Jason Dvorak had made his name as a rule-breaking and trend-setting architect, from his days as a designer who had made his first million dollars before most people ever got their graduate degrees. Jason's trademark had been to make full use of the material properties of the new superstrong alloys and exotic materials created by microgravity processing. These materials were for the most part untried by architects and engineers other than for experimental tests, but their properties had been measured as fully as simpler materials.
Why not use them?
If concrete could be reinforced with strands of fiberglass, he had surmised, then replacing the fiberglass with single-strand diamond fibers extruded in orbit should make the concrete even stronger and more resilient.
Jason's "supercrete" provided unheard-of strength and flexibility, allowing builders to construct large-scale shapes and curves that had never before been possible. City skylines began to change as buildings were no longer bound to convention. To him, the Saint Louis Arch and the Golden Gate Bridge were trivial exercises.
After five years of fame and awards, though, Jason saw that other architects were imitating him, fine-tuning his innovative designs and building on his ideas. He found this flattering, of course. He had more work than he could personally handle anyway.
But Jason was happiest developing concepts, playing with ideas, brainstorming. He took on large or small projects that captured his imagination, but he had grown dissatisfied. He wanted something different, a new challenge. He got what he wanted by volunteering to redesign Moonbase Columbus.
Which brought him back to thoughts of Margaret and his three-year-old twins. He froze up again.
Lon Newellen lumbered through Jason's open cubicle door. Jason jumped out of his reverie, but Newellen fixed his attention on the holographic model rising from the holo-dais.
"Still staring at that thing?" He nodded toward the image. "Well, I've finally got something that might help us keep a better watch on it, at least at the nanolevel."
Jason noticed that Newellen held a gadget in his hand that looked like an old-fashioned slide projector, the type that had gone out of use in his kindergarten days. "What's that, Big Daddy?"
Newellen stepped forward, turning the device in his hands and looking down at it. "We got here a super-duper camera. A scanning optical microscope and a transmitter. We want to make a few dozen of these things, load them into the javelins, and shoot one out every few days or so, right into the middle of the building site."
He pointed the probe lens at Jason. "The javelin crunches into the nanocritter-infested regolith. The SOM in the camera here sends snapshots until the critters disassemble it. We can get a picture as often as we shoot off a probe, and we got a hundred of those moon-penetrators. Closest we can get to realtime monitoring, and -- " He pointed a pudgy finger at Jason.
"It's without the risk of returning any active samples. I gotta confess, Jase, those live ones over at Sim-Mars make me nervous."
Jason took the probe camera in his hands and turned it over. It was an impressive piece of slapped-together engineering. "Why are you worried about those samples? Dr. Trace is impeccably cautious, and she's got telepresent teams on Earth doublechecking everything she's doing."
"No matter how careful Erika is -- those things are smart." He indicated the hologram of the Daedalus construction to prove his point. "If anything does happen, it won't take too long to find out about it. We'll have just about enough time to say 'Oooops!'"
"I get your point. I just don't know what else I can do about it.
McConnell is on our backs to find out everything we can. Maybe with your cameras we can get a few steps farther."
"All right. I've got the shops making a couple dozen more. We'll send the first one out tomorrow." Newellen took his probe camera and left.
The image of Alexandre Eiffel scowled at Jason, as if trying to get him to concentrate on the problem at hand. At least he had managed to stop thinking about Margaret. And his children.
He couldn't ignore the nagging question he continually brushed aside --
had he ever really loved his wife? He always wrapped himself in his work, pushed himself to higher and higher successes. It had been socially required for him to be "happily married" to have a faithful companion who would help him endure all those tedious functions, to take care of the personal stuff he could never be bothered with.
But he had never felt any genuine passion for Margaret. Wasn't his passion used up in his work? Jason recognized echoes of himself in the way Erika Trace buried herself in the problem at hand. He had subconsciously criticized her for ignoring everyone else on the moonbase, not taking time to make friends. But Jason was probably guilty of the same things himself with his life on Earth.
Back to work! Alexandre Eiffel's expression seemed to be saying.
Always back to work.
On the holo-dais the bizarre Farside structure glinted up at him, projected in the best reconstruction the computer could fabricate. The pit in the crater wall showed no detail, just a black hole extending underground.
Outside, in a circle clearly delineated by waste heat, raw materials had been scavenged one molecule at a time. Three of the dipole antennas of the VLF
array had been disassembled. Diamond-webs extended to the regolith in nets and taut strands.
Stretching from the pit to the boundary of the hot zone, sloping gossamer arches spread out like the petals of the largest flower in the solar system. The arches did not stand upright, but reclined at an angle of 42
degrees, held in place by support girders made of the same glittering material. Other struts crisscrossed the main area of the "petals," the gaps between them gradually filling with a translucent material. Diamond foam? That was his best guess.
The structure had changed a great deal in the month since Waite, Lasserman, and Snow had died discovering it. But he still couldn't figure out a purpose or a pattern to the overall object.
