by Hal Clement
“Rick, I’ll send the magnets down first and you can rinse ’em off a bit in the water. Then I’ll run out the sling and you can get it around the whale.”
“All right, sir. Standing by.” As the grapple went down again Dandridge called to the mechanic, who had turned back toward the lab.
“I suppose the whale is ruined, if you’re right about the infection. Can we collect damages?” Mancini shook his head negatively.
“No one could collect from DE; they went broke years ago—from paying damages. Besides, the courts decided years ago that injury or destruction of a piece of pseudolife was recoverable property damage only if an original model was involved. This fish is a descendant of a model ten years old; it was born at sea. We didn’t make it, and can’t recover for it.” He turned to his bench, but flung a last thought over his shoulder. “My guess that this pest is a DE escapee could be wrong, too. They worked out a virus for that strain a few months after it escaped, and I haven’t heard of an iron infection in four years. This may be a mutation of it—that’s still my best guess—but it could also be something entirely new.” He settled himself onto a stool and began dividing the material from the flask into the dozens of tiny containers which fed the analyzers.
In the water below, Stubbs had plunged from the ladder and was removing slime from the grapple magnets. The stuff was not too sticky, and the grit which might be magnetite slightly offset the feeling of revulsion which the boy normally had for slimy materials, so he was able to finish the job quickly enough to keep Dandridge happy. At Rick’s call, the grapple was retracted; a few moments later the hoist cable came down again with an ordinary sling at its extremity. Stubbs was still in the water, and Farrell had come part way down the ladder. The chief diver guided the cable down to his young assistant, who began working the straps around the torpedo-like form which still bobbed between the Shark’s hulls.
It was quite a job. The zeowhale was still slippery, since the magnets had not come even close to removing all the foreign growth. When the boy tried to reach around it to fasten the straps it slithered away from him. He called for more slack and tried to pin it against one of the hulls as he worked, but still it escaped him. He was too stubborn to ask for help, and by this time Farrell was laughing too hard to have provided much anyway.
“Ride him, Buster!” the chief diver called as Stubbs finally managed to scissor the slippery cylinder with his legs. “That’s it . . . you’ve got him dogged now!”
The boy hadn’t quite finished, actually, but one strap did seem secure around the forward part of the hull. “Take up slack!” he called up to the hatch, without answering Farrell’s remark.
Dandridge had been looking through the trap and could see what was needed; he reached to his control console and the hoist cable tightened.
“That’s enough!” called Stubbs as the nose of the zeowhale began to lift from the water. “Hold it until I get another strap on, or this one will slip free!”
Winches obediently ceased purring. With its motion restrained somewhat, the little machine offered less opposition to the attachment of a second band near its stem. The young swimmer called, somewhat breathlessly, “Take it up!” and paddled himself slowly back to the ladder. Farrell gave him a hand up, and they reached the deck almost as quickly as the specimen.
Dandridge closed the hatch without waiting for orders, though he left the ladder down—there would be other pickups in the next few minutes, but the wind was cold and loud. Stubbs paid no attention; he barely heard the soft “Eight hundred meters, seventy-five mils to starboard,” as he made his way around the closing hatch to Mancini’s work station. The mechanic’s job was much more fascinating than the pilot’s.
He knew better than to interrupt a busy professional with questions, but the mechanic didn’t need any. Like several other men, not only on the Shark but among the crew of her mother ship, Mancini had come to like the youngster and respect his general competence; and like most professionals, his attitude toward an intelligent labor draftee was a desire to recruit him before someone else did. The man, therefore, began to talk as soon as he noticed the boy’s presence.
“You know much about either chemical or field analysis, Rick?”
“A little. I can recognize most of your gear—untracentrifuge, chromatographic and electrophoretic stuff, NMR equipment, and so on. Is that,” he pointed to a cylindrical machine on another bench, “a diffraction camera?”
“Good guess. It’s a hybrid that a friend of mine dreamed up which can be used either for electron microphotography or diffraction work. All that comes a bit later, though. One thing about analysis hasn’t changed since the beginning; you try to get your initial sample into as many different homogeneous parts as possible before you get down to the molecular scale.”
“So each of these little tubes you’re filling goes through centrifuge, or solvation, or electrophoresis—”
“More usually, through all of them, in different orders.”
“I should think that just looking at the original, undamaged specimen would tell you something. Don’t you ever do that?”
“Sure. The good old light microscope will never disappear; as you imply, it’s helpful to see a machine in its assembled state, too. I’ll have some slides in a few more seconds; the mike is in that cabinet. Slide it out, will you?”
Stubbs obeyed, literally since the instrument was mounted on a track. The designers of the Shark’s laboratory had made it as immune to rough weather as they could. Mancini took the first of his slides, clipped it under the objective, and took one look.
“Thought so,” he grunted. “Here, see for yourself.”
Stubbs applied an eye to the instrument, played briefly with the fine focus—he had the normal basic training in fundamental apparatus—and looked for several seconds.
“Just a mess of living cells that don’t mean much to me, and a lot of little octahedra. Are they what you mean?”
