The Diploids and Other Flghts of Fancy

by Katherine MacLean

  “We have eliminated plagues, famines, and saber-toothed tigers, but old age is still with us. One was meant to go with the other, but evolution hasn’t had time to adjust us to the change.

  “That Russian scientist started me on this idea. Boglametz. He gave oldsters a little of their lost elasticity by injections of an antibody that attacked and dissolved some of their old connective tissue and forced a partial replacement.

  “I just want to go him one better, and see if I can coax a replacement for every creaking cell in the body.

  “You can see how it would be a drastic process—halfway between being born again and being run through a washing machine. There is nobody I dare try it on except myself, for I’ll have to feel my way, working out each step from the reactions to the last step, like making up a new recipe by adding and tasting.

  “Item: The best way to test your theories is to try them on yourself. Emergency is the mother of exertion.

  “Thirty-eight is just old enough to make me a good guinea pig. I am not so old and fragile that I would break down under the first strain, but I am not so young that a little added youth won’t show.

  “One question is—just how many tissues of any kind dare I destroy at once. The more I clear away at once, the more complete the replacement, but it is rather like replacing parts in a running motor. You wonder just how many bolts you can take out before the flywheel comes off its shaft and flies away. Speed should help. A quick regrowth can replace dissolved tissue before the gap is felt. The human machine is tough and elastic. It can run along on its own momentum when it should be stopped.

  “This winter I bred a special strain of mold from some hints I had found in the wartime research reports on the penicillia. The mold makes an art of carrying on most of the processes of life outside of itself. Digestion and even most of the resynthesis of assimilation is finished before the food touches the plant. Its roots secrete enzymes that attack protein, dismantle it neatly down to small soluble molecules, and leave them linked to catalytic hooks, ready to be reassembled like the parts of a prefabricated house.

  “The food below the mold becomes a pool. The mold plants draw the liquid up through their roots, give it the last touch that converts it to protoplasm, provide it with nucleus and throw it up in a high waving fur of sporangia.

  “But that liquid is magic. It could become the protoplasm of any creature with the same ease and speed. It could be put into the bloodstream and be as harmless as the normal rough aminos, and yet provide for an almost instantaneous regrowth of missing flesh, a regrowth complete enough, I hope, to allow the drastic destruction and replacement I need.

  “That may provide the necessary regeneration, but to have the old cells missing at the proper time and place, in the proper controlled amounts, is another problem entirely. The Russians used the antibody technique on horses to get a selectively destructive serum. That is all right for them, but it sounds too slow and troublesome for me. The idea of innoculating a horse with some of my connective tissue doesn’t appeal to me somehow. How am I supposed to get this connective tissue? Besides, I don’t have a horse. The serum farms charge high.

  “After watching a particularly healthy colony of mold melting down a tough piece of raw beef I decided that there are other destructives than antibodies.

  “I forced alternate generations of the mold to live on the toughest fresh meat I could find, and then on the dead mold mats of its own species. To feed without suicide it had to learn a fine selectivity, attacking only flesh that had passed the thin line between death and life. Twice, variants went past the line and dissolved themselves back to puddles, but the other strains learned to produce what was needed.

  “Then I took some of the enzyme juice from under a mat, and shot the deadly stuff into a rabbit—the brown bunny with the spot. Nothing happened to Bunny, she just grew very hungry and gained an ounce. I cut myself, and swabbed the juice on the cut. It skinned the callus from my fingertips, but nothing happened to the cut. So then I sent a sample over to the hospital for a test, with a note to Williams that this was a trial sample of a fine selective between dead and live tissue, to be used cautiously in cleaning out ragged infected wounds and small local gangrene.

