The Precipice (Asteroid Wars) Read online

  “Welcome, Ms. Lane.”

  The sound of his voice made Pancho flinch. He had opened the door silently while her back had been turned as she surveyed the greenery. She saw a man apparently about her own age, several centimeters shorter than she, a little on the pudgy side. He was wearing an open-necked pale yellow tunic that came down to his hips. His slacks were cinnamon brown, perfectly creased. His feet were shod in fancy tooled leather boots. His skin was doughy white, his hair dark and slicked back.

  “I’m here to see Mr. Humphries,” she said. “I’ve been invited:’

  He laughed lightly. “I’m Martin Humphries. I gave my staff the night off.”

  “Oh.”

  Martin Humphries gestured Pancho to come into his house. Knowing Elly was comfortably wrapped around her ankle, Pancho stepped right in.

  The house was just as luxurious as the grounds around it, perhaps even more so. Big, spacious rooms filled with the most beautiful furniture Pancho had ever seen. A living room long enough to hold a hockey rink, sofas done in gorgeous fabrics, holowindows showing spectacular Earthside scenery: the Grand Canyon, Mt. Fujiyama, Manhattan’s skyline the way it looked before the floods.

  The dining room table was big enough to seat twenty, but it was set for just the two of them: Humphries at its head, Pancho at his right hand. Humphries walked her past it, though, and into a book-lined library where the single holowindow showed the star-strewn depths of space.

  There was a bar along one side of the library.

  “What would you like to drink?” Humphries asked, gently guiding her to one of the plush-cushioned stools.

  “Whatever,” Pancho shrugged. A good way to judge a man’s intentions was to let him select the drinks.

  He looked at her for a fleeting, intense moment. Like being x-rayed, Pancho thought His eyes were gray, she noted, cold gray, like lunar stone.

  “I have an excellent champagne,” he suggested.

  Pancho smiled at him. “Okay, fine.”

  He pressed a button set into the bar’s surface, and a silver tray bearing an opened bottle of champagne in a refrigerated bucket and two tall fluted glasses rose up to serving height with a muted hum of an electrical motor. Humphries pulled the bottle from its bucket and poured two glasses of champagne. Pancho noticed that the ice-cold bottle quickly beaded with condensation. The glasses looked like real crystal, prob’ly made at Selene’s glass factory.

  The bubbles tickled her nose, but the wine was really good: crisp and cold, with a delicate flavor that Pancho liked. Still, she merely sipped at it as she sat beside Martin Humphries on the softly-cushioned bar stool.

  “You must be awful rich to have this place all to yourself,” she said.

  His lips edged into a thin smile. “It’s not mine, really.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Legally, this building is a research center. It’s owned by the Humphries Trust and operated jointly by a consortium of Earthside universities and the Selene executive board.”

  Pancho took another sip of champagne while she sorted that out in her mind.

  Humphries went on, “I live here whenever I’m at Selene. The research staff uses the other end of the house.”

  “But they don’t live here.”

  He laughed. “No, they live a few levels up, in… um, more ordinary quarters.”

  “And you get the whole place rent-free.”

  With a waggle of his free hand, Humphries said, “One of the advantages of wealth.”

  “The rich get richer.”

  “Or they lose what they’ve got.”

  Nodding, Pancho asked, “So what do they research down here?”

  “Lunar ecology,” Humphries replied. “They’re trying to learn how to build Earthlike ecologies here on the Moon, underground.”

  “Like the Grand Plaza, up topside.”

  “Yes. But completely closed-cycle, so you don’t have to put in fresh supplies of water.”

  “That’s what all the flowers and trees are about.”

  “Right. They’ve been able to make a lovely garden, all right, but it’s incredibly expensive. Very labor-intensive, with no birds or insects to pollinate the plants. The idiots running Selene’s environmental safety department won’t let me bring any up here. As if they could get loose! They’re so stupidly narrow-minded they could look through a keyhole with both eyes.”

