The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  Waking that morning just after 6:45—ten minutes later than the previous day (he had switched on the radio, heard one of the regular morning programmes as he climbed out of bed)—he had eaten a light unwanted breakfast, then spent an hour packing away some of the books in his library, crating them up and taping on address labels to his brother.

  —

  He reached Whitby’s laboratory half an hour later. This was housed in a one-hundred-foot-wide geodesic dome built beside his chalet on the west shore of the lake about a mile from Kaldren’s summer house. The chalet had been closed after Whitby’s suicide, and many of the experimental plants and animals had died before Powers had managed to receive permission to use the laboratory.

  As he turned into the driveway he saw the girl standing on the apex of the yellow-ribbed dome, her slim figure silhouetted against the sky. She waved to him, then began to step down across the glass polyhedrons and jumped nimbly into the driveway beside the car.

  “Hello,” she said, giving him a welcoming smile. “I came over to see your zoo. Kaldren said you wouldn’t let me in if he came so I made him stay behind.”

  She waited for Powers to say something while he searched for his keys, then volunteered: “If you like, I can wash your shirt.”

  Powers grinned at her, peered down ruefully at his dust-stained sleeves. “Not a bad idea. I thought I was beginning to look a little uncared-for.” He unlocked the door, took Coma’s arm. “I don’t know why Kaldren told you that—he’s welcome here any time he likes.”

  “What have you got in there?” Coma asked, pointing at the wooden box he was carrying as they walked between the gear-laden benches.

  “A distant cousin of ours I found. Interesting little chap. I’ll introduce you in a moment.”

  Sliding partitions divided the dome into four chambers. Two of them were storerooms, filled with spare tanks, apparatus, cartons of animal food, and test rigs. They crossed the third section, almost filled by a powerful X-ray projector, a giant two-hundred-fifty-amp GE Maxitron, angled onto a revolving table, concrete shielding blocks lying around ready for use like huge building bricks.

  The fourth chamber contained Powers’s zoo, the vivaria jammed together along the benches and in the sinks, big coloured cardboard charts and memos pinned onto the draught hoods above them, a tangle of rubber tubing and power leads trailing across the floor. As they walked past the lines of tanks dim forms shifted behind the frosted glass, and at the far end of the aisle there was a sudden scurrying in a large cage by Powers’s desk.

  Putting the box down on his chair, he picked a packet of peanuts off the desk and went over to the cage. A small black-haired chimpanzee wearing a dented jet pilot’s helmet swarmed deftly up the bars to him, chirped happily, and then jumped down to a miniature control panel against the rear wall of the cage. Rapidly it flicked a series of buttons and toggles, and a succession of coloured lights lit up like a jukebox and jangled out a two-second blast of music.

  “Good boy,” Powers said encouragingly, patting the chimp’s back and shovelling the peanuts into its hands. “You’re getting much too clever for that one, aren’t you?”

  The chimp tossed the peanuts into the back of its throat with the smooth, easy motions of a conjuror, jabbering at Powers in a singsong voice.

  Coma laughed and took some of the nuts from Powers. “He’s sweet. I think he’s talking to you.”

  Powers nodded. “Quite right, he is. Actually he’s got a two-hundred-word vocabulary, but his voice box scrambles it all up.” He opened a small refrigerator by the desk, took out half a packet of sliced bread, and passed a couple of pieces to the chimp. It picked an electric toaster off the floor and placed it in the middle of a low wobbling table in the centre of the cage, whipped the pieces into the slots. Powers pressed a tab on the switchboard beside the cage and the toaster began to crackle softly.

  “He’s one of the brightest we’ve had here, about as intelligent as a five-year-old child, though much more self-sufficient in a lot of ways.” The two pieces of toast jumped out of their slots and the chimp caught them neatly, nonchalantly patting its helmet each time, then ambled off into a small ramshackle kennel and relaxed back with one arm out of a window, sliding the toast into its mouth.

