The Precipice (6 page)

He shook his head in wonder as Pancho coaxed the snake back around her ankle. “And he eats mice.”

“She,” Pancho said as she straightened up again. “When I stay up here for more than a month I have to send Earthside for more
mice. Costs a bundle.”

“I'll bet.”

“The mice never get out of their cage,” Pancho added. “Once every other week I put Elly in with them.”

The inspector shuddered visibly. He took Pancho's entry forms and passed them in front of the electronic reader. The machine
beeped once. Pancho was cleared. The inspector put the transparent mouse cage back into her night bag and zipped it shut.

“You're okay to enter Selene,” he said, almost as if he didn't believe it himself.

“Thank you.”

Before she could hoist her bag onto her shoulder, he asked, “Uh… what're you doing for dinner tonight?”

Pancho smiled her sweetest. “Gee, I'd love to have dinner with you, but I already have a date.”

* * *

Dressed in a crisp white pantsuit set off by the flowery scarf she'd tied around her neck, Pancho followed the directions
Martin Humphries had videomailed to her.

In Earthside cities, height meant prestige. In hotels and condo towers, the higher the floor, the higher the price. Penthouses
were considered the most desirable, and therefore were the most expensive. On the Moon, where human settlements were dug into
the ground, prestige increased with depth. The airless lunar surface was dangerous, subject to four-hundred-degree temperature
swings between sunlight and shadow, bathed in hard radiation from deep space, peppered with meteoric infall. So in Selene
and the other communities on the Moon, the deeper your living quarters, the more desirable it was, and the more expensive.

Martin Humphries must be rotten rich, Pancho thought as she rode the elevator down to Selene's lowest level. According to
the biofiles on the nets Humphries was supposed to be one of the wealthiest men in the Earth/Moon system, but that could be
public relations puffery, she thought. The tabloids and scandal sites had more on him than the biofiles. They called him “Hump,”
or “the Humper.” He had a reputation as a chaser, married twice and with lots of media stars and glamour gals from the upper
crust to boot. When Pancho looked up the pix of his “dates” she saw a succession of tall, languid, gorgeous women with lots
of hairdo and skimpy clothes.

Pancho felt completely safe: the Humper wouldn't be interested in a gangly, horse-faced tomboy. Besides, if he tried anything
Elly would protect her.

He had called her personally. No flunky; Martin Humphries his own self had phoned Pancho and asked her to come to his home
to discuss a business proposition. Maybe he wants to hire me away from Astro, she thought. Astro's been a good-enough outfit,
but if Humphries offers more money I'll go to
work for him. That's a no-brainer. Go where the money is, every time.

But why did he call me himself, instead of having his personnel office interview me?

There were only a few living units carved into the rock this far underground. Big places, Pancho realized as she glided along
the well-lit corridor in the practiced bent-kneed shuffle that you had to use to walk in the Moon's low gravity. The walls
of the corridor were carved with elaborate low-relief sculptures, mostly astronomical motifs, but there were some Earthly
landscapes in with the stars and comets. She counted about a hundred strides between doors, which meant that the living units
on the other sides of the corridor walls were bigger than a whole dorm section on the floors above. The doors were fancy,
too: most of them were double, all of them decorated one way or another. Some of them looked like real wood, for crying out
loud.

But while all this impressed Pancho, she was totally unprepared for Martin Humphries's home. At the very end of the corridor
was a blank metal door, polished steel from the look of it. More like an airlock hatch or a bank vault than the fancy-pants
door she'd passed along the corridor. It slid open with a soft hiss as Pancho approached within arm's length.

Optical recognition system, she thought. Or maybe he's got somebody watching the corridor.

