He squeezed his eyes shut, driving back the panic. What if he was wrong? The clean-room dome was sealed and airtight, but by no means would it contain vigorous nanotech samples if they attempted to breach the walls. What if he was starting a chain reaction that would turn the planet into a ball of Drexler's infamous "gray goo"? If so, Parvu himself would be responsible for bringing a nanotech plague to Earth.
But the alien automata were already here! What good would it do to contain them inside the nanocore's defenses when someone like Kent Woodward could trot out with a snowshovel and dig up a dozen more samples out in the open air?
But those samples had been inert, activated only by Parvu's prototypes.
They might pose a different threat entirely.
However, he always had the x-ray burst inside the NIL as a last resort.
That would sterilize the hybrid automata, himself, and everything else. It gave him small comfort.
For now, Parvu had to see what the machines would do when they encountered the rat's bloodstream.
Old Gimp squirmed and made a high-pitched noise as Parvu injected it with the sample fluid. "Hold still, please," he told the rat. "This is what you were brought down here for, after all. Did you not read your contract?"
He put the rat back in its cage, left it in the clean-room, and glanced at the chronometer on the wall. Now he would have to be very conscious of time. He had nothing else to do but wait.
Parvu tried to sleep, but it didn't work.
Out of desperation, he decided to call his family, but they didn't answer. Checking the time, he realized that it was the middle of their day; his son would be off to work, the four grandchildren at school.
He very much wanted to call Erika at the moonbase, but he couldn't talk to her about this yet. He did not want to confess the incredible risk he was taking for her sake, until he could be sure it would pay off.
Parvu observed the rat without a break for the first hour, but when nothing seemed to be happening to it, he came back and checked only every fifteen minutes. He couldn't see any change in Old Gimp, but he kept watching, muttering to himself "Come on, come on!" as if urging whatever was going to happen to hurry.
But Parvu realized he didn't want to see anything happen. He wanted the rat to remain unharmed by the hybrid automata. He wanted the test to be safe so that he could determine how to help Erika. Any gross change in the rat's body structure would be a step in the wrong direction.
He found he could wait no longer than three hours. Parvu entered the clean-room again, this time not bothering to put on the full outfit, merely the lab smock and booties. What did it matter? The rat would have already contaminated the inside much more than what he was doing now, and Parvu had already let the hybrids out of their confinement. He had let the genie out of the bottle, and he had to pray that it was friendly.
Picking the rat out of the cage, he held Old Gimp in his hand. The rat seemed perfectly healthy. It didn't tremble or feel warm, but kept squirming in his grip as if it wanted to get down. Parvu stroked it behind the ears. He couldn't remember if the rat's tail had looked so pink and fresh before.
The rat squealed as Parvu stuck the hypodermic needle inside it again to withdraw a sample of blood. But Old Gimp seemed unperturbed when he put it back in the cage, as if it had grown used to being pricked and prodded.
He squirted the blood sample into the scanning optical microscope and called up displays on his screens as the apparatus went through its analysis sequence. The realtime images made him hold his breath in amazement.
The rat's blood cells looked like islands across the screen, and around them -- like the swarming canoes of invading islanders -- hybrid automata moved about. They had infiltrated the cells. They wandered in the protoplasm, traversed the serum between the cells. Larger substations had been constructed inside the cell nuclei, like control centers. The external units were tiny, of several different designs, like scouts, workers, programmers. They all had many arms vigorously moving, going about unfathomable tasks. The hybrids looked very different from the images Erika had sent him from the Sim-Mars lab. The automata were certainly no longer dormant.
And the rat did not seem harmed in the least.
Old Gimp scrabbled at the sides of its cage, making a racket. Parvu went over to it, grinning, and bent down to the rat's level. "We have done it, my friend. Though I am forced to confess that you did the most difficult part." He tapped his finger on the wires to stroke the side of the rat's head.
Old Gimp raised itself to hold onto the cage, looking up and around with pink eyes.
Parvu blinked twice. All of the rat's digits were intact. The two missing toes had grown back.
Parvu took one step backward. He knew he wasn't imagining this. Then his grin widened further. Of course! He had known all along about the theoretical reconstructive abilities of properly programmed nanotechnology.
Somehow, the sophisticated alien automata and his own prototypes had learned how to analyze the cellular structure of the rat, to determine what was missing and what was wrong -- and to fix it. It was just as Parvu had imagined, as he had dreamed.
To progress this far had seemed impossibly out of reach. He had never thought nanotechnology research would come to this point in his, or even Erika's, lifetime. All Parvu's doubts were suddenly buried under his sense of wonder.
He found he couldn't keep himself from chuckling. "We will have to find a new name for you, Old Gimp!"
He considered telling Erika this much, at least, so she might have hope, so she might imagine her mentor coming to the rescue after all. But he needed to try one more thing before he could let himself rest. This was incredible!
He took Old Gimp out again and held onto it with one hand. "I believe you are not going to like this, my friend," Parvu said, keeping his voice to a whisper. "But you may be surprised as much as I, okay?"
The knife was thin and delicate, used for trimming wires and scraping deposits from old circuit boards, but it did the job. Parvu brought it down swiftly onto the end of Old Gimp's naked pink tail.
