Farside

by Ben Bova

  Then he saw a sign on the wall up ahead:

  WARNING. THIS AREA MAY BE EXPOSED TO HIGH-INTENSITY ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT. LEAVE THE AREA IMMEDIATELY WHEN THE RED WARNING LIGHTS ARE FLASHING.

  A precaution against nanomachines that might escape from the lab, Grant realized. Even here in Selene they’re scared of nanomachines. Down at the end of the corridor he saw a closed door that bore the title NANOTECHNOLOGY LABORATORY.

  He raised a fist to knock on the door, but a speaker grill set into the wall beside it said, “Come on in, Grant.” Cardenas’s voice. Then he noticed the tiny red eye of a minicamera set above the door.

  The lab was surprisingly small, but then Grant told himself that machines the size of viruses don’t need a lot of room. He threaded his way through a set of workbenches, all of them bearing various pieces of apparatus. Most of the hardware was made of metal, a lot of stainless steel gleaming in the overhead lights, although Grant saw some intricate works of glass tubing, as well.

  No one seemed to be in the lab. But then he saw Kris Cardenas sitting at a desk set against the back wall. A big gray tubular object stood man-tall beside the desk. A scanning force microscope, Grant figured. He nodded to himself: that microscope can visualize individual atoms.

  “Welcome to the zoo,” Cardenas said, her voice flat and hard. She gestured to a sculpted plastic chair in front of the bulky microscope. “Have a seat.”

  As he sat down, Grant saw a trio of irregularly shaped chunks of optical glass resting on the shelf of a bookcase to one side of the desk. He said, “Mr. McClintock told me to come over. I’m not quite sure—”

  “Apparently you’re the resident expert on telescope mirrors,” Cardenas said, still looking bleak, almost angry. “I need to pick your brain.”

  “Such as it is,” he joked.

  Cardenas didn’t even crack a smile. Pointing to the glass samples, she said, “The glass factory sent these samples. Is this the raw material you use for the mirrors?”

  Grant nodded. “Looks like it.”

  “Not good enough, Grant. I need to be absolutely certain.” She turned and picked up one of the samples, then handed it to Grant.

  He turned the lump of glass over in his hand. “Yeah, look at the label etched into it: the serial number starts with an O. O for optical.”

  “Then this is the type of glass you use to make the mirrors.”

  “Right.”

  Cardenas took the sample from Grant and returned it to the bookshelf. “I’ll feed it to the disassemblers and get an atom-by-atom breakdown of its composition.”

  “Good,” said Grant.

  “I presume you can access all the files I’ll need about mirror construction,” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “Good. Then let’s get to work.”

  Two hours later Grant felt as if he’d been through a semester’s worth of final exams, with a police interrogation thrown in. Cardenas was all business, unsmiling, as if she resented being pressed into this task of mirror manufacture. But she volunteered for the job, Grant remembered. When she talked to McClintock she looked pleased to help. Happy about it. Now, with me, she’s pissed as hell.

  At last Cardenas seemed satisfied. Her eyes on the wall screen where Grant had forwarded all the data she’d asked for, she finally said, “That should do it, I think.”

  “That’s everything you need?” Grant asked, wondering why McClintock had insisted on his coming to her laboratory. I could have done this from Farside, he thought.

  “That’s the beginning,” she said. “The next step is to take apart the samples and get an exact analysis of their composition. Then I’ll have to program a set of assemblers to build you a mirror.”

  Grant said, “Once you’ve got the raw materials.”

  “Yes, there is that. I presume you can provide them for me.”

  “The mirror’s supposed to be one hundred meters in diameter. You’ll need a place to build something that big.”

  “That’s your department, Grant. You deal with Selene’s engineering department. Or maybe it’ll be the research department that gets involved in this.”

  Grant pictured dealing with more bureaucracies. I’ll have to get Uhlrich involved in this. Nobody in Selene is going to stir themselves for me. I’ll need the Ulcer’s authority to get people here to move.

  Cardenas broke into his thoughts. “It’s past seven P.M. Time to call it a day.”

