Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) (27 page)

“I love
you, too, Linda.”

Phil said
it quietly and would have preferred some privacy about then. Mary and Bailey’s
feminine sensibilities saw it and were kind. Bailey turned around and Mary
slowly ambled over to the opening and leaned out.

“I’ll
miss you,” Linda could barely say.

“I know.”

“What
should I tell your friends—and Edna?”

“Don’t
tell them anything. It’ll just spin all out of control worse than ever if you
do.”

“Okay.”

“Take
care of High Ridge. Don’t let the sage grow up through the porch. Keep the ants
down or they’ll be in the house. The damned things’ll take over if you let
them.”

“I will.”

In the
pause that followed Phil could feel Linda’s deep, trembling cry through the
miles of space and the thick, tight hide of the alien starship as if she was
there in his arms. He
stared at the page of notes in front of him unable to
say anything more. Finally, Linda asked the question as if it were a plea. “Who
says good-bye first? Who, Phil?”

Phil sat
and stared then held his heart still and made his mouth say the words and the
words came out thick and wooden.

“We’re
not ready for that yet,” he said. “We’ve got a few good calls left on these
batteries.”

In spite
of her tears, some part of Linda’s mind had been working, processing without
her knowledge. When the product of that computation was finally derived, the
background processor passed it up to the foreground, and it took immediate
precedence.

She
sniffed and wiped her nose with her wrist.

“They’re
a weapon, Phil. They’re gonna release those things on Earth to kill all the
people—just the people.”

9

He shook his head in a lame attempt to deny it. It was as if some
racial fear of conquest had
manifested,
created this alien race and its weird,
destructive technology. The match up was just too bizarre—and too perfect. Here
was the amalgam of all the hideous demons of our imagination thrust into
reality: the ship, the goons, the larvae, and the surgery. But these things
came from a place more solid than mere fearful imagination—they were distilled
out of the universe of real, rational possibilities. They’d grown up out of the
soil of nature’s relentless and towering plan; the plan that balances all, the
plan that weighs and shifts power and prunes and plants and grows and kills in
grotesque numbers by drought, by disease, by war—and now this.

Phil
handed the phone back to Mary and stood up then took a deep breath and walked
over to the opening.

“What?”
Mary asked. “What is it?”

Godamn,
he thought.
Food. I thought they were food. How stupid. Of course they’re not
food. We’re the fucking food.

He felt a
knot tighten deep in his gut as the glue of logic cemented the pieces in place
one at a time, perfectly.

Phil had
once read an article by a scientist who predicted that the first real contact
with an advanced race from some distant corner of the universe would probably
be our last. Conquest and malevolence, he’d said, was simply more natural and
far more common than the desire to develop trading partners. Why trade for what
you could easily take for free? If an alien race had the capability to get
here, chances were very good they had the capability to destroy us. The fact
was, he went on, that on finding us, they’d probably find a good number of
reasons to
want
to destroy us—not the least of which was the bounty of the planet. It was an
old motif. But it was grounded in many examples right here on our own planet:
Cortez and the Incas and the Indian wars of the West being just two very small
ones.

Imagine
that the space between inhabitable planets, he’d said, is suddenly easily
traversed and thus meaningless. What remains are the interplanetary equivalents
of countries populated by very, very unlike civilizations. What may have saved
us so far, is the idea that the speed of light is absolute, making the
possibility of interplanetary travel within those vast, insulating distances a
thankful impossibility. Needless to say, such ideas run counter to much of the
popular thinking of the last thirty years which portrayed alien races as either
covert or overt benefactors to homo sapiens. The bottom line, he’d said, was
that nature wasn’t cruel; it just wasn’t kind. Even Pollyanna could see it in
her own garden if she looked between the leaves.

Well
, Phil thought.
Here it is.
What
elegance in the method. What perfection! Breed strains of predatory wasps that
prey on hosts within a narrow genetic bandwidth. That’s why the loose wasp in
the tube ignored Mary, Bailey and me. One strain for the Asians, one for the
Blacks, one for the Anglos, one for the Latinos. Set a million free in just the
right places and within days you’d have billions.

