catalysts he was developing were revolutionizing the economics of the oil industry and helping the economics of the country. When a man like that goes missing we want to know if anyone has been putting pressure on him, and why. Of course, if he's just running away from a shrewish wife then it's his affair, and we drop it. That's happened before.' 'And what conclusions did you come to about Daddy?' 'At first we tied it in with the attack on Gillian,' I said. 'But that's a dead end; we know Mayberry was a loner. As it is, as far as the department could make out, your father was living quietly in Stockholm and apparently taking an extended holiday. There's nothing we could do about that.' 'No,' said Penny. 'We're not yet a police state. What's being done now?' I shrugged. 'The committee of brains at the top has decided to drop the matter.' 'I see.' She stared into the fire for a long time, then shook her head. 'But you'll have to give me time, Malcolm. Let me go to America. I'd like to get away from here and think. I'd like to…'
I held up my hand. 'Point taken-no further argument. Change of subject. What were you doing in Scotland?' I was damned glad to change the subject; I'd been shaving the truth a bit too finely. 'Oh, that Acting as adviser in the reconstruction of a laboratory. It's been worrying me because they're only willing to go up to P3 and I'm recommending P4. I was arguing it out with Lumsden this morning and he thinks I'm a bit… well, paranoiac about it.' 'You've lost me,' I said. 'What's P3? To say nothing of P4.' 'Oh, I forgot.' She waved her hand at the room. 'I was so used to talking things out here with Daddy that I'd forgotten you're a layman.' She looked at me doubtfully.
'It's a bit technical,' she warned. 'That's all right. Mine is a technical job.' 'I suppose I'd better start with the big row,' she said. 'An American geneticist called Paul Berg…' It seemed that Berg blew the whistle. He thought the geneticists were diddling around with the gene in the same way the physicist had diddled around with the atom in the '20s and '30s, and the potential hazards were even more horrendous. He pointed out some of them. It seems that the favourite laboratory animal of the geneticists is a bacterium called Escherichia coli and it is the most studied organism on earth-more is known about E. coli than about any other living thing. It was natural that this creature be used for genetic experimentation. 'There's only one snag about that,' said Penny. 'E. coli is a natural inhabitant of the human gut, and I don't mean by ones and twos-I mean by the million. So if you start tinkering around with E. coli you're doing something potentially dangerous.' 'For example?' I asked. 'You remember Lummy's example of genetic transfer from Rhizobium to make an improved wheat. I said we'd have to be careful not to transfer another, more dangerous, gene. Now, consider this. Supposing you incorporated into E. coli, accidentally or on purpose, the gene specifying the male hormone, testosterone. And supposing that strain of E. coli escaped from the laboratory and entered the human population. It would inhabit the digestive tracts of women, too, you know. They might start growing beards and stop having babies.'
'Christ!' I said. 'It would be a catastrophe.' 'Berg and some of his concerned friends called an international conference at Asilomar in California in 1975. It was well attended by the world's geneticists but there was much controversy. Gradually a policy was hammered out involving the concept of biological containment. Certain dangerous experiments were to be banned pending the development of a strain of E. coli unable to survive outside the laboratory and unable to colonize the human gut. The specification laid down was that the survival rate of the new strain should not be more than one in a thousand million.' I smiled. 'That sounds like certainty.' 'It's not,' said Penny soberly, 'considering the numbers of E. coli around, but it's close. I think that was the most important conference in the history of science. For the first time scientists had got together to police themselves without having restrictions thrust upon them. I think at the back of all our minds was the bad example set by the atomic physicists.' 'Fifteen months later the development of the new strain was announced by the University of Alabama.' Penny laughed. 'A writer in New Scientist put it very well. He called it 'the world's first creature designed to choose death over liberty'.' I said slowly, 'The first creature designed… That's a frightening concept.' 'In a way-but we've been designing creatures for a long time. You don't suppose the modern dairy cow is as nature intended it to be?' 'Maybe, but this strikes me as being qualitatively different. It's one thing to guide evolution and quite another to bypass it.' 'You're right,' she said. 'Sooner or later there'll be some hack or graduate student who will go ahead with a bright idea without taking the time to study the consequences of what he's doing. There'll be a bad mistake made one day-but not if I can help it. And that brings us to Scotland.'
