David looked from his uncle to his father, to the other uncles and cousins in the room, and finally to his grandfather. He shook his head helplessly. “That’s crazy. What are you talking about?”
Grandfather Sumner let out his breath explosively. He was a large man with a massive chest and great bulging biceps. His hands were big enough to carry a basketball in each. But it was his head that was his most striking feature. It was the head of a giant, and although he had farmed for many years, and later overseen the others who did it for him, he had found time to read more extensively than anyone else that David knew. There was no book, except the contemporary best sellers, that anyone could mention that he wasn’t aware of, or hadn’t read. And he remembered what he read. His library was better than most public libraries.
Now he leaned forward and said, “You listen to me, David. You listen hard. I’m telling you what the goddamn government doesn’t dare admit yet. We’re on the first downslope of a slide that is going to plummet this economy, and that of every other nation on earth, to a depth that they never dreamed of.
“I know the signs, David. The pollution’s catching up to us faster than anyone knows. There’s more radiation in the atmosphere than there’s been since Hiroshima— French tests, China’s tests. Leaks. God knows where all of it’s coming from. We reached zero population growth a couple of years ago, but, David, we were trying, and other nations are getting there too, and they aren’t trying. There’s famine in one-fourth of the world right now. Not ten years from now, not six months from now. The famines are here and they’ve been here for three, four years already, and they’re getting worse. There’re more diseases than there’s ever been since the good Lord sent the plagues to visit the Egyptians. And they’re plagues that we don’t know anything about.
“There’s more drought and more flooding than there’s ever been. England’s changing into a desert, the bogs and moors are drying up. Entire species of fish are gone, just damn gone, and in only a year or two. The anchovies are gone. The codfish industry is gone. The cod they are catching are diseased, unfit to use. There’s no fishing off the west coast of the Americas.
“Every damn protein crop on earth has some sort of blight that gets worse and worse. Corn blight. Wheat rust. Soybean blight. We’re restricting our exports of food now, and next year we’ll stop them altogether. We’re having shortages no one ever dreamed of. Tin, copper, aluminum, paper. Chlorine, by God! And what do you think will happen in the world when we suddenly can’t even purify our drinking water?”
His face was darkening as he spoke, and he was getting angrier and angrier, directing his unanswerable questions to David, who stared at him with nothing at all to say.
“And they don’t know what to do about any of it,” his grandfather went on. “No more than the dinosaurs knew how to stop their own extinction. We’ve changed the photochemical reactions of our own atmosphere, and we can’t adapt to the new radiations fast enough to survive! There have been hints here and there that this is a major concern, but who listens? The damn fools will lay each and every catastrophe at the foot of a local condition and turn their backs on the fact that this is global, until it’s too late to do anything.”
“But if it’s what you think, what could they do?” David asked, looking to Dr. Walt for support and finding none.
“Turn off the factories, ground the airplanes, stop the mining, junk the cars. But they won’t, and even if they did, it would still be a catastrophe. It’s going to break wide open. Within the next couple of years, David, it’s going to break.” He drank his eggnog then and put the crystal cup down hard. David jumped at the noise.
“There’s going to be the biggest bust since man began scratching marks on rocks, that’s what! And we’re getting ready for it! I’m getting ready for it! We’ve got the land and we’ve got the men to farm it, and we’ll get our hospital and we’ll do research in ways to keep our animals and our people alive, and when the world goes into a tailspin we’ll be alive and when it starves we’ll be eating.”
Suddenly he stopped and studied David with his eyes narrowed. “I said you’d leave here convinced that we’ve all gone mad. But you’ll be back, David, my boy. You’ll be back before the dogwoods bloom, because you’ll see the signs.”
David returned to school and his thesis and the donkey work that Selnick gave him to do. Celia didn’t write, and he had no address for her. In response to his questions his mother admitted that no one had heard from her. In February in retaliation for the food embargo, Japan passed trade restrictions that made further United States trade with her impossible. Japan and China signed a mutual aid treaty. In March, Japan seized the Philippines, with their fields of rice, and China resumed its long-dormant trusteeship over the Indochina peninsula, with the rice paddies of Cambodia and Vietnam.
