V 08 - The Crivit Experiment

by Allen L Wold (UC) (epub)

  It took him twenty minutes to get to the bypass going around Chapel Hill, and from there another half hour to where Cornwallis crossed highway 54 in the RTF The homeward-bound rush hour had already started.

  He pulled into the parking lot in front of the futuristic-looking Diger-Fairwell building. There were few cars left. He walked into the front lobby and up to the reception desk. There was only one woman on duty. She looked up as he neared.

  “My name is Durk Attweiler,” he said. “I’d like to see Dr. Van Oort, if she’s still here.”

  The receptionist looked at him and though she was trained to be polite, it was obvious that she doubted if he had any legitimate business here. Durk felt self-conscious in this center of high research and was painfully aware of the state of his clothes. He forced himself to stand still and not brush at the mud and dust.

  The receptionist picked up a phone and dialed a number, rather than letting him do it himself. “Dr. Van Oort,” she said, “there’s a man named Attweiler here to see you.” The response must have surprised her. “Yes, Doctor, I’ll have somebody show him up.”

  She hung up, obviously curious that someone as important and busy as the research director would find time to see a dirty farmer. “Louie?” she called to a security guard who was standing at the far side of the huge lobby. “Will you take Mr. Attweiler up to Dr. Van Oort’s office, please?”

  The guard came over to the desk, and the receptionist filled out and handed Durk a visitor’s sticker, which he stuck onto his shirt pocket.

  “This way, please,” the guard said, and led him up stairs, down a hall, through a secretarial foyer, then down another hall to a large office.

  The woman behind the desk surprised him. From his conversations with Arnold Rutgers and JoAnn Hirakawa the other day, he had expected Dr. Van Oort to be a vigorous foreign-looking gentleman instead of a small older woman.

  “Mr. Attweiler,” Dr. Van Oort said as he paused hesitantly in the doorway. “Please come in.” He did so and the security guard left. “In here,” she said, gesturing toward the bug-free parlor adjacent to her office. “Sit down, please,” she invited with a smile as she followed him in.

  “I’ll get your chair dirty,” Durk said apologetically.

  “Doesn’t matter. At least it will be good Carolina clay, and not green alien blood. Rutgers and Corey were a mess.”

  “How’s Wendel?” Durk asked, sitting gingerly.

  “He’s going to be just fine. Nothing broken, just a few sprains. You probably saved his life by acting as quickly as you did.”

  “Didn’t have time to think about it,” Durk said.

  “It was courageous anyway. And we appreciate your help in getting one of those monsters.”

  “You can have all you want. Uh, look, I don’t know if you’re the right person to talk to, but somebody ought to know.” He told her about the mine tunnel leading to the ridge beside the Visitors’ house, and what he’d seen there.

  “Yes,” Dr. Van Oort said when he’d finished. “That could be very important. We knew they were keeping a smaller species of herbivore, but didn’t know what for. As for the mine, I’ll tell the people who can make the best use of that information.”

  “I figure,” Durk said slowly, “that about six guys could take the lizards out if they snuck in that way at night.” “I’m sure they could, Mr. Attweiler, and I know you’re not happy with the Visitors breeding monsters like those crivits that close to your farm. But before we do anything drastic, we want to learn all we can about what they’re doing and why.”

  “They’re breeding monsters,” Durk said tightly. “That’s true, but to what purpose? Just to make better prison camp guards? Then why not do that at the camps? We suspect that the Visitors intend to set these monsters loose in certain places, which will make those places very unsafe for humans. Do crivits eat Visitors? If they do, then those places would be unsafe for them too, but if they don’t eat Visitors, then they could use those areas while we would be kept out of them. Unless, of course, there’s some more complex reason. And that’s why we won’t shut down their laboratory until we know more. And, if we can, until we know how to detect crivits underground and learn how to deal with them effectively.”

  “Yeah,” Durk said unenthusiastically. “I see what you’re talking about. It’s just that it’s my fields those things are running around in.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Attweiler.”

