Dr. Mough revealed that Serendipitous was mutating bats which could, as it were, vacuum-clean the air. The company was also mutating goats to eat land pollutants and refuse, and sharks which would digest oceanic pollutants.
At that very moment, Dr. Legzenbreins was in her office with her daughter.
"I need a man," Desdemona whined.
"Who doesn"t?" her mother said.
Desdemona blew out her bubble gum and looked cross-eyed at the iridescent bubble. Her mother became tense. Was Desdemona getting another fabulous idea?
The big bubble collapsed into the big mouth.
"You need a man?" Desdemona said. "You? The most beautiful woman in the world?"
"That"s what scares them off," Dr. Legzenbreins said. "And the few that don"t scare, the studs with low IQ"s, I can"t stand. So I"m in as bad a way as you are. Ironic, ain"t it?""Drs. Kerls, Lorenzo, and Mough would marry you within a minute, and they"re Ph.D."s," the daughter said, drooling.
"They"re five feet tall, and I"m six feet two," the mother said. "Besides, I"m not sure they"re not punch-drunk."
"They"re brilliant!"
"The two states are not necessarily incompatible."
"I don"t want big words. I want a man. I"m twenty-five!"
"I have a man for you," the mother said. "A psychoa.n.a.lyst."
She added, "In a very high-cla.s.s private sanitorium."
But she did not mean it. Her daughter provided the creative genius of Serendipitous. She herself, though a genius, was basically an a.n.a.lytic scientist, and her three a.s.sistants were basically synthesizers. Without madness, science would get no place, and Dr. Legzenbreins knew it.
She put on a very tight peekaboo dress and called in the three for a conference.
"I won"t marry until my daughter marries and quits bugging me about her s.e.x life or lack thereof. I"d suggest a lover. But she is, as you know, quite insane, and insists on remaining a virgin until she has a husband. Now, each of you goofb.a.l.l.s has asked me many times to marry him."
Dr. Kerls stood up, danced backward, cracked his knuckles, and said, "I repeat my offer."
Dr. Mough kicked him in the knee and slapped him twice in the face before he hit the floor. As Dr. Kerls tried to get up, he was. .h.i.t on the head with the coffee tray, which bent to form a semihelmet.
"Don"t interrupt!" Dr. Mough said.
Dr. Legzenbreins told them what they must do. There was a long silence when she had finished. It was finally broken by Desdemona"s "Eureka!" from the laboratory. At any other time, all would have stampeded through the door to find out what new idea she had just stubbed her mental toe on.
Dr. Legzenbreins leaned back and stretched her arms out and arched her back.
"The two survivors, uh, the two that don"t marry her, will be permitted to put their names on my marriage lottery list."
Dr. Mough grabbed Dr. Lorenzo"s bushy hair and yanked out a fistful.
Lorenzo screamed and grabbed the top of his head and moaned.
"Don"t ever let me catch you looking at her again like that," Mough said. "It ain"t decent."
"Thank you, Dr. Mough," she said. "I can"t stand naked l.u.s.t. Especially in a scientist. It"s so unprofessional."
"My pleasure," Dr. Mough said, beaming.
"What I don"t like about this," Dr. Kerls said, shrinking away from Mough, "is that the loser has to settle for Desdemona."
"Is any sacrifice too great for Science?" Dr. Mough said, shuddering.
"What"s Science got to do with this?" Kerls said. "Unless everything reminds you of Science?"
Dr. Legzenbreins said, "I leave it up to you gentlemen to decide who"s going to be put on the, uh, go to the altar with her."
She rose and stretched again, and the three moaned.
"Shall we see what Desdemona has thought of this time?"
"I was thinking," Desdemona said, "that this food tastes more like sawdust every day. So I was going to have to find another delicatessen. And men I thought, sawdust. Termites eat wood and get fat on it. Their guts contain protozoa, you know, them teeny little parasitical animals. Protozoa use enzymes to digest the cellulose in the wood and convert it into stuff fit to digest. OK, so thousands of tons of sawdust and chips of wood are just thrown away every year. Why couldn"t these be saved and fed to people? If. . ."
