Much as she might have pictured the mastermind at Pachyderm as a pewter-eyed Mengele, Norman Shagg was more an ageing Merry Prankster, shirtless with drawstring trousers the colour of Eleanor’s complexion: queasy purple. He rocked on rubber-tyre sandals and fingered a Masai snuff box thonged around his neck.
His uncombed locks shocked out from his head in various lengths of dread. Instead of the thin-lipped, sinister grimace of her imagination, Norman’s slapdash smile appeared to have been papered haphazardly on to his face at slightly the wrong angle. With his nose longish and pointed, his eyes keen and closely set, she wondered if he’d spent too long around his laboratory pets—he looked like a rat.
But a friendly rat. Glancing from her psychotic boyfriend to this hyperactive hippie Frankenstein, Eleanor thought, I am surrounded by friendly rats.
‘Don’t be fooled,’ Calvin whispered as they packed into Norman’s Suzuki, ‘he’s a genius.’
‘We’ve shipped in this load of immune-deficient mice, see,’ Norman was babbling. ‘So we can implant human foetal tissues and they’re not rejected. It’s dynamite! We’re growing intestines, lymph nodes, thymuses, you name it!’
‘What for?’ asked Eleanor warily.
‘Your friend here expects me to design a virus that only works on humans with green monkeys. Well, we’ve cracked it. We’ve cracked a lot while you’ve been gone, boyo. And these mice, with tiny human lungs, t-cells in the bloodstream, b-cells in the liver, you have got to see to believe. What we can’t quite figure is why the human cells don’t attack the meeses.’
‘Human cells are obviously at home in rodents,’ said Calvin.
‘I knew you’d have a scientific explanation.’
Calvin turned around to Eleanor in the back seat to explain that the facility had originally been established, innocently, for the conduct of his density studies: what happens when you crammed eighty rats in a pen meant for ten?
‘Uh-huh,’ she grunted, ‘and what did happen?’
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‘It was fantastic!’ Norman exploded, gunning up an embankment until Eleanor could feel the Suzuki’s centre of gravity tilt backwards.
‘We got whole colonies out of their tiny tree. Half the boys were gay, and you don’t ordinarily see a lot of buggery in rats. And the girls became lousy mothers; turned their hairless toddlers into latch-key kids.’
‘The females under normal density conditions build cup-shaped nests for their young,’ said Calvin. ‘In our high-density model, mothers would lay their young on a few stray strips and then desert.
We developed rat shanty towns.’
‘You got whole gangs of sexual deviants that would mate anything from newborns to drinking troughs,’ Norman shouted over the engine. ‘Males mounted females in the middle of giving birth. Court-ship rituals disappeared. The males usually do this little jig outside the female’s nest, trying to get her to come out and play—it’s cute.
With over-population, no more two-step.’
‘Though the biggest problem was cannibalism.’
‘Wonderful,’ Eleanor muttered, gazing out of the window through the billows of the car trying to take in the view. The landscape had that stark, desolate beauty of a place where people didn’t belong.
Why such a deserted vista would inspire research in depopulation was beyond her.
‘They started eating their own young,’ said Calvin, as if she wanted to know. ‘A mother would consume her litter as it was born. In the third month of this experiment, infant mortality was 96 per cent. In the fourth month, my poppet, the entire colony was dead.’
‘Swiftian, isn’t it?’ remarked Norman to his boss. ‘Maybe we should hang on a few more years here. In Africa I can see it: one big feeding frenzy. Kurtz, boy.’
She was clutching the car door to stay upright, as Norman swerved the Suzuki around brush and bounced over ruts, sending her head to the roof. Dust clouded the car, white dirt gathering on the fine hairs of her arms, paling her skin to ash. The grit in her teeth warned of a visit that would be hard to digest.
‘You should tell Eleanor about our happy-hour series,’ Norman commended sociably.
‘Mm?’
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‘Under normal density conditions,’ said Calvin, ‘if you give Norwegian rats access to alcohol, a few characters will take to it, town drunks if you will, but most don’t have a taste for meth. As we increased crowding, however, the number of tipplers rapidly increased.’
