"That's easy," Paul had told him. "I want to spend my last cent with my last breath."

Coming up on your last breath pretty soon, he knew. If you're lucky-damned motherhumpin' shitfaced lucky-you'll suck up the last oxygen molecule in the tank the instant you get inside the tempo's airlock.

It almost worked out that way.

Paul looked up from his crawling and saw the mound of rubble that marked the buried shelter. He could even see the comm mast, he was so close. No hopper, though. Only a tractor sitting outside the airlock on four ludicrously thin, springy wheels.

Who gives a flyin' fuck? he said to himself as he pushed himself to his feet and staggered, limped, hopped on his one good foot, holding his breath, reaching out with both hands and flopped into the open airlock that stood in front of the buried shelter.

He pounded the yellow-glowing phosphorescent button that activated the lock. The outside door creaked shut, although Paul could hear no sound in the lunar vacuum. He imagined the creaking as the curving door slid shut on its track, grinding stray dust particles in its path.

Bracing himself inside the phonebooth-sized airlock, Paul heard the hissing of air and even the chug of the pump. Most beautiful sounds in the world, he thought Beats Duke Ellington any day.

The overhead light went on and the indicator panel's green light glowed to life. Trembling, hoping this wasn't the last hallucination of a man dying of oxygen deprivation, Paul fumbled with the catch of his visor and slid it up. Sweetest air in two worlds.

He took deep lungfuls of the stuff. Next sonofabitch complains about canned air is gonna get my knuckles in his mouth, Paul promised himself.

The indicator pad told him the pressure in the airlock was high enough for him to open the inner hatch. He knew he should clean the suit first. Must be carrying six hundred pounds of dust on me.

But he was too tired, too exhilarated, too anxious to get inside the shelter and out of this foul-smelling suit even to begin vacuuming.

He opened the inner hatch, clumped in his boots down the steps into the shelter's single compartment, wincing every time he stepped with his right foot.

It was a typical temporary shelter. A long aluminum cylinder'tthat had been laid down in a trench scooped out by a bulldozer and then buried beneath a couple of feet of loose regolith rubble to protect it from the meteoroids that pelted the Moon's surface and the harsh swings of temperature from daylight to Anight. And from the radiation pouring in unimpeded from deep space.

Radiation. Paul wanted desperately to flop on one of the lovely, beckoning bunks that lined the far end of the shelter, I but he knew he had to worm himself out of his suit first. And check his radiation patch.

It seemed to take hours, removing the helmet, then the backpack, the gloves, boots, leggings and finally wriggling out of the suit's torso. The dust was thick enough to make him cough. Hope it doesn't foul up the air vents, Paul thought His radiation patch had turned yellow. Not good, but not as bad as red would have been.

Hey, you're alive and safe with nothing worse than a sprained ankle and a radiation dose that'll take a year or so off the ass end of your life. Count your blessings, man.

He limped to the nearest bunk and flopped onto it But before he could close his eyes he thought of Greg.

I'm not home free yet He might still win this.

I should have known he'd try to kill me. All those weeks of his smiling and working with me. Started when I agreed to the nanotech demonstration. He's hated me all along, every inch of the way. I should have known.

Ought to call the base, get them to patch me through to Joanna. The kid's tried to kill me. Already murdered Tink and Wojo. I ought to warn Joanna. He might turn on her, try to kill my child.

But he was too exhausted to do anything but close his eyes and sleep.

ALPHONSUS.

Paul had been in good spirits when he arrived at Moonbase. The transfer spacecraft that took him from the space station in low Earth orbit to the giant crater Alphonsus was an ungainly collection of tankage, antennas, cargo containers and a spherical passenger module with two bulbous observation ports. With its spindly, spraddling legs the craft looked like a huge metallic spider about to pounce on some hapless insect.

As the lander literally fell toward the Moon's surface, Paul commandeered a spot at one of the observation ports and hung there weightlessly, watching Alphonsus rush up at him. The crater's ringwall mountains looked deceptively soft, tired and slumped from eons of erosion by dust-sized meteorites that sandpapered their slopes to almost glassy smoothness.

It was hard to get any sense of scale staring out at the barren, pockmarked face of the Moon. He knew Alphonsus was more than seventy miles across, a crater big enough to swallow all of Greater New York, from Newark to Bridgeport. But as he hovered in free fall, watching, it merely looked like a big circle of mountains with a dimple in its middle.

