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allowing transmission to commence. Then she made a great show of smacking the
control panel with the palm of her hand. "There, does it work now?"
"We've got visuals!" Newellen said from his rover-van.
"Good, now let me keep working."
Moving across the panel, Erika encoded a molecular-dynamics program.
The code shot off to an array of parallel processors embedded in the matrix of
a solid-state cube; the program would perform a perturbative decomposition of
the molecular orbits to reconstruct the devices she had seen.
"Seems to be four or five different sorts of devices -- some are
assembling raw regolith, others are processing it, a third kind is scuttling
back and forth between all the others. Is this a coordinator? A supervisor? A
reprogrammer?
"There's one type that seems to sit back and do nothing. It's got a
completely different shape. Scattered among all the specimens, I see bigger
islands, like nanocritter shopping malls. Central controlling stations? Boy,
there's a lot of hypothesizing going on here."
"Erika, have you figured out how long those things will take to chew up
the whole sample and start climbing the walls in the vault?" It was Big Daddy,
still talking from his ten-kilometer distance.
Dvorak broke in before she could answer. "Make sure you don't take any
chances. We need to destroy the sample before a single one of those things
gets out. Director McConnell's people caution four hours max per sample, then
it gets sterilized."
Erika glanced at her screen. "Reproduction rate is below critical
threshold. Maybe their self-replicating phase is over. Or, it's more likely
that they need a handful of diverse elements to build more copies of
themselves, and they ran out of 'ingredients' in that little lump of moon
dirt. That could be why this sample hasn't disassembled yet -- they haven't
got anywhere to go."
Dvorak said what she had been thinking. "Unless they decide to look for
greener pastures outside the containment."
Erika swallowed. "If that happens, I'm not gonna have much time to get
out of here."
--------
*CHAPTER 10*
ANTARCTICA: NANOTECHNOLOGY ISOLATION LABORATORY
Alone in the Nanotech Isolation Laboratory, Jordan Parvu felt like the
last customer in a store closing for the night. The lights were dim, the doors
secured.
Outside, the wind had set in again, pounding against the wall even
through layers of insulation. Erika Trace's quarters were empty. She had
removed her paraphernalia from the bathroom cubicle, and Parvu realized that
he missed Erika's clutter.
He had forced the moonbase assignment upon her because he knew it would
take a major impetus to get Erika to forge her own path instead of following
in his footsteps. She was too good to keep working brilliantly in his shadow.
Still, Parvu yearned to discuss automata theory with her, as they had done for
years.
She had arrived on the Moon three days before. Parvu received the
rushed data summaries Erika transmitted to the Earthside researchers, asking
for input and suggestions. Though she had not talked to him directly, he was
fascinated by her conjectures, how she had classified the extraterrestrial
automata into Disassemblers, Assemblers, Programmers, Controllers, and
Unknowns. She had done a great deal of work in a short time.
Now inside his quarters, Parvu watched videoloops showing his
grandchildren at play, waving to him, smearing themselves with chocolate ice
cream at a birthday party. In the silent room, his reflection in the wall's
cosmetic mirror looked wistful.
At times like this, he questioned his priorities. _What had caused him
to leave everyone behind, to come to this desolate place, rather than growing
old with Sinda and enjoying his grandchildren?_
But the pragmatic side of him brought to mind the things he hoped to
accomplish, considering how well the prototypes in the nanocore were
progressing. He had in his hands the possibility to change the world....
Researchers had been working on nanotechnology for four decades,
spurred on by K. Eric Drexler's extrapolations in the 1980s. Drexler had
shaken the scientific world with his amazing and frighteningly plausible
ideas. Even paging through the old book now, Parvu could still feel the
excitement.
Drexler had conjectured automata small enough to work inside a human
cell, versatile enough to assemble complex structures -- and smart enough to
know what they were doing. A single nanomachine could use whatever raw
materials it needed to copy itself; the second-generation copy would then copy
itself, and so on, in a geometric explosion. With so many tiny and able
servants, programmed with the proper instructions, the human race could tackle
enormous jobs. A swarm of nanomachines could attack a pile of rubble, separate
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