Space Lash

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.