The thin blade snapped and pinged off the lab table. Old Gimp squeaked and whirled in Parvu's grip, trying to bite him, but Parvu held onto the bunched muscles in the rat's back. About an inch of the end of the tail lay severed on the tabletop.
A tiny drop of thick red blood congealed on the end of the stump, but otherwise the tail did not bleed. Parvu had no idea whether that was normal or not. Lizards didn't bleed much when they shed their tails -- what about mammals?
In the conference room, the chimes signalling an outside transmission suddenly rang out.
Parvu grumbled to himself, looked down at the rat without knowing what to do. No one made social calls to the Nanotech Isolation Lab, so every transmission had to be considered important. Parvu thrust the rat back into its cage.
Perhaps the caller was Erika.
He closed the cage door as the transmission chimes rang out again. He forced himself to be careful, to fasten the cage door so that Old Gimp could not escape, and ran to the double exit doors.
The chimes rang a third and fourth time before Parvu managed to answer them. Panting, he stared at the screen as a spacesuited image filled the field of view. A gloved hand reached up to flip up the faceplate.
"Hey, doc!" Kent Woodward said. "Did I catch you napping or what?"
"Hello, Kent. I am very sorry. I was busy in the lab." Anxious to get back to his tests, he fidgeted. He wanted to waste no time on small talk, but he couldn't say anything, especially not to a hotshot like Kent. "And what can I help you with? Surely this is not a social call?"
"We're not allowed to make social calls, doc. This is a serious mission we're on here." He grinned. "I got another bunch of snowpack samples, like the last ones I brought over."
Surprised, Parvu didn't know what to say for several seconds. "But I did not request these samples."
"I was bored." Kent shrugged in the bulky spacesuit. "I'm afraid these won't be from quite
as undisturbed and pristine snow cover, though. That storm is really whipping things up."
"Storm? Ah, yes." The insulated plates showing the outside view displayed mostly Antarctic darkness, with white wind swirling across the landscape.
"You seem preoccupied, doc. Better watch out you don't get a rep as an absent-minded professor. Say, can you tell me what all this sample gathering is about, anyway?"
Parvu considered, then gave what he thought would be the best answer.
"Something for Erika. And I am making great progress." Kent would be excited by that -- surely, he must know of Erika's predicament and the quarantine of all those on Moonbase Columbus?
"Okay, uh, so I'm on my way over to drop these samples off. No time for a shower today though. Gotta get back to base before Bingham Grace has a bird.
I shouldn't be out in this storm, but hey -- there's dust storms on Mars, right? This is all part of the simulation! Good training!" He switched off before Parvu could say anything. He had no idea how far Kent had to travel to reach him, but he could not wait for the young man. He had to see what was happening to Old Gimp.
Returning to the clean-room, Parvu pulled on rubber gloves, but took no other precautions. The gloves were important to him to keep the automata from contaminating his hands, though even the poreless rubber would not stop the machines from spreading, if they were so inclined.
The hybrids were loose in the environment now, escaping from the rat's skin, from its exhaled breath, from the droplets of blood exposed to the air when Parvu had cut off its tail. He had probably inhaled them already.
He had taken outrageous chances. It was stupid and extraordinarily risky. Inexcusable. In fact, he had gone past the point where he could ever regain his professional ethics -- but that no longer mattered to him. He had gambled everything on his hybrids.
As he stared into the cage now, at the rat moving from corner to corner, as if looking for something to eat, and saw its clean pink tail newly restored, good as new -- he knew that the desperate gamble had paid off.
The hybrid automata worked. They were not a threat -- and now perhaps he could use them to save Erika. And the other contaminated people stranded on the moonbase, of course.
Many major questions remained -- could he somehow find a way to use these "good" automata to eradicate the dormant ones in Erika's body? Could he replace or reprogram the ones inside Erika so that they would repair and maintain her body, just as they were doing to Old Gimp? All of Drexler's visions of perfect health, protection from injuries, lack of aging, possible immortality, flashed through his mind. Erika and the moonbase inhabitants could be the first.
Such a fantastic breakthrough would turn everything around --
regardless of what the Daedalus construction was, the alien nanotechnology had shown a way to help all of humanity. This could change the world's paranoia about nanotechnology into appreciation for the magical cures fallen from heaven.
Parvu had to contact the moonbase and let Erika and everyone else know.
He had to give all the details to Maia Compton-Reasor, and Celeste McConnell, and Maurice Taylor. He had to make some sort of statement for the newsnets, find a careful way to describe what he had done without making it look like he had taken so many inexcusable chances.
By doing so, he had, perhaps, singlehandedly saved humanity.
Parvu felt like a schoolboy as he went to the teleconference room. He fidgeted in the chair and worked and reworked the words in his mind. He wondered what Erika's reaction would be. She had looked very frightened last time, her eyes sunken and withdrawn.
But Parvu could change her fear. He keyed in the proper access codes and commanded the optical transceivers to adjust to a different satellite pickup that would direct his communication to the moonbase. He had not used it in several days, keeping quiet and out of touch as he did his risky experiments. But now, when the optical transceivers tried to realign themselves, a message flashed on his screen. "ERROR -- ABORT."
