“How long has this hole been here, Father?”
“For years. It was a flaw in the masonry … an earthquake, I believe.”
Joao turned, crossed to the door in three strides, went through an arched hallway, down a flight of stone steps, through another door and short hall, through a grillwork gate and into the exterior garden. He set the handlight to full intensity, washed its blue glare over the wall beneath the study window.
“Joao, what are you doing?”
“My job, Father,” Joao said. He glanced back, saw that the elder Martinho had stopped just outside the gate.
Joao returned his attention to the exterior wall, washed the blue glare of light on the stones beneath the window. He crouched low, running the light along the ground, peering behind each clod, erasing all shadows.
His searching scrutiny passed over the raw earth, turned to the bushes, then the lawn.
Joao heard his father come up behind.
“Do you see it, son?”
“No, Father.”
“You should have allowed me to crush it.”
From the outer garden that bordered the road and the stone fence, there came a piercing stridulation. It hung on the air in almost tangible waves, making Joao think of the hunting cry of jungle predators. A shiver moved up his spine. He turned toward the driveway where he had parked his airtruck, sent the blue glare of light stabbing there.
He broke off, staring at the lawn. “What is that?”
The ground appeared to be in motion, reaching out toward them like the curling of a wave on a beach. Already, they were cut off from the house. The wave was still some ten paces away, but moving in rapidly.
Joao stood up, clutched his father’s arm. He spoke quietly, hoping not to alarm the old man further. “We must get to my truck, Father. We must run across them.”
“Them?”
“Those are like the insect we saw inside, father—millions of them. Perhaps they are not beetles, after all. Perhaps they are like army ants. We must make it to the truck. I have equipment and supplies there. We will be safe inside. It is a bandeirante truck, Father. You must run with me. I will help you.”
They began to run, Joao holding his father’s arm, pointing the way with the light.
Let his heart be strong enough, Joao prayed.
They were into the creeping waves of insects then, but the creatures leaped aside, opening a pathway which closed behind the running men.
The white form of the airtruck loomed out of the shadows at the far curve of the driveway about fifteen meters ahead.
“Joao … my heart,” the elder Martinho gasped.
“You can make it,” Joao panted. “Faster!” He almost lifted his father from the ground for the last few paces.
They were at the wide rear door into the truck’s lab compartment now. Joao yanked open the door, slapped the light switch, reached for a spray hood and poison gun. He stopped, stared into the yellow-lighted compartment.
Two men sat there—sertao Indians by the look of them, with bright glaring eyes and bang-cut black hair beneath straw hats. They looked to be identical twins—even to the mud-gray clothing and sandals, the leather shoulder bags. The beetle-like insects crawled around them, up the walls, over the instruments and vials.
“What the devil?” Joao blurted.
One of the pair held a qena flute. He gestured with it, spoke in a rasping, oddly inflected voice: “Enter. You will not be harmed if you obey.”
Joao felt his father sag, caught the old man in his arms. How light he felt! Joao stepped up into the truck, carrying his father. The elder Martinho breathed in short, painful gasps. His face was a pale blue and sweat stood out on his forehead.
“Joao,” he whispered. “Pain … my chest.”
“Medicine, Father,” Joao said. “Where is your medicine?”
“House,” the old man said.
“It appears to be dying,” one of the Indians rasped.
Still holding his father in his arms, Joao, whirled toward the pair, blazed: “I don’t know who you are or why you loosed those bugs here, but my father’s dying and needs help. Get out of my way!”
“Obey or both die,” said the Indian with the flute.
“He needs his medicine and a doctor,” Joao pleaded. He didn’t like the way the Indian pointed that flute. The motion suggested the instrument was actually a weapon.
“What part has failed?” asked the other Indian. He stared curiously at Joao’s father. The old man’s breathing had become shallow and rapid.
“It’s his heart,” Joao said. “I know you farmers don’t think he’s acted fast enough for…”
“Not farmers,” said the one with the flute. “Heart?”
“Pump,” said the other.
“Pump,” The Indian with the flute stood up from the bench at the front of the lab, gestured down. “Put … Father here.”
The other one got off the bench, stood aside.
In spite of fear for his father, Joao was caught by the strange look of this pair, the fine, scale-like lines in their skin, the glittering brilliance of their eyes.
“Put Father here,” repeated the one with the flute, pointing at the bench. “Help can be…”
“Attained,” said the other one.
“Attained,” said the one with the flute.
Joao focused now on the masses of insects around the walls, the waiting quietude in their ranks. They were like the one in the study.
The old man’s breathing was now very shallow, very rapid.
He’s dying, Joao thought in desperation.
“Help can be attained,” repeated the one with the flute. “If you obey, we will not harm.”
The Indian lifted his flute, pointed it at Joao like a weapon. “Obey.”
There was no mistaking the gesture.
Slowly, Joao advanced, deposited his father gently on the bench.
The other Indian bent over the elder Martinho’s head, raised an eyelid. There was a professional directness about the gesture. The Indian pushed gently on the dying man’s diaphragm, removed the Prefect’s belt, loosened his collar. A stubby brown finger was placed against the artery in the old man’s neck.
