“PIC Chrysanthemum calling Mendel Station. Come in, Mendel Station.”

The call echoed through the research station’s empty corridors. Down in the lowest level of the station, Ian Morley pushed off from a demo stage in irritation. The damned thing wasn’t working right, and it wasn’t any fault of his. It was some stupid mechanical problem that any child could fix. But it was going to take time, time that could have been better spent doing real work. Not trying to find a stuck air valve so he could put on a show for some company rep who wouldn’t understand what she was looking at anyway.

Ian drifted across the small lab to its console. The station’s laserscope had already locked onto the source of the message, and the console showed a view of the incoming PIC vessel through the laserscope’s optics. This close to the station, the spacecraft’s fusion torch was far brighter than anything else in the sky. PIC’s logo pulsed on and off over the image, demanding Ian’s attention. Reluctantly, he tapped the logo, and it opened into a view of the Chrysanthemum’s cockpit.

“Mendel Station,” he said curtly.

The Chrysanthemum’s pilot turned towards the camera. The face on the screen was framed with short dark hair, and possessed a delicate nose that bespoke an Asian heritage. “Madori Beecher, representing Pallas Industrial Complex. Doctor Morley, I presume?”

Ian nodded.

“I’m about an hour out, Doctor. Is everything ready?”

An hour was more than enough time to fix the demo stage. He cleared his throat. “Yes, Representative.”

“Very good,” she said. “I’m looking forward to meeting you in person, Doctor.”

“Likewise,” Ian replied, trying his best to look sincere. The laser link cut out, and his smile disappeared with it. He did not at all appreciate PIC’s insistence on a personal demonstration of the virus he’d developed; he was an intensely private man. He had lived most of his life alone, and he liked it that way.

“Why couldn’t they just accept an upload and be done with it?” he asked aloud.

“Don’t be naive,” the station’s computer replied in a pleasantly androgynous voice. “You could fake the data, and they know it.”

“If I didn’t need the money…” he started.

“You’d do it anyway, for the recognition. Which you deserve. The work you’ve done here in the last year is revolutionary, and you know it.”

Ian smiled. The computer knew that appealing to his ego would calm him down. Nonetheless, his motive was purely capitalistic. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about the rest of humanity, but he needed money to keep the station going. And this was the best way to get it, the only way that let him work on his own projects and get paid for it. With a sigh he returned to the demo stage. He was going to have to take it completely apart to get at the faulty valve.

#

He barely had time to reassemble the stage before the Chrysanthemum arrived, and he didn’t have time to test it. He hurriedly toweled valve grease off his hands and headed up to the station’s dock, emerging from the cloistered lower level into late-afternoon sunlight. He’d built the station into a crater at Eugenia’s north pole and capped it with a transparent dome. The plants and animals that the dome sheltered formed the backbone of the station’s life-support system and were the best examples of his work. Loosed from the grip of Earth’s gravity, spindly birch trees had grown at arbitrary angles through the tangles of alder that dotted the crater floor. There was a continuous rustle of motion in the treetops; under the influence of his virus, the birch leaves had developed swivel joints that allowed them to compensate for the asteroid’s spin.

Twenty meters overhead, the dome’s graceful arch culminated in a cylindrical airlock. The Chrysanthemum had arrived and was in the final stages of docking. Thrusters flared silently, turning the ship around the axis of its massive fusion drive. Clustered around the drive were the usual pods: fuel tanks, boosters, laserscope, living quarters. Ian’s eyes narrowed when he spotted a pair of missile racks. Then he shrugged. Without a unifying authority in the Belt, a ship that couldn’t defend itself was risking piracy. For that matter, PIC had already fended off a hostile takeover attempt that year. They were just being careful.

The living quarters’ airlock lined up with the station’s, and the two locked together in a mechanical embrace.

“Let her in,” he instructed the station’s computer. Above him, the inner lock flashed a warning light. Moments later, the Pallas Representative floated headfirst through the dilated iris, a little hesitant in the face of the alien life below her.

“Welcome to Eugenia,” Ian called up to her.

She waved, then launched herself towards him, tumbling leisurely through half a circle to land on her feet beside him. In contrast to Ian’s baggy pants and utility vest, she wore a lightly armored spacesuit fitted with a high-power laser.

