Self-discovery

“It's not tricky. Why did the computer — womb use ammonia and phosphoric acid? Remember? It kept spewing out formulas and amounts and you ran around all the stores like a crazy man, trying to find it all. Why did you get it?! You don't know? I'll explain: the computer was synthesizing atpase and phosphocreatine — the sources of muscle energy. Understand?”

“I understand. But what about Galosha brand gas? And calcium rhodanate? And the methylviolet? And the other three hundred reagents?”

“I don't know yet. I have to read up on biochemistry….”

“Uh — huh… and now I'll explain to you why I got those disgusting things: I was fulfilling the logical conditions of the experiment — the rules of the game, and nothing else. I did not know about your superphosphate. And the computer probably didn't know that the formulas it was turning out in binary code had such fancy names — because nature is made up of structural elements and not names. And yet it asked for ammonia, phosphoric acid, and sugar, and not for vodka or strichnine. It figured out for istelf, and without textbooks, that vodka is a poison. And it created you without textbooks and medical encyclopedias — it modeled you from life.”

“I don't see why you're so uptight about biology. It has everything we need: knowledge about life and man. For example. ” — he was trying to convince me, it was obvious — “did you know that conditioned reflexes are created only when the conditioning stimulus precedes an unconditioned one? The cause precedes the effect, understand? The nervous system has a greater sense of causality than any philosophy book! And biology uses more precise terms than everyday life. You know, how they write in novels: 'The unconscious terror widened his pupils and made his heart beat faster. The sympathetic system went to work. There you go….” He leafed through his green bible. “ 'Under the influence of impulses passing through the sympathetic nerves, the following occurs: a) dilation of pupils through the contraction of the radial muscles of the iris; b) increase in frequency and strength of heart contractions…. That's more like it, eh?”

“It's more like it, but how much more? It doesn't occur to you that if biology had made giant strides in this business, then it would be biologists and not us who are synthesizing man?”

“But on the basis of this knowledge we'll be able to make an analysis of man.”

“An analysis!” I remembered the “streptocidal striptease with trembling….” my near breakdown, the punchtape bonfire — and I got mad. “All right, let's drop our work, memorize all the textbooks and pharmacology manuals, master a mass of terms, acquire degrees and baldspots, and thirty years or so from now let's return to our work so that we can label it all properly. This is phosphocreatine, and this is gluten… a hundred billion labels. I've already tried to analyze your appearance. I've had it. The analytic path will take us the devil knows where.”

In a word, we didn't reach an agreement. This was the first instance when each of us retained his opinion. I still don't understand why he, a systems technologist, engineer, electronics man… well, the same as I… why he turned to biology. We have an experimental setup the likes of which he'll never find in any other lab. We have to run experiments, systemize the results and observations, establish general laws — I mean general ones, informational ones! Biological laws are a step backward in comparison. That's the way it's done. And that's the only way to study the best way to control the computer — womb — after all, it's a computer first and foremost.

The arguments continued during the next few days. We got angry, attacking one another. Each one used arguments in his favor.

'Technology shouldn't be copying nature; it should be complementing it. We plan to double good people. And what if the good man is limp? Or lost an arm in the war? Or is in lousy health? After all, a man's worth is usually known when he has reached a ripe old age; and then his health isn't what it used to be, and maybe senility is creeping up… and we should re — create all that, too?”

“No. We have to find a way to iron out the wrinkles in the doubles. Let them be healthy, attractive.”

'There, you see!”

“What see?”

“In order to correct the doubles you need biological information on a good constitution and attractive looks. Biological!”