"If we could mutate protozoa to live in the human gut, right?" Dr. Lorenzo said.
Dr. Mough banged him on the forehead with his fist.
"Imbecile! How do you get people to eat wood?"
"You make it palatable, indeed, delicious," Desdemona said.
"Just what I was about to say in reply to my rhetorical question," Dr. Mough said.
"I wish you"d just give me rhetorical blows," Dr. Lorenzo said. "Them real blows hurt, you know."
"If I quit hitting you, you"d say I didn"t love you no more," Dr. Mough said.
"Quit bellyaching; get to work."
Desdemona, being mad, could not be trusted to work with the dangerous chemicals and expensive apparatus. But she was permitted to use cheap chemicals and equipment while searching for something to make sawdust tasty. Dr. Kerls supervised her every move. As Dr. Mough later said, this was a fortunate decision on his part, even though he was criticized for making Dr. Kerls her watchdog.
Dr. Kerls, carrying a long gla.s.s pipe to attach to Desdemona"s setup, turned around when Dr. Mough called to him. The pipe knocked over a tube of hydrocyanic acid onto Desdemona"s experiment for the day. The result was a minor explosion which caused Dr. Kerls to whirl around and bang Dr. Lorenzo across the eyes with the pipe and a salt which, sprinkled over sawdust, would bring tears of joy to a gourmet. Sawdust hamburgers became Desdemona"s favorite food.
She forgot that she needed protozoa to convert cellulose into food and that the protozoa had not been successfully mutated yet so it could live in the human gut. She lost weight. But the sad thing was that she was as ugly as ever, if not more so. The fat had hidden a very unaesthetic bone structure.
"Takes after her father," Dr. Legzenbreins said.
One day, Dr. Kerls sneezed into a test tube of protozoa, and the next day the animalcules were turning sawdust into protein. Desdemona drank a cupful of the little beasts and soon began to gain weight on a diet that only a termite should have loved.
A week later, Dr. Lorenzo got mad at Dr. Mough and threw a beaker of protozoa at him. Mough ducked, and the beaker flew through the door of the men"s room as Dr. Kerls stepped out. Dr. Mough said there was nothing to worry about, even if the protozoa were circulating in the city"s sewage system. The protozoa couldn"t get back into the drinking water, and what if they did?
The next day, Dr. van Skant called them all in and asked for a progress report on the antipollution projects.
"Eureka!" Desdemona cried, interrupting the conference.
"How about a virus which you can put into gasoline or any fuels burned in cars and factories? It"s quiescent until blown out the exhaust with the gases. Then it combines with the gases to render them physically inert, or it attacks the pollutants and decomposes them rapidly. You kill the toxics at the source. The viruses multiply as they float through the air, and they continue to eat up the combustion products.
And we can make aquatic viruses for the rivers, lakes, and oceans."
The three scientists shook hands with each other while the mother beamed at the daughter.
Van Skant said, "That"s fine. But I want a report on what"s been done, not on what you"re going to do in some cloud-cuckoo-land future."
"Certainly, step this way," Dr. Mough said.
He led the Federal man to a large table on which was a complicated array of very busy apparatus.
"My colleagues and I have put in many hours toiling to build this thingamajig.
It"s designed to make a substance to coat lungs. This coating will filter out the air pollutants and admit only pure air. How"s that grab you, Doctor?"
"I don"t know," van Skant said slowly. "There"s something wrong in your approach to the pollution problem. But I can"t quite put my finger on it."
Mough and van Skant put on protective suits and went into the biological room. There Mough showed him the mutated bats, sharks, and winged goats.
"You"ll notice the goats don"t have any feet," Dr. Mough said. "That means that they have to fly to get from one place to another on land. And while they"re flying, being big animals, they"re really breathing hard to keep themselves aloft. So they take in vast quant.i.ties of polluted air, and their specialized stomachs and lungs burn up the bad stuff. That leaves a swath of clean air behind them. What the winged goats don"t get, the bats will. Or maybe it"s the other way around."
