He recalled the precautions taken before the Apollo 10 shot. Tom Stafford, one of the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants astronauts back in the 1960s, had been assigned to pilot a lunar module to within nine kilometers of the Moon's surface. Travelling across space from Earth to the Moon to be brought up short by only nine kilometers sounded a bit too tempting, or that's what the administrators thought. How could they be sure Stafford wouldn't suffer "transmission difficulties" and "accidentally" land the craft after all, becoming the first human to set down on the Moon?
So before liftoff, knowing just how cocky some astronauts were, NASA officials had taken Stafford to the contractors who had built the lunar module. There, Stafford was personally shown how much the module weighed, how much fuel it carried. They took him step-by-step through all the calculations that proved the module was absolutely, positively a thousand pounds too heavy to leave the lunar surface if he broke orders and landed the craft. No matter how much he might want to land, Stafford would know in his gut that the lunar module would never fly again if he did.
Chu felt the same way now. He touched on the idea of trying to clean out the fuel tank, patch it and try to rocket off the Moon, just to spite the Agency -- but he too, was no fool.
Chu tore the plastic-covered note from the panel. The people stranded on the base had been bitter before. This would be like another slap in the face. See what Earth thinks about you now? He stuffed the note in his patch before opening the doors to the hold below him.
At least they had plenty of food.
The Columbus inhabitants greeted the flatbed transport and supplies with little enthusiasm, but they helped bring in the packets of food and medicine. Inside the receiving bay, Cyndi Salito pawed through a heap of dehydrated foodstuff, then scowled. "What, no dairy products? What the hell are they expecting us to do, live on calcium pills?"
She handed off a bag of the stuff to Bryan Zimmerman, who was standing next to her. A line of crewmen extended along the length of the inner corridor, helping to stuff the extra supplies into overhead nets and storage cubicles.
Zimmerman answered her in a deadpan voice. "They want us to keep our cholesterol down. It's bad for the arteries. Otherwise, we might die of a heart attack."
Salito's eyes widened at the remark. Bernard Chu held back a laugh. It was the first humorous thing he had ever heard the shuttle pilot say. If it had indeed been meant as a joke.
Once the supplies were stowed, Chu walked among the people, offering words of encouragement, feeling like the moonbase commander again. Jason Dvorak couldn't be bothered to be there, instead spending his time back over at the Sim-Mars lab. What did Erika Trace have left to do over there anyway?
Weren't they all purged of their contamination?
As he patted Salito on the back, she stared grimly at him. Most of the crew spoke in low murmurs to each other, if at all. Depression had descended again -- quite a difference from just a few days ago, when Erika Trace had announced her "cure" for the alien infestation. Everyone should be out dancing on the regolith right now, but they -- like himself -- did not trust the Agency to lift the quarantine anytime soon, and most of them wanted to flee home now.
Chu would have to provide a good example, strong leadership. Perhaps he would even take official command of the moonbase from Dvorak. Somehow, he doubted Dvorak would even mind.
Chu had been forced to follow orders and go up to the Collins. Just as Dvorak had been thrust into his place. Now, Dvorak must realize that the only right thing to do was to give up his unwanted command here. Leave it in more experienced hands. It was time to push whatever buttons he could with Celeste McConnell -- her friendship seemed to be fading fast.
He squeezed past Newellen and the others in the tunnel and made his way to the control center. "Someone bring up Agency Headquarters. I need to speak with Director McConnell."
The technician -- someone Chu did not recognize, probably one of the new people brought in on the last rotation -- turned, a question written on his face.
"Well?" Chu asked.
The tech searched for words. "It's eight o'clock in the evening there.
Twenty hundred hours."
"Well, then try her at home. You do have the access code, don't you? If not, I'll give it to you myself."
Five minutes passed before the tech could track her down. Celeste wore a neon sweatsuit, and tendrils of damp hair stuck to her forehead. In the background, her two big dogs barked and played with each other. She gave Chu a bland look that was tight at the lips. She nodded into the stereochip. "Hello, Bernard. Is everything going all right?"
