by Ben Bova
“I see.”
“You don’t want his damaged immune system attacking the machines that are trying to save him.”
“I understand.”
“Blood transfusions immediately. By the time my associates have analyzed the tissue samples the transfusions must be complete. Then we inject the nanomachines.”
“I see,” said Greg.
Zimmerman lapsed into’silence, folding his hands over his ample belly and letting his-many chins sag to his chest. He seemed asleep. Mom must’ve had him yanked out of his bed, Greg thought. She probably would’ve really kidnapped him if he hadn’t agreed to come up here. She’s frantic over Doug. Would she be just as frantic, just as determined, if it was me in the infirmary, dying?
“Contact light,” Deems said, his voice quavering slightly.
“Okay,” said Killifer. “We’re down.” He was perspiring; cold sweat made his palms slippery, stung his eyes.
They had landed at the edge of the ice field, as Deems had suggested. The ice partially melted beneath the blast of their rocket exhaust and the Jobber’s landing feet sank into a mushy cold swamp. For an instant both men had felt their vehicle; sinking, then it hit solid rock and came to a halt, tilted slightly ’ but safely down.
Killifer reached into his thigh pouch for a reusable sponge-like sheet of plastic to wipe his face. He saw that Deems was doing the same. Scared shitless, Killifer thought.
“Okay,” he said, after taking a breath. “Check suits. Prepare for surface excursion.”
“I don’t see their lights,” Deems said.
“They’re over the horizon, about four klicks out on the ice.”
“We both going out?”
“Damned right. We’ll hook a tether to the winch.”
Deems said, “All right,” without much enthusiasm.
Killifer stuffed his wiper back into the pouch on the thigh of his suit. Then he realized that the cermet hatch cover from Brennart’s hopper was not in there. He groped in the other thigh pouch. Not there, either.
“What’s the matter?” Deems asked.
“Nothing,” Killifer snapped. “Let’s get going.”
The astronomer. Stupid little gook put on my suit when she went up the mountain to get Stavenger. She’s got it!
Panic surged through him. If she understands what it means— No, he told himself. She wouldn’t How could she? It’s just a hunk of cermet to her. I’ll have to get it back from her, though.
“You okay?” Deems’ voice sounded worried in his earphones.
“Yeah. Let’s get moving.”
I’ll have to get it back from her, Killifer told himself again. Because if she figures it out, I’m dead.
Zimmerman terrified the meager infirmary staff. Only one M.D., a very junior young woman, and three technicians who split their time between medical duties and elsewhere, the staff was meant to deal with injuries and minor illnesses. Big problems were sent Earthward, either to one of the space stations or to a hospital on the ground.
“Equipment, this is? Junk, this is!” Zimmerman bellowed when they showed him the infirmary. “It is impossible to work with Tinkertoys! Impossible!”
None of the youngsters could please Zimmerman in the slightest. He bullied them, swore at them in German and English, told them what incompetent swine they were. He cursed their teachers, their progenitors, and predicted a dim future for the human race if such dummkopfs were allowed anywhere near the practice of medicine.
When Greg tried to intervene, Zimmerman turned on him. “So? Now you are an expert, also? How can I work here? Where are my facilities that your blackmailing mother promised me? Where is the blood for transfusion? How can I perform miracles without the tools I need? Even Christ had some water when he wanted to make wine!”
“Willi, Willi, I could hear you out at the airlock.”
Greg turned and saw Kris Cardenas, bright and blonde and perky, striding into the narrow confines of the four-bed infirmary.
“Kristine, liebling , no one told me you were coming here!”
Zimmerman’s demeanor changed as abruptly as the dawn transforms the dark lunar night.
“Willi, you mustn’t let yourself get angry at these people,” Cardenas scolded cheerfully. “They’re trying to help you.”
“Ach, with such help a’ man could die. I’d rather have Hungarians on my side.”
