Now I know it’s the sparrows, I can see how suicidal it would be to go outside. I mean, there are thousands of them out there. They’re on the limbs of the statues in the yard. They’re clustered on the concrete. They decorate the overhead wires, the signposts, the lamp posts. They’re on the pavement, in the gutter. They’re everywhere. When are they not? You don’t even notice them, normally. You take them for granted, consciously, even subliminally, ignore them.
They’re there every day, but today is different, today they are what they are. Any one of them could be. Potentially potent. The it among the they could blow you to kingdom come and go, so they tell us. It’s been on the news, in the news, everywhere, word of mouth, word of print. I don’t know which of them are, and which aren’t. How can you tell? Looking at them they all look the same: they all look innocent and deadly.
You have to sit well away from the window, just in case one of them lands on the sill. I’ve heard, they’ve told me on the comm, that slivers of glass fly in like knives shot from a gun, to strip you to the bone. That’s what I’ve heard. So you stay away from windows, keep the curtains closed, maybe even wire-net the inside.
Why me? This was the first, possibly very selfish, thought that crossed my brain when I got the call. Why me? Others have got the gift of insight, so why not them? Why not that dickhead Williams, or Danny Pugerchov? How come I was chosen to do the investigation? Who have I upset in the last few years? Who wants me out of the way for good? Unless the other agents are already dead? Unless they already have a hole in their torsos through which you could pass a football? Unless their heads are already decorating the town centre and suburbs as biltong and bone shards . . .
If I had any time, these questions themselves would be investigated. If I live through this, I will certainly seek out my enemies, and nail the bastards to the wall. In the meantime, I have to stay with it, stay on it, stay alive.
The first part of any investigation is of course easy. Pure research. Books can’t hurt you, at least in your own living-room. You don’t have to protect your eyes from splinters of bone and beak when reading a book, because books don’t explode, not yet anyhow. Maybe books will one day be the most dangerous articles in the office, but today at least they are innocuous. I have a substantial library in my office, which is where I live, eat, sleep and breathe. I don’t have to go out on the streets and risk getting my head blown off zipadee-doo-da-there’s-a-brown-bird-on-my-shoulder style.
‘Sparrow (spærou) noun. a member of Passer, fam. Fringillidae (*FINCH) esp. the house sparrow [O.E. spearwa].’
Good enough. So much for the dictionary. I always like to start with the definition. I mean, did you know the sparrow was a finch? Maybe you did, but a lot of people don’t. Me for one. I thought a sparrow was a sparrow.
‘SPARROW. Though probably the most often seen of British birds, sparrows are not the most numerous; they are outnumbered by chaffinches and blackbirds. Sparrows appear numerous because they live in close association with man, building untidy nests in holes, in thatch and walls and in hedges. There are two species of British sparrow: the tree sparrow and the house sparrow.’
Hedges? Tree sparrows? Walls and flagstones. Bricks and mortar. Concrete sparrows.
Seed eaters, it goes on to say. That was then. Now of course, there is no seed. No seed, no hedges, no trees. Not outside the greenhouses. Only concrete. Now they get what they can, where they can. They peck away at anything. It used to be the waste food in the trash: vegetable matter, offal, fat, gristle. Now even that is denied them, since the recycling of all edible rubbish, for domestic stock.
Enough of the encyclopaedia. There is more to say that is unwritten. That is, there are millions of the little bastards, swarming around the cities. They like us, or rather, they like the food we give them. They are worldwide. Sometimes so numerous as to be a hazard. Mao Tse Tung listed them as one of the ‘Four Pests’ and ordered their extermination in China. The year after the slaughter the country was invaded by insects.
The comm.
‘Hello?’
‘Listen, we need an answer soon. How close are you to an answer?’
‘I only just got started.’
‘We have to know. Is it the government? Is it anarchists or terrorists? Is it the big corporations or financial houses? It has to be one of these three groups.’
‘I’ll get back to you.’