“Very weak,” the Indian rasped.
Joao took another, closer look at this Indian, wondering at the sertao backwoodsman who behaved like a doctor.
“We’ve got to get him to a hospital,” Joao said. “And his medicine in…”
“Hospital,” the Indian agreed.
“Hospital?” asked the one with the flute.
A low, stridulate hissing came from the other Indian.
“Hospital,” said the one with the flute.
That stridulate hissing! Joao stared at the Indian beside the Prefect. The sound had been reminiscent of the weird call that had echoed across the lawn.
The one with the flute poked him, said: “You will go into front and maneuver this…”
“Vehicle,” said the one beside Joao’s father.
“Vehicle,” said the one with the flute.
“Hospital?” Joao pleaded.
“Hospital,” agreed the one with the flute.
Joao looked once more to his father. The other Indian already was strapping the elder Martinho to the bench in preparation for movement. How competent the man appeared in spite of his backwoods look.
“Obey,” said the one with the flute.
Joao opened the door into the front compartment, slipped through, feeling the other one follow. A few drops of rain spattered darkly against the curved windshield. Joao squeezed into the operator’s seat, noted how the Indian crouched behind him, flute pointed and ready.
A dart gun of some kind, Joao guessed.
He punched the ignitor button on the dash, strapped himself in while waiting for the turbines to build up speed. The Indian still crouched behind him, vulnerable now if the airtruck were spun sharply. Joao flicked the communications switch on the lower left corner of the dash, looked into the tiny screen there g
iving him a view of the lab compartment. The rear doors were open. He closed them by hydraulic remote. His father was securely strapped to the bench now, Joao noted, but the other Indian was equally secured.
The turbines reached their whining peak. Joao switched on the lights, engaged the hydrostatic drive. The truck lifted six inches, angled upward as Joao increased pump displacement. He turned left onto the street, lifted another two meters to increase speed, headed toward the lights of a boulevard.
The Indian spoke beside his ear: “You will turn toward the mountain over there.” A hand came forward, pointing to the right.
The Alejandro Clinic is there in the foothills, Joao thought.
He made the indicated turn down the cross street angling toward the boulevard.
Casually, he gave pump displacement another boost, lifted another meter and increased speed once more. In the same motion, he switched on the intercom to the rear compartment, tuned for the spare amplifier and pickup in the compartment beneath the bench where his father lay.
The pickup, capable of making a dropped pin sound like a cannon, gave forth only a distant hissing and rasping. Joao increased amplification. The instrument should have been transmitting the old man’s heartbeats now, sending a noticeable drum-thump into the forward cabin.
There was nothing.
Tears blurred Joao’s eyes, and he shook his head to clear them.
My father is dead, he thought. Killed by these crazy backwoodsmen.
He noted in the dashscreen that the Indian back there had a hand under the elder Martinho’s back. The Indian appeared to be massaging the dead man’s back, and a rhythmic rasping matched the motion.
Anger filled Joao. He felt like diving the airtruck into an abutment, dying himself to kill these crazy men.
They were approaching the outskirts of the city, and ring-girders circled off to the left giving access to the boulevard. This was an area of small gardens and cottages protected by over-fly canopies.
Joao lifted the airtruck above the canopies, headed toward the boulevard.
To the clinic, yes, he thought. But it is too late.
In that instant, he realized there were no heartbeats at all coming from that rear compartment—only that slow, rhythmic grating, a faint susurration and a cicada-like hum up and down scale.
“To the mountains, there,” said the Indian behind him.
Again, the hand came forward to point off to the right.
Joao, with that hand close to his eyes and illuminated by the dash, saw the scale-like parts of a finger shift position slightly. In that shift, he recognized the scale-shapes by their claw fringes.
The beetles!
The finger was composed of linked beetles working in unison!
Joao turned, stared into the Indian’s eyes, seeing now why they glistened so: they were composed of thousands of tiny facets.
“Hospital, there,” the creature beside him said, pointing.
Joao turned back to the controls, fighting to keep from losing composure. They were not Indians … they weren’t even human. They were insects—some kind of hive-cluster shaped and organized to mimic a man.
The implications of this discovery raced through his mind. How did they support their weight? How did they feed and breathe?
How did they speak?
Everything had to be subordinated to the urgency of getting this information and proof of it back to one of the big labs where the facts could be explored.
Even the death of his father could not be considered now. He had to capture one of these things, get out with it.
He reached overhead, flicked on the command transmitter, set its beacon for a homing call. Let some of my Irmaos be awake and monitoring their sets, he prayed.
“More to the right,” said the creature behind him.
Again, Joao corrected course.
The moon was high overhead now, illuminating a line of bandeirante towers off to the left. The first barrier.
They would be out of the green area soon and into the gray—then, beyond that, another barrier and the great red that stretched out in reaching fingers through the Goyaz and the Mato Grosso. Joao could see scattered lights of Resettlement Plan farms ahead, and darkness beyond.