  “That’s all right.” He got to his feet. “But if you ever want to use that mine, just let me know.”

  “We will,” Dr. Van Oort said, getting up to shake his hand. “And we’ll appreciate anything further you might learn about your neighbors and their pets.” She led him to the outer office. Louie, the guard, was waiting outside the door to take Durk back to the lobby.

  After Durk left, Lucia Van Oort closed up her office and walked to the other end of the building where the surgical laboratories were. Bringing the crivit in without being stopped at a checkpoint had been something of a trick, but they’d managed it, and now the monster was in lab B, where Penny Carmichal, JoAnn Hirakawa, and Arnold Rutgers were already at work when Lucia arrived.

  It was not a large lab and was normally used for smaller animals like rabbits, but it was accessed only through lab A, and the door could be concealed if Visitors ever took it into their minds to come through on an inspection tour. Diger-Fairwell had no deep basements as Data Tronix did, and Lucia just hoped that this makeshift security was adequate.

  Her three subordinates did no more than glance up when she entered. The crivit was stretched out on two metal tables set end to end, but even so the tentacles around its mouth dangled, the two longest ones reaching the floor. Over the creature, cameras mounted on ceiling tracks were sliding back and forth, changing angle, aperture, and magnification as Penny keyed in commands at the control console.

  “We’re using up a lot of videotape,” Arnold said as Lucia came over to stand beside him. “The thing is changing colors and its tentacles are shrinking.”

  “It smells,” Lucia said.

  “It does,” JoAnn agreed, “and it’s getting worse. It’s not like anything I’ve ever smelled before either.”

  “I wish you could have taken it alive,” Lucia said. “So do we,” Arnold told her, “but we’d have needed twice as many men and a bigger winch, and then I don’t know how we’d have gotten it into a cage.”

  “The Visitors have a method,” Lucia said, “according to Mr. Attweiler.”

  “You think the Visitors would let us build a special trap up on the sand flats?” JoAnn asked. “We’d have to do like they did—dig the trap first and then connect it with a trench.”

  “I know,” Lucia said, unruffled. “Just wishful thinking.”

  Penny finished with her pictures, so they turned the monster over onto its back. “We shot this side first,” Penny explained. “That was just the way it went onto the table.”

  JoAnn took a pair of surgical gloves and started drawing them on. “Ready to open it up?” she asked.

  “That’s what I’m here for,” Arnold said.

  As he worked, with JoAnn assisting, Penny took more pictures of each step. He slit the skin, peeled it back, checking the underlying musculature, locating the thoracic and abdominal cavities. The latter he opened up at once, to remove the stomach and bowels and their contents, to keep them from accelerating the creature’s decay.

  “It’s a female,” he said as he carefully lifted organs aside and removed them to be placed in preservative for later study. He reached in and gently removed a long tube of flesh, in which could be seen half a dozen bulges. He lay this down on the exposed rib cage and slit it open. Inside were six white, spherical eggs, each the size of a softball.

  “Let’s get those into an incubator,” Lucia suggested. “Just in case one hatches.” Since the others were busy, she went herself back into lab A to retrieve the desired equipment. When she brought it back, JoAnn carefully put the eggs into it.
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  “We took the crivit’s temperature,” she said, “as soon as we got it in, and given the amount of time it had been dead, I think I can make a good guess as to its internal temperature when it was alive.” She set the controls on the portable incubator, which Lucia then took back to lab A. Gordon Lloyd, a technician who had been taken into their confidence, came in as she was pushing the incubator into its place against the wall.

  “We just got a phone call from Data Tronix,” he said.

  “Tell me about it in here,” Lucia told him, and led him into lab B.

  For a long moment, Gordon could say nothing at all, but just looked at the monster on the tables.

  “She-it,” he said at last. “Goddamn.” He shook his head and swallowed a couple of times, hard. “That’s what the phone call was about,” he said, nodding at the monster. “Dr. Marino said they had made some progress on the ‘silicon project.’ That’s the ‘silicon project,’ huh?” “Makes you want to stay away from the beaches, doesn’t it?” Penny said.

