Part 33 (2/2)
only by their running lights. They were here to enforce the quarantine.
A driverless truck rolled up. ”Excuse the informal welcome,” announced an unseen speaker. Grunting, the astronauts hoisted the chest onto the flatbed and slammed shut the tailgate. The truck looped around them and drove to a pier jutting into the lagoon. Darkness and distance kept Kyle from seeing exactly how the chest was transferred to the awaiting submarine. No one knew how best to isolate the nanotech samples, or how rapidly the contagion might reproduce in terrestrial conditions. For lack of an
alternative, the safety protocols in the onboard labs, converted torpedo rooms, were based on biohazard containment.
The submarine sailed off into the midnight darkness, headed, Kyle knew, for the deepest point in the
island's lagoon. Nuclear powered, the sub extracted oxygen by electrolysis and desalinated its drinking water. The Navy boasted that its subs could remain submerged as long as the food lasted.
In the worst-case scenario, this sub would never surface.The driverless truck returned. ”Hop in, folks,” crackled the speaker. ”Time for your all-expenses-paid tropical vacation, courtesy of Uncle Sam.” They climbed in for the ride to a nearby cl.u.s.ter of huts. It went unspoken that their stay could be permanent if the coming dawn revealed an outbreak of alien nanotech. No one slept until an entirely ordinary sunrise became a gloriously ordinary day.
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EPILOGUE.
Kyle and Darlene strolled hand in hand along a serpentine strip of sand. Combers rolled lazily into the lagoon of the lonely atoll. Wind sighed through the fronds of palm trees. Stars sparkled overhead, all the brighter for the pallor of the altered moon. Both were barefoot, wearing only thin s.h.i.+rts over swim suits.
Humidity had frizzed her hair.
”You shouldn't be here, you know.” The gentle squeeze he gave her hand belied his words. ”It's dangerous.”
She snorted. ”Yeah, I can see what hards.h.i.+p duty this is.””It didn't tell you something that the only way you could come was to be lowered in a harness from a helicopter?” And that the chopper pilot then jettisoned the cable, a very long cable, instead of rewinding it?
”I missed you, too.”
They'd talked for hours. Cat anecdotes. Weather disasters possibly caused by the microwave onslaught.
The paperwork minutiae of modern life. Cat anecdotes. Radioed progress reports from the submerged lab. There was, at last, some unmitigatedly upbeat news: discovery that the nanotech was optimized for
unfiltered-by-atmosphere sunlight. The nannies, should any escape, would spread much slower on Earth than on the moon.With miles of tropical beach to themselves and, for the moment, perfect weather, apocalyptic scenarios and civilization's routines seemed equally improbable. Kyle whistled softly to himself, at peace with the world.
Darlene stopped short. ”I know that look.”
”What look?”
”That cat-that-ate-the-cardinal expression.” Stripes was quite the huntress; and there were no wild canaries in Virginia. ”Like someone who thought his hidden agenda for refueling shuttles in s.p.a.ce was, well, hidden.”
”You knew?”
”Honey, we all suspected.” She pecked his cheek. ”Retrieving the masersat was the right thing to do. It didn't matter that the capability to do so might also make other things possible.”
”And you never said anything.” He said it wonderingly-one who conspired had no standing to
complain about others holding their tongues.”So . . . about that look of yours.””We, mankind, have no choice but to develop a major lunar presence. People manufacturing robots and dispersing them across the moon's surface.” He rotated slowly, drinking in the beautiful night sky. This near the equator, many of the constellations were unfamiliar. It still took him a moment to get his celestial bearings. ”Maintaining that human presence will mean mining the ice in the eternal shadows, the forever nanotech-safe shadows, of the moon's polar craters. If permanent defeat of the alien nanotech does not come quickly-and nothing about this battle has gone smoothly-supporting lunar outposts will mean more s.p.a.ce travel, to harvest icy asteroids. But that's okay, because just as reaching low Earth
orbit is most of the work of getting to the moon, a lunar base is the hard part of reaching the planets.”His thoughts churned faster than he could find words. His mind's eye pictured mechanisms for aimingbanks of masers, rather than simply blinding their sensors. Steer the microwaves to antenna farms in the deep desert, where water vapor won't be increased, and the moon became Earth's solar-energy power plant. And if research could recover the original programming of the Krulchukor laser cannons? It would mean human sail-equipped s.p.a.cecraft.
”Swelk never meant Earth any harm, so the outcome is fitting. The result of her visit will be, not
disaster, but a rebirth of human exploration. I sincerely believe that her legacy will be mankind's dominion over the solar system.”
”Keep going.”
”Huh?” Gentle amus.e.m.e.nt wasn't the reaction he'd expected to his impa.s.sioned speech.
”Don't even try to bluff a diplomat. It's never going to work.” She peered at the ghostly crescent overhead. ”Since long before we met, the moon has been your obsession . . . yet you've scarcely glanced at it since I arrived. So I want to know, what has taken its place in your always scheming mind?”
He indicated a brilliant red spark near the horizon. A telescope for the object's proper study topped his wish list for the next airdrop. ”I don't expect it to be me personally”-not that I expected to go to the moon, either-”but that is what. That is mankind's next big step.
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