Dilke was trying to mend the radio which had gone dead once more. As he did so he watched the two men. They were engrossed in their project and he was glad to see that the coldness which he had sensed between them had gone and that now they worked well together in spite of their different personalities. Henry had provided the adhesive, which Olsen needed to attach the sighting tube to the crossbow, by killing a small spider and using the fluid from its spinning gland. Henry stood with his foot on the creature’s abdomen, like a man with a bright, red football, pressing out a milky fluid, while Bill Olsen ran the sighting tube along its spinnerettes, smearing the tube with adhesive. They attached it, and all three descended to the shed floor to test its accuracy and to do a little competitive target practice.
Crossbow Mark II exceeded the range of Dilke’s first bow by a clear two hundred millimetres, achieving a flight of almost five hundred millimetres. They found that the sighting tube was inaccurate so they removed it and returned to the more primitive method which Dilke had devised. In addition to his crossbow making, Bill Olsen’s professionalism showed itself in other ways: he organized their living conditions like a man setting up camp in the bush. He rationalized the Kremlin cooking arrangements —the name had stuck—he rigged up a cooking spit over the platform fire and he hauled up containers to the platform and stored water in them. He sent Henry for insect shells in which they could heat water, and with Henry’s help he made three hammocks from spider’s web. Olsen worked in a purposeful way at these tasks, his hands deftly weaving and knotting the hammocks. Henry watched the hands; they moved together like two brown creatures. They were thick and strong but dextrous, like those of a sculptor or a virtuoso pianist, and they seemed to have a life of their own. Even when he stood inactive with his arms loosely at his sides, they seemed eager to catch at and move and shape things.
Dilke removed the transmitter from its case, tightened every screw in sight and finally got through to Price. Shouting through a sea of static he complained about not being told of Olsen’s revised arrival date, then discovered that head office had tried but failed to make radio contact. He suggested that if he was unable to improve the transmitter’s performance he would leave it at the collecting point to be picked up and repaired. Price replied that he would prefer to send a new and better radio.
The three men had now settled down together; Olsen finished his organization of their living quarters and was eager to go hunting with the new bow.
Dilke explained his plans. He wished to produce a survival manual, and by combining Henry’s knowledge and Bill’s hunting experience he meant to list food resources and classify insects in terms of their danger to micro-man. They set out on a series of exploratory expeditions;.sometimes they went together, sometimes in pairs and occasionally Olsen went alone. The new bow was a formidable weapon though its accuracy was still not perfect, and they made a third bow so that each man was armed. Each evening, after a day spent in the plantations and forests of the allotment, they would return and busy themselves in their own ways: Dilke wrestled with the radio, Henry listed seeds and fruit and insects in order of edibility and palatability, Bill Olsen was absorbed in his plans for a super crossbow. He decided that accuracy with a do-it-yourself bow using secondhand bolts was impossible and he worked on drawings of a metal weapon to be made to his specification. The table of relative speed which Henry had drawn on the thick brass door was soon overdrawn with Bill Olsen’s scribbles and diagrams of crossbow mechanism.
Olsen had discovered something that French crossbow men had learnt centuries before when faced by the English longbow; that the crossbow was enormously powerful but dangerously slow to load. Olsen devised a twentieth-century crossbow: powerful, accurate and quick-loading.
His final design, sketched over a photograph of a fourteenth-century Milanese bow, was part crossbow, part lever-action Winchester, part telescopic hunting rifle, part Gatling gun. He specified that it should be made from anodized aluminium, matt olive-green. The bolts were to be tubes as thick as his thumb with a slug of lead in one end and a screw cap sealing the other; part of the kit was a syringe with the capacity to fill a single bolt with venom.
Dilke made a combined shopping list.
For himself:
A new radio telephone.
A guide and repair manual for the telephone.
A kit of radio repair tools.
For Scott-Milne:
A first-aid outfit.
A semaphore mirror.
