Off to one side was the deep pit that would one day be the grand plaza of the Moonbase that Doug envisioned. Maybe, she thought. If we can keep Yamagata from taking over.

It all looked about as romantic as a slag heap to her, yet Doug loved it.

"It's kind of dark right now," Doug said. "Nothing up there except a crescent Earth. When it's full, or even gibbous, it's a lot brighter."

"I can't even see—what's that?"

A big round thing was sitting on the ground off to their right, like a giant beach ball the size of their tractor. Peering at it, Edith saw that it was not solid, but built of some kind of wire mesh. And it seemed to be resting on a curved metal track laid across the ground.

Doug laughed. "That's the laundry."

"Laundry?"

"Sure. Dirt dries almost immediately in vacuum and detaches from fabric while the ultraviolet from the sun kills germs. We pack the dirty laundry in there when the sun's up and roll the sphere back and forth along the track for an hour or so. Clothes come out clean and sanitized."

"My clothes have been cleaned in there?"

"Yep."

"How do you iron them?"

"The old-fashioned way," Doug answered. "With automated ironing machines that use waste heat from the base's living quarters and machinery."

Edith shook her head inside her helmet. Her clothes seemed clean enough when she got them back from the laundry, but rolling them around out here…?

"I'm switching to the base's standard comm frequency," Doug told her. "First keypad on your comm set."

It took Edith a few moments to remember which row of pads on the wrist of her suit was the comm set. In the dim lighting, little more than the glow from the tractor's dashboard instruments, she figured it out after a few moments.

"… yes, I'm outside with Edith," Doug was saying.

"Are you crazy?" Jinny Anson's voice snapped. "What the blazes are you doing outside?"

"Trying to get to Gordette before he reaches Yamagata's people," said Doug. "Any joy with tracking his tractor?"

"Hell no.' Anson sounded thoroughly unhappy. "He was smart enough to turn off its transponder and now he's so far over the horizon that even if he had it on we couldn't hear it."

"Any idea of which way he went?"

"I checked the automated radar plot," Anson replied immediately. "Shows he was heading on a bearing of three-forty-five degrees, relative to true north."

"Three-forty-five?"

"That's out past the mass driver, heading almost due north."

"So he's not taking Wodjohowitcz Pass, then."

"Not yet. He's probably trying to knock out the mass driver first. The magnets, I betcha."

Doug's voice caught in his throat. "The magnets! So we can't use them to drive Wicksen's particle beam gun."

"Which means we won't have any chance at all of stopping an incoming nuke."

"I've got to stop him."

"Get real! He's got a six-hour lead on you."