Amanda’s heart sank. I’m the cause of all this, she realized all over again. I’ve turned this sweet, loving man into a raging monster.
“I’d like to smash his face in,” Fuchs growled. “Kill him just as he’s killed so many others.”
“The way you killed that man in the Pub,” she heard herself say.
He looked as if she had slapped him in the face.
Shocked at her own words, Amanda said, “Oh, Lars, I didn’t mean—”
“You’re right,” he snapped. “Absolutely right. If I could kill Humphries like that, I’d do it. In a hot second.”
She reached up and stroked his cheek as gently, soothingly as she could. “Lars, darling, please—all you’re going to accomplish is getting yourself killed.”
He pushed her hand away. “Don’t you think I’m already marked for murder? He told me he would have me killed. You’re a dead man, Fuchs. Those were his exact words.”
Amanda closed her eyes. There was nothing she could do. She knew that her husband was going to fight, and there was nothing she could do to stop him. She knew he would get himself killed. Worse, she saw that he was turning into a killer himself. He was becoming a stranger, a man she didn’t know, didn’t recognize. That frightened her.
“And to what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?” asked Carlos Vertientes.
He’s a handsome devil, Pancho thought. Aristocratic Castilian features. Good cheekbones. Neat little salt-and-pepper beard. He really looks like a professor oughtta, not like the slobs and creeps back in Texas.
She was strolling along the Ramblas in Barcelona with the head of the university’s plasma dynamics department, the tall, distinguished physicist who had helped Lyall Duncan build the fusion propulsion system that now powered most of the spacecraft operating beyond the Moon’s orbit. Vertientes looked truly elegant in a dove-gray three-piece suit. Pancho was wearing the olive green coveralls she had traveled in.
Barcelona was still a vibrant city, despite the rising sea level and greenhouse warming and displacement of so many millions of refugees. The Ramblas was still the crowded, bustling, noisy boulevard where everyone went for a stroll, a sampling of tapas and good Rioja wine, a chance to see and be seen. Pancho liked it far better than sitting in an office, even though the crowd was so thick that at times they had to elbow their way past clusters of people who were walking too slowly. Pancho preferred the chatting, strolling crowd to an office that might be bugged.
“Your university’s a shareholder in Astro Corporation,” Pancho said, in answer to his question.
Vertientes’s finely-arched brows rose slightly. “We are part of a global consortium of universities that invests in many major corporations.”
He was slightly taller than Pancho, and slim as a Toledo blade. She felt good walking alongside him. With a nod, she replied, “Yup. That’s what I found out when I started lookin’ up Astro’s stockholders.”
He smiled dazzlingly. “Have you come to Barcelona to sell more stock?”
“No, no,” Pancho said, laughing with him. “But I do have a proposition for you—and your consortium.”
“And what might that be?” he asked, taking her arm to steer her past a knot of Asian tourists posing for a street photographer.
“How’d you like to set up a research station in orbit around Jupiter? Astro would foot three-quarters of the cost, maybe more if we can jiggle the books a little.”
Vertientes’s brows rose even higher. “A research station at Jupiter? You mean a manned station?”
“Crewed,” Pancho corrected.
He stopped and let the crowd flow around them. “You are suggesting that the consortium could establish a manned—and womanned—station in Jupiter orbit at one-quarter of the actual cost?”
“Maybe less,” Pancho said.
He pursed his lips. Then, “Let’s find a cantina where we can sit down and discuss this.”
“Suits me,” said Pancho, with a happy grin. waltzing matilda
George looked sourly at the screen’s display.
“Four hundred and eighty-three days?” he asked. He was sitting in the command pilot’s chair, on the bridge; Nodon sat beside him.
Nodon seemed apologetic. “That is what the navigation program shows. We are on a long elliptical trajectory that will swing back to the vicinity of Ceres in four hundred and eighty-three days.”