  “Williams is the same irresponsible old goat he always was. There was an ancient patient dying of everything in the book, including a gangrenous leg. Williams shot the whole tube of juice into the leg at once, just to see what would happen. Of course it made a sloppy mess that he had to clean up himself. It served him right. He said that the surprise simply turned his stomach, but the stuff fixed the gangrene all right, just as I said it would. It was as close and clean as a surgical amputation. Nevertheless he came back with what was left of the sample and was glad to be rid of it. He guessed it to be a super catalyst somehow trained to be selective, and he wanted to get rid of it before it forgot its training.

  “When I asked about the old patient later, they said that he woke up very hungry, and demanded a steak, so they satisfied him with intravenous amino acids, and he lived five days longer than expected.

  “That was not a conclusive check, but it was enough. I labeled the juice ‘H’ for the acid ion. ‘H’ seemed a good name somehow.

  “The first treatment on schedule was bone replacement. Middle age brings a sort of acromegaly. People ossify, their bones thicken, their gristle turns to bone and their arteries cake and stiffen. My framework needs a polishing down.

  “For weeks I had cut my calcium intake down to almost nothing. Now I brought the calcium level in my blood down below the safe limit. The blood tried to stay normal by dissolving the treated bone. For safety, I had to play with parathyroid shots, depressants, and even a little calcium lactate on an hour-to-hour observation basis, to keep from crossing the spasm level of muscle irritability.

  “But the hullabaloo must have upset my own endocrines, for they started behaving erratically, and yesterday suddenly they threw me into a fit before I could reach the depressant. I didn’t break any bones but I came out of the fit with one of my ulna uncomfortably bent. The sight of it almost gave me another fit.

  “When one’s bones start bending it is time to stop. I must have overdone the treatment a bit. There seems to be almost no mineral left in the smaller bones, just stiff healthy gristle. I am now lying flat on the cot drinking milk, eggnogs, and cod liver oil. I dreamed of chop suey last night, but until I ossify properly, I refuse to get up and go out for a meal. The icebox is within easy reach. Maybe my large bones are still hard, and maybe not, but I’ll take no chances on bow legs and flat feet just for an oriental dinner.

  “Darling, I’m having a wonderful time, and I wish you were here to look over my shoulder and make sarcastic remarks. Every step is a guess based on the wildest deductions, and almost every guess checks and has to be written down as right. At this rate, when I get through I’ll be way ahead of the field. I’ll be one of the best cockeyed endocrinologists practicing.

  “I hope you are having a good time too, and finding hundreds of broken vases and old teeth.

  “I’ve got to switch back to the notes and hours record now and take down my pulse rate, irritability level, PH and so on. The time is now seven ten, I’ll give you another record soon.

  “G’by Hon—”

  Her voice stopped and the needle ran onto the label and scratched with a heavy tearing noise. Alec turned the record over. The label on the other side was dated one week later.

  Helen said cheerfully:

  “Hello, Alec. This is a week later. I took a chance today and walked. Flat on my back again now, just a bit winded, but unbowed.

  “Remember the time the obelisk fell on me? They set my arm badly, and it healed crooked with a big bump in the bones where the broken ends knitted. That bump made a good test to check the amount of chromosome control in this replacement business. If it approaches true regeneration, the bump should be noticeably reduced, and the knitting truer, to conform better to the gene blueprint of how an arm should be. />
  “The minute I thought of that test I had to try it. Risking flattened arches I got up and took the elevator down to the second floor office of Dr. Stanton, and walked right through an anteroom of waiting patients to the consulting room, where I promptly lay down on his examination table.

  “He was inspecting a little boy’s tonsils and said irritably: “ ‘I really must ask you to wait your turn— Oh, it’s Dr. Berent. Really Dr. Berent, you shouldn’t take advantage of your professional position to— Do you feel faint?’

  “ ‘Oh I feel fine,’ I told him charmingly, ‘I just want to borrow your fluoroscope a minute to look at an old break in the right humerus.’

  “ ‘Oh yes, I understand,’ he says blinking. ‘But why are you lying down?’

