The Green Gene Read online

  When he was settled he noticed the noise. After a few seconds’ bafflement he decided that it might be music. Yes. Outside one of the shops, a purveyor of electric equipment called The Shamrock, a group of young men sat with their instruments. Two of them were genuinely green, and the other four, though patently Saxon, made gestures in the direction of greenness; they had dyed their hair carrots and wore suits of baggy sacking. The girls nearest them wore the same sort of green-tinged makeup as Kate, and smocks, and head scarfs knotted under their chins. Two of the musicians were playing small harps wired to amplifiers provided by the shop. One young man was singing a song whose long notes seemed to emerge through his nose and after being processed by the microphone and speakers to bounce with a plaintive twang off the shop façades.

  “My wild colonial baaaaaaaaabe,” he sang.

  “Irish, with Welsh backing,” said Kate. “They’re a bit of a phoney, these mixed groups, but he can sing and that lead harpist is brilliant.”

  “You would like to listen, or you would like to talk?” said Humayan.

  “Talk,” she said. “You see, Pete … well … I mean …”

  She frowned. He realised that she was embarrassed, and irritated with him because of her embarrassment. He did not consider this a very promising mood for increasing her interest in him, and decided that a definite manly openness would be the most suitable attitude.

  “I will explain my own position,” he said. “I am a medical statistician …”

  “Christ! How did that happen?”

  “Oh, quite simply. My father had a very good horoscope drawn when I was born. He paid a lot of money, believe me. The astrologer said that I was destined to be a healer, so my father proposed to educate me in medicine. But horoscopes do not tell everything, and my one did not say that I was a genius.”

  She laughed.

  “Oh, it is quite true. I promise you. A teacher, a missionary from Aberdeen, discovered this fact when I was three. I am a mathematical genius. It is not common, but it occurs. In some ways it is like having a very rare disease. You can look up the other cases in books. It was more astonishing when I was three, of course. But I can still tell you the cube of any five-figure number you mention, in two or three seconds, and remember any number I have ever seen. Would you like me to demonstrate?”

  “Christ, no!

  He was disappointed but not abashed. No beautiful seducible woman he had ever met had been remotely impressed by his one supreme gift. Only he had hoped it might be different in England.

  “Oh, I am not a creative mathematician,” he said. “Not Boole, not Godel. I just breathe numbers. Other people have had this gift, this knack, and often it has made them most unhappy because they could not use it. But now, in a world where we have modern computers, it is a great convenience. I can do things with a computer which are not just mathematical tricks. I could show you … no, you are not interested.”

  “Yes I am, Pete. Honestly. Please go on.”

  “No. I will tell you what happened to me and why I am in England. My father, who was a wise man, looked around India and saw how many people were dying. He said to me, ‘Pravi, you cannot heal them all. It is a waste of your gift to heal only a few. You must use your gift in the field of healing.’ So I became a medical statistician. I had passed all my exams with top honours. That is not boasting, it is true. So I could choose among jobs, almost anything I wanted. My father was dead now, so I made enquiries and found there is more money in cancer research than any other field. Even in poor India there is lots of money in cancer research, because that is what the rich men are afraid of. So I set to work to build up a reputation in that field. You understand?”

  Her nod was only slightly bored, only slightly baffled.

  “Good. Now came my fate. I decided to work on the hereditary factors in liability to cancer, because the data is there but has never been properly analysed. I had the use of a little old computer at my university, so to make the most of it I had to arrange my material in particular ways. Nobody else could have done this. Now, one large set of figures had been gathered in Britain, and included all the relevant hereditary material, including racial origins. And of course skin colour—this is because there are some forms of skin cancer which are related to the reaction of the skin to ultra-violet radiation, and that in turn is related to the production of melanin and chloronin by the skin. All right?”

  She was thoroughly bored now. Or was she? Perhaps, he thought, this was a normal reaction—a sort of putting-out-of-the-mind—in this society to any subject which seemed to relate uncomfortably to its central and basic problem. He didn’t care. He was going to surprise her now.

  “It was all very dull,” he said. “I shuffled my figures about and found nothing. I shuffled them again and found nothing. But all the time, in that jungle of columns, my fate was waiting like a tiger. I shuffled again and the tiger sprang. I solved the mystery of the Green Gene.”

  “You did what?”

  “I perceived a relationship between a number of genetic factors and the point at which a population group of a given size, among whom the chloronin-forming gene is present but dormant, suddenly produces a preponderance of green babies. This has always been a mystery. Now it is a mystery no more, thanks to me.”

  “But that’s brilliant!

  “Oh, I do not say that. It was fate. I had arranged my figures for a quite different purpose, but I had my shape of mind and perceived this correlation in the arrangement. It stuck out like a …”

  “Sore thumb?”

  “No no no. Like the dome of a temple in the plains.”

  “Well, what’s the answer?”

  “Oh, I cannot explain that to you. It is very technical.”

  “Try.”

  The attempt was a failure but not a disaster. He could see that she was now deeply impressed.

