamagata’s people are on the ice down there. Now the question is, will they try to get to the top of the mountain right away or wait for the radiation to the down?”

“What do you intend to do with the minisat?” Greg asked.

“Tell Brennart that the Yamagata team’s in his back yard, what else?”

“Won’t that make it seem as if we’re pushing him to take bigger risks than necessary?”

Avoiding Greg’s eyes, Anson replied, “Brennart’s no feeb. He’ll know how much risk he can handle.”

“Can the minisat operate in this level of radiation?”

“The satellite’s only got to work for a few minutes,” Anson said. “Just long enough to tell Brennart that the Japs are in his lap. He’s got to know that! It’s vital.”

Greg wondered what Brennart would do with the information. It’s just going to put more pressure on him, Greg thought. Might push him to take risks he wouldn’t ordinarily take. Doug is out there with him. This might put Doug in even more danger than he’s in already.

Greg felt frozen inside, not daring to let his true emotions show, even to himself.

“I think my ribs are broken,” said Keiji Inoguchi.

Yazaru Kara heard the pain in his co-pilot’s voice. He himself had been unconscious for at least several seconds. The landing in the mountainous darkness had been a disaster. Their craft had touched down on what had seemed like smooth ice, but somehow the craft had tumbled at the last moment and come crashing down on its side.

Now, as the two men sat still strapped into their seats, bundled in their heavily armored spacesuits, Hara thought how like a dream the crash had been. Everything had happened so slowly, gracefully almost, like a kabuki dancer’s delicate movements. But the pain was real. His head throbbed and he tasted hot salty blood in his mouth… He could hear Inoguchi’s ragged, shallow breathing in his Helmet earphones. Every breath must be an agony for him, Hara thought.

A dream of pain and darkness. A nightmare. What was it that the old lamas said ’What if this life is nothing more than a dream within a dream?” Yes, what if?

At least he didn’t seem to be bleeding anywhere except inside his mouth. He had banged his head hard on the inside of his helmet, but thankfully the helmet was well-padded. Nothing broken, Hara said to himself. But if I have a concussion I’ll be vomiting soon. That should be delightful, inside the helmet.

Inoguchi groaned, forcing Hara to ignore his own fears.

“Can you move your arms at all?” he asked his companion.

“Yes, a little.” In the dim emergency lighting of the cockpit Hara saw Inoguchi’s arms move feebly.

He tried to think. “We might as well stay where we are, Keiji,” he said. “At least until the radiation goes down and the base puts a commsat over us.”

“Yes,” said Inoguchi, painfully. “I don’t think I’ll be of much help to you.”

“That’s all right, we’ll just sit here and call for help when the satellite queries us.”

“At least we don’t have to worry about fire,” Inoguchi said, trying to sound brave. “When I flew on Earth, fire was my one persistent fear.”

Hara nodded at the man’s confession, but did not reveal his own. Ever since coming to the Moon, Hara had suffered nightmares about choking to death for lack of air.

MT. WASSER

“Killifer to Brennart,” Doug heard in his earphones.

“Go ahead, Jack,” said Brennart. His voice sounded tired to Doug. Scratchy and strained.

“Just got a blast from Moonbase,” Killifer said. “Yamagata’s landed a team on the other side of Mt. Wasser.”

Doug felt a jolt of shock and saw Brennart’s spacesuited figure stiffen. Their communications gear was in the first shelter, where Killifer presided.

“Play it for me,” Brennart commanded.

Over the suit-to-suit frequency Doug heard, “Anson to Brennart. Yamagata lobber has landed on the far side of Mt. Wasser from your position. Definitely a crewed ship. They’re obviously going to try to make a claim for the area. Foster, the safety of your team is of primary importance, as you are aware. But I thought you should know about this move of Yamagata’s. As soon as the radiation drops to an acceptable.

Harsh ragged static drowned out her words.

“That’s all we got,” Killifer said.

Brennart huffed. “That’s plenty.”

“There’s another message, though,” said Killifer. “Piped in parallel with Anson’s.”

“What is it?”

“It’s for Mr. Stavenger.”

“For me?” Doug blurted. Brennart said nothing.

“Doug, this is Greg.” Doug was astonished to hear his brother’s voice. “I’m at Moonbase. I’ll be taking over the director’s slot when Anson leaves. I don’t want you to take any unnecessary chances out there. Do you understand me?

Play, it safe and come back alive.”

Doug felt embarrassed. “My brother,” he mumbled to Brennart and the others. “Half-brother, actually.”

“He’ll be the director pf Moonbase in a few days,” Brennart said, his voice flat,

“I had no idea,” said Doug.

A dead silence fell upon the bare little shelter. The four of them sat on the bunk edges, the only places to sit, staring at each other like a quartet of cyclops.

“We’ve got to get back to the mountaintop before the Japanese do,” Brennart said at last.

“Do you think they’d try it while the radiation’s still so high?” Doug asked.

“They sent the team here while the radiation flux is pretty damned near maximum,” Brennart pointed out. “They must have hardened suits.”

“And equipment,” Greenberg chimed in.

“And we don’t,” said Rhee.

Doug turned to face Brennart. “What should we do?”

For a long moment Brennart said nothing. Finally, “You said that legally we need two people at the summit?”

“That’s only if we intend to keep a team there. The minimum number is two,” said Doug. “That’s what the Moscow Treaty calls for.”

“But if we’re just going to set up a monitoring station?” Rhee asked.

Doug spread his gloved hands. “As long as the station can function automatically it doesn’t matter how many people are used to set it up.”

“All right, then,” Brennart said. I’ll go alone.”

“You can’t!” Doug snapped.

Brennart planted his fists on the hips of his spacesuit. “Do I have to remind you, Mr. Stavenger, that I’m in command here? Even if your brother’s going to be my boss in a few days, I’m still in charge of this team.”

Trying to keep his voice light, Doug replied, “We all know that, sir. I simply meant that the radiation out there will kill you before you could get the job done.”

“Maybe,” Brennart admitted. “But the job’s got to be done.”

“You have to kill yourself for the corporation?” Rhee asked.

Brennart turned toward her. “Like the man says, everybody dies, sooner or later. Do you think my life would be worth much if Yamagata gets to claim this whole territory?”

“That’s crazy,” Rhee said.

While Brennart and Rhee argued, Doug went to the shelter’s computer terminal and called up the medical file.

“It’s my job,” Brennart was saying. “My responsibility.”

Rhee said, “Oh, I get it. Machismo.” Her voice dripped loathing.

“No,” said Brennart. “It’s very practical. I get paid for results. If Yamagata takes this territory I might as well be dead, professionally.”

And he doesn’t have any other life, Doug realized, tapping out numbers on the screen. Rhee might despise the idea, but for men like Brennart this is a way of life. It’s all they’ve got. The time in-between missions is waiting time, limbo, useless. Call it machismo or stubborness or even stupidity, but it’s the hard-headed ones like Brennart who got the job done. My father must’ve been like that, Doug thought. He died rather than endanger the rest of the people in Moonbase.

“The question is,” Doug said — for himself as much as for Rhee and the others, “is the claim to this region worth risking your life over?”

“Let’s stop this right here,” Brennart said. “Somebody’s got to get back up that mountain and I’ve decided that I’ll do it. End of discussion.”

“Wait,” Doug said.

“I said end of discussion’ Brennart growled.

“But I think there might be a way we can get this job done at much lower risk.”

“How?”

Pointing to the numbers on the screen, Doug said, “I’ve just calculated the exposure doses, based on the background data in the medical file and a rough estimate of the time needed to get up to the mountaintop again.”

Brennart came across the shelter and leaned over Doug’s shoulder to peer at the screen.

Doug said, To get this job done, somebody’s got to find the astronomical equipment, load it onto the hopper, refuel the hopper, jump up to the summit, set up the equipment, and then fly back down here! Right?”

“Right.”

“Okay, here’s my estimate of the times involved for each task.”

“Pretty rough estimates.”

Smiling inside his helmet, Doug said, “It’s the best I could do. I’ve tried to include the shielding our suits provide—”

“It adds up to more than a lethal dose,” Rhee saw. Greenberg got off his bunk and joined the rest of them, but said nothing.

“But what if we break the job down into its component tasks and let different people handle each task?” Doug suggested.

“What of it?” Rhee asked.

Working the keyboard as he spoke, Doug said, “That way, each individual gets only a fraction of the radiation exposure that one person would get if he tried to do the whole job by himself. See?”

“Whoever flies the hopper up to the mountaintop still gets a big dose,” Rhee pointed out.

“But it’s not a lethal dose,” said Doug. “At least, that’s what the numbers show.”

“If everything goes exactly as you’ve plotted it,” Rhee countered.

“No, it won’t work,” Brennart said. Doug could sense him shaking his head inside his helmet. “I can’t ask people to take that kind of risk.”

“But look at the numbers,” Doug insisted. “We can do it!”

“Those numbers are shakier than a nervous guy with palsy in an earthquake,” Brennart grumbled.

“You’ll be killing yourself otherwise,” Doug said. “That’s the one really solid number we’ve got If one man tries to do the whole job, he gets a lethal dose. No doubt about it.”

Brennart rested his gloved hands on the thighs of his suit.

“Listen up, people. I’ve taken risks like this before and lived through them. Truth is, I don’t really give a damn if I live or die. I’ve had a full life and I’ve got nothing much to look forward to except retirement. Like the man says, I’d rather wear out than rust out.”

“More machismo,” Rhee muttered.

“Bianca,” Doug asked, “where are your astronomical instruments?”

She hesitated a moment. “I carried them into the shelter as soon as it was put up. Before we got the order to help with the digging.”

“Which shelter?” Brennart asked.

“The first one.”

“Okay,” Doug said. “So you could go to shelter one and get your hands on the instruments.”

“Sure.”

“Isn’t the second hopper right outside that shelter?”

“About fifty yards from the airlock,” Brennart said.

“So Killifer or somebody else could dash outside and load the instruments onto that hopper. No need to refuel the one we’ve already used.”

I’ll do it,” Greenberg said, surprising Doug. I’ll go with Bianca and load the instruments. It’ll only take a couple of minutes and then I’ve got an excuse to stay in shelter one. Let one of those guys pull on a suit and sit out here for a while.”

“Good,” said Doug, turning to Brennart. “Then you and I can hop up to the summit—”

“You’re not going,” Brennart said.

I’ve got to,” Doug answered firmly. “The numbers prove it. Two people can get the job done before the exposure adds up to a lethal dose. One can’t.”

“You are not going,” Brennart said, emphasizing each word. I’m not going to risk my future boss’s brother.”

“Half brother,” Doug said.

I’m not going to risk either half of you,” replied Brennart.

Doug grinned inside his helmet. He made a joke. Good!

“Besides,” Brennart went on, “I made a promise to your mother.”

Doug jumped on that “You promised not to let me out of your sight. How can you keep that promise if you go up to the mountaintop without me?”

Brennart was not amused. “Don’t split hairs with me, kid. I can’t allow you to take that risk.”

Very seriously, Doug replied, “And I can’t allow you to go by yourself.”

“Stavenger, I’m the commander here. I order you—”

“Besides, I can pilot the hopper if I have to,” Doug said, actually enjoying the excitement.

“This is getting weird,” Rhee said. “Now we’ve got two macho flangeheads.”

“I’m not going to let you take the risk,” Brennart repeated firmly.

I’m not going to let you kill yourself,” Doug answered.

Brennart got to his feet and loomed over Doug. “Now listen—”

“A dead body doesn’t constitute a legal claim,” Doug said.

“What?”

“If you die up on the mountaintop before you get the instruments set up the corporation won’t be able to make a legal claim to the area,” Doug said.

Tapping the numbers on the screen, Doug added, “And if you try to do this all by yourself you’re going to die.”

For a moment there was silence in the bare little shelter. Doug heard nothing but his own breathing and the faint whir of the air fans in his suit.

Then Brennart broke into a low chuckle. “All right, you’re dead-set on risking your neck. We’ll do it your way.”

Rhee repeated, “Two macho flangeheads.”

Greenberg said nothing.

“I don’t know about you,” said Jinny Anson, “but I could use a few hours’ sleep.”

Greg realized he had been awake more than twenty-four hours straight. The last six hours he had spent in Anson’s office, anxiously watching, waiting for some word from Brennart’s group. Nothing had come through, and the radiation from the solar flare was still lethally intense up on the surface.

I’ll go down to the control center, I guess,” he said.

Anson got up from her desk chair. “Don’t you want to catch a few winks?”

Shaking his head, Greg replied, “I’m too keyed up to sleep.”

“Go back to the party, then.”

“Is it still going on?”

With a grin, she leaned across her desk and stabbed at the keyboard. The display screen showed The Cave still jammed with dancing, drinking, chatting, laughing party-goers.

“They’ll stay at it till the radiation level starts to decay.”

Greg felt his brows knitting into a frown. “They’ll be in some shape for working, won’t they?”

Anson stiffened slightly. “The party breaks up when the radiation starts going down. It takes several hours, at least, before the radiation’s low enough to go out on the surface. They’ll be ready for work by then.”

Greg almost admired her. She could be a tigress when it came to defending her people.

“Okay, maybe I’ll drop in at the party. I’ll stick my head in at the control center first, though.”

“Whatever,” said Anson. She headed for the door, thinking, What this guy needs is to get laid.

Greg followed her out into the tunnel. Anson walked off toward her quarters; Greg went the other way, toward the control center.

He was surprised to see Lev Brudnoy there, hovering morosely in his faded, stained coveralls over the three technicians working the comm consoles. There were two men and one woman sitting at the consoles, none of them the same as the crew he had seen several hours earlier. Nearly half the screens were still blank or so streaked with interference that they were useless.

“What are you doing here?” Greg asked, realizing how tactless it was as he spoke the words.

Brudnoy made an elaborate shrug. “I worry.”

“Me too,” Greg admitted.”

“I understand that a Yamagata Vehicle has landed near Brennart’s team.”

“Yes,” said Greg, feeling slightly annoyed that this guest, this… farmer, knew as much about the situation as he did. Probably a lot more.

Brudnoy read his face. “There are very few secrets hi Moonbase, my friend.”

“Really?”

“We are too small, too crowded to keep secrets,” Brudnoy said. “It’s a good thing, I think. Governments back on Earth, they thrive on secrecy. Not here. Here we are like a mir, a village; everyone knows everyone.”

“And everyone knows everybody else’s business,” Greg added.

Brudnoy smiled charmingly. “Within limits.”

“Such as?”

Brudnoy placed a hand on the shoulder of the technician sitting nearest him. For example, even if I knew who this lout of an electronics man was sleeping with these days, I would not broadcast the news. It would be impolite.”

“And damned dangerous,” said the tech, glaring up at Brudnoy with mock ferocity.

“Like a village,” Greg muttered.

“Yes, like a village,” said Brudnoy. “You probably think of Moonbase as a subdivision of your corporation, with its organization chart and its lines of authority. Please throw that image out of your head. Think instead of a village. People come and go, it is true, but the social structure remains the same. In your country you call it a small town, I think.”

“Winesburg, Ohio,” Greg said, almost sneering.

“Oh no!” Brudnoy answered immediately. “I read that decadent work when I was first studying your language. No, not like Winesburg. More like Fort Apache — without the Native Americans.”

Greg blinked with surprise. “Fort Apache? Who’s our John Wayne, then?”

“Why, Brennart, of course. And you will be the stiff-necked commandant of the fort, if you pardon a personal reference.”

Greg automatically glanced down at the three technicians, to see how much of this they were taking in. All three of them were bent intently over their screens, which made Greg think they were listening to Brudnoy for all they were worth, despite the headsets clamped to their ears.

“You think I’m stiff-necked?” Greg asked coldly.

“Of course. Everyone is when they first come to Moonbase. It takes time to adjust to our village mentality, our small town social structure.”

Greg relaxed only slightly. “Fort Apache,” he repeated.

“An outpost on a vast and dangerous frontier. That’s what we are.” Brudnoy seemed to relish the concept.

“Message coming in from Tucson,” interrupted the chief technician. “Voice only. Radiation levels beginning to decrease slightly around Venus’s orbit. We can expect the storm to end in five to ten hours.”

“Great!” Greg almost wanted to grab Brudnoy and hug him. Instead he said to the chief tech, “How can we get the word to Brennart?”

The technician shook his head. “There’s nothing working in polar orbit right now.”

“What about the armored satellite they sent up?”

“Crapped out in the radiation. We don’t know if it even got its message down to Brennart.”

“Can’t you reactivate it?”

“It’s dead.”

“Then we’ve got to send up another one.”

Another head shake. “By the time we could get the last satellite hardened and launched the radiation levels’ll be getting low enough for Brennart’s people to figure it out for themselves.”

“Dammit,” Greg snarled, “I want a commsat put up!”

Unperturbed, the technician said, “Only the base director can authorize that.” Then he added sardonically, “Sir.”

Greg turned to Brudnoy. I’ll have to wake Anson up.”

Now Brudnoy shook his head. “I wouldn’t do that, my friend. She would not appreciate it.”

Greg wanted to push past him and storm down the tunnel to kick Anson’s door down. He wanted to tell Brudnoy in no uncertain terms that he was the next director of this base, not some snivelling technician or fanner afraid of incurring Jinny Anson’s wrath. I’m Joanna Masterson’s son, goddammit, he wanted to shout. I’ll run this whole corporation one of these days.

But he said nothing. He fought it down and remained quiet. It was a struggle; he felt certain that Brudnoy could see the inner battle raging in his eyes.

Brudnoy reached out and grasped his arm lightly. “I understand your impatience and your desire to inform your brother of the good news. But the technician is right. Even if we started this instant, by the time we got a commsat over the pole the radiation would already be dying and they would know it for themselves.”

“Yeah,” Greg said, not trusting himself with more than one syllable at a time. “Right.”

“But it’s crazy,” Killifer said.

Brennart’s voice came over the comm console’s speaker. “Sure it’s crazy, Jack,” he said lightly. “But it’s vital to the success of this mission. We’ve got to go.”

“You and Stavenger,” said Killifer. Deems and two of the women were crowded behind him as he sat in the tiny comm cubicle. He could feel their breaths on the back of his neck. And smell them.

“We’ll need your help. Greenberg and Rhee are coming to your shelter to pick up the astronomical equipment and load it onto the hopper.”

“Okay.”

“Jack, I need you to check out the hopper, make certain it’s ready for flight.”

“You want me to suit up and go outside?” Killifer asked. “With a zillion rads out there?”

“Doug’s done some rough calculations on the exposure levels. You should be all right”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I can’t order you to do it,” Brennart said. “I’m asking you to.”

Killifer grimaced. Yeah, sure, he can’t order me. But if I don’t I’ll be broken down to tractor maintenance or cleaning toilets.

“Okay,” he said. I’ll suit up.”

“Thanks, Jack!” Brennart’s voice sounded sincerely grateful.

