The Complete Short Stories

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

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

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

Coma was smiling broadly to herself. ‘Why the space helmet, though?’

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

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

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

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

Coma shook her head, puzzled. ‘Why, though?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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