Moonrise

MANHATTAN

It was more like a comfortable little lounge than a conference room, thought Carlos Quintana. Richly appointed and furnished with quiet, understated elegance. These diplomats do all right for themselves, he reminded himself.

The Secretary-General gestured him to sit beside her on the bottle green leather sofa. Quintana had known the woman since before she had been Ecuador’s ambassador to the U.N., back when she had been a shy and frightened newcomer to the world of international politics.

She introduced him to the acting president of the Security Council and the chairwoman of the General Assembly, a comely African whose skin glowed like burnished ebony. The Security Council president was from Bangladesh, one of the poorest nations on Earth, yet he was quite overweight and his thick fingers were heavy with jewelled rings.

Nothing is done swiftly among diplomats, Quintana already knew. The four of them had a drink, chatted amiably, and only gradually got down to the reason for which the meeting had been arranged.

“Yes,” Quintana said quietly, once he had been asked, “I am a beneficiary of nanotherapy. I had lung cancer. Now it is gone.”

“You had the therapy illegally?” asked the General Assembly chairwoman.

Quintana smiled. “It is a gray area. Nanotherapy is illegal in many nations, including Mexico. But in Switzerland apparently the authorities allow it to continue.”

“Not for Swiss citizens, however,” said the Security Council president, who had been a lawyen He had rolls of fat instead if a neck, the glistening skin of his face seemed stretched tight like an over-inflated balloon.

“But you did it anyway,” said the Secretary-General.

Still smiling, Quintana said, “It seemed better than surgery or radiation treatments.”

“Or chemotherapy.”

“Or death,” Quintana added wryly.

For a moment they were silent. Then the Secretary-General smoothed her skirt and said, “So you are a supporter of nanotechnology, then.”

“Yes. Very much.”

“And you would speak against the current treaty being negotiated?”

“To outlaw all nanotechnology research? Yes, I am against it.”

“Would you speak publicly against it?”

“If I must.”

“Wouldn’t that involve some element of danger for you, personally?”

Quintana shrugged. “There is always the chance of some fanatic. I can hire bodyguards.”

The Security Council president cleared his throat ostentatiously. All eyes turned to him.

“Isn’t it true,” he asked, in an accusing voice, “that you are a member of the board of directors of Masterson Aerospace Corporation?”

“That’s no secret,” Quintana said evenly.

“And isn’t it true that Masterson Corporation will suffer greatly if all nanotechnology work is prohibited?”

Quintana nodded. “It would mean the end of their base on the Moon. They could not survive up there without nanomachines to process oxygen for them and maintain their solar power farms.”

“It is also true, is it not,” the president continued, “that your corporation stands to make indecently enormous profits from nanotechnology manufacturing.”

“If we manufacture any salable products with nanomachines, the manufacturing will most likely be done in space, not on Earth.”

“The profits will be made on Earth.”

“Yes, certainly.”

“So you are not exactly unbiased in this matter.”

Quintana put his glass down on the marble-topped coffee table. “I am a living example of what nanotherapy can accomplish. As you can see, I am not a monster and the nanomachines that were put into my body have done me nothing but good.”

“But—”

“But nanotechnology can do more than heal the sick, that is true,” Quintana went on. “Nanomanufacturing can bring a new era of prosperity to Earth. I should think that nations such as Bangladesh and Zaire would welcome such an opportunity.”

“At the cost of ruining our existing industries!”

Quintana laughed disdainfully. “Your existing industries are keeping your people poor. If I were you, sir, I would embrace nanotechnology instead of trying to outlaw it.”

The president said nothing. Silence hung in the elegant little room for many heavy moments.

At length, the Secretary-General said, “Thank you for sharing your views with us, Carlos.”

Knowing he was being dismissed, Quintana got to his feet, bowed slightly to her. “Thank you for inviting me.”

He got as far as the door, then turned back to them. “Take my advice. Don’t fight nanotechnology. The best thing you could do, right now, would be to buy Masterson stock.”

And, laughing, he left the three of them sitting there.

He was still smiling as he stepped out of the elevator at the U.N. complex’s underground garage level. He walked to the dispatcher and asked him to call his limousine.

As he lit up a thin cigar, a man in grimy coveralls stepped up to him and pushed the muzzle of a nine-millimeter automatic into Quintana’s midsection.

“Antichrist,” he snarled. And he emptied the gun’s magazine into Quintana’s midriff and chest, smashing him back against the dispatcher’s booth. The shots rang deafeningly through the garage.

Quintana felt no pain, but the world seemed to tilt into crazy lopsided scenes of concrete ceiling and staring faces. The man with the gun stood calmly over him.

“Let’s see your devil’s bugs cure you of that.’ And he spat on Quintana’s shattered, bleeding body.

MOONBASE DIRECTOR’S OFFICE

“This nanotech treaty has got to be stopped!” Joanna said.

Greg nodded tightly. He had been director of Moonbase for slightly more than six months. What had been Jinny Anson’s office was now his, and he had transformed it considerably. His desk was an ultramodern curved surface of gleaming lunar glassteel, a new alloy from Moonbase’s labs that was as transparent as crystal yet had the structural strength of high-grade concrete. A long couch of lunar plastic sat against one wall and comfortable webbed chairs were scattered across the floor, which was covered with soft, sound-absorbing tiles manufactured in one of Masterson Corporation’s space station factories in orbit around Earth.

The air in the room was pleasantly cool, like an air-conditioned office of a major corporation back on Earth. Greg had insisted on paving a large section of Alphonsus’ floor with new radiators that allowed the environmental control system to work more efficiently and made all of Moonbase’s underground facilities much more comfortable. It was his major accomplishment, to date.

The office walls were lined with precisely spaced Windowall display screens. Most of them showed artwork from the world’s great museums, although Greg could, at the touch of a keypad, turn them into views of virtually any part of Moonbase or the surface of Alphonsus’ crater floor.

Behind Greg was a giant Windowall that presently showed a restful silk scroll landscape of mountains and mist by the thirteenth-century Chinese ’master Kao K’o-Kung. It lent the office an air of serenity that neither Joanna nor her two sons felt.

“Will the United States sign the treaty?” Doug asked, from his seat on the couch against the far wall.

Joanna, sitting on the webbed chair closest to Greg’s curved desk, had noticed that Doug always picked that couch to sit on. It was farthest from his brother.

“Yes, of course they will,” Greg said, frowning darkly. “The whole idea of the treaty came from Washington.”

“But they can’t outlaw nanotechnology completely,” Joanna said. “Not entirely.”

“Yes they can,” said Doug. Joanna knew he was just as concerned as his older brother, yet Doug looked at ease, relaxed, lounging back in the long couch as if this were nothing more than a computer game. She almost expected him to put his feet up and stretch out for a nap.

“But if they do, they’ll want us to stop using nanomachines here at Moonbase, too. We can’t allow that.” .

Greg shook his head. “If and when the U.S. signs the treaty, its provisions will be like federal law. And we’ll be bound by them just like any flatlander down Earthside.”

“You’ll have to stop work on the mass driver,” Joanna said.

With a tight nod, Greg said, “We’ll have to stop everything that we use nanomachines for.”

“That means closing Moonbase,” she said.

Greg started to nod but Doug interrupted with, “As long as we remain an American corporation.”

“I’ve thought about that,” Joanna said. “But Venezuela, Ecuador, all the European nations — they’re all going to sign the treaty.”

“What about Kiribati?”

Greg looked sharply at his brother. “Kiribati?”

“Don’t you have enough clout with them to keep them from signing, Greg?” Doug asked.

“What good would that do?” Greg almost growled the words.

Joanna turned to her elder son hopefully. “We could transfer our articles of incorporation to Kiribati.”

Greg shook his head dismissively. “And get half a dozen federal agencies jumping all over us. They’d take us to court and the courts would decide against us. We’d be in real trouble.

They’d send federal marshals up here to shut down all our nanomachines.”

Doug still looked strangely unperturbed. “Suppose we start up a new corporation,” he suggested. “In Kiribati. And Masterson sells the Moonbase operation to them.”

Greg’s somber face paled. “Sell Moonbase to them?”

Doug was grinning now. “Sure. Moonbase and all our Earth-orbital stations.”

“All the corporation’s space operations?”

“That could work,” said Joanna.

“It’s an obvious attempt to circumvent the treaty,” said Greg.

“But it’s legal,” Doug replied. “I checked it out with both the federal and international law programs.”

“Did you?” Greg grumbled.

Joanna smiled a little. “Rashid won’t like living in Tarawa, though.”

Doug replied, “He can stay in Savannah and be in Tarawa with a virtual reality connection any time he wants to. Just the same as you attend board meetings without leaving here, Mom.”

Greg objected, “The board of directors would never go for it.”

“Setting up a dummy corporation and selling the space division to it,” Joanna mused. “It would take some explaining.”

“It’ll never work,” said Greg.

“Why not?” Doug challenged. “You spent all those years out there in Kiribati. Don’t you think you can get them to play along with us?”

“Of course I could, but—”

Joanna interrupted with newfound enthusiasm. I’ll call Carlos right away.”

“Why not the board chairman?” Doug asked.

Greg answered sourly, “Because Quintana is the real power on the board — present company excepted, of course.”

“Of course,” Joanna agreed. “Can you put the call through for me, please?”

Frowning slightly, Greg touched the keyboard built into his desk with one long slim finger and said merely, “Carlos Quintana.” The comm system’s voice recognition circuitry searched automatically for Quintana’s number and made the connection.

“Johansen is just a figurehead,” Joanna was explaining to Doug as the communications computer established the link with Savannah. “He looks good for public relations, but he’s—”

The wall screen showing Monet lilypads changed abruptly to display a harried-looking young woman brushing at her dishevelled hair.

“I want to talk to Carlos,” Joanna snapped, unaccustomed to having underlings answer her calls.

“He’s dead!” the young woman bawled, bursting into tears. “He’s been shot!”

Joanna fell back against her chair’s webbing, feeling almost as if a bullet had hit her heart.

Ibriham al-Rashid felt perspiration beading his brow and upper lip despite the nearly-frigid air conditioning of the small control room.

Beyond that window, he knew, inside that gleaming metal sphere is a small man-made star, so hot and dense that its very atomic nuclei are being fused together.

The plasma physicist tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to the power gauges lining the control room’s side wall. Rashid nodded, too awed to speak.

The control room was almost silent Nothing but the faint electrical hum from the monitoring consoles.

“How long has it been running?” Rashid asked in a whisper. It seemed the proper tone of voice, this close to a miracle.

“Tomorrow will make four months, exactly,” said the plasma physicist. Even he kept his voice hushed.

He was a fellow Moslem, even a fellow native of Baltimore; a man Rashid had known in his youth. Now he was a paunchy overweight academic with thinning hair and a light brown beard and eyes that blinked behind oversized, tinted glasses. Now he was a plasma physicist at Johns Hopkins University who just happened to have invented the world’s first practical nuclear fusion generator.

“And it has been producing power like this for all that time?” Rashid whispered.

The plasma physicist nodded. “As long as we keep it supplied with helium-three.”

Rashid stroked his beard and turned back to stare through the safety glass at the small metal sphere. It was almost hidden inside a maze of magnet coils and cooling pipes and heavy tangles of multi-colored electrical wires. In his imagination, Rashid could see inside tьe sphere, see the blinding hot plasma that was fusing atomic nuclei together, forcing mass to transmute into energy, imitating the processes that made the stars shine.

By the Prophet, Rashid thought, Allah is offering us a gift beyond price.

But not beyond cost.

The plasma physicist gestured toward the door and, once out in the laboratory’s hallway again, Rashid drew a deep breath. “It really works,” he said, almost in a normal tone.

“It really works,” the plasma physicist echoed. “And much better — and cheaper — than that monstrosity up in Princeton.”

“But it requires helium-three for fuel, which the Princeton machine does not.”

“The Princeton machine is designed to produce new Ph.D.s,” the plasma physicist grumbled. “My generator is designed to produce megawatts.”

The plasma physicist led him up the hallway toward his own cluttered office. “Helium-three and deuterium,” he said. “The deuterium is easy to get from ordinary water. There’s enough deuterium in an eight-ounce drinking glass of water to equal the energy in half a million barrels of oil.”

Rashid smiled wanly. “Our brothers in OPEC will not be happy with you.”

The plasma physicist shrugged his soft shoulders. “They’re busy building receiving farms for the solar power satellites. The deserts will still be energy centers.”

“But once fusion comes on line…”

“It never will.”

“What? Your work—”

They reached his open office door. The room looked just as chaotic as when they had left it, an hour earlier.

“My work may win me a Nobel Prize,” the plasma physicist said, plopping himself in his creaking desk chair, “although the Princeton people will try to sabotage that.”

Rashid took the only other chair that didn’t have piles of journals or reports on it.

“But my fusion system will be nothing but a laboratory curiosity, I’m afraid.”

“Why? How?”

“For two reasons.” The plasma physicist raised two chubby fingers. Rashid noticed that his nails were dirty.

“First,” he said, “is the matter of the fuel. Helium-three is vanishingly rare. We have to produce it in nuclear accelerators, which makes it cost more than the power that the fusion generator produces.”

“Helium-three exists on the Moon,” Rashid said.

“So I’ve been told,” said the plasma physicist, as if Rashid had said he could produce helium-three by rubbing a magic lamp. “But there’s a second problem.”

“What is that?”

“Energy conversion.” When he saw the puzzled expression on Rashid’s face, the plasma physicist added, “Converting the heat and particle energy of the fusion reaction to electricity. It’s electricity you want, not hot plasma and energetic neutrons.”

His brows knitted, Rashid said, “But the gauges in your control room; weren’t they measuring electrical energy?”

The plasma physicist smiled slyly. “The gauges are something of a trick, They show how much electrical energy the generator would produce, based on an algorithm I devised from the amount of heat and kinetic energy inside the reactor.”

Rashid felt as if he’d been pushed out of an airplane without a parachute. “You mean that there’s no way for your generator to produce electricity? Then what good is it?”

Raising a single finger this time, the plasma physicist said, “I invited you here because I think there is a way. Magnetohydrodynamic power conversion is perfect for this task.”

“Mag… what?”

“Call it MHD,” said the plasma physicist.

“Tell me about MHD, then.”

Hunching over his desk enthusiastically, the plasma physicist began, “Those dolts up in Princeton and the bigger dolts funding them in Washington, they’re all trying to make a conversion system based on turbines. Turbines! Just like Edison did, a century and a half ago.”

“I don’t understand,” said Rashid.

Impatiently, the plasma physicist answered, “They want to use the heat energy from fusion to boil a fluid, probably liquid sodium, Allah protect us. That would keep the overall efficiency of the system down below forty percent; no better than a uranium-fueled generator and not even as good as a coal-fired one!”

Struck with new understanding, Rashid blurted, “That’s why their fusion system is more expensive than ordinary power plants!”

“Yes, exactly. They are using a man-made star as a tea kettle.”

For hours the plasma physicist rattled on, jumping out of his chair to rummage through bookshelves for old reports, grabbing chalk to draw schematic diagrams on his board, making the chalk shriek so often that Rashid winced and felt his blood running cold.

But slowly, Rashid began to see the picture. The fusion generator could produce electrical power with sixty percent efficiency or even better if it could be teamed with an MHD conversion system. And if it could obtain helium-three fuel…Rashid thanked his boyhood friend and promised him he would carefully consider funding his effort to match an MHD power converter to his fusion generator.

“Keep this as quiet as you can,” his friend pleaded as he walked Rashid out to his waiting limousine. “I may have to leave the university once they find that I’m being funded by your corporation.”

Rashid raised his brows questioningly.

The plasma physicist smiled unhappily. “Oh yes, there are lots of knives in the dark here. Even the New Morality people have questioned what I’m doing. They say it’s against God’s will to try to imitate the stars.”

Rashid snorted disdainfully. “What do they know of the One God?”

“Believe it or not, there are Moslems among them.”

Shaking his head, Rashid promised that he would keep very quiet about what he had seen and heard.

Once in his plane and heading back to Savannah, Rashid smiled to himself. Very quiet indeed. I could channel some of my discretionary funding to him, to get him started on this MHD business while I begin to prepare the board of directors for a full-scale fusion development program.

Helium-three, he mused. It’s imbedded in the lunar regolith, just like the hydrogen atoms they take up to make water. We could set up nanomachines to harvest helium-three and ship it to Earth easily enough. My division could open an entirely new line for the corporation: fusion power systems.

Instead of simply supplying raw lunar materials to the corporations that want to build solar power satellites, we could have a monopoly on the fuel for fusion power.

All the way back to Savannah Rashid dreamed about turning Masterson Aerospace into the world’s leading energy company. Fusion power. Enough energy to irrigate the world’s deserts, to light the world’s cities, to bring the poorest of the poor into the glow of the modern world. All based on helium-three from the Moon. All developed by Masterson Corporation’s space operations division. By me.

He pictured himself as president and CEO of Masterson Aerospace. As the most important and powerful man in America; in the world; in the whole Earth-Moon system.

One small cloud troubled his vision. The helium-three would be produced by nanomachines, and there was enormous resistance to anything touched by nanotechnology. Still, Rashid assured himself, if we have to we can extract the helium-three by older methods. It will raise the price somewhat, but not. too much.

He smiled again, satisfied that even the New Morality could not stop his inevitable rise to wealth and fame and power.

Doug left the meeting with Greg and his mother in a turmoil of conflicting emotions. They shot Quintana. Some New Morality fanatic gunned him down at the U.N. building. Because he was against the treaty. Or was it because he was living proof that nanotherapy can cure cancer? Maybe both reasons. Probably both.

As he strode down the tunnel he realized all over again that he could not return to Earth. Even if they let me through customs I’d be a marked man. Every nutcase in the world would come after me.

With a shake of his head, he tried to clear his mind of Quintana’s assassination and think through the idea of moving Moonbase’s legal ownership to Kiribati. With a half-bitter smile, Doug remembered an economics professor from his first year at Caltech telling the class, “Figures don’t lie, but liars sure can figure.”

Let them make their treaty; we’ll find a way around it Kiribati will have the highest per-capita income on Earth, just from the bribes Mom and Greg will spread around.

We can’t let them stop us from using nanomachines here. We can’t! It would be like stopping New York City from using elevators. The city would die.

One way or another we’ve got to keep on using our nanomachines. Otherwise we’ll have to shut down Moonbase. And then what about me? They’d have to let me come back Earthside. But if I do I’ll be a target for every brain-dead New Morality zealot who can get his hands on a gun.

Doug tried to push that fear out of his mind and concentrate on what had to be done.

For the past six months Doug had worked on the Mt. Wasser power tower project and building the pipeline from the ice fields at the south pole back to Moonbase. Negotiations were under way to sell water to Yamagata’s Nippon One and the Euro-Russian base over at Grimaldi.

But Doug knew that the ice fields were limited. He had helped to map them, down in the perpetual shadows of the polar mountains, and to probe their depths. There’s enough water there to provide for all three of the bases on the Moon; with recycling, the water should last for decades, maybe half a century, even. But there’s not enough to allow us to grow! That’s the problem. It’s a no-growth solution — which means no solution at all. Moonbase has got to grow. Or eventually die. Somehow, we’ve got to figure out how to get water and the other life-support volatiles we need from elsewhere in the solar system.

Grow or die. Just like any living organism, any society. You either grow or you wither away and disappear.

He realized his fists were clenched as he marched along the tunnel. Passersby were giving him strange looks. Doug tried to smile at them, tried to appear relaxed. But inside he was stretched tight.

There’s going to be a split with Earth, Doug knew. This nanotech treaty is just the beginning. They must know, down there, that we can’t exist without nanomachines. It would’ve taken years to build a pipeline from the south pole, instead of months. The cost of building the power tower would have been out of sight if we didn’t have nanomachines to do the work.

How can we prevent the split? How can we keep connected with Earth, at least until we’re fully self-sufficient?

He pushed back the door to his room, forming a scenario in his mind: Okay, we establish the legalities that we’re a corporation based in Kiribati and the Kiribati government doesn’t sign the nanotech treaty. But suppose the U.N. or the World Court doesn’t accept that? Suppose they insist that we’ve got to give up our nanomachines? And we can’t, of course. Suppose they send Peacekeeper troops up here to enforce their demands!

Doug sagged onto his bunk. Jeez, we’ve got to figure out a way to prevent that from happening. But how?

Without thinking consciously about it, he flicked on the Windowall screen hanging opposite his bunk. Instantly the screen seemed to turn into a big picture window that looked out at the floor of Alphonsus. Doug stared out at the scene for a few moments, then went to his desk and pecked at his keyboard. The ’window’ showed Victoria Falls, then an underwater scene from a tropical reef. Not satisfied, Doug finally got a live view from the top of Alphonsus’ ringwall mountains that looked out across Mare Nubium.

“Magnificent desolation,” he murmured. The barren plain was empty, not a sign that a human being had ever set foot on it, except for the faint glow of a handful of red beacons that marked the sites of the old temporary shelters marching off to the sudden horizon.

If Greg looked out there, Doug thought, he’d see nothing but barren wilderness. But I see beauty. I see freedom. I see the opportunity to explore and learn and grow and build the future. How can I make Greg see it the way I do?

He was still wondering about the problem as he put on his VR helmet and data gloves, booted up his computer and linked with his afternoon class from Caltech.

ROCKET PORT

Doug always asked permission to come into the rocket port’s flight control center. It was a tiny cubbyhole burned out of the lunar rock by plasma torches back in the earliest days of Moonbase, barely large enough for two controllers sitting shoulder to shoulder at their consoles. It always reminded Doug of an old-time submarine’s command compartment, compact and crowded, jammed with equipment that hummed and glowed and gave off heat. Despite Greg’s swath of new radiators, the flight control center was stuffy and sweaty.

It even had a conning tower, sort of. There was a vertical tunnel that led up to a minuscule observation bubble, barely big enough for a person to stick his head up above the surface of the crater floor for a visual inspection of the rocket pads outside.

The controllers had never refused Doug permission to come into the center, tight though it was. Usually Doug clambered up the ladder to the observation bubble, leaving the controllers to huddle over their glowing display screens.

Traffic was seldom heavy. The lunar transfer vehicles plied the route between Earth orbit and Moonbase on a monotonously steady schedule. Rarely were there two spacecraft on the pads at the same time, even though Moonbase boasted four pads for LTVs to land on, spaced equidistantly from the observation bubble.

Standing on the narrow platform of the observation bubble, his chin barely above the crater floor’s surface and his hair brushing the transparent dome, Doug watched the lander come down slowly, silently, its dirty-white rocket exhaust splashing on the smoothed rock pad, blowing dust and pebbles that rattled against the bubble’s glassteel dome. Doug could barely see the actual touchdown, when the big ungainly lunar transfer vehicle settled on its outstretched spindly legs like an old, old man sinking into a favorite easy chair.

From below he heard the chatter of the controllers as they remotely manipulated the access tunnel to lock against the LTV’s personnel hatch. To Doug it looked like a giant gray worm blindly groping for its prey.

The spacecraft that transited between Earth orbit and Moonbase had a human pilot aboard only when they were carrying passengers. Even so, the pilot was merely a redundancy required by archaic safety regulations. The controllers landed the craft remotely, as they did all the unmanned cargo carriers.

Once the access tunnel was connected and pumped up with air Doug slid down the ladder in dreamy lunar slow motion, without touching his feet to its rungs, and landed softly behind the two controllers.

“Thanks, guys,” he said, despite the fact that they both happened to be women on this shift. Without waiting for them to reply, he ducked through the hatch and padded quickly in his softboots down the tunnel that led to The Pit, the receiving area.

The airlock’s inner hatch was just swinging open as he got there. Two men stepped over the hatch’s steel lip, both dressed in me olive green coveralls of the mining and manufacturing group. The next, another man, wearing the pumpkin orange of the science and exploration group, tripped over the coaming. A newcomer, Doug realized. Despite his weighted boots he stumbled and floundered, arms flailing. Doug went to him, grabbed him, straightened and steadied him.

“I’m okay,” the man said. Like most of the short-timers, he was in his twenties.

“It’s a little strange, your first time,” Doug said. “Especially after a couple days of zero-gee.”

“I’m okay,” he repeated, scowling as he pulled free of Doug’s supportive grasp.

Doug watched him walk awkwardly away, as if he were stepping on land mines. He’ll never make it here, Doug said to himself. Too uptight to accept help; probably too self-centered to give help when it’s needed.

Turning back to the hatch, he saw Bianca step carefully through, also in orange. Her round face broke into a wide grin at the sight of Doug.

“Welcome back!” Doug said, striding up to her, arms outstretched.

“Hi!” she said, shifting her travel bag so they could embrace in a welcoming hug.

Half an hour later they were in The Cave, sipping fruit punch and catching up on the months since Rhee had last been at Moonbase.

“I’m not just a grad student slave this time,” she said proudly from across the narrow table. “I’m here to do my thesis work.”

“No kidding?”

“If I don’t run into any snags, I’ll be Doctor Rhee this time next year.”

“Terrific,” said Doug.

He liked Bianca. Ever since their experience together on the first south polar expedition — which was known now as the Brennart Expedition — Doug had felt that Bianca Rhee was one of his best friends. She had come to Moonbase twice in the past six months, for a month each time. They had eaten together, joined others for parties or meals, talked endless hours about their hopes and plans for the future. Nothing more. Sometimes Doug got the feeling that Bianca might be feeling lonely at Moonbase; sometimes he thought he saw something in her eyes, in her voice, that made him feel as if she was — what? Disappointed? Sad? Uncertain?

Maybe she’s a frustrated ballerina, Doug thought, remembering her shy confession about dancing. She had never brought up the subject again, so he hadn’t asked about watching her dance.

Doug couldn’t figure it out, and didn’t feel that he wanted to probe Bianca’s psyche that deeply. Is it sex? he wondered.

But she’s older than I am and she’s got her own life back Earthside. Probably boyfriends or lovers. Maybe her family’s already picked out a husband for her. She’s never brought up the subject and it’s none of my business. We’re friends and that’s fine; no sense getting it all tangled up with sex.

Doug was not a virgin, but he was far from experienced. He had dated now and then during his year on the Caltech campus. Despite the so-called New Morality that the politicians, the media, and even the university administration constantly drummed on, several times his dates had ended in bed. He had never had to push it, he just went along with the tide. He never considered that being good-looking, athletic, easy-going — and extremely wealthy — made him attractive to young women. Doug simply did what came naturally.

At Moonbase it was the same, yet different. There was a core of some two hundred long-term Moonbase employees, plus a couple of permanent residents such as Lev Brudnoy and his mother. The long-term Lunatics tended to form solid, long-term relationships, for the most part, although there were a couple of loose cannons of both genders. Rumor had it that Brudnoy himself was quite a Romeo, or had once been.

It was among the short-timers, the men and women who visited Moonbase for a month or so at a time, that most of the action took place. Doug had enjoyed a couple of flings, nothing major, nothing more than fun and games.

“So what’s your thesis about?” he asked.

“Well, originally I was going to do it on brown dwarfs; you know, superlarge planets that’re almost real stars. With the equipment up here I’ve been able to do a real thorough search for them.”

“Have you found any?”

“I’ve got six candidates, but I’d need some ultrasensitive infrared equipment to definitely identify them as brown dwarfs. They’ve got to be radiating at the wavelengths predicted by Chartrand’s theory.”

“Sounds heavy,” said Doug.

She grinned again. Too heavy. Too big a subject My thesis advisor wouldn’t let me tackle it”

“So?”

She took a quick breath arid then said, delightedly, “So I’m going to analyze the chemical compositions of the Earth-crossing asteroids, using the observatory here at Moonbase.”

Doug was immediately interested. “Now that’s something we can use right here. One of these days we’re going to want to go out and grab an asteroid that’s rich in carbon—”

“I remember you talking about mat last time I was up here,” Rhee said. “That’s one of the reasons I picked that topic. I thought it might help you.”

“It’d be a terrific help, Bianca. When we actually start the project, you could be part of our team.”

She beamed at him.

“If we ever start it,” he added, more soberly.

“If?”

“I’m learning economics the hard way,” Doug said. “I want to get an asteroid and mine it so we can use nanomachines to build Clipperships from asteroid carbon, make them out of pure diamond.”

“Diamond?”

Nodding eagerly, Doug said, “Diamond’s got a strength-to-density ratio fifty times better than the aluminum alloys we make at the space stations.”

“And nanobugs can produce pure diamond?”

“Out of the carbon we mine from the asteroid, sure: atom by atom.”

“Wow!” Rhee said. “That’s brutal!”

“But it takes money to get started. Capital investment And Moonbase isn’t making enough profits to swing it”

“Won’t the corporation—”

Doug interrupted, “The board of directors won’t sink any risk capital into Moonbase, not with the U.N. working up an international treaty that’ll ban nanotechnology completely.”

“That would shut Moonbase down!” Rhee said, alarmed.

“Maybe,” Doug replied. “But whether it does or not, the corporation isn’t going to provide the capital we need for the asteroid project.”

Rhee stared glumly at her half-finished drink. “And I was ready to come up here full time.”

“Full time? Really?” Doug asked. “I mean, I know you’ve got family and school and everything back Earthside.”

“There aren’t that many jobs for astronomers back there,” she said. “I couldn’t even get a teaching assistant’s position this semester.”

“Well, I’m sure we could fit you in here.” Then he added, “If this flipping nanotech treaty doesn’t shut us down completely.”

“You don’t think that could happen, do you?”

Doug smiled reassuringly. “No way. We’ll keep Moonbase going and we’ll use our nanomachines no matter what laws they pass down there.” Then he added, “I hope.”

“It’s really getting sick back home, you know,” she said, suddenly glum. “The New Morality people keep passing new laws and the Supreme Court lets them get away with it. They’ve even shut down the national art museum in Washington!”

But Doug’s mind was looking outward. “If only we could start the asteroid program now. If there was only some way I could get Greg to go for it.”

