by Larry Niven
“Oh.”
“May, our contract doesn’t say we’re swapping data.”
The signals were dying.
“We don’t have to share,” May said. “What we’re getting wouldn’t be of interest to you anyway. It just tells us if our vehicle is healthy. Dammit—”
“We don’t share either,” Toby Glyer said.
May realized she’d missed the point. “No, you sure don’t, but we don’t need to know anything except that launch was successful. And we pay penalties if your package doesn’t reenter within three years. The Crassen-Bodine Law classes Watchstar as an orbital hazard.”
“The mass will be out of orbit on schedule.”
“Is your package all right?”
“We won’t know that for a while. Years, really. But it’s in place. Well done, May.”
* * *
Mode One, the first set of instructions, was already in place.
Slot One opened. Briareus One crawled out, tasted, and began to eat. The operator was a meter long and looked like a traditional child’s toy, boxy and crude.
When Briareus One reached Wyndham Launch Systems’ antenna it kept eating. From the residue it built a copy of itself at half linear scale. The proto-nanobot—call it a hemibot—gave birth and immediately started another infant.
The firstborn, Briareus One-a, crawled back into Slot One. The protective hatch closed over it.
Briareus One-b clung to the hull, tasted, and began to eat.
Briareus One’s children were half its length, an eighth its mass. They were rather specialized. They avoided the carousel and Watchstar’s payload package because of the coating that had been added at Watchstar Labs. They ground everything else they came across into fine powder, processed what they could, then pushed the residue into the hole they had made in the orbiter’s empty propane tank. They absorbed and digested only the aluminum alloy hull structure.
They needed trace elements that weren’t in the Wyndham hull. They tasted at Briareus Six as if it were a salt lick. Briareus Six held less than a ton of additives, enough to get through Phases One and Two. After that …
They call it an experiment because it can fail.
Briareus One’s children were already making copies of themselves at half scale. A third and fourth generation began to nibble at the hull. Then they all ran out of aluminum alloy.
Now there was nothing left of the orbiter save a propane tank full of dust, the carousel, and a crawling mass of nanites in a wide range of sizes.
Briareus One and its children stopped moving.
Their children ate Briareus One.
Each of their descendants ate whatever was four times their linear size, sixty-four times their mass, or larger. Each made about five hundred half-sized, one-eighth-mass copies of themselves, losing a little mass-energy with every iteration.
Briareus One’s descendants—the operators—came to less than ten billion atoms apiece by the time anything smaller couldn’t function. When the operators could no longer sense anything to eat, they went quiet.
* * *
The telescope, Briareus Two, fed its signals into Briareus Three.
Briareus Three was never to open. That was the Master Computer, which issued the instructions for the operators.
A thousand orbits after Briareus One was released—fifteen hundred hours—nothing was left of the launch vehicle but a propane tank full of metallic powder, the Watchstar package and its six slots, and 4*1018 tiny Briareus One operators. The Master Computer waited two thousand hours, then sent its first, preset instruction.
Expand the telescope dish.
Four quintillion operators consumed their quintillion grandparents, digested their bodies, and spun the doped aluminum onto the rim of the telescope dish. It grew from the rim out. In a thousand hours most of the mass of the launcher’s second stage had become a vast silver mirror.
What showed from the ground was a bright satellite growing brighter. To any decent ground-based telescope, the Briareus Project seemed an orbiting telescope bigger than the Hubble.
* * *
The first time she got a look at him he was huckstering on TV. “The dinosaurs didn’t have a space program,” Toby Glyer told the media. “We do. We must! Briareus will watch for Earth-grazing objects until NASA can be refunded.”
The media lost interest rapidly. Movies about giant meteoroid impacts were more numerous than the Big Monkey movies of the 1950s. It was a dead topic.
* * *
Via its hugely expanded telescope, the Master Computer found Luna and Sol and Earth, oriented itself, and found Target One.
