Impossible Alone

Illustration by Randy Asplund-Faith

The most powerful person in the Solar System cadged a drink off me.

“Simon!” I said. Even on a low budget myself I willingly pulled out a ten to cover the next round. “What’s it been, sixteen, seventeen years?”

“That many?”

“You skipped that last cluster reunion.”

We graduated a year apart in the late nineties from Beloit, me with a degree in biochemistry that led to cell work on amphibians, he with a combined degree in physics and chemistry that led him on a zig-zag course after several higher degrees from MIT: first a NASA lackey, second a consultant for several top contractors, and then head of one of the largest aerospace companies on the globe, Kunz, with reputedly as many assets in Russia and China as in the U.S.

He nodded acquiescence. “So I did.”

“So what’s up for the trillionaire these days?” I hatched in my head a dozen leading questions—not that I wanted to take advantage of an old friend, but out of honest curiosity—I think it was honest—as to whether Kunz Corp had a philanthropic arm that would help fund my area of research.

He shook his head. “So people still think I’m a trillionaire.”

“Well, sure. You are, aren’t you?”

“I suppose it looks like it on paper, if you hold the paper upside down.”

“But don’t you have a center down in Sarasota you built only a few years back? And someplace up in Norway?”

He nodded. “But it means nothing, Bob. If I went the way you did—I mean, you’re still scrambling for grants, aren’t you? And living off an academic salary part of the year? If I did it your way I’d be better off now. Hell of a lot better.”

“But these buildings, whole industries at your beck and call—”

“When you have massive debt, you can always go deeper. And deeper. And deeper. Debt’s the only bottomless pit.”

I looked at the beer in front of him, bought with my five bucks, with new understanding. It also finally registered that this was no classy hotel in whose bar we happened to find each other. My presence indicated as much.

“You’re broke?” I said. I imagined reading the information in alumni news and decided it would never happen. The alumni editor put a bright cast on everything.

“Technically, no. In real money terms, absolutely.”

“My god, what happened?”

“I’m not sure I should say.”

“Come on, fess up. Give me a capsule version at least.”

“Capsule version? It still won’t be easy for you to swallow, I bet. But I’ll tell you this much. You know the collapse of efforts to get out of our gravity well? I don’t mean stuff to the Moon. That’s all nearby stuff, and money’s pouring into that like it won’t stop. I mean efforts to get away from here. Venus. Mars. Especially Mars.”

“You were big into Mars.”

“Kunz Corp was Mars. Nothing else. I piled everything into it. Absolutely everything. I took a bet.”

“And lost.”

“Lost big. The States pulled out when Congress hogtied NASA and Sands Offplanet into the Moon junkets. And when the States pulled out, Global Spacenet sucked in its gut and looked to the Moon, too. Sure, I could use what I have for Moon work. But all the long-range stuff we’d developed—kaplooey! We have a couple trillion in hardware sitting in Florida. Rocket technology, life-support technology, radiation-shielding technology. My couple trillion. It’s all wrapped up in stuff we can’t use. But that’s the nature of the gamble, isn’t it? It wouldn’t be the future if we could predict it.”

“But what about the new businesses of the last few years?” I’d heard about something having to do with biotech.

“That’s longer ago than a few years, Bob.” He gave me an odd smile, then shrugged. “I’m pretty much a sunk boat, unless this Green Spot stuff makes people force Congress’s hand.”

I thought about it. “It would take that, wouldn’t it? Public mandate, that kind of thing?”

He nodded.

The Green Spot had become big news the year before: an area of anomalous coloration had appeared on the surface of the Red Planet adjoining one of the polar caps. It had grown appreciably in the time since its discovery. The latest of the Observer series inconveniently went haywire, as did the prior one, meaning that the best near-space photos came from Earth-orbit and Moon-based telescopes—good images, it was true, but not good enough.

The images agreed in one respect, at least: that the Green Spot looked tantalizingly like evidence of plants. Life.