“A routine precaution,” the Rep said, noting the direction of his gaze. Her voice was distorted by the speaker built into the suit’s helmet. “I understand your work involves viruses. This is just a safeguard against infection.”

“There’s little chance of that,” he said. “I’ve lived here five years, and never had a problem.” The spacesuit bothered him far more than the missiles; it implied that he was a threat.

“You’re an expert,” she said. “I wouldn’t even know what to avoid. And I have a family to protect.”

Something in her expression made him think that she knew he lived alone, that, in fact, she probably knew most of the particulars of his solitary life. He looked away uneasily, and on impulse bent down and pinched off a blossom from a nearby patch of Ranunculus. The fist-sized flower twisted slowly on its stem, tracking the sun. The interior of the flower had a metallic yellow tint, and at the focus of the parabola of petals the slender filaments were tipped with dark, fleshy nodules. He held the flower out to her. She took it gingerly in a gloved hand.

“This is an infected organism,” he said. “As you can see, it’s quite healthy. Usually, the combination of low gravity and diminished sunlight that you find out in the Belt is anathema to plants. But the virus has modified this organism’s genetic structure, allowing it to adapt to its environment.”

“Most intriguing,” she murmured politely. She dropped the blossom into a collection bag at her waist and sealed it. “But as I recall, your contract with Pallas was to develop a cure for the banes, not new varieties of plant life.”

“But I have,” he said. “A general-purpose cure. This is just one example.”

Inside the helmet, her face was impassive.

“Come down to the lab with me,” he said. “I’ve arranged a demo.”

#

The demo stage resembled nothing more than an oversized clothes drier. Ian opened the stage’s circular hatch to reveal the centrifuge within. “This device can provide almost any combination of acceleration, air pressure, and ambient radiation,” Ian said. “We’ll use it to test a pair of voles.”

“Voles?”

“The species is indigenous to arctic biomes.” He opened a specimen cage and selected a dun-colored animal the size of a mouse. He held up the vole’s foreleg to show the bright red bracelet of plastic that encircled it. “This animal is the control. He doesn’t have the virus.”

He placed the vole in the demo stage, then pulled an identical animal out of the cage. Its foreleg was decorated with a blue bracelet. “This one is lucky,” he said. “He got a shot this morning, and that’s going to keep him alive when we crank the acceleration up to five gees and give him a dose of x-rays.”

“Is it really necessary to destroy both animals?” Beecher asked.

“Of course not,” Ian said mildly. “So long as you’re willing to take my word that both were raised in Eugenia’s centigravity, and that the new environmental conditions I’m imposing would normally be fatal to them both.”

It only took a moment for her to make up her mind. “Carry on,” she said.

He placed the infected vole in the centrifuge, shut the hatch, and started the demo cycle. With a low whine, the centrifuge began to spin. The air pressure readout dipped a little, then held steady at ninety percent Terrestrial. He let out a silent breath of relief, reassured that he’d fixed the problem with the valve.

He turned his back on the stage. “When I first started this project, I was looking for a specific solution to a specific problem: the banes. But what do radiation poisoning and calcium depletion have in common? Very little, besides the fact that they both afflict space travelers. I might have been able to develop specific cures for each condition, but there’d have been synergistic effects that would’ve taken years to sort out. So I focused on the root of the problem.”

“The environment,” she said flatly, eyes fixed on the speed-blurred contents of the centrifuge behind him. The set of her mouth revealed her distaste for the whole procedure. Ian felt a twinge of regret. He was not a cruel man. But sometimes the nature of his work required that he do cruel things. At these times he donned the carefully neutral mask of a professional scientist.

He nodded. “That’s right. The real problem is that people haven’t adapted to the space environment. Their bones are brittle from too much time in low gravity, and they get shot full of radiation if they come out from their shielding. They’re stuck, too weak to travel in anything but the biggest, slowest transports, and forever barred from planetary surfaces. So I built a virus that responds to environmental stress by altering its host’s genetic material. Classic negative feedback: the virus acts to reduce the stress on the organism. Very simple, really.”

“An elegant solution to a difficult problem.”

