SELENE
It was a shocked and thoughtful Trudy Yost who left the spaceport waiting area and headed toward the control center, where she could monitor the crew that was unloading the latest batch of antennas for the Cyclops radio telescope site.
Grant wondered if he’d been too brutally frank with her about Uhlrich’s condition. What the hell, he told himself, she’d find out about it one way or the other. The sooner the better. Help her to deal with the Ulcer.
The lobber was being refueled with powdered aluminum and liquid oxygen propellants, both elements gleaned from the lunar regolith at Selene by specialized nanomachines. Within half an hour Grant was cleared to board the rocket for its return flight to Selene.
* * *
After so many months at Farside, Selene felt like a metropolis. There was an automated tractor to whisk passengers through the tunnel that connected the Armstrong spaceport, out on the floor of the giant Crater Alphonsus, to Selene proper, more than a kilometer away.
As soon as he cleared the debarkation desk—manned by a smiling young woman in a coral red uniform—Grant phoned Dr. Cardenas to tell her he’d arrived.
“Good,” she said. In the pocketphone’s minuscule screen her face looked somber, almost grim. “Come on over to my lab.” And she abruptly clicked off.
Leaving his travelbag at the debarkation center, Grant used his pocketphone to find his way through Selene’s maze of corridors, although there were maps on voice-activated wall screens at every intersection. Dr. Cardenas’s nanotechnology laboratory was on the topmost of Selene’s four levels of living and working spaces, at the end of a winding side corridor. The corridor walls were blank, bare rock, and the low ceiling was lined with long strips of lights that seemed to be turned off.
Then he saw a sign on the wall up ahead:
WARNING. THIS AREA MAY BE EXPOSED TO HIGH-INTENSITY ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT. LEAVE THE AREA IMMEDIATELY WHEN THE RED WARNING LIGHTS ARE FLASHING.
A precaution against nanomachines that might escape from the lab, Grant realized. Even here in Selene they’re scared of nanomachines. Down at the end of the corridor he saw a closed door that bore the title NANOTECHNOLOGY LABORATORY.
He raised a fist to knock on the door, but a speaker grill set into the wall beside it said, “Come on in, Grant.” Cardenas’s voice. Then he noticed the tiny red eye of a minicamera set above the door.
The lab was surprisingly small, but then Grant told himself that machines the size of viruses don’t need a lot of room. He threaded his way through a set of workbenches, all of them bearing various pieces of apparatus. Most of the hardware was made of metal, a lot of stainless steel gleaming in the overhead lights, although Grant saw some intricate works of glass tubing, as well.
No one seemed to be in the lab. But then he saw Kris Cardenas sitting at a desk set against the back wall. A big gray tubular object stood man-tall beside the desk. A scanning force microscope, Grant figured. He nodded to himself: that microscope can visualize individual atoms.
“Welcome to the zoo,” Cardenas said, her voice flat and hard. She gestured to a sculpted plastic chair in front of the bulky microscope. “Have a seat.”
As he sat down, Grant saw a trio of irregularly shaped chunks of optical glass resting on the shelf of a bookcase to one side of the desk. He said, “Mr. McClintock told me to come over. I’m not quite sure—”
“Apparently you’re the resident expert on telescope mirrors,” Cardenas said, still looking bleak, almost angry. “I need to pick your brain.”
“Such as it is,” he joked.
Cardenas didn’t even crack a smile. Pointing to the glass samples, she said, “The glass factory sent these samples. Is this the raw material you use for the mirrors?”
Grant nodded. “Looks like it.”
“Not good enough, Grant. I need to be absolutely certain.” She turned and picked up one of the samples, then handed it to Grant.
He turned the lump of glass over in his hand. “Yeah, look at the label etched into it: the serial number starts with an O. O for optical.”
“Then this is the type of glass you use to make the mirrors.”
“Right.”
Cardenas took the sample from Grant and returned it to the bookshelf. “I’ll feed it to the disassemblers and get an atom-by-atom breakdown of its composition.”
“Good,” said Grant.
“I presume you can access all the files I’ll need about mirror construction,” she said.
“Sure.”
“Good. Then let’s get to work.”
Two hours later Grant felt as if he’d been through a semester’s worth of final exams, with a police interrogation thrown in. Cardenas was all business, unsmiling, as if she resented being pressed into this task of mirror manufacture. But she volunteered for the job, Grant remembered. When she talked to McClintock she looked pleased to help. Happy about it. Now, with me, she’s pissed as hell.
At last Cardenas seemed satisfied. Her eyes on the wall screen where Grant had forwarded all the data she’d asked for, she finally said, “That should do it, I think.”
“That’s everything you need?” Grant asked, wondering why McClintock had insisted on his coming to her laboratory. I could have done this from Farside, he thought.
“That’s the beginning,” she said. “The next step is to take apart the samples and get an exact analysis of their composition. Then I’ll have to program a set of assemblers to build you a mirror.”
Grant said, “Once you’ve got the raw materials.”
“Yes, there is that. I presume you can provide them for me.”
“The mirror’s supposed to be one hundred meters in diameter. You’ll need a place to build something that big.”
“That’s your department, Grant. You deal with Selene’s engineering department. Or maybe it’ll be the research department that gets involved in this.”
Grant pictured dealing with more bureaucracies. I’ll have to get Uhlrich involved in this. Nobody in Selene is going to stir themselves for me. I’ll need the Ulcer’s authority to get people here to move.
Cardenas broke into his thoughts. “It’s past seven P.M. Time to call it a day.”
She got to her feet and Grant stood up beside her. She was almost his own height, bright blond hair, good trim figure. But her sky-blue eyes seemed troubled, annoyed.
“I’ll see you here at eight tomorrow morning,” she said.
“Okay.” Then Grant realized he had no idea of where his quarters were. He’d left his travelbag with the young woman at the debarkation desk and hustled over to the nanolab before asking about where he was going to sleep.
“Eight o’clock, then,” Cardenas repeated. Grant realized he was being dismissed.