by Bill Schutt
“He hasn’t moved an inch, Mac,” Yanni said, as they stood beside the giant Morlock they had come to call Alpha.
His pose reminded them both of what were apparently five of Alpha’s ancient relatives, housed in a chamber that also held a Roman centurion.
“I don’t know what got into him,” a sorrowful MacCready had told Yanni earlier. “Nesbitt says she wandered in there chasing what were probably cousins of those snowflake mimics, found what she thought were weird statues, and got attacked.”
They’d both had some time to think about what happened and now, as the others prepared to move out, Yanni’s anger about the shooting of the little mammoth continued to seethe, just below the surface and barely contained. She did not know if she would ever be able to fully forgive Mac. For the moment, though, the two friends came together and stood beside Alpha.
Yanni broke the uneasy silence and spoke softly. “So, this Nesbitt, you believe her?”
“Jack pretty much backed up her whole story.”
“Do you think he knows what’s really in there? That those aren’t statues?”
“No,” Mac replied. “Although to tell you the truth I have no clue about what’s going on with those figures. Do you?”
“Pliny’s secret to life itself, I’d say.”
Mac shook his head. “Hell, if it is, I say we leave this part out.”
Yanni turned her attention to Alpha and nodded slowly. The Morlock had not only gone silent; its entire body was now covered in a layer of red mold that seethed and undulated, appearing (if that were possible) to take complete possession of the giant.
Mac glanced around to make sure there was nobody within earshot. “Look, Yanni, even if Alpha could leave—”
“—and judging by those living statues, I’d say that’s a long shot.”
Mac nodded. “Granted, but I don’t think he would anyway. He’d never risk spreading this shit to his kind. It’s why he brought us here. He knew the other Morlocks would never risk contaminating themselves.”
“And it’s also the reason he wouldn’t touch us,” Yanni added, crestfallen. “He knew we’d eventually be coming here and didn’t want his scent on us—or we’d end up like him.”
Captain Pederson’s arrival curtailed any further conversation. “You two ready to move out?”
R. J. MacCready reached a hand out to Yanni but she looked down at his holstered sidearm and shook her head. Mac gave a last glance back toward the place where the little mammoth lay and said, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Epilogue
Something Wicked This Way Comes
There are known knowns; these are things we know that we know. We also know that there are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
—Donald Rumsfeld (paraphrasing the 1955 “Johari Window”)
There’s another possibility: the unknown knowns—which [are] the things we know, and then we choose not to know them or not let other people know we know.
—Stephen Colbert (to Rumsfeld, 2016)
I find the lure of the unknown irresistible.
—Sylvia Earle
Metropolitan Museum of Natural History
New York
September 22, 1946
Major Patrick Hendry entered Charles Knight’s office and found it rather crowded. It was clear to him that the old artist, R. J. MacCready, Yanni, and Patricia Wynters had been deep in conversation before he walked in. The trio was admiring Knight’s latest work—a portrait.
“What do you think?” Mac said, holding the painting out toward the major.
Hendry nodded at the familiar face of his friend—now deceased.
“Mac’s gonna put it right next to Bob’s.”
“That’s a great place for it, Yanni,” Hendry replied. Finding himself on the verge of an uncomfortable emotion, he turned toward the artist. “You got a real future in this painting business there, Chuck,” Hendry said. “If you keep working at it.”
Charles Knight replied with a grunt he typically reserved for conversations with the major.
Hendry was just about to place a box down on a small empty table when a panicked look from the artist stopped him. “Don’t put it there!” Knight cried.
Hendry looked down. “Hey, nice theremin,” he said.
“And don’t touch this one!” Knight shot back.
“Okay, okay, I gotcha,” Hendry said, deciding to hold on to the box. Then he changed gears. “Well, I’m glad you’re all here.”
“Why’s that?” Mac asked.
“First things first,” the major continued. “Each of you take some of these.”
Four quizzical faces stared back at him.
