The Precipice

by Ben Bova

  “It might be best if we don’t, Martin. Not until after I return.”

  He nodded, grim-faced. Then he grasped both her wrists and said, “I love you, Amanda. I really do.”

  “I know,” she said, and kissed him swiftly, lightly, on the cheek.

  She hurried down the walk away from him so quickly that Pancho almost didn’t make it through the door before Humphries slammed it shut.

  LIVING QUARTERS

  Pancho had to sprint up the escalators to get back to the quarters she shared with Amanda before Mandy did. Twice she nearly stumbled and fell; it wasn’t easy to run up moving stairs when you can’t see your own feet.

  It was late enough that the corridors were not crowded. Pancho easily dodged around the few people still up and about, leaving a couple of them bewildered as she brushed past them; they felt certain that someone had just rushed by, yet there was no one in sight. She got to their quarters well ahead of Amanda, powered down the stealth suit as soon as she slid the door shut behind ter, stripped to her skivvies, and stuffed the suit under her bed. Elly was snoozing comfortably in her plastic cage, actually a box that still smelled faintly of the strawberries it had carried from China to Selene. Pancho had packed it with several centimeters of gritty regolith dirt, stuck in an artificial cactus, and kept a saucer of water in it for Elly’s comfort.

  She was kneeling beside the plastic box, pouring fresh water into the saucer when Amanda came in.

  Pancho looked up at her roommate. Mandy’s eyes were red, as if she’d been crying.

  “How’d your date go?” she asked, innocently.

  Looking troubled, Amanda said, “Oh, Pancho, I think he wants to marry me.”

  Pancho got to her feet. “He’s not the marrying kind.”

  “He’s been married. Twice.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  Amanda sat on her bed. “He… he’s different from any other man I’ve ever met.”

  “Yeah. He’s got more money.”

  “No, it isn’t that,” Amanda replied. “He’s…” She searched for a word.

  “Horny?” Pancho suggested.

  Amanda frowned at her. “He’s powerful There’s something in his eyes… he almost frightens me.”

  Thinking about Humphries’s home videos, Pancho nodded.

  “I can’t see him again. I simply can’t.”

  She sounded to Pancho as if she were trying to convince herself.

  “He’s so accustomed to getting whatever he wants,” Amanda said, more to herself than Pancho. “He doesn’t like being turned away, rejected.”

  “Nobody does, Mandy.”

  “But he…” Again her words faltered. “Pancho, with other men I could smile and flirt and let it go at that. But Martin won’t be satisfied with that. He wants what he wants, and if he doesn’t get it he can be… I just don’t know what he’d do, but he frightens me.”

  “You think he wants to marry you?”

  “He said he loves me.”

  “Aw hell, Mandy, guys have said that to me, too. All they want is to get into your pants.”

  “I think he really believes that he loves me.”

  “That’s a strange way to put it.”

  “Pancho, I can’t see him again. There’s no telling what he might do. I’ve got to stay away from him.”

  Pancho thought that Amanda looked scared. And she’s got plenty to be scared of, she told herself.

  First thing the following morning, Pancho phoned Dan Randolph and asked to meet with him. One of Randolph’s assistants, the big beefy-faced guy with the sweet tenor voice, said he’d call her back. In five minutes, he did. Randolph would see her in his office at ten-fifteen.

  Astro Corporation’s offices were just down the corridor from the living quarters that the company rented. In most corporations, executive country was conspicuously more luxurious than the regular troops’ territory. Not so at Astro. There was no discernible difference along the length of the corridor. As she walked along the row of doors, looking for Randolph’s name, Pancho decided that she wouldn’t tell him about the stealth suit. She’d returned it first thing that morning to Walton’s locker. Ike knew nothing of her borrowing the suit; if there was any bad fallout, he couldn’t be blamed for anything.

  Randolph looked tense when Pancho was ushered into his office by the big Aussie she’d talked to on the phone.

  “Hi, boss,” she said brightly.

