The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6 - [Anthology]
Page 30
“Secondly,” Ehricke continues, “assuming a gravitation similar to ours, you must assume the need for a basic frame, a bone structure. It would not necessarily look like ours, but it has to be there. If this life form operates on oxygen or some other chemical system which uses gaseous intake, there would have to be certain conversion systems in the body such as our lungs and heart. For protection, these organs must be placed where the bone structure would serve them best—within the frame or otherwise shielded by bones. If our vital organs were located without protection in any of our limbs, accident might lop them off entirely.”
The history of other worlds then is roughly the same as that of our own world: a competition between life forms, some able to win through, some unable to do so through bad placement of organs. The extinct billions of experiments that failed are not around for us to examine. Life, structuring itself for more efficient survival, remains.
To further illustrate his point, Ehricke cites airplane design in-the early 1900s: “Fantastic varieties emerged from many countries, all experimental, all different. But today by natural selection, there is only one optimum type of aircraft for certain speeds. So if conditions on other worlds are similar to ours, their creatures could show some physical resemblance to us.”
This allowed, we have no way of guessing what variations in mankind itself could make a more efficient creature with greater survival characteristics. A third eye in the back of our heads, for instance, would be a lifesaver in this age of the galloping pedestrian. On a world where the air is thick, the beings would need extremely small mouths and nostrils to cut down on intake. If the air is thin, they would need mouths and nose vents like barn doors.
To the lonely space man, an alien woman with the above features would hardly be attractive. Right here, the entire field of esthetics looms before us. Astronautical history may depend on those concepts of beauty and utility our men take along as unacknowledged cargo to the stars. Countless books will have to be written under the general title: Esthetics and Etiquette for Other Worlds. Otherwise we are in danger of mistaking a rough skin for a rough mind, a third eye for an evil eye, a cold hand for a cold and hostile heart.
We have our own history of Indian-white relations to look back on with dismay. But these were, though savages, men. Confronted with beings resembling cockroaches, will we pause to consider whether their I.Q. is 50 or 250? Or will we simply build the grandest shoe in history and step on them?
Our first astronauts then must be the wisest and most temperate men, slow to revulsion, quick to sympathy, capable even of having their concepts of male-female sexuality shaken. On the planets of Tau Ceti sexes may be combined in one body or, worse from our lusty view, may be lacking altogether because more efficient if less invigorating ways have been found by nature to keep a race going.
* * * *
Thus far we have dealt with planets enjoying climates as bright and fine as ours. But even on such worlds, spendthrift creation is almost certain never to repeat an accident in the same way. Man, ape on the way to being angel, is but one of a trillion happenstances, neither better nor worse than trillions of others thrown up for grabs in island universes we will never see.
So while we may find cities on other worlds, they will not look like cities, the houses not quite houses, and the furniture and art all a little wrong to our jaundiced eyes. We will watch games that seem hardly games, hear songs just barely songs, all on worlds exactly like ours in natural environment.
But what of planets swinging about redder or whiter suns than ours, covered with lethal atmospheres where we will move like deep-sea divers in our space suits?
Earth life is based on carbon and oxygen. Does it have to be, on other worlds? No. Here are some other possibilities:
A world where the air is a hydrogen-peroxide vapor. This vapor, breathed in by animals, could be broken down into oxygen and water for use by their bodies.
A world where fluorine might be inhaled as a gas by living creatures. The skin of flourine-breathers, however, would be leathery and unpleasant and the world itself so nightmarish that our space men probably would not stay more than an hour.
But in the creation of life the atmosphere of planets is less important than the kind of warm-broth seas that covered them in their formative years. We men are built largely of carbon which, billions of years ago, formed the basis of increasingly complicated chemical compounds that changed and changed again until at last they came alive.
We carbon creatures are prejudiced in our own favor because, in all truth, carbon life can survive environmental dangers that other noncarbon forms could not possibly stand. So versatile is it, in fact, that if ever carbon life and silicon life came into existence simultaneously, carbon life would wipe out the silicon life. So versatile is carbon that out scientists long ago divided their studies into organic (carbon) chemistry and inorganic chemistry. Carbon, a virtuoso performer, can do more tricks than the whole theater of all the other known chemical elements. Silicon is the only other element that approaches it. Can we then expect to find silicon life in the universe?
There is one serious flaw in imagining silicon creatures. We breathe out carbon dioxide, which is a gas. “Silicon creatures,” says Dr. Tombaugh, “would breath out silicon dioxide, which is quartz.”
It is hard to imagine an animal exhaling crystals of quartz as it moves through its world. Silicon life would need to breathe something like flourine. This would cause it to exhale silicon-tetra-fluoride, after using the liberated energy. This, too, would result in a creature far removed, if even faintly resembling, ourselves.