Writing materials.
Microfilmed copies of:—
European Flora Sc Fungi—Hutchinson.
An Encyclopaedia of Arthropods— Pendennis.
A set of logarithmic tables.
Slide rule.
Camera.
Electric torch.
For Bill Olsen:
Three crossbow kits as specified.
Axe.
Machete.
Auger.
Range of metal files.
Wood saw.
Hacksaw.
Portable light alloy vice.
Block and tackle.
1,000mm. of 0.005 mm. galvanized wire.
Dilke checked the list over and read it into the temperamental transmitter and was given a provisional delivery date.
That evening they took a stroll to the shed threshold to look out over the country which glowed in the light of the setting sun. This walk had become something of a ritual, it was a time for reviewing the day’s events and for planning tomorrow’s programme. “I want you both to make a marksman’s chart to show where to shoot insects, particularly where to hit and kill the dangerous ones when they’re attacking. Will you make a short list tonight, Henry, of likely insects? Ants, wasp, centipedes, that sort of thing, and tomorrow you can set off and start some field studies…”
Bill Olsen interrupted him by laying a silencing hand on his arm and pointing to a movement on the ground below the wooden threshold.
The movement was in a small depression beside the track along which they usually walked when leaving the shed. As they watched, the depression became deeper and wider, as if the earth was being sucked down from below.
“Ant lion,” breathed Henry. “Larva of the myrmeleontid fly. I’ve seen them in Middle Europe and as far north as Finland but they’re new here. They’ll suck you dry and spit out the bones!” The depression had widened into a crater twenty millimetres across.
“I’ll start with that bastard. I’ll bring along a bow and winkle him out in the morning,” said Bill Olsen. “I don’t like him next to the track like that.”
They had an early night and Olsen set off at dawn. They saw him shoot a young cockroach on his way and he vanished under the door with his bow under an arm, a machete at his waist and the ”roach on his shoulder.
Thirty minutes later, when they were preparing breakfast, there came a shout from the floor below and a tug on the rope as a signal to haul it up. It took the strength of both men to lift the heavy object. They sweated at their task till over the edge of the platform came the severed head of an ant lion: a monstrous head covered in heavy plating which was streaked with green fluid from the cut neck, the fringed mouth parts used to suck out the juices of its victims protruded from below the catching jaws of the creature. This was the first time Dilke had seen this terror of the ant world so closely and clearly. The jaws were enormous; spread like two horns as wide as a man’s outstretched arms. Terrifying in their destructive power, thick as a man’s waist near the head, they tapered to pointed tips and were armed along their inner edges with spikes. The end of a crossbow bolt stuck out of one of its eyes.
“Isn’t he a beauty!” shouted Bill Olsen as he climbed on to the platform. “Where shall we put him?”
“Over the mantelpiece,” said Dilke drily.
“Good idea, Mat,” cried Olsen and he hammered a bar into a crevice above the platform fire and lashed the trophy to it. Both men watched him ironically; he stood back to admire the great head: “How’s tha
t… is it straight, Henry?”
“It’s fine, as long as it doesn’t drip into my porridge,” said Henry.
They breakfasted and Henry and Olsen set off for a day’s hunting to collect data for the marksman’s chart They left through a side exit and as they walked out of the shadow of the hut they came upon a mob of cicadas scattered through a forest of rye grass. The noise was ear-splitting, each creature giving long burst of song then waiting for a reply. Olsen crept up to a cicada and aimed point blank at its abdomen. The bolt hit the creature when it was in full song. From where he stood Henry saw it pierce the big belly and fly out of the other side. The full deep song stopped abruptly, there was silence for some seconds while the insect stood motionless then it jerked into song again. From its abdomen came a high-pitched chittering sound like an alarm clock on a tin tray. The astonished insect shot into the air and disappeared into the grass jungle.
Bill Olsen grimaced. His second cicada also switched from baritone to castrato and escaped. Olsen turned his head to Henry and mouthed “Bloody hell!”
