by Ben Bova
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-NINE
FORTY
FORTY-ONE
FORTY-TWO
FORTY-THREE
FORTY-FOUR
Copyright Page
To Robin and Mike Putira
ONE
“I DON’T WANT YOUR CRAPPY LITTLE COMPANY!” said Dan Randolph.
“The hell you don’t!” Willard Mitchell snapped.
Dan gave a disgusted snort and leaned back in the stiff unpadded chair. Mitchell glared across the table at him. The two lawyers, seated beside their clients, shifted uneasily in their chairs.
The room was windowless, deep underground, without even a video screen on the wall. Just bare lunar concrete lit by glareless fluorescents set behind the ceiling panels. Technically, the chamber was not a cell or even an interrogation chamber. It was a conference room where defendants could meet in private with their lawyers.
Dan Randolph fished a small oblong plastic box from his inside tunic pocket. About the size of his palm, it was a flat gray color with a single row of tiny winking lights set across its face. All the lights were green.
“No bugs in here,” he muttered, adding silently to himself, At least none that this little snooper can sniff out.
He slipped the detector back into his pocket and turned his gaze again to Mitchell, still glaring at him from across the wobbly conference table. Randolph was on the small side, but solidly built, a welterweight with sandy hair that was turning gray at the temples. He had a pugilist’s face: strong square stubborn jaw, a nose that had been slightly flattened by someone’s fist a long time ago. But his light gray eyes glinted with a secret amusement, as if he were inwardly laughing at the foolishness of men, himself included.
Across the table from him Willard Mitchell was scowling grimly. Once he had been lean and athletic, a polo champion at Princeton, a well-known young yachtsman. But years of living in the Moon’s easy gravity had softened him. Now he appeared older than Randolph, bald pate gleaming with perspiration, badly overweight and overwrought. Like Randolph, he was wearing business clothes: a collarless waist-length tunic and matching slacks. But where Dan’s suit of sky blue looked trim and new, Mitchell’s pearl gray outfit was baggy, wrinkled, rumpled; stains of sweat darkened his armpits.
“This is all your doing, Randolph,” he snarled in a heavy grating voice. “Don’t think I don’t know that you set me up.”
Dan raised his eyes. to the glowing ceiling panels. “Lord spare me from my friends,” he said to the air. “I can protect myself from my enemies.”
Mitchell’s lawyer, a sallow-skinned old man with the build and demeanor of a cadaver, dressed in a blue so deep it looked almost black, leaned toward his client and whispered something that Dan could not hear.
Mitchell scowled at his lawyer, but turned back to Dan and grumbled, “All right, all right, as long as we’re stuck here—what’s your offer?”
Mitchell was on trial before the Global Economic Council’s lunar tribunal for illegally exceeding his allotted quota of lunar ores. He was guilty. He knew it, his lawyers knew it, and the tribunal had the evidence to prove it. The fine that the tribunal was about to assess would bankrupt him.
Dan Randolph leaned both elbows on the rickety table and hunched forward in his chair. “First off,” he said, his voice crisp with suppressed anger, “I did not set you up.”
“The hell you say.”
“Goddammit to hell and back! The day I turn anybody over to the GEC will be two weeks after the end of the world. If I wanted to grab your pissant little outfit I would’ve done it myself. I don’t need the double-damned GEC to help me.”
Mitchell fumed visibly, but held back from answering.
Randolph’s lawyer, a strikingly red-haired young woman new to the Moon, was sitting attentively at her boss’s left. She said mildly, “Mr. Mitchell has asked to hear your offer, Dan.”
He grinned at her. “Yeah. Right.”
“So?” Mitchell growled.
Randolph spread his hands. “I’ll buy your stock at the current market price—”
“Which is forty percent below par because of this lawsuit.”
“—and pay the fine that the GEC’s going to sock you with. You continue to operate the company; you remain CEO and COO. You can buy back your shares at market value whenever you want to.”
Mitchell sank back in his chair, the expression on his fleshy face somewhere between suspicion and hope. “Now, wait a minute,” he said. “You buy my shares—”
“All your shares,” said Randolph. “Sixty-three percent of the total outstanding, so I’m told.”
The other man nodded. “You buy the shares. You pay the fine. I stay in charge of the company. And then I can buy the shares back?”
Randolph gave him a crooked grin. “The harder you work, the more the shares’ll be worth.”
