Dancing With Myself

by Charles Sheffield

My announcement caused a stir in the media. They had presumably never heard of Steinmetz, which was a disgraceful statement of their own ignorance. Even if they hadn’t spent most of the past year combing old files and records, as we had, they should have heard of him. He was one of the past century’s most colorful and creative scientists, a man who had been physically handicapped (he was a hunchback) but mentally able to do the equivalent of a hundred one-hand push-ups without even breathing hard. Even I had heard of him, and you’d not find many of my colleagues who’d suggest I was interested in science.

  The buzzing in the media told me they were consulting their own historical data files, digging farther back in time. Even when they had done all that, they would still not understand the first thing about the true process of clone selection. It’s not just a question of knowing who died over seventy-five years ago, and will therefore be out of copyright. That’s a trivial exercise, one that any year-book will solve for you. You also have to evaluate other factors. Do you know where the body is—are you absolutely sure? Remember, you can’t clone anyone without a cell or two from the original body. You also have to be certain that it’s who you think it is. All bodies seventy-five or more years old tend to look the same. And then, if the body happens to be really old—say, more than a couple of centuries—there are other peculiar problems that are still not understood at all. When NETSCO pulled its coup a few years ago by cloning Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the other three combines were envious at first. Leibniz was a real universal genius, a seventeenth century super-brain who was good at everything. NETSCO had developed a better cell growth technique, and they had also succeeded in locating the body of Leibniz in its undistinguished Hanover grave.

  They walked tall for almost a year at NETSCO, until the clone came out of the forcing chambers for indoctrination. He looked nothing like the old portraits of Leibniz, and he could not grasp even the simplest abstract concepts. Oops! said the media. Wrong body.

  But it wasn’t as simple as that. The next year, MMG duplicated the NETSCO cell-growth technology and tried for Isaac Newton. In this case there was no doubt that they had the correct body, because it had lain undisturbed since 1727 beneath a prominent plaque in London’s Westminster Abbey. The results were just as disappointing as they had been for Leibniz.

  Now NETSCO and MMG have become very conservative; in my opinion, far too conservative. But since then nobody has tried for a clone of anyone who died before 1850. The draft picking went on its thoughtful and generally cautious way, and was over in a couple of hours except for the delayed deals.

  The same group of protesters was picketing the building when I left. I tried to walk quietly through them, but they must have seen my picture on one of the exterior screens showing the draft pick process. I was buttonholed by a man in a red jumpsuit and the same thin woman in green, still carrying her placard.

  “Could we speak with you for just one moment?” The man in red was very well-spoken and polite.

  I hesitated, aware that news cameras were on us. “Very briefly. I’m trying to run a proof-of-concept project, you know.”

  “I know. Is it going well?” He was a different type from most of the demonstrators, cool and apparently intelligent. And therefore potentially more dangerous.

  “I wish I could say yes,” I said. “Actually, it’s going rather badly. That’s why I’m keen to get back out.”

  “I understand. All I wanted to ask you was why you—and I don’t mean you, personally, I mean the combines—why do you find it necessary to use clones? You could do your work without them, couldn’t you?”

  I hesitated. “Let me put it this way. We could do the work without them, in just the same way as we could stumble along somehow if we were denied the use of computer power, or nuclear power. The projects would be possible, but they would be enormously more difficult. The clones augment our available brain power, at the highest levels. So let me ask you: why should we do without the clones, when they are available and useful?”

  “Because of the families. You have no right to subject the families to the misery and upset of seeing their loved ones cloned, without their having any rights in the matter. It’s cruel, and unnecessary. Can’t you see that?”

  “No, I can’t. Now, you listen to me for a minute.” The cameras were still on me. It was a chance to say something that could never be said often enough. “The family holds copyright for seventy-five years after a person’s death. So if you, personally, remember your grandparent, you have to be pushing eighty years old—and it’s obvious from looking at you that you’re under forty. So ask yourself, why are all you petitioners people who are in their thirties? It’s not you who’s feeling any misery.”

