"As I have said, I don't really know. I can only guess. If my
suspicion is right we shall save civilization from a horrible
destruction."
The Captain looked incredulous. "You're pulling my leg for what Ole and
I did to yours in San Francisco. When did you find out that we are a
gang of anointed crusaders prancing forth to make the world safe for
democracy?"
"We shall not make it safe for democracy, or for aristocracy, or for
socialism, or for any other pet creed. What we shall make the world
safe for is life itself. I am serious. This is the greatest adventure.
It was on the slaughter beach that I first definitely recognized
something fundamentally evil in all the strange things we have seen
so far. The second definite hint came from that black rock over which
Drake stumbled."
"The inscriptions on it?" Ole asked sagaciously.
"No. The rock itself gave the clue. Drake, have you a piece of the one
you chipped yesterday?"
Drake produced a small fragment of the black rock. Lane handed it to
the Captain.
"You were trained as a mining engineer, Anderson. Even twenty years of
whales can't have made you forget all the simplest things in elementary
geology. Take a good look at that chunk of rock and tell me what you
think it is. Here's my magnifying glass."
The Captain studied the fragment long and curiously.
"I don't want to make a fool of myself," he said at last, handing back
the glass and rock.
"Go ahead. What is the stuff? I'm not trying to trap you."
"Well, Doctor, either I have forgotten all I ever knew or that stuff
isn't rock at all."
"If it isn't rock, what is it?"
"Manufactured, I should say--some artificial stone, if you like, or a
queer sort of cement."
"Precisely."
"Well, what of it?"
"Doesn't it strike you as remarkable that millions upon millions
of tons of artificial cement, scribbled over with inscriptions,
should exist on a continent that died before America was born? The
inscriptions alone would not be so mysterious. Races without number, I
am convinced, have lived, died and been forgotten since the beginning
of time. The archaean rocks are an unread history. But that any race
should pave vast areas of its dwelling place with an unimaginable mass
of artificial cement as hard as diamond, is a thing for which history
has no parallel. It is unique."
"You are right," Ole agreed. "No race known ever paved more than ten
acres in one place. The ancient Babylonians--"
"Shut up, Ole. Go on, Doctor."
"Well, that is about all. Drake can tell the rest better."
"But you haven't said yet what made you bite in San Francisco."
"Your pickled reptile."
"That won't go. You have just said that all your junk isn't worth half
a cent compared to the real thing you are after."
"I am after my life's ambition. Does that satisfy you?"
"Perfectly. What is your life's ambition?"
The Doctor laughed. "You are a greater sea lawyer than Ole. I may as
well give you the whole story and be done with it. Then Drake can tell
you something worth hearing."
He paused for a moment, selecting the few facts necessary.
"It all began," he resumed, "when I was about ten years old. An aunt
gave me for Christmas a copy of that remarkable scientific romance by
Mary Shelley--the wife of the poet--based on the artificial creation of
life."
"I've read it," Ole interrupted eagerly. "It's a peach. Just like a
nightmare. '_Frankenstein_' is the name of the book."
"Most readers with any brains at all enjoy the story. If nothing
else it is imaginative, and that's a great deal in a world of prosy,
oversexed bores. Well, that book determined the course of my life. You
remember, Ole, how the hero of the story creates a living creature out
of chemicals. This creature was no mere amoeba, but a complex, highly
organized, half-human monstrosity.
"It is nothing against Mrs. Shelley's fascinating tale to state that
today we know definitely that such a thing is impossible. By merely
mixing together chemicals as her hero did it is not feasible to create
a complex, highly organized animal.
"On the other hand it _may_ be possible to create out of chemicals a
colloid--a sort of jelly or gluelike substance--having some of the
essential properties of living matter. Although thus far no chemist or
biologist has actually done this, it is not a sheer impossibility. If
it could be done, and this is what I wish to emphasize, it would be
an incomparably easier feat than the one which is the basis of Mrs.
Shelley's story.
"We can see the relative difficulty of the two by an example from
another field. The first savages killed one another by hurling stones
with their bare hands. We destroy one another wholesale by--among
other ingenious and devilish ways--exceedingly complicated machines.
There is a vastly greater gap between a gluelike substance having
some resemblance to living matter, and the simplest organized living
creature, than exists between a lump of stone hurtling through the air
and a torpedo directed by wireless.
"All this by the way. The significant thing for me in Mrs. Shelley's
book is that it awoke my imagination when I was ten years old. I
determined to become a scientist. The creation of life was to be my
life's ambition. This, I believe, is the greatest adventure.