“I could stay here,” Bianca said. “I wouldn’t mind staying here with you indefinitely.”

“You want to become a real Lunatic?”

“Why not?”

“You’re sure?”

She nodded gravely. I’m positive.”

Again Doug caught a hint of something more going on than her words revealed. But he pushed that out of his thoughts. How can we can get the asteroid-grabbing program started right now? he asked himself.

Looking up, he saw that people were filing into The Cave, lining up at the food dispensers for their evening meals. He spotted Lev Brudnoy’s tall, gangly form meandering through the rapidly-filling tables, a tray of food in his hands and a bemused, almost puzzled look on his grizzled face.

“Mr. Brudnoy,” Doug called out, getting to his feet. “Would you care to join us?”

“Why? Are you falling apart?”

“Huh?’”

Brudnoy smiled sheepishly as he approached their table. “Forgive me. It’s an gld Groucho Marx line and it’s become something of a conditioned reflex in my silly little brain.”

Doug didn’t quite understand. “Marx? Like, with Lenin?”

With a sigh, Brudnoy said, “Please ignore my foolishness. And, yes, I would like to join you. I hate to eat alone.”

“You were an astronaut, weren’t you?” Doug asked as Brudnoy put his tray down on the table and folded his lanky frame into the chair between himself and Rhee.

“A cosmonaut,” Brudnoy corrected. “The same thing, but in Russian.”

“What do you think of the possibilities of going out and finding a carbonaceous asteroid and moving it into an orbit around the Moon?”

Brudnoy slumped back in his chair and puffed out his cheeks, then let out a long, slow whistle. “Ambitious. It would take a lot of delta vee.”

“Change in velocity,” Doug explained before Rhee could ask.

“I know that!” she hissed.

“Even for the Earth-crossing asteroids,” Brudnoy said, half musing, “you would need a tremendous expenditure of propellant to change their momentum into a lunar orbit”

“Suppose we use the asteroid’s own materials as propellant?” Doug challenged.

Brudnoy’s shaggy brows went up. “It would have oxygen, wouldn’t it.”

Rhee said, “Carbonaceous chondrites contain water.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Hydrates,” she said, “chemically linked to the rock.”

“It would take energy to get the water from the rock.”

“There’s plenty of solar energy,” Doug said. “And we can use nanomachines to do the separation.”

“I see. Once you have water, of course, you have hydrogen and oxygen for rocket propellants.”

“Right.” Doug nodded eagerly.

“Of course, the trick is not to use up all the asteroid’s valuable chemicals merely to get it into an orbit around the Moon. You want its water for us to use here, don’t you?”

“And its carbon,” said Doug.

“Carbon?” Brudnoy’s shaggy brows rose. “For life support?”

“For making spacecraft out of diamond, using nanomachines,” Doug said.

“Diamond,” Brudnoy whispered.

“Stronger, lighter, more heat-resistant,” said Doug. “And cheaper to manufacture, with nanomachines.”

Brudnoy nodded, deep in thought, his dinner tray untouched. At last he asked, “Why bring the asteroid into lunar orbit?”

“So we can mine it,” Doug said.

“You can mine it while it remains in its own orbit around the Sun. Then all you need to bring back here are the materials you really want. Why drag the entire asteroid here? It’s inefficient.”

Doug thought about it for a moment. “Yes… that could work.”

“You see, my young friend, in space distance is not so important as the amount of energy you must expend to get the job done.”

Doug nodded agreement. “And it would take much less energy to bring the raw materials we want from the asteroid to Moonbase than it would to move the whole asteroid into a lunar orbit. I see.”

“Much less energy,” said Brudnoy, smiling approvingly at Doug. “Which means much less rocket propellant.”

“Which means much less money,” said Doug.

Brudnoy patted Doug’s shoulder. “You understand it very well.”

Rhee pointed to Brudnoy’s tray. “Your dinner’s getting cold.”

Glancing down at the plastic dishes, Brudnoy said, “It’s almost criminal how the cooks take the fruits of all my hard labor and turn it into unappetizing mush.”

“Maybe we need a good chef up here,” Rhee said, grinning.

Brudnoy nodded dolefully: “We certainly need someone who can create something better than this. Look, even the salad is soggy and lifeless.”

But he stuck a fork into it anyway. “I raised these sad little leaves. They were crisp and cheerful when I handed them over to the cooks.”

Doug had never given much thought to the quality of the meals. He ate what was available.

Munching thoughtfully, Brudnoy swallowed and asked, “What will you use for a spacecraft?”

“Adapt a lunar transfer ship, I suppose,” Doug replied.

“You will need a team of engineers and technicians.”

“We already have an astronomer to pick out the most likely asteroid.” Doug jabbed a thumb in Rhee’s direction.

“Congratulations.” Brudnoy lifted his tea mug to her. “But if you don’t mind my saying so, you’re going to need more than the three of us to accomplish this task.”

“Three of us? You mean you’re willing to help us?”

“Of course.”

“Terrific!” said Doug, tremendously pleased.

They clinked their cups together.

“We’ll take one of the LTVs and have it modified for the mission,” Doug said, his insides beginning to tremble with growing excitement.

“Do you have the facilities for modifying spacecraft here?” Rhee asked.

“No, but the corporation has space stations that can do that kind of work. In Earth orbit.”

Brudnoy’s enthusiasm was muted. “Why do it at a space station?” he asked, jabbing at another piece of salad on his tray. “Why not do it here?”

“We don’t have the facilities here,” Doug said.

“We could adapt what we do have,” said Brudnoy. “We have the talent, too, if we use our people properly.”

Doug gaped at him. “Modify the LTV here,” he muttered.

“Do the entire job here at Moonbase,” Brudnoy said firmly.

“Do you think we could build the Clipperships here at Moonbase?” Doug asked.

“Why not? The nanomachines don’t care where they are.”

“That would mean turning Moonbase into a major manufacturing center.”

“Why not?” the Russian repeated, smiling patiently. “After all, I can feed you lapin a la Brudnoy now, although I shudder to think of what the cooks would do with it. Why not take the next step forward?”

“From a mining center to a manufacturing center,” Doug mused.

“A natural step in the evolution of a frontier settlement. It will allow us to expand from a town into a city.”

“Wow,” said Rhee. “This is getting awesome.”

But Doug sagged back in his chair. “We’d need a lot of additional capital investment.”

“Of course.”

Rhee sensed Doug’s sudden change of mood. “The corporation won’t put up the money?”

“Not with this nanotech treaty hanging over us. The whole scheme depends on nanotechnology.”

“But you said we’d keep on using nanotechnology regardless of the treaty.”

“If we can. We’ll have to fight Washington over it.”

“And Moscow,” said Brudnoy. “And London and all the other world capitals. Even in Paris the couturiers must submit their fashion designs to a censorship board before they are allowed to go ahead with them.”

Doug began to wonder if Kiribati could withstand the international pressure, despite the best Greg could do.

“Could we do this without the corporation knowing about it?” Rhee asked.

Doug began to shake his head.

But Brudnoy said, “Perhaps it would be possible to “retire” one of the older transfer craft and then modify it.”

“We’d have to take people off other jobs to do it,” Doug said. “It would show up in the base’s bookkeeping.”

“There is a technique,” said Brudnoy, “known as midnight requisitioning. You must learn to be as creative in your bookkeeping as you are in your engineering.”

“Moonlight the whole project?! Rhee asked.

“Why not?” Brudnoy replied. “O perhaps we should call it Earthlighting, considering where we are.”

“Instead of capital investment from the corporation,” Doug mused, “we get people to invest their own time and talents into helping us. That’s a form of capital that doesn’t involve money.”

“Or the company’s bookkeepers,” Brudnoy added.

Doug said, “Greg would have to be in on this. We couldn’t hide it from him.”

A sly smile crept across Brudnoy’s bearded face. “Fort Apache,” he muttered.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing,” said Brudnoy. “I was just recalling a conversation I had with your brother when he first came up here.”

“What we’re proposing is to bring Moonbase up to the next step toward self-sufficiency,” Doug said.

“By mining an asteroid?” asked Rhee.

“If this scheme succeeds, Moonbase will have developed the means of supplying itself with carbon and nitrogen and all the other volatiles we now import from Earth,” Doug said, feeling the excitement rising in him again.

“If we succeed,” Rhee said.

“But if we can do it,” said Doug, “then it won’t matter what treaties or laws they pass Earthside. We can survive without them.”

“By mining asteroids,” Rhee repeated.

“By lifting ourselves up by our own bootstraps,” said Brudnoy.

“Operation Bootstrap,” Doug said, breaking into a huge grin. “We do it without letting Savannah know what we’re up to.”

“Can we get away with it?” Rhee asked.

“Why not?” said Brudnoy.

“We’ll need Greg’s help,” Doug said. “And my mother’s.”

The other two fell silent.

Doug pushed his chair back from the table. “They’ll help,” he said, with a confidence he did not truly feel. “I’m going to tell them about it right now.”

JOANNA’S QUARTERS

All employees were treated equally as far as their living space in Moonbase was concerned. Even the director, who had a two-room suite, received no more living space than anyone else: the director merely had an office that connected to the living quarters, which were no larger than any other one-room dwelling space within the tolerances of practical lunar architecture.

It took energy and manpower to carve out new quarters with plasma torches that vaporized the lunar rock. No one was going to get a bigger living space than anyone else. Utilitarian rules prevailed. Besides, standard-sized quarters prevented jealous comparisons and arguments.

However, Joanna Masterson Stavenger was not a Masterson employee. So while everyone was treated equally, Joanna was more equal than anyone else. Her quarters were a two-room suite; two ordinary living spaces that had been connected by a plasma-torched doorway.

At her own expense, Joanna had brought up furniture from her home in Savannah and turned one of her cubicles into a crowded little sitting room, the other into the most luxurious bedroom in Moonbase, with a real bed of actual wood — polished lustrous rosewood — and a thick cushiony mattress with pillows and flowered sheets and even a comforter that was strictly for ostentation in the climate-controlled environs of the underground base.

There was no space in the bedroom for the two massive wardrobes full of clothes that Joanna had brought with her; there was barely enough space to inch around the massive bed. So Joanna had requisitioned a pair of technicians to build storage space under her bed; the drawers formed a son of platform that was high enough to require steps to get up onto the bed itself.

The bed on its’throne’ — and who might be sharing it with the ’queen’ — quickly became the most talked-about item in Moonbase.

“You must tell Greg about this,” Joanna said to Doug as she reclined on the smaller of the two couches in her sitting room. She was wearing casual pale green silk slacks and a loose cashmere sweater of slightly darker green.

Doug had noticed that some of the women among the long-term Lunatics had taken to wearing more stylish clothes since his mother had come to Moonbase. Some women had started modifying their coveralls, snipping out pieces along the sleeves or shoulders or legs, adding trinkets or decorative patches. Eye candy, one of the guys called it.

Doug enjoyed the fashion trend. The women were adding color to the drab underground surroundings. Like the flowers that Brudnoy grew and the pictures that the Windowalls offered. Women wore perfume more often now, too. Even Bianca had added a trio of tiny gold pins to her collar as soon as she had arrived from Earthside: two cats on one side and some kind of fish on the other.

Doug remembered how Brennart had decorated his coveralls with mission patches and emblems. Yet none of the men had followed his lead. Doug himself wore his plain sky blue coveralls as he sat on the spindly armchair next to his mother’s delicate little upholstered couch, leaning forward intensely, elbows on knees.

“I wanted to run it past you first,” he said, “to make certain there aren’t any obvious holes in the plan.”

The corners of Joanna’s lips curled slightly. “I might even detect a subtle flaw, if there are any.”

Doug grinned sheepishly. “Aw, Mom, you know what I mean.”

“What you’re trying to do is to make Moonbase as self-sufficient as possible.”

“And as soon as possible.”

“Without letting the corporate management know what you’re doing.”

“Or the board of directors,” Doug added.

.Joanna studied her son for a long moment. Then she said, “The board’s in a turmoil since Carlos’ assassination. They’re all jockeying for power down there.”

“Will it affect you?”

She smiled grimly. “Of course it will. The trick is to make certain it enhances my position on the board rather than detracting from it.”

“Will you have to go back Earthside?”

“I don’t think so,” Joanna answered slowly. “The VR link’s been good enough — so far.”

Doug saw the shadow of uncertainty on her face. “I don’t want to start new problems for you, but—”

“No, I think your scheme could be a good insurance policy for us, in case they really do try to stop us from using nanomachines.”

Doug nodded.

“In fact,” Joanna said, smiling slightly, “if all the other major corporations are prevented from using nanotechnology by the treaty, Masterson could become very wealthy. Extremely wealthy.” Her smile widened. “We should support the nanotech treaty!”

“We can’t do that,” Doug snapped. “It’d be immoral.”

With a small shrug, Joanna said. “I suppose so. But still…”

“Will Greg go along with us?”

Joanna’s smile vanished. “Well,” she said carefully, “it’s a lot to swallow in one bite, for him.”

“He wants to shut down Moonbase, doesn’t he?” Without waiting for his mother’s response, Doug went on, “And I want to enlarge it, turn it into a manufacturing center, make it profitable so it can grow and prosper. That’s what Operation Bootstrap is all about…”

Joanna saw the intensity in her son’s face. Operation Bootstrap, she thought. A theatrical name for a pretty daring idea.

We’ve been talking about making Moonbase self-sufficient for years. Paul wanted to do it, even back then. And now Doug’s found the way to do it, if we can only get it started. Greg will be dead-set against this, though.

Aloud, she told her son, “Let me talk to Greg about it first. Alone.”

Doug nodded as if that was what he had expected. Maybe what he had hoped she would say.

“I think he’ll take it better if he hears it from you, Mom.”

Joanna sighed. “I think so too.”

Doug got to his feet and Joanna stood up beside her son. It always surprised her that Doug was so much taller than she, taller than his father had been. He looks so much like Paul, she thought, solid and compact. But he’s really much bigger. Almost Greg’s height.

And he’s still growing, she realized. Mentally. He’s challenging Greg already, although he doesn’t really understand that. Greg does, though. Greg will see exactly what this means.

I mustn’t let them clash over this Operation Bootstrap. I’ve got to get them to work together, not against one another.

Wilhelm Zimmerman almost toppled off his bar stool as he flinched away from his friend’s blazing anger. His huge bulk teetered on the swivelling stool. He had to grab the edge of the bar with both hands to steady himself.

Verban took no notice of his obese friend’s struggle to stay on the stool.

“Are you mad?” Verban hissed, his teeth showing. “Do you want to ruin us all?”

The bar was of the American type, in the old Osborne Hotel where the tourists stayed. Verban had insisted on their meeting there, rather than the ratskeller next to the campus where they usually had their seidels of beer.

It was late in the afternoon, yet the place was almost empty. Muted bland music issued thinly from the speakers in the ceiling. A few elderly couples, obviously tourists from Japan or one of the Asian rim tigers, sat together at one circular table, their heads together over a vidcam as they viewed their day’s videodiscs.

Verban had suggested this hotel bar as a place where they would not be seen. Zimmerman thought they looked as obvious as a syphilitic chancre on a nun’s face. How much better he would have felt in the noisy fellowship of the beer hall!

Zimmerman steadied himself, then said, “No one is going to be ruined just because I occasionally help a wealthy foreigner.” He whispered in the quiet, almost deserted bar.

“Madness!” Verban repeated. “Sheer madness.”

Zimmerman had known the man for nearly thirty years. Verban had always been the jittery type, scarecrow thin, nervous, given to smoking illicit cigarettes when he thought no one was watching. He was a professor in the university’s law school, on the verge of graduating into the bliss of a professor emeritus’ well-earned retirement.

“I’ve been doing it for so many years,” Zimmerman said. “Why does it upset you now?”

“Because the pressures are stronger now than ever! Don’t you watch the news? Don’t you see what’s going on around you — all over the world!”

“You mean that assassination in New York?”

“That’s only part of it.”

“And the treaty that the United Nations is sponsoring.” Zimmerman smiled at his old friend. “You see, I do keep an eye on events outside my laboratory.”

“Switzerland will sign the treaty.”

Zimmerman shrugged and reached for his glass of beer, a delicate thing that held only a fraction of a seidel’s worth. It was almost empty. At their favorite haunt the barmaids always made certain that the mugs were topped off regularly.

“So Switzerland will sign the stupid treaty. So what? The authorities have never bothered me.”

“They will now,” Verban whispered harshly. “They will close your laboratory entirely.”

“No, they won’t stop research—”

“Yes they will! And they’ll come looking for you first of all, you with your proud announcement that you saved that boy’s life on the Moon with nanckherapy.”

“But it’s true,” Zimmerman insisted. “I did.”

“And you had to tell the world about it?”

“I had to tell the world that nanotherapy is useful, therapeutic, and — used properly — it isn’t harmful.”

“So now you are a marked man. They will close your laboratory.”

Feeling sudden panic, Zimmerman blurted, “But what am I to do?”

“Retire as gracefully as you can. You certainly have enough money to live well.

He shook his fleshy head. “Not really. Most of my income I spent on new research, once the university stopped funding nanotechnology work.”

“It’s over, Willi,” Verban said, half annoyed, half sorrowful. “You mustn’t fight against them. Just take this peacefully and go off into retirement.”

“Never!”

“You’ll get the entire university shut down, you fool! Don’t you understand what kind of power they have?”

Zimmerman wanted to laugh. “They can’t shut down the entire university.”

“They can and they will, if you try to struggle against them.”

“But…’ Zimmerman’s words died in his throat. He stared at his old friend. Verban was terrified. If the university shut down, who would pay out his pension?

His voice suddenly heavy, Zimmerman said, “What they are doing is terribly, terribly wrong.”

“Yes, I know it,” said Verban. “But they have the power. And they will use it mercilessly.”

“I can’t stop my life’s work. I won’t! There must be some university, somewhere. Perhaps in America.”

“Hah!”

“Or Canada?” Zimmerman asked hopefully.

Verban shook his head.

Zimmerman realized he was perspiring. A fear reflex, he knew. They’re making me afraid. He felt a sudden surge of hatred for the faceless people who ladled out fear as part of their power.

Verban said, “It’s all finished, Willi. Nanotechnology — even theoretical research on the subject will be outlawed once the treaty goes into effect.”

“There must be someplace…’ Zimmerman muttered.

“Nowhere on Earth,” said Verban sadly.

Zimmerman heaved an enormous sigh. But then he remembered that his protege, Kris Cardenas, was now living in Canada. Vancouver, he recalled. Perhaps she can help; after all, she won the Nobel Prize. She must have some influence.

CHELSEA, MASSACHUSETTS

She was good-looking. Older than Killifer would’ve liked, but a real stunner despite her age. Skinny, though. Her arms were rail-thin and he guessed her legs were, too, beneath the tight ankle-length skirt she wore. No way of telling how much of a figure she had under that severe outfit. It was plain dull gray from the choker collar down to her plain dull gray shoes. Killifer almost wondered why she didn’t wear gloves, every other part of her body was covered. No jewelry at all.

But her face was enough to kill for. A sculptor’s dream. The kind of face video stars wished they had. A black Venus, a chocolate-cream-colored goddess of beauty.

As she walked up to Killifer, he was totally unable to stop himself from staring at her. Automatically he got up from the bench where he had been waiting. But then he saw something in her eyes that almost frightened him. Her eyes were pained, haunted, rimmed with red like the fires of hell.

“Jonathan Killifer?” she asked needlessly. Her voice was smokey, low, inviting.

“Jack,” he managed to choke out.

“I’m Melissa Hart. Pleased to meet you, Jack.” Without a smile, without any change in those burning eyes. “Would you follow me, please?”

Killifer wanted to tell her he would follow her off the edge of a cliff, but her eyes stopped him. In silence he walked beside her down the busy corridor. He noticed that all the people here dressed in gray, men and women alike, the only difference was that the men wore trousers while all the women wore tight ankle-length skirts. Well, Killifer thought, they sure can’t run away from you in those hobbles.

He expected her to lead him into her office, or maybe a conference room. Instead he followed her to the end of the hallway, up a narrow flight of stairs, and then through a metal door out onto the building’s roof. The open sunlight made Killifer’s eyes water.

“We can speak freely here, Jack,” she said.

That worried him. Wiping at his eyes, he asked, “Whattaya mean? Is your office bugged?”

Melissa gave him a cool smile. “Jack, the Urban Corps doesn’t believe in private offices, not even for General O’Conner. I thought that we could have our first chat here, without anyone else to bother us.”

“How’d you find me?” Killifer asked.

“We have sources of information.” She walked slowly toward the brick parapet along the roofs edge. “Isn’t it a beautiful day?”

Following her, Killifer could see that the building was on a hill and the whole city of Boston was laid out before them, beneath the bright cloudless sky. After so many years at Moonbase, the deep clear blue almost hurt. Everything was so dazzling: the green of the trees, the red brick buildings, the glittering glass facades of the soaring downtown high-rises.

Killifer took in a deep breath of real air. It smelled great, with the salt tang coming in off the harbor. He could almost taste it.

“You were born in Boston, weren’t you?” Melissa asked him.

He nodded and pointed. “Winthrop. Out there by the old airport.”

A Clippership took off from the airport, like a toy at this distance, the thunder of its rocket engines nothing more than a muted rumble.

“Do you remember what Chelsea used to be when you were growing up in Winthrop, Jack?”

Killifer grinned sourly. “A dump. We used to make jokes about Chelsea. It was the bottom of the barrel.”

“That’s right,” said Melissa Hart, like a schoolteacher pleased with her student’s answer. “For generations Chelsea was the bottom of the barrel.”

“And now?”

“Now it’s a model community. The Urban Corps has transformed Chelsea. We brought new industry into the community, new businesses. People have jobs now. They have hope. Crime is down. The schools are turning out model citizens.”

“I thought it was the New Morality did that.”

“We’re part of the New Morality. The Urban Corps, the Angels of God, the Disciples of Allah, St. Michael’s Battalion — there are dozens of organizations within the New Morality structure.”

“Uh-huh.”

“We want your help, Jack.”

“Mine? What for?”

“You’ve worked for years at Moonbase. We need to know all about Moonbase, what they’re doing up there, how they operate, what they’re planning.”

“Why?”

Melissa looked disappointed. “Jack, they work with nanomachines at Moonbase, don’t they?”

“They’ve got to,” he said.

“Nanomachines will soon be illegal,” she said. “We’ve got to know how the people at Moonbase will react to the new law.”

Killifer turned away from her and looked out at the city again. It was so shining and lush it almost looked unreal. It all seemed clean and fresh. And quiet. Hardly any noise from street traffic. No boom boxes blasting away. No voices raised.

“What’s in it for me?” he asked, still without looking at her.

If his self-centered questioned bothered her, Melissa Hart gave no hint of it. She immediately answered, “We’ll hire you as a consultant at fifteen hundred a day, with a guarantee of a minimum of one hundred consulting days per year.”

A hundred-fifty thousand per year, Killifer realized.

“That should augment your Masterson Corporation pension very nicely,” she added.

“My pension, yeah.” He wanted to spit.

“It’s a very generous offer, Jack.”

“For how many years?”

Sounding slightly disappointed again, she replied, “Oh Jack, I can’t promise you more than this one year. If everything goes the way we expect it to, Moonbase will be shut down by the end of that time.”

“And then what happens to me?”

“We’ll see,” she said simply. With a glowing smile. But her eyes still radiated pain.

Killifer thought it over briefly. “What the hell,” he said. “Why not?”

“Then you agree?”

“If you’ll come to dinner with me.”

She seemed to think it over with great care. At last Melissa said, “I’d be happy to have dinner with you, Jack. But only dinner.”

“Sure,” he said. “Just dinner.” It was a lie and he knew that she knew it.

The North End of Boston had once been an Italian preserve, but over the decades it had evolved into Little Asia. Vietnamese, Malay, Thai, Indian and a dozen varieties of Chinese now occupied the narrow twisting streets where once a patriot had climbed the Old North Church bell tower to signal Paul Revere.

Over spicy Hunan platters Killifer found himself spinning out his life story to this beautiful black woman with the haunted eyes. As if he couldn’t stop himself, he spilled out the bitterness, the rage and frustration of his wasted life.

“But why did you spend all those years in Moonbase,” Melissa asked sweetly, chopsticks held gracefully in her long slim fingers, “when you had such a promising career in nanotechnology?”

’Shedid it,” he growled. “Masterson’s widow. Then she married Stavenger. She stuck me in Moonbase.”

“But you could have resigned and come back to Earth, couldn’t you?”

He hadn’t intended to tell her about the nanobugs and Greg Masterson and Paul Stavenger’s murder. He had never intended to speak of that at all. But by the time dinner was finished and they were walking the crowded, brightly-lit streets, he had revealed himself to her almost completely.

“Greg Masterson murdered his stepfather?”

There was something in the way she said it that brought Killifer up short. Something in her voice.

“You know Greg Masterson?”

She nodded. In the harsh glare of the street lamp her face looked like frozen stone. “I knew him. Long ago.”

They walked in painful silence down to the waterfront, where the streets were emptier. And darker.

“My apartment’s up there.” Killifer pointed to an apartment block across the street from the piers.

“You must have a nice view,” Melissa said absently, sounding as if her thoughts were a quarter-million miles away.

“Come on up and see it,” he suggested, taking her by the arm.

She disengaged effortlessly. “No, Jack,” she said. “It doesn’t work that way.”

“Come on,” he wheedled. “Just have a drink with me.”

With a smile that might have been sad, or perhaps pitying, Melissa said, “You don’t understand, Jack. I’m celibate.”

“You’re what?”

“I’ve been celibate since I met General O’Conner, many years ago.”

“Celibate?”

“It’s part of our creed.”

“You mean everybody I saw in your building…?”

She nodded.

“That’s hard to believe.”

“Believe it, Jack. Celibacy removes one of the great causes of pain in this life.”

“But… but you’re so beautiful! It’s a damned shame. A waste.”

Her eyes flared. “No, it’s not a waste. I know what pain can be caused by the attractions of sex. I was caught in that web, once, years ago. It led to nothing but pain and evil, drugs and self-destruction. I nearly killed myself before General O’Conner found me.”

“General O’Conner.”

“He, wasn’t the general then; he hadn’t even founded the Urban Corps yet. But he saved my life. He made me dedicate my life to the New Morality and all that it stands for.”

“And you’ve gotta be celibate?”

“It simplifies your life, Jack. It allows you to concentrate your energies on the things that really matter.”

“Still seems like a damned waste to me,” Killifer grumbled.

“No, Jack. It makes life so much easier. Cleaner. Come back to the office tomorrow, Jack. I want you to join us. We need your help.”

Killifer thought, Maybe this celibate crap is just her excuse. After all, we just met this afternoon. Give it time, she’ll pull her pants down sooner or later.

“Okay,” he said lightly. “See you tomorrow morning.”

“Nine sharp,” said Melissa.

“Right.”

He left her at the street corner and went into his apartment building. She didn’t seem to have the slightest fear of being alone on the dark street.

Jinny Anson stared at her husband. “What do you mean?” she demanded.

“Just what I said,” he replied calmly, his teeth clamped on his favorite briar pipe.

“You’ve got to submit your syllabus to a freakin’ committee?”

His studied composure irritated her. “It’s not as if this is the first time,” he said.

“But this committee’s got nothing to do with the university,” she said.

Her husband shrugged. “It’s a local citizens’ group. They call themselves the Moral Watchdogs or something like that.”

“Moral dipshits,” Anson ’muttered.

Her husband gave her a disapproving frown. He was obviously afraid his young daughters might hear her language, even though the door to their bedroom was firmly shut and the kids were down in the rec room watching video on their new wall-to-wall Windowall screen.

Quentin Westlake was a sweet, gentle professor of English literature at the University of Texas. It had taken him ten years to work his way from various outlying campuses in the vast hinterlands of the state to the main campus at Austin. Along the way he had married, fathered two daughters, and divorced when his first wife fell in love with an investment broker from Chicago.

Jinny Anson had met him at a seminar in Lubbock, where she had been invited to participate in a panel discussion of ’Literature in the Space Age.” Jinny had been the only panel member who was not an English lit professor and Quentin had been the only one among them who had treated her with kindness.

It was a different kind of romance, with Jinny commuting every few months from Moonbase to Texas, and Quentin trying to convince his two pre-pubescent daughters that he wouldn’t marry anyone who would turn into a wicked stepmother. When Jinny took her regular annual leave from the directorship of Moonbase the commute became easier: merely from Savannah to Austin. By the time she returned to the Moon they had decided to get married.

Their wedding was at the Alamo, as scheduled, with Quentin’s two daughters serving as bridesmaids and Joanna Stavenger among the guests. Joanna’s best wedding present was to allow Jinny to transfer to the corporation’s manufacturing facility in Houston; she could commute to work now on the high-speed levitrain from Austin. In addition to her regular duties, Jinny was supervising construction of a model water recycling center for the city of Houston, based on the technology perfected at Moonbase. It made for very long days, but at least she was home each night with her husband. Most nights.

For nearly six months, now Jinny had lived in his three-bedroom ranch-style house in suburban Austin, getting acclimatized to raising two half-grown daughters and to the intricate jealousies and competitions of a major university’s faculty. She quickly fell in love with the girls; the other faculty wives and women professors — and administrators — she felt she could gladly do without.

Now, as they were undressing for bed, Quentin told her about the new committee that would be reviewing his work. She knew he was concerned about it, despite his easy-going attitude. He wouldn’t have brought up the subject if it didn’t bother him.

“But what right does a self-appointed gaggle of uptight New Morality people have to pass judgment on your syllabus?” Jinny asked, aggrieved.

Quentin smiled wearily and rubbed the forefinger of his right hand against its thumb. “Money talks, sweetheart. Some of those committee members are among the biggest contributors to the university.”

“It’s an invasion of academic freedom!” Jinny snarled.

