Greg cleared his throat and said, “Yes, I’ve got the mission plan on my list of action items. Top priority.”

“I hope you approve it,” said Doug.

“Don’t worry about it,” Greg replied.

Joanna watched her two sons, thinking, Maybe they can work together. Maybe they’ll learn to trust one another and become as close as brothers. But I’ll have to watch them. Closely. For a long time to come.

“Once we get the water flowing back here,” Doug was saying, “we can start thinking about expanding the base, turning it into a really livable, town.”

Greg said nothing. He was thinking, Doug knows! He knows what I did. He says he doesn’t care, he says it’s all in the past, but he hates me. He’ll do whatever he can to destroy me. He’s already challenging me. He’ll want to keep Moonbase open. He’ll want to be director, sooner or later. Sooner, most likely. I’ll have to keep a couple of jumps ahead of him. I’ll have to make certain that Mom doesn’t give him unfair advantages.

I’ll have to make certain that Moonbase is shut down for good. When I leave here, Moonbase will be history.

PART III: Legacy

MANHATTAN

It was more like a comfortable little lounge than a conference room, thought Carlos Quintana. Richly appointed and furnished with quiet, understated elegance. These diplomats do all right for themselves, he reminded himself.

The Secretary-General gestured him to sit beside her on the bottle green leather sofa. Quintana had known the woman since before she had been Ecuador’s ambassador to the U.N., back when she had been a shy and frightened newcomer to the world of international politics.

She introduced him to the acting president of the Security Council and the chairwoman of the General Assembly, a comely African whose skin glowed like burnished ebony. The Security Council president was from Bangladesh, one of the poorest nations on Earth, yet he was quite overweight and his thick fingers were heavy with jewelled rings.

Nothing is done swiftly among diplomats, Quintana already knew. The four of them had a drink, chatted amiably, and only gradually got down to the reason for which the meeting had been arranged.

“Yes,” Quintana said quietly, once he had been asked, “I am a beneficiary of nanotherapy. I had lung cancer. Now it is gone.”

“You had the therapy illegally?” asked the General Assembly chairwoman.

Quintana smiled. “It is a gray area. Nanotherapy is illegal in many nations, including Mexico. But in Switzerland apparently the authorities allow it to continue.”

“Not for Swiss citizens, however,” said the Security Council president, who had been a lawyen He had rolls of fat instead if a neck, the glistening skin of his face seemed stretched tight like an over-inflated balloon.

“But you did it anyway,” said the Secretary-General.

Still smiling, Quintana said, “It seemed better than surgery or radiation treatments.”

“Or chemotherapy.”

“Or death,” Quintana added wryly.

For a moment they were silent. Then the Secretary-General smoothed her skirt and said, “So you are a supporter of nanotechnology, then.”

“Yes. Very much.”

“And you would speak against the current treaty being negotiated?”

“To outlaw all nanotechnology research? Yes, I am against it.”

“Would you speak publicly against it?”

“If I must.”

“Wouldn’t that involve some element of danger for you, personally?”

Quintana shrugged. “There is always the chance of some fanatic. I can hire bodyguards.”

The Security Council president cleared his throat ostentatiously. All eyes turned to him.

“Isn’t it true,” he asked, in an accusing voice, “that you are a member of the board of directors of Masterson Aerospace Corporation?”

“That’s no secret,” Quintana said evenly.

“And isn’t it true that Masterson Corporation will suffer greatly if all nanotechnology work is prohibited?”

Quintana nodded. “It would mean the end of their base on the Moon. They could not survive up there without nanomachines to process oxygen for them and maintain their solar power farms.”

“It is also true, is it not,” the president continued, “that your corporation stands to make indecently enormous profits from nanotechnology manufacturing.”

“If we manufacture any salable products with nanomachines, the manufacturing will most likely be done in space, not on Earth.”

“The profits will be made on Earth.”

“Yes, certainly.”

“So you are not exactly unbiased in this matter.”

Quintana put his glass down on the marble-topped coffee table. “I am a living example of what nanotherapy can accomplish. As you can see, I am not a monster and the nanomachines that were put into my body have done me nothing but good.”

“But—”

“But nanotechnology can do more than heal the sick, that is true,” Quintana went on. “Nanomanufacturing can bring a new era of prosperity to Earth. I should think that nations such as Bangladesh and Zaire would welcome such an opportunity.”

“At the cost of ruining our existing industries!”

Quintana laughed disdainfully. “Your existing industries are keeping your people poor. If I were you, sir, I would embrace nanotechnology instead of trying to outlaw it.”

The president said nothing. Silence hung in the elegant little room for many heavy moments.

At length, the Secretary-General said, “Thank you for sharing your views with us, Carlos.”

Knowing he was being dismissed, Quintana got to his feet, bowed slightly to her. “Thank you for inviting me.”

He got as far as the door, then turned back to them. “Take my advice. Don’t fight nanotechnology. The best thing you could do, right now, would be to buy Masterson stock.”

And, laughing, he left the three of them sitting there.

He was still smiling as he stepped out of the elevator at the U.N. complex’s underground garage level. He walked to the dispatcher and asked him to call his limousine.

As he lit up a thin cigar, a man in grimy coveralls stepped up to him and pushed the muzzle of a nine-millimeter automatic into Quintana’s midsection.

“Antichrist,” he snarled. And he emptied the gun’s magazine into Quintana’s midriff and chest, smashing him back against the dispatcher’s booth. The shots rang deafeningly through the garage.

Quintana felt no pain, but the world seemed to tilt into crazy lopsided scenes of concrete ceiling and staring faces. The man with the gun stood calmly over him.

“Let’s see your devil’s bugs cure you of that.’ And he spat on Quintana’s shattered, bleeding body.

MOONBASE DIRECTOR’S OFFICE

“This nanotech treaty has got to be stopped!” Joanna said.

Greg nodded tightly. He had been director of Moonbase for slightly more than six months. What had been Jinny Anson’s office was now his, and he had transformed it considerably. His desk was an ultramodern curved surface of gleaming lunar glassteel, a new alloy from Moonbase’s labs that was as transparent as crystal yet had the structural strength of high-grade concrete. A long couch of lunar plastic sat against one wall and comfortable webbed chairs were scattered across the floor, which was covered with soft, sound-absorbing tiles manufactured in one of Masterson Corporation’s space station factories in orbit around Earth.

The air in the room was pleasantly cool, like an air-conditioned office of a major corporation back on Earth. Greg had insisted on paving a large section of Alphonsus’ floor with new radiators that allowed the environmental control system to work more efficiently and made all of Moonbase’s underground facilities much more comfortable. It was his major accomplishment, to date.

The office walls were lined with precisely spaced Windowall display screens. Most of them showed artwork from the world’s great museums, although Greg could, at the touch of a keypad, turn them into views of virtually any part of Moonbase or the surface of Alphonsus’ crater floor.