  It was a small office, considering it belonged to the head of a major corporation. There was a desk in one corner, but _ Randolph was standing by the sofa and cushioned chairs arranged around a coffee table on the opposite side of the room. Pancho saw that the walls were decorated with photos of Astro rockets launching from Earth on tongues of fire and billowing smoke. Nothing personal. No pictures of Randolph himself or anyone else. Pancho grinned inwardly when she saw that Randolph’s desk was cluttered with papers, despite the computer built into it. The paperless office was still a myth, she realized.

  Gesturing to the sofa, he said, “Have a seat. Have you had breakfast?”

  Instead of sitting down, Pancho asked, “Is that a trick question? Astro employees are up at the crack of dawn every day, boss, and twice on Sundays.”

  Randolph laughed. “Coffee? Tea? Anything?”

  “Can I use your computer for a minute?” she asked.

  He looked puzzled, but said, “Sure, go ahead.” Louder, he called, “Computer, guest voice.”

  Pancho went to the desk and leaned over the upright display screen. She gave her name and the computer came to life. Within a few seconds, she waved Randolph over to look at the screen.

  He peered at the display. “What the hell’s that?”

  “Martin Humphries’s personal menu of programs.”

  “Humphries?” Randolph sank into his desk chair.

  “Yep. I hacked into his machine last night. You can tap in anytime you want.”

  Randolph looked up at Pancho, then back at his screen. “Without his knowing it?”

  “Oh, he’ll figger it out sooner or later, I guess. But right now he doesn’t know it.”

  “How the hell did you do this?”

  Pancho smiled at him. “Magic.”

  “H’mp,” Randolph grunted. “It’s a shame you couldn’t do this a few days earlier.”

  “How come?”

  “We’re partners now.”

  “You and Humphries? Partners?”

  “Humphries, Selene and Astro. We’ve formed a limited partnership: Starpower, Limited.”

  “Hot spit! Where can I buy stock?”

  “It’s not public. Duncan and his people will get a block of shares, but otherwise, it’s Humphries, me, and the good citizens of Selene. It should help keep Selene’s taxes down, if it works.”

  Feeling a bit disappointed, Pancho grumbled, “Oh, just the big boys, huh?”

  Randolph gave her a sly grin. “I suppose,” he said, running a finger across his chin, “that we’ll award a few shares here and there, for exceptional performances.”

  “Like piloting a bird to the Belt and back.”

  Randolph nodded.

  “Okay,” Pancho said, with enthusiasm. “Meanwhile, you can poke into Humphries’s files anytime you want to.”

  Randolph cleared the screen with a single, sharp, “Exit” To Pancho, he said, “You’re wasting your time jockeying spacecraft. You make a mighty fine spy, kid.”

  “I’d rather fly than spy,” she said.

  Randolph looked at her. He’s got really neat eyes, she thought. Gray, but not cold. Deep. Flecked with gold. Nice eyes.

  “I’m not sure that I want to poke into Humphries’s files,” he said.

  “No?”

  “A man named Stimson was the U.S. Secretary of State back a century or more ago,” Randolph said. “When he found out that the State Department was routinely intercepting the mail from the foreign embassies in Washington he stopped the practice. He said, ‘Gentlemen do not read each other’s m
ail.’ Or something like that”

  Pancho snorted. “Maybe you’re a gentleman, but Humphries sure ain’t”

  “I think you’re half right”

  “Which half?”

  Instead of answering, Randolph tapped a button on the phone console. The big Australian came through the door from the outer office almost instantly.

  “You two know each other?” Randolph asked. Without waiting for a reply from either of them, he said, “George Ambrose, Pancho Lane.”

  “Pleased,” said Big George. Pancho made a quick smile.

  “George, who do we have who can download a complete hard drive without letting the hard drive’s owner know it?”

  Big George glanced at Pancho, then asked, “You want this done as quiet as possible, right?”

  “Absolutely right.”

  “Then I’ll do it meself.”

  “You?”

  “Don’t look so surprised,” George said. “I used to be an engineer, before I hooked up with you.”

  “You were a fugitive from justice before you hooked up with me,” Randolph countered.