"We just unloaded the supply shuttle, Celeste."
"We were waiting for your confirmation. Shouldn't you have called through the official line to local Mission Control? I assume that everything came through in good shape."
"Except for the fuel tanks." He made his voice sound bewildered and sarcastic at the same time. "Someone using your name played a terrible joke on us. They wrote us a letter, typed your name on the bottom, saying they sabotaged the fuel tanks so that the shuttle is useless now. Now, I know you wouldn't have had anything to do with such an action -- "
She set her mouth, showing impatience. "You know why we had to do that, Bernard. Same thing as with the Collins. We can't take chances, no matter how many tests show that you are not infected. Give it a little time for confirmation. Dr. Taylor at MIT has publicly said that there is a small chance that the infestation has only grown dormant, like a retrovirus. No one knows what might stimulate the nanomachines. And only one of them needs to get to Earth, maybe brought down by some hot-dog hero from the moonbase. I don't want to take that risk."
"If you can't trust the people you sent up here, who can you trust, Celeste? You hand-picked each and every one of us."
She moved her head back and forth. "You know I'm sorry. But until we can find out exactly what is going on, and what that damned thing is on Daedalus, we ...." She stopped herself in mid-sentence and straightened. "I won't get into that any further. Is there anything else I can help you with?"
"No compromise on the quarantine?"
"None. That is closed for discussion. For now. If the situation changes, we will reconsider."
"If the situation changes! How can it change? We're all clean."
"Bernard. Stop it."
He stared at her. "Is there anything we can do then?"
She looked momentarily surprised. It was the only chink in her armor he had seen for some time now. "Your orders remain unchanged: take any action you think necessary to ensure the survival of your crew -- without jeopardizing Earth, of course."
Chu studied her for a long time. The light delay added to the effect that she was staying still. More sweat stood out on her forehead than he had seen a moment ago.
He saw in front of him the woman that had saved his life onboard the Grissom. Whatever her sixth sense was, he owed his life to it. He should know better than to argue with it.
"Okay then -- give me command back of Moonbase Columbus."
She pursed her lips. "Bernard -- "
"You heard me, Celeste. I'm practically in charge now. Just make it official."
She waited several beats, finally lowering her eyes. "All right. I was considering that anyway. I'll inform Dvorak."
Chu nodded. Celeste had pulled him out of this job just to let him be a station keeper, but that had had its place too. Who else could have discovered Erika Trace's nanotech infestation, if he himself had not been doing biomedical studies on the Collins? He had brought the microgravity research up there, started taking baseline data. If he had not caught Erika's infection right there, the alien plague would be spreading like fire through all of humanity, making AIDS look like a minor cold in comparison.
With all that Celeste had done, with all of her proven insight, he knew he shouldn't be so angry at her. She just might be the one person responsible for ensuring the survival of mankind.
But as Chu switched off, he still cursed her for
abandoning them.
--------
CHAPTER 26
ANTARCTICA -- NANOTECHNOLOGY ISOLATION LAB
Parvu watched Kent Woodward pace inside the NIL's sealed clean-room. So far Kent had not bothered to acknowledge the scientist's presence.
Old Gimp rode on Kent's shoulder. The young man had been stroking the rat obsessively for the past day. The lab videocameras recorded every move he made.
Parvu had crammed as much food as he could into the autoclave and told Kent he had only to open the other side if he wanted something to eat. He hoped the food would last at least a week, because once the autoclave's interior had been exposed to the air swarming with automata, he did not want to open it to the outside again. Perhaps by the time Kent's food ran out, he would have some ideas, some solutions.
But so far Kent had eaten nothing.
The young astronaut suddenly whirled to face Parvu. The rat on his shoulder scrabbled to keep its grip on the smooth cloth of Kent's jumpsuit.
