Space Lash

by Hal Clement

  “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 times.”

  The boy looked thoughtful.

  “Maybe you have something there,” he said slowly. “But with all that knowledge, why only a hundred and fifty years? 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 even 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.”

  Stubbs shook his head. “I've never thought of it quite that way. To me, it's always been just a repair job, and I couldn't see why it should be so difficult.”

  Mancini grinned. “Maybe your cultural grounding didn't include a poem called the 'The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay.' Well, we'll be a couple of hours getting back to the Guppy. There are a couple of sets of analysis runs sitting with us here. Maybe, if I start trying to turn those into language you can follow, you'll have some idea of why the game is so hard before we get there, Maybe, too” — his face sobered somewhat—“you'll start to see why, even though we always lose in the end, the game is so much fun. It isn't just that our own lives are at stake, you know; men have been playing that kind of game for two million years or so. Come on.”

  He turned to the bench top on which the various analyzers had been depositing their results; and since Stubbs had a good grounding in mathematical and chemical fundamentals, their language ceased to resemble Basic English. Neither paid any attention as the main driving turbines of the Shark came up to quarter speed and the vessel began to pick her way out of the patch of ice floes where the zeowhales had been collecting metal.

  By the time Winkle had reached open water and Ishihara had given him the clearance for high cruise, the other four had lost all contact with the outside world. Dandridge's chess board was in use again, with Farrell now his opponent. The molecular mechanic and his possible apprentice were deeply buried in a task roughly equivalent to explaining to a forty-piece orchestra how to produce Aida from overture to finale — without the use of written music. Stubbs' basic math was, for this problem, equivalent to having learned just barely his “do, re, mi.”

  There was nothing to distract the players of either game. The wind had freshened somewhat, but the swells had increased little if at all. With the Shark riding on her hydrofoils there was only the faintest of tremors as her struts cut the waves. The sun was still high and the sky almost cloudless. Between visual pilotage and sonar, life seemed as uncomplicated as it ever gets for the operator of a high-speed vehicle.

  The Guppy was nearly two hundred kilometers to the south, far beyond sonar range. Four of her other boats were out on business, and Winkle occasionally passed a word or two with their commanders; but no one had anything of real importance to say. The desultory conversations were a matter of habit, to make sure that everyone was still on the air. No pilot, whether of aircraft, space vessel, surface ship, or submarine, attaches any weight to the proverb that no news is good news.

  Just who was to blame for the interruption of this idyll remains moot. Certainly Mancini had given the captain his preliminary ideas about the pest which had killed their first whale. Just as certainly he had failed to report the confirmation of that opinion after going through the lab results with Stubbs. Winkle himself made no request for such confirmation — there was no particular reason why he should, and if he had it is hard to believe that he would either have realized all the implications or been able to do anything about them. The fact remains that everyone from Winkle at the top of the ladder of command to Stubbs at the bottom was taken completely by surprise when the Shark's starboard after hydrofoil strut snapped cleanly off just below the mean planing water line.

  At sixty-five knots, no human reflexes could have coped with the result. The electronic ones of the Shark tried, but the vessel's mechanical I.Q. was not up to the task of allowing for the lost strut. As the gyros sensed the drop in the right rear quadrant of their field of perception, the autopilot issued commands to increase the angle of attack of the control foils on that strut. Naturally there was no response. The dip increased. By the time it got beyond the point where the machine thought it could be handled by a single set of foils, so that orders went out to decrease lift on the port-bow leg, it was much too late. The after portion of the starboard flotation hull smacked a wave top at sixty-five knots and, of course, bounced. The bounce was just in time to reinforce the letdown command to the port-bow control foils. The bow curve of the port hull struck in its turn, with almost undiminished speed and with two principal results.

  About a third of the Shark's forward speed vanished in less than the same fraction of a second as she gave up kinetic energy to the water in front, raising a cloud of spray more than a hundred meter
s and subjecting hull and contents to about four gravities of acceleration in a most unusual direction. The rebound was high enough to cause the starboard “wing” to dip into the waves, and the Shark did a complete double cartwheel. For a moment she seemed to poise motionless with port wing and hull entirely submerged and the opposite wing tip pointing at the sky; then, grudgingly, she settled back to a nearly horizontal position on her flotation hulls and lay rocking on the swell.

