Titan

28 December 2095: Nanolab

Malcolm Eberly felt distinctly uneasy inside the nanotech laboratory. Not that he had any religious scruples against nanotechnology; he simply shared the same fear that most people had about an outbreak of uncontrollable nanomachines, mindless microscopic monsters chewing up everything in their path like an unstoppable swarm of soldier ants. The thought made him shudder inside.

He knew his fears were grounded in solid fact. Nanomachines had killed people in the past. Back when Dr. Cardenas had first joined the habitat, while Professor Wilmot was still in charge of the interim government, the old man had insisted on all kinds of safeguards before he’d allow Cardenas to set up this laboratory. Why, just getting into this lab was a major struggle: You had to pass through a double set of heavy doors, just like an airlock. Cardenas had to keep the air pressure inside her lab lower than the pressure in the rest of the habitat, just to make certain none of the virus-sized machines could waft out on a stray current of air.

Urbain seemed uneasy, too. He must be really desperate, Eberly thought, if he’s considering using nanomachines to fix his probe down there on Titan.

If Kris Cardenas sensed their apprehensions, she gave no sign of it. Perched casually on a tall stool, one elbow leaning on the top of the lab bench, Cardenas was wearing a comfortable light, short-sleeved sweater of baby blue and denim jeans. Urbain, as usual, was in a jacket and carefully creased slacks. No tie, but he had knotted an ascot inside the collar of his shirt. Eberly himself wore a loose tunic over his slacks, as the dress code he had promulgated called for. Hardly anyone outside the habitat’s administrative staff paid much attention to his dress code.

“We’ve been working on nanos for self-repair and maintenance,” Cardenas was saying to Urbain. “That was what you asked for.”

“Yes, I realize that,” Urbain replied, running a nervous finger along his trim moustache. “But we are confronted by a new problem now.”

Eberly hadn’t actually been invited to this meeting, but once he heard that Urbain was going to Cardenas for help he decided he had to listen in. And Urbain was too ridiculously polite to tell the habitat’s chief administrator to keep his nose out of scientific matters. So Eberly sat in one of the folding chairs that Cardenas had provided for them while Urbain and the nanotech expert thrashed out their problems. Off at the far side of the lab, Cardenas’s lone assistant hovered among the gleaming metal equipment, intently listening. What’s his name? Eberly asked himself. Tavalera, came the answer. The engineer we picked up after the refueling accident at Jupiter.

“As I understand the problem,” Cardenas was saying, “the probe isn’t sending any data to you.”

Urbain touched his moustache again before answering. “Titan Alpha is not uplinking data from its sensors, that is true. We have reason to believe the sensors are working and gathering data. Alpha simply is not relaying the information to us.”

“Curious,” muttered Cardenas.

“Frustrating,” snapped Urbain. “We are receiving telemetry from Alpha’s maintenance program. All systems appear to be functioning properly—except for the sensor data uplink.”

Cardenas straightened up on her stool, crossed her legs, glanced over at her assistant, then made a little shrug. “I don’t see what we can do to help you, Dr. Urbain. It’s—”

“Please. Call me Eduoard. We have known each other long enough to use our first names.”

“Eduoard,” Cardenas said, with a slight dip of her chin. “I’m afraid I don’t see how nanos can help you, unless you can pinpoint the cause of the malfunction.”

Urbain sighed mightily. “That is the real problem. We don’t know what is causing the silence. No one knows. My people have been racking their brains for three days now. And three nights, I might add. They are going over all the computer programming, line by line. It is maddening.”

“So how can nanos help?”

With a shake of his head, Urbain said, “I was hoping that perhaps there might be some way to deliver nanomachines to Alpha that could construct a new uplink antenna.”

“A backup to the existing antenna?”

“Or a replacement,” said Urbain.

He’s desperate, Eberly said to himself. Grasping at straws.

Cardenas got down from the stool. “Let me think about it, Eduoard. That might be possible, but it won’t be easy …” Her voice trailed off.

Urbain got to his feet. “I would appreciate anything you can do.”

Cardenas walked him to the door of the laboratory, Eberly following a pace or so behind them. “Please keep me informed of your analysis of the situation,” she told Urbain. “You never know, something that seems trivial to you might open a window for us.”

“I will,” said Urbain. His gloomy tone showed how hopeless he felt. “Thank you.”

As soon as the lab door closed behind them, Eberly made a hasty farewell to Urbain and hurried outside the laboratory building, into the sunshine, along the gently rising street up to the administrative center and into his own office. Sliding into his desk chair he told the phone to locate Ilya Timoshenko and ask him to come to the chief administrator’s office immediately.

Timoshenko ran against me in the general election, Eberly told himself. So did Urbain. If they’re smart enough to combine their votes they could defeat me in June. I’ve got to get them working against one another. Divide and conquer, that’s the rule.

