Michael Rogers - Klysterman's Silent Violin [ss]

The path of scientific research sometimes takes unexpected turns - and so does the path of evolution!

September 17-

Klysterman is a fool. He is building a silent violin; taking up space in the laboratory, using unrequisitioned materials, interfering with more valuable projects, all to create a violin that will make no sound. He explained it to me this morning: the bow and strings are to be some piezoelectric substance, he claims, that in contacting itself creates not audible vibrations but electrical ones which will be amplified and fed into headphones that the musician will wear. He insisted that he will sell millions of these silent violins, one to every parent whose child is forced to take up the instrument. I told him he was a fool and not to waste my time talking about it. Late this afternoon I saw him wiring a small integrated amplifier. It is difficult to make out what has motivated him to this project but if he is successful I will never hear the end of it.

September 19-

Ludmila W., a young woman who came to the Lab late in the summer, and who is apparently some acquaintance of Klysterman's, gave a short talk at breakfast this morning. She has developed an electrochemical device to create parrot-fever virus from nickel-cadmium cells and carbon tetrachloride. This is the strategic battlefield psittacosis synthesizer that has been predicted for several years. This Ludmila W., although undeniably brilliant, must, I am warned, be watched carefully. For several months she was involved with last year's psilocybin intensification project before it was shut down. She appears to be perfectly normal in every respect, to me at least.

September 20-

On the fourth floor there was another outbreak of the augmented wheat rust this morning. We have emphasized, repeatedly, the necessity of hermetically sealing the puccinia graminis spore containers after each working day but mistakes continue to occur. The fool Klysterman was in charge of the carbon dioxide unit that cornered and destroyed the ergot fungus beside the reactor pool. He will undoubtedly get a commendation, ignoring the fact that he released nearly five thousand cubic feet of the gas in fifteen minutes. A child could have done it with less. He is a cretin, Klysterman is, but he has, such luck.

September 21-

A surprise this morning. Ludmila W. came to my office a bit before noon asking advice. It was a minor problem but it seems significant that she chose me to visit. She was troubled by extreme thermal run-away in the sustenance modulation circuits of her viral synthesizer. I sketched for her the necessary thermistor modifications and then expressed my polite amazement that she would need help on such a basic and straight-forward matter. It turns out that she is not an electronician by education, but a neural paralysis biotist. At one time she worked for a year on the ganglion-destructor toxin at Delta laboratories. She made no mention of the psilocybin intensification project and I was hesitant to bring it up.

I am very much impressed: I had no idea that there was someone of this competence on our staff. She is, as well, an unusually attractive young lady who has not followed the shaven-scalp fashion so popular among the female lab assistants. The effect of hair is truly striking, and easily worth the slight risk of biological contamination. I suspect that she has some interest in me. Perhaps the two of us together can work toward minimizing the massive annoyance of Klysterman here in Beta laboratories. We will, I am certain, get to know one another better.

September 22-

Today Klysterman played his silent violin incessantly. He supports it on his body with thick canvas straps over his shoulders, and insists that it works perfectly but will allow no one else to wear the headphones. I am convinced, for one, that Klysterman is an insane fraud, and it is only a matter of time before he is found out.

At lunch today I sat with Ludmila W. I can detect slight signs, now that I have watched her carefully, of previous involvement with the ill-fated psilocybin intensification project. Several times I clearly noticed her listening to conversations taking place at least two hundred feet away from us, on the other side of the cafeteria. She also stares intently at blank walls, for reasons I have yet to fully understand. After dessert there was a short ceremony presenting Klysterman with a commendation for destroying the augmented wheat rust outbreak, just as I predicted. He accepted it as the frivolous buffoon he has become, grinning and smirking and waving grandly from the podium to individuals in the audience. He waved particularly at Ludmila W., and she waved back, but this, I think, was only politeness on her part.

September 23-

This morning I was transferred up to temporarily supervise the augmented wheat rust project, which has encountered a remarkable turn of events. The wheat rust entered its fourteenth generation today and is now entirely carnivorous. It shows no interest in grains or synthetic protein substitutes. Naturally, we are all concerned. Although there was some slight suspicion that the augmentation might produce an omnivorous fungus, certainly no one ever considered the possibility of a spore-reproducing carnivore.