“Sure it is,” he agreed amiably. “But what can I do about it? The Jews don’t like “The Merchant of Venice,” the Africans don’t like “Othello.” The Baptists say “Hamlet” is smutty and the feminists complain about “Macbeth,” for lord’s sake! What can I do?”

That stopped her. What could they do about it if the university administration and the faculty leaders permitted it? Probably a lot of New Morality members among them, she realized.

“You know the old Chinese advice about getting raped,” Quentin said softly, as he took off his trousers.

“You shouldn’t relax,” she said, from her side of the bed. “And you sure as hell shouldn’t enjoy it.”

Naked, he flopped onto the bed. “Ah, love, let us be true to one another, for this world has neither certitude nor peace nor help for pain,” he misquoted slightly.

Jinny sat on the bed beside him. “This world,” she replied.

DIRECTOR’S OFFICE

“Operation Bootstrap?” Greg echoed, from behind his desk. “Are you joking?”

“No,” said Doug. “It’s not a joke.”

The two of them were alone in Greg’s office: Doug in his usual spot on the couch by the door, Greg sitting upright behind his desk.

With a shake of his head, Greg said to his brother, “When Mom told me about it I thought perhaps it was some kind of prank you and Brudnoy had cooked up.”

“Greg, it’s something we have to do,” Doug said earnestly.

“Really?”

“Sooner or later.”

“It won’t be sooner.”

For all the urgency in his words, Doug looked calm and relaxed, almost insolently at ease, Greg thought His young half-brother slouched back in the couch all the way across the office. He expects me to get up from my desk and go over to him, Greg told himself. No way.

I’m the director of Moonbase. I called him here into my office; he’s not going to make me jump through his hoops.

“Look, Doug, I asked you to come here without Mom so we could talk over this crazy idea of yours—”

“It’s not a crazy idea,” Doug said.

“Come on, now—”

“I’ve worked out the numbers, Greg. We can build Clipper-ships that’ll outperform anything that’s ever flown. And that’s just the beginning. There’s aircraft, automobiles — we can transform the whole world!”

Greg frowned at his half-brother. “Pie in the sky. Nothing but pipedreams.”

“Look at the numbers!” Doug urged. “I can bring them up on your computer.”

“I’m sure you can put numbers on a screen that say anything you want them to say,” Greg replied, acidly. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to get as crazy as you are.”

“It’s not crazy!”

“Operation Shoelace,” Greg sneered.

Doug jolted to his feet and strode up to the curving desk. Greg had to look up at his younger half-brother, leaning both fists on the desk top menacingly.

“Operation Bootstrap will not only save Moonbase, Greg,” Doug said, as calm and implacable as a brick wall, “it’ll make Masterson Aerospace the most powerful corporation on Earth. “Sit down,” Greg snapped.

Doug pulled up the nearest webbed chair and sat in it.

“Now listen to the realities,” Greg said, tapping a fingernail on his desk top.

Doug smiled slightly. “Okay, I’m listening.”

“I’ve spent the past six months searching for a way to keep this base afloat—”

“Operation Bootstrap is the way to do it!”

“All that you’ll accomplish,” Greg countered annoyedly, “is to push Moonbase into the red deeper and faster. It’s nonsense! Absolute nonsense!”

“But it’s not—”

“For chrissake, Doug, we can’t even get the mass driver finished!”

“I know that.”

“It’s taking every bit of energy and manpower that I can spare. I’ve got to get the mass driver built and still show a profit every quarter. Do you know how tough that is? Do you have any idea of the pressures I’m under?”

“Okay,” Doug said, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Forget everything I just said, then.”

“Good.”

“But we’ve got to do Operation Bootstrap if we’re going to keep Moonbase alive.”

“Moonbase is a continuing drain on the corporation’s finances.”

“Greg, this isn’t about money! It’s much more-’ ›

“Don’t be childish,” Greg snapped. “It’s always about money. There isn’t anything else.”

“But—”

“But nothing! If I don’t show a profit the board will shut us down, just like that.” Greg snapped his fingers. “Is that what you want?”

“No,” said Doug quietly. “But it’s what you want, isn’t it?”

Greg stared at him.

“You didn’t take the directorship here to save us, Greg. You came up here to kill Moonbase.”

Doug saw his brother flinch at the word ’kill.” I shouldn’t have said it, he told himself. But it’s too late now.

“Moonbase is Mom’s pet project,” Greg said slowly, his voice low and trembling. “She’s been nursing it along for more than twenty years now. But there’s no rationale to keep it going. It’s a drain on the corporation.”

With a shake of his head, Doug replied, “There’s more involved here than the quarterly profit-and-loss statement, Greg.”

“You still don’t see—”

“No, you don’t see,” Doug said, raising his voice slightly. “Moonbase has been tottering on the brink of extinction ever since it started. I know that. I also know that if we’re limited to supplying raw materials for the orbital factories we’ll always be on the ragged edge. Always!”

“What do you mean, limited?”

“We’ve got to expand our operations! We’ve got to make ourselves self-sufficient and move beyond just being a mining operation. Being self-sufficient means more than just having enough water to go around, Greg. We’ve got to be able to manufacture everything we need, right here at Moonbase, without needing imports from Earthside.”

“In your dreams,” Greg muttered.

“We can do it! I know we can! But we’ve got to start now. We’ve all got to work together on this.”

Is he really that naive, Greg wondered, or is he just trying to manipulate me?

Taking a deep breath and sitting up straighter, Greg said firmly, “When my term here is over, I’m going to recommend to the board that Moonbase be shut down.”

“But we can turn things around,” Doug urged.

Exasperated, Greg burst out, “Do you have any idea of what you’d need to mine an asteroid? This isn’t some game! Get real!”

Strangely, instead of getting angry, Doug smiled. “Greg, I’ve calculated every detail of the job. I’ve run it through our logistics and engineering programs. I can even tell you the exact date on which we’ll make rendezvous with 2015-eta.”

“With what?”

“That’s the best asteroid for our purposes. When you trade off its nearest-approach distance against the eccentricity and inclination of its orbit—”

Doug blathered on about the asteroid while Greg sat, seething. I didn’t want Mom here, he reminded himself, because she’d side with him and not me. I wanted to confront him face-to-face, all by ourselves. But now he’s pulling out all this technical garbage to show how much more he knows than I do.

“Hold it!” Greg snapped.

Doug stopped in mid-sentence.

“Now listen to this and believe it: Nothing new is getting started at this base. I’m willing to let the mass-driver job continue, but that’s just because we might be able to sell the facility to the Japanese once it’s finished.”

“Sell it?”

“Or sell the know-how. Yamagata could buy the nanobugs and build their own mass driver for themselves.”

“Maybe Yamagata will want to buy Moonbase,” Doug thought aloud. “The whole base.”

“Maybe,” Greg agreed, with a cold smile. “I hadn’t thought of that possibility. They just might be fanatic enough.”

“But otherwise you’ll shut’down Moonbase.”

“What choice do we have? The U.N.’s nanotech treaty will wipe out the base anyway.”

“So the deal with Kiribati is just a fake?” Doug asked.

“I’ll take care of the Kiribati deal. You don’t have to worry about it.”

“You’re just doing it to keep Mom happy.”

I’m doing it,” Greg said icily, “so that we’ll have a place to continue nanotech work, despite the U.N. treaty.” Before Doug could reply he added, “We don’t need Moonbase or even space stations to use nanotechnology. I can make Kiribati a very wealthy nation, using nanotechnology.”

“If the U.N. doesn’t pressure them into quitting,” Doug said. “Or the New Morality doesn’t bomb the islands.”

Greg glared at him.

“So you’re really going to shut down Moonbase,” said Doug.

“That’s right. And you can run to Mom and tell her all about it. I don’t care. My mind’s made up.”

“You’re making a mistake, Greg. A horrible mistake.”

Raising his voice nearly to a shout, Greg insisted, “Doug, I won’t have it! Stop this crap here and now! Moonbase is history! It’s dead!”

Doug looked shocked. For the first time since he’d sauntered into the office, he looked upset, almost fearful. Greg nodded, satisfied. That wiped the self-satisfied smile off his face.

“I’ve made my decision and that’s it,” Greg said. “Moonbase is history and there’s nothing you or Mom or anyone else can do to save it.”

Doug studied his older brother’s face for several silent moments. There’s no sense arguing with him, he realized. His mind’s made up. He’s in no mood to consider the facts.

“All right.” Slowly, Doug got up from the web chair. “You’re the boss.”

Greg’s smile widened slightly. “I’m glad you understand that.”

Doug walked to the door. He knew he shouldn’t, but he turned back and said, “But if Moonbase is dead, it’s because you’ve murdered it.”

Greg wanted to scream at the impudent young snot, but for just a flash of a second he thought he saw Paul Stavenger standing at the door and not his son. Looking at him accusingly. Greg blinked and it was Doug again. With the same accusing stare.

Before Greg could reply, Doug opened the door and stepped through.

“It’s always darkest just before the dawn,” Doug muttered to himself. It didn’t cheer him one bit.

Surprised and stung by Greg’s stubborn refusal to listen to reason, Doug did what he often did when he felt troubled. He went to the main airlock, pulled on a space suit, and went out for a walk on the crater floor.

The Sun was down; dawn would not come for another several hours, but it was never truly dark at Alphonsus’ latitude. The Earth hung up in the sky, glowing warm and bright, deep blue oceans and swirls of clean white clouds. Doug saw mat Earth was nearly at its full phase. He could clearly see the southwestern U.S. desert and the cloud-shaded California coast. On the other side of the Pacific the tight spiral of a powerful typhoon was approaching the Philippines.

Greg’s acting like he’s brain-dead, Doug told himself. He’s made up his mind and he doesn’t want to be bothered with the facts.

A tractor trundled past him, kicking up dust.

“Need a lift?” Doug heard in his helmet earphones.

“Thanks, no.”

The tractor lumbered past him, on its way out to the mass driver site. Doug walked slowly in that direction, thinking that up until a few months ago you could walk almost anywhere you wanted to out here on the crater floor and be happily alone. Except for the rocket port, of course, but you could avoid that easily enough if you wanted to.

Not anymore, he saw. The mass driver project was turning this part of the crater floor into a busy, bustling conglomeration of tractors and nanotech crews in dust-spattered space suits.

The mass driver. An electric catapult more than two miles long that accelerates packets of lunar ore to more than a hundred gees injffew seconds. With luck, they’ll finish it just in time to close down the whole base.

Tractors with bulldozer blades on their fronts were smoothing a road between the main airlock and the mass driver site, scraping aside the dark top layer of the regolith to reveal the bright, new-looking stuff beneath. Doug followed the churned-up turmoil of their tracks until he could clearly see the driver itself rising from the dusty, pockmarked ground like a low metal finger pointed at the horizon.

They were having trouble with the nanomachines, Doug knew. Not enough iron in the regolith to process into the structural steel they needed. And every atom imported from Earth raised hell with Greg’s quarterly profit-and-loss figures.

What a waste, Doug thought sadly. Finish the job so we can sell it to Yamagata. What would the men and women working on this mass driver think if I told them Greg’s going to close the base? That all their work is for nothing. That the best they can hope for is to sell the fruit of their labor to Yamagata.

It’s not right, he knew. It’s just not right. We ought to be building for the future, reaching out to the asteroids, the other planets, eventually to the stars. Not retreating, not slinking back to Earth as if we can’t meet the challenges out here.

Briefly Doug wondered what it’d be like to be launched off the Moon by the mass driver. A hundred gees. He laughed to himself. In the first second you’d be smeared into a thin bloody pulp. Take the nice slow rocket; it’s safer.

He could see the driver clearly now, its dark metal bulk marching straight as an arrow off into the distance while machines and spacesuited figures crawled over and around it like mechanical acolytes at some vast alien altar.

Greg doesn’t have the vision, Doug knew. He just doesn’t see the future at all. To him, tomorrow’s just like today. He’s making the deal with Kiribati so the corporation can become more profitable by using nanotechnology on Earth. He doesn’t even see the forces down there that’ll try to crush him and nanotechnology, together.

Okay, Doug said to himself. Do you see the future? Are you so dead-certain that you know what’s right?

He answered himself immediately. Yes. I know what we’ve got to do. I can see the path the human race has to take. Grow or die. It’s that simple, that stark. If we don’t grow beyond the confines of Earth we’re going to’sink into an overcrowded, overpolluted fishbowl of a world without freedom, without hope, a world of poverty and despair and global dictatorship.

As he trudged along the dusty crater floor, Doug tapped a gloved finger into the palm of his other hand, ticking off the points he wanted to make.

The mass driver’s important. It can lower our launch costs and make us profitable. But only if the factories in Earth orbit can build products that we can sell.

We’ve got to get out to that asteroid. We’ve got to show them that we can make Clipperships of diamond and revolutionize the aerospace industry. More than that, we’ll be producing a product with nanotechnology that everyone on Earth will want. We’ll be striking a blow against the nanoluddites and the New Morality. And even more than that, we’ll be moving Moonbase from a mining operation to a manufacturing center. From a marginal town to a growing city. That’s the most important thing.

That’s what we’ve got to do! We’ve got to! And we’ve got less than six months to do it.

Doug stared off into the dark endless sky. I can’t let Greg shut down Moonbase. I’ve got to get Operation Bootstrap going despite him. Behind his back, over his head, any way I can. We’ve got to push Operation Bootstrap whether Greg likes it or not.

But how? How can I mobilize the people here when Greg’s dead-set against it? How can I move us toward the asteroid mining effort if the base director won’t permit anyone to work on the program? It’ll be a direct challenge to Greg, almost a mutiny.

Can I really fight him? Mom wants us to work together, but Greg doesn’t want that. He just doesn’t see what we have to do. He doesn’t have the visions He’s acting as if he’s still sitting in Savannah or New York. That’s where his mind is. That’s where his attitudes are.

Doug turned away from the busy work scene stretching out along the miles-long track of the mass driver, turned his back to all that and looked across the emptiness of the pockmarked crater floor toward the softly rounded old mountains of the ringwall.

“It’s always darkest before the dawn,” he repeated to himself. Scant consolation, he thought.

It certainly was dark out there. With the Earth behind him, the airless sky looked black as infinity, specked here and there by a few stars bright enough to see through the heavy tinting of his helmet visor.

Dark and empty, Doug thought.

But as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Doug realized that there was a faint glow rising above the tired old mountain that poked its head up in the middle of the giant crater. Out beyond the brutally close horizon, the sky was slowly brightening.

They’re wrong! Doug told himself. They’re all wrong! It’s not darkest just before the dawn. Not on the Moon, at least.

For out in the star-flecked blackness beyond the weary mountains, a pale hazy glow was beginning to light the predawn hours. The zodiacal light, Doug knew. Sunlight reflected off dust particles floating in space, the leftovers from the creation of the solar system. Here in the airless sky of Moonbase they light up the heavens long before the Sun comes into view.

Doug raised his arms to the ancient motes of dust that brightened the predawn hours. They’re like friendly little fireflies out there in space, he told himself. They bring us the message, the promise that the light is on its way, the Sun will rise, a new day will dawn. Have hope. The darkness will end. It’s a good omen.

Feeling excited again, energized, he said to himself, I’ve got to talk with Brudnoy again. And Bianca. Maybe they can get me together with a few people who can get Operation Bootstrap started.

And Mom? Doug wondered about that as he started trudging back toward the main airlock. No, Mom will side with Greg. She’s a businesswoman, and Greg can make a stronger case for the bottom line than I can.

Still, Doug broke into a broad grin as he hurried back toward Moonbase. Greg’s got profit-and-loss statements and projections of inventories and all that puke. All I’ve got is a broken-down former cosmonaut and maybe a few other people who might want to help me with Operation Bootstrap.

And a vision for the future.

He began to leap across the barren dusty ground, soaring in twenty-yard strides across the crater floor.

“Hey, where you goin’ in such a hurry?” a construction worker’s voice called in his earphones.

“Into the future!” Doug sang back.

BIANCA’S QUARTERS

“All right, quiet down!” Bianca Rhee shouted.

They all stopped talking and looked at her expectantly. Doug counted fourteen people crammed into Bianca’s quarters, five of them squeezed on the bunk, the others crowded on the floor. Most of them were long-termers, men and women on year-long work contracts. Several had been working at Moonbase for many years, shuttling back and forth to Earth.

Lev Brudnoy had appropriated the desk chair and placed one of the female student-workers on his lap. He sat there with a satisfied smile on his grizzled face, one long arm around the young woman’s waist, his other hand grasping an insulated flask of rocket juice. The others clutched a motley assortment of cups, glasses, bottles, even zero-gee squeeze bulbs. It was a BYOB party.

The ostensible reason for the party was to show off the new wallscreen that Doug had bought for Bianca. It almost filled the wall opposite her bunk, turning the blank stone into a window that could look out on the world, wherever vidcams could go. For the first hour of the party they had hooted and catcalled through a production of a Masterson Corporation-sponsored drama set on a corporate space station where romance and intrigue flourished in zero gravity.

Now the video was finished and the Windowall showed a satellite view of the great rift valley of Mars. Bianca perched herself on the desktop, her legs too short to reach the floor. She asked Doug to come up and sit beside her. They all wore workers’ coveralls, color-coded to show their departments. Doug saw mostly the pumpkin orange of the research department and the olive green of mining, although there were a couple of medical whites in the crowd; one of the women medics wore hers unbuttoned almost to the waist, showing plenty of cleavage. He wore the only management blue.

Seeing that she had their attention, Bianca said more softly, “Doug’s got something important to tell you.” And with that, she turned to him, grinning.

“Thanks for the glowing introduction,” Doug joked weakly. A few chuckles from the people looking up at him. He knew most of them, at least the long-termers. Of course, each coverall carried a nametag.

“I need your help,” Doug began. “I want to start moving Moonbase along the road to self-sufficiency as rapidly as we can manage it.”

As he began to outline his plans for Operation Bootstrap, Doug studied their faces. At first they looked amused, as if they expected this to be an elaborate joke of some kind. But then they started getting interested, and began asking questions.

“You really expect us to modify an LTV in our spare time?”

Doug answered, “A couple of extra hours a day from five technicians who know what they’re doing can get the job done in ten weeks, from what the computer estimates tell me.”

“But we won’t get paid for the extra work.”

“No, it’ll be strictly voluntary. Your pay will come as a share of the profit we make from the asteroid ore.”

“Work first, pay later. Huh!”

Bianca said, “Hey, you’re always complaining there’s nothing to do up here except drink and screw around.”

“What’s wrong with that?” one of the guys piped up.

Everyone laughed.

But Doug went on seriously, “I know it’s a lot to ask, and you might put in a lot of work for nothing if the mission isn’t successful. But if we do succeed…”

“How much money we talking about?”

“The calculations work out to about five times your hourly wage, if we get the amount of ore we’re hoping for.”

“And the corporation’ll give us this money as a bonus?”

“Right.”

“But the corporation doesn’t even know we’re doing this… this Bootstrap thing? How does that work?”

Doug replied, “We’re all taking a chance. You’re risking your time. Once we’ve got the ore from the asteroid, though, the corporation will pay you a bonus along the lines I’ve calculated.”

“How can we be sure of that?”

“You have my word on it,” Doug said.

“No offense, pal, but how much weight does your word have with the management?”

Doug smiled. “Good question. Let me put it this way: If the corporation won’t come up with the money, then I will. Personally.”

“Or we can sell the ore to Yamagata,” one of the women said.

No one laughed.

Lev Brudnoy said, “I hate to be the bearer of evil tidings, but there is a rumor that the base will be shut down at the end of this director’s term.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that buzz.”

Several others nodded.

Doug had to admit it. “That’s the director’s current plan. I’m hoping we can make him change his mind.”

“He’s your brother, isn’t he?”

“My half-brother.”

“Does that mean he’s only half as heavy?” asked one of the women. “You know, “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.”

Doug made a rueful grin for her. “He’s twice as heavy, believe me.”

“So you want us to stick our necks out when the base director’s ready to shut down the whole humpin’ operation?”

“I want to save Moonbase,” Doug replied.

“Wait a minute. Where are you going to get an LTV to modify?”

I’ll handle that,” said Doug. “None of you has to do a thing or commit yourselves to a minute of extra work unless and until I get an LTV for us.”

They glanced at each other, muttering.

“Whatever happens,” Biaьca said, without waiting for them to come to a group decision, “this little meeting here ought to be kept secret for the time being.”

“Secret? From who?”

“Whom,” corrected one of the students.

“From management,” said Doug. “I want to present this as a fait accompli before my brother knows what we’re doing.”

Someone whistled softly.

“Look,” Doug said, “we can’t expect any support from the corporation. That’s why we’ve got to do this on a volunteer basis and hope to get our payback at the end of the asteroid mission.”

“Sounds awfully risky.”

“Sounds like a good way to get fired.”

“You can’t be fired for working overtime on a voluntary basis,” Doug said. “Read your employment contracts.”

“Well,” said Bianca, “I don’t know about the rest of you turkeys, but I’m ready to put in a couple of extra hours for this.”

Brudnoy said, “It should be more interesting than spending your spare time in The Cave, waiting for the menu to change.”

They all laughed. Doug thought maybe half of them would actually volunteer to work on their own time. But this meeting would never be kept a secret. The word about Operation Bootstrap would spread through Moonbase with the speed of sound.

Which was what he was counting on.

“I’ve never been out this far before,” said Brudnoy.

His voice sounded strange in Doug’s helmet earphones. Subdued. Almost reverent.

“I hardly ever come out here myself,” Rhee said. “Just for these regular maintenance checks.”

The astronomical observatory was on the opposite side of Alphonsus’ central peak from Moonbase. It had been placed out there to shield it from any stray light or dust or chemical pollution from the spacecraft landing and taking off at the rocket port. This meant a two-hour doctor ride across the crater floor, but Doug and Brudnoy had decided to accompany Rhee to see the instruments she used to track near-Earth asteroids.

Now Rhee led them through a jungle of metal shapes, all pointed skyward. Wide-angle telescopes, spectrometers, infrared and ultraviolet and even gamma-ray detectors. Doug easily recognized the wide dishes of the four radio telescopes off in the distance, but one shape puzzled him: it looked like a huge but stubby wide tub mounted on tracked pivots. It was easily twenty yards across.

“The light bucket?” Rhee said when he asked. “That’s the Shapley Telescope, two-thousand-centimeter reflector. The most powerful telescope in the solar system.”

“You use it for deep space observations?”

Rhee replied cheerfully, “I don’t use it all. It’s reserved for the Big Boys back Earthside. But yes, they use it for cosmological work. Quasars and redshifts, stuff like that”

Brudnoy asked, “Wasn’t there talk of building an even bigger “light bucket,” using liquid mercury instead of a glass mirror?”

“The Shapley’s mirror is aluminum,” Rhee answered. “No need for glass in this gravity.”

“But the mercury telescope?”

“Maybe someday. Probably be easier to make really big mirrors with mercury, but it tends to vaporize into the vacuum.”

Doug watched their two spacesuited figures as they spoke: Brudnoy taller than Rhee by more than a helmet’s worth.

“Couldn’t it be covered with a protective coating?” the Russian asked.

“Sure, but that cuts down on its reflectivity.”

“Ah.”

Doug asked, “Which ones do you use for tracking the asteroids?

“Over here.” Rhee pointed and Doug followed her outstretched gloved hand with his eyes.

“The two big ones are Schmidts,” she explained. “Wide field’scopes. Schmidt-Mendells, actually; they’ve been specially built for lunar work. And those over there are tracking individual asteroids, getting spectrographic data on their compositions.”

“For your thesis,” Doug realized.

“Right.”

“Don’t you use radar to detect asteroids?” Brudnoy asked.

Doug could sense her nodding inside her helmet. “Sure. One of the radio telescopes converts to radar sweeps twice a day. When we pick up something new we track it long enough to determine its orbit and then turn one of the spectrographic’scopes on it.”

“What happens to all this equipment if Moonbase shuts down?” Doug asked.

“The university consortium will keep them running as long as they can, I guess,” Rhee answered. “The data gets piped back Earthside automatically, as it is. Maybe they’ll be able to send a maintenance crew up here every six months or so, keep it all going.”

“It would be a shame to lose all this,” Brudnoy muttered.

Doug nodded agreement even though they couldn’t see him do it.

It took three hours for Rhee to complete all her maintenance checks and make the necessary adjustments in the instruments. Then they climbed back into the open tractor and trundled toward Moonbase. Brudnoy and Doug got off at the rocket port and Rhee drove alone back to the main airlock and the garage inside it.

“So this is the one you want to buy,” Brudnoy said as they walked slowly to the lunar transfer vehicle sitting on one of the smoothed rock pads.

“It’s been in service for ten years,” Doug said, looking up at the ungainly spacecraft. “The corporation would sell it for about twice its scrap value, I think.”

The LTV looked rather like a pyramidal shaped skeleton. It squatted on four bent, flimsy-looking legs that supported a metal mesh platform. From the platform rose gold-foiled propellant tanks, darker odd-shaped cargo containers, pipes and plumbing with gray electronics boxes wedged in, it seemed, wherever they could-be fitted. Up at the top, some thirty feet above Doug’s head, was the empty plastiglass bubble of a passenger/crew compartment.

“Well,” Brudnoy said, sighing, “we won’t need the passenger bubble.”

“Replace it with more cargo holds,” said Doug.

“No, I think the mining equipment should go there.”

“Oh, right,” Doug agreed hastily. “I almost forgot we’ll need that.”

For nearly an hour they clambered over the aging LTV, awkward in their cumbersome surface suits. The spacecraft stood stoically on the pad, like a dignified old gutted building being inspected by skeptical prospective buyers.

“Metal fatigue,” Brudnoy muttered time and again. “This whole section must be replaced.”

Doug took notes on his hand-held computer.

Finally the Russian was satisfied. “Not as good as I wanted,” he said as he and Doug climbed back down onto the scoured ground again. “But not as bad as I feared.”

“Can we get into shape?” Doug asked.

“Of course,” Brudnoy answered. Then he added, “The question is, how much will it cost to get it into shape?”

“We’ve got some homework to do,” Doug said as they headed for the main airlock.

Once inside, and out of their suits, Doug said, “Come on down to my quarters and we’ll start figuring out the cost numbers.”

He started striding down the tunnel. Brudnoy lagged behind him.

“I could use a good night’s sleep,” the Russian said.

Doug saw that Brudnoy’s pouchy eyes had dark circles under them. He glanced at his wristwatch. It was nearly midnight.

“Oh. Okay,” Doug said as they approached the double-sized hatch of the farm. “Actually, I’ve got a few hours of studying to do; got an exam tomorrow.”

“On what subject?”

“European architecture. I’ll have to build either a classical Greco-Roman temple or a Gothic cathedral.”

“With your bare hands?” Brudnoy asked.

Grinning, Doug replied, “They’ll let me use a computer.”

“Very kind of them.”

“I’ve still got to put in a few hours at the screen, though,” said Doug.

Brudnoy stopped a moment at the farm’s entrance. The airtight hatch was closed, as usual.

“I should check on my rabbits,” he said, yawning. “The automatic feeder has been cranky lately.”

I’ll help you,” Doug offered.

“No, not now. I’m too tired. Tomorrow will be good enough.” And he started walking down the tunnel again.

Doug slowed his own pace to keep in step with the Russian.

“You never get tired, do you?” Brudnoy asked.

“I don’t feel tired, no.”

“Is it the natural buoyancy of youth, I wonder? Or do the nanomachines in you give you this preternatural endurance?”

“Preternatural?” Doug laughed.

Just as they reached the cross tunnel, two young women came around the corner. They stopped and stood uncertainly in the tunnel, both in crisp new white coveralls. Doug saw that they were wearing weighted boots. Newcomers.

“Oh!” said the taller of the two. “We’re looking for the farm.”

She was a good-looking brunette. Her companion was stockier, curly red hair clipped short, with a bosom that strained the front of her jumpsuit.

Brudnoy stroked his bearded chin. “The farm? Why should two such lovely ladies be looking for the farm at this time of night?”

“We just got off our shift,” said the brunette.

“And we heard that you keep bunny rabbits down here,” said the redhead.

Brudnoy’s weariness seemed to disappear. Before Doug’s eyes the tired old man turned into a smiling, boyish swain with large, liquid eyes that blinked at the two women longingly.

“Ah, yes, the bunny rabbits. One of them just gave birth, this very afternoon.” ,

“Really?” they squealed in unison. “Can we see them?”

“Of course,” said Brudnoy. “Right this way.”

“It’s not too late?”

“For such lovely newcomers to our humble farm, how could it be too late?” Brudnoy glanced at Doug and rolled his eyes.

“I’ve got to be going,” Doug said.

Smiling wolfishly, Brudnoy said, “Then I shall have to show the rabbits to these young ladies all by myself?”

“Well,” said Doug, “maybe I can hang around for a little bit.”

“If it’s not too much trouble,” the brunette said.

“No trouble at all,” Brudnoy answered grandly. “Just follow me.”

Doug laughed to himself as he followed Brudnoy and the two women back toward the farm and the rabbit pens. No wonder Lev likes to keep the rabbits, he said to himself. And here I thought he only had our nutritional needs in mind.

Well, Doug mused, maybe we can recruit these two for Operation Bootstrap. If nothing else.

MT. YEAGER

“Well, what do you think?” Doug asked.

He could hear his mother’s excited breathing through the suit radio. From their vantage atop Mt. Yeager they could see almost the entire floor of Alphonsus before the sharp lunar horizon cut off their view. In the other direction, Mare Nubium stretched out like an endless undulating frozen sea of rock, dotted with smaller craters and the glowing red beacon lights of the old temporary shelters.

“You were right, Doug,” Joanna said in a hushed, awed voice. “It’s breathtaking.”

She had never been out on the lunar surface before. Doug quietly insisted that she make an excursion with him; they both knew his motive was to get her alone, away from Greg, so they could talk without interruption, without eavesdropping.

