In the October 1954 issue of Astounding, Mark Clifton and Frank Riley had one of the characters in their fine serial “They’d Rather Be Right” remember something he had read somewhere, “a line… which he never forgot: ’The scientist who would rather refute than comprehend demonstrates that he has chosen the wrong calling.’” It is a remark that can apply to anyone who attacks an idea because of the man who sponsors it, rather than trying to disprove the idea itself.

  Mr. Grinnell, whose first science-fiction story I anthologized in my 1952 Vanguard collection Invaders of Earth, has since then written a small number of very distinguished tales that have varied from whimsy to stark horror.

  PROFESSOR BORISOV had succeeded in shocking his audience. He had had their sympathy for a long time—several months, in fact. Months in which he had slipped across the frontier in Finland, in the dead of winter, months in which he had hidden aboard a Finnish fishing vessel and made his way to Sweden. Months in which he had lived from hand to mouth, a refugee from a political tyranny he despised, without means, until his scientific friends in America had been able to obtain the necessary papers and this most valued post at this corn belt university’s experimental laboratories.

  And now this!

  The professor waved his hands wildly, a little upset at disturbing his new-found friends. “But of course I am not a Communist—do I have to tell you this again? Do I have to show you what I have gone through? Am I not the same man I was an hour ago, yesterday, last month? A good biologist, a good believer in democracy, in freedom of speech and conscience P Da! I am all that—and yet I tell you again, Lysenko is right!”

  Melvin Raine shook his head. It had been his responsibility, this invitation to the refugee Russian. It would be on his head if it was now shown that they were harboring a hypocrite. Yet—what Borisov had said was so. There was little doubt of the man’s honesty, of his innate personal refusal to compromise with anything he believed false. So what were they now to make of this Lysenko business? Why, how could any self-respecting scientist place credence in that charlatan—in a man of “science” who had to be bolstered up by the dictates of a Politburo of police state bureaucrats?

  Raine voiced his thoughts. “And still you persist in this strange thing. You betray our intelligence with this belief in Lysenko’s outmoded notions. It is sheer Lamarckism—the inheritance of acquired characteristics, disproved for a hundred years in a thousand laboratories.”

  “Ah, no, no.” The little Russian was very upset, but very positive. “It is you who do not understand. I do not approve of Lysenko’s politics: he is a Communist, a Stalinist fanatic. I am a freeman, a democrat. And yet, I tell you, on this one thing he could be right and still wrong on a thousand others. And I tell you also that this one thing I have seen proved in Russia…proved to me, to my satisfaction.”

  The men gathered in Raine’s rooms were silent. They were members of the faculty, biologists, teachers of animal husbandry, botanists, men of integrity and learning. It was clear that Borisov did not have the sympathy of a man there.

  “Let me ask you,” spoke one finally. “Do you think it was right, let us say, for science, for such a man as Galileo to be harassed for his opinions by the inquisitorial court?”

  “Ah, yes,” shouted Borisov, “it was wrong of the court—for in that one thing Galileo was right. But I am glad you mentioned him. Very glad. For let me ask you this: Galileo was right in believing his astronomical discoveries and for saying that the earth did move. But how many other things that Galileo personally believed were wrong? Did he not share the ignorance and bias of his time in everything else? Did he not believe in the divine right of kings, in slavery, in the permanent servility of serfs and women, in a hundred, a thousand other such outmoded evils, falsehoods? Would he not be, by our standards, a hopeless bigot, a reactionary?

  “So…but in that one thing Galileo was right. So…in this one thing Lysenko is right. He shares the foolishness of the state around him, but unlike the case of Galileo the fickle state chooses to uphold his one discovery and suppress his opponents. Perhaps someday Trofim Denisovich may lose his political skill, and it will be his opponents who dictate the Marxist ’truth’ concerning genetics. All this is a mere accident of politics. What has it to do with whether his discovery be true or false?”

  Raine leaned forward. He looked at the man, studied him. Borisov’s blue eyes were plainly distressed, his face was lined and working. His prematurely gray hair was awry. Yes, the American decided, this man was on the level. Borisov meant what he said, and because he was implicitly honest, he had said it.

  “If,” and Raine weighed his words carefully, “you have seen proof that Lysenko’s theories of evolution and the heredity of acquired characteristics do work, would you be willing to conduct an experiment here—under our conditions—to prove it again?”

  Borisov frowned, ran a hand through his hair. “Yes.”

  “Then suppose we meet tomorrow and work out the details of this experiment to our mutual satisfaction?”

  “Why wait until tomorrow? Let us decide right here upon this experiment. After all, in dealing with generations we may have to need several years for this…Have you any suggestions?”

  One of the biology men spoke up, a sly smile on his lips. “What would you say to repeating Weismann’s experiment with mice? Shall we breed a race of tailless mice?”