I think the entire situation may be blamed on modern education. I would wager that the biotechnicians who originally modified the genetic structure of the wheat rust were younger men, trained in method but with no sense of craftsmanship. I shudder to imagine those eager overstuffed minds, tearing apart the RNA binders of the wheat rust the way one disassembles the encoder of an infrared spectrometer, with a screwdriver and long-nosed pliers. And, of course, now that they have wreaked their damage they have no idea as to how to set it straight again.

We spent the day examining the genetic profiles for each generation. There appears to be some unprecedented spontaneous evolution taking place between sporings that has no familiar textbook characteristics: a most notable free-form mutation. Klysterman, drifted in several times today, with the headphones perched on his huge head, playing his silent violin. It is not altogether silent, I can report with some satisfaction. The piezoelectric materials make a faint scraping noise which I find very annoying. This afternoon Klysterman produced a further consideration to threaten my position when he disconnected himself from his violin long enough to run a future-generational analysis of the wheat rust. The readouts indicate that by the twenty-second, or perhaps twenty-third, generation, the wheat rust may begin to produce activated gaseous lysergic acid derivatives in quantity.

Klysterman immediately suggested that we seal up all the spore cases and ship them to the counterinsurgency hallucinogenic toxin project at Epsilon labs, although he has promised not to make his findings official for several more days. I will not give up the administration of the wheat rust so easily: with sufficient care I think we can produce the strain of augmented ergot that was originally specified in the genetic contract. Klysterman simply wishes to discredit me.

Tonight I went to visit Ludmila W. at her dormitory but she was not in. This is the third evening in a row that she has been gone. Perhaps it is my natural dislike for the man but I cannot help but suspect Klysterman. The two of them associate far too much for Ludmila's best interests, in my view.

September 24-

At my suggestion, Ludmila W. has been temporarily assigned to the augmented wheat rust project. In order to meet the contract deadline someone must devote full time to developing the deployment devices for the new ergot strain.

At present we are considering sound-actuated capsules, perhaps two inches in length, faced with a sensitive audio-range disintegration diaphragm. These would be deployed from high-level aircraft, or upper atmosphere, MIRV targeted over the enemy agricultural center. The capsules would lie dormant in the fields until the slightest sound - the roar of a tractor starting, feet tramping the rows, even loud voices - fractures the diaphragm that holds the ergot spores in place. Once fractured, the oxygen in the atmosphere would react with the inner lining of the capsule and ultimately the entire assembly would decompose into the soil.

Ludmila W., although she is less excited about the deployment apparatus than I would like, will undoubtedly complete the assignment competently, giving me the necessary time to restructure the carnivorous wheat rust.

This afternoon the ergot entered its twentieth generation. It now lies in thick yellow-brown slabs in the bottom of the spore container, consuming nearly thirty pounds of raw beef a day. Klysterman suspects that we are starving it, at that; but here there are budgetary considerations to take into account. The most recent projections leave little doubt now that the ergot will begin to actively produce lysergic acid in several generations. Klysterman is threatening to make a full report on this matter tomorrow. This supra-paranoia on his part is not becoming of a scientist: his unwarranted caution, I think, is in reality a desire to see me fail.

September 25-

It is hard to know what to do with an annoyance like Klysterman. Today he came into the augumented wheat rust lab several times, I suspect, simply to make me nervous. He has also allowed Ludmila W. to listen to his silent violin. She wore the headphones for nearly half an hour today while he played. She says that he plays beautifully, and the tone that he produces from his massive sheet-aluminum violin is vastly superior to wooden varieties. I find all of this hard to believe. Although it is an unpleasant thought, I recall a memorandum issued last year warning specifically about the survivors of the psilocybin intensification experiments: they are "highly suggestible," the memorandum states, and "given to unusual, spontaneous, sympathetic flights of fancy of a highly irrational nature." Perhaps an unflattering thing to think of the marvelous Ludmila W., but a possibility we must keep firmly in mind.

The augmented wheat rust is doing very well, although I have yet to eliminate - or even isolate the origin of - its powerful carnivorous tendency. On the other hand, it occurred to me quite suddenly this morning that we should perhaps not be so hasty to stamp out this genetic miscalculation. Many of the greatest advances in science have come about through chance and error skillfully taken advantage of, and it seems to me that a spore-reproducing carnivore could have valuable tactical applications. Carnivorous wheat rust, I imagine, might well prove to be the ideal perimeter deterrent to guerrilla warfare. I plan to keep my opinion carefully hidden from Klysterman, who still insists on the destruction of the augmented ergot. He would be certain to try to steal any credit due me.

