The Precipice gt-8 Page 25

  Humphries ordered wine from their waiter. As soon as the young man walked away from their table, Cardenas hunched forward again and whispered, “Now! Tell them now! The sooner they know the safer they’ll be.” He gave her a hard look. Apparently the nanobugs in her bloodstream can’t deal with the effects of too little sleep, he thought. Or maybe she has nightmares. She’s on a royal guilt trip, that’s certain.

  “We agreed, Dr. Cardenas,” he said softly, “that we would warn them just as they approached the outer fringes of the Belt. That won’t happen for another day and a half.”

  “I want you to warn them now,” she insisted. “I don’t care what we agreed on.” With the barest shake of his head, Humphries said, “I’m afraid I can’t do that. We must stick to our plan.”

  “I was insane ever to agree to this,” Cardenas hissed.

  “But you did agree,” Humphries pointed out. “In the long run, you’ll be glad that you did.”

  It had been so easy to turn her. Humphries considered that his one major talent was finding the weak spot in other people’s personalities, and then playing on their weaknesses to get what he wanted. It worked with Dan Randolph and his ridiculous crusade to save the Earth. It worked with Dr. Cardenas and her burning anger against the Earth and the people who had separated her from her husband and family.

  The wine came. Humphries tasted it and sent it back. There was nothing really wrong with it, but Humphries simply felt like asserting himself. Subtly. Cardenas probably doesn’t understand what’s going on, not at the conscious level, he thought. But down in her guts she’s got to know that I’m the one in charge here. I make the decisions. I mete out the rewards and the punishments. She sat in stony silence while the embarrassed waiter took away the wine and swiftly returned with another bottle. Humphries sipped at it. Not as good as the first one, really, but he had established his point.

  “This is fine,” he murmured. “You may pour.”

  They ordered dinner. Cardenas barely picked at hers as, course by course, the dishes came and were taken away again. Humphries ate heartily. He was almost enjoying Cardenas’s discomfort.

  At last, after the waiter had left their desserts and walked away from the table, Cardenas said, “Well, if you won’t tell them, I will.”

  “That’s not what we agreed on,” Humphries said tightly.

  “To hell with what we agreed on! I don’t know why I let you talk me into it.”

  “You let me talk you into it because I can get you back to Earth, back to your exhusband and your children and grandchildren.”

  “He’s remarried,” she said bitterly. “There’s no point in messing up his life any more than I have already.”

  Humphries almost smiled. She’s really riding the guilt train, he said to himself.

  Aloud, he coaxed, “But your grandchildren. You do want to see them, don’t you?

  If you prefer, I could arrange to have them come up here, you know.”

  “I’ve asked them to come up, just for a visit. Begged them,” Cardenas said. “They won’t do it. They’re terrified that they’ll be refused re-entry back to Earth. That they’ll be exiled here, just as I am.”

  Smoothly, Humphries said, “I can arrange a visit for them. Outside normal channels. I can guarantee that they’ll be allowed to return to their homes.” He saw new hope kindled in her eyes. “You could?”

  “No sweat.”

  She sat in silence while her dessert slowly melted. Humphries spooned his up, watching her, waiting.

  “But don’t you understand how dangerous it is?” she blurted at last. “They’re going out past Mars, for god’s sake. There’s no one out there to help them.”

  “Randolph’s no fool,” he said sharply. “When the ship’s systems start to fail he’ll turn around and come back here. In a big hurry.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “And his pilot’s an expert. She won’t do anything foolish.” Cardenas either wasn’t listening to him or not hearing. “Once those nanos kick in,” she said, “there’s no stopping them. They’ll take the radiation shield apart, atom by atom, and then—”

  “They won’t have the time,” Humphries insisted. “You forget how fast Starpower goes. They’ll zip back here in a few days.”

  “Still…” Cardenas looked utterly unconvinced.

  Trying to sound unconcerned, Humphries said, “Look, I know this is a dirty trick to play on Randolph. But that’s the business world. I want his mission to fail so I can buy out his company on the cheap. I don’t want to kill him! I’m not a murderer.”

