by James Blish
“Watch out for teleology,” Anne warned. “That’s not why the organism secretes it. It’s just the result. Function, not purpose.”
“Fair enough. But right there is the borderline in our thinking about antibiosis. What is an antibiotic to the organism it kills? Obviously, it’s poison, a toxin. But some bacteria always are naturally resistant to a given antibiotic, and through—what did your father call it?—through clone-variation and selection, the resistant cells may take over a whole colony. Equally obviously, those resistant cells would seem to produce an antitoxin. An example would be the bacteria that secrete penicillinase, which is an enzyme that destroys penicillin. To those bacteria, penicillin is a toxin, and penicillinase is an antitoxin—isn’t that right?”
“Right as rain. Go on, Paige.”
“So now we add to that still another fact: that both penicillin and tetracycline are not only antibiotics—which makes them toxic to many bacteria—but antitoxins as well. Both of them neutralize the placental toxin that causes the eclampsia of pregnancy. Now, tetracycline is a broad-range antibiotic; is there such a thing as a broad-range antitoxin, too? Is the resistance to tetracycline that many different kinds of bacteria can develop all derived from a single counteracting substance? The answer, we know now, is Yes. We’ve also found another kind of broad-range antitoxin—one which protects the organism against many different kinds of antibiotics. I’m told that it’s a whole new field of research and that we’ve just begun to scratch the surface.
“Ergo: Find the broad-range antitoxin that acts against the toxins of the human body which accumulate after growth stops—as penicillin and tetracyline act against the pregnancy toxin—and you’ve got your magic machine-gun against degenerative disease. Pfitzner already has found that antitoxin: its name is ascomycin …. How’d I do?” he added anxiously, getting his breath back.
“Beautifully. It’s perhaps a little too condensed for MacHinery to follow, but maybe that’s all to the good—it wouldn’t sound authoritative to him if he could understand it all the way through. Still it might pay to be just a little more roundabout when you talk to him.” The girl had the compact out again and was peering into it intently. “But you covered only the degenerative diseases, and that’s just background material. Now tell me about the direct attack on death.”
Paige looked at the compact and then at the girl, but her expression was too studied to convey much. He said slowly: “I’ll go into that if you like. But your father told me that that element of the work was secret even from the government. Should I discuss it in a restaurant?”
Anne turned the small, compact-like object around, so that he could see that it was in fact a meter of some sort. Its needle was in uncertain motion, but near the zero-point. “There’s no mike close enough to pick you up,” Anne said, snapping the device shut and restoring it to her purse. “Go ahead.”
“All right. Some day you’re going to have to explain to me why you allowed yourself to get into that first fight with me here, when you had that Eavesdropper with you all the time. Right at the moment I’m too busy being a phony ecologist.
“The death end of the research began back in 1952, with an anatomist named Lansing. He was the first man to show that complex animals—it was rotifers he used—produce a definite ageing toxin as a normal part of their growth, and that it gets passed on to the offspring. He bred something like fifty generations of rotifers from adolescent mothers, and got an increase in the life-span in every new generation. He ran ’em up from a natural average span of 24 days to one of 104 days. Then he reversed the process, by breeding consistently from old mothers, and cut the life-span of the final generation way below the natural average.”
“And now,” Anne said, “you know more about the babies in our labs than I told you before—or you should. The foundling home that supplies them specializes in the illegitimates of juvenile delinquents—the younger, for our purposes, the better.”
“Sorry, but you can’t needle me with that any longer, Anne. I know now that it’s a blind alley. Breeding for longevity in humans isn’t practicable; all that those infants can supply to the project is a set of comparative readings on their death-toxin blood-levels. What we want now is something much more direct: an antitoxin against the ageing toxin of humans. We know that the ageing toxin exists in all complex animals. We know that it’s a single, specific substance, quite distinct from the poisons that cause the degenerative diseases. And we know that it can be neutralized. When your lab animals were given ascomycin, they didn’t develop a single degenerative disease—but they died anyhow, at about the usual time, as if they’d been set, like a clock, at birth. Which, in effect, they had, by the amount of ageing toxin passed on to them by their mothers.
