Yes, inches. When I’m stressed out, I revert to imperial units. It’s hard to be an American, okay?

I take them up to the lab and put together an experiment.

I smear some Astrophage on one of the circles and put another circle on top of it. Astrophage sandwich. Delicious, but only if you can get through the xenonite “bread.” I epoxy the two halves together. I make another identical sandwich.

And then I make another two similar sandwiches, but instead of xenonite, I use ordinary plastic discs that I cut from some mill stock.

Okay. Four hermetically sealed Astrophage samples—two with xenonite discs, two with plastic discs, all four of them sealed with epoxy.

I get two clear, sealable containers and set them up on the lab table. I put a xenonite sandwich and a plastic sandwich in each container.

In the sample cabinet, I have a few metal vials full of natural Taumoeba. The original stuff from Adrian, not the Taumoeba-82.5 version. I set the vial in one of the containers, open it up, and quickly seal the experiment. This is a very dangerous road to go down, but at least I know how to contain a Taumoeba outbreak if it happens. As long as I have nitrogen I’m okay.

I go to Breeder Tank One in the quarantine zone. I use a syringe to get the Taumoeba-infected air from the bin, then immediately flood the bin with nitrogen. I tape over the hole made by the syringe.

Back to the lab table, I close up the other container and use the syringe to inject the Taumoeba-82.5 in. Again, I seal that hole with tape.

I rest my chin in my hands and peer into the two boxes. “Okay, you sneaky little punks. Let’s see what you can do…”

It takes a couple of hours, but I finally see results. They’re exactly what I expected and the opposite of what I’d hoped.

I shake my head. “Dang it.”

The xenonite-covered Astrophage in the Taumoeba-82.5 experiment is gone. The plastic-covered Astrophage remains unchanged. Meanwhile in the other experiment, both Astrophage samples are unharmed.

What that means: The “control” samples (the plastic discs) prove Taumoeba can’t get through epoxy or plastic. But the xenonite samples tell a different story. Taumoeba-82.5 can work its way through xenonite, but natural Taumoeba can’t.

“I’m so stupid!” I smack myself on the head.

I thought I was oh so clever. All that time in the breeder tanks. Generation after generation of Taumoeba. I used evolution to my advantage, right? I made Taumoeba with nitrogen resistance! I’m so awesome! Let me know when I can pick up my Nobel Prize!

Ugh.

Yes, I made a strain of Taumoeba that could survive nitrogen. But evolution doesn’t care what I want. And it doesn’t do just one thing at a time. I bred up a bunch of Taumoeba that evolved to survive… in xenonite breeder tanks.

Sure, it has nitrogen resistance. But evolution has a sneaky way of working on a problem from every angle. So not only did they gain resistance to nitrogen, they figured out how to hide from nitrogen by sneaking into the xenonite itself! Why wouldn’t they?