  “He built that house himself,” Powers went on, switching off the toaster. “Not a bad effort, really.” He pointed to a yellow polythene bucket by the front door of the kennel, from which a battered-looking geranium protruded. “Tends that plant, cleans up the cage, pours out an endless stream of wisecracks. Pleasant fellow all round.”

  Coma was smiling broadly to herself. “Why the space helmet, though?”

  Powers hesitated. “Oh, it—er—it’s for his own protection. Sometimes he gets rather bad headaches. His predecessors all—” He broke off and turned away. “Let’s have a look at some of the other inmates.”

  He moved down the line of tanks, beckoning Coma with him. “We’ll start at the beginning.” He lifted the glass lid off one of the tanks, and Coma peered down into a shallow bath of water, where a small round organism with slender tendrils was nestling in a rockery of shells and pebbles.

  “Sea anemone. Or was. Simple coelenterate with an open-ended body cavity.” He pointed down to a thickened ridge of tissue around the base. “It’s sealed up the cavity, converted the channel into a rudimentary notochord, first plant ever to develop a nervous system. Later the tendrils will knot themselves into a ganglion, but already they’re sensitive to colour. Look.” He borrowed the violet handkerchief in Coma’s breast-pocket, spread it across the tank. The tendrils flexed and stiffened, began to weave slowly, as if they were trying to focus.

  “The strange thing is that they’re completely insensitive to white light. Normally the tendrils register shifting pressure gradients, like the tympanic diaphragms in your ears. Now it’s almost as if they can hear primary colours, suggests it’s readapting itself for a non-aquatic existence in a static world of violent colour contrasts.”

  Coma shook her head, puzzled. “Why, though?”

  “Hold on a moment. Let me put you in the picture first.” They moved along the bench to a series of drum-shaped cages made of wire mosquito netting. Above the first was a large white cardboard screen bearing a blown-up microphoto of a tall pagoda-like chain, topped by the legend: “Drosophila: 15 röntgens/min.”

  Powers tapped a small Perspex window in the drum. “Fruit fly. Its huge chromosomes make it a useful test vehicle.” He bent down, pointed to a grey V-shaped honeycomb suspended from the roof. A few flies emerged from entrances, moving about busily. “Usually it’s solitary, a nomadic scavenger. Now it forms itself into well-knit social groups, has begun to secrete a thin sweet lymph something like honey.”

  “What’s this?” Coma asked, touching the screen.

  “Diagram of a key gene in the operation.” He traced a spray of arrows leading from a link in the chain. The arrows were labelled: “lymph gland” and subdivided “sphincter muscles, epithelium, templates.”

  “It’s rather like the perforated sheet music of a player-piano,” Powers commented, “or a computer punch tape. Knock out one link with an X-ray beam, lose a characteristic, change the score.”

  Coma was peering through the window of the next cage and pulling an unpleasant face. Over her shoulder Powers saw she was watching an enormous spiderlike insect, as big as a hand, its dark hairy legs as thick as fingers. The compound eyes had been built up so that they resembled giant rubies.

  “He looks unfriendly,” she said. “What’s that sort of rope ladder he’s spinning?” As she moved a finger to her mouth the spider came to life, retreated into the cage, and began spewing out a complex skein of interlinked grey thread which it slung in long loops from the roof of the cage.

  “A web,” Powers told her. “Except that it consists of nervous tissue. The ladders form an external neural plexus, an inflatable brain as it were, that he can pump up to whatever size the situation calls for. A sensible arrangement, rea
lly, far better than our own.”

  Coma backed away. “Gruesome. I wouldn’t like to go into his parlour.”

  “Oh, he’s not as frightening as he looks. Those huge eyes staring at you are blind. Or, rather, their optical sensitivity has shifted down the band, the retinas will only register gamma radiation. Your wristwatch has luminous hands. When you moved it across the window he started thinking. World War IV should really bring him into his element.”

  They strolled back to Powers’s desk. He put a coffee pan over a Bunsen and pushed a chair across to Coma. Then he opened the box, lifted out the armoured frog, and put it down on a sheet of blotting paper.

