THE RETURN

    by Trevor Reeves


    Dr Stokes looked around the room in a rather morose fashion. There was still dust and bits of rubble where the workmen had been installing the metal mesh over the window. They were lucky. There'd been a run on the mesh since the emergency. Others weren't so lucky. There was some desperation in the work he had to do now. Here he was, in his mid-forties and well preserved, unsure as to whether he would ever see retirement.
    "Marie.... don't let that cat out just now".
    The cat in question simply lay near the door blearily staring out into the sunlight outside, its mind in underdrive. What a life! The cat - Morris by name, would have to run the gauntlet of the possums just like they all did. How did it all start? It began by an experiment. Didn't everything start with an experiment?
    "So men breed mice, as God bred men, for scientific sacrifice..." he'd read some prominent poet say. Then the politicians and journalists got into the act. They always do. The looney right, in this case.
    John Stokes had only been a "doctor" for only a few years. Prior to that he had been working as an assistant, mainly in the genetics laboratory of the Institute. That is, the Scientific Research Service before the Think Tanks turned it into an Institute like all the others.
    Science had to earn money. To be self-supporting and to show a profit in order to a be of service to mankind, John reflected bitterly. Where was science for science's sake? Nevertheless he had to earn a living. Anything less than $90,000 a year meant too little could be ploughed into the retirement fund. And all the bits and pieces things Marie wanted for the house. Marie was a skinflint anyway.
    Many who came to their 'bring your own' barbecues (before the emergency, anyway) admired her art collection. Little did they know she used to acquire works of art (modern art, of course), from well known artists, "on approval" and then return them months later, unbought. Her meanness mortified him at times. A scientist in the pure sense as he fancied himself to be, he was continually driven to making compromises. The younger people at the Institute, fresh in their studies and in their mid-twenties and with honours in this and that often looked sideways at him. They peered over his shoulder, frowning. This was while he was involved in the experiment that had led to this present parlous state of affairs for mankind and him in particular.
    When the great changeover had occurred, and the Government advisers had at last convinced the Government that things had to change, and the old taxpayer paid services at last went, John grew worried as to how he would get on. In the new order, researchers became managers. Managers became either redundant or 'researchers' according to some new, idiotic bureaucratic job description!
    "You'll be alright - you make plenty of public noise" Marie had said. "They can't throw you out".
    "Too right they can", John retorted, "They want us to shut up so that their true motives and plans aren't revealed".
    John reflected on the curious logic inherent in that conversation. He had been making predictions about genetics, his main field, for some years. He was inarticulate himself and prone to repeating himself endlessly. He had always had the support of a senior journalist who worked for the morning paper. The press releases trundled out until the name John Stokes became a household name. Margaret, the journalist, was away now, working as some sort of adviser to the United Nations. The world was getting smaller. A sense of isolation hung heavily in the room.
    "I have become the room I'm in", John poetised, giving another glance at the sleeping cat. He scrunched up a piece of paper and threw it in its direction. It twitched, purred slightly, and resumed slumbering. It would get eaten one day, John mused, flicking his pen back and forth along his moustache. By the 'beasts!'
    The day came when he had to decide. The Think Tank people from the Prime Minister's department had been dogging his footsteps for weeks. The time when the various research projects had to be defined and submitted had grown closer. John's project was a vile one but he felt he had to go through with it. Either that or be put out into the cold world with Marie harping on about having no money. Her own little business had collapsed. She had been in catering, to small exclusive gatherings in their suburb, Tairoa. As usual, she had got offside with someone.
    He vainly remonstrated with her. Marie's father had been an important businessman in Auckland and she had tried to become the very model of a bustling efficient businesswoman in his image. There was an argument over the type of catering and the price for a particular function. All because some little kid had got a message wrong made over the phone to the client. It mattered little to Marie. Her lawyer was writing threatening letters. When word got around, the work stopped.
    "You didn't have goodwill." John said.
    "What do you mean? They were wrong". said Marie.
    "You can't have good business if you don't have good will", retorted John.
    He received a torrent of tears and abuse in return. So, no second income and no other prospects for Marie to do some work of some kind. The conclusion with regards to the Institute was inevitable. He would have to stand by his projects.
    John submitted his two projects for "bio-change". He never thought they would be accepted, they were so bizarre. Is this really the way we want the world to go, he wondered? Not to his amazement, his projects were rejected. He was out in the cold as from the approaching August the first. There was bedlam at home.
    "How am I going to survive if I don't have a functioning scientist as a husband", Marie shouted. "What will people say about us?
    "I'll start up my own little laboratory in the my workshop downstairs", said John.
