Ben Bova - Moonwar

“That damned 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 bitch.” She pronounced 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 assembled constantly for tasks as diverse as ferreting oxygen atoms out of the regolith and building spacecraft 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 nanobug diseases.

Over the years Professors Cardenas and Zimmerman and their assistants 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 circumstances 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 pushing 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 bluster 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 massive 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 carcass.

“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 disassemble 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 Pass.

“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?”

Cardenas nodded and leaned her butt on the edge of the work bench. “It’s pretty intense in sunlight, yeah. But I think we can work around it.”

“We don’t want a set of nanobugs that can’t be turned off,” Doug warned.

She almost smiled. “Scared of the gray goo?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Uh-huh.” She lowered her head a moment, thinking. “Look, when the ship lands, what actually touches the ground?”

“Four landing pads. They’re about two meters in diameter and twenty, thirty centimeters thick.”

“And made of diamond?”

Doug nodded. “Their surfaces and internal bracing are diamond. There’re some hydraulic lines inside them.”

“The hydraulics are oil-based?”

“As far as I know, yes. I could check with the manufacturing division to make sure.”

“Okay,” Cardenas said, walking slowly away from the electron microscope. Doug followed in step beside her.

“The ship lands, right?” she said, thinking out loud. “Its landing pads come down on top of our gobblers. Covers them up, so they’re no longer in sunlight. And they’re shielded from the UV.”

“I get it. Then they can eat their way inside the landing pads and start taking the hydraulic system apart.”

“You got it.”

Doug broke into a grin, but it faded before it was truly started. “Only one problem, Kris.”

“What’s that?”

“What good’s it going to do us to prevent their Clippership from leaving the Moon? We want to stop them from getting here.”

Zoltan Kadar sat bleary-eyed in the middle of his monitoring screens, almost in tears as he squinted at the drawing of the Farside observatory. A beautiful dream, he told himself. My crowning achievement. It would be called the Kadar Observatory some day.

But it’s only a dream. I can’t even get an observation satellite to survey the ground.

For more than three days and three sleepless nights Kadar had hounded Doug Stavenger, to no avail. Most of his calls were intercepted by Jinny Anson, who sternly told him not to bother Stavenger.

“He’s got too much to do, Zoltan, to worry about your satellite shot.”

Twice he actually got to Stavenger himself, by tracking down Doug’s movements through the length and breadth -and depth—of Moonbase.

The first time, he accosted Stavenger as Doug was talking with the technicians in the control center. Doug listened patiently to Kadar’s complaints, then gripped the astronomer’s slim shoulder.

“Dr Kadar—”

“ Professor Kadar!”