Bracknell’s face went even redder. But he grinned like a schoolboy. “Well, okay,” he said, hefting her travel bags. “Great.”
Lara had brought only the two bags with her. They were close enough to Quito for her to buy whatever she lacked, she had reasoned.
Bracknell’s apartment was small, utilitarian, and so gleamingly neat that she knew he had cleaned it for her. Through the screened windows she could see the streets of the little city and, beyond them, the green-clad mountains. The skytower was not in view from here.
“No air conditioning?” she asked as he plopped her bags onto the double-sized bed.
“Don’t need it. Climate’s very mild; it’s always springtime here.”
“But we’re on the equator, aren’t we?”
“And nearly four kilometers high.”
She nodded. Like Santa Fe, she thought. Even Denver had a much milder climate than most people realized.
As she opened the larger of her two bags, Lara asked, “So the weather’s not a problem for the skytower?”
“Even the rainy season isn’t all that bad. That’s one of the reasons we picked this site,” Bracknell said as he peered into the waist-high refrigerator in his kitchen alcove. He pulled out an odd-shaped bottle. “Some wine? I’ve got this local stuff that’s pretty bad, and a decent bottle of Chilean—”
“Just cold water, Mance,” she said. “We can celebrate later.”
He nearly dropped the bottle he was holding.
Bracknell had a surprise for her at dinner: Victor Molina, whom they had both known at university.
“I had no idea you were part of this project,” Lara said, as they sat at a small square table in the corner of the city’s only restaurant. A quartet of musicians was tuning up across the way. Lara noticed that their amplifiers were no bigger than tissue boxes, not the man-tall monsters that could collapse your lungs when they were amped up full blast.
The restaurant was hardly half filled, Lara saw. Either most of the people eat at home or they come in much later than this, she reasoned. It was a bright, clean little establishment. No tablecloths, but someone had painted cheerful outdoor scenes of jungle greenery and colorful birds on the tabletops.
“Victor’s the reason we’re moving ahead so rapidly,” Bracknell said.
Lara refocused her attention on the two men. “I thought you were into biology back at school,” she said.
“I still am,” Molina replied, his striking blue eyes fastened on her. He was as good-looking as ever, she thought, in an intense, urgent way. Lara remembered how, at school, Molina had pursued the best-looking women on campus. She had dated him a few times, until she met Mance. Then she stopped dating anyone else.
Before she could ask another question, the robot waiter rolled up to their table. Its flat top was a display screen that showed the evening’s menu and wine list.
“May I bring you a cocktail before you order dinner?” the robot asked, in a mellow baritone voice that bore just a hint of an upper-class British accent. “I am programmed for voice recognition. Simply state the cocktail of your choice in a clear tone.”
Lara asked for sparkling water and Bracknell did the same. Molina said, “Dry vodka martini, please.”
“Olives or a twist?” she asked the robot.
“Twist.”
The little machine pivoted neatly and rolled off toward the service bar by the kitchen.
Lara leaned slightly toward Molina. “I still don’t understand what a biologist is doing on this skytower project.”
Before Molina could reply, Bracknell answered, “Victor’s our secret weapon. He’s the one who’s allowed us to move ahead so rapidly.”
“A biologist?”
Molina’s eyes were still riveted on her. “You’ve heard of nanotechnology, haven’t you?”
“Yes. It’s banned, forbidden.”
“True enough,” he said. “But do you realize there’s nanotechnology going on inside your body at this very instant?”
“Nanotech?”
“Inside the cells of your body. The ribosomes in your cells are building proteins. And what are they other than tiny little nanomachines?”
“Oh. But that’s natural.”
“Sure it is. So is the way we build buckyball fibers.”
“With nanomachines?”
“Natural nanomachines,” Bracknell said, trying to get back into the conversation. “Viruses.”
The robot brought their drinks and, later, they selected their dinner choices from the machine’s touch screen. Molina and Bracknell explained how Molina had used genetically engineered viruses to produce buckyball molecules and engineered microbial cells to put the buckyballs together into nanotubes.
“Once we have sets of nanotubes,” Molina explained, “I turn them over to the regular engineers, and they string them together into the fibers that make up the tower.”
“And you’re allowed to do this in spite of the ban on nanotechnology?” Lara asked.
“There’s nothing illegal about it,” Molina said lightly.
“But we’re not shouting the news from the rooftops,” Bracknell added. “We want to keep this strictly under wraps.”
“It’s a new construction technique that’ll be worth billions,” Molina said, his eyes glowing. “Trillions!”
“Once we get it patented,” Bracknell added.
Lara nodded, absently taking a forkful of salad and chewing contemplatively. Natural nanotechnology, she thought. Genetically engineered viruses. There are a lot of people who’re going to get very upset when they hear about this.
“I can see why you want to keep it under wraps,” she said.
PUBLISH OR PERISH
“What I really want,” Molina was saying, “is to get into astrobiology.”
“Really?” Lara felt surprised. In all the weeks she had been at Ciudad de Cielo, this was the first time he’d broached the subject with her.
She was walking with the biologist along the base city’s main street, wearing a colorful wool poncho that she’d bought from one of the street vendors that Mance allowed into town on the weekends. The wind off the mountains was cool, and it had drizzled for a half hour earlier in the morning. The thick wool poncho was just the right weight for this high-altitude weather. Molina had pulled a worn old leather jacket over his shirt and jeans.
“Astrobiology’s the hot area in biology,” he said. “That’s where a man can make a name for himself.”
“But you’re doing such marvelous things here.”
He looked over his shoulder at the skytower looming over them. Gray clouds scudded past it. With a discontented shrug, Molina said, “What I’m doing here is done. I’ve trained some bugs to make buckyball fibers for Mance. Big deal. I can’t publish my work; he’s keeping the whole process secret.”
“Only until the patent comes through.”
Molina frowned at her. “Do you have any idea of how long it takes to get an international patent? Years! And then the Skytower Corporation’ll probably want to keep the process to themselves. I could waste the best years of my career sitting around here and getting no credit for my work.”
Lara saw the impatience in his face, in his rigidly clenched fists, as they walked down the street. “So what do you intend to do?”
Molina hesitated for a heartbeat, then replied, “I’ve sent an application to several of the top astrobiology schools. It looks like Melbourne will accept me.”
“Australia?”
“Yes. They’ve just gotten a grant to search for more Martian ruins and they’re looking for people.”
“To go to Mars?”
He made a bitter smile. “Australia first, then maybe Mars. If I do well enough for them here on Earth.”