He was standing in the center of a big room, surrounded by empty shelves and broken, shattered wooden desks and tables. The roof was partially gone, so the sunlight streamed in, dust motes drifting lazily in the still air. The room was large and open, but Douglas Morgan seemed to fill it. He was big, hulking, broad-shouldered and thickbodied. Will Russo was almost as big, Alec realized. But where Will was a grinning, happy oversized puppy, Douglas Morgan was a towering, lumbering gray bear.

His face was square-jawed and strong, with iron-gray hair rising in a bristling shock from his broad forehead and framing his powerful jaw with an iron-gray spade-shaped beard. His blue eyes were like gunmetal. They stared straight at Alec now, unblinking, pinning him where he stood.

I don’t look anything like him, Alec heard his own inner voice saying. No wonder he hates me.

“You’re Alec, eh?” His voice was strong, demanding, even in normal conversational tone. “You have your mother’s genes, all right.”

And not yours? Alec wondered. “I’m Alec,” he said.

“Well, come over here and let me see you. I’m not going to bite you.”

Alec walked slowly toward his father. The man was a giant, a mountainous man, with a powerful commanding voice to match.

They stood confronting each other. Neither offered a hand. Neither smiled. Despite the sunlight beaming down through the broken roof, Alec felt cold, numbed to his core.

“He’s a good fighter,” Will’s voice broke the staring match between them. “Helped me take a nasty mortar nest. Handled himself very well.”

Douglas nodded. “That’s something.”

“I vomited afterward,” Alec snapped.

Douglas’s heavy eyebrows went up. “Did you? A sensitive soul, eh? Well... killing a man’s no joke. But be glad you were the one who was still alive to get sick, not the one somebody else got sick over.”

Will said, “Why don’t we sit down and have something to drink? It’s been a dusty ride up here, and I sort of feel like celebrating.”

“Celebrating what?” Douglas asked.

“Family reunion!”

“Oh. That.” He smiled sardonically. “Sure. Obviously you’ve found some liquid lightning along the way. So uncork it and we’ll have a little party. Just the three of us.”

“It’s in my pack.” Will bounded back toward the door.

“Sorry we haven’t had the place dusted and decorated for the big occasion,” Douglas said to Alec. “Eh... the furniture’s a bit nonexistent. Care to sit over here?”

He gestured elaborately toward the floor next to a scarred, battered wooden counter that ran across the front of the room. Alec shrugged and dropped down onto his heels. He watched as Douglas stiffly, slowly sank down into a sitting position. He leaned his back against the sagging partitions under the countertop with an audible sigh.

“Caught a cold in my back during the spring rains,” he said, without turning to look at his son. “Makes it merry hell to bend.”

Will came back, holding a metal flask in his big freckled hand. He sat on the floor facing Alec and Douglas. Grinning, he unscrewed the cap of the flask and sniffed at its contents.

“Wow! Shouldn’t keep this in the hot sun.”

Douglas reached for it and took a cautious whiff. “I’ll bet I could get fifty klicks to the gallon on my jeep with this stuff.” He passed the flask to Alec. “Here. You’re the guest of honor. You get the first shot. If you survive, maybe we’ll try it.”

“It’s not that bad,” Will said, trying to look aggrieved. “The farmer who sold it to me swore he brewed it last summer.”

Alec took the flask and brought it to his lips. The fumes seemed to crawl right up inside his eyeballs, making them water. He took a sip. It stung and tasted sour. Don’t cough! he commanded himself.

“Not bad,” he said, his voice-only partly choked.

Douglas took the flask from him. “Well, if you can stand it, I suppose I can too.”

Alec watched his father take a long swallow of the liquor, while his own sip burned its way down toward his stomach. They passed the flask among themselves for another round before Douglas said:

“We have a lot to talk about.”

“Yes, we do,” Alec agreed.

Will said, “Maybe I ought to tiptoe out...”

“No, stay right here,” Douglas commanded.

That eliminates talking about mother, Alec thought. Aloud, he said, “The fissionables are gone.”

“Right. We took them north... er, for safekeeping.”

 “We need them.”

“I know you do. I knew it before you were born.”

“Then why did you take them away? Why didn’t you bring them back yourself? Why did you turn your back on us and stay here in this mudhole?” All in a rush.

Douglas held the flask in his hand. He looked at it, then shook his head once, abruptly, as if he’d made a firm decision. “That is a long story. But it all boils down to one unavoidable fact. The lunar settlement cannot survive by itself. It needs Earth. Otherwise, it’s going to die.”

“Of course! We need those fissionables.”

“It’s not the fissionables.” Douglas leaned an elbow on the sagging wooden shelf behind him. The wood creaked. “There’s more than the fissionables involved... far more. The life of the settlement itself.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Look—the settlement was never intended to be entirely self-sufficient. Right? When the Sun flared up they were suddenly thrust on their own. No more support from Earth.”

Alec said, “And we’ve been on our own for more than twenty-five years now. Doing fine.”

“Bull-hinkey! You think you’re doing fine.” Douglas’s voice rose slightly. “But take a good, unbiased look at the settlement. You’re still operating with the machinery that was there before the flare, right? No one’s built new reactors, new processing plants, new solar panels, new shuttles, eh? No one’s even tried to rectify the processing plants so they can run on the voltages that the solar arrays produce, have they? No! Instead you keep coming back to Earth to grab fissionables for the reactors.”

“So?”

“So what happens when you’ve used up all the fissionable fuel you can find? What then?” Douglas demanded.

“That won’t happen for centuries!”

“Centuries, millennia... what difference? The point is,” Douglas insisted, “that it’s going to happen one day, and unless you people have the knowledge and the guts to work out new devices—like fusion generators, for example—then you’re going to die. All of you.”

Alec said, “But that’s so far in the future...”

“Then what about medicines?”