“Finding such an alga might be possible,” Alvarez said. “But finding one that is also capable of withstanding the temperatures in your anomaly is a far different story.”
“Do you think it has to be a local species?” Garner asked.
“Unquestionably,” Alvarez said. “Given the tremendous quantity of culture material you’ll need, it isn’t practical to import an exotic species. Even this lab doesn’t have access to large, purified cultures, and growing the cells would take weeks.” Alvarez scratched at his beard.
“No, what you’ll need to do is somehow invigorate the processes among species already out there.”
In confirming the arrangements with Alvarez by radio, Garner had faxed the phycologist a list of the most prevalent algae found in Medusa’s wet samples. Species, he reasoned, which were already coexisting with the Thiobacillus.
“Did you see any likely candidates on my list?” Garner asked.
“Three,” Alvarez said. “The first is too rare in the field and too finicky to keep alive in laboratory culture, so I doubt it’ll be of much use. The second is much easier to culture and grows quickly, but I don’t know if the adsorption of bacteria will be high enough.”
“And the third?” Garner asked.
“The third is Ulva morina,” Alvarez said. “Not at all like its macroscopic cousin, Ulva latuca, which most people know as sea lettuce. Ulva morina is a marvelously tough microscopic alga found around volcanic fissures in the North Atlantic.”
“So it’s tolerant of high temperatures,” Garner said.
Alvarez nodded.
“And it coexists with sulfur-sniffing bacteria like your Thiobacillus. So your short list of candidates may be very short indeed. I’ve got a couple of calls in to the Bedford Institute of Oceanography just across town here but I think Ulva morina will be your best and only bet.”
“Do you have a culture of it here?” Garner asked.
“A small one. One of my students, studying the botany of extreme environments, brought back a seed culture from her fieldwork in Iceland. It’s enough material to see how Thiobacillus responds to it, but if it works, I’ll have to think hard about where to get the kind of quantity you’ll need.”
The three academicians worked together to set up a bench-top experiment using Garner’s hot samples of Thiobacillus and Alvarez’s stock culture of Ulva morina. The first set of trials had just been prepared when a delivery arrived for Junko, in care of Alvarez’s laboratory.
She signed for the two smallish packing cases couriered from the National Livingston Laboratory. As Alvarez cleared some additional desk space for her, Junko carefully unpacked a laptop computer and a processing unit from inside the cases.
“Ah, the ubiquitous magic box known as the computer,” Alvarez said.
“I tried one, for about six months, back in the 1980s,” he said. “The department makes me use an e-mail account, but in general I avoid them. Packed in boxes like this, the beasts seem harmless enough, but I’m not so certain about the rest of the time. I guess I still haven’t found a worthwhile use for them.”
“I might not have either,” Junko said as she began setting up the machine. “We’ll know more in an hour or two.”
Junko tinkered with the new computer long into the evening while Garner continued his experiments using the Ulva culture and the Thiobacillus collected by Medusa. Meanwhile, Alvarez had taken a keen interest in the bacterium and occupied his time by looking at it under his fluorescent microscope, housed within a black-sheeted area in the corner of the lab. It was past dusk and the lab had grown utterly silent, save for the sound of seawater percolating through the culture tanks.
The sudden sound of Alvarez’s voice made Garner and Junko look up with a start.
“Eureka,” Alvarez said from within the lightless enclosure. “Or ‘bingo,” or ‘hot damn,” or whatever we mad scientists are supposed to say. I think I’ve found something.
“Look at this,” Alvarez said, beckoning them inside the tent. As Junko complied, Alvarez narrated what she was seeing.
“On the left is one of the Medusa samples you brought in,” Alvarez said. “On the right is a preserved sample of bacteria from one of my students’ fieldwork.”
“They look the same to a novice like me,” Junko said. “Except for the effects of the preservative, maybe.”
“They are the same,” Alvarez agreed, as Garner took his turn at the scope.
“Now look at this.” Alvarez moved the field culture aside and set a new slide next to the sample taken from Medusa.
This time Garner carefully studied the comparison.
“Not the same,” he said. “The one on the right has a different membrane structure and isn’t as crowded with organelles.” In monitoring Medusa’s camera arrays as they flipped though countless images of plankton assemblages, Garner had become expert at noting gross differences in cellular structures.
“Not bad,” Alvarez said, impressed. “It took me the past hour to notice the same thing. The culture under there now, the one on the right, is a natural strain of Thiobacillus ferrooxidans,” Alvarez explained.
“Yet it looks different,” Garner said.
“Because it is different,” Alvarez said. “Only marginally, but as you can see, indisputably. In fact, the difference is so slight that I might even chalk it up to chance mutation or environmental factors.”
“Except for the near-perfect match with the other slide,” Junko said.
“That’s the eureka,” Alvarez continued. “Almost an exact match with a species that is not ordinary Thiobacillus ferrooxidans, but a precisely modified strain.” He paused for a moment, enjoying the rapt attention of his small audience.
“The matching bacterium is one found in the field samples collected off the coast of Iceland — the same site as our parent culture of Ulva morina. Eventually we identified it using a single, obscure reference in the literature to Thiobacillus univerra ferrooxidans. To avoid confusion we took to calling it Thiobacillus univerra or, simply, Thiouni, since, as we discovered, it isn’t really a natural species at all,” Alvarez said.
“It isn’t?” Junko asked.
“No, it’s manmade,” Alvarez said.
“Manmade?”
“Thiouni is not a natural bacterium,” Alvarez repeated. “Although based on natural ferrooxidans, the univerra variety was cultured for laboratory use in the 1940s, though that work wasn’t made public until a few years ago.”
“How did you find it?” Junko asked.
“We didn’t,” Alvarez chuckled. “It found us. As I mentioned, one of my graduate students was describing Ulva morina and its epiphytes.” Epiphytes were lower plants that, like lichens and mosses, attached to larger algae and subsisted there in symbiosis.
“And one of those epiphytes was Thiobacillus—” Garner began.
“—univerra ferrooxidans,” Alvarez finished.
“Cynthia had a damnable time finding anything exactly like it in the literature, which is meager enough for marine bacteria, and especially so for the polar regions. Fortunately, Cynthia had a working knowledge of Russian and found a note in the back of a Soviet botanical journal.”