The Andromeda Strain Part 23

ALL HEAVIER METALS SHOW ZERO CONTENT.

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-STOP-.

What all this meant was simple enough. The black rock contained hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen, with significant amounts of sulfur, silicon, and selenium, and with trace quant.i.ties of several other elements.

The green spot, on the other hand, contained hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. Nothing else at all. The two men found it peculiar that the rock and the green spot should be so similar in chemical makeup. And it was peculiar that the green spot should contain nitrogen, while the rock contained none at all.

The conclusion was obvious: the "black rock" was not rock at all, but some kind of material similar to earthly organic life. It was something akin to plastic.

And the green spot, presumably alive, was composed of elements in roughly the same proportion as earth life On earth, these same four elements-- hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen-- accounted for 99 per cent of all the elements in life organisms.

The men were encouraged by these results, which suggested similarity between the green spot and life on earth. Their hopes were, however, short-lived as they turned to the amino-acid a.n.a.lysis: AMINO ACID a.n.a.lYSIS.

[graphic of amino acid a.n.a.lysis-- all zeroes]

TOTAL AMINO ACID CONTENT.

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- STOP -.

"d.a.m.n," Leavitt said, staring at the printed sheet. "Will you look at that."

"No amino acids," Burton said. "No proteins."

"Life without proteins," Leavitt said. He shook his head; it seemed as if his worst fears were realized.

On earth, organisms had evolved by learning to carry out biochemical reactions in a small s.p.a.ce, with the help of protein enzymes. Biochemists were now learning to duplicate these reactions, but only by isolating a single reaction from all others.

Living cells were different. There, within a small area, reactions were carried out that provided energy, growth, and movement. There was no separation, and man could not duplicate this any more than a man could prepare a complete dinner from appetizers to dessert by mixing together the ingredients for everything into a single large dish, cooking it, and hoping to separate the apple pie from the cheese dip later on.

Cells could keep the hundreds of separate reactions straight, using enzymes. Each enzyme was like a single worker in a kitchen, doing just one thing. Thus a baker could not make a steak, any more than a steak griller could use his equipment to prepare appetizers.

But enzymes had a further use. They made possible chemical reactions that otherwise would not occur. A biochemist could duplicate the reactions by using great heat, or great pressure, or strong acids. But the human body, or the individual cell, could not tolerate such extremes of environment. Enzymes, the matchmakers of life, helped chemical reactions to go forward at body temperature and atmospheric pressure.

Enzymes were essential to life on earth. But if another form of life had learned to do without them, it must have evolved in a wholly different way.

Therefore, they were dealing with an entirely alien organism.

And this in turn meant that a.n.a.lysis and neutralization would take much, much longer.

In the room marked MORPHOLOGY, Jeremy Stone removed the small plastic capsule in which the green fleck had been imbedded. He set the now-hard capsule into a vise, fixing it firmly, and then took a dental drill to it, shaving away the plastic until he exposed bare green material.

This was a delicate process, requiring many minutes of concentrated work. At the end of that time, he had shaved the plastic in such a way that he had a pyramid of plastic, with the green fleck at the peak of the pyramid.

He unscrewed the vise and lifted the plastic out. He took it to the microtome, a knife with a revolving blade that cut very thin slices of plastic and imbedded green tissue. These slices were round; they fell from the plastic block into a dish of water. The thickness of the slice could be measured by looking the light as it reflected off the slices-- if the light was faint silver, the slice was too thick. If, on the other hand, it was a rainbow of colors, then it was the right thickness, just a few molecules in depth.

That was how thick they wanted a slice of tissue to be for the electron microscope.

When Stone had a suitable piece of tissue, he lifted it carefully with forceps and set it onto a small round copper grid. This in turn was inserted into a metal b.u.t.ton. Finally, the b.u.t.ton was set into the electron microscope, and the microscope sealed shut.

The electron microscope used by Wildfire was the BVJ model JJ-42. It was a high-intensity model with an image resolution attachment. In principle, the electron microscope was simple enough: it worked exactly like a light microscope, but instead of focusing light rays, it focused an electron beam. Light is focused by lenses of curved gla.s.s. Electrons are focused by magnetic fields.

In many respects, the EM was not a great deal different from television, and in fact, the image was displayed on a television screen, a coated surface that glowed when electrons struck it. The great advantage of the electron microscope was that it could magnify objects far more than the light microscope. The reason for this had to do with quantum mechanics and the waveform theory of radiation. The best simple explanation had come from the electron microscopist Sidney Polton, also a racing enthusiast.

