Moonrise (54 page)

“You had the therapy illegally?” asked the General Assembly chairwoman.

Quintana smiled. “It is a gray area. Nanotherapy is illegal in many nations, including Mexico. But in Switzerland apparently the authorities allow it to continue.”

“Not for Swiss citizens, however,” said the Security Council president, who had been a lawyer. He had rolls of fat instead of a neck; the glistening skin of his round face seemed stretched tight, like an overinflated balloon.

“But you did it anyway,” said the secretary-general.

Still smiling, Quintana said, “It seemed better than surgery or radiation treatments.”

“Or chemotherapy.”

“Or death,” Quintana added wryly.

For a moment they were silent. Then the secretary-general smoothed her skirt and said, “So you are a supporter of nanotechnology, then.”

“Yes, Very much.”

“And you would speak against the current treaty being negotiated?”

“To outlaw all nanotechnology research? Yes, I am against it.”

“Would you speak publicly against it?”

“If I must.”

“Wouldn’t that involve some element of danger for you, personally?”

Quintana shrugged. “There is always the chance of some fanatic. I can hire bodyguards.”

The Security Council president cleared his throat ostentatiously. All eyes turned to him.

“Isn’t it true,” he asked, in an accusing voice, “that you are a member of the board of directors of Masterson Aero-space Corporation?”

“That’s no secret,” Quintana said evenly.

“And isn’t it true that Masterson Corporation will suffer greatly if all nanotechnology work is prohibited?”

Quintana nodded. “It would mean the end of their base on the Moon. They could not survive up there without nano-machines to process oxygen for them and maintain their solar power farms.”

“It is also true, is it not,” the president continued, “that your corporation stands to make indecently enormous profits from nanotechnology manufacturing.”

“If we manufacture any salable products with nanomachines, the manufacturing will most likely be done in space, not on Earth.”

“The
profits
will be made on Earth.”

“Yes, certainly.”

“So you are not exactly unbiased in this matter.”

Quintana put his glass down on the marble-topped coffeetable.
“I am a living example of what nanotherapy can accomplish. As you can see, I am not a monster and the nanomachines that were put into my body have done me nothing but good.”

“But—”

“But nanotechnology can do more than heal the sick, that is true,” Quintana went on. “Nanomanufacturing can bring a new era of prosperity to Earth. I should think that nations such as Bangladesh and Zaire would welcome such an opportunity.”

“At the cost of ruining our existing industries!”

Quintana laughed disdainfully. “Your existing industries are keeping your people poor. If I were you, sir, I would embrace nanotechnology instead of trying to outlaw it.”

The president said nothing. Silence hung in the elegant little room for many heavy moments.

At length, the secretary-general said, “Thank you for sharing your views with us, Carlos.”

Knowing he was being dismissed, Quintana got to his feet, bowed slightly to her. “Thank you for inviting me.”

He got as far as the door, then turned back to them. “Take my advice. Don’t fight nanotechnology. The best thing you could do, right now, would be to buy Masterson stock.”

And, laughing, he left the three of them sitting there.

He was still smiling as he stepped out of the elevator at the U.N. complex’s underground garage level. He walked to the dispatcher and asked him to call his limousine.

As he lit up a thin cigar, a man in grimy coveralls stepped up to him and pushed the muzzle of a nine-millimeter automatic into Quintana’s midsection.

“Antichrist,” he snarled. And he emptied the gun’s magazine into Quintana’s midriff and chest, smashing him back against the dispatcher’s booth. The shots rang deafeningly through the garage.

Quintana felt no pain, but the world seemed to tilt into a crazy lopsided scene of concrete ceiling and staring faces. The man with the gun stood calmly over him.

“Let’s see your devil’s bugs cure you of
that.
” And he spat on Quintana’s shattered, bleeding body.

“This nanotech treaty has got to be stopped!” Joanna said.

Greg nodded tightly. He had been director of Moonbase for slightly more than six months. What had been Jinny Anson’s office was now his, and he had transformed it considerably. His desk was an ultramodern curved surface of gleaming lunar glassteel, a new alloy from Moonbase’s labs that was as transparent as crystal yet had the structural strength of high-grade concrete. A long couch of lunar plastic sat against one wall and comfortable webbed chairs were scattered across the floor, which was covered with soft, sound-absorbing tiles manufactured in one of Masterson Corporation’s space station factories in orbit around Earth.

