The Precipice (37 page)

He tried to calm himself as he waited for his father's response.

“Gaining Astro Manufacturing is worth the risk,” the old man agreed. “Especially since no one can connect you with the… uh,
accident.”

“She can.”

Humphries knew what his father was going to say.

“Then you'll have to get rid of her.”

“But that doesn't mean I have to kill her. I don't want to do that. She's a valuable asset. We can use her.”

It wasn't a spur-of-the-moment decision, Humphries told himself. Dr. Cardenas and her knowledge of nanotechnol-ogy had been
part of his long-range plan all along. It's just that this crisis has forced me to move faster than I'd originally planned
to, he told himself.

“Use her?” his father snapped. “How?”

Waving a hand in the air, Humphries said vaguely, “Nan-otechnology. She's the top expert. Without her it would've taken years
to build that fusion rocket”

His father cackled. “You don't have the guts to take her out.”

“Don't be an idiot, Dad! She's much more valuable to me alive than dead.”

“You want her to be part of your team, then,” his father replied.

“Yes, of course. But she's having this goddamned attack of integrity. She's got cold feet about Randolph, and if I don't stop
her, she'll tell everyone about the sabotage, even though she's a party to it.”

The old man chuckled when he heard his son's complaint. “An attack of integrity, eh? Well, there are ways to get around that.”

“How?”

It was maddening to have to wait nearly three seconds for his father's response.

“Make her an offer that she can't accept.”

“What?”

Again the interminable wait. Then, “Offer her something that she really wants, but can't agree to. Make her an offer that
really tempts her, but she'll have to reject Then you've shown yourself to be reasonable, and she's being the difficult one.
Then she'll be more willing to agree to your next offer.”

Humphries was impressed. *That's… Machiavellian.”

When his father answered, his seamed, sagging face was strangely contorted, as if he were suppressing a guffaw. “Yes, it is,
isn't it? And it works.”

Humphries could only sit there and admire the old bastard.

More thoughtfully, his father asked, “What's her weak point? What does Cardenas want that she can't get unless you give it
to her?”

“Her grandchildren. They'll be our hostages. Oh, I'll do it in a nice, elegant manner. But I'll let her know that either she
works for me or her grandchildren suffer. She'll do what I want”

“You really want to be emperor of the world, don't you, Martin?”

Humphries blanched.
“Your
world? God forbid. Earth is a shambles and it isn't going to get any better. You can have it. You're welcome to it. If I
make myself emperor, it'll be up here: Selene, the Moon, the asteroids. That's where the power is. That's where the future
lies. I'll be emperor of these worlds, all right. Gladly!”

For long moments his father said nothing. At last the old man muttered, “God help us all.”

L
ars Fuchs was scowling as he peered at the display screen.

“Well?” Dan prompted.

The two men stood in the cramped sensor bay, where Fuchs had rigged a makeshift laboratory by yanking one of the ship's
mass spectrometers from its mounting and putting it on the repair bench where he was using it to examine the sample of dull
gray wire that Pancho had brought in. A thin sky-blue coolant tube lay alongside the wire. Dan knew the wire had originally
run through the tube, like an arm in a sleeve.

“There is no leak in the coolant line,” Fuchs said. “I drove pressurized nitrogen through it and it didn't leak.”

Dan felt puzzled. “Then what's causing the hot spot?”

Pointing to the tangle of curves displayed on the screen, Fuchs said, “The composition of the wire seems to match the specifications
quite closely: yttrium, barium, copper, oxygen—all the elements are in their proper proportions.”

“That doesn't tell us diddley-squat,” Dan groused.

Fuchs's frown deepened as he studied the display. “The copper level seems slightly low.”

“Low?”

“That might be a manufacturing defect. Perhaps that's the reason for the problem.”

“But there's no leak?”

Fuchs rubbed his broad, square chin. “None that I can detect with this equipment Really, we don't have the proper equipment
for diagnosing this. We would need a much more powerful microscope and—”

“Dan, we're receiving a call for you,” Amanda's voice came through the speaker in the sensor bay's overhead. “It's from George
Ambrose, marked urgent and confidential.”

