9
moonbase columbus
“Are you sure you’re not going to need an assistant out there?” Dvorak said. “Newellen is a telerobotics specialist.”
“Yeah,” Cyndi Salito interrupted, “since nobody can work with him, he’s got to do everything by remote control.”
“Oh, shut up!” Newellen said.
Erika shook her head. After a full night’s sleep, she felt rested for the first time in a week. “I’m more comfortable working by myself, really. With hazardous stuff like those nanomachines, you don’t want me to be nervous. And besides, let’s minimize the number of folks at risk.”
“If you insist,” Dvorak said. “Director McConnell wants us to give you every bit of help we can.”
“She’s got nanocritters in her pants,” Newellen grumbled.
Nanocritters! She liked the term. Erika hid a smile by turning to load her gear into the pressurized rover. The airlock opened directly into one of the supply habitats, making the packing much easier than hauling equipment outside.
Erika threw a bundle of vacuum tape into a pile accumulating at the rear of the rover-van. In the low gravity, the bundle sailed through the air. Already she had packed more things than all the personal possessions she had carried away from the NIL.
The rover-van resembled an Earthbound Winnebago RV, larger than the stripped-down rover Erika had ridden in from Zimmerman’s shuttle. She half expected the outside to be plastered with stickers that read:
“HOWDY! MERLE AND BILLY JO EBERT SAY HELLO FROM ALEXANDRIA, LOUISIANA!”
According to Big Daddy Newellen, the rover-van could travel five hundred kilometers from Columbus and stay outside for two weeks, if necessary. It was equipped with a telerobotic control panel for interfacing with geological-survey rovers, and was entirely self contained. The best part was that with the pressurized cabin she would not need to stay suited for the whole trip.
She wiped sweaty hands on her jumpsuit and glanced back at Dvorak. He lounged against the airlock, watching her. She couldn’t tell if he was smiling, or if his face always wore that puckish grin. “Could you throw me that next box?” she said.
Dvorak bent and picked it up, turning it over on its side. “Chlorine?” He tossed it to her. It tumbled in the low gravity.
She snagged it and set it with the rest of the supplies. “Those—‘nanocritters’—might be organically based, and a caustic solution could be useful. I don’t want the specimens to come into contact with any of my germs either. Who knows what kind of information they can pull out of even a virus DNA? Other than those first three people who died, these things have never come into contact with any Earth life. Let’s keep it that way.”
Dvorak set his mouth, but didn’t seem to know what to say.
Erika dropped her hands to her side. “I’ve seen the tapes, Jason. I know you’re thinking how dangerous it is. But you’ve got to realize that I’ve spent most of my professional life working with nanotechnology.” She headed for the airlock. “So let’s get me started, all right?”
“That’s what I wanted to hear.” Dvorak brushed himself off. Somehow, the fine and gritty moondust managed to creep into everything. “I’ll let the Agency know you’ll be on your way. Take whatever time you need to study the neutralized samples still inside the vault. We can arrange to launch another javelin to snatch a sample of regolith from the hot zone.”
“Thanks. And keep doing a daily IR flyover, to make sure nothing changes drastically.” She fidgeted. It was time to get going and be alone again; back at work, back where she belonged.
“Okay, but using IR as a diagnostic is pretty much worthless now while the site is in full daylight. The temperature difference is a lot more apparent at night.” Dvorak held out a hand. “We’ll do our best. Good luck. Keep in contact.”
“I will.”
Dvorak turned to Newellen, standing just inside the airlock. “And have fun. Don’t let Big Daddy push you around. He’s just your chauffeur.”
Erika backed into the Winnebago and found a seat amid the stacked supplies. Her spacesuit hung by the airlock, dwarfed by Newellen’s frame as he sealed the door.
He grinned at her. “I feel like I’m going on a vacation.”
With apprehension, Jason Dvorak watched the rover-van’s airlock hiss shut, not sure if he was doing the right thing to allow Erika Trace to go off on her own to face the thing that had killed three of his crew.
But Erika was a grown woman, a professional, hand-picked by Director McConnell as the most qualified person on Earth to investigate the Daedalus specimens.
It didn’t help that she reminded him of how his wife Margaret had looked ten years ago. But Margaret always seemed helpless out of her element. Erika didn’t have that problem.
