'Thanks,' she said, letting him tug the boots off her.

 

Slowly she got to her feet and, with Deems' help, lifted the upper half of the suit over her head. Deems hung the empty torso on its rack.

 

'You've been wearing Killifer's suit,' he said, noting the name stencilled on the chest

 

'Seems like I've been wearing it all my life,' Rhee said tiredly.

 

'It's only been a couple of hours.'

 

She started worming out of the lower half of the suit

 

'Do you think Doug will live through this?' Deems asked, his soulful brown eyes looking almost tearful.

 

Rhee shook her head slowly. 'He's awfully sick. So pale, like there's no blood in him.' Suddenly she wanted to cry.

 

'It's a shame,' Deems said.

 

'Yeah.'

 

Rhee finally worked her legs out of the suit and hung it on the rack. Without another word to Deems she padded in her stockinged feet to the toilet When she came out, Deems was gone. She was alone with the row of empty suits. No one could see her sobbing quietly.

 

After a few minutes she tried to pull herself together. The vidcam, she remembered. Doug was worried about the vidcam.

 

She went to the leggings she had just hung up and searched through the thigh pouches. Sure enough, Doug's vidcam was there. As she pulled it out, Rhee thought, This is what all the mess is about Doug put our legal claim on disk. This is what's killed him.

 

There was something else in the thigh pocket. Thinking it might be a part of the vidcam that had somehow worked loose, Rhee took it out. It was a flat square of reinforced cermet, about four inches on a side, anodized flat white on one surface, and gleaming gold on the other.

 

Rhee felt puzzled. This isn't part of the vidcam, she told herself. But she took it along with her, back to her bunk, where she stuck both the vidcam and the strange piece of cermet into her personal bag for safekeeping, until they got back to Moonbase.

 

VANCOUVER

 

'Do I really have to do this?' Kris Cardenas asked.

 

Greg Masterson's image in her desktop phone screen smiled gravely. 'How long have you known my mother, Kris?'

 

'I owe her, I understand that. But I can't just pop off to the Moon like I'm going to the mall for groceries.'

 

On the wall behind her desk hung the round gold seal of the Nobel Prize. The rest of the wall was covered with photographs, mostly family - husband and children who had grown to adulthood and now had children of their own. A few of the photos were not family, although each of them had Cardenas in them, together with a former President of the United States, a six-time Oscar-winning actress, a group of scientists posing before a splendid vista of the Alps.

 

Cardenas herself looked much younger than her fifty-eight years. Much younger. Her hair was still a sandy light brown, no trace of silver. Her bright blue eyes still sparkled youthfully. She looked as if she could spend the day surfing or skydiving or skiing down those snow-covered Alps, rather than delivering lectures to university students.

 

Greg's smile looked strained, she thought He was saying, 'Look, Kris, we're talking about my half-brother here. Mom will kidnap you if she has to.'

 

'But I can't do anything for him! Zimmerman is the man she wants.'

 

For almost three seconds she waited for Greg's reply. Finally, his smile transformed itself into a knowing smirk. 'Zimmerman's on his way here.'

 

'He is?'

 

Greg continued, not waiting for her reply, 'A Masterson Clippership lifted him and four of his assistants half an hour ago on a direct trajectory to Moonbase. They'll arrive here in about ten hours.'

 

Dumbfounded, Cardenas asked, 'How on Earth did she swing that?'

 

When her question reached him, Greg actually laughed. 'Simplest thing in the world. She just threatened to reveal to the media that he's running a nanotherapy clinic for wealthy foreigners right on the university campus.'

 

'Blackmail!'

 

'Black and green,' Greg replied after the lag. 'She's also making a hefty donation to his department at the university.'

 

Cardenas said, 'She hasn't offered me anything.'

 

When Greg heard her words, he replied, 'Come on up here, Kris. Bring your husband if you want. Even if it's just to hold her hand, she needs you. She's not as strong as she'd like everyone to believe, you know.'

 

Who the hell is? Cardenas asked herself. To Greg's image in the phone screen she said, I'll get there as soon as I can.'

 

Doug swam in and out of consciousness. He seemed to be floating, but that couldn't be. He dreamed he was drifting in the ocean, bobbing up and down on the long gentle swells of the open sea. Yet somehow he was stretched out on the desert sand, broiling in the sun, every pore sweating and Brennart lay beside him saying, 'Like the man says, working out on the frontier is nothing more than inventing new ways to get killed.'

 

When he opened his eyes Bianca Rhee was always hovering over him, gazing down at him with an expression that mixed tenderness with desperate fear.

 

Is this real or am I dreaming? Doug asked himself.

 

'We're on our way back to Moonbase,' Rhee said to him at one point. 'They're bringing specialists up from Earth to take care of you.'

 

Embalmers, thought Doug. Undertakers. Bury me on the Moon, he wanted to say. And don't forget Brennart's statue.

 

'The Yamagata team?' he heard himself croak.

 

'Killifer went out to get them,' Rhee replied gently, soothingly. 'Moonbase agreed with you, rescuing them blocks any claim they might have tried to make.'

 

'They're okay?'

 

'We don't know yet Killifer hasn't reached them,yet'

 

'I get all the shit jobs,' Killifer grumbled.

 

Deems, wedged into the cramped cockpit beside him, shrugged resignedly. 'Well, you're not alone, are you.'

 

They were piloting one of the Jobbers over Mt Wasseir, searching for the crashed Yamagata ship. Killifer had been ordered to do so directly by Jinny Anson, Moonbase's director.

 

Two big lobbers had arrived at their south polar camp from Moonbase, filled with oxygen and other supplies, but without a single human being aboard. Killifer had to guide their landings remotely and use the expedition's remaining personnel to unload them. Instructions - orders, really - -from Anson back at Moonbase crackled along the satellite ; relay system: Get Doug Stavenger back to Moonbase immedi ately. Then go find the wrecked Yamagata lander and save its crew.

 

Killifer had loaded the Stavenger kid onto one of the lobbers. The astronomer, Rhee, volunteered to go with him. Volunteered hell, Killifer thought Nobody could tear the little gook from the kid's side.

 

The expedition was a mess, but from what Anson told him, the corporation would have a valid claim to the area as soon as Stavenger's vidcam pictures were verified. As he monitored the Jobber's automated takeoff for its return flight to Moonbase, Killifer almost hoped that the radiation had ruined the vidcam and the disk would be a blank.

 

What the hell, he told himself. It rankled him, though, that even if he died young Stavenger would be a fucking hero. Especially if he died.

 

'I'm getting a transponder signal,' Deems said.

 

The summit of Mt Wasser was below them. Glancing down through the cockpit's transparent bubble, Killifer could glimpse the telescope and other gear that Brennart and Stavenger had left on the mountaintop.

 

'Show me,' he said to Deems.

 

With the tap of a gloved finger, Deems brought up the transponder signal on the cockpit's starscope display of the deeply shadowed ground below them. The screen showed not much more than a blur, with a red dot winking at them.

 

'Let's take it down to five hundred and hover,' Killifer said.

 

"That'll burn up a lot of propellant.' Deems' face was covered by his helmet visor, but his voice sounded scared.

 

'We gotta see the ground before we set down on it,' Killifer said. 'Friggin' starscope sure isn't showing much. Switch to infrared.'

 

'It's too cold down there in the dark,' said Deems. 'Must be two hundred below, at least.'

 

'Switch to infrared,' Killifer repeated, louder.

 

Silently Deems touched the keypad and the cockpit's main screen showed a false-color image of the ground below: mostly deep black.

 

"That must be ice,' Killifer said.

 

'Yeah, it's absorbing the infrared.'

 

'And the transponder signal's right in the middle of it'

 

'They must've landed on the ice,' said Deems.

 

Killifer nodded inside his helmet. 'Landing jets melted the ice under them and they splashed in. Dumb bastards.'

 

'Good thing the ice isn't too deep.'

 

'Nah, it must've refrozen as soon as they turned off then-rocket engines.'

 

'Then they must be stuck in it'

 

'Yeah,' Killifer said disgustedly. 'And we better make sure we don't get caught in the same stupid trap.'

 

Killifer was not primarily a pilot, although over the years at Moonbase he had trained in both lobbers and hoppers and flown them many times. But setting down in pitch darkness in totally unfamiliar territory - no wonder the Japs crashed, he said to himself.

 

Hovering above the ice field while Deems worriedly stared at their fuel gauge, Killifer jinked the lumbering spacecraft sideways, searching for solid ground to land on.

 

'Ice field's a lot bigger on this side of the mountain,' he muttered.

 

'But they wont be able to claim it once we rescue them, huh?'

 

'That's the theory.' The only ground the infrared display showed looked too rough for a landing, strewn with boulders; the size of houses.

 

The radio speaker crackled. 'Anson to Killifer. Yamagata just launched a lobber from Nippon One on a trajectory for the polar region. Must be their rescue party. Where are you?'

 

'Looking for a place to land without breaking our asses,' Killifer replied.

 

'It's important that you get to the Yamagata team before their rescue party does,' said Anson.

 

'Yeah, I know. But there doesn't look like much room to put down safely. That's why the Japs crashed in the first place.'

 

"There must be someplace!'

 

'When I find it I'll let you know.' Killifer punched the radio off. Turning to Deems, he added, 'If we can find a landing spot before we run out of fuel.'

 

Deems said, 'How about right on the edge of the ice?'

 

'We'll melt it, just like they did.'

 

'Okay, but it can't be real deep there. Must be solid ground underneath.' Before Killifer could object he added, 'And if there's boulders big enough to give us trouble, they'd probably be poking up above the surface of the ice.'

 

'Probably,' Killifer muttered.

 

'I don't see any other way,' said Deems. 'Do you?'

 

Killifer stared at the polished visor of Deems' helmet. He could only make out the vaguest outline of the face inside. For a scared rabbit, Killifer though, he's getting pretty gutsy.

 

'Otherwise we're just going to run out of propellant jerking around, looking for a flat spot that isn't here.'

 

Unaccustomed to bold ideas from Deems, Killifer grunted and mumbled, 'Maybe you're right.'

 

MOONBASE

 

It was unusual for a Clippership to land at Moonbase. Usually (the big commercial spaceliners went only as far as the space stations that hugged Earth in low orbits.

 

Greg watched the main display screen at the spaceport flight control center as the big, cone-shaped Maxwell Hunter settled slowly, silently on its rocket exhaust. More than a dozen others had crowded into the flight control center, too. Like a cruise liner landing in some out-of-the-way port, Greg thought. The natives go down to the dock to watch.

 

A flexible access tube wormed its way to the Clipper's main airlock while the ship stood on the blast-scarred landing pad, gleaming in the sunlight. Greg knew that the Clipper carried Professor Wilhelm Zimmerman and four of his top aides. Kris Cardenas was on her way to Moonbase, also. And Mom. It's going to be a busy few hours here, he said to himself.