Killifer turned in the little chair and got slowly to his feet. “Rog,” he said to Deems, “you take over here.”

“You’re going outside?” Deems’ normally startled expression had graduated to outright fear.

“That’s right,” Killifer said sourly. “You’re gonna see the fastest friggin’ checkout of a hopper in the history of the solar system.”

The women made room for him to pass and head up the shelter’s central aisle toward the airlock and the spacesuits. Brennart wants to be a big-ass hero and I’ve gotta risk my butt for him. Will I get any of the credit? Shit no. He’s the superstar; I’m down in the noise. Nobody’ll even know I was here.

Him and the Stavenger kid, Killifer fumed as he began to pull on the leggings to his spacesuit. The two of ’em. He tugged on his boots and sealed them closed. Then a new thought struck him.

The two of them. Going up to the mountaintop in the hopper, in all this radiation. What if they don’t make it back?

For an instant he felt a pang of remorse about Brennart, but then he thought, friggin’ butthead wants to be a hero, what better way is there than to die up there on top of the mountain?

As Doug lifted the uncrated spectrometer onto the platform of the hopper that stood outside Shelter One, he noticed that the radiation patch on his sleeve had already turned bright yellow.

This is going to be hairy, he thought We’ll both get enough radiation to put us in the hospital.

The telescope was already on the hopper’s metal platform, a man-tall tube supported on three Spindly legs.

A stocky spacesuited figure toted a telemetry transmitter with its solar power panels folded up like the wings of a bird and shoved it onto the hopper’s platform. Doug jumped up onto the metal mesh decking and started lashing down the instruments securely.

“Is that you, Bianca?” he asked the spacesuited figure.

“No, it’s not Bianca.” Killifer’s voice.

Surprised, Doug asked, “What’re you doing out here?”

Clambering up onto the hopper to help with the tie-downs, Killifer’s voice rasped, “I’m out here getting my cojones fried because you talked Brennart into being the big hero, that’s why I’m here.”

“I didn’t talk—”

“Fuck you didn’t,” Killifer snapped.

Doug’s usual reaction to hostility was to try to laugh it off. But he knew it wouldn’t work with Killifer.

“Look,” he said while he tied down the instruments, “I checked out your file and I understand why you’re sore at me.”

“You went into my personnel file?”

“I went into everybody’s files, everybody who’s on this expedition.”

“Who the fuck gave you authority for that?”

Doug was tempted to reply that his mother had given him the authority. Instead he answered mildly, “It’s part of my job.”

“The hell it is.”

“I saw the order transferring you to Moonbase and all your appeals.”

Killifer grunted as he lashed down the equipment on the deck.

“The transfer was signed by my mother. Your appeals were all bucked up to her and she rejected them.”

“That’s right.”

“What on Earth did you do to get my mother so pissed at you?” Doug asked. “She practically exiled you up here;”

“None of your friggin’ business.”

“Whatever it was, it wasn’t fair,” Doug said, without looking up from the straps he was locking down. “I wish there was some way I could make it up to you.”

Killifer stopped working and straightened up. “Yeah. Sure you do.”

“I mean it,” said Doug.

“Then give me back the eighteen years she stole from me.”

Doug sighed. “I wish I could.”

Killifer jumped down from the deck, floating slowly to the ground. Doug noticed that there was hardly any loose dust at all for his boots to kick up.

“Okay, then,” Killifer said as he headed back toward the shelter, “there is something you can do for me.”

“Name it.”

“Drop dead while you’re up there on that friggin’ mountaintop.”

Safely back inside the buried shelter’s airlock, Killifer slowly wormed out of his spacesuit and then ducked through the open hatch into the main section of the shelter. He saw Greenberg huddling with Martin, and Rhee standing worriedly next to the galley, munching on a protein bar. They were both happy to be out of their spacesuits after so many hours.

Once free of the spacesuit, Killifer strode past them swiftly and slipped into the tiny communications cubicle, where Deems still sat at the console. Standing behind Deems, he saw in the main screen the hopper outside where Brennart — with Doug Stavenger standing beside him — quickly ran down the hopper’s abbreviated checklist.

“Ready for takeoff,” Brennart said, his voice edged with tension.

“Clear for takeoff,” said Deems, his own voice high, quavering.

The little hopper disappeared from the screen in a burst of white, smokey rocket thrust.

Killifer smiled to himself as the aluminum vapor swiftly dissipated in the lunar vacuum. In the leg pouch of his spacesuit was a four-inch square of reinforced cermet, the covering for the hopper’s electronic controls for the liqui oxygen pump.

Bon voyage, Killifer said silently. He hadn’t rubbed a magic lamp, but he felt certain that his dearest wish was about to come true.

ACAPULCO

Carlos Quintana stood before the sweeping window of his clifftop hacienda and stared out into the limitless blue of tie Pacific. White cumulus clouds were building out over the horizon, towering up into thunderheads: so beautiful to look at from a distance, so treacherous to fly through.

He held a heavy cut crystal glass of exquisite single malt Scotch in his left hand, a slim black cigar in his right.

Cancer of the lung.

The words had sounded like a death sentence at first. Cancer had taken his father, both his uncles, even his older brother. But that had all happened before Carlos had built his fortune. Now he had the money to bring a few specialists to Mexico and let them inject nanomachines into his lung.

The thought disturbed him, almost frightened him. Nanomachines had killed Paul Stavenger and several others on the Moon. Nanomachines were illegal in the United States, in Mexico, in almost every nation on Earth. They didn’t always work the way they were supposed to. That’s what people said. They ran amok and killed Paul, up on the Moon.

He sipped at the whisky, then inhaled a long delicious drag from the cigar. And coughed.

But we’ve used nanomachines on the Moon for years now. They work as designed. Maybe whatever went wrong back then has been fixed now.

Yes, he argued with himself, but the corporation’s nanotech division has closed, except for the work they’re doing at Moonbase. It’s almost impossible to run a nanotech laboratory in the open — on Earth. And haw there’s talk in the U.N. outlawing nanotechnology entirely.

As the sun slowly settled onto the ocean horizon and the dipped below it, Qujntana stood alone at the window, watchin but not seeing, alternately sipping and puffing, wondering he trusted the scientists enough to let them inject invisible machines into his body.

He knew the answer, of course. Despite his fear of nanomachines, cancer of the lung frightened him more.

The fact that he would have to break the law to receive nanotherapy never impinged on his consciousness. Neither did the fact that a few hundred thousand of his fellow Mexican would die this year of lung cancer because they were too poor to afford nanotherapy.

MT. WASSER

the jump up to the summit was smoother this time. Standing beside Brennart, Doug realized that the man had entered the distance and altitude from their first flight into the hopper’s minuscule computer. Still, it took good piloting. One rather longish firing of the hopper’s rocket engine and they were soaring up, up the face of the mountain, breaking into brilliant sunlight, riding as smoothly as if they were on an elevator.

Everyone else was safely tucked inside the shelters. On Brennart’s orders, Rhee and Greenberg had been allowed to move into shelter one with Killifer and Deems. The two women who had been there had grudgingly pulled on their spacesuits and gone off to the fourth shelter, still only partially covered with protective rubble from the regolith.

Doug knew he should be worried about the radiation he was receiving, especially when they broke out of the shadows of the mountains and into the glaring sunlight. Yet somehow that danger seemed unreal compared to the thrill of flying up to the mountaintop again, the excitement of beating Yamagata to the claim for this rich territory.

This is fun! he told himself. We’re doing something nobody else would do.

Besides, the more sober part of his mind added, I made the rad dose calculations as conservative as I could. The numbers are okay. We’ll make it. We’ll be all right.

Their flimsy craft seemed to hover a hundred meters or so above the mountain’s summit, and Doug marvelled again at Brennart’s finely-tuned piloting. Without saying a word,

Brennart crabbed the craft sideways slightly and let it down almost exactly where they had landed before.

“That was terrific’ Doug said with genuine awe.

Brennart peered over the console at the ground and thi hopper’s broad round feet. “Missed our old landing spot by a good meter,” he muttered unhappily.

Doug laughed.

“All right,” said Brennart, slapping down the platform railing on his side of the hopper, “we’ve got to be quick now.”

Doug knocked down the railing on his side and they both bent to untie the astronomical instruments. Within a few minutes Doug was setting up the telescope and spectrometer while Brennart, kneeling beside him, unfolded the solar panels of the telemetry unit and began plugging wires from its base to the instruments.

It was clumsy work. Doug felt as if he were wearing thick mittens instead of the most flexible gloves that spacesuit engineers could design. He saw that the radiation patch on his sleeve was a deep orange. Brennart’s too.

“Ready to power up?” Brennart’s voice crackled in his earphones.

Doug swallowed hard and nodded inside his helmet ’Ready.”

The tiny display panels on the instruments lit up and the telescope swung automatically to focus on the Sun. Doug had to duck out of the way of its moving tube.

“Okay,” he said. “They’re working. Let’s drag our butts out of here.”

“Get it on tape,” Brennart said. “Make our claim legal.”

Fumbling with the vidcam in his hurry, Doug quickly panned across the little assembly of instruments with Brennart standing tall and unmistakable in his red-striped spacesuit beside them.

“Okay, got it,” he said, tucking the hand-sized vidcam back into his thigh pouch. “Now let’s get back to the shelter.”

“Wait one tick,” Brennart said. “I thought I saw something as we were coming in for the landing…’ And he loped off toward the edge of the summit in long lunar strides, almost oaring.

“Where’re you going?” Doug called, more puzzled than nnoyed or frightened.

“Come here, quick!” Brennart motioned with one long arm.

Doug tried to imitate Brennart’s lunar glide and hopped lumsily to the older man’s side.

“Down there. Can you see it?”

Doug peered into the inky blackness far below. “See what?” le asked.

“Lights. Like landing lights on a spacecraft.”

Doug stared. Far, far below he thought he saw two tiny gleams of lights, one red, one white. But when he looked directly at them, they disappeared.

“Masterson Aerospace to Yamagata lander,” he heard Brennart calling. “Can you hear me?”

That’s the Yamagata lander? Doug wondered. Down there?

“Masterson to Yamagata. Do you read?”

Doug was about to turn back to their hopper when he heard in his earphones, “Yamagata to Masterson. We read you.” The voice was weak, strained.

“We’ve just established legal claim to the mountaintop and we have a working base down at the ice field,” Brennart said, gloating happily. “You boys might as well pack up and go home.”

“We can’t. We crashed on landing. Both injured.”

Doug suddenly heard the pain in the man’s voice.

Brennart’s attitude changed instantly. “Does your base know of your condition?”

“No. Communications impossible in radiation storm.”

“We’ll try to get a team to you as soon as we can,” Brennart said.

“We are protected from radiation, but one of us is badly injured and needs medical attention.”

“We’ll do our best,” said Brennart. “Sit tight.”

“That is all we can do.”

Doug grabbed at Brennart’s arm. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here.”

“We’ll get help to you as soon as the radiation dies down, Brennart said. “Hang in there, guys.”

“Thank you.”

Without another word Brennart turned and loped back to the hopper. Doug ran alongside, almost matching his long gliding strides. They jumped up onto the platform together and Brennart slid his boots into the foot restraints and pushed the throttle forward in one motion, not even bothering to put up the railings.

But the hopper did not move.

Doug slid his boots into the foot loops and grabbed the edge of the console to support himself.

But the hopper did not move.

MT. WASSER

“Christ on a surfboard,” Brennart yelled. “It’s dead.”

“What’s wrong?”

Brennart swiftly scanned the meager control panel. “Everything’s in the green, but the goddamned engine won’t light.”

Doug felt cold sweat breaking out on him. , “Damn!” Brennart tugged at the throttle again. Nothing happened.

“What’s wrong?” Doug asked again.

Brennart turned toward him. “No time to check it out. Come on.”

And he jumped off the hopper’s platform. Doug followed him without questioning. Brennart was unfastening the empty ’cargo pod.

“Undo the oxy tank,” he commanded. “Get it down on the ground. Fast!”

Doug found the clips that held the bulbous green tank and clicked them open, then rolled the tank off the edge of the platform into his waiting arms. Shocked at how heavy it felt, he let it slip and thump onto the rocky ground. He felt immense gratitude that it didn’t burst apart.

Turning, he saw that Brennart was rolling the canister of nanobugs along the bumpy ground. He wedged it against the hopper’s other side.

“Get under the platform,” Brennart urged, dropping to all fours. “Come on!”

Doug dropped to his hands and knees and crawled beneath the hopper’s platform, between the oxygen tank and thennanomachine canister, nearly banging his helmet on the dangling nozzle of the defunct rocket engine.

“How are we going to fix it from under here?” he asked Brennart. There was Barely room enough to turn on his side, Doug saw. They could never get onto their backs, not with the life-support backpacks they carried.

“We’re not going to fix it,” the older man said. “We’re going to sit out the storm down here. This is our own little radiation shelter. Cozy, huh?”

“We’re going to stay here?” Doug heard a tinge of fear in his own voice.

“Nothing else we can do,” Brennart said calmly. “Can’t poke around trying to check out the hopper’s systems, not in this radiation flux. We’d be fried by the time we figured out where the malf is.”

“Malf?”

“Malfunction.”

“Oh.”

“So we pull down as much mass as we can to shield us from the sides and we hope the platform and rocket plumbing is thick enough to shield us overhead. And we wait.”

“But how can we tell when the radiation’s gone down enough—”

“When we hear a satellite signal. Either our minisats will come back on the air or Moonbase’ll put up a new commsat to re-establish a link with us.”

Doug puffed out a breath. “And in the meantime?”

“We wait.”

Stretched out prone beneath the hopper’s platform with a couple of tanks and cargo pods. It didn’t seem like much protection to Doug.

“Snug as two bugs in a rug,” Brennart said.

“Not quite.”

“Well, we’re better off than those Japs. Crashed on landing. And they need medical attention.”

“So will we,” Doug said.

For a moment Brennart did not reply. Then, quietly, “Yeah, I suppose we will.”

“What do you think happened to the hopper?” Doug asked.

Brennart’s shoulders wormed slightly inside his suit ’Something simple, most likely. Radiation knocked out some primary system, like the computer control or the oxidizer pump.”

“Isn’t the hopper shielded against radiation?”

“Sure, but that doesn’t make much difference now, does it? like the man says, this is where we’re at”

They should’ve been back by now,” Bianca Rhee said to no one in particular.

Roger Deems looked frightened, as usual, as he sat at the silent communications console.

“Shouldn’t they?” Bianca turned to Killifer, standing with Greenberg behind her.

Killifer slowly nodded, looking grim. “Yeah. Something must’ve gone wrong.”

“Can’t we talk with them?” Rhee pleaded.

Deems said shakily, “Up there on the mountain, they’re out of line-of-sight from our antenna, and we don’t have any working commsats to relay a signal to them.”

“But there must be something we can do!”

“Wait,” said Killifer.

Rhee stared at him, aghast.

“That’s all we can do,” Killifer said, almost gruffly. “Unless you want to kill yourself, too.”

“You think they’re dead?”

Killifer grunted, then answered, “As good as.”

“The radiation is definitely receding,” the main communications technician said to Greg. “In another five or six hours it ought to be almost down to normal.”

Greg nodded curtly. He’d been hearing ’another five hours’ for the past six hours, at least.

“You’d better get some rest”

Turning, Greg saw it was Jinny Anson who had just entered the control center.

“You look like hell,” Anson said cheerfully. She herself was fresh and bright-eyed.

“I’ll wait here,” said Greg.

“Get to bed before you fall down and hurt yourself,” Ansoi said firmly. “That’s not advice, it’s an order.” .Greg smiled tiredly at her. “You’re ordering me?”

I’m still director of this rat nest. Get your butt into you bunk. Now.”

For a moment Greg wondered how far he might go in showing her who the real boss was. How far might she go? he asked himself. She’d call security and have me carried to my quarters, he realized, staring into her steady, unwavering steel-gray eyes.

“Okay,” he said, his voice slurring slightly, “but you call me—”

“The instant anything happens,” Anson promised.

Greg trudged off to his quarters, not certain he remembered exactly where they were. He found the door eventually and flopped fully clothed on the bunk.

He dreamed, not of Doug and the others trapped in the radiation storm, but of his mother. The two of them were in The Cave, at the flare party, dancing together.

“Did you mean what you said back in the shelter?” Doug asked.

Lying prone beside him, Brennart said, “What did I say?”

“That you didn’t care if you lived or died?”

The older man hesitated a moment, then replied, “Yeah, I meant it.”

Doug couldn’t believe it. “Really?”

“Everybody dies, kid. Sorry I let you come along, though. You shouldn’t have been involved in this.”

“You think we’re going to die?”

“I’m already dying,” Brennart said. “Cancer in my lymph nodes.”

Shocked, Doug blurted, “But how could they let you keep on working?”

With a low chuckle, Brennart said, “Because they don’t know. I have my own doctor, my own physical. The corporation records are… well, doctored.”

“Falsified?” Doug had never dreamed such a thing was possible.

“Friends in high places,” said Brennart ’It happens when you’ve been around long enough.” , “You really have cancer?”

“Terminal — unless the radiation treatment we’re getting right now bums it out of me.” He laughed sardonically.

“Cancer,” Doug repeated.

“It’s land of an occupational disease when you spend a lot of time up here.”

“But,” Doug’s mind was churning, “but there are treatments. Nanotherapy could—”

“Find me a nanotherapy clinic that’s still open and I’ll go to it,” Brennart said bitterly. “The ones that haven’t been shut down by the lawyers have been burned down by the mobs.”

“Even in Switzerland?”

“Switzerland, Thailand, Argentina — the only people I could find doing nanotherapy now are crooks and frauds. Black market; you pay in advance and you take what you get. Not for me.”

“But my mother’s talked about clinics in Switzerland.”

“Your mom’s a very rich woman, Doug. I don’t have that kind of money. Or clout.”

“I do,” Doug said.

For a few moments Brennart was silent. Then he said, “I appreciate it, kid, but I think it’s too late for me even with nanotherapy.”

“How do you know—”

“Hey, I’ve had a damned good life. They’ll put up a statue to me here on the Moon after I’m gone. What more could I ask for?”

“How old are you?”

“Fifty-one, in September. If I make it that far.”

I’ll be nineteen next January.”

“Maybe not.”

“Yeah.”

I’m sorry,” Brennart said. “I shouldn’t have let you talk me into bringing you along.”

I’m not sorry about’it,” Doug said. He realized that he meant it truly. “I would’ ve kickdd myself for the rest of my life if I hadn’t come up here with you.”

Brennart made a noise that might have been a snort. Or a suppressed laugh. “You know what we used to say about test pilots, back when we still used test pilots? More guts than brains.”

Doug laughed out loud. “Yeah, that’s us.”

“That’s what it boils down to. You know what you’re doing is dangerous, but it’s so damned inviting! Like a really nasty-looking woman you see at a bar. You know she’s trouble, but you can’t help yourself.”