Timoshenko was not in the navigation center, which was his nominal work station, for the simple reason that he had nothing to do there now that Goddard was plying its orbit around Saturn. Nothing to do except think, and remember the life he had left behind on Earth. The woman he had left behind. His wife, the golden-haired Katrina. Katrina of the sweet smile and delicate hands. When she spoke it was like silver bells chiming in his heart.

No, that way lay remorse. And anger. A rage so towering that its black storm could engulf him utterly. Timoshenko fought against the rage, because he knew that he himself was its focus, its center. At the thundering heart of his bloodred fury was the knowledge that he had brought this exile on himself. He drank too much, he talked too much, he cared too much. So they had exiled him to this green and luxurious prison more than a billion kilometers from Katrina.

Timoshenko was working with the Titan Alpha mission control team when the call from Eberly reached him. Now that the probe was on Titan, the control center was on twenty-four-hour status: all consoles manned at all times. Timoshenko had volunteered to help fill mission control’s manpower needs. The job wasn’t really work; just babysitting the consoles. Boring routine, nothing more. The telemetry was coming through fine and showed that the stupid machine down there was functioning as it should. Except that it refused to send any sensor data to Urbain and his twitching scientists. Timoshenko almost laughed. Urbain’s pride and joy was sitting on a cliff of dirty ice like a sullen teenager, refusing to talk to its daddy.

So what? he asked himself. Why shouldn’t Urbain have his dreams shattered? Welcome to the club.

The phone’s synthesized voice spoke in its flat, dull tones in his earplug: “The chief administrator wishes to see you in his office immediately. Please acknowledge.”

Suppressing an urge to tell the chief administrator to pound sand up his ass, Timoshenko took in a breath, then replied into his lip mike, “I am on duty at the mission control center and cannot leave my post. My shift will end at seventeen hundred hours. I will report to the chief administrator’s office at seventeen-twenty, unless I hear otherwise from our respected and unparalleled chief administrator.”

There, Timoshenko thought. That ought to keep that fathead Eberly happy for a couple of hours.

Cardenas met Nadia Wunderly at the cafeteria precisely at noon. They carried their trays through the cold food line together, and Cardenas noted with an inner smile that Nadia took nothing more than a fresh green salad and a bottle of mineral water. Not wanting to tempt her friend to anything more, Cardenas limited her own selection to a Caesar salad augmented with bits of grilled faux chicken and a tall glass of tomato juice.

As they put their trays on an empty table and sat down, Cardenas remarked, “You’re looking well, Nadia.”

“I feel great,” said the physicist.

Cardenas nodded and dug into her salad.

“I mean,” Wunderly continued, “I can almost feel the nanos melting away the fat inside me. I’ve lost six kilos already!”

“That’s wonderful.” Cardenas smiled to herself.

A month earlier Wunderly had come to her, almost in tears, to beg her help. “It’s almost Christmas,” she pleaded, “and look at me! I’m fat as a pig!”

Cardenas had tried to calm her friend, but she knew what was coming and dreaded it.

At last Wunderly had begged, “Can’t you give me some nanos, just a little bit, just enough to burn this fat off me? Nobody’s going to ask me out for New Year’s Eve when I look like this!”

Wunderly was chubby. Her basic body type was chunky, big-boned. She would never look sylphlike or slinky unless she had a complete body makeover, which could take months.

“What you’re asking for is gobblers,” Cardenas had told her friend as gently as she could. “They’re illegal, totally banned everywhere. They could kill you; they’ve killed others, god knows.”

“I don’t care!” Wunderly had yelped. “I’ll take the risk!”

But Cardenas would not. Still, she could not leave her friend to despair. Grimly, she had told Wunderly, “Come to my lab tomorrow night, around eight.”

Wunderly had come to the lab as eager as a puppy. Cardenas gave her a fruit cocktail that contained not nanomachines, but a powerful appetite suppressant and a diuretic. A placebo, in effect. She gave Wunderly detailed instructions about dieting and exercise.

“If you don’t follow this regimen the nanos won’t attack the fat cells,” Cardenas had warned, mentally crossing her fingers. “And you’ll be endangering your health.”

Every two days Wunderly had returned to Cardenas’s lab for a booster. She thought she was getting nanomachines that would burn away her fat as if by magic. To her delight, she lost weight. Not magically: it was by dint of diet and exercise that she would never have undertaken without the lure of nanomachines doing their work inside her body.

And it was working. Nadia already looks better, Cardenas thought, and she’s smiling instead of blubbering about her weight.

Manny Gaeta came to their table, carrying a tray laden with soup, a McGlop sandwich, and a slice of peach pie. Cardenas had told him about her little deception, of course. She had to step on his foot, under the table, only three times before he caught her meaning.

“Hey, Nadia, you’re looking terrific,” he said, grinning at Wunderly. “You been working out or something?”

“Something,” Wunderly answered, beaming at Cardenas.