text: [Themes: Espionage, Science Fiction, Mystery, conversation, male protagonist, terraforming, Mars, science fiction]
  
  > Go downwards
  The lights flick on as you enter the cellar.
  
  The basement is lit by striplamps crisscrossed across the plastic ceiling, and is the only truly grubby room in the building. The floor is caked with dust and what even looks like soil; no doubt actually decomposing rubbish from various plants stored here over the years. The other clear thing about this room is that it's half the width it used to be - though the ceiling continues back there is a gleaming white wall in the way, in the centre of which is a large, forbidding door. It leads into the laboratory.
  
  Steps lead upward on one side.
  
  On one wall is the bubble thermostat.
  
  Cooling in a corner is a black chest.
  
  > eat the leaf
  The leaf is tough to chew, and waxy, and taste of little until you have pulped the outer skin when a thin banana-like flavour leaks out. Eventually you cannot swallow the residue of the hide and spit it out.
  
  > open the lock with the hairpin
  (the black box with the hairpin)
  You slide the hairpin in and with a steady wrist and dextrous movements set the first pin, then the second, and finally the third buried deep in the mechanism. The box springs open.
  
  > examine the chest
  A solid metal chest, large enough to hold a ream of paper, with curved edges to frustrate hacksaws and hinges buried under a lip of moulded steel. It is held closed by a small lock at the front, which takes an ordinary key (rather than a fingerprint or a magnetic strip). On the lid is a label: "MRS. LAURA MACKENZIE." Not his then, strangely; even though this is a storage box for organic material.
  
  > Open chest
  That's already open.
  
  > look in the chest
  The black box has got a genus K sample in it.
  
  > take the sample
  Taken.
  
  > examine the sample
  A yellow biosample bag containing what looks like just a handful of sunflower seeds. In black markerpen a large K has been scrawled. A label above reads: "C/O Jasper Morpheus" in a fine handwriting.
  
  > open the door
  The scanner on the laboratory door lock warms uncomfortably under your index finger, almost ready to burn - and then cools again into rough plastic. The door does not open.
  
  > Go north
  The living room is similarly austere, with its walls all white and furniture resting in between large spaces. In the north wall opposite the doorway is a large window through which the long view of desert stretches until reaching the tooth of Mount Olympus, and the room is filled by the orange-red tinge. Another door leads east to the bedroom.
  
  Against one wall is a table: not exactly pristine, but hardly messy with its papers and computer.
  
  The sofa stands out quite strikingly; it is pea-green.
  
  On the long sofa is a newspaper.
  
  You feel momentarily dizzy.
  
  > examine the sofa
  The sofa looks in good condition and pretty well made, which means almost certainly it was shipped in from Earth as the one luxury the house could afford. Simply getting it through the doors must have been a puzzle for the greatest scientific minds.
  
  > search sofa
  The long sofa has got a newspaper on it.
  
  > read newspaper
  The newspaper proclaims itself to be an issue of the single Martian-language newspaper, "The Native". It is, however, entirely blank below the headline and subhead: 'TOP SCIENTISTS PREDICT WINDSTORMS WILL REMAIN FOR "ANOTHER HUNDRED YEARS": Sources report failure of latest hope'. The date on the banner is 22.5.63.
  
  From somewhere to the south you hear the padding of footfalls, a drift of quiet humming, and a quiet slam.
  
  > go west
  You open the door, with a loud hissing sound, and go through.
  
  Your car is parked at a slight angle at the end of the long drive, its nose almost poking into a purple-leaved bush. The low sun makes the red dust glow like amber into the distance. Mackenzie's bubble is to the east, its door closed. The road leads right up to it, with no front garden.
  
  > examine the car
  A standard car from the pool; low-slung to avoid the dust trails and wide to hug the road in the weak gravity. This one is black.
  
  The door swings silently shut and the light on the card-reader returns to red.
  
  > go east
  You slip the card into the lock and the light flicks over to green. Then you push open the door and step into the porch.
  
  The porch is just a short space of corridor, with two large fans built into the walls behind a white-mesh grille. The air is a little better regulated here, and smells fresh and tart, straight from an algae-tank. There is little else here - a rack for shoes and a hook for coats. Either end of this space are the large doors that seal inside from outside, they are east and west respectively.
  
