by Larry Niven
—DANIEL WEBSTER
NOVEMBER 2026 AD
“Littlemeade Operation Systems wants all six slots,” May Sherbourne Wyndham said.
“Good,” her father said. A launch with a full cargo had to be good. “What are they putting up?”
“Toby Glyer won’t say. They’re calling the package ‘Cornucopia.’ They don’t want us inspecting it.”
Gordon Wyndham said, “If the Crassen-Bodine Bill goes through…?”
“We’d all be pretty much out of business. Dad, Crassen-Bodine got through the Senate, but it won’t be law before summer.”
“Better call Warren Littlemeade and tell him he’s under the gun. Maybe he can speed things up.”
“I did call.” Her irritation showed. “I got Toby. I think Toby’s stalling.”
* * *
Wyndham Launch had joined the cheap launch sweepstakes after the Triple Crash, when Libertarians were elected to the White House and held the swing votes in Congress, and all seemed possible. Then the Old Guard double-teamed the Libertarians in the next off-year election, new laws were passed, and everything went toxic. Small businesses began to collapse. The first to go were based in space.
Wyndham Launch, operating out of Ecuador, survived but did not grow. They’d planned a versatile, dependable, air-breathing first-stage launcher and a variety of disposable second stages … and built two, and drawn up some glorious designs including a manned spaceplane.
Wyndham’s Getaway Special would lift a package into low Earth orbit, if the client could fit his package into any of the six slots in Wyndham’s Getaway Carousel. Littlemeade wanted all six slots: an entire orbiter package.
* * *
Through the long summer they waited.
Littlemeade Operation Systems delivered three of their six Cornucopia packages. One was a nuclear power plant, clearly labeled, attached to a fearsome stack of U.S. government agency permissions. May Wyndham recognized another package as a laser sender. Both were off-the-shelf and dirt cheap after Lockheed went into receivership. One package seemed to be just a can with a pop-open lid.
The modules sat in the Getaway Carousel in Wyndham’s warehouse, waiting. Littlemeade fell further and further behind schedule, and everyone lost money.
The Crassen-Bodine Bill passed the House and was made law. Its list of inspections and permissions would cripple most science experiments, particularly in biology and nanotechnology.
Littlemeade Operation Systems paid its penalties, collected its stored packages, and declared bankruptcy. The launch window passed to a new company, Watchstar, as part of the settlement.
Watchstar was based in Westralia, the country that had been the western half of Australia. Wyndham couldn’t find out anything more.
The following year, Watchstar turned in six packages labeled Briareus One through Six, under the same security measures, and occupying the same six slots, as Littlemeade’s Cornucopia cluster.
“Three of these look very familiar,” May said.
“We are lucky to get the business,” her father said. “As far as we’re concerned, anything named Watchstar must watch for Earth-grazing asteroids. Not even Crassen could object to that. That package, Briareus Two, that’s a telescope, isn’t it?”
“Might be. New design.”
No mention was made of nanotechnology. The Watchstar cluster was launched in November 2027.
III
Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
—GEORGE SMITH PATTON
JUNE 2052 AD
“So how is it back in the States?”
May slumped and pushed away the last of her dessert. “The beggars take plastic.”
He stared, thought, and finally said, “How?”
“With their phones. There’s a slot.”
“Beggars have phones?”
“It’s a civil right. Otherwise they couldn’t vote.”
“Jesus.”
“Toby, is this stuff inside me, making more of itself?”
“They can’t.”
May said, “Because that’s what scares … well, not me, of course, but the general public. Little tiny machines that make more of themselves. That’s what you were selling fifteen years ago, and that’s why they forced you out. And now you’re putting them in human bodies?”