  “Recognize him? Your old childhood friend, the common frog. He’s built himself quite a solid little air-raid shelter.” He carried the animal across to a sink, turned on the tap, and let the water play softly over its shell. Wiping his hands on his shirt, he came back to the desk.

  Coma brushed her long hair off her forehead, watched him curiously.

  “Well, what’s the secret?”

  Powers lit a cigarette. “There’s no secret. Teratologists have been breeding monsters for years. Have you ever heard of the ‘silent pair’?”

  She shook her head.

  Powers stared moodily at the cigarette for a moment, riding the kick the first one of the day always gave him. “The so-called silent pair is one of modern genetics’ oldest problems, the apparently baffling mystery of the two inactive genes which occur in a small percentage of all living organisms, and appear to have no intelligible role in their structure or development. For a long while now biologists have been trying to activate them, but the difficulty is partly in identifying the silent genes in the fertilized germ cells of parents known to contain them, and partly in focusing a narrow enough X-ray beam which will do no damage to the remainder of the chromosome. However, after about ten years’ work Dr. Whitby successfully developed a whole-body irradiation technique based on his observation of radiobiological damage at Eniwetok.”

  Powers paused for a moment. “He had noticed that there appeared to be more biological damage after the tests—that is, a greater transport of energy—than could be accounted for by direct radiation. What was happening was that the protein lattices in the genes were building up energy in the way that any vibrating membrane accumulates energy when it resonates—you remember the analogy of the bridge collapsing under the soldiers marching in step—and it occurred to him that if he could first identify the critical resonance frequency of the lattices in any particular silent gene he could then radiate the entire living organism, and not simply its germ cells, with a low field that would act selectively on the silent gene and cause no damage to the remainder of the chromosomes, whose lattices would resonate critically only at other specific frequencies.”

  Powers gestured around the laboratory with his cigarette. “You see some of the fruits of this ‘resonance transfer’ technique around you.”

  Coma nodded. “They’ve had their silent genes activated?”

  “Yes, all of them. These are only a few of the thousands of specimens who have passed through here, and as you’ve seen, the results are pretty dramatic.”

  He reached up and pulled across a section of the sun curtain. They were sitting just under the lip of the dome, and the mounting sunlight had begun to irritate him.

  In the comparative darkness Coma noticed a stroboscope winking slowly in one of the tanks at the end of the bench behind her. She stood up and went over to it, examining a tall sunflower with a thickened stem and greatly enlarged receptacle. Packed around the flower, so that only its head protruded, was a chimney of grey-white stones, neatly cemented together and labelled:

  Cretaceous Chalk: 60,000,000 years.

  Beside it on the bench were three other chimneys, these labelled “Devonian Sandstone: 290,000,000 years,” “Asphalt: 20 years,” “Polyvimi-chloride: 6 months.”

  “Can you see those moist white discs on the sepals?” Powers pointed out. “In some way they regulate the plant’s metabolism. It literally sees time. The older the surrounding environment, the more sluggish its metabolism. With the asphalt chimney it will complete its annual cycle in a week, with the PVC one in a couple of hours.”

  “Sees time,” Coma repeated, wonderingly. She looked up at Powers, chewing her lower lip reflectively. “It’s fantastic. Are these the creatures of the future, doctor?”

  “I don’t know,” Powers admitted. “But if they are their world must be a monstrous surrealist one.”

  THREE

  He went back to the desk, pulled two cups from a drawer, and poured out the coffee, switching off the Bunsen. “Some people have speculated that organisms possessing the silent pair of genes are the forerunners of a massive move up the evolutionary slope, that the silent genes are a sort of code, a divine message that we inferior organisms are carrying for our more highly developed descendants. It may well be true—perhaps we’ve broken the code too soon.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, as Whitby’s death indicates, the experiments in this laboratory have all come to a rather unhappy conclusion. Without exception the organisms we’ve irradiated have entered a final phase of totally disorganized growth, producing dozens of specialized sensory organs whose function we can’t even guess. The results are catastrophic—the anemone will literally explode, the Drosophila cannibalize themselves, and so on. Whether the future implicit in these plants and animals is ever intended to take place, or whether we’re merely extrapolating—I don’t know. Sometimes I think, though, that the new sensory organs developed are parodies of their real intentions. The specimens you’ve seen today are all in an early stage of their secondary growth cycles. Later on they begin to look distinctly bizarre.”

