“You knew? All along you knew?”
“I wanted to kill him,” Fuchs said, his voice almost trembling with fervor. “He deserved to die. I wanted to kill the arrogant fool.”
“Lars… I’ve never seen you this way.”
“What’s worrying me,” he said, “is Humphries’s reaction to all this. The negotiations for buying out Helvetia are obviously finished. Buchanan was part of his attempt to force us out of the Belt. What is he going to try next?”
Amanda was silent for a long while. Fuchs watched her adorable face, so troubled, so filled with care for him. He almost smiled. The face that launched a thousand spaceships, he thought. Well, at least several hundred.
Yet she was thinking that her husband had turned into an avenging fury. Perhaps only for an hour or so, but Lars had gone out to the Pub deliberately to kill a man. And it didn’t worry him, didn’t frighten him at all.
It terrified her.
What can I do? Amanda asked herself. How can I stop him from becoming a brute? He doesn’t deserve this; it isn’t fair to force him to become a monster. She racked her brain, but she could see only one way back to sanity.
At last she said, “Lars, why don’t you speak directly to Martin?”
He grunted with surprise. “Directly? To him?”
“Face-to-face.”
“Over this distance that’s not possible, really.”
“Then we’ll go to Selene.”
His expression hardened. “I don’t want you that near to him.”
“Martin won’t hurt me,” she said. Tracing a hand across his broad chest, she went on, “And you’re the man I love. You have nothing to fear from Martin or any other man in the universe, on that score.”
“I don’t want you at Selene,” he whispered firmly.
“We can’t go to Earth unless we go through weeks and weeks of reconditioning.”
“The centrifuge,” he muttered.
Amanda said, “I’ll stay here, Lars, if that’s what you want. You go to Selene and talk this out with Martin.”
“No,” he said immediately. “I won’t leave you here.”
“But…?”
“You come to Selene with me. I’ll talk to Humphries, assuming he’ll agree to talk to me.”
Amanda smiled and kissed his cheek. “We can put an end to this before it becomes an out-and-out war.”
Pulling her to him, Fuchs said gently, “I hope so. I truly hope so.”
She sighed. That’s more like it, she thought. That’s more like the man I love.
But he was thinking, It’s Amanda that Humphries wants, nothing less. And the only way he’ll get Amanda is over my dead body.
“She’s coming here?” Martin Humphries asked, hardly daring to believe what his aide had just told him. “Here, to Selene?”
Diane Verwoerd allowed a tiny frown of displeasure to crease her forehead. “With her husband,” she said.
Humphries got up from his high-backed chair and practically pranced around his desk. Despite his aide’s sour look he felt like a little kid anticipating Christmas.
“But she’s coming to Selene,” he insisted. “Amanda is coming to Selene.”
“Fuchs wants to talk to you face-to-face,” Verwoerd said, folding her arms across her chest. “I doubt that he’ll let his wife get within a kilometer of you.”
“That’s what he thinks,” Humphries countered. He turned to the electronic window on the wall behind his desk and tapped at his wristwatch several times. The stereo image on the wide screen flicked through several changes. Humphries stopped it at an Alpine scene of a quaint village with steeply-pitched roofs and a slim church steeple against a background of snow-covered peaks.
That’s ancient history, Verwoerd thought. There hasn’t been that much snow in the Alps since the great avalanches.
Turning back to her, Humphries said, “Fuchs is coming here to surrender. He’ll try to wheedle as much of the ten million we offered him as he can get. But he’s bringing Amanda because he knows—maybe in his unconscious mind, maybe not consciously—but he knows that what I really want is Amanda.”
“I think we should look at this a little more realistically,” Verwoerd said, stepping slowly toward the desk.
Humphries eyed her for a moment. “You think I’m being unrealistic?”
“I think that Fuchs is coming here to negotiate your buyout of his company. I very much doubt that his wife will be part of the deal.”
He laughed. “Maybe you don’t think so. Maybe he doesn’t think so. But I do. That’s what’s important. And I bet that Amanda does, too.”
Verwoerd had to deliberately keep herself from shaking her head in disagreement. He’s insane about this woman. Absolutely gonzo over her. Then she smiled inwardly. How can I use this? How can I turn his craziness to my advantage?
DOSSIER: OSCAR JIMINEZ
When he finished the New Morality high school, at the age of seventeen, Oscar was sent to far-off Bangladesh for his two years of public service. It was compulsory; the New Morality demanded two years of service as partial repayment for the investment they had made in a youth’s education and social reformation. Oscar worked hard in what was left of Bangladesh. The rising sea levels and the terrifying storms that accompanied each summer’s monsoon inundated the low-lying lands. Thousands were swept away in the floods of the Ganges. Oscar saw that many of the poor, miserable wretches actually prayed to the river itself for mercy. In vain. The swollen river drowned the heathens without pity. Oscar realized that just as many of the faithful were drowned, also.
Luck touched him again, once he finished his two years of public service. The New Morality administrator in Dacca, an American from Kansas, urged Oscar to consider accepting a job in space, far away from Earth.
Oscar knew better than to argue with authority, but he was so surprised at the idea that he blurted, “But I’m not an astronaut.”
The administrator smiled a kindly smile. “There are all kinds of jobs up there that need to be filled. You are fully qualified for many of them.”
“I am?” Oscar’s qualifications, as far as he knew, were mainly lifting and toting, handling simple invoices, and following orders. With a nod, the administrator said, “Yes. And, of course, there is God’s work to be done out there among the godless humanists and frontier ruffians.”
Who could refuse to do God’s work? Thus Oscar Jiminez went to Ceres and was hired by Helvetia, Ltd., to work in their warehouse.
CHAPTER 16
Selene’s Hotel Luna had gone through several changes of management since it was originally built by the Yamagata Corporation.
In those early days, just after the lunar community had won its short, sharp war against the old United Nations and affirmed its independence, tourism looked like a good way to bring money into the newly-proclaimed Selene. Masterson Aerospace’s lunar-built Clipperships were bringing the price of transportation from Earth down to the point where the moderately well-heeled tourist—the type who took “adventure vacations” to Antarctica, the Amazonian rain forest, or other uncomfortable exotic locales—could afford the grandest adventure vacation of them alclass="underline" a trip to the Moon.
Sadly, the opening of the hotel coincided almost exactly with the first ominous portents of the greenhouse cliff. After nearly half a century of scientific debate and political wrangling, the accumulated greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere and oceans started an abrupt transition in the global climate. Disastrous floods inundated most coastal cities in swift succession. Earthquakes devastated Japan and the American midwest. Glaciers and ice packs began melting down, raising sea levels worldwide. The delicate web of electrical power transmission grids collapsed over much of the world, throwing hundreds of millions into the cold and darkness of pre-industrial society. More than a billion people lost their homes, their way of living, everything that they had worked for. Hundreds of millions died.