"How soon can I get out of here?" Doug asked. "I feel fine. Terrific, in fact"

Glancing at the monitors over Doug's bed, Zimmerman said, "Another few hours. There are some tests I must do. Then you get out of bed and I leave this glorified cave and return to civilization."

Joanna paced over to the other side of the bed. "Do you really feel fine?"

"Like I said, terrific. Really."

His mother looked across the bed at Zimmerman. Doug saw tears in her eyes. "You've saved him."

The sloppy old man shrugged, suddenly too embarrassed to say anything.

And Doug realized the enormity of what had happened to him. I would have died, he told himself. Under any normal circumstances I would be dead now.

He looked at Zimmerman with different eyes and saw a man of strength and vigor and the kind of passion that dares to challenge anyone, everyone who stands in the way between him and his life's work. Governments had outlawed nanotherapy. Ignorant mobs had burned nanolabs and killed researchers. But Zimmerman plugged doggedly ahead, despite all of that. Doug understood that even a fat old man can be heroic.

"You've given me life," Doug said.

"No," Zimmerman said, shaking his head slowly. "Your mother gave you life. I have merely helped you to keep it. And perhaps prolong it."

"If there's anything we can do," Joanna said stiffly, "you only have to name it."

"I have already informed you of my price, Madam."

Joanna's expression hardened. "Yes, you have, haven't you?"

"What I have already gained will be payment enough. Plus transportation back to Basel, of course."

"Of course," said Joanna. She was positively glaring at the old man now.

Doug realized that their conversation, back and forth across his bed, dealt with things he didn't know about.

"What's the price?" he asked. "What are you two talking about?"

Joanna tore her gaze from Zimmerman and looked down at her son: so young, so innocent and unknowing.

"She is referring, young man, to the fact that you will not be allowed to leave the Moon."

"For how long?" Doug asked.

"Forever," blurted Joanna.

"You are a walking nahomachine factory now," said Zimmerman. "No nation on Eartb will allow you entry."

Doug turned from Zimmerman, who looked gravely concerned, to his mother, who looked angry and fearful and almost tearfully sad.

"Is that all?" he asked. "I have to stay here on the Moon? That's what I wanted to do anyway.7 It was supposed to be Jinny Anson's going-away party. And it was supposed to be a surprise. But when Anson stepped into the darkened biolab, led by the hand by Lev Brudnoy, and they snapped on the lights and everybody yelled, "Surprise!" Anson took it all in her stride.

"You are not surprised," Brudnoy said, disappointed, as well-wishers pressed drinks into their hands.

Anson fixed him with a look. "What kind of a base director would I be if I didn't know what you guys were plotting?"

"Ah," said Brudnoy. "Of course."

She was surprised, though, when a dozen of the women started handing her wedding presents. Little things, made at Moonbase of lunar raw materials or cast-off equipment. A digital clock set to Universal Mean Time that told when lunar sunrise and sunset would be. A hotplate of cermet salvaged from a junked lander. A vial of lunar glass filled with regolith sand.

Halfway through the wedding gifts, Jack Killifer showed up and the party quickly centered around the new hero. Just as Anson had predicted, the women clustered around Jack, who had shaved and showered and put on a crisp new jumpsuit for the party.

Even as she continued to unwrap presents, Anson scanned the growing crowd for the astronomer, Rhee. No sign of her. Busted romance? she wondered. Or is the kid too shy to come to the party? She sneaks off every now and then. I thought she just wanted to be alone, but maybe she's already got a boyfriend tucked away someplace.

Not likely, Anson thought. Rhee's not much of a looker and she's too timid to go out and grab a guy for herself.

One of the lab benches had been turned into a bar. Anson wondered if the illicit still had been stashed in this lab all along; certainly they had all the right equipment for it, plumbing and glassware and enough chemical stores to plaster the whole base. The noise level climbed steadily: people talking at the top of their lungs, laughing, drinking. And then somebody turned on a music disk. The display screens along the walls all began to flash psychedelic colors and the lab quivered under the heavy thumping beat and sharp bleating whine of an adenoidal singer.

Couples paired off for dancing. Killifer seemed to be having the time of his life. Anson staggered away from the ear-splitting music, out into the tunnel where the party had spilled over.

Brudnoy was sitting on the floor with half a dozen others. Anson put her back to the wall and let herself slide down to a sitting position, careful not to spill a drop of her beaker of booze.

