DR. FREDERIC PALMQUIST
Grant and Trudy were the only passengers aboard the lobber on its return flight to Selene. The vehicle was configured for carrying cargo, not passengers, so they sat in a pair of fold-out seats up in the cramped cockpit, shoehorned in behind the pilot and copilot.
Grant saw that once they had lifted off, the pilots had nothing to do during the forty-five-minute flight except watch the control panel instruments. The ballistic flight followed Newton’s Laws faithfully.
Then he noticed that Trudy looked … not frightened, exactly, but concerned, almost worried, her face a little taut.
“It’s okay,” he said, trying to reassure her. “Everything’s going smoothly.”
Trudy looked startled. “I know. I just feel kind of like a sardine, cooped up in here.”
“It’s not first-class accommodations, that’s for sure,” he admitted.
“Can’t see the ground at all.”
Pointing between the pilots’ shoulders, Grant said, “We’ll see it on their display screen when we start to descend.”
Trudy nodded uncertainly.
“The flight’s on trajectory,” Grant said. “No worries.”
With a smile that looked forced, Trudy said, “Fliers claim that flying is the second most exciting thing a man can do.”
“And what’s first most exciting, sex?”
“No,” she said, her expression quite serious. “The first most exciting thing a man can do is landing.”
She is worried, Grant realized. He wondered what he could say to make her feel better.
“It’ll be okay, don’t worry about it.”
Grant thought it sounded pretty lame, but Trudy smiled again at him. It was a pretty smile, he thought.
The lobber’s landing was fully automated, although the two pilots hunched over their instruments, ready to assume manual control if necessary, as the rocket plummeted toward Selene’s blast-blackened landing pads.
Despite his reassurances, Grant felt a wave of relief once they touched down. He grinned at Trudy.
“Piece of cake.”
“Sure,” she said. “Now.”
As soon as they cleared the debarkation desk and got aboard one of the automated trams that ran through the kilometer-long tunnel to Selene proper, Grant phoned Dr. Palmquist.
The Swede was in a tour bus, taking in the tourist sites out on the floor of Alphonsus’s broad ringed plain.
“We are approaching the Ranger 9 site,” Palmquist said, in English slightly accented with a reedy Swedish intonation.
The phone’s reception was weak in the tunnel, its video image grainy. In the miniature screen, Palmquist looked to Grant like bleached white flour: his thinning dead white hair was combed straight back from his high forehead, his complexion was pale, his face roundish.
Grant nodded and asked, “When is your tour scheduled to return?”
Palmquist’s pallid face took on a slightly puzzled expression. “They told me it was a three-hour tour,” he replied, “and we left promptly at eleven o’clock.”
“So you’ll be back at fourteen hundred,” Grant prompted.
“I suppose so,” Palmquist said, looking uncertain about it.
“We’ll meet you when your bus arrives.”
“Fine. Very good. We can have tea together.”
Grant suppressed a chuckle. “We’ll go to the cafeteria.”
“Good,” said Palmquist.
Clicking his pocketphone shut, Grant turned to Trudy, sitting beside him on the tram. “He thinks he’s still in Stockholm. Tea in the afternoon.”
She shrugged. “We can do a tea, I betcha. The cafeteria’s got cookies and buns. We’ll make do.”
Glancing at his wristwatch, Grant said, “I’ve got to see Dr. Cardenas.”
“Fine,” said Trudy. “I’ll go over to the university and chat up the people in the astronomy department, see what they’re up to.”
The tram stopped at the end of the tunnel and Trudy agreed to meet Grant at the main garage, where the tour busses came in, a few minutes before 1400 hours. Then she started off for the university’s underground classrooms and offices. Grant headed straight for the nanotechnology lab.
* * *
Kris Cardenas was in a pensive mood when Grant reached her desk.
“You realize what you’re letting yourself in for, don’t you?” she asked Grant as soon as he settled himself in the chair by her desk.
“Letting myself in for?” he asked.
“Once people know you’ve ingested nanomachines, they’ll treat you differently. They’ll be wary of you, scared, even.”
“Not here,” Grant scoffed. “We use nanomachines all the time.”
“People are still scared of them.”
“You think so?”
