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.”