September 26-

Tragedy in the lab today - but tragedy of the most educational nature. A technician, in feeding the augmented wheat rust this morning, discovered unwittingly that the ergot has, as predicted, now developed the capacity to generate effective lysergic acid derivatives. What we did not suspect was that it would concurrently develop the instinct to use this hallucinogenic ability in a tactical, strategic manner. In bending over the spore case - which we now estimate contains nearly fifty pounds of the mutated puccinia graminis the technician was suddenly and without any apparent warning sprayed with a gaseous hallucinogen. Stunned and disoriented by the surprise attack he allowed his ungloved hand to brush the surface of the carnivorous ergot. The damaged portion of his arm was amputated and vaporized and at this hour the wheat rust is apparently still confined to its spore case. The technician is under heavy sedation and being treated by competent prostheticians.

There is no question in my mind that the carnivorous ergot has happened upon a remarkable new offensive device; enough, I would say, to put the spitting cobra and even the sophisticated toxin of the lion-fish to shame. A new confidence fills me at this moment: the ideal biological weapon may be within our grasp.

Ludmila has perfected the wheat rust deployment device. The slightest sound fractures the case and allows the contents to escape, and the material of the unit is entirely biodegradable. I joked with her a bit: a sound-actuated trigger, I told Ludmila, not much defense against a silent violin. She seemed remarkably subdued considering the unqualified success of her project.

Ludmila W. continues to show what I must consider an unhealthy and even perverse interest in Klysterman. I have learned lately that she has visited him in his dormitory room several times this week, presumably to hear his silent violin. I mean to discuss this matter seriously, at length. It is necessary that she understand the nature of his fraudulent appearance. This silent violin prank has gone on long enough.

September 27-

Klysterman is no longer so vocal in his threats that he will have the project taken out of my hands. He is building a second silent violin which I fear he may try to present to Ludmila W. The massive foolishness that this waste of man hours and materials represents is astounding to me. Klysterman is a perpetual annoyance; in and out of the lab constantly with his silent violin and his plans for a new one. Ludmila W. talks to him with animation and enthusiasm. I cannot stand Klysterman. He would like to see me fail; his attitude and new frivolity are altogether beyond my understanding.

September 28-

As of this morning, my speculations on the strategic value of carnivorous ergot have become a matter of laboratory record. To say that my modest efforts were received with intense interest, even enthusiasm, would be only to understate the truth. The spore-bearing carnivore has already generated more excitement, I think, than any project since selective botulism. This is very gratifying to me.

Klysterman, however, remains an annoying puzzle. He has for the most part ceased to be antagonistic about my augmented ergot; no more talk about destruction of the fungus or shipping it away from my authority - in fact he now displays an almost proprietary interest in the welfare of the wheat rust, coming in four or five times a day to lean over the spore case, his huge nose pressed against the plexiglass, smearing the plastic by wiggling his fingers and tapping on the cover.

A brief and somewhat laudatory announcement was made at lunch today regarding the tactical ergot project, so I suspect that by now Klysterman has realized the magnitude of what I have isolated, and he hopes to curry favor through his solicitousness. Little good it will do him, I might add, though it is, at any rate, a pleasant turn in his unappealing character.

September 29-

While the augmented ergot project is easily a significant professional victory, I cannot help but feel that somehow I have failed personally with Ludmila W. I had hoped that we might develop some sort of relationship that would extend past the laboratory and into more intimate realms. She is with Klysterman continually now, except for the short time she is compelled to spend with the wheat rust project. He has begun to instruct her in the silent violin and I think this occupies more of her attention and interest than all of what we are doing experimentally. The Tchaikovsky Concerto in D, Ludmila tells me, the first movement alone as Klysterman plays it would say more to me about life than a full chart of the Crosby-James amino acid progressions. Her new mysticism is both distracting and disconcerting to me. I am soundly disappointed at her adolescent foolishness.

