Armageddons

by Jack Dann

  Last night I dreamed I was a child again, watching my father grafting yet another shoot onto the apple tree in our kitchen garden. He had his back to me, and though I called out to him, he would not turn round and acknowledge me. True, it was only a dream, but if the finger is to be pointed at anyone, should it not be pointed at my father? I wonder what he would say to that if he were alive. Would he pass the buck on to his father—and so down the line forever and ever? Sometimes I think that there are no identifiable beginnings, only ends. And that surely is what we have here—the last full stop, the ultimate quietus. Unless, of course, you still believe in miracles.

  Dad's life ambition was to produce one single tree that carried as many different varieties of fruit as he could induce it to adopt. Two years before his death in 1981, he had four kinds of apple, three kinds of pear, and two different sorts of plum all producing fruit on the same tree. That summer a photographer from the local paper came round and took a picture of him beside his remarkable creation. They printed it over the caption: "Local Plant Wizard Displays the Fruits of His Skill." In the article that accompanied the picture, my father was quoted as saying: "If we work with her and not against her, she'll provide us all with another Garden of Eden." The "her" he referred to was, of course, "Mother Nature."

  When my father had his heart attack I was twenty-five years old and eighteen months into my first paid research job with Biotek. As soon as I heard the news I drove down to Chelmsford from Lincolnshire and went straight to the hospital. My mother and sister were already there. Dad was lying back with his eyes closed, looking gray and shriveled among the pillows. He was wired up to a monitor that was winking away steadily in a corner. A gurney with two gas cylinders was standing beside the bed, and a face mask lay ready to hand. Mother had just begun telling me in a strained whisper how it happened, when Dad opened his eyes. "Hello, Dad," I said. "How are you feeling?"

  "Is that you, Clive?" His voice was so weak I barely recognized it.

  "That's right," I said. "Who did you think it was?"

  "What are you doing here, Son?"

  "I've come to see how you are."

  "It's that bad, is it?"

  "Oh, they'll have you out of here in next to no time," I said. "They need the beds."

  He managed a faint smile. "How are things up in Grantham?"

  "Busy as ever."

  "No messages for the king, yet?"

  "Not yet," I said. "Just give me a year or two."

  At which point a nurse came in, followed by a couple of doctors, and we were ushered out of the room.

  "What did he mean about a message for the king?" asked my sister as I was driving her home.

  "It's a sort of private joke," I told her. "Something out of Gulliver's Travels."

  "Go on."

  "I can't remember it offhand," I said. "I'll look it up when we get back."

  While she was putting the kettle on, I went into Dad's cubbyhole of a study, hunted out his ancient copy of Gulliver's Travels, and, after some searching, found the passage I was looking for. I carried the book through into the kitchen. "Here we are, Lou," I said. "It's where the King of Brobdingnag is talking to Gulliver." And I read out: He gave it for his opinion that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before; would deserve better of Mankind, and do more essential service for his country, than the whole race of politicians put together."

  Lou was just pouring out the tea when the phone rang. It was Mother. Would we could back to hospital straightaway? Dad had just had another attack. As luck would have it, we got snarled up in the rush-hour traffic, and by the time we arrived, it was all over.

  The funeral took place five days later. As we trailed along the puddled path behind the coffin, the sun came out. A few minutes later, a brilliant rainbow had unfurled itself above the distant Roding. I remember how I chose to see it as a sort of omen—a message of hope for the future—as though Dad had somehow contrived to send me a benign blessing from wherever he was now. The wish was both father and mother to the thought.

  As soon as I could decently do so, I went back to work. Driving north through the flat, lush Cambridgeshire landscape, I found myself recalling a host of incidents from my childhood—long walks with my father through the summer fields and beside the slow, reedy East Anglian rivers; walks during which he had taught me the names of the birds and the flowers and the trees and had talked to me about his mysterious "Mother Nature." I remembered him poignantly as a man of great gentleness and compassion, and I was only slightly consoled by recalling how happy he had been when the news of my Open Scholarship had come through. That evening we had sat side by side, drinking to my future in glasses of his homemade wine and watching a documentary on the television about the ravages of the drought in Ethiopia. In my mind's eye I can still see those seemingly interminable lines of articulated skeletons wandering from nowhere to nowhere along a sort of crazy-paved highway of baked mud in a dried-up riverbed, while all around them wheeled the ominous shadows of the ever-present vultures. It was then that I noticed Dad was weeping. Now, recalling the shock I experienced, I think it was that grief of his as much as my own feelings of impotent horror at the pictures on the screen that made me decide how my own life would be spent.

  After the film ended, he went out into his study, brought back his tattered old copy of Gulliver's Travels, and read me out the bit I'd read to Lou. We talked for hours, ranging back and forth across the world. In our imaginations the sterile desert bloomed; the granaries of Asia, Africa, and South America overflowed; and the specter of Famine was banished forever from the face of the earth. As we were tottering off to our beds in the small hours, Dad paused on the stairs, peered down at me owlishly over the banisters, and said: "One of these days, Clive, we'll write our own postscript to Gulliver. We'll call it 'A Message to the King of Brobdingnag.' All it'll say is: 'Your Majesty's sacred mission is finally accomplished. Over and out.' "

  I giggled tipsily and saluted. "Message received and understood, Dad," I responded. "Over and out."

