Yet how could he explain that he was thinking about them, his own flesh and blood, in the most utterly real way possible? That in his mind's eye, an image that revolved endlessly like a closed spool of film, he was seeing the heritage his generation was bequeathing theirs.
A dead, polluted, uninhabitable planet.
He looked at his taut, outstretched hands and pressed them to his face, trying to stifle the croaking moan of despair forcing itself from his gut.
Bo Anyango knelt in the baked red earth and fingered the mottled leaves of a coffeebush. The rising sun had just cleared the peaks of a distant mountain range, so the air was still pleasantly cool; yet it was tainted with the sour odor of decaying vegetable matter.
Bo was mystified. Every single bush on his four-acre plot had been ruined. Shriveled discolored leaves were scattered all around, several inches deep in the furrows he had hoed with his own hands, using implements supplied by the Bakura Institute of Agriculture. Like his African neighbors, he had followed instructions and tended his crops just as the mzungu--the European agricultural officer--had shown him. And just like the crops of his neighbors, the coffeebushes had wilted and died. The only means of livelihood for himself, his wife, and five children was now so much rotten, stinking vegetation.
What had gone wrong?
Squatting on his skinny black haunches, Bo looked disconsolately around him. Three years work to prepare the land for the coffee crop he had been assured would fetch a good price totally wasted. He had been told of the miracles the Europeans could bring about with their powders and sprays, and he had been eager to try. /EG was the magic word on the side of the canisters. It was an English word, he supposed, though no one had told him its meaning. He had believed in JEG, because he had seen the results with his own eyes. Crops that normally would have been stripped bare by hordes of voracious insects, commonplace in this remote region of western Kenya, had flourished and grown to maturity. The valley, once a barren waste, had blossomed. The insects had been defeated--for a while.
Recently, however, some of the pests had reappeared, and in far greater numbers than before. The spider mite--not an insect but a member of the scorpion family--had returned in force, in their millions. Its razor-sharp mouth was specially adapted for piercing and sucking chlorophyll from leaves, and it had a prodigious appetite. In the past the spider mite population had been kept in check by predatory insects and birds, most of which had disappeared since they started using /EG. Animals too, he observed, had also gone, some of them found floating belly-up in the streams. Soon the valley would be denuded of vegetation, silent of birdsong, devoid of animal life. Only the vultures and the spider mites would be left.
Bo knew one thing for sure. Without the coffee crop he would be unable to barter for goods, unable to feed himself and his family. He knew also that he was worse off now than he had been before the mzungu came to the valley bringing the miracle of modern science.
3
Squeezing the rubber bulb between thumb and forefinger, Chase gingerly deposited a globule of fluid on the glass slide and positioned it under the microscope. He adjusted the magnification to a scan of 0.3 mm and the bead of water became a subminiature menagerie of marine life. Sharpening the focus, he concentrated on a particular group and after a few moments identified two subclasses of diatoms called Centri-cae and Pennatae. Both types had cases, or frustules, of silica, both were yellowish brown and highly ornamented. The difference lay in the sculptured patterns: In Centricae the lines radiated from a central point, whereas in Pennatae they were more or less straight.
Why such diversity in such tiny organisms, less than one millimeter in length? Obviously each was suited to a specific purpose and mode of life, fitted perfectly into its "niche," yet he couldn't help but marvel at the seemingly endless proliferation of design and the incredibly minute adaptations to environment.
By his right elbow lay his notebook and several sheets of graph paper, and next to those on the bench his heavily annotated copy of the standard work, Detrick's Diatom Growth and Development. Taking up the book and opening it at one of the sections marked with slips of paper, he refreshed his memory. Another distinguishing feature of the Pennatae variety was that they had a narrow slit--the raphe--running along one or both valves, which enabled them to move independently along the ocean floor. Most species of diatoms were widely distributed throughout the world, and were probably, Detrick had said, the most abundant and adaptable creatures in the oceans, if not on earth.
Chase wrote up his notes, frequently going back to the eyepiece to check a detail, and made rough sketches of the various subclasses to complement his descriptions. He found the ordered routine of lab work deeply satisfying. The slow, painstaking accumulation of observed data, the classifying and cross-referencing, the fragmentary picture slowly emerging--though after four months of steady work he was still a long way away from reaching any kind of conclusion. He shook his head in mute wonder at the amount of work Detrick must have put in to write his monumental study, surely a lifetime's dedication. Did he have that kind of perseverance? He doubted it; for instance, that specimen of brine he'd examined yesterday. He'd spent damn near three hours distilling it and setting up the test, and he might have been looking at tap water. The sample had obviously been spoiled, contaminated somewhere between collection and the lab. It had come from his last dive, he recalled, when Nick was handling the net. Maybe that explained why it had been low on what one would have normally expected to find in the ocean under the Antarctic Ice Shelf--low on phytoplankton, diatoms, and Ceratium.
Anyway, he'd written off the sample as a botched job and thrown the whole bloody lot down the sink. So much for the objective, dispassionate scientist. No, he thought wryly, a 378-page treatise on marine biology wouldn't be appearing under the name of Dr. Gavin Chase.
Still, he should have logged it. Supposing it hadn't been spoiled and he'd actually destroyed a perfectly valid specimen? But no, that was ridiculous; it would have been a freak result, against all the prevailing evidence and general consensus.
Chase stretched and yawned and glanced at his watch: twenty past four. This being Friday he didn't have any qualms of conscience about packing up early. George Pelham, his research colleague, had left at three. Off on another weekend hike, Chase supposed. God, that guy must walk ten thousand miles a year. There probably wasn't a square inch of the British Isles he hadn't tramped over in his size-ten boots.
It took him only a few minutes to clear away and return the specimen jars to the freezer.
He hung up his white coat and shrugged into his jacket. Then in the mirror next to the wall telephone, he caught sight of his bulging shirt-front. Soft living was catching up to him, that and English beer. He must have put ten pounds on since he got back. He didn't mind not winning the Nobel, but being overweight was just too much. Bike or pool? He didn't relish the idea of cycling now that the damp autumn nights were here, so it was down to the baths and twenty-five lengths of slow crawl. Sunday morning, definitely.