Gridlock and Other Stories Part 27

It was published in the May 1995, issue of a.n.a.log Science Fiction. Interestingly, I nearly missed it! I was at a school giving a lecture when someone brought me up a copy of the previous month's issue and showed me my story. I immediately ran out to buy up all the copies on the newsstands and found that they had already been pulled. I looked for my subscription copy, but apparently, we were between subscriptions at the time (wives never seem to understand the importance of keeping the SF magazines coming in an unbroken stream). So, I ordered a batch from a.n.a.log direct.

Had that nice lady at the school not showed it to me, I would probably still be waiting for its publication!

LYSENKO'S LEGACY.

There are things in life more important than ideology. Sometimes it takes the wisdom of age to realize this simple truth.

"The days are too short in December,"thought Vladimir Ivanovich Petrov as he hurried downhill along Tverskaya Street past Pushkin Square. As he did so, he breathed in the cold winter air of Moscow, which was characteristically heavy with the smell of automobile exhaust fumes and impending snow. His furshapka was jammed tightly onto his bald head, but with the ear covers still tied up such that his naked earlobes were exposed to the frigid atmosphere. He did not need to see the twin flaps of flesh to know that they were the same bright shade of pink as his cheeks and nose; the needles p.r.i.c.king at his features from the inside told him that. As last night's covering of snow crunched beneath his winter boots, he burrowed more deeply into the warmth of the mink lined collar of his coat and lengthened his stride to speed his progress toward the glowing red stars that were just coming into view down the street.

Tverskaya was one of the Soviet capital's show arteries, six lanes wide and modeled after the boulevards of Paris. Despite the early hour, the avenue was jammed with traffic -- oversize trucks, all painted the monotonous pea-green of the Soviet army, and smaller automobiles that represented all the colors of a somber rainbow. Intermixed with the Russian Zhigulis, Ladas, and Moskvitches were"foreign" models -- Mercedes, Bentleys, Volvos, and Fiats -- from the a.s.sociate republics of the Greater Union of Soviet Socialist States.

It was past 0700 hours and still the sun had yet to put in an appearance. As he hugged the cold facade of a building to avoid being splashed by the oily dark liquid that pooled near the curb, Petrov wondered why the scientists hadn't solved the problem of Moscow's dark winter days before now.

Perhaps the comrades in the Physics Directorate had not yet been properly motivated. Doctor Professor Petrov was a biologist, not a physicist, but if there was one thing the Soviet Saint had taught them, it was that human beings could work wonders if properly energized.

If the physicists could build atomic powered aircraft able to orbit the Imperialists' North American stronghold for years without refueling, why couldn't they provide the residents of the most powerful city on Earth with a little winter sunshine? In his mind's eye, he saw giant aircraft circling the capital of the G-USSS just beneath the winter clouds, illuminating the landscape with great searchlights built into their bellies. Perhaps the searchlights could even be colored! What a glorious sight would be the ever-changing kaleidoscope of multihued shadows as the sunlight planes...o...b..ted overhead.

He contented himself with the thought of a multihued Moscow until he reached the underground tunnel that led down beneath Tverskaya and across to the red brick buildings along the western border of Red Square. The tunnel served as a gathering place for the new free-market vendors hawking their wares. Petrov gazed at the bundled up people standing quietly on both sides of the tunnel and felt a momentary surge of irritation. Since the days of the Kulaks, private property had been anathema to all good Communists. It had been the late General Secretary who had loosened the laws against private property sufficiently to allow these street vendors to ply their trade. In Petrov's opinion, such liberalization was as dangerous to the G-USSS as the imperialist air force, and should be guarded against with equal vigilance.

A large crowd of people milled about near the western end of the pedestrian tunnel where escalators brought commuters up from the metro. Petrov joined the crush and fought his way through to the steps leading back up to street level. There he noted two menials who were chipping ice from the steps without regard to the traffic barrier they were creating. As he pa.s.sed the slowly working louts, he heard Russian spoken with thick English accents. He smiled inwardly at the sound, but did not pause. The people's business was too important to waste on remembered triumphs, not when there were so many future triumphs to come.

Petrov disdained walking the western length of the Kremlin Wall toward the river entrance. That was for comrades who labored in obscurity to serve the proletariat just as he himself had done for nearly thirty years. Those years of hard work and unwavering devotion to the party line had paid off with his appointment as Chief Inspector of the All-Union Biological Inst.i.tute. Petrov's current position allowed him to enter the Kremlin through the new gate just beyond the mausoleum of Stalin and Lenin, and as such, caused him to be inspired each morning by the statue of the Great Man.

