It was the Martian afternoon, as calm and unruffled as it ever was on this planet of controlled climate. A lambent sun was climbing down from the zenith in a cloudless pale blue sky, the rays catching the sheen-faced metal of Mars’s principal city, Didacus.
Quietness, tranquillity, dignity—noise outlawed by the force of science. Men and women went to and fro along the broad avenues or across the parklike open spaces and pedestrian ways. Mute aircraft flashed athwart the sombre heavens and were gone. Peace and contentment: the civilization of Mars at its apex.
Of the countless laboratories scattered about the planet none in Didacus held the importance of the research department, occupying all the top floor of the largest edifice in the city’s heart. There were only four people ever allowed into it—two men and two women, and even they were compelled to undergo and rigorous search before entering or leaving. It was not that the Martian Ruling Clique feared crime or sabotage, but there did remain the anxiety that in inexperienced hands some of the secrets of the great laboratory, and one in particular, might create untold havoc.
For the secret was priceless—nothing less than life eternal.
In charge of this difficult, exacting research was Zintra Caf, a young biochemist, one of the most brilliant in Didacus. With him worked one man who was a lesser luminary—Brin by name—and though he was also a biochemist he had none of the tremendous insight of Zintra Caf.
The two women, Nania and Lefone, were each specialists in their own fields of anatomy and radiotherapy. In a race long since equalled in its sexes they ranked as next in position to Zintra Caf himself.
For three years this laboratory research had been proceeding, beginning with a lowly effort to trace to its primary source the nature of mitogenetic radiation, or “energy of life,” as Zintra Caf called it. Three years of experiment, of transient dazzling successes, of heartbreaking failures, until now——
Zintra Caf straightened up from before the long polished metal bench under the glowing arctolights which, supplemented by daylight, cast a brilliant yet restful glow upon the instruments. He smiled with satisfaction, and noticing this, the one man and two women exchanged pleased glances.
“I believe we have it!” Zintra Caf clenched a lean brown fist and placed it gently upon the electromagnetic apparatus on the bench. “That last circuit you incorporated, Lefone, should give us the exact frequency we want. The most difficult radiation in the universe to master, but we’ve done it!
Zintra Caf paused and looked at his three colleagues in turn. He was young, gaunt-faced, powerful about the chin and mouth, with the dead black hair and heliotrope-coloured eyes of his race. In the males the eye-colouration was striking; in females it had a definite beauty. The two women who now stood beside the bench were also black-haired, their purple eyes gleaming in triumph, the laboratory overalls they wore scarcely concealing the subtle curves of their figures.
The woman Lefone, the radiotherapist, gave a grateful smile.
“I can hardly take the credit for the circuit, Zintra,” she said. “After all, we all worked upon it. It just—happened that I managed to think of a new way of incorporating it. The trouble all along has been that mitogenetic radiation, which is so infinitesimally slight—as of course it must be since it is only given off by the cells of living things—such as seeds, roots, and shoots. Cellular life is the hardest of all to analyse because of its smallness. But now we know that it has the wavebeat of life.”
Zintra Caf nodded. “A radiation emanating from one living cell and stimulating growth in another, yet so minute that none of our scientific instruments could detect it. But now look …”
The quartet became silent for a moment, their purple eyes studying the mitogenetic-oscillograph. Encased in a vacuum-globe, a delicate needle was pulsing back and forth with the monotonous regularity of a metronome.
“The beat of life!” Brin commented. “That is what it is.”
The tall biochemist nodded again and reflected. “There is a beat of life, a rhythm, throughout the entire universe. And by that I mean the micro and macro-universes. Electrons move in waves; sound and light, and the material media, also move in waves. So too, as we see there, does life itself. There we have the heart of all things. With every flick of the needle, mitogenetic radiation is being emitted by that mass of yeast cells at present under the oscillograph pickups.
“And we have you to thank for it, Lefone,” Caf smiled as he gripped the woman’s arm. “Yesterday there was no action in this needle, any more than there had been for three bitter years—but now your new circuit has done the trick. We have now established it as a fact that life-radiation can be transmitted from the most lowly cells into inert matter and give it life in turn. It’s all in the balance. Too much or too little will produce sterility or death. The exact amount, as on the scale reading there, will produce life! Life!”