"Then later, learning something of science while picking up an
education in odd hours, I saw clearly that I was a million miles from
my goal. And still later, digging deeper into the natural sciences, I
realized that my ambition was a fantastic dream.
"I saw then, and I see now, that if life is to be created by human
beings using purely artificial means it will not be in our generation,
nor in our century, nor perhaps in the next two centuries. That it will
be done eventually I have not the slightest doubt. But thus far we have
not succeeded even in stating the problem precisely.
"When we come to know exactly what it is that we are seeking we
shall find it. At present we lack even a definition of life that is
scientific and more than a scholastic jumble of words. Consequently,
although many of us may feel that we know what we are looking for,
few indeed have the training, the ability and the scientific tact to
seek it intelligently. Men who today search for the origin of life
are hopeless cranks in a class with circle squarers and inventors of
perpetual motion.
"Having realized early that my first ambition was a chimera, I turned
to more natural and far more useful investigations. I do not regret
the time lost in the vain pursuit of unattainable knowledge. It was
not indeed lost, for it was my apprenticeship to true science. Most of
my work since has been in the laws governing the growth and decay of
animals, and, as a by-product, the study of such diseases as depend
upon abnormal growth. I need not bore you with any of this.
"I said that I abandoned my quest for life. That is not strictly true.
It is impossible to eradicate from the mind the hopes, desires and
fears of childhood and adolescence. Although in maturity I put away all
thought of ever directly attacking the problem of life, my subconscious
habits of thought were unalterably fixed in my youth. My psychology
is what it was and I yet am driven against my will, for the most part
subconsciously, to think incessantly of the problem of life.
"All my work, I sometimes think, has been aimed at my first ambition.
It frequently gives me a shock to discover that what I am truly
interested in doing is not the artificial duplication of cancerous
growths, but the out and out creation of living cells. It is almost
as if some familiar spirit keeps whispering 'do this, and in spite
of yourself you will find what you are looking for,' and I, not
consciously hearing the whisper do as I am directed. This of course is
merely my own repressed desire taking its revenge.
"Again I do not regret. For my work has led to at least three positive
facts recognized by competent authorities as contributions of real
value to our knowledge and control of certain diseases.
"Now, Anderson, you will ask what all this has to do with our
expedition. In one word, everything. But for my repressed ambition you
would never have obtained one cent toward expenses, I am not interested
in oil or in any other form of wealth. I would not walk across this
cabin to make a million dollars. For I have all the money that is good
for myself and Edith. More would be a nuisance. Had you come to me
without that pickled reptile I should have shown you the door at once.
"You remember how at first I mistook your find for a young specimen of
a known prehistoric animal. It is true that no fossil yet discovered
has both scales and feathers. There is a 'missing link' in the chain
from reptiles to birds no less than in that from anthropoids to men.
But for all that your monster did not at first look wholly anomalous.
It might, in short, have been a natural animal. And that is what I at
first thought it was.
"Then, while you were talking of your adventures, I began to think. If
you were an ex-zoölogist instead of an ex-mining engineer, I could
make my next point--the crux of the whole story--much clearer.
"Thinking over your specimen and looking more closely at it, I
recognized that the monster was indeed a monster, a thing never created
and evolved by nature. There were certain astounding differences
between the obvious anatomy of the creature and any conceivable product
of orderly evolution.
"A frog will not evolve into a horse no matter how much time you give
him. From now to the end of eternity all the descendants of frogs will
retain certain specific peculiarities of structure which will easily
differentiate them from horses. At no point of the story will the two
become confused. It will be possible a million years hence for any
trained scientist to say at a glance that the descendants of our frogs
and of our horses living in his day, or fossilized in the rocks of his
time, never had a common ancestor.
"And so it was with your monster. At first it might have been a missing
link between the birds and the reptiles. Closer inspection showed that
none of its ancestors were related to reptiles and that none of its
descendants would ever evolve into birds. And it fitted nowhere else
into the scheme of evolution.
"Nor was it a deformity. A kitten with three eyes is still a young
cat for all its eyes. A man with six fingers on his right hand still
belongs to the family of men. Mere abnormality does not exclude a freak
from the family to which it otherwise would belong. Your queer find,
Anderson, was no deformed reptile, nor was it a freak bird, 'thrust
into the world before its time but half made up.'
"There remained but one rational conclusion. The thing was no creation
of nature but the result of a conscious attempt to imitate nature.