The comm falls silent. Of course it has to be one of the big three. As a loner you poison a jar of baby food and demand a ransom. That’s cheap and easy. You plant a bomb in a supermarket for fun, because you have a warped mind and you are an individual. You shoot fourteen, fifteen people with an automatic weapon because you are a sociopath or you do a string of serial murders as a psychopath. These don’t cost a great deal, no big layout.
But to produce genetically-detonated little flying bombs—that costs money. Big money. You need to be a billionaire several times over for that kind of thing.
An explosive random killer. Not a BIG bang, of course, but bigger than a feathered ball full of plastic explosive. What about nuclear fission, on a small scale? Is that possible? Can you control a chain reaction: limit it to pocket-sized boom? I don’t know too much about the science, but I know nuclear bombs need heavy elements to produce those enormous releases of energy. I know that much. Maybe the sparrows contain lighter elements? The explosion is large enough to rip apart a good sized room. If you’re inside with one when it goes off, so I’m told, they need a finely-sharpened razor to scrape you off the walls.
Something coming down the mail chute.
What’s this? Nobody writes letters any more. A parcel?
A live creature flies out of the tube and into the room and I instinctively dive for the space behind the desk.
After a second or two I see it’s not a sparrow, but a canary.
It’s got to be a joke. One, or some of the boys in another department in the building, trying to get me going, now that I’ve been put on the job. It’s probably that sicko, Jameson, in Dispatches. What the hell though, canaries may have started interbreeding with sparrows. Maybe it’s in the chromosomes and they pass it on, the deadly little sperm carrying the genetic code? A billion to one but who the hell wants to risk it? The heartbeat is rapid, pattering in the tiny chest. Shit, maybe this is the fuse? A time bomb. Not tick-tock-tick-tock, but pat-pat-pat-pat-pat, and on the eight-thousandth heartbeat, the detonation, the explosion? A room full of bits of feather and flesh, bird and man mingling on the wallpaper, on the ceiling, on the floor tiles.
Using my insight I check out the canary, find nothing.
I call Jameson.
‘Hey, Jameson? Did you send me a bird…? Oh, for my birthday? It’s not my birthday for five months. Remind me to do something nasty to you when I see you next.’
Now, what to do about the bird?
First I catch it, in the wastepaper basket.
Now, do I blow its head off? Shoot the thing? What with, a .45? Overkill. Stifle it then? Wait. If I kill it violently, maybe there’s a genetic device, a fail-safe primer hidden in the DNA, like a trembler on a conventional bomb? Maybe if I stop the heart, dead, it will go up automatically? Best to stop it slowly. Put it in the freeze compartment of the refrigerator, slow the heart beat down gradually, turn the poor little bastard to ice. This is survival after all. You can’t afford to be squeamish when you’re threatened with a nasty form of extinction.
I make another call, to the boss.
‘Are you sure this is real? I mean, have you actually heard one, seen a sparrow go off?’
‘There are people who have.’
‘Yeah, but apocryphal tales and all that shit? Everyone knows someone who knows someone who has, but no one has actually seen it for themselves. I mean, truth or myth? Is it really serious, or is it just rumour?’
‘It’s serious, believe me. Get on it.’
‘What about catching some, in a net, and looking at them under controlled conditions.’
‘And?’
‘Zilch. Someone has to look at them in the wild, that’s to say, in their own environment.’
‘The concrete jungle?’
‘Okay, the only environment they’ve got left. Outside. Whatever you like to call it. Nothing shows up when they’re in captivity. It’s up to you.’
‘Why me?’ I ask the question at last.
‘You know why. You’re the man.’
‘One of them.’
‘One of those.’
I am proof that the Theory of Punctuated Evolution, which states that evolution is not gradual and regular, but punctuated by drastic leaps to meet extraordinary circumstances, is no longer simply a theory. I’m one of those: a drastic leap. One of the few who can read the inscape of other people, read their emotions like a map, feel their intentions, discover their design. Survival. I find the terrorist in a crowd. I find the psychopath, the sociopath, when I get close enough to smell the desire for death, feel the absence of emotions. The human race has need of me, in this overdeveloped world, full of neuroses, madness, violence. I read them, and all other creatures, any and every living thing.