  “Yeah, yeah, but before that. I came to the Moon to tele-operate tractors up on the surface. My bloody degree’s in software architecture, for chrissakes.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Randolph said.

  “Well now you do. So what needs doing here?”

  “I’d like you to work with Pancho here. She’ll explain the problem.”

  George looked at her. “Okay. When do we start?”

  “Now,” said Randolph. Then, to Pancho, he added, “You can tell George anything you’d tell me.”

  “Sure,” Pancho agreed. But in her mind she added, Maybe.

  FACTORY #4

  “This is more like it,” said Dan.

  He heard Kris Cardenas’s nervous laughter in his helmet earphones.

  There were five of them standing on the factory floor, encased in white spacesuits like a team of astronauts or tourists out for a jaunt on the Moon’s surface. Before them, on the broad, spacious floor of the otherwise empty factory, stood a set of spherical fuel tanks, the smaller sphere of a fusion reaction chamber, and the unfinished channel of an MHD generator, all connected by sturdy-looking piping and surrounded by crates of various powdered metals and bins of soot: pure carbon dust. Dan, Cardenas and three of her nanotechnicians stood in a group, encased in their spacesuits, watching the results of the nanomachines’ceaseless work.

  It was daylight outside, Dan knew. Through the open sides of the factory he saw the brilliant sunlight glaring harshly against the barren lunar landscape. But inside the factory, with its curved roof cutting off the glow from the Sun and Earth, the components of the fusion system looked dark and dull, like the unpolished diamond that they were.

  “We start on the pumps next,” Cardenas said, “as soon as the MHD channel is finished. And then the rocket nozzles.”

  Dan heard an edge in her voice. She did not like being out on the surface. Despite all her years of living on the Moon— or maybe because of them—being outside bothered her.

  Selene’s factories were built out on the Moon’s surface, exposed to the vacuum of space, almost completely automated or run remotely by operators safe in control centers underground.

  “You okay, Kris?” he asked.

  “I’d feel better downstairs,” she answered frankly.

  “Okay, then, let’s go. I’m sorry I dragged you out here. I just wanted to see for myself how we’re doing.”

  “It’s all right,” she said, but she turned and started toward the airlock hatch and the tractor that had carried them to the factory.

  “I know that the vacuum out here is great for industrial processing,” she said, apologizing. “It just scares the bejesus out of me.”

  “Even buttoned up nice and cozy in a spacesuit?” Dan asked, walking across the factory floor alongside her.

  “Maybe it’s the suit,” she said. “Maybe I’m a closet claustrophobe.”

  Contamination was something that flatlanders from Earth took for granted. Living on a planet teeming with life, from bacteria to whales, thick with pollution from human and natural sources, and deep within a turbulent atmosphere that transports spores, dust, pollen, smog, moisture and other contaminants everywhere, cleanliness for Earthsiders was a matter of degree. That was why Dan, with his immune system weakened by the radiation doses he’d been exposed to in space, wore filter plugs and sanitary masks when he was on Earth.

  In the hard vacuum of the lunar surface, a thousand times better than the vacuum of low Earth orbit, not only was the environment clean of external pollution sources, the contaminants inside most materials could be removed virtually for free. Microscopic gas bubbles trapped inside metals per-colated out of the metal’s crystal structure and boiled off into the void. Thus Selene’s factories were out on the lunar surface, open to the purifying vacuum of the Moon.

  “We don’t need to go through the carwash again,” Dan said, touching the arm of Cardenas’s suit. “We can go straight to the tractor.”

  He walked around the bulky airlock and hopped off the concrete slab that formed the factory floor, dropping in lunar slow-motion three meters to the regolith. His boots puffed up a little cloud of dust that floated lazily up halfway to his knees.

  Cardenas came to the lip of the slab, hesitated, then jumped down to where Dan waited for her.

  Like all the lunar factories, this one was built on a thick concrete platform to keep the factory floor above the dusty ground. With no winds, there was little danger of contaminants blowing in from the outside. A curving dome of honeycomb lunar aluminum protected the factory from the constant infall of micrometeoroids and the hard radiation from the Sun and deep space.

