No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories (45 page)

Two or three rows of chairs remained almost empty. I looked at my watch—fifteen, maybe twenty minutes to go. How long had I been here? Some thirty or so minutes? Was that all? I supposed it must be. But then, memory is like that: past events, especially unpleasant ones, hurry across your mind like ripples over a pond on a windy day, eager to get done. Or rather,
you
are eager to get done with them.

I spoke into my microphone, but softly:

“You’re on duty in about twenty minutes, after the briefing—for what that’s worth—which I promise I’ll keep brief. So we’re able to give the latecomers a few minutes grace. That being so, I’ll ask you to curb your impatience. I mean, I appreciate how
eager
you must be to get on with things, but we’ll wait awhile longer anyway…”

That last was my idea of black humour, if only to calm the nerves and alleviate the tension, but no one laughed. Who could blame them? Not a single man-jack of them was “eager” to get on with any-damned-thing. This wasn’t a conventional war, and they weren’t conventional warriors. Those of them who were beginning to fidget were doing so not out of eagerness but a perfectly natural fear of the unknown.

Somewhere at the back of the basement a door clanged open and a messenger, a crippled kid whose legs had been shrivelled to useless twigs by mutant nettles, came speeding down a central aisle in his wheelchair. Clamped between his teeth he bore a sheet of paper. Even as I stood up, went down on one knee on the podium to take the note from him, I knew what it would be: a list of those who wouldn’t be joining us, those who’d failed to make it through the night, injured or murdered in their own homes while protecting themselves and their families.

As the kid spun his chair about face and went off back up the aisle, I glanced at the typed sheet, saw that I was right, bulldog-clipped the list to the notes I would be reading in a few minute’s time.

But before that I let my mind drift again, a sort of guilty “if only I…” trip back in time. A futile exercise really, for even back then it had probably been far too late to do anything about anything…

I think I may have said something somewhere about killing Kew. Actually, I don’t think I killed Kew at all. It’s just part of this guilt thing I seem to have developed, which I think began after the police contacted me. Contacted me? Well, it was something more than a mere contact.

It was probably the Min. of Ag. & Fish who put the police on to me, to sideline, marginalize and shut me up, I imagine; me and the rest of the staff at Kew. And at first those estimable officers of the law were pretty stiff with us, with me in particular.

Was it possible, they had wanted to know, that I’d smuggled something foreign and illegal out of Kew to give to the colonel or to grow in my own garden? Surely I was aware that the casual introduction of exotic strains into our finely balanced ecology was a serious offence? Just twelve years ago we had had mad cow disease; hadn’t that been enough of a warning not to go messing with nature? What was I attempting to do, sabotage the ecology? Destroy the vegetation and crops that our populace, animals and wildlife lived on?

But then I reminded them about the local GM problem they’d dealt with some eighteen months ago. I told them that if memory served me well it had been they, the police themselves, who had stopped those Friends of the Earth people who had only been trying to avoid this sort of problem in the first place. And there was something else they should take into account: the meteorite that had landed next door. As for myself: I was merely a botanist, a scientist, a man with a conscience who respected the law and knew his responsibilities. Did they really think I would be smuggling forbidden botanical material out of Kew to ingratiate myself with a well known local eccentric? And if they did think so, then why didn’t they question the colonel himself? And what items did they think I might have smuggled anyway? There was no more
Cannabis indica
at Kew Gardens than in any one of a thousand window boxes in Kensington! And anyway, wasn’t it entirely legal now?

And so, eventually, I convinced them of my innocence.

At that time…well of course I played the meteorite card very carefully. For in light of my former belief—in a Gaia as opposed to a Universal Nature—I still wasn’t one hundred per cent convinced of what I suspected
might
be going on here. And as for the police: I didn’t for a moment think that these very down-to-earth law officers were ready to subscribe to a Galactica theory—

—Not just then, anyway…

Through the autumn and into winter, events seemed to slow down a little. Contra the initial suspicion and police enquiries, I had taken a six-lobed leaf
from
Sellick’s Ivy (as I’d named it)
in
to Kew to have the real experts look it over. And three days later I was told that the leaf was as fresh as ever; it seemed it didn’t want to die! But there was so much going on at Kew at that time—so many peculiar specimens had come in, mostly from within a twenty mile radius of my home in Surrey—and so much work was being done on them—that I simply lost track of the thing, stopped asking after it.