‘It was gorgeous!’ Norman delighted on a hand-brake 180. ‘Huge pens weaving with these totally legless rats. Past a critical density, every one of them tap-tap-tapped at those methanol levers, like those colonial geezers at the Muthaiga Club on Sunday afternoons. They like skipped the water levers altogether. Gave up on sex, food, just hit the booze, all day. That crew died out, too.’
‘I liked the behavioural sink,’ Calvin reminisced.
‘I can hardly wait,’ said Eleanor, as Norman screeched to a halt inches short of a wall.
‘This wasn’t repugnant, just peculiar,’ Calvin explained. ‘The more crowded the pen got, the more the animals congregated in a single quarter of the compound.’
‘Nairobi,’ said Norman.
‘New York,’ said Calvin. ‘Rat-Tokyo.’
‘Don’t you think,’ supposed Eleanor, as they strode towards a banal white building that shimmered in the heat (a mirage, surely),
‘that parallels between rats and people are a bit tenuous?’
‘Nope,’ said Calvin.
Norman led them down the hall, though the building didn’t have that gleaming, twenty-first-century sterility she might have expected.
Billboards fluttered with notices for keg parties, reggae nights and weekend discos. She glanced in doorways where, between infra-red photos of the earth, topographic maps of Africa and tables of the elements, the cubicles were taped as well with New Yorker cartoons, misprints from the Standard and Far Side birthday cards. The desks were littered with granola bar wrappers and toilet-roll Father’s Day pencil holders; in the distance a coffee machine gurgled from its build-up of alkaline. A researcher in an Einstein T-shirt looked up from his computer, caught her eye and smiled. His soft hair in a boyish mop, he looked sweet. She caught up with her escorts, who were chuckling together, at jokes she was rather glad to miss. Yet the compound hardly felt clan-208
destine, mephistophelean. She passed two glistening men in shorts slashing the air with racquets, discussing serve and volley.
Turning into the next corridor, however, Norman led them to a massive open room cluttered with equipment; she thought at first they’d entered a gymnasium. No Nautilus presented itself. Eleanor lagged behind to stare: everywhere, big whirling, humming machines she didn’t understand. Blue sine waves oscillated on screens, centri-fuges whipped the air like propellers, lasers traced keen pure lines from one contraption to another. As Calvin entered the lab, first one and then another technician in sweaty Tusker Ts looked up eagerly from his station. Women in shorts and tank-tops strode with brusque professionalism between the aisles, waving to Dr Piper with scalpels.
Calvin clapped his researchers on the shoulder as they peered in microscopes, sometimes stopping to cajole, inquire about an experiment, or bring greetings from family. Eleanor was still waiting for her picnic. ‘To fraudulence,’ her glass would clink. ‘To Andromeda.
To dream.’
Cacophony preceded the next chamber: screeing, chittering and scrambling, over the whir of exercise wheels. The three filed past cages of chimps, pigeons, hamsters and, naturally, rats. She looked for signs of abuse, but aside from a few mice looking peaked, most of the animals appeared healthy, leaping and poking through the mesh as she walked by. Only the last cage gave Calvin noticeable pause: one of the green monkeys was dead. It looked like Malthus.
In Norman’s office, Ensor’s ‘Masque of the Red Death’ grinned over his potted plants. Norman closed the door and locked it. He fixed them coffee and biscuits; while, prepared for sa
lmon and champagne, Eleanor had lost her appetite.
‘Progress report?’ Calvin required, reclining in an armchair.
‘These mice have sped up a number of experiments.’ Norman propped his sandals on his desk. ‘Fitting the juvenile bill is a cinch; any number of organisms look promising, since a kid’s immune system isn’t fully in gear until at least five. It’s this discrete shaving of the labour force that’s the tall order. We’re looking for weaknesses in gene pools that are represented in the proportion of the adult population you
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want to crop. But chromosomes aren’t constant across populations, and that information is hard to come by. We got your Western geriatric requisition, and even that’s not as simple as you’d think.
Run the gauntlet of seventy years, you’re a survivor.
‘For the reproductive ages,’ he went on, though it was hard to take anyone seriously who discussed the future of humanity with a mouth covered in biscuit crumbs, ‘it’s a bitch to beat what’s on the market already. I’ve come to have a hell of a respect for HIV—30 to 60 per cent vertical transmission; and the sexual connection is poetic.
