Chains of the Sea Read online

  “Admittedly,” said Dunne, “the fate of Dr. Levy’s mushrooms has little personal meaning for the average man in the street. But what makes the mystery unusual, if only from a specialist’s point of view, is the fact that apparently every one of those mushrooms in the world is now dead. Dr. Levy has done extensive research in the short time since his own mushrooms died, and has been unable to find any. So check your Spanish catalpas. If you find a pinkish-white thing growing there, let Dr. Levy know. If not, well, maybe the world will have to get along without the Poly—”

  “Polyporus gugliemii.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Levy,” said Dunne, with an indulgent laugh. “This is Bob Dunne, NBC News, Wentell College, Romisch, Iowa.”

  Back with the local station, the announcer made a rude remark and introduced the weatherman. Paul watched the set silently, thinking. Linda had said nothing during the filmed interview, probably wondering why the network had invested so much money in such a dumb story. Who would miss a lousy mushroom? It was probably poisonous anyway.

  “I know how he feels,” said Paul.

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “I said, I know how he feels. That guy in Iowa. All his mushrooms died.”

  Linda turned around and propped herself on one elbow. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “He’s a scientist. His mushrooms meant something. Maybe he was working on something important. Your cruddy fish weren’t important.”

  “Not to you, they weren’t,” said Paul coldly.

  “You’re doggone right, they weren’t. They all dying may be the best thing that ever happened to you. Maybe you’ll open your eyes. Now you can get into something useful, if you’re smart.”

  “It’s scary,” said Paul, once more grateful to be able to shut his wife’s words out of his mind. “First, all the mollies in the world die. All at once. Then these mushrooms.”

  “They both start with m,” said Linda.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Maybe Morans are next.” She laughed at herself and turned around again to go to sleep.

  Paul stared at her back. “I wouldn’t joke about it,” he said thoughtfully.

  Several days passed in their usual unfulfilling way. Paul thought no more about the scientist’s fungi; he remembered the mollies every time he saw the abandoned tanks in the bedroom. Once or twice a day he would realize, as though for the first time, that he’d never see a molly again. Eventually he grew bored and sold the step-breeder, the large tank, and all the equipment back to the Fish Store. Linda laughed and said, “I told you so.”

  Paul’s life was so carefully regulated that he never examined the events of the week more closely. His job continued the same, day after day; he thought the same things at the same times, admitting his frustration but lacking the imagination to battle it. His relationship with Linda, though not ideal, at least had the virtue of being constant. He could look forward to years of the same, never a misstep from her, never a fall from the peculiar grace they had arranged. And, too, he would be faithful. He had enough inclination to the contrary—surely no one could fault him for looking at other women—but his minor existence sapped whatever energy he might have had. He just couldn’t be bothered.

  Days and weeks later, toward the middle of September, an article in the newspaper caught his attention and brought back the short-lived feeling of fear. Paul welcomed it; even a change to impersonal terror would be a relief from the flat monotony he had built with Linda.

  The article reviewed a speech given by Dr. Bertram Waters of Ivy University. Speaking before a meeting of the American Plasmonics Society, Dr. Waters revealed the results of a month-long survey conducted by himself with the aid of the North American Biological Research Association. Although biology was not Dr. Waters’ own field, and although his audience had come hoping to hear of his recent work in the area of applied plasmonics, his lecture caused a great deal of excitement.

  “We are right this minute caught in the midst of an unimaginable catastrophe,” said Dr. Waters. “Even as we sit here, the forces of nature, those immutable ordinances by which we shape our lives, conspire to spell our doom. But because the calamity is a slow one, because it operates on a large scale, striking down victims in isolated places around the globe, we may be inclined to dismiss its effects on ourselves as negligible. That would be a suicidal error.