  Borisov turned, shook a finger. “Now that is exactly what I mean when I say you do not know what Lysenko is doing. Weismann tried to disprove Lamarck by cutting off the tails of twenty-two generations of mice. And the last generation was born with just the same long tails as the first! Aha, you all say, this proves that you cannot inherit acquired changes! And then you all will get busy saying that Chinese women bound their feet for thousands of years and still were born with normal feet! Aha, you then add, this double proves it! And all that it proves is nothing! Nothing at all, except that nature sneers at foolishness.”

  He stopped, gathered his breath. “Let me explain and please listen. The mice did not lose their tails because there was no practical reason for them to lose their tails, there was no need for taillessness, there was no environmental necessity for it, it was pointless, senseless, useless. So the mouse breed simply ignored Weismann’s scalpel. The Chinese women were helpless with their feet bound. Their organism rejected that foolishness. Even if an artificial society wanted it, the body knew better.

  “Now please understand this. A body, a plant, an animal will pass on an acquired characteristic only when that new characteristic has been acquired by the individual in answer to an urgent need of the system to maintain itself. A seed that falls in a strange climate either adapts itself to that climate or it dies. If it adapts itself, it passes on its adaptation to its descendants, or they die. Burbank knew this. Plant growers know this. Only foolish college biologists do not know this.”

  “How about mutations?” said Raine. “You know that the means for the creation of new species has been shown to be by the mutation of the germ cell, by alteration of the chromosomes. In the course of survival, only those mutant individuals who have a beneficial quality from this genetic accident will live.”

  “This is not so. Consider the cavern fish,” said Borisov. “This is a thing you Americans discovered. But you ignore it in your fine theories. These fish, found in lightless caverns, have no eyes. But you take them out and breed them in lighted waters, and, presto, in a few generations the eyes are back. Why? Obviously these fish originally became trapped in these caverns. In lightlessness, their eyes were useless— worse, being sensitive, they were a handicap, a menace to their life. Hence they retracted, generation by generation, atrophied, until they were born in that atrophied submerged condition. But back in the light, the need for eyes reasserted itself, and the eyes returned in a few generations. This is not mutation, no.”

  He paused, held up a hand. “Now in this experiment, you must forget these tailless mice. If you use mice, you must create a condition which will make them change to survive; which will make them force the acquisition of some quality their young will need to have also. You will see. So I suggest this: why not intelligence? We will force the mice to use their brains. We will breed thinking mice, because maybe that will be the easiest experiment for us.”

  Raine nodded. “I do not believe it will work. But that will be an acceptable basis.”

  Raine and Borisov and several others worked out the details of the experiment, and within a month the scene was set.

  The men who had met that original night gathered at an old farmhouse several miles from the town. The farm and its dilapidated house had been acquired years ago by the college, which had thus far failed to make use of it. Raine and Borisov showed the men in. The interior of the house had been torn out, until the building was like a huge barn, only a hollow shell. It was hard to describe its present contents, save that it looked like nothing so much as a giant abdomen, tightly packed with crisscrossed and interlaced intestines made of tubes ranging from three to ten inches in diameter, some transparent, some translucent, some plastic black. The interior of the house, save for a few corners, a few observation posts set on platforms here and there, was a closed and vastly complex structure of these tubes. The men stared in amazement.

  Borisov explained. “We intend to breed mice to have cunning and quickness of thought. This also is an inherited characteristic. We will breed a race of mice that can make deductions, put two and two together, estimate for tomorrow.

  “You see, here is Lysenko’s law as he condenses it.” He took out a little gray-covered pamphlet, found a place, and translated: ” ’The alteration of requirements, that is of the heredity of a living body, always reflects the specific effects of conditions of the external environment, provided that they are assimilated by it!

  “Now, we have created an external environment for these mice. It is this maze, closed from the outside world in every way, and the mice will live and breed entirely within it. We have created, in accord with Lysenko’s theory, conditions within this maze which will force the change in the species of mice for the creation of intelligence. That is this. This maze of pipes, which is their home, is basically not too different from the dark holes and cracks they would inhabit in houses. This maze of pipes is full of tricks. It is movable. It will shift its tubes, change connections, in accord with a mathematical rhythm. Systematically, in increasingly complex cycles, the various entry places for food will shift. Day by day they will change, but they will repeat in cycles which the mouse should be able to determine, at first, without too much delay.

  “At first the mice will become confused, for to obtain water they must come to one place, salt another, meat a third, fruit a fourth, and so on. And within the lifetime of each mouse they will see the regular alternation of these places. They will have to learn to determine the next day’s alternation in advance, for there will never be enough food for all. As this goes on, as future generations come into existence, the pattern will become more complex, new problems will be added, dangers will be placed in the tubes. These mice will have to force themselves to acquire greater and greater skill at solving problems, or die out.”