 

Greg was shocked when Wilhelm Zimmerman pushed through the airlock hatch at the underground receiving area. He was grossly fat, almost as wide across his soft sagging middle as he was tall. Bald, jowly, wearing a gray three-piece business suit with the unbuttoned jacket flapping ludicrously, the first thing he did upon setting foot on the underground chamber's rock floor was to reach into his jacket pocket and pull out a long, black, evil-looking cigar.

 

'You can't smoke in here!' Greg shouted, lunging toward him.

 

Zimmerman scowled from beneath bushy gray eyebrows. 'So? Then where?'

 

'Nowhere in Moonbase. Snicking is strictly prohibited. For safety reasons.'

 

'Nonsense!' Zimmerman snapped. 'Like the laws in Switzerland. Pure nonsense.' He fished in his side pocket and pulled out a gold lighter.

 

Greg gently took the lighter from him. "This is a totally artificial environment,' he said. 'Smoking is not allowed.'

 

Zimmerman's scowl deepened. 'You drag me up here to this . . . this . . . cavern, you ask me to perform a miracle for you, and you deny me my only vice?' His English was heavily accented but understandable.

 

'I'm afraid so, Professor.'

 

'Professor Doctor!'

 

'No smoking,' Greg said somberly, 'no matter how many titles you have.'

 

Zimmerman looked as if he wanted to turn around and go back to the spacecraft that had brought him. But then he broke into a fleshy grin.

 

'Very well,' he said, suddenly amiable. 'Since I have no choice, I will refrain from smoking. But you can't stop me from chewing!' And he clamped his teeth on the fat black cigar.

 

Greg raised his eyes to the rock ceiling. 'Come this way, please,' he said softly, pointing to the tractor that was waiting to take them to Moonbase proper. 'And be careful-'

 

He realized that Zimmerman was walking perfectly well alongside him. Looking down, Greg saw that Zimmerman's feet were already shod in weighted lunar boots.

 

His grin turning triumphant, Zimmerman said grandly, 'I am not a complete . . . how do you say it, tenderfeet?'

 

'Where did you get them?' Greg asked. 'I didn't know they were available on Earth.'

 

'Mrs. Scavenger had them aboard the ship that took me here. My abductor is very kind to me.'

 

'Abductor?' Greg asked as he helped the obese old man up into the tractor.

 

'You think I would come to this bunker of my own volition? I have been kidnapped, young man, by a powerful, vicious woman.'

 

Greg gave him a wintry smile. 'My mother,' he said as he climbed into the driver's seat

 

'So?' Zimmerman looked briefly surprised. 'But your name is not hers.'

 

His smile disappeared. 'She remarried after my father . . . died.'

 

'Ah.' Zimmerman nodded, making his jowls jiggle. As Greg put the tractor in gear and started down the long tunnel, he asked, 'You have prepared the tissue samples for which I asked?'

 

'The medics will have them for you by the time we get to the infirmary.'

 

'And blood - whole plasma, hemoglobin, this you have available?'

 

Greg shook his head. 'The blood bank here is very small. We're lining up volunteer donors who have the proper ' blood type.'

 

'We will probably have to replace his entire blood supply.'

 

"Then we'll need more brought up from Earth,' Greg said. 'In the meantime, you can examine him and get started on your procedures.'

 

Zimmerman grunted. 'I will have time to wash my hands, perhaps?'

 

'It's my half-brother who's dying, Professor Doctor. We've got to act quickly.'

 

'Ah,' the old man said again. 'Very well. The tissue samples are needed so that we can imitate them on the surface of the nanomachines. Otherwise what is still functioning of his body's immune system will attack the machines when they are injected into his blood stream.'

 

'I see.'

 

'You don't want his damaged immune system attacking the machines that are trying to save him.'

 

'I understand.'

 

'Blood transfusions immediately. By the time my associates have analyzed the tissue samples the transfusions must be complete. Then we inject the nanomachines.'

 

'I see,' said Greg.

 

Zimmerman lapsed into'silence, folding his hands over his ample belly and letting his-many chins sag to his chest. He seemed asleep. Mom must've had him yanked out of his bed, Greg thought. She probably would've really kidnapped him if he hadn't agreed to come up here. She's frantic over Doug. Would she be just as frantic, just as determined, if it was me in the infirmary, dying?

 

'Contact light,' Deems said, his voice quavering slightly.

 

'Okay,' said Killifer. 'We're down.' He was perspiring; cold sweat made his palms slippery, stung his eyes.

 

They had landed at the edge of the ice field, as Deems had suggested. The ice partially melted beneath the blast of their rocket exhaust and the Jobber's landing feet sank into a mushy cold swamp. For an instant both men had felt their vehicle; sinking, then it hit solid rock and came to a halt, tilted slightly ' but safely down.

 

Killifer reached into his thigh pouch for a reusable sponge-like sheet of plastic to wipe his face. He saw that Deems was doing the same. Scared shitless, Killifer thought.

 

'Okay,' he said, after taking a breath. 'Check suits. Prepare for surface excursion.'

 

'I don't see their lights,' Deems said.

 

"They're over the horizon, about four klicks out on the ice.'

 

'We both going out?'

 

'Damned right. We'll hook a tether to the winch.'

 

Deems said, 'All right,' without much enthusiasm.

 

Killifer stuffed his wiper back into the pouch on the thigh of his suit. Then he realized that the cermet hatch cover from Brennart's hopper was not in there. He groped in the other thigh pouch. Not there, either.

 

'What's the matter?' Deems asked.

 

'Nothing,' Killifer snapped. 'Let's get going.'

 

The astronomer. Stupid little gook put on my suit when she went up the mountain to get Stavenger. She's got it!

 

Panic surged through him. If she understands what it means- No, he told himself. She wouldn't How could she? It's just a hunk of cermet to her. I'll have to get it back from her, though.

 

'You okay?' Deems' voice sounded worried in his earphones.

 

'Yeah. Let's get moving.'

 

I'll have to get it back from her, Killifer told himself again. Because if she figures it out, I'm dead.

 

Zimmerman terrified the meager infirmary staff. Only one M.D., a very junior young woman, and three technicians who split their time between medical duties and elsewhere, the staff was meant to deal with injuries and minor illnesses. Big problems were sent Earthward, either to one of the space stations or to a hospital on the ground.

 

"Equipment, this is? Junk, this is!' Zimmerman bellowed when they showed him the infirmary. 'It is impossible to work with Tinkertoys! Impossible!'

 

None of the youngsters could please Zimmerman in the slightest. He bullied them, swore at them in German and English, told them what incompetent swine they were. He cursed their teachers, their progenitors, and predicted a dim future for the human race if such dummkopfs were allowed anywhere near the practice of medicine.

 

When Greg tried to intervene, Zimmerman turned on him. 'So? Now you are an expert, also? How can I work here? Where are my facilities that your blackmailing mother promised me? Where is the blood for transfusion? How can I perform miracles without the tools I need? Even Christ had some water when he wanted to make wine!'

 

'Willi, Willi, I could hear you out at the airlock.'

 

Greg turned and saw Kris Cardenas, bright and blonde and perky, striding into the narrow confines of the four-bed infirmary.

 

'Kristine, liebling, no one told me you were coming here!'

 

Zimmerman's demeanor changed as abruptly as the dawn transforms the dark lunar night.

 

'Willi, you mustn't let yourself get angry at these people,' Cardenas scolded cheerfully. "They're trying to help you.'

 

'Ach, with such help a' man could die. I'd rather have Hungarians on my side.'

 

'It's bad for your heart to get so worked up,' Cardenas said, smiling sweetly. She was wearing a light blue sweater and slightly darker knee-length skirt. If Greg didn't know better, he would have sworn she wasn't much older than thirty-five.

 

Zimmerman's fleshy face turned puckish. 'Ah, this will be like the old days, won't it? You were my best student,, always.'

 

'And you were always my favorite professor,' Cardenas returned the compliment.

 

With a shake of his head that made his jowls waddle, Zimmerman spread his stubby arms in a gesture of helplessness. 'But look around at this place! There is not the necessary equipment! There is not the trained staff! How can I--'

 

Cardenas silenced him by placing a fingertip gently on his lips. 'Willi, I'm here. I'll assist you.'

 

'You will?'

 

'And the four people you brought from your clinic.'

 

'Clinic?' The fat old man looked startled. 'I have no clinic! My research facility at the university is a laboratory, not a clinic.'

 

'Yes, I know,' Cardenas said. 'Forgive my error.'

 

His beaming smile returned. 'For you, liebling, no forgiving is necessary. Now let us get to work.'

 

MOONBASE

 

'Welcome to Moonbase, mother,' said Greg.

 

Joanna did not look haggard. Not quite. But the tension in her face was obvious. She's frightened, Greg realized. Frightened and frustrated because there's nothing more that she can do for Doug. Nothing but wait and hope that Zimmerman can perform a miracle.

 

'Take me to him, Greg,' she said, her voice strained. 'Please.'

 

She had changed into standard lunar coveralls on the trip up, Greg saw. White, the color code for medics, rather than management's sky blue, such as he wore. And she was already wearing weighted boots.

 

Without another word, Greg led her to the tractor and started down the tunnel toward the main part of the base. I'm getting to be a taxi driver, he grumbled to himself.

 

'How is he? Is he in pain?'

 

"They've wrapped him in cooling blankets to bring his body temperature down as far as they dare,' Greg reported. 'Zimmerman and his team are programming a set of nano-machines to repair the damage to his cells that's been done by the radiation.'

 

Joanna nodded tensely.

 

Glancing at her as they drove down the long tunnel, Greg added, 'They're giving him massive blood transfusions, but the damage is pretty extensive, I'm afraid.'

 

I'll give blood,' Joanna said immediately. 'You can, too.'

 

Greg turned away from her. 'I don't know if Zimmerman's bugs are going to be able to save him.'

 

'If he can't, no one can,' Joanna said.

 

'Careful!' yelped Yazaru Hara. 'His ribs are broken.'

 

'Got to get him out of the seat,' Killifer said, The unconscious Japanese was dead weight made extra heavy by his bulky armored spacesuit. Killifer grasped him under his arms while Hara, turned awkwardly in his seat, lifted his companion's legs so that the American could slide him out of the spacecraft cockpit

 

'How long's he been unconscious?' Killifer asked, panting with the effort.

 

'Many hours,' said Hara. 'He was still breathing, though, when you arrived.'

 

'Yeah.' Slowly Killifer pulled Inoguchi's inert form through the cockpit's emergency hatch and out onto the black ice.

 

Deems had rigged a makeshift stretcher out of honeycomb panels from the side of the Yamagata craft. Killifer lowered the spacesuited Japanese onto it. He heard a groan from the Jap.

