‘Good job she went there,’ Sir John approved. ‘Showed initiative. She went back the following day with her sister to search for polyps. I suppose you know about polyps in the reproductive cycle of the jellyfish?’
‘Of course.’ He felt bitter. The news had soured the whole day for him. The divorce would get into the press before he’d had a chance to try and stop it. ‘So what’s the first step?’
‘On Friday you go down to Somerset to film the polyps. Our science staff has prepared a detailed brief for you. From there you’ll be transported to the Dorset coast where we’re mounting a combined services operation against the jellyfish — army and Navy together. This is a trial run to discover which methods work best.’
‘I’d poison the buggers,’ Alan said flatly, draining his glass. ‘Spray them from the air.’
‘D’you think we haven’t considered that?’
‘You used nerve gas once.’
‘In an emergency,’ Sir John agreed. His eyes never left Tim. ‘Everything in the sea around that spot died. We don’t want to mention that. It’s classified information. As for other poisons, dioxin has been considered. It has been used in pesticides and defoliation gases: in Vietnam, in particular. In Britain, the problems would be unimaginable. Take the amount of dioxin you could get into that claret bottle, drop it into our water supply, and you could wipe out half the population, humans as well as jellyfish.’
‘So roasting them alive is the only alternative?’ Tim asked.
‘It’s not very satisfactory, I know, but it causes less long-term damage. When this is all over we’re still going to need food to eat, water to drink. It’s ironic, isn’t it? We survived Hitler, we laughed at Mussolini, we dodged clear of Stalin, and the American president has yet to be elected in whom we’ve felt total confidence — yet all the time the real threat was in the sea. Jellyfish.’
‘It’s that bad?’
‘We have lost control of most of our coastline.’ He spelled it out gravely. ‘However many we kill, more come to replace them. Now they’ve found their way into our inland waters. If they multiply there in the same numbers they could overrun the entire country. So far there has been surprisingly little civil unrest, but when food shortages begin to bite —’ He left the sentence unfinished and beckoned to the waiter. ‘Now let’s have some brandy with our coffee. The best.’
Tim declined the brandy. He should ring Jane, he thought; possibly she might know where Sue was. At least she could tell him what was happening down there.
Outside, the rain was lashing down again. It had been a bad year all round; location work had taken twice as long as it should. From the members’ table came a sudden outburst of laughter, followed by a thin voice exclaiming that, anyway, it was good weather for jellyfish.
The speaker did not know how right he was.
Sue came away from visiting Mark feeling worried and depressed. He still had that intermittent fever and his cheeks, always thin, had taken on a hollow, sunken appearance. Her own hands had almost healed, but Mark’s were still in bandages; his forearms too, as far as the elbows. And they now knew that other jellyfish had found their way up his trouser legs and a few had landed on his waist below the hem of his pullover.
‘He’s going to pull round,’ the young doctor had said, though without conviction. ‘We just have to be patient. We’ve taken blood and urine samples together with scrapings of pus from the sores. When the reports come back from the lab we’ll know much better where we stand. The poison these tiny ones use is not quite the same as the big jellyfish.’
He was obviously one of those doctors who believed in telling everything; too enthusiastic about his work to be reassuring. Sue had nodded, hardly taking it all in.
What no one could explain was why she herself had got off so lightly. The young cyclist had died without recovering consciousness. His girlfriend, pale and silent, was taken home the next day by her father. Sue had watched them loading the two bicycles and rucksacks into their van, then driving slowly away.
Mark might die, she told herself.
The doctor himself had admitted that jellyfish poison could affect each person differently. He suspected Mark’s case might be complicated by a particular allergy.
It was a bitter irony, she thought as she stood on the hospital steps waiting for the downpour to ease before she risked dashing across the flooded car park to where she’d left her Mini. Before this had happened she’d been wondering whether she could stay with Mark much longer; whether, in fact, she’d done right to move in with him in the first place. She couldn’t leave him now, of course: that was obvious. Not now he needed her.
‘Oh, excuse me!’ It was the sister from the children’s ward, a friendly West Indian woman in her mid-thirties with flashing eyes, full of humour. ‘It was today, wasn’t it? D’you want to cancel it? We’re all terribly sorry about your friend. I told the children, so they’ll understand if you cancel.’
‘Cancel?’ Sue looked at her blankly. Then she remembered the show they had promised to put on for the children. It had completely escaped her mind. ‘Four thirty, wasn’t it?’
‘We do understand if you —’
Sue interrupted her. ‘You have jellyfish cases on the ward, don’t you? Among the children?’
‘That’s right, several. Two more came in this morning, though they’re in intensive care still. These floods, you know.’ She waved her arm vaguely in the direction of the car park. ‘Though we’re expecting fewer now they’ve evacuated the Torbay area. I don’t know if you’ve been told, but there are plans to evacuate this hospital if the front line gets any nearer.’
‘The front line?’
‘That’s what they’re calling it.’
Sue reckoned it out quickly. With the theatre closed, most of the company had already left, although Adrian and Tony were still around. Mark always did the children’s shows with her; he was out, of course. But they had started rehearsing the new one, a couple of short sketches at least: if they used those, plus some material from last time and a bit from the Christmas show…
It was not yet eleven. They had five clear hours.
‘Four thirty — we’ll be there,’ she promised. ‘It won’t be what we planned, but we wouldn’t want to disappoint the children. We’ll be there.’
As she ran across the car park, her feet kicking up the water which lay a good two inches deep in places, she could hear the now-familiar wail of an ambulance coming closer. Oh please God, let that be just an ordinary, everyday case, she prayed. Something simple like an appendix; or a baby coming into the world — anything but jellyfish.
She remembered her disbelief when Tim had first told her about them. God, how blind they’d all been!
The noise in the room was excruciating as people shouted at the top of their voices, trying to make themselves heard above the amplified sound of an eight-piece rock band.
It was stifling, too. They were crushed back against the walls to keep the floor free for the dancers who’d just been announced, which made it impossible to get anywhere near the drinks. Then somebody had the bright idea of passing freshly-opened bottles of champagne from hand to hand above their heads, dripping their contents down the necks of anyone unfortunate enough to be immediately beneath them.
Tim swore as one bottle passed him, but managed to grab the next to refill Dorothea’s glass.
‘Where’s the rest of our lot?’ he shouted.
‘No idea.’
‘What?’
‘No idea!’ she bawled.
They clinked glasses and drank, giving up their attempt at conversation.
The lamps dimmed, to be replaced dramatically by wild strobe lighting for the dancers: six girls in all, clad in flowing transparent robes beneath which they were completely naked. The robes were pink with red sequins; matching masks covered the girls’ faces. At first their movements were wild, dervish-like, but then the music changed, the strobing became slower, and they began a sinuous dream-like dance as if beckoning some god to appear before them.