  She got to her feet and Grant stood up beside her. She was almost his own height, bright blond hair, good trim figure. But her sky-blue eyes seemed troubled, annoyed.

  “I’ll see you here at eight tomorrow morning,” she said.

  “Okay.” Then Grant realized he had no idea of where his quarters were. He’d left his travelbag with the young woman at the debarkation desk and hustled over to the nanolab before asking about where he was going to sleep.

  “Eight o’clock, then,” Cardenas repeated. Grant realized he was being dismissed.

  DINNER FOR TWO

  Grant found his way back to the debarkation center. A different person was at the desk, an avuncular middle-aged man with a potbelly and an amiable smile. Grant’s travelbag was still there, sitting on the floor beside the desk, and the man looked up the location of the room that McClintock had reserved for him.

  Half an hour later Grant phoned McClintock from his one-room quarters. He got an answering machine, made a brief report of his meeting with Cardenas, then quickly unpacked his bag. He realized he was famished; he hadn’t eaten anything since leaving Farside in midmorning, and it was now nearly eight P.M.

  He knew that Selene’s choice of restaurants was limited. There was the Earthview restaurant, which was far too posh for him—and expensive. And the Pelican Bar: the last time he’d been there he’d gotten into the fight that got him expelled from Selene. The cafeteria, he thought. That’ll do.

  Grant showered quickly and pulled on the only other shirt and slacks he’d brought with him. I’ll have to get somebody back at Farside to send me more of my clothes if I have to stay here for more than an overnight, he thought.

  He was about to leave his room and head for the cafeteria when the room’s phone called out, “Dr. Cardenas calling Grant Simpson.”

  Cardenas? He felt surprised. Does she intend to work all frigging night?

  “Answer,” he told the phone.

  Cardenas’s face filled the screen. Grant realized she was really good-looking: bright blue eyes, strong jaw. She’d be actually beautiful if she’d just smile a little.

  “Grant, I just realized that you probably don’t have anybody to have dinner with.” Before he could reply, she added, “Neither do I.”

  Blinking with surprise, Grant said, “I was just going to the cafeteria.”

  She shook her head slightly. “Not the cafeteria. Why don’t you meet me at the Pelican Bar in half an hour?”

  Happily, he said, “Half an hour. At the Pelican Bar.” He wondered if anybody there would remember him.

  * * *

  The place was jammed, as usual. Men and women packed the bar, and all the tables seemed to be already occupied. Cardenas was nowhere in sight, although Grant searched carefully through the crowd for her head of golden hair: it would be easy to miss her in the crush of bodies.

  The Pelican Bar had been built in a cave. The bare rock ceiling was raw, unsmoothed, and so low Grant thought he could brush it with his fingertips if he stretched a bit. Pelicans were everywhere: stuffed doll pelicans, pelican statues of wood and metal, paintings and photographs of pelicans on the stone walls. The wide display screen behind the bar showed pelicans gliding just above the wavetops against a background of old Miami Beach hotels—obviously the video had been made before Florida was inundated by the greenhouse floods.

  “Hello.”

  Startled, Grant saw Cardenas standing beside him, a drink already in her hand. She was wearing a soft blue nubby sweater and a darker knee-length skirt. She was smiling slightly, but Grant thought the
smile looked forced.

  “Hello,” he replied.

  “You need a drink.”

  “Yeah.”

  He followed her as she wormed her way through the crowd at the bar. The human bartender, an older, heavyset man with pouchy eyes and a receding hairline, hollered over the buzz of the crowd, “What’s yours, pal?”

  He’s new here, Grant realized. He doesn’t recognize me.

  “Moonjuice,” Grant yelled back. Recycled lunar water, infused with carbon dioxide.

  The bartender nodded. Cardenas shouted to him, “We need a table, Robbie.”

  Nodding again, the bartender said, “Ten minutes.”

  Nine and a half minutes later Cardenas and Grant were perched on stools at a tiny round high-top table in the far corner of the Pelican Bar, studying the menu displayed on the tabletop screen. She picked soysteak, he tapped on eel filets.