 

'He's still alive!' Hara shouted.

 

'Yeah,' said Killifer, thinking, Great. Now we gotta carry this dead weight back over four klicks of ice. Lucky if we don't all wind up with busted bones.

 

'How much longer will it take?' Joanna demanded, nervously pacing up and down Jinny Anson's office.

 

Greg, sitting on the couch jury-rigged from scavenged spacecraft seats, shook his head. Zimmerman and his staff had been working for hours in Moonbase's nanolab. The grumpy old man hadn't even looked at Doug yet

 

'It takes time,' Kris Cardenas said. She was sitting behind Anson's desk. Anson herself had rushed down to the control center to pipe Doug's vidcam disk to The Hague, registering Masterson Corporation's claim to the Mt Wasser region. She had graciously turned over her entire suite to Joanna, saying she could stay in smaller quarters until her tour of duty was finished and she left for Earth. In truth, she wanted to keep as far away from Joanna as she could.

 

'But Doug doesn't have time,' Joanna said. 'He's dying!'

 

Cardenas got up from the desk chair. I'll get back to the lab and see if I can help speed things up.'

 

'Yes,' said Joanna. 'Good.'

 

The instant the door closed behind Cardenas, Greg got up from the couch, took his mother by the hand, and made her sit down where he had been. Then he sat beside her.

 

"There's no sense getting yourself sick over this,' he said. 'You should try to get some rest'

 

Joanna shook her head. 'How can I rest?'

 

'I could get something for you, to help you sleep.'

 

'No! I. . .' She stopped, as if confused, suddenly uncertain of what she wanted to say, wanted to do.

 

I'll let you know the instant something happens,' Greg promised.

 

'Don't you see!' Joanna blurted. 'It's my fault! All my fault! I should never have allowed him to go to Moonbase. I knew he was too young, too careless.' She broke into tears.

 

Greg put his arms around his mother and let her sob on his shoulder. 'It's not your fault; it isn't. And he wasn't careless. Nobody could have predicted the flare.'

 

'First the Moon killed Paul, now it's killed him. And it's my fault, all my fault.'

 

Coldly, Greg said, "The Moon didn't kill Paul Stavenger. We both know that.'

 

Joanna pulled slightly away from him. Her eyes were red, filled with tears. 'I was a terrible mother to you, Greg. What happened was my fault as much as anyone's.'

 

'Mom, that's all in the past. There's no sense dredging it up again.'

 

'But if only I had been-'

 

'Stop it,' Greg said sharply. I've spent years working my way through this. I don't want to hear any more about it.'

 

Joanna stared at him, but said nothing.

 

'It's not your fault. None of this is. What's happened has happened. Now all we can do is wait and see if Zimmerman can save him.'

 

But he was thinking, Would she cry over me? He tried to remember back to his own childhood, all those years, he could not recall his mother crying for him. Not once.

 

Joanna pulled herself together with a visible, shuddering effort. 'I can't stay here,' she said, jumping to her feet too hard in the unaccustomed lunar gravity.

 

Greg had to grab her, steady her. 'Be careful, Mom! You'll hurt yourself.'

 

'Take me to him,' Joanna said.

 

'Doug? He's in-'

 

'No. Zimmerman. I want to see him. I want to find out what he's doing.'

 

Zimmerman sat sweating on a rickety swivel chair that seemed much too fragile to support his weight He had draped an ancient lab smock over his gray suit; the coat had once been white but now, after so many years of wear and washings, it was beyond bleach.

 

Beads of perspiration on his lip and brow, he chewed anxiously on his black cigar, his fourth of the long, trying day. One of his assistants had thoughtfully converted a laboratory dish into an ashtray for him. It sat on the lab bench at his side, filled with the shredded and soggy remains of three earlier cigars.

 

On the other side of the clear plastiglass wall, his four assistants bent over lab benches. Their lab smocks looked very new, starched and pressed.

 

The airtight door of the nanotechnology laboratory sighed open and Kris Cardenas came through.

 

'How's it going?' she asked.

 

Zimmerman's bushy brows contracted into a worried frown. 'What takes weeks in Basel we are trying to do in hours here.'

 

'Is there anything I can do to help?'

 

'Turn up the air conditioning! Must I suffer like this?'

 

Cardenas shrugged. 'I think the temperature is centrally controlled.' To her the lab felt comfortably warm; perhaps a bit stuffy. She smiled and added, 'If you would lose some weight

 

'Camouflage,' Zimmerman said, slapping his belly.

 

'Camouflage?'

 

'Do you think the politicians and their spies suspect me of working on nanotherapies when I am so gross? Hah?'

 

Cardenas felt her jaw drop open. 'Is it that bad? Even in Switzerland?'

 

'I take no chances,' Zimmerman said.

 

'Do you need anything?' Cardenas asked.

 

Zimmerman's cheeks waddled slightly. 'No. The equipment here is surprisingly good. Not precisely what we require for medical work, but good enough, I think. We are adapting it.'

 

"They use nanomachines here quite a bit.'

 

'But not for medical purposes.'

 

'No, I think not.'

 

'How is the patient?' Zimmerman asked.

 

Cardenas shrugged. 'last time I checked he was fairly stable. Sinking slowly, but they've lowered his metabolic rate as far as they can.'

 

'Hmm.'

 

The airtight door slid open again and Joanna Masterson strode through, followed by Greg.

 

Zimmerman scowled. "This laboratory is in use. Find yourselves-'

 

'This is Joanna Masterson,' Cardenas said quickly.

 

Pushing himself up from the creaking little chair, Zimmerman clicked his heels and bowed slightly. 'My abductress. The woman who has blackmailed me.'

 

Joanna ignored his jibe. She looked at the rumpled obese old man, noting that he was several inches shorter than she.

 

'How soon will you be ready?' she asked.

 

'As soon as we can,' Zimmerman said.

 

'Please don't play games and don't patronize me. My son is dying. How soon can you begin to help him?'

 

Zimmerman's tone changed. 'It's a matter of programming. We are moving ahead as quickly as we can.'

 

'Programming,' Joanna echoed.

 

Waving a pudgy hand, Zimmerman explained, 'We are adapting our little machines to seek out damaged cells and repair them. They will remove damaged material, molecule by molecule, and repair the cells with fresh material, molecule by molecule.'

 

Joanna nodded. Greg, standing slightly behind her, folded his arms across his eftest.

 

"The problem is that your son has sustained massive damage. His case is very different from merely getting rid of accumulated fat cells or breaking down plaque along blood vessels.'

 

'Can you do it?' Joanna asked.

 

'We will do it, Madam,' said Zimmerman. 'Whether we will be able to do it in time, before he is too far gone even for the nanomachines to help him, remains questionable.'

 

'Is there anything else that you need? Any other assistants?'

 

'Nothing and no one that could be brought here in time.'

 

Greg asked, 'How much of a chance does he have? I mean-'

 

'If I had even one single week this would be no problem.'

 

'But we've only got a few hours.'

 

Zimmerman sighed hugely. 'Yah. This I know.'

 

Killifer clumped wearily to the comm cubicle of the buried shelter, still in his spacesuit, minus only the helmet. The young woman at the communications console rose to her feet

 

'You did a fine job out there,' she said, eyes gleaming. 'You saved two lives.'

 

With a crooked grin, Killifer said, 'I saved the corporation from any competition to their claim, that's what I saved.'

 

The young woman smiled knowingly. 'You're just being modest.'

 

Killifer shook his head and took the emptied chair, thinking, Hey, now I'm a friggin' hero. I'll have to look her up when we get back to the base. Might be worth some sack time.

 

'Moonbase says the Yamagata craft has shifted its trajectory and asked for permission to land here and pick up their men.'

 

'They're welcome to 'em. I hope they brought medics. One of them's in a bad way. Busted ribs.'

 

As he spoke, Killifer opened the channel to Moonbase. Jinny Anson's face appeared on his screen, surprising him.

 

'I'm living in the control center until things settle down,' Anson told him. 'Mrs. Stavenger's come up here to be with her son.'

 

'She's there? At Moonbase?'

 

'Yep. She's going to be pretty damned thankful to you for getting him down off the mountain, I betcha.'

 

Like I had any choice, Killifer thought.

 

'And for getting those two stranded Japanese guys. Yamagata's people have been falling all over themselves thanking us.'

 

'Really?'

 

'That's their way of admitting that they messed up any claim they might have made. Heads are going to roll over at Nippon One, I betcha.'

 

Who gives a fuck? Killifer said to himself. Then he remembered, and a pang of sudden fear flared through him.

 

'How's the Stavenger kid?' he asked.

 

Anson shook her head. 'Not good. The Dragon Lady's brought a team of nano specialists up here, but I don't know if they can save him. He's pretty far gone.'

 

It took a conscious effort for Killifer to unclench his teeth. 'And the astronomer? Rhee? How's she doing?"

 

Anson looked mildly surprised. 'I don't know. She was hanging pretty close to Doug Stavenger but she ought to be back at her job by now.'

 

Killifer nodded. I'll have to track her down when we get back to the base.

 

'I'm going to start breaking the camp here, soon as the Yamagata ship lands and picks up their guys.'

 

'Right,' said Anson. "The expedition didn't go the way we planned, but at least we've got a valid claim to the territory. Next time we go back, you'll be in charge.'

 

Killifer made himself grin. 'Yeah? That's great.' But he knew that his newfound status as a hero and leader could be destroyed by a single small square of cermet. I've gotta get it away from her, he told himself. Got to.

 

INFIRMARY

 

"That's it?' Joanna whispered harshly. 'All these hours have been spent to make something that doesn't even fill a single hypodermic?'

 

Standing beside her, Kris Cardenas nodded without taking her eyes off Zimmerman's bulky lab-coated form, bending over Doug's infirmary bed.

 

"That's all he'll need,' she whispered back, 'if it works right.'

 

Doug lay unconscious, his face pallid as death, covered to his chin in cooling blankets. Another hypothermia wrap was wound around his head. Like the undergarment of a spacesuit, the pale blue blankets were honeycombed with fine plastic tubes that carried refrigerated water to keep Doug's body temperature as low as possible. Intravenous lines fed into his arms and an oxygen tube was fixed to his nostrils.

 

Joanna couldn't tell if her son was breathing or not. The monitoring instruments above the bed showed his life signs: their ragged electronic lines looked dangerously low to her. She glanced at Greg, standing on her other side. He stared grimly through the plastiglass window that separated them from the infirmary bed.

 

'Shouldn't we have a medical team to stay with him? I could bring-'

 

Cardenas silenced her by placing a hand on Joanna's shoulder. 'Zimmerman's an M.D. as well as a Ph.D. And two of his aides are also physicians.'

 

Zimmerman straightened up. For a moment he gazed down at the unconscious patient, then he turned and went to the door.

