press and public, just “adaptene,” but only the most trusted officials of the Institute knew what it was by formula. By its very nature, it had to be shrouded in secrecy and kept from the hands of unscrupulous individuals. The Earth Union Government controlled exclusively the manufacture and use of adaptene.
Adaptene was the parent substance of all hormones in the living body. It controlled all metabolism, and therefore all the body processes to the last one.
Most remarkable of the applications of this near-miraculous substance had been the conquest of Jupiter’s inimical environment. It had seemed impossible at first. Jupiter’s surface had a crushing gravity, almost three times that of Earth, making human bones and muscles crack in a few hours.
A moisture-choked heat, from the titanic layers of pressing gases, promised constantly parched throats and slowly boiling skin. Worst of all, the atmosphere itself was laden with gases, besides oxygen, never meant for earthly lungs—methane, ammonia, and even traces of searing bromine that exuded from volcanic sources and gave the whole atmosphere its brownish tinge.
The natural life-forms of Jupiter’s wild environment were adapted by millions of years of evolution. How could Earthmen, nurtured in a gentler climate, meet that terrible challenge?
It was tried. A series of conditioning rooms had been prepared, with successively greater air pressure, heat and foreign gases. In a way, it was like the Twentieth Century compression chambers, which had been used to prepare divers for the great pressures under the sea. Three Earthmen, given strong doses of adaptene, had gone from chamber to chamber. Leaden suits were prepared for them and weight was added day by day. Their metabolism had faithfully undergone the necessary changes!
At the end of three months, they had reached the final conditioning room, which practically duplicated Jupiter’s conditions. Their skins had become tough and heat-resisting. Their lungs filtered out methane, ammonia and bromine automatically, retaining only the necessary oxygen. Their muscles, motivated by superactive adrenalin, easily supported five hundred pounds of weight without tiring. All this through the magic touch of adaptene, working in its mysterious way throughout every cell and vein.
The men had been sent to Jupiter. One of them succumbed to the continued harshness of life there, but the other two survived. With this proof of success, other men were bio-conditioned, and soon a settlement was founded and work begun to extract the chemical riches of Jupiter’s soil.
Now, in 2050 A.D., bio-conditioned Earthmen were to be found on ten different worlds of the Solar System—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Saturn and Titan. Adaptene had burst the former bonds of the narrow range of conditions under which the human body could survive.
It did not matter whether the atmosphere was thin or thick, whether life-supporting oxygen was scarce or overabundant, whether frigid cold or suffocating heat existed, whether the force of gravity was weak or bruisingly powerful—adaptene made metabolic corrections for all variations.
They were still humans, these made over colonists on other worlds. Science had changed their bodies somewhat, but not their minds. They lived and loved and worked in alien surroundings with as much of the measure of well being and happiness as came to Earth-living humans. Their children were easily bio-conditioned from birth onward by adaptene. It was only the start, but colonization was rapidly gaining momentum toward a great empire in which Earth people lived on all the worlds of the Solar System—by the virtue of adaptene.
ETBI, where the bio-conditioning was carried on, was a separate branch of the Earth Union Government, along with the Space Navy, Interplanetary Exploration and Planetary Survey Bureaus. The exploitation of space was a highly organized process.
First the ships of the exploration service mapped and explored, on any new world. Then the Planetary Survey experts tabulated all raw resources, mineral and otherwise. The Space Navy stepped in next, to establish outposts and fueling stations.
Finally ETBI sent its tailored, permanent colonists to dig in and develop the planet. And a new world had been added to man’s growing roster.
CHAPTER III
Mystery from the Spaceways
The heart of Extra-Terra Bio-Institute was its controlling laboratory system, whose activities ran the entire scale of science. Its staff numbered thousands. Its facilities were ultra-modern. It was the clearing house of all data brought back from the spaceways. On file was every conceivable bit of information relating to extra-terrestrial matters.
The head of ETBI was a cabinet member of the Earth Union Government. Second in command was Dr. Rodney Shelton, youngest and most brilliant of the scientific staff.
His career had been studded with vital researches. Even before coming to ETBI, his graduation thesis as a student had settled once and for all the virus-enigma, unsolved for a century. He proved that the viruses were molecular life-forms, the link between mineral and living states. Thus tagged, all virus diseases were curable, including the common “cold,” by treating them with artificial anti-virus molecules, as though they were simply chemical reagents.
But, joining the staff of ETBI, Shelton had turned his attention to the mysteries of extra-terrestrial biology. He had been with the famed Venus Swampland Expedition, commissioned to study the terrible brain-softening plague that periodically swept out from the swamplands to wipe out whole communities of Earth settlers.
Isolating the germ, Shelton had studied it at great risk alone—at his own insistence. He passed out his notes from a sealed-off cubicle of the ship. He lived in a sealed suit and did not dare eat or drink. In a week, he came out, thin and weak, but happy—with the answer.
The brain-softening bacteria died promptly in blue light, unknown on Venus because of its cloud-packed skies that filtered out all blue radiation. Thereafter, all Earth settlements were simply protected, when the plague reared, by rings of blue searchlights.
On Mercury, Shelton had found a much simpler way of stopping the voracious hordes of omnivorous, two-foot amoeboids than by blasting them to pieces with small cannon. No poison could affect them. Small gelatin capsules containing solid carbon dioxide were strewn in their stampeding path. The giant single-celled monsters absorbed them, dissolved off the gelatin, and swiftly puffed up into porous balloons by the action of released gas. In this form, they were whisked into the sky by the stiff winds, like bubbles, and eventually dashed to smears against rocks and cliffs.
But on Mars, Shelton had met, and conquered, the most baffling problem of them all. What could one do against invisible swarms of spongy germs that roamed the wastes of that planet and soaked up every last particle of water, to convert it into more spongy germs? The least exposure of a water supply would let them in, to fill it with their multiplying legions.
Shelton impregnated the normal water with one per cent of heavy-water, easily manufactured on Earth from deuterium, “heavy” isotopic hydrogen, and oxygen. By Mendelian principles, applicable to all life, whether on Earth, Mars or Andromeda, the hundredth or so generation of the sponge-germs were unable to breed.
Shelton remembered that back in the 1930’s the law had been laid down that heavy water inhibited reproductive processes. The sponge germ ceased to peril the water supplies of Earth colonists.
* * * *
But in the past three years, Shelton’s responsibilities had been shifted entirely to the most important of ETBI’s activities—the bio-conditioning. He was one of the trusted few who knew the chemical formula of adaptene, and was always in complete charge of every new bio-conditioning venture engaged in by ETBI.
Before