Henry took careful aim and hit the nearest singer high up on its back, it fell heavily, kicked a few times and lay still.
Olsen growled, “He seems to have gone off song… what’s the trick, Henry?”
For answer the younger man took his heavy knife to the dead insect; he hacked off the end of its abdomen, revealing a drum-like cavern—quite empty. He thrust a hand inside and prodded with his finger at a knot of muscle and nerve cords which was attached to the top of the abdomen. “That’s the trick.” He circled a hand in the void of the big belly. “This is just a sound box—hit him here and you only put a hole in his loudspeaker, Bill. But hit him up there and you destroy a nerve centre.”
“Good. Bloody good. I like that!” Bill grinned. “Let’s get Mat on to this game—but don’t tell him where their breadbasket is.” He kicked the severed bowl and it rolled in a wobbling circle, “We could start a soup kitchen with that… or a bath house.”
Weary of the shattering cicada song, they left the grass, crossed a plain and entered a forest of yellow cress where they ate their midday meal and lay back to rest in the shade.
Olsen fell asleep and Henry gazed up at the patches of blue between the green leaves and yellow blossoms. High in the August sky a swarm of winged insects whirled and Henry watched the flash of their wings as they wove flight patterns in the hot summer air. Under the cress the earth was cool and damp. The light, filtering down through the fleshy leaves, was changed to green; the air was still.
Henry turned on his side and looked at his sleeping companion, then closed his eyes.
A crash in the leaves above woke them both. A winged shape tumbled through the roof of leaves and branches and hit the ground before them. It was a big female fly. Perched on her back was a smaller fly, an ardent jockey who had clung to her throughout their fall from the sky. She walked heavily forward for a few steps, folded her shimmering blue wings against her stout green body and crouched down. The men stared at the motionless creatures.
The diminutive piggyback male at last stirred. His trembling antennae caressed the head of the crouching female.
Henry leaned close to Olsen, “You see the mating of the saphire fly.”
The antennae delicately explored the female’s neck but she remained indifferent. His caresses became more insistent. His antennae beat lightly on her shoulders, and at last she acquiesced. Her head lifted, the tip of her tail left the ground and swung slowly from side to side and a valve gaped between the last two segments of her abdomen. Her lover scrambled backwards and grappled her in sexual embrace. Their congress was a long and ecstatic labour rising in a series of climaxes to an ultimate ejaculation. For a while the exhausted lovers lay still, then the female raised her belly from the ground, swollen with now-fertilized eggs, and attempted flight—whirring up into the green branches, only to crash back to earth. Her consort was dislodged and she stepped briskly towards the sunlit plain. Taking off, she flew purposefully through the throng of courting insects and vanished into the glare of the sun.
Olsen’s attention was fixed on the stricken lover who lay on his side, his body vibrating with little tremors which rose to a crescendo of copulatory jerks. Suddenly the creature got to its feet, staggered sideways and collapsed.
“The job’s obviously too big for the poor bastard.”
“One crowded hour of glorious sex…” Henry misquoted, “that’s the philosophy of the saphire fly. Born in the morning, gone by night, and the female won’t last long after parturition.”
Olsen walked over, placed a palm across the end of a breathing tube and called, “He’s gone all right, I hope it was worth it.”
The big compound eyes reflected them a thousand times in the honeycombed lenses. Above the eyes antennae sprouted like two silk fans and the shimmering membrane of the half-spread wings transmuted the cool forest light into a rainbow of iridescent colours.
“He’s rather beautiful, isn’t he? It seems a waste, doesn’t it, Bill?”
“That’s unusually soft-hearted for you, Henry.”
Henry conceded it with a smile.
Olsen unsheathed his machete. “He has got a good head.” He decapitated the insect and they each grasped the base of an antenna and carried it between them out of the forest and across the plain towards home.
