“I brought him to Selene to help in our fight against Humphries,” Pancho half-lied. “I don’t want Stavenger or anybody else to know that.”
“How am I supposed to get him past Selene’s security guards?” Wanamaker asked, clearly distressed.
Pancho closed her eyes for a moment. Then, “Jake, that’s your problem. Figure it out. I want him off the Moon and headed back to the Belt. Yesterday.”
He took a deep breath, then replied reluctantly, “Yes, ma’am.” For an instant she thought he was going to give her a military salute.
“Anything else?” Pancho asked.
Wanamaker made a face that was halfway between a smile and a grimace. “Isn’t that enough?”
Ulysses S. Quinlan felt awed, his emerald-green eyes wide with admiration, as he stood in the middle of the huge downstairs living room of the Humphries mansion. Or what was left of it. The wide, spacious room was a charred and blackened desolation, walls and ceiling scorched, floor littered with burned stumps of debris and powdery gray ash.
Born in Bellfast of an Irish father and Irish-American mother, Quinlan had grown up to tales of civil wars. To please his father he played football from childhood, which eventually brought him an athletic scholarship to Princeton University, back in the States—which pleased his mother, even though she cried to be separated from her only child. Quinlan studied engineering, and worked long years on the frustrating and ultimately pointless seawalls and hydromechanical barriers that failed to prevent the rising ocean from flooding out most of Florida and the Gulf Coast regions as far south as Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula.
He suffered a nervous breakdown when Houston was inundated, and was retired at full pension precisely on his fortieth birthday. To get away from oceans and seas and floods he retired to the Moon. Within a year he was working in Selene’s safety department, as happy and cheerful as he’d been before the disastrous greenhouse floods on Earth.
Now he whistled through his breathing mask as he goggled at the size of the mansion’s living room.
“The grandeur of it all,” he said as he shuffled through the gray ash and debris.
“Like the old Tsars in Russia,” said his partner, a stocky redheaded Finnish woman. He could hear the contempt in her tone, even through her breathing mask.
“Aye,” agreed Quinlan, thudding the blackened wall with a gloved fist. “But he built solid. Reinforced concrete. The basic structure stood up to the flames, it did.”
His partner reluctantly agreed. “They could have contained the fire to one area if somebody hadn’t allowed it to spread to the roof.”
Quinlan nodded. “A pity,” he murmured. “A true pity.”
They wore the breathing masks to protect their lungs from the fine ash that they kicked up with each step they took. The grotto had been refilled with breathable air hours earlier. Quinlan and his Finnish partner were inspecting the ruins, checking to make certain that no hint of fire reignited itself now that there was oxygen to support combustion again.
They spent a careful hour sifting through the debris of the lower floor. Then they headed cautiously up the stairs to the upper level. The wooden facings and lush carpeting of the stairway had burned away, but the solid concrete understructure was undisturbed by the fire.
Upstairs was just as bad a mess as below. Quinlan could see the broken and charred remains of what had once been fine furniture, now lying in shattered heaps along the walls of the hallway. The windows were all intact, he noticed, and covered with metal mesh screens. He must have built with tempered glass, Quinlan thought. Bulletproof? I wonder.
Following the floor plan displayed on their handhelds, they pushed through the debris at the wide doorway of the master bedroom suite. Quinlan whistled softly at the size of it all.
“That must have been the bed,” his partner said, pointing to a square block of debris on the floor.
“Or his airport,” muttered Quinlan.
“Hey, look at this.” The Finn was standing in front of an intact door panel. “The fire didn’t damage this.”
“How could that be?” Quinlan wondered aloud, stepping over toward her.
“It’s plastic of some sort,” she said, running her gloved had along the panel.