Title: The Incredible Life-Form
A strange experiment was taking place on
the third planet of an isolated solar system.
In all the Universe there was no parallel to—
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
October 1954
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
To: The Director
From: Tone Seng Froot, Investigator for galaxies of 9th Sector.
Subject: Unique characteristic of life-form suggesting urgent action to rescind life charter to Element 6.
Sir,
May I draw your attention to an explosive potential in your early experimental series? This exists in an obscure solar system of nine planets in a minor galaxy on the outer perimeter of my territory where I call only at extended intervals.
You will best recall the location in connection with the assignment of a Self-Awareness Charter to Element 6 in the chemical series—more specifically, the crystalline form of carbon, as it is called locally.
I have not troubled you with my earlier surveys, since nothing critical occurred in the first billion years, but I had better bring you up to date.
Of all 96 elements to which life has been separately assigned in various locations, carbon showed the greatest durability at the outset. The diamond, or crystalline form, in which self-awareness was vested in this particular solar system, could be predicted to make efficient use of light energy because of its index of refraction. Also, at lower temperatures, the diamond presents an extreme rigidity or hardness which resists abrasion.
Perhaps these factors account for the astonishing egotism which developed shortly after we activated self-awareness among them. Not that egotism, itself, is unique in the various elemental life-forms. You will recall, this inflated self-esteem has long proved to be a factor consistent with self-awareness in all matter.
In the diamond, egotism flared early in its intellectual growth and seemed to supply a creative drive unsurpassed in all galaxies under surveillance.
On the third planet, diamonds quickly learned psychokinetic manipulations and immediately began experimenting with chemical combinations of the other elements—all of which are, of course, inert and lifeless in this galaxy.
On one of my earliest visits to the third planet, which is locally referred to as Terra, or Earth, I was attracted to the especially active, intellectual radiations of a particular diamond which I shall designate as Prime, since he was the one who out-stripped all the others ultimately.
Prime had worked his way out of the blue clay, down to the edge of a salt-water ocean, and when I inquired into his furious activity he reported that he was attempting to synthesize a new life-form.
At that time I was amused. Prime had managed to construct a few rather prosaic molecules, but none of them could accomplish self-growth by the usual absorption of radiant energy. I asked his purpose in such experimentation.
He answered, "What was your purpose in creating life in me?"
To compare his own motives with those of my gracious director was so absurdly egotistical that I made a note to check back with this same individual on my next round. Amusement is rare in my occupation, as you can conceive, and I appreciated the humor of this supremely confident bit of carbon trash, thinking he could play creator!
His project seemed harmless, so I left without disturbing him further.
On my next call I did search out Prime again, and great was my surprise to discover that not only had he managed to invest automatic growth and reproduction into a few complex molecules, but that he had attacked the problem from an entirely new concept, so far as I have yet determined.
On the southern tip of the land continent where I discovered Prime, still near the ocean, I found him surrounded with a growth which he called vegetation. Then he bade me examine the content of the salt water, and I beheld tiny aquatic creatures of many varieties, some active, some vegetative, but all reproducing with lusty prolificity.
"What are these land growths?" I asked.
He proudly replied, "I call them lichens and mosses."
"But how do they absorb energy from your sun?"
"I have invented a complex compound which can accomplish this," he said. "I call it chlorophyll. But you have many more surprises in store for you," he warned. "Wait until your next visit."
I was entranced, but his work appeared still to be no more than an oddity, so I let it pass.
Prime was quite right. On my next visit he showed me his crowning achievement. He called it animal life, a division of his so-called organic creations.
Here he departed almost entirely from our known concept of life-forms. Prime's animals maintained life, or at least a convincing simulation thereof, by ingesting other organic life-forms, both vegetative and animal, and through an awkward procedure of digestion and devious, chemical transformations, generated an interior source of energy.
What almost made me report the whole affair at that time was this innovation: Prime's animal life-forms now existed entirely independent of direct radiant energy! Instead, they substituted, of all things, heat-energy, gained from simple oxidation of various so-called organic compounds.
At this point I asked a question to which Prime gave me a very revealing answer. I asked, "How do you define the term, 'organic compound'?"
He lay there in the sun, flash—his iridescence at me in brilliant sparkles from his random facets and announced in a haughty manner: "Organic pertains to any carbon-containing life-form, of which I am the originator, of course."