“It sounds like there could be a quick reversal of public opinion, the way the tabloids are going,” I said. “Life on Mars. That’s all it takes, isn’t it, to get people furious to have manned exploration?”

He shrugged. “I’m hoping. Believe me, I’m hoping.”

He asked about my current project. Somehow we passed the next couple hours talking about that. He even showed a fair grasp of some of the topics I’ve been tackling, which helped, and which made me wonder exactly how far he had gotten into biotech.

My main concern has to do with ecostrophism. While it isn’t a word people use everyday, it preoccupies me a great deal.

Ecostrophism refers to the influence an organism has on environment: literally, it’s the measure of how “home-turning” an organism is. Every living thing “turns” its home from what it was, making it into a new thing, a new place, a new environment. Corals make atolls into the fantastically rich biotic regions they are. Grasses make the plains what they are. Voles and mice dig tunnels in the grasses, opening new pathways for snakes and insects; beetles leave droppings fed upon by bacteria; fungi in the soil make it possible for a seed to germinate, the plant which makes an environment suitable for a set of moths and butterflies to propagate, which in turn makes it an environment more suitable for birds and bats. The world turns and turns. Everything affects everything else.

Humanity tends to be more ecostrophic than most species, it’s true; and technological humanity gets carried away with it the same way humanity gets carried away about all things. To mention just one minor indicator of this: the neologism “eco-tastrophe” entered the language long before the more useful term “ecostrophism” did.

My difficulty lies with choices. How far should we exert this ecostrophism, once we realize that all our actions have implications within the “natural” world? My particular area of study has led to a development potentially of great importance to all amphibious life of the planet, with the possible exception of some legless and purely aquatic forms that rarely see direct sunlight.

I have engineered the better frog.

I should say I engineered the better frog skin. Frog populations dropped drastically the last two decades of the Twentieth, in part due to pollutants and in part to ozone decrease. Unscreened sunshine fries the tenderskinned animals, at least it does when flushes of acidic snowmelt in spring haven’t already kept the tadpoles from maturing into adults. A better skin seemed in order, one that would deal better with the Sun—reptiles had learned that trick long ago, and thrived in niches shared only with periodically appearing toads—and better with pollutants, too, if possible.

Once I had the skin, though, the question became which amphibia should I help? And where? And should I do it at all? It became not a question of whether I should try to save amphibians—the answer to that being an unequivocal Yes—but whether I should risk entire ecosystems. I was pondering the introduction of an unknown factor into some of the most delicate ecosystems known to humankind—limpid freshwater pools. How could I do it?

“I understand your dilemma,” Simon Kunz said. “Though I come at it from a different angle. I’m into the exploration of planets. Think of that, Bob. Think of an entire planet. From our point of view, it’s pristine. Pristine, that is, until we land a craft there, bum it with rocket flames on descent, walk all over it, and presumably leave monitoring machines behind us and some trash, too. We expel gas, we lose water vapor. Inevitably we leave bacteria. Think about that planet Mars. How do we go about its exploration when we know that the very act of exploration will irrevocably change the planet we re exploring? It’s a toss-up, is what it is. We have to decide one way or the other. Either we commit ourselves to going no nearer the planet than orbit, or else we commit ourselves to change, and accept the fact we’re never going to have a pristine planet again. And if we take that step, who’s to say when we stop? What’s going to keep us from going all the way? What’s going to stop us from changing the atmosphere, the landforms, the chemistry—in short, altering, or else creating, a whole planetary ecosystem?”

“Which way do you lean?”

“Frankly, I’m an all-the-way kind of guy. I wouldn’t be where I am—well, that’s not saying much, but I wouldn’t have gotten where I did in the space programs of three countries on two continents if I wasn’t into messing with the Universe. I figure we’ll go to Mars and change it radically. We re going to make it a human habitat if it isn’t a habitat for something else already. We re going to make it a place to live.”

I would have cause to remember those words.

Across the newsholo’s front page, full-screen, some ten or so days later: GREEN “SPOT” GROWS, MAKES RING AROUND POLE: MARS ALIVE? “The ring has blobs and other features, new photos reveal. See details Page 3 Down.”