  Not yet, he added silently. But I’m going to be. And I’m going to have to silence this woman before her guilt trip makes her warn Randolph. Unbidden, the thought of Amanda came to him. It only hardened his resolve. He’s making me kill her. Randolph deserves to die. He’s forced me to kill Amanda. As he looked across the table at Kris Cardenas, so troubled, her eyes focused on god-knows-what, Humphries nodded to himself. If I leave her alone she’ll warn Randolph. She’ll ruin everything. I can’t let her do that.

  SOLAR STORM

  The Apollo missions to the Moon in the mid-twentieth century were timed to avoid periods when the Sun was likely to erupt with a flare that would drench the solar system with killing levels of hard radiation.

  Later, spacecraft shuttling between the Earth and the Moon simply scurried for shelter when a solar storm struck. They either returned to the protection that the Earth’s magnetic field provides against the storm’s lashing hail of protons and electrons, or they landed on the Moon and their crews sought shelter underground. The earliest spacecraft to carry humans beyond the Earth-Moon system had no such options available to them, for their transit times to Mars were so long that they would inevitably encounter a solar storm while weeks or months away from a safe haven. Thus they were outfitted with storm shelters, special compartments in which the crew could be protected from the intense radiation spewed out by a solar flare. The first explorers sent to Mars spent days on end cooped up in their spacecraft’s cramped “storm cellar,” until the high-energy particles of the storm’s plasma cloud finally passed them by.

  Starpower 1 had no storm cellar. The entire crew module was protected in the same manner that a storm shelter would have been. The module was lined with thin wires of an exotic yttrium-based compound that formed a superconducting magnet which generated a permanent magnetic field around the crew module, a miniature version of the Earth’s magnetic field. Yet the superconductor could not produce a magnetic field strong enough to deflect the solar storm’s most dangerous killers, the high-energy protons.

  When faced with a vast cloud of deadly subatomic particles blasted out by a solar flare, the ship was charged to a high positive electrostatic potential by a pair of electron guns. The energetic protons in the cloud were repelled by the ship’s positive charge. The magnetic field was strong enough to deflect the cloud’s lighter, less energetic electrons — and thus keep the negatively-charged electrons from ruining the ship’s positive charge.

  Safely cocooned inside the protective magnetic field, the crew of Starpower 1 watched the swift approach of the storm’s plasma cloud. “Be here in another six hours,” Pancho announced, pulling off her headset as she swiveled the command pilot’s chair to face Dan.

  He frowned at the news. “That’s for certain?”

  “Certain as they can be. Early-warning spacecraft in Mercury co-orbit have plotted out the cloud. Unless there’s a great big kink in the interplanetary field, it’s gonna roll right over us.”

  Nodding, Dan said, “The electron guns are ready to go.”

  “Better start ’em up,” she said. “No sense waitin’ till the last minute.”

  “Right.” Dan stepped through the hatch, into the empty wardroom, and headed aft, where the electron guns were housed. Pancho could control them from the bridge, but Dan wanted to be there in case any problems cropped up. “And send Amanda up here, will you?” Pancho called to him. “I gotta take a brea
k.”

  “Right,” Dan shouted back, over his shoulder.

  Where is Amanda? He asked himself. The wardroom was empty. The doors to the privacy compartments along the passageway were closed. And where is Fuchs? he wondered, starting to feel nettled.

  He found them both in the sensor bay, where Fuchs was explaining something about the x-ray projector.

  “It would be more helpful if we could use a small nuclear device,” the planetary astronomer was saying, totally serious. “That would be the most convenient way of generating x-rays and gamma rays all at the same time. But of course, nuclear devices are banned.”

  “Of course,” Amanda said, looking just as intent as Fuchs.

  “Pancho needs you on the bridge, Mandy.” Dan said.

  She looked startled for a flash of a second, then said, “Right.” As she hurried toward the bridge, Dan asked Fuchs, “What in the name of the nine gods of Sumatra do you want a nuke for?”

  “I don’t!” Fuchs said. “They’re illegal, and justly so.”

  “But you just said—”

  “I was explaining to Amanda about x-ray spectroscopy. How we use xrays to make an asteroid fluoresce and reveal its chemical composition. The x-rays from this solar flare would have been very helpful to us if we were only close enough to the Belt.”

  “But a nuke?”