"You are not reigning at your own party?" Brudnoy asked. Even out here in the tunnel he had to half-shout to be heard over the music.

"Everybody's having a great time," she said.

"Are you?"

"Sure."

"Truly?"

"Yes, of course."

Brudnoy looked at her with his sad, bleary eyes. "I think you will miss us."

"Of course I'll miss you."

"Will your husband come up here with you? Brudnoy asked.

Anson shook her head. "I'm not coming back, Lev. I told you that. I'm starting a new life."

"In Texas."

"Just outside of Austin, actually," she said, straining her throat to get the words out over the party noise. "In the hill country."

"The land of enchantment, they say."

"That's New Mexico."

"Oh."

"But the Texas hill country is beautiful. Air you can breathe. Mountains and valleys and land that goes on forever. Flowers! When the bluebonnets bloom it's gorgeous. And a blue sky with white clouds. Clean and wonderful."

"Not like Moonbase."

"Not at all like Moonbase."

"And you really want to leave all this behind you?" Brudnoy made a sweep with his arm.

Anson knew he was kidding. Half kidding, at least. That sweep of his arm took in not merely this crowded underground warren of labs and workshops and cramped undersized living quarters. It took in the ancient ringwall mountains and the cracked crater floor, the vast tracts of Mare Nubium and the Ocean of Storms, the slow beauty of a lunar sunrise and the way the regolith sparkled when the sunshine first hits it, the sheer breathtaking wonder of standing on this airless world and planting your bootprints where no one had ever stood before, the excitement of building a new world, even that crazy mountain down at the south pole that's always in sunshine.

She pulled in a deep breath. "Yes, I'm really going to leave all this behind me. I'll miss you guys, but I've made up my mind."

Anson was surprised that she had to force the words past a good-sized lump in her throat.

Doug found that he could not lie idly waiting for the medics to start their tests. He asked for a computer and, once the technician on duty wheeled a laptop machine to his bed on a swing-arm table, he searched through the literature program for something to read.

Nothing appealed to him. In the back of his mind a question simmered, making him restless with pent-up curiosity. An oblong piece of ceramic or metal, about fifteen centimeters long and half as wide, gold on one side and white on the other.

There must be an inventory program, Doug told himself. He started searching the computer files for it BIOLAB.

The party was winding down. Jinny Anson had gone back inside the biolab, Lev Brudnoy at her side. Only about a dozen and a half people remained, most of them paired off into couples. The music had gone softly romantic, dancers held each other in their arms as they shuffled slowly across the cleared space behind tike lab benches.

As Anson tipped over the big cooler of fruit punch to get its last dregs into her plastic cup, Greg Masterson showed up at the door, looking somber as usual. Anson frowned inwardly. He's going to have to unwind if he expects to make it as director up here. Otherwise he's going to have a mutiny on his hands.

She giggled to herself. Captain Bligh, she thought. Who would be Fletcher Christian and lead the mutineers?

Brudnoy saw Greg, too, and made his way past the dancers and the lab benches toward him. Jinny followed the Russian, drink in hand, feeling a little annoyed. Greg's a wet blanket, he's going to rain on my parade, she thought, mixing metaphors in her slightly inebriated condition.

"Better late man never," said the Russian, smiling.

Greg's face remained somber. "Is my brother here?"

"Your brother?" Anson asked. "I thought he was in the infirmary."

"He was. He just disconnected all his monitors and walked out."

Anson glanced at Brudnoy, who looked as puzzled as she felt. "He hasn't shown up here."

Greg's frown deepened. "He's got to be someplace."

"Want to call security?"

"No," Greg said. "I don't Want to get my mother upset. She's asleep, but-"

"We can search for him," Brudnoy volunteered. "After all, this place isn't so big that he can hide from us"

"Why would he want to hide?" Anson wondered.

"Where the hell is he?" Greg growled.

Doug was prowling the tunnel that led to Jack Killifer's quarters. He had put aside his search of the computer's inventory program when the medics came in to run their infernal tests. After they left, he booted up the program again and found what he'd been looking for.

The cermet piece that Bianca Rhee had described was a cover for a hopper's electronics bay. The electronics bay held, among other items, the electrical controls for the main engine's liquid oxygen pump.

