It was after five before he was able to give any attention to the problem of Mrs. Doris Rowell, she of the white Dutch bob, the academic baritone, the tennis shoes, the faded cotton dresses on the fat soft sexless body.
He reviewed what he knew about her. She had lived on Sandy Key, down near Turk’s Pass for at least twenty years. She’d bought an ugly old stucco house down there when houses and land were very cheap. She lived alone, had owned a succession of very old cars, was an amateur naturalist, a savage conservationist. When the paper had some special research problem involving marine animals or plant life, bird life, indigenous trees and plants, Doris Rowell was the logical one to ask. If she did not have the information, she knew where and how to find it. Usually she had the information.
He drove down to see her. When he parked beside the house she came to the entrance to the shed in the side yard and stared at him as he walked toward her. She wore vast faded khaki trousers, a man’s shirt, a baseball cap.
“From the paper,” she said. “What is it this time? I’m busy. You’ll have to talk while I’m finishing something, Mr. Wing.”
He followed her into the shed. It was stiflingly hot. Lights hung over two large fish tanks in the back end of the shed. The water exchange system was bubbling. There were fingerling sheepshead in both tanks, about twenty in each. She was mixing some kind of fluid on a work bench near the tanks.
“What are you doing, Mrs. Rowell?”
“Are you making polite sounds with your mouth or do you want to know?”
“I’m naturally nosy. It helps when you’re a reporter.”
“I suppose so. These are Archosargus probatocephalus. I’m checking the relation of salinity to growth rate. That’s the control tank on the right. I’ve got a control pen in the bay too. Proctor, of the University of Southern California, published a paper on the same experiment, using a somewhat similar fish, but a labroid fish, the Primelometopon pulchrum. I didn’t like his conclusions. This is in the second month, but now I see perhaps he was correct.”
“Will you publish your results?”
She turned and stared at him stonily. “Where? How? I’m a layman.”
“Then why bother?”
“Are you trying to irritate me? I bother because it is knowledge. I bother because I am curious and I want to know. Why did you come here?”
“Just for a little general conversation about Grassy Bay.”
“I have no time for general conversations.”
“If I’m going to sneak any conservationist propaganda into the paper, which means running contrary to policy, I ought to have a little solid stuff to play with, don’t you think?”
“Will facts have anything to do with what will happen?”
“A lot of people would like to think so.”
She stared at him for a moment. “I can give you fifteen minutes. We will sit on the porch. I’ve been on my feet since six o’clock this morning.”
He followed her to the porch of the house. She sat in a wicker chair and stared at him for a moment. “To start with a general statement, filling the bay would be a criminal act. It will take away forever something which cannot be replaced or restored. Depth, temperature, tide flow, composition of the bottom, all combine to make this bay unique. We have shallow-water species here which are not found anywhere else along this coast.”
“I have to argue the other side of it, Mrs. Rowell, not because I believe it, but just to present the usual arguments on the other side. Isn’t this uniqueness important only to a few marine biologists?”
“It is important to the sum total of human knowledge. We know painfully little about the world we live in. This is a living laboratory. Each new environmental fact is important to mankind, no matter how trivial it might seem to a banker or a newspaper reporter. You are where you are because of science, not in spite of it. A star and a snail are of equal importance.”
“But when snails get in the way of man, they get eliminated. Hasn’t it always been that way?”
“Always?” She stared at him incredulously. “For a million years, Mr. Wing, man shared this planet with other living things. The ecology was in balance. Now we are in a very short time of natural history when we have a plague of men.”
“A plague?”
“I watch the cycles in the bay. For a few years everything will be favorable for certain species. It will become very numerous. It will dwindle the numbers of the other animals who share the same space, eat the same food. Then there will be too many of them. The climatic factors will change. The huge numbers will be reduced. The other species will come back. In this split second of time in which we are living, things have been too favorable for man. With science he has suppressed too many natural enemies. He is too numerous. He is poisoning the air and waters of the earth. He is breeding beyond reason. He is devouring the earth and the other creatures thereon. But it will come to an end, of course. Man has a longer cycle than do the small creatures. Geometric growth is insupportable. During this growth cycle it is the business of thinking people to protect and conserve the other forms of life, so when the cycle is reversed, the ecology will not be too badly distorted. A hundred generations from now, that bay might be supplying food for a mainland village just as it did thirty generations ago.”
“That’s a point of view so... so broad it takes my breath away.”
“It’s a scientific point of view, Mr. Wing.”
“That would mean you anticipate a defeat of... civilization, of everything we stand for?”
“My dear Mr. Wing, the only victory is existence, and the only defeat is extermination. When a species cannot survive, it is defeated. We must keep mankind from making the planet unsuitable for existence without technology. In the criminal campaign against fire ants in this country, the poisoners have slain an estimated five thousand tons of small birds. Tons, Mr. Wing. Thirty to forty million in specific areas. Believe me, I am not snuffling over what happened to the dear, dear little songbirds. This is not a situation where sentimentality is applicable. This was nonselective elimination, taking the healthy and sick, the predators and sapsuckers, destroying not only that generation but all possible subsequent ones from that conglomerate of basic strains. It is a thoughtless ecological abomination, Mr. Wing. It is like rubbing out one factor in a vastly complex equation. Due to the interrelationship of bird life, insect life and plant fertilization, the known characteristics of that area will change. To what? We do not know. We only know it will be different. I recognize a deity of interrelationships, of checks and balances and dependencies. Acts such as this are like spitting in the face of God. It is a dangerous temerity, Mr. Wing. It is, in its essence, stupidity, nonknowing, the most precarious condition of man. Filling this bay is a part of the same pattern of throwing away everything you do not understand.”
“I can see that you have some very... strong opinions.”
“I concern myself with facts, not opinions.”
“You seem to be able to get some very noted scientists to come down here and speak out in favor of leaving the bay alone.”
She shrugged. “They understand these things. I conduct a large correspondence. I help field crews when I can. They give me little research tasks. There is a little money sometimes. It helps.”
“Where did you get your training, Mrs. Rowell?”
“I read. I study. I work. I think. I observe.”
“You call yourself a layman. I assume that means you have no formal training in these fields of knowledge.”