“Thank you.” He was pleased that she saw the beauty of it.

“But don’t you think people might have problems with having their genetic material altered?”

“In an emotional sense?” He was a little puzzled by her question.

“In a marketing sense,” she said. “Doctor, we have to sell this thing. I’m not sure people are going to buy it. From what I understand, it would dynamically engineer their DNA. That’s a little radical for most people.”

A beep sounded from the console behind him. He glanced over his shoulder to see what the problem was. The air pressure was dropping, the same as before. So he hadn’t fixed the stage after all. He considered stopping the demo, but that wouldn’t bode well for his contract.

“For the purposes of this demo,” he spoke without taking his eyes off the pressure readout, “this particular virus has a very fast response time. Coupled with the small size and high metabolism of the test subject, transformations can occur in a matter of minutes. For humans, the changes would probably take anywhere from several days to several weeks. The end result would be a body that didn’t suffer from radiation poisoning, nor from calcium depletion. Its bones wouldn’t break, its children wouldn’t die in the womb. A cure for the banes, Representative.”

“The time scale of the process is not the issue,” she said. “The point is that through the agency of your virus, people would become something else. Maybe it would be stronger, maybe it would be better adapted to life in space. But it wouldn’t be human. And that does not make good ad copy, Doctor Morley.”

He faced her again without touching the abort switch. It was too late anyway; the air pressure was holding steady at zero. “Representative, I’ve raised generations of animals with the virus. The changes always stabilize when stress is relieved.” The centrifuge began to spin down. “People would be no more different than if they’d received a vaccination against a new disease.”

Her eyes said that she did not believe him. She raised her chin at the demo stage. “Let’s see what you’ve made in there.”

He turned to the stage, raised his eyebrows in false surprise. “It seems to have lost pressure,” he said. “There must be a bad valve. Blue had to cope with an extra variable, I’m afraid.” In the cold fluorescent light that flooded the lab, the blur on the other side of the hatch flickered down to a series of stroboscopic images. One vole was obviously dead, strangled on its own blood. Hunkered on the floor of the centrifuge, the other seemed frozen, its eyes shut tight against the vacuum. Then the side of the animal slowly flexed as if something else were inside its skin, trying to get out.

Despite the layers of protection between her and the creature within the stage, Beecher backed away. “My god,” she said. “What is it?”

“It looks like some kind of cocoon,” he said distantly. He was already mentally recalculating his budget based on not getting his contract renewed. If he couldn’t find another patron, it was going to be very tight. At least the ecosystem in the dome would keep basic life-support going while he looked for funding.

The vole’s flank split open. The creature inside got its claws through the split and pulled itself out of the leathery casing. It didn’t look much like a vole anymore; the closest terrestrial analog was an old-world chameleon. As they watched in horrified fascination, it spasmed and died.

Beecher looked like she was going to be sick.

“Not a fair test,” Ian muttered.

“What?”

He cleared his throat. “I said it wasn’t a fair test. An animal can only change so much, so fast.”

Her eyes searched his. “Doctor Morley, I think you’ve been living alone too long. You’ve lost touch with the rest of us. This,” she gestured at the demo stage, “is completely unacceptable. I’m afraid we’re going to have to drop your contract.”

Ian had a strange feeling of standing outside himself. “Yes,” he said, “I thought as much. Well, thank you for your time, Representative.”

“Good day,” she said with finality.

#

After a few days of self-recrimination, Ian put the failure behind him. Life went on, after all, and he had work to do. He’d never suspected that the virus might be able to adapt an organism to vacuum, and the potential intrigued him. Perhaps Beecher was right. Humanity might not be ready to personally reap the benefits of his work, but they’d be more than eager to utilize its by-products, plants and animals raised on native asteroid material, without the expense of domes and shielding and soil preparation.

He established a remote test site a few kilometers from the station, at the edge of a crater field. In the midst of a wilderness of fantastically sculpted forms, monuments to the simple mechanics of differential cooling, he sowed a variety of infected seeds. This would be his new garden, his new beginning. He was digging a hole for one of the larger bulbs when his suit picked up a faint whisper of laser light. Mendel Station was over the horizon; the transmission had to be coming from somewhere off the asteroid.

