THE ENGINEER AND THE EXECUTIONER

“My life,” said the engineer. “It’s mine. Can you understand that?”

“I understand,” replied the executioner calmly.

“I created it,” persisted the little man with the spectacles and the unsteady eyes. “I made it, with my own hands. It wasn’t entirely the creation of my own imagination. Other men can take credit for the actual plan, and the theory that allowed them to make the plan, but I made it. I put the genes together, sculptured the chromosomes, and put the initial cells together. I gave the time, the concentration, the determination. The others played with ideas, but I actually built their life-system. I made a dream come true. But something like you can’t possibly understand how I feel about it.”

“I understand,” repeated the robot. His red eyes shone unblinking from his angular head.

The engineer’s name was Gabriel Samarra. The executioner, because he was only a machine, had no name at all.

“Look at it,” said Samarra, waving an arm toward the great concave window that occupied one entire wall of the room. “Look at it and tell me it’s not worth anything. It’s mine, remember. It all grew from what I built. It all evolved from the cells I created. It’s going its own way now. It has been for years—but I put it on that road.”

The man and the robot stared through the glass. Beyond the window was the hollow interior of Asteroid Lamarck.

From space, Lamarck looked like any other asteroid, with crater-scars and jagged crags and waveless lakes of dust, but it was hollow, and inside it was a tightly-sealed, carefully controlled, Earth-simulation environment. It had air and water, and illumination produced by cells that trapped solar energy on the outside of the planetoid and released it again on the inside.

The light was pale and pearly. It waxed and waned as the asteroid turned on its axis. At present it was shining bright and clear; it was the middle of inner-Lamarck’s day.

The light shone upon the edge of a great forest of silver, made up of shimmering elements like great wisps of cobweb. The elements were so slight and filmy that it seemed as if one ought to be able to see a long way through them, but in fact visibility dwindled away within a dozen meters of the observation window.

Half-hidden by the silvery web-work were other growths, of many different colors and forms. There were red ones like sea anemones, which moved their tentacles in a slow, rhythmic dance, as if fishing for prey too tiny to be seen by human eyes. There were pale spheres of lemon yellow, mottled with darker colors, suspended within the framework of the silver filaments. There were tall, ramrod-straight spikes of blue and gold, which grew in geometrically regular clumps at random intervals.

There were things that moved, too—airborne puffballs, and tiny beings like tropical fish. floating in a gigantic bowl. There seemed to be no crawling life: nothing that walked. Everything mobile flew or floated. There was no gravity in the vast chamber. There was no up and down; there was only surface and lumen. It was different in the living-quarters, where a local “gravity-field” was induced by mysterious engines—mysterious, at least, to Gabriel Samarra, who was a genetic engineer, and knew little about any other kind of machinery.

“The life-system is somewhere between community, organism and cell,” said the engineer. “It possesses certain characteristics of each. The method of reproduction employed by the life system is unique. Light is the only thing that comes in from outside, in order to provide the energy that keeps the system in operation. Water, air and minerals are all recycled. There is no more organic matter there than there has ever been. Everything is used and reused as the life-system evolves and improves. As it grows, it changes, and, day by day, it evolves. It was designed to evolve, to mutate and adapt at a terrific pace. The cycle of its elements is a spiral rather than a circle. Nothing ever returns to a former state. Every generation is a new species; nothing ever replicates itself. What I have instituted here is ultra-evolution—evolution that is not generated by natural selection. My life-system displays an alternative kind of evolution, not covered by Darwin’s theory.”

He paused, casting an expectant glance at the robot. The machine did not react.

“It’s the most wonderful thing we have ever made,” continued the little man, dreamily. “It’s the greatest of all our achievements—and I built it. It’s mine.”

“I know,” said the executioner, irrelevantly.

“You don’t know,” said the little man. “What can you know? You’re metal: hard, cold metal. You don’t reproduce. Your kind has no evolution. What do you know about life-systems? You can’t know what it’s like to live and change, to dream and build. How can you claim to know what I mean?”

