The Precipice (Asteroid Wars) Page 15

  “Ten,” Humphries immediately shot back.

  “Five.”

  “Come on, Dan. You can’t get out of this so cheaply.”

  Dan looked up at the paneled ceiling, took a deep breath, looked back into Humphries’s icy gray eyes.

  Finally he said, “Seven.”

  “Eight.”

  Dan cocked his head slightly, then murmured, “Deal.”

  Humphries smiled, genuinely this time, and echoed, “Deal.”

  Each man extended his hand across the table. As they shook hands, Dan said to himself, Count your fingers after he lets go.

  SELENE NANOTECHNOLOGY LABORATORY

  Dan was watching intently as Kris Cardenas manipulated the roller dial with one manicured finger, her eyes riveted on the scanning microscope’s display screen. The image took shape on the screen, blurred, then came into crisp focus.

  The picture was grainy, gray on gray, with a slightly greenish cast. Dan could make out a pair of fuel tanks with piping that led to a spherical chamber. On the other side of the sphere was a narrow straight channel that ended in the flared bell of a rocket nozzle.

  “It’s the whole assembly!” he blurted.

  Cardenas turned toward him with a bright California smile. “Not bad for a month’s work, is it?”

  Dan grinned back at her. “Kinda small, though, don’t you think?”

  They were alone in the nanotech lab this late at night. The other workstations were empty, all the cubicles dark, the ceiling lights turned down to their dim nighttime setting. Only in the corner where Dan and Cardenas sat on a pair of swivel stools were the overhead lights at their full brightness. The massive gray tubing of the scanning microscope loomed above them both like a hulking robot. Dan marveled inwardly that the big, bulky machine was capable of revealing individual atoms.

  Cardenas said, “Size isn’t important right now. It’s the pattern that counts.”

  “Swell,” said Dan. “If I want to send a team of bacteria to the Belt, you’ve got the fusion drive all set for them.”

  “Don’t be obtuse, Dan.”

  “I was trying to be funny.”

  Cardenas did not appreciate his humor. Tapping a bright blue-polished fingernail against the microscope’s display screen, she said, “We’ve programmed this set of nanos to understand the pattern of your fusion system: the tankage, the reactor chamber, the MHD channel, and the rocket nozzle.”

  “Plus all the plumbing.”

  “And the plumbing, yes. Now that they’ve learned the pattern, it’s just a matter of programming them to build the same thing at full scale.”

  Dan scratched his chin, then said, “And the full-scale job will be able to handle the necessary pressures and temperatures?”

  “Most of it’s built of diamond.”

  That wasn’t an answer to his question, Dan realized. Okay, so the virus-sized nanomachines could take individual atoms of carbon from a pile of soot and put them together one by one to build structures with the strength and thermal properties of pure diamond.

  “But will that do the job?” he asked Cardenas.

  Her lips became a tight line. She was obviously unhappy about something.

  “Problem?” Dan asked.

  “Not really,” Cardenas said, “But…”

  “But what? I’ve got to know, Kris. I’m hanging my co-jones out in the breeze on this.”

  Raising both hands in a don’t-blame-me gesture, she said, “It’s Duncan. He refuses to come up here. None of his team will leave Earth.”

  Dan had known that Duncan, Vertientes, and the rest of the team had opted to remain Earthside and communicate with Cardenas and her nanotech people electronically.

  “You talk to him every day, don’t you?”

  “Sure we do. We even have interactive VR sessions, if you can call them interactive.”

  Feeling alarmed, Dan asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s that damned three-second lag,” Cardenas said. “You can’t really be interactive, you can’t even have a normal conversation when there’s three seconds between your question and their answer every blasted time.”

  “Is it actually hindering your work?”

  She made a face somewhere between a grimace and a pout “Not hindering, exactly. It’s just so damned inconvenient! And time-consuming. Sometimes we have to go over a thing two or three times just to be sure we’ve heard them right It soaks up time and makes everybody edgy.”

  Dan thought it over. “Maybe I can talk them into coming up here.”

