Movement outside the office cleared the door’s view panel. Grace Meyer stood in front of the door with her arms folded and her impatience plain on her heavily lined face. Helen suppressed a groan. What she wanted to do was open the intercom and say, “We’re having a meeting, Grace. Not now.” But she held back. Grace had proven herself willing to make trouble lately, and Venera did not need more trouble.
“We’ll finish in a minute, gentlemen,” she said instead. “Door. Open. Hello, Grace,” she said, not bothering to put on a smile, as Grace would know it was false. “What can I do for you?”
Dr. Grace Meyer was a short woman with a milk-and-roses complexion. Her lab coat was no longer crisp, and her tunic and trousers were as rumpled as if she’d slept in them. She wore a green kerchief tied over her short hair, which was the same strawberry blond as when she’d moved to Venera fifteen years ago. Grace was a long-lifer. She was actually twice Helen’s age, even though she looked only half that old.
Grace nodded to Ben and Michael and then turned all her attention to Helen. “I heard about U Washington.”
Helen sighed. “The only thing that travels faster than bad news is bad news about you personally.” Ben and Michael did not smile. Ben looked grim. Michael looked like he was trying to calculate the probable outcome of this scenario so he could ready his responses.
“What about U Washington?” asked Helen.
Grace glanced at Ben and Michael. In that glance, Helen read that Grace would like to ask them to leave but couldn’t quite work out how. And I’ll be damned if I’ll help you, Helen thought.
“Helen,” Grace started again, “there are still sources of money out there. If we shift emphasis just a little—”
Here it comes. “To the possibility of life on Venus?”
Grace leaned across the desk “You saw my new grant from Biotech 24. That’s good money, Helen. The absorbers—”
“Are a complex set of benzene rings with some strange sulfuric hangers-on under heat and pressure.”
Grace was a chemist who had come to Venera to help look for the ultraviolet absorber in the Venusian clouds. The clouds were mostly transparent to ultraviolet, but there were bands and patches that absorbed all but the very lowest end of the UV wavelengths. For years, no one had been able to work out what was happening. Grace and her team had isolated a large, complex carbon, oxygen, sulfur molecule that interacted with the sulfuric acid in the clouds and the UV from the Sun, so it was constantly breaking apart, re-forming and re-creating more of itself. Which was fine; it had won her awards and acclaim, and brought Venera a lot of good publicity.
The problem was, Grace was trying to get the compound, which she called “the absorber” for simplicity’s sake, classified as life.
Helen got slowly to her feet. She was not tall, but she had a few centimeters on Grace and didn’t mind using them. Especially now. She did not need this. “Your absorbers are not life. No funding university or independent research lab we’ve had on board for the last ten years has said it could be qualified as life, or even proto-life.”
Grace held her ground. “But there’s—”
“There’s one little company that’s got more of an existence in-stream than out in reality. It’s willing to gamble on your idea this is some kind of alien autocatalytic RNA.” Grace subsided just a little, but Helen wasn’t ready to. The past months had been too much on top of the past year, all the past years. All the fighting, all the frustration, all the time wasted, wasted on stupid, petty money-grubbing and useless personal projects. “I’ve read your papers, Grace. I’ve read them all, and you know what? I wish I’d tried harder to get you to leave it alone. You’ve directly contributed to the image of this base as a useless piece of dreamware. You have cost us, Grace. You personally have cost all of us!”
The intercom chimed again. “What is it?” demanded Helen icily. She needed to take the call. She needed to stop yelling at Grace. She was falling out of control, and she could not afford that. Grace could still make trouble—publicize internal dissension, that kind of thing. There was plenty she could do. Plenty she would do. Helen needed to stop.
“Ummm…Dr. Failia?” The screen flickered to life to show a slender young than with clear, sandy-brown skin and thick black hair. Behind him, a floor-to-ceiling view screen displayed the ragged gray cliff, possibly the edge of one of the continent-sized plateaus that broke the Venusian crust.
“Yes, Derek?” Helen tried to smooth the impatience out of her voice. Derek Cusmanos headed the survey department. Actually, Derek and his fleet of drones were the survey department. He always did his job well. He had done nothing to deserve her anger.