She stepped through the open doorway and immediately felt as if she'd entered another world. She found herself in a wide,
high-ceilinged cavern, a big natural cave deep below the lunar surface. Flowers bloomed everywhere, reds and yellows and green
foliage spread out on both sides of her. Trees! She gaped at the sight of young alders and maples, slim white-boled birches,
delicately fronded frangipani. The only trees she'd seen in Selene were up in the Grand Plaza, and they were just little bitty
things compared to these. After the
closed-in gray sameness of Selene's warren of corridors and tightly-confined living quarters, the openness, the color, the
heady scent of flowers growing in such profusion nearly overwhelmed Pancho. Boulders jutted here and there; the distant walls
of the cave and the ceiling high above were rough bare rock. The ceiling was dotted with full-spectrum lamps, she saw. Jeez,
it's like being in Oz, Pancho said to herself.

Like Oz, there was a path winding through the shrubbery, littered with flower petals. Pancho liked that much better than yellow
bricks.

She realized that there were no birds singing in the trees. No insects buzzed among the flowers. There was no breeze sighing
past. This ornate garden was nothing more than a big, elaborate hothouse, Pancho decided. It must cost a freaking fortune.

She glide-walked along the path until a final turn revealed the house set in the middle of the cavern, surrounded by still
more trees and carefully-planted beds of roses, irises and peonies. No daisies, Pancho noted. No marigolds. Too ordinary for
this layout.

The house was enormous, low but wide, with a slanted roof and walls of lunar stone, smoothed and glazed over. Big sweeping
windows. A wide courtyard framed the big double doors of the front entrance, with a fountain gurgling busily in its center.
A fountain! Pancho approached the door slowly, reached out her hand to touch its carved surface. Plastic, her fingertips told
her, stained to look like wood. For several moments she stood at the door, then turned to look back at the courtyard again,
the gardens, the trees, the fountain. What kind of a man would spend so much money for a private palace like this? What kind
of a man would have that much money to spend?

“Welcome, Ms. Lane.”

The sound of his voice made Pancho flinch. He had opened the door silently while her back had been turned as
she surveyed the greenery. She saw a man apparently about her own age, several centimeters shorter than she, a little on the
pudgy side. He was wearing an open-necked pale yellow tunic that came down to his hips. His slacks were cinnamon brown, perfectly
creased. His feet were shod in fancy tooled leather boots. His skin was doughy white, his hair dark and slicked back.

“I'm here to see Mr. Humphries,” she said. “I've been invited:'

He laughed lightly. “I'm Martin Humphries. I gave my staff the night off.”

“Oh.”

Martin Humphries gestured Pancho to come into his house. Knowing Elly was comfortably wrapped around her ankle, Pancho stepped
right in.

The house was just as luxurious as the grounds around it, perhaps even more so. Big, spacious rooms filled with the most beautiful
furniture Pancho had ever seen. A living room long enough to hold a hockey rink, sofas done in gorgeous fabrics, holowindows
showing spectacular Earthside scenery: the Grand Canyon, Mt. Fujiyama, Manhattan's skyline the way it looked before the floods.

The dining room table was big enough to seat twenty, but it was set for just the two of them: Humphries at its head, Pancho
at his right hand. Humphries walked her past it, though, and into a book-lined library where the single holowindow showed
the star-strewn depths of space.

There was a bar along one side of the library.

“What would you like to drink?” Humphries asked, gently guiding her to one of the plush-cushioned stools.

“Whatever,” Pancho shrugged. A good way to judge a man's intentions was to let him select the drinks.

He looked at her for a fleeting, intense moment. Like being x-rayed, Pancho thought His eyes were gray, she noted, cold gray,
like lunar stone.

“I have an excellent champagne,” he suggested.

Pancho smiled at him. “Okay, fine.”

He pressed a button set into the bar's surface, and a silver tray bearing an opened bottle of champagne in a refrigerated
bucket and two tall fluted glasses rose up to serving height with a muted hum of an electrical motor. Humphries pulled the
bottle from its bucket and poured two glasses of champagne. Pancho noticed that the ice-cold bottle quickly beaded with condensation.
The glasses looked like real crystal, prob'ly made at Selene's glass factory.

The bubbles tickled her nose, but the wine was really good: crisp and cold, with a delicate flavor that Pancho liked. Still,
she merely sipped at it as she sat beside Martin Humphries on the softly-cushioned bar stool.

