In his four weeks aboard ISS, Bill had only once laid eyes on the tube 23.

He pulled open the cell specimen chamber tray. Inside were twenty-four culture tubes arrayed around the periphery of the unit.

He identified #23 and removed it from the tray.

At once he was alarmed. The cap appeared to be bulging out, as though under pressure. Instead of a slightly turbid liquid, was what he'd expected to see, the contents was a vivid blue-green.

He tipped the tube upside down, and the culture did not shift. It was no longer liquid, but thickly viscous.

He calibrated the micro mass measurement device and slipped the tube into the specimen slot. A moment later, the data on the screen.

Something is very wrong, he thought. There has been some sort of contamination. Either the original sample of cells was not pure, another organism has found its way into the tube and has destroyed the primary culture.

He typed out his response to Dr. Koenig. Your downlinked data confirmed. Culture appears drastically altered. It is no longer liquid, but seems to be a gelatinous mass, bright, almost neon blue-green. Must consider the possibility of contamination ... He paused. There was another possibility, the effect of microgravity. On earth, tissue cultures tended to grow in flat sheets, expanding in only two dimensions across the surface of their containers. In the weightlessness of space, freed from the effects of gravity, those same cultures behaved differently. They grew in dimensions, taking on shapes they never could on earth.

What if #23 was not contaminated? What if this was simply how Archaeons behaved without gravity to keep them in check?

Almost immediately he discarded that notion. These changes were too drastic. Weightlessness alone could not have turned a single-celled organism into this startling green mass.