As the group left to dress and gather equipment, Elizabeth asked Hubbard worriedly, “Do you really have to go down into the roaches, Peter? Wouldn’t pictures be enough?”
The man’s face went taut with his inner scholarly excitement and determination. “Liz, this is a fantastic opportunity to view a colony mutation at first hand. It’s something scientists everywhere need to know about! What I really regret is that the nest does have to be burned for the sake of the island. The least I can do is make the fullest examination and report possible.”
“What if the carbon dioxide doesn’t get all of them?” she persisted. “We know how powerful they are, whatever you’re wearing!”
“If there’s trouble, I’ll have a rope around me so the men can pull me right out.”
She tried again. “Why not use something like chloroform?”
Hubbard found it easy to be patient with Elizabeth, and answered her quietly. “Wanda and I had discussed it, and there are two negative reasons. Chloroform could possibly work on our protective clothing and, more important, it would kill the roaches before I had any chance to take any alive.”
“I wish you wouldn’t do it!” Liz’s eyes were moist. Bonnie had been in love with Craig only for hours; she had loved this man for years.
“You know that I must,” he said simply, and pressed her shoulders with a tender message they both understood.
SIX
“Operation Extermination,” as the Yarkie men quickly labeled the venture, went more easily than even Peter Hubbard had hoped. Only a few of the vicious roaches were visible when the group reached the cave. The huge insects were dispatched with the dry ice, but not before even the most skeptical of the firemen became frightened and shaken believers.
Proceeding by Hubbard’s scheme, a hole was quickly drilled in the ceiling of the nest, and the hoses from car exhausts were inserted simultaneously. The vapors penetrated and spread as Hubbard planned. Elizabeth and Bonnie, standing at a considerable distance away with the firemen holding gasoline tanks, watched tensely, exchanging anxious looks.
From the firemen on guard, there were puffs of the dry ice. Where tunnel exits did bring a few furtive roaches trying for the surface, they were readily managed.
Men trained in the use of salvage tools had no difficulty shearing away the ceiling of the roach cave. Watching them enlarge the opening with their poles and hooks, Hubbard felt as if he were in an operating room where surgeons were removing the top of a skull. His heart was palpitating with the expectation of the discovery he anticipated. If his hypothesis was correct, he was about to bear personal witness to the actual fusion of individual insects into a multi-individual organism analagous to a vertebrate brain!
It was time. A hush fell over all the people on the scene. There was little breeze and only a few bird calls in the burned, leafless trees. It was almost as if the massive dose of carbon dioxide put the whole world to sleep—as the roaches seemed to be motionlessly asleep, or dead, when Peter Hubbard looked down and signaled Amos Tarbell and Ben Dorset to lower him into the nest’s darkness without disturbing the great roach mound he saw in the center. It was “the brain,” he was certain.
Elizabeth bit her lip and held her breath as the man disappeared into the hole. Pirates, or someone, had indeed cut out a great hidden cave in the eastern ridge. It was some eight feet deep to the floor. Despite the clumsiness of his protective suit and the diving helmet he decided to wear, Hubbard was able to see all around the walls. His flashlight picked out storage chambers everywhere. As in the earlier, abandoned nest, the insect larder was grisly with gaping skulls of both animals and men, broken bones of young and old, and maggots anesthetized to motionlessness on lumps of flesh that could only be from the children off the Tub.
Shuddering with aversion, Peter Hubbard was glad his mask spared him the effluvium of the cavernous death surrounding him. The redolence would strike at a man like a dynamite explosion.
The scientist scanned the cave impatiently. Only a few of the roaches showed any movement, a wiggling antennae here and there, an isolated flurry of wire legs in an insect’s weak throes. Hubbard knelt in a splashing of roach bodies to examine the centric mass. With one gloved hand directing his flashlight, his fingers swept aside the confusion of gassed insects shielding the omphalos.
And there it was!
