The Precipice (17 page)

Dan smiled at them both. “Thank you.”

“And I believe,” Uhrquest continued, “that Dr. Cardenas would be interested also.” Turning slightly, he called, “Dr. Cardenas,
are you here?”

No one answered.

“I will find her,” Uhrquest said, very seriously. “It is a shame she is not present today.”

Dan looked expectantly out at the audience, but no one else stood up. At last he said, “Thank you,” and stepped away from
the podium, back into the wings of the stage. Stavenger gave him a quick thumbs-up signal and returned to the podium for the
final item on the meeting's agenda: a request from a retired couple to enlarge their living quarters so they could have enough
space to start a new business for themselves.

Once the meeting broke up, Stavenger said, “If Kris Cardenas had been anywhere in Selene I would have introduced you to her.
Unfortunately, she's in a space station in near-Earth orbit, working on developing nanomachines to bring down the costs of
the Mars exploration centers.”

“Which station?” Dan asked.

“The one over South America.”

Dan grinned at him.
“Nueva Venezuela.
I helped build that sucker. Maybe it's time for me to pay a visit there.”

P
ancho watched the safety demonstration very carefully. No matter that she had put on a spacesuit and done EVA work dozens
of times; she paid patient attention to every word of the demo. This was going to be on the surface of the Moon, and the differences
between orbital EVAs and a moonwalk were enough to worry about.

The tourists in the bus didn't seem to give a damn. Hell, Pancho thought, if they ‘re stinky-rich enough to afford a vacation
jaunt to the Moon, they must have the attitude that nothing bad'll happen to them, and if it does they'll get their lawyers
to sue the hell out of everybody between here and Mars.

They had all suited up in the garage at Selene before getting onto the bus. It was easier that way; the bus was way too tight
for fourteen tourists to wriggle and squeeze into their spacesuits. They rode out to the Ranger 9 site in the hardshell suits,
their helmets in their laps. After all these years, Pancho thought, they still haven't
come up with anything better than these hard-shell suits. The science guys keep talking about softsuits and even nanomachine
skins, but it's still nothing more'n talk.

Even the teenagers went quiet once they cleared the garage airlock and drove out onto the cracked, pockmarked surface of Alphonsus.
A hundred and eight kilometers across, the crater floor went clear over the horizon. The ring-wall mountains looked old and
weary, slumped smooth from eons of being sandpapered by the constant infall of meteoric dust.

It was the dust that worried Pancho. In orbital space you were floating in vacuum. On the surface of the Moon you had to walk
on the powdery regolith, sort of like walking on beach sand. Except that the “sand” billowed up and covered your boots with
fine gray dust. Not just your boots, either, Pancho reminded herself. She'd heard tales about lunar dust getting into a suit's
joints and even into the life-support backpack. The dust was electrostatically charged from the incoming solar wind, too,
and this made the freaking stuff cling like mad. If it got on your visor it could blind you; try to wipe it off with your
gloves and you just smeared it worse.

They'd had some trouble finding Pancho a suit that would fit her comfortably; in the end they had to break out a brand new
one, sized long. It smelled new, like pristine plastic. When the bus stopped and the guide told the tourists to put on their
helmets, Pancho sort of missed the familiar scents of old sweat and machine oil that permeated the working suits she'd worn.
Even the air blowing gently across her face tasted new, unused.

The tour guide and the bus driver both checked out each tourist before they let the visitors climb down from the bus's hatch
onto the lunar regolith. Pancho's helmet earphones filled with “oohs” and “lookit that!” as, one by one, the tourists stepped
onto the ancient ground and kicked up puffs of dust that lingered lazily in the gentle gravity of the Moon.

“Look how bright my footprints are!” someone shouted excitedly.

The guide explained, ‘That's because the topmost layer of the ground has been darkened by billions of years of exposure to
hard radiation from the Sun and deep space. Your bootprints show the true color of the regolith underneath. Give ‘em a few
million years, though, and the prints will turn dark, too.”

