Squee
Edition opening
Contents and reading sections
Squee
by Margaret St. Clair
(illustration by MURPHY)
=There was hope for humanity only if men had learned one lesson--that
some things must not be done, even to win. Had they learned?=
They slept with their feet in each other’s faces, and breathed the
same air over and over again. Except for Neil’s laboratory, which was
well-lighted (Thomas Neil, the son of old sex-linked-virus Neil), they
lived in a perpetual twilight. They never had quite enough to eat, and
the water they drank came from the distillation of their own catabolic
wastes. For these and other bitterer causes, they were acutely
irritable. A dozen quarrels flared up a day. They had been living like
this for nearly three years now, and they would have to go on living
like this for at least a year more, until the time when they got back
to Earth. When. If.
It was Jacobsen who kept them sane. He was a natural clown and mimic,
a big, good-natured, imperturbable man who could play a zither like a
professional musician. Jacobsen had a gift for drawing the quarrels of
the others on himself and dissipating them harmlessly, in the way that
a lightning rod grounds the big bad voltage from the sky with no damage
to anybody. They couldn’t have got along without him. He was also a
brilliant and profound mechanic--an aptitude for whose display the
almost-powerless landing they were going to have to make on earth would
give ample opportunity.
* * * * *
If it was Jacobsen who kept them sane, it was Neil the ship was run
for. His laboratory was the one well-lighted, well-aired, roomy place.
This wasn’t because they liked him. They only saw him for thirty
minutes a day, at meals, but he would easily have won in a contest for
the most hated man on the ship; and on top of that they regarded him
with a sort of loathing, because of whose son he was. But they hoped
he might be able to undo some of the damage his father had done. They
hoped he might be able to get them out of the predicament they, and
everybody else, were in. They knew he was a first-class cytologist.
They hoped.
“What’s Neil trying to do, anyway?” Adams asked one day, when he and
Venner had been playing _Go_ in the dimness for as long as they could
stand. He had asked the question a number of times before, during the
years they had been in space; and he would undoubtedly ask it several
times more before they got home. Three years with the same shipmates
makes conversation repetitive.
“Well, I’m no biologist,” Venner answered. He pushed the _Go_-board
aside and crossed his fingers over his lean diaphragm. “But as I
understand it, he’s trying to make a sort of artificial ovum, an
artificial human egg.” It was the answer he always made when Adams
asked about Neil’s work.
“An artificial egg? How could he possibly do that? How can he turn a
sperm into a human egg?”
* * * * *
“That’s the million-dollar question,” Venner replied heavily. His
stomach rumbled. “But here’s the way it was explained to me: A
spermatozoon has all the chromosomes an ovum has; in a sense, it’s an
ovum stripped down, an ovum without any albumen and with the minimum
of cytoplasm possible. A mature sex-cell--a gamete--has been through
a--a reduction division, and so has only half the number of chromosomes
found in the ordinary body cells. That ordinary number is what they
call the diploid number. A mature spermatozoon, or a mature ovum, has
the haploid number.
“After fertilization occurs, the zygote has the full number of
chromosomes characteristic of the animal’s body cells. It’s diploid
again. All clear so far?”
“More or less.”
“Well, now, suppose you could get two sperms to, unh, sort of
anastomose. Suppose you could supply this new cell--remember, it now
has the _diploid_ number of chromosomes--with albumen, and the same
sort of cytoplasm an ovum has. What you’d have would be essentially a
zygote, a fertilized egg.”
“Unh. Why not work with spermatozoa _before_ the reduction division
takes place? Then you’d have your diploid number of chromosomes without
worrying about getting two sperms to snuggle up to each other and
become one.”
“You could, but it won’t work. The cells aren’t ripe enough; they just
die. I guess the point is that with anything as complicated as a human
being, you have to get the extra set of chromosomes from outside the
same cell. It has to be a little bit like fertilization.”
* * * * *
“If you can call another spermatozoon ‘outside’. Or--why don’t they try
surrounding a mature sperm cell with cytoplasm and so on, and then let
it be fertilized by another sperm? Wouldn’t that work?”
“Neil--he spent all of ten minutes talking to me on this subject
once--Neil said that a mature unastomosed sperm seems almost to fight
off any attempt to surround it with cytoplasm. The way he put it was,
it insists on remembering that it’s a sperm.”
“I wish his old man had remembered it.”
Venner laughed dutifully. “It helps to get the two sperms to anastomose
if the cell wall is a little bit flaccid,” he said. “That’s why Neil
has been doing so much work on sperms from men who have cancer of the
testes. They produce cells that are abnormal in a promising way.”
“Is that so!” For the first time in the routine conversation, Adams
sounded sharply interested. “Why didn’t you tell me? I never heard
that before. Why am I always the last one to know things on this ship?
Anything interesting, you don’t tell _me_.”
“I only heard it a couple of days ago, from Clancy. I thought you’d
heard, too. For Lord’s sake, don’t get so worked up.”
“You’re lying,” Adams said flatly. “Creep around behind my back and
then try to lie out of it, will you? You....”
* * * * *
Venner pushed the _Go_-board aside and confronted him. Both men were
breathing heavily. From the upper bunk where he was sitting--Clancy
slept under him--Jacobsen twanged a burst of notes on his zither.
