Analog SFF, January-February 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The boss interrupted, looking incredulous, “And when—oh, wait, they take you through that in the advanced certification for work on space stations, don't they? Part of the versatility training, I believe.”

  “Yes, ma'am. It was just one of the simple kits, where we had to add solution A to solution B, and that kind of thing. But I could look up exactly how to do it, and assuming we have that kind of kit on the Station, then I could try to take a look. It would tell us whether there's enough of a match for it to be worth paying a tech to do it officially. I assume the cost of the tech is the most expensive part.”

  “It won't save much on hourly wages, unless you do it on your own time.”

  “I'll do that, ma'am,” he said, feeling tired. “I'll do it on my own time.”

  “You know, Mike, you've been pushing for a full scan since day one. Tell me this whole thing isn't an elaborate setup to get what you want.”

  “No, ma'am.” He was pretty sure she'd actually made a joke there, but it was hard to know with her.

  “Well, one more thing, then. Why should I believe your results? Aren't you an interested party?”

  “Because I'd believe them. Ma'am.” Ahearn spoke suddenly.

  “Mrm,” she muttered in noncommittal assent. Then she took a breath that was louder than it needed to be. She pushed another button on her intercom. Soon she was talking to the law.

  “All right,” she said, pushing the disconnect button, “they've impounded the suit he used. You'll be wearing a legalcam once you take samples from it and until you get me your results. An officer will be here momentarily to attach a cam to you, too, Mr. Ahearn, following the usual procedure.”

  She pushed another button. “Hang on a second, Mike, and I'll see if I can't get us a spare microarray from one of the bigger labs. That way there won't be any real expense at all, and we won't have to worry about economizing.” She smiled thinly.

  It was the first time Mike had ever seen her extend herself to help. Was this her way of saying she saw his point?

  * * * *

  “So?” said Jessica, pouncing on Mike before he even reached the canteen.

  “So, I'm gonna eat dinner,” he said, a bit surprised.

  “I mean, so what's going to happen with Ahearn?”

  “Oh. Nothing yet. First we have to show he's guilty.”

  “Show he's—I don't get it.”

  Mike explained. “And,” he wound up, “I get to spend all night trying to remember how to do this stuff.”

  Jessica looked glum. “We're never going to get rid of him, are we?”

  “We may not.”

  She looked glummer.

  “I haven't had anything to eat since breakfast,” he said. “If you want to watch me eat, we can discuss what to do about Hernie as far as you're concerned.”

  She trailed after him, not looking too thrilled.

  “I, uh, didn't mean you had to. Whatever works for you.”

  She started getting redder, until she was the color of one of the better class of tomatoes.

  “Whatever works,” he repeated a bit desperately, wondering what to say to keep himself out of trouble.

  “It's,” she said, looking at the floor and the walls and far down the hallway, “it's not that. It's ... I'd ... like ... to go to the canteen. I just don't want to waste the time talking about Hernia-boy.”

  Mike stared at her for a second. Then he remembered that his w—ex-wife always had said that he was slow.

  He had no idea what to say next. How long have you felt that way? No. I'm glad to hear it? Also not. What do you want to do about it? Definitely not. Although he'd really like to know.

  She was still bright red, but as she looked at him looking at her, she started to smile.

  That, he could deal with. He started to smile back.

  “I guess you're going to be pretty busy with all this stuff the next few days, huh?” she said.

  Busy? He liked the sound of—wait, she didn't mean that stuff, she meant the Ahearn stuff. He'd forgotten all about the Ahearn stuff. Life was really asking a bit much of him, if he was supposed to waste time on that now.

  “I could probably help,” she said. “I mean, I do know how to read directions, and I took the basic Station certification. We did some lab work in that for advanced water quality testing.”

  “Jessica,” he said, beaming, “that's really nice of you.” That was the one thing that could make messing with microarrays bearable. That was ... Or was she just trying to get close enough to the samples to make sure they gave the results she wanted? Couldn't be. Or could it? “Uh, look, I'm not sure how to say this, but, given how you feel about Hernie, are you sure you want to help?”

