Asking Gunther Mosby to navigate was equivalent to asking an ostrich to fly. But he didn't complain. He wanted to be there when they found Kent. If they found him at all.
The Antarctic night made the search eerie, like a ritual under a full Moon. The locator homed in on the last known position of the rover, leading them to where Kent should have been waiting. The astronauts had all been briefed time and again about survival measures. The Mars rover contained plenty of resources. Gunther imagined finding his friend next to the stalled vehicle, hunching over some jury-rigged heater, drinking reconstituted coffee and waiting for them to rescue him. Gunther tried not to think of other, more realistic, scenarios.
The rover's speed picked up; Grace was anxious to get the bad news over with. But when they lurched over an unseen outcropping of rock, the commander slowed their pace. "We're not going to join him at the bottom of that crevasse," he said. "Take it easy."
Gunther swallowed. "Kent would have had me say, 'Fuckin'-A,' I believe."
Commander Grace nodded his helmet slowly. "Yes, that's probably what he would have said."
When they came around a jagged ridge near the location of the lost rover, they suddenly began to receive the distress signal more clearly. Then the rover picked up speed, hurrying the last half kilometer.
Reaching the target point, Commander Grace brought the vehicle to a halt, then switched on the intense broadbeam searchlights to augment the headlights. The rover hissed and sighed as it settled onto its stabilizers.
Gunther didn't wait for Grace to secure the vehicle before he activated the sequence to open the external doors. He stepped down on snow that crunched under his boots. Though the winds had scoured the landscape with ice particles, very little new snow had actually fallen. The hardened surface near the edge of the crevasse had probably been there for decades, with only the topmost layer redistributed by seasonal storms.
Kent was down there somewhere, deep in the jaws of the crevasse.
Gunther peered down into the glaring splash of spotlights on the crevasse walls. He could see the twisted wreck of Kent's rover. Loose snow had settled onto the broken hull, obscuring the United Space Agency logo but showing jagged tears where split metal plates had popped loose.
His stomach sank, tempered by amazement that Kent had not been killed outright in the plunge, that he had survived long enough to activate the distress call and voice a few words into the radio.
Beside him, Bingham Grace spoke through the suit radio. "We need to go down there. Just to make sure." Gunther turned to see that the commander held a cable in his hand; one end had already been clipped to the front of the rover. "Do you want to go down, or should I?" Grace asked.
"Me." Gunther took the cable in his gloved hand, looped it around his waist and clipped it to the safety-line on the back of his suit -- just the way they had learned to do it in astronaut training. He pulled the cable taut, then backed toward the edge of the crevasse.
The yellow-white glare of the rover's spotlights washed over him. He saw Bingham Grace's silhouette giving him the high sign. Gunther gestured back to him, then eased himself over the lip of the ice shelf.
He felt as if he were falling into a giant jagged mouth. He grabbed the cable more tightly and walked down the rough wall, letting himself drop a few feet at a time. The spotlights glared down, drowning out the stars above. He kept his mind focused on the descent, finding each foothold, securing his weight before seeking another place to set his boot. It seemed a long way down, a long way to fall.
His boots struck the metal side of the rover. He caught his balance, eased his weight onto the wreck, then released the cable. Somehow, he expected Kent to jump out of the rover and wave. "Hey, what took you guys so long?" But he heard only his own muffled breathing in the stillness of the crevasse.
"Anything yet?" Grace's voice came over the suit radio.
"I am working my way forward now." Gunther stopped at the front. The windshield had been smashed out. The pilot compartment was empty. "Commander!
He is not here."
"What?" Grace's silhouette came a step closer to the top of the ledge ten meters above.
Gunther made an exaggerated gesture down into the rover. "The pilot compartment is empty. The windshield has been smashed out." Shining his broadbeam light into the dark interior, he saw the bent control panels, the sharp edges that would have stabbed Kent as he sat in the pilot seat. He doublechecked for the tangle of a frozen body crammed in a corner, hidden by shadows, but the rover cabin was empty. He saw blood on some of the sharp protrusions.
"Where did he go?" Grace asked.
Gunther stood up outside of the vehicle and turned around, playing his beam on the opposite wall. Something glinted.
"I see pitons. He must have managed to get himself out." Gunther edged his way over to the far wall of the crevasse. The pitons had been pounded into the ice wall at scattered intervals, as if Kent had not been able to think straight. Two of them had been pulled loose during the climb. Gunther's beam fell on patches of blood rubbed against the wall.
"He made it to the top. He was bleeding badly. It has been hours -- he could barely walk, and he climbed right out into that terrible storm."
"Shit," Bingham Grace muttered.
Gunther reeled with disbelief and despair. He felt cold inside his suit, though the heaters were working to full capacity. He remembered his astronaut training with Kent, sharing dorm quarters with him, listening to the other man's constant bragging about his plans for Mars.
On one of the first days at the training center, when Gunther had commented how much he enjoyed the cafeteria food they were being served, Kent had made a sour face, then changed to his 'friendly and helpful' expression.
"Why don't you tell the server, then? I'm sure the cook would like to hear all the compliments he can get."