“I try to understand.”

“You came to destroy it all! You came to send Lamarck toppling into the sun, to burn my world and my life into cinders. You were sent to commit murder. How can a murderer claim to understand life? Life is sacred.”

“I am not a murderer,” said the robot calmly. “My instructions are to remain here while you take my place in the capsule which brought me here. It is programmed to rendezvous with station K6 in one month’s time. You must take your place in the capsule very soon, and activate the procedure for placing yourself in artificial hibernation. You will come to no harm. No one is to die.”

“I’m not talking about the murder of a human,” said the bespectacled man, in a low, petulant voice. “I’m talking about the murder of an entire life-system. They can’t deflect it into the sun. It’s worse than mere murder. It’s worse than genocide—it’s the destruction of an entire Creation.”

“It was considered to be too dangerous to permit Asteroid Lamarck to exist,” quoted the robot. “It was decided that the dangerous experiment begun here should be obliterated with all possible speed, and that no possibility of contamination should be tolerated.”

“Why was it decided?” complained Samarra.

“It was agreed that Asteroid Lamarck harbors a danger potentially capable of threatening life on Earth,” explained the machine. “It is believed that there is a danger of spores capable of crossing space leaking from within the planetoid. It was pointed out that if such an eventuality were to come about, there would be no way of preventing the Lamarck life-system from destroying all life on Earth. The life-system, according to your reports of its nature, is a genetic predator, which could consume all organic matter with which it comes into contact.”

The little man wasn’t really listening. He had heard it all before. He was staring hard through the window, at the silver forest. Little teardrops were leaking into the corners of his eyes. He was not crying for himself, but for the life he had created in Lamarck.

“What are they really afraid of?” he asked, of himself rather than the robot. “Are they afraid that my life might evolve intelligence? That it might become cleverer, better in every way than a man? Are they afraid of being superseded?”

“I know nothing about fear,” said the robot. “I know what I have been told. There is a danger of infection from Asteroid Lamarck. The consequences of such a danger are so terrible that no such danger can be allowed to exist for a moment longer than is inevitable.”

“My life could never reach Earth.”

“It is felt that there is a danger of the evolution of Arrhenius spores.”

“Arrhenius spores,” sneered the little man. “What could Arrhenius know? He died hundreds of years ago. His speculations are nonsense. His supposition that interstellar spores might be responsible for seeding new planets with life was naive and ridiculous. There is no evidence that such spores could ever exist. If the men who sent you used Arrhenius spores as an excuse, then they are fools and liars.”

“Your life-system, if it ever got to Earth, could destroy the planet,” said the robot, patiently. “Every organism here is unique, and each carries two sets of chromosomes. Each set of chromosomes carries a complete genome. One set determines the present form of the organism, the others are attached to gene-sequences that can act as viruses. When an organism reaches senility, the virus-augmented chromosomes pre-empt control of protein synthesis from the organism-chromosomes. Billions and billions of virus particles are produced and the organism dies of its inbuilt diseases. The virus particles are released and are universally infective. Any protein-synthesizing system is open to their attack.

“On infection, the viral chromosomes fuse with the chromosomes of the host. The fused chromosomes induce metamorphic changes in the host body, which mutates serially through a chain of forms, each one of which lives only for a matter of hours or days. Forms that are registered as viable are ‘recorded’ in different chromosome-sets, most of which become dormant, each attached to viral gene-sequences. When the process ceases and an ‘adult’ form of the organism is stabilized, the cycle is completed.

“The important aspect of the life-system is the fact that the virus can potentially infect absolutely any living creature, irrespective of whether or not it is already a part of the life-system. There is no possible immunization.”

The little man nodded. “So you know it all,” he conceded. “You know what it is and how it works—parrot-fashion, at any rate. Your masters have accused me of the Frankensteinian sin of creating a monster that is not only waiting to destroy me but to conquer Earth. Can’t you see how childish and ludicrous it all is?”

“There exists a danger,” said the robot obstinately.

