Moonrise (49 page)

“It takes time,” Kris Cardenas said. She was sitting behind Anson’s desk. Anson herself had rushed down to the control center to pipe Doug’s vidcam disk to the Hague, registering Masterson Corporation’s claim to the Mt. Wasser region. She had graciously turned over her entire suite to Joanna, saying she could stay in smaller quarters until her tour of duty was finished and she left for Earth. In truth, she wanted to keep as far away from Joanna as she could.

“But Doug doesn’t have time,” Joanna said. “He’s dying!”

Cardenas got up from the desk chair. “I’ll get back to the lab and see if I can help speed things up.”

“Yes,” said Joanna. “Good.”

The instant the door closed behind Cardenas, Greg got up from the couch, took his mother by the hand, and made her sit down where he had been. Then he sat beside her.

“There’s no sense getting yourself sick over this,” he said.

“You should try to get some rest.”

Joanna shook her head. “How can I rest?”

“I could get something for you, to help you sleep.”

“No! I …” She stopped, as if confused, suddenly uncertain of what she wanted to say, wanted to do.

“I’ll let you know the instant something happens,” Greg promised.

“Don’t you see!” Joanna blurted. “It’s my fault! All my fault! I should never have allowed him to go to Moonbase. I knew he was too young, too careless.” She broke into tears.

Greg put his arms around his mother and let her sob on his shoulder. “It’s not your fault; it isn’t. And he wasn’t careless. Nobody could have predicted the flare.”

“First the Moon killed Paul, now it’s killed him. And it’s my fault, all my fault.”

Coldly, Greg said, “The Moon didn’t kill Paul Stavenger. We both know that.”

Joanna pulled slightly away from him. Her eyes were red,
filled with tears. “I was a terrible mother to you, Greg. What happened was my fault as much as anyone’s.”

“Mom, that’s all in the past. There’s no sense dredging it up again.”

“But if only I had been—”

“Stop it,” Greg said sharply. “I’ve spent years working my way through this. I don’t want to hear any more about it.”

Joanna stared at him, but said nothing.

“It’s not your fault. None of this is. What’s happened has happened. Now all we can do is wait and see if Zimmerman can save him.”

But he was thinking, Would she cry over me? He tried to remember back to his own childhood—all those years, he could not recall his mother crying for him. Not once.

Joanna pulled herself together with a visible, shuddering effort. “I can’t stay here,” she said, jumping to her feet too hard in the unaccustomed lunar gravity.

Greg had to grab her, steady her. “Be careful, Mom! You’ll hurt yourself.”

“Take me to him,” Joanna said.

“Doug? He’s in—”

“No. Zimmerman. I want to see him. I want to find out what he’s doing.”

Zimmerman sat sweating on a rickety swivel chair that seemed much too fragile to support his weight. He had draped an ancient lab smock over his gray suit; the coat had once been white, but now, after so many years of wear and washings, it was beyond bleach.

Beads of perspiration on his lip and brow, he chewed anxiously on his black cigar, his fourth of the long, trying day. One of his assistants had thoughtfully converted a laboratory dish into an ashtray for him. It sat on the lab bench at his side, filled with the shredded and soggy remains of three earlier cigars.

On the other side of the clear plastiglass wall, his four assistants bent over lab benches. Their lab smocks looked very new, starched and pressed.

The airtight door of the nanotechnology laboratory sighed open and Kris Cardenas came through.

“How’s it going?” she asked.

Zimmerman’s bushy brows contracted into a worried frown. “What takes weeks in Basel we are trying to do in hours here.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Turn up the air conditioning! Must I suffer like this?”

Cardenas shrugged. “I think the temperature is centrally controlled.” To her the lab felt comfortably warm; perhaps a bit stuffy. She smiled and added, “If you would lose some weight …”

“Camouflage,” Zimmerman said, slapping his belly.

“Camouflage?”

“Do you think the politicians and their spies suspect me of working on nanotherapies when I am so gross? Hah?”

Cardenas felt her jaw drop open. “Is it that bad? Even in Switzerland?”

“I take no chances,” Zimmerman said.

“Do you need anything?” Cardenas asked.

Zimmerman shook his head slightly. “No. The equipment here is surprisingly good. Not precisely what we require for medical work, but good enough, I think. We are adapting it.”

