The Documents in the Case (27 page)

‘Wasting my time,’ said Hoskyns. ‘I told them exactly what they put into my mouth. You’re right, Jim, they’d believe anything. The elixir of life — that’s what they really want to get hold of. It would look well in a headline. If you can’t give ’em a simple formula to cure all human ills and explain creation, they say you don’t know your business.’

‘Ah!’ said Perry, with a twinkle of the eye, ‘but if the Church gives them a set of formulae for the same purpose, they say they don’t want formulae or dogmas, but just a loving wistfulness.’

‘You’re not up-to-date enough,’ said Waters. ‘They like their formulae to be red-hot, up-to-the-minute discoveries.’

‘Why, so they are,’ said Perry. ‘Look at Stingo here. He tells them that if two unfit people marry, their unfitness will be visited on their children unto the third and fourth generation, after which they will probably die out through mere degeneration. We’ve been telling them that for three or four thousand years, and Matthews has only just caught up to us. As a matter of fact, you people are on our side. If you tell them the things, they may perhaps come to believe in them.’

‘And possibly act on them, you think?’ said Matthews. ‘But we have to do all the work for them, just as you have to do the godly living.’

‘That’s not altogether true,’ said Perry.

‘Near enough. But we do get on a bit faster, because we can give reasons for things. Show me a germ, and I’ll tell you how to get rid of plague or cholera. Call it Heaven’s judgement for sin, and all you can do is to sit down under it.’

‘But surely,’ struck in the curate, ‘we are expressly warned in Scripture against calling things judgements for sin. How about those eight on whom the Tower of Siloam fell?’

‘If it was anybody’s sin,’ said Perry, ‘it was probably the carelessness of the people who built the tower.’

‘And that’s usually a sin that finds somebody out,’ added Waters. ‘Unfortunately, the sinner isn’t always the victim.’

‘Why should it be?’ said Matthews. ‘Nature does not work by a scheme or poetical justice.’

‘Nor does God,’ said Perry. ‘We suffer for one another, as, indeed, we must, being all members one of another. Can you separate the child from the father, the man from the brute, or even the man from the vegetable cell, Stingo?’

‘No,’ said Matthews. ‘It is you that have tried to keep up that story about Man in the image of God and lord of nature and so on. But trace the chain back and you will find every linkhold — you yourself, compounded from your father and mother by the mechanical chemistry of the chromosomes. Back to your ancestors, back to prehistoric Neanderthal Man and his cousin, Aurignacian. Neanderthal was a mistake, he wouldn’t work properly and died out, but the line goes on back, dropping the misfits, leaving the stabilised forms on the way — back to Arboreal Man, to the common ancestor Tarsius, to the first Mammal, to the ancestral bird-form, back to the Reptiles, the Trilobites, back to the queer, shapeless jellies of life that divide and subdivide eternally in the waters. The things that found some kind of balance with their environment persisted, the things that didn’t, died out; and here and there some freak found its freakishness of advantage and started a new kind of life with a new equilibrium. At what point, Perry, will you place your image of God?’

‘Well,’ said Perry, ‘I should not attempt to deny that Adam was formed of the dust of the earth. And your ape-and-tiger ancestry at least provides me with a scientific authority for original sin. What a mercy the Church stuck to that dogma, in spite of Rousseau and the noble savage. If she hadn’t, you scientists would have forced it back on her, and how silly we should all have looked then.’

‘But it was all guess-work,’ retorted Matthews, ‘unless you call it inspiration, and very inaccurate at that. If the author of Genesis had said that man was made of sea-water, he would have been nearer the truth.’

‘Well,’ said Waters, ‘he put the beginnings of life on the face of the waters, which wasn’t so very far off.’

‘But how did life begin?’ I asked. ‘After all, there is a difference between the Organic and the Inorganic. Or there appears to be.’

‘That’s for Waters to say,’ said Matthews.

‘I can’t be very didactic about that,’ said the chemist. ‘But it appears possible that there was an evolution from Inorganic or Organic through the Colloids. We can’t say much more, and we haven’t — so far — succeeded in producing it in the laboratory. Matthews probably still believes that Mind is a function of Matter, but if he asks me to demonstrate it for him, I must beg to be excused. I can’t even show that Life is a function of Matter.’