Cholera struck in Rome, Los Angeles, Galveston, and Savannah. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, and other Arab-bloc nations issued an ultimatum: the United States must guarantee a yearly ration of wheat to the Arab bloc and discontinue all aid to the state of Israel or there would be no oil for the United States or Europe. They refused to believe the United States could not meet their demands. International travel restrictions were imposed immediately, and the government, by presidential decree, formed a new department with cabinet status: the Bureau of Information.
The redbuds were hazy blurs of pink against the clear, May-softened sky when David returned home. He stopped by his house only long enough to change his clothes and get rid of his boxes of college mementos before he drove out to the Sumner farm, where Walt was staying while he oversaw the construction of his hospital.
Walt had an office downstairs. It was a clutter of books, notebooks, blueprints, correspondence. He greeted David as if he hadn’t been away at all. “Look,” he said. “This research of Semple and Frerrer, what do you know about it? The first generation of cloned mice showed no deviation, no variation in viability or potency, nor did the second or third, but with the fourth the viability decreased sharply. And there was a steady, and irreversible, slide to extinction. Why?”
David sat down hard and stared at Walt. “How did you get that?”
“Vlasic,” Walt said. “We went to med school together. He went on in one direction, I in another. We’ve corresponded all these years. I asked him.”
“You know his work?”
“Yes. His rhesus monkeys show the same decline during the fourth generation, and on to extinction.”
“It isn’t just like that,” David said. “He had to discontinue his work last year—no funds. So we don’t know the life expectancies of the later strains. But the decline starts in the third clone generation, a decline of potency. He was breeding each clone generation sexually, testing the offspring for normalcy. The third clone generation had only twenty-five percent potency. The sexually reproduced offspring started with that same percentage, and, in fact, potency dropped until the fifth generation of sexually reproduced offspring, and then it started to climb back up and presumably would have reached normalcy again.”
Walt was watching him closely, nodding now and then. David went on. “That was the clone-three strain. With the clone-four strain there was a drastic change. Some abnormalities were present, and life expectancy was down seventeen percent. The abnormals were all sterile. Potency was generally down to forty-eight percent. It was downhill all the way with each sexually reproduced generation. By the fifth generation no offspring survived longer than an hour or two. So much for clone-four strain. Cloning the fours was worse. Clone-five strain had gross abnormalities, and they were all sterile. Life-expectancy figures were not completed. There was no clone-six strain. None survived.”
“A dead end,” Walt said. He indicated a stack of magazines and extracts. “I had hoped that they were out of date, that there were newer methods, perhaps, or an error had been found in their figures. It’s the third generation that is the turning point then?”
David shrugged. “My information could be out of date. I know Vlasic stopped last year, but Semple and Frerrer are still at it, or were last month. They may have something newer than I know. You’re thinking of livestock?”
“Of course. You know the rumors? They’re just not breeding well. No figures are available, but, hell, we have our own livestock. They’re down by half.”
“I heard something. Denied by the Bureau of Information, I believe.”
“It’s true,” Walt said soberly.
“They must be working on this line,” David said. “Someone must be working on it.”
“If they are, no one’s telling us about it,” Walt said. He laughed bitterly and stood up.
“Can you get materials for the hospital?” David asked.
“For now. We’re rushing it like there’s no tomorrow, naturally. And we’re not worrying about money right now. We’ll have things that we won’t know what to do with, but I thought it would be better to order everything I can think of than to find out next year that what we really need isn’t available.”
David went to the window and looked at the farm; the green was well established by now, spring would give way to summer without a pause and the corn would be shiny, silky green in the fields. Just like always. “Let me have a look at your lab equipment orders, and the stuff that’s been delivered already,” he said. “Then let’s see if we can wrangle me travel clearance out to the coast. I’ll talk to Semple; I’ve met him a few times. If anyone’s doing anything, it’s that team.”
“What is Selnick working on?”
“Nothing. He lost his grant, his students were sent packing.” David grinned at his uncle suddenly. “Look, up on the hill, you can see a dogwood ready to burst open. Some of the blooms are already showing.”