by Warren Fahy
The image of a large squirming animal surrounded by the rats became visible on a screen mounted over the window and on various laptops on the lab counters. Unmistakable stripes of iridescent colors radiated over its bony frill. Sizzling stripes of pink and orange zigzagged on its furry back. It drummed its limbs in spasms, staying in place. “That,” Geoffrey sighed, “is a spiger.”
Katsuyuki frowned. “How?”
“We never figured out where spigers come from. But that’s one right there. The rats must be able to develop into them. But, why?” Geoffrey pressed his mind for some evolutionary pressure that could explain it. “Why would rats turn into spigers?”
“Maybe they’re breeding their own food,” Otto said.
“Like we breed pigs and cows!” Katsuyuki agreed.
Geoffrey nodded. “Perhaps. Spigers had scarcely any big game to hunt except for other spigers. So maybe the rats made enough spigers to ensure spiger-on-spiger kills, which would provide the rats with a feast, as well.”
“Why wouldn’t both spigers be eaten in the feeding frenzy?” Otto wondered.
“Yes, how could they survive?” Katsuyuki asked.
“The larger animals on Henders Island were protected by armies of symbiants,” Geoffrey said. “We’ve been learning about them from the hendros. We call them ‘symbiants’ since they seem to have been related to disk-ants. They fed on anything that attacked their host, even knitting together to protect wounds. But if a wound was too severe, the symbiants seemed to sense it and abandoned the sinking ship, sometimes even turning on their host. When symbiants turn and are ready to migrate to viable new hosts, other animals can sense it and attack their dying host. As a consequence, only the losers in a spiger fight would have been attacked, unless both spigers were mortally wounded. Healthy spigers could gorge themselves to their heart’s content right alongside the rats and not be touched, and inherit a lot of their prey’s symbiants simultaneously.”
“So rats grow their own beef,” Katsuyuki said.
“And butchers, too,” Geoffrey said. “These cows are both.”
“It’s like vultures breeding wildebeest,” Otto wondered, his mouth opening in shock. “But how do the rats make them?”
“Like bees, maybe,” Dimitri said.
“Of course,” Katsuyuki said. “Bees feed royal jelly to larvae to turn them into queens.”
Geoffrey nodded. “Right. They could be regurgitating food with some enzyme or hormone. Or they could be like locusts. Environmental pressures trigger a dormant genetic expression that changes grasshoppers into locusts. We used to think they were different species.”
“Christ, can you imagine?” Otto said. “If these things got loose above, they’d be creating locusts the size of SUVs.”
Dimitri looked at Geoffrey, betraying fear now for the first time. “So how do we kill this stuff, Geoffrey?”
“Henders life is already eating through the walls,” Geoffrey said. “That lichenlike stuff growing on everything in there uses sulfuric acid to dissolve rock. It’s what carved Henders Island into a giant bowl. We called it clover. And you may have clover in there, too, creatures that eat the clover with acid. Any number of Henders species could penetrate structural weaknesses down here. Nano-ants probably chewed through the electrical insulation. Clover may have followed and widened the holes. That may be how Sector Four was breached. Who knows? However they did it, they’re spreading—fast. Is this place contained? The whole place, I mean? Is there any way this stuff can reach the surface, Dimitri, other than the railroad tunnel in Sector Seven?”
“The city is sealed, do not worry,” Dimitri said. “The air pumps in all the ventilation shafts are built with elaborate filters, more elaborate than the ventilation system of Cheyenne Mountain, which was built four years after Pobedograd. These filtration systems were engineered to block radiation, poison gas … nothing larger than a microbe could ever reach the surface through them, I assure you. And Sector Seven is always sealed off from the rest of the city.”
“Not always.” Geoffrey frowned. “We came through it when we arrived. If one wasp or ant had gotten through and made it to that tunnel.”
“Unless those filters are made out of diamonds,” Otto said, “then it’s just a matter of time before Henders life eats through them, too. They’ll only slow it down. It’s got millions of years now.”
