Moonrise (3 page)

By the time he got to the corporate offices in the Trade Towers, Paul needed a drink. The walnut-panelled board room had a bar and a spread of finger foods set up in the back, but neither a bartender nor a waitress had shown up yet. Paul did not see any tequila. He settled for a beer, instead.

Paul had always been one of the early ones at board meetings, but this time apparently he was the first. The opulent room was empty, except for him. Glancing at his wristwatch, Paul saw that the meeting was scheduled to start in less than fifteen minutes. Usually more than half the directors would be already here, milling about, exchanging pleasantries or whispering business deals to one another, drinking and noshing.

Where is everybody? Paul wondered.

He paced the length of the long conference table, saw that each place was neatly set with its built-in computer screen and keyboard.

He went to the long windows at the head of the conference room and gazed out at the towers of Manhattan, thinking how much better it was on the Moon, where all a man had to worry about was a puncture in his suit or getting caught on the surface during a solar flare. He craned his neck to see JFK, hoping to catch another Clippership takeoff or, even more spectacular, see one landing on its tail jets.

“Paul.”

Startled, he whirled around to see Joanna standing in the doorway, looking cool and beautiful in a beige miniskirted business suit. He hadn’t seen her since the day of her husband’s suicide.

“How are you?” he asked, hurrying toward her. “How’ve you been? I wanted—”

“Later,” she said, raising one hand to stop him from embracing her. “Business first.”

“Where’s everybody? The meeting’s scheduled to start in ten minutes.”

“It’s been pushed back half an hour,” Joanna said.

“Nobody told me.”

She smiled coolly at him. “I asked Brad for a half-hour delay. There’s something I want to discuss with you before the meeting starts.”

“What?”

Joanna went to the conference table and perched on its edge, crossing her long legs demurely. “We’re going to elect a new president and CEO,” she said.

Paul nodded. “Greg. I know.”

“You don’t sound happy about it.”

“Why should I be?”

“Who else would you recommend?” she asked, with that same serene smile.

“Greg doesn’t know enough to run this corporation,” Paul said, keeping his voice low. But the urgency came through. “Okay, we’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, I know, but his father nearly drove this company into the ground.”

“And you saved it.”

Paul felt uncomfortable saying it, but he agreed. “I had to practically beat your husband over the head before he saw the light.”

Every major airline in the world began clamoring for Masterson Clipperships, once Paul pushed the project through its development phase. Yet Gregory Masterson II had almost ruined Masterson Aerospace, despite the Clippership’s success. Maybe because of it, Paul now thought.

And his son was eager to follow in his father’s mistaken footsteps.

“He wants to shut down Moonbase,” Joanna said quietly. “He told me so.”

“You can’t let him do that!”

“Why not?” she asked.

“It’s the future of the company—of the nation, the whole goddamned human race!”

She sat on the edge of the conference table in silence for a moment, her eyes probing Paul. Then Joanna said, “The first order of business in today’s meeting will be to elect me to the board to fill Gregory’s seat.”

“And then they’ll elect young Greg president and CEO,” Paul said, surprised at how much bitterness showed in his voice.

“They’ll have to have nominations first.”

“Brad’s going to nominate him.”

“Yes. But I intend to nominate you,” said Joanna.

He blinked with surprise. A flame of sudden hope flared through him. Then he realized, “To show there’s no nepotism.”

Joanna shook her head. “I know my son better than you do, Paul. He’s not ready to head this corporation. He’d ruin it and himself, both.”

“You mean you really want me to be CEO?”

“I want it enough,” Joanna said, slipping off the table to stand before him, “that I want us to get married.”

Paul’s insides jolted. “Married?”

Joanna smiled again and twined her arms around Paul’s neck. “I like being the wife of the CEO. I just didn’t like the CEO very much. With you, it will be different, won’t it? Very different.”

Paul’s mind was racing. CEO. Married. She doesn’t love me, not really, but if we’re married and I’m CEO we can keep Moonbase going until it starts making a profit but she’s probably only doing this so Greg can grow up some and then she’ll want to turn the corporation over to him sooner or later.

