“But this morning…I didn’t have to bury him. The grass had done it for me.” He nodded at the mound. “I found him like that, which was when I began attacking the foliage again. Damn it all, I refuse to be intimidated by bloody greenery!”
I shook my head. “Gordon—” (I rarely called him by his forename, though he’d years ago invited its use) “—the grass couldn’t possibly have ‘buried’ this cat. He’s actually under the soil—most of him, anyway.”
“Under the soil, yes,” he answered, “but very shallow, as you’ve already pointed out.” The colonel’s voice had fallen to a mere murmur, as if he were talking to himself rather than to me. “And there’s a reason for that, why it’s so shallow.”
“A reason?” Truth to tell, I was beginning to wonder about the old boy’s reason. He probably sensed it or heard something in my voice and frowned at me.
“Eh, what? You think I’m losing it, do you? Well, just you step back a few paces and yank some of that grass there. Go on, pull a few blades up by their roots.“
I did as he suggested. The grass came out easily enough in my hand, and the roots were white.
The old boy nodded and stepped onto the grass close to the mound. And he too pulled grass…from directly over the spot where the cat was buried. Then, again nodding his head—knowingly now—he held the tuft out for my inspection. At which I drew back from him, wrinkling my nose in disgust.
The roots of the grass in his hand were red! And:
“You’re the botanist,” he said, very quietly. “Now tell me, what kind of weird morphology is it that uses blood as chlorophyll? What kind of bloody vampire is this—eh, what? I mean, how does it photosynthesize that, for God’s sake?”
I could only shake my head…but I glanced hastily down, to make sure that I was still on the path.
“And look,” he went on. “Look at my feet.”
He was wearing tough wellington boots and had been standing up to his lower calves in the grass by the burial mound for two or three minutes, no more. But already the grass had curled inward, over his boots, and as he moved his feet the grass broke, so that his feet carried some of the severed blades back to the path with him.
Where he had been standing, the earth was almost bare, the grass visibly drawing down into the soil. It was like trying to watch the movement of the minute hand on the clock in the village clock tower—the motion was barely discernible—but the grass was moving!
I backed away down the path and tried to say, “Gordon,” but all that came out was a gurgle. At my second try I managed, and said, “Gordon, it’s time I made a few phone calls. In fact it’s long since past the time! So if you’ll excuse me now…”
He nodded and said, “And me, I must get back to killing all of this damned stuff. I’ll turn it all to compost, start again. That’s what I’ll do—eh, what?”
“Whatever,” I told him. And then I got out of there…
The near-distant jackhammers, silent for a while, resumed their clamour, their vibrations stronger than previously. Jarred back to the present—as the generators coughed and electric lights flickered, and rills of dust jitterbugged down from the ceiling—I gave a small start, blinked once or twice, let my audience, my troops, float back into focus.
There, seated in groups, I saw about half of them: some two hundred men, and as many still to come. They’d been arriving in a steady trickle, quietly thinking their private thoughts, automatically assembling with other members of their sections and platoons. Clad in grey coveralls and carrying grey, protective gloves, they were grey as can be and gaunt-faced to a man.
I recognized one of them sitting central in the front row. Yesterday he’d been squad leader of a spore patrol out towards Watford. The fern forest had been making big inroads, mutating as it came. Ignoring the season and propagating like crazy, it was hurling its spores before it, “galloping” over the fields, making exploratory forays up roadside verges and central reservations, and taking root wherever there was soil. Yesterday the winds had been fanning north-west out of London: ideal for the flamers. Whoever could have foreseen or imagined the day would arrive when we’d be burning our fields, our woodlands? And not only the Green but whatever doomed, terrified species of wildlife remained in it.
