A Slow Cold Death

by Susy Gage

  “Yeah. Bad things. Very bad things. We need to find Rose. I need to teach my class. I need to take poison.”

  “One thing at a time. Go change and teach, I’ll see if he’s free this afternoon.”

  “Not going to change. This is my outfit for the next sixty years.” She parked her bike in her office and slunk off, afraid of encountering Solomon Rose before she was ready to break all the bad news.

  They were both waiting for her when class got out, and they dragged her downstairs to the BSL-3.

  Lori didn’t even make fun of Rose when he went to extremes not to touch the bench tops or walls in the yellow-fever lab. Besides, she was not in a laughing mood. The PIP was ruined and it was all her fault. Carol, Abby and the Buboes had all confirmed that her backpack had been stolen by none other than that punished LEPER, Bob Drift.

  “Why would Bob do something as idiotic as steal our data?” wondered Lou.

  “No doubt to redeem himself by passing it on to LEPERs,” said Lori.

  “He’s a fool.” Rose seemed reluctant to speak, but they whirled on him, practically frothing with curiosity.

  Still standing in the middle of the room, scared to touch any of the furniture, Rose explained, “Bob only got hired because Gerson left. But the LEPERLab hasn’t given up on the idea of doing astrobiology—they think they just need more money and to recruit someone more compliant than Gerson. That’s why they’re pulling out all the stops to win this PIP. If we win it instead, it’s business as usual for the LEPERs. But if the LEPERLab wins it, Bob—” He drew his finger across his throat.

  “Can’t we just tell him that?” Lori wondered. “How could he and Carol not know?”

  “It’s a bit late to tell him now,” Rose sighed. “I’m sure by now the data are all over the LEPERLab.”

  “I have no excuse to have been such a moron as to carry that CD in my bag. It’s all my fault.”

  “Yes, it kind of is,” Solomon Rose agreed. “What are you going to do about it?”

  Change my name to Wigbert was the obvious answer, but looking at each of them in turn, those goofy theorists so scared of a little pus, she realized that they weren’t angry with her but were simply looking for a solution to a problem. “I don’t know,” she exclaimed. “Are they going to try to stop us from submitting, or just steal our data?”

  “I can’t think offhand of how they would stop us, at least not using legal means,” mused Rose. “Stealing our data would be the most effective approach. None of us is a recognized astrobiologist, and if we go up against each other with the same data, the LEPERs will win.”

  “I suppose there’s one thing I can do, then,” Lori said, resting her head in her hands so that her lips came a mere three inches from the bench. “Redo all of the ice core data and make them even better this time.”

  A small smile played at the corner of Rose’s mouth. “If you can do it, then that’s what you need to do.”

  “OK.” Lou still didn’t seem too convinced. “I can take more pictures of ice cores, I guess. But there’s still so much to do. I haven’t even started on the management section.”

  “Pah.” Rose strode over to the microscope where Lou was sitting. He looked at the computer somewhat skeptically, then nodded thanks to Lori when she handed him a pair of gloves. Slowly, hindered by the latex, he typed out

  The Superior Technological Institute Polar Antarctic Research In Astrobiology (PARIA) project is organized along the Galley Slave model. The PI, because he is old and has a Nobel Prize, will play the time-honored role of Figurehead. The Co-Is will serve as Slave Drivers. Slaves will be recruited by press-gangs operating at the American Physical Society March meeting, the Lunar and Planetary Sciences conference, and the Geological Society of America.

  “There’s your management section,” said Rose, stripping off his gloves and handing them to Lori as if they were a dead mouse.

  “It’s pretty good,” she admitted, “but the acronym needs an H.”

  “I say no H,” insisted Lou. “That way it’s French, and it is also the past tense of parier, ‘he wagered.’ Lay the odds, my friends, les jeux sont faits.”

  “Recruit your students, train them as much as you can, and see what you can do,” Rose continued. “You still have ten days.”

  Lori thought about Chi-Ming, and Walter, and the Buboes, and was not reassured. They just weren’t efficient enough, and they were occupied with so many other things. Then there was Carol, who was probably a spy for Bob and the LEPERs.

