The Martian Ambassador (12 page)

‘He was suffocated. His breathing apparatus was sabotaged... by the insertion of
Acarus galvanicus
mites!’

Crosse stepped back suddenly and seemed to stagger, as if Blackwood had just struck him. ‘Oh, dear God!’ he cried.

Blackwood moved forward slowly towards the scientist, his tall frame subtly menacing. ‘The mites fed directly on the life-giving gasses circulating through the apparatus, before they could reach the Ambassador’s lungs. Whoever placed them there murdered him, just as surely as if they’d put a bullet through his brain!’

‘No!’ whispered Crosse.

‘There is no such organism as
Acarus galvanicus
in Nature: they are artificial life forms, grown from inanimate matter through the application of electro-chemical techniques... techniques which
you
perfected, Mr Crosse!’

The scientist’s hands flew up to his face, hiding it, and he turned away from Blackwood and Sophia, bent over his workbench, and began to weep. ‘I didn’t know!’ he said, between snivelling gasps. ‘God help me, I didn’t know!’

‘Didn’t know
what
, Mr Crosse?’

Sophia moved forward, intending to comfort the man, but Blackwood put out an arm and stopped her. ‘Thomas,’ she whispered angrily, ‘he’s broken –
look
at him.’

Blackwood glared at her and shook his head firmly.

‘I didn’t... didn’t know they’d be used for such a foul purpose. How
could
I have known?’

‘Used by whom?’ demanded Blackwood. ‘Tell me now, man, or it will go very badly for you!’

Although he had stopped Sophia from comforting Crosse, Blackwood understood her compassion. This man, he was quite sure, was no criminal: he was a seeker after the truth of the world, a pilgrim in search of knowledge. He was an explorer, after a fashion, charting the unknown realms of electricity and chemistry, seeking out the mysterious processes by which they had combined, in aeons past, to produce life on Earth. He was to be respected – applauded! – for his vocation, but clearly, like many men of science, he was naïve and ill understood the darker ways of humankind. Blackwood saw through to the root of the matter: someone had visited Crosse recently and had taken advantage of his research in ways the scientist would never have sanctioned, had he but known the truth. But who?

Blackwood did not like using threats, but regrettably there were occasions when there was no other way to get to the truth. Andrew Crosse appeared to be on the point of collapse: Blackwood would only have to sneeze to make him crumble completely and spill everything he knew.

He lowered his voice as he said, ‘I have to tell you, sir, that you are looking at the hangman’s noose unless you cooperate with us entirely and without hesitation. Even then, it’ll be the devil’s own job to keep you out of prison for a very long time.’

‘But I had no intention of...’ Crosse began to protest.

‘Your intentions are what we have come to ascertain,’ Blackwood interrupted. ‘Your work was dismissed by the Royal Society, was it not? They considered you a charlatan and a buffoon.’

‘You think I acted out of a desire for revenge?’ asked Crosse incredulously.

Blackwood did not answer immediately. Instead, he began to examine the various items of electrical equipment with which the laboratory was packed. ‘How did you do it?’ he asked presently. ‘How did you manage to create life from lifelessness? Tell us everything. And tell us now!’

Crosse sighed deeply, and leaned against the workbench as if exhausted by some terrible labour. ‘It happened while I was conducting certain experiments on the artificial formation of crystals by means of weak electrical currents applied over long periods of time. I was attempting to produce crystals of silica by allowing a suitable fluid medium to seep through a piece of porous stone, while applying an electric current from a voltaic battery. The fluid was a mixture of hydrochloric acid and a solution of silicate of potash.

‘On the fourteenth day from the commencement of this experiment, I observed through a lens a few small whitish excrescences, projecting from about the middle of the electrified stone. On the eighteenth day, these projections enlarged and stuck out seven or eight filaments, each of them longer than the hemisphere on which they grew.’

‘The
galvanicus
mites?’ said Blackwood.

Crosse nodded. ‘On the twenty-sixth day, these appearances assumed the form of a
perfect insect
, standing erect on a few bristles which formed its tail. Until this period I had no notion that these appearances were other than an incipient mineral formation. On the twenty-eighth day, these little creatures moved their legs. I must admit that I was not a little astonished. After a few days they detached themselves from the stone and moved about of their own volition.

‘Over the course of the next few weeks, about a hundred of these creatures appeared on the stone. I examined them closely under a microscope, and saw that the smaller ones appeared to have six legs, and the larger ones eight. I decided that they must be of the genus
Acarus
, but wondered whether they were a known species or one never seen before.

‘At first, I was unable to venture an opinion on the cause of their birth, and for a very good reason: I was unable to form one. The simplest solution of the problem which occurred to me was that they arose from ova deposited by insects floating in the atmosphere and hatched by electric action. Still I could not imagine that an ovum could shoot out filaments, or that these filaments could become bristles, and moreover I could not detect, on the closest examination, the remains of a shell.

‘I next imagined that they might have originated from the water and consequently made a close examination of numbers of vessels filled with the same fluid; in none of these could I perceive a trace of an insect, nor could I see any in any other part of the room.’

Blackwood and Sophia listened to Crosse’s explanation in silence. They both felt their flesh crawling at his matter-of-fact description of the creatures’ unexpected emergence out of inanimate matter. Although Sophia had been struck by the scientist’s respectable appearance, she couldn’t help but sympathise with the people of the area who viewed him with such terror and loathing. She likewise noted how he seemed to have lost his own fear and anguish – or at least had succeeded in ignoring them for the moment. As with all true men of science, Crosse seemed able to banish the problems and vicissitudes of life from his awareness while considering the abstract, scientific and theoretical. In that respect, she thought, science was very close to art.

