(1980)*
Martha Dodson & Robert L. Forward
A sting of fatigue pierced the unreachable spot in his right shoulder as Dr. Ernest Hill bent over one last report from the computer. It really didn't look very promising; just another carefully phrased, machine-cold summary of another native creature that hadn't changed much since its beginning, that wasn't going to change much, and that would have to be left unchanged. Like all the rest of the specimens he had examined on this fertile but dead-end planet, this one had strayed off the pathway leading up the hill of life. Lured on by an undemanding Nature in the form of an almost unchanging climate, the life forms on this planet had wandered onto an ecological mesa. They were unable to develop any further, and it wasn't possible to evolve back into simpler forms. Unless a statistically improbable multiple mutation caused them to jump across the chasm back onto the right pathway, they were fated to spend their second, third, and fourth billion years as they had their first, living and dying, layer upon layer, but never, never changing.
Even on a challenging planet, Nature took a tiresomely long time to evolve useful, complicated, and interesting specimens, but Man preferred to Do It Now. On a fresh, naive planet such as this one. it was very satisfying to play God. Controlled genetics between computer-chosen individuals led to the development of a new dominant race for each new world—one indigenous to that world, capable, intelligent, productive, and unhampered by any history whatsoever. If carefully selected breeding stock was insufficient, then it was easy enough to induce a moderate amount of selective mutation.
Even if doing so proved impractical, Ernest Hill could use any two animals, independent of age, sex, order, genus, or even class. Starting with one cell from each, he would rip them down to the DNA in their genes, eliminating all the cellular bias against mixing; then carefully tease the stringy macromolecules with chemicals, warmth, and controlled pulses of coherent light, take them apart, cut out the pieces that he wanted, and recombine them into a new, vital storehouse of genetic information. It usually required years to get a living cell out of the process. That was the hard way, a way that was professionally interesting, but not one that a Ph.D. working for a Phi.Sci. wanted to get involved in, especially if he had a family.
The unripe state of this world, so unchanged from its creation that its seas still looked like Chaos and its shadows like Old Night, meant that the meddlers in the shiny dome had a hard time finding anything better to work with than a rather lovely jellyfish. There was no real hurry; Ernest Hill and Frank Young, the biomathematician, had their wives and families snugly housed right next door, and the warp-radio operator and all-around handyman, an aging bachelor, would be just as dour on the next world. Twenty-eight generations had distilled a persimmon-like acidity in Thor Leip untouched by the frost of his native Iceland.
No one was breathing down their necks for results, but it was humiliating to the good doctor to examine captive after captive only to find nothing. He would laboriously analyze their genetic characteristics, argue with Frank over the importance of each gene—or lack of one—in the hypothetical and statistically fuzzy future social structure of a creature holding those genes. He would then carefully submit all the details to the indifferent machine, only to have them calmly rejected, every one, as "Unfit for Expansion at This Time."
The doctor was struggling with a most unscholarly resentment of the shiny computer's high-handed dismissal of all the offerings he had laid on its doorstep. His carefully cultivated patience was not bearing up too well, either, under the rather sarcastic curiosity of Thor. "How is the ol' Darwin doing?" and "Just like Kansas City—this place has gone about as fur as it can go" were remarks not calculated to encourage. Thor really had far too much time on his hands—only a little maintenance and an occasional laconic report to the base required his attention—and he had whiled a good bit of his time away, acquiring an amateur's knowledge of the jobs of the other two men.
"I think I'll quit for now," Dr. Hill sighed, straightening up and exuding both relief and discouragement, his fingers jabbing futilely at the unreachable sting on his back. He thought gratefully of Ann, who could soothe away the tension in two minutes. He left the room as it was. There was never any need to put anything away when he would be the only person using the equipment next.
Going through the door, he shed ten years, several pounds, his depression, and his coat. He advanced on all fours toward his reading chair. There, his daughter waited. The excitement of Daddy's arrival made her bounce like a yo-yo, sparking her face and boosting the volume of her greeting to an alarming degree. As soon as he was within navigable distance, she fearlessly let go the support, and, bare-masted, tacked breathlessly to and fro until she made the safe harbor of his arms.
Janet was one year old today and did not care a bit. Her parents were jubilant, though, and the rest of their small party gathered at dinner to help celebrate. Frank had merrily suggested that his beloved computer ought to be in on the fun and was a little surprised at the vehemence with which Dr. Hill denied it any place in the festivities. Frank's wife joined them, as did their son, briefly. He was ten, and Frank and Marge hoped to renew their acquaintance with the boy when he had emerged from the Video Thriller and Peanut Butter stage.
The radioman, with some slight instinct for the duties of a guest, unbent sufficiently to try to say something without a barb in it. He realized immediately, however, that the attention of his small audience went from slight to zero whenever the conversation was in danger of deviating from the subject of the small fry then present. So he relapsed into silence, consoling himself with mentally perfecting the details of a practical joke to be played on the proud father.