For all the years she'd worked in space, Pancho had never been out on a Moonwalk. She found it fascinating, once she cut off
the radio frequency that carried the tourists' inane chatter and listened only to the prerecorded talk that guided visitors
to the Ranger 9 site.

To outward appearances she was just another tourist from one of the three busloads that were being shepherded along the precisely-marked
paths on the immense floor of Alphon-sus. But Pancho knew that Martin Humphries was in one of the other buses, and her reason
for being here was to report to him, not to sightsee.

She let the cluster of tourists move on ahead of her while she lingered near the parked buses. The canned tourguide explanation
was telling her about the rilles that meandered near the site of the old spacecraft crash: sinuous cracks in the crater floor
that sometimes vented out thin, ghostlike clouds of ammonia and methane.

“One of the reasons for locating the original Moonbase in Alphonsus's ringwall mountains was the hope of utilizing these volatiles
for—”

She saw Humphries shuffling toward her, kicking up clouds of dust as if it didn't matter. It had to be him, she thought, because
his spacesuit was different from the ones issued to the tourists. Not different enough to be obvious to the tenderfeet, but
Pancho recognized the slightly wider, heavier build of the suit and the tiny servo motors at the joints that helped the wearer
move the more massive arms
and legs. Extra armor, she thought. He must worry about radiation up here.

Humphries had no name tag plastered to the torso of his suit, and until he was close enough to touch helmets she could not
see into his heavily-tinted visor to identify his face. But he walked right up to her, kicking up the dust, until he almost
bumped his helmet against hers. She recognized his features through the visor: round and snubby-nosed, like some freckle-faced
kid, but with those cold, hard eyes peering at her.

Pancho lifted her left wrist and poised her right hand over the comm keyboard, asking Humphries in pantomime which radio frequency
he wanted to use. He held up a gloved hand and she saw that he was holding a coiled wire in it. Slowly, with the deliberate
care of a person who was not accustomed to working in a spacesuit, he fitted one end of the wire into the receptacle built
into the side of his helmet. He held out the other end. Pancho took it and plugged into her own helmet.

“Okay,” she heard Humphries's voice, almost as clearly as if they were in a comfortable room, “now we can talk without anyone
tapping into our conversation.”

Pancho remembered her childhood, when she and some of the neighborhood kids would create telephone links out of old paper
cups and lengths of waxed string. They were using the same principle, linking their helmets with the wire so they could converse
without using their suit radios. This'll work, Pancho thought, as long as we don't move too far apart. She judged the wire
connecting their helmets to be no more than three meters long.

“You worried about eavesdroppers?” she asked Humphries.

“Not especially, but why take a chance you don't have to?”

That made sense, a little. “Why couldn't we meet down at your place, like usual?”

“Because it's not a good idea for you to be seen going
down there so often, that's why,” Humphries replied testily. “How long do you think it would be before Dan Randolph finds
out you're coming to my residence on a regular basis?”

Teasingly, Pancho said, “So he finds out He'll just think you're inviting me to dinner.”

Humphries grunted. Pancho knew that he had invited Amanda to dinner at his home twice since they'd first met. And he'd stopped
asking Pancho to report to him down there. Now they met at prearranged times and places: strolling in the Grand Plaza, watching
low-gravity ballet in the theater, doing a tourist moonwalk on the crater floor.

Pancho would have shrugged if she hadn't been encased in the suit She said to Humphries, “Dan made his pitch to the governing
council.”

“I know. And they turned him down.”

“Well, sort of.”

“What do you mean?” he snapped.

“A couple of citizens volunteered to work on Dan's project. He's goin' down to the Venezuela space station to try to get Dr.
Cardenas to head up the team.”

“Kristine Cardenas?”

“Yup. She's the top expert at nanotech,” Pancho said.

“They gave her the Nobel Prize,” Humphries muttered, “before nanotechnology was banned on Earth.”

“That's the one he's gonna talk to.”

For several long moments Humphries simply stood there unmoving, not speaking a word. Pancho thought he looked like a statue,
with the spacesuit and all.

