Survival

by David Fletcher

  Stuart was only thirty years old, but he had already decided that if he wanted to watch a genuine cinematographic masterpiece, he would have to seek out a film made somewhere between the ’40s and the ’70s. He would have to look for a genuine silver-screen rush by watching a film that was nearly half a century old, or maybe considerably older. In fact, to guarantee that he ended up viewing a production that had outstanding dialogue, polished acting and a well-written screenplay, he knew that, as often as not, he would have to resort to a black-and-white movie (other, of course, than Citizen Kane) in which all the characters filled their non-speaking intervals by lighting a fag. Gravity, most certainly, even with all its colour and all its technical wizardry, was not in this bygone premier league. Nor even in the league four rungs below. Instead it was a fifth-rate misuse of everybody’s time, and that included all those involved in its production and all those unfortunate enough to have chosen to watch it rather than taking a nap in the bath. It was awful, and he wished he and Gill had gone for a pint instead. Maybe accompanied by a game of cribbage. And he also wished that it wasn’t just 8.30 in the morning and he now had to deal with a whole day of boring intercepts. But he did, and he knew he had to get started. There was already an unusually large backlog…

  He had noticed a little rise in the traffic over the past few days, partly as a result of an undue number of exchanges on a new bit of bother in Venezuela, and partly due to an increasing number of less-than-illuminating briefings on the new Asian flu. More and more officials around South America were, it appeared, taking an interest in the likelihood that the next unwanted present from China would land on their mat. However, today that little rise had become a big rise, and as Stuart worked his way through the morning it became crystal clear that this surge in communications had nothing to do with Venezuela but everything to do with the potential of an epidemic to become a full-blown pandemic. Everybody wanted more information on this threat, but nobody, it seemed, was able to provide this information. And the reason for this, he began to gather, was that no information was now coming out of China. Where initially that country’s masters had been ‘fully transparent’ and ‘uncharacteristically open’ in their communications, they now seemed to have reverted to type, and little if any information was emerging from the infected empire.

  This was more than a little odd, and Stuart began to think that he might have the seed of a worthwhile report to HQ. But then he thought not. If he’d observed this behaviour by scrolling through these intercepts, it was inconceivable that the Death Star back in Blighty hadn’t picked it up as well, and that it wasn’t already attempting to divine what it all meant. And anyway, maybe it was no more than the sort of mass panic that overtakes everyone when they’re not quite sure of what’s going on. It was probably just human nature on show and nothing more. There was certainly no evidence to indicate that the epidemic was getting particularly worse, and indeed there was not even any evidence that it was spreading around the world. Quite the reverse. The emergence of new cases in other countries was being closely monitored, and there seemed to be none at all. Which surely must be very good news and hardly a reason to indulge in a bout of indecent panic.

  Nevertheless, Stuart would keep a close watch on developments. It was what he was trained to do and why he’d been posted to this windswept corner of the world. And who could tell? What might emerge could prove to be a great deal more interesting than watching Sandra Bullock and George Clooney pootling around in space. In fact, it could hardly prove less…

  eight

  Alex and Debbie shared their breakfast with two retired teachers. One had taught maths; the other, his wife, had taught physical education. Neither of them, it appeared, had fully recovered from their experience. It was in their manner. It was as though, thought Alex, they expected him or Debbie to become disruptive at any time or even to report them for inappropriate behaviour.

  So, Alex tried to assuage their potential concerns by steering clear of discussing anything that could be construed as controversial or that might lead to any sort of conflict. The condition of the sea was, he thought, a safe topic to introduce, and he asked them how they had dealt with the swell, a gentle but obvious swell that had developed overnight as a result of the Sea Sprite moving into open ocean. They both confirmed that this hadn’t been a problem during the night, and that it still wasn’t now. Indeed, they apparently felt entirely OK, and they thought they could probably cope with these sorts of seas indefinitely. Alex responded that he and Debbie felt the same, but didn’t confide that what was uppermost in his mind at the moment was whether he could identify – very quickly – a new safe topic of conversation, because this current swell one was on the point of drying up. He need not have worried. The maths teacher took up the task. By asking Alex and Debbie whether they had any idea what a ‘life coach’ did.

  After a little hesitation, Alex said he thought that they helped people in some way, but he really wasn’t sure. The maths man then revealed what he believed a life coach did, which was ‘to help people attain their goals in life’.

  This caused Alex to ignore his toast for a moment and to ask the single-word question ‘How?’

  This is when it soon became apparent that nobody around the table knew the answer to this question, and that the real purpose of life coaches being introduced into the conversation was to illustrate the proliferation of jobs that were something of a mystery to all those who didn’t do them. Life coaching was an extreme example, but what do ‘community development officers’ actually do, asked the maths man, and didn’t the world used to spin on its axis without an army of ‘social media managers’ to help it, or indeed without a single ‘existential therapy counsellor’; who, according to maths man, was somebody who helped his clients to gain new insights by changing the way they saw the world.

