On a space station, in zero gee, a hundred ninety-six cubic feet was almost generous. Here on the Moon it came close to inducing claustrophobia.
Paul shrugged and gave the standard line, “Beats sleeping outside.”
“Not by much,” Jinny replied with the standard counter.
He could smell a soft flowery fragrance. “How do you stay so fresh in these sardine cans?”
She smiled prettily. “I just took my weekly shower a couple of hours ago. In your honor. Ask me again in a few days.”
A vision of her lithe body glistening with sweat filled Paul’s mind for an instant. “Pheromone heaven,” he muttered.
“More like pheromone hell,” Jinny said. “Head colds are a blessing around here.”
Paul mumbled, “Yeah. Maybe so.”
“My cubbyhole’s at the other end of this row,” she said, grinning. “In case you get lonely.”
“I’m a married man,” Paul said quickly, thinking as he spoke that it sounded terribly nerdy.
Jinny’s grin turned saucy. “Well, just in case…”
Paul thanked her for the escort service and shooed her off, then went into his compartment, dropped onto the bunk, and immediately went to the desktop computer to call Joanna. But he was thinking of how pleasing it would be if Jinny really buttered up the boss; or vice versa.
“I just don’t trust machines I can’t see,” Wojo grumbled.
Paul and the tractor teleoperator were sitting in the galley, hunched over Paul’s hand-sized computer.
“If these things work we can let them do all the construction out on the surface and you can sit down here in comfort and count your insurance benefits.”
Wojo fixed him with a baleful stare. The man’s breath smelled terrible. Like the exhaust fan from a brewery, Paul thought. But where in the hell would he get beer up here?
“Just how smart are these slime-sucking bugs?” Wojo asked.
“Like ants,” said Paul.
Wojo scratched at his shaggy beard. “Read a book once—”
“No!” Paul pretended shock.
With a small grin, Wojo said, “You’d be surprised what I’m capable of. Anyway, this book was about army ants in South America. Every once in a while they run amok and strip the whole festering jungle right down to the bark and bone. Don’t leave anything alive in their path.”
“These bugs aren’t like that,” Paul said.
“How do you know?”
Paul had to think a moment. “Well, for one thing, they’re programmed to stop functioning at temperatures above thirty degrees.”
Wojo heaved his bulk up from the spindly chair and trudged over to the thermostat on the curving wall of the galley. “It’s twenty-seven degrees in here right now. Just a smidge over eighty, Fahrenheit.”
“I thought it felt warm in here.”
Walking back to the long, narrow table and settling ponderously into the little chair across from Paul, Wojo complained, “We need more radiator surface outside. Only way to get rid of heat is to radiate it away. You know that. I know that. But your pus-infested, maggot-brained, excrement-eating systems engineers sitting comfy and cool in their air-conditioned offices in Savannah haven’t seen fit to honor our humble requests for more radiators.”
“But thermal conduction—”
“Isn’t worth a thimbleful of warm spit,” Wojo said. “We’re dug in nice and deep. The rock outside our shells conducts heat about as well as a politician tells the unvarnished truth.”
“So turning the thermostats down won’t help?”
With a massive shake of his shaggy head, Wojo said, “All you’d do is put an extra load on the air conditioners and the radiators. Which we need about as much as a prostitute needs an honest cop.”
I’ll get you more radiators,” Paul said.
“Thank you kindly, sir,” said Wojo. “Now, to get back to these mechanical viruses you brought up here with you — you say they’re programmed to shut down at thirty Cee?”
“That’s right.”
“All that means is that they won’t work out on the surface in daylight. Even at our current level of discomfort, they could be doing whatever it is they’re programmed to do in here right now. How would we stop ’em?”
“Each set of the nanomachines is programmed to utilize one type of atom or molecule. When they run out of that material, they stop functioning.”
“And what materials are these bugs programmed to use?”
Paul punched up the list on his computer.
Squinting at the small screen, Wojo mumbled, “Titanium, aluminum, silicon — for the love of sweet Jesus, they could munch their way right through the whole body of the Moon and come out the other side!”
“No, no,” Paul insisted. “We have other safeguards.”
“You better show ’em to me.”
Tapping on the miniaturized keyboard, Paul said, “See, a polarizing current can shut them all down immediately.”
“Long as you can get the current to them.”
Paul looked at Wojo’s grizzled face. He’s being extra cautious, and he’s right to look at it that way. This is so new that nobody’s had any experience with it.
But he said, “Look, Wojo, if these nanobugs work we can turn this set of tin cans into a regular palace in a couple of years. Moonbase can start making profits right away.”
“But if it doesn’t work—”
“That’s why we’re conducting the demonstration at a remote site,” Paul said, with growing irritation. “If anything goes wrong, it’ll go wrong out there and won’t threaten the base here.”
Wojo nodded solemnly. “It’ll go wrong out there, all right. With you and me twenty miles from help.”
“We’ll have a hopper, for chrissake,” Paul snapped. “We could jump all the way back here in fifteen minutes, if we had to.”
Wojo nodded. “I suppose that’s true,” he said. But he didn’t sound as if his heart was in it.
Nettled by Wojo’s worries, Paul spent that whole afternoon deep in conference with Kris Cardenas, back at San Jose.
Sitting on his bunk, Paul said to her image in his laptop screen, “You can see why some of the people here are scared of the whole idea.”
“Well,” she admitted grudgingly, “the nanomachines are the size of viruses. They can be carried by air currents and float around. But the Moon’s airless, so—”
“The interiors of our habitation modules aren’t airless,” Paul pointed out.
“Yes, but you’re not using the bugs in your habitation modules, are you?” Cardenas replied sharply, her blue eyes snapping. “You’re only using them out in the remote site, twenty miles from the nearest existing shelter.”
“That’s true, “Paul agreed.
“So there shouldn’t be any trouble. Even if there is, once daylight comes up the bugs will overheat and shut down.”
“Can they last fourteen days in a dormant condition?”
“For sure,” she said. “But in fourteen days you ought to be able to sweep them all up.”
“Paul nodded. “I guess so.”
Cardenas smiled prettily. “Believe me, Mr. Stavenger, we’ve gone through every possible scenario in our simulations. We even rented the big vacuum chamber over at Ames to simulate the lunar environment. Nothing’s going to go wrong.”
“I guess so,” Paul said again.
“Mr. Masterson has been here half a dozen times, checking out every facet of the experiment,” she added.
“Greg?”
“Yes. He’s triple-checked everything. And then some.”
“That’s good,” Paul said lamely, adding to himself, I suppose.
But he went hunting through the underground shelters for Lana Goodman. Moonbase’s so-called permanent resident was a smart scientist, Paul knew, and had no axe to grind in the matter of nanotechnology.
He found her in the photo lab that she had crammed into the minimal space between the laundry and the shower facility.
“Nanomachines?” Goodman was peering at a strip of film through a magnifying glass. Paul saw her elfin features in profile. With the light behind her, her thinning gray hair looked almost like a halo.