Holding the joint—a merry little smokable in pink paper—between his thumb and middle fingers, Ian leaned down and looked through the eyepiece. Gerry, meanwhile, considered what he had seen. He had to admit, it looked as if Neil was having some success.
Ian lifted his head. “Looks like it’s doing something.”
Gerry’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah.”
“You think it will work?”
“I hope so.”
“But?”
Gerry shrugged. “Maybe he’s got it.”
“But?”
It was indeed a piece of work that such a colossal structure could be dismantled this way, and he felt nothing but keen admiration for his brother.
“We’ll just have to wait.”
“Wait for what?” asked Ian.
“Seems like a slow process.”
“And?”
“The Tarsalans could respond.”
“Respond how?”
“With a neutralizer, or antidote, or some such other molecular or nanogenic agent. If you’re going to fight the Tarsalans, you have to be smarter, stronger, and sooner than they are.”
“Sooner?”
“You have to hit them all at once, like Stephanie says.”
Three technicians delivered infrared equipment to the Alleyne-Parma Observatory the following day.
Gerry was surprised, and also relieved. He had thought for sure that he wouldn’t get any of this new equipment until Neil’s toxin attempt had unequivocally failed. That he should see the equipment so soon made him think his arguments had, after all, carried weight, and that even the rhetorically minded Ira Levinson had at last seen reason.
The apparatus, in its entirety, was a boxy unit about the size of a refrigerator, and reminded Gerry of a giant multilens camera. One of the lenses stuck out further than the others, protruding from the white casing about six inches, while the other two lenses remained recessed into the instrument, covered with special optical filters made of blue glass.
The technicians took the whole afternoon to install the unit, and to download software into the accompanying computer.
When they were done, they gave Gerry a rundown, and by the time they left he was fairly adept at imaging, enhancing, and analyzing the infrared views of Earth.
The mayor came a few hours later. “How’s it working?” asked Hulke.
“You pulled some strings.”
“It was more than strings, Ger.”
“Malcolm… thanks.”
“Just do something with it. Give Ira a bone or something.”
“I’ve been studying the new images for the last few hours.”
“And so, like, your brother’s thing…is it working?”
Gerry shrugged. “As far as it goes, I guess. But the evidence is inconclusive yet.”
“Even in the new images? Does this…does it help get a better look at what your brother’s toxin is doing? Because I had to use that…that line of reasoning with Ira, even though I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. Otherwise you would have been waiting forever.”
Gerry sighed. So. Here it was again. The hidden agenda. The new apparatus wasn’t meant to further his own research, but to confirm his brother’s. What else was new?
He glumly told the mayor the truth. “I’m not sure.”
The mayor gestured at the infrared views of Earth on the monitors. “How many blooms show deterioration?”
Gerry glanced at the monitor. “I count…five. And it looks as if they’ve just seeded another, so that makes six. It’s just that, you know…” He motioned at the screen. “It seems the phytosphere is catching on, getting an idea of what’s happening…like I said it would.”
“Gerry, please don’t say that.”
Gerry shook his head. “I’m just not sure yet. The hydrogen sulfide seems to be working in some blooms, and not in others. Omicron bloom, for instance. It’s hardly made a dent.”
The mayor’s smooth face flushed. “That’s not, like, the best news I’ve heard all day. Any way I can put a positive spin on it for Ira?”
He raised his brow, frustrated that the mayor should be looking at it this way. “I wouldn’t say it’s a complete bust, Malcolm. But the temperature relationships are complex.” The mayor’s face sank at this notion. “And I haven’t quite figured them out.” Hulke’s face sank further, as if Gerry’s inability to figure things out was just another breach in the confidence the mayor had placed in him.
“So there are… temperature relationships.” The mayor didn’t seem to like this at all. “Okay. Not what I was expecting, but if you could explain without getting too technical…so I have something to take back to Ira.”
Gerry collected his thoughts. “We should be getting an extremely cold infrared signature on the dead plant tissue, well into the darkest blues.”
“But?” The mayor’s pale eyes had now gone wide.
“Well…we
Gerry pointed. “The green indicates that the plant material has actually grown inert. Not dead, just inert.
There’s no growth activity. It’s like an oak tree in winter. It’s still alive, but nothing’s happening.”
“So does that mean your brother’s failed?”
Gerry shrugged. “There’s been no regrowth in the affected areas. I wouldn’t call that failure, but I wouldn’t call it success either. Maybe what we’re going to get is a shroud with a lot of holes in it. Which is better than a shroud with no holes at all.”
“But if the U.S. keeps peppering the phytosphere with this hydrogen sulfide, and keeps starving the xenophyta… surely we’ll get rid of it once and for all.”
“I don’t know. This freeze-up action happens faster each time. It might reach a point where the seeding will stall the minute it hits the phytosphere.”
“But generally speaking, your brother’s had at least some initial success.”
“Given what I’m seeing here, I would say yes.”
The mayor stared at the images on the monitors. “And what about…you know…your own research?
Ira was asking about it.”
“He was?”
“He hasn’t
Gerry’s eyebrows twitched upward. “That’s just the shot in the arm I was looking for, Malcolm.”
“He wanted to know about the… uh… anomalous band.”
Hearing this, Gerry had to rethink his opinion of Ira. He motioned at the monitors. “You can see the band a lot better using infrared.” He pointed. “It runs all the way from the north pole to the south pole.
On the infrared scale, it fluctuates into yellow, even into orange near the equator, and that means it’s generating a lot of heat. Heat means stress.”
“Stress?”
“Whenever things are under great pressure, or great stress, they heat up. This heat band from north to south indicates that the phytosphere comes under global cyclical stress. I’m still trying to understand it.”
“But it has nothing to do with your brother’s poison?”
“No. It was there before my brother used the hydrogen sulfide. I’m working on some models to explain it.
