TINY PINK ALIENS
Brian and Larissa flew to Calgary from Repulse Bay late Wednesday, almost Thursday, in a pale green turboprop with black racing stripes. After the nineteen-hour drive down from Arctic Bay, the two researchers had waited another fourteen hours in the tiny excuse for a terminal, but now they were finally aloft, taking two of the five available seats. The other three were filled with empty propane tanks, aluminum recycling, and various other things Larissa was far too exhausted to even wonder about.
Brian kept the small package on his lap, clutching it tightly, unwilling to surrender it to his stowed luggage, even though there was barely room in the cabin. Larissa didn’t argue with him. She didn’t want it out of her sight, either.
But as soon as the plane leveled out at cruising altitude, they were both fast asleep.
“How’s it going?” Larissa asked him, as she walked into their lab Friday morning.
Brian started, then grinned. “God, you scared me.” He pushed his brown hair out of his eyes with a forearm, as his hands were blue-gloved, and clutching a pipette. “I’m fine, it’s good to be home.” He glanced behind her, quickly.
“Yes, I locked the door.” She softened her words with a smile, then peered at his lab bench. “What’s that?”
“Don’t worry.” He nodded at the package, still bound in brown paper, at the end of his bench. “I was waiting for you. I thought you were going to sleep all day.”
“Me too.” She pulled up a stool and sat, and tossed her own long brown hair back. “I hate travel.”
“Well, if that’s what we think it is, our travel days will be limited to Stockholm.”
“Stockholm?”
Brian grinned again, suddenly years younger. “You know…Stockholm…the phone call at five in the morning…”
Larissa’s musical laughter rang through the small lab. “Oh, Stockholm! ‘Yes, Mr. Chairman of the Nobel Prize Committee, of course I was awake! So nice to hear from you!’”
They unwrapped the package together, gloved fingers trembling. Brian pulled the final bit of paper from the package, revealing the clear plastic box within. They both held their breath, though they knew what was in there, they’d packed it themselves. Larissa let him open the box.
The half-dozen things that looked like larvae were still in there, tiny and pink…and, ever so slightly, wiggling.
“Ohh…” she sighed.
“It’s really real.” He caught his breath.
“Quick—get them in the dish.”
He tipped the box into a waiting Petri dish, and added a few drops of sterilized water. The almost-invisible things moved around in the water, first animatedly, then settling into a quieter motion. They seemed to be keeping their distance from one another, though their movements could be random.
“They’re like little fish, swimming around…” Larissa breathed.
Brian shot her a look. “They’re not—”
“I know,” she interrupted, quickly. “I’m just—well, they’re still alive.”
“Yes, they are.” Then he frowned. “Now we have to figure out what they eat.”
Larissa sat beside Brian on the stage of the meeting hall.
“As you know, Dr. Garcia and I have been looking into the effects of global warming on the Arctic ice caps,” Brian was saying to the assembled crowd. Larissa nodded as twenty-seven pairs of eyes flicked to her, then back to Brian.
“Our full results will be published in Nature on the fifteenth.” He allowed himself a small, very proud smile, and Larissa tried to hide a grin herself. “But there are a few things that, er, we saved out from the Nature paper, that we wanted to share with you here. The results are very preliminary, and we make no conclusions. But we thought you should see it.”
Get to the point, Larissa thought. She stifled an urge to sit on her hands.
“You see, the thing is…” Brian paused, as if for effect, but Larissa knew he was still struggling with how much to say, how much to hold back. “Well, we believe we’ve discovered an entirely new life form. Like nothing that’s ever been seen on Earth before.”
The crowd would have gasped, if they’d not been trained scientists. Part of such training is a studied über-coolness in the face of astonishing claims, which almost invariably later turn out to be baseless. Yet they sat forward, ever so slightly, listening. He had their attention.
“We were only able to collect a small sample,” Brian went on. “The conditions were extreme, to say the least. But we’re certain there are more there. By necessity, we had to sacrifice one of the specimens in order to perform the assay.” He turned, and clicked a button on a small remote; the screen behind him lit up, showing a cross-section of the organism.
Now a small noise moved through the audience, more like a sigh than a gasp.
“As you can see, the entity possesses the usual arrangement of internal processes… vascular, digestive, pulmonary. As if it were an animal.” Brian illustrated with a laser pointer as he spoke. “But organized in, shall we say, a most peculiar way. Almost plant-like. And it has other features that would indicate placing it in the plant kingdom.”
