The shining in the sky was becoming with every passing hour less greenish and more intensely dark red.
The Lieutenant was going to the bathroom.
He had a lot of cold tea and six cups of coffee during the night. He was alone on duty and there was nobody left to take over his shift. He had to be at his post, but nobody would know that he was absent from the control room for just two minutes in order to relieve himself. He had read in a magazine once that if you do not pee regularly and restrain yourself, it would be detrimental for your prostate and you might not be able to have children. Or you would not put it up any more… something of the sort. Whatever, he stood up from his chair and went out.
He was walking along the corridor back to the control room, whistling merrily, when he noticed Alan to sneak out of the control room and close the door quietly.
What the fuck?!, he thought.
“Alan! Hey, Alan, what are you doing here? What’s going on?”, the Lieutenant shouted at him while approaching.
The man just turned back, looked at him sharply with bloodred pupils, then started running along the passage to the front door.
“Hey, Alan, what’s got into you, man?” He started going after him, but Alan disappeared around the corner as a shadow. The Lieutenant did not usually pay much attention to people’s eyes but was pretty sure that Alan’s eyes were brown.
She was checking the samples from the ship for the hundredth time maybe.
The results were always the same.
At the beginning she thought that she had made a mistake or that the samples were not fresh enough, but now she knew for sure: this here was presence of an unknown life form!
Marcela was in love with her work. Here, under the microscope, there were only alive real things, not like with people. There were no fakes, cheatings or hypocrisy. Death was genuine and unarguable just like life was. The smaller, or like they were termed the lower organisms hid that immaculate beauty and frankness, that she had never yet encountered in men. In people, she corrected herself in her mind.
The loneliness of the laboratory work and the direct contact with nature by way of the membrane of a singular cell through the eye-lens of the microscope made her happier than all scientific awards in the world. She might be living in her own sterile world without realizing how much she had distanced herself from normal human communication.
The image under the lens of the electronic microscope was unclear and smeared, she put it to focus, turning the knob with her slender white fingers, and scrutinized again the cellular ring.
No, she was by no means mistaken. She had conducted the experiments again and again dozens of times.
She needed to call Norman.
“What is it, March?”
“Major, you’ve got to see this. The corals are really unusual, I’ve never seen such… Most corals depend on sunlight and grow in shallow transparent waters, so that they can absorb energy from the sun. But these here are structured in a way to survive at a much greater depth…”
“How deep are we talking?”
“Look, species are known here, on Earth, inhabiting deeper waters and not so strongly dependent on sunlight, up to a depth of about 10 000 feet, and only some species at that.”
“What about those here?”, Norman pointed to the samples in the Petri dish.
“Those here are able to process chemical energy from sea water, without needing sunlight…”
“Do you mean they come from a greater depth?”
“I mean, there is no way for such species to exist on the Earth!”
“And where do you think they came from?” Norman asked skeptically.
“How, the hell, do I know, Norman? I am only a university biologist who came to the fucking desert after being dragged from the plane against my will! How can I have any idea?!” Her voice was trembling. Her nerves could not hold on and she broke down rying.
Norman was caught unprepared to see her so vulnerable, but it was obvious that the pressure of the last couple of days had been too much for her.”
“Pull yourself together, March, everything will be okay, I promise” Norman said without flinching. “Now, tell me about the corals, please.”
She turned towards the samples. She hated displaying weakness and was now ashamed of the fact that she demonstrated vulnerability and lost her self-control. She wiped her wet eyes, took a deep breath and went on:
“They have a very thick layer of calcium carbonate, which does not have the usual rhombic lattice but possesses a complex fractal polymorphic structure. Besides, chemical macro structure hard cover of calcite forms something like a space suit and I am sure they can bear thousands of atmospheres of underwater pressure. Moreover, they don’t need energy and do not have mitochondria or any other organelles. I noticed tiny bubbles which most probably serve for the processing of hydrogen sulphide and other molecules at great depths… much deeper places than we have ever had on Earth… a 50 or… I don’t know… 100 miles underwater.”
“And where could those depths be, March?”
“Well, the deepest place on the Earth is the Mariana Trench 36 000 feet, but these here probably come from greater depths of other oceans…”
“Like from which place?!”
“There are oceans so deep in our Solar System only on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. On Europe, under a deep layer of ice, there are oceans, heated by the warm core of the heavenly body, that reach depth of 70 miles.”
“Okay, I need to report to Washington. Thank you, you may continue with your work.” Norman started abruptly for the door.
“Just one more thing… Do you know the ancient Greek legend about the birth of the corals?”
Norman half-turned without stopping.
“According to Greek mythology when Perseus cut the head of Gorgona Medusa, a few drops of blood fell in the sea and created the corals”, Marcela said and sat before her utensils.
“And God looked the man who He had created Himself and told him:
‘You shall be imperfect, because so I order and because all things in nature are imperfect. Here you get also an imperfect and illogical woman, in order to make you love and be unable to escape your nature…’
‘I accept’, the man replied to Him.
Bare field. Among its bushes and trees are scattered and trash, blown by the wind.
The man decided to build himself a house. He arranged the stones, sorted tree trunks and cut them, mixed mud and baked some bricks. He needed seven summers and lots of efforts to create his home. He extracted a lot of energy from his strong muscles to introduce harmony in this natural disorder.
Man lived happily in the house with his family, but after many years he met his demise and nobody ever came to this field. After standing for one hundred years in the wind, rain, snow and living creatures, the house steadily collapsed. And after one hundred years more the field was empty again, with rocks, bushes and innumerable specks of dust, covering the earth.
The measure of chaos in a system is entropy. The bigger the chaos, the less the energy and the more stable the system is. The better arranged the system is, the greater the energy and the less the entropy. Correspondingly, the system itself is more unstable.
Each system strives for minimum energy and maximum disorder.
Conclusion: Perfection is only hypothetical and is practically impossible from the point of view of the Second principle of thermodynamics, since it would require infinite quantity of energy and zero chaos.