“Then what?”

Walton stood up a little straighter. He was about Pancho’s height, stringy and loosejointed.“The eighth anniversary of my being awarded the Selene Achievement Prize.”

“Achievement Prize?” she asked. “What’s that?”

The bartender broke into their conversation. “Hey, Ike, don’t you think you’ve had enough for one night?”

Walton nodded solemnly. “Yup. You’re right.”

“So why don’t you go home to your wife,” the bartender suggested. Pancho heard something more than friendliness in his tone, an undercurrent of — jeeps, she thought, he almost sounds like a cop.

“You’re right, pal. Absolutely right. I’m going home. Whatta I owe you?”

The bartender waved a meaty hand in the air. “Forget it. Anniversary present.”

“Thank you very much.” Turning to Pancho, he said, “You wanna walk me home?”

She glanced at the bartender, who still looked unusually grim, then shrugged and said, “Sure, Ike. I’ll walk you home.”

He wasn’t as unsteady on his feet as Pancho had thought he’d be. Once outside the bar Walton seemed more depressed than drunk. Yet he nodded or said hello to everyone they passed.

“What’s the Achievement Prize?” Pancho asked as they walked down the corridor.

“Kind of a secret.”

“Oh.”

“I did the impossible for them, y’see, but I did it too late to be of any use and they don’t want anybody to know about it so they gave me the prize as hush money and told me to keep my trap shut.”

Confused, Pancho asked, “About what?”

For the first time that evening, Walton broke into a smile. “My cloak of invisibility,” he answered.

Little by little Pancho wormed the story out of him. Walton had been working with Professor Zimmerman, the nanotech genius, when the old U. N. had sent Peacekeeper troops to seize Moonbase.

“Stavenger was in a sweat to develop nonlethal weapons so we could defend ourselves against the Peacekeepers when they got here without killing any of them,” Walton said, growing steadier and gloomier with each step along the corridor. “Zimmerman promised Stavenger he’d come up with a way to make our guys invisible, but the bastards killed him when they attacked. Suicide bomber got down to his lab and blew the old man to smithereens.”

“Himself, too?” Pancho asked.

“I did say ‘suicide,’ didn’t I? Anyway, the so-called war ended pretty quick and we got our independence. That’s when we changed the name from Moonbase to Selene.”

“I know.”

“For a while there I didn’t have anything to do. I’d been Zimmerman’s assistant and now the old man was gone.”

Walton had doggedly kept working on Zimmerman’s idea of finding a method for making a person invisible. And eventually he succeeded. “But who needs to be invisible?” Walton asked. Before Pancho could answer he went on, “Only somebody who’s up to no damn good, that’s who. Spies. Assassins. Crooks. Thieves.”

Selene’s governing council decided to mothball Walton’s invention. Bury it so that no one would even know it existed.

“So they gave me the big fat prize to keep me quiet. It’s a pension, really. I can live in comfort — as long as I stay in Selene and keep my mouth shut.”

“Sounds cool to me,” Pancho said, trying to cheer him up. But Walton shook his head. “You don’t understand, Pancho. I’m a freaking genius and nobody knows it. I’ve made a terrific invention and it’s useless. I’m not even supposed to mention it to anybody.”

Pancho said, “Aren’t you taking a chance, talking to me about it?” He gave her a sidelong glance. “Aw, hell, Pancho, I hadda tell somebody tonight or bust. And I can trust you, can’t I? You’re not gonna steal it and go out and assassinate anybody, are you?”

“ ’Course not,” Pancho answered immediately. But she was thinking that it might be a hoot to be invisible now and then.

“Wanna see it?” Walton asked.

“The invisibility dingus?”

“Yeah.”

“If it’s invisible, how can I see it?”

Walton broke into a cackle of laughter. Clapping Pancho on the back, he said, “That’s what I like about you, Pancho ol’ pal. You’re okay, with a capital oke.” Walton turned down the next cross-corridor and led Pancho up to the level just below the Grand Plaza, where most of Selene’s life-support machinery chugged away, purifying the air, recycling the water, rectifying the electrical current coming in from the solar farms. Pumps clattered. The air hummed and crackled. The ceilings of these chambers were rough, unfinished rock. Pancho knew that on their other side was either the manicured lawn of the Grand Plaza or the raw regolith of the Moon’s surface itself. And along a corridor not far from where they walked lay the catacombs.

“Isn’t the dingus under lock and key?” Pancho asked as Walton led her past a long row of metal lockers.

“They don’t even know it exists. They think I destroyed it when they gave me their lousy prize. Destroy it, hell! I’ll never destroy it. It’s the only one in the whole wide solar system.”

“Wow.”

He nodded absently. “And it’s not a ‘dingus’, it’s a stealth suit.”

“Stealth suit,” Pancho echoed.

“Like a wetsuit, covers you from head to toe,” he explained in a hushed voice, as if afraid someone would hear him. Pancho strained to listen to him over the background hum and chatter of the machinery.

Pancho followed Walton down the long row of metal lockers. The corridor smelled dusty, unused. The overhead lights were spaced so far apart that there were shadowy pools of darkness every few meters. Walton stopped in front of a locker identified by a serial number. Pancho saw that it had an electronic security lock.

Feeling uneasy, Pancho asked, “Don’t they have any guards patrolling up here?”

“Nah. What for? There’s cameras at the other end of the corridor, but this old tunnel’s like an attic. People store junk up here, personal stuff they don’t have room for down in their quarters.”

Walton tapped out the security code on the electronic lock and pulled the metal door open. It squealed slightly, as if complaining.

“There it is,” he said in a hushed voice.

Hanging inside the locker was a limp bodysuit, deep black. “Ain’t she a beauty?” Walton said as he carefully, lovingly, took the suit from the locker and held it up by its hanger for Pancho to admire. “Looks almost like a wetsuit,” Pancho said, wondering how it could make someone invisible. It glittered darkly in the feeble light from the overhead fluorescents, as if spangled with sequins made of onyx. “The suit’s covered with nanocameras and projectors, only a couple of molecules thick. Drove me nuts getting ’em to work right, lemme tell you. I earned that prize money.”

“Uh-huh,” Pancho said, fingering one of the gloved sleeves. The fabric felt soft, pliable, yet somehow almost gritty, like grains of sand. “The cameras pick up the scenery around you,” Walton was explaining. “The projectors display it. Somebody standing in front of you sees what’s behind you. Somebody on your left sees what’s on your right. Just like they’re looking through you. To all intents and purposes you’re invisible.”

“It really works?” she asked.

“Computer built into the belt controls it,” Walton said. “Batteries are probably flat, but I can charge ’em up easy enough.” He pointed to a set of electrical outlets on the smoothed-rock wall of the corridor, opposite the lockers. “But it really works?” she repeated.

He smiled like a proud father. “Want to try it on?”

Grinning back at him, Pancho said, “Sure!”

While Pancho wriggled into the snug-fitting suit Walton plugged the two palmsized batteries into the nearby electrical outlet. By the time she had pulled on the gloves and fitted the hood over her head, he was snapping the fully-charged batteries into their slots on the suit’s waist.

“Okay,” Walton said, looking her over carefully. “Now pull the face mask down and seal it to the hood.”