Steve nodded. "FIAWOL," he agreed.
Alex held up his bowl. "More gruel, please."
Gordon laughed. "No, no, it is 'Please sir, may I have some more?' "
Mike roared. "You like that stuff? Don't you have 'gruel' where you come from?"
"Oh, sure," Alex retorted. "We make it from the wheat we harvest on our limitless acres."
"Well, if it's cereal you want," said Sherrine, "you've come to the right place. What Wall Street is to junk bonds, Minneapolis is to cereal grain."
Mike scratched his beard again. "Take some home with you, why don't you? I'm sure we could stick a case of Quaker Oats or Cream of Wheat into the Titan with you. A gift from Earth."
"Hey!" said Sherrine. They all looked at her and she spread her arms apart. "Why not?"
"Why not what?"
She stood up and bounced to the center of the room. "If we're going to loft a rocket we should pack it with gifts. As much as it will take. Not just oatmeal, but… Oh, everything. Anything! Anything we've got down here that the Angels need!"
Doc raised his eyebrows. "That's a great idea, Sherri. It'll show the Angels that they've still got a few friends down here. What sort of stuff do your folks need, Alex?"
"What do we need? What don't we need?" Alex wondered how well-informed the fans were about conditions in the habitats. Not very, he suspected. "Bacon and eggs. Meats of any sort. Milk. Carrots, broccoli, everything you were serving at the Meet the Readers Party Hell, any vegetable. You have foodstuffs down here that some of our folks have never seen, let alone eaten."
"Chitlins and collard greens?" asked Steve.
"Sure."
"You guys must really be desperate."
"Have you ever lived on a diet of lettuce and mustard greens? Zucchini, sometimes. We do grow vegetables, but there are never enough. You can't eat spider plants! And some of our plant species have died off. We synthesize a lot of vitamins, but nutritional deficiencies are one of our biggest worries." Along with solar flares, nitrogen outgassing, shortages of metals and plastics, and you name it. But let's not disillusion anyone.
"Food, then," said Mike. "Geez, we should name the ship The Flying Greengrocer."
"Seeds, Mike," said Sherrine. "Not live plants. Call it Johnny Appleseed." She went to the small lamp table and rummaged in its drawer, emerging with a pencil and a small pad of note paper.
Mike scowled. "I knew that. I am the county ag agent, you know. Not that I know a damn thing about it--"
"Then how the hell did you get the job?" Doc demanded. "As if I didn't know."
"Seniority, of course. I was able to bump out someone else. Helps that I can claim minority ancestry."
"What kind of minority, white man?" Steve asked.
"Yes, just so. Native American," Mike said. "Doesn't show, does it?" He shrugged. "But we can claim it, so I do. The point is, I may be able to get stuff, and I can sure get access to the library records."
He pushed himself out of his armchair and paced the room, rubbing his fist with his hand. "You'll want plants to satisfy three needs," he continued, thinking aloud. "Hot damn! Who would ever have thought that a county agent and the space program… Well, okay, nutrition is one. You want maximum food value for minimum energy input. Oxygen production and CO2 scrubbing is another. And radiation hardening. So…" He paused and rubbed his face. "I should sit down and put together a list, balancing all three needs. But for a start… Sherrine, write these down: green leafy vegetables and yellow vegetables. Sweet potatoes, carrots, spinach."
"Why them?" asked Gordon.
"They're great sources of vitamin A," Doc told him. "Important for bone growth, and radiation resistance."
"Tocopherol, vitamin E. That's good for radiation, too," said Steve.
"Sure. We can include a couple of bulk bottles of concentrated multivitamins."
"And tomatoes," Mike added. "Rich in vitamin A and they're easy to grow hydroponically."
"We have some of those," Alex said. "But they went bad. Started making people sick. We still grow tomatoes, but we make fertilizer out of them, mulch for the moon rock soil."
"Tomato seeds. Several varieties." Sherrine wrote rapidly. "You must need hydroponic chemicals, too. Even with closed loop recovery, there have to be losses. What do you need for that?"
"Nitrogen, for one thing," Alex said.
"Potassium nitrate," said Gordon. They all looked at him in surprise. "Potassium nitrate," he repeated. "You know. Saltpeter."
"Flower seeds," said Steve.
Alex looked at him in surprise. "Can't eat flowers," he said.
Steve shook his head. "Not for food. But as long as you need plants to produce oxygen, some of them might as well be pretty."
"Pretty is fine," Gordon said. "But pretty takes time, too." He shrugged. "Here you are rich. So much to eat. Not made of algae."
"Green slime," Alex said. "Good stuff. Bubble waste water through a vat of green slime. Takes out the ketones. Dissolve the carbon dioxide. It grows, and you can bake it into bread…"
"Okay," said Steve. "We send up everything we can get, though. Why not? Seeds are small. They weigh next to nothing; and they'll keep practically forever."
"Is good," Gordon said. "When we know how much mass we can take up, we can ask station commander what is needed. I think is not proper to ask until--"
The room fell silent. "Until you believe in this," Sherrine said. "Don't get their hopes up."
"Something like that," Alex said. "I mean--we're grateful, and you're risking everything, and--"
"But it's pretty mad to talk about finding an old Titan, fueling it up, and lighting it off," Doe said. "Of course it is. But--" He held up a finger. The others joined in unison as he said, "It's the Only Game in Town." Doc's eyes lit. "Spices. Pepper. Thyme. Savory. Oregano. Sweet Basil. Dill--parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme…"
Alex's mouth watered. Mythical flavors from childhood. "Ketchup," he remembered. "And mustard. Peanuts. Gordon, you have never tasted peanut butter. And not just foodstuffs, either." As long as he was daydreaming, why not daydream big. "We could use all sorts of materials. Machine tools, too."
"Plastics," said Gordon. "They can be shredded and remolded. Could always use more."
Alex shook his head. "Plastics would be too bulky to lift in useful quantities. We need things that are small and valuable."
"Don't rule anything out, yet," said Sherrine. "We're brainstorming."
"Too bad you can't grow plastic from seeds," said Doe. "Like you can plants."
"But you can!" Mike said suddenly.
"What?"
"Well, not quite; but… There was an experimental field--in Iowa?--where they grew plastic corn. Alcaligeneseutrophus is a bacterium that produces a brittle polymer. Eighty percent of its dry weight is a naturally grown plastic: PHB, poly-beta-hydroxybutyrate…"
"Contains only natural ingredients!" declared Steve with a grin.
"Researchers found they could coax the bug into producing a more flexible plastic by adding a few organic acids to the glucose 'soup.' They cloned the polymer producing enzymes--oh, 1987 or so--and spliced them into E. coli. Later, they spliced them into turnips, and finally corn. That was the bonanza. The mother lode of plastic. The corn grew plastic kernels. Think of it: plastic corn on the cob," he chuckled. "Shuck the cobs and you get pellets. Perfect for melting in a forming machine hopper."
Doc frowned. "And you plant some of the plastic seed corn and grow more? That doesn't sound right."
Mike shook his head. "No, that was the problem, plastic seeds don't germinate. So you'd still need the original bugs, but you can breed them in vats and harvest the polymers directly Not as efficient as the corn, but… They were this close to cracking the sterility problem when the National Scientific Research Advisory Board halted all testing."