Either that monster had been created whole and alive by intelligent
beings, or it was the descendant of remote ancestors so created.
"The first possibility was out of the question. Had the monster been
recently created we should have had another Frankenstein. I know enough
of the present state of biology to be certain that such a complete
creation of a highly complex organism today is impossible.
"There remained the alternative. Your monster was the descendant of
inconceivably remote ancestors, and those ancestors, incomparably
simpler in structure, had been created by conscious, intelligent beings.
"Evolution had done the rest. Shaping the initial, simple organism
through millions of years, time and evolution had gradually complicated
its simplicity into a highly developed organism.
"The first creation probably was a mere speck of living matter, perhaps
a single cell, and this full-blown monster of yours was the slow flower
of ages blooming from that first almost formless seed.
"Such was my guess while you sat talking of the monsters boiling up in
oil from the floor of the ocean. I decided to chance your veracity and
see for myself.
"On the slaughter beach, you remember, I pointed out how all those
dead monsters differed radically, in spite of superficial resemblances,
from their nearest types in the fossil beds. The number and arrangement
of one monster's teeth I emphasized as particularly significant. Nature
does not cram one man's mouth full with eighty teeth and give his
neighbor only sixteen. She does nothing by violent jumps that can be
seen by a blind man. Her changes are minute. That is my second point.
"On that beach another thought disturbed me greatly. All those monsters
gave me the impression of being badly botched jobs. Suppose you were
aiming to create a harmless toad and achieved a deadly rattlesnake. You
wouldn't consider yourself a master of the technique of life, would
you? Well, neither can the beings whose scientific blundering millions
of years ago started the evolution of all those hideous monsters on the
beach.
"What those misguided experimenters intended to do I don't know.
What they did start, I do know, and I pronounce its fruit an obscene
abomination. Not one of those huge creatures had intelligence above a
worm's and not one of them ever could be of any possible value to the
world. They are merely gigantic feeding, breeding and fighting machines
with just a spark of intelligence--enough to make them exceedingly
dangerous and no more.
"I suspect that all those huge brutes are, as I have tried to make
clear, the result of minute seeds first created and sown millions of
years ago. Further, I believe that nature, taking the artificially
created seeds, has grown from them, through countless mutations, the
changing shapes whose perfected, dangerous uselessness infests the
secret places of this continent. The beginning was unnatural, the
development and its conclusion are the work of natural laws.
"Finally I believe that the original creators of those monstrosities
realized when it was too late what they were doing, foresaw its
consequences, became terrified, tried to undo their blundering work
and perished in a war to destroy their own creations. This, however,
belongs to Drake's part of the investigation. He can tell it better
than I.
"Now last, let me say exactly what I expect to get from this
expedition. I hope from close study of the anatomy, habits and
environment of these strange creatures to rediscover their origin.
See what this implies. If I am successful I shall be able to create
artificially a true living seed of life. Whether or not I shall wish to
do so depends upon what we discover in the next few days.
"Mind, I am not expecting to make a gigantic lizard out of dead slime
or anything of that fantastic sort. But I do hope to rediscover the
lost secret which started all those monstrosities. A mere speck of
living matter, a single cell visible only under a high power microscope
is all that I shall achieve, if anything. For I am convinced that the
originators of that aborted creation on the beach achieved no more.
One spark starts the forest fire; their invisible specks of artificial
living matter started the self-imposed catastrophe that wiped them out."
"But Doctor," Ole objected, "if they only made those very small specks
of living matter how were they wiped out? You say it took millions of
years to evolve dangerous animals out of those bad beginnings. The
things were too small, according to you, to bother a flea. If I get
your meaning they were nothing better than pieces of jelly invisible to
the naked eye. How could such things fight anybody?"
"That is what I hope to find out, definitely and in detail. Drake and I
already have a rational theory."
"Is it your theory that they were disease germs when first created?"
"No, Ole, nothing so romantic. As I tried to make plain a robin's egg
will never hatch crocodiles. Nor will a disease germ ever evolve into a
three hundred foot brute with a head and body like a bad dream."
"Then what is your theory?"
"On that point, if I understand your question, I have none. Before
indulging in hypotheses on the origin of life I shall find out the
facts."
"Listen, Doctor. I have a theory. Those things were first created--"
"Oh, pipe down, Ole." The Captain was back on the job. "Now Drake, let
us have your side of it."
"It is so late," Drake yawned, "that I shall have to beg off this time.
We start at five in the morning. Good-night, everybody."
16