Georgia On My Mind and Other Places

by Charles Sheffield

  He led the three of us downstairs, with the others close behind. I expected to go back to the dome and peer in again through a cleared patch of wall panel, but instead we headed for the main building. I looked across at the dome. It was almost four in the afternoon and the sun was lower in the sky. The dome’s internal lights must be on, for its panels were glowing now with a mottling of pale purples and greens.

  When we had entered the main building earlier in the day it had seemed deserted. Now it swarmed with people. The entrance area had been equipped with a 48-inch TV projection screen, a TV camera, and about twenty chairs. Men and women were sitting on the chairs, staring silently at the screen. They were all in their early twenties and they all had the same squeaky-clean airhead look that we had first noticed in Scott.

  As the main attraction we were led to chairs in the front row, and found ourselves staring up at the screen.

  What we were looking at had to be the interior of Ecosphere Nine. There was a purple-green tinge to the air, as though it were filled with microscopic floating dust motes, and as the camera inside Nine panned across the interior I could see peculiar mushroom-shaped plants, three or four feet high, rising from the floor. And that floor was nothing like the soil we had seen in Ecosphere Eight. It was a fuzzy, wispy carpet of pale green and white, as though the whole area had been planted with alfalfa sprouts. As I watched, the carpet rippled and began to change color to a darker tone.

  Lockyer grunted and leaned forward, but before the color change was complete the camera had zoomed in on three figures sitting on the floor near the far side of the dome. It focused still closer, so that only Marcia Seretto was in the field of view.

  She must have been able to see exactly what was happening in the room we were in, because she at once pointed her finger at us. “I gave no instructions for him to be brought here,” she said in a hoarse voice. The golliwog face was angry. “Can’t you obey the simplest directive?”

  “The other two refused to come without Professor Lockyer.” Scott was close to groveling. “I thought the best thing to do was bring all three of them.”

  “I was the one who insisted on being here, Marcia,” said Lockyer. He was not at all put out by her manner and he was studying her closely. “And I was quite right to do so. You have to get out of Nine—at once. Take a look at yourself, and listen to yourself. Look around you at the air. You’re inhaling spores all the time, the air is full of them, and God knows what they’ll do to you. And look at those fungi—if they are still fungi—like nothing you’ve ever seen before. The habitat is changing faster than ever.”

  She glared out of the screen at him. “Professor Lockyer, I respect you as a teacher, but on matters like this you don’t know what you are talking about. I feel fine, the people in here with me feel fine. This is just what we have been looking for, a small habitat that will support humans and is perfect for use in space.” She waved her arm. “Take a close look. We have more efficient energy utilization than we ever dreamed of, and that means we can make more compact living environments.”

  “Marcia, didn’t you understand what I said?” Lockyer was not the type to raise his voice, but he spoke more slowly and clearly, as though to a small child. “You’re not in a stable environment, as you seem to think. You are involved with a different attractor from any you’ve seen before, and everything in the ecosphere will be governed by it. You hear me? The habitat is evolving. And you form part of the habitat. If you remain there, neither I nor anyone else can predict what is going to happen. You have to get out—now.”

  She ignored him completely. “As for you two,” she said to me and Tom. “I don’t know why you came here and I don’t much care. You represent a sheer nuisance and I’m not going to allow you to interfere with our work.”

  “So what are you going to do with us?” I asked.

  “We don’t owe you one thing. No one asked you two to come here, no one wanted you to come here. We’ll decide if you leave and when you leave.” Her protruding eyes bulged farther than ever and she rapped out: “What we’re doing is more important than any individual. But I’ll listen to you. If you can offer any reason why you shouldn’t be held until we’re ready to let you go, tell me now.”

  The force of personality, even through a TV link, was frightening. It made my nerves jangle and I could think of nothing at all to say. The surprise came from Tom.

  “Professor Lockyer was your professor, wasn’t he?” he said quietly. “The spiritual father of the Habitat League.”