  Externally she showed little sign of damage. The missing strut was, of course, under water anyway, and her main structure had taken only a few dents. The propellers had been twisted off by gyroscopic action during the cartwheel. Aside from this, the sleek form looked ready for service.

  Inside, things were different, Most of the apparatus, and even some of the men, had been more or less firmly fixed in place; but the few exceptions had raised a good deal of mayhem.

  Winkle and Ishihara were unconscious, though still buckled in their seats. Both had been snapped forward against their respective panels, and were draped with sundry unappetizing fragments of the dissected zeowhale. Ishihara's head had shattered the screen of his sonar instrument, and no one could have told at first glance how many cuts were supplying the blood on his face.

  The chess players had both left impressions on the control panel of the winch and handling system, and now lay crumpled beside it. Neither was bleeding visibly, but Farrell's arms were both twisted at angles impossible to intact bones. Dandridge was moaning and just starting to try to get to his feet; he and Mancini were the only ones conscious.

  The mechanic had been seated at one of his benches facing the starboard side of the ship when the impact came. He had not been strapped in his seat, and the four-G jerk had started to hurl him toward the bow. His right leg had stopped him almost as suddenly by getting entangled in the underpinning of the seat The limb was not quite detached from its owner; oddly enough, its skin was intact. This was about the only bit of tissue below the knee for which this statement could he made.

  Stubbs had been standing at the mechanic's side. They were to argue later whether it had been good or bad luck that the side in question had been the left. It depended largely on personal viewpoint. There had been nothing for Rick to seize as he was snatched toward the bow or, if there was, he had not been quick enough or strong enough to get it. He never knew just what hit him in flight; the motions of the Shark were so wild that it might have been deck, overhead, or the back of one of the pilot seats. It was evident enough that his path had intersected that of the big flask in which Mancini had first collected the iron-feeding tissue, but whether the flask was still whole at the time remains unclear. It is hard to see how he could have managed to absorb so many of its fragments had it already shattered, but it is equally hard to understand how he could have scattered them so widely over his anatomy if it had been whole.

  It was Stubbs, or rather the sight of him, that got Mancini moving. Getting his own shattered leg disentangled from the chair was a distracting task, but not distracting enough to let him take his eyes from the boy a few meters away. Arterial bleeding is a sight that tends to focus attention.

  He felt sick, over and above the pain of his leg; whether it was the sight of Rick or incipient shock he couldn't tell. He did his best to ignore the leg as he inched across the deck, though the limb itself seemed to have other ideas. Unfortunately these weren't very consistent; sometimes it wanted — demanded his whole mind, at others it seemed to have gone off somewhere on its own and hidden. He did not look back to see whether it was still with him; what was in front was more important.

  The boy still had blood when Mancini reached him, as well as a functioning heart to pump it. He was not losing the fluid as fast as had appeared from a distance, but something would obviously have to be done about what was left of his right hand — the thumb and about half of the palm. The mechanic had been raised during one of the periods when first-aiders were taught to abjure the tourniquet, but had reached an age where judgment stands a chance against rules. He had a belt and used it.

  A close look at the boy's other injuries showed that nothing could be done about them on the spot; they were bleeding slowly, but any sort of first aid would be complicated by the slivers of glass protruding from most of them. Face, chest, and even legs were slashed freely, but the rate of bleeding was not — Mancini hoped — really serious. The smaller ones were clotting already.

  Dandridge was on his feet by now, badly bruised but apparently in the best shape of the six.

  “What can I do, Marco?” he asked. “Everyone else is out cold. Should I use…"

  “Don't use anything on them until we're sure there are no broken necks or backs; they may be better off unconscious. I know I would be.”

  “Isn't there dope in the first-aid kit? I could give you a shot of painkiller.”

  “Not yet, anyway. Anything that would stop this leg from hurting would knock me out, and I've got to stay awake if at all possible until help comes. The lab equipment isn't really meant for repair work, but if anything needs to be improvised from it. I'll have to be the one to do it.