  Pancho smiled at him, remembering how hard it had been for her to get the approval to bring Elly and her food into Selene. I must be smarter than he is, she thought. Or maybe Selene’s execs just don’t like megazillionaires trying to push them around.

  “And those full-spectrum lamps cost a fortune in electricity,” Humphries went on.

  “Electricity’s cheap, though, isn’t it?”

  Humphries took a long draft of his champagne, then answered, “It’s cheap once you’ve built the solar energy farm up on the surface… and the superconducting batteries to store electrical energy during the night High capital costs, though.”

  “Yeah, but once you’ve got the equipment in place the operating costs are pitiful low.”

  “Except for maintenance.”

  “Keeping the solar farms clean, up on the surface, you mean. Yeah, I guess that ain’t cheap.”

  “Any work on the surface is damned expensive,” he grumbled, bringing his champagne flute to his lips.

  “So how rich are you?” she asked abruptly.

  Humphries didn’t sputter into his champagne, but he did seem to swallow pretty hard.

  Pancho added, “I mean, do you own any of this or are you just livin’ in it?”

  He thought a moment before answering. Then, “My grandfather made his fortune in the big dot-com boom around the turn of the century. Gramps was smart enough to get into the market while it was still rising and get out before the bubble burst.”

  “What’s a dot-com?” Pancho asked.

  Ignoring her question, Humphries went on, “My father took his degrees in biology and law. He bought into half a dozen biotech firms and built one of the biggest fortunes on Earth.”

  “What’re your degrees in?”

  “I have an MBA from Wharton and a JD from Yale.”

  “So you’re a lawyer.”

  “I’ve never practiced law.”

  Pancho felt alarm signals tingling through her. That’s not a straight answer, she realized. But then, what do you expect from a lawyer? She recalled the old dictum: How can you tell when a lawyer’s lying? Watch his lips.

  “What do you practice?” she asked, trying to make it sound nonchalant.

  He smiled again, and there was even some warmth in it this time. “Oh… making money, mostly. That seems to be what I’m best at.”

  Glancing around the luxurious library, Pancho replied, “I’d say you’re purty good at spendin’ it, too.”

  Humphries laughed aloud. “Yes, I suppose so. I spend a lot of it on women.”

  As if on cue, a generously-curved redhead in a slinky metallic sheath appeared at the doorway to the dining room, a slim aperitif glass dangling empty from one manicured hand. “Say, Humpy, when is dinner served?” she asked poutily. “I’m starving.”

  His face went white with anger. “I told you,” he said through clenched teeth, “that I have a business meeting to attend to. I’ll be with you when I’m finished here.”

  “But I’m starving,” the redhead repeated.

  Glancing at Pancho, Humphries said in a low voice, “I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”

  The redhead looked Pancho over from head to toe, grinned, and flounced off.

  Visibly trying to contain his fury, Humphries said, “I’m sorry for the interruption.”

  Pancho shrugged. So I’m not invited for dinner, she realized. Should’ve known.

  “Is that your wife?” she asked coolly.

  “No.”

  “You are married, aren’t you?”

  “Twice.”

  “Are you married now?”


  “Legally, yes. Our lawyers are working out a divorce settlement.”

  Pancho looked straight into his icy gray eyes. The anger was still there, but he was controlling it now. He seemed deadly calm.

  “Okay,” she said, “let’s finish up this business meeting so y’all can get down to dinner.”

  Humphries picked up his glass again, drained it, and placed it carefully back on the bar. Looking up at Pancho, he said, “All right. I want to hire you.”

  “I already have a job,” she said.

  “As a pilot for Astro Manufacturing, I know. You’ve been working for them for more than six years.”

  “So?”

  “You won’t have to quit Astro. In fact, I want you to stay with them. The task I have in mind for you requires that you keep your position with Astro.”

  Pancho understood immediately. “You want me to spy on them.”

  “That’s putting it rather crudely,” Humphries said, his eyes shifting away from her and then back again. “But, yes, I need a certain amount of industrial espionage done, and you are ideally placed to do it.”

