No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories (44 page)

Intelligence. We believed it was the province—the exclusive province—of the vertebrate mammalia. Well, okay, the cephalopods had the octopus, and two or three other orders had their individual geniuses, but on the whole it was the mammalia, and especially Man. But how does one measure intelligence in species other than or alien to the human variety? And when, at what point, does it take the next step up and
become
intelligence as opposes to mere instinct?

Consider the Venus fly trap. By what extremes of evolutionary process did this plant develop spiked, spring-loaded leaves to capture its victims? Or take for instance the squirting cucumber, a Mediterranean plant that squirts a weak acid at you if you brush against it. Actually, it’s simply ejecting its seeds; but still we have to assume that a dose of acid in the eyes is a warning to wild animals or livestock, to stop them trampling on the plant. To me it’s simply another example of weird vegetable instinct. And what if evolution was to take the next step up?

Well, thanks to the meteorite—and to a degree to genetic modification—plant evolution has taken and is taking the next step up. And the next, and the next…

After that episode with Sellick’s grass, back in my own garden—my walled, almost entirely work-free, neatly laid out “horticulturist’s paradise”, as he had called it—I went from plot to plot, suspicious as a caged budgie in a house with cats. It seemed the walls might have saved me from any immediate influx. Well they probably had, from most of it. But not entirely.

I found several magnolia corms (I believe that’s the word: those green pods that carry the tree’s seeds) scattered in the flower beds parallel with the colonel’s garden. This had never happened before; the magnolia’s seed pods are fairly heavy and usually fall straight to the ground. Moreover, the old fellow’s tree was well away from my wall, much deeper into his garden.

So then, had there been a storm which I hadn’t especially noticed? I didn’t think so. Or (laughingly) had the tree found a way to propel its would-be progeny abroad? Outrageous! And I gave that last thought only momentary consideration. But nevertheless, it was very late in the season to be discovering such as these in my garden, or any garden for that matter. Likewise the dandelions.

I had always been scrupulous with weeds however pretty some may be, and while admittedly I hadn’t had much time for gardening recently, I’d never failed to pull dandelions whenever they attempted another insidious invasion. But it appeared obvious I must have missed some, and the ones I’d missed were beauties!

Tall, thick-stemmed, with flowers twice their regular size and as golden as the sun, there were specimens in almost every plot. Some of them were into the seed phase of their existence, once again very late in the season…didn’t these things know when to stop growing? Even as I stood frowning at them a breeze came up, snatched a puff of parasols into the air, carried them higher and higher, until they whirled away to the south-east. I found myself wondering where they’d land and try to take root:

Kent? East Sussex? The English Channel? (No luck there!)

Or perhaps some place much farther afield, such as France? Belgium? Germany? And for some reason that galvanized me, sent me hurrying indoors to do my telephoning…

I called Kew, David Johnson, who I knew was on duty that weekend. He was an old acquaintance of mine, an expert on Mediterranean flora who had studied with me twenty years previously.

“Hi,” he said, a friendly voice coming over the wires; and yet there was an excited or nervous edge to it. “What can I do for you on this beautiful Saturday morning, when you should be out on the river—or in the pub, or your garden, or anywhere except where I am?”

“In my garden?” I said. “No, I don’t think so. In fact I’d rather be anywhere
but
there! I was already there this morning—and in the garden next door—and I didn’t much like either one of them!”

“Ah, you’ve been neglecting things, right?”

“No, I’ve been noticing things.”

“Oh yes? Well, me too. In fact I’ve just noticed something—or rather experienced something—that gave me quite a shock! Funny, really…and yet not.”

There it was once again: that edge in David’s voice, more properly an unfamiliar quavering that was quite out of character. And despite that there were things I must tell him, I was suddenly interested in what he patently wanted to tell me. For which reason:

“What’s been going on?” I asked him. “What have you been up to?”

“Well, I’m on my own today,” he began. “Gloria Hamilton is supposed to be in, too, but she’s come down with something, so there’s only me and the security guards; and of course they’re doing their rounds.”

“Sounds lonely,” I said. “In fact you make it sound positively spooky! So what’s this: a haunted greenhouse story?”

“Or something,” he answered. And after a moment’s silence: “Tell me, do you remember that old myth about mandrakes—how they scream when you pull them out of the ground?”

I felt my blood cooling as I answered, “I know the legend, yes.” And I was almost afraid to ask, “What of it?”

“Well, I was in the Mediterranean section—my domain, the hothouse, as I call it—and you know something? That old myth is true! I yanked what I thought was a diseased mandrake—”

“And it screamed?” I beat him to it. And: “David, listen,” I continued, in all earnestness. “No, I’m not a bit surprised. I suspect we haven’t been nearly as careful or attentive as we should have been, and not only at Kew. By now that entire place is probably contaminated, not to mention the rest of the south-east!”

“What on earth are you…?” he began to ask, but yet again I cut him short:

“No, be quiet, I want you to listen: is Director Hawkworth still in America? I thought so. Which means I’m in charge, the man responsible. So: do you have a staff list there? Telephone numbers, addresses? Good, because I want you to start calling them,
all
of them, and get them in for an O-Group first thing Monday morning.”

“An O-Group?” I could almost see the puzzled expression I knew he must be wearing. “Don’t you mean a general meeting?”

“No,” I told him. “I mean an Orders Group, as in military terminology. You thought a screaming mandrake was odd, David? Well yes, I have to agree. But I suspect that’s just one small example of this thing, one small part. As for the whole of it: it’s war, David. I do believe it’s war!”

Then I had tried to get on to the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. Pointless! Ridiculous! A complete waste of time and effort! At almost midday on a Saturday, no one was there. When I did reach them on Monday morning…they already knew about it.

As for the woman I spoke to, not the Minister himself (no, of course not!) but an underling: I sensed she was stalling me, hoping I would go away, just like her bureaucratic superior and a handful of lesser bean-counters in his office must have been hoping “the problem” would go away. And you know, I might have expected it? For of course they were the ones who’d sanctioned all those GM experiments in the first place! And they probably believed the experiments were at the “root” of it—

—Which I have to admit was what I myself still believed, at least at that moment in time. It was my Earth Mother faith, etcetera, which, despite Sellick’s meteorite, kept obstructing any positive acceptance of a then inchoate, at best unresolved Galactica or Universe Mother theory.

But the evidence was mounting, and the mountain was like a Welsh coal mine’s slag tip in the rain: ready to slip and slide and bury us all…

And again the jackhammers, reminding me of where I was. Me and my audience, my army; our eyes turning up almost as one to look at the concrete ceiling, narrowing to avoid the last few trickles of loose dust.

Up there in Oxford Street or nearby, and all over London, men were clearing the vegetation—the remaining green areas, traffic islands, verges, decorative plots—right down to their raw concrete foundations. Then they’d spray sulphuric acid into the gaping holes to kill any roots, fill them with debris, finally level everything and seal their work with fresh concrete.

And as for the parks: God-only-knows how they were dealing with the parks!

While down here in this briefing room the small army of men waiting for me to speak must be thinking much the same thing as I was: that the city we’d known—the whole world we’d known—was no more and might even be gone forever…