  She started to glower.

  “How'm I supposed to take that?” she said. “If you mean, do I want to help Ahearn, then no, of course not. If you mean, will I try to fake the results instead of helping, well, then...” For someone with such a cherubic face, she had quite a glower. “I do know the difference between doing what's right and doing what I want, you know.”

  “Jessica, I—They'll probably make you wear a legalcam.”

  “Right. So?”

  * * * *

  The hour was nearing midnight. Even the graduate students had left the lab where Mike and Jessica had been allowed to work. The samples were still waiting. Jessica began flowcharting protocols. Mike was still plowing through old files from his courses, then checking twenty screens’ worth of instructions. He remembered too clearly why it was that he'd dropped out of college.

  Then, a couple of hours after that, they finally had their first result, taken from the sterilizer tank. They both leaned in toward the computer screen—and Mike realized he was too tired to even notice the feel of her at first. Man, Ahearn was really going to have a lot to answer for when he was finally done with this nonsense. Which should be soon now.

  The results scrolled up.

  They matched nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not E. coli, not eagles, and not earwigs. Not any living thing. Mike groaned.

  “Oh, hell,” muttered Jessica. “We screwed up somewhere.” After a minute, she said, “Well, come on. We have to redo it. The sooner we get started, the sooner we'll be done.”

  “You have got to be kidding.”

  “Do you want the answer or don't you?”

  “I want the answer, all right. I just don't want to do the work to get it.”

  “Yeah.” She grinned a bit. “I know just how you feel.”

  An hour later—they were getting better at it with practice—the results scrolled up again. This time they'd tried the sample off the spacesuit boots. But again, the results matched nothing in the world. Except they did match the previous ones.

  “Mike, look at that. It says there's a hundred percent match between the two samples. But no match to anything else. How is that possible?”

  How indeed?

  “The only way to do that is if we got a real result the first time, and the same one second time around. If it was a mistake, we couldn't get the exact same mistake twice.”

  “What are we looking at here? The water tank or the stuff off his boots?”

  “Both. Number one was water, number two was boots.” Then he had a dreadful thought. What if the samples had somehow been switched, and they'd been working on distilled water or something the whole time? Although that should have led to no data rather than bad data. He found some of the regular test strips and dipped those in.

  They came up positive for E. coli.

  Either they were wrong or the microarray that looked at the whole genome was wrong. The microarray couldn't be wrong. The test strips were being fooled by ... by what?

  By a one in ten billion chance match with a tiny little stretch of DNA. By life that was right off scale, hiding in plain sight because it was camouflaged by a cheap test strip. Hiding in plain sight out on the surface where everyone knew nothing could survive, instead of being deep in the ocean where everyone was looking for it.
/>   He looked at Jessica. She looked at him.

  “What's that expression of yours? Christ on a bike ... We've found life on Europa. Now all we have to do is find a scientist who's willing to listen to a couple of plumbers.”

  Copyright (c) 2007 Mia Molvray

  * * * *

  “Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason so few engage in it."—Henry Ford

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Short Story: A DEADLY INTENT

  by RICHARD A. LOVETT & MARK NIEMANN-ROSS

  Illustration by Nicholas Jainschigg

  * * * *

  It's always nice to learn to do something new. The hard part is anticipating what else you may be doing....

  * * * *

  There's an ineffable something about a frozen corpse. And sadly, if you hang around high elevations and the Antarctic as much as I have, you eventually see a few.

  Not that this stopped me from dropping my pack, yelling Courtney's name, and running to her. It's called denial. Your hindbrain figures that if you act quickly enough, maybe you can roll back the clock and stop the disaster that's already happened. Your conscious knows better, but for the moment it's just along for the ride.

