The Darwin Strain

by Bill Schutt

  “Just what we need,” said Boulle. “The Cthulhu awakes, and it thinks.”

  At last Yanni, who’d been silently keeping one ear on the conversation, put down her headphones. “Well, boys, there is more.”

  Everyone turned to her.

  “’Cause I found something really interesting on this tape—a conversation we missed earlier.”

  Mac shot her a skeptical look. “You fluent in Russian all of a sudden?”

  “It ain’t Russian,” she said. “Just listen.”

  Yanni turned back toward the machine, flipped a lever, and let the tape begin. “This is before all the commotion,” she said. “Just some poor slob dictating notes.”

  “Yeah, and?”

  “Listen to what’s going on in the background. It’s coming up.” A few seconds passed, then a few more. Finally Yanni raised a hand and gave them her best “This is it!” gesture.

  There was a repetitive series of scratches and clicks, barely audible, and a few ticks later this was joined by a second series at a slightly lower key. It was instantly recognizable to everyone in the room as the sounds made by the barbed suction disks of their specimen. On the tape, however, a more coordinated pattern was involved. Whoever was dictating into the recorder had heard it as well, and stopped talking.

  Yanni paused the tape and asked, “What’d the guy say there, Mac? Just then?”

  She hit the rewind lever for a second and ran the brief section again.

  This time Mac strained to hear above the suddenly intriguing auditory backdrop.

  “He’s pissed off,” Mac said. “I’m pretty sure he thinks somebody’s messing with him.”

  “Well, I think it’s the Kraken,” Yanni said. “Two of ’em.”

  “Agreed,” Mac added.

  Cousteau moved closer. “Yes, but doing what?”

  “Talking,” Yanni replied, quite matter-of-factly. “Maybe getting ready for what comes next?”

  She allowed the tape to play on for another minute. The strange background sounds had stopped now and the doomed Russian went back to work dictating.

  Yanni stopped the tape, just short of the part she knew marked the first scream. “Kraken,” she said again. “The ancient enemy.”

  5.33 Million b.c.

  The Lost World of Mediterranean Canyon

  The simians traveled by day, as fast as they could, snatching up plentiful fruits and small creatures along the river’s edge, seeking out mudflats and trying to avoid stands of tall trees that might have held the snake-limbed predators. They slept hardly at all, remembering monsters, and looking up into the night rains even when there was no dark canopy of leaves overhead.

  One morning, Proud One brought her clan to the edge of a marsh where the river met a great sea of brackish water. There was not the faintest scent or hint that the Stone-throwers had followed them, and fortunately, the monsters from the trees had not reappeared.

  “Home,” Proud One signed, and looked around. “New home.”

  The end of the river delta spread before them like a sea of reeds, and in every direction were more sources of grain, fruit, and meat than they could ever hope to eat.

  Hyperalert since the beginning of their ordeal, Seed was drawn easily to the slightest noise or movement, and began stalking a red-spotted snail, about twice the length of her hand. Tall and slender, it possessed one large and succulent foot, upon which it hopped—prodigiously. The snail no longer possessed the shell of its Mediterranean ancestors. Two miles below normal sea level, the air was so dense that harmful ultraviolet rays were prevented from reaching the ground. Because it was no longer possible for the sun to damage the snail’s flesh, the weighty shell had been lost—replaced, in the equivalent of a geologic instant, by adaptations for speed.

  Still, the child of Proud One possessed quicker reflexes, and was able to catch the meal despite its distracting, side-to-side hops. Immediately she shrieked with outrage, not fully believing that something like a tongue had whipped out of the snail and shot a long black thorn into her hand. Even after pulling out the barbed stinger with her teeth, the pain continued to grow in waves, worse than any bee sting. Instinctively, Seed ran down to the edge of the marsh and plunged her bleeding hand into the water.

  And in that moment, she realized that the water had eyes—large eyes. The child remained crouched, too paralyzed with astonishment to move.

  All she could do was look. And the water looked back.

  Chapter 7

  Lysenko

  Even as rockets begin to open a path to space, what competition will arise between the Soviets and the Americans will be focused more and more upon future military uses.

  —Earl Lane

  In Italy they had 500 years of bloodshed and they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace—and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.

  —Orson Welles

  War can sometimes be a stimulating thing. But you can overdo a stimulant.

  —H. G. Wells

  July 1, 1948

  The Village of Fira, Santorini

  The man outside the church wore a backpack but carried no other bags. He wore a Greek fisherman’s cap and the rest of his attire reflected a concerted effort to blend in with the locals. In the daylight, though, the loose-fitting clothes would only partially hide the fact that he possessed a muscular build—not a weight lifter’s or a fisherman’s body but instead one that had been shaped through the rigors of his profession and the hardship of his active participation in a long, brutal war.