Zintra Caff turned suddenly, his whole attitude one of intense relief after years of grinding struggle. There was almost gaiety in the way he waved his hands to hundreds of young seedlings standing at attention in thermostatically controlled fibre-beds beside the far wall.
“Not one of them a seed!” he announced proudly. “Each one a piece of apparently dead vegetation from the forest which underwent the mitogenetic treatment and became alive.”
Nania, the woman anatomist, made a comment slowly: “Out of this achievement, Zintra, two possibilities emerge. We can either produce synthesis of life—bring life into what is dead tissue; or we can indefinitely prolong life already in existence.”
Zintra Caf mused, his deeply coloured eyes looking over the equipment and then back to his colleagues.
“As I see it,” he said, “the mystery of mitogenetic radiation means that our race can be forever perpetuated until such time as our planet becomes too old to support life, and all our scientific ingenuity fails to keep it habitable. Given the gift of immortality we shall have no need of synthesis.” He smiled triumphantly. “We have done much, my friends. We have consummated that science of which we are a part. We have overcome the most relentless enemy of all—death!”
Physically and mentally the other three in the laboratory were incapable of realizing the emotional reaction of the moment. That only appeared in the more sensitive mind of Caf. It seemed to him quite prosaic when the woman anatomist posed a straight question.
“I assume you will inform the Ruling Clique as to what we have done?”
“Certainly. And immediately. It is for the Clique to say how the discovery shall be used. We are the scientists, not the rulers—unfortunately,” Caf finished dryly.
The necessity of having to address the Ruling Clique on the progress of ultimate triumph of the research irked Zintra Caf considerably. It was a positive ordeal for a man of his active mentality to have to recount wearyingly details with which he had lived for years—but it had to be done, and in the sombre calm the Elders of Didacus, their powers lying in their genius for government and not for science, listened with respectful attention to all there was to be said.
For an hour Zintra Caf talked, turning now and again for corroboration to the two women and the man seated behind him. His every word was recorded; his every gesture photographed. Until at last he ploughed through the whole mass of data on mitogenesis and its effects, and went into his final peroration.
“In the course of progress, gentlemen, we have overcome every scientific barrier. In my time, in my parents’ time, and my grandparents’ time, we have in turn mastered crime and disease, the atom, and the climate. We have become a race remarkable for its placidity, never touched by the breath of evil motives such as our dim ancestors were. To crown all we now have this—eternal life! I consider it a just reward that we, as masters and scientists, should have life everlasting.”
“Truly spoken,” agreed President Xicus, ruler of the Clique and the city. “There is no doubt that great credit attaches to you and your colleagues for the marvel you have created. But to return to scientific issues: are we to understand that this life energy is capable of being transmitted from a living mass of cells to a dead mass?”
“That is correct, sir,” Caf assented, nodding. “As I have explained, it is a minute radiation given forth by the cells of all living organisms, no matter how simple or how complex, and with the equipment we have devised we can trap this radiation so that it can give eternal life. All that is required is a brief period within the range of the transformers, which steps up the inconceivably minute radiation into normal voltage—and the thing is done.”
“How?” questioned a member of the Clique.
Zintra Caf seethed inwardly at having to repeat so many of his statements. But the Elders of Didacus were not fools: they rarely commented one way or the other upon a scientific issue from merely hearing the details. They had to have every angle and fact—a necessity indeed since they themselves were not scientists.
“We are all of us composed of living cells,” Caf explained, feeling as if he were teaching children. “But as things stand at present each cell has an entity of its own. If one group of cells dies we say in surgical language that gangrene has set in. That alone proves that the cells are interdependent on one another but that they act in their own immediate little sphere. After mitogenetic radiation has been allowed to play on them, however, they lose their individual entity and become vital to each other. In other words, an electrical balance is absorbed whereby, as one cell weakens, its neighbouring cell strengthens it again. Thuswise the perfect balance between anabolism and katabolism is established—probably for all time. In Nature, once a perfect balance has been achieved, it remains, as inevitably . . .
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