Now I understood a part of the immensity of Prime's egotism. In devising his own life-form he built it around his own element in which Terra abounds, largely in the gaseous dioxide compound.
I presumed that Prime had attempted to pass on the great Charter of Life to the non-crystalline forms of carbon about him, and, failing that, he enlisted the other elements in combination with carbon to produce his desired end.
Imagine such circuity, though! Substituting heat-energy for light as the basic life-fuel!
I was no longer amused. Inflated by his success, his over-bearing self-esteem began to rankle a bit. "What," I asked, "of self-awareness? Your life-forms are quite pointless if you fail to stimulate self-awareness in them."
"I agree," he said promptly. "It would be futile to create life without self-determination. You have returned a little too early to see the end of my experiment," he said. "On your next visit I will reveal the purpose of my whole project."
Rather than file a premature estimate of the affair, I held my notes and accepted Prime's challenge to wait and see. Had I insisted at that time on knowing his intentions, I might have had the wisdom to restrain him, but then again who could have anticipated what happened? Not even Prime, himself, realized that his life-form would get out of hand the way it did.
On my final trip to Terra I had an extremely difficult time locating Prime. His emanations were so weak as to be almost indistinguishable in the screaming ruck of sensations that met my startled perceptions.
Part of my difficulty was the fact that the whole planet reeked with noxious nuclear-type radiation that made long-range communication with Prime virtually impossible. When I finally found him he was imprisoned in the grip of a gold setting on a ring-like artifact worn by a decomposing life-form.
"I am quite happy to see you," Prime greeted me with the first note of welcome I had ever received from him.
"Is this grotesque cadaver your wonderful life-form that you promised?" I jeered at him. Then I noticed that Prime's surface had been chipped into geometrically precise facets of ingenious angles which would enable him to make maximum use of light absorption—were it not for the fact that his entire surface was charred with a coating of oxidation such as would occur after exposure to excessive heat.
It was this near-opacity of his outer surface that had reduced Prime to his weakened condition.
"If you will be so good as to assist me to remove the char from my skin, I will proceed with a very important mission," he said.
Looking about me at the evidence of an advanced mechanico-primitive civilization, recently devastated by apparent atomic disruption, I demanded, "What is this important mission?"
"To destroy the one remaining human on Terra."
"What might a human be?" I countered.
"The appendage to which you find my gold setting attached belonged to a living human at one time. Perfection of this animal was the goal toward which I was striving on your last visit."
I began removing the charred coating from Prime questioning him further. "Did you succeed in developing self-awareness in your human life-form?"
"Completely," he replied with a note of subdued triumph. "Much too successfully, in fact."
And then he related the true purpose of his whole project. It seems that, through the ages, Prime and his fellow diamonds brought a most complicated life-form into being by a rather trial-and-error process of evolution. By psychokinesis they instilled a system of reproduction and heredity dependent upon bio-chemical devices he called chromosomes. These were composed of tinier units, or genes, which were easily manipulated to change any given strain.
In such a manner Prime and his fellows evolved this human life-form, and if I may say so, the most was made of the animal potentialities I first witnessed on the beach. The human model was a bi-symmetrical biped with two upper appendages which terminated in clever, five-fingered vises. These latter accounted for the complex artifacts with which Terra was strewn.
Prime proudly helped me dissect one of the dead creatures, and I believe what struck me most was the plumbing. Visualize, if you can, a closed system of nutrient fluid, called blood, circulating through 100,000 miles (see enclosed equivalent chart) of semi-flexible conduit arranged in an exceedingly complex network. This blood is held at precisely 98.4 degrees Fahrenheit (see chart) in spite of widely varying exterior temperatures. But most fantastic is the pump which makes a complete circulation of the total blood volume every one and a quarter minutes (see chart)! What an organ! Although its weight is measured in ounces (see chart) each 24-hours (see chart) it pulses about 100,000 times, moving 10 or more tons (see chart) of blood through it!
Well, this was only one of the physical-chemical oddities Prime installed in his heat-life-form contrivance. The other which I shall describe at this time was the so-called brain, or seat of intelligence. By a rather sluggish and clumsy system of electron-flow, the human's brain controlled physical activities, stored memories and managed a perverted form of thinking that was too intimately involved with sub-conscious, bodily interferences ever to amount to much.
Nevertheless, this outrageously complicated thought-organ was the seat of Prime's catastrophe, and also, it has proved to be the source of the subject of this report.