The air in the room was pleasantly cool, like an air-conditioned office of a major corporation back on Earth. Greg had insisted on paving a large section of Alphonsus’s floor with new radiators that allowed the environmental control system to work more efficiently and made all of Moonbase’s underground facilities much more comfortable. It was his major accomplishment, to date.

The office walls were lined with precisely spaced Windowall display screens. Most of them showed artwork from the world’s great museums, although Greg could, at the touch of a keypad, turn them into views of virtually any part of Moonbase or the surface of Alphonsus’s crater floor.

Behind Greg was a giant Windowall that presently showed a restful silk scroll landscape of mountains and mist by the thirteenth-century Chinese master Kao K’o-Kung. It lent the office an air of serenity that neither Joanna nor her two sons felt.

“Will the United States sign the treaty?” Doug asked from his seat on the couch against the far wall.

Joanna, sitting on the webbed chair closest to Greg’s curved desk, had noticed that Doug always picked that couch to sit on. It was farthest from his brother.

“Yes, of course they will,” Greg said, frowning darkly. “The whole idea of the treaty came from Washington.”

“But they
can’t
outlaw nanotechnology completely,” Joanna said. “Not entirely.”

“Yes, they can,” said Doug. Joanna knew he was just as concerned as his older brother, yet Doug looked at ease, relaxed, lounging back on the long couch as if this were nothing more than a computer game. She almost expected him to put his feet up and stretch out for a nap.

“But if they do, they’ll want us to stop using nanomachines here at Moonbase, too. We can’t allow that.”

Greg shook his head. “If and when the U.S. signs the treaty, its provisions will be like federal law. And we’ll be bound by them just like any flatlander down Earthside.”

“You’ll have to stop work on the mass driver,” Joanna said.

With a tight nod, Greg said, “We’ll have to stop everything that we use nanomachines for.”

“That means closing Moonbase,” she said.

Greg started to nod, but Doug interrupted with, “As long as we remain an American corporation.”

“I’ve thought about that,” Joanna said. “But Venezuela, Ecuador, all the European nations—they’re all going to sign the treaty.”

“What about Kiribati?”

Greg looked sharply at his brother. “Kiribati?”

“Don’t you have enough clout with them to keep them from signing, Greg?” Doug asked.

“What good would that do?” Greg almost growled the words.

Joanna turned to her elder son hopefully. “We could transfer our articles of incorporation to Kiribati.”

Greg shook his head dismissively. “And get half a dozen federal agencies jumping all over us. They’d take us to court and the courts would decide against us. We’d be in real trouble. They’d send federal marshals up here to shut down all our nanomachines.”

Doug still looked strangely unperturbed. “Suppose we start
up a new corporation,” he suggested. “In Kiribati. And Masterson sells the Moonbase operation to them.”

Greg’s somber face paled. “Sell Moonbase to them?”

Doug was grinning now. “Sure. Moonbase and all our Earth-orbital stations.”

“All the corporation’s space operations?”

“That could work,” said Joanna.

“It’s an obvious attempt to circumvent the treaty,” said Greg.

“But it’s legal,” Doug replied. “I checked it out with both the federal and international law programs.”

“Did you?” Greg grumbled.

Joanna smiled a little. “Rashid won’t like living in Tarawa, though.”

Doug replied, “He can stay in Savannah and be in Tarawa with a virtual reality connection any time he wants to. Just the same as you attend board meetings without leaving here, Mom.”

Greg objected, “The board of directors would never go for it.”

“Setting up a dummy corporation and selling the space division to it,” Joanna mused. “It
would
take some explaining.”

“It’ll never work,” said Greg.

“Why not?” Doug challenged. “You spent all those years out there in Kiribati. Don’t you think you can get them to play along with us?”

“Of course I could, but—”

Joanna interrupted with new-found enthusiasm, “I’ll call Carlos right away.”

“Why not the board chairman?” Doug asked.

