Bios by Robert Charles Wilson Page B

triggered the biohazard alarm. But the damage to the pod itself, no, no single agent or combination of agents could conceivably have done that.”
    â€œAs far as we know.”
    He shrugged. “You’re right. We
don’t
know. But we’re talking about chemical isolates at the microgram level.”
    â€œAny other problems, prior to the disaster?”
    â€œPod Six had problems with algal gunk interfering with the samplers and sensor arrays. But don’t jump to conclusions, Elam. We’ve had much the same trouble all up and down the station, though it gets worse with depth. It would be a tremendous coincidence if both things happened simultaneously—a toxic releaseinside the pod and a compromised seal serious enough to collapse the structure itself.”
    â€œWhatever caused the watertight seals to break down might also have taken out the glove-box array.”
    â€œMaybe. Probably. And doesn’t that suggest to you a hazard of the first order?”
    She thought about it. “All we have that would make Pod Six unique is a heavy algal infestation in the sensor arrays?”
    â€œI don’t know about unique. It’s a matter of degree. But in the sense you mean, yes.”
    â€œCan I look at these organisms?”
    â€œCertainly.”
    Freeman Li had hedged Degrandpre’s bet by confining his staff to the upper two pods of the chain, where they could make a quick escape to the shuttle bay if the need arose. The remaining three pods had been closed and sealed. That cut into station productivity in general and interrupted at least two very promising research lines, but, Li said flatly, “That’s Degrandpre’s problem, not mine.”
    It was a laudably Kuiper-like sentiment, Elam thought.
    She followed him down a narrow access shaft to the lowermost of the occupied pods. The bulkheads caught her eye as she passed beneath them: immense steel pressure doors ready to snap shut in an unforgiving fraction of a second. In that awful Terrestrial novel, there had been a passage about a mouse walking into a trap. She had never seen a mouse or a mousetrap, but she imagined she knew how the animal felt.
    Precautions in the microbiology lab, never less than stringent under Freeman’s watch, had been tuned since the accident to a fine pitch. Until further notice, all Isian biota and isolates were to be treated as proven hot Level Five threats. In the lab’s secured anteroom, Elam donned the requisite pressurized suit with shoulderpack air and temperature controls. As did Li, and with his headgear in place he looked peculiar: hollow-eyed, somber. He guided her through the preliminary washdown, past similarlydressed men and women working at glove boxes of varying complexity, through yet another airlocked antechamber and into a smaller, unoccupied lab.
    Elam felt some of the terror she had first felt on entering a Level Five viral-research lab during her training on Earth. Of course, it had been worse then. She had been a naive Kuiper student raised on Crane Clan tales of the horrors of the Terrestrial plague years. The great divide between Earth and the Kuiper colonies had always been a biological chasm, deeper in its way than the simple distances of space. The Kuiper clans enforced a quarantine: no one was permitted to arrive or return from Earth unless he or she was scrubbed of all Terrestrial disease organisms, down to the cellular level. Terrestrial/Kuiper decon was grueling, physically difficult, and as lengthy as the long loop orbit from the inner system. There had never been an outbreak of Terrestrial disease on an inhabited Kuiper body; had there been, the settlement in question would have been instantly quarantined and decontaminated—hygiene protocols that would have been impractical on Earth, with its dense and mostly impoverished population.
    Elam had gone to Earth for her post-doc the way a fastidious social worker might consent to enter a leper