“I'd better get back up to the bridge,” Dan said. “Do the best you can, Lars, with what you've got.”

Fuchs nodded unhappily. How can a man accomplish anything without the proper tools? he asked himself. With a heavy sigh, he
turned back to the display screen while Randolph ducked through the hatch and headed forward.

What other sensors can I take from the set we have to examine this bit of wire? Everything we have here has been designed
to measure gross chemical composition of asteroids, not fine details of a snippet of superconducting wire.

With nothing better that he could think of, Fuchs fired up the mass spectrometer again and took another sampling of the wire's
composition. When the curves took shape on the display screen his eyes went wide with surprised disbelief.

George held one meaty hand over the earphone clamped to the side of his head, listening intently to Dan Randolph's tense,
urgent voice. There was no video transmission; Dan had sent audio only.

“… you go with Blyleven to Stavenger himself and tell him what's happened. Stavenger can bypass a lot of red tape
and get Selene's security people to turn the place upside down. You can't hide much in a closed community like Selene. A really
thorough search will find Dr. Cardenas… or her body.”

George nodded unconsciously as he listened. Once, ten years earlier, he had lived as a fugitive on the fringes of Selene,
an outcast among other outcasts who called themselves the Lunar Underground. But they had survived principally on the sufferance
of Selene's “straight” community. They could exist on the fringes because nobody cared about them, as long as they didn't
make nuisances of themselves.

George agreed with Dan, up to a point. If Selene's security cops wanted to find a person, there wasn't much chance of hiding.
But a dead body could be toted outside, concealed in a tractor, and dumped in the barren wilderness of the Moon's airless
surface.

“Okay, Dan,” he half-whispered into the pin-mike at his lips. “FU get to Stavenger and we'll find Dr. Cardenas, unless she's
already dead.”

Frank Blyleven was head of Astro corporate security. A round, florid-faced, jovial-looking man with thinning straw-colored
hair that he wore down to his collar, Blyleven seemed to have a grandiatherly smile etched permanently on his face. It unnerved
George to see the security director smiling as he explained about Dr. Cardenas's disappearance.

“This is way out of our league,” he said, without the slightest change in expression. “I mean, I only have half-a-dozen people
in my group. We chase down industrial espionage and petty theft, for the lord's sweet sake, not kidnappings.”

George knew how well Astro's security team chased down petty theft. The Lunar Underground lived on small “borrowings” from
corporate storerooms.

“Dan said we should go to Stavenger,” said George.

Nodding cheerfully, Blyleven turned to his desktop phone and asked for Douglas Stavenger.

When George and Blyleven were ushered into Stavenger's office, up in the Grand Plaza, a fourth man was sitting in front of
Stavenger's broad, glistening desk. Stavenger introduced him as Ulrick Maas, director of security for Selene. Maas looked
like a real cop to George: muscular build, dark, suspicious eyes, scalp shaved bald.

“You realize that this may be nothing to get alarmed about,” Stavenger said once all four men were seated. “But Kris Cardenas
isn't the kind of woman who suddenly goes into hiding, so I think we ought to try to find her.”

“She's in Humphries's place, down at the bottom level,” George said flatly.

Stavenger leaned back in his desk chair. Maas stared at George through narrowed eyes; Blyleven looked as if he were thinking
about much more pleasant things. Through the office windows George could see the broad expanse of the Grand Plaza. A couple
of kids were flying above the greenspace like a pair of birds, flapping their brightly-colored rented plastic wings.

Grimacing, Stavenger asked, “You're certain of that?”

“It's Humphries she was scared of,” George replied. “Where else would he stash her?”

“That area down there is the property of the Humphries Trust,” Maas pointed out. “Selene doesn't have legal authority to go
in and search it.”

“Not even if her life's on the line?” George asked.

Stavenger said to Maas, “Rick, I think you'll have to initiate a search.”