  The most worrisome source of pollution came from the humans who occasionally entered the factories, even though they had to wear spacesuits. Before they were allowed onto the factory floor, Dan and the others had to go through the “carwash,” a special airlock equipped with electrostatic scrubbers and special powdered detergents that removed the traces of oil, perspiration and other microscopic contaminants that clung to the spacesuits’ outer surfaces.

  As the tractor slowly trundled back to Selene’s main airlock, Dan thought about what he had just seen. Before his eyes, the MHD channel was growing: slowly, he admitted, but it was visibly getting longer as the virus-sized nanoma-chines took carbon and other atoms from the supply bins and locked them into place like kids building a tinkertoy city.

  “How much longer?” he asked into the microphone built into his helmet.

  Cardenas, sitting beside him, understood his question. ‘Three weeks, if they go as programmed.”

  “Three weeks?” Dan blurted. “Looks like they’re almost finished now.”

  “They’ve still got to finish the MHD channel, which is a pretty tricky piece of work. High-current-density electrodes, superconducting magnets and all. Then comes the pumps, which is no bed of roses, and finally the rocket nozzles, which are also complex: buckyball microtubes carrying cryogenic hydrogen running a few centimeters away from a ten-thousand-degree plasma flow. Then there’s—”

  “Okay, okay,” Dan said, throwing up his gloved hands. “Three weeks.”

  “That’s the schedule.”

  Dan knew the schedule. He had been hoping for better news from Cardenas. Over the past six weeks his lawyers had hammered out the details of the new Starpower, Ltd. partnership. Humphries’s lawyers had niggled over every detail, while Selene’s legal staff had breezed through the negotiation with little more than a cursory examination of the agreement, thanks largely to Doug Stavenger’s prodding.

  So now it was all in place. Dan had the funding to make the fusion rocket a reality, and he still had control of Astro Manufacturing. Astro was staggering financially, but Dan calculated that the company could hold together until the profits from the fusion system started rolling in.

  Still, he constantly pushed Cardenas to go faster. It was goin
g to be a tight race: Astro had already started construetion of its final solar power satellite. When that one’s finished, Dan knew, we go sailing over the disaster curve. No new space construction contracts in sight.

  “Can’t this buggy go any faster?” Cardenas asked, testily.

  “Full throttle, ma’am,” said the imperturbable technician at the controls.

  To take her mind off her fears of being out in the open, Dan asked her, “Did you see this morning’s news from Earthside?”

  “The food riots in Delhi? Yeah, I saw it.”

  “They’re starving, Kris. If the monsoon fails again this year there’s going to be a monster famine, and it’ll spread a long way.”

  “Not much we can do about,” Cardenas said.

  “Not yet,” Dan muttered.

  “They got themselves into this mess,” she said tightly, “breeding like hamsters.”

  She’s really bitter, Dan thought. I wonder how she’d feel if her husband and kids had decided to stay on the Moon with her. With a sigh, he admitted, She’s got plenty to be bitter about.

  Big George was waiting for Dan in his private office, sitting on the sofa, a sheaf of printouts scattered across the coffee table.

  “What’s all this?” Dan asked, sitting in the chair at the end of the coffee table. When George sat on the couch there really wasn’t much room for anyone else.

  “Stuff I lifted from Humphries’s files,” George said, his red-bearded face wrinkled with worry. “He’s out for your balls, y’know.”

  “I know.”

  Tapping a blunt finger on the pile of printouts, George said, “He’s buyin’ every share of Astro stock he can get his hands on. Quietly. No greenmail, no big fuss, but he’s pushin’ his brokers to buy at any price.”

  “Great,” Dan grunted. “Maybe the damned stock will go up a little.”

  George grinned. “That’d be good. Been in free fall long enough.”

  “You’re not thinking of selling, are you?”

  With a laugh, George replied, “The amount I’ve got? Wouldn’t make any difference, one way or the other.”

  Dan was not amused. “If you ever do want to sell, you come to me first, understand? I’ll buy at the market price.”