No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories

THE MAN WHO KILLED KEW GARDENS

The banks of makeshift air filters were whirring away, working overtime in the concrete ceiling of the great Operations Room, once the basement of the biggest shoe store in central London’s Oxford Street. At first the monotony of their massed, whistling hiss was an aggravation—not unlike the subdued howling of an airplane’s jet engines coming through the fuselage walls, which if you’re subjected to it long enough will eventually turn into white noise—and I had been listening to the air filters for quite some time.

I was there early; I liked to have time to myself, to sit and think before my audience arrived. My audience: the flamers, slashers, poisoners, mulchers, and acid sprayers. An army actually, made up of sections, squads, platoons. I was here in the role of a Commander: to direct and inspire them, warn and forearm them; to issue their orders for the day or, where some of them were headed, for the endless night of underground London.

Why me? Probably because I’d seen the start of it, issued the very first warnings, understood—as best possible—what had happened and was still happening…which made me as good a choice as any, apparently. As a conventional general there’s no doubt I would be a dismal failure, but until recently I had been the assistant director at Kew Gardens. Enough said.

Rills of dust, dislodged by the vibration of distant jackhammers, trickled down from the ceiling, were stirred a little by the draft from the air filters. Somewhere up above they were digging out the Green, spraying acid, preparing to lay concrete and gradually turning London grey. And the sooner the better, I thought, but never quickly enough.

The sound of muted footsteps and the scrape of steel-framed chairs on the gritty floor brought me upright in my seat behind my desk on the podium. Two young men, yawning, gaunt-faced, had seated themselves side by side in the third row of four hundred as yet empty chairs. Early birds, new to the game, they awaited their instructions. Well, let them wait. The hundreds were still to come trickling in.

And not only here but all over England, all over the world. For each city had its volunteer army, and each morning the war started all over again. Indeed, it never stopped, couldn’t ever stop, daren’t stop. Not if we were to survive. The night shifts were coming off now, and the day shifts—the morning forays—were soon to begin. But never a stranger war than this.

The cities: they were our redoubts, concrete islands floating in an enemy ocean. As for the enemy: there were millions of square miles of him…

My notes were before me; updated every three or four hours during the night as reports from the battle areas came in, they were as current as could be. My job was simply to read them out loud to the army and then send the men out to their battle locations. But not until the troops were gathered here en masse.

Even as I thought that thought, more scraping sounded from the back of the marching ranks of empty chairs as another bunch of early birds adjusted their seats. And more dust came smoking down as the distant jackhammers started up again.

I tapped my microphone’s grid and was reassured by its pop and crackle, then sat back. And with time to spare I let myself slump down in my seat a little, let my mind wander, remembering how it all began…

It was the meteorite, for sure. But it was probably more than just that. It may also have been—just may have been—what they were doing with the crops: genetically modified food. The scientists, botanists, geneticists, had engineered it so that the green things could fight back; fight disease, weeds, bugs, too much sun, hard rains, and yet still prosper in the poorest soil, growing stronger and giving a better yield. We’d made it easier for them to conquer all of their worst enemies, without taking into account that we were their worst enemy. We were the ones—men, and the animals we bred—who ate them for God’s sake! And now they’re eating us.

Genetic modification, yes, and also the meteorite. In fact, mainly the meteorite.

It was a small thing, three and a half inches long, two and a half wide, like a big egg. A lump of pockmarked rock, seared black at the fat end, convoluted like a morel or a brain coral at the thin end. Not a meteorite shower, like in The Day of the Triffids, just one small rock. And no one woke up blind, and no one was in any way affected. Not at first, anyway.

But that first year: well, we might as well have been blind for all the attention we paid. I remembered it like it was yesterday…

Three years ago; just three years, my God! Two-thirty on an early June morning; a clear starry sky outside my window; something had started me awake. A pistol shot? The echoes of a drum roll quickly fading on the still, small-hours air? Thunder? No, not thunder. No way. So what, then?

I got up, went to the window and opened it wide, looked out and up and away. A vapour trail, curving down out of the stars, was already dispersing, blown on the soft night breeze. A trace of cordite or sulphur stink drifted in the air, also dispersing. And fifty or so yards away, in my next-door neighbour’s garden, a thin column of smoke was spiralling up from the rose beds.

Had something crashed? Well obviously, but not an airplane, or it would be visible and there’d be an inferno. Had something fallen off an airplane, perhaps? Or a fragment of space debris, a bit broken off from one of the myriad satellites up there? Or…could it perhaps have been a meteorite?

It had taken me one or two minutes to come fully awake, so that by the time I’d thought all these things through the smoke from my neighbour’s garden had thinned to nothing, likewise the vapour trail in the sky and the gunpowder plot smell. And everything seemed back to normal.

Except, of course, it wasn’t…

He was called Gordon Sellick, a retired army colonel whose wife had died several years ago, and he lived next door or mainly in his garden…in fact he lived for his garden, because that was his life now. But when I say “next door” don’t misunderstand me. We were neighbours, but ours were fairly large detached houses, each set in a quarter acre, with long gardens that ran parallel down to the river. A solitary type myself, I enjoyed living in the country a few short miles from my work. Commuting was easy and I didn’t have to spend too much time in the cluttered noisy world between gardens, mine and the more extensive, more exotic ones at Kew.

I could see Gordon Sellick at a distance in his garden just about any old time, or close up to talk to on a Friday night in the Olde Horse and Carriage, our village pub at the bend in the river. But this thing from the sky had landed on a Saturday and I wasn’t about to wait the week out. Up at eight, I breakfasted and then went round to his place.

He was in the garden, as I’d suspected he would be. And he had found the meteorite.

“So you heard it,“ he said, beckoning me closer.

“I’d have had to be deaf not to!” I answered. “Is that it?”

Sellick was leaning on his spade in the middle of a bed of beautiful roses, a few in full bloom but many just now budding. At his feet, a small crater was plainly visible, with good dark earth thrown out in typical ray fashion. “Went in about a foot, maybe an inch or so more,” he said. And he handed it over, this rock as I’ve described it, which he’d only just this minute dug out.