  Hours earlier, Dmitri Chernov had boarded the grounded surveillance vessel, gathering as much information as he could before returning to the mini-sub. Nowhere near as difficult as the realization that all of the crew had been killed was his destruction of the ship. Keeping to the shadows of Aspronisi, and with the speed and dexterity of a spider, he had ascended a steep cleft onto the tabletop of the deserted islet. After that, it was a more or less simple matter to place a pair of little shaped charges in a rocky seam located some sixty yards above the crippled ship. There were many fissures for him to choose from, in a chalky rock matrix built mostly from pumice, packed barely stronger than deep snow. The island was a loosely held together collection of stony splinters, each so fragile that when the autumn squalls came, or the volcano trembled, slabs taller than the Kremlin domes routinely crashed down to the sea. The rubble and dust of fresh collapses could be seen in every direction. The locals were used to such avalanches, so it was easy for Dmitri to bury a secret and make it look like an act of nature.

  “Even the explosion sounded like an earthquake,” Alexi told him later.

  Dmitri said nothing, nor did he glance back at the enormous blocks of white ash that fell upon, squashed, and now hid the surveillance ship’s very existence.

  Just another earthquake, he had told himself with some small consolation, before he and his brother charted a course to the best Santorini drop-off point, a spot where it was possible to simply walk out of the sea unobserved.

  July 1, 1948

  The Kremlin

  Moscow, U.S.S.R.

  Trofim Lysenko looked across his desk and smiled indulgently. The sixty-year-old man sitting opposite had authored three textbooks and dozens of scientific papers, many of which Lysenko himself had read as a student at the Kiev Agricultural Institute. Lysenko neither sought nor possessed any formal degrees but this had not stopped him from publishing his own text five years earlier: Heredity and Its Variability. At sixty-five pages, he believed that it demonstrated how “our Soviet science now provides a clear understanding of the way in which the nature of organisms may be changed.” The geneticists who read the work could see immediately that it was complete nonsense.

  “They laughed at Galileo and they laughed at Tsiolkovsky and von Braun,” Lysenko had told a gathering of Russia’s most brilliant agricultural scientists.

  “They also laughed at The T
hree Stooges,” one of the older man’s coworkers had replied, quietly, though not quietly enough.

  The unfortunate jokester’s colleagues had known better than to laugh at all, for none possessed Lysenko’s political connections. And thus, in a world where politics held sway over science, Russia’s leading expert on the breeding of wheat was declared “an un-person,” not long before taking a permanent place among “the disappeared.” Lysenko, meanwhile, rose to the position of director of genetics for the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

  Now, with none of his fellow scientists willing to accompany him, the older man was feeling seriously uncomfortable. Why, he wondered—why is it that we humans so consistently find the most dangerously farcical among us and elevate them to positions of authority where they can inflict the most harm? He kept the thought to himself, of course, not solely because of an addiction to breathing, but because he still held on to a shred of hope that he could discuss real science and perhaps even talk some common sense into his new boss.

  “There are no genes, no chromosomes,” Lysenko said, maintaining his smile. “Isn’t that right, comrade?”

  “But Mendel—” The geneticist broke off into a nervous stutter and could not complete the sentence.

  “Mendel was a hack, a capitalist, a . . . mathematician.”

  “And—”

  “And mathematics has no place in biology!”

  The man was aware that Lysenko was watching his reaction, very carefully. Hesitantly, he raised a hand, feeling as if he were a schoolboy asking to be called on by a teacher. “May I speak fr-freely?” he asked, shakily.

  “Of course,” Lysenko replied, and with a gentle wave of his hand, he granted the older man’s request. He did so with what was already common knowledge that dissenters to the concept of acquired inheritance were becoming as common as Siberian mammoths.

  “Given the evidence, sir, you c-cannot believe t-that?” the scientist blurted, desperate to see or hear anything that could be interpreted as support.

  One of the scientist’s hands began to tremble, and he noticed that Lysenko appeared absolutely gleeful at the sight.

  “No, comrade,” said the director, “it is you who are wrong. As I’ll explain.”

  “But—”

  Lysenko held up a hand. “No need to worry about state secrets now, is there?”

  No need to worry about state secrets. And with those seven words, the geneticist knew that even before he had stepped into the room, he himself was “an un-person.”

  The director of genetics continued: “Of course you’ve read my landmark work on vernalization?”

  “I’m familiar with the key concepts,” the scientist said, “that outside influences in the environment, all by themselves and without any need for random variation, can change the heredity of organisms.”

  Lysenko smiled broadly. “How pleasing it is to see that such a great thinker as yourself has studied my work.”

  The geneticist shook his head slowly and resumed: “You never originated the idea. That mistake was Lamarck’s, made well over a hundred years ago. You simply . . . co-opted it.”

  “Lost your stutter, I see,” Lysenko responded, and for a moment, just for a moment, his smile disappeared. Just as quickly, he regained his composure—a talent he was known to have begun developing some twenty years earlier, honing it to a butcher knife’s edge during the seven years since Comrade Stalin had become premier of the Soviet Union.

  Exhibiting all the self-assurance of one who had long ago sided with the winning team, Lysenko addressed the scientist. “What if I were to tell you that we have discovered just such an ‘outside influence,’ as people like you call it. Something that can direct the heredity of a breed into new channels, and without waiting for nature’s accidents?”

  The old geneticist said nothing, so Lysenko continued. “What if I was also to tell you that our agents were, at this very moment, set to harvest this so-called outside influence, set to obtain it in such vast quantities that it will enable us to increase the quality and yield of all Soviet crops?”

