Farside

by Ben Bova

Hunching over the table toward her, Stavenger said earnestly, “We need nanotechnology here. Nanomachines pull the oxygen we breathe out of the regolith. They manufacture water for us—”

  “But you were refining oxygen from the regolith and manufacturing water before you started using nanotechnology, weren’t you?”

  “Yes,” he admitted. “But it was much more expensive and limited. We could never have expanded Selene to the size it is today without nanotechnology.”

  “Yes, I see.”

  “Nanotechnology saves lives, too, you know,” Stavenger went on. “Nanomachines have saved my life. More than once.”

  “I see,” Halleck repeated. So it’s true, she thought; his body’s filled with nanomachines, too.

  Edith made a bright smile and said, “We’ve made a deal with the little bugs, Anita. They help us and we keep ’em under control.”

  “It’s worked very well for us,” Stavenger added.

  Trying to make her voice light, pleasant, Halleck said, “I understand. You’ve done very well with nanotechnology.”

  And she thought that nanotechnology was going to be very useful to her, as well.

  VISITS

  While they waited for Cardenas to confirm that she could build Farside’s mirrors with nanomachines, for nearly a week Grant found himself buried in paperwork. There was little work going on outside, but now that he was head of the tech staff, Grant found that there was plenty of record-keeping, schedule fixing, workshift adjusting to be done. Once he had dismissed such tasks as nothing more than paper shuffling. Not that they used paper; everything was done digitally. But Grant began to understand that without the paperwork, the real work could not be done.

  And then there were the personnel problems. Personality problems, really. Harvey Henderson returned from Selene but his foot was still on the mend; he couldn’t work outside. Josie Rivera was flirting with several guys at the same time, causing lots of resentment. Grant remembered the days when he had first started taking hefty doses of steroids, and his chemically induced aggression had led him into roaring arguments and even battering brawls.

  And while he sweated over records and schedules, the damned cracked mirror just lay there on the dusty ground, absorbing hard radiation from the Sun and stars, and being slowly abraded by the constant hail of dust-mote-sized micrometeorites falling to the Moon’s surface.

  The Sun was touching the ringwall mountains of Mare Moscoviense; Grant knew that once the two-week-long lunar night settled across the giant crater’s floor, the mirror’s glass would begin to contract in the cold and its crack would worsen. He tried to get Uhlrich to okay building a roof over the mirror to protect it from the meteoroid infall, but the professor kept delaying that decision.

  When Grant complained to McClintock that nothing was being done, he told Grant to be patient.

  “Your job here is safe as long as you keep your nose clean,” McClintock said daily. “Don’t antagonize Uhlrich. And follow my orders.”

  Grant said nothing, but he thought that it was more important to get the job done, and done right, than to pussyfoot around the Ulcer or wait for this playboy to make decisions that were clearly beyond his understanding.

  He spoke several times with Kristine Cardenas, back at Selene, checking on the progress of her effort to build the telescope mirror with nanomachines. He had another motive for keeping in touch with her: he desperately wanted Dr. Cardenas to inject him with a set of nanomachines tailored to repair his damaged liver and protect him from radiation effects once he began working out on the surface again.

  He was growing more impatient, more apprehensive, with each passing day. The dull ache in the small of his back seemed to be getting worse. Grant knew he faced an increasingly desperate conundrum: he needed the steroids he’d been taking so that he could work out on the surface, but those steroids were damaging his liver, perhaps permanently. And god knows what else, he thought.

  He pressed McClintock for permission to fly back to Selene, but McClintock evaded the issue with a brittle smile and a vague, “Not yet. Soon, but not just right now.”

  So Grant was pleasantly surprised one morning when McClintock woke him with a phone call.

  “Grant, there’s a resupply lobber coming in later this morning. I want some of your people to help the crew offload its cargo and then you ride back to Selene with them.”

  Sitting up in his wrinkled bed, Grant said eagerly, “I’ll call Kris Cardenas, tell her I’m coming.”