Joanna kissed him lightly on the lips. “Don’t you think marriage is a good idea? Like a corporate merger, only much more fun.”

“You’d marry me?” Paul asked.

“If you ask me.”

“And nominate me for CEO?”

“You’ll be elected if I nominate you.”

She’s right, Paul realized. If she doesn’t back her own son
the rest of the board will turn away from him. Hell, I’m one of the corporation’s leaders. Saved the outfit from bankruptcy. Making them all rich with the Clippership profits. Half of ’em would be afraid to vote against a black man; afraid it’d look like discrimination. And I could protect Moonbase from Greg and Brad. I could keep them from shutting it down.

“Okay,” he said, surprised at the tightness in his throat. “Will you marry me?”

Joanna laughed out loud. “How romantic!”

“I mean—well, will you?”

“Of course I will, Paul. You’re the only man in the world for me.”

Paul kissed her, knowing that neither one of them had used the word love.

The edge of the sunlit day came up to meet Paul with the inevitability of a remorseless universe. One moment he was in shadow, the next in full glaring sunlight. The sky overhead was still black, but now the glare reflecting from the ground washed away the few stars that he had been able to see before.

A pump somewhere in his backpack gurgled, and the air fan in his helmet whined more piercingly. He thought he heard metal or plastic groan under the sudden heat load.

Paul looked down and, sure enough, the ground was breaking into sparkles of light, like a whole field of jewels glittering for hundreds of meters in front of him. The sunshine triggered phosphorescence in the minerals scattered in the regolith’s surface layer. The effect disappeared after a few minutes, but plenty of the earliest workers on the Moon had actually thought they’d found fields of diamonds: the Moon’s equivalent of fool’s gold.

There was real wealth in the regolith, but it wasn’t gold or
diamonds. Oxygen. The opiate of the masses. Habit-forming substance: take one whiff and you’re hooked for life.

Cut it out, Stavenger, he railed at himself. You’re getting geeky in your old age. Straighten up and concentrate on what you’re doing.

He plodded doggedly ahead, but his mind wandered to the first time his eyes had opened to the grandeur of the Moon. At the planetarium, he remembered. Couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven. The videos of astronauts walking on the Moon, jumping in low-gravity exhilaration while the lecturer told us that one day we kids could go to the Moon and continue the exploration.

Levitt, Paul remembered. Old Dr. Levitt. He knew how to open a kid’s mind. The bug bit me then, Paul realized. He had gone up to the lecturer after the show and asked if he could stay and see it again. A round-faced man with a soft voice and big glasses that made his face look like an owl’s, Dr. Levitt turned out to be the planetarium’s director. He took Paul to his own office and spent the afternoon showing him books and tapes about space exploration.

Paul’s father was away at sea most of the time. His classmates at school were either white or black, and each side demanded his total loyalty. Caught between them, Paul had become a loner, living in his own fantasy world until the bigger dream of exploring the Moon engulfed him. He haunted the planetarium, devoured every book and tape he could find, grew to be Dr. Levitt’s valued protégé and, eventually, when he reached manhood, his friend. It was Lev who secured a scholarship for Paul at MIT, who paved the way for his becoming an astronaut, who broke down and wept when Paul actually took off from Cape Canaveral for the first time.

Paul was on the Moon when the old man died, quietly, peacefully, the way he had lived: writing a letter of recommendation for another poor kid who needed a break.

I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Lev, Paul knew. Even if I die here, I’ll still owe him for everything good that’s happened in my life.

He knew it was psychological more than physical, yet with the Sun pounding on him Paul felt as if he had stepped from an air-conditioned building onto a baking-hot parking lot.
Some parking lot, he told himself as he pushed on. The dusty, gray regolith looked like an unfinished blacktop job, pockmarked and uneven. Mare Nubium, he thought. Sea of Clouds. The nearest body of water is a quarter-million miles away.

Still, it did look a little like the surface of the sea, the way the ground undulated and rolled. A sea that was frozen into rock. I guess it was a sea once, a sea of red-hot lava when the meteoroid that carved out this basin slammed into the Moon. How long ago? Three and a half billion years? Give or take a week.

