Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) (35 page)

“What
exactly do you want me to do about it Greenbaum?” Phil snapped back.

“Find a
way to sabotage the ship.”

“Is that
all?”

“We have
pictures, Phil,” Linda offered hopefully. “Maybe those could help.”

“Maybe I
could ask them to just pack up and go home!” Phil yelled back. “That makes as
much sense!”

“You’ve
got to find a way!” Greenbaum barked.

“There is
no way!”

“Well you’ve got to find
it!”

“Stop! Stop it!” Linda
yelled at them.

She gave Greenbaum a look that
could have cut. He was blowing it. In a matter of seconds, it had all flown out
of control. This was not what they’d agreed to. Greenbaum’s panic had
flummoxed the whole thing.

It all sounded so logical
just an hour before. Horrible, but logical.

Linda wanted to vomit. She
was way over her head.

She’d thought out what to
say and how to say it, rehearsing it in her mind. She’d forgotten almost all
of it. It was all a cloud now.

“Greenbaum’s right,” she
said. “You have to try to kill the . . . the ship.”

She wanted to run, to hide
in the nearest hole in the ground and never come back out.

“Even if you . . . you die
trying, Phil, you have to try.” That was the hardest part. She wanted to tell
him that the fate of the world as they knew it lay in his hands, but she
couldn’t muster the nerve to say the words.

“You have to stop it,
Phil,” she simply said.

The silence on the other
end of the phone was thick enough to cut.

“Look,” Greenbaum said,
leaning in at the speaker phone. “If you can move around freely, and if you
think you can fly one of those damned things home, then you know enough to find
a way to kill or disable the ship before they release their weapon. From what
you’ve said, that could be at any time now, right?”

That wasn’t as agreed,
either, and Linda held in check the raging impulse to backhand Greenbaum with
her fist. She closed her eyes.

Release
their weapon,
Phil thought.
That was
it. The wasps were simply a biological weapon. That put it all in perspective.
That was the right view. The aliens were there to kill and conquer—no less
than Cortez, Pol Pot or Ghingis Khan—it was that simple. The mode was
different, but the motivation was precisely the same.

“You have
to find a way, Phil,” Linda said, trying to sound kind.

To Phil,
her voice sounded hollow as if it were coming up out of a deep, cold well.

“Phil?”
Linda’s voice said.

On some
cosmic plane, maybe it all made sense after all. At the core of all life was
the struggle of species against species for the available resources. It was simple.
The struggle spanned the interplanetary regions of space. Why shouldn’t it?

“Phil?”

Only the
strong survive.

“Phil,
are you there?”

Survival
of the fittest.

“Phil!”
she pleaded.

Nobody’s
keeping score.

“I’m
here,” he finally said.

“Thank
God.”

“For what,
Linda?” he said calmly.

Phil
broke the connection just before the timer chimed. He’d hung up on them and it
chilled Linda to the bone.

When she
looked over at Greenbaum, he reminded her of Billy Hoffer, the bratty kid she
grew up with who always had to have his way—no matter what. She wanted to kill
him.

“You
stupid son of a bitch,” she said. The remark was aimed at herself, too. She had
it coming.

“Do you
think he’ll do it?” he asked, trying to ignore the insult.

She
looked at him and shook her head.

“It’s not
like we asked him to change a tire, now is it?”

“No. It
isn’t.”

“If it’s
possible,” she said. “He’ll try—and when he calls tomorrow—if he calls—we’d
better he ready to help him any way we can.”

“I’ll get
the photos to the lab,” he said.

“You do that.”

*
 
*
 
*

“So this
is your chamber? They gave it to you?” Bailey asked, sauntering around with her
hands on her hips. Her smile was as sweet as honey. The chamber was larger and
cleaner than the holes in the tube. There was actually a ledge going around it
that you could sit on. Bailey tried it out.

“Yes. It
can be yours, too.”

“Roommates?”
she asked sweetly.

Gilbert
drew his mouth into an invisible smile and harumphed just below an audible
level.

Against one
wall, there were plastic crates filled with foodstuff, and Bailey poked around
in them. She pulled out a package of Ding Dongs with a big grin.

“Can I
have these?”

The
sphinx nodded.

“Yeah?”

She
opened the package and took a big bite. Her face lit up, and she made a big,
toothy, chocolaty smile at the sphinx.

“Yum,”
she said. “So are you friends with them now—the aliens I mean?”

“Something
like that.”

“Can I be
their friend, too?”

“Perhaps.”

Bailey
exhaled her best smile. “Really?”

“I said
perhaps.”

“Can you
put in a word for me?”

The
sphinx found that funny and almost smiled.

“Come
here,” he said.

Bailey
lit up shyly and came over and kneeled down in front of him. She took another
bite of Ding Dong.