 

Stepping into the observation cubicle where the others waited, he dropped the syringe into the waste recycling can.

 

'It is done,' he said, his voice loud enough to startle Joanna. 'Now we wait.'

 

'And rest,' Cardenas said. 'You look like you could use a nice nap, Willi.'

 

In truth, his fleshy face looked ravaged.

 

Greg spoke up, 'We should all get some sleep.' Turning to Zimmerman, he asked, 'How long before we see some results?'

 

The old man blinked his pouchy eyes. 'Twelve hours. Maybe more. Maybe a little less.'

 

'Nothing's going to happen for eight to ten hours, at least,' Cardenas said briskly. 'So let's all get a decent sleep.'

 

Greg agreed. I'll get the people on duty to call if there's any change in his condition.'

 

Joanna said, 'I can sleep here, on the chair.'

 

'No,' Greg said firmly, taking her by the arm. 'You sleep in your quarters, on a bunk. Doctor's orders.'

 

Reluctantly, Joanna allowed her elder son to lead her out of the observation room and toward the suite that Anson had vacated for her. She almost felt grateful to Greg for his forceful tenderness.

 

Small as viruses, millions upon millions of nanomachines flowed through Doug's blood stream like an army of repair personnel eager to get to work. Blind, deaf, without the intelligence of an amoeba, they were tuned to the chemical signatures that cells emit In their world of the ultrasmall, where a bacterium is as gigantic and complex as a shopping mall, they were guided by the shapes of the molecules swarming around them.

 

Built to seek out specific types of molecules, they quickly spread through the enormous labyrinthine ways of Doug's failing body. With receptors barely a thousand atoms long they touched and tested every molecule they came in contact with. Hardly any of them were of interest to the nanomachines; they merely touched, found that the molecule did not fit precisely into their receptor jaws, and left the molecule behind. Like a lock seeking its proper key, each nanomachine blindly searched the teeming liquid world within Doug's wasting body.

 

When they did find a molecule that nested properly in their receptors, they clamped onto it and tore it apart into its individual atoms: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and the rarer metals and minerals. Then other nanomachines seized the freed atoms and combined them into new molecules, new nutrients for the cells that were damaged and dying.

 

Deep into the cells they penetrated, into the nucleus where the huge double spiral DNA molecules worked as templates for building vital proteins. Here was where the most crucial damage had been done. The links between the two intertwining spirals, the base pairs that were the genes themselves, had been heavily damaged by the ionizing radiation. Where the nanomachines saw a break in this vital linkage, where base pairs had been broken or mismatched, the nanomachines rebuilt the bases and linked them correctly. Like vastly complex three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles, the DNA molecules were put together properly by the busily hurrying nanomachines, much as Doug's own natural enzymes were valiantly trying to do. Together, the polymerases and the nanomachines worked frantically to repair the massive DNA molecules.

 

They worked with blinding speed, although time meant nothing to them. In this nanometer universe a thousandth of a second stretched like years and decades. In microseconds they repaired damaged cells and then flowed onward, seeking, testing, destroying damaged areas, rebuilding molecules for the growth of healthy new cells. DNA repair was more intricate, more demanding. It took whole tenths of seconds to repair a damaged DNA molecule. Millions of cells and DNA molecules were repaired each minute. But there were so many billions more to reach.

 

Killifer was not accustomed to being a hero. He was surprised to see that Jinny Anson and more than a dozen others were waiting for him at The Pit when he led his weary team out of their Jobbers. Anson pounded him on the back and insisted on taking him to The Cave for a drink. She even provided the booze.

 

'You did damned fine out there,' Anson said, leaning back in her chair, grinning across the table at Killifer.

 

Unshaven, grimy, Killifer relished the glow of the rocket juice that laced his coffee. And the glow of her approval.

 

'Yep,' Anson said, 'now I can turn over the job to Greg Masterson and leave on schedule and get myself married.'

 

Shocked, Killifer blurted, 'Married?'

 

"The Dragon Lady wanted me to stay on until the expedition got back. So now you're back and I can head for San Antone with a clear conscience.'

 

I'll be damned,' Killifer said.

 

Anson's expression sobered. 'Shame about Brennart, though.'

 

'Yeah.'

 

'What went wrong with his hopper, do you think? Why'd it die out there?'

 

Shifting nervously in his chair, Killifer said, 'Radiation must've knocked out the electrical system. Something like ithat.'

 

'Somebody'll have to check it out when you go back there,' said Anson.

 

'Yeah. Right'

 

'But we've got the polar region, that's what's really important.'

 

'How's the Stavenger kid?'

 

She shrugged. 'They're working on him.'

 

'Is he gonna pull through?'

 

With a shake of her head, Anson replied, 'Damned if I know. They've dragooned some high-priced talent here to try nanotherapy on him, but nobody knows if it'll work.'

 

Killifer was silent for a moment 'And, uh, the astronomer...' Don't look too anxious, he warned himself. 'What's her name?'

 

'The Korean? Rhee. Bianca Rhee.'

 

'Yeah. How's she doing?'

 

'Okay, I guess, Why're you so interested in her?'

 

I'm not,' he said quickly. 'Just - she flew out with Stavenger, I wanted to make sure she's okay.'

 

'She's probably on duty right now. Check the astronomy dome if you want to see her.'

 

'Yeah,' Killifer said. 'Maybe I will. After I clean up some.'

 

Anson grinned lopsidedly. 'Do I detect a romance?'

 

'Naw,' Killifer said. Then wished he hadn't.

 

It made no difference. Anson, her mind turning toward her own marriage, said, 'Don't be coy, Jack. You're a hero now. You can have your pick of the love-starved women of Moonbase, I betcha.'

 

Killifer grinned at the idea. Yeah, he told himself. I'm a big friggin' hero. As long as nobody finds out what I did to Brennart and Doug Stavenger.

 

She wasn't at the astronomy dome. The place was empty. Nothing there except a half dozen display screens and a computer humming to itself.

 

Killifer slipped into the empty chair and used the computer to find where Rhee's quarters were. He phoned; no answer.

 

Maybe I can duck in there, he thought, and find the cement cover. Then when we go back to Mt. Wasser I can stick it back onto the hopper and nobody'll ever know what happened.

 

He headed for Rhee's quarters.

 

Bianca Rhee was at the infirmary, staring through the observation room's window at Doug's inert form, still swathed in the light blue cooling blankets. The medic on duty told her that Doug wasn't expected to come out of his hypothermic coma for days. But with oriental patience, Rhee sat as immobile as he was and watched over him.

 

The accordion-fold door was locked but Killifer got past it easily enough, using his plastic ID card to spring the bolt. Rhee's one room looked as neat as a real-estate model. Everything in place. Bed, desk, bureau: standard issue, same as every other apartment in Moonbase. The only signs of individuality were a set of framed photographs on the bureau, family from the looks of mem, and a delicate small lacquered vase with an imitation flower in it

 

Killifer went swiftly through the desk drawers. It wasn't there. Then the bureau. Nothing but clothes. And a pair of toe shoes, for god's sake, beat up as hell and just as smelly. The closet Not there either.

 

He stood for an agonized moment in the middle of the room, so small that he could almost touch its opposing walls by stretching out his arms. It's got to be in here someplace, he told himself. Where? He checked under her sink. Nothing.

 

Where the hell is it? She can't be carrying it around with her. Can she?

 

Then he saw it. So obvious that he knew she wasn't trying to hide it. She was using it as a base, beneath the flower vase. Its gold plating complimented the deep burgundy of the vase nicely. Killifer felt his pent-up breath ease out of him. Feeling enormously relieved, he slipped the cover out from under the vase and tucked it into the back pocket of his coveralls. : Cautiously, he cracked the apartment door open. Two people were coming down the tunnel, talking earnestly. Killifer let them pass, then eased himself out behind them, closed the door and heard its lock click, then walked swiftly in the other direction.

 

With the cermet cover in his pocket

 

'It's been almost twelve hours,' Joanna said to Zimmerman. 'Shouldn't we see some change? Some improvement?'

 

She and Greg, the Swiss scientist and Cardenas were in the infirmary's observation room again. A young oriental woman had been sitting there when Joanna entered, but she got up and left so swiftly that Joanna didn't even get the chance to ask her who she was. She was wearing the pumpkin orange coveralls of the scientific staff; maybe she was working for Zimmerman, Joanna thought

 

'There is improvement' Zimmerman said, pointing a stubby finger at the monitors above Doug's bed. 'Look at his vital signs. Heartbeat is stronger. Blood pressure is almost normal. Kidney function is returning.

 

'But he hasn't moved,' Greg said, peering through the window.

 

'That's to be expected,' Cardenas said softly. 'He's using all his energy internally.'

 

'I believe,' Zimmerman said, pulling out another long black cigar, 'that it will be possible to remove the hypothermic blankets in another two hours.' He chomped on the cigar with relish. "Three, at most.'

 

'And then?' Joanna asked.

 

With a sloppy shrug, Zimmerman said, 'And then, sooner or later he will wake up and ask for food. He will be very hungry. Very!'

 

'He'll be cured?'

 

'If that's the word you want to use, yes. He will begin to function normally again.' Zimmerman grinned around his cigar.

 

Joanna looked from his florid, fleshy face through the window at her son. Doug will be cured! This nightmare will be over. Even Greg looked pleased, she thought.

 

'He'll be all right,' Cardenas said to her. "The nanomachines are working inside him.'

 

For an instant Joanna wanted to throw her arms around Zimmerman and kiss him. But she controlled herself and the moment passed. As calmly as she could, she said to him, 'Dr. Zimmerman, I want to find some way to repay you. What can I do?'

 

'Let me go home,' he snapped.

 

Laughing, Joanna said, 'Of course. Of course. As soon as Doug regains consciousness - although I suppose you'll want to see him after he's on his feet again.'

 

'Yes, yes. You have virtual reality equipment here. I can examine him using VR.'

 

'But won't you want to see him in person?' Joanna asked. 'In the flesh?'

 

Zimmerman shook his head violently, making his cheeks waddle. 'I am not coming back to this cavern! Never!'

 

'All right. Doug can see you in Basel, then.'

 

'That will be impossible, I fear.'

 

'Why not?'

 

'A young man who is carrying millions of self-replicating nanomachines in his body would not be a welcome person on Earth. I doubt that he would be able to get past your own customs and immigration inspectors.'

 

Feeling confused, Joanna sat down on the couch facing the observation window. 'I don't understand.'

 

Cardenas sat next to her. Zimmerman remained standing. Greg was staring at him now.

 

'Your son is carrying nanomachines,' Zimmerman said. 'He would not be permitted to land on Earth. Every nation has laws against nanomachines in the human body. They are all afraid of nanomonsters.'

 

'But the bugs will flush out of his system once they've finished their work,' Joanna said, then added, 'Won't they?'

