The Paradox of the Sets

by Brian Stableford

  I returned the grin, and went on.

  Knowing that fools rush in where angels fear to tread isn’t enough to qualify anyone for wings and a halo.

  CHAPTER NINE

  We gave Gley a cabin, feeling that it was the least we could do in view of his own generous hospitality. We also fed him. Though none were voiced, opinions apparently varied as to whether the good, nourishing concentrates we offered him were preferable to the rather more primitive fare he had provided for us. The Sets had brought along a dismantled tepee on the back of one of the pack animals, and they pitched this outside.

  Helene Levasseur called the ship in the late evening to assure us that she was steadily making progress. Karen reported that we’d made contact with Gley and that he’d helped us out after the accident, but diplomatically didn’t mention that he was standing in the doorway listening to every word that was said. Mme. Levasseur didn’t seem rapturous about the idea of our having talked to Gley, but she didn’t want to talk about it. She was a very cautious person, as befitted a judge with an interest in politics. I was strongly tempted to displace Karen for a few moments so that I could tell her that Gley wanted it passed on (a) that there could be nothing worth looking at on the photographs and (b) that he intended to shoot her if she set foot in his crater, but I refrained. Common sense held unchallenged sway over the proceedings.

  When I showed Gley to his cabin I was careful to point out the shower and offer him some clean clothes. He was uninterested in the latter, but I was glad when he took a constructive attitude to the former. I was about to leave him to it when I noticed that he had something else on his mind.

  “Do you have spacesuits on board?” he asked.

  I couldn’t help dropping my jaw just a little. “Spacesuits?” I echoed. Then, seeing that he was waiting for an answer, I added, “No.”

  “But you have something,” he went on, quickly. “The girl mentioned it. Suits to maintain sterile conditions, with air filters.”

  “We have sterile suits,” I agreed. “But they’re just glorified plastic bags. The filters take out all the organic matter from the air, and some obnoxious gases, but they can strain water, and you can squeeze liquefied food through the filters too. They certainly wouldn’t do for wandering about in space.”

  “I don’t want to wander about in space,” he said. “Rather the reverse.”

  For a moment I was at a loss to see what he meant. Then I got it.

  “The cracks in the northern wall of the crater,” I said. “You want to go pot-holing on the side of a volcano. Why the suits?”

  “Sulfur dioxide,” he said. “Not much of it, but enough to make it very dangerous to go down there for any length of time. And the water vapor that belches out occasionally can be hot.”

  “The filters will stop SO2,” I said, dubiously. “And the suits have an air-system to which we can attach oxygen bottles if they begin to fail. Hot vapor might still be a problem, though.”

  “It’s just a matter of keeping it off the skin,” he said.

  “There is a thermostatic control of sorts,” I told him. “But it was designed with cold in mind rather than heat. I don’t know that the water recycler would appreciate working at high temperatures.”

  “I’ll take the risk,” he said.

  “Why? Why the hell would you want to go into the fissures?”

  “That’s my business,” he said. “You don’t have to come along. Just give me a suit.”

  “First you want to borrow equipment for measuring radioactivity,” I said, “now you want a sterile suit. And you won’t say a damn thing about the theory you’re working on. What could possibly be inside the mountain?”

  “You’re a clever man Mr. Alexander,” he said. “You can work it out for yourself.”

  They say it takes two to make a competition. He appeared to have read my character right, if what he said really was a challenge. But maybe he was just stalling in a faintly insulting way.

  “You can have the suit,” I said. “When do you want to go back?”

  “There isn’t much time,” he said. “I don’t want to hang about here waiting for Helene Levasseur. I’m going back tomorrow.”

  “That’ll be the third time in three days I’ve traveled that fifty miles.”

  “You don’t have to come.”

  “I’d like to take another look at your garden. Anyhow, you’ll need at least one of us to operate the radiation apparatus.”

  He shrugged.

  I left him to get on with his shower. I went straight to Linda’s cabin, but she wasn’t there. I found her in the lab.

  She had already sorted out such equipment as we had for making sensitive radiation counts. She was working now with the light microscope, looking at sections she’d cut from various types of plant fiber.

  “What are you doing that for?” I asked. “That’s routine drudge-work.”

  “I cut the sections to see if I could get radio-carbon counts,” she explained. “Just a matter of testing the apparatus. They register, but the counts are very low and quite stable. They’re exactly what one would expect, given the radio-carbon count in the atmosphere.”

  “It’s no surprise,” I said. “But why the microscope?”

  “Since I had the sections I thought I might as well take a look,” she replied. “Pity to waste them. Besides, I’m looking for something.”

  “Don’t you start,” I groaned. “Just because everyone else is operating a triple-locked memory bank there’s no need for us to start.”

  “It’s no secret,” she assured me. “It’s in the survey report in black and white. Quite unimportant. Just curiosity. You know.”