But there are quite a few others who can do the same. I’m not unique. I am no freak, you understand.
‘What’s happened to the others? What are they doing right now? Where’s Williams?’
‘You’re the investigator on this one.’
‘I might get blown to pieces and then I’ll be nothing. How about a protective suit, or even a flack jacket and helmet?’
‘Wear what you want. Protect yourself. But get out there. It’s your job.’
It’s my job. They know that. Others know that. Did Jameson really send me the bird? Was that his voice on the comm or a clever copy? What do I know? Nothing. I can’t use insight at a distance, through walls. I have to get close to my subject to see inside it, understand it.
I look inside the canary again, carefully study its inscape. It feels innocent enough. Nothing registers. Maybe they’ve got it screened in some way. You evolve the gift of insight and then someone comes up with a screen to prevent it. That’s progress. Only thing that stands between unstoppable attack and ultimate defence is time. You get one, the other follows naturally, as night follows day, only in unknowable hours.
Into the freezer with the canary.
Sparrows. Just the right size. Not too big, not too small. All over the goddamn place. Random. Millions of the little fuckers. Flying bombs. Hiding on the ledges, the rooftops, in the eves, in the drains. Not hiding at all, but hopping along pavements, roads, pathways. Scattered in the squares, looking harmless. How the hell are we going to find out? What do we do when we do find out? Gas them all overnight? Maybe someone will come up with a device for killing them. A freeze gun? You point the thing, squeeze the trigger, and a dozen sparrows fall out of the sky. Thunk, thunk, thunk. Little balls of solid ice.
Wait a minute. Maybe the gun has already been invented? Maybe it was invented before the sparrows became biological experiments? The gun had no use, so then the inventor invented a use? Perhaps the sparrows are here because the gun needs to be marketed, sold in all the retail stores, for the inventors to get their money back? First the freeze gun, then the sparrows? I would buy one. Who wouldn’t? Even if the truth got out, you would still want a weapon, and if that was the most effective, then purchase and be damned, regardless of moral distaste.
How many of these have there been, in recent years? The cure without the disease, so then discover the disease, let it loose, get rich curing it?
Could be the big corporations.
Back to the research.
The Ornithologist’s Guide: ‘Sparrows do not migrate.’
They’re local then. You can contain the experiment, within a given area. This is more like government, testing out its new weaponry. ‘Don’t worry boss, it won’t get out of hand. We’ll just test it out on a few people. No one will know. Nobody will ever find out. Nothing can go wrong.’ Famous last sentences, rearrangable syntax. Myxomatosis wiped out sixty million rabbits in this country alone and it wasn’t even started here. They started it on the other side of the world. It always gets out of hand, always goes wrong. Sixty million. That’s the total British population, of people, right now.
Governments are good at hiding things, covering up their insane blunders, losing documents. Yet they never stop their experiments, on people, on animals, on nature. Wonderful methods of destruction: defoliants, napalm, nuclear weapons. They move too fast when starting things, and move too slowly to stop them. God has always made the big disasters, and now governments too. The disasters get bigger all the time. Government equals God now. Disasters at nuclear power stations. Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, over a period of thirty years. Random disasters, flying around in history by the hundred million, too few in a lifetime to alarm, but in geological time, too many.
The comm again.
I am impatient with them.
‘What?’
‘Go outside and look around.’
‘Fuck you. You go outside.’
A voice charged with quiet panic.
‘You can be replaced.’
‘So replace me.’
‘You can be punished.’
‘Yeah? Who’s going to come round to smack me?’
Click.
So what about the third possibility?
Terrorists don’t do things for nothing. They want something. Prisoners released. Land returned. Ideologies destroyed and other ideologies put into place. An end to war, a start to war. Not nothing. Something. What do they want then?
How about the Mafia? They want money and power. No money and power to be had with random terror.
Strike out terrorists and criminals.