  “It does not matter,” he said at last. “And there is much work still to be done. I have merely made a beginning. So there I was, Miss Kate—my fate had sprung from the jungle and pinned me down. At first I thought it a simple dilemma—I had stumbled on an interesting but useless piece of knowledge. There was no money in it, but there might be prestige, and in the end prestige is money too. Ought I to forsake the certain gains of cancer research for the possible gains of genetic research? It was a moral question.”

  He paused to emphasise the spiritual drama, the wrestling in a man’s soul in far Bombay.

  “But that’s fascinating!” she said. “You mean you can tell whether I’m going to have a green baby—I mean supposing I were going to have a baby at all?”

  “Well, not precisely,” said Humayan, allowing even in the lack of precision for still wider margins of error. “There are all kinds …”

  “I must tell Francis.”

  “Who is she? Is she about to give birth?” said Humayan, with all the male Indian’s fastidious shrinking from anything to do with midwifery. Kate laughed.

  “He’s our neighbour in the Yard. His name’s as bad as yours to spell, P-R-A-O-N-S-A-I-S, I think. Francis Leary, but he calls himself Frank Lear for professional purposes. He’s a journalist specialising in the Green Question.”

  “Oh yes?” said Humayan, implying the negative. “Well, I had better cut my long story short. I went to my Director and told him what I had found, and he also was part of my fate, for in his youth he had played cricket for a team captained by the Maharaja of Bhurtpore, and one of his team-mates is now a senior official in your Race Relations Board. So there was no escape. They offered me a very good salary to continue my genetic research here in London. Here I am.”

  “You’ve come to work for the RRB?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She looked away. Humayan sensed this sudden withdrawal of confidence, but didn’t understand it. He watched two young green men performing a complicated form of jig to the music of the h
arpists. They were beginning to whoop between leaps when a couple of policemen strolled round the corner of the patio and rapped them perfunctorily on the skulls with their truncheons. The jiggers subsided. The owner of the shop, a stout, bald man, came out and spoke briefly with the policemen, who turned away and walked on. These policemen were green, and their faces seamed and hard. Humayan saw their four pale eyes flick to where he sat and stay fixed. The brows frowned and the strides faltered, but then the shoulders shrugged and they passed on. He watched the scurrying shoppers move instinctively clear of their path until they rounded the next corner.

  “Yes, I’m paid by the RRB,” he said, swallowing unnecessary spittle. “But my work will be entirely objective, neutral. I am simply going to find out the truth.”

  “Why did you come to us?” she said, still not looking at him.

  “I advertised for accommodation in a magazine, and your father wrote to me.”

  “The magazine was called Prism?” she said.

  “Yes. It is an impressive publication.”

  “It had bloody well better be,” she said. “Dad’s the editor.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “My Director in Bombay showed me this paper and suggested that I …”

  “Prism is a glossy magazine devoted to racial problems. I’ve never met anybody who buys it—any person I mean. Institutions subscribe to it and leave it on tables in their reception areas, but even so it loses a packet of money. It’s kept going by a front organisation called the Council for Citizenship, and I’ve never heard of anybody who belongs to that either. The Council gets its money from a few big firms—Francis knows their names—which want to keep things as they are—cheap green labour and all that—but don’t mind spending a bit on a pseud paper which makes people—you know, people like the Americans and your Director and so on—think it’s all not so bad as all that and we’re doing the best we can. Did you read it?”

  Humayan nodded, shocked. Most of his knowledge of Britain had come from the three copies of Prism which the Director had lent him. He had considered it a very reliable organ.

  “You’re the first I’ve ever met, not counting Dad. And I’m not sure he does. Did you see any pictures in it of Greens who weren’t smiling?”

  “I do not remember.”

  “Well, I can tell you you didn’t. Greens smile in Prism, just like names of books go into italic. It’s a real pseud, and Dad’s main worry is not what he puts into it but how he persuades the backers that anybody in the wide world reads it; he’s hit on a cunning wheeze, which is to print pages and pages of small ads from all over the world. He writes them all himself, because he can’t trust any of his staff not to slip in a joke one. And then, out of the blue, you send him a genuine ad. What does he do?”

  “He prints it?”

  “He answers it, nut-head … Pete, I mean.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, that’s Dad. He’s got this idea he’s an honest man—the honest man. Mum’s been at him to let Moirag’s room before I install some shaggy boy-friend, so a far-flung scientist was a godsend, but that was a side-issue. Prism pays his salary, so he has to feel sure it’s doing a useful, worthwhile job, never mind how much he fakes it up. But it gives his conscience a few twinges, so he reacts by acting double-honourable anywhere it doesn’t matter, like your ad. Anyone else would have chucked it away, but he made sure you got at least one answer—and then he didn’t have the nerve to tell Mum quite what he’d done, bringing in a … a …”

  “Brown,” he said.

  “Young,” she said.

  “Foreign,” he said.

  “Genius,” she said.

  “Bombabomba bombabomba bombabomba bombabomba bomb!” sang the young man, beginning the syllables without a meaning and finishing with one.

  “They got something this morning, just before you came,” said Kate. “I heard the windows rattle.”