“_Ain’t no sense,
Sittin’ on a fence.
Lone little sperm in the moonlight,
It’s insane,
Strollin’ down the lane,
Lone little sperm in the moonlight.”_
The tension in the cabin dropped abruptly. After a moment, both men
laughed.
Venner sat down again. Adams stooped and began picking up _Go_-pieces
from the floor. “Can it be done?” he asked when he had them all back on
the board.
“Making an artificial egg? That time he talked to me, Neil said it was
about trying to lift yourself up by your bootstraps while you have a
hundred-pound weight tied on each foot. But I think he’s hopeful; human
sperms seem quite tolerant of albumen derived from Ganymedean insect
eggs.”
“Things work out funny, don’t they,” commented Adams. “Who’d ever have
thought, when they sent out the robot rockets to the further planets
before ... _it_ happened, that soil cores from Ganymede would turn out
to be useful. But there it is.”
“Yeah.... Old sex-linked-virus Neil’s son. But I suppose he knows what
he’s doing. By sending him along, they saved a couple of years in
working on the problem. The insects whose eggs he’s been using aren’t
at all those that were in the soil core the robot rocket brought back.
The ones, I mean, that first attracted the biologists’ attention to
Ganymede. Those were a sort of scale insect, parasitic on Ganymedean
lichens. What Neil’s using now is something more like a sow bug. If he
hadn’t been along, we wouldn’t have known what insects to collect.”
* * * * *
Jacobsen was playing again on his zither. He was touching the strings
in a way that gave the instrument almost the resonance of a guitar.
It was a song he had played once or twice for them before, sad and
romantic, called _A Border Incident_.
The music had turned their thoughts in a less scientific direction.
Half-guiltily--he knew it was a forbidden topic--Venner said, “You
know, I was married.”
“You were lucky,” answered Adams, who had been too young to have a wife.
“Yeah.... We weren’t awfully close to each other. Oh, she used to ask
me what I’d done that day when I got home from work, and I’d tell her.
Stuff like that. But it wasn’t what you’d call a romantic marriage.”
“It was a marriage. You were lucky,” Adams repeated.
“Unhhunh.... We had a couple of kids, a boy and one of the others, but
they were more her kids than they were mine. What I mean is, I never
thought of myself as much of a hand for the women. If she’d died in ...
in the ordinary way, I probably wouldn’t have remarried. But now--it’s
like all the meaning had gone out of life. I don’t know what I’m living
for.”
“Everybody says the same thing,” Adams answered. “Even the ones you
wouldn’t think would miss women much. It’s like daylight, I guess. You
don’t think it matters very much; you can always turn on the electric
lights. But if sunlight stops falling on the Earth, it means the end of
most terrestrial life.”
* * * * *
Jacobsen was singing to his own accompaniment, the words to the song
he had been playing before. “_Spanish is the loving tongue_,” he
sang softly, in his warm, pleasant baritone voice. The beautiful,
dark, loving girl and the soft words she had taught him. And then the
refrain, “_Mi amor, mi corazon_.”
“Stop it, Jacobsen,” Venner said after they had listened for a little
while. “You’ll have us crying into our tea in a minute, thinking.”
There was no unkindness in his voice.
Jacobsen played another verse before he put the zither aside.
“Sometimes it’s a good thing to think,” he said.
It was two days or so after this that Neil, coming in to lunch with the
crew, attracted their attention by his air of supressed excitement. His
normal game-cock aggressiveness seemed to have doubled. His small black
moustache bristled, his teeth and eyeballs had a gleam like glass.
None of them wanted to ask him questions. But by the time the dessert
course--one small sweet biscuit per man--was served, they were all
watching him.
Neil pushed his chair back and got to his feet. “Captain Ambarzumian,”
he said formally. “I suggest you break out the stores of medicinal
liquor. We have something to celebrate.”
Captain Ambarzumian’s normally ruddy color had paled. “Please explain
yourself, Dr. Neil,” he said with equal formality.
“I cannot be quite certain,” Neil replied. He paused for dramatic
effect. “But I believe--it is my sincere belief--that the future of
the race is safe.”
* * * * *
There was a moment of dead silence. Somebody coughed. “The difficulties
still to be overcome are enormous,” Neil continued. “Getting something
as complicated as a human embryo to go through the later stages of its
development _in vitro_ is almost impossible. Almost. We will have to
work very hard. The first human beings we produce from our artificial
egg cells will almost certainly be monsters. But I believe that within
fifty years--perhaps even within twenty-five--young human beings like
ourselves will again walk the surface of our earth.”
Another silence. It was as if they couldn’t assimilate what he had told
them. Then Jacobsen struck a wild burst of notes on his zither; his
face had lit up like a sign-board. “_Mine eyes have seen the glory of
the coming of the Lord!_” he sang with the full strength of his rich
baritone voice.
The leaping exultation of the old words, if not their bellicosity,
expressed what they all felt. By the time Jacobsen came to the
full-throated chorus, they were all singing.
“_Glory, glory, Hallelujah!
Glory, glory, Hallelujah!
Glory, glory, Hallelujah!_”