Early in Prime's animal-evolution, he explained, his animal's brain developed what he described as an instinct for survival. I interpret this as meaning simply an excessive desire to remain in a state of self-awareness.
Please note, this is quite aside from a secondary instinct, that of reproduction or survival of the race, which is not unheard of elsewhere.
But in Prime's humans, this tremendous desire for survival of the individual grew into a virtual obsession. I tested Prime, himself, on this factor, and found him quite normal. He had no feeling at all on the subject of remaining self-aware. I had thought this unseemly human characteristic might have been a perversion from his unhealthy egotism, but patently it was not.
Therefore, I had to conclude that the human's high drive to self-preservation was of a spontaneous nature, deriving as one of the random results of Prime's unique heat-life-forms.
Anyway, Prime had been so intent in accomplishing his earlier purpose that he gave it little thought until it was too late. This purpose, incidentally, was the only shred of amusement I could salvage from this last trip.
It developed that Prime and his fellow diamonds bred this whole life-strain principally to satisfy their insatiable egos. You see, they finally inculcated into their humans a great love and admiration for diamonds—so much so that they were declared the prince of gems and valued most highly for their ornamental value.
Entirely ignorant that diamonds contained a self-awareness of their own, humans toiled and strained to dig them from deep mines just to fashion them into baubles for their own adoration.
Here again, Prime asserted a crude genius. Not only did he create a whole life-form and induce its members to worship him, but also he insinuated the desire and skill into humans to cut and polish their diamonds in a manner to provide a maximum of light refraction. Prime and many others of his Terra kin, enjoyed high stimulation from being so cut, polished, transported and worshipped.
And so Prime's incredible motives were finally divulged.
A few years (see chart) before my final return, however, Prime's humans, in their sluggish way, stumbled upon some rudimentary universal facts about the construction of the atom.
Until this time, as I stated, the humans' extreme obsession with survival had been of no concern to Prime, although the instinct had brought his prize animal into a savage, vicious, condition of belligerence that resulted in highly destructive warfare among various groups.
Atomic power changed all this rather quickly. Where humans had previously only managed to slaughter other organic life-forms and each other, now they began detonating nuclear devices. And in the process even the durable diamond family suffered many casualties.
At this point, I gather, Prime's egotism became somewhat sublimated into outrage and anger, that his adoring subjects could be so thoughtless as to destroy their precious diamonds along with their own populace.
After the initial incident in an area called Japan, Prime passed the word to all his fellows, and they deliberately spurred the humans on to produce great piles of nuclear ammunition. Later, by clever manipulation of the humans' sub-conscious emotions and instincts of self-preservation, Prime's culture ironically turned this unique attribute back on the humans. They were goaded into a self-destroying atomic war that accomplished Prime's vengeance in a very brief time.
True, a great number of diamonds were destroyed in the holocaust, but as I mentioned, Prime was not at all contaminated with this survival-of-the-individual instinct of his created life-forms.
Rather, he gloated and took immense egotistical pleasure in the destruction of his creations.
When I came upon him that last day in his oxidized condition he had only one regret. He confessed that a single human individual had escaped the radio-active destruction. Blinded and weakened, he was at the point of despair when I scraped the black oxidation from his exterior. It was this last human's death which he named when I asked him the nature of his mission.
He invited me to come along, solely, I suspect, to save him the strenuous task of teleportation of his own mass to the vicinity of the human.
As he bid, I carried him across one ocean, deep into the interior of a continent he called North America. My curiosity was at some pitch to meet a living specimen of Prime's paternity, although I gave him no inkling of my sharp interest.
We found this human, a female, (see chart) near the peak of a mountain. Her abode was a great cave lined with lead, air-tight and littered with mechanical devices to filter the air she breathed and otherwise provide for her survival.
Prime explained that this female had been considered a highly beautiful example of her kind, yet she was also a scientist of some reputation.
Her scientific ability and remarkable foresight were quite apparent from the scrupulous pains she had taken to avoid destruction—since that was her motivation in secreting herself in the wilderness.
Her appearance, however, was anything but thrilling to me. The protuberance that Prime called her head was covered with a sickly yellow tangle of filaments. The organs for sight, hearing, aereation and speaking were unsightly bumps, holes and gashes. I will admit that the way she moved her torso and appendages did have a certain exotic rhythm, but by and large I was unimpressed by her physical appearance.
