Crispin's Army

“Are you a doctor?” said Josie, when she and Tana and Cath were back in the privacy of Josie’s cottage. She was breast feeding Karl, and Gus appeared embarrassed to be watching - particularly strange in a city-dweller, she thought - though at the same time he showed fascination with Karl’s fingers and toes.

There was a pause, and Gus suddenly realised that he had been asked a question. “Sorry?” he said with a start.

“Are you a doctor?” Josie repeated. “I assume you are, from the interest you’re taking in Karl’s... malformations.”

Gus hesitated. “No,” he said slowly. “I’m not a doctor.”

Josie twitched an eyebrow, indicating that he might continue and tell them what he was. He didn’t act on her non-verbal cue. She allowed a sigh to escape. She felt as if she were drawing teeth. “What are you, then?”

Gus had the look of a punch-drunk boxer getting into the ring for another round. “I’m a scientist,” he admitted defensively, adding in a rush, “but I didn’t have anything to do with what happened back there. Nothing at all.”

“Hey,” said Cath, putting a calming hand on his shoulder, “settle down. No one’s accusing you. What kind of scientist?”

“Well,” said Gus, looking relieved that he was not being called upon to defend his whole profession, as he had been countless times since joining a raggle taggle band of fleeing Urbians so many months before. “It’s not easy to explain, but I was working on something very special when all the trouble began. I was just about to start doing some tests with something nothing short of revolutionary.”

“What kind of tests?” Josie demanded, irritated by the man’s caginess. “What kind of revolutionary something?”

“It’s a kind of cross between science and engineering. I’ve coined a name for it. Nanotechnology.”

“Nano as in nanosecond?” said Cath.

“Exactly,” Gus smiled, evidently relieved to find someone who was on even approximately his wavelength.

“Very small technology,” Cath continued.

“Yes,” said Gus. ”Very small.”

“How small?” Cath queried, conscious that the other two women had lapsed into an uneasy silence, having tacitly assigned to her the role of interrogator.

“Technology on the scale of atoms and molecules,” Gus explained.

“To do what?” said Cath, wondering what this was leading to.

Gus drew a deep breath. “It has the potential to change the world as we know it. Change it utterly beyond recognition.”

The three women stared hard at the man seated in their midst. His wide blue eyes had a particular look about them, and it was hard to tell whether it was madness or genius that they betrayed. He looked from one to another of them, trying to see what impact his words were having on them.

“Go on,” said Josie.

“You think I’m a nut, don’t you?” said Gus, peering at them from beneath hooded brows.

“We’ll reserve judgement until we’ve heard the full story,” Cath announced. How is this thing going to change the world?”

“Do you know much science?” asked Gus. “It’s just that I’m an indifferent teacher.”

“I know the basics,” said Cath. “What I needed to get me into nursing.”

Gus’s eyes moved to Josie. “A little,” she said, removing Karl’s puckered lips from her nipple and lacing her dress.

The eyes settled on Tana. She gave a slight shrug. “Just talk,” she said simply. “I’ll pick up what I can, and get these two to fill in the gaps afterwards.”

“Okay,” said Gus, prepared for an uphill struggle. “You know, perhaps, that the biomass, everything from the air we breathe to the soil under our feet, and our own bodies, is made up of atoms, all arranged into different molecules to create different substances?”

He got nods from Cath and Josie, and from Tana a wave of the hand to indicate that he should continue to speak, without seeing if she were following or not.

“Well,” he continued, “there are more than a hundred elements on the atomic table, but life itself is based on just four - hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and carbon. This makes things a lot easier for our purposes. What I’ve been working on in my lab back in Urbis, and what I was just about to try out when, as I say, this whole thing blew up, was machines - robots, if you like - that work on a molecular scale, rearranging material atom by atom.”

He glanced up at the three faces, their brows knit in concentration as they sought to take in the full meaning of what he was saying. He felt the incongruity of the subject in the simple surroundings of Crispin’s little cottage.

