The Death of Grass

TWO

Ann, who was dummy^{26}, switched the wireless on for the nine o’clock news. John had landed in a three no-trumps contract which they could not possibly make, chiefly to shut out Roger and Olivia, who only wanted thirty for game and rubber^{27}. John frowned over his cards.

Roger Buckley said boisterously: “Come on, old boy! What about finessing^{28} that nine?”

Roger was the only one of John’s old Army friends with whom he had kept in close touch. Ann had not cared for him on first acquaintance, and longer experience had not moved her towards anything more than tolerance. She disliked his general air of schoolboyish high spirits almost as much as his rarer moments of savage depression, and she disliked still more what she saw as the essential hardness that stood behind both aspects of his outward personality.

She was reasonably sure that he knew what her feelings were, and discounted them—as he did so many things—as unimportant. In the past, this had added further to her dislike, and but for one thing she would have weaned John away from the friendship.

The one thing was Olivia. When Roger, fairly soon after her first meeting with him, had brought along this rather large, placid, shy girl, introducing her as his fiancée, Ann had been surprised, but confident that this engagement—the latest of several by John’s report—would never end in marriage. She had been wrong in that. She had befriended Olivia in the first place in anticipation that Roger would leave her stranded, and subsequently so that she could be in a position to protect her when, after marriage, Roger showed his true colours^{29}. She had been humiliated to find, by degrees, not only that Olivia continued to enjoy what seemed to be an entirely happy marriage, but also that she herself had come to depend a great deal on Olivia’s warm quiet understanding in her own minor crises. Without liking Roger any more, she was more willing to put up with him on account of Olivia.

John led a small diamond towards King—Jack in dummy. Olivia placidly set down an eight. John hesitated, and then brought down the Jack. With a triumphant chuckle, Roger dropped the Queen on top of it.

From the radio, a voice said, in B.B.C. accents:

“The United Nations^{30} Emergency Committee on China, in its interim report published today, has stated that the lowest possible figure for deaths in the China famine must be set at two hundred million people…”

Roger said: “Dummy looks a bit weak in hearts. I think we might try them out.”

Ann said: “Two hundred million! It’s unbelievable.”

“What’s two hundred million?” Roger asked. “There’s an awful lot of Chinks in China. They’ll breed ’em back again in a couple of generations.”

Ann had encountered Roger’s cynicism in argument before, and preferred not to do so at this moment. Her mind was engaged with the horrors of her own imagination.

“A further item of the report,” the announcer’s voice continued, “reveals that field tests^{31} with Isotope^{32} 717 have shown an almost complete control of the Chung-Li virus. The spraying of all rice fields with this isotope is to be carried out as an urgent operation by the newly constituted United Nations Air Relief Wing. Supplies of the isotope are expected to be adequate to cover all the rice fields immediately threatened within a few days, and the remainder within a month.”

“Thank God for that,” John said.

“When you’ve finished the Magnificat^{33},” Roger said, “you might cover that little heart.”

In mild protest, Olivia said: “Roger!”

“Two hundred million,” John said. “A sizeable monument to human pride and stubbornness. If they’d let our people work on the virus six months earlier they would have been alive now.”

“Talking of sizeable monuments to human pride,” Roger said, “and since you insist on stalling before you bring that Ace of hearts out, how’s your own little Taj Mahal^{34} going? I hear rumours of labour troubles.”

“Is there anything you don’t hear?”

Roger was Public Relations Officer to the Ministry of Production. He lived in a world of gossip and whitewash^{35} that fostered, Ann thought, his natural inhumanity.

“Nothing of importance,” Roger said. “Do you think you’ll get it finished on time?”

“Tell your Minister,” John said, “to tell his colleague that he need have no fears. His plush-lined suite will be ready for him right on the dot.”

“The question,” Roger commented, “is whether the colleague will be ready for it.”

“Another rumour?”

“I wouldn’t call it a rumour. Of course, he might turn out to have an axe-proof neck. It will be interesting to see.”

“Roger,” Ann asked, “do you get a great deal of pleasure out of the contemplation of human misfortune?”

She was sorry, as soon as she had said it, that she had let herself be provoked into reacting. Roger fixed her with an amused eye; he had a deceptively mild face with a chin that, from some angles, appeared to recede, and large brown eyes.

“I’m the little boy who never grew up,” he said. “When you were my age, you probably laughed too at fat men sliding on banana skins. Now you think of them breaking their necks and leaving behind despairing wives and a horde of under-nourished children. You must let me go on enjoying my toys as best I can.”

Olivia said: “He’s hopeless. You mustn’t mind him, Ann.”

She spoke with the amused tolerance an indulgent mother might show towards a naughty child. But what was suitable in relation to a child, Ann thought with irritation, was not therefore to be regarded as an adequate way of dealing with a morally backward adult.