“So what we’re looking for now is not an antibiotic—an anti-life drug—but an anti-agathic, an anti-death drug. We’re running on borrowed time, because ascomycin already satisfies the condition of our development contract with the government. As soon as we get ascomycin into production, our government money will be cut down to a trickle. But if we can hold back on ascomycin long enough to keep the money coming in, we’ll have our anti-agathic too.”
“Bravo,” Anne said. “You sound just like father. I wanted you to raise that last point in particular, Paige, because it’s the most important single thing you should remember. If there’s the slightest suspicion that we’re systematically dragging our feet on releasing ascomycin—that we’re taking money from the government to do something the government has no idea can be done—there’ll be hell to pay. We’re so close to running down our anti-agathic now that it would be heartbreaking to have to stop, not only heartbreaking for us, but for humanity at large.”
“The end justifies the means,” Paige murmured.
“It does in this case. I know secrecy’s a fetish in our society these days—but here secrecy will serve everyone in the long run, and it’s got to be maintained.”
“I’ll maintain it,” Paige said. He had been referring, not to secrecy, but to cheating on government money; but he saw no point in bringing that up. As for secrecy, he had no practical faith in it—especially now that he had seen how well it worked.
For in the two days that he had been working inside Pfitzner, he had already found an inarguable spy at the very heart of the project.
CHAPTER SIX: Jupiter V
Yet the barbarians, who are not divided by rival traditions, fight all the more incessantly for food and space. Peoples cannot love one another unless they love the same ideas.
–GEORGE SANTAYANA
THERE WERE three yellow “Critical” signals lit on the long gang-board when Helmuth passed through the gang deck on the way back to duty. All of them, as usual, were concentrated on Panel 9, where Eva Chavez worked.
Eva, despite her Latin name—such once-valid tickets no longer meant anything among the West’s uniformly mixed-race population —was a big girl, vaguely blonde, who cherished a passion for the Bridge. Unfortunately, she was apt to become enthralled by the sheer Cosmicness of It All, precisely at the moment when cold analysis and split-second decisions were most crucial.
Helmuth reached over her shoulder, cut her out of the circuit except as an observer, and donned the co-operator’s helmet. The incomplete new shoals caisson sprang into being around him. Breakers of boiling hydrogen seethed seven hundred feet up along its slanted sides—breakers that never subsided, but simply were torn away into flying spray.
There was a spot of dull orange near the top of the north face of the caisson, crawling slowly toward the pediment of the nearest truss. Catalysis—
Or cancer, as Helmuth could not help but think of it. On this bitter, violent monster of a planet, even tiny specks of calcium carbide were deadly, that same calcium carbide which had produced acetylene gas for buggy lamps two centuries ago on Earth. At these wind velocities, such specks imbedded themselves deeply in anything they struck; and at fifteen million p.s.i. of pressure, under the catalysis of sodium, pressure-
ice took up ammonia and carbon dioxide, building protein-like compounds in a rapid, voracious chain of decay:
For a moment, Helmuth watched it grow. It was, after all, one of the incredible possibilities the Bridge had been built to study. On Earth, such a compound, had it occurred at all, might have grown porous, hard, and as strong as rhinoceros-horn. Here, under nearly three times Earth’s gravity, the molecules were forced to assemble in strict aliphatic order, but in cross section their arrangement was hexagonal, as though the stuff would become an aromatic compound if only it could. Even here it was moderately strong in cross section —but along the long axis it smeared like graphite, the calcium and sulphur atoms readily changing their minds as to which was to act as the metal of the pair, surrendering their pressure-driven holds on one carbon atom to grab hopefully for the next one in line, or giving up altogether to become incorporated instead in a radical with a self-contained double sulphur bond, rather like cystine ….
