Chains of the Sea Read online

  One article a few days before had argued that the situation was a great deal more serious than anyone had yet imagined. Surely people like Paul and Linda could not be concerned over the extinction of Cantepus nepifer, a microscopic animal that lived in bogs and ponds and such. But, the author of the article continued, the dirans flatworm, which fed almost exclusively on the nepifer, would be in very bad shape. Perhaps the flatworm, too, would be driven to extinction; deprived of its natural food, it would die off before its natural turn.

  The idea intrigued Paul. He had never before realized how interdependent things were. He did not get concerned, however; no, greater scientists than even the author of the article argued that introducing such concepts as a creature’s “natural turn” automatically prejudiced the case by making the argument irresponsibly subjective. There was no way to debate the question without resort to scientifically untenable premises. Nevertheless the controversy raged, and the newspapers and magazines cheerfully served as a forum. And they continued to list the forever-gone animals and plants, one by one.

  Paul adopted a patient, noncommittal attitude. More accurately, he didn’t especially care and, like the majority of people with whom he discussed the situation, didn’t particularly believe any of it. It was just another wild scientific theory, like the existence of life on other planets, or proof of Noah’s Flood in the streaky strata of the Grand Canyon. The scientists were having fun fighting it out, and everyone was getting a scrap of entertainment, but the matter itself would probably be forgotten in a few weeks.

  The line shuffled ahead. Paul leaned against a bulletin board, empty except for a single poster. The notice showed a decapitated body searching for its head, which rested far away, eyes x-ed out, as the bottom dot of an exclamation point that emphasized the words “Carelessness Costs!”

  “It don’t make any difference,” thought Paul as he examined the poster wearily. “My mollies led good molly lives. They were as careful as they could be. They honored their mothers and their fathers. It never did them any good.” The line moved again. Paul arranged the spare thumbtacks on the board into a large F.

  “Could I read your paper for a minute?” he said to the woman ahead of him in the fine.

  She turned around and regarded him blankly for a moment. “What?” she said.

  “Could I see your paper?” The woman blinked, then handed the newspaper to him. He nodded his thanks, unfolded the paper, and sought out the black box. The small type inside said Norassis scotti. There was a line drawing of a weirdly shaped tubular thing, with regular segments and large nuclear structures. Paul could see that it was some strange microscopic living thing, but whether it was an animal or plant he could not tell. He frowned and folded the newspaper. As an afterthought he reopened it and turned to the sports pages, to check the major league pennant playoffs. There was no good news there, either, and he returned the paper to the woman.

  The day went by slowly. Paul worked on an assembly fine during the morning, tightening the same six bolts on voltmeter chassis until lunchtime. In the afternoon he typed out Quality Control tags with lists of the subassemblers’ code numbers. Then he went home. As soon as he stepped into the sunlight he forgot all the petty annoyances of the day. His job wasn’t serious enough to make him rehearse his irritation after working hours. He showed up at the factory in the morning and stayed long enough to earn his pay- check; beyond that, the job had no existence.

  He was glad to get home, nevertheless. He was tired, and he just wanted to watch the news and eat supper. He said hello to Linda (who failed to answer) and went straight into the bedroom. He lay down and switched on the television. The international and national news rarely interested him; the local news had relevance only slightly more often. But after the major items, and just before the sports and the weather report, the news program presented a summary of the day’s activity among the scientists.

  Linda came into the room. “Can’t you hear me? I’ve called you three times now. If you want to eat, come on. I’m not going to serve you in here.”

  Paul looked up at her. She was his wife; she was even now carrying their first child, due to be born around the end of December. He knew it was foolish to be sentimental now, after so much bad feeling had grown up between them. Even the baby was a sore spot in their relationship; Linda never missed an opportunity to blame the unwanted pregnancy on his selfish appetites. She was probably frightened and unhappy; he certainly hadn’t been doing anything to ease her anxiety. “Sit down for a while,” he said. “Watch the news with me.”

  “The food’s getting cold,” she said. “I’m going to eat now. Bring the set out with you if you don’t want to miss your program.”

