The Darwin Strain

by Bill Schutt

  Yanni was about to step out and join Mac in the electronics cabin when she noticed something that gave her pause—a perfectly undisturbed mattress on the lower portion of a bunk bed. Covering it, and no less incongruous than an intact mattress amid so much wreckage, was a flower-patterned sheet.

  Yanni stood for several moments, feeling oddly mesmerized by the unlikely tableau. At last she moved in for a closer look, compelled for some indefinable reason to pull up a corner of the sheet. In response, a two-foot-long section of something roughly snakelike rolled off the sheet and struck the deck with a wet thud. Remarkably, its flesh displayed the same flower pattern as the sheet from which it had just tumbled, but only for a second. That quickly, the mass all but disappeared as it took upon itself the wood-grained appearance of the deck. The thicker end of the “snake”—which seemed to have been severed from something quite a bit larger—remained visible.

  Yanni reached down to prod the “whatever-it-is” with a long sliver of wood.

  “Mac!” she called. “You need to—”

  A chorus of screams tore through the ship, accompanied by the sound of wood splintering and the horrific smashing of flesh against an unyielding mass. Yanni jumped to her feet and ran into the passageway. Cousteau had heard it as well, and he bolted aft down the same companionway.

  “Mac!” Yanni yelled above the din—and then, just as suddenly, the ship was silent again.

  Central Park West, New York City

  In their listening post on the Upper West Side, the two Russians had been working through the night, encoding everything they had heard in the theremin broadcasts the previous day, before transferring it to microfilm.

  During their long days and nights together, Genya had predicted that strange happenings in the eastern Mediterranean would bring MacCready. Were he only a few years younger, Genya would normally have become obnoxiously assertive, once his predictions were confirmed. But he and Victor were no longer normal men. Like many Russians, they were being taught paranoia through what Americans called “the school of hard knocks.” They knew that being right could often prove depressingly inconvenient.

  Victor looked out the window. Sunrise was still hours away, and the prohibition against the use of phones or anything except direct, prearranged personal contact meant they knew nothing at all yet about a ship in trouble near Santorini—much less that, at this very same moment, R. J. MacCready was actually aboard the ship.

  “You must realize, Victor, that this Yanni woman accompanying MacCready changes the situation completely.”

  “Her expertise with animals?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Perhaps she can talk to the fishes,” Victor said with a laugh.

  “I was thinking about dolphins,” Genya replied. “Maybe now they will try to turn them against us. She made some progress with elephants—and more recently a small whale.”

  “Our scientists have tried that already, no? And it was a waste?”

  “They have,” Genya continued, his tone becoming conspiratorial. “But I’m sure the Americans have yet to learn what we have learned.”

  “Good, good,” Victor said, eagerly. “Let them waste their own time and resources.”

  Genya let out a disquietingly grim laugh. “Well, from what I’ve heard, you won’t see any of our people studying dolphin intelligence for a long, long time.”

  “Though it did seem a good idea, no?”

  “I don’t think you know even half of it,” Genya said, clearly relishing his ability to draw out the facts of the tale. “It did seem a good idea while it lasted.”

  “What? For all of two years?”

  “Less,” Genya said bitterly. “Our scientists tried to communicate with these things too, like this Yanni. Trained them to plant mines on ships, but they resisted. Finally, when it appeared they would obey. No. They had their own ideas.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Apparently the fucking dolphins decided to plant the mines on all ships—including our own!”

  “So what do the Americans know of this problem?” Victor asked, his voice now filled with concern. “And what if this Hendry sent Yanni because he thinks there is a more suitable animal infiltrator—and she a more suitable animal trainer?”

  “Now you are clutching at strings,” Genya said, but, seeing that Victor now appeared concerned and puzzled, he softened his response. “While that danger may be very unlikely, where the future of our navy and perhaps even our whole existence is involved, we can overlook nothing.”

  Victor nodded. “Then of course there is this ‘red moctus proctus’ they keep referring to.”

