Water. Just a dribble, and it was warm and flat. But it tasted better than champagne to him.
He took another sip. Still had to suck hard, but at least some water was flowing now. The connection had been dislodged when he fell and now it was back in place. Okay.
“Okay,” he said aloud, his throat not so parched now. “Let’s get on with it.”
He started off again, still using the trail of his own boot prints to point him in the right direction. The glare of the sun made him want to squint, even behind the heavily tinted visor.
Ten more miles,” he said. “Okay, maybe twelve. Could be less, though. Hard to tell.”
He trudged on, boots kicking up soft clouds of dust that fell languidly in the gentle gravity of the Moon. His mind turned back to Greg. Nanomachines. The sonofabitch turned them into a murder weapon. Kid’s brilliant. Crazy but brilliant. Will he turn on Joanna? Will he try to kill his own mother? How crazy is he? Or is it all a very clever scheme to get what he’s always wanted — total control of the corporation. Total control of his mother. Total control of Melissa, too.
Melissa. Paul thought about her as pushed himself across the barren rocky plain. Sweet silky Melissa. I knew she’d be my downfall. I knew it, but I let it happen anyway.
SAN FRANCISCO
Paul’s tour of the corporation’s divisions took him to Houston Denver, Los Angeles and finally to the struggling nano technology division in San Jose, squarely in the dilapidated heart of what had once been called Silicon Valley.
Joanna stayed in Savannah. They had not made love since the ill-starred trip to the space station. The night after Greg’s confrontation over the videodisk, Joanna had flinched when Paul had touched her in bed.
“Not now,” she said. “I just can’t.”
Trying not to feel angry, Paul leaned against the pillows and grumbled, “You’re acting as if I did kill Gregory.”
Joanna turned to face him. “Maybe we did, Paul. In a way.”
Paul started to shake his head.
“He found out about us,” Joanna said. “That might have driven him to kill himself. We’re responsible.”
The hell we are.”
“Why else would he do it?” she asked, her voice filled with anxiety. Yet her eyes were dry and clear. “Unless Greg’s right and somebody actually did murder him?”
“He blew his own brains out,” Paul insisted.
“But why?”
Paul thought a moment. “Good question. I’ll ask McPherson to look into it.”
“What do you mean?”
“There must have been some reason for Gregory’s suicide. And I don’t mean us. Let McPherson hire some investigators. There’s a lot about Gregory’s life that we don’t know about.”
Joanna’s face hardened. “There’s a lot about his life that I don’t want to know about. Not the details.”
“Okay. But I want to know the details. I want to know if there’s anything there that could be a reason for his killing himself.”
“Such as?”
“How the hell would I know? Let McPherson look into it.”
Joanna agreed — hesitantly, Paul thought. But they didn’t make love that night, nor any night afterward until Paul left on his swing of visits to the corporation’s facilities across the country.
Paul was surprised to see Bradley Arnold at the Houston division. The chairman of the board was sitting in the division manager’s office when Paul arrived. He looked uneasy, his bulging frog’s eyes darting back and forth between Paul and the division chief, who was coming around his desk, his hand extended to Paul.
“I didn’t know you were coming here, Brad,” Paul said as he shook hands with the youthful division manager. “I could have flown you out in my plane.”
“I’m on my way to a meeting in Tokyo,” Arnold said, fiddling with his ill-fitting toupee nervously.
“Tokyo? By way of Houston?” Paul forced himself to chuckle as he sat beside the chairman in front of the manager’s desk. Arnold refused to fly in the Clipperships. He would take all day to get from Savannah to Tokyo on his private supersonic jet rather than make the jump in forty minutes aboard a Clippership.
“I wanted to stop off here and talk with you,” Arnold replied. Turning to the manager, he added, “In private.”
The manager took the hint and excused himself. Once he shut the office door behind him, Paul asked, “What’s this all about, Brad?”
Radiating earnestness out of his florid face, Arnold said, “I know it looked as if I were on Greg’s side, back there at the house—”
“It sure did,” said Paul.
“But I’m on your side, Paul. I want you to understand tha and believe it.”
Yeah, Paul said to himself. And Brutus loved Caesar so much he stabbed him.
“I wanted that meeting to be a reconciliation between you two. I had no idea Greg was going to make the demand he did.”
“You didn’t seem terribly surprised,” Paul said.
“Oh, but I was!”
“If I remember correctly, you told me that you were going to play Greg’s videodisk for the rest of the board members.”
“I had no choice!” Arnold pleaded. “Greg’s going to do it anyway, so I went along with him. How can I act as a mediate between the two of you if he doesn’t trust me?”
Paul looked into Arnold’s hyperthyroid eyes and saw nothing but ambition. He’s playing both sides of the street or trying to. If Greg can shove me out of the corporation, Brad runs the show. Greg’ll be CEO but Brad will be pulling the kid’s strings. If I hang in and beat Greg, the bastard wants me to believe that he’s been on my side all along.
“All right,” Paul said calmly. “What are you going to do about the disk?”
Arnold spread his chubby hands in a gesture of helplessness. “What can I do? Greg’s determined to show it to each and every member of the board. All I can do is try to downplay it, tell them that Gregory had turned into a paranoid alcoholic and committed suicide.”
Pouncing on that, Paul demanded, “You’ll say that to the board?”
Arnold nodded.
“In front of Greg?”
“Yes.”
Thinking swiftly, Paul said, “All right, then. Can you call an emergency meeting of the board as soon as I get back from this trip? Let’s get this out in the open and finish it, once and for all.”
Bobbing his head up and down, Arnold said, “The quarterly meeting is due—”
“I don’t want to wait for the quarterly meeting,” Paul snapped. “Call a special meeting and play the videodisk for them all at the same time, before Greg can get to them.”
“I think he’s trying to meet each board member individually,” Arnold said, “and show the disk to each of them in private.”
“All the more reason for speed, then. Set up an emergency meeting right now.” Paul pointed to the phone console on the manager’s desk.
“Yes, good thinking.” The board chairman pushed himself out of his chair and went to the phone.
Nodding, satisfied, Paul got up and headed for the door. “Thanks, Brad,” he called over his shoulder. “Have a good meeting in Tokyo.”
Arnold waved to Paul, the phone receiver in his other hand. But as soon as Paul left him alone in the office, he phoned Gregory Masterson III in Savannah.
Melissa Hart was also at the Houston plant. She told Paul she had come to help negotiate new work rules for the factory that was being converted from making commercial airliners to building Clipperships.
She was at the Los Angeles facility, too. And then, when he got to San Francisco, Paul saw her walk into the lounge at the Stanford Court.
No one who could afford to avoid it stayed overnight in San Jose: despite all the efforts at rebuilding the area after the economic collapse that had swept the American computer industry at the turn of the century, the slums were still dangerous and dirty. The corporation’s travel office booked Paul into the Stanford Court Hotel in the heart of San Francisco.
The nanotechnology division was Greg’s special baby; his father had let Greg pump money into a nascent technology even though any hope of profitability was years, maybe decades, away. The board of directors had tried more than once to admit defeat and close the division down. Then they wanted to move it away from San Jose, to a’safer’ location in Nevada.