Maybe anarchists? Any government is a bad government, no government is a good government. I’ll go along with that. So why kill the ordinary people? The population? Does that upset the government? Not really. They do it themselves, in various ways.
Sparrows. What if they increase in number, the bomb-sparrows as opposed to the non-bomb-sparrows? Maybe there’s say, one in a thousand at the moment, but with breeding? What if it’s a dominant gene? A dominant gene and a season to pass it on, before the ticker reaches the required number and takes out the wall of a house.
Comm. Me again.
‘Fuck it, I’m going outside. I’m going crazy in here. There are no answers to be found indoors.’
‘About time.’
‘I’ll get back to you.’
‘Leave the line open, so we can hear.’
‘Hear what?’
No answer.
Someone singing in my head: My sweet ex-pend-able you...
After putting on a flack jacket and helmet I prepare myself, psychologically, for going outside. There’s no point in wearing anything over the whole of my head, like a diver’s helmet, because that would interfere with my insight. Anyway, it’s just a gesture. When you get that close to a bomb, the concussion turns your brains to porridge, whatever you’ve got on in the way of protective clothing. There are other more important considerations to worry about.
What if it’s not a time bomb? What if it’s some kind of heat-trigger that sets it off? You walk close to a sparrow and Goodbye Columbus. Or maybe some kind of beam from their eyes and you break the circuit? Perhaps the exploding birds have funny laser eyes, that blow you to hell?
I have plenty of questions.
‘I think it’s nature,’ I say into the comm, ‘not governments, terrorists or corporations. They’re big noises to us, but mere hiccups in time to nature, to history. Just little glitches, little pops and fizzes, like seedpods exploding under the sun. What if it’s the way they reproduce now, spread their egg-seeds over a wide area like exploding pods, grow sparrow-blooms that break off in the spring and fly away?’
‘Have you been outside and taken a look?’
> ‘That must be it. Nature. It’s something we’ve done to the atmosphere, with our radio waves, our space junk, our deodorant sprays. We’ve polluted the sky and the earth, letting in things through the ozone layer. The sparrows are just freaks, but natural freaks, so not freaks at all. I mean, if they’ve altered naturally, overnight, then they’re not mutants, but simply quick-change artists of evolution, like me. Humans the unfortunates that get in their way? Wham-bam, evolutionary spam.’
‘Listen, have you been outside?’
‘I’d like to go, but there ’s death out there. On the streets, in the air. I used to be scared of motorways and skin cancer, but now it’s sparrows that obsess me. I will go out, but not today, not till I get used to them, take them for granted, like bombs in the Blitz.’
‘If you don’t go out soon, we may never get to know, we might not be given the chance.’
‘That’s true. Do we need to? I mean, do we have to know the why of everything? Can’t we leave just one question unanswered, one puzzle unsolved? Why do we have to classify all the shapes on the earth, label them in Latin, count their bones, their heartbeats, witness their sexual antics, watch them eating each other? I mean, these are the first exploding sparrows, so they don’t fit into any group, type, family or species. Or if you really can’t bear for it not to have a scientific label, then how about Passer bombicus? That’ll do, won’t it? Why do we need to explain everything?’
‘It’s your job.’
‘What, to understand the whole universe?’
‘No, to find out what this is.’
‘Well, let’s leave this one, eh? Why not? Let’s just have a wonder we don’t know anything about. A deadly wonder. We’ve killed enough cobras and dissected them. We’ve hunted enough sharks and measured their jaws, numbered their teeth. Let’s have one very dangerous thing we don’t know anything about and let it keep its secrets? The cryptic sparrow, with its weird unknown biological reaction to God knows what. Here we have what used to be the common house sparrow, ladies and gentlemen, which suddenly turned into a kamikaze killer, for no logical reason. Reach out with your emotions, and feel what you feel: hate, admiration, fear. Marvel but don’t analyse. Empathise, but don’t try to understand, or you’ll destroy the wonder of the thing. What do you say? I’m going to hang up now, and I don’t want to hear from you again.’
Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales Page 15