"Slow dissolve," he muttered, keying up the initial image sent by Waite's rover, then having the holo-dais reconstruct the Daedalus site day by day as additional probes had observed from a distance. The result was a time-lapse slide show of the changes as billions of alien nanomachines assembled the structure from their built-in blueprints. The petals extended, the arches formed, the superstructure surrounding the pit took shape.
Jason tried to imagine what the thing could be, what the components were meant to represent. He could learn so much about the extraterrestrial builders if he could just unravel the nature of the artifact -- he could surmise how tall the alien race was, something about the gravity of their home world and the resources available there, not to mention a bit of their point of view -- but he had no final blueprint, only sketches.
Alexandre Gustave Eiffel offered no insight.
Jason let his mind drift in free association to see what he might come up with. It was like looking for an indistinct object out of the corner of his eye.
He had run CAD simulations, asking the computer to project what the structure would turn out to be. No luck. He didn't have enough imagination to figure it out for himself, and the computer had even less.
Jason sighed, waving his hand through the insubstantial image to dismiss it, then powered down the holo-dais. He rested his elbows on the slate surface of the dais and stared at the wall.
The Parvu-Trace scenario sounded likely to him, about the aliens sending a near-lightspeed nanotech expeditionary force to set up some kind of outpost here, but that didn't help him much. Even if that explanation was valid, the purpose of the thing remained a mystery. All this trouble, the huge structure, all the resources used seemed a bit much just for an alien fact-finding tour. An invasion force? Some kind of stronghold waiting for slower macroships to arrive? Jason didn't know and he needed to find out. All of Earth needed to find out.
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CHAPTER 13
ANTARCTICA: NANOTECHNOLOGY ISOLATION LABORATORY
Jordan Parvu stood
in the NIL's teleconferencing room alone. He had transferred the display screens from the main lab out to here so he could watch in relative comfort, without having to put on the confining clean-suit.
Working alone of late, he had grown more and more impatient with the tedium of his strict research protocol, all the discomfort and inconvenience it caused.
He no longer had to provide a perfect example for Erika.
Outside the lab, the Antarctic wind picked up like a frost giant breathing against the walls.
Parvu folded his brown hands in his lap, waiting as the computer searched. High-energy astrophysics was not his field, but he knew what he was looking for. His program scurried through the international database downlinked from satellites to the optical receivers outside the NIL. The next image appeared. Parvu stared at detector tracings taken from the Kuiper-3
airborne observatory, but he found no evidence of a shower of alien automata striking Earth's atmosphere.
"Next," he said to the computer.
For hours, he had been staring at images culled from high-energy cosmic ray experiments, selecting those with huge anomalies in their data. He focused on information from satellite observatories and high-altitude balloons, even from sensitive detectors on the lunar surface. The best images so far had been from the open bay of the aging Kuiper-3 observatory, a C-141 jet that could fly high enough to take astronomical measurements normally spoiled by the thick atmosphere.
He looked at the new display and shook his head again. "Next."
If the aliens had beamed their automata across the Galaxy in all directions, Parvu could not believe that they would hit the Moon and not manage to strike Earth. But if they had indeed reached Earth, why had they not manifested themselves, as they had on Daedalus? Had the automata burned up in the atmosphere? Not likely.
Parvu sighed. He needed another cup of tea.
That morning he had taken a break to check on the prototypes in the nanocore. They had continued studying their surroundings, cataloging the microstructure of various samples he squirted into the nutrient solution. One of the images the prototypes had transmitted back -- a blocky mosaic of an iron filing's cratered surface -- was going to be the cover illustration for an upcoming issue of ANALOG. Of course, photos of the Daedalus construction seemed to be preempting everything, and Erika kept discovering new things.
Now, alone in the NIL, Parvu played his music louder on the speakers to make the lab seem less quiet, less empty. He didn't like doing this work by himself. He liked to exchange ideas with someone as he puttered about doing menial tasks. His requests for a new assistant had been repeatedly brushed aside; he suspected it was because most of the qualified people did not want to work under such isolated conditions.
Parvu reclined in the chair in the teleconference room, watching the screen with varying interest. "Next. Next. Next." It wasn't difficult to go through the images quickly. He was searching for something blatant, something that could not be denied even by blindfolded conservatives.
By studying the rate of change in the Farside construction over the past month, Parvu extrapolated backward to determine when the automata must have arrived and started their assembly process. This gave him a window in time for when the stream of machines should have been passing through the solar system. Now he had to find the right kind of detector in the right place at the right time.
"Next." He rose half out of his seat as soon as the following image formed. "There!"
Something too big to be caused by a cosmic-ray shower, and much too small and too energetic to be a micrometeorite, had plowed across the detector like a cannonball through jello. Parvu could barely keep himself from jumping up and down.
With the timeframe now firmly narrowed down, Parvu searched through the remaining subset of candidates in the database. He found fifteen streaks, ranging from various types of detectors in different locations, over a two-day period. Almost certainly, these would have been dismissed as mere glitches by the researchers in question, flaws in the recording apparatus or the detectors themselves -- but Parvu knew better.
