“Make an assessment?” Doug echoed. “Like they’re intelligent?”
“No, that cannot be,” Zimmerman said. But he didn’t seem terribly certain of it.
“The bugs must have reacted to the immediate stimulus, as you said,” Doug suggested.
“Yah. Perhaps. And yet—
“Whatever they did,” Joanna said, “they saved Doug’s life.”
“By stopping my heart and killing me.”
Zimmerman seemed lost in thought. “They are either very stupid, or much more intelligent than I had ever thought possible.”
He reached for the curtain screening off Doug’s bed, muttering, “I must talk to Kristine about this. This is very unexpected.”
Without another word to Doug or his mother, Zimmerman stepped out of the cubicle.
For several moments Doug simply lay in his bed, silent, looking at his mother’s sad, abstracted face. Finally, he said, “It’s a shame we couldn’t save Greg.”
Joanna’s face clouded. “There wasn’t anything they could do for him. All his internal organs were ruptured. Melissa too.”
Doug’s last conscious memory of them flashed through his mind. Blood spurting everywhere, their final strangling, gargling shrieks.
“And Bianca Rhee was killed too?”
His mother nodded. “No one seems to know what she was doing out in the garage. They found her in a spacesuit but she had already died of heart failure.”
“From the bends.”
“Yes, nitrogen bubbles blocked her heart valves.”
Leaning his head back against the pillows, Doug wished he could feel something. Some emotion. Sorrow. Pain. Even relief. Nothing. Just a blank emptiness inside him. As if the nanomachines that had saved his life had also taken away his soul.
His mother still looked stricken. Nearly twenty years she’s protected Greg and now he’s dead. He killed himself and I couldn’t stop him. I tried and failed. He killed my father and Melissa and Bianca. And himself. And I couldn’t prevent it.
“It’s not your fault,” Joanna said, as if she could read his mind.
“What?”
“It’s not your responsibility. Greg would have killed himself sooner or later. I know that. I suppose I’ve known it all along.”
“If I had just been a little faster—”
“No,” Joanna said. “You saved the base. You saved me.”
“He opened the plasma vents to vacuum,” Doug said. “He wanted to kill us all. That’s what he said.”
“What Greg really wanted was to kill himself.”
“I should’ve stopped him.”
“Jinny had sealed the vent access hatches in tunnels one and two,” Joanna said. “We had evacuated three and four. So no one was killed when he opened the main hatch. Some equipment’s been damaged, but it’s nothing that can’t be repaired.”
Bianca died, though, Doug said to himself. I’ll have to go out to the main garage and find her ballet slippers. They must be back in the screened-in area where she practices. Then he corrected himself: practiced. Past tense. She’s dead.
He closed his eyes for what seemed like a moment, but when he opened them again his mother was gone and the tubes had been disconnected from his arms. Flexing both hands, Doug realized that the fracture in his left arm must be healed. Another gift of the nanobugs, he thought.
“You’re awake?” It was his mother again. This time Lev Brudnoy stood beside her, tall and gangling but looking neater, straighter than Doug remembered him. His beard was nicely trimmed, his hair combed. Instead of coveralls he was wearing dark slacks and a deep green turtleneck shirt Joanna was in a colorfully patterned dress.
“We’re heading back to Savannah in a few hours,” Joanna said.
“We?” Doug asked. “The two of you?”
“Yes,” said Brudnoy.
His mother added, “Lev and I have become…very close, over the past few days.”
Brudnoy actually blushed.
Doug tried to make a smile for them, and hoped it worked. “Why Savannah?” he asked.
“To pick up the pieces,” she replied. “I’ve got to make certain that the board of directors doesn’t try to hinder the repairs we need here. And I want to push your diamond Clippership project.”
Doug guessed, “Jinny Anson will run the base?”
“Yes. I may have to get myself elected to board chairman again,” Joanna said. “It may be some time before I can get back here.”
“I understand,” Doug said.
“Zimmerman and Kris Cardenas are staying. They’ll be able to help you.”
“I understand,” Doug repeated.
And he did. Joanna needed to get away, to return to more familiar surroundings, to immerse herself in something more than regrets and grief for the son she had lost. She knows I can get along okay, Doug told himself. And she’s bringing Lev along to help her over the emotional bumps. Doug could see the wry humor of it, even though he could not make himself smile. Lev’s going to be my stepfather.
By the time they were ready to go out to the rocket port, Doug was strong enough to get out of bed and go with them. The medics argued against it, but the monitors showed that his metabolic rate was stable and his weight — down nearly five pounds a few days earlier — was almost back to normal.
Doug watched their liftoff from his favorite perch, in the tiny observation blister of the rocket port. The big, ungainly LTV was there one instant, and an instant later it was gone in a cloud of aluminum oxide smoke.
Doug slid down the ladder to the cramped flight center, then wordlessly went out to the tunnel that led back to the base. Instead of taking the tractor, though, he pulled on one of the spacesuits standing on the rack and, after an hour of prebreathing and solemn meditation, he climbed up to the hatch that opened onto the floor of the crater. Without a spacecraft sitting on any of the pads it was hard to tell that humans were present in Alphonsus’ wide ring of mountains. The Sun was down but the sky gleamed with thousands of diamond-hard pinpoints of stars, strewn so thickly Doug felt almost as if he could walk upon them. His practiced eye scanned the weary, slumped old mountains of the ringwall, smoothed to an almost glassy polish by eons of infalling meteoric dust. He traced out the sinuous cracks in the crater floor, knowing that deep below there was ammonia and methane, precious life-sustaining resources.
He looked up and saw the Earth, a glowing crescent of blue and white, its night side clear to see against the starry sky. Warm and rilled with life, Doug knew. And yet he felt no longing, no desire to return to the world of his birth. The human race will die there, he knew, unless we help them to expand beyond Earth’s confines.
He looked again at the barren lunar landscape stretching all around him. Turning, he saw the barely-discernible mounds where the original Moonbase shelters had been buried, the slight cleft in the mountain face where the airlock of today’s base stood, the glittering acres of the solar power farms. Lifting his gaze, he traced out the rounded top of Mt. Yeager and the notch of Wodjohowitcz Pass.
We’re already putting names on the wilderness, Doug said to himself. We’re starting to place our marks here.
He saw Moonbase as it would be. A thriving city built underground but large enough for trees and flowering bushes and maybe even a stream of real water meandering through a grassy expanse. He saw spacecraft made of pure diamond plying the routes between Earth and Moon, and heading outward, toward the distant planets, toward the stars themselves.
He saw the human race growing, learning, facing the frontier and the future with hope and brimming desire.
There’s a lot of work to do, he realized. A lifetime of work, and then some. Generations of work.
Nodding inside his helmet, he strode toward the airlock, Time to get started, he told himself. If it is to be, it’s up to me.