Dan stared off into space, thinking hard. “Two years. We could be making profits from the Asteroid Belt by then. Should be, if everything goes right.”
“And if it doesn’t go right?”
Dan shrugged. “Then Humphries will take control of Astro and throw me out on my butt.”
“I’ll take his head off his fookin’ shoulders first,” George growled.
“A lovely sentiment, pal, but then we’d have to deal with his lawyers.”
George rolled his eyes toward heaven.
GRAND PLAZA
This is getting silly, Pancho thought. Humphries doesn’t trust phones or electronic links, too easy to tap, he says. So we have to meet face-to-face, in person, but in places where we won’t be noticed together. And he’s running out of places.
He had stopped inviting Pancho to his home, down at the bottom level. Worried about somebody seeing her down there where she doesn’t belong, he claimed. But Pancho knew he’d stopped inviting her down there once she’d introduced him to Mandy. So his house was now out.
Going outside on tourist jaunts is dumb, she thought. Besides, sooner or later some tourist is gonna recognize the high and mighty Martin Humphries on his bus. And how many times can an Astro employee take an afternoon off to go on a bus ride up on the surface? It’s silly.
So now she was strolling along one of the paved paths that meandered through the Grand Plaza. Lots of grass and flowery shrubs and even some trees. Nothing as lush as Humphries had down at his grotto, but the Plaza was pleasant, relaxed, open and green.
For a town that’s only got about three thousand permanent residents, Pancho thought, there’s an awful lot of people up here sashaying around. The walking paths weren’t exactly crowded, but there were plenty of people strolling along. Pancho had no trouble telling the Selene citizens from the rare tourists: the locals shuffled along easily in the low gravity and dressed casually in coveralls or running suits, for the most part; the few tourists she spotted wore splashy tee-shirts and vacation shorts and hopped and stumbled awkwardly, despite their weighted boots. Some of the women had bought expensive frocks in the Plaza shops and were showing them off as they oh-so-carefully stepped along the winding paths. The Selenites smiled and greeted each other as they passed; the tourists tended to be more guarded and uncertain of themselves. Funny,
Pancho thought: anybody with enough money and free time to come up here for a vacation oughtta be more relaxed.
The outdoor theater was jammed, Pancho saw. She remembered a news bulletin about Selene’s dance club performing low-gravity ballet. All in all, it seemed a normal weekday evening in the Plaza, nothing out of the ordinary.
All the paths winding through the greenery led to the long windows set into the far end of the Plaza dome. Made of lunar glassteel, they were perfectly transparent yet had the structural strength of the reinforced concrete that made up the rest of the dome’s structure. It was still daylight outside, and would be for another two hundred-some hours. A few tourists had stopped to gape out at the cracked, pockmarked floor of Alphonsus.
“It looks so dead!” said one of the women.
“And empty,” her husband muttered.
“Makes you wonder why anyone ever came up here to live.”
Pancho huffed impatiently. You try growing up in Lubbock, or getting flooded out in Houston, see how much better the Moon looks to you.
“Good evening,” said Martin Humphries.
Pancho had not seen him approaching; she’d been looking through the windows at the outside, listening to the tourists’ comments.
“Howdy,” she said.
He was wearing dark slacks with a beige pullover shirt. And sandals, no less. His “ordinary guy” disguise, Pancho thought. She herself was in the same sky-blue coveralls she’d been wearing all day, with an Astro Corporation logo over the left breast pocket and her name stenciled just above it.
Gesturing to a concrete bench at the edge of the path, Humphries said, “Let’s sit down. There are no cameras out here to see us together.”
They sat. A family strolled by, parents and two little boys, no more than four or five. Lunatics. Selenites. The kids might even have been born here, she thought.