by James Blish
But Seppi, let me ask you this: Does the Bridge really fall under the interdict you uttered against the gigantic research projects? It’s gigantic, all right. But—is it gigantic on Jupiter? I say it isn’t. It’s peanuts. A piece of attic gadgetry and nothing more. And we couldn’t have performed the necessary experiments on any other planet.
Not all the wealth of Ormus or of Ind, or of all the world down the ages, could have paid for a Manhattan District scaled to Jupiter’s size.
In addition—though this was incidental—the apparent giganticism involved was a useful piece of misdirection. Elephantine research projects may be just about played out, but government budgetary agencies are used to them and think them normal. Getting the Joint Committee involved in one helped to revive the committeemen from their comatose state, as nothing else could have. It got us appropriations we never could have corralled otherwise, because people associate such projects with weapons research. And—forgive me, but there is a sort of science to politics too—it seemed to show graphically that I was not following the suspect advice of the suspect Dr. Corsi. I owed you that, though it’s hardly as large a payment as I would like to make.
But I don’t mean to talk about the politics of crackpot-mining here; only about the concrete results. You should be warned, too, that the method has its pitfalls.
You will know by now about the anti-agathic research, and what we got out of it. I talked to people who might know what the chances were, and got general agreement from them as to how we should proceed. This straight-line approach looked good to me from the beginning.
I set the Pfitzner people to work on it at once, since they already had that HWS appropriation for similar research, and HWS wouldn’t be alert enough to detect the moment when Pfitzner’s target changed from just plain old age to death itself. But we didn’t overlook the crackpots—and before long we found a real dilly.
This was a man named Lyons, who insisted that the standard Lansing hypothesis, which postulates the existence of an ageing-toxin, was exactly the opposite of the truth. (I go into this subject with a certain relish, because I suspect that you know as little about it as I do; it’s not often that I find myself in that situation. ) Instead, he said, what happens is that it’s the young mothers who pass on to their offspring some substance which makes them long-lived. Lansing’s notion that the old mothers were the ones who did the passing along, and that the substance passed along speeding up ageing, was unproven, Lyons said.
Well, that threw us into something of a spiral. Lansing’s Law—“Senescence begins when growth ends”—had been regarded as gospel in gerontology for decades. But Lyons had a good hypothetical case. He pointed out that, among other things, all of Lansing’s long-lived rotifers showed characteristics in common with polyploid individuals. In addition to being hardy and long-lived, they were of unusually large size, and they were less fertile than normal rotifers. Suppose that the substance which was passed along from one generation to another was a chromosome-doubler, like colchicine?
We put that question to Lansing’s only surviving student, a living crotchet named MacDougal. He wouldn’t hear of it; to him it was like questioning the Word of God. Besides, he said, if Lyons is right, how do you propose to test it? Rotifers are miscroscopic animals. Except for their eggs, their body cells are invisible even under the miscroscope. Technically speaking, in fact, they don’t seem to have any body-cells as adults—just a sort of generalized protoplasmic continuum in which the nuclei are scattered at random, rather like the Plasmodium of a slime-mold. It would be quite a few months of Sundays before we ever got a look at a rotifer chromosome.
Lyons thought he had an answer for that. He proposed to develop a technique of microtome preparation which would make, not one, but several different slices through a rotifer’s egg. With any sort of luck, he said, we might be able to extend the technique to rotifer spores, and maybe even to the adult critters.
We thought we ought to try it. Without telling Pfitzner about it, we gave Pearl River Labs that headache. We put Lyons himself in charge and assigned MacDougal to act as a consultant (which he did by sniping and scoffing every minute of the day, until not only Lyons, but everybody else in the plant hated him). It was awful. Rotifers, it turns out, are incredibly delicate animals, just about impossible to preserve after they’re dead, no matter what stage of their development you catch them in. Time and time again, Lyons came up with microscope slides which, he said, proved that the long-lived rotifers were at least triploid—three labeled chromosomes per body-cell instead of two—and maybe even tetraploid. Every other expert in the Pearl River plant looked at them, and saw nothing but a blur which might have been rotifer chromosomes, and might equally well have been a newspaper halftone of a grey cat walking over a fur rug in a thick fog. The comparative tests—producing polyploid rotifers and other critters with drugs like colchicine, and comparing them with the critters produced by Lansing’s and MacDougal’s classical breeding methods—were just as indecisive. Lyons finally decided that what he needed to prove his case was the world’s biggest and most expensive X-ray miscroscope, and right then we shut him down.
MacDougal had been right all the time. Lyons was a crackpot with a plausible line of chatter, enough of a technique at microdissection to compel respect, and a real and commendable eagerness to explore his idea right down to the bottom. MacDougal was a frozen-brained old man with far too much reverence for his teacher, a man far too ready to say that a respected notion was right because it was respected, and a man who had performed no actual experiments himself since his student days. But he had been right—purely intuitively—in predicting that Lyons’ inversion of Lansing’s Law would come to nothing. I gather that victory in the sciences doesn’t always go to the most personable man, any more than it does in any other field. I’m glad to know it; I’m always glad to find some small area of human endeavor which resists the con-man and the sales-talk.