He set down the digger and switched the helmet’s receiver array from omni to directional. The whisper turned into Madori Beecher’s voice, riding a tight beam all the way from Pallas. “…briefed my superiors here at PIC on the situation on Eugenia, and they’ve instructed me to repossess all equipment lent to you in the course of your contract.”

“Shit,” he said under his breath. It would be next to impossible to carry on his work without that equipment.

“However, in their opinion and mine, the risk of contamination is too high to allow the equipment to leave Eugenia, or to even to attempt to remove it from Mendel Station.” For a long moment the only thing he heard was the hiss of random photons. When she resumed, her voice had lost the official edge it had carried before. “I’m sorry, Doctor Morley. We have little choice but to destroy the station. Of course, we’ll credit your estate for the loss…”

“My estate?” he screamed. Without realizing he’d done it, he’d sprung from his position beside the digger, and was drifting in a lazy parabola a dozen meters over the surface of the asteroid. “What about me? What about -” A flare of light lit the horizon, and his suit speaker screamed as the electromagnetic pulse slashed through the lasercom’s circuits. He landed clumsily, nearly losing his balance, but the claws built into his boots bit into the icy regolith and held him upright.

She must have left a missile in orbit around the asteroid when she left, he realized numbly. Too bad he hadn’t checked the radar. He glanced down at the helmet’s dosimeter and grimaced. Lethal dose. He shouldn’t have jumped; the horizon might have shielded him if he’d stayed on the surface. Of course, then the ground wave would have pulverized him. At least that would have been quick. As it was, it was going to be a race between lack of air and radiation poisoning, and he wasn’t going to be around to congratulate the winner.

He made his way over to his supply cache, fighting to keep panic at bay. His toolbox was battered but intact, as were three of the air tanks. The tanks were good for eight hours apiece at a normal rate of usage. If he could cut his consumption in half, he had forty-eight hours to live. A tide of fear rose within him as he imagined suffocating in the suit. He forced himself to take a deep breath and let it out again. There were always options.

He pulled the toolbox out. The inner surface of the lid was coated with a glittering layer of ice crystals; the precious vials within had been shattered. He pawed through the mess, turning up useless shards of glass and ice, sensors, and spools of microtubing. There. He carefully extracted a vial from the jumble. The serum within moved languidly in Eugenia’s centigravity, surface tension holding it together like a slug of mercury. The label identified the bottle’s contents as one of the faster viruses, but that was good, that was what he needed. He wasn’t a vole; even with a couple of days to let the virus propagate through his body, it would be close. He loaded the vial into a heavy-duty hypodermic, then got a patch out of his suit-repair kit. He peeled off its backing and laid it on his knee.

It was a simple choice, really: change or die. He didn’t have to think about it very long. He pressed the snout of the hypodermic hard against his biceps and pulled its trigger. There was a moment of stinging cold, then an expanding circle of numbness. An alarm blinked urgently in the helmet readout. He dropped the hypodermic into the repair kit, picked up the patch, and pressed it over the fine jet of air coming from his arm. The spreading chill halted and began a slow retreat.

#

The Chrysanthemum’s search radar strobed through Ian Morley’s mind, a brilliant flickering sound. He woke up slowly, sliding in from the edge of death. His pulse increased and stabilized at twelve beats per minute. He opened his eyes onto dark confinement, thinking that the sound was his suit’s low air alarm. After he’d injected himself, he’d spent most of his time sleeping, only waking when the alarm had gone off. But this sound was clearly different. Besides, the sedative he’d given himself when he’d neared the end of the last tank should’ve seen him through its exhaustion. And that thought brought him up short. He glanced towards the helmet’s readout, but the power seemed to be out; he couldn’t see a thing. He strained to hear the familiar sounds of the suit’s air-circulation system, but the only sound was the dull thud of his heart and the anomalous, unidentifiable flicker of the search radar.

He hadn’t really believed that the virus would work; the changes required were too extensive, the time too short. But there was no other reasonable explanation. He thought back to the vole, encased in a cocoon made of its own skin, and the cold, close darkness took on a different meaning. He levered his elbow back and the material that bound him gave slightly. Harder, and it split. Operating on a blind, instinctual level, he backed out of his shed flesh, twisting and pushing until he emerged into sunlight.

