Teasingly, Pancho said, “So he finds out. He’ll just think you’re inviting me to dinner.”
Humphries grunted. Pancho knew that he had invited Amanda to dinner at his home twice since they’d first met. And he’d stopped asking Pancho to report to him down there. Now they met at prearranged times and places: strolling in the Grand Plaza, watching low-gravity ballet in the theater, doing a tourist moonwalk on the crater floor.
Pancho would have shrugged if she hadn’t been encased in the suit. She said to Humphries, “Dan made his pitch to the governing council.”
“I know. And they turned him down.”
“Well, sort of.”
“What do you mean?” he snapped.
“A couple of citizens volunteered to work on Dan’s project. He’s goin’ down to the Venezuela space station to try to get Dr. Cardenas to head up the team.”
“Kristine Cardenas?”
“Yup. She’s the top expert at nanotech,” Pancho said.
“They gave her the Nobel Prize,” Humphries muttered, “before nanotechnology was banned on Earth.”
“That’s the one he’s gonna talk to.”
For several long moments Humphries simply stood there unmoving, not speaking a word. Pancho thought he looked like a statue, with the spacesuit and all.
At length he said, “He wants to use nanomachines to build the rocket. I hadn’t expected that.”
“It’s cheaper. Prob’ly better, too.”
She sensed Humphries nodding inside his helmet. “I should’ve seen it coming. If he can build the system with nanos, he won’t need my financing. The sonofabitch can leave me out in the cold—after I gave him the fusion idea on a silver fucking platter!”
“I don’t think he’d do that.”
“Wouldn’t he?” Humphries was becoming more enraged with every word. “I bring the fusion project to him, I offer to fund the work, but instead he sneaks behind my back to try to raise funding from any other source he can find. And now he’s got a way to build the fucking rocket without me altogether! He’s trying to cut my balls off!”
“But-”
“Shut up, you stupid bitch! I don’t care what you think! That prick bastard Randolph thinks he can screw me out of this! Well, he’s got another think coming! I’ll break his back! I’ll destroy the sonofabitch!”
Humphries yanked the wire out of Pancho’s helmet, then pulled the other end out of his own. He turned and strode back to the bus that had carried him out to the Ranger 9 site, practically boiling up a dust storm with his angry stomping. If he hadn’t been in the heavy spacesuit, Pancho thought, he’d hop two meters off the ground with each step. Prob’ly fall flat on his face.
She watched as he gestured furiously to the bus driver, then clambered aboard the tourist bus. The driver got in after him, closed the hatch, and started off for the garage back at Selene.
Pancho wondered if Humphries would allow the driver to come back out and pick up the other tourists, or would he leave them stranded out here? Well, she thought, they can always squeeze into the other buses.
She decided there was nothing she could do about it, so she might as well enjoy what was left of her outing. As she walked off toward the wreckage of the tiny, primitive Ranger 9, though, she thought that she’d better tell Dan Randolph about this pretty damned quick. Humphries was sore enough to commit murder, it seemed to her.
SPACE STATION NUEVA VENEZUEU
It was almost like coming home for Dan. Nueva Venezuela had been one of the first big projects for the fledgling Astro Manufacturing Corp., back in the days when Dan had moved his corporate headquarters from Texas to La Guaira and married the daughter of the future president of Venezuela.
The space station had lasted much better than the marriage. Still, the station was old and scuffed-up. As the transfer craft from Selene made its approach, Dan saw that the metal skin of her outer hulls was dulled and pitted from long years of exposure to radiation and mite-sized meteoroids. Here and there bright new sections showed where the maintenance crews were replacing the tired, eroded skin. A facelift, Dan thought, smiling. Well, she’s old enough to need it. They’re probably using cermet panels instead of the aluminum we started with. Lighter, tougher, maybe even cheaper if you consider the length of time they’ll last before they need replacing.