Joanna had been upset and impatient during the hour they spent getting into the spacesuits and prebreathing their low-pressure mix of oxygen and nitrogen. Then Doug had requisitioned a hopper and taken his mother — who made it clear she was frightened half to death — up to the top of the tallest mountain in Alphonsus’ ringwall.

“There’s the mass driver,” Doug said, pointing at the dark line laid out across the crater floor. “And the rocket port. You can see the solar energy farms…”

But Joanna’s eyes were turned the other way. She stretched out a gloved hand toward the red beacons marching straight out toward the brutally close horizon.

“Those are the tempos, aren’t they?” she asked.

Doug nodded inside his helmet, then grasped his mother’s shoulders gently and turned her slightly to the left.

“That’s Wodjohowitcz Pass,” he said, pointing to a rounded cleft in the ringwall. “That’s where my father died.”

He heard the breath catch in her throat.

“Would you like to see the plaque there?” Doug asked.

“No,” Joanna said, her voice husky. “I know what it says.”

“We put one like it at the top of Mt. Wasser,” he said. “For Brennart.”

“I know.”

“We really ought to put up a statue for Brennart,” Doug went on. “He deserves it.”

“Not until there are tourists to spend money to see it,” Joanna replied firmly.

Doug laughed lightly. “Right.” More seriously, he added, “Brennart and I were just getting to know each other… respect each other…”

“And you lost him.”

“We all lost him. Mom, if he were still here he’d be pushing Operation Bootstrap even harder than I am.”

“All right,” Joanna said. “Tell me what it is that you didn’t want to say in front of Greg.”

Doug went to scratch his chin, but his gloved hand bumped into his helmet, instead. “Well,” he said, only slightly startled, “I need to buy an LTV.”

“A lunar transfer vehicle? Buy one?”

“Would the corporation let us modify one of their LTVs for the asteroid mission? Would Greg?”

“No,” she said. “Of course not.”

“Then I’ll have to buy one. I’ve thought it all through a thousand times,” he said, exaggerating only a little. “I’ve worked it out with Lev Brudnoy and a couple of other people who don’t want their names used, not yet, anyway—”

“You’ve got a real conspiracy going!” Joanna said, sounding shocked.

“A cabal,” Doug answered lightly. He immediately added, “But it hasn’t done any harm to Moonbase. Or to Greg. No harm at all.”

“Really?”

Doug returned to his subject. “We need an LTV to get out to the asteroid.”

“But you’ll have to modify the spacecraft. You can’t use it as-is to make a rendezvous with an asteroid.”

“That’s right.” Doug nodded.

“And where will you make these modifications?”

“I’d like to do it right here.”

“At Moonbase?”

“Right.”

“Do you have the facilities here?”

“Not really.”

The proper personnel?”

“Sort of.”

“And how do you propose to get the facilities and people you need without your brother knowing about it?”

Doug spread his arms out wide. “That’s the tough part of it. But I figured once we actually acquired an LTV he’d have to let us go ahead and modify it.”

“Have to?” Doug could hear the amusement in his mother’s voice. “Greg would more likely fire everyone connected with your — what did you call it, cabal?”

“He wouldn’t fire anyone if you were on our side,” Doug said.

That stopped her. Joanna fell silent. The time stretched and stretched.

“I can’t be on your side,” Joanna said at last, her voice almost a whisper. “And I can’t be on Greg’s. I don’t want you two to oppose each other.”

“I know you don’t, Mom,” Doug said. “But you’re going to have to choose.”

“No!”

“You can’t avoid it,” Doug said firmly, knowing that it was going to come down to this, hating the need but fully certain that there was no other way, there’d never been any other way, she was destined to choose between the two of us since these mountains were raised up, since the beginning of time.

“It’s not just Greg or me,” Doug explained. “It’s Moonbase.

It’s the future of humanity. Either Moonbase expands and becomes self-sufficient or it dies. My father knew that. You know it! We’ve got to move beyond being a mining town and grow into a community that’s physically and economically self-sufficient. That’s what the diamond Clipperships are all about, but Greg’s too close-minded to see the entire picture, to grasp the fullness of the future.”

“And you do understand it?”

“I honestly think I do, Mom. Either Moonbase grows or it dies. And if Moonbase dies, if we close this little foothold on the frontier, humankind folds back in on itself. The whole human race will sink into poverty and despair — and the kind of mind-controlling dictatorship that the New Morality is aiming at.”

“What about Yamagata and Europeans?”

“They can’t open the frontier the way we can. They’re government-run, they’ll stay small and stick to scientific research.”

“I don’t see where—”

“Dictatorship is already on the march back Earthside, Mom. It’s already happening!” Doug insisted, pleading with her. “Now they want to shut down all nanotechnology. They’ve been censoring books and video for years. They’re taking control of the universities. Don’t you see, Mom? They’re trying to control the thought centers! Once they’ve got them under control they can take over governments. And then the corporations.”

“But even if that’s true, what’s it got to do with Moonbase?”

“We can be free of them,” Doug said. “And as long as there’s one place that’s free the rest of the human race has a chance. We can be an example of what people can accomplish when they’re free to think and build and grow.”

For a few moments Joanna was silent. Doug strained to see her face through her visor, but all he saw was the reflection of his own blank helmet.

“Those are fine words, Doug,” she said at last. “And I know you believe them—”

“You believe them, too, don’t you?”

“I don’t know.” She turned away from him, looked out across Mare Nubium again.

“My father believed it,” Doug said. “He died for it. So did Brennart.”

She stood stock-still, facing the vast Sea of Clouds and the tiny red beacons still glowing out where the old buried shelters stood.

“I need your help, Mom.”

“So does Greg.”

“Then you’ll have to choose between us.”

“No,” she whispered.

“Yes,” Doug insisted. “Him or me. My father’s dream, or…” Doug found that he couldn’t finish the sentence.

But Joanna could. “I either help you build Paul’s dream or I help his murderer. That’s what you’re saying.”

“That’s where it is, Mom.”

She turned back to face him. “Buy your damned LTV,” Joanna hissed. “Do what you have to do. I’ll try to get Greg to listen to reason.”

“Thanks.” Doug was surprised by the bitterness in her voice, and even more shocked at the resentful anger he felt welling up inside him.

I’ve won, he told himself. Why does it feel so awful?

VANCOUVER

“Isn’t this city beautiful?” Kris Cardenas asked. “I’m going to hate to leave it.”

She and Wilhelm Zimmerman were strolling along a curving path through Stanley Park’s harborside garden, dazzling with flowers: Above them the sky was a perfect blue, dotted with puffs of cumulus. In the distance the snow-capped peaks of the coastal range floated like blue-white ghosts disconnected from the ground.

“Christchurch is just as beautiful,” said Zimmerman, in his wretchedly accented English. “Almost.”

“I’ve been very happy here,” Cardenas said wistfully. “Pete’s been able to do really useful work among the poor.”

“Are you safe here?” Zimmerman asked. “There have been murders, you know.”

Cardenas laughed lightly. “Safer than Switzerland, Willi. Canadians are the least violent people on Earth, I think.”

“But Canada will sign the U.N.’s treaty,” Zimmerman said heavily.

“New Zealand’s so far away!”

Although he was not that much older than she, Zimmerman looked to passersby like Cardenas’ father or at least a paunchy elder uncle as they walked slowly along the meandering garden path. Puffing away on a foul-smelling cigar that earned him several angry stares, the Swiss biophysicist was sloppy and grossly overweight, his suit jacket flapping in the sea breeze like a loose sail. Cardenas still looked like a California surfer, curly sandy hair and broad in the shoulders, decked in jeans and a light beige sweater.

But her bright blue eyes did not sparkle.

“How does your husband feel about New Zealand?” Zimmerman asked.

She waggled a hand in the air. “A good neurosurgeon can work wherever he goes. That’s no problem.”

“And the children?”

Cardenas smiled at him. “Grandchildren, Willi.”

“No!”

“Of course. What did you expect? My oldest will be thirty in another few months.”

Zimmerman puffed hard on his stogie. “How many grandchildren are there?”

“Two, so far. My daughter’s expecting in November. That’s why I want to stay until the end of the year.”

“Well,” said Zimmerman bravely, “Christchurch is less than an hour away from here, if-you use the rocket.”

Cardenas smiled wanly. “I know. But still…”

“Yes, I know. I understand. I will miss Basel, also. The pastries. And the good beer. More than half of my staff refuse to leave Switzerland. I can’t blame them. Some of them worry about their pensions, others have family they don’t want to leave.”

“It’s not an easy choice, Willi.”

“For you and me, it is. We go where they allow us to work. As long as New Zealand doesn’t sign the verdammt treaty—”

Her phone buzzed. Only the immediate family had access to it, so Cardenas hurriedly pulled the palm-sized instrument from her shoulder purse.

“Yes? Pete?” Zimmerman watched her face relax. She was worried about her pregnant daughter, obviously. “Joanna Stavenger?” She glanced at Zimmerman. “Why in the world would I travel to Moonbase, just to examine her son? That’s ridiculous… No, I’ll call her myself when we get home.”

Her husband said more, and Zimmerman saw Cardenas’ jaw clench. “Oh no! Oh my god.”

He waited as patiently as he could, standing there in the winding garden pathway as couples and families passed them, casting frowns at his cigar, while Cardenas’ face grew whiter.

At last she folded the phone and put it back in her shoulder bag.

“Bad news?”

“New Zealand’s just announced that they’ll sign the treaty, after all.”

“No!”

“Their government is under tremendous pressure from the party that’s backed by the New Morality movement. To stay in power, they’ve decided to sign the treaty.”

Zimmerman flung his cigar butt to the brick walk and stamped on it, swearing in German. Cardenas couldn’t understand the words but she recognized the tone easily enough.

“Well,” she said, her breath fluttering, “Pete really didn’t want to leave Vancouver anyway. And the kids are all here…’ Her voice tailed off.

“The only concession you must make is to give up your career,” Zimmerman said scornfully. “That’s all.”

There were tears in her eyes. “You too, Willi. They’ve stopped us both.”

“Never! I do not stop.”

“Where are you going to go?” Cardenas asked rhetorically. “There’s only a couple of tiny nations that won’t sign the treaty and they don’t have the facilities or the trained personnel you need.”

“Where will I go?” Zimmerman grasped her by the shoulders and turned her to face toward the distant mountains. The pale curve of the Moon hung above the bluish snow-clad peaks.

“There!” said Zimmerman firmly. “I will give up wiener schnitzel. Sausage and pastries and even beer I will give up. Even cigars! But not my work. Never! I will not give up my work, even if I have to live like a cave man!”

MOONBASE CONTROL CENTER

“The first day or so when I came up here,” Greg was telling his mother, “I spent more time in this spot than anyplace else.”

“I remember,” Joanna said.

“The radiation storm.”

“You told me they had a big party going on in The Cave.”

Greg nodded as he walked along the row of consoles. Each was occupied by a man or woman; they all had earphones clamped to their heads, but there was no tension in the room, no excitement. Most of the technicians looked bored as they watched their screens.

The big electronic map of Moonbase that covered one wall of the control center glowed softly. No red lights and only a few amber ones. Everything was under control; no major problems in sight. The base was functioning smoothly.

“We haven’t had a big flare like that one since then,” Greg said. “We’re about due for one.”

Greg made his rounds of the base once each day, walking from his office out to the main airlock, then down the ladder that led to the tunnel that went past the farm, then back along the next tunnel to The Cave, and finally to the control center. The fourth tunnel was entirely living quarters, and Greg saw no need to inspect it every day, although he strolled its length at least once a week, just to check things out.

The control center was the nerve nexus of Moonbase, of course. From its consoles every electronic circuit, every valve, every pump and drop of water and whiff of air was monitored both by the base’s mainframe computer and the human technicians who constantly watched the display screens and the big glowing wall map.

Joanna was following him on this afternoon’s inspection tour, seeking a way to tell him of what Doug wanted to do without causing an explosion.

“So what did you and Doug talk about out there on the mountaintop?” Greg asked, making it sound so casual that she knew he was blazing with curiosity. Or more.

“Operation Bootstrap,” she replied honestly.

“Is he still harping on that nonsense?” Greg complained as he strolled slowly along the row of consoles. “I wish he’d grow up.”

“I think Doug—”

“Do you know what he’s doing?” Greg interrupted, a sly smile on his lips. “He and Brudnoy want to get their hands on one of our old LTVs and convert it for this idiotic asteroid mission he’s dreamed up. He’s behaving like a sneaky little kid.”

“Do you think Brudnoy’s behaving childishly, too?” Joanna asked mildly.

Instead of answering, Greg stopped and bent over one of the technicians’ shoulders to look closely at the monitor display. Joanna wondered if he actually were interested in the display or just doing it for effect.

When Greg straightened up and resumed pacing behind the seated technicians, Joanna said, “I think Doug has a good idea — it’s too good to throw away.”

“Not you too!”

She stopped, forcing him to stop too and turn to face her.

“Greg, we’ve got to move on this while we still can. If we wait, the U.N. or the New Morality or somebody might try to stop us.”

With exaggerated patience, Greg said, “Mom, look: I’ve lined up Kiribati for us. We’ll be able to continue developing nanotechnology there in the islands. You ought to be making certain that the board is solidly behind us on this maneuver.”

“Don’t worry about the board.”

“Then we can forget about this Bootstrap business, can’t we? We can forget about Moonbase altogether. We won’t need it as long as Kiribati is cooperative.”

“And how long will that be?”

“Long enough for me to build the first diamond ship,” Greg said.

Shocked, Joanna blurted, “What?”

Smiling icily, Greg said, “We have plenty of carbon on Earth, Mother. We don’t have to build Doug’s dream ships up here. We can do it in Kiribati; much more cheaply, too. And once I demonstrate the prototype to the major aerospace lines, they’ll clamor to buy them, treaty or no treaty.”

“But what about your brother? What about Moonbase?”

“Doug will have to return to Earth when I shut this base down.”

Joanna took a breath. “But Doug can’t return to Earth! They’ll kill him just like they killed Carlos!”

“He can live in the islands. We can protect him there.”

Glancing at the men and women attending the consoles, Joanna said, “Greg, we shouldn’t be discussing this here.”

But he planted his fists on his hips and demanded, “Why not? I’m going to recommend to the board that we shut down Moonbase for good. There’s nothing we’re doing up here that we can’t do in Kiribati and you know it!”

My god, Joanna thought, his mind’s made up and he won’t listen to any alternatives. He doesn’t care what happens to Doug. He doesn’t care about anything at all.

She heard herself reply, “Very well, then, Greg. I’ll fight you every inch of the way on this. And in the meantime I’m going to buy an LTV and pay for adapting it for the asteroid rendezvous.”

The blood seemed to drain from Greg’s face. “You’re going … to buy…’ He couldn’t choke out the rest of the words.

“With my own money,” Joanna said. “It’ll be a private venture.”

“You can’t…”

“Yes I can,” said Joanna, trying to keep her voice down, hating having to say this within earshot of so many strangers.

“And I can rent space from Moonbase for doing the necessary refurbishing work on the LTV.”

Greg visibly struggled to regain control of himself. Some color returned to his cheeks. His eyes seemed to calm down somewhat.

“It’s your money,” he said. Then he pushed past his mother and strode back toward the door to the control center, leaving Joanna standing there.

Spend Christmas on Christmas Island, Ibriham al-Rashid grumbled to himself. Only an advertising executive who’s never left Manhattan could come up with such an idiotic idea.

It had been three months since Rashid had been named chief operations officer of the new Kiribati Manufacturing and Entertainment Corporation, a weirdly structured company that included luxury vacation centers alongside all of Masterson Corporation’s former space operations division, including Moonbase.

Just like that, with little more than a few strokes on a keyboard, he had been removed from his directorship of Masterson’s space division and made chief operating officer of this ridiculous new corporation. His work with the fusion energy system was put on hold. “No need for that if we can still use nanotech in space, or out there on the islands,” the corporate president told him. “Don’t look so grim! This is a promotion for you.”

A promotion, Rashid thought bitterly. They’re throwing away the fusion development and sticking me here on this miserable little island. I’ve been destroyed by corporate politics.

As part of their deal with Kiribati, Masterson Corporation was setting up the new company with seats on the board of directors for each of the council chiefs. In addition to transferring Moonbase and the entire space operations division to the new corporation, Masterson was funding construction of two major tourist complexes, with hotels and casinos and all the amenities, one on Tarawa and another on Kiritimati — the atoll that Westerners still called Christmas Island. “Spend your holidays on Christmas Island,” was going to be their advertising slogan.

Rashid stood on the atoll’s highest point, Joe’s Hill, all of twelve meters high, and stared at the devastation that last week’s typhoon had left. The sandy islands had been scrubbed clean by the ferocious winds and a storm-driven tide that had surged completely across them, leaving nothing standing but a few battered palm trees.

The islanders had been moved to safety days before the storm struck, of course, and now were trickling back from the shelters to which they had scattered, most of them thousands of miles away, across the broad Pacific.

There were more construction workers than natives on the atoll now, and Rashid’s ears rang with the grating whine of power saws and the incessant thumping of electric staple-drivers. Huge trucks groaned and rumbled all over the tiny island.

They were building a luxury casino hotel, an amusement center, and an airfield that could handle Clippership rockets as well as supersonic jets. International relief crews would be arriving soon to start helping the returning natives to rebuild their homes, but the corporate task of turning this smashed atoll into a vacation paradise was moving ahead without delay. Every gram of building materials had to be flown in. Four thousand palm trees were due to arrive today, Rashid knew. Tomorrow’s Clippership cargo would include enough sod to grass over the ’championship eighteen-hole golf course’ that the advertising brochures promised.

It would almost be as easy to build a resort complex at Moonbase, Rashid thought sourly.

Construction had been behind schedule when the typhoon struck. Now it was seriously lagging. Rashid, who hated to leave Savannah, and actually preferred New York, had rocketed out to Tarawa once the storm had spun away, and then flown on a corporate jet to what was left of Christmas Island.

Not this Christmas, he knew. There’d be no tourists visiting this atoll for many months to come.

His only consolation on this trip was the new assistant he had hired, a tall, sleek dark woman named Melissa Hart who had gladly accompanied him on this depressing journey to this miserable little lonely island.

Rashid had been impressed with her good looks and smooth self-confidence when she had first appeared at his office seeking a job on his staff. Her personnel file said that she had been a faithful Masterson employee for more than ten years, with an excellent record.

She was older than the women Rashid usually went after. And rather too thin for his taste. Yet she was alluring: cool yet tempting, proper in dress and demeanor while her smile seemed to suggest everything a man could desire. She spoke modestly, worked efficiently, and smiled deliciously. When she agreed to accompany him as his assistant on this trip to the Pacific, Rashid’s fantasies kept him awake and sweating for the entire flight.

Now, with the sun setting and the infernal racket of the trucks and construction crews beginning to ease off, Rashid walked along the sandy beach toward the little tent city that had been put up to house the workers. The largest tent of all had been erected for him. Melissa slept in a tent with three other women, all construction workers, all bigger, more muscular, and much tougher-looking than Rashid himself.

Yet he grinned as he walked along the curving beach. At least now that the construction crews were knocking off for the evening he could hear the hiss and boom of the surf. There would be a moon tonight. Very romantic, looking out across the lagoon at the night sky.

And Melissa had agreed to have dinner with him. In his tent. Just the two of them, alone. Rashid felt like a sheik of old as he prepared his mind for the night’s pleasure.

Melissa Hart had not been surprised at how easy it was to get close to Rashid. New Morality cohorts in Masterson’s personnel department had faked a record for her, and Rashid hadn’t bothered to check any of the recommendations that were signed by department heads from across the continent.

No, the man had taken one look at her and hired her with a wolfish smile.

Sex is a weapon, Melissa told herself. But a weapon is powerful only when it’s used wisely. Keeping Rashid wanting her was the important thing; as long as his desire was alive, she had the power. Allowing him to have her would diminish that power she knew. She would give Rashid smiles and glances, even kisses and fondling. But they would consummate his lust only when it suited Melissa’s goal.

Tonight we have dinner in his tent, she told herself as she clipped on a pair of faux pearl earrings. One of them was a microminiaturized radio that would transmit every word of their conversation to the solid-state recorder hidden beneath her cot.

“Big night with the big shit boss, huh?” said one of the construction workers with whom Melissa shared the tent. She was a short, burly woman with a good-natured laugh and a vocabulary from the docks. The other two had not come in yet.

Melissa nodded as she studied her image in the only mirror she had, a small hand-sized one.

“How do I look?” she asked.

The woman eyed her critically. Melissa was wearing flowing light pink silk harem pants slitted from hip to cuff, with a loose long-sleeved overblouse.

“Good enough to eat,” the construction worker said, grinning.

Melissa smiled back at her. The woman began to pull off her grimy tee-shirt. “Watch out for him,” she warned. “He’s got ideas about you.”

“Don’t worry about me,” said Melissa. “I’ve handled men like him before.”

“Sure.” And the woman made an up-and-down movement with her fist.

Melissa laughed at the crudity. I should give her a lecture on morality, she thought, but I don’t have the time.

As she started out of the tent, the woman said, “I’m damned fuckin’ jealous, you know.”

Surprised, Melissa blurted, “You’d want to have dinner with the boss?”

“Uh-uh,” she replied. “I’d rather have you.”

“Oh,” was all that Melissa could think to reply. But as she left the tent she thought that she would certainly have to give her a morality lecture. Then she wondered if she’d be safer in Rashid’s tent overnight than with the three other women.

Joanna felt miserably alone as she walked along the tunnel toward her quarters.

Instead of bringing them together I’m driving them further apart, she said to herself. I want Greg and Doug to work in harmony, and here I’ve as much as told Greg I don’t trust his judgment and I’m siding with Doug.

But what else can I do? Doug’s right and Greg’s simply refusing to pay attention to what he’s trying to accomplish. This whole Kiribati business could blow away at any time; Greg thinks he’s being so clever in setting it up, yet it could be a house of straw.

Well, she thought as she slid open the door to her suite, it’s done. I’ve told Greg what I’m going to do. Now I’d better tell Doug. At least he’ll be happy about it. I hope.

The message light on her computer was blinking. Joanna closed her door, then said in a clear, firm voice, “Computer, read messages.”

The screen lit up with the words as the computer announced in a synthesized contralto voice, “Dr. Kristine Cardenas returned your call at 1435 hours today.”

Joanna slid into her desk chair as she asked, “Did she leave a message?”

“Yes.”

“Read it, please.”

Again, the words spelled on the screen as Kris Cardenas’ slightly shaking voice said, “Mrs. Stavenger, I’ve been thinking about your request that I come to Moonbase to examine your son. Professor Zimmerman is with me, and we would both like to come, if that can be arranged.”

“End of message,” said the computer.

Joanna sat at the blankly glowing screen, thinking hard. Zimmerman! He swore he’d never come back here again. But Switzerland’s going to sign the nanotech treaty. Canada, too. Could it be…?

“Phone,” said Joanna. “Call Kristine Cardenas.”

Their conversation was brief, cool, and to the point Kris Cardenas and Wilhelm Zimmerman would leave from Vancouver for Moonbase on the next available flight. Joanna checked the schedules and saw that they could get to an Earth-orbiting transfer station on the next day. Then they’d have to wait for four days before an LTV was scheduled to make the weekly run to Moonbase.

She shook her head. They’re too important to sit around for four days. The authorities might even try to detain them, especially if they wait in Vancouver instead of the space station.

Joanna ordered a special flight to meet them at the orbital station and take them immediately to Moonbase. They’ll be here in three days, she told herself.

The corporate comptroller called an hour later to ask if she knew how much a special lunar flight cost and how thin Moonbase’s profit margin was already.

I’ll have to clear this with the division head,” he said, glowering out from the screen at Joanna. “And he’ll probably want to check it out with the director of Moonbase before he okays it.”

Joanna sighed. “Put it on my personal account, Lester,” she said.

Once her words reached him, his eyes went wide. “You’re going to pay for it out of your own pocket?” He looked as if she had threatened some fundamental tenet of his inner faith.

“Yes,” Joanna snapped. “And while I’ve got you on the link, I want to buy a lunar transfer vehicle. A used one, if possible; one that’s about to be retired, if there are any such available. But used or new, I want an LTV. Put that on my personal account, too.”

She thought the man would faint.

SPACE STATION MASTERSON

Like most of the major complexes in permanent Earth orbit, Masterson was a combination of several purposes: part manufacturing facility, part scientific research laboratory, part observation platform, part maintenance and repair center, and part transfer station for people and cargo heading onward to Moonbase.

Orbiting some two hundred fifty miles above the Earth, at first glance Masterson looked like a disconnected conglomeration of odds and ends, a junkyard floating in space. The modules where personnel were housed spun lazily on opposite ends of a two-mile-long carbon filament tether, like two oversized aluminum cans glinting in the sunlight, connected by a string so thin and dark it was for all practical purposes invisible. Outside the circumference of the housing modules’ arc floated the factories, labs, repair shops and transfer center, their angular utilitarian shapes dwarfed by huge wings of solar panels and radiators, massive concave solar mirrors that collected and focused the Sun’s heat for smelting and other processing work, and forests of antennas and sensors — all in zero gravity, or the nearest thing to it.

Spacesuited figures bustled from module to module, some of them jetting along in solo maneuvering units, others riding the bare-bones shuttlecraft that the station personnel called broomsticks.

Jinny Anson shook her head as she peered out the observation port. It had been almost nine months since she’d last been in zero gee, and she was testing her reactions. She felt a little woozy, but nothing she couldn’t handle.

Not so bad for an old lady, she told herself. Just don’t make any sudden moves.

There was a lunar transfer vehicle floating out there next to the repair sheds, she saw. It wasn’t the regular LTV, which wasn’t due back from its run to Moonbase for another thirty-six hours. As far as Jinny knew, the LTV had no business being there. But a maintenance crew was working on it, and she could see propellant lines feeding into its tanks.

“Are you ready for the inspection tour, Ms. Anson?”

Jinny pushed off the smooth surface of the observation port with her fingertips. The plastiglass felt cold, a reminder that there was nothing on its other side but empty infinity.

Turning toward the earnest young man who was to be her guide through the chemical processing plant, Jinny smiled and resisted the reflex to correct him. I’m still Ms. Anson on the company’s files. I’m only Mrs. Westlake in Austin.

“Let’s get it done, son,” she said.

He pushed off the handgrip projecting from the bulkhead and floated through the hatch. Jinny followed him into the access tube leading out of the observation center, saying, “Take it slow, huh? It’s been a while since I’ve been up here.”

The kid grinned over his shoulder at her.

As far as Masterson Corporation was concerned, Jinny was visiting the space station as part of her duties as quality control manager of the Houston division. The station manufactured the alloys and most of the electronics components that Houston used to build Clipperships. The station itself was now the property of the new Kiribati corporation, but its new ownership seemed to make no observable difference on the station staff or the work they did.

There had been a rumor that some day they would start using nanomachines to build the Clippers out of pure diamond, but Jinny discounted that as the usual shop-floor outgassing. If nothing else, the nanotech treaty would scuttle that idea.

Unofficially, Jinny had come to the station to hitch a ride to Moonbase. It wasn’t as simple as catching a bus, of course, but for a former director of’the base and a pretty important company official, the rules couldtbe stretched a little. She only wanted to visit Moonbase for a day or so, just long enough to talk with Joanna Stavenger face to face. Jinny was convinced that what she had to ask Joanna couldn’t be done any other way. I’ve got to see the whites of her eyes when I pop the question to her.

“What’s that LTV out there doing?” she asked as casually as she could.

The youngster turned lazily as he floated along the access tube so he could look back at her. “Special job,” he answered. “Rumble is that there are some big gasbags coming up from Savannah, on their way to Moonbase. Ultra VIP. They pooched out a backup LTV just to take them up to the base, quickie-quick.”

“How many?” Jinny asked.

“Dunno,” the kid said. “Two or three, from what I heard. Could be more, but not enough to fill a whole passenger pod.”

Jinny smiled to herself. There’s my ride. Quickie-quick.

It was startlingly easy to talk her way onto the special LTV. Most of the crew at the station knew her; most of the senior crew, at least. There was plenty of spare capacity aboard the nearly-empty LTV, and an extra body visiting Moonbase for a couple of days wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows — especially when the body was a former base director.

Jinny was supposed to get permission from the current base director, of course, but she knew how to get around that problem. She simply accessed the proper file from the station’s mainframe and okayed her own trip, using the computer codes that hadn’t been changed since she’d been running Moonbase. Easy.

I’ll say hello to Greg Masterson when I get there, she told herself. See his eyes pop.

There were only two other passengers in the LTV’s personnel pod. Jinny recognized the fat old guy as Professor Zimmerman, the nanotech whiz who had saved Doug Stavenger’s life after the big solar flare the previous year. The woman with him looked familiar, but Jinny couldn’t place her. She had ’California’ written all over her sandy-haired, tanned features. They ignored Jinny almost completely, talking to each other with deep seriousness as the LTV’s co-pilot ducked in to make sure they were buckled safely into their seats.

Silly safety regulation, Jinny thought. This bucket won’t put out enough thrust to slosh the coffee in a cup, even on a high-energy burn to Moonbase. Still, when the red light came on and the rockets lit, she felt herself squeezed back into her seat.

It was impossible to eat, sleep and go to the bathroom over the thirty-six-hour length of their flight without saying anything to the other passengers. When Jinny went past them to get to the meal dispenser, she hovered weightiessly by their seats long enough to say hello to Professor Zimmerman. The old man didn’t remember her at first, but when he started to unstrap and politely get up from his chair, his face went pale.

“Please, stay in your seat,” Jinny pleaded. “The rules of etiquette are different in zero gee.” Inwardly, she wanted to make sure that the flatlander didn’t puke all over her.

