Immortality (4 page)

Mark set down the can of Pepsi. He was eating lunch by himself. The café was one of his favorites, close enough to UCLA to walk, with the best falafel in the city. The eatery was nothing more than a glass storefront on Kinross Avenue in Westwood, but every lunch hour it was packed and had a waiting line that extended down the sidewalk.

Mark had gotten there early and nabbed one of the prime spots, a small round table next to the only window. On the checkered tablecloth was a copy of the Los Angeles Times folded open to an article he’d been reading.

Children raised in Los Angeles County had twenty percent less lung capacity than the rest of the country.

The article explained that a UCLA study had established solid links between lung capacity and air pollution. Mark glanced at the folded paper. He thought about all the health food stores and restaurants in Los Angeles…in some areas they actually outnumbered the liquor stores. There was an odd counter-logic to it. The residents of Los Angeles breathed toxic air and swim in polluted bays but eat healthy and exercise as a way of making up for all the things they won’t control.

Mark had returned from Wyoming this morning and gone straight to UCLA. The Physical Sciences Department had a scanning electron microscope. There was a waiting list months long for access to the machine. Mark had used his influence to get his specimens moved to the top of the list, even bumping a set of routine work-orders from UCLA Medical Center’s Pathology department.

The technician operating the equipment had a set of photographs on Mark’s desk an hour later. The black and white prints showed the Nanofossil outline of a single animal with the distinctive capsule shape and flagella tail unique to
Chromatium Omri 3.7
. In some ways, single-celled creatures were as complex as their multi-celled descendants. Even with all the bacteria catalogued by modern science, more were discovered each year with totally new structures and behaviors. Their diversity was as great as the stars in the sky. There were dozens of strains of living Chromatium Omri beside his COBIC-3.7. The oceans and fresh waters were teeming with Chromatium. He would have liked to work with living COBIC-3.7 again as he had during his days of Noble Prize research. Those had been heady times. The specimens he discovered and collected from hot springs had reproduced and grown into a breeding colony. The colony lived for almost a year in the lab before perishing from an infection of bacteriophages. He had a freezer full of uninfected, cryogenically frozen samples from that colony. All the common strains of Chromatium Omri were highly susceptible to pressure damage from freezing and were typically killed by the process, but COBIC-3.7 was an exception. The bacterium had a thirty percent reanimation rate. All he had to do was thaw some of his colony out to have a live strain again; but there was no scientific reason to do it, no new information to be obtained.

Mark checked his watch. The time was a few minutes past one. He took a last bite of falafel. It was time to drop in on Professor Ann Wilson. She was the dean of the entomology department. He had called and asked her to consult but had offered her no explanation over the phone. They both liked little games of intrigue.

Mark knocked on the open doorframe then walked in. The lab was cluttered with something new. An entire wall was stacked with one-gallon aquariums. Mark peered into a tank with his face almost touching the glass. A six-inch scorpion stared back at him. He’d never seen one that large. Its body was armored in what looked like dull black plastic. The monster skittered backward an inch. Its stinger curled up into the air. The spike was quivering. It looked ready to strike at Mark’s face through the glass.

“Starting a pet store?” he called out.

Mark heard Ann Wilson walking over. He turned away from the aquariums and saw her. She was smiling behind a set of Ben Franklin glasses. Her gray hair was frizzed out enough to suggest the appearance of a female Einstein. She wore a white lab coat over a black sweatshirt, black sweatpants, and Nike running shoes.

“They’re giant South-Asian scorpions,” she said. “One of the most aggressive strains. They’ve been known to kill and eat small rodents. If your life insurance is paid up, you can pet one.”

“Only after it’s been stepped on, thank you very much.”

“I hope your mystery’s going to be entertaining,” said Ann. “I had to put off a staff meeting.”

“Sorry to drag you away from such an exciting afternoon.”

“So what’s so important?” she asked.

“A bug.”

“I’d have never guessed.”

