Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  “No one knows yet just what happened. Apparently the Shark hit something going at full clip, but no one knows yet what it was. They’re towing her in; I trust there’ll be enough evidence to tell us the whole story.”

  “How about the other fellows?”

  “Ishi is plugged in. He may need a week with computer regeneration control, or ten times that. We won’t be able to assess brain damage until we find how close to consciousness he can come. He had a bad skull fracture. The captain was knocked out, and some broken ribs I missed on the first-aid check did internal damage. Bert is still trying to get him off without regeneration, but I don’t think he’ll manage it.”

  “You didn’t think he could manage it with you, either.”

  “True. Maybe it’s just that I don’t think I could do it myself, and hate to admit that Jellinge is better at my own job than I am.”

  “How about Joe?”

  “Both arms broken and a lot of bruises. He’ll be all right. That leaves you, young fellow. You’re not exactly a critical case, but you are certainly going to call for professional competence. How fond are you of your fingerprints?”

  “What? I don’t track.”

  “Most of your right hand was sliced off, apparently by flying glass from my big culture flask. Ben Tulley from the Conger, which picked us up, found the missing section and brought it back; it’s in culture now.”

  “What has that to do with fingerprints? Why didn’t you or Mr. Jellinge graft it back?”

  “Because there’s a good deal of doubt about its condition. It was well over an hour after the accident before it got into culture. You know the sort of brain damage a few minutes without oxygen can do. I know the bone, tendon, and connective tissue in a limb is much less sensitive to that sort of damage, but an hour is a long time, chemically speaking. Grafting calls for healing powers which are nearly as dependent on genetic integrity as is nerve activity; we’re just not sure whether grafting is the right thing to do in your case. It’s a toss-up whether we should fasten the hand back on and work to make it take, or discard it and grow you a new one. That’s why I asked how much you loved your fingerprints.”

  “Wouldn’t a new hand have the same prints?”

  “The same print classification, which is determined genetically, but not the same details, which are random.”

  “Which would take longer?”

  “It the hand is in shape to take properly, grafting would be quicker—say a week. If it isn’t, we might be six or eight times as long repairing secondary damage. That’s longer than complete regeneration would take.”

  “When are you going to make up your minds?”

  “Soon. I wondered whether you’d have a preference.”

  “How could I know which is better when you don’t? Why ask me at all?”

  “I had a reason—several, in fact. I’ll tell you what they were after you’ve had two years of professional training in molecular mechanics, if you decide to come into the field. You still haven’t told me which you prefer.”

  The boy looked up silently for a full minute. Actually, he spent very little of that time trying to make his mind up; he was wondering what Mancini’s reasons might be. He gave up, flipped a mental coin, and said, “I think I’d prefer the original hand, if there’s a real chance of getting it back and it won’t keep me plugged in to these machines any longer than growing a new one would.”

  “All right, we’ll try it that way. Of course, you’ll be plugged in for quite a while anyway, so if we do have trouble with the hand it won’t make so much difference with your time.”

  “What do you mean? What’s wrong besides the hand?”

  “You hadn’t noticed that your head is clamped?”

  “Well, yes; I knew I couldn’t move it, but I can’t feel anything wrong. What’s happened there?”

  “Your face stopped most of the rest of the flask, apparently.”

  “Then how can I be seeing at all, and how is it that I talk so easily?”

  “If I knew that much about probability, I’d stop working for a living and take up professional gambling. When I first saw you after your face had been cleaned off and before the glass had been taken out I wondered for a moment whether there hadn’t been something planned about the arrangement of the slivers. It was unbelievable, but that’s the way it happened. They say anything can happen once, but I’d advise you not to catch any more articles of glassware with your face.”

  “Just what was it like, Marco? Give me the details.”

  “Frankly, I’d rather not. There are record photos, of course, but if I have anything to say about it you won’t see them until the rebuilding is done. Then you can look in a mirror to reassure yourself when the photos get your stomach. No”—as Stubbs tried to interrupt—“I respect what you probably think of as your clinical detachment, but I doubt very strongly that you could maintain it in the face of the real thing. I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t, if it were my face.” Mancini’s thoughts flashed back to the long moments when he had been dragging his ruined leg across the Shark’s deck toward the bleeding boy, and felt a momentary glow—maybe that disclaimer had been a little too modest. He stuck to his position, however.

  Rick didn’t argue too hard, for another thought had suddenly struck his mind. “You’re using regeneration on my face, without asking me whether I want it the way you did with my hand. Right?”

  “That’s right,” Mancini said.

  “That means I’m so badly damaged that ordinary healing won’t take care of it.”

  Mancini pursed his lips and thought carefully before answering. “You’d heal, all right,” he admitted at last. “You might just possibly, considering your age, heal without too much scarring. I’d hesitate to bet on that, though, and the scars you could come up with would leave you quite a mess.”

