by Kit Pedler
Soon the fire was burning up brightly throwing a plume of smoke and sparks up to the station roof. Almost immediately, their spirits improved. They sat staring into the flames, their wet clothing steaming in the heat. The fire threw great dancing shadows on the curved roof of the station.
As the warmth soaked back into their tired bodies, complete fatigue overtook them. Slayter was the first. He was sitting against the wall of the station, his knees hunched against his chest. Slowly his head nodded forward until it rested on his knees, one arm dropped limply to the floor beside him.
Anne had brought a torn and dirty sheet of tarpaulin over to the fire. She was rigging it up on short lengths of plank as a screen against the steady cold air flowing past them.
She unzipped her skirt and took it off together with her blouse, coat and slip and hung them on pieces of wood around, huddling before the fire in her pants completely unselfconsciously, as Gerrard noticed, despite the fact that her underclothes were almost transparent. In the bright light of the fire he could easily see the dark shape of her nipples and the dark smudge of hair between her thighs as she squatted forward over the fire. It was entirely irrational he knew, but he felt a sting of jealousy as he saw Slayter staring across at her too.
They squatted down warming themselves and occasionally stoking the glowing wood embers.
Anne looked up at Gerrard and then snuggled close to him. He put his arm round her.
Suddenly she turned her face up to him. He kissed her, surprised to find a sudden spring of passion and response. She lay back and he looked down at her. Her hair scattered, her face pale in the firelight, farther down her body a dark gold as the shadows chased each other across her body.
She reached her arms up round his neck and pulled him down. His hand slowly passed down the length of her body from her shoulders, casually brushing over her breasts, over her flat stomach and thighs. Her hands on his body felt cold, almost impersonal, but with a light and delicate touch which he instantly responded to.
Suddenly he laughed and she murmured an inquiry into his ear.
‘I don’t know,’ said Gerrard. ‘It’s just, here we are underneath the middle of this city, lying beside a fire in a cave, half naked, as naked as our ape ancestors.’
‘Don’t,’ she said, beginning to laugh with him. ‘Please don’t start me off, we’ll wake Slayter.’
‘I can’t help it,’ said Gerrard, and he roared and roared with laughter, rolling away from her in the process. Her body was almost bent double with the effort to restrain her giggles and the two of them, unable to resist, roared helplessly until Gerrard felt the tears streaming down his face.
‘You … bastard,’ said Anne, gasping between her laughter. ‘You unromantic bastard.’ Slayter beside them stirred and suddenly jerked upright in astonishment.
‘God,’ he said. ‘That’s all we need.’ The expression on his face set them off again and, after a moment of astonished bewilderment, Slayter joined in.
‘For God’s sake what’s so damned funny?’ Slayter gasped.
‘He wants to play cavemen,’ said Anne. She turned away and started dressing, putting on her now dry clothes.
‘Not a bad idea,’ said Slayter. ‘Let me know when it’s my turn to play.’
‘It’s time we got the hell out,’ said Gerrard.
‘Quiet,’ said Anne. ‘Listen, I can hear something.’
‘What?’
They fell silent. Gerrard felt his scalp crawl. All they could hear was the hiss and snap of the damp wood in the fire. ‘Not that,’ Anne said. ‘It’s somewhere else.’
She suddenly crouched down and put her ear to the platform. ‘Yes, there it is, listen!’
Gerrard bent down and put his ear against the concrete of the platform. He heard a noise which he realized had been part of the atmosphere of the station from the first but he had been too tired to isolate it from the other sounds before. It was a soft hissing and bubbling. It was coming from underneath the platform.
‘Let’s see if there’s a crack then we can have a look underneath,’ said Gerrard. He picked up the torch.
Slayter took a burning brand from the fire and followed him. They searched over the surface of the platform. Finally, they discovered a broken iron manhole cover.
Gerrard bent down and put his face closer to the gap. Suddenly, he grimaced, coughed and drew back.
