“I’m planning to go.”
“I bet you stay. That you don’t get caught if you do smuggle genes out of Pennington, but you stay anyway.”
“Maybe.” Ev kept his tone noncommittal.
Women didn’t usually affect him the way this one did. But then, in his experience, matrons doted on him, while younger ones fawned or flirted. Miraly did neither. Ev felt the way he had when he first saw Ladies of the Lake and met brilliant, hard-edged beauty that he could not live without.
He had two years to persuade her to come along to the stars.
In the three years since the disaster of the prairie. Mark’s life had been, to all outward appearances, normal. He was now a junior faculty member with papers to publish and classes to teach. In secret, he harbored a purpose and a dread that gave him broken sleep and bad dreams. The single worst and most compelling nightmare happened one evening as he napped after dinner. In the dream, Mark beheld a cosmic wake, the Earth in a tattered, dull green death shroud, and passing comets with the wings and the faces of archangels, mourning. Later that same night, he went through the motions of teaching a seminar in a stunned daze.
With his perpetual ache of insomniac fatigue, the afternoon class in introductory ecology was the most difficult part of the day for him. But he prepared methodically, presented thoughtfully, and struggled to get the importance of the subject across to often disinterested young minds.
Early in the semester, Mark had issued each student in Intro Eco a glass ball and the task of filling the ball with water and a balanced population of algae, brine shrimp, and micro-organisms. The balls were then sealed. By now, mid-semester, a variety of initial mistakes in the composition of the microecologies were apparent, in the form of sick and cloudy or dead and slimy contents in the glass eco-spheres.
“The Earth is an ecosphere too.” Mark meant to make one more, conclusive point before the hour was over. “That is, a system closed except for energy, receiving from the Sun a fairly constant amount of electromagnetic radiation. Energy from the outside was necessary but not sufficient for life on Earth; life also had to organize itself into a dynamic yet stable balance.”
“It’s not materially closed any more,” objected a student named Pol—one of the Mark’s least favorite students. “We’ve got space resources now.”
“True. But Earth always had space resources in the form of meteorite and comet impacts, and cosmic rays and dust.” To decisively regain the upper hand, he threw out a testable packet of information. “Life on Earth may have originated with organic compounds formed in interstellar dust clouds. In the early days of the Solar System, there was a continual rain of interstellar dust, some of which contained hydrocarbons, including molecules that may be considered the precursors of amino acids. Thus the dust from interstellar space seeded Earth with the potential for life, if the Cosmic Genesis hypothesis is correct.”
Pol slouched.
“With or without closure of the planetary ecosystem, it’s vital that populations of organisms be in balance, constituting a dynamic, yet stable, system. If an ecosystem is destabilized, you get a runaway degradation of the environment—as in some of your ecospheres. In other words, a partial or total die-off.”
Pol interrupted Mark again. “But space resources mean we can live under domes on Earth even if nature dies.”
“Don’t count on it,” said Ev, who, to Mark’s complete surprise, had appeared in the classroom doorway, startlingly out of place in an expensive business suit. “The out-planets could decide to keep their resources instead of throwing them down into a gravity well.”
Mark introduced Ev to the class. “This is Dr. Evrett Reynolds. A research scientist with Pennington Genetech, who grew up on Titan.” Mark wondered with alarm why Ev was here. It had to be ship business.
Without asking permission, Ev picked up Pol’s ecosphere and walked away to the window’s light, examining it. Then he said, “You botched this one. And no fair opening it to fix it up. So you might as well throw it away.” Ev tossed the ecosphere back to Pol, who bristled as he caught it.
Mark hastily dismissed the class. Pol left muttering. Some of the departing female students giggled and whispered among themselves with backward glances. Resplendent in the business suit, Ev radiated a sardonic intensity which blew the last of the students out of the classroom, including those who might have lingered to ask questions.
With the room cleared, Ev turned to Mark. “Today the Supreme Court upheld the Alaska law. No exports of wild biomatter. Interpretation extended to seeds and other germ plasm.”
Mark felt a surge of consternation, with a sharp and unsettling undertone of relief. He collected his thoughts out of the mishmash of feelings. “It’s ridiculous! The law in Alaska was meant to prevent wild places from being dug up wholesale. Seeds, and germ plasm, which the starship needs, are different! What are a few seeds?”
“They’re seeds of an idea, and the idea is a new world,” Ev said forcefully. “Listen. The Genesis Foundation expected this. The ship leaves tonight.”
“What!” Mark sagged against a counter.
“Everybody won’t make it before the launch, so there’ll be a whole fleet of rocket planes and old Delta Clippers coming up from Earth to meet the ship tonight and in the next few days. It’ll be a mad scramble. The ship will add passengers from the colonies and outworlds all the way to the end of the Solar System. But they’ve asked some of us on Earth-such as biological scientists—to come tonight to maximize the chances of us making it out unhindered.”
“Unhindered?” Mark stammered. “What does that mean?”
“Mark, the court’s decision is going to be a signal flag. It will encourage protestors, corporations, and the government itself to undertake God only knows what actions against people trying to join the ship and against the ship itself. It’s a good bet that the President of the U.S. will declare martial law at midnight tonight.”
Mark’s nerves jangled. “Wait. Wait! The ship can’t possibly have absolutely everything it needs yet for terraforming—”
“The more genes the better,” Ev agreed. “We ought to grab extra seeds on the way out.”
Automatically, Mark led the way toward the reference collection. Mark thought about the little dead eco-spheres. Wrong initial conditions. In some cases, only slightly wrong. End result, the slime of decay. He felt hot and prickly. “They’re sure they’ve got everything to make ecosystems?”
“The planetary ecologists have been running computer models continuously with the species actually in the ship’s freezers. The more diversity and redundancy the better. So, now that the chips are down, the Foundation is grabbing everything it can, be it animal, vegetable, or virus.”
“The Foundation is stealing biota?”
“All over the world.”
Astounded, Mark asked no more questions.
“We have to go by Anna’s office, don’t we?” Ev asked. The ecology department occupied one floor of the ancient biology building. The reference collection was located just down the dusty and crowded corridor from the office of Annetine van Leeuwen. “Does she know you’ve been planning to go?”
“She guesses,” Mark said tersely. He did not elaborate on Anna’s sharp glances, the frosty nod of her head when he asked for specimens for Active research needs, intending to send them to the Foundation for the ship. For years, Anna van Leeuwen had been outspoken in her criticism of Samantha Berry’s decision to leave on the earlier starship. Anna had complained bitterly about having inherited the department chairmanship from Berry. Before the starship, the two middle-aged women had been friends and department allies.