  Stubbs lay silent for a time, staring at the featureless ceiling. The mechanic was sure his expression would have been thoughtful had enough of the young face been visible to make one. He could not, however, guess at what was bothering the boy. As far as Mancini could guess from their work together there was no question of personal cowardice—for that matter, the mechanic could not see what there might be to fear. His profession made him quite casual about growing tissue, natural or artificial, on human bodies or anywhere else. Stubbs was in no danger of permanent disfigurement, crippling damage, or even severe pain; but something was obviously bothering the kid.

  “Marco,” the question came finally, “just where does detailed genetic control end, in tissue growth, and statistical effects take over?”

  “There’s no way to answer that both exactly and generally. Genetic factors are basically probability ones, but they’re characterized by regions of high probability which we call stability wells. I told you about fingerprints, but each different situation would call for a different specific answer.”

  “It was what you said about prints that made me think of it. You’re going to rebuild my face, you say. You won’t tell me just how much rebuilding has to be done, but you admitted I could heal normally. If you rebuild, how closely will you match my original face? Does that statistical factor of yours take over somewhere along the line?”

  “Statistical factors are everywhere, and work throughout the whole process,” replied Mancini without in the least meaning to be evasive. “I told you that. By rights, your new face should match the old as closely as the faces of identical twins match each other, and for the same reason. I grant that someone who knows the twins really well can usually tell them apart, but no one will have your old face around for close comparison. No one will have any doubt that it’s you, I promise.”

  “Unless something goes wrong.”

  “If it goes wrong enough to bother you, we can always do it over.”

  “But it might go really wrong.”

  Mancini, who would have admitted that the sun might not rise the next day if enough possible events all happened at once, did not deny this, though he was beg
inning to feel irritated. “Does this mean that you don’t want us to do the job? Just take your chances on the scars?” he asked.

  “Why do scars form, anyway?” was the counter. “Why can’t regular, normal genetic material reproduce the tissue it produced in the first place? It certainly does sometimes; why not always?”

  “That’s pretty hard to explain in words. It has to do with the factors which stopped your nose growing before it became an elephant’s trunk—or more accurately, with the factors which stopped your overall growth where they did. I can describe them quite completely, and I believe quite accurately, but not in Basic English.”

  “Can you measure those factors in a particular case?”

  “Hm-m-m, yes; fairly accurately, anyway.” Stubbs pounced on this with an eagerness which should have told the mechanic something.

  “Then can’t you tell whether these injuries, in my particular case, will heal completely or leave scars?”

  “I . . . well, I suppose so. Let’s see; it would take . . . hm-m-m; I’ll have to give it some thought. It’s not regular technique. We usually just rebuild. What’s your objection, anyway? All rebuilding really means is that we set things going and then watch the process, practically cell by cell, and correct what’s happening if it isn’t right—following the plans you used in the first place.”

  “I still don’t see why my body can’t follow them without your help.”

  “Well, no analogy is perfect; but roughly speaking, it’s because the cells which will have to divide to produce the replacement tissue had the blueprints which they used for the original construction stamped ‘production complete; file in reference storage’ some years ago, and the stamp marks covered some of the lines on the plans.” Mancini’s temper was getting a little short, as his tone showed. Theoretically his leg should not have been hurting him, but he had been standing on it longer than any repairman would have advised at its present stage of healing. And why did the kid keep beating around the bush?

  Stubbs either didn’t notice the tone or didn’t care.

  “But the plans—the information—that’s still there; even I know that much molecular biology. I haven’t learned how to use your analysis gear yet, much less to reduce the readings; but I can’t see why you’d figure it much harder to read the plans under the ‘file’ stamp than to work out the ability of that magnetite slime to digest iron from the base configuration of a single cell’s genes.”

  “Your question was why your body couldn’t do it; don’t change the rules in the middle of the game. I didn’t say that I couldn’t; I could. What I said was that it isn’t usual, and I can’t see what will be gained by it; you’d at least double the work. I’m not exactly lazy, but the work at best is difficult, precise, and time-consuming. If someone were to paint your portrait and had asked you whether you wanted it on canvas or paper, would you dither along asking about the brand of paint and the sizes of brushes he was going to use?”

  “I don’t think that’s a very good analogy. I just want to know what to expect—”

  “You can’t know what to expect. No one can. Ever. You have to play the odds. At the moment, the odds are so high in your favor that you’d almost be justified in saying that you know what’s going to happen. All I’m asking is that you tell me straight whether or not you want Bert and me to ride control as your face heals, or let it go its own way.”

  “But if you can grow a vine that produces ham sandwiches instead of pumpkins, why—” Mancini made a gesture of impatience. He liked the youngster and still hoped to recruit him, but there are limits.

