Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) (20 page)

He handed
the binoculars to her and pointed down the canyon. “Just this side of the
rocks,” he said, “on the other side of the stream.”

Linda
took the binoculars and looked. The heat made shimmery waves of the air, but
she could see in the round, flattened field of view the blue tent and VW bus
partially covered with brush. The camp was still, as still as the air. They
could be napping in the tent. It was a good time of day for that.

“That’s a
kid who sneaks in and camps a couple of weekends a month in the summer. I
recognize the vehicle. We never minded much.”

“Does he
stay during the week?”

Linda
shook her head thoughtfully. “No, he never does.”

“Then
we’d better take a look.”

Linda handed the
binoculars back to George. Then she instinctively touched the grip of her
pistol with her hand.

*
 
*
 
*

 
“Where’s Mary?” Phil asked, knowing the
answer.

“They
took her at . . .” Bailey checked her watch. “.. .Four p.m. exactly.”

Phil
allowed himself to contemplate the horrific process she was going through for a
brief, gut-twisting moment. The fact that the entire operation was a means to
get—to grow, some strange, alien delicacy made the atrocious exercise even more
hideous.

Twelve
hours of hell,
he thought.
I hope
she makes it.

“Who
else?” he asked, taking a deep breath.

“Tom
Moon,” she said matter-of-factly. “And one of the Chinese guys.” She plucked up
another Oreo cookie out of the plastic tray and stuffed her mouth with it.

Phil saw
the intense, steady look in Bailey’s eyes and recognized it right away. Combat
survivors had that look. The eyes said “I’m alive, and I plan to stay that
way.” It took the duress of this bizarre situation to bring that strength of
spirit to the surface—if one possessed it to begin with.

“Good
work,” Phil said.

He took
the pupae out of his shirt pocket and popped it around in his hand. “What’d ‘ya
think we oughta do with this?” he asked of Ned.

“What is
it?” Bailey asked, twisting up her face at it.

“We think
it’s a wasp larva,” Phil answered. “We found millions of them in a chamber at
the end of the tube.”

“Cool.
Maybe we could smash them and make them stop this shit,” she said.

“I doubt
it,” Ned said. “They’d just kill us and start over. Or
not
kill us and start
over. We think they’re food for the aliens.”

“No
shit?” she said with childlike fascination.

Their
excursion hadn’t been a resounding success, but the ancient remnants of the
hunter-warrior in the two men was much pleased with the female’s interest in the
spoils of the hunt, meager as they were.

Phil
intoned the whole expedition. When he was done he tossed the hard pupa over to
Bailey who caught it in her open hands with a look of disgust. She handled it
gingerly and rubbed a finger over its smooth, shiny brown surface. “Can I have
it?” she asked.

“Sure,”
Phil said. “It’s dead. But keep it out of sight of the big bastards. They might
wonder where you got it.”

Ned
chuckled.

Bailey
put the pupa under the corner of her sleeping bag.

Then,
after the men had moved away from the opening, she lifted the corner back up
and took a long look at the horrible little doohickey again. The longer she
looked at it, though, the more interesting its appearance became. She took
another glance at the vacated opening to be sure they were gone, then picked it
back up and held it closer to the light. It was translucent like the coating on
a candy apple and was slightly streamlined being tapered at one end. Under the
translucent coating, she could make out the larval form of a wasp, and the
shell followed its form exactly, smoothly, as if it had been dipped in thick
syrup. The larva’s legs could be seen bunched up neatly under it. If she looked
closely she could see the form of the wasp’s abdomen. The whole thing reminded
her, somehow, of those seeds in glass that people wore around their necks; the
little tear-shaped glass things with the seeds in them.

Mustard
seeds,
she thought.

That gave
her an idea.

It was a
quite primitive idea and grew out of the tribal brain owned by all women.
Bailey didn’t see it like that. But she knew a unique piece of jewelry when she
saw it.

Mary had
a stash of tools—or things that looked like tools—against one wall, all neatly
lined up so the big bastards wouldn’t scoop them out as garbage. She scooted
over to them and found one, a little sharp thing that looked like a flattened
nail with a black tape handle on it. It looked like it might do the job.

She
worked the pointed end of the little awl through the very tip of the tapered
end of the pupa, blowing away the shavings of the casing as they worked out
along the blade. It made a fairly neat hole. Her sleeping bag was sewn together
with clear nylon thread, and big lengths of it had worked loose of the seams.
She found a loop of it and pulled it until she had about 2 feet of it. Using
her teeth, she bit the thread off. Holding the pupa up so she could see, she
threaded the length of nylon through the hole and tied off the ends.

Done.

She
looped the arrangement over her head and let the pupae fall down on her chest.
She drew her chin in and up and looked down at the charm with the satisfied
frown only that particular maneuver can create, and smiled in spite of it. She
turned it so it hung just right. She lifted the charm daintily and dropped it
into her shirt so no one could see it, then dragged her hand over it a time or
two to smooth her shirt. She’d have to be careful like Phil said and ditch it
before she got taken, but she thought her new good-luck charm was pretty neat.

It would
protect her, she was sure of it.

Who knows,
she thought,
maybe this one was grown in my flesh,
harvested from my own body. It
’s
mine
.
Nobody in
the whole world had one like it—that’s for sure.

She lay
down, flapped the thin blanket around herself and tried to sleep. Her thoughts
returned to Earth, and she thought about Jim and how much she missed him.

