Greenberg opened the tube and placed several even thinner tubules on the bare rock.

“That’s it,” the nanotech said. “The first set of nanomachines for construction of Moonbase’s solar power tower have been put in place at,” he lifted his left arm to peer at his watch, “nineteen hundred hours and eight minutes.”

“Got it,” said Doug. “The tape has a time and date setting, too, so the timing will be verified.”

“Very well,” Brennart said. “Transmit the imagery to Moonbase.”

Doug switched his suit radio’s frequency to the channel for the minisats. No response. Checking the schedule he had taped to his forearm, he went back to the suit-to-suit frequency and said to Brennart, “No commsat over our horizon for another eleven minutes.”

He could hear Brennart huff impatiently. “All right,” the expedition leader grumbled. “Call in eleven minutes. Now let’s get out of here. Quickly.”

“Right,” said Bianca. “Let’s get under shelter.”

Bianca sounded frightened, Doug thought. She knows more about flares than any of us; if she’s scared she must have good reason to be.

“This is what you do when there’s a flare?” Greg asked.

After an intense hour or so in her office, making certain the base was battened down for the incoming radiation storm, Jinny Anson had led Greg back to The Cave. It was already filled with nearly every person in Moonbase. The tables had been pushed to one wall, raucous music was blaring from the overhead speakers, people were laughing, talking, drinking, couples were dancing on the smoothed rock flooring between the squares of grass.

“There’s not much else to do,” Anson replied, her voice raised to be heard over the thumping beat of the music, “except eat, drink and be merry. Until the radiation outside goes back to normal.”

Greg consciously tried to keep from frowning, yet he could feel his brows knitting. Okay, the people who work on the surface ought to be brought safely inside, he told himself. But that’s only a handful. Most of the base personnel work indoors; they could go right on with their jobs even though a solar flare is bathing the surface with lethal radiation levels.

“Relax!” Anson said. “This is just about the only excuse for a party we ever get up here.”

She led him to the row of food dispensers lined against The Cave’s far wall, stainless steel with glass fronts, seven feet tall. Not much of a selection, Greg saw. Most of the offerings were preprocessed soybean derivatives, of one sort or another.

“You mean all work stops while the flare’s going on?” Greg heard the brittleness in his own voice as he selected something that looked somewhat like finger sandwiches.

Anson shrugged. “Might as well. All the surface equipment is shut down. Even the scientific instrumentation outside takes a beating from the flare, so a lot of the researchers got nothing much to do.”

“What about communications?” Greg asked.

“The comm center is always manned,” she said easily, pulling out a soyburger on a bun and heading for the microwave ovens. “Even during a party.”

“Doesn’t the flare interfere with communications?”

“We can always go to the laser comm system if the microwave gets too hashed up.”

“I didn’t mean communications with Earth,” Greg said. “I meant with the expedition.”

Her face went serious. “We’ve got six minisats in polar orbit. They’re hardened, of course, but if the radiation levels exceed their hardening—”

“Then those people are cut off.”

“Right,” she conceded.

“Then what happens?”

“We’ve got two more minisats as backups. We send them up after the radiation dies down. Not much more that we can do.”

Greg thought hard for a few moments, then had to admit, “I guess you’re right.”

The microwave pinged and Anson pulled out her steaming soyburger. “Come on, let me introduce you to some of the gang. Are you straight or gay?”

Greg nearly dropped his plastic dish.’What?”

“Gay or straight? Who’d ya like to dance with?” Sex, Greg realized. It all comes down to sex. That’s what this party is all about. The solar flare is an excuse for these people to have a gene-pool enrichment. Just like neolithic hunting tribes that came together once a year to exchange virgins.

Anson waslooking at him with a positively impish expression. “Have I embarrassed you?” she asked.

“No…”

“We get pretty close to one another, living cooped up in here for months on end she said. “I forgot that most people Earthside aren’t as open as we are. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Greg said, trying to adjust his outlook. “And I’m straight.”

“Great!” Anson said, with seemingly genuine enthusiasm. “Then you can dance with me.”

Riding down the mountain was like dropping down a long dark shaft. Brennart fired the hopper’s main rocket engine once to lift them off the summit, then used the maneuvering jets to nudge them away from its slope. After that it was a long slow fall into the darkness below.

Doug felt his stomach fluttering and wondered how Bianca was handling it. Brennart stood at the podium, his gloved hands on the controls, like a sea captain of old at the helm of his storm-tossed ship. Instead of a sou’wester he was encased in a bulky spacesuit. And instead of the heaving and rolling of the waves, their hopper was falling smoothly in the shadows of the massive mountains, plummeting swiftly, silently, like a pebble dropped down a deep, deep well. This is what the old-time explorers must have felt like, Doug told himself. Danger and excitement and the thrill of doing things nobody’s done before. He grinned inside his helmet. This could become habit forming!

His earphones chirped with the signal from one of the minisats. Quickly, Doug plugged his vidcam into the comm port on the belt of his suit and played the tape at top speed. He heard a brief screeching in his earphones, like a magpie on amphetamines, then a verifying beep from the satellite. The data-compressed signal had been received.

“What about transmitting our claim?” Brennart asked before Doug could report to him.

“Just did it,” he said. “Squirted the tape to the minisat. When it comes over Moonbase’s horizon it’ll transmit the whole scene to the base.”

“How soon will that be?”

Doug made a quick mental calculation. “The satellite orbit is one hour. Should be in forty, fifty minutes.”

Brennart huffed again. “Plasma cloud might hit by then.”

“The commsats are hardened, aren’t they?”

“Up to a point.”

“Is there a chance the radiation could knock them out before our message reaches Moonbase?”

“Ever heard of Murphy’s Law?” Brennart replied.

“Yes, but—”

“It’s all a matter of degree. There’s no such thing as absolute hardening. The minisats are built to withstand a certain level of radiation. If the plasma cloud’s levels are higher, then the satellites will be kaput.”

“Then we’d be cut off from Moonbase.” Bianca’s voice, filled with apprehension.

“Until they pop up more satellites, after the storm is over.”

“I wonder how hardened the Yamagata snooper satellite is,” Doug mused.

Brennart made no answer and when Doug tried to talk to him he realized that the expedition leader was talking to the ground on a different frequency. Doug switched to that channel.

“… landing lights haven’t been set up yet,” he heard Killifer’s voice, almost whining. “You told me to get everybody inside—”

“Never mind,” Brennart snapped. “Turn up the radar beacon to full power. I’d like to have some idea of where the ground is!”

“Right.”

Doug knew there were no lights beneath the hopper’s platform. We could crash in this darkness, he realized.

The little cluster of instruments on the control podium included a laser altimeter, and Doug saw that its digital readout was falling so fast the numbers were almost a blur. Still Brennart did not fire the rocket to slow their descent It’s like parachute jumping, he thought. See how long you cap stay in free-fall before you chicken out and pull the ripcord.