“Let’s make it by acclamation,” said the vice-chair.

“Hear, hear!”

Paul broke into a grin and got to his feet. The entire board stood up and applauded their new chairperson. Paul went around to Joanna and ceremonially guided her to the empty chair at the head of the table.

The board members sat down, obviously expecting Joanna to make a little acceptance speech. Standing there at the head of the table, she glanced at Paul, then looked at Greg.

“Thank you,” she said, her eyes still locked on her son. “This is totally unexpected and a little scary.”

Paul noticed that Joanna was resting her fingers lightly on the table top. Her hands were steady, her voice firm.

“I want you to know that I will do my very best to serve you as chairperson of this board. I will do everything I can to fulfill the trust you’ve shown in me.”

Greg’s eyes were on his mother, his face blank, emotionless.

“The first order of business I would like to address,” Joanna went on, “is unity. I’know my late husband’s death has upset many members of this board. And Brad Arnold’s, too. But I ask you now — all of you — to put these deaths behind us and work together for a stronger, more productive company.”

“Hear, hear,” muttered one of the older men.

“I expect no recriminations and no accusations,” Joanna said, still looking at Greg. “I want cooperation and harmony. It’s useless to dwell on the past; we must look to the future.”

They all applauded, Greg the loudest of all. Paul noticed that Joanna said not another word about Bradley Arnold, nor did any of the other board members. Sic transit gloria mundi, he said to himself. Gone and forgotten.

SAVANNAH

The next three months were the happiest Joanna had ever known. Her son and her husband were working together, forging a bond between them, learning to know and respect one another.

Greg dined frequently at the house. He gave up his apartment in Manhattan to live full-time in his Savannah condo. He and Paul travelled together frequently to San Jose to check the progress of the nanotech program. They had agreed that the first goal would be to have the nanomachines build a complete shelter out on Mare Nubium totally out of local raw materials from the lunar regolith.

“I think we should put the site pretty far out on the mare,” Greg suggested at one of their meetings.

Kris Cardenas arched a questioning eyebrow. The three of them were in her cubbyhole of an office, hunched around the tiny circular table she used instead of a desk.

“If anything goes wrong,” Greg explained, “we don’t want the bugs infesting any of the existing shelters.”

“What could go wrong?” Cardenas demanded.

Paul intervened. “I think Greg is right. This is the first time we’re trying this. No harm in being a little on the conservative side.”

“But we’ve already programmed a temperature limit into the bugs. They won’t operate at an ambient higher than thirty degrees.”

“Celsius,” Paul said.

“That’s what — ninety degrees Fahrenheit?” Greg asked.

“Eighty-six,” said Cardenas. “So the bugs can’t work or multiply on the surface during the lunar daytime. Even if they somehow started to spread, you’d have two weeks of lunar night to dig ’em up and get rid of them.”

“Still,” Greg insisted, “we ought to put the demonstration some distance away” from existing facilities. Don’t you think so, Paul?”

“I guess so. No harm being careful.”

Cardenas looked more angry than hurt. “You guys act as if we’re in a Frankenstein mode. We’re using assemblers here, y’know, not gobblers.”

“Still,” Paul said, “the test site ought to be remote enough so that if anything does go wrong—”

“It won’t,” she snapped.

“If something unforeseen happens,” Paul went on, “it’ll happen far enough out in the boondocks so none of the existing tempos’ll be threatened.”

“Tempos?” Cardenas asked.

“That’s what the shelters are called,” Greg explained. “They’re supposed to be temporary shelters.”

She blinked those deeply blue eyes. “They’ve been in use for nearly ten years, some of them, haven’t they?”

“That’s right,” Paul said.

“Some ‘temporary’.”

With a tight smile, Paul said, “When the history of Moonbase’s first hundred years gets written, you’ll see that they’re temporary.”

“I should live so long,” Cardenas muttered.

“I thought your nanobugs were going to allow you to live a thousand years or so,” Paul teased.

“Once the friggin’ FDA lets us start using them in human patients, they will.”

Greg leaned back in his chair and steepled his long, sensitive fingers in front of his face. “Do you mean that you wouldn’t inject nanomachines into yourself if you thought they could improve your medical condition, just because the FDA hasn’t approved them?”

“If we had bugs that I knew would protect me from tumors or keep my arteries from clogging I’d swallow ’em in a hot second,” she said. “But we haven’t progressed that far yet, and we can’t make much more progress on the medical end until we get an FDA okay to do human trials on the simple stuff we have developed, y’know.”

Greg looked thoughtful. “So the medical work is on hold.”

“Right.”

“But you’re making progress on the toxic waste bugs.”

“The gobblers? For sure.”

Greg nodded as if satisfied.

That evening Paul invited Cardenas and Greg to dinner at the Stanford Court, in San Francisco. She showed up with her husband, whom she introduced as the finest neurosurgeon in the Bay area.

Paul shook hands with Pete Cardenas. He was as slim as a dancer, his skin a shade darker than Paul’s own. His given name must really be Pedro, Paul thought.

“So this is where you get your medical inputs,” Paul said.

“Is that supposed to be a pun?” Kris asked, pretending suspicion.

Paul felt his mouth drop open. “I didn’t mean—”

Greg guffawed. It was the first time Paul had seen his step-son actually relaxed enough to laugh out loud. And it has to be at my expense, he groused inwardly. But it was good to see that the kid at least knew how to laugh.

Greg had come into the dining room alone, even though Paul had urged him to bring a date. They had talked about it during the helicopter ride from San Jose.

But Greg had said, “You’re not bringing a date, are you?”

“Hey, I’m a married man,” Paul had replied.

“Yes,” Greg had said. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

With the two men in her life working shoulder-to-shoulder, Joanna put her energies into her new position as chairwoman of the board of Masterson Aerospace Corporation.

To her surprise she found that she enjoyed the work. And the newfound respect that Masterson’s employees gave her. Before, when she happened to visit the corporate offices, she was the boss’s wife. Now, she was chairwoman of the board.

She couldn’t .exactly fire people; but she could see to it that they were fired by others.

All her life she had been the reflection of the men around her. As her father’s daughter she had been one of the brightest young lights in Savannah’s social scene: a fine catch for some worthy young man. Her father had married her off to Gregory Masterson II, who had a bright future ahead of him as the heir to Masterson Aerospace. Joanna’s marriage saved her father’s failing fortune; Masterson money propped up the old man’s final years.

Then she had been the wife of Gregory Masterson, outwardly a happily-married woman with not a trouble in the world. Except that her husband drank and whored and had the business sense of a butterfly combined with the stubbornness of a jackass. And a mean streak that could cut deep without ever raising a hand. Joanna was a leader of Savannah society — but she knew the whispers that trailed behind her back. Gregory slept with any and every woman he could get his hands on. She bore it with as much dignity as she could pretend to, not knowing what else she could do.