  Paul pulled the television’s cord from the wall and followed his wife into the kitchen. He put the set on the table and plugged it in. “We never watch anything together anymore,” he said, noticing that it was spaghetti for supper.

  “Maybe that has something to do with the differences in our tastes. Maybe we’re not as compatible as we used to be. Maybe one of us is growing and maturing, and the other is content to let his mind rot.”

  “Have you been paying any attention to how all these animals and things have been dying?” he asked.

  Linda paused in her eating to stare at him. “No,” she said, “I haven’t. I have other things to do.”

  “It’s just that somebody said today how all these tiny dead bugs and plants may hurt us, eventually. I mean, with them gone, the other animals have less to eat.”

  She gave him a scornful look. “Listen who has the big heart all of a sudden. He can’t spare a minute for his own wife’s pains, but he’s worried sick about a lousy bug. Look, we won’t have any trouble, and that’s all that counts. As long as the A & P doesn’t go out of business, we’ll be all right.”

  “Never mind.” Paul gave up his conciliatory effort. After all, he had made a decent try; the next move was up to Linda. He ate his supper resentfully and watched the news commentator, who was remarking on the potential danger caused by the sudden gaps appearing in the ecological food chains.

  “What few people beside the scientific researchers can grasp,” said the newsman, “is the idea that something as negligible as the pond scum in your backyard may be indirectly important to the well-being of your entire family. Though the individual plants that make up the algae layer are so tiny that they’re invisible to the naked eye, they play an important role in the natural scheme of things. Besides serving as food for various larger creatures, they serve a critical function by aerating the water, supplying oxygen to the fish. One species of fresh-water algae became extinct over three weeks ago, and as a result the entire population of fishes in several lakes in Colorado was nearly wiped out. Fortunately, an alternate species of algae was artificially introduced by a local high school biology class.

  “In the random pattern of Dr. Waters’ theory, we cannot be sure what particular species of plant or animal will be next. Perhaps one day soon every shoot of Oryza sativa, or common rice, will die. It is not difficult to imagine what effect that will have on the nearly two billion people who depend on rice as their daily nourishment. That’s certainly food for thought. This is Gil Monahan, Channel Ten News, New York.”

  “That’s what I call yellow journalism,” said Linda.

  “Why?”

  “Because he can’t even prove what he’s talking about, and the first thing he tries to do is scare the audience. Sure, it would be awful if all the rice in the world died overnight. But what are the odds of that happening?”

  Paul got up and scraped the rest of his spaghetti into the garbage. “Yeah, you’re right. But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong to be prepared.”

  “And maybe an airplane will fall out of the sky and smash you on your way to work tomorrow. Is that going to keep you home?”

  Paul grimaced as he unplugged the television and carried it back to the bedroom. “Maybe it will,” he said.

 
Above and beyond all considerations of mere change and transmutation, the pure panic of a disaster is fun to watch. I could see the symptoms already—my experience in these matters stood me in good stead—and I could hardly contain my excitement. I could tell no one, least of all Dr. Johnson, what I knew and what I could so easily foresee. My very good friend would himself provide many evenings’ entertainment as I observed his placid frame of mind begin to fray around its selvaged border. His screams and hysterical pronouncements of doom were the sweetest music to me, for I understood that if such an unreliable sort as Dr. Johnson could be reduced to frenzy, the common crowd would soon break loose altogether.

  I forgot one detail. The great masses were not as educated as my companion, and were for the most part totally ignorant of the implications of our disaster. Like those poor souls who lived on the very slopes of Vesuvius, they did not comprehend the proximity of death. And, like the survivors of that ancient Pompeiian spectacle who relocated themselves afterward on those same slopes, I don’t suppose the masses especially cared. Human beings have carried within themselves the notion of their own superiority so long that it’s very difficult for us to imagine a world without people. If a group or a city or even a nation is wiped out, other cities and nations remain to merely cluck tongues. I had no slightest desire to spell out the imminent doom; I wanted only to be around when the idea dawned on them all.

