“Shutdown,” Vertientes said.

Everyone relaxed, sagged back a bit, let out their breaths.

“Thirty seconds, on the tick,” someone said.

“Power output?” Duncan asked.

“Design maximum. It reached fifty megawatts after four seconds and held it there right to cutoff.”

Vertientes was beaming. He turned and clutched Duncan by both shoulders.

“Perfecto! She is a well-behaved little lady!”

“You mean that’s it?” Dan asked, incredulous.

Duncan was grinning too. They all were.

“But nothing happened,” Dan insisted.

“Oh no?” said Duncan, grasping Dan’s elbow and turning him toward the row of consoles. “Look at that power output graph.”

Frowning, Dan remembered a scientist once telling him that all of physics boiled down to reading a bloody gauge.

“But it didn’t go anywhere,” Dan said weakly.

They all laughed.

“It isn’t a rocket,” Duncan said. “Not yet. We’re only testing the fusion reactor.”

“Only!” said the Japanese woman.

“Thirty seconds isn’t much of a test,” Dan pointed out.

“Nay, thirty seconds is plenty of time,” Duncan rebutted.

“The plasma equilibrates in five seconds or less,” said Vertientes. “But to be useful as a rocket,” Dan insisted, “the reactor’s going to have to run for hours… even weeks or months.”

“Si, yes, we know,” Vertientes said, tapping a finger into the palm of his other hand. “But in thirty seconds we get enough data to calculate the heat transfer and plasma flow parameters. We can extrapolate to hours and weeks and months.”

“I don’t trust extrapolations,” Dan muttered.

The blonde stepped between them. “Well, of course we’re going to build a fullscale model and run it for months. For sure. But what Doc Vee is saying is we’ve done enough testing to be confident that it’ll work.”

Dan looked her over. California, he decided. Maybe Swedish ancestry, but definitely California.

“We intend to mate the reactor with an MHD generator,” Vertientes said, earnestly trying to convince Dan. “That way the plasma exhaust from the reactor can provide electrical power as well as thrust.”

“Magneto…” Dan stumbled over the word.

“Magnetohydrodynamic,” Vertientes finished for him. The blonde added, “The interaction of electrically-conducting ionized gases with magnetic fields.”

Dan grinned at her. “Thank you.” She’s showing off, he thought. She wants me to know that she’s a smart blonde, despite her surfer chick looks. Then he caught Duncan watching him with that sly look in his glittering coalblack eyes, and remembered the student from Birmingham who had convinced Humphries to pay attention to their work. He shook his head ever so slightly, to tell Duncan that he wouldn’t need to be convinced that way. Once he would have scooped up a young available woman and enjoyed every minute of their brief fling together. But not now. He grimaced inwardly at the weird curves fate throws. When Jane was alive I chased every woman I saw, trying to forget her. Now that she’s dead I don’t want anyone else. Not now. Maybe not ever again.

Don’t you intend ever to return to Earth?”

Martin Humphries leaned back in his exquisitely padded reclining chair and tried to hide the dread he felt as he gazed at his father’s image on the wall screen. “I’m working hard here, Dad,” he said.

It takes almost three seconds for radio or light waves to make the round-trip between the Earth and the Moon. Martin Humphries used the time to study his father’s sallow, wrinkled, sagging face. Even though the old man had made his fortune in biotech, he still refused rejuvenation treatments as “too new, too risky, too many unknowns.” Yet he wore a snow-white toupee to hide his baldness. It made Martin think of George Washington, although George was alleged never to have told a lie and anyone who had ever dealt with W. Wilson Humphries knew that you had to count your fingers after shaking hands with the old scoundrel. “I need you here,” his father admitted grudgingly. “You need me?”

“Those bastards from the New Morality are pushing more tax regulations through the Congress. They won’t be satisfied until they’ve bankrupted every corporation in the country.”

“All the more reason for me to stay here,” Martin replied, “where I can protect my assets.”

“But what about my assets? What about me? I need your help, Marty. I can’t fight these psalm-singing fundamentalists by myself!”

“Oh, come on, Dad. You’ve got more lawyers than they do.”

“They’ve got the whole damned Congress,” his father grumbled. “And the Supreme Court, too.”

“Dad, if you’d just come up here you’d be able to get away from all that.”

His father’s face hardened. “I’m not going to run away!”

“It’s time to admit that the ship is sinking, Dad. Time to get out, while you can. Up here on the Moon I’m building a whole new organization. I’m creating Humphries Space Systems. You could be part of it; an important part.” The old man glared at him for much longer than it took his son’s words to reach him. At last he growled, “If you stay up there too long your muscles will get so deconditioned you won’t be able to come back to Earth.” He hasn’t heard a word I’ve said, Humphries realized. He talks and he never listens.

“Dad, I’m in the middle of a very complicated deal here. I can’t leave. Not now.”

He hesitated, then said, “I might never come back to Earth.” Once he heard that reply, his father’s image went from its normal unhappy scowl to a truly angry frown. “I want you here, dammit! This is where you belong and this is where you’re going to be. That’s final.”

“Father,” said Martin, feeling all the old fear and frustration swirling inside him like a whirlpool pulling him down, drowning him. “Father, come here, come be with me. Please. Before it’s too late.”

His father merely glowered at him.

“Give it up, Dad,” Humphries pleaded. “Earth is finished. Everything down there is going to crash; can’t you understand that?”

The old man sputtered, “Dammit, Marry, if you don’t listen to me…” He faltered, stopped, not knowing what to say next.

“Why can’t you listen to me for a change?” Martin snapped. Without waiting for a response, he said, “I’m trying to build an empire up here, Dad, an empire that’s going to stretch all the way out to the Asteroid Belt and beyond. I’m putting the pieces together right now. I’m going to be the wealthiest man in the solar system, richer than you and all your brothers put together. Maybe then you’ll treat me with some respect.”

Before his father could reply, Humphries sat up in his recliner and pressed the stud set into the armrest to terminate the videophone link. The old man’s face disappeared from the wall, revealing a holowindow that showed a realtime view of Jupiter as seen by the twenty-meter telescope at the Farside Observatory. For a long moment Humphries simply sat there, alone in the office he had set up for himself in the house deep below the lunar surface. Then he took a long slow breath to calm the furies that raged inside him.

The old man has no understanding of the real world. He’s still living in the past.

He’d rather go down with the ship than admit that I’m right and he’s wrong. Unbidden, the memory of his drowning engulfed him again. Nine years old. His father insisting that the trimaran was in no trouble despite the dark storm winds that heaved the boat so monstrously. The wave that washed him overboard. The frothing water closing over him. Desperately clawing for the surface but sinking, sinking, can’t breathe, everything going dark.

Martin Humphries died at the age of nine. After they revived him, he learned that it had been one of the crew who’d dived into the sound to rescue him. Watching the boy sink out of sight, his father had stayed aboard the trimaran and offered a bonus to any crewman who could rescue his son. Form that moment on, Humphries knew that there was no one in the world he could trust; he was alone, with only his inner fears and yearnings to drive him. And only his money to protect him.