Parvu stared at the screen and tried again, but the monitor displayed the same message. "Inquiry," he said, requesting the reason for the error.
"UNABLE TO DIRECT ANTENNA."
Parvu stared. He didn't know much about how to fix the equipment, but he had the manuals online and in hypertext. Parvu cancelled his command and then went back out to the living quarters. He would have to go outside and take a look first.
It would be tedious suiting up, but the wind and the Antarctic cold could do major damage to the human body in a very short time, especially in a storm like this. He didn't want to take chances, not now.
He opened the closet. Erika had left her spare parka inside. He felt a pang. Little landmines of memory like this kept popping up, small items she had forgotten, projects she had started but never finished. And she never would finish them, unless she came back home.
Parvu got the insulated flexible pants and tugged them over his own loose trousers then sealed them around his waist. He pulled on the parka cap, the gel-impregnated faceshield, then fitted the hood over his hair and sealed it tight against his cheeks. He tugged on his mittens and congratulated himself at finally having finished.
Outside, he took a deep breath of the knife-edged air, startled at how cold it was, and how fresh. He had not set foot outside the NIL for weeks, a month perhaps. Maybe not since he had bid Erika goodbye.
The steep crags bordering the NIL on two sides blocked off most of the wind, and jutting rock on the third side diverted it farther, all of which made the isolation laboratory nearly impossible to reach through overland long-distance helicopters. Now, the rough formations turned the wind into a vortex, blasting ice crystals and snow horizontally into an abrasive, stinging force that hissed against the hood of his parka.
Parvu stepped into the storm and sealed the NIL door behind him. Just the look of the blizzard made Parvu shiver, though none of the cold had penetrated his layers of insulation. He trudged across the snow and rock toward the optical transceivers.
A pearly white light from the snow lit up the landscape. The optical transceivers stood like skeletal silhouettes glistening as he approached. He saw clods of ice that had fallen to the ground -- and sheared-off scraps of metal.
Staring at the girders and the sheltered mirrors, Parvu needed only a moment to determine what had gone wrong. The storm had frozen up the hydraulic guiding mechanisms. Though every cranny had supposedly been protected from the onslaught of weather, the long barrage of the storm had penetrated even those defenses. When Parvu had attempted to adjust the pointing array from inside the NIL, something had snapped.
He would have to fix the mechanism before he could talk to anybody. He wasn't certain he could complete the repairs at all, and he certainly couldn't do it in this blizzard.
And what was worse, in his attempts to redirect the jammed pointing array, he had managed to move it out of alignment before the hydraulics had broken; now he couldn't even go back to his former position and talk with the others in the United Space Agency, or even the Mars practice base. Nobody would bother to check up on him until he had been silent for more than a week.
He rarely made contact with the outside more frequently than that.
The NIL was effectively incommunicado except for whatever short-range radio transmissions he could get, and those were useless at this distance with all the intervening rock outcroppings and the storm. He couldn't tell Erika his news. He couldn't find out what was happening to her. That would be the worst part. Damn all the other inconveniences!
He cursed and felt broken inside as he staggered back to the NIL. He pulled off his thick gloves, but otherwise remained suited up. He felt cold to the bone, though not from the weather. Now what was he going to do?
Parvu stood inside for several moments before he finally recognized the insistent hum of the warning beacon inside the communications room. Another message? Who could be sending a warning, and how could he receive it without his optical transceivers on-line?
He unsealed his parka and hurried into the other room, activating the RECEIVE switch. It was an automatic Mayday beacon on a regular radio frequency
-- from one of the Mars rover vehicles.
It must be Kent Woodward. Something had happened to him in the storm.
Parvu touched the controls again. It would be a broad-spectrum Mayday; he didn't need to find the exact frequency Kent was transmitting. His answering radio message would be distorted by all the rocks in the vicinity of the NIL, but it might get through. If Kent was close enough.
"Kent, is that you? Please respond. I have received your Mayday. How can I help?"
A loud burst of static came back over the speakers. Parvu was unused to communicating in such a crude way, to listen to weak voice transmissions without video. "Kent! Is that you?"
Another burst of static, enough that he knew someone must be trying to speak to him. Finally, deep within the buzzing static, he could make out words. "_Help ... crevasse_ ...."
"Kent! This is Dr. Parvu. I will attempt to help you, okay? Please hold on. I will do everything I possibly can, okay?"
He had no idea whether Kent could hear him or not. He switched off the RECEIVE, then had the computer home in on the automatic beacon. Perhaps he could send the coordinates to the Mars base camp and Kent's astronaut comrades could dispatch a rescue mission.
But Parvu realized he could not accomplish that. If Kent's signal could barely reach him, his own transmission could not penetrate the obstacles to reach the distant habitation modules. Without the optical transceivers, Parvu was out of touch; he could not even ask for help for Kent.
The computer spat back coordinates, projecting them on a topographical map of the area; there wasn't enough information for an exact triangulation of Kent's position. Parvu sat up, startled. Kent was somewhere on that line, still kilometers away from the NIL.
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