The “brain” existed precisely as Peter Hubbard had imagined it would be! Incredibly and fantastically, in its own way it was awesomely and wonderfully there before his eyes. The integument covering the mound protectively was partially transparent, so he could mark the gross anatomy of the structure before even making his planned incision.
The rise itself was three full feet at the center, and it was five or six feet in diameter. The covering was, Hubbard noted, morphologically like the dura mater between the human brain and the bone of the skull. Beneath the membrane lay the brain cells, and he saw at once that they were very different from the huge roaches with which they had been dealing outside. These were very small insects, smaller than the usual house roach, not more than a quarter of an inch long.
Not unexpected! The human brain has billions of cells. The roach’s brain cells could not be the size of the rest of the colony or there would be no room for anything, including itself. These thoughts flashed through Hubbard’s mind as he pierced the membrane to take a sample of the liquid within. Stoppering the test tube, he bet himself that the clear liquid would contain some form of acetylcholine—the chemical, localized in little sacs at the ends of neurons, that conducted impulses across the synaptic cleft in vertebrate systems.
Hubbard had trouble steadying his hands in his uncontainable excitement as he painstakingly cut away a full section of the dome roaches—the “roach cerebrum,” he thought elatedly. He could predict what his later dissection and analysis of the unprecedented body would show. He would find that these tiny roaches were actually adapted in two separate ways to receive and discharge nervous impulses. Some of the bodies, he was sure, would be acting as postsynaptic receptor cells, structured to receive chemical-electrical impulses across the synapse, while other of the roach bodies would be presynaptic—the transmitters. Microscopic examination would show these to have the spherical vessels that discharged the transmission chemical initiating action. The latest work in this field was being done in San Francisco, and he would rush some of his bizarre specimens there.
His improbable-sounding hypothesis was proving one hundred percent correct, incredible though it had seemed even to him at first. He regretted only that Wanda Lindstrom had not lived to share this transfixing discovery with him.
Keenly, Hubbard stripped away more of the cover. Some of the brain-cell roaches were still twitching, having been partially protected from the anesthetic vapors. But these little insects posed no physical danger. For one thing, they were not free. As he had suspected, the roach bodies were fastened together, antennae to antennae, like the wired component units of a computer. They had only tiny, seemingly vestigial mandibles. These bodies were clearly not designed for fighting or food gathering or reproduction or locomotion. Only for “thinking!”
The oozing liquid bathing the cells also contained their food supply, Hubbard reasoned. There were signs all around that nurse roaches, feeding off the larder brought in by the foragers, regurgitated their stomach contents into the dome’s fluid—an adaptation of trophallaxis done on a community rather than individual-to-individual basis. The brain would literally be bathed in food! Ingenious Nature again!
Unfortunately, there was no way this biological freak could be preserved in its entirety for the world to study. Hubbard signaled for his camera to be lowered, and began to take flash pictures. At least there would be this photo record of the incredible mutation on Yarkie Island. Science would ponder it for many a year.
His concentration was so tightly focused that Hubbard did not notice a weaving line of guard roaches coming toward him, emerging from one of the larders. They prowled like hu
nting animals stalking. They were dazed by the penetrating fumes in the nest, but unlike its soporific effect on most of the insects it was having a paradoxic reaction in these mutants. As happens with some humans, their nervous systems had been jolted into activity by the anesthesia.
Hubbard was finding the heavy diving gloves a nuisance as he clicked picture after picture. He managed to draw off the glove from his right hand, and returned with new satisfaction to his record-making.
He saw the blood on his hand before he felt the incisions that were already needling down to the bone. Huge mouths were gnawing at his fingertips before he realized what was happening. He could not loosen the great mandibles without dropping the camera, and that, to him, was unthinkable.
Looking up for help, he saw the top of the nest rimmed with horrified faces. He saw mouths working, but his helmet had cut off the sound of their warning cries.
With his gloved hand, Hubbard tried to defend against the roaches eating at his right-hand fingers. He could not manage. He flung his hands upward in a frantic gesture of despair, while gripping the camera fiercely. Another rope fell before him. He could use only his left hand, but his plight lent it power. His grip held his weight as the men above started to pull him slowly out of the pit.
