“Three? Four?”

The technician shook her head. “All gone.”

“Five and six?”

“All of ’em.”

Greg asked, “Can’t you regain contact?”

She pointed to a hash-streaked screen. “Not now. The satellite links are down.”

“But there were six satellites, weren’t there?”

“Yessir, but the storm’s knocked all six of them out. Bing, bing, bing, one right after another. All six gone.”

“I have to go to the toilet,” said Bianca Rhee.

She whispered the words to Doug, leaning the helmet of her spacesuit against his so she wouldn’t have to use the suit radio.

They had been sitting in the half-covered shelter for several hours with nothing much to do except stare at the blank curving walls. Doug knew that the plumbing in the suits was different for women, and the suits were not meant to be worn for more than twelve hours at a time. From what he knew about solar flares, they would be in their suits for at least another twenty-four hours, perhaps considerably longer.

“If your urine collector is full you can void it into the chemical toilet,” Doug said to heir, “without getting out of the suit.”

“That’s not my problem,” Rhee said.

“Aren’t you wearing—”

“No,” she said. “Are you?”

Wonderful, Doug thought. People have been using space-suits for a century and still nobody’s come up with anything better than a plastic bag you stick on your bare butt What do they call it? FC-something: fecal containment system? Some system. And you have to slap it in place before you zip up your suit, of course.

“It’s not safe to get out of your suit,” he said.

“But I’ve got to!”

“The radiation level’s still too high.”

“I can’t do it in my pants.”

Why not? Doug thought. But from the sound of Bianca’s voice, even muffled through the helmets, there was no debating the issue.

He turned to Brennart and clicked on his suit radio. “Sir, do we have anything that we can rig up as temporary shielding in the John?”

“What are you talking about?” Irritated.

“Rhee’s got to get out of her suit for a few minutes. Can we put up some temporary shielding in the toilet compartment for her?”

For a long moment Brennart didn’t reply, and Doug could only guess what was going through his mind. At last he said gruffly, “Pull off the leggings of your suit and hold them on your lap.”

This has happened before, Doug realized, almost smiling. Bianca’s not the first one with the problem.

“And be quick about it,” Brennart added. “Every minute you’re out of the suit you’re exposed to ten times the radiation you’d get in a year Earthside.”

There’s no problem of depressurization, Doug knew. They were already breathing the shelter’s air. The suits were just for protection from the radiation.

Rhee headed for the toilet compartment, too embarrassed to say anything. Doug thought about asking her if she needed help getting her boots and leggings off, then thought better of it. Funny, she’d rather risk the radiation exposure than mess her pants. She’d rather die of radiation poisoning than embarrassment.

Then Doug realized that before the radiation died down they’d all have to use the toilet.”

“Sir, have you been in this kind of situation before?” he asked Brennart.

“Have I?” The expedition leader’s voice took on a new tone: lighter, almost eager. “This is a piece of cake compared to the fix we were in back when we were digging the first shelters in Alphonsus. The first time we were hit by a solar storm…”

A quarter-hour later Rhee returned from the toilet. Brennart was still spinning out yarns about the old days. Greenberg slinked to the compartment while Brennart kept on talking. And talking. And talking.

“… so we started vacuum breathing contests; you know, opening the visor of your helmet out on the surface to see how many seconds you could go before you closed it again. See what kind of guts you had. When you felt your eyes starting to pop you sealed up again. Well, one night there were just three of us out there, Jerry Stiles, Wodjohowitcz and me…”

Slowly, Doug realized what Brennart was doing. He’s not just helping to pass the time away; he’s calming us down, making us realize that he’s been through this kind of thing lots of times, telling us that we’ll live through it. Doug looked at his spacesuited leader with new respect. That’s what leadership is really all about, he thought: keeping the fear at arm’s length.

After making certain that communications with Earth were still intact, Greg went to his quarters and called his mother.

His quarters were a standard single cell, no bigger than a third-class stateroom on an ocean liner, since there had been so little time for the Moonbase staff to prepare for his arrival. Once Anson left, Greg would be moved to the director’s more spacious suite: two whole rooms, with a private toilet and shower stall.

For now, Greg slouched on his bunk and watched his mother’s face in the slightly grainy image on the screen built into the compartment›s smoothed stone wall.

“Has all communication with Brennart’s team been cut off?” Joanna was asking.

Nodding, Greg assured her, “For the time being. But they’re all safe inside their own shelters. They had plenty of time to dig in.”

“Yes,” she said once she heard his response. “Of course.” But her face belied her words.

She’s looking at me, Greg thought, she’s talking to me. But she’s thinking about Doug.

“How is Anson treating you? Is she being friendly?”

Almost laughing, Greg answered, “She danced with me.”

Before his mother received his reply, the phone chimed. Greg tapped his keyboard and the display screen split. Jinny Anson’s face appeared on the second half, her brows knit with concern.

“Danced with you?” Joanna started to say. “What do you mean?”

But Greg’s attention was on Anson. “What’s happened?”

“Thought you ought to know. Nippon One’s just launched a ballistic lobber toward the south polar region. Must be a crewed vehicle, I betcha.”

“Now? With the radiation storm at its peak?”

“Now,” Anson replied flatly.

“Where are you?”

“In my office.”

I’ll be right down there.” He clicked Anson’s image off his screen.

“What is it, Greg?” Joanna was demanding. “What’s going on?”

“Yamagata’s just launched a vehicle toward the pole. We don’t know if it’s manned or unmanned.”

It took three seconds for the news to reach Joanna. When it did, she flinched with shock. “What are they up to?”

“That’s what I intend to find out,” Greg said. I’ll call you when I’ve learned something.”

Brennart was running out of tall tales. Doug wondered if he’d start in on camp songs next. He remembered a counselor, when he’d been six or seven, who knew only a half dozen songs and repeated them endlessly every night around their gas-fed campfire.

“I wonder how the other shelters are doing?” Doug asked when Brennart took a breath.

“They’re all right,” Brennart said. “One and two are better off than we are; they’ve got more room and they can sit in their shirtsleeves.”

Getting to his feet carefully inside the cumbersome suit, Doug stepped over to the airlock hatch and the cluster of instruments built into its metal frame.

“Radiation level’s down slightly,” he said. “We might be past the worst of it.”

He could sense Brennart shaking his head inside his helmet. “Don’t kid yourself, son. The radiation levels will fluctuate up and down for hours. When it starts to tail off you’ll see a pretty rapid drop, not those little jiggles.”

The voice of experience, Doug said to himself.

“As soon as we can get through to Moonbase,” Greenberg said, “we’ve got to request another shipment of machines.”

“Another?” said Brennart.

“You mean more nanomachines?” Rhee asked. “Why?”

“The ones we left on the mountain are all dead by now.”