‘God, what an awful stench!’ Slayter bent down and sniffed and drew back retching.
‘What is it?’ Anne gasped. Slayter thought for a moment. ‘Why didn’t we smell it down the other end of the platform?’
‘Draught’s going the other way,’ replied Gerrard. He shone the torch down into the manhole again. ‘There’s a flow, the whole lot’s moving in one direction, look!’
The others peered down, hands over their noses. Just visible in the dim light there was a seething mass of bubbling brownish slime. It was moving steadily in one direction.
‘This platform must be hollow underneath,’ said Slayter.
‘Right,’ said Gerrard, ‘that smell I know it – somewhere – where? – God dammit!’ He banged his fist into his palm in concentration. ‘Of course! The plastic – the decaying cables in the tube and the gears from the robot.’
‘You’re right,’ Anne said quietly, ‘you’re absolutely right.’ She ran back to the fire and disentangled the now empty canister. She looked at the two men. ‘Your belt please,’ she said to Slayter.
Slayter took his belt off and gave it to her. She tied the end round the handle of the canister and lowered it till it touched the foaming liquid underneath. She let the belt slacken until it submerged then pulled it up full. The liquid inside was in a perpetual state of movement, bubbling and hissing. Anne carried it back over to the fire, brought out her handbag and took out a small bottle of cologne which she emptied and shook dry. She then carefully filled it with liquid in the can. Held up against the firelight the contents were turbid and yellowish. Even in the small bottle it still hissed and foamed. She carefully wiped the outside dry with a tissue from her bag. She screwed on the metal cap until it was tight then unscrewed it by one half turn.
Gerrard took it from her. ‘Let’s do an experiment,’ he said. ‘Let’s see what happens.’ He felt in his pocket and brought out a cheap plastic ballpen. This he placed in the now half empty canister with the top protruding above the level of the writhing fluid. Slayter remained squatting over the manhole, looking down.
They both went back over to him. ‘It leads away beyond the end of the platform,’ he said, puzzled. ‘The current’s quite strong.’
‘Could be connecting with one of the underground rivers,’ said Anne. ‘They have them here, don’t they? Doesn’t the Fleet run underground at this part of London?’
‘Could be,’ said Slayter hesitantly. ‘Or it could be the effluent from a busted sewer, smells like it anyway.’
Gerrard went back to the fire and looked into the canister. He shouted out. The others came running.
He bent down and slowly pulled out the pen. The top half was slightly soft and his fingers deformed the plastic slightly but the bottom half had now almost melted away from the metal core. As he pulled it out, its whole shape started dripping away like wet paint. The liquid in the canister was dyed with the blue colour of the pen.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Anne. ‘What is it?’
‘I’m not completely sure,’ said Gerrard. ‘But whatever it is it obviously contains the agent which is attacking plastic. This could well be the source of it all.’
Suddenly, he plunged his hand in the liquid and held it there.
‘Don’t! What are you doing?’ Anne cried out. ‘You don’t know what’s in it.’
‘Let’s find out,’ said Gerrard.
He held his hand in for another few seconds, pulled it out and studied it carefully. He dried it off on a handkerchief which he threw away. He turned to the others: ‘It feels OK, I’m going down.’
‘What! under
the platform?’ said Anne. ‘You don’t know how deep it is.’
‘It can’t be all that deep,’ said Gerrard. ‘It’s only about three feet down to the level of the track. Anyway we’ll soon find out.’ He strode back over to the hole, the others followed.
‘What the hell are you up to?’ asked Slayter.
‘Tell you in a minute, I hope,’ he replied. He swung himself over the edge of the hole and lowered his feet gingerly into the angry liquid. It came up just over his waist. The smell almost made him vomit and the current was quite strong. He took the torch from Slayter.
As he ducked down under the rim of the manhole the bubbling and hissing seemed all about him, in his face. He slowly moved forward shuddering as his feet touched various submerged objects.
