We marched to one of the three domes and peered in through the transparent wall panels. I saw a sloping floor with a little fountain at the upper end, close to where we were standing. A trickle of water ran across the dome’s interior and vanished at the other side. The rest of the floor was covered with dusty-looking plants, growing halfheartedly in a light-colored soil. The plants looked tired, and slightly wilted. In the center of the floor stood the skeleton of a much smaller dome, with only half its walls paneled, and within that structure three human figures were bending over what looked like a computer console.
A telephone handset hung on the outside of the dome, and Scott reached for it. “New arrivals,” he said. “Any changes?”
The three figures inside straightened to stare out at us and waved a greeting. “Welcome aboard.” The voice on the phone was young, friendly, and enthusiastic. “Nothing special happening here. We’ve been trying to find out what’s wiping out the legumes, but we don’t have an answer. Oxygen and nitrogen down a little bit more—still decreasing.”
“Still trying changed illumination?”
“Just finished it. We’re putting in a bit less power from the ceiling lights, we’re making it longer wavelength. We won’t know how it works for a while.”
“No danger, though?”
“Not yet. No matter what, we’ll have another couple of weeks before we begin to worry. But it’s a pain to see it go this way. Three weeks ago we were pretty sure this one would make it.”
“Maybe it will.” Scott waved to the people inside. “We’ll keep trying, too. Now that I have some help maybe I’ll have time to run an independent analysis.”
He hung the handset back on its closed stand and pointed to the panel next to it. “This is all new,” he said. “And a real improvement. We have dual controls now, inside and outside. Temperature and humidity and lighting levels in the dome can be controlled from this panel here. When we started out, all the controls were inside and it was a real nuisance. If there was no crew we had to send someone through the airlock whenever we wanted to vary the interior environmental conditions.”
He started toward the middle of the complex. “Anyway, that’s Eight,” he said as we walked. “Not going too good now. Seven is a lot better.”
“What happened to One through Six?” asked Tom.
“They went to stable end-forms, but they weren’t ones that humans could live in. So we brought the crews back outside, closed down the operations, and reused the domes.”
He didn’t notice Tom’s raised eyebrows, and went on, “But Nine’s the interesting one! I’ll warn you now, though, you won’t see much of the inside of it from here. We’ve had to ship a TV camera to the interior, to supplement the audio descriptions, otherwise we’d be short of data. But we’ll take a look through the panels, anyway.”
We were closing on the strangest of the domes, and now I could see that its wall panels were neither painted nor made of opaque materials. They were coated on the inside. Scott went to a telephone set in the wall—in that respect this was identical to the other dome.
“Marcia?” he said. “New arrivals. How about clearing a patch, so we can take a look inside Nine?”
The coating of the wall panels was close in color to the way we had first seen it, an orange-red with a touch of brown. While we stood and watched, a circular cleared patch began to appear on the wall panel closest to us. Soon we could see a hand holding a plastic scraper.
“Tough coating,” said a woman’s voice. “A good deal tougher than yesterday.”
The clear patch was finished and about a foot across. In the middle of that patch a frowning black face suddenly appeared. It was that of a woman, with protruding eyes and black straight hair that stuck out wildly in all directions.
We hadn’t found Jason Lockyer; but we had found the inspiration for the caricature design of the golliwog stamp.
“New arrivals,” said Scott again. The tone of his voice was quite different from the way it had been at the other dome. Now he was respectful and subdued, almost fearful.
This time there was no cheery wave. The golliwog face stared hard at me and Tom. “What chapter?” said a gruff voice through the handset.
We had no choice.
“Philadelphia,” I said.
“Your names?”
“Rachel Banks and Tom Walton.”
The way to the car was around the dome and then dead ahead. We could be in it in thirty seconds and driving down the mountain. On the other hand, Scott was acclimatized to ten thousand feet and we were not. I couldn’t run more than fifty yards without stopping for breath, and overweight Tom was sure to be in worse shape…
While those thoughts were running through my head the face on the other side of the panel had disappeared. We stood there for about thirty seconds, while my instinct to run became stronger and stronger. I was all ready to shout at Tom to make a break for it when Marcia’s face appeared again at the panel. Already the wall was partly coated, and she had to use the scraper again to clear it.
“I’ve told all the chapters,” she said. “I have to approve any new members in advance of joining—and certainly in advance of being sent here. We must check on you two. And while that’s being done we can’t afford any risks. Building Two, Scott. You’re responsible for them.”
There was no doubt who was in charge. And I had waited too long. I half-turned, and found that Marcia had used her brief absence to call for reinforcements. Four men were on their way over to the dome, all young and tanned and fit-looking.
Tom looked to me for direction. I shook my head. Marcia’s check on us was going to show that we were not members of whatever group she led, we could be sure of that. But this was not the time or place to look for an escape. I suddenly realized something I should have been aware of minutes ago: the car keys were in my purse—and my purse was back at the lockers with the rest of my clothes. Thank God I hadn’t told Tom to run for it. I would have felt like the world’s prize idiot, sitting inside the car while our pursuers came closer and I explained to him that I had no way to start the engine.
