Insects 3: Specimen

by John Koloen

  Cox’s office was small, windowless, and stocked with medium-grade institutional furnishings. His desktop was neat, with an in-out basket on one corner, a large desk pad calendar covered with scribbles, and several short stacks of folders.

  “I must say that I’m impressed,” Cox said after exchanging greetings and directing Duncan to sit.

  “Pardon me?”

  “You’ve been here two weeks and already you’ve had a private meeting with the big boss.”

  Duncan smiled and shrugged while Cox fidgeted with the folders. In his forties, with neatly trimmed hair turning gray on the sides, open face and high-cheek bones, he looked like a TV newscaster, Duncan thought.

  “He called me and I came running.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Did I do something wrong?”

  “No, not really. It’s just that as your divisional administrator, you should have told me.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know that.”

  “Yeah, it’s just one of the many things they don’t tell you about in orientation. I know you’re new here and, really, you’re quite the star or Mr. Mazur wouldn’t have called you to his office. That’s really quite an honor, you know. I’ve been here nearly five years and I was invited to his office only twice, and even then it was with several others. Of course, I’ve had other contacts with him, just not in his office.”

  Duncan looked puzzled.

  “So, is that why you called me into your office?”

  “Not entirely. I’d like to explain a few things to you about how this place works.”

  The purpose of the meeting became clear to Duncan. He had thought that working at a corporation would be different than working at a university. Apparently, micromanagement could not be evaded. Not good at disguising his feelings, his expression hardened, which Cox noticed immediately. He was well aware of the adversarial relationship that often developed between employees and management and was schooled in how to deal with it. Because of Duncan’s status as a scientist and, more importantly, his precious blaberus specimens, he needed to keep Duncan happy, but at the same time he didn’t want him to ignore the chain of command.

  Responding to Cox, Duncan told him that he had gotten a call from the CEO’s secretary and that he wanted to meet immediately.

  “You see, even if I knew that I’m supposed to tell you about my meetings—”

  “Not all of them, just the ones involving people higher than me, especially the big guy. You can appreciate that, right? You would expect the same thing were you in my place. Right?”

  “I understand where you’re coming from,” Duncan said. “I’ll definitely keep that in mind. My only interest really is my research.”

  “Excellent, now tell me what he said.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Your meeting with Mazur. What did he say, exactly?”

  5

  DUNCAN WAS PUZZLED and annoyed as he returned to his office from his meeting with Cox. Boyd was sitting in front of Duncan’s desk playing Hearts on his phone.

  “What’s up? How’d your meeting go?” the young assistant asked, swiveling his chair to face his boss.

  Pouring himself a cup of decaf from the office coffee maker, Duncan plopped into his Aeron and sighed.

  “The meeting was kinda strange.”

  “How so?”

  “Oh, he talked about the chain of command—apparently it’s a violation for me to talk to the CEO without telling him about it—but then he got into this spiel about how because everything is so compartmentalized here you have to create your own networks of people to know what’s really going on.”

  “Sort of like at the university?”

  “Yeah, but more so. I got the impression he’s deathly afraid of being out of the loop.”

  Boyd nodded knowingly.

  “That’s what Jason told me. He said it helps to make friends with a lot of people. He said most managers are paranoid that their bosses will ask them something and they won’t have an answer. Kinda weird, isn’t it?”

  “I take it you’re building a network,” Duncan said.

  “Definitely.”

  “Good, then I don’t have to.”

  6

  BECAUSE REPTILUS BLABERUS was more than an insect, incorporating traits that normally occur in mammals and reptiles, there were no off-the-shelf breeding kits they could purchase. Duncan’s lab had to develop its own approach while at the same time keeping the specimens alive. At first, the scientist worried about the males fighting each other over the female, so she was isolated from them in a separate aquarium. So little was known about the carnivores’ behavior that Duncan feared everything. He feared the female might eat its young. He feared parasites might infect the specimens. Above all, Duncan feared the return of the fungus that had killed most of the juveniles in the wild. He worried that it lay dormant inside the female, ready to decimate its offspring.

  Throughout the ordeals in Brazil, Duncan felt he knew little about blaberus, though in retrospect he could write page after page describing what he had learned about them, some of which he obtained from the research of Professor Fernando Azevedo, whose crowning achievement was identifying the mechanism by which the insects were transformed from tiny, fragile swarms into huge colonies of organized and savage butchers. Azevedo’s key finding pointed to the Tabebuia avellanedae, a tree also known as Pau D’Arco, as the source of a crystal that proved fatal to the fungus. With astonishing speed, the tiny groupings of blaberus expanded into huge colonies that could strip a human to the bone in a matter of hours.