Eventually, when he’d walked, as he judged, about half the length of the platform, he found what he was looking for. There was a close mesh grille set low in the wall and the bubbling liquid was streaming through it. It was almost entirely dogged with various bits of debris and the liquid was hissing through into a dark hollow. He steeled himself to put his hand down under the surface and started feeling along the edge of the grille.
The next few minutes seemed the longest of his life as he brought up various sodden objects and examined them in the light of the torch before discarding them again. His stomach felt gripped by a large hand and he wondered if he could suppress the almost uncontrollable urge to vomit.
Eventually he found what he had been looking for, put it in his pocket, turned round and began wading back. The level seemed to have risen slightly and was now soaking the front and side of his jacket. When he’d almost reached the underside of the manhole he could hear Anne’s voice echoing down, ‘Luke, Luke!’
The dreadful, cloying smell had now affected him almost to the point of collapse. He was just able to pull himself up onto the surface of the platform only to flop down, exhausted on the concrete. Anne bent down beside him and reached out her hand, but he pushed it weakly away. ‘Don’t. I’m a bit untouchable right now. I’ve got it – two of them.’ He fumbled weakly in the pocket of his suit and drew out two small disc-shaped objects. He held them out in the palm of his hand.
‘I don’t quite …’ she began.
Slayter craned forward. Anne peered more closely.
‘The bottle tops – the biodegradable bottle tops! Of course! The first people who bought the licence – they had metal inserts made to go into the plastic. They – yes – here it is.’ She pointed to an interwoven monogram embossed on the metal.
‘Couldn’t they belong to anything else?’ said Slayter.
‘Unlikely,’ said Anne. She looked at Gerrard. ‘That’s what you were looking for, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ said Gerrard.
‘Then you suspected it all along?’ said Anne.
‘Logically, there was no other explanation,’ Gerrard went on. ‘That biodegradable bottle was made so that it would break down with light and air to a compound which could be consumed by bacteria. This compound is a halfway structure between plastic and protein, OK? Well I think bacteria fed on this compound and then mutated to feed on other plastics. Each generation growing more efficient and more omnivorous than the last.’
‘But what kind of bacteria?’ said Slayter.
‘I think the answer lies down there,’ said Gerrard. ‘It’s something that has evolved from the sewage. The biodegradable bottles found their way into the sewage as intended and whatever bacteria were in the sewage developed an appetite for this kind of plastic. It then started foraging for other forms of plastic to consume and mutated to the point where it could eat them.’
He turned to Anne. ‘Think now. Do you know of any new type of bacteria that has been used, say, for disposal of sewage?’
Anne nodded. ‘There was one, I can’t think what it’s called,’ she said. ‘But I know about two years ago I was going to do an article on some bacteria called B Accelerens. It was developed at the Reading Sewage Works. It was said to break down sewage faster than any other bacteria. It had an almost exponential growth rate. But it didn’t eat plastic. It’s impossible surely. Anyway, they gave up the project. But how did the sewage get to’ – she paused – ‘plastic wires?’
‘Obviously,’ said Gerrard, ‘whatever the original channel of the sewage is, it wasn’t underneath this platform. Therefore it’s found a new outlet. I’m only guessing,’ he said. ‘But I imagine that somewhere along the route it came into contact with some plastic cables. Once the stuff gets into the plastic, its growth rate is phenomenal and it wouldn’t take long for the degradation to spread right along its length, out of the sewer system and down here. There are hundreds of seepage points in the underground. Nobody knows where they all are.’
‘Then from the cables to plastic gas pipes and water mains and … eventually to the computer governing my traffic system,’ said Slayter.
‘Precisely,’ said Gerrard.
‘My God,’ said Slayter. ‘If that’s true there’s no way of stopping it that I can see.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Gerrard, ‘and right now I’m incapable of thinking any further. What we’ve got to do is to take these samples up above ground and fast. God only knows what things are like up there now.’