“I’ve never heard it put that way before,” Doug said.

“Yeah.” Brennart almost sighed. “You can’t turn it down, so you tell yourself you can handle the danger, you’re prepared for it.”

“My father must’ve been like that”

“He was one smart turkey, let me tell you. He knew when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em. Never took a chance he hadn’t calculated out to six decimal places.”

“I never knew him,” said Doug. “He died before I was born.”

“That’s what impressed me about you, kid. You didn’t just decide to run up this mountaintop for the glory of it. You calculated the odds, first.”

“I didn’t calculate on our hopper dying, though.”

“Like the man says, you can’t win ’em all.”

Doug nodded, blinking at perspiration that was trickling into his eyes.

“If we get through this without being totally fried,” Brennart asked, “what do you want to do with your life?”

“You mean the ten minutes I might have left?”

“Come on, seriously. Have you thought about it?”

“Not much.”

“You ought to. A guy in your position has all sorts of opportunities open to him. You ought to start thinking seriously about them.”

“I’ve sort of been following my father’s footsteps,” Doug admitted. “I’ve never thought about anything but Moonbase.”

“You could do a lot worse,” said Brennart. “Your father knew which way was up.”

“I sort of thought I’d like to study architecture.” It was something of a confession. Doug had never told anyone about that, not even his mother.

“Architecture?”

Shrugging inside his spacesuit, Doug replied, “Lunar architecture, you know. I want to build’a real city here.”

“Oh,” Brennart said. “You really have the bug, don’t you?”

“Maybe it’s genetic.”

“No,” said Brennart. “It’s the frontier. It gets to you. Like Mark Twain said, “When it’s steamboat time, you steam.”

“Steamboat time?”

“In Twain’s era the steamboat was the exciting thing. Another generation of kids wanted to be railroad engineers. Then came airplanes, and any self-respecting youngster wanted to be a pilot.”

“And then came the Moon,” Doug said, “and they all wanted to be astronauts.”

“And now you want to be a lunar architect.”

“If we get out of this,” Doug pointed out.

Ignoring that, Brennart went on, “You want to build, to add something to the world. Like your dad. That’s good. Everybody should leave his mark on the world.”

“You’ve certainly left yours,” Doug said. “They really will build a statue to you.”

“I’ve had a helluva lot of fun doing it,” Brennart said. “Too bad it’s got to end.”

“Like the man says,” Doug quoted him, “everybody dies.”

They fell silent again.

Eventually, Doug said, “I wish I could have had a life like yours.”

With a low chuckle, Brennart replied, “You can have it, kid. It’s not all that much, you know.”

“But you’re a real legend! You’ve done so much!”

“Except the one thing I really wanted.”

“What was that?”

“Mars.”

“You wanted to go on the Mars mission?” Doug felt stupid as he heard his own words. Of course Brennart wanted to go on the Mars mission. Who wouldn’t?

“The lead American astronaut was a friend of mine, Pete Connors,” said Brennart. “Pete’s a good guy, but I’m a better one.”

“Then why didn’t they pick you?”

“Bunch of academics made the selections.” Brennart said the word academics very much the way he pronounced lawyers. “I work for a dirty old profit-making corporation. Pete always stayed with the government program.”

“And that’s why they didn’t take you?”

“That’s why.”

“But that’s rotten! They must’ve been a bunch of brain-dead turds!”

Brennart laughed softly. “Pete did a good job. They got back okay.”

A second Mars expedition was being put together, Doug knew. Moonbase was supplying all their oxygen and Masterson orbital factories were building spacecraft and electronics assemblies. On government contracts, for a fixed fee.

“It’s a damned shame,” Doug mumbled.

“Yeah. But I’ll get a statue and Pete won’t.”

“They ought to put your statue right here, up at the summit”

“No, no! I want it at Moonbase,” Brennart objected. “Nobody’ll see it if you put it here.”

Doug replied, “We’ll run special tours to Mt Wasser to see your statue.”

He could sense the older man grinning. “Make more money that way, huh?”

“Might as well.”

“Why the hell not? Good thinking.”

Hesitantly, Doug asked, “Is there anyone… do you have any family…

“Nope. I was an only child and I never had any kids of my own — that I know of.”

Before Doug could answer, Brennart added, “I’ve been sterile for a lot of years. Another occupational hazard up here.”

“Damn,” Doug said. “It’s just not right for them to shut down nanotechnology. With nanomachines in your body, things like sterility and cancer could be stopped before they started. The nanobugs would destroy cancerous tumors and rebuild tissue that was damaged by radiation.”

“Maybe so,” said Brennart. “But it’s not going to help me.”

“It’s criminal to prevent nanotherapy!”

“Yeah, maybe so. But they’ve got their reasons, you know.”

“Religious fanatics,” Doug complained. “And politicians without enough spine to stand up straight. Nanoluddites.”

“Now, don’t go getting all righteous and indignant,” Brennart said.

“Why not? What they’ve done—”

“Take a look at Earth. Take a good look. Going on ten billion people down there, with no end to population growth in sight.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Last thing in the world those governments need is people who live two or three hundred years. They’re barely holding things together as it is, and you want them to let people extend their lifespans indefinitely? Get real.”

“You don’t think that the world’s leaders use nanotherapy for themselves?”

“Even if they do, they can’t let it out where everybody can use it. They’re already up to their armpits in starving people; give ’em nanotherapy and they’ll all go under.”

“No,” Doug said. “I don’t believe that.”

“Believe it, kid. You’ve lived in a nice comfortable cocoon all your life. The rest of the world’s poor, hungry, ignorant — and violent.”

Doug had no reply for that.

“Who’d pay for nanotherapy, anyway?” Brennart went on. “Only a handful of people could afford it. You think the poor majority would sit back and watch the rich folks live forever? Hell no!”

“That’s why they’ve trained down nanolabs,” Doug said with new understanding.

“They’d burn down your house, with you and your mother in it, if they thought you guys were using nanotherapy that they couldn’t have”

Doug thought about that. Then he replied, “Yes, I imagine they would.”

“The little guys always try to bring down anybody who gets ahead of them. Greed isn’t only for the rich, you know.”

“You’re talking about envy.”

“Yeah, maybe so.”

Doug thought for a moment, then, “Maybe that’s what a frontier is really for.”

“What?”

“To get away from the little guys, the small minds, the people who don’t want any changes, any new ideas.”

“The escape valve,” Brennart said.

“Right. That’s what the frontier is: our escape valve.”

“Don’t let them take it away from us, kid. We need a frontier.”

Doug nodded silently inside his helmet.

“How do you feel, kid?”

“Okay, I guess.” It was less than the truth. Doug felt feverish; perspiration was oozing out of him, trickling along his back, down his ribs.

I’m kinda tired. Think I’ll catch a few zees.”

“Nothing better to do,” Doug agreed.

But he could not sleep. Stretched out prone beneath the scanty protection of the flimsy hopper, he rolled over as far to his left as his backpack would allow him. That took some of the strain off his neck, but not much. Methodically, Doug checked each frequency of his suit radio. Nothing but harsh static grating in his earphones.

I’m going to die here, he told himself. He found that he was not afraid of the idea. He really didn’t believe it. The idea of dying on this mountaintop, killed by radiation that he could neither see nor feel, seemed almost ludicrous to him. As if someone were playing an elaborate practical joke on him.

Sooner or later somebody’s going to pop out and yell April Fool! Doug told himself.

And then he tasted blood in his mouth.

I must’ve bit my tongue, was his first reaction. But he knew that he hadn’t. And he also knew that bleeding gums were one of the first symptoms of radiation poisoning.

Doug flicked his radio back to the suit-to-suit freak. Brennart wasn’t snoring, but Doug could hear the man’s steady, slow breathing. Vaguely he remembered some old astronaut telling him, when he was just a kid, “Never stand when you can sit, never pass a toilet without taking a piss, and never stay awake when you can sleep. Those are the three basic rules of long life.”

Long life, Doug thought. The blood in his mouth tasted warm and salty. He turned his head to find the water nipple, took a long sip, and swished the water in his mouth. There was no place to spit it out, so he swallowed it.

That feels better, he told himself. But a few minutes later the warm salty taste of blood came back.

As soon as Greg awoke he checked with the control center. “Radiation levels haven’t started down yet, Mr. Masterson,” said the young woman on his phone screen. “We expect them to start diminishing within the next hour or so.”

“Thank you,” Greg said tightly. Within the next hour or so. How long have I slept?

He tapped the keyboard next to his bunk and the screen showed he’d been asleep a little more than four hours. Feeling grimy, he stepped into the shower stall. But no water came from the shower head. “Christ!” he bellowed. “Doesn’t anything work right around here?”

Naked, he stormed back to his bunk and pounded the keyboard. “Maintenance,” he told the phone’s computer.

A bored-looking kid in repulsive sickly green coveralls appeared on the screen. “Got a problem?”

“My shower’s not working.”

The kid glanced off to his left. “Room two twenty-three, right?”

“No shower until Tuesday. Sink Water only”

Greg raged, “What do you mean—”

“Water rules,” the kid said, with the finality of unshakable regulations on his side. “Got a problem, take it up with administration.”

“I’m the next director of this base!” Greg roared.

The kid was far from impressed. “Then you oughtta know the rules.” The screen went blank.

Defeated but still steaming, Greg sponged himself as best as he could in the tiny stainless steel sink, pulled out a fresh pair of dark blue coveralls from his travel bag, then put through a call to Savannah.

“The radiation level will be back to normal in about an hour,” Greg told his mother as he pressed the Velcro seal of his coveralls front.

And heard her saying, as soon as she saw his image on her screen, “The radiation level will be back to normal in about an hour.”

Greg laughed and so did Joanna.

“They’re going to be okay,” he said.

This time she waited for his words to reach her before replying, “Have you heard from them yet?”

“Not yet,” Greg said. “I’m going down to the comm center now. I’ll have them patch you in to their transmission when it comes through, if you like.”

Joanna answered, “No, that won’t be necessary, just as long as you can tell me they’re all right. I can talk to Doug later, when things calm down and get back to normal.”

Pleased with her response, Greg said, “Okay, Mom. I’ll let you know the instant we re-establish contact with them.”

“Fine,” she said.

But once the screen went dark again Greg wondered, Why doesn’t she want to talk with Doug as soon as we make contact again? Is she worried that I’d be jealous? Or will she be making her own contact, direct from Savannah, without letting me know?

Doug’s eyes snapped open. He hadn’t realized he’d fallen asleep until he woke up. He had been afraid to go to sleep, he realized. Despite everything he had been telling himself, deep within him lurked the fear that once he shut his eyes in sleep he would never open them again.

Well, he said to himself, that was feeble.

He found himself lying on his right side and tried to roll back onto his stomach again. The effort left him gasping, dizzy.

I’m weak as a kitten, he said to himself.

Brennart was still asleep, stretched out beside him. Doug twisted over and looked around. It made his head swim. For several minutes he simply lay still, panting, trying to fight down the fear and nausea that rose inside him like an inexorable tide. Hang on, he demanded of himself. Hang in there; the storm must be almost over by now. Help will be on the way soon.

But not soon enough, a sardonic voice in his head replied.

His world was constrained to this metallic nest beneath the hopper, with a few containers and tanks around them. The nozzle of the hopper’s main engine hung between him and Brennart like a bell in a church spire.

An old tune sprang to his mind: It’s a Small, Small World. Idiot, Doug snarled to himself. You’re being fried by a solar flare and you’re thinking about childhood songs.

His earphones chirped.

By reflex, before he realized what it meant, Doug tapped the radio channel selector on his wrist.

“Moonbase to Brennart. Do you read?”

He heard Killifer’s overjoyed voice, “Loud and clear, baby! Are we glad to hear you!”

“We’re working on reactivating the minisats that the storm knocked out. We have two of them working so far.”

“Great!”

“What is your condition?”

“We’re all okay, except Brennart and Stavenger. They’ve been up at the top of Mt Wasser for. .Doug sensed Killifer checking a clock, “… almost seven hours now.”

A different voice came on. “Seven hours? In the open?”

“Brennart himself? And the Stavenger boy?” It sounded like Jinny Anson’s voice. Urgent Demanding. Doug didn’t much like being called a boy.

“Right,” Killifer said again.

“What’s happened to them?” Now it was Greg’s voice. Unmistakable.

“Don’t know,” said Killifer. “We haven’t been able to contact them.”

“This is Stavenger,” Doug said, shocked at how weak his own voice sounded. “Can you hear me?”

“Stavenger!” Anson shouted. “How are you?”

“Alive… barely.”

“And Brennart?”

“Sleeping. Or unconscious.”

“We’ll get help to you as soon as we can,” Anson promised.

Greg came on again. “Killifer! Get somebody up to that mountaintop and bring those two back to your base camp. Now!”

“Hey, we’ve got a few problems of our own. Power cells are running low, our one remaining hopper needs refueling—”

“Get them as quickly as you can,” Anson said. Her voice was cool, but there was no mistaking the implacable tone of her command.

“Right,” said Killifer. “We’re on our way.”

“And shoot us a complete rundown of your own status,” Anson added. “All systems.”

“Doug,” Greg called. “Doug, how are you?”

“I feel kind of sick, but I’m still breathing.” He reached across and shook Brennart’s shoulder. No response. “I mink Mr. Brennart’s unconscious.”

“We’ll get help to you right away,” Greg said.

“Good,” said Doug.

Anson came on again. “Killifer, it’s going to take us several hours to get a resupply lobber to you. Storm beat up our surface facilities pretty good and we’ll need some time to get ’em all back on line.”

“Understood,” Killifer replied. “We’re all okay here, except for Brennart and Stavenger.”

“How long can your power supplies hold out?”

“Fuel cells are down about forty percent. We can power down if we have to, stretch ’em out till the resupply arrives.”

Doug heard Greg’s voice in the background urging, “You’ve got to send a medical team down there. Right away!”

“Stavenger,” Anson called, “can you put your medical monitoring system on frequency three? We can start checking out your medical condition.”

“Okay. And Mr. Brennart’s, too.”

“Right. Of course. But you’ve got to be quick. The satellite won’t be above your horizon much longer.”

“I understand,” Doug said. “Now, which of these plugs is the medical system?”

“It’s marked with a red circle.”

Doug held his left arm up in the light of his helmet lamp. It brushed the underside of the hopper’s platform. He squinted hard to keep his vision from blurring. Either the lamp’s running down or my eyesight’s going, he thought.

“Okay, found it.”

“Toggle the microswitch and then press the keypad for frequency three,” Anson directed patiently.

It seemed to take forever, but Doug finally got it right.

“Okay, good,” Anson said. “Data’s coming in.”

“What about Brennart?”

“Do the same for him, if you can.”

Puzzled by the if you can, Doug pushed himself closer to Brennart, found the right switch and punched frequency three on his radio keypad.

“We’ve only got another fifty seconds before the satellite drops below your horizon,” Anson said. “Killifer, get a team up to those two immediately.”

“Will do.”

“We hope to re-establish a link with you in fifteen minutes.”

“Right.”

The contact broke up into crackling static. Doug clicked off the noise. The universe went silent, except for the sound of the suit’s fans and his own breathing, it sounded ragged, labored. A wave of nausea was surging up his throat Doug fought it back. The last thing he wanted was to upchuck inside the helmet.

Panting, sweating, feeling sick and dizzy, he clicked on the suit-to-suit frequency, to check on Brennart’s breathing.

Nothing. Doug held his breath and listened hard. He could not hear anything at all from Brennart.

BASEL

Wilhelm Zimmerman rocked slowly in his desk chair. It creaked under his weight. He was a fat, bald, unkempt man in a wrinkled gray suit that looked as if he had been sleeping in it for a week.

The woman sitting in front of his desk looked distraught. She was well into her seventies, lifeless white hair hanging straight, skin wrinkled and brittle-looking, obviously her blood circulation was poor. Too bad, thought Zimmerman, she must have been something of a beauty once.

“I don’t want to die,” she said, her voice cracking.

“Neither do I,” said Zimmerman softly. “No one does. And yet…’ He shrugged elaborately.

“I’ve heard… some of my friends have told me… that it is possible to reverse the effects of aging.” She looked at him piercingly, her diamond-hard blue eyes belying the hesitancy in her voice.

Zimmerman rested his hands on his considerable paunch. She wants to live. So do I.

“Madam, what your friends have told is unkind. There are no miracles.”

“But… I thought that your work here at the university,” she said. “What is it called? Nano-something or other.”

“My research is on nanotechnology, yes,” he replied. “But procedures on human subjects is absolutely forbidden. The laws are very strict. We are not allowed to deal with human patients.”

“Oh!”

“In fact,” Zimmerman said, “for the past several years we have worked only on non-medical aspects of nanotechnology. The animal rights movement has made even animal experiments too difficult to continue.”

The elderly lady took a tissue from her tiny purse and dabbed at the corners of her eyes.

Pointing a chubby finger at the graphs on his office wall, Zimmerman said with some distaste, “As you can see, Madam, our most recent work has been on new manufacturing processes for solar panels and long-range electrical distribution lines.”

“Oh my,” said the elderly lady, “I haven’t the faintest idea of what that means.”

“For an organization called OPEC,” Zimmerman explained, frowning. “To generate electricity in the desert and send it here to Europe.”

The woman’s eyes went crafty. “But isn’t it true that you also do therapeutic work — but you’re not allowed to let people know about it?”

Zimmerman shook his head hard enough to make his cheeks waddle. “No!” he said firmly. “That would be against the law. The university would not stand for it and neither would the authorities.”

“But I was told—”

“Madam, you were misinformed. I am sorry, but do I look like the kind of man who would risk his career and his good name by breaking the law?”

Dubiously, she replied, “I suppose not.”

For another half hour she tried to get Zimmerman to admit that he could use nanotherapy to help her. When at last she gave up and left, Zimmerman called a friend from the forensic medical department who came to his office, grinning, and lifted several excellent fingerprints from the armrests of the chair on which she had sat.

It took more than a week for Zimmerman’s connections in the Swiss national police to get the information to him. The elderly woman was the mother of a bureaucrat in Berne who was in charge of monitoring all nanotherapy work in the nation.

“An agent provocateur,” Zimmerman said to himself. “Next they will close down all nanotechnology work, even research, the way they’ve done in the United States.”

He wished there was somewhere in the world where he could continue his work in peace.

MOONBASE

“It’ll take at least twelve hours to get a lobber properly loaded with the supplies they need,” Anson said over the din in the garage.

Tractors were starting up, the whining shrill of their electrical engines echoing painfully off the rock walls of the cavernous garage area. Men and women were scurrying across the polished rock floor; the big steel inner hatch of the airlock itself was groaning on its bearings as it slid shut for the twentieth time in the past two hours.

“They need help now,” Greg insisted. “My brother’s dying, for chrissake.”

Anson shook her head. “No sense killing more people by going out there half-cocked.”