“They use nanomachines here quite a bit.”

“But not for medical purposes.”

“No, I think not.”

“How is the patient?” Zimmerman asked.

Cardenas shrugged. “Last time I checked he was fairly stable. Sinking slowly, but they’ve lowered his metabolic rate as far as they can.”

“H’ mm.”

The airtight door slid open again and Joanna Stavenger strode through, followed by Greg.

Zimmerman scowled. “This laboratory is in use. Find yourselves—”

“This is Joanna Stavenger,” Cardenas said quickly.

Pushing himself up from the creaking little chair, Zimmerman clicked his heels and bowed slightly. “My abductress. The woman who has blackmailed me.”

Joanna ignored his jibe. She looked at the rumpled obese old man, noting that he was several inches shorter than she.

“How soon will you be ready?” she asked.

“As soon as we can,” Zimmerman said.

“Please don’t play games and don’t patronize me. My son is dying. How soon can you begin to help him?”

Zimmerman’s tone changed. “It’s a matter of programming. We are moving ahead as quickly as we can.”

“Programming,” Joanna echoed.

Waving a pudgy hand, Zimmerman explained, “We are adapting our little machines to seek out damaged cells and repair them. They will remove damaged material, molecule by molecule, and repair the cells with fresh material, molecule by molecule.”

Joanna nodded. Greg, standing slightly behind her, folded his arms across his chest.

“The problem is that your son has sustained massive damage. His case is very different from merely getting rid of accumulated fat cells or breaking down plaque along blood vessels.”

“Can you do it?” Joanna asked.

“We will do it, madam,” said Zimmerman. “Whether we will be able to do it in time, before he is too far gone even for the nanomachines to help him, remains questionable.”

“Is there anything else that you need? Any other assistants?”

“Nothing and no one that could be brought here in time.”

Greg asked, “How much of a chance does he have? I mean—”

“If I had even one single week this would be no problem.”

“But we’ve only got a few hours.”

Zimmerman signed hugely. “Yah. This I know.”

Killifer clumped wearily to the comm cubicle of the buried shelter, still in his spacesuit, minus only the helmet. The young woman at the communications console rose to her feet.

“You did a fine job out there,” she said, eyes gleaming. “You saved two lives.”

With a crooked grin, Killifer said, “I saved the corporation from any competition to their claim, that’s what I saved.”

The young woman smiled knowingly. “You’re just being modest.”

Killifer shook his head and took the emptied chair, thinking, Hey, now I’m a friggin’ hero. I’ll have to look her up when we get back to the base. Might be worth some sack time.

“Moonbase says the Yamagata craft has shifted its trajectory and asked for permission to land here and pick up their men.”

“They’re welcome to ’em. I hope they brought medics. One of them’s in a bad way. Busted ribs.”

As he spoke, Killifer opened the channel to Moonbase. Jinny Anson’s face appeared on his screen, surprising him.

“I’m living in the control center until things settle down,” Anson told him. “Mrs. Stavenger’s come up here to be with her son.”

“She’s there? At Moonbase?”

“Yep. She’s going to be pretty damned thankful to you for getting him down off the mountain, I betcha.”

Like I had any choice, Killifer thought.

“And for getting those two stranded Japanese guys. Yamagata’s people have been falling all over themselves thanking us.”

“Really?”

“That’s their way of admitting that they messed up any claim they might have made. Heads are going to roll over at Nippon One, I betcha.”

Who gives a fuck? Killifer said to himself. Then he remembered, and a pang of sudden fear flared through him.

“How’s the Stavenger kid?” he asked.

Anson shook her head. “Not good. The Dragon Lady’s brought a team of nano specialists up here, but I don’t know if they can save him. He’s pretty far gone.”

It took a conscious effort for Killifer to unclench his teeth. “And the astronomer? Rhee? How’s she doing?”

Anson looked mildly surprised. “I don’t know. She was hanging pretty close to Doug Stavenger, but she ought to be back at her job by now.”

Killifer nodded. I’ll have to track her down when we get back to the base.

“I’m going to start breaking the camp here, soon as the Yamagata ship lands and picks up their guys.”

“Right,” said Anson. “The expedition didn’t go the way we planned, but at least we’ve got a valid claim to the territory. Next time we go back, you’ll be in charge.”