  “We should stock up,” said Dr. Johnson one morning. “We ought to get a large vehicle and raid a supermarket. Canned goods. We could live out our lives on canned goods if we had to, couldn’t we? Meat, especially. What if all the cattle go? No more meat. Cases and cases of ravioli, that’s what we need.”

  “And all the wheat?” I asked. “What if wheat goes tomorrow? Crackers will soon be very scarce. Of course, you can buy those tinned, I suppose, but that soon gets expensive. Particularly if you’re thinking about forty years’ worth of rations.”

  “Forget that,” said Dr. Johnson irritably. “Never mind wheat. If wheat goes, we can get used to cornmeal products. Or rye bread. Rye toast with fresh butter and blackberry jam is one of the grandest things in the world. Surely the laws of chance prohibit the extinction of wheat, com, and rye within a single lifetime.”

  “Then stop worrying about the cattle. There’s always pork and lamb.”

  “You’re insane!” he cried, and I only laughed gently. “What sort of ivory tower do you live in? Don’t you see what’s happening? Don’t you care?”

  Of course I saw. And no, I didn’t care. Out with the old, in with the new! Great bloody holes were being ripped in the food chains that Mother Nature had so patiently devised over countless millennia. How would the world react? What would devour what? There are always certain special moments in one’s life, like the day I awoke to learn that FDR had died. How stunning! What would happen next? How would the powers realign themselves? Now I felt that precise emotion—what would happen next? How would nature realign things? Would the blue-point oyster find something else to live on, or choose a species-specific suicide by its overspecialized diet? And all Dr. Johnson (and the rest of the scientific community, for the most part) could think of was his own future.

  I did not worry about myself. I knew that I could eat just about anything.

  The public, which for so many weeks had ignored the increasingly strident warnings of Dr. Waters and his colleagues (us), now began to panic. They had been blind to the problem for so long that now, when they chose to see, the situation was far graver than their meager hope could battle. They reacted in typically bestial fashion. First, religion. Never before had so many prayers wafted heavenward, so much incense or whatever devoteeward, so many anguished moans helpless priestward. None of that worked, and I had little sympathy. In the meantime, with Dr. Johnson’s weak- kneed aid, I made a killing by corralling the canned-sardine market in Cleveland’s Irish Channel. I convinced several local store managers that the seas were dying, the algae had become extinct, the kelp and the seaweed, and that soon every fish in the ocean would be floating belly up to God. I sold cases and cases of hoarded sardines for remarkable profits, which I used to buy up all the pimentos in town. This proved to be a mistake. I digress.

  Anyway, after religion the populace turned to politics, recapitulating the discoveries of universal folly they had all made as adolescents. Countries were urged to war to feed their citizens, all busily envisioning themselves starving on the morrow. No one had yet been beset by these hardships, of course; but Dr. Waters’ prose was so persuasive that millions of people developed the most delicious sense of verging destruction. Any minute now, any minute and we’ll have nothing to eat. I loved it.

  Dr. Johnson went berserk. Having neither religion nor politics to turn to, having only the cold embrace of science, he imagined himself abandoned in the cosmos. He smashed every little bottle of chemicals we had; their contents drifted powdery to the floor, combining in useless mixtures which my friend tried to ignite. No success there. Then he thrust his bare arm into a cage of gerbils, bidding the timid beasts to gnaw his flesh. They would not. In an ecstasy of impotent terror he leaped headlong into a half- completed glassware sculpture, only to emerge with cuts over one eye and charming glitters of jeweled glass in his hair and beard.

  As he knelt amid the silicate ruin, I touched his shoulder. “Have you had quite enough?” I asked.

  “I will not see,” he said, sobbing.

  “Splinters in your eyes? Shards of glass tubing, unpolished by any Bunsen’s flame, stabbing into the soft blueness of your irises?”

  He only shook his head. I laughed quietly. Dr. Johnson was finally, completely broken. He had had enough, and I did not wish to cause him any further torture. I helped him rise, brushed off his wrinkled lab coat, ran a brotherly hand through his tangled hair to collect what bloody spikes of crystal I could, and urged him upstairs to bed. As we progressed slowly up that felted spiral, I wished that someone could do the same for the whole race of man. That was sadly impossible. I was needed here.

