The Precipice Read online

  With my help, she added silently. I’m an accomplice to murder. A blind, stupid, stubborn fool who didn’t see.what she didn’t want to see. Not until it was too late.

  And now I’m going to be murdered, too. Why else would they be taking me all the way out into the godforsaken wilderness?

  The thought of being killed frightened her, intellectually, in the front lobe of her brain. But being outside on the surface of the Moon, out in the deadly vacuum with all the radiation sleeting in from deep space, out here where humans were never meant to be—-that terrified her deep in her guts. This tired little tractor had no pressurized cabin, no crew module; you had to be in a spacesuit to survive for a minute out here.

  This is a dead world, she thought as she looked through her helmet visor. The gray ground was absolutely dead, except for the cleated trails of other tractors that had come this way. No wind or weather would disturb those prints; they would remain in place until the Moon crumbled. Behind them, a lazy rooster tail of dust floated in the soft lunar gravity.

  And beyond that, nothing but the gently undulating plain of barren rock, pockmarked with craters, some the size of finger-pokes, some big enough to swallow the tractor. Rocks strewn everywhere, like the playroom toys of careless children.

  The horizon was too close. It made Cardenas feel even jumpier. It felt wrong, dangerous. In the airless vacuum there was no haze, no softening with distance. That abrupt horizon slashed across her field of view like the edge of a cliff.

  She saw that the ringwail mountains of Alphonsus were almost below the horizon behind them.

  “Where are we going?” she asked again, knowing it was useless.

  Beside her, Frank Blyleven was no longer smiling. He sweated inside his spacesuit as he drove the tractor. When he’d made his deal with Martin Humphries, it had been for nothing more serious than allowing Humphries to tap into Astro Corporation’s communications net. A good chunk of money for practically no risk. Now he was ferrying a kidnapped woman, a Nobel scientist, for the lord’s sweet sake! Humphries was going to have to pay extra for this.

  Blyleven had to admit, though, that Humphries had smarts. Stavenger wants to search for Dr. Cardenas? Okay. Who better to spirit her out of Selene for a while than the head of Astro’s security department? Nobody asked any questions when he showed up at the garage already suited up, with another spacesuited person alongside him.

  “Got to inspect the communications antennas out on Nubium,” he told the guard checking out the tractors. “We’ll be out about six hours.”

  Sure enough, three hours into his aimless wandering across the desolate mare, he got a radio signal from Humphries’s people. “Okay, bring her back.”

  Smiling again, he leaned his helmet against Cardenas’s so she could hear him through sound conduction.

  “We’re going back now,” he said. “They’ll have a team to meet you. You behave yourself when we get to the garage.”

  Kris Cardenas felt a huge surge of gratitude well up inside her. We’re going back. We’ll be safe once we’re back inside.

  Then she realized that she was still Humphries’s prisoner, and she wasn’t really safe at all.

  * * *

  Dan felt simmering anger as he watched George’s report on the wallscreen of the ship’s wardroom.

  “I was in on th’ search of Humphries’s place. It’s big enough to hide a dozen people. We din’t find Dr. Cardenas or any trace of her,” George ended morosely.

  “She must still be alive, then,” Dan said. Then he blew out an impatient huff of breath as he realized that George wouldn’t hear his words for another twenty minutes or so.

  Pancho was sitting beside him in the wardroom, looking more puzzled than worried as George’s image faded from the wallscreen.

  “If they haven’t found her body,” Dan said to her, “it means she’s probably still alive.”

  “Or they’ve stashed the corpse outside,” Pancho suggested.

  Dan nodded glumly.

  “Why would Humphries want to kill Dr. Cardenas?” Pancho asked.

  “Because she found out something that she wanted to tell me; something that Humphries doesn’t want me to know.”

  “What?”

  “How should I know?” Dan snapped.

  Pancho grinned lamely. “Yeah, I guess that was a pretty dumb question.”

  Dan rubbed his chin, muttering, “Humphries knew the security people were coming to search his place so he just moved her somewhere else until the search was over. I’ll bet a ton of diamonds she’s back inside his house now. He’ll want to keep her close.”