September 30-

My initial requisition for experimental animals arrived today; fully twice as many as I had ordered - some indication, perhaps, of the new priority of tactical ergot. The basement of the lab is now crowded with a generous complement of the smaller rodents, an excellent assortment of domestic barnyard animals, a full kennel of dogs and a neat, compact selection of the more notable tropical and subtropical vertebrates and lower primates: a total of nearly four hundred subjects ready for our investigation of the carnivorous ergot strain, and Ludmila W., the beautiful, inscrutable Ludmila W., shows no more interest, or enthusiasm, at the prospect than do our thirty-five rhesus monkeys freshly out of quarantine. She and Klysterman are entirely beyond my understanding: there is such a gap between us that we might as well not try to talk at all.

Klysterman, I think, does not as yet realize the jeopardy that his light-hearted excesses here at Beta Lab have placed him in. There is serious talk, I am told, about relieving him of his technical responsibilities and reprocessing his work-status, due to the extreme and frivolous nature of his current experimental diversions. No more than two months ago Klysterman completed a magnificent, elegant central nervous system disrupter - massive, noiseless, long-distance CNS disruption operating on the most sophisticated of principles - and then he dropped it almost overnight to pursue the idiocy of his silent violin. Individuals who have examined the violin tell me that at least half of it is based directly on devices pirated by Klysterman from his discarded CNS disrupter. While a great deal of eccentricity is tolerated here at Beta Lab, in wise recognition of the part free inquiry plays in scientific progress, prolonged pointless nonsense, such as Klysterman's violin, simply will not do, and I am certain that Klysterman will soon feel a small amount of pressure on him to return to productive pursuits.

October 1-

Although it is a distasteful idea, I cannot help but wonder once again what influence the psilocybin intensification project had on my attractive colleague Ludmila W. I have noticed certain aspects of her behavior that are odd: odd, perhaps, past the delicate point of personal whimsy. Ludmila W., I suspect, harbors unusual notions - how to say this properly? - is a bearer of remarkable fancies that make it nearly impossible for us to communicate at any length. She has begun of late to bring small portions of food wrapped up in a napkin back from lunch to feed the ergot - "treats" she tells me, "treats for the fungus." I have explained to her the experimental necessity for a careful regimentation of the ergot's diet - no chicken salad, I admonish her, no meat balls, no gravy. Ludmila ignores me as if I do not exist. There are moments when I sense that, regardless of her prodigious technical abilities, she is not happy with the work done here at Beta Lab - and that, in fact, she bears me some malice for my own successful career here.

And I would in no way be surprised to learn that she is responsible for influencing Klysterman away from the promising professional future which he now seems intent upon destroying with foolishness.

Klysterman continues his ritual of visiting the ergot daily, waggling his fingers and moving his lips silently as he leans over the case, oblivious to the stares of my colleagues. I have begun to entertain disquieting feelings about smug Klysterman and the carnivorous ergot: is there something that Klysterman is aware of that has escaped me?

This evening, however, I am elated: today we ran the first series of tests with the lower primates - remarkable in every respect. The ergot is quick, efficient, silent, hardy - certainly all that one would want a fungus to be.

October 2-

This morning I noticed that Klysterman has logged a great deal of computer time in the last two days. It is not difficult to tell from the records that he has been running extended analyses of the ergot's future generational profiles. Yet he has said nothing of this to me and has even removed the duplicate readouts of his computations from Central Reference. This is most suspicious, and, in fact, upsetting to me. There is some significance here, I am certain.

October 3-

Today I stopped Klysterman when he first came in to moon vacantly over the ergot. I demanded that he tell me what work he had been doing with the generational profiles on the wheat rust and why I had not been informed. Klysterman is slippery. Klysterman is a sly individual, there is no doubt about that - and he simply smiled in his distracted fashion and said little. Nothing had come of it, he told me, far too much genetic distortion had taken place to allow accurate predictions and it was pointless to try anymore. Perhaps he was telling the truth: he is the expert and I am inclined to believe him, for the time, at least.

The hallucinogen generated by the carnivorous ergot is becoming increasingly sophisticated with each new sparing. While initially it appeared to effectively produce instantaneous disorientation, our most recent results with the primates strongly suggest that it now has some positive attractant factor. The youngest of the ergot simply waits placidly in one corner of the test cell and the subjects go to it. The lower primates, in truth, seem to be distinctly cheerful throughout the entire procedure, as nearly as we can tell: all of this is very strange and exciting to me, and only furthers my conviction that augmented wheat rust will presently give us some interesting and significant turns.

