by Greig Beck
All biologists and especially astrobiologists knew that human life, in fact all life on Earth, was precariously balanced and therefore fragile. One of the reasons for its survival was a thin skin surrounding the planet – the ozone layer – that acted as a solar blanket, and a shield against anything trying to enter. Only the largest objects could make it through, but were usually then obliterated on impact. But anything else ended up being vaporized before it could touch down on the planet’s surface.
Nothing could get through – Harry straightened – unless you brought it through inside your space shuttle and transported it all the way to the ground.
“Harry, come and give me your opinion here.” Sarah stood beside the microscope, and fiddled with her mask again.
“Something interesting happening with your mold?” he asked.
“Mold? This thing is to mold as a Neanderthal is to modern man.” She pointed a finger at his chest. “You know, that might just be it. If you took some mold and let it evolve for a few million years, you might get something like this.”
“That’s a bit of a stretch,” he said as he leaned over her scope. He placed his eye over it, and adjusted the resolution. Sarah was right; it was damn hard to see while wearing the Plexiglas splatter mask as it distorted the image.
Sarah crouched down next to him. “Rapid cell division, and looks like they’re differentiating.”
“So? We knew it was still viable.”
“Yeah, I know that, but once I added in a simple sugar solution, these cells immediately consumed it – and I mean, quick. I think this stuff will eat anything. But that’s not all; then it started budding – and I mean massive sporogenesis.”
“Damn, wish we had the instruments to weigh the molecular weight of the samples before and after, but …” he shrugged.
“Yeah, yeah, blah, blah, no budget.” Sarah grinned and looked skyward for a moment.
Harry looked back into the lens. “Hmm, you’re right, definitely bigger though.” He watched as the material divided, bubbled and slid, converting the last of the sugars into more of … itself.
“Like a Trojan Horse,” he whispered.
“Huh?” Sarah leaned closer.
“The Orlando … it was like a Trojan horse, bringing this stuff in past our safe walls, our atmospheric shield.” He turned to look at Sarah who had her visor up yet again.
“Sarah, will you please drop that visor. We’re exposing ourselves to enough damn risk as it is.”
“Can’t work with this stupid thing, Harry.” She snapped it down, cursing under her breath, and then folded her arms. “Anyway, if you want my opinion, this mold reminds me a little of a polyphyletic organism.”
“Polyphyletic?” Harry frowned. “You mean like a slime mold?”
“Yeah, sort of, but much more advanced. And those spores that’re free floating in the atmosphere, well, this stuff is saturated with them.” She laid a hand on the base of the microscope. “It’s acting like a cellular entity now, like a protist slime mold. But when I first started to examine it, it was more like a plasmodial slime mold, in that it was enclosed within a single membrane without walls and as one large cell – a super cell.”
“Syncytium.” Harry came closer.
“Yes. Essentially nothing more than a bag of cytoplasm containing thousands of individual nuclei.”
“I saw it; the spores clumped together, and then broke apart – almost at will. But what does that tell us?” Harry asked. “You’re the expert.”
“Well, it tells me it likes the warmth. It triggers its metabolism, switches it on, makes it get hungry, and then it sprays spores and goes looking for food.” She tilted her head. “It decides when it wants to be a single cell, or individual cells – it can coalesce at will.”
“From protist to plasmodia? That’s a neat trick. It decides if it wants to be big or small. Hey, you think it’s doing this consciously?” Harry waved that thought away. “That’s dumb, forget I said that.”
“No, no, not dumb at all,” she said. “But if not consciously, then surely instinctively. After all, ants can operate as individuals, but also form colonies and act as a single hive mind.”
Harry nodded.
“There’s nothing like it, Harry. Nothing.” Sarah had her hands on her hips, and her eyebrows were way up. She grinned. “Understand?”
“What?” He tilted his head.
“There’s nothing like it, on Earth.” She beamed.
