Cold War in a Country Garden

by Lindsay Gutteridge

  Sounds of running water and the early morning flight of wasps filled the air. A mob of grasshoppers came down to drink, the slanting light of the early sun gleaming on their angular bodies. Dilke aimed his first shot at the middle of the nearest hopper. The bolt went with good velocity but hit the creature low in the body, it glanced off the smooth plating and plunged into the shallow stream throwing up a spray of water. The insect was startled by the blow and it sprang into the air and vanished. Dilke’s second shot was better, but though it hit a hopper squarely on the thorax it failed to penetrate. The creature was knocked sideways and almost fell, then it left its companions by the stream and stood sulkily alone. The wooden bolts were too light and Henry suggested that panel pins cut to length might be more effective.

  A caterpillar humped its way along a leaf above the stream. Dilke shot a bolt at the soft-skinned creature which passed clean through its body; its movements stopped and it rolled slowly down the curved surface of the leaf, its brilliant green back and pale-green belly flashing as it rolled. It fell into the shadows in a shower of water. Then, to their astonishment, it righted itself and started its undulating journey again—a little more slowly, but otherwise unchanged. They were not the only observers of the caterpillar: a hunting wasp which had come to drink on the other side of the stream suddenly took a dozen running steps, flew off low over the water and with a noise like a buzz-saw mounted the caterpillar. Its legs clutched the bolster-like shape, the tip of its abdomen was raised high then brought flashing down, plunging its sting into the soft body. It withdrew the sting, spurting amber venom, and plunged it in twice more, the caterpillar rolled convulsively each time then lay still. The wasp retained its hold and with a blur of wings which rippled the surface of the stream it rose with its victim and lurched slowly and laboriously into the air.

  Henry was the first to speak. “By God! that’s it, Mathew. That’s the answer. Even if we penetrate these creatures many of them will be unharmed by a simple bolt. We must do it like that…” and he pointed to where the wasp disappeared among the honeysuckle leaves. They reconsidered the whole problem. Clearly they couldn’t use wasp stings but they could make their own; and instead of wasp venom they could use poison from the jungle of nettles which grew against the hut side.

  They returned to the spare-parts depot in the old spider’s web and raked out dozens of tubes, the remains of insects’ legs, which they carried to the edge of the stream. They stuck the ends into soft yellow clay and laid them in the sun to let the plugs harden, sealing one end. Then they climbed on to a nettle leaf and filled the tubes; Dilke struck the tips of the stings with the back of his heavy machete and the brittle glass-like spears snapped at the base. Henry carefully decanted the liquid into the hollow tubes and plugged the ends with clay. They sat on the leaf and waited for their first victim to come to the water.

  A dung beetle abandoned its huge load to drink. The poisoned bolt was wonderfully effective. The weight of the liquid poison gave it extra penetrating power and the insect was killed or paralysed almost instantly. It was a convincing test case, for the beetle was heavily armoured. They took turns to shoot at a mixed mob of hoppers and aphids. Their shooting was erratic because not all the tubes were straight and some of the bolts swerved in flight.

  Ironically, one of their victims was a hunting wasp; it came to the same watering-place as the wasp which had inspired Henry. It took a little time to die, its erratic buzzing and spinning as it floated downstream frightening away the more timid insects.

  During their discussions about crossbow-making Dilke discovered that his ideas about size and distance had become very muddled. When in his garden he alternated between thinking of the measurements he had known when his garden was thirty feet long and the distance which he now travelled, in which his garden seemed to be several miles long.

  Though Henry had occasionally found it difficult to adapt emotionally to the new scale, in the abstract he took to it immediately: a life spent thinking in fractions of a millimetre had prepared him for a micro-world.

  “What we want is a range of at least a hundred yards if this crossbow is going to be any good,” said Dilke.

  “Yards, Mathew?” laughed Henry. “What we want is a standard system of measurement if we’re going to have a meaningful way of talking about distance. What I mean is that if we’re going to relate the world of head office and our world then we’ll have to use a set of measurements which will be common to both worlds yet which are fine enough to be of use to you and me. I think it’s typical of British insularity that we’re coded as 00.25 of an inch; I’ll bet your Major Price was behind that.”

