Farside

by Ben Bova

  “What better reason could there be?” Halleck replied.

  But Grant said, “There’s big money tied up in the IAA’s program. If Farside can do the job the IAA would drop its program.”

  “And leave me looking ridiculous,” said Halleck.

  “And the corporations that’re working on your program would have their contracts canceled,” Grant added. “They wouldn’t like you for that.”

  Halleck glared at him, but said nothing.

  Across the tiny room, Oberman pushed himself to his feet and tottered to the lavatory, still rubbing his jaw.

  Grant said, “I have to contact Farside and tell the professor what’s going on. They’ll have to abandon the site for a couple of weeks.”

  “And go where?” Trudy asked. “Selene won’t take us.”

  “Yes they will. Now that we know what we’re up against, Selene’s safety people can screen each one of us to make sure we’re not carrying the gobblers.”

  “Dr. Cardenas is still at Farside,” Trudy recalled. “Maybe she can run the screening operation.”

  “Good,” said Grant. “I’ll call the Ulcer and tell him that—”

  He got no further. Oberman dashed out of the lavatory, a heavy wrench in his hand, and smashed Grant across the back of his head. Grant fell facedown to the floor, unconscious, his scalp bleeding heavily.

  FARSIDE

  “I feel stupid,” muttered Harvey Henderson as he smeared machine oil across the face of the mirror lab’s airlock.

  Josie Rivera, working alongside him, said, “You’ll feel a lot worse if the airlock springs another leak.”

  Ten engineers and technicians were industriously covering the airlock’s titanium-alloy face with oil. Every man and woman at Farside was coating every titanium surface in the base with oil or margarine or even liquid detergent.

  “The Ulcer’s gone off the deep end,” Henderson complained, “ordering us to do this.” Still, he assiduously swept his oil-soaked cloth across the face of the hatch. His hands felt greasy, slimy, and he knew that the coveralls he was wearing were getting stained with oil.

  Several of the technicians were on ladders, reaching to the top rim of the hatch, rubbing away and dripping oil down on them.

  Rivera reminded him, “Dr. Cardenas says the way to stop the nanobugs from eating holes in the titanium is to coat the metal with oil. The bugs attack bare metal; if the metal’s covered with oil the bugs won’t bother it.”

  “That’s what she says,” Henderson grumbled.

  “She’s the expert.” Rivera turned to the oil dispenser lying on the floor at her feet and bent down to soak the cloth she was using again. Suddenly she broke into a giggle.

  “What’s funny?” Henderson asked.

  “My grandmother,” said Rivera, still chuckling. “She worked all her life as a housecleaner. If she could see me now! All my education, my degree in engineering, getting a job on the Moon—and here I am, doing the same kind of work she did!”

  Henderson didn’t find it funny. “I still feel stupid,” he groused.

  * * *

  Kris Cardenas stepped into Professor Uhlrich’s office, looking intently determined despite her faded, wrinkled coveralls. Her golden hair was tied up in a no-nonsense upsweep and she carried a plastic container tucked under her arm.

  Carter McClintock, sitting at the table abutting the professor’s desk, stared at her.

  “Dr. Cardenas?” he asked, looking surprised. “What are you carrying?”

  “Cooking oil from the cafeteria’s kitchen,” Cardenas replied with a tight smile.

  “Cooking oil?” Uhlrich asked from behind his desk. As usual, he was wearing a dark jacket over a turtleneck shirt. His silver-gray hair and beard were combed impeccably.

  “For you two gentlemen,” said Cardenas, putting the container on the table in front of McClintock. “You can start rubbing down the emergency airlock hatches along the main corridor.”

  “I?” Uhlrich blurted. “You expect me—”

  “Everyone else is working at it,” Cardenas said firmly. “Even Edie Elgin’s out there swabbing away at the exposed metal parts of the space suits hanging in the lockers.”

  McClintock slowly rose from his chair. Like Professor Uhlrich, he wore a businessman’s jacket and slacks. “I get it.” Turning to Uhlrich, he explained, “This will be good for the staff, Professor, to see us at work alongside them. Shoulder to shoulder, working together. That sort of thing. I’ll get this Elgin woman to take photos of us. Good public relations!”

