Quite a number of plants and animals were building up heavy metals as radiological shields. In the hills behind the beach house a couple of old-time prospectors were renovating the derelict gold-panning equipment abandoned over eighty years ago. They had noticed the bright yellow tints of the cacti, run an analysis and found that the plants were assimilating gold in extractable quantities, although the soil concentrations were unworkable. Oak Ridge was at last paying a dividend!!
Waking that morning just after 6-45 — ten minutes later than the previous day (he had switched on the radio, heard one of the regular morning programmes as he climbed out of bed) — he had eaten a light unwanted breakfast, then spent an hour packing away some of the books in his library, crating them up and taping on address labels to his brother.
He reached Whitby’s laboratory half an hour later. This was housed in a 100-foot-wide geodesic dome built beside his chalet on the west shore of the lake about a mile from Kaldren’s summer house. The chalet had been closed after Whitby’s suicide, and many of the experimental plants and animals had died before Powers had managed to receive permission to use the laboratory.
As he turned into the driveway he saw the girl standing on the apex of the yellow-ribbed dome, her slim figure silhouetted against the sky. She waved to him, then began to step down across the glass polyhedrons and jumped nimbly into the driveway beside the car.
‘Hello,’ she said, giving him a welcoming smile. ‘I came over to see your zoo. Kaldren said you wouldn’t let me in if he came so I made him stay behind.’
She waited for Powers to say something while he searched for his keys, then volunteered: ‘If you like, I can wash your shirt.’
Powers grinned at her, peered down ruefully at his dust-stained sleeves. ‘Not a bad idea. I thought I was beginning to look a little uncared-for.’ He unlocked the door, took Coma’s arm. ‘I don’t know why Kaldren told you that — he’s welcome here any time he likes.’
‘What have you got in there?’ Coma asked, pointing at the wooden box he was carrying as they walked between the gear-laden benches.
‘A distant cousin of ours I found. Interesting little chap. I’ll introduce you in a moment.’
Sliding partitions divided the dome into four chambers. Two of them were storerooms, filled with spare tanks, apparatus, cartons of animal food and test rigs. They crossed the third section, almost filled by a powerful X-ray projector, a giant 250 amp G.E. Maxitron, angled on to a revolving table, concrete shielding blocks lying around ready for use like huge building bricks.
The fourth chamber contained Powers’ zoo, the vivaria jammed together along the benches and in the sinks, big coloured cardboard charts and memos pinned on to the draught hoods above them, a tangle of rubber tubing and power leads trailing across the floor. As they walked past the lines of tanks dim forms shifted behind the frosted glass, and at the far end of the aisle there was a sudden scurrying in a large cage by Powers" desk.
Putting the box down on his chair, he picked a packet of peanuts off the desk and went over to the cage. A small black-haired chimpanzee wearing a dented jet pilot’s helmet swarmed deftly up the bars to him, chirped happily and then jumped down to a miniature control panel against the rear wall of the cage. Rapidly it flicked a series of buttons and toggles, and a succession of coloured lights lit up like a juke box and jangled out a two-second blast of music.
‘Good boy,’ Powers said encouragingly, patting the chimp’s back and shovelling the peanuts into its hands. ‘You’re getting much too clever for that one, aren’t you?’
The chimp tossed the peanuts into the back of its throat with the smooth, easy motions of a conjuror, jabbering at Powers in a singsong voice.
Coma laughed and took some of the nuts from Powers. ‘He’s sweet. I think he’s talking to you.’
Powers nodded. ‘Quite right, he is. Actually he’s got a two-hundredword vocabulary, but his voice box scrambles it all up.’ He opened a small refrigerator by the desk, took out half a packet of sliced bread and passed a couple of pieces to the chimp. It picked an electric toaster off the floor and placed it in the middle of a low wobbling table in the centre of the cage, whipped the pieces into the slots. Powers pressed a tab on the switchboard beside the cage and the toaster began to crackle softly.
‘He’s one of the brightest we’ve had here, about as intelligent as a five-year-old child, though much more selfsufficient in a lot of ways.’ The two pieces of toast jumped out of their slots and the chimp caught them neatly, nonchalantly patting its helmet each time, then ambled off into a small ramshackle kennel and relaxed back with one arm out of a window, sliding the toast into its mouth.
‘He built that house himself,’ Powers went on, switching off the toaster. ‘Not a bad effort, really.’ He pointed to a yellow polythene bucket by the front door of the kennel, from which a battered-looking geranium protruded. ‘Tends that plant, cleans up the cage, pours out an endless stream of wisecracks. Pleasant fellow all round.’
Coma was smiling broadly to herself. ‘Why the space helmet, though?’
Powers hesitated. ‘Oh, it — er — it’s for his own protection. Sometimes he gets rather bad headaches. His predecessors all—’ He broke off and turned away. ‘Let’s have a look at some of the other inmates.’
He moved down the line of tanks, beckoning Coma with him. ‘We’ll start at the beginning.’ He lifted the glass lid off one of the tanks, and Coma peered down into a shallow bath of water, where a small round organism with slender tendrils was nestling in a rockery of shells and pebbles.
‘Sea anemone. Or was. Simple coelenterate with an open-ended body cavity.’ He pointed down to a thickened ridge of tissue around the base. ‘It’s sealed up the cavity, converted the channel into a rudimentary notochord, first plant ever to develop a nervous system. Later the tendrils will knot themselves into a ganglion, but already they’re sensitive to colour. Look.’ He borrowed the violet handkerchief in Coma’s breast-pocket, spread it across the tank. The tendrils flexed and stiffened, began to weave slowly, as if they were trying to focus.
‘The strange thing is that they’re completely insensitive to white light. Normally the tendrils register shifting pressure gradients, like the tympanic diaphragms in your ears. Now it’s almost as if they can hear primary colours, suggests it’s re-adapting itself for a non-aquatic existence in a static world of violent colour contrasts.’
Coma shook her head, puzzled. ‘Why, though?’
‘Hold on a moment. Let me put you in the picture first.’ They moved along the bench to a series of drum-shaped cages made of wire mosquito netting. Above the first was a large white cardboard screen bearing a blown-up microphoto of a tall pagoda-like chain, topped by the legend: ‘Drosophila: 15 ršntgens!min.’
Powers tapped a small perspex window in the drum. ‘Fruitfly. Its huge chromosomes make it a useful test vehicle.’ He bent down, pointed to a grey V-shaped honeycomb suspended from the roof. A few flies emerged from entrances, moving about busily. ‘Usually it’s solitary, a nomadic scavenger. Now it forms itself into well-knit social groups, has begun to secrete a thin sweet lymph something like honey.’
‘What’s this?’ Coma asked, touching the screen.
‘Diagram of a key gene in the operation.’ He traced a spray of arrows leading from a link in the chain. The arrows were labelled: ‘Lymph gland’ and subdivided ‘sphincter muscles, epithelium, templates.’
‘It’s rather like the perforated sheet music of a player-piano,’ Powers commented, ‘or a computer punch tape. Knock out one link with an X-ray beam, lose a characteristic, change the score.’
Coma was peering through the window of the next cage and pulling an unpleasant face. Over her shoulder Powers saw she was watching an enormous spider-like insect, as big as a hand, its dark hairy legs as thick as fingers. The compound eyes had been built up so that they resembled giant rubies.