Mom was sleeping when I slipped out to work. Dr. Brando wanted me in early. “Exciting news,” he texted.
I hated to leave, but I planned to call her in a couple of hours, pop back in over lunch, and leave work early.
“It’s nitrogen,” Brando said the minute I walked in. “The OpenGro box has been running a little high on nitrogen.”
“I wondered about nitrogen. But there’s no ammonia. No nitrates. No nitrites in the containment atmosphere,” I said. “So what’s going on with the nitrogen?”
Bacteria, at least on Earth, convert nitrogen to all those things. Ammonia is what stinks when stuff decays. Crimsy didn’t seem to be doing any converting. Just turning green.
“I can’t explain it, at least not yet,” Brando said. “But it makes intuitive sense. Throw a bunch of nitrogen-containing fertilizer in a pond, and what happens: a bright green algal bloom. There’s comparatively no nitrogen in the Martian atmosphere, but lots of it in ours. Crimsy lands here a few billion years ago, evolves from a boring, methane-making red bug into an oxygen-making, food-manufacturing green dynamo. The earliest cyanobacteria. Goddamn it!” he yelled and threw up his hands as I jumped. “We gotta get her off that space station.”
“Next step?”
“Simplest may be to subject Crimsy to varying nitrogen levels.”
“Makes sense,” I said. “But what about carbon dioxide? Temperature, pressure?”
“Those, too. Basic idea will be to gradually make her environment more like Earth. But first, I want to see if we can rule in or out one factor at a time, starting with nitrogen. I’ve gotta be in court today. Can you let the gang know at our lunch meeting?”
“It’s at lunch?”
“Marcia changed it last minute.”
“Would it be okay if I left around eleven? I promised my mom I’d come by my place. Be back in time for lunch.”
“Cool with me. How’s the visit going?”
“Fine. We’re having a great time.”
“Two weeks with my mom in a little apartment? They’d have to canonize me.”
“Mom’s dying to see Lexi. I was thinking the ferry, to Bainbridge or maybe Vashon.”
“Vashon, definitely. Bainbridge is over-developed. Put Lexi down for it—if I still have custody of her after today.”
“Is that really in question?” I asked.
“Every day.”
Mom was fine. Ate a nice breakfast at a cafe up the street. Caught up on the news. Spiffily dressed and waiting for me.
“I know we were planning to do lunch, but you wouldn’t be interested in a lunch meeting with a bunch of cool scientists, would you?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said. “If I won’t be in the way.”
“I asked Dr. Levitt. She’d love to see you again.”
Caterers were dropping box lunches in our conference room when mom and I got off the elevator. Dr. Levitt stepped into the hallway. “Patrice, right?” she said to mom, taking her arm.
“Yes. Marcia?”
“That’s me. And we have plenty of box lunches, so grab one and make yourself at home.”
I walked in and heard mom gasp behind me. She stopped at the doorway.
“Mom?”
“Is that…?” She stared at Dr. Hale’s teleparted image.
“It is,” I said. “I didn’t think he’d be here. You wanna leave? You could go down to the post-doc office or the faculty lounge.”
She gathered herself. “What is..that doesn’t—”
“Latest in teleconferencing technology.”
“TelePart?” she asked. “We were thinking about getting it for the office.”
“Creeps me out,” I said.
“I can see why.” She walked in. “I’ll be fine. I doubt he’d recognize me anyway.” She sat.
“Patrice?” Hale said.
“Hal?” she replied.
“Oh...boy,” he said.
“I’m visiting,” mom said.
She smiled. Introductions went around the table. Dr. Cooper slid over a box lunch. Then the inquiries started.
“You guys know each other?”
“High school sweethearts.”
“Get out!”
“You’re joking?” Dr. Marcum said.
“So—how long has it been?” mom asked Hale.
He turned toward the sound of her voice. “Too long,” he said, I thought somewhat suggestively.
And that’s how the first couple minutes of our lunch meeting went. Despite her discomfort, mom hung in. It was actually kind of fun watching her stare incredulously at 3D-Hale. Also funny how quickly they recognized each other after all these years.
“Jennifer, I want to yield the floor to you,” Levitt started after confirming the Deep Space Gateway crew was within earshot. “Dr. Brando couldn’t be here, but has some exciting news he asked Jennifer to convey.”
“We think nitrogen may be what’s making Crimsy turn green—or greenish,” I began. “Dr. Brando wants team approval to test this hypothesis.”
“That nitrogen turns things green?” Dr. Shonstein asked.
“Crimsococcus, specifically,” I said.
“I gathered we weren’t talking lawns,” she said. “What are you proposing?”
“Varying nitrogen levels with different sub-colonies,” I said. “Raise it. Lower it. See if the coloring increases, decreases, or vanishes. See how rapidly it happens.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Dr. Cooper said.