In Africa it’s spreading like Christmas. Asia may follow suit. How could you ask for more?’
‘Takes too long,’ said Calvin. ‘And all these bloodhounds snuffling for a cure, they’re bound to dig up something eventually. There’s money in it.’
‘Sure. But you know what’s going to happen? They’ll come up with a therapy, all right. It will cost a bundle. We’ll save a handful of well-heeled gays in America. But governments spend an average of two dollars a year on health care here! What are the chances anyone’s going to front 6,000 dollars apiece for an updated AZT?
Africa will still be a write-off, so will the subcontinent. And the Chinese government will be dancing in the streets to have that disease. I bet they’re already inviting Haitian gays, Manhattan main-liners and Nairobi prostitutes as guests of the nation.’
‘Pachyderm will outclass HIV. AIDS is a pretty tortuous way to go.’
‘That’s the other thing,’ Norman said. ‘This stipulation that Pachyderm’s to be like Bactine. We can come up with something quick.
But every potion stings, Pipe. Dying isn’t usually a lot of fun.’
‘Pachyderm doesn’t have to be pain-free so long as it’s fast. There’s only so much punishment people can experience overnight.’
‘Pi-prrr,’ Norman purred. ‘You haven’t suffered much, have you?
It is astonishing the agony a man can pack into ten seconds. Multiply overnight by two billion and you have an impressive aggregate of hell.’
‘We have an impressive aggregate of hell already. Do what 210
you can. As for HIV, I’ve put Eleanor on to it. If HIV’s up to the job, splendid, we close shop.’
‘Eleanor, we’ll have to be in touch, then.’ He sprinkled in his hand from the snuff box around his neck and proceeded to roll a joint.
‘AIDS demography is crucial. Because this country is hot. My squash game is off-form. The disco’s OK, but we never have live jazz. I don’t want to sweat it out in this second-rate Club Med if I don’t have to.
Which reminds me, my man, we badly need some new films. The Killing Fields has shown three times. All things being equal, I would really prefer The Blues Brothers.’
‘How about,’ Calvin suggested, ‘ The Elephant Man?’
Norman took a few deep drags and passed the joint to Eleanor.
She accepted; Calvin looked over, eyebrows raised. In adolescence she’d avoided dope, for it made her more awkward and tongue-tied than she was already. Right now, however, getting stoned seemed just the ticket. She had a hunch that Norman smoked this stuff all the time.
‘No use offering any to Mr Straight here,’ said Norman, taking the reefer back. ‘He disapproves of drugs that don’t kill you. Which reminds me, just in case you think we’re flat on our bums here, Pipe, you should know we’ve come up with half a dozen concentrated virtually instantaneous toxins that will dissolve in water or disperse through the air.’
‘So what’s the problem?’
‘They nix everybody.’
Calvin smiled. ‘Has an appeal, doesn’t it?’
‘And how. If we really cared about this planet, we’d all cheer one last sunset with bright pink Guyana Kool-Aid, in tiny biodegradable paper cups.
‘You know,’ he went on, exhaling, ‘QUIETUS has to make up its mind about a test run.’
‘We’re uncomfortable, Norman.’
‘Even if we make a hash of it and our fatality rates go too high, you’re talking a few hundred max.’
‘The problem is detection. If we wipe out a third of a village and it becomes an international incident, we run the risk of being traced.
No one in QUIETUS is keen to get done for tossing a mere ditchful of unfortunates.’
‘Why assume you’d get fingered? Target a village in an 211
AIDS pocket. A bit of a confound, but whole towns are already dropping off the map in Tanzania and nobody gives a toss…Can you imagine,’ he supposed, studying the curling smoke, ‘the havoc, the hysteria, if towns were dissolving one after another in North Carolina, in Yorkshire? But in East Africa, who would notice one more? Renamo shot up 1,000 Mozambicans last week and the news report was one column long.’
‘Things go wrong,’ warned Calvin.
‘Hell yes, that’s why we need a test. Throwing Pachyderm to the winds without a small-scale trial would be like catering a banquet and serving your new recipe for mango chowder without cooking a bowl of it first. You’re talking about inflicting a brand-new microbe on the entire human race. The stakes are pretty high if we’re a bit off. Especially if we decide on a virus; the bastards mutate on you in no time.’
