Ben Bova - Moonwar

He still dressed in the gray, old-fashioned three-piece suits he had brought to Moonbase with him seven years earlier. He had personally designed a set of nanomachines to keep the suits in perfect repair, renewing fraying cuffs and worn spots—atom by atom. The nanomachines even kept his clothes clean.

Still, as he sat sprawled in his favorite sofa, he looked like a rumpled mess, his jacket unbuttoned and flapping loose, his vest stretched tight across his ample stomach, tie loose from shirt collar, the halo of stringy gray hair surrounding his bald pate as dishevelled as King Lear in the storm scene.

“A direct trajectory here?” he was asking Doug. “It is customary first to go to a space station, yah?”

“I think they might be worried that most of the people in the space stations are on our side,” Doug said.

Doug was sitting in one of the oversized, overpadded armchairs facing the sofa. Built by nanomachines that Zimmerman himself had programmed, the furniture looked ludicrously out of place in this vast, echoing electronics studio carved out of the lunar rock. No one else was in the studio. The lights had been turned off, except for the lamps on the end tables that flanked the sofa: slender graceful stalks of lunar aluminum; the tables were built of lightweight but sturdy honeycomb ‘sandwich’ metal, also produced by nanomachines.

Zimmerman nodded as if Doug’s answer satisfied him. “And you have notified the U.N. that we are now an independent nation?”

Nodding, Doug replied, “The U.N., and as much of the news media as we could reach.”

“Still the troopship has not turned around?” Zimmerman’s accent seemed to get thicker each year.

“Not yet.”

“And there is no reaction from the U.N. to your declaration of independence?”

“Not yet,” Doug repeated.

“So,” the professor stretched out his short arms, “now we have nothing to do except wait, yah?”

“And prepare.”

Zimmerman’s shaggy brows shot up. “Prepare for what? Either they accept our independence or the Peacekeepers come in here and close everything.”

“I don’t intend to allow them to close Moonbase,” Doug said evenly.

Zimmerman snorted. “And how do you intend to stop them? With prayer, maybe?”

“That’s why I’ve come here to you, Professor,” said Doug. “We need your help.”

“To do what? Make a magic wand for you out of nanomachines? A death ray, maybe you want?”

Doug was accustomed to the old man’s blustering. “I was thinking more along the lines of medical help,” he said. “We may need—”

“I thought I’d find you here, Willi.”

Kris Cardenas came striding out of the shadows. Despite her years on the Moon she still kept a deep tan, thanks to ultraviolet lamps. To Doug she looked like a California surfer: broad shoulders, trim build, sparkling blue eyes. She kept her sandy hair clipped short and wore a loose, comfortable jumpsuit of pastel yellow. No jewelry, no decorations of any kind. From the easy-going, no-fuss look of her, you would never suspect she was a Nobel laureate nanotech researcher.

“Our young friend here wants me to make everyone bulletproof,” Zimmerman said, grudgingly dragging his bulk to one side of the sofa so Cardenas could sit beside him. Even on the Moon, Zimmerman did not move fast.

“No,” Doug protested. “All I’m asking—”

“You think perhaps that the nanomachines you carry inside you will protect you against machine guns? They saved your life twice before, but they don’t make you a superman.”

“Willi,” said Cardenas, with a charmer’s smile, “why don’t you let Doug tell you what he wants?”

“Medical supplies,” Doug blurted before Zimmerman could say another word. “If we’re cut off from Earth for more than a couple of months we’re going to run short of medical supplies. I was wondering if nanomachines could be developed to replace or augment some of the pharmaceuticals we use.”

“How can I do that? Your own silly rules prevent me from using nanomachines anywhere inside Moonbase, except in my laboratory,” Zimmerman grumbled.

“The safety rules, yes, I know,” said Doug.

“Even my furniture I had to make in my lab and then get a crew to schlep into here.”

“We can’t take the chance of having nanomachines propagate inside the base.”

“Nonsense,” Zimmerman muttered. “Superstition.”

Cardenas stepped in again. “So you’re ready to bend the safety rules, Doug?”

“We’ll have to, at least a little.”

“And you need help with medical supplies, right?”

“Right.”

“Aspirin maybe?” Zimmerman grumbled suspiciously.

“More than aspirin,” said Doug.

“Specifically?”

“I don’t know, specifically. You’ll have to talk to the medical staff.”

“I will have to? These are your orders? You are the field marshal now and I am under your command?”

“That’s exactly right,” said Cardenas, still smiling sweetly. “That’s the situation we’re in, Willi, and we’ve all got to do everything we can to help.”

Zimmerman mumbled something in German.

“Otherwise,” Cardenas warned, “we’ll all be sent back to Earth—and never allowed to work on nanotechnology again.”

For a long moment the old man said nothing. Then, with an enormous groaning sigh, he nodded unhappily. It made his cheeks waddle.

“Yah,” he said at last. “I will speak with your medical staff. I might as well. There is nothing else for me to do, now that Kiribati no longer takes our transmissions.”

Lunar University’s courses had been beamed to Kiribati for distribution to students around the world. That had worked well enough for the engineering and humanities curricula. But since most nations forbade teaching nanotechnology openly, the nanotech courses had to be packaged separately and delivered in clandestine ways. Cardenas often complained that she felt as if she were dealing in pornographic videos, “shipping them out in plain brown wrappers’.

“When this is over you can start teaching again,” Doug said.

“You think we will win?” Zimmerman’s tone made it clear that he had no such illusions.

“We’ll try,” said Doug, getting to his feet.

“And we’ll do everything we can to help,” Cardenas said. “Won’t we, Willi?”

“Yah.” Without enthusiasm.

“Thanks,” Doug said. “I appreciate whatever you can do.”

He started off toward the door, threading his way through the equipment standing idle in the shadows of the unlit studio. Behind his retreating back, Cardenas leaned toward Zimmerman and whispered a suggestion to him. The old man frowned, then shrugged.

“Maybe we can make you invisible,” Zimmerman called after Doug, his voice echoing through the darkened studio.

Doug looked back over his shoulder and suppressed the urge to laugh. That’d be great,” he said, thinking that bulletproof would be a lot better.

Back in his quarters, Doug lit up his wall screen, scanning the computer’s personnel files for anyone who had military experience. It was a fruitless search. Moonbase’s employees were scientists and engineers, technicians and medical doctors, computer analysts, nurses, construction specialists, agrotechnicians, managers and administrators. They had all been hired through Masterson Corporation’s personnel office, back Earthside. The only military veterans were a handful among the astronauts who piloted the transfer spacecraft from Earth, and none of them were at Moonbase at the present time.

Faure picked his timing very carefully, Doug realized. Halfway through the first phase of building the main plaza, with dozens of extra construction workers on hand and not a single spacecraft at the rocket port. We’ve even got that dance troupe from Canada visiting; another thirty-five mouths to feed.