  “Yes, this is of paramount importance to Comrade Lysenko.”

  “No sleep for us tonight or tomorrow,” said Victor. “We must have this information flying out of LaGuardia as fast as we can prepare it.”

  They both glanced at the black strips of microfilm, each frame tiny enough to fit into nickels that had been halved, hollowed out, and carefully machined to screw together seamlessly. Each was distinguishable only to the intended recipient by a specific V-shaped chip cut out of the Philadelphia mint mark.

  Genya already had one of the coins in his pocket.

  Scrambling into the compartment Mac had entered minutes earlier, Yanni and Cousteau found him calmly seated in front of what appeared to be a reel-to-reel recording device.

  “Sorry,” he said, “I couldn’t find the volume control on this goddamned thing.”

  While Mac squinted at the machine, Yanni and Cousteau exchanged looks.

  “Ah, here it is,” Mac said, before fiddling with a dial. He flipped a crescent-shaped switch and the room was again filled with sound, though this time at a more tolerable volume. What became nearly intolerable, however, were the tape-recorded transitions from intelligence gathering to life-and-death struggles between the Russian crew and whatever had invaded their ship. Yanni was able to make out some of the words.

  Mac, who like Yanni had gained at least a rudimentary knowledge of Russian (because the birth of what they were now calling the Cold War required it), cocked an ear, clearly trying to translate more of the frantic exchange.

  “Well?” Mac asked, turning off the machine.

  “I don’t know,” said Yanni. “There’s a whole lotta fighting, and someone cursing—and one word, screamed over and over again, that I’m not familiar with.”

  “And what’s that?”

  Yanni repeated it, accented in its original Russian.

  “Friends,” Cousteau responded, somberly, “that is not a Russian word.”

  “Oh?”

  “It is Norwegian.”

  Yanni saw Mac’s eyes widen in recognition but he remained silent.

  She paused a moment, then set her hands on her hips. “So is anyone going to tell me what the hell a Kraken is?”

  Neither man said anything, so she casually threw a thumb over her shoulder. “Because I found a chunk of one next door.”

  The Chernov brothers had rounded the west end of the island just after dawn, and were soon forced, by the approach of a small boat, to submerge. Exceptionally calm waters allowed the crew to watch the proceedings, with the periscope rising no more than a single hand-length above the sea surface.

  Dmitri and Alexi looked on in bewilderment.

  Three people went aboard, encountering no resistance.

  “Where is the crew?” Alexi had asked.

  “Waiting below,” Dmitri suggested. “Those three will be prisoners and the crew will ship out during the high tide.”

  That is what should have happened, but in these times what should have been and what was tended to be galaxies apart.

  Later, when the three intruders emerged and motored away, there was no question that something had gone terribly wrong.

  “Where is the fucking crew?” Alexi asked, again.

  The brothers knew that normally, if most of the crew had been killed during a battle, and if capture were imminent, those still alive w
ould have burned and scuttled the ship—destroying its equipment and records as well.

  “It makes no sense,” said Dmitri, pointing to the distant boat they could now see was headed toward the main island of Santorini. “That little scouting party that just left—whoever they are and whatever their mission is—they were not part of this attack, and neither was the American military. No country launches a sneak attack against just one vessel.”

  Alexi nodded in agreement. “Who then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And the crew, all dead?”

  “It seems clear,” Dmitri said. “But I must see for myself what happened.” He ran through a quick checklist of the equipment he would need, while his brother extended the moon pool’s telescoping collar downward, adjusting the cabin’s “sea level” downward with it. Dmitri then pulled on his wet suit and dove out through the pool.

  July 1, 1948

  Santorini, 9:30 a.m.

  Inside the “Only Hotel in Town”

  “It is definitely part of a tentacle,” Cousteau said, staring down over MacCready’s shoulder at the axe-slashed section of appendage. Mac was prodding it with a pair of tongs that had served as dinner utensils in a recent past life.

