Kenneth Gantz - Not in Solitude

Wertz noticed the disorder of his place after Cruzate’s neat workroom. Both benches were cluttered, and most of the jars and impervious flasks on the self-stowing shelves would need careful attention before the take-off. Still, he had his luck. Without his old good luck he might have drudged along for weeks without turning up the Mars isomer. That’s it. I’ll call it the Mars Isomer, he decided. Get a supply of the lichen things back home in good condition and throw a new idea to the annual A.A.A.S. meeting for a change. Dr. Rudolf Wertz of the National Institute will now present a paper on “The Mars Isomer, a Chemical Life Principle.”

He took up the test tube that held his centimeter or two of the isomer, the product of a truly original attack, if he did say so. “I isolated this stuff from the lichen tips. Now watch. He put a small pinch of a yellowish-brown powder on a filter paper. “Hydrous ferric oxide. I brought along a quantity in the natural earthy state on the possibility that the Vaucouleurian theory might be correct, that it is the constituent of the soil of Mars that gives the planet its red color. I wanted to compare the natural Earth substance with the Mars soil, but they don’t quite match. The Mars mineral is more like the amorphous substance we call ferrite, metallic derivatives of the ferric hydroxide Fe2O2(OH)2. Now the lichen type of plant, as you have just said, consists of two dissimilar organisms, a fungus living married with several algae.”

Cruzate said, “Symbiosis.”

“You have the term,” Wertz admitted. “Now, as I understand it, the fungus offers protection from the cold and provides inorganic substances by exuding acids that can decompose what the plant is growing on. The protoplasm of the algae cells at the growing tips manufactures enzymes and organic acids that diffuse through the cell wall into the host material. If the fungus is growing on wood, these digestive chemicals diffuse out into the wood host and break it down into simple sugars. These in turn diffuse into the fungus mycelium and are converted into more fungus. In the lichen the digestive acids, so to speak, can even break down rock as a host to secure what we might call their food. That is correct?”

“But certainly,” Cruzate said. “You put it exactement. ”

“Now on Mars these lichen plants grow in sand and dust. They break down the ferrites in the soil and absorb principally iron and silicates. The Earth-like algae bodies supply oxygen by photosynthesis. You have checked that?”

“Correct.” Cruzate nodded. “And also build up the organic substances.”

“Well, back to our problem. How to account for the extremely rapid growth. The speed at which the green areas expand in the spring has been a puzzle for generations. Now we ourselves have seen them shoot out toward the spacecraft and grow over a hundred yards of bare sand in an hour. Now look.”

Wertz put a pinch of the ocher-colored powder under a large bell glass. “The ferric oxide will serve as a concentrated form of the iron food the Mars lichens find in the soil. I next dampen it with water bearing finely ground silicon dioxide, the pure form of silica. Water is an unknown elixir of life for our Mars lichens accustomed only to the meager H2O they can draw from a trace of mist. At best a light dew is their only experience with water, and they are extremely hydroscopic. Next I replace the bell jar over my souped-up synthetic Mars soil. It has these inlets by which I can introduce an equally souped-up atmosphere.”

He connected a tube running from a small metal gas cylinder. “The atmosphere in the spacecraft is regulated Earth atmosphere, rich in oxygen, such as the Mars lichens have never known.” He turned the petcock at the end of the cylinder for an instant and then closed it again. “This introduces a little more carbon dioxide, about the same as its percentage in the atmosphere of Mars.”

He took up the test tube. “Now, my botanist friend, for the climax of our little drama. I have provided a small bed of highly concentrated lichen fertilizer, so to speak, under an enriched atmosphere.”

Cruzate shrugged. “You make the beaucoup talk. You belong, I say it again, in the Sorbonne lecture salles . This ‘lichen fertilizer,’ I do not comprehend.”

Wertz laughed. “A figure of speech. The silica and the hydrous ferric oxide are very similar to the minerals the Mars lichens decompose in their native sand for their own growth. Only much concentrated. The water seems to work like a catalyst. Just watch.”

He held up the test tube. “In this solution I have concentrated a substance that I’ve been able to extract from the Mars lichen plant. I haven’t been able yet to formulate its exact structure, but it belongs among the carbon compounds and isomers. For the time being I just call it the growth element. As a matter of fact, in spite of the tremendous research in the organic compounds, their practically infinite possibilities have barely begun to be synthesized. All that we know about most of them is that they are theoretically possible.”

Cruzate cleared his throat hesitantly. Wertz ignored him. The demonstration would settle his hash, but really one had to have a little of the background. To attain a reasonable understanding of experimental phenomena, one must be prepared to grapple with principles.

“Let me take one example,” he went on. “The simplest group of carbon compounds is the paraffin hydrocarbons, composed of only carbon and hydrogen. The simplest compound in the series is CH4, with one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms. The next is C2H6, followed by C3H8, then C4H10, and so on. The thing to remember is that with the exception of the first three members of the series, the formula for each compound does not represent a single substance. There are five different substances represented by the formula C6H14 and nine by C7H16. The simpler members of the series have familiar names, like butane for the fourth. But there are two butanes, normal butane and isobutane. They may have the same molecular formula, but they are very different in properties. Even though they are both gases under ordinary conditions, normal butane liquifies at about zero Centigrade, isobutane at about minus 17 degrees. And every chemical compound made with normal butane is different from the substance with the same molecular formula that is made from isobutane. Follow me?”

It didn’t matter. Cruzate was smart enough to know that the other man knew his own field. Wertz went ahead with it, savoring the symmetry of his exposition, glad over the compactness of the explanation. When he really wanted to, he could explain the complex in terms easy enough for anybody. “Such varieties of a compound are called isomers,” he went on, “and for the higher members of even the simple paraffin series chemists have not yet prepared all the possible isomers, each of which, remember, has its own properties, different in at least some fashion from all the other isomers and compounds in the entire range of organic chemistry. Chemists have calculated that there are over three hundred thousand isomers represented by the formula C20H42 and about seventy trillions of isomers—that’s seventy million millions—represented by the formula C40H82. And that’s in only one series of simple carbon compounds. They have not even calculated yet the number of possible carbon substances that result from the isomers of the many series of possible compounds, say with from one to forty carbon atoms and hydrogen and nitrogen and oxygen atoms in all possible combinations. How do we pretend to know what can be? Who knows what mysteries may be among them?”

“It is enough!” Cruzate cried. “Desist. I whirl in the head!”

“Here you are then,” Wertz said, “one more idea, then I will demonstrate what strange properties some of these infinite combinations may conceal. In the Mars lichen I have found an isomer of a carbon compound that has the same property for self-reproduction or self-copying that we find in the protein structure of the sexual genes of Earth life. Now I have established that this carbon-hydrogen-nitrogen-oxygen isomer is a profuse constituent of the body of the Mars lichen, and that it and two related isomers are capable of exploding into an immense multiplication of their own kinds, resulting in the formation of the overall shape and substance of the complete lichen plant. Explosive generation, as I told you. And explosive generation you are about to see.”