“A meteorite,” I nodded, brushing dust and dirt off it. “A good job it didn’t hit the house. Would have come right through the tiles!”

“Would have been hot, too,” he answered. “Gave me a hell of a fright! Rattled the windows like billy-o, but it doesn’t seem to have damaged my roses. I’d have been pretty mad about that.”

Gordon Sellick was all army. A six-footer in his youth, but beginning to bend a bit now, he still had his curling handlebar moustache and bristling brows—far more hair on his face than above it—and his shiny dome was brown as can be as a result of his interminable gardening. Out in all weathers, ex-Colonel Sellick.

I examined the rock, which was heavy. “This rounded end…fried off and blackened by atmospheric friction.” I offered my opinion. “And the pointed end…hmmm! Looks odd.” I frowned. “Might be crystalline. Some metallic ore forged in an exploding star, then pitted and patterned in the frozen deeps of space.”

One of Sellick’s ample white eyebrows went up, in something of surprise I supposed. “So then, you’re a bit of a poet—eh, what? Well, can’t complain about that, what with my garden and my roses and what all. Roses? Bloody flowers? Why, they’d have laughed me out of the bloody officers mess! Funny the things a man can get up to, when he’s on his own and there’s bugger all else to do.”

He was a lonely one, the old colonel.

“What’ll you do with it?” I handed the meteorite back.

He shrugged. “Oh, I’ll make a few enquiries. Offer it to a museum. Might even try to sell it. See if they can find any of those Martian bugs in it—eh, what? Hah! And if none of that works, I’ll sit it in a pot indoors with some of my cactuses.”

In fact it went to a museum, into a case behind good thick glass. Best place for it. Better still if it had never arrived here at all…

Shooting stars, comets, meteorites. The way they’ve shaped this world of ours…it’s incredible. And I wonder how many people have thought about it. I look back at all the mass extinctions, at what happened to the dinosaurs, and I wonder.

But for that BIG rock all those millions of years ago, it’s even possible that some kind of dinosaur might be lording it in the world right now, living in dinosaur cities, and facing this new unthinkable threat instead of us. Unthinkable in that none of us would ever have thought of it.

But in fact the big rock landed, the dinosaurs were killed off, men evolved, and before you knew it these three kings were following a different kind of shooting star, one that didn’t so much shoot as creep across the sky. And didn’t that turn things around—“eh, what?” I’m told that some eighty per cent of all the world’s wars were caused by religion, but not this current conflict, though it’s a safe bet there’s a babble of religious lunatics out there right now blaming it all on God…

Chairs were scraping again, and had been for some little time. Looking up, I met the massed weary gaze of maybe a fifth of my command—eighty men and youths—drooping where they’d fallen into their chairs. Barely recovered from yesterday’s exertions, they slumped there, their legs stretched out before them, their arms hanging limp. But in little more than half an hour’s time, ready or not, they’d be joining battle again, trying to avenge the comrades they’d lost yesterday.

Lost comrades, yes.

My mind returned to its wanderings…

I thought of old Sellick and his garden, the day he called me over, maybe six weeks after the meteorite incident, to show me the ivy growing up the bole of a fifty-year-old magnolia.

“What do you make of that?” he said.

But of what? So-called “expert” that I was, that I am, I couldn’t see what he was on about, not at first. “The ivy?” I said. “It’s a decorative variety, probably an Asian strain of Hedera helix, a five-lobed climber that’s essentially fragile, and—”

“Six-lobed,” he cut in. “Down near the bottom there, last year’s growth: five-lobed. But up here, this new growth: each leaf has six lobes. And that’s not all. The outer lobes on each leaf have tiny hooks to fasten to the tree. It can grow a damn sight faster if it doesn’t have to root itself first. And it’s not so bloody fragile, either! This is a mutant strain, or I’m not an ex-Guards colonel. Eh, what?”

I almost laughed, half-laughed, but managed to hold it back while making a mental note to consult the ledgers at Kew. There would be notes on this one, for sure. But still—and perhaps a little flippantly—I couldn’t resist saying, “Colonel, you’ll be telling me next there are four-leaved clovers on your lawn!”

“Yes.” He nodded, deadly serious. “And quite a few with six leaves, too. Eh, what? I’ve been preserving them for posterity, pressing them under ‘flora’ in my old gardening dictionary, for at least a fortnight now!” Then he showed me his right forearm: a fresh red scratch deep enough to leave a scar. “See this? Got it from my ‘thornless’ roses—by God!” He scowled at the sore red gouge. “And what do you think of that? Eh, what?”

I scratched my head. “Something in the pollen? GM rapeseed maybe? I remember they were experimenting with it last year in a field not a quarter of a mile away. Some people from Friends of the Earth and a slew of other so-called eco-friendly groups were down there, ripping it out as quickly as they could plant it. But they didn’t get it all. The police were there dragging them away, putting a stop to it. And then, just lately, there’s been this problem with the bees.”

“Eh, bees?” the colonel queried, somewhat absentmindedly. “Never bother with the little buggers. Eh, what? Got enough on my hands with the greenfly, sod ’em all! I did get stung once, though.” Frowning, he sat down in one of his favourite places: a rustic oak bench where it circled the magnolia. And resting his back against the bole, he squinted up at me and asked, “So what’s that you were saying? Something about the bees? Come to think of it, I haven’t seen a bee in quite a while.”

“That would be about right,” I told him. “It seems there’s something of a scarcity. The local beekeepers are complaining that the workers haven’t been making it back to their hives.”

Sellick clenched a military jaw, narrowed his eyes, gloomed out over his quarter acreage. “It’s not right,” he growled. “It doesn’t feel the same. This year—I don’t know—it’s like it isn’t my garden at all! Ever since that bloody meteorite! Well, bollocks to it! One way or the other, I’ll get my garden back.” And starting to his feet: “It’s Friday. Do you fancy a pint?”

And I did, so we took the river path and made our way down to the Olde Horse and Carriage…

The following Monday I spent an hour looking for Sellick’s ivy in the manuals at Kew Gardens. I never did find it, though. And I never will. It simply isn’t there, never will be unless I name it and register it myself; name it after old Sellick, perhaps?