Hubble’s pictures hadn’t been this clear. Target One was an oblong of iron and rock, three kilometers long, double-lobed, evidently cooled from magma to solid before its spin could pull it completely apart. It was an Earth grazer, but not much of a threat. Two chances in a thousand that it could strike the Earth in 11,441 AD, or 18,861, or 23,309.
The Master Computer watched, and shaped orbits for a best fit, and watched further to test its mapping. Then it formed its second instruction.
Build a linear motor.
Issues of strength and balance arose. Briareus Three hadn’t been designed to manage every decision down to the primary level—nothing ever had. It directed operators to link together for on-the-spot processing, all part of the plan.
* * *
That fantastic bright object in the sky began to dim. Earth-based telescopes saw no more than that. The brilliant dish still obscured all other detail.
The Briareus telescope was failing. Toby Glyer could not be reached for comment.
* * *
Four quintillion Briareus One operators nibbled the telescope dish from the rim inward. It was still large when they stopped. What they were building projected from the orbiter’s remaining mass like a wasp’s stinger. Over the next eleven days it grew longer and longer. To the best telescopes it would seem a scratch in the lens, but it was two kilometers long when the dust that had been part of a Wyndham Launch orbiter began to flow down the spine.
Electromagnetic fields, fed by the nuclear power plant, sent the dust outward at an exhaust velocity far beyond that of any chemical rocket.
Briareus was in motion.
* * *
Toby Glyer was interviewed by Rory Dennett of CNN, at an unspecified location in Peru. The nice part about the media holding themselves above the law was that the practice occasionally protected people who deserved it. “Briareus was always an engineering project. Our purpose is not only to spy out the next potential Dinosaur Killer, but to deal with it.
“Over the next six years, Briareus will use the Moon and then Venus for gravity assists. A last boost will place the package in range of Target One. If all goes as planned, our Briareus One device will then mine the asteroid to build a linear motor and move the asteroid from its current Earth-threatening course.
“Our financial backers prefer to remain anonymous, but their motives must surely be clear. This is for our grandchildren’s grandchildren. Target One was not a near-term threat, but such things can pop up with a warning time of weeks or months. The life of our planet depends on our knowing how to move a Dinosaur Killer.
“There is the possibility of profit, but I can’t discuss the details. If every part of this endeavor succeeds except that we go broke, we will surely have done well.”
“Mr. Glyer.” That was Dennett. “I notice that you haven’t used the term ’nanotechnology.’”
“No, as a courtesy to the president. It makes him uneasy.”
“What about you? Are you aware of the ‘gray goo’ scenario? Nanites might lose their programming, multiply without limit and eat everything—”
“—Until the whole world has turned to ‘gray goo. Scary as hell. Made a good movie.”
CNN cut to a feed with Dr. Wade Curtis, self-exiled to Perth when he’d exceeded the federal age limit on health care. Dennett must have expected a vintage sci-fi writer to help out with the scary
stories.
Curtis grinned around his moustache. “Yes, I’ve heard the ‘gray goo’ fable. I imagine when our ancestors began using fire, some shaman tried to aggrandize himself by wailing about the risk of it going out of control and burning up the entire world.”
Dennett: “But that’d be ridiculous.”
Curtis: “Of course it’s ridiculous. Most things don’t burn, and fire has to have the right circumstances to keep going even when there’s fuel. And fire is simple. Nanobots aren’t. And the stuff that can be made into nanobots has to meet standards that are a hell of a lot more exacting than ‘find some dry wood.’”
* * *
Briareus ran out of reaction mass not long after passing the Moon.
Now most of the orbiter was gone; but the carousel was intact, and an expanded telescope, a nuclear motor, a laser signaling system, Briareus One’s first daughter in Slot One, and four quintillion machines, each under three thousand atoms long in any dimension. Slot Six was nearly empty of the trace elements the nanites needed to reproduce; but their reproduction phase had passed.