"a.s.sume," Polton said, "that you have a road, with a sharp corner. Now a.s.sume that you have two automobiles, a sports car and a large truck. When the truck tries to go around the corner, it slips off the road; but the sports car manages it easily. Why? The sports car is lighter, and smaller, and faster; it is better suited to tight, sharp curves. On large, gentle curves, the automobiles will perform equally well, but on sharp curves, the sports car will do better.

"In the same way, an electron microscope will 'hold the road' better than a light microscope. All objects are made of corners, and edges. The electron wavelength is smaller than the quantum of light. It cuts the corners closer, follows the road better, and outlines it more precisely. With a light microscope-- like a truck-- you can follow only a large road. In microscopic terms this means only a large object, with large edges and gentle curves: cells, and nuclei. But an electron microscope can follow all the minor routes, the byroads, and can outline very small structures within the cell-- mitochondria, ribosomes, membranes, reticula."

In actual practice there were several drawbacks to the electron microscope, which counterbalanced its great powers of magnification. For one thing, because it used electrons instead of light, the inside of the microscope had to be a vacuum. This meant it was impossible to examine living creatures.

But the most serious drawback had to do with the sections of specimen. These were extremely thin, making it difficult to get a good three-dimensional concept of the object under study.

Again, Polton had a simple a.n.a.logy. "Let us say you cut an automobile in half down the middle. In that case, you could guess the complete, 'whole' structure. But if you cut a very thin slice from the automobile, and if you cut it on a strange angle, it could be more difficult. In your slice, you might have only a bit of b.u.mper, and rubber tire, and gla.s.s. From such a slice, it would be hard to guess the shape and function of the full structure."

Stone was aware of all the drawbacks as he fitted the metal b.u.t.ton into the EM, sealed it shut, and started the vacuum pump. He knew the drawbacks and he ignored them, because he had no choice. Limited as it was, the electron microscope was their only available high-power tool.

He turned down the room lights and clicked on the beam. He adjusted several dials to focus the beam. In a moment, the image came into focus, green and black on the screen.

It was incredible.

Jeremy Stone found himself staring at a single unit of the organism. It was a perfect, six-sided hexagon, and it interlocked with other hexagons on each side. The interior of the hexagon was divided into wedges, each meeting at the precise center of the structure. The overall appearance was accurate, with a kind of mathematical precision he did not a.s.sociate with life on earth.

It looked like a crystal.

He smiled: Leavitt would be pleased. Leavitt liked spectacular, mind-stretching things. Leavitt had also frequently considered the possibility that life might be based upon crystals of some kind, that it might be ordered in some regular pattern.

He decided to call Leavitt in.

[graphic of EM crystal pattern] Caption: (Early sketch by Jeremy Stone of hexagonal Andromeda configuration. Photo courtesy Project Wildfire.) As soon as he arrived, Leavitt said, "Well, there's our answer."

"Answer to what?"

"To how this organism functions. I've seen the results of spectrometry and amino-acid a.n.a.lysis."

"And?"

"The organism is made of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. But it has no amino acids at all. None. Which means that it has no proteins as we know them, and no enzymes. I was wondering how it could survive without protein-based organization. Now I know."

"The crystalline structure."

"Looks like it," Leavitt said, peering at the screen. "In three dimensions, it's probably a hexagonal slab, like a piece of tile. Eight-sided, with each face a hexagon. And on the inside, those wedge-shaped compartments leading to the center."

"They would serve to separate biochemical functions quite well."

"Yes," Leavitt said. He frowned.

"Something the matter?"

Leavitt was thinking, remembering something he had forgotten. A dream, about a house and a city. He thought for a moment and it began to come back to him. A house and a city. The way the house worked alone, and the way it worked in a city.

It all came back.

"You know," he said, "it's interesting, the way this one unit interlocks with the others around it."

"You're wondering if we're seeing part of a higher organism?"

"Exactly. Is this unit self-sufficient, like a bacterium, or is it just a block from a larger organ, or a larger organism? After all, if you saw a single liver cell, could you guess what kind of an organ it came from? No. And what good would one brain cell be without the rest of the brain?"

Stone stared at the screen for a long time. "A rather unusual pair of a.n.a.logies. Because the liver can regenerate, can grow back, but the brain cannot."

Leavitt smiled. "The Messenger Theory."

"One wonders," Stone said.

The Messenger Theory had come from John R. Samuels, a communications engineer. Speaking before the Fifth Annual Conference on Astronautics and Communication, he had reviewed some theories about the way in which an alien culture might choose to contact other cultures. He argued that the most advanced concepts in communications in earth technology were inadequate, and that advanced cultures would find better methods.

