The Complete Short Stories

‘Well, as Whitby’s death indicates, the experiments in this laboratory have all come to a rather unhappy conclusion. Without exception the organisms we’ve irradiated have entered a final phase of totally disorganized growth, producing dozens of specialized sensory organs whose function we can’t even guess. The results are catastrophic — the anemone will literally explode, the Drosophila cannibalize themselves, and so on. Whether the future implicit in these plants and animals is ever intended to take place, or whether we’re merely extrapolating — I don’t know. Sometimes I think, thovgh, that the new sensory organs developed are parodies of their real intentions. The specimens you’ve seen today are all in an early stage of their secondary growth cycles. Later on they begin to look distinctly bizarre.’

Coma nodded. ‘A zoo isn’t complete without its keeper,’ she commented. ‘What about Man?’

Powers shrugged. ‘About one in every 100,000 — the usual average — contain the silent pair. You might have them — or I. No one has volunteered yet to undergo whole-body irradiation. Apart from the fact that it would be classified as suicide, if the experiments here are any guide the experience would be savage and violent.’

He sipped at the thin coffee, feeling tired and somehow bored. Recapitulating the laboratory’s work had exhausted him.

The girl leaned forward. ‘You look awfully pale,’ she said solicitously. ‘Don’t you sleep well?’

Powers managed a brief smile. ‘Too well,’ he admitted. ‘It’s no longer a problem with me.’

‘I wish I could say that about Kaldren. I don’t think he sleeps anywhere near enough. I hear him pacing around all night.’ She added: ‘Still, I suppose it’s better than being a terminal. Tell me, doctor, wouldn’t it be worth trying this radiation technique on the sleepers at the Clinic? It might wake them up before the end. A few of them must possess the silent genes.’

‘They all do,’ Powers told her. ‘The two phenomena are very closely linked, as a matter of fact.’ He stopped, fatigue dulling his brain, and wondered whether to ask the girl to leave. Then he climbed off the desk and reached behind it, picked up a tape-recorder.

Switching it on, he zeroed the tape and adjusted the speaker volume. ‘Whitby and I often talked this over. Towards the end I took it all down. He was a great biologist, so let’s hear it in his own words. It’s absolutely the heart of the matter.’

He flipped the table on, adding: ‘I’ve played it over to myself a thousand times, so I’m afraid the quality is poor.’

An older man’s voice, sharp and slightly irritable, sounded out above a low buzz of distortion, but Coma could hear it clearly.

WHITBY:… for heaven’s sake, Robert, look at those FAQ statistics. Despite an annual increase of five per cent in acreage sown over the past fifteen years, world wheat crops have continued to decline by a factor of about two per cent. The same story repeats itself ad nauseam. Cereals and root crops, dairy yields, ruminant fertility — are all down. Couple these with a mass of parallel symptoms, anything you care to pick from altered migratory routes to longer hibernation periods, and the overall pattern is incontrovertible.

POWERS: Population figures for Europe and North America show no decline, though.

WHITBY: Of course not, as I keep pointing out. It will take a century for such a fractional drop in fertility to have any effect in areas where extensive birth control provides an artificial reservoir. One must look at the countries of the Far East, and particularly at those where infant mortality has remained at a steady level. The population of Sumatra, for example, has declined by over fifteen per cent in the last twenty years. A fabulous decline! Do you realize that only two or three decades ago the Neo-Malthusians were talking about a ‘world population explosion’? In fact, it’s an implosion. Another factor is — Here the tape had been cut and edited, and Whitby’s voice, less querulous this time, picked up again. just as a matter of interest, tell me something: how long do you sleep each night?

POWERS: I don’t know exactly; about eight hours, I suppose.