It was an old and very personal indulgence of his: long, hot showers. Back when he’d been a kid working on the early construction projects in orbit and then on the Moon, a hot shower was an incredibly rare luxury. He’d had his nose broken for the second time over the right to a long shower. For years, before Moonbase became the independent nation of Selene, lunar shower stalls were rarer than ten-meter high jumps on Earth. Even when you did find an incredibly luxurious living unit with a real shower, back in those days the water shut of automatically after two minutes, and there was no way to get it to turn back on again until a full hour had elapsed.
Even now, Dan thought as he let the hot water sluice over him, being on Selene’s water board carries more real political clout than being a member of the governing council.
He turned off the water at last and let the built-in jets of hot air dry him. Dan preferred old-fashioned towels, but the air blowers were cheaper.
Naked, he crawled into bed and tried to get some sleep. But his mind kept churning with his hopes, his plans, his frustrations.
Yamagata isn’t going to put up any money, he realized. Nobo would have called me by now if he were going to come in with me. He hasn’t called because he’s reluctant to give me the bad news. Malik and the GEC are a lost cause. I shouldn’t even have wasted the time to appear before them, but at least if and when we get this fusion drive going we can say we offered it to the double-damned bureaucrats and they turned us down. So they’ve got no claim on us whatsoever.
Astro’s hanging on by the skin of its teeth, one jump ahead of the bankruptcy courts, and I need to raise a couple of billion to make this fusion system work. Humphries is dangling the money at me, but he’ll want a big slice of Astro in return. I need somebody else. Who can I turn to? Who the hell else is there?
Selene, he realized. They don’t have the capital, but they’ve got trained people, equipment, resources. If I can talk them into coming in with me…
Then it hit him. Bypass Selene’s governing council. Or, at least, end-run them. Douglas Stavenger still outvotes everybody else up here. And Masterson Aerospace is his family’s company. If he’ll go for this, Master-son will get behind it and Selene’s council will fall in step with him.
Doug Stavenger.
He fell asleep thinking about the possibilities. And dreamed of flying past Mars, out to the Asteroid Belt.
“Who’s your boyfriend?” Amanda asked.
She and Pancho were exercising in Selene’s big gymnasium complex, working up a fine sheen of perspiration on the weight machines. Through the long window on one side of the room Pancho could see two men strapped into the centrifuge, both of them grimacing as the big machine’s arms swung round and round, faster and faster. She knew one of the men, a maintenance tech out at the tractor garage, a thoroughly nice guy.
The gym was packed with sweating, grunting, grimacing men and women working the treadmills, stationary bikes, and weight machines. The only faces that didn’t look miserable were the kids; they scampered from one machine to another, laughing, sometimes shrieking so loud the adults growled at them.
Every person in Selene, adult or child, citizen or visitor, had to follow a mandatory exercise regimen or be denied transport back to Earth. The low lunar gravity quickly deconditioned muscles to the point where facing Earth’s gravity became physically hazardous. Daily exercise was the only remedy, but it was boring.
Pancho wore a shapeless T-shirt and faded old shorts to the gym. Amanda dressed as if she were modeling for a fashion photographer: brand-new gym shoes, bright pink fuzzy socks, and a form-fitting leotard that had men tripping over their own feet to gawk at her. Even the women stared openly.
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” Pancho replied, grunting as she pulled on the weighted hand grips. A favorite gambit of tourists was to have a picture taken while lifting a barbell loaded with enormous weights. What looked superhuman to Earth-trained eyes was merely ordinary in the one-sixth gravity of the Moon.