Something Fishy

by Derek Hansen

  Dedication

  It is really a pleasure to be able to dedicate this book to a good mate, Peter Trethewey. Year after year, Captain Pete has taken me aboard his Salthouse sportsfisher and shown me the wonders of the Sea of Cortez. I’ve seen sights that John Steinbeck wrote about in The Log from the Sea of Cortez back in 1938, sights I thought no longer occurred — striped marlin in their hundreds free jumping off the island of Cerralvo; porpoises in their thousands jammed in an area the size of a football field chasing bait fish, with yellowfin tuna up to one hundred and fifty kilograms leading the charge; and manta rays leaping from the water like giant tossed pancakes. Utterly amazing. Sometimes just being there is enough and catching fish irrelevant. Peter, this is a heartfelt thank you.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Something Fishy

  The Ripple Strip

  Fat Boy and the Professor

  Second Best

  Men in White

  Not Good Fish for Man to Eat

  The Peppermint Pom

  The Burden of Responsibility

  Educating Pinky

  The Evil Within

  Tipping the Scales

  Walking the Line

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Derek Hansen

  Copyright

  Something Fishy

  ‘All mankind descended from fish,’ said Everton Sweet.

  His wife sighed and slipped away to look for another group talking about more sensible things, like spring fashions. She noticed her friend,Al, who’d heard Everton’s party piece before, also slip away. She waited for him to catch up.

  ‘That’s not nice,’ she said facetiously. ‘Walking away while my husband is speaking.’

  ‘Good God, Francine, what are you going to do about him?’

  ‘What can I do,Al? I married a genius and live with a fool.’

  Francine had married Everton some twenty years earlier, recognising that his special abilities could keep her a valued Chanel and Gucci customer for life. He hadn’t disappointed her. She’d spent his money enthusiastically and not always wisely, but the cost of her extravagances was no impediment to their steady accumulation of wealth. What Francine couldn’t understand was how her husband, who was a luminary in genetics and related fields and whose patents raked in millions of dollars a year, could be so socially inept. Al, on the other hand, was handsome, socially adroit and reasonably successful in a salaried sort of way. Unfortunately for Francine, Al’s success couldn’t even begin to compare with Everton’s. She spent the equivalent of Al’s gross annual salary in a single month. What she wanted was for Everton to become more like Al, or Al to become as successful as Everton, whereupon other arrangements could be made.

  ‘Man descended from apes, surely,’ Francine heard an unwitting guest say. She took Al’s arm and walked away. She knew exactly how Everton would respond and also knew that he would keep the hapless guest and those around her baled up for another thirty minutes unless they had the sense to sneak away. Everton’s problem was that he knew too much about one thing and not enough about anything else.

  ‘Ah, but what did the apes descend from?’ said Everton. ‘What is the ancestor of all primates? If you follow that thought back far enough, for three hundred million years, you’ll reach the instant when the first creature left the sea to live on dry land. Now, think about that creature and where it came from, and try to imagine what its ancestor would have been.’

  ‘A fish,’ said a young lady who clearly hadn’t heard Everton’s party piece before.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Everton. ‘When the coelacanths — the fish with legs — broke away from the main order of fish you could argue that they took the first steps on the evolutionary ladder that led to mankind. All land vertebrates are simply highly modified fish.’

  ‘Why not a reptile?’ said her young man.

  ‘The first creatures to stray onto dry land may well have been primitive forms of reptiles,’ said Everton tolerantly.‘But still it would have been the result of a genetic mutation of an extremely primitive form of fish.’

  ‘So you’re saying we’re all fish?’ said the young lady.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Everton.‘God knows, when I look at you, young lady, I don’t see anything remotely fish-like. I see a beautiful example of the most intelligent life form on earth — a woman.’ He waited for the predictable chuckles to die down.‘However, if I put you under a microscope, a very, very powerful microscope, guess what I’d find?’

  ‘Something fishy?’

  ‘Exactly. You might think the genetic make-up of human beings would be vastly more complex than that of a fish but in fact it isn’t. Human DNA is made up of around three billion pairs of four nucleotides arranged like rungs on a ladder. Fish have close to the same number. So, for that matter, have fruit flies. We’re really not as special as we like to think we are.

  ‘All the various species on earth evolved by genetic mutation. Where the mutation was benevolent, a new, successful species emerged. Where it was unsuccessful, the mutation resulted in extinction. When you consider that this process of mutation has been going on for hundreds of millions of years, it is no surprise that we have so many divergent species, both of animals and plants. Yet, despite these millions of years of mutations, I can look at your genetic code and still see clear evidence of our common ancestor. I can look at the DNA of a lionfish or a queen fish, a snapper or a John Dory, and know that, but for a series of genetic accidents, there go I.’

  ‘Is that what you do?’ asked the young lady.

  ‘It is indeed,’ said Everton.‘I believe that fish carry in their genes the answer to almost all of mankind’s problems.’

