But after that conference in the Banana, she had gone back to her little shop and, as an alternative to crying all night or sticking her head out the airlock, she had altered the program that those little robots were following and told them to begin bending the tunnel, curving it gently as it delved into the asteroid. Until then, the robots had been moving directly away from her and she’d been able to look through her tiny quartz window, into the watermelon-sized hollow, and straight down the tunnel that the robots were cutting. She had to flip a welding glass down over the window when she did this because they were cutting with plasma arcs whose brilliant purple light would burn her eyes. But by the time that the five new arrivals got to Izzy on A+0.17, the robots had disappeared around the bend in the tunnel that they had made. The universe could not see them. Cosmic rays ran in straight lines, like light, and they could not negotiate that bend.
Dinah had them carve a little hollow into the side of that tunneclass="underline" a storage niche. She packaged up all of her spare chips and PC boards into a bundle. It was a small one, given how tiny and powerful modern chips were—a cube small enough to hold in one hand. Normally this would have been a bad idea—a single cosmic ray might shoot through the entire stack and kill every board at once. She handed it off to an eight-legged robot and sent that robot through the airlock and down the tunnel. Seeing through the remote eye of its video camera, manipulating a data glove connected to its grappling arms, she maneuvered it into the niche and then made it splay out its arms and go rigid so that it couldn’t drift out. Her transistors were now safe.
Rhys watched her do it. He had been on Izzy for five hours. He was too sick to do anything except lie very still. Dinah, whose shop was full of zip ties and clamps and other useful devices, had helped him wedge his head between a couple of pipes, padding them with foam to make it a little more comfortable. She had left him with a supply of barf bags and gone about her work.
“What do you call that type?” he asked.
“A Grabb,” she answered. “Short for Grabby Crab.”
“Good name, I suppose.”
“It’s the most obvious body type for something that’s meant to pick its way around on a rock. Each leg has an electromagnet on its tip, so it can stick to Amalthea, which is mostly iron. When it wants to pick up that foot, it just switches off the magnet.”
“I’m sure you’ve already thought of this,” Rhys said delicately, “but you could hollow out the whole asteroid this way. Create a shielded environment. Maybe even fill it with air.”
Dinah nodded. She was busy, placing the Grabb’s eight arms one by one, making sure each of them was stuck to a wall of the niche. It would be embarrassing if all of her vitamins floated out and got lost. “We’ve discussed it. Me and the, like, eight thousand engineers on the ground who are working on this.”
“Yes, I didn’t suppose it was a solo effort.”
“The constraint is working gas. The plasma cutters are very powerful, but they require some gas flow. Almost any gas will do. But industrial gases are rare and valuable up here, and they have this annoying habit of escaping into space.”
“But if you were hollowing something out, as opposed to working on its surface—”
“Exactly,” Dinah said. “You could seal the exits and recapture the used gas, and recycle it.”
“So you’re way ahead of me, in other words.”
Dinah’s upper face was obscured in a VR rig but a smile spread below it. “That’s the thing about space,” she said. “So many smart people are so interested in it that it’s difficult to come up with a really new idea.”
There was a pause in the conversation while she switched control to a different robot and got it moving down the tunnel.
“Moving my eyeballs oh so slightly, I see at least three other morphologies in your bestiary.”
“The Siwi is adapted from a robot that was made for exploring collapsed buildings. Which in turn was obviously adapted from a snake.”
“A sidewinder, presumably, given the name.”
“Yeah. The electromagnets are arranged around the Siwi’s body in a double helix, so by turning some on and others off, it can sort of roll diagonally along the surface with minimal power usage.”
“The thing that looks like a Buckyball seems to be using a similar trick.”
“You nailed the name. We do in fact call those Buckies. Technically speaking, it’s a thing called a—”
“Tensegrity.”
Dinah felt herself blushing. “Of course, you’d know all about those. Anyway, because it’s big and roughly spherical, it can roll in any direction by playing tricks with electromagnetics and making its struts get longer or shorter. The brains live in that sort of nucleuslike package suspended in the middle.”
“Grabbs, Siwis, and Buckies. What do you call the tiny ones?”
“Nats. Our attempt to build a swarm. Lina’s been moonlighting on it.”
There was a little gap in the conversation while both of them considered the unfortunate choice of wording.
“It’s pretty experimental still,” Dinah continued. “But the idea is that they can latch on to each other as needed, like ants making an ant-ball to cross a river. I know this must all seem pretty weird. It’s not normal engineering.”
“I’m not a normal engineer. I’ve been doing biomimetics—which is what you are doing—for a while. Except I build things that stand still.”
“Okay. You get it then.” Dinah peeled off the 3-D goggles she’d been using to see through the eyes of the Grabb. The second robot, the Siwi, had perched itself in the tunnel behind the Grabb and raised its head, cobralike, to shine light on it and shoot video. Gazing at the flat-panel screen, Dinah made the Siwi pan back and forth to inspect the Grabb’s position, ensuring there was no way those circuit boards could drift away.
“Yes. I get it,” Rhys said. Then he added, “It’s not for me to tell you your business. But you know what hermit crabs do, don’t you?”
It took Dinah a few moments to access the memory. She had never been a beach kind of person. “They use the discarded shells of other crabs as shelter.”
“Not of other crabs, but of mollusks. But yes, you have it.”
Dinah thought about it for a moment, then turned to look at him. He seemed slightly less green and sweaty than before. “I think I see where you are going.”
“Better yet,” Rhys said, “consider the foraminifera.”
“What are they?”
“The biggest single-celled organisms in the world. They live beneath the Antarctic ice. And as they grow, they take grains of sand from their environment and glue them together to form hard outer skins.”
“Sort of like Ben Grimm?” she asked.
It was a throwaway reference to a comic book character, the armor-plated member of the Fantastic Four. She didn’t expect him to pick up on it. But he shot back: “To name another cosmic ray victim, yes. But without the alienation and self-pity.”
“I always wanted skin like the Thing.”
“It wouldn’t suit you nearly as well as the skin God gave you. But as a way for you to protect your robots from cosmic rays, while giving them the freedom to roam around—”
“I think I’m in love,” she said.
He clapped a bag over his mouth and threw up.
HOW DO YOU TELL THE WORLD THAT IT’S GOING TO DIE? DOOB WAS glad he didn’t have to say it. Instead he just stood behind the president of the United States. His job was to look serious—which wasn’t difficult—as part of a Mount Rushmore of eminent scientists lined up behind a semicircle of world leaders. He stared at the back of J.B.F.’s head as she explained it into a teleprompter. Bracketing her were the Chinese and the Indian presidents, saying the same things at the same time in Mandarin and Hindi. Fanning out into the wings were the prime ministers of Japan, the United Kingdom, France, and (acting as a sort of proxy for most of Latin America, as well as his own country) Spain; the chancellor of Germany; the presidents of Nigeria, Russia, and Egypt; the pope; prominent imams from the main branches of the Islamic faith; a rabbi; and a lama. The announcements were made simultaneously, so that as much of the human race as possible would hear the news at the same instant, and not have to await translations.