by Ben Bova
I’ll bet,” said Paul.
As she led Paul past a row of cages filled with hairless lab rats, Cardenas told him, “We’re already adapting what we’ve developed here for other applications.”
One of the monkeys yipped at them and within half a second all of them were howling and shrieking. The din was overpowering, echoing off the tiled walls like shock waves pounding on Paul’s ears.
Looking worried, Cardenas shouted over the noise, “Maybe we’d better go someplace quieter.”
“Amen to that,” Paul yelled back.
Once they were out in the corridor again, with the heavy doors muffling most of the noise, Cardenas said, “Just about every one of those monkeys had cancerous tumors. Y’know, really nasty carcinomas and stuff like that. The nanobugs found them inside their bodies and disassembled them, molecule by molecule.”
“So once you finally get FDA approval this division ought to be worth a good-sized fortune,” Paul said reassuringly.
“For sure.”
“In the meantime, though…’ Paul let the thought dangle in the air between them.
“In the meantime,” she said, leading him farther down the corridor, “we’re trying to spin off the medical work into toxic waste cleanup.”
“You can program the bugs to eat toxic wastes?”
Cardenas nodded vigorously. “It’s pretty simple, really, compared to the tumor work. They can go through a waste dump, find the molecules you want to get rid of, and take them apart. Nothing left but carbon dioxide, water, and pure elements — which you can recycle.”
“Sounds good,” Paul said.
“We’re trying to get the state environmental agency to participate in a demonstration we ve set up.”
“Not the federal EPA?”
Cardenas wrinkled’her nose. “The feds are real assholes. My strategy is to get the state environmental guys on our side and let them convince the feds.”
Paul remembered the first man he had worked for, when he had started at Masterson Aerospace. “Make the customer a party to the crime,” he had advised. “Get them on your side and they’ll do half your work for you.” His respect for Cardenas went up a notch.
She stopped at a locked door with a RESTRICTED ACCESS sign over it. “At least this area will be quieter than the animal pens.”
A few taps at the electronic lock and the door swung open. Paul followed her into a small, stuffy, windowless room crammed with consoles and instrumentation. The only lights came from the display screens on the consoles. The room felt overly warm, uncomfortably so.
As Paul peeled off his jacket, Cardenas leaned over one of the keyboards and typed out a single command. A shutter slid back from the blank wall on Paul’s right and he saw a window that looked into another room.
An ancient Cadillac sat in there, one of those old monsters heavy with chrome and tailfins. Bright red, where there was paint still on it. Almost half the side that Paul could see was dull bare metal. The car was up on blocks, although the rear tire was still on its hub. The front tire was gone. The hood was propped up part-way; the windshield wipers were gone.
“What’s this?” Paul asked. “A pop art exhibit?”
Cardenas grinned at him. “It’s our toxic waste exhibit. What do you think of it?”
Paul turned back to stare at the Cadillac through the thick window. “Nanobugs are taking it apart?”
She nodded happily. “We’ve got four different types of specialized gobblers in there.”
“Gobblers?”
“Nanomachines specifically designed to attack certain molecules, break them apart into their constituent atoms.”
“Gobblers,” Paul repeated.
“One set’s taking out the paint,” Cardenas explained. “Another is reducing the organic molecules in the tires to carbon dioxide, methane, and whatnot The third is working on the engine, separating out all the tungsten and platinum in the steel alloys.”
“Tungsten and platinum?”
“They’re valuable metals, y’know. We want to separate them out so we can recycle them.”
“I see,” said Paul.
“And the fourth set of nanos is gobbling the plastics in the dashboard, steering wheel, seat covers and such.”
Paul could see the sheer fervor of achievement radiating from her face. A muffled bang made him snap his attention back to the Cadillac. The one tire remaining had just blown out and now hung limply on its hub. Paul thought he could see it twitching like something alive being devoured by parasites.
“Why do you keep the car in a sealed chamber?” he asked.
“To keep the bugs from spreading, of course,” Cardenas answered. “We keep the chamber at ten below zero, Celsius. The bugs are programmed to stop at any temperature above zero.”
“But why—”
“To make sure they won’t start gobbling people!”
“Oh.” Paul hadn’t thought of that.
Cardenas didn’t seem the least bit condescending as she explained, “The bugs don’t see any difference between your molecules and the Cadillac’s, y’know. Except temperature. We design them to immobilize themselves way before they get to human body temperature.”
Paul nodded slowly. “Then how do you expect to use them in toxic waste dumps if you’re worried that they might attack people?”
Her smile faded slightly. “We’re working on that problem. We’ve got to make them much more specific than they are now.
Muchmore specific. Tailor them to distinctive molecules, so they’ll gobble those molecules and nothing else.”
“Can you do that?”
“In time,” she replied.
Time costs money, Paul knew. It was the old story: an exciting new possibility that could make fortunes of profit, but first you have to sink fortunes of investment into it and pray that it eventually succeeds.
“What else do you have?” he asked.
Cardenas went back to the control console, flicked her fingers across a different keyboard. Another section of shutters slid back, this time on Pauls left.