The Colossus stood in the center of the square. Nearly as tall as Saint Basil's, the great statue looked southwest, as though staring toward Smolensk where an atom bomb of the Soviet Air Force had vaporized the ma.s.sed tanks of the Hitlerite bandits in the darkest days of the Great Patriotic War. After Smolensk, nothing had stopped the soldiers of theRodina as they swept unhindered into Germany.

Petrov's father had often recounted the day when Berlin had vanished in nuclear fire, and the fascists had sued for peace. June 6, 1944, had been the greatest day in the history of the world!

The Soviet Saint had lived twenty more years and had devoted himself to the formidable task of consolidating the Greater Union beneath the Soviet nuclear shield. Before his death in 1964, Stalin had extended the Union from the western coast of Wales to the harbor mouth of Hong Kong. Only the twin.o.bstacles of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans had slowed the great consolidation. Even these two great natural barriers would not hold the forces of socialism forever. Petrov expected that before his life was over, he would see the Red Banner fluttering above every capital on Earth.

The post-war years had been good ones for Soviet science, which was only proper since it had been science that had crushed the Hitlerite foe. Not even the advances in atomic physics had exceeded those in Petrov's own field, biology. For in the complex structure of the cell were to be found the greatest mysteries of the universe.

Petrov stopped at the gate to present his papers to the two members of the Taman Guards stationed there. Two meters tall, with broad chests and rippling muscles bulking out their greatcoats, the soldiers'

stern expressions could not quite make up for the youthfulness of their faces. Petrov smiled inwardly.

He had helped develop that particular strain in the years he and Marina had lived in the city of Perm in the foothills of the Urals. Those had been good years, with meaningful work, a beautiful and loving wife, and a new son to keep him occupied. He remembered the many times he and his son had canoed on the Kama River, floating past the huge camps where the world's most important experiments were conducted.

The guards held him up for the regulation 15 seconds before handing back his internal pa.s.sport and waving him through the security barrier. A dozen strides later found him through the great wall of red brick and inside the Kremlin itself. The weather was more comfortable here in the lee of the wall amid the buildings that housed the center of government for the G-USSS. As he hurried through courtyards where once Czars and Czarinas trod, Petrov's reflective mood continued. He saw not the cold winter day, but rather a lively spring morning a dozen years past. His son Mikhail Vladimirovich had been twelve at the time, and Petrov had brought him into the Kremlin to see the historical exhibits. They had toured the Armory, filled with Faberge eggs and silver gifts to the long dead czars. They had seen the a.r.s.enal, around which were still stacked the hundreds of cannon captured from Napoleon'sGrand Armee nearly two centuries earlier. Nor was the French artillery train the only cannon within the Kremlin walls. Young Mikhail had exclaimed in wonder at the big Czarist cannon on display there, a gun of sufficient size that a small man might climb completely into its bore if we wished a spectacular means of committing suicide.

However, the moment that Petrov remembered most fondly was when he had showed Mischa the statue of Lysenko, Father of Soviet Biology. Mikhail Vladimirovich had stood quietly with his head tilted back and his mouth open for nearly a minute while gazing up into the features of the great man. It had been then that he had told his father that he, too, wanted to be a biologist when he grew up. That spring day in the Kremlin courtyard had been the best day of Petrov's life.

LYSENKO, TROFIM DENISOVICH (1898-1967).

Hero of Soviet Labour, Biologist #.

T. D. Lysenko was born in a small village in the Karlovka region and graduated from the Uman School of Horticulture in 1921. He was initially a.s.signed to the Belaya Tserkov Selection Station before receiving a degree as Doctor of Agricultural Science from the Kiev Agricultural Inst.i.tute. After a further series of a.s.signments, Comrade Lysenko was appointed senior specialist in the department of physiology at the Ukrainian All-Union Inst.i.tute of Selection and Genetics in Odessa.

It was there that Comrade Lysenko became interested in a process known as "vernalization." Themethod involved immersing the seeds of winter wheat in water and then freezing them. Seeds so treated germinate in the spring and grow to maturity before the killing frosts of autumn, thereby increasing the efficiency of our collective farms. Seeds not so treated lie dormant through much of the summer growing season.

Contrary to popular belief, Comrade Lysenko did not actually invent the vernalization technique. It had been known to agriculturists for centuries. His contribution to our glorious science lay in noticing something that all others had missed.

With the goal of improving the yield of crops on the new state runkolhozes (collective farms), Comrade Lysenko experimented with a batch of seeds of a particular species of wheat. He froze the seeds for several days, then thawed and planted them. When the young wheat plants sprouted, he found that most were identical to their parents, but that a few appeared to be of a completely different species.

