“Are you certain?”

She nodded. “Make fusion work and you can forget about Kiribati.”

Rashid laughed shakily. “I could go home to Savannah.”

“You could be elected to the board of directors!”

“And solve the world’s energy problems.”

“You could become the most powerful man in the corporation,” Melissa urged. “The most powerful man on Earth!”

He laughed again, stronger. “I could live in a Moslem nation, where a man is allowed his proper number of wives.”

“And concubines,” said Melissa, deliciously.

For an instant Rashid looked as if he would toss the table aside and seize her in his arms. But then the fire in his eyes dimmed, shifted. His face fell.

“Greg Masterson,” he muttered. “And his mother.”

“But they’re a quarter-million miles away,” Melissa said. “You can outmaneuver them.”

He shook his head. “Joanna is a powerful woman. And Greg — he must be the one behind this diamond Clippership concept.”

Melissa took a deep breath, then said, “Why don’t you let me deal with them?”

“What do you mean?”

Very seriously, Melissa replied, “Let me go to Moonbase and speak to them directly. Let me try to convince them that shutting down Moonbase is the right thing for the corporation to do.”

“How on Earth can you possibly do that?”

With a knowing smile, Melissa said, “Oh, there are ways to convince people of almost anything.”

“Are there?”

“Yes, of course. Especially if you know things about them that they would prefer to keep others from knowing.”

PIE FARM

“I am honored that you have come to see my humble patch of weeds,” said Lev Brudnoy, quite seriously.

He had been bent over one of the miniature lime trees that he had planted in a row of pots filled with lunar sand. Getting the cuttings to start the miniature citrus orchard had been relatively easy; people brought them up from Earthside, and, after an intense inspection by Moonbase’s environmental protection scientists, they were carried in sealed containers to the farm. The little orchard was another step in Operation Bootstrap.

Joanna cocked a brow at him. “Come off it, Lev. We’re not in old Mother Russia anymore.”

Brudnoy pawed awkwardly at his shock of graying hair. “But you are such a great lady, and I am only a sort of peasant…”

“Lev,” said Joanna sternly, “how long have we known each other?”

He screwed up his eyes, thinking. “About nine months, more or less.”

“How much actual work have you seen me do in that time?”

“Work?” He spread his hands. “Your work is far removed from the kind of thing I do.”

“Not any more,” said Joanna. “If we’re going to make a success of this Operation Bootstrap that you helped hatch up—”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. Maybe it was entirely Doug’s idea, but I have a feeling that you at least aided and abetted him.”

Brudnoy spread his arms in a gesture of helplessness. “I am part of the cabal, I confess it freely.”

Joanna’s expression relaxed into a smile. “Very good. So am I, from here on. I’m here to help you. What do you want me to do? Weeding? Picking? Name it.”

He swallowed visibly. “Well, we don’t have weeds. So far, we’ve, been able to screen them out before we accept a new batch of seeds or cuttings. But pruning is important…”

Joanna rolled up the sleeves of her blouse and made a mental note to wear regular coveralls the next time she came to Brudnoy’s farm.

“Look, I know how I’d feel if I was still the base director and my predecessor showed up all of a sudden,” said Jinny Anson.

Seated behind his curved glass desk, Greg eyed her suspiciously. “Do you?” he retorted.

Anson gave him a disarming smile. “I don’t want your job, Greg! Honest. Been there. Done that. All I want is a place where my husband can work in peace.”

“Doug suggested he come up here.”

“With two teenaged daughters?” Anson shook her head. “You don’t want that, I don’t want that, and they don’t want that.”

“Then what?” Greg demanded.

“Damned if I know,” Anson admitted. “There’s gotta be someplace on Earth where Quentin can teach without being hounded by the New Morality bigots.”

A slow smile crept across Greg’s lips. “You could move to Kiribati.”

Anson blinked. “Kiribati.”

“The islands are really lovely,” said Greg. “I wish I were there, right now.”

“Kiribati,” she repeated.

Three extra people at Moonbase strained the living accommodations. Zimmerman got the base’s only unoccupied quarters. Anson and Cardenas had to share one room, and a ninety-day contract employee, a young nanotech engineer working on the mass driver, reluctantly agreed to gite up his quarters and double up with one of the other short-timers for the remainder of his stay.

Anson called her husband in Austin as soon as the crew that delivered the extra bunk to her quarters had shut the door behind them.

“Kiribati?” Quentin’s placid face crinkled into a mild frown. “Where the hell’s that?”

Knowing that she was taking her husband’s career in her hands, she said, “Way out in the middle of the Pacific. They used to be called the Gilbert Islands, I think.”

Once her words reached him, his frown dissolved. “The Gilberts? Robert Louis Stevenson lived there! He loved it! Said it was the best place on Earth.”

“Really?”

They chattered back and forth — with three-second lags — for more than an hour. Quentin pulled up a geography program that showed them both the modern Kiribati: palm-fringed atolls in the tropical Pacific; small towns with happy, crime-free people.

“It’ll be a better place to raise the girls than Austin,” said Quentin, with real enthusiasm.

Jinny worried about tropical islanders’ ideas about sex, but said nothing.

“I could start the English department for this new university,” Quentin went on. “I could really-’ Suddenly his voice cut off and his big smile vanished.

“What is it?” Jinny asked.

Before her words could reach him, Quentin said, “But what about you? You’ll have to leave your job with Masterson Aerospace if we move to the islands.”

Jinny relaxed. “Don’t sweat it,” she said easily. “I’ve got a new job all picked out. I’m going to be president of the new university, whatever we decide to name it.”

His eyes widened once he heard her response. “President? Wow.”

“Damn’ right,” said Jinny. “I’m gonna be your boss, sweetheart!”

She couldn’t get what she wanted without going to bed with him. Melissa decided that she had played Rashid as far as she could; the next step had to involve sex.

Rashid was no fool. He realized that the only way for him to get out from under this Kiribati farce was to move the fusion development forward. He had to get the board of directors hot for fusion energy, divert their attention — and their funding — from Moonbase and nanotechnology.

Both Rashid and Melissa assumed, automatically, that Greg Masterson was behind the diamond Clippership scheme. And Melissa urged, almost begged, Rashid to send her to Moonbase to deal with Greg.

Yet Rashid was wary of allowing Melissa to go to Moonbase. He wanted to know how she could possibly stop Greg Masterson and, even more difficult, his mother.

She told him, part of it, in bed.

They had their usual dinner in his tent. This time, though, instead of keeping him at arm’s length Melissa let Rashid hold her, kiss her, undress her. She almost laughed at the way his hands trembled as he rumbled with the old-fashioned hook-and-eye at the back of her blouse’s collar.

It wouldn’t do to tell him outright, she knew. Her story would have much greater impact if she seemed to reveal it to him reluctantly, overpowered by his masculine mastery, her resistance melting away under the fierceness of his passion.

So she let him paw her and walk her to his double-sized cot and run his hands and lips over her naked body. She felt almost nothing, she kept herself in rigid control. But she moaned for him and writhed and gasped and heaved when he entered her.