A blurry holo next to the headline showed, indeed, blobs and other features.

I remembered the headline from a tabloid only the day before: “Martian Canals Will Reappear This Month, Scientists Say.” I nearly bought it.

Less happy news arrived on the Newsprint Local, with an obituary of O. Howard Luntes, industrialist, benefactor of the Great Lakes Area Freshwater Task Force, and past trustee of Nettleridge Community College. I could count on no more assistance from that quarter, presumably. The Dean mailed me a note about one of my classes, moreover. A cancellation. “Enough students signed up,” she said, “but we had to cut somewhere and the axe is coming down in the part-time staff. That’s been an unprofitable part of our operation this last quarter. Sorry, Bob, I tried to save this one.” Thank you, Jean. Better news from Sandy, who was off visiting home: “Mom’s better,” she said, “and I bought her a new dress. One for me, too. Love and kisses, and a bill, enclosed.”

The same day, mid-afternoon, an ambiguous express package apparently arrived at my office at the college. I say apparently because I was at home that evening when the phone call telling me about it came via secure line.

“Hello, Bob?” he said. Even without the vidline activated—part of the security process, I supposed—I knew his voice.

“Didn’t expect to be hearing from you,” I said. I only spoke the truth. I figured to run into Simon Kunz in another decade, after he spent his way through another fortune on space and I had fruitlessly hit up another zillion blank-faced benefactors for funding frog skin research.

“Did you get the stuff?” he said.

“What stuff?”

“I didn’t have your home address. Or someone didn’t. I don’t know. I’m just in charge of this place. They must have sent it to the college. You’re still at Nettleridge, right?”

I thought of the canceled classes: two last year, one so far this year. “Sure.”

“I sent a plane ticket there. It must be at your office. I want to talk to you. Can you catch the flight? It’s going out tonight.”

“Tonight? My god, Simon, what are you talking about? It’s after six!”

“You’re doing fine,” Simon said. “Plane’s not till nine. Go pick up the ticket and I’ll meet you at the airport at midnight.”

“You’re crazy!”

“Sure I am. See you later!”

“Wait, wait—why not just talk to me on the phone. I mean, I’m here, and you’ve got me. Talk. Tell me what’s going on.”

His silence told me he wouldn’t before his voice did. “Bob, listen. No one listens to Nettleridge College phone lines, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, I’m not Nettleridge.”

He hung up.

Three hours later I sat in a plane headed for a layover in Cleveland and a connection with a flight to Sarasota. There, in the air, I remembered I had been thinking of taking the train to Iowa the next day. Iowa. Home of a rara avis—a rara rana would be closer to the truth, and rara acris would be closest of all—Blanchard’s cricket frog, extinct or nearly so now over most of its range and still common in only a few areas of Iowa-Nebraska. I had made some calls to a herpetological friend in Cedar Rapids, a member of my amphibian-watchdog team. I’d even suggested a time and a meeting place. And had forgotten to cancel plans after Simon Kunz called. It would have sounded strange, I know: “Listen, Ed, one of the leading aerospace industrialists just called and I can’t go on the frogging trip.”

A businessman sat beside me on the flight. At the moment he stared at his lap, at his cellular.

“Flight attendants won’t let me use it,” he said, noticing my gaze. He had porcine cheeks despite a relatively slim build, and large eyes that looked both apologetic and spoiled. “But it’s damn pretty, isn’t it?”

The phone sat on with its back-side up, a trio of miniature screens there showing what I presumed to be videos. One screen showed what looked to be movie material. The other two spoke to me more loudly of the businessman’s state of mind: a Saturday morning cartoon, and a pornflick with writhing, sweat-slicked bodies. A human nature show, I supposed.

I nodded. “Real pretty.”

“Too bad we re bom with only two eyes, eh?” He bulged his at me.

“Scientists are working on it,” I said, wondering if they were.

“I owe you a beer,” Simon Kunz said.

“Christ, you bring me here in the middle of the night to buy me a beer?”