He scoffed. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“Why not?” She grabbed his arm. “Life from space; this could be it.” She grinned. “Here’s NASA’s damned stardust, Doctor Harry H. McManus.”
He laughed. “Well, let’s hope not, or they might …” his face dropped, and he stared.
“What?” She frowned back at him.
There was a speck in the white of one of Sarah’s eyes. He frowned and craned his neck forward to see a little better through their visor shields.
“What?” She took a step back.
Harry peered at her. “Did you touch the slide and then your microscope lens?”
“Maybe, I don’t know.” Her brows snapped together. “What the fuck, Harry?”
“When your visor was up, did you … did you let the lens touch your face?”
“I don’t …” She raised a gloved hand, the fingers hovering inches from her cheek. She looked like she desperately wanted to touch it. Her head whipped from one side to the other, perhaps searching for something reflective to look into.
“Hold still.” Harry raced to the benchtop and got a swab; a long, thin stick with cotton fibers wound around one end.
She flipped up her splatter mask. “Is there something there? Is it on me? Please tell me it’s not on me.”
Harry saw panic on her face, and he grabbed her arm.
“It’s corrosive, but …” Sarah tugged back. “We don’t know what it can do to mammalian tissue. We don’t know what it can do! Get it off me.”
Harry grabbed her again. “Just hold still.” He held up the swab, preparing to wipe away the biological speck. Sarah’s eyes widened in fright. “Hooold it right there.” He eased the swab toward the speck.
It moved.
Harry jerked back, and immediately regretted it. Sarah gulped air in horror, like a drowning swimmer going down for the last time. Harry also felt a bolt of fear run through his gut. The thing had moved away from the swab, he was sure of it.
Behind his visor it was becoming stifling. He tried to blink away the rivulets of sweat running down his face.
“Sorry, Sarah, ah, missed it. Stay still.”
His hand shook when he reached out again. But this time when he neared it, the tiny speck of matter darted away across her eyeball. He jabbed at it but missed, and the blob vanished into the corner of Sarah’s eye.
“Fuck!”
Sarah’s expression turned to outright terror and she backed up, her hands up and fingers curled into claws. “What, Harry?”
“I, I missed it.” He swallowed in a dry throat and his mind felt like it was short-circuiting from fear.
“You missed it – twice? What the fuck does that mean?” She tore off her visor and flung it across the room and then spun back. “How did you miss it? How?” She suddenly jerked a hand up toward her face, and he grabbed it holding it away. Her arm was trembling. Or was that his?
“Sarah, please, just hold still, dammit, and sit down.” He pushed her back into a seat, and ripped his own visor off, dropping it; to hell with his own safety.
He searched for the tripod magnifying glass, grabbed it and stood it on the desk next to her. He switched on its ring of halogen lights and angled it toward her.
“Open your eyes wide, and look to your right.” Sarah shivered and the color had drained from her face, but to her credit, she kept still and did as he asked.
Harry looked deep into the outer corner of her eye. The orb itself looked normal, if not a little red from a spray of fine spidery veins.
He was sure his own eye looked the same – lack of sleep, too much coffee, and eyestrain from staring down too many microscope lenses.
“Eeeasy, just hold it there.” He tried to keep his voice soothing, as she had gripped his wrists, tight.
“Look away.” The pupil stayed where it was. “Sarah, look away please.” He insisted.
“I am.”
Harry frowned, pulling back a moment, and noticing that her other orb had shifted the pupil away into the corner as he instructed. But the one he was examining stayed fixed – on him.
“Are you sure y—”
The errant pupil finally slid away from him – but in the opposite direction of its twin.
He frowned. “Uh, are you doing that?”
“Doing what?” Her grip on his wrist got tighter. “What are you talking about?” She pushed at him. “Hand me a mirror … or the specimen tray.”
Harry glanced at the silver tray. “Not yet.” He hung onto her. “Keep looking away.”
Sarah’s eye turned to fix on him, but only the one he was examining.
“It stings, Harry.” She whimpered, and a tear ran down her cheek. “And I’m getting a headache.”