“And now Maxim wants us to make some repellent so he can turn the power on down here. It’s madness,” Geoffrey said.
“Why would that make any difference?” Dimitri asked.
“Look through the window,” Geoffrey said. “With just those chandeliers, Henders clover has already covered every surface that is directly illuminated. That’s the base of the food chain. These species would quickly exhaust the supply of oxygen down here. But with light, the clover will photosynthesize and produce oxygen. Every species will carry scales of Henders clover and distribute it wherever they go. As dangerous as this ecosystem is, the planet may not be threatened yet, since there is limited light, oxygen, and food down here. But if we turn the power plant on, there will be light. We’d be pouring gasoline on a fire.”
“He’s right, man,” Otto said. “You don’t understand the reproductive capacity of these things in optimal conditions. Their offspring are already producing offspring before they’re even born!”
“OK, OK!” Dimitri said, touching his forehead with trembling fingers. “But it sounds like we should make some repellent, no matter what.”
“I’ve thought about it,” Geoffrey said. “And you’re right.” He looked around the room, spotting the four hatches—one that led to their dorm, another to the garage downstairs, another to the stairs in front of the hospital. He pointed to the last one in the wall to the left of the window. “Where does that hatch go?”
“We don’t open that one,” Dimitri said.
“Why not?”
“It’s an antechamber to the nursery—a storage room—which we used as a sort of air lock for a while, till things got out of hand.”
“Till those two died, you mean?” Geoffrey pointed at the dissolved remains inside the chamber, their outlines obscured under growth.
“Yes.” Dimitri closed his eyes. “They died after going through the door on the other side of that room. They closed the door behind them, thankfully, but we haven’t gone back in since.”
Geoffrey considered the situation. “All right. First we have to find out if the ante-room was compromised.”
“How?” Katsuyuki asked.
“Get me a stethoscope and a piece of meat.” He looked at the guards.
“We can communicate directly with Maxim through the Undernet.” Dimitri pulled a laptop on the nearest counter.
“The Undernet?” Otto asked.
“It’s a wireless network of relays and transponders that isn’t connected to the outside world, unfortunately,” Dimitri said.
Geoffrey watched Dimitri’s fingers as he logged in to the underground web, but they moved too fast for him to catch his password.
2:19 P.M.
The crystal room around Nell was like a gigantic eye that peered into the world of lucid nightmares tumbling in fluid darkness around her. Two days had passed, according to Nell’s watch, which she had set for Maxim’s upside-down time zone shortly after arriving.
Nell felt naked in the glass room that protruded into the Pandemonium Sea, where she saw countless creatures as she reclined on the lavender bed, suspended in a euphoria of wonder and fear. A three-foot-wide Spanish dancer nudibranch, its surface outlined by pinlights of purple and gold, flapped like a magic carpet above her. Blue squids shaped like artillery shells chased one another in single file, flashing as they careened around the room. Limpets rasped their radulae against the surface of the crystal walls like Zamboni machines grinding away the strange algaelike growth before it could accumulate.
Nell rolled onto her stomach. In the murky distance through the crystal wall, she saw radiating red and orange arms,
each twenty feet long, rising together from the bottom of the lake.
She spotted a light switch next to the window and turned it on, and two dozen beams of light pierced the water in a semicircle outside the invisible room. A new palette of colors emerged from the darkness. The Spanish dancers were now orange, yellow, and red; the gammies were now yellow, red, and white; and the giant arms rising from the lake bottom fifty feet away were reticulated white, purple, and orange.
She now saw that the eight arms bristled with lacy white stalks, each a yard long and releasing a stream of organisms delaminating like budding medusae. Some of the juveniles swam away solo while others linked together and stroked their legs in a pulsing wave. A cloud of multicolored chunks of particulate matter billowed up in the water from the mouth of the mega-medusa. As the plume rose, a squadron of squids converged in a swirling frenzy to feed on the bits of matter. Nell noticed that the young medusae that had broken off from the mega-medusa now did an extraordinary thing: The free-swimming solitary ones latched on to those that had linked together in chains and began dragging them through the feeding animals. As the chains came in contact, the squids and other creatures were instantly paralyzed and sank into the waiting mouth of the mega-medusa.
