“You’re going to have to see her,” Joanna said.
“Yes,” he said, feeling the desperation creeping into his bones. “Yes, I suppose I will.”
“Would you like me to be with you when you do?”
What to answer? Greg wondered. I can’t tell my mother that I’m afraid to see Melissa by myself. But I am! I don’t want to see her, I don’t want to be anywhere near her. She’s bringing me nothing but pain, I know it, I can feel it.
“Well?” Joanna insisted.
“Yes,” Greg blurted. “I think it would be better if you were present when I talked with her.”
“Good. I do too.”
Doug didn’t forget about Melissa, but he relegated her presence at Moonbase to a corner of his mind. He had more important things to do.
He brought Bianca and Lev Brudnoy to his room and imaged on his Windowall the LTV sitting on its pad.
“She’s a beauty,” Doug said, beaming at the picture on the screen. “Only been used for seventy-two flights; practically new.”
Brudnoy scratched at his beard. “I’ve always wondered why Americans tend to personalize their machinery. It looks like any other LTV, to me.”
Bianca was more practical. “Okay, how long are we going to let it sit out there?”
“I’ve requisitioned a dome for it,” said Doug. “The machine shop’s putting it together now.”
“So we put up the dome over the landing pad?”
“No, that’d interfere with the rocket port operation too much. We put up the dome a half-mile away from the pad and tow the LTV to it.”
“We’re going to work on the ship in spacesuits?” Brudnoy asked.
“No, the dome will be pressurized.”
“But we’ll need suits to get to and from, won’t we?” asked Bianca.
Doug admitted it with a shrug. “Can’t be helped. There’s no space inside the base to work on it”
“The main garage? Is the ceiling high enough?”
“I checked. Ceiling’s okay, we can just about squeeze her in, but there’s not enough room for the LTV when all the tractors are inside.”
“But at least half of them are left outside, usually,” said Brudnoy.
Shaking his head, Doug told them, “I know. I asked Greg about it, but he just scrolled up the regulations on his screen. The main garage’s got to be able to house all the tractors in an emergency.”
“What kind of emergency?” Brudnoy asked.
“Solar flare,” Bianca and Doug answered in unison.
“So your technicians will have to spend an hour getting into spacesuits and then walk or ride half a mile past the rocket port to work on our LTV,” said Brudnoy.
— ’They can work in their shirtsleeves once they’re inside the dome, “Doug pointed out.
Brudnoy sighed. “And then spend another hour getting back into their suits to go home again.”
Doug spread his hands helplessly. “What else can we do, Lev? You know how much work it takes to carve out extra space underground. We can’t blast out the space we need with plasma torches; it’d take too long and too much effort. The dome’s our best bet.”
“I presume you’ve run all the numbers through your computer,” Brudnoy said drily.
“Frontwards and backwards,” said Doug. “I’ve gone through every option I could think of. The dome’s our best choice.”
“I just hate all that extra work of getting into the suits,” the Russian muttered.
“It’s the prebreathing that takes most of the time,” Bianca said. “If the suits ran at the same pressure that the base does we could zip into them in half the time.”
“Well, they don’t,” said Doug, “and it takes time to breathe the excess nitrogen out of your system.”
Brudnoy’s pouchy eyes looked even sadder than usual.
With a grin, Doug added, “When I’m director of Moonbase I’ll start our people working on suits that run at normal base pressure, so you’ll be able to hop into them in a couple of minutes.”
Bianca shook her head. “You’d think after all these years somebody would’ve already done that.”
“Not much need for it,” said Doug. “What kind of an emergency could come up so suddenly that you need to jump into a suit in a few minutes?”
Brudnoy nodded. “True enough. I’ve been here more than twenty years and I’ve never seen such an emergency.”
Doug nodded.
“On the other hand,” the Russian went on, “it’s going to slow down our work tremendously. Isn’t there some way we can put up a pressurized access tube to the dome?”
“A mile-long tube?” Bianca asked.
“Wait!” said Doug. “Why don’t we pressurize one of the tractors? Couldn’t we put the crew module from the LTV itself onto a tractor? That way we can take three or four people at a time out to the dome in their shirtsleeves.” ’Yeah!” Bianca cheered. “That could work.” Brudnoy was more reserved. “Check it out on your computer, my friend. Don’t celebrate until the engineering program tells us it can be done.”
“It’s good to see you again, Greg,” said Melissa.
“It’s been a long time,” he said, staring at her from behind his desk. She looks awful, Greg thought. Her face is still beautiful, but it’s like a death mask, a skull, her skin is stretched so tight over the bones it’s a wonder she can open her mouth. And she’s so thin! As if she’s been a prisoner of war all these years.
She wore a shapeless gray pants suit, its jacket falling halfway to her knees. When she sat in front of Greg’s desk and crossed her long legs, he saw that the trousers ended in stirrups that looped under her weighted boots.
It was Melissa’s eyes that frightened Greg. He saw fury in them, hot red rage. He remembered the last time he had been with Melissa, when he had told her they were through. Her eyes were red then, too, but with tears and pleading. I turned my back on her and she’s never forgiven me for it, Greg realized. All these years she’s been hating me.
He turned to his mother, sitting beside Melissa. Joanna was outwardly cool and controlled, but Greg knew that she was just as tense as he was. He could see it in the way Joanna was nervously fingering the ends of the flowered silk scarf she was wearing.
Greg had to swallow before he could bring his voice back. “I understand that you’re working for Rashid now, with the new corporation.”
Melissa’s chin dipped a bare centimeter. “That’s right”
Greg opened his mouth again but no words came out He didn’t know what to say. He looked up at the ceiling, menacingly low.
Joanna prompted, “Rashid’s pushing the fusion program, isn’t he?”
“I’m not here to talk to you-two about Rashid or his programs or anything like that.’Melissa said, her eyes flaring.
“Then what?” asked Joanna.
She focused those laser-beam eyes on Greg. This is the man who abandoned me, she thought, staring at him. The man I begged to stay with me. The man I thought I loved. The man whose child I was going to have. A wave of self-loathing swept over her, made her shudder visibly. I pleaded with him! I got down on my knees and begged him! And he turned his back on me. He walked away, the cold-hearted sonofabitch. He knew I was pregnant with his baby and he just walked away from both of us.
“Murder,” she whispered.
I murdered my own baby. You made me do it, the two of you. You threw me out like so much garbage. I aborted the baby. I committed murder.
“What are you talking about?” Joanna demanded.
Greg knew.
Melissa pointed a skeletal finger at him. “You murdered Paul Stavenger. You used nanomachines to kill him.”
“That’s nonsense!” Joanna snapped.
“Is it?”
Greg couldn’t answer. He couldn’t speak. He gripped the armrests of his swivel chair and stared in growing horror at Melissa. It’s all coming back. It’s all rising up again, all around me, walling me in, smothering me.
“I have Jack Killifer’s sworn statement,” Melissa was saying, her voice cold and hard as ice. “He gave you a sample of nanomachines that attacked long-chain carbon molecules. Gobblers, he called them.”