* * * *
What we have guessed so far is unpromising, unsettling, sometimes terrifying. How nice it would be to step off our rocket on some far world and find just home folks like us.
It could happen.
Thomas Gold of Cornell’s space research group believes Earth may have been visited by cosmic neighbors a billion years ago. Finding the climate not to their taste, they dumped their picnic trash and left. From this discarded lot, bacterial life in its own good billion-year time evolved up to present-day man. We, too, some year, may seed other worlds with Coke bottles, paper napkins and orange peels from which our germs, invisibly stamped with our images, might rise up and walk on legs a billion years hence. So the creatures of the universe, through an intergalactic untidiness, might summon forth twins a thousand million sunrises apart.
Improbable. But improbable, too, is the thought that spores, drifting down the star winds, may have carried life from other nebulae to ours. Or the thought that perhaps huge meteoroids, shot across the abyss, carried out the work. Yet there is evidence that this may have happened. Dr. Melvin Calvin of the University of California at Berkeley has discovered recently, in examining meteor bodies, molecules resembling the basic stuff of genetic material here on Earth. In these blazing gifts from space he found prebiological forms that have not been on Earth for millions of years. These chemical combinations were the very ones that had to occur before life could stir.
In the scientific laboratories experts are experimenting with the creation of life in a test tube. In an artificial recreation of our raw and nightmarish environment when lightnings prowled our world like unchained beasts, Scientist Stanley L. Miller subjected a mixture of methane, or marsh gas, hydrogen, ammonia and water to electrical discharge. The result was the production of amino acids: Biochemist Sidney W. Fox, of Florida State University, has carried the process one significant step further: from the amino acids he has produced substances resembling proteins which then form tiny spheres which look like—and in some ways act like—bacteria.
Life in a test tube: a mystery.
Life on Earth: a mystery.
Life on other worlds: a mystery.
The mysteries move closer together through the immense shuttling of our thoughts, our laboratory devices, our far-traveling rockets.
The dust which once flew in the voids, the stuff of the sun, the mineral trash of Earth, has
reared itself up in our time to become man—to speak in tongues, to put forth hands and, with one of its billion-year-developed senses, to see those beckoning stars. That dust which came down through cycles of destruction and rebirth now desires to seek other dusts, to know what further shapes strange suns and gravities may have given them.
In our time this search will eventually change our laws, our religions, our philosophies, our arts, our recreations, as well as our sciences. Space, the mirror, waits for life to come look for itself there.
<
* * * *
ED LEAR WASN’T SO CRAZY!
by Hilbert Schenck, Jr.
The owl and the pussycat went into space
In a modified Jupiter C.
They took some lox, and standard clocks
And an ape with a Ph.D.
The owl took a sight on the stars above,
And sang to the guide beam’s sound,
“Oh lovely pussy, oh pussy my love,
We should never have left the ground,
The ground,
The ground!
We should never have left the ground.”
Pussy said to the owl, “Our atmosphere’s foul,
And your singing’s upsetting our course.
But let us be wedded and compute where we’re headed,
We will send our decision in Morse.”
So they rocketed gay, the elliptical way,
To the land where the fungus grows.
And there, as he should, a Martian stood,
On a ring instead of his toes,
His toes,
His toes,
On a ring instead of his toes.
“Will you loan us your ring, if the owl doesn’t sing?”
Telepathed back the Martian, “I will.”
So they dragged it away, and were married next day,
By some sort of a thing with a gill.
They dined on yams and boneless hams,
While the Martians espied them in mirth.
And hand in hand on the ruddy sand,
Each thumbed, his nose at the earth,
The earth,
The earth,
Each thumbed his nose at the earth.
<
* * * *
INSTRUCTOR
by Thelwell
<
* * * *
THE BROTHERHOOD OF KEEPERS
by Dean McLaughlin
Dean McLaughlin is a quiet, self-contained young man who works full time in a college bookstore, and in his spare time turns out, too infrequently, thoughtful and thought-provoking stories, mostly for Analog (Astounding).
He says that “half of the idea” for this story originated with his father (the Ann Arbor astronomer of the same name): “Xi Scorpii is a genuine bona fide binary star, roughly 80 light-years from here (and Lambda Serpentis would make a very good way-station stop en route). The twin stars actually could play catch with a planet as described in the story.
“The other half of the story’s genesis was some remarks In Loren Eiseley’s essay, ‘The Fire Apes,’ with which I didn’t entirely agree....”
* * * *
PROLOGUE
The cold wind screamed and drove dart-chips of crystal stuff deep into Chier-cuala’s fur.
Chier-cuala struggled up the hill. It was hard going. His walking flippers couldn’t find good footing in the white, soft powder that smothered the land, and the slope was steep. His stubby legs ached with fatigue. He floundered and wallowed in the white powder. It was cold.