“It’s bad for your heart to get so worked up,” Cardenas said, smiling sweetly. She was wearing a light blue sweater and slightly darker knee-length skirt. If Greg didn’t know better, he would have sworn she wasn’t much older than thirty-five.
Zimmerman’s fleshy face turned puckish. “Ah, this will be like the old days, won’t it? You were my best student, , always.”
“And you were always my favorite professor,” Cardenas returned the compliment.
With a shake of his head that made his jowls waddle, Zimmerman spread his stubby arms in a gesture of helplessness. “But look around at this place! There is not the necessary equipment! There is not the trained staff! How can I—”
Cardenas silenced him by placing a fingertip gently on his lips. “Willi, I’m here. I’ll assist you.”
“You will?”
“And the four people you brought from your clinic.”
“Clinic?” The fat old man looked startled. “I have no clinic! My research facility at the university is a laboratory, not a clinic.”
“Yes, I know,” Cardenas said. “Forgive my error.”
His beaming smile returned. “For you, liebling, no forgiving is necessary. Now let us get to work.”
MOONBASE
“Welcome to Moonbase, mother,” said Greg.
Joanna did not look haggard. Not quite. But the tension in her face was obvious. She’s frightened, Greg realized. Frightened and frustrated because there’s nothing more that she can do for Doug. Nothing but wait and hope that Zimmerman can perform a miracle.
“Take me to him, Greg,” she said, her voice strained. “Please.”
She had changed into standard lunar coveralls on the trip up, Greg saw. White, the color code for medics, rather than management’s sky blue, such as he wore. And she was already wearing weighted boots.
Without another word, Greg led her to the tractor and started down the tunnel toward the main part of the base. I’m getting to be a taxi driver, he grumbled to himself.
“How is he? Is he in pain?”
“They’ve wrapped him in cooling blankets to bring his body temperature down as far as they dare,” Greg reported. “Zimmerman and his team are programming a set of nano-machines to repair the damage to his cells that’s been done by the radiation.”
Joanna nodded tensely.
Glancing at her as they drove down the long tunnel, Greg added, “They’re giving him massive blood transfusions, but the damage is pretty extensive, I’m afraid.”
I’ll give blood,” Joanna said immediately. “You can, too.”
Greg turned away from her. “I don’t know if Zimmerman’s bugs are going to be able to save him.”
“If he can’t, no one can,” Joanna said.
“Careful!” yelped Yazaru Hara. “His ribs are broken.”
“Got to get him out of the seat,” Killifer said, The unconscious Japanese was dead weight made extra heavy by his bulky armored spacesuit. Killifer grasped him under his arms while Hara, turned awkwardly in his seat, lifted his companion’s legs so that the American could slide him out of the spacecraft cockpit.
“How long’s he been unconscious?” Killifer asked, panting with the effort.
“Many hours,” said Hara. “He was still breathing, though, when you arrived.”
“Yeah.” Slowly Killifer pulled Inoguchi’s inert form through the cockpit’s emergency hatch and out onto the black ice.
Deems had rigged a makeshift stretcher out of honeycomb panels from the side of the Yamagata craft. Killifer lowered the spacesuited Japanese onto it. He heard a groan from the Jap.
�
��He’s still alive!” Hara shouted.
“Yeah,” said Killifer, thinking, Great. Now we gotta carry this dead weight back over four klicks of ice. Lucky if we don’t all wind up with busted bones.
“How much longer will it take?” Joanna demanded, nervously pacing up and down Jinny Anson’s office.
Greg, sitting on the couch jury-rigged from scavenged spacecraft seats, shook his head. Zimmerman and his staff had been working for hours in Moonbase’s nanolab. The grumpy old man hadn’t even looked at Doug yet.
“It takes time,” Kris Cardenas said. She was sitting behind Anson’s desk. Anson herself had rushed down to the control center to pipe Doug’s vidcam disk to The Hague, registering Masterson Corporation’s claim to the Mt Wasser region. She had graciously turned over her entire suite to Joanna, saying she could stay in smaller quarters until her tour of duty was finished and she left for Earth. In truth, she wanted to keep as far away from Joanna as she could.