  Pancho didn’t think twice. “How much money are we talkin’ about here?”

  CUENCA

  Dan Randloph felt a wave of giddiness wash over him as he stood at his hotel window and looked down into the rugged gorge of the Jucar River.

  This is stupid, he told himself. You’ve been in high-rises a lot taller than this. You’ve been on top of rocket launch towers. You’ve been to the Grand Canyon, you’ve done EVA work in orbit, for god’s sake, floating hundreds of miles above the Earth without even an umbilical cord to hold onto.

  Yet he felt shaky, slightly light-headed, as he stood by the window. It’s not the height, he told himself. For a scary moment he thought it was one of the woozy symptoms of radiation sickness again. But then he realized that it was only because this hotel was hanging over the lip of the gorge, six stories down from the edge.

  The old city of Cuenca had been built in medieval times along the rim of the deep, vertiginous chasm. From the street, the hotel seemed to be a one-story building, as did all the buildings along the narrow way. Inside, though, it went down and down, narrow stairways and long windows that looked out into the canyon cut by the river so far below.

  Turning from the window, Dan went to the bed and unzipped his travel bag. He was here in the heart of Spain to find the answer to the world’s overwhelming problem, the key to unlock the wealth of the solar system. Like a knight on a quest, he told himself, with a sardonic shake of his head. Seeking the holy grail.

  Like a tired old man who’s pushing himself because he doesn’t have anything else left in his life, sneered a bitter voice in his head.

  The flight in from Madrid had turned his thoughts to old tales of knighthood and chivalrous quests. The Clippership rocket flight from La Guaira had taken only twenty-five minutes to cross the Atlantic, but there was nothing to see, no portholes in the craft’s stout body and the video views flashing across the screen at his seat might as well have been from an astronomy lecture. The flight from Madrid to Cuenca, though, had been in an old-fashioned tiltrotor, chugging and rattling and clattering across a landscape that was old when Hannibal had led armies through it.

  Don Quixote rode across those brown hills, Dan had told himself. El Cid battled the Moors here.

  He snorted disdainfully as he pulled his shaving kit from the travel bag. Now I’m going to see if we can win the fight against a giant bigger than any windmill that old Don Quixote tackled.

  The phone buzzed. Dan snapped his fingers, then realized that the hotel phone wasn’t programmed for sound recognition. He leaned across the bed and stabbed at the ON button.

  “Mr. Randolph?”

  The face Dan saw in the palm-sized phone screen looked almost Mephistopholean: thick black hair that came to a point almost touching his thick black brows; a narrow veeshaped face with sharp cheekbones and a pointed chin; coal-black eyes that glittered slyly, as if the man knew things that no one else knew. A small black goatee.

  “Yes,” Dan answered. “And you are… ?”

  “Lyall Duncan. I’ve come to take you to the test site,” said the caller, in a decidedly Highland accent.

  Dan puffed out a breath. They certainly aren’t wasting any time. I’m not even unpacked yet.

  “Are you ready, sir?” Duncan asked.

  Dan tossed his shaving kit back onto the bed. “Ready,” he said.

  Duncan was short, rail-thin, and terribly earnest about his work. He talked incessantly as they drove in a dusty old Volkswagen van out into the sun-drenched countryside, past scraggly checkerboards of farms and terraced hillsides, climbing constantly toward the distant bare peaks of the Sierras. The land looked parched, poor, yet it had been under cultivation for thousands of years. At least, Dan thought, it’s far enough from the sea to be safe from flooding. But it looks as if it’s turning into a brown, dusty desert.

  “… tried for many a year to get someone to look at our work, anyone’’ Duncan was saying. “The universities were too busy with their big reactor projects, all of them sucking on one government teat or another. The private companies wouldn’t even talk to us, not without some fancy university behind us.”

