The Sun Chemist by Lionel Davidson Page A

been more to it than that. Little Miss Margalit hadn’t finished the memorandum, however, and she needed the Xerox for comparison, so I had nothing to show.
    ‘Anyway, we’ll see,’ he said. ‘Finster is carrying on with the work.’
    ‘With the ordinary kind of batatas.’
    ‘It’s all we have.’
    ‘Wouldn’t the plant genetics people have any others?’
    ‘Not specimens. The plant doesn’t come true from seed, and they wouldn’t have kept tubers after the work was dropped. They’d just have records of crosses, sports, et cetera.’
    ‘What crosses, sports?’ I said.
    ‘If you want new strains, you cross-fertilize, or watch out for mutations – sports. It’s a slow business, and the roots don’t keep. In countries where they grow this thing – the West Indies, Africa, et cetera – they do it with bits of tuber or cuttings. You have to keep growing them on to keep them in cultivation. They wouldn’t have done that after the research was called off.’
    Why would it have been called off?’ I said.
    Well, there was a host of pressing problems, you know. People were pouring in by every ship, from camps in Europe and elsewhere , the Arab lands. The country was really very primitive. People were living in tents. They had to be fed and clothed, somehow taught a common language. Quite a lot of confusion, as you can imagine. I expect the sweet potato was just quietly dropped.’
    ‘Without his knowledge?’
    ‘Oh, he’d lost interest by then.’
    ‘By when?’
    ‘The period we are talking of – his last days.’
    I felt my brain beginning to unhinge slightly. An unaccustomed mass of lore had been thrust into it lately. As soon as I grappled with one lot, it was dislocated by another. Weizmann had lost interest in the sweet potato in his last days? But he’d surely exhibited the most violent interest in it, and on his last day; and not from a bucolic desire to ‘grow things’ but to make petrol.
    ‘I mean, he specifically says so,’ I said. ‘It’s almost his last coherent thought.’
    Beylis sat and rubbed his nose and looked at me.
    ‘Hmm,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Well, I didn’t know about the date. It might explain certain contradictions. We are having trouble with Vava.’ He rubbed his noise a bit more. ‘You see, from the note to Fritz Haber, which is all we have, Weizmann doesn’t seem to be taking the work seriously. If Vava had achieved real results, I don’t see how he could fail to be interested. He was, after all, a classic innovator himself in the field of fermentation. Yet he is laughing at it. Why?’
    ‘It doesn’t work?’
    ‘I don’t know. It looks as if we never will. But there certainly is something a bit odd about Vava. What he has apparently done is three things: he has found a particular plant, and a particular bacterium, then a method of converting the result into something much better.’
    ‘Is that difficult?’
    ‘The speed is. Just the plant, just the bacterium, just the method – all in a few weeks. Each of them can take years.’
    ‘Do you mean he couldn’t have done it?’
    ‘He could – given a series of very happy accidents and uncommon intuition. But Vava wasn’t famous for his intuition. He was not one of the great lights of science, you know.’
    ‘Are you saying he invented the whole thing?’
    ‘I’m saying he wasn’t noted for his intuition. On the other hand, Weizmann was. You see?’
    ‘Ah.’ He was smiling at me rather sagely as he said this, and nodding, so I nodded back. ‘No,’ I said.
    ‘Well.’ He rubbed his nose again. ‘If you’re right about the date, it might explain a couple of things. You see, at the time of the saline water tests he was absolutely not interested in petrol. I mean, this I can tell you. I remember it. Not a flicker of interest. He’d been through the petrol thing. He did manage to make it, incidentally – and very expensively, I may say. Nothing in it. But if after the tests he suddenly recalled