  “I’ve tried to, god knows. Duncan won’t budge. Neither will any of his people. They’re terrified of nanomachines.”

  “No!”

  “Yes. Even Professor Vertientes. You’d think he’d know better, at his age.”

  “They’re scared of nanomachines?”

  “They won’t admit it, of course,” said Cardenas. “They say that they might not be allowed to return to Earth if the authorities know that they’ve been working with nanomachines. I think that’s a crock; they’re just plain scared.”

  “Maybe not,” Dan said. “Those Earthside bureaucrats get wonky ideas, especially about nanotechnology. I sure haven’t told anybody that I’m dealing with nanomachines.”

  Her brows shot up. “But everybody knows—”

  “Everybody knows that you and your staff are building a fusion rocket with nanos. As far as the general public is concerned, I don’t come near ‘em. I’m a bigshot tycoon, I don’t get involved in the dirty work. I’ve never even been in your lab.”

  Cardenas nodded with newfound understanding. “That’s why you sneak in here late at night.”

  “I don’t sneak anywhere,” Dan said, with great dignity. “I’ve never been here. Period.”

  She laughed. “Of course.”

  “Kris,” he said, more seriously, “I think Duncan and the rest of them have legitimate reasons to be scared of coming up here and working with you. I’m afraid you’re going to have to live with that three-second lag. It’s their safety net.”

  Cardenas took a deep breath. “If I have to.”

  “You’ve accomplished a helluva lot in just four weeks,” Dan pointed out.

  “I suppose that’s true. It’s just… it’d be so much easier if we could all work together under the same roof.”

  Smiling gently, Dan said, “I never promised you a rose garden.”

  She was about to reply when the door to the corridor banged open, all the way across the mostly-darkened laboratory. Instinctively, Dan started to duck behind the big microscope tube, like a boy hiding from his mother.

  Then he recognized the hulking, shaggy, red-bearded figure of Big George Ambrose.

  “That you, Dan?” George called as he strode between workstations toward them. “Been lookin’ everywhere for you, y’know.”

  Despite his size, George moved gracefully, light on his feet and perfectly at home in the low lunar gravity.

  “I’m not here,” Dan growled.

  “Right. But if you were, I’d hafta tell you that Pancho Lane’s missin’.”

  “Missing?”

  “Not in her quarters,” George said as he approached. “Not in any of the Astro offices. Not in the spaceport or the Grand Plaza. Not anyplace I’ve looked. Blyleven’s worried about her.”

  Frank Blyleven was chief of Astro’s security department. Dan glanced at Cardenas, then said to George, “She could be in someone else’s quarters, you know.”

  George looked surprised at the idea. “Pancho? She doesn’t have a guy and she doesn’t sleep around.”

  “I wouldn’t worry—”

  “She didn’t show up at the office t’day. She’s never missed an hour of work, let alone a whole day.”

  That worried Dan. “Didn’t show up at all?”

  “I asked everybody. No Pancho, all day. I been lookin’ for her all night. Nowhere in sight.”

  “Did you ask her roommate?”

  “Mandy Cunningham? She was out hav
in’ dinner with Humphries.”

  “She should be back by now.”

  George made a leering smirk. “Maybe. Maybe not”

  Turning to Cardenas, Dan said, “I’d better look into this. George is right, Pancho’s had her nose to the grindstone ever since she came up here.”

  “So maybe she’s taking a little r and r,” Cardenas said, unruffled.

  “Maybe,” Dan admitted. But he didn’t think so.

  PELICAN BAR

  Pancho had spent the entire day being invisible. The night before, she had gone to the Pelican Bar for a little relaxation after another long, grueling day of study and simulation runs in the Astro office complex.

  The incongruously-named Pelican Bar had been started by a homesick Horidian who had come to Selene back in the days when the underground community was still known as Moonbase. Hired to be the base’s quartermaster, he had developed a case of hypertension that kept him from returning to Earth until a regime of exercise and medication brought his blood pressure under control.