"So why don't you just turn this nanoshit inside me off, doc? What's wrong with your design?"
Parvu fought down an urge to flee and put his hands on his hips. "I do not know what your question means, Kent." He kept his voice calm. Any conversation at all had to be helpful at this point.
After Kent had removed his RF electrodes, Parvu had no way of knowing anything about the other man's health. Despite Parvu's cajoling, Kent refused to cooperate. And Parvu needed that data if he would ever be able to interpret any information to help Erika, even if Kent did not care about her.
Kent sat down in his chair and took the rat in his hands, scratching its ears. "You sold McConnell this grand plan of seeding Mars with nanomachines to liberate the oxygen and water trapped in the rocks. And once they had done their job, you were going to transmit a satellite signal that would shut down all the devices. Well, your nanomachines have done their work inside me. It's finished. So shut them down!"
Kent stood up, livid now. He was visibly trembling all over, as if he were about to go into convulsions. The rat dropped to the floor and scrambled into hiding under the chair.
"Kent, I did not design these hybrids," Parvu said. "My own technology is not sophisticated enough to program them -- we were just ... lucky, you and I, that the hybrids were intuitive enough to understand your cell structure, your injuries. I do not know how to turn them off. I wish I did."
"Then you need some help," Kent said.
"I have no other assistants."
"Have you requested any more? Now that I'm stuck here, maybe the Agency will be a bit more interested."
Parvu shook his head. "More likely they will decide to sterilize the entire NIL, with you and me inside it, as an unacceptable threat. They will fly over with bombs and think they are safe when it is all over."
"So you still haven't told anybody I'm here, have you?"
"My optical transmitter remains out of alignment." Parvu felt as if he were being interrogated.
"Haven't you even tried to fix it yet? The storm's been over for two days! What have you been sitting around here for?"
"I have been monitoring you." Annoyance crept into his voice, making him sound stern and paternal. "You are the most important problem at the moment."
"Well I'm fine now. Go out and fix the transmitter."
Parvu tapped his fingers against the glass. "I will make a bargain with you, Kent. If you put the RF electrodes back on your body, then I can be assured of continued monitoring, even while I am outside. Without the data only you can provide, I can find no way to help anybody, including yourself."
"Go to hell."
Parvu waited a moment. "I need that data ... and you need to be free again, okay? How much trouble is that for you?"
Kent clenched his hands together. Parvu sighed. It was no use. The young astronaut was too headstrong to agree.
As he turned to go, Kent slowly shuffled to the work table, bent over, and picked up one of the discarded electrodes that lay against a table leg.
Grudgingly, he stuck it to his chest. "All right already." He searched around for another electrode. "I know how to put these on. Just go outside and fix the damned thing."
Two hours later, inside the NIL's teleconference room, Parvu fidgeted like a teenager about to ask someone to the prom. After replacing the hydraulic cables and working with the computer to iterate and realign the optical uplink outside, he had showered, changed his clothes, combed his steel-gray hair, made sure his appearance was professional. Now he could talk to Erika again. Now he could communicate with the rest of the world.
Now he had to break the news of exactly what he had done.
The computer keyed in the sequence, requesting a connect.
Parvu swallowed the lump in his throat. After his break in communications, he should have called the simulated Mars base camp to inform Bingham Grace that Kent was not dead after all. Or he should have contacted his wife Sinda, to let her know that he was all right. He should have gotten in touch with United Space Agency headquarters, to see if they had sent any urgent instructions, since they were bound to order him to shut down the NIL.
Everything was falling to pieces.
Instead, what Parvu chose to do first -- what he needed to do first --
was contact Erika Trace.
When the Moonbase Columbus receivers accepted his transmission and relayed it to the Sim-Mars substation, the screen flashed to tell him he was waiting for someone to answer. When the image of Erika resolved itself, she appeared thinner, tired, harried -- but she smiled upon recognizing him.
"Jordan!" she cried. "We've been trying to reach you for days, but you've been offline. What happened?"