‘The Behaviourists seem to think that what looks like Intelligence and Freewill are merely mechanical responses to material stimuli,’ I suggested.

‘That’s all very well,’ said Hoskyns, emerging with a grin from a cloud of tobacco-smoke, ‘but all you people talk so cheerfully about Matter, as if you know what it was. I don’t, and it’s more or less my job to know. Go back again, go past your colloids and your sea-water. Go back to the dust of the earth and the mass of rotating cinders which was before the ocean even began. Go back to the sun, which threw the planets off so unexpectedly, owing to a rare accident which might not happen in a million light-years. Go back to the nebula. Go back to the atom. Do some of the famous splitting we hear so much about. Where is your Matter? It isn’t. It is a series of pushes or pulls or vortices in nothingness. And as for your train of mechanical causation, Matthews, when you come down to it, it resolves itself into a series of purely fortuitous movements of something we can’t define in a medium that doesn’t exist. Even your heredity-business is fortuitous. Why one set of chromosomes more than any other? Your chain of causation would only be a real one if all possible combinations and permutations were worked out in practice. Something is going on, that is as certain as anything can be — that is, I mean, it is the fundamental assumption we are bound to make in order to reason at all — but how it started or why it started is just as mysterious as it was when the first thoughtful savage invented a god to explain it.’

‘Why should it ever have started at all?’ said Matthews. ‘As Matter passes from one form to another, so forces change from one to another. Why should we suppose a beginning — or an end if it comes to that? Why not a perpetually shifting kaleidoscope, going through all its transformations and starting again?’

‘Why, my lad,’ replied Hoskyns, ‘because in that case you will come slap up against the second law of thermodynamics, and that will be the end of you.’

‘Oh!’ said Mr Perry, ‘the formula that starts so charmingly about “Nothing in the statistics of an assemblage” — that appears to be all the Law and the Prophets nowadays.’

‘Yes,’ said Hoskyns. ‘It’s general meaning is that Time only works in one direction, and that when all the permutations and combinations have been run through. Time will stop, because there will be nothing further by which we can distinguish its direction. All the possibilities will have been worked out, all the electrons will have been annihilated, and there will be nothing more for them to do and no radiant energy left for them to do it with. That is why there must be an end. And if an end, presumably a beginning.’

‘And the end is implicit in the beginning?’ said I.

‘Yes; but the intermediate stages are not inevitable in detail, only overwhelmingly probable in the gross. There, Perry, if you like, you can reconcile Foreknowledge with Freewill.’

‘Life, then, I suppose, is but one more element of randomness,’ said I, ‘in the randomness of things.’

‘Presumably,’ said Hoskyns.

There was a pause.

‘What is Life?’ I asked, suddenly.

‘Well, Pontius,’ said Waters, ‘if we could answer that question we should probably not need to ask the others. At present — chemically speaking — the nearest definition I can produce is that it is a kind of bias — a lop-sidedness, so to speak. Possibly that accounts for its oddness.’

‘I’ve said that kind of thing myself,’ I said, rather astonished, just as a sort of feeble witticism. Have I hit on something true by accident?’

‘More or less. That is to say, it is true that, up to the present, it is only living substance that has found the trick of transforming a symmetric, optically active compound into a single asymmetric, optically active compound. At the moment that Life appeared on this planet something happened to the molecular structure of things. They got a twist which nobody has ever succeeded in reproducing mechanically — at least, not without an exercise of deliberate selective intelligence, which is also, as I suppose you’ll allow, a manifestation of Life.’

‘Thank you,’ said Perry. ‘Do you mind saying the first part over again, in words that a child could understand?’

‘Well, it’s like this,’ said Waters. ‘When the planet cooled, the molecules of that original inorganic planetary matter were symmetric — if crystallised, the crystals were symmetric also. That is, they were alike on both sides, like a geometrical cube, and their reversed or mirror-images would be identical with themselves. Substances of this kind are said to be optically inactive; that is to say, if viewed through the polariscope, they have no power to rotate the beam of polarised light.’

‘We will take your word for it,’ said Perry.