  They were talking on the ledge of the bed-sit; the evening air was cool and they had a good leaping fire going.

  “Let us go metric. Look, Mathew,” lectured Henry, “we are about one three-hundred of our original size—that is to say: You were 6 feet, you are now 00.25 of an inch, which is a quarter of an inch. A quarter of an inch goes into 6 feet 288 times. That’s near enough 300: in other words, one foot of our old world is now 300 feet. Your garden, which I would guess was 30 feet long, is now like 9,000 feet long to us.” Henry paused to do mental arithmetic. “Let’s say a mile is roughly 5,000 feet, then that makes your garden almost 2 miles long. And let’s say the allotment is 75 feet long, about five miles to us, that makes it roughly 7 miles from here to your house, to us.

  “But this is the interesting thing: you were 6 feet tall, you are now 6 millimetres tall. If we think in terms of millimetres instead of feet we have an easy way to talk about distances. For instance… Henry pointed over the edge of the platform at the shed floor which lay in darkness, “the floor is about 150 millimetres below us—that would have been 150 feet by our old standards.”

  Henry now talked quickly, as if at a lectern, impatiently flicking back his dark hair when it fell into his eyes.

  “We could go on to centimetres and decimetres but it might be better to keep it simple and stick to millimetres. We can use decimals to express fractions of a millimetre: you are 6 millimetres, I am about 5.95 millimetres… ” Henry paused for breath. “Our walking speed is about 15.000 millimetres an hour; our running speed is about 50.000 millimetres an hour. A normal-sized man walking at 3 miles per hour would seem to us to be travelling at about 1,000 miles per hour.” He pulled a stick out of the fire, knocked out the flames on the platform edge and drew figures on the smooth yellow surface of the door.

  OBJECT

  Actual speed (miles)

  Apparent speed to us

  Normal man

  3 m.p.h.

  1,000 m.p.h.

  Vehicle

  30 m.p.h.

  10,000 m.p.h.

  Jet plane

  1,000 m.p.h.

  300,000 m.p.h

  Henry gazed abstractedly at the box. He wrote beneath it in big letters: ONE MILLIMETRE—ONE FOOT, then turned to Dilke with a wide smile. “I’ve run out of steam.”

  He speared the charcoal stick out into the blackness and came and squatted by the fire, “As you say, Mathew, what we want is a crossbow with a range of at least 300 millimetres.”

  On the following evening Dilke revealed his thoughts on the sort of life future micro-men might have.

  “There’s no food shortage, that’s certain.” Dilke gazed into a steaming bowl made from a beetle’s shell and poked at the half submerged seeds, sliced bean shoots and insect eggs. He recalled some of Professor Mathis’s views on micro-populations and his belief that mass miniaturization could solve the problem of overpopulation.

  “I think Mathis is too sanguine,” Henry drily interposed. “If they don’t lower the birth-rate the increase will soon negate the advantage of a bigger food supply. But they may be buying time—if they can reduce the pressure till the end of the century it gives them the chance to come up with something else.”

  “You don’t sound at all optimistic, Henry.”

  “Just realistic, Mathew.” Henry fed sticks into the fire and sat bac
k. “These population trends are common to all forms of life: the graph goes up when conditions are right and comes down when they’re not—though I think man has more in common with the suicidal lemming, than with other beasts.

  “The big jump in the population of man started around 25000 B.C. with the invention of the clay pot and of missiles—which is just about where we’ve got to…” he nodded at the bowl and the crossbow. “Before that there was enormous mortality through drinking blood and eating putrid flesh and burnt meat—stewing food sterilized it. And weapons reduced deaths from hunting dangerous animals. Ever since then, the increase has accelerated, till now it’s up to fifty millions a year.”

  “Well, we’ve got to try something, then.” Dilke looked up sharply through the steam.

  “Of course. But don’t worry Mathew, if this doesn’t work there is always war, famine, pestilence, disease… acts of God and man. And I’m not really a pessimist. It’s a slow, slow business; even if we bomb each other into the stone age we can’t destroy all recorded knowledge, and the next lot will get a flying start when they dig it all up.”