He plodded on, one booted foot after another, trying not to look at the thermometer on his forearm displays.

His mind started to drift again.

I never told her that I loved her, Paul remembered. Not then. Guess I was too surprised. Marry me and I’ll make you CEO. She never said she loved me, either. It was a business deal.

He almost laughed. Marriage is one way of ending a love affair, I guess.

But Greg didn’t laugh about it. Not then, not ever. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him smile, even. Not our boy Greg.

The other board members filtered into the meeting room in twos and threes. Greg Masterson walked in alone, his suit a funereal black, the expression on his face bleak. He was a handsome man of twenty-eight, tall and slim, his face sculpted in planes and hollows like a Rodin statue. He had his father’s dark, brooding looks: thick dark hair down to his collar and eyes like twin gleaming chunks of jet.

But where his father had been a hell-raiser, Greg had always been a quiet, somber introvert. As far as Paul knew, he
might still be a virgin. He had never heard a breath of gossip about this serious, cheerless young man.

Reluctantly, feeling guilty, Paul made his way across the board room to Greg.

“I’m sorry about your father,” he said, extending his hand.

“I bet you are,” Greg said, keeping his hands at his sides. He was several inches taller than Paul, though Paul was more solidly built.

Before Paul could think of anything else to say, Bradley Arnold bustled up to Greg and took him by the arm.

“This way, Greg,” said the board chairman. “I want you to sit up beside me today.”

Greg went sullenly with the chairman of the board. Arnold was the whitest man Paul had ever seen. He looked like an animated wad of dough, short, pot-bellied, wearing a ridiculous silver-gray toupée that never seemed to sit right on his head; it looked so artificial it was laughable. Eagerly bustling, he led Greg up to the head of the table and sat the younger man on his right. Arnold’s face was round, flabby, with hyperthyroid bulging frog’s eyes.

Sixteen men and three women, including Joanna, sat around the long polished table. Paul took a chair across the table from Joanna, where he could see her face. The symbolism of Arnold’s seating Greg next to him was obvious. Paul waited to see how the board would react to Joanna’s less-than-symbolic nomination.

Arnold played the meeting for all the drama he could squeeze out of it. He began by asking for a moment of silence to honor the memory of their late president and CEO. As Paul bowed his head, he glanced at Melissa Hart, sitting down near the bottom of the table.

Silky smooth, long-legged Melissa, with skin the color of milk chocolate and a fierce passion within her that drove her mercilessly both at work and play. Most board members thought of her as an affirmative action “twofer”: black and female. Or a “threefer,” since she represented the unions among the corporation’s workforce. Paul knew her as a fiery bed partner who was furious with him for dropping her in favor of Joanna.

She had been sleeping with Gregory Masterson before Paul, everyone knew. That was how she got on the board of
directors, they thought. Now, as Paul glanced her way, she did not look terribly grieved. Instead, she glared angrily at him.

Arnold next asked for a vote to accept the minutes of the last meeting, then called for reports from the division heads while the board members fidgeted impatiently in their chairs.

When it came to Paul’s turn, he gave a perfunctory review of the Clippership’s profits and the firm orders from airlines around the world. Paul referred to them as aerospace lines, even the ones that were not doing any true business in orbit, because the Clipperships spent most of their brief flight times far above the atmosphere. “The way to make money,” Paul had told every airline executive he had ever wined and dined, “is to keep your Clipperships in space more than they’re on the ground.”

Ordinarily, at least a few of the board members would ask nit-picking questions, but everyone wanted to move ahead to the election of the new CEO.

Almost everyone.

“What’s this I hear about your people making giant TV screens up there in the space station?” asked Alan Johansen.

He was one of the newest board members, a handsomely vapid young protégé of Arnold’s with slicked-back blond hair and the chiselled profile of a professional model.

Surprised, Paul said, “It’s still in the developmental stage.”

“Giant TV screens?” asked one of the women.

“Under the weightless conditions in orbit,” Paul explained, “we can make large-crystal flat screens ten, fifteen feet across, but only a couple of inches thick.”

“Why, you could hang them on a wall like a painting, couldn’t you?”