Then Saturn swung into view, huge, brilliant, those impossible rings hanging like swirls of diamonds above its middle. Gaeta could see bands of clouds eddying across the planet’s immense bulk, storm systems bigger than Earth surging through the delicate saffron cloud tops.
“You goin’ out?” Pancho asked.
Gaeta forced his attention to the metal frame of the airlock hatch. Gripping it with both hands, he said curtly, “Stepping out.”
Sitting on a stool in the bio lab, Cardenas tried not to look at her wristwatch, nor at the digital clock on the wall above Negroponte’s workbench. She knew Manny’s mission plan by heart. He should be just stepping out of the transfer rocket now and starting to get into the aeroshell heat shield.
“Are the muffins all right?”
Cardenas snapped her attention to Negroponte’s long, almond-eyed face. The biologist looked very serious, almost worried.
“The muffins,” Negroponte asked again. “Are they all right? The cafeteria didn’t have—”
“They’re fine,” Cardenas said. “My mind wandered. I’m sorry.”
Four smallish muffins remained on the makeshift placemat that Negroponte had spread upon her workbench, together with the crumbs of the two the women were already chewing on and a pair of steaming plastic coffee mugs. A working breakfast.
“Just what is it that you wanted to show me?” Cardenas asked, wiping crumbs from her lips and then reaching for her coffee.
Negroponte pushed her hair back off her face with both hands. “These bugs that Nadia discovered …” Her voice trailed off.
“Bugs?” Despite herself Cardenas smiled. “Is that the biological term for them?”
Utterly serious, Negroponte replied, “I don’t know what to call them. I don’t even know if they’re actually alive.”
“But Nadia said—”
“I know. I worked with her. We wrote the report together.”
“And you said that the specimens in the ice particles were alive. ‘Biologically active’ is the phrase you used, isn’t it?”
Negroponte smiled minimally. “You read our paper.”
“I certainly did.”
Negroponte clicked on the monitor screen at her elbow. Cardenas saw dark blobs pulsating slowly.
“The samples from the rings?” she guessed.
“Yes,” said Negroponte. “The vid is speeded up by a factor of one hundred from real time.”
Eying the screen, Cardenas said, “They move. They seem to interact with their environment. You’ve measured metabolic reactions in them. They’re alive. What’s the problem?”
“Is a virus alive?” Negroponte asked.
Cardenas hesitated. “I’m not a biologist—”
“Don’t be modest. You know the answer as well as I do.”
“So?”
“A virus can remain dormant, nothing more than a nanometer-sized spore, for centuries. Millennia, even.”
“But when it comes in contact with a living cell—”
“It becomes active. It invades the cell’s nucleus and takes over its reproductive machinery to produce more of itself.”
“And the cell eventually dies,” Cardenas said.
“Not before the virus has reproduced itself a millionfold or more.”
Nodding toward the display screen, Cardenas asked, “You think the organisms in the rings are viruses?”
Negroponte shook her head solemnly. “Let me ask my next question.”
“Go right ahead,” said Cardenas, intrigued.
“Is a nanomachine alive?”
Gaeta thought the aeroshell looked like a shallow bathtub. Attached to the hull of the transfer craft like an opened parasol, its white heat shield ceramic exterior glowed warmly in the saffron light from Saturn. The return pod package stuck up above the shell looked like the fat handle of an umbrella. It contained the return rocket thruster and its fuel, and was covered in similar heat-resistant ceramic. It was connected to the aeroshell’s rim by three slim buckyball struts.
Inside the armored excursion suit, Gaeta floated out to the end of the tether he’d attached to the transfer craft’s hull, dangling in the emptiness of space while he waited for Wanamaker to stow the emptied container of decontaminating nanomachines back inside the airlock. Space isn’t empty, he reminded himself. This vacuum is filled with hard radiation. He turned himself around by swinging his arms until he faced the overpowering radiance of Saturn and its rings. Down at the planet’s south polar region he could see the bright shimmering of its aurora. Enough radiation to fry a man in seconds, Gaeta knew, if he wasn’t protected.
The airlock hatch opened like a glowing eye in the shadowed darkness of the transfer ship’s hull. A lone figure glided out, seemingly wearing nothing but coveralls. Gaeta knew that Wanamaker was in a suit composed of nanofibers, and he was protected as well as a man in a cumbersome old-fashioned hard-shell space suit. Still, he shook his head. They’ll never get me in one of those flimsy damned things. Looks like nothing more than a plastic raincoat and hood.
“Ready to get into the bathtub?” Wanamaker’s voice crackled slightly in Gaeta’s earphones.
With a nod that Wanamaker couldn’t see, Gaeta said, “Let’s do it before Fritz starts hyperventilating.”
Sure enough, von Helmholtz’s testy, impatient voice came through from the mission control center aboard Goddard, “You are already three minutes behind schedule. The timeline must be adhered to!”
“I’m getting into the aeroshell,” Gaeta answered. “Don’t get yourself lathered up.”
Timeline, he thought as he climbed up the rungs built into one of the connectors and slowly swung a leg over the rim of the aeroshell. Even in the microgravity of orbit it took an effort to move inside the suit. The servomotors could help with walking and normal leg movements; this maneuver was more like climbing into a saddle on a tall horse.
It unnerved Gaeta slightly to see Wanamaker puttering around him in nothing more substantial than the nanosuit.
“How’s it feel inside that baggy?” he asked as he lowered himself to lay down on his back inside the aeroshell’s bowl.
“Fine,” answered Wanamaker. “A lot easier moving around than in a regular suit. Or that clunker you’re in.”
“Clunker?” Gaeta bristled inwardly. “This suit’s seen me through a helluva lot of weird situations, pal.”
Wanamaker clicked the connecting clamps to rings fitted into the torso of Gaeta’s suit. In the vacuum of space there was no sound, but Gaeta felt the hooks clicking into place. He was flat on his back now, staring up at the return pod package looming above him.
Fritz came back on the radio and went through the checklist with Wanamaker, who unhooked a hand-sized camera from the belt of his suit and played it over Gaeta’s supine body, giving Fritz visual proof that every clamp was properly in place.
“Very well,” Fritz said, sounding reluctant. “The connectors are set.”
God forbid that fregado should ever say he’s satisfied with anything, Gaeta grumbled to himself.
“Admiral Wanamaker,” Fritz called. “My congratulations. You’ve made up seventy full seconds of our timeline.”
“Thank you,” said Wanamaker.
Gaeta was too stunned to say anything.
Wanamaker rapped lightly on Gaeta’s helmet. “Good luck, buddy.”
Gaeta nodded again, even though he realized Wanamaker couldn’t see it inside the suit’s heavy helmet. “Thanks, Jake.”
Wanamaker disappeared from his view. All that Gaeta could see now was the ceramic-coated return pod standing above him like a massive triphammer ready to squash him flat. Beyond it, the stars: unwinking eyes staring down at him. The stars, he thought. What would it be like to fly to Alpha Centuari, or one of those stars that has Earth-sized planets orbiting around them? Are they really like other Earths? What a kick it would be to get there first, before anybody else, and see for myself what’s there.