The Complete Short Stories

‘Oh, he’s not as frightening as he looks. Those huge eyes staring at you are blind. Or, rather, their optical sensitivity has shifted down the band, the retinas will only register gamma radiation. Your wristwatch has luminous hands. When you moved it across the window he started thinking. World War IV should really bring him into his element.’

They strolled back to Powers’ desk. He put a coffee pan over a bunsen and pushed a chair across to Coma. Then he opened the box, lifted out the armoured frog and put it down on a sheet of blotting paper.

‘Recognize him? Your old childhood friend, the common frog. He’s built himself quite a solid little air-raid shelter.’ He carried the animal across to a sink, turned on the tap and let the water play softly over its shell. Wiping his hands on his shirt, he came back to the desk.

Coma brushed her long hair off her forehead, watched him curiously.

‘Well, what’s the secret?’

Powers lit a cigarette. ‘There’s no secret. Teratologists have been breeding monsters for years. Have you ever heard of the "silent pair"?’

She shook her head.

Powers stared moodily at the cigarette for a moment, riding the kick the first one of the day always gave him. ‘The so-called "silent pair" is one of modern genetics’ oldest problems, the apparently baffling mystery of the two inactive genes which occur in a small percentage of all living organisms, and appear to have no intelligible role in their structure or development. For a long while now biologists have been trying to activate them, but the difficulty is partly in identifying the silent genes in the fertilized germ cells of parents known to contain them, and partly in focusing a narrow enough X-ray beam which will do no damage to the remainder of the chromosome. However, after about ten years’ work Dr Whitby successfully developed a whole-body irradiation technique based on his observation of radiobiological damage at Eniwetok.’

Powers paused for a moment. ‘He had noticed that there appeared to be more biological damage after the tests — that is, a greater transport of energy — than could be accounted for by direct radiation. What was happening was that the protein lattices in the genes were building up energy in the way that any vibrating membrane accumulates energy when it resonates — you remember the analogy of the bridge collapsing under the soldiers marching in step — and it occurred to him that if he could first identify the critical resonance frequency of the lattices in any particular silent gene he could then radiate the entire living organism, and not simply its germ cells, with a low field that would act selectively on the silent gene and cause no damage to the remainder of the chromosomes, whose lattices would resonate critically only at other specific frequencies.’

Powers gestured around the laboratory with his cigarette. ‘You see some of the fruits of this "resonance transfer" technique around you.’

Coma nodded. ‘They’ve had their silent genes activated?’

‘Yes, all of them. These are only a few of the thousands of specimens who have passed through here, and as you’ve seen, the results are pretty dramatic.’

He reached up and pulled across a section of the sun curtain. They were sitting just under the lip of the dome, and the mounting sunlight had begun to irritate him.

In the comparative darkness Coma noticed a stroboscope winking slowly in one of the tanks at the end of the bench behind her. She stood up and went over to it, examining a tall sunflower with a thickened stem and greatly enlarged receptacle. Packed around the flower, so that only its head protruded, was a chimney of grey-white stones, neatly cemented together and labelled: — Cretaceous Chalk: 60,000,000 years Beside it on the bench were three other chimneys, these labelled ‘Devonian Sandstone: 290,000,000 years’, ‘Asphalt: 20 years’, ‘Polyvinylchloride: 6 months’.

‘Can you see those moist white discs on the sepals,’ Powers pointed out. ‘In some way they regulate the plant’s metabolism. It literally sees time. The older the surrounding environment, the more sluggish its metabolism. With the asphalt chimney it will complete its annual cycle in a week, with the PVC one in a couple of hours.’

‘Sees time,’ Coma repeated, wonderingly. She looked up at Powers, chewing her lower lip reflectively. ‘It’s fantastic. Are these the creatures of the future, doctor?’

‘I don’t know,’ Powers admitted. ‘But if they are their world must be a monstrous surrealist one.’

Three

He went back to the desk, pulled two cups from a drawer and poured out the coffee, switching off the bunsen. ‘Some people have speculated that organisms possessing the silent pair of genes are the forerunners of a massive move up the evolutionary slope, that the silent genes are a sort of code, a divine message that we inferior organisms are carrying for our more highly developed descendants. It may well be true — perhaps we’ve broken the code too soon.’

‘Why do you say that?’