“They’re from Jack,” Hendry said, tilting the open box toward them. “He says he wants you to spread ’em around.”
“What the hell is this?” Mac replied, picking up one of the red, white, and blue bumper stickers and a matching pin.
“Your boy’s running for Congress!” Hendry announced.
“Yeah, but not in this state,” Yanni said, examining one of the buttons.
“How is Jack, anyway?” Mac asked.
“Thanks to your little adventure,” Hendry said, “his back was completely screwed. Now, though, he says it’s been gettin’ a lot better.”
Knight chimed in. “Yeah, I hear he’s screwing three”—he glanced at Yanni and Patricia—“beautiful Tiffany lamps together.”
Patricia laughed. “I’ve seen pictures of him with some of those lamps.”
“Bad back, huh?” MacCready replied. “Anything I can do to help?”
Yanni shot him a dirty look as she attached a campaign button to her blouse.
“Guy’s got an interesting future ahead of him,” Hendry said, before turning to Knight and Wynters. “Okay, enough about our boy. By my calendar you guys are still on the payroll. So what else have you come up with?”
“Well,” Patricia replied, “we finished with the last bits of Pliny’s Omega codex.”
“And by bits, she means bits,” Knight said, pouring an envelope full of dust and fragments onto a metal specimen tray. “Most of this stuff was disintegrating before it ever got here,” he lied.
Hendry continued. “I suppose all that business about how the Cerans molded life like clay got destroyed, too?”
“Funny,” Patricia said, “it turned out to be the most fragile part of the codex.”
Hendry gave Knight a knowing nod. “That’s . . . um . . . terribly unfortunate,” he said, trying his best to sound official.
Never suspecting that Hendry might really have been on their side all along, Knight and Patricia each raised an eyebrow—to Hendry’s amusement.
“Did your boys from D.C. photograph those last codex sections?” Wynters asked.
“Hmmm . . . I’d have to check,” Hendry replied, a response that Mac would doubtless translate into Hendry never has to check anything. He’s hidden or destroyed some of those negatives.
The major turned to Mac and Yanni. “All right, final time I’m gonna ask this.”
“Go on,” came the simultaneous reply.
“Was Pliny’s ‘molding life’ stuff still there and is there any way that it came out with any of you?”
“No, the red grotto was only death, and the stuff you’re talking? It was back in that valley—if it existed at all.”
“And?”
“And Yanni and I were the only ones who ever got in and out of there alive.”
“So what’s your assessment?”
“Never saw them doing anything like Pliny describes,” said Yanni.
Clearly unable to completely trust Hendry, Wynters said, convincingly, “We know environments in isolation often produce some strange evolutionary quirks.”
Hendry shot her a skeptical look. “Like carnivorous grass, angry snowflakes, angrier Morlocks?”
“Look around this plan
et hard enough, Major,” Knight added, “and you’ll probably find even stranger examples.”
Normally, Major Hendry would have challenged the pair, but he knew that this was anything but a normal conversation. It was more like a dance.
Mac nodded. “So, officially, we’re assessing the key feature of Pliny’s Omega codex as a naturally occurring evolutionary phenomenon, expanded into a fairy tale.”
“And I’m guessin’,” Yanni said, “with the Russians and Chinese suddenly having other things to worry about—”
“—like each other.” Hendry completed the thought.
Mac grimaced and continued. “Because of that, I think we can keep a lid on this for a while longer.”
“A couple of years if we’re lucky,” Yanni added. “Then somebody’s gonna go back in there.”
For several seconds there was silence, as they each pondered that particular problem.
“Well, at least that gives us some time to think this through,” Mac said, resting Jerry’s portrait on the theremin.
“Okay, now that that’s settled,” the major continued.
“For now,” Yanni countered, stopping herself from saying anything more. She and Mac both knew—we’ve stopped it for now, but this is far from over.
“One way or another,” Mac had told her earlier, “it’s going to come back. Pliny’s microbes—wildly adaptable and with numbers on their side.”
