Game Control (30 page)

  'On the contrary,' said Calvin, knife and fork upright on the table, though no one was eating, 'historically, that is what's happening right now. We think more and more people is better and better, we save this lot and that lot from starving, and we can't afford it! The whole planet can't afford it!'

  'What no society can afford,' Thomas returned through his teeth, 'is blithely condemning whole populations of its own kind to death because their existence is inconvenient.'

  'We are not talking inconvenience, Eggerts, we are talking extinction!'

  'So you say. I am not fully persuaded. But I believe there are different kinds of extinction. It is hypothetically possible for us to persist as a species but to lose what makes us remarkable. In my mind, our distinction has everything to do with a capacity for altruism, empathy and, if you don't mind the word in a conversation where it obviously has little place,
love
.'

  Calvin leaned forward. 'All right, we agree. Have you ever been to villages where there's nothing to eat? You're so concerned with our sinking to mindless, unfeeling animals, well, that's what happens, Eggerts. They
sit
, all day, with flies in their eyes, and after a certain point nobody bothers to dig graves. They don't sing, they don't read, they don't even bloody talk most of the time, much less pass on quaint anthropological tales of the ancestors. If you starve people enough they don't care about each other any longer,
all
they care about is food. And that's what all of Africa is looking at unless someone or something moves fast.'

  'So what do you propose?'

  'To begin with—' Calvin hesitated, though it had been such a breeze with BC. 'I would withdraw child survival programmes.'

  'You mean, pack up the vaccines? Tell the Red Cross to close shop?'

  'That's right.'

  'That would be tantamount to murder.'

  'At this point,' said Calvin defiantly, 'I am not entirely opposed to murder.'

  Thomas Eggerts stood up. 'Then we have nothing more to say to one another. Perhaps we will skip dessert.'

  Eleanor fumbled from her place, her face bright red. 'Calvin—'

  Calvin rose. 'You're a wet, fatuous tit, Eggerts. It's people like you who cause a lot of suffering in the end, keeping everyone in sight alive one more hateful day.'

  'It's your day that's hateful, from the sound of it,' said Thomas at the door. 'But you wanted money, didn't you? So here, Tin Man—' He handed out a ten-shilling note. 'Go buy yourself a heart.'

Back in the Land Cruiser, Calvin exploded. '
Who
put that prat on my list? Every single name was supposed to be exhaustively vetted! Somebody's going to get it in the neck! Thomas Eggerts is a pious, maudlin dish-rag! Lucky for us all I kept my cards close to my chest, or we would be up one seriously brown creek! I am not making another appointment until that list is double-checked. And what is wrong with you, anyway? I'm not angry at you. It's not your lousy homework.'

  Eleanor put her hand to her cheek so he couldn't see her face and announced quietly, 'I have never been so embarrassed in my life.' From a woman who had spent thirty-eight years in a state of nearpermanent shame, it was an extreme statement.

When he first proposed taking her to the Pachyderm lab, Eleanor said, 'Where?' She went vague. When pressed, she supposed she couldn't see the harm, but then she hadn't seen the harm in his whole fantasy, and that's why she didn't want to go. Before they left the house, she thought of phone calls to make, postcards to send, until he lifted her from the dining-room table by the nape of her neck, the way you drag cats cowering under the bed when they can hear their bath running.

  Eleanor climbed heavily into Calvin's cockpit and entertained various preconceptions. She pictured one of those grotty, fly-away Kenyan concerns, like Nyayo's lobby: a back room in need of paint, counters scattered with half a dozen chipped test tubes, shelves of dusty jars with coloured powders like an array of ceramic glazes, a few spoons, an old hunchback with a manic gleam in his eye stirring a bowl of something brown and noxious all under the omniscient, rheumy eyes of another photograph of President Moi. Or maybe a zany palace full of scientists who would all on cue tear off their white coats to expose garters, corsets and stilettos, to high-kick down the corridors, Rocky Horror. More likely still, there was no lab. Calvin would fly to a pretty, deserted spot in Samburu, lift her from the plane and laugh. They would picnic: salmon and champagne. He had planned it in advance, on ice. Toasting, Eleanor would confess that for a little while she was taken in, that the Corpse meeting and fund-raising alike had been brilliant theatre, and QUIETUS would go down as his wittiest practical joke.

