“One of the reasons for locating the original Moonbase in Alphonsus’s ringwall mountains was the hope of utilizing these volatiles for—” She saw Humphries shuffling toward her, kicking up clouds of dust as if it didn’t matter. It had to be him, she thought, because his spacesuit was different from the ones issued to the tourists. Not different enough to be obvious to the tenderfeet, but Pancho recognized the slightly wider, heavier build of the suit and the tiny servo motors at the joints that helped the wearer move the more massive arms and legs. Extra armor, she thought. He must worry about radiation up here. Humphries had no name tag plastered to the torso of his suit, and until he was close enough to touch helmets she could not see into his heavily-tinted visor to identify his face. But he walked right up to her, kicking up the dust, until he almost bumped his helmet against hers. She recognized his features through the visor: round and snubby-nosed, like some freckle-faced kid, but with those cold, hard eyes peering at her.

Pancho lifted her left wrist and poised her right hand over the comm keyboard, asking Humphries in pantomime which radio frequency he wanted to use. He held up a gloved hand and she saw that he was holding a coiled wire in it. Slowly, with the deliberate care of a person who was not accustomed to working in a spacesuit, he fitted one end of the wire into the receptacle built into the side of his helmet. He held out the other end. Pancho took it and plugged into her own helmet. “Okay,” she heard Humphries’s voice, almost as clearly as if they were in a comfortable room, “now we can talk without anyone tapping into our conversation.”

Pancho remembered her childhood, when she and some of the neighborhood kids would create telephone links out of old paper cups and lengths of waxed string. They were using the same principle, linking their helmets with the wire so they could converse without using their suit radios. This’ll work, Pancho thought, as long as we don’t move too far apart. She judged the wire connecting their helmets to be no more than three meters long.

“You worried about eavesdroppers?” she asked Humphries.

“Not especially, but why take a chance you don’t have to?”

That made sense, a little. “Why couldn’t we meet down at your place, like usual?”

“Because it’s not a good idea for you to be seen going down there so often, that’s why,” Humphries replied testily. “How long do you think it would be before Dan Randolph finds out you’re coming to my residence on a regular basis?” Teasingly, Pancho said, “So he finds out. He’ll just think you’re inviting me to dinner.”

Humphries grunted. Pancho knew that he had invited Amanda to dinner at his home twice since they’d first met. And he’d stopped asking Pancho to report to him down there. Now they met at prearranged times and places: strolling in the Grand Plaza, watching low-gravity ballet in the theater, doing a tourist moonwalk on the crater floor.

Pancho would have shrugged if she hadn’t been encased in the suit. She said to Humphries, “Dan made his pitch to the governing council.”

“I know. And they turned him down.”

“Well, sort of.”

“What do you mean?” he snapped.

“A couple of citizens volunteered to work on Dan’s project. He’s goin’ down to the Venezuela space station to try to get Dr. Cardenas to head up the team.”

“Kristine Cardenas?”

“Yup. She’s the top expert at nanotech,” Pancho said.

“They gave her the Nobel Prize,” Humphries muttered, “before nanotechnology was banned on Earth.”

“That’s the one he’s gonna talk to.”

For several long moments Humphries simply stood there unmoving, not speaking a word. Pancho thought he looked like a statue, with the spacesuit and all. At length he said, “He wants to use nanomachines to build the rocket. I hadn’t expected that.”

“It’s cheaper. Prob’ly better, too.”

She sensed Humphries nodding inside his helmet. “I should’ve seen it coming. If he can build the system with nanos, he won’t need my financing. The sonofabitch can leave me out in the cold — after I gave him the fusion idea on a silver fucking platter!”

“I don’t think he’d do that.”

“Wouldn’t he?” Humphries was becoming more enraged with every word. “I bring the fusion project to him, I offer to fund the work, but instead he sneaks behind my back to try to raise funding from any other source he can find. And now he’s got a way to build the fucking rocket without me altogether! He’s trying to cut my balls off!”

“But-”

“Shut up, you stupid bitch! I don’t care what you think! That prick bastard Randolph thinks he can screw me out of this! Well, he’s got another think coming! I’ll break his back! I’ll destroy the sonofabitch!”

Humphries yanked the wire out of Pancho’s helmet, then pulled the other end out of his own. He turned and strode back to the bus that had carried him out to the Ranger 9 site, practically boiling up a dust storm with his angry stomping. If he hadn’t been in the heavy spacesuit, Pancho thought, he’d hop two meters off the ground with each step. Prob’ly fall flat on his face.

She watched as he gestured furiously to the bus driver, then clambered aboard the tourist bus. The driver got in after him, closed the hatch, and started off for the garage back at Selene.

Pancho wondered if Humphries would allow the driver to come back out and pick up the other tourists, or would he leave them stranded out here? Well, she thought, they can always squeeze into the other buses.

She decided there was nothing she could do about it, so she might as well enjoy what was left of her outing. As she walked off toward the wreckage of the tiny, primitive Ranger 9, though, she thought that she’d better tell Dan Randolph about this pretty damned quick. Humphries was sore enough to commit murder, it seemed to her.

It was almost like coming home for Dan. Nueva Venezuela had been one of the first big projects for the fledgling Astro Manufacturing Corp., back in the days when Dan had moved his corporate headquarters from Texas to La Guaira and married the daughter of the future president of Venezuela. The space station had lasted much better than the marriage. Still, the station was old and scuffed-up. As the transfer craft from Selene made its approach, Dan saw that the metal skin of her outer hulls was dulled and pitted from long years of exposure to radiation and mite-sized meteoroids. Here and there bright new sections showed where the maintenance crews were replacing the tired, eroded skin. A facelift, Dan thought, smiling. Well, she’s old enough to need it. They’re probably using cermet panels instead of the aluminum we started with. Lighter, tougher, maybe even cheaper if you consider the length of time they’ll last before they need replacing.

Nueva Venezuela was built of a series of concentric rings. The outermost ring spun at a rate that gave the occupants inside it a feeling of normal Earthly gravity. The two other rings were placed where they would simulate Mars’s one-third g and the Moon’s one-sixth. The docking port at the station’s center was effectively at zero gravity. The tech guys called it microgravity, but Dan always thought of it as zero g.

A great place to make love, Dan remembered. Then he chuckled to himself. Once you get over the heaves. Nearly everybody got nauseous their first few hours in weightlessness.

Dan went through customs swiftly, allowing the inspector to rummage through his one travelbag while he tried to keep himself from making any sudden movements. He could feel his sinuses starting to puff up as the liquids in his body shifted in response to weightlessness. No postnasal drips in zero g, Dan told himself. But you sure can get a beaut of a headache while the fluids build up in your sinuses before you adapt.