“Listen, Eric,” I said, and took a deep breath. “What I don’t understand is this. You people have been working on this problem for years. You and I have been friends for years, and all during that time you’ve known that I’m good at life-support systems. So why didn’t you ever tell me about it?”
He reddened, chewed his lower lip. “Oh — no reason—”
“Why, Eric? Why?”
“Well — at first it was Charlie, you know. Being your husband and all—”
“Come on, Eric. We were only married a few years. You and I have been friends a lot longer than that. Or was it like with Charlie in the lab that day — just acting?”
“No, no,” he said emphatically. “Not at all. I wanted to tell you, believe me.” He looked up from the table at me. “I just couldn’t be sure about you, Emma. I couldn’t be sure that you wouldn’t tell the Committee about us. You always spoke in favor of the Committee and its policies, whenever the subject came up—”
“I did not!”
He stared at me. “You did. You’d complain about being given too much work and being shunted from place to place, but you’d always end up saying you were glad the sectors were being coordinated, pulled off each others’ throats. And that you were pleased with the life the Committee arranged for you. That’s what you said, Emma!” He pulled at his cheeks as I shook my head. “Then when they jailed your father I thought you would change—”
“My father broke the law,” I said, thinking about things I had said through the years.
“So are we! See? What if I had told you about us back on Mars, and you had said, you’re breaking the law. I couldn’t take the chance. Davydov was against it, and I couldn’t take the chance on my own, although believe me I wanted to—”
“Damn you,” I said. “Damn Oleg Davydov—”
“How were we to know any better?” he asked, his blue eyes unflinching. “I’m sorry, but you asked me why. We thought you were Committee all the way. I was the only one who thought otherwise, and even with me it was just a hope. We couldn’t take the chance. It was too important, we were trying to accomplish something great—”
“You were pursuing a crackpot scheme that is going to kill sixty people for no reason,” I said harshly, standing up as I spoke. “A stupid plan that takes you off into space and leaves you there with no way to colonize a planet even if you found one—” I shoved my chair back and walked quickly away, my eyes filling with tears so that it was hard to balance. People were watching me; I had shouted.
I pulled myself furiously through the halls of the living quarters, cursing Swann and Davydov and the entire MSA. He should have known. How could they not have known? I crashed into my room, and happily it was empty. I banged from wall to wall for a time, crying and muttering angrily to myself. Why didn’t he know? Why couldn’t he tell, the idiot?
For a moment I caught sight of my reflection in my little washstand mirror, and I went over to look at it, floating in midair. I was so upset I had to squeeze my eyes shut as hard as I could, before I could look in the glass at myself: and when I did, I experienced a frightening thing. It seemed that the true three-dimensional world was on the other side of the glass, and that I was looking into it through a window. The person floating in there was looking out. She appeared distraught over something or other…
And in this curious state I had the realization, at the moment of seeing that stranger there, that I was a person like everybody else. That I was known by my actions and words, that my internal universe was unavailable for inspection by others.
They didn’t know.
They didn’t know, because I never told them. I didn’t tell them that I hated the Mars Development Committee — yes, admit it, I did hate them! — I hated those petty tyrants as much as I hated anything. I hated the way they had treated my foolish father. I hated their lies — that they were taking over power to make a better life on an alien planet, etc., etc. Everyone knew that was a lie. They just wanted power for themselves. But we kept our mouths shut; talk too much and you might get relocated to Texas. Or on Amor. The members of the MSA had compensated with a stupid plan, to escape to the stars in secret — but they resisted, they stole, they subverted, they disbelieved, they resisted! And me? I didn’t even have the guts to tell my friends how I felt. I had thought that cowardice was the norm, and that made it okay. I had thought that resistance necessarily would be like the rash and drunken words of my father, pointless and dangerous. I had been scared of the idea of resistance, and the worst of it was, I had thought that everyone was like me.
I looked at the stranger in the other room through the glass. There was Emma Weil. You couldn’t read her mind. She looked plain and grim, skinny, dedicated, unhumorous. What was she thinking? You would never know. She sounded pretty self-satisfied. People who sound self-satisfied usually are. But you would never know for sure. You could look in her eyes as hard as you wanted, for an hour and more: nothing there but empty, weightless black pools…
For a couple of days I sat in my room and did nothing. Then one morning when Nadezhda and Marie-Anne were leaving to work on the starship, I said, “Take me with you.”
They looked at each other. “If you like,” Nadezhda said.
The two ships had been placed side by side. We took our boat into the bay of Hidalgo. I followed my roommates back to the farm, ignoring the occasional stare we received from other workers in the halls.
They had already added a few rows of vegetable tanks to the standard farm set-up. The glare of white light from the many lamps made me blink. I trailed behind the two women, listening as they talked to other technicians. Then we were off by ourselves, among the big suspension bottles, spotted green and brown, of the algae room. The glare of the lamps forced us to put on dark blue sunglasses.
“Chlorella pyrenoidosa with nitrate as its nitrogen source takes ten times less iron out of that nutrient medium than when urea is the nitrogen source, see?” Nadezhda was talking.
“But we have to use that urea somewhere,” Marie-Anne said.
“Sure. But I’m worried that the biomass created will eventually become too much to handle.”
“Feed it to the goats?”
“But what happens when the nutrient medium is exhausted? No source of iron in the vacuum, you know…”
They had a problem there. There had to be a very close agreement between the photosynthetic coefficient for algae and the respiratory coefficient for the humans and animals; otherwise too much CO2 or too much oxygen would build up, depending. One way to deal with this is to provide different sources of nitrogen to different sections of algae, as this will alter the photosynthetic coefficient. But the algae use up their mineral supplies at different rates, depending on their type of nitrogen feed. And over long periods of time this could be significant; to keep up a balanced gas exchange might take more minerals than the rest of the biocenosis would be producing.
“Can’t you use urea and ammonia exclusively,” I asked them, “and shift amounts of pyrenoidosa and vulgaris to keep the exchange balanced? That way you’d be using more urea, and avoiding the problem of nitrates.”
They looked at each other.
“Well, no,” Nadezhda said. “See, look at this — the damn algae grow so fast with urea — too much biomass, we can’t use it all.”
“What about giving it less light?”
“But that makes for problems with the vulgaris,” Marie-Anne explained. “Stupid stuff, it either dies or grows wild.”
Clearly I was repeating the most obvious solutions. Problem-solving for a biologic life-support system is like a game. One of the very finest intellectual games ever devised, in fact. In many ways it is like chess. Now, Nadezhda and Marie-Anne were certainly grand masters at this game, and they had been working with this particular model for years. So they were a big step ahead of me at that moment, discussing modifications that I had never heard of. But I had never met anybody who had a flair for the game like I did — if it had been chess, I would have been Martian champion, I am sure. When I saw the patient look on Marie-Anne’s face as she explained why my suggestion wouldn’t work, something snapped in me, and my vague intentions for this visit crystallized.