Yanni also realized that, once again, wherever the road had divided into right decisions and wrong decisions, they had made the best available choice. Yet, once again, every path they had taken seemed, on some level, to have made matters worse.
“For now,” Yanni emphasized again, with as much confidence as she could muster, “it is settled.”
“All right, for now,” Hendry acquiesced. “What else did you figure out?”
It was Wynters who replied. “Apparently, our Roman friends stuck around in Tibet for quite a while—a coupla years in fact.”
“Though you’d never know it from reading Pliny’s Natural History,” Knight added. “He covered up those missing years pretty well.”
“Anything else?” Hendry asked them.
“Yeah,” Knight continued. “Eventually Pliny and his Nubian friend made their way home. And we know what happened there.”
“What about the other guy, the centurion?”
“We think Severus stayed behind,” Wynters said.
Mac and Yanni exchanged brief but knowing glances, simultaneously sharing a thought. He definitely stayed behind.
Knight cleared his throat. “Now, Major, I’ve got a few questions for you.”
“Go ahead,” Hendry said, crossing his arms.
“So where exactly did they find this codex?”
“Herculaneum, if you want to be precise,” Hendry snapped, then checked his watch. “And before you ask your last question, we found it in a cylinder made of some metal—it’s probably some new alloy. God only knows why he wrote the damned thing up in the first place.”
“He had to,” Knight guessed aloud. “In his own way, the guy was an artist.”
“Well, artist or not,” Hendry said, “someone buried his codex months or maybe even years before the eruption. Buried it deep.”
“And then deeper still, I imagine, after the eruption,” Mac added.
“About sixty feet deeper than Pliny had planned,” Hendry said, before turning back to Knight and Wynters. “You two finished with Twenty Questions?”
“Two questions,” Knight replied, oblivious to the game show reference. “But for now . . . yeah.”
Mac, however, wasn’t quite done. “What happened to Tse-lin? He still in custody overseas?”
“For the moment,” Hendry replied. “With all he knows, we couldn’t let him go back to China now, could we?”
“Right,” Mac agreed, “and then there’s all that contact he had with us Americans. If he did go back home, he could be arrested or worse for less than that.”
“Especially now,” Hendry replied, “with the little war you guys almost started.”
Mac shrugged.
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Hendry continued. “It’s not like you sicced that Russian chopper and those two Chinese choppers on each other, right?”
R. J. MacCready summoned his best who me? expression.
On the other side of the room, Yanni bit her lip, understanding that this was another of the details Mac had decided to keep from Hendry—to protect them all from an incident that was already widening the rift between China and the Soviets.
Yanni decided to change the subject. “So about Wang Tse-lin?”
Hendry held up his hand, then spoke slowly. “Everything’s been arranged.” The major shot a wry smile at four faces wearing the same expression of anticipation. He waited a beat, apparently to savor the moment, and then went on. “You can use a new vertebrate zoologist here, right? Especially one who’s familiar with a part of Asia we might have trouble visiting ourselves?”
“Sure we can!” Yanni answered, not bothering to check with the three people who actually worked at the museum.
MacCready was momentarily relieved with the news about the Chinese scientist, but his look quickly returned to one of concern. “So, Pat, what about those Devil’s Brigade guys? They saw the Morlocks, or the Yeti or whatever you want to call them. What if they say something?”
“I’ve got that covered, too, Mac,” Hendry said. “Anyone who mentions your hairy pals—either species—will get the same treatment that those Night Fighter flyboys from the 415th got when they started chirping about their so-called ‘fucking foo-fighters.’”
Now the nonmilitary types in the room shot the two Army guys a trio of quizzical looks.
“Unidentified flying objects they’re calling ’em,” Mac explained. “In this case, glowing round objects that some of our pilots have claimed to see following their planes around.”
Hendry continued. “The bottom line is that everyone considers these guys to be laughingstocks now, and that’s exactly what the Devil’s Brigaders will face if they start flappin’ their lips about fuzzy giants.”
