Coma brushed her long hair off her forehead, watched him curiously.
'Well, what's the secret?'
Powers lit a cigarette. 'There's no secret. Teratologists have been breeding monsters for years. Have you ever heard of the "silent pair"?'
She shook her head.
Powers stared moodily at the cigarette for a moment, riding the kick the first one of the day always gave him. 'The so-called "silent pair" is one
of modern genetics' oldest problems, the apparently baffling mystery of the two inactive genes which occur in a small percentage of all living
organisms, and appear to have no intelligible role in their structure or development. For a long while now biologists have been trying to activate
them, but the difficulty is partly in identifying the silent genes in the fertilized germ cells of parents known to contain them, and partly in
focusing a narrow enough X-ray beam which will do no damage to the remainder of the chromosome. However, after about ten years' work Dr Whitby
successfully developed a whole-body irradiation technique based on his observation of radiobiological damage at Eniwetok.'
Powers paused for a moment. 'He had noticed that there appeared to be more biological damage after the tests - that is, a greater transport of
energy - than could be accounted for by direct radiation. What was happening was that the protein lattices in the genes were building up energy in the
way that any vibrating membrane accumulates energy when it resonates - you remember the analogy of the bridge collapsing under the soldiers marching in
step - and it occurred to him that if he could first identify the critical resonance frequency of the lattices in any particular silent gene he could
then radiate the entire living organism, and not simply its germ cells, with a low field that would act selectively on the silent gene and cause no
damage to the remainder of the chromosomes, whose lattices would resonate critically only at other specific frequencies.'
Powers gestured around the laboratory with his cigarette. 'You see some of the fruits of this "resonance transfer" technique around you.'
Coma nodded. 'They've had their silent genes activated?'
'Yes, all of them. These are only a few of the thousands of specimens who have passed through here, and as you've seen, the results are pretty
dramatic.'
He reached up and pulled across a section of the sun curtain. They were sitting just under the lip of the dome, and the mounting sunlight had begun
to irritate him.
In the comparative darkness Coma noticed a stroboscope winking slowly in one of the tanks at the end of the bench behind her. She stood up and went
over to it, examining a tall sunflower with a thickened stem and greatly enlarged receptacle. Packed around the flower, so that only its head
protruded, was a chimney of grey-white stones, neatly cemented together and labelled: - Cretaceous Chalk: 60,000,000 years Beside it on the
bench were three other chimneys, these labelled 'Devonian Sandstone: 290,000,000 years', 'Asphalt: 20 years', 'Polyvinylchloride: 6 months'.
'Can you see those moist white discs on the sepals,' Powers pointed out. 'In some way they regulate the plant's metabolism. It literally sees time.
The older the surrounding environment, the more sluggish its metabolism. With the asphalt chimney it will complete its annual cycle in a week, with the
PVC one in a couple of hours.'
'Sees time,' Coma repeated, wonderingly. She looked up at Powers, chewing her lower lip reflectively. 'It's fantastic. Are these the creatures of
the future, doctor?'
'I don't know,' Powers admitted. 'But if they are their world must be a monstrous surrealist one.'
