Stabbed

Back to the microscope. “Okay, you little reprobates. You’re radiation-proof, I’ll grant you that. But how about I stab you in the face?”

Normally a nanosyringe would be controlled by finely tuned equipment. But I just wanted some stabby time and didn’t care about the tool’s integrity. I grabbed the collet (where it would normally mount to the control machinery) and brought the needle into view in the microscope. They’re called nanosyringes, but they’re actually about 50 nanometers wide. Still, the needle was tiny compared to the hulking 10-micron Astrophage—only about one two-thousandth the width.

I poked an Astrophage with the needle and what happened next was nothing I could have expected.

First off, the needle penetrated. No doubt on that front. For all its resistance to light and heat, apparently, Astrophage was no better at dealing with sharp things than any other cell.

The instant I poked a hole in it, the whole cell became translucent. No longer a featureless black dot, but a cell with organelles and everything else a microbiologist like me wants to see. Just like that. It was like flicking a switch.

And then it died. The ruptured cell wall simply gave up the ghost and completely unraveled. The Astrophage went from being a cohesive roundish object to a slowly widening puddle with no outer boundary. I grabbed a normal needle from a nearby shelf and sucked up the goop.

“Yes!” I said. “I killed one!”

“Good for you,” Stratt said without looking up from her tablet. “First human to kill an alien. Just like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator.”

“Okay, I know you’re trying to be funny, but that Predator died by deliberately setting off a bomb. The first human to actually kill a Predator was Michael Harrigan—played by Danny Glover—in Predator 2.”

She stared at me through the window for a moment, then shook her head and rolled her eyes.

“Point is, I can finally find out what Astrophage is made of!”

“Really?” She set the tablet down. “Killing it did the trick?”

“I think so. It’s not black anymore. Light is getting through. Whatever weird effect was blocking it isn’t anymore.”

“How did you do it? What killed it?”

“I penetrated the outer cell membrane with a nanosyringe.”

“You poked it with a stick?”

“No!” I said. “Well. Yes. But it was a scientific poke with a very scientific stick.”

“It took you two days to think of poking it with a stick.”

“You…be quiet.”

I took the needle to the spectroscope and ejected the Astrophage goop onto the platform. Then I sealed the chamber and fired up the analysis. I bounced from one foot to the other like a little kid while I waited for the results.

Stratt craned her neck to watch me. “So what’s this you’re doing now?”

“It’s the atomic-emission spectroscope,” I said. “I told you about it earlier—it sends x-rays into a sample to excite the atoms, then watches the wavelengths that come back. Didn’t work at all when I tried it on the live Astrophage, but now that the magic light-stopping properties are gone, things should work like normal.”

The machine beeped.

“All right! Here we go! Time to find out what chemicals are in a life-form that doesn’t use water!” I read the LCD screen. It showed all the peaks and the elements they represented. I stared at the screen silently.

“Well?” Stratt said. “Well?!”

“Um. There’s carbon and nitrogen…but the vast majority of the sample is hydrogen and oxygen.” I sighed and plopped down in the chair next to the machine. “The ratio of hydrogen to oxygen is two to one.”

“What’s wrong?” she asked. “What does that mean?”

“It’s water. Astrophage is mostly water.”

Her mouth fell open. “How? How can something that exists on the surface of the sun have water?”

I shrugged. “Probably because it maintains its internal temperature at 96.415 degrees Celsius no matter what’s going on outside.”

“What does this all mean?” she asked.

I put my head in my hands. “It means every scientific paper I ever wrote is wrong.”

***

Chapter 4