Assemblers of Infinity Read online

  On the interior wall of his craft, Bryan Zed had painted GLORIA -- his wife's name. He had told Erika, using only about three sentences, how it was tradition to paint the name of one's wife on the outside of a special aircraft

  -- Glamorous Glennis, Enola Gay -- but since he had no way to reach the exterior hull of his shuttle, the cabin wall would have to do.

  He displayed several images of Gloria on the flight deck next to a plaque given to him by his graduating class at astronaut training. They had awarded him "Mr. Personality," but it must have been some sort of a joke.

  Erika wasn't sure if Bryan Zed realized that.

  She fumbled at her straps, but they were already as tight as they could be. Erika felt her face flush with excitement and a bit of fear as she tried to see the televised view of their approach. Below, the lunar surface looked like flash-frozen meringue. Gray and black shapes filled the high-definition screen. Craters, tips of craggy mountains, and vast plains of hardened lava slipped past the screen as the shuttle descended. But the shadow of lunar night masked most of the details.

  She spotted a lit-up array of half-buried cylinders in the distance, similar to the Mars training camp in Antarctica. All too quickly the view narrowed to a smoothed landing area.

  "Five kilometers." Zimmerman was really on a roll. This must have been twice as many words he had spoken since the journey down from L-1. Erika couldn't see his face as he concentrated on the landing, but he continued. "We usually deliver supply pods by remote piloting, but a human in the loop gives a much greater sense of security." He placed his hands over the override controls.

  "I guess it must." Erika forced the words, then closed her eyes.

  "Two kilometers -- we're down to 50 meters a second."

  The lunar shuttle vibrated as the stern engines ignited for a few seconds. The viewscreen showed nothing but a landing pad in the distance. Red concentric circles spread out from the middle of the zone. Set into the ground at a 90 degree angle, a string of strobelights intersected the circles, bright on the dark plain.

  "Looking good." To Erika's relief, Zimmerman didn't turn around, but he kept up the chatter. "If our angle was wrong, the strobes would look red because of prisms in the rim. We're right on path. Relax."

  The ground swelled toward them. The shuttle began vibrating as the engines kicked on, this time to stay. The landing pad's strobelights disappeared from the screen as dust boiled up, spoiling the view.

  "Twenty ... ten ... five ... bingo!" Zimmerman slapped at the controls just as the engines cut off. Erika had never imagined he could sound so delighted.

  Erika felt dizzy as she sat up. "The Moon. One small step for mankind, and all that."

  Zimmerman gave her a blank stare and turned back to the control panel to switch the view from the landing zone to the lunar horizon. The image jumped from an unbroken plain to the brilliant headlights of an approaching rover, glimmering off plumes of dust kicked up from the shuttle's landing.

  From the other side of the landing pad a gantry rolled up to Zimmerman's lander. As it approached and made contact, Erika heard a faint "thunk" as the gantry docked.

  Erika pulled out her lunar EVA suit, ready to go through all the motions she had rehearsed back in Star City. But Zimmerman made no move to secure his own suit. She hesitated. "Aren't you coming with us?"

  "No," he said in his flat voice. She expected him to say something like

  'Just the facts, Ma'am.' "Not in my purview. It's dangerous out there."

  The light above the airlock switched from amber to green as she waited with helmet in hands. Air hissed and Erika smelled the tang of ozone. As the airlock door unseated its seals and pushed open, she felt her hair fly up at the edges; a chill ran down her back as she heard the faint popping of sparks.

  A spacesuited man with namepatch DVORAK stepped out of the chamber. The suit looked as if it had been freshly cleaned, which seemed strange since she had just seen him driving across the dusty lunar landscape.

  A voice came over the control panel radio, not from the suit. "Erika Trace?"

  Zimmerman nodded to the stranger. "Mr. Dvorak is the Director of Moonbase Columbus. He's patched through the radio."

  "Oh." Erika glanced at the spacesuit but spoke toward the transmitter on the control panel. "Uh, yes sir, Mr. Dvorak."