 

Zimmerman would not meet her eye.

 

Joanna turned to Cardenas. 'What's he talking about?'

 

With a careful sigh, Cardenas said, 'You know about the laws against injecting nanomachines into human patients, don't you?'

 

'Oh, that stupid stuff.'

 

'It's stupid, all right, but it's still the law. If Doug still has any trace of nanomachines in his system, he'll be stopped by the immigration inspectors at any rocket port on Earth. They're terrified of nanobugs running amok and killing people.'

 

'But-'

 

'May I point out,' Zimmerman interjected, 'that perhaps these laws are not so stupid after all. How many military establishments have supported research into nanoweapons? Nanotechnology could make biological warfare look like child's games.'

 

'But there are laws against military applications of nanotechnology,' Greg objected. 'International treaties.'

 

'Yes, of course. Those are precisely the laws that do not allow nanomachines to be injected into human patients.'

 

'But Doug isn't going to hurt anybody!' Joanna said.

 

''Still, he will be carrying these self-replicating nano-machines for as long as he lives.'

 

'What?' Startled, Joanna snapped, 'You didn't tell me that-' „'

 

'That,' said Zimmerman, bending to put his cigar-clenched face close to hers, 'is the payment I extract from you.'

 

'Payment? What are you talking about?'

 

'Your son is my living laboratory, Madam; my lifetime experiment. He carries self-replicating nanotnachines within his body. Forever.'

 

'What have you done?' Joanna cried.

 

'I have given your son a great gift, Madam,' Zimmerman replied.

 

Before Joanna could say anything, Cardenas said, 'You've enhanced his immune system.'

 

Zimmerman took the soggy cigar from his mouth. 'Yah, but there is more to it than that.'

 

'What?' Joanna demanded.

 

Almost smirking, Zimmerman said, 'Frankly, I do not know. No one can know. We have no experience with self-replicating nanomachines in the human body.'

 

'You've turned my son into-'

 

'An experiment. A living laboratory,' Zimmerman said. 'A step toward the perfection of nanotherapy.'

 

Before Joanna could reply, Cardenas said, 'It's a great gift, really! His immune system is now so enhanced he'll probably never even catch a cold anymore.'

 

Zimmerman nodded. 'Perhaps. The machines should be able to adapt to destroy microbes and viruses that invade his body.'

 

'But you don't know for certain what they'll do,' Greg said, his voice hollow.

 

'They should also repair effects of aging and any injuries he might incur,' Zimmerman added, still speaking to Joanna. 'Your son will most likely live a long, long time, Frau Stavenger.'

 

Greg muttered something too low for Joanna to hear.

 

'But mat doesn't mean he can't return to Earth,' Joanna said.

 

'Yes it does,' said Cardenas. "They'll never let him off the rocket.'

 

"They don't have to know.'

 

'They already know,' Zimmerman said. 'I have informed my colleagues and by now the authorities know.'

 

'You informed... why?' Joanna wanted to scream, yet her voice was barely a whisper.

 

'I have my own fish to fry, Madam. My own agenda. Your son will be a living advertisement that nanotherapy is not dangerous and not undesirable. I will see to it that his case is broadcast all over the world. Some day, sooner or later, he will jecome the cause celebre that will lead these ignorant politicians and witch doctors to lift their ban on nanotherapy.'

 

Feeling fury rising within her, Joanna said, 'I don't want a cause celebre. I want a normal, healthy son!'

 

'Healthy, he will be,' said Zimmerman. 'Normal, never.'

 

Trying to cool her down, Cardenas said, "Think of it, Joanna. He'll never get ill. He might never even get old! And if he's ever injured, the nanomachines will repair him.'

 

Joanna thought of it. And turned to Greg, who stood mute and deathly pale, staring through the observation window at his half brother.

 

Slowly Doug woke from a long, deep dream. He had been swimming with dolphins the way he'd done when he was a kid visiting Hawaii except that the water was cold, numbingly cold and so dark that he could only sense the dolphins swimming alongside him, big powerful sleek bodies gliding effortlessly through the cold black waters. Don't leave me behind, he called to them, but somehow he was on the Moon and it was Brennart standing beside him whispering something, the secrets of the universe maybe, but Doug could not hear the man's words.

 

And then his eyes opened.

 

He saw that he was in some kind of hospital room. Moonbase. The infirmary. Low rock ceiling painted a cheerful butter yellow. A wide mirror took up almost the whole wall on one side of his bed. He could hear the humming and beeping of electronic monitors over his head.

 

The door opened and Bianca Rhee stepped through.

 

'You're awake!' she said looking happy and surprised and awed and curious, all at once.

 

Doug grinned at her. 'I guess I am.'

 

'How do you feel?'

 

'Hungry!'

 

Bianca's smile threatened to split her face in two. Before she could say another word, a medic in crisp white coveralls pushed through the door angrily.

 

'What're you doing in here?' he demanded of Rhee. 'No one's allowed in here without-'

 

'Shut up!' Doug snapped. 'She's my friend.'

 

The man glared at Doug. 'No one is allowed inside this cubicle without specific permission from the resident M.D., friend or not.'

 

Over the next ten minutes, Doug learned how wrong the young medic was. Rhee dutifully left his cubicle, but his mother, Greg, and several strangers poured in, including a funny-looking fat older man with an unlit cigar clamped ludicrously in his teeth.

 

His mother fell on his neck, crying for the first time he could remember. Greg smiled stiffly. The others stared at the monitors while they checked his pulse, thumped his chest, and performed other ancient medical rituals.

 

'How do you feel?' everyone seemed to ask.

 

'Hungry,' Doug kept repeating. But no one brought him anything to eat.

 

Gradually he began to piece it together from the babbling of their chatter. Nanotherapy. He was alive and well. And would be for a long time to come. It was a lot to take in over a few minutes. It seemed to Doug as if just a few minutes ago he was dying from radiation poisoning. Now they were telling him he would live forever, just about

 

'Could I just have something to eat?' he shouted over their voices.

 

Everyone stopped and stared at him.

 

'I'm starving,' Doug said.

 

'You see?' said the old fat guy. 'Just as I told you!'

 

INFIRMARY

 

Bianca Rhee came back, shyly, almost tiptoeing into Doug's cubicle after everyone else had left. He had eaten a full dinner, napped a short while, then asked for another dinner. Its remnant crumbs were all that was left on the food tray when Rhee entered and smiled happily at him.

 

'How do you feel?' she asked, sitting on the edge of his bed because there was no chair in his cubicle.

 

'Fine,' said Doug with a big grin. 'I feel as if I could run up to the top of Mt. Wasser in my bare feet!' "The nanotherapy is really working.'

 

'I guess it is.'

 

'Do you feel - different?'

 

Doug thought about it for a moment. 'No,' he answered. 'Not different, exactly. Just - a little tired, but good, just the same. Like I've just won my fifth gold medal in the Olympics.'

 

"That's wonderful,' she said.

 

'What about you?' Doug asked. 'Have you been checked over? Are you okay?'

 

She shrugged. 'We all took more of a radiation dose than we should have, but I'm okay. No obvious medical problems.'

 

'Obvious?'

 

'Oh, I might have a two-headed baby someday.' She tried to laugh.

 

'And your chances of getting cancer?' Doug asked.

 

'A few percent higher.'

 

'Oh.'

 

'But that won't happen until I'm old and gray,' she said.

 

'Besides, there's no history of cancer in my family.'

 

'That's good,' Doug said, but he thought, There will be now, most likely.

 

Then he noticed that her coveralls were sweat-stained, and there was a fine sheen of perspiration on her forehead.

 

'Are you sure you're okay?' he asked. 'You're perspiring.'

 

'Oh.' Rhee looked more embarrassed than worried. 'I - I was exercising a little.'

 

'Exercising?'

 

She nodded, keeping her lips clamped tight This isn't the time to tell him I practice dancing, she decided. He's a nice, guy, but he'd laugh. The fat little gook in ballet slippers, pretending she's a ballerina in the low gravity of the Moon. Anyone would laugh.

 

So they talked about the expedition, about Brennart and what heroism was all about. Doug told Bianca that Brennart was already dying of cancer and had nothing much to lose by his daring.

 

She shook her head. 'I still think it was a real bonkhead thing to do. Just because he wanted be a hero was no reason for you to take such a risk.'

 

'We would've been okay,' Doug insisted, 'if the hopper hadn't broken down.'

 

'Sure.'

 

'Well, anyway, I appreciate your coming out to get us. You saved my life.'

 

Bianca blushed. 'I didn't do much. The radiation was back to normal by then.'

 

'Still, you must've volunteered. Didn't you?'

 

'Well. .. yes, I guess I did.'

 

'And my vidcam,' Doug went on. 'You saved that, too, didn't you? The corporation owes you a lot'

 

Her expression changed. 'I didn't do it for the corporation,' Bianca said, so low mat Doug could barely hear her.

 

'Still,' he said, 'you're as much a hero as anybody.'

 

She shook her head. 'Not really.'

 

Doug sensed that something had gone slightly off track.

 

Bianca had been smiling and friendly up to a moment ago, but now she seemed to be almost sad, almost - disappointed.

 

'Tell me all about it,' he said. 'Tell me exactly what happened.'

 

'It was all in a rush, you know,' she said, still looking unhappy, almost bitter. 'Kind of confused. Killifer was pretty nervous, really wired tight. He got pissed off because I grabbed his suit by mistake.'

 

Doug listened as she haltingly told him what they were doing while he and Brennart were stuck underneath the hopper on the mountaintop.

 

'. . . and when you started mumbling about the Yamagata people, he didn't want to believe you.'

 

'Killifer?'

 

'Right. He didn't like the idea of going out again to find them. He didn't like it all'

 

Doug let out a sigh. 'I guess I don't blame him.'

 

Rhee's face contracted into a puzzled frown. 'And there was something semi-weird, too.'

 

'Semi-weird?' Doug grinned at her.

 

'When I got your vidcam, there was another piece of something ... a flat oblong hunk of ceramic or metal. I don't think it's part of the vidcam. It was all white on one side and gold on the other.'

 

'Doesn't sound like anything from the vidcam.'

 

'No. Besides, the vidcam looked intact to me. Maybe it was something Killifer had on him. I was in his suit, remember. Maybe he already had it in his pocket.'

 

Curious, Doug asked, 'How big was it?'

 

She shaped it with her hands. 'Oh, just about fifteen centimeters long, I think. Maybe half that wide.'

 

'White on one side and gold on the other?'

 

'I took it along with your vidcam, and then left it in my quarters,' Rhee said, looking even more puzzled. 'But it's disappeared.'

 

'Disappeared?' Doug sat up straighten

 

'It was on my bureau yesterday, but now it's gone.'

 

'Are you sure-'

 

'Of course I'm sure!" she snapped.

