Dvorak stood next to her, fidgeting. After some moments had passed, he finally said, "So what next?"
Erika looked up. Dvorak waited, not pressing the issue. She had not explained her idea to him, though she had thought it would be obvious from her actions. But then she realized that Jason Dvorak was an architect, not a microengineer. To someone not versed in research methods, Erika might have been performing some sort of witch-doctor rite.
Erika nodded to the holotank which, at this magnification, still showed the immense expanse of the milliwaldo as a cage for the nanocritters. "We can't come up with some sort of quick purge to get rid of all those nanocritters in our bodies. At least I can't think of anything. We need to find some other way of going about the problem. Come up with a new weapon."
Dvorak's forehead creased with concentration. "So why enclose these things in a box?"
Erika grinned. "These nanotech machines are not dumb. But they're not very smart either, not intuitive. They have a limited amount of intelligence, if you want to call it that, with a whole bunch of sophisticated programming.
Look at the Daedalus construction -- each one of the Controller substations must carry a complete blueprint of the whole structure! So, I'm hoping they're smart enough to take a hint, if I can make the hint clear to them."
"So what's the hint?"
"I've scrambled them with high-energy particles. Maybe that'll knock out some of their old programming and leave them open to suggestions. I'm trying to teach them a different type of behavior."
Erika poked a finger at the box made up of milliwaldoes. "Here's my rationale: We already know the Assemblers power themselves by using energy from breaking chemical bonds -- but they seem prohibited from using organic molecules. At least for now -- that's why we haven't been gobbled up. But if they can't break down a few molecules every minute, they'll go dormant."
Dvorak nodded and smiled. But he obviously didn't get it.
"So, I've trapped a lot of those buggers inside my cage here. They can't get out because of the electrostatic fence I put up. I added a grain of regolith to keep them happy for the time being. But once that runs out, and since there's no organic material to cause them to switch off, they start getting hungry."
"So what next?"
"We sit back and wait."
"For what?"
Exasperated that Dvorak still didn't understand, Erika said, "Take an overpopulation of rats in a box and throw in a piece of cheese. If there's not enough cheese to go around, the rats learn a new behavior pattern -- when they get hungry enough, they start eating each other."
Dvorak paced behind her chair, as if he were digesting the information.
Now that he had shown a healthy interest in her work, she looked at him in a different light. Before, Dvorak had come across as a know-it-all, insisting that she get him some answers. But under the circumstances, with the sudden pressure and the relative newness of his command, and with her coming up to the moonbase demanding special treatment, Erika could understand his reactions.
He didn't look as old as she had first thought either. Without the thinning spot on the top of his head, his dark curly hair and narrow face gave him a boyish appearance. The persistent upturn of his lips made him appear on the verge of breaking into a smile. Even the faint lines around his dark eyes didn't seem threatening....
Jason spoke softly. "So you're training some of these Assemblers to run amok?"
"Well, we can use them to attack the other Assemblers in the bloodstream. If Dr. Parvu's fail-safe theory is correct, they won't be able to do anything to the organic material in our bodies -- they won't have any other source of energy, besides other Assemblers."
Jason snorted. "I never thought I'd be saved by cannibals."
Erika didn't mention the other possibility, the nagging fear that had almost made her stop the experiment entirely: She could just as well be training the nanocritters to devour organic material. She had to hope that the restriction was fundamental to their programming and could not be overridden so easily. Otherwise, the moonbase would be disassembled after all.
Tense, Erika trembled as she moved the milliwaldo. Under high magnification from the scanning optical microscopes, her motion made the cage door look like a giant wall grinding slowly to one side.
Seconds later, a flurry of small, dark shapes wiggled past her field of view, moving like bullets into the test solution and beyond the field of view.
The rest of the cage was empty.
Jason's voice close behind her asked, "Well, did it work?"
Erika reached up to adjust the counter and ran a slow-motion replay in one of the holotank's cubes. "Watch."