  It was quieter off in the corner of the crowded, bustling place.

  “You must come here pretty often,” Grant said.

  Cardenas nodded. Then she asked, “You don’t drink alcohol?”

  “Can’t afford it.”

  “Dinner’s on me,” she said. “I invited you.”

  Shaking his head, Grant replied, “I don’t want to get into the habit.” To himself, he added, I’ve got enough habits to deal with without adding booze to the list.

  A squat little flat-topped robot rolled up to their table, bearing their dinner orders. They picked up the dishes and placed them on the table and the robot trundled off.

  “Bon appetit,” Cardenas said. Flat, mechanical. Without a smile.

  They ate in silence for several minutes. Grant thought the eel was good. Fish and shellfish were a specialty in Selene. Aquaculture produced far more protein per input of energy than meat. Soya was the base for almost everything else, although in-vitro meat—cultured in a bioreactor from animal cells—was available, but expensive.

  At last Grant broke their silence. “I appreciate your inviting me to dinner.”

  “Nothing to it,” Cardenas said.

  “I don’t like to eat alone.”

  “Neither do I.” She looked away from him briefly, then said, “But I’m going to have to get accustomed to it.”

  “Huh?”

  “My husband decided today that he won’t come here and live on the Moon. My kids won’t even come to visit me. I’ll never see my grandchildren again. They’ll all stay on Earth.” Her voice was flat and hard: not angry, exactly, but bitter, terribly, terribly bitter.

  “Well, you can go Earthside, then.”

  She shook her head. “No, I can’t. I’m full of nanomachines. I’m barred from Earth.”

  “Can’t you be flushed clean?” Grant asked.

  “And turn into a seventy-year-old hag? No thanks.”

  “Seventy?”

  “Calendar-wise, I was seventy-two last month.”

  Grant was speechless. Cardenas looked no more than thirtyish. Maybe forty, on the outside.

  “I’ve used nanomachines to rebuild my cells, to clear plaque out of my arteries, to attack viruses and foreign bacteria that invade my body. Like a super immune system. Without them I’d probably collapse and die.”

  “And nanotech is forbidden on Earth,” Grant murmured.

  “It sure as hell is,” Cardenas said, with the first hint of fervor Grant had seen from her. “Those stupid luddites are scared to death of nanotechnology. Even if I got a special dispensation from some Earthside government to come and visit my grandchildren, some suicide bomber kook might assassinate me. Blow me away and the grandkids with me.”

  Another woman would have been in tears by now, Grant thought. But Kris Cardenas’s eyes were dry. And hard.

  “I’ve heard there are secret nanotech labs on Earth,” he said. “Big corporations run them.”

  “To what avail?” Cardenas asked. “Do you think some multinational corporation is going to pay for a nanotech lab when they can’t use the products the lab produces?”

  “They could use it in secret, I suppose.”

  She gave him a skeptical frown. “For what? So their executives can stay young? Or their wives?”

  “Or mistresses,” Grant said, trying to lighten the conversation’s tone.

  Cardenas did not smile. “I’ll stay here on the Moon, and my loving husband and my devoted children and my adorable, innocent grandchildren will never see me again.”

  Grant told her, “I can’t go back to Earth, either.”

  She nodded. “I know about your legal troubles. I read it in your dossier.”

  “We’re two of a kind then,” he said. Then he added, “Sort of.”

  As if she hadn’t heard him, Cardenas muttered, “As far as my family’s concerned, I’ve made a deal with the devil and I’ll have to pay the price for it.”

  Grant heard himself say, “I know what it’s like, making a deal with the devil.”

  Cardenas looked as surprised as he felt. “What do you mean?”

  Feeling suddenly flustered, unsure of himself, Grant waved a hand in the air. “Oh … I’m taking medications so I can work outside. You know, anti-radiation meds … some steroids…” Inwardly he fumed, Why the hell are you telling her this? She doesn’t care. Nobody cares.