  Dilke silently paddled the stew round the pot then said with mild exasperation, “Why the hell did yon come on this jaunt, then?”

  “I was asked,” Henry replied. “And I wanted to be the first entomologist to meet Aculeata formicidae face to face.”

  Dilke frowned.

  “The ant, Mathew,” Henry explained.

  3

  Head office rang through next day.

  Olsen was to join them. He was under sedation and would be ready to be picked up in ten days.

  Henry put ten charcoal strokes on the door and as each day passed he crossed one out. On the evening before the rendezvous Dilke talked a good deal about Olsen.

  Bill Olsen: an Anglo-Dane, son of a bankrupt tobacco farmer. They first met in a bar in Lagos when Dilke was keeping watch on a Chinese Peoples Republic Agricultural Delegation—and Olsen was resting between Rich American Trophy Hunters. When the C.P.R.A.D. left, the two men went up-country and safaried around for a while. For several years afterwards Dilke spent his vacations with Olsen. They both liked heat, rough country, hunting and boozing. When hunting went out of favour in East Africa Olsen took a job with the Kenya Game Preservation Reserve as a senior warden—“poacher turned gamekeeper”, some said. Hippo and elephant overcrowded the reserve and Olsen was mostly employed in culling. In a letter to Dilke he had complained that his boss was a German conservation nut. Olsen found red tape irksome.

  Henry began to wonder if he was going to get along with Olsen.

  Dilke sat by the fire wrapping the handle of his machete with fishing-line. He had unravelled a length of multistrand line and was carefully wrapping a strand round the metal handle. He talked of the villages up in the Gorilla highlands; of the sort of life the villagers lived and of their friendliness; of the drinking and the drumming and the dancing. He carefully wound the line in neat rows as he talked, grunting occasionally when he pulled it tight, remembering the trips through the sunburnt country, the black people, the thatched huts sitting like beehives on the hillsides… He heard a drumming so clearly that it could have been real, an ululating cry so real that it could have come from a village in a valley.

  He looked up from the knife, Henry sat opposite, staring at him, his head turned a little to one side, listening…

  Dilke dropped the knife, scrambled to his feet, cupped his hands round his mouth and shouted “Bill!” He pulled the short word out; holding the sound for several seconds then he jumped to the platform edge and looked down to the shed floor, shielding his eyes from the glare of the fire. On the floor far below a figure squatted by a hollow seed-case shaped like a calabash. The beat of the drum grew quicker and louder till the hands of the man moved in a blur of speed. Then they stopped. There was a pause of seconds and a deep, measured voice spoke into the silence, intoning the words as if speaking a litany.

  “Nakusalimu ndugu yangu. Nimekuja kwako kwa salama na amani.”

  Dilke recognized the Swahili greeting of a stranger come to visit.

  The greeting was followed by a shout of hoarse laughter, Dilke vaulted over the lip of the platform before the laughter stopped echoing from the shed walls, he took the rope in his hands and descended rapidly to the floor, like a rock climber going down a cliff face.

  The light was now almost gone, but Henry saw Dilke hit the floor and run towards the drummer. The men paused for a moment before shaking hands and hammering each other on the back; then they turned and walked towards the tower. Henry heard the sounds of garbled talk and bursts of laughter, which grew clearer as the men climbed higher up the box face. A brown hand took hold of the platform edge, a second hand appeared and placed a polythene demijohn on the platform.

  Olsen hauled himself up and stood erect. He was suddenly silent and he gazed at Henry steadily and without expression. Both men remained silent until Dilke clambered up and said, “Henry this is Bill Olsen, Bill this is Henry Scott-Milne,” then Olsen stepped forward and shook hands. He was a much shorter man than Dilke, but as broad; his medium height and wide shoulders gave him a square appearance and he stood on slightly bowed legs. He had a beat-up Jean Gabin face rather too big for his body; his hair was blond, streaked with bleached white strands.