With an effort to maintain his dignity even while seated, Zimmerman introduced Professor Kristine Cardenas to Jinny.

Soon the three of them were talking together the way passengers on a trip will, strangers yet shipmates. Jinny found that Cardenas was also an expert in nanotechnology and they were both going to Moonbase at the personal request of Joanna Stavenger.

She also learned that their real reason for allowing Joanna to coax them up to Moonbase was almost exactly the same as Jinny’s own motivation.

“Perhaps we should pool our resources,” Zimmerman said. He was obviously uncomfortable in zero gee; Cardenas looked a little green, too. Jinny had gone to the meal dispenser for them and brought them prepackaged trays. And slow-release anti-nausea patches, which they both stuck behind their ears.

“What do you mean?” Jinny asked. It was impossible to eat in zero gee without spraying crumbs and droplets all around. The compartment’s air circulation sucked them up — slowly — into the ventilator grids along the ceiling.

Zimmerman started to gesture with his hands, then thought better of it. “You know the Stavenger woman much better than I or even Kristine. You could help us to convince her to allow us to remain at Moonbase indefinitely.”

“I work for her,” Jinny said, “but I can’t say that I know her very well. Not socially.”

Kris Cardenas said, “Still, if we all want the same thing, we ought to present a united front.”

Fine by me,” said Jinny, delighted to have a Nobel prizewinner and her mentor as unexpected allies.

Greg’s face looked like a storm cloud, when he stepped into the reception area beneath the rocket landing pads.

“What’s the matter?” Joanna asked him.

“Jinny Anson,” he snapped.

“Jinny?”

“She’s on the incoming ship, with Cardenas and Zimmerman.”

“But she’s supposed to be in Houston.”

“She’s on the ship. She thought she’d sneak in here without my knowing it. Thought I wouldn’t bother checking the LTV’s manifest.”

Joanna immediately recognized the problem. Naturally Greg would be suspicious of having the former director of the base suddenly pop in for a visit. Especially when she hasn’t told anyone she’s coming or even asked permission to make the trip.

“They’ll be corning down in a few minutes,” Greg said, in a tight-throated whisper. “Flight control has locked in on them.”

Joanna nodded wordlessly, wondering what she could do or say to ease his misery.

“Where’s Doug?” Greg asked her.

“He went up to the observation bubble,” she said. “He likes to watch the spacecraft land.”

Greg made a sour face. Everything’s a game to Doug; just a big entertainment. Impatiently he went to the wall panel beside the hatch and flicked on the intercom.

“Fifteen… right down the pipe,” said the flight controller’s voice. “Ten… five…”

“Green light,” a different voice announced. The spacecraft’s pilot, Greg assumed.

“Touchdown confirmed.”

“Shutting down.”

“Base power connected. The snake’s on its way.”

Greg paced impatiently across the small room. Doug came in through the door from the flight control center.

“Hi, Greg,” he said.

His half-brother gave him a dark look in return. Joanna thought how strange it was that they could both wear the same color coveralls, but Doug’s sky-blue jumpsuit looked bright and sunny while Greg’s seemed somehow darker, more ominous.

“This is your doing, isn’t it?” Greg snapped.

“My doing? What?”

“Bringing Anson here.”

“Jinny Anson?” Doug looked genuinely surprised. “She’s aboard this ship?”

Greg waved a finger in Doug’s face. “Don’t play innocent with me, Doug. I know what you’re doing, you and your Operation Bootblack.”

“I didn’t know Jinny Anson was coming here until this moment,” Doug said evenly.

“You’re a liar!”

Joanna’s breath caught in her throat. Greg stood red-faced before his half-brother, slightly taller but much slimmer. Doug seemed stunned by the accusation, his face frozen with shock, his hands clenching into fists at his sides.

“That’s quite enough,” Joanna said, stepping between them. “I won’t stand for you two fighting like this.”

But Doug smiled and stepped back, his hands relaxing. “Honestly, Greg, I’m just as surprised as you are that Jinny’s come here. As for Operation Bootstrap, okay, we’re trying to make Moonbase profitable without costing you any cash flow. It’s all to your benefit, really.”

“Really?” Greg sneered.

“Really,” said Doug as pleasantly as a springtime breeze.

The airlock hatch’s signal-chikie interrupted them. Joanna and her two sons turned to the heavy metal hatch as the indicator light on its/panel turned from red to amber and one of the mission controllers came hustling into the reception area. She was a petite, almost frail-looking young woman, wearing the gray coveralls of the transportation division. Why do they give the heaviest jobs to the smallest kids? Joanna wondered. The hatch had to be swung open manually, and even though there was a pilot and co-pilot on this flight, standard procedure was for one of the controllers to be on hand to open the hatch from this side, if necessary.

It wasn’t necessary. As soon as the indicator light went from amber to green, the heavy metal hatch swung open. Joanna felt a slight stir of air in the reception room; the air pressure on the other side of the hatch had not exactly matched the pressure on this side.

The pilot pushed the hatch all the way open, grinning at the mission controller. “See,” he said, “there is a reason for carrying us up from Earth orbit, after all.”

“Then you ought to get paid as a doorman,” said the controller.

He wasn’t all that much bigger than she, Joanna realized. The pilot’s eyes widened when he recognized Greg. “Hey,” he said to the controller, “don’t talk that way in front of the boss.”

Greg forced a smile for them as they passed him, on their way to the flight control center. They didn’t recognize Joanna, apparently; at least the pilot didn’t.

Then Jinny Anson stepped through the hatch. Right behind her came Kris Cardenas and, finally, the lumbering form of Wilhelm Zimmerman.

For an awkward moment no one knew what to say. Greg looked like a smoldering volcano, Doug seemed nonplussed, and Joanna herself wondered what was going to happen.

Then Zimmerman broke the silence. “We seek asylum,” he said, with great dignity.

DIRECTOR’S OFFICE

“Let me get this straight,” Greg said. “You’re seeking political asylum? Here at Moonbase?”

“You are now under the legal jurisdiction of the nation of Kiribati, is that not so?” Zimmerman asked.

“Legally, yes,” said Greg.

“So! We seek asylum. Me from Switzerland, she from Canada.”

The six of them sat around the circular conference table in Greg’s office, where Greg had taken them immediately after their arrival. Joanna sat between her two sons, facing Anson across the table. Cardenas’ and Zimmerman’s luggage was still at the reception area, out at the rocket port.

“I don’t know if it’s political asylum or what,” said Kris Cardenas, “but we want the freedom to continue our research—”

“And our teaching,” interrupted Zimmerman.

Cardenas nodded. “And our teaching.”

“And you can’t do it Earthside?” Doug asked.

“Not once this treaty goes into effect,” said Zimmerman heavily. “All research on nanotechnology will be banned. Teaching also.”

Joanna saw the despair in his fleshy face. She had never considered how the nanotech treaty would affect researchers like Zimmerman and Cardenas.

Greg steepled his fingers before his face and looked at Anson. “Jinny, don’t tell me you’re seeking asylum, too.”

She grinned mischievously. “Nope. I just wanted to talk to you — and Mrs. Stavenger — about getting transferred to someplace where my husband can teach without the New Morality on his back.”

“What does he teach?” Joanna heard herself ask.

“English literature,” Anson replied. “Specializes in Marlowe — the Elizabethan, not the detective.”

No one laughed.

“Why don’t we invite him here?” Doug asked.

“Here?” Greg demanded. “To Moonbase? We can’t afford to carry nonproductive people here. What would we do with an English lit professor?”

“Start a university,” said Doug.

“What?”

Gesturing toward Zimmerman and Cardenas, Doug said, “We have two of the world’s greatest nanotech researchers, don’t we? Let Jinny’s husband teach English lit from here. Bring up a few other teachers and researchers. Moonbase can start its own university and people will pay good money to study here.”

“But the transportation costs,” Joanna pointed out.

Doug gave her a patient smile. “Mom, I’m studying at Caltech and the Sorbonne and the American University in Rome — all without leaving Moonbase. People on Earth can study with our faculty the same way.”

“Electronically.”

“Virtual reality, when you need it,” said Doug.

Greg seemed intrigued despite himself. “You mean we could make a profit out of a university?”

“Of course!” said Zimmerman. “We can make this miserable collection of caves into a great intellectual center!”

Greg turned to his mother questioningly.

Joanna leaned close enough to whisper into his ear, “Don’t fight it. Take the credit for it.”

He smiled and thought, As long as Kiribati doesn’t sign the U.N. treaty, I can start the university here and transfer it to the islands when I close Moonbase.

Melissa had easily eluded Rashid’s attempts at romance during their first dinner together in his tent She had talked nothing but business, and learned more about the rumors of building a new type of Clippership out of diamond, using nanomachines. Rashid, ardently wanting to impress her, had blithely laid out everything he had heard about the scheme at her feet.

His reward was a brief kiss goodnight and the vague promise of delights to come.

Melissa dared not report back to General O’Conner or her cohorts at the Urban Corps headquarters in Atlanta. The only communications links on the storm-ravaged atoll belonged to Masterson Corporation; she wasn’t prepared to take the risk of being overheard.

Instead, she tried to think out a plan of action for herself. The nanotech scheme had to be stopped, preferably nipped in the bud. Greg Masterson must be behind it, she reasoned. He always was fascinated with nanotechnology. Another reason to ban it everywhere.

If they actually succeeded in making this breakthrough in spacecraft manufacturing with nanotechnology it would be a body blow to the U.N. treaty. Greg could sit up there at Moonbase and build spacecraft and make billions. These people here in Kiribati would get rich. Then they would start using nanomachines to manufacture other things: automobiles, perhaps; aircraft, certainly. Who knew what else?

The nanotech treaty would be a shambles, a mockery. All because this little island nation could be bribed into resisting the will of the people, the mandate of God.

All because of Greg, she knew. He’s sitting up there, above us all, laughing at us. Laughing at me. I’ve got to stop Greg, Melissa told herself. I’ve got to tear him down from his throne in the sky. I’ve got to wipe out Moonbase.

Her only tool, she realized, was Rashid.

He invited her to dinner the next night, but she refused. Again the following night, and she refused again. But by the third night, Melissa had done enough research into Rashid’s own personal and corporate life so that the beginnings of a plan had started to form in her mind. When he oh-so-casually asked her if she would like to keep him company during dinner, she accepted.

His answering smile pleased her.

In place of candles, Rashid’s tent was lit by battery-powered fluorescent lamps. His table was still meager, supplies had to be flown in from Hawaii, yet Melissa could see the effect he was trying to create: a romantic dinner for two, alone from the rest of the world.

Instead of the usual slacks and shin, Rashid wore a flowing white robe with gold embroidery, and a cloying musky cologne that made Melissa’s nostrils twitch. She half expected to hear reedy Middle-eastern music; instead, the background was the rhythmic beating of the surf against the reef out beyond the island.

“And how is your wife today?” Melissa asked coyly as they sat at the folding table facing each other.

Rashid smiled blandly. “I’ve been much too busy to speak with her today. I’ll call tomorrow.”

Nodding understandingly, she asked, “Moslems are allowed four wives, aren’t they?”

He seemed pleased that she knew. “The Koran allows four, yes. But the laws of the United States make polygamy illegal.”

With a slight frown, Melissa said, “Secular law shouldn’t be placed above religious law. Don’t you agree?”

“In this case, I agree wholeheartedly!”

Melissa looked down at her dinner, a prepackaged meal heated in the portable microwave oven. We might as well be aboard an airliner, she thought. The natives who had returned to the island were catching fresh fish in the lagoon, although the papaya and mango and other fruit trees had been stripped by the typhoon’s winds, if not flattened altogether.

Rashid did not offer wine; neither of them imbibed. Instead they drank clear water produced by the desalting plant that had finally gone into operation.

Slowly, as they ate and chatted, Melissa brought the subject around to Moonbase.

“I just don’t understand how the corporation can risk so much of its resources on a totally unproven scheme,” she said.

“Unproven?”

“The idea of manufacniring Clipperships with nanomachines,” Melissa said. “Nanotechnology isn’t really that reliable. It’s dangerous, in fact.”

“They use nanomachines at Moonbase all the time.”

“Yes, of course,” she said, “but only for the simplest of tasks, like taking oxygen out of the regolith. When it comes to trying to build the mass driver, they’re having trouble, aren’t they?”

Rashid’s eyes narrowed slightly. “You’re very well informed.”

“I am your assistant,” said Melissa. “It’s my job to know what you need to know.”

“Yes.”

“And it worries me,” she went on, “that your whole standing in the corporation hangs on this crazy scheme. How on Earth did you ever agree to be part of it?”

His brow knit more deeply. “I really had no choice. I was transferred here on the orders of Joanna Stavenger.”

“Isn’t she Greg Masterson’s mother?” Melissa asked innocently.

“Yes. And he’s the director of Moonbase.”

“But you’re his superior. He reports to you in the corporate chain of command.”

His nostrils flaring slightly, Rashid muttered, “Not for long, I imagine. He’ll be sitting on the board of directors before I do, no doubt.”

“Because of his mother?”

“Why else?”

“But she’s retired, hasn’t she? She’s living up at Moonbase, too.”

“She’s still on the board of directors. And still very powerful.”

Melissa took a sip of water, then asked, “So because of this woman you must risk your career?”

Stiffening, Rashid replied, “I wouldn’t put it just that way.”

“But suppose Kiribati decides one day to sign the U.N. treaty? What happens then?”

“That won’t happen.”

“No one expected New Zealand to sign the treaty, but they did. What if Kiribati does, too?”

Rashid puffed out a breath. “The whole scheme collapses like a house of cards.”

“And yet you have-the key to the corporation’s salvation in your hands, don’t you?”

“I do?”

“Fusion power,” said Melissa. “The secret of the stars, brought to Earth.”

“Ah, yes! Fusion. Yes, I had great hopes for it.” His face darkened again. “Before I was assigned to the Kiribati Manufacturing and Entertainment Corporation.” He pronounced the words with clear disgust.

“And what’s happening with the fusion development program?” Melissa asked.

“Nothing. It’s dead in the water. If the corporation would only put some funding behind the effort…”

She reached across the table to put her hand on his. “Why don’t you move in that direction?”

“I can’t,” he said. “I’ve got to get this miserable resort complex up and going.”

“Wouldn’t the board back you, if you made a strong presentation about the benefits of fusion energy?”

Rashid blinked at her several times as he stroked his trim dark beard. “With Quintana gone,” he muttered, “the balance of power on the board is rather shaky.”

“Moonbase has always been such a marginal operation,” said Melissa eagerly. “Why not cut it entirely and devote our resources to developing fusion? That way there won’t be any problems with the U.N. treaty to worry about, and you can end this farce of a resort complex here in these godforesaken islands.”

“But the fusion generator requires helium-three.” — Melissa waved an impatient hand. “One trip to the Moon per year could scoop up enough helium-three to run a hundred fusion generators. You don’t need a permanent base on the Moon for that.”

“Are you certain?”

She nodded. “Make fusion work and you can forget about Kiribati.”

Rashid laughed shakily. “I could go home to Savannah.”

“You could be elected to the board of directors!”

“And solve the world’s energy problems.”

“You could become the most powerful man in the corporation,” Melissa urged. “The most powerful man on Earth!”

He laughed again, stronger. “I could live in a Moslem nation, where a man is allowed his proper number of wives.”

“And concubines,” said Melissa, deliciously.

For an instant Rashid looked as if he would toss the table aside and seize her in his arms. But then the fire in his eyes dimmed, shifted. His face fell.

“Greg Masterson,” he muttered. “And his mother.”

“But they’re a quarter-million miles away,” Melissa said. “You can outmaneuver them.”

He shook his head. “Joanna is a powerful woman. And Greg — he must be the one behind this diamond Clippership concept.”

Melissa took a deep breath, then said, “Why don’t you let me deal with them?”

“What do you mean?”

Very seriously, Melissa replied, “Let me go to Moonbase and speak to them directly. Let me try to convince them that shutting down Moonbase is the right thing for the corporation to do.”

“How on Earth can you possibly do that?”

With a knowing smile, Melissa said, “Oh, there are ways to convince people of almost anything.”

“Are there?”

“Yes, of course. Especially if you know things about them that they would prefer to keep others from knowing.”

PIE FARM

“I am honored that you have come to see my humble patch of weeds,” said Lev Brudnoy, quite seriously.

He had been bent over one of the miniature lime trees that he had planted in a row of pots filled with lunar sand. Getting the cuttings to start the miniature citrus orchard had been relatively easy; people brought them up from Earthside, and, after an intense inspection by Moonbase’s environmental protection scientists, they were carried in sealed containers to the farm. The little orchard was another step in Operation Bootstrap.

Joanna cocked a brow at him. “Come off it, Lev. We’re not in old Mother Russia anymore.”

Brudnoy pawed awkwardly at his shock of graying hair. “But you are such a great lady, and I am only a sort of peasant…”

“Lev,” said Joanna sternly, “how long have we known each other?”

He screwed up his eyes, thinking. “About nine months, more or less.”

“How much actual work have you seen me do in that time?”

“Work?” He spread his hands. “Your work is far removed from the kind of thing I do.”

“Not any more,” said Joanna. “If we’re going to make a success of this Operation Bootstrap that you helped hatch up—”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. Maybe it was entirely Doug’s idea, but I have a feeling that you at least aided and abetted him.”

Brudnoy spread his arms in a gesture of helplessness. “I am part of the cabal, I confess it freely.”

Joanna’s expression relaxed into a smile. “Very good. So am I, from here on. I’m here to help you. What do you want me to do? Weeding? Picking? Name it.”

He swallowed visibly. “Well, we don’t have weeds. So far, we’ve, been able to screen them out before we accept a new batch of seeds or cuttings. But pruning is important…”

Joanna rolled up the sleeves of her blouse and made a mental note to wear regular coveralls the next time she came to Brudnoy’s farm.

“Look, I know how I’d feel if I was still the base director and my predecessor showed up all of a sudden,” said Jinny Anson.

Seated behind his curved glass desk, Greg eyed her suspiciously. “Do you?” he retorted.

Anson gave him a disarming smile. “I don’t want your job, Greg! Honest. Been there. Done that. All I want is a place where my husband can work in peace.”

“Doug suggested he come up here.”

“With two teenaged daughters?” Anson shook her head. “You don’t want that, I don’t want that, and they don’t want that.”

“Then what?” Greg demanded.

“Damned if I know,” Anson admitted. “There’s gotta be someplace on Earth where Quentin can teach without being hounded by the New Morality bigots.”

A slow smile crept across Greg’s lips. “You could move to Kiribati.”

Anson blinked. “Kiribati.”

“The islands are really lovely,” said Greg. “I wish I were there, right now.”

“Kiribati,” she repeated.

Three extra people at Moonbase strained the living accommodations. Zimmerman got the base’s only unoccupied quarters. Anson and Cardenas had to share one room, and a ninety-day contract employee, a young nanotech engineer working on the mass driver, reluctantly agreed to gite up his quarters and double up with one of the other short-timers for the remainder of his stay.

Anson called her husband in Austin as soon as the crew that delivered the extra bunk to her quarters had shut the door behind them.

“Kiribati?” Quentin’s placid face crinkled into a mild frown. “Where the hell’s that?”

Knowing that she was taking her husband’s career in her hands, she said, “Way out in the middle of the Pacific. They used to be called the Gilbert Islands, I think.”

Once her words reached him, his frown dissolved. “The Gilberts? Robert Louis Stevenson lived there! He loved it! Said it was the best place on Earth.”

“Really?”

They chattered back and forth — with three-second lags — for more than an hour. Quentin pulled up a geography program that showed them both the modern Kiribati: palm-fringed atolls in the tropical Pacific; small towns with happy, crime-free people.

“It’ll be a better place to raise the girls than Austin,” said Quentin, with real enthusiasm.

Jinny worried about tropical islanders’ ideas about sex, but said nothing.

“I could start the English department for this new university,” Quentin went on. “I could really-’ Suddenly his voice cut off and his big smile vanished.

“What is it?” Jinny asked.

Before her words could reach him, Quentin said, “But what about you? You’ll have to leave your job with Masterson Aerospace if we move to the islands.”

Jinny relaxed. “Don’t sweat it,” she said easily. “I’ve got a new job all picked out. I’m going to be president of the new university, whatever we decide to name it.”

His eyes widened once he heard her response. “President? Wow.”

“Damn’ right,” said Jinny. “I’m gonna be your boss, sweetheart!”

She couldn’t get what she wanted without going to bed with him. Melissa decided that she had played Rashid as far as she could; the next step had to involve sex.

Rashid was no fool. He realized that the only way for him to get out from under this Kiribati farce was to move the fusion development forward. He had to get the board of directors hot for fusion energy, divert their attention — and their funding — from Moonbase and nanotechnology.

Both Rashid and Melissa assumed, automatically, that Greg Masterson was behind the diamond Clippership scheme. And Melissa urged, almost begged, Rashid to send her to Moonbase to deal with Greg.

Yet Rashid was wary of allowing Melissa to go to Moonbase. He wanted to know how she could possibly stop Greg Masterson and, even more difficult, his mother.

She told him, part of it, in bed.

They had their usual dinner in his tent. This time, though, instead of keeping him at arm’s length Melissa let Rashid hold her, kiss her, undress her. She almost laughed at the way his hands trembled as he rumbled with the old-fashioned hook-and-eye at the back of her blouse’s collar.

It wouldn’t do to tell him outright, she knew. Her story would have much greater impact if she seemed to reveal it to him reluctantly, overpowered by his masculine mastery, her resistance melting away under the fierceness of his passion.

So she let him paw her and walk her to his double-sized cot and run his hands and lips over her naked body. She felt almost nothing, she kept herself in rigid control. But she moaned for him and writhed and gasped and heaved when he entered her.

At last it was finished. She wanted to leap out of the narrow bunk and run to the lagoon for a cleansing swim in the warm enfolding waters. Instead she lay at Rashid’s side, breathing softly.

He turned toward her and propped himself on his elbow. Looking down at her in the darkened tent, he asked, “Was that enjoyable for you?”

Melissa made a sigh. “The best I’ve had in years and years,” she said languidly. Truthfully.”

He laughed gently. “How many years?”

“Ever since…’, Melissa let her voice fade away into the shadows.

“Since when?”

“I shouldn’t tell you,” she whispered. “I shouldn’t let anyone know.”

“Know what?”

For long moments she remained silent, waiting for his curiosity to grow unbearable, knowing that the best lies were always based on truth.

He leaned over her, grasped her by the shoulders almost menacingly. “What is this great secret? Tell me.”

Melissa let the breath sigh out of her. “It was so long ago, so many years have passed—”

“You can confide in me,” he said more gently. “I won’t tell anyone else.”

“Years ago — a lifetime ago-’ She hesitated.

“You must have been only a girl,” he said.

“Yes,” Melissa replied. “I was very young. And I fell in love.”

“Ahh.”

“With Greg Masterson.”

Even in the darkness of the tent she could see his eyes go wide. “Greg Masterson?”

“I was his lover,” said Melissa, in a little girl’s voice. “But he cast me aside. He nearly destroyed me.”

Rashid dropped onto his back and lay beside her. “Greg Masterson,” he muttered.

“Greg Masterson,” she repeated.

“And you want to go to the Moon to be with him again.”

“I want to go to the Moon,” whispered Melissa, “to repay him for the way he treated me.”

“You no longer love him?”

“I’ve hated him for nearly twenty years.”

Rashid was silent for a long time. At last he asked, “And what can you do to him on the Moon that you can’t do from here on Earth?”

“I can confront him. And his mother. His mother is at Moonbase. She’s protected him all these years.”

“Protected him? From what?”

“From-’ Melissa stopped herself. She had no intention of telling Rashid everything. “From me,” she said. “I was carrying Greg’s baby when he sent me away. I had an abortion. All my life I’ve had to live with the knowledge that I murdered my own child.”

It was a clever variation of the truth. But it was enough to convince Rashid.

“So you want to go to Moonbase to confront Greg and Mrs. Stavenger.”

“Yes. I want them to know that if they don’t shut down Moonbase I’ll tell the whole world about him, how he abandoned me, how he made me commit murder.”

Rashid thought it over for a few moments. “But that all happened almost twenty years ago, you say.”

Melissa pulled her trump card. “There is no statute of limitations on murder. The law says abortion is murder. I’m willing to stand trial for what I did. I deserve to be punished. But Greg will have to stand trial beside me, as an accomplice to murder.”

“My god!”

“That’s the law now in America,” she said.

“It would ruin him,” said Rashid.

“It would force him to return to Earth to face trial,” Melissa said.

“His mother would never allow that.”

“Do you think she would shut down Moonbase instead?”

“Yes,” said Rashid. “I think she would. The old tigress would blow up Moonbase and all the people in it before she’d let her son be humiliated and destroyed like that.”

Melissa nodded in the darkness. What would Mrs. Stavenger do once she knew that her precious son would have to stand trial for the murder of his stepfather?

“Then you’ll send me to Moonbase?” Melissa asked.

He hesitated. “There’s a board of directors meeting coming up next week. I’ve asked to be put on the agenda, to make a presentation about the fusion program to them. Let’s see how that goes. It might not be necessary to… go to all that trouble.”

Melissa knew that she should not press him too far. “You’re thinking of me, aren’t you? Trying to save me the pain, the suffering of confronting them.”

“If the board allows me to push the fusion development, then why go to all that trouble?”

“But if the board decides against you…?”

“Then,” Rashid said, his voice cold and hard, “yes, I will send you to Moonbase like a guided missile.”

“Good,” said Melissa.

“You want to go?”

“I want to help you,” she said quickly. “I want to see you gain the power and recognition that you deserve.”

“But you must return to me,” he said, excited by the future parading before his eyes. “I will become the most powerful man in the corporation, once Moonbase is closed.”

“And I will be one of your loving slaves,” Melissa lied.

It aroused Rashid just as if it were the truth.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Good things always happened to Alan Johansen. Never a deep intellect, he had at least been clever enough to pick extremely wealthy parents. He also inherited their good looks: Johansen had the chiseled blond features of a Nordic warrior of old, although his slim, almost delicate build was more like that of a dancer than a Viking: With his slicked-back hair and thin-lipped smile he looked like a chorus boy from the Roaring Twenties.

He was, in fact, chairman of the board of Masterson Aerospace Corporation. And very confused and troubled.

It was bad enough that Joanna Stavenger insisted on attending Board meetings electronically, instead of in person. Her image appeared on the wallscreen at the end of the conference table, floating above their heads like the magic mirror in Snow White. At least Carlos Quintana was able to keep things running smoothly, even with that infernal delay whenever she wanted to say something.

Now Quintana was gone, and half the board members were scheming and trying to make alliances against the other half, and to top it off they had set up this dummy corporation on some tropical islands out in the South Seas to take over all their space operations. It sounded awfully tricky to Alan, maybe even illegal.

And on top of everything else, the man they had sent out to those islands was pestering him with some crack-brained idea about nuclear energy, of all things. Why, nuclear energy was as dead as the horse-and-buggy. People hated nuclear! It was full of dangerous radiation.

“Alan sat at the head of the-polished board room table, watching Rashid’s video. In the Windowall that stretched almost the length of the entire room, a smallish metal sphere stood, humming slightly, doing nothing.

“As you can see from the power gauges,” Rashid’s voice was saying, “this one small generator can produce enough electrical energy to power an entire city the size of Savannah.”

“And this is nuclear fusion?” asked one of the white-haired men sitting halfway down the table.

“Yes,” Rashid’s voice replied. “Fusion, not fission. No uranium or plutonium is involved. The fuel basically comes from water and the waste product is helium: inert and safe. You can use it to blow up balloons for your grandchildren.”

A few snickers of laughter went down the conference table.

“I thought you said we needed fuel from the Moon to make this work,” said one of the women directors.

“One shipload per year will fuel as many fusion generators as we can profitably build,” Rashid answered.

“So we wouldn’t need to keep Moonbase open?”

“No. We could even process the helium-three without nanomachines, if we must.”

“Now wait a minute,” Johansen interrupted. “I thought you said the helium was a waste product. Now you’re saying it’s the fuel? I don’t understand.”

Patiently, Rashid tried to explain, but Johansen felt more confused than ever.

“But the point is,” said the comptroller, “that we could get the fuel we need from the Moon without keeping Moonbase open.”

“That is correct,” said Rashid.

“Then why have we started up this dummy corporation in Kiribati?” asked Johansen.

Rashid’s voice answered from the screen, “The Kiribati Corporation exists specifically to allow Moonbase to continue using nanotechnology in spite of the U.N. treaty.”

“In other words, we’re sinking all this money into those islanders just to keep Moonbase poking along?”

Rashid’s voice replied, “Without nanotechnology, Moonbase could not exist.”

Joanna’s face, in the screen at the far end of the room, hardened as soon as she heard the question. “We’re keeping Moonbase poking along’ she said, with steel in her voice, “because we will soon be able to manufacture spacecraft out of pure diamond, using nanotechnology.”

“Who needs a diamond Clippership?” asked one of the women. IThe Clipperships we have now work just fine, don’t they?”

Johansen twiddled his fingers impatiently until Joanna’s response came from the Moon:

“Diamond ships will be lighter, yet far stronger, than anything made of metals. Therefore they will be safer yet more economical to operate. They will be cheaper to manufacture, yet the market will pay more for them than they do for today’s Clipperships. Our profits will be double, or even greater.”

“You mean Moonbase will actually start showing real profit, after all these years?”

Again that agonizing wait.

Then Joanna replied, “I mean that diamond Clipperships, built by Moonbase, will make this corporation more profitable than it’s ever been.”

“Then why do we need this fusion thing?” Johansen asked, almost surprising himself that he spoke his thoughts out loud.

The Windowall view of the fusion reactor vanished and Rashid’s trimly bearded face loomed over them. “Because, with fusion generators Masterson Corporation can become bigger than the old petroleum companies were!”

