The Precipice (5 page)

With an exasperated frown, Freiberg said, “Listen, I know I still get my paycheck from Astro, but that doesn't mean I can
jump whenever you blow the whistle.”

Dan looked into the other man's light blue eyes and saw pain there, disappointment and outright fear. Zack blames himself
for this catastrophe, Dan knew. He discovered the greenhouse cliff and he acts as if it's all his fault. Instead of some fathead
king shooting the messenger, the messenger wants to shoot himself.

“Look, Zack,” he said, as reasonably as he could manage, “you have to eat a meal now and then, don't you?”

Freiberg nodded warily. He'd been sweet-talked by Dan into doing things he hadn't wanted to do often enough in the past.

“So I brought you lunch,” Dan said, waving his arm in the direction of the oversized mobile home he'd arrived in. Its roof
glittered with solar panels. “When the noon whistle blows, come in and break some bread with me. That's all I'm asking.”

“You want me to look at this proposal over lunch? You think I can make a technical decision about this in an hour or less?”

Dan shrugged disarmingly. “If you can't, you can't. All I'm asking is that you give it a look.”

Freiberg gave Dan a look that was far from happy.

Yet five minutes after noon he climbed up through the open door of Dan's big mobile home.

“I might have known,” he muttered as he stepped past Big George, standing by the doorway.

The van was luxuriously fitted out. George was Dan's major domo and bodyguard. An attractive young Japanese woman, petite
and silent, was stirring steaming vegetables in
an electric wok. Dan was sitting in the faux-leather couch that curved around the fold-down dinner table, a suede jacket draped
over his shoulders even though the van felt uncomfortably warm to Freiberg. Zack could see the crease across Dan's face that
the sanitary mask had left.

“Drink?” Dan asked, without getting to his feet. A half-empty tumbler of something bubbly sat on the table before him.

“What are you having?” Freiberg asked, sliding into the couch where it angled around the table's end. The table was already
set for two.

“Ginger beer,” said Dan. “George turned me on to it. Nonalcoholic and it's even good for the digestion.”

Freiberg shrugged his rounded shoulders. “Okay, I'll have the same.”

George quickly pulled a brown bottle from the refrigerator, opened it, and poured Freiberg a glass of ginger beer.

“Goes good with brandy, y'know,” he said as he handed the glass to Freiberg.

The scientist accepted the glass wordlessly and George went back to his post by the door, folding his heavy arms over his
massive chest like a professional bouncer.

After a sip of his drink, Dan asked, “Might have known what?”

Freiberg waved a hand around the compartment. “That you'd be living in the lap of luxury, even out here.”

Dan laughed. “If you've got to go out into the wilderness, you might as well bring a few creature comforts with you.”

“Kind of warm in here, though,” Freiberg complained mildly.

Dan smiled gauntly at him. “You're accustomed to living in the wild, Zack. I'm not.”

“Yeah, guess so.” Freiberg glanced at the painting above Dan's head: a little girl standing by a banyan tree. “Is that real?”

“Holoprint,” said Dan. “A Vickrey.”

“Nice.”

“What're you living in, out here?”

“A tent,” said Freiberg.

Nodding, Dan said, ‘That's what I thought.”

“It's a pretty good tent, as tents go, but it's nothing like this.” His eyes swept the dining area appreciatively. “How many
other rooms in here?”

“Just two: office and bedroom. King-sized bed, of course.”

“Of course.”

“You like it, it's yours.”

“The holoprint?”

“The van. The whole shebang. I'll be leaving later this afternoon. If you can find somebody to drive George and me to the
airstrip you can keep this for yourself.”

Surprised, Freiberg blurted, “Can you afford to give it away? From what I've heard—”

“For you, Zack,” Dan interrupted, “my last penny. If it comes to that.”

Freiberg made a wry face. “You're trying to bribe me.”

“Yep. Why not?”

With a resigned sigh, the scientist said, “All right, let me see this proposal you want me to look at”

“Hey George,” Dan called, “bring me the notebook, will you?”

