Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) (45 page)

Phil studied him for a moment. The poor guy was sliding downhill
fast. He hoped he could hold out.

The nerve bundle was the logical target all right, considering
their chemical weaponry. If they could administer the poison at the right
point, they might be able to disable the entire ship.

“It’s like this,” Phil said. “The central nervous system carries
instructions to and from all sections of the body. The signals are processed by
the brain. If the spinal column is severed all activity below that point ceases
and all sensation, all autonomic functions fail. That’s why neck injuries are
so debilitating—they cut ties to the brain at the worst possible point—just below
the brain stem, short-circuiting nearly all bodily functions below it. An
injury to the spine at the lower back does far less damage for the same
reason—fewer systems below the point of damage to be effected.”

“So we want to get to a point close to the brain?” Mary asked.

“That’s right,” Phil answered. “The problem is, we have no idea
where the brain is in this animal. It could be right under our feet, or the
thing might have smaller, multiple brains that act like fail-safe backup
systems for one another. It might not even have a brain as we think of it.”

Bailey looked at Phil and blinked. The tip of a finger found its
way into her mouth and she gnawed at it a little. “I don’t know where the head
is,” she said. She obviously saw it as a personal failing.

“It’s okay,” Phil said. “We’ll just have to find it.”

They had to know where to strike. Without that information, the
most they could do was piss it off, not disable it.

“We’re going back to the barracks,” Phil said.

“Why?” Mary wanted to know.

“We need the antenna for the phone.”

*
 
*
 
*

Gilbert stood in the center of the chamber and thought about what
to do. Recent events were stuck to his mind like leaves in tar. It was clear
she had planned to get back to that Phil Lynch from the beginning. She was a
liar and a fraud. He had told her too much. She was a liar. She had manipulated
him.

He swallowed and took inventory of the real damage done.

If she’d made it back to Phil’s tube, they’d have the phone
already. She had some detailed information about the ship now, not all, but
some.

He cursed himself for being careless, but it wasn’t his fault. She
was the one who had lied, not him. She was the turncoat. He hadn’t done
anything at all. If there was any blame to be laid, it had to be laid on her.

He tried to imagine them calling someone and telling them about
the “invasion” and almost smiled at what a ridiculous idea that was. It was,
after all, God’s secret. No one would ever believe them.

All the
same, you never knew.

He decided to tell the alpha about the phone. That was the best
idea. It was her fault; he hadn’t done anything wrong. The alpha would
understand and do a complete sweep of the ship, then he’d have the phone again
and the rest of them would be turned into something—something ugly—something
ugly and painful.

*
 
*
 
*

Linda’s
words rang in his ears.
“We have pictures, Phil,”
she’d said.

“What
time is it?” Phil asked.

“Almost
noon,” Mary volunteered.

“Close
enough,” he said and started to dial.

If it were
true, she might be able to tell him which end of the thing was heads and which
was tails, provided those definitions worked on the godamned thing.

The phone
rang twice and Linda picked up the phone.

“It’s
me,” Phil said.

“Phil,
I’m sorry . . .” Linda said. “I thought . . . ”

“Linda,
forget it. You said you have pictures. What kind of pictures?”

“Pretty
good ones. They look fakey as shit, but they’re not bad quality-wise.”

“What
does the damned thing look like from the outside?” There was a brief pause while
she collected her thoughts. “It’s . . . uh . . . like a football . . . uh.”

“Go get
the pictures.”

“Hold on.
They’re right here.”

She
pulled the pictures out of a folder and scattered them over the table.

“It’s
roundish and bloated,” she said, more confident this time. “It has eight things
sticking out that Greenbaum calls
rudimentary
legs
. There’s a bunch of machinery and shit on one end of it that covers
the whole end of it.”

“Okay. Is
it amorphous or bi-symmetrical? Does it have a right and left side? Does it
have a head, a clearly defined head?”

“Yes it
does.”

“Which?”

“Uh, both. It’s the same on both sides and it has a head—a small
head. I mean it looks small.”

“Okay, listen. There’s a huge port they use for the shuttles. Try to
find it and tell me where it is.”

“Is it a hole?”

“Not now, it would look star-shaped.”

“I get it.”

“Anything look like that?”

Linda studied the pictures up close, squinting at them.

“I don’t see anything that looks like that.”

Phil got confused.

“The shuttle bay is huge,” he said. “It’s got to be there.”

“Oh, maybe that’s it . . .”

“Where?”

“It’s a little thing toward the butt end.”

“How big is it—the thing you’re looking at?”

“Well, I can’t say for sure, not without measuring. I don’t know.”

He thought for a second. “How big is the ship overall? Guess.”

“Greenbaum says it’s almost seven hundred yards across
,” she said.