  “What of it?”

  “He provided you with the original idea for habitats, and the original designs for them. He’s one of the world experts on microbial life-forms, far more knowledgeable than anyone here. When he says it’s dangerous in Nine, shouldn’t you believe him?”

  “I respect Professor Lockyer. But he has no experience with habitats of this size. And he’s wrong about Nine.” Marcia glared at us. “Anything else?”

  When we did not speak she nodded and said, “Scott, take them back. All three of them. And then I want you here.”

  Within ten minutes we were back upstairs in the windowless building and sitting again at the same table. The thick outer door on the ground floor had been locked, and two women members of the project had been left outside as guards. They had a radio unit with them, and knowing Marcia’s style it wouldn’t have surprised me if the two of them were expected to watch us all night.

  Lockyer picked up his wine glass, still half-full from our rapid departure. “At least we know where we are with Marcia.”

  “She’s a maniac,” I said. “How long does she intend to stay in that habitat?”

  “Maybe months. Certainly weeks.”

  “Continuously?”

  He nodded. “She has to. That’s the whole point about the habitat being a complete ecosphere. She’s part of it, and if she leaves she upsets the thermal and material balance. Also, anyone who goes in and out provides a disturbance of another type, too: they carry foreign organisms. Even if it’s only bacteria or viruses, every new living entry destroys the totally sealed nature of the habitat.”

  I was listening with half an ear and trying to think of ways we might get away. But Tom came to full attention and grabbed my arm hard enough to hurt. “Are you saying what I think you are?” he said to Lockyer. “When Marcia Seretto comes out of Ecosystem Nine, she’ll bring out with her anything that happens to be in there.”

  “Roughly speaking. Of course, I’m talking mainly at a microorganism level. She won’t come out carrying plants and fungi.”

  “But you have no idea which part of the habitat is the ‘aggressive’ part. For all you know, when Marcia and the others step out of that habitat they’ll be carrying with them the seeds of something that is more efficient and vigorous than the natural biosphere here on Earth. The damned thing could take over the whole planet. It’ll be the Mega-Mother they talked about in that letter, wiping out the natural biosphere—and maybe we won’t be able to live in it.”

  Lockyer put down his glass and frowned at the table. “I don’t think so,” he said at last. “The chances are, any ecosystem that works in the habitat won’t be well-suited to control the Earth’s biosphere. If it were, it should have occurred naturally during biological history.”

  Then he was silent for a much longer interval, and when he looked up his face was troubled. “But I am reminded of one thing. Marcia had an excellent understanding of recombinant DNA techniques. If she has been using them, to create tailored forms that provide efficient energy utilization and a more efficient ecosphere…”

  “Then we’ll all be in trouble when she comes out—and the longer she stays in there, the worse the odds.” Tom jumped to his feet. “We can’t risk wiping out Earth life, even if the chances are only one in a million that it will happen. We have to get the people out of Nine—and sterilize it.”

  “Sure. How do we get out of here for starters?” I said.

  But Tom was already rushing down the s
piral stairs. By the time I followed him he was hurtling toward the heavy outside door. He hit it at full speed, all two hundred and thirty pounds of him. It didn’t cave in or fly open, but it certainly shivered on its hinges.

  Tom hammered at it with both fists. “Open up!” he roared. “Open up!”

  Only an idiot or a genius would expect jailers to respond to a command like that, but the Habitat League members were different—or maybe they were just used to obeying orders.

  “What do you want?” said a nervous voice.

  “We have to get out. There’s a—a f-fire in here.”

  There was a scream of horror from the other side of the door, and a rattling of a key. Before the door could fully open Tom was pushing through. The two women were standing there, mouths gaping.

  I tried to move past Tom. I knew what would happen next. He could never bring himself to hit a woman and he would just stand there. They had been foolish enough to let us out, but now they would either shout for help over the radio or run for the other building—and they were used to being at ten thousand feet. We would never keep up. It was up to me to stop them.

