Moonrise (16 page)

“Move we close the nominations,” Greg said.

“Second.”

Numb with surprise, Paul looked at Joanna, sitting across the table from him. She seemed just as shocked as he was. Automatically, he called for discussion.

“Let’s go straight to a vote,” said the old man at Paul’s right.

“Let’s make it by acclamation,” said the vice-chair.

“Hear, hear!”

Paul broke into a grin and got to his feet. The entire board stood up and applauded their new chairperson. Paul went around to Joanna and ceremonially guided her to the empty chair at the head of the table.

The board members sat down, obviously expecting Joanna to make a little acceptance speech. Standing there at the head of the table, she glanced at Paul, then looked at Greg.

“Thank you,” she said, her eyes still locked on her son. “This is totally unexpected and a little scary.”

Paul noticed that Joanna was resting her fingers lightly on the table top. Her hands were steady, her voice firm.

“I want you to know that I will do my very best to serve
you as chairperson of this board. I will do everything I can to fulfill the trust you’ve shown in me.”

Greg’s eyes were on his mother, his face blank, emotionless.

“The first order of business I would like to address,” Joanna went on, “is unity. I know my late husband’s death has upset many members of this board. And Brad Arnold’s, too. But I ask you now—all of you—to put these deaths behind us and work together for a stronger, more productive company.”

“Hear, hear,” muttered one of the older men.

“I expect no recriminations and no accusations,” Joanna said, still looking at Greg. “I want cooperation and harmony. It’s useless to dwell on the past; we must look to the future.”

They all applauded, Greg the loudest of all. Paul noticed that Joanna said not another word about Bradley Arnold, nor did any of the other board members. Sic transit gloria mundi, he said to himself. Gone and forgotten.

The next three months were the happiest Joanna had ever known. Her son and her husband were working together, forging a bond between them, learning to know and respect one another.

Greg dined frequently at the house. He gave up his apartment in Manhattan to live full-time in his Savannah condo. He and Paul travelled together frequently to San Jose to check the progress of the nanotech program. They had agreed that the first goal would be to have the nanomachines build a complete shelter out on Mare Nubium totally out of local raw materials from the lunar regolith.

“I think we should put the site pretty far out on the mare,” Greg suggested at one of their meetings.

Kris Cardenas arched a questioning eyebrow. The three of
them were in her cubbyhole of an office, hunched around the tiny circular table she used instead of a desk.

“If anything goes wrong,” Greg explained, “we don’t want the bugs infesting any of the existing shelters.”

“What could go wrong?” Cardenas demanded.

Paul intervened. “I think Greg is right. This is the first time we’re trying this. No harm in being a little on the conservative side.”

“But we’ve already programmed a temperature limit into the bugs. They won’t operate at an ambient higher than thirty degrees.”

“Celsius,” Paul said.

“That’s what—ninety degrees Fahrenheit?” Greg asked.

“Eighty-six,” said Cardenas. “So the bugs can’t work or multiply on the surface during the lunar daytime. Even if they somehow started to spread, you’d have two weeks of lunar daylight to dig ’em up and get rid of them.”

“Still,” Greg insisted, “we ought to put the demonstration some distance away from existing facilities. Don’t you think so, Paul?”

“I guess so. No harm being careful.”

Cardenas looked more angry than hurt. “You guys act as if we’re in a Frankenstein mode. We’re using assemblers here, y’know, not gobblers.”

“Still,” Paul said, “the test site ought to be remote enough so that if anything does go wrong—”

“It won’t,” she snapped.

“If something unforeseen happens,” Paul went on, “it’ll happen far enough out in the boondocks so none of the existing tempos’ll be threatened.”

“Tempos?” Cardenas asked.

“That’s what the shelters are called,” Greg explained. “They’re supposed to be temporary shelters.”

She blinked those deeply blue eyes. “They’ve been in use for nearly ten years, some of them, haven’t they?”

“That’s right,” Paul said.

“Some ‘temporary.’”

With a tight smile, Paul said, “When the history of Moonbase’s first hundred years gets written, you’ll see that they’re temporary.”

