Sarah Macallister lives in Scotland. She holds a PhD in botany and is embarking on a second PhD in art history. Mother of one child, but he has the energy of more than one! Besides academic writing, she writes short stories whenever she can.

The Scientist

Underground, under fake sunshine, thousands of brilliant green shoots emerged wearing seed husks like hats. Beginning an experiment was a vital step for Professor Roach, whose minions feared disappointing him. Any initial misstep or miscalculation called everything thereafter into question. Even if you thought nothing went wrong, you might still have done something wrong; and science was never wrong.

 Willow mounted the stairs from the basement carrying a box of foliar samples. Rain hammered the ceiling-high window and security lights flared orange lozenges onto the floor. She flipped her card pass over the door, granting entry into Laboratory 203. At the second bench, she selected one of the cradled pipettes to assist in the painstaking extraction of goblets of soon to be meaningful clear liquids. If she extracted the RNA correctly this time.

A stubborn air bubble refused to dissipate, despite her tapping and flicking, so she gave up and ejected it into the used tips bucket. The minute clatter reverberated into a strident, high pitched beeping from the freezer room. As the only one working so late, the alarm demanded her attention. She lowered the pipette and walked, and then jogged, towards the ominous beeping. 

Red digits flashed on the screen of their lab’s freezer. The temperature no longer read minus eighty but minus sixty-nine, minus sixty-eight, sixty-seven, sixty-six and rising. DNA and RNA samples were all at risk of disintegration. This could waste months of hard work. She ran to the adjoining lab and banged on the locked door, behind which stood three large, minus eighty freezers. Nobody answered. She clutched the nearest stool. Wielding it over her shoulder, she cracked a metal leg into the glass panel of the door.

The white lab coat sleeve protected her arm from glass shards as she reached through the window and unbolted the door on the other side. She rushed back and poured the contents of the failing freezer into a polystyrene box filled with smoky nuggets of dry ice before teetering towards a fully functioning minus eighty with a free drawer and tinkling all the foil envelopes inside.

A faint beep sounded outside in the corridor as the main laboratory door swung and slammed, followed by a familiar brisk tread. Willow felt the air shift behind her and skipped a breath. 

 “The cleaners won’t like this. What are you doing?” said Professor Roach.

“Our freezer broke, so I moved all the samples into –”

“Ah ok. You’re brighter than you appear. One day you’ll have Dr in front of your name. Now go home! What time do you call this?”

Willow worked late because he expected it. He eyed her beetroot cheeks.

“Come on.” He threw his arm around her shoulders and spoke into her ear. “I don’t trample on anything that isn’t already crushed. I hate to see a broken spirit.” 

The next morning, after tossing away a few hours of the night in bed, Willow traipsed to the basement where the grey locked growth cabinet stood and checked the time, temperature and ambient gas levels on the small screen attached to the heavy bolted door. She grasped and yanked open the door, stepping into the blinding light.

The seedlings shivered slightly in the breeze of the outside air, then stillness resumed as she inspected the rows. They were growing every day like stars. Leaves fanned, splintered, light and water split, and the electrons jumped. A faint buzzing emanated from the walls. Growth room air cosseted the seedlings, moist and warm, over the sweet reek of compost, the background drone of mechanization and the harsh blue light. Willow imagined a fierce sun bouncing off a leafy mess within some glade created by an ancient tree succumbing to its end, the deadwood, the insects crawling and bruising the air, the gradually drying fathoms of soil. How different from these lined up pots, each with a solitary seed in sanitized compost, caged in the underbelly of a redbrick university. Willow’s hair bleached under the peculiar light as she sat on the high stool, fiddling delicate new pine needles into the small fluorometer chamber to catch data on their photosynthesis.

Leaf tips yellowed and curled on seedlings ailing in the drought group. The control group flourished in their moist compost, and didn’t care about their thirsty brothers and sisters. No one cared about the plants. Hordes of plant rights activists neglected to barricade this lab brandishing signs demanding to ‘Free the Trees!’

Snap of the door unhinging. Professor Roach brought himself in, but cast no shadow in the gleaming light of the growth cabinet.