  I could move around better, though, if this leg were splinted. Use the raft foam from the handling locker.”

  Five minutes later Mancini's leg, from mid-thigh down, was encased in a bulky, light, but reasonably rigid block of foamed resin whose original purpose was to provide on-the-spot flotation for objects which were inconvenient or impossible to bring aboard. It still hurt, but he could move around without much fear of doing the limb further damage.

  “Good. Now you'd better see what communication gear, if any, stood up under this bump. I'll do what I can for the others. Don't move Ishi or the captain; work around them until I've done what I can.”

  Dandridge went forward to the conning section and began to manipulate switches. He was not a trained radioman — the Shark didn't carry one — but like any competent crew member he could operate all the vessel's equipment under routine conditions. He found quickly that no receivers were working, but that the regular transmitter drew current when its switches were closed. An emergency low-frequency beacon, entirely separate from the other communication equipment, also seemed intact; so he set this operating and began to broadcast the plight of the Shark on the regular transmitter. He had no way of telling whether either signal was getting out, but was not particularly worried for himself. The Shark was theoretically unsinkable — enough of her volume was filled with resin foam to buoy her entire weight even in fresh water. The main question was whether help would arrive before some of the injured men were beyond it.

  After ten minutes of steady broadcasting — he hoped — Dandridge turned back to the mechanic, to find him lying motionless on the deck. For a moment the winchman thought he might have lost consciousness; then Mancini spoke.

  “I've done all I can for the time being. I've splinted Joe's arms and pretty well stopped Rick's bleeding. Ishi has a skull fracture and the captain at least a concussion; don't move either one. If you've managed to get in touch with the Guppy, tell them about the injuries. We'll need gene records from Denver for Rick, probably for Ishi, and possibly for the captain. They should start making blood for Rick right away, the second enough gene data is through; he's lost quite a bit.”

  “I don't know whether I'm getting out or not, but I'll say it all anyway,” replied Dandridge, turning back to the board. “Won't you need some pretty extensive repair work yourself, though?”

  “Not unless these bone fragments do more nerve damage than I think they have,” replied Mancini. “Just tell them that I have a multiple leg fracture. If I know Bert Jellinge, he'll have gene blocks on all six of us growing into the machines before we get back to the Guppy anyway.”

  Dandridge eyed him more closely. “Hadn't I better give you a shot now?” he asked. “You said you'd done all you could, and it might be better to pass out from a sleepy shot than from pain. How about it?”

  “Get that message out first. I can hold on, an
d what I've done is the flimsiest of patchwork. With the deck tossing as it is any of those splints may be inadequate. We can't strap any of the fellows down, and if the wave motion rolls one of them over I'll have the patching to do all over again. When you get that call off, look at Rick once more; I think his bleeding has stopped, but until he's on a repair table I won't be happy about him.”

  “So you'd rather stay awake.”

  “Not exactly, but if you were in the kid's place, wouldn't you prefer me to?” Dandridge had no answer to that one; he talked into the transmitter instead.

  His words, as it happened, were getting out. The Conger, the nearest of the Shark's sister fish-tenders, had already started toward them; she had about forty kilometers to come. On the Guppy the senior mechanic had fulfilled Mancini's prediction; he had already made contract with Denver, and Rick Stubbs' gene code was about to start through the multiple-redundant communication channels used for the purpose — channels which, fortunately, had just been freed of the saturation caused by a serious explosion in Pittsburgh, which had left over five hundred people in need of major repair. The full transmission would take over an hour at the highest safe scanning rate; but the first ten minutes would give enough information, when combined with the basic human data already in the Guppy's computers, to permit the synthesis of replacement blood.

  The big mother-ship was heading toward the site of the accident so as to shorten the Conger's journey with the victims, The operations center at Cape Farewell had offered a “mastodon” — one of the gigantic helicopters capable of lifting the entire weight of a ship like the Shark. After a little slide-rule work, the Guppy's commander had declined; no time would have been saved, and the elimination of one ship-to-ship transfer for the injured men was probably less important than economy of minutes.

  Mancini would have agreed with this, had he been able to join in the discussion. By the time Dandridge had finished his second transmission, however, the mechanic had fainted from the pain of his leg.