  In the phone’s small display screen, McClintock’s face took on a pensive expression. “Yes, I suppose you might as well touch base with her while you’re in Selene, but the reason I want you there is to meet a Dr. Frederic Palmquist, who’s visiting from Earth. He’s asked for a tour of Farside.”

  Frowning with puzzlement, Grant said, “There’s nothing much here to show a visitor.”

  Almost smirking, McClintock replied, “You know that and I know that, but Professor Uhlrich’s in a sweat to get this fellow here and impress him. Woke me up at five this morning, all excited about Palmquist.”

  “What’s so damned exciting about the man?”

  “He’s from Stockholm.”

  “A Swede?” Then it hit Grant. “The Nobel committee?”

  McClintock nodded solemnly. “It’s nothing official. Palmquist isn’t even on the committee. But Uhlrich’s in a lather. You’d think Jesus Christ and all twelve Apostles were coming to town.”

  Grant couldn’t help grinning. “Yeah, I’ll bet the Ulcer is salivating.”

  “Like Pavlov’s dogs.”

  “Okay,” Grant said, pulling his legs free of the tangled sheets. “What time’s the lobber due to land?”

  “Between ten thirty and eleven.”

  “I’ll have a crew there, suited up and ready to help.”

  As soon as McClintock hung up, Grant put in a call to Dr. Cardenas.

  * * *

  It took more than an hour to unload the supplies that the lobber carried: mostly food, with some replacements for pieces of laboratory equipment. Grant worked with the lobber’s crew and two of his regular Farside team.

  He was worming his arms out of his space suit, feeling tired and smelly, when he saw Trudy Yost step into the locker area.

  Surprised, Grant asked her, “What brings you down here?”

  She wrinkled her nose slightly, caught herself, and put on a smile instead. “Professor Uhlrich wants me to go to Selene to meet this Swedish visitor and bring him here.”

  “That’s what I’m supposed to be doing,” Grant blurted.

  “The professor thought it would be best if an astronomer met the man.”

  Leaning over to unfasten his boots, Grant muttered, “Instead of a lousy engineer, huh?”

  Trudy looked confused. “What do you mean?”

  “McClintock told me to go pick up the Swede.”

  “The professor told me,” said Trudy.

  Grant thought it over for all of six seconds. “Looks like we’re both going.”

  “I don’t think the professor would want both of us to go.”

  Standing up in his thick-stockinged feet, Grant said, “McClintock told me to go. Nobody’s told me not to.”

  “But the professor…” Trudy’s voice tailed off.

  With a shake of his head, Grant said, “McClintock and the Ulcer screwed up. The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.”

  “I’ll phone Professor Uhlrich,” Trudy said.

  “No!” Grant snapped. “We’ll both go. Why not?”

  “Because the professor will pop his cork when he finds out, that’s why not.”

  “Let him,” said Grant. “He can argue it out with McClintock. In the meantime, you and I can go visit Selene together.”

  Trudy looked apprehensive, but slowly a mischievous grin dimpled her cheeks. At last she said, “Sounds good to me.” Then she added, “But there’ll be hell to pay when we get back.”

  “We’ll be bringing the Swede wit
h us. The Ulcer won’t dare show his temper in front of him.”

  Besides, Grant thought, I’ll get my chance to see Cardenas and get injected with her nanomachines while Trudy’s making nice-nice to our Swedish visitor.

  DR. FREDERIC PALMQUIST

  Grant and Trudy were the only passengers aboard the lobber on its return flight to Selene. The vehicle was configured for carrying cargo, not passengers, so they sat in a pair of fold-out seats up in the cramped cockpit, shoehorned in behind the pilot and copilot.

  Grant saw that once they had lifted off, the pilots had nothing to do during the forty-five-minute flight except watch the control panel instruments. The ballistic flight followed Newton’s Laws faithfully.

  Then he noticed that Trudy looked … not frightened, exactly, but concerned, almost worried, her face a little taut.

  “It’s okay,” he said, trying to reassure her. “Everything’s going smoothly.”

  Trudy looked startled. “I know. I just feel kind of like a sardine, cooped up in here.”

  “It’s not first-class accommodations, that’s for sure,” he admitted.

