QUARANTINED
Trudy watched Grant leave the office, sliding the door shut with a heavy thud. She turned to Professor Uhlrich and saw him seated at his desk, his head in his hands.
“I’m ruined,” Uhlrich moaned. “Utterly ruined.”
Without thinking about it, Trudy got up from her chair, went around the professor’s desk, and knelt at his side.
“It might not be that bad, Professor,” she said, her voice soft, tender.
“They’ll stop our work, I know they will,” Uhlrich said. “Just when we were starting to get significant results…” His voice trailed off.
Trying to make him feel better, Trudy said, “I can write up our spectrographic results. We can publish that. First spectra from Sirius C. Oxygen and water vapor in the planet’s atmosphere. That’ll put Farside’s name on the map!”
Uhlrich seemed inconsolable. “What good will that do? We won’t be able to make any progress beyond that.”
“But it’s a breakthrough!” Trudy insisted. “I’ll bet it’ll impress those guys in Stockholm.”
He looked up at her. “The Nobel committee? Do you think so?”
“Certainly. And we won’t be shut down for long, I bet. Selene’ll send some accident investigators here and soon’s they figure out what caused the explosion we’ll be back in business.”
Uhlrich began to nod. But then he said, “What if Simpson is right? What if this facility is infected with nanomachines? They’ll shut us down, perhaps permanently.”
Trudy had no reply for that.
* * *
Dog tired after hours of poring over telemeter data, Grant made his way to the cafeteria and blindly punched buttons for a late supper. The cafeteria was almost empty at this time of the night; only a pair of technicians at one of the tables and a lone administrator bent over a digital reader as he sipped at a mug of tea.
Grant carried his tray to the farther end of the table and plunked himself down.
“Mind if I join you?”
He looked up to see Kris Cardenas standing there, holding a dinner tray.
“I didn’t see you come in,” said Grant.
Cardenas nodded as she sat beside him. “You seemed totally wrapped up in your own thoughts.”
Grant said, “Yeah.”
“Tough day.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve made arrangements to meet with Halleck’s engineers from here,” she said. “We’ll do the conference electronically instead of in the flesh.”
“Good.” Grant stuck a fork in the plate before him. He had forgotten what it was supposed to be. Some soy derivative or another, masquerading as real food.
“Have you found anything?” Cardenas asked quietly.
With a halfhearted shrug, Grant answered, “Looks like the oxygen feed line to the rocket engine gave out. Pure oxygen dumped into the hot exhaust. Boom.”
“And what caused the line to fail?”
Grant looked at her. Cardenas seemed wary, as if she expected an answer she didn’t really want to hear.
“Don’t know yet,” he said.
Before she could reply, Grant added, “But the coupling that connected the feed line to the rocket’s combustion chamber was made of the same alloy that our space suit collars are made of.”
“The same alloy?”
“Yeah. Some coincidence, eh?”
“What are you saying, Grant?”
He ran a weary hand across his saddened eyes. “The same kind of nanobugs that ate through Winston’s space suit collar could have eaten through the oxygen line’s coupling.”
Cardenas took the news without flinching. “But how could they get there? It’s just not likely. It’s pretty close to impossible.”
“Close only counts in horseshoes,” Grant said. “Maybe it is unlikely, but that’s what happened, I’m certain of it.”
“You’re jumping to a conclusion that—”
“Here’s another conclusion I’ve jumped to,” he interrupted. “It’s not just the shelter at Mendeleev that’s been hit by the nanos. We’re infected here, right here, at Farside.”
“You don’t have any evidence for that!”
“Tell that to Derek and his copilot. For chrissakes, Kris, you came within ten seconds of getting killed yourself!”
The two technicians at the other table looked up at the sound of Grant’s raised voice. The administrator kept on reading peacefully.
Cardenas stared at Grant for several moments, silent, looking almost resentful.
“We’re going to have to quarantine this facility, Kris,” Grant said, his voice lower. “Nobody in, nobody out. Not until we find out how those bugs got here. And who brought them.”