“Can’t we send a medical team right now?” Greg pleaded. “I don’t care what it costs—”

Anson whirled on him. “You think I’m worried about cost?”

Greg backed a step away from her sudden fury. “What I meant was… dammit, send a medical team now. Right away! Consider that an order from the board of directors.”

“I take my orders from Ibriham Rashid, in Savannah,” Anson said, striding away from Greg.

He pushed past two technicians waving hand-held computers at each other as they argued.

Grabbing Anson by her shoulder, Greg said, “Send the medical team now. Don’t wait for the rest of the stuff they need. Do it now! I’ll take the responsibility.”

Anson glared at him. “We don’t have any medical staff to send! One doctor and a couple of part-time technicians, that’s our medical staff. They won’t be able to do anything for him down there anyway.”

“But—”

“It isn’t a matter of responsibility or cost or anything else except the fact that we don’t have the personnel we need up here. And it takes time to fuel up a rocket vehicle, goddammit to hell and back! It takes time to bring our radars and other surface, instruments back on line after the pounding they just took.”

“I know, but—”

“I can’t just wave a freakin’ magic wand and have a fully loaded and properly crewed lobber jump off to the freakin’ south pole!”

“But you can send out a lobber as soon as the goddamned equipment is back on lines can’t you?” Greg yelled back. “Get him here as soon as you can.”

Anson pulled in a deep breath and stood there in the middle of the bustle and noise, staring hard at Greg. He saw her nostrils flare angrily and thought for a moment that she was going to charge him, like an enraged bull.

Instead, her shoulders relaxed slightly and she said, just loud enough to be heard over the clanging, yelling, screeching cacophony, “Yeah, you’re right. I can.”

Before Greg realized what she had said, she added, “And I will.”

She turned abruptly and started off in a half trot, yelling over her shoulder, “C’m’on, we’ve got to get out to the rocket port and light some flares under some butts.”

As soon as she heard Doug’s voice over the satellite link, Bianca Rhee ducked out of the cramped comm compartment and raced down the shelter’s central aisle to the airlock, where the spacesuits were stored. Without bothering even to think about what size she was grabbing, she pulled on the first pair of leggings she came to and plopped down on the floor to tug on the boots.

“What d’you think you’re doing?”

Rhee looked up and saw Kilьfer standing over her, looking displeased.

“We’ve got to go up there and get them!” Rhee said, scrambling to her feet once the boots were sealed.

“You know how to run a hopper?”

“No,” she said, “but you do. Come on, hurry!”

Kilьfer grunted unhappily. “That’s my suit you’re putting on.”

“Oh!” She felt confused for a moment. “Look, there’s no time for me to get out of these and into my own. We’re about the same size. Use my suit.”

“Plumbing’s different,” Kilьfer said. But he reached for Rhee’s suit, hanging next to his.

“We won’t be out long enough for that to matter,” Rhee said. Then she added, “Will we?”

Kilьfer almost laughed.

Is he dead? Doug wondered. Brennart didn’t seem to be breathing and all Doug’s prodding and poking hadn’t awakened the astronaut.

Maybe it’s just a coma, Doug told himself. The radiation hasn’t killed me, why should it kill him?

But he had to admit that he felt very sick. His head was spinning and waves of nausea made him feel weak and feverish. The bleeding in his mouth seemed to have stopped, though. Maybe I just bit my lip or something, he tried to reassure himself.

Doug didn’t realize he had drifted into sleep until a sudden voice jerked him awake.

“Brennart! Stavenger! We’re here!”

Someone was rolling the canister of nanomachines out of the way.

“Under here,” Doug called weakly. “We’re underneath the hopper.”

Someone pulled him by the arms. “Careful,” he heard. “Don’t rip his suit.” Bianca’s voice? Doug couldn’t be sure.

“Brennart,” Doug mumbled. “Get him. He needs help.”

“Like you don’t”

Doug felt himself carried a short distance and then laid down on his side. He fought back the nausea that burned up into his throat. Don’t vomit, he commanded himself. Not inside the helmet. “Strap him down, I’ll go get Brennart.”

“Can you carry him by yourself?”

“If I need help I’ll holler.”

“Vidcam,” Doug said weakly. “Make certain the vidcam’s in my pocket.”

“Don’t worry about that now.” Definitely Bianca’s voice, he thought.

“No, it’s important Our legal claim. Got to have it. Otherwise Yamagata…’ He had to pause for breath.

“It’s okay,” Bianca said. “The vidcam’s there in your thigh pouch.”

“You take it,” Doug gasped. “Hang onto it Take care of it.”

She pulled the vidcam out of his thigh pouch and held it up so he could see it. “I’ve got it I’ll take care of it. Now relax, Doug.”

Relax. The word seemed to echo in Doug’s mind. Relax. Relax. There’s nothing more that you can do. You’ve done everything you could. It’s up to them now. Up to them.

The sudden pressure of takeoff startled him out of his drowsiness. Doug realized he was strapped down like a patient on a surgical table. And then the long, falling emptiness as the hopper descended back to their base camp. Got to tell them about the Yamagata team, Doug thought We’ve got to rescue them. They’re hurt. Got to tell them about it.

But the falling sensation overpowered every thought in his head and Doug held himself as rigidly as possible, forcing himself not to give in to the nausea burning up into his throat The only thing he could see was the flank of the mountain, twinkling like crystal in the sunlight gleaming so brightly that it hurt his eyes and he had to squeeze them shut.

Weight returned. We’ve landed, Doug knew. Darkness all around him. He was being lifted again, moved.

“We’re down,” Bianca’s voice said tenderly. “We’ll have you in the shelter and out of your suit in a few minutes.”

“Barf bag,” Doug mumbled.

“What is it?” He sensed Bianca bending low over him, as if that would improve their suit-to-suit radio link. “What do you need?”

“Barf bags,” he repeated, raising his voice as loud as he could. “Plenty of them.”

Joanna sat tensely in the rear seat of the company jetcopter. Greg’s face on the tiny pop-up display screen built into the seat’s armrest looked tired and strained.

“He’s taken a massive radiation dose,” Greg was saying. “The data they’re transmitting from his medical sensors aren’t good.”

Greg continued speaking, but Joanna ignored his words and said, “Get him back to Moonbase as quickly as possible. I’ll get a team of specialists up there right away.”

She saw Greg stop in midsentence to hear what she was saying. “I expected as much,” he said. “Jinny Anson’s already sent off a lobber to get him. It should be landing at their base camp in half an hour or so.”

“Good,” said Joanna. “I’m coming up there, too.”

Even in the minuscule screen she could see the displeasure on Greg’s face. “There’s nothing you can do to help him.”

Nothing you can do.The words echoed in Joanna’s mind. I let this happen to Doug. The Moon killed his father and now it’s going to kill him.

Misunderstanding her silence, Greg said, “We’re doing everything possible.”

“I’m already on my way to the rocket port,” Joanna said firmly.

When her words reached him, Greg nodded wearily. “I’m not really surprised, even though I think it’s a waste of your time.”

Joanna bit back an angry retort and said instead, “Greg, if this had happened to you, I’d be on my way to Moonbase just as fast.”

His face brightened a little. But only a little.

Joanna saw the yellow message light beside the screen start to flicker.

“Greg, I’ve got to end this call,” she said. “I’ve been trying to reach Kris Cardenas all morning and she’s finally returning my calls.”

It seemed to Doug that he spent a thousand hours or more weaving between consciousness and a restless feverish sleep that brought him neither rest nor relief from the waves of pain and nausea that were washing through him.

But it couldn’t have been all that long, because when he opened his eyes he saw Bianca Rhee still bending over lьm. And she was still in her spacesuit; only the helmet i was gone.

“How’s Brennart?” Dougfcroaked. His throat was raw from i the bout of vomiting that he had surrendered to as soon as they had removed his helmet.

“He’s dead,” said Rhee.

Killifer’s face appeared beside her, unshaven, dark circles beneath the eyes. “Poor bastard strangled on his own puke while the two of you were laying under the hopper.”

“Oh no.” Doug gagged on the bile burning up into his throat again. Rhee grabbed a vomit bag and pushed it into Doug’s hand. He retched miserably.

When he lay back on the bunk again, his eyes were watery and he felt as if every molecule of strength had been drained out of him.

“Brennart must have been unconscious when it happened,” Rhee said. “Totally out of it.”

“You’re lucky to be alive,” Killifer said dourly. “You took a helluva dose out there.”

“I would have died if Brennart hadn’t rigged up a shelter for us.”

“You might still die, kid,” said Killifer. “You’re not out of the woods yet”

Doug grinned weakly. “Thanks for the news.”

Killifer walked away.

Does he blame me for Brennart’s death, Doug wondered. He turned to Bianca. “What about the Yamagata people?”

“What Yamagata people?”

“The men in the lander… on the other side of the mountain.”

Rhee shook her head. “Don’t worry about them. You’ve made the claim to the mountaintop. I’ve got your vidcam.”

“No… you don’t understand.” Doug tried to raise his head but the effort left him dizzy, exhausted. “They crashed. They’re hurt. They need help.”

Rhee’s eyes widened. “They crashed?”

“We talked to them. They need medical help.”

“Wait,” Rhee said. I’ll tell Killifer.”

She disappeared from Doug’s sight. He lay on the bunk, too weak to do anything else.

Bianca returned with Killifer, who looked more annoyed than usual.

“What’s this about the Yamagata team?”

Doug told him. Killifer eyed him suspiciously. “You sure about this? Maybe you were delirious out there and dreamed it up.”

“I’m sure,” Doug said, too weary to get angry.

“Well,” Killifer groused, “they’ve probably re-established communications with their own base. Let the Japs take care of their own; we’ve got enough on our hands.”

“No,” Doug protested. “Go get them.”

Glaring, Killifer said, “Get real, kid. Why should we help the competition?”

Trying to pull together enough strength to get a whole sentence out, Doug said, “Because… if we rescue them… it wipes out any hope Yamagata might have… of making a claim… to any part of this region.”

Killifer stared at him for a long moment.

“Do it,” Doug urged, his voice little more than a whisper. “It’ll impress… management”

“Think of it as a working vacation,” Joanna was saying to the tiny display screen.

Kris Cardenas looked distinctly unhappy.

Glancing up at her window, Joanna saw that the jetcopter was approaching the landing circle at the far end of the Savannah rocket port. A Clippership stood waiting on Pad Three, a thin wisp of white vapor wafting from the liquid oxygen hose connected to its LOX tank.

“Kris, I don’t have time for pleading with you. My son is dying from a massive radiation dose. If you tell me there’s nothing that nanotherapy can do for him, all right, I’ll have to believe you. But if there’s the slightest chance that you could help him…’ Joanna ran out of words. For the first time in years she felt on the verge of crying.

“But I’m not the one you want,” Cardenas replied. In the minuscule screen of the armrest her face still looked earnest, intent.

“Then who?”

“Zimmerman, at the University of Basel.”

“I’ve never heard of him.”

Cardenas almost smiled. “He keeps a very low profile. But he’s the best there is at this kind of nanotherapy.”

“Can you get him for me?” Joanna asked. “I’m leaving for Moonbase in a few minutes.’?’You mean, talk him into going to the Moon?”

Nodding briskly, Joanna said, “Offer him anything he wants. The sky’s no limit.”

“I don’t know—”

“Get him to Moonbase,” Joanna commanded. “And quickly.”

Cardenas looked bewildered by the idea. I’ll try.”

“You come, too,” Joanna said. “Both of you. And any equipment you need. I’ll get my people to contact you, make all the arrangements.”

I’ll try,” Cardenas repeated lamely.

“Thanks, Kris,” Joanna said as warmly as she could manage. Then she cut the connection and immediately called Ibriham Rashid, back at the office in Savannah.

The jetcopter was settling on the ground in a flurry of rotor-blown dust and the high keening wail of its engines as Rashid’s dark bearded face appeared on Joanna’s screen.

“Omar, I don’t have time for details. I’m leaving for Moonbase. Get Kris Cardenas and Zimmerman, at the University of Basel, off to Moonbase as soon as possible. They’ve got to be there in twenty-four hours or less. I’ll call you from the Clippership with more. Understand?”

Rashid nodded as if he had been expecting such a call, “darkening and obedience,” he said.

Bianca Rhee finally left Doug’s bunk and trudged wearily to the airlock hatch. She slumped tiredly to the plastic flooring; and started to unseal her boots.

“Need help?” Roger Deems asked.

“Thanks,” she said, letting him tug the boots off her.

Slowly she got to her feet and, with Deems’ help, lifted the upper half of the suit over her head. Deems hung the empty torso on its rack.

“You’ve been wearing Killifer’s suit,” he said, noting the name stencilled on the chest.

“Seems like I’ve been wearing it all my life,” Rhee said tiredly.

“It’s only been a couple of hours.”

She started worming out of the lower half of the suit.

“Do you think Doug will live through this?” Deems asked, his soulful brown eyes looking almost tearful.

Rhee shook her head slowly. “He’s awfully sick. So pale, like there’s no blood in him.” Suddenly she wanted to cry.

“It’s a shame,” Deems said.

“Yeah.”

Rhee finally worked her legs out of the suit and hung it on the rack. Without another word to Deems she padded in her stockinged feet to the toilet When she came out, Deems was gone. She was alone with the row of empty suits. No one could see her sobbing quietly.

After a few minutes she tried to pull herself together. The vidcam, she remembered. Doug was worried about the vidcam.

She went to the leggings she had just hung up and searched through the thigh pouches. Sure enough, Doug’s vidcam was there. As she pulled it out, Rhee thought, This is what all the mess is about Doug put our legal claim on disk. This is what’s killed him.

There was something else in the thigh pocket. Thinking it might be a part of the vidcam that had somehow worked loose, Rhee took it out. It was a flat square of reinforced cermet, about four inches on a side, anodized flat white on one surface, and gleaming gold on the other.

Rhee felt puzzled. This isn’t part of the vidcam, she told herself. But she took it along with her, back to her bunk, where she stuck both the vidcam and the strange piece of cermet into her personal bag for safekeeping, until they got back to Moonbase.

VANCOUVER

“Do I really have to do this?” Kris Cardenas asked.

Greg Masterson’s image in her desktop phone screen smiled gravely. “How long have you known my mother, Kris?”

“I owe her, I understand that. But I can’t just pop off to the Moon like I’m going to the mall for groceries.”

On the wall behind her desk hung the round gold seal of the Nobel Prize. The rest of the wall was covered with photographs, mostly family — husband and children who had grown to adulthood and now had children of their own. A few of the photos were not family, although each of them had Cardenas in them, together with a former President of the United States, a six-time Oscar-winning actress, a group of scientists posing before a splendid vista of the Alps.

Cardenas herself looked much younger than her fifty-eight years. Much younger. Her hair was still a sandy light brown, no trace of silver. Her bright blue eyes still sparkled youthfully. She looked as if she could spend the day surfing or skydiving or skiing down those snow-covered Alps, rather than delivering lectures to university students.

Greg’s smile looked strained, she thought He was saying, “Look, Kris, we’re talking about my half-brother here. Mom will kidnap you if she has to.”

“But I can’t do anything for him! Zimmerman is the man she wants.”

For almost three seconds she waited for Greg’s reply. Finally, his smile transformed itself into a knowing smirk. “Zimmerman’s on his way here.”

“He is?”

Greg continued, not waiting for her reply, “A Masterson Clippership lifted him and four of his assistants half an hour ago on a direct trajectory to Moonbase. They’ll arrive here in about ten hours.”

Dumbfounded, Cardenas asked, “How on Earth did she swing that?”

When her question reached him, Greg actually laughed. “Simplest thing in the world. She just threatened to reveal to the media that he’s running a nanotherapy clinic for wealthy foreigners right on the university campus.”

“Blackmail!”

“Black and green,” Greg replied after the lag. “She’s also making a hefty donation to his department at the university.”

Cardenas said, “She hasn’t offered me anything.”

When Greg heard her words, he replied, “Come on up here, Kris. Bring your husband if you want. Even if it’s just to hold her hand, she needs you. She’s not as strong as she’d like everyone to believe, you know.”

Who the hell is? Cardenas asked herself. To Greg’s image in the phone screen she said, I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

Doug swam in and out of consciousness. He seemed to be floating, but that couldn’t be. He dreamed he was drifting in the ocean, bobbing up and down on the long gentle swells of the open sea. Yet somehow he was stretched out on the desert sand, broiling in the sun, every pore sweating and Brennart lay beside him saying, “Like the man says, working out on the frontier is nothing more than inventing new ways to get killed.”

When he opened his eyes Bianca Rhee was always hovering over him, gazing down at him with an expression that mixed tenderness with desperate fear.

Is this real or am I dreaming? Doug asked himself.

“We’re on our way back to Moonbase,” Rhee said to him at one point. “They’re bringing specialists up from Earth to take care of you.”

Embalmers, thought Doug. Undertakers. Bury me on the Moon, he wanted to say. And don’t forget Brennart’s statue.

“The Yamagata team?” he heard himself croak.

“Killifer went out to get them,” Rhee replied gently, soothingly. “Moonbase agreed with you, rescuing them blocks any claim they might have tried to make.”

“They’re okay?”

“We don’t know yet Killifer hasn’t reached them, yet”

“I get all the shit jobs,” Killifer grumbled.

Deems, wedged into the cramped cockpit beside him, shrugged resignedly. “Well, you’re not alone, are you.”

They were piloting one of the Jobbers over Mt Wasseir, searching for the crashed Yamagata ship. Killifer had been ordered to do so directly by Jinny Anson, Moonbase’s director.

Two big lobbers had arrived at their south polar camp from Moonbase, filled with oxygen and other supplies, but without a single human being aboard. Killifer had to guide their landings remotely and use the expedition’s remaining personnel to unload them. Instructions — orders, really — from Anson back at Moonbase crackled along the satellite ; relay system: Get Doug Stavenger back to Moonbase immedi ately. Then go find the wrecked Yamagata lander and save its crew.

Killifer had loaded the Stavenger kid onto one of the lobbers. The astronomer, Rhee, volunteered to go with him. Volunteered hell, Killifer thought Nobody could tear the little gook from the kid’s side.

The expedition was a mess, but from what Anson told him, the corporation would have a valid claim to the area as soon as Stavenger’s vidcam pictures were verified. As he monitored the Jobber’s automated takeoff for its return flight to Moonbase, Killifer almost hoped that the radiation had ruined the vidcam and the disk would be a blank.

What the hell, he told himself. It rankled him, though, that even if he died young Stavenger would be a fucking hero. Especially if he died.

“I’m getting a transponder signal,” Deems said.

The summit of Mt Wasser was below them. Glancing down through the cockpit’s transparent bubble, Killifer could glimpse the telescope and other gear that Brennart and Stavenger had left on the mountaintop.

“Show me,” he said to Deems.

With the tap of a gloved finger, Deems brought up the transponder signal on the cockpit’s starscope display of the deeply shadowed ground below them. The screen showed not much more than a blur, with a red dot winking at them.