“Yep. Magnetite crystals, or I’m a draft-dodger.” (His remark had no military significance; the term now referred to individuals who declined the unskilled-labor draft, voluntarily giving up their rights to higher education and, in effect, committing themselves to living on basic relief.) “We’ll make sure, though.” The mechanic slid another piece of equipment into position on the microscope stage, and peered once more into the field of view. Stubbs recognized a micromanipulator, and was not surprised when Mancini, after two minutes or so of silent work, straightened up and removed a small strip of metal from it. Presumably one of the tiny crystals was now mounted on the strip.
The mechanic turned to the diffraction camera, mounted the bit of metal in a clamp attached to it, and touched a button which started specimen and strip on a journey into the camera’s interior. Moments later a pump started to whine.
“Five minutes to vacuum, five more for scanning,” he remarked. “We might as well have a look at the fish itself while we wait; even naked-eye examination has its uses.” He got up from his seat, stretched, and turned to the bench on which the ruined zeowhale lay. “How much do you know about these things, Rick? Can you recognize this type?”
“I think so. I’d say it was a copper-feeder of about ’35 model. This one would be about two years old.”
“Good. I’d say you were about right. You’ve been doing some reading, I take it.”
“Some. And the Guppy’s shop is a pretty good museum.”
“True enough. Do you know where the access regions are on this model?”
“I’ve seen some of them opened up, but I wouldn’t feel sure enough to do it myself.”
“It probably wouldn’t matter if you did it wrong in this case; this one is safely dead. Still, I’ll showed you; better see it right than do it wrong.” He had removed the straps of the sling once the “fish” had been lowered onto a rack on the bench, so nothing interfered with the demonstration. “Here,” he pointed, “the reference is the centerline of scales along the back, just a little lighter in color tha
n the rest. Start at the intake ring and count eight scales back; then clown six on either side, like that. That puts you on this scale . . . so . . . which you can get under with a scalpel at the start of the main opening.” He picked up an instrument about the size of a surgical scalpel, but with a blunt, rounded blade. This he inserted under the indicated scale. “Sec, it comes apart here with very light pressure, and you can run the cut back to just in front of the exhaust vents—like that. If this were a living specimen, the cut would heal under sealant spray in about an hour after the fish was back in the water. This one . . . hm-mm-m. No wonder it passed out. I wonder what this stuff is?”
The body cavity of the zeowhale was filled with a dead-black jelly, quite different in appearance from the growth which had covered the skin. The mechanic applied retractors to the incision, and began silently poking into the material with a variety of “surgical” tools. He seemed indifferent to the feelings which were tending to bring Stubbs’ stomach almost as much into daylight as that of the whale.
Pieces of rubbery internal machinery began to litter the bench top. Another set of tiny test tubes took samples of the black jelly, and followed their predecessors into the automatic analyzers. These began to hum and sputter as they went to work on the new material—they had long since finished with the first load, and a pile of diagrams and numerical tables awaited Mancini’s attention in their various delivery baskets. He had not even taken time to see whether his guess about magnetite had been good.
Some of the organs on the desk were recognizable to the boy—for any large animal, of course, a heart is fairly obviously a heart when it has been dissected sufficiently to show its valve structure. A four-kilogram copper nugget had come from the factory section; the organism had at least started to fulfill its intended purpose before disease had ended its pseudolife. It had also been developing normally in other respects, as a twenty-five centimeter embryo indicated. The zeowhales and their kindred devices reproduced asexually; the genetic variation magnification, which is the biological advantage of sex, was just what the users of the pseudo-organisms did not want, at least until some factor could be developed which would tend to select for the characteristics they wanted most.
Mancini spent more than an hour at his rather revolting task before he finally laid down his instruments. Stubbs had not been able to watch him the whole time, since the Shark had picked up the other two unresponsive whales while the job was going on. Both had been infected in the same way as the first. The boy was back in the lab, though, when the gross dissection of the original one was finished. So was Winkle, since nothing more could be planned until Mancini produced some sort of report.
“The skeleton was gone completely,” was the mechanic’s terse beginning. “Even the unborn one hadn’t a trace of metallic iron in it. That was why the magnets didn’t hold, of course. I haven’t had time to look at any of the analysis reports, but I’m pretty certain that the jelly in the body cavity and the moldy stuff outside are part of the same life form, and that organism dissolved the metallic skeleton and precipitated the iron as magnetite in its own tissues. Presumably it’s a mutant from one of the regular iron-feeding strains. Judging by its general cellular conformation, its genetic tape is a purine-pyrimidine nucleotide quite similar to that of natural life—”
“Just another of the original artificial forms coming home to roost?” interjected Winkle.
“I suppose so. I’ve isolated some of the nuclear material, but it will have to go back to the big field analyzer on the Guppy to make sure.”
“There seem to be no more damaged fish in the neighborhood. Is there any other material you need before we go back?”
“No. Might as well wind her up, as far as I’m concerned—unless it would be a good idea to call the ship first while we’re out here to find out whether any other schools this way need checking.”
“You can’t carry any more specimens in your lab even if they do,” Winkle pointed out, glancing around the littered bench tops.
