by Ben Bova
“Come in, Greg,” she called, shutting down the screen and placing the cyberbook reader on the end table beside her.
He looked tense, quivering with suppressed anger. Yet his shirt and slacks were neatly pressed, no perspiration stains. If he had physically helped with the moving, it did not show.
Joanna remained seated in the comfortable armchair as Greg crossed the room toward her.
“Did you get everything?” she asked.
“Yes. I think so.”
“There’s quite a lot of things in the basement. Mostly old toys and school papers.”
He shook his head. “I won’t have room for that. My condo’s too small.”
I’ll keep it all here for you.”
Greg swallowed hard. “I— I suppose it’s time that I moved into a place of my own.”
Smiling as gently as she could, Joanna said, “Greg, dearest, you’ve had a place of your own in New York for quite a while now.”
“I mean… moving out of this house.” His voice almost broke. “My home.”
She held her arms out to him and he dropped to his knees and let her embrace him.
“Oh, Greg, I’m so sorry that things have worked out this way. I didn’t want it to happen like this.”
“I know,” he said, his head on her lap. “It’s not your fault.”
“It’s not anyone’s fault.
“It’s his!” Greg snarled, looking up from his mother’s lap, his eyes red and burning. “He’s done this to us!”
“If you mean Paul—”
“He murdered my father!”
Joanna stroked his midnight hair, trying to soothe him. “Greg, I told you… I was with Paul all that afternoon. I really was.”
Shaking his head stubbornly, Greg insisted, “He didn’t have to do it himself. He could have hired someone.”
“He couldn’t have.”
Greg looked into his mother’s eyes. “You have no idea of how low he really is, do you?”
“Now, Greg, I won’t listen—”
“You think he loves you? He loves the corporation! He loves that stupid Moonbase!”
“He’s my husband,” Joanna said.
“Right Sure. And last night he was in bed with Melissa Hart. Some husband.”
Joanna’s could feel her face flame. “That’s not true!”
“Isn’t it? Do you think it’s a coincidence that Melissa’s been at the Houston and L.A. divisions the same time he’s been there? Is it an accident that they both booked the same hotel in San Francisco?”
Joanna’s breath caught in her chest. She could not answer.
“Why shouldn’t he take his pick of younger women?” Greg went on. “He’s the top dog now, isn’t he? He’s an important man, thanks to you. He can have any woman he wants.”
“You’re lying!”
“Check with the travel office. The two of them have been travelling across the country together. Your black CEO and his black mistress.”
“But I thought Melissa…’ Joanna ran out of words. Her thoughts were tumbling through her head.
“Melissa’s a slut who’ll sleep wherever the power is. You gave Paul the power so she’s gone back to him.”
“No…’ she said weakly.
“He murdered my father and he’ll spit on you now that he’s got what he wants.”
“No,” Joanna repeated desperately. “Paul’s not like that. He isn’t!”
“He’s a cheat and a murderer.”
“No!”
“He is! I know he is! He murdered my father and now he’s cheating on you.”
“But why? Why would he murder your father?”
“To get you!” Greg blurted. “To get control of the corporation. To save his precious Moonbase.”
Trying to drive thoughts of Paul in bed with Melissa out of her mind, Joanna shook her head stubbornly.
“But he already had me, Greg. I loved him and he loved me. We were going to tell your father, sooner or later. I was going to get a divorce.”
“But if you divorced Dad, then Paul could never hope to get control of the corporation. He had Dad murdered so he could make himself CEO.”
Joanna said again, “No, Greg. Paul had no idea that he could become CEO. He was shocked when I told him I was going to nominate him.”
“But—”
“And that was just a few minutes before the board meeting started,” Joanna continued. “You were there. Didn’t you see how stunned he looked?”
“I was there, all right,” Greg growled.
“I know, it was a shock to you, too, dear. But I had to make Paul take over the company. I’m sorry I couldn’t explain it to you beforehand.”
“He forced you into it, didn’t he?”
“No, dear. He didn’t know anything about it until just before the meeting started.”
“You didn’t trust me to run the corporation. You still don’t.”
Patiently, trying her best to mollify her son, Joanna explained, “Greg, dearest, you’re not ready yet.”
I’m twenty-eight years old. Dad wasn’t much older when he took over from his father.”
Joanna remembered. Gregory hadn’t been ready, either. And he never really learned how to make the corporation profitable. Under his direction Masterson Aerospace staggered along from one crisis to another: Until Paul pushed through the development of the Clipperships. That saved us, she thought.
“Greg,” she said to her son, “I know that Brad Arnold has been telling you he thinks you’re capable of running the corporation, but Brad’s merely flattering you.”
“Flattering?”
“Brad thinks that he can control you, and through you control the company. That’s why I had to put Paul in charge. To stop Brad.”
“He couldn’t control me.”
“He’s very clever,” Joanna said. “And much more experienced in this kind of infighting.”
“He could never control me.”
Joanna hesitated. Then she said, “Now that I think of it, the only one who could possibly havte thought he’d benefit from your father’s death is Brad.”