“Um . . .
these are good. Want some?”

The
sphinx shook its head just enough. Bailey kneeled there and chewed, waiting for
him to say something, smiling cutely at him from time to time.

“You are
the first of the thousand,” Gilbert said, not looking at her. “Do you know
what that means?”

“Nope.”

“It means
God has given you over to me for safekeeping.”

“Oh,
boy,” she said past the food.

“Yes. You
are the first and shall be the mother to many. Glory to God.”

 
“I’m sorry?”

“That’s
right,” he said, reaching out to touch her hair. “The mother to many.”

Bailey
felt his hand caress her hair.

“Who’ll
be the daddy to these manys?” she asked chewing.

The
sphinx just stared, then let the slightest tremble of a smile cross his face,
like he was telling a secret.

“I hope
it’s not those gosh-danged aliens,” she said with a sideways grin.

It didn’t
matter that she didn’t hear me,
he thought.
There was time for that later.

“Do you
know how—evil—the world is?” the sphinx said.

“Pretty
bad, huh?”

“There
are liars in the world who would say anything.”

“I know
what you mean. I’ve known a couple of those. They’ll say anything to get in
your pants. All they wanna do is fuck you in the ass.”

She
stuffed the last of the cake in her mouth.

The
sphinx gathered up a fistful of Bailey’s hair and twisted it.

“Ow!”

“I don’t like
dirty words.”

“I’m
sorry,” she said wincing. “I didn’t know bad words would hurt the ears of the
God our lord.”

He
relaxed his grip. Bailey looked hurt for a second more, then brightened.

“Tell me
more about the thousand . . . whatevers.”

The
sphinx thought about how to tell her he would soon be the lord and master of
what was left of humanity. He wanted to tell her straight out but didn’t want
her to panic. He was sure he’d heard of women fainting or running screaming
from men of enormous power. He was certain this one had never met an agent of
God.

He
wondered briefly how she would take the news that billions of humans would soon
die horribly, but that didn’t matter.

“God has
sent these demons to do His will,” he began. “They shall unleash a horror on
the Earth to cleanse it. Great numbers of people will die.”

“Like how
many?”

“Most of
them.”

“Wow.
That’s a lot of people. Why do they want to kill so many people?”

“It is
the will of God that they do it.”

“When
will it happen?”

“A week. Perhaps
just somewhat longer.”

“And you
and me won’t die? We’ll be like . . . saved?”

“Yes. You
will be part of the thousand. You will be saved to serve God and his agent.”

“How come
me?”

“I can’t
tell you just now.”

“Who is this God’s agent?”

The
sphinx stared at her and let the answer well up from deep in his soul. When the
words were of sufficient volume, he let them out in a long, warm gush.

“I am the
agent of God and the master of the one thousand.”

Bailey
smiled her brightest smile at him.

“Hey, are
you gonna be the daddy of all the babies then?” she asked sweetly.

The
sphinx nodded and swallowed. “Not all. But the children of the new Earth must
be clean and wholesome,” it said. “They must not be liars, or keepers of
secrets.”

Bailey
smiled up at him adoringly like he was the very image of God Himself.

Gilbert
Keefer looked down at the moist, oval face of Bailey Hall, so close to his
loins that he could feel the heat of her lovely head against them. He could see
her chest and her cleavage beneath her shirt and the fine, straight scars of
his queen’s ordeal. The power of his Lord God stirred in him like a beast in
rut.

Bailey just smiled up at him with an open and innocent smile.
I’d abort it with a coat hanger before I gave birth to your nasty
mother-fucking baby,
she thought.

“Can I
have another pack of Ding Dongs?” she asked nicely.

12

We’ve had a change in plan,” Phil said. He read the confusion in
their faces and wanted to apologize. What else could you do?

“What kind of change?” Ned wanted to know.

Mary squinted one eye at him.
“Spit it out, Phil,” she said.

 
“We have to find some way to stop the aliens
before they dump the wasp larvae on the Earth. If we don’t—and we manage to
escape, we’ll die anyway.”

He hated
to parrot George Greenbaum, but he couldn’t find a better way to put it. It
pissed him off.

“How the
hell are we supposed to do that?” Ned asked with a scowl.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said and
let it sink in.

“What’s that mean?” Mary asked.

Phil felt
his ability to communicate slip and stumble down a gravel covered slope. His
keen analytic skills flew out of his hands as he fought for balance.

“For us
it’s different. If we escape, we’ll live to see . . . let me put it this way .
. . if we run, we won’t escape death for long.”

“But it
would give us,” Mary implored, “two of us at least—the chance to be with our
friends and families.”

“Mary,
listen to me. You’d be with your family all right, but you’d be carrying a
secret of such horror, you’d wish you were dead.”

“I’m
doing
that
now.”