  “A few weeks ago, every member of the species Mollienisia sphenops was killed by some unknown agent, no matter where in the world the fish might have been. This event caused some little comment but was quickly forgotten, except by breeders of tropical fish. A short time later, every specimen of the fungus Polyporus gugliemii was noted to have perished. Since then, with the aid of NABRA, I have made a list of other species which have become extinct, suddenly and with no apparent—let me amend that: no rational—reason. Yes, there are other species. This list has been prepared carefully; all the extensive resources of NABRA have been employed to check it thoroughly, and I have every confidence in its accuracy. There are twelve other species, eight members of the plant kingdom, four of the animal kingdom, which no one here will ever see alive in nature again. Most of them, of course, will hardly be missed by the common man. Three of the four animals, for instance, were insects, tiny creatures barely distinguishable except by an expert.

  “But that is not the point. One of the plants was noted by a botanist in Switzerland to have gone out of existence several years ago, ‘seemingly overnight.’ Other researchers have remarked on similar occurrences, some of which are still being investigated and may eventually be added to the list. What does this mean? Here is my theory, one which is highly speculative and will prove highly unpopular. Some of you will brand me a mad romantic, or worse. Nevertheless, in my opinion this is what the evidence points to.

  “Who knows how many separate species of animal and plant life are on the earth today? The total must run into the trillions. The catalogued varieties alone are far too numerous for any man to comprehend. If only one species disappeared each day, beginning with the birth of Christ, no, the appearance of thinking man, no, even more, the creation of the world—it is possible that we would scarcely have noticed the difference. So many unclassified insects, bacteria, microbes, sea creatures exist that man can hardly hope even to name them all.

  “I think that whatever put us here, all of us, man and animal and plant alike, is calling us home. One by one. The black mollies have been called. And the gugliemii fungus. And the echaifly. And who knows how many others over the course of eons? And who knows which will be next? We cannot even know how often this strange selection takes place.”

  The article went on at greater length, giving the conclusion of Waters’ speech and the outraged reaction of his audience. But Paul was oddly contented. Perhaps it was only the idea that there might be, after all, some sort of plan, however gruesome and arbitrary it seemed. He looked into the kitchen, where Linda was making supper. Suddenly he felt a surge of affection for her, something that hadn’t happened since shortly after their marriage. Paul wondered how long the feeling would last; he figured sadly that it would take more than a few mollies and a fungus to rejuvenate their union.

  Disasters, it seems, have been my stock in trade. At least, I have never felt quite as comfortable as I do in the midst of a good, rending cataclysm. So many things fall into place, so much is settled for good or ill; I sometimes pray for more upheavals, if only to clear the air. But a disaster has its full share of negative values also. If you happen to be idly standing around, you find yourself clutched, scattered, or dragged away.

  It’s important to keep your wits about you at all times. Even so, it is often impossible to resist the emotional demands of weaker individuals. Thus it was that I found myself dragged away, down the spiral staircases of our St. Charles Avenue mansion and into the hot, sunny yard. Behind the house the spiky, gray-green plants were still bead-strung with drops from the afternoon’s shower. The gra
ss in the yard had been left to grow unchecked, and now the rough blades grasped up inside my lab coat, scraping unpleasantly on the bare skin of my legs below my Bermuda shorts.

  There was a door set into the back of the house, a small door only five feet high; unlike the remainder of the mansion, the exterior of which was preserved as well as our budgets allowed, the door was a seedy tatter of another era. Its cream-colored paint was faded and dirty, tending now to peel and chip, littering the small flagstone walk with sad tear-flakes of pigment. I had on occasion asked Dr. Johnson what rested behind that anomalous door, but I had never succeeded in getting a straight answer. “It’s the sickled grain room,” he would reply. If I pushed him some more, he would go on in terrifying clichés about age and death and the fatal vanity of art.

  “I know,” I said, suddenly comprehending what ought to have been clear long before. “This is where you keep your pets, in whatever form they may take.”

