The Cassandra Complex

by Brian Stableford

  Probably, she thought, that was why the intruders had come to her apartment—not to rob, but to discredit her; to do as much as they could to earn her the mistrust of Peter Grimmett Smith and his merry MOD men. If so, she had to hope that Mr. Smith wouldn’t fall for it—and whether he did or not, she had to bend every atom of her intelligence and of her knowledge of Morgan Miller’s life and work to figuring out exactly what kind of mess he had gotten himself into.

  First Interlude

  THG POLITICS OF MOUSEWORLD

  The tour that Morgan Miller gave Lisa when he welcomed her to the department began with the lab space in which she would be working and the parallel spaces occupied by her fellow research students, then progressed to his own territory. There was far too much for her to take in all at once, and too many names to remember, but it was obvious from the start that Miller was a misfit. It wasn’t just the fact that he was the only person except for the departmental secretaries who wasn’t wearing a white coat; it was the slight wariness haunting the attitudes other people struck when they spoke to him. Some of them, Lisa assumed, must have been working cheek-by-jowl with him for years, but not one of them gave the impression of actually knowing him.

  Miller was not a tall man—his height was almost exactly the same as Lisa’s—but he gave the impression of being loftier than he was. His frame was slim and his face rather gaunt. She guessed that he was in his late thirties, but there was a stern agelessness about his hard features that suggested he wouldn’t look substantially different in twenty years’ time. No one would have described him as handsome, but the narrowness of his jaw made the upper half of his face seem uncommonly wide, exaggerating the width of his forehead and making his dark-brown eyes seem a trifle overlarge. When he had been a child, Lisa thought, those eyes must have seemed plaintive and adorable, but now that he was a man, they seemed intimidatingly cool and contemplative. The whole ensemble gave the impression of a penetrating intelligence quietly lurking in the depths of an unusual mind. Had he not possessed such a luxuriant head of dark-brown hair—which certainly wasn’t a wig—Miller might have have resembled a stereotyped cartoon egghead, but there was something about him that resisted submission to any kind of category.

  It wasn’t until the end of the tour that he took her into Mouseworld. He ushered her through the door with a wry smile, as if he were ashamed to have to stoop so low as to use it as a kind of punch Une but had no alternative. It was an awesome sight, and it stopped her in her tracks for a moment. Miller had obviously seen similar reactions many times before, and the wryness of his smile twisted his thin lips into an unclassifiable grimace.

  “Four hundred and fifty thousand, give or take ten percent,” he said, anticipating the question that had indeed sprung unbidden to Lisa’s lips—although she had not actually intended to voice it, because she knew how lame it would sound. “That’s in the one big experiment distributed around the four walls. The mice in the central block are taking part in several hundred different enterprises of considerably more importance, so we take care to give them all the space they need. Ours are in this sector here.”

  Miller moved toward the central H-shaped complex, but Lisa didn’t move with him, even though she had noted that he’d said “ours” rather than “mine.” She couldn’t take her eyes off the walls.

  The four cities were not identical in terms of their layout—London had to accommodate the door to the lab, Paris was interrupted by two large windows, Rome by two smaller ones, and New York by a huge cupboard—but all four were “open” in the sense that all of the internal partitions contained doorways and all of the rooms had openings in the floor and ceiling, connected by ladders to the floors above and below. Although each city’s space was divided into dozens of floors and each floor into hundreds of compartments, every mouse could get to any location within its own city, always provided that the other mice in the sector would permit it to pass.

  Lisa observed that the automatic feeding mechanism was simple in its basic design but amazingly intricate in its construction, making a supply of food pellets and water continuously available to every compartment. She also saw that each compartment had its own built-in cleaning system, equally simple in design, which continuously replaced the sawdust-like matrix that soaked up the urine. The system must have been wondrously efficient, because the stink, though distinct, was by no means nauseating. Such quasiclinical observations were, however, utterly overwhelmed by the impression created by the restless mice as they swarmed in vast numbers through the mazy complexes, like wheat fields blown by a wayward wind, or an ocean stirred by lashing rain and turbulent eddies.

