Georgia on My Mind and Other Places (35 page)

“Small?” I asked. “How small?”

“You sound like Marcia. Small enough to fit in this wine bottle. The original self-sustaining ecospheres lived in one-liter containers.”

“That’s
small
,” said Tom.

“You also sound like Marcia.
Too
small, she said. But she asked me if it would be possible to design an ecosphere that was big enough for a few humans to live in—and live off, in the sense that it would provide them with food, water, and air—but not much bigger than a house. I told her I didn’t see why not, and I even sketched out the way I would go about designing the mix of living organisms to do it. You need something that does photosynthesis, and you need saprophytes that help to decompose complex organic chemicals to simpler forms. But with an adequate energy supply there’s no reason why an ecosphere to support humans has to be Earth-sized.

“Marcia graduated, and I thought she had taken a job somewhere on the West Coast. I didn’t worry about her, because she was the most charismatic person I had ever met. She seemed able to talk the rest of the students into doing anything. It turned out that I was right but I had underestimated her. The next thing I knew, I had a letter from another one of my students. He wanted to know what end-forms were possible when you started an ecosphere with a given mix of organisms. The answer, of course, is that today’s theories are inadequate. No one knows where you’ll finish. But it was the first hint I had that something had gone on beyond my lecture. I sent him a reply, and a week later in my In-box at the university I found a letter with an odd stamp on it, like a caricature of a black-faced doll.”

“A golliwog,” I said.

“So I learned. I also realized that it looked a lot like Marcia. The letter said that I was the official founding father of the Habitat League. I’ve seen stuff like that before, silly student jokes. So it didn’t worry me. But
then
I began to receive anonymous letters with the same stamp. And when I read those, I began to worry.”

“We saw one,” I said. “It was sent to you but the mails fouled up the delivery.”

“The person who wrote them said that Marcia had set up her own organization within Ascend Forever, with its own chapters and its own sponsors for funding. She had organized a camp in Colorado—this one—and they were following my advice on setting up self-sustaining ecospheres that could be used as a model for space habitats. I replied to him, saying the Colorado mountains were not a bad site, but they weren’t the best.”

“Why not?”

“Simulated space environment,” said Tom, before Lockyer could answer. “If you want to match the spectrum of solar radiation in low earth orbit, you should go as high as you can and as near the equator as you can, where the sunlight is less affected by the atmosphere. Somewhere in the Andes near Quito would be ideal.”

“You’re a member of the Habitat League?” Lockyer was worried.

“Never heard of them until today. But I’ve read about space colonies and habitats.”

“Then you probably know that you have to do things a lot differently than they’re done in the Earth’s natural biosphere. For example, the carbon dioxide cycle on Earth, from atmosphere, through plants and animals, and back to the atmosphere, takes eight to ten years. In the ecospheres that I helped to design, that was down to a day or two. And that means other changes—major ones. And
that
means unpredictable behavior of the ecosphere, and no way to know the stable end conditions without trying them. Sometimes the whole ecosphere will damp down to a low level where only microbial life-forms can be supported. That happened in the first half dozen attempts out here. And there was always the possibility of a real anomaly, a thriving, stable ecosphere that seemed to be heading to an end-point equal in vigor to the Earth biosphere, but grossly different from it.”

“Ecosphere Nine?” I said.

“You’ve got it. That one was first established four months ago, with its own initial mix of macro and micro life-forms. Almost from the beginning it began to show strange oscillatory behavior—cyclic patterns of development that weren’t exactly repeating. It reminded me when I saw it of the life cycle and aggregation patterns of the amoebic slime molds, such as
Dictyostelium discoideum
, though you may be more reminded of the behavior of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky chemical reaction, or of the Oregonator and Brusselator systems. They all have limit cycles around stable attractor conditions.”

He must have seen the expression on my face. “Well, let’s just say that the behavior of Ecosphere Nine originally had some resemblance to phenomena in the literature. But it isn’t in a stable limit cycle. The man who wrote to me was worried by that, because he was one of the people who would live in Nine’s habitat. He called me and asked if I would make a trip out here and look at Nine, without telling anyone back home where I was going—he had promised to keep this secret, just as all the others had.

“I agreed, and I must say I was fascinated by the whole project. When I arrived here, ten days ago, I was greeted very warmly—almost embarrassingly warmly—by Marcia Seretto, and shown Nine with great pride. In her eagerness to show me how my ideas had been implemented it did not occur to her immediately to ask why I was here. Nine was doing wonderfully well as a possible space habitat, easily sustaining the three humans inside it. But I realized at once that it hadn’t stabilized. And it has still not stabilized. It is
evolving
, and evolving fast. I have no idea of its end state, but I do know this: the life cycles in Ecosphere Nine are more efficient than those on Earth and that means they are biologically more
aggressive
. I pointed that out to Marcia, and five days ago I recommended action.”

A door slammed downstairs and I heard a hubbub of voices.

“What did you recommend?” asked Tom. He ignored the downstairs noise.

“That the human occupants of Nine be removed from it at once. And that the whole ecosphere be sterilized. I appealed to the staff to support my views. But I didn’t realize at the time how things are run here. Marcia controls everything, and I think she is insane. She violently opposed my suggestions, and to prove her point that there is no danger she herself went in to Ecosphere Nine. She is there now, together with the man who brought me out here. And she insisted that I be held here. No one will say for how long, or what will happen to me next.”

There was a clatter of footsteps on the spiral staircase and Scott burst into the room followed by the other four who had brought us here. His face was pale, but he was obviously relieved when he saw all three of us quietly seated at the table.

“You lied,” he said to me. “You have nothing to do with our Philadelphia chapter, or any other. You have to come with me. Marcia wants to talk to you. Both of you.”

“What about me?” said Lockyer.

“She didn’t say anything about seeing you.”

“Well, I need to talk to her.” He stood up. “Let’s go.”

“We’re not supposed to take you.”

“We won’t go if Lockyer doesn’t,” I said quickly. “You’ll have to drag us.”

Scott and the others looked agonized. They weren’t at all the types to approve of violence, but they had to follow orders.

“All right,” said Scott at last. “All of you. Come on.”

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.”