by John Koloen
“I don’t know. You told someone, right?”
Her expression hardened, as if realizing Boyd had inexplicably violated her trust.
“And your point is? It wasn’t a secret, was it? If it was, you should have told me. Honestly, Cody, what is this about?”
Boyd’s mind did battle with itself. On the one hand, he wanted to get things into the open, on the other he didn’t want to imperil their relationship. A voice in the back of his mind told him to drop it. Let sleeping dogs lie. But now McKenzie wouldn’t let him.
“I don’t know,” Boyd said. “Let’s just forget it.”
“You can’t drop it like that,” she argued.
“I don’t even know why I brought it up.”
“Because it’s bothering you and you’re the type of person who has a hard time with that. And that’s one of the things I like about you. I like you. I really had a good time with you, the best since I came here. I think you’re an honest and truthful person and, really, you have to be honest now. You owe me an explanation, if you care about me.”
Boyd knew he was over his head. His instinct told him to apologize but his brain told him an apology wouldn’t be enough. She had radar that could penetrate his defenses.
“OK, I’ll tell you everything, but don’t get mad at me. This is coming from my boss.”
“Spit it out,” she said, encouragingly, putting her hand on his.
Boyd breathed deeply, exhaled and avoided eye contact.
“My boss thinks you’re a spy,” he said quickly, almost inaudibly.
“What!” she said, loud enough for others nearby to take notice.
“I’m not saying it, he’s saying it,” Boyd said nervously.
“And you believe it?”
“No, absolutely not. He’s paranoid. And he was pissed at Dr. Thomas and the big boss.”
“What’d they do?”
“You know, this is stupid. They pissed him off.”
“And you got pissed off at me because of your boss?”
“No, no, no, no, no. I wish I hadn’t brought it up. It’s stupid. My boss is stupid, he just, well, I don’t know. I don’t even want to talk about it. I shouldn’t have brought it up. You’re more important to me than my boss. I wish we’d never gone into the lab.”
McKenzie’s expression softened. She could see Boyd’s struggle clearly on his face. The grimaces. The sighs. The confusion.
“So, just for the record, you don’t think I’m a spy.”
“Nope, no way. Now, can we forget about this stuff and never bring it up again?”
“Fine with me.”
For a moment they held hands across the table.
“Poor baby,” she said softly. “I have an idea. Why don’t we go to my place tonight?”
“What’s wrong with my place?”
“Oh, I didn’t tell you. I live off campus, on a ranch.”
“Really! That’s cool. So you drive in every day?”
“Yep.”
“Hey, is that why you stayed with me, so you didn’t have to make that long drive?”
“Yeah, the whole ten minute drive. Yeah, that’s why I did it. Yeah, that’s me.”
Boyd frowned, fearful that he’d stepped into it again.
“I’m kidding. Golly, you need to lighten up.”
Boyd smiled.
“You don’t have to stay. I can drive you back.”
“Oh, no, I wanna see your place.”
“OK, after work then. I’ll meet you in parking lot B.”
“Which one is that?”
“Behind the family residence hall. It’s a whole different world where I live. You’ll like it.”
35
IT WAS LATE afternoon when Boyd and Jason Gruber met to compare notes. If anyone in the labs was a spy, it was Boyd, who reported everything Gruber said to Duncan. Because of their shared experiences in the Brazilian rainforest, Boyd and Gruber had a special relationship that can be formed only in the crucible of shared hardship and terror. Both had proved themselves as steadfast in the face of death. Of the two, Gruber had endured the most, the memory of which haunted him. A colleague had died as a result of his actions and it weighed on him to an extent that was chipping away at his ambition to pursue a career in science. If only there was something he could do to atone for this darkest moment of his life. He couldn’t erase it from his mind, though he tried. But the harder he tried, the stronger the memory became, until it threatened to obscure everything else in his life.
He never missed a counseling session and had a prescription for Prozac. Diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder helped insofar as it put a label on his condition, but despite his best efforts it had gotten to a point where he could not distinguish it from depression. Not that it mattered, as he felt if the PTSD didn’t get him, the depression would. Where Gruber worked, only Dr. Thomas had shared the Brazilian experience and he refused to discuss it, preferring to bury himself in his work. Gruber couldn’t do that. It wasn’t his lab and, as Thomas’s chief assistant, he was subject to all manner of distractions. But he looked forward to talking with Boyd. They had a bond.
“You ever read about the symptoms of PTSD and depression?” he asked Boyd as they sipped wine at a cafe table in a small courtyard behind their lab building. It was late afternoon of an uneventful day.
“Can’t say that I have.”
“It’s like, what isn’t a symptom? The same with side effects from Prozac.”
“What’s the point of taking it?”
“When it’s working, I don’t feel as anxious, I’m not so sad. But I want to be the person I was, and that ain’t happening. At least far as I can tell, and, to tell the truth, sometimes I can’t tell. It’s like my former self is on the other side of a river and I can’t get back to it. I’ve actually had dreams like that.”
