4.i. Sunlight in Space - and Shadows
Gerald was pacing back and forth outside the docking bay as nervously as any expectant father in a maternity ward. It seemed to be taking an eternity for the shuttle to dock and the tube to be sealed around the door. What if something had gone wrong? What if she'd gotten worse? What if.. "Grandfather!" Gerald spun around in time to be hit around the waist by thirty pounds of delighted granddaughter. Automatically he scooped her high, meeting her ear-to-ear grin with one of his own, even as his eyes looked anxiously for some sign of illness.
"She seems to be fine at the moment, Dad." Gerald pulled his gaze from his granddaughter to see Jerry, his elder son, standing with a suitcase in one hand an a box under the other arm. "But I'm not sure how long it'll last..." He looked with worried eyes at the three-year-old who was now pretending to braid Gerald's moustache. "The doctors say that the stumbles will keep getting worse each time, and she'll keep getting sick. That's," he indicated the child's right arm, "where they gave her a plasma transfusion for antibodies to fight off her last cold; it should last a few more days, they say."
Gerald nodded vaguely, looking at the small bandage on Maria's arm. "Are those her things? Bring them on this way." To Maria, "Let's go see your new room, sweetheart." He shifted her to one arm and led the way down the corridor. She looped her arms around his neck and leaned her golden head against his cheek.
He had arranged Maria's rooms in a newly constructed portion of the ARK, away from the main corridors, moving his own near them. They had been sterilized and he had modified two of the maintenance bots to constantly patrol the room and clean it. There was only one entrance to the hall, which was punctuated by special lights that were designed to kill bacteria and viruses; the air was ultra-filtered for the same purpose. Maria's room also had a special niche in which he intended to station the Gizoid at night, hoping that the Chaos Emerald would have the same enhancing effect on her that it had on his research animals. The only other rooms on the hall were his own, his private lab, and a guest room for when her parents visited. The bedrooms each had attached baths; carving them out of the asteroid had meant extra digging, but the Gizoid had turned out to be very effective at excavation work.
Maria's things were passed through a sanitizer into the hall and she, her father and her grandfather passed through an archway lined with the special lights into her new home. Her blue eyes looked curiously around. She frowned at the bare sealed-stone walls, her pale brows drawing together. "Grandfather? There aren't any pictures."
"You'll have to draw me some; then I'll hang them on the wall for everyone to see them."
"Are there a lot of people here? Can I see them?"
" Not just yet, my dear. They're very busy, and we have to make sure you're done being sick."
"Oh." There was a pause and a more thoughtful frown, then "Grandfather? Can you make me well again?"
Gerald found himself at a loss for a reply. He didn't want to give her a glib assurance, even as young as she was; she was bright enough to know that she was sick in a different way than the other children she knew and aware to some degree of the severity of her illness. Her father cleared his throat, his eyes glistening suspiciously. "I'm going to try, love," Gerald answered at last. "I'm going to do everything I can to make you well again."
"Good," replied the child with an assurance Gerald wished he could share. "Then I can meet everybody and make friends with them." She then gave him that marvelous grin, and suddenly he was as certain as she that everything would be all right. Maria's personality shone as brightly and warmly as sunlight in the steel and stone of the Space Colony ARK.
After settling Maria in her room, and her father in the adjacent guest room, Gerald paced thoughtfully back to his lab. Gerry would only be staying a day or two to be sure Maria settled in all right. Gerald wanted to see as much of him as possible, but he'd have to remember to check on his experiments as well. Speaking of experiments...
He glanced at the jars of blue goo on the shelves above his desk as he pulled a sheet of paper from the analyzer. He'd fed the most recent samples from the research animals in this morning before going down to await Maria's arrival. Strictly speaking, his current project was not really contributing to immortality research at all; although he had contrived a plausible explanation if anyone ever asked. And he was collecting good baseline info on both his selected species of parthenogenic lizards and several lines of congenitally immune-suppressed rats. The third group of test animals were also rats, but these had been normal until the daily administration of NIDS toxin had altered both immune response and nerve function.
Sitting down at the computer Gerald pulled up the notes on Project: Shadow. He'd given the project that name in part because the lighting of the ARK was designed to prevent shadows, and also because in the vastness of space there was relatively little on which to project a shadow; thus making shadows as unlikely as immortality. He added the results from the analyzer and noted that the animals treated with the "luminescent blue gelatinous substance" definitely had strengthened immune responses compared to the control groups. Some actually had normal results. He rubbed his nose absent-mindedly; for some reason it wouldn't stop itching today. Then he saved the file and started pulling down the jars of blue goo.
He knew what the stuff could do to animals; he'd been running tests in the Project : Shadow lab for almost three months. Now he needed to know what it could do to humans. This "stuff" was what he had pinned his hopes on for short term maintenance of Maria's health; the duration of the health enhancement was short, but easily and safely repeatable. Measuring immune response was tricky, a normally functioning system usually demonstrated no change, but the immune-suppressed rats had shown dramatic boosts in both antibody titers and actual challenge tests with various diseases. Those rats receiving the NIDS toxin not only demonstrated the immune boosts but temporary amelioration of the toxin's effects. Measuring non-immune types of healing was simple enough, however.
