“If you ask me.”
“And nominate me for CEO?”
“You’ll be elected if I nominate you.”
She’s right Paul realized. If she doesn’t back her own son the rest of the board will turn away from him. Hell, I’m one of the corporation’s leaders. Saved the outfit from bankruptcy. Making them all rich with the Clippership profits. Half of ’em would be afraid to vote against a black man; afraid it’d look like discrimination. And I could protect Moonbase from Greg and Brad. I could keep them from shutting it down.
“Okay,” he said, surprised at the tightness in his throat. “Will you marry me?”
Joanna laughed out loud. “How romantic!”
“I mean — well, will you?”
“Of course I will, Paul. You’re the only man in the world for me.”
Paul kissed her, knowing that neither one of them had used the word love.
MARE NUBIUM
The edge of the sunlit day came up to meet Paul with the inevitability of a remorseless universe. One moment he was ь shadow, the next in full glaring sunlight. The sky overhead was still black but now the glare reflecting from the ground washec away the few stars that he had been able to see before.
A pump somewhere in his backpack gurgled, and the air fan in his helmet whined more piercingly. He thought he heard metal or plastic groan under the sudden heat load.
Paul looked down and, sure enough, the ground was breaking into sparkles of light, like a whole field of jewels glittering for hundreds of meters in front of him. The sunshine triggered phosphorescence in the minerals scattered in the regolith’s surface layer. The effect disappeared after a few minutes, but plenty of the earliest workers on the Moon had actually thought they’d found fields of diamonds: the Moon’s equivalent of fool’s gold.
There was real wealth in the regolith, but it wasn’t gold or diamonds. Oxygen. The opiate of the masses. Habit forming substance; take one whiff and you’re hooked for life.