  Almost twelve months to the day after Dad's death, I attended a three-day international conference at Cambridge that was being arranged under the aegis of UNIDO. For the afternoon of the second day the organizers had laid on an inspection trip to the A.R.C.'s plant-breeding institute. After lunch we piled into a fleet of coaches and were driven off. By chance I found myself sitting next to a young woman whose identity badge proclaimed her to be "Dr. N. E. Sheran." I introduced myself and asked her what her specialty was. She told me she was a microbiologist. "And where are you from?" I said.

  "I'm from Sussex."

  "With Professor Dawlish?"

  She nodded.

  "Hey! Are you researching nitrogen fixers?"

  "We're researching lots of things."

  "It's those nifs I'm really interested in," I told her. "What's the point of developing high-yield strains of cereals if none of the Third World countries can afford the fertilizers to reap the benefit?"

  She smiled. "So maybe we should all be researching ways of producing cheaper fertilizers."

  We spent that afternoon on a conducted tour of the trial plots and in listening to an account of the P.I.B.'s latest colchicine experiments. I was very impressed. By cutting the twelve years it takes to produce a genuinely new variety down to eight years, they seemed to have stolen half a march on the inexorable Malthusian progression, which decrees that the mouths to be fed will forever outstrip the production of the wherewithal to feed them on.

  As we rode back to Cambridge, I expatiated on this theme to Dr. Sheran. "A world population headed for over 6 billion by the year 2000 means we've got to increase food production by at least 50 percent just to keep starvation down to its present level. What we need are shortcuts."

  "Or efficient birth control," she suggested mildly.

  "That's bound to come with the rise in the standard of living."

  "But to achieve that you'll h
ave to increase your food production by at least 100 percent. Do you really think it's possible?"

  "To make two ears of corn grow where only one grew before?" I said. "Of course it's possible."

  "In twenty years?"

  "Improving the species is only one aspect of it," I said. "Improving your methods of agriculture—better irrigation, soil conservation, cheaper fertilizers—they're all vital. It has to be a broad-front operation. But it can be done. It must be."

  "You know, you sound exactly like my father," she remarked with a smile.

  "To me I sound just like my father," I told her.

  That evening we both attended a film show sponsored by I.C.I., and after it we ended up in the hotel bar. By then I'd discovered that her first name was Natasha. Now, under further questioning, she told me that her mother was Russian and her father Eurasian. "An F2 hybrid!" I exclaimed rapturously. "That's really exciting. Are you married?"

  She shook her head.

  "But you're going to be?"

  "Am I?"

  "You're not telling me there isn't a bloke swanning around in the background?" I protested. "I mean—well, you're really something special, Natasha. You're far and away the most fantastic microbiologist I've ever laid eyes on. And an F2 hybrid into the bargain!"

  I wasn't lying, either. She had the sort of looks of one or two of the girls I'd occasionally seen dangling from the arms of well-heeled Tory twits in the lounge bar of The Marquis of Grantham—sweet peaches growing in an orchard on the other side of a barbed-wire fence. I couldn't believe my luck.

  Adroitly she changed the subject to what I was doing at Biotek. I told her how I was trying to isolate improved strains of the nitrogen-fixing bacteria Rhizobia and induce them to cooperate with cereals. I said I believed that the answer lay in getting Rhizobium genes into cereals so that the plants would be persuaded to form root nodules and hence create their own soluble nitrates. I added that I also had a hunch that somewhere in the world a strain of wild grain already existed that had succeeded in solving the problem for itself. If only we could track it down and then maybe exploit the P.B.I. colchicine techniques to improve its yield, we'd have the battle more than half-won.

  We talked and talked, bouncing ideas back and forth, until eventually I became aware that the lights were being turned off in the lounge. I glanced at my watch, saw to my astonishment that it was long after midnight, and realized that I'd just passed the most exciting and enjoyable three hours of my life.

  I spent the final morning of that conference in Natasha's company and succeeded in convincing her that her afternoon would be more profitably passed with me in a boat on the river than in attending an illustrated lecture on reafforestation programs in the Kashmir. As soon as we were afloat, I picked up where I'd left off the night before. I cross-questioned her about her line of research at Sussex and learned that for the past year she'd been working on the insertion of nif genes into chloroplast DNA. The aim of the exercise was to persuade the host plant to fix nitrogen directly in its leaves. I found the idea appealing as an idea, but it seemed a terribly long shot, and I told her so.

  "No longer than yours," she retorted. "No one's anywhere near to interpreting the DNA code that allows Rhizobium to cooperate with its hosts."

  "Well, if you ever happen to find it out, promise me you'll let me know," I said. "I really could do with some help."

  "Do you mean that?"

  Something in the tone of her voice brought me up short. I stared at her. "Yes, I do mean it," I said. "I really do. Why do you ask?"

  "I just wondered."

