Farside

by Ben Bova

  Kris Cardenas had agreed to have dinner with him, and McClintock intended to make the most of his opportunity. Cardenas was far better-looking, and much more sophisticated, than any of the women on the Farside staff. Trudy Yost had been amusing, almost pitifully pleased that McClintock had deigned to notice her. But why settle for an inexperienced kid when a beautiful, intelligent, and altogether pleasurable woman was available?

  How available is she, really? McClintock asked himself as he bent down to select a pair of prepackaged dinners from his small but well-stocked freezer. Well, we’ll soon find out.

  That’s the excitement of it all, he thought. Men are hunters by nature, and the thrill of the chase is almost as exciting as the reward at the end. He laughed to himself. Almost.

  Precisely on time he heard her knock at the door. McClintock straightened up, kneed the freezer door shut, and started across the room. Take your time, he told himself. Don’t rush. Don’t make her think you’re anxious or overly eager. But he was.

  He slid the door open and there stood Kristine Cardenas, smiling at him, looking fresh and tempting in a coppery red frock that complemented her thick curly hair and cornflower blue eyes.

  “Right on time,” said McClintock, ushering her into the room with a sweeping gesture. “Punctuality: the pride of princes.”

  Her smile widening, she replied, “I’m on time because I’m hungry.”

  McClintock showed her to the sofa, then went to the kitchenette to pick up the wine bottle and a pair of glasses.

  “I’m afraid this is all I have to drink,” he apologized as he sat beside her. “Professor Uhlrich doesn’t encourage alcohol consumption here.” Except in his own quarters, McClintock added silently.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Cardenas. “I never get drunk, anyway.”

  “Never?” he asked, pouring the wine.

  “My nanomachines take apart the alcohol molecules before my digestive system can get them into my bloodstream.”

  “Really?”

  “One of the unexpected side effects,” she said.

  They clinked glasses and sipped. McClintock thought that the wine tasted slightly tart. California chardonnay? he asked himself. I’ll bet this stuff was cooked up in a lab at Selene. I overpaid.

  Cardenas asked, “Have you decontaminated the shelter at Mendeleev?”

  McClintock nodded. “I’ve got two men out there now, with ultraviolet lamps.”

  “Good. That should take care of the problem.”

  He studied her face as he took another swallow of wine.

  “May I ask you a personal question, Kris? Um … you don’t mind me calling you Kris, do you?”

  “Not at all,” she said. “And I think I know what your question is. Yes, my body is filled with nanomachines. Has been, for years.”

  “They protect you against disease.”

  “And keep me young.”

  “But there are side effects.”

  “Only one that’s harmful: I can’t return to Earth.”

  “That’s political,” he said.

  Her face going somber, Cardenas replied, “No, it’s emotional. Irrational. The product of ignorance and fear.”

  “I suppose so,” McClintock said. He had no intention of getting into an argument with her.

  Cardenas put her wineglass down on the coffee table, practically untouched. “Do you have any idea of how the nanos got into that space suit?”

  McClintock shook his head. “Not the faintest. But once the shelter out at Mendeleev is decontaminated the problem should be solved. Right?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe? What do you mean?”

  “Carter … those nanomachines didn’t get into that space suit by themselves. Or the dewar in the tractor’s motor. Somebody put them there, whether by accident or on purpose.”

  McClintock felt his face creasing into a frown.

  “You’ve got to find out how they got there,” Cardenas went on. “Otherwise, you could be attacked again.”

  “Attacked? You think someone deliberately sabotaged the space suit? Murdered the man who was wearing it?”

  “Perhaps not deliberately. But somebody, somehow, put destructive nanomachines into that man’s suit. And the tractor’s motor, earlier.”

  “My god!” McClintock exclaimed. “How on earth do we go about finding out who did it?”

  “Good question,” said Cardenas.

  Dinner was far more somber than McClintock had planned. They talked about nothing but nanomachines; he couldn’t get her off the subject.