But guilty? For taking that single leaf in? No, the poison was already there in the guise of all those mutant species; my guilt lay in refusing to convert to Galactica! In that…and in the fact that I’m a botanist in name only.

There, I’ve admitted it. And therein lies my guilt: in not having been able to recognize and accept a seedling from space when I was shown one. Oh, I had my qualifications, achieved by sheer hard work and good fortune—by learning things one day and forgetting them the next, after the examinations—but my leanings led elsewhere. My forte was seen to be administration, hence my “exalted” position. And in that position I should have pushed and fought and done more. But as I’ve already stated, I believe the war was lost before we even started to fight back, lost on the morning that damned thing crashed down in old Colonel Sellick’s garden.

So where was I? Ah, yes: the winter, two years ago. And the months passing by, and season following season…

But if the winter had slowed things down, the spring accelerated them almost beyond belief! So that this time when the police called me in it was to act as their local expert!

At last the government had surrendered to increasing public concern and pressure. MAF and their GM experiments had been accused, found guilty without trial, and thrown to the wolves; and as possible saviours of the situation, the botanists had become the new elite. Even then it had been only a “situation”, not a full-blown disaster, and despite that I and a handful of others at Kew and similar institutes had been given a free hand, still we were seen by many as nothing more than scaremongers.

In May a resurgent MAF issued a statement: their “experts” were certain that given time, perhaps a year, the alien effects would be “diluted by absorption”, or some such claptrap. To the best of my knowledge no one believed them, and rightly so. And all GM experiments were banned worldwide, irrevocably, now and forever.

Well, and it might have had something to do with GM—might
just
have—but mainly it was Sellick’s meteorite. By then they had cut it open; it could be seen that it was most definitely a thing of “alien” or universal nature, spawn of Megagaia.

There were chambers inside: a honeycomb of minute chambers, connected by microscopic tubes to the outer surface. Heat, friction with Earth’s atmosphere, would have caused any materials—liquids, gases—that were inside to expand, would have driven the living plasma along the tubules under pressure. And moments before impact the pressure would have shattered a brittle heat-shield sheath, releasing—

—All hell on Earth, as it turns out…

A cold breeze blew on my mind, sending the ripples on my mental pond fleeing ever faster. Memories that in the main didn’t want to be remembered surfaced, fragmented like confetti shapes in a kaleidoscope, reformed into new, even less acceptable pictures.

In June something macabre. I was called to a local cemetery where the police had roped off a twenty foot perimeter around a family plot: mother, father, and small girl child, victims of a bad traffic accident. They had been buried just five days ago, but already the three graves had sprouted huge fungi, covering them with a canopy of thick fleshy parasols. Mushrooms were my department; I knew more about fungi than anything else in the botanical world. These were boletus, but mutated of course.

Boletus satanus
, yes: “Satan’s mushroom…poisonous when raw.” Or in this case just pure poison.

Whereas the more common variety—the original variety—was rarely more than eight or nine inches across the cap, these
un
common growths were up to two or three feet across and leaned outwards from clumps so tightly packed that it was difficult to see the borders of the plot they were shading…in which their fat, barrel-shaped stipes were rooted. And they issued a sickly sweet stench promoting dizziness and nausea in anyone standing too close to them. Several relatives of the deceased were present, stretched out moaning on a gravel path, being looked after by a doctor in a gas mask. The police were wearing masks, too.

The doctor, a good distance from this abnormality, offered me his mask; I put it on and was approaching the graves when a man, probably another relative, came staggering down the lanes between plots. He was green, looked ill, had vomit on his shirt and carried an axe. “Bloody bastard
things
!” he gasped, breaching the cordon.

Then the smell, the alien scent, got to him. He went to his knees, choking, and the axe fell from his hand, the flat of its blade thumping against an outer stipe, one of the fat pink mushroom stems. Then the horror:

The skin of the cap less than twelve inches from the fallen man’s face peeled back; a sphincter appeared, opened, hosed out a jet of some vile ichor. The man screamed, shot upright, stumbled away hissing and frothing. His face was melting! He crashed to the ground, stone dead!

The stench must have increased tenfold…anyone not wearing a gas mask was driven almost physically back…the doctor cried, “My God! Oh God!
Oh God!
Cadaverine, it can only be!”