"But I do not know what to say -- "
"_Ka-ka_. That's the American term for it. It means 'delicious.' I'll help you with your colloquialisms. Just go up there and tell the server that
'This food is ka-ka!' Really!"
Gunther had thanked him for his help -- but the server had snarled at him when he repeated Kent's phrase. Gunther had not found out until weeks later how Kent had been pulling his leg.
Kent always did things like that, but somehow Gunther could not bring himself to resent his partner. Especially not now. Injured, Kent must have crawled to the top of the crevasse and stumbled out into the middle of a blizzard. Gunther knew that they would never find him.
"Come on back up," Commander Grace said.
Gunther grabbed the cable and began the ascent. When he reached the top, he turned and looked across the flat ocean of snow and ice and rock, lit by stars and the rover's searchlights. Somewhere out there, frozen, covered by snow, lay his friend. He recalled seeing the mummified carcasses of seals trapped where they had died a century before. The bodies of Robert Falcon Scott's disastrous expedition to Antarctica had remained preserved for months before another group had found them at their last camp.
Perhaps Kent Woodward would join them in folklore.
Bingham Grace opened his faceplate to the still Antarctic air. This shocked Gunther; the commander had always been the most strict adherent to the simulated nature of the mission, always dressing and behaving as if they were actually in the Martian environment. The mission had been his entire life.
Now, he stood with his helmet open, his face drowned in the shadows left by the rover's bright lights.
"Commander?"
Bingham Grace turned to him. Gunther saw a stunned, defeated look on the man's normally florid face. "It's over."
Gunther thought he was talking about the death of Kent, but the commander continued. "This has ended our mission. With the Moon quarantined, and the Sim-Mars base contaminated, and now the loss of one of our crewmembers
-- that alone will spark months of investigative hearings. We are finished. We will never set foot on Mars ... not us, at least."
--------
CHAPTER 23
SIM-MARS
Erika woke with a start. As she opened her eyes, she felt as if she were falling. She reached out to steady herself, and discovered that she was sliding off her chair in a dreamlike, low-gravity topple. Her stomach lurched as she suddenly knew that the disorientation, the buzzing in her head, the vertigo was all from the nanocritters inside her body. They had finally decided to take her apart. She was dissolving! She struggled until the black tatters of sleep finally cleared from her mind.
It took a second until everything came back to her. She was on the Moon, in the Sim-Mars lab module. She must have dozed off while keeping watch on the interminable experiments. They needed some drastic action to get rid of the infection, and it was up to her. And she didn't have the courage, or the imagination, to figure out what she needed to do.
Erika glanced around the lab, blinking away the blur from her exhaustion. In the center of the module, the steel column holding the sterilization apparatus ran straight up from the floor; the holotank was built into the cylinder to save space. Four isolation chambers of varying sizes were set symmetrically throughout the room. She had tests running in two of them, with tandem telepresence verification tests in their counterparts.
Ordinarily, she should have sterilized the Sim-Mars lab two hours ago and requested a new sample from the Farside crater. But it just didn't make sense to waste an important sample now. The nanomachines were already loose, contaminating everyone and everything on Columbus -- what more access could they have? She just had to gamble now.
Especially if what Parvu had suggested was true. Had the Disassemblers really gone into a "fail-safe" mode because they had encountered a living organism? Had they mutated, perhaps, into something dormant ... until something turned them on again? Some follow-up signal from the faceless aliens? And what other evidence did Parvu have, data he was reluctant to share with her?
Back at Columbus, Jason Dvorak continued to study the growing structure, attempting to second-guess what the nanocritters were building, hoping to find some clues to understand the purpose behind the aliens. By extension, that might provide some insight into how Erika could defeat the infestation in their own bodies. But so far, none of it had helped.
Fighting the stiffness and aches of a bad sleep, Erika picked up her cup of cold coffee from the control panel. Dumping it into the reclamation sink, she prepared a new cup from the dwindling supplies and studied the isolation tank experiments. Still nothing exciting, nothing helpful.
Inside Erika's body, her life was ticking away, dependent on microscopic machines. Even if the aliens had taken enormous precautions, with the sheer number of automata present, surely one of the robot memories would get zapped by a stray cosmic ray and "flip a bit," the electrical equivalent of a hiccup. And if that just happened to switch off the fail-safe mode....
Erika had to understand it before she could consider any solutions. She had to know what the Assemblers were doing in her bloodstream, besides multiplying. Were they gathering data -- for later? The nanotech Controllers were running the show, giving their Assembler servants every instruction.
A thought came into her head. If the Controllers can reprogram the nanocritters ... if a cosmic ray might scramble their instructions ... why can't I? Because she didn't have the slightest idea where to start.
She mulled over the thought. Each nanocritter has a memory like that of an ancient supercomputer. Altogether, they were very clever, very sophisticated. They had the capacity, but did they have the flexibility, the intelligence to understand?
What if there was a way to reprogram the existing Assemblers, to direct them not to replicate themselves? The population of nanocritters would exist in steady state.
What if she took the next step? What if she managed to program Assemblers to seek out other Assemblers, destroy them, then shut themselves down when they could find no other prey?