October 4-

I have come to wonder: just what is Klysterman doing? He and Ludmila W. have taken to almost constant association with each other and a reticence - should I say almost a fanatic secrecy? - that inspires the worst sort of suspicion in me. There is some pattern in all of this, I am certain, some small key that Klysterman is deliberately concealing from me. He continues to log computer time for his generational analyses, clumsily disguising his efforts by using misleading programs and inputs - but the nature of his activity is transparently clear to me.

I stop Klysterman in the halls now when I see him and demand as strongly as I am able that he inform me of what he is doing. He smiles - that wondering, beatific smile - and shrugs; "no more is possible" he tells me. Too much genetic distortion he insists, nothing else can be done. This is untrue; Klysterman has developed techniques, he and Ludmila W. together have created projection procedures that are unavailable to me. The two of them have become a significant distraction and a source of no little concern.

The augmented wheat rust continues a magnificent evolution - unquestionably we here at the lab are the first to witness living matter achieve such sophistication in so few generations. I predict a general leveling-off of the mutation process within three or four generations: it seems to me that there is little left to improve on in this magnificent fungus. Production has already begun to tool up for the deployment devices - slightly modified now, with somewhat more of the antipersonnel flavor about them - and the final series of trials will be run this week with South African vertebrates. Within the month I will be sent East for a program of briefings. I feel more than slight pride with each generation that develops, thick and yellow-brown on the spore case. Klystermanis, in perspective, only a minor annoyance against this achievement in strategic biology.

October 5-

I will not allow Ludmila W. and Klysterman to distract me. All I can conclude is that they are in the grip of some contagious insanity and that their odd behavior is symptomatic of mutual mental disturbance. I will have to take steps unless Klysterman excludes himself from the premises of the tactical ergot project and Ludmila W. returns to her normal duties. There is only so much which I can tolerate.

October 6-

Klysterman in and out many times today, his silent violin strapped to his shoulders, checking on the ergot. There seems to be no way to keep him out. More computer time registered under his name this afternoon. Ludmila W. leaves the lab early today claiming illness. All this very suspicious.

October 7-

What is Klysterman trying to do to me?

October 8-

Symbiosis: I could never have foreseen it - there is no way I might have guessed. Klysterman and Ludmila must have had techniques, derivations, extrapolations, syntheses: they must have had insight, pure burning insight, to see in the tracings of sugars and phosphates, in the bondings of adenines and cytosines and guanines and thymines - to perceive even most dimly the conditions that signal symbiosis. And I fear that they perceived far better than dimly.

This morning I unlock the door of the ergot project and find Klysterman already inside, Ludmila W. standing behind him, the plexiglass cover and sides of the ergot case smashed almost completely. "Best not touch me," Klysterman says and sweet Ludmila nods her head. When I come closer the change in their appearance is obvious; Klysterman is completely covered with a thick layer of the ergot - only his hair and eyes and fingernails are as they were. Ludmila W. is the same, a fine yellow brown velvety covering spreads over her features like stage makeup, adhering as tightly as skin. "A step forward," Klysterman tells me. "A logical extension of your fine work. Evolution in its purest state."

The spore case is empty: as neatly cleaned as if by ultrasonics. Klysterman babbles on about evolution, but I cease to listen to him. Ludmila's arm is a chalky brown, thicker now, and nonreflectant as dried mud. When she smiles her teeth are intensely white.

"The most marvelous of symbiotic relationships," Klysterman insists. "A genetic contract signed and sealed for eternity."

This afternoon Klysterman went out on the street to find someone to perform a marriage ceremony for him and Ludmila. No one was certain just how to stop him. For the moment it seems wiser to give Klysterman his way: the ergot is apparently neutralized only so far as its symbiote is concerned. God knows what reality is for Klysterman now, wrapped up in lysergic ergot like a lungfish in mud.

While Klysterman is gone, Ludmila W. perches on my desk, headphones over her thick brown ears, sawing away on her silent violin as if all were normal. To be polite I attempt to make conversation. We discuss her impending marriage. She would like children, she says, and I ask her how many. Maybe ten, she tells me, or twenty, or forty, or fifty. She laughs: maybe more.

Ludmila hasn't heard of overpopulation?, I wonder aloud.

She looks puzzled: What overpopulation? Two of us, she tells me, are not even enough for a string quartet.

As was pointed out long ago, "It ain't what you say, it's the way you say it!" that counts.