I looked at the cylinder, back to her, back to the cylinder, and back to her. “This is some bull-puckey.”

“Look at the bright side,” she said. “You’ll be forever known as the man who made first contact with extraterrestrial life.”

“If it even is life,” I mumbled.

I got the fourteen latches open with some effort. Those things were tight. I vaguely wondered about how the ArcLight probe closed them in the first place. Must have been some kind of cool actuated system.

The inside wasn’t impressive. I didn’t expect it to be. Just a small, clear, plastic ball that appeared to be empty. The mysterious dots were microscopic and there weren’t very many of them.

“No radiation detected,” Stratt said through the intercom.

I shot a glance over at her. She watched her tablet intensely.

I took a good long look at the ball. “Is this under vacuum?”

“No,” she said. “It’s full of argon gas at one atmosphere of pressure. The dots have been moving around the whole time the probe was returning from Venus. So it looks like the argon doesn’t affect them.”

I looked all around the lab. “There’s no glove box here. I can’t just expose unknown samples to normal air.”

“The entire room is full of argon,” she said. “Make sure you don’t kink your air line or rip your suit. If you breathe argon—”

“I’ll suffocate and won’t even know it’s happening. Yeah, okay.”

I took the ball to a tray and carefully twisted it until it came apart in two halves. I placed one half in a sealed plastic container and mopped the other half with a dry cotton swab. I scraped the swab against a slide and took it to a microscope.

I thought they’d be harder to find, but there they were. Dozens of little black dots. And they were indeed wriggling around.

“You recording all this?”

“From thirty-six different angles,” she said.

“Sample consists of many round objects,” I said. “Almost no variance in size—each appears to be approximately ten microns in diameter…”

I adjusted the focus and tried various intensities of backlighting. “Samples are opaque… I can’t see inside, even at the highest available light setting…”

“Are they alive?” Stratt asked.

I glared at her. “I can’t just tell that at a glance. What do you expect to happen here?”

“I want you to find out if they’re alive. And if so, find out how they work.”

“That’s a tall order.”

“Why? Biologists worked out how bacteria works. Just do the same thing they did.”

“That took thousands of scientists two centuries to work out!”

“Well… do it faster than that.”

“Tell you what” —I pointed back to the microscope—“I’m going to get back to work now. I’ll tell you anything I work out when I work it out. Until then, you can all enjoy some quiet study time.”

I spent the next six hours doing incremental tests. Over that time, the military people wandered out, eventually leaving only Stratt by herself. I had to admire her patience. She sat in the back of the observation room and worked on her tablet, sometimes looking up to see what I was doing.