Farside (29 page)

“That’s right,” said Grant, his eyes on the bead of bright red blood that Cardenas had smeared onto the probe’s specimen stage.

Zacharias’s butterball face suddenly went somber. “Grant, you’ve got nanomachines inside you?”

He nodded tightly.

“Cheez,” said Zach, with awe in his voice. “I didn’t know.” He edged slightly away from Grant.

“It’s only been a month or so,” Grant said.

Toshio said, “Am I correct in believing that you also carry nanomachines within you, Dr. Cardenas?”

“That’s no secret,” Cardenas replied.

“Cheez,” Zacharias repeated.

The wall screen to the right of the workbench lit up and Grant stared at the sight of dozens of little blobs racing back and forth.

“Not the sharpest resolution,” Cardenas murmured.

“It’s the best we can do,” said Aichi.

“Those are nanos?” Zacharias asked.

“Yes,” said Cardenas. “They are programmed to disassemble molecules that don’t carry Grant’s specific genetic markers.”

“Any molecules?” Grant asked.

“Only organics,” answered Cardenas. “And only within the specific environment of your body. If any of those nanos get outside your body they will automatically deactivate themselves. They’re tailored to your body, Grant. They’ll switch themselves off in any other environment.”

Grant glanced at his wristwatch. Twenty-four minutes to liftoff.

“How can you tell if there are any other types of nanomachines in my blood?” Grant asked.

Frowning at the display screen, Cardenas replied, “I can’t. Not at this resolution. But…”

Standing beside her, Grant peered at the screen. He could feel Toshio and Zach behind him, literally breathing down his neck.

“What am I supposed to be seeing?” he asked.

Cardenas murmured, “Wait … just a minute or so more.…”

The frantic little specks on the screen were slowing down. As Grant watched, the blobs that were nanomachines moved more and more sluggishly. Finally they stopped altogether.

Nodding as if satisfied, Cardenas said, “That’s it. They’re deactivated.”

“They’re dead?” Zach asked.

“Deactivated,” Cardenas corrected. Turning to Grant she said, “You see? Once the nanos are outside your body, no longer powered by your body heat, they shut down.”

Grant was still staring at the screen. The specks that were nanomachines were totally inert now, unmoving.

“Are you satisfied, Grant?” Cardenas asked. “Do you feel better now?”

He broke into a guarded smile. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

“All right, then,” Cardenas said. “Let’s get to that rocket!”

Grabbing her by the wrist, Grant raced out of the maintenance center, leaving Aichi and Zacharias staring at them, dumbfounded.

As they sprinted along the corridor, Grant flicked his pocketphone open and called the flight control monitor.

“They’re on schedule,” Josie Rivera said.

“Find a reason to delay their liftoff for a few minutes, will you, Jo?”

“A reason? You mean, like make up some excuse for delaying them? I can’t do that, Grant. You know I can’t do that. The Ulcer would fry my butt if he found out. Flight control at Selene would go ballistic!”

“Just a couple of minutes,” Grant pleaded, puffing as he ran. “Dr. Cardenas doesn’t want to miss the flight.”

Josie’s dark-eyed face looked stubborn in the phone’s tiny screen. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said, in a tone that Grant knew meant that she would do nothing.

They skidded into the reception area, startling Nate Oberman so badly he dropped the mug of juice he’d been sipping. It spilled across the desk.

“… eight … seven…” The automated countdown sounded in the speakers set into the stone ceiling.

Grant stood by Oberman’s desk, chest heaving, Cardenas panting beside him. Ten seconds too late, he thought. Ten frigging seconds.

“Dammit,” Cardenas muttered.

“… two … one … liftoff.”

The wall screen showed the lobber hurtling off the launchpad in a silent blast of dust and pebbles. The pilot’s voice confirmed, “Liftoff on schedule. Bye-bye, Farside.”

“Confirm liftoff,” Josie Rivera said. “Have a good flight, Derek.”

“See you in three days, kiddo.”

“I’ll be waiting for you.”

The automated camera out by the landing pad was tracking the lobber as it climbed higher and higher into the star-filled black sky.

“Pressure drop!” the copilot’s voice yelled.

In the wall screen’s display the lobber suddenly blossomed into a glaring ball of white-hot flame. Grant could see pieces of the rocket hurtling across the sky, falling slowly, gently, spinning lazily like children’s toys.