He was nodding. “Voters, medical patients, investors, Congress—they’re all terrified of something that goes into a vein, through the blood, into the heart and liver and brain. May, that would be immortality! But I knew I couldn’t get backing. I’m not selling that. May, it’s hard to make something that can make a working copy of itself. This stuff, the D-1 Cure, it goes through the gut and out. It’s just visiting. And of course I’m shading the law, even here, but if my customers keep talking, maybe someday. Someday we’ll try the Briareus Project again.”
She said, “This seems a long way from what you were doing.”
“How much of that did you work out?”
“Your project ate our launch vehicle after launch. Ate it. That alone told us it was nanotech. Were you already thinking medicine?”
He didn’t answer.
“Can you talk about it now?”
Toby thought it over first, but from the beginning he was lost. He liked to talk. “I lost track of Briareus,” he said. “We lost communications even before the money ran out and the law shut us down. But it reached the asteroid! If the rest works as well as the first phase did, one day we’ll rebuild our Shuttles and go up for the wealth of the universe.”
“What if it doesn’t? Do you ever worry about what your lost project is doing with that asteroid?”
“I used to have nightmares. Haven’t had one in years.”
In the silence that followed, he could hear the TV in the bar announcing an upcoming bulletin about technology out of control. When he turned back from glaring in that direction, May said, “What’s wrong?”
“Der Spiegel 2 getting ready to whip up a mob,” he said. “I can translate.”
She glanced that way and saw the usual cartoon gear-and-lightning-bolt symbol. “I understand ‘quant suff’ in any language. Let’s leave.”
* * *
Outside, he spotted a cab, raised a hand to hail it, and cracked someone on the chin. “Ow! Sorry!” He held his hand and looked her over.
“I tried to warn you,” May said.
The tall woman said, “’Sokay.” Her coloring was Indian (feathers not dots), and she looked like a teenager, but dressed older. “You’re Dr. Glyer, right?”
She didn’t act like a self-righteous worldsaver, but he still paid wary attention to her hands. “Right, have we met?”
“No, William Connors showed me your picture.”
He stopped noticing the pain in his finger. “Good grief, is he still alive?”
Her eyes sparkled. “Oh my yes. Got a message for you.”
“How did you find me?”
“Somebody tracked your phone. I was in Bern for something anyway, so here I am.”
“Where is he these days?”
“I met him in Farmington last year, but he moves around a lot. You want the message?”
“Sure.”
Faster than he could react, she put an arm around his waist and a hand behind his neck, kissed him vigorously, and then pulled her face back slightly and murmured, “Wyoming.”
A bit dazed, he said, “You want your gum back?”
She let go, laughing. “Glad I didn’t take his bet. He said you’d keep your head enough to say something funny.”
“Is that the whole message? ’Wyoming’?”
“He said you’d figure out the rest. Bye.” She turned and strode down the street, owning it.
Toby stared after her for a few steps, then turned and looked at May.
She looked amused and interested and just a touch annoyed. “That happen to you a lot?”
“Hardly ever.”
“Who’s Wi
lliam Connors?”
“Artificer. He designed the atom sorter for Littlemeade’s first nanos. He left us over creative differences. Jesus, he’d be in his nineties now. I don’t know how he’s still going. He wasn’t that healthy when we met. Usually used a power chair.”
“Accident?”
“Poor choice of grandparents. Allergies, metabolic faults, and stuff that happened when the rest worked together. He could work maybe four hours a day without getting sick, but damn, what he accomplished in four hours!”
“Ladies’ man?”
“From a motor chair?”
May said, “Benjamin Franklin invented the rocking chair. I doubt it was to knit. And she acted like she knew what he could do in four hours. Good kisser?”
“How the hell would— Oh. Uh, yeah, she is.”
“Thought so. I think she’s had some work done. She’s older than she looks. Walking like that takes practice, I don’t care what music channels you watch. I do enjoy a challenge.”
IV
I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories.
—WASHINGTON IRVING
He didn’t remember being this good.
Eventually she broke the mood: she asked about what was working in her body.
