Richard Cowper - Clone

At 12.30 hours on September 3rd, 2072, Alvin had an eidetic hallucination. Since it was the first he had experienced the effect upon him was wholly unprecedented. He sat down on the stump of the Forsythe spruce he had just felled, clasped his hands across his chest and began to shiver uncontrollably.

Observing the lad's strange behaviour, his companion Norbert, a thirty-two-year-old Antaen-hybrid chimpanzee, switched off his laser trimmer and came over to see what was the matter. In the normal way Norbert was an ape of few words but he was extremely fond of Alvin and felt protective towards him. He rested his left hand on Alvin's right shoulder and gripped him reassuringly with his prosthetic thumb. 'You feeling all right, son?' he enquired.

By this time the severest of Alvin's tremors had abated a little. He swallowed manfully and blinked his eyes. 'I saw he began, and then shook his head.

Norbert peered round at the muddy ground all ribbed and churned with the imprint of their plastic boot soles. Alvin's saw was lying where he had dropped it. It had switched itself off. 'What about the saw?' he said.

Again Alvin shook his head. Unclasping one arm from his rib cage he raised his hand and appeared to grope, somewhat hesitantly, at the empty air about eighteen inches in front of his nose. 'I saw this girl,' he said slowly, 'as real as you are, Norbert. I swear I did.'

Norbert frowned. Pushing back his helmet he scratched his deeply furrowed brow. "'Girl"?' he repeated dubiously. 'What girl, son?'

'She had green eyes,' murmured Alvin dreamily, 'and dark brown hair.' He sighed. 'Oh she was as pretty as rnyosoton aquaticum, Norbert. Even prettier.'

The chimp realized that it was his duty to call up Control and report the matter, but something in Alvin's rapt expression restrained him. He consulted the timeteller strapped to his left wrist and said: 'We'll take our break now. You wait here and I'll go and fetch our packs from the buggy.'

He gave Alvin's shoulder a comforting squeeze, then knuckled his way crabwise across the slope and vanished among the trees by the water's edge.

All alone Alvin sat gazing out unseeing across the reservoir with an expression of near-idiotic bliss on his round, guileless face. Two large, happy tears gathered along his lower eyelids, brimmed over, and trickled unheeded down his chin.

Norbert returned five minutes later. He handed Alvin his lunch pack and sat down 'beside him on the trunk of the felled tree. 'I've been thinking,' he said. 'Maybe it was Doctor Somervell.'

'No, Norbert,' said Alvin firmly, 'I'm sure it wasn't anyone I've ever seen here.'

The chimp selected a sandwich from his own pack, peeled back a corner to expose the peanut butter filling, smacked his lips appreciatively and then took a healthy bite.

'Besides,' added Alvin reflectively, 'Doctor Somervell isn't pretty.'

'I wouldn't know,' said Norbert. 'She pinks up pretty good.'

'This girl,' said Alvin, ignoring the observation, 'had green eyes. Doctor Somervell has brown eyes.'

'Maybe she changed 'em,' shrugged Norbert, unscrewing the cap of his boiler flask and raising it to his lips.

'It wasn't Doctor Somervell,' insisted Alvin with some heat. 'After all, Norbert, I ought to know! I saw her!'

'No offence meant,' said Norbert wiping his lips with the back of his hand. 'Eat up, son.'

Alvin undid his pack, extracted an apple and took a moody bite out of it. For a minute or two he chewed away in thoughtful silence, then, swivelling round on his tree stump till he was facing the chimp he said: 'It could be from Before, couldn't it Norbert?' "'Before"?' echoed the chimp. 'Before what?'

'Before I was here.'

'There's no such thing,' said Norbert uneasily. 'You know that, Alvin. Hey, if you don't want that core, I'll have it.'

Alvin passed across the apple core and helped himself to a sandwich. He knew Norbert was speaking the truth simply because his earliest memory was of waking up in the Station's sick bay and seeing Doctor Somervell and Doctor Pfizier bending over him. That was when Doctor Pfizier had given him his name -'Alvin'. Later, of course, he had acquired a whole host of other memories, but that was the first and it had always been Alvin's favourite. He found it quite impossible to express adequately either the gratitude he felt towards the good, grey-haired old Hydrologist who had introduced him to his identity, or the sense of almost dog-like devotion with which he recalled those early talks the two of them had had. 'Now you be good, Alvin,' the gentle old scientist had enjoined him, 'and let the others be the smart cookies.' How often Alvin's eyes had misted over as he recollected the fervent tremor in his own voice as he had replied: 'Oh, I will, sir! I will!' 'Blessed are the pure in heart, Alvin. Don't you ever forget that, my boy.' 'I won't, sir! Believe me!' 'Women are a snare and a delusion, Alvin.' 'Even Doctor Somervell, sir?' 'Mo's the worst of the lot, but don't say I told you.' The old man's wisdom had flowed like a pellucid, inexhaustible fountain and young Alvin had drunk deep.

If he had so far been unable to test the validity of many of the good doctor's precepts it was for the simple reason that adequate opportunity had never presented itself. Since the complement of the Aldbury Hydrological Station was restricted to Alvin, the two scientists and thirty-two prosthetised apes, the boy's temptations were minimal, and until the incident already described, he had not even felt anything that could be classed as curiosity about his origins.

His cognizant life having been passed mainly in the company of the chimps, whom he had found to be in all significant respects immeasurably his superiors, Alvin felt none of the anti-anthropoid resentment that was still to be met in other less enlightened areas of the world. For their part, once the problem of his union membership had been sorted out, the apes accepted him in a brotherly way and had been happy to relieve him of the contents of his slender wage packet whenever he sat in on one of their Saturday poker schools. Eventually Norbert had felt constrained to call a branch meeting-from which Alvin had been tactfully excluded-and had told his fellow apes that it was a shame to take advantage of such a nice guy. Since then Alvin's regular losses at the card table had diminished remarkably and, once or twice, much to his amazement and delight he had even won a small pot.

The Station on which Alvin worked was part of the vast complex of artificial freshwater lakes that had been created towards the end of the 2oth Century to supply the ever-increasing demands of the London Conurbation. Some hundreds of square miles of rich agricultural land had been inundated and more would undoubtedly have suffered the same fate had not a series of increasingly violent earthquakes finally persuaded the government of the day that the money spent on re-building devastated towns might be more advantageously invested in de-salination plants.

The Aldbury Station was responsible for Lake Tring and Lake Caddesden together with that area of the Chilterns which constituted their catchment area. Its principal duties were to monitor erosion, nutrient salt balance and biological productivity. Among its peripheral concerns were re-afforestation, tree culling, maintenance of fish stocks, hire of pleasure craft and management of the two refreshment centres. These tasks were left entirely in the hands of the apes who had also, on their own initiative, organized a round-the-clock, summer rescue service.

It was Alvin's most dearly cherished ambition to become a helmsman of one of the two Skeeto rescue boats. In his daydreams he sped up and down the ten-mile stretch of Lake Tring, his tangerine-tinted Zyoprene wetsuit glittering like a goldfish as he swooped to rescue beautiful maidens from watery graves. Unfortunately an inherent inability to distinguish between port and starboard at moments of stress seemed likely to preclude him from ever realizing his ambition. Bosun, the grizzled old ape who was in charge of the rescue service, had given strict orders that Alvin was never to be allowed near the Skeetos unless he was accompanied by a fully qualified chimp.