He was looking out upon a scene of waves breaking against a rocky shore, which was so uncannily like the stock shot incorporated into Roger Corman’s films of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories that it filled him with superstitious dread. His chief assistant had a voice rather like Vincent Price’s, which rather added to the impression he sometimes had that he was living as a character in somebody else’s nightmare. He was glad to be distracted when his secretary came in to tell him that his two visitors had arrived.
Oysterdrill didn’t often have people turning up at his laboratory to consult him. His reputation as the world’s greatest expert on mollusks carried a certain prestige, but it didn’t usually bring members of the public flocking to his door. He was curious to know why this young man and his fiancée wanted to see him. When they had made the appointment they had indicated that it was a matter of some urgency.
The young man’s name was Albert Zeitgeist. He was in his early twenties, pale and neurasthenic. It seemed to Oysterdrill that he oozed world-weariness from every pore. His companion was introduced simply as Sandra. She was blonde and even thinner than Zeitgeist—pretty enough in an angular sort of way, but by no means voluptuous. She too seemed distinctly lacking in joie de vivre. They both sat down carefully, looking slightly embarrassed. They refused Oysterdrill’s offer of a Bacardi, and watched disinterestedly as he poured himself a double.
While Oysterdrill sipped his drink, Zeitgeist began to tell his story. He was hesitant at first but gradually warmed up until the words came out in a veritable torrent.
It was the strangest story Oysterdrill had ever heard.
* * * *
Albert Zeitgeist was a research fellow in medical science, working with a team of biochemists who were investigating the properties of a new generation of psychotropic proteins. The proteins had been developed by research scientists at Imperial College, using design software developed by Oxford Molecular, and were manufactured—using standard techniques of plasmid engineering—by Lifetech, Incorporated, a multinational company whose English laboratories were in Slough.
It so happened that a batch of new proteins, unknown to nature, had recently been given to Zeitgeist for testing. They had exhibited some very remarkable properties. Their psychotropic effects were quite exciting. Zeitgeist had quickly come to the conclusion that he was on the brink of discovering the underlying biochemical causes of melancholia. When taken into the body these new compounds could induce spectacular depression.
Zeitgeist had concluded that an understanding of the biochemistry of these proteins might well pave the way for a breakthrough in the treatment of the various symptoms lumped under the heading of “clinical depression” and some closely-related mental illnesses, just as the investigation of endorphins some thirty years before had paved the way for a better understanding of anesthesia and opiate dependency.
As Zeitgeist had progressed with his investigations, though, he had gradually become aware of the fact that these proteins were biologically active in other ways. They could interfere dramatically with the systematic organization of the metazoan corpus!
“You see, sir,” Zeitgeist explained to the fascinated Oysterdrill, “it’s like this. The one great enigma left in biology is the inheritance of structure. We know well enough how the genes function as a kind of chemical factory—how they provide blueprints for all the proteins that go to make up a complex organism. What we don’t know much about is how the development of the embryo to produce a precise bodily structure is organized and determined. The egg of an ostrich isn’t all that much different from the egg of a whale, in terms of the proteins which its genes can make, but somehow it carries instructions to make an ostrich-like body and not a whale-like body. The natural proteins controlling that process haven’t yet been identified; but the artificial proteins I’ve been working with seem to be active in this way in addition to their psychotropic properties.”
Oysterdrill’s general training in biology allowed him to follow the details of this explanation perfectly adequately. In any case, he had tried hard to keep up with the spectacular advancements in the area of biological engineering that were being made in the first decade of the twenty-first century, because he recognized in them the real cutting edge of human progress. If anything could save the world from the multitudinous threats which it faced, it would be biotechnology—or so, at least, he believed.
“This is all very interesting, Doctor Zeitgeist,” Oysterdrill complained, spreading his hands wide in a gesture of incomprehension, “but I can’t imagine what any of this has to do with me. I study mollusks—I have nothing to do with psychotropic medicine or embryology. I’m flattered, of course, that you should want to tell me about your exciting discoveries, but why exactly have you come to consult me?”
“I came to you,” said Zeitgeist, gloomily, “because my proteins seem to the ones—or analogues of the ones—which instruct mollusk eggs to develop into mollusks.”
Oysterdrill frowned as he tried to work out the implications of this remarkable statement. “How do you know?” he asked.
“Well,” said Zeitgeist, “we’ve run into a little problem at Lifetech these last few months—ever since the flu epidemic in October last. We all came down with it, you know. Now, our sterile technique is usually pretty good—I’m not saying it’s perfect, but we don’t just ignore the regulations like some cowboy outfits I could name. How it could have happened I don’t know, but some of our DNA stores—our artificial plasmids—seem to have been infected by the flu virus, and some of the plasmids appear to have fused with virus particles. The infection changed the structure of the virus, so that although we’d all had the flu, we didn’t actually have any immunity to the new form. So we all had a second bout of it.”
“And?” prompted Oysterdrill, as the young man paused for breath.