“We can’t sink risk money into both these new ideas,” said the comptroller, sitting at Johansen’s right hand. “It’s just too chancy.”

“Suppose the World Court decides that our Kiribati Corporation is nothing but a subterfuge to get around the U.N. treaty?” Rashid threatened.

But before anyone on the board could respond to that, Joanna countered, “How long will it take to make this fusion process practical? And profitable?”

Rashid hesitated. “Well, the power conversion system needs to be developed.”

“Power conversion?”

“Magneto-’ Rashid cut his words short. “MHD is what its called.”

“How long will that take?” asked the comptroller. “And how many bucks?”

Before Rashid could reply, Joanna said firmly, “We’re not asking for a penny of corporate risk funding on our new Clippership development.”

All heads turned to her image.

“Moonbase will build a prototype diamond Clippership on our own. It won’t cost the corporation a cent.”

The board broke into a dozen conversations at once.

Joanna’s voice stilled them all. “But once that prototype ship is demonstrated and the aerospace lines start placing their orders, I’ll expect every Moonbase employee who worked on the program to get a share of the profits.”

Johansen wished for the hundredth time that Quintana were still there. He’d know what to say. As it was, the board sat in stunned silence for what seemed like half a lifetime.

Finally the comptroller spoke up. “Mrs. Stavenger, if your people up there can build a diamond Clippership without additional funding from the corporation and sell the concept to the aerospace lines, I’m sure we can work out an equitable profit-sharing plan.”

Rashid, in an agonized voice, asked, “But what about the fusion program?”

Johansen spoke up. “Let’s wait before we make a decision about that. Let’s see what Moonbase can actually do for us, first”

Sitting in his bare little office in the concrete building on Tarawa, Rashid sank back in his chair. The board of directors nodded their heads — white haired, bald, silvery gray — and agreed with Johansen’s idiotic decision.

Angrily, Rashid punched his desktop keyboard and blanked the display screen on the office’s wall.

Melissa Hart got up from her chair at the side of the desk and stepped behind Rashid. Gently she massaged his shoulders as she whispered, “Let me go to Moonbase. Let me use the sword of vengeance against them.”

Rashid closed his eyes as her deft fingers kneaded the tension out of him.

“Yes,” he said. “You go to Moonbase on the next available ship.”

ROCKET PORT

This one was different. Doug could hardly contain his excitement as he stood in the rocket port’s observation bubble and watched the LTV come down. The LTV. The one they were going to modify for the asteroid mission.

He spotted the puffs of rocket exhaust against the dark sky as the controllers made their final adjustments, then the LTV took shape, big and lumpy with tanks and pods, and then the main engine fired its final braking burst and the ungainly vehicle settled down on its rickety-looking legs in a dirty white cloud of gaseous aluminum oxide and blowing lunar dust.

Doug just stood there, practically on tip-toes, his hair brushing the curved plastiglass of the bubble, and admired the spacecraft. This wasn’t a wom-out cripple, ready for the scrap heap. This LTV was practically new; his mother had insisted on getting quality for her money.

To his surprise, the personnel access tube was worming its way toward the hatch in the passenger pod. Were there passengers aboard the ship?

Doug slid languidly down the ladder into the flight control center and asked the two controllers on duty.

“One passenger. VIP from Tarawa,” said the chief controller.

Surprised, Doug said, “Well, I might as well go down and greet him.”

“Her,” the controller corrected. “Personal representative from the chief operating officer of the Kiribati Corporation.”

“Oh,” said Doug. “The new owners.”

He ducked out of the flight control center and slid down the ladder into The Pit. He walked briskly to the airlock hatch and waited for the indicator light to turn green. As soon as the hatch cracked open, Doug grabbed it and helped to swing it all the way.

“Welcome to Moonbase,” he said. The words almost stuck in his throat. The LTV’s pilot and co-pilot both were holding the arms of a very beautiful dark-skinned woman who looked as if she were dying.

It had been a miserable flight for Melissa. Worse than hell, forty-eight hours of weightlessness. She had never been in space before, and the nausea of free-fall simply overwhelmed her, despite all the medication. She puked her guts out during the first few hours of the flight and had the dry heaves the rest of the way.

The only thing that kept her going was the mantra she repeated to herself all the long, exhausting way to the Moon. It was a mantra of hate. She filled her mind with a vision of Greg Masterson. The man who had betrayed her so brutally. All men were betrayers, of course, but Greg had been the worst. She had loved him, once. She had conceived his baby. Now for nearly twenty years she had survived by hating him. His betrayal had driven her into self-loathing and a life so foul it had nearly killed her, just as she had killed the unborn child within her, but Melissa fought for her life with one burning goal set before her pain-filled eyes: to make Greg pay. To make him feel the agony she had felt. To make him suffer as she had suffered.

It was not a worthy goal, she knew. General O’Conner and the others would be horrified if they could see into her soul. But it was the goal that had kept Melissa sane all these years. And now she was close to achieving it.

Hate can move mountains, she said to herself. Faith, hope and hate. And the greatest of these is hate.

Now her long journey was over. With at least some sense of weight to anchor her stomach, she looked with watery eyes at a bright-faced young man beaming a ridiculous greeting to her.

I’ll take care of her,” Doug said. The two crewmen looked enormously relieved.

“Come on,” he said, taking Melissa by the arm. “You’re okay now. You just need to cleak up a bit and get some food into you.”

Melissa groaned at the thought of food. “I must look a mess,” she said.

Grinning, Doug admitted, “A shower and a change of clothes would help.” She smelled so bad his own stomach wanted to heave.

He led Melissa to the waiting tractor and the co-pilot dumped her one travelbag on the back seat. As they trundled along the dimly-lit tunnel, Doug accessed the central computer and found the room assigned to Melissa. She must be a real VIP, he thought, to get the personnel department to push another short-timer into doubling up.

Fortunately Melissa’s assigned quarters weren’t far from the main airlock. Doug walked her there and told her to take a shower.

I’ll wait out in the tunnel and take you to lunch when you’re ready,” he told her.

Melissa was too miserable and weak to debate with the stranger. She stumbled into what looked like a cell carved out of rock, found the shower stall, and stepped in fully clothed. The water was tepid, at best, but it felt good. Slowly she stripped off her soggy clothing as the water sluiced over her.

She was looking for soap when the water stopped. Blinking drops from her eyes, she turned the controls. Nothing. Suddenly blasts of air pummeled her from vents in the ceiling and sides of the stall. She shivered, but as the air evaporated the droplets on her skin it began to feel warm, even hot.

And then it, too, suddenly stopped. Melissa shook her head, feeling like a hamburger in an automated oven. As she stepped out of the shower she realized that her nausea was gone. She shook her head again. No wooziness at all.

Leaving her soiled clothes in the shower, she opened her bag and got dressed: crisp clean ivory slacks and a pullover blouse of metallic gold. It was a struggle, though; every move she made seemed too big. She nearly toppled over onto the bunk when she tried to step into the slacks. Of course, she told herself. You’re on the Moon. The gravity’s much less here. Carefully, she finished dressing and slipped on a pair of soft-soled espadrilles.

No jewelry, only her wristwatch. She looked at herself in the shadowy reflection of the desktop computer screen; there was no mirror in the room. Warmed-over shit, she appraised herself. Well, girl, that’s as good as it’s going to get.

Wondering if the nice young kid was still waiting out in the hall, she stepped cautiously to the accordion-pleat door and slid it partway open.

Doug saw her peeking out. “Hi!” he said. “Feeling better?”

The shock of recognition almost knocked her legs out from under her. Standing there grinning at her was a young Paul Stavenger. Bigger than Paul, lighter skinned. But it was Paul’s eyes she saw looking at her; Paul’s irresistible smile.

Then it flashed into her mind: Paul’s son, Douglas, lived here at Moonbase with Greg and their mother. Paul’s son. Joanna’s son.

She pushed the door all the way open and stepped out into the tunnel, very carefully.

“We’ll have to get you a pair of weighted boots,” Doug said, offering her his arm. “First stop, though, is The Cave.”

Melissa clung to his arm and let him do the talking. She learned that The Cave was some sort of cafeteria or galley where Moonbase people took their meals. The thought of eating felt better to her now that her stomach was in place. She actually felt hungry. Ought to be, she told herself. You lost everything you had in there and then some.

“You haven’t told me your name,” she said as they walked slowly down the tunnel.

“Doug Stavenger,” he answered. “And yours?”

She covered her emotions quickly. “Melissa Hart,” she said, not trusting herself to say more. Joanna’s baby. Greg’s half-brother.

Then she remembered that this was the young man whose body swarmed with nanomachines. This was the symbol of wickedness that General O’Conner was sworn to destroy. Almost, she disengaged from his arm. The thought of those evil machines inside his body frightened her. But he looked normal enough, and she was afraid that if she let go of his arm she’d stumble and fall.

“You didn’t have any trouble working the shower, did you?” he asked as they walked down the tunnel.

“The water shut off on me.”

“Oh, sure. There’s a timer. Water’s pretty precious, still, so there’s an automatic cutoff in all the showers.”

“And air driers?”

Doug nodded easily. “We generate a lot of heat, most of it’s too low-grade to be put to anything useful, but we can save a lot of towel laundering by using some of it to dry off in the shower.”

“I see,” Melissa said.

“Not that we use water for the laundry,” he added.

“No?”

“Don’t have to. Just take the dirty laundry outside; the dirt dries out almost immediately in the vacuum, so you can shake it off.”

Melissa wondered if he were telling her the truth or pulling her leg.

“And the ultraviolet out there sterilizes everything, too, of course.”

He seemed quite serious. Melissa realized mat Doug Stavenger was a bright, good-looking, charming young man. Paul’s son in every way. Once they were seated at a small table in The Cave and Melissa no longer had to worry about walking in the feeble gravity, she could study his face, feel his intensity. He had Paul’s infectious enthusiasm, the same drive that could sweep you up and carry you away, despite yourself.

“…so you’ve actually brought us the LTV we’re going to use for our asteroid mission,” he was saying.

Melissa paid scant attention to his words. She saw Paul again. And the whole sorry mess of twenty years ago played itself out in her mind. All the pain and rejection and fury boiled up inside her, burning worse than the bile she had vomited on the way to the Moon.

“Your brother is the director of Moonbase, isn’t he?” she asked, struggling to keep her voice from shaking.

“Greg. That’s right”

“And your mother lives here, now, doesn’t she?”

Doug nodded eagerly. “In fact, there she is now.” He stood up and waved.

Melissa turned in her chair and saw Joanna: older, a bit thicker in the middle, her hair more gray than ash-blonde now, but unmistakably Joanna. While the other women in The Cave wore mostly coveralls, Joanna was in a midnight blue pantsuit set off by a flowered silk scarf at her throat. She doesn’t need weighted boots to hold her down, Melissa thought; those bracelets and necklaces must be heavy enough to do the job.

Doug saw that his mother had spotted him and pulled up a third chair for her. Joanna smiled as she approached their table, but her smile froze once she recognized who was sitting with her son.

It’s Melissa Hart! Joanna realized as she neared Doug’s table. She looks as if she’s been through hell and back. Painfully thin. And her eyes — as if she hasn’t slept in years. What’s she doing up here?

“Melissa,” she said as she put her tray on the table. “Whatever brings you here?”

“She came up on the LTV you’re buying,” said Doug.

“Really?” Joanna sat down between them.

“I’m here as the representative of the new corporation’s COO,” Melissa said coolly.

“Omar? You’re working for him?”

“For Mr. Rashid, yes.”

Doug sensed their mutual hostility. It was as obvious as the snarling of a pair of lionesses arguing over a bleeding chunk of fresh meat.

“I didn’t know you were still with the corporation,” Joanna said.

“I dropped out,” Melissa replied, “but I’m back now.”

“And in such a key position, too.”

Melissa said, “Mr. Rashid seems pleased with my work.”

“I’m sure,” Joanna murmured-

Doug broke in, “Just what are you doing here, Melissa? Why’ve you come to Moonbase?”

Before she could think of a reply, Joanna said, “Rashid is pushing the idea of developing nuclear fusion power.”

“Using helium-three?” Doug asked.

“You know about it,” said Melissa, impressed.

“I’ve looked into it. Power conversion is the key to its economic success.”

Turning to Joanna, Melissa lied, “I was hoping to get your support for the fusion development.” This isn’t the time or place to confront her, she told herself. I want to see Greg. He’s the one I’ve come for.

“I suppose we could program nanomachines to glean helium-three out of the regolith,” said Joanna.

“You don’t really need nanomachines to do that,” Melissa said.

“We’re fully committed to nanotechnology here,” Joanna replied icily.

“But the U.N. treaty—”

“Won’t be signed by Kiribati. You know that.”

“Still,” Melissa said, “the fusion program shouldn’t be dependent on nanotechnology.”

Doug said, “We want to show the world that nanomachines aren’t harmful, despite all the hysteria down there.”

Melissa kept herself from replying.

“After all,” Doug went on, “nanomachines can do a lot more than scour the regolith for raw materials. The medical applications of nanotech are the greatest thing they’ve got going for them.”

“Are they?” Melissa countered. “Nanomachines killed your father, didn’t they?”

Doug felt as if she had slapped his face. He saw that his mother had gone white, too.

“That was twenty years ago,” Joanna said stiffly. “Nothing like that has happened again.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“Nanomachines saved my life,” Doug said, recovering somewhat ’If it weren’t for nanotech I’d have died of radiation poisoning.”

“And now you can live forever, is that it?”

“Really,” Joanna started.

But Doug silenced her with a gesture. “I don’t know how long I’ll be able to live. But wouldn’t you want to extend your lifespan, if you had the chance?’”

“That’s just it, isn’t it?” Melissa retorted. “Of all the billions of human beings on Earth, how many of them will get the chance to live forever?”

“Answer the question,” Doug insisted. “If you, yourself, had the chance to extend your lifespan indefinitely, would you take it?”

“No,” Melissa said honestly. “I don’t want to extend this misery one minute longer than I have to. Life is pain, don’t you understand that? The sooner we’re out of it, the better off we are.”

DIRECTOR’S OFFICE

“Melissa? Here?” Greg stiffened at the news. “What does she want?”

Joanna was too nervous to sit down. “She wants to see you.”

“But why?”

“Who knows? She says she’s here to ask our support for Rashid’s fusion program.”

“You don’t think that’s the truth?”

Joanna glared at her son. “Do you?”

Greg leaned back in his desk chair and stared at the ceiling. The bare rock seemed lower than usual, heavier, inching down to crush him.

“You’re going to have to see her,” Joanna said.

“Yes,” he said, feeling the desperation creeping into his bones. “Yes, I suppose I will.”

“Would you like me to be with you when you do?”

What to answer? Greg wondered. I can’t tell my mother that I’m afraid to see Melissa by myself. But I am! I don’t want to see her, I don’t want to be anywhere near her. She’s bringing me nothing but pain, I know it, I can feel it.

“Well?” Joanna insisted.

“Yes,” Greg blurted. “I think it would be better if you were present when I talked with her.”

“Good. I do too.”

Doug didn’t forget about Melissa, but he relegated her presence at Moonbase to a corner of his mind. He had more important things to do.

He brought Bianca and Lev Brudnoy to his room and imaged on his Windowall the LTV sitting on its pad.

“She’s a beauty,” Doug said, beaming at the picture on the screen. “Only been used for seventy-two flights; practically new.”

Brudnoy scratched at his beard. “I’ve always wondered why Americans tend to personalize their machinery. It looks like any other LTV, to me.”

Bianca was more practical. “Okay, how long are we going to let it sit out there?”

“I’ve requisitioned a dome for it,” said Doug. “The machine shop’s putting it together now.”

“So we put up the dome over the landing pad?”

“No, that’d interfere with the rocket port operation too much. We put up the dome a half-mile away from the pad and tow the LTV to it.”

“We’re going to work on the ship in spacesuits?” Brudnoy asked.

“No, the dome will be pressurized.”

“But we’ll need suits to get to and from, won’t we?” asked Bianca.

Doug admitted it with a shrug. “Can’t be helped. There’s no space inside the base to work on it”

“The main garage? Is the ceiling high enough?”

“I checked. Ceiling’s okay, we can just about squeeze her in, but there’s not enough room for the LTV when all the tractors are inside.”

“But at least half of them are left outside, usually,” said Brudnoy.

Shaking his head, Doug told them, “I know. I asked Greg about it, but he just scrolled up the regulations on his screen. The main garage’s got to be able to house all the tractors in an emergency.”

“What kind of emergency?” Brudnoy asked.

“Solar flare,” Bianca and Doug answered in unison.

“So your technicians will have to spend an hour getting into spacesuits and then walk or ride half a mile past the rocket port to work on our LTV,” said Brudnoy.

— ’They can work in their shirtsleeves once they’re inside the dome, “Doug pointed out.

Brudnoy sighed. “And then spend another hour getting back into their suits to go home again.”

Doug spread his hands helplessly. “What else can we do, Lev? You know how much work it takes to carve out extra space underground. We can’t blast out the space we need with plasma torches; it’d take too long and too much effort. The dome’s our best bet.”

“I presume you’ve run all the numbers through your computer,” Brudnoy said drily.

“Frontwards and backwards,” said Doug. “I’ve gone through every option I could think of. The dome’s our best choice.”

“I just hate all that extra work of getting into the suits,” the Russian muttered.

“It’s the prebreathing that takes most of the time,” Bianca said. “If the suits ran at the same pressure that the base does we could zip into them in half the time.”

“Well, they don’t,” said Doug, “and it takes time to breathe the excess nitrogen out of your system.”

Brudnoy’s pouchy eyes looked even sadder than usual.

With a grin, Doug added, “When I’m director of Moonbase I’ll start our people working on suits that run at normal base pressure, so you’ll be able to hop into them in a couple of minutes.”

Bianca shook her head. “You’d think after all these years somebody would’ve already done that.”

“Not much need for it,” said Doug. “What kind of an emergency could come up so suddenly that you need to jump into a suit in a few minutes?”

Brudnoy nodded. “True enough. I’ve been here more than twenty years and I’ve never seen such an emergency.”

Doug nodded.

“On the other hand,” the Russian went on, “it’s going to slow down our work tremendously. Isn’t there some way we can put up a pressurized access tube to the dome?”

“A mile-long tube?” Bianca asked.

“Wait!” said Doug. “Why don’t we pressurize one of the tractors? Couldn’t we put the crew module from the LTV itself onto a tractor? That way we can take three or four people at a time out to the dome in their shirtsleeves.” ’Yeah!” Bianca cheered. “That could work.” Brudnoy was more reserved. “Check it out on your computer, my friend. Don’t celebrate until the engineering program tells us it can be done.”

“It’s good to see you again, Greg,” said Melissa.

“It’s been a long time,” he said, staring at her from behind his desk. She looks awful, Greg thought. Her face is still beautiful, but it’s like a death mask, a skull, her skin is stretched so tight over the bones it’s a wonder she can open her mouth. And she’s so thin! As if she’s been a prisoner of war all these years.

She wore a shapeless gray pants suit, its jacket falling halfway to her knees. When she sat in front of Greg’s desk and crossed her long legs, he saw that the trousers ended in stirrups that looped under her weighted boots.

It was Melissa’s eyes that frightened Greg. He saw fury in them, hot red rage. He remembered the last time he had been with Melissa, when he had told her they were through. Her eyes were red then, too, but with tears and pleading. I turned my back on her and she’s never forgiven me for it, Greg realized. All these years she’s been hating me.

He turned to his mother, sitting beside Melissa. Joanna was outwardly cool and controlled, but Greg knew that she was just as tense as he was. He could see it in the way Joanna was nervously fingering the ends of the flowered silk scarf she was wearing.

Greg had to swallow before he could bring his voice back. “I understand that you’re working for Rashid now, with the new corporation.”

Melissa’s chin dipped a bare centimeter. “That’s right”

Greg opened his mouth again but no words came out He didn’t know what to say. He looked up at the ceiling, menacingly low.

Joanna prompted, “Rashid’s pushing the fusion program, isn’t he?”

“I’m not here to talk to you-two about Rashid or his programs or anything like that.’Melissa said, her eyes flaring.

“Then what?” asked Joanna.

She focused those laser-beam eyes on Greg. This is the man who abandoned me, she thought, staring at him. The man I begged to stay with me. The man I thought I loved. The man whose child I was going to have. A wave of self-loathing swept over her, made her shudder visibly. I pleaded with him! I got down on my knees and begged him! And he turned his back on me. He walked away, the cold-hearted sonofabitch. He knew I was pregnant with his baby and he just walked away from both of us.

“Murder,” she whispered.

I murdered my own baby. You made me do it, the two of you. You threw me out like so much garbage. I aborted the baby. I committed murder.

“What are you talking about?” Joanna demanded.

Greg knew.

Melissa pointed a skeletal finger at him. “You murdered Paul Stavenger. You used nanomachines to kill him.”

“That’s nonsense!” Joanna snapped.

“Is it?”

Greg couldn’t answer. He couldn’t speak. He gripped the armrests of his swivel chair and stared in growing horror at Melissa. It’s all coming back. It’s all rising up again, all around me, walling me in, smothering me.

“I have Jack Killifer’s sworn statement,” Melissa was saying, her voice cold and hard as ice. “He gave you a sample of nanomachines that attacked long-chain carbon molecules. Gobblers, he called them.”

Joanna blustered, “That doesn’t mean—”

“You put them in with the nanomachines that Paul was using up here on the Moon, didn’t you, Greg? They killed Paul and two other men.”

“My husband died in an accident,” Joanna insisted.

“He was murdered. By your son. And I can prove it.”

“That…’ Greg choked out the words, “… that was, for god’s sake, that was twenty years ago, almost.”

Melissa smiled thinly. “There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

“You haven’t got a shred of evidence,” Joanna said. “Even if this Killifer person gave Greg a set of nanomachines, what of it? You can’t prove murder in a court of law.”

“Can’t I? Criminal courts have become much tougher over the past few years.”

“We’ll have the best lawyers in the world.”

“Fine. Hire all the lawyers you want. A big, scandalous trial will be perfect. The public will love to watch the two of you, week after week. It’ll be the entertainment highlight of the year.”

Two of us?” Joanna asked.

“You aided and abetted your son, Mrs. Stavenger. Didn’t you? Accessory after the fact.”

“Now wait…’ Greg started.

Melissa silenced him with a glance. “Mrs. Stavenger, it was you who covered up the evidence of the murders. It was you who sent Jack Killifer to Moonbase, so he wouldn’t be available to tell anyone what he’d done until nearly twenty years afterward.”

“You can’t be serious,” Joanna said.

“I’ve never been more serious in my life,” Melissa replied. “The murderer son and his accomplice mother. Think how that’s going to look on video back home.”

Greg stared at her. The bitch is trying to ruin my life. She’s trying to ruin both our lives. He thought how easy it would be to get up from this chair, walk around the desk, and snap her neck like a brittle stick.

Then he gasped with the sudden realization that Doug had ordered Killifer out of Moonbase. And I let him do it! Greg raged at himself. Doug knew exactly what he was doing. He knew Killifer would testify against me once he got back to Earth! He’s been against me from the very beginning. Doug, Melissa — all of them!

Joanna took a deep breath, then asked Melissa, “What do you want?”

“Justice,” said Melissa.

“And what do you think would be just, in this case?”

Melissa turned away from Joanna’s cool gray-green eyes to look squarely at Greg once again. “Shut down Moonbase,” she said flatly. “Put an end to all the nanotechnology you’re using here.”

Greg blinked at her. “And what else?”

Melissa shook her head. “First things first. I want an end to this evil of nanotechnology. An end to this place where rich people can escape the problems of Earth.”

With a shaky laugh, Greg asked, “That’s all? Just shut down Moonbase?”

“And any nanotech operations you might have elsewhere,” Melissa said.

“And for that, you’ll forget about this murder business?” He couldn’t believe it.

Melissa smiled again, this time showing teeth. “Oh no, Greg. You misunderstood me. Moonbase has to be shut down. But you’ll still have to stand trial for murder. In Atlanta, I imagine. In the federal court in Atlanta.”

“You little bitch! You want to destroy me!”

“That’s right,” Melissa said calmly. “I’m going to destroy you. And Moonbase with you. And the nanotechnology that you’re protecting.”

For the first time, Joanna looked alarmed. “My son’s life was saved by nanotherapy. He can’t return to Earth.”

“He’ll have to. He’ll have no other choice.”

“But they’ll murder him! One of your fanatics will kill him just the way they killed Carlos Quintana.”

Melissa replied coolly, “Surely, Mrs. Stavenger, you have enough money to protect your son. Even if you go to prison, the family fortune will still be there for him.”

“To live behind walls all his life?” Joanna said, her voice almost pleading. “To live separated from the rest of civilization?”

“What’s he doing here?” Melissa retorted. “A quarter-million miles from civilization.”

Greg watched and listened, the horror within him freezing his insides. They’re worrying about Doug when she wants to put me on trial for murder. She wants to destroy me and Mom’s thinking of Doug! Moni doesn’t care about me; it’s Doug she’s trying to protect.

“All right!” he shouted, leaping to his feet. “You want to kill me? You want to wipe out Moonbase? All right, I’ll help you!”

Joanna’s face went white. “Greg, what are you—”

He came around the desk, swift as death, and grabbed Melissa by her bony wrist.

I’ll show you!” Greg roared, dragging Melissa toward the door. “I’ll show you all!”

ZIMMERMAN’S QUARTERS

“So? You have come to see my monastic little cell?” Zimmerman asked as he stepped aside and allowed Doug to enter his room.

Stepping past an unopened garment bag thrown carelessly on the floor, Doug said, “I think we can make the room feel a lot bigger if we put up a couple of Windowalls for you.”

“Windowalls?”

“Big flat-screen display panels. You could show videos of scenes you like, make it seem as if you’re looking out a window.”

Zimmerman bobbed his fleshy jowls. “Yah, that would be an improvement.”

I’ll let you have one of mine until we get some new ones brought up,” said Doug.

Zimmerman gave Doug a crafty look. “You didn’t come here to discuss my interior decorating problems, hah?”

“No,” Doug admitted cheerfully. “I’ve come to enlist your help.”

“Sit,” said the professor, gesturing to the desk chair as he eased his bulk onto the sagging bunk. “What help do you need from me?”

“We want to build Clipperships out of pure carbon — diamond — using nanomachines.”

Zimmerman’s shaggy brows rose. “So? That would make them much stronger than metal ships, no?”

“And lighter,” Doug said.

“My experience has been mostly in medical uses of nanotechnology, not rocket engineering.”

“It would help us enormously if you’d work with the technicians here. Just look over their shoulders a bit. Encourage them.”

“Stick my nose in.”

“You’d be an inspiration to them.”

Zimmerman shook his head. “I’d be an old man bothering your young people. The one you want is Professor Cardenas. She has experience in engineering programs.”

“I intend to ask her, too. But I wanted to ask you first.”

“Why first?”

“Because I respect you so much,” Doug replied. “I owe my life to you.”

Zimmerman slouched back on the bunk until his head rested against the cushioned wall. “The Chinese believe that if you save a man’s life, you are responsible for him ever afterward,” he said gloomily. “I have the feeling that you are going to find many things for me to do.”

Doug laughed. “I’m not Chinese. But I do want your help on this.”

“I suppose—”

The ceiling lights flickered.

“What was that?” Zimmerman sat up rigidly on the bunk.

“Don’t know,” said Doug. “The lighting system must’ve switched—”

They flickered again.

“Does this happen often?” Zimmerman looked decidedly worried.

“No, never,” Doug said, puzzled. “I don’t know what’s going on.”

From outside in the tunnel they heard the ceiling speakers paging, “DOUGLAS STAVENGER, PLEASE CALL THE BASE DIRECTOR’S OFFICE. DOUGLAS STAVENGER, PLEASE CALL THE BASE DIRECTOR’S OFFICE.”

Feeling uneasy, almost worried, Doug tapped the phone key on Zimmerman’s computer keyboard.

Joanna’s face appeared on the screen, strained, distraught. “Doug! Where are you?”

“I’m with Professor Zimmerman, in his quarters.”

“Your brother’s snapped! He’s run off with Melissa Hart somewhere, screaming that he’s going to destroy everything.”

“Greg? What do you mean?”

Then he heard the unmistakable thud of an airlock hatch slamming shut.

“EMERGENCY’ blared the speakers out in the tunnel’s ceiling, loud enough to be heard clearly through the flimsy accordion door. “EMERGENCY. AIR PRESSURE DROP IN MAIN GARAGE. ALL AIRLOCKS HAVE AUTOMATICALLY SHUT. FOLLOW EMERGENCY PROCEDURES. UNLESS YOU ARE WITH SECURITY OR ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROL GROUPS, REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE. DO NOT MOVE FROM YOUR PRESENT LOCATION UNTIL NOTIFIED BY BASE ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROL.”

The sad sweet strains of the Rose Adagio from Sleeping Beauty filled her mind as Bianca Rhee floated through a nearly-perfect grand jete, higher in the air than any prima ballerina could possible achieve on Earth, arms extended, toes pointed properly, when the loudspeakers bellowed out their warning.

She landed on her toes, stumbled off-balance, and staggered against the flimsy partition that closed off her little practice area from the rest of the main garage. Almost angrily she yanked out the earplug and snapped off the miniature chip player clipped to her belt.

“EMERGENCY,” the automatic warning repeated.” AIR PRESSURE DROP IN MAIN GARAGE. ALL AIRLOCKS HAVE AUTOMATICALLY SHUT. FOLLOW EMERGENCY PROCEDURES. UNLESS YOU ARE WITH SECURITY OR ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROL GROUPS, REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE. DO NOT MOVE FROM YOUR PRESENT LOCATION UNTIL NOTIFIED BY BASE ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROL:”

Bianca didn’t feel any air-pressure drop. Some stupid sensor’s gone down, she thought But she padded in her ballet slippers to the edge of the partition and looked out at the main garage. People were hustling for the hatches that led into the base’s four main tunnels.