She
thought also about how that thing had killed him with such meanness. She could
see Jim hitting its tough head time and again with the flashlight and hear the
thunk
sound the blows
made. Just before he died, Jim had dropped the light and tried to push the
thing away from his belly with his hands. His hands had left thick smears of
his own blood on the thing’s head and long neck. She wished she had it to do
over again. She wouldn’t freeze up like she had. Not now. She’d have picked up
the heavy flashlight and brought it down with both hands on the fucker’s head
and smashed it stupid. She’d have kept smashing it until the ugly head was
bashed flat.

The image
of that conflict repeated itself again and again and she clenched her teeth
with each blow. It focused her anger but it also produced just the slightest
odd feeling of pleasure and she indulged it like a sexual fantasy.

When she
tired of smashing the thing’s head to pieces and clenching and unclenching her
teeth, she slept.

7

Felix Bronkowitz considered himself quite fearless, but he feared
the interrogations by the alpha alien to the very bone. The simple reason was
that the alpha alien wasn’t human and Felix never quite knew how to take it.
The sense of the familiar, that quality of being accustomed to another with the
passing of time, eluded him even after hours and hours of questions and
answers. Felix was still painfully aware that he was carrying on conversations
with an alien from some far corner of the heavens who could do unimaginably
bizarre and horrible things to him. In short, the alpha operated under a
completely different set of rules and that persistent, ominous fact was never
taken for granted by Felix.

They’d
yanked him out of the little hole they’d stuffed him into and brought him
before the alpha alien within hours of his capture. He was still in shock,
dripping blood from his nose and ears and completely disoriented, not so much
so that he wasn’t shocked further when he heard the alien speak—and not because
the ugly thing was making the approximations of English words, but because he
had addressed Felix by what sounded very much like his first name.

In a
voice that sounded like it was talking with a throat lined with straw, the
alpha told Felix that it needed information. If Felix would provide it, there
would be much to gain. If not, he would suffer.

Then came
the questions, the answers to which the alpha
just
had
to have known already. It was a test, that first meeting—it
had all the earmarks of a test. Felix Bronkowitz did very well on tests.

It was a
simple arrangement on the face of it. But the situation was soon complicated
by the fact that the alpha was in fact a sponge, an information sink-hole.
Felix, “the sponge” Bronkowitz knew all about that. No matter how much Felix
had to say, the alien had more questions. In their first interview, Felix had
asked the alpha why he didn’t just tune into the radio or TV for information,
and the alpha had grilled Felix for the next three days about how radio and TV
worked and the nature of programming. As incredible as it seemed to Felix, the
aliens had developed their technology with neither radio nor television. When
Felix asked the alpha how he had learned English, the alpha told him it had
been taught to him by a human.

Felix
thought then, and still believed, that the alpha had no sense of humor whatsoever.
If Felix had taken the opportunity to crack a joke, he might have spent the
next day or two explaining the nature of humor.

The
interviews started out as interesting dialogues, but they were getting old—and
scary.

I’ve had
enough,
Felix thought today.
Enough.

Photographic
memories are a myth. They don’t exist. Good memories
do
exist, and Felix had
one of the best. Combined with that able memory was a prodigious appetite for
the written word in any form. As a child, Felix wasn’t content to read just the
back of the cereal boxes at breakfast, but the entire paper before going to
school. Given a choice between watching TV and reading a good book, young Felix
consistently took the road less traveled.

The more
you learn the more you
can
learn. It’s an upward cycle and it carried Felix easily through Harvard and
then Stanford. He breezed through, swept along and upward by the spiraling wind
of his own desire for words and knowledge.

Felix
knew he was smart, a
smartass
some would say. To Felix’s way of thinking, once you knew as much as he did
about as much as he did, you saw ignorance at every turn. It glared at him,
nagged him, and he watched it like a cat as it sneaked around life’s corners
like a rodent. He watched in frustration as people glossed over it, hid it,
camouflaged it and denied it. He hated it and he called people on it when he
saw it, which was often. He always had done so and always would do so.

As a
maker of friends, he was doomed from the start.

Felix
Bronkowitz was lucky to have had any friends at all but, if pressed, he could
produce one, his fiancée Joan and a few other close calls. His family, of
course, was his
family.

Felix
disliked most people and the feeling was reflected back, as such feelings are,
as if by a mirror. This very human phenomenon was the millstone around the
neck of Felix Bronkowitz, an otherwise exceptional student of philosophy.

Conversation
is a two-way street and over the months, the alien had surrendered much about
itself and its species.

But a few
questions every third meeting or so just didn’t cut it, at least for Felix. In
the face of a one-of-a-kind opportunity for new perspectives and knowledge,
Felix had a list of questions numbering in the hundreds he would never get to
ask. A few of them burned in his brain. In spite of that, he’d been able to
piece together some very interesting things about his captors. The most
interesting to Felix was the fact that the aliens could not lie. It wasn’t as
if they didn’t have the skill to lie, they just didn’t understand how an
untruth could be spoken. It would be the same as saying up was down. It was an
impossibility of logic. That didn’t mean they weren’t prudent or couldn’t hold
their tongues. But they operated on the idea that one could
not
hold a truth and speak
it as something else. It was woven into their culture, science and alien
morality as thoroughly and firmly as threads in fine cloth. The way Felix saw
it, that particular world view was the cornerstone of their oral history and
the foundation on which their science and technology had evolved. It was the
singular reason they had such an incredible technology to begin with. No
distortions.