The Precipice (Asteroid Wars) Page 13

  “At one time we thought we could develop nanomachines to produce water for us by taking hydrogen from the incoming solar wind and combining it with oxygen from the regolith. It was technically feasible but in practice a complete failure.”

  Recognizing the councilman as one who loved the sound of his own voice, Dan said curtly, “If nanomachines can build entire Clipperships they can build fusion drives.”

  Another woman councilor, with the bright red hair and porcelain-white complexion of the Irish, spoke up. “I’ve been stuck with the job of treasurer for the council, the thanks I get for being an honest accountant.”

  Dan laughed, along with most of the audience.

  “But it’s a sad fact that we don’t have the funds to spare on your program, Mr. Randolph, no matter how admirable it may be. The money just isn’t in our hands.”

  “I don’t want money,” Dan said.

  “Then what?”

  “I want volunteers. I need people who are willing to devote their time to the greatest challenge of our age: developing the resources of the entire solar system.”

  “Ah, but that boils down to money, now, doesn’t it?”

  “No it doesn’t,” said a deep voice from the middle of the theater. Dan saw a squat, heavily-built black man get to his feet.

  “I’m Bernie James. I retired from the nanotech lab last year. I’m only a technician, but I’ll work with you on this.”

  A few rows farther back, a taller man, blond hair cropped short, got to his feet. “Rolf Uhrquest, Space Transportation Department,” he said, in a clear tenor voice. “I would be willing to take my accumulated vacation time to work on this fusion project.”

  Dan smiled at them both. “Thank you.”

  “And I believe,” Uhrquest continued, “that Dr. Cardenas would be interested also.” Turning slightly, he called, “Dr. Cardenas, are you here?”

  No one answered.

  “I will find her,” Uhrquest said, very seriously. “It is a shame she is not present today.”

  Dan looked expectantly out at the audience, but no one else stood up. At last he said, “Thank you,” and stepped away from the podium, back into the wings of the stage. Stavenger gave him a quick thumbs-up signal and returned to the podium for the final item on the meeting’s agenda: a request from a retired couple to enlarge their living quarters so they could have enough space to start a new business for themselves.

  Once the meeting broke up, Stavenger said, “If Kris Cardenas had been anywhere in Selene I would have introduced you to her. Unfortunately, she’s in a space station in near-Earth orbit, working on developing nanomachines to bring down the costs of the Mars exploration centers.”

  “Which station?” Dan asked.

  “The one over South America.”

  Dan grinned at him. “Nueva Venezuela. I helped build that sucker. Maybe it’s time for me to pay a visit there.”

  ALPHONSUS

  Pancho watched the safety demonstration very carefully. No matter that she had put on a spacesuit and done EVA work dozens of times; she paid patient attention to every word of the demo. This was going to be on the surface of the Moon, and the differences between orbital EVAs and a moonwalk were enough to worry about.

  The tourists in the bus didn’t seem to give a damn. Hell, Pancho thought, if they ‘re stinky-rich enough to afford a vacation jaunt to the Moon, they must have the attitude that nothing bad’ll happen to them, and if it does they’ll get their lawyers to sue the hell out of everybody between here and Mars.

  They had all suited up in the garage at Selene before getting onto the bus. It was easier that way; the bus was way too tight for fourteen tourists to wriggle and squeeze into their spacesuits. They rode out to the Ranger 9 site in the hardshell suits, their helmets in their laps. After all these years, Pancho thought, they still haven’t come up with anything better than these hard-shell suits. The science guys keep talking about softsuits and even nanomachine skins, but it’s still nothing more’n talk.

  Even the teenagers went quiet once they cleared the garage airlock and drove out onto the cracked, pockmarked surface of Alphonsus. A hundred and eight kilometers across, the crater floor went clear over the horizon. The ring-wall mountains looked old and weary, slumped smooth from eons of being sandpapered by the constant infall of meteoric dust.