And she felt a breeze.

Bianca had screened off this unused part of the main garage to serve as her practice hall. It was as far away from everything — and everyone — else as it could be, a good hundred meters from the nearest airlock.

There was definitely a wind surging through the main garage. She could see dust swirling along the floor. Somehow one of the airlocks to the outside must have been opened and the air was rushing out into the vacuum. A pang of fear shook her. I’ll never get to one of the tunnel hatches in time!

A rack of six spacesuits stood a few meters away, hanging like empty suits of armor against the rock wall. There were racks like this spotted throughout the garage, standing ready against a possible emergency.

Bianca dashed to the nearest suit, ducked under its torso and wormed her way into it. As soon as her hands wiggled into the gloves attached to the arm cuffs, she reached overhead and grabbed the helmet, desperately hoping that the backpack’s tanks were filled with breathable air. She clapped the helmet down on the neck ring and sealed it, then took a deep breath. The seal mechanism automatically activated the air flow.

Okay, she told herself shakily. The gasket around the waist of the torso shell will hold your air; you’ve got a couple of minutes to get into the leggings. It was awkward bending inside the hard shell of the suit’s torso, but she ripped off her ballet slippers and got into the leggings faster than she had ever done before. Then she sat on the floor and pulled on the boots.

I did it! Bianca exulted. I got into the suit. Then she remembered that if she stayed in the suit for more than a few minutes she would get decompression sickness: the bends.

Greg had dragged Melissa from his office, down the tunnel toward the rear of the base.

“You want to destroy everything?” he had screamed at her. I’ll show you how to wipe them all out! All of them!”

Melissa tried to keep up with him but her legs wouldn’t work right in the low lunar gravity. She stumbled, flailed her free arm to regain her balance, then tripped again and fell to the floor. Greg hauled her along, skidding and scraping on the cold rock floor.

Two women and a young man, all in the olive green coveralls of the mining division, rushed up the tunnel toward them.

“What’s the matter?” one of the women asked. “What’s going on?”

“Get out of my way!” Greg roared. “Get out! Now! Leave us alone!”

The two women glanced at Melissa, sitting on the tunnel floor with her legs drawn up, glaring up at them.

“I’m the base director,” Greg bellowed, banging the nametag on his chest with his free hand. “Get out of my goddamned way.”

“Call security,” said the young man. “Let them take care of it.”

They hesitated a moment longer, staring at Greg’s wild-eyed expression and Melissa, her arm still hanging in his grasp.

“Come on,” said the young man. The three of them hurried up the tunnel.

“Assholes,” Greg muttered after them.

Melissa yanked her wrist free of Greg’s grasp. He turned on her, hand raised to strike.

I’ll help you,” she said, climbing slowly to her feet ’You don’t have to drag me. I’ll go with you willingly.”

“You bet you will,” Greg said. And he started down the tunnel again.

“Where are we going?” Melissa asked, trying to keep up with him without stumbling again.

“EVC,” he muttered.

“What?”

“Environmental control center. The air pumps.”

Breathlessly, Melissa answered, “Good.”

Greg felt lightheaded, almost giddy, as he hurried down the tunnel. Don’t run, he warned himself. You might trip yourself and fall. You don’t want to look foolish in front of Melissa. He thought about the veteran Lunatics he had seen taking yards-long strides in the gentle gravity, soaring along like ballet dancers. I’ll show those wiseasses, he thought I’ll show them all. Let’s see how far they can jump when there’s no air left to breathe.

For the first time in his life Greg felt free, totally, absolutely free. It didn’t matter what anyone thought or said or did. This is the end of it all. At last it’ll all be over with, finished. The end of everything. No more fear. All my worries are behind me now.

To Melissa, this tunnel seemed longer than the others. As she struggled to keep up with Greg, she saw that they had passed the area where laboratories and offices lined the tunnel on both sides. Now the doors were farther apart and the labels on them proclaimed MAINTENAISjCE STORES and ELECTRONICS SPARES.

At the end of the tunnel was a dull metal hatch with an electronic security pad alongside it.

“Rank has its privileges,” Greg said, almost giggling as he tapped the keyboard with his index finger. “All the base director has to do to open any hatch, anywhere, is punch in his personal code.”

Greg’s eyes were aglow. Melissa thought he looked — happy. I’ve freed him, she said to herself. I’ve freed us both.

The hatch clicked but did not open. Greg grasped its metal wheel, gave it half a turn and then pushed.

Inside was a shadowy cavem that throbbed with the sound of pumps.

As Greg, suddenly solicitous, helped Melissa over the hatch’s coaming, he explained, “All the base’s air supply is routed through here. That’s the recycling equipment…’ He pointed to a clump of bulky metal shapes connected by a maze of piping. “We’ll take care of them later.”

He pushed the hatch shut, then spun its wheel, locking it.

“Find a tool box,” he ordered Melissa. “There’s got to be tools stashed here someplace.”

“What about those lockers?’1 She pointed to the row of metal lockers a few feet down the wall from the hatch.

“Right’ said Greg. He yanked the lockers open, one after the other, and slammed each door shut again with a disgusted clang. “Emergency space suits, emergency oxygen tanks, extra coveralls — where “do they keep the fucking tools?’ His roar echoed off the bare rock walls.

“Here.” Melissa called from a workbench on the other side of the hatch.

Greg rushed to her. “Right!” He yanked open the metal boxes lining the back of the workbench and lifted out a heavy wrench. “Just what I need.”

Grinning madly, he went back to the hatch and lifted the back cover off the security pad. Then, raising the wrench over his head like a spear, he jammed it into the electronic works of the hatch’s security pad. Sparks crackled, throwing blue-white highlights against his grimacing face.

“There,” Greg said triumphantly. Then he jammed the wrench into the hatch’s wheel, to prevent it from being turned. “Now if they want to get in here they’ll have to blast.”

He whirled around, eyes blazing. Melissa felt her heart thundering beneath her ribs. We’re going to do it! she said to herself. We’re going to tear it all down! We’re going to put an end to all of it, at last!

There was a computer at the end of the workbench. Greg strode to it, bending over the keyboard.

“One system at a time,” he muttered. “First the lights.”

The computer screen lit up. Greg worked the keyboard, fingers moving in staccato rhythm. Melissa thought the sparse overhead lights flickered, but the lighting was so dim in this cavern that she couldn’t be sure.

“Damn! The backup nuke conies on-line automatically and there’s no way to shut it down unless the solar farms come back on.”

He pecked at the keyboard again, harder. “Shit,” he muttered. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“You can’t do it?” Melissa asked, looking at the incomprehensible alphanumerics scrolling up the display screen.

“I can do it,” Greg growled. “I just can’t do it through the damnable computer. Too many redundancies and backups.”

“Then what—”

“The main airlock!” Greg crowed. “I can open the main airlock long enough to blow all the air out of the garage! Emergency decontamination procedure. Look!”

Melissa saw another jumble of symbols on the computer screen, but overhead loudspeakers immediately blared out a warning that echoed through the big cavern.

“That’s just a start!” Greg shouted.

He ran back to the workbench, picked up another wrench, and waved it in the air. “I’m going to wipe them all out!I can do it! Watch me!”

Melissa followed him down the narrow walkway between man-tall metal shapes that throbbed and chugged ceaselessly.

“I don’t need the compiler system,” Greg railed, banging his wrench angrily on the metal domes of the pumps as he passed them, making the cavern ring. “I don’t need the fucking computer! I’ll do it the hard way!”

“Do what?” Melissa asked.

Instead of answering her, he turned and pointed back to the workbench. “Get every tool you can carry. Bring them to me. Now!”

She scurried to obey, staggering slightly in the unaccustomed gravity, righting her balance by leaning against the cold metal pumps.

She went to the toolbox they had already opened and lifted out an assortment of wrenches, pliers and screwdrivers. By the time she got back to Greg he had already twisted off two of the four bolts holding down the domed top of one of the pumps.

“It all gets down to plumbing,” Greg mumbled as he worked furiously. “All the high technology of this base depends on pipes that carry either air or water.”

“You’re going to break the pumps?”

Greg looked up at her, a grease stain already smeared across his forehead. I’m going to cut off their air supply. Let them choke to death on their own fumes.”

“Us too?” she asked.

He laughed. “Of course, us too. We’ll die together, Melissa. You’ll like that, won’t you?”

“I was in love with you,” she said.

“No greater love has any man,” Greg babbled as he yanked at the bolts of the pump, “than he lays down his life for his ex-lover.”

She dropped to her knees next to him. “Kill them all,” she whispered urgently. “But be sure to kill us, too.”

“We’ll die,” Greg said triumphantly. “We’ll all die!”

CONTROL CENTER

Doug flew down the tunnel, his feet barely touching the ground, leaping the distance between one closed airtight hatch and the next in a few long, loping lunar strides.

Jinny Anson was already in the control center when Doug got there. So was his mother and Lev Brudnoy.

“They’re in the EVC, affl right,” Anson was saying, pointing at the big electronic wall map of the base. “Sonofabitch blew out the garage and now the oxygen partial pressure in tunnel four is below safe level.”

“How could he do that?” Joanna asked, wide-eyed.

Still scowling at the wall map, Anson replied, “He just opened the main airlock. All the air in the garage got sucked out into the vacuum.”

“But how—”

“There’s an emergency procedure in the computer controls,” Anson answered impatiently, “so we can clear the garage of toxins or radioactives or any other crap in a hurry.”

“Was anyone in the garage?”

“Of course! We’re counting heads now, making sure everybody got out okay.”

“What about tunnel four?” Doug asked. “That’s the tunnel that leads into the EVC, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, right. He must’ve shut down the pumps, I guess. Or maybe turned off the air-circulating fans. It doesn’t take much.”

“What is he trying to do?” Brudnoy asked.

“Commit suicide,” Joanna replied without an instant’s hesitation.

“And take all of us with hint?” Anson almost snarled the words.

Joanna nodded silently.

Doug asked, “Has anybody been able to make contact with him?”

Anson shook her head. “He doesn’t answer, not even the paging system. And he must’ve knocked out the surveillance cameras somehow, we can’t get a picture from inside theEVC.”

“Damn!”

Doug saw that the consoles were fully manned; tight-lipped technicians sat at the monitor screens, headsets clamped to their ears, fingers running over their keyboards as they checked every system in Moonbase.

In the control center’s air of quiet frenzy, Anson had naturally, automatically taken charge.

“He’s trying to knock out the whole base,” she said, thinking aloud. “Already blown out the garage and tunnel four’s down below safe minimums. It’s only a matter of time before he gets the rest of us.”

“What can we do to stop him?” Joanna asked, sounding a bit frantic.

“First things first,” said Anson. Turning, she marched to one of the consoles and spoke to the technician seated there. “Activate all the emergency air filtration systems. And get a squad of safety people to manually check them.”

Doug saw the question in his mother’s eyes. “Backup systems,” he explained, “to filter the carbon dioxide out of the air. Even if Greg shuts down the main recycling equipment, the backups will keep our air breathable.”

“For how long?” Joanna asked.

Brudnoy looked at her with sad eyes. “A few hours,” he said softly. “At most, a few hours.”

“Shouldn’t we get everyone into spacesuits, then?” Joanna suggested.

“There aren’t enough suits for everyone,” Brudnoy countered.

Doug added, “And it would take an hour of pre-breathing before you could get into a suit without giving yourself the bends.”

“Besides,” the Russian said, “if the EVC goes down, the suits will only prolong your misery for a few hours more.”

“Very encouraging,” Zimmerman said loudly as he stepped through the control center’s entrance. “I don’t suppose you have suits my size anyway.”

They all turned to see the fat old professor walking toward them as carefully as a man negotiating a minefield. Zimmerman’s gray three-piece suit looked rumpled, but there was no sign of fear in his fleshy face. He looked more annoyed than afraid.

“I told you to stay in your quarters,” Doug said. “How did—”

“You expect me to sit in that coffin of a cell, all alone? Never! If I am to die, it will be in company.”

“But the hatches.”

“Bah! Obviously I learned how to open them.”

“You shut them behind you, I hope.”

Anson said, “They close automatically, don’t worry about it.”

“So what is the problem?” Zimmerman asked.

Doug swiftly explained. The old man’s face went gray.

“Cut off our air? He must be a madman!”

Without looking at his mother’s reaction, Doug said, “We’ve got to get in there and stop him before he knocks out all the pumps and kills us all.”

Brudnoy said, “The security team said the hatch to the EVC was sealed shut. They started to force it open manually but the air pressure kept on dropping in the tunnel and they had to get out.”

“He’s got himself barricaded in there,” said Doug.

Anson said, “At least we got everybody out of the garage and tunnel four. No casualties.”

“Yet,” Brudnoy muttered.

“But even if he stops the pumps,” Joanna asked, “won’t the air recycling equipment keep going?”

“Won’t do us a rat’s ass worth of good if the pumps shut down,” Anson replied, brow’s knitted. “If he shuts down all the freakin’ pumps, we’ll all be asphyxiated within a couple of hours.”

“But you said we had backups…”

“They’ll scrub of the CO2 for a few hours,” Anson said flatly. “They were only meant for short-term emergencies, not to replace the main system indefinitely.”

“What can we do?” Joanna pleaded.

“I’ve got to get in there and stop him,” said Doug.

“You?” Zimmerman asked.

“Me.”

“But how?”

Turning to Anson, Doug asked, “Is there any other way into the EVC besides the hatch from the tunnel?”

She shook her head gloomily.

Doug asked, “What about the air ducts?” He turned back to the big electronic map. “All the air ducts in the base lead into the EVC, sooner or later. Maybe I can crawl through one—”

“Only if you are the size of a little mouse,” Brudnoy said morosely. “The ducts are too small for you.”

“There must be some way to get in there.”

Brudnoy scratched at his beard, staring at the big wall map. Then he reached up and traced a finger along a ghostly gray line that reached from the EVC to the edge of the base, at the face of the ringwall mountain. It branched four times, once into each of the base’s main tunnels.

“The plasma torch vents,” he murmured.

“What?”

“When we started excavating these tunnels,” Brudnoy explained, “we vaporized the rock with plasma torches.”

“Everyone knows that,” Joanna snapped.

“Yes, dear lady. But everyone forgets that we vented the vaporized rock outside through large ducts.”

“Big enough for a man to crawl through?” Doug asked eagerly.

Brudnoy nodded. “We made them big so the vapors could get out quickly and dissipate into the vacuum outside.”

“Terrific!”

“But those vents have, been sealed off for years,” Anson pointed out.

“The seals were very simple, very primitive, if I recall correctly,” said Brudnoy, furrowing his brow. “Nothing more than a series of airtight partitions every hundred meters or so. And they can be opened and closed from here in the control center, once you call up the proper program.”

“That program must be ancient, Anson snapped.

“As old as I am, do you think?” countered Brudnoy, with a smile.

Doug whirled to the nearest empty console and began working its keyboard even before he pulled up a chair to sit in.

“Come on, Lev,” he called. “Help me find it.”

Brudnoy leaned over Doug’s shoulder as the screen scrolled through several menus. Finally, a schematic of the vent system came up.

“Okay!” Doug said, nearly shouting. “I can crawl through the vent that runs along the tunnel here, work my way into the central vent, and then come down into the EVC.”

“Is there air in the vents?” Joanna asked.

“Yep,” said Anson. “Same pressure as the rest of the base, too.”

“Then I can work my way through without a problem,” Doug said.

“You’ll have to get through the partitions,” said Brudnoy.

“Those partitions haven’t been opened in nearly twenty years, Anson said.

“They’re controlled from here, though, aren’t they?” Doug asked.

She nodded, but warned, “Some of ’em might be sealed shut. Dust gets into everything, y’know.”

I’ll need some power tools, then.”

Nodding, Brudnoy said, “The two of us should be able to pry the hatches open, even if they don’t respond to the controls.”

Doug did not reply to the Russian. Turning to Anson, he said, “Get a repair team suited up and working on the hatch that Greg sealed. Start them prebreathing now. We’re going to need every second we can squeeze out. Come on, we don’t have any time to waste!”

“Wait a minute,” Anson said. “If we pry that hatch open, the whole EVC’s gonna lose its air. It’ll go down to the pressure in tunnel four,” she snapped her ringers, “like that.’

“Can’t be helped,” said Doug.

“Yeah, but what if you’re in the EVC when they break through?”

With a shrug, Doug repeated, “Can’t be helped. We have to do everything we can, as quick as we can.”

“But the risk—”

Tell the crew working on the hatch to bring some breathing masks from the infirmary. If they can get them on us fast enough we’ll be okay.”

“You’re taking a helluva chance,” Anson said.

“What’s the alternative?” Doug challenged. “Let my brother kill all of us? Let Moonbase die?”

Joanna stepped up to her son. “Doug, I can’t let you do this. It’s too dangerous.”

“You can’t stop me, Mom.”

“Douglas—”

“I’m not going to let him destroy Moonbase,” Doug said firmly. “He tried to once before, remember? I’m not going to let him get away with it.”

“Your life is worth more than Moonbase,” Joanna said.

He locked his gray-green eyes with hers. “No, it isn’t,” Doug said flatly. “Moonbase is more important than any of us.”

“Not to me.”

“It is to me,” Doug said. Then he added, “He’s trying to kill you, too, you know.”

Joanna’s mouth opened, but no sound came out.

Doug started for the door.

“Aren’t you going to at least put on a spacesuit?” Joanna called after him.

“No time, Mom! I’ve got to get to Greg as fast as I can.”

The bends, Bianca Rhee thought, trying to fight down the panic surging through her. Breathing the low-pressure air in the suit tank means that the nitrogen in my cells will bubble out and cause all kinds of trouble.

How long do I have? she asked herself as she hurried across the emptied garage toward the nearest hatch to a tunnel. Minutes? Seconds?

She reached the hatch to tunnel four, fumbled with the electronic keypad in her eagerness to get it open, and finally managed to get her gloved finger on the proper button. The hatch slid-open and she stepped into the little chamber between the outer and inner hatches that served as an airlock.

Okay, she told herself shakily. So far so good.

She got the inner hatch open and, with a sigh of relief, slid up the visor of her helmet.

And choked. She couldn’t catch her breath. No air! she screamed silently as she slammed her visor down again. They’ve pumped the air out of this tunnel! What if they’ve pumped the air out of all of them?

A sharp needle of pain seared her chest. Got to try the next tunnel. She stumbled through the airlock again, back out into the garage, and headed for the hatch to tunnel three. ~ Her legs gave way before she reached it. Agonizing pain flared through her. She felt as if she was being electrocuted. Or burned at the stake.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, she cried to herself. It hurts! Christ! Oh Christ, Christ, Christ it hurts!

Greg got to his feet slowly and admired his handiwork. What had been a set of air pumps was now a shambles of disconnected parts scattered across the cold rock floor of the EVC.

“That’s one,” he said, puffing slightly.

Melissa stood beside him, her cool gray jacket smeared with grime, her hands greasy, knuckles skinned from banging them as she tried to help Greg.

“Let’s get the next one,” she urged.

“Give me a minute,” Greg said, stretching his arms over his head. He was unaccustomed to so much intense physical exertion.

“They’ll be trying to get in here again,” she warned.

Greg gave her a knowing smile. “Not yet. I pumped down the air pressure out in the tunnel before taking the pump apart. They can’t breathe the thin stuff out there now.”

“But they have spacesuits, don’t they?”

“Sure. But it takes an hour of prebreathing before you can get into a suit. Unless you want to die of the bends.”

“Prebreathing?” Melissa asked. “Bends?”

“Never mind,” Greg snapped. “Let’s get to work on the next set of pumps.”

“Good!”

“Four tunnels,” Greg said as he stooped to gather his tools. “Each one has its own set of air pumps, including backups. Triple and quadruple redundancy.” He laughed, a brittle sound that rang off the stone walls. “A lot of good it’s going to do them!”

“Will we have time to do them all?” Melissa asked.

Walking leisurely to the second set of pumps, Greg replied, “Plenty of time. And then we’ll do the recycling system, just to make certain.” He laughed again. “That’ll be our own little bit of redundancy.”

He slapped the big wrench on one of the nuts holding down the main pump’s domed top. It made a beautiful, echoing clang.

“We won’t pass out before the job’s finished, will we?” Melissa asked. She worried that Greg would screw up, one way or another. They were so close to the final ending, she didn’t want to go through this and then find that they had failed.

“No,” Greg assured her. “This chamber is sealed off from all the others. There’s enough air in here for the two of us for days on end.”

“But how will we…?”

“Finish it?” Greg’s smile beamed at her. He moved closer to her, whispering like a little boy, “When all the pumps are done, when I’ve knocked out the recycling system, I’ll open the hatch out into the tunnel. Our air will blow out and we’ll be dead in a couple of minutes.”

“You’re sure?”

“As certain as death can be,” Greg said.

Melissa kissed him on the lips. “Then let’s make love while the air goes out. Let’s die in each other’s arms.”

Greg cocked his head slightly. “Sure. Why not?” She sighed. It would all be over soon. What was it Shakespeare said? All the heartache and the thousand natural shocks flesh is heir to. It’s all going to end, and Moonbase and nanotechnology with it. She felt a peace and contentment that she had not known since childhood.

“Stop daydreaming and help me with this,” Greg snapped.

Startled, she looked at the man she hated, the man she loved, and went to help him.

A dull booming sound reverberated through the shadowy, high-ceilinged cave.

“What was that?” Melissa asked.

Greg peered up into the shadows. “I don’t know.”

Another, like the growl of distant thunder.

“They’re trying to get in again!”

“No,” said Greg. “It’s not the hatch. It’s too far away, whatever it is.”

Melissa thought wildly. “Maybe they’re launching a ship, getting away!”

Greg shook his head angrily. “There’s only one LTV on the pads and it can only hold a half-dozen passengers, max.”

“Your mother—”

“My mother wouldn’t even think of trying to get away,” Greg said. “It wouldn’t even enter her mind. Or Doug’s, they’ll try to figure out some way to save everybody, whole base.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive. Especially Doug. He’ll want to be a hero. He’d rather die than let Moonbase be destroyed. Even if he was safe in bed in Savannah, once we wipe out Moonbase he’ll die too.”

“You’re sure?” Melissa repeated.

Greg laughed bitterly. “That noise is probably Doug battering his thick skull against the airlock hatch, trying to ram his way in here.”

VACUUM VENT NO. 3A

“When all else fails,” granted Brudnoy, “use the precision adjuster.”

He and Doug gripped the long metal rod they had scavenged from the construction spares supply and rammed it again into the square metal ceiling panel that was the access to the vacuum vent that ran the length of tunnel three. The booming thud reverberated hollowly down the length of the tunnel.

“Well,” Doug panted, “I don’t think we’re going to surprise them.”

Brudnoy peered up at the access panel. It had barely budged. “I don’t know about that,” he said, wiping sweat from his eyes with the back of his sleeve. “They may hear the noise we’re making, but will they know what’s causing it?”

“Maybe not,” Doug agreed half-heartedly. He gripped the rod again in both hands. “Come on, let’s get it done.”

We’re not moving fast enough, Doug told himself. Greg’s in there taking the EVC apart and we’re stuck here as if we’re glued to the floor.

For one of the rare times in his young life Doug felt real anger. He wants to kill us all, kill himself and me and Mom and everybody. He wants to kill Moonbase. He wants to kill my father all over again.

Never! he snarled inwardly. I won’t let him get away with it He rammed the rod with all his strength against the unyielding ceiling panel.

Four more bangs and the panel gave way with a groan. Doug could see it lift away slightly from the lip of the square in the rock ceiling.

“I think that did it,” he said, puffing from the exertion.

“Yes.” Brudnoy was panting, too. Wheezing.

“Okay,” said Doug. “You’d better get back to the control center and tell them I’m on my way.”

“But I’m going with you,” said Brudnoy.

“No,” Doug said, placing a hand on the Russian’s bony shoulder. “This is something I have to do alone. Besides, I need you to take care of my mother.”

Brudnoy gave him an odd look. Then he shrugged submissively. “I understand. I’m too old for heroics.”

Doug smiled at him sadly. “You’re out of shape, you know.”

Shrugging, Brudnoy replied, “Too much soft living. Here, at least I can help you up.”

“I can jump it. Get on back before he starts pumping the air out of this tunnel, too.”

“They can’t,” Brudnoy countered, “now that the hatches have all been closed.”

Doug nodded. “Yeah, all he can do is knock out the pumps or the recycling system and let us strangle slowly.”

“It’s always best to look on the bright side,” said Brudnoy.

With a rueful grin, Doug backed up a few steps, then lunged forward and leaped, arms outstretched. His fingertips caught the open space where the panel had been pushed ajar. Hanging there with one hand, he shoved at the panel with the other. It hardly moved.

“No leverage,” Doug gasped.

“Stand on my shoulders,” said Brudnoy, ducking under Doug’s flailing feet. “Then you can use both hands.”

“You knew this would happen all along, didn’t you?” Doug asked, as Brudnoy straightened up under him. He pushed the panel aside; it screeched like a rusty hinge.

“Simple physics,” Brudnoy said.

Doug hauled himself up into the vent ’Thanks,” he said, looking down at the Russian.

“There you are!” It was Zimmerman, hurrying along the tunnel. He reminded Doug of a big sea lion waddling across a beach.

“You should be in your quarters,” Doug called down to him.

“So? I will be safer there?”

Brudnoy turned slightly to hide the smile that the professor’s sarcasm triggered.

“We can’t have people just wandering around the base,” Doug said.

“I am not wandering. I came looking for you.”

“Oh? Why?”

“To warn you.”

Brudnoy’s smile vanished. “Of what?”

Waggling a stumpy finger up toward Doug, Zimmerman said, “You think you are superman, maybe, because you have the nanomachines in you?”

Doug blinked down at the professor. “I hadn’t even thought about that.”

“Good. Forget about them. They will not make you into a hero. They cannot protect you from all harm.”

“I didn’t think they could,” Doug said.

“They are medical, metabolic,” Zimmerman went on. “They can heal injuries quickly. But that is all they can do for you.”

“Okay,” said Doug.

“Do not think you can perform superhuman feats. You cannot”

“Okay,” Doug repeated, feeling slightly exasperated “Thanks for the warning. I’ve got to get going now.”

“Yah. I know.” Zimmerman stood there fidgeting for a moment, men said in the softest voice Doug had ever heard out of him, “Good luck, my boy.”

Grinning, Doug replied, “Thanks.”

Brudnoy handed him the power drill they had brought with them. Doug grasped it, men started to worm around for his trek down the vent.

“Turn on the transponder,” Brudnoy reminded.

“Yeah, right.” Doug reached for the little black box clipped to his chest pocket and pressed its stud. Now they could track his progress back at the control center. If I get killed, he thought sardonically, at least they’ll know where to find the body.

“One more thing,” Brudnoy called.

“What?” Doug asked, getting irritated at the delay.

“I want you to remember something your father often said. Every time he had a difficult job to do, he said it”

“My father?” Doug asked, more gently.

“If it is to be, it’s up to me,” Brudnoy said. “That was your father’s motto.”

“If it is to be, it’s up to me,” Doug repeated.

“Yes,” said Brudnoy.

“Thanks, Lev. That’s good to know.”

“Good luck.”

“Right.”

Brudnoy and Zimmerman watched the young man disappear into the darkness of the overhead vent.

“Come on,” said Brudnoy to the professor. “Time for us old men to go wait with the women.”

Zimmerman shook his head, glanced up at the ceiling, then let Brudnoy lead him back toward the control center.

Doug tucked the hand drill into the thigh pocket of his coveralls and undipped the penlight from his chest pocket. The pencil beam seemed feeble as he swung it back and forth. The vent was barely wider than his shoulders, and caked with dust. Should’ve brought a breathing mask, he said to himself. At least there won’t be any rats or bugs. Shouldn’t be. All the inbound cargoes are checked Earthside and on arrival here. There won’t be anything in this vent to surprise me. Couldn’t be.

But he knew he was trying to convince himself of something he was really unsure of.

Joanna almost threw herself at Brudnoy when he and Zimmerman came back into the control center.

“He’s in the vent?” she asked, her voice high with tension.

Brudnoy said as soothingly as he knew how to, “He’s on his way. He’ll be at the EVC in half an hour, at most”

Anson muttered, tight-lipped, “They can do a lotta damage in half an hour, I betcha.”

Brudnoy shrugged. “As long as they don’t damage the recycling equipment too badly…”

“Good thing they don’t have any explosives in there,” Anson said, turning back to the wall screen.

“It’s a question of time now,” Brudnoy said to Joanna. “Can Doug get there soon enough to stop them from doing too much damage.”

Joanna fought to keep back her tears. Doug was going to have to fight Greg. At best, only one of her sons would come out of this alive, she knew.

“We’re picking up his transponder signal,” called one of the technicians from his monitoring station.

“Put it on the big screen,” Anson commanded.

A blinking red dot showed up on the wall screen, halfway down the gray line marking the vent running atop tunnel three.

Zimmerman, sitting on one of the little wheeled console chairs like a walrus perched on a beach ball, pointed and asked, “That is him?”

“That’s him,” Anson replied.

“Can we speak with him?”

“He’s got a pocket phone,” she said. “He’ll call in when he hits the first partition.”

Joanna stared at the blinking red dot as it moved slowly along the gray line. Brudnoy stood beside her and put an arm around her shoulders. She leaned against him, grateful for the support.

Roger Deems unconsciously gnawed on a fingernail as the eight others — three women among them — filed into the security office. Just my luck, Deems thought, to be tapped for the security job this month. The others looked equally unhappy.

