Everyone smiled.
‘Rebecca shows a remarkable propensity to develop her linguistic skills,’ observed Cody, ‘and to extend them quite spontaneously. Her ability to adapt to a situation is impressive, to say the least. I wonder just what she might be capable of.’
Lincoln Warner, who had been silent for a while, cleared his throat loudly.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I might be able to answer that. She might be capable of doing just about anything we can do. There’s something about Rebecca I think you ought to know. Something remarkable.’
CASTORP. WE ARE PLEASED THAT YOU THINK YOU MAY BE ABOUT TO COMPLETE YOUR MISSION, BUT AT THE SAME TIME WE HAVE STRONGLY ROOTED OBJECTIONS TO ANY COURSE OF ACTION THAT MIGHT RESULT IN YOUR HARMING ANY OF THE SCIENTISTS WHO HAVE BEEN YOUR UNWITTING HOSTS. YOUR MISSION WILL BE REGARDED AS A FAILURE IF IT INVOLVES THE DEATH OF ANY AMERICAN CITIZEN. MOREOVER, THIS OFFICE AND THIS OFFICE ONLY WILL DETERMINE ISSUES OF NATIONAL SECURITY AS THEY AFFECT THE UNITED STATES. PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE BY RETURN IMMEDIATELY UPON RECEIPT OF THIS E-MAIL TO INDICATE YOUR COMPLIANCE. HUSTLER.
Bryan Perkins and Chaz Mustilli sat in Perrins’s office and waited for CASTORP to acknowledge their last message. The configuration of the CIa’s e-mail server meant that they knew CASTORP had already collected the message from his In Box. But fifteen minutes passed and still he did not acknowledge his compliance. Perrins turned to his desktop PC and typed another e-mail, demanding that CASTORP acknowledge. This time Perrins’s message remained uncollected.
‘He must have collected the last message and turned off his laptop,’ said Mustilli.
‘That’s what I think,’ agreed Perrins. ‘Shit.’ He shook his head. ‘Is there anything we can do? To protect those people?’
‘I can’t think of anything.’
‘Damn it, Chaz, we’ve got to do something. We can’t just let him murder them.’
‘Maybe we could try calling the Royal Nepal Police. See if they could send a detachment of men up there to protect them.’
‘Do it.’
‘But you know,’ added Mustilli, ‘if there is a nuclear war down there, he might turn out to be the least of their problems.’
‘And if there’s not a war?’
Chaz sucked hard on his empty pipe.
‘I’ll make that call.’
Twenty-seven
‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.’
In the Sanctuary, the wind seemed finally to have blown itself out. Underneath the dark canopy, Lincoln Warner looked vaguely troubled by what he had to relate.
‘Most of our DNA doesn’t add up to very much,’ he said. ‘Molecules that once had a function are now lost. For example, when we had gills or used our tails to hang on to branches. It’s like finding a key for a lock in a door to a house that no longer exists. Except that there are thousands of such doors. The main molecules that concern us have to do with the long chains of amino acids we call proteins. Haemoglobin for one. That’s made up of two amino acid chains each described by a single bit of DNA. A single gene, if you like. Okay, that’s something you can’t see. But genes influence how you are seen, what you look like.
‘Now take a human being and a chimpanzee. Only one-point-six percent of our DNA differs from chimp DNA. Although as a matter of interest, that doesn’t include those genes that describe our haemoglobin. You’d be right if you said that it’s different genes that prevent a chimp from speaking like we do. We don’t actually know which genes they are. All we can say with any certainty is that they’re part of that elusive one-point-six percent difference I was just talking about. Just think of that for a moment. Ninety-eight-point-four percent of our genes are normal chimp genes. And that one-point-six percent difference? Why, it’s less than that between two species of gibbons. Zero-point-six percent less, to be exact.
‘The chimp is our closest living relative. Up to now, scientists like me have found only five out of a grand total of thirteen hundred amino acids that are actually different. Three of them are in an enzyme called carbonic anhydrase. One is in a muscle protein called myoglobin, and the fifth is in a haemoglobin chain called the delta chain.
‘So here’s the first part of the news. That enzyme called carbonic anhydrase? Rebecca has only two of those particular amino acids different from us, not three. And the delta chain? It’s the same. So what we have here, very crudely, is an animal — and I use the word with some caution — an animal that is different from us in its DNA by less than one percent. Which makes Rebecca and her species our closest living relative, not the chimpanzee.’
‘That’s fantastic. Link,’ said Swift.
‘I’m not finished. Not by a long way. Some of you will be familiar with the idea of using differences in protein chemistry as a kind of molecular clock. A protein can be used as a marker, determining a mutation from the main evolutionary branch. To cut a long story short by a few million years, it’s generally assumed that Homo sapiens split from chimpanzees about five million years ago. Personally, I’ve always thought it was rather more distant than that, about seven to nine million years ago. But whatever the time span, it’s clear to me that Homo sapiens and Homo vertex, as I propose that we shall call the yeti, demonstrate a much more recent separation. Perhaps as recently as the beginning of the Pleistocene epoch, some one million years ago, before the last great periods of glaciation. It could even be that the pre-glacial period, at the end of the Pliocene epoch, may date the mutation.
‘Only I don’t speak of the mutation that has resulted in man, but rather the other way around. Until I get back to my laboratory, it’s hard for me to be more precise about this. However, my early findings indicate that the yeti’s ancestor split from man’s ancestor and that, given the mutation was in all likelihood occasioned by a dramatic change in the world’s temperature, then we should regard Homo vertex, the yeti, as the younger of the two species. Far from being some kind of missing link that reinforces man’s privileged status in the evolutionary scheme of things, we can probably regard the yeti as no less of an inevitable being than ourselves. You can’t argue with the molecules, folks. However we may wish to view it otherwise, we can no longer view Homo sapiens as the ultimate living being on earth.
‘Now, all of this might not mean very much except for the nuclear war that threatens this part of the world, perhaps even the whole planet, and the climatic conditions that might easily result from it.
‘What is certain is that a climatic catastrophe would result from even a nominal thermonuclear war between the superpowers. All of the post-holocaust environmental consequences would cause sunlight to be absorbed by the dust in the atmosphere, the atmosphere to be heated rather than the earth itself, and the earth’s surface to be cooled. A study by a number of scientists including Carl Sagan demonstrated that severe and prolonged low temperatures would follow even a small thermonuclear war, what they called a nuclear winter. Even a one-degree cooling in the world’s temperature would nearly eliminate wheat-growing in Canada. But a worst-case nuclear scenario might result in a temperature drop of between twelve and fifteen degrees Centigrade. In short, it would bring on another ice age.
‘I have a computer program that predicts how DNA connections and evolutionary trees might be affected by environmental changes. It was designed to take account of climatic differences between continents. But I was interested in what it might say about the environmental changes provoked by a nuclear war. And what it says is that in the event of one hundred major Chinese and former Warsaw pact cities being destroyed, a nuclear winter would ensue within a few months, lasting for at least a year, during which period the only major anthropoid to survive would be Homo vertex. Already well adapted to almost permanent Arctic conditions, the yeti might very well inherit the earth, and man might find himself as extinct a species as the dinosaur. Within another million years, according to the same computer predictive sequence, the yeti could conceivably have evolved to become the dominant life-form on this planet.’