When Pfitzner discovered ascomycin, we had HWS close Pearl River out entirely.
Negative results of this kind are valuable for scientists too, I’m told. How you will evaluate your proposed research method in the light of these two experiences is unknown to me; I can only tell you what I think I learned. I am convinced that we must be much slower, in the future, to ignore the fringe notion and the marginal theorist. One of the virtues of these crackpots—if that is what they are—is that they tend to cling to ideas which can be tested. That’s worth hanging on to, in a world where scientific ideas have become so abstract that even their originators can’t suggest ways to test them. Whoever Locke was, I suppose he hadn’t put a thousandth as much time into thinking about gravity as Blackett had; yet Blackett couldn’t suggest a way to test his equation, whereas the Locke Derivation was testable (on Jupiter) and turned out to be right. As for Lyons, his notion was wrong; but it too fell down because it failed the operational test, the very test it proposed to pass; until we performed that test, we had no real assessment of Lansing’s Law, which had been traveling for years on prestige because of the “impossibility” of weighing any contrary hypothesis. Lyons forced us to do that, and enlarged our knowledge.
And so, take it from there; I’ve tried to give back as good as I have gotten. I’m not going to discuss the politics of this whole conspiracy with you, nor do I want you to concern yourself with them. Politics is death. Above all, I beg you—if you’re at all pleased with this report—not to be distressed over the situation I will probably be in by the time this reaches you. I’ve been ruthless with your reputation to advance my purposes; I’ve been ruthless with the careers of other people; I’ve been quite ruthless in sending some men—some hundreds of men—to deaths they could surely have avoided had it not been for me; I’ve put many others, including a number of children, into considerable jeopardy. With all this written against my name, I’d think it a monstrous injustice to get off scott-free.
And that is all I can say; I have an appointment in a few minutes. Thank you for your f
riendship and your help.
BLISS WAGONER
CHAPTER NINE: New York
It is sometimes claimed that religious intolerance is the fruit of conviction. If one be absolutely certain that one’s faith is right and all others wrong, it seems criminal to permit one’s neighbors’ obvious error and perdition. I am tempted to think, however, that religious fanaticism often is the result not of conviction but rather of doubt and insecurity.
—GEORGE SARTON
R UTHLESSNESS, ANNE had said, is what it takes. But—Paige thought afterwards—is it?
Does faith add up to its own flat violation? It was all well enough to have something in which you could believe. But when a faith in humanity-in-general automatically results in casual inhumanity toward individual people, something must have gone awry. Should the temple bell be struck so continually that it has to shatter—make all its worshippers ill with terror until it is silenced?
Silence. The usual answer. Or was the fault not in faith itself, but in the faithful? The faithful were usually pretty frightening as people, Believers and humanitarians alike.
Paige’s time to debate the point with himself had already almost run out—and with it, his time to protect himself, if he could. Nothing had emerged from his soil samples. Evidently bacterial life on the Jovian moons had never at any time been profuse and consisted now only of a few hardy spores of common species, like Bacillus subtilis, which occurred on every Earth-like world and sometimes even in meteors. The samples plated out sparsely and yielded nothing which had not been known for decades—as, indeed, the statistics of this kind of research had predicted from the beginning.
It was now known around the Bronx plant that some sort of investigation of the Pfitzner project was rolling, and was already moving too fast to be derailed by any method the company’s executives could work out. Daily reports from Pfitzner’s Washington office—actually the Washington branch of Interplanet Press, the public relations agency Pfitzner maintained—were filed in the plant, but they were apparently not very informative. Paige gathered that there was some mystery about the investigation at the source, though neither Gunn nor Anne would say so in so many words.
And, finally, Paige’s leave was to be over, day after tomorrow. After that, the Proserpine station—and probably an order to follow, emerging out of the investigation, which would maroon him there for the rest of his life in the service.
And it wasn’t worth it.
That realization had been staring him in the eyes all along. For Anne and Gunn, perhaps, the price was worth paying, the tricks were worth playing, the lying and the cheating and the risking of the lives of others were necessary and just to the end in view. But when the last card was down, Paige knew that he himself lacked the necessary dedication. Like every other road toward dedication that he had assayed, this one had turned out to have been paved with pure lead—and had left him with no better emblem of conduct than the miserable one which had kept him going all the same: self-preservation.
He knew then, with cold disgust toward himself, that he was going to use what he knew to clear himself, as soon as the investigation hit the plant. Senator Wagoner, the grapevine said, would be conducting it—oddly enough, for Wagoner and MacHinery were deadly political enemies; had MacHinery gotten the jump on him at last?—and would arrive tomorrow. If Paige timed himself very carefully, he could lay down the facts, leave the plant forever, and be out in space without having to face Hal Gunn or Anne Abbott at all. What would happen to the Pfitzner project thereafter would be old news by the time he landed at the Proserpine station—more than three months old.
And by that time, he told himself, he would no longer care.