“Utter nonsense! My life-system is absolutely bound to the inside of Asteroid Lamarck. There is no possibility of its ever reaching the exterior. If it did, it could not live. Even a system as versatile as mine could not live out there, without air or water. Only robots can do that. There is no escape from Lamarck, as far as the system is concerned.”

“If, as you have claimed in your reports, the evolution of the Lamarck life-system is directive and improving, then it would be a mistake to limit the presumed capabilities of the system. There is a finite probability that the system will gain access to outer Lamarck, and will evolve a mechanism of extraplanetary dispersal.”

“Arrhenius spores!” spat the little man. “How? Just tell me, how? How can a closed system, inside an asteroid, export spores to Earth, against the pressure of the solar wind? Surely, even the idiots who sent you must realize that Arrhenius spores would be bound to drift outwards, away from Earth.”

“It is impossible to make predictions about the pattern of drift within the solar system,” stated the robot implacably. “I must warn you, Professor Samarra, that time is limited. I have followed my instructions carefully, and have already set the gravity-field device that will reduce the momentum of the asteroid. When the timer is activated, Lamarck will begin its slow spiral into the sun. It is necessary that the capsule detaches before the field is activated, and I am instructed to make certain that you are aboard.”

“I won’t go.”

“You must go. Asteroid Lamarck is to be tipped into the sun. There is no appeal against the decision. You cannot remain here.”

“No appeal,” sneered the genetic engineer. “There’s no appeal because they didn’t dare allow me a voice. There’s no justice in this decision. There’s only fear—the fear of some monstrous ghost. That’s all it is—a crazy, stupid, pathological fear of something they can’t begin to understand or appreciate. Fear that can be made to breed fear, to infect others with fear. Fear that can be used as a lever to make death sentences. They say that some infection might reach Earth. It is there already. Fear infects everything, and its second generation is murder.”

“Fear is a natural defense-mechanism,” said the executioner.

“They’ve passed a death sentence upon you too,” said the genetic engineer.

“I accept the necessity.”

“Is that supposed to make me accept it too? You’re a robot. You don’t place the same value on life that I do. You’re programmed to die. You’re only a machine.”

“Yes,” said the robot, demurely. “I am a machine.”

The little man stared through the glass wall, forcing back the nausea, the frustration—and the fear.

“I won’t go,” he repeated. “It’s my life. It’s everything I’ve done—everything I believe in. I don’t want to die, but I don’t want all this to die either. It’s important to me. I made it. That, you can’t possibly understand.”

“If you say so,” conceded the executioner. “But you must leave now. I have been instructed to ensure that you are placed in the capsule. I have permission to employ discreet force in placing you in a state of artificial hibernation. You cannot refuse.”

The little man turned away from the glass wall, toward the door.

“There is nothing you can do,” said the robot. “It is futile to attempt resistance.”

Samarra stopped and turned his head.

“There are some things I must fetch,” he said. “I will do what you wish, but you must wait a few moments.”

“As you wish,” said the executioner. “You must do whatever you need to do. But I must ask you to hurry. There is little time left.”

The little man left the room, and the robot turned his red eyes to the glass wall. He stood in silent contemplation, watching the silken forest. Beyond and within the silver threadwork—which was all one creature—were other organisms. Some moved; most remained still. It was all very peaceful. The robot watched without curiosity. He was not interested.

The little man returned, having been gone less than three minutes. He was holding a revolver, so heavy that it required both hands. He had small, delicate hands and thin arms.

“What are you going to do?” asked the robot, quietly.

The little man peered through his thin-rimmed spectacles, sighting along the barrel of the gun. It was obviously an unfamiliar experience.

“It will not serve any purpose to shoot me,” said the robot.

“What do you care whether I shoot you or not?” demanded Samarra. His voice was sharp and emotional. “You’re metal. You don’t understand life. You kill, but you don’t know what you’re really doing.”

“I know what it is to exist,” said the robot.