“But Doug doesn’t have time,” Joanna said. “He’s dying!”
Cardenas got up from the desk chair. I’ll get back to the lab and see if I can help speed things up.”
“Yes,” said Joanna. “Good.”
The instant the door closed behind Cardenas, Greg got up from the couch, took his mother by the hand, and made her sit down where he had been. Then he sat beside her.
“There’s no sense getting yourself sick over this,” he said. “You should try to get some rest”
Joanna shook her head. “How can I rest?”
“I could get something for you, to help you sleep.”
“No! I…’ She stopped, as if confused, suddenly uncertain of what she wanted to say, wanted to do.
I’ll let you know the instant something happens,” Greg promised.
“Don’t you see!” Joanna blurted. “It’s my fault! All my fault! I should never have allowed him to go to Moonbase. I knew he was too young, too careless.” She broke into tears.
Greg put his arms around his mother and let her sob on his shoulder. “It’s not your fault; it isn’t. And he wasn’t careless. Nobody could have predicted the flare.”
“First the Moon killed Paul, now it’s killed him. And it’s my fault, all my fault.”
Coldly, Greg said, “The Moon didn’t kill Paul Stavenger. We both know that.”
Joanna pulled slightly away from him. Her eyes were red, filled with tears. “I was a terrible mother to you, Greg. What happened was my fault as much as anyone’s.”
“Mom, that’s all in the past. There’s no sense dredging it up again.”
“But if only I had been—”
“Stop it,” Greg said sharply. I’ve spent years working my way through this. I don’t want to hear any more about it.”
Joanna stared at him, but said nothing.
“It’s not your fault. None of this is. What’s happened has happened. Now all we can do is wait and see if Zimmerman can save him.”
But he was thinking, Would she cry over me? He tried to remember back to his own childhood, all those years, he could not recall his mother crying for him. Not once.
Joanna pulled herself together with a visible, shuddering effort. “I can’t stay here,” she said, jumping to her feet too hard in the unaccustomed lunar gravity.
Greg had to grab her, steady her. “Be careful, Mom! You’ll hurt yourself.”
“Take me to him,” Joanna said.
“Doug? He’s in—”
“No. Zimmerman. I want to see him. I want to find out what he’s doing.”
Zimmerman sat sweating on a rickety swivel chair that seemed much too fragile to support his weight He had draped an ancient lab smock over his gray suit; the coat had once been white but now, after so many years of wear and washings, it was beyond bleach.
Beads of perspiration on his lip and brow, he chewed anxiously on his black cigar, his fourth of the long, trying day. One of his assistants had thoughtfully converted a laboratory dish into an ashtray for him. It sat on the lab bench at his side, filled with the shredded and soggy remains of three earlier cigars.
On the other side of the clear plastiglass wall, his four assistants bent over lab benches. Their lab smocks looked very new, starched and pressed.
The airtight door of the nanotechnology laboratory sighed open and Kris Cardenas came through.
“How’s it going?” she asked.
Zimmerman’s bushy brows contracted into a worried frown. “What takes weeks in Basel we are trying to do in hours here.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Turn up the air conditioning! Must I suffer like this?”
Cardenas shrugged. “I think the temperature is centrally controlled.” To her the lab felt comfortably warm; perhaps a bit stuffy. She smiled and added, “If you would lose some weight—”
“Camouflage,” Zimmerman said, slapping his belly.
“Camouflage?”
“Do you think the politicians and their spies suspect me of working on nanotherapies when I am so gross? Hah?”
Cardenas felt her jaw drop open. “Is it that bad? Even in Switzerland?”
“I take no chances,” Zimmerman said.
“Do you need anything?” Cardenas asked.
Zimmerman’s cheeks waddled slightly. “No. The equipment here is surprisingly good. Not precisely what we require for medical work, but good enough, I think. We are adapting it.”
“They use nanomachines here quite a bit.”
“But not for medical purposes.”