“You must be awful rich to have this place all to yourself,” she said.

His lips edged into a thin smile. “It's not mine, really.”

“It's not?”

“Legally, this building is a research center. It's owned by the Humphries Trust and operated jointly by a consortium of Earthside
universities and the Selene executive board.”

Pancho took another sip of champagne while she sorted that out in her mind.

Humphries went on, “I live here whenever I'm at Selene. The research staff uses the other end of the house.”

“But they don't live here.”

He laughed. “No, they live a few levels up, in… um, more ordinary quarters.”

“And you get the whole place rent-free.”

With a waggle of his free hand, Humphries said, “One of the advantages of wealth.”

“The rich get richer.”

“Or they lose what they've got.”

Nodding, Pancho asked, “So what do they research down here?”

“Lunar ecology,” Humphries replied. “They're trying to learn how to build Earthlike ecologies here on the Moon, underground.”

“Like the Grand Plaza, up topside.”

“Yes. But completely closed-cycle, so you don't have to put in fresh supplies of water.”

“That's what all the flowers and trees are about.”

“Right. They've been able to make a lovely garden, all right, but it's incredibly expensive. Very labor-intensive, with no
birds or insects to pollinate the plants. The idiots running Selene's environmental safety department won't let me bring any
up here. As if they could get loose! They're so stupidly narrow-minded they could look through a keyhole with both eyes.”

Pancho smiled at him, remembering how hard it had been for her to get the approval to bring Elly and her food into Selene.
I must be smarter than he is, she thought. Or maybe Selene's execs just don't like megazillionaires trying to push them around.

“And those full-spectrum lamps cost a fortune in electricity,” Humphries went on.

“Electricity's cheap, though, isn't it?”

Humphries took a long draft of his champagne, then answered, “It's cheap once you've built the solar energy farm up on the
surface… and the superconducting batteries to store electrical energy during the night High capital costs, though.”

“Yeah, but once you've got the equipment in place the operating costs are pitiful low.”

“Except for maintenance.”

“Keeping the solar farms clean, up on the surface, you mean. Yeah, I guess that ain't cheap.”

“Any work on the surface is damned expensive,” he grumbled, bringing his champagne flute to his lips.

“So how rich are you?” she asked abruptly.

Humphries didn't sputter into his champagne, but he did seem to swallow pretty hard.

Pancho added, “I mean, do you
own
any of this or are you just livin' in it?”

He thought a moment before answering. Then, “My grandfather made his fortune in the big dot-com boom around the turn of the
century. Gramps was smart enough to get into the market while it was still rising and get out before the bubble burst.”

“What's a dot-com?” Pancho asked.

Ignoring her question, Humphries went on, “My father took his degrees in biology and law. He bought into half a dozen biotech
firms and built one of the biggest fortunes on Earth.”

“What're your degrees in?”

“I have an MBA from Wharton and a JD from Yale.”

“So you're a lawyer.”

“I've never practiced law.”

Pancho felt alarm signals tingling through her. That's not a straight answer, she realized. But then, what do you expect from
a lawyer? She recalled the old dictum: How can you tell when a lawyer's lying? Watch his lips.

“What do you practice?” she asked, trying to make it sound nonchalant.

He smiled again, and there was even some warmth in it this time. “Oh… making money, mostly. That seems to be what I'm best
at.”

Glancing around the luxurious library, Pancho replied, “I'd say you're purty good at spendin' it, too.”

Humphries laughed aloud. “Yes, I suppose so. I spend a lot of it on women.”

As if on cue, a generously-curved redhead in a slinky metallic sheath appeared at the doorway to the dining room, a slim aperitif
glass dangling empty from one manicured hand. “Say, Humpy, when is dinner served?” she asked poutily. “I'm starving.”

His face went white with anger. “I told you,” he said through clenched teeth, “that I have a business meeting to attend to.
I'll be with you when I'm finished here.”

“But I'm starving,” the redhead repeated.

Glancing at Pancho, Humphries said in a low voice, “I'll be with you in a few minutes.”