Extermination, page 4
Some of them glowed all over and others only from under their hoods.
That was where the spores were formed, and those spores made new fungal threads in the soil from which new mushrooms would grow. The spores were tiny and a small breeze of air could take them anywhere, even outside this supposedly hermetically sealed room.
Before she started working at Opis Station, Tara had studied astrobiology on Mars.
She had been there when there was a problem with contamination of the water plant. She might have been doing controversial research here at Opis Station, and might not like to show Frog Face Ken’s work, but she was not crazy. She knew the risks of contamination. And this was a strange thing. It made her uneasy.
In theory, these plants and mushrooms were meant to be cleaner than all the others, because they had been exposed to a vacuum. This was part of Ken’s experimental method, not only to make sure that there was no necessity for treating agricultural rooms with pesticides, but to increase the hygiene of the crops as well.
But there was no way, even if these mushrooms were part of Ken’s work, and even if she held them dear to her heart, that she could be silent about this.
She would have to raise it with Freddie the Frog.
Chapter Seven
WHEN THE CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS had finished for the day, Jonathan and Gaby went to look for the elusive Mark Stevens.
He had a room not far from Jonathan’s, at the end of the B corridor.
They knocked on the door, but got no reply.
“It looks like our mysterious man is not home,” Jonathan said.
“What do we do now?” Gaby asked.
“We’ll try to go in anyway,” Jonathan said, and he tried the door handle. None of the doors had dead locks, and he was only a little bit surprised that it opened.
He was a lot more surprised at the state of the room on the other side.
The bed had been slept in, the sheets and blankets thrown back, the pillow ruffled. The suitcase was on the floor, with shirts and trousers and socks spilling out.
There was a collection of devices on the small desk in the corner, and the cupboard was open, with two pairs of shoes just thrown in.
“This doesn’t look like a regulation military room,” Gaby said.
No, it didn’t. Jonathan would have been surprised at the state of this room for a successful civilian scientist, but because the man he was after was military, or ex-military, the mess was even more of a surprise.
“Why would he leave the place like this?” Gaby said.
“It could be that the room was searched.”
Gaby studied a pad on the desk. “Would they have left these devices strewn about?”
“It depends on what they were looking for.”
“Well, whatever this Mark Stevens is, he’s certainly a mystery.”
That was definitely true.
Jonathan went into the room and idly poked at some of the heaps of clothing with the tip of his shoe.
The devices on the desk were a PCD and a small pad, as well as a charging station.
He wondered if any of them were charged and on standby.
He touched the screen of the pad and it came to life.
It showed a very generic menu of choices. From memory, this was how the devices came out of the box.
“This pad is brand new,” he said. Possibly acquired for this trip.
Gaby looked over his shoulder as he tried several options. But nothing was personalised on this device. The news was all generic, the music was generic and no personalised info had been added.
“Try the link that says ‘documents’,” Gaby said.
Jonathan did. It came up with very short list of files that did look more personalised. The first one was called simply “documentation”.
The next one said “diagrams”. And one said “presentation”.
Jonathan said, “I didn’t know he was going to present anything.” In fact, he was pretty certain that the name was not on the list of speakers, because the name would have shown up in his search.
“Maybe he changed his mind, or maybe he prepared a presentation just in case so that he could give it if they allowed him, but the program was already full.”
That was possible, but it was very strange nevertheless.
Jonathan opened that file.
It came up with the graphic representation of a small research space station that he was unfamiliar with, but the caption marked it as Opis Station.
He turned to Gaby. “I think we found what we were after. He’s come here under a false name. His name is not Mark Stevens. It’s Fred Wilkins.”
And Fred Wilkins was—or had been—a military officer, hence that familiar military look about him.
Jonathan flicked to the second screen of the presentation. It said, “The catastrophic failure of the habitat of Opis Station led to the deaths of two hundred people, but it had much worse implications. The Space Force and the governments of Earth don’t want you to know what I’m going to show you in this presentation.”
Gaby said, “Holy crap.”
“He’s probably been barred from giving this presentation.”
Gaby said, “Copy it. I want to get out of here. I don’t like the thought of getting caught in here if he’s gone missing. Who knows what’s going on and why the organisers didn’t allow it. Or why he’s not here.”
Jonathan did that. And yes, he agreed with her. Something was very smelly about this situation and he didn’t want to stay here any longer than necessary. And besides, they needed to get ready for the conference dinner.
The conference dinner was held in the foyer of the conference hall, and they needed to go back to their rooms in order to get dressed up for it. It was a formal civilian event, meaning that there were to be no uniforms worn, to increase the level of integration between military and civilian researchers.
