Chapter 2
Dead Water
. . . Till clomb above the eastern bar
The hornèd Moon, with one bright star
Within the nether tip.
– S.T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1817
one
Up here on the seventy-third parallel, the world was whiter than white. Shimmering white clouds hung overhead, ready to darken at any moment like a pathetic fallacy and shed their angry burden of snow upon the defenceless ground – if ground was the right word, for beneath the frozen Greenland Sea, if one had the patience to drill through pack-ice centuries old, one would find the icy depths of the unfrozen Greenland Sea. The empty whiteness of the landscape stretched away in all directions, bare as a novelist’s imagination, affording concealment to countless polar bears, arctic foxes and the ice-stiffened newspapers dropped by passing scientific expeditions.
Such were the thoughts which drifted again through the mind of Gwynfor Bjørgstrøm, in his snowbound research station; a mind whose relentless grinding away at data had been called the world’s first real perpetual motion machine. Bjørgstrøm was always modest enough to insist that he was merely the second-finest climatologist in the world, and that one Fredrik Winkel was his master; though, since Winkel’s special field of study involved deserts and Bjørgstrøm’s snow, it was hard for outside observers to make the fine distinctions so beloved of climatologists.
Now, though . . . now Bjørgstrøm was not thinking of Winkel. Those puny deserts of heat and sand – what was there to engage a man’s intellect there? The great ice deserts, the tundra of the frozen North, they were clean and unchanging places where hard-edged reason could operate to its fullest extent. And besides, he didn’t like Winkel.
He moved through the lonely routine of his arctic exile, struggling not to be forced into hasty conclusions by the fantastic new data his last few weeks’ work had torn from the intractable face of the ice. It had been on his third Antarctic trip that frostbite had eaten into his own face and left him hideously ravaged . . . so now he chose to work alone, with no impressionable colleagues or research students to disturb his composure by having nightmares and heart attacks whenever he happened to look at them.
Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea . . . he murmured to himself as he operated the massive coring mechanism; and, for the benefit of the students who were not there under the ice-blown sky where he worked, he mechanically added, ‘Coleridge’. His thickly gloved hands protected him from the freezing, burning touch of the metal handles; the electrically heated coring head sank gradually into the rock-like whiteness. It was at times like these that Bjørgstrøm sometimes revelled in the secret facts of snow and ice that to him were open books. Little did the mundane world know of the sixfold crystalline symmetry of each and every snowflake; of the strange fact that packed snow is less dense than ice and even that it is less dense than water, which was why the frozen part of the sea stayed at the top for him to examine rather than sinking forever into the deep; or even of the curious truth that a full 79.72 calories of heat, no less than 333.54848 joules, must be expended to melt even a single gram of ice!
The wind whipped across the ice-locked sea and pelted him with powdered snow-like sea-foam; the electrically heated corer sank further in, a mighty phallus raping the virgin ice-field. This would be the last core of his current investigation, the last desperate hope of a man trapped by the inexorable facts and by his own icily reasoning mind. The worst of it was that he’d never been able to feel sympathy with Marxism . . .
Marxist geology, he bitterly reminded himself, had long been hampered by ideology, by its rejection of the slow changes of continental drift. Instead the Soviet geologists had preferred a theory of catastrophism, a theory whereby the mighty forces of the Earth built up slowly to the point where there was sudden change – revolutionary change! As Western critics had gleefully pointed out, the underlying rock strata were supposed to behave like the proletariat – held enslaved, until the time of revolution, by the reactionary forces in the upper crust . . . But in fact the theory wasn’t unworkable. Just as Einstein’s E = mc2 had been useless until science invented the atomic bombs which it described, so the old Marxist theories of geological catastrophe might come into their own at last.
In a way nobody at all had suspected!
Later, much later, far into the terrible Arctic night, Bjørgstrøm leant back from his workbench with an expostulation of despair.
‘Shit!’
He pushed aside the research tools of his tiny climatological station, the electron microscope, the bubble chamber, the polaroid camera, the metre rule. The violated ice-core, sectioned and minutely examined in a dozen places, began to melt as with a shiver Bjørgstrøm turned up the central heating: he didn’t care. He didn’t even trouble to shift some of the fragments into the deep-freeze which cost him so much of his power budget: there was no need; he had its secret now.
‘Pressure,’ he rasped to the empty air, to the curved walls of his single room. ‘Tremendous pressure is warping and distorting the structure of the polar ice-fields – accelerating in its effect as time goes on, as though’ – he groped for a simple analogy which could be understood by the stupidest person, ready for the time when he would carry his warning to the world – ‘As though an enormous tyre were being pumped up, closer and closer to bursting – or as though a shockwave were spreading through a charge of explosive, more and more violently every instant – or as though two pieces of plutonium—’ Well, sooner or later he’d find a convenient way of explaining it to the masses. They’d swallow anything.
Grimly he paced the hard floor, three paces up, three paces down; space was limited in this tiny oasis of warmth amid the encircling frost and night. His eye fell upon the microfilmed library he carried – how could the long-treasured books help him now? There were countless texts on climatology and meteorology, others covering geological and oceanographic theories, the complete novels of C.P. Snow and a physics text by Eisberg he’d bought by mistake . . . and none of them, not one of them even recognized the possibility of what seemed to be happening out there.
‘Pressure building to a point of catastrophe,’ he said in anguish, massaging his ravaged features. ‘Down there in the ice, the higher allotropic forms must be developing – ordinary ice crushed into states like Ice-IV which behaves almost like a metal – the fracture-lines beginning to spread as the ice-fields begin to part company with their continental anchorage on Greenland and the north Asian tundra . . .
‘There must be a reason. There has to be a reason. I can only imagine that . . . the shape of the Earth itself must be changing!’
