“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.”
STARPOWER 1
Lars 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. “I’ll 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 grandfatherly smile etched permanently on his face. It unnerved George to see the security director smiling as he explained about Dr. Cardenas’s disappearance.