  Dr. Johnson fiddled with the several locks. I watched the strong muscles of his back shifting beneath the coarse white duck of his lab coat. “They take only the grim forms of corruption,” he said. I considered the uncountable ways he might have described the death of his pets, each way a monstrous perversion of literary style. But he had not chosen one of the more readily accessible clichés, after all. Perhaps he was recovering. I could only think that perhaps there was hope for my own romantic affliction.

  He flung the door open. Standing in the bright glare of the yard, I could see nothing of the chamber beyond. Dr. Johnson entered, ducking his head; I followed, somewhat bored and resigned to offering my condolences. I stood beyond the threshold of the room for some seconds, waiting drowsily for my eyes to grow accustomed to the dimness. My nose rebelled immediately, however; mixed with the ancient, musty smell of a room long sealed away from the common business of a great house was the fetid odor of decay. The room itself was rotting, a spreading abscess devouring an entire corner of the mansion. But more than that, I sensed an overpowering presence of putrefying material, lately and voluntarily introduced by my friend.

  Soon I could make out a series of roughhewn wooden tables set up in rows, each bearing small boxes of damp earth. In these I saw dozens of mushrooms, their thin stalks no longer able to support the weight of their huge, spreading caps. Dr. Johnson picked up one of the boxes and carried it into the daylight. At last, delivered in death into the full glare of the sun, their colors became evident. They were brilliantly hued underneath, though the stalks and the tops of the caps were a sick pinkish white.

  “My pets!” said Dr. Johnson, in an odd whining voice.

  “Remarkably phallic, aren’t they?” I asked.

  “Dead, all dead.”

  “That is the way of the world,” I said. He stared at me for a few seconds. Then he roused himself, as though struck by some overpowering thought.

  “Come, you must help me carry them all out.” I shrugged. He was obviously deeply affected and, though he had spared few tears for my mollies, I felt bound to accede to his sudden wishes. Together we brought out the boxes of dead mushrooms, nearly a hundred containers in all. Dr. Johnson placed them against a low brick wall at the very back of the yard. A row of tall banana plants grew along the wall, and in the middle of the line a space had been left for some sort of arbor. The arbor itself had long since disappeared and its place been filled by a sapling crape myrtle purchased recently by my companion. Furiously he ripped the newly planted tree from the ground, casting it carelessly over his shoulder. I ignored his frenzy. Then he began to dig. He seemed to forget my presence, so intent was he; it was just as well, as I had little desire to aid his foolishness. Hours later he had completed his task—a deep grave, lined with flagstones tom from the walk and driveway. His mushrooms (fungi, he insisted on calling them. They were fungi, not mushrooms) were safely buried beneath a towering cairn of stones and old wooden milk crates.

  Days passed, and Dr. Johnson’s grief did not abate. I mentioned once, casually, while bringing him a tray of broth and junket, that life must go on. He did not take the hint. I suggested he get another sort of pet. He only growled senselessly. He did not appear to want to work at all until he saw, quite by accident, a newscast in which a botanist somewhere in the great outback of North America described the coincidental demise of his own fungi. Then, later, came Dr. Waters’ brilliant thesis. I remember the look on my colleague’s face when he read that. He jumped out of bed, wearing the quaint hospital-style lab coat I had fashioned for him (cut out in the back), and ran to our typewriter. He wrote a letter of commiseration to the Iowa botanist, and a letter of admiration to Waters.

  “I’m all right, now,” he said to me afterward. “It’s okay. As long as it’s part of some cosmic something-or-other, I don’t mind. In fact, I’m proud. Maybe the government will reimburse me.”

  How easily his fungi were forgotten; how grateful I was for the divine intervention. Now at last we had our goal and our first true data, all at once. We accepted as a given Dr. Waters’ curious hypothesis. Perhaps every day a different species of animal or plant would leave this God-favored world for good and all; what an exciting prospect to research! It made little difference to us, as callous, disinterested members of the scientific community, what those species might be. But we had to know how often the phenomenon occurred. Such is the nature of science: what can be measured, what can be classified, named, catalogued, filed, documented, that was all that concerned us. How often did an entire species croak? We spent many sleepless nights debating, not on the length of the period (we agreed that it must be once per diem), but on the best method of proving it.

