“Richards? We should start worrying more about ourselves. The hell with Richards— ”
“You know what the Commissioner said.”
“The hell with him as well.”
Khomich stared out at huge blurred shapes in the middle-distance. “You are a very brave man, Professor, I would have let Magruder be torn to pieces by that creature rather than go within a mile of it. When you and I first met, I was jealous of your courage in facing Towne. I told myself you were simply a stupid scientist who had never seen the reality of a Security Department basement but I was wrong.” He hesitated. “You do not like me, but will you take my advice?”
“Let’s hear what it is.”
“Professor—if the Commissioner had Larson thrown out of a window as a precaution, what do you think he would do to you—somebody he knows is his enemy?”
“Let him try—I’ve survived three years in the Out- lands, I guess I can keep out of Towne’s hands.”
“To get out of here we will have to go through that process. Who knows what orders Towne might give to Major Wollaston?”
“You mean—have me killed before I got back to full-size?”
“Yes.”
“You think Towne’s as mad as all that?”
“It is very possible.”
“Christ. So there’s nothing I can do?”
“Yes there is. He is obsessed by his fears of a conspiracy. That is why we are here—to make Richards tell us who the Commissioner’s enemies are. As long as we have Richards, we are safe. Magruder has told Robinson that he is willing to testify against Richards. If we have them both in our custody, they will be our insurance. And once we are back to normal, you will have a chance to escape from the Commissioner.”
“I shouldn’t have thought it would worry you whether I lived or died, Khomich.”
Khomich looked down at the marks his boot was making on the dull white marble. “I respect any man who is braver than myself,” he said quietly.
‘‘Okay then, that’s it. We press on as fast as possible and find Richards and then get the hell out of this place.” He touched Khomich’s arm. ‘‘I really mean it, Khomich— thank you.”
Khomich looked away, embarrassed. They climbed down.
‘‘We’ll look for a place to pitch the tent,” Bruce said. ‘‘We must be under shelter by twilight.”
‘‘There isn’t much twilight down here,” said Lena. ‘‘Suddenly, everything is just switched off.”
Bruce was waist-high in glossy leaves edged with fine hairs, holding onto an upright periwinkle flower stem as he held out his right hand to help Anne up through the overhanging creeper onto the solid edge. Slowly, he pulled her up through the creeping stems and big green leaves until she got her knees onto solid ground and scrambled to her feet. For a moment, she lost balance. He caught hold of her arms. Their faces were very close.
“I’m sorry,” she said, in a strangely emphatic way.
“What for?”
“What you did back there was just about the bravest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“No, I’ve worked with insects all my life, that one was just a little bigger— ”
“I didn’t mean that. When you refused to leave Stanley behind—and then you were going to shoot Khomich . . .”
“It wasn’t going to come to that.”
“I have to tell you this. We were going to abandon you and the soldiers. I didn’t want George to be arrested. We were going to leave you without the radio once we were over the top.”
“Whose idea was that?”
“Stanley’s.”
He snorted. “And I was facing up to Khomich for the young creep! What made you change your mind?”
“I suddenly realized—when Khomich wanted to leave Stanley behind—I was becoming as mad as everybody else connected with this loathsome place.”
“If you hate it so much, why did you get involved with it?”
“You know George. He’s a megalomaniac and a bully. He made me come. I was scared to death every single minute, but he didn’t care.”
“You sound as if you hate him.”
“Do I?” She looked genuinely puzzled. Seeing Carr’s brown face looking up at them through the creeper, he took her arm and started up the slope again. Ahead, he saw Robinson and Khomich. He kept his voice down.
“Who else knows about this place among the senior staff at Geneva?”
“I don’t think there’s anybody. George said nobody would take the project seriously until he could produce concrete evidence that it was viable.”
“How was he going to do that?”
“He has a film about SRP they’re going to show at the Supreme Council next week—only he was going to substitute a film about this place without telling Towne. He says Towne is so obsessed with holding onto power he’ll do anything to discredit him.”