“True enough. Maybe there’s something which wouldn’t need a major checkup, though. But you’re the captain; play it as you think best. I’ll be busy with this lot until we get back to the Guppy whether we go straight there or not.”
“I’ll call.” The captain turned away to his own station.
“I wonder why they made the first pseudolife machines with gene tapes so much like the real thing,” Stubbs remarked when Winkle was back in his seat. “You’d think they’d foresee what mutations could do, and that organisms too similar to genuine life might even give rise to forms which could cause disease in us as well as in other artificial forms.”
“They thought of it, all right,” replied Mancini. “That possibility was a favorite theme of the opponents of the whole process—at least, of the ones who weren’t driven by frankly religious motives. Unfortunately, there was no other way the business could have developed. The original research of course had to be carried out on what you call ‘real’ life. That led to the specific knowledge that the cytosine-thymine-adenine-guanine foursome of ordinary DNA could form a pattern which was both self-replicating and able to control polypeptide and polysaccharide synthesis—”
“But I thought it was more complex than that; there are phosphates and sugars in the chain, and the DNA imprints RNA, and—”
“You’re quite right, but I wasn’t giving a chemistry lecture; I was trying to make an historical point. I’m saying that at first, no one realized that anything except those four specific bases could do the genetic job. Then they found that quite a lot of natural life forms had variations of those bases in their nucleotides, and gradually the reasons why those structures, or rather their potential fields, had the polymermolding ability they do became clear. Then, and only then, was it obvious that ‘natural’ genes aren’t the only possible ones; they’re simply the ones which got a head start on this planet. There are as many ways of building a gene as there are of writing a poem—or of making an airplane if you prefer to stay on the physical plane. As you seem to know, using the channels of a synthetic zeolite as the backbone for a genetic tape happens to be a very convenient technique when we want to grow a machine like the one we’ve just taken apart here. It’s bulkier than the phosphate-sugar-base tape, but a good deal more stable.
“It’s still handy, though, to know how to work with the real thing—after all, you know as well as I do that the reason you have a life expectancy of about a hundred and fifty years is that your particular gene pattern is on file in half a cubic meter of zeolite mesh in Denver under a nice file number . . .”
“026-18-5633” muttered the boy under his breath.
“. . . which will let any halfway competent molecular mechanic like me grow replacement parts and tissues if and when you happen to need them.”
“I know all that, but it still seems dangerous to poke around making little changes in ordinary life forms,” replied Rick. “There must be fifty thousand people like you in the world, who could tailor a dangerous virus, or germ, or crop fungus in a couple of weeks of lab and computer work, and whose regular activities produce things like that iron-feeder which can mutate into dangerous by-products.”
“It’s also dangerous to have seven billion people on the planet, practically every one of whom knows how to light a fire,” replied Mancini. “Dangerous or not, it was no more possible to go from Watson and Crick and the DNA structure to this zeowhale without the intermediate development than it would have been to get from the Wright brothers and their powered kite to the two-hour transatlantic ramjet without building Ford tri-motors and DC-3’s in between. We have the knowledge, it’s an historical fact that no one can effectively destroy it. so we might as well use it. The fact that so many competent practitioners of the art exist is our best safeguard if it does get a little out of hand at tunes.”
The boy looked thoughtful.
“Maybe you have something there,” he said slowly. “But with all that knowledge, why only a hundred and fifty ye
ars? Why can’t you keep people going indefinitely?”
“Do you think we should?” Mancini countered with a straight face. Rick grinned.
“Stop ducking. If you could, you would—for some people anyway Why can’t you?” Mancini shrugged.
“Several hundred million people undoubtedly know the rules of chess.” He nodded toward the board on Dandridge’s control table. “Why aren’t they all good players? You know, don’t you. why doctors were reluctant to use hormones as therapeutic agents then when they became available in quantity?”
“I think so. If you gave someone cortisone it might do what you wanted, but it might also set other glands going or slow them down, which would alter the levels of other hormones, which in turn . . . well, it was a sort of chain reaction which could end anywhere.”
“Precisely. And gene-juggling is the same only more so. If you were to sit at the edge of the hatch there and let Gil close it on you. I could rig the factors in your gene pattern so as to let you grow new legs; but there would be a distinct risk of affecting other things in your system at the same time. In effect. I would be taking certain restraints which caused your legs to stop growing when they were completed off your cell-dividing control mechanisms—the sort of thing that used to happen as a natural, random effect in cancer. I’d probably get away with it—or rather, you would—since you’re only about nineteen and still pretty deep in what we call the stability” well. As you get older, though, with more and more factors interfering with that stability, the job gets harder—it’s a literal juggling act, with more and more balls being tossed to the juggler every year you live.
“You were born with a deep enough stability reserve to keep yourself operating for a few decades without any applied biochemical knowledge; you might live twenty years or ninety. Using the knowledge we have, we can play the game longer; but sooner or later we drop the ball. It’s not that we don’t know the rules; to go back to the chess analogy, it’s just that there are too many pieces on the board to keep track of all at once.”