  “Well, Alec, you remember how that young man is—rather innocent, and trying to be dignified and stuffy to make up for it. The last time we spoke to him, and you made those wonderful cracks, I could see him thinking that we were somewhat odd, if not completely off our rockers. If I tried to tell him now that I was afraid my legs would bend, he would have called for a padded wagon to come and take me away.

  “I said, ‘I am afraid that I have upset my parathyroids. They are on a rampage. Just a momentary condition, but I have to stay relaxed for a while. You should see my irritability index! A little higher and… ah… I feel rather twitchy. Do you happen to have any curare around?’

  “He looked at me as if I had just stabbed him with a hatpin, and then pulled out the fluoroscope so fast it almost ran over him, screened my arm bones and hustled me out of there before I could even say aha. Apparently the idea of my throwing a fit right there didn’t arouse his professional ardor one bit.

  “Alec, when I saw those bone shadows it was as much as I could do to keep from frightening the poor boy with war whoops. I put both arms under together, and I couldn’t see any bumps at all. They were exactly the same.

  “This means that cells retain wider gene blueprints than they need. And they just need a little encouragement to rebuild injuries according to specifications. Regeneration must be an unused potential of the body. I don’t see why. We can’t evolve unused abilities. Natural selection only works in life and death trials—probably evolution had no part in this. It is just a lucky break from being fetal apes, a hang-over bit of arrested development.

  “I wonder how wide a blueprint each cell retains. Can a hand sprout new fingers, a wrist a new hand, a shoulder a new arm? Where does the control stop?

  “The problem is a natural for the data I am getting now. Next winter when I am through with this silly rejuvenation business I’ll get down to some solid work on regeneration, and try sprouting new arms on amputees. Maybe we can pry a grant from the Government, through that military bureau for he design of artificial limbs. After all, new legs would be the artificial limb to end all artificial limbs.

  “But that is all for next year. Right now all I can use it for is to speed up replacement. If I can kid my cells into moving up onto embryo level activity—they would regrow fast enough to keep the inside works ticking after a really stiff jolt of the bottled dissolution. I’d have to follow it fast with the liquid protein— No, if they regrew that fast they would be using the material from the dissolved old cells. I could telescope treatment down to a few hours. And the nucleus control so active that it rebuilds according to its ideal.

  “Demolition and Reconstruction going on simultaneously. Business as Usual.

  “Next stop is the replacement of various soft tissues. If I were not in such a hurry, I would do it in two long slow simple Ghandi-like fasts, with practically no scientific mumbo jumbo. The way a sea squirt does it, I mean—though I’d like to see someone starve himself down to a foot high.

  “I have to start working now. The record is running out anyhow, so good-by until the next record, whenever that is.

  “Having wonderful time.

  “Wish you were here.”

  He took the record off hurriedly and put on the next one. It was recorded on only one face, and dated September 17th, about fifty days later, seven weeks.

  Helen started speaking without any introduction, her voice clearer and more distant as if she were speaking a few feet from the microphone.

  “I’m rather upset Alec. Something rather astonishing has happened. Have to get you up to date first.

  “The fasting treatment went fine. Of course I had to stay indoors and keep out of sight until I was fit to be seen. I’m almost back to normal now, gaining about a pound a day. The embryo status treatment stimulated my cells to really get to work. They seem to be rebuilding from an adult blueprint and not a fetal one, so I am getting flesh again in proper proportion and not like an overgrown baby.

  “If I am talking disjointedly it is because I am trying hard not to get to the point. The point is too big to be said easily. Of course you know that I started this experimenting just to check my theoretical understanding of cell metabolism. Even the best available theory is sketchy, and my own guesses are doubtful and tentative. I never could be sure whether a patient recovered because of my treatment, in spite of my treatment—or just reacted psychosomatically to the size of my consultant fee.

  “The best way to correct faulty theory is to carry it to its logical absurdity, and then to use the silliness as a clue to the initial fault.

  “Recipe: to test theories of some process take one neutral subject—that’s me—and try to induce a specific stage of that process by artificial means dictated by the theories. The point of failure will be the clue to the revision of the theories.

