Colt's eyes widened as he realized what Murdock was saying. "You mean you think Chet would commit treasonT'
"I'm not accusing anyone of anything," Murdock said, obviously doing just the opposite. "I'm just being careful."
As he packed his spartan travel kit Colt began to understand what Murdock was doing. The sonofabitch is using me! Because I'm a friend of Chefs and he trusts me. Gonna look great. Like Brutus sticking in his blade. He zipped the bag viciously and hefted it in one hand. And Murdock knows I'll do it, too. I've come too far and fought too many of those lily-white bastards to back down now. Never duck a tough job. Never turn down a chance for a promotion. Don't give 'em a chance to pass you over. And if I have to step across Chefs body to get the next step up—shit, if I don't do it somebody else will.
As he reached for the door of his compartment Colt remembered the technician working on his spaceplane. Fuck him. Let him work his white ass off. And he stepped into the corridor and strode off toward the Moonbound shuttle.
"When you said we were going for a walk I didn't realize you meant up here," Diane said.
She and Kinsman were in lunar suits, walking slowly and carefully across the inlet of the Mare Nubium that covered Selene and lapped up to the base of Alphonsus's ringwall.
Kinsman loathed the pressure suits. It was like being inside someone else's skin. Sluggish, difficult to move even in the gentle lunar gravity. They always smelled of plastic and machine oil and somebody else's sweat. He was annoyed with himself for not having the guts to order a special suit custom-made for him. The commander's entitled to it, espe- cially if you're going to spend the rest of your life up here. But you're afraid of looking less than egalitarian. Kinsman the nice guy, that's the image you want them to have of you.
"Everybody ought to see the surface," he said to Diane. "Too many ninety-dayers come here and stay down below all through their tour. Might as well be in the Pentagon or the New York subway."
"What's that?" Diane pointed toward a rounded plastic dome, more than a kilometer away. He could not see her face behind the helmet's glare-proof visor. Her voice was an electronic approximation in his earphones.
"That's the original Lunagrad dome," Kinsman ex- plained. "Leonov's people still land their shuttles over there." And why did Pete beg off meeting me today? What's going on with him?
Diane stepped closer to him, waddling ponderously. "How come the two bases were built right next to each other?"
"That was back when the watchword was cooperation. We were going to share most of the facilities: electric power, water factory, the farms . . . cheaper for both sides."
"It didn't last long, did it?"
"Earthside politics," Kinsman said. "The food short- ages, the energy crunch—we started getting orders to make Moonbase self-sufficient. Not to depend on the Russians for anything. They got the same orders. But we'd already been living together for several years. It's hard to distrust people when you live with them."
Diane said nothing.
Spreading his arms, Kinsman turned slowly and asked, "Well . . . what do you think of the place?"
She may have tried to shrug inside the suit, it was impossible to tell. "It looks so barren . . . desolate. And it's so empty."
"We've got lots of space," Kinsman agreed. "And energy—free, almost, from the sun. What we don't have is water. Have to process it out of the rocks. Funny: energy's cheap here and water's expensive. On Earth it's just the other way around."
"Water isn't cheap on Earth anymore," Diane said. "Not drinkable water."
Kinsman shook his head even though Diane could not see the gesture. "You'd think that would be the last thing they'd mess up on a planet brimful of the stuff."