Halfway out, Hubbard felt himself slipping. Involuntarily, he made a grab for the rope with his right hand. All it did was smear the strand with his blood, making it more slippery. He felt himself going down. His left hand was unable to clutch firmly. In a moment, he would be dropping back into the brain mass. He would be half-buried in it, helpless, and the attack roaches could gnaw his vulnerable wrist under his suit. One opening was all they needed. It was his turn to be annihilated by the brood he had been battling!
But strong hands were reaching down and grabbing Hubbard under the shoulders. He was yanked to the surface. Sprawled on the ground, he tried not to cry out with the agony of his lacerated hand. He dared not look at the damage to his fingers. The sheriff was pouring antiseptic directly on still-chewing roaches.
Firemen lifted Hubbard to the seat of the fire truck. Elizabeth helped them get his helmet off. She quickly opened a first aid kit to bandage his lacerated hand, and found with infinite relief that the injury was not as severe as it had seemed. The exhaust gas had evidently weakened the jaw muscles of even the monster insects. Otherwise, their bites would have been deeper and more massive.
Hubbard saw Elizabeth expertly tightening a tourniquet above his wrist. Through his pain, he noticed with new respect that the woman was dealing with his raw wounds without the slightest flinching, and her touch was soft and comforting.
Bonnie Taylor was nearby, watching the two in a terrible, suppressed anguish. The sight of Peter Hubbard’s blood smearing the ground brought back the butchery of Craig Soaras. In her mind’s eye, she again saw Craig fall amid the roaches, saw the killers tearing away at the lips she had wanted. Death had kissed them first, death out of this evil cavern where men, themselves looking like robot creatures in their masks and rubber suits, were now pouring gasoline down on the roach pile.
Bonnie’s hate burst in her breast. With a shriek of outrage, she grabbed a can of gasoline and dashed to the opened roach nest. For one moment she stared into the sullen shadow of the deep hole. There were the predators, her enemies, every stinking one! The murderers of Craig Soaras! Many, she could see, were now creeping about, coming alive, surviving yet to rampage and maim again. Bonnie terribly needed to be with the first to pour the fuel on those crawling beasts, the first to set the devilish hiding place afire, the first to see the insects consumed, burned, burned, burned, and hear their roach squeaks of agony, watch their dirty bodies singe and sizzle and turn to blobs.
The weighty container slipped from her slim, perspiring hands. In grabbing for it, the woman’s feet came out from under her on the loosened earth. Spikes of new terror ripped her insides as she slid down the yawning hole. She saw herself falling in, buried alive beneath the insect filth. She, too, would die in bloody pieces in the foul roach mouths! Bonnie Taylor fainted, and did not know she was being pulled to safety by the sheriff and his men.
When she was safe and recovered, Tarbell signaled firemen to come forward with more gasoline.
The cresting explosion sent flames geysering out of the nest, destroying everything within.
The Yarkie men pounded each other on their rubber-suited backs, jumping about and shouting jubilantly in the ultimate victory.
Bonnie watched the blaze with glaring eyes of malice and detestation. Lines from Shakespeare seethed through her mind: “. . . and entrails feed the sacrificing fire. Whose smoke, like incense, doth perfume the sky.” To the others, the incinerating fire might be the foulest stink in the world, but to her the smoke of the roach entrails was a perfume, an incense of revenge and vengeance sweet to her nostrils, though too late, too late, too late . . .
SEVEN
The column of smoke marked the immolation of the fearsome Yarkie misbegotten. It was the funeral pyre of demonic creatures, mutations that turned out evil dissonances in the hidden mysteries of evolution—“dissonances” at least to humans, Peter Hubbard thought.
On his feet, with his bandaged hand on Elizabeth Carr’s arm, the scientist watched with a swelling of regret as well as abhorrence as The Nest went up. The threat had to be demolished, as he had acknowledged. Yet, the natural power that had created this roach colony was an imperial force beyond Man’s right and wrong.
