The seat took a firm grip on him and Job shifted acceleration. The probe need not have waited this hour for rendezvous to be made. Its point of return was closely predictable. But the laboratory ship stood a ways off as a routine precaution. Warped space was an eerily new thing to deal with. There were even some cranks who preached that changing the constants of physics was a direct defiance of God. Well, they had said much the same about every fundamental advance; and people did in fact get hurt, by fire and domestic animals and steam engines and fusing atoms. Few physicists completely understood the Colbert-Otway Effect. There was too much else they had to understand.

  The probe slipped out of sight as Job lay alongside. Acceleration ended. Villiers popped an anti-nausea pill into his mouth, but free fall didn’t seem to bother Urban and Eide enjoyed it. The view flickered briefly: induced currents when the radiation screens of the two craft interacted. It steadied again. A quivering sounded through the hull, a series of clanks and a long rumble. Then silence drew a curtain between men and ship.

  “Probe taken aboard,” Job said at length. “If there are no contrary orders, I shall proceed at one-tenth gravity toward Luna. Weight will be useful in carrying out analyses, and that acceleration should allow ample time for the most important preliminary ones.”

  “Right-o,” Villiers said.

  The engine purred. Eide’s body sank back into the seat cushions. He felt himself released, and bounced up. “Let’s go!”

  “Where?” Villiers asked.

  “Doctrine is that no human shall approach the probe until I have verified that it is safe to do so,” Job reminded them.

  Urban grimaced. “Yes, yes, yes,” he muttered. “But you needn’t be so cold-blooded about it. You tin brains give me the willies sometimes.”

  “Oh, do relax,” Villiers said. “Why should he be emotionally concerned? This isn’t his daydream.”

  Eide felt embarrassed. Job was listening. It occurred to him that Ultra Model Electroencephalon Mark IV, serial number such-and-such, was all too well nicknamed.

  Villiers took a thoughtful drag at his bombilla. “Y’know,” he went on, obviously trying to calm down the biologists—he was sure that the engineering aspect was O.K.—“we’ve talked for a long time now about making contact with alien races. But I wonder if we’ll ever find any as alien as this one we’ve built ourselves.”

  “That’s beside the point,” Eide said. His own purpose was to change the subject. “What we’ll gain from extraterrestrial civilizations, besides knowledge, is culture. New insights, new arts, new philosophies, new ways of living. We’re getting stagnant now. I say nothing against the Australian Authority—war had to be eliminated somehow—but it isn’t enough. Not if we wish to keep mental as well as physical frontiers.”

  Urban gnawed a knuckle, but managed to say, “True. Another reason, by the way, Eide, why we haven’t sent probes to the stars yet. It’d delay development of a manned FTL ship. To understand what those races are about, what their cultures mean, we’ve got to have people actually living there, getting to know the intimate details, learning to think in extrahuman ways. Otherwise we’ll just be collecting a slew of inferior travelogues.”

  “There’s that,” Villiers said. “Also, even in purely physical science, the fact is that instruments can only experience what they’re designed to experience. You need a conscious being on hand, a being with imagination, who can see something totally unexpected and come back to describe—” Abruptly his own calm broke across. He set his bombilla down on the table so hard that it rattled. “What are we bandying cliches for?” he growled. “Hurry up, will you?”

  “I have begun chemical tests,” Job said. “But you must allow me some time yet to make certain that the environment is safe for you.”

  “Hvad?” Eide exclaimed. Fingers closed around his heart.

  “The bacterial and protozoan cultures are dead. The higher plants and metazoans are dying.”

  The operations hold was vast and dim, but so crowded with instruments that men must walk carefully. Eide passed by a thing of tendrils and tubes which under Job’s direction was placing a slide in an electron microscope. Just beyond, a centrifuge whirred, and colors crawled up a chromatograph. The fluorescent illumination felt cold on his skin.