“I continue having concerns about dividing the colony,” Shonstein said. “We just don’t know enough to know what impact this might have.”
We’d divide the colony into multiple agar dishes, just like Dr. Shonstein did with her antibiotic tests, something I was dying to bring up until someone with a lot more pull did it for me.
“Seems a bit like the pot worrying about the kettle,” Dr. Marcum said.
“How so?” Shonstein said.
“Your antibiotic tests.”
“That was different.”
“How so?”
“For one thing, we weren’t poisoning the atmosphere,” she said.
“No, you were poisoning the colonies.”
“That’s not fair, Bill.”
“I don’t see how changing nitrogen levels is tantamount to poisoning,” Dr. Cooper chimed in. “You’re not talking about crazy levels, right?”
“Reb—”
“Tell that to our choking neighbors in the Third World,” Shonstein shot back.
“Okay. Okay,” Levitt said. “Brandy’s not here to defend the idea and I don’t think he intended to hang Jennifer out to dry. Maybe we should just table it.”
“We’re okay with whatever,” Captain Gillory said from the space station. Mom looked around the room. I leaned over to whisper.
“In orbit,” I said, pointing upward. “Space station crew.”
She nodded with an “ahh.”
“I understand tabling the idea, but are we losing our urgency?” Marcum said. “The ‘we never know when they’ll cut us off again’ urgency.”
Dr. Levitt looked at 3D Hale. “Hal?” He turned to her. “What do you think?”
“Your team, your game,” he said.
“C’mon. You always have an opinion.”
I watched mom watch him rub the back of his head in thought.
“I think you gotta do what you can as soon as you can,” Hale said. “I don’t know what’s going on anymore than you do, but recent history suggests this project could get shut down at the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen.”
“He always did have a way with words,” mom said after the meeting.
But even Hale’s eloquence couldn’t save Project Little Green Women from a delay. Dr. Shonstein’s opinion carried massive sway with Dr. Levitt. Plus, there was Levitt’s own prickly relationship with Dr. Hale.
“Why did you sandbag me?” Dr. Brando said as I walked into his office.
“I didn’t sandbag you,” Dr. Shonstein answered.
“Yes. You did,” he said. “And when I wasn’t even around to defend myself.”
“There was nothing to defend. I brought up some concerns. We discussed them. Marcia made a decision.”
“Are you angry we might be onto something?” he said.
“Why would I be angry?”
“Why, indeed.”
“Don’t fuck with me, Brandy.”
“Because your project failed.”
“What—the antibiotic tests?”
He looked at her.
“What an unfair, bullshit thing to say,” Shonstein said.
“What’s unfair is how you’ve pushed back on every idea I’ve had while I always support you.”
“If you don’t know me well enough to know by now that I don’t play those kind of petty games, then I don’t know what else to say other than unfair,” Shonstein said. “And bullshit.”
“Look—I saw something everyone else saw, too,” Brando said. “The color green. You wrote it off to a trick of the light. Others probably thought, weird little Martian critter. Might turn purple next. But I saw it and I thought about it and we’ve just now started investigating it. And if we don’t keep going we stand a good chance of having the rug pulled again, maybe permanently. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Spare me the ‘I’m a martyr for my science’ speech’,” Shonstein said. “You’re not Galileo,” who pissed off The Catholic Church with his “heretical” cosmic contemplations.
“And you’re not the Pope,” Brando said. “You’re not even the PI.”
“But the PI has validated my concerns. We kill Crimsococcus with all this tinkering and then where are we?”
“Are you serious? She grows like a wildflower on my agar. Or is that another hangup? That I solved the agar problem?”
“Hangup?” She dropped her voice. “Fuck you.”
“What did you say?” Brando asked, I think gritting his teeth.
I had heard Shonstein and Brando—the two people on our team who study small things—didn’t always agree, so I took their periodic bickering in stride. Now, it seemed on a whole new level.
“Look who I found.” Lexi waltzed in with mom at the door.
Saved from another F-bomb.
“So—looks like everything went okay,” Shonstein said, with a change in her tone of voice.
“I won that argument,” Dr. Brando said. His latest custody hearing was yesterday.
“Jennifer’s mom wants to take me to the Space Needle,” Lexi said.
“Correction,” mom said. “I want her to take me.”
“What did your mom say?” Brando asked.
“Nothing. I didn’t even know until after she dropped me here.”
“Can I come?” I asked. I resolved to keep as good an eye on mom as I could. We hadn’t talked about what happened, not yet anyway. I wasn’t sure when we would. I wasn’t even sure mom remembered everything. Maybe me finding her in the park. Or the clock chiming in the lobby. Bits and pieces. How would either of us broach anything this serious with only bits and pieces?
“Of course,” she answered.