  He took the pills, largely ignored the exercise, and started the bar in his own quarters as a clandestine drinking club for his cronies. Over the years he had grown into a paunchy little barrel of a man, his bald head gleaming under the ceiling fluorescents, a perpetual gap-toothed smile on his fleshy, tattooed face. He often told his patrons that he had found his true calling as a bartender: “A dispenser of cheer and honest advice,” as he put it.

  The bar was several levels down from the Grand Plaza, the size of two ordinary living suites, carved out of the lunar rock. And quiet. No music, unless someone wanted to sit at the synthesizer that lay dusty and rarely touched in the farthest, most shadowy corner of the room. The only background noise in the place was the buzz of many conversations.

  Pelicans were everywhere. A holographic video behind the bar showed them skimming bare centimeters above the placid waters of the Gulf of Mexico against a background of condo towers and beachfront hotels that had long since gone underwater. Photos of pelicans adorned every wall. Statues of pelicans stood at each end of the bar and pelican mobiles hung from the smoothed-rock ceiling. A meter-tall stuffed toy pelican stood by the bartender’s computer, dressed in garish, outlandish Florida tourist’s garb and peering at the drinkers through square little granny sunglasses.

  Pancho liked the Pelican Bar. She much preferred it to the tidy little bistro up in the Grand Plaza where the tourists and executives did their drinking. The Pelican was a sort of home away from home; she came often enough to be considered one of the steady customers, and she usually bought as many rounds as any of the drinkers clustered around the bar.

  She exchanged greetings with the other regulars while the owner, working behind the bar as usual, broke away from an intense conversation with a despondent-looking littte redhead to waddle down the bar and pour Pancho her favorite, a margarita with real lime from Selene’s hydroponic fruit orchard.

  Although a set of booths lined the back wall, there were no stools at the bar itself. You did your drinking standing up, and when you could no longer stand your buddies took you home. House rules.

  Pancho had wedged herself into the crowd in between a total stranger and a retired engineer she knew only as a fellow Pelican patron whose parents had hung the unlikely name of Isaac Walton around his neck. The word was he had originally come to the Moon to get away from jokes about fishing.

  Walton’s face always seemed slightly askew; one side of it did not quite match the other. Even his graying hair seemed thicker on one side than the other. Normally a happy drinker, he looked morose as he leaned both elbows on the bar and stared into his tall, frosted drink.

  “Hi, Ike,” Pancho said brightly. “Why the long face?”

  “Anniversary,” Walton mumbled.

  “So where’s your wife?”

  He gave Pancho a bleary look. “Not my wedding anniversary.”

  “Then what?”

  Walton stood up a little straighter. He was about Pancho’s height, stringy and loose-jointed. “The eighth anniversary of my being awarded the Selene Achievement Prize.”

  “Achievement Prize?” she asked. “What’s that?”

  The bartender broke into their conversation. “Hey, Ike, don’t you think you’ve had enough for one night?”

  Walton nodded solemnly. “Yup. You’re right.”

  “So why don’t you go home to your wife,” the bartender suggested. Pancho heard something more than friendliness in his tone, an undercurrent of—jeeps, she thought, he almost sounds like a cop.

  “You’re right, pal. Absolutely right. I’m going home. Whatta I owe you?”

  The bartender waved a meaty hand in the air. “Forget it. Anniversary present.”

  “Thank you very much.” Turning to Pancho, he said, “You wanna walk me home?”

  She glanced at the bartender, who still looked unusually grim, then shrugged and said, “Sure, Ike. I’ll walk you home.”

  He wasn’t as unsteady on his feet as Pancho had thought he’d be. Once outside the bar Walton seemed more depressed than drunk. Yet he nodded or said hello to everyone they passed.

  “What’s the Achievement Prize?” Pancho asked as they walked down the corridor.

  “Kind of a secret.”

  “Oh.”

  “I did the impossible for them, y’see, but I did it too late to be of any use and they don’t want anybody to know about it so they gave me the prize as hush money and told me to keep my trap shut.”

  Confused, Pancho asked, “About what?”

  For the first time that evening, Walton broke into a smile. “My cloak of invisibility,” he answered.