  She was sprawled facedown in the snow, wearing nothing but turquoise panties, about a dozen feet from her tent. If there was any doubt she was frozen, it was dispelled when, ignoring the fact it was fifty degrees below zero and blowing like a bitch, I stripped off my gloves and reached out to take her pulse. Her arm was unbendable, and not from rigor mortis. That doesn't exist at minus fifty. If you die without a thermal suit, you freeze solid long before rigor can set in.

  There was just one other thing wrong: Courtney Brandt was warm to the touch. Which was truly bizarre because she was so solidly frozen I couldn't depress her skin enough to have found a pulse if there'd been one to find. But even though the wind was rapidly sucking the heat from my hands, she was most emphatically warm. Nice, toasty, body-temperature warm. Feverishly so, in fact.

  Weirder yet, a Courtney-shaped depression indicated that even as she was freezing to death, she'd been generating enough heat to melt into the snow, while I'd been off with other clients on the Vinson Massif.

  If you've not heard of it, the Massif is the highest point in Antarctica. Sixteen thousand feet of wind, glacier, and why-the-hell-am-I-doing-this slogging. Except I knew why, because I'm paid by NanoSport Systems to help take average-Joe-and-Jane tourists on adventures proving NanoSport gear can keep you comfortable under any conditions, even on a late-season climb only seven hundred fifty miles from the South Pole.

  Which means that Courtney was absolutely not supposed to die this way. Not to mention that she was one of the world's true innocents and didn't deserve it. She was a twenty-seven-year-old florist who'd won a slot on the trip by writing two hundred gushy words on why she wanted to go to Antarctica. So what if there aren't any penguins at sixteen thousand feet? She'd been the lucky one who won the draw, and NanoSport's whole shtick was that our DaemonGear can take any reasonably fit person anywhere on the planet. You might fall off the mountain, but by golly you'd be warm and comfy when you hit bottom.

  Courtney had even programmed her tent to play Pachelbel's Canon as her wakeup music. People like that aren't supposed to die on vacation. Especially on a promotional trip where the Pachelbel tent was one of the products we were planning to launch next year—though with a lot of other music options.

  Of course, my reaction on finding Courtney wasn't quite as calm as all that. I've read At the Mountains of Madness. Lovecraft's Antarctic creepy-crawlies lived underground and didn't flash-freeze young women into too-warm corpses, but for those of us who guide down here, reading that book is like chanting, “Who has my golden arm?” around campfires in the Midwest. Spooking yourself is one of life's great pleasures if there's no chance it's real. Death is real. As for spooky death? Let's just say there were cold fingers running up and down my spine that NanoSport's best could do nothing to dispel.

  * * * *

  The only reason Courtney had been alone in camp was that our senior guide had taken a fall three days ago, laying out monofilament line on the Headwall. He survived, but spiked himself good with his crampons. We'd patched him up well enough to stop the bleeding, but he'd barely been able to walk back to camp and had to be ‘coptered out.

  These expeditions are (supposedly) safe for the tourists because the clients don't step out of camp without clipping into the lines—even to go to the toilet. And if you think that's silly, you've never seen an Antarctic ground blizzard.

  But for those of us who lay out the lines, these trips are as risky as a real climb—not to mention a hell of a lot more work.

  Anyway, the accident left us one guide short. Not that I'm technically a guide. I'm the equipment rep: everyone's best friend, the giver of schwag, the guy who's oh-so-happy to hear all the details of those little “expeditions” that qualified you for our promotional tour. Hell, if you can climb a thousand meters on a health club stair-climber, you're qualified. Even in weather like this, getting to the top is just a grunt. The only difference from the stair-climber is the view.

  Until, that is, Vince bit it on the Headwall. That meant there was no one to turn back with Courtney today, when it became clear she hadn't put in the health-club training to get to the top of sixteen-thousand-plus feet of snow and ice.

  Not that she should have had any problem on her own. Clipped into the line, she should have gotten back to camp just fine—which apparently she had. Whatever killed her happened after she'd gotten here.