‘What happened then?’ asked Blackwood. ‘Presumably, you attempted to perfect your technique.’

‘That’s correct,’ Crosse replied. ‘I modified the method: I discarded the porous stone, and found that I could produce the
Acarus
mites in glass cylinders filled with concentrated solutions of copper nitrate, copper sulphate and zinc sulphate. The creatures usually appeared at the edge of the fluid surface; however, in some cases the creatures appeared two inches
under
the electrified fluid, but after emerging from it, they were destroyed if thrown back.

‘In one experiment, the mites appeared on a small piece of quartz, immersed at a depth of two inches in fluoric acid holding silica in solution. I arranged for a current of electricity to pass through this fluid for just over a year, and at the end of some months three of the
Acarus
mites were visible on the piece of quartz, which was kept negatively electrified.

‘Their first appearance consisted in a very minute whitish hemisphere, formed upon the surface of the electrified body, sometimes at the positive end, and sometimes at the negative, and occasionally between the two, or in the middle of the electrified current, and sometimes upon all. This speck gradually enlarged and elongated vertically, and shot out filaments of a whitish wavy appearance, easily seen through a lens of very low power.

‘Then commenced the first appearance of animal life. If a fine point was made to approach these filaments, they immediately shrank up and collapsed like zoophytes upon moss, but expanded again sometime after the removal of the point. Some days afterwards these filaments became legs and bristles, and a perfect
Acarus
was the result, which finally detached itself from its birthplace, and if under a fluid, climbed up the electrified wire and escaped from the vessel.

‘If one of them was afterwards thrown into the fluid in which it was produced, it immediately drowned. I have never before heard of
Acari
having been produced under a fluid, or of their ova throwing out filaments; not have I ever observed any ova previous to or during electrization, except that the speck which throws out filaments be an ovum, but when a number of these creatures, in a perfect state, congregate, ova are produced.

‘In a later experiment, I managed to produce an
Acarus
in a closed and airtight glass retort, filled with an electrified silicate solution. On connecting the battery, I observed that an electric action commenced; oxygen and hydrogen gases were liberated; the volume of atmospheric air was soon expelled. Every care had been taken to avoid atmospheric contact and admittance of extraneous matter, and the retort itself had previously been washed with hot alcohol.

‘I discovered no sign of incipient animal formation until on the 140th day, when I plainly distinguished
one Acarus
actively crawling about
within
the bulb of the retort.

‘I found that I had made a great error in this experiment, and I believe it was in consequence of this error that I not only lost sight of the single insect, but never saw any others in this apparatus. I had omitted to insert within the bulb of the retort a
resting-place
for these
Acari,
and as I had observed, they are always destroyed if they fall back into the fluid from which they have emerged. I thought it very strange that, in a solution
eminently caustic
and under an atmosphere of
oxihydrogen gas
, one single
Acarus
should have made its appearance.’

‘It sounds to me like these organisms are incredibly resilient and thrive in conditions which would be the end of ordinary organic life,’ observed Blackwood.

‘What now for the ideas of Mr Darwin?’ wondered Sophia. ‘Your successes fly in the face of Evolution, sir.’

‘An interesting statement, madam,’ Crosse replied. ‘But one with which I cannot concur. The Theory of Evolution is quite intact, I assure you, and is not in the least undermined by my own work – any more than the reality of walking is undermined by the existence of steam locomotives! Just as Mr Watt invented a short cut between locations through the application of artificial speed, I discovered a short cut from inanimate matter to the substance of life, through the artificial application of life-creating principles.

‘But you, Mr Blackwood, noted the extreme resilience of the creatures,’ he continued. ‘And I was most curious as to the
limits
of that resilience. I found myself wondering what would happen if I placed them in environments analogous to those of other planets...’

‘Other planets?’ said Sophia. ‘Including Mars?’

‘Mars was the first alien world I chose for the next phase of my experiments,’ Crosse replied with a vigorous nod. ‘As you may know, the Martian atmosphere consists of 95 percent carbon dioxide, 2.7 percent nitrogen, 1.6 percent argon, and just over a tenth of a percent oxygen, along with a number of other gases in trace amounts. I introduced these gases in the correct proportions into one of the sealed retorts containing several
Acarus
mites, and found that they metabolised the atmosphere at an incredible rate!’

‘Fascinating,’ said Blackwood, with a glance at Sophia. ‘But I fail to understand the
reason
for this research. What could it avail a man to reproduce artificially what Nature achieves as a matter of course?’

‘There are two answers to that question, Mr Blackwood. First, original research – enquiry
for its own sake
– is always desirable, and may become useful in ways unimagined by the person conducting it. And second, it occurred to me that there might very well be practical applications for my work. If a way could be discovered of compelling the
Acari
to absorb dangerous gases and metabolise them into harmless or beneficial ones...’

‘I see your point,’ said Blackwood. ‘For one thing, the mining industry would be transformed: the danger from volatile gases in coalmines would be removed, allowing men to work in greater safety than they do now.’

‘Precisely!’ cried Andrew Crosse. ‘And that is merely one among many possible applications.’

‘But the Royal Society didn’t agree,’ said Sophia.