If ever I get the chance.

If we win this war with the rest of the damned foliage: the ivies, roses, and clovers—and the fungi, mosses, and ferns—these and every other botanical order and species that was ever catalogued, all of them changed now and forever changing. Every damned one of them. Hundreds, thousands of seething, continuously mutating species; most of them hostile to animal life, just as animal life was once inimical to them…

My mind went sideways again. Meteorites and shooting stars.

Those previously “crazy” people who believed that life came to Earth on meteorites or in the tails of comets. I mean, that was something I’d never been able to take on board! Here we had a world of soft oceans and rocks worn down into soils that were simply screaming to be inhabited; an oxygen rich atmosphere and free running rivers of fresh water; black smokers pouring their chemicals into the depths of soupy seas, and lifebuilding ribonucleic acids galore. Was it any wonder life happened here?

And then on the other hand we had this “ridiculous” theory of maggots from Mars and other places: space-rocks falling out of the skies to seed the predawn Earth with life. That was what I couldn’t get my head around: rocks, without air, water, any-damned-thing at all, cruising the universe’s most deadly environment, outer space, with these dormant seeds clinging to them. How in hell did those seeds get stuck on the meteorites, or in the comet’s tail, in the first place? Where did they come from?

And that’s not the end of it. For then this chunk of interstellar debris comes hurtling down at tens of thousands of mph, gets burned black from atmospheric friction—without damaging the seeds, of course—and slams down with sledgehammer force, releasing, but not hurting, its passenger/s. For me, that just wasn’t logical. Not then, anyway.

No, for then I’d believed in Gaia, Mother Earth, Ma Nature, the planet perceived as a living entity. And that was where I’d made my mistake, me and thousands of others. We’d been thinking on a less than cosmic scale—indeed a microscopic scale—that was typical of human egocentricity; thinking in terms of a tiny little mudball Earth-nature, and almost completely ignoring the fact of the great big universe out there. Much like the Inquisition, we’d considered our world as the “Center of Everything”, when the center of everything was an entire Big Bang away back at the beginning. What we should have been thinking wasn’t Gaia but Galactica, or at the very least Megagaia: not Earth-mother but Galaxy- or Universe-mother.

A nature through all space and time that’s just waiting for the right conditions. Planets form around a star; they cool; Ma Nature—Universal Nature—is waiting. She tried before, but her babies got burned up. No problem; she has plenty more; it’s just a matter of hitting the right place at the right time. For after all, how many dandelion seeds land on rocks or in deserts or oceans? A very hit-and-miss process, true: trial and error, but they get there in the end. And time is on Megagaia’s side.

So eventually the time is right; another rock falls out of the sky, slams down on the surface of this entirely conjectural planet. There are the makings of life on the new world, perhaps even the first amoebic stirrings on the fringes of soupy oceans, and that’s what Universal Ma Nature is looking for. That’s what she does. She assists. She releases the meteorite’s gasses, or whatever it is that those bloody things contain: the catalysts that form chains in the RNA, that bring about life or—where it already exists—accelerate its evolution!

It was guesswork, of course, science fiction, but…just suppose I was right? And now I’m not thinking some conjectural world but Earth again. If I was on the right track, then maybe this wasn’t the first time this had happened. Back then, after the big lizards and their killer rock, maybe there was another space pebble, something that balanced things up again, brought about mutations, caused life to continue. The dinosaur survivors became birds, and a certain branch of scared little mammal creatures became monkeys and then men.

And why not? I mean, they’re still looking for the missing link. And maybe I can tell them where to find it: behind glass in a museum in a town not far out of London…

Two and a half years ago, that might have been when I poisoned Kew—but accidentally, of course. Anyway, Kew wasn’t the only thing that was dying. Lots of things died.

I remember a certain story, a piece of fiction. (I used to read scads of macabre stuff, anything from E. A. Poe to Stephen King.) This one was by an American author whose name I’ve since forgotten. But he was very good. Coincidentally, it concerned a colour out of space, something that crashed out of the sky on a meteorite. It seems especially relevant now…though nowadays I can’t think why I chuckled at the idea of malevolent, shining mutant skunk cabbages! Or I can…but it no longer strikes me as funny…

It was the last Saturday of summer. I had been down to the Olde Horse and Carriage last night, but old man Sellick hadn’t shown up. That was peculiar; the colonel liked his Friday night pint. Something else that was rather odd: the pub’s usually excellent menu wasn’t nearly up to scratch. Meat, but no fresh vegetables…only frozen ones. Fish, but no homemade chips. And then, on overhearing a few snatches of conversation from a group of disappointed, would-be diners, I couldn’t help but feel troubled:

“Salad days? Forget it! Tried buying tomatoes or a lettuce just lately? Rotten soil, no rain, no spuds…not that taste like spuds, anyway!” And: “My apples are blistered to hell and full of yellow shit. Taste like it, too. I caught some village kids scrumping in the orchard. Next thing, they’re curled up in the grass crying and puking their guts out. Poor little buggers, I didn’t have the heart to give them a hard time. But I’ll give you odds they were shitting their pants all the way home!” And: “Don’t talk to me about apples. Last year, mine were eaten rotten from the inside out by wasps. This year I’d be pleased just to see a bloody wasp!”

Trouble with the veg, yes, but all very local. The restaurants were shipping veg in! Blame it on the weather or something…or something.

So then it was Saturday morning and I gave old man Sellick a call. His phone rang but the colonel didn’t answer. Yet from my upstairs balcony I could plainly make out something of him—the odd patch of suntanned skin, tatty jeans, and stained white shirt—stirring under the foliage in his garden. Not fifteen feet from his open door, he must surely hear the phone ringing—I could just about hear it myself—but he wasn’t making any attempt to answer it.

Something had to be wrong, so I went round to his place and into his garden to enquire personally.

