“Kelly!” the colonel shouted. Communications above the roar was barely possible. “Set the bomb to detonate on impact!”
“Are you crazy?” Kelly yelled, disarming the bomb. “We’re too low to bail out!”
“I know! But we’ve got to! They’re in my head!”
“He is crazy,” Kelly muttered, jettisoning the fuse and bracing for a crash. He hit the lever to jettison the fuel, but he knew he was too late.
The huge plane came in near the center of the valley and erupted in a spray of broken wood and torn aluminum. The wings sheared off, engines ripped loose, and nearly full fuel tanks ruptured. Orange flames and black smoke poured through houses and into basements. Huddled people screamed and died.
One wing tank spun into Pinecroft’s side and burst and burned. The entire side of the hundred-foot-tall tree was a blanket of flame. It went through the windows and up and down the elevator shaft.
Mona and Patricia made it to the surface in Mack, a TRAC tanker loaded with water. They set him to spraying those walls that were not yet burning, and got out.
Copernick’s fauns, Colleen and Ohura, ran out of the tree house, each carrying a human baby. Most of Ohura’s black hair was burned off.
“My babies!” Mona screamed.
The fauns handed the unharmed Copernick children to Mona and Patricia, then turned back to the burning tree house.
When Colleen and Ohura ran inside, they found the elevator bouncing rapidly, convulsed with pain. They ran to the staircase, reaching it just as burning jet fuel was starting to dribble down. Without hesitation they ran up the stairs through the flames. Their hoofs provided some protection, but the fur on Ohura’s legs caught fire midway up. She continued upward to the fauns’ room before throwing herself to the floor and rolling on the carpet to put out the flames.
Cradled in soft niches on Pinecroft’s second floor, the four baby fauns each still lay on its back contently sucking the treenipple just above its mouth.
While Ohura flailed at her smoldering fur, Colleen took the babies from their niches. As Ohura finished she picked up one of her own children and one of Colleen’s. Each carrying two fauns, Colleen and Ohura bounded for the corridor.
The fire and smoke in the hallway had grown much worse, and the fauns had to crawl, babies clutched to their breasts, groping then-way to the service stairway, Colleen in the lead. A wall of flames shot up between them and Ohura gasped, involuntarily inhaling the fire, singeing her lungs. She couldn’t breathe or speak, and the world started to become dark gray. As she became unconscious, she tucked the two children under her, trying to protect them from the heat with her own body.
Colleen reached the service staircase before she realized that Ohura wasn’t behind her. She hesitated for a second, then turned back to grope blindly for her sister. As she crawled, a branch that had supported the third floor gave way, smashing the bones of her left knee and pinning her to the floor. The smoke cleared for an instant and she saw Ohura a few feet in front of her.
“Ohura! I’m over here!” But Ohura didn’t move.
The log pinning Colleen down was two feet in diameter and fifteen yards long. Colleen struggled helplessly, rolling over, trying to rip her own leg off. Anything to save herself and her children.
Suddenly an LDU darted through the smoke, his body silvery white to reflect the heat. His lateral tentacles grabbed for Ohura and the two babies were quickly secured to his underside.
The LDU turned its attention to the trapped faun. I’m Dirk, Colleen.” He tried to lift the log from her leg but failed. “Better give me the children. I can’t move this log.”
The flames were rapidly approaching them as Colleen gave up the baby fauns. The pain in her leg was unbearable. Death would be welcome.
“Sorry, Colleen.” Dirk tapped her behind the head, knocking her unconscious, ending the pain. Then he wrapped a tentacle tightly around her left thigh and with one whack of a dagger-claw severed the leg above the knee.
Dirk placed Colleen next to Ohura and the four baby fauns and raced down the burning stairway to safety.
Copernick stayed at his post in the communications center, giving an almost continuous stream of rational orders to the CCU, most of which had been anticipated and were being put into effect before they were received. Guibedo stayed at his nephew’s side, occasionally making suggestions.
“Get as many of the crew out as possible,” Copernick said. “Give them medical treatment in preference to our own people if necessary. We need the bastards.”
LDUs waded ankle deep through burning gasoline, slashing through aluminum and boron-fiber composite with their knife-claws, searching out every scrap of human flesh in the burning bomber.
Tree houses over an entire square mile were searched for the injured, the dying, and the dead.
The fire did not spread past the second subbasement of Copernick’s complex, because of Pinecroft’s green growing wood and the efficiency of the LDUs.
Hundreds of injured people and animals were brought to the third-level medical center. Among them, near the end of the list, were Ohura, with third-degree burns over eighty percent of her body, and Colleen, battered but still alive.
Liebchen was with them, holding four uninjured baby fauns, the size of squirrels.
“Dirk pulled you all out. He says that you’re going to be okay in a month,” Liebchen said. Ohura’s lungs were too seared for her to speak, but she smiled slightly.
“Are our babies all right?” Colleen’s eyes were swollen shut.
“I’ve got them all right here. They’re fine. Lady Mona said you two did everything perfect,” Liebchen said.
“Oh, good. I hope Pinecroft’ll be all right,” Colleen said, before putting herself to sleep.