“Don’t worry, I’m just going to rinse it out.” Harry felt a hard knot tighten in his stomach. The eye was a gateway to the human body, and a direct path to the brain.
Harry lifted a small vial of sterile saline solution, and let some drip into the eye. The fluid didn’t stay on the eye’s surface, but seemed to be immediately absorbed.
This stuff will eat anything, Sarah had said.
He put a few more drops in, then a lot more. It all just seemed to drain inwards.
Then, to his horror the pupil just melted away to leave a totally white orb. Then the entire eye shriveled like a deflating balloon, and then collapsed back into an empty socket.
Gas escaped from the gaping hole – horrifyingly, he smelled it through his bio-filter – methane, CO2, nitrogen, just like from the Orlando sample. He wasn’t wearing his visor and he quickly held his breath, and went to pull back, but Sarah’s hand on his arm tightened.
Her mouth dropped open. “Gah.”
“Let go, Sarah,” He let the empty water vial fall to the floor, and used his spare hand to try and dislodge her fingers. “Please – let go – now.”
“Gah, gah.” Her mouth swung wider as it worked, as if she was suddenly unable to speak the language.
“Gah, ga-aaah.”
Her other eye shrunk into the socket.
“Oh god, Sarah.” Harry’s head whipped around to the phone on the wall. He needed help – he snatched at her hand that was pressing so hard on his forearm now that his fingers were beginning to throb.
“Gaaa-aaaaaaaaaaa …”
Harry felt his colleague begin to vibrate, and there came a small moan, but it was his own voice. He gave up trying to dislodge her hand and instead used his greater mass to drag himself and her with him toward the phone on the wall.
Sarah came slowly, but she was strangely heavy. Not fighting against him, but more a dead weight, like he was dragging a sack of wet sand.
“Help!” His yell did little but echo in the sealed laboratory. Harry continued to drag at Sarah, and the pain in his forearm was so acute now, that his hand was swelling and his fingers wouldn’t bend anymore. It felt as if someone had looped steel cables around his arm and yanked it tight.
He looked down at her upturned face; the empty sockets were dark moist holes, and her mouth hung slack. However, her jaws still worked as though she was desperately trying to speak.
“Ga-aaaaaaacgghhhkkk.”
Her gag became a wet, ragged sound, and then insanely he saw within her open mouth that her tongue had crumpled back into her throat. Her head looked tiny, as the collar on her suit swamped her.
Harry felt sanity leaving him. “Heeeeeelp!” He screamed even harder and yanked at her, pulling furiously.
Contaminated, was all he could think. The sample infected her.
Harry finally tugged them both to the wall phone, but in his panic he couldn’t dial, or even speak. To his left he spotted the fire alarm.
He leaned across and punched the huge, red button on the wall, and then turned to lean against it as the klaxon horn sounded and a red light began to spin slowly over his head. Sarah was still hanging on to his arm, but had slid to the ground. He looked down at her and saw her body looked strangely misshapen.
Harry was now hyperventilating, but froze in confusion when he saw a long smear of greenish-brown emanating from the legs of her suit as though she was leaking something. He knew that in death, and even in extreme trauma, the bowels and bladder can void, but this stuff looked horrifyingly like the material that had been sent to them in the sample Sarah had been investigating. What had Sarah told him? That it was converting matter.
Looking back at her, he couldn’t see her face anymore. It was as if her head had retreated into her suit.
His arm was numb from her grip before, but now it stung like fire. He looked down and saw that Sarah’s fingers had somehow penetrated the thick rubberized polymer material of his suit sleeve. She had managed to rip open the tough fabric and worm her fingers inside to be against his flesh.
“God no, no, no.” His head throbbed and he began to taste something unpleasant at the back of his throat that was obviously welling up from his stomach.
He turned. “Hurry-yyyyyyy!” His scream was futile but all he had left.