    Later that day, Marcus Henderson arrived in his gleaming Opel car. He was an angular looking man in a blue pinstripe suit, black suede sneakers and Boston drawl. From the Think Tank, he had come around to talk to John about the project. He came night after night, after that. There were phone calls from others in his group. Some meetings were held in town and eventually the whole thing began to take shape.
    The money came from somewhere and the Institute took John on after all. It wasn't tax money. Really, it was a matter of getting public acceptance for what had to be done, to avoid the 'mad scientist' tag that would result from him working on his own in a suburban basement. Anyway there would be the laboratory and technical support necessary from a team of technicians that he would have to gather around him.
    The idea seemed reasonable enough. Logically looked at, there were too many possums in the country. People called them opossums but they were wrong. That was a different species. The other problem was that the deer that had been imported into the country last century had almost been wiped out by ravenous human meat hunters (ravenous for money, that is), who had cleaned them out from the bush, from the top of the country right down to Stewart Island.
    Deer farming was now out of fashion. Since the collapse of the trade talks, the European and near east Asian countries had increased subsidies to their own farmers and were breeding huge flocks of deer. The Global Village was starting to break up. It was held together only by the tenuous threads of electronic communication. But that was failing too. Who wants to be communicated to when there was nothing to talk about?
    "But people do fancy those beasts brought up in the wild". drawled Henderson, elegantly flicking ash off the trousers of his designer pin stripe suit. Morrison, his offsider, pulled the papers back out of his bulky grey briefcase and they went over the facts and figures again.
    "Look, I'm just a scientist". protested John. That didn't get him very far.
    "It's all part of the process - the ultimate result at the end of the day....', started Henderson as John interrupted, repeating himself. Repeating himself had become a sort of nervous twitch.
    "Yes, hmmm, yes, oh, alright then, hmmm, yes, I'll do it, hmm, yes..., yes, alright then....
    The scientific research was the easiest part of the plan. There were many laudable social and ecological aims, but the real aim was simply to get a tastier beast. Something new for European palates. Something they couldn't copy there. The Europeans didn't have possums because there weren't any trees left. Decades of acid rain and other pollution had seen to that. All their meat was produced in great covered barns adn they were fed highly concentrated food to make them fat. Just about all humans and beasts lived indoors in Europe these days.
    Here, it was a matter of organising existing resources within existing parameters and realising strategic advantages, as the consultants would say. There was plenty of bush and plenty of possums. And so it went on. John had reflected that colleagues of Henderson and Morrison would soon be in Europe telling the Europeans how to develop strategies to counter what was being done here. Free competition, or catch phrases such as 'user advantage' is what they would call it, without turning a hair.
    It all revolved around a chemical in protein called an Ocyclate Inhibitor. That regulated cell growth, particularly in the brain of the beast. The actual instinct patterns could be 'clocked' for change according to the growth processes of the animal.
    "I don't wish to go into a great amount of scientific detail", John had written in his first press release since being taken on by the Institute, "but feed patterns that have been observed in the extinct Moa species show that the young moas, in their first few months, had some difficulty extracting sufficient protein from the sparse forest growth that was their traditional habitat".
    He paused over his word processor. This would give it some authenticity, he thought, and show that the carnivore instinct is present in all animals. The public will see that he was doing research that was a development and enhancement of sheer ordinary normality. It was a bit difficult without his friend Margaret, his "mouthpiece" to do it when writing press releases.
    "They - that is, the young Moas, ate insects and yes, even small lizards and tuataras, which were then common on the Canterbury plains. What we are doing here is simply adapting a similar process to the imported species of deer and possum". Another hour carefully wording the balance of what he wanted to say and it was ready.
    It all sounded perfectly reasonable and next morning he passed it by the Director's desk for approval. He knew he always got it but he did not anticipate the reaction this time. Dr Passmore was furious.
    "You're here to keep your trap shut", he raged. "If this stuff gets out there'll be all sorts of cranks and loonies attacking us and the Government. They'll stitch up our funding and we'll all be down the road". The doctor flung the piece of paper into a corner of the bookcase and ordered John out. Something must have got to him, thought John.
    The shock was even greater next day when Dr Passmore suddenly dropped dead from what was described as a heart attack. It probably was. Red faced bad-tempered people like him often went that way. A new director wasn't appointed for another three months because of political agitation and journalistic speculation. Also, jockeying amongst the bureaucrats for the job. There was more than one demand by some brainless backbench MP for a full public inquiry. Meantime John's work went on.
    The field testing was the most interesting part. That had been well advanced and the results showed that starving young deer of protein by feeding them fibrous exotic plant food from the fringes of the Mongolian desert, was making them look for other food.