“Let’s take it down to five hundred and hover,” Killifer said.

“That’ll burn up a lot of propellant.” Deems’ face was covered by his helmet visor, but his voice sounded scared.

“We gotta see the ground before we set down on it,” Killifer said. “Friggin’ starscope sure isn’t showing much. Switch to infrared.”

“It’s too cold down there in the dark,” said Deems. “Must be two hundred below, at least.”

“Switch to infrared,” Killifer repeated, louder.

Silently Deems touched the keypad and the cockpit’s main screen showed a false-color image of the ground below: mostly deep black.

“That must be ice,” Killifer said.

“Yeah, it’s absorbing the infrared.”

“And the transponder signal’s right in the middle of it”

“They must’ve landed on the ice,” said Deems.

Killifer nodded inside his helmet. “Landing jets melted the ice under them and they splashed in. Dumb bastards.”

“Good thing the ice isn’t too deep.”

“Nah, it must’ve refrozen as soon as they turned off then-rocket engines.”

“Then they must be stuck in it”

“Yeah,” Killifer said disgustedly. “And we better make sure we don’t get caught in the same stupid trap.”

Killifer was not primarily a pilot, although over the years at Moonbase he had trained in both lobbers and hoppers and flown them many times. But setting down in pitch darkness in totally unfamiliar territory — no wonder the Japs crashed, he said to himself.

Hovering above the ice field while Deems worriedly stared at their fuel gauge, Killifer jinked the lumbering spacecraft sideways, searching for solid ground to land on.

“Ice field’s a lot bigger on this side of the mountain,” he muttered.

“But they wont be able to claim it once we rescue them, huh?”

“That’s the theory.” The only ground the infrared display showed looked too rough for a landing, strewn with boulders; the size of houses.

The radio speaker crackled. “Anson to Killifer. Yamagata just launched a lobber from Nippon One on a trajectory for the polar region. Must be their rescue party. Where are you?”

“Looking for a place to land without breaking our asses,” Killifer replied.

“It’s important that you get to the Yamagata team before their rescue party does,” said Anson.

“Yeah, I know. But there doesn’t look like much room to put down safely. That’s why the Japs crashed in the first place.”

“There must be someplace!”

“When I find it I’ll let you know.” Killifer punched the radio off. Turning to Deems, he added, “If we can find a landing spot before we run out of fuel.”

Deems said, “How about right on the edge of the ice?”

“We’ll melt it, just like they did.”

“Okay, but it can’t be real deep there. Must be solid ground underneath.” Before Killifer could object he added, “And if there’s boulders big enough to give us trouble, they’d probably be poking up above the surface of the ice.”

“Probably,” Killifer muttered.

“I don’t see any other way,” said Deems. “Do you?”

Killifer stared at the polished visor of Deems’ helmet. He could only make out the vaguest outline of the face inside. For a scared rabbit, Killifer though, he’s getting pretty gutsy.

“Otherwise we’re just going to run out of propellant jerking around, looking for a flat spot that isn’t here.”

Unaccustomed to bold ideas from Deems, Killifer grunted and mumbled, “Maybe you’re right.”

MOONBASE

It was unusual for a Clippership to land at Moonbase. Usually (the big commercial spaceliners went only as far as the space stations that hugged Earth in low orbits.

Greg watched the main display screen at the spaceport flight control center as the big, cone-shaped Maxwell Hunter settled slowly, silently on its rocket exhaust. More than a dozen others had crowded into the flight control center, too. Like a cruise liner landing in some out-of-the-way port, Greg thought. The natives go down to the dock to watch.

A flexible access tube wormed its way to the Clipper’s main airlock while the ship stood on the blast-scarred landing pad, gleaming in the sunlight. Greg knew that the Clipper carried Professor Wilhelm Zimmerman and four of his top aides. Kris Cardenas was on her way to Moonbase, also. And Mom. It’s going to be a busy few hours here, he said to himself.

Greg was shocked when Wilhelm Zimmerman pushed through the airlock hatch at the underground receiving area. He was grossly fat, almost as wide across his soft sagging middle as he was tall. Bald, jowly, wearing a gray three-piece business suit with the unbuttoned jacket flapping ludicrously, the first thing he did upon setting foot on the underground chamber’s rock floor was to reach into his jacket pocket and pull out a long, black, evil-looking cigar.

“You can’t smoke in here!” Greg shouted, lunging toward him.

Zimmerman scowled from beneath bushy gray eyebrows. “So? Then where?”

“Nowhere in Moonbase. Snicking is strictly prohibited. For safety reasons.”

“Nonsense!” Zimmerman snapped. “Like the laws in Switzerland. Pure nonsense.” He fished in his side pocket and pulled out a gold lighter.

Greg gently took the lighter from him. “This is a totally artificial environment,” he said. “Smoking is not allowed.”

Zimmerman’s scowl deepened. “You drag me up here to this… this… cavern, you ask me to perform a miracle for you, and you deny me my only vice?” His English was heavily accented but understandable.

“I’m afraid so, Professor.”

“Professor Doctor!”

“No smoking,” Greg said somberly, “no matter how many titles you have.”

Zimmerman looked as if he wanted to turn around and go back to the spacecraft that had brought him. But then he broke into a fleshy grin.

“Very well,” he said, suddenly amiable. “Since I have no choice, I will refrain from smoking. But you can’t stop me from chewing!” And he clamped his teeth on the fat black cigar.

Greg raised his eyes to the rock ceiling. “Come this way, please,” he said softly, pointing to the tractor that was waiting to take them to Moonbase proper. “And be careful—”

He realized that Zimmerman was walking perfectly well alongside him. Looking down, Greg saw that Zimmerman’s feet were already shod in weighted lunar boots.

His grin turning triumphant, Zimmerman said grandly, “I am not a complete… how do you say it, tenderfeet?”

“Where did you get them?” Greg asked. “I didn’t know they were available on Earth.”

“Mrs. Scavenger had them aboard the ship that took me here. My abductor is very kind to me.”

“Abductor?” Greg asked as he helped the obese old man up into the tractor.

“You think I would come to this bunker of my own volition? I have been kidnapped, young man, by a powerful, vicious woman.”

Greg gave him a wintry smile. “My mother,” he said as he climbed into the driver’s seat.

“So?” Zimmerman looked briefly surprised. “But your name is not hers.”

His smile disappeared. “She remarried after my father… died.”

“Ah.” Zimmerman nodded, making his jowls jiggle. As Greg put the tractor in gear and started down the long tunnel, he asked, “You have prepared the tissue samples for which I asked?”

“The medics will have them for you by the time we get to the infirmary.”

“And blood — whole plasma, hemoglobin, this you have available?”

Greg shook his head. “The blood bank here is very small. We’re lining up volunteer donors who have the proper ’ blood type.”

“We will probably have to replace his entire blood supply.”

“Then we’ll need more brought up from Earth,” Greg said. “In the meantime, you can examine him and get started on your procedures.”

Zimmerman grunted. “I will have time to wash my hands, perhaps?”

“It’s my half-brother who’s dying, Professor Doctor. We’ve got to act quickly.”

“Ah,” the old man said again. “Very well. The tissue samples are needed so that we can imitate them on the surface of the nanomachines. Otherwise what is still functioning of his body’s immune system will attack the machines when they are injected into his blood stream.”

“I see.”

“You don’t want his damaged immune system attacking the machines that are trying to save him.”

“I understand.”

“Blood transfusions immediately. By the time my associates have analyzed the tissue samples the transfusions must be complete. Then we inject the nanomachines.”

“I see,” said Greg.

Zimmerman lapsed into’silence, folding his hands over his ample belly and letting his-many chins sag to his chest. He seemed asleep. Mom must’ve had him yanked out of his bed, Greg thought. She probably would’ve really kidnapped him if he hadn’t agreed to come up here. She’s frantic over Doug. Would she be just as frantic, just as determined, if it was me in the infirmary, dying?

“Contact light,” Deems said, his voice quavering slightly.

“Okay,” said Killifer. “We’re down.” He was perspiring; cold sweat made his palms slippery, stung his eyes.

They had landed at the edge of the ice field, as Deems had suggested. The ice partially melted beneath the blast of their rocket exhaust and the Jobber’s landing feet sank into a mushy cold swamp. For an instant both men had felt their vehicle; sinking, then it hit solid rock and came to a halt, tilted slightly ’ but safely down.

Killifer reached into his thigh pouch for a reusable sponge-like sheet of plastic to wipe his face. He saw that Deems was doing the same. Scared shitless, Killifer thought.

“Okay,” he said, after taking a breath. “Check suits. Prepare for surface excursion.”

“I don’t see their lights,” Deems said.

“They’re over the horizon, about four klicks out on the ice.”

“We both going out?”

“Damned right. We’ll hook a tether to the winch.”

Deems said, “All right,” without much enthusiasm.

Killifer stuffed his wiper back into the pouch on the thigh of his suit. Then he realized that the cermet hatch cover from Brennart’s hopper was not in there. He groped in the other thigh pouch. Not there, either.

“What’s the matter?” Deems asked.

“Nothing,” Killifer snapped. “Let’s get going.”

The astronomer. Stupid little gook put on my suit when she went up the mountain to get Stavenger. She’s got it!

Panic surged through him. If she understands what it means— No, he told himself. She wouldn’t How could she? It’s just a hunk of cermet to her. I’ll have to get it back from her, though.

“You okay?” Deems’ voice sounded worried in his earphones.

“Yeah. Let’s get moving.”

I’ll have to get it back from her, Killifer told himself again. Because if she figures it out, I’m dead.

Zimmerman terrified the meager infirmary staff. Only one M.D., a very junior young woman, and three technicians who split their time between medical duties and elsewhere, the staff was meant to deal with injuries and minor illnesses. Big problems were sent Earthward, either to one of the space stations or to a hospital on the ground.

“Equipment, this is? Junk, this is!” Zimmerman bellowed when they showed him the infirmary. “It is impossible to work with Tinkertoys! Impossible!”

None of the youngsters could please Zimmerman in the slightest. He bullied them, swore at them in German and English, told them what incompetent swine they were. He cursed their teachers, their progenitors, and predicted a dim future for the human race if such dummkopfs were allowed anywhere near the practice of medicine.

When Greg tried to intervene, Zimmerman turned on him. “So? Now you are an expert, also? How can I work here? Where are my facilities that your blackmailing mother promised me? Where is the blood for transfusion? How can I perform miracles without the tools I need? Even Christ had some water when he wanted to make wine!”

“Willi, Willi, I could hear you out at the airlock.”

Greg turned and saw Kris Cardenas, bright and blonde and perky, striding into the narrow confines of the four-bed infirmary.

“Kristine, liebling , no one told me you were coming here!”

Zimmerman’s demeanor changed as abruptly as the dawn transforms the dark lunar night.

“Willi, you mustn’t let yourself get angry at these people,” Cardenas scolded cheerfully. “They’re trying to help you.”

“Ach, with such help a’ man could die. I’d rather have Hungarians on my side.”

“It’s bad for your heart to get so worked up,” Cardenas said, smiling sweetly. She was wearing a light blue sweater and slightly darker knee-length skirt. If Greg didn’t know better, he would have sworn she wasn’t much older than thirty-five.

Zimmerman’s fleshy face turned puckish. “Ah, this will be like the old days, won’t it? You were my best student, , always.”

“And you were always my favorite professor,” Cardenas returned the compliment.

With a shake of his head that made his jowls waddle, Zimmerman spread his stubby arms in a gesture of helplessness. “But look around at this place! There is not the necessary equipment! There is not the trained staff! How can I—”

Cardenas silenced him by placing a fingertip gently on his lips. “Willi, I’m here. I’ll assist you.”

“You will?”

“And the four people you brought from your clinic.”

“Clinic?” The fat old man looked startled. “I have no clinic! My research facility at the university is a laboratory, not a clinic.”

“Yes, I know,” Cardenas said. “Forgive my error.”

His beaming smile returned. “For you, liebling, no forgiving is necessary. Now let us get to work.”

MOONBASE

“Welcome to Moonbase, mother,” said Greg.

Joanna did not look haggard. Not quite. But the tension in her face was obvious. She’s frightened, Greg realized. Frightened and frustrated because there’s nothing more that she can do for Doug. Nothing but wait and hope that Zimmerman can perform a miracle.

“Take me to him, Greg,” she said, her voice strained. “Please.”

She had changed into standard lunar coveralls on the trip up, Greg saw. White, the color code for medics, rather than management’s sky blue, such as he wore. And she was already wearing weighted boots.

Without another word, Greg led her to the tractor and started down the tunnel toward the main part of the base. I’m getting to be a taxi driver, he grumbled to himself.

“How is he? Is he in pain?”

“They’ve wrapped him in cooling blankets to bring his body temperature down as far as they dare,” Greg reported. “Zimmerman and his team are programming a set of nano-machines to repair the damage to his cells that’s been done by the radiation.”

Joanna nodded tensely.

Glancing at her as they drove down the long tunnel, Greg added, “They’re giving him massive blood transfusions, but the damage is pretty extensive, I’m afraid.”

I’ll give blood,” Joanna said immediately. “You can, too.”

Greg turned away from her. “I don’t know if Zimmerman’s bugs are going to be able to save him.”

“If he can’t, no one can,” Joanna said.

“Careful!” yelped Yazaru Hara. “His ribs are broken.”

“Got to get him out of the seat,” Killifer said, The unconscious Japanese was dead weight made extra heavy by his bulky armored spacesuit. Killifer grasped him under his arms while Hara, turned awkwardly in his seat, lifted his companion’s legs so that the American could slide him out of the spacecraft cockpit.

“How long’s he been unconscious?” Killifer asked, panting with the effort.

“Many hours,” said Hara. “He was still breathing, though, when you arrived.”

“Yeah.” Slowly Killifer pulled Inoguchi’s inert form through the cockpit’s emergency hatch and out onto the black ice.

Deems had rigged a makeshift stretcher out of honeycomb panels from the side of the Yamagata craft. Killifer lowered the spacesuited Japanese onto it. He heard a groan from the Jap.

“He’s still alive!” Hara shouted.

“Yeah,” said Killifer, thinking, Great. Now we gotta carry this dead weight back over four klicks of ice. Lucky if we don’t all wind up with busted bones.

“How much longer will it take?” Joanna demanded, nervously pacing up and down Jinny Anson’s office.

Greg, sitting on the couch jury-rigged from scavenged spacecraft seats, shook his head. Zimmerman and his staff had been working for hours in Moonbase’s nanolab. The grumpy old man hadn’t even looked at Doug yet.

“It takes time,” Kris Cardenas said. She was sitting behind Anson’s desk. Anson herself had rushed down to the control center to pipe Doug’s vidcam disk to The Hague, registering Masterson Corporation’s claim to the Mt Wasser region. She had graciously turned over her entire suite to Joanna, saying she could stay in smaller quarters until her tour of duty was finished and she left for Earth. In truth, she wanted to keep as far away from Joanna as she could.

“But Doug doesn’t have time,” Joanna said. “He’s dying!”

Cardenas got up from the desk chair. I’ll get back to the lab and see if I can help speed things up.”

“Yes,” said Joanna. “Good.”

The instant the door closed behind Cardenas, Greg got up from the couch, took his mother by the hand, and made her sit down where he had been. Then he sat beside her.

“There’s no sense getting yourself sick over this,” he said. “You should try to get some rest”

Joanna shook her head. “How can I rest?”

“I could get something for you, to help you sleep.”

“No! I…’ She stopped, as if confused, suddenly uncertain of what she wanted to say, wanted to do.

I’ll let you know the instant something happens,” Greg promised.

“Don’t you see!” Joanna blurted. “It’s my fault! All my fault! I should never have allowed him to go to Moonbase. I knew he was too young, too careless.” She broke into tears.

Greg put his arms around his mother and let her sob on his shoulder. “It’s not your fault; it isn’t. And he wasn’t careless. Nobody could have predicted the flare.”

“First the Moon killed Paul, now it’s killed him. And it’s my fault, all my fault.”

Coldly, Greg said, “The Moon didn’t kill Paul Stavenger. We both know that.”

Joanna pulled slightly away from him. Her eyes were red, filled with tears. “I was a terrible mother to you, Greg. What happened was my fault as much as anyone’s.”

“Mom, that’s all in the past. There’s no sense dredging it up again.”

“But if only I had been—”

“Stop it,” Greg said sharply. I’ve spent years working my way through this. I don’t want to hear any more about it.”

Joanna stared at him, but said nothing.

“It’s not your fault. None of this is. What’s happened has happened. Now all we can do is wait and see if Zimmerman can save him.”

But he was thinking, Would she cry over me? He tried to remember back to his own childhood, all those years, he could not recall his mother crying for him. Not once.

Joanna pulled herself together with a visible, shuddering effort. “I can’t stay here,” she said, jumping to her feet too hard in the unaccustomed lunar gravity.

Greg had to grab her, steady her. “Be careful, Mom! You’ll hurt yourself.”

“Take me to him,” Joanna said.

“Doug? He’s in—”

“No. Zimmerman. I want to see him. I want to find out what he’s doing.”

Zimmerman sat sweating on a rickety swivel chair that seemed much too fragile to support his weight He had draped an ancient lab smock over his gray suit; the coat had once been white but now, after so many years of wear and washings, it was beyond bleach.

Beads of perspiration on his lip and brow, he chewed anxiously on his black cigar, his fourth of the long, trying day. One of his assistants had thoughtfully converted a laboratory dish into an ashtray for him. It sat on the lab bench at his side, filled with the shredded and soggy remains of three earlier cigars.

On the other side of the clear plastiglass wall, his four assistants bent over lab benches. Their lab smocks looked very new, starched and pressed.

The airtight door of the nanotechnology laboratory sighed open and Kris Cardenas came through.

“How’s it going?” she asked.

Zimmerman’s bushy brows contracted into a worried frown. “What takes weeks in Basel we are trying to do in hours here.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Turn up the air conditioning! Must I suffer like this?”

Cardenas shrugged. “I think the temperature is centrally controlled.” To her the lab felt comfortably warm; perhaps a bit stuffy. She smiled and added, “If you would lose some weight—”

“Camouflage,” Zimmerman said, slapping his belly.

“Camouflage?”

“Do you think the politicians and their spies suspect me of working on nanotherapies when I am so gross? Hah?”

Cardenas felt her jaw drop open. “Is it that bad? Even in Switzerland?”

“I take no chances,” Zimmerman said.

“Do you need anything?” Cardenas asked.

Zimmerman’s cheeks waddled slightly. “No. The equipment here is surprisingly good. Not precisely what we require for medical work, but good enough, I think. We are adapting it.”

“They use nanomachines here quite a bit.”

“But not for medical purposes.”

“No, I think not.”

“How is the patient?” Zimmerman asked.