  "Please, call me Jason unless it makes you uncomfortable." He moved his arms, but his voice coming from the other side of the chamber made her feel disoriented. "We can leave for Columbus once you've finished suiting up."

  Erika turned and picked up her helmet. Bryan Zed led her to a cubbyhole across from the airlock. "You know the drill?"

  "Yeah. I've practiced this enough."

  "Have you? Let me help anyway. There's a big difference between stepping into hard vacuum versus a tub of water back on Earth. Difference in viscosity, for one."

  For a moment, Erika felt a flash of defensive anger again, but from the way Zimmerman went about helping her, she realized that he would have acted the same way no matter who it had been. But Erika was so accustomed to doing things herself, working alone or with no one but Parvu for company, she knew she would have to make a conscious effort to fit in. Otherwise her time spent here would be even more miserable than she feared.

  She stood in front of the cubbyhole that held the life-support pack and spent the next fifteen minutes letting Zimmerman secure her connections. Once he tightened the last zipper, he powered up her suit.

  She felt a surge of hot liquid run through her suit's inner liner. "I can feel the heater." She jerked her neck to bump the chin control, trying to remember all the memorized checklists. "Everything seems okay. I'm ready for the helmet."

  With the helmet on she could suddenly hear Dvorak's breathing over the suit radio. "Mr. Dvorak?"

  "Ready?" He struggled up from a mesh net that had served as a chair for the enormous bulk of his suited form.

  "As much as I'll ever be." Consciously, she made herself smile to look relaxed, but no one could see her through the helmet anyway.

  "Let's do it." Dvorak turned his faceless helmet to Zimmerman. "Thanks, Bryan."

  Zimmerman grunted, back to his old ways.

  "Let's go, Dr. Trace." Dvorak turned for the airlock.

  Erika stepped across the shuttle deck and followed him, immediately surprised at the ease with which she could move. The augmented servos that functioned as the suit's muscles made everything simple. In the crash course she had taken back on Earth, the suit and life-support pack had weighed nearly a hundred pounds; even in the water simulation tank she had not gotten a true feel for what it was like to move around in low gravity.

  She squeezed into the airlock and waited for the air to cycle out back into the shuttle's reserve tanks. Dvorak pushed against her suit and motioned with his hand.

  "Try not to move too quickly, and keep your center of gravity over your feet. If you start to fall, it'll feel like you're drowning in a bowl of molasses and there's nothing you can do about it. So if you drop anything, either let it be or call for help -- but don't bend over. That's an acquired skill."

  She felt a little more relaxed with Dvorak's conversation. It was a pleasant change from Bryan Zed's impenetrability. She found herself putting a light tone in her voice. "Sounds like how to survive on the Moon in two easy lessons."

  "That's about all that you'll need to know for now. But the main thing is that if you've got any questions, don't be afraid to ask. Believe me, the only dumb question here is 'Why did she have to die?'"

  Erika kept her mouth shut. If there really was anything to this nanotech threat that existed on the other side of the Moon, then she had a lot more to worry about than learning how to walk in low gravity.

  The airlock opened, and Erika felt like Dorothy opening the farmhouse door in The Wizard of Oz. The view sprawled in front of her, the same as had appeared on the high-definition screen inside the lander.

  They stepped out onto a gantry platform encircled by safety wires.
>
  Above, a shower of stars lit the distant crags in pearly relief. As the platform lowered them to the lunar surface, Erika felt no sensation of movement.

  Dvorak helped her into the rover, which looked like someone had added balloon tires to the stripped-down chassis of a junked car. Behind them, the gantry withdrew from the landing pad.

  Dvorak moved around to the other side, climbing in behind the controls.

  He powered on the headlights. "We've got about a ten-kilometer ride to the base, half an hour."

  "When can I see the nanotech specimens?"

  "We're preparing another sample-return mission as soon as you've been acclimated, Dr. Trace -- "

  "Okay, please stop calling me Dr. Trace. It's Erika, all right?"

  "Fine. But in return you have to promise never to call me Jase. Jason is fine, but I hate nicknames."