Thus, he reasoned, while the stress of freezing had merely reset the biological clocks of most of the plants, the actual heredity of a few special plants had been altered as a result of exposure to cold. From this humble beginning grew the thought that would, many years later, be formalized as Lysenko's Law:

"There exists within every species the possibility of changing the genetic makeup of individual organisms through the application of environmental stress."

Comrade Lysenko announced his discovery at the All-Union Biological Conference in Moscow in 1930. His paper was not well received by the reactionaries who were in control of Soviet biology at the time. Most maintained that evolution could only take place from generation to generation and never within a single organism. Indeed, many of the biologists in attendance, notably, the infamous N. I.

Vavilov, demanded to know if Comrade Lysenko was next going to begin cutting the tails off rats. The remark referred to a theory by the 18th Century French philosopher, Lamarck, who maintained that if one cut the tails off enough generations of rats, eventually the species would be born tailless. Others demeaned Lysenko's results as being caused by sloppy experimental technique, namely the contamination of the original wheat sample with seeds of the other species.

The argument between Comrade Lysenko and Vavilov went on for nearly five years, with many of the more reactionary biologists siding with Vavilov. Lysenko was not without his allies, however.

Several highly intelligent scientists, notably I. I. Prezent and V. R. Vilyams, came to his defense.

Lysenko's argument with the biology establishment might have remained merely a squabble among specialists had he not come to the notice of our great leader, Josef Stalin. The Soviet Saint heard of the brash young scientist and was impressed by the practical benefits of Comrade Lysenko's ideas. In 1935, he made Lysenko director of the inst.i.tute in Odessa and substantially increased state support for plant research.

By this time, however, Comrade Lysenko had foreseen even greater benefits to be derived from his discovery. If environmental stress could be used to alter the heredity of plants, he reasoned, why not apply the principle to higher organisms as well? However, it was not until the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War some five years later that Lysenko was given the opportunity to prove the full range of his theories.

--FromGeroi Soyuza Sovietskikh Socialisticheskikh Respublik (Heroes of the Union of SovietSocialist Republics), 1992, Moskva, Rossiya #.

Vladimir Petrov entered the long mustard yellow building that housed the offices of the Greater Union Biological Inst.i.tute. The decor inside was plush, as befitted the union's premier scientific establishment. Petrov's shoes sank into the plush crimson carpet as he walked, even to the point of leaving a barely discernible trail, as though in snow, behind him.

He had used the private entrance to the inst.i.tute, as was the habit of most of the staff. To enter by the public door would have meant navigating through the ever-present crowd of wailing mothers, tearful babushkas, and forlorn fathers, all of whom were seeking exemptions for loved ones. Nor were all such seekers old. Young people often came in person to seek exemptions for themselves. Like a horde of cursed capitalists, they came clutching sheaves of ruble notes, each hoping to find an official who would take their money in exchange for the coveted exemption. The young women, of course, offered other inducements than money.

There had been a time when Petrov could elbow his way through the jostling crowd without really seeing them. No longer. Now to navigate the cavernous public hall of the inst.i.tute was to subject himself to an emotional tug-of-war that threatened to rip him asunder. He would rather have faced Guederion's ma.s.sed panzers alone.

He reached the oversize door leading to his own office and pushed it open. Inside, his secretary, Natalia, was on the telephone and his a.s.sistant, Grigoriy, was perched on the edge of her desk, undoubtedly attempting to win some measure of s.e.xual favor from her. Grigoriy snapped to attention, somewhat comically, Petrov thought, and Natalia smiled, covered the mouthpiece with her hand, and wished him good morning.

"Good morning to you as well, Natalia. Grigoriy Borisovich, do you not have duties to perform?"

"Da, Comrade Chief Inspector."

"Then please perform them."

"Yes, Comrade."

"Natalia, the morning reports as soon as you are off the telephone."

"Right away, Comrade Chief Inspector."

"And my morning tea, too."

"Five minutes, Comrade."

Petrov nodded and pushed through into the inner office. Like the rest of the inst.i.tute, his office was richly furnished with czarist finery. His writing table and chair were at least a hundred years old. Even so, he would have preferred a regulation government desk and a chair made of good Siberian ash. He removed his coat andshapka and hung them on the clothes tree provided for the purpose before moving to sit down in the delicate chair that was one of the perquisites of being a chief inspector.