Cardenas shrugged. “last time I checked he was fairly stable. Sinking slowly, but they’ve lowered his metabolic rate as far as they can.”

“Hmm.”

The airtight door slid open again and Joanna Masterson strode through, followed by Greg.

Zimmerman scowled. “This laboratory is in use. Find yourselves—”

“This is Joanna Masterson,” Cardenas said quickly.

Pushing himself up from the creaking little chair, Zimmerman clicked his heels and bowed slightly. “My abductress. The woman who has blackmailed me.”

Joanna ignored his jibe. She looked at the rumpled obese old man, noting that he was several inches shorter than she.

“How soon will you be ready?” she asked.

“As soon as we can,” Zimmerman said.

“Please don’t play games and don’t patronize me. My son is dying. How soon can you begin to help him?”

Zimmerman’s tone changed. “It’s a matter of programming. We are moving ahead as quickly as we can.”

“Programming,” Joanna echoed.

Waving a pudgy hand, Zimmerman explained, “We are adapting our little machines to seek out damaged cells and repair them. They will remove damaged material, molecule by molecule, and repair the cells with fresh material, molecule by molecule.”

Joanna nodded. Greg, standing slightly behind her, folded his arms across his eftest.

“The problem is that your son has sustained massive damage. His case is very different from merely getting rid of accumulated fat cells or breaking down plaque along blood vessels.”

“Can you do it?” Joanna asked.

“We will do it, Madam,” said Zimmerman. “Whether we will be able to do it in time, before he is too far gone even for the nanomachines to help him, remains questionable.”

“Is there anything else that you need? Any other assistants?”

“Nothing and no one that could be brought here in time.”

Greg asked, “How much of a chance does he have? I mean—”

“If I had even one single week this would be no problem.”

“But we’ve only got a few hours.”

Zimmerman sighed hugely. “Yah. This I know.”

Killifer clumped wearily to the comm cubicle of the buried shelter, still in his spacesuit, minus only the helmet. The young woman at the communications console rose to her feet.

“You did a fine job out there,” she said, eyes gleaming. “You saved two lives.”

With a crooked grin, Killifer said, “I saved the corporation from any competition to their claim, that’s what I saved.”

The young woman smiled knowingly. “You’re just being modest.”

Killifer shook his head and took the emptied chair, thinking, Hey, now I’m a friggin’ hero. I’ll have to look her up when we get back to the base. Might be worth some sack time.

“Moonbase says the Yamagata craft has shifted its trajectory and asked for permission to land here and pick up their men.”

“They’re welcome to ’em. I hope they brought medics. One of them’s in a bad way. Busted ribs.”

As he spoke, Killifer opened the channel to Moonbase. Jinny Anson’s face appeared on his screen, surprising him.

“I’m living in the control center until things settle down,” Anson told him. “Mrs. Stavenger’s come up here to be with her son.”

“She’s there? At Moonbase?”

“Yep. She’s going to be pretty damned thankful to you for getting him down off the mountain, I betcha.”

Like I had any choice, Killifer thought.

“And for getting those two stranded Japanese guys. Yamagata’s people have been falling all over themselves thanking us.”

“Really?”

“That’s their way of admitting that they messed up any claim they might have made. Heads are going to roll over at Nippon One, I betcha.”

Who gives a fuck? Killifer said to himself. Then he remembered, and a pang of sudden fear flared through him.

“How’s the Stavenger kid?” he asked.

Anson shook her head. “Not good. The Dragon Lady’s brought a team of nano specialists up here, but I don’t know if they can save him. He’s pretty far gone.”

It took a conscious effort for Killifer to unclench his teeth. “And the astronomer? Rhee? How’s she doing?”

Anson looked mildly surprised. “I don’t know. She was hanging pretty close to Doug Stavenger but she ought to be back at her job by now.”

Killifer nodded. I’ll have to track her down when we get back to the base.

“I’m going to start breaking the camp here, soon as the Yamagata ship lands and picks up their guys.”

“Right,” said Anson. “The expedition didn’t go the way we planned, but at least we’ve got a valid claim to the territory. Next time we go back, you’ll be in charge.”

Killifer made himself grin. “Yeah? That’s great.” But he knew that his newfound status as a hero and leader could be destroyed by a single small square of cermet. I’ve gotta get it away from her, he told himself. Got to.

INFIRMARY

“That’s it?” Joanna whispered harshly. “All these hours have been spent to make something that doesn’t even fill a single hypodermic?”

Standing beside her, Kris Cardenas nodded without taking her eyes off Zimmerman’s bulky lab-coated form, bending over Doug’s infirmary bed.

“That’s all he’ll need,” she whispered back, “if it works right.”

Doug lay unconscious, his face pallid as death, covered to his chin in cooling blankets. Another hypothermia wrap was wound around his head. Like the undergarment of a spacesuit, the pale blue blankets were honeycombed with fine plastic tubes that carried refrigerated water to keep Doug’s body temperature as low as possible. Intravenous lines fed into his arms and an oxygen tube was fixed to his nostrils.

Joanna couldn’t tell if her son was breathing or not. The monitoring instruments above the bed showed his life signs: their ragged electronic lines looked dangerously low to her. She glanced at Greg, standing on her other side. He stared grimly through the plastiglass window that separated them from the infirmary bed.

“Shouldn’t we have a medical team to stay with him? I could bring—”

Cardenas silenced her by placing a hand on Joanna’s shoulder. “Zimmerman’s an M.D. as well as a Ph.D. And two of his aides are also physicians.”

Zimmerman straightened up. For a moment he gazed down at the unconscious patient, then he turned and went to the door.

Stepping into the observation cubicle where the others waited, he dropped the syringe into the waste recycling can.

“It is done,” he said, his voice loud enough to startle Joanna. “Now we wait.”

“And rest,” Cardenas said. “You look like you could use a nice nap, Willi.”

In truth, his fleshy face looked ravaged.

Greg spoke up, “We should all get some sleep.” Turning to Zimmerman, he asked, “How long before we see some results?”

The old man blinked his pouchy eyes. “Twelve hours. Maybe more. Maybe a little less.”

“Nothing’s going to happen for eight to ten hours, at least,” Cardenas said briskly. “So let’s all get a decent sleep.”

Greg agreed. I’ll get the people on duty to call if there’s any change in his condition.”

Joanna said, “I can sleep here, on the chair.”

“No,” Greg said firmly, taking her by the arm. “You sleep in your quarters, on a bunk. Doctor’s orders.”

Reluctantly, Joanna allowed her elder son to lead her out of the observation room and toward the suite that Anson had vacated for her. She almost felt grateful to Greg for his forceful tenderness.

Small as viruses, millions upon millions of nanomachines flowed through Doug’s blood stream like an army of repair personnel eager to get to work. Blind, deaf, without the intelligence of an amoeba, they were tuned to the chemical signatures that cells emit In their world of the ultrasmall, where a bacterium is as gigantic and complex as a shopping mall, they were guided by the shapes of the molecules swarming around them.

Built to seek out specific types of molecules, they quickly spread through the enormous labyrinthine ways of Doug’s failing body. With receptors barely a thousand atoms long they touched and tested every molecule they came in contact with. Hardly any of them were of interest to the nanomachines; they merely touched, found that the molecule did not fit precisely into their receptor jaws, and left the molecule behind. Like a lock seeking its proper key, each nanomachine blindly searched the teeming liquid world within Doug’s wasting body.

When they did find a molecule that nested properly in their receptors, they clamped onto it and tore it apart into its individual atoms: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and the rarer metals and minerals. Then other nanomachines seized the freed atoms and combined them into new molecules, new nutrients for the cells that were damaged and dying.

Deep into the cells they penetrated, into the nucleus where the huge double spiral DNA molecules worked as templates for building vital proteins. Here was where the most crucial damage had been done. The links between the two intertwining spirals, the base pairs that were the genes themselves, had been heavily damaged by the ionizing radiation. Where the nanomachines saw a break in this vital linkage, where base pairs had been broken or mismatched, the nanomachines rebuilt the bases and linked them correctly. Like vastly complex three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles, the DNA molecules were put together properly by the busily hurrying nanomachines, much as Doug’s own natural enzymes were valiantly trying to do. Together, the polymerases and the nanomachines worked frantically to repair the massive DNA molecules.

They worked with blinding speed, although time meant nothing to them. In this nanometer universe a thousandth of a second stretched like years and decades. In microseconds they repaired damaged cells and then flowed onward, seeking, testing, destroying damaged areas, rebuilding molecules for the growth of healthy new cells. DNA repair was more intricate, more demanding. It took whole tenths of seconds to repair a damaged DNA molecule. Millions of cells and DNA molecules were repaired each minute. But there were so many billions more to reach.

Killifer was not accustomed to being a hero. He was surprised to see that Jinny Anson and more than a dozen others were waiting for him at The Pit when he led his weary team out of their Jobbers. Anson pounded him on the back and insisted on taking him to The Cave for a drink. She even provided the booze.

“You did damned fine out there,” Anson said, leaning back in her chair, grinning across the table at Killifer.

Unshaven, grimy, Killifer relished the glow of the rocket juice that laced his coffee. And the glow of her approval.

“Yep,” Anson said, “now I can turn over the job to Greg Masterson and leave on schedule and get myself married.”

Shocked, Killifer blurted, “Married?”

“The Dragon Lady wanted me to stay on until the expedition got back. So now you’re back and I can head for San Antone with a clear conscience.”

I’ll be damned,” Killifer said.

Anson’s expression sobered. “Shame about Brennart, though.”

“Yeah.”

“What went wrong with his hopper, do you think? Why’d it die out there?”

Shifting nervously in his chair, Killifer said, “Radiation must’ve knocked out the electrical system. Something like ithat.”

“Somebody’ll have to check it out when you go back there,” said Anson.

“Yeah. Right”

“But we’ve got the polar region, that’s what’s really important.”

“How’s the Stavenger kid?”

She shrugged. “They’re working on him.”

“Is he gonna pull through?”

With a shake of her head, Anson replied, “Damned if I know. They’ve dragooned some high-priced talent here to try nanotherapy on him, but nobody knows if it’ll work.”

Killifer was silent for a moment ’And, uh, the astronomer…’ Don’t look too anxious, he warned himself. “What’s her name?”

“The Korean? Rhee. Bianca Rhee.”

“Yeah. How’s she doing?”

“Okay, I guess, Why’re you so interested in her?”

I’m not,” he said quickly. “Just — she flew out with Stavenger, I wanted to make sure she’s okay.”

“She’s probably on duty right now. Check the astronomy dome if you want to see her.”

“Yeah,” Killifer said. “Maybe I will. After I clean up some.”

Anson grinned lopsidedly. “Do I detect a romance?”

“Naw,” Killifer said. Then wished he hadn’t.

It made no difference. Anson, her mind turning toward her own marriage, said, “Don’t be coy, Jack. You’re a hero now. You can have your pick of the love-starved women of Moonbase, I betcha.”

Killifer grinned at the idea. Yeah, he told himself. I’m a big friggin’ hero. As long as nobody finds out what I did to Brennart and Doug Stavenger.

She wasn’t at the astronomy dome. The place was empty. Nothing there except a half dozen display screens and a computer humming to itself.

Killifer slipped into the empty chair and used the computer to find where Rhee’s quarters were. He phoned; no answer.

Maybe I can duck in there, he thought, and find the cement cover. Then when we go back to Mt. Wasser I can stick it back onto the hopper and nobody’ll ever know what happened.

He headed for Rhee’s quarters.

Bianca Rhee was at the infirmary, staring through the observation room’s window at Doug’s inert form, still swathed in the light blue cooling blankets. The medic on duty told her that Doug wasn’t expected to come out of his hypothermic coma for days. But with oriental patience, Rhee sat as immobile as he was and watched over him.

The accordion-fold door was locked but Killifer got past it easily enough, using his plastic ID card to spring the bolt. Rhee’s one room looked as neat as a real-estate model. Everything in place. Bed, desk, bureau: standard issue, same as every other apartment in Moonbase. The only signs of individuality were a set of framed photographs on the bureau, family from the looks of mem, and a delicate small lacquered vase with an imitation flower in it.

Killifer went swiftly through the desk drawers. It wasn’t there. Then the bureau. Nothing but clothes. And a pair of toe shoes, for god’s sake, beat up as hell and just as smelly. The closet Not there either.

He stood for an agonized moment in the middle of the room, so small that he could almost touch its opposing walls by stretching out his arms. It’s got to be in here someplace, he told himself. Where? He checked under her sink. Nothing.

Where the hell is it? She can’t be carrying it around with her. Can she?

Then he saw it. So obvious that he knew she wasn’t trying to hide it. She was using it as a base, beneath the flower vase. Its gold plating complimented the deep burgundy of the vase nicely. Killifer felt his pent-up breath ease out of him. Feeling enormously relieved, he slipped the cover out from under the vase and tucked it into the back pocket of his coveralls. : Cautiously, he cracked the apartment door open. Two people were coming down the tunnel, talking earnestly. Killifer let them pass, then eased himself out behind them, closed the door and heard its lock click, then walked swiftly in the other direction.

With the cermet cover in his pocket.

“It’s been almost twelve hours,” Joanna said to Zimmerman. “Shouldn’t we see some change? Some improvement?”

She and Greg, the Swiss scientist and Cardenas were in the infirmary’s observation room again. A young oriental woman had been sitting there when Joanna entered, but she got up and left so swiftly that Joanna didn’t even get the chance to ask her who she was. She was wearing the pumpkin orange coveralls of the scientific staff; maybe she was working for Zimmerman, Joanna thought.

“There is improvement’ Zimmerman said, pointing a stubby finger at the monitors above Doug’s bed. “Look at his vital signs. Heartbeat is stronger. Blood pressure is almost normal. Kidney function is returning.

“But he hasn’t moved,” Greg said, peering through the window.

“That’s to be expected,” Cardenas said softly. “He’s using all his energy internally.”

“I believe,” Zimmerman said, pulling out another long black cigar, “that it will be possible to remove the hypothermic blankets in another two hours.” He chomped on the cigar with relish. “Three, at most.”

“And then?” Joanna asked.

With a sloppy shrug, Zimmerman said, “And then, sooner or later he will wake up and ask for food. He will be very hungry. Very!”

“He’ll be cured?”

“If that’s the word you want to use, yes. He will begin to function normally again.” Zimmerman grinned around his cigar.

Joanna looked from his florid, fleshy face through the window at her son. Doug will be cured! This nightmare will be over. Even Greg looked pleased, she thought.

“He’ll be all right,” Cardenas said to her. “The nanomachines are working inside him.”

For an instant Joanna wanted to throw her arms around Zimmerman and kiss him. But she controlled herself and the moment passed. As calmly as she could, she said to him, “Dr. Zimmerman, I want to find some way to repay you. What can I do?”

“Let me go home,” he snapped.

Laughing, Joanna said, “Of course. Of course. As soon as Doug regains consciousness — although I suppose you’ll want to see him after he’s on his feet again.”

“Yes, yes. You have virtual reality equipment here. I can examine him using VR.”

“But won’t you want to see him in person?” Joanna asked. “In the flesh?”

Zimmerman shook his head violently, making his cheeks waddle. “I am not coming back to this cavern! Never!”

“All right. Doug can see you in Basel, then.”

“That will be impossible, I fear.”

“Why not?”

“A young man who is carrying millions of self-replicating nanomachines in his body would not be a welcome person on Earth. I doubt that he would be able to get past your own customs and immigration inspectors.”

Feeling confused, Joanna sat down on the couch facing the observation window. “I don’t understand.”

Cardenas sat next to her. Zimmerman remained standing. Greg was staring at him now.

“Your son is carrying nanomachines,” Zimmerman said. “He would not be permitted to land on Earth. Every nation has laws against nanomachines in the human body. They are all afraid of nanomonsters.”

“But the bugs will flush out of his system once they’ve finished their work,” Joanna said, then added, “Won’t they?”

Zimmerman would not meet her eye.

Joanna turned to Cardenas. “What’s he talking about?”

With a careful sigh, Cardenas said, “You know about the laws against injecting nanomachines into human patients, don’t you?”

“Oh, that stupid stuff.”

“It’s stupid, all right, but it’s still the law. If Doug still has any trace of nanomachines in his system, he’ll be stopped by the immigration inspectors at any rocket port on Earth. They’re terrified of nanobugs running amok and killing people.”

“But—”

“May I point out,” Zimmerman interjected, “that perhaps these laws are not so stupid after all. How many military establishments have supported research into nanoweapons? Nanotechnology could make biological warfare look like child’s games.”

“But there are laws against military applications of nanotechnology,” Greg objected. “International treaties.”

“Yes, of course. Those are precisely the laws that do not allow nanomachines to be injected into human patients.”

“But Doug isn’t going to hurt anybody!” Joanna said.

“’Still, he will be carrying these self-replicating nano-machines for as long as he lives.”

“What?” Startled, Joanna snapped, “You didn’t tell me that-’„”

“That,” said Zimmerman, bending to put his cigar-clenched face close to hers, “is the payment I extract from you.”

“Payment? What are you talking about?”

“Your son is my living laboratory, Madam; my lifetime experiment. He carries self-replicating nanotnachines within his body. Forever.”

“What have you done?” Joanna cried.

“I have given your son a great gift, Madam,” Zimmerman replied.

Before Joanna could say anything, Cardenas said, “You’ve enhanced his immune system.”

Zimmerman took the soggy cigar from his mouth. “Yah, but there is more to it than that.”

“What?” Joanna demanded.

Almost smirking, Zimmerman said, “Frankly, I do not know. No one can know. We have no experience with self-replicating nanomachines in the human body.”

“You’ve turned my son into—”

“An experiment. A living laboratory,” Zimmerman said. “A step toward the perfection of nanotherapy.”

Before Joanna could reply, Cardenas said, “It’s a great gift, really! His immune system is now so enhanced he’ll probably never even catch a cold anymore.”

Zimmerman nodded. “Perhaps. The machines should be able to adapt to destroy microbes and viruses that invade his body.”

“But you don’t know for certain what they’ll do,” Greg said, his voice hollow.

“They should also repair effects of aging and any injuries he might incur,” Zimmerman added, still speaking to Joanna. “Your son will most likely live a long, long time, Frau Stavenger.”

Greg muttered something too low for Joanna to hear.

“But mat doesn’t mean he can’t return to Earth,” Joanna said.

“Yes it does,” said Cardenas. “They’ll never let him off the rocket.”

“They don’t have to know.”

“They already know,” Zimmerman said. “I have informed my colleagues and by now the authorities know.”

“You informed… why?” Joanna wanted to scream, yet her voice was barely a whisper.

“I have my own fish to fry, Madam. My own agenda. Your son will be a living advertisement that nanotherapy is not dangerous and not undesirable. I will see to it that his case is broadcast all over the world. Some day, sooner or later, he will jecome the cause celebre that will lead these ignorant politicians and witch doctors to lift their ban on nanotherapy.”