  While we tackled the riddle from a purely technical, reasoned, dispassionate angle, the popular media began its hateful commercialism. Each day the Cleveland States-ltem printed a little box on the front page, much as at Christmas a record of “shopping days left” is kept. The box was outlined with a heavy black border, and centered within, in small type, was the name of the species that, biologists had decided, had gone extinct the previous day, with a mawkish photo of it. It’s hard to jerk a tear with a picture of a scarce Australian peat moss; but I’ll never forget the day the kaji lemur passed away. Those huge, pleading eyes turned my stomach.

  This went on for a while; most days the box was completely empty, meaning that the scientists had been unable to identify which of the innumerable species no longer was. Less frequently, there was some plant or animal I’d never heard of gracing the newspaper’s lower left corner. I complained to Dr. Johnson, wishing that we could end the sentimental exploitation of our disaster. He scowled at me. “You’re as bad as they are!” he said angrily. “What about the silkworm? What about the inkwell beetle? What about the diamondwort?” I could only shrug my shoulders and smile in embarrassment.

  Through a quirk of the city’s public transportation system, Paul arrived at work nearly fifteen minutes earlier than usual. It was late September; already the mornings were retaining some of the night’s icy chill. It would not be long before Paul would need a stronger incentive to face the winter cold. Still, the autumn sharpness excited him. The slight dash of cool air, the deeper blue of the sky, even the fresh rustling of the fading leaves revived him, made him realize that his narrow world could still be beautiful. But that annual discovery was too ephemeral; it never lived beyond the second snowfall, when the first already lay crushed and filthy.

  Paul waited in the long line by the time clocks. He stood behind an older woman who was dressed in faded, tom coveralls. The woman carried a copy of the morning paper folded under her arm, her lunch pail in the other hand. Bored, waiting for the slow line to creep by the clock, Paul tried to read the bits of articles revealed by the woman’s heavy arm. He saw the bottom part of the first page, the news index and the weather forecast. Beside that, half concealed by a fold of the woman’s knit pullover, was the day’s black box. Paul could see that it was not empty; another something had died off, the day before, perhaps. If the scienti
sts had been able to decide what had gone extinct, it must have been a fairly common species.

  Paul hoped that it was good and dramatic. He felt a little guilty as he stood in the line, straining to see what the paper said. In years gone by he had always turned to the obituary section with a thrilling, eager feeling: who knew what might be there? A beautiful movie star cut down in the prime of her career, an athlete tragically killed in a freak accident, a leader murdered, leaving a nation directionless-something to make the day special, something to talk about. “Did you hear? Korpaniev died. In his garage. They found him in the car with the motor running. Maybe suicide.”

  That was the way it used to be. Now Paul looked first at the little black box. Most mornings it was empty; the experts had not been able to determine just what had gone extinct the day before. Sometimes the box named a flower or a bug; that didn’t mean that they had necessarily died within the previous twenty-four hours, of course. It was merely that the scientists had finally noticed their sudden absence. Day after day Paul hoped for something impressive; he was usually disappointed and had to turn to the obits, where celebrities still passed away in the old proportions.

  More and more articles appeared in the paper, each taking some shrill position on the question of Dr. Bertram Waters’ theory. Of course, most conservative biologists would not believe the matter really existed. There was no concrete proof, other than the ragged list of suddenly extinguished species. But that was not necessary- and-sufficient evidence that Waters was right. There could be no such evidence; the whole situation was too theological for serious scientists to argue. But, if Waters happened to be correct, then the entire rational basis of natural science meant nothing any longer anyway. Paul was content to skim a small portion of the debates and wait anxiously for something big to go: bears. What if every bear in the world died? Wouldn’t that cause a fight?