He was still one stroke ahead of Mai, though, and two strokes in front of his next closest competitor, a lantern-jawed Australian named MacTavish.
But MacTavish overdrove his ball, trying to clear that ridge, and it rolled past the cup to a stop at the edge of the deep sand.
Mai putted carefully, but her ball hit a minuscule pebble at the last instant and veered a bare few centimeters from the cup. She tapped it in, and came away with a double eagle. She now was leading at five below par.
Sam had trudged out to the sand, where his ball lay. He needed to chip it onto the green and then putt it into the hole. Barely bothering to line up his shot, he whacked it out of the sand. The ball bounced onto the green and then rolled and rolled, curving this way and that like a scurrying ant looking for a breadcrumb, until it rolled to the lip of the cup and dropped in.
Pandemonium. All of us in the comm center sprang to our feet, hands raised high, and bellowed joyfully. The crowd in Dante’s lobby roared so hard it registered on the seismograph over in Selene.
Sam was now three below par and so happy about it that he was hopping up and down, dancing across the green, swinging his club over his head gleefully.
Ramjanmyan wasn’t finished, though. He lofted his ball high over the ridge. It seemed to sail up there among the stars for an hour before it plopped onto the middle of the green and rolled to the very lip of the cup. There it stopped. We all groaned in sympathy for him.
But the Indian plodded in his exoskeleton suit to the cup and tapped the ball. His final score was six below par.
The only way for MacTavish to beat him would be for him to chip the ball directly into the cup. The Aussie tried, but his chip was too hard, and the ball rolled a good ten meters past the hole. He ended with a score of four below par.
Ramjanmyan won the tournament at six below par. Mai came in second, five below, and Sam surprised us all with a three below par score, putting him in fourth place.
Everyone celebrated far into the night: golfers, tourists, staffers, and all. Sam reveled the hardest, dancing wildly with every woman in Dante’s Inferno while the band banged out throbbing, wailing neodisco numbers.
I danced with Mai, no one else. And she danced only with me. It was well past midnight when the party started to break up. Mai and I walked back to her hotel room, tired but very, very happy.
Until I thought about what tomorrow would bring. Mai would leave to return to Earth. I’d be an unemployed golf course architect stranded on the Moon.
“You’re awfully quiet,” Mai said as we stepped into her room.
“You’ll be leaving tomorrow,” I said.
“I’ll get the best lawyers on Earth,” she said as she slid her arms around my neck. “Earth’s a big place. Your ex-wife can’t harass you anywhere except Singapore.”
I shook my head. “Don’t be so sure. Her mother has an awful lot of clout.”
“We’ll find a place. . .”
“And spend the rest of our lives looking over our shoulders? That’s not what I want for you, Mai.”
She kissed me lightly, just brushing her lips on mine. “Sufficient for the day are the evils thereof.”
“Huh?”
Mai smiled at me. “Let’s worry about things tomorrow. We’re here together tonight.”
So I tried to forget about my troubles. I even succeeded—for a while.
I was awakened by the phone’s buzzing. I cracked one eye open and saw that Mai was sleeping soundly, peacefully curled up beside me.
“Audio only,” I told the phone.
Sam’s freckled face sprang up on the phone’s screen, grinning lopsidedly.
“Mai, I’ve got the medical reports here,” he began.
“Quiet,” I whispered urgently. “Mai’s still asleep.”
“Charlie?” Sam lowered his voice a notch. “So that’s where you are. I called you at your place. We’ve gotta talk about financial arrangements.”
Severance pay, I knew.
“Come over to my office around eleven thirty. Then we’ll go to lunch.”
“Mai’s flight—”
“Plenty of time for that. My office. Eleven thirty. Both of you.”
They say that today is the first day of the rest of your life. I went through the morning like a man facing a firing squad. The rest of my life, I knew, was going to be miserable and lonely. Mai seemed sad, too. Her usual cheerful smile was nowhere in sight.
We got to Sam’s office precisely at eleven thirty and settled glumly onto the sawed-off chairs in front of his desk. Sam beamed down at us like he hadn’t a care in the world. Or two worlds, for that matter.
“First,” he began, “the radiation badges we all wore show that the nanosuits protected us just as well as the standard suits protected everybody else.”
“Dr. Cardenas will be pleased,” Mai said listlessly.
“You bet she is,” Sam replied. “We’re having dinner together over at Selene this evening.”