The death
of millions of people within the first few days would put such a strain on the
infrastructure that, in a week, there would be no way to deliver food, water or
essential services to the remaining population—let alone muster a countermeasure
against the plague. There would be no way to burn or bury the bodies fast
enough and the larvae would hatch out by the billions. Phil could just imagine
the trucks and other large vehicles jamming the freeways of Los Angeles and
elsewhere, and the wasps removing forever the possibility of clearing them
away. Such a swift strike would dull the sword of any defense and make it
useless. “Run and hide!” would be the battle cry. The wasps would spread to
outlying areas in search of more hosts, and in time would occupy each niche now
occupied by man. In less than a season, those few lucky enough to survive would
be driven underground living on what they could scavenge until, they, too, were
attacked and succumbed to the wasp’s predation or were killed by secondary
plagues of disease or other pestilence. It would just be a matter of time.

It was
likely that the wasps were bred—tuned genetically
—
so that there would be no crossover to
other host species. And then the best part, oh, the best part of it all, was
that the voracious little wasps would exterminate themselves as the food source
dwindled. Having done their job, and unable to adapt to other chow, they would
go the way of the carrier pigeon, and the dodo and Tyrannosaurus Rex, leaving
the earth squeaky-clean of both humans and themselves as well.

Poor
Linda,
he thought.
Unlike
the blessedly ignorant masses, she’ll have to carry the fear around with her
in the coming weeks or months, perhaps make some plans for escape—to somewhere—maybe
to High Ridge to slow, if not stop, the inevitable.

Once he had it in his mind
how to tell them, he turned around and told Bailey to fetch Ned. When he had
all three assembled, he began. When he was finished, they all sat down. It
wouldn’t have been fair to say they actually prayed, but nobody said a word for
an hour or more.

*
 
*
 
*

Bailey
looked at Tom’s wound for the first time and made a face. “That doesn’t look so
good,” she said. “It’s all infected-like.”

“Yeah, I
know,” Tom said weakly. “I guess he got me better than I figured.”

Gilbert
had moved out of the chamber and into the one used by Pui Tamguma and had been
keeping a low profile since the attack on Tom. Mary figured that was just fine.
She hopped up into the hole with a wet t-shirt in each hand and sat down next
to Tom’s head. She folded one of the shirts into a compress and put it against
his sweaty brow. Tom looked up at her with the wide-eyed innocence of the very
ill. She took the other shirt, formed it into swabbing cloth and gently wiped
his face and neck with it. She hated Gilbert for what he’d done and herself
for mistreating this poor man.

She
looked at Tom, and her heart poured out to him.

He was
barely thirty years old, she guessed, but his face was cross-hatched with
wrinkles, burned in deep, by what to him, was the inescapable and relentless
sun. Through that thick, tough skin she could see a child underneath, a child
not too bright and always a little behind—a child a little afraid.

He’s
burning up,
she thought.
The
infection is right in his neck. He’ll be dead soon.

Not that
it really mattered much now. The way things were shaping up, they’d all be dead
soon and so would all the rest of the people everywhere. All the fathers,
mothers, aunts, uncles and children of the world would soon be dead. What did
the death of one more really mean against that backdrop?

“How are
you feeling?” she asked.

“Not so
good,” he said and closed his eyes.

There was
little left to say. Bailey looked at Mary and skewed her mouth sideways.

After
Mary had done what she could, she stood up and waved Bailey out of the chamber
with her. Phil and Ned were standing outside in the tube. Mary thought that in
spite of the alien environment, it all seemed just then a lot like being in a
hospital. The feeling was the same.

“How’s he
doing?” Phil asked.

“Piss
poor. He’s dying.”

Ned shook
his head, and Mary sighed.
After all he’d
been through,
she thought. To be killed by a pen knife in the hand of a fop
like Gilbert was almost laughable.

“Well,
there’s not a whole bunch we can do for him,” Phil said rubbing his eyes. Mary
saw him look in the direction of Gilbert’s hole; and for a moment, his face
turned so hard and stony, she could barely recognize him.

A heavy
pall fell over them. Then Ned clapped his hands quietly and shooed it away.
“Bailey and me thought we’d do some reconnoitering,” he said.

“Yeah,
can I go this time?” Bailey added.

Phil saw
the fire in her eyes. “Sure.”

“Really?”

“Sure.
Why not?”