“Then
you’re getting the point,” he continued. “While your family was smiling at you,
you’d be dying inside. You won’t be able to tell them what’s wrong because it
would be useless. First, they’d never believe you. Second, if they did, or
pretended to, what would you do? Hide in a hole? Would you have them hide in a
hole while you all waited for alien wasps to eat you alive? It’s preposterous,
isn’t it? It’s preposterous that it’s happening, but it is.”

Mary
groaned a deep moan and buried her head in her arms.

“What are we supposed to
do?” she asked without coming
up
.

“That
doesn’t matter, either,” he said and chuckled strangely. He felt himself land
flat on his back and start to slide.

No one
said anything for several seconds. When Mary finally spoke, her muffled voice
was barely audible.

“I don’t
get it,” she said.

“It
doesn’t matter what we do,” Phil repeated. “We just have to do something,
anything to try to stop it. That’s the right thing, the correct thing to do.”

“The
moral
thing?” Ned asked.
“The
noble
thing?”

Phil just
nodded his head.

Mary
looked up and her eyes were teary. She tried to smile a little through the
tears.

“There’s
nothing to do anyway . . .” she said. “Nothing to do but die . . . ”

“You’re
getting the point,” Phil said. “We’ve got nothing to lose, do we? We’ll give up
our lives if we have to.”

“Why
not?” Mary said into her arms. “Why the hell not?”

The odds
of success were so slim it made no sense to even discuss it. There was always a
chance—there always was—but if they dwelt on the odds, they’d freeze up.

Mary was
showing symptoms of another hysterical laughing jag; and this time, Ned joined
right in early. There was a demonic note to the sticky laughter.

“Maybe I
could screw up the timing of the air lock,” she laughed. “Maybe we could
evacuate all the air.”

“Maybe we
could make it sick?” Ned suggested.

“Yeah,
cough on it, Ned.”

“Sneeze
on it.”

“Piss on
it.”

“Shit on
it.”

“Fuck
it.”

“Make it
die.”

Phil took
the little envelope with the wire straws out of his pocket and started to
crumple it up. Then he smoothed it slowly and put it back.

*
 
*
 
*

Ned moved
stuff with his foot, kicking it around idly. There were plenty of blankets,
books, pots, cups and other mostly useless crap. Some of it, however, was quite
remarkable: a small Buddha covered with flaking gold leaf, shards of broken
clay pottery of Asian origin, and primitive wooden bowls and vessels from the
third world’s remote areas.

“What are
we looking for?” Ned said finally, using his foot to lift a folded aluminum
lawn chair.

“I’m not
sure,” Phil said. “A weapon of some kind—I don’t know.”

“They’re
not stupid,” Mary said. “You won’t find as much as a butter knife in here.”

She picked
up the chair Ned was so disinterested in. “But maybe we could make something,”
she said.

She
turned the chair around, checking it for potential lethality, then gave up and
tossed it back down on the heap. Then something caught her eye—the corner of a
small woven object. She squatted down and freed it from the tangle. It was a
small basket, about eight inches wide and woven fairly tightly like a giant
piece of shredded wheat cereal. It was sewn shut across the top with just a few
loops of the same smooth, reed-like material as the basket. A longer strand of
softer, fibrous material was attached to two corners and acted as a shoulder
strap. It was well-worn and used. The material was frayed at the squarish
corners.

“Nice
purse,” Ned commented with a wry grin.

She shook
it gently. When she stopped, she felt a slight movement, a quiet bump from
inside it.

“There’s
something alive in this,” she said jiggling it again.

“What?
Check it out,” Phil said, still rummaging.

Mary
unthreaded the fiber holding it shut and slowly parted the seam. Holding the
basket open, she looked as if she’d opened up a bagful of diamonds. “Oooo . . .
they’re darling . . .” she said.

“What is
it?” Phil said, coming over.

“The
cutest little frogs . . .” she said holding it open for the two men to see.

There in
the bottom of the basket, lying partially on one another, were two small,
bright red and black frogs, each no longer than a couple of inches.

“See . .
. aww . . . looook . . .” she said.

Phil
wondered for not the first time in his life how time and tide and the winds of
fortune blew to no known rhythm. Life’s oscillations had no metered movements
or regular heartbeat, only random ups and downs and an irregular pulse.

“Hallo-fucking-loo-ya
. . .” he said, putting his hand on the basket possessively.

She
started to reach her hand in to touch one with her finger.

“Don’t
touch them!” Phil barked, grabbing her hand.

“Why not?
Believe me, I’ve touched frogs before . . .”

“Not like
these. They’d probably kill you. They’re poison dart frogs—South American
variety.”

*
 
*
 
*

Linda’s
hand was over her mouth and nose like she was trying to keep out noxious fumes.
She wasn’t even aware she was doing it.

