Fixing her dark eyes on his long, hound-sad face, Lisa answered, “The day that you—any of you—can get together like this without me knowing about it, that will be the day I resign as head of administration.”

LaStrande, the other man sitting on the bed, said gravely, “We’re happy to see you up and around.”

The rest of them murmured agreement.

“Thank you,” said Lisa. “Martin, you made a slight misstatement a moment ago. You are not in charge of electrical power; Douglas is.”

Kobol nodded unhappily. “That’s right, Douglas is... when he’s here.” His voice was nasal, reedy, and had a tendency toward screeching when he got upset. “But it’s been nearly two weeks since he went Earthside. We haven’t heard a report from him for three days now.”

“He’ll be back,” Lisa said.

“Of course. And when he’s back he’ll be in charge of electrical power. But until he comes back, I’m in charge.”

Lisa smiled at him. “Naturally.”

Kobol was tall, almost as tall as Douglas, but bone-thin. Cadaverous, Lisa thought. He looks like those mummies the archeologists dig up in Egypt. For a briefest moment a hot pang of remorse shot through her as she realized that the temples, the museums, the archeological digs, the people of Egypt and England and everywhere else were all gone, dead, burned, melted by the fury of the Sun and the even hotter fireballs of human retaliation.

She forced the thought down, just as she forced away the pain that surged through her abdomen. Instead she concentrated on the other people in the room, the self-proclaimed leaders of the isolated little colony.

Demain sat on the bed, his back pressed against the stone wall, his legs pulled up against his chest fetally. His bulging, balding dome gave him an infant’s look, but his eyes were crafty. The eyes of a peasant, a farmer. And that’s exactly what he is, Lisa thought, even if his farms are complicated hydroponics facilities that use chemicals and electrical energy and sunlight filtered down from the surface through fiber optics pipes.

His wife was in charge of the hospital. White haired but still radiantly lovely, her skin unwrinkled, her life truly dedicated to caring for others, Catherine had given up a brilliant medical career Earthside to be with her husband on the Moon.

LaStrande was a little gnome of a man, already half-blind despite the laser surgery performed on his failing eyes. But he was a powerhouse of a personality, argumentative yet never offensive, a genius at maintaining and even enlarging the settlement’s vital life support equipment on a shoestring of personnel and materials.

Blair was dying of cancer. They all knew it, despite the fact that he looked pinkly healthy and went about his work at the communications center with unfailing good cheer. Marrett was a burly, loud-voiced diamond in the rough who had retired from a career in meteorology to spend his final days on the Moon and somehow—restless, talented, a born leader—had become chief of the tough, no-nonsense miners.

And Kobol. She looked up at him as he stood next to her chair, automatically taking charge of the meeting, reaching for the power to rule them all the way an eager little boy reaches for a jar of cookies.

What would they think, Lisa wondered, if they knew that Kobol had fathered the baby I’ve lost, and not Fred Simpson? What would Douglas do, if I ever told him? She closed her eyes for a moment. Catherine Demain noticed and thought that Lisa must be in pain. But Lisa was merely holding tight the anger she felt at Douglas, her husband, the man she had chosen five years ago to mold into a leader, a giant, a commander who could take charge of this pathetic little community on the Moon and use it as a base for political power on Earth.

She shook her head, trying to dismiss the thoughts from her mind. The Earth was gone now. There was nothing left. Not that Douglas would have followed her lead anyway; he had turned out to be far too stubborn and self-centered to be influenced by anyone else. What a mistake I made! Lisa told herself. To think that I believed I could mold that domineering, simple-minded bull into a world leader.

But he’s gone too, she realized. He’ll never come back. He’s probably dead by now. Strangely, the thought saddened her.

“...and if the hydroponics output can be increased fifteen percent,” Kobol was saying, in his reedy twang, “we ought to be able to get along without importing food from Earthside indefinitely.”

If the population stays level, Lisa thought.

Demain was bobbing his head up and down, over his drawn-up knees. “I can do it,” his soft voice was barely audible, “if you can get me more room, more acreage. And more energy. It takes energy.”

