The Darwin Strain

by Bill Schutt

  “And so nice to see both of you, as well,” Nesbitt said.

  “Save it, Nora,” Knight said. “Why don’t you just tell us why you’re here?”

  “The truth is, I’m doing a follow-up to the Himalayan expedition and I needed to check a few things.”

  “Follow-up for whom?” the elderly artist shot back.

  Their former museum colleague ignored the question. Instead she took a quick glance around the room, which was in an even greater state of disarray than usual. “Looks like Mac left in a hurry. He must be in the field, huh?”

  “Back to central Brazil,” Knight replied, a bit too quickly. “Looking for prehistoric horses.”

  “Bit of a homecoming too,” Patricia chimed in, attempting to salvage the story. “For Yanni, that is.”

  Nesbitt responded with a wry grin. “Personally, I think you’re going to need a better cover story.”

  “Well, then I guess you got some bad information,” Knight said, once again trying to sound convincing, but failing miserably.

  Instead of attempting a further rebuttal, Nesbitt produced a color photograph from her bag and passed it to the artist. It showed a single elongated digit—a finger, though far too long to be human. Seemingly tanned like leather, the flesh was covered in what appeared to be red velvet. The two researchers examined the photo silently for several seconds before Nesbitt cleared her throat. “Look familiar?”

  Patricia shook her head. “Not in the least.”

  Charles Knight gave a slight shoulder shrug. “Haven’t got a clue.”

  “Look,” Nesbit said, making no attempt to hide her disappointment. “I’m trying to have a serious conversation here.”

  “Please hurry, dear,” Patricia said. “We’ve really got a ton of work to do.”

  “Okay, then let’s get right down to it,” Nesbitt said. “You do remember that red microbe I discovered in Tibet? The one that can speed up the process of evolution, maybe extend life, cure the sick?”

  Patricia Wynters clenched her teeth, as if trying to keep her jaw from dropping open.

  “You discovered?” Knight said, with a derisive laugh, his response eliciting a near-instantaneous wince from Patricia.

  Dr. Nora Nesbitt smiled her unpleasant smile again. “You two would make terrible spies,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Maybe it’s because we deal in facts,” Patricia followed. “In our world, deception is a bit harder to see—kind of gets lost in the peripheral vision. Can you say the same?”

  “All right, so let’s kill the BS,” said Knight. “Get to the point or get out!”

  The biologist remained calm. “You both know as well as I do that we have to keep a lid on something.”

  “That’s an interesting concept,” Patricia said, gesturing toward Mac’s notebooks.

  Nesbitt ignored the comment. “On Plum Island, my coworkers and I have been running tests on a small sample of the red microbe that came into my possession. You can see it in that photo.”

  “You mean the photo of the sample you stole?” Knight interjected. “And then smuggled out of Tibet?”

  Nesbitt shrugged. “Collected/stole, exported/smuggled. It’s all semantics.”

  “As I understand it,” Knight said, “one mission requirement was not to bring anything alive out of those valleys.”

  “And how do you know what my mission was? Have you been given clearance, up to that level?”

  Silence.

  “Well, let me fill you in,” Nesbitt said. “You have.”

  “Clearance by whom?” Patricia asked. “And why?”

  “Not that we give two . . . licks,” Knight said, angrily.

  “The first part of that question isn’t important right now. As for why: For one, you already know most of the story. Plus you’ve all developed a little more expertise on the biology and history of today’s lost worlds than I’d been led to believe.”

  “You’d been led to believe?” Knight said, growing even more annoyed.

  “Yes,” Nesbitt continued, “just like I believe—know—that Mac’s nowhere near Brazil, and that Yanni’s involved in this little excursion as well.”

  “And what if she is?” Patricia asked.

  “Such an interesting woman. You know, I’ve heard from one of our contacts in Brazil that she was a very strange child. That would be consistent with her incomparable, empathic connections with whales and elephants—and who knows what else in the pantheon of animals.”

  “So what?” Knight said.