“You exist,” sneered the genetic engineer. “You don’t know what life means. You don’t know what that means”—he pointed at the great window—“to me, to science. You only want to kill. To kill life, to kill knowledge, to kill science. For the sake of fear.”

“Put the gun down, Professor Samarra. There is no way to save the asteroid. If you destroy me, you will only succeed in placing your own life in danger. It would be a futile gesture.” The machine’s gentleness was infuriating.

“Everything’s futile. I’m a condemned man. Whatever I do, it’s a waste of time. I’m a dead man. You’re a dead robot—but you don’t care.”

The executioner remained silent.

The little man raised the gun, and pointed it at one of the robot’s red eyes. For a few moments, man and machine stared at one another. The robot watched impassively as a thin, unsteady finger pressed the trigger of the gun.

The hands that were holding the weapon jerked as the recoil jolted the genetic engineer. There was a loud bang. The bullet clanged off the metal ceiling and ricocheted into the window. The glass did not break.

“It’s pointless,” said the robot softly. Somehow, after the report of the gun, his calmness seemed plaintive.

The little man fired again, squeezing the muscles round his eyes and mouth as he struggled to keep his hands still. The bullet splashed the robot’s electronic eye into tiny red fragments. The metal man moaned, and toppled over, backwards. There was a moment when the balance adjustment in his double-jointed knees compensated for the impact, and held the robot in a backward kneeling position. Then the moaning ended in a sharp gasp, and the engineer winced as the robot fell full length on to the floor.

The fallen robot uttered what sounded very like a laugh, rattling harshly out of the uncoordinated vocal apparatus. The engineer stared at the crumpled heap of metal. It was no longer a parody of a human form. It was just metal. It was dead.

The little man walked slowly over to the large window. He fired from the waist, gunfighter style. The bullet rebounded from the glass and grazed his thigh. His face went pale, and he winced, but he did not fall down. He fired three more times, at the same spot. At the third attempt the glass cracked, but there was still no breach in the wall.

The engineer felt tears easing from the corners of his eyes, and a trickle of blood on his leg. He smashed the butt of the gun into the glass, again and again. The cracks spread, and finally the window gave up the fight and shattered.

Once the gap was there, it was not very difficult to enlarge it. The little man allowed the artificial gravity of the laboratory to pull him to the floor, resting his injured leg, while he chipped away at the lower edge of the hole, until he had made a doorway in the wall.

He crawled into the world of his life-system. Once there, beyond the scope of the gravity-field, his leg stopped hurting him, and his body was filled with an exhilarating buoyancy.

He breathed the air, and imagined that he found it cleaner and fresher than the cold, sterile air of his own quarters. He felt nothing, but he knew that in the air he breathed, and through the wound in his leg, virus-particles were invading his body.

He pushed himself away from the window, in order to get away from the murdered robot, and found that he could move with amazing rapidity and with little expenditure of effort. The geneticist wanted to leave the window far behind, because it was a window into a world that had sent an executioner to take away his Creation. He grabbed at spongy alien flesh, and used the leverage to pull himself further and further into the body of the silver forest, and on, and on.

He found another forest—another single being with many individual aspects. This one was a conglomeration of tree-forms, which consisted of twisted, many-branched stalks, each of which seemed to have arisen by a process of bifurcation and spiraling away of elements from a single point of origin. Each of the branches terminated in a small, eye-like spheroid.

The branches were of equal thickness, and of a glass-like smoothness and hardness. At first sight, the entire forest seemed petrified, but there was life here in abundance, and growth. Nothing ever petrified in the Lamarck life-system. Nothing ever really died.

Within the globes at the ends of the branches, the engineer could perceive movement, and when he stopped to look more closely, he saw a shifting and pouring like swirling smoke, which could only be cytoplasmic streaming. He perceived darker regions that were nuclei and organelles. He concluded that the spheroids were the living elements of a colonial being or hive, and that they constructed the stalks bearing them aloft from purely inorganic matter.