  The probe lay long and shining in its rack. One side was open and the biological specimens, such as had not been removed so far, were exposed to view. Urban had snatched a sample of algae, turned to brown scum in the past couple of hours, and put it under a microscope of his own. Eide brushed aside a pumpkin leaf—green and unwithered, but the needle on an attached biometer stood at zero—to look at a cageful of rats. Most lay unmoving. A couple of them still panted feebly. Even as Eide watched, one crawled to a water dispenser and drank again. Its belly was bloated. After a moment it gasped, shivered, and fell quiet.

  A machine arm reached over Eide’s shoulder, opened the cage, and hooked the body out. Wheels trundled. Turning, the bionicist saw the small furry shape popped into a revival chamber. A heart-lung device began to chug. His gaze went back to the other corpses. “You poor dumb devils,” he murmured.

  Villiers came to stand beside him. The engineer’s face was locked into grimness. “I just checked the instrument records for myself,” he said. “There is no difference from the probes we sent before. No difference whatsoever.”

  “Radiation?” Eide groped.

  “No. That would have registered. Anything physical known to man would have.”

  “I thought…perhaps…when you go blasting through the hydrogen in space, faster than light—”

  “Those atoms don’t penetrate the drive field. The warp is equivalent to too great a potential barrier. You do get aerodynamic effects, which you have to allow for in plotting an orbit. But nothing from the outside universe can directly affect what happens inside the hull.” Villiers jammed hands in pockets. “I also made a quick check of the power and pilot systems. As far as I went, it only confirmed Job’s word that they functioned normally the whole time.”

  Urban joined them. “I can’t find any structural alteration in the cells,” he said. His voice fell flatly amidst the hummings and buzzings. “Oh, certain gross pathologies, but no clue to what produced them, nothing like the changes in structure that a virus makes, say. Well, Job will have to investigate the submolar details. He’s doing that now…The beast is doing everything.”

  “That’s what he is for,” Eide said.

  “But…our own helplessness!”

  “We’re no use here,” Villiers said. “Let’s go back.”

  “And keep on talking in circles?” Urban groaned.

  “Not necessarily,” Eide answered. “We should start getting some data to work with pretty soon.” His feet dragged over the deck.

  Job’s voice pursued him: “Revival procedures have failed.”

  “What about the specimens in cold sleep?” Urban demanded.

  “What’s this?” Eide asked.

  “Didn’t you know?” Urban said. “We wanted to test that, too. Knocked ’em down close to absolute zero, at the usual speed with the usual drugs. The idea was that spaceship crews should have the equipment available in case of medical emergencies. Maybe cold sleep has inhibited whatever chemical change went on here.”

  “Come on,” Villiers said. “Let’s get cracking.”

  They went topside at a funeral pace and settled back into the verandah seats. Space blazed at them. The pockmarks on Luna were becoming visible.

  “Well.” Villiers lit a cigarette and drew a ragged puff into his lungs. “What about some tea?”

  Eide looked straight at Sirius. We’re coming just the same, he told it. He shook his shoulders and willed determination into himself.

  “This seems to be in your line,” Urban said to him tonelessly. “No apparent changes in cell structure. So what happened at a more basic level?”

  Eide frowned, gathering his wits. “You must help me there,” he said. “I have tried to understand how the spacewarper works, but I couldn’t get much through this thick old noggin. What part of its operation might have biological effects?”

  “Who knows?” Villiers said. “Theoretically, though, there shouldn’t be any important ones.”

  “What about the minor ones? They may not be so little after all.”

  “Well, of course the alteration of natural constants is bound to have some influence on the chemistry and physics of an organism.”

  “Tell me very simply, please; how that works. I think I know, but I need to be sure.”

