He pulled off the headset and nudged the controller who had given it to him. The man had been studiously keeping his back to George.

He swiveled his chair to face the Aussie. “Finished so soon?”

“How long will it take to get an answer?”

The controller tapped at his keyboard and squinted at the display on his console’s central screen. “Seventeen minutes and forty-two seconds for your message to reach them. Same amount of time for their answer to get back here, plus a couple additional seconds. They’re moving pretty damned fast.”

“Thirty-five minutes,” George said.

“Got to allow some time for them to hear what you’ve got to say and decide what to say back to you. Probably an hour, at least.”

“I’ll wait.”

Martin Humphries unconsciously licked at the thin sheen of perspiration beading his upper lip. He hated talking with his crotchety sour-faced father, especially when he had to ask the old man for advice.

“You kidnapped her?” W. Wilson Humphries’s wrinkled face looked absolutely astonished. “A Nobel Prize scientist? You kidnapped her?”

“I’ve brought her here, to my home,” Humphries said, holding himself rigidly erect in his chair, exerting every gram of willpower he possessed to keep from squirming. “I couldn’t let her warn Randolph.”

The conversation between father and son was being carried by a tight laser beam, directly from Humphries Space System’s communication center on the top of Alphonsus crater’s ringwall mountains to the roof of the senior Humphries’s estate in Connecticut. No one could eavesdrop unless they tapped into the laser beam itself, and if someone did, the drop in the beam’s output at the receiver would be detectable.

“Killing Randolph isn’t bad enough,” grumbled the old man. “Now you’re going to have to kill her, too.”

“I haven’t killed anybody,” Humphries said tightly. “If Randolph has any brains at all he’ll turn back.”

It took nearly three seconds for his father’s reply to reach him. “Sloppy work. If you want to remove him, you should have done it right.” Humphries’s temper flared. “I’m not a homicidal maniac! Randolph is business, and anyway, if he dies it will look like an accident. His ship fails out there in the Belt and he and his crew are killed. Nobody will know what happened and nobody will be able to investigate, not for months, maybe years.” He tried to calm himself as he waited for his father’s response. “Gaining Astro Manufacturing is worth the risk,” the old man agreed. “Especially since no one can connect you with the… uh, accident.”

“She can.”

Humphries knew what his father was going to say.

“Then you’ll have to get rid of her.”

“But that doesn’t mean I have to kill her. I don’t want to do that. She’s a valuable asset. We can use her.”

It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision, Humphries told himself. Dr. Cardenas and her knowledge of nanotechnology had been part of his long-range plan all along. It’s just that this crisis has forced me to move faster than I’d originally planned to, he told himself.

“Use her?” his father snapped. “How?”

Waving a hand in the air, Humphries said vaguely, “Nanotechnology. She’s the top expert. Without her it would’ve taken years to build that fusion rocket.” His father cackled. “You don’t have the guts to take her out.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Dad! She’s much more valuable to me alive than dead.”

“You want her to be part of your team, then,” his father replied. “Yes, of course. But she’s having this goddamned attack of integrity. She’s got cold feet about Randolph, and if I don’t stop her, she’ll tell everyone about the sabotage, even though she’s a party to it.”

The old man chuckled when he heard his son’s complaint. “An attack of integrity, eh? Well, there are ways to get around that.”

“How?”

It was maddening to have to wait nearly three seconds for his father’s response.

“Make her an offer that she can’t accept.”

“What?”

Again the interminable wait. Then, “Offer her something that she really wants, but can’t agree to. Make her an offer that really tempts her, but she’ll have to reject. Then you’ve shown yourself to be reasonable, and she’s being the difficult one.

Then she’ll be more willing to agree to your next offer.”

Humphries was impressed. “That’s… Machiavellian.” When his father answered, his seamed, sagging face was strangely contorted, as if he were suppressing a guffaw. “Yes, it is, isn’t it? And it works.” Humphries could only sit there and admire the old bastard. More thoughtfully, his father asked, “What’s her weak point? What does Cardenas want that she can’t get unless you give it to her?”

“Her grandchildren. They’ll be our hostages. Oh, I’ll do it in a nice, elegant manner. But I’ll let her know that either she works for me or her grandchildren suffer. She’ll do what I want.”

“You really want to be emperor of the world, don’t you, Martin?” Humphries blanched. “Your world? God forbid. Earth is a shambles and it isn’t going to get any better. You can have it. You’re welcome to it. If I make myself emperor, it’ll be up here: Selene, the Moon, the asteroids. That’s where the power is. That’s where the future lies. I’ll be emperor of these worlds, all right. Gladly!” For long moments his father said nothing. At last the old man muttered, “God help us all.”

Lars Fuchs was scowling as he peered at the display screen. “Well?” Dan prompted.

The two men stood in the cramped sensor bay, where Fuchs had rigged a makeshift laboratory by yanking one of the ship’s mass spectrometers from its mounting and putting it on the repair bench where he was using it to examine the sample of dull gray wire that Pancho had brought in. A thin sky-blue coolant tube lay alongside the wire. Dan knew the wire had originally run through the tube, like an arm in a sleeve.

“There is no leak in the coolant line,” Fuchs said. “I drove pressurized nitrogen through it and it didn’t leak.”

Dan felt puzzled. “Then what’s causing the hot spot?” Pointing to the tangle of curves displayed on the screen, Fuchs said, “The composition of the wire seems to match the specifications quite closely: yttrium, barium, copper, oxygen — all the elements are in their proper proportions.”

“That doesn’t tell us diddley-squat,” Dan groused.

Fuchs’s frown deepened as he studied the display. “The copper level seems slightly low.”

“Low?”

“That might be a manufacturing defect. Perhaps that’s the reason for the problem.”

“But there’s no leak?”

Fuchs rubbed his broad, square chin. “None that I can detect with this equipment. Really, we don’t have the proper equipment for diagnosing this. We would need a much more powerful microscope and—”

“Dan, we’re receiving a call for you,” Amanda’s voice came through the speaker in the sensor bay’s overhead. “It’s from George Ambrose, marked urgent and confidential.”

“I’d better get back up to the bridge,” Dan said. “Do the best you can, Lars, with what you’ve got.”

Fuchs nodded unhappily. How can a man accomplish anything without the proper tools? he asked himself. With a heavy sigh, he turned back to the display screen while Randolph ducked through the hatch and headed forward. What other sensors can I take from the set we have to examine this bit of wire? Everything we have here has been designed to measure gross chemical composition of asteroids, not fine details of a snippet of superconducting wire. With nothing better that he could think of, Fuchs fired up the mass spectrometer again and took another sampling of the wire’s composition. When the curves took shape on the display screen his eyes went wide with surprised disbelief. George held one meaty hand over the earphone clamped to the side of his head, listening intently to Dan Randolph’s tense, urgent voice. There was no video transmission; Dan had sent audio only.