He laughed.

An attractive, matronly woman had run me from the airport to the Kunz complex, and led the way to the office of the man himself. She looked like an older version of that resident assistant of ours back in that Beloit dorm.

Kunz looked pretty much like Kunz did the last time I saw him, down to the faint lines of worry. I had heard about his abrupt upturn of fortune when the States and the new provisional Moon governing body had announced the revival of Mars expeditions junked nearly a decade before. Global Spacenet followed suit days later.

So I noticed and wondered at those lines of worry.

The office looked far more spare than 1 had expected. Even the window took in a relatively modest view of a courtyard and garden of mildly exotic plants. The furnishings had a lived-in feel. I suspected they had seen these four walls for all of the past ten years, a tight-belted time for the world that revolved around Simon Kunz.

He pulled a pair of English ales from a cooler with labels I had never seen before. I wondered that he had found time for pub-crawls in his down-and-out phase.

“Actually, you’ll probably think it’s an awfully small thing, what I bring you here for,” he said.

The statement first made me angry, then made me laugh. “Simon! Our ideas of what’s small don’t exactly jibe, I don’t think.”

He nodded affably. “Right enough, Bob. And this I’m pretty sure is my idea of small. It’ll seem pretty big for you, unless things have changed as radically for you in the past few weeks as they have for me. No? But anyway I couldn’t tell you about it over the phone. If this leaks I’m cooked. You got that? Cooked. Let me give you this first.”

He handed me an envelope, unsealed, which my fingers opened before caution could stop me. The writing on the check inside certainly stopped me breathing.

“What for?” I said.

“Hey, don’t take it wrong! I’m not paying for silence! Believe me!” Then he laughed and took a sip of ale. “I’m paying for your research. You need money? You have it. Right there. It’s made out to your obscure little frog-watch organization so you don’t have to declare it as a gift or as income. Nonprofit, right? Did I get the name right?”

I nodded.

“Good,” he said. “So, let me ask you. Have you made a decision about—you remember what we talked about? About your frog skins? You weren’t sure if you were going to do it or not? What are you doing now?”

I told him about the cricket frogs. About Iowa. About possibly trying a re-insertion of the species in Wisconsin and Michigan.

He nodded. “So you think that’s the one? The cricket frog?”

I pursed my lips. I hadn’t made a decision to genetically alter them or any other frogs. What a decision to make, after all! How could I do it lightly?

Yet I had to admit the idea was growing on me. Deciding to go to Iowa, to fetch eggs if we could find them, was pushing me even farther in that direction.

I nodded hesitantly.

“Good.” He grinned widely at that. The widest I had seen him grin. “Listen, Bob, we’re going to work together.”

“Hold on. You haven’t told me what all the secrecy’s about.”

“The reason for all the secrecy’s a secret.”

“Yeah, but come on. You’re dragging me here in the middle of the night, and we’ve got beers in our hands. I don’t know about you, but having a beer in my hand—and the fact that you put it in my hand—means you’re about to lay a story on me. So lay it on. Thick, if you have to.”

He shook his head. “It’s amazing you got anywhere in science, you old barfly. But I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you exactly what I wouldn’t want winded about, because someone in the news biz might get ahold of it, and might think it really is what’s going on. You get me?”

I nodded hesitantly. “I think so.”

“Good,” he said. “Just imagine this. I’m telling you a story, see? Imagine someone sinks a lot of money into getting to Mars. A lot. To the point that if the nations of our two worlds, Earth and Moon, should ever get together and decide to finally make that push for putting people on Mars, maybe even putting people there in great numbers, then that person would stand to earn a lot—a lot of dough. I know it’s hard to imagine someone like that, but do it for the sake of argument.” He arched an eyebrow at me. “And now imagine this. Imagine the space biz undergoes a depression. The nations pull back from ideas about Mars. This someone we’re talking about—let’s call him Mr. Kud-zu—he uses some of his resources and keeps pushing for Mars. Only he does it in secret. Say he thinks of a way of attracting public interest in that planet, and he does the development work. Say he pulls it off, and it’s a phenomenal stunt. I don’t know what the stunt would be—but, oh, say he invests in a bioengineering project, and creates a plant that can live on Mars, that can reproduce in those conditions and spread like mad, and that slowly begins to alter the atmosphere and hence climate of the Red Planet once it’s there.”