 

'I didn't mean it that way,'- he laid. 'Has anybody else been in your quarters?'

 

Rhee shook her head. But before she could say anything, the door to Doug's cubicle slid back and Joanna stepped through. Even in ordinary blue coveralls she radiated power and decision. Zimmerman waddled in behind her, still in his rumpled three-piece suit with the lab coat thrown over it.

 

Rhee hopped off the bed. 'I'm glad you feel so well, Doug,' she said. Impulsively, she darted forward and gave Doug a peck on the cheek, then rushed past Joanna and Zimmerman and left the room.

 

'Who's that?' Joanna demanded.

 

'The woman who saved my life,' said Doug.

 

Joanna frowned, while Zimmerman smiled bemusedly.

 

'Does that give her the right to kiss you?' Joanna asked sharply.

 

'Oh come on, Mom! It was just a friendly little smack.'

 

'You don't have to feel obligated to somebody for doing their job,' Joanna said.

 

Doug laughed lightly. 'Simmer down, Mom. She's just a friend. I hardly even know her, actually.'

 

Zimmerman eyed him thoughtfully. 'Perhaps the nano-machines enhance your sexual attractiveness, hah?'

 

Doug frowned at the old man. 'You must be Dr. Zimmerman, right?'

 

'Yah.' Zimmerman clicked his heels and bowed slightly, his paunch making it difficult to go farther.

 

'How soon can I get out of here?' Doug asked. 'I feel fine. Terrific, in fact'

 

Glancing at the monitors over Doug's bed, Zimmerman said, 'Another few hours. There are some tests I must do. Then you get out of bed and I leave this glorified cave and return to civilization.'

 

Joanna paced over to the other side of the bed. 'Do you really feel fine?'

 

'Like I said, terrific. Really.'

 

His mother looked across the bed at Zimmerman. Doug saw tears in her eyes. 'You've saved him.'

 

The sloppy old man shrugged, suddenly too embarrassed to say anything.

 

And Doug realized the enormity of what had happened to him. I would have died, he told himself. Under any normal circumstances I would be dead now.

 

He looked at Zimmerman with different eyes and saw a man of strength and vigor and the kind of passion that dares to challenge anyone, everyone who stands in the way between him and his life's work. Governments had outlawed nanotherapy. Ignorant mobs had burned nanolabs and killed researchers. But Zimmerman plugged doggedly ahead, despite all of that. Doug understood that even a fat old man can be heroic.

 

'You've given me life,' Doug said.

 

'No,' Zimmerman said, shaking his head slowly. 'Your mother gave you life. I have merely helped you to keep it. And perhaps prolong it.'

 

'If there's anything we can do,' Joanna said stiffly, 'you only have to name it.'

 

'I have already informed you of my price, Madam.'

 

Joanna's expression hardened. 'Yes, you have, haven't you?'

 

'What I have already gained will be payment enough. Plus transportation back to Basel, of course.'

 

'Of course,' said Joanna. She was positively glaring at the old man now.

 

Doug realized that their conversation, back and forth across his bed, dealt with things he didn't know about.

 

'What's the price?' he asked. 'What are you two talking about?'

 

Joanna tore her gaze from Zimmerman and looked down at her son: so young, so innocent and unknowing.

 

'She is referring, young man, to the fact that you will not be allowed to leave the Moon.'

 

'For how long?' Doug asked.

 

'Forever,' blurted Joanna.

 

'You are a walking nahomachine factory now,' said Zimmerman. 'No nation on Eartb will allow you entry.'

 

Doug turned from Zimmerman, who looked gravely concerned, to his mother, who looked angry and fearful and almost tearfully sad.

 

'Is that all?' he asked. 'I have to stay here on the Moon? That's what I wanted to do anyway.7

 

It was supposed to be Jinny Anson's going-away party. And it was supposed to be a surprise. But when Anson stepped into the darkened biolab, led by the hand by Lev Brudnoy, and they snapped on the lights and everybody yelled, 'Surprise!' Anson took it all in her stride.

 

'You are not surprised,' Brudnoy said, disappointed, as well-wishers pressed drinks into their hands.

 

Anson fixed him with a look. 'What kind of a base director would I be if I didn't know what you guys were plotting?'

 

'Ah,' said Brudnoy. 'Of course.'

 

She was surprised, though, when a dozen of the women started handing her wedding presents. Little things, made at Moonbase of lunar raw materials or cast-off equipment. A digital clock set to Universal Mean Time that told when lunar sunrise and sunset would be. A hotplate of cermet salvaged from a junked lander. A vial of lunar glass filled with regolith sand.

 

Halfway through the wedding gifts, Jack Killifer showed up and the party quickly centered around the new hero. Just as Anson had predicted, the women clustered around Jack, who had shaved and showered and put on a crisp new jumpsuit for the party.

 

Even as she continued to unwrap presents, Anson scanned the growing crowd for the astronomer, Rhee. No sign of her. Busted romance? she wondered. Or is the kid too shy to come to the party? She sneaks off every now and then. I thought she just wanted to be alone, but maybe she's already got a boyfriend tucked away someplace.

 

Not likely, Anson thought. Rhee's not much of a looker and she's too timid to go out and grab a guy for herself.

 

One of the lab benches had been turned into a bar. Anson wondered if the illicit still had been stashed in this lab all along; certainly they had all the right equipment for it, plumbing and glassware and enough chemical stores to plaster the whole base. The noise level climbed steadily: people talking at the top of their lungs, laughing, drinking. And then somebody turned on a music disk. The display screens along the walls all began to flash psychedelic colors and the lab quivered under the heavy thumping beat and sharp bleating whine of an adenoidal singer.

 

Couples paired off for dancing. Killifer seemed to be having the time of his life. Anson staggered away from the ear-splitting music, out into the tunnel where the party had spilled over.

 

Brudnoy was sitting on the floor with half a dozen others. Anson put her back to the wall and let herself slide down to a sitting position, careful not to spill a drop of her beaker of booze.

 

'You are not reigning at your own party?' Brudnoy asked. Even out here in the tunnel he had to half-shout to be heard over the music.

 

'Everybody's having a great time,' she said.

 

'Are you?'

 

'Sure.'

 

'Truly?'

 

'Yes, of course.'

 

Brudnoy looked at her with his sad, bleary eyes. 'I think you will miss us.'

 

'Of course I'll miss you.'

 

'Will your husband come up here with you? Brudnoy asked.

 

Anson shook her head. 'I'm not coming back, Lev. I told you that. I'm starting a new life.'

 

'In Texas.'

 

'Just outside of Austin, actually,' she said, straining her throat to get the words out over the party noise. 'In the hill country.'

 

'The land of enchantment, they say.'

 

'That's New Mexico.'

 

'Oh.'

 

'But the Texas hill country is beautiful. Air you can breathe. Mountains and valleys and land that goes on forever. Flowers! When the bluebonnets bloom it's gorgeous. And a blue sky with white clouds. Clean and wonderful.'

 

'Not like Moonbase.'

 

'Not at all like Moonbase.'

 

'And you really want to leave all this behind you?' Brudnoy made a sweep with his arm.

 

Anson knew he was kidding. Half kidding, at least. That sweep of his arm took in not merely this crowded underground warren of labs and workshops and cramped undersized living quarters. It took in the ancient ringwall mountains and the cracked crater floor, the vast tracts of Mare Nubium and the Ocean of Storms, the slow beauty of a lunar sunrise and the way the regolith sparkled when the sunshine first hits it, the sheer breathtaking wonder of standing on this airless world and planting your bootprints where no one had ever stood before, the excitement of building a new world, even that crazy mountain down at the south pole that's always in sunshine.

 

She pulled in a deep breath. 'Yes, I'm really going to leave all this behind me. I'll miss you guys, but I've made up my mind.'

 

Anson was surprised that she had to force the words past a good-sized lump in her throat.

 

Doug found that he could not lie idly waiting for the medics to start their tests. He asked for a computer and, once the technician on duty wheeled a laptop machine to his bed on a swing-arm table, he searched through the literature program for something to read.

 

Nothing appealed to him. In the back of his mind a question simmered, making him restless with pent-up curiosity. An oblong piece of ceramic or metal, about fifteen centimeters long and half as wide, gold on one side and white on the other.

 

There must be an inventory program, Doug told himself. He started searching the computer files for it

 

BIOLAB

 

The party was winding down. Jinny Anson had gone back inside the biolab, Lev Brudnoy at her side. Only about a dozen and a half people remained, most of them paired off into couples. The music had gone softly romantic, dancers held each other in their arms as they shuffled slowly across the cleared space behind tike lab benches.

 

As Anson tipped over the big cooler of fruit punch to get its last dregs into her plastic cup, Greg Masterson showed up at the door, looking somber as usual. Anson frowned inwardly. He's going to have to unwind if he expects to make it as director up here. Otherwise he's going to have a mutiny on his hands.

 

She giggled to herself. Captain Bligh, she thought. Who would be Fletcher Christian and lead the mutineers?

 

Brudnoy saw Greg, too, and made his way past the dancers and the lab benches toward him. Jinny followed the Russian, drink in hand, feeling a little annoyed. Greg's a wet blanket, he's going to rain on my parade, she thought, mixing metaphors in her slightly inebriated condition.

 

'Better late man never,' said the Russian, smiling.

 

Greg's face remained somber. 'Is my brother here?'

 

'Your brother?' Anson asked. 'I thought he was in the infirmary.'

 

'He was. He just disconnected all his monitors and walked out.'

 

Anson glanced at Brudnoy, who looked as puzzled as she felt. 'He hasn't shown up here.'

 

Greg's frown deepened. 'He's got to be someplace.'

 

'Want to call security?'

 

'No,' Greg said. 'I don't Want to get my mother upset. She's asleep, but-'

 

'We can search for him,' Brudnoy volunteered. 'After all, this place isn't so big that he can hide from us'

 

'Why would he want to hide?' Anson wondered.

 

'Where the hell is he?' Greg growled.

 

Doug was prowling the tunnel that led to Jack Killifer's quarters. He had put aside his search of the computer's inventory program when the medics came in to run their infernal tests. After they left, he booted up the program again and found what he'd been looking for.

 

The cermet piece that Bianca Rhee had described was a cover for a hopper's electronics bay. The electronics bay held, among other items, the electrical controls for the main engine's liquid oxygen pump.

 

Doug's mind had leaped from one point to the next. Remove the cover and the electronics systems are exposed directly to the radiation from the solar flare. Knock out the rocket engine's propellant pump and the engine can't ignite. A dead engine keeps the hopper on the mountaintop, where the radiation will build up to a lethal level in a couple of hours or less.

 

He killed Brennart! And he damned near killed me. Once Doug was convinced of that, he pulled off his monitor leads, bolted out of bed and ran out of the infirmary in nothing but his flapping pale blue hospital gown.