  “So, it’s a cephalopod after all?” said Boulle, who had spent an uneventful morning dockside with the newly christened Alan and the truck.

  “Absolument,” said Cousteau.

  “But this one’s new to science,” Mac added.

  “Agreed,” Cousteau said, without looking up from the specimen. “Utterly unique. In fact quite unimaginable!”

  Within only minutes of returning from the derelict, they had rearranged the furnishings in two adjoining rooms, converting dresser tops and even a bed into makeshift lab benches and equipment stands. Mac also unpacked a very decent light microscope he’d borrowed from the museum, along with a serviceable set of dissecting instruments. On a writing table, a large pan, filled with seawater, kept most of the severed tentacle damp. It was surely dead, but as Cousteau observed, “Some stubborn, hidden bundle of nerves renders it alive-seeming still.”

  It’s color-shifting abilities, though fading fast, were impressive even in death. “Few people have ever seen this, I think,” Cousteau emphasized.

  “At least no one who lived to tell about it,” Mac said, regretting his faux pas a second too late.

  “I beg to differ, boys,” Yanni said. “Someone on that trawler lived long enough to tell us quite a lot.” She motioned toward Alan, who was modifying the electrical cord on the Magnetophon they had retrieved from the ship.

  Mac nodded. “I’m just wondering how long we have till the Red Team boards that trawler and figures out they’re down one tape recorder.”

  MacCready’s tone was shifting from impatience to agitation. Alan, who had volunteered to render the recorder compatible with the island’s power supply, shot him a good-natured wave of dismissal. “Yes, I know,” he said. “I’m taking all day.”

  “Well?” Mac said.

  “And now I’m nearly done!”

  Mac smiled and nodded in approval before turning back to the specimen. He withdrew a magnifying glass from his duffle bag, adjusted a desk lamp to provide extra light, then used the makeshift tongs to stretch the tapered end of the appendage across a dampened washcloth.

  Along the tentacle’s surface, Mac watched thousands of tiny chromatophores expand and contract in a feeble attempt to match the new background and lighting. The washcloth was blue, but after only a few seconds, all of the pigment-containing cells seemed to relax, as if fading into a dying memory of the flower-patterned sheet they had been lying atop, and mimicking, for several hours.

  “Uh—not for nothing, but did you just see something weird?” Yanni asked.

  Mac threw her an incredulous look. “All things considered, I’m seeing a lot weird here.”

  “No,” she said. “Forget about the camouflaging. I mean, look right there, around the lips of those suction cups.”

  MacCready did as Yanni suggested. There is something, he thought, but—

  “Zut alors!” Cousteau exclaimed, too loudly, and far too close to Mac’s ear. “There is a layer of ‘red velvet’—the same velvet we found at the vent site.”

  “You think these things are using the microbes?”

  “That could be,” Cousteau replied. “I thought it was the free divers who had been visiting and scraping mats of this growth off the rocks. But now I am thinking it was these animaux.”

  “All right, let’s get a slice for the scope,” Mac said, moving in with a scalpel.

  An unexpected shift in the specimen caused him to freeze. The tapered end of the tentacle began a slow roll into a coil.

  “What the—?” Mac exclaimed.

  “Cthulhu,” Boulle muttered under his breath.

  “Gesundheit,” Alan said, though no one responded to the Lovecraft reference—except, perhaps, for the arm. It coiled more tightly, the uncut end forming a perfect spiral.

  R. J. MacCready was instantly reminded of the Willis O’Brien–animated stegosaurus in King Kong—its tail coiling, even as the humans who killed it passed by the enormous body. But when the distal end of the tentacle began to uncoil, and as the fingerlike tip moved toward the scalpel he was holding, Mac abandoned any thought that they were witnessing the random firings of a dying neuromuscular system.

  He shifted his hand to the left, watching as the tentacle tracked the movement.