As his machine-like brain scanned forward through the murkiness of time to what must happen when the point of catastrophe finally arrived, Professor Gwynfor Bjørgstrøm abandoned himself to the inevitable. Moving slowly, grey-faced, he set up the simple camp-bed which occupied most of the floor-space when erected. The catastrophe was written as though in Braille in the stress patterns of the tortured ice-field, but not even the skills of the second-finest climatologist in the world could read the how or the when. Better to turn one’s thoughts away, better to occupy the ever-whirring mind with something, anything, other than this coming break-up of the roof of the world. The colossal pressures were poised in uneasy balance, like – his razor-honed mind saw the analogy now – like, say, the Great Pyramid miraculously balanced upside-down, unmoving and in perfect equilibrium, yet sensitive to the least touch, the least breeze, the least footfall of an insect which might send it heeling over and into ruin. Better to turn one’s thoughts away . . . With trembling hands Bjørgstrøm unrolled the inflatable doll which was his sole companion in these lonely field expeditions, set his lips to the rather inconveniently placed valve-nozzle, and began to blow it up.
The doll’s face was hideously painted to resemble his own. Somehow that reduced his guilt about it all. Sealed away from the world, he began his groping and jostling, reasserting an ancient rhythm of humanity amid the sterile white, throbbing and pounding, testing the sensuous plastic of the doll to its limits, pulsing at last to a beat which struck resonances, twanging at sub-sub-harmonics . . . as a tinkling bell in a budgie’s cage can wake resonance in a mighty gong of bronze.
‘This,’ he breathed to the doll as he trembled on some inner brink, ‘this thing is bigger than both of us . . .’ And in his personal, insignificant moment of release he failed to notice the answering quiver that ran through the ice-field lying on the Greenland Sea. Outside the night had cleared to a crystalline chill far below zero; had anyone been standing outside the igloo-like research hut, and had that someone diverted his or her attention from the trembling and crackling all around for long enough to study the cold stars, then he or she might have noticed that they were marching . . . sliding up from the south and setting in the north.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle affirms that observer and observed cannot remain aloof and independent. To observe an electron is to change its position or velocity dramatically. To observe an ice-field . . . normally, ice-fields are not delicately balanced things.
With unnatural speed the stars drifted across the great dome of the sky, as though in some drunken planetarium that, with sickening slowness, was falling over. As he panted in the damp aftermath of his world-shaking orgasm, Bjørgstrøm moved unknowingly south, in a cocoon of warmth, securely riding atop the first glaciers of the new Ice Age.
two
Adolf Hitler stared dubiously at the gleaming consoles of the milking shed. Last night his hosts had offered lavish hospitality in the immemorial manner of the earthy English countryside – the finest hamburgers and fish fingers, fresh from the deep-freeze and brought to piping hotness in the Loams’ microwave oven – but, alas, his offers of help in the kitchen had been laughingly declined. ‘Sit you there, you daft bugger, and get an eyeful of the telly,’ Jeb Loam had said.
Non-Aryan fingers had lifted those other fingers of fish – gefilte-fish no doubt, if the truth were known! Semitic hands had carried those succulent grey burgers to the table – kosher meat, he was sickeningly certain, prepared according to the ancient Protocols of the Elders of Zion! He had feigned illness and retired to bed in one of the children’s rooms, from which the impurely bred lad Reuben had been evicted for this hospitable purpose. Indeed, he thought to himself, the children were now both . . . concentrated in a single room. The notion pleased him strangely.
Next morning, too cautious to take breakfast, he had cunningly suggested that he help with, say, the milking.
‘Aye, ’tis a kind thought,’ Jeb mused. ‘Today I do be up to my ears wi’ scranleting forty-acre, watching they great blades o’ the mighty automatic scranleter tearing their savage way through the rich, dark Devon soil. Man’s work, it is. And the missis – Rachel! Rachel! Don’t you go forgetting there’s the week’s washing to be done after you’ve taken young Reuben to the playgroup and picked up another forty pounds of lasagna from freezer centre in the village!’
‘Increasing hurricane disturbances over the Pacific,’ said the miniature TV set which the Loams kept perched on their simulated-oak breakfast table. ‘An unprecedented series of disasters to shipping . . . large craft have been advised to stay in harbour and small craft to stay out of the water . . .’ The announcer slapped hurricane-zone stickers onto his world map until it resembled a snooker table after the first break. To Hitler, the TV was merely another sign of England’s effeteness and decadence – but he smiled grimly to himself at the thought of these portents which surrounded his second coming.
‘You be a city man, Mr Schmidt, no offence intended to your good self . . . I do think you might stand a shift on Emergency Monitor in the milking shed, being as how the hired boy’s down with a mysterious and as yet unidentified sickness. What d’you say to that?’
‘Sehr gut – I mean, jolly good show, old chap.’ Hitler licked his lips at the thought of that milk, still warm and creamy from the bellies of Jeb Loam’s own cows. Or cow, if you thought of it that way. Then, his real objective obscured by this flanking movement, he might soon be trusted to help with the Clonette that was the key to the new Master Race.
‘Scientists have pooh-poohed suggestions that planetary conjunctions or unidentified new bodies in our Solar System are responsible for the atmospheric upheavals—’
‘Ah, soddit,’ said Jeb, and clicked off the set before Hitler could learn whether (as he had always suspected it would) astrology had indeed been given its rightful place among the exact sciences.
‘This here’s the milking shed,’ Jeb Loam explained a few minutes later as he and Hitler stopped outside a ramshackle wooden hut, Hitler surreptitiously trying to shake the thicker deposits of organic fertilizer from his shoes. ‘Ar. They automation buggers that did the place up, they called it Master Bovine Control . . .’ He flung open the door to reveal a gleaming white-walled room where consoles blinked and a low hum of power, or of air-conditioning, was a constant background. There were no windows. There were no cows.
‘What precisely do I do?’ the supposed Klaus Schmidt asked warily.
‘Well, you sit there, you do see that seat? Ay. There’s where you sit. And should there be a systems fault, see you, it’s for you to engage the Manual Override.’ Jeb removed a stray cornflake from between his teeth and spread his hands. ‘Simple, sir, is it not? But a power of help you’d be giving me.’
‘How do I operate this override, then?’