  “So,” Nesbitt replied, “a little birdie tells me Mac’s meeting up with this Cousteau fella—which means they’re in the water. And Yanni’s along for the ride. Now, please don’t tell me another strange animal’s involved.”

  “I’m thinking it’s sharks,” Patricia said.

  “So what do you think?” Knight asked. “Is it fish for breakfast, for you? Or vice-versa?”

  Nesbitt rolled her eyes and allowed Knight to finish.

  “And if you’re planning on swiping more of that stuff—stuff that’s been nothing but trouble, I’ll be rooting for the sharks.”

  “Look, we’re scientists,” Nesbitt said, with a hint of exasperation. “Have you ever heard of anyone going out on an expedition and not collecting samples? It’s how we learn.”

  “And so here you are,” Patricia said, motioning toward Mac’s stacked papers, “sampling someone’s personal property, all in the name of science. Isn’t that right, my dear?”

  The invertebrate biologist said nothing.

  “I thought so,” Patricia said, before casting for a little more information herself. “So what sorts of experiments have you been running for the past two years?”

  “I’m afraid to ask,” muttered Knight. “Found anything Mac and Yanni should be warned about? Anything interesting?”

  “Maybe,” she replied. “And certainly.”

  “Then spill it,” Knight said sternly.

  “After all,” Patricia followed, “we have been given clearance, haven’t we, Nora?”

  Nesbitt smiled her mirthless smile at the tag team. “As I’ve already said, you’re cleared, if you really want to hear it. But in return for what Mac needs to know—and you can watch over me while I do it—I’ll need to continue going through his notes.”

  Knight shook his head, “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  Nesbitt nodded, solemnly. “Look, if there are more of these microbes out there, and if Mac’s written anything down somewhere, or if you know anything about it—then I need to know. ’Cause there sure as shit isn’t much here.”

  The two friends turned to each other, each seeking approval for what they were about to do. Finally, Patricia gave Nesbitt the slightest of nods, but the point was clear. You first.

  “Our experiments started out as rather simple ones, really. You’re both familiar with fruit flies, right?” Nora asked, cheerily, sounding more like the young researcher they had grown to admire two years earlier, but a little more arrogant as well.

  “Do we look like nitwits?” Knight snapped. “Drosophila.”

  “Long chromosomes and short life spans,” Patricia responded, maintaining her genial air. “That makes them great subjects for genetics experiments.”

  “It’s funny you should mention that last bit,” Nesbitt said. “Have you ever heard of fruit flies living for two years?”

  “Nonsense,” Knight said, with a contemptuous wave. “What species are you talking about? Drosophila melanogaster live for maybe forty-five days. Fifty, tops.” He turned to Patricia. “Who ever heard of such a thing?”

  “Well . . . now you have,” Nesbitt said, allowing herself yet another smile.

  “So?” Knight followed.

  Nesbitt looked down at the stacked notebooks and scraps of paper. “So . . . now Mac inexplicably cancels a return expedition to Brazil—a trip that he’d been anticipating for—what? At least two years. And right after that I find a pair of references to ‘scarlet scratisfortum’ a
nd ‘red moctus proctus’— Just those four words, and not even a sentence fragment to go with them.”

  Patricia and Knight exchanged brief looks at the mention of Mac and Yanni’s double-talk–inspired code words.

  “Hmmm,” Nesbitt said, studying their expressions. “I wonder what he’s talking about?”

  “No clue,” Knight responded, trying plainly not to detonate the last remains of a blown cover story. “So, not to change the subject too much, but after two years I’m betting your experiments have moved on to something a little more interesting than fruit flies. You want to talk about it?”

  “Not today. Now, do you want to talk about what new animal Yanni’s been sent to investigate?”

  “Not today,” Knight replied.

  “No, Nora, not today,” Patricia emphasized.

  Then, having all agreed on what was currently off-limits, the uneasy trio continued discussing what wasn’t.