I couldn’t believe how quiet the garden was as I approached down the crazy-paved path. No birds—not a one—and I truly missed the buzzing of bees. As to why I hadn’t noticed anything before, I mean in my own garden: that’s hard to say. I had been busier than usual, putting in a lot of overtime at Kew. There’d been a great many queries from the public about odd hybrid species; many specimens had arrived, been isolated, were being studied by various botanical specialists. Maybe that’s the answer: I’d had too much on my plate to notice what was going on in my own or Sellick’s garden, the weirdness that was happening.

But the old boy had noticed it, certainly; and right there and then on that garden path, suddenly I could feel it, too…I felt the strangeness, like an alien cloud hanging over everything. Oh, it was very obvious. And the colonel had had it dead to rights the day he’d told me, “It’s not right—doesn’t feel the same—not like my garden at all!” Dead to rights, yes.

But where was Sellick? I jumped twelve inches when a hedge cutter burst into clattering mechanical life. And there he was, the colonel: under a small mountain of Clematis vitalba, traveller’s joy, where his garden shed had used to be. Hell no, where it was now—a considerable wooden structure—but buried deep in the clematis! What in the name of…? Why had he let it get so rank, so out of hand?

Anyway, as a great swath of it was sliced through and toppled to the ground, he saw me framed in the gap and switched off his machine. Then, stumbling over a heap of cut growth as dense as box hedge, finally he confronted me. Grimy, dishevelled, and with sweat rivering his dusty face, he panted a hoarse, resentful greeting and continued, “Meteorite? No, that was more than just any old meteorite. It was the green hand of God, advising us to go easy on the GM stuff! And for the last fortnight I’ve been fighting this…this green jungle that you bloody scientists…and botanists,” (he literally spat that last word in my face,) “have conspired to make of my garden!”

“Colonel, I—” I began.

But waving his hedge cutter at me until I fell back a little, the old boy almost literally cut me off. “My roses are far bigger, and more beautiful than ever before,” he snarled, “but their thorns are inches long, and for all that I keep trying I can’t dead-head ’em. You know how you’re supposed to nip their withered heads off to encourage new growth? Well, these things are like bloody rubber: they stretch but they won’t break. And as for encouragement—I swear they don’t need any! What? They don’t even like being touched!” He showed me his arms, his new wounds criss-crossing a great many old ones.

“Gordon—”

“And look at this!” He hurled a bloodied arm to point at his shed where it leaned under the weight of rampant clematis. “Would you believe—could you believe—I cut this lot back just three days ago? You’re lucky with your garden, which I’ll admit I’ve long despised: all those flagged paths between segregated beds, more like a piece of fancy tatting than a garden proper! Lucky? Oh, yes: because you don’t have half the damned greenery that I’ve got! Eh, what? Why, right now you haven’t a tenth of it! And as for the grass…now tell me, what do you make of the bloody grass?”

“Gordon,” I tried yet again. “I mean, am I to be allowed to speak, or what?”

He didn’t answer, just stood there glaring at me, or if not at me at the world in general; stood there with his chest heaving and the sweat of his uneven fight running down his neck and staining his shirt.

But now that I was able to answer him I could find nothing immediate to say, except: “Grass? What on earth are you talking about?” Where we were standing there was a little grass—a few tufts coming up between the chinks in a small paved patio area—but apart from the fact that it was coarse and needed tending it looked normal enough to me.

“You haven’t noticed?” He stared hard at me, then relaxed a little. “Ah, no, but then you wouldn’t, would you? You’ve not got enough of the bloody stuff, not in your pallid little horticulturist’s paradise!”

Now I was annoyed and told him so. “You’re taking all your anger out on me,” I said, “insulting me. But I didn’t cause any of this and I don’t much care for your accusations. Oh, I agree something is wrong with the vegetation—but the problem isn’t special to you and your ‘bloody’ precious garden! Weird looking plants, seeds, and fungi are arriving at Kew daily, and there’s been some strange stuff happening in gardens all over the southeast. It seems we’re right in the middle of this…this infestation, whatever it is. And it could well turn out that you’re right and our extraterrestrial visitor was its source. I can’t guarantee that, mind you. But I do care about what’s happening; while on the other hand I don’t much care for this tongue-lashing from a cranky old soldier! God, I only came round to see if you were okay! I missed you at the pub last night.”

At that, whatever sort of fury—or funk?—he was in, the colonel snapped out of it at once. “Good Lord!” he said. “Oh my good God! Eh, what? But that wasn’t like me at all! No, not one little bit. Not to a friend. And you’ve been a very good friend. But…” He gave a helpless, frustrated shrug. “It’s the garden. I mean, it’s really getting me down. I’m sorry. What more can I say or do?”

“Well, for a start, you might want to flush it out of your system!” I told him. “And first off: what’s all this about the grass? Yes, as I’ve already allowed, there seem to be some serious problems with all sorts of greenery, but to the best of my knowledge no one’s so far mentioned anything about grass!”

“Come,” he beckoned. And as we walked, skirting the sprawling undergrowth—the rose tangles, and the overgrown brambles that not too long ago were cultivated blackberries—he inquired, “You don’t have a lawn as such, do you?”

“No,” I told him. “At the front I have a wide gravel drive, ornamental pools and fountains, two chestnut trees over clover, and floral borders—all of it walled. At the back: well, it’s pretty much as you described it, except it too is walled, protected. As for grass: grass means work, and it isn’t especially interesting…er, from my point of view, that is.” (I didn’t want to start him off ranting again.)

“But I do have a lawn,” he said, “or I used to.”

“Used to?”

“Just here,” he nodded, grimly, “to the side of the house.”

But as I went to turn the corner he caught my arm. And: “Go careful, my friend,” he told me, very quietly, and in that same moment I thought I felt a shudder running through his hand into my arm. “I think we should go very carefully!”

I frowned at him, glanced around the corner of the house, and saw little or nothing that might be considered extraordinary or dangerous. A square, flagged path surrounded a lawn some ten by ten yards; and central in the lawn a white plastic table supported a floral parasol and was flanked by a pair of folding chairs. After a moment, I looked at the colonel enquiringly.

He gave an impatient nod of his head and said: “The grass—look at the grass.”