  Little by little Pancho wormed the story out of him. Walton had been working with Professor Zimmerman, the nan-otech genius, when the old U.N. had sent Peacekeeper troops to seize Moonbase.

  “Stavenger was in a sweat to develop nonlethal weapons so we could defend ourselves against the Peacekeepers when they got here without killing any of them,” Walton said, growing steadier and gloomier with each step along the corridor. “Zimmerman promised Stavenger he’d come up with a way to make our guys invisible, but the bastards killed him when they attacked. Suicide bomber got down to his lab and blew the old man to smithereens.”

  “Himself, too?” Pancho asked.

  “I did say ‘suicide,’ didn’t I? Anyway, the so-called war ended pretty quick and we got our independence. That’s when we changed the name from Moonbase to Selene.”

  “I know.”

  “For a while there I didn’t have anything to do. I’d been Zimmerman’s assistant and now the old man was gone.”.

  Walton had doggedly kept working on Zimmerman’s idea of finding a method for making a person invisible. And eventually he succeeded.

  “But who needs to be invisible?” Walton asked. Before Pancho could answer he went on, “Only somebody who’s up to no damn good, that’s who. Spies. Assassins. Crooks. Thieves.”

  Selene’s governing council decided to mothball Walton’s invention. Bury it so that no one would even know it existed.

  “So they gave me the big fat prize to keep me quiet. It’s a pension, really. I can live in comfort—as long as I stay in Selene and keep my mouth shut.”

  “Sounds cool to me,” Pancho said, trying to cheer him up.

  But Walton shook his head. “You don’t understand, Pancho. I’m a freaking genius and nobody knows it. I’ve made a terrific invention and it’s useless. I’m not even supposed to mention it to anybody.”

  Pancho said, “Aren’t you taking a chance, talking to me about it?”

  He gave her a sidelong glance. “Aw, hell, Pancho, I hadda tell somebody tonight or bust. And I can trust you, can’t I? You’re not gonna steal it and go out and assassinate anybody, are you?”

  “’Course not,” Pancho answered immediately. But she was thinking that it might be a hoot to be invisible now and then.

  “Wanna see it?” Walton asked.

  “The invisibility dingus?�
��

  “Yeah.”

  “If it’s invisible, how can I see it?”

  Walton broke into a cackle of laughter. Clapping Pancho on the back, he said, “That’s what I like about you, Pancho ol’ pal. You’re okay, with a capital oke.”

  Walton turned down the next cross-corridor and led Pancho up to the level just below the Grand Plaza, where most of Selene’s life-support machinery chugged away, purifying the air, recycling the water, rectifying the electrical current coming in from the solar farms. Pumps clattered. The air hummed and crackled. The ceilings of these chambers were rough, unfinished rock. Pancho knew that on their other side was either the manicured lawn of the Grand Plaza or the raw regolith of the Moon’s surface itself. And along a corridor not far from where they walked lay the catacombs.

  “Isn’t the dingus under lock and key?” Pancho asked as Walton led her past a long row of metal lockers.

  “They don’t even know it exists. They think I destroyed it when they gave me their lousy prize. Destroy it, hell! I’ll never destroy it. It’s the only one in the whole wide solar system.”

  “Wow.”

  He nodded absently. “And it’s not a ‘dingus,’ it’s a stealth suit”

  “Stealth suit,” Pancho echoed.

  “Like a wetsuit, covers you from head to toe,” he explained in a hushed voice, as if afraid someone would hear him. Pancho strained to listen to him over the background hum and chatter of the machinery.

  Pancho followed Walton down the long row of metal lockers. The corridor smelled dusty, unused. The overhead lights were spaced so far apart that there were shadowy pools of darkness every few meters. Walton stopped in front of a locker identified by a serial number. Pancho saw that it had an electronic security lock.

  Feeling uneasy, Pancho asked, “Don’t they have any guards patrolling up here?”

  “Nah. What for? There’s cameras at the other end of the corridor, but this old tunnel’s like an attic. People store junk up here, personal stuff they don’t have room for down in their quarters.”

  Walton tapped out the security code on the electronic lock and pulled the metal door open. It squealed slightly, as if complaining.