Garden at the End of the Universe
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Back on the Endurance, Captain Tam rapidly and publicly issued directions to the crew, reminding them of the predations of the beings we now knew as the Gods and exactly what we had suffered at their hands. She asserted that the Gods were, even now, very probably watching and listening to everything we were doing and asked everybody for extra caution with what one said to one another. She also made it clear that anybody who wished to leave the crew of the Endurance could do so, with only a short period of notice required. More privately, Tam instructed the heads of various scientific and engineering sections that I should be given every cooperation, with immediate access to any machine or system I might ask for. I knew several of these people reasonably well already, and all seemed happy enough for me to follow whatever independent lines of research I fancied. The objective, when the Endurance was being constructed, was complete self-sufficiency: the ability to fabricate anything we might require from raw materials. The automated factories had limited capacity, though, so many complex devices, including microscopes - both optical and electron - spectrographs, chromatographs, mass spectrometers and a bewildering array of other instruments had been procured in a complete state. Now, many of these instruments had long been mothballed, but it should be possible - I hoped - to return them to an operational state fairly quickly. After some visits to determine the exact state of the equipment I might want to use, it was time to investigate the state of the silk handkerchief. Silk lasts very well in ideal conditions: the absence of light and moisture; of course, the deposit I had collected was distinctly damp and the kerchief, when I removed it from the plastic bag, had become very misshapen and even more delicate than before. Grandma would not have approved. I decided that I would start by examining the remains of the cloth with one of the high-powered optical microscopes. It was easy enough to detach a soiled fragment of the silk and get one of the technicians - a woman I recognised but could not, for the moment, put a name to - to prepare a set of slides for the microscope's table. After a few tens of anxious minutes hanging around, I was finally in a position to closely inspect the remnants of the silk handkerchief. The structure of the woven silk strands was obvious at first glance and closely resembled the textbook images I had studied earlier. The sperm in the semen samples were dead and unmoving, long since desiccated beyond any chance of continuing life. I spent a long time poring over the different parts of the slides; there really was nothing unusual, except for a strange fuzzy quality to some portions, a sensation of faint movement unexpectedly visible. I initially suspected that this strange effect might have been an artifact of the recent recommissioning of the microscope. I showed the lab technician, who swore that the microscope was in perfect working order, but had no explanation for the enduring fuzziness. I spent several more hours convincing myself that the effect was real, and not just something that I was imagining, then spoke to the technician again and asked her to prepare a sample for the Scanning Electron Microscope. (more coming soon)
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Part 5
