both began their research careers at NYU, Jacqueline working with a Dane called Luk Lysgaard-Peacock on the population genetics of snails, and he himself, at that stage, working on the mathematics of a model of consciousness with the mathematician Jacob Scrope, under the direction of the micro-biologist Abraham Calder-Fluss. Nineteen sixty-two, Marcus’s second postgraduate year, was the year of the Cuban missile crisis. Marcus’s generation, including Marcus, are haunted by nuclear fear, a millenarian anxiety that the ultimate weapon will be—hurled, deployed, unleashed?—leaving a world of winter and emptiness and sickness, a world imaginatively constituted by film of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whose emblem is the upsurge of the mushroom cloud over Bikini atoll. When Cuba came, Jacob Scrope packed his books and clothes ready to depart for Ireland, out of range of a possible London bomb, or bomb on the Fylingdales Early Warning System, with its white globes resting on the moors. Marcus was rattled by Scrope’s assessment of the risks, but Jacqueline was solidly unmoved—“They cannot be such
fools
,” she said, “they are just male creatures puffing themselves up like gannets and geese, they will back down and look the other way, you’ll see,
they’ve got to
, they’re human.” Her confidence came out of her own good sense, which had been Marcus’s life-line, but he could not quite share it. In his experience, good sense was not so strong in human beings as people like Jacqueline supposed, as the society they lived in was built on supposing. In effect, like gannets or geese, Khrushchev and Kennedy deflated their swollen breasts and stepped aside. In the interim, Jacqueline had begun to notice that thrush-anvils where she and Christopher Cobb had counted shells were deserted, that eggs were not hatching in nest-boxes, that dead owls were appearing in barns and farmyards. In the spring of 1961, tens of thousands of birds were found dead in the British countryside. Cobb’s activities began to include the delivery of boxes of tiny corpses to the laboratories of NYU for analysis, wherethey were found to contain mercury, benzene hexachloride, and other poisons. In 1963 Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring
was published in England, and Jacqueline gave a copy to Marcus. On the royal estate in Sandringham, Jacqueline told him, the dead birds included: pheasants, red-legged partridges, wood-pigeons and stock-doves, green-finches, chaffinches, blackbirds, song-thrushes, skylarks, moorhens, bramblings, tree sparrows, house-sparrows, jays, yellowhammers, hedge sparrows, carrion crows, hooded crows, goldfinches and sparrow hawks.
She said to Marcus, “We shall kill the planet. We are a species that
has gone wrong
somewhere. We shall kill everything.”
“We’ve all been saying that about the Bomb. I think we probably shall kill everything.”
“We shall kill everything because we’re too intelligent, and not intelligent enough to control our own intelligence. Nobody
meant
to kill these birds—they were just trying to improve something else—the wheat, the potatoes, a lot of this is owing to
seed-dressings
—trying to make things grow. I think—I do think—we might learn not to be so aggressive, when it’s not just another man or another
army
that’s at stake. But I think we’re just too
stupid
not to destroy the planet.”
Marcus said, “Fallout changes genes. Chemical mutagens change genes. Something that has taken millions and millions of years to make forms that
work
—we can just destroy—or turn into monstrosities—in a twinkling.”
Jacqueline said, “There’s so little one person can do. Collect dead birds.”
“Make sure the evidence is watertight. For politicians who are short-sighted and won’t care.”
They were young and healthy, they were full of the huge, energetic despair of the young and healthy confronted with rational fear. Their waking dreams were haunted by the idea of sumps, and
fools
,” she said, “they are just male creatures puffing themselves up like gannets and geese, they will back down and look the other way, you’ll see,
they’ve got to
, they’re human.” Her confidence came out of her own good sense, which had been Marcus’s life-line, but he could not quite share it. In his experience, good sense was not so strong in human beings as people like Jacqueline supposed, as the society they lived in was built on supposing. In effect, like gannets or geese, Khrushchev and Kennedy deflated their swollen breasts and stepped aside. In the interim, Jacqueline had begun to notice that thrush-anvils where she and Christopher Cobb had counted shells were deserted, that eggs were not hatching in nest-boxes, that dead owls were appearing in barns and farmyards. In the spring of 1961, tens of thousands of birds were found dead in the British countryside. Cobb’s activities began to include the delivery of boxes of tiny corpses to the laboratories of NYU for analysis, wherethey were found to contain mercury, benzene hexachloride, and other poisons. In 1963 Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring
was published in England, and Jacqueline gave a copy to Marcus. On the royal estate in Sandringham, Jacqueline told him, the dead birds included: pheasants, red-legged partridges, wood-pigeons and stock-doves, green-finches, chaffinches, blackbirds, song-thrushes, skylarks, moorhens, bramblings, tree sparrows, house-sparrows, jays, yellowhammers, hedge sparrows, carrion crows, hooded crows, goldfinches and sparrow hawks.
She said to Marcus, “We shall kill the planet. We are a species that
has gone wrong
somewhere. We shall kill everything.”
“We’ve all been saying that about the Bomb. I think we probably shall kill everything.”
“We shall kill everything because we’re too intelligent, and not intelligent enough to control our own intelligence. Nobody
meant
to kill these birds—they were just trying to improve something else—the wheat, the potatoes, a lot of this is owing to
seed-dressings
—trying to make things grow. I think—I do think—we might learn not to be so aggressive, when it’s not just another man or another
army
that’s at stake. But I think we’re just too
stupid
not to destroy the planet.”
Marcus said, “Fallout changes genes. Chemical mutagens change genes. Something that has taken millions and millions of years to make forms that
work
—we can just destroy—or turn into monstrosities—in a twinkling.”
Jacqueline said, “There’s so little one person can do. Collect dead birds.”
“Make sure the evidence is watertight. For politicians who are short-sighted and won’t care.”
They were young and healthy, they were full of the huge, energetic despair of the young and healthy confronted with rational fear. Their waking dreams were haunted by the idea of sumps, and
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