Garner flashed her a smile.
“Morning, Doc,” he said. “You look like you have something on your mind.”
She certainly did have something on her mind. Everything and nothing, all at once. Unlike her admirable colleagues, fatigue was beginning to make its presence felt to Junko. In the ER, they called it “running on fumes.”
Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. It was time for the doctor to start heeding her own prescriptions.
In the days since the Phoenix’s lab had been converted to a makeshift nuclear field facility, several experiments had been run using small amounts of the radioactive water. Provided that the material was contained, there was very little risk of exposing the laboratory technicians to elevated levels of radiation. Nonetheless, an ever-larger portion of the laboratory equipment — from beakers and culture dishes to microscopes and centrifuges — had been labeled with colored tags indicating degrees of contamination. Though much of the equipment could still be used, discarding the items permanently ruined by the modest experimentation would add even more to Junko’s mental shopping list.
Garner began his work in the lab exactly where he had left off: examining a culture of the marvelous bacterium known as Thiobacillus ferrooxidans. The previous evening he had separated the Thiobacillus from the rest of the samples, then decanted the cells into a series of petri dishes with a variety of food sources. The makeshift experiment was designed to determine which food sources the bacterium liked best and what effect this might have on its reproductive capacity.
As Garner peered into the fluorescent microscope, counting the cells yielded by each culture, Junko relayed her concerns about the water supply and her suggested course of action.
“We need a minimum number of hands on board to maintain safe operation, but those hands will use water,” Garner concurred. “We should also have the galley lock up all the sodas, juices, and bottled water they have left and adjust their food preparation. When that’s done we’ll run the numbers again.”
“I’m worried that still may not be enough,” Junko said. The sounding Byrnes had done that morning showed approximately twenty seven hundred gallons remaining in the tank.
“And the hotter we become, the farther out we go…” She did not have to elaborate.
“Let’s see if Byrnes is willing to pare down his estimates any further,” Garner said. “If the musical chairs leaves anyone standing, we can airlift them out on the helo that brings in the water.”
“Everyone seems to be devoted to Carol and the Nolan Group,” Junko mused. “We may have to pry them away from their stations, or at least draw straws.”
“That’s better than losing any more lives,” Garner said. “Beyond a certain point, we’ll all be at risk no matter who stays.”
As Junko turned back to her own workstation, the sleeve of her suit brushed one of Garner’s petri dishes. Before she could catch it, the dish flipped up on its edge and dumped its contents onto the top of the bench. She was momentarily terrified that she had cooked the lab.
“Oh dammit,” she stammered. “I’m sorry, Brock. I’m tired. No excuse, I know. I should have been paying more attention.”
“Relax, that one was just a control,” Garner said. If the dish had contained hot water, even such a relatively minor spill would have necessitated an involved scrubbing procedure. Everyone working in the lab would have had to don hoods and respirators until the bench could be scoured and the wastewater siphoned into the ship’s containment tanks. Wasted time. Wasted water. Cooked equipment. Contamination.
Even this was not enough to placate Junko: “Here I am, playing mother hen to all these kids on board, and I go and make a careless mistake that even a rookie—” She cut herself short, picked up a sponge from the sink, and began wiping the countertop. She scooped up as much of the spill as possible with one careful swipe, then daubed the rest dry.
Her chagrin was hardly warranted by the minor incident.
“Junko, it’s okay,” Garner assured her. “If you’re going to spill anything, plain of’ seawater is the thing to spill. That we’ve got lots of.” He waited as Junko wrung out the sponge, then waved the wand of a dosimeter over the site of the spill.
The bench had not been contaminated.
“There, see? No harm done.”
“No excuse,” Junko said again. She stepped back, the sponge in one gloved hand and the dosimeter in the other. “Do I look like the cleaning woman in a breeder reactor or what?” she asked with a chuckle.
The image was striking to Garner.
“What if you and I hop the next bus back to civilization?” he asked suddenly.
Junko wasn’t certain she had heard him correctly.
“Us?” she asked. “You mean, leave the ship?”
“Not for long,” Garner said. “Just a couple of days. Look at this,” he said, indicating the microscope. He pushed back from the bench to allow her to look through the eyepieces.
She brushed the hair back from her face and complied.
“What am I looking for, exactly?”
The binocular lens of the scope revealed a fluorescent galaxy no larger than a dime. Against the vibrant, ultraviolet background of the nutritive culture, the aggregation of Thiobacillus glowed brilliantly from their treatment with the acridine orange stain. Several of the cells also exhibited a second color, a bright, chromatic yellow that seemed to fill many of the cells to the point of bursting.
“The yellow is cesium 137,” Garner explained. “Stained, radioactive cesium in soluble form, taken directly from Medusa’s bottles.”
“It looks as though the cells are digesting it,” she observed.
“Exactly,” Garner said. “Digesting it. Last night I inoculated the dish with radio cesium. Today, it’s almost entirely absorbed by our little friends here.”
“That’s wonderful!” Junko said. “It means the bacteria are actually helping to clean up the hot water.”
“Not exactly,” Garner cautioned. “The radioactivity may be moved into the cells, but the cells are still in the water.”
“I see what you mean,” Junko agreed. “It doesn’t matter if the radionuclides are in the water or in the cells suspended in solution, the effect on the environment is the same.”
“Almost,” Garner said. “And here is where I think we might get a break. The Thiobacillus survive only within the water heated by our radiation source, right?”
“Right. The colder, surrounding water can’t support the bacteria.”
“But inside the slick the cells are thriving,” Garner said. “And they’re slurping up radioactive debris like crazy.”
“So what we’ve really been measuring isn’t the radiation in the water, but radiation ingested by the Thiobacillus.”
“Which means the radiation itself is being drawn into the heated water,” Garner said. “Taken up by the organic matter in solution.”
“But how does the Thiobacillus ‘know’ how to stay with the nuclides?”
“Bacteria act a lot like sharks in how they track a scent from a distance,” Garner explained. “It’s not that they know which way the source is, but when they lose the scent, they double back until they find it again.”
“So it’s the allure of the nuclides that’s keeping the Thiobacillus floating along with the isotopes in solution.”
“Right.” Garner nodded. “So instead of trying to retrieve the radionuclides from the water, maybe we can achieve the same effect by collecting the bacteria.”