Matthew and Sam stood in the airlock, waiting as the contaminated air was sucked out of the compartment and replaced, once again, with the safe air of the Corvus.
“I’m exhausted,” Sam said, holding his arms out to let jets of warm steam clean the radiation from his clothes. “How long were we out there?”
Matthew glanced at the display over the doorway. “A couple hours.”
The light over their heads turned green once the radiation had been eliminated.
Sam yawned and ground the heel of his hand into his eye as they stepped out of the airlock into the controlled environment of the ship.
“You’d think after a hundred years asleep I wouldn’t be tired, but damned if I’m not beat. I’m going to catch some shut-eye. What about you?”
Matthew shook his head. “I’m going to find Dunne.”
Matthew found Dunne in the laboratory, sitting hunched over a tablet at a long metal table. She raised her head when he walked into the room.
“Find anything?” Matthew asked.
“I found plenty,” she said. “Now if I could only figure out what it means.”
Dunne put the tablet on the table, then pushed it across toward Matthew. Matthew looked at the screen and saw a pattern of shapes and colors that he recognized as cells, laid together like bricks.
“What am I looking at?” he asked.
“That’s you,” Dunne said. “Well, your tissue sample, anyway. Notice anything?”
Matthew looked closely, absently reaching one hand across his body and massaging the place on his side from which Dunne had taken the sample hours earlier.
“No,” he said finally.
“Exactly. Nothing. No radiation damage.” She reached across the table and swiped a finger across the display. The image zoomed tight into a single cell. “At the cellular level, the mitochondrial level—even when I looked right at the cell nucleus, at the DNA. No damage. No mutations.”
“Nothing.”
Dunne nodded. “Exactly, nothing.”
Matthew looked up. “But that’s good, right? That’s normal?”
“Not exactly. Even without the high level of radiation, I’d have expected to see something—some level of damage to the DNA or the cells just from regular wear and tear. I’d at least expect to see some endogenous damage from normal metabolic—”
Matthew lifted his hands off the table, held them in the air in a gesture of surrender. “I’m going to have to stop you right there. You’re saying that some damage to my DNA is—”
“Normal, yes. Just by eating food and processing the nutrients, your body creates some by-products that cause damage on the cellular level. There are natural biological processes to repair this damage, but still, a normal tissue sample will have some percentage of the cells that aren’t shipshape. Even when radiation isn’t a factor.”
“And you didn’t even see that?”
Dunne shook her head. “No, not even a little bit.”
“So what does it mean?” he asked.
“That’s what I kept knocking my head against. Then I had an idea: why not re-subject the tissues to the outside radiation? The air inside the Corvus is decontaminated. I thought it wouldn’t matter, that whatever radiation we’d all absorbed outside would be enough to see what was going on in the samples, but obviously I was wrong about that. So I put your tissue sample in the containment chamber and filled the chamber with the irradiated air from outside.”
Dunne spun her chair away from the table, toward the containment chamber. Matthew came around and joined her at the control panel. The containment chamber was a compartment about the size and shape of a coffin in the center of the lab surrounded in plate glass. From the top of the chamber, a narrow tube ran to the ceiling and a discharge in the outer hull. Inside the chamber was a small-rimmed plastic dish containing Matthew’s tissue sample.
“Look at the display,” Dunne instructed, and tilted her head toward the control panel.
Matthew looked at the screen and saw the familiar view of biological cells squeezed up next to each other.
Dunne pushed both arms into a pair of rubber gloves that came up to her elbows and allowed her to reach inside the containment chamber. She adjusted the placement of the dish; on the screen, the arrangement of cells wobbled, then came into focus again.
“Watch that one,” she said, extracting her arms and moving back to the control panel. She tapped the screen. “That one in the middle.”
She turned a knob, and as she did the picture zoomed in even further, until only the single cell was visible. Matthew watched for a few seconds, then glanced at Dunne.
“What am I looking for?” he asked.
“Just watch,” Dunne said, not taking her eyes off the display. “It comes and goes in a split second. You’ll miss it if you’re not looking carefully.”
Matthew looked back at the screen. For a few long moments, nothing happened. No change, no movement.
Then, something happened—so subtle that at first Matthew thought it was a trick of his eyes.
At the edge of the screen, the cell was breaking down. The membrane tearing open.
And then, just as abruptly as the cell broke open, it zipped shut again in a flash.
It was all so fast that at the end of it Matthew wondered if he had imagined the whole thing, if it was just a glitch in the display.
He looked to Dunne. “What did I just see?”
“It’s fast, right? At first I thought I was seeing things too. But then it kept happening. I recorded it, slowed it down, and sure enough …” Her fingers flicked over the panel, then she pointed back at the screen. “There.”
In slow motion, one microscopic frame at a time, the cell burst open and then, just as quickly, closed up again.
“But what’s happening?”
“The biological cells are breaking down, just like we’d expect them to under high radiation. They’re literally cooking. Popping open.”
“And then repairing themselves.”
“Right! But not repairing themselves, exactly—that’s impossible. The body just doesn’t have the resources to do that, to regenerate cells that quickly.”
“What, then?”
Dunne shook her head, reached a hand up to her face and ran the fingers idly over her cheek as she thought. “That’s what I don’t know. Yet. But one thing’s for sure. The radiation on this planet is enough to kill us by itself. But there’s something else in the environment. Something that’s keeping us alive. I’ll find it. I just need more time.”
“We might not have that much time,” Matthew said.
Dunne raised an eyebrow. “Why’s that?”
“We’re not alone. There’s something else here. Someone else.”
Dunne’s mouth dropped open.