“No, Paul,” Chatvieux said. “Not with one that formidable. The panatropes make adaptations, not gods. They take human germ-cells—in this case, our own, since our bank was wiped out in the crash—and modify them genetically toward those of creatures who can live in any reasonable environment. The result will be manlike, and intelligent. It usually shows the donors’ personality patterns, too, since the modifications are usually made in the morphology, not mind, of the resulting individual.
“But we can’t transmit memory. The adapted man is worse than a child in his new environment. He has no history, no techniques, no precedents, not even a language. In the usual colonization project, the seeding teams more or less take him through elementary school before they leave the planet to him, but we won’t survive long enough to give such instruction. We’ll have to design our colonists with plenty of built-in protections and locate them in the most favorable environment possible, so that some of them will survive learning by experience alone.”
The pilot thought about it, but nothing occurred to him which did not make the disaster seem realer and more intimate with each passing second. Joan Heath moved slightly closer to him. “One of the new creatures can have my personality pattern, but it won’t be able to remember being me. Is that right?”
“That’s right. In the present situation we’ll probably make our colonists haploid, so that some of them, perhaps many, will have a heredity traceable to you alone. There may be just the faintest of residuums of identity—panatropy’s given us some data to support the old Jungian notion of ancestral memory. But we’re all going to die on Hydrot, Paul, as self-conscious persons. There’s no avoiding that. Somewhere we’ll leave behind people who behave as we would, think and feel as we would, but who won’t remember us—or the Earth.”
The pilot said nothing more.
“Saltonstall, what do you recommend as a form?”
The panatropist pulled reflectively at his nose. “Webbed extremities, of course, with thumbs and big toes heavy and thornlike for defense until the creature has had a chance to learn. Smaller external ears, and the eardrum larger and closer to the outer end of the ear-canal. We’re going to have to reorganize the water-conservation system, I think; the glomerular kidney is perfectly suitable for living in fresh water, but the business of living immersed in fresh water, inside and out, for a creature with a salty inside means that the osmotic pressure inside is going to be higher than outside, so that the kidneys are going to have to be pumping virtually all the time. Under the circumstances we’d best step up production of urine, and that means the antidiuretic function of the pituitary gland is going to have to be abrogated.”
“What about respiration?”
“Hmm,” Saltonstall said. “I suppose book-lungs, like some of the arachnids have. They can be supplied by intercostal spiracles. They’re gradually adaptable to atmosphere-breathing, if our colonist ever decides to come out of the water. Just to provide for that possibility, I’d suggest retaining the nose, maintaining the nasal cavity as a part of the otological system, but cutting off the cavity from the larynx with a membrane of cells that are supplied with oxygen by direct irrigation, rather than by the respiratory system. Such a membrane wouldn’t survive for many generations, once the creature took to living out of the water even for part of its life time; it’d go through two or three generations as an amphibian, and then one day it’d suddenly find itself breathing through its larynx again.
“Also, Dr. Chatvieux, I’d suggest that we have it adopt sporulation. As an aquatic animal, our colonist is going to have an indefinite life-span, but we’ll have to give it a breeding cycle of about six weeks to keep up its numbers during the learning period; so there’ll have to be a definite break of some duration in its active year. Otherwise it’ll hit overpopulation before it’s learned to cope with it.”
“Also, it’d be better if our colonists could winter over inside a good, hard shell,” Eunice Wagner added in agreement. “So sporulation’s the obvious answer. Many other microscopic creatures have it.”
“Microscopic?” Phil said incredulously.
“Certainly,” Chatvieux said, amused. “We can’t very well crowd a six-foot man into a two-foot puddle. But that raises a question. We’ll have tough competition from the rotifers, and some of them aren’t strictly microscopic; for that matter even some of the protozoa can be seen with the naked eye, just barely, with dark-field illumination. I don’t think your average colonist should run much under 250 microns. Give them a chance to slug it out.”
“I was thinking of making them twice that big.”
“Then they’d be the biggest animals in their environment,” Eunice Wagner pointed out, “and won’t ever develop any skills. Besides, if you make them about rotifer size, it will give them an incentive for pushing out the castle-building rotifers, and occupying the castles.”
Chatvieux nodded. “All right, let’s get started. While the panatropes are being calibrated, the rest of us can put our heads together on leaving a record for these people. We’ll micro-engrave the record on a set of corrosion-proof metal leaves, of a size our colonists can handle conveniently. We can tell them, very simply, what happened, and plant a few suggestions that there’s more to the universe than their puddles. Some day they may puzzle it out.”
“Question,” Eunice Wagner said. “Are we going to tell them they’re microscopic? I’m opposed to it. It may saddle their entire early history with a gods-and-demons mythology that they’d be better off without.”
“Yes, we are,” Chatvieux said; and la Ventura could tell by the change in the tone of his voice that he was speaking now as their senior on the expedition. “These people will be of the race of men, Eunice. We want them to win their way back into the community of men. They are not toys, to be protected from the truth forever in a fresh-water womb.”
“Besides,” Saltonstall observed, “they won’t get the record translated at any time in their early history. They’ll have to develop a written language of their own, and it will be impossible for us to leave them any sort of Rosetta Stone or other key. By the time they can decipher the truth, they should be ready for it.”
“I’ll make that official,” Venezuelos said unexpectedly.
And then, essentially, it was all over. They contributed the cells that the panatropes would need. Privately, la Ventura and Joan Heath went to Chatvieux and asked to contribute jointly; but the scientist said that the microscopic men were to be haploid, in order to give them a minute cellular structure, with nuclei as small as Earthly rickettsiae, and therefore each person had to give germ-cells individually—there would be no use for zygotes. So even that consolation was denied them: in death they would have no children, but be instead as alone as ever.
They helped, as far as they could, in the text of the message which was to go on the metal leaves. They had their personality patterns recorded. They went through the motions. Already they were beginning to be hungry, but there was nothing on Hydrot big enough to eat.
After la Ventura had set his control board to rights—a useless gesture, but a habit he had been taught to respect, and which in an obscure way made things a little easier to bear—he was out of it. He sat by himself at the far end of the rock ledge, watching Tau Ceti go redly down.
After a while Joan Heath came silently up behind him, and sat down too. He took her hand. The glare of the red sun was almost extinguished now, and together they watched it go, with la Ventura, at least, wondering somberly which nameless puddle was to be his Lethe.
He never found out, of course. None of them did.