“Good.”
“But we’ve got to do Operation Bootstrap if we’re going to keep Moonbase alive.”
“Moonbase is a continuing drain on the corporation’s finances.”
“Greg, this isn’t about money! It’s much more-’ ›
“Don’t be childish,” Greg snapped. “It’s always about money. There isn’t anything else.”
“But—”
“But nothing! If I don’t show a profit the board will shut us down, just like that.” Greg snapped his fingers. “Is that what you want?”
“No,” said Doug quietly. “But it’s what you want, isn’t it?”
Greg stared at him.
“You didn’t take the directorship here to save us, Greg. You came up here to kill Moonbase.”
Doug saw his brother flinch at the word ’kill.” I shouldn’t have said it, he told himself. But it’s too late now.
“Moonbase is Mom’s pet project,” Greg said slowly, his voice low and trembling. “She’s been nursing it along for more than twenty years now. But there’s no rationale to keep it going. It’s a drain on the corporation.”
With a shake of his head, Doug replied, “There’s more involved here than the quarterly profit-and-loss statement, Greg.”
“You still don’t see—”
“No, you don’t see,” Doug said, raising his voice slightly. “Moonbase has been tottering on the brink of extinction ever since it started. I know that. I also know that if we’re limited to supplying raw materials for the orbital factories we’ll always be on the ragged edge. Always!”
“What do you mean, limited?”
“We’ve got to expand our operations! We’ve got to make ourselves self-sufficient and move beyond just being a mining operation. Being self-sufficient means more than just having enough water to go around, Greg. We’ve got to be able to manufacture everything we need, right here at Moonbase, without needing imports from Earthside.”
“In your dreams,” Greg muttered.
“We can do it! I know we can! But we’ve got to start now. We’ve all got to work together on this.”
Is he really that naive, Greg wondered, or is he just trying to manipulate me?
Taking a deep breath and sitting up straighter, Greg said firmly, “When my term here is over, I’m going to recommend to the board that Moonbase be shut down.”
“But we can turn things around,” Doug urged.
Exasperated, Greg burst out, “Do you have any idea of what you’d need to mine an asteroid? This isn’t some game! Get real!”
Strangely, instead of getting angry, Doug smiled. “Greg, I’ve calculated every detail of the job. I’ve run it through our logistics and engineering programs. I can even tell you the exact date on which we’ll make rendezvous with 2015-eta.”
“With what?”
“That’s the best asteroid for our purposes. When you trade off its nearest-approach distance against the eccentricity and inclination of its orbit—”
Doug blathered on about the asteroid while Greg sat, seething. I didn’t want Mom here, he reminded himself, because she’d side with him and not me. I wanted to confront him face-to-face, all by ourselves. But now he’s pulling out all this technical garbage to show how much more he knows than I do.
“Hold it!” Greg snapped.
Doug stopped in mid-sentence.
“Now listen to this and believe it: Nothing new is getting started at this base. I’m willing to let the mass-driver job continue, but that’s just because we might be able to sell the facility to the Japanese once it’s finished.”
“Sell it?”
“Or sell the know-how. Yamagata could buy the nanobugs and build their own mass driver for themselves.”
“Maybe Yamagata will want to buy Moonbase,” Doug thought aloud. “The whole base.”
“Maybe,” Greg agreed, with a cold smile. “I hadn’t thought of that possibility. They just might be fanatic enough.”
“But otherwise you’ll shut’down Moonbase.”
“What choice do we have? The U.N.’s nanotech treaty will wipe out the base anyway.”
“So the deal with Kiribati is just a fake?” Doug asked.
“I’ll take care of the Kiribati deal. You don’t have to worry about it.”
“You’re just doing it to keep Mom happy.”
I’m doing it,” Greg said icily, “so that we’ll have a place to continue nanotech work, despite the U.N. treaty.” Before Doug could reply he added, “We don’t need Moonbase or even space stations to use nanotechnology. I can make Kiribati a very wealthy nation, using nanotechnology.”
“If the U.N. doesn’t pressure them into quitting,” Doug said. “Or the New Morality doesn’t bomb the islands.”
Greg glared at him.
“So you’re really going to shut down Moonbase,” said Doug.
“That’s right. And you can run to Mom and tell her all about it. I don’t care. My mind’s made up.”
“You’re making a mistake, Greg. A horrible mistake.”
Raising his voice nearly to a shout, Greg insisted, “Doug, I won’t have it! Stop this crap here and now! Moonbase is history! It’s dead!”
Doug looked shocked. For the first time since he’d sauntered into the office, he looked upset, almost fearful. Greg nodded, satisfied. That wiped the self-satisfied smile off his face.
“I’ve made my decision and that’s it,” Greg said. “Moonbase is history and there’s nothing you or Mom or anyone else can do to save it.”
Doug studied his older brother’s face for several silent moments. There’s no sense arguing with him, he realized. His mind’s made up. He’s in no mood to consider the facts.
“All right.” Slowly, Doug got up from the web chair. “You’re the boss.”
Greg’s smile widened slightly. “I’m glad you understand that.”
Doug walked to the door. He knew he shouldn’t, but he turned back and said, “But if Moonbase is dead, it’s because you’ve murdered it.”
Greg wanted to scream at the impudent young snot, but for just a flash of a second he thought he saw Paul Stavenger standing at the door and not his son. Looking at him accusingly. Greg blinked and it was Doug again. With the same accusing stare.
Before Greg could reply, Doug opened the door and stepped through.
“It’s always darkest just before the dawn,” Doug muttered to himself. It didn’t cheer him one bit.
Surprised and stung by Greg’s stubborn refusal to listen to reason, Doug did what he often did when he felt troubled. He went to the main airlock, pulled on a space suit, and went out for a walk on the crater floor.
The Sun was down; dawn would not come for another several hours, but it was never truly dark at Alphonsus’ latitude. The Earth hung up in the sky, glowing warm and bright, deep blue oceans and swirls of clean white clouds. Doug saw mat Earth was nearly at its full phase. He could clearly see the southwestern U.S. desert and the cloud-shaded California coast. On the other side of the Pacific the tight spiral of a powerful typhoon was approaching the Philippines.
Greg’s acting like he’s brain-dead, Doug told himself. He’s made up his mind and he doesn’t want to be bothered with the facts.
A tractor trundled past him, kicking up dust.
“Need a lift?” Doug heard in his helmet earphones.
“Thanks, no.”
The tractor lumbered past him, on its way out to the mass driver site. Doug walked slowly in that direction, thinking that up until a few months ago you could walk almost anywhere you wanted to out here on the crater floor and be happily alone. Except for the rocket port, of course, but you could avoid that easily enough if you wanted to.
Not anymore, he saw. The mass driver project was turning this part of the crater floor into a busy, bustling conglomeration of tractors and nanotech crews in dust-spattered space suits.
The mass driver. An electric catapult more than two miles long that accelerates packets of lunar ore to more than a hundred gees injffew seconds. With luck, they’ll finish it just in time to close down the whole base.
Tractors with bulldozer blades on their fronts were smoothing a road between the main airlock and the mass driver site, scraping aside the dark top layer of the regolith to reveal the bright, new-looking stuff beneath. Doug followed the churned-up turmoil of their tracks until he could clearly see the driver itself rising from the dusty, pockmarked ground like a low metal finger pointed at the horizon.