Jays said, “You told us you could command the resources this would need. Anyhow,” he said, eyeing her, “I hear you have contacts of your own over there. Maybe that could, umm, smooth the way.”

He was right, of course. Although it added another layer of complication. Not only was she going to have to campaign for this ridiculous lashed-up lunar mission, but she was also going to have to get her ex-husband and her Russian lover to work together on it…

Frank, frowning, started to sketch in a Soyuz on his napkin: a pepper-pot, with fragile solar wings.

“Holy shit,” he said respectfully. “Maybe it will work. I think we could do it.”

“Hell, of course we can do it,” Jays boomed. “Makes you think, though. What did we learn in all those years of flying Shuttle, all those billions of bucks, to help with this, when the chips are down? I’ll tell you. Diddley.”

Geena said to Frank, “Can you turn this into some kind of formal recommendation?”

Frank said, “For what audience?… Never mind. We can cover that when we have the material. We have a lot of studies to do. The conversion of the Shoemakers. Looking into the IUS. Figuring out the Soyuz option. Confirming the mass estimates. Figuring out what you’d need on the surface — what about EVA suits, for Christ’s sake? — and then there’s the operational stuff. Assembly at the Station. Who and how? Looking at the launch manifest for Shuttle and Titan and Proton, figuring out what can be bumped…” He looked at her nervously. “You know, it doesn’t pay to go into these things just one chart deep.”

“I understand. I’ll start pulling strings. If,” she said heavily, “you think you can do it.”

“Oh, I can do it.” He grinned. “After all, everything’s off the shelf.”

Jays said, “You say you put forward this kind of proposal a few years ago.”

“Yeah,” said Frank. “An internal study. A little less improvised, of course—”

“What happened?”

“It was too expensive. We aimed to get back to the Moon for less than a billion bucks. We still found we came in at nearer two billion.”

Jays belched. “Hell,” he said. “Speaking as an old Air Force man I can tell you that’s the cost of one B-2A Spirit bomber. A return to the Moon, for that. What a waste. What a fucking waste.” He grabbed the empty bottles. “Where’s the waitress? You want another?”

They all did, and before the waitress could clear the tables, Geena took the napkins Frank had sketched on, and folded them carefully, and put them away.

They stayed for more beers, long into the night, and the Outpost got steadily more raucous.

7

…There was a quake in Seattle, in fact, on June 1st, the day before Joely Stern moved there.