Almost an hour later, Freiberg looked up from the notebook's screen and said, “Well, I'm no rocket engineer, and what I know
about fusion reactors you could put into a thimble, but I can't find anything obviously wrong with this.”

“Do you think it'll work?” Dan asked earnestly.

“How the hell should I know?” Freiberg snapped irritably. “Why in hell did you come all the way out here to ask my opinion
on something you
know
is outside my expertise?”

Dan hesitated for several heartbeats, then answered, “Because I can trust you, Zack. This guy Humphries is too slick
for me to believe. All the experts I've contacted claim that this fusion rocket is workable, but how do I know that he hasn't
bought them off? He's got something up his sleeve, some hidden agenda, and this fusion rocket idea is just the tip of the
iceberg. I think he wants to get his paws on Astro.”

“That's a helluva mixture of metaphors,” Freiberg said, grinning despite himself.

“Never mind the syntax. I don't trust Humphries. I do trust you.”

“Dan, my opinion doesn't mean a damned thing here. You might as well ask George, or your cook.”

Hunching forward over the table, Dan said, “You can talk the talk, Zack. You can contact the experts that Humphries has used
and sound them out. You can talk to other people, the real specialists in these areas, and see what they think. They'd talk
to you, Zack, and you'd understand what they're saying. You can—”

“Dan,” Freiberg said icily, “I'm working twenty-six hours a day already.”

“I know,” Dan said. “I know.”

Freiberg had thrown himself totally into the global effort to cut down on the greenhouse gas emissions given off by the world's
fossil-fueled power-generating stations, factories, and vehicles.

Faced with disastrous shifts in climate due to the greenhouse warming, the nations of the world were belatedly, begrudgingly,
attempting to remedy the cataclysm. Led by the Global Economic Council, manufacturers around the world were desperately trying
to convert automobiles and other vehicles to electrical motors. But that meant trebling the global electricity-generating
capacity, and fossil-fueled power plants were faster and cheaper to build than nuclear plants. There was still plenty of petroleum
available, and the world's resources of coal dwarfed the petroleum reserves. Fission-based power plants were still anathema
because of
the public's fear of nuclear power. The new fusion generators were costly, complex, and also hindered by stubborn public resistance
to anything nuclear.

So more and more fossil-fueled power plants were being built, especially in the rising industrial nations such as China and
South Africa. The GEC insisted that new plants sequester their carbon dioxide emissions, capture the dangerous greenhouse
gas and pump it safely deep underground.

Zachary Freiberg had devoted his life to the effort to mitigate the greenhouse disaster. He had taken an indefinite leave
of absence from his position as chief scientist of Astro Manufacturing and criss-crossed the world, directing massive construction
projects. His wife had left him, he had not seen his children in more than a year, his personal life was in tatters, but he
was driven to do what he could, what he had to do, to help slow the greenhouse warming.

“So how's it going?” Dan asked him.

Freiberg shook his head. “We're shoveling shit against the tide. There's just no way we can reduce greenhouse emissions enough
to make a difference.”

“But I thought—”

“We've been working our butts off for… how long has it been? Ten years? Not even a dent. When we started, fossil fuel burning
pumped six billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air every year. Know how much we're putting out now?”

Dan shook his head.

“Five point three billion tons,” Freiberg said, almost angrily.

Dan grunted.

Pointing through the van's window to the massive trucks rumbling by, Freiberg grumbled, “Yamagata's trying to convert their
whole fleet of trucks to electricity, but the Chinese are still using diesels. Some people just don't give a damn! The Russians
are starting to talk about cultivating what they call the ‘virgin lands' in Siberia, where the permafrost is
melting. They think they can turn the region into a new grain belt, like the Ukraine.”

“So something good might come out of all this,” Dan murmured.

“My ass,” Freiberg snapped. “The oceans are still warming up, Dan. The clathrates are going to break down if we can't stop
the ocean temperature rise. Once they start releasing the methane that's frozen in them…”

Dan opened his mouth to reply, but Freiberg kept right on agonizing. “You know how much methane is locked up in the clathrates?
Two times ten to the sixteenth tons. Twenty quadrillion tons! Enough to produce a greenhouse that'll melt all the ice in Greenland
and Antarctica. Every glacier in the world. We'll all drown.”