“Well,” said Zeitgeist, “the upshot of it all was that the virus seems to have taken up permanent residence in our bodies, and every time it breaks out...actually, there’s a combination of things that happen. We all start sneezing...and then we get terribly, terribly depressed...and then....”
Zeitgeist paused again, gulping air as his eyes filled with tears of shame and remorse.
“And then?” Oysterdrill echoed, finding the tension unbearable.
“And then,” Zeitgeist announced, melodramatically,” we turn into giant whelks.”
* * * *
Oysterdrill knew that he really should have expected this development, but his mind had instinctively shied away from it. It was too horrible to contemplate.
“Whelks?” he repeated, nearly choking on his Bacardi. He stared at Zeitgeist, shamefully aware that his mouth must have fallen wide open in astonishment.
“Mostly whelks,” Zeitgeist corrected himself. “Actually, there’s a murex or two on the administrative level—they’re closely related, aren’t they? And a handful of common or garden gastropods among the support staff. Mostly, it’s whelks.”
“Holy shit!” said Oysterdrill, although it was not an expression he used habitually.
Zeitgeist pulled out a rather grey handkerchief and blew his nose sadly.
“Well,” said Oysterdrill, once he had drawn breath. “This is certainly exciting. I’m very glad you told me about it. I’d like to visit Lifetech as soon as possible. Giant whelks, you say? This could be the opportunity of a lifetime. There’s not much that crops up in my field that’s genuinely new, you see...it’s not like yours. A whelk with the biomass of a human being would be quite something...and I’ll bet the metamorphosis is an amazing sight too. What an opportunity to push back the frontiers of the biology of the Prosobranchia!”
“Good God!” exclaimed Sandra, leaping from her chair. “Is that all you can say? We don’t want you to come and watch—we want you to help us do something about it. You’re our last hope! We want you to tell us how to fight this scourge, before it’s too late. Don’t you see what might happen if this new virus starts an epidemic?”
Oyst
erdrill thought about it for a few minutes.
“Ah!” he said, finally. “I think I get your drift. Alarming thought, isn’t it?”
“It certainly is,” replied Zeitgeist.
“I suppose you’ve consulted the usual specialists—Harley Street, the Institute of Tropical Medicine, the Maudsley and so on?”
“Of course.”
“And they haven’t been able to find a cure, or an effective treatment?”
Zeitgeist shook his head, sadly—so sadly, in fact, that he seemed to be on the point of bursting into tears. It was, however, his clothing that began to burst.
The buttons on Zeitgeist’s shirt began to pop and the seams sizzled as they were unceremoniously ripped apart. His torso swelled enormously, but the resemblance to TV representations of the Incredible Hulk went no further. His lugubrious face lengthened as his legs began to wrap themselves round his head. It seemed that his spine was flowing out of the back of his neck, spreading out to envelop his oozing flesh in a great helical shell.
It was, as Professor Oysterdrill had blithely hypothesized, a truly amazing sight.
“You stupid old fart!” cried Sandra. “You’ve set him off. I knew this was a mistake. He shouldn’t even be out of bed, you know!”
Oysterdrill watched in awed fascination as a gargantuan but perfectly formed specimen of Nucella lapillus took form in his living room. He had never seen one that measured more than four centimeters from the tip of the shell to the leading edge of the kopfuss, but this one was all of two metres. It was the most astonishing thing he had ever seen in thirty years of studying mollusks.
With a screechy hiss rather like the one a lobster is said to emit when thrown alive into boiling water (though perhaps a fraction lower in pitch) the creature smashed its way through the French windows and set off for the beach.
Sandra seemed to have got over her initial shock and horror. She sat down again, tiredly. It was obvious that she had been through this before.
“He runs amok, you know,” she said, grimly. “He’ll go on the rampage in the oyster beds...and there isn’t an R in the month, either. It’s all right for you—I’m the one that will have to cope with him when he gets back.”
“Now, now,” said Oysterdrill, apprehensively. “You mustn’t let it get you down.” He was afraid she would start to cry. He hated the sight of a woman crying. It always reminded him of his mother.
There was a peculiar popping sound. It took Oysterdrill a couple of seconds to identify it as the sound of Sandra’s bra snapping. By that time, her head had ducked between her knees and her skull was beginning to dissolve. There was a strange sucking sound, and then a throaty expectoration as the heaving mass of glop she had now become discharged a corset and a suspender belt before beginning the serious business of forming a shell.
“Oh dear,” said Oysterdrill, as a specimen of Buccinum undatum many times bigger than any he had ever seen followed the Nucella through the shattered window. He wondered whether the young couple’s lives would be permanently blighted by the fact that they were no longer members of the same species. It was bound to cause problems if they were forced to start married life with this hanging over them.
He wondered what was happening in Slough, and remembered John Betjeman’s famous line about it not being fit for people now.
* * * *
Later, as Oysterdrill watched the two gigantic creatures cavorting on the rocks below, indulging in what was surely a perverse form of love-making, he began to feel more than usually depressed.