“This all sounds very high-powered,” said Cath. “Surely you didn’t do all this alone?”

Gus laughed. “No indeed. It would have been very difficult to do it all single-handed. I was on the staff of a large laboratory, and could call on any of a legion of assistants to help me out. But of course, at the outbreak of the fighting, self-preservation became people’s prime concern.” He hesitated. “Not that I blame them or anything.” After a pause, he continued. “The ramifications of this whole project are enormous, and if you’re interested, I can give you the details at some other time, but for the moment I’ll confine myself to the medical aspect, as that’s what concerns you most.”

He paused again to draw breath, and looked from Karl’s contented face to Josie’s, and in Josie’s eyes he saw what he had scarcely dared aspire to: the kindling of the light of hope as she began to comprehend precisely what it was that this man had in mind.

“It’s all pretty fantastic...” Cath began, her voice betraying skepticism.

“Shh!” hissed Josie, eager now for Gus to finish his explanation.

Gus smiled a wry smile. “You were going to say, Cath, that it all sounds pretty fantastic, and what proof do I have that my stuff works?”

“Yes,” Cath conceded. “I was.”

“The fact that you and I are here is proof that it works,” said Gus. “We all started out, way back down the evolutionary ladder, as single-celled creatures. Those single cells learned to replicate themselves, and to create ever more complex organisms. Latterly, including people. What I am seeking to do is to copy what nature does, and also to improve on it. Just before the trouble started, I made my most successful cell repair operation. I induced a heart attack in one of my lab rats. After he had been dead for an hour, I sent some of my little machines into him, and they rebuilt the fatally damaged cardiac muscles, and I brought him back to life. I had hoped to be able to do something similar to a human being, but the circumstances prevented that. But I know I have the ability, the potential, basically, to put every doctor out of business. Among other things.”

“Are you saying,” Josie said slowly, her dream hovering tenuously between realisation and evanescence, “that you can make Karl whole?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” answered Gus, his confidence growing. “Conventional surgery could separate his fused fingers, some expensive bionics might be able to accommodate him with artificial substitutes for the fingers that are missing, but,” he stroked the bulbous dome of the child’s head, “there’s not much they could do about his brain, and you’re likely to see in time that he is in fact quite retarded. Only I can rebuild his neural tissue. And without surgery or any other kind of dangerous operation.”

“I see,” said Josie. “And I’m grateful to you for your concern. Very grateful. One thing puzzles me. Why Karl? There must be thousands of people out there you could use as guinea pigs. And that’s just the live ones. If you’re saying that you can bring the dead back to life, well, Urbis has millions of customers for you, surely. Why my son?”

“Well,” said Gus, smiling a little shyly, “you could call it a bit of p.r. You people are pretty highly regarded by a lot of folk I’ve met in the country out there. Some even call you heroes of the revolution. For my part, I want to make it clear that I don’t hold it against you that I was obliged to come into this exile just at the moment of my triumph. I can see that the old regime had to be overthrown. The timing was just a bit unfortunate.”

“So you’d describe yourself as sympathetic to the Underground?” queried Tana, pleased to be able to understand at least this aspect of the conversation.

“Yes,” Gus smiled. “I would. I’m sorry it became necessary to wage a civil war, but I believe there was no other way. And this brings me to my other point. I believe that ultimately the Underground will win, and will create a new government. I would like to help. I think my ideas will contribute to a better society. But I will need the support of, ah, friends in high places, to help get my radical ideas across.”

He looked with hope in his eyes from one to another of the three women.

Josie laughed. “For a scientist, you’re a shrewd politician, Gus. You’ve also solved my main problem, I think.”

“What problem’s that, Josie?” said Gus, visibly heartened by the smiles the women were giving him.