Jason thought of what Bernard Chu would have done in that situation. Was it really a good idea to let Erika go off alone? He should not be thinking of Erika first. He should be worried about the inherent risk in bringing more live nanomachine specimens so close to the moonbase.
“What is it?” Erika squeezed to the front of the Winnebago. She stared down at the screen, not out the front windshield.
Guided by Doppler radar and a heuristic homing sensor, the rover-van guided itself to Sim-Mars. Lon Newellen sat back and watched the vehicle pick its way across the lunar landscape as he munched out of a bag of food. He pointed a dehydrated apple to the high-definition TV screen inset in the control panel. “It’s a week’s worth of IR flyover images. I can pull up a slow-dissolve montage of the last week’s readings if you want.”
“Go ahead.” As she watched the glowing red circle around the Daedalus construction, seeing views from day to day, she saw the intensities fluctuate around some portions of the great structure, but nothing moved beyond the three-kilometer diameter. When the two-week-long lunar day spilled solar heat across the area, the resolution of infrared changes dropped drastically.
Far ahead, unseen in the lunar night, sat Sim-Mars, built in preparation for the final simulated Mars mission. No one could ever have guessed it would be used to study alien technology before the training mission ever got there.
Newellen spoke around a mouthful of dried apple chips, “Personally, I don’t trust that x-ray shower. I mean, not with my life. There’s just no way to make sure that compact toroid thingie produces enough radiation to kill whatever might have contaminated the lab. These nanocritters have survived who-knows-how-many years in open space with all the radiation you can imagine. How can the measly little puff we give them be all that bad?” He started to put another shriveled apple into his mouth when he turned to look at her. She held her mouth tight and didn’t say a word.
Newellen shrugged and tossed the fruit up in the air. It twirled in the low gravity and sank toward his mouth in slow-motion. He stationed himself under it and gulped it down. “But it doesn’t matter what I think, does it? You’re the one going in there. By yourself.”
“Yeah,” said Erika. “I know.”
The Winnebago docked to Sim-Mars. Once he had idled the rover-van’s engines to a quiet hum, Newellen didn’t let Erika open the airlock until he had satisfied himself that the isolated lab module had ample air and lighting.
Erika hesitated before entering. Everything in there should have been sterilized. Remote diagnostics ran purity tests of the lab’s atmosphere; readouts on a TV monitor showed that the simulated Mars base was ready for humans.
“Don’t expect me to carry you over the threshold, Erika. That’s not my forte, even in low gravity.”
Erika forced a smile for him, then drew in a breath as she entered. The air smelled the same as everywhere else she had been on the Moon—stale with a hint of machine oil.
If all of the nanotech specimens had not been killed after all, she probably wouldn’t have time to find out. She’d disappear just like Waite, dissolve into nothingness. . . .
She pushed the thought from her mind, and realized that she was being foolish. She knew that if the Farside sample had contaminated the lab, Sim-Mars would have been changed beyond recognition, with every scrap of metal and plastic dismantled.
She turned to Newellen. “Thanks for the lift, uh, Big Daddy.”
He shrugged. “Wish I could stay and help you. I’ll be camping out about ten klicks away if you need me.”
Before her lay her most dangerous and exciting times, her greatest responsibility. Erika strode forward, unmindful of the airlock closing behind her.
Erika flexed the milliwaldoes, reaching into the bowels of the sterilized vault. She watched the high-def holographic tank as the tiny multidigited extensions moved with her. Although the milliwaldoes were a thousand times smaller than her hand, they duplicated her movements exactly. And she did not need to risk contaminating a single cell of her real hands in an environment containing the alien “nanocritters.”
Her head ached. She had been working for five hours with the “dead” sample brought over by the first geological javelin probe, the one that had been studied via telepresence from Moonbase Columbus. Unfortunately, the bombarding high-energy x rays had obliterated nearly all traces of the nanomachines, leaving only hunks of microscopic slag, ruined pieces of the tiny destroyers, a few intact dead shells. She had gathered more information just from looking at the long-distance videoloops.
No, she needed a fresh sample. A live one.
She contacted Columbus without hesitation. Jason Dvorak agreed to get her one right away, then dispatched another javelin probe to the Farside.
While she waited, Erika inspected the apparatus available to her at Sim-Mars. Nearly every conceivable instrument for extraterrestrial analysis was crowded into the lab area. Though some people had become skeptics in the half century since Viking had landed on Mars, an important portion of the Mars mission would be to search for evidence of microorganisms in the harsh environment.