Parvu blinked, momentarily at a loss for words. "We had a storm here.
Some of the cables from the optical uplinks became fouled. I just got them fixed." He smiled. "But what has happened to you? I too have received no information in days."
She took a deep breath. "We're clean, Jordan. All the nanocritters are gone. We're not infected anymore."
Parvu sat back in his chair and folded his hands together in his lap, just to grip something. "But how? How can you be sure? Was it spontaneous?"
Erika said, "I did it myself. I ... modified the nanocritters."
Beside her, a man whom Parvu recognized as moonbase commander Dvorak pushed into the field of view. "She created nanocannibals!" he said, then turned to grin at her.
It took Erika several minutes to tell the entire story, but by the time she had finished, Parvu was standing up, barely controlling his delight.
"Celeste McConnell still doesn't believe we're clean," Dvorak said.
"She won't let us come home."
Parvu waved his hands to dismiss Dvorak's concern. "That will come soon. You have nothing to worry about now! That was ingenious, Erika, to use behavioral modifications while I had grown stagnant thinking of direct reprogramming." He of all people should not have underestimated the adaptive abilities of the alien automata.
Suddenly, the screen flashed. Erika squinted off-screen. "We've got an incoming message from the moonbase. Bernard Chu, I think. Can we talk to you later? I have a lot of things we should discuss."
Parvu sighed with a bittersweet feeling. He had learned so much in this conversation that he could be happy for now. True, he had not been able to tell her about Kent Woodward and his situation there at the NIL, but that was no longer so important. Erika had saved herself, and Parvu could perhaps use the same techniques to purge Kent of his automata. It would be difficult, and he was working with a different breed of automata entirely, but the light at the end of the tunnel had reappeared, brighter than ever before!
"Goodbye Erika. I will call you back as soon as I am able. I must check on several things, now that you have given me this new information. My congratulations. I am very, very proud of you."
She beamed at that, and he saw Jason Dvorak clap a congratulatory hand on her shoulder. The transmission ended and the screen winked out.
<
br /> Less than five seconds later, Kent Woodward began screaming from the quarantine chamber.
Parvu ran down the curved corridor and stopped in front of the observation window.
Inside, Kent Woodward was scrambling backward. He had knocked a chair over and stood up against the nanocore, screaming. His eyes remained fixed on something that looked like Old Gimp convulsing on the floor.
"Kent!" Parvu shouted. He turned up the volume on the intercom. "Kent, what has happened?"
"I was holding it right in my hands! Right in my hands!" He extended his palms, staring at them and then at the floor.
Then Parvu noticed that the rat looked fluid, bumpy, and flowed over the floor.
Suddenly, its legs convulsed, sticking straight out. Bulges pulsed on its sides, bending the ribcage outward. Its mouth opened wider, wider, until the skin parted, and still the rat's jaws folded backward even more.
The seams split as the rat writhed and thrashed. Blood oozed out, then sealed up. Something squirmed inside the yawning mouth of Old Gimp, a lump, a pinkish gray shape thrust out -- a second head, with blue-black eyes buried beneath a film of wet skin. Two more legs protruded from its sides.
The rat's ears elongated, folded back again. The whole body shuddered, split, and rolled over. A dozen more limbs protruded from its ribcage.
Something that might have been a ... wing thrust upward, flapped once, and then curled over to melt like cellular wax back into the seething main body.
Kent was screaming now. But Parvu could watch nothing but the rat as it began to lose all bodily definition. It flowed together into a sizzling mass as eyeballs and bones and teeth bubbled upward and came back down.
White fur suddenly sprouted like tall feathers, turning the lump into a mound of hair -- but then the strands, too, rippled and flattened out. The thing changed to a uniform brown-red consistency, like protoplasm oozing in a formless mass, adjusting its contours to the shape of least structure.
Then the whole thing slowly moved, extending a tiny pseudopod forward.
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