  “Can’t see the ground at all.”

  Pointing between the pilots’ shoulders, Grant said, “We’ll see it on their display screen when we start to descend.”

  Trudy nodded uncertainly.

  “The flight’s on trajectory,” Grant said. “No worries.”

  With a smile that looked forced, Trudy said, “Fliers claim that flying is the second most exciting thing a man can do.”

  “And what’s first most exciting, sex?”

  “No,” she said, her expression quite serious. “The first most exciting thing a man can do is landing.”

  She is worried, Grant realized. He wondered what he could say to make her feel better.

  “It’ll be okay, don’t worry about it.”

  Grant thought it sounded pretty lame, but Trudy smiled again at him. It was a pretty smile, he thought.

  The lobber’s landing was fully automated, although the two pilots hunched over their instruments, ready to assume manual control if necessary, as the rocket plummeted toward Selene’s blast-blackened landing pads.

  Despite his reassurances, Grant felt a wave of relief once they touched down. He grinned at Trudy.

  “Piece of cake.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Now.”

  As soon as they cleared the debarkation desk and got aboard one of the automated trams that ran through the kilometer-long tunnel to Selene proper, Grant phoned Dr. Palmquist.

  The Swede was in a tour bus, taking in the tourist sites out on the floor of Alphonsus’s broad ringed plain.

  “We are approaching the Ranger 9 site,” Palmquist said, in English slightly accented with a reedy Swedish intonation.

  The phone’s reception was weak in the tunnel, its video image grainy. In the miniature screen, Palmquist looked to Grant like bleached white flour: his thinning dead white hair was combed straight back from his high forehead, his complexion was pale, his face roundish.

  Grant nodded and asked, “When is your tour scheduled to return?”

  Palmquist’s pallid face took on a slightly puzzled expression. “They told me it was a three-hour tour,” he replied, “and we left promptly at eleven o’clock.”

  “So you’ll be back at fourteen hundred,” Grant prompted.

  “I suppose so,” Palmquist said, looking uncertain about it.

  “We’ll meet you when your bus arrives.”

  “Fine. Very good. We can have tea together.”

  Grant suppressed a chuckle. “We’ll go to the cafeteria.”

  “Good,” said Palmquist.

  Clicking his pocketphone shut, Grant turned to Trudy, sitting beside him on the tram. “He thinks he’s still in Stockholm. Tea in the afternoon.”

  She shrugged. “We can do a tea, I betcha. The cafeteria’s got cookies and buns. We’ll make do.”

  Glancing at his wristwatch, Grant said, “I’ve got to see Dr. Cardenas.”

  “Fine,” said Trudy. “I’ll go over to the university and chat up the people in the astronomy department, see what they’re up to.”

  The tram stopped at the end of the tunnel and Trudy agreed to meet Grant at the main garage, where the tour busses came in, a few minutes before 1400 hours. Then she started off for the university’s underground classrooms and offices. Grant headed straight for the nanotechnology lab.

  * * *

  Kris Cardenas was in a pensive mood when Grant reached her desk.

  “You realize what you’re letting yourself in for, don’t you?” she asked Grant as soon as he settled himself in the chair by her desk.

  “Letting myself in for?” he asked.

  “Once people know you’ve ingested nanomachines, they’ll treat you differently. They’ll be wary of you, scared, even.”

  “Not here,” Grant scoffed. “We use nanomachines all the time.”

  “People are still scared of them.”

  “You think so?”

  Cardenas’s bright blue eyes fixed Grant with a hard stare. “Take it from me. I’ve gone through it. I lost a lot of friends once they realized my body’s full of nanos.”

  Grant puffed out a little grunt. “I don’t have that many friends.”

  “You’ll have fewer, once they know. You’ll become a pariah.”

  “Even at Farside?”

  “Even at Farside,” Cardenas said, utterly serious.

  Grant thought about it for a few silent moments, then said, “Maybe it’d be better if nobody knew about it, then.”

  She pursed her lips, then murmured, “I think you’re right. Keep it to yourself.”