Boyd had no insight into Gruber’s situation except from what Gruber told him. He’d read about PTSD and depression but couldn’t relate to it. All he could do was offer a sympathetic ear and eventually work the conversation into something more relevant, which almost always was about their jobs.
“We’re still waiting for the habitat we ordered like two months ago,” Boyd complained. “The fish tanks are just not working. It was easy to separate the one female from her babies, and during the first week after they were born we were able to scatter them into different tanks. But we couldn’t sex them and now, after two weeks, they’re already half-grown adults and it’s impossible to get them out of their tank without some of them escaping. We’ve been lucky so far. We managed to kill the ones that tried to get away. But we won’t try that again.”
“Some of them escaped?”
“Yeah, three or four. We killed them.”
“You’re sure you got all of them?”
“I’m pretty sure we got all of them. There were only like three that got out and—”
“Remind me not to visit your lab.”
“You know, we’d know if any of them escaped.”
“How?”
“Right now, we’ve got bugs in a dozen tanks, one with two male adults, one with the female and others with the juveniles. We’ve done some experiments and we’ve found that they are constantly looking at each other. When we cover the tanks so they can’t see the others, they’ll sit there waiting for a while and then go about their business. Then, when we remove the covers, they immediately start watching the other tanks again. Duncan thinks they’re communicating somehow.”
“They got ESP?”
“I don’t know. He thinks maybe pheromones. One weird thing though is how they’re looking for a way out of the tanks. A few times they tried jumping but it didn’t take long for them to stop. Even with these guys, you can only bash your head so many times before you decide it’s not working. What about you?”
“Oh, well, we’ve sequenced the DNA and Dr. Thomas is waiting for eggs from one of your bugs to clone them. He’s pretty confident he’ll succeed.”
“Real
ly? Why would he want to clone them when we’ll have hundreds of them in a few weeks?”
“I don’t know exactly. You know, even though he says he trusts me, he doesn’t confide in me. I don’t think he confides in anybody. My guess is that he’s going to clone them to develop a bug with certain characteristics. You know, his project is super secret so I figure it has to do with DARPA or some unmentionable government organization.”
“So, what’s the point of us doing what we’re doing if he only needs eggs?”
“That’s it. You’re egg producers. I hate to tell you this, but once he’s got enough eggs I’ll bet the company shuts you down. I’ve seen it before. It’s the way they operate. Everything is compartmentalized, you know, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, and so on. That’s the way they like it.”
“I don’t know,” Boyd said. “My boss has a contract.”
“That’s funny,” Gruber said.
“Whadya mean?”
“Did he write the contract? Did he read the fine print?”
“Of course not. He hates small print.”
“Yeah,” Gruber smirked. “I’ll bet if your boss looked closely at his contract he’ll find that the bugs he came here with are his to keep but the ones that he produces belong to the company.”
Boyd let this settle in. According to Duncan, his contract with the company required him to breed his specimens while allowing him to conduct experiments to satisfy his curiosity about the creatures’ behavior, something he couldn’t do effectively without the custom habitat he’d ordered.
“This is news to me,” Boyd said.
“Well, I don’t know for sure. I’m just speculating.”
“So what’s your boss going to do with the clones?”
“I have no idea. Just like you’re egg producers, maybe we’re clone producers. Dr. Thomas hasn’t said a word about it. I asked once.”
“What’d he say?”
“Nothing. He’s not what you’d call an open book. I wouldn’t put it past him that he’s got another lab here somewhere that will experiment with the clones.”
“And he wouldn’t tell you?”
“Not if I wasn’t going to be involved.”
“So, you could be out of here, too?”
“Oh, I don’t think so. I manage the lab for him. We’ve got other projects.”
“But we don’t.”
“Yeah, y’all are kinda vulnerable.”
Boyd’s cell phone started ringing in his pants pocket. It was Carolyn.
“Where are you?” she said.
“Shit! I’m on my way.” Boyd pushed his chair away. “I gotta go.”
“Got a hot date?”
Boyd smiled broadly as Gruber gave him a thumbs up. Gruber watched as his friend jogged and then broke into a run. Good for him, he thought.
36
HOWARD DUNCAN WAS surprised by how quickly the reptilian insects had grown. Within a week they’d grown from the size of a grain of rice to an inch in length. Not yet equipped with the anatomy that would allow them to leap, they were relatively easy to capture and move to other habitats. He had hoped that they would be able to separate the males from the females, but there were no outward sexual characteristics at the time to guide him. It turned out to be a good thing that they’d been moved during the first week, as they had doubled in size again by the end of the second week, fully two inches long and equipped with much stronger hind limbs and the beginnings of the axe-shaped protrusions on their forelimbs. One behavior that remained consistent as they grew was their voraciousness, particularly when provided with live food, such as grasshoppers and beetles. At two weeks they showed the same stalking behavior that worked for the colonies so well in the rainforest. A few would lead by cornering the prey and then others would join the slaughter.
