Tsavo tried hard not to hold his left hand up to his ear. He was waiting for news that Yamagata had arrived, waiting for his instructions on what to do with Pancho.
“Pretty fancy setup you guys have for yourselves,” Pancho teased as they walked along the corridor. Its walls were painted in soothing pastels. The noise of construction was far behind them. “Nice thick carpets on the floor and acoustic paneling on the walls.”
“Rank has its privileges,” Tsavo replied, making himself smile back at her.
“Guess so.” Where are they getting the capital for all this, Pancho wondered. Nairobi Industries doesn’t have this kind of financial muscle. Somebody’s pouring a helluva lot of money into this. Humphries? Why would the Humper spend money on Nairobi? Why invest in a competitor? ‘Specially when he’s sinking so much into this goddamn war. I wouldn’t be able to divert this much of Astro’s funding; we’d go broke.
“Actually,” Tsavo said, scratching at his left ear, “all this was not as expensive as you might think. Most of it was manufactured at Selene.”
“Really?”
“Truly.”
Pancho seemed impressed. “Y’know, back in the early days of Moonbase they thought seriously about putting grass down in all the corridors.”
“Grass?”
“Yep. Life-support people said it’d help make oxygen, and the psychologists thought it’d make people happier ’bout having to live underground.”
“Did they ever do it?”
“Naw. The accountants ran the numbers for how much electricity they’d need to provide light for the grass. And the maintenance people complained about the groundskeeping they’d have to do. That killed it.”
“No grass.”
“Except up in the Main Plaza, of course.”
Tsavo said, “We plan to sod our central plaza, too. And plant trees.”
“Uh-huh,” said Pancho. But she was thinking, If Humphries isn’t bankrolling Nairobi, who is? And why?
The receiver in Tsavo’s ear buzzed. “Mr. Yamagata is expected in two hours. There is to be no interrogation of Ms. Lane until after he has arrived. Proceed with dinner as originally planned.”
At that precise moment, Pancho asked, “Say, when’s dinner? I haven’t had anything to eat since breakfast.”
“Perfect timing,” Tsavo murmured, stopping at a set of double doors. Using both hands, he pushed them open. Pancho saw a conference room that had been transformed into a dining room. The central table was set for eight, and there were six people standing around the sideboard at the far end of the oblong room, where drinks had been set up. Two of them were women, all of them dark-skinned Africans.
Tsavo introduced Pancho to his Nairobi Industries colleagues, then excused himself to go to the next room for a moment, where the servers waited with a group of six Japanese men and women.
“No drugs,” Tsavo told their chief. “We’ll have a normal dinner. We can sedate her later.”
TORCH SHIP ELSINORE
Doug Stavenger rode with Edith all the way up to the torch ship, waiting in a tight orbit around the Moon. He went with her through Elsinore’s airlock as the ship’s captain personally escorted his passenger to her quarters, a comfortable little cabin halfway down the passageway that led to the bridge.
Once the captain had left them alone and had slid the passageway door shut, Stavenger took his wife in his arms.
“You don’t have to do this, Edie,” he said.
“Yes I do,” she replied. She was smiling, but her eyes were steady with firm resolve.
“You could send someone else and have him report what he finds to you. You could stay here at Selene and produce the news show or documentary or whatever—”
“Doug,” she said, sliding her arms around his neck, “I love you, darling, but you have no idea of how the news business works.”
“I don’t want you risking your neck out there.”
“But that’s the only way to get the story!”
“And there’s a solar storm approaching, too,” he said.
“The ship’s shielded, darling.” She nuzzled his nose lightly, then said, “You’d better be getting back to Selene before the radiation starts building up.”
He frowned unhappily. “If something should happen to you…”
“What a story it would make!” She smiled as she said it.
“Be serious.”