  Nodding, Grant said, “Okay. That’s what I’ll do.”

  “It’s nobody else’s business, really.”

  “Yeah. I suppose so.”

  Cardenas brightened slightly and pulled a desk drawer open. She picked a small plastic vial out of it.

  “Here’s your first dose.” She handed the vial to Grant.

  He held it up and peered at it. “Looks like orange juice.”

  “That’s what it is. Orange juice—with a few million nanomachines suspended in it.”

  “That many?”

  “They’re programmed to the blood sample you gave me. You drink them down and they’ll start repairing your liver.”

  “What about radiation protection?”

  “That’s the next batch. I want you to let these little fellows work on your liver. You come back here in two weeks. I’ll set up a medical exam for you. If everything’s working right, we’ll go on to phase two and build up your cellular repair mechanisms.”

  Grant asked, “So what do I do, drink this stuff?”

  “That’s right.”

  He unscrewed the vial’s top and drank its contents in one long swig.

  Cardenas gave him a wry smile. “Welcome to the club.”

  * * *

  Grant knew it was psychosomatic, but as he walked from Cardenas’s nanotech lab to Selene’s main garage, he thought that the dull ache in the small of his back was lessening.

  They can’t act that fast, he told himself. But he actually did feel better.

  Trudy was already in the garage’s nearly empty waiting room, looking like an anxious little waif in her plain tan coveralls. There were three other people—two men and one woman—also waiting for the tour bus to return.

  “Been here long?” he asked Trudy.

  “Less than two minutes,” she replied, gazing through the window that looked out on the busy, clanging garage. Busses and tractors were parked in rows, while maintenance crews worked on them. Beyond that stood the big dulled metal hatch of the huge airlock.

  Grant was just about to say that Palmquist was late when the airlock hatch swung inward and the bus rolled through, a gleaming silver cylinder on spindly little wheels, its lower flanks coated with gray lunar dust.

  The passengers got out of the bus and filed into the waiting room. Grant easily recognized D
r. Palmquist: ghostly pale, wearing a business suit of soft pastel blue, walking very carefully in the unaccustomedly light gravity. He entered the waiting room and looked around uncertainly.

  “Dr. Palmquist,” said Grant, going up to him and extending his hand. “I’m Grant Simpson—”

  “Ah! The fellow who called me on the phone,” said Palmquist in his soft voice.

  “—and this is Dr. Yost, Professor Uhlrich’s assistant,” Grant finished.

  Trudy took Palmquist’s hand. “I’m very pleased to meet you, sir. Professor Uhlrich is so looking forward to your visit to the Farside Observatory.”

  “So am I, my dear,” said Dr. Palmquist.

  As Grant walked them out of the garage area and down the corridor that led to the cafeteria, Palmquist asked Trudy, “You are an astronomer?”

  “Yes, I am. Are you?”

  Palmquist shook his head self-effacingly. “No, no. I am an economist. But certain, er … certain acquaintances of mine asked me to look in on Professor Uhlrich while I was here visiting Selene University’s economics faculty.”

  “I see,” Trudy replied.

  The Nobel committee, Grant thought. Those were Palmquist’s “acquaintances.”

  As they walked to the cafeteria, Grant thought about the afternoon’s agenda. He knew that Uhlrich had laid on a special flight back to Farside at 1800 hours. Not enough time to ask Trudy to have dinner with me, he told himself. We’ll do this silly tea business with the Swede and then head back to Farside. Maybe Trudy and I can have dinner there, after we drop Palmquist off with the Ulcer.

  But all through their brief repast in Selene’s noisy, bustling cafeteria Palmquist spoke only to Trudy, ignoring Grant as if he weren’t there. Grant never got the opportunity to ask her about dinner.

  RETURN TO FARSIDE

  Uhlrich was practically quivering with anticipation in the tiny reception area of Farside’s one-pad spaceport when the lobber landed. McClintock stood beside him, much cooler.

  “Dr. Palmquist,” Uhlrich gushed as the Swede stepped through the access tube’s hatch, “how kind of you to visit our facility.”