“I should live so long,” Cardenas muttered.

“I thought your nanobugs were going to allow you to live a thousand years or so,” Paul teased.

“Once the friggin’ FDA lets us start using them in human patients, they will.”

Greg leaned back in his chair and steepled his long, sensitive fingers in front of his face. “Do you mean that you wouldn’t inject nanomachines into yourself if you thought they could improve your medical condition, just because the FDA hasn’t approved them?”

“If we had bugs that I knew would protect me from tumors or keep my arteries from clogging I’d swallow ’em in a hot second,” she said. “But we haven’t progressed that far yet, and we can’t make much more progress on the medical end until we get an FDA okay to do human trials on the simple stuff we have developed, y’know.”

Greg looked thoughtful. “So the medical work is on hold.”

“Right.”

“But you’re making progress on the toxic waste bugs.”

“The gobblers? For sure.”

Greg nodded as if satisfied.

That evening Paul invited Cardenas and Greg to dinner at the Stanford Court, in San Francisco. She showed up with her husband, whom she introduced as the finest neurosurgeon in the Bay area.

Paul shook hands with Pete Cardenas. He was as slim as a dancer, his skin a shade darker than Paul’s own. His given name must really be Pedro, Paul thought.

“So this is where you get your medical inputs,” Paul said.

“Is that supposed to be a pun?” Kris asked, pretending suspicion.

Paul felt his mouth drop open. “I didn’t mean—”

Greg guffawed. It was the first time Paul had seen his stepson actually relaxed enough to laugh out loud. And it has to be at my expense, he groused inwardly. But it was good to see that the kid at least knew how to laugh.

Greg had come into the dining room alone, even though Paul had urged him to bring a date. They had talked about it during the helicopter ride from San Jose.

But Greg had said, “You’re not bringing a date, are you?”

“Hey, I’m a married man,” Paul had replied.

“Yes,” Greg had said. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

*       *       *

With the two men in her life working shoulder-to-shoulder, Joanna put her energies into her new position as chairwoman of the board of Masterson Aerospace Corporation.

To her surprise she found that she enjoyed the work. And the new-found respect that Masterson’s employees gave her. Before, when she happened to visit the corporate offices, she was the boss’s wife. Now, she was chairwoman of the board. She couldn’t exactly fire people, but she could see to it that they were fired by others.

All her life she had been the reflection of the men around her. As her father’s daughter she had been one of the brightest young lights in Savannah’s social scene: a fine catch for some worthy young man. Her father had married her off to Gregory Masterson II, who had a bright future ahead of him as the heir to Masterson Aerospace. Joanna’s marriage saved her father’s failing fortune; Masterson money propped up the old man’s final years.

Then she had been the wife of Gregory Masterson II, outwardly a happily married woman with not a trouble in the world. Except that her husband drank and whored and had the business sense of a butterfly combined with the stubbornness of a jackass. And a mean streak that could cut deep without ever raising a hand. Joanna was a leader of Savannah society—but she knew the whispers that trailed behind her back. Gregory slept with any and every woman he could get his hands on. She bore it with as much dignity as she could pretend to, not knowing what else she could do.

She was the mother of Gregory Masterson III, and the thought of how devastating to her son would be a bitterly contested divorce stayed her hand for years, for decades. She lived for her son and tried to raise him to be the kind of man she had hoped her husband would be.

And then she met Paul Stavenger and her life turned upside-down. For the first time she let herself be loved, wonderfully, excitingly, foolishly loved by another man.

It had almost turned to ashes. Gregory’s suicide and Greg’s almost insanely jealous accusations had nearly torn her apart. But now Greg and Paul were working harmoniously together. Greg had finally accepted his father’s suicide and his mother’s new marriage.

Joanna hesitated to tell Greg that she was expecting a baby. Paul’s son. Several times she had been on the verge of telling him, and each time she refrained. Wait, she told herself. Give his relationship with Paul a little more time to ripen. The two men are getting along so well together, don’t throw this at Greg. Not yet.