  “There couldn’t have been more than a milligram’s worth of them,” Cardenas said. She was eating automatically, paying no attention to the food. Just as well, McClintock thought, the meal was bland and undercooked.

  “They were gobblers?” he asked.

  She scowled at the word. “Disassemblers, yes. Programmed to take apart a specific metal alloy: the metal that both the dewar and the space suit’s collar are made of.”

  “Could they be an offshoot of the nanos that built the telescope mirror?”

  “No way. That’s like expecting a flower to turn into a hand grenade.”

  “But still—”

  The phone buzzed. Annoyed, McClintock looked across the room at the phone console on his desk.

  “Who’d be calling at this hour?” he grumbled.

  Trudy Yost’s eager young face appeared on the phone’s screen. “Carter, I just got a call from Grant, out at Mendeleev. They’ve finished the spectrometer installation! I’m going to take some test spectra tonight! Right now!”

  “Aren’t you going to answer?” Cardenas asked.

  “No,” said McClintock. “Not at this hour.”

  “She seems very excited.”

  “Scientists,” McClintock growled. Then he remembered that Kris Cardenas was one of them.

  “Go ahead and call her back,” Cardenas urged. “Let her know you approve of what she’s doing.”

  Thoroughly disgusted with the way the evening was going, McClintock called out, “Phone: reply to latest incoming call.”

  Trudy babbled enthusiastically for nearly half an hour while McClintock watched his dinner cool. By the time he got her off the phone, Cardenas pushed her chair from the table and stood up.

  “Thank you for a lovely meal, Carter.” She said it mechanically, like a child repeating a lesson learned by rote.

  “You’re not leaving?” he blurted, trying to keep the disappointment out of his voice. “You haven’t had dessert yet.”

  “No dessert for me, thanks. It’s not good for my figure.”

  Annoyed, McClintock said, “I thought your nanos took care of that.”

  She grinned at him. “I don’t want to overwork them.” Heading for the door, she said, “Thanks for dinner. And you’d better start thinking about how to find who planted those disassemblers.”

  Reluctantly, he slid the door open. Cardenas patted his cheek as she went past. “Thanks again, Carter.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said dully.

  He slid the door shut behind her, then turned and surveyed his empty quarters. He had taken special pains to make up the bed neatly. All for nothing, McClintock thought. All for goddamned nothing.

  He went back to the coffee table and carefully worked the artificial cork back into the wine bottle. No sense throwing it out, he thought, we only had one glass apiece and Kris hardly touched hers.

  There’s always tomorrow, he said to himself as he tucked the bottle back into his refrigerator.

  RETURN TO FARSIDE

  Grant was listening to Trudy’s excited voice as he fastened the two ultraviolet lamps to the metal floor of the hopper.

  “… swung the ’scope over to the Orion constellation and took spectra of Betelgeuse.” Even in the small speakers of his helmet he could hear the exhilaration in her voice. “Beautiful! You should see ’em! I got emission lines nobody’s ever seen before. Not from old Beetlejuice! I could write a paper about it!” />
  “That’s great,” he said. “You didn’t stay up all night, did you?”

  “Oh no. I got to bed around three, three thirty, somewhere in there. Maybe four.”

  Glancing at the digital readout on his wrist, Grant said, “So you got maybe four hours’ sleep?”

  “Something like that. I’m going to set up the ’scope to look at Sirius C today. Get spectra from its atmosphere.”

  “Assuming it has an atmosphere.”

  Trudy replied, “We know it’s got something of an atmosphere, Grant. Now I’m going to find out how thick it is and what it’s made of.”

  “Good,” he said. “I’m about ready to haul my butt back to Farside. As soon as Nate comes out of the shelter.”

  “Great! Call me when you get back. I owe you a steak dinner.”

  “I’ll do that,” said Grant. Steak grown out of a culture in a laboratory was nowhere near as satisfying as the real thing, but there weren’t any beef cattle closer than half a million klicks, and dinner with Trudy would be fun no matter what was on the platter, he thought.

