NANODEATH
Grant hurried to his quarters and put in a call to Dr. Cardenas. Her answering vid came up on the phone screen, smiling perfunctorily as she said, “I’m not available at this—”
Abruptly, the image was replaced by another view of Cardenas, her face serious, grave.
“I heard about the accident, Grant,” she said. “I’ve been expecting your call.”
“Could it be me?” Grant blurted. “Did the nanos in my body somehow cause Win’s death?”
“No way,” said Cardenas. “No way on God’s green Earth.”
We’re not on God’s green Earth, Grant thought. But he said to Cardenas’s unsmiling face, “How can you be so sure?”
She held up a hand and ticked off on her fingers, “One: the nanos in your body are tuned to your metabolism, nobody else’s. Two: they’re designed to attack microbes and viruses; they are not random disassemblers.”
“Gobblers,” muttered Grant.
Cardenas frowned at the word, but continued, “Three: the only way the nanomachines in your body could get into anyone else is by direct physical contact with your blood. They don’t fly through the air, Grant. They’re not evil spirits.”
“Okay. Thanks.” He hesitated a beat, then added, “I had to ask, Kris. I had to know for certain.”
She smiled minimally. “I know. I understand. Don’t take it personally if I come down too hard.”
“That’s okay. I guess you get a lot of damn-fool questions.”
Cardenas’s smile turned bitter. “That I do, mister. That I do.”
* * *
Grant fought the itch to return to the maintenance center and lean on Toshio and Zach. Let them do their work, he told himself. They’re not going to get results any faster with you breathing down their necks.
He went to the engineering office and plunged into the problems of scheduling the construction of the telescopes at the Korolev and Gagarin craters. Coordinating the crews who would construct the foundations, shelters, protective roofs; scheduling the arrival of the nanomachines; checking the maintenance of the robots, the duty shifts at the teleoperations center: there was plenty of work to be done.
His phone buzzed. Annoyed at the interruption, he yanked it from his coverall pocket and saw that it was Trudy Yost calling. His annoyance dwindled away.
“What’s up, Trudy?” he asked.
In the phone’s tiny screen, Trudy’s snub-nosed face looked troubled.
“I need your help,” she said.
“What’s the problem?”
“Can we talk? Face-to-face, I mean.”
His first impulse was to suggest meeting at the cafeteria, but then he remembered that he had turned down Josie Rivera’s invitation to dinner. If Josie sees me with Trudy she’ll get the wrong idea, he thought.
“Can you come to my quarters?” he asked Trudy. “In half an hour?”
“Sure,” she said, without the slightest hesitation.
Thirty-two minutes later Grant was straightening up his messy room when he heard a tap on the door. Sliding it open, he saw Trudy standing there, looking a little like a lost urchin.
“Come on in,” Grant said.
“I appreciate your taking the time to see me,” Trudy said as she stepped into the room.
“What’s the problem?” he asked again. Looking at the place through her eyes, Grant thought that his quarters were shabby, strictly utilitarian. This is where I sleep, he apologized silently. Where I sleep and work.
Trudy seemed oblivious to the meager furnishings, though. She went straight to the sofa and perched herself on its front few centimeters.
“Professor Uhlrich wants me to come up with a plan for using the Mendeleev telescope. He doesn’t want it to sit idle while the other ’scopes are being built.”
“Makes sense,” Grant said, heading for the kitchenette in the corner. “Can I get you something to drink? Juice? Tea?” He glanced at the half-full coffeepot next to the two-burner stove. “The coffee’s a couple days old, I’m afraid.”
“Juice will be fine,” Trudy said.
As he bent down and yanked open the little refrigerator Grant called to her, “So you have to come up with a plan for Mendeleev.”
“The professor wants to start taking spectra of Sirius C right away,” she said.
“Is that doable?” Grant found a half-empty bottle of grapefruit juice, shook it vigorously, and poured a glass for her.
“Yes. The planet’s too small for us to image with any decent resolution, but we should be able to get a spectrum, see if it has an atmosphere.”
“I thought that was settled,” said Grant.
With a curt nod, Trudy replied, “The planet gives a fuzzy edge in the imagery that telescopes in Earth orbit have gotten. Not a sharp edge. That indicates an atmosphere of some sort.”
“That’s what I’d heard.”
“But it shouldn’t have an atmosphere, not really,” Trudy went on. “When Sirius B went through its nova phase, the burps of hot plasma should have boiled away any atmosphere the planet might’ve had.”
“But you said it looks fuzzy-edged.”
“Yeah,” said Trudy, almost wistfully. “It shouldn’t. But it does.”
As he handed the glass to her, Grant asked, “So can you measure the atmosphere’s constituents?”
“If it really has an atmosphere—and the absorption lines are strong enough.”
Sitting beside her on the sofa, Grant said, “So there’s your research program.”
She nodded uncertainly. “I suppose so.”
“Measuring the components of an exoplanet’s atmosphere,” said Grant. “That would be an accomplishment, wouldn’t it?”
“If I can do it.”
“Sure you can,” he encouraged. “It’ll give you a solid reputation.”
“But what if I fail?”
Grant looked at her. She’s really worried, he realized. Uhlrich’s given her this responsibility and she’s scared of it.
“Behold the lowly turtle,” Grant quoted. “She only makes progress when she sticks her neck out.”
Trudy looked surprised, then puzzled. Then she broke into a grin, all within the span of a second.
“You’re telling me I should get to work and stop worrying about it,” she said.
“I’m telling you that you can do the job. Uhlrich wouldn’t have hired you if you couldn’t.”
For several heartbeats Trudy said nothing. Then, in a low voice, “Thanks, Grant.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Yes you did. And you kept me from falling apart when Win died. You came out and saved me.”
He didn’t know what to say, how to answer her.
Trudy got up from the sofa. “Thank you, Grant. You’re very kind.”
Standing beside her, Grant replied, “De nada.”
He followed her to the door, then leaned past her and slid it open. “Any time you need to talk, I’ll be here.”
Trudy gazed at him in silence with her light green eyes. Pretty eyes, he thought. There’s flecks of amber in them.
Abruptly, Trudy stood on her tiptoes and gave Grant a peck on the lips. Then she turned and hurried down the corridor.
Grant stood there, somewhere between bemused and astonished. Women, he thought. Studying the mysteries of the cosmos is simple. Figuring out women is the real challenge.
His phone buzzed again as Grant slid his door shut.
“On wall screen,” he commanded the phone.
Toshio Aichi’s face filled the screen: ascetically lean, unsmiling. Talk about inscrutable, Grant thought. Tosh doesn’t let anything show.
“Grant, we’ve found a defect in Winston’s suit,” Aichi said without preamble.
Grant’s chest tightened.
“A defect?”
“Relax,” Aichi said, his expression unchanged. “You couldn’t have seen it when you checked Winston’s suit. Nobody could have, not without a laser probe.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a pinhole leak in the suit’s collar ring. Too small to see with the naked eye, but big enough to slowly leak air out of his helmet. Not enough of a leak for decompression, but enough to asphyxiate him.”
“A pinhole leak?” Grant asked.
Nodding a millimeter or so, Aichi said, “Pinhole. Like the leak that knocked out your superconducting coil.”