The airtruck was going faster than he wanted, but Joao dared not slow it. They might become suspicious.
“You must go higher,” said the creature behind him.
Joao increased pump displacement, raised the nose. He leveled off at three hundred meters.
More bandeirante towers loomed ahead, spaced at closer intervals. Joao picked up the barrier signals on his meters, looked back at the Indian. The dissembler vibrations seemed not to affect the creature.
Joao looked out his side window and down. No one would challenge him, he knew. This was a bandeirante airtruck headed into the red zone … and with its transmitter sending out a homing call. The men down there would assume he was a bandleader headed out on a contract after a successful bid—and calling his men to him for the job ahead.
He could see the moon-silvered snake of the São Francisco winding off to his left, and the lesser waterways like threads raveled out of the foothills.
I must find the nest—where we’re headed, Joao thought. He wondered if he dared turn on his receiver—but if his men started reporting in … No. That could make the creatures suspect; they might take violent counter-action.
My men will realize something is wrong when I don’t answer, he thought. They will follow.
If any of them hear my call.
Hours droned past.
Nothing but moonlighted jungle sped beneath them now, and the moon was low on the horizon, near setting. This was the deep red region where broadcast poisons had been used at first with disastrous results. This was where the wild mutations had originated. It was here that Rhin Kelly had been reported missing.
This was the region being saved for the final assault, using a mobile barrier line when that line could be made short enough.
Joao armed the emergency charge that would separate the front and rear compartments of the truck when he fired it. The stub wings of the front compartment and its emergency rocket motors could get him back into bandeirante country.
With the specimen sitting behind him safely subdued, Joao hoped.
He looked up through the canopy, scanned the horizon as far as he could. Was that moonlight glistening on a truck far back to the right? He couldn’t be sure.
“How much farther?” Joao asked.
“Ahead,” the creature rasped.
Now that he was alert for it, Joao heard the modulated stridulation beneath that voice.
“But how long?” Joao asked. “My father…”
“Hospital for … the father … ahead,” said the creature.
It would be dawn soon, Joao realized. He could see the first false line of light along the horizon behind. This night had passed so swiftly. Joao wondered if these creatures had injected some time-distorting drug into him without his knowing. He thought not. He was maintaining himself in the necessities of the moment. There was no time for fatigue or boredom when he had to record every landmark half-visible in the night, sense everything there was to sense about these creatures with him.
How did they coordinate all those separate parts?
Dawn came, revealing the plateau of the Mato Crosso. Joao looked out his windows. This region, he knew, stretched across five degrees of latitude and six degrees of longitude. Once, it had been a region of isolated fazendas farmed by independent blacks and by sertanistos chained to the encomendero plantation system. It was hardwood jungles, narrow rivers with banks overgrown by lush trees and ferns, savannahs, and tangled life.
Even in this age it remained primitive, a fact blamed largely on insects and disease. It was one of the last strongholds of teeming insect life, if the International Ecological Organization’s reports could be believed.
Supplies for the bandeirantes making the assault on this insect stronghold would come by w
ay of São Paulo, by air and by transport on the multi-decked highways, then on antique diesel trains to Itapira, on river runners to Bahus and by airtruck to Registo and Leopoldina on the Araguaya.
This area crawled with insects: wire worms in the roots of the savannahs, grubs digging in the moist black earth, hopping beetles, dart-like angita wasps, chalcis flies, chiggers, sphecidae, braconidae, fierce hornets, white termites, hemipteric crawlers, blood roaches, thrips, ants, lice, mosquitoes, mites, moths, exotic butterflies, mantidae—and countless unnatural mutations of them all.
This would be an expensive fight—unless it were stopped … because it already had been lost.
I mustn’t think that way, Joao told himself. Out of respect for my father.
Maps of the IEO showed this region in varied intensities of red. Around the red ran a ring of gray with pink shading where one or two persistent forms of insect life resisted man’s poisons, jelly flames, astringents, sonitoxics—the combination of flamant couroq and supersonics that drove insects from their hiding places into waiting death—and all the mechanical traps and lures in the bandeirante arsenal.
A grid map would be placed over this area and each thousand-acre square offered for bid to the independent bands to deinfest.
We bandeirantes are a kind of ultimate predator, Joao thought. It’s no wonder these creatures mimic us.
But how good, really, was the mimicry? he asked himself. And how deadly to the predators?
“There,” said the creature behind him, and the multipart hand came forward to point toward a black scarp visible ahead in the gray light of morning.
Joao’s foot kicked a trigger on the floor releasing a great cloud of orange dye-fog beneath the truck to mark the ground and forest for a mile around under this spot. As he kicked the trigger, Joao began counting down the five-second delay to the firing of the separation charge.
It came in a roaring blast that Joao knew would smear the creature behind him against the rear bulkhead. He sent the stub wings out, fed power to the rocket motors and banked hard around. He saw the detached rear compartment settling slowly earthward above the dye cloud, its fall cushioned as the pumps of the hydrostatic drive automatically compensated.
The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert Page 57