Gordon Hardy had insisted on taking the tissue and the apparatus which cherished it with him to the reservation when he was arrested; he had been equally stubborn about taking the living tissue along during the escape in the Chili. Now Mrs. ‘Avidus still lived and grew in the New Frontiers, fifty or sixty pounds of her-blind, deaf, and brainless, but still alive.
Mary Sperling was reducing her size. “Hello, Lazarus,” she greeted him. “Stand back. I’ve got the tank open.”
He watched her slice off excess tissue. “Mary,” he mused, “what keeps that silly thing alive?”
“You’ve got the question inverted,” she answered, not looking up; “the proper form is: why should it die? Why shouldn’t it go on forever?” –
“I wish to the Devil it would die!” came the voice of Dr. Hardy from behind them. “Then we could observe and find out why.” – –
“You’ll never find out why from Mrs. ‘Avidus, boss,” Mary answered, hands and eyes still busy. “The key to the matter is in the gonads-she hasn’t any.”
‘Hummph! What do you know about it?”
“A woman’s intuition. What do you know about it?”
“Nothing, -absolutely nothing!-which puts me ahead of you and your intuition.”
“Maybe. At least,” Mary added slyly, “1 knew you before you were housebroken.”
“A typical female argument. Mary, that lump of muscle cackled and laid eggs before either one of us was born, yet it doesn’t know anything.” He scowled at it. “Lazarus, I’d gladly trade it for one pair of carp. male and female.” –
“Why carp?” asked Lazarus.
“Because carp don’t seem to die. They get killed, or eaten, or starve to death, or succumb to infection, but so far as we know they don’t die.”
“Why not?”
“That’s what I was trying to find out when we were rushed off on this damned safari. They have unusual intestinal flora and it may have something to do with that. But I think it has to do with the fact that they never stop growing.”
Mary said something inaudibly. Hardy said, “What are you muttering about? Another intuition?”
“I said, ‘Amoebas don’t die.’ You said yourself that every amoeba now alive has been alive for, oh, fifty million years or so. Yet they don’t grow indefinitely larger and they certainly can’t have intestinal flora.”
“No guts,” said Lazarus and blinked.
“What a terrible pun, Lazarus. But what I said is true. They don’t die. They just twin and keep on living.”
“Guts or no guts,” Hardy said impatiently, “there may be a structural parallel. But I’m frustrated for lack of experimental subjects. Which reminds me: Lazarus, I’m glad you dropped in. I want you to do me a favor.”
“Speak up. I might be feeling mellow.”
“You’re an interesting case yourself, you know. You didn’t follow our genetic pattern; you anticipated it. I don’t want your body to go into the converter; I want to examine it.”
Lazarus snorted. “‘Sail right with me, bud. But you’d better tell your successor what to look for-you may not live that long. And I’ll bet you anything that you like that nobody’ll find it by poking around in my cadaver!”
The planet they had hoped for was there when they looked for it, green, lush, and young, and looking as much like Earth as another planet could. Not only was it Earthlike but the rest of the system duplicated roughly the pattern of the Solar System-small terrestrial planets near this sun, large Jovian planets farther out. Cosmologists had never been able to account for the Solar System; they had alternated between theories of origin which had failed to stand up and sound mathematico-physical “proofs” that such a system could never have originated in the first place. Yet here was another enough like it to suggest that its paradoxes were not unique, might even be common.
But more startling and even more stimulating and certainly more disturbing was another fact brought out by telescopic observation as they got close to the planet. The planet held life . . , intelligent life . . . civilized life.
Their cities could be seen. Their engineering works, strange in form and purpose, were huge enough to be seen from space just as ours can be seen.