“We hope to re-establish a link with you in fifteen minutes.”

“Right.”

The contact broke up into crackling static. Doug clicked off the noise. The universe went silent, except for the sound of the suit’s fans and his own breathing, it sounded ragged, labored. A wave of nausea was surging up his throat Doug fought it back. The last thing he wanted was to upchuck inside the helmet.

Panting, sweating, feeling sick and dizzy, he clicked on the suit-to-suit frequency, to check on Brennart’s breathing.

Nothing. Doug held his breath and listened hard. He could not hear anything at all from Brennart.

BASEL

Wilhelm Zimmerman rocked slowly in his desk chair. It creaked under his weight. He was a fat, bald, unkempt man in a wrinkled gray suit that looked as if he had been sleeping in it for a week.

The woman sitting in front of his desk looked distraught. She was well into her seventies, lifeless white hair hanging straight, skin wrinkled and brittle-looking, obviously her blood circulation was poor. Too bad, thought Zimmerman, she must have been something of a beauty once.

“I don’t want to die,” she said, her voice cracking.

“Neither do I,” said Zimmerman softly. “No one does. And yet…’ He shrugged elaborately.

“I’ve heard… some of my friends have told me… that it is possible to reverse the effects of aging.” She looked at him piercingly, her diamond-hard blue eyes belying the hesitancy in her voice.

Zimmerman rested his hands on his considerable paunch. She wants to live. So do I.

“Madam, what your friends have told is unkind. There are no miracles.”

“But… I thought that your work here at the university,” she said. “What is it called? Nano-something or other.”

“My research is on nanotechnology, yes,” he replied. “But procedures on human subjects is absolutely forbidden. The laws are very strict. We are not allowed to deal with human patients.”

“Oh!”

“In fact,” Zimmerman said, “for the past several years we have worked only on non-medical aspects of nanotechnology. The animal rights movement has made even animal experiments too difficult to continue.”

The elderly lady took a tissue from her tiny purse and dabbed at the corners of her eyes.

Pointing a chubby finger at the graphs on his office wall, Zimmerman said with some distaste, “As you can see, Madam, our most recent work has been on new manufacturing processes for solar panels and long-range electrical distribution lines.”

“Oh my,” said the elderly lady, “I haven’t the faintest idea of what that means.”

“For an organization called OPEC,” Zimmerman explained, frowning. “To generate electricity in the desert and send it here to Europe.”

The woman’s eyes went crafty. “But isn’t it true that you also do therapeutic work — but you’re not allowed to let people know about it?”

Zimmerman shook his head hard enough to make his cheeks waddle. “No!” he said firmly. “That would be against the law. The university would not stand for it and neither would the authorities.”

“But I was told—”

“Madam, you were misinformed. I am sorry, but do I look like the kind of man who would risk his career and his good name by breaking the law?”

Dubiously, she replied, “I suppose not.”

For another half hour she tried to get Zimmerman to admit that he could use nanotherapy to help her. When at last she gave up and left, Zimmerman called a friend from the forensic medical department who came to his office, grinning, and lifted several excellent fingerprints from the armrests of the chair on which she had sat.

It took more than a week for Zimmerman’s connections in the Swiss national police to get the information to him. The elderly woman was the mother of a bureaucrat in Berne who was in charge of monitoring all nanotherapy work in the nation.

“An agent provocateur,” Zimmerman said to himself. “Next they will close down all nanotechnology work, even research, the way they’ve done in the United States.”

He wished there was somewhere in the world where he could continue his work in peace.

MOONBASE

“It’ll take at least twelve hours to get a lobber properly loaded with the supplies they need,” Anson said over the din in the garage.

Tractors were starting up, the whining shrill of their electrical engines echoing painfully off the rock walls of the cavernous garage area. Men and women were scurrying across the polished rock floor; the big steel inner hatch of the airlock itself was groaning on its bearings as it slid shut for the twentieth time in the past two hours.

“They need help now,” Greg insisted. “My brother’s dying, for chrissake.”

Anson shook her head. “No sense killing more people by going out there half-cocked.”

“Can’t we send a medical team right now?” Greg pleaded. “I don’t care what it costs—”

Anson whirled on him. “You think I’m worried about cost?”

Greg backed a step away from her sudden fury. “What I meant was… dammit, send a medical team now. Right away! Consider that an order from the board of directors.”

“I take my orders from Ibriham Rashid, in Savannah,” Anson said, striding away from Greg.

He pushed past two technicians waving hand-held computers at each other as they argued.

Grabbing Anson by her shoulder, Greg said, “Send the medical team now. Don’t wait for the rest of the stuff they need. Do it now! I’ll take the responsibility.”

Anson glared at him. “We don’t have any medical staff to send! One doctor and a couple of part-time technicians, that’s our medical staff. They won’t be able to do anything for him down there anyway.”

“But—”

“It isn’t a matter of responsibility or cost or anything else except the fact that we don’t have the personnel we need up here. And it takes time to fuel up a rocket vehicle, goddammit to hell and back! It takes time to bring our radars and other surface, instruments back on line after the pounding they just took.”

“I know, but—”

“I can’t just wave a freakin’ magic wand and have a fully loaded and properly crewed lobber jump off to the freakin’ south pole!”

“But you can send out a lobber as soon as the goddamned equipment is back on lines can’t you?” Greg yelled back. “Get him here as soon as you can.”

Anson pulled in a deep breath and stood there in the middle of the bustle and noise, staring hard at Greg. He saw her nostrils flare angrily and thought for a moment that she was going to charge him, like an enraged bull.

Instead, her shoulders relaxed slightly and she said, just loud enough to be heard over the clanging, yelling, screeching cacophony, “Yeah, you’re right. I can.”

Before Greg realized what she had said, she added, “And I will.”

She turned abruptly and started off in a half trot, yelling over her shoulder, “C’m’on, we’ve got to get out to the rocket port and light some flares under some butts.”

As soon as she heard Doug’s voice over the satellite link, Bianca Rhee ducked out of the cramped comm compartment and raced down the shelter’s central aisle to the airlock, where the spacesuits were stored. Without bothering even to think about what size she was grabbing, she pulled on the first pair of leggings she came to and plopped down on the floor to tug on the boots.

“What d’you think you’re doing?”

Rhee looked up and saw Kilьfer standing over her, looking displeased.

“We’ve got to go up there and get them!” Rhee said, scrambling to her feet once the boots were sealed.

“You know how to run a hopper?”

“No,” she said, “but you do. Come on, hurry!”

Kilьfer grunted unhappily. “That’s my suit you’re putting on.”

“Oh!” She felt confused for a moment. “Look, there’s no time for me to get out of these and into my own. We’re about the same size. Use my suit.”