Grant was surprised to see so many people still roaming along the corridor. His wristwatch read 21:14. It’s early, he saw. For several moments he simply stood there as people passed by, staring at the quickly flicking numerals counting out the seconds. How many seconds until I can get back to Earth, back to Marjorie—if she still wants me? He didn’t dare try to calculate the number.
It was only a few meters to his own door. Better get to sleep, he told himself, and start tomorrow fresh and alert. But just as he started to tap out his security code, he felt a hand on his shoulder.
It was O’Hara. Tall and lithe, with her hair still tumbling down past one shoulder. She smiled at him.
“You never had dessert,” she said.
Grant had to think a moment. “That’s right,” he said. “I never did.”
“Come on.” She tugged gently at his arm. “I’ve got a cache of ice cream in my place. And some real Belgian chocolate.”
Grant allowed her to lead him to her quarters, only a few paces farther along the corridor.
“Has the party broken up already?” he asked.
“No, but it was going downhill, don’t you think? Egon and the colleens were getting pretty frisky with each other. I don’t like group scenes.”
“What about Zeb?”
“He’s retreated into his own private little mirage.
Lord knows what he dreams about, but it’s not fun watching him staring off into space.”
They had reached her door. She pecked out the security code and they stepped in.
O’Hara’s room was the same size and shape as the other quarters, but it was completely different from anything Grant had seen in the station. The wallscreens displayed underwater scenes from Earth’s oceans: myriads of colorful fish, octopi pulsing and waving their suction-cupped tentacles, sharks gliding past menacingly. The floor began to glow, too. Before Grant’s eyes a coral reef swarming with more fish took shape and fell steeply off into an endless, bottomless abyss. Grant flattened himself against the closed door, suddenly giddy with vertigo.
O’Hara noticed his near panic. “Now don’t be alarmed. The floor’s quite solid.” She tapped on it with one moccasined foot. “See? I forget that people are thrown off by the effect. I don’t have visitors in here very often.”
Taking a breath, Grant stepped out onto the floor. It felt firm enough, but it seemed he could stare down into the teeming crystal-clear sea for thousands of meters.
“Look up, why don’t you,” O’Hara suggested.
The stars! Instead of a ceiling, Grant saw the infinite bowl of black night, spangled with thousands of stars. The underwater scenes on the walls vanished, replaced by more stars. It was like being far out at sea on a clear moonless night.
“That’s what we’d see if we were outside the station,” she explained. “Minus Jupiter, of course. I could put Jupiter into the display but it would overpower the grand view of it all, don’t you think?”
He nodded dumbly, staring at the stars. They looked back at him, solemn, unblinking.
“That one’s Earth,” O’Hara said, standing close enough to touch shoulders and pointing to one bright bluish dot of light among the hosts of stars.
Earth, Grant thought. It looked awfully far away.
“It’s a regular planetarium,” he heard himself say in a hushed voice.
“My father ran the planetarium in Dublin,” O’Hara said. “He sent me the program.”
“But … where’s the projector? How do you get all those stars on the ceiling … and make it look, well, almost three-dimensional?”
“Microlasers,” she said, moving away from him. “I sprayed the ceiling and floor with ’em.”
“There must be thousands of them,” Grant conjectured.
“Oh, yes,” O’Hara replied, halfway across the room. “And more on the floor, of course.”
“How did you do it? Where did you get them?”
“Built them in the optics shop.” She popped open the door of the small refrigerator; its light spilling into the room broke the illusion of being out in the middle of the sea.
“I promised you ice cream and chocolate and that’s what you’re going to have,” O’Hara said, as if there had been some question about it.
But Grant’s mind was on more practical matters. Walking through the starlit darkness, across the softly glowing floor, he asked, “You built thousands of microlasers? All by yourself?”
“They’re only wee crystals, a hundredth of a cubic centimeter or so.” She was rummaging in a drawer by the light of the still-open fridge.
“And you built thousands of them?”
“I had some help.”
“Oh.”
She handed Grant a small plate with a scoop of vanilla ice cream in it, topped by a small dark piece of chocolate.
“I used nanomachines,” she said.
“Nanomachines?”
“Of course. How else?”
“But that’s against the law!” “On Earth.”
“The law applies here, too. Everywhere.”
“It doesn’t apply at Selene or the other Moon cities,” O’Hara pointed out.
“But it should. Nanomachines can be dangerous.”
“Perhaps,” she said, slamming the refrigerator door shut with a nudge from her hip.
“I mean it,” Grant said. “On a small station like this, if the machines get loose they could kill everybody.”
Holding her own plate of ice cream in one hand, O’Hara took Grant by the sleeve and guided him to a low couch beneath the stars. He sat awkwardly and sank into the couch’s yielding softness.
Sitting beside him, she said, “Eat your ice cream before it melts.”
He was determined not to be deterred. “Lane, seriously, nanomachines are like playing with fire. And what if Dr. Wo found out?”
She laughed. “Wo started using nanotechnology here more than a year ago.”
Grant felt stunned.
“It’s all right, Grant,” said O’Hara. “We’re not terrorists. We’re not going to develop nanobugs that eat proteins. We’re not going to cause a plague.”
“But how can you be sure?”
“They’re
Grant shook his head. “They’re outlawed for good reason.”
“Certainly,” she agreed. “On Earth, with all its billions of people, nanotechnology could easily fall into the hands of terrorist fanatics, or lunatics, or just plain thrill-seekers. But it’s different here, just as it’s different in the lunar cities.”
“They claim they need nanotechnology to survive on the Moon,” Grant muttered.
“Of course they do. And we need it here, too.”
Looking up at the stars, Grant sneered. “For interior decoration?”
In the darkness, he heard her take in a sharp breath. Then she answered, “For that. And other things.”
“Such as?”
She hesitated again. “Maybe you’d better ask the director about that.”
“Sure,” Grant said. “Wo is going to unburden his soul to me. All I have to do is ask.”
She laughed gently. “You’re right. Wo’s just allowed you to step up a notch. This wouldn’t be the time to ask him sensitive questions.”
“There’s that word again.”
“Which word?”
“Sensitive. Every time I ask just about anything, somebody tells me it’s sensitive information.”
“Ah, yes.”