  Well, this had been an entirely unexpected start to the day, and a frivolous one as well. However, frivolity of any sort was soon to be dispensed with, because Jane had organised another mandatory presentation on biosecurity in anticipation of her charges being let loose on South Georgia in two days’ time. And that meant more lounge time after breakfast for another briefing on how not to screw up a fragile environment. And this briefing was, in many ways, a re-run of the first biosecurity briefing, but it was designed to underline just how special and how super-fragile the environment of South Georgia was, and how easily it could be damaged. Those who were responsible for this environment might have cleared it of introduced rats – and before then, introduced reindeers – but this hundred-mile-long refuge in the southern Atlantic still ran the risk of an assault by new alien invaders, and particularly an assault by a multitude of unwelcome seeds. It had already been colonised by a number of alien plant species, and there was now a real effort being made to prevent any further foreign wildlife setting up home there. Accordingly, Jane went to great lengths to explain that everyone’s kit would have to be near antiseptically clean before its owner was allowed to set foot on South Georgia, and that immediately after her briefing, there would be another kit inspection, where every outside piece of wear intended to be taken ashore would be rigorously examined.

  She hadn’t been joking. Alex and Debbie, along with all the other passengers from the Erikson Deck, had to report to an inspection point on this deck, where their boots, waterproof trousers, outer jackets, gloves, hats and neck warmers were all given the third degree. Not just a cursory perusal, but a full-blown ‘invasive’ examination, with particular attention paid to the rubber soles of their boots. These were the favourite hiding place of seeds, and needed to be screened for the smallest particle imaginable – that might just be a seed. It was not quite what Alex and Debbie had expected: an almost draconian scrutiny of one’s clothing, where there was a real possibility that one would be ordered back to one’s cabin to scrub one’s trousers or to take a paperclip to the soles of one’s boots, and thereafter report back for a further inspection.

 
They were OK. No aliens were located on their boots and no suspicious residues needed to be scrubbed from their trousers. They were therefore free to spend the rest of the morning at leisure – or, if they so wished, attend a non-mandatory presentation on how to take the best photos in South Georgia and the Antarctic, given by the ship’s official photographer, a willowy young lady called Rosie. This was mildly tempting, but not tempting enough. Debbie wanted to catch up on a number of minor chores, and Alex doubted that anyone could improve the way he just pointed his clever little camera at the object of his interest and then pressed the button on its top. So, while Debbie stayed in their cabin, Alex took himself off to explore the ship’s library, where, sitting in one of its handsome easy chairs, was Roy. With nobody else in this elegant sanctum, they soon decided that it was in order to have a conversation, and so Roy abandoned his tome on Flags of South American States and Provinces and engaged the new visitor to the library in an exchange on alien species…

  ‘It just breaks the habit of a lifetime,’ he started. ‘I mean, all this checking for seeds.’

  ‘I’m not sure I follow,’ offered Alex.

  ‘Well, it’s one of the things that define us: our propensity to introduce alien species into an environment where they’ll wreak havoc. And now we’re going to all this trouble in an attempt to stop something like a marginally harmless cress setting up home on a rock in the South Atlantic that’s already been invaded by stuff like buttercups and daisies. It just seems a bit… well, futile.’

  Alex must have betrayed the shock at what he’d just heard, because Roy immediately went on.

  ‘No, I know it’s not futile, and I’m just as fanatical as anyone when it comes to preventing the further screwing up of an environment. But I was simply trying to make the point that it’s quite funny that the most practised agent of alien invasions – our Homo sapiens mob – is now going to such great pains to reverse the habit of hundreds of lifetimes…’

  ‘Well, they did get rid of the rats – and the reindeer…’

  ‘Yes, they did,’ conceded Roy. ‘But from an island in the middle of the Atlantic. And that’s not to underestimate their efforts. But set against what we’ve done all around the world, it’s hardly going to register. And there’s no way they – or anybody – are going to be able to repeat that success on any major land mass.

  ‘I mean, how would you go about undoing the work of that guy in the States? You know, the one who thought that New York would be “more cultural” if its Central Park were home to every bird mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays, including the starling? And that’s why starlings are now a ubiquitous pest from Alaska to Mexico, and one that won’t ever be shifted no matter how many helicopters we might deploy.

  ‘Mind, that’s hardly the worst example, is it? Think about all the other species we’ve introduced stupidly or unwittingly. All those that haven’t become just pests, but an actual existential threat to the indigenous wildlife. I’m sure you know already, but there are just so many examples of introduced species first establishing themselves and then going on to compete with the native species. And knocking the shit out of them. You know, by introducing pathogens or parasites that either kill them directly or by screwing up their habitat. Or, of course, they might just miss out the middleman and simply eat them themselves…’

  Alex did already know, and, as Roy continued his indictment of mankind, in his mind he reeled through possums, cane toads, fire ants and pythons.

  ‘And don’t forget all those chaps that have gone feral all over the place. And all those plants: Himalayan balsam, Japanese knotweed, kudzu, rhododendron, purple loosestrife… I mean, you can go on and on. And, of course, it’s still happening. All those tree diseases that are cropping up everywhere, courtesy of our neglect and indifference, with no doubt more in the pipeline.’