Jonathan didn’t like dressing up very much. He liked the simplicity of wearing a uniform every day. You didn’t have to think about what to wear, but Gaby had told him to bring at least a nice suit or matching trousers and shirt for the dinner. So he went to get changed, drew a comb through his hair, shaved, and then waited outside Gaby’s room until she was ready.
And waited, and waited, while Gaby did . . . whatever women did when they got ready for an event.
Then the door opened.
The woman who came out into the hallway didn’t look like Gaby.
She had transformed into a veritable princess. She had put her dark hair up, she was wearing dangling glittering earrings, and a dark red dress that hung half off her shoulders. A necklace with a hanger in the shape of Saturn completed the picture.
He felt the heat rising to his cheeks. “You look amazing.”
“You think so?” She turned around and watched herself in the mirror across the room through the open door. “I think I should have gone to the hairdressers before coming here. It was really hard to get my hair to stay up, because it’s so long.” She patted the back of her head, where her hair was held in a bun with the aid of pins and hair spray.
“I say you look amazing. I should ask you out.”
“Well, why don’t you?”
“We’re already going out.”
“But that doesn’t mean you can’t ask me.”
She smiled at him.
Jonathan’s face grew even hotter. He searched his mind for things to say. He should say something like “Princess, would you come to the ball with me?” But that would sound corny and stupid. To simply ask her whether she would want to come to the conference dinner with him was just dumb. He searched his mind for something witty to say, and no doubt he could have found a lame witty comment for anyone else, except Gaby. Because about Gaby, he was deadly serious and didn’t want to get things wrong.
So the occasion went past, and he didn’t ask her anything.
It was a mistake, and he knew it.
She shut the door to her room and they walked down the hallway to the lift foyer and took the sometimes up, sometimes sideways and weightless and sometimes down lift in awkward silence. Gaby even managed to keep her dress in place in weightlessness.
He had to say something, so he spoke about work, again. And then about the disappearance of Mark Stevens.
“So, how much do you think the organisers know about this person? When I asked the student at reception, she seemed to know him. Now we find out he’s really Fred Wilkins under a false name. What’s going on? Opis was an ex-Lemura station. Most of the stations in this area were ex-Lemura. We still don’t know what the Space Force wants with them. Space Force retired him, but he’s still quite young. He clearly has a story to tell that he doesn’t think is being heard. Space Force doesn’t want him to tell his story. Can you smell trouble in a Fred Wilkins-shaped package?”
“We could just not get involved.”
“Yes, but he came to me asking for help. Do I deny help to him? That’s not my style.”
“He could be nuts and full of weird conspiracy theories.”
“He could be. It’s still not my style to dismiss him without hearing what he has to say.”
“I knew you’d say that.”
She smiled, and for a while, it seemed like everything was all right.
Chapter Eight
TARA OPENED THE DOOR to the experiment room.
At the very first glance, Fred knew what she had come to warn him about.
The mushrooms that he had seen last night glowed with such radiance that the light in the room didn’t even need to be on.
It was an eerie blue-green glow that emanated from underneath their hoods.
“I’m guessing this is not the desired effect?”
She had probably already picked up on the fact that he was ignorant about crops, and there was no point in hiding it. He was an auxiliary systems engineer.
“No, I saw it last night when I was still cleaning up the room.” She glanced at the former manager’s room, a bit awkwardly.
The room was completely empty, with marks on the desk where equipment had stood, and on the walls where posters had been. The shelves were still dusty and the floor bore scuff marks.
He wondered what she had done with all the junk that had been on the shelves and the desk and even the floor.
“Why didn’t you come to talk to me about this last night?”
Her cheeks went red. “I wasn’t sure if it was important enough.”
“These mushrooms have some sort of contamination, we are in a closed environment, and you aren’t sure if it was important enough?” Seriously, did these people call themselves biologists?
“Well, I figured no one else was going to come in here overnight.”
That was true. “But still. We are in a closed environment. Recycling is important. If this gets into the air ducts, who knows what it’s going to do to the rest of the station, to our food supply.”
“This is a sealed environment. We have our own system for the lab and the growing rooms.”
At least they had that much sense. And he should have checked that.
Damn, what was he going to do about these electric mushrooms? The promise of a quick and easy job was slipping through his fingers.
Fred dressed in safety gear, which consisted of a full hazard suit, helmet, gloves and shoe covers. Underneath the helmet, he wore a facemask connected to a small tank for the supply of fresh breathable air.
Boy, it was hot in all this get up.
He opened the door to the lab and walked around the tables and racks, inspecting the trays with plants or mushrooms.
The infection only affected the far right corner of the lab right now. One rack of trays with mushrooms had been reduced to a mess of luminescent slime, another contained the mushrooms with the glowing hoods.
“Did you treat them with anything?” His voice sounded muffled inside the helmet.
It was cool inside the room, and his breath fogged against the inside of the visor.
