Don't Push Your Luck

For the week hosting St. Patrick's Day (17th March) Theme Thursday gives writers this striking picture of a rare little plant . . .

   The idea woke Dr. Octavius Trefoyle at four in the morning. "How appropriate that my life's Eureka Moment, involving as it does, the number four, should strike at this very hour. Four of the tickety-tock kerr-lock!" He said this aloud, gazing at the ceiling, clutching the edge of the duvet. Mrs. Trefoyle did not stir, but this did not mean she was asleep. She was used to him.
   "A rogue gene,"he said, still out loud. "It must be! What else could it be? This is worth millions!" In a long working life, now approaching its conclusion, Dr. Trefoyle had been visited by many ideas worth millions. His wife was used to them. Now she proved herself awake.
   "What is it this time?" She did not open her eyes.
   "I wonder how many I will need?"
  "How many what do you wonder you will need?" Mrs. Trefoyle opened her eyes and made a face at the morning. "A single million would do me. I could buy myself a place somewhere. Australia perhaps."
   "Ah ha!  Wait and see! Tell it not in Ghatt, nor whisper it in the streets of Ashkelon. Now! I, Trefoyle the Invincible, Prince of the Lanes and Hedgerows, will make us tea."
   Mrs. Trefoyle, sixtyish, first name Honoria, closed her eyes again because the Prince of the Lanes and Hedgerows had removed his pyjamas and was hopping about on one leg as he put the second half of his trousers on.
   From behind closed lids she asked, "Isn't it a bit early for tea?"
  "It is never too early to hunt for the rogue gene. The gene for the fourth leaf, no less." And so, the midsummer sun being fully up, Dr. Trefoyle made and delivered tea to Honoria who had by then gone back to sleep, then set out with two plastic specimen boxes to search for those time-honoured harbingers of good luck, four leafed clovers.
   Let it be related that eight hours and twice as many miles of lanes and hedgerows later he had been lucky enough to find four. "Four-by-four, so to speak." He put these in one of the boxes, and the same number of bog-standard three leaf clovers - for comparison - in the other.  These precious boxes, worth an estimated millions, he took to the Gene Sequencing Laboratory in the Department of Molecular Biology of the University of Blogspot-sur-Mer.
   The astute reader will have guessed the rest. You haven't? Then I'll tell you. Trefoyle planned to isolate the mutant gene responsible for fourleafedness and introduce it - the anti GM lobby permitting - into the seed of the three leaf variety so that as generations of clover came and went, the four leafed strain would proliferate and eventually take over the world's clover fields so that anyone, everyone, that's you and me, our parents, children, fellow bloggers, lovers - everyone - would need only to bend down in a clover meadow to help themselves to handfuls of good luck.
  "The relentless march of science!" Trefoyle mused. "What a wonderful world it will be!"  This on the morning four (note, four!) years later when the sequencing was complete and a white suited lab assistant wearing blue wellies, face mask and surgical style cap  handed him two large rolls of paper chart covered with squiggles. The letters of the clover genomes!  One for the three leaf and one for the four leaf variety!  Inch by inch and foot by foot Dr. Octavius Trefoyle pored over the charts looking for the difference - the tiny difference - between them that would pinpoint the rogue gene.
   Four months later - a computer analysis would have taken a few minutes but Trefoyle had no faith in the things - he found it!  A peak on one chart which did not show on the other! There is no feeling in the world (to a scientist) to equal the thrill of discovery, to stand alone, Prince of the Lanes and Hedgerows, looking upon something no man has looked upon before.
   But there was a rat in the works, as there usually is.
  I mean, have YOU ever found yourself in a field of four leaf clovers? Of course you haven't. Neither have I. Nor will you ever, unless you repeat Dr. Trefoyle's experiments. But he tried. Oh how he tried! Every technique known to molecular biology to get four leaf genes into three leaf seed. Nothing worked, and in due course, defeated, Trefoyle retired with only his dreams for company, Honoria having gone to Australia, millions or not.
   It never occurred to Octavius, or anyone else for that matter, to ask -
   "Did someone perhaps get the specimen boxes mixed up?"
   I mean - how unlucky can you get?


(Readers have perhaps noticed that Octavius = Eight = Twice Four. Coincidence, probably.)