Then he pulled himself on, half-flying through the small forest, and into another kind of forest, and another. He had lost sight of the smashed window, and he could not see any of the batteries of solar cells that were the only other evidence of human interference with the Lamarck life-system. He was alone, a stranger in the world he had made. He floated to a stop, and sank slowly on to the carpet of tiny unique organisms. He lay there, exhausted, listening to the beating of his heart and admiring the wonders that his genetic engineering skill had produced.

There was a strange lurching sensation, and his head reeled with sudden dizziness. The gravitational wrench was gone within a few seconds, and then his weightlessness was restored, but he knew that the device the robot had brought to tip Lamarck into the sun had been activated. There had been no way to prevent its activation. It was all over now; he and his life-system were doomed to die together. He was overwhelmed by a sense of tragedy, and he mourned.

He was beginning to feel sick and feverish. His body was trying—hopelessly—to mobilize its defenses against multitudinous infections.

He saw a giant plant, not far off, which must have covered a much larger area of ground than any of the so-called forests. It was of such complexity that it was built in tiers in the air. The lowest layer consisted of a dense tangle of light-colored tendrils of an even continuity, not unlike the filaments of the silken forest. The slender threads were woven into cushions of varying density. Above that region there was a looser serial carpet of thicker elements, which were darker in color but of a similar even texture. The threads stirred gently, and appeared to be very flexible. From that stratum extended towers of small spherical elements, held vertical by the pressure of inner turgor. Those spherical cells were being continually produced by budding from the filaments. The topmost spheres continually lost the adhesion binding them to the mass, and drifted away, very slowly, dipping and soaring on gentle air-currents. Eventually, each one exploded into a cloud of invisibly small particles.

In the opposite direction, the engineer could see another vast growth, which had the appearance of a tree bearing fruits that were precious stones. The growth arose from a deep bed of slime—a great morass, which would have seemed hostile to life had it not been part of the Lamarck life-system. When he squinted, the little man could perceive thousands of rod-like corpuscles moving randomly within the slime-body.

The tree itself was slender and extremely beautiful in the manner of its curving and branching. The branches were translucent, but not wholly clear, for at certain points they contained encapsulated rod-bodies, entombed like flies in amber. The engineer imagined that the tree was formed of crystalline slime. At the tip of each branch was a large spherical or elliptical jewel, each enclosed by a thin membrane. There was movement within each gem, and they looked like the many faceted eyes of some strange beast.

The engineer looked, and marveled, and loved.

* * * * * * *

The engineer slept, and while he slept he died.

The viruses worked within him. They invaded cells, penetrated nuclei. They fused with his chromosomes, and pre-empted protein production within the corpse—for the cells did not die all at the same time, and there were processes of life even within a dead man. The viruses had killed, but even while they were killing, they began rebuilding and regenerating. The passenger chromosomes carried by the viruses began an elaborate mating-dance with the forty-six human chromosomes. The DNA within them began to undergo chemical metamorphosis as bases shifted and genes were remodeled.

As new genotypes were created, they mutated and replicated. The generation of the new entity that was being born, phoenix-like, from the carcass of Gabriel Samarra was a gradual and unsteady process. There was much in the engineer’s genes that was entirely new to the Lamarck life-system, and although there was nothing in that system capable of ‘knowing’ or ‘thinking,’ there was, at the biochemical level, a process of discovery unfolding. As Lamarck’s ecosphere absorbed the hopeful monster that had somehow erupted into it from another world, it obtained the potential for an evolutionary leap of marvelous scope.

Had Gabriel Samarra been able to guess that this would happen, he would have been rapt with joy. In godlike fashion, he had made the ultimate gift to his Creation—he had donated his substance, his power, his inner fire. He was his own Prometheus, his own Christ.

In conjunction with chemical metamorphosis came physical change. The body of the genetic engineer began to flow and dissolve. A new being was forming inside the old, and was growing within it, feeding on its latency as well as its flesh. The process that was going on inside the corpse of the little man was more complex than the elementary mode of genetic exchange the engineer had initially incorporated into the life-system at the time of its creation. The rapidity of the life-system’s evolution had increased the speed, the smoothness, and the efficiency of its metamorphoses considerably.