“What’s the status on the bomber crew?”
“Six of the original eight are alive, my lord. Three of those are capable of talking. Their flight orders were signed by Major General Hastings, chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency.”
“Hastings, huh?” Copernick said. “That’s perfect, politically. I want those three men programmed to make complete confessions to the news media, and I want it done in three hours. They are to say that they had orders to drop an atomic bomb on American citizens, and that they would have done so if their plane had not developed engine trouble. Call for volunteers among the valley’s citizens. I need all roads out of the valley blocked by ‘refugees’ for three hours. We need time to set the stage before the newsmen get here.”
Guibedo said, “What do you figure that’s going to accomplish, Heiny?”
“We were lucky this tune, and we can’t repeat the performance. Bringing that plane down cost us five hundred birds.
“CCU. See that all of the birds are cleaned out of the wreckage. I don’t want the government to know that we have any capability of fighting back. Save any birds that can be saved and… give the rest an honorable burial.
“Uncle Martin, our only hope is to kick up so much political flack that our opponents will wait a few months before attacking again. And with luck, by then they won’t have anything to attack with.”
“Heiny, it’s time we let our bugs loose.”
“Do you want the honor, Uncle Martin?”
“Yah. Now I want the honor. Telephone! Do it!”
In subbasements below their feet, long ceiling-high racks were filled with white eggs the size of beachballs, each connected by a black umbilical cord to the mother—being and by a thin pink string to the CCU.
The eggs began to open. By the thousands, full-sized swans broke soundlessly from their shells and started their silent, orderly, mindless procession upward. They climbed the wide circular ramp four hundred feet to the surface, and beyond, through the burned-out shell that was Pinecroft. They climbed until they were a hundred feet above the ground then dove into the night air. The great white birds circled high, then each flew off to its own separate destination.
Guibedo climbed Pinecroft. Still a wanted man, he c
ouldn’t attend the press conference at the auditorium, but he could see the flash of strobes, the milling crowds. None of Copernick’s creations was in sight. They had been hidden, and the valley’s citizens had been cautioned not to mention them.
He could make out the long line of beds set up near the band shell, an outdoor hospital and morgue.
Guibedo watched the swans flying high and away. “Fly high, my pretty friends. Do your job, and this will never happen again.”
Each of the myriad birds headed to its five-square—mile target zone, then started flying a zigzag pattern. At four-second intervals, it discharged two mosquitoes, one a shiny aluminum, the other a duller iron. When it had discharged 1,024 of each insect, it froze in the air, its programming and life completed. It fell to the ground and became fertilizer for the food-making tree in its breast.
Each of the mosquitoes sought out metal. A car, a plane, a tin can. It laid an egg and flew on to do it again, a thousand times more. And then it died.
Each egg hatched and grew into a larva which, in three days’ time, would eat two ounces of metal and then become a mosquito and lay a thousand eggs of its own.
They would do this for eighty generations, and then their short-lived race would become extinct. Or rather, would try to, for after forty generations there would be neither iron nor aluminum nor any of their alloys left in an unoxidized state on Earth.
Patricia Cambridge came up and stood at Martin Guibedo’s side.
“There were too many old colleagues at the press conference. It sort of hurt, seeing them again. We talked, but I wasn’t one of them anymore.”
“It doesn’t matter, Patty. The world you knew has ended. Now we will build a better one.”
Patricia thought he was talking of love, and snuggled closer.
Chapter Nine
JUNE 20, 2003
MAINTENANCE of a proper resource allocation scheme will require a continuously updated local census of the humans and other bioforms under our jurisdiction.
Local ganglia are therefore instructed to inform me of all human activities within their assigned areas.
—Central Coordination Unit
“I’m sorry that it had to be you, George,” General Powers said. “You were right in doing what you did, and it certainly wasn’t your fault that the bomber crashed. But political realities force me to relieve you of your command.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Officially, our position is that you went insane because of the death of your family some years ago. You will be assigned to a psychiatric ward under sedation for about a month. By that time we should have a final solution to this bioengineering problem, and your name can be cleared,” Powers said.
“A month or so in the funny farm won’t kill me, sir.”
“No point in that. I said ‘officially.’ Actually, I’d just like you to go away for a while. Take a vacation somewhere. You’ll know when you should come back.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“And have a good time.”
Hastings cut himself a set of orders assigning himself to the 315th Fighter-Bomber Squadron at Westover Field, Massachusetts. Then he cut a second set reassigning himself, his plane, and one atomic bomb to the Naval Testing Lab in San Diego.
Eight hours after leaving General Powers’ office, Hastings was flying his F-38 Penetrator at forty thousand feet over the Utah desert. Death Valley was thirty minutes away.
“Like the man said, if you want something done right, you’d better do it yourself,” Hastings said aloud to himself.
Directly below him, a single mindless larva was sinking its solid diamond teeth into a contact pin of an electrical connector. This connector was mounted directly to the solid-fuel rocket that powered the F-38’s ejection seat. The contact tasted bad, like gold, so the larva crawled to the next pin to see if it was aluminum. In the process, its aluminum body touched both contacts simultaneously and the resulting electrical current killed it. It also ignited the solid fuel rocket, which blasted Hastings out through the F-38’s plastic canopy.