  Fuchs spread his hands. “Merely an example of how to produce x-rays and gamma rays on demand. An example only. I have no intention of bringing nuclear explosives into space.”

  “I don’t know,” Dan said, scratching his chin. “You might be onto something. Maybe we could talk the IAA into letting us use nukes as sources for spectroscopic studies.”

  Fuchs looked aghast. Dan laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. Fuchs saw the joke and grinned weakly back.

  Dan’s mood darkened as he edged down the narrow walkway in the aft end of the module. He did not like the thought of being exposed to hard radiation. He had taken a lifetime’s worth of radiation back in his earlier days, working in space. Much more of a dose would kill him, he knew. It wouldn’t be an easy way to go, either.

  As he lifted the covers protecting the electron guns’ innards and checked them for the eleventh time since they’d launched out of lunar orbit, Dan thought, Maybe Stavenger’s right. Get a jolt of nanomachines, let them clean up the damage the radiation’s done, rebuild me from the inside. So I won’t be able to go back to Earth. So what? What’s down there that I’d miss so much? He knew the answer even as he asked the question. Sea breezes. Blue skies and soft sunsets. Birds flying. Flowers. Huge ugly brutal cities teeming with life. Vineyards! Dan suddenly realized that no one had yet tried to grow wine grapes off-Earth. Maybe that’s what I’ll do when I retire: settle down and watch my vineyards grow.

  The intercom speaker set into the narrow walkway’s overhead carried Pancho’s voice. “Dan, you ready for me to light up the guns?”

  The electron guns were just as good as they’d been all the other times he’d inspected them. Closing the cover on the one on his right, Dan answered, “You may fire when ready, Gridley.”

  Pancho retorted, “I don’t know who this Gridley guy is, but I can’t rev up the guns till you close both their covers and seal ’em right and proper.”

  “Aye, aye, skipper,” Dan said.

  By the time he made it back to the bridge, Pancho was nowhere in sight. Amanda sat alone in the right-hand seat, and the bridge was rocking to the beat of highintensity pop music. As soon as she saw Dan come through the hatch, Amanda snapped the music off.

  “Pancho’s in the loo,” she said as Dan slid into the command-pilot’s seat.

  “How’s the storm?”

  “Precisely on track.” Amanda tapped at one of her touchscreens; it displayed a simplified map of the inner solar system, the orbits of Earth and Mars shown as thin lines of blue and red, respectively; the position of Starpower 1 was a blinking bright yellow dot. A lopsided gray miasma was almost touching the dot. Dan’s mouth went dry. “I hate these things,” he mumbled.

  “It missed the Earth completely. Mars, as well.”

  “But it’s going to swamp us.”

  “Actually,” Amanda said, “we’ll merely be brushed by it. A few hours, that’s all.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Our own velocity is helping a lot, you know. An ordinary spacecraft, coasting along the way they do, would be in the cloud for days on end.” Dan had no desire to be in the cloud for even ten minutes. He changed the subject, as much to get away from the fear building up inside him as any other reason. “How friendly are you and Fuchs?”

  Amanda’s brows shot up. “Lars? He’s very earnest — about his work. Nothing more.”

  “That’s all there is to it?”

  “Yes.”

  Dan thought it over. Two healthy young people locked in this sardine can for a couple of weeks. Of course, there’s Pancho and me to chaperon them. Dan grinned to himself. Damn, it’s like being a teenager’s father.

  Pancho returned to the bridge. “Hey boss, get outta my chair.”

  “Yes’m,” said Dan.

  The plasma cloud hit them less than an hour later. There was no buffeting, no clanging of alarms, nothing to tell them that they were being engulfed in the cloud of killing radiation except the rising curves of fire-engine red on the radiation monitoring screens.

  Pancho did not consider the storm so dangerous that someone had to be on the bridge at all times. She came into the wardroom and joined the others for dinner. Dan ate mechanically, not really tasting his food, not really hearing the conversation. Double-damned radiation, he kept thinking. I hate this. Despite two steaming mugs of coffee, he felt cold inside. But the others seemed completely unfazed by the storm. After the meal Dan said good-night to them all and went to his compartment. He dreamed of floating helplessly in space, slowly freezing as the Sun glowered at him.

