by Allen Steele
The boss ’bot now stood at the edge of the construction site, its eyes emitting a soft red glow as it peered at the sky above the crater’s eastern rim. Watching. Waiting.
Less than ten minutes after the ’bot received the transmission, a bright spot of light hurtled into view above the crater rim.
It was moving fast and low. On Earth, it might have been mistaken for a large meteor entering the upper atmosphere, save for the fact that it was fewer than five hundred feet above the ground. As it streaked over the crater walls, the fireball flared even more brightly, creating a false dawn on the crater floor far below. At the same time, it abruptly slowed down, braking as it commenced a quick descent into the vast crater.
As backwash from the fireball revealed the teardrop-shaped spacecraft behind it, the Grag 320-A watching its descent sent a signal to machinery deep below the crater floor. A hundred yards from where it was standing, long thin bars of light forming a luminescent H suddenly appeared upon the ground. They quickly expanded, becoming two mammoth doors cleverly disguised to resemble the surrounding terrain, opening to reveal an illuminated landing platform just below.
In the silence of the lunar night, the small yacht came in for touchdown. Flanges opened upon its aft fuselage to allow its multijointed landing tripod to unfold into position. As its pads made contact with the platform, the spacecraft’s engine shut down.
The Cornet had reached its destination.
Visible only by the platform’s landing beacons and the soft illumination of the yacht’s bow and side portholes, the platform began to slowly descend into a large hangar hidden beneath the crater floor. The moment the Cornet disappeared from sight, the doors began to close again. The Grag 320-A watched the doors until they were completely shut; no light escaped to betray the hangar’s existence.
The robot continued to observe the sky above Tycho. Several minutes went by, then another spot of light appeared. This one was much farther up, though, and moving much more slowly: the engine exhaust of a spacecraft in low orbit, searching the lunar badlands thousands of feet below. The robot watched as the craft passed over Tycho; it did not slow down or change course, and in less than a minute it passed over the horizon to the west and disappeared.
Inside the cockpit, Roger Newton had just reconfigured the pilot’s seat from a horizontal to vertical position and was unbuckling the harness when a blandly mechanistic voice came through his headset. “Search craft sighted above Tycho,” the Grag 320-A reported. “It has moved on. No indication of having noticed the base or your presence.”
Roger smiled. “Thank you. Remain on station and report any unusual activity.” He turned to Elaine, whose seat was still reclined in landing position. “Good news from the consruction team supervisor. It spotted a search and rescue craft, but apparently it wasn’t following us. Still searching for wreckage, I guess.”
Elaine nodded, not returning the smile but nonetheless quietly relieved. “So we’re dead,” she murmured. Looking down at the sleeping child in her arms, she added, “Such a tragedy. At least it was quick … you probably never felt a thing.”
“With luck, that’s what everyone will assume.” Roger reached over to touch the controls for his wife’s seat. With a soft whirr it slowly tilted upward, allowing her to place her feet on a deck that, until now, had been an aft bulkhead. “I packed enough phosphorous into the limpet charge to simulate a catastrophic engine failure. If anyone on the ground or in orbit actually saw what happened—”
“They’ll think the main engine … blew just as you were throttling up … for the perigee burn to return to Earth.” Behind them, Simon had already lowered the passenger seat. “You’re lucky … I’m already a dying man,” he wheezed. “You would’ve scared … ten years off my life with … that dive you made.”
“Sorry. Couldn’t be helped.” Roger stood up and arched his back, sighing a little as he felt the vertebrae of his lower spine crack. It had been years since the last time he’d visited the Moon; it felt good to get back in its lower gravity. “We got here without being detected. That’s what matters.”
After he’d jettisoned the bomb strapped to the Cornet’s hull and sent the radio signal that ignited it, Roger had thrown the stick forward and fired the engine, putting the yacht into a dangerous power-dive that had shed 1,500 feet in seconds. A tricky maneuver, and dangerous as hell; he’d put the lives of his wife, child, and mentor at risk, not to mention his own. But if it worked, as he believed it would, any lunar traffic control officers observing the small yacht on radar after it transmitted a Mayday would believe that its engine had suffered—as accident reports tended to call such things—“a major malfunction” that obliterated the small craft and its passengers. Such accidents were uncommon, but not impossible. Magnetoplasma engines customarily sustained temperatures of nearly two million degrees Kelvin; if the magnetic fields that confined them to the reactor vessel failed, the result would be catastrophic.
Which is what happened to the Cornet, or so Roger wanted everyone to believe. There would be many people at home who’d be shocked and saddened by the tragedy. Neither he nor Elaine had any living parents or siblings, but they each had relatives and close friends who were probably just now getting the news. There was nothing that could be done about this, though, at least for the time being.
But if Victor Corvo was fooled, too, then it would be worth it.
Roger climbed down the ladder from the control room to the middeck. Pausing in the galley, he opened a wall locker between the curtained bunks to collect ankle weights. He strapped on a pair and left two more on the galley table for Elaine and Simon—Roger smiled as he wondered how long it would take Curt to adapt to one-sixth g; this would be interesting to observe—then continued climbing down to the third level where the ready-room and airlock lay. He didn’t need to suit up again. A glance at the indicator panel beside the outer hatch as he stepped into the airlock told him that positive pressure lay outside the ship. Roger turned the recessed wheel to undog the hatch, then grasped the lock lever and pushed it down. A faint hiss of escaping air, then he shoved the hatch open.
