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thinks it was too easy themselves. They're not even going to consider letting
us back to Earth for quite a while."
Erika sat up too fast and felt dizzy again. "Why not? If all of us
check out clean, what are they worried about?"
"The Daedalus construction," he said. "They still don't know what it
is, and they're terrified. It looks almost finished and they're afraid we've
all been ... well, _possessed_ by the aliens. They don't know what the
nanomachine infestation did to us. And neither do we."
--------
*CHAPTER 24*
ANTARCTICA -- NANOTECHNOLOGY ISOLATION LAB
When Kent Woodward woke up, he did so fully and completely, as if he
was a machine suddenly switched on. With a blink of his eyes, the bright
surroundings came to him like a snapshot projected on a dark screen. He felt
no fatigue, no soreness, only a persistent buzzing in his head, a singing
thunderstorm of white noise chewing at the back of his thoughts.
He blinked his eyes again and sat up. His entire body felt as if it
were crawling with the pins-and-needles sensation of having circulation cut
off during a deep sleep. Every one of Kent's nerve endings screamed.
He found himself in a clean white room, filled with glass surfaces,
porcelain, stainless steel. _A UFO came down and kidnapped me!_ he thought. He
saw the work tables, a line of stereoscreen and flatscreen workstations,
various pieces of analytical hardware. Rising through the center of the room
like some high-tech Roman column stood a transparent cylinder filled with
milky liquid; metal conduits and conduction strips lined the walls of the
cylinder. A control bank sat at the bottom.
On one of the worktables rested a wire-mesh cage that held a white lab
rat. Oblivious to Kent, the rat scuttled around and sniffed its food dish.
Along the ceiling he noticed cameras staring at him.
Everything clicked together at once. He was in the Nanotech Isolation
Lab. Alone.
The next chunk of information dropped into his mind. He remembered the
blizzard, the unseen crevasse, the crash of the rover. He had been barely
conscious, bleeding. Pain crushed him from the inside out, and impossible cold
gnawed at him.
He had known he was going to die, but he sent out a distress call
anyway. Someone, a garbled voice, had answered. But nobody could have rescued
him. Not in that storm, not so far away, not with his injuries. He hadn't had
a chance!
"So, Kent, I observe that you are awake. Welcome back to us!"
Turning, he saw Jordan Parvu standing on the other side of the
observation windows. Parvu fluttered his hands in the fidgety way that
indicated how anxious he was. Relief washed over Kent as he saw the old
scientist. The scenario did make sense now, at least a little bit. Everything
was under control.
He remembered getting the extra set of snow samples for Parvu, though
the doctor hadn't asked for them. Kent had done that on his own initiative,
sure. He was bored. He wanted something to do -- and gathering samples gave
him a legitimate reason to poke around. He had ignored the increasing storm.
Right now, even he had to admit it was a pretty stupid idea.
"So tell me, please -- how do you feel?" Parvu placed his hands against
the outer glass, as if to get a better view ... or to steady himself.
_How do you feel?_ That was a rather inane question. _Oh, I'm fine. How
about yourself?_ But then Kent began to wonder. He clearly recalled the pain
deep inside as he tried to work the rover controls ... the blood, the grinding
ache of broken bones.
Now he felt no pain at all, not even the dull throb of healing -- only
the fizzing, crawly sensation running through his entire body, inside and out.
Kent noticed a dozen or so RF electrode pads on his body, wirelessly
transmitting his vital signs to sequencers and computer monitoring systems.
What had Dr. Parvu done to him?
He recalled Gunther Mosby's superstitious fear of the NIL and
nanotechnology research -- and he wasn't sure he wanted to know.
* * * *
With fear gnawing his stomach, Parvu watched from the other side of the
window, looking into the clean-room of the NIL. The walls appeared too thin,
the observation window too weak to hold anything back. It seemed a very
questionable membrane to protect him from the invisibly boiling environment
inside.
None of these barriers could protect him -- or the world -- if the
hybrids decided to break out. The alien automata had escaped much more rigid
controls in the Sim-Mars lab and infected Erika. From what Parvu had seen at
the Daedalus crater, from what he knew about the theoretical possibilities of
nanotechnology, he couldn't stop the hybrids from doing anything they decided
to do.
Luckily, his hybrids had shown themselves to be completely benign
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