  She found herself smiling behind the faceplate. "A deal. When will we get a new sample? I've been going a thousand miles an hour for the past two weeks preparing for this. So as soon as you can get me to the lab and have the samples ready, the sooner I can do my job here." And the sooner I can go home, she thought.

  As the rover rolled away from Zimmerman's lander, Erika braced herself with one hand. The constant-volume suit caused annoying problems -- when she bent her legs, the air redistributed inside her suit, causing the suit to respond by pinching her. And her hands already hurt from the pressure of moving the gloves.

  She caught a support strut as the rover bounced away from the compressed landing area. "Am I going to be stationed out at Sim-Mars? How far is that from Columbus Base?"

  "Just over fifty kilometers, on the other side of the landing zone. We don't have all the specialized tools for you to use the lab telerobotically, so you'll have to go there in person."

  "I never thought I'd get there before the Mars crew."

  Dvorak sighed. "We didn't think it would be used so soon either."

  Erika fell silent, losing herself in the stark, exotic scenery as they bounced along. The grayness of the entire nightside world looked foreboding.

  She had been on the surface for only a couple of hours and she already wished she could see some color, smell something other than the antiseptic inside her suit. How about the high desert of New Mexico, or the lush woods of South Carolina? Even the sharp snow of Antarctica and the stench of a crowded penguin rookery?

  The silhouetted horizon seemed oddly near, as if she could throw a stone all the way to the edge. As the rover bumped along, she picked out a spot on the horizon and tried guessing how long it would take to reach it.

  Approaching the moonbase, Dvorak pointed out the distant astronomical facilities, the enormous dangling box of the gamma-ray observatory, the sprawling radio telescope, the high-energy cosmic ray observatory, and the solar telescope. The broad proton-beam collector lay off to the left, ready to receive a burst from the Nevada Test Site on Earth.

  She couldn't comprehend the effort it must have taken to assemble and distribute the massive equipment. By starlight, Erika could make out tracks in the regolith, indicating that more activity had occurred here. It made her think of the gigantic Daedalus construction.

  Dvorak said, "We're almost there." She saw rounded mounds at the starlit horizon. Erika suddenly felt good about being here.

  Moonbase Columbus looked as if a giant had strewn empty beer cans on the ground, then kicked dirt over them. In the center of the base a regolith-covered hemispherical dome -- the control center -- towered over the buried modules. Other cylinders lay like spokes radiating from the dome. The remaining buildings sat above ground in a random arrangement with connections running from cylinder to cylinder.

  Dvorak said, "The original base is the pretty-looking stuff in the center. Everything else is temporary storage for Phase II until we can dig below the original structure."

  "An anthill on the Moon!" She suddenly giggled.

  "Well, the dirt is for radiation protection from solar flares and galactic cosmic rays."

  "Wow cosmic!" She laughed again. Why was everything silly? She felt punchy, wonderful. She hadn't felt so good in ... a long time. She wondered what it would be like to dance in low gravity.

  Dvorak abruptly turned to her. She couldn't see his face through the mirrored faceplate, but she could imagine the look he was giving her. She wanted to stick her tongue out at him, teach him a lesson, call him 'Jase'

  over and over again until he got really upset....

  Dvorak's voice burst over her helmet radio. "Erika! Check your CO2."

  "See oh two? See you too. See you later!"

  He leaned over to check the diagnostic readings on the front of her suit. "Decrease your oxygen supply."

  Oxygen. Erika kicked up the reading on her chin display and glanced at the colored lights dancing on the front of her helmet. Most of the lights were green, but two flashed red. She seemed to remember something at Star City about this --

  She felt pressure at the front of her suit. Dvorak had one hand on the wheel and the other groping at her chest. Wow, bodice-ripping romance on the Moon! "Hey!" She tried to knock his hand away.

  The thought of necking in a parked lunar rover, while both of them wore bulky spacesuits sent her into a fit of laughter again, but suddenly she realized it didn't sound funny anymore. She frowned and glanced at her heads-up display. The red lights had turned to amber.

  O2 partial pressure -- 3 psi: decreasing

  CO2 partial pressure -- 2 psi: increasing

  "Hey, I was hyperventilating!"

