Blowout by Byron L. Dorgan Read Free Book Online

with the notion that microbes—bacteria—could communicate with each other. She’d not been the only scientist to come up with the idea, of course, Princeton’s Bonnie Bassler being the most brilliant and well known of the others, but she’d 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 eat—just about anything she engineered them to eat, coal included. That had been the tough part, the coal and what her bacterial cocktail produced—methane—and 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 “microbial Esperanto.”
    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 effects—primarily a methane runaway or a coal-seam fire—but 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 America—trees that consumed carbon dioxide and converted it to oxygen, which was a nifty bit of natural sequestration—people were literally killing the planet. Sooner or later, unless something were done—something drastic because it was nearly at the point of no return—Earth 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 gadget—the first atomic bomb—was 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 end—Bernhardt Stein, her lab coordinator who’d come over from ARPA-E on Forester’s orders; Harvard’s Alex Melin, her assistant microbiologist and one of the brightest people she’d 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 couldn’t 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