Space Lash

by Hal Clement

  “Quite a bit of wind,” remarked the captain as his fingers lifted from the hydrojet controls. “All right. Pick it up.”

  “Think the magnets will be all right, Marco?” asked Dandridge. “That whale looks funny to me.” The mechanic joined the winchman and divers at the hatch and looked down at their floating problem.

  At first glance the “whale” was ordinary enough. It was about two meters long, and perfectly cigar-shaped except where the intake ring broke the curve some forty centimeters back of the nose. The exhaust ports, about equally far from the tail end, were less visible since they were merely openings in the dark gray skin. Integument and openings alike were hard to see in detail, however; the entire organism was overgrown with a brownish, slimy-looking mass of filaments reminiscent both of mold and of sealskin.

  “It's picked up something, all right,” Mancini conceded. “I don't see why your magnets shouldn't work, though… unless you'd rather they didn't get dirty.”

  “All right. Get down the ladder and steer 'em, Rick.” Dandridge caused a light alloy ladder to extend from the bow edge of the hatch as he spoke; then he fingered another switch which sent the grapples themselves slowly downward. Stubbs easily beat them to the foot of the ladder, hooked one leg through a rung, reached out with both arms and tried to steady the descending mass of metal. The Shark was pitching somewhat in the swell, and the eighty pounds of electromagnet and associated wiring was slightly rebellious. The youngest of the crew and the only nonspecialist among its members — he was still working off the two-year labor draft requirement which preceded higher education — Rick Stubbs got at least his share of the dirty work. He was not so young as to complain about it.

  “Slower…slower…twenty c's to go…ten…hold it now… just a touch lower all right, juice!” Dandridge followed the instructions, fed current to the magnets, and started to lift,

  “Wait!” the boy on the ladder called almost instantly. “It's not holding!”

  The mechanic reacted almost as fast.

  “Bring it up anyway!” he called. “The infection is sticking to the magnets. Let me get a sample!” Stubbs shrank back against the ladder as the slimy mass rose past him. In response to Mancini's command. Dandridge grimaced with distaste as it came above deck level and into his view.

  “You can have it!” he remarked, not very originally.

  Mancini gave no answer, and showed no sign of any emotion but interest. He had slipped back into his lab as the material was ascending, and now returned with a two-liter flask and the biggest funnel he possessed.

  “Run it aft a little,” he said briefly. “That's enough…I'll miss some, and it might as well fall into the water as onto the deck.” The grapple, which had crawled a few inches toward him on its overhead rail, stopped just short of the after edge of the hatch. Mancini, standing unconcernedly at the edge of the opening with the wind ruffling his clothes, held funnel and flask under the magnets.

  “All right, Gil, drop it,” he ordered. Dandridge obeyed.

  Most of the mess fell obediently away from the grapple. Some landed in the funnel and proceeded to ooze down into the flask; some hit Mancini's extended arm without appearing to bother him; a little dropped onto the deck, to the winchman's visible disgust. Most fell past Stubbs back into the sea.

  The mechanic took up some of the material from his arm and rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. “Gritty,” he remarked. “And the magnets held this stuff, but not the whale's skeleton. That means that most of the skeleton must be gone, and I bet this grit is magnetite. I'll risk a dollar that this infection comes from that old 775-Fe-DE6 culture that got loose a few years ago from Passamaquoddy. I'll give it the works to make sure, though. You divers will have to use slings to get the fish aboard, I'm afraid.”

  “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 stern. 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 boys presence.

  “You know much about either chemical or field analysis, Rick?”

  “A little. I can
recognize most of your gear — ultracentrifuge, 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 show 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 than the rest. Start at the intake ring and count eight scales back; then down 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. “See, 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-m-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-thiamine-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 polymer molding 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.