Still watching Ann, Roger continued: “The thing all you adult, sensitive people must bear in mind is that things are on your side at present—you live in a world where everything’s in favour of being sensitive and civilized. But it’s a precarious business. Look at the years China’s been civilized, and look what’s just happened out there. When the belly starts rumbling, the belly-laugh comes into its own again.”

“I’m inclined to agree,” John said. “You’re a throwback^{36}, Roger.”

“There are some ways,” Olivia said, “in which he and Steve are just about the same age.”

Steve was the Buckleys’ nine-year-old son; Roger was too devoted to him to let him go away to school. He was rather small, decidedly precocious, and capable of bouts of elemental savagery.

“But Steve will grow out of it,” Ann pointed out Roger grinned.

“If he does, he’s no son of mine!”

The children came home for half-term, and the Custances and the Buckleys drove down to the sea for the week-end. It was their custom to hire a caravan between them; the caravan, towed down by one car and back by the other, housed the four adults, while the three children slept in a tent close by.

They had good weather for the trip, and Saturday morning found them lying on sun-warmed shingle, within sound and sight of the sea. The children interspersed this with bathing or with crab-hunting along the shore. Of the adults, John and the two women were happy enough to lie in the sun. Roger, more restless by nature, first assisted the children and then lay about in evident and increasing frustration.

When Roger had looked at his watch several times, John said: “All right. Let’s go and get changed.”

“All right, what?” Ann asked. “What are you getting changed for? You weren’t proposing to do the cooking, were you?”

“Roger’s been tripping over his tongue for the last half-hour,” John said. “I think I’d better take him for a run down to the village. They’ll be open by now.”

They were open half an hour ago,” Roger said. “We’ll take your car.”

“Lunch at one,” Olivia said. “And not kept for latecomers.”

“Don’t worry.”

With glasses in front of them, Roger said:

“That’s better. The seaside always makes me thirsty. Must be the salt in the air.”

John drank from his glass, and put it down again.

“You’re a bit jumpy, Rodge. I noticed it yesterday. Something bothering you?”

They sat in the bar parlour. The door was open, and they could look out on to a gravelled patch on this side of the road, and a wide stretch of green beyond it The air was warm and mild.

“This is the weather the cuckoo likes,” Roger quoted. “When they sit outside the ‘Traveller’s Rest,’ and maids come forth sprig-muslin drest, and citizens dream of the South and West. And so do I. Jumpy? Perhaps I am.”

“Anything I can lend a hand with?”

Roger studied him for a moment. “The first duty of a Public Relations Officer,” he said, “is loyalty, the second is discretion, and having a loud mouth with a ready tongue runs a poor third. My trouble is that I always keep my fingers crossed when I pledge loyalty and discretion to anyone who isn’t a personal friend.”

“What’s up?”

“If you were me,” Roger said, “you wouldn’t tell, honesty being one of your stumbling-blocks. So I can tell you to keep it under your hat. Not even Ann yet. I haven’t said anything to Olivia.”

“If it’s that important,” John said, “perhaps you’d better not say anything to me.”

“Frankly, I think they would have been wiser not to keep it dark, but that’s not the point either. All I’m concerned with is that nothing that gets out can be traced back to me. It will get out—that’s certain.”

“Now I’m curious,” John said.

Roger emptied his glass, waited for John to do the same, and took them both over to the bar for refilling. When he had brought them back, he drank lengthily before saying anything further.

He said: “Remember Isotope 717?”

“The stuff they sprayed the rice with?”

“Yes. There were two schools of thought about tackling that virus. One wanted to find something that would kill the virus; the other thought the best line was breeding a virus-resistant rice strain. The second obviously required more time, and so got less attention. Then the people on the first tack^{37} came up with 717, found it overwhelmingly effective against the virus, and rushed it into action.”

“It did kill the virus,” John said. “I’ve seen the pictures of it.”

“From what I’ve heard, viruses are funny brutes. Now, if they’d found a virus-resistant rice, that would have solved the problem properly. You can almost certainly find a resistant strain of anything, if you look hard enough or work on a large enough scale.”

John looked at him. “Go on.”

“Apparently, it was a complex virus. They’ve identified at least five phases by now. When they came up with 717 they had found four phases, and 717 killed them all. They discovered number five when they found they hadn’t wiped the virus out after all.”

“But in that case…”

“Chung-Li,” said Roger, “is well ahead on points.”

John said: “You mean, there’s still a trace of the virus active in the fields? It can’t be more than a trace, considering how effective 717 was.”

“Only a trace,” Roger said. “Of course, we might have been lucky. Phase 5 might have been slow where the other four were fast movers. From what I hear, though, it spreads quite as fast as the original.”

John said slowly: “So we’re back where we started. Or not quite where we started. After all, if they found something to cope with the first four phases they should be able to lick^{38} the fifth.”

“That’s what I tell myself,” Roger said. “There’s just the other thing that’s unsettling.”

“Well?”

