After a couple of days’ healing rest, Christina was back at UCLA. When she arrived on campus, she ordered the largest size soda at the Court of Sciences plaza café. She needed the caffeine to counteract the sedative effect of the mild painkillers she was taking for the burns on her legs.
The building directory still read “UCLA-CaliPetro Bioenergy Institute.” Christina wondered if Bactofuels would get its name up there soon.
“Good morning, Dr. Chen,” she said, bouncing into the lab.
“Chrissy! Welcome back,” Dr. Chen said. “It’s too quiet around here without you. How are you doing? Are you sure you’re ready to be on your feet again?”
His voice conveyed genuine concern. When Christina chose to work with Robert Chen, she won the P.I. lottery. He was a good scientist and a good man.
“I’m fine, Dr. Chen. Plus my cousin is driving me crazy.”
He laughed. “I know what you mean. I can’t stand being sick; I start to lose my mind after two days at home. Well, I have lots of work for you to do. Jeff Trinley was here yesterday about the photosynthetic E. coli project. Bactofuels wants HPLC measurements of bacteriochlorophyll production and quantification of gene expression from the crt operon.”
“I can do that,” Christina said.
“That’s what I told Trinley,” Dr. Chen said, “even though he didn’t believe it.”
“Thanks,” she said, grateful for her mentor’s support.
“If you don’t mind, I need to excuse myself for a few minutes. I’m in the middle of writing a review. Don’t want to lose my train of thought.”
“Of course,” Christina said.
Dr. Chen disappeared into his office. Christina drained her soda cup and tossed it in the trash before approaching her lab bench. Though she was tidy, her workspace was probably contaminated with toxic chemicals. She would never bring food or drink near it.
She opened a laboratory protocols manual to review how to do the HPLC experiment, but found it hard to concentrate. She worried about the escaped Syntrophus bacteria—if that’s what had happened. River and Mickey agreed that she ought to tell Dr. Chen about the gas leaks around town. Christina conceded that she would not tell him CaliPetro’s experiment had been sabotaged. An accidental explosion sufficiently explained how the bacteria might have entered the subterranean ecosystem.
She hated to lay a burden of guilt on him; Dr. Chen would feel responsible for the accident and its consequences. But she couldn’t rat on her family.
If I ever get my hands on that Neil character…
Using a flint sparker, Christina lit a blue flame in the Bunsen burner on her bench. The fire acted like salt on her emotional wounds from Pit 91.
Oh, Linda, she thought and wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her lab coat.
Natural gas was easy to ignite, but hydrogen gas was ten times easier. Ordinary static from a person’s hair or clothes could do it. At the time of the accident, Linda was carrying steel excavation tools in one hand. They clinked against each other and sparked over a hydrogen leak. Linda didn’t have a chance.
Christina cordoned off her grief and started to work. She picked up a bacterial culture needle—a thin platinum wire mounted on a pencil-like handle—and lifted the wire into the hottest part of the burner flame until the metal glowed red. After allowing the wire to cool in the air, she plunged it into a flask of cloudy yellow liquid: an old culture of the photosynthetic E. coli bacteria. Then she dipped the tip of the wire into a tube of fresh sterile broth. To the naked eye the wire looked clean, but Christina knew it was covered with thousands of invisible bacteria that would slip off into the fresh food and begin to grow vigorously, doubling in number every half hour. Only a touch was all it took to spread bacteria from one liquid to another.
“Chrissy?” Dr. Chen said. “I finished the abstract. You said you wanted to talk to me about something?”
She told him what she’d heard from the police officer about the incidents, and how they could all be explained by hydrogen gas leaks. She emphasized that acetic acid vapors were often present, and that methane was not detected in the subway accident.
“Dr. Chen, all these things happened after the explosion in Jefferson Park,” she said.
Her teacher’s expression was grave. “I heard on the radio this morning that there was a fire in the basement of a grocery store in Koreatown. That could be another one.”
“Do you think our Syntrophus bacteria are responsible?”
“That’s quite a lot of circumstantial evidence, so I’m forced to consider the possibility,” Dr. Chen said.
“Should we test for it?”
“How? Syntrophus is anaerobic; exposure to air kills it. To get a test sample, we’d have to drill at least ten meters underground.”
“CaliPetro could do that.”
“I’m pretty sure CaliPetro doesn’t want to know.”
“So what are we going to do?”
Dr. Chen considered for a minute.
“Nothing,” he said. “At least, nothing for now. We’ll wait and see what develops. If our altered Syntrophus bacteria are feasting their way through the Salt Lake Oil Field, there’s nothing we can do to stop them. Once they’ve eaten the uppermost layers, the system should naturally come into some kind of balance.”
“But what about the danger of hydrogen leaks?”
Again, Dr. Chen was momentarily silent.
“Let’s hope for the best. And stay out of any basements.”