Harbin shook his head, wondering what schemes played through Humphries’s mind.
Better not to know, he told himself. You have enough old crimes to fill your nightmares for the rest of your life. You don’t need to peer into anyone else’s.
SELENE: WINTER SOLSTICE PARTY
It was the social event of the year. Everyone who meant anything in Selene City was invited and everyone who was invited dressed up and came to the party. Douglas Stavenger, the scion of the lunar nation’s founding family, brought his wife. The ambassador from the Global Economic Council, Earth’s world government in all but name, brought two of his four wives. Pancho Lane, head of the rival Astro Corporation, came unescorted. Nobuhiko Yamagata, head of the giant Japanese corporation, made a special trip to Selene for the occasion. Even Big George Ambrose, the shaggy red-maned chief of the rock rats’ settlement at Ceres, traveled on a torch ship all the way from the Belt to be at Martin Humphries’s Christmas party.
The invitations called it a Winter Solstice Party, artfully avoiding any religious sensitivities among the Moslems, Buddhists, Hindus and die-hard atheists on the guest list. Some of the Christian conservatives grumbled at the lack of proper piety, but then Martin Humphries never pretended to be a believer. Big George complained, with a mug of beer in each beefy paw, that back in his native Australia this time of the year marked the onset of winter darkness, not the gradually longer days that led to springtime.
One of the reasons for the full turnout was that Humphries gave the party in his palatial home, built deep in the lowest level of Selene City. He rarely invited anyone to his mansion, and curiosity—more than holiday good cheer—impelled many of the hundreds of guests.
Technically, the sprawling, low-roofed mansion was the property of the Humphries Trust Research Center, a legal fiction that was a monument to the ingenuity of Martin Humphries.
The airless surface of the Moon is exposed to temperature swings of four hundred degrees between sunlight and shadow, drenched in hard radiation from the Sun and deep space, and peppered with a constant infall of microscopic meteoroids. Human settlements are built underground, and the deeper below the surface, the more prestigious and expensive the habitation.
Humphries built his home in the deepest grotto below the original Moonbase, seven levels beneath the surface. He established an extensive garden that filled the grotto with the heady scents of roses and lilacs, irrigated by water manufactured from oxygen and hydrogen smelted out of the lunar surface rocks, lit by long strips of broad-spectrum lamps fixed to the rough rock ceiling to simulate sunshine. The garden was a little over one square kilometer in extent, slightly more than ten hectares. It cost a fortune to maintain this improbable paradise, with its showy azaleas and peonies always in bloom, its alders and white-boled birches and graceful fronds of frangipani. Flowering white and pink gardenia bushes grew tall as trees. Humphries had established a research trust to finance his garden, and had even gotten the government of Selene to accept the slightly absurd justification that it was a long-term study in maintaining a man-made ecology on the Moon.
The truth was that Humphries wanted to live on the Moon, as far away as he could get from his coldly crusty father and the storm-racked world of his birth. So he built a mansion in the middle of his underground Eden, half of it taken up by research laboratories and botanical workshops, the other half an opulent home for none other than Martin Humphries.
The residential half of the mansion was big enough to take a couple of hundred guests easily. The big living room accommodated most of them, while others roamed through the formal dining room and the art galleries and outdoor patios.
Pancho headed straight for the bar built into the book-lined library, where she found Big George Ambrose with one hand wrapped around a frosty-looking beer mug, deep in intent conversation with a slinky, low-cut blonde. George was unconsciously worming a finger of his free hand in his collar, obviously uncomfortable in a tux. Wonder who did the bow tie for him, Pancho asked herself. Or maybe it’s a clip-on.