“Where
does something like that come from?” she asked through her fingers.

“Hell
must exist in some corner of the universe,” Greenbaum said. “I’d say it came
from there.”

The
photos didn’t have great quality. They had the grainy look of enlargements, but
enough detail survived. The edges of the object were flared and fuzzy from the
enormous backlight of the sun, so much so that all detail there was lost. There
was virtually no background whatsoever—just washed out nothing- ness—and the
halo around the edges added to the impression of a ghastly specter floating in
a white null. On the 8 x 10 print, the image of the ship was about the size of
a clenched fist.

“What are
those things?” she asked, pointing to the appendages sticking out of it.

“Vestigial
remnants of legs I’d say.”

“What?”

“Its
former . . . legs.”

“Christ. Is
it a reptile, mammal, fish, what?”

“I don’t
think any of those apply to it.”

Linda
clamped her hand tighter and stared wide-eyed at the photos. She spread them
out with her other hand by pecking at the edges with a finger. Some were
lighter or darker but were all basically the same.

“How big
is it?”

Greenbaum
frowned in thought. “I’ve done the calculations and within a hundred feet or
so, it’s seven-hundred yards across.”

“Jesus .
. .”

The ship
wasn’t quite round, but nearly so. They were looking almost straight up at the
creature’s underside. It reminded Linda of the dead and gas-swollen bodies of
bovines she’d seen in pictures of drought and war. The eight little legs stuck
straight out from the enormous distended gut, the tips lost in the sun’s brightness.
The surface was striated laterally in thick rolls. The most disturbing part was
the head, clearly visible and hanging down out of the swollen body like a
freakish parasitic appendage. It was small, minuscule compared to the rest of
the body.

“It that
the head?” she asked without pointing at it.

“I’d say
so.

The
detail was good enough to reveal a twisted, anguished expression like the stiff
faces of the battle field dead. There was a difference, though, that turned
Linda’s stomach: this thing wasn’t dead.

“How do
you do that?” she asked into her palm. “How do you make something like that?”

Greenbaum
shook his head. “Unknown. I suppose if you screw with a thing’s DNA enough, and
feed it enough, you could get that.”

“What’s
all that crap at the rear end?”

The
anterior portion was covered with what looked like barnacles, or bumps and
scales as if it had a strange disease.

“It looks
like hardware. If you look closely, it has a mechanized appearance. I’d say
it’s part of the propulsion system. It may not be metal.”

Looking
at the raised, rash-like anterior made Linda want to scratch her bottom.

“I’m
sick,” she said.

She
turned to the sink, filled a glass with tap water and took a long pull on it.

“It’s not
what I would have expected,” Greenbaum said. “But it makes sense in a way. We
have technology that uses stuff, material, to make and shape things. But if you
remove those materials, take them out of the evolutionary equation so to speak,
and . . . and advance the technology in the right direction, it doesn’t take
much imagination to visualize the result.”

“What do
you mean?” Linda asked.

“We use,
consume, shape and change materials to accommodate real or imagined
requirements. This alien species does the same, only it takes advantage of the
ability of DNA to grow and shape an organism into usable forms. We do the same
thing with dogs, live-stock, crops—but we’re infants compared to these things.”

“I don’t
see the advantage.”

“There
are some.”

“I don’t
think so,” she said, burying her face in her glass.

“DNA is
self-replicating—self-fabricating so to speak. Once you have the basic pattern
down, all you have to do is feed the organism and it’ll shape and manufacture
itself into whatever pattern is locked in its DNA. It’ll even reproduce
itself—breed and make more of itself. You no longer need a manufacturing infrastructure.
All you do is grow things into whatever you need—tables, chairs, clothes,
lamps, houses—hulls of space ships.”

“You’re
crazy,” she said, sticking her head back in the glass.

Greenbaum
knew she was denying the possibilities because of the implicit horror. They’d
both heard Phil’s reports from inside the vessel. These invaders didn’t grow
better corn or smarter dogs. They forced, bent and cut the living material into
required forms. They didn’t just work on the benign level of cellular
modification, they molded the fully developed, living, feeling material as
well.

“I
suppose I am,” he said.

“Look,
screw all that,” she said. “How does it help Phil?” She moved back up to the
table, and her hand found her mouth again as if she’d stepped into a cloud of
noxious gas.

“I’m not
sure. It’s larger than we thought. It’s more hideous than we thought. I’m don’t
know how either of those helps.”

Linda
looked at the photos and something started to click in that part of her mind
that did the pattern recognition. She pushed the cups and the condiments aside
and laid the photos out in two rows of five.

“Are
these the frame numbers?” she asked pointing to the time and date stamp in the
corner of one.

“Yes.”

She
shifted them around, organizing them left to right by the frame numbers until
she had the complete sequence.