  “I expected to spend the second half of my vacation in the hospital, checking over records of the experiment, and happily writing an article on the meaning of its failure.

  “To be ready for the emergency I had hitched one of the electric timer clocks to the dictaphone and telephone. If I didn’t punch it at five-hour intervals, the alarm would knock off the telephone receiver, and the dictaphone would yell for an ambulance.

  “Pinned to a big sign just inside the door was an explanation and full instructions for the proper emergency treatment. At every step in the experiment I would rewrite the instructions to match. ‘Be Prepared’ was the motto. ‘Plan for every contingency.’ No matter when the experiment decided to blow up in my face I would be ready for it.

  “There was only one contingency I did not plan for.

  “Alec, I was just looking in the mirror. The only mirror that is any good is the big one in the front bedroom, but I had put off looking into it. For a week I lounged around reading and sleeping on the lab cot and the chair beside the window. I suppose I was still waiting for something to go wrong, but nothing did, and the skin of my hands was obviously different —no scars, no calluses, no tan, just smooth pink translucent skin—so I finally went and looked.

  “Then I checked it with a medical exam. You’ll find that data in with the other notes. Alec, I’m eighteen years old. That is as young as an adult can get.

  “I wonder how Aladdin felt after rubbing a rusty lamp just to polish it up a bit.

  “Surprised I suppose. The most noticeable feature of this new face so far is its surprised expression. It looks surprised from every angle, and sometimes it looks pale, and alarmed.

  “Alarmed. Einstein was not alarmed when he discovered relativity, but they made a bomb out of it anyhow. I don’t see how they could make a bomb out of this, but people are a wild, unpredictable lot. How will they react to being ageless? I can’t guess, but I’m not reckless enough to hand out another Pandora’s box to the world. The only safe way is to keep the secret until you get back, and then call a quiet council of experts for advice.

  “But meanwhile, what if one of our friends happens to see me on the street looking like eighteen years old? What am I supposed to say?

  “It is hard to be practical, darling. My imagination keeps galloping off in all directions. Did you know your hair is getting thin in back? Another two years with that crew cut and you would have begu
n to look like a monk.

  “I know, I know, you’ll tell me it is not fair for you to be a juvenile when every one else is gray, but what is fair? To be fair at all everyone will have to have the treatment available free, for nothing. And I mean everyone. We can leave it to an economist to worry out how. Meanwhile we will have to change our names and move to California. You don’t want people to recognize you, and wonder who I am, do you? You don’t want to go around looking twice as old as your wife and have people calling you a cradle snatcher, now do you?

  “Wheedling aside, it is fair enough. The process is still dangerous. You can call yourself Guinea Pig Number Two. That’s fair. We can sign hotel registers G. Igpay and wife. Pardon me, Alec, I digress. It is hard to be practical, darling.

  “If the treatment gets safely out of the lab and into circulation—rejuvenation worked down to a sort of official vaccination against old age—it would be good for the race I think. It may even help evolution. Regeneration would remove environmental handicaps, old scars of bad raising, and give every man a body as good as his genes. A world full of the age proof would be a sort of sound-mind, sound-body health marathon, with the longest breeding period won by the people with the best chromosomes and the healthiest family tradition.

  “Thank heavens I can strike a blow for evolution at last. Usually I find myself on the opposite side, fighting to preserve the life of some case whose descendants will give doctors a headache.

  “And look at cultural evolution! For the first time we humans will be able to use our one talent, learning, the way it should be used, the way it was meant to be used from the beginning, an unstoppable growth of skill and humor and understanding, experience adding layer on layer like the bark of a California Redwood.

  “And we need thinkers with time to boil the huge accumulation of science down to some reasonable size. It is an emergency job—and not just for geniuses, the rest of us will have to help look for common denominators, too. Even ordinary specialists will have time to learn more, do some integrating of their own, join hands with specialists of related fields.