“Please, Phil, drink this.” Amos pushed the bottle on me again.
“Any side effects I should know about? Like I'll be dead of an allergic attack in a few hours?”
“You'll probably feel a little more irritable than usual for the next week,” Lapp said.
I sighed. “What else is new.”
Decisions…Even if I had the first catalyst, I could live the rest of my life without ever encountering the second.
No, I couldn't go on being so vulnerable like that. I liked autumn leaves. But how did I know for sure that what Amos was offering me was the antidote, and not the second catalyst? I didn't—not for sure—but wouldn't Amos have tried to leave me in Mo's house to burn if he'd wanted me dead? Decisions…
I drank it down, and looked around the barn. Incredible scene of high Victorian science, like a nineteenth century trade card I'd once seen for an apothecary. Enough to make my head spin. Then I realized it was spinning—was this some sort of reaction to the antidote? Jeez, or was the antidote the poison after all? No—the room wasn't so much spinning, as the light, the fireflight, was flickering…in an oddly familiar way.
Lapp was suddenly talking, fast, arguing with someone.
Sarah!
“There's a Mendel bomb here,” she was shouting. “Please. You all have to leave.”
Lapp looked desperately around the room, back at Sarah, and finally nodded. “She's right,” he said and caught my eye. “We all have to leave now.” He grabbed on to Sarah's shoulder, and beckoned me to follow.
Amos had his arm around Laurie, and was already walking quickly with her towards the door. Everyone else was scurrying around, grabbing what netted cages they could.
“No,” I said. “Wait.” An insight was just nibbling its way into my mind.
“Doctor, please,” Lapp said. “We have to leave now.”
“No, you don't,” I said. “I know how to stop the bomb.”
Lapp shook his head firmly. “I assure you, we know of no remedy to stop this. We have perhaps seven, maybe eight minutes at most. We can rebuild the barn. Human lives we cannot rebuild.”
Sarah looked at me with pleading eyes.
“No,” I insisted, looking past Sarah at Lapp. “You can't just keep running like this from your enemies, letting them burn you out. You have incredible work going on here. I can stop the bomb.”
Lapp stared at me.
“Okay, how's this,” I said. “You clear out of here with your friends. No problem. I'll take care of this with my science and then we'll talk about it, all right? But let me get on with it already.”
Lapp signaled the last of his people to leave. “Take her,” he said, and passed custody of Sarah along to a big burly man with a gray-flecked beard. She tried to resist but was no match for him.
Lapp squinted at the flickering fireflies. They were much more distinct now, as if the metamorphosis into bomb mode had coarsened the nature of the mesh.
He turned to me. “I'll stay here with you. I'll give you two minutes and then I'm yanking you out of here. What does your science have to offer?”
“Nothing all that advanced,” I said, and pulled my little halogen flashlight out of my pocket. “Those are fireflies, right? If they've retained anything of the characteristics of the family Lampyridae I know about, then they make their light only in the absence of daylight, when the day has wanted—they're nocturnal. During the day, bathed in daylight, they're just like any other damn beetle. Well, this should make the necessary adjustment.” I turned up the flashlight to its fullest daylight setting, and shone it straight at the center of the swirling starlight fountain, which now had a much harsher tone, like an ugly light over an autopsy table. I focused my halogen on the souped-up fireflies for a minute and longer. Nothing happened. The swirling continued. The harsh part of their light got stronger.
“Doctor, we can't stay here any longer,” Lapp said.
I sighed, closed my eyes, and opened them. The halogen flashlight should have worked—it should have put out the light of at least some of the fireflies, then more, disrupting their syncopated overlapping pattern of flashing. I stared hard at the fountain. My eyes were tired. I couldn't see the flies as clearly as I could a few moments ago…
No…of course!
I couldn't see as clearly because the light was getting dimmer!
There was no doubt about it now. The whole barn seemed to be flickering in and out, the continuous light effect had broken down, and each time the light came back, it did so a little more weakly…I kept my halogen trained on the flies. It was soon the only light in the barn.
Lapp's hand was on my shoulder. “We're in your debt, Doctor. I almost made the fool's mistake of closing my mind to a source of knowledge I didn't understand—a fool's mistake, as I say, because if I don't understand it, then how can I know it's not valuable?”
“Plato's Meno Paradox strikes again,” I said.
“What?”
“You need some knowledge to recognize knowledge, so where does the first knowledge come from?” I smiled. “Wisdom from an old Western-style philosopher—I frequently consult him—though actually he probably had more in common with you.”
Lapp nodded. “Thank you for giving us this knowledge of the firefly, that we knew all along ourselves but didn't realize. From now on, the Mendel bombs won't be such a threat to us—once we notice their special flicker, all we'll need to do is flood the area with daylight. Plain daylight. Sometimes we won't even need your flashlight to do it—daylight is after all just out there, naturally for the asking, a good deal of the time.”
“And in the evenings, you can use the flashlight—it's battery operated, no strings attached to central electric companies,” I said. “See, I've picked up a few things about your culture after all.”
Lapp smiled. “I believe you have, Doctor. And I believe we'll be all right now.”