Greg answered sourly, “Because Quintana is the real power on the board—present company excepted, of course.”

“Of course,” Joanna agreed. “Can you put the call through for me, please?”

Frowning slightly, Greg touched the keyboard built into his desk with one long slim finger and said merely, “Carlos Quintana.” The comm system’s voice recognition circuitry searched automatically for Quintana’s number and made the connection.

“Johansen is just a figurehead,” Joanna was explaining to
Doug as the communications computer established the link with Savannah. “He looks good for public relations, but he’s—”

The wall screen showing Monet lilypads changed abruptly to display a harried-looking young woman brushing at her dishevelled hair.

“I want to talk to Carlos,” Joanna snapped, unaccustomed to having underlings answer her calls.

“He’s dead!” the young woman bawled, bursting into tears. “He’s been shot!”

Joanna fell back against her chair’s webbing, feeling almost as if a bullet had hit her heart.

Ibriham al-Rashid felt perspiration beading his brow and upper lip despite the nearly frigid air conditioning of the small control room.

Beyond that window, he knew, inside that gleaming metal sphere was a small man-made star, so hot and dense that its very atomic nuclei were being fused together.

The plasma physicist tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to the power gauges lining the control room’s side wall. Rashid nodded, too awed to speak.

The control room was almost silent. Nothing but the faint electrical hum from the monitoring consoles.

“How long has it been running?” Rashid asked in a whisper. It seemed the proper tone of voice, this close to a miracle.

“Tomorrow will make four months, exactly,” said the plasma physicist. Even he kept his voice hushed.

He was a fellow Moslem, even a fellow native of Baltimore; a man Rashid had known in his youth. Now he was a paunchy overweight academic with thinning hair and a light brown beard and eyes that blinked behind oversized, tinted glasses. Now he was a plasma physicist at Johns Hopkins University who just happened to have invented the world’s first practical nuclear fusion generator.

“And it has been producing power like this for all that time?” Rashid whispered.

The plasma physicist nodded. “As long as we keep it supplied with helium-three.”

Rashid stroked his beard and turned back to stare through
the safety glass at the small metal sphere. It was almost hidden inside a maze of magnet coils and cooling pipes and heavy tangles of multicolored electrical wires. In his imagination, Rashid could see inside the sphere, see the blinding hot plasma that was fusing atomic nuclei together, forcing mass to transmute into energy, imitating the processes that made the stars shine.

By the Prophet, Rashid thought, Allah is offering us a gift beyond price.

But not beyond cost.

The plasma physicist gestured toward the door and, once out in the laboratory’s hallway again, Rashid drew a deep breath. “It really works,” he said, almost in a normal tone.

“It really works,” the plasma physicist echoed. “And much better—and cheaper—than that monstrosity up in Princeton.”

“But it requires helium-three for fuel, which the Princeton machine does not.”

“The Princeton machine is designed to produce new Ph.D.’s,” the plasma physicist grumbled. “My generator is designed to produce megawatts.”

The plasma physicist led him up the hallway toward his own cluttered office. “Helium-three and deuterium,” he said. “The deuterium is easy to get from ordinary water. There’s enough deuterium in an eight-ounce drinking glass of water to equal the energy in half a million barrels of oil.”

Rashid smiled wanly. “Our brothers in OPEC will not be happy with you.”

The plasma physicist shrugged his soft shoulders. “They’re busy building receiving farms for the solar power satellites. The deserts will still be energy centers.”

“But once fusion comes on-line…”

“It never will.”

“What? Your work—”

They reached his open office door. The room looked just as chaotic as when they had left it, an hour earlier.

“My work may win me a Nobel Prize,” the plasma physicist said, plopping himself in his creaking desk chair, “although the Princeton people will try to sabotage that.”

Rashid took the only other chair that didn’t have piles of journals or reports on it.

“But my fusion system will be nothing but a laboratory curiosity, I’m afraid.”

“Why? How?”

“For two reasons.” The plasma physicist raised two chubby fingers. Rashid noticed that his nails were dirty.

“First,” he said, “is the matter of the fuel. Helium-three is vanishingly rare. We have to produce it in nuclear accelerators, which makes it cost more than the power that the fusion generator produces.”