Cardenas’s bright blue eyes fixed Grant with a hard stare. “Take it from me. I’ve gone through it. I lost a lot of friends once they realized my body’s full of nanos.”
Grant puffed out a little grunt. “I don’t have that many friends.”
“You’ll have fewer, once they know. You’ll become a pariah.”
“Even at Farside?”
“Even at Farside,” Cardenas said, utterly serious.
Grant thought about it for a few silent moments, then said, “Maybe it’d be better if nobody knew about it, then.”
She pursed her lips, then murmured, “I think you’re right. Keep it to yourself.”
Nodding, Grant said, “Okay. That’s what I’ll do.”
“It’s nobody else’s business, really.”
“Yeah. I suppose so.”
Cardenas brightened slightly and pulled a desk drawer open. She picked a small plastic vial out of it.
“Here’s your first dose.” She handed the vial to Grant.
He held it up and peered at it. “Looks like orange juice.”
“That’s what it is. Orange juice—with a few million nanomachines suspended in it.”
“That many?”
“They’re programmed to the blood sample you gave me. You drink them down and they’ll start repairing your liver.”
“What about radiation protection?”
“That’s the next batch. I want you to let these little fellows work on your liver. You come back here in two weeks. I’ll set up a medical exam for you. If everything’s working right, we’ll go on to phase two and build up your cellular repair mechanisms.”
Grant asked, “So what do I do, drink this stuff?”
“That’s right.”
He unscrewed the vial’s top and drank its contents in one long swig.
Cardenas gave him a wry smile. “Welcome to the club.”
* * *
Grant knew it was psychosomatic, but as he walked from Cardenas’s nanotech lab to Selene’s main garage, he thought that the dull ache in the small of his back was lessening.
They can’t act that fast, he told himself. But he actually did feel better.
Trudy was already in the garage’s nearly empty waiting room, looking like an anxious little waif in her plain tan coveralls. There were three other people—two men and one woman—also waiting for the tour bus to return.
“Been here long?” he asked Trudy.
“Less than two minutes,” she replied, gazing through the window that looked out on the busy, clanging garage. Busses and tractors were parked in rows, while maintenance crews worked on them. Beyond that stood the big dulled metal hatch of the huge airlock.
Grant was just about to say that Palmquist was late when the airlock hatch swung inward and the bus rolled through, a gleaming silver cylinder on spindly little wheels, its lower flanks coated with gray lunar dust.
The passengers got out of the bus and filed into the waiting room. Grant easily recognized Dr. Palmquist: ghostly pale, wearing a business suit of soft pastel blue, walking very carefully in the unaccustomedly light gravity. He entered the waiting room and looked around uncertainly.
“Dr. Palmquist,” said Grant, going up to him and extending his hand. “I’m Grant Simpson—”
“Ah! The fellow who called me on the phone,” said Palmquist in his soft voice.
“—and this is Dr. Yost, Professor Uhlrich’s assistant,” Grant finished.
Trudy took Palmquist’s hand. “I’m very pleased to meet you, sir. Professor Uhlrich is so looking forward to your visit to the Farside Observatory.”
“So am I, my dear,” said Dr. Palmquist.
As Grant walked them out of the garage area and down the corridor that led to the cafeteria, Palmquist asked Trudy, “You are an astronomer?”
“Yes, I am. Are you?”
Palmquist shook his head self-effacingly. “No, no. I am an economist. But certain, er … certain acquaintances of mine asked me to look in on Professor Uhlrich while I was here visiting Selene University’s economics faculty.”
“I see,” Trudy replied.
The Nobel committee, Grant thought. Those were Palmquist’s “acquaintances.”
As they walked to the cafeteria, Grant thought about the afternoon’s agenda. He knew that Uhlrich had laid on a special flight back to Farside at 1800 hours. Not enough time to ask Trudy to have dinner with me, he told himself. We’ll do this silly tea business with the Swede and then head back to Farside. Maybe Trudy and I can have dinner there, after we drop Palmquist off with the Ulcer.
But all through their brief repast in Selene’s noisy, bustling cafeteria Palmquist spoke only to Trudy, ignoring Grant as if he weren’t there. Grant never got the opportunity to ask her about dinner.