  “But there are the relatives—” he said.

  “Oh, yes, the relatives. Are you a relative of somebody who has been cloned?”

  “Not yet. But if this sort of thing goes on—”

  “Listen to me for one more minute. A long time ago, there were a lot of people around who thought that it was wrong to let books with sex in them be sold to the general public. They petitioned to have the books banned. It wasn’t that they claimed to be buying the books themselves, and finding them disgusting; because if they said that was the case, then people would have asked them why they were buying what they didn’t like. Nobody was forcing anybody to buy those books. No, what the petitioners wanted was for other people to be stopped from buying what the petitioners didn’t like. And you copyright-extension people are just the same. You are making a case on behalf of the relatives of the ones who are being cloned. But you never seem to ask yourself this: If cloning is so bad, why aren’t the descendants of the clones the ones doing the complaining? They’re not, you know. You never see them around here.”

  He shook his head. “Cloning is immoral!”

  I sighed. Why bother? Not one word of what I’d said had got through to him. It didn’t much matter, I’d really been speaking for the media anyway, but it was a shame to see bigotry masquerading as public-spirited behavior. I’d seen enough of that already in my life.

  I started to move off towards my waiting aircar. The lady in green clutched my arm again. “I’m going to leave instructions in my will that I want to be cremated. You’ll never get me!”

  You have my word on that, lady. But I didn’t say it. I headed for the car, feeling an increasing urge to get back to the clean and rational regions of space. There was one good argument against cloning, and only one. It increased the total number of people, and to me that number already felt far too large.

  I had been gone only thirty hours, total, but when I arrived back at Headquarters I learned that in my absence five new problems had occurred. I scanned the written summary that Pauli had left behind.

  First, one of the thirty-two booster engines set deep in the surface of the asteroid did not respond to telemetry requests for a status report. We had to assume it was defective, and eliminate it from the final firing pattern. Second, a big solar flare was on the way. There was nothing we could do about that, but it did mean we would have to recompute the strength of the magnetic and electric fields close to Io. They would change with the strength of the Jovian magnetosphere, and that was important because the trouble-shooting team in my absence had agreed on their preferred solution to the problem of adjusting impact point and arrival time. It called for strong coupling between the asteroid and the five-million amp flux tube of current between Io and its parent planet, Jupiter, to modify the final collision trajectory.

  Third, we had lost the image data stream from one of our observing satellites, in synchronous orbit with Io. Fourth, our billion ton asteroid had been struck by a larger-than-usual micro-meteorite. This one must have massed a couple of kilograms, and it had been moving fast. It had struck off-axis from the center of mass, and the whole asteroid was now showing a tendency to rotate slowly away from our pre­ferred orientation. Fifth, and finally, a new volcano
had become very active down on the surface of Io. It was spout­ing sulfur up for a couple of hundred kilometers, and obscuring the view of the final impact landmark.

  After I had read Pauli’s terse analysis of all the problems—nobody I ever met or heard of could summarize as clearly and briefly as he did—I switched on my communications set and asked him the only question that mattered: “Can you handle them all?”

  There was a delay of almost two minutes. The trouble­shooters were heading out to join the rest of our project team for their on-the-spot analyses in the Jovian system; already the light travel time was significant. If I didn’t follow in the next day or two, radio signal delay would make conversation impos­sible. At the moment Jupiter was forty-five light-minutes from Earth.

  “We can, Al,” said Pauli’s image at last. “Unless others come up in the next few hours, we can. From here until impact we’ll be working in an environment with increasing uncertainties.”