Greg’s body twitched as if a live electric wire had touched him. He looked into his mother’s eyes. “Brad?” he whispered, unbelieving.
“Paul had no idea I’d nominate him,” Joanna repeated slowly, thinking out loud. “But Brad would have known that if your father died, he could make you CEO and run the whole company through you.”
“I told you he couldn’t control me!” Greg snapped.
“Yes, yes, I know,” Joanna said quickly, stroking his hair again. “But Brad thought otherwise, I’m certain.”
For several moments Greg remained still, his head in his mother’s lap, as she stroked him soothingly.
At last he said, “Do you really think Brad murdered my father?”
“No,” Joanna said softly. “I think your father committed suicide.”
But you said—”
“I said that the only one who would have profited from your father’s death was Brad.” Before her son could insist he couldn’t be controlled again, she added, “At least, he was the only one who thought he might have profited.”
“Brad,” Greg breathed.
He stayed there kneeling at his mother’s feet until the butler rang from downstairs to say that the moving men were waiting in their van for Greg to direct them to his new home.
Then he kissed his mother’s cheek and left the house.
Joanna sat alone for most of the afternoon, trying to keep herself from phoning the travel office to see if Greg’s accusation was true. Her son’s voice kept ringing in her ears, half triumphant, half sneering: Why shouldn’t he take his pick of younger women? He’s the top dog now, isn’t he? He’s an important man, thanks to you. He can have any woman he wants.
MARE NUBIUM
The Moon turns very slowly on its axis: one complete revolution in just under twenty-eight days. That’s why Paul did not have a GPS signal to guide him as he pushed h
imself across the mare, hoping that he was heading for the ringwall mountains of the giant crater Alphonsus.
On Earth, two dozen global positioning satellites are enough to provide pinpoint locating fixes for virtually any spot on the globe. The satellites’ orbits are fixed in space while the Earth spins below them. No matter where on Earth you are, there are always at least two satellites above your horizon to give you a precise navigational fix.
To get the same kind of coverage on the Moon, with its slow rotation rate, takes many more satellites. The consortium of private companies and government agencies that had cooperatively set up the lunar GPS system had tried to strike a careful balance between practicality and cost. They had started with a network of six positioning satellites and were adding to the web from time to time.
Just my luck to be out here at a time when the two closest satellites are both too low on the horizon for my suit radio to pick up their signals, Paul grumbled. Maybe it isn’t luck. Maybe Greg timed it all. Is the kid that smart?
What difference does it make? he asked himself as he plodded across the barren lunar plain. Every few minutes he stopped to turn and see if his path remained straight, but he knew that was only the roughest of guides. You could be drifting off to one side or the other and never know it.
He sucked up a mouthful of water, sloshed it around his teeth and then swallowed it:
“Hell,” he muttered, “for all you know you’re heading for the pissin’ south pole by now.”
One of the GPS signals oughtta come through pretty soon. I’ll straighten out my course then. In the meanwhile, keep: pushing ahead.
In the back of his mind Paul knew, as every astronaut knew that what killed people on the Moon was fatigue. More than equipment failure or ignorance or even bad judgment, simple fatigue could wear you down to the point where you forgot just one little, vital thing. And then you were dead.
Paul forgot about the dust.
That powdery, fine dust, like beach sand underfoot, was electrically charged by the constant infall of ionized particles from the solar wind. No matter how carefully you stepped, your boots stirred up little clouds of dust, and some of the stuff inevitably clung electrostatically to your suit.
Through hard experience the men and women who worked on the Moon had learned to include a hand vacuum cleaner in the airlocks of their buried shelters. After an hour or so out on the surface, the suit needed a thorough cleaning. Otherwise the dust would get into everything inside the shelter itself.
It was more than an annoyance. Gritty dust particles worked their way into the hinges of space suits. If enough dust clogged the knees or other joints the suit would stiffen up just like the Tin Woodsman of Oz, left out in the rain. The experienced astronaut listened carefully for grating noises in his suit; kept sensitive to whether or not the joints of his suit were moving smoothly.
When they weren’t too tired to remember.
Paul plodded along. He knew that he had been down on all fours back at the glass-smooth crater that he had slid into. He knew, if he had thought about it consciously, that his gloves probably had a thin sheen of lunar dust clinging to them electrostatically.
But he was too tired to be wary of the dust.
Wish I had a headband, he said to himself as he tried to blink the sweat out of his eyes. He didn’t want to look at the thermometer on his forearm panel, didn’t want to know how hot it really was. The Sun was broiling him, he knew that and it was enough.
The bleak plain stretched in every direction around him, nothing but rocks and dusty regolith and more rocks. In his helmet earphones he heard nothing but the precisely timed beep of his suit radio’s plaintive call to the GPS satellites that were not there to answer. Like a Chinese water torture, Paul groused. Beep. Then wait. And then another beep. Where the fuck’s the answering signal? At least one of the pissing satellites ought to be in range by now.
But he heard only his suit radio’s patient, maddening call signal.
One foot in front of the other, Paul told himself as he pushed along. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other and you’ll get there sooner or later.
His vision blurred and without thinking he wiped at his helmet visor. A film of gray smeared across the visor.