  I did know. A survey report is just page after page of words and figures. Comprehensive chaos. Everything you ever wanted to know about Geb was there, encoded into quantified data. It was all good solid knowledge, but it didn’t represent understanding. You can look at words and figures until they begin to swim before your eyes, but they never really start to mean anything until you get to the world and start looking at things. A picture is worth a thousand words, they say. A visual image can make a whole page of information clear and coherent. You can’t know reality from printed pages—only a particular kind of abstract from reality. To get to know reality you have to see it and touch it and cut it up into little sections to inspect it under a microscope. There’s a great deal that can’t be condensed into quantified data—sometimes everything that matters.

  I found the survey report on the table, open at a page which dealt with some tortuously detailed analysis of the chemical basis of life on Geb. It was work that had taken years to do, based not on the brief time the team had spent here but on the follow-up investigation they’d done in the lunar labs of plant and animal specimens brought back from the world. The page dealt with one of the curious—but by no means unique—features of Geb life-system.

  Most life-systems only have one basic system of genetic information-transfer—one species of chemical molecule that carries a genetic code. Earth’s basic species is the nucleic acids, of which there are two natural varieties and half a dozen artificial forms used in genetic engineering. Most Earthlike worlds thus far investigated have between one and four varieties of a single basic species, but one or two have rather more diverse systems in which three or four varieties of molecules from two distinct species are represented. This is presumably the result of two life-systems evolving independently in the primordial oceans and only later becoming integrated into a single land life-system. The situation is much more common on less Earth-like worlds because of their different biotic characters—it is, in fact, one major cause of unsuitable biotic characters on worlds that are potentially Earthlike but actually unsuitable for colonization.

  Geb was a world of the rare kind that is chemically highly compatible with Earth life and yet has more than one species of nucleic acid-analogue. In fact it had two different species each with three common varieties. Metazoan and complex plant life were each “m
ixed” in the sense that one variety of each species was represented there.

  “You’re looking at the cell structure of plants which use different species of coding molecules?” I asked.

  “That’s right,” she confirmed.

  “Is there a particular reason?”

  “Not really. But I had the sections and I wanted to look at something, and it seemed like the most interesting thing to look at. Only it isn’t, very. The difference isn’t by any means striking.”

  “It wouldn’t be,” I said. “The different systems would have met quite early in their evolutionary careers. Under normal circumstances one would have outcompeted the other and survived alone, but these two managed to co-adapt. They’ve been a major selective factor in one another’s development. In many cases, even at the most basic level—in fact, especially at the most basic level—the price of coexistence has been convergent evolution. In order that both should survive they had to become very similar. And when it came to metazoan evolution that meant building the same kinds of metazoan reproductive machines. The differences in cell structure are bound to be subtle.”

  I wondered, carelessly, whether this might be linked with the high rate of variation in the crater. I imagined a situation where there were two different coding molecules, each one manufacturing molecules that were mutagenic with respect to the other—a kind of basic competitive stratagem which had led not to the elimination of one species by the other but to the rapid evolution of both. It was a fascinating theme, but one of no real relevance to the other problems on my mind.

  I peered over her shoulder until she moved aside and let me look down the microscope. She switched the slides for me and told me which was which.

  “You’re right,” I said. “Nothing spectacular. Something to ponder deeply on a rainy day. We’ll have lots of time. Especially if we’re stuck up here the entire time we’re on the planet.”

  “Okay,” she said. “We might as well get some sleep. You must be exhausted.”

  “You’ve no idea,” I told her, “and by the way, we’re starting out early in the morning.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “You, me and Gley. We take the radiation equipment, and three sterile suits.”

  “Sterile suits?” she said, warily.

  “Just in case we fancy a journey to the center of the planet,” I said. “Didn’t you know that there are always exciting subterranean worlds under volcanoes?”

  “I didn’t know we were planning to visit one.”

  “Gley is,” I told her.

  “Three suits?”

  “Well, you never know,” I said. “He may want some radiation counts made while he’s down there.”

  “You’re crazy,” she said.

  I hadn’t the nerve to deny it. I went to bed.

  CHAPTER TEN

  It is an oft-repeated lie that many significant discoveries have been made in sleep. People confronted with problems of tortuous complexity, it is said, worry themselves to the point of nervous breakdown and then exile themselves to the land of dreams, letting their subconscious common sense, thus unfettered, get down to the job of tying all the loose ends together. They wake up both refreshed and wiser.

  Unlike many oft-repeated lies this one has at least the shadow of a truth among its implications. The power of conscious rational thought—immense though it is—is only a means of processing ideas. It tests them, helping us to sort out the true from the false by making hypotheses jump through hoops. Consciousness worries our notions like a dog worrying a rat, ultimately dragging the entrails from them and exposing any unwilling reductio ad absurdum that may be lurking therein, concealed from immediate perception by a gaudy spray of rhetoric. But conscious rational thought is in this sense no more than prophylactic. It protects us, in some measure, from error. It helps us check up on the notions created in the imagination by investigating their internal consistency and comparing them with what we know of the world. Conscious rational thought, however, does not in itself produce hypotheses. The so-called process of induction in which Francis Bacon invested so much of his faith in perfect science and the prospect of a better world is not genuinely creative of ideas. Sometimes, it is true, a knowledge of the data may touch hidden springs in the mind which releases hypotheses, but it is from secret places in the caverns of the mind that notions are actually generated.