 

Killifer kept the cover in his spacesuit pocket, Doug reasoned as he trotted down the nearly-empty tunnel. It was past midnight, the lighting was turned down to its late-night level. Still, the few people he passed in the tunnel stared at Doug in his loose gown and bare feet.

 

Bianca found the piece and thought it might have something to do with my vidcam. She kept it in her quarters and Killifer went in there and took it back. Good thing she wasn't there when he broke in; he might have killed her, too.

 

There it is. Doug saw J. KILLIFER stencilled on the name card beside the accordion-pleat door. He banged on the door frame and called Killifer's name. No answer. Either he's sound

 

asleep or he's not in. Doug pulled on the door handle. Locked. He braced one bare foot on the door jamb and pulled hard. The flimsy catch gave way and the door jerked open, nearly toppling him.

 

Doug padded into Killifer's quarters. Empty. The bunk was a mess, hadn't been made in days, from the looks of it. The place smelled of unwashed clothes and sweat. Doug closed the door as far as it would go. He's got to come back here sooner or later. I'll wait

 

He didn't want to sit on the grubby tangle of the bed. There was a slim molded plastic chair at the room's desk. When Doug sat on it he realized that his hospital gown left a lot to be desired. The chair felt cold and sticky on his partly-bare rump.

 

He jumped up and went to Killifer's closet. Two clean pairs of olive green coveralls hung limply there, but once Doug held them up against his own frame he realized how small Killifer really was. No wonder Bianca took his spacesuit by mistake; he's not much bigger than she is.

 

So he waited for Killifer in his loose hospital gown, pacing up and down the tiny room in four strides. Suddenly an idea struck him. The cermet cover must be here someplace, hidden in this room. Doug started to search through the drawers of Killifer's desk.

 

It was the best night Jack Killifer had ever had on the Moon. There's something to this hero business, after all, he laughed to himself as he headed back toward his quarters, weaving slightly along the tunnel.

 

The patty had been great fun, and just like Jinny had said, there were several women falling all over him. He danced with them all, then picked the one who had snuggled the closest and walked her back to her quarters. Sure enough, she made no objection when he stepped into her place with her and as soon as he slid the door shut she was unzipping her jumpsuit for him.

 

When he left her quarters, Killifer thought briefly about heading back to the party, see who's still there, maybe go for a double-header. But as tie started along the tunnel to the biolab he ran into Jinny and Lev and Greg Masterson.

 

'Have you seen Doug Stavenger?' Jinny asked him, very serious and concerned.

 

'Little Douggie?' Killifer wanted to laugh but held it in. 'He's in the infirmary.'

 

'No he's not,' snapped Greg. He showed no recognition of Killifer whatsoever. They hadn't seen each other in more than eighteen years, but Killifer recognized Greg instantly.

 

'We're trying to find him,' said Brudnoy, also looking so damned sober.

 

Killifer ignored Greg. He wants to be a stranger, fuck him. Suddenly it all seemed awfully funny: little Douggie out on the loose. Maybe he'll fall down and break his neck. But he made a serious face and shook his head gravely. 'Nope. Haven't seen him.'

 

They hurried on past him. Killifer stood in the tunnel, blinking with thought. Douggie's not in the infirmary. They lost their little Douggie.

 

Then a thought hit him hard enough to snap him into sobriety. The cover! Suppose the little sonofabitch has figured it all out and he's looking for the cover. I'd better hide it, and quick.

 

He started running down the dimly-lit tunnel toward his quarters.

 

Doug almost laughed at the pathetic stupidity of it. Under the mattress. Killifer had hidden the cermet cover beneath his mattress.

 

Maybe it wasn't so dumb after all, Doug thought. It had taken a real effort of will to work up the strength to touch Killifer's roiled, sweaty bunk.

 

Doug held the cover in his hands. The murder weapon. He stepped over to the desk and placed it down on its surface, gold side up.

 

And the door flew open.

 

Killifer's eyes were so wide Doug could see white all the way around the irises. The man stared at Doug, then his eyes flicked to the gold-plated cermet cover, then back to Doug again.

 

'Why did you want to kill Brennart?' Doug asked quietly. 'Or was it me you were after?'

 

Killifer slid the door shut behind him. 'It was you. Brennart-' he shrugged. 'Couldn't be helped.'

 

'Couldn't ... be ... helped.' For the first time in his life Doug felt real anger, a fury that threatened to shatter his self-control.

 

'He wanted to be a big-ass hero, now he is one,' Killifer said. 'So what?'

 

Before he knew what he was doing, Doug lashed out with a stinging left that snapped Killifer's head back and a hard straight right, blurringly fast. Killifer slammed back against the rock wall and crumpled to the floor, blood gushing from his nose.

 

Doug bent down and grabbed the front of his coveralls. Yanking Killifer to his feet, Doug cocked his right fist again.

 

And stopped. Killifer made no move to protect himself. His arms hung limply at his sides. Blood streamed down his chin, spattering his coveralls and Doug's hand, still gripping the coverall front.

 

Doug pushed him onto the bunk.

 

'Why?' he demanded. 'Why did you do it? Why did you want to kill me?'

 

'Because you killed me, you snotty sonofabitch.'

 

'Me? I never even saw you until ten days ago.'

 

'Your mother,' Killifer snarled. 'She killed me. She took away everything I ever had. She exiled me to this goddamned cavern in the sky.'

 

'I know that,' Doug said. 'But why? Why would she do that? What did you do to make her hate you so much?'

 

Killifer stared at him, wiping at his bloody nose. Slowly a crooked smile worked its way across his face.

 

'You don't know, do you?' he asked, grinning at Doug. 'You really don't know.'

 

All of a sudden Doug felt slightly ridiculous, standing over this beaten smaller man in a dangling hospital gown that barely covered him.

 

Killifer was cackling with laughter. 'You don't know! You don't know a friggjn' thing about it! She never told you, did she?'

 

'Never told me what?'

 

'About your brother! She never told you what your brother did!'

 

'Greg?' Doug felt suddenly uneasy, as if he were teetering on the edge of a tremendous precipice. 'What's Greg got to do with this?'

 

'He killed your old man!' Killifer roared. 'He murdered your father, kid.'

 

'That's a lie,' Doug snapped.

 

'The hell it is. Your brother salted the nanomachines your father was using. The nanos didn't malfunction. They did exactly what they were programmed to do.'

 

Inwardly Doug was falling off that precipice, dropping like a stone into the darkness. He heard his own voice, hollow with shock, "They were programmed to destroy the spacesuits?'

 

'Yeah. Your brother asked me for a sample of nanobugs that could eat carbon-based molecules. I didn't know what the fuck he wanted 'em for, but he was big shit with the corporation so I gave him what he wanted.'

 

'You gave him-'

 

'Gave him the bugs that killed your old man, that's right Nobody else knew. Just your big brother Greg and me. But your mother figured it out and shipped me up here.'

 

Feeling his legs trembling, Doug pulled up the plastic chair and sat on it. Hard. 'But why would she send you here to Moonbase?'

 

'To get me outta the way, wise ass! She didn't want me where I might rat out her son.'

 

'Greg.'

 

'That's right.'

 

'Greg murdered my father and you helped him.'

 

'Hey, I didn't know what he wanted the friggin' bugs for. Not until after it happened.'

 

'You were just following orders,' Doug muttered.

 

'Right.'

 

For what seemed like hours Doug sat there, running the story around in his head, over and over again. Mom protected Greg. She knew he'd killed my father and she protected him. And she never told me.

 

Never told me.

 

Never told me.

 

'So, whatcha gonna do now, kid?' Killifer taunted. 'Beat the crap outta me? Kill me?'

 

Slowly Doug got to his feet. Killifer cringed back on the bunk, his bravado suddenly evaporated.

 

'Get out of here,' Doug said quietly.

 

'What?'

 

'Get off the Moon. Quit Masterson Corporation. Take early retirement and go back to Earth.'

 

'And if I don't want to . . . ?'

 

Doug looked down at him. 'If I see you here after tomorrow I'll kill you.'

 

From the look in Killifer's eyes, Doug knew the man believed him.

 

ALPHONSUS

 

Doug walked alone across the floor of the giant crater, his boots stirring clouds of dust that settled languidly in the gentle lunar gravity.

 

He had lost track of time. For hours now the universe had narrowed down to his spacesuit, the sound of his own breathing, the air fans softly whirring, the bleak cracked, pitted ground. He passed the rocket port, where an ungainly transfer ship sat on one of the blast-scarred pads, waiting for tomorrow's launch Earthward. Past the solar farms he walked, where nanomachines were patiently converting regolith silicon and trace metals into spreading acres of solar panels that drank in sunlight and produced electricity. Off in the distance he could barely make out the dark bulk of the half-finished mass driver, a low dark shadow against the horizon.

 

Turning, he looked through the visor of his helmet up at the worn, rounded mountains that ringed the crater floor. Mount Yeager, he saw. And the notch in the ringwall near it that everybody called Wodjohowitcz Pass.

 

My father died up there. Greg murdered him and my mother covered it up, kept it even from me. Protected him, protected my father's murderer. My half-brother. Her son. He's just as much her son as I am and he murdered my father. And got away with it.

 

'Doug? Is that you?'

 

The voice in his earphones startled him. He would have turned the suit radio off, but the safety people had fixed all the suits so that you couldn't

 

A small tractor was approaching him, kicking up a plume of dust that looked almost silvery in the sunlight. Must be the safety guys, Doug thought. I guess I've wandered too far out for them. Broke a rule.

 

'Doug, are you all right?'

 

He realized it was Bianca Rhee's voice.

 

'I'm okay,' he answered as the tractor approached him. Sort of, he added silently.

 

He stood there as the tractor pulled up and stopped in a billow-of dream-slow swirling dust.

 

'Where've you been?' Rhee asked, stepping down from the tractor. It was a two-seat machine with a flat bed for cargo: the lunar equivalent of a pickup truck.

 

'I needed some time by myself,' he said.

 

'Oh! I'm interrupting-'

 

'No, it's okay. I was just about to start back anyway.'

 

'Everybody's looking for you. Your mother's just about to roast the infirmary staff under a rocket nozzle for letting you walk off like that.'

 

Doug looked at Rhee's stubby, spacesuited figure and felt glad that their helmet visors hid their faces. He did not want anyone to see his expression right at this moment. Nothing but an impersonal, faceless figure encased in protective plastic, metal and fabric.

 

'How'd you find me?' he asked.

 

'I like to be by myself sometimes, too.'

 

'And you come out here?'

 

'No . . .' Her voice faltered. 'I, uh, I find some cubbyhole where I'm alone and I... dance.'

 

'Dance? By yourself?'

 

'Ballet,' Rhee said, her voice so low Doug could hardly hear her. 'You know, with an orchestra disk.'