The new being absorbed the engineer, and came slowly to the first of its many maturities.

The body of the little man had lost its substance. The face widened into a skull-grin, and the ridiculous pair of spectacles lay lop-sided across the gleaming white bridge of the crumbling nose. The brain was completely gone from the skull, and the whole of the lower abdomen gradually disappeared. The legs decayed into thin ropes of wiry muscle. The ribs were reduced to tiny studs attached to what had once been the spine. Only organic dust remained where the heart and lungs had once been.

Above the corpse, a winged thing hovered, bat-like, testing its strength. It was small-bodied but large-skulled. It had a tiny wizened face, without eyes, but which nevertheless retained some faint echo of human expression. The face moved continuously, as if experiencing unknown emotions, and the creature made a small, thin sound like a rattling laugh.

It flew away from the remains of its ‘father’, zooming through the weird forests of inner Lamarck in great circles. Finally, it found the silver forest, and settled on a branch very near to the smashed glass wall. It lay still. It had never eaten. It was not even equipped to eat. It was already changing again into something new, and it had many changes yet to undergo, and many cousins yet to meet.

* * * * * * *

In time, the plants of inner Lamarck passed through the doorway the engineer had made for them. They ‘explored’ his laboratories, his library, his bedroom, and his office. They slipped under doors and through keyholes. Things grew upon the inert mass of the robot, consuming the plastics and synthetic proteins in his body. In due course, they consumed the metal, too. There was only one place that the organisms could not easily reach, and that was the world of outer Lamarck, beyond the great iron air-lock that had neither crack nor key.

Organisms ‘died’, and were ‘reborn’. They were changing, ever changing. New types of creature formed around and on the iron door—entities that built their cell walls out of pure iron. With vegetable efficiency, they began to dissolve the airlock.

All kinds of new winged creatures evolved within the gravity-field of Samarra’s living quarters. Crawling creatures—or, at least, clinging creatures—made their first appearance in inner Lamarck. They experimented with endothermy and exothermy, with chitin and with bone, with blood of many colors. They lived and passed in legions, forever sprinkling tiny offspring from strange organs. Sphincters pulsed and pulsed, and every pulse-beat was a measure of the inventiveness of Samarra’s Creation.

Millions of tiny organic motes floated in the air, far too light for the weak gravity to pull them to the ground. The air within the lumen of the asteroid also became filled with them, and their effect upon the silvery forests was remarkable. The entire ecosphere became unquiet with constant mutation. Everywhere there was movement, catalysis, metastatis. Having absorbed the corpus of its creator, the life-system on inner Lamarck had become fervent with ambition, biochemically inspired by that unprecedented martyrdom.

In the months that followed, Asteroid Lamarck spiraled slowly inwards toward the sun. It crossed the orbit of Mars, the orbit of the Earth, and the orbit of Venus, but it was still tens of millions of miles from the sun when pinpricks first began to appear in the outer airlock door. By that time, the inner door was completely gone. Air began to seep away, slowly at first, but with increasing rapidity as the holes were enlarged.

Like all the other creatures of the Lamarck life-system, the iron-eaters were fast and efficient. The seepage ultimately became a rush. As it erupted into the void, the air took tiny particles produced in thousands of millions by all manner of exotic organisms.

Lamarck was far too small to hold the atmosphere that flooded out into the desolation of its outer surface. The air was lost, and the particles with it. While Lamarck plunged on towards the sun, in the ever-decreasing spiral, it left behind a long, long trail of grey dust. Of every million micro-organisms, only a bare handful could function as Arrhenius spores, but there were so very many millions of particles.

The few cells that were viable even in the extreme conditions began to drift lazily on the hot solar wind, carrying their infinitely precious cargo of gluttonous chromosomes—the gift of a new Creation—slowly outwards....toward the orbit of Earth.