  “Prob’ly,” Pancho agreed.

  “I wish there was a way we could get somebody into Humphries’s place without him knowing it,” Dan mused.

  Pancho sat up straighten “There is,” she said, with a sly smile.

  * * *

  George counted it as a sign of Doug Stavenger’s respect for Dr. Cardenas that he agreed to a private meeting.

  “Invisible?” Stavenger looked shocked. “A cloak of invisibility?”

  “I know it sounds nutty,” George said, “but Dan told me that—”

  “It’s not nutty,” Stavenger murmured, steepling his fingers before his face. “I’m stunned, though, that Ike Walton told anyone about it.”

  “You mean it’s real? A cloak of invisibility?”

  Stavenger eyed the big Aussie from behind his desk. “It’s real, all right. But I doubt that it comes in your size. We’re going to have to put the loose-lipped Mr. Walton back to work.”

  The worst part about this, Dan fumed silently, is being so far apart that we can’t talk in real time.

  He had paced the length of the crew module several times, from the bridge where Pancho and Amanda chatted amiably while monitoring the ship’s highly automated systems to the sensor bay at the far end of the passageway, where Fuchs was bent over the sample of superconducting wire.

  George’s last message had an almost fairy-tale quality to it. “Stavenger’s got the guy who made the cloak enlarging it to fit me. He’s over in th’ nanotech lab now, doin’ it. He says I’ll be able to sneak into Humphries’s place sometime tomorrow morning, if he doesn’t run into any snags.”

  Rumpelstiltskin, Dan thought as he prowled along the passageway. No, he was the guy who spun straw into gold. Who had the cloak of invisibility?

  Pancho, he answered himself. Of all the sneaky con artists in the solar system, she’s the one who comes up with a cloak of invisibility. Well, chance favors the prepared mind, they say. Pancho was smart enough and fast enough to use what chance offered her.

  He found himself at the sensor bay again. There wasn’t room for a chair. Fuchs was standing, staring at the same display screen he’d been staring at the last time Dan had looked in at him.

  “Anything interesting?” Dan asked him.

  Fuchs stirred as if being awakened from a dream. But from the worried expression on his face, Dan thought it might have been a nightmare.

  “What is it, Lars?”

  “I’ve found what created the hot spot in this section of wire,” Fuchs said, his voice grave, solemn.

  “Good!” said Dan.

  “Not good,” Fuchs countered, shaking his head.

  “What is it?”

  Pointing to the curves traced across the display screen, Fuchs said, “The amount of copper in the wire is diminishing.”

  “Huh?”

  “The wire is superconducting only if its composition remains constant.”

  “And it stays cooled down to liquid nitrogen temperature,” Dan added.

  “Yes, of course. But this length of wire… its copper content is diminishing.”

  “Diminishing? What do you mean?”

  “Look at the curves!” Fuchs said, with some heat. Rapping his knuckles on the display screen he said, “In the past two hours the copper content has gone down six percent.”

  Dan felt baffled. “How could—”

  “As the copper
content dwindles, the wire goes from a superconducting state to a normal state. It begins to heat up. The hot spot boils off some of the nitrogen coolant. The hot spot grows. It was only microscopic at first, but it eventually became large enough for the monitoring sensors to detect it.”

  Dan stared at him.

  “There is only one agency that I can think of that could selectively remove copper atoms from the wire.”

  “Nanomachines?” Dan squeaked.

  Fuchs nodded solemnly. “This length of wire was seeded with nanomachines that remove copper atoms and release them into the liquid nitrogen coolant Even now they are removing copper atoms and letting them flow into the air of this compartment.”

  “Jesus H. Christ on a bicycle,” Dan said, his insides suddenly hollow. “That’s why Humphries grabbed Cardenas. She’s the nanotech expert.”

  “We are infected,” Fuchs said.

  “But you caught it in time,” Dan countered. “It’s only this one length of wire that’s infected.”