The security assignment was rotated among the long-time Lunatics. Usually the job required nothing more than keeping the base’s surveillance cameras working. Drugs were a minor problem, but the long-timers usually policed themselves pretty well and kept the short-timers under control. The still that produced rocket juice was an open secret and seldom made problems for anyone. The toughest moment Deems could remember had been when two short-timers got into a fistfight in The Cave over a woman they both coveted. By the time that month’s security chief had arrived on the scene, like the sheriff in an old west barroom brawl, the other Lunatics had already ended the fight simply by dousing the combatants with all the fruit juice they could grab from the dispensers. Wet and sticky, the two young men felt foolish and embarrassed. Wyatt Earp was not really needed.

Deems had been at his desk, performing a routine check of the surveillance cameras, when the automatic emergency announcement blared from the overhead speakers. The sound of the airtight hatches slamming shut all along the tunnel startled him, but he didn’t get too worried until Jinny Anson’s voice came on the speakers and ordered everyone to stay put, then ended with an ominous, “THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”

Before Deems could get out of his desk chair Anson was on the phone, telling him tightly what had happened and what she expected him to accomplish. Deems swallowed twice to keep down the bitter bile that was suddenly burning its way up his throat, nodded once to Anson, and got busy. He punched into the loudspeaker system, startled to hear his own voice booming out in the tunnel as he said:

“THIS IS THE SECURITY CHIEF. WE NEED VOLUNTEERS TO HELP CLEAR UP THIS EMERGENCY. ANYBODY IN TUNNEL TWO WHO ISN’T INVOLVED IN LIFE SUPPORT WORK AND DOESN’T HAVE TO GET PAST ONE OF THE CLOSED HATCHES, REPORT TO THE SECURITY OFFICE RIGHT AWAY.”

Volunteers. Deems almost laughed. Anybody who could reach the security office without going through one of the closed hatches was a volunteer. By definition.

Now the three women and five men stood crowded, worried and uncertain before his desk.

“The base director’s locked himself in the EVC and is threatening to cut off our air,” Deems said to the assembled ’volunteers,” without preamble.

They gasped, shocked.

“We need to open the EVC’s hatch,” he went on, running a hand through his thinning hair, “and we don’t have time for prebreathing.”

“Whaddaya mean, “we?” Why do we hafta do it?”

“Yeah, aren’t there specialists for a problem like this?”

“Like who?” Deems asked, trying hard to scowl at them.

No one had an answer.

“Listen,” he said, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms over his chest, “we can sit here on our rumps and let the cuckoo sonofabitch choke off our air or we can try to do something about it. Which is it gonna be?”

“You mean we need to get into suits?”

“It’s that bad?”

“Air pressure in tunnel four is ’way down, unbreathable,” said Deems, actually beginning to enjoy the feeling of authority, “and the pressure’s dropping in tunnel three.”

“Christ! My wife’s in three!”

Deems raised a chubby hand. “Don’t panic. We’ve already got safety people evacuating three. She’ll be okay.”

“But we have to get into suits?” one of the women asked, not certain she had heard him correctly.

“That’s right. No time for prebreathing, either.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

“Not if we do it right,” said Deems. “We’re going to the suit rack at the end of this tunnel and purge a half-dozen backpack tanks. Get rid of the low-pressure mix that’s in ’em and refill them with regular base air. Then you won’t need prebreathing and there’s no danger of the bends.”

“But if you pump up the suits to room-normal pressure they’ll get so stiff we won’t be able to move in them,” said one of the men. Deems recognized him as an engineer from the mining group.

“You won’t have to do any delicate work,” he countered. “Just set up a laser torch to burn through the hatch.”

The engineer looked dubious and muttered something too low for Deems to catch.

“But we’ve gotta move fast,” Deems said, starting to feel like a real leader. “No time to waste. We’ve gotta get into the EVC before he knocks out all the pumps and recyclers.”

“Isn’t there any other way to get to the EVC?”

They don’t like this, Deems could tell by looking at their faces. Not any of it. Can’t say I blame them.

“Doug Stavenger is working his way through the old plasma vents,” he said, “but we don’t know if he can make it all the way to the EVC or not. In the meantime, we gotta get that locked hatch open.”

“Wait a minute,” said one of the engineers. “If the pressure’s down in tunnel four and we burn through the hatch, won’t that blow the air out of the EVC?”

“Right”

“And anybody in there gets killed.”

“Most likely.”

“Then what about Stavenger? What if he’s in there when we blow the hatch?”

Deems shrugged. “We’ll carry extra suits and try to get them on all three of the people in there before decompression get them.”

“Fat chance,” grumbled the engineer.

Deems knew he was right.

“Shouldn’t we be taking the recyclers apart?” Melissa asked. Her arms hurt from exertion and she could feel blisters welling up painfully on the palms of her hands.

Greg snorted impatiently, kneeling over one of the pumps. “What good’s the recycling equipment if the pumps aren’t moving fresh air? Kill the pumps and you kill the people.”

He seemed calmer now. Methodical. When they had first burst into the EVC Greg was frenzied, wild-eyed. Now he worked with the deliberate, meticulous care of a man who was totally dedicated to his task. He’s really going to do it, Melissa said to herself for the hundredth time. He’s going to kill them all. He’s going to kill himself. He’s going to kill me.

For the first time, she realized that there was no way to stop Greg. If she tried to interfere with his dismantling of the pumps, he would calmly brain her with one of the wrenches.

She shuddered.

“Haven’t heard that booming noise again,” Greg said absently as he worked, head bent over the inner works of the pump.

“No,” said Melissa. “It’s stopped.”

“What do you think they’re doing, outside?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Getting into spacesuits, maybe?”

Greg laughed. “Fat lot of good it’ll do them. There aren’t enough to go around. Oh, I suppose my mother and her little circle of sycophants are in suits. But the others — no.”

“Maybe they’re calling for help.”

Greg looked up at her. His face was smeared with grime, but he smiled brightly at Melissa. “I’m sure they are. They must be screaming for help. But the quickest any help can come from Earth is six hours or more, and that’s only if they have an LTV all ready to go and it’s programmed for a high-energy boost.”

“They could be calling to the other bases here on the Moon, couldn’t they?”

“My mother, ask Yamagata or the Europeans for help? She’d sooner die.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

His dark eyes snapped at her. “Don’t tell me what I believe! If she asked Yamagata or the Europeans for help, they’d end up owning Moonbase. She’d never do that. She wouldn’t even think of it.”

“But that’s better than dying, isn’t it?”

Greg pulled a section of pipe away from the dismantled pump and let it drop to the rock floor with a clang. “Besides, what could anybody do to help her? Before anybody can break through the hatch to get to us, everybody out there’ll be dead.”

Melissa paced back and forth along the narrow walkway between pumps, arms folded across her chest, massaging her aching muscles.

“They must be doing something,” she said.

Greg snorted disdainfully. “If I know my mother, she’s spending her last moments writing me out of her will.”

Doug’s sneeze rang along the length of the metal-walled vent like a raucous gong. The dust was filling his nose, choking his throat whenever he inadvertently opened his mouth. The vent was big enough for him to crawl on his hands and knees, but still the dust floated languidly up to his face with every step he took.

How on Earth could dust get into these closed vents? With a shake of his head he reminded himself that he wasn’t on Earth and lunar dust got into everything, its burnt-gunpowder smell was as common in Moonbase as the odor of frying oil in a hamburger joint back Earthside.

I wonder what the nanomachines are doing with the dust particles that get down to my lungs, he asked himself. Despite the sneezing and coughing, he seemed to be breathing well enough.

He had passed three partitions. Two of them had opened up on the electrical signal from the control center, when Doug had phoned Anson. The third refused to budge, and Doug had to drill off its hinges, which were caked solid with lunar dust.

The partitions had been set up like valves in the blood stream, to flip open in one direction only, letting fumes flow outward toward the vacuum outside the base, but sealing firmly shut once the outward-pushing pressure dropped.

As long as the last seal holds, the one at the end of the vent, where it opens out at the face of the mountain, as long as that one holds the vent will hold air for me to breathe, Doug told himself.

Then a sudden thought struck him. Is there a backup set of controls in the EVC? Could Greg pop the outside hatch open and blow all the air out? And me with it?

No, he told himself. Greg doesn’t know I’m coming along the vent, so even if there are backup controls he won’t know to use them. It’s not possible.

He hoped he was right.

In the thin beam of his penlight he saw that the vent ended in a T-shaped intersection up ahead. That’s the junction with the main trunk, he knew. I’m at the end of tunnel four; the EVC is only a few dozen yards away.

He fished the phone out of his pocket again, flicked it on, and said softly, I’m at the juncture with the main trunk.”

The comm tech’s voice said, “Hold one.”

Then Anson came on. “Okay. We’ve got an emergency team in suits ready to start burning open the hatch.”

“In suits?” Doug blurted, startled. “But they haven’t had enough time—”

“They’re breathing regular air at base pressure.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Are you ready to pry open the access cover in the EVC?” Anson demanded.

“Yes,” Doug said. “In about two minutes.”

“Okay. I’ll start the team working on the hatch. That oughtta draw their full attention.”

“Right.”

“They’ve got a spare suit with them, for you.”

“Only one?”

“They’ve got two more, but I told them to be sure they slap one on you before they do anything else.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

Doug stuffed the phone back in his pocket, thinking, Once they blow that hatch all the air’s going to rush out of the EVC. Explosive decompression. A spacesuit won’t help unless they can get it on before your blood boils and your eyes pop out of your head.

He inched his way to the final access panel. I’ve got to stop Greg before they blow that hatch, he told himself.

MAIN GARAGE

“There’s a body here!”

Deems had to bend over to see the spacesuited figure slumped on the main garage’s rock floor halfway between the hatches to tunnel four and tunnel three.

Several of the team gathered around the fallen figure, bending stiffly in their overpressured suits.

“He’s unconscious.”

“I think it’s a woman.”

“If whoever it is got into that suit without prebreathing, he’s got the bends. Or she.”

Just what we need! Deems growled to himself. Some stupid shit who didn’t get in to safety in time.

Pointing to the man closest to him, he said, “Drag him inside tunnel two and call the medics. Then get your butt back out here right away. We’re gonna need every pair of hands we’ve got.”

It felt spooky as his eight men and women waddled cumbersomely through the main garage to the closed hatch that was the entrance to tunnel four. The garage was usually bustling and noisy with tractors being repaired, technicians yelling back and forth, music from individual disk players wailing over the clang and clamor.

Now the garage was deathly silent and still. It seemed to have taken hours to purge the spacesuit tanks of their low-pressure mix and refill them with room air. Then getting into the damned suits took even longer. The metal shell of the torso and leggings were unaffected by the additional air pressure, but the gloves ballooned so badly they looked like boxers’ mitts, and all the suit joints were painfully stiff. It’s like we’ve all got arthritis real bad, Deems thought.

He watched four members of his team checking out the cutting laser, clumsy and slow in the overpressured suits. The laser looked heavy and sinister, mounted on a tripod like some kind of gun. Clusters of power condensers and cooling blades lined its length. Another pair from their group sat on the rock floor awkwardly connecting power cables together.

Who the hell got himself caught in a suit out here? he wondered. Personnel claimed they checked out everybody working in the garage, they all got into tunnels one and two okay. And the only guy on the surface made it to the rocket port, so he’s accounted for. Somebody’s miscounted or screwed up someplace.

Tunnel four was two hundred yards long, Deems knew. Twice the length of a football field. They were going to lug the laser down to the sealed EVC hatch at the end of the tunnel, dragging the cable along, and start cutting the hatch open.

And when we do, he said to himself, we’ll be killing anybody inside the EVC. He glanced at the three empty suits on the floor by the hatch. Shaking his head inside his helmet, Deems thought that the suits would be about as much good as an umbrella in a typhoon.

The Stavenger kid’s gonna die, he thought We’ll get the two who’re trying to wipe us out, but we’re going to kill the Scavenger kid in the process.

“Did you hear that?” Melissa asked, looking up toward the rock ceiling of the EVC, lost in the shadows beyond the strips of overhead fluorescent lamps.

Greg was hunched over the display screens at the front of the chamber. Tunnel four was almost a vacuum, and although somebody had shut all the airtight hatches in the other tunnels, the oxygen level in tunnel three was sinking nicely.

“Hear what?” he called to Melissa.

“It sounded like—”

“Wait!” Greg snapped, silencing her. “Listen!”

Melissa walked to his side. She felt utterly weary. Her knuckles were skinned, her hands greasy, her clothes a mess. She had stripped off her jacket, and now she felt chilled in nothing but the light sleeveless blouse she had worn beneath it.

Greg tapped on the keyboard and the display screen showed the tunnel outside. Four people in spacesuits were aiming a heavy cutting laser at the EVC hatch.

“They’re trying to get through the hatch,” he whispered.

Melissa stood by him and glanced again up toward the shadowy ceiling. She thought she had heard something from up above, but in this echoing cavern, maybe it was a noise from the tunnel outside that had caught her ear.

Greg laughed, shakily. “It’ll take them hours to burn through the hatch,” he said. “I know the kinds of lasers they use for cutting metals.”

It sounded less than reassuring to Melissa. “I thought you said they couldn’t get through the tunnel at all.”

“They must have set up a death squad,” he said. “They’re just killing themselves faster, that’s all.”

Doug clamped his penlight in his gritted teeth and tried to work the edge of the power drill into the dust-caked rim of the access panel. Things don’t rust up here, he thought, but the dust packs as solid as concrete after a few years.

He had carefully removed the hinges from the access panel, trying to do it as quietly as he could. Surprise is still a weapon, he told himself. As long as they don’t know I’m here I’ve got an advantage over them.

Perspiration stung his eyes but he kept levering the power drill with both hands, using the drill like a miniature crowbar, trying to pry the damned panel loose. Does Greg have any weapons with him? he suddenly wondered. As far as Doug knew there wasn’t a gun anywhere on the Moon. The worst Greg might have would be a steak knife from The Cave. Or a wrench that he could use as a club.

The panel creaked a little. Doug saw light seeping into the vent from below. Worming the point of the drill deeper into the crack he had created, he struggled to his knees — head bent to keep from banging the top of the vent — and leaned all his weight on the tool, wishing for once that they were on Earth where his weight counted for more.

Groaning, the panel edged up an inch or so. Doug grabbed its edge with both hands and pushed, straining so hard he felt pain across his shoulders and down his back.

With a final shriek of protest the panel opened all the way. Doug pushed it clattering aside and looked down into the environmental control center. A pump’s disassembled parts lay scattered oh the stone floor twenty feet below him. He could see another pump, apparently still working, on the side of the narrow walkway. No sign of Greg or Melissa, though.

The walkway down there looked very tight. If I don’t hit it just right I’ll land on the pump or the pieces Greg’s strewn across the floor. I could break an ankle. Or my neck.

But there was no time to hesitate. Twenty feet down. You’re on the Moon; you can drop twenty feet with no sweat. Still, Doug grabbed the edge of the open access hatch and lowered himself slowly, hanging by both hands for a moment.

Then he saw Greg, only ten yards away, by the front hatch. And Greg, turning suddenly, saw him.

Doug let go and started to drop with the dreamlike slowness of lunar gravity to the walkway below. Greg howled madly, grabbed a heavy wrench and threw it at his brother.

Doug felt his left arm shatter with pain as he hit the floor, slipped on a loose piece of junk, and went down flat on his back. As he fell he saw Greg grab for another weapon.

ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROL CENTER

It was Doug!

Greg turned at the blood-freezing screeching noise of metal grinding against metal and saw his half-brother hanging like an ape from the ceiling. Then Doug let go and dropped slowly, like a monster in a nightmare, toward the floor. Howling, Greg reached for a wrench and threw it at Doug, then leaped to the workbench and grabbed the first tool his hand could reach, a screwdriver, smaller, but comfortably heavy.

Melissa stood frozen against the workbench, screaming, “Get him! Get him!”

Greg saw that Doug had sprawled on his back. Got to put him out before he can get to his feet, Greg told himself. He leaped toward his fallen brother.

Through pain-hazed eyes, Doug saw Greg springing at him. There was no room on the confined walkway to do more than turn on his side, no place to hide or even dodge.

Greg landed on Doug’s side with a thump that drove the air from Doug’s lungs. He tried to shield himself, but his left arm wouldn’t work. He could hardly move it.

Greg held the screwdriver like a knife up above his head and stared down into his half-brother’s pain-widened eyes. For an instant he hesitated. Melissa was screaming something. Greg saw not Doug, but Paul Stavenger looking up at him accusingly. Murderer! he heard Paul call him. You murdered me once and now you’re going to do it again.

Through pain-hazed eyes Doug saw his half-brother hesitate, the screwdriver held over his head like a dagger. Pushing Greg’s weight off him, Doug reached up with his good arm and grabbed Greg’s wrist.

It was a nearly equal contest. Doug’s left forearm was broken, but he was stronger, more muscular than Greg. Gripping Greg’s wrist, Doug pulled himself up to a sitting position, forcing Greg backwards. Then he began bending Greg’s wrist back slowly, slowly, until Greg grunted and dropped the screwdriver.

The two brothers sat on the cold stone floor, gasping, glaring at each other.

“How’d you get in here?” Greg growled.

“Vents,” Doug panted. “Plasma torch exhaust vents.”

“What do you think… you’re going to… accomplish?”

Doug pointed with his good hand toward the hatch up at the front of the EVC. “They’ll be breaking through,” he said, breathing raggedly. “When they do… we’re all dead. The tunnel’s… almost down to vacuum.”

Suddenly Doug’s world exploded. Flashes of light burst before his eyes and then it all went utterly black.

He slumped over, the back of his head oozing blood. Greg looked up and saw Melissa standing triumphantly over them, a heavy wrench grasped tightly in both her gaunt hands. The wrench was stained with Doug’s blood.

“That takes care of him ,” she snarled.

Greg climbed slowly to his feet.

“You heard what he said,” Melissa urged. “They’re going to kill us when they get the hatch open.”

“We’re trapped in here,” Greg said, looking around wildly. “There’s no way out.”

“Then let’s finish what we came here for.”

“We won’t have time!”

“We’ve got to!”

Another thumping sound from the hatch.

“They’re going to burn through it,” Greg said, his voice shaking. He looked down at Doug again; his half-brother seemed dead.

“Do something!” Melissa shouted.

Greg tried to clear his thoughts. “He came through the old plasma vents…’ Straightening up, Greg went to the computer by the workbench. “Those vents open to vacuum! If I can open them all, it’ll suck all the air out of the base in a few minutes.”

Melissa’s eyes glowed. “That’ll do it!”

Greg began scrolling through the computer programs, searching for the controls to the plasma vents.

Doug couldn’t focus his eyes. Everything was a blur, a red smear. Blinking, coughing, he pushed himself up to a sitting position and slumped against one of the pumps. He wiped at his eyes with his good hand and they came away sticky with blood.

Far, far away he saw a slim figure bent over a glowing computer display screen. Greg. Someone was standing beside him but his vision was too blurred to make out who it might be.

“Hurry!” she was saying, her voice pitched high and shrill. “Hurry! I can hear them outside the hatch!”

“I’ve got it,” Greg said, his voice as calm and implacable as death.

“Greg…’ Doug croaked, his throat raw. “Don’t…”

Greg turned and his eyed flashed wide. “I thought she’d killed you.”

“Don’t do it,” Doug said again. “You’ll be killing Mom.”

He saw his brother’s eyes widen slightly. But then Greg said, “What of it?”

Doug pushed himself to his feet, feeling slightly dizzy. He reached out a hand to steady himself against the gutted shell of a pump.

“Stay away,” Greg warned, growling. Yet his fingers hesitated over the keyboard.

Melissa tried to push him away. “If you won’t do it, I will,” she snarled.

Strength was returning to Doug’s legs. The pain hi his left arm was bearable, a sullen throb. His vision had cleared and he felt stronger with each step he took toward the pair of them.

“Stop it, Greg. Stop it now while you can. Put an end to the killing.”

I’ll put an end to everything!’ Greg snapped. But he stared at his brother without touching the keys that would open the plasma vents.

“No, you don’t want to do that, Greg. You can’t destroy Moonbase. It means too much to everyone on Earth. It means the future of the human race.”

“The human race!” Melissa laughed bitterly. “The world would be better off if the human race were wiped out to the last pitiful one.”

Doug was almost within arm’s reach now. The nano-machines had stopped the bleeding from his scalp wound, repaired the blood vessels in his brain that Melissa’s blow had ruptured. They were even beginning to knit together the fracture in his forearm.

“I’m warning you!” Greg screeched. “Stay away from me!”

“Just back off from the computer, Greg,” Doug said as softly as he dared. “Go to the hatch and tell them you’re coming out peacefully.”

“No!”

“You’ve got to, Greg. This isn’t just between you and me. There’s more than our lives involved here, much more.”

Greg took an uncertain, lurching step backwards, like a drunk too addled to understand what he was doing.

“Coward,” Melissa hissed. She stabbed a finger toward the keyboard.

Doug lunged forward blurringly fast and caught her frail wrist ’No,” he said. “You’re not going to destroy us.”

“Leave her alone!” Greg threw himself at Doug, clawing at his throat Melissa scratched at Doug’s face with her free hand.

He staggered back under their assault, flung Melissa aside like a rag doll and grasped one of Greg’s strangling hands. His brother was trying to choke him. Beyond his insanely twisted face, Doug could see Melissa reaching for the keyboard again.

Doug jabbed a thumb in Greg’s eye. He howled and released Doug’s throat Stepping back just enough for the leverage, Doug punched his brother in the jaw with a short, compact right Greg’s eyes rolled up and he collapsed to the stone floor.

Melissa was banging on the keyboard, desperately hoping to strike the key that would open the plasma vents to vacuum. Doug reached for her again when suddenly the big chamber seemed to erupt into a tornado. Dust swirled as Doug’s ears roared painfully.

He saw Melissa’s face, glowing with triumph, crumble into a mask of blood. Blood gushed from her ears, her eyes. Her mouth filled with blood as she twirled in the rushing air, and slid across the floor, arms flapping like a scarecrow’s.

Doug had only a moment to turn and look down at Greg, bleeding from every pore, before he too collapsed and died.

MOONBASE INFIRMARY

Douglas Scavenger was sitting up in the bed, tubes carrying whole blood, saline solution, and liquid nutrient into his arms, monitoring machines above his head blinking and displaying crawling, glowing lines that represented his heart beat, breathing rate, blood pressure. Each factor was so high that the monitors had been specially programmed so that they would not constantly be screeching their warning signals.

His mother was sitting on a hard plastic chair at the foot of the bed while Zimmerman stood beside the bed, scowling at him.

“The nanomachines have raised your metabolic rate by a factor of nearly three,” he muttered. “I don’t understand it.”

Joanna said softly, “They saved his life; that’s enough for me.”

“Yah, but how ?” Zimmerman insisted. “How did they do it?”

“Don’t ask me,” said Doug. “One moment I was passing out in the EVC. The next thing I knew, I woke up here in the infirmary.”

Still scowling, Zimmerman mumbled, “They must have shut down your heart rate to lower your blood pressure and prevent ruptures of the capillaries.”

“How did they know to do that?” Doug asked.

Zimmerman looked down at him. “How did they make the decision to suspend your heart function? Did they simply react to the immediate physical stimulus, or…’ His voice trailed off.

“Or what?” Joanna asked.

With a shake of head hard enough to make his jowls waddle,

Zimmerman continued, “Or did they make an assessment that it was safer to shut down your heart than to allow your capillaries to burst?”

“Make an assessment?” Doug echoed. “Like they’re intelligent?”

“No, that cannot be,” Zimmerman said. But he didn’t seem terribly certain of it.

“The bugs must have reacted to the immediate stimulus, as you said,” Doug suggested.

“Yah. Perhaps. And yet—

“Whatever they did,” Joanna said, “they saved Doug’s life.”

“By stopping my heart and killing me.”

Zimmerman seemed lost in thought. “They are either very stupid, or much more intelligent than I had ever thought possible.”

He reached for the curtain screening off Doug’s bed, muttering, “I must talk to Kristine about this. This is very unexpected.”

Without another word to Doug or his mother, Zimmerman stepped out of the cubicle.

For several moments Doug simply lay in his bed, silent, looking at his mother’s sad, abstracted face. Finally, he said, “It’s a shame we couldn’t save Greg.”

Joanna’s face clouded. “There wasn’t anything they could do for him. All his internal organs were ruptured. Melissa too.”

Doug’s last conscious memory of them flashed through his mind. Blood spurting everywhere, their final strangling, gargling shrieks.

“And Bianca Rhee was killed too?”

His mother nodded. “No one seems to know what she was doing out in the garage. They found her in a spacesuit but she had already died of heart failure.”

“From the bends.”

“Yes, nitrogen bubbles blocked her heart valves.”

Leaning his head back against the pillows, Doug wished he could feel something. Some emotion. Sorrow. Pain. Even relief. Nothing. Just a blank emptiness inside him. As if the nanomachines that had saved his life had also taken away his soul.

His mother still looked stricken. Nearly twenty years she’s protected Greg and now he’s dead. He killed himself and I couldn’t stop him. I tried and failed. He killed my father and Melissa and Bianca. And himself. And I couldn’t prevent it.

“It’s not your fault,” Joanna said, as if she could read his mind.

“What?”

“It’s not your responsibility. Greg would have killed himself sooner or later. I know that. I suppose I’ve known it all along.”

“If I had just been a little faster—”

“No,” Joanna said. “You saved the base. You saved me.”

“He opened the plasma vents to vacuum,” Doug said. “He wanted to kill us all. That’s what he said.”

“What Greg really wanted was to kill himself.”

“I should’ve stopped him.”

“Jinny had sealed the vent access hatches in tunnels one and two,” Joanna said. “We had evacuated three and four. So no one was killed when he opened the main hatch. Some equipment’s been damaged, but it’s nothing that can’t be repaired.”

Bianca died, though, Doug said to himself. I’ll have to go out to the main garage and find her ballet slippers. They must be back in the screened-in area where she practices. Then he corrected himself: practiced. Past tense. She’s dead.

He closed his eyes for what seemed like a moment, but when he opened them again his mother was gone and the tubes had been disconnected from his arms. Flexing both hands, Doug realized that the fracture in his left arm must be healed. Another gift of the nanobugs, he thought.

“You’re awake?” It was his mother again. This time Lev Brudnoy stood beside her, tall and gangling but looking neater, straighter than Doug remembered him. His beard was nicely trimmed, his hair combed. Instead of coveralls he was wearing dark slacks and a deep green turtleneck shirt Joanna was in a colorfully patterned dress.

“We’re heading back to Savannah in a few hours,” Joanna said.

“We?” Doug asked. “The two of you?”

“Yes,” said Brudnoy.

His mother added, “Lev and I have become…very close, over the past few days.”

Brudnoy actually blushed.

Doug tried to make a smile for them, and hoped it worked. “Why Savannah?” he asked.

“To pick up the pieces,” she replied. “I’ve got to make certain that the board of directors doesn’t try to hinder the repairs we need here. And I want to push your diamond Clippership project.”

Doug guessed, “Jinny Anson will run the base?”

“Yes. I may have to get myself elected to board chairman again,” Joanna said. “It may be some time before I can get back here.”

“I understand,” Doug said.

“Zimmerman and Kris Cardenas are staying. They’ll be able to help you.”

“I understand,” Doug repeated.

And he did. Joanna needed to get away, to return to more familiar surroundings, to immerse herself in something more than regrets and grief for the son she had lost. She knows I can get along okay, Doug told himself. And she’s bringing Lev along to help her over the emotional bumps. Doug could see the wry humor of it, even though he could not make himself smile. Lev’s going to be my stepfather.

By the time they were ready to go out to the rocket port, Doug was strong enough to get out of bed and go with them. The medics argued against it, but the monitors showed that his metabolic rate was stable and his weight — down nearly five pounds a few days earlier — was almost back to normal.

Doug watched their liftoff from his favorite perch, in the tiny observation blister of the rocket port. The big, ungainly LTV was there one instant, and an instant later it was gone in a cloud of aluminum oxide smoke.

Doug slid down the ladder to the cramped flight center, then wordlessly went out to the tunnel that led back to the base. Instead of taking the tractor, though, he pulled on one of the spacesuits standing on the rack and, after an hour of prebreathing and solemn meditation, he climbed up to the hatch that opened onto the floor of the crater. Without a spacecraft sitting on any of the pads it was hard to tell that humans were present in Alphonsus’ wide ring of mountains. The Sun was down but the sky gleamed with thousands of diamond-hard pinpoints of stars, strewn so thickly Doug felt almost as if he could walk upon them. His practiced eye scanned the weary, slumped old mountains of the ringwall, smoothed to an almost glassy polish by eons of infalling meteoric dust. He traced out the sinuous cracks in the crater floor, knowing that deep below there was ammonia and methane, precious life-sustaining resources.

He looked up and saw the Earth, a glowing crescent of blue and white, its night side clear to see against the starry sky. Warm and rilled with life, Doug knew. And yet he felt no longing, no desire to return to the world of his birth. The human race will die there, he knew, unless we help them to expand beyond Earth’s confines.

He looked again at the barren lunar landscape stretching all around him. Turning, he saw the barely-discernible mounds where the original Moonbase shelters had been buried, the slight cleft in the mountain face where the airlock of today’s base stood, the glittering acres of the solar power farms. Lifting his gaze, he traced out the rounded top of Mt. Yeager and the notch of Wodjohowitcz Pass.

We’re already putting names on the wilderness, Doug said to himself. We’re starting to place our marks here.

He saw Moonbase as it would be. A thriving city built underground but large enough for trees and flowering bushes and maybe even a stream of real water meandering through a grassy expanse. He saw spacecraft made of pure diamond plying the routes between Earth and Moon, and heading outward, toward the distant planets, toward the stars themselves.

He saw the human race growing, learning, facing the frontier and the future with hope and brimming desire.

There’s a lot of work to do, he realized. A lifetime of work, and then some. Generations of work.

Nodding inside his helmet, he strode toward the airlock, Time to get started, he told himself. If it is to be, it’s up to me.