  I suppose I must have sensed that there was something else underlying her seemingly casual question, but I also knew that I lacked the subtlety to elicit it without appearing unbearably nosy. I tucked it away in the back of my mind, and that evening, when we were halfway through our second drink, I contrived to revert to it in a roundabout sort of way. Thus it was that I discovered she was even then in the painful process of extricating herself from a pretty intense relationship with one of her Sussex colleagues.

  "Does that mean you're looking around for a change of scene?" I suggested ingenuously.

  "It might have its attractions," she agreed. "Always providing I could find something in my own specialized field. Last month I got as far as writing off for application forms for a post with Unilever, but then I changed my mind."

  At that point my own mind went into accelerated overdrive. I whipped out my diary and a pen and handed them across to her. "Jot down your address and phone number," I told her. "When I get back to Grantham I'll have a word with our Big White Chief. I'm pretty sure there may be something coming up at Biotek in the very near future."

  "Really?" she said, scribbling down the information. "What sort of 'something'?"

  "There've been rumors floating around the department for months," I told her. "The one thing I am sure is that they're stepping up our genetic research funding. That's bound to mean taking on some more bodies. Why shouldn't one of them be a gorgeous Ph.D. microbiologist specializing in DNA transfer? I bet we'd pay you more than you get at Sussex."

  "No takes on that," she said with a grin, and handed back my diary and pen.

  Thinking about it over these past months, I believe I've succeeded in isolating five distinct episodes in my life that have led me directly to this particular point. Maybe "episodes" isn't quite the right word, but it will have to do. The first was, of course, Dad—his inspiration, his encouragement, and above all his belief in me. Without that, I might never have got started in science at all. The second was my discovery of Natie at that UNIDO conference in Cambridge in '82. The third, unquestionably, was my meeting with Dr. Sancharez at Ayacucho.

  What got Natie and me out to South America in the summer of '88 was largely a series of flukes, starting with the takeover of Biotek by Monagri in '86. When that happened Natie and I were distinctly apprehensive about what it might entail, but in the space of eighteen months we'd both been upgraded, and my Rhizobium project had been singled out for special encouragement—thanks largely to the promising field trials with GX3.

  Being a U.S.-based multinational, Monagri had all sorts of Third World links that were completely beyond the scope of Biotek's largely U.K./European operation. Furthermore, they believed strongly in what they liked to think of as "multinational cross-fertilization." When the GX3 reports filtered through to Los Angeles and were fed into the computer, what came out was, I presume, a recommendation that Dr. Clive Woodhouse be flown out to South America to scatter some of his intellectual pollen around sundry outposts of the far-flung Monagrian empire. Fortunately, Dr. Woodhouse was now in a position to stipulate that his colleague Dr. Sheran should accompany him, and on May 3, 1988, Natie and I found ourselves descending the gangway of a transcontinental jet at Sao Paulo on the first leg of a journey that was to take us to five countries in three and a half weeks. The supreme irony is that Ayacucho didn't even feature on our itinerary!

  We were supposed to spend two days at Cajamarca in Peru, fly on to Quito in Ecuador for a further four days, and then return home by way of Bogotá. What happened was that somewhere about halfway between La Paz and Lima, the private company jet that was ferrying us around developed engine trouble and had to make an emergency landing at Ayacucho. I managed to put through a phone call to the Monagri people at Cajamarca, and explained what had happened. They said they'd get back to us as soon as possible. We checked into the airport hotel and then wandered out to take a look at the town. When we returned to the hotel a couple of hours later, we were met by a lean, leather-faced, gray-haired man who introduced himself in excellent American English as Dr. Jaime Sancharez and informed us regretfully that our plane would have to remain grounded for at least twenty-four hours. In the meantime, he trusted that we would do him the inestimable honor of being the guests of himself and his wife at the Botanical Institute, which was situated a mere thirty minutes' drive outside the town.

  We never did discover precisely what Dr
. Sancharez's link with Monagri amounted to—he referred vaguely to some departmental funding connection via the University of Lima—but he told us that over the past ten years he had sent more than fifty species of wild plants and seeds to the N.S.S. lab in Colorado, and that he spent at least four months of each year on field trips up in the mountains. His real enthusiasm was reserved for the potato, of which he contended he had personally identified no fewer than eighty-three different kinds, seven of them previously unknown varieties.

  We passed that afternoon examining his collection, and then he took us on a personally conducted tour of the steeply terraced gardens of the institute, which were perched on the hillside high above the town. After that we risked heart failure by plunging into a deep pool that was fed by a mountain stream. Later we sat on the Sancharezes' terrace, sipping tall glasses of iced sangria while we watched the sun go down, and chatted about our experiences in Bolivia and Brazil. Then, over a truly excellent dinner, we told him something about our present line of research at Biotek and explained how it had led directly to our being there enjoying his hospitality. As we were on the point of retiring to bed, there came a phone call from our pilot at the airport to say that the plane had been repaired and that we were now free to continue our journey.

  Early next morning Dr. Sancharez drove us back into Ayacucho. We exchanged addresses, promised to keep in touch, and half an hour later were airborne once more and on our way to Cajamarca.