Feeling fury rising within her, Joanna said, “I don’t want a cause celebre. I want a normal, healthy son!”

“Healthy, he will be,” said Zimmerman. “Normal, never.”

Trying to cool her down, Cardenas said, “Think of it, Joanna. He’ll never get ill. He might never even get old! And if he’s ever injured, the nanomachines will repair him.”

Joanna thought of it. And turned to Greg, who stood mute and deathly pale, staring through the observation window at his half brother.

Slowly Doug woke from a long, deep dream. He had been swimming with dolphins the way he’d done when he was a kid visiting Hawaii except that the water was cold, numbingly cold and so dark that he could only sense the dolphins swimming alongside him, big powerful sleek bodies gliding effortlessly through the cold black waters. Don’t leave me behind, he called to them, but somehow he was on the Moon and it was Brennart standing beside him whispering something, the secrets of the universe maybe, but Doug could not hear the man’s words.

And then his eyes opened.

He saw that he was in some kind of hospital room. Moonbase. The infirmary. Low rock ceiling painted a cheerful butter yellow. A wide mirror took up almost the whole wall on one side of his bed. He could hear the humming and beeping of electronic monitors over his head.

The door opened and Bianca Rhee stepped through.

“You’re awake!” she said looking happy and surprised and awed and curious, all at once.

Doug grinned at her. “I guess I am.”

“How do you feel?”

“Hungry!”

Bianca’s smile threatened to split her face in two. Before she could say another word, a medic in crisp white coveralls pushed through the door angrily.

“What’re you doing in here?” he demanded of Rhee. “No one’s allowed in here without—”

“Shut up!” Doug snapped. “She’s my friend.”

The man glared at Doug. “No one is allowed inside this cubicle without specific permission from the resident M.D., friend or not.”

Over the next ten minutes, Doug learned how wrong the young medic was. Rhee dutifully left his cubicle, but his mother, Greg, and several strangers poured in, including a funny-looking fat older man with an unlit cigar clamped ludicrously in his teeth.

His mother fell on his neck, crying for the first time he could remember. Greg smiled stiffly. The others stared at the monitors while they checked his pulse, thumped his chest, and performed other ancient medical rituals.

“How do you feel?” everyone seemed to ask.

“Hungry,” Doug kept repeating. But no one brought him anything to eat.

Gradually he began to piece it together from the babbling of their chatter. Nanotherapy. He was alive and well. And would be for a long time to come. It was a lot to take in over a few minutes. It seemed to Doug as if just a few minutes ago he was dying from radiation poisoning. Now they were telling him he would live forever, just about.

“Could I just have something to eat?” he shouted over their voices.

Everyone stopped and stared at him.

“I’m starving,” Doug said.

“You see?” said the old fat guy. “Just as I told you!”

INFIRMARY

Bianca Rhee came back, shyly, almost tiptoeing into Doug’s cubicle after everyone else had left. He had eaten a full dinner, napped a short while, then asked for another dinner. Its remnant crumbs were all that was left on the food tray when Rhee entered and smiled happily at him.

“How do you feel?” she asked, sitting on the edge of his bed because there was no chair in his cubicle.

“Fine,” said Doug with a big grin. “I feel as if I could run up to the top of Mt. Wasser in my bare feet!”

“The nanotherapy is really working.”

“I guess it is.”

“Do you feel — different?”

Doug thought about it for a moment. “No,” he answered. “Not different, exactly. Just — a little tired, but good, just the same. Like I’ve just won my fifth gold medal in the Olympics.”

“That’s wonderful,” she said.

“What about you?” Doug asked. “Have you been checked over? Are you okay?”

She shrugged. “We all took more of a radiation dose than we should have, but I’m okay. No obvious medical problems.”

“Obvious?”

“Oh, I might have a two-headed baby someday.” She tried to laugh.

“And your chances of getting cancer?” Doug asked.

“A few percent higher.”

“Oh.”

“But that won’t happen until I’m old and gray,” she said.

“Besides, there’s no history of cancer in my family.”

“That’s good,” Doug said, but he thought, There will be now, most likely.

Then he noticed that her coveralls were sweat-stained, and there was a fine sheen of perspiration on her forehead.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked. “You’re perspiring.”

“Oh.” Rhee looked more embarrassed than worried. “I — I was exercising a little.”

“Exercising?”

She nodded, keeping her lips clamped tight This isn’t the time to tell him I practice dancing, she decided. He’s a nice, guy, but he’d laugh. The fat little gook in ballet slippers, pretending she’s a ballerina in the low gravity of the Moon. Anyone would laugh.

So they talked about the expedition, about Brennart and what heroism was all about. Doug told Bianca that Brennart was already dying of cancer and had nothing much to lose by his daring.

She shook her head. “I still think it was a real bonkhead thing to do. Just because he wanted be a hero was no reason for you to take such a risk.”

“We would’ve been okay,” Doug insisted, “if the hopper hadn’t broken down.”

“Sure.”

“Well, anyway, I appreciate your coming out to get us. You saved my life.”

Bianca blushed. “I didn’t do much. The radiation was back to normal by then.”

“Still, you must’ve volunteered. Didn’t you?”

“Well… yes, I guess I did.”

“And my vidcam,” Doug went on. “You saved that, too, didn’t you? The corporation owes you a lot”

Her expression changed. “I didn’t do it for the corporation,” Bianca said, so low mat Doug could barely hear her.

“Still,” he said, “you’re as much a hero as anybody.”

She shook her head. “Not really.”

Doug sensed that something had gone slightly off track.

Bianca had been smiling and friendly up to a moment ago, but now she seemed to be almost sad, almost — disappointed.

“Tell me all about it,” he said. “Tell me exactly what happened.”

“It was all in a rush, you know,” she said, still looking unhappy, almost bitter. “Kind of confused. Killifer was pretty nervous, really wired tight. He got pissed off because I grabbed his suit by mistake.”

Doug listened as she haltingly told him what they were doing while he and Brennart were stuck underneath the hopper on the mountaintop.

“… and when you started mumbling about the Yamagata people, he didn’t want to believe you.”

“Killifer?”

“Right. He didn’t like the idea of going out again to find them. He didn’t like it all”

Doug let out a sigh. “I guess I don’t blame him.”

Rhee’s face contracted into a puzzled frown. “And there was something semi-weird, too.”

“Semi-weird?” Doug grinned at her.

“When I got your vidcam, there was another piece of something… a flat oblong hunk of ceramic or metal. I don’t think it’s part of the vidcam. It was all white on one side and gold on the other.”

“Doesn’t sound like anything from the vidcam.”

“No. Besides, the vidcam looked intact to me. Maybe it was something Killifer had on him. I was in his suit, remember. Maybe he already had it in his pocket.”

Curious, Doug asked, “How big was it?”

She shaped it with her hands. “Oh, just about fifteen centimeters long, I think. Maybe half that wide.”

“White on one side and gold on the other?”

“I took it along with your vidcam, and then left it in my quarters,” Rhee said, looking even more puzzled. “But it’s disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” Doug sat up straighten.

“It was on my bureau yesterday, but now it’s gone.”

“Are you sure—”

“Of course I’m sure!” she snapped.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” — he laid. “Has anybody else been in your quarters?”

Rhee shook her head. But before she could say anything, the door to Doug’s cubicle slid back and Joanna stepped through. Even in ordinary blue coveralls she radiated power and decision. Zimmerman waddled in behind her, still in his rumpled three-piece suit with the lab coat thrown over it.

Rhee hopped off the bed. “I’m glad you feel so well, Doug,” she said. Impulsively, she darted forward and gave Doug a peck on the cheek, then rushed past Joanna and Zimmerman and left the room.

“Who’s that?” Joanna demanded.

“The woman who saved my life,” said Doug.

Joanna frowned, while Zimmerman smiled bemusedly.

“Does that give her the right to kiss you?” Joanna asked sharply.

“Oh come on, Mom! It was just a friendly little smack.”

“You don’t have to feel obligated to somebody for doing their job,” Joanna said.

Doug laughed lightly. “Simmer down, Mom. She’s just a friend. I hardly even know her, actually.”

Zimmerman eyed him thoughtfully. “Perhaps the nano-machines enhance your sexual attractiveness, hah?”

Doug frowned at the old man. “You must be Dr. Zimmerman, right?”

“Yah.” Zimmerman clicked his heels and bowed slightly, his paunch making it difficult to go farther.

“How soon can I get out of here?” Doug asked. “I feel fine. Terrific, in fact”

Glancing at the monitors over Doug’s bed, Zimmerman said, “Another few hours. There are some tests I must do. Then you get out of bed and I leave this glorified cave and return to civilization.”

Joanna paced over to the other side of the bed. “Do you really feel fine?”

“Like I said, terrific. Really.”

His mother looked across the bed at Zimmerman. Doug saw tears in her eyes. “You’ve saved him.”

The sloppy old man shrugged, suddenly too embarrassed to say anything.

And Doug realized the enormity of what had happened to him. I would have died, he told himself. Under any normal circumstances I would be dead now.

He looked at Zimmerman with different eyes and saw a man of strength and vigor and the kind of passion that dares to challenge anyone, everyone who stands in the way between him and his life’s work. Governments had outlawed nanotherapy. Ignorant mobs had burned nanolabs and killed researchers. But Zimmerman plugged doggedly ahead, despite all of that. Doug understood that even a fat old man can be heroic.

“You’ve given me life,” Doug said.

“No,” Zimmerman said, shaking his head slowly. “Your mother gave you life. I have merely helped you to keep it. And perhaps prolong it.”

“If there’s anything we can do,” Joanna said stiffly, “you only have to name it.”

“I have already informed you of my price, Madam.”

Joanna’s expression hardened. “Yes, you have, haven’t you?”

“What I have already gained will be payment enough. Plus transportation back to Basel, of course.”

“Of course,” said Joanna. She was positively glaring at the old man now.

Doug realized that their conversation, back and forth across his bed, dealt with things he didn’t know about.

“What’s the price?” he asked. “What are you two talking about?”

Joanna tore her gaze from Zimmerman and looked down at her son: so young, so innocent and unknowing.

“She is referring, young man, to the fact that you will not be allowed to leave the Moon.”

“For how long?” Doug asked.

“Forever,” blurted Joanna.

“You are a walking nahomachine factory now,” said Zimmerman. “No nation on Eartb will allow you entry.”

Doug turned from Zimmerman, who looked gravely concerned, to his mother, who looked angry and fearful and almost tearfully sad.

“Is that all?” he asked. “I have to stay here on the Moon? That’s what I wanted to do anyway.7

It was supposed to be Jinny Anson’s going-away party. And it was supposed to be a surprise. But when Anson stepped into the darkened biolab, led by the hand by Lev Brudnoy, and they snapped on the lights and everybody yelled, “Surprise!” Anson took it all in her stride.

“You are not surprised,” Brudnoy said, disappointed, as well-wishers pressed drinks into their hands.

Anson fixed him with a look. “What kind of a base director would I be if I didn’t know what you guys were plotting?”

“Ah,” said Brudnoy. “Of course.”

She was surprised, though, when a dozen of the women started handing her wedding presents. Little things, made at Moonbase of lunar raw materials or cast-off equipment. A digital clock set to Universal Mean Time that told when lunar sunrise and sunset would be. A hotplate of cermet salvaged from a junked lander. A vial of lunar glass filled with regolith sand.

Halfway through the wedding gifts, Jack Killifer showed up and the party quickly centered around the new hero. Just as Anson had predicted, the women clustered around Jack, who had shaved and showered and put on a crisp new jumpsuit for the party.

Even as she continued to unwrap presents, Anson scanned the growing crowd for the astronomer, Rhee. No sign of her. Busted romance? she wondered. Or is the kid too shy to come to the party? She sneaks off every now and then. I thought she just wanted to be alone, but maybe she’s already got a boyfriend tucked away someplace.

Not likely, Anson thought. Rhee’s not much of a looker and she’s too timid to go out and grab a guy for herself.

One of the lab benches had been turned into a bar. Anson wondered if the illicit still had been stashed in this lab all along; certainly they had all the right equipment for it, plumbing and glassware and enough chemical stores to plaster the whole base. The noise level climbed steadily: people talking at the top of their lungs, laughing, drinking. And then somebody turned on a music disk. The display screens along the walls all began to flash psychedelic colors and the lab quivered under the heavy thumping beat and sharp bleating whine of an adenoidal singer.

Couples paired off for dancing. Killifer seemed to be having the time of his life. Anson staggered away from the ear-splitting music, out into the tunnel where the party had spilled over.

Brudnoy was sitting on the floor with half a dozen others. Anson put her back to the wall and let herself slide down to a sitting position, careful not to spill a drop of her beaker of booze.

“You are not reigning at your own party?” Brudnoy asked. Even out here in the tunnel he had to half-shout to be heard over the music.

“Everybody’s having a great time,” she said.

“Are you?”

“Sure.”

“Truly?”

“Yes, of course.”

Brudnoy looked at her with his sad, bleary eyes. “I think you will miss us.”

“Of course I’ll miss you.”

“Will your husband come up here with you? Brudnoy asked.

Anson shook her head. “I’m not coming back, Lev. I told you that. I’m starting a new life.”

“In Texas.”

“Just outside of Austin, actually,” she said, straining her throat to get the words out over the party noise. “In the hill country.”

“The land of enchantment, they say.”

“That’s New Mexico.”

“Oh.”

“But the Texas hill country is beautiful. Air you can breathe. Mountains and valleys and land that goes on forever. Flowers! When the bluebonnets bloom it’s gorgeous. And a blue sky with white clouds. Clean and wonderful.”

“Not like Moonbase.”

“Not at all like Moonbase.”

“And you really want to leave all this behind you?” Brudnoy made a sweep with his arm.

Anson knew he was kidding. Half kidding, at least. That sweep of his arm took in not merely this crowded underground warren of labs and workshops and cramped undersized living quarters. It took in the ancient ringwall mountains and the cracked crater floor, the vast tracts of Mare Nubium and the Ocean of Storms, the slow beauty of a lunar sunrise and the way the regolith sparkled when the sunshine first hits it, the sheer breathtaking wonder of standing on this airless world and planting your bootprints where no one had ever stood before, the excitement of building a new world, even that crazy mountain down at the south pole that’s always in sunshine.

She pulled in a deep breath. “Yes, I’m really going to leave all this behind me. I’ll miss you guys, but I’ve made up my mind.”

Anson was surprised that she had to force the words past a good-sized lump in her throat.

Doug found that he could not lie idly waiting for the medics to start their tests. He asked for a computer and, once the technician on duty wheeled a laptop machine to his bed on a swing-arm table, he searched through the literature program for something to read.

Nothing appealed to him. In the back of his mind a question simmered, making him restless with pent-up curiosity. An oblong piece of ceramic or metal, about fifteen centimeters long and half as wide, gold on one side and white on the other.

There must be an inventory program, Doug told himself. He started searching the computer files for it.

BIOLAB

The party was winding down. Jinny Anson had gone back inside the biolab, Lev Brudnoy at her side. Only about a dozen and a half people remained, most of them paired off into couples. The music had gone softly romantic, dancers held each other in their arms as they shuffled slowly across the cleared space behind tike lab benches.

As Anson tipped over the big cooler of fruit punch to get its last dregs into her plastic cup, Greg Masterson showed up at the door, looking somber as usual. Anson frowned inwardly. He’s going to have to unwind if he expects to make it as director up here. Otherwise he’s going to have a mutiny on his hands.

She giggled to herself. Captain Bligh, she thought. Who would be Fletcher Christian and lead the mutineers?

Brudnoy saw Greg, too, and made his way past the dancers and the lab benches toward him. Jinny followed the Russian, drink in hand, feeling a little annoyed. Greg’s a wet blanket, he’s going to rain on my parade, she thought, mixing metaphors in her slightly inebriated condition.

“Better late man never,” said the Russian, smiling.

Greg’s face remained somber. “Is my brother here?”

“Your brother?” Anson asked. “I thought he was in the infirmary.”

“He was. He just disconnected all his monitors and walked out.”

Anson glanced at Brudnoy, who looked as puzzled as she felt. “He hasn’t shown up here.”

Greg’s frown deepened. “He’s got to be someplace.”

“Want to call security?”

“No,” Greg said. “I don’t Want to get my mother upset. She’s asleep, but—”

“We can search for him,” Brudnoy volunteered. “After all, this place isn’t so big that he can hide from us”

“Why would he want to hide?” Anson wondered.

“Where the hell is he?” Greg growled.

Doug was prowling the tunnel that led to Jack Killifer’s quarters. He had put aside his search of the computer’s inventory program when the medics came in to run their infernal tests. After they left, he booted up the program again and found what he’d been looking for.

The cermet piece that Bianca Rhee had described was a cover for a hopper’s electronics bay. The electronics bay held, among other items, the electrical controls for the main engine’s liquid oxygen pump.

Doug’s mind had leaped from one point to the next. Remove the cover and the electronics systems are exposed directly to the radiation from the solar flare. Knock out the rocket engine’s propellant pump and the engine can’t ignite. A dead engine keeps the hopper on the mountaintop, where the radiation will build up to a lethal level in a couple of hours or less.

He killed Brennart! And he damned near killed me. Once Doug was convinced of that, he pulled off his monitor leads, bolted out of bed and ran out of the infirmary in nothing but his flapping pale blue hospital gown.

Killifer kept the cover in his spacesuit pocket, Doug reasoned as he trotted down the nearly-empty tunnel. It was past midnight, the lighting was turned down to its late-night level. Still, the few people he passed in the tunnel stared at Doug in his loose gown and bare feet.

Bianca found the piece and thought it might have something to do with my vidcam. She kept it in her quarters and Killifer went in there and took it back. Good thing she wasn’t there when he broke in; he might have killed her, too.

There it is. Doug saw J. KILLIFER stencilled on the name card beside the accordion-pleat door. He banged on the door frame and called Killifer’s name. No answer. Either he’s sound asleep or he’s not in. Doug pulled on the door handle. Locked. He braced one bare foot on the door jamb and pulled hard. The flimsy catch gave way and the door jerked open, nearly toppling him.

Doug padded into Killifer’s quarters. Empty. The bunk was a mess, hadn’t been made in days, from the looks of it. The place smelled of unwashed clothes and sweat. Doug closed the door as far as it would go. He’s got to come back here sooner or later. I’ll wait.

He didn’t want to sit on the grubby tangle of the bed. There was a slim molded plastic chair at the room’s desk. When Doug sat on it he realized that his hospital gown left a lot to be desired. The chair felt cold and sticky on his partly-bare rump.

He jumped up and went to Killifer’s closet. Two clean pairs of olive green coveralls hung limply there, but once Doug held them up against his own frame he realized how small Killifer really was. No wonder Bianca took his spacesuit by mistake; he’s not much bigger than she is.

So he waited for Killifer in his loose hospital gown, pacing up and down the tiny room in four strides. Suddenly an idea struck him. The cermet cover must be here someplace, hidden in this room. Doug started to search through the drawers of Killifer’s desk.