  “This . . . is . . . nuts,” MacCready muttered, noting that the creature’s suckers were ringed with hooks and barbs. Most of them, especially those exposed to open air, went into spasm, opening and closing. Clicking against each other, the barbs produced a sound like a dozen miniature castanet players while the suckers in contact with the tray’s base scratched at it like fingernails against a chalkboard.

  Without saying a word, Yanni picked up a blunt probe from the arrangement of dissecting instruments that had been laid out. But instead of moving toward the limb, she drew the rounded tip against the metal base of the desk lamp, adjusting the motion until she had produced what Mac realized was a reasonable facsimile of the clicking from the specimen.

  Yanni followed the rhythm produced by the barbs, her attempts inharmonious at first, as she responded too soon or for too long, but after only a minute the sounds produced by the human/cephalopod duo began to meld into something coherent. The duet—and Mac could find no other suitable description—continued for another minute, until finally the limb shuddered twice and relaxed. The loss of tone was immediately apparent as the severed tentacle at last assumed its role as inert flesh.

  Yanni nodded toward the seeming impossible sight. “Mac, maybe you wanna get in there a little closer—see if you can get her to play something else?”

  “No,” Mac said quietly, while pushing himself back from the table. “I think I’m good.”

  An hour later, while Mac and Cousteau worked on the specimen—making drawings, measurements, and microscope slides—Yanni had donned a pair of headphones and was reexamining the tape recording from the trawler.

  “This creature, it is most amazing, no?” Pierre Boulle said, with uncharacteristic emotion.

  “That was my first thought too,” Cousteau added solemnly, “just before my friends and Stavracos . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “So what do we know about this thing?” Mac asked, looking up from the slide he’d been examining under the microscope.

  Cousteau answered. “Under any other circumstances I would refuse to believe any of this activity. Certainly its brain is gone. It should not have any part of a circulatory system that was still alive, hours after being severed. No means to provide the tissues with oxygen.”

  “So, what has it got?” asked Alan.

  “Well, there’s an active neuromuscular system,” said Mac, before gesturing toward the now-dead specimen. “Or there was.”

  “And active chromatophores,” Cousteau chimed in.

  “Righ
t, more cellular activity.”

  Cousteau grinned with wonder. “This means that nerves and muscles are adapted to survive longer than you would think, avec little or no d’oxygène.”

  “Right, but this is pretty sophisticated stuff,” Mac added. “So, maybe we’re looking at a nervous system that—instead of having one centralized brain, like us—is spread out as nerve bundles that work together.”

  “Or apart,” Boulle added, gesturing toward the severed limb.

  Cousteau nodded. “A sort of . . . nerve net.”

  “Exactly,” Mac replied. “Something like this could be networked across the whole animal, almost as if collectively—”

  “—these nerve centers act like a single unified brain,” said Cousteau, finishing the thought.

  “You got it!” Mac exclaimed.

  “No, you’ve got it,” Cousteau said, before turning to Boulle. “This is amazing. And what could be more alien to the behavior of any animal we have yet seen?”

  Mac allowed himself a knowing grin. “So last night, when Yanni and I saw those flashes of light under the water, she was thinking there might have been some sort of pattern to it, kinda like Morse code.”

  “And now you tell us,” Cousteau said, sounding shocked. “Now you tell us that these lights were, what is the word . . . coherent? I’m sure you have all begun to appreciate the dangers raised by all of this.”

  “Hey, calm down,” Mac replied. “Remember last night we didn’t know shit. And now we do.”

  “I am sorry,” Cousteau said.

  MacCready held up a hand. “No, Jacques, I’m sorry.”

  His friend shot him a nod, so Mac continued. “So, we’re thinking this flash-signaling must have happened around the same time the Russian trawler was attacked.”

  “Excusez moi,” Boulle interjected. “If it should be that you are right about every part of this animal having its own little brain—”

  “—then all of the parts, connected, can be smart enough to take on a ship full of armed men,” added Cousteau. “And more.”