The grass…was green, even, and looked in good health. I couldn’t understand why he’d let it grow so long—a good eight or nine inches—but other than that…

“I cropped it last Thursday,” he told me then. “Just a few days ago; cropped it as short as a bloody billiard table! Nothing normal grows that fast or that even. Every single blade is the same length. No meadow, no golf course or bowling green was ever so uniform. And there’s something else. Something really—I don’t know—macabre?”

He stepped round the corner of the house onto the path, and I followed in his footsteps, urging him: “Well, go on—what is it?”

“You see that mound,” he said. “Near the far corner there?”

The ground had a small but definite hump where he was pointing. We followed the path to the corner in question, and as the colonel halted, crouched, and stared hard at the mound, I said, “Yes, I see it. What of it?”

“Look closer.”

I did, and saw something of what he was getting at. Deep in the grass, the last six inches and scraggy tuft of a cat’s tail stuck up out of the ground. And a few inches away, a furry paw, claws extended, was also visible.

“You buried a dead cat there,” I said. “But not nearly deep enough.”

“I did no such thing.” He shook his head. “I buried nothing there—but the grass did! Let me tell you about it:

“Yesterday, I was battling with the garden, as usual. Hell, it’s my bloody garden, after all! But working late, I was just too tired to bother going down to the pub. As the shadows lengthened I went upstairs; I would have an early night, and get an early start this morning. But looking from the window up there, I saw this manky old moggy come out of the shrubbery. I really hate cats because they piss on every-damn-thing in the garden! Anyway, this one appeared to be on his last legs: he was stiff and scraggy; his eyes bulged; he could hardly walk. But he made it this far before collapsing. I thought: ‘Well, in the morning he’ll either have moved on or he’ll be dead—eh, what? And if the latter, then I’ll bury him.’

“But this morning…I didn’t have to bury him. The grass had done it for me.” He nodded at the mound. “I found him like that, which was when I began attacking the foliage again. Damn it all, I refuse to be intimidated by bloody greenery!”

I shook my head. “Gordon—” (I rarely called him by his forename, though he’d years ago invited its use) “—the grass couldn’t possibly have ‘buried’ this cat. He’s actually under the soil—most of him, anyway.”

“Under the soil, yes,” he answered, “but very shallow, as you’ve already pointed out.” The colonel’s voice had fallen to a mere murmur, as if he were talking to himself rather than to me. “And there’s a reason for that, why it’s so shallow.”

“A reason?” Truth to tell, I was beginning to wonder about the old boy’s reason. He probably sensed it or heard something in my voice and frowned at me.

“Eh, what? You think I’m losing it, do you? Well, just you step back a few paces and yank some of that grass there. Go on, pull a few blades up by their roots.“

I did as he suggested. The grass came out easily enough in my hand, and the roots were white.

The old boy nodded and stepped onto the grass close to the mound. And he too pulled grass…from directly over the spot where the cat was buried. Then, again nodding his head—knowingly now—he held the tuft out for my inspection. At which I drew back from him, wrinkling my nose in disgust.

The roots of the grass in his hand were red! And:

“You’re the botanist,” he said, very quietly. “Now tell me, what kind of weird morphology is it that uses blood as chlorophyll? What kind of bloody vampire is this—eh, what? I mean, how does it photosynthesize that, for God’s sake?”

I could only shake my head…but I glanced hastily down, to make sure that I was still on the path.

“And look,” he went on. “Look at my feet.”

He was wearing tough wellington boots and had been standing up to his lower calves in the grass by the burial mound for two or three minutes, no more. But already the grass had curled inward, over his boots, and as he moved his feet the grass broke, so that his feet carried some of the severed blades back to the path with him.

Where he had been standing, the earth was almost bare, the grass visibly drawing down into the soil. It was like trying to watch the movement of the minute hand on the clock in the village clock tower—the motion was barely discernible—but the grass was moving!

I backed away down the path and tried to say, “Gordon,” but all that came out was a gurgle. At my second try I managed, and said, “Gordon, it’s time I made a few phone calls. In fact it’s long since past the time! So if you’ll excuse me now…”

He nodded and said, “And me, I must get back to killing all of this damned stuff. I’ll turn it all to compost, start again. That’s what I’ll do—eh, what?”

“Whatever,” I told him. And then I got out of there…

The near-distant jackhammers, silent for a while, resumed their clamour, their vibrations stronger than previously. Jarred back to the present—as the generators coughed and electric lights flickered, and rills of dust jitterbugged down from the ceiling—I gave a small start, blinked once or twice, let my audience, my troops, float back into focus.

There, seated in groups, I saw about half of them: some two hundred men, and as many still to come. They’d been arriving in a steady trickle, quietly thinking their private thoughts, automatically assembling with other members of their sections and platoons. Clad in grey coveralls and carrying grey, protective gloves, they were grey as can be and gaunt-faced to a man.

I recognized one of them sitting central in the front row. Yesterday he’d been squad leader of a spore patrol out towards Watford. The fern forest had been making big inroads, mutating as it came. Ignoring the season and propagating like crazy, it was hurling its spores before it, “galloping” over the fields, making exploratory forays up roadside verges and central reservations, and taking root wherever there was soil. Yesterday the winds had been fanning north-west out of London: ideal for the flamers. Whoever could have foreseen or imagined the day would arrive when we’d be burning our fields, our woodlands? And not only the Green but whatever doomed, terrified species of wildlife remained in it.

So there he sat, this squad leader: his hair crisped, hands gnarled and blistered from the heat of the flamethrowers, weary arms a-dangle. Now and then his thin frame would shudder, prelude to wracking fits of coughing. All of that burning must have leached the air from his lungs and seared them to so much blackened leather. So I thought—

—Until, once again, my thoughts went elsewhere…

Intelligence. We believed it was the province—the exclusive province—of the vertebrate mammalia. Well, okay, the cephalopods had the octopus, and two or three other orders had their individual geniuses, but on the whole it was the mammalia, and especially Man. But how does one measure intelligence in species other than or alien to the human variety? And when, at what point, does it take the next step up and become intelligence as opposes to mere instinct?