  Coma nodded. “A zoo isn’t complete without its keeper,” she commented. “What about man?”

  Powers shrugged. “About one in every one hundred thousand—the usual average—contains the silent pair. You might have them—or I. No one has volunteered yet to undergo whole-body irradiation. Apart from the fact that it would be classified as suicide, if the experiments here are any guide the experience would be savage and violent.”

  He sipped at the thin coffee, feeling tired and somehow bored. Recapitulating the laboratory’s work had exhausted him.

  The girl leaned forward. “You look awfully pale,” she said solicitously. “Don’t you sleep well?”

  Powers managed a brief smile. “Too well,” he admitted. “It’s no longer a problem with me.”

  “I wish I could say that about Kaldren. I don’t think he sleeps anywhere near enough. I hear him pacing around all night.” She added: “Still, I suppose it’s better than being a terminal. Tell me, doctor, wouldn’t it be worth trying this radiation technique on the sleepers at the Clinic? It might wake them up before the end. A few of them must possess the silent genes.”

  “They all do,” Powers told her. “The two phenomena are very closely linked, as a matter of fact.” He stopped, fatigue dulling his brain, and wondered whether to ask the girl to leave. Then he climbed off the desk and reached behind it, picked up a tape recorder.

  Switching it on, he zeroed the tape and adjusted the speaker volume.

  “Whitby and I often talked this over. Towards the end I took it all down. He was a great biologist, so let’s hear it in his own words. It’s absolutely the heart of the matter.”

  He flipped the tape on, adding: “I’ve played it over to myself a thousand times, so I’m afraid the quality is poor.”

  An older man’s voice, sharp and slightly irritable, sounded out above a low buzz of distortion, but Coma could hear it clearly.

  WHITBY: …for heaven’s sake, Robert, look at those FAO statistics. Despite an annual increase of five percent in acreage sown over the past fifteen years, world wheat crops have continued to decline by a factor of about two percent. The same story repeats itself ad nauseam. Cereals and root crops, dairy yields, ruminant fertility—are all down. Couple
these with a mass of parallel symptoms, anything you care to pick from altered migratory routes to longer hibernation periods, and the overall pattern is incontrovertible.

  POWERS: Population figures for Europe and North America show no decline, though.

  WHITBY: Of course not, as I keep pointing out. It will take a century for such a fractional drop in fertility to have any effect in areas where extensive birth control provides an artificial reservoir. One must look at the countries of the Far East, and particularly at those where infant mortality has remained at a steady level. The population of Sumatra, for example, has declined by over fifteen percent in the last twenty years. A fabulous decline! Do you realize that only two or three decades ago the neo-Malthusians were talking about a “world population explosion”? In fact, it’s an implosion. Another factor is—

  Here the tape had been cut and edited, and Whitby’s voice, less querulous this time, picked up again.

  …just as a matter of interest, tell me something: how long do you sleep each night?

  POWERS: I don’t know exactly; about eight hours, I suppose.

  WHITBY: The proverbial eight hours. Ask anyone and they say automatically “eight hours.” As a matter of fact you sleep about ten and a half hours, like the majority of people. I’ve timed you on a number of occasions. I myself sleep eleven. Yet thirty years ago people did indeed sleep eight hours, and a century before that they slept six or seven. In Vasari’s Lives one reads of Michelangelo sleeping for only four or five hours, painting all day at the age of eighty, and then working through the night over his anatomy table with a candle strapped to his forehead. Now he’s regarded as a prodigy, but it was unremarkable then. How do you think the ancients, from Plato to Shakespeare, Aristotle to Aquinas, were able to cram so much work into their lives? Simply because they had an extra six or seven hours every day. Of course, a second disadvantage under which we labour is a lowered basal metabolic rate—another factor no one will explain.