“Why, the problem of how to get Crispin to agree to go back to the city to see this thing through to the end. I thought I was going to have a long drawn out fight on my hands, but if he knows there’s a way to make Karl perfectly healthy - perfectly! - I think he’ll agree to make the trip.”

“There’s one aspect of this I haven’t raised,” said Gus in a low voice. “But if I’m going to be straight with you, I have to say it.”

“What’s that?” said Josie, noting the anxious twitching at the corners of his mouth.

“My lab,” Gus replied. “It isn’t in some out of the way corner of the city. It’s in sector six, pretty much in the war zone. There’s no telling what state it’ll be in by the time we get back there.” He dug into a pocket and produced a small metal cylinder. “I have all my records with me of course, but if the lab has been destroyed, it’s a case of back to square one. It could take years to rebuild.”

Josie pulled a face. It was as if the glimmer of hope she had suddenly glimpsed had just as suddenly been snuffed out. “Well,” she said, avoiding Gus’s eyes, and pushing the words past a lump that seemed to have instantly materialised in her throat, “we’ll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it, won’t we?” She laughed. “I do have some experience of crossing dangerous bridges, you know.”

During the days that followed, Gus was introduced to the other members of the Underground in Vale. Josie breezily announced to them that he was an ally to their cause, and potentially of great benefit to the new Urbis which would rise from the ashes.

When Josie told them he was a scientist and he outlined his plans, the responses of the others were mixed. Charlie, warm and amiable, scratched his black thatch and professed ignorance of such high-flown technical prestidigitation, but added that if Josie, Cath and Tana were all in favour of it, then it was probably okay.

The other three men, Nick, Ralph and Keith, expressed varying degrees of disinterest in the finer points of Gus’s work, but were happy to welcome into their ranks any newcomer who was supportive towards the cause.

The most overtly hostile was Mina, whom they found among the harvesters, wielding a scythe as if the winter barley were ranks of Security men. As Josie explained who Gus was, she stood, feet planted firmly, clutching the scythe almost menacingly as she looked him up and down.

“I don’t like people like you,” she announced. “People who tamper with the basis of nature, promising all kinds of miracles, and then something goes wrong, and we end up worse off than before. Dead, likely as not.”

“You’re referring to the meltdown, I suppose,” said Gus adopting his all-too-familiar defensive posture, folding his arms across his chest. “I think it’s pretty certain that that was a result, direct or indirect, of the fighting. For your whole life prior to that you had enjoyed the benefits of limitless cheap power. And under normal circumstances you would have continued to do so for the rest of your life.”

“You can’t always count on circumstances being normal, Prof,” Mina said sourly. “And it’s those abnormal circumstances that show up the fatal flaws in any technology. We know now how our power generation was flawed. Do you know how this stuff of yours is flawed?”

“No,” Gus admitted, “at the moment I don’t.”

“In that case,” said Mina, “you’ll forgive me if I don’t welcome your ideas with open arms.”

She turned her back and began swinging her scythe with renewed vigour.

By contrast, the warmest reception to Gus’s ideas came from Simone, whom they found with Goran, the smith, helping him to build a rudimentary grain elevator and a horse driven winch, which together would make the job of harvesting easier and quicker to accomplish, reducing the risk of crop spoilage when the autumn rains came.

Simone tossed her mane of chestnut coloured corkscrew curls, and her green eyes flashed as she visualised some aspects of the remarkable new world Gus described. Cheered by her enthusiasm, he became more voluble, and began filling in more of the details.

Simone refused to be put off even by the prospect that his equipment might need to be rebuilt from scratch.

“You’ve got all the technical ability,” she smiled, “and I’m pretty handy, if I do say so myself. I’d be happy to help out.”

It was at this point that Josie deemed it prudent to withdraw. Karl was probably due for a feed, she said to herself, and she would have plenty of time to talk to Gus about the finer points of his project.

She was surprised to find the cottage door standing open, and surprise turned to pleasure when she entered. Karl was being rocked gently in the arms of his father.