“Don’t open it up yet,” Pancho warned. “Don’t want grit or dust contaminating the air.”
“I know,” he groused.
It seemed to take hours. Dan tried to keep from coughing but the air in his suit seemed awfully thick; his chest was hurting. He pictured old pantomime comedy routines as he and Pancho haltingly fumbled with the air hose, working blindly, and refilled each other’s suit tanks. They filled Dan’s backpack first, and within a minute he could take a deep breath again without it catching in his throat.
Once they filled Pancho’s backpack he heard her inhale deeply. “Best canned air in the solar system,” she announced happily.
“What time is it? How long do we have to go?”
“Lemme see… seven and a half hours.”
“That’s how long we’ve been down here?”
“Nope, that’s how long we still have to go,” Pancho answered.
“Another seven and a half hours?”
Pancho laughed. “You sound like a kid in the back seat of a car.”
He huffed, then broke into a chastened grin. “I guess I was whining, wasn’t I?”
“A little.”
A new thought struck Dan. “After the time’s up, how do we tell if the radiation’s really gone down enough for us to get back to the ship?”
“Been thinkin’ about that. I’ll worm my extensible antenna wire up to the top of this rubble heap and see if we can link with the ship. Then it’ll be purty simple to read the ship’s sensors.”
“Suppose the ship’s comm system’s been knocked out by the radiation.”
“Not likely.”
“But what if?”
Pancho sighed. “Then I’ll just hafta stick my head out and see what my suit sensors read.”
“Like an old cowboy video,” Dan said. “Stick your head out and see if anybody shoots at you.”
“Hey, boss, you really did learn a lot from Wild Bill Hickok, didn’t ya?”
This late at night there was only one man on duty monitoring Selene’s security-camera network. He was a portly, balding former London bobby who had spent his life’s savings to bring himself and his wife to the Moon and live in comfortable, low-gravity retirement. He’d found retirement so boring, however, that he pleaded with Selene’s personnel department to allow him to work, at least part-time.
The uniform they gave him wasn’t much; just a set of glorified coveralls with an insignia patch on the left shoulder and his name badge clipped over its breast pocket. But at least he could spend three nights each week sitting alone and content, watching the videos his wife always complained about while still feeling that he was doing something worthwhile. He half-dozed, leaning back in his padded swivel chair, as the twenty display screens arranged in a semicircle around his desk flashed views from Selene’s hundreds of security cameras. Actually, only nineteen of the screens showed the cameras’ scenes; the screen directly in front of the desk was showing the football match from Vancouver, live. But with the sound well-muted, of course.
The computer did all the real work. The toffs in the main office programmed the computer with a long list of things that would be considered questionable or downright illegal. If the computer detected any such activity it sounded an alarm and indicated where and what was going on.
With the score still tied and only four minutes left in the final period, the blasted computer buzzed.
The guard frowned with annoyance. His central screen winked out for an instant, then displayed a ceiling-eye-view of a woman walking through one of the labs. unauthorized person blinked in red across the bottom of the screen.
It took a few minutes to coax the information out of the computer, but finally the guard phoned the security chief, waking him of course, with the news that Dr. Kris Cardenas had entered the nanotechnology laboratory. The chief grumbled and cast a bleary eye at the guard, but at least had the good grace to say, “Thanks. I’ll send somebody down there.”
Then he hung up and the guard went back to watching the football game. It was going into overtime.
HAVEN
Try as he might, Dan could not get back to sleep. Pancho had attempted to call Amanda and Fuchs, but there was no response from them.