“Hmm.”

The airtight door slid open again and Joanna Masterson strode through, followed by Greg.

Zimmerman scowled. “This laboratory is in use. Find yourselves—”

“This is Joanna Masterson,” Cardenas said quickly.

Pushing himself up from the creaking little chair, Zimmerman clicked his heels and bowed slightly. “My abductress. The woman who has blackmailed me.”

Joanna ignored his jibe. She looked at the rumpled obese old man, noting that he was several inches shorter than she.

“How soon will you be ready?” she asked.

“As soon as we can,” Zimmerman said.

“Please don’t play games and don’t patronize me. My son is dying. How soon can you begin to help him?”

Zimmerman’s tone changed. “It’s a matter of programming. We are moving ahead as quickly as we can.”

“Programming,” Joanna echoed.

Waving a pudgy hand, Zimmerman explained, “We are adapting our little machines to seek out damaged cells and repair them. They will remove damaged material, molecule by molecule, and repair the cells with fresh material, molecule by molecule.”

Joanna nodded. Greg, standing slightly behind her, folded his arms across his eftest.

“The problem is that your son has sustained massive damage. His case is very different from merely getting rid of accumulated fat cells or breaking down plaque along blood vessels.”

“Can you do it?” Joanna asked.

“We will do it, Madam,” said Zimmerman. “Whether we will be able to do it in time, before he is too far gone even for the nanomachines to help him, remains questionable.”

“Is there anything else that you need? Any other assistants?”

“Nothing and no one that could be brought here in time.”

Greg asked, “How much of a chance does he have? I mean—”

“If I had even one single week this would be no problem.”

“But we’ve only got a few hours.”

Zimmerman sighed hugely. “Yah. This I know.”

Killifer clumped wearily to the comm cubicle of the buried shelter, still in his spacesuit, minus only the helmet. The young woman at the communications console rose to her feet.

“You did a fine job out there,” she said, eyes gleaming. “You saved two lives.”

With a crooked grin, Killifer said, “I saved the corporation from any competition to their claim, that’s what I saved.”

The young woman smiled knowingly. “You’re just being modest.”

Killifer shook his head and took the emptied chair, thinking, Hey, now I’m a friggin’ hero. I’ll have to look her up when we get back to the base. Might be worth some sack time.

“Moonbase says the Yamagata craft has shifted its trajectory and asked for permission to land here and pick up their men.”

“They’re welcome to ’em. I hope they brought medics. One of them’s in a bad way. Busted ribs.”

As he spoke, Killifer opened the channel to Moonbase. Jinny Anson’s face appeared on his screen, surprising him.

“I’m living in the control center until things settle down,” Anson told him. “Mrs. Stavenger’s come up here to be with her son.”

“She’s there? At Moonbase?”

“Yep. She’s going to be pretty damned thankful to you for getting him down off the mountain, I betcha.”

Like I had any choice, Killifer thought.

“And for getting those two stranded Japanese guys. Yamagata’s people have been falling all over themselves thanking us.”

“Really?”

“That’s their way of admitting that they messed up any claim they might have made. Heads are going to roll over at Nippon One, I betcha.”

Who gives a fuck? Killifer said to himself. Then he remembered, and a pang of sudden fear flared through him.

“How’s the Stavenger kid?” he asked.

Anson shook her head. “Not good. The Dragon Lady’s brought a team of nano specialists up here, but I don’t know if they can save him. He’s pretty far gone.”

It took a conscious effort for Killifer to unclench his teeth. “And the astronomer? Rhee? How’s she doing?”

Anson looked mildly surprised. “I don’t know. She was hanging pretty close to Doug Stavenger but she ought to be back at her job by now.”

Killifer nodded. I’ll have to track her down when we get back to the base.

“I’m going to start breaking the camp here, soon as the Yamagata ship lands and picks up their guys.”

“Right,” said Anson. “The expedition didn’t go the way we planned, but at least we’ve got a valid claim to the territory. Next time we go back, you’ll be in charge.”

Killifer made himself grin. “Yeah? That’s great.” But he knew that his newfound status as a hero and leader could be destroyed by a single small square of cermet. I’ve gotta get it away from her, he told himself. Got to.

INFIRMARY

“That’s it?” Joanna whispered harshly. “All these hours have been spent to make something that doesn’t even fill a single hypodermic?”

Standing beside her, Kris Cardenas nodded without taking her eyes off Zimmerman’s bulky lab-coated form, bending over Doug’s infirmary bed.

“That’s all he’ll need,” she whispered back, “if it works right.”

Doug lay unconscious, his face pallid as death, covered to his chin in cooling blankets. Another hypothermia wrap was wound around his head. Like the undergarment of a spacesuit, the pale blue blankets were honeycombed with fine plastic tubes that carried refrigerated water to keep Doug’s body temperature as low as possible. Intravenous lines fed into his arms and an oxygen tube was fixed to his nostrils.

Joanna couldn’t tell if her son was breathing or not. The monitoring instruments above the bed showed his life signs: their ragged electronic lines looked dangerously low to her. She glanced at Greg, standing on her other side. He stared grimly through the plastiglass window that separated them from the infirmary bed.

“Shouldn’t we have a medical team to stay with him? I could bring—”

Cardenas silenced her by placing a hand on Joanna’s shoulder. “Zimmerman’s an M.D. as well as a Ph.D. And two of his aides are also physicians.”

Zimmerman straightened up. For a moment he gazed down at the unconscious patient, then he turned and went to the door.

Stepping into the observation cubicle where the others waited, he dropped the syringe into the waste recycling can.

“It is done,” he said, his voice loud enough to startle Joanna. “Now we wait.”

“And rest,” Cardenas said. “You look like you could use a nice nap, Willi.”

In truth, his fleshy face looked ravaged.

Greg spoke up, “We should all get some sleep.” Turning to Zimmerman, he asked, “How long before we see some results?”

The old man blinked his pouchy eyes. “Twelve hours. Maybe more. Maybe a little less.”

“Nothing’s going to happen for eight to ten hours, at least,” Cardenas said briskly. “So let’s all get a decent sleep.”

Greg agreed. I’ll get the people on duty to call if there’s any change in his condition.”

Joanna said, “I can sleep here, on the chair.”

“No,” Greg said firmly, taking her by the arm. “You sleep in your quarters, on a bunk. Doctor’s orders.”

Reluctantly, Joanna allowed her elder son to lead her out of the observation room and toward the suite that Anson had vacated for her. She almost felt grateful to Greg for his forceful tenderness.

Small as viruses, millions upon millions of nanomachines flowed through Doug’s blood stream like an army of repair personnel eager to get to work. Blind, deaf, without the intelligence of an amoeba, they were tuned to the chemical signatures that cells emit In their world of the ultrasmall, where a bacterium is as gigantic and complex as a shopping mall, they were guided by the shapes of the molecules swarming around them.

Built to seek out specific types of molecules, they quickly spread through the enormous labyrinthine ways of Doug’s failing body. With receptors barely a thousand atoms long they touched and tested every molecule they came in contact with. Hardly any of them were of interest to the nanomachines; they merely touched, found that the molecule did not fit precisely into their receptor jaws, and left the molecule behind. Like a lock seeking its proper key, each nanomachine blindly searched the teeming liquid world within Doug’s wasting body.