Perhaps the monster was more like a giant Cassiopeia, Nell thought now—a rare jellyfish that lived upside down attached to the sea bottom. Whatever it was, she had never seen a species whose young hunted food for it so that the adult could concentrate on reproduction—except for ant or termite colonies. “What do you think, Ivan?” she whispered, rubbing the dog’s head. Ivan barked. “I agree,” she said.
Just then she heard someone clanking on the door outside. Men’s voices yelled. The door began to open. Ivan looked at her. She mouthed barking, and he started barking immediately, to her astonished gratitude. She heard men yelling loudly in Russian as the door began to push in.
Nell remembered that Sasha had recorded a message in case the guards found her. Nell scrambled to the CD player and pressed START. Then she dashed around the corner to the bathroom as Sasha’s message played: “Get out of here! I’ll tell Papa! Don’t you dare come closer! Oh, my God, I hate you! Ivan’s going to eat you! Go away! I’m naked!” Then Sasha screamed long and loud on her recording.
The door closed decisively as Nell hunkered down. She crept back into the room and switched off the lights, crawling under the covers of the bed and trying to hide somehow in the fishbowl of Sasha’s secret room.
2:24 P.M.
Maxim sat in the conservatory, scanning the views of security cameras arrayed on the wall behind his desk.
Sasha suddenly banged on her father’s desk, startling him. “Papa!”
A moment after, three guards marched through the main hatch to report to Maxim. Their mouths froze open, amazed to see that Sasha had gotten there before them.
Sasha identified the look in their eyes and immediately screamed. “There they are! These are the ones who keep harassing me, Papa!”
They visibly shrank in front of Maxim’s desk as he swiveled toward them in his chair.
“I’ve found a nice room for me and Ivan, and these pervs tried to barge in on me again just now! Didn’t you? Why can’t I get any privacy around here!” she screamed.
“Now, now, shinka!” He glared at the men. “What have you to say about this?”
“Um, we did find a passageway to the room Sasha was in, Chief, and we thought we should check it out. We didn’t know she was inside!”
“You’re Peeping Toms!” Sasha shouted, pointing at each of them. “They totally heard me and they barged in anyway. Didn’t you?”
“All right, what about this, damn it?” Maxim demanded.
“We did not mean to intrude on her, Chief. We were looking for Nell Binswanger.”
“We’re very sorry, Miss Dragolovich!”
“I was naked! Just like the last time you barged in on me!”
“We closed the door as soon as we heard her, Chief!”
Maxim glared at the men with ominous fury.
Sasha ran around his desk and kissed him. “Bye, Papochka!” Then she trotted to the spiral stairs and waved at the guards before flipping them off and leaving them to fend for themselves.
“I can’t believe she got here before us, Chief,” said one of the confused men. “We came straight here.…”
“She’s explored more of this palace than anyone,” Maxim fired back in Russian. “Find Nell Binswanger instead of spying on my naked daughter! You are to leave Sasha alone, do you hear me? How many times must I tell you! Can you manage that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thanks, Chief!”
“What if—?”
“What?” Maxim snapped.
“A ghost may have gotten her.”
“They seem to be everywhere in the city, Chief.”
“She might have wandered off by herself and—”
“Get out! Find her! Before I feed you to a ghost!”
4:45 P.M.
The scientists in the maternity ward cranked the latch of the door to the storage room and pulled it open a crack.
Geoffrey dumped a can of Vienna sausages into the room, and they slammed the hatch shut.
Otto listened to the door with a stethoscope, noticing his cloven right thumb, the nail deformed after a Henders rat hatchling had split it down the middle on Henders Island. He placed the head of the scope to different parts of the door and closed his eyes as he osculated.
“What if Henders animals don’t like the salt in the Vienna sausages?” Dimitri said.
