Read Ell Donsaii 13: DNA for Free Online

a secret that, to her and she was sure to them, would be even more thrilling. They were only meeting about once every three to six months now, having gradually cut back from the weekly meetings they’d had back when the aliens on Tau Ceti were a brand-new finding.
    Still, it was good to see her old friends. Although the team had expanded and subsequently had some turnover since it had originally gotten started, Wheat, Piscova and Norris were all still active members. As they happily greeted one another, Ell found it hard to believe that the team had first formed to study the aliens on Tau Ceti nearly 9 years ago.
    Goldie, Silver, their kids and their tribe all seemed to be doing fairly well at their new location. Dr. Wheat reported concern about what the volcanic ash occluding the upper atmosphere was doing to the vegetation. The parabolic reflectors D5R had put up in the region around the Yetany tribe’s new location were doing a good job of greening up the vegetation in that area and were probably even keeping the temperatures a little warmer. However, this wasn’t helping the rest of the continent where global cooling induced by the dust in the stratosphere was making the plants, and therefore the animals higher in that food chain, somewhat sick.
    They argued for a while about whether they should bring in more parabolic reflectors to help a bigger area or whether they should interfere at all in a change that Mother Nature had wrought. This led to a disagreement about whether they should try to establish a system to warn against or even prevent asteroid impacts in the future.
    Ell mostly listened, but when things had calmed down a little, she cleared her throat and said, “I’ve got some news…”
    Most of the people in the room turned to look curiously at her, but Harold Wheat’s head turned sharply and his eyes widened with excitement, “Another living planet!”
    Ell nodded, still feeling guilty that she’d never told them about the sigmas. “The fourth planet around Beta Canum Venaticorum.”
    Piscova brightened, “Do they speak?”
    “No, sorry. No signs of intelligent life that I’ve seen. Let me tell you what I do know.” As she spoke Allan put up some of the video clips she’d prepared showing the riotous jungle greenery of BC4. “The atmosphere sounds breathable at sixteen percent oxygen, seventy-five percent nitrogen, and five percent argon, but carbon dioxide’s too high at four percent. Unfortunately the pressure is about 188 times that of Earth, so we couldn’t possibly live there in anything but an extremely hard shelled suit or an indoor environment. The gravity’s 0.78 G so it’d be comfortable if it weren’t for the density and CO 2 concentration of the atmosphere.
    The animals,” here Allan began putting up images of the fauna, “are quite a lot like we imagine the dinosaurs to have been. Well, except for the fact they don’t have a head and neck separate from their body. Their mouthparts are right on the trunk like a crab’s. They’re immense and they have some huge flyers,” she waved at the big screen where an enormous flyer sailed across, “this particularly big one’s ten meters, wingtip to wingtip.
    “As with Tau Ceti and Alpha Centauri, the biome is DNA-based, giving further support to the panspermia hypothesis…”
    Ell weathered a storm of questions, though the people in the room had a hard time tearing their eyes away from the screen. When the queries started to die down, she said, “So, I was wondering if you guys would like to take over investigating BC4, or, whether you’d like for me to try to find a new group to study this place.”
    She turned to look at them and found shocked expressions on their faces. “Of course we want to study this planet,” Wheat said for the group.
     
    When Ell had finished turning over control of the rockets on BC4, she stopped in her office to take care of a few small things that needed her personal presence and then started for