  This was the prompt for Everton to launch into a long monologue of how certain fish genes had the potential to treat various human diseases and extend human life. In his enthusiasm he’d fail to notice people’s eyes go glassy, their jaws drop and their minds not so much wander off as implode. By the time he’d got into the use of fish genes in the production of new wonder drugs, half of his audience had usually found an excuse to be elsewhere. By the time he’d got to the use of fish genes in modifying food, he was lucky if he didn’t find himself talking to the wall.

  ‘But if you transplant sand shark genes into potatoes to stop them going soft and mouldy, won’t they taste fishy?’

  Everton blinked hard and looked around. He wasn’t accustomed to people staying to the end of his scintillating mini-lectures. It was the young lady and she was gazing at him with genuine interest. Her young man had gone elsewhere. Everton’s eyes flicked quickly around the room and found him engaged in deep and meaningful conversation with a scantily clad beauty, from a position where he was free to gaze down her cleavage.

  ‘Well?’

  Everton’s attention snapped back to the young lady in front of him. He owed her an answer, having more than likely cost her a boyfriend.

  ‘It can happen,’ he said reluctantly. ‘The sand shark gene didn’t affect the natural taste of the potato, but things like that can happen.’

  ‘If potatoes tasted fishy, we wouldn’t need fish with our chips,’ said the young lady brightly.

  She had, Everton had to concede, hit a very annoying nail right on the head.

  Psychiatrists claim that the line between genius and madness is the finest ever drawn. Everton managed to keep to the right side of the line although there were times when he appeared to straddle it. His obsession with fish genes was a good example. There had been a time when he’d taken a much more catholic approach to solving problems and fish were no more favoured than, say, fowl, foxes or fungus in providing DNA.

  Everton was a specialist in xenotransplantation, which meant he mixed
and matched DNA from different species. Just as orchardists might splice a branch of a mandarin tree to an orange tree, or one type of apple tree to another, Everton spliced animal DNA to plant DNA and vice versa. One of his triumphs was to splice a strand of DNA from rapeseed into the DNA of a pig and, as a consequence, reduce the amount of saturated fat in pork products to the point where even crackling got a Healthy Heart tick. He patented the relevant genes and sold the concept to pork producers around the world. He did the same with hens, except that he spliced in a strand of DNA from a Spanish olive so they produced monounsaturated eggs which, he liked to joke, fried themselves.

  These were the more sensational examples of the sort of thing Everton did. On a more mundane level, he used a flounder gene to quadruple the shelf life of tomatoes, and a gene from pyrethrum to make cotton and grain crops like wheat, barley and maize naturally resistant to insect pests. The royalties just kept coming in.

  Nobody could pinpoint when he became obsessed by fish genes, but it may have been during his research for a Swiss drug company specialising in dental pharmaceuticals, when he developed a local anaesthetic from the Patagonian toothfish. The anaesthetic was five times more effective than novocaine and had no known side effects. In studying the DNA of the toothfish in such minute detail, Everton may have recognised the patterns that hinted at his own — and all of mankind’s — origins. There again, it could have happened when he found an enzyme in the common pipi which stopped Polyfilla drying out before you’ve finished patching the hole you’re working on. It could have been any of a hundred projects. Whatever it was, it convinced Everton that fish genes held the answer to just about every problem.

  He became increasingly fascinated by the medical possibilities of fish genes. He became convinced that they had the potential to cure, treat or arrest every known human ailment, but he was continually frustrated by the need to test his new drugs in clinical trials, all of which took years. Invariably, his drugs would produce a side effect and the process of engineering out the fault put the testing program back to square one.

  However, enough of what Everton did worked, and worked without side effects. He became richer and, as he became richer, he also became more obsessed with fish genes. Everton took his obsession home with him, took it into the lounge, the library, the dining room, the games room and, yes, into the bedroom. His beautiful wife became more convinced she lived with a fool.

  Francine thought about leaving him but also thought of the wealth Everton had yet to amass, and decided an affair with Al offered her the best of both worlds. Al was happy to oblige. Nobody bothered to ask Everton what he thought of the arrangement. When Francine and Al were together they never mentioned fish and never ordered it to eat, either. The strength of their relationship lay in the fact that it was entirely fish-free.

  Everything went swimmingly for Francine and her fish-obsessed husband until the day Everton’s hand wobbled of its own accord. Most people would have dismissed the occurrence as an aberration or the result of an excess of wine or spirits, but Everton sat up and took note as every good scientist should. When the tremor recurred two weeks later, and for a more sustained period, he realised the aberration was not a transient thing but the product of physiological malfunction.

  A number of diseases that he’d tried to cure or arrest with his fish-gene-based therapies scrolled through his mind, and he was distressed to realise his tremor might have something to do with Parkinson’s disease. He hadn’t had much success in finding a drug to arrest, relieve or cure Parkinson’s. His relief at discovering that he wasn’t suffering from Parkinson’s disease was short-lived. His doctor informed him, with much regret, that he had a tumour the size of a gull’s egg buried deep in his brain. The shaking was caused by the tumour impacting on his cerebral cortex. Unhappily, Everton hadn’t had much success in finding a treatment for brain tumours, either.