He pulled out two sealed-sterile instruments - a tongue depressor, which he unwrapped and used to scoop out a glob of the faintly glowing glop - and a scalpel blade. He peeled the package open and removed the blade. Gritting his teeth, he slashed the blade across his forearm near the outside of his elbow. Hissing at the pain, he stood with his arm over the trash can, watching the blood run across his arm. Wrinkling his nose, which was itching again (why does it always itch when I can't scratch it?), he made a second slice, cutting across the first at an angle. Then he dropped the blade on the table and picked up the tongue depressor, slapping the goo on about two-thirds of the injury. The pain from the treated portions of the cuts vanished immediately, and as the blue stuff slid down across his arm and dropped off into the receptacle below, it revealed skin that was not only no longer bleeding but not even scarred. He applied the remainder of the goo to the rest of the cut, then washed his arm clean. Not even the faintest sign of the blade cuts remained. He moved over to his computer and noted this down. Then he removed from the first aid drawer a gauze pad and wrap. Using a new tongue depressor he smeared more of the goo on the gauze and used the wrap to fasten it to his other arm. He knew brief contact with the goo was harmless, now he had to evaluate prolonged skin contact.
The problem, he mused, is how to utilize the healing... - I really need a better name than goo or glop - economically. It wasn't so much a problem of expense as of time. The stuff was extremely effective, even diluted in various solvents, but addition of fluids tended to make it run which could reduce the contact time needed for healing. However, it was very slowly produced from a combination of the energy fluid and a variation of the cells used in the Artificial Chaos robots. He needed a better way to extend it. He sneezed abruptly and unexpectedly on the computer screen. Oh great. Now where did I leave the wipes. He rummaged in the drawer for the anti-static wipes to clean the monitor... And stopped. Vapor. Mist. Fluid droplets in the air. No dilution of effect but the ability to cling where larger droplets would run. Do we have a nebulizer? Where? Professor Gerald jumped out of his chair, took two steps towards the door, turned back long enough to give the monitor a swipe that probably did more to smear it than clean it, then spun back around and ran through the halls to the maintenance stores. There had been a problem early on with maintaining adequate humidity in the halls. Since installation of algae tanks for humidity and oxygen and additional humidifiers to monitor the air passing through the conditioning cycle it was mostly under control, and the temporary portable sort of humidifiers had been put into storage. But I thought...there was that one shipment that was the wrong item. And I know we never throw anything - Aha! He reached up and pulled down a box. Now if he could modify it to do what he wanted...
It took two weeks to get the right balance of nebulized healing goo and air. By then Gerald had proved to his satisfaction that he, at least, had no deleterious effects from prolonged contact with it, or inhaling the vapor form of it. He had isolated himself in Maria's wing as some sort of cold virus seemed to be making the rounds of the researchers, and was NOT going to risk exposing her to it. He did however send an adapted nebulizer over with instructions and a jar of goo. One of his fellow researchers set it up in an internal air lock (in case of damage to the Space Colony that exposed part of the corridors to space, the internal locks would allow repair crews to travel to the affected areas while protecting unbreached areas) adjacent to the sick bay and essentially filled the small space with the vaporized goo. A group of volunteers - most of whom had active colds - had joined him in the lock prior to the activation of the nebulizer. After twenty minutes of standing in and breathing the mist, they turned off the machine and scrubbed the walls, floor and ceiling clean. They then reported to sick bay where it was proved that none of the treated personnel retained any live virus. The checks were made every two hours for the next two days and no virus was detected in any of the researchers. One of the other researchers absconded with the machine and set it up in a shower stall, and by the end of the day there was no one left with an active cold in the entire facility. There was also very little leftover healing goo.
Gerald now focused on developing an automated production method and developed the earliest form of his famous Heal Unit: a force field container, powered by the mist it contained, that could be easily ruptured to release a burst of mist that could heal many injuries and diseases. The Heal Unit generator, fed by Mary's liquified chaos energy, refined the fluid into healing mist and generated the initial field to surround it. He located several of these around the ARK, including one at the entrance to Maria's wing, and the child was finally free to visit other areas of the colony.
She had tolerated the weekly monitoring of her blood cell counts far better than Gerald would have. The Heal Units did appear to bolster her immune system and the nervous faults nearly disappeared; after the installation of the Heal Units the counts were reduced to monthly. She had been warned that they'd have to take more blood again if she did not remember to throw one of the blue bubbles at the wall every time she came back to her hall, and the three-year-old remembered her instructions far better than Gerald had expected. He did have to step in once when he caught her throwing the unit simply for the fun of watching the blue spray, but on the whole she was surprisingly responsible about the new therapy.
Maria had good reason to remember as hard as she could, and be responsible. For all the toys in her room, it was boring, and once she'd papered the hall with drawings that Gerald dutifully hung, she wanted something else to do. It was much more fun to run around the base and look at things, and talk to people than it was to be stuck in her room and hall. She was the sort of child that loved everyone, and even the surliest of the researchers found it difficult to rebuff her - not that a rebuff had any long-term effect. In fact anyone who did snap at her was likely to find a hand-drawn picture outside their door the next time they went through it, or later, a few flowers. Most of the researchers had children, or nieces and nephews, at home and welcomed the golden-haired child as a substitute during their tour on the ARK. She went everywhere except the deep testing rooms and was the instigator of a few non-practical changes to the research colony's routines. The hydroponics lab, which had both research rooms and a general garden where vegetables and herbs were grown, added a few trays of purely ornamental flowers. Maria was given (most of) the responsibility for taking care of the flower garden. While she was not always punctual about remembering to care for them, she took great pride and delight in delivering bouquets to the cafeteria and the main social room of the ARK, as well as delivering flowers to people she considered in need of cheering up, or just those she liked. Gerald's room and her own always had one or two flowers in a vase, and she made certain that Grandfather always got the prettiest ones of the day.