  This was all valid stuff, thought Alex, but it was going nowhere. They both knew only too well just how destructive invasive species can be, and how humans had been so instrumental in facilitating the whole process of the wrong things being in the wrong place. So, Alex thought it was time to widen the discussion, first by registering the fact that Homo sapiens has so often played the role of invasive species itself.

  ‘Let’s not forget ourselves,’ he started. ‘Ever since we decided to take a stroll outside Africa, we’ve been busy invading everywhere else, and doing everything that’s expected of a noxious invasive species. We’ve killed the native species directly, for food or even sport. We’ve fucked up their environment or simply removed it. And, of course, we’ve introduced whole armies of domestic animals to displace the native wildlife. To the point that, in most of the world, the only animal of any size that you’re ever likely to encounter is one we intend to eat. In fact, we’ve been not so much an invasive species as an ecological steamroller, squashing flat the natural world as fast as our stupid careless attitude will let us.’

  This was no good. This was turning not into a debate, but into some sort of mutual reinforcement of Alex and Roy’s deep-seated beliefs, and matters were not improved by Roy’s further observations that by using all our skills to eliminate fauna and flora so adeptly, we were already an established extermination event. That, at the rate we were going, we were on course to wipe out half of all animal and plant species by the end of the century. And that would be as a direct result not just of our invasive species habits, but also of our love of overfishing, forest clearance, mining, hunting, contaminating or building on the natural world, and, of course, our buggering up of the climate as well.

  It was time to draw this exercise in reciprocal breast-beating to a close, and Alex did this by asking Roy how long he thought it would take for the human dreadnought of destruction to arrive in that one part of the world that it had yet to violate: Antarctica. It didn’t take long for Roy to respond.

  ‘Well, I assume you don’t mean Antarctic waters, because the Chinese krill fishers are already there…’

  Alex nodded his head.

  ‘Yes, I was meaning the continent itself. What’s currently protected by the Antarctic Treaty…’

  Roy again responded immediately.

  ‘The groundwork’s already started. Just look at how many so-called “research stations” there are where there is probably bugger-all real research going on. No, loads of them are just stakes in the ground, evidence of a pre-existing national presence to allow a national claim to be made when the starting whistle’s blown. I mean, you’re never going to convince me that Ukraine’s “research station” has been established to forward Antarctic research. Or how about Romania’s, or Pakistan’s! And then there are a whole clutch of Argentinian stations and a crop of newcomers, countries like South Korea, India, the Czech Republic and Belgium, all of whom have suddenly developed an intense interest in Antarctic research. Most of which, I suspect, has yet to be published…’

  ‘When will the starting whistle be blown?’ interrupted Alex.

  ‘As soon as our insatiable world decides that it’s a mere extravagance to ignore the Antarctic’s untapped riches. And that date isn’t too far off. Just think of all the minerals that could be mined there. And, of course, without any disturbance to human settlements, and largely out of sight. There won’t be many witnesses to an open-cast iron-ore mine at the bottom of the world.

  ‘Although, there again, I suspect the first wounds will be as a result of mining to extract some of the rather more exotic stuff. After all, if the world’s already bingeing on smartphones and it plans to power everything on four or more wheels with a battery, it’ll need a hell of a lot more lithium to start with, to say nothing of cobalt, nickel and some other really rare metals. And none of this stuff, as far as I know, grows on trees. And soon not enough of it will be found underground – unless we raid our precious larder of last resort. I’m sorry, but I think Antarctica is already on borrowed time, and however the starting whistle gets blown, as soon as the shrill blast i
s heard, the prospectors and the miners will be in there before you can say, “Devastate, despoil and devour.” Antarctica, as we know it, will no longer exist.’

  Alex didn’t quite know how to respond. Especially as he could again challenge nothing that Roy had said. It was more or less what he himself thought would be Antarctica’s fate. And he certainly agreed with him on the rather suspect proliferation of so-called research stations on the continent, and the remarkable interest in Antarctic research shown by so many countries so far from Antarctica that had shown no such interest in the past. Or maybe Romania really did want to push forward the understanding of this frozen continent. He couldn’t, of course, be entirely sure that it didn’t…

  Anyway, it was now coming up to lunchtime, so Alex avoided an immediate response by suggesting to Roy that they rendezvous in a few minutes time in the lido restaurant, where, with Debbie, they would be able to gauge whether outside dining was feasible despite being in such an exposed part of the planet. It was. And over lunch, Debbie was treated to a synopsis of their earlier discussion before she rescued them both from their self-inflicted melancholy by steering the conversation in the direction of workplace romances. Where, she wanted to know, would men and women meet each other in the future, now that workplace dalliances seemed to be on the verge of being bracketed with stalking and sexual assault? Especially those men and women who were allergic to discos and nightclubs. Neither Alex nor Roy knew the answer to this puzzle, although Roy did suggest that if they weren’t able to meet, it might provide a partial solution to the world’s population problem.