It was not too far from the truth to call it a form of cancer. The compound seemed to be as close as Jupiter came to an indigenous form of life. It grew, fed, reproduced itself, and showed something of the characteristic structure of an Earthly virus, such as tobacco-mosaic. Of course it grew from outside by accretion like any nonliving crystal, rather than from the inside, by intussusception, like a cell; but viruses grew that way too, at least in vitro.
It was no stuff to hold up the piers of humanity’s greatest engineering project, that much was sure. Perhaps it was a suitable ground-substance for the ribs of some Jovian jellyfish; but in a Bridge-caisson, it was cancer.
There was a scraper mechanism working on the edge of the lesion, flaking away the shearing aminos and laying down new ice. In the meantime, the decay in the caisson-face was working deeper. The scraper could not possibly get at the core of the trouble—which was not the calcium carbide dust, with which the atmosphere was charged beyond redemption, but was instead one imbedded speck of metallic sodium which was taking no part in the reaction—fast enough to extirpate it. It could barely keep pace with the surface spread of the disease.
And laying new ice over the surface of the wound was worthless, as Eva should have known. At this rate, the whole caisson would slough away and melt like butter, within an hour, under the weight of the Bridge above it.
Helmuth sent the futile scraper aloft. Drill for the speck of metal? No—it was far too deeply buried already, and its location was unknown.
Quickly he called two borers up from the shoals below, where constant blasting was taking the foundation of the caisson deeper and deeper into Jupiter’s dubious “soil.” He drove both blind, fire-snouted machines down into the lesion.
The bottom of that sore turned out to be a hundred feet within the immense block of ice. Helmuth pushed the red button all the same.
The borers blew up, with a heavy, quite invisible blast, as they had been designed to do. A pit appeared on the face of the caisson.
The nearest truss bent upward in the wind. It fluttered for a moment, trying to resist. It bent farther.
Deprived of its major attachment, it tore free suddenly, and went whirling away into the blackness. A sudden flash of lightning picked it out for a moment, and Helmuth saw it dwindlling like a bat with torn wings being borne away by a cyclone.
The scraper scuttled down into the pit and began to fill it with ice from the bottom. Helmuth ordered down a new truss and a squad of scaffolders. Damage of this order of magnitude took time to repair. He watched the tornado tearing ragged chunks from the edges of the pit until he was sure that the catalysis-cancer had been stopped. Then—suddenly, prematurely, dismally tired—he took off the helmet.
He was astounded by the white fury that masked Eva’s big-boned, mildly pretty face.
“You’ll blow the Bridge up yet, won’t you?” she said, evenly, without preamble. “Any pretext will do!”
Baffled, Helmuth turned his head helplessly away; but that was no better. The suffused face of Jupiter peered swollenly through the picture-port, just as it did on the foreman’s deck.
He and Eva and Charity and the gang and the whole of satellite V were falling forward toward Jupiter; their uneventful, cooped-up lives on Jupiter V were utterly unreal compared to the four hours of each changeless day spent on Jupiter’s ever-changing surface. Every new day brought their minds, like ships out of control, closer and closer to that gaudy inferno.
There was no other way for a man—or a woman—on Jupiter V to look at the giant planet. It was simple experience, shared by all of them, that planets do not occupy four-fifths of the whole sky, unless the observer is himself up there in that planet’s sky, falling toward it, falling faster and faster—
“I have no intention,” he said tiredly, “of blowing up the Bridge. I wish you could get it through your head that I want the Bridge to stay up—even though I’m not starry-eyed to the point of incompetence about the project. Did you think that that rotten spot was going to go away by itself after you’d painted it over? Didn’t you know that—”
Several helmeted, masked heads nearby turned blindly toward the sound of his voice. Helmuth shut up. Any distracting conversation or other activity was taboo down here on the gang deck. He motioned Eva back to duty.