Phil let it sink in. That’s why the goddamned
thing seemed empty. It was immense
.

“Okay, now—how far is the head from that opening?”

“The head sticks out of the other end, not straight out but down
at an angle.”

“How far from the opening?”

“Exactly?”

“As close as possible.”

“Hold on.”

Using a pencil as a scale, she measured the distance from the opening
to the head and compared it to the overall dimension. “Five hundred yards,
give or take,” she said.

“Okay . . . what’s that in feet? . . . that’s . . .” Phil did the
math and provided his own answer. “ . . . Fifteen hundred feet, right?”

“Pretty close.”

“Okay. Thanks. Stay by the phone. Bye.”

“Phil . . . ?”

“See you later.”

He broke the connection and handed the phone to Bailey who stuffed
it back into her bag.

He briefed the others.

The ship was bi-symmetrical with a single head. Of all the possible
configurations it could have possessed, it had the one most in common with
known life forms. Since it had just one head, it was likely that it possessed
just one nervous system. Phil was even more convinced that the nerve bundle was
its weak point. Now that he knew how far the head was from the shuttle opening,
there was just one parameter yet to establish, the direction of the head from
their present position. There was no way to tell. He turned the pages of
Bailey’s notebook until he found her sketch of the layout of the tubes. She’d
rightly drawn the central tube down the middle of the ship; that was its
lateral line. Where the tube terminated, the shuttle bay started. Looking at
the sketch, Phil could see the symmetry in the pattern of the tubes laid out on
both sides of the central tube.

“Which way is the head?” he asked of no one in particular.

It was Mary who piped up. “It’s . . . that way,” she said pointing
along the central tube with a finger.

“How’s that?”

“Well, if the head is fifteen hundred feet from the shuttle hole,
and if the shuttle hole is nearer the
ass-end
as your friend says—at least closer to one end—then the only distance that can
be more than half of the thing’s length is in the direction away from the
propulsion machinery along a line through the shuttle bay.”

“Fine. But how do we know where the propulsion crap is?”

“Simple. Bailey traveled at least seven hundred feet to get here,
right?”

“Okay.”

“You can count the loops and see that . . .”

“I said
okay
.”

“A quarter mile is half the thing’s length. Since she traveled
half of its length and did not encounter the end of it and came to the shuttle
bay at the end of her travel, she must have departed from a point at least, at
least, one quarter of a mile, half the thing’s length, away from the shuttle
bay.”

“So?”

“So the only place the head can be—assuming your buddy is right
about the size—is about seven hundred feet from the shuttle bay along the
central tube in the direction Bailey came. I’d say she was within a hundred
feet of it when she left Gilbert’s chamber.”

Phil thought it over.

“Get it?” she asked.

“I think so . . . ”

“Think of it this way, whichever departure point allowed her to
travel a total distance equal or greater than half the thing’s length, must
provide the starting point for the direction of travel.”

“Huh . . . ?”

“She couldn’t have come from any other direction than the one she
came from and still have traveled half the thing’s length.”

“So what!”

“So—she couldn’t have come from the other way because she would
have come from outside the ship!”

“Goddammit, Mary . . . ”

“Clear your mind. Clear your mind. Look, there’s only so much
ship, right? I mean, it’s not infinite in size.”

“Right.”

Mary
sighed and lowered her head. This was hopeless. “The head, Phil,” she said
slowly. “Is that way,” she pointed again, “because I say so . . . period.”

“Fine.”

“If we didn’t know the thing’s size, we couldn’t have deduced
where the head was.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank your friend, Linda.”

*
 
*
 
*

Gilbert
hadn’t expected having to explain the concept of
cellular
telephone
to the
alien, but he was. The fact that this alien race had no radio flew in the face
of the Earthly version of technology’s evolution. They had obviously grown
their own complete and peculiar branches of technology’s tree, not just climbed
up and out the arms of an imagined and universal oak. The inability to fathom
radio signals made the entire idea of communicating over long distances a
notion of such fantastic and magical proportions to the alien that Gilbert was
hard pressed to find believable examples, so he’d stopped and was now trying to
explain the actual process in straightforward terms.

“I have
heard of this,” the alpha rasped. “I do not know how it can be done.”

Gilbert
swallowed hard. The conversation had an edge of danger about it. As a defense,
Gilbert’s voice had taken on that intermittent interrogative quality as if the
odd punctuation somehow added weight or clarity to his words.

“The waves
are . . . modulated? in such a way that information can be . . . carried? . .
. on them? Information such as . . . speech? Can be . . . carried on them?”

“On what
do the waves travel?”

The alien
had hit the nail on the head. If radio was in fact wave form energy, something
had to carry the waves. There was no evidence of any such ether or
spatial water
, thus the actual mode of
wave travel through space was unknown.