Shifting the backpack’s weight on his shoulders, Paul crouched over and placed his gloved hands on the bare rock. Four legs are better than two for this, he told himself. Slowly, with enormous care, he picked his way up the gradual slope. It felt like walking on glass. Or ice. For a crazy moment Paul thought back to his one and only ice-skating lesson, when he’d been a teenager. Split his eyebrow open in a fall that ended his interest in skating forever.

Easy now, he commanded himself. Don’t slide down. You don’t have any time to waste playing around in here.

His boots slipped and skidded, barely providing any traction at all. Paul bent his face closer to the stone, looking for rough patches, bumps, anything that could provide purchase. He was grateful that the Sun was still low enough in the sky to throw long shadows; made it easier to see where he could plant his feet and get something to push against.

Just as he reached one hand across the rim of the crater his foot slipped and he started to slide backward. He clung desperately to the slightly raised edge of the crater, grabbed with his other hand and hung on to keep himself from sliding all the way back to the bottom.

For several moments he stayed there, strung out, gasping, while his booted feet searched for something to hold them. He gave it up and hauled himself upward, letting his legs go limp. He got his belly over the edge, trying not to think of what would happen if he tore the fabric of his suit. One leg over the rim. Then the other.

At last he climbed to his feet. Wish I had a marker beacon, he thought. There ought to be a warning here.

Okay, get moving. Enough time wasted.

But which direction? He turned a full three hundred sixty degrees. Mare Nubium looked the same in all directions. Flat bare plain of dust-covered rock. The hump that marked the shelter he had fled was nowhere in sight now, but neither was the next shelter, nor the ringwall mountains of Alphonsus.

“Talk about the middle of nowhere,” Paul said aloud.

He checked the GPS receiver on his suit’s forearm. Nothing. The display was dark. No signal chirped in his earphones. Satellite’s too low for my suit antenna to pick up the signal.

Paul stared out at the horizon. For the first time he felt truly afraid. He was alone and lost and miles from any possibility of help.

“Murder?” Paul felt his insides go hollow.

“That’s what Greg said,” Melissa Hart told him.

It was Paul’s first day in his new office as CEO of Masterson Aerospace. He had been in the midst of setting up his personal mementos on his broad ebony desk: a fist-sized chunk of Moon rock; a solid mahogany model of a Clippership in the red, white and blue colors of American Airlines; a framed photograph of Joanna smiling at him from beneath a wide-brimmed straw hat.

It had taken more than a week to get his new office suite squared away. Paul had wanted to stay at his old office, but it was in the manufacturing plant out where I-16 intersected with I-95. Corporate headquarters was in the old historic section of Savannah, down by the riverfront, where the docks and warehouses had been largely replaced by tourist hotels and upscale restaurants. At least he could walk to work, just a few blocks along Bryan Street.

He had felt uneasy about taking over Gregory’s suite, but finally decided he shouldn’t let old guilts stand in the way of doing his new job. So he had his secretary totally redecorate the office; a chore she delighted in, for six whirlwind days of painters and carpet installers and electricians and decorators.

And now Melissa had walked unannounced into his office, so spanking new it smelled of paint and freshly-sawn wood. She stood before his desk, arms clasped tightly across her chest, looking wired tight.

Paul sank into his stylishly modern caramel leather swivel chair, staring open-mouthed at Melissa.

“Murder?” he repeated.

She pulled up the upholstered chair in front of his desk. “Greg’s got a videodisk that his father made just before he died. He says it proves Gregory didn’t commit suicide. He was murdered.”

“Holy shit,” Paul groaned.

Melissa said nothing.

“Did you see this videodisk?”

“Greg played it for me,” she said.

“What’s on it?”

“Gregory’s sitting at his desk. Right here in this office. It must’ve been late afternoon, right before he was killed.”

He was supposed to have been at the executive committee meeting, Paul remembered. But Gregory had walked out on the rest of the committee halfway through the agenda and returned to his office. Nothing unusual in that; he had done it often enough in the past. Meetings usually made him more irritable than usual, especially when there were unpleasant decisions to be made that he wanted to avoid.

“He looked drunk to me,” Melissa went on. “Smashed. Muttering into the camera. He must’ve set it up on his desk.”

“What did he say?”

She made a little shrug. “Most of it was hard to understand. He did a lot of mumbling. But he had that Magnum on his desk and he said something about somebody trying to kill him. “The gun’s for protection,” he said. “This gun’s going to save me.’”

“And?”

“That’s about it. A lot of it was incomprehensible. Greg says he’s going to get some experts to go over the disk and extract as much from it as they can.”

“Has he shown it to the police?”

“Not yet. He just got it himself; it was delivered through the interoffice mail.”

“It took more than a month to get a videodisk fifty feet down the hall?”

Melissa almost smiled. “Greg’s been in New York all this time. He just got back yesterday and started going through his mail.”

“Oh. I see.” Paul looked out the picture window toward the riverfront, then turned back to Melissa. She seemed tense, wary. But not angry, the way she’d been at the board meeting.

He asked her, “Why are you telling me this?”

“Figured you ought to know.”

“You’re not sore at me? About Joanna, I mean?”

A flicker of something crossed her face, but she regained her self-control almost immediately. “It hurt when you dumped me, Paul.”

Feeling flustered, he spread his hands and said defensively, “I didn’t exactly dump you, did I?”

Her voice deathly calm, Melissa replied, “Call it what you want. Soon’s you started after the boss’s wife you didn’t have any time for me.”

“I fell in love,” Paul said.

Melissa swept her almond eyes around the big office in a long, exaggerated inspection. “Yeah,” she said finally. “I can see that.”

Paul wished he could get angry at her, but he was terribly afraid that she was right.

“Well, anyway, thanks for the news.”

“Sure.” She got up to leave and for the first time Paul noticed the forest green miniskirt that clung to her hips and her long slim legs encased in patterned green stockings.

“Who in the hell would want to kill Gregory?” he muttered as she headed for the door.

Melissa turned back toward him. “Maybe it was the guy who took over his job. And his wife.”

Paul sagged back in his chair, stunned. “You don’t mean that!”

She shrugged again. “That’s what Greg thinks. That’s what he’s going to tell the police.”

For a long while Paul sat at his desk, staring out the window, looking at nothing. In his mind’s eye he saw Gregory sitting in this same room, with a Smith Wesson .357 Magnum from his gun collection in the wall cabinet sitting on the desk in front of him and a half-empty decanter of Gentleman Jack beside it.

He put the gun in his mouth and blew his head off, Paul told himself. Nobody murdered him. The bastard committed suicide, but first he made that pissing disk to leave as much trouble behind him as he could. He knew about Joanna and me. The disk’s his revenge on us.

But why did Joanna have his body cremated? You can’t exhume a cremated body and look for evidence of murder.