The statement first made me angry, then made me laugh. “Simon! Our ideas of what’s small don’t exactly jibe, I don’t think.”
He nodded affably. “Right enough, Bob. And this I’m pretty sure is my idea of small. It’ll seem pretty big for you, unless things have changed as radically for you in the past few weeks as they have for me. No? But anyway I couldn’t tell you about it over the phone. If this leaks I’m cooked. You got that? Cooked. Let me give you this first.”
He handed me an envelope, unsealed, which my fingers opened before caution could stop me. The writing on the check inside certainly stopped me breathing.
“What for?” I said.
“Hey, don’t take it wrong! I’m not paying for silence! Believe me!” Then he laughed and took a sip of ale. “I’m paying for your research. You need money? You have it. Right there. It’s made out to your obscure little frog-watch organization so you don’t have to declare it as a gift or as income. Nonprofit, right? Did I get the name right?”
I nodded.
“Good,” he said. “So, let me ask you. Have you made a decision about—you remember what we talked about? About your frog skins? You weren’t sure if you were going to do it or not? What are you doing now?”
I told him about the cricket frogs. About Iowa. About possibly trying a re-insertion of the species in Wisconsin and Michigan.
He nodded. “So you think that’s the one? The cricket frog?”
I pursed my lips. I hadn’t made a decision to genetically alter them or any other frogs. What a decision to make, after all! How could I do it lightly?
Yet I had to admit the idea was growing on me. Deciding to go to Iowa, to fetch eggs if we could find them, was pushing me even farther in that direction.
I nodded hesitantly.
“Good.” He grinned widely at that. The widest I had seen him grin. “Listen, Bob, we’re going to work together.”
“Hold on. You haven’t told me what all the secrecy’s about.”
“The reason for all the secrecy’s a secret.”
“Yeah, but come on. You’re dragging me here in the middle of the night, and we’ve got beers in our hands. I don’t know about you, but having a beer in my hand—and the fact that you put it in my hand—means you’re about to lay a story on me. So lay it on. Thick, if you have to.”
He shook his head. “It’s amazing you got anywhere in science, you old barfly. But I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you exactly what I wouldn’t want winded about, because someone in the news biz might get ahold of it, and might think it really is what’s going on. You get me?”
I nodded hesitantly. “I think so.”
“Good,” he said. “Just imagine this. I’m telling you a story, see? Imagine someone sinks a lot of money into getting to Mars. A lot. To the point that if the nations of our two worlds, Earth and Moon, should ever get together and decide to finally make that push for putting people on Mars, maybe even putting people there in great numbers, then that person would stand to earn a lot—a lot of dough. I know it’s hard to imagine someone like that, but do it for the sake of argument.” He arched an eyebrow at me. “And now imagine this. Imagine the space biz undergoes a depression. The nations pull back from ideas about Mars. This someone we’re talking about—let’s call him Mr. Kud-zu—he uses some of his resources and keeps pushing for Mars. Only he does it in secret. Say he thinks of a way of attracting public interest in that planet, and he does the development work. Say he pulls it off, and it’s a phenomenal stunt. I don’t know what the stunt would be—but, oh, say he invests in a bioengineering project, and creates a plant that can live on Mars, that can reproduce in those conditions and spread like mad, and that slowly begins to alter the atmosphere and hence climate of the Red Planet once it’s there.”
“That’s an awful lot of what-ifs,” I said.
“I suppose so,” he said. “But they’re good ones.”
I laughed at his devil-take-it gesture. “Do I get this story right? This Mr. Kudzu sends these things to Mars? Without consulting anyone else? And these things then reproduce and somehow attract public interest?”
“Hypothetically, yes,” Simon said, leaning back and smiling. “Think how cheap it would be—from my point of view, Bob, not yours. All you would need to do, once you have the proper organisms, would be to send the ship. You wouldn’t need to get it back. It could all be automatic. A robot planter—or hundreds of them, more efficiently—would emerge from the landing craft and go about the process of cultivating what are in essence weeds on Mars.”
“Weeds on Mars, eh?”
“Yes. Weeds. The weeds, the robots, the landing craft, they all stay there. That’s a big savings right there. But you remember our conversation about changing things? Ecostrophism? I think I told you back then: you have to decide. Either you’re going to keep hands off, or not. If you decide to get your hands messy, then it’s an open question as to how far you go.”
“I see,” I said. I did begin to see and what I was seeing bothered me not a little. “What sort of plant might it be?”
“Like I said, a bioengineered one. But with some Earthly beginnings. Say, a quick-growing vine that might be common in the South. And some resistant root system capable of dealing with permafrost and other extreme conditions, say from some tundra plant. Plus other genes from hither and yon. I’m just putting this out as theoretical, you know.”
“Theoretical,” I repeated, nodding, seeing the Green Spot in my mind’s eye. I waved the check in my hand. “Theoretically speaking, what part does this huge check have to do with this story which of course is not true and which you don’t want the news to get?”
Simon put his hands together and looked at the marvel of bioengineering contained in his brown ale bottle. “I suppose that piece of paper might fit in the story. For instance, imagine that Mr. Kudzu wants a bioengineered toad—one with high tolerance for UV and maybe low-O2 conditions—”
“A toad? Why?”
“Well, maybe Mr. Kudzu released not only a species of plant of Mars, but insects, too. More than one kind. A pollinator, a predator, a pest. The first two kicked the bucket. I mean, theoretically they might kick the bucket, and Mr. Kudzu might need a back-up predator. The pollinators don’t matter, since the kudzu—I mean the Martian plant, whatever it might be—spreads pretty rapidly as it is by means of rhizomes and creepers. It’s all-purpose, when it comes to propagation. To come up with new predators, however, Mr. Kudzu might possibly already have people working on spiders and a kind of parasitic wasp, but he might think it worthwhile to have—”
“Martian toads?” I said. My mind staggered—easy enough to do, since it was already staggering even though I had hardly touched the ale. I mean: A kudzu grows on Mars!
“You got it,” he said, raising his bottle in toast.
Later, after several more toasts, and several more of the means whereby we toasted, he looked at me soberly, or at least with the appearance of sobriety, and said, “Bob, you know it as well as I do. Some things are impossible to do alone. So you got to get help. And what do you do. You give them a kick in the ass. A big one. A wailing big kick in the ass! The whole damned world public if that’s what it takes! A wailing big kick!”
The Green Spot. A bright spot in the history of our reaching out to other planets, is how it will be remembered.
And as a wailing good kick in the hinder!
Me, I’m glad my rear still smarts.
Whether Simon will be as glad, once the public finds out how it’s been flamboozled, I don’t know—