The Precipice (19 page)

Humphries seemed surprised when Dan called him, but he quickly agreed to a meeting the very next morning. He insisted on having
the meeting in the Humphries Space System's
suite of offices, up in the same tower on the Grand Plaza that housed Doug Stavenger's office.

Dan accepted meekly enough, laughing inwardly at Humphries's gamesmanship. He tried to phone Big George, got only his answering
machine, and left a message for George to call him first thing in the morning. Then he undressed, showered, and went to bed.

He dreamed about Jane. They were together on Tetiaroa, completely alone on the tropical atoll beneath a gorgeous star-strewn
sky, walking along the lagoon beach while the balmy wind set the palm trees to rustling softly. A slim crescent of a Moon
rode past scudding silvery clouds. Jane was wearing a filmy robe, her auburn hair undone and flowing past her shoulders. In
the starlight he could see how beautiful she was, how desirable.

But he could not speak a word. Somehow, no matter how hard he tried, no sound would come out of his mouth. This is stupid,
Dan raged at himself. How can you tell her you love her if you can't talk?

The clouds thickened, darkened, blotted out the Moon and stars. Beyond Jane's shadowy profile Dan could see the ocean stirring,
frothing, an enormous tidal wave rising up higher, higher, a mountain of foaming water rushing down on them. He tried to warn
her, tried to shout, but the water crashed down on them both with crushing force. He reached for Jane, to hold her, to save
her, but she was wrenched out of his arms.

He woke, sitting up and drenched with sweat. His throat felt raw, as if he'd been screaming for hours. He didn't know where
he was. In the darkness of the bedroom all he could see was the green glowing numerals on the digital clock on the night table.
He rubbed at his eyes, working hard to remember. Selene. I'm in the company suite in Selene. I'm going to see Humphries first
thing in the morning.

And Jane's dead.

* * *

“You've been quite a busy fellow,” Humphries said, with obviously false joviality.

Instead of meeting in his personal office, he had invited Dan to a small windowless conference room. Not even holoviews on
the walls, only a few paintings and photographs of Martin Humphries with celebrities of various stripes. Dan recognized the
current President of the United States, a dour-faced elderly man in black clerical garb, and Vasily Malik of the GEC.

Leaning back relaxedly in the comfortable padded chair, Dan said, “I guess I have been on the go quite a bit since we last
met.”

Sitting across the table from Dan, Humphries clasped his hands together atop its gleaming surface. ‘To tell you the truth,
Dan, I get the feeling you're trying to screw me out of this fusion operation.”

Laughing, Dan said, “I wouldn't do that, Marty, even if I could.”

Humphries laughed back at him. It seemed more than a little forced to Dan.

“Tell me something,” Dan said. “You didn't stumble across Duncan by accident, did you?”

Humphries smiled more genuinely. “Not entirely. When I started Humphries Space Systems I went out and backed more than a dozen
small, long-shot research groups. I figured that one of them was bound to come through with something. You ought to see some
of the kooks I had to deal with!”

“I can imagine,” Dan said, grinning. He'd had his share of earnest zanies trying to convince him of one wild scheme or another
over the years.

“I got lucky with Duncan and this fusion rocket,” Humphries went on, looking pleased with himself.

“It was more than luck,” Dan said. “You were damned smart.”

“Maybe,” Humphries agreed. “It only takes one swing to hit a home run.”

“And it doesn't cost much, either, at the laboratory stage.”

Nodding, Humphries said, “If more people backed basic research we'd get ahead a lot faster.”

“I should've done it myself,” Dan admitted.

“Yes, you should have.”

“My mistake.”

“Okay then, where do we stand?” Humphries asked.

“Well… you financed Duncan's original work.”

“Including the flight tests that you saw,” Humphries pointed out.

Dan nodded. “I've been trying to put together the financing for building a full-scale spacecraft and sending a team out to
the Belt.”

“I can finance that. I told you I'd put up the money.”

“Yep. But it'd cost me a good chunk of Astro Corporation, wouldn't it?”

“We can negotiate a reasonable price. It won't cost you a cent out of pocket.”

“But you'd wind up owning Astro,” Dan said flatly.