  I had underestimated Tom. He reached out and grabbed the girls by the neck, one in each hand. While I watched in astonishment he banged their heads ruthlessly together and dropped the women half-stunned to the floor.

  This was Tom, the gentlest of men! I stared at him in disbelief. I thought, You’ve come a long way, baby.

  But he was off, blundering away in the semidarkness toward the dome that housed Ecosystem Nine. “Take care of them,” he shouted over his shoulder. “I need five minutes.”

  They didn’t need much taking care of. They were down in the dirt, flinching away when I bent toward them. I picked up the radio and swung it by its strap against the wall of the building. The case cracked open and the batteries flew out. When I bent over one of the women and grabbed her arm, she moaned in fear and wriggled away from me.

  “Inside,” I said. With Lockyer’s help—he had finally sauntered downstairs and out of the building—I pushed them through the door, slammed it, and turned the key. Then I walked—slowly, I might need my wind in a minute or two—toward the main building. Tom had said he needed five minutes. If anything had been sent over the radio before I destroyed it, I wasn’t sure I could guarantee him five seconds.

  I sneaked closer in the gathering darkness with Lockyer just behind me. The door of the building remained closed, and there was no sign of activity there. I crept forward to look in the window. Three people sat quietly reading.

  “The dome!” said Lockyer in an urgent whisper. Then he moved rapidly away from me.

  I looked after him. The third dome, the one that housed Nine, was glowing bright pink in the night. The internal lighting level had been turned way up.

  After one more glance at the main building—all still quiet there—I headed after Lockyer. If one of the project teams happened to be outside, they would surely be drawn to the bright dome. I could help Tom better there than I could anywhere else.

  He was standing by the dome controls and trying to peer in through one of the wall panels. The telephone was in his hand, but he was not using it.

  “Can’t get any response,” he said when he saw me. “I called inside, told Marcia to get the hell out of there while they could. But not a word back. Not one word.”

  I saw that the illumination level on the control panel had been turned to its maximum and the internal temperature was set at sterilization level—three hundred and twenty Celsius, hot enough to kill any organism that I knew about, hot enough even to destroy the Mega-Mother. The panel control knobs were broken off and lay on the floor.

  “Tom, you’ll kill them.”

  “I hope not. I warned them. I’m not going to stop. I won’t stop until Ecosphere Nine is burned clean, and anyway I can’t stop it—I buggered the controls here.” He turned to Lockyer. “These people all respect you, they’ll at least listen. Go back to the building where they have the TV, and see what’s going on inside Nine. Tell them all that Marcia has to get out in the next ten minutes, otherwise she’ll be cooked.”

  Lockyer didn’t flap easily. He nodded and set off without a word. I stood around useless for a little while, and finally followed him. There was nothing to be done here and at least I could confirm what Lockyer said to the others.

  The door was wide open when I got there and the building reception area was empty. Lockyer stood frozen in front of the big TV screen. It was still turned on, with the dome’s camera set to provide a general view of the interior. The glare of lights at their maximum setting showed every detail.

  Nine had changed again. No part of it resembled any Earth plant or animal that I could recognize. The floating spores were gone but the air was filled with tiny, wriggling threadworms, supported on gossamer strands attached to the walls and ceiling. The fuzzy carpet of green and white alfalfa sprouts had gone, too, passing through a color change and a riotous growth. The sprouts had formed long, wispy tendrils of purple-black, threading the whole interior and wriggling like a tangle of thin snakes across the floor and up the walls. They were connected to the squat mushroom plants, and small black spheres hung on them like beads on a necklace.

  The increased lighting level seemed to be driving the whole ecosphere to a frenzy of activity. A crystalline silver framework of lines and nodes was forming, linking all parts of the dome into a tetrahedral lattice. The habitat pulsed with energy. As I watched a new wave of black spheres began to inch their way toward the middle of the dome, where a great cluster of them sat on a lumpy structure near the dome’s center.