“A megalomaniac bully and a paranoic old murderer—not a lot to choose between them.”
“What are you going to do to George?”
“I’m going to save his damned life because it’s the only way I can see of saving my own.”
Five minutes later, they were coming around a huge ribwort weed, its seeded stalks towering far above their heads, when they saw the tip of a big gray boulder beyond a clump of heather. By now, they were high enough to feel a slight breeze. The sky was darkening. They decided to erect the tent in a sheltered space between the rock and the heather. Cautiously, they probed the shadows with their prods, and then began to open out the dark green nylon of the tent, noticing a sweet, musty smell but failing to spot its source a few feet above their heads on the heather, a pale green creature with two huge, exquisitely tailed wings.
That was when it began, the night of the moonmoths.
The female luna moth was ready to take a mate. For this purpose, nature had given her equipment so complicated and sophisticated it was not fully understood by scientists. Every two seconds, there was a pulsing protrusion of green segments at the rear of her furry body. She was sending out two forms of the same signal, one a series of electro-magnetic waves with an infrared element for distance, the other a stream of scent molecules that were wafted off into the dusk by a faint breeze. The message was simple—a virgin female had reached her time. In heather plants and bushes all the way along the downwind breeze, the message was being received by the fern-shaped antennae of moonmoth males. To them, it was not simply a message or an invitation, but a command they were programmed to obey instantly, the sole reason for their existence, a command that could stretch out through the darkening sky for mile after mile ...
By then, they were feeling the cold. They pulled themselves into their sleeping bags and lay together in impersonal, quilted intimacy. From the dusk sky above came the needle-fine screams of bats.
“Paradise,” Carr said ironically. “I just don’t understand it.”
“Don’t understand what?” said Lena.
“People like you—educated, been to universities, scientists and all that—you’re off your rockers thinking you could live down here.”
“You could catch worms for us,” Lena said.
“I’m not going to be here, though, am I?”
In strong contrast to her normal prickly aggression when dealing with groups of people, Lena had a way of picking out one individual and making him feel they had been intimate friends all of their lives. Through her sleeping bag she gave Carr a kick. “Listen, you overmuscled bonehead,” she growled, her voice hoarse with a somewhat violent note of affection, “Homo sapiens started as a hunter and then became a farmer—we can farm and hunt from the start. George says this place is an orchard and a granary and a happy hunting ground combined.”
“Granary?” Robinson sneered. “Who’s going to drive the tractors to plough the wheatfields?”
“We won’t have to plough. A few square yards of wild corn would give us enough grain for a whole year! We could dig a hole for one seed potato and feed hundreds of people. We could trap blackbi
rds and thrushes in nets— they used to be considered a royal delicacy, didn’t they? You could be the number one hunter, Roy. You’d be good at trapping giant birds.”
“Yeah,” said Carr enthusiastically, “we could use worms as bait, stake ’em out, make snares with wire— ”
“Do shut up, Carr,” Robinson snapped.
“What about rabbits and guinea pigs? They’re good eating—we could sink traps and— ”
“Carr! If you won’t shut up, you’ll go outside on watch!”
“No, thank you.”
“You’ll do what I tell you, Carr. Go outside!”
“Not bloody likely.”
“I’ll put you on a charge!”
Carr made a growling noise. “You—put me on a charge? Just wait till our Area OC hears about this caper. You told him a lot of lies. He hates green uniforms, he’ll— ”
“Go outside—THAT’S AN ORDER!”
“Drop dead.”
“Why don’t you take the first watch, Hugh?” Lena
said maliciously, “aren’t officers supposed to set an example? Not scared of the dark, are you?’’
“Keep out of this, you meddling bitch! Carr—when we get back, I’ll have you in front of a Disciplinary Board so fast your feet won’t touch the ground! That’s a promise.’’
“Tell me the old, old story,’’ Bruce drawled, “show the human race paradise and within two minutes we’re at each other’s throats. Tell your boys to stop squabbling, Khomich, they may waken the neighbors.’’