"Wouldn"t flying elephants burn up even more bad air?" van Skant said, sneering.
"Please don"t be absurd," Dr. Mough said.
"There"s something I can"t quite put my finger on," van Skant said, shaking his head.
Dr. Mough didn"t tell him, but the thingamajig was also being used as a matrimonial roulette wheel. There were three special chemicals in the setup, each of which was presently colorless but would eventually change into a primary color. One would be red; one, purple; one, green. Mough"s color was red; Lorenzo"s, purple; Kerls"s, green. A random selector had dumped the chemicals into the setup, and so the three colleagues did not know which chemical would change color first. It was all up to chance.
The man whose color appeared first would win Desdemona"s hand.
"And, G.o.d help him, the rest of her!" moaned Dr. Mough.
One day, the winged goats were gone, having eaten through the steel bars and the gla.s.s walls imprisoning them.
Several days later, the three scientists and Desdemona were having lunch in the laboratory when Dr. Legzenbreins walked out of her office. She was completely covered with a helmet and suit, being on her way to the virus section to run a late phase of an experiment. She waved at the group as she went by; the men stopped eating to groan and moan.
A moment later, Dr. van Skant, purple-faced, charged into the room.
"You"re closed down!" he bellowed. "Your G.o.dd.a.m.n flying goats ate half my car in the parking lot! This is the last straw! I"m canceling all your government contracts!"
Drs. Kerls, Lorenzo, and Mough sprang to their feet and their heads met. The result was a loud thunk and cries of pain as they reeled back clutching their heads.
The alarm attached to the thingamajig whooped, and a bright orange light flashed.
"Oh, my G.o.d!" Kerls screamed. "It"s happened!"
"What? What?" van Skant and Desdemona cried. Desdemona had been behaving rather woodenly lately, but she was aroused now.
Dr. Kerls, half-fainting, grabbed Mough.
A green thread was streaking through the mud-brown liquid in the pipes on the thingamajig.
Dr. Mough felt so sorry for his colleague, he did not hit him for having put his hands on him.
Dr. Legzenbreins raced out of the virus section, leaving the door open.
"What is it? What is it?"
Dr. Mough said, "It"s the biggest. . ."
Boom!
Clouds of brown vapor and sprays of green liquid filled the laboratory.
By the time the scientists and Desdemona got back onto their feet, they could see clearly. The clouds were gone, revealing a wrecked laboratory and ruptured walls behind which had been the virus section and the zoological room.
"The green doesn"t count," Kerls mumbled. "I had my fingers crossed when we swore to abide by the decision of the thingamajig."
"You"ll marry Desdemona or else," Dr. Mough said.
"Or else what?" Kerls squeaked.
"Or else this!" Mough said, and he broke a beaker of yellow liquid over Kerls"s head and then rammed the flaming end of a Bunsen burner against Kerls"s rear when Kerls turned away from him.
Desdemona spat out green liquid.
"Gee, I feel funny," she muttered. She walked out of the laboratory as if she were made of wood.
"Think she"s all right?" van Skant said. "That virus got blown all over the place, and G.o.d knows what the chemicals in the thingamajig will do."
"Won"t hurt nothing," Mough said. "I"ll stake my reputation on that."
"We"re lost!" van Skant said, and he staggered out of the room.
Desdemona wandered around, singing, until she found a vacant lot, one in which the good earth was uncovered. And there she stood motionless, arms extended to the sides, while roots, still half-flesh, sprouted and drove into the ground through her shoes.
The fourth day, she put out buds.
The sixth day, a pigeon spotted her and landed to build a nest.
By then, hundreds of thousands of Southern Californians were undergoing similar metamorphoses.
The polluters were changing into something which could not pollute and which converted carbon dioxide into the much-needed oxygen. Serendipitous had found the ideal solution.
Only one was left unmetamorphosed. She had been wearing a protective suit at the time of the explosion and had not taken it off until she was certain that the danger was over.