  She got up from her bench and strode around the room, thinking. “We need to maximize everyone and everything we have. Lou, you might have to learn to use the electron microscope as well as the fluorescence. If you can do that, Chi-Ming can slice and stain, and Walter…” The ideas began to crystallize in her head. “Then Walter can do ribosomal RNA analysis! We can characterize the communities completely. With the fluorescence, we can even do FISH.”

  “Uh oh,” worried Rose. “Animal experiments?”

  “No, no—Fluorescence in situ hybridization, F-I-S-H. It tells us what kinds of organisms are living in the samples. I took a molecular biology class when I was a senior here, just for fun—it was with Jerry Pine, remember him?—and all the reagents are available from the stockrooms on campus. It will make the first version of the proposal look completely unsophisticated, if not downright wrong.”

  A gleam appeared in Rose’s bunny-like liquid brown eyes. “Speaking of which, could you please make me a CD of the old version of the proposal, one where you may have inserted, here and there, a couple of egregious and embarrassing errors?”

  “I can do that,” said Lori, “while Lou is helping Sam with this paper revisions. Then we can get started in the microscope room. Get your parka, and I’ll meet you at five.”

  It was a relief to put on normal clothes, and adding the egregious errors to the proposal was highly amusing. She replaced “Antarctica” in several places with “Australia,” referred to the ice cores as “meteorites,” and added a sentence describing the microorganisms that ended with “…similar to those life forms known to be found on Mars.”

  The last few errors were more subtle, ones that would escape a non-scientist reader but which any technical reviewer should catch, no matter how jet-lagged or hung over he might be. She changed the scale bar on the figure from “nm” to “km,” she referred to a transmission electron micrograph as a “scanning” electron micrograph, and made reference to the “two-kingdom” taxonomic model, which had probably been out of date when Rose was in elementary school.

  Then it was time for some real work. Pushing a two-tiered aluminum cart over to the BioBar, Lori loaded up on all of the molecular biology kits she could find that might help them. There was something called “community whole DNA extraction kit,” of which she took a few, and a couple for RNA as well. She got the special reagents needed to work with RNA without degrading it. Enzymes that broke up RNA were everywhere in nature, especially in those bodily fluids that seemed to flow freely in the lab: sweat, tears, saliva, and snot. She ordered three FISH probes, each targeting a seprate kingdom of life. Any bacteria in the samples would be labeled a turquoise blue, fungi a deep red, and archaea a bright mac-n-cheese orange. She’d chosen those colors so as not to overlap the dyes she knew Lou was using for other parts of the cells.

  The FISH probes wouldn’t be ready for a couple of days, but everything else just needed hands, eyes, and to a lesser extent, brains. Lori walked into the first-year student office and told them all that they could get extra credit for a “real live” project of which she revealed no details. Each team of two had a specific kit and a specific experiment with a specific result, and she said that whoever got the best data wouldn’t have to take any finals at all. STI’s exams weren’t known for their cruelty, but they were long and grueling, and she figured this would be incentive for something.

  She debated whether to make a team out of the two best first-years, Chi-Ming and Walter, or whether to distrib
ute them. Finally she put them together so that they could have the most sensitive part of the operation, the one where they actually saw and touched the ice cores. The other students might have had loyalty to Kuzno; it was impossible to tell, but as long as they were delivered nothing but small tubes of clear liquid, there was no way they could know for sure what was being done.

  Feeling considerably better, she had time to jog into town and have a sandwich and a triple latte before heading back to meet Lou at the microscope. It was going to be a long night.

  It was funny to see him all tan and blond from their outing yesterday but wrapped in a black winter coat and carrying mittens and a fuzzy hat, ready to be an electron microscopist. The room was cold, dangerously cold, and parkas or no, neither of them could stand more than half an hour at a time. They did alternating slices of the cores, one thick and then one nanometer-thin, sliding each section onto a numbered and labeled slide or electron microscopy grid. The thick slices were for optical microscopy, and the thin ones for electron. Keeping them in order, they would be able to directly compare the images they got using each technique.