One of the pieces was the body of a man, Derek or his copilot. Frozen in horror, Grant watched the guy’s arms and legs flailing as he screamed in the utter silence of the lunar vacuum all the way down to the hard, barren ground.

A PLAGUE OF NANOMACHINES

Grant couldn’t move. He stared at the display screen as the fireball that had been a lobber dissipated and pieces of the rocket fell bouncing to the ground.

“It … it…” Cardenas’s voice was choked, gasping.

“It blew up,” Nate Oberman said, his voice a hollow whisper.

“Oh, my god.” Cardenas began to sob.

Turning toward her, Grant took both of her hands in his. It took him three tries before he found his voice. “Are you okay?”

Her eyes filled with tears, Cardenas nodded as she pulled in a deep, shuddering breath. “I might have been on it,” she whispered. “I might have…”

“You weren’t on it,” Grant said firmly, “and you’re alive. You’re okay.”

She said nothing, simply stared at him.

Josie Rivera’s voice came through the overhead speakers. “It’s gone. It … it…”

Raising his voice, Grant said, “Better call Selene, Josie, tell them what happened.”

“Yeah, right.” Her voice sounded weak, dazed. “But how did it happen? How did it happen?”

That’s what we’ve got to find out, Grant told himself. But first I’ve got to tell Uhlrich about it.

*   *   *

Grant walked Cardenas back to the quarters that had been assigned to her.

“Will you be okay by yourself? I can get somebody to stay with you.”

Her eyes red but dry now, Cardenas said calmly, “I’m all right. It was … a shock. But I’m all right now.”

“Good. I’ll look in on you in a while. Right now, I’ve got a lot to do.”

“I understand. Go ahead.”

Grant left her and started sprinting down the corridor toward Professor Uhlrich’s office. As he ran he called Harvey Henderson on his pocketphone.

“Get a crew suited up and go out to pick up the bodies,” Grant ordered.

“What’s left of ’em,” Henderson said grimly.

“Don’t touch the debris,” Grant continued. “Leave it where it fell. We might be able to establish an idea of the force of the explosion from the debris pattern on the ground.”

“Yeah. Right.”

He reached Uhlrich’s office, rapped on the door once, and slid it open.

The professor was at his desk, as usual, with Trudy Yost sitting at the conference table. One of the wall screens was filled with spectrographic data.

Uhlrich looked annoyed at Grant’s interruption; Trudy seemed surprised.

“What do you want, Mr. Simpson?”

“There’s been an accident, Professor.”

“An accident?”

“The lobber from Selene. It exploded on liftoff.”

“What?” Uhlrich shot to his feet.

“The two men in the crew were killed. Dr. Cardenas wasn’t aboard it, though. She’s okay.”

“It exploded? How? Why?”

“That’s what we’ll have to find out,” said Grant. “The flight monitoring people have all the telemetered data from the vehicle. I think the copilot said something about a pressure drop just before she blew up.”

Uhlrich slumped back into his chair and stared sightlessly at Grant.

“It blew up?” he asked, his voice a thin, pitiful whine.

Grant looked at Trudy. She seemed shocked, distraught.

“I’ll get down to the flight control center and see what the telemeter record can tell us,” Grant said.

Uhlrich shook his head in misery. “Selene will send investigators. They’ll get in our way, poking and probing everywhere. Just when we’re starting to get results from the first telescope, they’ll ruin everything.”

“Professor, two men were killed. Of course Selene will want to investigate.”

“They’ll ruin everything, everything,” Uhlrich moaned.

Trudy suggested, “Maybe I could go out to Mendeleev and work the telescope from there, out of their way.”

“No!” Grant snapped.

She turned toward him. “Why not?”

“You’ll be safer here.”

“Safer?” Uhlrich demanded. “Safe from what?”

“Nanomachines,” said Grant. As he spoke the word he realized that his deepest fear was looming before him. “I think this place is infested with destructive nanomachines.”

“That’s insane!” Uhlrich roared. “You’re insane!”

“Face the facts, Professor. Winston was killed at Mendeleev. Now the lobber blows up.”

“There is no evidence that nanomachines destroyed the lobber,” Uhlrich insisted. “None at all!”

“They killed Winston and now they’ve blown up the lobber,” Grant countered stubbornly.

Leveling a finger at Grant, Uhlrich seethed, “If you mention nanomachines to anyone outside this room I’ll fire you! I’ll send you packing, Simpson!”