‘Ar. That’s not for me to say, not since goat did eat the instruction manual. But nothing’s gone wrong in the three years since we installed the system. Tied hand and foot we are, by the Ministry’s bleeding regulations – have to have a man on duty, but there’s nothing says he has to be trained. You just watch the screen there, sir, and Rachel will bring ’ee a nice ploughman’s lunch, pizza and chips, when she’s finished hauling in the coal. That is if your poor tummy’s feeling up to it . . .’
By the time he’d peered at the monitor screen for two hours, Hitler’s stomach felt shrivelled to the size of a .45 bullet, and it was rumbling like distant machine-gun fire. He’d counted on stealing a sustaining draught of milk still warm and creamy from the bellies of the cows . . . instead he had to watch the milking-tractor zeroing in on cows in a field that might be kilometres away, and extruding its automated milking-hoses to draw the warm creamy milk from the cows’ bellies, and by and by rewarding them with a jolt to the pleasure centres of the brain via the specially implanted terminals. Hitler had made a note of the location of the apparatus Jeb had shown him the night before, a thing like an overgrown stapling machine that was kept in a drawer with the cutlery and used for implanting those very brain-stimulation terminals. It might be that such a device could be of use in the Plan for the Fourth Reich . . .
Meanwhile he watched the milking with a vacant gaze; it was a tedious business, made no less tedious by the identical appearance of each and every Daisy as she submitted to the mighty suction-pumps of the milker. After 119 replays of the same basic performance Hitler sat glassy-eyed, his head nodding in time to the pulsations of the tubes as they had their evil way with the last cow, his parched mouth filled with fantasies about the taste of warm creamy milk from . . .
‘Mr Schmidt?’
It was the Jew woman. He backed against the far console, animal terror flickering on his face, the fear of contamination . . . ‘Hello,’ he said through gritted teeth.
She pointed to a digital counter. ‘Hundred and twenty,’ she observed. ‘That’s the last cow done now, sir; the milking usually finishes about this time of morning, plus or minus 16.8 seconds. Won’t you come for a snack now?’
‘That . . . would be . . . very nice.’
His brain raced furiously as he followed her through the farmyard muck. He must not antagonize the Loams until the right moment came, the moment when he could strike.
‘Pizza and chips,’ she said amid the stainless-steel fitments of the farmhouse kitchen. ‘It’s what the ploughman used to like, while we still had one.’
A brainwave! ‘Thank you so much, Mrs Loam. It looks quite delicious . . . but I am still not quite well from my journey here. I shall take it to the lavatory and eat it there, in case there are . . . unfortunate results.’ He mimed vomiting in the way that had once made Eva and the General Staff laugh so much.
‘Bless you, sir, the kids are doing that all the time. You just sit down—’
‘No. No, I must insist.’
Safe in the toilet, he bolted the door and ran water into the basin. Such a mind as his could not be baffled for long by the problem of the contaminating Semitic touch. The chips betrayed a slight tendency to dissolve as he scrubbed them carefully with a nailbrush, but he ate what he could of the cleansed result; the tasty-looking sauce atop the pizza washed away all too readily and left him with a thick, sodden mass of something which (as he nibbled gingerly at it) proved to taste strongly of cardboard.
The woman would pay for this! He thought fleetingly of the microwave oven in the kitchen – but no, it was far too small.
Back at the table he found Jeb tucking into a vast mound of scampi. ‘That’s done,’ he said heartily with his mouth full. ‘’Safternoon I’m spraying the north fields – more o’ they new-fangled fertilizers from the Central Ag Dist scheme, if there’s not been another mix-up in transit! Silly buggers sent radioactive uranium hexafluoride in the cylinders last time around; ar, we had a good laugh about that one, down in the old Dog and Bladder.’
‘So kind of you to wash up your plate, sir,’ murmured Rachel as she took it from him. He hadn’t noticed she’d got so close – the bulge of her pregnancy made distances deceptive.
‘Damn you, woman! I’ll not have you making love to any stranger that comes in from the road. Shameless ’ee are. Be off with you!’
Hitler supposed that the smilingly departing Rachel was quite attractive, really . . .
‘Thank you again for your kindness, Mr Loam,’ he said suavely. ‘I wonder if I might see this “Clonette” of yours? My country’s farmers are less efficient than you, by far.’
‘Good of you to say so, sir, very good of you indeed. You just gimme a hand with the spray cylinders and ’ee shall look at the Clonette all afternoon – play with it all you like, that wonder of modern technology, for the beauty is that it’s absolutely foolproof, not meaning any offence.’
So it was that Hitler, his limp forgotten, set his shoulders to Jeb Loam’s helicopter to roll it out of the old barn where it was kept, and helped haul the massive, tarnished cylinders which held the latest approved crop-spray for this country’s soil. And his pride surged when he saw the small print on the cylinders was in German! His country still held its own in this terrible new world; his country should yet know the tread of its old saviour!
‘Much obliged to you, sir. Clonette’s in number three shed, just beyond the reactor; we have to have a reactor you see, because we’re not on mains electricity here; you just cast your eye over the Clonette instructions and see if you don’t agree it’s the simplest, naturallest piece of farm machinery here on God’s green earth. Oh, and don’t let Rachel forget to muck out the sty—’
The helicopter blades spun, faster, faster, seeming to switch direction as the human eye was fooled by their speed of rotation. A blast of air filled Hitler’s eyes and nostrils with dust; as the tears came he saw the ’copter rise, tilt and move off to the north on Jeb Loam’s rustic business, the ancient servitude of the soil.
But as he trudged to the Clonette shed, something tugged at his memory. Those cylinders had looked so very old, and somehow so familiar. Of course it must be mere coincidence that they were labelled Tabun and Sarin, names which had had a special meaning in Hitler’s heyday. After all, what possible ‘mix-up’ could have caused those substances to have been accidentally distributed to the countless farmers who (Jeb had remarked) habitually treated their ground in this manner with the latest offering of what they jokingly called the ‘Spray of the Month Club’?
He cautiously opened the door of the tatty-looking shed to disclose, as in the milking shed, an interior of laboratory cleanliness (apart from the dried footprints of dung on the floor and a Gay Boys in Bondage calendar on one wall, which stirred pleasant memories of the SS and Hitler Youth). There was the machine. There was the detailed instruction manual: The Clone Arranger – Clone Your Own In Six Easy Steps. He sat down and studied it for a long while.