  It was the dust that worried Pancho. In orbital space you were floating in vacuum. On the surface of the Moon you had to walk on the powdery regolith, sort of like walking on beach sand. Except that the “sand” billowed up and covered your boots with fine gray dust. Not just your boots, either, Pancho reminded herself. She’d heard tales about lunar dust getting into a suit’s joints and even into the life-support backpack. The dust was electrostatically charged from the incoming solar wind, too, and this made the freaking stuff cling like mad. If it got on your visor it could blind you; try to wipe it off with your gloves and you just smeared it worse.

  They’d had some trouble finding Pancho a suit that would fit her comfortably; in the end they had to break out a brand new one, sized long. It smelled new, like pristine plastic. When the bus stopped and the guide told the tourists to put on their helmets, Pancho sort of missed the familiar scents of old sweat and machine oil that permeated the working suits she’d worn. Even the air blowing gently across her face tasted new, unused.

  The tour guide and the bus driver both checked out each tourist before they let the visitors climb down from the bus’s hatch onto the lunar regolith. Pancho’s helmet earphones filled with “oohs” and “lookit that!” as, one by one, the tourists stepped onto the ancient ground and kicked up puffs of dust that lingered lazily in the gentle gravity of the Moon.

  “Look how bright my footprints are!” someone shouted excitedly.

  The guide explained, ‘That’s because the topmost layer of the ground has been darkened by billions of years of exposure to hard radiation from the Sun and deep space. Your bootprints show the true color of the regolith underneath. Give ‘em a few million years, though, and the prints will turn dark, too.”

  For all the years she’d worked in space, Pancho had never been out on a Moonwalk. She found it fascinating, once she cut off the radio frequency that carried the tourists’ inane chatter and listened only to the prerecorded talk that guided visitors to the Ranger 9 site.

  To outward appearances she was just another tourist from one of the three busloads that were being shepherded along the precisely-marked paths on the immense floor of Alphon-sus. But Pancho knew that Martin Humphries was in one of the other buses, and her reason for being here was to report to him, not to sightsee.

  She let the cluster of tourists move on ahead of her while she lingered near the parked buses. The canned tourguide explanation was telling her about the rilles that meandered near the site of the old spacecraft crash: sinuous cracks in the crater floor that sometimes vented out thin, ghostlike clouds of ammonia and methane.

  “One of the reasons for locating the original Moonbase in Alphonsus’s ringwall mountains was the hope of utilizing these volatiles for—”

  She saw Humphries shuffling toward her, kicking up clouds of dust as if it didn’t matter. It had to be him, she thought, because his spacesuit was different from the ones issued to the tourists. Not different enough to be obvious to the tenderfeet, but Pancho recognized the slightly wider, heavier build of the suit and the tiny servo motors at the joints that helped the wearer move the more massive arms and legs. Extra armor, she thought. He must worry about radiation up here.

  Humphries had no name tag plastered to the torso of his suit, and until he was close enough to touch helmets she could not see into his heavily-tinted visor to identify his face. But he walked right up to her, kicking up the dust, until he almost bumped his helmet against hers. She recognized his features through the visor: round and snubby-nosed, like some freckle-faced kid, but with those cold, hard eyes peering at her.

  Pancho lifted her left wrist and poised her right hand over the comm ke
yboard, asking Humphries in pantomime which radio frequency he wanted to use. He held up a gloved hand and she saw that he was holding a coiled wire in it. Slowly, with the deliberate care of a person who was not accustomed to working in a spacesuit, he fitted one end of the wire into the receptacle built into the side of his helmet. He held out the other end. Pancho took it and plugged into her own helmet.

  “Okay,” she heard Humphries’s voice, almost as clearly as if they were in a comfortable room, “now we can talk without anyone tapping into our conversation.”

  Pancho remembered her childhood, when she and some of the neighborhood kids would create telephone links out of old paper cups and lengths of waxed string. They were using the same principle, linking their helmets with the wire so they could converse without using their suit radios. This’ll work, Pancho thought, as long as we don’t move too far apart. She judged the wire connecting their helmets to be no more than three meters long.

  “You worried about eavesdroppers?” she asked Humphries.

  “Not especially, but why take a chance you don’t have to?”