  Everton looked at the scans and MRIs of his brain and agreed with the surgeon that excision was not an option: operating would not remove enough of the tumour yet remove too much of his healthy brain. He agreed with the oncologist that chemotherapy and radiation therapy offered limited benefits and that intervention would only buy him a few more months to live. He used his contacts and rang eminent researchers in the US, scientists working on ‘magic bullets’ and laser treatments, and agreed with them that they could not yet offer him anything remotely approaching a cure. Having exhausted all his options, he went home and told his darling wife.

  ‘What about me?’ she said in horror. ‘What’s going to happen to me?’

  Everton pointed out that the trusts and royalties would provide her with more money on an annual basis than she could ever hope to spend, unless she was inconceivably reckless or stupid or both.

  ‘How much more?’ she wanted to know.

  ‘Angel heart, if there were two of you, there’d still be more than enough.’

  That was the answer Francine was looking for. With Everton out of the way she could formalise her relationship with Al. Everton’s royalties would take care of his extravagances as well.

  ‘What about you?’ she asked, now that her concerns were alleviated.

  ‘I’m going to die in seven months,’ he said.

  ‘Can’t they do something?’ Francine wanted to make certain he was really checking out.

  ‘They? Yes. They can keep me alive for another two or three months with chemo and radiation therapy.’

  ‘Three months?’ said Francine. In her head she was adding three months to seven, working out what season it would be when he died and what season it would be when she subsequently married Al. She had her wedding dress to think of.

  ‘But chemo and radiation therapy are out of the question.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘The fact is, I have only one chance left.’

  ‘One chance? You’ve still got a chance?’

  ‘An outside chance.’

  ‘How far outside?’

  ‘In the time I have left, I have to find a way to get rid of my tumour myself. It isn’t going to be easy, but it would be impossible if I let my system be blasted with radiation and poisoned by chemotherapy. I’d be too sick to work. Although I’ve got seven months to live, I don’t have seven months to work. I’m not exactly sure what will happen as the tumour grows or when it will happen, but I know whatever happens won’t be pleasant.’

  ‘So seven months, right?’

  By Francine’s calculation, seven months would take them to the beginning of winter which, following an appropriate period of short black dresses, would clear the way for a spring wedding.

  ‘That’s right. Seven months,’ said Everton.‘Unless . . .’

  ‘Unless you find a cure,’ said Francine bluntly. The prospect of that happening didn’t worry her in the least. She wasn’t stupid. She knew some of the best brains on the planet had been working on cancer cures for decades. What could Everton do in seven months? No, Francine saw no impediment to her wedding plans.

  Everton worked day and night, but not exclusively, on trying to find the genes that would save his life. He wanted to make sure his dear wife was properly taken care of in the probability that he wouldn’t find the gene he was looking for in time. He wanted her financial security to be absolute: fireproof, bombproof, recession-proof, conman-proof and well-meant-advice-proof. He saw his poor bereaved wife living alone in their many mansions and condos for the rest of her life, mourning his demise. He couldn’t bear the thought of her worrying about money as well. It never occurred to him that his death was exactly what Francine needed to make her life perfect. So while he trawled through the DNA of amberjack, bass, catfish, dhufish, eels, flathead, etcetera, etcetera he also took time out to work on commissions.

  New Zealand lamb producers asked him to change the taste of lamb to make it taste more like pork so that they’d have a better chance of cracking the US market. Meanwhile, pork producers asked him to alter the taste of pork so that it tasted more like beef, which was far a
nd away more popular than pork. The pork producers also slyly hoped to exploit a marketing opportunity created by outbreaks of mad cow disease, which had put a lot of people off their steak. At the same time, beef producers asked him to rid beef of flavour altogether so that it didn’t interfere with the taste of fried animal fat and salt, which was actually what people most liked about their product.

  Unfortunately for the lamb, pork and beef producers, all of these innovations were scrapped during testing on the grounds of the confusion they caused. The changes drove people mad and, in turn, they drove the marketing experts back into their boxes.

  Still, Everton collected his fees because he did what he was asked to do. It wasn’t his fault that what he’d been asked to do was stupid. And every day, he grew ever closer to drawing his final breath.

  Sometimes his shaking hands made work all but impossible and, as the months passed, he also had to contend with fits that struck without warning. Everton worked his way through three of his remaining seven months, through the alphabet of fish to the sharks, and through the species of sharks to the great white before he made his breakthrough. The answer was so obvious that he was stunned he hadn’t thought of it earlier and angry with himself that he’d wasted three valuable months.

  Nature had made the great white shark wonderfully efficient, so efficient in fact that its DNA had remained substantially unchanged from the moment the first great white had taken its first tentative bite out of its neighbour. It had never had reason to change or adapt because it had sat pretty well at the top of the food chain ever since. Everton should have realised that. He should also have reasoned that a killing machine as efficient as the great white shark had no need for a big sophisticated brain and could get by with a brain the size of a pea.

  On the other hand, Everton had a big sophisticated brain and it should have been obvious to him that a big shark with a minuscule brain could not afford to suffer brain tumours. Not even a small tumour, not even one the size, say, of a grain of rice. It was only logical that, in order to have survived for one hundred million years, the great white shark would have a defence against brain tumours. It was this defence, spread over a number of genes, that Everton found.