He wondered how long the incubation period of the virus might be, and regretted having shaken hands with young Zeitgeist.
The opportunity to get further into his subject was not entirely unattractive, in some ways, although he hoped that he would not end up as a limpet. On the other hand, he didn’t suppose that his mollusk self would retain much in the way of scientific curiosity and taxonomic expertise. Mollusks were, on average, not very bright. Even a giant leap for mollusk-kind would hardly amount to a tiny step in terms of the intellect.
The future did not look too rosy, wisdom-wise.
“Oh well,” the professor said to himself, in the angst-ridden tone that had become so commonplace in recent times, “it’s not the end of the world.” Even as he said it, however, a remarkable apocalyptic vision was rising unbidden into his mind.
It came to Oysterdrill, with all the shock of divine revelation, that he now knew exactly how everything would come to pass. He finally knew which of many probable and improbable catastrophes would win the race to defeat the valiant efforts of mankind. He knew which rock it was upon which the wave of human progress was doomed to break.
The climax of human story would be neither a bang nor a whimper, but a slow fade into quiet oblivion, as the ruins of civilization were lovingly embalmed in polished highways of slime.
<
* * * *
THE PIEBALD PLUMBER OF HAEMLIN
Haemlin, the Ultimate Utopian City, had a problem.
Such a thing should not have been possible, but the Brain of Haemlin knew better than to waste time in useless lamentations. The problem was the worst kind imaginable, because it affected the Bloodstream itself—and anything that affected the Bloodstream went to the very Heart of the Body of Humanity and all that it stood for. The problem had to be solved, and quickly, but the Brain knew that it would not be solved easily. Everything that human ingenuity could do had already been done in the planning and making of Haemlin, when that ingenuity had attained its peak and its terminus.
The Senior Citizens of Haemlin were bitterly disappointed to find themselves in such a predicament, for which they held the Brain to blame. “How can this be?” they demanded. “Where did this menace come from? Why have all the measures you have taken to counter the threat been so utterly ineffective?”
“I don’t know,” replied the Brain. “There is no imaginable way that our fortress could have been invaded, but invaded it has been. There is no imaginable explanation for the invaders’ immunity to all the measures I have deployed against them, but immune they are.”
“Is there nothing further that can be done?” demanded the anguished Senior Citizens
“One thing and one thing only,” said the Brain. “We must submit the problem to the consideration of a fresh intelligence. The time may well have come for the Inheritors of Earth to repay their debt to humankind, if they can do it. Our ancestors nurtured theirs through difficult infancy and troubled childhood; I doubt that they will refuse to offer assistance in maintaining us through the eternal twilight of our years.”
“Have all our hopes and dreams come to this?” complained the Senior Citizens. “Are we no longer the masters of our own destiny? Have we no pride? Are we not men?”
To which the Brain answered, with crushing literalness: “yes”; “no”; “yes, alas”; and, “it all depends what you mean by men.”
Having settled those issues, the Brain sent for help to the pigs who had inherited the Earth.
When the pigs of Earth were informed of the broad nature of Haemlin’s problem—the details remained annoyingly vague—they decided to send a plumber and his tools. They also sent an apologetic note to the effect that, because they had never expected to receive a summons to the far side of the moon, they had no spacecraft capable of accommodating a larger relief force.
* * * *
The plumber was a piebald pig named Tam.
The ancestors of the citizens of Haemlin had, of course, remade their inheritors in something very like their own image, but subsequent generations of pigs had chosen to engineer some of their traditional features into their appearance. Most modern pigs wore relatively modest surskins covered in short, bristly hair, which were simply patterned in various combinations of pink, white and black. Although they all had maintained the old human habit of using chairs, the majority had reclaimed their curly tails. Even the faces of more recent generations had begun to take on a slightly porcine expression;
piggish pride had never managed to come to terms with the aesthetics of noses.
It was, of course, inevitable that the Senior Citizens of Haemlin should deplore all of these trends.
“Our ancestors gave you everything,” they complained to Tam, when they had admitted him to the interior of the moon by the far-side entry-port. “They could have chosen dogs, or lions, or horses, but they chose you. Did they raise you up from the ranks of the beasts merely in order that you should lower yourselves down again? Your present appearance, if typical of your kind, is a flagrant insult to your makers.”
“Your ancestors gave us the Earth, which is a good deal less than everything by anyone’s reckoning,” Tam replied, quite undaunted by the fact that he was the first pig to find himself in human company for at least five thousand years. “Dogs had not enough biomass to be successfully uplifted, horses too much. Lions had been hounded to extinction, along with every other viable candidate for biosophistication. Far from lowering ourselves, we have continued to travel the path of progress, which your ancestors forsook, and whose abandonment has delivered you into your present predicament. Whatever you may think of my appearance—which is by no means atypical of my kind, although we have preserved a reasonable variety of forms—it has a great deal more in common with the appearance of your ancestors than you now have.”
In the Flesh and Other Tales of The Biotech Revolution [SSC] Page 23