“Of Humphries's place?” George asked.

“Of all of Selene proper,” Stavenger said. “Humphries's place is a different matter.” He turned to the phone and asked it
to connect him with Martin Humphries.

* * *

“Dr. Cardenas?” Martin Humphries said to Stavenger's image on his patio wallscreen. “You mean the scientist?”

“Yes,” said Stavenger, looking strained. “She's missing.”

Humphries got up from the chaise longue on which he'd been reclining while he reviewed his father's holdings in Libya.

“I don't understand,” he said to Stavenger's image, trying to look puzzled. “Why are you telling me about this?”

“The security office has initiated a search for her throughout Selene. I'd appreciate it if you allowed them to search your
premises, as well.”

“My home?”

“It's just a formality, Mr. Humphries,” Stavenger said, with an obviously false smile. “You know security types: they want
to dot every eye and cross every tee.”

“Yes, I suppose they do,” Humphries replied, smiling back. “I suppose someone could hide out in the gardens, couldn't they?”

“Or inside the house. It's rather large.”

“H'mm, yes, I suppose it is—by Selene standards.” He took a breath, then said reluctantly, “Very well, let them send a team
down here. I have no objections.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You're welcome,” said Humphries. He snapped his fingers to shut down the connection. Then he went into the house, walking
swiftly to his office.

He snapped his fingers as he entered the office. The phone screen lit up. “Get Blyleven down here on the double. I've got
a job for him.”

T
he tractor plodded slowly along the bleak, empty expanse of
Mare Nubium,
heading away from the ring-wall mountains that marked Alphonsus and the site of Selene.

Kris Cardenas fought to keep the terror from overcoming her. She could feel it, trembling deep inside her, crawling up into
her throat, making her heart race so hard she could hear its pulse thundering in her ears.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked, her voice muffled by the helmet of the spacesuit they had put her into.

No response from the driver. Of course, Cardenas thought. They've disabled my suit's radio. A neat, high-tech way of gagging
me.

The two goons who had picked her up the night before had brought her down to Humphries's extravagant place in Selene's lowest
level. Martin Humphries had not deigned to meet her, but she knew whose place it was. The servants had been very polite, offering
her food and drink and showing
her to a comfortable guest suite where she'd spent the night. The door to the corridor had been locked, of course. She was
a prisoner and she knew it, no matter how sumptuous her cell.

Strangely, she slept well. But thinking over the situation the next morning, after a maid had brought a breakfast tray into
her sitting room, Cardenas reasoned that Humphries was going to murder her. He'll have to, she thought. He can't let me go
and let me tell everyone that he's killed Dan Randolph.

With my help, she added silently. I'm an accomplice to murder. A blind, stupid, stubborn fool who didn't see.what she didn't
want to see. Not until it was too late.

And now I'm going to be murdered, too. Why else would they be taking me all the way out into the godforsaken wilderness?

The thought of being killed frightened her, intellectually, in the front lobe of her brain. But being outside on the surface
of the Moon, out in the deadly vacuum with all the radiation sleeting in from deep space, out here where humans were never
meant to be—-that terrified her deep in her guts. This tired little tractor had no pressurized cabin, no crew module; you
had to be in a spacesuit to survive for a minute out here.

This is a dead world, she thought as she looked through her helmet visor. The gray ground was absolutely dead, except for
the cleated trails of other tractors that had come this way. No wind or weather would disturb those prints; they would remain
in place until the Moon crumbled. Behind them, a lazy rooster tail of dust floated in the soft lunar gravity.

And beyond that, nothing but the gently undulating plain of barren rock, pockmarked with craters, some the size of finger-pokes,
some big enough to swallow the tractor. Rocks strewn everywhere, like the playroom toys of careless children.

The horizon was too close. It made Cardenas feel even
jumpier. It felt wrong, dangerous. In the airless vacuum there was no haze, no softening with distance. That abrupt horizon
slashed across her field of view like the edge of a cliff.