“Nanomachines can build things, too, y’know,” Cardenas said.
At first Paul thought he was looking at a child’s sand castle, the kind that kids build on the beach. The chamber he was looking into was hardly larger than a phone booth, dimly lit by a single bare bulb in the ceiling. Its floor was covered with sand or a grayish brown powder of some sort. In the middle of it stood a half-built tower.
“Here we’ve got assemblers at work,” Cardenas said, her voice low, almost a reverential whisper.
Paul studied the tower. It was about three feet tall. It wasn’t made of sand, he realized. It was gray, almost the same color as the stuff strewn over the floor, but it looked smoother, metallic.
“What is this?”
In the dim light from the display screens Cardenas’ expression was difficult to read. But her voice was vibrating with barely-suppressed excitement.
“Last week Mr. Masterson phoned me with a special request. This is the result.”
“What’d Greg want?”
“That sand is from the Moon,” Cardenas said. “We’ve put in a few simple assemblers and the tower is what they’re building.”
“Assemblers? You mean nanomachines?”
She nodded eagerly. “Actually, we put one hundred assemblers into the sand, five days ago.”
“And they’ve built the tower,” Paul said.
“They’re still building it. Watch real careful and you can see new features being added.”
Paul turned and stared at the tower rising out of the lunar sand. It rose perpendicularly from a wide, low base, its flanks smooth and featureless except for small setbacks every foot or so.
“Nothing seems to be happening,” he said.
Cardenas peered at the tower. “They stop every once in a while, like they’re taking a coffee break. Then they get busy again.”
“Don’t you know why they stop?”
“For sure.” She grinned.
“Each time they reach a change in the blueprint we’ve programmed into them, they stop until the proper members of the team are in the right position to start the new phase of the building.”
Paul’s eyes widened. “You make them sound as if they’re intelligent.”
“About as intelligent as bacteria,” Cardenas replied.
Paul grunted.
“The assemblers spent the first four days building more of themselves out of the aluminum and silicon in the sand. Yesterday that tower wasn’t here.”
“No shit,” Paul breathed.
“The tower is mainly titanium, y’know. The assemblers are taking titanium atoms preferentially from the sand and using them to build the tower.”
“How do they know—”
“It’s all programmed into them,” Cardenas said. “We did this sort of thing last year, as a demonstration for Mr. Masterson and his father, when they visited here. We didn’t use lunar sand then; just beach sand. We built a really neat castle for them.”
Paul looked at her. “Could you build more complex stuff?”
Without an eyeblink’s hesitation, Cardenas said, “We could build a whole base on the Moon for you, if you give us the time to program the assemblers.”
Paul saw that there were a couple of little wheeled typist’s chairs by the consoles. He pulled one up and sank onto it Cardenas took the other one facihg him.
“Instead of sending tons and tons of heavy machinery to the Moon,” she said, leaning toward him, “all you’d have to do is send a sampling of the necessary assemblers. They’ll build more of themselves out of the raw materials in the Moon’s soil—”
“Regolith,” Paul corrected automatically.
“-and then they’ll construct your base out of the regolith, ” she stressed the word, “all by themselves.”
“One shipload of nanomachines,” Paul mused.
“Could build your whole base for you,” she said.
“How long would it take you to develop the nanomachines? Specifically for Moonbase, I mean.”
She waved her hands in the air. “Simple tasks, like building airtight shelter shells and other construction forms, that’s pretty easy. When you get down to complicated equipment, like air regenerators and pressure pumps, we’ll need a while to program the assemblers.”
“A while? How long?”
“Months. Maybe years. We’ve never tried to build anything very complicated. Not yet It’ll take some time.”
A new thought struck Paul. “Most of the compounds in the regolith are oxygen-bearing. And there’s hydrogen imbedded in the top layers of the regolith, blown in on the solar wind. Could your machines—”
“Produce water out of those atoms? For sure. That’s no problem!”
“Jesus H. Christ on a motorcycle.”
“You want a motorcycle, we’ll build you a motorcycle.” Cardenas laughed.
“Maybe we ought to be talking with Harley,” Paul kidded back.
“Or General Motors.” She was suddenly completely serious.
INFLIGHT
Paul was in the company helicopter heading back to San Francisco International Airport when his pocket phone beeped.
It was Melissa. “Delta’s flight’s been cancelled,” she said, “and there’s nothing connecting to Savannah until late tonight. Can I ride back with you?”
“Sure,” Paul said, knowing it was a mistake, not knowing how to say no without feeling like a jerk.
Melissa was waiting for him in the hangar where his twin-engined jet was sheltered. The same plane in which he and Joanna had made love for the first time. Melissa was standing beside the plane, looking slightly forlorn in a baggy pair of tan slacks and a light sweater that hung loosely on her.
“Sorry to impose on you,” she said as soon as Paul got to within arm’s reach. I’d have to fly the redeye to Atlanta and then make a connection at six tomorrow morning, otherwise.”
“It’s okay,” Paul said. Last night they had been in bed together. But that was last night.
Melissa picked up her single garment bag. “I know I look a mess. This is my airline outfit. It’s for comfort, not looks.”