  Now the man let out a mirthless laugh. “Even if that were true, who will you get to work the soil? The farmers you displaced by confiscating their land?”

  “Some of them,” Lysenko snapped. “The smart ones. And those comrades will form the basis for the new Soviet farmer.”

  “Your breeding stock.”

  “Tovarishch Stalin prefers the term ‘exceptional citizens,’” Lysenko countered.

  “Slaves,” the man said to himself, though loud enough that the director of genetics could hear it plainly.

  “Lost that shakiness in your hand too,” Lysenko observed. He picked up a phone and spoke into the receiver. “We are finished here,” he said, then hung up.

  Trofim Lysenko rose from his chair and turned toward the door. As was his habit, at such moments, he walked out without bothering to look back at his guest. “I have work to do, Nikola Velilkov,” he said, only now addressing the man by his full name, and secure in the knowledge that it would be the last time anyone uttered it.

  July 2, 1948, 6:00 a.m.

  Santorini

  Dmitri Chernov knew that even on a much larger island, foreigners were easy to find. One simply looked for the best bar in town. This too was easy to find, owing to a form of math-based behavior that was as predictable as it was peculiar. Whenever a ship arrived at a port city, most of its crew would immediately scatter to the various pubs. Then, from this seemingly random dispersal, a strange sort of nonrandom order invariably took over, as if the participants were practicing some unspoken international law of the sea. Inevitably, crewmen began looking for the next best bar, then the next, until eventually everyone ended up in the same place, “the best bar in town.”

  Just as inevitably, locals at this bar would know the comings and goings of every stranger in town, and often enough even their names, or at least their aliases.

  The Russian had already obtained a good lead, through the periscope, even before he approached the first bar. He was looking for two light-skinned men, either Western European or American, traveling with a dark-complected, Asian-appearing woman. By the time he left the best bar in town and scouted the perimeter of “the only hotel in town,” he knew much more.

  Shortly after daybreak, Dmitri entered the hotel lobby and approached a front desk that seemed to have been constructed from random pieces of furniture.

  He nodded at the clerk, who was busy eating breakfast, and spoke in perfect though accented Greek. “I am looking for friends who are staying here. Three foreigners: a Frenchman, an American, and his companion, a young woman with long black hair.”

  “Sir, you have come to the right place,” the clerk said through a mouthful of bread.

  Dmitri smiled and nodded, casually letting his right hand stray toward the Nagant 1895M revolver hidden in his belt. He had instantly sized the man up as precisely what he appeared to be, a genuinely harmless clerk. Still, he remained acutely alert for the slightest noise from the surrounding rooms, and from outside. Though the weapon was equipped with a sound suppressor, he had no desire to silence a witness or to draw the attention that blood and bodies in the wrong place and at the wrong time would inevitably bring. He was saving the bullets for the real enemy, should he need them, and at a time and place of his own choosing.

  “But I’m sorry to have to say, you have come too late,” the clerk continued. “They moved out last night. Packed a truck up with all their shit and they were gone.”

  “What sort of . . . shit did they have with them?”

  “Air tanks, heavy duffle bags, and a strange device that looked like a radio—but not really.”

  Dmitri’s eyes widened. “Please, can you draw this device?”

  “Certainly,” the clerk responded.

  While the man sketched, the Russian motioned toward the registry book. “Do you mind?”

  The hotel man waved him an affirmative, then finished his drawing.

  The R
ussian glanced down at the last two entries: “Maurice Chevalier” and “Dr. and Mrs. Bill Dickey.” He had learned enough at the bar to be reasonably certain that the former guests fit the descriptions of MacCready and his Brazilian partner in crime, along with a man who had once been an ally of Russia in the French Resistance—more popularly known as “that crazy old frog with the Aqua-Lung.”

  The clerk proudly showed off his artwork: a rectangular case with a wide disk at each upper corner.

  “I am also sorry to tell you,” said the clerk, “that Mr. Chevalier was involved in a terrible diving accident last week. A local man died, as well as two of Chevalier’s French friends.”

  “Oh?”

  “Shark attack. Quite horrible,” the clerk replied, glumly. “Would you like a deluxe room with a view of the garden?” he added quickly, holding out the pen to his presumed new guest.

  Dmitri waved it away. “Did they happen to give any indication where they were going?”

  The clerk shook his head, and the Russian could see the disappointment starting to set in: the realization that he had provided an awful lot of free information to someone who wasn’t even going to rent a room.

  The Russian smiled, withdrew his wallet, and placed a crisp new one-thousand-drachmae note on the table.

  The clerk snatched it. “Santorini is a small island, sir,” he said, pocketing the bill. “There was also a Japanese or a Chinese man with them. He may be the only one like that around here. You will certainly find them.”

  “That is a relief. And you have been most kind,” Dmitri said, with a slight bow. “If you do see them again please do not mention our little conversation. I’m looking to make a surprise appearance.”

  The clerk returned the conspiratorial smile. “I swear on it, sir,” he said.

  “One final request,” the Russian said. “Can I see the rooms where they stayed?”