with the notion that microbesâbacteriaâcould communicate with each other. Sheâd not been the only scientist to come up with the idea, of course, Princetonâs Bonnie Bassler being the most brilliant and well known of the others, but sheâd figured out how to talk back to them and in an efficient, no-fail way. Train them like Pavlov did with his dogs. Ring the dinner bell and her babies would begin to eatâjust about anything she engineered them to eat, coal included. That had been the tough part, the coal and what her bacterial cocktail producedâmethaneâand how it produced it and the speed at which it produced the gas, and the other by-products.
But the really tough parts were understanding the exact language of each bacteria colony, the fact that in general bacteria were multilingual, and finally learning a universal language that Smithsonian magazine had dubbed âmicrobial Esperanto.â
And then, of course, the design of the gadget, which when lowered into the borehole could translate her instructions into microbial Esperanto and transmit them.
It worked on a very small scale in the lab. But the real test would come first thing in the morning. And if she were being honest with herself, she would admit that she was damned scared, not only because of the possible side effectsâprimarily a methane runaway or a coal-seam fireâbut of the effects that a failure would have on the initiative and on her career.
Or the long-term alternatives; that because of the increasing amount of carbon dioxide being relentlessly pumped into the atmosphere by cars and trucks and buses, by coal- and oil-burning electrical plants, by factories and by the deforestation of large sections of South Americaâtrees that consumed carbon dioxide and converted it to oxygen, which was a nifty bit of natural sequestrationâpeople were literally killing the planet. Sooner or later, unless something were doneâsomething drastic because it was nearly at the point of no returnâEarth would be unfit for human life. It could even become another Venus with runaway heating; rivers of molten lead, a world where just about all biologic life was extinct.
Scientists had been sending the message for years but no one had really listened until the near miss in Texas, and the White House had suddenly sat up and taken notice that the U.S. was vulnerable.
Too late, Whitney thought as she took the stairs down and heard the raucous party going on in the control center. She wanted to be angry with them for their levity at a time like this. But they were kids, some of them, and just as nervous as she was, just as frightened as were the scientists, techs, and engineers at Trinity in the New Mexico desert the night before the gadgetâthe first atomic bombâwas to be test-fired, and they were letting off steam.
Music with a very heavy bass thump, but almost no tune, some sort of country and western, fairly vibrated the corridor walls and rattled the door to the control center and when she came around the corner someone in the room burst out laughing.
She had six people at this endâBernhardt Stein, her lab coordinator whoâd come over from ARPA-E on Foresterâs orders; Harvardâs Alex Melin, her assistant microbiologist and one of the brightest people sheâd ever known; plus her postdocs, Jeff Roemer, Donald Unzen, Susan Watts (the class clown), and serious Frank Neubert from a small town somewhere in Iowa who was their prophet of doom. All of them really serious people. Really bright. Really dedicated.
And really in trouble, Whitney wanted to say when she walked in, but she couldnât and she almost burst out laughing.
As soon as she was noticed, someone cut the music, everyone stopped talking and laughing, and everyone turned toward her; like lemmings, she thought, facing the cliff.
Everyone was dressed in pajamas over which they wore lab coats and fuzzy bunny slippers, and