Insects 3: Specimen

by John Koloen

“You’re not an entomologist, I guess.”

  “Are you kidding? I think cockroaches are disgusting.”

  “These aren’t cockroaches.”

  “Whatever they are, they look disgusting, and dangerous. Why don’t we go back to the party or something.”

  As excited as he was by the newborns and having successfully separated them from their mother, his attention quickly returned to McKenzie. He’d taken a liking to her from the moment they’d met. He liked her voice. He liked her looks. He liked that she was his age and in good shape. He liked that she didn’t run screaming from the lab.

  “I really appreciate your help,” he said.

  “I didn’t do much.”

  “I couldn’t have done it without you,” he said as he led her to the lab’s lobby.

  “It was exciting,” she said as she watched him type into his phone.

  “I’m just sending a text to my boss. Let him know about the babies.”

  “OK,” she said. “How about then we go for a walk or something? Unless you want to go back to the party.”

  “No way. A walk sounds great to me. I’m all hopped up on adrenaline. It was a rush,” he said, slipping his phone into his pocket. “By the way, what do you do for Dr. Thomas?”

  “I do data.”

  28

  AS MUCH AS he wanted to see Maggie on Friday, that’s how much Duncan wanted to check his phone messages on Sunday afternoon. All he had wanted was to see if he had any messages. Normally, he wouldn’t have cared, but when she ordered him to set his phone on airplane mode and leave it in his suitcase he’d felt an urge to defy her. Realizing how childish that would be, he buried the thought and concentrated on their time together, which was everything he had hoped it would be. Friday night and most of Saturday he didn’t even think about the phone, much less miss it. But by Sunday morning, after breakfast, as they prepared to check out, it felt like the silenced phone was burning a hole in his pocket. At her insistence.

  “You can’t look at your phone until you drop me off at the airport,” she said. “Honestly, I thought you didn’t like cell phones.”

  “I don’t,” he admitted, “it’s just that…”

  “And if you check it right now, what then? In another hour you’ll be free of me and you can spend the rest of the day checking messages.”

  “It’s not like that. I don’t want to be free of you. I just want to see if everything’s OK at the lab.”

  “You and your precious lab and those disgusting bugs,” she teased.

  “They’re not disgusting,” he protested.

  “Don’t worry. You’ll be done with me in another hour.”

  “I don’t want to be done with you. It’s OK. I won’t give it another thought, until you’re on your way. I promise.”

  Laughing quietly, Duncan held the door open while she pulled her roll-on into the spacious, thickly carpeted hallway.

  “You owe me a visit now,” she said as they made their way to the elevators, kissing as they waited.

  29

  DUNCAN’S PHONE WAS set to accept messages only from entries in his contact list. As a result, he received few calls, since his contacts were almost entirely former colleagues or people at Biodynamism. He did this to protect himself from the media, which had hounded him following his first expedition in search of blaberus that led to several deaths through no fault of his own, or so he believed. A lawsuit was slowly winding its way through the judicial system, but the main target was the university that had employed him. The family of the student who had died was aiming at deeper pockets than a former professor of entomology. Of course, they sought to pillory Duncan, but bankrupting him would not create the type of legacy that the parents expected and hoped to create.

  Boyd had set up Duncan’s phone so that email from the press ended up in his spam folder, along with the other messages he didn’t want to read. On occasion, he would page through the spam folder as a form of perverse entertainment before deleting them. It was how he kept track of his newsworthiness, which, according to his most recent review, was virtually nil.

  He tried to look at his messages when he dropped off Cross but airport police ushered him along. Fumbling in his pocket for his phone while driving in an unfamiliar city and responding to directions from the GPS, he pulled into the parking lot of a motel, relishing the moment when he would finally view his messages. There were several, all from Boyd. One of the messages took his breath away: The babies have arrived.

  The message had arrived yesterday. He nearly dropped the phone after reading it. Fortunately, Boyd picked up on the third ring.

  “How are they? How many are there?” Duncan said excitedly, peppering his assistant with questions.

  “Slow down,” Boyd protested. “Didn’t you get my texts? I called once or twice and I know how you don’t like that.”

  Duncan apologized as Boyd reiterated what he’d already noted in his texts and calls.

  “I’ve been waiting for you to tell me what to do,” he said, his voice rising. “I don’t know how many there are.”

  “Does anybody else know?”

  “No, of course not. Why would I tell anybody? Malcolm and Jacob aren’t even here.”

  “Are you in the lab now?”

  “I’ve been watching them.”

  “Good. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

  Boyd stared at his phone momentarily, propped up on a pillow in his bed. Beside him, Carolyn McKenzie smiled provocatively.

  “That your boss?”

  “Yeah, he finally read my texts. God, I hate lying to him like that.”

  Reaching out, she snatched his phone and set it on the nightstand on her side of the bed.

  “We’re not finished here.”

  30

  DUNCAN REMEMBERED LITTLE about the drive as he was focused on his project. Finally, the female had done her job and he’d demonstrated that blaberus would reproduce in captivity. He had achieved a milestone, and now he had a cohort who would produce answers to all the questions he had about the ferocious insect.

