The Guac Bug
by Charles L. Harness
Illustration by Authur George
The Meteorite
Quentin Thomas, lawyer, and his favorite client, Walter Gruen (Gruen Pharmaceuticals), had been motoring along the Skyline Drive that Wednesday morning. They had stopped at a deserted overlook, parked the car, got out, and they were looking down into the valley and the seven loops in the Shenandoah River, when something shrieked through the air behind them and exploded with a blinding light into the front of the lawyer’s brand-new Pathfinder.
The two men stood paralyzed a moment, then rushed back to the car. The radiator was steaming and sizzling and gurgling. Whatever had hit it had left a six-inch hole in the grille. The coolant mix of water and glycol was dribbling away on something very hot and was immediately changing into steam.
Thomas put his hands on his hips and looked dubiously at his friend. “Meteor?”
“Meteorite,” corrected the chemist. “Can I have it?”
“It’s all yours.” The Lawyer reached into the front seat for his car phone. “Meanwhile, let’s see if the ranger can find us a tow truck.” As he placed the call he was thinking a few feet farther west, and he… or Gruen… oh well… No use thinking about it. They had been lucky. But never underestimate your chances of being struck by a meteorite. That woman in Alabama… the thing went through her roof… actually scraped her leg… And that village in India… one had hit a dog. “Oh, hello? Ranger? Look, I have a problem…”
In the Lab
They were waiting as Thomas walked into the conference room. Gruen, of course. And Ben Blake, the chief chemist, and a young woman with intense dark eyes and sunken cheeks whom he had seen in the lab but whose name he did not know. Gruen introduced him to Dr. Lacey, bioanalyst.
“Mary,” she said.
“Quentin.”
In the center of the table lay two pieces of black rock, each half the size of a coffee mug.
“It’s your meteorite,” Gruen explained. “Net weight, about 3½ pounds. Ben?”
“It’s definitely from Mars, Quentin,” said the scientist. “We’ve done a lot of work on it. Walter thought we should have this meeting before we publish.”
Thomas eyed the two pieces thoughtfully. “Yes… quite right.” He frowned. “Mars?” The word hung there.
Gruen smiled. “I didn’t believe it myself at first. Actually, it’s in good company.”
Blake said, “Counting this one, there are now at least fourteen Martian meteorites in our museums. The five-kilo rock returned last year by Pathfinder Five—‘PV’—is of course the current standard. Before that, it was the four-pound meteorite found in the Allan Hills of Antarctica in 1984—ALH 84001. Our little prize is geologically and chemically quite similar to PV and ALH 84001. PV and our rock were thrown high into the Martian air by a tremendous meteoric impact some fifteen million years ago. They were already four billion years old when that happened. PV fell back to the planet’s surface but our rock was hurled into an escape orbit. It circled the sun for fifteen million years and was exposed to cosmic rays that modified its surface in characteristic ways. We can calculate the time it spent in space by radiometric dating. Some minor gravitational perturbation—maybe a passing asteroid—knocked it out of solar orbit, and so, Quentin, last year it hitched a ride on your auto.” He handed Thomas a pair of plastic gloves. “Go ahead, pick it up. Either piece, both… You can’t hurt them.”
Thomas snapped the gloves on and picked up one of the pieces. It was black on the outer surface, but a mottled gray where the diamond saw had sliced through. Obviously, some sort of internal irregularities. Pores? he wondered. He looked up questioningly at Blake.
“We’ll start with the easy stuff,” said the chemist. “As you know, both PV and ALH 84001 have properties that strongly suggest life. Our rock has all these. Number one, the tiny globules of carbonate. We have similar chemistry on our own planet: creatures in Earth oceans take in carbon dioxide from the air and likewise convert it to carbonates. Second—within those globules, we find PAH’s—polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, such as are produced by living organisms when they decay. Third, within the globules, we find two kinds of magnetic minerals, iron oxide and iron sulfide—components of certain Earth bacteria. Fourth—the rims of the globules contain structures suggesting that microbacteria had once lived there.”
Thomas peered closely at the shard. “Suggestive…”
Blake said, “True, but at the outset, we must point out that each and every one of these four characteristics could have been produced inorganically, without the aid of any kind of life. However, we believed it practically impossible that all four could have been produced simultaneously inorganically, and in the same locus. And with that thought in mind, we investigated further.” He paused, looked over at Gruen, who nodded.
The chemist continued. “So far, nothing really different from PV or ALH 84001. However…
Here his voice shifted into a dead laconic monotone, which Thomas sensed was an attempt to conceal excitement. “However, there’s one very big difference. We recovered a viable life form from our rock. When we sawed open the rock we found a colony of something—microcells in an internal fissure. Apparently the colony was sufficiently deep inside to resist destruction by heat, and was chilled so quickly by the cold of space that it was preserved intact. Recall, ordinarily when DNA ages, it tends to break into small pieces, about one to two hundred base pairs. That didn’t happen here.”
Thomas thought back. DNA had been recovered from insects and vertebrates of a hundred million years ago, when dinosaurs ruled the earth. But he knew both PV and ALH 84001 were supposed to be over four billion years old. His eyes suddenly widened. “But—from Mars? Do you realize—?”
Gruen’s mouth tightened in a half-smile. “Yes indeed. Life on Mars. But do we dare announce what we have? When the news gets out, the media all over the world will explode. Our labs would be in total disarray overnight. Oh, we know the full story will come out sooner or later, but right now we believe the publicity would seriously damage our research. We need more time. At the moment we think the Martian microorganism is useful, very useful. But is that the whole story? Can it also be deadly? Is there a downside? We don’t think so, but we don’t want to identify the source until we know more.”
The lawyer nodded. “Makes sense.”
Blake said, “Meanwhile our culture vats are working twenty-four hours a day. We now have several kilos of the product. We’re preparing a paper for Science—no mention of Mars.”
Thomas frowned. “Careful. .. premature disclosure could screw up your patent program.”
“No patent,” Gruen firmly. “We’re dedicating it to the public.”
Thomas raised his eyebrows. “No patent? It’s just an academic curiosity? No commercial possibilities?”
“We’re not certain,” Gruen said. “But if it does what we think, it will be very useful indeed. And that’s why we want it to be freely available to the public. Ben?”
“Watch this,” Blake said. The lights dimmed. The screen on the opposite wall lit up. “A little drama recorded by the electron microscope. The blob in the lower right is a T-cell, one of the most important cells of the human immune system. Thirty minutes earlier we infected that cell with a Bis virus, which we assume is now in the process of integrating itself into the DNA of the cell and taking over command of the cell machinery. Now watch the upper left-hand comer.”