  Straightening up stiffly in the cumbersome space suit, he looked at the mound of rubble that marked the shelter as he called Oberman on the suit-to-suit frequency. “Nate, I’m ready to get going. How about you?”

  A moment’s hesitation. Then, “Be with you in a minute, Grant. Just tidying up my bunk.”

  Housekeeping, Grant thought. Nate’s paying attention to the finer points. Housekeeping was important. You made the place neat and clean for the next guys to come out here. And they did the same for you. Grant wondered if cowhands in America’s Old West did the same with their frontier shacks.

  Turning, he looked at the big tube of the telescope. It rose like some ancient tower, canted over slightly, the huge mirror and frame at its base serving as an anchor to keep it from tipping too far. The Leaning Tower of Mendeleev, he thought.

  “I’m getting into my suit now,” Oberman called. Grant sighed to himself, then said, “Okay, I’ll come in to check you out as soon as I finish preflight on the hopper.”

  “You haven’t checked out the bird yet?”

  “Not yet. Just starting.”

  “Jeez, you said you were ready to haul ass.”

  “I am. Preflight only takes a couple of minutes,” Grant said, starting to feel irritated.

  “Unless you find something wrong,” Oberman added.

  Yeah, Grant replied silently. Unless I find something wrong.

  * * *

  Professor Uhlrich got up from his chair, went around his desk, and brushed the fingertips of both his hands against his special tactile wall screen, which displayed the spectrum of the red giant star Betelgeuse.

  “Impressive resolution,” he murmured.

  “That’s the carbon monoxide line,” Trudy said, barely able to stay in her chair at the conference table.

  “And this,” Uhlrich said as his fingers moved across the glow of colors and dark absorption lines, “this is…?”

  “Formaldehyde!” Trudy burst.

  “No! It can’t be. Not in Betelgeuse’s photosphere.”

  “I checked the reference spectrum twice last night and again this morning,” Trudy said. “It’s formaldehyde, all right.”

  “Incredible. A complex organic in the photosphere of Betelgeuse.”

  She had never seen the professor look so pleased. He gazed right at her, smiling, absently stroking his trim silver-gray beard.

  “We must write a paper on this,” Uhlrich said. “And we must send an online message to International Astrophysics Letters with the raw data, to establish precedence. Then we will write a full paper for the journal.”

  Agreeing eagerly, Trudy added, “I think we can detect Sirius C’s atmosphere directly and get spectra on it.”

  “Yes! Of course!”

  Uhlrich returned to his desk, as sure-footed and confident as if he were sighted, his face beaming.

  As he sat at his desk again, the professor recited, “First results from the Farside Observatory’s hundred-meter optical telescope. That will be the title of our message to IAL.”

  Our message, Trudy thought. I’ll write the paper and he’ll put his name on it. In front of mine. Doesn’t matter. He’s in charge here, he’s got the prerogative. Everybody’ll know I did the work.

  “I’ll send out the tweet right away,” she said.

  “And mention Sirius C, as well,” Uhlrich commanded. “Spectroscopic analysis of the atmosphere around the planet will be a spectacular feather in our cap.”

  Trudy nodded happily. “You bet!” She pushed her chair back from the conference table, then hesitated.

  “Is there something else?” Uhlrich asked.

  “Something…” Trudy started. “Something I’ve been wanting to ask you.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s … personal,” she warned.

  “Yes?”

  Trudy bit her lip, then finally said, “It’s about how you perceive the world around you. I mean … I know your sight is gone, but … you get around so well, you don’t let your blindness stop you in any way. I think you’re very courageous, sir.”

  Uhlrich looked mildly surprised. “Why, thank you, Trudy. I do the best I can.”

  “Can I ask you … how do you see me? I mean, do you actually know what I look like?”

  He smiled slightly. “How do you know that one sighted person sees the same image of you as another one does? That’s why we describe spectra in terms of wavelength, rather than color, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose,” said Trudy.