Eyes narrowed against the unaccustomed glare, he examined himself clinically. His fingers and toes were more like a lizard’s than a man’s, and the claws that tipped them had a metallic gleam. The epidermis had hardened and taken on a dark, greenish-grey color. But the basic structure was the same; the changes wrought by the virus were extensive, but relatively superficial. Most of its work had involved reprogramming cells rather than replacing them.

His suit lay nearby where he’d cast it off during the dream-fever of the transformation. He retrieved the helmet and looked inside at its readout. It had been nearly a week. He stripped off the tool belt and wrapped it around his waist. It was much too large; he’d lost a lot of mass. Faced with a lack of oxygen, the virus must have switched his cells over to a self-consuming anaerobic metabolism. He tied the ends of the belt together and rifled through its pouches until he found his gyrocompass. He flipped open the device and twisted it so he could see his reflection in the sight mirror. An alien eye looked back at him, an eye cased in heavy green lids and silvered against solar radiation.

The Chrysanthemum’s radar strobed him again, louder this time, and he saw a flicker of light overhead as the ship rotated to bring its laserscope to bear. Before he could move, he was pinned in a monochromatic spotlight as Beecher scanned him. He didn’t wait for her to make up her mind about what she was seeing; he jumped. Behind him the laserscope’s beam turned hot, and the surface of the rock exploded under the thermal stress. A shard caught him in the shoulder with bruising force, set him spinning. He came down as fast as he’d gone up, tumbling across the uneven ground. When he gained his feet, he jumped again, but this time he kept his trajectory low, skimming over the ice. The beam probed somewhere off to his right, laser light flashing through a geyser of superheated vapor.

On sudden inspiration, he veered towards the blue afterimage of the beam. As he’d hoped, the laserscope had blasted a cavern into Eugenia’s icy regolith. He dove into the gaping hole, landed hard on a glazed wall. He nearly bounced off, but his claws held in the ice, and he hung there in the reflected sunlight like a giant, tailless chameleon.

He was starting to feel light-headed. He hadn’t taken a breath since he’d woken up, hadn’t even felt the need to do so, but a dull pounding behind his eyes told him that his exertions had taken a toll. Had the virus failed to provide for long-term viability, blindly opting for a short-term solution instead? He shut his eyes, listening to the dark red rush of blood, and willed himself to relax. His pulse slowed and for the first time he noticed a subtle tingling where he was exposed to sunlight. He turned so the light splashed across his chest.

The tingling intensified as the chloroplasts in his skin went to work, converting light and water and the carbon dioxide in his blood to sugar and oxygen. The virus had read the oldest programs in his cells, had found the legacy of the blue-green bacteria that had preceded all higher life, and taken advantage of it. But Eugenia was far from the sun, and Ian’s need for energy was greater than any plant’s. He measured the geometry of the ice cavern with his eyes, noting the angle of the sun in relation to the curved walls. Hanging from his claws, he hand-walked along the underside of the overhanging ledge to the focus of the cavern, the point where the reflected rays of sunlight converged.

It was barely enough. He basked in the sunlight, a golden haze of erasing all thought of danger until a small sound brought him back. The sputtering noise rose faintly above the background rush of the solar wind and was unmistakably artificial. He hand-walked to the lip of the cavern and chinned over the ledge to look out in the direction of the sound. The Chrysanthemum settled down at the outskirts of the crater field, electric-arc thrusters flickering in time to the noise. The living quarters’ airlock opened and Beecher jumped down to the surface.

Ian ducked back out of sight. Pallas must have detected signs of his survival and sent Beecher back to finish the job. He looked around the cavern. It wasn’t nearly big enough to hide him. If she found it – and he was sure she would – he’d be trapped, gunned down. He had to get out and take his chances in the open. But ultimately, there was nowhere to run, without a ship. His best bet would be to steal the Chrysanthemum while Beecher was searching for him, steal it and run some place where they wouldn’t find him. There were plenty of unexplored rocks left in the Belt.