  She had never seen anything like it, nor had she ever imagined anything like it. She had never seen Ufe in such awful, chaotic profusion.

  “It must cost a fortune,” was the observation she actually made when she finally found her voice, but it was a ridiculous understatement of her actual response.

  “Compared with what?” Miller retorted wryly. “A cyclotron? Ofsted? Back in seventy-four, the university’s one and only computer filled a dedicated building and cost millions—Mouseworld must have seemed trivial by comparison. But you’re right, of course. The startup cost was far too high even in the context of thirty years ago, at the optimistic height of one of the rosier interludes of the old boom/bust cycle. Fortunately, the population explosion was a hot topic then, thanks to Paul Ehrlich and a few other best-selling alarmists. There were big grants to be had. That was before the ostrich factor took hold.”

  It was the manner in which he spoke that kept everyone at a distance, Lisa realized. It wasn’t that he was contemptuous, or hostile, or unduly arrogant—but there was something in his manner that emphasized a detachment so extreme as to constitute removal. She knew it wasn’t the kind of trait that most women would find attractive, but most women didn’t consider themselves natural-born forensic scientists. Why, she wondered, didn’t he wear a lab coat?

  “Ostrich factor?” she queried, while her captive eyes roamed the four walls of Mouseworld, refusing even to see the central block, where all the compartments were neatly separated from one another and at least one mouse in ten was a Morgan Miller, gloriously secure in its own abundant personal space.

  “Head in the sand,” Miller told her. “If we refuse to see the problem, it doesn’t really exist. The phrase is Garrett Hardin’s, but the book that contains it didn’t get anywhere near the best-seller lists, thus proving its own thesis. You should come along to my third-year lectures on the population dynamics module—I kick off with an introduction to the neoMalthusians in three weeks time. It’s usually rather lively, even nowadays, when little short of a neutron bomb can be relied upon to raise the majority of students out of their appalling apathy. No offense intended.”

  “None taken,” she assured him. She knew what he meant. She’d taken undergraduate courses in Practical Transgenics and Bioethics—topics that raised a storm wherever the chattering classes gathered for a dinner party or paused to gossip in Waitrose or the GP’s waiting room, but couldn’t even raise a ripple at home. Anyone who bothered to sign up for such courses was already numbered among the converted, and the students were relentlessly agreeable in the face of their teachers’ preachings. It was almost as if they were members of some beleaguered cult.

  “I’m assuming that you’re an exception,” Miller said, perhaps intending to pay Lisa a compliment. “I suppose that as a policeman, you’ll at least be uncommonly dutiful, if not overly willing to challenge authority.”

  That seemed to Lisa to be marginally more offensive than the remark for which he’d issued his offhand non-apology. “I’ll come along to your lectures,” she assured him. As a postgraduate, she was obliged to attend a quota of second- and third-year courses in order to make up ground that had fallen outside her own undergraduate specialties. Those that her supervisor taught had to be on her list, if only for diplomatic reasons.

  “If you cared to set an example and ask some searching que
stions in the seminars, I’d be grateful,” he said. “It might save me from having to go quite so far over the top in the hope of eliciting a response. Feel free to be as aggressive as you like. It’s a postgrad’s responsibility to play the Judas goat, after all.”

  It wasn’t, but Lisa didn’t know whether he was joking or being provocative, so she didn’t laugh and didn’t rise to the bait. “Twenty-eight years is a long time to run an experiment,” she said instead. “And the running costs can’t be trivial. Even if the food’s cheap, equipment maintenance and waste disposal must consume quite a budget.”