Toby was delighted to lecture. “The core of the nano is a buckyball of the first order, a regular polygon made of sixty carbon atoms. There’s a big atom of … call it kryptonite, trapped inside.”
“Kryptonite? Toby, you don’t keep secrets well at all.”
“Just say it’s a big, heavy atom. It doesn’t react chemically. The buckyball holds it like a cage. The nano needs an anchor. A, a cornerstone. It doesn’t behave right, it flexes into the wrong shape, if the kryptonite atom isn’t in there. We grow the nanos in a sea of kryptonite, precise temperature and pressure. Ideal conditions, and we still get a few duds. We separate them by luring the working ones to a holding tank where there isn’t any kryptonite, and we watch. There’s never been a batch that reproduces then, but if there was, we’d dissolve it in fluorine and recycle. We do that with the duds.
“When the nanos go into your body, the only kryptonite around is in the nanos. A nano dies, another can, hypothetically, reproduce. Not all of them can manage, so they keep a census. After they pull the crap out of a diverticulum, they turn it loose and crawl downstream, so to speak. The crap leaves you the usual way. The dose moves in a slow wave down your gut, maintaining its numbers until it’s out. Except that you’ve got a reserve now. The first target was your appendix, and they’ll be crawling out of there for months.”
“What happens when, ah…”
“The dose finishes the tour, he said tactfully? It breaks down. Fast. In principle you could build a nano that has a coating to protect it from ambient oxygen, but you’d face the same problem they get when oxygen starts combining with the surface. Poor mobility. Like a kid wearing two snowsuits. With the Briareus nanos, more like three, the outer one made of sapphire. They are mostly aluminum.”
“So why don’t evolved— Never mind.”
Toby grinned. “Evolved microbes have had a billion years or more to adapt to the presence of oxygen, and you’ll kindly notice that they’re still not articulated. Those don’t sort, they just glom on to stuff whole and spit out what they don’t want.”
“So you made an atom sorter.”
“With Connors, yeah. Connors came up with the method, but he didn’t have the dexterity or training to do any of it himself. He called it a ‘scratch-n-sniff.’ Pop off an atom with a diamond chisel, poke it with photons to see what it will and won’t absorb, and now you know what element it is. Give it a shake to find its weight, pigeonhole it in the slot for that isotope, and pop off another atom. I’m waving my hands a lot here.”
“It sounds awfully slow.”
“It’s a lot faster than cells do it, and all the unstable nuclei end up in the power plant. That was one of our arguments. He didn’t want to use chemical power at all. Sunlight and radiation only. The D-1 breaks down cellulose for fuel, and I’m sure he’d have pointed out that the added sugars contribute to weight problems. Can’t have them touch fats; most of the brain is fat.”
“Explains why supermodels always look drifty. —You two argued a lot?”
“May, in five minutes the man could have made Mother Teresa start looking for a ruler. And that was his polite mode. I got to see him lose his temper with an ‘adviser’ an investor sent once. Guy was an MBA from Yale. After fifteen minutes I thought he was going to cry—the Yalie, I mean.”
May’s eyes were wide enough to be conspicuous even in the faint light. She’d dealt with Ivy Leaguers. “My God, what kind of language was he using?” she laughed.
“Not a bad word. Never raised his voice. Started by asking the man’s history as if checking for qualifications, asked a few more questions to draw out detail, and then delivered a little parable about Jesus going to work for the Roman Empire and using his abilities to keep Tiberius Caesar healthy. I wish I’d been recording. Even if I remembered the exact words, I still wouldn’t have the delivery.”
“What did the guy say?”
“Nothing. For the next couple of days. Then he made one suggestion, about a guide to keep joints from getting twisted. Connors just nodded at him, said, ‘That could work,’ and started drafting it on his screen. Guy phoned his boss and we got more money the next day.”
“Wow. —You don’t think he set that up, do you?”
“No. Manipulation wasn’t in his toolbox. He was terrible with people.”
