Timoshenko was working with the Titan Alpha mission control team when the call from Eberly reached him. Now that the probe was on Titan, the control center was on twenty-four-hour status: all consoles manned at all times. Timoshenko had volunteered to help fill mission control’s manpower needs. The job wasn’t really work; just babysitting the consoles. Boring routine, nothing more. The telemetry was coming through fine and showed that the stupid machine down there was functioning as it should. Except that it refused to send any sensor data to Urbain and his twitching scientists. Timoshenko almost laughed. Urbain’s pride and joy was sitting on a cliff of dirty ice like a sullen teenager, refusing to talk to its daddy.
So what? he asked himself. Why shouldn’t Urbain have his dreams shattered? Welcome to the club.
The phone’s synthesized voice spoke in its flat, dull tones in his earplug: “The chief administrator wishes to see you in his office immediately. Please acknowledge.”
Suppressing an urge to tell the chief administrator to pound sand up his ass, Timoshenko took in a breath, then replied into his lip mike, “I am on duty at the mission control center and cannot leave my post. My shift will end at seventeen hundred hours. I will report to the chief administrator’s office at seventeen-twenty, unless I hear otherwise from our respected and unparalleled chief administrator.”
There, Timoshenko thought. That ought to keep that fathead Eberly happy for a couple of hours.
Cardenas met Nadia Wunderly at the cafeteria precisely at noon. They carried their trays through the cold food line together, and Cardenas noted with an inner smile that Nadia took nothing more than a fresh green salad and a bottle of mineral water. Not wanting to tempt her friend to anything more, Cardenas limited her own selection to a Caesar salad augmented with bits of grilled faux chicken and a tall glass of tomato juice.
As they put their trays on an empty table and sat down, Cardenas remarked, “You’re looking well, Nadia.”
“I feel great,” said the physicist.
Cardenas nodded and dug into her salad.
“I mean,” Wunderly continued, “I can almost feel the nanos melting away the fat inside me. I’ve lost six kilos already!”
“That’s wonderful.” Cardenas smiled to herself.
A month earlier Wunderly had come to her, almost in tears, to beg her help. “It’s almost Christmas,” she pleaded, “and look at me! I’m fat as a pig!”
Cardenas had tried to calm her friend, but she knew what was coming and dreaded it.
At last Wunderly had begged, “Can’t you give me some nanos, just a little bit, just enough to burn this fat off me? Nobody’s going to ask me out for New Year’s Eve when I look like this!”
Wunderly was chubby. Her basic body type was chunky, big-boned. She would never look sylphlike or slinky unless she had a complete body makeover, which could take months.
“What you’re asking for is gobblers,” Cardenas had told her friend as gently as she could. “They’re illegal, totally banned everywhere. They could kill you; they’ve killed others, god knows.”
“I don’t care!” Wunderly had yelped. “I’ll take the risk!”
But Cardenas would not. Still, she could not leave her friend to despair. Grimly, she had told Wunderly, “Come to my lab tomorrow night, around eight.”
Wunderly had come to the lab as eager as a puppy. Cardenas gave her a fruit cocktail that contained not nanomachines, but a powerful appetite suppressant and a diuretic. A placebo, in effect. She gave Wunderly detailed instructions about dieting and exercise.
“If you don’t follow this regimen the nanos won’t attack the fat cells,” Cardenas had warned, mentally crossing her fingers. “And you’ll be endangering your health.”
Every two days Wunderly had returned to Cardenas’s lab for a booster. She thought she was getting nanomachines that would burn away her fat as if by magic. To her delight, she lost weight. Not magically: it was by dint of diet and exercise that she would never have undertaken without the lure of nanomachines doing their work inside her body.
And it was working. Nadia already looks better, Cardenas thought, and she’s smiling instead of blubbering about her weight.
Manny Gaeta came to their table, carrying a tray laden with soup, a McGlop sandwich, and a slice of peach pie. Cardenas had told him about her little deception, of course. She had to step on his foot, under the table, only three times before he caught her meaning.
“Hey, Nadia, you’re looking terrific,” he said, grinning at Wunderly. “You been working out or something?”
“Something,” Wunderly answered, beaming at Cardenas.
28 December 2095: Storage building
Holly led Nadia Wunderly down the high-ceilinged corridor of the storage facility. On either side of them the walls were blank, except for long strings of numbers on each closed and locked door. Strip lamps along the ceiling lit the corridor brightly, but to Wunderly the place seemed dusty, gritty from disuse, and eerily quiet.
“So who’re you going with to the New Year’s Eve bash?” Holly asked, as they prowled along the corridor.
“One of the computer techies,” Wunderly replied cheerfully. “Da’ud Habib.”
Holly felt impressed. “He’s the head of Urbain’s computer team. From the University of British Columbia.”
“You know him?” Wunderly asked, surprised.
“Only from the human resources files.”
“Oh.”
“He’s a Moslem.”
“But he’s no chauvinist,” Wunderly countered immediately. “He’s really kind of a sweet guy.”
They walked on through the silent, dusty corridor. Wunderly eyed Holly’s lean, long-legged figure. Bet she’s never had to use a treadmill in her life, she said to herself. Still, though, her own figure was looking better every day—thanks to Cardenas’s nanos, she thought. And she was taking the enzyme injections to make her skin turn golden, just like everybody else, so she wouldn’t look so pasty. Almost everybody else, she realized. Holly doesn’t need enzymes: Her skin’s a wonderful toasty brown already.
“It’s like a maze down here,” Wunderly murmured, as Holly walked assuredly beside her.
“Just down another two cross-corridors, and then we turn left. Two doors in, that’s it.”
Clear admiration showed on Wunderly’s dimpled face. “You’ve got it memorized?”
Holly smiled gently. “Got it all memorized, Nadia. The whole layout. Everything and everybody in the habitat.”
“Memorized?”
“I’m a reborn, Nadia. Hope that doesn’t bother you.”
Wunderly’s eyes widened slightly. “Cryonics? How long were you in?”
“A little over twenty years.”
“But I thought reborns’ memories were pretty much wiped out when they’re revived.”
Nodding, Holly replied, “Yep. I don’t remember anything from my first life. Oh, maybe a snatch of something or other, but no connected memories.”
“Then how come—”
“The rehab team gave me a lot of RNA treatments and memory boosters. Didn’t work, far’s as remembering my first life’s concerned, but it surely gave me a near-perfect memory now. I see something once and I’ve got it forever, pretty near.”
“Eidetic,” Wunderly murmured.
“That’s what the psychs call it, yeah.”
They turned at a cross-corridor and stopped before the second door on their left.
“This is it,” said Holly, so flatly certain that Wunderly didn’t question her. “Manny has the combination,” she added, peering at the keyboard lock set into the door.