  “Your impression of the color red might not be the same as, say, Mr. McClintock’s. There’s no way for another person to know what it looks like inside your head, is there?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  Steepling his fingertips, Uhlrich went on, “But, to get back to your original question, I have a distinct image of your face in my mind. Your dossier includes a verbal description, which the auditory center of my brain sends to my visual cortex. I know that you have green eyes, light brown hair, a roundish facial structure. My visual cortex has created a picture of that face for me.”

  “But how much detail do you see?” Trudy asked, hoping she wasn’t intruding too far.

  “Enough to tell me that you are quite a lovely young woman,” said Uhlrich, his voice strangely hushed.

  Suddenly Trudy felt embarrassed. “Oh! Thank you. I guess I should get out of your hair and go write that message to the IAL.”

  She hurried out of the professor’s office, leaving Uhlrich smiling benignly from behind his desk.

  * * *

  Grant realized that he half expected a problem with the hopper, another glitch caused by nanomachines. But the bird checked out almost perfectly: a slightly lower voltage than normal from the fuel cells was the only anomaly and even that was too trivial to worry about.

  He climbed down from the hopper and trudged toward the shelter’s airlock.

  Could the nanos have come from me? he asked himself for the thousandth time. I don’t remember touching the tractor’s dewar. But I did check out Winston’s suit before he left for Mendeleev. Could I have infected him with rogue nanos? Kris says it’s impossible, but the nanobugs got into his suit somehow. How?

  He cycled through the airlock and saw that Oberman had already donned the lower half of his space suit and was holding the hard-shell torso in his hands, ready to lift it over his head.

  “Almost ready, Grant,” said Oberman.

  “Let me give you a hand,” Grant said, as he took off his helmet.

  “I can do it myself.”

  Oberman slid the shell down his torso. Once his head came through the collar he wriggled his arms through the sleeves. Grant picked up the life-support pack and attached it to the fittings on the suit’s back.

  “Hopper check out okay?” Oberman asked as he pulled on his gloves.

  “Fuel cell’s voltage is a tad low. Nothing to worry about.”

  “B
atteries okay?”

  Grant nodded, then realized Nate couldn’t see him because he was still behind the man, checking the connections between the backpack and the suit.

  “The batteries are fully charged. We could make it back to Selene, almost, if we had to.”

  “Not on a lousy hopper,” Oberman said.

  “I said almost.”

  Once Oberman sealed his helmet to the suit’s neck ring, Grant insisted on a radio test.

  Looking sour, Oberman asked, “You want to go outside to check the stupid radio?”

  Grant reached for his helmet. “Not a bad idea. I’ll go out and call you.”

  “Whatever,” said Oberman.

  Ten minutes later the two men were standing on the hopper’s open platform, hurtling across the barren lunar landscape, heading back to Farside.

  And Grant was still wondering if somehow he was responsible for Winston’s death.

  ALTERNATIVES

  “But how could the nanomachines have gotten into the man’s space suit?” Professor Uhlrich demanded.

  McClintock answered with another question. “And into the motor of that tractor?”

  Uhlrich sat rigidly erect behind his desk. His brain’s visual cortex created a picture of McClintock based on the smoothly urbane sound of his voice: tall, handsome, slim, and self-assured. The image reminded Uhlrich of a video star he had seen years ago, a smiling rogue of a lady’s man.

  “Dr. Cardenas believes they were planted deliberately,” Uhlrich muttered.

  “Actually, she said they might have been planted deliberately. She didn’t rule out an accidental situation.”

  Uhlrich drummed his fingers on his desktop. “Deliberate or accident, someone planted those nanomachines. Who? And why?”

  He sensed McClintock’s shrug. “Damned if I know.”

  “We must find out.”

  “How?”

  “We must enlist Dr. Cardenas’s help. After all, she is the leading expert on nanotechnology.”

  “But she’s leaving to return to Selene on the next lobber flight.”

  Shaking his head forcefully, Uhlrich said, “She mustn’t leave! You must convince her to stay here.”

  McClintock thought about the disappointing dinner he’d had with Cardenas the previous night. Getting her to stay might not be altogether a bad idea, he said to himself. It could give me another chance at her.