  Dr. Johnson fell asleep quickly, thanks partly to the drug I had mixed into his milk and Bosco. I left him and returned downstairs, wondering if any more of our abandoned experimental animals had gone extinct since last I checked. On an impulse I threw open all the cages and set them free; hamsters and monkeys and others scampered or limped to the exit. I flung out the double shuttered doors; the animals trooped past, obviously in some bewilderment. I threw handfuls of lettuce and wood chips onto the gravel walk outside, and they soon got the idea. The next morning I saw only a single serpent, twined in the iron lace that fringed the pillars supporting the upstairs balcony.

  Soon Dr. Johnson regained his mental balance. I read to him of other great catastrophes in the world’s youth, from the Bible and various works of science fiction. He seemed greatly cheered by these recitals and began at last to ask me questions of our current situation, as though I had any more answers than he. I lied to him as best I could, and he improved steadily; soon, about the middle of November, he was well enough to accept my suggestion that we go on some sort of vacation. Even the idea of a fishing trip did not frighten him (it was the thought of poor slaughtered beasts that had driven him wacky, I later learned); he was very eager to go out into the world and get his limit while both he and the fish still existed. I nodded sagely. Everything was all right.

  On the fifth of November, the sugar maples died.

  It was the first really remarkable species to become extinct. It was very definitely the big thing that Paul had been waiting for. But when he saw the black box in the paper that evening, his reaction was rather one of anger, as though the power that caused the event had somehow rudely imposed on him.

  “Did you see this?” he asked Linda, holding the newspaper out for her to read.

  “What now? Something else die off?”

  “Yeah, maple trees.”

  “That’s too bad,” she said. She didn’t really look very concerned; she rested on the
bed, spending the final five weeks of her gravidity conserving her energy. “Is that where we get syrup and stuff?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Oh, well, as long as we still have sugarcane, never mind.”

  Paul tossed the paper onto the bed. “That’s not the point,” he said irritably. “This thing’s turning into a pretty lousy inconvenience. It’s got to be the air. Remember when everybody was saying the bad winters were on account of the Russians or the strontium 90 or something? Nobody ever talks about that anymore. I’ll bet there was more truth in it than the government ever admitted. I’ll bet this whole thing’s our punishment for pollution.”

  Linda switched off the television impatiently. She had watched six hours of daytime game shows, and now the situation-comedy reruns were too much for her. “That’s silly,” she said. “What are the maple trees being punished for?”

  “They always say that God moves in mysterious ways.”

  “God? Since when God? And those aren’t mysterious ways you’re talking about. They’re childish and stupid.”

  “I don’t know about anything else. I can’t explain it. Sometimes it scares me.”

  “I still don’t believe it’s happening,” said Linda, turning heavily on her side. “I haven’t seen anything that’s convinced me; I think a lot of supposedly smart people are getting hysterical over nothing.”

  Paul felt himself being led into the same argument they had had every day for nearly four months. “What more proof do you want? For crying out loud, every lousy sugar maple tree in the world just died, all together in one day, and you say nothing strange is happening.”

  Linda gave him a forced smile, broad and cold and mocking. “How do I know every maple tree in the world is dead? Whose word am I taking? How do they know? How can you be sure there isn’t one left, far away—in Pakistan, maybe?”

  Paul sat on the edge of the bed. He reached across his wife’s body to turn on the television again. When the picture came on, he changed the station, searching for the early-evening news. An ominous scene stopped his hand: a shaky film, shot with a handheld camera while running down some nameless street, showed huge boiling clouds of smoke rising behind a row of stores. The windows of the shops were all smashed. Broken bottles and crates, overturned shopping carts, automobiles abandoned where they had smashed into walls or telephone poles, and merchandise, looted and thrown away as useless, littered the sidewalk. A figure farther down the street ran into view. The cameraman stopped, tried to focus on the other person, who threw something and ran. The scene jumped wildly, then settled down with the camera staring fixedly at the sky. The picture went black, and almost immediately a newscaster appeared to gloss the events.