He settled on his bunk and gestured to a chair. “I’m afraid there’s not much place to put anything down. There’s an extra glass in the cupboard, and I’ll join you as soon as I finish the drink I’m on.”
She looked with interest at his glass. “Fruit juice?” “Well, one must mix the canniforene in something.” Her eyes widened. “But that’s illegal.”
“Not in England or America. Things are pretty wretched in England and all the mild euphorics are allowed—nay, encouraged.”
“Have you ever smoked LSD?” she asked with a touch of respect in her voice.
“No, didn’t really feel the need. It’s not the sort of thing you smoke, anyway. Not that I mind smoking, mind you; I prefer to take cannabis that way. But I’ve been drilled that you don’t smoke anything on the moon—too dangerous—so I had this canniforene smuggled up with the lot from Kardensky. Cost me a packet—two hundred dollars, that bet, remember?—to get it through.”
She mixed in some fruit juice with her alcohol, tested the mixture and smiled. “Do you find the routine here so wearing?”
“Not at all. It’s dead easy. I haven’t even been here long enough for the low-gravity high to wear off. But while you were rigging up the link to Alphonsus I decided to have a skull session over the Kardensky stuff. Canniforene gives me ideas sometimes, lets me see connections I wouldn’t otherwise.”
Nikka frowned and opened her mouth to say something. Nigel waved his hand elaborately, murmuring, “Ah, I know. Buggering up my mind for a lot of over-the-counter insights. Well, I can’t feel it doing me any harm. It’s given me some sparks of creativity in the past that helped my career a lot. And anyway, Nikka, it’s delicious. Very fashionable stuff, that, it’s much the rage. All the hominids are doing it.”
“All right,” Nikka said, “I might even try some myself. But look, I thought you were going to meet me in the gym an hour ago.”
“I was, wasn’t I? Well, it’s a dreary lot of exercise machines they have in there and I was busy with my cogitating here.”
“You should do it, you know. Valiera will be onto you about it pretty soon. If you don’t do the exercises eventually you can’t return to Earth at all.”
“When they put in a swimming pool I’ll be there.” He took a sip of his drink and studied a sheet of paper nearby.
“That won’t be too long, now that we’ve struck ice. Besides, Nigel, the exercises make you feel good. Look—” She nimbly turned in the air and did a one-handed flip, landing neatly on her feet. “I’ll admit it’s not all that hard in low gravity.”
“Yes, yes,” Nigel said, looking at her curiously. He guessed that she was a bit uneasy at visiting him in his digs. She was a naturally physical sort of person, so anxiety would probably show up as increased activity; thus the gymnastics.
“Sit down here, I’ve got some things to show you.” He handed her a color photograph of Earth taken from orbit. “That’s the same picture we got on the console awhile back. Kardensky had it shifted into approximately our color scale, so it doesn’t look red to us.”
“I see. What part of Earth is it?”
“South America, the southern tip, Tierra Del Fuego.” Nigel tapped a fingernail on the slick surface. “This is the Estrecho de Magellanes, a narrow strait that connects the Atlantic and Pacific.”
Nikka studied the photo. “That’s no strait. It’s sealed up at four or five spots.”
“Right. Now look at this.” He snapped down another print of the same area, dealing as though he were playing cards. “Kardensky got this by request from Geological Survey, taken last year.”
“It’s open,” Nikka said. “It is a strait.”
“That spot has always been clear, ever since Europeans reached the New World. This picture we got from the wreck’s memory bank must be how it looked before erosion cleared the strait.”
Nikka said quickly, “This gives us another way of direct dating, then.”
“Precisely. Rates of erosion aren’t known all that well, but Kardensky says this picture is at least three-quarters of a million years old. It ties in pretty well with the radiation damage estimates. But that’s not all.” Nigel collected notes, photographs and a few books which were lying about his bed. “Somebody in Cambridge has identified those lattice-works we found.”
“What are they?”
“Sectioned views, from different angles, of physostig-mine.”
“Isn’t that …”
“Right. I’m a bit rusty at all this but I checked with Kardensky and my memory from the news media is right—that’s the stuff they use as an RNA trigger. That, and a few other long chain molecules, are what the NSF is trying to get legislation about.”
Nikka studied the prints he handed her. To her untrained eye the complex matrix made no sense at all.
“Doesn’t it have something to do with sleep learning in the subcortical region?”
Nigel nodded. “That seems to be one of its functions. You give it to someone and they are able to learn faster, soak up information without effort. But it acts on the RNA as well. The RNA replicates itself through the DNA—there’s some amino acid stuff in there I don’t quite follow—so that there is a possibility, at least, of passing on the knowledge to the next generation.”
“And that’s why it’s illegal? The New Sons don’t want it used, I’ve heard.”
Nigel leaned back against the wall and rested his feet on the narrow bunk. “There’s one point where our friends from the Church of the Unwarranted Assumption may have a point. This is dangerous stuff to fool about with. Biochemists started out decades ago using it on flatworms and the like. But a man isn’t a worm and it will take a bloody long series of experiments to convince me using it on humans is a wise move.”
He paused and then said softly, “What I’d like to know is why this molecule is represented in an alien computer memory almost a million years old.”
Nikka held out her glass. “Could you give me a drop of that canniforene in fruit juice? I’m beginning to see it might have a use.”
“Quite so,” Nigel said dryly.
“There are some other points too. That long black line against the mottled background we found, that’s a DNA molecule entering a—let me look it up—pneumococcus. A simple step in the replication process, Kardensky tells me.” He put aside his papers and carefully mixed her a drink. “That’s what I was having off on, hallucinating about, I suppose, when you knocked.”
Nikka drank quickly and then smiled, shaking her head. “Interesting taste. They mix it with something, don’t they? But explain what you mean, I don’t see where all this points.”
Nigel chuckled and turned thumbs up. “Great. I’m hoping the fellows who peeked inside the packages from Kardensky won’t see it either.”
“What do you mean? They were opened?”
“Sure. All the seals were off. The canniforene was disguised, so it got through. The rest was just books, papers, photos and a tape. I don’t know what the censors—New Sons I’d imagine—thought of it all.”
