INSTALLATION
“Okay,” Trudy’s voice said in Grant’s helmet speakers, “now plug in the connector cord from the backup computer.…”
Grant was standing on the spider-work platform built halfway up the telescope, where its secondary mirror had been placed. It was dark inside the hundred-meter-wide tube, and he was glad that it was nighttime again out on the floor of the crater. He was sweating enough inside his insulated suit. Cooling water gurgled through the tubes of his thermal undergarment, yet still he was perspiring. I should’ve remembered to bring a headband, he berated himself, blinking sweat away from his eyes, wishing he could snake a hand past the suit’s neck ring and rub his eyes, scratch his itching nose.
“You’re doing swell, Grant,” Trudy encouraged. “Almost finished.”
Grant saw her snub-nosed gamine’s face on half the display screen he had set up on the work platform’s grilled floor. The other half showed a schematic of the spectrometer’s mount. Trudy’s right, he saw: we’re damned near finished.
Nate Oberman was way over on the other side of the big tube, carrying out a routine check of the telescope’s steering motors. Grant plugged the computer cord into its socket and the schematic flickered briefly, then its edges turned bright green.
“That’s it,” said Trudy happily. “All finished.”
Grant felt good about it, too. “See?” he said to Trudy. “You did it remotely. You didn’t have to come out here after all.”
“You did it, Grant,” she said. “I just looked over your shoulder.”
He huffed, then told her, “Well, you owe me a steak dinner when I get back.”
“You’re on! And no soy product, either. We’ll have cultured steak.”
Trudy seemed to be glowing happily, but Grant felt strangely glum, let down. He said a reluctant good-bye to her and cut the communications link. Then, on the suit-to-suit frequency, he hailed Oberman.
“I’m finished here, Nate. How’re you coming along?”
Oberman replied, “I’ve been finished for half an hour, buddy. I’ve just been stoogin’ around, waiting for you before I headed in for the shelter.”
“Okay, I’m coming down.” Grant glanced at the digital time display on his wristband. Fifteen forty-three. We can jump on the hopper and get back to Farside in time for dinner, he thought.
Then he remembered that he had to decontaminate the shelter. Don’t rush that job, he told himself. Take plenty of time, shine UV in every nook and cranny.
It was well past 1900 hours when Grant finally clicked off the ultraviolet lamp he’d been holding for nearly four hours. He and Oberman had taken off their space suits and stored them by the shelter’s airlock—and then irradiated them with UV, inside and out.
Standing in the middle of the narrow shelter, in his sweat-damp gray coveralls, Grant looked around, then nodded, satisfied. “That’s it, I think.”
Oberman lowered his lamp to the steel mesh floor. “Jesus, Grant, we’ve shined these damned lamps everywhere in this dump except up our respective a*sholes.”
With a chuckle, Grant said, “Thoroughness is next to godliness.”
Oberman forced an exaggerated sigh. “Okay. Pull your pants down.”
Grant laughed, but he thought that if Oberman knew his body was filled with nanomachines the guy wouldn’t be so nonchalant about it. They’re therapeutic nanobugs, Grant reminded himself. They can’t hurt anything. They can’t get out of your body. Even if they did, Kris engineered them to go inert once they no longer had my body heat to power them.
He wished he really believed that.
“So whattaya think,” Oberman asked, breaking into Grant’s thoughts. “You want to bunk in here or fly back to Farside now?”
Grant mulled it over for a few moments. “Safety regs recommend we sleep here. No sense flying the hopper when we’re tired.”
“Unless we have to,” said Oberman.
“No reason for us to go now.”
“I thought you wanted to get Trudy Yost to buy you a steak dinner,” Oberman said, grinning. “If we start out now we can make it back to Farside by midnight. Nice romantic midnight dinner, buddy.”
The sonofabitch has been tapping into my comm link back to Farside! Grant realized.
“You could even have dinner in bed, I bet.”
Suddenly Grant wanted to smack him in his leering face. Instead, he took a deep breath.
“We’ll sleep here,” he said tightly. “You can use the lav first. Just be sure to clean up after yourself.”