The floor of the crater was cracked, criss-crossed with sinuous rilles. Once in a while a whiff of ammonia or methane or one of the noble gases would seep out from the Moon's deep interior through those cracks. It was one of the reasons Moonbase had been sited inside Alphonsus's circling mountains: one day they would drill for the methane and ammonia, valuable sources of life-supporting volatiles.

Paul saw the unfinished oxygen plant and a crew of construction technicians milling around it like spacesuited ants.

Oxygen was the most valuable resource of them all, in space. If Moonbase ever became profkable, it would be by selling oxygen to the factories and other facilities in Earth orbit.

The spacecraft tilted over so that it could land on its rocket exhausts, and the/funar landscape shifted out of Paul's view. Clasping the handgrips on either side of the port, he felt the slightest of pressures, just a gentle nudge. And then the soft thump of landing. Weight returned, but it was only a sixth oi the weight he felt on Earth. This was the Moon. Paul felt as if he were returning home.

It took less than ten minutes for the spacesuited ground crew to connect the flexible tunnel to the lander's hatch. I wish the ground crews at commercial airports worked so fast, Paul thought as he made his way, slightly bent over, through the ribbed tunnel and into the main entrance of Moonbase.

It was hardly grand. Moonbase consisted of a dozen 'temporary' shelters, each buried beneath piles of regolith rubble and interconnected by tunnels barely high enough to stand in. The tempos, developed out of modules for space stations, reminded Paul of mobile homes: long and narrow cramped and confining, buzzing with electrical machinery and the constant rattle of air pumps, lit by ghastly overhead fluorescents that made everyone's complexion look sickly, smelling of sweat and machine oil and microwaved fast food and too many people crowded too close together.

Paul loved it.

Wojo was at the receiving desk, checking out the cargo that the lander was unloading, his computer screen split between the invoice list and a camera view of the spacesuited ground crew hauling out the crates from the lander's cargo platforms.

"So you've decided to come live with the proletariat for a while," Wojo said pleasantly. He was a bulky man, big in the shoulders, with a beer gut and the glittering eyes of a seeker after truth. Roughly Paul's age, Wojo's hair and ragged beard were already dead white and thinning. He insisted that it was from the radiation dosage he received when he worked out on the lunar surface.

"How're you doing, Wojo?" Paul asked, sliding his one travelbag from his shoulder and letting it thump softly on the plastic flooring.

"Still trying to get those narrow-minded bean counters in the insurance office to admit that the company owes me premium pay," Wojo grumbled, not taking his eyes from his display screen.

It was an old, old argument. Wojo demanded compensation for his tractor maintenance work out on the surface, over and above the hazardous duty pay called for in his employment contract.

Paul had steered clear of the fight while he'd been Wojo's division manager. Now that he was CEO he feared the man would ask him to intervene.

But Wojo had not done that, so far. "They got a new manager in the so-called human resources department. A man so narrow-minded he can look through a keyhole with both eyes.

Paul laughed. "You don't like him?"

Wojo looked up and gave Paul a withering glance. "He tells lies, his feet stink, and he don't love Jesus."

"Yeah," Paul said. "You don't like him."

"He'll make a ton of money for you. He's so tight-fisted his palms have never seen the light of day."

Paul made his way past the receiving desk before Wojo could ask for any favors. Jinny Anson, pert and blonde and feisty, directed him through the tunnels to the sleeping quarters they had reserved or him.

"I tried to find you a corner that's at least a little quieter than most. No snorers on either side of you, and you can barely hear the pumps."

"Thanks," Paul said. "I appreciate the special treatment."

"Nothing but the best for our new CEO."

"You're just trying to butter up the boss," he kidded. Yet he realized that this was the first time the CEO had visited Moonbase.

Jinny led him through two of the interconnected shelters, down another tunnel, and along the narrow central passageway of a third tempo: She's a chipper little handful, Paul thought. Fills out her coveralls in all the right places. Then he frowned inwardly. Cut that out. You made a promise to Joanna and you're gonna keepit. Yeah, he agreed silently. But it won't be easy.

"How's the air recycling plant going?" Paul asked, trying to put his focus on business.

"Humming along fine," Jinny replied. "Getting close to eighty percent efficiency. Gimme another few months and I'll have the loop closed good, I betcha."

"Really?"

"Uh-huh. Then we'll only need new oxy for what leaks through the airlocks, little stuff like that."

"Good."

They stopped at the last partition; Paul saw his name neatly printed on the card alongside the doorway. And Lev Brudnoy's name on the partition across the narrow corridor.