  That made sense, a little. “Why couldn’t we meet down at your place, like usual?”

  “Because it’s not a good idea for you to be seen going down there so often, that’s why,” Humphries replied testily. “How long do you think it would be before Dan Randolph finds out you’re coming to my residence on a regular basis?”

  Teasingly, Pancho said, “So he finds out He’ll just think you’re inviting me to dinner.”

  Humphries grunted. Pancho knew that he had invited Amanda to dinner at his home twice since they’d first met. And he’d stopped asking Pancho to report to him down there. Now they met at prearranged times and places: strolling in the Grand Plaza, watching low-gravity ballet in the theater, doing a tourist moonwalk on the crater floor.

  Pancho would have shrugged if she hadn’t been encased in the suit She said to Humphries, “Dan made his pitch to the governing council.”

  “I know. And they turned him down.”

  “Well, sort of.”

  “What do you mean?” he snapped.

  “A couple of citizens volunteered to work on Dan’s project. He’s goin’ down to the Venezuela space station to try to get Dr. Cardenas to head up the team.”

  “Kristine Cardenas?”

  “Yup. She’s the top expert at nanotech,” Pancho said.

  “They gave her the Nobel Prize,” Humphries muttered, “before nanotechnology was banned on Earth.”

  “That’s the one he’s gonna talk to.”

  For several long moments Humphries simply stood there unmoving, not speaking a word. Pancho thought he looked like a statue, with the spacesuit and all.

  At length he said, “He wants to use nanomachines to build the rocket. I hadn’t expected that.”

  “It’s cheaper. Prob’ly better, too.”

  She sensed Humphries nodding inside his helmet. “I should’ve seen it coming. If he can build the system with nanos, he won’t need my financing. The sonofabitch can leave me out in the cold—after I gave him the fusion idea on a silver fucking platter!”

  “I don’t think he’d do that.”

  “Wouldn’t he?” Humphries was becoming more enraged with every word. “I bring the fusion project to him, I offer to fund the work, but instead he sneaks behind my back to try to raise funding from any other source he can find. And now he’s got a way to build the fucking rocket without me altogether! He’s trying to cut my balls off!”

  “But—”

  “Shut up, you stupid bitch! I don’t care what you think! That prick bastard Randolph thinks he can screw me out of this! Well, he’s got another think coming! I’ll break his back! I’ll destroy the sonofabitch!”

  Humphries yanked the wire out of Pancho’s helmet, then pulled the other end out of his own. He turned and strode back to the bus that had carried him out to the Ranger 9 site, practically boiling up a dust storm with his angry stomping. If he hadn’t been in the heavy spacesuit, Pancho thought, he’d hop two meters off the ground with each step. Prob’ly fall flat on his face.

  She watched as he gestured furiously to the bus driver, then clambered aboard the tourist bus. The driver got in after him, closed the hatch, and started off for the garage back at Selene.

  Pancho wondered if Humphries would allow the driver to come back out and pick up the other tourists, or would he leave them stranded out here? Well, she thought, they can always squeeze into the other buses.

  She decided there was nothing she could do about it, so she might as well enjoy what was left of her outing. As she walked off toward the wreckage of the tiny, primitive Ranger 9, though, she thought that she’d better tell Dan Randolph about this pretty damned quick. Humphries was sore enough to commit murder, it seemed to her.

  SPACE STATION NUEVA VENEZUELA

  It was almost like coming home for Dan. Nueva Venezuela had been one of the first big projects for the fledgling Astro Manufacturing Corp., back in the days when Dan had moved his corporate headquarters from Texas to La Guaira and married the daughter of the future president of Venezuela.

  The space station had lasted much better than the marriage. Still, the station was old and scuffed-up. As the transfer craft from Selene made its approach, Dan saw that the metal skin of her outer hulls was dulled and pitted from long years of exposure to radiation and mite-sized meteoroids. Here and there bright new sections showed where the maintenance crews were replacing the tired, eroded skin. A facelift, Dan thought, smiling. Well, she’s old enough to need it. They’re probably using cermet panels instead of the aluminum we started with. Lighter, tougher, maybe even cheaper if you consider the length of time they’ll last before they need replacing.