  Reproduction was just the starting point for Duncan’s lab. He knew the creatures were prolific breeders in the wild. More important to him was to learn how the invertebrates organized themselves and how they communicated, especially how they foraged for food. In the lab they showed no aversion to consuming bits of irradiated meat that constituted their diet in captivity. In the wild, they hunted, but they did it in groups. He wondered if there was a population threshold beyond which they would engage in foraging. And how was it that thousands of little carnivores, working in groups of several hundred, could scour the rainforest floor for food with all of them converging when a food source was found and somehow reporting to the main colony the location of its next meal? How do they do that? he wondered. How did they do that in such a way that a living victim would be incapacitated until the arrival of the main colony, which would reduce it to a skeleton? And how did they develop the tactic of immediately attacking the soft parts of a victim, particularly the eyes and mouth?

  “If only we can get our female to reproduce,” he’d told Boyd. “Before she dies of old age.”

  7

  PRIOR TO HIS disfigurement and escape from certain death, Dr. Nolan Thomas had never been self-conscious. Though he was not socially adept, self-doubt had never been his problem. Even as a teenager, he was so involved in his studies and hobbies that it never occurred to him that he was missing out on important rites of passage, such as teenage angst and fear of doing poorly on his SATs. His milieu involved science fairs, first chair violin in the school orchestra, and advanced placement classes. While he was aware of the teen culture that surrounded him, he paid it little mind, sometimes ridiculing it with his like-minded, small circle of friends.

  And then, after one terrible night in the dark rainforest, everything changed. He had not been prepared for the pain and the fear that he’d experienced, huddled in a shipping crate, doing everything he could to protect himself against the relentless assault of flesh-consuming Reptilus blaberus. Even though he had suffered ghastly wounds, he was fortunate that he wasn’t killed. What saved him was the grim determination he’d mustered to protect himself. Even so, they’d eviscerated his left eye, chopping through it as if it were a raw egg. They’d slashed away much of his lips, exposing his teeth like some macabre Halloween mask. They’d chopped at his flesh, leaving divots on his arms, back and legs. Through force of will he’d swallowed his pain, knowing that opening his
mouth would have invited the murderous creatures to scuttle into his esophagus. When his colleagues found him the next morning, he was unable to unclench his jaws, which had been locked for hours against the invaders.

  Unable to work miracles, his team of surgeons had done their best to restore his face but he thought the result so far to be little more than a mockery of his former self. Nothing could hide the poorly matched grafts, the scars, the drooping lower lip. Nothing could be done to repair the damage inflicted on facial nerves. The eye socket, filled with a prosthesis, was so grotesque that he covered it with a patch. It didn’t help that he resisted his therapists, especially his psychiatrist.

  “You have to get past your anger and fear,” the psychiatrist warned.

  “I face my anger every day when I brush my teeth,” Thomas replied bitterly, with a pronounced lisp, the result of his injuries, though he believed that the speech impediment was the consequence of surgical error.

  Like many experts, he acted as if his expertise extended into other fields and frequently disagreed with those whose job it was to help him recover. He didn’t like taking orders, and once it became apparent that the one thing he wanted more than any other, the restoration of his face, would never be attained, he ignored them and refocused his energies on returning to his lab to exploit the creature that, in the course of trying to kill him, had changed his life.

  8

  KNOWING AS LITTLE about blaberus as he did, Duncan, the world’s leading expert on the creature, knew that he had to produce results. He made it clear to his assistants that they were to closely monitor the specimens and compile notes about their behavior. The more detailed the notes, the better.

  “I don’t want summaries,” Duncan stressed during his first staff meeting. “I want detailed observations.”

  “What about the cameras?” Malcolm Chang asked. “Aren’t they recording everything?”

  “Not all the time. Your notes are more important. Really, I’m depending on your powers of observation. The cameras can’t tell us when something interesting is happening. Only you can, all of you.”

  “Good pep talk, boss,” Boyd told him later.

  Duncan’s assistants watched the bugs in shifts. Boyd compiled daily reports based on their observations. Meanwhile, the entomologist debated whether to wait for the female to reproduce naturally, not knowing whether she would. Blaberus had never been successfully studied in captivity, and he worried that the specimens would die before the female reproduced. The bugs in the wild were extremely robust, but he feared that without their colony to support them they would wither in the lab. So far, he’d seen no sign of deterioration. The males were sometimes belligerent toward each other, but they didn’t harm each other the way they harmed victims in the rainforest.

  For the most part, the insects were orderly in behavior. They covered every corner in their habitat, searching for a way out, over and over patrolling their environment as if expecting an opening to eventually appear. While Duncan waited for delivery of a custom-designed habitat, he and Boyd used off-the-shelf glass twenty-nine gallon aquaria. The hope was that the female’s eggs were fertile and that it was only a matter of time before she reproduced. The one thing Duncan thought he knew for certain about their reproductive system was that she was ovoviviparous, a trait identified by Professor Azevedo, though it had not been verified by others.

  “How long are we going to wait before you try to mate them?” Boyd asked.

  “You know, I’ve been thinking about that. She’s been in there going on three weeks, right?”

  “Twenty-four days to be exact, three days before we got here.”