The children had adjusted to this new world as casually as children always do. Ernest and Ann had devoted a great deal of extremely serious thought to the problems of just how many diapers, toys, and larger and larger shoes, it would be necessary to pack before leaving home, so it was with a relief practically amounting to a letdown to see Janet developing so trauma-free and serene. Frank's son, young Stewart, gave his parents no worry other than that their tapes of thrillers might not hold out for the duration, but they found reassurance in the fact that re-watching the old ones produced the same glassy-eyed tranquility. The only problem Stewart had for weeks was this very same birthday party; he knew he would hate it, would be bored to death, uncomfortably dressed, and obliged to sit up straight—all a rather high price to pay for even such unquestionable delicacies as ice cream and cake.
While Janet was engaged in wrapping both sets of parents firmly around one sticky finger, Stewart and Thor conducted a masculine dialogue on the possibility of stocking the nearby pools with trout. Soon, however, the lowered tone of this conversation attracted the birthday child's attention, and the discovery that two of those present were not yet under her spell prompted her to begin an earnest attempt to bring them into line. Stewart was easy. The deposit of every movable object in the room into his lap, accompanied by two dozen calculated entrancing stares, and he was beaming pinkly. However, the radioman remained aloof; to him, Janet was as alien as anything on the planet.
Only after the object of everyone's attention was asleep, and the wives had begun scanning the latest news tapes, was Thor able to dip a tentative oar into the conversation and steer it toward the work in progress.
Ernest felt gloom settling on him again. "I thought I had a real prospect today—quadruped, circulatory system, almost an Earth-type reptile, but the computer turned it down. Too small a brainpan or some darn thing."
"Have you searched all around? Maybe on the other side of this continent?" The radioman put the question to him almost seriously—a few more months and he would be as anxious for an answer as they.
Ernest confessed there was much still unexplored. "Too much. There is a vast amount of life here—beings that differ from each other a lot or a little—but none of it, combined with any of the rest of it, will give us anything much different from the majority of it. All these red genes, so to speak, combined with all those white genes, will give us plenty of pink genes, but we need a black gene."
-
In the morning Ernest Hill set out on yet another hunting trip. To his cynical eyes, all the specimens in the laboratory seemed hardly worth bothering the computer with. On his trip, he found a few deviations from the current individuals he had been working with, but nothing startling until he had given up and was heading home. Regarding him gravely from the edge of a pool was something that looked so much like a frog that he nearly passed it by, noting only that it was a fine frog. Then he realized he had not seen a frog on this world before! Aside from being shiny blue-green and weighing nearly ten pounds, it was no prettier than an Earth frog, but Dr. Hill carried it as tenderly to the lab as if it were an enchanted prince.
Subjected to analysis, his find proved a trifle discouraging; the creature's characteristics were not as high above the norm as he could have wished. In his excitement at preparing the data for the computer—and his secret hopes for a break—he didn't notice that additional information had already been fed into the machine.
Carefully, he inserted his data into the memory and started the calculations. His spirits rose, in spite of his efforts at self-damping, while he watched the machine. If only this turned out to be a "possible," he promised himself, he would search patiently, even indefinitely, for the species to combine with it. With elation he heard the computer calling in buzzes and hums and whirs that had not sounded before, taking an unusually long time to complete the calculations. He scanned the output, his bewilderment growing.
The machine was not enthusiastic over his frog. In fact, it was quite cool toward his frog. It viewed his frog with much misgiving. But it conjectured that, united with the mate that had been suggested, it was quite possible that a big step upward would be made. The machine was quite enthusiastic about this mate, implying that this was the sort of material it should have had to work with all along, if progress was to be made.
Ernest Hill frowned. He had not suggested any mate. Someone had been tampering with the computer. A quick query to the computer retrieved the answer. The mate suggested for the frog was Janet!
Unfortunately, practical jokers are not excluded from the universal rule barring the taking of life, so with full knowledge of his probable fate Ernest Hill set out to find Thor Leip and destroy him in some lingering fashion. He did not even hesitate when he learned from Frank that Thor had taken the skimmer for an excursion to the mountains in the south. However, as the search for his prey lengthened, Dr. Hill found the enthusiasm of the computer for human genes first tolerable, then understandable—exactly what the radioman had expected, of course. Ernest's fury had spent itself to the extent that hunter and hunted finally faced off with a cool stare and returned home in silence.
"This frog almost has it made, Frank. It can grasp with its front paws and shows a tendency to keep them free from the ground. Its eyes are highly developed and it will eat practically anything. It has a brain that for size has no equal on this planet, but it's stupid—stupid as a damned frog!"