"Let us say a culture wishes to scan the universe," he said. "Let us say they wish to have a sort of 'coming-out party' on a galactic scale-- to formally announce their existence. They wish to spew out information, clues to their existence, in every direction. What is the best way to do this? Radio? Hardly-- radio is too slow, too expensive, and it decays too rapidly. Strong signals weaken within a few billion miles. TV is even worse. Light rays are fantastically expensive to generate. Even if one learned a way to detonate whole stars, to explode a sun as a kind of signal, it would be costly.

"Besides expense, all these methods suffer the traditional drawback to any radiation, namely decreasing strength with distance. A light bulb may be unbearably bright at ten feet; it may be powerful at a thousand feet; it may be visible at ten miles. But at a million miles, it is completely obscure, because radiant energy decreases according to the fourth power of the radius. A simple, unbeatable law of physics.

"So you do not use physics to carry your signal. You use biology. You create a communications system that does not diminish with distance, but rather remains as powerful a million miles away as it was at the source.

"In short, you devise an organism to carry your message. The organism would be self-replicating, cheap, and could be produced in fantastic numbers. For a few dollars, you could produce trillions of them, and send them off in all directions into s.p.a.ce. They would be tough, hardy bugs, able to withstand the rigors of s.p.a.ce, and they would grow and duplicate and divide. Within a few years, there would be countless numbers of these in the galaxy, speeding in all directions, waiting to contact life.

"And when they did? Each single organism would carry the potential to develop into a full organ, or a full organism.

"They would, upon contacting life, begin to grow into a complete communicating mechanism. It is like spewing out a billion brain cells, each capable of regrowing a complete brain under the proper circ.u.mstances. The newly grown brain would then speak to the new culture' informing it of the presence of the other, and announcing ways in which contact might be made."

Samuels's theory of the Messenger Bug was considered amusing by practical scientists, but it could not be discounted now.

"Do you suppose," Stone said, "that it is already developing into some kind of organ of communication?"

"Perhaps the cultures will tell us more," Leavitt said.

"Or X-ray crystallography," Stone said. "I'll order it now."

Level V had facilities for X-ray crystallography, though there had been much heated discussion during Wildfire planning as to whether such facilities were necessary. X-ray crystallography represented the most advanced, complex, and expensive method of structural a.n.a.lysis in modern biology. It was a little like electron microscopy, but one step further along the line. It was more sensitive, and could probe deeper-- but only at great cost in terms of time, equipment, and personnel.

The biologist R. A. Janek has said that increasing vision is "increasingly expensive." He meant by this that any machine to enable men to see finer or fainter details increased in cost faster than it increased in resolving power. This hard fact of research was discovered first by the astronomers, who learned painfully that construction of a two-hundred-inch telescope mirror was far more difficult and expensive than construction of a one-hundred-inch mirror.

In biology this was equally true. A light microscope, for example, was a small device easily carried by a technician in one hand. It could outline a cell, and for this ability a scientist paid about $1,000.

An electron microscope could outline small structures within the cell. The EM was a large console and cost up to $100,000.

In contrast, X-ray crystallography could outline individual molecules. It came as close to photographing atoms as science could manage. But the device was the size of a large automobile, filled an entire room, required specially trained operators, and demanded a computer for interpretation of results.

This was because X-ray crystallography did not produce a direct visual picture of the object being studied.. It was not, in this sense, a microscope, and it operated differently from either the light or electron microscope.

It produced a diffraction pattern instead of an image. This appeared as a pattern of geometric dots, in itself rather mysterious, on a photographic plate. By using a computer, the pattern of dots could be a.n.a.lyzed and the structure deduced.

It was a relatively new science, retaining an old-fashioned name. Crystals were seldom used any more; the term "X ray crystallography" dated from the days when crystals were chosen as test objects. Crystals had regular structures and thus the pattern of dots resulting from a beam of X rays shot at a crystal were easier to a.n.a.lyze. But in recent years the X rays had been shot at irregular objects of varying sorts. The X rays were bounced off at different angles. A computer could "read" the photographic plate and measure the angles, and from this work back to the shape of the object that had caused such a reflection.

The computer at Wildfire performed the endless and tedious calculations. All this, if done by manual human calculation, would take years, perhaps centuries. But the computer could do it in seconds.

"How are you feeling, Mr. Jackson?" Hall asked.

The old man blinked his eyes and looked at Hall, in his plastic suit.

"All right. Not the best, but all right."

He gave a wry grin.

"Up to talking a little?"

"About what?

"Piedmont."

"What about it?"

"That night," Hall said. "The night it all happened."

"Well, I tell you. I've lived in Piedmont all my life. Traveled a bit-- been to LA, and even up to Frisco. Went as far east as St. Louis, which was far enough for me. But Piedmont, that's where I've lived. And I have to tell you--"

"The night it all happened," Hall repeated.

He stopped, and turned his head away. "I don't want to think about it," he said.

"You have to think about it."