  June 30, 1948

  Santorini

  “Mac, Yanni has always been kinda—you know, spooky,” Bob Thorne had explained four years earlier. It was an abbreviated explanation from MacCready’s late best friend, but necessary, from almost the very start, down in Brazil.

  “Spooky?”

  “Yeah, ‘woooo-woooo’ and all that supernatural shit. The assholes ’round here think she’s some kinda witch.” It was a designation that had been just fine with Bob, because mostly it meant that everyone left Yanni alone.

  It was also something she carried with her after Bob had died and she’d accompanied Mac to New York. There the outsider effect took the form of a resistance by her coworkers and even some of Mac’s colleagues. One recurring bone of contention was her insistence that in many places and in many different ways, evolution had probably been marching toward the rise of intelligent life. Nonhuman life.

  “Where,” Mac had been asked, “is the academic training that might justify a statement like that?”

  Mac knew better—knew more, in fact, than he was allowed to tell the critics. He had seen Yanni in action (as had a very select handful of others she’d allowed into her life). And no one who had seen her at work would ever look at elephants, beluga whales—or even a common house cat—in quite the same way again.

  “The things we refer to as ‘dumb animals’ are not so far below us as we humans want to believe,” she had explained. Beluga whales have their own language, she insisted. Then she went out and proved it, fully realizing that more than a year’s work had revealed only the tiniest part of the whale’s language repertoire, but a means of higher communication nonetheless.

  Elephants had been far easier. “All the human emotions are there,” she explained, and added, “Even the zoo’s lions mourn their dead.”

  And although Mac knew what the answer would be, he asked her yet again—as always, expecting something a bit more. “So, remind me how you’re able to figure all of this out?”

  But once again, her answer was much the same, explaining almost nothing, yet at the same time perhaps explaining everything. Mac was not sure he even had the necessary talent to puzzle it out. “I don’t know how I do it,” Yanni said. “I just do it. Being able to know what an animal feels—especially the smarter ones—at first it’s kind of like just bits and pieces. If you keep at it, those bits and pieces come together and eventually something like a crude sculpture forms in your mind.”

  “A sculpture?” Mac asked.

  “Hey, I’ve told you it’s hard to explain.”

  “Okay, go on.”

  “With some animals that’s as far as it goes, but with others, like elephants and whales and—” Yanni paused.

  And giant vampire bats, Mac thought but did not say.

  “Well, if you really keep at it, eventually, there you are, seeing this beautiful finished work of art through the animal’s eyes.”

  Mac was coming to the conclusion that he could never really fathom how she did it. For the moment, it was enough for him that Yanni was able to keep childhood’s sense of wonder alive in him. Her peculiarities were a sufficiently large enigma all by themselves, even without the possible reemergence of a mysterious microbe, the unearthing of Alan Tse-lin’s ancient bonobo culture, or Cousteau’s encounter with shape-shifting marine predators.

  June 30, 1948

  Central Park West, New York City

  In a sparsely furnished apartment several blocks away from the Metropolitan Museum of Natural History, two men were huddled over a table-mounted radio receiver. One of them suddenly removed a set of headphones, pushed back his chair, and stood. “Bango!” he whispered loudly.

  His partner shot him a quizzical look.

  “It is American slang. It means, We win!”

  The pair had been monitoring the fifth floor of the museum for nearly two years, since the delivery, as “a gift” to MacCready’s department, of history’s first electronic musical instrument. On one side, it displayed a personal presentation plaque from its Russian inventor, Leon Theremin. The Russian had also equipped his gift with a covert listening device of his own design. The tiny apparatus, which would come to be known in espionage circles as “the Thing,” consisted of a capacitive membrane connected to a small antenna. With no power supply, it could be turned on only by a radio signal of the correct frequency. Once “illuminated” by that signal, sounds from the room set the membrane vibrating, transmitting conversations to the antenna first, then to a remotely located receiver.

