suspended the sample. Until the top was on and all the magnetic beams activated, the slightest motion could send the sample sliding off the magnetic fields and cause it to make contact with part of the machine. If it did that, the microbots would have a new source of raw materials.
The top in place, Cap engaged the locking bolts. “Activate the magnetic guns in sequence, Lei.”
Leila typed instructions to the computer controls and watched the screen that gave a virtual image of what was happening inside the ball.
The device hissed lightly.
“Chamber evacuated to pressure of eight torr. Field is on, all beams nominal,” she said. “Sample contained at center of sphere.”
Rock breathed a heavy Slavic sigh of relief. The microbots floated inside the unit suspended on magnetic beams, as sturdily contained as if they were packed in concrete, yet in contact with nothing but the energy fields that hit them from twenty directions. The microscopic creatures might be able to use the energy in some way, but without any materials to strip and convert into more microbots, they were as helpless as a demolition crew stranded in outer space.
Cap nodded. “All right.” He turned to Dr. Bhotamo. “With your permission, I’d like to take this over to Lawrence Livermore and analyze it further.”
“Please, Professor Anger. My lab is your lab.”
“Thank you. Leila—get this into the van. We’ll work on a defense against them in a moment.” He gazed up through his cold-suit visor toward the building through which the rogue helicopter had crashed. “After that, we’ll track down their source.”
He turned to Rock. “Let’s freeze that other pool.”
Chapter Nine
The Weapon Makers
Captain Anger gritted his teeth.
None but his friends and long-time companions Rock and Leila noticed, or even knew why. Only the hardening of his gaze, the tightening of the muscles along his strong jawline gave any clue to his emotion.
The three had entered a place of war.
Lawrence Livermore was a scientific research laboratory very similar to the Anger Institute. In low-lying buildings amid footpaths lined with trees, scientists spent their days in contemplation of fascinating and obscure aspects of the laws of nature. With unbridled enthusiasm, they tinkered with mighty machines and miniature wonders, pushing the limits of physics and engineering to astounding extremes.
But where the Anger Institute dedicated its efforts solely and exclusively toward the betterment of mankind, Lawrence Livermore had another, darker duty. Under contract to the federal government, scientists there daily researched new and more powerful ways to kill.
They did not view their jobs in such a light. In their own minds, these powerful thinkers considered their tasks to be nothing less than the dispassionate inquiry into the workings of nature. They pondered sub-atomic particles and found ways to break them into the fundamental building blocks of the Universe. What the politicians did with such information, they thought, lay beyond their realm of expertise. They were scientists, not philosophers.
Captain Anger knew better. As a merchant marine in his younger days, he had stumbled upon many wars fought with weapons of far less sophistication than those designed by his fellow scientists at Lawrence. Even the crudest devices brought misery and devastation wherever they fell.
Cap could not quite bring himself to hate these scientists who toiled in ignorance of the consequences of their actions, but to him the place spoke of death.
He followed Dr. Bhotamo down the cool, robin’s egg blue corridor. Willowy Leila and the ursine Russian brought up the rear, wheeling the magnetic suspension unit on a lab cart.
“I have commandeered a lab for you,” Dr. Bhotamo said, “and I give you my personal guarantee that you won’t be disturbed by members of the press or any others.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
Bhotamo ran his ID card through a slot in a set of double doors, which parted at the priority security clearance. Inside was everything Cap would need.
“What exactly are you planning?” Dr. Bhotamo asked.
Cap smiled with a wry expression. “I’m planning to develop a microbotic vaccine.”
For hours Captain Anger sat in front of the atomic force microscope. It gave him a superb view of one of the microbot’s infinitesimal control circuits. With the computer-enhanced image uplinked to Flash via satellite, Cap was able—between the two of them—to divine the exact workings of the tiny terror’s gallium-arsenide brain.
“ It’s fascinating,” Flash said from his lab at the Institute. “ Whoever built this has an incredibly fine grasp of three-dimensional circuit design
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Cap said nothing. He gazed intently at the complex circuit diagram developing as the computer analyzed the microbot. His deep green eyes drank it all in as though they were bottomless seas of infinite capacity. After a moment, he tapped at the computer keys with swift, sure finger strokes. He superimposed another circuit diagram—different in several ways from the original—over the circuit diagram for the tiny scavenger.
“How’s that, Flash?” was all he said.
After a moment, Flash said, “ Looks fine, Cap. That ought to turn it against its own.”
“Let’s try it.” Cap programmed the plasma beam to deposit a new circuit on the microbot’s surface. With stupendous precision, the beam alternately vaporized old pathways and fused new ones with near atomic-width tolerances. Within moments, it was done.
Rock stared at the screen in bafflement. “What does that do?” Though he was one of the most brilliant aerospace propulsion experts in the world, electronics proved a constant source of bewilderment to him. As far as he was concerned, computers were incomprehensible black boxes that one attached to rockets or jets to make them fly. He used computers every day for design and control, but what went on inside them—their electronic guts—he expressed little desire to understand.
“Simple, Rock.” Flash watched the operation on his own terminal screen. Next to that glowed a screen presenting a view of the Lawrence Livermore lab, courtesy of Leila’s videocam. “Cap’s reprogrammed that microbot to seek out the other microbots and reprogram them to stop scavenging. And to become reprogrammers themselves. And nothing else
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“Let’s test it.” Cap used a microscopic probe to position another, unaltered microbot into the vicinity of the reprogrammed one.
Immediately, the latter used its carbon rods to size up the newcomer like one ant feeling out another. When it did, it immediately attacked, carefully cutting new atom-wide pathways into its foe’s circuitry, following the commands indelibly etched into its own memory.
“See?” Flash’s voice said over the earcomm. “Now we have two robots working on our side. Now they won’t destroy anything in their path—they’ll just search for other microbots to reprogram.”
Rock grunted. “And when they run out of microbots to reprogram?”
“They’ll keep searching until they corrode from sunlight and air pollution.” Cap held the probe in front of the mandibles of the newly-reprogrammed creature. It felt at the probe but did nothing to it. Neither did the other. He urged the pair into the teeming millions that made up the tiny silver blob floating on the magnetic field. They