  Dvorak grunted. "You might want to keep your voice alert on to catch that next time. Bitchin' Betsy, we call it. Zimmerman didn't have you switch it on."

  Erika flipped up the suit options and keyed it in. "Thanks." She felt incredibly stupid. Hyperventilating! What a way to make a first impression

  -- and with the moonbase commander yet.

  "No problem. Happens to everyone." He turned the rover and headed toward what looked like a tent in a plowed-level area. "Well, a few people anyway."

  As they approached, Erika made out four other rovers parked underneath the deeper shadow of a silvery awning. "Easiest garage in the world," Dvorak said. "Since there's no weather, all we have to do is keep the sunlight off them during the daytime."

  Erika climbed down from the rover after he brought it to a stop. Dvorak led her to the moonbase airlock. "Step up and wait inside for me."

  The inside of the chamber was lined with several air vents. The metal walls had a control panel embedded near each corner. The multilingual instruction placard described them as emergency manual backups, in case the control center links malfunctioned.

  When they were both inside the lock, Dvorak said, "Stand back from the wall and raise your hands."

  Erika took an uneven step backward and placed her hands over her head.

  She heard a rapid "whoosh" through her helmet, then a sharp "snap."

  "That's our dust buster. An electric charge polarizes the dust, pops it off your suit, and the air carries it out. Between that and the floor suction we manage to get most of it. But you'll find the grittiness will still drive you crazy."

  The airlock slid open. An enormous man wearing only a powder-blue jumpsuit stood inside the entrance. He was so large that it looked as if he might not have been able to get into the airlock. He helped Erika take her helmet off, letting Dvorak handle his own undressing. With a burst of air from the inside, the first thing she noticed was the musty, humid smell that reminded her of a room packed full of people on a hot day.

  "Erika Trace? I'm Lon Newellen. I'll be driving you right out to Sim-Mars, after you've taken a breather here." He started helping her with her suit fastenings.

  "Thanks." Erika allowed the beefy man to disengage the life support unit from her back as she looked around. The habitat was a long cylinder packed with supplies. Boxes stamped FREEZE DRIED on the side were stacked all through the room. Nets hung from the ceiling, bulging with additional boxes.


  At the end of the module, looking like the opposite end of a craggy tunnel, was an airlock.

  Dvorak moved around in front of her; he tossed his helmet to the side.

  A middle-aged woman caught it and gave the base commander a thumbs up. Other people came to the doorway.

  Newellen finished unfastening the unit from Erika's back. "That should give you a little more mobility. Feel free to take off the rest of the suit --

  we're in double-hulled chambers now. All the comforts of home." Erika thought of her austere NIL quarters and realized he wasn't far off.

  Erika turned to Dvorak. Finally, she was able to put a face to the voice that had come over the radio: dark curly hair, brown eyes, narrow features. He looked to be in his mid-thirties. His lips curved upward in what seemed to be a perpetual shy smile.

  "Welcome to Columbus, Erika." He nodded toward the middle-aged woman.

  "Dr. Salito is our mining expert; you can share her quarters whenever you're not out at the Sim-Mars lab."

  "Call me Cyndi," said Salito, shaking Erika's hand. "We're anxious for you to solve all our problems at Daedalus."

  "Sure." She felt overwhelmed already.

  "We've got you scheduled to go out to Sim-Mars tomorrow," Dvorak said.

  "Big Daddy has a break in his duties then."

  "When he says tomorrow, he means twenty-four hours," Newellen said.

  "Since the lunar day is fourteen Earth days long, 'tomorrow' would literally mean about ten days from now -- "

  "Thanks for explaining that, Lon," interrupted Salito. She took his arm and ushered him toward the airlock at the far end of the tunnel, shaking her head.

  Dvorak waited for them to leave before breaking into a smile. "Big Daddy gets a little too helpful at times, but he means well."

  "I thought you said you hated nicknames?" Erika said.

  "On me, but not on anybody else. They're inevitable up here. After living with these people for months in close quarters, they become a little more than neighbors. The flip side of the coin is that you tend to forget how to interact with other people."