The Cornet stood on its tail within an underground shaft resembling a twentieth-century ICBM silo, except that it was big enough to also accommodate a lunar hopper that had its own elevator platform and doors. The shaft had been originally intended to contain instruments for the energy research that the lab’s original owners had planned to conduct before they ran out of money; Roger and Simon had redesigned it to hide the Cornet and the base’s short-range transport.
Roger heard the whirr of immense fans winding down, and his nose picked up the faint burned-gunpowder aroma of moondust. The hangar computer had automatically decontaminated the shaft during the pressurization procedure. As expected, the gangway had also been extended. It led straight from the Cornet to a door high in the hangar’s curving wall.
Roger stepped out on the enclosed catwalk and looked up at the vessel. The fast little ship had gotten them there safely, but it would be a long time before he’d fly it again. It was officially destroyed, after all … yet it wasn’t the only regatta yacht out there. Peering at the ship’s name christened on the hull beside the hatch, it occurred to him that it wouldn’t take much to change the r and n to an m. Perhaps if the Cornet became the Comet …
The door slid open on the other end of the catwalk, and he turned to see the supervisor robot standing there. “Good evening, Dr. Newton,” it said, lowering its bulbous head slightly to regard Roger with unblinking red eyes. “I hope your trip went well.”
“It did, umm—”
“You may call me Grag.”
Roger raised an eyebrow. Most robots, when asked to identify themselves, usually rattled off a serial number, then offered their owner or operator the option of picking a name for them. This one had not only made the choice itself, but had apparently selected the name of its manufacturer as its own. Interesting …
Roger turned to see his wife standing in the airlock, Curt
riding in a papoose sling upon her back. “Where’s Simon?” he asked.
“Coming.” Then she dropped her voice. “He’s having trouble, Roger. I think the trip took more out of him than he wants to admit … particularly the last part.”
Roger nodded. It was nothing less than a miracle that Simon had remained alive this long. The last hour or so must have been an ordeal. “Go on ahead of us,” he said quietly. “I’ll take care of him.” She nodded and walked across the gangway, squeezing past the giant robot that stood on the other side. “Come here, Grag,” Roger said. “I need your help.”
“As you wish, Dr. Newton.” As Grag stepped onto the gangway, the padded soles of its massive feet making a solid thud with each step, Elaine gave Roger a significant look. She’d overheard the conversation he’d had with Grag and noticed the same thing he had: this particular robot had not only chosen a name for itself, but it was also that of its creator. An indication of emerging sentience? Something worth investigating … later.
“Simon?” Roger called out as he reentered the ship, Grag right behind him. Hearing no answer, he moved quickly across the ready-room and up the ladder.
He found Simon in the middeck galley, clutching the folded frame of a dining table chair and struggling to hold himself up. The old man was breathing hard; his skin was sallow, his forehead lightly beaded with sweat. He apparently knew where he was, because he raised his head to stare at Roger as he scrambled the rest of the way up the ladder, but when he tried to speak, all that came out was a dry whisper.
“Roger … sorry, I…”
Simon’s legs gave way beneath him. Even in the Moon’s lower gravity, they no longer had the strength to support him. Roger caught his old professor as he fell; he gently lowered him to the floor and tore open the collar of his shirt in an effort to help him breathe better.
“Grag! Find the med kit! I need the oxygen mask!” Roger didn’t look to see whether the robot was complying, but instead raised his ring to his mouth. “Elaine!” he snapped, praying that the base’s Anni node was active. “Get up here! Simon’s having a seizure!”
It was soon clear that Simon Wright was beyond their ability to save him. He lost consciousness by the time Grag located the oxygen mask. When Elaine returned to the ship, she found her husband huddled above the old man, cradling his head in his lap.
“Roger…,” she whispered.
“Go to the lab, make sure the suspension tank has been installed.” Roger’s voice was breaking, his eyes moist. “Take the drone with you. Grag and I will carry him in when you tell me you’re ready.”
“All right, but … are you sure we can do this? I mean, we’ve just arrived.”
“We have to try, don’t we? Hurry.”
V
The empty beaker on the lab bench weighed no more than a tenth of an ounce in lunar gravity, but it might just as well have been ten pounds. The three fingers of the drone’s right manipulator fumbled with the receptacle, their rubberized tips seeking a firm grip on the glass surface. The robot hand finally grasped the beaker and lifted it from the bench, but then the drone swung about too fast on its ductfans and the beaker slipped out of its grasp.
“Damn it!” Simon snapped.
Roger darted forward and grabbed the beaker before it shattered on the floor. “No, no, you’re doing fine,” he said patiently, straightening up to return it to the bench. “At least you didn’t break anything this time. You just need to learn how to coordinate your lateral movements with your—”
“I know what I have to do.” Simon Wright’s voice came from the speaker grill on the drone’s body … on Simon’s body, Roger silently reminded himself. A short burst of fuzz that had mystified both of them until they realized that this was an approximation of a sigh as delivered by a vocoder instead of a pair of lungs. “It’s just … oh hell, son, I never figured it would be so hard to get used to this.”