  Nueva Venezuela was built of a series of concentric rings. The outermost ring spun at a rate that gave the occupants inside it a feeling of normal Earthly gravity. The two other rings were placed where they would simulate Mars’s one-third g and the Moon’s one-sixth. The docking port at the station’s center was effectively at zero gravity. The tech guys called it microgravity, but Dan always thought of it as zero g.

  A great place to make love, Dan remembered. Then he chuckled to himself. Once you get over the heaves. Nearly everybody got nauseous their first few hours in weightlessness.

  Dan went through customs swiftly, allowing the inspector to rummage through his one travelbag while he tried to keep himself from making any sudden movements. He could feel his sinuses starting to puff up as the liquids in his body shifted in response to weightlessness. No postnasal drips in zero g, Dan told himself. But you sure can get a beaut of a headache while the fluids build up in your sinuses before you adapt.

  The main thing was to make as few head motions as possible. Dan had seen people suddenly erupt with projectile vomiting from merely turning their heads or nodding.

  The inspector passed him easily enough and Dan gratefully made his way along the tube corridor that led “down” to the lunar-level wheel.

  He dumped his bag in the cubbyhole compartment he’d rented for this visit, then prowled along the sloping corridor that ran through the center of the wheel, checking the numbers on each door.

  Dr. Kristine Cardenas’s name was neatly printed on a piece of tape stuck above her door number. Dan rapped once, and opened the door.

  It was a small office, hardly enough room for the desk and the two plain plastic chairs in front of it. A good-looking young woman sat at the desk: shoulder-length sandy hair, cornflower blue eyes, broad swimmer’s shoulders. She wore an unadorned jumpsuit of pastel yellow; or maybe it had once been brighter, but had faded after many washings.

  “I’m looking for Dr. Cardenas,” said Dan. “She’s expecting me. I’m Dan Randolph.”

  The young woman smiled up at him and extended her hand. “I’m Kris Cardenas.”

  Dan blinked. “You… you’re much too young to be the Dr. Cardenas.”

  She laughed. Motioning Dan to one of the chairs in front of the des
k, she said, “I assure you, Mr. Randolph, that I am indeed the Dr. Cardenas.”

  Dan looked into those bright blue eyes. “You too, huh? Nanomachines.”

  She pursed her lips, then admitted, “It was a temptation I couldn’t resist Besides, what better way to test what nan-otechnology can do than to try it on yourself?”

  “Like Pasteur injecting himself with the polio vaccine,” Dan said.

  She gave him a sidelong look. “Your grasp of the history of science is a bit off, but you’ve got the basic idea.”

  Dan leaned back in the plastic chair. It creaked a little but accommodated itself to his weight. “Maybe I ought to try them, too,” he said.

  “If you don’t have any plans to return to Earth,” Cardenas replied, with a sudden sharpness in her voice.

  Dan changed the subject “I understand you’re working with the Mars exploration program.”

  She nodded. “Their budget’s being slashed to the bone. Beyond the bone, actually. If we can’t develop nanos to take over the life-support functions at their bases, they’ll have to close up shop and return to Earth.”

  “But if they use nanomachines they won’t be allowed to come back home.”

  “Only if they use nanomachines in their own bodies,” Cardenas said, raising a finger to emphasize her point “The IAA has graciously decided they can be allowed to use nanotechnology to maintain and repair their equipment.”

  Dan caught the sarcasm in her tone. “I’ll bet the New Morality was thrilled with that decision.”

  “They don’t run the entire show. At least, not yet.”

  Dan huffed. “Good reason to live off Earth. I’ve always said, When the going gets tough, the tough get going—”

  “—to where the going’s easier,” Cardenas finished for him. “Yes, I’ve heard that.”

  “I don’t think I’d be able to live off-Earth forever,” Dan said. “I mean… well, that’s home.”

  “Not for me,” Cardenas snapped. “Not for a half a dozen of the Martian explorers, either. They’ve accepted nanoma-chines. They have no intention of returning to Earth.”