Using the dead nanocritters as test specimens, she observed them with transmission electron microscopes, then scanning electron microscopes using secondary electrons, backscattered electrons, characteristic x rays, low-loss electrons. She had good results with Auger/ESCA electron spectroscopy, then even better with a scanning x-ray microscope. By altering the energy level of the bombarding x rays, she had fine-tuned her method by the time the quad-armed robot rolled out of its retrieval dock to accept the second package from the Farside probe.
Now, her milliwaldoes hung fifty microns above the new regolith chunk. The entire analytical apparatus was housed in a depleted-uranium-lined vault in the next room, while the vault itself was shielded with lead. Erika worked under the sensation of actually watching from a spot just above the waldoes, a world on an incredibly small scale.
A voice came from the speaker set in the control panel. Stationed ten kilometers away from the isolation lab—rescue distance, Dvorak had called it—Lon Newellen sounded as if he was in the next room. “We’re still having trouble with the video link, Erika. Are you sure you’ve got all the channels enabled?”
Erika threw a glance behind her at the tri-video camera. It was positioned to stare over her shoulder during the entire sample analysis. A green light blinked RECORD, but two rows down an LCD array read TRANSMIT PARITY ERROR: RESET. Erika smiled to herself. “Uh, doesn’t look like anything is wrong here, Big Daddy. It says it’s recording.”
“How about resetting the parity switch?”
Erika reached toward the disabled switch but stopped short of touching it; when the recording was reviewed later, no one would be able to tell if she had depressed the switch or not. “It doesn’t seem to work.”
Newellen remained quiet for a moment. “I could come on over and fix it for you—”
“Look, I’ve got to keep working,” Erika said with an edge to her voice. “No telling how much time I have. This is a new facility, remember? It’s bound to have some glitches. Don’t worry. I’ll call as soon as I have anything.”
“Oh, all right.” He was probably bored with twiddling his thumbs and not getting any picture.
Submitting to the cameras recording her every move was bad enough, though necessary for the permanent record of the nanotech analysis. But Erika could never work with half a dozen people watching over her shoulder, backseat driving in realtime. She would make her own decisions and set her own pace.
“Voice contact will have to do for the first sequence of tests,” said Dvorak’s voice over the lab speakers.
“Starting the magnification now, from low and working my way up to high.” Erika had already moved the milliwaldoes up to the surface of the sample. The view jumped in magnification as the polarized-light microscope kicked in. Computer-enhanced, the image looked weird as false-color coding added to the three-dimensional topography.
Speaking out loud for the benefit of the others suited her fine—she normally talked to herself or Parvu in the laboratory. “I can’t see anything unusual at this magnification. The surface of the sample looks viscous, though, like it’s liquid. Maybe just Brownian motion. Maybe not.”
She checked a diagnostic on the bottom left corner of her virtual goggles. “A good bunch of heat radiating out of it, though. A lot more than you’d expect from an ambient rock. The sample isn’t radioactive, and I can’t detect any chemical process. Probably waste heat generated by the nanocritters.”
There, she had adopted Newellen’s terminology for the microscopic devices. No doubt it would stick once the newsnets picked it up.
“Higher magnification?” Dvorak asked over the link.
Erika kept her voice stiff. “I’m still doing an overall analysis of this chunk. Let me call the shots, okay, Jase?” She used the nickname on purpose.
“Sorry. I’ll stay quiet.”
She ran through the standard macro-examination, testing the regolith’s mechanical properties, heat conductivity, pliability, brittleness. She brushed the edge with the tip of the milliwaldo, hoping to scrape the surface of the specimen. It seemed to flow away from the tip of the tiny pincers.
She returned the milliwaldoes to their home base, a section of thinly sliced ceramic. Just off to the right of her field of view were the images of larger “precision waldoes”—devices ten times as large, for fine macroscopic work on samples.
To the left of the thin ceramic film appeared a dot barely visible in the holotank. She slowly moved her hands on the virtual controls. As she approached the dot, she kicked up the magnification by an order of magnitude.
Smears of chromatic aberration blurred out the details, but she resolved the dot into a cluster of still tinier waldoes, able to manipulate objects a millionth of a meter in size. She left her huge-seeming milliwaldo hanging and slaved a pair of microwaldoes to follow the now-massive ones she still controlled.