Hastings was unconscious, but his flight suit had been designed for use at L-5. It protected him from the cold and near vacuum. At five thousand feet, his parachute opened automatically.
The plane had been set on full automatic and programmed to fly to San Diego, so that its transponder could assure Ground Control that the aircraft’s flight plan was being followed. It continued the journey without pilot or canopy, made a perfect landing on its assigned runway, and stopped, awaiting further instructions. Within minutes it was visited by an egg-laying mosquito.
The crash truck was unable to go out to the plane to investigate. A larva had eaten a hole in the truck’s fuel pump.
The swans looked like ordinary birds, and so attracted little attention. Bored radar operators noticed unusual migration patterns, and properly logged them. But the logs were not due to reach the scientific community for months, and actually would never be examined at all.
Each swan died and fell in the center of its assigned area. Copernick had decided that the food trees, and thus the population, should be scattered as far as possible, to limit the possibility of riots and plagues and to keep them isolated when they occurred.
But if the scientific community failed to notice the swans, the animal community did not. Over half the fallen swans were eaten by animals or other birds. This possibility had been taken into account. The seeds were hard, small, and indigestible. They sprouted, absorbing the flesh around them. The scavengers died, and provided additional fertilizer.
Less than a hundred swans were eaten by people, and cooking destroyed most of the seeds. In eleven cases the swans were not properly cooked, and the people died.
But people who eat raw carrion do not notify authorities when a death occurs. Nor do they perform autopsies or embalm their dead. The trees grew.
Two hundred and eighteen professional biologists across the world found first-generation larvae and excitedly took them into labs to study. Incredible! An insect with a biochemistry different from anything previously known. They hurriedly prepared preliminary reports, each expecting to be the first to publish.
A first-generation larva had been laid on the wing of a DC-16. Unnoticed in the course of three days, it ate its way into the tubular aluminum wing strut. There it metamorphosed into a mosquito, which was unable to fly out of the two hundred-foot sealed chamber. It laid its thousand eggs along the length of the wing and died.
Two days later a thousand larvae were contentedly munching away. Eleven hundred passengers were aboard the Qantas airliner, with a crew of forty taking them from Los Angeles where it was midsummer to Melbourne in the middle of its whiter. Skirting a hurricane south of Hawaii, the left whig sheared off. There were no survivors.
* * *
Another first-generation egg was laid on the side of an aging space shuttle. It was just burrowing its way into the cabin at takeoff, and the small air leak wasn’t noticed until the ship was in orbit. The larva ate its way into the cargo compartment and then into the chassis of a strip-chart recorder. With its cargo unloaded at a station in a low polar orbit, the shuttle returned. Its departure left the wheel-shaped space station with only one small ship capable of landing on Earth. The larva metamorphosed in a biology lab during a sleep period and laid eight hundred eggs before an astronomer swatted it. None of these eggs reached maturity; many of them were blown out into space when they ate through the outer walls. The rest died when the station became airless.
Thanks to automatic alarms, 820 of the station’s 957 people aboard were able to get into intact space suits in time.
By then no spacecraft on Earth was able to take off, primarily due to punctures in their fuel tanks.
Due to their low polar orbit, no other station could help them in time.
The station’s only functional ship was capable of landing a cargo of only twelve thousand pounds. The station commander, a 180-pound man, decided to save the maximum number of people, and s
o ordered the ship to be filled on the basis of weight. There were no acts of violence, and only minimal objections to the plan. One hundred and nineteen persons, mostly small women, were loaded aboard.
The ship made it safely to Earth. Seven hundred and one people in orbit died with dignity.
They would have received more sympathy if those on Earth hadn’t had troubles of their own.
The metallic larvae ate thin sheet metal along its entire thickness, cutting irregular slashes in car fenders, aircraft wings, and missile hulls.
Fuel tanks were among the first components to be rendered useless. While two percent of the world’s aircraft crashed and one percent of the land vehicles were wrecked due to mechanical failures, the great majority of them sat on their runways and driveways and simply fell to pieces.
The left engine on Lou von Bork’s Cessna 882 Super Conquest died within a second of the right.
“Seat belts, gang!” He shouted over the intercom: “We are going down.”
Senator Beinheimer had been dozing in the copilot’s chair. “What? What’s up, Lou, boy?”
“It looks like we’re out of fuel, Moe.” Von Bork tried to restart the turbo props, then gave up and feathered his propellers.
“Out of fuel? But we just tanked up at Fort Scott!” Beinheimer said.
“I know, but for the last ten minutes the fuel gauges have been moving left like you wouldn’t believe. I was hoping that it was an electrical problem until the motors quit. We must have sprung a leak.”
“Oh. My. God.”
“It’s not that bad, Moe. We’re still at thirty-one thousand feet, so we have ten minutes to find a soft place to land. And in Kanssas, that’s not all that hard to do. At least I think we’re still in Kansas.”
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