Mark opened a metal lockbox the size of a dictionary. A segment of the fossilized bacterial mat was inside. Ann carefully placed the specimen under a customized stereoscope that was fitted with a video camera. A computer displayed a magnified image of the fossilized insect. She stared at the screen for several minutes, then looked over at Mark.

“My technical analysis is that we have windshield splat,” said Ann.

“I think windshield splat’s a little too broad in the old taxonomy department to help much,” said Mark. “That’s a marine fossil and that bug’s not an aquatic animal, right?”

“Not unless its air sack was used as a floatation device.”

Ann got up and selected a volume from a set of books that occupied an entire wall of her lab. The collection was a reference set that contained photographs and drawings of every known species of insect. With one hand on the stereoscope and the other flipping pages, she went to work identifying the little creature.

“You’re lucky the hind legs and air sack are intact,” said Ann. “I should be able to figure this one out in no time.”

“So how’s your husband doing?”

“Don’t ask. He dragged me out to a cocktail party the other night. Everyone there was a politician of some type. Harry was in his element. There was this one idiot city councilman who crossed over into my bailiwick, spouting off about how disorganized a species man was. He said we ought to look at how well run ant-societies were. Can you believe it? He thought we should organize into hives.”

“Ann, the world’s full of loony tunes.”

She blinked a few times as if digesting what he’d said, then continued her story while simultaneously flipping through pages in the reference volume.

“This guy wouldn’t stop ranting about how perfect a machine these ant colonies were. Finally, I just couldn’t take it anymore and interrupted him. I told him that in ant-societies there are workers who sometimes blow a fuse and start dismembering their fellow comrades. Sounds a lot like some postal workers we’ve heard of, right? Anyway I told him how the ant-society deals with these sociopaths: a bunch of soldier ants show up and eat him. I said, I think we’re already too much like ants right now.”

“Sounds like you were the life of the party.”

“Wait a minute,” she motioned him to be quiet. “I think we’ve identified your little friend here... Yeah, I’ve got him.”

Mark leaned closer to the monitor. She adjusted the scope to show a detailed view of the hairs on one of its legs.

“This baby is one of the all time winners in the evolutionary contest,” said Ann. “Maybe that explains what it’s doing mixed in with your marine critters.”

“What is it?”

“Periplaneta Americana.”

“Hey, that really clears things up for me,” said Mark.

“Study your Latin, my boy. This is the king of all bugs. A giant North American Cockroach. This one was big enough to make a nice pet. I’d say about three inches long.”

Mark felt a twinge in his stomach. That mess was a cockroach. His college job during his sophomore year was at a burger joint that had been infested. He’d hated those scampering vermin ever since, disease-infected rats of the insect world.

“Any guesses on how he got into the depths of an ocean?” asked Mark.

“Who knows,” said Ann. “They get into everything.”

“So what do I owe you?”

“Dinner.”

“You’re on. My place tomorrow night. I’ll pick up your favorite dessert.”

“I’m afraid to ask. What’s my favorite dessert?” said Ann.

“Mint grasshopper mud pie.”

“Ouch.”

~

After Mark left UCLA, instead of driving home, he rode into Santa Monica. His car was a vintage ‘69 Mustang convertible. He had the top down. It was late afternoon; rush hour was just beginning. The streets were still moving freely. Mark decided the light traffic must have been a gift from the gods. The Santa Ana winds were picking up. The sky was clear except for a haze of pollution at the horizon. A full strength Southern California sun was flooding down. He was listening to NPR on the radio as he bathed in the sun. An interview was being aired with Professor Alan Minasu, a notorious environmentalist and an award winning marine biologist. Minasu had been arrested and served ten years for bombing commercial fishing ships in several states up and down the east and west coasts. For a one-year period of time, Minasu’s presence was felt and feared any place where endangered fisheries were being harvested. The over-fishing practice had slowed and some environments were probably saved. No one knew who was behind the bombings until the end when the FBI apprehended him. To Mark, the man was an eco-terrorist of the worst kind, not a scientist. It was a shame that he was one of the most articulate and brilliant speaker on the environmental scene today. His past behavior had been forgiven. He was the G. Gordon Liddy of the environmentalists, convicted felon reborn as a media personality.