The freed Assemblers sped out of the box, this time on a timescale a thousand times slower than what she had just observed. Something about them reminded her of a submicroscopic wolfpack. She counted only eleven of them --
out of the thousands she had corralled.
"Did it work?" Jason asked, worried.
Erika flopped back in her chair and ran a hand through her hair. Her hand started trembling again. But this time she was grinning. "Yeah, I think so. In fact, I'm pretty sure."
Jason remained unconvinced. "You don't sound excited."
Erika cracked a smile. Suddenly, she remembered Jordan Parvu hauling out his stash of caviar and celebrating their success with the crude prototypes in the NIL nanocore. "This is all the excitement you get. What am I supposed to do, get up and dance?"
On impulse she staggered to her feet. She hadn't stood up for hours, and even in the relatively low gravity the blood rushed from her head, making her feel dizzy. "If you insist." She grabbed Jason, lifted his arms and began a clumsy twirl around the lab.
Jason looked shocked but after a beat, he managed to take the lead in a pantomimed ballroom dance that brought Erika to the front of the lab without breaking anything. Once stopped, she held a hand to her mouth and giggled.
Jason looked bewildered.
Erika pushed back her hair and put out a hand to steady herself. She noticed her drawl coming back and tried to restrain it. "Ever since I came up here you all thought I was some sort of wizard called in to save the world.
And now I think I just did!" She stopped, at a loss for words.
Jason nodded with a bemused look. "I think I understand. I went through something like that when I first got here too. I never planned on being put in command of the moonbase. I was just the architect. And now Chu's back."
Erika jumped when Jason placed a hand on her elbow. He steered her back to the holotank. "But we're not cured yet. What do we do next?"
Erika ignored that question as she sat back down. "Why did you come out here to Sim-Mars, anyway? Everyone else -- "
"Is scared to death we're all going to die," Jason finished for her. He looked into her eyes and fell silent for a moment. He started to answer, hesitated, then said, "I thought you'd need some help, that's all. Like you said, everything is riding on your shoulders, and I figured you might appreciate another back to carry the load."
"But you're still the moonbase commander. What about your own responsibilities -- "
Jason smiled wanly. "Bernard Chu is doing very well, thank you. But that's beside the point right now. You need to save us." He scooted his own chair closer to hers.
Erika blinked. "All right, let me take some blood. I'll inject the, uh,
'nanocannibals' into the sample. We'll use that as a first test."
Jason started rolling up the sleeve of his powder-blue jumpsuit. "I hope you take blood better than you dance!"
She gave the test half an hour longer to run than she had originally intended. This allowed more time for complications to set in, and it permitted her to record a full report of her procedures creating the modified Destroyers.
She preferred her nickname of 'nanocannibals,' but with the other tag of 'nanocritter,' her peers on Earth would say she was being too flippant with a crucial problem. Prudence dictated that she follow at least some semb
lance of professional demeanor.
Jason peered over her shoulder as she prepared the solution of nanocannibals and displayed the results. "What's up?"
"Look for yourself. It worked. Every last one of those suckers is gone."
"You mean the nanomachines in my blood?"
"At least the ones in your blood sample. And the nanocannibals don't seem to have damaged any of the blood cells at all."
Jason beamed with relief, then frowned. "What about the last nanocannibal? They all ate each other, right? So the king of the mountain has to be left."
Erika thought for a moment. "Starved to death. Nothing else to eat, you know, and it's prohibited from breaking organic material. We hope."
Jason gestured toward the walls of the Sim-Mars lab. "I still don't understand why they didn't go after the non-organic stuff all around us."
"Why should they? Their behavior was modified to only go after other Destroyers, the only other 'food' they had. We weeded out all the other ones.
The important thing is that it worked. Now I've got to test it on something that matters. We've got to see if it'll work in the human body."