“We’ll carve out the acreage for you,” Marrett assured him.

LaStrande waggled a hand in the air. “Listen, I know how we can get a leg up on the energy problem. The safety margins we’ve enforced on the life support systems are ridiculously large. Typical Earthside overengineering. I can run the air and heating systems on half the energy we now allocate.”

“Half?” Kobol snapped. “You’re sure?”

LaStrande peered at him myopically. “If I say I can, I can. The recyclers don’t need all that standby power. There’s no reason we can’t shunt it off to hydroponics.”

Kobol rubbed his chin in thought.

Lisa smiled inwardly at him. He’s not easy to mold, either, she told herself. But at least he wants power. He has the ambition that Douglas lacks. But he’s insidious. Like a snake. He’d never challenge Douglas face-to-face. But he didn’t mind slipping into my bed when I invited him. And now he’s trying to take charge of the community.

With a weary sigh of regret, Lisa realized, this is all the world we have now. Martin can be made into its ruler. And I will rule him.

“It’s settled, then,” Kobol was concluding. “The standby power goes to hydroponics. Marrett, your miners will start enlarging the hydroponics bay immediately. Jim...”

But Blair and the others were looking past Kobol, to the doorway. Lisa turned in her chair and saw a youngster standing there in a drab coverall. She wore the shoulder patch of the communications group.

“Yes?” Blair said to her. “What is it?”

Her youthful face seemed flushed with excitement. She stepped into the tiny, crowded bedroom, maneuvered past Kobol and Lisa’s chair, and handed Blair a flimsy sheet of ultrathin plastic—the lunar settlement’s reusable substitute for paper.

Blair read the message, his face lighting up.

“It’s from Douglas,” he said, his eyes still scanning the typed words, as if he could not believe what they said. “He’s on his way back. He’ll arrive in forty-five hours.”

They all gasped with surprise. Lisa felt an irrational pang of joy spring up inside her. Idiot! she raged at herself. He’ll spoil everything. Everything.

Yet she could not control the surge of happiness that coursed through her.

Kobol’s face was as gray as a corpse’s. His mouth pressed shut into a thin, bloodless line.

“That’s not all,” Blair told them, waving the flimsy sheet in his hand. “Douglas says he’s bringing twenty-five people back with him. He says most of them are in very bad physical condition and will need hospitalization immediately.”

Chapter 3

The biggest chamber in the underground community was a combination warehouse, depot, and garage just inside the big double metal hatch of the main airlock leading out to the surface. Vehicles were parked next to the airlock’s gleaming, vault-like doors, assembled in precise rows along colored lines painted on the smooth floor: electric forklift trucks, springy-wheeled lunar surface rovers, bicycles for pedalling along the underground corridors.

Supplies were stacked in equally precise ranks and files, each box or crate carefully labelled and arranged in sections according to what was inside it. Machinery, foodstuffs, medicines, clothing—all the things that the lunar settlement did not make for itself were stacked there, row upon row, piled up almost as high as the rugged stone ceiling of the cave.

They are a reminder, thought Lisa as she entered the big chamber, a reminder of how much we depended on Earth. Can we survive without Earth? Kobol says we can, but is he right? Can we survive?

Kobol stood beside her, and at her other side was Catherine Demain. They waited before the airlock hatch, at the end of the wide aisle separating the stacks of supplies from the rows of parked vehicles. Behind them stood a specially-picked team of volunteers, ready to help the survivors from Earth to beds and medical care.

Kobol studied his wristwatch. “Another few minutes, at most.”

“The radar plot is still good?” Lisa asked.

He shrugged his bony shoulders. “I could check with Blair,” he said, gesturing toward the phone set into the wall next to the hatch.

“No. Don’t bother. If anything goes wrong he’ll put it on the public address system.”

She heard the sounds of shoes scuffing on the plastic floor of the cavern, sensed the presence of other people. Turning, Lisa saw that dozens of people were stepping off the powerlift, milling around the cavern expectantly.