Decipher by Stel Pavlou

Author:Stel Pavlou
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-07-07T16:00:00+00:00

“Hi, This is Ted,” Rebecca annouced, introducing everybody. “Ted, this is Jon and Sarah. Ted’s a marine biologist. He studies jellyfish.”

“Oh,” Sarah commented brightly. “They must be very interesting animals.”

“They’re not animals per se,” Ted responded icily. “They are planktonic marine creatures. Protoplasm.” Ted wore sandals and had long greasy hair, like a surfer with a personal hygiene problem. He also didn’t know when to break eye-contact, which made conversation with him awkward and uncomfortable. “Some of them are not single creatures at all, but a collective of tiny creatures that choose to work, live and hunt together in a form we call the jellyfish.”

“Oh,” Sarah replied with an air that she hoped suggested she stood corrected.

“Ted’s a little edgy at the moment, aren’t you, Ted?” Rebecca interjected apologetically.

The other biologists steered clear of their little gathering. They also wore their hair long, were in the process of growing beards, and were more interested in the spores they were cultivating in glass dishes than infiltrators from the lab down the hall.

“We studied C60 before,” Rebecca announced sweetly, tapping the screen of her computer and signaling to her colleagues that everything was fine. “There you go. That’s your transfer started. Shouldn’t take long.”

“Thank you,” Hackett replied dismissively, aware Sarah was hovering beside him. “What, uh, what do you mean you studied C60 before? Why on earth would you do that as a microbiologist?”

“Fullerenes,” Rebecca explained, “are a good candidate for seeding life through space. Didn’t you know?”

Sarah folded her arms tightly across her chest. “Obviously not,” she said, thinking of the hand back in the tunnel in Egypt, and shivering.

“Oh,” Rebecca cooed dreamily, watching the data on the screen. “Carbon’s a really special little element. And C60’s a really smart little molecule.”

“Carbon’s very adaptable,” Hackett agreed. “It’s in the ink we write with. It’s in the flesh we live by. It goes from being a gas to being part of the human brain, able to contemplate its own existence.”

“Which is incredible considering that, as an element, it’s so mediocre,” Rebecca added. “It does most things, but isn’t an extremist, like say potassium, which blows up at the drop of a hat. Carbon only makes up 0.2 percent of the earth’s elements, but is part of more compounds than any other element. Hundreds of thousands of compounds.”

“But why the C60 molecule as a candidate for spreading life?” Sarah persisted.

“Because it’s hollow,” Rebecca replied, as if Sarah, since she knew so much about carbon, should have known the answer to that question already. “It’s the shape of a soccer ball.”

“The Carbon 60 molecule,” Hackett objected, “is only approximately three angstroms across. That’s enough space for about one atom only.”

“Yes, but think about it. What atom?” Rebecca threw right back at him. “You choose the right atom and you wind up creating the world’s most powerful non-metal magnet. You make C900, which they’ve done in the lab. The same enclosed structure as C60 emerges but with 900 carbon atoms. And that isn’t a ball anymore—that’s a capsule.

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