“Yeah, but it was a good thing you had Sarah Fischer to warn you this time, anyway,” I said.
Of course, the enemies of John Lapp and Amos Stoltzfus would no doubt come up with other diabolical breedings of weapons. No one ever gets a clear-cut complete victory in these things. But at least the scourge of Mendel bombs would be reduced. I guess I'd given them an SDI for these pyro-fireflies—imperfect, no doubt, but certainly a lot better than nothing.
I was glad, too, about how Sarah Fischer had turned around. She'd come back to the barn to warn us. Said she couldn't take the killing anymore. She said she had nothing directly to do with Mo's or Jacob's—her father's—deaths, but she could no longer be part of a community that did such things. She had started telling me about the allergens—the irritation ones—because she wanted the world to know. I wanted to believe her.
I'd thought of calling the Pennsylvania police, having them take her into custody, but what was the point? I had no evidence on her whatsoever. Even if she had set the Mendel bomb in John Lapp's barn—which I didn't believe—what could I do about that anyway? Have her arrested for setting a bomb made of incendiary flies I'd been able to defuse by shining my flashlight—a bomb that Lapp's people were unwilling in any way to even acknowledge to the outside world, let alone testify about in court? No thank you—I've been laughed out of court enough times as it is already.
And Lapp said his people had some sort of humane program for people like Sarah—help her find her own people and roots again. She needed that. She was a woman without community now. Shunned by all parties. The worst thing that could happen to someone of Sarah's upbringing. It was good that John Lapp and Amos Stoltzfus were willing to give her a second chance—offer her a lamp of hope, maybe the real meaning of the Mendelian lamp, as it Lapp had aptly put it.
I rolled my window down to pay the George Washington Bridge toll. It felt good to finally be back in my own beat-up car again, I had to admit. Corinne was off with the girls to resettle in California. I'd said a few words about Mo at his funeral, and now his little family was safely on a plane out West. I couldn't say I'd broug
ht his murderers to justice, but at least I'd put a little crimp in their operation. Laurie had kissed Amos goodbye, and promised she'd come back and see him, certainly for Christmas…
“Thanks, Chief.” I took the receipt and the change. I felt so good to be back I almost told him to keep the change. I left the window rolled down. The air had its customary musky aroma—the belches of industry, the exhaust fumes of even EPA-clean cars still leaving their olfactory mark. Damn, and didn't it fell good to breathe it in. Better than the sweet air of Pennsylvania, and all the hidden allergens and catalysts it might be carrying. It had killed both Jacob and Mo. They'd been primed with a slow-acting catalyst years ago. Then the second catalyst had been introduced, and whoosh…some inconsequential something in their surroundings had set the last short fuse. Just as likely a stray firefly of a certain type that buzzed at their ankles, or landed on their arm, as anything else. Jacob's barn had been lit by them. The lamp was likely the other thing Mo had wanted to show me. There were likely one or two fireflies that had gotten into our car on the farm, and danced unseen around our feet as we drove to Philadelphia that evening…A beetle for me, an assassin for Mo.
The virtue of New York, some pundit on the police force once had said, is that you can usually see your killers coming. Give me the soot and pollution, the crush of too many people and cars in a hurry, even the mugger on the street. I'll take my chances.
I unconsciously slipped my wallet out of my pocket. This thinking about muggers must have made me nervous about my money. It was a fine wallet—made from that same special lamp-weave as Laurie's handbag. John Lapp had given it to me as a little present—to remember Jacob's work by. For a few months, at least, I'd be able to better see how much money I was spending.
Well, it was good to have a bit more light in the world—even if it, like the contents it illuminated, was ever-fleeting…
Kiss Me
KATHERINE MacLEAN
Katherine MacLean entered the science fiction field in 1949 and produced some of the fine hard SF short stories of the 1950s. Like Judith Merril and Virginia Kidd, she was one of the bright, tough-minded young women who entered the SF scene in the late 1940s and helped change the face of SF in the next decade. She was at her best and most influential in short fiction. Her collections, The Diploids and The Trouble with You Earth People, are filled with gems but now hard to find. She took a break and then produced some fine work in the 1970s, including her best novel, The Missing Man. By the end of that decade, she had left again, moved to Portland, Maine, and only returns to writing SF sporadically, for fun. This story is from Analog and shows the lighthearted side of hard SF. It's an interesting contrast to the Landis story.
Denny's new girlfriend, Laury, was not interested in science; she was busy studying computer applications to business, but she was pretty and she hung around his laboratory most of her free time and happily listened to him explain what he was doing.
This time his laboratory was full of frogs.
“This bunch is from South Africa, and this bunch in the plastic crate,” he pointed, “they are from Kenya.” He moved his skinny self over to a big damp glass box. “These are from a lake in Georgia, where they fell into a fishing boat. Usually people only send in frog falls when they come down in dry territory or on city sidewalks, come down like rain. Maybe they come down over lakes too, but on a lake, they could have jumped into the boat from the water. So I don't trust this batch.”
Laury stared solemnly at each one, trying to see some exciting difference. All the frogs were dark brown, or green with spots, or a pinkish tan, and they all had big yellow-gold eyes. “Beebeeb,” said a big one.