    That's where the chemical process came in. The external signals to brain cell growth were carefully balanced by a controlled injection of synthetic Ocylate which strengthened the young animals' craving for non-vegetarian food. Various insects, then mice were introduced to the beasts. The carnivorous cravings of the young deer were being "clocked in" so to speak so that they could not revert back to eating vegetable matter. Technically speaking, the Ocylate removed certain cell coverings so that the present "thought process", induced by the chemical reaction would create a permanent building block for like-minded cells to replicate.
    It wasn't all that hard to explain, John thought. He'd managed to get it down to about three paragraphs in the abortive press release of a few months before. The sudden gain in confidence arising from the success of the experiment resulted in a sudden loss of the repetition and stammering that had bugged him when he was trying all his life to talk to people. He'd realised that Margaret had taught him something about writing and communicating to the general public. He would do more of it when his research was at last hailed as an astounding success and he got his due rewards. Marie would get her opulent new home to play around with and another cottage by the lakes as well.
    The next step was to introduce fresh possum skins to the enclosures. The young spikies - that is, the one-year old deer, would prod and poke away at them and after a time, figure out a way to hold the skin with a front paw whilst scraping off bits of skin and flesh. A string was then attached to the skins. A technician would suddenly pull the skin away just as the animal was getting it pinned down. An injection module was attached to the neck of the beast and a mixture of adrenalin and carefully measured diluted Ocylate solution was injected by remote control just as the rumpling jerking skin was drawn across the floor of the enclosure.
    A high, smooth-walled enclosure was built around a small piece of bushland in the Wairarapa. Possums (fairly young ones) and young deer were introduced together. It was working! The deer ignored the foliage and started to develop ingenious ways of stalking the possums. Their front paws, along with their spikes became battering rams and dead possums were being ripped and pulled apart by the now ravenously carnivorous deer.
    It was the perfect solution! The deer would eat the possums instead of the undergrowth. The forest would be saved. Our atmosphere would benefit, being cleansed and re-oxygenated. There would be reduced methane emissions from plant-eating deer. A bountiful supply of different-tasting and much richer meat from the hordes of deer that would inhabit the remaining forests and bushlands of the country would grace our tables The Europeans would buy!
    The only remaining piece to put into place was the introduction of a carefully measured amount of a special substance that had taken John many years to develop, under the old Science Service setup. This was when pure research was the thing, not this self-serving user pays stuff.
    It was called CH Reactor Chain or 'chean stopper', for short. Now, as John explained in another press release amongst the many that he was habitually doing now, even though they weren't being released, "You are what you eat - that's the old saying and it's true, really".
    "However, with Ocylate engineering, which changes species' instincts, there is no way of stopping the passing on of specific generic characteristics to other species via the food chain, unless you stop it with a further chemical process. It's a bit like photography.
    "You all know", said Dr John Stokes, "that when you develop a film you must place it in a stop bath, or fixer bath so that the process doesn't continue and ruin the result". He would make a best selling book out of all these press releases one day. Maybe the new director, due to be appointed in January would approve. A welcome change to Passmore who was as stuffy as could be.
    The 'chean stopper' was now ready to introduce to the animals in the new enclosure. In closed cage experiments it had been found that bite marks from one animal to another led to a chain reaction from the Ocylate-injected animal to the one infected, so that it, too developed carnivore tendencies that, to the scientists' surprise and even shock, turned the inected animals into carnivores over a fairly short period of time!
    The new director's name was Dr Reid, from (where else!) but Boston! He wasn't even a bureaucrat! The science fraternity was starting to get stuffed full of right wing loony think tank types. Who cared? By now John Stokes was well into and completely convinced as to the rightness of the experiments. He was still a socialist of sorts, though, having been brought up that way and being too busy to try to think differently. Socialism was politics. What he was doing here was different. It was science.
    Reid was the very epitome of the new broom. He inherited Passmore's old office and immediately knocked it into shape. "What's this", he said, picking up the original press release John had written, tucked away and forgotten in the corner of the bookcase where Dr Passmore had flung it.
    "This looks good - release it". he barked to his secretary, not noticing that it was dated three months before that day. The first John heard about it when his phone started ringing and his fax started cranking out messages full of questions from the overseas media.
    There was an uproar. Every pressure group in heaven and hell (in an earthly sense, naturally) was clamouring for the media. Renegade members of parliament had a field day.
    "Genetic Engineering Disgrace. Manipulation of Nature. Destruction of Species", howled the headlines. The National Forest Association even got into the act, even though it was their damn trees the scientists were trying to save!