He couldn’t remember any cold time like this one. Never had it been so cold. Never had the wind blown so hard— so endlessly. It had not stopped for many sleeping times. And never had the strange white powder lain so thick on the ground.
Chier-cuala couldn’t understand.
The cold, hard darts of crystal stuff clung to his fur. He brushed them away. The wind plastered more against him.
The wind leaked through his thick pelt and chilled him. His walking flippers ached and throbbed with the cold. He whimpered softly.
Stubbornly, he pressed on toward the crest of the hill. He needed food. His hunger was a compelling agony. It was the only thing that could have driven him out into this cold and wind. Always before, when a cold time came, he had huddled in his lair until it stopped—until the sky was blue again, and the powderlike white stuff on the ground turned to wetness, and the air turned warm.
But this time the cold had not stopped, and the wind still blew, and the sky remained gray. He had not eaten since...
He remembered the last thing he ate—the small, clumsy creature he had caught in the recesses of his lair. It was so small he would have ignored it, except he was starved.
And after he ate it, he had slept through a dark time, and then there was a bright time during which he did not eat because there was nothing, and then another dark time through which his sleep was troubled by visions of edible creatures.
Now, forced out of his lair by his hunger, he climbed the hill. The odd creatures on the hilltop had given him good things to eat, sometimes, when he did things which they made him understand they wanted him to do. Purposeless things, and some of them were very hard, but the odd creatures gave him good things to eat when he did them.
The slope was covered with the cold, white powder, and the broken-off stems and stalks of what had been a forest stuck up nakedly. Shattered pieces of them, buried under the white powder, slashed his walking flippers and blue stains marked his path.
Chier-cuala tried to pull himself up the steep slope by grasping the upright stalks in his prehensile, paddlelike forepaws. The stalks broke. He fell back—rolled downhill in a whirl of the white powder. It got into his fur. It was wet and cold.
He lay where he stopped rolling. He whimpered, too weary to move. Finally, knowing he must move and making the effort, he struggled up and went on. He did not try to grasp the stalks again.
At last, he found a way to the hilltop. The wind blew more fiercely up there. It slashed through his fur and chilled his body. He cried softly, miserably. His walking flippers were full of pain—turning numb. The blue stains in his footprints grew large. Clumsily, he stumbled across the hilltop toward the place of the odd creatures.
He whacked a forepaw against the flat thing that blocked the entrance. It did not move. He slapped again, and then again and again, harder and harder. He uttered a broken, heart-forsaken cry. He could not understand why the odd creatures did not take away the entrance-block and give him food.
He had to have food. He was hungry.
The cold wind screamed.
Chier-cuala slapped the door and sobbed.
* * * *
1
They called it coffee, even though it was brewed from the stems of a plant which originated forty light-years from Earth. It had a citric, quininelike taste. Hot and sweetened, it served the same function as coffee. Some people even preferred it.
It was an odd hour; Sigurd Muller and Loren Estanzio were alone in the commissary. Muller sipped from his cup —it was too hot yet. He set it down.
“What do you think about it?” he asked the younger man.
Estanzio made an awkward, unconvincing shrug. “It sort of scares me,” he admitted.
“Yeah?” Muller leaned his weight on the table. “Why?”
The young man was embarrassed. “Well,” he explained, “you remember last year, just after I got here, you put me through the test sequence—the same one you use on the floppers?”
Muller smiled. “I put all you young squirts through it. You’re supposed to be smart, or you wouldn’t get to come here. It’s a good calibration standard.”
Estanzio nodded. “I didn’t do so good,” he said.
“You did average,” Muller recalled, as if it was an unimportant matter. He tapped a fingernail on the table top. “The trick with an intelligence test, you’ve got to make it tougher than the smartest guy to take it. Otherwise, it’s a no
-good test.” He slouched back and half closed his eyes. “In the seven years I’ve been here, the average intelligence of the scientist-candidates that come here hasn’t gone up an inch. I guess you kids have reached an evolutionary plateau.”
“That’s the thing that scares me,” Estanzio confessed. “I mean, I knew all about mazes and problems, but the set you’ve got had me stopped. And when I saw that flopper catch on to the pattern maze—when it didn’t even know the principle of a maze...” He hesitated. “I’m scared,” he repeated lamely.
“It was a smart one, all right,” Muller said.
Estanzio wasn’t ready to go quite that far. “It could have been a fluke,” he suggested.
Muller shook his head. “No fluke,” he said. He leaned closer. “What if I told you the one we had today wasn’t the first?”
Estanzio frowned. “I hadn’t heard of any others,” he said doubtfully. “And I know there haven’t been any since I’ve been here.”