  The trip took just over an hour, and Eleanor asked no questions. As they entered the Northern Frontier District, she objected that the flight was making her woozy; maybe they should visit another day. But Calvin had already decreased his altitude, looping around a neat grid of long white buildings with red crosses on top. 'Am Ref?' she inquired faintly.

  'Camouflage. And why not? We're flying doctors of a kind, diligently concocting a cure-all for the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.'

  Pachyderm had its own landing strip, and Calvin explained that as air traffic control in East Africa was Wild West, it had proved easy to fly equipment and crates of rats and monkeys into the compound undetected. From overhead, he identified research prefabs, residential quarters and supply huts with mayoral pride. Pachyderm was effectively a small town, one of those self-sufficient settlements formed round a single industry, even if most of these townspeople hadn't a clue what they manufactured.

  'Oh, they're aware the operation is hush-hush,' Calvin extolled. 'The higher-ups imagine we're on a US defence contract. The peons think we're trying to beat Burroughs-Well-come to a cure for AIDS. This fuels them with the fires of righteousness when cleaning cages and helps explain why our experimental populations keep dying out.'

  'Calvin, this place is huge!'

  'We've over 300 employees all told. No one leaves. No one is allowed to. We keep them fed, housed and entertained. We have a PX, bar. And Bunny was kidding about not having a sauna.'

  'How could you convince anyone to work out here?'

  'Salaries are high. Grants have so dried up in the US and UK that our foremost scientists are paying to publish their own papers. Besides, I not only supply them with state of the art equipment but here their experiments aren't hogtied by nerdy restrictions from the animal rights cuddly-toy brigade. And the way you lure any good microbiologist is with interesting work. Pachyderm is the most fascinating research on the face of the earth. We are on the cutting edge of mortality. Set on stage with the elegant belladonnas you'll see dancing down below, the atomic bomb is a cow in a ballet.'

  Landing, Eleanor's stomach flipped. The dust cleared to reveal their welcome wagon of one, who wailed over the dying engine, 'Don't tell me! More
parameters
!'

  Calvin laughed. 'Eleanor? Norman.'

  Much as she might have pictured the mastermind at Pachyderm as a pewter-eyed Mengele, Norman Shagg was more an ageing Merry Prankster, shirtless with drawstring trousers the colour of Eleanor's complexion: queasy purple. He rocked on rubber-tyre sandals and fingered a Masai snuff box thonged around his neck. His uncombed locks shocked out from his head in various lengths of dread. Instead of the thin-lipped, sinister grimace of her imagination, Norman's slapdash smile appeared to have been papered haphazardly on to his face at slightly the wrong angle. With his nose longish and pointed, his eyes keen and closely set, she wondered if he'd spent too long around his laboratory pets—he looked like a rat. But a friendly rat. Glancing from her psychotic boyfriend to this hyperactive hippie Frankenstein, Eleanor thought, I am surrounded by friendly rats.

  'Don't be fooled,' Calvin whispered as they packed into Norman's Suzuki, 'he's a genius.'

  'We've shipped in this load of immune-deficient mice, see,' Norman was babbling. 'So we can implant human foetal tissues and they're not rejected. It's dynamite! We're growing intestines, lymph nodes, thymuses, you name it!'

  'What for?' asked Eleanor warily.

  'Your friend here expects me to design a virus that only works on humans with green monkeys. Well, we've cracked it. We've cracked a lot while you've been gone, boyo. And these mice, with tiny human lungs, t-cells in the bloodstream, b-cells in the liver, you have got to see to believe. What we can't quite figure is why the human cells don't attack the meeses.'

  'Human cells are obviously at home in rodents,' said Calvin.

  'I knew you'd have a scientific explanation.'

  Calvin turned around to Eleanor in the back seat to explain that the facility had originally been established, innocently, for the conduct of his density studies: what happens when you crammed eighty rats in a pen meant for ten?

  'Uh-huh,' she grunted, 'and what did happen?'

  'It was fantastic!' Norman exploded, gunning up an embankment until Eleanor could feel the Suzuki's centre of gravity tilt backwards. 'We got whole colonies out of their tiny tree. Half the boys were gay, and you don't ordinarily see a lot of buggery in rats. And the girls became lousy mothers; turned their hairless toddlers into latch-key kids.'

  'The females under normal density conditions build cup-shaped nests for their young,' said Calvin. 'In our high-density model, mothers would lay their young on a few stray strips and then desert. We developed rat shanty towns.'