The girl donned her helmet obediently enough, but it was plain from the way that her normally full lips were thinned that she thought Helmuth had ended the argument only in order to have the last word.
Helmuth strode to the thick pillar which ran down the central axis of the operations shack, and mounted the spiraling cleats toward his own foreman’s cubicle. Already he felt in anticipation the weight of the helmet upon his own head.
Charity Dillon, however, was already wearing the helmet. He was sitting in Helmuth’s chair.
Charity was characteristically oblivious of Helmuth’s entrance. The Bridge operator must learn to ignore, to be utterly unconscious of, anything happening about his body except the inhuman sounds of signals; must learn to heed only those senses which report something going on thousands and hundreds of thousands of miles away.
Helmuth knew better than to interrupt him. Instead, he watched Dillon’s white, blade-like fingers roving with blind sureness over the controls.
Dillon, evidently, was making a complete tour of the Bridge—not only from end to end, but up and down, too. The tally board showed that he had already activated nearly two-thirds of the ultraphone eyes. That meant that he had been up all night at the job; had begun it immediately after he had last relieved Helmuth.
Why?
With a thrill of unfocused apprehension, Helmuth looked at the foreman’s jack, which allowed the operator here in the cubicle to communicate with the gang when necessary, and which kept him aware of anything said or done on the gang boards.
It was plugged in.
Dillon sighed suddenly, took the helmet off, and turned.
“Hello, Bob,” he said. “It’s funny about this job. You can’t see, you can’t hear, but when somebody’s watching you, you feel a sort of pressure on the back of your neck. Extra-sensory perception, maybe. Ever felt it?”
“Pretty often, lately. Why the grand tour, Charity?”
“There’s to be an inspection,” Dillon said. His eyes met Helmuth’s. They were frank and transparent. “A couple of Senate subcommittee chairmen, coming to see that their eight billion dollars isn’t being wasted. Naturally, I’m a little anxious to see to it that they find everything in order.”
“I see,” Helmuth said. “First time in five years, isn’t it?”
“Just about. What was that dust-up down below just now? Some-body—you, I’m sure, from the drastic handiwork involved—bailed Eva out of a mess, and then I heard her talk about your wanting to blow up the Bridge. I checked the area when I heard the fracas start, and it did seem as if she had let things go rather far, but—What was it all about?”
Dillon ordinarily hadn’t the guile for cat-and-mouse games, and he had never looked less guileful than now. Helmuth
said carefully: “Eva was upset, I suppose. On the subject of Jupiter we’re all of us cracked by now, in our different ways. The way she was dealing with the catalysis didn’t look to me to be suitable—a difference of opinion, resolved in my favor because I had the authority. Eva didn’t. That’s all.”
“Kind of an expensive difference, Bob. I’m not niggling by nature, you know that. But an incident like that while the sub-committees are here—”
“The point is,” said Helmuth, “are we going to spend an extra ten thousand, or whatever it costs to replace a truss and reinforce a caisson, or are we to lose the whole caisson—and as much as a third of the whole Bridge along with it?”
“Yes, you’re right there, of course. That could be explained, even to a pack of senators. But—it would be difficult to have to explain it very often. Well, the board’s yours, Bob; you could continue my spotcheck, if you’ve time.”
Dillon got up. Then he added suddenly, as though it were forced out of him:
“Bob, I’m trying to understand your state of mind. From what Eva said, I gather that you’ve made it fairly public. I … I don’t think it’s a good idea to infect your fellow workers with your own pessimism. It leads to sloppy work. I know. I know that you won’t countenance sloppy work, regardless of your own feelings, but one foreman can do only so much. And you’re making extra work for yourself—not for me, but for yourself—by being openly gloomy about the Bridge.
“It strikes me that maybe you could use a breather, maybe a week’s junket to Ganymede or something like that. You’re the best man on the Bridge, Bob, for all your grousing about the job and your assorted misgivings. I’d hate to see you replaced.”