“Dr. Felden?” the chairman of the department interrupted.
“Yes, sir?” Brian turned away from the graphic and smiled at his boss.
“Did you amplify the color for effect, to show the contrast? Because, and I know this is just for the department, but you should state that.”
Brian glanced back at the slide. “No, sir, this is precisely the color of the organism.”
Now the crowd did gasp. Larissa felt warm to her toes. Stockholm, here we come, she thought.
“Did you hear them?” she asked. “They were calling them pink aliens!”
Brian took a long pull of his beer. “That was just the junior faculty.” But then he grinned. “Tiny pink aliens, I believe was the phrase.”
All around them, the noisy bustle of medical students and off-duty clinical fellows filled the crowded bar. “They sure did take notice!” Larissa felt giddy, floating on the thrill of the discovery. She sipped her wine. Nature had indeed accepted their paper, in record time. They’d actually had to sacrifice two of the organisms to complete the preliminary research, which just about killed both researchers, since that left only four. But it was the only way to verify their astonishing findings. They were already planning their next trip to Nunavut, once the spring thaws began.
Fortunately for their research—if not for the planet—the spring thaws were coming earlier every year.
Brian and Larissa worked through the winter in their secure lab on the seventh floor of the biological sciences building. After the furor from the Nature paper had died down, they were left in peace. And once they found that the organisms could be kept alive indefinitely on a rich mix of protein, glucose, and electrolytes, they were free to try whatever they could think of to analyze the larvae. Or whatever they were.
One morning in February, Larissa came in earlier than usual and found Brian already at his bench. “You look awful,” she said, setting her laptop case down on her bench. “Did you spend the night here again?”
He looked up at her, eyes bright in a pale face. “Yeah...I couldn’t leave, I’m really close. I keep thinking just a few more tries and we’ll have something. And I’m fine, I’m not tired.”
“You’ve run that assay fourteen times,” she said, gently. “Once more isn’t going to change the results.” She put a hand on his shoulder, and felt how thin he was getting. He was warm to the touch, even through the lab coat. “You are tired, I can see it. Go home—get some sleep, and then have a huge breakfast. Okay?”
He smiled at her. “Okay. Just—”
“No, right now. I’ll finish this one for you, if it will make you go.”
“I can get a bagel, take a quick nap in the break room. Really, Larissa—”
She folded her arms across her chest. “I’ll call the dean and tell him you haven’t filled out your effort reports in six months.”
He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, then sighed. “Okay, you win. I guess I could use some sleep. I didn’t realize how late it had gotten.”
“It’s not late, it’s early. Now go.”
Within a few minutes, she’d seen him off. He’d insisted on taking his lab notebook home, so he could update it with the night’s work while he was on the bus. Against her better judgment, she’d let him. After all, they were partners; neither of them could tell each other what to do. Not that she wouldn’t try, when she could see he was ruining his health.
She set about continuing his assay. Each time they ran it, they used a tiny bit more of the genetic material of the sacrificed organisms. She hoped they wouldn’t have to kill another one. They were still months away from getting back out into the field.
After she set the assay running, she went to the tissue culture room to put away some unused well plates. After stacking them on the shelves, she peeked into the hood where the organisms lived. She was embarrassed to let Brian see how much she liked to watch them, slowly undulating around in there, almost too tiny to see with the naked eye. She felt like she’d gotten to know them over the months. One was a little bigger than the others; she called him Papa. One was a little more corkscrew-shaped; he was Twist. The other two were indistinguishable, and they were the Twins.
She gazed into the covered dish, then gave a quick gasp. She yanked the hood open and pulled the dish out, setting it on the counter where the light was better. “Oh my god...”
One of the Twins was missing.
Larissa stepped carefully back from the counter, shaking. “Oh my god,” she said again.
After she took a few deep breaths, she went out to her bench and got an old-fashioned hand-held magnifying glass. She held it over the dish and scanned every millimeter of it. But it contained only three organisms.
She ran to the front door of the lab, but it was still locked. No one but Brian had been here since she’d arrived today.
She walked slowly back to her bench, then sank onto a stool and sat shivering. What had Brian done with it? Had he moved it to a different dish? Why hadn’t he told her?
She suddenly reached for his lab notebook, then cursed as she remembered he’d taken it home. If he’d sacrificed another organism, he should have told her about it. As tired as he was. This wasn’t the kind of thing one forgets to mention.
Had he imagined she wouldn’t notice?