'How?' 'What I've just described is biological containment. There's also physical containment to keep the bugs from escaping. Laboratories are classified from P1 to P4. P1 is the standard microbiological lab;
P4 is the other extreme-the whole of the lab is under negative air pressure, there are air locks, showers inside and out, changes of clothing, special pressurized suits-all that kind of thing.' 'And you're running into trouble with your recommendations in Scotland?'
'They're upranking an existing P2 lab. In view of what they want to do I'm recommending P4, but they'll only go to P3. The trouble is that a P4 lab is dreadfully expensive, not only in the building, but in the run ning and maintenance.' 'Are there no statutory regulations?' 'Not in this field; it's too new. If they were working with recognized pathogens then, yes-there are regulations. But they'll be working with good old E. coli, a harmless bacterium. You have about a couple of hundred million of them in your digestive tract right now. They'll stay harmless, too, until some fool transfers the wrong gene.' She sighed. 'All we have are guidelines, not laws.' 'Sounds a bit like my job-not enough laws.' She ruefully agreed, and our talk turned to other things. Just before I left she said, 'Malcolm; I want you to know that I think you're being very patient with me-patient and thoughtful. I'm not the vapouring sort of female, and I usually don't have much trouble in making up my mind; but events have been getting on top of me recently.' 'Not to worry,' I said lightly. 'I can wait.'
'And then there's Gillian,' she said. 'It may have been silly of me but I was worrying about her even before all this happened. She's never been too attractive to men and she looked like turning into an old maid; which would have been a pity because she'd make someone a marvellous wife. But now-' she shook her head '-I don't think there's a chance for her with that face.' 'I wouldn't worry about that, either,' I advised. 'Michaelis has a fond eye for her.' I laughed.
'With a bit of luck you'll not have one, but two, spies in the family.' And with that startling thought I left her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE The British weekend being what it is I didn't get to the War Office until Monday. Anyone invading these islands would be advised to begin not earlier than four P.M. on a Friday; he'd have a walkover. I filled in the necessary form at the desk and was escorted by a porter to the wrong office. Two attempts later I found the man I needed, an elderly major called Gardner who was sitting on his bottom awaiting his pension. He heard what I had to say and looked at me with mournful eyes. 'Do you realize the war has been over for thirty years?' I disliked people who ask self-evident questions. 'Yes, I'm aware of it; and I still want the information.' He sighed, drew a sheet of paper towards him, and picked up a ball point pen. 'It's not going to be easy. Do you know how many millions of men were in the army? I suppose I'd better have the names.' 'I suppose you had.' I began to see why Gardner was still a grey-haired major. 'George Ashton, private in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers; demobilized 4 January, 1947.' 'In London?' 'Probably.' 'Could have been at Earl's Court; that was used as a demob centre. The other man?'
'Howard Greatorex Benson, sergeant in the Royal Army Service Corps. I don't know where he was demobilized.' 'Is that all you know of these men?' 'That's it.' Gardner laid down his pen and looked at me glumly.
'Very well, I'll institute a search. You'd better give me your address or a phone number where I can find you.' He sniffed lugubriously.
'It'll take about a month, I should say.' 'That's not good enough. I need the information a damned sight faster than that.' He waved a languid hand. 'So many records,' he said weakly. 'Millions of them.'
'Don't you have a system?' 'System? Oh, yes; we have a system-when it works.' I set out to jolly him along and by a combination of sweet talk, name-dropping and unspoken threats got him out of his chair and into action, if one could dignify his speed by such a name. He stood up, regarding me owlishly, and said, 'You don't suppose we keep five million army records here, do you?' I smiled. 'Shall we take your car or mine?' I had what I wanted four hours later. At the time I thought I'd been lucky but later decided that luck had nothing to do with it because it had been planned that way thirty years earlier. We started with the records of Earl's Court, now an exhibition hall devoted to such things as cars and boats, but then a vast emporium for the processing of soldiers into civilians. There they exchanged their uniforms for civilian clothing from the skin out-underwear, shirt, socks, shoes, suit, overcoat and the inevitable trilby or fedora hat of the 1940s. There was also the equivalent of a bank which took in no money but which lashed it out by the million; the serviceman's gratuity, a small-very small-donation from a grateful nation. At its peak the throughput of Earl's Court was 5000 men a day but by early 1947 it had dropped to a mere 2000. The ledgers for 4 January were comparatively small; they had coped with only 1897 men-it had been a slack day. Infuriatingly, the ledgers were not listed in alphabetical order but by army number, which meant that every name
