Tourism trickled down to nothing except the extremely wealthy, who lived on their financial mountaintops in ease and comfort despite the woes of their brethren.
Hotel Luna became virtually a ghost facility, but it was never shut down. Grimly, hopefully, foolishly, one owner after another tried to make at least a modest success of it.
To a discerning visitor, the lavish, sprawling lobby of the hotel would appear slightly seedy: the carpeting was noticeably threadbare in spots, the oriental tables and easy chairs were scuffed here and there, the ornate artificial floral displays drooped enough to show that they needed to be replaced.
But to Lars Fuchs’s staring eyes, Hotel Luna’s lobby seemed incredibly posh and polished. He and Amanda were riding down the powered stairway from the hotel entrance up in the Grand Plaza. Glistening sheets of real, actual water slid down tilted slabs of granite quarried from the lunar highlands. The water was recycled, of course, but to have a display of water! What elegance!
“Look,” Fuchs exclaimed, pointing to the pools into which the waterfalls splashed. “Fish! Live fish!”
Beside him, Amanda smiled and nodded. She had been brought to the hotel on dates several times, years ago. She remembered the Earthview Restaurant, with its hologram windows. Martin Humphries had taken her there. The fish in those pools were on the restaurant’s menu. Amanda noticed that there were far fewer of them now than there had been back then.
As they reached the lobby level and stepped off the escalator, Fuchs recognized the music wafting softly from the ceiling speakers: a Haydn quartet. Charming. Yet he felt distinctly out of place in his plain dark gray coveralls, like a scruffy student sneaking into a grand palace. But with Amanda on his arm, it didn’t matter. She wore a sleeveless white pantsuit; even zippered up to the throat it could not hide her exquisitely-curved body.
Fuchs didn’t pay any attention to the fact that the spacious lobby was practically empty. It was quiet, soothing, an elegant change from the constant buzz of air fans and faint clatter of distant pumps that was part of the everyday background of Ceres.
As they reached the registration desk, Fuchs remembered all over again that Martin Humphries was footing their hotel bill. Humphries had insisted on it. Fuchs wanted to argue about it as they rode a Humphries fusion ship from Ceres to Selene, but Amanda talked him out of it.
“Let him pay for the hotel, Lars,” she had advised, with a knowing smile. “I’m sure he’ll take it out of the price he pays you for Helvetia.”
Grudgingly, Fuchs let her talk him into accepting Humphries’s generosity. Now, at the hotel desk, it rankled him all over again.
When it had originally opened as the Yamagata Hotel, there had been uniformed bellmen and women to tote luggage and bring room service orders. Those days were long gone. The registration clerk seemed alone behind his counter of polished black basalt, but he tapped a keyboard and a self-propelled trolley hummed out of its hidden niche and rolled up to Fuchs and Amanda. They put their two travel bags onto it and the trolley obediently followed them into the elevator that led down to the level of their suite.
Fuchs’s eyes went even wider once they entered the suite.
“Luxury,” he said, a reluctant smile brightening his normally dour face. “This is real luxury.”
Even Amanda seemed impressed. “I’ve never been in one of the hotel’s rooms before.”
Suddenly Fuchs’s smile dissolved into a suspicious scowl. “He might have the rooms bugged, you know.”
“Who? Martin?”
Fuchs nodded gravely, as if afraid to speak.
“Why would he bug the rooms?”
“To learn what we plan to say to him, what our position will be in the negotiation, what our bottom figure will be.” There was more, but he hesitated to tell her. Pancho had hinted that Humphries videotaped his own sexual encounters in the bedroom of his palatial home. Would the man have cameras hidden in this bedroom?
Abruptly, he strode to the phone console sitting on an end table and called for the registration desk.
“Sir?” asked the clerk’s image on the wallscreen. A moment earlier it had been a Vickrey painting of nuns and butterflies.
“This suite is unacceptable,” Fuchs said, while Amanda stared at him. “Is there another one available?”
The clerk grinned lazily. “Why, yessir, we have several suites unoccupied at the moment. You may have your pick.”
Fuchs nodded. Humphries can’t have them all bugged, he thought.
“I’m glad you decided to meet me in person,” Martin Humphries said, smiling from behind his wide desk. “I think we can settle our business much more comfortably this way.”
He leaned back, tilting the desk chair so far that Fuchs thought the man was going to plant his feet on the desktop. Humphries seemed completely at ease in his own office in the mansion he had built for himself deep below the lunar surface. Fuchs sat tensely in the plush armchair in front of the desk, feeling uneasy, wary, stiffly uncomfortable in the gray business suit that Amanda had bought for him at an outrageous price in the hotel’s posh store. He had left Amanda in the hotel; he did not want her in the same room as Humphries. She had acquiesced to his demand, and told her husband that she would go shopping in the Grand Plaza while he had his meeting.
Humphries waited for Fuchs to say something. When he just sat there in silence, Humphries said, “I trust you had a good night’s sleep.”
Suddenly Fuchs thought of hidden cameras again. He cleared his throat and said, “Yes, thank you.”
“The hotel is comfortable? Everything all right?”
“The hotel is fine.”
The third person in the room was Diane Verwoerd, sitting in the other chair in front of the desk. She had angled it so that she faced Fuchs more than Humphries. Like her boss, she wore a business suit. But while Humphries’s dark burgundy suit was threaded with intricate filigrees of silver thread, Verwoerd’s pale ivory outfit was of more ordinary material. Its slit skirt, however, revealed a good deal of her long slim legs.
Silence stretched again. Fuchs looked at the holowindow behind Humphries’s desk. It showed the lush garden outside the house, bright flowers and graceful trees. Beautiful, he thought, but artificial. Contrived. An ostentatious display of wealth and the power to flaunt one man’s will. How many starving, homeless people on Earth could Humphries help if he wanted to, instead of creating this make-believe Eden for himself here on the Moon?
At last Verwoerd said crisply, all business, “We’re here to negotiate the final terms of your sale of Helvetia Limited to Humphries Space Systems.”
“No, we are not,” said Fuchs.
Humphries sat up straighter in his chair. “We’re not?”
“Not yet,” Fuchs said to him. “First we must deal with several murders.”
Humphries glanced at Verwoerd; for just that instant he seemed furious. But he regained his composure almost immediately.
“And just what do you mean by that?” she asked calmly.
Fuchs said, “At least three prospectors’ ships have disappeared over the past few weeks. Humphries Space Systems somehow acquired the claims to the asteroids that those prospectors were near to.”
“Mr. Fuchs,” said Verwoerd, with a deprecating little smile, “you’re turning a coincidence into a conspiracy. Humphries Space Systems has dozens of ships scouting through the Belt.”