  “That isn’t funny,” Gordon told her. “Dr. Marino also said her ‘friends’ were going to ‘start a production’ at ‘The Dunes.’ ” He turned to Lucia. “She wants you and Arnold to come over.”

  “I can’t,” Arnold said. “Gordon, you’ve been drafted as my assistant. JoAnn, you go with Dr. Van Oort.” “Right,” JoAnn said, peeling off her gloves. “You’ll get used to it after a while,” she told Gordon as he reluctantly went to get a fresh pair of gloves for himself.

  Without wasting any further time, Lucia and JoAnn left.

  Anne Marino met Lucia and JoAnn in the lobby and took them down to the secret lab below Data Tronix where Mark Casey, Steve Wong, and Shirley Patchek were already waiting. “We’ve gotten some interesting messages,” Anne explained, “and we thought we’d better let you in on them so you can tell us whether we ought to be concerned about the implications.”

  “You think the Visitors are going to let crivits loose down at the beaches?”

  “Something like that,” Mark said. “Apparently Leon had made some kind of report to Diana, which we couldn’t tap, of course, not having a bug at the breeding station, but if we read it correctly, Diana called Chang shortly after that and had her call Leon. At first, except for mentioning Leon, we didn’t know that Diana’s conversation with Chang had anything to do with crivits. You know how it goes: when you both know what you’re talking about, you don’t bother recapitulating like they do in bad fiction—‘As you know, Chang, those crivits guard our prison camps’ and so on. But then when Diana hung up, Chang immediately called Leon and warned him about following through with his plans without Diana’s approval.”

  “And those plans,” Anne said, “appear to include taking breeding pairs of this new variety of crivit to certain locations we haven’t been able to identify, and there let them go.”

  “I keep on feeling,” Steve Wong said, “that there’s more to it than that, but I can’t point to any particular phrase or sentence in the transcriptions to support that.”

  “That could be pretty disruptive all by itself,” JoAnn said. “You know what the crivits have done over at Attweiler’s farm.”

  “We know they’re chewing up one of his fields,” Steve said, “and that you had a hell of a time catching one this afternoon.”

  “Crivits are pretty nasty,” JoAnn said, and described the one they’d caught to the computer scientists.

  “My God,” Anne said, “we can’t have creatures like that running loose all up and down the East Coast.”

  “That would take care of tourism on the beaches, for sure,” Steve agreed.

  “It may not be as bad as we think,” Lucia said. “Crivits are strongly limited in two ways. First, they can’t go where the soil is too dense. Attweiler’s field is just marginal. Put one out in your front yard, and it would be helpless. And second, as a carnivore it needs a large prey population. Though we think it’s reptile, it eats the way a mammal does—as do the Visitors too, of course. The sandy areas of the East Coast tend to have less wildlife than elsewhere, and so the number of crivits can’t ever get too large.”

  “You don’t need many tigers,” Steve said, “to make the jungle dangerous.”

  “1 agree,” Lucia replied, “and that’s the real threat. Not that crivits will multiply extravagantly, but that even one is enough to make a farm unusable, a beach too hazardous to visit. It isn’t that people will be eaten in large numbers, but that thousands of acres of land will be unavailable to us, and some of that land is valuable for reasons other than tourism or crops. Imagine what would happen down at Fort Bragg, for example, with all the sand they’ve got there.” “Rather academic,” Mark said, “since the base has been closed.”

  “True, but there are other places. No, I agree, the monsters have to be stopped, but for economic reasons rather than because they’re a great threat to human life.” “The trick is,” JoAnn said, “that once they’re loose, you have no idea where they are. Where their environment is marginal, you can hear them burrowing, but the softer the sand, the more quiet they are.”

  “So what are we going to do about it?” Mark asked. “If Leon doesn’t have Diana’s full approval, we might stop him by letting Diana know what he’s up to and letting her take care of it.”