“Okay,” she said into the speakers. “I’m bringing the micro along to the spot on the sample with the highest heat readings.” She guided the milli back toward the heat source, bringing with it a tiny set of microwaldoes. “Let’s have a look.”
Once over the spot, she guided the giant milliwaldo to position the micro correctly. Switching controls, she flexed the microwaldo’s digits. The view clicked through three more orders of magnitude; everything seemed to rush toward her in the holotank as she now viewed the regolith sample from a viewpoint a thousand times smaller than before, through the eyes of Auger/ESCA microscopy.
“Whoa!” She drew in a breath at the sight.
Stationed just above the regolith sample, the microwaldo’s sensors sent back a stereoscopic view: Multi-faceted objects scurried around the sample like ants on a stirred-up anthill. She had seen the remote images from the first sample, but now the nanocritters seemed to be right in front of her eyes, in a handful of shapes and sizes.
She was protected only by a wall of lead and depleted-uranium shielding that the nanomachines could probably disassemble anytime they wanted to. Images of Can’t Wait Waite and Becky Snow, their suits bubbling and dissolving, passed before her, but she blinked them away and pushed closer to the holotank to make out more details.
She was already at the maximum magnification resolution of the remote lab. No one had ever expected to need to look at material structure on the scale of a billionth of a meter. At that magnification, a simple virus would have looked the size of a house.
And the aliens had been able to put together complicated machines a hundred times smaller.
The nanocritters looked unlike anything else she had ever seen, as far removed from the prototypes in the NIL as a rowboat was from a rocketship. Parvu’s attempts had been lumps of machinery jumbled together until the pieces happened to fall into place. These intricate machines looked as if they had been sculpted, designed with an artistic flair in five or six distinct varieties, every subsystem assembled with the precision a model builder used to make a sailing ship inside a bottle. It was incredible.
“Hey, Erika? You still there?” It was Lon Newellen. “Should I come in for a rescue?”
“No. Hang on a minute.” She brought her hands down toward the holographic surface in front of her eyes. The microwaldoes mimicked her movements.
Erika could sense her heart beating faster. “These critters are so small I’m having trouble even getting a lock on their morphology.” She spoke faster as excitement set in, and her southern drawl deepened. “How can they even function? They’re really nothing more than molecules, set in patterns I’ve never seen before. What’s their energy source? I’d guess breaking down chemical bonds inside the raw materials around them. Need more tests, though. Are you all still listening?”
“Wish we could see a picture!” Dvorak said.
Oh, all right! she relented. She pulled her hands from the waldoes and left them stationary. “Let me try emergency repair procedure number two.” Blocking the view of the camera with her shoulder, she reset the parity, allowing transmission to commence. Then she made a great show of smacking the control panel with the palm of her hand. “There, does it work now?”
“We’ve got visuals!” Newellen said from his rover-van.
“Good, now let me keep working.”
Now Erika encoded a molecular dynamics program. The code shot off to an array of parallel processors embedded in the matrix of a solid-state cube; the program would perform a perturbative decomposition of the molecular orbits to reconstruct the devices she had seen.
“Seems to be four or five different sorts of devices—some are assembling raw regolith, others are processing it, a third kind is scuttling back and forth between all the others. Is this a coordinator? A supervisor? A re-programmer?
“There’s one type that seems to sit back and do nothing. It’s got a completely different shape. I also see bigger islands scattered among all the specimens, like nanocritter shopping malls. Central controlling stations? Boy, there’s a lot of hypothesizing going on here.”
“Erika, have you figured out how long those things will take to chew up the whole sample and start climbing the walls in the vault?” It was Big Daddy, still talking from his ten-kilometer distance.
Dvorak broke in before she could answer. “Make sure you don’t take any chances. We need to destroy the sample before a single one of those things gets out. Director McConnell’s people caution four hours max per sample, then it gets sterilized.”
Erika glanced at her screen. “Reproduction rate is below critical threshold. Maybe their self-replicating phase is over. Or it’s more likely that they need a handful of diverse elements to build more copies of themselves, and they ran out of ‘ingredients’ in that little lump of moon dirt and they can’t get much out of the depleted-uranium chamber walls. That could be why this sample hasn’t disassembled yet—they haven’t got anywhere to go.”
Dvorak said what she had been thinking. “Unless they decide to look for greener pastures outside the containment.”
Erika swallowed. “If that happens, I’m not gonna have much time to get out of here.”