“No, I think not.”
“How is the patient?” Zimmerman asked.
Cardenas shrugged. “last time I checked he was fairly stable. Sinking slowly, but they’ve lowered his metabolic rate as far as they can.”
“Hmm.”
The airtight door slid open again and Joanna Masterson strode through, followed by Greg.
Zimmerman scowled. “This laboratory is in use. Find yourselves—”
“This is Joanna Masterson,” Cardenas said quickly.
Pushing himself up from the creaking little chair, Zimmerman clicked his heels and bowed slightly. “My abductress. The woman who has blackmailed me.”
Joanna ignored his jibe. She looked at the rumpled obese old man, noting that he was several inches shorter than she.
“How soon will you be ready?” she asked.
“As soon as we can,” Zimmerman said.
“Please don’t play games and don’t patronize me. My son is dying. How soon can you begin to help him?”
Zimmerman’s tone changed. “It’s a matter of programming. We are moving ahead as quickly as we can.”
“Programming,” Joanna echoed.
Waving a pudgy hand, Zimmerman explained, “We are adapting our little machines to seek out damaged cells and repair them. They will remove damaged material, molecule by molecule, and repair the cells with fresh material, molecule by molecule.”
Joanna nodded. Greg, standing slightly behind her, folded his arms across his eftest.
“The problem is that your son has sustained massive damage. His case is very different from merely getting rid of accumulated fat cells or breaking down plaque along blood vessels.”
“Can you do it?” Joanna asked.
“We will do it, Madam,” said Zimmerman. “Whether we will be able to do it in time, before he is too far gone even for the nanomachines to help him, remains questionable.”
“Is there anything else that you need? Any other assistants?”
“Nothing and no one that could be brought here in time.”
Greg asked, “How much of a chance does he have? I mean—”
“If I had even one single week this would be no problem.”
“But we’ve only got a few hours.”
Zimmerman sighed hugely. “Yah. This I know.”
Killifer clumped wearily to the comm cubicle of the buried shelter, still in his spacesuit, minus only the helmet. The young woman at the communications console rose to her f
eet.
“You did a fine job out there,” she said, eyes gleaming. “You saved two lives.”
With a crooked grin, Killifer said, “I saved the corporation from any competition to their claim, that’s what I saved.”
The young woman smiled knowingly. “You’re just being modest.”
Killifer shook his head and took the emptied chair, thinking, Hey, now I’m a friggin’ hero. I’ll have to look her up when we get back to the base. Might be worth some sack time.
“Moonbase says the Yamagata craft has shifted its trajectory and asked for permission to land here and pick up their men.”
“They’re welcome to ’em. I hope they brought medics. One of them’s in a bad way. Busted ribs.”
As he spoke, Killifer opened the channel to Moonbase. Jinny Anson’s face appeared on his screen, surprising him.
“I’m living in the control center until things settle down,” Anson told him. “Mrs. Stavenger’s come up here to be with her son.”
“She’s there? At Moonbase?”
“Yep. She’s going to be pretty damned thankful to you for getting him down off the mountain, I betcha.”
Like I had any choice, Killifer thought.
“And for getting those two stranded Japanese guys. Yamagata’s people have been falling all over themselves thanking us.”
“Really?”
“That’s their way of admitting that they messed up any claim they might have made. Heads are going to roll over at Nippon One, I betcha.”
Who gives a fuck? Killifer said to himself. Then he remembered, and a pang of sudden fear flared through him.
“How’s the Stavenger kid?” he asked.
Anson shook her head. “Not good. The Dragon Lady’s brought a team of nano specialists up here, but I don’t know if they can save him. He’s pretty far gone.”
It took a conscious effort for Killifer to unclench his teeth. “And the astronomer? Rhee? How’s she doing?”
Anson looked mildly surprised. “I don’t know. She was hanging pretty close to Doug Stavenger but she ought to be back at her job by now.”
Killifer nodded. I’ll have to track her down when we get back to the base.