Doug's mind had leaped from one point to the next. Remove the cover and the electronics systems are exposed directly to the radiation from the solar flare. Knock out the rocket engine's propellant pump and the engine can't ignite. A dead engine keeps the hopper on the mountaintop, where the radiation will build up to a lethal level in a couple of hours or less.

He killed Brennart! And he damned near killed me. Once Doug was convinced of that, he pulled off his monitor leads, bolted out of bed and ran out of the infirmary in nothing but his flapping pale blue hospital gown.

Killifer kept the cover in his spacesuit pocket, Doug reasoned as he trotted down the nearly-empty tunnel. It was past midnight, the lighting was turned down to its late-night level. Still, the few people he passed in the tunnel stared at Doug in his loose gown and bare feet.

Bianca found the piece and thought it might have something to do with my vidcam. She kept it in her quarters and Killifer went in there and took it back. Good thing she wasn't there when he broke in; he might have killed her, too.

There it is. Doug saw J. KILLIFER stencilled on the name card beside the accordion-pleat door. He banged on the door frame and called Killifer's name. No answer. Either he's sound asleep or he's not in. Doug pulled on the door handle. Locked. He braced one bare foot on the door jamb and pulled hard. The flimsy catch gave way and the door jerked open, nearly toppling him.

Doug padded into Killifer's quarters. Empty. The bunk was a mess, hadn't been made in days, from the looks of it. The place smelled of unwashed clothes and sweat. Doug closed the door as far as it would go. He's got to come back here sooner or later. I'll wait He didn't want to sit on the grubby tangle of the bed. There was a slim molded plastic chair at the room's desk. When Doug sat on it he realized that his hospital gown left a lot to be desired. The chair felt cold and sticky on his partly-bare rump.

He jumped up and went to Killifer's closet. Two clean pairs of olive green coveralls hung limply there, but once Doug held them up against his own frame he realized how small Killifer really was. No wonder Bianca took his spacesuit by mistake; he's not much bigger than she is.

So he waited for Killifer in his loose hospital gown, pacing up and down the tiny room in four strides. Suddenly an idea struck him. The cermet cover must be here someplace, hidden in this room. Doug started to search through the drawers of Killifer's desk.

It was the best night Jack Killifer had ever had on the Moon. There's something to this hero business, after all, he laughed to himself as he headed back toward his quarters, weaving slightly along the tunnel.

The patty had been great fun, and just like Jinny had said, there were several women falling all over him. He danced with them all, then picked the one who had snuggled the closest and walked her back to her quarters. Sure enough, she made no objection when he stepped into her place with her and as soon as he slid the door shut she was unzipping her jumpsuit for him.

When he left her quarters, Killifer thought briefly about heading back to the party, see who's still there, maybe go for a double-header. But as tie started along the tunnel to the biolab he ran into Jinny and Lev and Greg Masterson.

"Have you seen Doug Stavenger?" Jinny asked him, very serious and concerned.

"Little Douggie?" Killifer wanted to laugh but held it in. "He's in the infirmary."

"No he's not," snapped Greg. He showed no recognition of Killifer whatsoever. They hadn't seen each other in more than eighteen years, but Killifer recognized Greg instantly.

"We're trying to find him," said Brudnoy, also looking so damned sober.

Killifer ignored Greg. He wants to be a stranger, fuck him. Suddenly it all seemed awfully funny: little Douggie out on the loose. Maybe he'll fall down and break his neck. But he made a serious face and shook his head gravely. "Nope. Haven't seen him."

They hurried on past him. Killifer stood in the tunnel, blinking with thought. Douggie's not in the infirmary. They lost their little Douggie.

Then a thought hit him hard enough to snap him into sobriety. The cover! Suppose the little sonofabitch has figured it all out and he's looking for the cover. I'd better hide it, and quick.

He started running down the dimly-lit tunnel toward his quarters.

Doug almost laughed at the pathetic stupidity of it. Under the mattress. Killifer had hidden the cermet cover beneath his mattress.

Maybe it wasn't so dumb after all, Doug thought. It had taken a real effort of will to work up the strength to touch Killifer's roiled, sweaty bunk.

Doug held the cover in his hands. The murder weapon. He stepped over to the desk and placed it down on its surface, gold side up.

And the door flew open.

Killifer's eyes were so wide Doug could see white all the way around the irises. The man stared at Doug, then his eyes flicked to the gold-plated cermet cover, then back to Doug again.