Inter Ice Age 4

by Kono Abe

  Professor Yamamoto brought out from behind a screen a contraption resembling a large birdcage. In it two flat, gray creatures about the size of the palm of a hand were crawling about. They were repulsive insects to look at, with bristles gray like the body all around them and their whole surface covered with a viscous membrane.

  “What do you think they are? They have six legs, yet they’re really insects. They’re flies. Surprised? They’re arrested but full-grown larvae. See here . . . they have a mouth just like a fly, and reproductive powers to boot. This one is the male, and that one is the female. They’re only a novelty; they have no great significance. We’re keeping them to commemorate our first success. They’re ferocious. If you put your hand in, they’ll bite. When they’re feeling well, probably at times when they’re in heat, they make a curious creaking sound. Now then, let me take you into the growing-room.”

  We went down the bridge of the breeding-room, and passing through another door opposite the one we had entered, we came out again in a dark corridor. Ahead, Professor Yamamoto cocked his head to one side and continued talking.

  “Since then, international exchange of information on insect metamorphosis has come to a dead stop. Well, it hasn’t completely; some concerning the production of mammals outside the natural womb is published. But it’s all pretty abstract, and other than that a wall of utter silence obstructs further exchange. When you think about it, it’s to be expected. For those of us in such research the significance of the silence is all too clear. It’s no longer a simple question of scholarship or technique. Everyone has the premonition of something more profoundly frightening. The apprehension is all the greater in that reconstruction of life seems possible, theoretically and probably technically too. I want you to see. It’s this room.”

  There was an iron door on which was painted the numeral 3. I saw a box, glazed on three sides, about thirty-six square feet in size. The inside was visible through the glass. Several scores of conveyors on a number of different planes were moving slowly right and left. Beside them hundreds of machines, like lens polishers, were operating in a slow, up-and-down motion. At the bottom, four white-coated men facing a long metal worktable were in the act of performing some operation.

  “I can’t let you go in. The inside is sterile. I usually give orders from out here myself. Look there. In this room alone we are able to handle thirteen hundred fetuses a day. We are separating them from their natural line of development according to a pre-established program. What you see right in front of you are the fetuses of aquatic cows. Yes, it’s quite true. We were thoroughly frightened too when we first pictured this to ourselves,” said Professor Yamamoto sympathetically looking at me, the comers of his eyes wrinkling. “After all, we’re natural scientists, you see. We’re always getting called all kinds of exaggerated things—we’re the defilers of nature—but we keep right on. To tell the truth, we were horrified only at the time we conceived of a place for processing the metamorphosis of fetuses.”

  “Even now as I look at it I find it horrifying.”

  “I don’t blame you. A truncated future generally gives one a strange feeling. I hear that when certain primitive natives in Africa first came to the city and saw the tall buildings, they took them for human slaughterhouses. Well, sorry, don’t take me too literally. What I mean is, something whose connection with human experience we cannot grasp is bound to be frightening. Something that’s meaningless but stronger than we are.”

  “Then are you saying there’s some reason you manage not to shudder at this fantastic research?”

  Professor Yamamoto nodded emphatically with self-confident candor, emotionless as a doctor reasoning a patient into compliance. Without immediately answering me, he opened the metal box located to the side, and turning a switch, spoke through the glass to those working on the inside.

  “Harada, would you please show us one of the seeds you’re preparing,” he said, and turned around. “We’re in the habit of calling unprocessed fetuses freshly removed from the placenta ‘seeds.’ ”

  One of the workers nodded over his shoulder, picked up a flat glass container from a table, and climbing the iron stairs, came over to us. He wore a suppressed smile, and his eyes sparkled mischievously. Apparently to soften somewhat my stiffness, Tanomogi coughed next to my ear.

  “This is a Yorkshire hog,” said the man through the receiver.

  “Are they in place?’’ asked Professor Yamamoto in return.

  “Yes. Everything has gone smoothly.”

  Tiny strands of blood vessels coming from a wormlike center in a dark-red gelatinous substance lay scattered about like little bursts of fireworks.

  “The most difficult part,” explained Professor Yamamoto, “is fixing the seed in an artificial placenta. We do that first. Something like grafting, I suppose. Of course, we have problems getting the seeds and storing them until they’re delivered to us. Obviously, they’ve got to come into contact with the outside, and that’s when the secret’s most likely to leak out.”

  “The present rate of successful implantation of pigs is seventy-four per cent with Yorkshires.”

  Professor Yamamoto nodded to the voice in the receiver. “On that worktable you can see down there they’re culling. It’s the only time we use human hands. From this point on everything is mechanized, as you can see. We put only the successfully implanted seeds, artificial placenta and all, on this end of the conveyor belt. Then the machine transports them one by one. It takes about ten days to go from one end to the other. See those cocks with swinging heads placed at fixed intervals along the way? They inject a fixed dosage of finely differentiated hormones into each fetus. In a real womb the interaction of the hormones coming from both the fetus and the mother’s body produces minute changes. We analyze them in terms of quantity and time and supply the hormones accordingly. If we performed the process in the same way it takes place within a real placenta, we would naturally get a land mammal similar to the mother. But these pigs have been created under slightly modified conditions. We can express this modification by a secretional equation, in which a expresses the rate of hormonal flow, but let’s skip that.”