  “I hope so,” Fuchs said. “Otherwise, we’re all dead.”

  HUMPHRIES TRUST RESEARCH CENTER

  George stood to one side of the walkway leading into Humphries’s house. It had been eerie, riding down the escalators wearing the enlarged stealth suit that Ike Walton had cobbled together for him. George couldn’t see his own feet. At one point, he nearly tripped and tumbled down a night of escalator stairs.

  Walton had looked like a naughty little kid caught peeking at dirty pictures when Stavenger had confronted him in his office and ordered him to enlarge the stealth suit to fit George.

  Red-faced, Walton had stammered that he’d need help from the nanolab technicians, and that would ruin the secrecy that had shrouded the stealth suit since he’d first invented it.

  “That can’t be helped,” Stavenger had replied tightly. “Secrecy’s already been breached.”

  In the end, Stavenger himself went with Walton and George to the nanolab and asked the chief technician to clear out the lab and work with Walton by herself. In total secrecy. Once she understood that Dr. Cardenas’s life might be at stake, she quickly agreed.

  “I’d heard rumors about a stealth suit, off and on,” she marveled, once Walton explained what was needed.

  “Don’t add to them,” Stavenger pleaded.

  Walton had the programs for the nanomachines buried in his personal files. Within hours, he and the chief technician were watching a spread of darkly-glittering stealth cloth growing on a lab table. George stood slightly behind them, eyes goggling as the invisible virus-sized machines busily turned bins of metal shavings into his new suit.

  Now he stood at the entrance to Humphries’s house at high noon, trying to figure out a way to get through the front door without being detected. The huge cavern was in its daylight mode, long strips of full-spectrum lamps shining brightly. Wondering if the people inside the house came out for lunch, George edged closer to the door.

  It swung open, surprising him, and a pair of Humphries’s research scientists came out, deep in earnest conversation. George knew they were scientists from their costumes: the guy wore a shapeless open-necked shirt and faded jeans; he had a long ponytail down his back as well. The woman was in a light sweater and loose, comfortable slacks. They were talking about the life cycle of some Latin-named species.

  George slipped behind them as the door started to close and held it halfway open with one extended arm. The two scientists went on their way, chattering intently. George pushed the door open a little more and peered inside. Two hefty men in blue security uniforms stood inside, looking bored. George slipped through the door and then let it swing shut. The two guards never noticed. They were talking about last night’s football tournament, videoed Uve from Barcelona.

  An older man in a dark suit came out of a doorway halfway down the hall. He had the frozen-faced expression of a trained butler. George tiptoed past the guards, peeking into each open doorway as he went. He could hear voices from his left, and found a doorway that opened onto a long corridor, with plenty of people shuttling from one office to another along its length. That must be where the research staff works, he thought Don’t they break for lunch?

  It was difficult to pick up odors from inside the suit’s face mask, but George caught the unmistakable scent of steaks on the griddle, something he hadn’t smelled since he’d been on Earth. Steaks! he thought. Humphries doesn’t mind spendin’ his fookin’ money on hauling steaks up here.

  The hallway ended in a busy, stainless-steel kitchen big enough to keep a good-sized restaurant going. The staff eats in, George realized. At least they do for lunch. Cooks and assistants were scurrying back and forth, pots were boiling steam, and an industrial-sized grill was sizzling with thick steaks. George counted eleven of them. A banker’s dozen, he said to himself.

  One of the dark-uniformed maids was putting together a much more modest meal on a large teak tray: a crisp salad, a small sandwich, a slice of melon and a pot of tea. A woman’s lunch, George thought

  He followed the maid as she carried the tray past him, down the hallway, and up the stairs to the second floor. One of the doors along the upstairs hall was guarded by a bored-looking young man in a gray business suit He saw the maid approaching and opened the bedroom door.

  “Lunch is here, Dr. Cardenas,” he said.

  George stopped as the maid went through the bedroom door and came out again less than a minute later, the tray empty at her side. She closed the door. George heard the lock click. The guard gave her a smile and she smiled back, but neither of them said anything as she headed back for the stairs.