  Cardenas gave him a long, thoughtful gaze. Then she said so softly that Grant barely heard her over the noise of the crowd, “Maybe there’s something I can do about that.”

  “Something? What?”

  “Therapeutic nanomachines,” Cardenas said.

  Now he fell silent.

  “They can help you,” said Cardenas, leaning closer to him. “Instead of the drugs you’re taking.”

  “They’re medications,” Grant snapped.

  “Medications.”

  “Nanotherapy,” he mused.

  “It could help,” Cardenas said, unsmiling, utterly serious.

  MARE MOSCOVIENSE

  McClintock was on his knees—an unusual position for him—rummaging through his kitchen’s mini-sized refrigerator/freezer and the cabinets stocked with packaged foods. No liquor, he saw. Not even wine.

  He’d been at Farside for nearly three weeks and he hadn’t seen a drop of liquor in all that time. Not even beer.

  Straightening up, he wondered if the lack of alcohol was Uhlrich’s policy. Has the man banned alcoholic drinks from Farside? If so, McClintock thought, I’ll have to find some way around it. After all, rank hath its privileges.

  Frowning unhappily, he pulled a prepackaged meal out of the low cabinet and popped it into the microwave oven. Then he returned to his desk and resumed scrolling through the Farside Observatory’s personnel files. He paid particular attention to the women: a few of them looked attractive.

  “They’ll look absolutely gorgeous after a couple more weeks,” he muttered.

  The microwave pinged and he took his hot meal to the room’s only table, sat down, and began to eat absently once he’d told the computer to project the personnel files onto the wall screen.

  Engineers, technicians, but precious few astronomers, he saw. Well, Uhlrich’s an astronomer, and he really doesn’t need any here until the telescopes are finished.

  There’s the kid I rode in the lobber with, he remembered. He told the computer to display Trudy Yost’s file. She’s going to be Uhlrich’s assistant. Not bad-looking, he thought. But you have to be careful with these young ones; they’re quick to holler about sexual harassment.

  Then there’s this Grant Simpson fellow. Very earnest; apparently capable. Uhlrich’s put a lot of responsibility on his shoulders.

  McClintock remembered that Simpson had left a message for him. He’s at Selene and already working with Dr. Cardenas, the nanotechnology expert. Good. Uhlrich’s wary of nanotech, McClintock understood, but he’s desperate enough to move in that direction—almost.

  Your job, Carter my lad, is to soothe Uhlrich’s fears and get those telescope mirrors built with nanomachines. Then you can go back to Pennsylvania with a trium
ph in your hand. Then you can—

  The phone sang out, “Grant Simpson calling.”

  McClintock put down the forkful of in-vitro chicken he was holding. For a moment he debated refusing the call. Is Simpson going to make a pest of himself, calling at all hours of the night or day? Finally, with a resigned sigh, he ordered, “On screen, please.”

  Simpson’s dark-bearded face appeared on the wall screen, his eyes sorrowful.

  “Mr. McClintock,” said Grant.

  “How’s everything in Selene?” McClintock asked. “How’s Dr. Cardenas?”

  “She’s already working to get a complete analysis of the borosilicate glass. Should have it done by tomorrow.”

  “Fine.” McClintock realized that was the first step. “What then?”

  “That’s why I called. We’ll have to get the resources together to produce the raw material she’ll need to build a mirror.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem, should it?”

  “I’ll work with Selene’s mining and manufacturing department,” Grant said. “But they’ll want some kind of official requisition from Professor Uhlrich.”

  McClintock nodded. “They’ll get it. I’ll see to that.”

  “The big problem is to get a frame for the mirror over here, so the nanobugs have a structure to work with.”

  McClintock frowned slightly. “You mean like the frame of the mirror that cracked?”

  “Or its duplicate.”

  “Do we have a duplicate?”

  “Only the one being used in the mirror lab right now, on the turntable.”

  “Ah, where the second mirror’s being polished.”

  “Right.”

  McClintock thought for a moment. One frame sitting out in the open with the ruined mirror, the other on the turntable where the polishing job is going on.

  “What do you recommend?” he asked.