Tabun and Sarin, the Reich’s most deadly nerve gases? Suppose, in one of the old war dumps – ?
No, that surely couldn’t be. And it wasn’t any business of his, anyway.
The manual said that almost any cells would do, but that hair, fingernails and the outermost layer of skin should be avoided, since they tended to be dead and thus not clonable. ‘Use the standard ClonestartTM Handy Battery-Powered Biopsy Facilitator,’ the manual advised. This gadget would take a core of tissue less than a tenth of a millimetre across, with more than enough cells for a dozen clones. Hitler first read this as a tenth of a metre, and spent some anxious moments making measurements on his body . . .
He sat, holding the biopsy tool he’d found clipped to the Clonette’s side, holding it over his unprotected arm, hesitating. Suddenly he wanted to do anything to delay the fatal moment, even go back to the farmhouse and chat with that not-at-all-bad-looking but undeniably Semitic female.
Adolf Hitler never had been able to bear the sight of blood.
three
I’m not a science correspondent for nothing, thought the man on Blackfriars Station, a station on London Underground’s Circle and District lines which is as convenient as any for Fleet Street. Bloody editor wanted to stick this parcel of plutonium straight into a bucket of water ‘to be on the safe side’, the shitty old idiot, any first-year physics student at the smallest and grottiest polytechnic could have told him how water acts as a moderator and slows down and bounces back the neutrons this plutonium’s putting out, and with more neutrons being fed back into the system that way the critical mass is reduced . . . Charming sight that would have been, blue glow of Cerenkov radiation and everyone in the office probably dead . . . I mean, I’m only a science correspondent, failed my university entrance exams, and that was only in modern languages at that, but even I, Bert Tremble, know all about this sort of thing . . .
A doom-laden rumble from the tunnel hinted at the coming of a train. Tremble’s face fell slightly, as it did at about this time on most weekdays of the year, when he saw that people were packed into the slowing train with a density which must rival that of the collapsed matter he’d written about in the science column two, three months back – stuff you found in white giant stars, or was it red dwarfs?
He’d begun to shoulder his way grimly through the crush when:
The Fat Man effect!
He halted. He could feel the blood draining from his face while sweat burst out on his forehead, a weakness assailed his knees and a violent trembling ran up and down his arms in perfect time with the shivers which moved in antiphase along his spine.
The Fat Man effect! He wondered if he’d shown any signs of nervousness. No bloody matter, nobody ever takes any notice of what you do on an Underground station . . . That was something the American reactor man told me; some accident they’d had over there. Working with a bare reactor, they were, cranked down to safety below critical size – shift enough moderating material up close to it and it would have moved up to critical point, neutrons multiplying like rabbits, climbing the scale towards a radioactive hell. And what’s moderating material? Hydrogen atoms do pretty well, light enough to absorb energy from neutrons, the way a ping-pong ball will share out its energy if you flip it against another ping-pong ball but will bounce off almost unchanged in speed if it hits a snooker ball . . . Hydrogen atoms make good moderating material. You find them in water, you find them in fats and proteins, you find them in people.
And one day there were too many overweight scientists working too near to that reactor. The Fat Man effect. I heard that some of them lived . . .
If I’d got into that carriage with that tight-packed crush of people . . .
The London rush-hour is unpredictable in detail, but in general it means that a lot of trains will be jampacked with people between 4pm and 6pm each weekday of the year. Despite the terrible things which seemed to be happening all over the once stable world, the London rush-hour was carrying on, business as usual. From Blackfriars one travels two stops on the Circle or District lines to Embankment Station; from Embankment one travels one stop south on the Bakerloo or Northern lines to the old, majestic and extremely grubby terminal of Waterloo; from Waterloo it’s a mere twenty minutes to Gnome’s Green.
Oh bloody hell, Bert Tremble thought as a new wave of people spilled onto the platform. He stood as far from his case as was compatible with not abandoning it, and discovered within himself an urgent need to visit the lavatory. I’d almost rather the Fat Man effect than what Daphne’s going to say . . .
At about the same time another man was tapping his feet restlessly on the crowded platform of Piccadilly Circus Station. From there, one travels three stops south on the Bakerloo line to reach the grubbily majestic terminal of Waterloo; the second of these stops is Embankment, and here the crush can become even more intolerable as hordes of people from the Circle and District lines force themselves aboard your train.
The man on Piccadilly Circus Station had never heard of the Fat Man effect. He was slightly winded, having run hard to reach his train only to have the doors perform snapping-turtle imitations right in his face. His name was John Strickler. With a not particularly muffled curse he staggered back from the now-moving train, settled himself on the heavy case and prepared to wait. Perhaps luckily, he was on the whole a rather thin man.
four
‘Yesh,’ said the swaying Dr Lucius Apricot, one of Britain’s very finest particle physicists, perhaps the finest, and thus indisputably placed in or nearly in the top seventeen hundred such scientists in the whole Northern Hemisphere. ‘Yesh,’ he repeated. ‘We’re shitting, er, know what I mean, sitting on top of the biggesht fluorocarbon aerosol inna whole wide world. Thatsh what. Hic!’
Sitting facing him in the crowded lounge-bar of the Goat and Spectroscope, an almost respectable public house just a few minutes’ walk from the heavily guarded North Gate of the Chiltern Hundreds Atomic and Nuclear Computation and Research Establishment, the voluptuous Avedon Patella leant forward to expose a little more of the snowy rift between her breasts. ‘But, Doctor, aren’t those aerosols dangerous? Haven’t I read that, should enough fluorocarbon compounds be released into the atmosphere, they would have a destructive effect upon the ozone layer and perhaps allow millions of people to die from skin cancer or third-degree sunburn?’
‘Thatsh true,’ Apricot agreed, nodding his head and craning forward a little more. ‘How ’bout another double gin, then?’