On the edge of the writing table were a photograph of Marina and little Mischa, taken while they had still lived in Perm. The sight of his dead wife caused the usual small pang to form in his heart. That was not the reason why he quickly averted his eyes, however.He reached for the morning'sPravda and had barely finished the first story concerning crop yields in Uzbekistan when Natalia knocked on his door and then stepped inside. She laid the morning report on his desk along with a gla.s.s of steaming tea in a silver holder before turning to go.

"Natalia!"

"Yes, Comrade Chief Inspector?" she answered as she turned back.

"Is Grigoriy bothering you again?"

Her pouty lips beneath high cheekbones and slanted eyes widened into a smile. "Our little boy Grigoriy is just being himself, Comrade. I can handle him."

"If he gets to be too much of a bother, let me know and I will say something to him about it."

"Yes, Comrade Chief Inspector. Will there be anything else?"

"Not at this time."

Petrov laid aside the paper and opened the green file folder. The paper was light gray in color, and had been typed on a typewriter with too light a ribbon. Central supply was being n.i.g.g.ardly again, he noted, and resolved to lay in a stock of the precious ribbons. He was getting too old and too set in his ways to tolerate straining his eyes on a report that was barely readable. What were they trying to do, blind him?

Nevertheless, he quickly scanned down the multiple columns of figures. The casualty lists were approximately as he expected.

The cold weather project at Omsk had lost 1.2% of their subjects over the past week. By the end of winter, they would be down to one-third the number they had started this year's experiments with ...

again. That was to be expected. Developing a human being that could live, work, and fight in snow was a dream that the Greater Union had been pursuing for nearly thirty years. Results had been disappointing. The problem, of course, was that cold adaptation was not a single gene or even a few related genes. It was a complex of genetic characteristics that ranged from one end of the DNA molecule to the other.

"How many had died in the search for that particular Holy Grail of science?" he wondered somewhat blasphemously to himself. The blasphemy was against the Greater Union, not the Christian religion in which he did not believe. "Millions? Tens of millions?" He could have looked, of course, but why depress himself on such a cold, cheerless morning?

Petrov had just finished working his way through the voluminous columns of statistics that were the morning report and in the process managed to drink three-quarters of the heavily sugared tea, when Grigoriy knocked respectfully on the office door before entering.

Petrov looked up in irritation to see that his aide had his fur coat andshapka on. He strode directly to the clothes tree to fetch Petrov's own.

"What is it, Grigoriy?"

"A message from the Director, Comrade Chief Inspector. There was some trouble at Zagorsk last night. He asks that you look into it."

"Trouble? What kind of trouble?""A riot by the experimental subjects, I believe, Comrade."

Petrov nodded. The Zagorsk camp was engaged in a program to breed a strain of humans capable of living and working with ten percent less food intake. The program was not one of Petrov's favorites.

In fact, it had been begun at the behest of the Ministry of Agriculture after he, Petrov, had recommended against it. In his opinion, the Greater Union would be better served if the comrades at Agriculture worked half as hard at growing foodstuffs as they had in lobbying the Biological Inst.i.tute. Their efforts had put Petrov in mind of a joke that periodically made the rounds of the office, a joke about a fict.i.tious Lysenko Program that attempted to breed a horse that need not be fed. The joke was that those in charge of the program kept reporting that they were progressing well, but that the horses died just shy of success. Like most jokes, this one had enough truth in it to make the subject an uncomfortable one for those in positions of power.

That there had been a riot among the experimental subjects at Zagorsk did not surprise him in the slightest. Even the most zealous of socialists had difficulty remembering the public good when their bellies were empty. Unfortunately, even the Great Lysenko himself could not find a method that would force the subject's DNA to adapt to new conditions while leaving the subject himself in good humor.

In truth, the Science of Lysenkoism was too new, its results too haphazard, for Petrov's peace of mind. No matter what experimental technique was used to force a desirable genetic change, the percentage of subjects who bred true after treatment was always low. Among Great Russians, for instance, the number of subjects who showed positive results ranged from 0.1 to 0.3 percent, and that after a preselection process that chose only those with the greatest opportunity for success. That was the reason why the camp populations were so large at the beginning of an experiment, If only one person in a thousand responded to treatment, the initial experimental sample must, of necessity, be a large one.

There had long been an argument within the inst.i.tute as to why results were so poor. Some of the senior biologists maintained that there was a recessive gene -- yet unidentified -- that allowed organisms to alter their genetic makeup in response to environmental stress. The problem, these scientists maintained, was a simple one, namely that the gene in question was only present in a small percentage of the population. Other biologists theorized that Lysenko adaptation was controlled by the human mind, and that given a proper incentive, anyone could adapt. While counterintuitive, the theory had the advantage of explaining why human beings were the least adaptable of any species yet tested.

