Jack McDevitt - The Moonfall

And the chaplain. Mark Pinnacle. Mousy little man who'd looked so frightened on the speaker's platform. Who would have thought? She'd been delighted to hear of his offer. It had allowed her to call in Chip Mansfield and tell him he was off the hook. And if somebody else would agree to stay, she could get rid of Benning, who was next in line. She hated the notion of spending the last hours of her life with people who'd stayed only because someone had forced them into it. Better to die with the valiant.

She climbed out of her jumpsuit. It'd been a long day and she ached for a shower. She could justify it now: There was no further need to conserve water.

The telephone rang as she stepped into the stall, but she didn't bother with it. Get it when she came out. The ultimate emergency had broken over her head and nothing was going to rush her again. Not in this life.

Evelyn had been born in Dakar. Her father had been a British missionary, her mother a teacher of French literature at Senegal University. Evelyn had announced early that she wanted to become a physician. She'd seen firsthand the living conditions of the tribes, and she was going to do what she could. It was an admirable ambition, but one that faded in high school when she discovered a distaste for chemistry and physics.

She went to the University of Versailles, where she concluded that a great deal more money was to be made by bringing fantasy to the middle class rather than medical repairs to the poor. Virtual reality was about to arrive on African shores in all its manifestations, diagnostic, cinematic, therapeutic, analytic. Evelyn did not yet have her bachelor's degree when she founded MicroTech, Ltd., hired a secretary, and secured licenses from poorly informed bureaucrats.

From that moment she controlled the growth of the industry in and around Senegal. She profited handsomely from her monopoly, expanded into Mauritania, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and the Ivory Coast. Organized crime tried to move in on her, but she hired her own elite security force, and in the end she was tougher than they were. All of this took place just before the African boom. When it came, Evelyn parlayed it into a seat on the board of Global Communications, Ltd.

She was in the right spot when the nations decided they wanted to establish a permanent presence on the Moon and they needed a corporation to help them do it.

For a while it was MicroTech all over again, except on a global level. She was Time's Woman of the Year in 2022, she employed a half-dozen Nobel prize winners, and she was on first-name terms with prime ministers and presidents. Her ghostwritten book, Moon Over Wall Street, was enjoying its fifty-seventh week on the New York Times best-seller list.

She'd married twice. Marcus Hampton had been gunned down during the war with the east African thugs. William had gotten the wrong idea about her, thinking she'd consent to be part of a harem. She didn't know where he was now.

She had one son by Marcus, who lived with her in Roxbury. He was at MIT, working on a doctorate. Old enough to deal with the loss of his mother. Should it come to that.

The phone was ringing again when she shut the water off. She strode out of the bathroom, toweling herself as she went. "Hampton," she said. Her name, spoken by her voice, activated the instrument.

"Evelyn." It was Chandler. "I just got a message from Ops."

"What's wrong, Jack?"

"The flight left without Haskell."

She needed a moment to digest that. "How'd it happen?"

"He and his party apparently walked. One of them delivered the tickets and told our people to give the seats to somebody else. He was up here several minutes ago."

"Did he explain why? Why he didn't go?"

"No. But he's on his way over to see you."

"Okay," she said. "Thanks, Jack. I assume we filled the seats."

"Yes."

"Okay. Put them on the morning flight tomorrow."

"Yes, ma'am."

She heard raised voices in the corridor. "I think he's here, Jack. I'll talk to you later."

She grabbed a robe, drew it around her shoulders, and turned to face the door. Moonbase, Grissom Country. 2:06 P.M.

Charlie Haskell was no hero. He admired heroes, was always ready to quote TR or Churchill, and had twice presided over the Veterans Day ceremonies. But he'd never in his life been called on to perform an act that could be described as heroic. He'd confronted a bully or two, and once stood up to a tyrannical geometry teacher. The memory of that long-ago day had flashed briefly, absurdly, through his memory as he sat on the tram, surrounded by Rick and his frustrated agents, riding back to Main Plaza.

Frustration had been the order of the afternoon. He'd insisted his agents board their scheduled flight. They'd refused. And Rick, who usually looked after himself first, had picked this moment to step out of character. He'd argued that Charlie couldn't possibly stay, couldn't consider it, owed it to the American people to get home, was too valuable to lose. Which is to say, even Rick couldn't come up with a compelling reason for him to save his skin.

Charlie had no family that was dependent on him, no one who would be terribly hurt if something happened to him. And no real reason for existing, other than his job, which someone had once described as consisting of three duties: to go fishing, to preside over the Senate, and to wait for the president to die.

Rick had argued all the way down to Evelyn's apartment.

But it seemed to Charlie as if his whole life had been a preparation for this terrible moment. He thought of himself as a national leader. He enjoyed the trappings of his position, luxuriated in the celebrity, rubbed shoulders with the powerful, toured the country clubs. Now had come the moment to lead.

He'd sat on the tram, listening to Rick. He pictured himself in the White House next year, if he got lucky, trying to drive from his mind the knowledge that someone braver than he had died in his place. He couldn't even remember the chaplain's name. His heart had been pounding. Later he would come to believe that the decision had been taken hours earlier, that it had been a left-brain thing, that it was just a matter of waiting for his conscious mind to catch up. And maybe there was some truth to that.

Charlie had tried to call the president from the tram. He had a code that got him through the Moonbase commcenter without a hitch, but Henry had been in a meeting. He'll call you back, sir. So he left a message explaining what he had done. That, of course, had put him across the Rubicon.

Then he'd gone looking for Evelyn. If he was going to take this kind of step, he wanted at least to relish the pleasure of telling her personally. He wondered why it was so important to him to gain her respect. But now he stood outside her door, telling Rick and his embattled agents to go away, waiting for her to answer, feeling elated and terrified and very pleased with himself.

He was surprised when the door opened. He'd detected no movement on the other side, but feet padding across a floor were harder to hear in lunar gravity. Evelyn was wrapped in a yellow terry-cloth robe, standing in a puddle, and looking curiously at him. "What's going on, Mr. Vice President?"

"I'm not sure," Charlie said. "May I come in?"

She stood aside. "They tell me you missed your flight."

He glanced back at Rick and Sam, and walked across the threshold. She closed the door behind him.

"I'm staying," he said.

"Staying?"

They looked at each other across a gulf.

"Got any coffee?"

"You and the chaplain," she said almost dreamily. "Why?"

"I kept thinking about MacArthur," he said.

"MacArthur?"

"Twentieth-century American general."

"I know who he was." She frowned. "What's Douglas MacArthur got to do with anything?"