 

'Ballet,' said Doug. 'Sure! Here on the Moon it must be terrific.'

 

I'm not very good, even in low gravity.'

 

'How do you know, if you don't let anybody see you?'

 

'Every time I fall down, I know!'

 

Doug didn't laugh. He could tell from the tone of her voice that this was very precious to Rhee.

 

Softly, he said, 'I hope ybu'll let me see you dance sometime, Bianca.'

 

He waited for her reply, but she said nothing. So he said, 'You're the only one in the whole base smart enough to find me.'

 

'I checked with the airlock monitors,' she said, sounding relieved. 'They keep a record of everybody who goes out.'

 

'And comes in,' Doug added. The crew monitoring the main airlock didn't know that Doug was supposed to be in the infirmary. They had allowed him outside after only a cursory check of the computerized files.

 

'You must be feeling awfully good to come out here,' Rhee said cheerfully, clambering back up to the driver's seat

 

And Doug realized, She must feel awfully strong about me to come out looking for me. It can't be impersonal, after all. It never is.

 

'Bianca,' he asked as he climbed up into the tractor beside her, 'how long are you going to be here at Moonbase?'

 

'My tour's over at the end of the month. That's when the new semester starts.'

 

'Well,' Doug said carefully, 'we've got a couple of weeks to get acquainted, then.'

 

He could hear her breath catch, over the suit radio. Then she said, "That'd be fine.'

 

I can't tell her anything, Doug knew, but at least I can have a friend to unwind with. Somebody to help keep me sane.

 

'Uh . . .' How to say it without hurting her feelings? 'You know, it's good to have a friend here. I really don't know anyone else in Moonbase.'

 

'There's Killifer,' she said lightly.

 

'He's leaving tomorrow.'

 

'Really?' She sounded completely surprised.

 

'Really.'

 

'Well, your brother's here now, isn't he?'

 

'Half brother.' Doug felt his insides clench. 'And I hardly know him. He's always . . . we've never been close.'

 

He heard her chuckling. 'What's so funny?'

 

'Oh, I was just thinking about some of the other women here. They'll be green with envy.'

 

'Bianca, it isn't going to be like that.'

 

'They'll say I'm robbing the cradle,' she went on, happily ignoring him. 'After all, I'm almost five years older than you.'

 

Doug shook his head inside the helmet. 'I've aged a lot since coming to Moonbase,' he said. And he hoped that he could keep her as a friend without crushing her dreams.

 

'You never told me about Greg.'

 

Doug could see the sudden alarm in his mother's eyes. They were having dinner together in the suite Anson had turned over to Joanna: a sparse microwaved meal of bland precooked veal that Joanna had commandeered from the stores at The Cave.

 

'What about Greg?' she asked, from across the round table that Anson had used for conferences in her office.

 

Despite the roaring emotions blazing in him, Doug still had an appetite. He chewed carefully on a thin slice of veal while his mother watched him, waiting.

 

Doug put his fork down and said, 'Greg murdered my father.'

 

She did not look surprised. Only tired. Suddenly his mother looked utterly weary.

 

'He did, didn't he?' Doug asked, keeping his voice low, not screaming out the accusation the way he wanted to.

 

'He was terribly sick,' Joanna said. 'He didn't really understand-'

 

'Don't lie for him,' Doug snapped. 'He killed my father. Killifer helped him. I know the whole story.'

 

'The whole story? Do you? Do you know what kind of childhood Greg had? How abusive his father was to both of us? Do you know how hard he's struggled over these past eighteen years to atone for what he did?'

 

'Atone?'

 

'Greg's gone through hell and purgatory to overcome the feelings that led him to ... to-'

 

'Murder,' Doug said, uncompromising.

 

Tears were glimmering in Joanna' s eyes but she fought them back. 'That's right, murder. He killed your father. My husband. The man I loved.'

 

"The father I never knew.'

 

'I knew him. I loved your father.'

 

Doug saw what she wanted to say. 'But you loved Greg, too. You couldn't let your son be arrested for murder.'

 

'He was so sick,' Joanna said, suddenly pleading. 'Don't you understand, he would never have done anything like that if he'd been well. He was in torment every day of his life.'

 

'So you helped him.'

 

'I protected him. I got him the best medical help on Earth. He worked, Douglas. He went through hell-'

 

'And purgatory.'

 

She shook her head. 'You just don't know. How could you? For years and years and years Greg struggled and worked to overcome his feelings. He's accomplished so much! He's come so far.'

 

'He's come to the Moon.'

 

'He's your brother,' Joanna said.

 

'Half brother.'

 

'You're both my sons. I love you both. I don't want you to hate him. That's why I never told you.'

 

'Didn't you think I'd find out one day?'

 

Joanna waved one hand in the air, still clutching her fork. 'One day, yes. Some day. But I didn't mink it would happen so soon.'

 

'Is that why you kept us apart all these years? Because you were afraid I'd find out?'

 

'I don't know,' Joanna said. 'No, I don't think so. At first, when you were an infant, I worried that Greg might be jealous of you. He was in heavy therapy then and I felt it was best to keep him away from you. Later...' Her voice died away; she seemed lost in the past.

 

'I've told Killifer to resign and take early retirement,' said Doug flatly.

 

'All right. Fine.'

 

'What are you going to do about Greg?'

 

She looked at him sharply. 'What do you mean?'

 

'I'm stuck here at Moonbase indefinitely. Greg's the new base director.'

 

'I can't send Greg back to Earth. It would look as if I had fired him as director before he even started.'

 

Doug spread his hands. 'So we're going to be here together then.'

 

From the expression on her face it seemed to Doug that his mother hadn't thought about it before. She was silent for long moments.

 

'You're right,' she said at last. I'll have to stay here, too.'

 

'You?'

 

Nodding as if she had made up her mind irrevocably, Joanna said, I'll resign as chair of the board of directors and live here. For the coming year, at least.'

 

Doug stared at her and saw the determination in her eyes. 'To keep between Greg and me.'

 

To bring the two of you together,' Joanna said, almost desperately. 'I love you both and I don't want you to hate each other.'

 

'You're asking a lot.'

 

'Don't you see, Doug? It was my fault, too. I'm his mother. Whatever Greg's done, I bear a responsibility for it.'

 

'You didn't murder anybody.'

 

'But I didn't stop him from doing it! I didn't raise him well enough to keep him from murder.'

 

"That's like blaming Hitler's mother for the Holocaust,' Doug snapped.

 

'I didn't pay enough attention to him. And when I met your father - how betrayed Greg must have felt.'

 

"The criminal as victim,' Doug muttered.

 

Joanna pointed at him with the fork. 'Douglas, if you hate your brother for what he did, you'll also be hating me. He's my son, as much as you are, and what he did is my fault, too.'

 

Doug felt drained, exhausted, almost the way he had felt up at the mountaintop with Brennart. My father, Brennart, even Zimmerman's leaving Tie. I can't lose her too; I can't drive

 

446

 

Ben Bova

 

Moonrise

 

447

 

my mother away from me. She. wants to live up here, to be with me. And Greg, too, but stillX

 

With a slow shake of his head, Doug replied, 'I don't hate Greg.' He hoped it w^as true.

 

'Do you mean it?' his mother asked.

 

'It's just - all mis is new to me. I never thought-'

 

Joanna got her feet and came around the table to sit at the empty chair beside him.

 

'I love you, Douglas. I don't want to lose you. You and Greg are the only people in the world I care about.'

 

'I know,' he said. And he let her put her arms around him and hold him close. It felt awkward for a moment, but then he melted into his mother's embrace and it felt warm and safe and soothing.

 

Joanna could feel the tension between her two sons, crackling like an electrical spark between two electrodes of opposite polarity.

 

The three of them were standing in Anson's former office. Now it was Greg's office. Joanna had moved into her own quarters.

 

It had been a long day. They had seen Anson off and Greg had formally taken the directorship of Moonbase. Now, the little cluster of people who had crowded the office to congratulate their new boss had left. Greg stood behind his desk, Joanna at his side, Doug in front of the desk.

 

Even in the sky-blue coveralls that designated management, Greg looked darkly somber. Doug, wearing the pumpkin orange of the research and exploration group, seemed as bright and youthful as a freshly-scrubbed cadet. Joanna wore a flowered dress, insisting that she would not limit her wardrobe to the utilitarian jumpsuits that everyone else wore.

 

Doug smiled at his half-brother and put his hand out over the desk.

 

'I haven't had a chance to congratulate you, Greg' he said. 'Best of luck as director.'

 

Greg took his hand and smiled back. "Thanks'

 

'And I want you to know,' Doug said as their hands separated, 'that I understand what happened . . . about my father.'

 

Greg turned his startled gaze to Joanna.

 

'She didn't tell me. Killifer did.'

 

'Killifer?'

 

'He left Moonbase a couple days ago. It's all over with. Finished.'

 

'Is it?' Greg asked. 'Just like that, you find out about your father's death and you don't care?'

 

Doug looked toward Joanna, too, then turned back to his brother. 'I care, Greg. But it's all ... kind of abstract. I never knew my father. He died before I was born. Maybe I ought to be angry, furious - but I can't seem to work up the emotion.'

 

Greg just stared at him.

 

'It's all in the past,' Dqug said. 'I don't like it, but then I guess you don't either.'

 

With a quick glance at his mother, Greg said, 'No, I'm not happy about the past.'

 

'Then let's make the future something we can both be happy about. All of us,' he quickly amended.

 

'Okay,' Greg said guardedly. 'Sounds good.'

 

Doug caught the slight but definite stress on the word sounds.

 

'What do you have in mind?' Joanna asked.

 

Doug shrugged indifferently. 'I've got a lot of learning to do. I'm signed up with the research and exploration group. We'll be going back to Mt. Wasser and building the power tower."

 

Greg cleared his throat and said, 'Yes, I've got the mission plan on my list of action items. Top priority.'

 

'I hope you approve it,' said Doug.

 

'Don't worry about it," Greg replied.

 

Joanna watched her two sons, thinking, Maybe they can work together. Maybe they'll learn to trust one another and become as close as brothers. But I'll have to watch them. Closely. For a long time to come.

 

'Once we get the water flowing back here,' Doug was saying, 'we can start thinking about expanding the base, turning it into a really livable, town.'

 

Greg said nothing. He was thinking, Doug knows! He knows what I did. He says he doesn't care, he says it's all in the past, but he hates me. He'll do whatever he can to destroy me. He's

 

already challenging me. He'll want to keep Moonbase open. He'll want to be director, sooner or later. Sooner, most likely. I'll have to keep a couple of jumps ahead of him. I'll have to make certain that Mom doesn't give him unfair advantages.

 

I'll have to make certain that Moonbase is shut down for good. When I leave here, Moonbase will be history.

 

PART III: Legacy

 

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 tiie 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.'