‘Oh, well, that’s quite simple. Ordinarily speaking, the vibrations in the aether — need I explain aether?’

‘I wish you could,’ said Hoskyns.

‘We will pass aether,’ said Perry.

‘Thank you. Well, ordinarily the aetheric vibrations which propagate the light takes place in all directions at right angles to the path of the ray. If you pass the ray through a crystal of Iceland spar, these vibrations are all brought into one plane, like a flat ribbon. That is what is called a beam of polarised light. Very well, then. If you pass this polarised light through a substance whose molecular structure is symmetric, nothing happens to it; the substance is optically inactive. But if you pass it through, say, a solution of cane sugar, the beam of polarised light will be twisted, and you will get a spiral effect, like twisting a strip of paper either to the right or to the left. The cane sugar is optically active. And why? Because its molecular structure is asymmetric. The crystals of sugar are not fully developed. There is an irregularity on one side, and the crystal and its mirror image are reversed, like my right hand and my left.’ He laid the palm of the right hand on the back of the left to show his meaning. We all frowned and practised on our own hands.

‘Very good,’ continued Waters. ‘Now, we can produce in the laboratory, by synthesis from inorganic substances, other substances which were at one time thought to be only the products of living tissues — camphor, for instance, and some of the alkaloids used in medicine. But what is the difference between our process and that of Nature? What happens is this. The substance produced by synthesis always appears in what is called a racemic form. It consists of two sets of substances — one set having its asymmetry right-handed and the other left-handed, so that the product as a whole behaves like an inorganic, symmetric compound; that is, its two asymmetries cancel one another out, and the product is optically inactive and has no power to rotate the beam of polarised light. To get a substance exactly equivalent to the natural product, we have to split it into its two asymmetric forms. We can’t do that mechanically. We can do it by the exercise of our living intelligence, of course, by laboriously picking out the crystals. Or we can do it by swallowing the substance when our bodies will absorb and digest the dextro-rotating form, of, for example, glucose, and pass the laevo-rotating form out unchanged. Or we can get a living fungus to do it for us, such as blue mould, which will feed on and destroy the dextro-rotatory half of the racemic form of paratartaric acid and leave unchanged the laevo-rotatory half, which is the artificial, laboratory-made half. But we can’t, by one mechanical laboratory process, turn an inorganic, inactive, symmetric compound into one single, asymmetric, optically active compound — and that is what living matter will do cheerfully, day by day.’

28

Waters finished his exposition with a smart little thump of the fist on the table. I knew what that was. It was the postman’s knock, bringing the answer to that letter of mine. A horrid sinking feeling at the solar plexus warned me that in a very few minutes I should have to ask a question. Why need I do it? The subject was remote and difficult. I could easily pretend not to understand. If there really was a difference between the synthetic and the natural product, it was not my business to investigate it. Waters was changing the subject. He had gone back to the first day of creation. Hang him! Let him stay there!

‘So that, as Professor Japp said, as long ago as 1898, “The phenomena of stereo-chemistry support the doctrine of vitalism as revived by the younger physiologists, and point to the existence of a directive force, which enters upon the scene with Life itself and which, in no way violating the laws of the kinetics of atoms” — that ought to comfort you, Hoskyns — “determines the course of their operation within the living organism. That is that at the moment when Life first arose, a directive force came into play — a force of precisely the same character as that which enables the intelligent operator, by the exercise of his will, to select one crystallised enantiomorph and reject its asymmetric opposite.” I learnt that passage by heart once, as a safeguard against cocksureness and a gesture of proper humility in face of my subject.’

‘In other words,’ said Matthews, ‘you believe in miracles, and something appearing out of nowhere. I am sorry to find you on the side of the angels.’

‘It depends what you mean by miracles. I think there is an intelligence behind it all. Else, why anything at all?’

‘You have Jeans on your side anyway,’ put in Hoskyns. ‘He says, “Everything points with overwhelming force to a definite event, or series of events, of creation at some time or times, not infinitely remote. The universe cannot have originated by chance out of its present ingredients.” I can’t tell you what produced the fast molecules of gas, and you can’t tell me what produced the first asymmetric molecules of Life. The parson here may think he knows.’