Ben Bova - Moonwar

“How long will you remain at Moonbase?” Zimmerman asked.

“I wish I knew,” Inoguchi replied wistfully. “Our mission to Moonbase was arranged very hastily, and with the blockade in effect—”

“Blockade?”

“No flights to Moonbase have been permitted for six weeks now. Surely you were aware of that.”

“Oh, that. Yah. I didn’t think of it as a blockade,” Zimmerman said.

With a rueful gesture, Inoguchi said, “They told us back home before we left that they would try to arrange a mission from Nippon One to pick us up here and then bring us back to Copernicus. From there we can take a flight back to Earth. But I have no idea of how long that will take to negotiate or how long I must remain here.”

“I see.”

“One thing is certain, however. Even if there were a hundred ships ready to take me back to Kyoto, I could not leave until I had looked through your laboratory.”

Zimmerman grunted. “You think I am cooking up nano-machines to wipe out Japan, maybe?”

Inoguchi actually broke into a grin. “No, sir, I don’t. But the people at the U.N. who sent me here fear that you might be brewing nanobugs that will spread deadly plagues all across Earth.”

“Nonsense!”

“You know it is nonsense, and I know it is nonsense, but they do not have enough knowledge to allay their fears.”

Zimmerman looked at the younger man with newfound respect.

“Let us be frank with one another,” Zimmerman said. “I will show you my work, but you must tell me about your own. Fair?”

Inoguchi nodded. “Quite fair.”

“Your laboratory is funded by Yamagata Industries, I trust?”

“My entire department is funded by Yamagata. Seigo Yamagata himself has taken a deep interest in my work.”

“Which is?”

“Nanotechnology, of course. You must have known that.”

Turning to lead him to the bench where the electron microscope and micromanipulators were, Zimmerman said over his shoulder, “I had my suspicions.”

Several hours later they were sitting on stools at the back end of the lab, where Zimmerman kept his dwindling supply of imported beer. He had led his visitor through his whole lab, congratulating himself on not once letting him guess that his most recent work was all aimed at helping Moonbase to defend itself against Peacekeeper attack.

Zimmerman took a long draught of beer from the plastic beaker he used as a stein. “If the verdammt blockade continues much longer,” he groused, “I will be reduced to drinking fruit juice.”

Inoguchi said nothing.

“We’ve been trying to make beer with nanomachines, you know.”

“Ah?”

Shaking his head, Zimmerman confessed, “It tastes like piss.”

“Mr Yamagata is most interested in the therapeutic uses of nanotechnology,” Inoguchi said, holding his lab beaker of beer in both hands. “He is concerned about cancer, especially.”

“So? How old is he?”

“Hardly fifty, but the family history—”

“PROFESSOR ZIMMERMAN, PLEASE REPORT TO THE INFIRMARY IMMEDIATELY,” the wall speaker blared. “PROFESSOR ZIMMERMAN TO THE INFIRMARY AT ONCE. EMERGENCY.”

Even nanomachines need a finite time to react.

The virus-sized machines teeming in Doug’s blood stream sensed the sudden drop in pressure and the desperate chemical changes that tried to activate the natural clotting factors before Doug bled to death. His windpipe was cruelly ruptured and blood was leaking into his lungs, choking him.

Unconscious, gasping for breath, bleeding to death as his heart spewed his life’s blood out through his severed arteries, Doug’s hands spasmed, his body shuddered, and then he was still.

Inside him hundreds of millions of nanomachines were working with millisecond frenzy, seizing individual atoms and locking them in place like a stubborn team of men doggedly packing sandbags onto a flood-broken levee. With mindless purposefulness other nanomachines pulled apart the droplets of blood leaking into Doug’s lungs, broke up the liquid into molecules of gas. Doug coughed and retched as nanomachines seamlessly knitted together his carotid arteries and began to close the gash across his throat.

Nearly half his blood had been splashed over the bunk, the wall, even the ceiling above the bunk before the nanomachines sealed his arteries and stopped the major bleeding. It took longer—minutes—to completely close the wound in his throat.

Still unconscious, Doug sank into a deeper coma while the nanomachines cleaned his lungs and augmented the natural chemical factors that prompted his bone marrow to start producing more red blood cells. Yet his blood supply was dangerously depleted. He needed plasma and liquids. He lay there, between life and death, unable to move, unable to open his eyes or stir himself out of the coma.

Hours later, Edith came back to the apartment, tired yet keyed up with the excitement of having pulled off a masterful broadcast. By golly, I am good, she told herself as she slid the door shut and started across the living room to see how Doug was doing.

She screamed when she saw all the blood. Her knees buckled and she felt as if she was going to faint.

No! she raged at herself. Get help! Quick!

She banged on the phone keyboard and shrieked for an emergency medical team. Then she ran back to take a closer look at Doug. Despite the blood she saw no wounds, nothing but a thin red line across his throat. It looked more like a paper cut than anything serious. Yet there was blood all over the bunk, soaking him, splattered on the wall, the ceiling. He was unconscious, totally out of it. He was breathing, though. Or is he? Fighting down her panic, Edith saw that Doug was breathing slowly, deeply, like a man innocently asleep.

The medical team barged into the apartment: the base’s resident doctor and two paramedic aides drafted from other duties.

“What the hell happened here?” Dr Montana scowled at the scene. Within minutes Doug was being wheeled to the infirmary by the aides while the deeply puzzled doctor asked Edith again and again questions that she could not answer as they ran behind the gurney.

By the time Doug opened his eyes, Zimmerman and Kris Cardenas were hovering over his infirmary bed and Jinny Anson was standing beside a pale and shaken Edith, both women peering worriedly at him through the glass partition that closed off his cubicle. A tall youngish Japanese man was out there too; Doug remembered him as one of the U.N. inspectors.

Doug looked up at Zimmerman, who was staring intently at him, as if sheer willpower could make his patient awake. The old professor looked more dishevelled than usual, straggly hair in wild disarray, both vest and jacket unbuttoned and flapping across his paunch. Yet there was a gentleness in his gaze, like a grandfather watching over a sleeping infant.

“This is getting monotonous,” Doug said, weakly. His voice was hoarse, grating.

Zimmerman’s expression immediately hardened into his usual disapproving frown. “So? Even a cat has only nine lives,” he said brusquely. “You are using up yours at a rapid rate.”

“I’m getting a lot of help,” Doug breathed. He realized there were intravenous tubes in both his arms. Monitors beeped away quietly somewhere behind his head.

“What happened?” Zimmerman asked.

Doug blinked, remembered. “Bam. Leroy Gordette. He tried to murder me.” His sandpaper voice was filled with the surprise and grief that he felt at Gordette’s betrayal.

“It was Gordette?” Cardenas asked, her clear blue eyes snapping. “The ex-soldier?”

“He slit my throat,” Doug said, fingering his throat, finding neither wound nor pain there.

Edith pushed into the narrow cubicle, Anson right behind her. Inoguchi remained on the other side of the observation window.