With my assistance, Prime and I materialized inside her abode without violating the integrity of her air-tight structure. I placed Prime on the female's table (see chart) where she was busily ingesting preserved organic material from an open vessel of alloyed metals.
She gasped, and her visual sockets opened wide. I sensed fear-shock then admiration bordering on ecstasy. She grasped Prime with an appendage and held him up to a source of artificial light.
I fully expected him to strike her dead with the brain-searing power he could command, but did he? No! The worshipful emanations washed over him from the female's mind, and his anger dissipated.
"What a marvelous jewel!" the female exclaimed, little realizing that she was unwittingly protracting her life.
For the first time Prime communicated directly with a human being. He telepathed, "I am, indeed, a fine jewel. Six carats of flawless, blue-white!"
The female's face contorted, and her mind revealed fear again, fear for her sanity and a great confusion. Gradually, she calmed, however, and I could see that in spite of his diminished anger, Prime was enjoying her agitation as well as her admiration.
"You are not mad," he said at length. "I am a diamond, all right, but feast your eyes well, for I have come to destroy you as I have the rest of your ungrateful race."
"Why? Why?" she cried, her appendages trembling and waves of fear beating out. Her eyes seemed to bulge in fascinated terror as she stared at Prime. She couldn't, of course, sense my presence, since she was minus that one critical perceptic.
Prime snapped back at her, "Because you are a race of hypocrites. You professed to love your diamonds, yet you have destroyed them by the thousands in your vandalistic warfare."
The thought was more than she could encompass, so Prime embraced her mind with a telepathic field and patiently revealed the whole, lengthy history of his creation of the human race and its delinquent failure to pay proper respect to its creator.
When she recovered from the overwhelming revelation she threw back her head and exclaimed, "The secret of human life! The eternal goal of the philosophers! And I have learned it!"
She broke into an emotional laugh that defies my powers of description. In it were vestiges of irony, amusement, self-pity and terror, but none of the adoring remorse that Prime had been seeking.
Then suddenly a little corner of her brain blocked itself off from both Prime and me. She said, "But if you destroy me, who will be left to love you and admire you?"
Through some oversight of logic, this had never occurred to Prime, which was indicative of his many deficiencies. Not that his logic had much to recommend it, but at least he might have been consistent.
At the time she spoke thusly she fondled Prime and moved him closer to the light. Attuned as I was to the female through Prime's perceptics, I slowly became entranced with the spell she cast over him.
She said, "I don't doubt that you can destroy me, and perhaps I deserve it. But how proud I am to have custody of the most exquisite diamond in the whole world—even if it is only for a few seconds before I perish."
May I point out at this stage that the female's behavior was now solely motivated by this above-mentioned survival instinct. In the face of almost certain extinction she was mustering every wile and emotional device at her command to influence Prime to spare her insignificant life.
The effect on Prime was fantastic. He flashed cold fire from his facets, and his sensuous delight was a thing of embarrassment.
Yet, in proximity to him as I was, I could not avoid some of the exotic essence of her transparent flattery. I found myself trying to justify Prime's change.
He said at last, "You are quite right, woman. It is fitting that the last human on earth live to pay respect to the creator of her race."
Instantly the female's whole attitude changed. With the realization that she had Prime in her control, she became demanding.
"Of course, I shall require some consideration, too," she said.
"Whatever is necessary to provide for your comfort shall be accomplished," he agreed without hesitation. "What did you have in mind?"
"A mate," she said. "You destroyed my mate in the first Soviet attack. You must give me a mate."
Prime thought that one over. "But then there would be children," he objected, dimly aware that somehow his recent resolve was being subverted.
"Of course," she said. "Many of them. All the more to worship you. And when my mate and I die, we will leave others behind to continue our devotion to you."
"Well, I don't know," Prime said, but there was no longer any doubt in the female's mind—nor in my own.
After all he had endured for the sake of vengeance, Prime was prepared to produce a mate for this female and begin the whole silly business all over again!
At this point I withdrew.
As you can see, this instinct for survival or self-preservation is a fabulously potent factor, and if man is ever allowed loose in the universe it is difficult to foresee where it might end.
In my opinion we are hardly justified in continuing the Life-Charter to the crystalline carbon element in this galaxy. Regardless of Prime's pseudo-brilliance of bio-chemical creation, never in all my travels have I encountered such an egotistical, futile, fickle-minded chucklehead (see chart for equivalent). End of report.
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