  He paused for breath. The men looked at the bewildering maze of tubes, probably miles of it crowded into the space within the wooden farm walls. “There will be lighting cycles within the tubes. There will be heat and cold spells. Mostly there will not be enough heat, by the third or fourth generation surely. But they will have the raw means for making heat, if they can learn to use them. There are special phases through which their development must operate. Light, heat. We are going to give them more oxygen than in the normal atmosphere; this will assist them to think and move faster. Professor Raine has agreed to it. We are even going to feed them supplies of a milk formula at first, which is chemically similar to human milk. Lysenko claims that the sap of a foster-parent plant can influence the heredity of a grafted twig from another species. This is permissible in the experiment.”

  They looked over the maze. Raine unrolled the plans for it, explained the various subtleties, showed them the machinery for operating it, the schedules of food and heat alternations, for creating “season” within the sealed mouse world.

  “Professor Borisov and I have our distinct opinions on how this will end. I say that his twentieth generation of mice will be as ignorant as his first, that they will not pass on any basic cunning to their offspring. I say further that if anything strange should develop, I will prove that it is by mutation and that it will display the evidence of it on its own body.”

  Borisov shrugged. “You will see. By the way, gentlemen, we are not using laboratory white mice here. We agree that their albinism and their artificial breeding does not correspond with nature’s norm. We are starting this experiment with wild gray house mice, captured in the city itself. And—we begin the experiment now.”

  He opened a valve in a large tube, took a box from which excited squeaks were coming, and lifted a shutter at the box’s side, which he had pressed against the tube’s opening. There was a scurrying of little feet as the mice rushed through. Another box was lifted. “The females, now,” and another scurrying of feet.

  “And now we shall see.”

  A half year later, Borisov and Raine stood on the upper observation post near the roof of the old house, watching the movements of the little gray mice through the sides of a transparent wide tube. The entry point for fruit was at that spot that hour, and they had just placed the supply there. No mice were in sight when they had done so, but within three minutes there was a flash of gray and a mouse was at the food, turning it over, nibbling. Then, in a few seconds, there were several mice, and shortly after, a crowd.

  Raine snapped his watch shut. “About the same time as yesterday,” he said. “Not bad. May have been luck.”

  Borisov fingered his chin. “Or it may have been an old and experienced mouse simply on the prowl. But I think that first one had figured out where the entry would be.”

  Raine leaned over, watching the stream of mice that was now coming and going. “The trouble is that several generations are alive at once. But it does seem true that the younger mice seem to be edging the older ones out.”

  “But,” said Borisov, “just to argue your point, this could be merely agility.”

  He noted the time in a large notebook, one of the many which had been used in the short time so far. There had been a period within the first few weeks when the mice had had very great difficulty in finding the food in time. Many of the original ones had certainly died in that time, starved, or eaten by their hungry fellows. But definitely they had overcome this original handicap. Of that there could be no doubt. But was this the development of intelligence or was it merely a system of having sentinels dispersed widely at all possible points? This angle had not occurred to them before.

  However, the next steps were already planned. This was a system of new barriers. When the next food entry points came around in the complex schedule, there would be additional problems to be solved. But the question was still whether this was merely a system of food scouts set up by the older generations and picked up by example by the new ones. It was hard to tell…

  In the next year, Borisov and Raine became more and more baffled. The mice seemed to have established a fairly standard time for the discovery of the rhythmically changing food spots. It took usually about two and a half minutes for discovery and rarely varied. The total number of mice did not seem to be increasing, but was apparently stationary. There was no longer any practical way of determining how many mice were in the entire maze, but they knew that only a certain limit could be supported.

  However, what they could see of the mice did not seem to indicate any noticeable physical changes. They did not remove any of the little animals, for the test demanded that the mouse maze be sealed and stay that way.

  It was about two and a quarter years later, about the time that a twentieth generation might have been in the tubes, that Raine first spotted the blue mouse. It had originally made its appearance at one of the food entries among the first five to find it. By that time the mathematical shifting of the ports had assumed a complexity that would have confused humans and would have required a whole month’s records to determine its next shifts. Yet the mice kept on spotting the shifts in time.

  Raine pointed out the blue mouse to the Russian. They were again on the upper observation platform. This mouse was actually slightly larger, possibly longer, and his fur was quite definitely more bluish than gray. The tail appeared to be shorter and in some ways he seemed faster.

  “Look at that,” whispered Raine. “Look at that! Could that be a result?”

  Borisov pursed his lips. He had been getting a bit uneasy about the experiment. Even though they were trying for intelligence and not physical change, he had expected that some physical changes would occur as a corollary to the greater brain ability. Man knew too little of nature to predict all the factors that might accompany a change in the direction of a being’s existence. Yet all he had seen had been little gray mice that never seemed any different to the eye. But this… well…

  Raine went on, “That mouse has all the appearance of a mutant. An irrelevant color change, an unusual variation in size and length. If it is also intelligent, would it not prove my point and not yours?”

  Borisov was shaken more than he would care to admit. “Still,” he said, “there might be a factor within the tubes that we do not understand which called forth these changes. We should avoid conclusions until the experiment is over. Should we check the controls, the heat, the inside atmosphere?”

 

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