Christina steered her bike through the paralyzed streets on her way to UCLA. She refused to think, and concentrated on the novelty of not having to dodge moving cars while bicycling. When she arrived, the softness of a Southern California evening lay on the campus. Dwindling sunlight and a gentle breeze came from the direction of the ocean. She locked her bike on the usual rack, but changed her mind about leaving it unattended. In today’s traffic situation, her wheels were worth more than a car. She took the bike up to the lab with her.
Hardly anyone was on campus. Christina wondered how many students and professors had made it home, and how many were stranded. The door to the lab was locked. She dug her keys from her backpack.
“Dr. Chen?”
“I’m here, Chrissy,” he called from the media prep kitchen in the back.
Christina noticed someone had printed out three journal articles and laid them on her desk. The titles said they were about lateral gene transfer in bacteria. She didn’t know why they were there.
Dr. Chen emerged, wiping his hands on a paper towel. He tossed the towel in a trash can, crossed his arms, and leaned against the hard black surface of the lab countertop. His brow wrinkled as he seemed to struggle for the right words.
“If our Syntrophus bacteria are in the city’s gasoline, I…” he began, then faltered and lowered his head.
Christina felt tears welling up in her eyes.
“Our bacteria didn’t do this,” she said. “They’re anaerobes.”
Dr. Chen laughed, a mournful, hollow laugh.
“Christina. At some point in the past, all life on earth was anaerobic. But it didn’t stay that way.”
She didn’t want to believe.
“We must consider the evidence,” Dr. Chen said. “First, the time correlation. The explosion at our test site preceded the hydrogen leaks. The hydrogen leaks preceded the corruption of the city’s oil supply. Second, the presence of acetic acid. Did you smell any stalled cars today?”
“Yes,” she said meekly.
“They’re leaking acetic acid. Syntrophus converts hydrocarbons into hydrogen, acetic acid and carbon dioxide. Third, the weather.”
“The weather?”
“Today’s disasters coincide with an increase in the ambient temperature. Syntrophus is thermophilic; it grows best when it’s hot.”
Christina nodded. “But how—”
“We’ll speculate about how later. Tonight we need to ascertain the facts. We need to know whether the Chen-Gonzalez strain of genetically modified Syntrophus bacteria is present and alive in commercial gasoline.”
He reached for a rack of test tubes on the bench top. Each tube held a few milliliters of liquid, about two tablespoons.
“These are samples of gas I siphoned from randomly chosen cars between here and my house. If the car was stalled or smelled of vinegar, I made a note of it. As a control I also have a sample from my own car, which I haven’t refueled in twelve days. It should be clean, a good negative control.”
He handed her the rack of tubes.
“Tonight, you’re going to do DNA studies to look for our bacteria in these samples. You will also attempt to culture bacteria from the gasoline in the presence and absence of oxygen. Meanwhile I’ll do the biochemical studies to figure out what’s happened to the molecules in the gasoline, to understand why it’s gone bad.”
Christina accepted the tubes of gasoline with trepidation. Then she went to work. Using scratch paper, she mapped out the experiments to be done, planning for appropriate controls. She checked the lab freezer to make sure they had the reagents she needed. She would use PCR, or polymerase chain reaction, as the most sensitive test for Syntrophus; PCR could detect as little as one single bacterium in the material tested. Added to that, she would use DNA hybridization in a microarray to detect the DNA sequence changes that she and Dr. Chen had introduced into their strain. For good measure, she also decided to run enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays, or ELISAs, which used antibodies to detect proteins in the bacterial cell wall. Finally, she would set up cultures, but it might take days to get the results on that.
Dr. Chen disappeared into another part of the building to use the mass spectrophotometer, leaving Christina alone with her thoughts. She meticulously followed her experimental protocols, but her mind churned with anxiety. It couldn’t be true. Dr. Chen was such a nice man, and she was an honest, well-meaning student. Their scientific work was intended to help humankind. They didn’t send hundreds of people plunging to their deaths today.
But what if they had?
She programmed the thermal cycler for the PCR and put the microarray in an incubator. While waiting for results from those experiments, she did the ELISA. The test was easy to read. A strong positive turned blue. Negatives didn’t.
Adding a drop of this, then a drop of that to each reaction, Christina watched her timer count off the seconds. The liquids swirled together. A faint hue appeared in the solution. Christina’s heart sank as a deep indigo color developed in several of the samples.
They would get more details from the DNA tests and the chemical analysis of the gasoline, but Christina could no longer deny the facts. Her bacteria were eating L.A.’s gas.
#
Just before dawn, Christina and her boss shared their data with each other. In laboratory science, results were often ambiguous or conflicting, but their efforts tonight had produced clean data and an inescapable conclusion. Dr. Chen looked defeated, his shoulders sagging and his face wooden.
“I have to contact the authorities. If the infection spreads…” He paused, and shuddered. “The oil-eating bacteria must not escape the L.A. basin. The city must be quarantined.”
Christina wondered how they were going to do that. These germs would spread as easily and relentlessly as the flu, a plague of petroleum instead of people. Humans didn’t carry the bacteria in their bodies but in their transportation machines, in their automobiles, railroad cars, pipelines and ocean-going tankers. In things that moved, things that traveled to places the bacteria hadn’t reached yet. The nozzle on every filling station pump in Los Angeles could transmit the infection. You might fill up at Shell in Los Angeles today and contaminate an Arco station in San Francisco tomorrow. Every car that used the pump after you would also be infected in an unstoppable epidemic against which they had no vaccine, and no treatment.
“Who will you call?” she said.
“Everyone I can think of,” he said, “starting with CaliPetro, then the university chancellor, I guess. She’ll know how to get the information to the right people.”
Christina considered what would happen next. Dr. Chen would be blamed for a disaster whose scale was yet to be determined, but already had taken hundreds of lives. So would she, for that matter, but she was a lowly graduate student, like an army private following orders. At best, Dr. Chen’s career was over. At worst, he might go to prison.
She couldn’t let that happen. The bacteria’s escape from the test site wasn’t his fault.
“Before you call CaliPetro I have to tell you something.”
He looked at her with dull eyes. She swallowed hard.
“You mustn’t let them blame you.”
“But Chrissy, I’m responsible. The bacteria were engineered in my laboratory. I directed the test that blew up and released Syntrophus into the environment.”
“Yes, but—” Christina hesitated, “—but the explosion at the test site wasn’t an accident.”
Curiosity brought a flicker of life to the professor’s expression.
“What are you talking about?”
“The tank was sabotaged by an eco-terrorist, someone named Neil. Neil did this, not you.”
“How in the world do you know that? And why didn’t you tell me before?”
She told him about River and Mickey, how they were loosely connected to the guilty party, how she didn’t want them to get in trouble but she could keep silent no longer.
“Your cousin did this?” Dr. Chen said, his face now fully animated by anger. “And you didn’t tell me?”
“I’m sorry,” was the only thing she could think to say.
A tall, narrow cardboard box marked with drawings of broken flasks stood against the wall nearby. Chen kicked it with all his might. Glass waste inside tinkled and shattered as the box crumpled. He kicked it again and the box tipped over, spilling sparkling shards on the laboratory floor.
“I can’t believe this,” he said.
Christina kept silent.
Chen paced back and forth a few times. Then he righted the bin of broken glass and rubbed his scalp.
“I understand,” he said heavily. “It’s not your fault. But ultimately, the whole affair is my responsibility.” He folded his hands in front of his face. “And whether or not this young fool is found and punished, no one can undo what he’s done.”