It didn’t take very long. By the time Pancho had reached the galley once again, they were roaring after her, the men bellowing with outrage. “When I get my hands on you, I’m gonna break every bone in your scrawny body!” was one of their gentler threats.

Even Amanda was so furious she lapsed back to her native working-class accent:

“We’ll ’ang you up by your bloody thumbs, we will!”

As long as I can stay ahead of them, I’m okay, Pancho told herself as she skimmed through the European lab module and into the observatory section, ducking under and around the bulky telescopes and electronics consoles. They were still yelling behind her, but she wondered if all five of them were still chasing. By now there’d been plenty of time for one or more of them to pop into a suit and cut across the top of the tee-shaped station to cut her off.

Sure enough, when she barged into the Russian lab module, two of the guys were standing at the far end in spacesuits, visors up, waiting for her like a pair of armored cops.

Pancho glided to a halt. One of the privacy unit screens slid back and a stubbled, bleary, puffy male face peered out, then quickly popped back in again and slid the screen shut with a muttered string of what sounded like Slavic cursing. The other three — Amanda and two of the men — came through the hatch behind her. Pancho was well and truly trapped.

“What the fuck are you trying to pull off, Pancho?”

“You cleaned out our bank accounts!”

“We oughtta string you up, damn you!”

She smiled and spread her hands placatingly. “Now fellas, you can’t hang a person in microgee. You know that.”

“This isn’t funny,” Amanda snapped, back to her faux-Oxford enunciation.

“I’ll make restitution, okay?” Pancho offered.

“You damned well better!”

“And you lost the bet, too, so we each get a month’s pay from you.”

“No,” Pancho said as reasonably as she could. “We never went through on the vacuum breathing, so the bet’s off.”

“Then we want our money back from your goddamned escrow account!”

“Sure. Fine.”

Amanda pointed to the wallphone by the hatch. “You mentioned restitution,” she said.

Meekly, Pancho floated to the phone and tapped out her number. “You’ll have to give me your account numbers,” she said. “So I can put the money back in for you.”

“We’ll punch in the account numbers ourselves,” Amanda said firmly.

“You don’t trust me?” Pancho managed to keep a straight face, but just barely.

They all growled at her.

“But it was only a joke,” she protested. “I had no intention of keeping your money.”

“Not much you didn’t,” one of the guys snapped. “Good thing Mandy figured out what you were up to.”

Pancho nodded in Amanda’s direction. “You’re the brightest one around, Mandy,” she said, as if she believed it.

“Never mind that,” Amanda replied tartly. To the men she said, “Now we’ll all have to change our ID codes, since she’s obviously figured them out.”

“I’m going to change my account number,” said one of the guys.

“I’m gonna change my bank,” another said fervently.

Pancho sighed and tried her best to look glum, chastised. Inwardly, she was quivering with silent laughter. What a hoot! And none of these bozos realizes that the half hour or so they’ve spent chasing me means half an hour’s worth of interest from each of their accounts into mine. It’s not all that much, but every little bit helps.

She just hoped they wouldn’t figure it out while they were all cooped up in the transfer buggy on the way to the Moon.

Well, she thought, if they try to get physical I’ll just have to introduce them to Elly.

Dan had to shout through his sanitary mask to make himself heard over the din of construction. “All I’m asking, Zack, is can he do it or can’t he?” He’d known Zack Freiberg for more than twenty years, since Zack had been an earnest young planetary geochemist intent on exploring asteroids and Dan had hired him away from his university post. Freiberg had taken flak from his friends in academia for joining big, bad Dan Randolph, the greedy capitalist founder and head of Astro Manufacturing. But over the years a mutual respect had slowly developed into a trusting friendship. It had been Zack who’d first warned Dan about the looming greenhouse cliff, and what it would do to the Earth’s climate. The greenhouse cliff had arrived, and the Earth’s politicians and business leaders had sailed blindly over its edge as the planet plunged into catastrophic warming. Zack was no longer the chubby, apple-cheeked kid Dan had first met. His strawberry hair had gone iron gray, although it was still thick and tightly curled. The past few years had toughened him, made him leaner, harder, boiled away the baby fat in his body. His face had hardened, too, as he watched his equations and graphs turn into massive human suffering.

The two men were standing on the edge of a denuded ridge, looking out across a barren coal-black valley where thousands of Chinese workers toiled unceasingly. By all the gods, Dan thought, they really do look like an army of ants scurrying around. In the middle of the valley four enormously tall smokestacks of a huge electricity-generating plant belched dark gray fumes into the hazy sky. Mountainous piles of coal lay by the railroad track that ran alongside the power plant. Off on the horizon, beyond the farther stripped-bare ridge, the Yangzi River glittered in the hazy morning sunshine like a deadly boa constrictor slowly creeping up on its prey. A sluggish warm breeze smelled of raw coal and diesel fumes.

Dan shuddered inwardly, wondering how many billions of microbes were worming their way through his sanitary mask and nose plugs, eager to chew past his weakened immune system and set up homes for themselves inside his body. “Dan, I really don’t have time for this,” Freiberg hollered over the roar of a huge truck carrying twenty tons of dirt and rubble down into the valley on wheels that dwarfed both men.

“I just need a few hours of your time,” Dan said, feeling his throat going hoarse from his shouting. “Jeez, I came all the way out here to get your opinion on this.” It was a sign of the Chinese government’s belated realization that the greenhouse warming would decimate China as well as the rest of the world that they had asked Freiberg to personally direct their massive construction program. At one end of the valley, Chinese engineers and laborers were building a dam to protect the electrical power-generating station from the encroaching Yangzi. At the other end, a crew from Yamagata Industries was constructing a complex pumping station to remove the carbon dioxide emitted by the power station’s stacks and store it deep underground, in the played-out seams of the coal bed that provided fuel for the generators.

With an exasperated frown, Freiberg said, “Listen, I know I still get my paycheck from Astro, but that doesn’t mean I can jump whenever you blow the whistle.” Dan looked into the other man’s light blue eyes and saw pain there, disappointment and outright fear. Zack blames himself for this catastrophe, Dan knew. He discovered the greenhouse cliff and he acts as if it’s all his fault. Instead of some fathead king shooting the messenger, the messenger wants to shoot himself.

“Look, Zack,” he said, as reasonably as he could manage, “you have to eat a meal now and then, don’t you?”

Freiberg nodded warily. He’d been sweet-talked by Dan into doing things he hadn’t wanted to do often enough in the past.

“So I brought you lunch,” Dan said, waving his arm in the direction of the oversized mobile home he’d arrived in. Its roof glittered with solar panels. “When the noon whistle blows, come in and break some bread with me. That’s all I’m asking.”

“You want me to look at this proposal over lunch? You think I can make a technical decision about this in an hour or less?”