  For months it had stood in the office of Charles Knight, providing the Russians with plenty of information about Tasmanian tigers, the mating habits of Rhedosaurus elsoni, and finally a species of wooly mammoth with two very dexterous trunks—but essentially transmitting nothing of value.

  Then something quite fortuitous occurred, although it took the Russians several days to realize it. What was clear from the conversations they’d monitored was that the theremin had been temporarily moved into MacCready’s office to give the artist Knight a bit more room. During the first few days, only the once-daily entrance of the custodial crew broke the silence. It also became clear that MacCready was gone—although the two spies had no idea where he went.

  The monotony was finally broken by the sound of the door opening and closing quietly. Moments later, something slammed down close enough to the microphone that they were both jolted in their seats. The pair exchanged pained looks. They could hear drawers opened and closed and objects being moved. For nearly an hour there were no sounds besides some faint shuffling—until the office door opened again.

  “Patricia. Charles,” said a female voice, cheerily.

  “Find everything you need?” came the voice of another woman.

  The pair of Russian agents listened carefully until the three Americans eventually left the room and, once again, there was only silence.

  Seven floors below the sparsely furnished apartment, amid the noisy bustle of traffic and pedestrians on Central Park West, no one could see and few could have imagined that, so near to them, Russian agents had been watching and listening, and were transcribing notes at a furious pace.

  “Not today,” the one called Knight said.

  “No, Nora, not today,” his female colleague emphasized.

  Knight continued. “So, speaking of ‘what Mac needs to know,’ we’re thinking you should hold up your side of the bargain.”

  “If you want to see any more of his notebooks, that is.”

  “Or if you want to know what we know.”

  After a brief wash of static, Nesbitt’s voice responded, “Once we got home from Tibet, any of us who encountered the um . . . red moctus proctus had to give samples of blood, saliva, and hair.” Static rose and fell again.

  “—then what?”

  “Hendry saw the report and I’m sure he understood the meaning of it. He was cleared to give Mac the results.”

  “And what was in those results?”

  “There’s a problem with Yanni.”

  At the same hour that two Russians in
a Manhattan listening post completed their initial report on the broadcast from Mac’s office, R. J. MacCready was staring up into the incomparable depth and beauty of the Milky Way. He had followed a Santorini road to an overlook on the lagoon, lit only by starlight. The sea was so calm, and the stars so bright, that they reflected in the lagoon as if it were a polished black mirror. Mac always loved the night sky.

  “Won’t see this in New York City,” a voice behind him said suddenly. Yanni had followed him out to the overlook, undetected until she spoke.

  Mac nodded. “Yeah. What do we got in the city—maybe five stars if we’re lucky?”

  “I’ve forgotten how much I miss this.”

  Tonight, each could see the details in the Milky Way’s dust lanes more clearly than ever before, and each suspected that this new sharpness of vision was the unprecedented side effect of something to which they’d both been exposed. Two years earlier Mac had been told that eyeglasses were in his near future. Now, though, he could tell planets apart by the faint glimmer of the two largest Jovian moons or the slightly oblong shape of Saturn and its rings.

  In the lagoon below, a black shape eclipsed a small patch of reflected stars.

  “You see that?” Mac asked, pointing to the silhouette.

  “Looks like a boat.”

  “Yeah. Anything seem odd to you?”

  “She looks adrift. No lights and no one on deck.”

  “No one?” Mac asked, squinting into the night.

  Yanni shook her head. “And it’s drifting away from where Cousteau’s vent’s supposed to be.”

  Mac laughed. “Your eyes have gotten even better than mine.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Yanni replied. “Side effects of the last vacation you took me on.”

  Mac thought back to Tibet and to the “stuff” they’d found growing there—stuff that could reverse the effects of altitude sickness, heal wounds, and which had evidently sped up evolution, perhaps even on an up-close-and-personal scale. Once we drank the contaminated water, ate what grew there, Mac told himself, a new kind of fuse was lit. It had all been capped off by the grotto Nesbitt stumbled into—the entire site covered in bright scarlet growth. Once we breathed the grotto’s air . . .