So there he sat, this squad leader: his hair crisped, hands gnarled and blistered from the heat of the flamethrowers, weary arms a-dangle. Now and then his thin frame would shudder, prelude to wracking fits of coughing. All of that burning must have leached the air from his lungs and seared them to so much blackened leather. So I thought—
—Until, once again, my thoughts went elsewhere…
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 y
ears 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…
Two or three rows of chairs remained almost empty. I looked at my watch—fifteen, maybe twenty minutes to go. How long had I been here? Some thirty or so minutes? Was that all? I supposed it must be. But then, memory is like that: past events, especially unpleasant ones, hurry across your mind like ripples over a pond on a windy day, eager to get done. Or rather, you are eager to get done with them.
I spoke into my microphone, but softly:
“You’re on duty in about twenty minutes, after the briefing—for what that’s worth—which I promise I’ll keep brief. So we’re able to give the latecomers a few minutes grace. That being so, I’ll ask you to curb your impatience. I mean, I appreciate how eager you must be to get on with things, but we’ll wait awhile longer anyway…”
That last was my idea of black humour, if only to calm the nerves and alleviate the tension, but no one laughed. Who could blame them? Not a single man-jack of them was “eager” to get on with any-damned-thing. This wasn’t a conventional war, and they weren’t conventional warriors. Those of them who were beginning to fidget were doing so not out of eagerness but a perfectly natural fear of the unknown.
Somewhere at the back of the basement a door clanged open and a messenger, a crippled kid whose legs had been shrivelled to useless twigs by mutant nettles, came speeding down a central aisle in his wheelchair. Clamped between his teeth he bore a sheet of paper. Even as I stood up, went down on one knee on the podium to take the note from him, I knew what it would be: a list of those who wouldn’t be joining us, those who’d failed to make it through the night, injured or murdered in their own homes while protecting themselves and their families.
As the kid spun his chair about face and went off back up the aisle, I glanced at the typed sheet, saw that I was right, bulldog-clipped the list to the notes I would be reading in a few minute’s time.
But before that I let my mind drift again, a sort of guilty “if only I…” trip back in time. A futile exercise really, for even back then it had probably been far too late to do anything about anything…
I think I may have said something somewhere about killing Kew. Actually, I don’t think I killed Kew at all. It’s just part of this guilt thing I seem to have developed, which I think began after the police contacted me. Contacted me? Well, it was something more than a mere contact.
It was probably the Min. of Ag. & Fish who put the police on to me, to sideline, marginalize and shut me up, I imagine; me and the rest of the staff at Kew. And at first those estimable officers of the law were pretty stiff with us, with me in particular.
Was it possible, they had wanted to know, that I’d smuggled something foreign and illegal out of Kew to give to the colonel or to grow in my own garden? Surely I was aware that the casual introduction of exotic strains into our finely balanced ecology was a serious offence? Just twelve years ago we had had mad cow disease; hadn’t that been enough of a warning not to go messing with nature? What was I attempting to do, sabota
ge the ecology? Destroy the vegetation and crops that our populace, animals and wildlife lived on?
But then I reminded them about the local GM problem they’d dealt with some eighteen months ago. I told them that if memory served me well it had been they, the police themselves, who had stopped those Friends of the Earth people who had only been trying to avoid this sort of problem in the first place. And there was something else they should take into account: the meteorite that had landed next door. As for myself: I was merely a botanist, a scientist, a man with a conscience who respected the law and knew his responsibilities. Did they really think I would be smuggling forbidden botanical material out of Kew to ingratiate myself with a well known local eccentric? And if they did think so, then why didn’t they question the colonel himself? And what items did they think I might have smuggled anyway? There was no more Cannabis indica at Kew Gardens than in any one of a thousand window boxes in Kensington! And anyway, wasn’t it entirely legal now?
And so, eventually, I convinced them of my innocence.
At that time…well of course I played the meteorite card very carefully. For in light of my former belief—in a Gaia as opposed to a Universal Nature—I still wasn’t one hundred per cent convinced of what I suspected might be going on here. And as for the police: I didn’t for a moment think that these very down-to-earth law officers were ready to subscribe to a Galactica theory—