  On the shoe rack are a pair of lady's shoes.
  
  > Go north
  The living room is designed in spacious fashion - furniture spanned neatly between smooth white walls. In the north wall opposite the doorway is a large window through which the long view of desert stretches until reaching the tooth of Mount Olympus, and the room is filled by the orange-red tinge. Another door leads east to the bedroom.
  
  Against one wall is a table: not exactly pristine, but hardly messy with its papers and computer.
  
  The sofa stands out quite strikingly; it is pea-green.
  
  On the long sofa is a newspaper.
  
  > look at the computer
  A Mx200 notebook computer; built they say for lightness and speed, but in reality constructed to handle the flaky network connections running under the Marsian dust by devoting half their size to transmitters angled in as many directions at once at possible. As a result they're renowned for overheating.
  
  > turn on the computer
  You flip open the notebook. It bleeps but does not turn on - except for a small light which ignites in the corner. It is bright red but slowly starts to grow deeper in shade.
  
  > examine the light
  The screen is blank. A light in the top red corner is a deep maroon, and blinking.
  
  > turn off the computer
  Click.
  
  > take computer
  Although the computer is light, it has no doubt been positioned in the only place in the bubble to receive a decent data-transfer rate. Moving it, then, would be bad feng shui.
  
  > examine papers
  They are stamped with the seal of the European Union, and look like dossiers on various topics. You pick up the first sheet and scan for English fragments.
  
  The top document must be new - the date is 23.5.63 and it has yet to be annotated; which is to say the whole thing is still in ProtoFrench and contains no translations. The only words you recognise in the horrendous grammatical nightmare that remains are "colonnaque" (colony), "houmlla dla sciesse" (scientists) and "Knassion" - which is not PF at all, but is familiar from previous debriefings all the same. It's a recent prototype piece of biotech.
  
  > take the papers
  It is unlikely to be useful to cart them all around.
  
  > look out window
  The dunes are brushed with a delicate haze of floating orange dust like the steam rising from a Spaniard's tanned back; still but for the sporadic storms that whip across the sky unchecked and unpredictable. It is dotted with a few strange plants - wide trunked cacti, large flat leaved palms that spread across the ground instead of upwards into the sky, and grass stalks that rise and bend flat at two metres high. Most are unfamiliar to your eye.
  
  > search sofa
  The long sofa has got a newspaper on it.
  
  > read the newspaper
  The newspaper proclaims itself to be an issue of the single Martian-language newspaper, "The Native". It is, however, entirely blank below the headline and subhead: 'TOP SCIENTISTS PREDICT WINDSTORMS WILL REMAIN FOR "ANOTHER HUNDRED YEARS": Sources report failure of latest hope'. The date on the banner is 22.5.63.
  
  > Go east
  (opening the bedroom door first)
  You open the bedroom door.
  
  The bedroom is no more personal than the rest of the house; it occurs to you that the photograph in the hallway is the only item of decoration from either of the couple who live here. Unless you count the yucca plant. A large bed fills the centre, with a nightstand by one side. There are no bookcases and no books; there is no television because there are no stations here. A doorway in the southwest wall leads to the bathroom, built into the central column of the bubble.
  
  In the wall is a long window with a view of the endless desert.
  
  In one corner is a large chest of drawers, on top of which is a cactus plant.
  
  By the bedside is a glass of water.
  
  > examine the plant
  A bulb-shaped cactus, covered little clumps of spines.
  
  > get the spine
  (the cactus spine)
  You already have that.
  
  > touch the cactus
  (the cactus spine)
  That would hardly be wise.
  
  > touch the plant
  The spines are sharp, and quite hardy under pressure.
  
  > look at the chest
  A large wooden chest with many drawers.
  
  > open the drawers
  The interesting drawer is the bottom one - instead of clothes and the like, it contains one large cardboard folder. You lift it out onto the floor.
  
  > open folder
  You flip open the file.
  
  > Inventory
  You are carrying:
  a genus K sample
  a hairpin
  a cactus spine
  a plastic card
  a printed fax
  a brown envelope (which is open)
  a case file
  
  > read the folder
  A plain cardboard folder, its creases a little worn.
  
  The cardboard folder has got several photos in it.