“But they all look normal!” she was disappointed. “They don't look strange at all.” She picked the biggest tan one from his glass box and kissed it, but nothing about it changed. It stared at her and puffed its throat in and out, “Reebeeb.”
She put it back. “Reebeeb,” she said back.
Denny was eager to explain. “That's what's strange about them, there aren't any tree frogs or desert toads or poison frogs or any of the interesting ones, the frogs people send in from frog falls are always the same three kinds, no matter where they are from.”
“Where did you get all these frogs?” She tapped on the side of the glass box. Most of them jumped away from her finger into the water, and some jumped toward her finger and bumped their noses on the glass.
“Ouch,” she said sympathetically to the ones who had bumped their noses. “That must have hurt.”
Denny was pleased by her interest. “The whole collection—” he waved at the room full of glass-faced boxes full of frogs, “was turned over to me by the Charles Fort Foundation. People are always sending them frogs from sidewalks and city roofs. They are funding me for a research project on the frogs that come down in frog falls.”
“Funding you?” She looked at him with admiration. Scientists seemed to have a talent for generating money for their most kooky projects. “What do they want you to do?”
“Just study their genes. I put it to the university gene fingerprinter machine. So far just normal Rana pippens and such. No lead there.” He leaned warmly against her shoulder to point. “That bunch is from a desert in Arizona. Look at the date on the label. They were just sent in this week.”
Laury was baffled. “Arizona? Frogs don't grow in deserts, do they? They grow in water.”
Denny was excited. “They didn't grow in the desert. They rained out of the sky. A rain of frogs. The bible has something about rains of frogs in Egypt. But when it happens in a desert, ten or twenty miles from the nearest puddle, people really notice it and save some frogs to look at. Then I have a chance to get samples.”
She was indignant. “You think I'll believe frogs fall out of the sky? You're putting me on. How did they get into the sky?”
“Here, read this,” He shoved a big book into her hands. “It's a collection of reports about frogs raining from the sky.” Dennis pointed at a photograph of a wrinkled-looking toad. “Ask me where that toad came from.”
Obediently she asked, “Where did it come from?” She calculated the chances of making a tourist business about frog falls. Could Denny predict them?
“It was found inside a lump of coal. That means it's a billion years old or so. Maybe all frogs and toads came from rains of frogs. Maybe rains of frogs started life on land, instead of lungfish. Frogs are a billion years old.”
She looked at the big one she had kissed. “They don't look that old.” She thought of putting a million-year-old frog on display. Would anyone pay admission?
He took a deep breath to control his temper and looked at her figure for consolation. “I don't mean these frogs. I mean the ancestors of all frogs. And maybe we are descended from them too. My theory is that some alien space satellite was set in orbit to seed Earth with life, and it has been cloning frog eggs and raising pollywogs, and launching frogs down on us ever since Earth cooled and the oceans condensed. I'm sure that when I map all the frog falls and their dates they're going to show an orbit line around the Earth. With that for a clue I can get an observatory to locate the alien satellite in orbit around Earth and get it on camera launching frogs.” He spun around in glee. “Ha! On CNN and the cover of Science!”
“Why would aliens launch frogs at us?” Laury asked. “Is it an invasion?”
“Calm down, Laury. Frogs aren't going to hurt us. They never have. They're too small. All they do is hop around, swim, lay eggs and eat bugs. They don't live long enough to become civilized and start wars.” Denny started a round of throwing little white worms into the glass boxes. The frogs' tongues shot out and yanked the worms into their mouths so suddenly the insects seemed to vanish.
“Some of these are adult males. The green ones that say Peeeep and the big ones that say Reebeeb and Beebeeb are singing to attract females. They mature to be adults in one year.”
Laury nodded, “That's their real problem, too much sex at an early age, retards growth, distr
acts from learning.”
The big tan one in the glass case said, “Reebeeb reebeeb,” in a deep musical voice, still staring at her.
“You shouldn't have kissed him,” Denny said, “Kiss me instead.”
“You never know about superstitions until you try them. He didn't turn into a prince,” said Laury. “But if he's only a year old he'd make a pretty small prince anyhow, still in diapers, so it's a good thing it didn't work.”
“But he's an adult.” Denny moved closer. “I'm an adult too. I'm a consenting adult. Kiss me. Maybe I'll turn into a prince.”
“Maybe you'll turn into a frog.” She kissed him but his green baseball cap got in the way. He spun the visor to the back, crossed his legs, and tried again.
The big frog sang “Reeebeeb reeebeeb!” and hopped at them, butting his nose against the glass.
“He's not very smart,” said Laury. “No kind of invader from a spaceship can conquer anything being so small and dumb. Maybe they were sent down to be invaders from outer space, but Earth is too sexy for them and they become adults instead of growing up.”
“If you put thyroid into the water of the pollywogs they turn to their adult shape when they are really tiny. The tiny females can even lay eggs.” Denny said absently, watching Laury.
“That's not the kind of growing up I meant. That's the opposite. I mean—what can you give them to keep them from getting sexy so they can keep on growing and get bigger?”
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