Cautionary Gaieties

By Horace Judson

THE MOLECULE MEN by SIR FRED HOYLE and GEOFFREY HOYLE

255 pages. Harper & Row. $5.95.

Intellectual sightseers being guided around Cambridge, where one of the three-star attractions is Sir Fred Hoyle and his Institute for Theoretical Astronomy, are likely to be told a cautionary anecdote. It is the science don's equivalent of the Little Princes in the Tower. One day, goes the tale, a colleague rushed to Hoyle with the incomprehensible datum that variable star Alpha, though 1,000 times larger than star Beta, was pulsing 1,000 times faster. "Oh, but there's no mystery; the reason is obvious," said Hoyle, and proceeded to explain it. His colleague went away awed, only to burst in again to say the mystery was deeper than ever, because he had strained his datum; it was really Beta vibrating 1,000 times faster than Alpha. "Oh, but there's no mystery," Hoyle instantly replies. "The reason is obvious . . ."

Just so: Hoyle is the world's most celebrated astrophysicist, not only because of the reach of his knowledge and intuition, but because of the outrageous speed of his cosmological imagination. Several times Hoyle's exuberance has boiled over into fiction, including The Black Cloud and Rockets in Ursa Major --the latter written in collaboration with his son Geoffrey, as are the two long short stories in this book.

The title story, The Molecule Men, is the better of the two. What if a form of life existed that could modify its own genetic message, deliberately and with the speed and flexibility, say, of Fred Hoyle's imagination? What if such a protean protein were invading Earth? This is the fear that seizes Dr. John West, Cambridge scientist, as he sees a bank robber on trial at the Old Bailey turn himself into a swarm of malevolent bees. Soon after, the bees become a pack of ravening wolves and then, successively, a series of the earth's largest life forms: an elephant leading a protest march and a grove of giant sequoias sur rounding Buckingham Palace.

Penultimately, the invading quick-change alien becomes simultaneously the British Prime Minister, the Presidents of the U.S. and U.S.S.R., and Chairman Mao. But as the creature changes, it learns not only earth biology but politics and catches up, with deadly irony, to Dr. West's (and Hoyle's) own belief that scientists and technologists, not politicians, hold the real power.

The second story, whose "What if?" begins at the bottom of Loch Ness, is hardly more than a vehicle for an affectionate Highlands scene-and-character sketchbook. But the Hoyle stories are the playthings of genius. Because they carry around no portentous sociological baggage, the Hoyles are all the more effective at the classical task of science fiction, which is to satirize grotesque social reality in the mirror of scientific possibility. More than that, the tales have that rarest of qualities in fiction, science or otherwise: gaiety.

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