“That’s an awful lot of what-ifs,” I said.

“I suppose so,” he said. “But they’re good ones.”

I laughed at his devil-take-it gesture. “Do I get this story right? This Mr. Kudzu sends these things to Mars? Without consulting anyone else? And these things then reproduce and somehow attract public interest?”

“Hypothetically, yes,” Simon said, leaning back and smiling. “Think how cheap it would be—from my point of view, Bob, not yours. All you would need to do, once you have the proper organisms, would be to send the ship. You wouldn’t need to get it back. It could all be automatic. A robot planter—or hundreds of them, more efficiently—would emerge from the landing craft and go about the process of cultivating what are in essence weeds on Mars.”

“Weeds on Mars, eh?”

“Yes. Weeds. The weeds, the robots, the landing craft, they all stay there. That’s a big savings right there. But you remember our conversation about changing things? Ecostrophism? I think I told you back then: you have to decide. Either you’re going to keep hands off, or not. If you decide to get your hands messy, then it’s an open question as to how far you go.”

“I see,” I said. I did begin to see and what I was seeing bothered me not a little. “What sort of plant might it be?”

“Like I said, a bioengineered one. But with some Earthly beginnings. Say, a quick-growing vine that might be common in the South. And some resistant root system capable of dealing with permafrost and other extreme conditions, say from some tundra plant. Plus other genes from hither and yon. I’m just putting this out as theoretical, you know.”

“Theoretical,” I repeated, nodding, seeing the Green Spot in my mind’s eye. I waved the check in my hand. “Theoretically speaking, what part does this huge check have to do with this story which of course is not true and which you don’t want the news to get?”

Simon put his hands together and looked at the marvel of bioengineering contained in his brown ale bottle. “I suppose that piece of paper might fit in the story. For instance, imagine that Mr. Kudzu wants a bioengineered toad—one with high tolerance for UV and maybe low-O₂ conditions—”

“A toad? Why?”

“Well, maybe Mr. Kudzu released not only a species of plant of Mars, but insects, too. More than one kind. A pollinator, a predator, a pest. The first two kicked the bucket. I mean, theoretically they might kick the bucket, and Mr. Kudzu might need a back-up predator. The pollinators don’t matter, since the kudzu—I mean the Martian plant, whatever it might be—spreads pretty rapidly as it is by means of rhizomes and creepers. It’s all-purpose, when it comes to propagation. To come up with new predators, however, Mr. Kudzu might possibly already have people working on spiders and a kind of parasitic wasp, but he might think it worthwhile to have—”

“Martian toads?” I said. My mind staggered—easy enough to do, since it was already staggering even though I had hardly touched the ale. I mean: A kudzu grows on Mars!

“You got it,” he said, raising his bottle in toast.

Later, after several more toasts, and several more of the means whereby we toasted, he looked at me soberly, or at least with the appearance of sobriety, and said, “Bob, you know it as well as I do. Some things are impossible to do alone. So you got to get help. And what do you do. You give them a kick in the ass. A big one. A wailing big kick in the ass! The whole damned world public if that’s what it takes! A wailing big kick!”

The Green Spot. A bright spot in the history of our reaching out to other planets, is how it will be remembered.

And as a wailing good kick in the hinder!

Me, I’m glad my rear still smarts.

Whether Simon will be as glad, once the public finds out how it’s been flamboozled, I don’t know—

Whoosh! I can imagine the paddle now! A red spot!

But we’ll be laughing in our dotage, Simon and I, surrounded by our vines and bugs and these modified blackskinned South American toads I have here in this shipping container, sucking in the CO₂, ready to go.

As I will be, one day.

One day, when that red light in the sky turns all green.