‘Oh, I’ll get them, Dr Apricot. It’s such an honour for a mere reporter like myself to interview a man who, after all, is widely acclaimed as the finest of British particle physicists. I’m so thrilled . . .’ She rose to her feet with a snakelike grace and smoothed her raven-black hair, inhaling in a manner which made Apricot swallow hard. His eyes followed her to the bar, locked upon the exquisitely curved legs in their sheerest of black tights; such was his absorption that he scarcely noticed as one elbow slid across the table through pools of spilt gin, until it slid off altogether and he fell forward with his head in the rather overfull ashtray.
The sudden inhalation of cigarette ash reminded him of Security. All the Security offices smelt that way. Keep firm control of yourself, he thought, mentally, to himself, without so much as uttering a word. It’s just possible that this gorgeous creature is trying to worm something out of you . . . I wonder if that machine in the gents’ toilet is still working?
A whiff of that maddening perfume which should have been classified as a dangerous war gas announced that Patella had returned. ‘I made it triple gins this time,’ she said lazily. ‘After all, this is a special occasion . . .’ She settled herself with legs crossed, looked into his eyes, said, ‘To us,’ and raised her glass. Dr Apricot fixed his gaze helplessly upon her knees, tried to raise his glass and spilt half of it into his lap. ‘Hic!’ he temporized.
‘Now do tell me all about this fascinating yet deadly reservoir of fluorocarbon material you keep in the Establishment . . .’
Apricot twisted on his seat, twined his fingers and knitted his brows. He wasn’t so drunk, he thought, that he couldn’t give an unclassified rundown on his work . . . he’d had plenty of practice, after all. One of the few perks of working for this Civil Service dump was that large gentlemen who spoke excessively perfect English were always ready to stand you a few vodkas in the lunch break.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s neutrino detection, you see. The usual way of doing it is to use gigantic tanksh of chlorinated hydrocarbons, dry-cleaning fluid to you. It’sh only the chlorine that’s important; chlorine-37 picks up a neutrino and beta decays to argon-37—’
‘I’m so sorry, Dr Apricot, but a plain girl like me doesn’t understand all these technical terms; by “beta decay” do you by any chance mean that a neutron in the nucleus of chlorine-37 absorbs a neutrino and is thus caused to emit an electron and becomes a proton in the process, so that the charge of the nucleus changes, as does the atomic number, and thus the nucleus is no longer a chlorine nucleus but one having the next atomic number up, namely argon?’
She smiled winsomely. Dr Apricot gave a judicious nod. ‘Mmm, you’ve more or less undershtood my explanation, yesh. Now the stroke of genius which I expect will bring me my Nobel Prize came while I was looking at a book on chemistry . . .’
‘Oh Doctor, what a polymath you are!’ She hitched her short skirt imperceptibly higher, producing a more than perceptible increase in the bulging of the great scientist’s eyes.
‘Oh, we have to keep hup’ – a brief convulsion went through him – ‘keep up with other fields, y’know. When I make the Nobel speech you can be sure I’ll give some credit to Fifty Fun Experiments You Can Do In Your Kitchen. Thing is, thing is that fluorine’sh just a step up the Periodic Table from chlorine!’
‘By the “Periodic Table” you of course mean the classification into which Mendeléev first arranged the known elements, and which has since cast much light on their relations and properties?’
‘Absholutely.’
‘Thank you so much, Doctor. To be with you is an education. Do have a crisp.’
‘No thanksh.’ Apricot swigged a little more gin and homed in again on his subject, using a kind of mental landing radar to feel his way through the fog which seemed to have become so thick in the bar and inside his head. ‘Fluorine acts jusht like chlorine in oh, lots of ways. Jusht like! Only it’s more reactive – the most reactive element known!’
‘And so?’ Her eyes had widened prettily, and Apricot studied them with a distinct feeling that he might fall into their limpid depths; he let his eyes fall again to the study of other physical phenomena.
‘More reactive, shee? Higher up the Periodic Table. More likely to combine with other elementsh – more likely to combine with neutrinos! So our neutrino detector, which is gonna be a hundred times bettern anything bloody Americans got, is jusht, shimply, nothing more or less than—’
She clapped her dainty hands. ‘A gigantic tank of carbon tetrafluoride!’
‘Jackpot! Let that stuff come gooshing out and all hell breaks loose. But sho long as it stays where it is, and we get Admin Office to authorize the £500 grant we need to build the actual detectors to use with it, it could mean a Nobel, two Nobels . . .’
Inwardly he reviewed the classification level of what he’d said. Had he let anything slip? No, no, the formula for carbon tetrafluoride was still locked in the hazy recesses of his skull – CF4, that was it. And not a word had he breathed of how it boiled at –129 deg. C, which was why the giant tank had to withstand such pressure; nor had he hinted at the stuff’s molecular weight of 88.01. Security was especially touchy about molecular weights.
Ecstasy thrilled up his arm. She’d taken him by the hand. ‘I suppose it must be a terrible, terrible responsibility,’ she was saying. ‘Knowing that if you turned the wrong taps you could release all that dreadful stuff into our poor dear atmosphere . . .’
‘Only one tap,’ he mumbled. ‘Admin still hasn’t authorized the expenditure for the shafety interlocksh I wanted.’
A further burst of ecstasy: had he been less drunk he might have fainted. She had pressed his hand against her warm, silken knee. He felt himself grinning idiotically, and after a moment a terrible suspicion came over him. He investigated: yes, dammit, his tongue was hanging out. He put it back in, thinking Avedon Patella was the nicest journalist he’d ever met.
‘Perhaps we could arrange for me to visit your laboratory,’ she crooned into his ear, almost suffocating him with that psywar perfume.
‘It’sh a class-four security zone, maybe you could get clearansh—’
‘Oh, I’ll have one – I’ll arrange clearance through the Daily Grunt office. We science correspondents have special privileges, you know.’
Somehow they were sitting side by side on the padded window-seat of the Goat and Spectroscope’s lounge bar. Through humming fog Apricot watched those wonderful knees, and noticed his hand inching like a caterpillar towards the hemline of Patella’s skirt. Perhaps he ought to stop it before it gave offence in some way. He tried. He couldn’t.