  It took me a few seconds to recognize that structure. It was formed of Marcia and her two companion crew members.

  They sat quietly on the floor of the dome. Black spheres formed a dense layer over their bodies, and long tendrils of wriggling white grew from ears, mouths, and nostrils. Their skins had a wrinkled, withered look.

  I grabbed at Lockyer’s arm. “We have to get back to the dome,” I exclaimed. “Turn off the heat. Marcia and the others are still inside and they’re…”

  They’re still alive, I was going to say. But when I looked at them I could not believe it.

  “No point now,” said Lockyer in a hushed voice. “It’s too late.” And then, still capable of objective analysis, he added, “Drained. Drained and absorbed. They are on the way to becoming part of the ecosphere. It’s evolving faster than ever, accepting everything. Look at the walls.”

  I saw that the dome’s wall panels had an eroded, eaten look. Where the gossamer threads were attached, the hard panel material was being dissolved. In places the plastic support ribbing was almost eaten through. Given a little more time, Ecosphere Nine would break free of the dome’s constraint and have access to the vast potential habitat of Earth.

  But Nine would not be given time.

  The internal temperature was rising rapidly. As we watched the support tendrils began to writhe and convulse. The silver network shivered. Black spheres were thrown free and rolled around on the floor, pulping delicate filaments beneath them. As the mushroom structures split open, ejecting a black fluid that spattered across the interior, it was easy to see the ecosphere as one great organism, sucking in more and more energy from the blazing lights and fighting desperately for survival while the temperature went up and up.

  (There was a clatter of footsteps and two men and a woman came into the room. Lockyer and I hardly noticed them. They sensed that something final and terrible was happening and they joined us, staring in horror at the TV screen.)

  Ecosphere Nine was losing its battle. The black spheres inflated and burst, throwing off puffs of vapor like popping corn as the internal temperature rose above boiling point. Gossamer threads shriveled and fell to the floor, long tendrils writhed and withered. In the blistering heat the broken mushroom structures sagged and dwindled, sinking back to floor level.

  Steam filled the interior, and in the final moments it was difficult to
see; but I was watching when the last spheres fell away from Marcia and her companions, and the tendrils trailed limp from their open mouths. What remained was hardly recognizable as human beings. Their bodies were eaten away, corroded to show the staring white bones of chest and limbs.

  And then, quite suddenly, it ended. Tendrils slowed and drooped, spheres lay on the floor like burst balloons. The silver lattice disappeared. Inside the dome, nothing moved but rising steam.

  Lockyer felt his way toward one of the metal chairs and collapsed into it. The three camp members next to him clung to each other and wept.

  I went outside and called to Tom. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine but I can’t see into the dome. What’s happening?”

  “It’s over,” I said. “It’s dead. They’re all dead.”

  And then I leaned over in the cold Colorado night, and vomited until I thought I was going to die, too.

  I thought that was the end, but of course it was just the beginning.

  No one could think of sleep that night. There seemed to be a thousand things to do: police to be informed, families told, the interior of the dome inspected, the bodies recovered.

  But none of this could begin until the morning, and some of it would take much longer; the dome needed at least forty-eight hours to cool before anyone could go inside.

  Tom, Jason Lockyer, and I went back to our former prison and sat at the table, talking and drinking wine. I didn’t ask the vintage or the pedigree, and I didn’t care what it would do to my stomach or my liver. I sluiced it down—we all did.

  “Thank God it’s over,” I said, after several minutes of silence.

  Lockyer sighed. “Back to the real world. Pity in some ways, I quite like it here. You’ve no idea how complimented a professor feels when his students appreciate him enough to take his teaching and actually implement it. I’ll be sorry to leave.”

  Not a word about wife Eleanor, waiting with her claws out back in Washington.

  “I don’t think you should leave,” said Tom. “In fact, I don’t think any of us should leave. It would be irresponsible.”