“Yeah, there’s a lot of sodium in those things,” Katsuyuki agreed.
“For that matter, why do they like to eat us?” Otto said. “We’ve got salt in our blood, sweat, and tears, just like the ocean.”
“It’s a myth that we have the same amount of salt in us as the ocean,” Geoffrey said. “Seawater has three and a half times the concentration of salt that we have in our blood. We might have the same amount of salt in our blood as the ocean did when our ancestors crawled out on land. But now there is enough of a difference in seawater to trigger a warning signal in these things and not enough in our blood to keep us off the menu. They probably have about as much salt in their blood as we do. They just can’t slough off excess salt, so when they’re exposed to saltwater the magnesium buildup anesthetizes and kills them. Hear anything, Otto?”
“Nope. Nothing.”
“OK, so next, a visual test.” Geoffrey turned. “Anyone have a camera with a flash?”
Katsuyuki produced a small camera from his shirt pocket.
Geoffrey charged the flash, and when they opened the door, Geoffrey stuck the camera in, pointed it at the floor, set off the flash, and pulled his hand in as they slammed the door. They saw the picture of all seven Vienna sausages lying unmolested on the white tile floor of the storage room. “The room’s clear,” Geoffrey said.
“What makes you so sure?” Dimitri asked.
“We’re sure,” Otto said.
“Let’s rig a way to open the far hatch, let in some Henders critters, and then close the door, all from here,” Geoffrey said. “Then we’ll set up saltwater sprayers to collect their repellent.”
“Hey!” Dimitri noticed a security camera view on his laptop sitting on the nearest lab counter: two limousines were arriving in front of the hospital. Maxim and his entourage got out and rushed up the stairs from the street.
“Great,” Otto said.
Maxim entered through the far hatch. “Have you figured it out, Geoffrey?” Maxim asked.
Geoffrey turned to him. “We will need saltwater, Maxim.”
“We have our own ocean,” Maxim replied. “What else?”
Geoffrey held his eyes. “Got any ice chests? Big ones? Fifteen of them would be good. And something we can spray water with.”
“Throw in duct tape, rope, and string. And some plastic bags and cable ties,” Otto said. As a former NASA systems engineer, Otto considered these items es
sential prototyping materials.
“And cheesecloth,” Geoffrey said.
“E-mail a list to me,” Maxim said to Dimitri. “I’m very glad to see you’re making progress, Geoffrey. Very good!”
“Where’s my wife, Maxim?” Geoffrey said.
Irritation returned to Maxim’s face. “We will bring her to you soon. If you do not complete this task, it won’t matter, Geoffrey.”
“God damn it, where is she, you son of a bitch!” Geoffrey glared at him. “Are you trying to blackmail me? Where is she?”
Maxim looked at him, a startled look in his eyes, which surprised Geoffrey. “Carry on, Dr. Binswanger,” he said gravely. “I only meant that all of us are in danger if you fail. Your wife has managed to get herself lost in Pobedograd. I cannot guarantee her safety. Only you can do that, by doing what you can to stop these creatures.”
“Why did you bring them here?”
“For insurance.”
“To use as weapons?”
“When your enemy has very big weapons, you need them, too.”
“You can’t aim these weapons, Maxim! Not at a country or even a continent. They will destroy everything, everywhere, if they ever get out! What were you planning to do with them?”
“If they ever tried to attack this city, they would trigger their own destruction.”
“Who is they, Maxim?”
Maxim leaned forward, his ice-blue eyes piercing Geoffrey. “The human race.”
After a brief word with Dimitri in Russian, he departed. As he passed, his two armed guards replanted their feet against the wall behind them.
4:49 P.M.
Only when Sasha brought food in and called her name did Nell come out of hiding. “Thank you, Sasha,” she sighed. “I think Ivan saved me! He’s a very smart dog.”
“Of course,” Sasha said. “Dogs are as smart as their owners.”
“You may be right.” Nell smiled. “Interesting theory.”
