Part 9 (1/2)

”And what if it isn't?” Montana snapped.

”Then you'll have to take care of her,” O'Malley said, with more than a hint of belligerence in his voice. ”You're a doctor, aren't you?”

”You want my considered medical advice? Abort it. Get rid of it now, to be on the safe side. There's no telling how long this stupid blockade is going to last.”

”We can't!” O'Malley said.

”You're young enough to have a dozen babies. This one is bad timing, that's all.”

”I won't,” Claire said quietly.

”You're both Catholic, is that it?” Montana's voice softened slightly. ”I am too. The Church won't-”

”We're not going to have an abortion,” O'Malley said, his voice darkening. ”And that's final.”

Montana huffed at him. ”Well, maybe the Peacekeepers will take over the base and send us all back home.”

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 12 HOURS 22 MINUTES.

Doug stood atop a house-sized boulder and watched the drivers park their tractors on the three unoccupied landing pads of the rocket port. The half-built Clippers.h.i.+p that had been towed onto the fourth pad gleamed in the starlight.

Jinny Anson, recognizable by the bright rings of b.u.t.ter yellow on the arms of her bulky s.p.a.cesuit, stood beside him.

”Okay,” her voice said in his helmet earphones, ”we clutter up the landing pads so they can't use 'em. But they can still put down on the crater floor just about anywhere they want to.”

Doug nodded inside his helmet. Jinny was right. Alphonsus's floor was flat enough for a Clippers.h.i.+p to set down. The ground was cracked with rilles, pockmarked with small craters and strewn with rocks, but there were plenty of open s.p.a.ces where a good pilot could make a landing.

”All you're doing is forcing 'em to sit down a kilometer or so farther away from our main airlock,” Anson went on. ”What good's that going to do?”

”Maybe none,” Doug admitted. ”But I sure as h.e.l.l don't intend to let them use our landing pads.”

He sensed Anson shrugging inside her suit.

”Jinny, it's just about the only chance we've got, other than just folding up and surrendering.”

”That d.a.m.ned Quebecer wants to turn the base over to Yamagata?” Anson asked for the fortieth time.

”That's what he told my mother.”

”Son of a b.i.t.c.h.' She p.r.o.nounced each word distinctly, with feeling.

”Come on, let's get inside,” Doug said. ”They're finished here and I want to see how far Zimmerman and Cardenas have gotten along.”

The nanotech lab was a series of workshops set along one of the old Moonbase tunnels. The rooms were interconnected by airtight hatches and that entire section of corridor could be sealed off from the rest of the base, if necessary. Each workshop room and the corridor outside had powerful ultraviolet lamps running along their bare rock ceilings, capable of disabling any of the virus-sized nanomachines that might have inadvertently been released to float in the air. The floors and walls were strung with buried wires that could generate a polarizing current that would also deactivate any stray nanomachines.

These safety systems were turned on at the end of every working day, to guarantee that no nanomachines infected the rest of the base. The containment worked. Although nanomachines were a.s.sembled constantly for tasks as diverse as ferreting oxygen atoms out of the regolith and building s.p.a.cecraft structures of pure diamond out of carbon dust from asteroids, there had been no runaway 'gray goo' of nanomachines devouring everything in their path, no plagues of nan.o.bug diseases.

Over the years Professors Cardenas and Zimmerman and their a.s.sistants had developed nanomachines for medical uses. Moonbase employees regularly received nano injections to scrub plaque from their blood vessels and to augment their natural immune systems. In a closed environment such as the underground base, nanotherapy helped to prevent epidemics that might endanger the entire population. It was a standing joke that people returned from Moonbase healthier than they arrived. No one in Moonbase even had the sniffles, except for those few who were allergic to the ubiquitous lunar dust.

And the Cardenas/Zimmerman team was working on that.

Or had been, until the U.N. crisis erupted.

Doug went to Cardenas. Zimmerman would see no one; he had locked himself in his lab with orders that he could not, must not, would not be disturbed under any circ.u.mstances whatsoever.

”It's my fault,” Kris Cardenas told Doug. ”I teased Willi that afternoon you came to us in the university studio, told him he ought to figure out how to make a person invisible.”

”That's what he's working on?”

Cardenas nodded.

”But what help is that going to be?”

She shrugged. ”Leave him alone. While he's pus.h.i.+ng down that line he'll probably come up with one or two other things that'll be really useful.”

Doug started to object, but Cardenas added, ”It won't do you any good to try to get him onto another track. He'll just bl.u.s.ter and roar and go right back to what he wants to do.”

”I know,” Doug admitted ruefully.

”Let me show you what we've accomplished,” Cardenas said, leading Doug to the ma.s.sive gray metal tubing of the high-voltage scanning probe microscope that stood at one end of the lab table.

The two scientists working at the table made room for them. Cardenas peered at the microscope's display screen briefly, made a small adjustment on a roller dial, then turned smiling to Doug.

”Take a look.”

The display screen showed a swarm of dots surrounding a flat grayish thing. The gray material was shrinking rapidly. The dots seemed to be devouring it like a pack of scavengers tearing apart a bleeding carca.s.s.

”We've revived an old idea,” Cardenas said as he watched. ”Something we were working on more than twenty years ago, back Earthside.”

Slowly, Doug backed away from the screen and looked into her brilliant blue eyes. ”Gobblers,” he whispered.

”Right. This particular set is programmed to disa.s.semble carbon-based molecules...” Her voice trailed off as she saw the expression on Doug's face and realized that it had been gobblers, from her own lab in San Jose, that had killed Doug's father up on Wodjohowitcz Pa.s.s.

”Oh!” she said, fingers flying to her lips.

Doug fought the memory. It had happened before he'd been born. He'd been eighteen when he finally discovered that his half-brother Greg had used gobbler nanomachines to murder Paul Stavenger. That's all in the past, Doug told himself. Greg's been dead for seven years and it's all over and there's nothing you or anybody else can do to change the past.

”It's all right,” he said brusquely to Cardenas. ”I was just... it just caught me unawares, that's all.”

”I had forgotten,” Cardenas said, her voice low, trembling slightly. ”Twenty-five years ago...”

”It's all right,” he repeated. Taking a deep breath, he tried to bury the past and concentrate on the present.

”By the time the Peacekeepers land, though, the Sun will be up and the nanomachines will go into estivation, won't they?”

”We can program a batch to work at high temperature.”

”What about the UV?”