  'You got whole gangs of sexual deviants that would mate anything from newborns to drinking troughs,' Norman shouted over the engine. 'Males mounted females in the middle of giving birth. Courtship rituals disappeared. The males usually do this little jig outside the female's nest, trying to get her to come out and play—it's cute. With over-population, no more two-step.'

  'Though the biggest problem was cannibalism.'

  'Wonderful,' Eleanor muttered, gazing out of the window through the billows of the car trying to take in the view. The landscape had that stark, desolate beauty of a place where people didn't belong. Why such a deserted vista would inspire research in depopulation was beyond her.

  'They started eating their own young,' said Calvin, as if she wanted to know. 'A mother would consume her litter as it was born. In the third month of this experiment, infant mortality was 96 per cent. In the fourth month, my poppet, the entire colony was dead.'

  'Swiftian, isn't it?' remarked Norman to his boss. 'Maybe we should hang on a few more years here. In Africa I can see it: one big feeding frenzy. Kurtz, boy.'

  She was clutching the car door to stay upright, as Norman swerved the Suzuki around brush and bounced over ruts, sending her head to the roof. Dust clouded the car, white dirt gathering on the fine hairs of her arms, paling her skin to ash. The grit in her teeth warned of a visit that would be hard to digest.

  'You should tell Eleanor about our happy-hour series,' Norman commended sociably.

  'Mm?'

  'Under normal density conditions,' said Calvin, 'if you give Norwegian rats access to alcohol, a few characters will take to it, town drunks if you will, but most don't have a taste for meth. As we increased crowding, however, the number of tipplers rapidly increased.'

  'It was gorgeous!' Norman delighted on a hand-brake 180. 'Huge pens weaving with these totally legless rats. Past a critical density, every one of them tap-tap-tapped at those methanol levers, like those colonial geezers at the Muthaiga Club on Sunday afternoons. They like skipped the water levers altogether. Gave up on sex, food, just hit the booze, all day. That crew died out, too.'

  'I liked the behavioural sink,' Calvin reminisced.

  'I can hardly wait,' said Eleanor, as Norman screeched to a halt inches short of a wall.

  'This wasn't repugnant, just peculiar,' Calvin explained. 'The more crowded the pen got, the more the animals congregated in a single quarter of the compound.'

  'Nairobi,' said Norman.

  'New York,' said Calvin. 'Rat-Tokyo.'

  'Don't you think,' supposed Eleanor, as they strode towards a banal white building that shimmered in the heat (a
mirage
, surely), 'that parallels between rats and people are a bit tenuous?'

  'Nope,' said Calvin.

  Norman led them down the hall, though the building didn't have that gleaming, twenty-first-century sterility she might have expected. Billboards fluttered with notices for keg parties, reggae nights and weekend discos. She glanced in doorways where, between infra-red photos of the earth, topographic maps of Africa and tables of the elements, the cubicles were taped as well with
New Yorker
cartoons, misprints from the
Standard
and Far Side birthday cards. The desks were littered with granola bar wrappers and toilet-roll Father's Day pencil holders; in the distance a coffee machine gurgled from its build-up of alkaline. A researcher in an Einstein T-shirt looked up from his computer, caught her eye and smiled. His soft hair in a boyish mop, he looked sweet. She caught up with her escorts, who were chuckling together, at jokes she was rather glad to miss. Yet the compound hardly felt clan

destine, mephistophelean. She passed two glistening men in shorts slashing the air with racquets, discussing serve and volley.

  Turning into the next corridor, however, Norman led them to a massive open room cluttered with equipment; she thought at first they'd entered a gymnasium. No Nautilus presented itself. Eleanor lagged behind to stare: everywhere, big whirling, humming machines she didn't understand. Blue sine waves oscillated on screens, centrifuges whipped the air like propellers, lasers traced keen pure lines from one contraption to another. As Calvin entered the lab, first one and then another technician in sweaty Tusker Ts looked up eagerly from his station. Women in shorts and tank-tops strode with brusque professionalism between the aisles, waving to Dr Piper with scalpels. Calvin clapped his researchers on the shoulder as they peered in microscopes, sometimes stopping to cajole, inquire about an experiment, or bring greetings from family. Eleanor was still waiting for her picnic. 'To fraudulence,' her glass would clink. 'To Andromeda. To dream.'