Harry began to weep as he watched what was once his friend and coworker’s suit writhe and palpitate on the floor as though there were small animals fighting within it. The revolting wriggling moved up her arm toward his.
“Stardust,” he whispered, and started to cry.
* * *
“Jesus!” Chief science officer Jim Teacher jumped about a foot out of his seat as the klaxon horn sounded.
“Fire drill … now?” he asked his empty office. He grabbed at his phone, calling through to security. He sniffed, not smelling smoke. There’d still be an evacuation, he bet.
Security came back to him quickly.
“Where is it?” Jim asked.
“Alarm initiation point is lab-45, sir.” Jim overheard them conducting a background discussion for a few moments before they came back on the line. “Doesn’t seem to be any thermal warnings, so maybe it’s chemical spill. We’re still calling an evacuation to be safe and heading down now. The fire department has been notified.”
“Okay, I’m on my way.” Jim hung up. Lab-45 – that was where Harry and Sarah were working. He headed for the door.
Under the relentless, blaring alarms, people were filing out to their designated assembly areas, and Jim worked his way back through the tide of people. Lab-45 was an underground unit and in a module separated by several hundred yards of white corridor – good for security and for fighting fires, but bad if you needed to get to it in a hurry.
Jim sprinted now, the horn obliterating all other background noises. He shouldered open the double white doors to the laboratory complex and entered the outer offices. It was now deserted and he slowed to a jog as he counted down the labs getting to 45. Finding it, he entered the outer control room and walked toward the large double-layered, toughened glass of the window. Jim stepped up close.
There was smoke but no fire, nor was there any sign of Harry or Sarah. The once pristine and sterile white room was putrid. He stepped closer and squinted. What he had assumed was smoke seemed to be some sort of speckled, particulate gas, heavier near the floor.
Jim grimaced; revoltingly, there did look to have been some sort of explosion within the hermetically sealed room. The floor and walls were lumped with a greenish-brown matter, and there were even strands of it hanging from the ceiling. He quickly checked a live CCTV feed from the airlock between the rooms and finding that also empty, he pressed the intercom.
“Harry? Sarah?”
He frowned, trying to see around the streaks running down the window and let his ey
es run over the room’s interior. He pressed the open mic again.
“Harry, where the hell are you, buddy?”
He pressed himself up closer to the window spotting something. “There you are.”
On the floor in the corner, there were two tangled hazardous material suits but strangely deflated looking. They took ’em off? Why?
Jim moved along the edge of the window, trying to see into every nook and cranny. There was really nowhere for anyone to hide, unless they had forced themselves into one of the small cabinets, which would be impossible for someone like Harry, who was stick-thin but six-three.
Both the inner and outer airlock doors were still sealed, and he damn well didn’t pass them on the way down here. He turned as two security guards entered carrying fire extinguishers.
“Stay back.” He held a hand up in their faces.
“Chem-spill?” One asked and looked past Jim. His lips curled. “Jesus, it’s a freaking mess in there. Is everyone out?”
“I … don’t know.” Jim continued to stare in at the suits, and as he watched, the larger of the two, wriggled slightly.
“Wait.” Jim stared.
The suit’s arm began to move. His brows drew together just as something that looked like a mouse-sized blob of green-brown mud squeezed out. It left the end of the sleeve and continued to slide across the white floor until it came to another mound of the same material, where it promptly merged with it. The larger mass quivered momentarily.
“Oh god, Harry.” Jim’s mouth hung open.
“Harry McManus and Sarah Mantudo.” One of the security guards checked a digital pad. “According to this, they’re still on the base. They must have got past us.”
“No, no they didn’t,” Jim said and put a hand over his mouth feeling his gorge rise. “They never left the room ‒ they’re still in there.”
“What? Where?” The guard turned and squinted.
Jim pointed. “I think, there.”
“That … shit? What the fuck happened to them?”
“Maybe contamination, or some sort of infection.” It was crazy, but Jim knew it was true even as he said it. It was something NASA had war-gamed for decades.