  “Yet the various seeds differ in the time and the number of hours and days since conception. How do you even them out?”

  “You’ve hit on an important point. In the case of pigs, generally our standard practice is to take fetuses about two weeks old, but of course there’s some difference among them. There is no need to add, I believe, that as long as the change in their development takes place according to the a function I mentioned up to the crucial point when the fetus becomes aquatic or amphibious, there is no need to be concerned with the rate of growth.

  “There are also differences in wombs: Some are young, some older. Only when the crucial time comes should the distinction be made. You can’t tell very well in the area you can see from here, but there’s a change in the color of the placenta. You see, it’s a little paler. When you get accustomed, you can spot it immediately.”

  The young worker Harada at once went back to get one. As we waited for him to return, Professor Yamamoto lit a half-smoked cigarette he had stuck in the pocket of his white gown, saying it was all right to smoke.

  “What curious habits we fall into, we breathers of air,” he murmured, following the smoke with his eyes as if he were witnessing something quite fabulous.

  “For instance, up to there is the work of Growing-Room Three,” said Tanomogi insistently in the tone he had used before. Perhaps he was giving in to fatigue.

  I had become weary myself, and despite the strain shuddered as if I had done something inexcusable. But Professor Yamamoto paid not the slightest attention.

  “Now, the order goes like this: Room One, removal of impurities; Room Two, transplantation to artificial placentae; then they come here. When a color change in the placenta occurs, we move them on to Room Four, and finally they begin to change into aquatic mammals. Ah, he’s evidently found one.”

  T
he young man of a while ago came hurrying back, bearing a different glass receptacle, which he held up for us to see. Since it had been explained to me, I recognized a fetuslike object, an indistinct shadow in the area where the blood vessels branched out.

  “There, you see. A new inner secretion has evidently begun in the fetus. When we see that it’s arrived at this stage, we shift it immediately to Room Four. Harada, show us the front, will you? They develop fast. The characteristics of this period are that the backbone is almost formed and the first kidneys and the gills are very active. The large folds at the base of the head are the gills. Why are the first kidneys and the gills, which ultimately disappear, so active only in this stage? Sorry for the biology lecture, but this is a most important point.”

  A condensed version of Professor Yamamoto’s explanation: In evolutionary theory the principle of interrelation is a very important one. According to this law, change in a single organ of a living creature necessarily provokes change in other organs. We’re not merely concerned with being able to repeat the past, with being able to repeat the life line of the species through the individual process, but with the necessity of forcing this life process ahead. Of course, everything is not repeated. Blood in the early stages of fetal development, for example, is almost the same as that of an adult. Only those elements that ultimately disappear and yet are necessary for the next stage of growth are repeated. For instance, even in the case of the pig, there is a stage when it has a first kidney. In full-grown creatures only the lamprey has this type of kidney. In other cases the first kidney atrophies in about five days without exercising any function. Then afterwards a second kidney is formed. At first glance it seems a purposeless process, but when in this period the first kidney is eliminated, the second kidney is unformed. Thus the atrophy of the first kidney is not a simple disappearance; it plays the role of a kind of inner secretionary organ leading to the second-kidney stage. The second kidney also undergoes a specialized transformation and changes into an inner secretionary organ, ultimately forming the real kidney, the final stage.

  The same is true of the gills. The half nearest the head functions specifically as an inner secretionary gland and serves to bring about the evolution of the other half from gills into lungs. The organs that transform the gills are called the thymus and thyroid glands.

  Now the question arises as to what would happen if we ended up, for example, with the gills remaining as they are and not evolving into inner secretory glands. Like the fish, whose evolution stops at just this point. But even if we arrested the fetus of a mammal here, it still wouldn’t turn into a fish. The most we would produce would be some monster like a slug with no vitality, because the number of elements essential for becoming a fish would have already atrophied without all elements being repeated.

  Having come this far in his explanation, Professor Yamamoto with his thick-lipped smile looked at me questioningly.

  “Have I explained sufficiently?”

  Without waiting for an answer he started walking in the direction of the door. “Now I should take you to Growing-Room Four, the next in order. But there are only glass bowls turning round and round in a dark room, so we’ll skip it and go on to the last room, number five.”

  “Yes,” said Tanomogi over his shoulder as he made way for me, “when Wada brought me here the first time we made the visit in this order.”

  “If you like, I can let you see later a film taken with infrared light.”

  “No, thank you very much. It’d probably be too specialized for me.”

  “Of course. Unless you’re particularly interested technically, there’s really no need. But I would just like you to see Room Five. It’s rather an attraction.”

  25

  Again we set off along the long, downward-sloping corridor.

