“White on one side and gold on the other?”
“I took it along with your vidcam, and then left it in my quarters,” Rhee said, looking even more puzzled. “But it’s disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” Doug sat up straighten.
“It was on my bureau yesterday, but now it’s gone.”
“Are you sure—”
“Of course I’m sure!” she snapped.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” — he laid. “Has anybody else been in your quarters?”
Rhee shook her head. But before she could say anything, the door to Doug’s cubicle slid back and Joanna stepped through. Even in ordinary blue coveralls she radiated power and decision. Zimmerman waddled in behind her, still in his rumpled three-piece suit with the lab coat thrown over it.
Rhee hopped off the bed. “I’m glad you feel so well, Doug,” she said. Impulsively, she darted forward and gave Doug a peck on the cheek, then rushed past Joanna and Zimmerman and left the room.
“Who’s that?” Joanna demanded.
“The woman who saved my life,” said Doug.
Joanna frowned, while Zimmerman smiled bemusedly.
“Does that give her the right to kiss you?” Joanna asked sharply.
“Oh come on, Mom! It was just a friendly little smack.”
“You don’t have to feel obligated to somebody for doing their job,” Joanna said.
Doug laughed lightly. “Simmer down, Mom. She’s just a friend. I hardly even know her, actually.”
Zimmerman eyed him thoughtfully. “Perhaps the nano-machines enhance your sexual attractiveness, hah?”
Doug frowned at the old man. “You must be Dr. Zimmerman, right?”
“Yah.” Zimmerman clicked his heels and bowed slightly, his paunch making it difficult to go farther.
“How soon can I get out of here?” Doug asked. “I feel fine. Terrific, in fact”
Glancing at the monitors over Doug’s bed, Zimmerman said, “Another few hours. There are some tests I must do. Then you get out of bed and I leave this glorified cave and return to civilization.”
Joanna paced over to the other side of the bed. “Do you really feel fine?”
“Like I said, terrific. Really.”
His mother looked across the bed at Zimmerman. Doug saw tears in her eyes. “You’ve saved him.”
The sloppy old man shrugged, suddenly too embarrassed to say anything.
And Doug realized the enormity of what had happened to him. I would have died, he told himself. Under any normal circumstances I would be dead now.
He looked at Zimmerman with different eyes and saw a man of strength and vigor and the kind of passion that dares to challenge anyone, everyone who stands in the way between him and his life’s work. Governments had outlawed nanotherapy. Ignorant mobs had burned nanolabs and killed researchers. But Zimmerman plugged doggedly ahead, despite all of that. Doug understood that even a fat old man can be heroic.
“You’ve given me life,” Doug said.
“No,” Zimmerman said, shaking his head slowly. “Your mother gave you life. I have merely helped you to keep it. And perhaps prolong it.”
“If there’s anything we can do,” Joanna said stiffly, “you only have to name it.”
“I have already informed you of my price, Madam.”
Joanna’s expression hardened. “Yes, you have, haven’t you?”
“What I have already gained will be payment enough. Plus transportation back to Basel, of course.”
“Of course,” said Joanna. She was positively glaring at the old man now.
Doug realized that their conversation, back and forth across his bed, dealt with things he didn’t know about.
“What’s the price?” he asked. “What are you two talking about?”
Joanna tore her gaze from Zimmerman and looked down at her son: so young, so innocent and unknowing.
“She is referring, young man, to the fact that you will not be allowed to leave the Moon.”
“For how long?” Doug asked.
“Forever,” blurted Joanna.
“You are a walking nahomachine factory now,” said Zimmerman. “No nation on Eartb will allow you entry.”
Doug turned from Zimmerman, who looked gravely concerned, to his mother, who looked angry and fearful and almost tearfully sad.
“Is that all?” he asked. “I have to stay here on the Moon? That’s what I wanted to do anyway.7
It was supposed to be Jinny Anson’s going-away party. And it was supposed to be a surprise. But when Anson stepped into the darkened biolab, led by the hand by Lev Brudnoy, and they snapped on the lights and everybody yelled, “Surprise!” Anson took it all in her stride.
“You are not surprised,” Brudnoy said, disappointed, as well-wishers pressed drinks into their hands.
Anson fixed him with a look. “What kind of a base director would I be if I didn’t know what you guys were plotting?”
“Ah,” said Brudnoy. “Of course.”
She was surprised, though, when a dozen of the women started handing her wedding presents. Little things, made at Moonbase of lunar raw materials or cast-off equipment. A digital clock set to Universal Mean Time that told when lunar sunrise and sunset would be. A hotplate of cermet salvaged from a junked lander. A vial of lunar glass filled with regolith sand.
Halfway through the wedding gifts, Jack Killifer showed up and the party quickly centered around the new hero. Just as Anson had predicted, the women clustered around Jack, who had shaved and showered and put on a crisp new jumpsuit for the party.
Even as she continued to unwrap presents, Anson scanned the growing crowd for the astronomer, Rhee. No sign of her. Busted romance? she wondered. Or is the kid too shy to come to the party? She sneaks off every now and then. I thought she just wanted to be alone, but maybe she’s already got a boyfriend tucked away someplace.
Not likely, Anson thought. Rhee’s not much of a looker and she’s too timid to go out and grab a guy for herself.
One of the lab benches had been turned into a bar. Anson wondered if the illicit still had been stashed in this lab all along; certainly they had all the right equipment for it, plumbing and glassware and enough chemical stores to plaster the whole base. The noise level climbed steadily: people talking at the top of their lungs, laughing, drinking. And then somebody turned on a music disk. The display screens along the walls all began to flash psychedelic colors and the lab quivered under the heavy thumping beat and sharp bleating whine of an adenoidal singer.
Couples paired off for dancing. Killifer seemed to be having the time of his life. Anson staggered away from the ear-splitting music, out into the tunnel where the party had spilled over.
Brudnoy was sitting on the floor with half a dozen others. Anson put her back to the wall and let herself slide down to a sitting position, careful not to spill a drop of her beaker of booze.
“You are not reigning at your own party?” Brudnoy asked. Even out here in the tunnel he had to half-shout to be heard over the music.
“Everybody’s having a great time,” she said.
“Are you?”
“Sure.”
“Truly?”
“Yes, of course.”
Brudnoy looked at her with his sad, bleary eyes. “I think you will miss us.”
“Of course I’ll miss you.”
“Will your husband come up here with you? Brudnoy asked.
Anson shook her head. “I’m not coming back, Lev. I told you that. I’m starting a new life.”
“In Texas.”
“Just outside of Austin, actually,” she said, straining her throat to get the words out over the party noise. “In the hill country.”
“The land of enchantment, they say.”
“That’s New Mexico.”
“Oh.”
“But the Texas hill country is beautiful. Air you can breathe. Mountains and valleys and land that goes on forever. Flowers! When the bluebonnets bloom it’s gorgeous. And a blue sky with white clouds. Clean and wonderful.”
“Not like Moonbase.”
“Not at all like Moonbase.”
“And you really want to leave all this behind you?” Brudnoy made a sweep with his arm.
Anson knew he was kidding. Half kidding, at least. That sweep of his arm took in not merely this crowded underground warren of labs and workshops and cramped undersized living quarters. It took in the ancient ringwall mountains and the cracked crater floor, the vast tracts of Mare Nubium and the Ocean of Storms, the slow beauty of a lunar sunrise and the way the regolith sparkled when the sunshine first hits it, the sheer breathtaking wonder of standing on this airless world and planting your bootprints where no one had ever stood before, the excitement of building a new world, even that crazy mountain down at the south pole that’s always in sunshine.