Lab techs Malcolm Chang and Jacob Winston spent endless hours watching the birth cohort as it matured. In addition to observing the insects, they were in charge of providing food and water to each of the increasing number of aquaria. Water was provided through a narrow tube that ran down the side of each of the standard twenty-nine gallon aquaria, emptying into a shallow tray. The tube was regarded to be too narrow for even a newborn to crawl through, though several had tried and drowned as a result. Food was dispensed by opening the top and dropping it. The elaborate habitat that Duncan had ordered included feeding ports that allowed food to be inserted using a small acrylic box. The ports consisted of a one-way flap that would be pushed open when the feeding box was inserted and close when the box was removed. According to the manufacturer, the ports could not be opened from the inside.
With the three adult specimens, feeding through the top presented few challenges. The techs simply lifted the front section of the top, dropped the food and lowered the top. The task took only seconds and could be done before the insects were aware of it. However, by the time the juveniles had grown to three inches, it became apparent to the young assistants that their methodology needed improvement. Although Boyd had initially estimated the birth cohort at forty individuals, by the third week the number held steady at thirty-six.
“I would have thought the mortality rate would have been higher,” Chang told Boyd.
“It makes you wonder what it is in the wild. That might explain why there were so many of them.”
The twenty-two-year-old Chang, who held a bachelor of science degree in biology, had suspended his education to pay off some of his undergraduate debt. He planned to enter a graduate program in molecular and cellular biology in the fall and felt fortunate to be working in Duncan’s lab. In addition to receiving above average pay, living on campus allowed him to pay his loans off at a faster rate than might otherwise be possible. He had friends in Austin who were working as servers in restaurants and in retail and barely made enough to cover rent and food. In addition, his job involved scientific research and would look good on his curriculum vitae.
“You know, they’re doing a lot more jumping now than even last week,” Chang said cautiously, reluctant to bring up concerns about feeding them.
“I’ve noticed that, too,” Boyd said, whose job did not include feeding the insects.
“They’re growing so fast and, you know, it’s impossible to keep an eye on all of them and I’m thinking maybe there should be two of us during feeding time. You know, one to open the lid and the other to drop the food in.”
“Have you had any problems?”
“No, not yet. But, they’re gonna get even bigger and I can see the potential for, you know, one of them, maybe, escaping. I’ve read about what happened to y’all in Brazil, and, you know, I…”
“You’re afraid?”
“Not afraid. OK, maybe afraid. Lately these guys have really gone after the food. I mean, they’re shredding the grasshoppers and next week we’re supposed to feed them live mice.”
“That’s what the doc wants. He expects most of them to be fully grown in another week or so.”
“I know, but there’s ten or more of them in each of the tanks. The bigger they get, the more risk with the way we’re doing it.”
“Well, we can’t double the number of lab techs just for feeding. Besides, the mice might last longer as a food source.”
“And they’ll make the place really stinky.”
“I wish there was a way to clean out the tanks, but I can’t think of one, can you?”
“No way. But what happens after this next birth cohort?”
Boyd looked puzzled.
“We won’t be able to isolate the juveniles from the adults,” Chang said.
“We’ve been hoping to have our custom-made habitat delivered. We thought we’d have it weeks ago.”
“I know. Jake and I have talked about it. We’re in agreement on this. What are we gonna do next month, or the month after?”
“Well, first thing, we don’t yet know the gestation period. We had the female for a month before she gave birth but she may have been carrying the offspring lo
nger than that. That’s the number one thing we’ll find out with this next cohort. And that’s a big thing.”
The two were in the lab while they spoke, every once in a while glancing at the aquaria, both of them aware of the inadequacy of the equipment.
“I know what you’re saying,” Boyd said. “I’ll talk to the doc. Maybe he’s got some ideas.”
37
WHEN CAROLYN TOLD Cody that she lived on a ranch, he was both jealous and curious. Wide open spaces appealed to him, though where they were in the Texas Hill Country open spaces weren’t very wide and were often surrounded by rugged hills and exposed limestone. Though she’d claimed it was only a ten-minute drive from the campus, Boyd realized quickly that it was ten minutes for her and at least fifteen minutes for anyone else. Trying to look nonchalant, his right hand squeezing the life out of the door pull, he watched with trepidation as she took the curves like a race car driver straightening the road by maneuvering from edge to edge while dodging potholes, apparently unconcerned that another car might be approaching from the opposite direction. With the top down and the noise of the rushing air filling their ears she wouldn’t have heard him shout, even if he had done so. But he didn’t. He swallowed his fear rather than reveal it and hoped that the drive would end well, which it did when she slowed and pointed the car down a single dirt lane that led into a heavily wooded valley hiding several ramshackle buildings arranged around an open area covered with loose soil and weeds.
Not waiting for her to turn the engine off, he practically leaped from the car, nearly losing his balance in the process. He wanted urgently to comment about her aggressive driving but, for fear of sounding like a wimp, did not. Instead, he looked at the condition of the buildings and shook his head.
“You live here?” he said, his eyes on a small cabin with several broken windows and a roof in want of shingles.
Carolyn flashed a smile, shaking her head.
“Nope,” she said, pointing to a small horse barn that had seen better days.
“You live in a barn?” he asked incredulously.