Kenneth Gantz - Not in Solitude

“The ‘subject’ of botany,” Cruzate loved to say, pronouncing the word sujet , as in French, when he was excited, “the sujet de botany is like the drama of Racine. La botanique she is classique . She has the order. But also she has the poetry. What surprise! What variation of form and theme!”

What the guy really meant, Wertz supposed, was that plant life—it’s a wonder he didn’t call it the vegetable kingdom, or whatever the French for that would be—what he meant was that plant life is capable of reduction to reasonably systematic classification but displays a wide spectrum of deviation from the systematic norms. The man was provincial. Consider the carbon compounds and their isomers, endless, almost mathematically infinite in their number and their diversity of properties. Cruzate knew too much botany and not enough anything else. Even so, you couldn’t help liking the little guy a lot.

“Why does a Spaniard like you talk French when you get mad?” he asked him.

“I have tell you, I have tell every man on this madman’s venture I am so blindly vain to adopt, I have tell you all from the dawn to the dark, Spanish I am not. My name, it is Spanish. My father’s father, he was Spanish, but my father and my mother and I, even one named José Ruiz Cruzate after my father’s father, became born in the glorious city of Paris, where I am even now, if not for my insufferable pride in my poor attainments and the blandishments of you Americans. Paris! Not canned up like the herring in an impossible place with the fear of the machinery trouble and the listening to the talk of the nonsense. And why do I speak French? I know no Spanish for my native tongue. You Americans, perhaps with your atomic drives and your United States Air Force and your Expedition Mars you have better reason for a man to be speaking French than it is his own native tongue?”

“Okay, Ruiz,” Wertz told him, “I only wanted to hear you explode. Now what don’t you like about the idea, except that it’s a chemical concept instead of biological?”

“ Non! ” Cruzate shouted. “It is you who do not understand. Not I. It is impossible. You do not comprehend either the lichen or the life.”

“You want to tell me why they grow over more than a mile of bare dust in a day?”

Cruzate threw the lichen branch back on the bench. “You want to tell me why the spring corn breaks through the soil crust, to come out for the sun?” He shrugged dramatically. “ Non , my friend, we see these things, we describe them, we give them the names, but let us not ask ourselves why they come to be. That is the way of things. Why does a man become old? Why does the stone fall? Perhaps it should likewise fly up? You find the answer in your test tubes? Non . You tell me only that the stone falls. You tell me only that it falls in such a way.”

Wertz creaked the chair back. “You and I are going to have to have a talk about operational analysis one of these days. You’re talking words. Your distinctions are verbal. The distinctions I would like to make are distinctions in the understanding of activity of one kind or another. In any situation upon which we direct our inquiry, a complete analysis of the activity involved would satisfy our inquiry. Maybe there are other things to analyze than activity, but they have not proved necessary for our purposes. Take the question of meanings. If I want to know the meaning of a term I wish to use, I think I must know the conditions under which I will use it. If I want to know the meaning of a term you use, I have to know the conditions that caused you to use it. So I say meanings are operational. They grow out of activities. Don’t talk to me about ‘life’ as if it could exist isolated and pure, like a substance. Talk to me about the activities you want to associate and characterize by the term ‘living,’ which is therefore itself a term naming an activity.”

Cruzate exploded a bah ! “You give me the headache. You should be in the Sorbonne.”

“Okay,” Wertz said, “I’ll split hairs with you. You tell me why you’re so sure these things have Earth-like life; then, I’ll tell you how they act. Once we see what activity the term ‘growth’ describes here on Mars in the case of the Mars lichens, perhaps we can also discuss the terms ‘living’ and ‘generation’ more calmly.”

Cruzate exclaimed, “So now we play the game! I tell you what you already know. I describe the lichen plant. Then you tell me I am wrong, because these lichens are different. That I already know.” His voice was climbing toward the Frenchman’s octave. ‘I know also they are of the lichen family. Any botanist recognize these thing at once as a variety of lichen, Ascomycetous fungus living symbiotically with protococcalous algae. Fruticose thallus body, erect and freely branching, like Cladonia , the reindeer moss, except very much more large and more coarse. A first-year student recognize it immediately. Thus are the principles of plant life exhibited here in another world, even as your elements and compounds are to be found the same.”

“Except that there are countless millions of possible chemical compounds and combinations, few of which we know naturally on Earth—or here. Sure, we’ve found a fungus-like body drawing its sustenance from the chemical soil in a lichen-like manner, breaking down the compound of the soil with lichen-like acids exuded through the mycelium-like sheath of the thallus, as you call it. Sure, there are chlorophyll-bearing, plant-like cells captive within the plant to supply the photosynthesis. The whole thing looks like a lichen. Superficially it acts like a lichen in many ways, but make no mistake, it’s not what you call a lichen at all in its most significant activity. I mean its growth and reproduction. Or have you found the customary spores and sex organs?”

“It may be they are characteristic of another season. By analogy the plant should have them.”

“Look, Ruiz, how many planets in the solar system? How do we know? We don’t. We count those we observe. We don’t establish an ideal number in our minds, like the ancients, and say there are five, or some other number that fits a harmony of the spheres. We count them. Likewise there are no sex organs or no spores until we observe them. You can’t establish a phenomenon by analogy with a preconceived pattern. You have to establish it experimentally.”

“It may be that you have established your explosive generation experimentally? Is it not more likely these plants have what we call the fast life and convert the soil food into the lichen cells with a great quickness? It is common to observe the mycelium of a fungus to grow across the entire field of the microscope while we watch it. In forty-eight hours a speck of fast-growing fungus can advance at a rate of 1/8000 inch a minute, a rapidity incredible. Every advancing cell, it can put out a new side branch every thirty to forty minutes, and each branch, it can advance at the same rate and put out new branches. In twenty-four hours the fungus colony has produce one half mile of mycelium strands. In forty-eight hours it has produce the hundreds of miles of cells. By the analogy why can we not expect these big lichens to grow in large size, as the microscopic Earth fungi can grow in the miniature?”

Wertz said, “Look, Ruiz, just as I told you, you’re talking in words. You can’t predict events by analogy.” He got up on his feet, the old soreness bearing out against the base of his spine. He was going to get a regular program of exercise going when he got back to Earth and put himself back in some semblance of shape. There was always the threat of diabetes to the thickset man who let himself get fat. Martha would have to quit making so many biscuits and good fried meat gravy. A man couldn’t help stuffing. But a man ought to do something for himself besides live in a laboratory. Had been almost ten years since he had even so much as played a game of golf. “Ruiz,” he said, “come down to my lab. I want to show you something.”