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nose of a hammerhead shark, into an organ that luminesced in the infrared.
Below its eyes were two large, forward-directed, concave areas, formed from a
mixture of reflective and absorbent tissues that functioned both as variable-
geometry focusing surfaces to produce a crudely directed beam that could be
steered by moving the head, and as receivers tuned to the reflections. Thus,
it navigated and hunted by means of its own system of self-contained, thermal
radar.
The anquiloc's main prey was a small, wasplike octopod known as the chiff. The
chiff possessed IR-sensitive antennae that evolution had shaped to operate in
the same general range as the anquiloc's search frequencies, which gave rise
to an unusual contest of everchanging strategy and counterstrategy between the
two species. The chiff's first, simple response on detecting a search signal
was to fold its wings and drop out of the beam. The anquiloc countered by
learning to dip its approach in anticipation when it registered a chiff. The
chiff reacted by skewing its escape to the left, and when the anquiloc
followed, the chiff switched to the right; when the anquiloc became adept at
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checking in both directions, the chiff reacted by climbing out of the beam
instead of falling; or of going left, or maybe right. Whichever was adopted,
all the possible ensuing variations would unfold in some order or other and
then maybe revert to an earlier form, producing an ever-changing pattern in
which new behaviors constantly appeared, lasted for as long as they were
effective, and gave way to something else.
But what made the anquiloc more than just "peculiar" was the way it came
preprogrammed with the right maneuvers to deal with the latest to have
appeared from the chiff's repertoire of routines for evading it. And it was
not simply a statistical effect, where newborn anquilocs possessing all
possible varieties of behavior appeared equally, and only the ones that
happened to be "right" at the time survived.
Newborn individuals exhibited the same response pattern as the latest that the
parents had learned up to the time of conception. Since that pattern changed
depending on the current mode of cliff behavior, the mechanism represented a
clear case of inheriting a characteristic that had been acquired by the parent
during life and not carried by the gene line -- a flat contradiction of the
principles determined by generations of researchers on
Earth. Jevlenese and Ganymean scientists had long before settled the point by
training anquilocs in certain tasks and testing their offspring for the
ability after separating them at birth, and there was no doubt of it. Neither
was it the only instance of the phenomenon that they had encountered in their
probings of the nearby regions of the Galaxy.
But for the biologists of Earth it was a revelation that went against all the
rules, throwing some of their most precious tenets into as much disarray as
their colleagues from the physical sciences were already having to come to
terms with.
Professor Christian Danchekker operated a tracker ball on the control panel of
the molecular imager and peered at the foot-high hologram as it rotated in the
viewing space in front of him. He tapped a command key to create a ghostly
sphere of faint light, about the size of a cherry, and turned the tracker ball
again to guide the sphere until it enclosed a selected part of the image. Then
he spoke in a slightly raised voice toward a grille in the panel to one side.
"Voice on. Magnify by ten." The part of the image that had been inside the
sphere expanded to fill the viewing space and resolved itself into finer
detail. "Reduce by five..." Danchekker rotated the image some more and
repositioned the sphere slightly. "Magnify by ten...Increase contrast ten
percent...Voice off."
For a few moments he sat back and contemplated the result with satisfaction
tinged by a dash of undisguised amazement. He was tall and sparse
in build, with a balding head and antiquated, gold-rimmed spectacles perched
precariously on a hollowed, toothy face. The assistant seated on another chair
called a set of neural mapping charts, heavily annotated with symbols, onto
one of the auxiliary display screens while she waited.
"There it is, Sandy," Danchekker murmured. "The base sequence has altered. Run
a delta-sigma on the code and correlate it against the map. But I
have no hesitation in predicting, now, that you'll find it embedded there.
This is how it transfers."
Sandy Holmes leaned forward and studied the enhanced section of the molecule's
structure now being presented. "It's a cumulative progression from what we had
before," she commented.
Danchekker nodded. "Which is what one would expect. As the learned routine is
registered by the nervous system, the encoded representation impressed into
the messenger increases. We're actually looking at transferable memory in
action."
They had taught some anquilocs, brought from Jevlen, to adapt to artificial
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