"Don't we need to run some more tests first? Look for side effects, doublecheck the procedure -- "
Erika flipped her hair behind her ear and frowned at him. "Look, every one of us has a time bomb inside. What if the Controllers decide to circumvent the restriction on organic material? The Assemblers are still there -- what if they decide to alter our DNA somehow? I'm not waiting around for that to happen, especially when I have something that might work."
"Point taken." Jason started to roll his sleeve back up again. "I've got nothing to lose. Let's get to it."
Erika shook her head as she eyed the hypodermic, now filled with a second generation of nanocannibals. The solution looked perfectly clear to her naked eye, but the liquid teemed with reprogrammed Destroyers, already devouring each other. "You're too important, Jason. You're the moonbase commander. I've already done everything I can."
"Don't be stupid. You can always try something different. Nobody else has your background. You can't give up."
Erika said, "I'm not giving up. I'm being practical."
As Jason took a step toward her, Erika considered warding him off with the filled hypodermic; but the thought nearly made her laugh. She thought of all those scenes from old plague movies, where the brilliant doctor comes up with a risky serum to cure the disease and decides to test it on himself first.
Before, Erika had always found those scenes ridiculous. But as Jason held out his hand to her, she quickly jabbed her arm and squeezed the hypo.
"Ouch!"
It wouldn't really matter if she hit an artery or just muscle tissue.
The nanocritters were inside her body. She could just as well have smeared the nutrient solution on her skin.
She felt Jason's arms around her. "Sit down, you idiot." He helped her to her seat.
"At least I'm an academically trained idiot," she said. Sitting back, she felt suddenly woozy. "Whatever's happening is going on a lot faster than it should."
"What does it feel like?" Jason's face swam in and out of focus. He held a hand to her forehead. "You're cool, but damp."
"Great. It's like they just got turned loose in a free-for-all banquet.
Good God, what's going on?"
Erika fought to keep herself conscious. She felt dizzy, and the edges of her sight seemed to collapse inward, into a brown tunnel. Jason's voice became a buzz, growing louder, as if all she could hear was the chittering of millions of nanocannibals voraciously working their way through her body.
Chaotic, psychedelic nightmares faded into bursts of static and twinkling lights. When she opened her eyes, she felt as if she were falling, dissolving .... She reached out to steady herself and found that she was sliding from a padded couch. Back at ... Moonbase Columbus?
Jason Dvorak's face appeared, wearing a ridiculous grin. "It's alive, Igor!"
"What?" Her mouth was dry, cottony, and tasted terrible. "Who's Igor?"
"It's about time you woke up. You've been out five hours."
Erika tried to struggle up from the couch, but he firmly pushed her back. "What happened to me?"
"Well, it worked -- or at least everyone thinks it did. Once I got you on the couch, I managed to get hold of Compton-Reasor on Earth and Bernard Chu here. They led me through the procedure for keeping track of your vitals, and it looks like you were completely purged of the nanocannibals within fifteen minutes. I brought you back to Columbus for monitoring."
"What about Jordan? Dr. Parvu? Does he know what I did?"
He shook his head. "He's been offline, but the weathersats showed a big storm over McMurdo Sound. Don't worry. We'll get back in touch with him." He squeezed her shoulder.
"You haven't heard the best news: remember how the Assemblers must have originally been transmitted to us, by touch? Well, your nanocannibals have done the same thing -- Bernard Chu tested my blood, and he can't find any trace," he grimaced at the pun, "I mean any evidence, of Assemblers there either. Transmitted through the skin, the nanocannibals are working their way through everyone who's infected."
Erika interrupted with a feeble wave. "You said I was out for a few hours. Weren't you affected yourself? What happened?"
"I was dizzy and feverish for a few minutes, but it passed. Chu thinks you suffered more from fatigue than from Destroyers."
Erika ran a tongue over her teeth. They felt as if they were covered with fur. "Could I get some water?" After she drank, she said, "You know, I'm not even sure what I did to create those things."