  Cardenas almost laughed. “I hadn’t thought of the morale aspect. I need every hand available in this base. There’s a lot of metal that the nanomachines can attack. I just hope we have enough oils and greases to cover all the exposed metal around here.”

  Uhlrich slowly stood up and came around his desk, the fingers of one hand brushing the desktop. Very reluctantly, he stepped up to Cardenas.

  “Very well,” he said, like a man forced into a distasteful chore, “tell me where you want us to work.”

  “Down the main corridor. Cover the emergency airlock hatches and any other exposed metal surfaces you see.”

  “I’ll work with you, Professor,” said McClintock. “We’ll be a team.”

  Uhlrich hesitated. He asked Cardenas, “Have you heard anything from Simpson? I thought he’d gone out to Korolev to confront Mrs. Halleck.”

  Cardenas shook her head. “No. Not a word from Grant. I wonder what’s going on out there?”

  KOROLEV

  Grant came to slowly. His head thundered with pain, his vision was blurred. He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. Trudy’s face came into focus, taut and white with anxiety. She was bending over him, holding a towel or something to the back of his head.

  “What happened?” he asked thickly.

  Trudy replied, “Oberman found a wrench from the tool closet in the lav and hit you with it.”

  Grant tried to sit up, but the world swam dizzily around him and his guts heaved.

  “Stay down, Grant,” Trudy urged. “You must have a concussion. Maybe he fractured your skull.”

  “Where … where is he?”

  “He ripped up the sleeves on our suits! The emergency suits in the locker, too! We can’t go outside! We’re stranded here!”

  Grant saw that she was trying to control herself, trying to hold down the fear, the panic.

  “It figures,” he said, his voice weak from the pain. “They don’t want … any witnesses. Halleck … told us too much.”

  “Then they put on their suits and left,” Trudy went on. “They just went into the airlock a second ago.”

  With an effort, Grant focused his eyes on the airlock control pad. He saw its light flick from green to red.

  “They’ve gone outside,” he said.

  “Nate was really distressed, kind of wild. He said he’s taking Mrs. Halleck to Gagarin, they’ll stay in the shelter there until she can get Selene or the IAA or somebody to send a rescue flight to them.”

  “And they left us here to die,” Grant muttered. Yeah, he told himself, that’s what Nate would do. Run away and hide. Then he remembered.

  “Trudy … have you told Cardenas … about the gobblers? What Halleck told us?”

  “No. There hasn’t been time.”

  “You’ve got to call her.”

  “How?” she asked. “The phone’s smashed.”

  “Thanks to me.”

  “Could we use the radio in one of the space suits?”

  Grant started to nod, but the movement sent white-hot streaks of pain through his head. “Maybe,” he said weakly, wondering, Is the signal from the suit radio strong enough to get through the shelter’s concrete shell and the rubble piled on top of it?

  “I don’t know what else we can do,” Trudy said.

  “Pull my suit torso … over here and connect … the backpack to it. Maybe there’s enough juice … left in the batteries … to get through to the commsats.”

>   Suddenly all the lights in the shelter turned off.

  * * *

  Nate Oberman nodded inside his bubble helmet as he disconnected the power cable leading from the array of solar cells to the shelter.

  “That’ll do it,” he muttered, more to himself than Anita Halleck, standing in her space suit between him and the hopper. “The shelter’s batteries’ll only last a few hours.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Halleck urged.

  “Right.” Oberman straightened up and headed for the hopper.

  She followed him, thinking, We’ve taken care of Simpson and Dr. Yost, but now this man is a witness to everything.

  Oberman reached the hopper and started up its ladder without a backward glance at her.

  On the other hand, Halleck told herself as she put a booted foot on the ladder’s first rung, he’s a party to the crime. He’s helped me from the beginning, and he actually did attack Simpson.

  “You may have killed him, you know,” Halleck grumbled as they clambered up to the hopper’s grillwork platform.

  “They’re as good as dead, one way or the other. Their electric power’ll run out in a couple hours.”

