“I grieve for you,” Hamilton had answered, “but you had better take it up with Hargrave.”
He had left soon after that. It was evident that those human calculating machines needed nothing from him, and that they knew what they were doing. The project was important-damned important, he thought it was-to investigate what the Universe had been and what it would become. But it was certainly a long-distance matter and he himself would never live to see the end of it. Cliff had told him with a perfectly straight face that they hoped to check their preliminary calculations in a matter of three or three-and-a-half centuries. After that they could hope to build a really worthwhile machine which might tell them things they did not already know.
So he dismissed the matter. He admired the sort of intellectual detachment which would permit men to work on such a scale, but it was not his horse.
The Great Research in its opening phases seemed to fall into half a dozen major projects, some of which interested him more than others because they gave some hope of producing results during his lifetime. Some, however, were almost as colossal as the building of the Grand Eidouraniun. The distribution of life through the physical universe, for example, and the possibility that other, nonhuman intelligences existed somewhere. If there were such, then it was possible, with an extremely high degree of mathematical probability, that some of them, at least, were more advanced than men. In which case they might give Man a “leg up” in his philosophical education. They might have discovered “Why” as well as “How.”
It had been pointed out that it might be extremely dangerous, psychologically, for human beings to encounter such superior creatures. There had been the tragic case of the Australian Aborigines in not too remote historical times-demoralized and finally exterminated by their own sense of inferiority in the presence of the colonizing Anglish.
The investigators serenely accepted the danger; they were not so constituted as to be able to do otherwise.
Hamilton was not sure it was a danger. To some it might be, but he himself could not conceive of a man such as Mordan, for example, losing his morale under any circumstances. In any case it was a long-distance project. First they must reach the stars, which required inventing and building a star-ship. That would take a bit of doing. The great ships which plied the lonely reaches between the planets were simply not fast enough. Some new drive must be found, if the trips were not to take generations for each leg.
That they would find life elsewhere in the universe he was quite sure, although a millennia of exploration might intervene. After all, he considered, the universe was roomy! It had taken Europeans four centuries to spread throughout the two continents of the “New World” — what about a galaxy! But Life they would find. It was not only an inner conviction; it was just short of scientific fact, for it was a tight inference of only one stage from established fact. Arrhenius the Great had set forth the brilliant speculation, sometime around the beginning of the XXth century, that life-potent spores might be carried from planet to planet, from star to star, pushed along by light pressure. The optimum size for motes to be carried along by light pressure happens to be on the same order as the sizes of bacilli. And bacilli spores are practically unkillable-heat, cold, radiation, time-they sleep through it until lodged in a favorable environment. Arrhenius calculated that spores could drift to Alpha Centauri in around nine thousand years-a mere cosmic blink of the eye.
If Arrhenius were right, then the universe was populated, not just the earth. It mattered not whether life had originated first on earth, first elsewhere, or in many different neighborhoods, once started it had to spread. Millions of years before spaceships it had spread-if Arrhenius were right. For spores alone, lodging and multiplying, would infect an entire planet with whatever forms of life were suited to that planet. Protoplasm is protean; any simple protoplasm can become any complex form of life under mutation and selection.
Arrhenius had been spectacularly vindicated, in part, in the early days of interplanetary exploration. Life had been found on all the planets, save Mercury and Pluto; even on Pluto there were signs of feeble, primitive life in the past. Furthermore, protoplasm seemed to be much the same wherever found-incredibly varied but presumably related. It was disappointing not to have found recognizable intelligence in the solar system-it would have been nice to have had neighbors! (The poor degenerate starveling descendants of the once-mighty Builders of Mars can hardly be described as intelligent