Quiet Invasion(82)

Quai sat back and fingered the holotattoo on his neck. He could barely believe things were really happening. Ever since he’d thrown in with the separatists, he’d gotten used to the idea that it was going to be a long, hard slog. Ted Fuller rotted in an isolation cell. Mars was discovering easy economic benefits in lining up to serve the mines, the heavy industries, and the long-life resorts.

But now, now, he could see the end. He could almost touch it. Okay, not the end, but the beginning. The new beginning.

He’d never really believed he’d have this kind of help, or that the people they needed so badly would come around.

But he did and they had, and now it was a whole new game.

“Well, well,” murmured Alinda, pushing her heavy braid of hair back over her shoulder. “Don’t push the Send key yet, ladies and gentlemen.”

Grace looked up from her desk. “What are you mumbling about, Al?”

Alinda’s dark eyes sparkled and Grace groaned inwardly. There was nothing Alinda Noon loved more than a good rumor.

That is the biggest problem with v-babies, thought Grace. They all believe gossip is a social grace.

The three of them sat along the curving wall of Chemistry Lab Nine, their desks a small island on a sea of cluttered workbenches and metal-sided analyzers.

“Looks like reports of aliens on Venus were a bit premature,” Alinda went on.

Grace froze. “What?” she demanded.

“I win the pool.” Al called over her shoulder to Marty, who’d frozen his own simulation to listen. “I said the yewners would be crying fraud within a week of getting here.”

“What are you talking about?” Grace heaved herself to her feet.

Alinda blinked, startled. “Nothing catastrophic, Grace, really. The yewners are calling for an audit of base books and time logs. Only one reason for it. They think we’ve been playing games with time and money.”

Each word thudded hard against Grace’s mind. “But they don’t know?”

“Know we’ve been playing games?” Alinda’s brow creased.

“That the Discovery’s is a fake!”

“Of course not. Why? Should they?”

Alinda’s blank look, Marty’s stupid, stunned stare were suddenly more than Grace could stand. “Pay attention, little girl!” she roared. “That Discovery is saving your job and your precious base! If it gets taken away, this whole place is going into cold storage! There is nothing funny here!”

Grace wanted to shake her. She wanted to smack him. Instead, she strode into her private office and slammed the door. She knew outside a whole cloud of whispers was now rising, most of them containing her name. She had just given the entire lab something to chew over for weeks. She gripped the back of her chair and squeezed.

Get it together, get it together. Nothing’s happened yet. It’s just an audit. Of course there had to be an audit.

But it wasn’t just an audit; it was another round of questions and inspections and sideways glances and gossip and more questions and nobody believing what she’d found.

For just a minute there, it had been going so well. The outside world was actually listening to her. For once, the great Helen Failia hadn’t been able to divert her funding or try to monopolize her research assistant’s time.

On the wall of her office, Grace kept a still shot of an absorber chain. It had been taken by a stasis microscope and looked like someone had taken forty gray-and-white tennis balls and stuck them together in a ring that twisted in on itself. Not in the neat double helix, but more like a bedspring wound far too tightly and then folded over in the middle and fed back into itself.

This small tangle had been her life for ten years. She and her team had isolated this as Venus’s mysterious ultraviolet absorber. Snarls of this little molecule created the dark bands that showed up in the cloud banks. There had been praise and papers and money, and even Helen had been happy.

Which had all been fine, but then Grace had discovered that the compound was alive.

“Now, I’m not saying it’s a yeast or an alga,” she tried to tell them. “But it must be considered on a level with a virus or at the very least an autocatalytic RNA molecule. It absorbs energy; it exudes waste chemicals.” Ozone and water molecules were more concentrated in the absorption bands than outside them. This had been independently measured. “It has an identifiable internal barrier to increase electrochemical potential. And”—she’d stab at the table, or the chart, or the nearest person with her index finger as she got to this part—“it reproduces itself.”

There was the snag. The molecules were highly active, always combining and combining. But Grace couldn’t get anyone else to say that this process was definitely reproduction, and she hadn’t yet been able to duplicate its peculiar gyrations in the lab. The consensus of the rest of the worlds was that the intense ultraviolet light hitting the top of the cloud layer broke apart the molecules, which re-formed once they’d dropped far enough down in the clouds to be out of reach of the worst of the UV.