  “Will you stop sounding like an anti-vivisectionist who’s been asked for a statement on heart surgery and give me a straight answer to a straight question? The chances are all I can give you. They are much less than fifty-fifty that your face will come out of this without scars on its own. They are much better than a hundred to one that even your mother will never know there’s been a controlled regeneration job done on you unless you tell her. You’re through general education, legally qualified to make decisions involving your own life and health, and morally obligated to make them instead of lying there dithering. Let’s have an answer.”

  For fully two minutes, he did not get it. Rick lay still, his expression hidden in dressings, eyes refusing to meet those of the man who stood by the repair table. Finally, however, he gave in.

  “All right, do your best. How long did you say it would take?”

  “I don’t remember saying, but probably about two weeks for your face. You’ll be able to enjoy using a mirror long before we get that hand unplugged, unless we’re remarkably lucky with the graft.”

  “When will you start?”

  “As soon as I’ve had some sleep. Your blood is back to normal, your general pattern is in the machine; there’s nothing else to hold us up. What sort of books do you like?”

  “Huh?”

  “That head’s going to be in a clamp for quite a while. You may or may not like reading, but the only direction you can look comfortably is straight up. Your left hand can work a remote control, and the tape reader can project on the ceiling. I can’t think of anything else to occupy you. Do you want some refreshing light fiction, or shall I start you on Volume One of ‘Garwood’s Elementary Matrix Algebra for Biochemists?”

  A regeneration controller is a bulky machine, even though most of it has the delicacy and structural intricacy possible only to pseudolife—and, of course, to “real” life. It’s sensors are smaller in diameter than human red blood cells, and there are literally millions of them. Injectors and samplers are only enough larger to take entire cells into their tubes, and these also exist in numbers which would make the device a hopeless one to construct mechanically. Its computer-controller occupies more than two cubic meters of molecular-scale “machinery” based on a synthetic zeolite framework. Mating the individual gene record needed for a particular job to the basic computer itself takes nearly a day; it would take a lifetime if the job had to be done manually, instead of persuading the two to “grow” together.

  Closing the gap between the optical microscope and the test tube, which was blanketed under the word “protoplasm” for so many decades, also blurred the boundary between such initially different fields as medicine and factory design. Marco Mancini and Bert Jellinge regarded themselves as mechanics; what they would have been called a few decades earlier is hard to say. Even at the time the two had been born, no ten Ph.D.’s could have supplied the information which now formed the grounding of their professional practice.

  When their preliminary work—the “prepping”—on Rick Stubbs was done, some five million sensing tendrils formed a beard on the boy’s face, most of them entering the skin near the edges of the injured portions. Every five hundred or so of these formed a unit with a pair of larger tubes. The sensors kept the computer informed of the genetic patterns actually active from moment to moment in the healing tissue—or at least, a statistically significant number of them. Whenever that activity failed to match within narrow limits what the computer thought should be happening, one of the larger tubes ingested a single cell from the area in question and transferred it to a large incubator—“large” in the sense that it could be seen without a microscope—just outside Rick’s skin. There the cell was cultured through five divisions, and some of the product cells analyzed more completely than they could be inside a human body. If all were well after all, which was quite possible because of the limitations of the small sensors, nothing more happened.

  If things were really not going according to plan, however, others of the new cells were modified. Active parts of their genetic material which should have been inert were inerted, quiet parts which should have been active were activated. The repaired cells were cultivated for several more divisions; if they bred true, one or more of them was returned to the original site—or at least, to within a few microns of it. Cell division and tissue building went on according to the modified plan until some new discrepancy was
detected.

  Most of this was, of course, automatic; too many millions of operations were going on simultaneously for detailed manual control. Nevertheless, Mancini and Jellinge were busy. Neither life nor pseudolife is infallible; mutations occur even in triply-redundant records. Computation errors occur even—or especially—in digital machines which must by their nature work by successive-approximation methods. It is much better to have a human operator, who knows his business, actually see that connective tissue instead of epidermis is being grown in one spot, or nerve instead of muscle cells in another.

  Hence, a random selection of cells, not only from areas which had aroused the computer’s interest but from those where all was presumably going well, also traveled out through the tubes. These went farther than just to the incubators; they came out to a joint where gross microscopic study of them by a human observer was possible. This went on twenty-four hours a day, the two mechanics chiefly concerned and four others of their profession taking two-hour shifts at the microscope. The number of man-hours involved in treating major bodily injury had gone up several orders of magnitude since the time when a sick man could get away with a bill for ten dollars from his doctor, plus possibly another for fifty from his undertaker.

  The tendrils and tubes farthest from the damaged tissue were constantly withdrawing, groping their way to the action front, and implanting themselves anew, guided by the same chemical clues which brought leukocytes to the same area. Early versions of the technique had involved complex methods of warding off or removing the crowd of white cells from the neighborhood; the present idea was to let them alone.