In the meantime, she found that she enjoyed being chairwoman of Masterson’s board of directors. She was a person in her own right now. Not a wife or a mother but chairwoman of the board. She was determined to be the best board chairperson Masterson had ever known.

Joanna threw herself into a complete review of the corporation’s product lines. The Clipperships were the only profitable products Masterson had, although the prospects for the Windowall TV screens looked extremely bright. Still, she could see from the marketing department’s forecasts that there was a disaster curve looming about three years ahead. New orders for the rocket vehicles were going to taper off dramatically in three years.

Sales of the Clipperships will have saturated the market by then, the reports told her. The corporation will have sold as many as the world’s airlines wanted or felt they needed. Sales would dwindle terribly.

What then? Joanna asked herself. The other divisions—commercial aircraft, electronics, and satellite manufacturing—were barely holding their own in very competitive markets. The Windowall development might be the salvation of the orbital manufacturing group, but the nanotechnology division and Moonbase were deeply in the red and showed no prospects of profitability for years to come.

Unless Greg and Paul could pull a rabbit out of the hat with their lunar nanotech demonstration. She knew Paul’s reasoning by heart. If Moonbase can be developed into a viable resource center, the costs of orbital manufacturing will drop by a factor of twenty. The two will be synergistic: as the manufacturing facilities in Earth orbit grow more profitable, their demand for raw materials will make Moonbase more profitable, too.

She looked up from the charts on her computer screen. And if we can use nanotechnology to build Moonbase faster
and more cheaply, the nanotech division will begin to find markets on Earth, as well.

But it’s such a gamble, Joanna knew. It’s piling one shaky bet on top of another and even a third. With that disaster curve waiting for us, just three years down the road.

She spent weeks thinking about the problem, discussing it with division managers and other members of the board of directors. She consulted experts from outside the company in finance, marketing, even forecasters of technological trends.

She did not tell either Paul or Greg what she was doing. They were happily working together and she had no intention of interfering or upsetting them.

Slowly, over many weeks, she gathered together a picture of what a prudent corporate leader would do. Sell off the divisions that were still marginally profitable, divisions that still had some market value. Drop the divisions that were not profitable. Lay off as many employees as you had to and downsize the corporation.

The only viable market that we can depend on, three years from now, is selling parts and maintenance services for the Clipperships. Maybe the Windowalls, but it’s too early to bank on that. We should be preparing the corporation for a smaller market, trim off all the excess fat and get ready for some leaner years. Ten years from now there will be a market for Clipperships again: new, bigger, more efficient Clipperships. But we’ve got to be able to last through the lean times in between then and now.

She knew Paul would never go for it. Would Greg? A few months ago he would, but now he seems completely on Paul’s side, ready to risk everything for the sake of this nanotech demonstration on the Moon.

Joanna mentally counted up the votes on the board of directors. If I suggested a downsizing plan it would pass, she realized. It would also break Paul’s heart and ruin our marriage.

But it would save Masterson Aerospace Corporation.

The damned ankle really hurts.

Paul limped along, trying to make up for the time he had lost by drifting off course. Like being on a pissin’ treadmill, he grumbled to himself. You keep humpin’ along, but you aren’t getting anywhere. That’s why he had never liked gyms or exercise equipment, even when he had first pulled duty on the old space stations that hung in zero gee and exercise was required every day.

Get my exercise in bed, Paul had bragged. Keep my heart in good shape nature’s way. Keep my whole system pumpin’ good. Yeah.

He was panting now and that was a bad sign. Exhaustion. How long have I been out here? He lifted his left arm as he staggered along, but between the dust clinging to his visor and the blurriness of his vision he could not see the figures on the digital clock clearly.

Long enough, he said to himself. Too long.

One foot in front of the other. But the ankle really hurts. Can’t be a fracture, I wouldn’t be able to put any weight on it. Chipped bone, maybe. More likely a sprain. But a sprain shouldn’t hurt so much when you walk on it, should it? At least it makes me stop fussin’ about the chafed heel on the other foot.

He remembered his grandfather’s grumbling remedy for a headache: “Drop an anvil on your toes.”