  “The determination in the gill stage of whether the gills are to be completed as such or whether they are to change into inner secretory glands,” continued Professor Yamamoto, lowering his voice slightly, aware of the reverberations, “is governed by the quality of the hormones coming from the nerve cells, just as in the case of the metamorphosis of insects. The nervous system is really a strange thing. It’s not only indispensable for the maintenance of life, but it is also the evolutionary energizer. If you stop the flow of these hormones, specialization at once stops at that stage. On this principle we have created snail-pigs about two feet long.”

  “Can you eat them?” broke in Tanomogi mockingly.

  He seemed to be parading his ability to react in a most everyday manner, even in these circumstances. I found it displeasing.

  “Well, I don’t see why not,” answered Professor Yamamoto, obviously not in the slightest offended. “But with the arrest of specialization, the nervous system also stops at the same time and at a low level of development. As a result, the evolution of muscle, that is, protein, is slower. So I imagine the taste is not too good.”

  Some white-clad men and women nodded as they passed us. The corridor continued on a lower plane, and from this point the ceiling was arched. The downward slope seemed more abrupt. I had the impression I could hear the roar of the ocean, but perhaps it was a ringing in my ears.

  “If we can do this on the level of these snail-pigs,” said Professor Yamamoto, making a gesture as if he were supporting an invisible box and turning toward me, “the work of causing the gills of mammalian fetuses to remain should actually be easy. But the matter of arresting the respiratory organs at the gill stage and letting the rest mature normally presents difficulties. Our general theory about positive and negative hormonal function is not enough. Anyway we can well be proud of our results.”

  “It’s an awfully long corridor, isn’t it?”

  “We’re almost there. It’s just around the next corner. We’ve come the whole way around a U-shaped building. Are you tired?”

  “Maybe it’s the humidity.”

  “That’s unavoidable; we’re below water level.”

  There was no door to the room. Following the walls, and separated from them by a space of about two yards, a deep hole had been scooped out of the central portion and was filled to the brim with water. It gave the impression of a small indoor pool. But it was different in that the inside of the tank was illuminated, and the scene within showed clearly; it was as if one could touch it with one’s hand. That it seemed deep where we were standing and suddenly shallow on the other side was due to the refraction of the light. Around on the left-hand wall were sorts of windows with gauges and to the right several rather larger windows. Two men wearing aqualungs were suspended in the water, at work in front of one of the windows provided with gauges; they sent up columns of bubbles that shone radiantly.

  “These are the veterinarians and breeders,” chuckled Professor Yamamoto, circling the edge of the pool and leading the way to a small room on the right. It was a most unprepossessing cubicle with medical supplies, surgical instruments, aqualungs, and other electrical implements with strange forms-all scattered about pell-mell. A ventilating device whirred audibly, but an unmistakably pungent stench assailed my nostrils. A small man with a low forehead, who was tracing a graph on section paper, at once arose and offered his chair. When I saw there were only two in evidence, I refused. I did not wish to remain long.

  “These gentlemen are here to observe. Would you be so kind as to ask the technicians to make their work easily observable.”

  We followed the man, who went out dragging along the cord of a small-sized microphone and squatted down at the edge of the pool. In response to his interpolation the two men in the water raised their faces and returned his greeting by waving their hands.

  “In two more minutes the next fetus will come out,” said the man, looking around at Professor Yamamoto. As he spoke, one of the men in the water signaled with two fingers. _

  “At this point, they’re being born at the rate of one every five to eight minutes,” said Professor Yamamoto, nodding back to the man. “Until they get here, the gill-stage
fetuses, like the ones you saw in Room Three, differ according to species; but like the pigs, they’re stored in Room Four next door for about six months or more. It’s curious to use the term ‘store,’ I know.”

  “But,’’ I exclaimed in surprise in spite of myself, “doesn’t the rate of one every five minutes amount to a staggering figure in six months?”

  “Of course it does. With five levels, each producing sixteen thousand apiece, we can handle a total stock of eighty thousand,” said the small man, shoving out his jaw as he placed the stained end of a finger under his nose and sniffed the tobacco smell.

  “If you were a specialist in the field,’’ continued Professor Yamamoto, peering into the tank, “I dare say you would be interested in the setup of Room Four. The handling of the food supply and waste products especially, the regulation of warmth and pressure-particularly the warmth, which we make slightly lower than human heat-the addition of artificial secretory substances that suppress the specialization of the gills and at the same time let the other organs develop their own specialization. Controlling poison with poison, as it were. Well, that’s not quite right. For instance, how do you make salt crystals nonsoluble in water? You use an oversaturated concentration, of course. Anyway we have succeeded in checking the development of the gills alone without affecting anything else.”

  In the pool red lights lit a gauge at the window. “It’s coming,” called the small man, scratching at his scruffy head.

  “It’s an artificial birth,” exclaimed Tanomogi, placing his hands on the edge of the pool and leaning over.

  The men in the water signaled by waving their hands, and then moved in the direction of the window, keeping to the side as much as possible so that the air bubbles would not obstruct our view. Suddenly a metal box painted a dark color filled the window as it came sliding through, stopping about two feet away. At once the men began manipulating the gauges.