‘Met a shience correspondent once,’ he said by way of distraction. ‘Fellow called Tremble. Thought neutrino meant a little neutron; I asked him if he thought pianissimo meant – What was I shaying?’
‘Tomorrow,’ Patella said lovingly, detaching his hands from her breast and thigh, and planting a moist kiss on his forehead. ‘Tomorrow I’ll see you again . . . and I’ll be wearing something specially nice instead of this old sack . . .’
She left him there, glazed, happy, and slipped from the room. Tomorrow, she was thinking. It was all so easy after all. Trevelyan can forge the clearance in three hours flat – and then I’ll have no trouble getting to that release valve! One twist, and the world suffers the greatest disaster it’s ever known!
Perhaps after this they’ll listen seriously to the demands of the Action Group. Perhaps this will be the first step towards having Cornish acknowledged as the second language of the British Isles!
five
Longitude 57.3 degrees North. Here there is deep brown water which is not the sea, a long slash of it running straight as a Roman road, a Roman canal, almost precisely northwest in its direction, or southeast should you choose to count it from the other end: deep brown water stretching for kilometre after kilometre through sundered Scotland, interminable as the padding in some hack novel. And in the deeps:
Two great brains were conferring wordlessly. It was possible for them to do this, since they were connected (as they had been for centuries) by almost thirty metres of bone-sheathed spinal cord. Modern-day beings have long since lost that ancient comfort and company of a second brain at the far end of the spine – it’s no wonder they often feel the need to herd together instead; or, in the highly evolved case of humanity, to take refuge in a split personality. Consider, for example, the lemming – but no matter, we shall be coming to the lemmings presently. The ancient brains on which we now eavesdrop are vaster by far than most of those living on Earth in that time, ‘vaster than empires and more slow’, alien and unrecognizable to our too-different minds.
Two great brains were conferring wordlessly; but in words, approximately:
– O stranger-brother who shares my body, is it that you are afflicted? Come share your woes with me, even as I with you . . .
– Hell of a stink down here, mate. Don’t it get up your nose too?
– Alas, the sensation is not unknown to me, o little one; too close, too close do I dwell to those-which-breathe, the organs of olfaction whose cry sings through my inmost being. What are your woes beside mine?
– Come off it now. Don’t you try and come that one over me. Bleeding patrician cranial brains, you’ve got eyes, haven’t you, things like that, that’s what I call a bit of a distraction. Down here I just get the sacral end of the stick; all the earthy sort of senses wind up down here. You should flipping try it sometime.
– Truly your words are but the babble of waters in a stream at flood, which rises without wits and in the same manner sinks. Truly your stores of knowledge are fouled and empty as gassy bubbles in that-which-digests (and which you so imperfectly control). Stretch out your perception, small idiot brother; merge your being one instant with mine and see now what you will . . .
– Can’t see nothing. Never can, of bloody course, water’s all crappy brown and bitter from wossname, peat. So there’s nowt to see; so what?
– O one of shallow mind, you spoke of that-which-sees as high distraction and felicity; yet is it bitter tedium and no more. Once, only once has there been solace in this deep, as the metal thing-made-by-men came searching. Yellow it was, and sleek beauty lay in its lines; a submarine, as men call such things.
– Never mind that. And never mind how it’s getting bleeding ice-age weather out there again, those bloody people don’t know when to stop having their ice ages, got no thought for others . . . Never mind that, like I said. What I want to know is, what’s the flipping pong? It’s really getting up our nose, I can tell you.
– Alas, always it is thus: be our knowledge never so great or never so scanty, I must think for two. Very well –
– Come to think of it, wouldn’t be no bloody surprise if it was those flaming sacrificial offerings those buggers leave on the bank – been a long while since we made with the godlike presence and all that article of goods. Could be they’re putting muck in the water as a kind of hint it’s our duty to show ourselves every once in a while –
– Aieeeee! Speak not to me of offerings. Long and hard was the pain, and still it is not abated, since broke we a tooth upon some rich ornament which bedecked a live sacrifice; aye, the ornaments men call cameras. Fain would I avoid such mortal grief in any of the endless aeons to come.
– I know I’m only a bloody sacral brain, not fit to share a spinal cord with the likes of you, but have you thought maybe it’s summat in the air? All sorts of gunk falling into the loch this last century or so; these last few days have been the bleeding limit. Place won’t be fit to live in if they buggers keep spraying what they’ve been spraying just lately.
– Strange words, o brother; yet my heart tells me that by some chance you may have fallen upon truth. Then must we die with all dignity, proud and free –
– Not so bleeding fast! This isn’t the only puddle on the beach, y’know. Gets flaming cold up north, but what d’you say to a look down south?
– Long and hard, long and hard must I weigh such words. Year upon cruel year must roll over us like the tides ere this be
decided . . .
So it was that, as overhead the crop-spraying planes continued to discharge various unlikely substances upon the land, the owner of the two brains began to stir from its immemorial and majestic rest. Slowly it rose through the dark brown peaty water; with faint grunts which suggested it might be out of practice, it floundered onto shore. None of the loch’s few remaining observation posts were well positioned to spot the emergence, save one which was rather too well positioned and which, with its occupant, succumbed to the two-brained creature’s first limbering-up exercises on dry land. Evening was approaching as, clumsily at first but with increasing litheness, an Niseag began to move south towards the Grampian Mountains . . . an Niseag, alias Nessie, alias the Loch Ness Monster.
A change is as good as a bloody rest, one of its brains remarked to the other: but who could say which?
six
Death never sleeps, but sometimes he may choose to rest.
He rests now, in the pearly grey limbo which stretches to infinity and (this region not being subject to any known logic) some considerable way beyond. In his rest he finds himself in much the position of a television watcher, to use an analogy wholly unworthy of Death’s majesty: rather than attending, say, a football match and seeing the filth and the fury in throbbing live action, he may remain at ‘home’ and range among a dozen such events – not the events themselves but the distant shadows they cast in his mind.
Without motion, now, he moves among the shadows. Here, for example, he spies on a certain time of the morning at a place called John o’ Groats, formerly the northernmost tip of the British mainland.
