Closing the door, he said, “If we explored Black Lake right now, we’d find those things all over town, wouldn’t we?” “Those and God knows what else,” Derek replied. “Fast-track terraforming. The growing cycle has begun. In the streets and parks, in backyards and alleyways, in school playgrounds, out there in the forests, at the bottom of the lake—oh, everywhere, everywhere—we will find a new world growing, a botanical wonderland of things we’ve never seen before and that we’ll wish we’d never seen at all.” With sudden, devastating understanding, Molly said, “The air.” “I wondered when you’d think of that,” Derek said. Trees, grasses, the vast floating fields of algae in the seas: The flora of Earth filter carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. As a by-product of photosynthesis, they pump out oxygen. Vital, life-sustaining oxygen. What process, similar to but different from photosynthesis, might this alien vegetation employ? Instead of oxygen, might it produce another gas?