  NANOTECHNOLOGY LABORATORY

  Long past midnight, Kris Cardenas sat alone in her office in Selene’s nanotechnology lab. The rest of the lab was empty, darkened to its nighttime lighting level.

  She had agreed to have dinner with Martin Humphries because she wanted to get the man to warn Dan Randolph about the nanomachines that she had planted in his vessel, virus-sized disassemblers that once were known as “gobblers.” They were the reason that nanotechnology was banned on Earth — and under careful supervision at Selene.

  Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? she asked herself. Who will watch the watchmen? Some Roman asked that question more than two thousand years ago, Cardenas knew.

  All nanotech work was under very strict control in Selene. No one was allowed to work with gobblers: they had killed people. They had even been used to commit murder. If they ever got loose they could destroy all Selene. The medical work had to be supervised down to the nanometer because the therapeutic nanobugs that took apart plaque in a person’s arteries or destroyed tumors atom by atom were forms of gobblers, nothing less. If they ever got loose, if their programming was ever-so-subtly altered…

  That was why Kris Cardenas’s primary duty as head of all nanotech work at Selene was to protect against such a catastrophe. She watched over every aspect of the work done in the nanotech lab.

  But who will watch the watchmen? She had produced a microscopic batch of gobblers for Humphries, specifically tailored to damage Starpower 1 enough so Dan would have to turn the ship around and limp back to Selene. Humphries had promised that he would obtain permission for her to visit Earth again, to see her daughters and her grandchildren.

  Now he was offering to bring them up here. Even better. But the price! Dan Randolph and the other people on that ship could get killed. Is that what Humphries really wants? She asked herself. If I warned Dan now he’d have to return to Selene. Flat and simple. But Humphries wants to wait another day or so, let Dan get to the inner fringes of the Belt and then tell him that his ship’s going to fail.

  Or maybe he won’t warn Dan at all!

/>   Cardenas sat up straight in her desk chair. That’s it, she told herself. He wants to kill Dan and the rest of the crew. She knew it with the certainty of revealed truth. What can I do about it?

  Warn Dan, she answered her own question. Warn him now.

  But how? She wondered. I can’t just pick up a phone and put a call through to him.

  They’re out past the orbit of Mars by now.

  I’ve got to get to someone in the Astro office. Someone who can put me through to Dan. Maybe that big Australian bodyguard of his. What’s his name? George something.

  Martin Humphries could not sleep, despite the exertions he’d been through with the raven-haired woman lying beside him. Nominally an environmentalist on the consulting staff of Humphries Trust, the young woman’s favored environment seemed to be a bedroom with plenty of furniture to play on, as far as Humphries could determine.

  She was sleeping peacefully. He was wide awake.

  Dr. Cardenas. Humphries was worried about her. Even the lure of seeing her grandchildren wasn’t going to outweigh her overdeveloped sense of honor, he thought. She wants to warn Randolph; she’s probably figured out that I want the sonofabitch dead.

  He sat up in the bed and glanced at the woman sleeping beside him. Slowly, carefully, he pulled the silk sheet down from her shoulders. Even with no lights in the room except the green glow from the digital clock, he could see that her body was smooth, flawless, perfectly proportioned. Too bad she’s heading back to Earth in a few days.

  Cardenas, he reminded himself sternly.

  She’s going to try to warn Randolph, he felt certain. Maybe that’s a good thing. If Randolph turns back now, Amanda will come back with him. With him. She won’t be coming back to me. She doesn’t want me, that’s why she ran off with him. If Cardenas warns them, they’ll come back here together to gloat at me. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to drive out the mental images of Randolph and Amanda together. I’ve got to think this through carefully. Logically. For Cardenas to warn Randolph she’ll have to get somebody here in Selene to set up the message for her. She’ll probably go to Astro; that’s where Randolph’s people are. And if she asks them to let her put through a call to Randolph they’ll ask her why. Sooner or later she’ll tell them why: Martin Humphries has bugged the Starpower ship with nanomachines. And then they’ll know all about it. Conclusion: For my own protection, I’ve got to stop her from talking to anyone at Astro. I’ve got to stop her from even trying to warn Randolph. I’ve got to stop her. Period.