  And Halleck thought, He’ll be able to hold this over me for the rest of my life. I’ve got to find a way to get rid of him.

  “We’ve got to get over to Gagarin,” Oberman was saying. “There’s a shelter there just like the one here.”

  I can accuse him of murdering Simpson and Yost, Halleck told herself. I never told him to do that. I can show myself as the innocent victim of a homicidal madman.

  Oberman clomped to the control podium and lifted up its cover.

  “What are you doing?” Halleck asked.

  “Hot-wiring the ignition. I don’t want to turn on the normal controls. Soon as we do, the hopper’s beacon will automatically turn on. Then the controller at Farside will know exactly when we left here.”

  “So what?”

  “So they’ll be able to figure out that Grant and Yost were still alive when we left, that’s what. This way, we can fudge our departure time, tell them they were already dead and we got away from here to save our own lives.”

  Halleck thought his reasoning was very thin, but Oberman was at least partially right: they had to cover up the two deaths. Two murders, she realized. I’m a murderess! But no, it’s not me. He did it, I didn’t. I’m going along with him because he might kill me too if I don’t do what he wants.

  She was still rehearsing the story she would tell the investigators when her suit radio pinged.

  “Someone’s calling,” Halleck said, sounding alarmed.

  Oberman heard it, too. “It’s gotta be Grant. Ignore it.”

  But Halleck tapped the radio control on her suit’s wrist keypad.

  * * *

  The shelter’s lights came on again in a heartbeat, but they seemed dimmer.

  “We’re on battery power,” Grant said weakly. “Nate’s disconnected … the solar cells.”

  “How long will the batteries last?” Trudy asked, her voice trembling slightly.

  “Five hours, max.”

  “Then we’ll be out of power? The lights, the air recirculator, the heater?”

  “Better get the suit radio working,” Grant said.

  Trudy dragged the suit torso and backpack across the room to where Grant lay on his back, feeling like a helpless invalid, while she connected the backpack.

  She looked up from the suit with a little smile. “The lights are all green.”

  “Okay, good.” The pain came in waves, making him almost giddy. “Hand me the … the sleeve with the keypad on it.”

  Trudy grabbed the sleeve and held it over Grant’s face. He saw that the sleeve had been methodically ripped to tatters, making the suit useless. Almost useless, he corrected himself. Blinking his eyes, Grant tried to focus on the keypad. Very carefully he tapped out the communications link with Farside. Each movement of his fingers brought a fresh surge of pain washing over him.

  “Farside,” a voice issued from the speakers in the suit’s neck ring.

  With an enormous effort, Grant said, “This is … Grant Simpson. Patch me through to Dr. Cardenas. Right away. Top emergency priority.”

  A moment’s hesitation. “Dr. Cardenas isn’t in her quarters, Grant.”

  He recognized the man’s voice. “Find her, Sherry. Call her pocketphone. Life and death, man.”

  “Right.”

  Within moments, Cardenas’s voice, high with anticipation, called, “Grant?”

  “It’s me,” he answered weakly.

  “What’ve you found out?”

  “They’re gobblers. They attack vanadium atoms.”

  “Vanadium! Of course. Pull the vanadium out of the alloy and the molecules collapse.”

  “Right,” he breathed. “UV doesn’t kill them.”

  “What’s their lifespan?”

  “Four weeks, maybe a little more.” He took a painful breath. “Tell Uhlrich he’ll have to … get everybody out of the base until—”

  “No, no, we won’t have to do that.” Even in the tiny speakers of the space suit, Cardenas’s voice sounded bright, strong. “We’re covering every metal surface in the place with oil. That’ll protect it from the disassemblers. I’ve put in a call to Selene for more oil.”

  “They won’t send a flight—”

  “Unmanned lobber,” Cardenas interrupted. “One-way flight. I talked with Doug Stavenger. He’ll get it done.”

  “Good,” Grant said, with the last of his strength.

  “We need medical help,” Trudy said urgently. “Grant’s got a bad concussion. Maybe a skull fracture.”

  Cardenas immediately replied, “I’ll see to it.”