He doesn't snore, Paul thought, but he grunts a lot during the mating season. Which is always, for him.

"Not quite an executive suite, huh?" Jinny said, pulling back the accordion-fold partition to reveal a standard habitation compartment, one hundred ninety-six cubic feet that had to serve as sleeping quarters and office. No bigger than anyone else's quarters.

On a space station, in zero gee, a hundred ninety-six cubic feet was almost generous. Here on the Moon it came close to inducing claustrophobia.

Paul shrugged and gave the standard line, "Beats sleeping outside."

"Not by much," Jinny replied with the standard counter.

He could smell a soft flowery fragrance. "How do you stay so fresh in these sardine cans?"

She smiled prettily. "I just took my weekly shower a couple of hours ago. In your honor. Ask me again in a few days."

A vision of her lithe body glistening with sweat filled Paul's mind for an instant. "Pheromone heaven," he muttered.

"More like pheromone hell," Jinny said. "Head colds are a blessing around here."

Paul mumbled, "Yeah. Maybe so."

"My cubbyhole's at the other end of this row," she said, grinning. "In case you get lonely."

"I'm a married man," Paul said quickly, thinking as he spoke that it sounded terribly nerdy.

Jinny's grin turned saucy. "Well, just in case..."

Paul thanked her for the escort service and shooed her off, then went into his compartment, dropped onto the bunk, and immediately went to the desktop computer to call Joanna. But he was thinking of how pleasing it would be if Jinny really buttered up the boss; or vice versa.

"I just don't trust machines I can't see," Wojo grumbled.

Paul and the tractor teleoperator were sitting in the galley, hunched over Paul's hand-sized computer.

"If these things work we can let them do all the construction out on the surface and you can sit down here in comfort and count your insurance benefits."

Wojo fixed him with a baleful stare. The man's breath smelled terrible. Like the exhaust fan from a brewery, Paul thought. But where in the hell would he get beer up here?

"Just how smart are these slime-sucking bugs?" Wojo asked.

"Like ants," said Paul.

Wojo scratched at his shaggy beard. "Read a book once-"

"No!" Paul pretended shock.

With a small grin, Wojo said, "You'd be surprised what I'm capable of. Anyway, this book was about army ants in South America. Every once in a while they run amok and strip the whole festering jungle right down to the bark and bone. Don't leave anything alive in their path."

"These bugs aren't like that," Paul said.

"How do you know?"

Paul had to think a moment. "Well, for one thing, they're programmed to stop functioning at temperatures above thirty degrees."

Wojo heaved his bulk up from the spindly chair and trudged over to the thermostat on the curving wall of the galley. "It's twenty-seven degrees in here right now. Just a smidge over eighty, Fahrenheit."

"I thought it felt warm in here."

Walking back to the long, narrow table and settling ponderously into the little chair across from Paul, Wojo complained, "We need more radiator surface outside. Only way to get rid of heat is to radiate it away. You know that. I know that. But your pus-infested, maggot-brained, excrement-eating systems engineers sitting comfy and cool in their air-conditioned offices in Savannah haven't seen fit to honor our humble requests for more radiators."

"But thermal conduction-"

"Isn't worth a thimbleful of warm spit," Wojo said. "We're dug in nice and deep. The rock outside our shells conducts heat about as well as a politician tells the unvarnished truth."

"So turning the thermostats down won't help?"

With a massive shake of his shaggy head, Wojo said, "All you'd do is put an extra load on the air conditioners and the radiators. Which we need about as much as a prostitute needs an honest cop."

I'll get you more radiators," Paul said.

"Thank you kindly, sir," said Wojo. "Now, to get back to these mechanical viruses you brought up here with you-you say they're programmed to shut down at thirty Cee?"

"That's right."

"All that means is that they won't work out on the surface in daylight. Even at our current level of discomfort, they could be doing whatever it is they're programmed to do in here right now. How would we stop 'em?"

"Each set of the nanomachines is programmed to utilize one type of atom or molecule. When they run out of that material, they stop functioning."

"And what materials are these bugs programmed to use?"

Paul punched up the list on his computer.

Squinting at the small screen, Wojo mumbled, "Titanium, aluminum, silicon-for the love of sweet Jesus, they could munch their way right through the whole body of the Moon and come out the other side!"

"No, no," Paul insisted. "We have other safeguards."

"You better show 'em to me."

Tapping on the miniaturized keyboard, Paul said, "See, a polarizing current can shut them all down immediately."

"Long as you can get the current to them."