"Now look, Ernest, obviously, the main trouble is that there is no association going on in its brain. The nerve pulses come in from the sense organs and go right back out to the muscles without any interaction taking place. In our brains, we not only have full control over most of our reactions but can also use a part of the brain to create an imaginary stimulus to drive the rest of it. When a man rushes into a burning building to save a child, the artificial stimulus of the suffering child makes him ignore the very real pain of the flames on his skin and the smoke in his lungs. This ability to make imaginary models of the outside world allows us to formulate plans. But for this process to take place, there must be interaction among the neurons in the brain. I think the problem is that this frog has plenty of brain cells but he doesn't make use of them. I bet they don't have any branching ratio to speak of."
"No! That's not it," said Ernest. "It's the first thing I thought of. I examined a specimen and the nerve cells branch out all over the brain. If anything, he has more interconnections per neuron than we do."
"Well then, he's got them, but he doesn't use them. As far as I can see, we're looking at a biological problem, not a socio-statistical one, and I am afraid that I won't be of much help. But it doesn't make sense. If the creature doesn't use his connections, then it is statistically impossible for them to have developed. Therefore he must use them, but we know he doesn't because he is stupid, so—"
"All right, all right!" Ernest shouted. "Don't you think my brain hasn't been telling me the same thing all week! It looks as if I had better go back to sophomore biophysics and start at the fundamentals and work up. Something has gone wrong in the development of that frog, and the cool east breeze that passes for bad weather around here hasn't been enough of a factor to accomplish any natural selection." As Ernest left the room, Frank pulled out a phrase he had been saving for a long time.
"Right! Who needs to be fitter except when it's bitter." But the door slammed on the middle of the sentence, and the humor was wasted.
Two days later Ernest emerged from the lab with a disgusted look on his face. "Why didn't I think of that before?" he said. "It was so obvious that any undergraduate could have found it!"
"That's why they like to have Ph.D.'s teach undergraduate classes," said Frank, "so they'll be forced to go back and learn all the facts they had forgotten. What was the trouble?"
"Our froggy friends are short-circuited. Every time one of their nerve cells tries to pass on a message, the signal gets shorted out by ionic conduction to the surrounding fluids. Their nerve fibers are contained within a membrane, like ours, but it isn't the high-resistance membrane that we have, just a poor imitation. Chemically it is quite similar, but electrically it conducts much more current.
"That's also the reason that the frog has such a large branching ratio. Since only a few of the pulses make it down the nerve fiber, they have to trigger hundreds of neurons each pulse just to keep the level of the signals up. No wonder he's so dumb! I've done some checking, and all the rest of the animal life on the planet has the same problem, It doesn't seem to bother the simpler forms, since they don't have very big brains to begin with, but it sure prevents the development of intelligence."
Frank protested, "That doesn't make sense. If this material that the frogs use for nerve insulation is chemically similar to ours, but is so much poorer in terms of survival value, then it's statistically improbable that it wasn't replaced long ago. There must be some fundamental reason that would prevent natural mutations from being effective. I'm afraid that you haven't found the real answer to the frog's lack of intelligence, only another symptom."
This time Ernest didn't find the answer in two days. First he had to take the insulating membrane apart and identify the various proteins and fats that composed it. He finally found the culprit. One of the proteins that made up the membrane had a minor difference in the arrangement of its amino acids compared to the equivalent human protein. Where the human protein had three cystines in a row, frog protein had substituted another amino acid for the middle cystine. Again, Ernest was forced to concede that such a minor defect would have been corrected by natural mutation during the millions of years that that particular protein had been used to cover nerve fibers on this planet.
Since the end product was shoddy, the next place to look for the source of the problem was the machine that had made it. He looked for the organic template whose job it was to form this particular protein. This was the giant molecule RNA that carried the genetic information from the genes in the nucleus to the protein factory in the cell. It wasn't hard to find the RNA molecule, for he knew every position of every base on its stringlike chain.
The RNA used a simple code to carry its message. It had four different bases: uracil, adenine, cytosine, and guanine—U-A-C-G. They were used in groups of three to code the twenty-plus amino acids that were the building blocks of the proteins. Since the RNA code for one cystine amino acid was three A's in a row, all Ernest had to do was locate the section of the RNA that was the blueprint for the manufacture of the leaky section of the protein, and change it so there were nine A's in a row. Following the straightforward procedures for small changes of this sort, it wasn't long before he had modified the frog RNA so that it would manufacture human-type protein. Ernest realized that the problem was not yet solved, for although he could change the RNA "working drawings" by cut-and-try, the DNA "master blueprints" in the genes still had the incorrect code.
Since the DNA was a mirror image of the RNA, it was not long before the computer told him which one of the DNA strands was responsible for the production of the faulty RNA.
Again, a simple change in one DNA strand was a textbook problem, although it proved a little tricky due to the double spiral structure of the DNA; the yields weren't too high.
