CHAPTER 9
He’s put in a call to Pancho Lane,” said Diane Verwoerd.
She and Humphries were strolling through the courtyard outside his mansion. Humphries claimed he enjoyed taking a walk in the “outdoors”—or as near to outdoors as you could get on the Moon. Humphries’s home was in the middle of a huge grotto down at the deepest level of Selene’s network of underground corridors and habitation spaces. The big, high-ceilinged cavern was filled with flowered shrubbery, profusions of reds and yellows and delicate lilacs blooming from one rough-hewn rock wall to the other. Taller trees rose among the profusion of flowers: alders and sturdy maples and lushly flowering white and pink gardenias. No breeze swayed those trees; no birds sang in the greenery; no insects buzzed. It was a huge, elaborate hothouse, maintained by human hands. Hanging from the raw rock ceiling were strips of full-spectrum lamps to imitate sunlight.
Verwoerd could see the enormous garden beyond the ornate fountain that splashed noisily in the courtyard. The house itself was massive, only two stories high, but wide, almost sprawling. Built of smoothed lunar stone, its roof slanted down to big sweeping windows.
Compared to the gray underground drabness of the rest of Selene, this garden and home were like a paradise in the midst of a cold, forbidding desert. Verwoerd’s own quarters, several levels up from this grotto, were among the best in Selene, but they seemed cramped and colorless compared to this.
Humphries claimed he enjoyed walking in the open air. The only other open space in Selene was the Grand Plaza, under the big dome up on the surface, and anyone could take a stroll up there. Here he had his privacy, and all the heady color that human ingenuity and hard work could provide on the Moon. Verwoerd thought he enjoyed the idea that all this was his more than any aesthetic or health benefits he could gain from walking among the roses and peonies.
But any pleasure he might have enjoyed from this stroll was wiped away by her announcement.
“He’s called Pancho?” Humphries snapped, immediately nettled. “What for?”
“She scrambled his message and her reply, so we don’t know the exact words as yet. I have a cryptologist working on it.”
“Only one message?”
With a small nod, Verwoerd answered, “His incoming to her, and hers outgoing to him immediately after.”
“H’mm.”
“I can guess what the subject was.”
“So can I,” Humphries said sourly. “He wants to see if she’ll better our offer.”
“Yes.”
“He’s playing her against me.”
“It would seem so.”
“And if she outbids me, then Astro gets full control of his Helvetia Limited.” He pronounced the name sneeringly.
Verwoerd frowned slightly. “He’s already using Astro as his supplier. What does Pancho have to gain by buying him out?”
“She keeps us from buying him out. It’s a preventive strike, that’s what it is.”
“So we increase our bid?”
“No,” Humphries snapped. “But we increase our pressure.”
Seyyed Qurrah laughed with delight as he gazed through the thick quartz observation port at his prize, his jewel, his reward for more than two years of scorn and struggle and near starvation. He feasted his eyes as the irregular chunk of rock slid across his view, grayish brown where the sunlight struck it, pitted and covered here and there with boulders the size of houses.
“Allah is great,” he said aloud, thanking the one God for his mercy and kindness.
Turning to the sensor displays in his cabin’s control panel, he saw that this lump of stone bore abundant hydrates, water locked chemically to the silicates of the rock. Water! In the desert that was the Moon, water fetched a higher price than gold. It was even more valuable at Ceres, although with only a few hundred people living at the big asteroid, the demand for precious water was not as high as that of Selene’s many thousands.
Qurrah thought of the contempt and ridicule that they had heaped upon him back home when he’d announced that he intended to leave Earth and seek his fortune in the new bounty of the Asteroid Belt. “Sinbad the Sailor” was the kindest thing he’d been called. “Seyyed the Idiot” was what most of them said. Even when he had reached Ceres and leased a ship with the last bit of credit his dead father had left him, even there the other prospectors and miners called him “Towel Head” and worse. Well, now the shoe was on the other foot. He’d show them!