“Me?”

“Yes. He said you wouldn’t be interested.”

“Did he?” Alec felt the tide of rage building up in him. “What else did he say?”

Lenore looked at him quizzically. “Nothing,” she replied quietly. “He didn’t say anything else...”

“No?” Alec gripped her arm. “He didn’t say that I’m a classic Oedipal? He didn’t tell you that I’d like to screw my mother?”

“No... Alec...” Her eyes were wide and frightened now.

Alec threw his cup down on the floor and stood up. “I don’t know what your game is, but you can tell Kobol or anyone else that I’m not afraid of anything. I’m not weak and I’m not scared! Of anything!”

He turned and reached for the door. She sat huddled in the corner of the bunk. “Alec... what did I...”

With one hand on the door handle, he said to her, “For all I know, Kobol put you up to this—to see if I have any balls at all!”

“Do you?”

Suddenly he wanted to hit her, smash her face, throttle her. Instead he grabbed her, pulled her off the bunk, tore the clothes from her body. She gasped and swung at him. But it was clumsy, hampered by the torn clothing that hung on her arms. They struggled against each other. She was a big woman but he was furious with a murderous rage. He ripped the rest of her clothes off, pushed her onto the bunk. When she tried to get up he cuffed her, hard, with the back of his hand.

She recoiled back onto the bunk, then reached for the bottle on the desk. By that time Alec had his jumpsuit unzipped. He knocked the bottle away, turned her on her back and fell on top of her. She snarled at him, teeth bared, “I’ll bite your prick off!”

“Try it.”

She struggled briefly, then stopped trying to push him off. “Wait... wait... at least...”

But he exploded inside her, then pulled away and got to his feet.

“Tell Kobol I’m not dead yet,” he said.

And he left her there.

Chapter 12

“And I say we go now!”

They were sitting in the satellite station’s tiny mess hall, which also served as a conference room. There were only four tables in the cramped metal-walled room. At this time of night, the other three were empty.

Sitting around the table with Alec were Kobol, Ron Jameson, and Bernard Harvey. Jameson was one of the few real military men of the settlement, an expert in weapons and tactics who had been a twenty-year-old soldier on duty at the lunar settlement when the sky burned. He had gone Earthside on every expedition since then, and now served as the commander’s chief aide, the man who translated strategy into order to the men. He was tall, utterly calm, flat-stomached, with unflinching gray eyes set in a hawk-nosed, hunter’s lean face. A hard man to panic. Harvey was a round, soft-faced, balding Councilor who would return to the settlement as soon as the expedition touched Earthside.

“But the schedule,” Harvey objected, “calls for your leaving three weeks from now.”

Kobol steepled his fingers in front of his face, hiding his mouth. “That’s when the spring rains will be over and the ground dried out,” he said. “Travel across country will be a lot easier then.”

Alec said, “If we land at the airport we’ll only have to travel a couple of kilometers, over paved roadway. We can be in and out overnight.”

“But your own battle plan...”

“Ron, what do the pilots say?” Alec asked Jameson.

“They’d prefer the airport,” he said in his easy drawl. “We’ve put the high-mag ‘scopes on the airfield every time since you suggested it. Runways are in a sorry state, but there’s plenty room for both shuttles. It’d be a lot better than trying to land in open country.”

“The shuttles will be sitting ducks at the airfield,” Kobol said. “That’s how we lost the last one, at an airfield.”

“Any sign of barbarian bands around the airfield?”

Jameson shook his head.

Tapping the table with a forefinger to make his points, Alec said, “The spring rainstorms keep the natives holed up, prevent them from travelling. In another three weeks those forests down there will be teeming with them and we’ll have to fight our way into Oak Ridge and back out again. Right now the only natives who could be there are the locals, who aren’t much of a threat. And no matter where we land the shuttles, they’re going to be vulnerable.”

Kobol looked impassive; Harvey upset.

“If we go now,” Alec insisted, “land at the airport, we can have the entire mission accomplished in two days, max. Before any barbarian hordes have had time to mass and reach us.”

“But that’s not the way the mission was planned,” Harvey pleaded. “It’s your own plan! The Council...”

“The Council gave me command. My decision is that we go now. Tomorrow, if possible. The next day at the latest.”

“It’s a mistake,” Kobol said flatly.

“Maybe,” Alec countered. “But it’s my mistake.”

They sat there under the bluish fluorescent light panels of the ceiling for a silent few moments.

“All right,” Alec said. “That’s it. Ron, please get the men ready for boarding as soon as possible. Inform the pilots and maintenance crews.”

Jameson nodded.

Turning to Harvey, Alec said, “You can report this back to the Council, if you want to.”

Visibly sweating, the Councilor said, “I guess I’ll have to.”

Alec got up from his chair, nodded to them, and walked out of the mess hall. The station’s main corridor was dimmed down for night. As he walked through the shadows to his own compartment, Alec told himself, At least I won’t have to see her anymore.

It took two days.

Two days of checking out the weapons, the communications gear, the food and clothing they would need. Two days of carefully observing the weather patterns across North America and predicting that the Oak Ridge area would be dry and clear. Two days of frenetic calls back and forth from the satellite station to the lunar settlement. Men who thought they had three weeks suddenly telescoping their homeward conversations into forty-eight hours. Questions from the Council. Technical data from the settlement’s main computers to the station’s.

Two days of innoculations and medical checks. Alec put off his final medical exam until the last possible moment. Lenore was all business with him, impersonal, clinical. Except as he got up to leave, she said calmly, “Good luck, Alec.”

He mumbled a thank you and hurried out of the infirmary.