  “Tell you without math? Can’t.” Villiers recollected himself. “Sorry. You must have a fair background in math, for your own work.” He reached for a notepad in his shirt pocket. “Uh, the equations—”

  “No, no. I’ve seen them. What I mean is something like this. In modern physics, the laws of nature can be expressed as functions of space-time geometry. For instance, the frequency of emitted light, or of atomic vibration, is affected by the gravitational field, which in turn depends on—or is—the local warping of space. Likewise, the exact form of a particle’s psi function, its probability-wave, is conditioned by geometry, by just what curve is locally a geodesic. Now the Colbert-Otway Effect involves the creation of some very peculiar warps indeed. Within the drive field of one of your interstellar probes, light has a different velocity and the mass-energy relationship takes on a new form. Thus speed is no longer limited by the velocity of light in ‘flat’ space. Am I correct?”

  “You’re not too far off,” Villiers nodded.

  “O.K., then, why does this not change the other constants of nature so much that nothing will work?”

  “Because there are compensating effects. If one parameter, like dielectric constant, increases, a related one tends to decrease. And the warp is a good bit weaker inside the drive field than at the edge. Oh, we’ve had our problems. A NiCad battery rated at 1.35 volts delivers 1.42 while the probe is traveling. Photo film sensitivity drops from ASA 1200 to 970. That sort of thing. We had to design a tandem autocontrol, one set of computers to operate under normal drive, another under FTL. But each can feed its data directly into the other, so this still amounts to having only one system, using its ‘right’ or ‘left’ half as the need arises. It works fine, now.”

  “Ah,” Eide pounced. “But biological systems are much more complicated—chemically, at least—than anything robotic.”

  As if on cue, Job said: “Analysis shows certain trace compounds in the cells studied. They are proteins, but do not appear to be identical with any described in my memory banks. It will take considerable time to establish their molecular structure. Do you wish me to defer that and proceed at once with the examination of the cold sleep specimens?”

  “Yes, yes,” Urban almost shouted.

  “Wait,” Eide said. Excitement fluttered in him. “How much of those proteins is there, quantitatively?”

  “Micro quantities,” Job answered. “I do not know how they were synthesized, but they do not appear sufficient to cause mortality, even if they are poisonous.”

  “Haven’t you found anything else?”

  “Further data on observed pathologies. You saw how thirsty the rats were, and how this led to edema. I am tracing out the chemistry of that metabolic imbalance. There appears to be some enzymatic abnormality involved. A full description will be prepared in due course.” After a moment: “Despite every effort at treatment, the last metazoan has just died.”

  “Wasn’t there any way to save them?” Villiers asked. His words came harsh and uneven.

  Urban spoke an obscenity. “No,” he said. “This ship has every kind of apparatus. The Prime Minister couldn’t have gotten better care than those wretched animals.”

  Eide gloomed at the deck. “Let us get back to, um, the background,” he said. “Could it simply be that no organism can survive the changes in physical constants under FTL? If, for instance, the rate at which neurones fire, or the oxygen tension, or any such thing, is altered too much—the organism dies.”

  “But the change isn’t that great,” Urban replied. “We made plenty of preliminary experiments, believe me. To take your own example, we reduced neural rates and oxygen tension, with drugs, away below what FTL would do; not to speak of pH, osmotic pressure, everything we could think of. No harm. Oh, on a prolonged trip there’d have to be certain precautions. Special diets and so forth. But no trip would be too long. In warped space, transit time between stars is only a few hours. The crew’s health should be less affected than it was by weightlessness in the early days.”

  “And yet,” Villiers breathed, “everything on the probe was effectively killed, within sixty seconds.”

  Eide lifted his eyes to the viewscreen once more. Earth gleamed at one edge. The sun was just rising over Europe.

  “Wait a minute!” he said. “Clearly, under the conditions of FTL, some fundamental biological mechanism is deranged. The question is what, and what can we do about it? Now look, suppose some important molecules break up, or simply flip over into a different isomer—”

  Urban shook his head violently. “No. We thought of that long ago, and checked it out. Impossible. The changes in relative energy potentials and so forth aren’t enough to break any chemical bond that matters. Certainly not enough to alter atomic nuclei. My team even looked into the possibility of ordinarily random hookups acquiring a directedness, so that lethal compounds could be formed. It turned out to be a statistical absurdity.” He raised his voice. “What’s new, Job?”

