So he whispered into the helmet pickup. “Amigo, I’m running a wild risk. Turn off the cameras! I don’t want no record of this.…”
“Off it is. My good friend, what the hot perdition’s fire are you up to, eh?”
“This is something I got to do. You behind me?”
“You must ask?” the dark, musical laugh came over the mike. “I stand behind you. Always.” Del Azarchel did not even bother to ask the details. But he had to add: “Always. Except when I am far in front.”
This conversation was still on the private channel. But at that same time, the shared suit channel came on. Another voice, this time of Dr. S. Ramananda, said in amazement: “What is this? Look! Montrose has an automatic bone rongeur in his hand! Are you going to perform surgery on yourself, Sensai Montrose?”
All the passengers were strapped to cots that could be tilted to various axes, depending where the combination of carousel rotation or engine thrust put the gravity-vertical. Only older models of punts still used seats. Under microgravity, there is no weariness in standing for hours on end, and cots were easier to fold or inflate than seats in any case.
Dr. Ramananda was overhead to the upper left, from Menelaus’s viewpoint, upside down. His helmet was not far from Menelaus’s helmet, but even if he had entertained the impulse to try to wrest the medical appliance out of Menelaus’s hand by force, the shoulder-harness and helmet of his suit were not built for stretching one’s hands overhead. Indeed, Ramananda had not (and could not) crane his neck to look “up” at Menelaus directly, but instead lifted a gauntlet, and pointed a fingertip camera-dot at him.
Ramananda said tensely, “What is in that needle, Sensai?”
The radio channel was silent. Ramananda was a high-caste Brahmin. Caste was not all-important on an expedition like this. Ramananda was here because of his work proving the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture relating to general cases of rank greater than one. But caste was not unimportant either. Respect for Ramananda’s status kept the others silent.
Menelaus could not take his eyes from the bore of the needle. It was like looking down a well. But the alert light shone green: It had selected the path through bone and brain calculated to cause the least damage. A flick of the thumb, the circuits in the needle would engage, and the needle would find the right spot and move of its own accord, and puncture his skull, and pump his brain full of neuro-pharmaceuticals.
“Intelligence.” Menelaus grinned wickedly. “Superhuman intelligence. The next rung up on Darwin’s ladder. I aim to be the first to hoist my buttocks up yonder, gentlemen. Easy as shimmying up a tree.”
But his fingers, five little traitors, trembled.
The ampoule contained a cocktail of totipotent cells, taken from his own gene template, with artificial ribosomes programmed to turn into neural tissue. The molecular cues had already been established, one cell cluster at a time over a series of months, here and there within his cortex and midbrain tissue, to act as anchor points for the new growth.
A second group of ribosomes would begin the manufacture of certain chemicals in his brain out of raw materials in his bloodstream: intelligence-augmenting agents. Here were the molecular codes to create phosphotidyl serine, which increased learning speed by improving special cells receptors; vinpoticene to increase blood flow to the brain; and phenytoin to improve concentration.
Here also were proteins to affect the brain’s ability to remodel its synapses. Other proteins to prevent calcium overloads would be released by reactions from his pituitary gland and medulla oblongata, as needed. The artificial proteins would produce other neurochemicals, whose functions were less well understood, but which had been found in the brains of geniuses—and also in schizophrenics.
A third group would rewire certain nerve-paths, linking cell to cell with strands of material more sensitive and conductive than natural nerve cells, but grown out of his own brain-material. Protected by redacted RNA messengers, the new material was part of what his body would think was his gene code. Even if wounded, the new pseudo-nervous cells would grow back.
But this was only what the ampoule contained physically. What it contained in reality was the unknown, an inexpressibly alien otherness. What lay beyond man, was in this needle.
And so he hesitated.
Ramananda said, “So. It has come to this. You will not abide by what was decided; you will not abide by what you agreed. Did you not read the articles before you signed?”
There was no surprise in the voice of Ramananda. No one in the cabin failed to grasp what Menelaus meant to do. During training camp Menelaus had argued that such a thing as this should be tried, had to be tried: all had heard him say, or, at times, had heard him rant, that more than human intellect was needed to decipher the Monument.
“I read the articles, sure enough,” said Menelaus. “Read ’em over and over. And if my recollecting is fair, what they say is this: Any member of the scientific arm of the expedition may perform experiments or investigations of his own devising, and at any time. Well, I pick right now for my time. Nothing in the articles said I had to wait til we reached the Diamond Star to start. And since I am not aboard the ship yet, not reported for duty there, I am not officially under Captain Grimaldi’s command: so even if you radio him, he could not tell me to stand down. I am square within my rights. This here is my first experiment.”
A soft voice murmured. “Ah. That’s what we deserve for inviting a lawyer aboard.” He was not sure, over the helmet radio, if it had come from before or behind, but it sounded like the voice of a Spaniard named de Ulloa.
Melchor de Ulloa was something of a lady’s man in his youth. The rumor that he and Montrose had a running bet to see who could get into more trouble with the Mission Commander during training was false, but the mere fact that the rumor spread showed how alike they were, how they had egged each other on. Melchor de Ulloa won fame for his solution of Hilbert’s Sixteenth Problem, dealing with the upper bound of the number of limit cycles in polynomial vector fields.
Menelaus was shocked to hear the scoffing voice of handsome young de Ulloa. It had been de Ulloa, during that last night when the six younger astronauts—Del Azarchel’s clique—had stolen out of camp together, who had practically begged Menelaus to smuggle some form of Prometheus Formula aboard.
Ramananda was saying, “This is a useless experiment! An illegal experiment! Are you attempting to revive the nightmares of Shanghai—those horrible children in vats the Chinese kept alive for so long, gargoyles with bloated heads? You have not separated your skull plates.”
Menelaus did not have a high opinion of Chinese neural science in any case. He said, “Phooey. The Zi Mandarins discovered ninety-nine ways how not to augment intelligence. This uses path redaction, not merely adding cell mass.”
“The Ephrin Topography Hypothesis? That method, used on pigs, resulted in severe nerve-tissue degradation.”
“Then I will be too plumb stupid to care about what I have done, eh, gentlemen? Any how, ’tis my brain to risk, that’s all.”
“But that is not all, sir,” said Ramananda solemnly. “Your course is recklessly selfish. You have been selected because the mission needs you! All mankind needs you! Do you think your aptitudes, your guna, were delivered to you merely for your own amusement and pleasure, to waste? We are engaged in a sacred quest for the ultimate knowledge! Circling V 886 Centauri is the library that holds, perhaps, all the secrets of a civilization thousands, or millions, or billions of years in advance of our own. If this expedition solves the major problems of translation, it will mean the future, an unimaginable future, a science so far in advance of our own…”