  “I wish there was a way to tell if she’s ready,” Duncan said. “Since she’s the only female we have, we can’t afford to do anything that might cause injury.”

  “You’re sure that she’s female?”

  “That’s what I have to think,” Duncan said.

  “What if it’s the other way around? What if the three males are really females?”

  “Let’s just say it’s my hypothesis.”

  “So, after three weeks, we’re still in the dark, aren’t we?” Boyd said.

  “Yeah, that’s about it. I’m getting to the point where we should just assume she’s not fertile and introduce her to one of the males and hope they don’t kill each other. They wouldn’t do that in the wild, otherwise why would there be so many of them?”

  “You know, it just serves to reason that the females reproduce, you know, frequently, or else they’d have to reproduce in huge numbers. I can’t imagine that little thing emitting hundreds of critters at a time. Imagine how small they’d have to be.”

  “That’s one of the many things we’ll find out, soon, I hope,” Duncan said.

  “How long does it take them to grow into adults? Like overnight? I mean, in the jungle there was no limit to them.”

  “It’s all speculation at this point,” Duncan said. “We just have to watch and wait. We’ll give it another week and then take the next step. I’m sure Gabriel thinks we’re doing nothing.”

  “Yeah, but you can’t count the first week. We didn’t even have email set up,” Boyd said.

  “That was then. They’re getting impatient upstairs.”

  9

  ONE THING THAT Duncan appreciated about the campus, beyond the close proximity to his lab, was how safe he felt from the media, which had dogged him for months since the death of one of his students in the Brazilian rainforest. The university where he taught had done little to defend him against the outcry from the young man’s distraught family and instead distanced itself, forcing him to take a sabbatical that had turned into a dismissal. Afraid of the intense publicity, his major funder had withdrawn its support just before the university had closed down his lab.

  Ever since Biodynamism’s security chief, James Haverty, had arranged to have Duncan, Boyd and the specimens evacuated out of Brazil and into Texas, the scientist felt that the company had his back. He liked the imposing perimeter fence, the long, tree-lined gravel drive that led from the road to the single entry point with its intimidating guard house, and, most of all, he liked the fact that nobody knew where he was. The company replaced his phone and other electronics so that only his few trusted friends could reach him, much less the intrusive press. He knew his newfound anonymity wouldn’t last forever, but he was determined to enjoy it for as long as he could.

  Without Haverty’s subterfuges, the living insects would never have been allowed to leave Brazil, much less enter the United States. Authorities in both countries would have branded the insects dangerous and invasive. Had Duncan not been involved, he would have agreed with them. But he was involved. He was an entomologist whose life’s work had narrowed to the study of a single species of insect and to lose the opportunity based on legal argument rather than science would have been a travesty. In his mind, illegally smuggling his specimens into the country was not only justified but mandatory. It was the only way he could study them, learn from them, and perhaps, eventually, regain the stature he’d lost because of them.

  Haverty, a former Special Forces officer, was a trusted confidante of CEO Galen Mazur. The two were on the same page about almost everything. Both were supremely confident and, with the exception of periodic poker games, seldom left anything to chance. Both were adept at planning and improvisation and knew how to cover their tracks when required.

  Not only had Haverty spirited the dangerous bugs into the country but he had managed to have Duncan’s and Boyd’s passports stamped as if they had actually gone through customs when they entered the country. No detail was too small for Haverty, whose favorite clothing was khaki and camo. Meeting with Mazur shortly after delivering Duncan and his assistant, Haverty summarized his trip to Brazil while they toasted themselves with Forty Creek Canadian Whisky.

  “The hardest part wasn’t getting them out of the country with their bugs, it was getting into the State Department’s database. Our hacker’s got some balls to
change the passport records like that.”

  Mazur smiled and nodded.

  “The hacker’s got balls? You got balls. You did a great job once again. And now that we’ve got what we wanted, it’s on to the next step.”

  “You think they’ll breed?”

  “They’d better, or we wasted a lot of money and took a lot of risks.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m just amazed that we pulled it off, even getting the plane back home without some agency or another spotting us.”

  “Goes to show the advantages of low altitude flying at night.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Haverty grinned.

  “You know, we really don’t need Dr. Duncan.”

  “I figured.”

  “Sure, they’re his bugs, but I’m most interested in Thomas’s research.”

  “This is good stuff,” Haverty said, holding his glass up to the light.

  “It oughta be. It was voted the best whiskey in the world.”

  “Nothing but the best, right, boss?”

  10

  DUNCAN HAD HOPED to meet with Nolan Thomas soon after his return to the campus but the feeling wasn’t mutual. Even after Cody Boyd relayed his conversations with Thomas’s senior assistant, Jason Gruber, who described a man who avoided personal contact, Duncan persisted in his belief they had developed a special relationship in the rainforest that transcended Thomas’s newfound reclusiveness.

  “I call him and he doesn’t answer,” Duncan lamented to Boyd.

  “He’s screening his calls.”

  “But he doesn’t call back.”

  “Have you tried text messages or email?”