“Moira?!” Doob said. He grabbed a handle on the wall so that he could spin himself around and get a better look. His glasses had gone askew during the wrestling match, so he poked them back up on his nose. It was her all right, suffering from a clear case of moon face.
He had last seen Dr. Moira Crewe at the Crater Lake announcement, where she had been assisting her mentor, Clarence Crouch, the Nobel Prize–winning geneticist—the poor sod who had been given the job of explaining the Casting of Lots to the world. Since then Clarence had died of cancer in his Cambridge house, surrounded by biological samples and scientific memorabilia that would not long survive the onset of the Hard Rain. No doubt it had been a blessing for him. Doob had lost track of Moira after that, but of all the people on Earth she was one of the most obvious candidates for inclusion on the Cloud Ark. She was of West Indian ancestry, wearing her hair in finger-length dreadlocks that had adapted pretty well to zero gravity—better than white-people hair, for sure. Moon face had added a few years to her apparent age, but Doob knew her to be in her late twenties. Raised in a dodgy part of London, she’d gone to a posh school on scholarship and went on to earn a biology degree at Oxford. She had gone to Harvard for her Ph.D., working with a project there on de-extinction. Her general charisma, and an accent that Americans found charming, had made her into the most well-known spokesperson for that project. She had done TED talks and other public appearances describing her lab’s efforts to bring the woolly mammoth back to life. After a brief sojourn in Siberia, working with a Russian oil billionaire who wanted to create a nature preserve stocked with formerly extinct megafauna, she had returned to the UK and begun postdoctoral work with Clarence.
It was not the first time Doob had been pleasantly surprised to bump into a colleague who had, unbeknownst to him, been sent up to Izzy. It always raised an awkward point of etiquette. It was tempting to express delight and give the person a big hug, as you’d naturally do if you encountered them at a party in Cambridge or on the street in New York City. But none of them had come up here on a happy errand. And Moira anyway had a certain owlish way about her, a way of keeping her distance.
And hugging people in zero gee was harder than it sounded. You had to get to them first.
Doob held his arms out to his sides. “Hug,” he said.
She did the same. “Is that what one does here?” she asked.
“It is not unheard of. Moira, PCA, it is good to see you up here.”
PCA was an abbreviation for “present circumstances aside” and had become a staple of Facebook, Twitter, and the like.
“I had heard you’d come up,” Moira said, “but it didn’t quite register, as I’ve been awfully preoccupied.”
“I can only imagine,” Doob said. “While I’ve been running around shilling for the Cloud Ark, you’ve probably been doing actual science, huh?”
“Getting ready to do it might be more precise,” she said. Her big brown eyes, behind a geeky but stylish pair of glasses, strayed in a direction. “Is that what they call forward?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, the place where I’m working is about as far forward as it’s possible to get, because they want my lab to be sheltered by the big rock.”
“Amalthea.”
“Yes. And if we go there, I can show you a bit of what I’ve been up to. I feel I should offer you tea as well, but I don’t know how to make it here.”
Doob smiled at her way of talking. She had been a fiend for theater at Oxford, and might have become an actress. Intensely conscious of the difference between the way her people in London talked and the way people talked at her school and at Oxford, she’d become good at switching between those accents for effect. “I’d be happy to have a look,” he said. “I think I know the module you’re talking about—I saw it docking a few days ago, and was curious.”
HE HOOKED THE UNOCCUPIED PRESSURE SUIT TO THE WALL OF MOIRA’S lab and it hung there, an inanimate observer, as Moira showed him around. Never one for the life sciences, Doob couldn’t understand everything she was saying to him, but he didn’t care. Being able to relax and let someone else explain science to him was a welcome turnabout.
“Do you know about the black-footed ferret?” she asked.
“No,” Doob said. “I think you can pretty much assume that my answer to all questions about biology and genetics is going to be in the negative.”
“Ninety percent of their diet was prairie dogs. Farmers killed almost all of the prairie dogs and so the population of black-footed ferrets crashed to the point where only seven remained. From that breeding stock, it was necessary to bring them back.”
“Wow, only seven . . . so inbreeding must have been an issue?”
“We speak of heterozygosity,” she said, “which just means the amount of genetic diversity within a species. In general, it’s a good thing. If you have too little of it, then you start to see the sorts of problems that we associate with inbreeding.”