The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [29]
“I’m assuming that you’re an exception,” Miller said, perhaps intending to pay Lisa a compliment. “I suppose that as a policeman, you’ll at least be uncommonly dutiful, if not overly willing to challenge authority.”
That seemed to Lisa to be marginally more offensive than the remark for which he’d issued his offhand non-apology. “I’ll come along to your lectures,” she assured him. As a postgraduate, she was obliged to attend a quota of second- and third-year courses in order to make up ground that had fallen outside her own undergraduate specialties. Those that her supervisor taught had to be on her list, if only for diplomatic reasons.
“If you cared to set an example and ask some searching questions in the seminars, I’d be grateful,” he said. “It might save me from having to go quite so far over the top in the hope of eliciting a response. Feel free to be as aggressive as you like. It’s a postgrad’s responsibility to play the Judas goat, after all.”
It wasn’t, but Lisa didn’t know whether he was joking or being provocative, so she didn’t laugh and didn’t rise to the bait. “Twenty-eight years is a long time to run an experiment,” she said instead. “And the running costs can’t be trivial. Even if the food’s cheap, equipment maintenance and waste disposal must consume quite a budget.”
“Animal population dynamics is a difficult field in which to do experiments,” Miller agreed, seeming to lose half an inch of height as he bowed to the force of her fascination with the four cities and slumped into patient resignation. “Even organisms that can get through a generation in thirty days or so have to be observed for years if you’re to get any worthwhile data about the way their populations respond to changes in circumstance. Anything with a yearly life cycle is out of the question for lab work, although there are teams all over the world that send people out every spring to collect data on wild populations of all kinds of species, and have been doing so for twenty years and more. Most of what we know about mammalian population dynamics in nature is based on the records kept by hunters and fur trappers, and the data is prejudiced by the fact that the killing of their members by humans is by far the most important variable impacting on the populations. Lab-based observations are virtually restricted to rats, rabbits, and mice—and if you think the running costs of this setup are an unacceptable burden, imagine what it would cost to keep a similar number of rats or rabbits.”
“So why keep them in such large numbers?” Lisa asked.
“Because you can’t do experiments on the effects of overpopulation with small numbers,” Miller observed, without loading the comment with more scorn that was actually necessary.
“I see,” Lisa said, wishing that she’d seen it a little earlier.
“The American experiments set up in advance of this one were all terminated after a couple of years,” Miller told her, perhaps by way of repentance. “Even when they began to produce interesting results, the practical and political difficulties of keeping them going were insuperable. The whole point of this one was to build something sustainable over the long term, in the hope that it would clarify some of the puzzles Calhoun and McKendrick had to leave unsolved.”
“And has it?” Lisa asked, determined not to be forced into a humiliating confession that she had no idea of who Calhoun and McKendrick were. Fortunately, Miller knew perfectly well that she was a biochemical geneticist whose background in population biology was likely to be exceedingly sketchy, and he didn’t try to make her look foolish.
“Calhoun was one of the first people to investigate what would happen to a population limited only by space,” he said. “His experiments gained a certain anecdotal notoriety in the sixties, when even I was but a child, but that overestimated both their scope and their importance. To simplify brutally, he put