  “We’re running on battery power here,” Trudy added. “We’ve only got a few hours left.”

  “I’ll get help to you right away,” Cardenas said.

  As she signed off Grant eased his head back on the towel or whatever Trudy had wadded on the back of his head. She’ll be okay, he told himself. Farside will send a hopper out to here to pick us up. Trudy’ll be okay. He closed his eyes. All Grant wanted was to sleep, to tumble into blessed oblivion, to have the murderous pain go away.

  But suddenly he snapped his eyes wide open.

  “Nate’s taking the hopper?” he asked Trudy. “The one you rode in here on?”

  She looked perplexed. “I guess.”

  “Get him on the radio! Freak two. Now!”

  As Trudy obediently picked up the space suit sleeve again she said to Grant, “Lie back. You need to rest.”

  “Get Nate on freak two,” he insisted. “He can’t use that hopper. I disabled it.”

  “Then he’ll use the one you came in on,” she said.

  “If he’s smart … that’s what he’ll do. But Nate isn’t that—”

  Halleck’s impatient voice came through the speakers. “What do you want?”

  * * *

  Oberman heard Grant’s voice in his suit speakers.

  “Don’t try to take off … in that hopper!”

  “So you’re awake, huh?” Oberman said. “I always thought you had a thick skull.”

  “Nate, don’t light up … that hopper! There isn’t enough oxy to—”

  “No use begging me, Grant. I’m not taking you or Miss Goody-Goody with us.”

  “You can’t—”

  Oberman held his gloved thumb over the control panel’s ignition button. “So long, pal,” he said to Grant. “Hope I didn’t crack your skull.”

  “Don’t!”

  To Halleck, Oberman said, “Hang on.” And he leaned his thumb against the ignition button.

  The hopper lurched off the ground in total silence. The ground fell away.

  “We’re off!” Oberman said. “Next stop, Gagarin!”

  Suddenly the thrust cut off. For a terrifying instant the hopper seemed to hang in space, hovering a few hundred meters above the hard, stony ground.

  Then it plunged down
ward, falling like a stone.

  Halleck screamed. Oberman had time to screech “Shit!” before the hopper hit the ground and smashed into pieces.

  * * *

  Grant stared at Trudy as he heard Oberman’s arrogant, “We’re off! Next stop, Gagarin!”

  He thought, Maybe there’s enough LOX in the pipeline to—

  Then he heard Halleck’s scream and the radio link abruptly cut off. On the airless Moon, the hopper’s crash made no sound at all.

  Trudy looked stricken. “Are they…?”

  “They’re dead,” Grant said, miserable with sudden guilt. “I killed them.”

  The last of his strength seemed to leave him. He faded into unconsciousness.

  BACK TO FARSIDE

  Grant faded in and out of consciousness. Vaguely he was aware of somebody bending over him. Not Trudy.

  “Pretty bad,” he heard a voice mutter. Dr. Kapstein. Ridiculously, Grant wondered if she’d thrown up again in her space suit on the way over from Farside.

  With Trudy helping, Kapstein and whoever else had come to Korolev with her worked Grant into a fresh space suit. He felt them lift his pain-wracked body and carry him to the shelter’s airlock. The pain seemed to be easing, but he felt woozy, as if he were muffled in cotton batting. Painkillers, he thought; Kapstein’s pumped me full of painkillers.

  When he opened his eyes again he saw that he was in the locker area at Farside. Kapstein and Trudy and even Carter McClintock were looking down at him. His nose wrinkled.

  “Smells like … salad dressing…”

  Kris Cardenas’s youthful face bent over him. “Stopgap defense against the disassemblers,” she said. “We used all the salad oil in the kitchen, and lots of other oils.”

  “Great…”

  Dr. Kapstein’s face looked grim. “We’ve got to get you to Selene.”

  “But … quarantine…”

  “The quarantine’s lifted,” Cardenas said. “Now that we know what we’re looking for, Selene’s open again.”

  “Good.”

  Kapstein said to Cardenas, “Whatever you put into him probably has saved his life.”

  “Therapeutic nanomachines,” Cardenas said.