“All the more reason,” Dan said, “for pushing out to the Asteroid Belt. We can bring in all the metals and minerals the Earth
needs, Zack! We can move the world's industrial operations into space, where they won't screw up the Earth's environment.”

Freiberg gave Dan a disbelieving look.

“We can do it!” Dan insisted. “If this fusion rocket can be made to work. That's the key to the whole damned thing: efficient
propulsion can bring the cost of asteroid mining down to where it's economically viable.”

For a long moment Freiberg said nothing. He merely glared at Dan, half angry, half sullen.

At last he mumbled, “I'll make a few calls for you, Dan. That's all I can do.”

“That's all I ask,” Dan replied, forcing a smile. Then he added, “Plus a ride to the airstrip for George and me.”

“What about your cook?”

With a laugh, Dan said, “She goes with the van, old buddy. She only speaks Japanese, but she's terrific in the kitchen. And
the bedroom.”

Freiberg flushed deep red. But he did not refuse Dan's gift.

T
he customs inspector looked startled when he saw the plastic cage and the four live mice huddled in it among the loose food
pellets.

He set his face into a scowl as he looked up at Pancho. “You can't bring pets into Selene.”

The other astronauts had sailed through the incoming inspection without a hitch, leaving Pancho to face the grim-faced inspector
alone. They had cruised to the Moon without incident, none of the others realizing that Pancho had milked each of their bank
accounts for a half-hour's interest Pancho figured that even if they eventually discovered her little scam, the amount of
money involved was too small to fight over. To her, it wasn't the amount so much as the adroitness of the sting.

“They're not pets,” she said coolly to the inspector. ‘They're food.”

“Food?” The man's dark eyebrows hiked halfway to his scalp line.

“Yeah, food. For my bodyguard.” Most of the customs inspectors knew her, but this guy was new; Pancho hadn't encountered him
before. Not bad-looking, she thought. His dark blue zipsuit complemented his eyes nicely. A little elderly, though. Starting
to go gray at the temples. Must be working to raise enough money for a rejuve treatment.

As if he knew he was being maneuvered into giving straight lines, the customs inspector asked, “Your bodyguard eats mice?”

Pancho nodded. “Yes, sir, she does.”

The inspector huffed. “And where is this bodyguard?”

Pancho lifted a long leg and planted her softbooted foot on the inspector's table. Tugging up the cuff of her coverall trouser,
she revealed what looked like a bright metallic blue ankle bracelet.

While the inspector gaped, Pancho coaxed Elly off her ankle and held her out in front of the man's widening eyes. The snake
was about thirty-five centimeters long from nose to tail. It lifted its head and, fixing the inspector with its beady, slitted
eyes, it hissed menacingly. The man flinched back nearly half a meter.

“Elly's a genetically-modified krait. She'll never get any bigger'n this. She's very well-behaved and wicked poisonous.”

To his credit, the inspector swiftly recovered his composure. Most of it, at least.

“You… you can't bring a snake in,” he said, his voice quavering only slightly. “That's against the regulations and besides—”

“There's a special exception to the regulations,” Pancho said calmly. “You can look it up. Paragraph seventeen-dee, subclause
eleven.”

With a frown, the inspector punched up the relevant page on his palmcomp. Pancho knew the exception would be there; she had
gone all the way up to the Selene health and safety executive board to get it written into the regs. It had
cost her a small fortune in time and effort; many dinners with men old enough to be her grandfather. Funny thing was, the
only overt sexual pass made at her was from the woman who chaired the executive board.

“Well, I'll be dipped in…” The inspector looked up from his handheld's tiny screen. “How in hell did you get them to rewrite
the regs for you?”

Pancho smiled sweetly. “It wasn't easy.”

“That little fella is poisonous, you say?”

“Her venom's been engineered to reduce its lethality, but she's still fatal unless you get a shot of antiserum.” Pancho pulled
a slim vial from her open travelbag and wagged it in front of the inspector's bulging eyes.