A new and improved multi-purpose Assembler! Yes, that would be wonderful. But then it would really be a Destroyer, wouldn't it? It would cleanse her bloodstream, purge the entire moonbase of the nanotech infestation.
Erika grew excited at the prospect. The only problem was how to go about reprogramming the nanocritters. She had not learned the smallest detail about the operating system resident in the submicroscopic memory cube of each Assembler, nor in the larger controlling stations. Erika herself was no expert in machine languages, though she knew a little about basic programming.
Earth computers had become so intuitive and user-friendly that no one needed to know the nitty gritty details of code. You could tell the computer what you wanted, and it usually accomplished the task. You didn't have to dissect its circuitry to add a new program. And these nanocritters were vastly more complicated and sophisticated.
Erika stopped, flushed with excitement. She set her mouth, feeling as if she was back in grad school again and had stumbled onto the solution of her thesis problem. Except now, the stakes were much higher.
She almost had it. Her muscles were tense, cramping as she hunched over the holoscreen, gripping the microwaldo controls. She was afraid to move, afraid to do anything that might shatter the spell.
Reprogramming the Assemblers.
Instead of trying to induce an electronic, or an even more cumbersome chemical change, among the nanocritters, why couldn't she take advantage of their heuristic programming? If the Assemblers "learned" to adapt to their environment, why couldn't she modify that environment to produce the results she wanted?
First she had to scramble them, "reset" their rigid programming into something that might be amenable to modification. She had taken a large sample of the nanocritters and bombarded them with radiation -- neutrons, charged particles -- enough to destroy many of them, and alter the rest. Leave them open to suggestion.
She would try to ... train them. Modify their behavior. Teach them what to do. She couldn't think of any other way to describe it.
She had huge numbers of the nanomachines to work with. Surely some of them would turn out the way she wanted. If she provided the right stimuli, some of them might get the hint.
Erika flipped through her online archives, skimming over how B.F.
Skinner had set the wheels of behaviorism into motion back at Harvard years ago. As part of their heuristic behavior, the Assemblers had shown a remarkable tendency to learn, so all she had to do now was shape their environment to get the intended response, nudge their behavior in the direction she wanted.
The intended response would be to switch the Assemblers into a
"Destroyer" mode. But how to do it eluded her. What could she do to encourage them to kill each other?
A voice from the holotank jarred her out of her thoughts. "Dr. Trace?"
A message window appeared in the holotank, overriding her background images.
"Erika? This is Jason Dvorak."
"What?" She was surprised at the curtness of her response, but the irritation dug at her. I almost had it! As she turned to the holotank she pushed back her hair. She realized she must look haggard, a mess. "Yes, what is it?"
Dvorak was in a spacesuit, his helmet off. His image bounced as if he were riding in a vehicle. He looked apologetic. "Sorry if I disturbed you -- "
"It's all right," she lied. "How can I help you?"
"I'm about ten minutes away from Sim-Mars. I've decided to come over and help you."
Ten minutes? Her instant reaction was that she didn't want him bothering her right now. She fought the urge to switch him off. Erika had no need for distractions. Now that she felt close to a solution, Dvorak thought it was tourist season. She frowned. But if he was offering to help, then she would put him to work.
"Thanks for the warning. Ten minutes." She smiled s
weetly, turning on the Southern charm that made everyone think she was a bimbo. Right. "Will you need any help getting in?"
He gave the hint of a smile. "No. I know the way."
After Dvorak switched off, Erika caught a glimpse of her reflection on the metallic surface of the sterilization cylinder. No use being completely uncivil, she thought. For no other reason than common courtesy, slipped to the bathroom cubicle. And after washing her face, she decided to brush her hair.
"Hand me that milli, please," she said to him, not looking over her shoulder. When he didn't respond, she said, "The milliwaldo glove, over there." Erika nodded to the set of gloves that hung by the experimental table.
"Sure." Dvorak stood in front of the gloves. They were lined up in descending sequence, color coded with embossed words: DECA, MILLI, MICRO.
Remotely connected to the waldoes, each glove controlled any movement of the tiny devices. Dvorak pulled a yellow glove and handed it to Erika.
"Thanks," she grunted. He genuinely seemed to want to help, to be supportive and offer whatever assistance he could give.
She used the glove to guide an array of milliwaldoes against each other, overlapping their splayed fingers to form an enclosed chamber. One by one she placed the milliwaldoes around the enclosure until she had formed a tiny cage only a millimeter in size. Closed, the claws of the milliwaldoes made bars too close-set for any of the nanocritters to push through. A high voltage, electrostatic charge along the surface would keep the nanomachines from disassembling the equipment itself.
Satisfied that her box was sealed and escape-proof, she zoomed the holotank view down by three orders of magnitude. The tiny cage now appeared to be an impenetrable wall.
Still wearing the milliwaldo glove to hold the cage in place, Erika used the microwaldo on her other hand to round up the Assemblers she had earlier bombarded with high energy radiation. They looked like a horde of bubbling gnats as she herded them into the cage, then pushed a grain of regolith in after them. Sealing the box with another milliwaldo, she locked the waldoes in place before leaning back with a sigh.
Assemblers of Infinity Page 20