But first he had to get past Beecher, and that was not going to be easy. She had a laser; all he had was a set of claws. Much as he wanted to get out of the cavern, it would not be a good move. She could cut him down at a distance as easily as up close. No, he was going to have to tackle her hand-to-hand, disable her somehow, and then run for it. Ian hadn’t been in a fight since his childhood, and the thought of going up against Beecher frightened him badly. She had the advantages of greater mass, firepower, and endurance. The only factor on his side was surprise; she didn’t know exactly where he was, or even if he was still alive.

He hand-walked back to where the ledge that formed the roof of the cavern met the wall and anchored himself in the corner, knees up against his chest. He tried to call up a memory of Beecher’s suit, where the armor was located, where its weak spots were. But his fear got in the way of the image, painting livid pictures of his own body cut open by the hard light, steaming in the vacuum. He shut his eyes, bringing a wall of darkness across the despair he felt. He would survive. He would do whatever he had to do. He would kill her if he had to. He pictured himself smashing her helmet against the ice, breaking it open to hard vacuum like she’d broken his dome, leaving a wilderness of death behind where life had been.

He saw her shadow first, cutting across the sunlight that filled the cavern. She walked around the hole in the crust, shining a low power beam on the walls. Ian hung motionless, hoping that if he were visible at all through the ice, he looked like an impurity, a cyst of carbon embedded in Eugenia’s skin.

She stopped opposite him, and he tensed. If she jumped into the hole now, she’d see him immediately. But instead she kneeled and put her head down below the surface so she could look inside. Moment of truth, Ian thought. He launched himself across the cavern, slamming into the back of her helmet. If she hadn’t been suited, the blow would’ve broken her neck. As it was, the helmet’s yoke broke her collarbone, and she cartwheeled down into the hole with Ian.

He’d hit too hard to keep his grip on her; he rebounded off the floor and twisted to take the next bounce on his feet. With a fury that amazed him, he landed on her back and wrapped his legs around her waist. He grabbed her laser arm in one hand as she struggled to knock him off, and ripped at the laser’s power feed with his other. The cable was armored, but the inside of the elbow joint on the other side had been left unprotected. His claws caught in the fabric, tore through it and the brachial artery below. Air and blood geysered past his face. He released her, sickened by the sight. For a moment he hesitated, his instincts and training saying he should help her. Then he turned and ran.

It didn’t take him long to reach the ship; she’d landed near the test site. He opened the access panel that shielded the airlock controls. The readout under the panel blinked at him: ENTER ACCESS CODE. Ian stared at the message, his mind churning through alternatives. The access code could be anything. Beecher had mentioned a family, but no specific names. In fact, he knew very little about her beside the fact that she worked for Pallas Industrial Complex.

It was tempting to hit the controls, try to break through the control panel and hot-wire the airlock. But more likely than not, that would trigger a response from the Chrysanthemum’s computer. And if the ship’s designer had half a brain, he’d have shielded the airlock controller from just that kind of tampering. He backed away from the living quarters’ hull, looking up to the cockpit at its bow. The curve of glass that encased the pilot’s position was barely visible from where he stood. He retreated further for a better view, casting about at the same time for a rock. He found something much better: the digger.

He returned to the ship with the tool. Cradling the device in his arms, he gauged the distance to the ship carefully, crouched, and jumped. From the top of his trajectory, he saw Beecher emerge from the cavern, and felt a curious mix of relief and dread. He was glad he hadn’t killed her, but he sincerely hoped he’d hurt her badly enough that she couldn’t use the laser.

He landed softly on top of the dome that shielded the cockpit. The polycarbonate was tough; it didn’t shatter when he first holed it, but it wasn’t designed to withstand deliberate abuse. In a few minutes he’d created a rough-edged doorway. He shoved the digger inside, and then followed it into the evacuated cockpit. Shards of plastic covered the acceleration couch. He swept them aside and sat down. The flight controls were locked, but that didn’t matter. He opened his suit-repair kit and pulled out the heavy-duty hypodermic. As he’d thought, there was enough serum left in it for another injection.

Perhaps Beecher had been right when she said he’d lived alone too long. When she reached the ship, he’d give her a choice. She could kill him, and then suffocate, or she could become like him. He thought he knew what her choice would be.

– Copyright © 1991 Doug Franklin