“Send me where? Do you think Selene or anyplace else will take somebody from a site that might be infested with a plague of nanomachines?”

QUARANTINED

Trudy watched Grant leave the office, sliding the door shut with a heavy thud. She turned to Professor Uhlrich and saw him seated at his desk, his head in his hands.

“I’m ruined,” Uhlrich moaned. “Utterly ruined.”

Without thinking about it, Trudy got up from her chair, went around the professor’s desk, and knelt at his side.

“It might not be that bad, Professor,” she said, her voice soft, tender.

“They’ll stop our work, I know they will,” Uhlrich said. “Just when we were starting to get significant results…” His voice trailed off.

Trying to make him feel better, Trudy said, “I can write up our spectrographic results. We can publish that. First spectra from Sirius C. Oxygen and water vapor in the planet’s atmosphere. That’ll put Farside’s name on the map!”

Uhlrich seemed inconsolable. “What good will that do? We won’t be able to make any progress beyond that.”

“But it’s a breakthrough!” Trudy insisted. “I’ll bet it’ll impress those guys in Stockholm.”

He looked up at her. “The Nobel committee? Do you think so?”

“Certainly. And we won’t be shut down for long, I bet. Selene’ll send some accident investigators here and soon’s they figure out what caused the explosion we’ll be back in business.”

Uhlrich began to nod. But then he said, “What if Simpson is right? What if this facility is infected with nanomachines? They’ll shut us down, perhaps permanently.”

Trudy had no reply for that.

*   *   *

Dog tired after hours of poring over telemeter data, Grant made his way to the cafeteria and blindly punched buttons for a late supper. The cafeteria was almost empty at this time of the night; only a pair of technicians at one of the tables and a lone administrator bent over a digital reader as he sipped at a mug of tea.

Grant carried his tray to the farther end of the table and plunked himself down.

“Mind if I join you?”

He looked up to see Kris Cardenas standing there, holding a dinner tray.

“I didn’t see you come in,” said Grant.

Cardenas nodded as she sat beside him. “You seemed totally wrapped up in your own thoughts.”

Grant said, “Yeah.”

“Tough day.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve made arrangements to meet with Halleck’s engineers from here,” she said. “We’ll do the conference electronically instead of in the flesh.”

“Good.” Grant stuck a fork in the plate before him. He had forgotten what it was supposed to be. Some soy derivative or another, masquerading as real food.

“Have you found anything?” Cardenas asked quietly.

With a halfhearted shrug, Grant answered, “Looks like the oxygen feed line to the rocket engine gave out. Pure oxygen dumped into the hot exhaust. Boom.”

“And what caused the line to fail?”

Grant looked at her. Cardenas seemed wary, as if she expected an answer she didn’t really want to hear.

“Don’t know yet,” he said.

Before she could reply, Grant added, “But the coupling that connected the feed line to the rocket’s combustion chamber was made of the same alloy that our space suit collars are made of.”

“The same alloy?”

“Yeah. Some coincidence, eh?”

“What are you saying, Grant?”

He ran a weary hand across his saddened eyes. “The same kind of nanobugs that ate through Winston’s space suit collar could have eaten through the oxygen line’s coupling.”

Cardenas took the news without flinching. “But how could they get there? It’s just not likely. It’s pretty close to impossible.”

“Close only counts in horseshoes,” Grant said. “Maybe it is unlikely, but that’s what happened, I’m certain of it.”

“You’re jumping to a conclusion that—”

“Here’s another conclusion I’ve jumped to,” he interrupted. “It’s not just the shelter at Mendeleev that’s been hit by the nanos. We’re infected here, right here, at Farside.”

“You don’t have any evidence for that!”

“Tell that to Derek and his copilot. For chrissakes, Kris, you came within ten seconds of getting killed yourself!”

The two technicians at the other table looked up at the sound of Grant’s raised voice. The administrator kept on reading peacefully.

Cardenas stared at Grant for several moments, silent, looking almost resentful.

“We’re going to have to quarantine this facility, Kris,” Grant said, his voice lower. “Nobody in, nobody out. Not until we find out how those bugs got here. And who brought them.”

NANOFEAR

This teleconference is a farce, Cardenas thought. Instead of discussing the design of the space-based telescope mirrors, Halleck’s engineers wanted to talk about nothing except the accident.