“Suppose I let the company go to the dogs and leave you holding the bag?”
Randolph shrugged. “That’s the risk I take. But I don’t see you shitting on your own baby.”
Mitchell glanced at his lawyer, who remained deadpan, then turned back to Randolph. “I don’t get it. What’s in it for you?”
Dan’s smile turned dazzling. “A chance to shaft Malik and his double-damned GEC. What else?”
TWO
DANIEL HAMILTON RANDOLPH WAS the richest human being living off-Earth. While there was no dearth of suspicious souls who were convinced that no one could get that filthy rich while staying entirely within the law, for the most part Dan Randolph had earned his wealth legally.
Once, briefly, he had been accused of piracy. By Vasily Malik, who had then been director of the Russian Federation’s space program. Dan had evaded the charges against him, married the Venezuelan woman Malik was engaged to, and personally broken the Russian’s jaw, together with a knuckle of his own right hand.
Now, ten years later, Dan’s marriage had long since ended in divorce. The woman he had loved, the woman who had thought she loved him, was now Malik’s wife. And Malik himself had survived the turmoil and treachery in the Kremlin to become the new Russian Federation’s representative on the Global Economic Council.
Dan Randolph had amassed his fortune from space. When America had floundered and waffled, too preoccupied with earthly problems to move boldly in space, Dan had battled his way to a job with the Japanese building the first solar power satellite. “When the going gets tough,” he announced to anyone who would listen, “the tough get going—to where the going’s easier.”
Not that the going was altogether easy among the Japanese. It was on the Moon, in a brawl with four sneering Japanese mining engineers, that his nose had been broken. But he had won that fight, and won the grudging respect of all his fellow workers. Some of those fellow workers were women, and somehow Dan managed to be highly attractive to them. His rather ordinary features seemed to intrigue them. “Is it my smile?” he once asked a buxom Swedish electronics technician who shared his bed for a while. She considered carefully before she answered, “Your smile, yes. And your eyes. There is the devil in your eyes.”
By the time he had returned to Earth he was a moderately wealthy man. He started his own company, Astro Manufacturing, and headquartered it in sprawling Houston, where a handful of entrepreneurs were desperately trying to start a new industrial revolution despite their own government’s persistent indifference and occasional outright hostility. Houston, because by then Dan had met Morgan Scanwell, an earnest, incorruptible young politician who had the energy and drive to match Dan’s own. Scanwell helped Dan to make the contacts that funded the fledgling Astro Manufacturing. Dan raised money for Scanwell’s political campaigns. They joked between themselves that one day Scanwell would be in the White House and Dan would be on Mars.
They made an unlikely duo. Morgan Scanwell was austere, abstemious, a man whose ultimate guide was his deeply held religious faith. Dan Randolph was a hell-raising scoundrel who was out to make as many millions as he could while cutting a swath through the female population of every community in which he lived.
The glue that held the two men together was Morgan’s wife, Jane Scanwell: a tall, regal woman with long, flowing copper red hair, alabaster skin, and eyes the color of a green icy fjord. Utterly loyal to her husband, Jane had no other goal in life than to see Morgan Scanwell elected President of the United States.
She was unobtainable. Naturally, Dan fell in love with her. It was impossible; it was sinfully treacherous. But as Morgan Scanwell inevitably abandoned his moral rectitude and succumbed at last to the women who sought to touch his power, Jane came at last to Dan Randolph’s bed. To their mutual surprise, she discovered that she had fallen in love with this scoundrel, her husband’s best friend.
By the time Scanwell was campaigning for the presidency, Jane had painfully terminated her affair with Dan. She had the strength to end it; the White House was more important to her than romance. “The country needs Morgan, Dan,” she said, convincing herself by trying to convince him. “And he needs me. We can’t jeopardize his chances by sneaking around behind his back. If anyone found out he’d be finished.”
Morgan Scanwell was governor of Texas then. Dan’s personal fortune was nearing a billion dollars. He knew that Jane’s mind was made up, so he went back to his old ways and became notorious again for his sexual pursuits. While he was squandering his energies on every woman he desired, Jane allowed a compliant Oklahoma legislature to confer a residency upon her, so she could run for vice-president alongside her husband.
