The first light of dawn woke Alec. He lay with Angela’s soft warmth beside him, her head cradled in his arm, and watched the day slowly brighten through the bedroom window. The sleeping bag was spread lumpily over them.
“Are you going to stay?” Angela asked very quietly.
“Huh? I thought you were sleeping.”
She smiled at him. “I’ve been thinking for the past couple of hours.”
“With your eyes closed?”
“Are you going to stay here… at the base, I mean?”
“Do I have a choice? I’m a prisoner.”
Pushing away from him slightly, she said, “Oh, that. You don’t have to worry. Douglas just wanted you to come here without any fuss. He wouldn’t stop you from leaving. He does love you, you know.”
“The hell he does.”
“Don’t be a fool. Of course he does.”
Then why did he leave us? Alec demanded silently. What kind of love is that?
“Well?” she asked.
“What?”
“Are you going to stay here?”
“Would you come with me if I left?” he countered.
“No. I couldn’t.”
“Because he needs you more than I do.”
She laughed. “Don’t be silly. Douglas doesn’t need me. He doesn’t need anybody except one person.”
“Who’s that?”
“You.”
He huffed. “Don’t be funny.”
Angela sat up and pulled her knees up to her chin. The cover slid down to her ankles, and Alec shivered; not from the room’s chill, but from the curve of her smoothly fleshed back and hip.
“Look,” she said, “What you don’t…”
“I’m looking,” he murmured.
She intercepted his reaching hand. “Not now. You’ve got to realize a few things. Douglas is an old man…”
“Fifty-five. That’s not old.”
“It is when you’ve lived the way he has,” Angela said, completely serious. “He needs help. Your help. That’s why he brought you here. He was overjoyed that you made it all the way here from Oak Ridge. He bragged about how you got through the summer on your own.”
“I’ll bet.”
“He wants you to join with him, help him bring the lunar settlement and his own territory here together. If the two of you can work together you can build a real civilization that links the Earth and the Moon. But if you fight…”
“Listen to me,” Alec snapped. “He ran out on us. Not just on my mother and me, but on hundreds of men, women and children who depended on him, trusted him. He’s stolen the fissionables that we need. Without them we’ll all die. He won’t let us have them.”
“Yes he will!” Angela insisted. “If only you’ll agree to help him.”
“Help him make himself into another Genghis Khan? He can rot first.”
“You just don’t understand!”
“Wrong! I understand far more than you do. Far more.”
She shook her head. “No, Alec, you’re wrong. You’re all wrong about so many things.”
Instead of answering, he got to his feet. The bare floor was cold.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Back to my own quarters.”
“Not yet.” She slid one hand up the side of his leg. He turned and sank to his knees on the mattress.
“You don’t have to go now,” Angela said, almost in a whisper. “And stop pouting. What’s going on between you and your father has nothing to do with what’s going on between you and me.”
Doesn’t it? he demanded in his mind. Aren’t you doing this to make me stay here, to get me to join forces with him?
But although he thought it, Alec did not say anything as Angela pulled him back into the warmth of the bed again.
Chapter 23
It was easy to slide into the routine of daily life at the base.
The leaves fell steadily from the trees, the grass turned brown and brittle. The wind came always from the north or west, cold and sharp enough to cut through the heaviest of coats. The sky turned gray as the days shortened. The Sun did not climb far above the horizon and the Moon seemed to have disappeared from the cloudy night skies. One titanic rainstorm stripped away the last of the leaves, blew off roofs and tore limbs from the bare trees. Alec’s quarters stayed dry, although the heat and electricity went out for several days.
Angela’s house was flooded to a depth of ten centimeters in the cellar.
Then the weather turned fine and dry. Days were cold, invigorating. Nights were arctic. More and more, Alec slept with Angela. If Douglas knew about it, he said nothing, even though they dined together frequently in his house with Will Russo and others of Douglas’s aides.
It was an easy time. The summer’s fighting was over and everyone was preparing for the long winter. Trucks and wagons came in every day from the outlying villages, heaped with produce from the harvest. They went out with tools, guns, and ammunition that had been manufactured in the base’s shops.
Troops of warriors came in from the hinterlands, reunited with families and friends that they had not seen all summer. There were parties, celebrations, even dramatic offerings by self-styled actors and singers in the base’s mammoth, bare auditorium.
Alec found their efforts amateurish, but he attended every performance, sitting with Angela next to him. Douglas always sat front row center and it always appeared to Alec as if the performers were playing especially to him. He appeared to enjoy himself hugely, guffawing at the jokes and applauding every effort lustily.
Will had brought in a cache of whisky, “liberated” from a long-deserted city that his troop had detoured through. He rationed the stuff carefully, except for one long night when he gave a party and they all—even Alec—sang drunkenly until the Sun rose.
All except Douglas, who left early in the evening after a few drinks. And by the time they started singing “The Frigging Bird” for the fourth time, Angela slipped quietly away, too.
“I wanted to check on Douglas,” she explained the next morning. “He didn’t look too well when he left.”
Through his thundering hangover, Alec said, “So you had to nursemaid him.”
“You seemed to be having fun,” she answered, smiling.
But I don’t want you with him, Alec said to himself.
I want you with me. And suddenly he realized that he loved her.
A few nights later they were walking arm in arm from the mess hall to her house, heavily bundled in thick coats and wool hats and gloves. The water in the nearby lake had a thin layer of ice over it, and the only birds still remaining around the base were hardy brown sparrows who puffed up their feathers and hopped over the dead grass looking for seeds or crumbs.
For the first time in weeks, Alec noticed the Moon. It was only a sliver sailing eerily among the clouds scuttling by.
“I wonder how my men are doing?” he mused aloud.
“Have you asked…”
“I’ve tried to get to them, but Will said it’s better if I don’t. He told me they’re all okay, but I shouldn’t ask anything more about them.”
“Will wouldn’t lie to you,” she said.
Gazing at the thin slice of a Moon, he wondered, “Do you think Kobol’s still in Florida? Or has he returned to the settlement? What’s he up to? What’s his game?”
Angela said nothing.
“He’ll be back in the spring,” Alec went on. “I’ll bet he heads this way, next spring.”
“Then there’ll be fighting,” she said.
“Plenty of it.”
They had reached Angela’s house. “And when the fighting begins, which side will you be on, Alec?”
He thought about it. “I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “I just don’t know.”