“Didn’t understand them, huh?”
“Understood them perfectly. Didn’t enjoy it. He was smart, and had no patience with any kind of stupidity. The thing is, he was so smart that when he showed you any respect, it felt like you’d gotten a medal.”
“What finally made him leave?”
“Didn’t like the division method of making nanos. Too much wastage from errors. And that was after we’d gotten it down to three percent per stage. He wanted to build one set of nanos and have them link up for quality control, then copy themselves directly from the resource mass. Zero defects. The work to build those nanos would have taken us another year at least.”
Littlemeade had barely made their money stretch long enough to get launched. May said, “Turns out you were right.”
“Maybe. He had ideas for what we could do to keep the cash flowing. Selling power from nano arrays set in glass. Sifting mine tailings. He plowed every cent he had into Littlemeade. Came to me once to apologize for having to sell a few shares to buy better painkillers.”
“God. What did he do when you had to declare bankruptcy?”
“Phoned me to see if he could help. Geniuses can be a lot like kids. The better sort of kid. Impulsive, open, not many filters. React to everything. I once talked him out of disintegrating selected politicians as a method of social reform. I think I did. I haven’t noticed anything, anyway.”
“Were you looking?”
“Well … now and then.”
He couldn’t tell if she was amused or alarmed. “You said he didn’t build them, but you also gave him credit. What, exactly, was his job?”
“Mostly he sat around and thought about stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“What stuff you got? Practically all the man could do most days was think, and he thought about everything. Know what he did after he left? Advertising. Remember ‘The food babies ask for by name!’ and ‘Not available in all locations’? Those were his. Made more money than I could pay him.”
“How did he get his job at Littlemeade?”
Toby smiled. “You ever see The Man in the White Suit? Alec Guinness. Genius designs a monomolecular fiber, can’t get anyone to listen, gets a job packing and lifting at a textile factory, shows up in the lab one day delivering a piece of equipment nobody can figure out but him, and they ask him to stick around to help with it. Unlike the boss in the movie, I noticed him pretty quick, as
ked the gang some questions, and put him on salary. He’d been living on disability. First day on the payroll he came in and told me we needed to include three encrypted records of the finished product in every nano. Three different encryption methods, used to check each other. No errors. Damn near everything he came up with was completely obvious—after he said it.”
“Except ‘Wyoming.’” Yes, she was definitely alarmed.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. But after twenty-five years he suddenly sends a pretty girl to stick her tongue in your mouth? Why?”
“Why not?— Holy shit!”
V
And the plan of Zeus was being accomplished.
—HOMER
NOVEMBER 2027
The Wyndham disposable second stage made low Earth orbit without incident. Wyndham’s sensors on the orbiter watched Slots One, Two, Five, and Six open.
Something like a metal stork emerged from Slot Two and unfolded into a small reflecting telescope. Briareus One emerged like a shadowy bug, but the telescope’s unfolding dish obscured anything Wyndham’s cameras might have seen. From Briareus Five came a ruby twinkling, a laser signal aimed at Jarvis Island.
Wyndham’s people waited for packages to launch on springs or compressed air. That didn’t happen. The other slots remained closed.
May Sherbourne Wyndham phoned Toby Glyer, lately at Littlemeade, currently at Watchstar. “Toby! Any problem?”
May knew nothing of Watchstar’s man beyond his voice. Toby had a deep, oratorial voice: he sounded irritatingly like a radio preacher. “No problem so far. Good launch, May!” Today he sounded satisfied, even excited. “The Briareus modules aren’t supposed to separate. We booked with Wyndham because we want the disposable final stage.”
“Yes, but we want data from the flight recorders. Damn.” The signals were getting fuzzy. Wyndham’s people, four underpaid grad students, continued testing their receiving systems. May Wyndham watched while she spoke. “Two of your slots didn’t open—”
“One’s the nuclear power source. The other’s the master computer.”