‘The biggest danger is we fail. You keep worrying about fatality going too high; I’m more concerned it won’t go high enough.’
‘You’re not cooking in my kitchen—it’s lucky we wash our hands.
With the boil and bubble in this lab, it’s a miracle the whole operation hasn’t melted like the Wicked Witch of the West into the plains of the NFD. Don’t you worry about fatality. This lab is a snake farm.
I’m not opening the cages until I know what the animal’s going to do.’
Calvin grunted. ‘I suppose there’s time to sort this out. You’re not likely to resolve Pachyderm any time in the immediate future.’
Norman leered. ‘I beg to differ.’
Calvin’s forehead rippled into an expression Norman might read as hopeful, but Eleanor saw as nervous.
‘We expect to have your elephant on a platter quite shortly,’
Norman assured him, relighting his joint.
‘How shortly?’
‘ Shortly,’ Norman repeated, in the same voice Calvin had reiterated drastic to BC. ‘And if we get ahead of schedule, why wait for 1999?
Sure you’re not that superstitious about Nostradamus. The sooner we strike, the fewer futureless five-year-olds we have to put to sleep.’
‘True,’ said Calvin, without enthusiasm.
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‘So you’ll have to address dissemination more seriously. If we go for air delivery, you’ll need to mobilize a fair force of planes, and there’s the obstacle of airspace. Just anyone doesn’t fly over China.
Start collecting data on weather patterns. Seeding could be arranged so if an ill-wind were on its way, you wouldn’t have to crop dust directly over countries where getting permission to fly private craft could be dodgy.’
Norman led the visiting director and his research assistant on a tour of the facility, pointing out promising strategies, introducing their authors, updating his employer on the status of each experiment. Eleanor, packed in the protective cotton of powerful Kenyan bhang, was beginning to find it all very intriguing. Calvin, rather than shoulder-clap his way through his staff with that fatherly swagger to Norman’s office, had curled into himself. He mumbled to technicians, and even with the
most advanced projects seemed distracted, uninvolved—or especially with these.
‘Just how hard,’ Eleanor inquired of Norman as the two walked ahead of Calvin, ‘did you work on inducing infertility instead of fatality?’
‘Pretty hard.’ Norman shrugged. ‘Same problem as with our contagions: we could only design drugs that were 100 per cent effective. Throw total infertility at a population and it dies out. So we gave up.’
‘But you haven’t given up on a pathogen, even when your first solutions failed.’
Norman squinted. ‘What are you implying?’
‘I simply wonder,’ said Eleanor carefully, her words far away and difficult to pronounce, ‘whether you gave a non-mortality route your all. Knowing Calvin, I mean. I might find even inducing invol-untary infertility extreme, but Calvin wouldn’t. It wouldn’t appeal to him.’
‘And death does?’
Eleanor stopped staring at the floor and looked Norman in the eye. ‘You know it does.’ She kept her voice down. ‘Poison is more attractive than progesterone. To Calvin? It’s sexier.’ Her brittle laugh was meant only for herself.
‘I thought you were into this,’ said Norman suspiciously. ‘Inner circle. Gung-ho. Or Piper wouldn’t bring you here.’
‘I found out about QUIETUS by accident,’ Eleanor 213
admitted. ‘Calvin hadn’t any choice but to involve me. But how I feel about it—I don’t know.’
Norman clammed up.
‘Doesn’t it bother you,’ she asked softly as they strolled the hall,
‘what you do here? Aren’t you a little disturbed, or frightened, or disgusted?’
‘Not really. It’s a great game.’
‘Is it a game?’
‘Ask your boyfriend.’
Eleanor’s fingertips grazed the wall, checking it was solid. If Pachyderm was a game, it seemed to have got rather out of hand.
‘Pipe.’ Norman noted at their plane. ‘One last thing. I’m afraid we haven’t got anywhere on Semitic immunity.’
Calvin looked crestfallen. ‘Maybe we can skip Israel, then. Fly over Egypt instead.’
‘You soft-headed chump,’ said Norman affectionately. ‘Israel is smaller than Connecticut. With an airborne toxin, drift alone—’