“Okay.”

“Jack, I need you to check out the hopper, make certain it’s ready for flight.”

“You want me to suit up and go outside?” Killifer asked. “With a zillion rads out there?”

“Doug’s done some rough calculations on the exposure levels. You should be all right”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I can’t order you to do it,” Brennart said. “I’m asking you to.”

Killifer grimaced. Yeah, sure, he can’t order me. But if I don’t I’ll be broken down to tractor maintenance or cleaning toilets.

“Okay,” he said. I’ll suit up.”

“Thanks, Jack!” Brennart’s voice sounded sincerely grateful.

Killifer turned in the little chair and got slowly to his feet. “Rog,” he said to Deems, “you take over here.”

“You’re going outside?” Deems’ normally startled expression had graduated to outright fear.

“That’s right,” Killifer said sourly. “You’re gonna see the fastest friggin’ checkout of a hopper in the history of the solar system.”

The women made room for him to pass and head up the shelter’s central aisle toward the airlock and the spacesuits. Brennart wants to be a big-ass hero and I’ve gotta risk my butt for him. Will I get any of the credit? Shit no. He’s the superstar; I’m down in the noise. Nobody’ll even know I was here.

Him and the Stavenger kid, Killifer fumed as he began to pull on the leggings to his spacesuit. The two of ’em. He tugged on his boots and sealed them closed. Then a new thought struck him.

The two of them. Going up to the mountaintop in the hopper, in all this radiation. What if they don’t make it back?

For an instant he felt a pang of remorse about Brennart, but then he thought, friggin’ butthead wants to be a hero, what better way is there than to die up there on top of the mountain?

As Doug lifted the uncrated spectrometer onto the platform of the hopper that stood outside Shelter One, he noticed that the radiation patch on his sleeve had already turned bright yellow.

This is going to be hairy, he thought We’ll both get enough radiation to put us in the hospital.

The telescope was already on the hopper’s metal platform, a man-tall tube supported on three Spindly legs.

A stocky spacesuited figure toted a telemetry transmitter with its solar power panels folded up like the wings of a bird and shoved it onto the hopper’s platform. Doug jumped up onto the metal mesh decking and started lashing down the instruments securely.

“Is that you, Bianca?” he asked the spacesuited figure.

“No, it’s not Bianca.” Killifer’s voice.

Surprised, Doug asked, “What’re you doing out here?”

Clambering up onto the hopper to help with the tie-downs, Killifer’s voice rasped, “I’m out here getting my cojones fried because you talked Brennart into being the big hero, that’s why I’m here.”

“I didn’t talk—”

“Fuck you didn’t,” Killifer snapped.

Doug’s usual reaction to hostility was to try to laugh it off. But he knew it wouldn’t work with Killifer.

“Look,” he said while he tied down the instruments, “I checked out your file and I understand why you’re sore at me.”

“You went into my personnel file?”

“I went into everybody’s files, everybody who’s on this expedition.”

“Who the fuck gave you authority for that?”

Doug was tempted to reply that his mother had given him the authority. Instead he answered mildly, “It’s part of my job.”

“The hell it is.”

“I saw the order transferring you to Moonbase and all your appeals.”

Killifer grunted as he lashed down the equipment on the deck.

“The transfer was signed by my mother. Your appeals were all bucked up to her and she rejected them.”

“That’s right.”

“What on Earth did you do to get my mother so pissed at you?” Doug asked. “She practically exiled you up here;”

“None of your friggin’ business.”

“Whatever it was, it wasn’t fair,” Doug said, without looking up from the straps he was locking down. “I wish there was some way I could make it up to you.”

Killifer stopped working and straightened up. “Yeah. Sure you do.”

“I mean it,” said Doug.

“Then give me back the eighteen years she stole from me.”

Doug sighed. “I wish I could.”

Killifer jumped down from the deck, floating slowly to the ground. Doug noticed that there was hardly any loose dust at all for his boots to kick up.

“Okay, then,” Killifer said as he headed back toward the shelter, “there is something you can do for me.”

“Name it.”

“Drop dead while you’re up there on that friggin’ mountaintop.”

Safely back inside the buried shelter’s airlock, Killifer slowly wormed out of his spacesuit and then ducked through the open hatch into the main section of the shelter. He saw Greenberg huddling with Martin, and Rhee standing worriedly next to the galley, munching on a protein bar. They were both happy to be out of their spacesuits after so many hours.

Once free of the spacesuit, Killifer strode past them swiftly and slipped into the tiny communications cubicle, where Deems still sat at the console. Standing behind Deems, he saw in the main screen the hopper outside where Brennart — with Doug Stavenger standing beside him — quickly ran down the hopper’s abbreviated checklist.

“Ready for takeoff,” Brennart said, his voice edged with tension.

“Clear for takeoff,” said Deems, his own voice high, quavering.

The little hopper disappeared from the screen in a burst of white, smokey rocket thrust.

Killifer smiled to himself as the aluminum vapor swiftly dissipated in the lunar vacuum. In the leg pouch of his spacesuit was a four-inch square of reinforced cermet, the covering for the hopper’s electronic controls for the liqui oxygen pump.

Bon voyage, Killifer said silently. He hadn’t rubbed a magic lamp, but he felt certain that his dearest wish was about to come true.

ACAPULCO

Carlos Quintana stood before the sweeping window of his clifftop hacienda and stared out into the limitless blue of tie Pacific. White cumulus clouds were building out over the horizon, towering up into thunderheads: so beautiful to look at from a distance, so treacherous to fly through.

He held a heavy cut crystal glass of exquisite single malt Scotch in his left hand, a slim black cigar in his right.

Cancer of the lung.

The words had sounded like a death sentence at first. Cancer had taken his father, both his uncles, even his older brother. But that had all happened before Carlos had built his fortune. Now he had the money to bring a few specialists to Mexico and let them inject nanomachines into his lung.

The thought disturbed him, almost frightened him. Nanomachines had killed Paul Stavenger and several others on the Moon. Nanomachines were illegal in the United States, in Mexico, in almost every nation on Earth. They didn’t always work the way they were supposed to. That’s what people said. They ran amok and killed Paul, up on the Moon.

He sipped at the whisky, then inhaled a long delicious drag from the cigar. And coughed.

But we’ve used nanomachines on the Moon for years now. They work as designed. Maybe whatever went wrong back then has been fixed now.

Yes, he argued with himself, but the corporation’s nanotech division has closed, except for the work they’re doing at Moonbase. It’s almost impossible to run a nanotech laboratory in the open — on Earth. And haw there’s talk in the U.N. outlawing nanotechnology entirely.

As the sun slowly settled onto the ocean horizon and the dipped below it, Qujntana stood alone at the window, watchin but not seeing, alternately sipping and puffing, wondering he trusted the scientists enough to let them inject invisible machines into his body.

He knew the answer, of course. Despite his fear of nanomachines, cancer of the lung frightened him more.

The fact that he would have to break the law to receive nanotherapy never impinged on his consciousness. Neither did the fact that a few hundred thousand of his fellow Mexican would die this year of lung cancer because they were too poor to afford nanotherapy.