‘What the hell’s all this?’ a man is saying to Dr Gwynfor Bjørgstrøm. Death perceives that the first man’s name is Ferguson and that his customary business is to photograph those few tourists who trickle this far through desolation to stand on what to the British mind has always been the northern edge of the world – until an uncertain hour of this very morning.
‘Taking all the bloody trade away – look, you’ve camped out on it, you must know something about it!’
Indeed, by what to anyone but Death might seem a pretty odd coincidence, Bjørgstrøm’s research hut survives, intact, perched at the very edge of the ice-field which now stretches away from John o’ Groats and over the northern horizon. The former edge of the world is now the foot of an icewall.
‘Pity about the Shetlands,’ a perceptive bystander remarks. A certain inner decency prevents him from mentioning the Orkneys: portions of the Orkneys can still be discerned on the cliff of ice which has paused here on its southward march.
Professor Bjørgstrøm is wearing a bitter expression which is not precisely one of ‘I told you so!’ but the still more bitter ‘I would have told you so if I’d had the chance’. A portion of his mind still grinds away at the data, fitting the quantitative facts of the ice advance into the equations tentatively set up on the day before, and making rough estimates of the flexibility of the University of Toronto’s travelling expenses budget.
Still attached to the ice-face, which towers 100 metres over the hotel, are the ropes affixed by enterprising young climbers and by which Bjørgstrøm was able to descend. It is a long, hard climb, either way. But in the flicker of an eye one can shift one’s glance, one’s attention, from top to bottom of the soiled cliff of ice: even before the man Ferguson has finished preparing his new signs (REAL ICE FROM THE JOHN O’ GROATS GLACIER! BE PHOTOGRAPHED AGAINST THE JOHN O’ GROATS GLACIER! etc), Death’s attention has flicked to the top. There is little to be seen but the irregular upper surface of the ice-plain which covers the sea and has ground down island after island in its path. Death moves his viewpoint higher. He appears to be expecting something. Presently, a little to the north of true east, he sees it. A far-off dark stain, irregular, amoeboid, blackening the ice like a creeping oil-slick or a fast-growing fungus.
Death turns off his metaphorical TV set for a short while, to recover from a sudden fit of the giggles.
Then, continuing our worthless analogy, he begins to try new channels.
Somewhere in the Middle East, an argument is going on:
‘President, I implore you! I represent the cream of our country’s scientists, and our firm consensus is that this trial could be disastrous. As I have just spent two hours telling you in detail, it could destroy our very water supply!’
‘Very well, Doctor. Refresh my memory and summarize your arguments . . .’
‘In summary, then. The military arm wishes to detonate a 500-kiloton nuclear weapon in a specially constructed pit far underground; i.e., an atomic bomb of the fission-fusion-fission type having an energetic yield of some 500,000 tons of exploding TNT; i.e., enough energy to heat you three cups of tea every day for something like sixty million years—’
‘I do not drink tea, Doctor.’
‘And all this energy you propose to release into the deep rock strata beneath our desert! Already the desert is drier than it should be, because our artesian wells in the cities drain away the water table. This proposed test could crack the deep strata – let the whole water table seep away into the inmost bowels of the Earth – and leave us all to die of thirst! To die, President! To die!’
‘I answer you with four points. Firstly, the military say that without some such show of force as this demonstration that we have a nuclear deterrent, we may die more quickly than of thirst. You know the international situation. Secondly, I have hired numerous scientists to support the Government’s view. Thus you are quite outvoted – thus democracy is maintained. Thirdly, the desalination plant will in any case serve for this city and the Governmental headquarters . . .’
‘And fourthly, President? I say this knowing well that you have manoeuvred me into doing so in order that your next words will have an unmerited dramatic weight . . .’
‘Fourthly, scum, to speak as you have done is nothing less than treason. Guards, remove this dog and have him shot. No . . . better still . . . maroon him far out in the desert, his only supplies to be a knapsack full of highly salted peanuts!’
Death nods his head knowingly as this scene fades from the videotube of his inhuman mind. He moves on, sifting through time and space: for Death is not limited to the present moment quite as humanity is, though his limitations do exist. Here, for example, is a moment which will not happen for a little while yet, as a long-delayed yet relatively empty Bakerloo Line train pulls into Piccadilly Circus and a weary man hauls a heavy case aboard it. Here is a moment which, unnoticed, has already happened . . .
The balance of air and water, earth and sea, is a delicate thing. Factory fumes, chewing-gum wrappers, the illimitable hordes of people who persist in breathing – all these take their toll. Only Death knows the point where a certain balance tips, and even he has his limitations. Consider: here in industrial zones all over the world, machines convert oxygen to carbon dioxide, the life-giving gas to the inert miasma of suffocation. Where there are no machines, people can handle the task (though less efficiently). Where there are no people . . . but this is to anticipate. Consider, too: plants, alone on Earth, labour to convert useless CO2 back to oxygen; and all over the Earth, plants are being eaten, defoliated, wiped out or cut down until . . .
The moment comes. The balance tips. All that has happened, to human eyes, is that the usual chain-saw has done its usual work, felling another tree in the endless forests of the Amazon basin: the result is that Earth is now a net user rather than producer of oxygen. Presently, as CO2 builds up in the air, the ‘greenhouse effect’ will develop; the increased concentration of the gas will mean that less solar heat is reflected into space, which means that Earth will become hotter, which means that more plants will die off, which means . . .
It is probably just as well that the benighted people of Earth don’t know about this, muses Death. It would only worry the poor dears. And he giggles again.
Elsewhere, there are floods.
Elsewhere, dormant volcanoes seem to be stirring.
And a little way into the future . . . Death looks annoyed.
All over the world, seers and sages are probing into the Apocalypse they sense ahead. Unfortunately, the mystical lines into the future seem to have got crossed. Predictive static is everywhere. Crystal balls condescend to show nothing more than snowstorms; haruspicators find nothing in the entrails save the information that the bird has been hung too long; the readers of tea leaves discover an almost suspicious randomness in their cups; practitioners of sortilege open their Bibles with closed eyes only to discover the randomly chosen verse they find to guide them is always obscure, and always from the Book of Revelations.