Something flashed in Humphries's eyes for a moment. But he quickly put on a synthetic smile. “How could I take over Astro
Manufacturing, Dan? I know you wouldn't part with more than fifteen-twenty percent of your company.”

“More like five or ten percent,” Dan said.

“Even worse, for me. I'd be a minority stockholder. I wouldn't even be able to put anybody on the board—except myself, I imagine.”

Dan said, “H'mm.”

Hunching closer, Humphries said, “I hear you're going the nanotech route.”

“You hear right,” Dan replied. “Dr. Cardenas is returning to Selene to head up the job.”

“I hadn't thought about using nanomachines. Makes sense.”

“Brings the cost down.”

“Makes my investment smaller,” Humphries said, straight-faced.

Tired of the fencing, Dan said, “Look, here's the way I see this. We bring Selene in as a third partner. They provide the
facilities and nanotech personnel.”

“I thought you were recruiting retirees,” Humphries said.

“Some,” Dan admitted, “but we'll still need Selene's active help.”

“So we've got a third partner,” Humphries said sullenly.

“I want to form a separate corporation, separate and apart from Astro. We'll each be one-third owners: you, me, and Selene.”

Humphries sat up straighter. “What's the matter, Dan, don't you trust me?”

“Not as far as I can throw the Rock of Gibraltar.”

Another man might have laughed grudgingly. Humphries glared at Dan for a moment, his face reddening. But then he got himself
under control and shrugged nonchalantly.

“You don't jsvant to let me have any Astro stock, do you?”

“Not if I can help it,” Dan said pleasantly.

“But then what are you bringing into this deal? I've got the money, Selene's got the personnel and facilities. What do you
offer?”

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 Astra'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.

D
an 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
co-jones
out in the breeze on this.”

Raising both hands in a don't-blame-me gesture, she said, “It's Duncan. 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.”

“Is it actually hindering your work?”

She made a face somewhere between a grimace and a pout “Not hindering, exactly. It's just so damned inconvenient! And time-consuming.
Sometimes we have to go over a thing two or three times just to be sure we've heard them right It soaks up time and makes
everybody edgy.”

Dan thought it over. “Maybe I can talk them into coming up here.”

“I've tried to, god knows. Duncan won't budge. Neither will any of his people. They're terrified of nanomachines.”

“No!”

“Yes. Even Professor Vertientes. You'd think he'd know better, at his age.”

“They're scared of nanomachines?”

“They won't admit it, of course,” said Cardenas. “They say that they might not be allowed to return to Earth if the authorities
know that they've been working with nanomachines. I think that's a crock; they're just plain scared.”

“Maybe not,” Dan said. “Those Earthside bureaucrats get
wonky ideas, especially about nanotechnology. I sure haven't told anybody that I'm dealing with nanomachines.”

Her brows shot up. “But everybody knows—”

“Everybody knows that
you
and your staff are building a fusion rocket with nanos. As far as the general public is concerned, I don't come near ‘em.
I'm a bigshot tycoon, I don't get involved in the dirty work. I've never even been in your lab.”

Cardenas nodded with newfound understanding. “That's why you sneak in here late at night.”

“I don't sneak anywhere,” Dan said, with great dignity. “I've never been here. Period.”

She laughed. “Of course.”

“Kris,” he said, more seriously, “I think Duncan and the rest of them have legitimate reasons to be scared of coming up here
and working with you. I'm afraid you're going to have to live with that three-second lag. It's their safety net.”

Cardenas took a deep breath. “If I have to.”

“You've accomplished a helluva lot in just four weeks,” Dan pointed out.

“I suppose that's true. It's just… it'd be so much easier if we could all work together under the same roof.”

Smiling gently, Dan said, “I never promised you a rose garden.”

She was about to reply when the door to the corridor banged open, all the way across the mostly-darkened laboratory. Instinctively,
Dan started to duck behind the big microscope tube, like a boy hiding from his mother.

Then he recognized the hulking, shaggy, red-bearded figure of Big George Ambrose.

“That you, Dan?” George called as he strode between workstations toward them. “Been lookin' everywhere for you, y'know.”