  Humayan remembered the shuffling of air that had diverted the policemen outside McWatter’s Auld Bothie. He decided that the explosion had been remote enough to be brave about.

  “I do not at all wish to distress your mother,” he lied.

  “Doesn’t matter. Dad will get his own way. He does it on purpose, sort of, pushing her as far as she’ll go, and seeing her come to heel again. He does it for kicks. Glenda—she’s my kid sister, sixteen, quite like him in some ways—she’s got him taped. She says he thinks he’s God, only he’s too bloody lazy to do any godding. He’ll get his way with Mum, puffing at his pipe and stroking the back of his neck and talking in that soft voice as though he’s the only reasonable person in the whole bloody world—oh Christ, he makes me vomit. He’s always showing his right-mindedness with symbols. You’re one—a nice safe symbol of liberal attitudes which won’t get him into any trouble with anyone. But he never lifts a finger to do anything which will make the slightest difference to the whole bloody situation. He sits there at Prism drawing his salary and persuading himself that if he doesn’t print another six pictures of smiling Greens the world will be a bloody sight worse off than it is already.”

  Humayan considered Doctor Glister’s attitude to be a very proper and responsible one for the father of a family, but chose not to say so. Kate was slightly flushed with her anger, and her pretty bosom seemed to have grown more emphatic under the loose orange smock. These were hopeful auguries. Her emotion might well be sexual, but for sound psychological reasons she was diverting it into anger against her father. He ran a judicious index finger down the line of his moustache.

  “I do not wish to be an embarrassment to anybody,” he said. “What will your mother really feel?”

  “Oh, Mum’s all right. She’s dead honest, once you’ve learnt her language. And anyway nothing that happens outside her own family is really real to her nowadays. Once she’s decided you’re clean and quiet and won’t spoil our chances of marrying a couple of chartered accountants, she’ll start telling the neighbours what a jewel you are. It’s all her idea, really. The new zoning laws came in this year and Moirag had to move out, though she still comes in daily, so Mum started to worry about the empty room. That’s the sort of thing she worries about, not bombs and kidnappings. Her excuse is that she wants to build up capital so that when we’re married she can retire to Hertfordshire and breed her horrible little dogs.”

  “I see,” said Humayan, carefully registering that he must not allow it to become apparent to Mrs. Glister that he was any impediment to Kate’s reception as a virgin bride into the bed of some young lion of finance.

  “By the way,” said Kate, “I know it sounds awful to say it, but you’ve got to watch Moirag. She rips off.”

  “She is an exhibitionist?”

  “Bad luck. Anyway she’s hideous. No, I mean she takes things—anything she can sell for brandy. She’s morally justified of course, but it’s a nuisance. You just have to watch her.”

  “I see. Thank you for telling me. And your sister?”

  “Glenda? You’ve got to watch her too.”

  “About, er, ripping off?”

  “About everything.”

  “All is changed utterly,” sang the singer.

  “Yeah, feller, yeah,” agreed the rest of the group.

  “A terrible beauty is boooooooooorn,” sang the singer.

  The group agreed with him again.

  “I think I’ve gone off him,” said Kate. “Pity you weren’t here yesterday. There was a chap with the electric bagpipes—he was brilliant.”

  II

  MR. MARVLE (Exeter) asked the Minister for Education what progress was being made in the replacement in State Secondary Schools of out-of-date history textbooks, especially those dealing with Celtic affairs.

  LADY PYNE (Hove Central): The withdrawal of erroneous textbooks, begun under the Butler administration, was scandalously allowed to lapse under the Socialist Government. But
since last year I have been giving this matter top priority and the process is almost complete. It is better for children not to be taught at all than for them to be taught wrong. (Government cheers.)

  MR. MARVLE: So far so good. But what about the introduction of new textbooks based on the latest historical research?

  LADY PYNE: This is a more difficult matter. Research is proceeding under the auspices of the Race Relations Board. But I am sorry to have to tell the House that many scholars have refused to abandon the myths—often patently absurd and even wicked myths—on which their reputation is founded. It has been a matter of discovering historians and scientists of real calibre who are prepared to take a more realistic view of the social function of history.

  Doctor Glister was not a large man, but he managed to move and hold himself as though he was. Indeed, though he was not actually fat either, he looked as though he could be the moment he chose, like one of those fish that is able to puff itself to a threatening size at the approach of danger. He wore heavy spectacles, had a bald but freckled dome and a trim grey beard. His eyes were mild and brown and slightly bloodshot. A curving pipe projected from moist lips.

  “Come in, come in,” he said. “Kate, you’d better get out of that rig before your mother sees you.”

  His voice was almost a whisper, which Humayan later discovered was normal to him, but there in the hall it sounded like complicity with his daughter against the great matriarchal plot. Kate ran up the stairs.

  “Come in, come in,” said Doctor Glister again, holding open the door into the living room so that there was no hand for Humayan to shake. “Mrs. Glister is a little distressed at the moment, I’m sorry to say.”

  “About my arrival?”

  “No no, my dear fellow. We are both delighted about that. No, no. I don’t know whether you heard an explosion this morning. It turns out they got Harrods.”