We were escorted, very politely, to the second and smaller of the two white buildings. I noticed for the first time that it had no windows.
“This is just part of the standard procedure,” said Scott. He was embarrassed. “I know everything will be all right. I’ll check as soon as I can with the group leader in Philadelphia, and then I’ll come and let you out. Help yourself to any food you want from the refrigerator.”
The door was thick and made of braced aluminum. It closed behind us. And locked.
We were standing in a room with three beds, a kitchen, and one other door. Tom went across to it.
“Locked,” he said after a moment. “But padlocked on this side. Where do you think it leads?”
“Not outside, that’s for sure. Probably upstairs. It wouldn’t help, though—there are no windows there, either.” I went across to the refrigerator and found a carton of milk. I had savage heartburn and what I would have really liked was a Mylanta tablet, but they were also in my purse. I was proving to be quite a klutz of a detective.
Tom was still over at the door. “It’s wood, not aluminum. And nowhere near as strong as the one that leads outside.”
“Good. Can you break the damned thing open?”
“Break it!” He stared at me in horror. “Rachel, this is someone’s private property.”
“It sure as hell is. Tom, I know you were brought up to regard personal property as sacred. But we’re in a fix. That bloody golliwog woman is all ready to serve us on the halfshell, and I don’t give a shit about property. Break it.” I was drinking from the carton—most unhygienic, but I was past caring. “Whatever they plan to do with us, I doubt if adding a broken door to the list of crimes will make much difference. Have fun. Smash away.”
“Well, if you really think we have to.” Tom was still hesitating. “All right, I’ll do it. With luck I won’t need to do any actual smashing.
”
He wandered over to the kitchen area of the room and found a blunt knife. The door’s padlock was held in position by four wood screws. It took him only three or four minutes to remove all of them. He swung the door open and we found we were looking at the foot of a tightly spiraling staircase.
“We can’t get out this way,” I said. “But there’s nothing better to do. Let’s take a look.”
He went up the stairs in front of me, clutching the central support pole. On the second floor we came to another door, this one unlocked.
Tom opened it. We were looking at a carbon copy of the room below, but with one important difference. At the table in the kitchen area sat a man with a loaf of bread and a lump of cheese—Edam, by the look of it—in front of him. Next to those stood a bottle of red wine, and the man facing us had a full glass in his hand and was sniffing at it thoughtfully. When the door opened he looked up in surprise.
I think I was more surprised than he was, though of course I had no right to be. I knew him from his picture. We were looking at Jason Lockyer.
The introductions and explanation of who we were and how we got there took a few minutes.
“And it seems we’re all stuck here,” I said.
“Well, there are worse places,” said Lockyer. We had set a couple more chairs around the table and were all sitting there. “I ought to apologize, because of course this is all my fault. When I look back I can see I started the whole damned thing.”
He was a small, neatly built man with a good-humored face and the faint residual of a Boston accent. The fact that he was locked up, with no idea what was likely to happen to him next, did nothing to ruin his appetite. His only complaint was the quality of the wine. (“California ‘burgundy,’” he said. “It shouldn’t be allowed to use the name. It’s no excuse to say wine like this is cheap. It ought to be free.”)
“Three years ago,” he went on, “I was invited to give a talk to the local chapter of Ascend Forever in Baltimore. I had no idea what to say to them, until one of my best students—Marcia Seretto—who was also a member of the society, mentioned the society’s interest in establishing stand-alone colonies out in space. That would imply a completely stable, totally recycling environment. After that it was obvious what I had to talk about.
“Most people know that one fully recycling environment, driven only by energy from the sun, already exists. That’s the biosphere of the planet Earth. What I pointed out—and what got Marcia so excited that she almost had a fit—was the existence today of other biospheres. They were small, and they only supported life at the microbe level, but they were—and are—genuine miniature ecospheres, relying on nothing but solar energy to keep them going. The first ones were made by Clair Folsome in Hawaii in 1967, and they’re still going.”
“Small?” I asked. “How small?”
“You sound like Marcia. Small enough to fit in this wine bottle. The original self-sustaining ecospheres lived in one-liter containers.”
“That’s small,” said Tom.
“You also sound like Marcia. Too small, she said. But she asked me if it would be possible to design an ecosphere that was big enough for a few humans to live in—and live off, in the sense that it would provide them with food, water, and air—but not much bigger than a house. I told her I didn’t see why not, and I even sketched out the way I would go about designing the mix of living organisms to do it. You need something that does photosynthesis, and you need saprophytes that help to decompose complex organic chemicals to simpler forms. But with an adequate energy supply there’s no reason why an ecosphere to support humans has to be Earth-sized.
“Marcia graduated, and I thought she had taken a job somewhere on the West Coast. I didn’t worry about her, because she was the most charismatic person I had ever met. She seemed able to talk the rest of the students into doing anything. It turned out that I was right but I had underestimated her. The next thing I knew, I had a letter from another one of my students. He wanted to know what end-forms were possible when you started an ecosphere with a given mix of organisms. The answer, of course, is that today’s theories are inadequate. No one knows where you’ll finish. But it was the first hint I had that something had gone on beyond my lecture. I sent him a reply, and a week later in my In-box at the university I found a letter with an odd stamp on it, like a caricature of a black-faced doll.”