It was the best night Jack Killifer had ever had on the Moon. There’s something to this hero business, after all, he laughed to himself as he headed back toward his quarters, weaving slightly along the tunnel.

The patty had been great fun, and just like Jinny had said, there were several women falling all over him. He danced with them all, then picked the one who had snuggled the closest and walked her back to her quarters. Sure enough, she made no objection when he stepped into her place with her and as soon as he slid the door shut she was unzipping her jumpsuit for him.

When he left her quarters, Killifer thought briefly about heading back to the party, see who’s still there, maybe go for a double-header. But as tie started along the tunnel to the biolab he ran into Jinny and Lev and Greg Masterson.

“Have you seen Doug Stavenger?” Jinny asked him, very serious and concerned.

“Little Douggie?” Killifer wanted to laugh but held it in. “He’s in the infirmary.”

“No he’s not,” snapped Greg. He showed no recognition of Killifer whatsoever. They hadn’t seen each other in more than eighteen years, but Killifer recognized Greg instantly.

“We’re trying to find him,” said Brudnoy, also looking so damned sober.

Killifer ignored Greg. He wants to be a stranger, fuck him. Suddenly it all seemed awfully funny: little Douggie out on the loose. Maybe he’ll fall down and break his neck. But he made a serious face and shook his head gravely. “Nope. Haven’t seen him.”

They hurried on past him. Killifer stood in the tunnel, blinking with thought. Douggie’s not in the infirmary. They lost their little Douggie.

Then a thought hit him hard enough to snap him into sobriety. The cover! Suppose the little sonofabitch has figured it all out and he’s looking for the cover. I’d better hide it, and quick.

He started running down the dimly-lit tunnel toward his quarters.

Doug almost laughed at the pathetic stupidity of it. Under the mattress. Killifer had hidden the cermet cover beneath his mattress.

Maybe it wasn’t so dumb after all, Doug thought. It had taken a real effort of will to work up the strength to touch Killifer’s roiled, sweaty bunk.

Doug held the cover in his hands. The murder weapon. He stepped over to the desk and placed it down on its surface, gold side up.

And the door flew open.

Killifer’s eyes were so wide Doug could see white all the way around the irises. The man stared at Doug, then his eyes flicked to the gold-plated cermet cover, then back to Doug again.

“Why did you want to kill Brennart?” Doug asked quietly. “Or was it me you were after?”

Killifer slid the door shut behind him. “It was you. Brennart-’ he shrugged. “Couldn’t be helped.”

“Couldn’t… be… helped.” For the first time in his life Doug felt real anger, a fury that threatened to shatter his self-control.

“He wanted to be a big-ass hero, now he is one,” Killifer said. “So what?”

Before he knew what he was doing, Doug lashed out with a stinging left that snapped Killifer’s head back and a hard straight right, blurringly fast. Killifer slammed back against the rock wall and crumpled to the floor, blood gushing from his nose.

Doug bent down and grabbed the front of his coveralls. Yanking Killifer to his feet, Doug cocked his right fist again.

And stopped. Killifer made no move to protect himself. His arms hung limply at his sides. Blood streamed down his chin, spattering his coveralls and Doug’s hand, still gripping the coverall front.

Doug pushed him onto the bunk.

“Why?” he demanded. “Why did you do it? Why did you want to kill me?”

“Because you killed me, you snotty sonofabitch.”

“Me? I never even saw you until ten days ago.”

“Your mother,” Killifer snarled. “She killed me. She took away everything I ever had. She exiled me to this goddamned cavern in the sky.”

“I know that,” Doug said. “But why? Why would she do that? What did you do to make her hate you so much?”

Killifer stared at him, wiping at his bloody nose. Slowly a crooked smile worked its way across his face.

“You don’t know, do you?” he asked, grinning at Doug. “You really don’t know.”

All of a sudden Doug felt slightly ridiculous, standing over this beaten smaller man in a dangling hospital gown that barely covered him.

Killifer was cackling with laughter. “You don’t know! You don’t know a friggjn’ thing about it! She never told you, did she?”

“Never told me what?”

“About your brother! She never told you what your brother did!”

“Greg?” Doug felt suddenly uneasy, as if he were teetering on the edge of a tremendous precipice. “What’s Greg got to do with this?”

“He killed your old man!” Killifer roared. “He murdered your father, kid.”

“That’s a lie,” Doug snapped.

“The hell it is. Your brother salted the nanomachines your father was using. The nanos didn’t malfunction. They did exactly what they were programmed to do.”

Inwardly Doug was falling off that precipice, dropping like a stone into the darkness. He heard his own voice, hollow with shock, “They were programmed to destroy the spacesuits?”

“Yeah. Your brother asked me for a sample of nanobugs that could eat carbon-based molecules. I didn’t know what the fuck he wanted ’em for, but he was big shit with the corporation so I gave him what he wanted.”

“You gave him—”

“Gave him the bugs that killed your old man, that’s right Nobody else knew. Just your big brother Greg and me. But your mother figured it out and shipped me up here.”

Feeling his legs trembling, Doug pulled up the plastic chair and sat on it. Hard. “But why would she send you here to Moonbase?”

“To get me outta the way, wise ass! She didn’t want me where I might rat out her son.”

“Greg.”

“That’s right.”

“Greg murdered my father and you helped him.”

“Hey, I didn’t know what he wanted the friggin’ bugs for. Not until after it happened.”

“You were just following orders,” Doug muttered.

“Right.”

For what seemed like hours Doug sat there, running the story around in his head, over and over again. Mom protected Greg. She knew he’d killed my father and she protected him. And she never told me.

Never told me.

Never told me.

“So, whatcha gonna do now, kid?” Killifer taunted. “Beat the crap outta me? Kill me?”

Slowly Doug got to his feet. Killifer cringed back on the bunk, his bravado suddenly evaporated.

“Get out of here,” Doug said quietly.

“What?”

“Get off the Moon. Quit Masterson Corporation. Take early retirement and go back to Earth.”

“And if I don’t want to…?”

Doug looked down at him. “If I see you here after tomorrow I’ll kill you.”

From the look in Killifer’s eyes, Doug knew the man believed him.

ALPHONSUS

Doug walked alone across the floor of the giant crater, his boots stirring clouds of dust that settled languidly in the gentle lunar gravity.

He had lost track of time. For hours now the universe had narrowed down to his spacesuit, the sound of his own breathing, the air fans softly whirring, the bleak cracked, pitted ground. He passed the rocket port, where an ungainly transfer ship sat on one of the blast-scarred pads, waiting for tomorrow’s launch Earthward. Past the solar farms he walked, where nanomachines were patiently converting regolith silicon and trace metals into spreading acres of solar panels that drank in sunlight and produced electricity. Off in the distance he could barely make out the dark bulk of the half-finished mass driver, a low dark shadow against the horizon.

Turning, he looked through the visor of his helmet up at the worn, rounded mountains that ringed the crater floor. Mount Yeager, he saw. And the notch in the ringwall near it that everybody called Wodjohowitcz Pass.

My father died up there. Greg murdered him and my mother covered it up, kept it even from me. Protected him, protected my father’s murderer. My half-brother. Her son. He’s just as much her son as I am and he murdered my father. And got away with it.

“Doug? Is that you?”

The voice in his earphones startled him. He would have turned the suit radio off, but the safety people had fixed all the suits so that you couldn’t.

A small tractor was approaching him, kicking up a plume of dust that looked almost silvery in the sunlight. Must be the safety guys, Doug thought. I guess I’ve wandered too far out for them. Broke a rule.

“Doug, are you all right?”

He realized it was Bianca Rhee’s voice.

“I’m okay,” he answered as the tractor approached him. Sort of, he added silently.

He stood there as the tractor pulled up and stopped in a billow-of dream-slow swirling dust.

“Where’ve you been?” Rhee asked, stepping down from the tractor. It was a two-seat machine with a flat bed for cargo: the lunar equivalent of a pickup truck.

“I needed some time by myself,” he said.

“Oh! I’m interrupting—”

“No, it’s okay. I was just about to start back anyway.”

“Everybody’s looking for you. Your mother’s just about to roast the infirmary staff under a rocket nozzle for letting you walk off like that.”

Doug looked at Rhee’s stubby, spacesuited figure and felt glad that their helmet visors hid their faces. He did not want anyone to see his expression right at this moment. Nothing but an impersonal, faceless figure encased in protective plastic, metal and fabric.

“How’d you find me?” he asked.

“I like to be by myself sometimes, too.”

“And you come out here?”

“No…’ Her voice faltered. “I, uh, I find some cubbyhole where I’m alone and I… dance.”

“Dance? By yourself?”

“Ballet,” Rhee said, her voice so low Doug could hardly hear her. “You know, with an orchestra disk.”

“Ballet,” said Doug. “Sure! Here on the Moon it must be terrific.”

I’m not very good, even in low gravity.”

“How do you know, if you don’t let anybody see you?”

“Every time I fall down, I know!”

Doug didn’t laugh. He could tell from the tone of her voice that this was very precious to Rhee.

Softly, he said, “I hope ybu’ll let me see you dance sometime, Bianca.”

He waited for her reply, but she said nothing. So he said, “You’re the only one in the whole base smart enough to find me.”

“I checked with the airlock monitors,” she said, sounding relieved. “They keep a record of everybody who goes out.”

“And comes in,” Doug added. The crew monitoring the main airlock didn’t know that Doug was supposed to be in the infirmary. They had allowed him outside after only a cursory check of the computerized files.

“You must be feeling awfully good to come out here,” Rhee said cheerfully, clambering back up to the driver’s seat.

And Doug realized, She must feel awfully strong about me to come out looking for me. It can’t be impersonal, after all. It never is.

“Bianca,” he asked as he climbed up into the tractor beside her, “how long are you going to be here at Moonbase?”

“My tour’s over at the end of the month. That’s when the new semester starts.”

“Well,” Doug said carefully, “we’ve got a couple of weeks to get acquainted, then.”

He could hear her breath catch, over the suit radio. Then she said, “That’d be fine.”

I can’t tell her anything, Doug knew, but at least I can have a friend to unwind with. Somebody to help keep me sane.

“Uh…’ How to say it without hurting her feelings? “You know, it’s good to have a friend here. I really don’t know anyone else in Moonbase.”

“There’s Killifer,” she said lightly.

“He’s leaving tomorrow.”

“Really?” She sounded completely surprised.

“Really.”

“Well, your brother’s here now, isn’t he?”

“Half brother.” Doug felt his insides clench. “And I hardly know him. He’s always… we’ve never been close.”

He heard her chuckling. “What’s so funny?”

“Oh, I was just thinking about some of the other women here. They’ll be green with envy.”

“Bianca, it isn’t going to be like that.”

“They’ll say I’m robbing the cradle,” she went on, happily ignoring him. “After all, I’m almost five years older than you.”

Doug shook his head inside the helmet. “I’ve aged a lot since coming to Moonbase,” he said. And he hoped that he could keep her as a friend without crushing her dreams.

“You never told me about Greg.”

Doug could see the sudden alarm in his mother’s eyes. They were having dinner together in the suite Anson had turned over to Joanna: a sparse microwaved meal of bland precooked veal that Joanna had commandeered from the stores at The Cave.

“What about Greg?” she asked, from across the round table that Anson had used for conferences in her office.

Despite the roaring emotions blazing in him, Doug still had an appetite. He chewed carefully on a thin slice of veal while his mother watched him, waiting.

Doug put his fork down and said, “Greg murdered my father.”

She did not look surprised. Only tired. Suddenly his mother looked utterly weary.

“He did, didn’t he?” Doug asked, keeping his voice low, not screaming out the accusation the way he wanted to.

“He was terribly sick,” Joanna said. “He didn’t really understand—”

“Don’t lie for him,” Doug snapped. “He killed my father. Killifer helped him. I know the whole story.”

“The whole story? Do you? Do you know what kind of childhood Greg had? How abusive his father was to both of us? Do you know how hard he’s struggled over these past eighteen years to atone for what he did?”

“Atone?”

“Greg’s gone through hell and purgatory to overcome the feelings that led him to… to—”

“Murder,” Doug said, uncompromising.

Tears were glimmering in Joanna’s eyes but she fought them back. “That’s right, murder. He killed your father. My husband. The man I loved.”

“The father I never knew.”

“I knew him. I loved your father.”

Doug saw what she wanted to say. “But you loved Greg, too. You couldn’t let your son be arrested for murder.”

“He was so sick,” Joanna said, suddenly pleading. “Don’t you understand, he would never have done anything like that if he’d been well. He was in torment every day of his life.”

“So you helped him.”

“I protected him. I got him the best medical help on Earth. He worked, Douglas. He went through hell—”

“And purgatory.”

She shook her head. “You just don’t know. How could you? For years and years and years Greg struggled and worked to overcome his feelings. He’s accomplished so much! He’s come so far.”

“He’s come to the Moon.”

“He’s your brother,” Joanna said.

“Half brother.”

“You’re both my sons. I love you both. I don’t want you to hate him. That’s why I never told you.”

“Didn’t you think I’d find out one day?”

Joanna waved one hand in the air, still clutching her fork. “One day, yes. Some day. But I didn’t mink it would happen so soon.”

“Is that why you kept us apart all these years? Because you were afraid I’d find out?”

“I don’t know,” Joanna said. “No, I don’t think so. At first, when you were an infant, I worried that Greg might be jealous of you. He was in heavy therapy then and I felt it was best to keep him away from you. Later…’ Her voice died away; she seemed lost in the past.

“I’ve told Killifer to resign and take early retirement,” said Doug flatly.

“All right. Fine.”

“What are you going to do about Greg?”

She looked at him sharply. “What do you mean?”

“I’m stuck here at Moonbase indefinitely. Greg’s the new base director.”

“I can’t send Greg back to Earth. It would look as if I had fired him as director before he even started.”

Doug spread his hands. “So we’re going to be here together then.”

From the expression on her face it seemed to Doug that his mother hadn’t thought about it before. She was silent for long moments.

“You’re right,” she said at last. I’ll have to stay here, too.”

“You?”

Nodding as if she had made up her mind irrevocably, Joanna said, I’ll resign as chair of the board of directors and live here. For the coming year, at least.”

Doug stared at her and saw the determination in her eyes. “To keep between Greg and me.”

To bring the two of you together,” Joanna said, almost desperately. “I love you both and I don’t want you to hate each other.”

“You’re asking a lot.”

“Don’t you see, Doug? It was my fault, too. I’m his mother. Whatever Greg’s done, I bear a responsibility for it.”

“You didn’t murder anybody.”

“But I didn’t stop him from doing it! I didn’t raise him well enough to keep him from murder.”

“That’s like blaming Hitler’s mother for the Holocaust,” Doug snapped.

“I didn’t pay enough attention to him. And when I met your father — how betrayed Greg must have felt.”

“The criminal as victim,” Doug muttered.

Joanna pointed at him with the fork. “Douglas, if you hate your brother for what he did, you’ll also be hating me. He’s my son, as much as you are, and what he did is my fault, too.”

Doug felt drained, exhausted, almost the way he had felt up at the mountaintop with Brennart. My father, Brennart, even Zimmerman’s leaving Tie. I can’t lose her too; I can’t drive.

My mother away from me. She wants to live up here, to be with me. And Greg, too, but still—

With a slow shake of his head, Doug replied, “I don’t hate Greg.” He hoped it waas true.

“Do you mean it?” his mother asked.

“It’s just — all mis is new to me. I never thought—”

Joanna got her feet and came around the table to sit at the empty chair beside him.

“I love you, Douglas. I don’t want to lose you. You and Greg are the only people in the world I care about.”

“I know,” he said. And he let her put her arms around him and hold him close. It felt awkward for a moment, but then he melted into his mother’s embrace and it felt warm and safe and soothing.

Joanna could feel the tension between her two sons, crackling like an electrical spark between two electrodes of opposite polarity.

The three of them were standing in Anson’s former office. Now it was Greg’s office. Joanna had moved into her own quarters.

It had been a long day. They had seen Anson off and Greg had formally taken the directorship of Moonbase. Now, the little cluster of people who had crowded the office to congratulate their new boss had left. Greg stood behind his desk, Joanna at his side, Doug in front of the desk.

Even in the sky-blue coveralls that designated management, Greg looked darkly somber. Doug, wearing the pumpkin orange of the research and exploration group, seemed as bright and youthful as a freshly-scrubbed cadet. Joanna wore a flowered dress, insisting that she would not limit her wardrobe to the utilitarian jumpsuits that everyone else wore.

Doug smiled at his half-brother and put his hand out over the desk.

“I haven’t had a chance to congratulate you, Greg’ he said. “Best of luck as director.”

Greg took his hand and smiled back. “Thanks”

“And I want you to know,” Doug said as their hands separated, “that I understand what happened… about my father.”

Greg turned his startled gaze to Joanna.

“She didn’t tell me. Killifer did.”

“Killifer?”

“He left Moonbase a couple days ago. It’s all over with. Finished.”

“Is it?” Greg asked. “Just like that, you find out about your father’s death and you don’t care?”

Doug looked toward Joanna, too, then turned back to his brother. “I care, Greg. But it’s all… kind of abstract. I never knew my father. He died before I was born. Maybe I ought to be angry, furious — but I can’t seem to work up the emotion.”

Greg just stared at him.

“It’s all in the past,” Dqug said. “I don’t like it, but then I guess you don’t either.”

With a quick glance at his mother, Greg said, “No, I’m not happy about the past.”

“Then let’s make the future something we can both be happy about. All of us,” he quickly amended.

“Okay,” Greg said guardedly. “Sounds good.”

Doug caught the slight but definite stress on the word sounds .

“What do you have in mind?” Joanna asked.

Doug shrugged indifferently. “I’ve got a lot of learning to do. I’m signed up with the research and exploration group. We’ll be going back to Mt. Wasser and building the power tower.”

Greg cleared his throat and said, “Yes, I’ve got the mission plan on my list of action items. Top priority.”

“I hope you approve it,” said Doug.

“Don’t worry about it,” Greg replied.

Joanna watched her two sons, thinking, Maybe they can work together. Maybe they’ll learn to trust one another and become as close as brothers. But I’ll have to watch them. Closely. For a long time to come.

“Once we get the water flowing back here,” Doug was saying, “we can start thinking about expanding the base, turning it into a really livable, town.”

Greg said nothing. He was thinking, Doug knows! He knows what I did. He says he doesn’t care, he says it’s all in the past, but he hates me. He’ll do whatever he can to destroy me. He’s already challenging me. He’ll want to keep Moonbase open. He’ll want to be director, sooner or later. Sooner, most likely. I’ll have to keep a couple of jumps ahead of him. I’ll have to make certain that Mom doesn’t give him unfair advantages.

I’ll have to make certain that Moonbase is shut down for good. When I leave here, Moonbase will be history.