“
The problem has been growing for decades with almost no public awareness,” said Minasu. “Today, the Colorado River has been dammed in so many places and water is siphoned off to such a degree that what flows out into the Gulf of California is often a trickle. For millions of years, the Colorado River provided twenty percent of the fresh water to the Gulf of California wetlands. These were vast breeding grounds for birds and sea life that flourished. Now, the wetlands are a desert of dry clamshells. For hundreds of square miles all you see are plains of these bleached white shells. All of that used to be the fertile bottom of wetlands.”

“
The Gulf of California is a key location where migratory birds lay over and whales come to give birth to their young. A thriving fishing industry is there, which harvests shrimp and fish. They are an important source of these foods.”

“
This is both a potential environmental disaster for the world and an economic disaster for Mexico. All it would take to defuse this ticking bomb is to give back a small percentage of the water currently being diverted in the United States. There are hundreds of locations along the Colorado River where water is taken for irrigation and drinking. If each state just took one percent less, this disaster could be averted. Several environmental organizations have been trying for years to get the states along the river to give back one percent. No one is willing to budge. With water rights and water laws in the way, getting one percent back will take an act of Congress. When talking with the individual water authorities for these states, you would think we were asking them for one percent of their tax base instead of what, in many cases, amounts to less than a fraction of a percent of their state’s total water usage…”

Mark shook his head. Minasu was absolutely right and on-target as usual. He didn’t know which was more frustrating: the blind eye we turn toward environmental crisis or having a jerk like Minasu as the representative to the world on such important matters. We were ignoring global warming, loss of topsoil, and water pollution to the point where we might not be able to feed the world’s population by mid-century. What was hardwired so wrongly in us that we were this self-centered, this greedy, knowingly destroying the world our children would inherit?

Mark couldn’t stand to listen anymore and turned off the radio. He was almost at his destination anyway. Wilshire Boulevard was sloping down toward the ocean. A man wearing a monk’s robe stood by a corner holding a six foot wooden cross. A sign hung around his neck: ‘
They are threatened by our pillaging! The End is near!’
A small crowd had gathered. Two police officers were getting out of their car. Mark felt sorry for the man. There were damaged people like that in every city of the world. One block from a cliff that dropped off into the Pacific Ocean, he cut over onto Lincoln Boulevard which ran parallel to the coast, then turned west on San Vicente. Mark parked his car on a small side street. Tall trees canopied the midsize houses along the block. The neighborhood was just a fifteen-minute walk from the Pacific, but it could have been a street anywhere in the country.

Mark walked to the end of the block and stopped. The house never seemed to change. It was a small two bedroom with Ivy covered trellises and olive trees. He remembered a moment from years ago…he and Julie in the front yard picking olives. He smiled with the memory. Julie had read a book on how to cure olives. One step was to soak them in lye. He had told her it sounded insane and that the book had to have been written by mad anarchists. Julie had persisted and the olives turned out to be the best he’d ever eaten.

The front door opened. His daughter Mary came running out. She was only nine but already looked so much like Julie. She had her mother’s eyes and mouth and hair. She was wearing a private school uniform, a plaid skirt, white socks and shoes.

“Hi daddy!” she screamed.

He knelt down to her height. As she hugged him, he felt all the wonderful times: the picnics on the beach, the trips to the zoo, the endless rides at Disneyland. She whispered, “I love you, Daddy.”

He looked past his daughter’s hair and saw his ex-wife in the doorway. She was smiling warmly. He looked into her face. Memories surfaced and his happiness waned. There were the nights he never came home, the expeditions into the field – and always a coed to share the evenings, a different gal for each semester. What had he been looking for? What had he been running from? Julie smiled. She had forgiven him long ago, but he could never forgive himself. She had divorced him saying she loved him – and herself – too much to live like this.