“A golliwog,” I said.
“So I learned. I also realized that it looked a lot like Marcia. The letter said that I was the official founding father of the Habitat League. I’ve seen stuff like that before, silly student jokes. So it didn’t worry me. But then I began to receive anonymous letters with the same stamp. And when I read those, I began to worry.”
“We saw one,” I said. “It was sent to you but the mails fouled up the delivery.”
“The person who wrote them said that Marcia had set up her own organization within Ascend Forever, with its own chapters and its own sponsors for funding. She had organized a camp in Colorado—this one—and they were following my advice on setting up self-sustaining ecospheres that could be used as a model for space habitats. I replied to him, saying the Colorado mountains were not a bad site, but they weren’t the best.”
“Why not?”
“Simulated space environment,” said Tom, before Lockyer could answer. “If you want to match the spectrum of solar radiation in low earth orbit, you should go as high as you can and as near the equator as you can, where the sunlight is less affected by the atmosphere. Somewhere in the Andes near Quito would be ideal.”
“You’re a member of the Habitat League?” Lockyer was worried.
“Never heard of them until today. But I’ve read about space colonies and habitats.”
“Then you probably know that you have to do things a lot differently than they’re done in the Earth’s natural biosphere. For example, the carbon dioxide cycle on Earth, from atmosphere, through plants and animals, and back to the atmosphere, takes eight to ten years. In the ecospheres that I helped to design, that was down to a day or two. And that means other changes—major ones. And that means unpredictable behavior of the ecosphere, and no way to know the stable end conditions without trying them. Sometimes the whole ecosphere will damp down to a low level where only microbial life-forms can be supported. That happened in the first half dozen attempts out here. And there was always the possibility of a real anomaly, a thriving, stable ecosphere that seemed to be heading to an end-point equal in vigor to the Earth biosphere, but grossly different from it.”
“Ecosphere Nine?” I said.
“You’ve got it. That one was first established four months ago, with its own initial mix of macro and micro life-forms. Almost from the beginning it began to show strange oscillatory behavior—cyclic patterns of development that weren’t exactly repeating. It reminded me when I saw it of the life cycle and aggregation patterns of the amoebic slime molds, such as Dictyostelium discoideum, though you may be more reminded of the behavior of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky chemical reaction, or of the Oregonator and Brusselator systems. They all have limit cycles around stable attractor conditions.”
He must have seen the expression on my face. “Well, let’s just say that the behavior of Ecosphere Nine originally had some resemblance to phenomena in the literature. But it isn’t in a stable limit cycle. The man who wrote to me was worried by that, because he was one of the people who would live in Nine’s habitat. He called me and asked if I would make a trip out here and look at Nine, without telling anyone back home where I was going—he had promised to keep this secret, just as all the others had.
“I agreed, and I must say I was fascinated by the whole project. When I arrived here, ten days ago, I was greeted very warmly—almost embarrassingly warmly—by Marcia Seretto, and shown Nine with great pride. In her eagerness to show me how my ideas had been implemented it did not occur to her immediately to ask why I was here. Nine was doing wonderfully well as a possible space habitat, easily sustaining the
three humans inside it. But I realized at once that it hadn’t stabilized. And it has still not stabilized. It is evolving, and evolving fast. I have no idea of its end state, but I do know this: the life cycles in Ecosphere Nine are more efficient than those on Earth and that means they are biologically more aggressive. I pointed that out to Marcia, and five days ago I recommended action.”
A door slammed downstairs and I heard a hubbub of voices.
“What did you recommend?” asked Tom. He ignored the downstairs noise.
“That the human occupants of Nine be removed from it at once. And that the whole ecosphere be sterilized. I appealed to the staff to support my views. But I didn’t realize at the time how things are run here. Marcia controls everything, and I think she is insane. She violently opposed my suggestions, and to prove her point that there is no danger she herself went in to Ecosphere Nine. She is there now, together with the man who brought me out here. And she insisted that I be held here. No one will say for how long, or what will happen to me next.”
There was a clatter of footsteps on the spiral staircase and Scott burst into the room followed by the other four who had brought us here. His face was pale, but he was obviously relieved when he saw all three of us quietly seated at the table.
“You lied,” he said to me. “You have nothing to do with our Philadelphia chapter, or any other. You have to come with me. Marcia wants to talk to you. Both of you.”
“What about me?” said Lockyer.
“She didn’t say anything about seeing you.”
“Well, I need to talk to her.” He stood up. “Let’s go.”
“We’re not supposed to take you.”
“We won’t go if Lockyer doesn’t,” I said quickly. “You’ll have to drag us.”
Scott and the others looked agonized. They weren’t at all the types to approve of violence, but they had to follow orders.
“All right,” said Scott at last. “All of you. Come on.”
Georgia On My Mind and Other Places Page 27
