Enrico Fermi and the Dead Cat From pole to pole, about five centimeters deep, the green

scum covered the fourth planet from the red star. It floated on the oceans, raining down forever into their depths. It lay across the continents in thin green sheets, leaving only the highest mountaintops bare. It washed down rivers; at their mouths it clung to piers unused for a hundred thousand years. It blew on the wind against piles of rubble that were no longer buildings, stuck to the naked rock on plains that had once been deep in topsoil. And the green film was all there was. Each year there was less of it, for no circulating ecology fed it. It bled away to the ocean floor, or on the wind to the glaciers and mountaintops, each time losing forever some of the carbon and nitrogen fixed by the planet s former ecology. Faintly at first, radio signals fell on the planet. Ancient genes woke from disuse and responded. !he green film coalesced and organi"ed. #ells speciali"ed; the film transformed itself into a single planetwide organism. $ighty stalks of cellulose fiber, kilometers high, grew up in less than a decade. %ong filaments ran over beaches and rocky coasts down into the sea, and membranes at their ends filtered in silver, gold, aluminum and copper, which travelled a molecule at a time up the filaments to coat the outsides of the stalks. At the top of the stalks, leaves, grew. &ther organs grew deep into the ground, taking energy captured by the leaves and binding it into separated metals and great chambers filled with acid. It took thirty years to finish growing. 'y then the signals were strong and clear, with one great dip in strength for ten twenty(fourths of each long cycle that might have suggested ( had there been a mind to suggest it to ( a world with its radio stations concentrated on two thirds of its lines of latitude. !he final phase of the genetic program activated. )reat currents pulsed along the stalks in the shape of incoming signals, interrupted in a pattern read from the genes themselves. After barely two years of this, the energy reserve exhausted, most of the few remaining bioavailable trace elements of the planet s*uandered, the great organism reverted within hours to green scum. It devoured its own towers and filaments and batteries, subsiding first into thin remnants of the green film, then, over millennia, into mere spores. !he spores waited while ammonia and methane replaced free oxygen in the atmosphere, while rain and wind scoured the continents bare. &ccasionally something flickered toward life, perhaps once in fifty thousand years; always it met a spore, and shortly became a spore itself. Eventually the sun went out.

+uddenly, among the normal static and background noise, there was bits of pieces of fifty(year(old television programs. &ccasionally blips flickered in and out on older radars. !hen the EuroEar on the back side of the moon started getting it, and before anyone really had time to ask any *uestions, do"ens of ground(based radio telescopes, even home(made ones, were picking it up. +o there was no hope of keeping the transmissions secret. ,ithin a week all newspapers were printing copies of the message, showing that the stops always fell in pairs and the pattern of stops repeated identically every few hours, regardless of what old broadcast it had been superimposed on. +ome used bars, some used $orse #ode notation, but all offered pri"es for the best -decoding.. ,ithin two weeks the pri"es were all claimed. Any number of biologists had noted that the four possible pair values ( short(short, short(long, long(short, and long(long ( could be assigned to the four nucleotides on a strand of /0A. And when the translation was set to !hymine1short(short Adenine1short(long #ytosine1long(short )uanine1long(long the /0A resembled that of several terrestrial viruses. !here were a few nut letters in the papers, of course, and one religious publisher brought out a confusing, badly written and badly printed book, Satans Spawn from Space, but most people 2ust watched to see whose laboratory would actually produce the organism first. Every dime the respective governments could scrape together poured into the labs, and there were fresh scandals in grant diversion every week. &hio +tate, something of a dark horse, won, producing a virus from the /0A. !riumph was sweet for several months, until it became clear that the stuff didn t do anything. It seemed to be so alien that no living thing on Earth made antibodies to it. It replicated freely inside living cells, but after making a few copies of itself it did nothing there, diffusing la"ily through organisms without affecting them at all. Its only other notable feature was that all of the descendents of &+3 s first virus replicated simultaneously, at intervals of 4567.88 seconds, as if they all carried copies of the same clock. !he message from space died out after two years, fading to nothing across a few days. ,ithin a few years the virus was no more than a curiosity. Inevitably, as its

harmlessness became apparent, precautions became lax, and it escaped into the environment. 9apers were published arguing there had been no message ( that some sort of accident or fluke accounted for stuttering fifty(year echoes. &thers claimed that the message had been written in a four(letter alphabet, and the resemblance to a /0A se*uence had been purely accidental. !hree scholarly 2ournals devoted themselves to the interpretation and discussion of the signals, and on most college campuses there were one or two exosignalists. !he mystery virus itself found minor niches in science. 'ecause it was ubi*uitous, safe, and rather large, high(school students did science(fair pro2ects with it. A :apanese company patented a process for converting to edible protein. Ecologists studies its spread, finding it in insects in the Antarctic dry valleys, among the first lichens on a new volcanic island in the +outh 9acific, and in fungus in a cave deep within ;7. $ost people forgot about it most of the time. 9robably, in the two hours of agony as the world ended one day, no one was even thinking about the virus. Every living thing with a voice was screaming, everything that could tear tore at itself, ripping out sickly green hunks from its own flesh. ,ithin a few years, the green scum spread over the surface of the Earth, in an even layer about five centimeters deep. It waited for a radio signal, one with a recogni"able pattern. <ad it been capable of speech, and disappointment, it would have said that it had never been disappointed anywhere in the galaxy.