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Then it wastime for the final interview.
Ann Sloam was two days short of seventy-five, according to Letty’s briefing packet. She lived in a narrow three-story stone town house on a backstreet not far from the heart of Oxford. “This is unexpected,” Hawkins said, looking down the line of well-kept homes. “Tutors are generally…mmm…not fairly paid. Not well paid, for what they do. This house is beyond the means of an average tutor. I would expect that in this location, it could go for well in excess of a half-million pounds.”
“An estimate left over from the ex-wife?”
“Yes, I would have to admit that’s true. She could talk real estate twenty-four hours a day. And often did. We’d be in bed and I was working as hard as I could and she’d moan, ‘We can take care of the cat odor.’ ”
So, did he think about his ex-wife a lot? But wait: wasn’t she the one who’d mentioned ex-wife?
—
Ann Sloam hadcurly steel-gray hair and stooped shoulders, but a bright smile, a youthful step. She opened her door, looked at Letty and said, “I imagine you’re the young lady from the United States.”
“Yes, I am,” Letty said. “I appreciate your talking to us.”
“I’m happy to. I’m very worried about Lionel,” she said, as she stepped back from the doorway. Letty and Hawkins looked into a comfortable sitting room with a large television hung from one wall. She pointed them at two overstuffed chairs, while she sat on a sofa. “Lionel is suffering,” she said.
Letty: “I understand that he contracted several diseases in his work…”
Sloam waved that away. “He has handled those—though not without serious physical discomfort. The suffering I was referring to, though, is psychological. He is in a bad way.”
“Tell me,” Letty said.
Sloam sighed, and looked at the ceiling, gathering her thoughts. “You know that I was his instructor in biochemistry. He did two years in biochemistry before he began his medical studies. Even as he was doing that, he continued with me, as a tutor.”
“So you knew him well…”
“Quite well. He was a bright young man, perhaps a bit short of what I’d call brilliant, but certainly bright enough.” She put an index finger over her lips and tip of her nose, as though to hush herself up, then took the finger away and asked, “What do you know about the Gaia hypothesis?”
Letty shook her head: “Almost nothing. I studied economics. I mean, I’ve heard of it.”
“So let me start with a bit of background on Lionel…”
Scott had grown up with devoutly religious parents—their divorce notwithstanding—and for years had gone to church services most days of the week, Sloam said. Scott carried that background toOxford, where for his first two years at university, he continued to attend religious services on a regular basis.
“He lost his religious faith along the way, during his medical studies,” Sloam said. “There were too many tensions, he told me, and he resolved those in favor of science. Still, he neededsomekind of faith. Something to live for, some bigger purpose.”
The one that tempted him was the Gaia hypothesis, Sloam said, the belief that the earth itself was a living organism that had grown and protected life itself for billions of years. He rejected the idea at first, because it seemed contrary to the general acceptance of Darwinism—that life is a competition between organisms, and the fittest survive. The Gaia hypothesis suggests the contrary, that while competition does occur, the overall thrust of life is cooperative, when you look at it from a long enough perspective, and a large enough time frame.
“All right,” Letty said. “But he rejected that?”
“He did at first, as I said, but over the years, his views began to change, especially as he became more and more involved in the struggle to defeat disease in the Third World,” Sloam said. She plucked at a knit on the sofa, then scratched at it, thinking. “What he thought he saw was that there had once been a kind of balance…a cruel balance, but perhaps a necessary one…that used disease to limit the human population. With his work, he saw that balance being destroyed. He came to the belief that when nobody died early, when procreation was allowed to run wild, that we would inevitably reach a state where sheer population would destroy Gaia.”
Letty said, “A lot of people…think that is already happening.”
Sloam nodded. “Global warming. Humans can defeat it in some ways—something as simple as air conditioning could make a hotworld tolerable for many people, especially the rich. Temperatures in the Middle East and even in the southern parts of the U.S. now rise to levels that would be intolerable without it.”
Letty agreed. “I’ve seen a study that says if the power grid in Phoenix, Arizona, failed during a midsummer heat wave, more than 800,000 people would need emergency assistance and perhaps seventeen thousand would die. We already have rolling blackouts in some parts of the Southwest during heat waves. So…things are becoming fraught.”
“Yes, indeed they are. Perhaps we could control the indoors, but how do you air-condition the outdoors?” Sloam asked. “How do you air-condition forests and farmland and oceans? Can’t do it. We can air-condition ourselves until our arses freeze, but we can’t get along without food.”
“So Dr. Scott is doing what? Looking for a cure?”
“I don’t know exactlywhathe is doing,” Sloam said. “I know that he spent a lot of time working with children, so many children, in central Africa and Bangladesh. I know that he began to study advanced maths, statistics. He told me once, a few years ago, that we might have to go to an enforced one-child policy, like China tried, to drive the population down.”
“Put all women on the pill?”
“Well, that would be one way, perhaps…although, culturally, in many places, children are the guarantee of elder care, and the more children you have, the more guarantee you have,” Sloam said. “I know he researched the possibility of government programs that would pay womennotto have children, but that, it seems, would be a dead end. To get payments high enough to be effective, we’d have to spend not trillions of dollars, but hundreds of trillions of dollars. Won’t happen.”