Oh crap! Just what I need; Paul grumbled to himself. The upper half of the visor was covered with dust. He had to peer through the lower half to see where he was going.
Without stopping, he fumbled in the pocket on the right thigh of his suit for an electrostatic cloth. Got to be one in there, he said to himself. If they kept the suit supplies topped off. If the cloth hasn’t already been saturated.
It was almost impossible to feel anything as thin as the cloth with his gloves on, but at last Paul pulled a bright green square from the pocket. He held it up in front of his visor and inspected it as best as he could through the smear of dust. Looks good enough. Most of it was still bright green, although one corner of the cloth had turned gray. It had been used before.
Carefully folding the cloth so that the gray, used section was out of the way, Paul wiped slowly at his visor. It seemed to help, but only a little.
Ought to have windshield wipers on the damned helmets, he thought. The cloth was not doing the job it should have done. Must’ve lost some of its electrostatic charge while it was sitting in the pocket. It’s been used before, too. Christ, it’s just not working!
The gray smear seemed a bit thinner now, not as opaque. Paul could see through it as if it were a frosted window: blurry shapes and shadows, not much more.
He refolded the cloth and tried again. No improvement. All he managed to do was to smear the dust a little further across his visor.
In disgust he tossed the cloth away. It soared like a rigid sheet of thin metal in the airlessness of the Moon, spinning lazily until it sailed out of his range of vision.
“Okay,” Paul muttered. “Now we play pissin’ blind man’s bluff all the way to the next tempo.”
Then he heard a sudden chatter of beeps in his earphones: the signal from a GPS satellite. I’ll play it by ear,” he said aloud, and began to laugh wildly at his pun.
But he needed to look at the displays on his forearm panel to make sense of the GPS navigational signal. His laughter died as he squinted through the dust filming his visor. If he was reading the instruments correctly, he had drifted more than six miles off his course to the next underground shelter.
SAN JOSE
The manager of the nanotech division was barely out of her thirties, young and intense and obviously nervous. Yet she seemed to be the oldest person that Paul could see anywhere in the plant. Her skirted suit of charcoal gray looked as if she hadn’t worn it since her first job interview. She looked uncomfortable in it, as if she longed to be in a t-shirt and jeans, as almost everyone else was.
Paul felt like an old and stuffy grandfather in his light whipcord slacks and tan sports jacket. Good thing I didn’t wear a tie, he said to himself. These kids’d think I came from Mars.
“Mr. Masterson was here last week, y’know,” the manager was saying, “and he said he was very satisfied with the progress we’ve made in the past six months.”
So that’s it, Paul realized as they looked through the thick window into a clean room where white-smocked technicians were bent over laboratory benches. Paul saw that the techs wore white caps over their heads and even had white booties over their shoes. Or sandals, he thought, glancing at the manager’s bare unpainted toes.
“Look,” he said to her, “I’m not here to swing a hatchet, you know.”
The manager’s expression clearly said she didn’t believe Paul. The ID badge pinned to her jacket said Kris Cardenas. She didn’t look Hispanic, though. To Paul she looked like a California surfer chick: an attractive kid with softly curled sandy hair, a swimmer’s broad shoulders, wide sincere cornflower blue eyes and a deep tan. And enough brains in her head to rise to the top of this very competitive high-tech division.
Making a smile for he
r, Paul explained, “You’ve probably heard that Greg Masterson and I are enemies, haven’t you?”
She nodded warily.
“Well, even if we are that doesn’t mean I want to kill this division just because he’s backing it. From what I can see, you’re doing a good job here.”
Cardenas seemed to be holding her breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“What I’d like to know,” Paul went on, “is whether or not you’re at a stage of development where we can try some practical tests of nanotechnology.”
“We were ready to try clinical tests of tumor killers,” Cardenas said, “but the government ruled that anything intended to go inside human patients has to go through the FDA’s approval procedure, and that takes years’
“I know,” Paul said. Washington’s decision had sent the entire nanotechnology industry into a tailspin. It wiped out any hope of profitability for this division for years to come.
“I can show you the animal tests we’ve done,” Cardenas said, starting down the corridor. “We can destroy tumors with better than eighty percent efficiency — and no collateral damage to healthy tissue, y’know.”
Following her, Paul said, “In animals.”
She nodded vigorously. “Pigs, rhesus monkeys, even chimps. There’s no reason why the bugs shouldn’t work just as well in humans. There’s just no sense to the government’s restrictions!”
With a world-weary shrug, Paul said, “I agree, but they’ve made their decision and we’ve got to live with it.” Or die with it, he added silently.
“It’s stupid,” Cardenas insisted.
“I was wondering, though, could you adapt nanotechnology to other applications?”
“Oh, sure,” she said easily, pronouncing the word shirr .
They had reached a set of big double doors. Cardenas pushed one open and they stepped through into a large room filled with animal cages. The walls and floor were tiled in white. The smell of animal fur and excrement was enough to make Paul’s eyes water.
“Careful,” Cardenas warned. “These floor tiles get kind of slick, y’know. The handlers have to wash them down a lot.”