With nothing to send down the linear motor, the nanites went to work again. They spun their aluminum work mass into an expanded telescope dish. When the Master Computer had rechecked Briareus’s course, they spun again. The telescope dish become something more, a vast frail sheet only a few atoms thick: a mirror kilometers across. From Earth it seemed a brightly twinkling star.
All things considered, the Briareus Project was a fantastic success. Every part of it was experimental. It was history’s first use of nanotech in space, third orbiting telescope, first use of a traveling linear motor, fourth working solar sail … and, technically, first piloted slingshot maneuver.
But no kind of money was flowing back.
OCTOBER 2029
When Toby Glyer spoke in private, he sounded like this: “If you would plan for years, build a house. If you would plan for decades, plant an orchard. If you would plan for lifetimes, found a university.”
“Sounds Oriental,” May Wyndham said. “Not standard business procedure. Toby, where are you getting your money?”
“We’re planning for lifetimes.”
“Nobody thinks that way.”
They were both in late middle age, speaking through an encryption program. Maybe Toby was in Cuba and maybe he wasn’t. Nobody cared where May was.
Toby said, “Science fiction writers do.”
“Is that—”
“Science fiction fans do.”
“But they’re traditionally poor. Wait, now. Tom Clancy? Terry Pratchett? Not Heinlein. This can’t be as old as Heinlein.”
“Well, May, he might not have been up to speed on nanotech, but don’t count on it, and he certainly knew about asteroids and kinetic energy.”
“The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress? Toby, are you guessing? Do you even know?”
“Some.”
VI
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
—JOHN KEATS
JUNE 2052
May stared as Toby dressed at high speed. “Where are you going?”
“To my clinic. Both of us. We need to be scanned for nanos. Wyoming Knott, from The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. ‘Wye Knott’? I think the crazy sonofabitch put a genetic cleanup nano into us. It was one of his ideas. Fix damaged DNA, make you young again, copy over bad genes with good ones from the other chromosome, except a Y chromosome would look like a really damaged X chromosome, so it turns it into an X. Not ‘Why not,’ Y,” he drew the letter in the air, “not. Without it everybody turns into a teenage girl!”
“The messenger!”
“Bingo!” He checked his bag.
May had seldom dressed quickly after sex, and never after good sex. First time for everything.
In the elevator, he said, “It can’t have kicked in yet. We’d be feverish, like a really bad flu.”
“And I already had this year’s flu early. —Toby, is there a chance we’re overreacting?”
“Yes. Want to go back to bed?”
“No. —Well, eventually.” She smiled, but she was being brave.
There were four men in anonymous gray suits getting out of cars as they came out the door. One said, “Tobias Glyer?”
“Who are you?”
The initial answer was the four men grabbing them both. “U.S. Marshals. We have a warrant for your extradition, Glyer,” the leader went on, flashing something that might have been a badge. He reached inside Toby’s jacket and pulled out a comfortably shabby billfold.
It wasn’t Toby’s. He’d never seen it before.
As the marshal went through it, he said, “Plane tickets to Ecuador? Making a run for it? Little late, aren’t you?” Neither Toby nor May spoke. They’d both grown up knowing the Stewart Lesson: Never speak to Feds about anything. “Quite a bankroll here— Aw, crap. Sorry, Doctor. We’re looking for a dangerous fugitive. Are you all right?” The one with Toby’s bag returned it.
“I’ve been better,” May said.
“I do apologize, ma’am. This is a desperate man we’re after. A companion might have been a hostage, or an accomplice.”
“What’d he do?” Toby said, in character. Some character, anyway. He’d have felt better knowing who he was supposed to be.
“Terrorist. Good evening.” The four went inside.
Toby waited until they were in a cab before going through his pockets to find out who the hell he was now. “Passport says, ‘Bernard Fox, MD.’ She swapped the wallet. And my phone. I never even noticed.”
“You might not have noticed a toe being amputated,” she observed.
“Well—”
“Where you headed?” said the driver. Cab drivers spoke English everywhere Toby had been except America.