In fact
Ned and Bailey were the only logical choices. Both of them had been recently
cycled and were unlikely to be taken again soon. Besides, it didn’t matter.

“Oh,
good. I’ll get the backpack thing,” Bailey said.

A few
minutes later she had the backpack full of foodstuff and was ready to go.

“Pen?
Notepad? Maps?” Ned asked her.

“Got it
all right here,” she said seriously, tapping the side pocket.

“Let’s
hit it, then.”

“Try to
get into some of those side tubes,” Phil said. “And if you get as far as the
end, try to bring back a couple more pupae. I want to take a close look at
them.”

“You’re
gonna bring another one of those things back in here?” Mary asked like a
concerned wife.

“Yeah,
there might be something there.”

Mary made
a face. They walked with Bailey and Ned to the rear seam and wished them luck.

On the
way back, they saw Gilbert step down out of his hole, Bible in hand. He just
stood there and waited for God only knew what from Mary and Phil. Seeing him
standing there waiting for them to say something made her want to wring his
neck. Some itsy-bitsy part of him was daring them, daring her, to say
something.

“Tom’s
dying!” she yelled at him. “You killed him, you cocksucker!”

“Hey,
c’mon,” Phil warned, tapping her arm. “Be nice.”

“Oh,
bullshit. He’s warped. He deserves it.”

“Maybe.”

“Uh-uh.
No
maybe.
That one deserves it”

“I want
to talk to him. I’ll see you later,” Phil said and headed over in Gilbert’s
direction.

“That’ll
be damned enlightening,” she said and hopped back up into Tom’s chamber. “I’ll
stay with Tom—he’s better company.”

In a far
place in Phil’s psyche, an old dog got to its feet and shook its coat. Dust
flew.

Gilbert
just stared ahead with his hands holding his Bible in front and when Phil was
the right distance from him, he turned with a friendly expression.

“Hey,
hey, amigo,” Gilbert said slowly.

Phil
hadn’t been called “amigo” since he was a kid and the attempt by Gilbert to
endear himself to him made the dog in him growl. The deep sound resonated in
the tube.

“You
stabbed Tom Moon, why?” Phil said evenly.

“I’m very
sorry about—that? Tom said something that made me very—angry?”

Gilbert
swallowed with his mouth open. “If I could take it—back?, I would do that, but
I can’t—do that?, and I don’t know what else to do—about that?”

“I see.
What did he say to you?”

Gilbert
harrumphed just barely and stared. When the moment was right, he shook his
head. He knew his silence and hesitation would make the moment so much more
weighty and meaningful. Phil would think Tom had said something very horrible,
so horrible that Gilbert couldn’t even say it but could only shake his
head—just enough.

“Well,
what did he say that was so terrible?”

“I . . .
I’m not even sure I can—repeat that? Even if I could, I’m not sure I would—want
to?”

Phil was
getting nowhere fast. He wasn’t in the mood to listen to the evasiveness of
this liar. And there were times, Marine Sergeant Phil Lynch knew, when the
cool voice of reason just wasn’t the answer.

The growl
got deeper and the dog’s scarred lips pulled back over well-used teeth.

“Sure,”
he said. “Now tell me what it was or I’ll bust your ugly head.”

Gilbert’s
loose jaw came open and he swallowed. “I don’t think I have to tell you
anything,” he said, swallowing again. “You have no jurisdict..nun over me.”

Phil set
his jaw and nodded his head a few times. Then, its teeth bared, the dog
attacked with a snarl.

He took
hold of Gilbert’s thin, flaccid arm with his strong right hand and squeezed
down hard until Gilbert winced. He had to squeeze much harder than he thought
he’d have to and knew he was leaving one hell of a bruise on his scrawny arm.
He found a reserve of a few more foot-pounds somewhere and clamped even harder.

Phil’s voice
came up ten or twenty decibels and he stepped up to within inches of Gilbert’s
face.

“Let me
tell you something, shit bird, if you so much as look cross-eyed at anybody
else in this tube, I’ll have your ass. Are you paying attention?” he asked,
shaking the arm hard. The arm felt loose-jointed and useless. “So help me God,
I’ll
strip
you naked,
break
your bones
fuck
your ass and
choke
you to
death with my dick
. Is that
plain enough?”