“Who, dammit?” she snarled.
“Lewis Cantner.”
“Find the son of a bitch,” she hissed. “Bring him to me. I’m going to rip his lungs out.”
“We’ve sealed the Doors and the surface locks. He’s somewhere in Crisium. We’ll get him.”
A wet coughing sound brought her eyes back down. “Alan? I’m here.”
His eyes opened—fluttered, focused. Breathing raggedly, he rasped, “Honey… I… I had a bad day at the office.” A thin line of red ran from the corner of his mouth.
Tears sprang to her eyes. “I told you that bastard was trying to make me miscarry.”
“Do what needs doing, babe,” he whispered. “Take care of the kid.”
“Save your strength. I’m here now.”
The ambulance arrived. Anne backed away to give the medical technicians room to work. She spoke briefly with Watts and the doctor in the corner of the room, eyes carefully averted from the gore. Within minutes, they had Alan strapped securely to the back of the flat-bed electric cart. She then followed them out into the corridor.
Edgar Rice ran up just as they were pulling away. “Anne?”
She turned from watching the ambulance. Face drawn and pale, she drew herself to her full height. “Edgar, turn on your microphone,” she ordered. “I have an official press release for you from the Commissioner’s office.”
“Uh, right.” He fumbled at his collar to unfold the tiny gooseneck, swiveling it towards her. “Ready.”
“At 2:55 this afternoon, Lewis Cantner, former president of the Crisium Business Group, entered the office of Commissioner Alan Lister. He shot Commissioner Lister three times in the chest at close range with a high-velocity, small caliber weapon. He is presently at large in the city of Crisium, presumed to be armed and dangerous.”
She swallowed hard as tears began to trickle down her cheeks. “Commissioner Lister is not expected to live.”
Twenty-four hours. That’s all she asked. Twenty-four hours. Turn back the clock. Give her time to say all the things that she had thought she’d had a lifetime to say. Time to apologize for burning the steak she’d cooked for his birthday two weeks after they’d met. Time to hold him just once more. Time to laugh about the look on her face when he’d asked her to marry him. Time to tell him how much she loved him. Time for another cup of coffee together. Time to tell one more joke. Time to choose a name for the child. Time to tell him how much she’d miss him.
Time for her to tell him not to go to the office that day.
When it comes to love, there’s never enough time.
The downside to having a small, efficient government is that there’s no redundancy. There’s no one to take up the slack.
With clench-jawed determination, Anne took the helm of the Crisium government. She didn’t want the job. She didn’t have the intuitive feel that Alan had brought to the position. She wanted nothing more than to crawl into a cave and lick her wounds.
But it was better than staying at home.
The very place that should have been a comfort to her had betrayed her. Every wall, every pillow, every chair screamed Alan’s name. She was being deafened by her memories.
So she had come to work—to escape.
Things that Alan had done instinctively, effortlessly, required conscious thought on her part. Things she had taken for granted now pressed in on her relentlessly. She had been too close to her husband to see what a talented administrator he had been. Only by facing the problems he had faced on a day-to-day basis did she learn that she was not cut from the same cloth as he. Others had told her for years that he was a great man, possibly that rarest of political species, a statesman. Editorials had always respected him, even when they disagreed. To her, he had always been just… Alan.
It took his death for Anne to learn that he had been something more than a man with a habit of leaving socks on the floor and a weakness for tapioca. She had been too close to the trees to see the forest.
A persistent psychologist kept calling, unasked, unwanted, telling her that she was not allowing herself time to grieve; that she needed to take time to grieve; take time to be by herself. The last time he had called, she had exploded, telling him that if he was so blasted sensitive and caring, that he could damn well do her grieving for her. She had not heard from him since.
She would have the rest of her life to grieve on the installment plan. She knew. She cried herself to sleep every night.
Two weeks after she had assumed the reins of power, she allowed herself a rest, if only for ten minutes. She had the computer call Jennifer Holmes.
“So when are we going to Mars?” she asked as soon as Jenny’s face appeared over her desk.
Jenny froze when she saw who was calling. “Anne! I was so sorry to hear about Alan. I tried to call, but I couldn’t get through.”
Anne waved her hand as though to wipe the slate. “I set the computer to refuse all calls. When are we going to Mars?”
Jenny sighed. If Anne wanted to be brusque, then that was her option. “We’re doing well. Ramping up the power to increase the range was a simple engineering problem. It’s the control circuits that are giving us fits. We’re working on our third prototype now. We expect to have it ready for testing in another two weeks or so.”
“Jenny, you don’t work for me, and I can’t claim that I have a lot of clout with the brass at Lunar Magnetics, but I really want to go to Mars.”
“A change of scenery?”
“Call it that.” She shook her head. “I just… Alan’s last words were for me to do what needed doing, and to take care of the kid. I’m going to have the baby here, but as soon as things settle down, I want out.”
“Is that safe? I mean, for the baby?”
Anne laughed humorlessly. “Children seem to survive being born into Earth’s gravity. If anything, the gravity on Mars, being a little over twice what it is here, ought to be closer to what we were designed for.”
“But won’t it be rough on you?”
Anne snorted. “So? Pioneer women survived worse. If we’ve got a Door, I’ll be within minutes of good medical care here in Luna. It won’t be that bad.”
Jenny was quiet for a moment. “Anne, are you sure you’re not just running away?” she asked gently.
“Of course I’m running away, dammit! But this is one of those rare occasions when running away and forging ahead happen to lead in the same direction. I’ve always wanted the same thing that you’ve wanted, Jenny—to go outwards. I just happen to have an extra reason now. I hate Earth. I hate what it represents. I want to get as far away from that cursed place as I possibly can. When you get around to opening a Door to Ganymede or Titan, I’ll be the first one in line.”
“Wait a minute. I don’t understand. How did losing Alan translate into hating Earth?”
“Lewis Cantner may have pulled the trigger, but it was Earth that created Cantner—his attitudes, his entire personality. He didn’t have what it took to succeed on Earth, or, as it turned out, on Luna. When the inevitable failure came, he took it out on my husband, instead of on the person at fault… namely, himself. Earth is full of people who are convinced that they’re victims—that it’s all someone else’s fault. I cannot forgive Earth for that.”
Jenny frowned thoughtfully. “But that can be fixed, can’t it?”
“Alan always said that it’s not the strong that you have to fear, it’s the weak.”
“What? I don’t see—”
“Let’s say that you have one really evil man—someone who’s intent on taking over the world. To stop him, all you have to do is find him and either reason with him or kill him. Without him, the organization falls apart—all that’s left is some mopping up. But true terror is a mob. You can’t reason with them. Killing just one won’t stop them, because the rest keep coming. They will overwhelm you by the sheer weight of their numbers even though individually they’re weak.”