Consider the Venus fly trap. By what extremes of evolutionary process did this plant develop spiked, spring-loaded leaves to capture its victims? Or take for instance the squirting cucumber, a Mediterranean plant that squirts a weak acid at you if you brush against it. Actually, it’s simply ejecting its seeds; but still we have to assume that a dose of acid in the eyes is a warning to wild animals or livestock, to stop them trampling on the plant. To me it’s simply another example of weird vegetable instinct. And what if evolution was to take the next step up?

Well, thanks to the meteorite—and to a degree to genetic modification—plant evolution has taken and is taking the next step up. And the next, and the next…

After that episode with Sellick’s grass, back in my own garden—my walled, almost entirely work-free, neatly laid out “horticulturist’s paradise”, as he had called it—I went from plot to plot, suspicious as a caged budgie in a house with cats. It seemed the walls might have saved me from any immediate influx. Well they probably had, from most of it. But not entirely.

I found several magnolia corms (I believe that’s the word: those green pods that carry the tree’s seeds) scattered in the flower beds parallel with the colonel’s garden. This had never happened before; the magnolia’s seed pods are fairly heavy and usually fall straight to the ground. Moreover, the old fellow’s tree was well away from my wall, much deeper into his garden.

So then, had there been a storm which I hadn’t especially noticed? I didn’t think so. Or (laughingly) had the tree found a way to propel its would-be progeny abroad? Outrageous! And I gave that last thought only momentary consideration. But nevertheless, it was very late in the season to be discovering such as these in my garden, or any garden for that matter. Likewise the dandelions.

I had always been scrupulous with weeds however pretty some may be, and while admittedly I hadn’t had much time for gardening recently, I’d never failed to pull dandelions whenever they attempted another insidious invasion. But it appeared obvious I must have missed some, and the ones I’d missed were beauties!

Tall, thick-stemmed, with flowers twice their regular size and as golden as the sun, there were specimens in almost every plot. Some of them were into the seed phase of their existence, once again very late in the season…didn’t these things know when to stop growing? Even as I stood frowning at them a breeze came up, snatched a puff of parasols into the air, carried them higher and higher, until they whirled away to the south-east. I found myself wondering where they’d land and try to take root:

Kent? East Sussex? The English Channel? (No luck there!)

Or perhaps some place much farther afield, such as France? Belgium? Germany? And for some reason that galvanized me, sent me hurrying indoors to do my telephoning…

I called Kew, David Johnson, who I knew was on duty that weekend. He was an old acquaintance of mine, an expert on Mediterranean flora who had studied with me twenty years previously.

“Hi,” he said, a friendly voice coming over the wires; and yet there was an excited or nervous edge to it. “What can I do for you on this beautiful Saturday morning, when you should be out on the river—or in the pub, or your garden, or anywhere except where I am?”

“In my garden?” I said. “No, I don’t think so. In fact I’d rather be anywhere but there! I was already there this morning—and in the garden next door—and I didn’t much like either one of them!”

“Ah, you’ve been neglecting things, right?”

“No, I’ve been noticing things.”

“Oh yes? Well, me too. In fact I’ve just noticed something—or rather experienced something—that gave me quite a shock! Funny, really…and yet not.”

There it was once again: that edge in David’s voice, more properly an unfamiliar quavering that was quite out of character. And despite that there were things I must tell him, I was suddenly interested in what he patently wanted to tell me. For which reason:

“What’s been going on?” I asked him. “What have you been up to?”

“Well, I’m on my own today,” he began. “Gloria Hamilton is supposed to be in, too, but she’s come down with something, so there’s only me and the security guards; and of course they’re doing their rounds.”

“Sounds lonely,” I said. “In fact you make it sound positively spooky! So what’s this: a haunted greenhouse story?”

“Or something,” he answered. And after a moment’s silence: “Tell me, do you remember that old myth about mandrakes—how they scream when you pull them out of the ground?”

I felt my blood cooling as I answered, “I know the legend, yes.” And I was almost afraid to ask, “What of it?”

“Well, I was in the Mediterranean section—my domain, the hothouse, as I call it—and you know something? That old myth is true! I yanked what I thought was a diseased mandrake—”

“And it screamed?” I beat him to it. And: “David, listen,” I continued, in all earnestness. “No, I’m not a bit surprised. I suspect we haven’t been nearly as careful or attentive as we should have been, and not only at Kew. By now that entire place is probably contaminated, not to mention the rest of the south-east!”

“What on earth are you…?” he began to ask, but yet again I cut him short:

“No, be quiet, I want you to listen: is Director Hawkworth still in America? I thought so. Which means I’m in charge, the man responsible. So: do you have a staff list there? Telephone numbers, addresses? Good, because I want you to start calling them, all of them, and get them in for an O-Group first thing Monday morning.”

“An O-Group?” I could almost see the puzzled expression I knew he must be wearing. “Don’t you mean a general meeting?”

“No,” I told him. “I mean an Orders Group, as in military terminology. You thought a screaming mandrake was odd, David? Well yes, I have to agree. But I suspect that’s just one small example of this thing, one small part. As for the whole of it: it’s war, David. I do believe it’s war!”

Then I had tried to get on to the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. Pointless! Ridiculous! A complete waste of time and effort! At almost midday on a Saturday, no one was there. When I did reach them on Monday morning…they already knew about it.

As for the woman I spoke to, not the Minister himself (no, of course not!) but an underling: I sensed she was stalling me, hoping I would go away, just like her bureaucratic superior and a handful of lesser bean-counters in his office must have been hoping “the problem” would go away. And you know, I might have expected it? For of course they were the ones who’d sanctioned all those GM experiments in the first place! And they probably believed the experiments were at the “root” of it—

—Which I have to admit was what I myself still believed, at least at that moment in time. It was my Earth Mother faith, etcetera, which, despite Sellick’s meteorite, kept obstructing any positive acceptance of a then inchoate, at best unresolved Galactica or Universe Mother theory.

But the evidence was mounting, and the mountain was like a Welsh coal mine’s slag tip in the rain: ready to slip and slide and bury us all…

And again the jackhammers, reminding me of where I was. Me and my audience, my army; our eyes turning up almost as one to look at the concrete ceiling, narrowing to avoid the last few trickles of loose dust.