    At first, John revelled in the excitement. He had all the answers and there was always either Henderson and Morrison handy to help. Often both, clutching their pin-stripe trouser legs and peering through their 'glued-on' dark glasses. Marie was happy. She at last was the respected scientist's wife in all her glory. She made plans for purchases and, of course, new barbecues with all sorts of new and exciting people.
    It could only get worse. There were resignations from the Institute. Some were scientists, but more were the trendy green young technicians without families and mortgages and with political ambitions. The Chean-stopper programme was being held up! One of those grubby back benchers in parliament almost secured a Royal Commission to look into the whole thing. Then some busybody on the fringe of causes formed a 'Green Resurrection Action Movement', or "GRAM" as it became known..
    What the hell is that, wondered John aloud to his remaining loyal colleagues. He became worried. People didn't know! The transmissible effect of the unfettered Ocylate trigger would be worse than Aids! But its effects would be instant!
    "I've got to get to the compound", he said to Marie in a panic the morning after the Jones Show had some of these Marxist type green revolutionary long hair action people with their designer stubble on his show, threatening to take the Institute and all to do with it, apart.
    You've guessed it. John Stokes was too late. He saw the bulldozers advancing upon the clear-sheeted possum-proof wall even as he was turning into the long dusty driveway towards the compound. There was a creaking and then a great crash as the wall was barged over. Then a shrieking and thrashing as the possums, many injured by the ravenous deer flew about in all directions.
    The possums had been introduced to the compound in small numbers so that they would all be consumed before the lead time effect of the transmitted (non chean-stopped) Ocylate action had turned them into carnivores in just the two days that it took to take effect.
    The results were a calamity. He and the others in the Institute programme were sacked. During the next year he and a few remaining unemployed colleagues tried to devise a method of mass medication, you could call it, for want of a better explanation, to get the Chean-stopper into the waterways, food chain, anything!

    Think of the scale of the effort involved! Think of the consequences if the Chean-stopper adversely affected various species it was not designed for? Some carnivore species might become vegetarian. Some species which were vegetarian might become carnivore! The stress might cause the total destruction of the animal kingdom, even mankind!
    The situation worsened. The new species of meat eating possum had got the edge on the deer. They had a better method of attack! They would drop down off trees and wrap their big claws protruding from their little short fat feet around the deer's antlers, or neck, and literally bite their way through the animals' spinal column until the hapless animal dropped in a heap. The population of deer diminished drastically. Now the possums, millions of them, were invading whole neighbourhoods! They chose young children for special attention because of their soft little necks and spinal columns that were easy to chew through.
    The possums couldn't get through the mesh over the windows, though. Specially chaperoned groups of children went to school protected by territorial force men possessing special anti-possum, mace sprays.
    Scientific experiments never end. Sure, a possum finally got the cat. Morris had finally got out on to their nice sunny concrete driveway and had rolled around sleepily. There was fur flying suddenly as a possum dropped on it from the roof and despatched it, right before their eyes!
    Meantime John had been working on the original notes and analyses of the Ocylate growth accumulator factor. Might as well. There might be something there. Sure there was. The Ocylate accumulator factor could be seen to be reacting over an extended period of time to another chemical factor not studied in depth by the Institute. This chemical was already in the animals' chemical structure, but dormant.
    Mainly because of budget restraints forced by the user pays regime this B-type retro-ocylate was ignored. Another factor was that it seemed to dilute itself as it took partial effect and was not seen as the ultimate dilutant or reversal agent in the principal introduced Ocylate carnivore status.
    The possums and remaining deer started eating trees again after a year. The National Forest Association complained but anyway, they complained about everything. It seemed that John's whole project had been ultimately, utterly useless. There was a change of Government. The men in pin-striped suits were sent packing back to Boston. John never got his job back.
    There were reports over the following year - on the fringes of the Mongolian desert, opossums (no, not our type of possums) had been seen attacking lynxes and small rats. Their feed had been bad. Very little protein. Also with the break-up of the Soviet Union and the Americanisation of China, personnel from the Boston Right Future Institute had set up camp in most Asian countries, bearing offers of help and funding.
    There's no doubt about it, a scientist's life was an exciting one. John smoothed the fur of his new cat, Bradford, and tickled its ear. Soon it would want its next meal of boiled corn. The breakthrough had been complete. His new research, conducted from his basement, was going splendidly. Marie had left him in disgust because he was now unemployed.
    It would only be a matter of time now, he explained to Green Action Futures, or GAF he had just joined and whose views he embraced wholeheartedly now that they regarded him as some kind of guru....
    "Soon the world will be completely cleansed of meat eaters."