  Better for me if she'd wandered off looking for penguins and tobogganed two thousand feet down the Headwall. Once she reached camp, Courtney Brandt should not have died.

  * * * *

  My suit was warm, but my hands weren't. Besides, it was going to be really bad for morale to leave her lying here, virtually naked, in the snow. In fact, Marisa was already edging up behind me.

  “Is she...?”

  “Yes.” There have been some remarkable recoveries from hypothermia, but frozen solid is a different story. I had no clue what to make of her weirdly warm skin, but exposed to the wind like that, she had to be dead.

  I glanced at Marisa. She'd been one of Vince's charges, who I'd inherited in the reshuffle because she was the fittest and least likely to be trouble. Thirty-something and built like a soccer player—short but powerful—she'd cruised up the peak with me after Courtney turned back, almost as though on a Sunday stroll. Hopefully she also had the kind of toughness I needed now.

  “Can you help?”

  She nodded.

  I pulled my gloves back on and grabbed Courtney's shoulders, while Marisa took her legs. I didn't have to tell her where we were going. On the Massif, you do everything you can in a tent.

  Of course, the tent might be just as cold inside as we were on the outside. The new DaemonBots drank power, and with the sun rapidly going north for the winter, solar power just wasn't what it could be, so I'd asked Courtney and the others to dial back their thermostats before we left. The tech folks back home weren't going to like it, but they were going to have to do something about that tent's power consumption.

  Figuring out things like that was the one of the reasons I was here. The DaemonBots are nanites that control temperature by kicking fast-moving “hot” molecules in, while keeping slow-moving “cold” ones out. The name has something to do with a guy named Maxwell, who didn't really believe it could be done. But the older-generation nanites in my climbing suit were so efficient they could be powered from my own exertions, via piezoelectric threads.

  Unfortunately, you can get cold spots when entire clusters of bots malfunction or power threads break. The new design cures that with special, mobile bots programmed to find and fill the gaps, with occasional side trips to power threads when they needed to recharge. Very slick, and likely to make a strong impression with the defense buyers. And it probably works just fine
around those Midwestern campfires. Down here, though, the damn things scurry from one side of the tent to the other each time the wind shifts. A minor programming error, I'm sure, but a big power drain.

  * * * *

  As it turned out, the power was on, though the warmth didn't last long. Dragging a frozen body into a tent is hard work, and all the warm air puffed out as Marisa and I struggled to get Courtney inside. In life, she'd been petite and vivacious. In death, she was a 120-pound lump. Her legs were as unbendable as her arms, and the tent entrance was narrow enough to make the task even more difficult.

  Huffing and grunting, we'd gotten her into the vestibule and partway into the tent when Marisa kicked something that clattered behind her.

  There aren't many things that should clatter in a tent. In this case, she'd nearly knocked over a stove on which sat a small titanium pot.

  Cooking in a tent is a very bad idea, just because of the risk of this type of accident. That's one of the reasons mountain tents have vestibules: to give you a safe place to cook. Some expeditions also have dedicated cooking tents, with wood floors, dining tables, and propane heaters, but NanoSport isn't into that kind of gear; we only do lightweight backpacking-style equipment.

  Luckily, the tent's computer—which was a lot smarter than the new nanites—hadn't allowed the stove to drain the solar batteries too far by running indefinitely at high power. Otherwise, Marisa might have scalded herself.

  The lukewarm liquid she'd slopped out of the pot had a familiar aroma. Marisa pulled off a glove to move the pot and stove out of the way, then touched a finger to her lips. “Chicken soup,” she said.

  Way too many homey connotations for Courtney's last meal.

  * * * *

  The tent was a mess. Normally, Courtney was meticulous to the point of being fussy, but now, her sleeping bag was shoved into the foot of the tent and clothes were strewn in random wads. It was surprising that the stove hadn't been knocked over before Marisa'd had a chance to kick it. The tent's touchscreen bore an unfinished sat-message beginning, “Dear Mom and Dad.”