I mean, we're in the real world. And people get a second chance, don't they?"
He took her in his arms. Kissed her. Not in a brotherly manner—but not with any marked passion. "Of course they do. And... you know, I've never forgotten you."
Kea stood and gently lifted her with a genteel hand under the elbow. "Now we have the time to get to know each other properly. Look. As soon as I'm back from this... business trip, I'll give you a call. Maybe have dinner or something. We have a lot to talk about."
He walked back to his desk. Tamara stared at him. She painted a smile across her face. He responded. She slowly went to the outer door, and opened it. She looked back at him. He was still smiling. Tamara stepped outside, and the door hissed closed. Just before it shut, and just before the insulation cut sound, Kea laughed.
Loudly. A harsh, unrelenting laugh. A Martian laugh. Then he forgot her.
Kea Richards vanished from man's haunts. He and the star-ship he had never bothered to name. He zigged his way across the galaxy toward the Alva Cluster. He tracked toward the discontinuity. Against interstellar blackness, he saw once again the sparklers flashing, an independence fireworks against the moonless night as tiny bits of normal matter collided with AM2 particles.
He set his course. Through the discontinuity, and into that other universe, the universe of black and all colors. He navigated, at quarter-drive, by the blind-flying system he had developed after years of hard thought, a sophisticated evolution of the navigational system Murph and Doctor Fazlur had improvised.
He had a prox detector mounted in the ship's nose. It signaled. He was closing on some interstellar debris. Perhaps no more than half a meter in size. But it would be Anti-Matter Two, more than enough to shatter this tiny ship he was aboard. He killed stardrive, went to secondary Yukawa drive, then cut all power, braked, and let inertia close him on the chunk of Anti-Matter Two.
He looked at another instrument and felt hope. This registered any object impacting on the ship's skin and was sensitive enough to go off if an Earth raindrop landed on it, when the ship was parked. Or less, actually. The readout showed his starship had been hit by particles after entering this mad universe. AM2 particles. With no adverse effect to the ship.
The prox detector's signaling was a continuous banging. Richards moved to another workstation. He fitted his hands into waldos and concentrated on instruments. From a bay just below the ship's nose, a probe extended. A claw. Another modification of Kea's. A scoop. Plated with Imperium X. He worked for long minutes with the unfamiliar controls. Sweat spattered on the controls in front of him. If he had been wrong, not only would all these years have been wasted, but he would be very dead as well, if Imperium X was not the perfect shield he had thought it to be, and the AM2 detonated in its beyond-nuclear hell.
The probe's instruments said the chunk was inside the claw. Eyes involuntarily closed, brain expecting mindshatter explosion, he closed the waldos. And again, nothing happened.
He was the proud possessor of a chunk of Anti-Matter Two. He moved the long arm back inside the ship and the bay hatches closed. The inside of the bay was also plated with Imperium X. He touched controls, and the ship went to lightspeed, on an orbit out of the discontinuity. This was the moment of real victory. Right now, even before the research, development, mining, and rest, Kea Richards had just made himself lord of the universe.
The world ended less than a year later, in two cataclysms. The catastrophes occurred a month apart. The first bannered every liviecast throughout the Solar System and to the scatter of settled worlds beyond. Deimos had blown up. The moon was now a blasted irregular asteroid like Phobos. An impossibility. Moons do not self-destruct. Deimos was uninhabited, except for three or four caretakers at the old First Base. More facts surfaced. In fact, Deimos had been well-populated. Several hundred men and women had been working in a secret complex of laboratories around the old First Base. The development belonged to Bargeta Industries. The screamers grew larger. Five—no, six—no, four hundred and fifty beings had vanished. Someone must pay.
The livie and newscasters stalked Bargeta Ltd. headquarters. Its CEO, a white and shaken man, stumbled through a prepared statement. Yes, the laboratory was a project center for his corporation. No, he would not say what it had been developing, except that it pertained to spaceship development. No, Austin did not know what happened. Bargeta scientific investigators were already trying to determine the cause of the disaster. No... no further comment. The ‘casters found Kea Richards. He had no statement. No ideas. And absolutely no comment.
"What the blazes happened?" Bargeta screamed.
"I don't know," Richards said. "I had a com two E-days before, from Doctor Masterson, the director. He said that one of the exploratory teams had a new and fascinating lead, but it was so out of the ordinary he declined to be specific, for fear of embarrassment until further tests were made. Maybe something went wrong with those tests."
"Christ," Austin moaned. "All those people. The best scientists we could find. It wasn't like they were worker bees or anything. My God, my God. Do you realize what they're going to say at the annual meeting? How am I going to explain this to the stockholders?" Kea didn't know.
The second disaster was internal. Auditors had prepared a final report on Operation Suk. It was like some kind of financial black hole, Austin thought as he scanned the fiche. Thirty-eight percent of all convertible assets of Bargeta Ltd.—not just the transport company, but some of the holding company's assets as well—had vanished into the project. Worse was the classified scientific report attached—it appeared that the attempts to synthesize Kea's X substance had not only failed, and in the failing destroyed Deimos, but the entire idea had been proven absolutely fallacious. The Philosopher's Stone. A pollution-free oxygen-combinant combustion engine. Cold fusion. Bargeta was... if not bankrupt, lurching toward it. The huge conglomerate was broken now. It would be lucky to survive two more fiscal years, unless some kind of miracle happened, a miracle no one could see on any horizon.
Austin scrolled through the last page, and went looking for Kea. He found him in his office. The chamber was stripped bare. Travel boxes were stacked in one corner.
"What—"
Kea indicated an envelope, hand-addressed to Austin, on his desk. Bargeta read it. It was Richards's resignation. "All this," Kea said, in what appeared to be a shell-shocked monotone, "was my fault. I... I was wrong. No gold, no rainbow."
Bargeta looked for words and didn't find any. Kea started to say something, but merely put his hand on Austin's shoulder. Then he left.
Bargeta walked to the window and stared out and down the two hundred stories to Madison Avenue. The world had just ended for him, for his family, and for Bargeta Ltd. What next? What now?
Next was Bargeta and allied stocks plummeting even before the emergency stockholders meeting was called. Somebody had leaked the report to the Street—and Wall Street had divisions on every continent and planet. Investigators later found someone had also dumped Bargeta stock a day or so before the report had been released internally by the audit department. They could never determine just who'd been the original holder of the stock, since the certificates had traveled through a dizzying number of hands before being sold.
Kea Richards was gone, abandoning his Earth estates, his friends, his women, and his possessions. It was odd, and showed a previously unknown Spartan side, that in fact he didn't own that much. His mansions were only half-furnished, the half that someone on the outside might happen on. Or else they were leased furnished. The same with his yacht and his gravcars.