How strange, I think, how alien, how wonderful they are! On temperate Earth, where animal life has taken the form of protoplasmic oxygen-breathing beings whose chemistry is based on carbon, the phenomenon of superconductivity itself is a bizarre and alien thing, sustainable only under laboratory conditions. But in the unthinkable cold of Pluto, how appropriate that the life-forms should be fashioned of silicon and cobalt, constructed in flawless lattices so that their tissues offer no resistance to electrical currents. Once generated, such a current would persist indefinitely, flowing forever without weakening—the spark of life, and eternal life at that!
They still look like grotesque crabs to me, and not the machines that Sherrard insists they must be. But even if they are animals rather than machines, they are, by comparison with any life-form known to Earth, very machine-like animals indeed.
We have spent a wearying six hours. This discovery should have been exhilarating, even exalting; instead we find ourselves bickering over whether we have found living creatures or mere ingenious mechanisms. Sherrard is adamant that they are machines; Gartenmeister seems to lean in both directions at once, though he is obviously troubled by the thought that they may be alive; Leonides is convinced that we are dealing with true life-forms. I think the dispute, now overheated and ugly, is a mere displacement symptom: we are disturbed by the deeper implications of the find, and, unwilling thus far to face them directly, we turn instead to quarreling over secondary semantic technicalities. The real question is not who created these beings—whether they are the work of what I suppose we can call the divine force, or simply of other intelligent creatures—but how we are to deal with the sudden inescapable knowledge that we are not alone in the universe.
I think we may just have settled the life-versus-machine dispute.
It is morning, ship-time. Gartenmeister calls out sharply, waking us. He has been on watch, puttering in the lab, while we sleep. We rush in and he points to the Plutonian that has been kept at superconductive temperatures.
“See there? Along the lower left-hand rim of its shell?”
I can find nothing unusual at first. Then I look more carefully, as he focuses the laser lamp to cast its beam at a steeper angle. Now I observe two fine metallic “whiskers,” so delicate that they are barely visible even to my most intense scrutiny, jutting to a length of five or six millimeters from the edge of the shell.
“I saw them sprout,” he says. “One came half an hour ago. The other just now. Look—here comes a third!”
We crowd in close. There can be no doubt: a third delicate whisker is beginning to protrude.
Sherrard says, “Communications devices, perhaps? It’s programmed to signal for help when captured: it’s setting up its antenna so that it can broadcast to the others outside.”
Leonides laughs. “Do you think they get captured often? By whom?”
“Who can say?” Sherrard responds. “There may be other creatures out there that prey on—”
He stops, realizing what he has said. It is too late.
“Other creatures?” I ask. “Don’t you mean bigger machines?”
Sherrard looks angry. “I don’t know what I mean. Creatures, machines—” He shakes his head. “Even so, these might be antennae of some sort, can’t they? Signalling devices that protrude automatically in time of danger? Say, when one is trapped by an ice-slide?”
“Or sensors,” offers Leonides. “Like a cat’s whiskers, like a snail’s feelers. Probing the environment, helping it to find a way out of the tank we’ve got it in.”
“A reproductive organ,” Gartenmeister says suddenly.
We stare at him. “What?”
Unperturbed, he says, “Many low-phylum life-forms, when they are trapped, go automatically into reproductive mode. Even if the individual is destroyed, the species is still propagated. Let us say that these are living creatures, yes? For the sake of argument. Then they must reproduce somehow. Even though they are slow-growing, virtually immortal, they must still reproduce. What if it is by budding? They take in minute quantities of silicon and cobalt, build up a surplus of nutrients, and at a certain time they put forth these filaments. Which gain in size over—who knows, a hundred years, a thousand, ten thousand?—and when they have the requisite minimum mass, they break free, take up independent life, foraging for their own food. The electrical spark of life is transferred automatically from parent to offspring, and sustains itself by means of their superconductivity.”
We look at him in amazement. Obviously he has been pondering deeply while we were sleeping.
“If you tell us that they metabolize—they eat, they transfer nutrients along the flow of helium II, they even reproduce,” says Leonides, “then you’re telling us that they’re living things.
Or else you’re asking us to redefine the nature of machines in such a way as to eliminate any distinction between machines and living things.”
“I think,” says Gartenmeister in a dark and despondent tone, “that there can be no doubt. They are alive.”
Sherrard stares a long while at the three tiny filaments. Then he shrugs.
“You may be right,” he says.
Leonides shakes his head. “Listen to you! Both of you! We’ve made the most exciting discovery in five hundred years and you sound as though you’ve just learned that the sun’s going nova tomorrow!”
“Let them be,” I tell him, touching his arm lightly. “It’s not easy.”
“What’s not?”
“A thousand years ago everyone thought the earth was at the center of the universe, with everything else moving in orbit around it,” I say. “It was a very comfortable and cozy and flattering idea, but it didn’t happen to be true, as Copernicus and Kepler and Galileo were able to prove. It was such a hard thing for people to accept that Galileo was put on trial and forced to deny his own findings, wasn’t he? All right. In time everyone came to admit that the earth moves around the sun, and not vice versa. And now, for centuries, we’ve explored space and found it absolutely lifeless—not a smidgeon of life, not a speck, no Martians, no Venusians, no Lunarians, nothing. Nothing. Earth the cosmic exception, the sole abode of life, the crown of creation. Until now. We have these little superconductive crabs here on Pluto. Our brothers-in-life, four billion miles away. Earth’s last uniqueness is stripped away. I think that’ll be harder to swallow than you may think. If we had found life right away, on the Moon back in the twentieth century, on Mars a little later on, it might have been easier. But not now, not after we’ve been all over the System. We developed a sort of smugness about ourselves. These little critters have just destroyed that.”
“Even if they are machines,” says Gartenmeister hollowly, “then we have to ask ourselves: Who built them?”
“I think I’d prefer to think they’re alive,” Sherrard says.
“They are alive,” I tell them. “We’re going to get used to that idea.”
I walk to the hatch and peer outside. Small dark shapes lie huddled motionless here and there on the ice, waiting for night to return. For a long while I stare at them. My soul is flooded with awe and joy. The greatest of miracles has happened on this planet, as it had happened also long ago on Earth; and if life has been able to come into being on dismal Pluto, I know we will encounter it on a million million other worlds as we make our way in the centuries to come beyond this little Solar System into the vast galaxy. Somehow I cannot find anything to fear in that thought. Suddenly, thinking of the wonders and splendors that await us in that great beyond, I imagine that I hear the jubilant music of the spheres resounding from world to world; and when I turn and look back at the others, I realize that they also have been able to move past that first hard moment of shock and dismay which the loss of our uniqueness has brought. I see their faces transfigured, I see the doubt and turmoil gone; and it seems to me that they must be hearing that music too.