  “Animal population dynamics is a difficult field in which to do experiments,” Miller agreed, seeming to lose half an inch of height as he bowed to the force of her fascination with the four cities and slumped into patient resignation. “Even organisms that can get through a generation in thirty days or so have to be observed for years if you’re to get any worthwhile data about the way their populations respond to changes in circumstance. Anything with a yearly life cycle is out of the question for lab work, although there are teams all over the world that send people out every spring to collect data on wild populations of all kinds of species, and have been doing so for twenty years and more. Most of what we know about mammalian population dynamics in nature is based on the records kept by hunters and fur trappers, and the data is prejudiced by the fact that the killing of their members by humans is by far the most important variable impacting on the populations. Lab-based observations are virtually restricted to rats, rabbits, and mice—and if you think the running costs of this setup are an unacceptable burden, imagine what it would cost to keep a similar number of rats or rabbits.”

  “So why keep them in such large numbers?” Lisa asked.

  “Because you can’t do experiments on the effects of overpopulation with small numbers,” Miller observed, without loading the comment with more scorn that was actually necessary.

  “I see,” Lisa said, wishing that she’d seen it a little earlier.

  “The American experiments set up in advance of this one were all terminated after a couple of years,” Miller told her, perhaps by way of repentance. “Even when they began to produce interesting results, the practical and political difficulties of keeping them going were insuperable. The whole point of this one was to build something sustainable over the long term, in the hope that it would clarify some of the puzzles Calhoun and McKendrick had to leave unsolved.”

  “And has it?” Lisa asked, determined not to be forced into a humiliating confession that she had no idea of who Calhoun and McKendrick were. Fortunately, Miller knew perfectly well that she was a biochemical geneticist whose background in population biology was likely to be exceedingly sketchy, and he didn’t try to make her look foolish.

  “Calhoun was one of the first people to investigate what would happen to a population limited only by space,” he said. “His experiments gained a certain anecdotal notoriety in the sixties, when even I was but a child, but that overestimated both their scope and their importance. To simplify brutally, he put a few rats into a fairly spacious but limited complex, gave them as much food and water as they needed, and did what he could to keep pollution within reasonable limits. The population did pretty much what he expected it to do: rose exponentially to a peak, then collapsed again. When the crowding became unbearable, the rats’ social system—such as it was—completely disintegrated. They fought continually and destructively, began to eat their own young, and showed every known symptom of environmental stress: ulceration, heart disease, hair loss … you name it, the observers saw it. It was never really intended as an experiment in the scientific sense, of course. If I remember correctly, Calhoun was working for the National Institutes of Health. It was a demonstration—a parable to supplement the natural parables of the lemming and the snowshoe hare.”

  “I read about the snowshoe hare,” Lisa put in helpfully. “They’re responsible for the lynx cycle in Canada—and the lemmings are famous. There used to be a cinema ad that showed them pouring over a cliff, but I can’t remember what it was for.”

  “It was an antismoking ad,” Miller reminded her. “People misunderstood the lemmings for a hundred years, just as they misunderstood the lynx cycle. The myth was that the lemmings were committing suicide, just like smokers who wouldn’t stop. There were all kinds of crackpot theories. One suggested that some atavistic instinct was forcing them to follow an ancient migration route to land that had been inundated by the sea. In much the same spirit, people tried to correlate the lynx cycle with the sunspot cycle, as if that would somehow provide an explanation. Even within the scientific community, there was a well-established myth of predator-prey cycles suggesting that the number of lynx pelts recovered by the Hudson Bay Company’s trappers varied cyclically because of the feedback effects of the trappers’ own activity, or because every time the lynx numbers increased, they sent the populations of their prey into steep decline. All nonsense, of course. The lynx population and the snowshoe hare population went up and down together—the population crashes that caused the hares to decline were entirely independent of the intensity of predation, but every time the hare population crashed, the lynx population crashed too.”

  “But they can’t have been in the same situation as the experimental rats,” Lisa pointed out, glad for an opportunity to show that she was on the ball. “They had unlimited space.”

  “That’s the curious thing,” Miller agreed. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? The snowshoe hares had all of Canada, the lemmings all of Siberia and Scandinavia. You’d think that the limiting factor controlling their population size would be the availability of food—but it wasn’t. When the cases were actually investigated, it immediately became obvious that the peak populations could endure the winters, despite the scarcity of food. The populations didn’t collapse until the spring, when food was becoming much more abundant.”