  When it got too cold to endure, they would take a break and go into the BSL-3, where Lou had set up a station for fluorescent staining. They had dyes to show cell walls, DNA, membranes, and active metabolism. Each dye was supposed to stick only to its target on the cell and nowhere else, but this was where they ran into a lot of problems. Most of the dyes also stuck to rocks and minerals, making it sometimes hard to tell what was a bacterial cell and what was just a piece of rock. A bad enough problem here on Earth—but a disastrous one for any instrument that was supposed to land on Mars. No one would think you were crazy for seeing bacteria anywhere on this planet, even in Antarctic ice, but on another planet the burden of proof was just that much higher.

  With the problems in mind, Lori put on all her warm clothes and went back next door. She hoped that the higher resolution of electron microscopy would help resolve some of the ambiguities. Even though it was essentially impossible to make an electron microscope small enough to send to Mars, they all hoped that someday a Martian rock would be brought back for examination by all of Earth’s most sophisticated techniques.

  The key was to figure out exactly what to look for. How did a rock that once harbored bacteria differ from a rock that had never seen traces of life? So many blebs and particles of mineral looked like cells that the shape and size alone could never be proof.

  Many of the rocks Lori looked at seemed to have “shadows” of cells, imprints where bacteria had once sat. She used the X-ray spectroscopy feature of the microscope to get an elemental analysis of the imprinted areas compared to areas without the patterns. This used the electron beam to make atoms emit characteristic X-rays that identified the element. Unfortunately, it only worked for the heavier elements, so key components of cells—namely carbon—didn’t show up.

  Most of the imprint-looking areas came up high in sulfur. Maybe, she thought, the sulfur minerals around living cells were different than those in purely-mineral areas?

  She tried to call Ben Gerson, but couldn’t reach him. So she stayed until late in the night taking images and spectra, hoping that somewhere on the ice lab’s hard drive was an explanation of Earth’s most remote life forms.

  Twenty-Six: Drift Toward Catastrophe

  Bob wouldn’t listen when she said that going against Lori Barrow and a Nobel laureate spelled nothing but trouble, but maybe after a few hours of questioning in a hot room with the cops, he would start to get it.

  Carol wasn’t going to lie to protect him. That orange backpack was obviously Lori’s, and Bob had definitely shown interest in it lately. He had stolen it and he had been caught.

  A minor crime by any standard, maybe, but if Bob spent so much as a night in jail, his days at the LEPERLab were over. He knew himself about the LEPERLaws: he had used them to tell Jim as soon as he was hired that that he couldn’t protect him from dismissal if he got any police reports filed against him.

  She didn’t need to waste her Monday here at the station, in this hard wooden chair, in the heat, with flies crawling up the wall. There was work to do in her lab—real work, with Lori’s SLAP and a microscope that had finally been plugged in and adjusted by Dr. van Gnubbern—so she left a note and headed back up the hill.

  She spent the afternoon happily photographing what Lori called the “footballs,” tiny minerals that might have been simply rocks, or might have been the outer coating of some kind of very tough bacteria, nobody could tell. Analysis was not her job; she just had to take the pictures and pass them on.

  A loud slam of the door broke her concentration and she leapt up, swallowing a scream. She let out her breath when she saw it was just Bob, and was about to walk over to him until she realized he was furious. At her.

  He called her a traitor for doing work for the STI group, shouted that he could get her fired, and demanded she turn over all of the images on her computer. Pacing in rage, he nearly tripped over the thick extension cord going to the microscope—which he then tore out of the wall and waved above his head as if he’d slain a dragon. His eyes bulged with fury and he growled low in his throat like a pissed-off duck defending its nest.

  She’d never seen him like this, and had to close her eyes and count to ten before she could respond calmly. “Bob,” she appeased in her best logical tone, “you know it’s illegal for me to work without a charge number. Lori is the only one who’s given me a SLAP.”

  “I’ll give you a slap if you don’t hand over that data!” roared Bob.

  Carol stood up slowly. Now she was getting mad, too. “Are you threatening me?”