“Well, that’s sort of a relief,” Yanni said. “I guess.”
Major Hendry, though, was clearly not finished with the topic and Yanni’s halfhearted response served as a reminder. “What about our other problem?” he asked. “Your Dr. Nesbitt?”
The three museum workers exchanged uneasy looks, before Patricia Wynters spoke up, presumably because it had been her idea to bring the invertebrate biologist into the project.
“Ummm . . . well . . . as you know, Nora left the museum a few weeks ago,” she said. “Rather abruptly.”
“She get fired?” Hendry asked.
“No.” Wynters hesitated. “She took another job—at a lab.”
Hendry was suddenly paying a lot more attention to the conversation, and there was no way he could have missed MacCready wincing. “Where?”
Mac stepped in. “A small lab that nobody seems to know anything about.”
“Something about a fruit,” Knight added. “Peach Island I think it was.”
“Well, that’s not very reassuring,” Hendry replied. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Mac nodded a thanks.
“One last question,” Hendry said, and this one he directed at Yanni. “Your little elephants, did you get to chat them up like you did with that pair in Central Park?”
“As a matter of fact, I did,” she responded. “One in particular.”
“And how’d that work out?”
“Badly,” she said. “But I’m not ready to talk about it yet.” Yanni shot a quick glance at Mac, who was looking downcast. “But there was nothing anyone could have done,” she added.
“So how smart do you really think they were?” Hendry asked.
Yanni paused for a moment. “As I’ve said, maybe smarter than humans,” she replied, “and definitely more kind.”
Hendry chuckled, then started to head for the do
or. “Well, personally, I’m glad I missed ’em then.”
“Why’s that?” Yanni asked.
“If they are smarter than us,” Hendry said, “maybe they’ll be running the show someday. And I’d hate to wake up one morning and find humans depending on the humanity of elephants.”
“Could be worse,” Mac said, almost to himself.
“Could be a lot worse,” Yanni said. Then she quietly took Mac’s hand.
On that same afternoon, beneath the snows of Tibet, and in a way that neither the Morlocks nor the humans had ever anticipated, the little white mammoths launched a sudden revolt. It was as ruthlessly brutal as it was competent and when it was over the mammoths had displayed more human behaviors than even Yanni could have imagined.
Herculaneum Harbor
Just after midnight
August 25, a.d. 79
Finally, the architect thought, the last of the boats have been launched.
Pliny’s Nubian friend had spent the better part of the night at the docks, comforting concerned parents and their children, and assisting them into an array of small craft he and a few friends had hauled out from beneath the stone arches of the city’s marina. When the eruption began, many had refused to enter the boats. The giant mushroom cloud of black smoke was so distant that most people believed it safer to remain ashore than to set sail onto increasingly turbulent waters. Proculus ordered his artisans and slaves into the first boat—“As an example for others to follow, and only as a precaution,” he lied. “You’ll probably be home for dinner.”
Many of those who had either chosen to stay behind or failed to find room in a boat were now huddled beneath the marina’s arches. Each vaulted chamber was a storage room that served primarily as a drydock for an assortment of fishing boats. The arches and chamber ceilings formed the foundations of the city’s waterfront buildings—a neighborhood that normally offered stunning views across the Bay of Neapolis.
Now though, the sights and sounds were of a far more frightening nature. The mountain, Vesuvio, had been rumbling for fourteen hours. And though the skies above Herculaneum were still crystal clear and full of stars, Pompeii to the east was now invisible, as were the entire eastern horizon and the stars above it. They were blotted out by an inky black cloud that had risen from the mountain—a cloud rent by forked and quivering bursts of flame, like flashes of lightning magnified a hundredfold. The constant rumbling roar was frequently joined by muffled cracking sounds, and each of these was followed by a growing chorus of moans and cries from those assembled along the shoreline or hiding below the arches.
