The Silent War

ASTEROID 73-241

Levinson felt distinctly uneasy in the space suit. It was bad enough to have to fly out to this remote piece of rock in the middle of nowhere, carrying the heavily armored flask of nanomachines he had produced in the HSS lab at Selene. Now he had to actually go out of the ship like some superjock astronaut and supervise the crew he had brought with him.

“Me?” he had asked, alarmed, when Vickie Ferrer had told him that Martin Humphries himself wanted Lev to personally supervise the experiment.

“You,” she had replied, silky smooth. “It’s to your advantage to handle the job yourself. Why let someone else take the credit for it?”

As he hung weightlessly between the slowly spinning torch ship and the lumpy dark asteroid, clipped to the tether that was anchored to the ship’s airlock, Lev realized that Vickie had played him like a puppet. Her alluring smiles and promising cleavage, her smoky voice and tantalizing hints of what would be possible after he had succeeded with his nanomachines had brought him out here, to this dark and cold emptiness, face to face with a pitted, ugly chunk of rock the size of a football field.

Well, he told himself, when I get back she’ll be waiting for me. She said as much. I’ll be a big success and she’ll be so impressed she’ll do whatever I want her to.

Prodded by Ferrer’s implicit promises, Levinson had rushed through the laboratory work. Producing nanomachines that were not damaged by ultraviolet light was no great feat; the trick was to keep them contained so they couldn’t get loose and start eating up everything in sight. It was after he’d accomplished that that Ferrer had told him he must go out to the Belt and personally supervise the experiment.

So here I am, he said to himself, shuddering inside the space suit. It’s so absolutely empty out here! Despite his cerebral knowledge that the Asteroid Belt was mostly empty space, he found the dark silence unsettling. It’s like being in a football stadium with only one seat occupied, he thought. Like being all alone in an empty city. There were the stars, of course, but they just made Levinson feel spookier. There were millions of them, countless myriads of them crowding the sky so much that the old friendly constellations he knew from Earth were blotted out, swamped in the multitudes. And they didn’t twinkle, they just hung up there as if they were watching, solemn unblinking eyes staring down at him.

“We’re ready to unseal the bugs.” The voice of one of his technicians grated in his earphones, startling Levinson out of his thoughts.

“They’re not bugs,” he replied automatically. “They’re nanomachines.”

“Yeah, right. We’re ready to open the jug.”

Levinson pulled himself slowly along the tether to its other end, anchored in the solid rock of the little asteroid. His two technicians floated above the rock, able to flit back and forth on the minijet thruster units attached to their backpacks. Levinson, a novice at extravehicular activities, kept himself firmly clipped to the tether. He carried the “jug,” a sealed bottle made of pure diamond, on the utility belt around the waist of his space suit.

He planted his feet on the asteroid and, much to his consternation, immediately bounced off. In his earphones he heard one of his techs snicker softly.

“Newton’s laws work even out here,” he said, to cover his embarrassment.

He approached the rock more slowly and, after two more tries, finally got his boots to stay on the surface. He could see the puffs of dust where he first landed still hanging in the asteroid’s minuscule gravity.

The technicians had marked concentric fluorescent circles across the surface of the rock, like a glowing bull’s-eye. Cameras back in the ship would record how quickly the nanomachines spread from the release point, chewing up the rock as they went. Levinson went to the center of the circles, tugging on his tether, bobbing up and off the asteroid’s surface with each step he took. He heard no giggling from his technicians this time. Probably they’ve turned their transmitters off, he thought.

It was clumsy working in the space suit’s gloves, even with the tiny servomotors on the backs to help him flex the fingers. Finally Levinson unsealed the bottle and placed it, open end down, on the exact center of the bull’s-eye. Again, the light gravity worked against him. The bottle bobbed up from the surface as soon as he took his hand off it. Frowning, he pushed it down and held it for a moment, then carefully removed his hand. The bottle stayed put. Looking up, he saw that both his technicians were hovering well clear of the rock. Scared of the nanomachines, Levinson thought. Well, better to be safe than sorry. He grabbed the tether with both hands and hauled himself off the asteroid, then started his hand-over-hand return to the ship.

The tether suddenly went slack, and for a fearful moment Levinson thought something had gone wrong. Then he saw that it was still fastened to the ship’s airlock and remembered that the techs were supposed to set off an explosive charge that released the end of the tether attached to the asteroid. In the vacuum of space he couldn’t hear the pop of the explosive bolt. It took a surprisingly tough effort to turn around, but once he did he saw the other end of the tether hanging limply in empty space.

And the asteroid was vanishing! Levinson’s eyes goggled at how fast the nanomachines were chewing up the asteroid, leaving a rising cloud of dust that grew so rapidly the solid rock itself was quickly obscured. It’s like piranhas eating up a chunk of meat, he thought, recalling videos he had seen of the voracious fish setting a South American stream a-boil as they attacked their prey.

“Start the spectrometer!” Levinson called excitedly as he resumed tugging his way back to the ship.

In less than a minute he could see the sparkling dazzle of a laser beam playing over the expanding dust cloud.

Puffing with exertion, he saw as he approached the airlock that its hatch was closed. His two assistants had jetted to the ship ahead of him, he realized.

“What’re you getting?” he asked into his helmet microphone.

The technician running the spectrometer aboard the ship answered, “Iron, lead, platinum, silver —”

“Pure elements or compounds?” Levinson demanded, watching the asteroid dissolve like a log being chewed up by a wood chipper.

“Atomic species mostly. Some compounds that look pretty weird, but most of it is pure atomic species.”

The weird stuff must be the nanos, Levinson thought. He had programmed them to shut down after forty-eight hours. At this rate there wouldn’t be anything left of the asteroid in forty-eight hours except a cloud of individual atoms. Wow! he thought. It works even better than I expected. Vickie’s going to be impressed, all right.