Morgan was elected president, only to face a string of crises that killed him. The Russian Federation emerged from its own desperate internal cataclysms with a new belligerency. After coming so perilously close to dissolution and civil war that the rest of the world expected the tottering new Federation to collapse, the Russians regained control of their sprawling land and peoples. The United States, half disarmed, was suddenly confronted with a resurgent, bellicose Moscow. America had long since lost real interest in space, and had allowed Japan and Europe to take the leadership in space developments. Now the Russians, with the world’s most powerful rockets and still armed with thousands of ballistic missiles, quickly took a stranglehold on all space operations—military as well as civilian.
The U.S. economy was foundering. The Russians were making demands on an unprepared America. Congress studied opinion polls that showed the American people were in no mood for a war that would rain hydrogen bombs on their heads.
America bowed. And Morgan Scanwell suffered a fatal stroke. Dan Randolph left Texas when Congress revoked all federal licenses for space operations. Astro Manufacturing moved to Venezuela, and Jane Scanwell became the first woman President of the United States.
She still held a deep passion for Dan Randolph. But now that passion had turned to hatred.
THREE
THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC COUNCIL’S LUNAR tribunal was based in Copernicus City. Like all the other centers on the Moon, Copernicus was deep underground, gouged out of lunar rock to protect its human population from the lethal radiation and enormous temperature swings up on the airless surface.
Ostensibly, the GEC was politically neutral. It insisted that all lunar habitats be given geographic names rather than being named after national biases. Thus the Russian penal colony was officially titled Aristarchus Center, even though most lunar residents still called it by its older name: Lunagrad. On all GEC maps, the great Japanese manufacturing center was called Alphonsus City, rather than Yamagata Industries Lunar Operation #1. The place where humans had first set foot on the Moon’s dusty surface was still called Tranquillity Base; the American astronauts had, even then, been thinking in non-nationalistic terms.
The lunar tribunal had all the aspects of a court of law. There was a banc with high-backed seats for three judges, although officially they were titled “conciliators.”
But as Dan Randolph took his seat among the rows of benches for onlookers, he thought that the conciliators never really reconciled grievances; all he had ever seen them do was take a man’s hard-earned wealth and hand it over to the GEC. He looked with mixed emotions at the sky blue flag of the United Nations standing to one side of the bane. He knew the world could not afford the divisive competition of nationalism, especially when even the smallest nation could manufacture biological weapons that could slaughter millions. But the alternative was a global government to which there was no appeal: a worldwide bureaucracy that was gradually imposing a dictatorship by committee, leveling everything on Earth to the same flat gray dullness. And now they were extending their grip to the Moon.
There was no jury box in this courtroom. The three conciliators listened to the evidence and made their decision. There was no appeal, either.
Mitchell and his zombie of a lawyer entered the tribunal chamber from the side door. The robot recording machine said, “All rise,” and the three conciliators trooped in from the door behind the bane. They wore ordinary business clothes rather than robes. Two men and one woman, the chief of the team.
Dan glanced at his own lawyer, sitting beside him. Katherine Williams was a pert, young, ambitious redhead who had swiftly risen to the top of his legal department despite fierce competition. She knew all the tales about Dan Randolph’s skirt-chasing. When Dan had first interviewed her for a job, she had firmly announced that she did not sleep with the boss. Not yet, Dan had thought, eying her with approval. Now, several years later, she was his top lawyer, and he wondered what her body looked like underneath the tailored royal blue jacket and fitted gold slacks she was wearing.
“The tribunal is ready to pass sentence,” said the woman occupying the middle chair up on the bane. Her voice was sharp, cutting. “Does the defendant have anything to say in his own behalf?”
Mitchell’s lawyer got to his feet, a tall scarecrow dressed like a funeral director. With a voice to match, he intoned sorrowfully, “The defendant deeply regrets the actions which have led to this proceeding, Your Honors. He regrets his actions so deeply, in fact, that he has divested himself of all ownership in the company that he has founded and directed, Mitchell Mining and Smelting. His remorse has led him to repudiate the ownership of his own company; this is similar to renouncing parenthood of one’s own child. It is a deeply wrenching emotional …”
“Counselor,” snapped the chief conciliator, “are you telling us that Mr. Mitchell has sold off his company?”
“Yes, Your Honor. And I respectfully request that this act of true remorse and regret be considered punishment enough for his mistaken actions of the past.”
The woman snorted disdainfully and glanced at her two male colleagues. “To whom has he sold his company?” she asked.