Nevertheless, when the quick morrow came, he marched into Gunn’s office—which Wagoner had taken over—like a man going before a firing squad.
A moment later, he felt as though he had been shot down while still crossing the door-sill. Even before he realized that Anne was already in the room, he heard Wagoner say:
“Colonel Russell, sit down. I’m glad to see you. I have a security clearance for you, and a new set of orders; you can forget Proserpine. You and Miss Abbott and I are leaving for Jupiter. Tonight.”
It was like a dream after that. In the Caddy on the way to the spaceport, Wagoner said nothing. As for Anne, she seemed to be in a state of slight shock. From what little Paige thought he had learned about her—and it was very little—he deduced that she had expected this as little as he had. Her face as he had entered Gunn’s office had been guarded, eager, and slightly smug all at once, as though she had thought she’d known what Wagoner would say. But when Wagoner had mentioned Jupiter, she’d turned to look at him as though he’d been turned from a senator into a boxing kangaroo, in the plain sight of the Pfitzner Founders. Something was wrong. After the long catalog of things already visibly wrong, the statement didn’t mean very much. But something had clearly gone wrong.
There were fireworks in the sky to the south, visible from the right side of the Caddy where Paige sat as the car turned east on to the parkway. They were big and spectacular, and seemed to be going up from the heart of Manhattan. Paige was puzzled until he remembered, like a fact recalled from the heart of an absurd dream, that this was the last night of the Believer Revival, being held in the stadium on Randalls Island. The fireworks celebrated the Second Coming, which the Believers were confident could not now be long delayed.
Gewiss, gewiss, es naht noch heut’
und kann nicht lang mehr säumen …
Paige could remember having heard his father, an ardent Wagnerian, singing that; it was from Tristan. But he thought instead of those frightening medieval paintings of the Second Coming, in which Christ stands ignored in a corner of the canvas while the people flock reverently to the feet of the Anti-Christ, whose face, in the dim composit of Paige’s memory, was a curious mixture of Francis X. MacHinery and Bliss Wagoner.
Words began to bloom along the black sky at the hearts of star-shells:
No doubt, Paige thought bleakly. The Believers also believed that the Earth was flat; but Paige was on his way to Jupiter—not exactly a round planet, but rounder than the Believers’ Earth. In quest, if you please, of immortality, in which he too had believed. Tasting bile, he thought, It takes all kinds.
A final starshell, so brilliant even at this distance that the word inside it was almost dazzled out, burst soundlessly into blue-white fire above the city. It said:
Paige swung his head abruptly and looked at Anne. Her face, a ghostly blur in the dying light of the shell, was turned raptly toward the window; she had been watching, too. He leaned forward and kissed her slightly parted lips, gently, forgetting all about Wagoner. After a frozen moment he could feel her mouth smiling against his, the smile which had astonished him so when he had seen it first, but softened, transformed, giving. The world went away for a while.
Then she touched his cheeks with her fingertips and sank back against the cushions; the Caddy swung sharply north off the park-way; and the spark of radiance which was the last Retmal image of the shell vanished into drifting purple blotches, like after-visions of the sun—or of Jupiter seen close-on. Anne had no way of knowing, of course, that he had been running away from her, toward the Proserpine station, when he had been cornered in this Caddy instead. Anne, Anne, I believe; help me in mine unbelief.
The Caddy was passed through the spaceport gates after a brief, whispered consultation between the chauffeur and the guards. Instead of driving directly for the Administration Building, however, it turned craftily to the left and ran along the inside of the wire fence, back toward the city and into the dark reaches of the emergency landing pits. It was not totally dark there, however; there was a pool of light on an apron some distance ahead, with a needle of glare pointing straight up from its center.
Paige leaned forward and peered through the double glass barrier —one pane between himself and the driver, the other between the driver and the world. The needle of light was a
ship, but it was not one he recognized. It was a single-stage job: a ferry, designed to take them out no farther than to Satellite Vehicle One, where they would be transferred to a proper interplanetary vessel. But it was small, even for a ferry.
“How do you like her, Colonel?” Wagoner’s voice said, unexpectedly, from the black corner where he sat.
“All right,” Paige said. “She’s a little small, isn’t she?”
Wagoner chuckled. “Pretty damn small,” he said, and fell silent again. Alarmed, Paige began to wonder if the senator was feeling entirely well. He turned to look at Anne, but he could not even see her face now. He groped for her hand; she responded with a feverish, rigid grip.
The Caddy shot abruptly from the fence. It bore down on the pool of light. Paige could see several marines standing on the apron at the tail of the ship. Absurdly, the vessel looked even smaller as it came closer.
“All right,” Wagoner said. “Out of here, both of you. We’ll be taking off in ten minutes. The crewmen will show you your quarters.”
“Crewmen?” Paige said. “Senator, that ship won’t hold more than four people, and one of them has to be the tube-man. That leaves nobody to pilot her but me.”
“Not this trip,” Wagoner said, following him out of the car. “We’re only passengers, you and I and Miss Abbott, and of course the marines. The Per Aspera has a separate crew of five. Let’s not waste time, please.”