"Taylor's group is working to come up with a few theories. They'll probably milk dozens of journal articles out of it."
Erika sighed. "It still seems too easy."
Jason's expression grew more serious. "It's not over yet. The Agency thinks it was too easy themselves. They're not even going to consider letting us back to Earth for quite a while."
Erika sat up too fast and felt dizzy again. "Why not? If all of us check out clean, what are they worried about?"
"The Daedalus construction," he said. "They still don't know what it is, and they're terrified. It looks almost finished and they're afraid we've all been ... well, possessed by the aliens. They don't know what the nanomachine infestation did to us. And neither do we."
--------
CHAPTER 24
ANTARCTICA -- NANOTECHNOLOGY ISOLATION LAB
When Kent Woodward woke up, he did so fully and completely, as if he was a machine suddenly switched on. With a blink of his eyes, the bright surroundings came to him like a snapshot projected on a dark screen. He felt no fatigue, no soreness, only a persistent buzzing in his head, a singing thunderstorm of white noise chewing at the back of his thoughts.
He blinked his eyes again and sat up. His entire body felt as if it were crawling with the pins-and-needles sensation of having circulation cut off during a deep sleep. Every one of Kent's nerve endings screamed.
He found himself in a clean white room, filled with glass surfaces, porcelain, stainless steel. A UFO came down and kidnapped me! he thought. He saw the work tables, a line of stereoscreen and flatscreen workstations, various pieces of analytical hardware. Rising through the center of the room like some high-tech Roman column stood a transparent cylinder filled with milky liquid; metal conduits and conduction strips lined the walls of the cylinder. A control bank sat at the bottom.
On one of the worktables rested a wire-mesh cage that held a white lab rat. Oblivious to Kent, the rat scuttled around and sniffed its food dish.
Along the ceiling he noticed cameras staring at him.
Everything clicked together at once. He was in the Nanotech Isolation Lab. Alone.
The next chunk of information dropped into his mind. He remembered the blizzard, the unseen crevasse, the crash of the rover. He had been barely conscious, bleeding. Pain crushed him from the inside out, and impossible cold gnawed at him.
He had
known he was going to die, but he sent out a distress call anyway. Someone, a garbled voice, had answered. But nobody could have rescued him. Not in that storm, not so far away, not with his injuries. He hadn't had a chance!
"So, Kent, I observe that you are awake. Welcome back to us!"
Turning, he saw Jordan Parvu standing on the other side of the observation windows. Parvu fluttered his hands in the fidgety way that indicated how anxious he was. Relief washed over Kent as he saw the old scientist. The scenario did make sense now, at least a little bit. Everything was under control.
He remembered getting the extra set of snow samples for Parvu, though the doctor hadn't asked for them. Kent had done that on his own initiative, sure. He was bored. He wanted something to do -- and gathering samples gave him a legitimate reason to poke around. He had ignored the increasing storm.
Right now, even he had to admit it was a pretty stupid idea.
"So tell me, please -- how do you feel?" Parvu placed his hands against the outer glass, as if to get a better view ... or to steady himself.
How do you feel? That was a rather inane question. Oh, I'm fine. How about yourself? But then Kent began to wonder. He clearly recalled the pain deep inside as he tried to work the rover controls ... the blood, the grinding ache of broken bones.
Now he felt no pain at all, not even the dull throb of healing -- only the fizzing, crawly sensation running through his entire body, inside and out.
Kent noticed a dozen or so RF electrode pads on his body, wirelessly transmitting his vital signs to sequencers and computer monitoring systems.
What had Dr. Parvu done to him?
He recalled Gunther Mosby's superstitious fear of the NIL and nanotechnology research -- and he wasn't sure he wanted to know.
With fear gnawing his stomach, Parvu watched from the other side of the window, looking into the clean-room of the NIL. The walls appeared too thin, the observation window too weak to hold anything back. It seemed a very questionable membrane to protect him from the invisibly boiling environment inside.
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