“Or else what?”
With a grim smile, Humphries answered, “I’ll think of something.”
ASTRO CORPORATION OFFICES
If he finds the account I set up for him to pay the rent on my sister’s dewar I’m toast,” Pancho said as she paced across Dan’s office.
Sitting behind his desk, Dan said, “I’ll get George to scratch the program. Astro can pay the storage fees for your sister.”
Pancho shook her head. “That’ll just call attention to what I did.”
“Not if we erase the subroutine completely. He’ll never know.”
“No!” Pancho insisted. “Don’t go anywhere near it. It’ll tip him off for sure.”
Dan could see how agitated she was. “You just want to leave it there? He might stumble across it any minute.”
“He knows I did it,” Pancho said, crossing the room again in her long-legged strides. “I know he knows. He’s just playin’ cat-and-mouse with me.”
“I don’t think so. He’s not the type. Humphries is more a sledge-hammer-on-the-head kind of guy.”
She stopped and turned toward Dan, her face suddenly white, aghast. “Jesus H. Christ… he might turn off Sis’s life support! He might pull the plug on her!”
Dan knew she was right. “Or threaten to.”
“That’d give him enough leverage to get me to do whatever he wants.”
“What does he want?”
“He wants Mandy. He wants her scrubbed from the mission so he can talk her into marrying him.”
Dan leaned back in his desk chair and stared at the ceiling. He’d had the office swept for bugs only an hour earlier, yet he had the uneasy feeling that Humphries knew everything that he said or did. Pancho’s not the only Astro employee he’s recruited, Dan reminded himself. My whole double-damned staff must be honeycombed with his snoops. Who can I trust?
He snapped forward in the chair and said into the phone console, “Phone, find George Ambrose. I want him here, now.”
In less than a minute Big George came through the doorway from the outer office.
“George, I want this whole suite swept for bugs,” Dan commanded.
“Again? We just did it an hour ago.”
“I want you to do it this time. Yourself. Nobody else.”
Scratching at his shaggy beard, George said, “Gotcha, boss.”
It took a maddening half hour. Pancho forced herself to sit on the sofa while George went through the office with a tiny black box in one massive paw.
“Clean in here,” he said at last.
“Okay,” said Dan. “Close the door and sit down.”
“You said you wanted the outer offices done, too,” George objected.
“In a minute. Sit.”
Obediently, George lowered his bulk into one of the cushioned chairs in front of Dan’s desk.
“I’ve been thinking. Tonight, the three of us are going to move a dewar out of the catacombs,” Dan said.
“Sis? Where—”
“I’ll figure that out between now and then,” Dan said. “Maybe somewhere else on the Moon. Maybe we’ll move her to one of the space stations.”
“You’ve gotta have the right equipment to maintain it,” George pointed out.
Dan waved a hand in the air. “You need a cryostat to keep the nitrogen liquified. Not much else.”
“Life support monitors,” Pancho pointed out.
“Self-contained on the dewar flask,” said Dan.
“Not the equipment,” Pancho corrected. “I mean you need some people to take a look every few days, make sure everything’s running okay.”
With a shake of his head, Dan said, “That’s a frill that you pay extra for. You don’t need it. The equipment has safety alarms built in. The only time you need human intervention is when the flask starts to exceed the limits you’ve set the equipment to keep.”
“Well, yeah… I guess,” Pancho agreed reluctantly.
“Okay, George,” Dan said. “Go sweep the rest of the place. We can
all meet here for dinner at…” he called up his appointment screen with the jab of a finger,”… nineteen-thirty.”
“Dinner?” Pancho asked.
“Can’t do dirty work on an empty stomach,” Dan said, grinning mischievously.
“But where are we taking her?” Pancho asked as she disconnected the liquid nitrogen feed line. Despite its heavy insulation, the hose was stiff with a rime of frost. Cold white vapor hissed briefly from its open end, until she twisted the seal shut.