  “The PNU people planned it that way. Go ahead—but send me full transcripts.” I left the system switched on, and went off to the next room to study the notes I had taken of the five problem areas. As I had done with every glitch that had come up since the Phase B demonstration project began, I placed the problem into one of two basic categories: act of nature, or failure of manmade element. For the most recent five difficulties, the volcano on Io and the solar flare belonged in the left-hand column: Category One, clearly natural and unpredictable events. The absence of booster engine teleme­try and the loss of satellite image data were Category Two, failures of our system. They went in the right-hand column. I hesitated for a long time over the fifth event, the impact of the meteorite; finally, and with some misgivings, I assigned it also as a Category One event.

  As soon as possible I would like to follow the engineering teams out towards Jupiter for the final hours of the demonstration. However, I had two more duties to perform before I could leave.

  Using a coded link to Romberg AG HQ in synchronous earth-orbit, I queried the status of all the clone tanks. No anomalies were reported. By the time we returned from the final stages of Phase B, another three finished clones would be ready to move to the indoctrination facility. I needed to be there when it happened.

  Next, I had to review and approve acquisition of single use copyright for all the draft picks we had negotiated down on Earth. To give an idea of the importance of these choices, we were looking at an expenditure of twenty billion dollars for those selections over the next twelve months. It raised the unavoidable question, had we made the best choices?

  At this stage of the game every combine began to have second thoughts about the wisdom of their picks. All the old failures came crowding into your mind. I already mentioned NETSCO and their problem with Einstein, but we had had our full share at Romberg AG: Gregor Mendel, the origina­tor of the genetic ideas that stood behind all the cloning efforts, had proved useless; so had Ernest Lawrence, inven­tor of the cyclotron, our second pick for 1958. We had (by blind luck!) traded him along with forty million dollars for Wolfgang Pauli. Even so, we had made a bad error of judg­ment, and the fact that others made the same mistake was no consolation. As for Marconi, even though he looked like the old pictures of him, and was obviously highly intelligent, the clone who emerged turned out to be so indolent and cas­ual about everything that he ruined any project he worked on. I had placed him in a cushy and undemanding position and allowed him to fiddle about with his own interests, which were mainly sports and good-looking women. (As Pauli acidly remarked, “And you say that we’re the smart ones, doing all the work?”)

  It’s not the evaluation of a person’s past record that’s diffi­cult, because we are talking about famous people who have done a great deal, written masses of books, articles, and papers, and been thoroughly evaluated by their own contem­poraries. Even with all that, a big question still remains. Will the things that made the original man or woman great still be there in the cloned form? In other words, Just what is it that is inherited?

  That’s a very hard question to answer. The theory of evolu­tion was proposed a hundred and seventy years ago, but we’re still fighting the old Nature versus Nurture battle. Is a human genius mainly decided by heredity, or by the way the person was raised? One old argument against cloning for genius was based on the importance of Nurture. It goes as follows: an individual is the product of both heredity (which is all you get in the clone) and environment. Since it is impossible to repro­duce someone’s environment, complete with parents, grandparents, friends, and teachers, you can’t raise a clone that will be exactly like the original individual.

  I’ll buy that logic. We can’t make ourselves an intellectually exact copy of anyone.

  However, the argument was also used to prove that cloning for superior intellectual performance would be impossible. But of course, it actually proves nothing of the sort. If you take two peas from the same pod, and put one of them in deep soil next to a high wall, and the other in shallow soil out in the open, they must do different things if both are to thrive. The one next to the wall has to make sure it gets enough sunshine, which it can do by maximizing leaf area; the one in shallow soil has to get enough moisture, which it does through putting out more roots. The superior strain of peas is the one whose genetic composition allows it to adapt to whatever environ­ment it is presented with.

  People are not peas, but in one respect they are not very different from them: some have superior genetic composition to others. That’s all you can ask for. If you clone someone from a century ago, the last thing you want is someone who is identi­cal to the original. They would be stuck in a twentieth century mind-set. What is needed is someone who can adapt to and thrive in today’s environment—whether that is now the hu­man equivalent of shade, or of shallow soil. The success of the original clone-template tells us a very important thing, that we are dealing with a superior physical brain. What that brain thinks in the year 2040 should be different from what it would have thought in the year 1940—otherwise the clone would be quite useless. And the criteria for “useless” change with time, too.