  “Maybe I am!”

  “How dare you threaten me! Are you even doing any of this work legally? Who’s paying for your time to bug Lori’s computer and steal her data?”

  He wouldn’t tell her, just bellowed and stomped some more like a complete Neanderthal. Carol couldn’t believe that the LEPERLab had done this to her dorky, mellow Bob, but she wasn’t going to put up with it.

  “You need to go now,” she said firmly, urging him towards the door. “Don’t make me call Security on you.”

  He screamed that she was the one who’d be punished, that he could get her fired on the spot for her treachery, but it was an empty threat and they both knew it. Finally Bob left, eyes wet with wrath, or remorse, or both.

  The first thing Carol did was upload all of her new data onto an FTP site and tell Lori that they were there. She knew what side her bread was buttered on, but she wouldn’t be surprised if Bob got some idiot to come in here and shut her down.

  Vigilantism was not regarded positively at the LEPERLab. Bob didn’t have a SLAP on the PIP, so he had no right to think about the proposal or to try to help in any way. There were already more than twenty people on the waiting list for SLAPs of any kind, which Carol knew because she was one of them, willing to make copies or collate or even fly out Friday morning to Washington, DC to deliver before the deadline so they didn’t have to rely on a delivery company. If Bob didn’t watch out, he’d find himself bitch-SLAPPED, forbidden to work on the project under penalty of dismissal.

  Carol sat and thought for a good, long while before deciding what to do next. The LEPER phones wouldn’t dial internationally, so she reached for her cell and looked up the country code in the phone book.

  There were so many numbers to dial that she was amazed to hear the tone come through so clear, and the voice with its American intonation unmarred from five years Down Under. “Kameakaloa lab, Radhika speaking. Hello? Is someone there?”

  “Hi, Radhika,” Carol finally managed in a wee small voice. “It’s Carol, you know, Carol Dugoni from graduate school. Um… what time is it there?”

  “Nine o’clock on Tuesday morning.” The thought, Why would you call me, you boson, traversed the Australian continent and two thousand miles of Pacific ocean. She called out something to her students, something about laser power.

  “I’m c
alling because my husband and your ex-girlfriend have gotten into something way over their heads.”

  “Hah! I can’t speak for Boson Bob, but Lori’s a big girl. I’ve never seen her in over her head.”

  “This isn’t funny. She’s trying to bring down the LEPERLab.”

  “The LEPERLab?” Radhika laughed long and hard. “Let me tell you something: I interviewed there while Lori was interviewing at STI. And even thought I love her more than I do all of the other six billion humans put together, all I wanted to do afterwards was put as much distance as globally possible between me and that hellhole.” She took a breath to recover from that sentence, then continued, “The human resources rep was off his face at ten in the morning and lied to me about the scientists being on soft money. The researchers were broken and cowed and talked about nothing but parking. If she can do something about that place, then more power to her! …And to the 488 line, guys—13%, OK?”

  Physics was such a small world, Carol reflected. Everyone knew each other and there were personal feelings behind everything they did. “The problem is, it wasn’t her idea. I think she’s being used.”

  “By who? Rose and Maupertuis?” Radhika made a pfft of disdain. “Carol, mere mortals like us cannot understand Lori. Lori was born and bred at that university. She knows STI better than she knows—knew—her own mother. She has been wrapping Solomon Rose around her little finger for twenty years. As for Maupertuis, from everything I could find out, he’s nothing but a spoiled rich playboy. He has a degree in drama, for fuck’s sake, and when I met him at the March meeting he cared more about surfing than physics—as do I, incidentally. Here in Oz, we have our priorities, and it’s summertime.”

  “Radhika, could you please just give me fifteen minutes to explain?”

  “You have half an hour. After that I’m going to the beach.”

  Carol started off totally wrong, telling about the data and Bob. Of course Radhika just sneered at her, calling Bob all sorts of names and saying that he deserved to lose his job if he was taking Lori’s data. She had to shift gears, mentioning Jim Kalb, the cold room, and what she knew—not much—about the grad student who had died.