JOB DESCRIPTIONS
Grant watched in stunned silence as Oberman slammed furiously out of the professor’s office and banged the sliding door loudly shut behind him.
The office fell absolutely still. Grant could hear the whisper of the air blowing softly through the ducts in the stone ceiling.
I’m going to head up the tech team, Grant said to himself. Nate thinks I angled for his job. He’s sore as hell. Then he thought, I guess I would be, too, if the Ulcer had bounced me out of my job.
At last Uhlrich asked, in a voice that was low but sharp enough to cut steel, “Where is the damaged mirror now?”
“On its way back here,” Grant replied. “It’s about halfway down the ringwall road. Should be at the mirror lab airlock in six or seven hours.”
“You left it there? You left your crew?”
“You told me to report to you as quickly as possible, didn’t you? Well, here I am.”
Uhlrich stared blankly at Grant. After several moments, McClintock tried to break the tension. “Couldn’t we repair the mirror, instead of recasting it?”
Surprised, Grant asked, “Repair it? How?”
“With nanomachines.”
“Nanos…” Grant glanced back at Uhlrich, who sat as rigidly as a Chinese mandarin presiding over an execution.
Nanomachines can be dangerous, Grant knew. He had considered suggesting using them to Uhlrich back when he’d first arrived at Farside, but decided against it. Too risky, he’d thought. Especially in a facility as small as Farside. If some rogue nanos got loose they could wipe out the whole place and everybody in it.
Instead, he had followed Uhlrich’s decision to spin cast the mirrors. With the Moon’s lighter gravity it was possible to spin cast telescope mirrors far larger than anything on Earth.
Yeah, Grant thought. Until you try to get them over the ringwall mountains and they crack on you.
Halfheartedly, Uhlrich said, “If nanomachines can repair the mirror, we will have lost only a few weeks.”
Instead of the months it would take to recast the mirror, Grant thought. He looked at McClintock with newfound respect. He might be able to do it. Nanomachines might be the answer, after all. Despite the risks.
Uhlrich dismissed them both with a curt nod of his head. Grant followed McClintock through the door and out into the corridor.
As he slid the door shut, Grant asked McClintock, “Do you really think nanotechnology can save the mirror?”
The taller man made a barely discernible shrug. “I really don’t know. Maybe we’re grasping at straws.”
Starting down the corridor, toward the area where the living quarters were located, McClintock said, “I’m surprised that Professor Uhlrich didn’t look into nanotech when he first came to Farside.”
“Maybe he should have,” Grant replied noncommittally.
“I mean, with Cardenas heading the nanolab over at Selene. She’s up for the Nobel, for god’s sake.”
“Nanomachines can be dangerous, you know,” Grant said. “They’re banned back on Earth. Worried about murderers or terrorists using them.”
“Or the gray goo,” said McClintock.
Grant looked at him. The man was not smiling now.
McClintock went on, “Someone could design nanomachines to tear apart carbon-based molecules. There goes all the world’s plastics—and people.”
“I’ve heard there are secret nanolabs on Earth,” Grant said. “Big corporations have them tucked away here and there.”
“Old wives’ tales,” McClintock muttered.
Grant nodded. “Maybe so.”
The corridor was narrow and low-ceilinged. The construction engineers who had cut these tunnels hadn’t spent a penny more than necessary. Strictly utilitarian. Bare rock, drab and gray. Pipes and conduits along the ceiling. Overhead lights spaced every twenty meters made the corridor look shadowy. Like a haunted house, Grant thought. He grimaced. I don’t need any props or settings to haunt me, he thought. I’ve got my own demons chasing me.
He felt his hands beginning to tremble, and knew that he needed a fix. Only a few more meters to my door, Grant told himself. I can make it without letting him see how bad off I am. He jammed his hands in his coverall pockets.
Was it my fault the mirror cracked? he asked himself. Nate plotted out the road, and I told him he ought to make it easier, but the Ulcer was in a sweat to get the frigging mirror over to Mendeleev, and Nate didn’t have the balls to stand up to him. Maybe I should’ve tried to help Nate, stiffen his backbone a little. Maybe I could’ve helped to make the road easier to traverse. I might have saved Nate’s job for him. But that would’ve meant we’d need more time to build the road and Uhlrich—
He realized that McClintock was speaking to him.
“… my quarters at seventeen hundred, sharp.”
Grant blinked, confused. “Your quarters?”
“For my teleconference with Dr. Cardenas,” McClintock said.
“You want me in on that?”
“Of course.”
They had reached Grant’s door. “This is my place,” he said.
McClintock stopped and repeated, “Seventeen hundred. Sharp.”
“I’ll be there,” said Grant. Then he realized, “Um, where is your place?”
McClintock broke into an easy smile. “A-twenty-four. That’s halfway down the next cross corridor.”
“I know. Okay.”
His smile fading, McClintock said, “You’ve something of a reputation, you know.”
“Oh?” Grant felt his pulse start to race.
“Fine engineer,” said McClintock, “but … well, dependent on … medications.”
“I’ve got some physical problems, that’s true,” Grant admitted. “I can’t return to Earth. I’ve got to stay here on the Moon.”
McClintock nodded. “I heard that you were bounced out of your job at Selene.”
Grant admitted it with a mute nod.
“Fighting. You wrecked the Pelican Bar, they tell me.”
His voice low, Grant replied, “I had help. It was a free-for-all.”
“So now you’re stuck here at Farside.”
“That’s right, I guess.”
“Apparently you’ve kept your nose clean here,” McClintock said.
Grant nodded again, thinking, When is this inquisition going to end?
“Well, you’ve risen to the top of the tech gang, but that’s only temporary. You’re on trial, Simpson.”
So what else is new? Grant asked silently.
McClintock broke into his sunny smile again and said, “But we’ll see what we can do to make your temporary promotion a permanent one.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Grant mumbled.
“Good.” McClintock started down the corridor, but as Grant tapped out the entry code for his door, he turned back and said, “Oh, and do take a shower before you come to my quarters. Right?”
“Right,” Grant agreed.
* * *
All the living spaces at Farside were the same. Grant thought of it as an engineering-inspired bit of democracy. From the Ulcer down to the lowliest inventory clerk, everybody got identical living spaces. The engineers who designed and built the underground facility had decided it would be cheaper and easier to build that way.
Selene had started out the same way, back decades ago when it had begun as Moonbase. But over the years, as Selene grew larger, the newer living quarters became bigger, more luxurious. Two and three bedrooms. Spacious sitting rooms: well, spacious by the standards of a community where every corridor, every room, every living and working space had to be carved out of the solid lunar rock by plasma torches.
Of course, there was that grotto at Selene’s deepest level, a natural cave that zillionaire Martin Humphries had turned into a blooming botanical garden with his own luxurious mansion smack in its middle. Incredibly expensive to maintain, but the Humphries Trust footed the bill and sponsored the fantasy that the area was an ecological research center, dedicated to studying how to establish an Earth-type environment deep underground on the Moon.
Yeah, Grant thought as he hurried down the corridor toward McClintock’s quarters. A research facility, with the richest man in the solar system living in splendor smack in the middle of it.