“No.” Tara had come in after him, but she also wore a suit, and her voice came through the loudspeaker in the helmet.
“Did you look at whether this species of mushroom is normally phosphorescent?”
“I did. It isn’t.”
“Did you notice anything else unusual?”
“I didn’t.”
“Have you seen this before anywhere?”
“No.”
“Did you bring anything into this room that could have caused this?”
“We normally dress like this when we go inside, for fear of contamination. The only way out of that room is a hatch on the other side. It has another chamber, which we use for vacuum experiments.”
“Vacuum experiments?” What was that supposed to mean? That was not on the list of trials he had been given. They were supposed to be looking at nutritional value or air cleansing properties of plants.
Tara didn’t say anything for a while, and didn’t look at him. They were both wearing these awkward suits, so it was difficult to look at each other.
“Vacuum experiments?” Fred repeated.
“Well, the previous boss, Ken, had this idea that we might be able to grow plants in a vacuum.”
“That’s ridiculous. Why would he think that?”
“I know it sounds stupid, but there are some papers where people have, either on purpose or accidentally, exposed plants or seeds to hard vacuum. They don’t die as quick as people would think. In fact, some of the plants are hard to kill. It was his idea to breed plants that would be resistant to regular exposure to a vacuum, so that we could eliminate the need for pesticides inside the station, and all the problems that it causes. With modifications, we could even grow plants outside the shell of the station.”
That was an interesting thought. “How would you do that?”
“Ken developed a model based on a rolling cover that would provide the plants with the nutrients they needed which would service each part of the crop for a short period every day. He had no idea if this was even possible, but some of the publicly available data suggested it was not as crazy as it sounds. Space is always at a premium in closed environments. One would think that an agriculture plant is a way of cleansing the air, but in smaller environments, it turns out often just the opposite. So, if you have a small space station, and could grow the plants on the outside of the ship, then not only would they be free of disease, they would be out of the way as well.”
Clearly, she felt quite passionate about this idea, because her cheeks went red as she spoke.
“Ken developed these special heat pads. Heat dissipates very slowly in space because there is nothing to lose heat to, so if you just heat the roots and the direct environment of the plants then you can grow them outside.”
“But what about air, what about light? You can use sunlight, but usually it would be far too bright. And the rest of the time there wouldn’t be enough of it.”
“You can put lights and filters. I’ll go to the other lab and show you the things that he had designed.”
And so they left the isolation chamber, after taking all the gear back off, and went into the lab.
Here, Tara showed him a number of conceptual designs where the entire outer skin of a spacecraft would be covered in plants.
To be honest, it was all so ridiculous that Fred could hardly imagine it working. “I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around this. What’s the basis for this research?”
She showed him a couple of papers that had been done many years ago in lower Earth orbit, where people had exposed seedlings to a vacuum and found that few of them died.
“I’ll read that. However, you’re here to research the nutritional value of these mushrooms, and to improve the crop yield of these other crops. I want you to work on those projects. And I want you to take some samples of those glowing mushrooms, and analyse them. Especially for microbial content. I want you to analyse a few. One from each table should do as a preliminary sample.”
“Yes, all right.”
She went back to her desk.
She sounded unhappy.
“I want you to understand that I would like to run an open shop. If there are any problems, I’d like you to let me know. We need to work together to bring this project to full conclusion.”
“There are no problems.”
Maybe not, but she clearly didn’t like him and let that stand in the way of her dealings with him.
Fred went into his newly cleaned office, and for most of the day watched Tara out of the corner of his eye. She worked hard, barely sitting down to have a meal. He reminded her that she was not allowed to eat in the lab for safety reasons.
She left for a while after that.
After Tara had left, Fred went through the stuff that she had removed from the office that still sat on the floor of the lab, and found some small scale models of Ken’s plans to put gardens on the outsides of space ships. The plants would grow in trays, covered in flexible transparent material, that would rotate around the outside of the ship and pass underneath a vent that would blow a mixture of gases into the transparent envelope.
The designs were pretty, and nice handiwork, and the idea was interesting, but this sort of stuff belonged in a science fiction story. This had nothing to do with the purpose of the station.
Fred looked at results from Ken’s previous vacuum experiments.
While it was true plants could survive a short period in vacuum, the notion that they could actively grow and thrive there was ridiculous.
To his surprise, some of the plants, in particular carrots, held out for surprisingly long periods.
He hated to think about the radioactive content of the resulting crops though, and went to hunt for any measurements of those.
There were none, but in one of his note folders, Ken had made the observation that the plants grew in strange shapes.
Well, yes. That was not surprising.
But for a solution, Ken said that people could just get used to plants having unusual shapes in space. After all, zero and low gravity environments caused plants to grow in different ways.