After all, as he taught his classes, there are a billion billion insects on earth, nearly a billion for each human. Mass extinctions occurred in Nature—like the close of the Cretaceous period, when death came to dinosaurs, plankton, ammonites, and other forms of life. Theories included disease, copper poisoning of oceans, climatic upheavals, even asteroid collisions with earth.
Maybe, a scientist had to consider—maybe Nature had created destructive creatures like these roaches precisely to start wiping out the world as it had come to be. Maybe Nature wanted a clean slate, to destroy what Man had become and done to the earth. Maybe the roach hunger which he, as a man, so readily deplored as “feral” was in more universal fact Nature’s yearning to start over.
There was a point of view from which he himself had undertaken a terrible responsibility in this destruction. To humans, this roach mutation was intolerable. But for a naturalist, it was superficial to view the creatures simply as vile. He himself had lectured the Yarkie people that the insects had acted out of their inner essence, not from “malice” or “enmity” or “malevolence.” So, a cancer on Yarkie, yes—from the human point of view; but from Nature’s view—who could know?
Hubbard wanted to share his thoughts with the woman standing beside him. He took in her grace and beauty with new gratitude for the warmth he felt from her and toward her. That was Nature, too. But he knew she would not want to hear his speculations, not yet. She did not have his training, his objectivity. She would not be wondering, as he was wondering, whether this mutation of cockroaches was a form of Nature’s own antennae stitching the air of infinite time in search of new organic forms, new expressions of the life force.
He could not still his mind and its agnosticism.
The purposes of life, their own and all the plants and animals on earth, were beyond a man’s understanding. Who should say how far Man’s dominion properly extended? It was an essential riddle of both biology and theology: In the contentions of the species, did Man have the unlimited, absolute right to assume he was the lord of the earth, that his well-being was paramount and unqualified?
In human laws, there was the canon stated by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Your right to swing your cane ends where my nose begins. Did mankind have a God-given right to swing its cane regardless of the noses of any other living beings? But then there was the vice versa of it and, inwardly, watching the cremation of the roaches, the scientist had to admit his own, primeval enjoyment of the sounds of the insect bodies sputtering in the flames to oblivion. W
hatever his rationalizations, people simply could not tolerate such a colony of butchers in their midst. Intent was irrelevant.
In a nutshell, Peter Hubbard concluded grimly, if Nature’s rule was indeed the survival of the fittest, men did have a natural right to impose their intelligence against these challengers.
And so the scientist joined with Elizabeth and Bonnie and the Yarkie men as they expressed their loathing of the intruders with unrestrained cheers, hoots, and cries of triumph.
It was too bad, Hubbard thought, that Reed Brockshaw and Craig Soaras especially could not be with their Yarkie fellows to witness the victory they had now finally achieved. The Task Force had won in the end. The price had been high, the way perilous and troubled. It was more than right for eyes to be shining with achievement through their fatigue and tension.
Hubbard saw that even Bonnie’s tears had ended. Her back was straight and her head was high as she watched the flames dying down. There was some consolation for her and for all the Yarkie victims in this fiery retaliation.
They could turn now to leave. The threat was past and gone, the suffering was over at last. Yarkie Island was finally free again.
VICTORY
ONE
Jubilance was tempered with sadness, sadness was brightened by hopefulness at the celebration that night in Elias Johnson’s house. The captain prepared his special drink, a “switchel,” to toast the Task Force that could now be disbanded. The generously filled mugs contained a mixture of rum, molasses and ginger-flavored water. It was a potion that sailors usually foreswore as being for landlubbers and sissies—but not when made with the extra dollops of rum Johnson poured in with a generous hand.
The captain toasted the group, ladies first: Elizabeth and Bonnie. Then Peter Hubbard and Amos Tarbell, Ben Dorset, Russell Homer, and Stephen Scott for supplying the special equipment they had needed. “Well, we got the scurvy lot!” were his words. “And the more credit to all of us for it!”
The Nest Page 25