Killifer made himself grin. “Yeah? That’s great.” But he knew that his new-found status as a hero and leader could be destroyed by a single small square of cermet. I’ve gotta get it away from her, he told himself. Got to.

“That’s it?” Joanna whispered harshly. “All these hours have been spent to make something that doesn’t even fill a single hypodermic?”

Standing beside her, Kris Cardenas nodded without taking her eyes off Zimmerman’s bulky lab-coated form, bending over Doug’s infirmary bed.

“That’s all he’ll need,” she whispered back, “if it works right.”

Doug lay unconscious, his face pallid as death, covered to his chin in cooling blankets. Another hypothermic wrap was wound around his head. Like the undergarment of a spacesuit, the pale blue blankets were honeycombed with fine plastic tubes that carried refrigerated water to keep Doug’s body temperature as low as possible. Intravenous lines fed into his arms and an oxygen tube was fixed to his nostrils.

Joanna couldn’t tell if her son was breathing or not. The monitoring instruments above the bed showed his life signs: their ragged electronic lines looked dangerously low to her. She glanced at Greg, standing on her other side. He stared grimly through the plastiglass window that separated them from the infirmary bed.

“Shouldn’t we have a medical team to stay with him? I could bring—”

Cardenas silenced her by placing a hand on Joanna’s shoulder. “Zimmerman’s an M.D. as well as a Ph.D. And two of his aides are also physicians.”

Zimmerman straightened up. For a moment he gazed down at the unconscious patient, then he turned and went to the door. Stepping into the observation cubicle where the others waited, he dropped the syringe into the waste recycling can.

“It is done,” he said, his voice loud enough to startle Joanna. “Now we wait.”

“And rest,” Cardenas said. “You look like you could use a nice nap, Willi.”

In truth, his fleshy face looked ravaged.

Greg spoke up, “We should all get some sleep.” Turning to Zimmerman, he asked, “How long before we see some results?”

The old man blinked his pouchy eyes. “Twelve hours. Maybe more. Maybe a little less.”

“Nothing’s going to happen for eight to ten hours, at least,” Cardenas said briskly. “So let’s all get a decent sleep.”

Greg agreed. “I’ll get the people on duty to call if there’s any change in his condition.”

Joanna said, “I can sleep here, on the chair.”

“No,” Greg said firmly, taking her by the arm. “You sleep in your quarters, on a bunk. Doctor’s orders.”

Reluctantly, Joanna allowed her elder son to lead her out of the observation room and toward the suite that Anson had vacated for her. She almost felt grateful to Greg for his forceful tenderness.

Small as viruses, millions upon millions of nanomachines flowed through Doug’s bloodstream like an army of repair personnel eager to get to work. Blind, deaf, without the intelligence of an ameba, they were tuned to the chemical signatures that cells emit. In their world of the ultrasmall, where a bacterium is as gigantic and complex as a shopping mall, they were guided by the shapes of the molecules swarming around them.

Built to seek out specific types of molecules, they quickly spread through the enormous labyrinthine ways of Doug’s failing body. With receptors barely a thousand atoms long they touched and tested every molecule they came in contact with. Hardly any of them were of interest to the nanomachines; they merely touched, found that the molecule did not fit precisely into their receptor jaws, and left the molecule behind. Like a lock seeking its proper key, each nanomachine blindly searched the teeming liquid world within Doug’s wasting body.

When they did find a molecule that nested properly in their receptors, they clamped onto it and tore it apart into its individual atoms: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and the rarer metals and minerals. Then other nanomachines seized the freed atoms and combined them into new molecules, new nutrients for the cells that were damaged and dying.

Deep into the cells they penetrated, into the nucleus where the huge double spiral DNA molecules worked as templates for building vital proteins. Here was where the most crucial damage had been done. The links between the two intertwining spirals, the base pairs that were the genes themselves, had been heavily damaged by the ionizing radiation. Where the nanomachines saw a break in this vital linkage, where base pairs had been broken or mismatched, the nanomachines rebuilt the bases and linked them correctly. Like vastly complex three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles, the DNA molecules were put together properly by the busily hurrying nanomachines, much as Doug’s own natural enzymes were valiantly trying to do. Together, the polymerases and the nanomachines worked frantically to repair the massive DNA molecules.