  “We don’t know that she would,” Anne said, “and besides, if we lodged any kind of complaint, they’d know that their headquarters were bugged, and we’d lose whatever advantage we have because of that.”

  “But if we don’t,” Steve said, “we may lose control of a large portion of the East Coast. What good are bugs then?” “We need to know more,” Lucia said. “Obviously, part of the problem is that you don’t have any direct intelligence from the breeding station. If you could get a bug on their lines, that could make a lot of difference.”

  “We could give it a try,” Steve said dubiously, “if we can just get ourselves to the place without being seen.” “That may be possible,” Lucia said, and told them about the mine Durk Attweiler had described to her.

  “That sounds interesting,” Mark said. “We’ll have to check that out.”

  “Especially,” Shirley said, “if that will give us a clue as to where this Camp T-3 is.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Lucia said.

  The computer scientists filled her in on what they’d been able to learn of the secret prison camp so far. “If we can locate the place,” Mark concluded, “we might be able to help a few people escape. Would Corey and Fenister be interested in a project like that?”

  “I’m sure they would,” JoAnn said, “but Fenister isn’t going to be doing much for the next few days.” She explained about his minor but disabling injuries.

  “I don’t think we’re ready for that kind of rebel activity,” Lucia said. “We’ve been lucky that there’s been practically no fighting in the Triangle area, but at the same time that means we have nobody who’s had combat experience.” “I know,” Mark said, “but we’re going to have to start sometime.”

  Leon and Freda walked between the stacks of verlog cages. The animals inside seemed to be doing well—they were healthy and plump.

  “The breeding rate for this variety,” Freda said, “is very good. Four litters a year, ten pups each, and they reach breeding maturity in half a year.”

  “They’re also tastier than the more common variety,” Leon said. “Of course, it takes a lot of food to keep them going, but we should have no trouble with that.”

  “They’ll taste even better,” Freda said, “when they have access to natural forage instead of this silage.” She led him over to a series of cages kept separate from the others, against the side wall of the bam toward the back. “Like these,” she said. “This group has been getting mostly oak and hickory.” Instead of feed troughs, these cages had a special box on the front into which leaves and twigs had been stuffed. “These here have been fed pine—it gives an interesting piquancy to the taste. Cedar makes the flesh a bit too strong. Swe
etgum, though, and yellow poplar are also nice.”

  “Let’s have one along with dinner tonight,” Leon suggested, “as a treat.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Freda said. She reached into one of the cages where a verlog slightly smaller than a cat was munching on yellow-poplar leaves. The animal froze as her hand touched it. She lifted it out, closed the cage, and the other animals inside went back to their perpetual eating.

  “Ever tried human?” Freda asked as they took the animal out of the bam.

  “Once. Very complex flavor, as you’d guess from their mixed diet. How about you?”

  “One time. Too sweet for my taste.”

  They went into the “kitchen” of the house and handed the verlog to Edmond, whose turn it was to prepare supper that night. He already had the serving cages of birds and rodents set out, so he started to prepare the verlog at once while Freda went to call the others. He was an expert butcher and had the cups of blood and plates of meat strips all ready by the time the rest of the staff had assembled.

  They had just started eating when the communicator in the upstairs office chimed.

  “Damn,” Leon said. He picked up one slice of verlog and went up to answer the call.

  He chewed the meat, instead of just swallowing it whole, in order to savor the subtle spiciness of the flavor. He sat at the communicator; hit the “acknowledge” button, and gulped hurriedly when Diana’s image came on the screen.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt your supper,” Diana said, not sounding sorry at all. “I assume Administrator Chang gave you my message earlier today.”

  “Yes, Diana, she did. I was disappointed to receive it, but I agree that your objections are valid.”

  “We cannot risk destroying this environment,” Diana said, “the way we did our own back home. Your ideas are bold, Leon, but I’m not sure you fully appreciate the consequences.”