Dan smiled his widest. “My management skills. After all, I’m the one who came up with the nanotech idea.”
“I thought it was Stavenger’s idea.”
Dan felt his brows hike up. And his respect for Humphries’s sources of information. He didn’t get that from Pancho; I didn’t tell her. Does he have Stavenger’s office bugged? Or infiltrated?
“Tell you what,” said Dan. “Just to show you that I’m not such a suspicious sonofabitch, I’ll chip in five percent of Astro’s stock. Out of my personal holdings.”
“Ten,” Humphries immediately shot back.
“Five”
“Come on, Dan. You can’t get out of\this so cheaply.” Dan looked up at the paneled ceiling, took a deep breath, looked back into Humphries’s icy gray eyes. Finally he said, “Seven.”
“Eight.”
Dan cocked his head slightly, then murmured, “Deal.” Humphries smiled, genuinely this time, and echoed, “Deal.” Each man extended his hand across the table. As they shook hands,
Dan said to himself, Count your fingers after he lets go.
SELENE NANOTECHNOLOGY LABORATORY
Dan was watching intently as Kris Cardenas manipulated the roller dial with one manicured finger, her eyes riveted on the scanning microscope’s display screen. The image took shape on the screen, blurred, then came into crisp focus.
The picture was grainy, gray on gray, with a slightly greenish cast. Dan could make out a pair of fuel tanks with piping that led to a spherical chamber. On the other side of the sphere was a narrow straight channel that ended in the flared bell of a rocket nozzle.
“It’s the whole assembly!” he blurted.
Cardenas turned toward him with a bright California smile. “Not bad for a month’s work, is it?”
Dan grinned back at her. “Kinda small, though, don’t you think?”
They were alone in the nanotech lab this late at night. The other workstations were empty, all the cubicles dark, the ceiling lights turned down to their dim nighttime setting. Only in the corner where Dan and Cardenas sat on a pair of swivel stools were the overhead lights at their full brightness. The massive gray tubing of the scanning microscope loomed above them both like a hulking robot. Dan marveled inwardly that the big, bulky machine was capable of revealing individual atoms.
Cardenas said, “Size isn’t important right now. It’s the pattern that counts.”
“Swell,” said Dan. “If I want to send a team of bacteria to the Belt, you’ve got the fusion drive all set for them.”
“Don’t be obtuse, Dan.”
“I was trying to be funny.”
Cardenas did not appreciate his humor. Tapping a bright blue-polished fingernail against the microscope’s display screen, she said, “We’ve programmed this set of nanos to understand the pattern of your fusion system: the tankage, the reactor chamber, the MHD channel, and the rocket nozzle.”
“Plus all the plumbing.”
“And the plumbing, yes. Now that they’ve learned the pattern, it’s just a matter of programming them to build the same thing at full scale.”
Dan scratched his chin, then said, “And the full-scale job will be able to handle the necessary pressures and temperatures?”
“Most of it’s built of diamond.”
That wasn’t an answer to his question, Dan realized. Okay, so the virus-sized nanomachines could take individual atoms of carbon from a pile of soot and put them together one by one to build structures with the strength and thermal properties of pure diamond.
“But will that do the job?” he asked Cardenas.
Her lips became a tight line. She was obviously unhappy about something.
“Problem?” Dan asked.
“Not really,” Cardenas said, “But…”
“But what? I’ve got to know, Kris. I’m hanging my cojones out in the breeze on this.”
Raising both hands in a don’t-blame-me gesture, she said, “It’s Dun-can. He refuses to come up here. None of his team will leave Earth.”
Dan had known that Duncan, Vertientes, and the rest of the team had opted to remain Earthside and communicate with Cardenas and her nanotech people electronically.
“You talk to him every day, don’t you?”
“Sure we do. We even have interactive VR sessions, if you can call them interactive.”
Feeling alarmed, Dan asked, “What’s wrong?”
“It’s that damned three-second lag,” Cardenas said. “You can’t really be interactive, you can’t even have a normal conversation when there’s three seconds between your question and their answer every blasted time.”