‘How are we going to do it?’ said Anne.
‘The draught,’ said Gerrard. ‘That must give us the way out of here. It must be coming from somewhere, we’ve got to find where.’
Eleven
Gerrard’s reasoning had been nearly correct, but in one respect he was quite wrong!
He had in fact discovered Ainslie’s bacillus.
It is usual practice for bacteriologists who discover a new strain to have their name attached to it. It is a minor and rather droll form of immortality and often the only way in which the desiccated ego of a backroom worker can find sustenance.
Ainslie’s bacillus had never reached the textbooks. It was, in fact, known only to Ainslie.
Two and a half years before Gerrard and his party were trapped, Ainslie had begun work:
Dr Simon Ainslie only had one really good idea during the whole of his academic career. It occurred just after the main drain leading from his house blocked solid and, as he was slopping about in gumboots trying rather ineffectually to clear the stoppage with a flexible rod, he found the cause of the obstruction to be a crumpled fragment of polythene sheet, probably flushed down the lavatory by one of his children.
Dr Ainslie was a bacteriologist.
A mild man by nature, he had never striven particularly hard to climb the academic ladder and was, in late middle age, stuck at the level of senior lecturer in the microbiology department of a London teaching hospital.
Dividing his time equally between routine hospital specimens and giving rather dull lectures to medical students who had begun to scare him with their sense of youth and attack; he often set up rather whimsical experiments in the forlorn hope that he might get enough original material together for a publication.
Poking the polythene sheet out of the drain, it occurred to him that the plastic would have remained in the drain for perhaps a thousand years, that it would never have broken down like ordinary sewage under bacterial attack.
Bacterial attack!
The idea was born! What if bacteria could be induced to attack plastic debris. What if they could be specially tailored by culture and reculture, by genetic mutation with properly designed nucleic acids? What an answer to the problem of garbage pollution. A major world disposal problem would be solved. His fantasies grew until his carefully acquired critical faculty began to take over.
What about the number of generations necessary? How could he get hold of the equipment? What sort of DNA or RNA?
As he dropped the drain cover back with a clang, his momentary excitement had almost disappeared.
Later on that evening after his customary glass of dry sherry, the idea recurred and took root. Eased by the drink, he poured himself another – a much larg
er one – and started to write. Tentatively at first, then with increasing speed, the project sped down onto paper. The idea was valid – it could be made to work.
Midnight came and still he worked on. Finally it was all written and he relaxed into indulgent fantasies of an FRS or even a Nobel Prize.
A week later he still hadn’t told anyone but believed totally in the idea. He kept it absolutely to himself. If it worked, scientific honour was his at last.
Gradually he began to collect equipment from the lab and took it home. In his study, he started to build apparatus; to set up incubators and tube racks until he had a complete bacteriological work bench. A replica of his hospital laboratory layout on a small scale.
He began to work furiously. Cutting short his lectures at the hospital he left work earlier and earlier in the evening. He developed a spring in his walk and an air of preoccupation which led his hospital colleagues to suppose that he had acquired a mistress. In fact he sped home on the first available train and with a cursory word to his wife, locked himself almost immediately into his study laboratory and went to work. Starting with a well-known germ called bacillus prodigiosus he began experiments to change its nature.
Growing it first of all in its normal culture material, he then began to alter the constituents so that the generations of bacteria began to change their nature. He starved the bacteria of their normal protein food and began to substitute the protein with various materials whose structure resembled the long chain molecules of plastic.
Every few days, he would secretly take one of the dishes of cultured bacteria with him to the hospital and subject it to radiation from a small radioactive cobalt source which was kept in the hospital laboratory for other experiments.
After the radiation, he would take the treated bacteria back to his home and reculture them on different media in the hope that one of the mutations induced by the radiation would be able to adapt to the consumption of plastic.