“You… you’re going to have his baby?” Greg was panting as if he had run a thousand meters. “His baby?”
Joanna nodded solemnly.
“Abort it! Get rid of it!”
“I can’t do that.”
“You can’t have his baby,” Greg seemed about to dissolve in tears. “Don’t you see? It’s the last straw! The final nail in my coffin.”
“No,” Joanna said. “It won’t be like that.”
“The hell it won’t! He’ll want to give the corporation to his own son, not to me!” Greg howled. “He’ll push me out of the way, and you’ll help him!” Just then the butler came in with the main course.
“Get out!” Greg screamed at him. “Get out of here!”
Wide-eyed, the butler looked to Joanna. She nodded and he disappeared back into the kitchen.
“Greg, dear,” she said soothingly, “try to calm down. This isn’t going to change anything between us.”
“It changes everything!” he snapped. “I got Brad out of the way just to make sure. But what good is that now?”
“What do you mean? What are you talking about?”
“His baby! You’re going to give him a son so he can get rid of me once and for all. He murdered my father and now you’re helping him to kill me! Even after he’s dead he’ll still be killing me!”
Greg lurched to his feet, swung one fist across the table and knocked china and glassware crashing to the floor. Joanna jerked with sudden fear. Her son was standing over her, fists clenched, murderous rage boiling through him.
“I knew he was out to get me, but I didn’t think you would help him!”
“No one’s out to get you, Greg,” Joanna said, fighting to keep her voice calm. “Now sit down and—”
“You’re all against me! All of you! Brad, him, even you. But you’ll see. I’m smarter than he is. Smarter than all of you. He’ll never come back to you. Never! I’m going to be the master here, not him!”
He reached over the table and grabbed the vase with his flowers. “I’m going to destroy him. Like this!” And, raising the glass vase over his head, he smashed it on the table top. It shattered into bits, water and flowers exploding from it.
Joanna sat there, paralyzed with shock and fear. Greg’s insane, she thought. He’s homicidal.
Shaking his fist at her, Greg bellowed, “He’s not coming back to you. He’ll never leave the Moon. Never!”
Terrified, Joanna gasped, “What are you talking about?”
“You’ll see,” he repeated. “You’re either with me or agains me now. You’ve got to decide. You get rid of my little brother and we can live just as happy as we were before Paul took you away from me. Otherwise…”
Joanna stared at her son, barely recognizing this wild-eyei maniac who stood over her so threateningly.
Abruptly, Greg strode out of the dining room, turning at the doorway to shout, “It’s your decision. Him or me. Then he left.
Joanna realized the butler was standing at the doorway to the kitchen, white-faced. She shooed him back into the kitchen.
What have I done? Joanna asked herself, looking over the dripping shambles of the dining table. I worked so hard to bring them together and now…
Greg’s gone insane. He hates me because I’m going to have Paul’s baby.
Paul wants to be on the Moon and Greg hates the sight of me, Joanna said to herself. I’m all alone. They’ll both leave me and I’ll be all alone.
No, she realized. Not alone. I have a new life within me. I’m not alone.
MARE NUBIUM
Like a madman Paul tottered on toward the glowing red beacon atop the tempo’s communications mast. Dragging his bad leg, staggering, gasping the last fumes of oxygen left in his tank, he pushed himself single-mindedly toward the safety that lay so tantalizingly just beyond the short lunar horizon.
It’s just over the horizon, he told himself. You can make it. Just over the horizon.
You know what the horizon is? taunted a voice in his head. An imaginary line that recedes as you approach it.
World peace is just over the horizon. Fusion energy is just over the horizon. The answer to all your prayers — just over the pissin’ horizon.
Through his smeared, fogged visor Paul saw that beckoning red eye rising higher and higher. He could not make out the mast itself against the black lunar sky, but he knew that with each step he was closer to safety.
Unless it’s a pissin’ star, that sardonic voice jeered at him. You could be heading for Mars, for all you know.
No, dammit, it’s the tempo. Gotta be.
Gotta be.
The ground was rising slightly. His right leg collapsed under him and he pitched forward again. This time he put out his hands as usual, but didn’t bother to push himself up to a standing position. Crawl, man. Like a little baby, down on all fours. You can make it. Just crawl right along.
He was getting dizzy, his vision blurring. Man, what I wouldn’t give for just a ten-minute break. Even five minutes.
Wouldn’t work, though’. Not unless you can hold your breath for five minutes. .
Suddenly he wanted to laugh, remembering a conversation with McPherson back when he had first become a division manager. Hie lawyer wanted Paul to make out a will. He seemed surprised that Paul had never had one.
“You’ve got to make arrangements for handling your estate,” McPherson had said, very serious.
“That’s easy,” Paul had told him. “I want to spend my last cent with my last breath.”
Coming up on your last breath pretty soon, he knew. If you’re lucky — damned motherhumpin’ shitfaced lucky — you’ll suck up the last oxygen molecule in the tank the instant you get inside the tempo’s airlock.
It almost worked out that way.
Paul looked up from his crawling and saw the mound of rubble that marked the buried shelter. He could even see the comm mast, he was so close. No hopper, though. Only a tractor sitting outside the airlock on four ludicrously thin, springy wheels.
Who gives a flyin’ fuck? he said to himself as he pushed himself to his feet and staggered, limped, hopped on his one good foot, holding his breath, reaching out with both hands and flopped into the open airlock that stood in front of the buried shelter.
He pounded the yellow-glowing phosphorescent button that activated the lock. The outside door creaked shut, although Paul could hear no sound in the lunar vacuum. He imagined the creaking as the curving door slid shut on its track, grinding stray dust particles in its path.
Bracing himself inside the phonebooth-sized airlock, Paul heard the hissing of air and even the chug of the pump. Most beautiful sounds in the world, he thought Beats Duke Ellington any day.
The overhead light went on and the indicator panel’s green light glowed to life. Trembling, hoping this wasn’t the last hallucination of a man dying of oxygen deprivation, Paul fumbled with the catch of his visor and slid it up. Sweetest air in two worlds.
He took deep lungfuls of the stuff. Next sonofabitch complains about canned air is gonna get my knuckles in his mouth, Paul promised himself.
The indicator pad told him the pressure in the airlock was high enough for him to open the inner hatch. He knew he should clean the suit first. Must be carrying six hundred pounds of dust on me.
But he was too tired, too exhilarated, too anxious to get inside the shelter and out of this foul-smelling suit even to begin vacuuming.
He opened the inner hatch, clumped in his boots down the steps into the shelter’s single compartment, wincing every time he stepped with his right foot.
It was a typical temporary shelter. A long aluminum cylinder’tthat had been laid down in a trench scooped out by a bulldozer and then buried beneath a couple of feet of loose regolith rubble to protect it from the meteoroids that pelted the Moon’s surface and the harsh swings of temperature from daylight to Anight. And from the radiation pouring in unimpeded from deep space.
Radiation. Paul wanted desperately to flop on one of the lovely, beckoning bunks that lined the far end of the shelter, I but he knew he had to worm himself out of his suit first. And check his radiation patch.