“Neither did I. Maybe we should have.” Roger took a seat on a nearby stool. “But look … Curt took his first steps just the other day, right? So it’s taken a little more than ten months for him to get to that point, and that’s even after living at one-sixth g for the last four. You’re having to relearn many of the same basic motor skills, and seventy-eight years of prior experience doesn’t mean much when you’ve got manipulators for hands and props for legs.”
“Perhaps, but…” Simon’s eyestalks shifted from Roger toward the two long metal caskets set side by side in the middle of the laboratory floor. “I’m still missing him … the old me, I mean.”
The two caskets, white and featureless, dully reflected the earthlight coming in through the lunaglass window in the ceiling high above. Connected to each other by cables, both were large enough for a person to lie supine. And indeed, each contained a body: one dead, the other in the process of being born.
The casket on the left was a modified version of the standard-issue suspension cell, the type commonly used in hospital emergency rooms to keep a dying person alive until he or she could either receive proper medical treatment or, if the condition was hopelessly terminal, euthanasia. This one contained Simon Wright’s body … or rather, his original body. It had been hastily placed there during the coronary seizure he’d suffered four months ago immediately after the Cornet touched down in Tycho Crater. As they’d already planned, Roger and Elaine allowed their old friend to pass away, but as soon as his heart stopped beating in the cell, they wheeled in the robosurgeon that, along with the rest of their equipment, they’d had shipped to the hidden lab for exactly this purpose.
Over the course of the next fourteen hours, the robosurgeon, under Elaine’s supervision, had opened Simon’s skull, carefully removed his brain, and placed it inside the self-contained life-support cell of the drone they’d brought with them on the Cornet … or rather, the Comet, as it was now called. Before leaving Earth, Elaine had spent months designing and building the machine as an intermediate step toward Simon Wright’s second life, with the ultimate goal of having him be able to assist her and Roger in the final steps of creating his replacement body. Two and a half hours later, Simon returned to consciousness as a cyborg, inhabiting an artificial body both radically different from yet far more useful than the form in which he’d been born.
That was just the first phase of the experiment.
The other casket was a bioclast, an apparatus specifically designed to build a full-size human body from scratch. Within this artificial womb, the individual Roger and Elaine had affectionately christened Otho—it occurred to them that the acronym derived from his scientific designation was as good a name as any—was being created.
Androids had usually been conceived as robots in human form, but the only part of Otho that was mechanical in nature was his carbon-fiber skeleton; the rest was a composite of low-stiffness polymers more resilient than human flesh. Suspended in a viscous goo of programmable nanites and organic compounds, a body was slowly being formed from the inside out. The blueprint for this new body was the old one; over the past four months, Simon Wright’s body had been slowly and methodically scanned at the molecular level by lasers, which then relayed their information to the bioclast. The second casket then used this information to gradually fashion the artificial replacement for the original, drawing upon biochemicals contained in a collection of attached tanks for the material needed to construct the new body, while also integrating the subtle improvements that would make the new body superior to the first one.
This was how Roger and Elaine intended to give Simon a second chance at life. His present existence was only meant to be a temporary measure, one that would sustain his brain—the one part of him that couldn’t be flawlessly duplicated—until his new body was ready. Once this was done, his brain would be scanned via high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging into Otho, and Simon Wright would return to the world of the living, this time in a body stronger and more adaptable than his original.
“I’m not sure why I even bother.” Simon’s ductfans tilt
ed slightly and he floated over to the two caskets. “By the time Otho’s ready, I’ll have figured out how to pick up that beaker without breaking it. All that work for nothing…”
“No. Not for nothing.” Roger folded his arms together. “You need to keep the motor skills active, or you’ll have an even tougher time adapting to your new body—to Otho—once you’ve been transplanted. And we also want to see if the cyborg form will work as well, as an option for … well, people who might want to have it instead.”
“I can’t imagine why.” Simon paused. “Well, maybe I can. I now have 360-degree peripheral vision, with no blind spots except directly beneath me. Ability to see in ultraviolet and infrared frequencies, too.” His manipulators moved up and down, giving him a crablike appearance. “Claws instead of hands, if I could just learn how to make them work. Aerial mobility, limited only by power supply and gravity—”
“You’d have a short range on Earth,” Roger admitted, “but here or on Mars, those fans work just fine. But it’s not just that. You don’t need to sleep, eat, or drink. You can directly access communications and data networks. You can even interface directly with the Comet if we retrofit the guidance system with a portal.” He shrugged. “I can name a few people who’d give a lot to have those things.”
“And I can name one person who’d like to enjoy a good meal again.”
“You will. Just be—”
“I’m not sure I’d count on that,” Elaine said.
She entered the main room from the stairway pushing Curt’s stroller. Although he’d delighted his parents just days earlier by taking his first steps, his mother still insisted on wheeling him about the lab. From his stroller, the child beamed and waved his tiny arms at the sight of his father.