At length he said, “He wants to use nanomachines to build the rocket. I hadn't expected that.”

“It's cheaper. Prob'ly better, too.”

She sensed Humphries nodding inside his helmet. “I should've seen it coming. If he can build the system with nanos, he won't
need my financing. The sonofabitch can leave me out in the cold—after I gave him the fusion idea on a silver fucking platter!”

“I don't think he'd do that.”

“Wouldn't he?” Humphries was becoming more enraged with every word. “I bring the fusion project to him, I offer to fund the
work, but instead he sneaks behind my back to try to raise funding from any other source he can find. And now he's got a way
to build the fucking rocket without me altogether! He's trying to cut my balls off!”

“But—”

“Shut up, you stupid bitch! I don't care what you think! That prick bastard Randolph thinks he can screw me out of this! Well,
he's got another think coming! I'll break his back! I'll
destroy
the sonofabitch!”

Humphries yanked the wire out of Pancho's helmet, then pulled the other end out of his own. He turned and strode back to the
bus that had carried him out to the Ranger 9 site, practically boiling up a dust storm with his angry stomping. If he hadn't
been in the heavy spacesuit, Pancho thought, he'd hop two meters off the ground with each step. Prob'ly fall flat on his face.

She watched as he gestured furiously to the bus driver, then clambered aboard the tourist bus. The driver got in after him,
closed the hatch, and started off for the garage back at Selene.

Pancho wondered if Humphries would allow the driver to come back out and pick up the other tourists, or would he leave them
stranded out here? Well, she thought, they can always squeeze into the other buses.

She decided there was nothing she could do about it, so she might as well enjoy what was left of her outing. As she walked
off toward the wreckage of the tiny, primitive Ranger 9, though, she thought that she'd better tell Dan Randolph about this
pretty damned quick. Humphries was sore enough to commit murder, it seemed to her.

I
t was almost like coming home for Dan.
Nueva Venezuela
had been one of the first big projects for the fledgling Astro Manufacturing Corp., back in the days when Dan had moved his
corporate headquarters from Texas to La Guaira and married the daughter of the future president of Venezuela.

The space station had lasted much better than the marriage. Still, the station was old and scuffed-up. As the transfer craft
from Selene made its approach, Dan saw that the metal skin of her outer hulls was dulled and pitted from long years of exposure
to radiation and mite-sized meteoroids. Here and there bright new sections showed where the maintenance crews were replacing
the tired, eroded skin. A facelift, Dan thought, smiling. Well, she's old enough to need it. They're probably using cermet
panels instead of the aluminum we started with. Lighter, tougher, maybe even cheaper if you consider the length of time they'll
last before they need replacing.

Nueva Venezuela
was built of a series of concentric rings. The outermost ring spun at a rate that gave the occupants inside it a feeling
of normal Earthly gravity. The two other rings were placed where they would simulate Mars's one-third
g
and the Moon's one-sixth. The docking port at the station's center was effectively at zero gravity. The tech guys called
it microgravity, but Dan always thought of it as zero
g.

A great place to make love, Dan remembered. Then he chuckled to himself. Once you get over the heaves. Nearly everybody got
nauseous their first few hours in weightlessness.

Dan went through customs swiftly, allowing the inspector to rummage through his one travelbag while he tried to keep himself
from making any sudden movements. He could feel his sinuses starting to puff up as the liquids in his body shifted in response
to weightlessness. No postnasal drips in zero g, Dan told himself. But you sure can get a beaut of a headache while the fluids
build up in your sinuses before you adapt.

The main thing was to make as few head motions as possible. Dan had seen people suddenly erupt with projectile vomiting from
merely turning their heads or nodding.

The inspector passed him easily enough and Dan gratefully made his way along the tube corridor that led “down” to the lunar-level
wheel.

He dumped his bag in the cubbyhole compartment he'd rented for this visit, then prowled along the sloping corridor that ran
through the center of the wheel, checking the numbers on each door.