  “Configurational analysis has now been performed on several individual chromosomes,” the ship reported. “None have been altered. Nor have ribosomes or any other fundamental structure.”

  “Hurry up in that cold sleep chamber!” Urban barked.

  Villiers laid a warning hand over his.

  Eide pulled at the mouthpiece of his bombilla. The tea was strong and scalding. It seemed to glow in his stomach. This is a bad setback, he told himself. But man won’t admit he has ever met an unsolvable problem. He can’t.

  Yet the silence grew so dense that Job’s eventual words came as if from a brass angel:

  “I have resuscitated assorted specimens. They were alive at the time.”

  Villiers and Urban looked at each other. A flame went between their eyes. Eide grabbed the arms of his seat. The image of his youngest son flashed across the stars. So you must go then sleeping, Olav. But go you shall.

  “The bacteria and protozoa died almost immediately,” said the cool voice. “The higher plants and metazoans are still alive, but cells are beginning to exhibit the same pathologies as in the previous cases, progressing at a rate which indicates that these organisms will not survive under normal conditions longer than the others. Evidently cold sleep did not prevent the phenomenon but merely postponed its commencement.”

  Eide sprang to his feet. He began to pace, around and around the narrow circle of the verandah, not in a low-weight glide but with a stamp that shivered the deck.

  “Job, what’s doing it?” Villiers pleaded. “You were built to figure such things out. What’s doing it?”

  There was no prompt response. “Are you listening?” Villiers said with a rush of anger.

  “Yes,” the ship acknowledged. A man would have said, “Of course.”

  “Well, you’re supposed to have creativity. Find us an explanation before I tear you apart!”

  “I must gather all possible data before attempting to frame a hypothesis,” Job said.

  “But those new proteins—they had to come from somewhere,” Villiers choked. “Isn’t that a clue? What makes them?”

  Eide stopped in his tracks.

  He stood there, unmoving, for so long that the others got alarmed and scrambled erect. “Are you all right?” Urban said. “D’you want to lie down a while?”

  Eide didn’t answer. Urban came over and shook his arm.

  Slowly, Eide turned to face them both. His features had changed from gnome to troll.

  “I…believe…I…see.” The words creaked out of him.

  “What? What?”

  “I think I have your explanation.” Eide stumbled to his chair, sat down and buried his face in his hands.

  “You mean—” Villiers began.

  “Hold mund!” Eide yelled.

  They lowered themselves, cautiously, back into their own seats, and watched him tremble.

  When at length he looked up again, his eyes seemed blind. “The genetic code,” he said, machine fashion.

  “Eh?” Urban said. “You mean there’s a mutation in the DNA? I just told you that can’t be.”

  “No. In its function.”

  Eide reached for his pipe with unsteady hands, took out his tobacco pouch and began to fill the bowl. All the while he was staring past them, out at the stars.

  “Consider,” he said, in the same dead voice. “The DNA molecule of the chromosome has four bases, adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. They make up a four-letter alphabet, whose different combinations each specify an amino acid. The code is transcribed onto a molecule of ‘messenger’ RNA and carried to the site of protein synthesis, each kind of amino acid being delivered by a particular form of ‘transfer’ RNA. There, then, proteins are synthesized: enzymes, which go on to control the entire chemistry of the organism. It is usually described as an information transfer mechanism.”

  Villiers and Urban exchanged a glance. Has the old man gone dotty? We learned this in the second form.

  Eide ignored them, plowed on, talking to the sky: “But there are certain constraints on the code. You can write the same message in Latin or Greek or runic characters; or you can go over to Chinese and use an altogether different system which cannot ever carry quite the same messages. That’s arbitrary. But the genetic code is not. Everywhere, in every life form we know, the same codon, the same sequence of bases, means the same amino acid. Why should this be? It isn’t needed by information theory.

  “I found out some time ago that it is required by the laws of nature. Given protoplasmic life, at least, no other system will work.”