NASA Astrobiology; dedicated to the study of organic compounds derived from stardust and future sample return missions, meteorites, lab simulations of Mars, interstellar, proto-planetary travel.
Quite a mouthful, but it made him beam with pride. The bit about stardust always got him right in the heart muscle. It conjured up images of shooting stars, sparkling magic dust, and kids sitting cross-legged in wide-eyed wonder.
The phone buzzed, and he snatched it to his ear, grinning as he heard the news.
“Excellent. Take it directly to lab-45, we’re all set.” He watched on the monitor as the helicopter touched down and his technicians raced to meet it.
He replaced the phone. “Aren’t we, Harry?” Jim looked toward his ever-morose colleague, Harry McManus, who was standing beside him also watching the monitor.
“Sure, ready as we’ll ever be… with what we’ve got.”
“Yeah, well, we’d all like more funding, Harry.” Jim sighed. “But we aren’t going to get it, are we? And with a downed shuttle, it’s going to be even tighter to get budget approval next year.”
Harry groaned, grumbled to himself and folded his arms, his eyes still on the monitor as technicians took the sealed container from the helicopter pilot. “Strange business.” Jim turned. “But was it there under the ice, or did it come down in the shuttle?” He turned back to the screen. “Or, is it finally our stardust?”
Harry shrugged. “According to the Orlando’s mission manifest, there were plenty of plant and animal specimens onboard.”
“Blasted by radiation, yeah maybe,” Jim stood. “We’ll do this one by the numbers, right?”
“Always do,” Harry mumbled.
Harry McManus cursed the primitive conditions that he and fellow astro-biology scientist Sarah Mantudo had to work in as he perspired into his heavy polyurethane suit. He shifted and rubbed an arm against his side, trying to wipe away a tickling river of sweat running down to further soak his underwear.
The private sector had so much more money, he cursed, and therefore top of the line facilities, staff, and rates of pay he could only dream about. Government agencies had to fight for every scrap. And Jim was right, a multi-billion-dollar shuttle orbiter going down didn’t exactly scream money well spent.
He could only grimace and put up with his slicked hair and hot, red face behind his splatter mask and bio-filter. He snorted; they didn’t even have full HAZMATS or negative-air-pressure labs. They sort of faked it and usually that was enough. But today, he didn’t think it was, and that made him nervous as hell.
He blinked and tried to focus on his work. Initial analysis showed the Orlando sample contained two things: the first was the greenish-brown blob of biological matter. The second thing was some of the gases that had collected in the mountain-crater basin.
The spectroscopic analysis hadn’t been conclusive, answering a few questions, but raising dozens more.
Harry read the chart again and shook his head as he looked at the elemental breakdown of the atmospheric gas. The thing was, today’s atmosphere contained approximately seventy-eight percent nitrogen, twenty-one percent oxygen, one percent argon, and 0.4 percent carbon dioxide, plus small amounts of other gases and water vapor, depending where you were on the planet.
But the gases from the Orlando sample were extremely high in methane, carbon dioxide and thirty-two percent oxygen — eleven percent higher than in the current global atmosphere. This stuff was thick and heavy, the greenhouse gas from hell, and was one possible reason for why the gases were creating a sort of heavy environmental bubble over the Alaskan mountaintop.
But he knew there was a precedent for this type of atmospheric structure. Harry let his mind wander — hundreds of millions of years ago the sun was only about seventy percent as bright as it is today. Earth should have frozen over, but it didn’t because heavy gases in the atmosphere trapped enough of the sun’s heat to keep it warm.
And he also had a suspect. Harry looked at the pictures the scanning microscope had taken moments before. He had also run a biological filtration over the mixture, and the results both intrigued and alarmed him — there were significant amounts of a free-floating spores, sub-microscopic, and some little bigger than a virus. They would have easily been missed if he hadn’t run them through the micron filters.
He enlarged one of them, looking closely at the spiky ball with a whip-like tail. There were also small holes all over the spore that seemed to quiver, or vibrate, as if… he frowned, looking across to the collected matter in the filter.
Harry grabbed a small microphone and set it up over the mass of spores, and recorded for a few minutes before transferring it to the computer. He ran it back, and his screen showed the vibrations as a constant sound, so he turned it up. There it was. A sort of whine, like wind whistling in through window cracks of an old house.
There were plenty of precedents — after all, Urnula Craterium was a species of mushroom that hissed as it released its spores. But this had more of a musical note texture. Harry chuckled softly. Maybe these guys are all singing to us. Or screaming…
That’s enough of that, he thought
He went back to his scope, peering down at the microscopic entities. They were similar to the bluish-green microscopic organisms called cyanobacteria that lived in Earth’s oceans. They absorbed carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight via a process of photosynthesis, and then they gave back oxygen. But these little guys from the mountaintop were also giving off a whole range of gas mixes and were airborne, and nothing like their water-based cousins — if they were even related.
As Harry watched several of the microbes used their spikes to join together, then more of them, until they had formed a clump that settled on the floor of the container, creating a tiny speck. Like the slime. But then they broke apart and dissipated into a gas again that was an atmospheric primordial soup.
Harry looked over at his colleague, Sarah. “Have you got a sec?” he asked.
Sarah lifted her head from her microscope, and listened as Harry told her what he’d just learned about the microbes and the heavy gases.
“Gigantism,” she said distractedly.
He straightened. “Go on.” He concentrated, deciphering the mushy words coming through her bio-filter.
Sarah continued to work on the biological sample for a few more moments. “Remember the insects during the Carboniferous period?” She looked up from her microscope. “They grew large in the air, some as big as condors, and on the ground, to horse size. Insects don’t have lungs, but instead a tracheal breathing system, which limits how big they can get because they can’t absorb the necessary oxygen. But millions of years ago when oxygen levels were higher, then those upper limits didn’t apply.”
“Meganeura,” Harry said softly, referring to an ancient, extinct dragonfly as big as an eagle.
“Yep, plus spiders the size of a small dog and even a freaking millipede nearly nine feet — would not have been a fun time to be a soft-bodied mammal.” She went back to looking down her scope.
“Interesting,” Harry said. The weird thing was that he had just read a paper that postulated that early forms of bacteria had been a factor in the first instances of evolution in organisms — they had triggered cellular and even DNA changes. And the most abundant bacteria on a primordial Earth could have been like the ones he was seeing. It had always been suspected that life on the planet was kick-started by microorganisms that arrived from somewhere else in the universe.