  Instead of paying attention to the road, he wondered about their sex ratio. Now he would have enough specimens to learn about their behavior, how they differentiated tasks, how they were organized. First thing would be to assure the newborns’ survival. Breeding was one thing, helping them grow to adulthood was another. He wished Boyd was sitting in the passenger seat so he could bounce questions off him. Boyd had done the proper thing in separating the mother from her offspring. Duncan had worried about cannibalization, though he had no reason to do so. Now he could breathe easier. Surely, even if there was a high mortality rate among the juveniles, there would be enough to continue the breeding program. First, though, he’d have to sex them. Could he do it now, even though they were no larger than a grain of rice? How long would it take before they were old enough to reproduce? How would the females be fertilized?

  For the first time he felt that all that he’d been through had been worth it, except for the loss of life. He was not so obsessed by blaberus that he could justify the deaths of the people who had died on the two expeditions. But at least now, the deaths would not have been in vain.

  “No,” he said aloud, while speeding toward the campus. “That’s not right.”

  31

  HOWARD DUNCAN PRACTICALLY burst into his lab after returning from San Antonio. Cody Boyd was waiting for him, perched on a lab stool in front of the habitat containing the new cohort of Reptilus blaberus. Peering into the aquarium, Duncan tried to count the tiny bugs as they scurried on the glass bottom.

  “I tried to count ’em, too,” Boyd said. “Couldn’t do it.”

  “There’s a lot of them. I see you put some bits of meat out for them.”

  “Yeah, and some puddles of water. They look the same as yesterday.”

  “How’s the female doing?”

  “I put her in that tank. She comes out every once in a while and presses against the glass, like she’s looking at her babi
es. And then she hides again.”

  “Hmm. How about the males?”

  “Well, the two healthy ones ate the third one.”

  “Really? So they’re cannibals too, huh? Did you feed them?”

  “I did everything as usual. They seemed to prefer the wounded bug to the dead meat.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “I put it in the log.”

  “Anyone else know about this?”

  “Just me,” Boyd said, then looking at the camera positioned over the habitat he added, “and there was a girl I met who was with me.”

  “What?”

  “I met a girl at a party Saturday and we came down here to check on the specimens and that’s when I saw that—”

  “You brought someone from outside into the lab,” Duncan said sternly, facing Boyd.

  “Yeah, I did. But, boss, I was just gonna check up on ’em. I didn’t think there would be a problem.”

  Duncan gave Boyd a disappointed look.

  “I couldn’t have gotten the female out of the tank without her help,” Boyd said defensively.

  “What about Malcolm and Winston?”

  “You gave them the weekend off, remember, because you didn’t want them to find out about the injured bug. Remember? It was just me here. For all we know, if we didn’t come down here when we did the female would have eaten all of the young.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Neither do you. C’mon. What if I didn’t come down when I did? What then?”

  Duncan sighed heavily. For a moment he regretted spending the weekend with Maggie. But the surviving males and the female seemed to be doing well and the tiny newborns were as active as ants. The female hadn’t shown any outward signs that she was about to give birth. She hadn’t grown in captivity and had been separated from the males from day one. Did that mean that it took at least two months for the newborns to emerge? Had she been fertile, with eggs developing inside her, at the time of capture? Or did this happen when she and the males were together in a glass jar in Brazil prior to being separated? The manner of birth seemed to support the contention that blaberus was indeed ovoviviparous, in which the eggs develop inside the female, with the yolk providing all the nourishment the insects would get. Essentially, the female was an incubator. When the eggs hatched, the newborns emerged live.

  Duncan and Boyd watched the video that captured the newborns appearing from under a pile of leaves. The female was under the leaves and could not be seen. The birthing process took only several minutes.

  “Well, that doesn’t answer many questions,” Duncan said.

  “At least now, when these guys become adults, we’ll be able to do some dissections and really find out what’s going on,” Boyd said encouragingly.

  “Oh, yeah,” Duncan said. “We’re gonna learn a lot in the next month or two. You know, Cody, I’m sorry if I sounded harsh about you bringing a girl into the lab.”

  “That’s OK, boss.”

  “I understand how it is. You meet a girl. It’s a weekend. Things happen. You’re right. We don’t know enough about blaberus to make assumptions. Just looking at the way they came out, it looked like they were scattering all over the place. Maybe in the wild they do that to get away from the adults and in an aquarium there’s only so far they can go.”

  Boyd nodded.

  “So, this girl, does she work here?”

  “Yeah, she works for Dr. Thomas.”

  “What?”

  “She does data. Is something wrong?”

  “Can you trust her?”

  Boyd felt irritated by the question.

  “Well, I guess. I mean, why not?”

  “You don’t, you know, think she’s a spy?”

  “What? Just because Thomas disses you, you think… I had to talk her into helping me. She thinks the bugs are disgusting.”

  “Forget I said it,” Duncan said. “I’m probably overreacting.”

  Damn right, Boyd thought. Damn right.

