The Death of Grass Read online

  ‘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, 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 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 were 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 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 appetitite 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. The mind boggles at man’s progress in the last hundred years. If I were a Martian, 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 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 might have to tighten our belts.’

  ‘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.’

  3

  The news of Phase 5 of the Chung-Li virus leaked out during the summer, and was followed by widespread rioting in those parts of the Far East that were nearest to the focus of infection. The Western world looked on with benevolent concern. Grain was shipped to the troubled areas, where armoured divisions were needed to protect it. Meanwhile, the efforts to destroy the virus continued in laboratories and field research stations all over the world.

  Farmers were instructed to keep the closest possible watch for signs of the virus, with the carefully calculated prospects of heavy fines for failure to report, and good compensation for the destruction of virus-stricken crops. It had been established that Phase 5, like the original virus, travelled both by root contact and through the air. By a policy of destroying infected crops and clearing the ground for some distance around them, it was hoped to keep the spread of the virus in check until a means could be found of eradicating it entirely.

  The policy was moderately successful. Phase 5, like its predecessors, reached across the world, but something like three-quarters of a normal harvest was gathered in the West. In the East, things went less well. By August, it was clear that India was faced with an overwhelming failure of crops, and a consequent famine. Burma and Japan were very little better off.

  In the West, the question of relief for the stricken areas began to show a different aspect. World reserve stocks had already been drastically reduced in the attempt, in the spring, to succour China. Now, with the prospect of a poor harvest even in the least affected areas, what had been instinctive became a matter for argument.

  At the beginning of September, the United States House of Representatives passed an amendment to a Presidential bill of food aid, calling for a Plimsoll line for food stocks for home use. A certain mimimum tonnage of all foods was to be kept in reserve, to be used inside the United States only.

  Ann could not keep her indignation at this to herself.

  ‘Millions facing famine,’ she said, ‘and those fat old men refuse them food.’

  They were all having tea on the Buckleys’ lawn. The children had retired, with a supply of cakes, into the shrubbery, from which shrieks and giggles issued at intervals.

  ‘As one who hopes to live to be a fat old man,’ Roger said, ‘I’m not sure I ought not to resent that.’

  ‘You must admit it has a callous ring to it,’ John said.

  ‘Any act of self-defence has. The trouble as far as the Americans are concerned is that their cards are always on the table. The other grain-producing countries will just sit on their stocks without saying anything.’

  Ann said: ‘I can’t believe that.’

  ‘Can’t you? Let me know when the Russians send their next grain ship east. I’ve got a couple of old hats that might as well be eaten.’

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p; ‘Even so – there’s Canada, Australia, New Zealand.’

  ‘Not if they pay any attention to the British Government.’

  ‘Why should our government tell them not to send relief ?’

  ‘Because we may want it ourselves. We are earnestly – I might say, desperately – hoping that blood is thicker than the water which separates us. If the virus isn’t licked by next summer…’

  ‘But these people are starving now!’

  ‘They have our deepest sympathy.’

  She stared at him, for once in undisguised dislike. ‘How can you!’

  Roger stared back. ‘We once agreed about my being a throwback – remember? If I irritate the people round me, don’t forget they may irritate me occasionally. Woolly-mindedness does. I believe in self-preservation, and I’m not prepared to wait until the knife is at my throat before I start fighting. I don’t see the sense in giving the children’s last crust to a starving beggar.’

  ‘Last crust…’ Ann looked at the table, covered with the remains of a lavish tea. ‘Is that what you call this?’

  Roger said: ‘If I were giving the orders in this country, there wouldn’t have been any cake for the past three months, and precious little bread either. And I still wouldn’t have had any grain to spare for the Asiatics. Good God! Don’t you people ever look at the economic facts of this country?’

  ‘If we stand by and let those millions starve without lifting a finger to help, then we deserve to have the same happen to us,’ Ann said.

  ‘Do we?’ Roger asked. ‘Who are we? Should Mary and Davey and Steve die of starvation because I’m callous?’

  Olivia said: ‘I really think it’s best not to talk about it. It isn’t as though there’s anything we can do about it – we ourselves, anyway. We must just hope things don’t turn out quite so badly.’

  ‘According to the latest news,’ John said, ‘they’ve got something which gives very good results against Phase 5.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Ann said. ‘And that being so, what justification can there possibly be for not sending help to the East? That we might have to be rationed next summer?’