Death would like to probe a little further into the Holocaust to come, to revel with still greater confidence in his coming inheritance of everything from the great towers and palaces of this world to the cesspit on Ambledyke Farm . . . but even Death has his limitations. The future is cloudy beyond a certain point.
Only certain Zen masters gaze inscrutably on an intermingled past and future, entire and perfect as a crystal or the body of Avedon Patella. They are at one with past and future, and thus unable to separate any portion of themselves actually to comprehend it. This oneness is a drag. Even if they were able to see what must happen, they would keep quiet about it, since it is written in the most sacred texts that the true Zen master does not shoot off his mouth. Or words to that effect.
The future is cloudy.
For the present, there is a question to be answered. Death knows the answer but idly turns his attention to it again, ready to admire this pretty stroke which the Norns have contrived. The question is, what strange and far-off stain is darkening the ice between Norway and Scotland? What creature – for it is no doing of Man’s – what creature could be responsible?
The answer is a lemming.
seven
The legend of the death-seeking lemming, the animal which amid great swarms of its own kind rushes suicidally towards the sea, has excited much incredulity from humans who choose not to make comparisons between this quirk and, say, the state of the roads to the sea anywhere in Britain or America during a national holiday. The lemming story was disbelieved, accepted, debunked, de-debunked and finally established in a modified form – much to the confusion of all those people who’d read one debunking and categorically disbelieved any tendency on the part of lemmings to swarm or, in extreme cases, to exist.
The incredibly beautiful Dr Joyce Abramowitz, possibly the greatest lemming specialist in the world, had been studying the periodic lemming population explosion throughout Scandinavia, and was quickly refreshing her memory from the nearest encyclopedia to make sure no fact had slipped from her mind about the animal upon which she’d written so many books, theses and dissertations, not to mention learned papers without number for J. Biol. Zool. Stud. and Reader’s Digest. ‘Lemmings,’ she murmured knowingly to herself, her lips moving as she read . . . ‘Yes, there are four genera of these small rodents found in north temperate and polar regions. The collared lemming, the true lemming, the wood or red-backed lemming, and of course my darling favourite the bog lemming . . . Ten to eighteen centimetres long, of course, and greyish – or reddish-brown when viewed from above. Gestation period twenty to twenty-two days – nearly forgot that, that’s a tricky number! Noted for their regular population explosions, say every three or four years . . . Yes, and so they tend to migrate – but contrary to popular legend they don’t plunge suicidally into the sea; in fact they avoid water on the whole!’
She peered from the window of the helicopter she was steering, the encyclopedia momentarily forgotten. Her long, gorgeous blonde hair fell across her face and she pushed it aside as she gazed down on the lemming swarm she was tracking in the ’copter. Sure enough, they were greyish – or reddish-brown when viewed from above – a reassuring confirmation of the basic values of Joyce Abramowitz’s life. It was a vaster swarm than usual, understandable when so many other strange things seemed to be happening in this strangest of all possible worlds – and it was headed for the sea! Millions upon millions of lemmings, surging over the cool green Norwegian fields, leaving a swathe of devastation in their wake, as their savage rodent teeth showed no mercy to roots, shoots, grasses . . .
Why were they heading for the sea? Would she have to rewrite her books after all? Were these lemmings plotting against her?
There was a solution, of course, a solution of sorts. Norway, being a foreign country, did not practise quite the same rigid control of disease as did, say, Great Britain. This passed quite clearly through her head as with one hand she resumed the ’copter controls and with the other applied a further coat of the lipstick that had been designed for her sensual lips by none other than the Regius Professor of Aphrodisiacs at Oxford University. The solution depended on those white flecks a less trained observer than she might have failed to notice coming and going in this onrushing tide of rodents. The white flecks of tiny animals foaming at the mouth!
It was not only lemmings which had undergone a population explosion. The dread disease of rabies had exploded along with them. Millions on millions of rabid lemmings were rushing headlong towards the fjords, towards the cold of the North Sea. Already it must be too late for them to stop.
How does one head off a stampede of lemmings? Shoot the leaders? Which were the leaders? Turn the kilometre-wide front of the swarm with the downdraught of, say, a helicopter’s rotors?
But perhaps rabid lemmings were better drowned . . . The beautiful scientist wept at the thought of the slaughter, but she was enough of a hard-headed logician, despite her magnificent body, to resign herself to the inevitable after only mild hysterics and convulsions.
And perhaps, after all, this tragedy to come would add to the legend of the lemmings. She had toyed with the theory that the lemmings’ unique (seemingly) irrationality was in the very long run a powerful evolutionary mechanism. The lemming left all the effort of developing civilization to less acute creatures such as mankind – the lemming’s genes knew well that any animal of such eccentric ways as the lemming would be preserved, looked after, prevented from ever becoming extinct. Lemming genes would always survive, in zoos if nowhere else.
Could the genes have been planned that way?
Ah, the mysteries of evolutionary logic were too complex to understand.
Now the tragedy was near. Now the sea was in sight . . . an unusually white sea, a choppy sea? Now (she could hardly bear to look) the vanguard of the lemming horde was toppling from the cliffs and darkening the white water . . . Tears spurted again in her eyes, and as she mopped at them with tissues and then repaired her elaborate make-up the ’copter slipped downward another fifty metres. She saw, then, that the lemmings were undeterred by water; that they went grimly on; that the water was not water but ice crammed by some unthinkable force deep into the channel of the fjord.
It was impossible!
But it was happening; and, heedless of frostbitten toes, a number of lemmings which staggered imagination was sweeping like the Golden Horde from the east, carrying ruin and rabies over the frozen North Sea.
Dr Abramowitz’s duty was clear. And besides, there might be a book to be written about this. She urged the ’copter forward to follow the dark writhing mass as it straggled for kilometres across the ice.
eight
A long-delayed yet relatively empty Bakerloo Line train moved out of Piccadilly Circus. It stopped with a jerk in the Underground tunnel before even reaching the next stop, Charing Cross. John Strickler mopped his brow. Nearby, two passengers were arguing about whether the stoppage might not be caused by floods . . .