  32

  DUNCAN THOUGHT HE was doing the right thing when, the day after returning from San Antonio, he asked to meet with division administrator Gabriel Cox. Duncan was in a cheerful mood now that the female had given birth. This is what he’d been working toward since coming to Biodynamism. Finally, he had something to work with. He could now turn his attention to learning about the insects’ reproductive cycle and colony behavior. There had been plenty reason to be skeptical about his project and whether he would succeed. Nolan Thomas believed it was the reason he was charged with cloning the bugs, in case Duncan failed.

  Cox patiently waited for Duncan to finish talking, smiling weakly.

  “I already know all about this,” Cox said. “Mazur told me. Actually, he didn’t tell me. He sent me an email asking if I knew about this. Of course, I didn’t.”

  “What! How could that be? It happened over the weekend.”

  “I don’t know. Mazur doesn’t confide in me. Of course, I told him I knew, that you’d told me like you’re supposed to.”

  “I didn’t tell anybody,” Duncan protested.

  “Well, somebody did. Who else would know? Not to mention you were out of town all weekend.”

  “I was back yesterday afternoon.”

  “My understanding is that it happened Saturday. Can you confirm this?”

  Sitting in a chair facing Cox, who was at his desk, Duncan looked toward the ceiling and exhaled heavily.

  “Yes, yes, I can confirm it. It happened Saturday. While I was in San Antonio. That’s why I have assistants. My senior assistant was in charge. He told me about it.”

  “You think he told Mazur?”

  “No way,” Duncan said emphatically. “He hasn’t even met him.”

  “Well, somebody did. Why don’t you ask him?”

  33

  DEFLATED AND UPSET that what should have been a triumphal moment had been turned into an afterthought, Duncan returned to his lab with the mentality of an interrogator. Two of his assistants were observing the newborns.

  “Where’s Cody?” Duncan demanded gruffly as he burst into the lab.

  “I don’t know,” Malcolm Chang said nervously.

  “Haven’t seen him,” Jacob Winston agreed.

  Duncan scanned the lab as if Boyd was hiding and then retreated to his office, slamming the door behind him. After checking his email and messages, which included a congratulatory text from Mazur sent Sunday night but not received until his meeting with Cox, he phoned Boyd. His assistant was slow in picking up.

  “Yeah, boss,” Boyd said.

  “Where are you?”

  “In my apartment.”

  “Are you taking the day off?”

  “Well, I did work over the weekend. I was planning on coming in this afternoon.”

  “I want to see you now,” Duncan demanded. “That girlfriend of yours…did you tell anyone else about the newborns, Gruber perhaps?”

  “No, I haven’t seen him since Saturday morning. Girlfriend? You mean Carolyn?”

  “I don’t know her name. But she knew, right?”

  “Well, yeah. Why?”

  “She told somebody.”

  “Was it a secret? I mean, everybody knows what we’re working on.”

  “That’s not the point. Cox just reamed me because he found out about it from Mazur, for chrissake. I told you how pissed off Gabe was when he found out I’d met with Mazur. This is worse.”

  Boyd sighed. He didn’t understand the Biodynamism pecking order nor why anyone would be jealous about not being the first to know about the newborns. It seemed to him to be good news no matter how word got out. Thinking about it made him angry.

  “This isn’t my fault. I just did my fucking job. Anyway, what does this have to do with anything? I thought you don’t even like Cox.”

  “I don’t, but I’m trying to get him to speed up delivery of the habitat we’ve been waiting for.”

  “So, something like this is gonna stop that?”

&n
bsp; “You’ll find out when you get your own lab that there are people in positions above or even below you that if you piss them off they can decide to not do or do something that makes your life miserable. Cox strikes me as a thin-skinned guy who holds grudges.”

  “So you think he’s the reason we’re using fish tanks instead of the habitats you ordered?”

  “I got no proof but I wouldn’t put it past him. Anyway, if we don’t get the habitat in the next three or four weeks, it’ll be too late.”

  Duncan had talked himself out of his anger at Boyd, realizing that how word of the newborns got out was immaterial to his project. After ending the call, he wondered whether he was to blame for not at least texting Cox after he’d seen the newborns. Keeping administrators informed of his work had never been a strong suit. And he hadn’t delegated it to anyone else, so how could he blame Boyd for not doing it? He could just as well blame Maggie for not letting him check his messages. And he wasn’t about to do that.

  34

  CODY BOYD WAS afraid that he would sound confrontational if he brought the subject up while he and Carolyn McKenzie were having lunch in the company’s main cafeteria. They’d spent much of the weekend together but hadn’t seen each other for several days. He remained conflicted over his dispute with Duncan. It was unavoidable that Carolyn would know that the female blaberus had given birth, but why did she have to blab about it?

  “Is something bothering you?” she asked.

  “No, why, do I look bothered?”

  “You’re not talking,” she said, setting her sandwich on her paper plate. “Does it have something to do with me?”

  “Ahh, it’s just that my boss got reamed by the division administrator.”

  “Why?”

  “Because someone told the big boss about what happened Saturday, and that pissed off my boss and Cox. They had an argument and Duncan blamed it on me. But I didn’t tell anybody, and you’re the only other one who knew.”