  The extraordinary thing about him was his colouring. His face had been burnt brick-red by the African sun but the rest of him was a patchwork of brown and white like a Hereford bull. His bush shirt and shorts had kept his pale skin from the sun and his feet were laced with a white filigree from the straps of his sandals. A puckered scar started in the brown of his neck and ran across his chest as if he had been run through a sewing machine.

  “How the hell did you get here?” cried Dilke.

  “Walked, you soft sod. Straight down Park Lane, and I brought my luggage with me!” Bill Olsen reached out a hand and picked up the polythene container.

  “Yes, but how did you find us?” insisted Dilke.

  “Followed you; a one-eyed Kaffir with his head in a sack could have seen your tracks. Here—have a go at this, old man,” he uncapped the big polythene bottle and handed it to Dilke. The swirling liquid hiccuped twice and Dilke put his nose to the neck of the bottle then grinned and raised it to his mouth. Henry watched his Adam’s apple rise and fall in jerks, then Dilke wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, wiped the neck with his palm and handed it across to him.

  Henry put the bottle to his lips and sipped at its contents. The neat whisky caught at his throat and he burst into a paroxysm of coughing; tears ran from his eyes.

  Bill Olsen rescued the bottle and looked at him in a friendly way, “You should take more water with it, my old lad.”

  “But why are you a day early? You weren’t due until tomorrow.”

  “It’s Saturday today and I said they could drop me off on Friday night and save the week-end of the guy who was doing the delivery job. Christ! You were right about the game, Mat. The place is alive with it: millions of ants and herds of those green things. How are you fixed for guns? You’ll need a .470 Bloch and Steiner to stop some of the brutes, they’ve got plates on them like bloody tanks.”

  Henry brought out the crossbow and gave it to Olsen who examined it with interest but clearly thought it was inadequate until they explained the use of the poisoned bolts. He caressed its stock with his hand, worked the cocking lever, and put it to his shoulder. “It’s very good,” he said, “it might be better to hinge the lever a bit farther back and you should try to cut out that squeak. Is this the only one you have?”

  “The only one,” said Dilke.

  “I’ll start on number two tomorrow,” said Olsen.

  They moved indoors away from the moths and took the fire with them. The two older men settled down to a session of reminiscence and bottle passing. Henry sat quietly and watched them, contributing laughter to Bill Olsen’s more outrageous stories and keeping the fire going. As the hours passed a sadness came over him; these men
talked of friends and places and past experiences as if they still lived in the world they had known. He fell asleep with Bill Olsen’s voice in his ears; English, with Danish and American overtones, spiced with obscenities.

  Henry woke early and saw only Dilke asleep in the chamber, through the door he saw Olsen’s square shape standing on the platform edge; as he watched, Olsen slowly brought the bow to his shoulder and fired.

  “Any luck?” Henry asked.

  Bill Olsen swung round “No, no luck at all, Henry, these bolts are the big problem.” He was quieter than he had been on the previous night, though he seemed to suffer no ill effects from the drinking.

  He asked Henry to help him get parts for a new bow and they talked together until they heard a long yawn from the lock interior. Bill Olsen raised his voice and called, “Get up you lazy bastard!” and Dilke came out, his eyes screwed up against the grey morning light He sat down heavily by the fire and in reply to Olsen’s “How are you feeling?” answered, “Out of practice.”

  They went to the stream and Dilke revived after a cold swim. As they re-entered the shed they saw the box in the distance. The morning sun revealed its full Byzantine glory, just as Dilke had first seen it. All three men stopped to stare. Then Olsen stepped forward. “Come on men, let’s get back to the Kremlin, I’m hungry.”

  After breakfast Bill and Henry went off to find crossbow parts: to the web for bolts and a lever and to the mouldering slopes of the News of the World for a bow. Henry dispatched a wood louse and cut out the bow spring; Bill Olsen’s face showed surprise at finding this butcher’s skill in one he had thought so young. Henry killed and dissected two more lice and handed the three bow springs over: “There’s a choice of size for you, Bill.” They worked together on the new bow; in general it was much like the first one but with two important differences: the bow spring was much bigger, almost two millimetres wide; and Olsen fitted a sighting tube. There were also refinements in the shape of its stock and in its dimensions which made it much nicer to handle and which improved its performance.