A wheat plant exposed to freezing cold at an odd time of the year has no way of knowing that it is being artificially forced from its normal cycle. Neither does a bovine whose udders are pumped a dozen times a day to encourage milk production. However, human beings are intelligent and can recognize when their environment is artificial. Knowing that conditions are not normal, the human brain always resisted making a change. The Great Lysenko had characterized this tendency by postulating that "intelligence is inherently conservative." In practice, a positive Lysenko Adaptation was only possible when the experimental subject became absolutely convinced that the experiment would continue until either death or success resulted.

Nor was it possible to concentrate only on the single environmental change that was the goal of a particular experimental series. To prepare an organism for adaptation one must necessarily a.s.sault it on several fronts: hunger, thirst, heat, cold, sleeplessness, and enforced exercise.... Any or all of these must be applied for months or years at a time before the survivors' subconscious minds gave up their fight against change.

Those fortunate few who adapted were richly rewarded for their service to the state. Once out of the camps, they were given fine apartments and even their own automobiles. Women spent their days exercising, eating well, and bearing as many children as possible. Men were similarly pampered, althoughthey were given work other than merely servicing the women. Some maintained that such luxuries were inconsistent with true socialist philosophy, but Petrov believed that they were a small enough price if they kept the valuable breeding stock content. For once, the human genetic code had been forced into the proper socialist path; it needed to be duplicated as quickly as was practical.

Petrov considered all of these factors in the time it took him to rise to his feet. As his aide helped him into his coat, he wondered how badly the program at Zagorsk had been damaged. Once ensconced in fur, he turned toward the door. "Come, Grigoriy. Let us go see for ourselves what has happened."

Zagorsk was eighty kilometers northeast of Moscow. It was reached via a wide highway whose two halves were separated by a snow-covered strip of cleared ground. The inst.i.tute's Zhil automobile raced away from the capital at 120 kph, its driver confident that the GAI, the traffic police, would never dare to stop him for speeding. He did not even slow as they pa.s.sed the GAI inspection station that stood on the outskirts of the city. Petrov had a brief impression of a greatcoated policeman saluting him as they roared past. Behind the policeman lay the inevitable junkyard of wrecked autos that such stations always seemed to collect.

In czarist times, Zagorsk had been the seat of the Russian Orthodox Church. Even with its current status of cultural museum, the walled compound was gorgeous as they swept past it less than an hour after leaving the Kremlin. Visible above its whitewashed walls were nearly a dozen onion domes. Some were bright blue with gold stars, while others were pure gold. Each was topped by the double bladed cross of the eastern Christian churches.

Zagorsk Camp, a kilometer down the road from the old religious center, lay in stark contrast to the great cultural monument. The camp was modeled after those of the Red Army, with row after row of barracks stretching back into the birch forest. Petrov and Grigoriy presented their credentials at the gate and were ushered through onto the muddy track that served as the main road into camp.

The headquarters building was a hundred meters inside the tall triple fence festooned with "Danger, High Voltage" warnings. As the Zhil splashed its way to a halt in front of the building, a portly man in an ill fitting brown suit huffed his way onto the wooden porch that ran the length of the building.

"All right, Alexander Alexandrovich, how did it happen?" Petrov demanded as he mounted the three steps leading up to the porch and the waiting camp director.

"Good morning, Chief Inspector," A. A. Sermentov stammered.

"I asked you how it happened." Petrov's voice held that quiet quality that signified to anyone that knew him that someone was in very serious trouble. Sermentov blanched at the sound. Perhaps, Petrov decided, the camp director had guessed his thoughts. Sermentov was too old to enter the experimental program -- not enough breeding potential if the requisite Lysenko Adaptation were successful -- but that wouldn't stop him from so ordering if he thought the camp director had failed in his duty.

"I ... I ... don't know, Comrade Chief Inspector. We were doing our weekly cold stress exercises on the parade ground when the subjects rushed the gate. They must have planned it for some time, else why would it have occurred to so many of them at once?"

"Perhaps they were merely tired of the cold," Petrov interjected mildly. "What happened next?"

"The guard towers began firing over their heads until they reached the compound gate. When it appeared that they would break through into the headquarters area, they fired into the crowd. All was inaccordance with doctrine."

"How many dead?"

"Twenty six, Comrade Chief Inspector."

"And wounded?"

"Fourteen."

"I don't suppose the wounded will be able to continue the experiment."

"No, Comrade. I have had them transferred to a hospital for treatment of gunshot wounds."