Up there in Oxford Street or nearby, and all over London, men were clearing the vegetation—the remaining green areas, traffic islands, verges, decorative plots—right down to their raw concrete foundations. Then they’d spray sulphuric acid into the gaping holes to kill any roots, fill them with debris, finally level everything and seal their work with fresh concrete.

And as for the parks: God-only-knows how they were dealing with the parks!

While down here in this briefing room the small army of men waiting for me to speak must be thinking much the same thing as I was: that the city we’d known—the whole world we’d known—was no more and might even be gone forever…

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 uncommon 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!”

I dragged him away, helped him to sit, said, “Cadaverine?”

“That’s…what…it…smelt like!” he said, shudderingly, looking at me with streaming eyes, his mouth sucking at air that was at least a little cleaner. “Cadaverine: the loathsome juices that ferment in corpses!”

We called in a spray truck, turned everything to slush with twenty gallons of fungicide, then sprayed the whole area with a fine sulphuric acid mist.

And while all that was going on—thinking of the boletus, of what they must be feeding on—I found myself a place to be sick behind someone’s mausoleum. Even back there I had no lack of company; before I was done the doctor and one of the policemen had joined me…

In July the French closed the Channel Tunnel and banned all imports from the United Kingdom…well, what else was new? Remembering my dandelion seeds, however—not to mention an entire year’s contact of one sort or another—it was too little, too late. In August the Germans embargoed France, and a week later, right across Europe, everyone else was forbidding contact with everyone else.

Until then America had been just a little complacent, distant, casual; then, suddenly, she was hit! The wheat, barley and maize—all the cereal crops—infected, poisoned by the same disease or “condition”. And worse to come: a three-hundred-mile wide cloud of lethal, choking pollen and granular dust drifting east and south-east from the vast cereal “prairies”, taking out entire towns and cities in its darkening path. Quincy, Chicago, Logansport, Lafayette and Bloomington…all gone. While fifty per cent of the population in the trapesium of Nashville, Pittsburgh, and the Appalachians was evacuated by presidential order into territory east of the Great Lakes. As for the other fifty per cent: they defied the order, stayed and faced death.

Once again the sleeping giant had been awakened, only this time there was no one to hit out at.

By mid-October millions of sheep were dead in New Zealand, the paddy fields were smoking alkaline swamps across China and the Far East, the Australian Aborigines had wisely chosen to go walkabout, but no longer in the bush…now they did it in the desert, the only safe place. For now, at least…

Then it was winter again, but you would hardly know it. The weather was mutating along with the flora! Climatic change accelerated by what was happening to the green stuff, by weird new greenhouse gases. But at least the winter gave us a much-needed break, enabling our retreat into the towns and cities, allowing us to regroup, try to sort out some kind of defence. These mass evacuations were like scenes from one of the Great Wars, except there were no tanks in the streets, just tanks of herbicide and acid, and no distant rumbles of man-made thunder. (No, allow me to correct myself…we did in fact bomb several forests, which only served to spread it that much faster.)

And finally it was “spring”—last spring, perhaps the last spring—by which time all Mankind was under siege.

But enough, my mind was almost numb, memories merging, the ripples blurring into a froth on my mental pond. And yet a last few scenes continued to surface, despite that they were things I really didn’t want to remember…

In April of this last year, months after the evacuations, old man Sellick called me at Kew. Most of the land-lines were down (the rampant vines and ivies) but he had retained my cellphone number from the old days. Even so he was lucky to get through; the atmospherics were that bad.

“You’re still at home?” I could scarcely credit it. Just a day or two before what was to have been his forced evacuation, he’d told me he was heading north to his sister in Edinburgh.

“Yes,” came his reply, almost drowned in static. “I fooled ’em, stayed on. Surrender? Me? No, no! Out of the question! Eh, what? But I’ve had it now. I’m tired. Can’t win. So then…I know it’s a tall order, but is there any chance you can get me out of here?”

“I’ll do what I can,” I said. “But I can’t promise. You’re deep in the heart of it—the very heart of it—and to tell the truth I don’t know how you’ve survived.”

“Well I have—until now,” he told me, “but now it’s fighting back—deliberately! Roots come up in the night, from under the floorboards. Searching, I suppose. I hear them groping. And the garden: I’ve taken it out, burned most of it to the ground. It’ll make for a fine big black helipad for the chopper, that’s if you have one. I know I’m asking a lot, but—”

“I’ll see what can be done,” I told him, before the static overwhelmed us.

I got on to Surveillance and was told that a chopper would be going out that way in a few days time. They picked me up; we sped out over the Green; at Sellick’s place they put me down in a flurry of ashes in what had once been his garden. I was in my protective gear: the man from Mars in an NBC suit, gas mask and all. Next door, my old house was invisible under a green mound, sagging under the weight of foliage. Sellick’s place, too.

But the colonel’s big magnolia was still standing—God, it was still in leaf!—there in the one last patch of what looked like normal garden. I went down the old scorched path at a run, then skidded to a halt under the tree’s now ominous canopy.

I just couldn’t believe what I saw sitting there. Or rather I could for I’d seen its like before; it was just that I didn’t want to believe. And in that grim grey-and-green wasteland deserted by all animal life, devoid of creature sounds, I stood on rubbery legs, gazing through eyes round as pennies, and reached out a trembling rubber-gloved hand to touch Sellick’s mutilated, transfigured face.

Why did I do that? I don’t know. Probably to confirm with a second sense the evidence I’d almost refused to accept from the first. But no, I wasn’t nightmaring. It was all too real.

Old Sellick. Sometime in the last day or two he must have gone out into what was left of his garden, and as was his wont nodded off to sleep on the bench with his back against the magnolia. Then the attack…probably not of the green stuff; more likely the old boy’s heart, because he was sitting there clutching his left arm, his head back and mouth wide open. I think it must have been that way—a heart attack—because he wouldn’t have just sat there and let all…all of this happen.

The ivy: growing up his trousers and bulging out his shirt; entering him somewhere—I hate to think where!—and issuing forth from his dislodged eyes, from his ears, his gaping mouth. And the old colonel all dried up, wrinkled like a walnut—like a kernel!—with all the good sucked out of him, and the veins in the ivy’s six-lobed leaves tinted pink with his liquids!

