Lifeline

But then he thought of the others the Council could turn to. Dobo Daeng? Sandovaal snorted. Dobo was a good assistant, a crackerjack technician, but he had no initiative to head up a research team. Dobo followed orders and did things right, but he had no imagination. Tough times demanded a special type of person—someone who could do what needed to be done. Someone like Luis Sandovaal.

He stood in the alcove for some minutes, lovingly rolling the meter-long strands of wall-kelp with his fingertips. He thought he could sense the wall-kelp growing, hear it moving like bamboo, but a thousand times faster.

Sandovaal brought the strand close to his lips and took a nibble. This substance would etch his name in Filipino history forever, right alongside General Aguinaldo, General MacArthur, and the first President Magsaysay.

Sandovaal winced at the taste.

He dropped the strand and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Conceptually, he realized the raw kelp material was edible, but his mouth rebelled at the acrid, unprocessed taste.

Even he admitted that things would have to be very grim before people worshiped that as manna from heaven.

Trial and error.

For months their research had followed a dogged routine. Sandovaal’s team, including Ramis’s parents, Agpalo and Panay Barrera, and Dobo Daeng, clustered in the laboratory units. Using chlorella algae as a genetic base material, combined with two different species of kelp, Sandovaal tried to enhance the salient features of a good food substitute—that it be fast growing, high in protein, and tailored for the Aguinaldo’s environment. Sandovaal insisted that the plant be self-sufficient, not tied to the soil by any root system.

After running a series of converging molecular-dynamic calculations, and dozens of trials, the transgenetic algae/kelp survived and increased its mass. Dobo, in a rush of accidental inspiration, suggested they could grow the plant over the Aguinaldo’s walls. The idea excited Sandovaal. He grabbed the other man’s round face and patted him like a puppy.

The wall-kelp proved to be amazingly versatile—to Sandovaal’s surprise as much as anyone else’s. It could cling to any freestanding object; a few unsupported spherical nodules drifted in the zero-G core. The fronds of wall-kelp advanced like a green wave over barren sections of the internal hull, producing oxygen and a digestible bio-mass.

Sandovaal decided he had discovered the panacea that would give the Aguinaldo independence from the Americans and their supply shuttles.

Decades before, his grandmother had worked in the rice paddies on the Philippines, tilling the soil and carrying “honey buckets” of human waste to spread as fertilizer. She splashed through the brown water, sweating in the humidity, her hands raw from the rice shoots. Sandovaal remembered seeing a tractor rusting at one end of the rice paddy, but otherwise he might have been imagining a scene from two hundred years ago.

By way of support for the new Filipino government established after World War II, the Americans had shipped in thousands of tons of farm equipment: tractors, harvesters, silos—equipment that should have elevated the Philippines to a true second-world country. The Islands had all the resources; the Filipinos had only to learn to use the new equipment.

But once the tractors ran out of gas or oil, or ground to a halt because of mechanical failures, the Filipinos found it easier just to let them stand in the fields and rust than to fix them.

Sandovaal had heard their excuse: it was Western equipment, built and designed to be run by Western hands.

Sandovaal snorted at the blindness of his own people, their stupidity. Survival was more important than misplaced pride. They should use the tools, the techniques, the discoveries already available. He himself had not felt the need to reproduce all the pioneering genetics experiments Gregor Mendel had performed in his monastery garden. That would be foolish, and Sandovaal had no patience with fools.

The same ingrown resistance to change made the Aguinaldo colonists reluctant to accept his wall-kelp as food. They turned up their noses at its taste, though the kelp was nutritionally sound. Sandovaal considered it a direct insult from his own people. But at least they used it as animal feed.

One day, after he had been on the Aguinaldo for two years, Sandovaal looked up as daylight streamed into the laboratory from the open door. President Magsaysay stood outside, silhouetted. His bare feet contrasted with the formal barong he wore, but fit his image well.

Sandovaal motioned him inside and indicated the small culture tanks of new wall-kelp strains. The laboratory room carried a spoiled smell from the raw nutrients. He began to jabber about his progress, knowing how important it would be for the Council to learn, but Magsaysay seemed uninterested in the conversation. It occurred to Sandovaal that the dato’s eyes were misty and troubled.