Then he found the trouble. The DNA mirror pattern for the nine A's in the RNA was a string of nine U's. When he made the DNA with nine U's in a row, it refused to make RNA! A quick check by the computer showed that nowhere on the natural DNA strand was there a code of nine U's.
Finally Ernest had identified the ecological mesa that had trapped the animal life on this planet. He had known that there was a major difference between the frog DNA and the human DNA, but up until now he didn't think that it was important. The frog DNA used the four bases U-A-C-G, the same code as frog RNA, and even human RNA. However, human DNA used a different code, T-A-C-G, where the T stood for thymine. This seemingly inconsistent behavior of the gene-coding mechanisms of the higher animals on Earth was now seen to have a reason. The frogs were the result of taking a conventional path of using the same code for both the RNA and the DNA. The chemical difference between thymine and uracil is almost insignificant, and they both attract the same mirror-code, adenine. However, nine T's in a row on human DNA could make nine A's in a row on human RNA, whereas nine U's had failed the frogs.
Ernest had the computer search through every DNA molecule that it had analyzed since landing on the planet, but nowhere was there a molecule that used thymine. He finally gave up and went to talk to Frank Young.
"... and the worst part of it, Frank, is that I could fix up the troublesome part of the DNA by putting nine T's in one of the frog genes, but after the first cell division I would be right back where I started from. The new cell would be forced to use U's in making the new DNA, since the growing cell doesn't have the capability of manufacturing its own thymine. The cell can't make thymine because the protein that manufactures that base has a section in it requiring three cystine amino acids in a row, and this requires nine A's in a row on the RNA—"
"—and that requires nine T's in a row on the DNA," said Frank. "That's like the old problem of trying to get a loan without collateral. You can't get money unless you already have some. Why don't you add a section of the DNA that will cause the cell to make its own thymine?"
"Sure!" Ernest exploded, "that's just a little engineering detail! To make the simple change to correct the leaky membrane only took me a week. The protein that makes the thymine molecule is a million times more complex. I don't want to wait that long to get my Phi.Sci."
Frank remained silent in the chair as Ernest paced around the study. After quite a long time, Ernest finally came to a halt. "I bet I could use a section of human DNA strand for the thymine molecule protein. The tail end of the strand would have to be modified to match with the frog DNA, but I bet one of us has a code similar enough so that I could make the necessary changes in a few weeks."
"You know perfectly well that that sort of thing is frowned upon," said Frank. "People have done it, and there is no law against it, but count me out!"
"Okay, I'm sorry I mentioned it. I'll just have to go back into the jungles and see if I can find some organism on this planet that makes its own thymine."
In the following weeks, Ernest grew still more unhappy. Not the least of his problems was the fact that he had been unable to think up a suitable retribution for Thor; and the wearisome search was somehow made more chafing by the knowledge that he really could use just the tiniest speck of his daughter's tissues with every expectation of success. He had tried his own genes—they were close, but not good enough. With Janet he had to be very furtive indeed, suspecting rightly that his wife would fire him into orbit at the mere suggestion. Janet's genes were otherwise quite ordinary, so back on Earth he would have had no trouble at all finding a donor, but here ...
In desperation Ernest brought the big frog into their home, hoping that perhaps he and his wife might develop a more neutral feeling for it. It was a mistake. Ann, since childhood, had been the type of person who classed all reptiles with the original serpent of Eden. However, Janet took one look at the creature and recognized it instinctively as a pet. She was soon dressing it in scraps of cloth and leading it around by a string. The frog submitted stolidly—its sole virtue and defect was its placidity—but Ernest's stomach assailed him every time he saw the child pat the iridescent hide.
Doggedly he continued working, searching, trying, patiently laying himself open to snubs from the computer and gibes from Thor. Then one afternoon of a particularly trying day it happened—his gentle, humane, civilized self sank without a trace, and all his primitive emotions rose grinning to the surface. Uttering one of the sulfurous words he was suddenly glad that he knew, he hurried from the room and descended to his small but complete cellar ...
It was a very good party, they agreed. Even Thor was impressed. Surely the doctor was not so stuffed a shirt as heretofore believed, when he so cheerfully encouraged all to join him in becoming completely sozzled. Why, he even assisted Thor in finding his bed, which persisted in eluding him late that night.
The next morning, Ernest began the long but interesting project—working with the cells and teasing the genes into alliance. The radioman discovered him at his work and watched with increasing interest and offensive jocularity. He had learned enough so that he could guess that Ernest had given up searching and was using human DNA. He promptly dubbed Janet "The Princess" and maintained, half seriously, that his name should be on the paper with that of the good doctor, since he had first suggested mixing the two.
"I should think you would be very proud, Doc. A grandfather at your tender age! Are you going to show pictur...
allforjesus2001