  He paused, inviting Lisa to catch on. She had to hesitate for six or seven seconds, but then she figured it out. “The mating season,” she said.

  “Exactly,” Miller conceded, favoring her with a smile of pure but not particularly abundant generosity. “They could tolerate the density of population when their attention was fixed exclusively on the business of survival, but when the breeding season came around, the males became fiercely territorial. It wasn’t the absolute limitation of space that was important, but the perceived limitation. The competition for territory became so intense so suddenly that the animals couldn’t handle the consequent physiological stress. Their systems became permanently adremdinized. Snowshoe hares are relatively meek, so they just drop dead in droves, mostly from heart attacks. Lemmings aren’t—when they get into fighting mode, they simply can’t stop. The lemmings that died in the last couple of so-called lemming years were mostly killed on the roads, and human activity has had such a profound effect on their numbers that there’ll probably never be another, but the lemmings that had attracted the most attention back in the famous lemming years were the ones that carried their territorial squabbles to the limits of the available territory. They fought on cliff tops for every last meter, sometimes to the death. Suicide wasn’t a factor, although sheer frustration was.”

  “And all these examples became parables in the sixties and seventies because everybody thought that something of the same sort was going to happen to us,” Lisa finished for him. “I see.”

  “If only,” Miller said. “What actually happened was that a few strident alarmists began telling people that something of the sort was bound to happen to the human population if we didn’t take measures to prevent it, and take them soon. For five years or so, a few people listened, and crew anxious—and then even they decided that by far, the easiest way to stave off the anxiety was not to listen to the alarmists. So they played the proverbial ostrich and stuck their heads in the sand. They were encouraged to do it by economic theorists who # thought that economic growth was the only worthwhile goal of collective human endeavor, and th
at population growth was good because it facilitated economic growth. Ironically enough, the original founders of Mouseworld were also anti-alarmists.”

  Lisa hadn’t been expecting that, and she couldn’t take advantage of the pause that Miller left for her to pick up the baton and carry the argument forward.

  “After Calhoun’s demonstration,” Miller continued, “other researchers tried to repeat his experiment using mice, which were more convenient by virtue of their smaller size. McKendrick was one of those researchers. The other experiments duplicated Calhoun’s findings, and so did some of McKendrick’s populations, but McKendrick also found some exceptions. Some of his mouse populations didn’t exhibit the standard boom/crash scenario. They adapted their behavior to a much higher population density than their wild cousins were used to. There was still a certain amount of nastiness, but they managed to limit their breeding without overmuch cannibalism, and the increase in mortality that helped bring the two into equilibrium was achieved without overmuch fighting.”

  “I get it,” Lisa said. “Mice are meek, like snowshoe hares, while rats are more like lemmings.”

  “That’s part of it,” Miller agreed. “But it’s not the whole story. Snowshoe hares may be meek, but they still go through boom-and-crash cycles. Nobody knows for sure, but the more important distinction might be that when rat numbers explode in the wild, they’re usually cut back by disease—as witness the Black Death. Calhoun’s rats were flea-free, of course, so they didn’t suffer the same check. Plagues of mice are more commonplace than plagues of rats, especially in limited spaces, but there doesn’t seem to be an external limiting factor that kicks in—not reliably, at any rate. For that reason, mice seem to have evolved their own internal limiting mechanisms. Because the mechanism is activated only under exceptional circumstances, which may occur only once in a hundred or a thousand generations, a lot of strains lose it to genetic drift—but enough retain it to gain a selective benefit when the conditions do arise. The same is true of some insects that became human commensals as soon as the first agriculturalists began cultivating wheat and rice. The grain beetles, for whom a field of wheat was Utopia and a granary Seventh Heaven, have relatively efficient internal mechanisms of population control, which can stabilize their populations and protect them from the devastations of boom/crash cycles.