  Dan nodded and tried to stay awake. The man’s soft Scottish burr was hypnotic as they drove along the winding highway into the hills. There were hardly any other cars on the road, and the hum of the tires on the blacktop was lulling Dan to sleep. Electric motors don’t make much noise, he told himself, trying to fight off the jet lag. He remembered that auto makers such as GM and Toyota had tried to install sound systems that would simulate the vroom of a powerful gasoline engine, to attract the testosterone crowd. The GEC had nixed that; silent, efficient, clean electrical cars had to be presented as desirable, not as a weak second choice to muscle cars.

  “… none of them wanted to see that a compact, lightweight, disposable fusion generator could work as well as the behemoths they were building,” Duncan droned on. “No one paid us any attention until we caught the ear of Mr. Martin Humphries.”

  Dan perked up at the mention of Humphries’s name. “How did you reach him? He’s pretty high up in the corporate food chain.”

  Duncan smiled craftily. “Through a woman, how else? He came to Glasgow to give a speech. The anniversary of his father’s endowment of the new biology building, or something of that sort. He took a fancy to a certain young lady in our student body. She was a biology major and had quite a body of her own.”

  With a laugh, Dan said, “So she did the Delilah job for you.”

  “One of the lads in our project knew her—in the biblical sense. He asked her if she’d help the cause of science.”

  “And she agreed.”

  “Willingly. ‘Tisn’t every day a lass from Birmingham gets to sleep with a billionaire.”

  “Oh, she was English?”

  “Aye. We couldn’t ask a Scottish lass to do such a thing.”

  Both men were still laughing as the car pulled into the test site’s parking lot.

  It wasn’t much of a site, Dan thought as he got out of the car. Just a flat, open area of bare dirt with a couple of tin sheds to one side and a rickety-looking scaffolding beyond them. Rugged hills rose all around, and in the distance the Sierras shimmered ghostlike in the heat haze. The sun felt hot and good on his shoulders. The sky was a perfect blue, virtually cloudless. Dan inhaled a deep breath of clean mountain air; it was cool and sharp with a tang of pines that even got past his nose plugs. Dan thought about taking them out; it would be a relief to do without them. But he didn’t remove them.

  There were six people in the “office” shed, two of them women, all but one of them young, wearing shabby sweaters and slacks or jeans that hadn’t known a crease for years. Dan felt overdressed in his tan slacks and suede sports jacket One of the women was tall, with long, lank blond hair that fell past her broad shoulders. She looked like a California surfer type to Dan. Or maybe a Swede.
The other was clearly Japanese or perhaps Korean: short and chunky, but when she smiled it lit up her whole face.

  They all looked eager, excited to have Dan Randolph himself here to see their work, yet Dan caught a whiff of fear among them. Suppose it doesn’t work today? Suppose something goes wrong? Suppose Randolph doesn’t understand its value, its importance? Dan had felt that undercurrent in research labs all around the world; even on the Moon.

  The one older man looked professorial. He wore baggy tweed trousers and a matching vest, unbuttoned. His long face was framed by a trim salt-and-pepper beard. Duncan introduced him as “Dr. Vertientes.”

  “I am delighted to meet you, sir,” Dan said, automatically lapsing into Spanish as he took the man’s hand.

  Vertientes’s brows rose with surprise. “You speak Spanish very well, sir.”

  “My headquarters is in Venezuela.” Dan almost added that he’d once been married to a Venezuelan, but that had been too brief and too painful to bring into the conversation.

  “We are a multinational group here,” Vertientes said, switching to British English, overlaid with a Castilian accent. “We speak English among ourselves.”

  “Except when we curse,” said the Japanese woman.

  Everyone laughed.

  Much to Dan’s surprise, Duncan was the leader of the little group. The tall, distinguished Vertientes turned out to be the group’s plasma physicist. Duncan was the propulsion engineer and the driving force among them.

  “You know the principle of nuclear fusion,” the Scotsman said as he led the entire group out of the office shack and toward the slightly larger shed that served as their laboratory.