There was no point in staying. I used avgas to set fire to Sellick and the magnolia, returned to the chopper still hovering there, and went back with the patrol to London…

Intelligence. It’s a crazy idea…or is it? l mean, how does this thing, or these things, propagate? With no more—or damn few—birds, bees, wasps, flies, how do they do it? Is the wind sufficient, or do they help each other? I remember what Colonel Sellick told me: about roots coming up through his floorboards, searching through the house.

And then there’s what happened to David Johnson. For just a few weeks ago, David got his.

He was the last man out of Kew, a rearguard left behind to ensure that everything we had once nurtured was destroyed. Last to go would be that area of his own special interest, of course, the Mediterranean section. But after he’d been left there—on his own, for three days—finally someone remembered that David hadn’t called.

So we called him, and got no answer.

We found him in the hothouse, examined him and figured out how he had died. A squirting cucumber had got him in the eyes: the blackened sockets and the blisters on his face told us that much. Backing off, he must have staggered into a patch of previously inoffensive cactus…they’d shot poisonous spines into him, and his body was puffed up like a balloon. And finally the mandrakes had got to him…they were sprouting in his decaying flesh. I didn’t attempt to pull one.

As we opened up with the flamethrowers, the whole place was thrashing and seething—“screaming” if you like—in all its silent fury…

I became aware of someone standing at the foot of the podium. A young man, recently arrived, probably a driver. The chairs were mostly filled now; the empty ones…would wait until we found replacements.

“Yes?” I said.

“The stores are open, sir,” he said. “The toshers are waiting outside, and the transport is ready up top.”

I nodded, said, “Good, thank you,” and then got on with it. I had promised them I’d be brief, and now I kept my word; kept things even shorter by omitting to read the names of those men they’d no longer be seeing. Why should I drench, or even drown, these already dampened spirits? Instead, the names of our dead, brave former comrades-in-arms would be posted where they could be read privately, allowing the living to deal with their losses in their own way in their own time.

There were eight platoons; I assigned four of them to a continuation of yesterday’s work, the other four to an invasion on a brand new front.

“It’s the sewers,” I told them. “Fungus and a black alga. I don’t know how the latter survives without sunlight, but in any case it’s your job to ensure it doesn’t survive. The fungus is a mutant species of puff- or earth-ball that grows in enormous clumps; it’s yellow, warty, and the fruiting bodies are full of black spores. There’s evidence that these spores will take root in flesh and produce mycelia, fungus strands that will spread through your tissues like wildfire! We got that evidence from an abundance of dead rats; in fact you won’t find any live rats down there! Which just about says it all.

“You’ll have gas masks, of course, but with the various gas pockets you are liable to encounter it’s obvious that you won’t be able to use flamers. So I’m afraid it’s algicides and fungicides, and that’s your lot. So, if anyone has an even slightly suspicious gas mask, get it changed!

“As for the algae: it crawls, however slowly. So every hour or so you’ll surface and get your suits hosed down. Now listen, I know all this is new and strange to you, but you won’t be on your own. In the old days—I mean the really old days, back in the 19th century—there were workers called ‘toshers’ down in the sewers. Scavengers mainly, they searched for valuables that had been flushed away. Well, we’ve been recruiting toshers, reinforcing our modern-day ‘flusher’ gangs, the workers who keep the sewers clean and in good order. Now they’re working in tandem, but they’re not so much treasure-hunting or repairing the sewers as cleaning them out—searching for the Green so that you can destroy it! But I’m not going to understate the danger: there’s a lot of this stuff down there, and it’s deadly. If we let it get up into our homes and buildings…” I tailed it off, let it go at that. And finally:

“Okay, that’s it. But always remember: safety first! Suits, masks, equipment—check ’em all out. And tomorrow morning let me see all your ugly faces looking right back at me, just like today.”

They began to leave, some faster, more eager, than others. The eager ones would be new to this…they wouldn’t be quite so eager tomorrow. And I knew I wouldn’t be seeing all of their ugly faces.

That thought was like an invocation.

The man in the front row, the squad leader—the man with the crisped hair and gnarly hands, whose coughing had made me think his lungs were suffering from the blown-back heat of the flame-throwers—had lurched to his feet. He coughed yet again, gurgling at me like a drain, and stumbled forward. I saw that his eyes were starting out, his hands clawing at thin air.

I jumped down off the podium, but too late to catch him as he fell over. He writhed on the floor, almost vibrating there, but only for a moment or two. And then he lay still.

Some of his men had come forward, staring transfixed, babbling half-formed questions. Waving them back, I got down on my knees beside the fallen man. He wasn’t breathing. I put my ear to his chest. Nothing.

Then something:

A hooked green tendril with a bud at its tip uncurled from his right nostril! It elongated vertically to about six inches in length, swaying there. Then the bud turned in my direction where I lay frozen, with my head on the dead man’s chest. And the damned thing opened and hissed at me!

Someone cried out, stepped forward with clippers, snipped the bud off so that it fell on the floor. As it writhed there, other men came forward and dragged me away. More tendrils were emerging from his ears, his mouth; there was nothing for it but to hose him down with sulphuric acid spray, reducing everything to slop…

There may be survivors. Maybe the Green won’t go into the cold places, maybe it won’t invade the deserts. Who can say but that an oasis pool, or perhaps the pack ice, or a black smoker down on the sea-bed, may well be the last refuge of animal life?

Or there again, maybe sixty million years from now another space rock will come hurtling from the sky, and this time it’ll kick-start, revitalize the vertebrates…though it’s possible it could just as easily announce the rise of the insects!

Who can say?

But I have remembered the name of that American author who wrote about a terrible colour out of space: he was called H. P. Lovecraft, and tonight when I go out and look at the sky, I may have a word with him. I may say, “Well, Mr. Lovecraft, wherever you are now, I just want you to know that the stars don’t leer. But on the other hand, looking at them and wondering what else is out there, I’m pretty sure I know what you meant…”