Eighteen board members took their places around the long table. Arnold called for discussion of the nominations. The board members shifted uneasily in their chairs, looked at one another. No one wanted to be first.
“I presume,” Arnold said, seizing the initiative, “that you are still in favor of keeping Moonbase going, Paul?”
Nodding solemnly, Paul replied, “The future of this corporation is in space, and Moonbase holds the key to profitable space commerce.”
“But the government’s backed away from it,” Arnold pointed out. “If they won’t do it, why should we? After all, they can print money; we have to earn it.” He made a rictus of a smile to indicate humor.
Paul hesitated, as if carefully considering his answer, even though he knew exactly what he wanted to say. After a couple of heartbeats he began, “Washington is giving us an opportunity to develop this new frontier without a lot of government red tape tying our hands. The politicians have finally realized that they can’t run anything at a profit. But we can! And we will — eventually.”
“How long is eventually?” one of the older board members asked. “I don’t have all that much time to wait.”
Paul smiled patiently. “Several years, at least. We’re talking about developing a new frontier here. How long did it take Pittsburgh to become the steel center of the world? How long did it take to make air travel profitable?”
“It’s still not profitable!”
“The Clipperships are profitable,” Paul pointed out.
No one contradicted him.
“I know it’s asking a lot to back Moonbase on our own, but believe me, this is the key to our future. I believe that, as firmly as I believed that the Clipperships would make money for us.”
Joanna asked, “Isn’t the government willing to pay whoever operates Moonbase to keep the scientific work going?”
Nodding, Paul replied, That’s right. Washington’s willing to support six scientists at Moonbase. It’s not very much money, but it’s a baseline commitment.
“And if we decide not to continue with Moonbase,” one of the other directors asked, “what happens to those scientists?”
“Moonbase operations will be offered to any other corporation that wants to bid on the base. If nobody bids, the base is shut down and all work on the Moon comes to an end.”
“You’re fully committed to keeping Moonbase open?” Joanna asked him.
“Totally,” said Paul. “Take me, take Moonbase with me. One and inseparable.”
“Now and forever,” muttered a voice further down the table.
The vote was an anticlimax. Arnold claimed that he had Greg’s proxy. The only other vote for Greg came from Melissa Hart. Paul Scavenger was elected president and chief operating officer of Masterson Aerospace Corporation by a vote of sixteen to three.
“Congratulations,” smiled the comptroller. “Now when is the wedding going to take place?”
MARE NUBIUM
Some wedding, Paul said to himself as he sweated across the lunar regolith. Like another pissing board meeting, only bigger. The biggest society bash in Savannah. They all came out of curiosity. Too soon after Gregory’s death, they all whispered. Bad taste. But they all came and sipped the champagne and ogled at the daughter of one of the oldest families in Georgia actually marrying a black man. Lawdy, lawdy, what would Miz Scarlett say?
The whole board of directors showed up for the wedding. All except Greg. And Melissa. Joanna planned every detail, even picked the comptroller to be my best man. So what? I had enough on my dish. Pissing company was in even worse shape than I’d thought. I could see right at the outset that saving Moonbase was going to be a bitch and a half.
It was always there, the race thing. Even at MIT the blacks had their own clubs and cliques. Had to. Nobody hung WHITES ONLY signs in the halls, but everybody knew who was who and what was what. The classes and labs were one thing: performance counted there. It was the social life where they cut you. And Paul got cut both ways. He wasn’t black enough to suit the militants; he was too black to please most of the whites. Especially when he dated white women.
Learning tp fly was something else, though. Alone in a plane Paul could get away from everything and everyone, at least for a couple of hours. More than once he would squint up at the blue sky and see the pale ghost of the Moon riding out beyond his wing tip.
I’m on my way, he would say to the distant Moon. I’ll be with you in a few years.”
Something was wrong with his left boot It was rubbing his heel raw. A pang of fear burned through his gut. He saw Wojo again, screaming as the nanobugs ate his suit and his flesh. And Tink, screeching like a terrified monkey in a leopard’s jaws. Forget about the pissin’ nanobugs! Paul raged silently. It’s nothing but a lousy fitting boot, he insisted to himself.
He was trying not to limp, despite the pain in his left heel every time he set his foot down. It felt awkward, walking that way.
And then his boot slipped.
If he had fallen forward, just tripped and gone down face-first, he would have had plenty of time to put out his hands, stop the fall, and push himself up to his feet again. Even in the cumbersome surface suit, the Moon’s gravity was so slight that he could have done that. It was an old trick among the “Lunatics,” done to impress newcomers: pretend you’re going to go splat on your face, then push yourself up to a standing position before the tenderfoot can holler, “Look out!”
But Paul’s foot skidded out from under him on a suddenly slick piece of exposed rock and he fell over backward, onto his life-support backpack and oxygen tank, banged down heavily and skidded, yowling sudden pain and fear, down a slope so gradual he hadn’t even noticed it a moment before.
His head banged inside his helmet, his vision blurred. He tasted blood in his mouth. For long moments he lay panting, dizzy, blinking to clear his eyes. Gradually he took stock. He was lying on his right side, his arm pinned under him, the bulky backpack and oxygen tank pressing against the back of his suit.
Shakily he lifted his left arm to look at the displays. No red lights. Everything still in the green. He listened carefully. Nothing but the air fans whining and his own labored breathing. No hisses. No leaks. He hoped.
He pushed himself up to a sitting position, grateful that he weighed only one-sixth of what he would on Earth.
He was at the bottom of a shallow pit with sides sloped so gradually that you had to be inside it to realize it was a depression at all. Absently, he ran a gloved hand along the stony ground. Smooth as glass. Must be an old crater; a really old one, smoothed down by the infalling meteoric dust for Christ knows how long.
It was a struggle to get to his feet. Once erect, he saw that the pit was slightly deeper than his own height and some forty-fifty feet across. Got to get up this slippery slope, he told himself. Not going to be easy.
Shifting the backpack’s weight on his shoulders, Paul crouched over and placed his gloved hands on the bare rock. Four legs are better than two for this, he told himself. Slowly, with enormous care, he picked his way up the gradual slope. It felt like walking on glass. Or ice. For a crazy moment Paul thought back to his one and only ice-skating lesson, when he’d been a teenager. Split his eyebrow open in a fall that ended his interest in skating forever.
Easy now, he commanded himself. Don’t slide down. You don’t have any time to waste playing around in here.
His boots slipped and skidded, barely providing any traction at all. Paul bent his face closer to the stone, looking for rough patches, bumps, anything that could provide purchase. He was grateful that the Sun was still low enough in the sky to throw long shadows; made it easier to see where he could plant his feet and get something to push against.
Just as he reached one hand across the rim of the crater his foot slipped and he started to slide backward. He clung desperately to the slightly raised edge of the crater, grabbed with his other hand and hung on to keep himself from sliding all the way back to the bottom.