  Or to put it another way, you can pound your brain all day and come up with nothing if it so happens that all the ideas you are disemboweling are the wrong ones. Sometimes having your head full of bad ideas will prevent you from realizing that there are others you haven’t even thought of.

  But in the sleep of reason, so we are assured, nightmares come. And with nightmares (though we so often fail to see this because the emotions stirred by the dream capture our attention so completely) come notions. They are thrust up from the unconscious, and might just be caught and held, if only consciousness can come upon them, invading the dream with tigerish ease to grab them in its claws. Sometimes, it happens.

  All the real work still needs to be done, in wakefulness—the testing, the teasing, the worrying.

  Most of the great hypotheses of history emerged during wakefulness and were captured then—but the process which generated them (as opposed to the process which tested them) is active in sleep as well as in wakefulness, and hence the myth. Sometimes in sleep you can find a new notion which may strike consciousness with all the impact of inspiration.

  And so, I think, it was that I awoke the next morning with something in my mind that had not been, there when I went to sleep—an idea grown awesome and bloated in the few fleeting seconds between sleep and alertness, where my persona discovered it, interpreted it and understood it.

  A less phlegmatic man might have been tempted to cry “Eureka!” but it is a habit I have grown out of. Ideas which provoke such a reaction always seem red hot when you first encounter them, but what matters is how they check out. I was very wary of this one, first because it was so unlikely, and second because if it was true it was an idea with some very far-reaching implications.

  I got down to some hard conscious, rational thinking to test it out against everything I knew already—not an easy thing to do before breakfast.

  The new idea was not dispelled. It grew and grew, and came to seem the only explanation which fit all the facts. That, of course, was an illusion. There are always lots of explanations which fit the facts, and if the one you’re working on seems to fit them better than the rest, that’s just as likely to be due to the fact that it’s the one presently occupying your mind as to the fact that it’s the right one.

  I felt, intuitively, that I was right. But I knew this was one intuition that would have to take some very rigorous examination, because it wasn’t one to blurt out. If true, it put our whole mission in a new perspective. And if it was the hypothesis that Gley and Mme. Levasseur were working with, I could understand their reluctance to start shouting it from the rooftops—especially in our direction. At breakfast, I didn’t mention it to anyone—not because I was jealous of my proprietary rights or because I thought it best to keep the dread secret away from such delicate ears as Mariel’s or Conrad’s, but because I wanted to be careful. If necessary, I decided, I would talk it over with Gley—once I was sure that his idea of what had happened some time in the near or distant past was the same as mine. Linda could referee, or perhaps play devil’s advocate.

  After we’d eaten I went back to the lab to check the survey report. The information I wanted wasn’t in the printed version, and I had to get the computer to map it out for me specially. It only took a few seconds. What I asked for was the distribution, in terms of number of known species and in terms of estimated biomass, of the two species of genetic coding system occurring naturally on Geb. What I got—in both cases—was a series of contour lines, each one a complex curve like a particularly protean amoeba. They crossed only in a couple of places. For the most part they were stacked inside one another lookin
g for all the world like a great mountain. Its peak was the Isis mountains. That was where the biomass ratio was greatest in favor of one of the two systems—about 70/30. The ratio declined steadily as one went away from the mountains—distorted by other geographical features and interrupted by the bulbous Mediterranean Sea which separated Akhnaton from Imhotep. There were still some places in the antipodean sub-continent, one hundred and eighty degrees removed from the Isis mountains, where the ratio was 0/100.

  It was exactly what I would have expected on the basis of my new idea, but it wasn’t what any sane man would call proof. Proof—if there was any proof accessible to the human hand or eye—was only likely to turn up in or near or underneath the elliptical crater. If Gley was right, and the aerial photographs were useless, then we only had two options open to us—the attempt to discover something by radioactive dating and the attempt to discover something by going into the ground. Left to myself, I’d have advocated digging, slowly and carefully, in the soil of the crater. But I didn’t suppose for one moment that Gley would approve of that. He’d been fired with a powerful sense of urgency by the knowledge that Helene Levasseur was coming here—and might just be aware of what be was doing and why—and also by the fact that we were here. He wasn’t going to settle for an extended archaeological exploration. He wanted action. And sterile suits.

  We made rapid preparations to move out. I took a couple of pills to boost my flagging enthusiasm and to help my lungs get more benefit out of the thin air. I offered similar help to Linda, but she refused. She hadn’t done any walking yet.

  We loaded equipment onto the donkeys—sterile suits, oxygen bottles, tubes of liquefied food and radiation measuring equipment. By the time we’d done it there weren’t enough animals for everyone to ride, and the Sets had to take turns walking. They didn’t seem to consider this too unreasonable.