Fifteen data points! Stochastic analysis would be able to pinpoint the nanomachines' point of origin -- perhaps that was the most exciting part. They could find, or at least guess, the direction from which the explorers had come.
Back in his own quarters, with Beethoven's bright "Pastorale" playing in the background, Parvu finished the rest of his caviar without crackers, wishing he had Erika back with him to share it. Instead, he gave each of the rats an extra bit of food.
Celeste McConnell squinted her dark eyes, then blinked in surprise as she recognized him. "Why, Dr. Parvu! You don't often call directly, and you certainly don't use the secure line. What's up?" She turned and spoke to someone else, a man by his voice, that she would be 'just a minute.'
Parvu composed himself and folded his hands in front of him. "I have discovered something very disturbing to me," he said. "I thought you should be informed."
She frowned. Her small face looked as if it had been chiseled from marble. "Please, tell me."
"You may have wondered how the alien automata happened to travel such a vast distance to land on our Moon, yet managed to miss Earth, which is a much larger target?"
McConnell put two fingers in front of her lips. "That hadn't occurred to me! Do you think the aliens targeted our moon specifically? Why would they do that?"
"I have another explanation, though it is more troubling." he took a deep breath. "I submit that the alien automata did not, after all, miss Earth.
I will provide you with fifteen data points from various cosmic-ray detection experiments confirming that a shower of automata has indeed struck this planet. They are already here."
McConnell looked startled and sat up, straight-backed, away from the prime focus of the viewer.
Parvu spoke again before she could recover. "Now I have a request of you, Director McConnell. I know and you know that every inch of this planet is monitored by a Brilliant Eyes network. I also know that most of the pictures the Eyes take are merely archived unless someone has a reason to suspect something. Now, I suggest that you contact a team of spooks in the government's analysis section and make them scour every scrap of land, looking for something like the Daedalus construction here on Earth, okay?"
He drew in another deep breath and continued. "I doubt the automata would build anything in the ocean, mostly because of the currents -- and that eliminates three-quarters of the Earth. But there remain plenty of empty spots on mountain ranges, in rain forests, deserts, even here in Antarctica, where such a construction could go unnoticed for a long time."
McConnell nodded. She sounded shaken, but serious. "I agree, Dr. Parvu.
I'll get on it right away and let you know what we find."
She signed off abruptly. He knew he had rattled her. Good. The secure link disconnected, displaying an archival code number on the bottom where a recording of the conversation would be placed in the National Security Archives. Parvu had no doubt she would give him an honest answer -- if they were to find another construction, he would be the most likely one to study it anyway.
At 67, Parvu felt like a teenage girl constantly using the telephone.
He keyed in the proper coded sequence to contact the Mars simulation base in Antarctica, using the numbers both Celeste McConnell and Kent Woodward had given him. His own optical uplinks went to the designated satellite, overrode the artificial transmission delay algorithm, and he immediately reached the base.
The mission commander, Bingham Grace, was on monitor duty. He patched Parvu to Kent Woodward's rover, which had been deployed for the day on a routine geological survey mission.
"Hey, Doc Parvu!" Kent said upon recognizing him. His own expression was barely visible behind the spacesuit helmet. He flipped up the faceplate to talk better. Beside him, Gunther Mosby, intent on the simulation as ever, kept his suit sealed.
"Kent, how would you like to gather some samples for me? If your duty ro
ster permits? I have spoken to your commander, and this work has Director McConnell's approval."
Parvu already knew the answer. The Mars crew had many practice missions, scenarios they had followed a dozen times for their 300+ days in Antarctica. The primary goal of the mission was to make sure they could survive with nothing but their limited equipment and their own skills for the duration of the mission. They were allowed to conduct other useful scientific research in Antarctica while they were stationed there, and the astronauts generally loved the break from tedium.
"Sure!" Kent said, "What do you need and where do we get it?"
"I require random samples of the top layer of snowpack from as wide an area as you can cover. Please provide at least thirty different specimens."
"Am I looking for anything in particular?"
Parvu pursed his lips. "If I tell you what I am seeking, I cannot be assured of a random sample."
"Guess not."
It was a long shot, but the upper layers of the Antarctic snowpack had been little disturbed in the past several months, though the storm season would be coming soon.
"Doctor, I am concerned," Gunther Mosby broke in. "Are we trying to capture something? Did one of your samples escape from the lab?"
"No!" He chuckled "No, they are fully contained. Please, indulge me in my request."
He heard a burst of static as Kent Woodward bumped one of the radio controls. "Whoa! Didn't see that rock! I could have plunged us right into a crevasse, Gunther -- quit distracting me. I'll get your stuff, Dr. Parvu. I've been wanting to go on a road trip anyhow. We'll bring those samples over tomorrow."
"Kent will do it himself," Mosby said.
"Tomorrow, then," Parvu said. He heaved another sigh as he signed off.
Time would tell if his fears were well founded.
The pieces of Kent Woodward's spacesuit lay strewn about the floor of the NIL's living annex. It had taken him half an hour to remove every piece of the suit to get ready for a shower.
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