“Take those leaf samples up to Charlotte Fremer. Ask how her mass spectrometer feels today.” He turned his head and his dark glasses sparkled in the brightness. “You know, she only married that husband of hers because he can code the mass spec analysis pipeline and she can’t.” 

Professor Roach glanced at the sea of seedlings.

“Are you remembering to rotate them all?”

“I thought you said we could adjust for that at the statistics stage?” 

“Did I? Well, it’s too late now, isn’t it? Let’s hope statistics can save the day.” Willow watched him leave the cabinet and waited for a backward glance and a wink, but nothing was forthcoming.

At the end of the week, they held an interdepartmental conference in their low-ceilinged staff room. Edging around the buffet table, Willow heard Professor Roach dominating a small crowd of men and women who stopped to listen to the stories that poured from him like wine. She lingered. Talk of stomatal control, oxidative stress and epigenetic inheritance, and the myriad clever ways the seedlings were trying to escape the drought, without moving into their neighbour’s moist pots. 

“Willow knows the simple experiments work the best, don’t you, Willow?” He winked and flicked his tongue over his smile at her.

“I read Suzanne Simard’s paper on mother trees yesterday.” Willow said, her tone even but betrayed by a hot flush. She wanted to describe what Suzanne said about the forest, the wild wood, where old trees feed young seedlings and mycorrhizae link families together. She wanted to ask how this connected with the design of their artificial experiment and its endless reams of data. 

Professor Roach smiled without his eyes.

“We must conduct our experiments here. In a controlled environment. If you experiment in a forest, among that mad profusion of vegetation, the thing becomes a gargantuan nightmare to analyse! Remember that correlation does not mean causation!”

The post-docs and fellows looked askance as their Professor veered into the territory of probability and chaos theory. After the group dispersed, Willow tried to creep away.

“You look lost. Only somebody looking for me could look that lost.” said Professor Roach.

“I feel lost.” Willow said.

“I’m keen to hear what progress you’ve made. Come to my office. We’ll go through the data.” 

Professor Roach pushed open his office door and stood aside while she slipped past, breathing in sandalwood from his jacket. The room betrayed nothing. Clean lines of books. Completed supervised PhD theses earned their place on the shelves. Two computer monitors. No clutter, not even a house plant. He surveyed Willow through his glasses, currently transparent in the cool light filtering through the blinds.

Out of her lab-coat, she wore a black v-neck and a skirt that rested above her knees while she sat. Her neck curved in a slender arc, and soft curls fell about her flushed face. She brought her tiny usb stick out, and he told her to bring it round to his computer and sit in his chair. Her graphs weren’t anything to get excited about. He brushed her hand to claim the mouse and made a few quick changes in the data analyses, explaining the statistical model, aware that she trembled slightly, aware that she couldn’t really understand what he was saying. 

 “Good.” he said. “I think you’ll have a thesis chapter in this. Remember though, the thesis is only partial fulfilment of the doctorate. You must do more besides write up to secure your degree.”

He began rubbing his hands together as though he were cold, and his tough skin rasped slightly.

“Charlotte Fremer. She’s put in a complaint against me.”

“What about?” Willow asked.

“I doubt anyone will take her seriously. The whole thing is a farce. She’s complaining about being used and said we failed to acknowledge her contribution, when we did, remember? We put her name in the acknowledgements section. But what she’s really after is co-author. And then some guff about her mental health problems being my fault. Why do we all need mental health these days? What happened to just health, that you took responsibility for yourself?”

He finished rasping his hands.

“I shouldn’t have to waste my time on this.” 

Willow stayed late in the laboratory. All the seedlings would die off until only their tiny corpses inside the foil packets remained to be analysed. Machines whirred and hummed, sending dead messages across the room, white noise like snow falling endlessly behind a window. Past ten thirty she became unable to stop making mistakes, trapped bubbles messed up the quantities, and her right hand shook. She stopped and the far end of the room blurred because she had been so focused directly on the bench in front of her and the inchoate lines of test tubes. So what if dust settled into the tubes? 

She drifted down the empty corridors while overhead lights snapped on in reaction to her movement and she caught sight of herself reflected in the window, pale and thin. 

Outside, the chill pierced her. Gusts transported bright leaves and scattered them about the sullen lumps of metal in the car park. Headlights flared on. Professor Roach waved her over to his car.