He made a smile for her. “You look fine, kid.
As he walked toward the plane beside Melissa, Paul remembered his elderly grandfather on the day the news broke that the first black president of the United States had been caught in the sack with a woman who was not his wife.
His grandfather had shaken his head mournfully. “See the trouble a man’s cock can get him into?”
Yeah, I see, Gramps. But Seeing ain’t the same thing as doing.
Paul let Melissa sit in the co-pilot’s seat as he slipped on the headset and checked out the plane’s instruments. She did not say a word to him as he taxied out to the runway, got clearance for takeoff, and then shoved the throttles forward.
The engines howled joyfully and the plane surged down the runway, faster, faster, the ground blurring as Paul watched the digital airspeed display, then pulled back with an artist’s delicate touch to rotate the nose wheel off the concrete. The plane seemed to leap into the air and Paul’s heart soared with it.
Once they cleared the airport traffic and Paul put the twin-jet on course eastward, he slipped his earphones down around his neck and turned to Melissa.
“Too bad there’s no Clippership service to Savannah,” he said.
“When will we get there?”
“Eleven-thirty, eastern time, the way things look now. We’ll have to make a pit stop in Amarillo. Gas up.”
Melissa nodded. “Beats the redeye.”
For a while neither of them said anything. Paul watched the shadows lengthening below as they flew over the mountains with the sun setting behind them.
“Lake Tahoe,” he said.
“Uh-huh.”
Time went by in silence. Then he pointed out the Grand Canyon, barely visible off in the distance in the twilight haze.
Melissa stared out the window on her side of the cockpit until a cloud bank obscured the ground altogether.
Finally, Paul said hesitantly, “About last night—”
Melissa turned sharply toward him. “Forget it,” she said.
“Forget it?”
“It never happened.”
Paul felt puzzled. “What d’you mean?”
“You’re a married man and you’re worried I’m going to shoot my mouth off to Greg or somebody. Well, don’t worry about it.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Shit, Mel, I wasn’t thinking you were a spy for Greg.”
“The hell you weren’t.”
“You told me you two had broken up.”
“Yes. That’s right.”
Paul’s befuddlement deepened. Melissa seemed irritable, almost angry.
“Look,” he said. “I’m sorry about last night. I shouldn’t have done it. I am a married man and—”
“Oh, Paul, it’s not your fault. I…” She seemed to want to say more, but stopped.
Paul didn’t know what to say. If anything. It was a stupid thing to do, he told himself. If Joanna finds out I’ll have hurt her just as bad as Gregory hurt her in the past.
“Do you know why Greg and I broke up?” Melissa asked, her voice so low Paul had to strain to hear her over the muted rumbling of the engines.
“You said it was because of Joanna.”
Melissa shook her head slowly. “That’s only part of it. I mentioned the magic word, and that drove him off the deep end.”
“The magic word?”
“Baby.”
Paul wasn’t certain he had heard her correctly.
“I told Greg that I wanted his baby,” Melissa said sorrowfully. “I told him that when a man and a woman love each other they make a baby together.”
“He didn’t like the idea.”
“I thought he was going to punch me out.”
“If he ever lays a hand on you—”
Melissa si
lenced Paul by laying a slender finger on his lips. “I can take care of myself,” she said. “You’ve got a wife to think about. You can’t go around fighting my battles.”
But Paul pictured Greg hitting Melissa. Just like the spoiled sonofabitch, he thought. He doesn’t love anybody except himself. If he ever touches her I’ll punch out his lights, but good.
After they stretched their legs in Amarillo and took off again, Melissa curled up in one of the capacious reclining seats in the plane’s cabin and fell asleep. Paul put the plane on autopilot, but flayed in the cockpit, awake, his mind churning with thoughts of Greg and Melissa and Joanna and the nanomachines that could make Moonbase a going proposition if only he could hammer the idea through the board of directors. But Greg was going to use the next meeting to accuse him of murder, or at least fornication. How can he attack me without attacking his mother? Then Paul realized that Greg was so furious with blind hate that he wanted to hurt Joanna, punish her for falling in love with a black man.
It was almost midnight when Paul finally put the twin-jet down on the company’s airstrip, a few miles from Savannah. He was tired, drained physically and emotionally. Gratefully, he saw that the limo was there at the apron in front of the hangar, waiting for him.
Paul helped Melissa down the little metal ladder to the concrete of the apron. When he turned back toward the limousine, he saw that Joanna was standing beside it, staring at them.
MARE NUBIUM
Do I have enough oxygen to make it? Paul asked himself that question again and again as he struggled across the rocky undulating lunar plain, trying to make up for the time and distance he had lost by straying so far off course.
He pushed himself harder. “Gotta get smokin’ now,” he told himself. “Gotta get there before the oxy runs out.”
Somewhere in the back of his mind he remembered an equation that showed how oxygen consumption is related to the amount of physical work the body is doing. From some aerobics class he had taken back when he was in astronaut training, a thousand years ago. Shaking his head inside his helmet, Paul tried to forget about the equation. Just keep pumping along, he told himself. Go, go, go.