Dilke approved of their trophy and they placed it next to the great ant lion head. From the outside the Kremlin began to look like a hunting lodge, inside it was like a ship’s forecastle.
Head office rang to say the order could be collected in eight days. The items requested would be at the collecting point—as well as an electronics and weapons expert. “What do you mean, Major Price?”
“We are sending you a man to operate the radio and to advise you on weapons.”
“I haven’t asked for an electronics and weapons expert.”
“The equipment is very sophisticated and this man will be able to service it for you.”
Dilke put down the receiver.
At supper-time Dilke gazed over his bowl of stew at the stack of crossbow bolts in the corner of the platform.
“Henry, what is the difference between nettle and wasp poison?”
“That’s an interesting question, Mathew. The strange thing is that though animal and vegetable poison have evolved in different ways they are often remarkably similar. Nettle poison is probably proteinaceous and wasp venom is a protein/enzyme mixture with a high histamine content. Sting for sting, wasp venom is undoubtedly the most virulent, but quantity for quantity—I’m not sure.”
“Let’s find out,” said Dilke. “Bill—I’d like to try wasp venom in the bolts. Will you see if you can get some?”
Bill Olsen nodded, “I think there’s a nest in the honeysuckle. I’ll climb up tomorrow and see. And while I’m there I’ll go on up and get a view of the country from the roof. Would you like to come, Henry? We’ll be back in good time to pick up the stores.”
They started early but they took it easy, stopping frequently to rest. At noon they lay on a leaf which overlooked the half-concealed wasp’s nest and ate their midday meal. They watched the traffic of wasps roaring in and out of the nest before continuing their climb and they reached the gutter late in the afternoon. The gutter was choked with dust in which fine grass sprouted; they concealed themselves in the thicket and rolled into their blankets for the night.
A shower of dust and rocks woke them. They crawled to the edge of the thicket and looked out. A sparrow was taking its morning dust-bath in the gutter, fluttering its huge wings and pecking at the lice which were dislodged from its feathers. Some of the lice escaped, scuttling past the men for shelter. They had not seen a bird so close before, the formidable horny beak, like the prow of a boat, looked dangerous and they backed into cover and crept away. They climbed on to the corrugated roof and stood in the curve of a shallow valley which sloped gently upwards. They scrambled up the valley side and stood on the ridge; from it th
ey could see the whole roof stretched in iron waves for hundreds of millimetres. Before them the sun rose above the fluted edge of the shed, shining on the cold, dew-wet metal. They walked dreamily towards the bail of light, dazzled by its splendour. After the chill of the night the heat on Henry’s body accentuated the coldness of the air and he shivered. They came to the edge of the roof. It was like the edge of the world. The sheer face of the shed fell perpendicularly for two thousand millimetres and spread out below them was the allotment, the garden and the house itself.
They lay in a valley during the morning, sunning themselves. At midday, when the metal had grown uncomfortably hot, they returned down the slope and sheltered from the sun beneath the tangle of honeysuckle which was on the roof. Sand and debris had been washed down the valleys and held by the twisted strands of the plant, lying on the sand were fallen blossoms and the sweet smell of honeysuckle filled the air A trumpet-shaped blossom lay half buried. Henry laid a hand on the end of the great tube where it had parted from the plant stem, the edge was not torn but had a regular notched cut.
“Do you see this, Bill? It’s been bitten through by a wasp.” He pointed to the stub from which the blossom had fallen and Olsen saw a dried smear of gum which had oozed from the nectar gland of the plant. “The regulation way to get at the nectar is along the tunnel of the blossom, pollenizing it in passing (moths stick a long tongue down it for the same purpose), but some wasps don’t bother and they take a short cut by chewing off the whole flowerhead and getting at the nectar that way.”
“The little bastards!” grinned Olsen.
“I’ll show you.” Henry climbed up into a flowerhead which swayed near the ground.
Cold War in a Country Garden Page 5
