Christ he thought, if the visor fogged up when it was two hundred below zero outside the suit what’s going to happen when it goes over two-fifty above, and the damned suit can’t radiate my body heat away?

A sardonic voice in his head answered, You’ll find out real soon now.

The sunrise line inched forward to meet him, undulating slowly over the uneven ground, moving toward him at the pace of a walking man.

Despite the fear gnawing inside him, Paul thought back to his first days on the Moon. The excitement of planting boot prints where no one had ever stepped before; the breathtaking grandeur of the rugged landscape, the silence and the dramatic vistas.

That was then, he told himself. Now you’ve got to make it to the next shelter before you run out of oxy. Or before the Sun broils you. Or the damned bugs eat up your suit.

He forced himself forward, dreading the moment when he stepped from the night’s shadow into the unfiltered ferocity of the Sun.

Yet even as he walked toward the growing brightness, his mind turned back to the day when all this had started, back to the time when he had married Joanna so that he could take control of Masterson Aerospace. Back to the moment when Greg Masterson had begun to hate him. It had all been to save Moonbase, even then. Paul realized that he had given most of his life to Moonbase. “Most of it?” he asked aloud. “Hell, there’s a pissin’ great chance I’m going to give all of it to Moonbase.”

SAVANNAH

They had spent the afternoon in bed, making love, secure in the knowledge that Joanna’s husband would be at the executive committee meeting.

At first Paul thought it was only a fling. Joanna was married to the head of Masterson Aerospace and she had no intention of leaving her husband. She had explained that to him very carefully the first time they had made it, in one of the plush fold-back chairs of Paul’s executive jet while it stood in the hangar at the corporation’s private airport.