“Phase 5 was masked by the others before 717 got to work. I don’t know how this business applies, but the stronger virus strains somehow kept it inactive. When 717 removed them, it was able to go ahead and show its teeth. It differs from its big brothers in one important respect.”

John waited; Roger took a draught of beer.

Roger went on: “The appetite of the Chung-Li virus was for the tribe of Oryzae, of the family of Gramineae. Phase 5 is rather less discriminating. It thrives on all the Gramineae.”

“Gramineae!”

Roger smiled, not very happily. “I’ve only picked up the jargon recently myself. Gramineae means grasses—all the grasses.”

John thought of David. ‘We’ve been lucky.’ “Grasses,” he said,”—that includes wheat.”

“Wheat, oats, barley, rye—that’s a starter. Then meat, dairy foods, poultry. In a couple of years’ time we’ll be living on fish and chips—if we can get the fat to fry them in.”

They’ll find an answer to it.”

“Yes,” Roger said, “of course they will. They found an answer to the original virus, didn’t they? I wonder in what directions Phase 6 will extend its range—to potatoes, maybe?”

John had a thought: “If they’re keeping it quiet—I take it this is on an international level—might it not be because they’re reasonably sure an answer is already in the bag?”

That’s one way of looking at it. My own feeling was that they might be waiting until they have got the machine-guns into position.”

“Machine-guns?”

They’ve got to be ready,” Roger said, “for the second two hundred million.”

“It can’t come to that. Not with all the world’s resources working on it right from the beginning. After all, if the Chinese had had the sense to call in help…”

“We’re a brilliant race,” Roger observed. “We found out how to use coal and oil, and when they showed the first signs of running out we got ready to hop on the nuclear energy wagon^{39}. The mind boggles at man’s progress in the last hundred years. If I were a Martian^{40}, I wouldn’t take odds even of a thousand to one on intellect of that kind being defeated by a little thing like a virus. Don’t think I’m not an optimist, but I like to hedge my bets^{41} even when the odds look good.”

“Even if you look at it from the worst point of view,” John said, “we probably could live on fish and vegetables. It wouldn’t be the end of the world.”

“Could we?” Roger asked. “All of us? Not on our present amount of food intake.”

“One picks up some useful information from having a farmer in the family,” John said. “An acre of land yields between one and two hundredweight of meat, or thirty hundredweight of bread. But it will yield ten tons of potatoes.”

“You encourage me,” Roger commented. “I am now prepared to believe that Phase 5 will not wipe out the human race. That leaves me only my own immediate circle to worry about I can disengage my attention from the major issues.”

“Damn it!” John said. “This isn’t China.”

“No,” Roger said. “This is a country of fifty million people that imports nearly half its food requirements.”

“We may have to tighten our belts^{42}.”

“A tight belt,” said Roger, “looks silly on a skeleton.”

“I’ve told you,” John said, “—if you plant potatoes instead of grain crops you get a bulk yield that’s more than six times heavier.”

“Now go and tell the government. On second thoughts, don’t. Whatever the prospects, I’m not prepared to throw my job in. And there, unless I’m a long way off the mark, you have the essential clue. Even if I thought you were the only man who had that information, and thought that information might save us all from starvation, I should think twice before I advised you to advertise my own security failings.”

“Twice, possibly,” John said, “but not three times. It would be your future as well.”

“Ah,” said Roger, “but someone else might have the information, there might be another means of saving us, the virus might die out of its own accord, the world might even plunge into the sun first—and I should have lost my job to no purpose. Translate that into political terms and governmental levels. Obviously, if we don’t find a way of stopping the virus, the only sensible thing to do is plant potatoes in every spot of ground that will take them. But at what stage does one decide that the virus can’t be stopped? And if we stud England’s green and pleasant land with potato patches, and then someone kills the virus after all—what do you imagine the electorate is going to say when it is offered potatoes instead of bread next year?”

“I don’t know what it would say. I know what it should say, though—thank God for not being reduced to cannibalism as the Chinese were.”

“Gratitude,” Roger said, “is not the most conspicuous aspect of national life—not, at any rate, seen from the politician’s eye view.”

John let his gaze travel again beyond the open door of the inn. On the green on the other side of the road, a group of village boys were playing cricket. Their voices seemed to carry to the listener on shafts of sunlight.

“We’re probably both being a bit alarmist,” he said. “It’s a long cry from the news that Phase 5 is out and about to a prospect either of a potato diet or famine and cannibalism. From the time the scientists really got to work on it, it only took three months to develop 717.”

“Yes,” Roger said, “that’s something that worries me, too. Every government in the world is going to be comforting itself with the same reassuring thought The scientists have never failed us yet. We shall never really believe they will until they do.”

“When a thing has never failed before, it’s not a bad presumption that it won’t fail now.”

“No,” Roger said, “I suppose not.” He lifted his nearly empty glass. “Look thy last on all things lovely every hour. A world without beer? Unimaginable. Drink up and let’s have another.”