  George leaned against the wall a half-dozen meters from the lethargic guard, who sat on a wooden chair and pulled a palmcomp from inside his jacket. From the beeps and peeps, George figured the guy was playing a game to pass the time.

  Okay, George said, folding his arms across his chest. Cardenas is in there. She’s still alive. Now how do I get her out—alive?

  He spent the better part of an hour prowling along the upstairs hall, checking out the stairway, studying the lone guard. Humphries apparently insisted on a dress code for his servants: the guards wore suits, the maid and the kitchen help wore uniforms. The scientists stayed on the other side of the house. They’d be no problem, George decided.

  The maid returned with the empty tray, went into Carde-nas’s room, and came out with the lunch dishes. George thought Cardenas might be on a hunger strike; she had hardly eaten anything.

  Shortly afterward, Humphries himself came up the hall. He was dressed casually: a white velour pullover and navy blue well-creased slacks. The guard snapped to his feet and stuffed his still-beeping palmcomp into his side pocket. Humphries frowned at him and motioned impatiently for him to open the door.

  The door’s kept locked, George realized, as Humphries stepped into the room. He waited until the door was almost shut, then tiptoed to it and pushed it slowly open. The guard paid no attention, engrossed once more in his video game. George let the door swing halfway open, then deftly slipped into the room.

  Humphries noticed it. Frowning, he marched to the door and snapped at the guard. “Can’t you close a goddamned door properly?” Then he slammed it shut.

  Suppressing a chuckle, George edged into a corner of the room. Dr. Cardenas was standing tensely by the only window. It was a super room, George thought: big pieces of furniture made from real wood. Hauling it up to Selene must have cost more than the whole kitchen staff’s salaries for ten years.

  “How do you feel today?” Humphries asked Cardenas, crossing the oriental carpet toward her.

  “I want to go home,” she said flatly, as if it were a request that they both knew would be ignored.

  Sure enough, Humphries acted as if he hadn’t heard her. “I’m sorry that we had to take you outside. I understand that you don’t like that.”

  “I want to go home,” Cardenas repeated, stronger. “You can’t keep me locked up here forever.”

  “I
have a proposition to offer you. If you agree to it, you could go back to Earth and be with your grandchildren.”

  She closed her eyes wearily. “I simply want to go back to my quarters here at Selene. Let me go. Now.”

  Humphries sighed dramatically and sat on the upholstered chair near the window. “I’m afraid that’s impossible, at this precise moment. Surely you can understand why.”

  “I won’t say a word to anyone,” Cardenas replied, walking uncertainly toward the sofa that faced his chair. “I simply want to return to my normal life.”

  “Without warning Randolph?”

  “It’s too late to warn Dan by now,” she said. “You know that.”

  Humphries spread his hands. “Really, the best option for you is to return to Earth. You’ll be in very comfortable quarters and I’ll personally guarantee that your daughters and grandchildren will be brought to you.”

  “The way I was brought here?”

  “You haven’t been harmed, have you? You’ve been treated with great care.”

  “I’m still a prisoner.”

  It seemed to George that Humphries was working hard to control his temper. “But if you’ll only do what I ask,” he said, tightly, “you can return to Earth and be with your family. What more could you ask for?”

  “I don’t want to go to Earth!” Cardenas burst. “I won’t be a part of your scheme!”

  “You haven’t even heard what my… scheme, as you put it, is.”

  “I don’t care. I don’t want to hear it.”

  “But it will stop the greenhouse wanning. It will save the Earth.”

  “Nothing can save the Earth and you know it.”

  He hung his head for a moment, as if trying to find the right words. At last he looked up at her again. “You can save the Earth, Dr. Cardenas. That’s the real reason why I brought you here. I need you to run the operation. I need the absolute best person there is. That person is you. No one else could make it work.”

  “Whatever it is, I won’t do it,” Cardenas said flatly.

  “Not even to save the Earth?”

  She gave him a withering look. “What makes you think I want to save the Earth?”