  All these facts and a hundred others were running around inside my head as I reviewed the list for this year. Finally I made a note to suggest that J.B.S. Haldane, whom we had looked at and rejected three years ago on the grounds of unmanageability, ought to be looked at again and acquired if possible. History shows that he had wild views on politics and society, but there was no question at all about the quality of his mind. I thought I had learned a lot about interfacing with difficult scientific personalities in the past few years.

  When I was satisfied with my final list I transmitted everything to Joe Delacorte, who was still down on Earth, and headed for the transition room. A personal shipment pod ought to be waiting for me there. I hoped I would get a good one. At the very least, I’d be in it for the next eight days. Last time I went out to the Jovian system the pod’s internal lighting and external antenna failed after three days. Have you ever sat in the dark for seventy-two hours, a hundred million miles from the nearest human, unable to send or receive messages? I didn’t know if anyone realized I was in trouble. All I could do was sit tight—and I mean tight, pods are small—and stare out at the stars.

  This time the pod was in good working order. I was able to participate in every problem that hit the project over the next four days. There were plenty of them, all small, and all signifi­cant. One of the fuel supply ships lost a main ion drive. The supply ship was not much more than a vast bag of volatiles and a small engine, and it had almost no brain at all in its computer, not even enough to figure out an optimal use of its remaining drives. We had to chase after and corral it as though we were pursuing a great lumbering elephant. Then three members of the impact monitoring team came down with food poisoning—salmonella, which was almost certainly their own fault. You can say anything you like about throwing away spoiled food, but you can’t get a sloppy crew to take much no
tice.

  Then, for variety, we lost a sensor through sheer bad pro­gram design. In turning one of our imaging systems from star-sensing to Io-Jupiter sensing, we tracked it right across the solar disk and burned out all the photo-cells. According to the engineers, that’s the sort of blunder you don’t make after kindergarten—but somebody did it.

  Engineering errors are easy to correct. It was much trickier when one of the final approach coordination groups, a team of two men and one woman, chose the day before the Io rendezvous to have a violent sexual argument. They were millions of kilometers away from anyone, so there was not much we could do except talk to them. We did that, hoped they wouldn’t kill each other, and made plans to do without their inputs if we had to.

  Finally, one day before impact, an unplanned and anomalous firing of a rocket on the asteroid’s forward surface caused a significant change of velocity of the whole body.

  I ought to explain that I did little or nothing to solve any of these problems. I was too slow, too ignorant, and not creative enough. While I was still struggling to comprehend what the problem parameters were, my trouble-shooters were swarming all over it. They threw proposals and counter-proposals at each other so fast that I could hardly note them, still less contribute to them. For example, in the case of the anomalous rocket firing that I mentioned, compensation for the unwanted thrust called for an elaborate balancing act of lateral and radial engines, rolling and nudging the asteroid back into its correct approach path. The team had mapped out the method in minutes, written the necessary optimization programs in less than half an hour, and implemented their solution before I understood the geometry of what was going on.

  So what did I do while all this was happening? I continued to make my two columns: act of nature, or failure of manmade element. The list was growing steadily, and I was spending a lot of time looking at it.

  We were coming down to the final few hours now, and all the combines were working flat out to solve their own problems. In an engineering project of this size, many thousands of things could go wrong. We were working in extreme physical conditions, hundreds of millions of kilometers away from Earth and our standard test environments. In the intense charged-particle field near Io, cables broke at loads well below their rated capacities, hard vacuum welds showed air-bleed effects, lateral jets were fired and failed to produce the predicted attitude adjustments. And on top of all this, the pressure, isolation, and bizarre surroundings were too much for some of the workers. We had human failure to add to engineering failure. The test was tougher than anyone had realized—even PNU, who were supposed to make the demonstration project just this side of impossible.