At this point they’d be insane to go to his clinic. Toby was looking at the plane tickets, and the documents clipped to them. “The Olympics.”
“I only go as far as Bern-Belp. Licensing rules.”
He was unprepared for the hysterical laughter his little joke got.
* * *
Neither of them expected paperwork trouble at the airport, in the circumstances, and they were right. Naturally May had her passport with her at all times. It was still the same one. Nobody was looking for October Kroft.
Not yet, anyway.
Their flight was in another two hours. They were brought to the VIP lounge, and taken from there to a private room that not just any common VIP was allowed into. “I wonder who Bernard Fox is supposed to be?” May said as the room’s servant departed, after fetching them slippers.
“I wonder why the Soylents are coming after me after waiting so long,” Toby said. He looked uneasily at the room’s screen. “If I ran an airport, I’d monitor that.”
“Does the phone work?”
“I’d also— Oh, the new one. Good idea.” He opened it. “No messages. Huh.”
“He may think you figured it all out right away. We cut it pretty close.”
“No, he made allowances for other people not getting stuff … which makes me suspicious of the timing of those marshals.”
“You think they were fake?”
“Hadn’t thought of that. I was wondering if he was the one who tipped them off. It would mean my apartment is bugged.”
“Would he do that?”
“I am goddamned if I know. I would have said no, but the coincidence is…”
“Are you okay?”
He’d gone online and Lilithed his name, and the first hit was about Target One. The asteroid had become next to invisible years before, when light collectors finished covering its surface, but something had been spotted displaying a plume of fluorescing oxygen, and decelerating. If it kept up its thrust it would match course with Earth in a matter of weeks.
The hard part was sifting through the media hysteria.
The issue of getting a full body scan seemed fairly unimportant at this point.
* * *
The tickets were for a
private cabin for six on an Aero Transcielo Rukh. The Rukh was the biggest aircraft ever built. May should know; she’d built it, to carry a hybrid orbiter to the edge of space. It had been sold and downgraded from full hypersonic capability after Wyndham’s clients went toes-up, but the thing still worked. The private attendant—who also looked like a teenage Indian—brought them drinks and left them alone. Toby sipped his, looked at May, and said, “Grape soda and apple juice, pinch of salt.”
“Eeuchh.”
“Barbarian. How’s yours?”
She tasted it. “Long Island Iced Tea with a twist of lime peel. We’re still being managed.”
“Yeah. GISS.”
“Huh?”
“‘Gosh, I’m So Surprised.’ Fannish term.”
“I never heard it.”
“We used it all the time at Littlemeade. What now, I wonder?”
His phone was playing a tune from the Planets Symphony. He turned the speaker on.
“This message is being sent from the plane,” said a voice that was almost unfamiliar. It sounded sort of like Connors, but healthy. “If you’re hearing it, the diversions worked long enough. Sorry I was so slow on the uptake, I’d stopped watching the rock years ago. Only noticed what was going on there when the computers showed paper on you. Then today they moved quite suddenly. You’ll be met in Quito. I’ll see you as soon as I can, but I’ve got other stuff going on there. Meanwhile, enjoy the Olympiad. Be seeing you. —And Bernard Fox played Dr. Bombay in the original show.” The phone shut off.
Bewitched had had a revival in the twenties. They looked at each other. “The witch doctor,” May said.
“Could have been worse,” Toby said. “Could have been Jonathan Harris.”
“Ouch. —Hang on. That was Connors, right?”
“As far as I could tell, yes.”
“So he’s into the U.S. attorney general’s system. It flagged the warrant on you.”
“Oh Christ,” Toby said, and dialed rapidly.
“What?” said May.
He held up a hand and said, “Wait.” He typed at high speed, hit Send, and said, “I thought I’d better tell the Factory Team to divvy up the petty cash and get to shelter. Mass mailing. We made contingency plans.” He hove a sigh. “Yeah, hacking the Feds sounds like something he’d do if he could. Didn’t know he could, though.”