Khomich merely grunted.
“Paradise—an old Hebrew word, pardress, a citrus orchard,” Magruder said reflectively. “That’s what this could be, an orchard as big as outer space. Look, we’ve hardly put our feet down on this planet, so who’s to say there’s only one environment that can sustain us? Is this any crazier than outer space—yet we’re spending trillions on reaching the galaxies?”
“Paradise?” Khomich grunted. “Flies as big as birds? Beetles as big as wolves? Birds as big as houses? Scaly monsters that rise up out of the dirt to tear you in pieces? Plants that eat flesh? Paradise ?”
“If that had happened with a lion or crocodile, would you have said that people couldn’t live in Africa? George is right— ”
“No, he is not right,” Anne said firmly, “he’s my husband, so I suppose I’m being disloyal, but it’s my honest belief that George has become totally irrational over this project.”
“Very disloyal,” snapped Lena, “if he was my husband— ”
“Which he isn’t, although you’d make a good pair.”
“Of all the sounds the human voice makes, the least attractive is that of women snapping at each other,” Bruce drawled.
“Is that why you never married?” Lena sneered.
“On the contrary, I was married. My wife killed herself because the WFC Population Department classed her as ineligible for motherhood. In case you think that’s a sob story, I have to say they were right—my wife was a
schizophrenic. Mind you, that wasn’t their reason—they said she was too old at thirty-two.”
“Weren’t you happily married?” asked Anne.
“Let me tell you about the love life of the ceratoid anglerfish. It lives deep down in the ocean where it’s very dark. It doesn t often meet another ceratoid anglerfish, but when it does, the male sinks his pincer teeth into the female’s side and never, ever lets go. You may think that sounds more like female behavior in our species, but, however gradually, the male’s body fuses into the female’s body. Their blood systems unite. The male gets fed through the female. Then a strange thing happens— his testes begin to grow at an alarming rate— ”
“His what?” Carr demanded.
His balls! In fact they grow so big he has no room for anything else—all his other organs just wither away. Even his eyes become mere relics. His whole body is just one big pair of balls! This isn’t nature necessarily punishing the male—it’s a precaution in case that female never bumps into another eligible male down there in the deep dark ocean. For the rest of her life she has sperm on tap. If they didn’t behave like that, the species would die out.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t become fashionable,” said Magruder.
“Then again, there’s the praying mantis,” Bruce went on, talking to prevent more arguments. “During copulation, the female often feels peckish and starts nibbling at her husband, in fact, she’ll eat his head off during the very moment of ecstasy.”
Are you trying to tell us marriage is one-sided?” Lena said ironically.
“Not at all—without his head, the male mantis doesn’t lose interest halfway through. His nervous system goes on working—the female gets all his sperm. The moral is—nature isn’t in the business of putting the magic into marriage, nature is in the business of reproduction. Now, consider the Empipididae, one of the robberflies. They mate on the wing and the female will eat the male —unless he brings her a gift. What he does is
catch a midge and wrap it in his own silk secretion. While she’s eating it, he— ”
Something crashed into the tent, immediately flattening it across their bodies and faces.
Paralyzed by shock, for a long, terrible moment they could not move a muscle, not even to scream.
Out of the purple dusk they zoomed one after another, the big male moonmoths, drawn from as far away as two and three miles by the imperative command carried on the breeze.
It was a race—with only one prize. Guided by scent, homing toward the mysterious infrared beam by their fern-shaped antennae, the males fluttered down onto the low clump of heather, jostling each other, folding back their long-tailed, lime-green wings as they crowded toward the pulsing body of the virgin female whose night it was. Five, ten, then twenty—and still the big wings fluttered down toward the source of the scent.
Within seconds the prize had been claimed. The first male to reach her was already linking his body with hers. But it was a strange race—for the big males had never seen the prize before, did not recognize the prize when they saw it, failed to realize that they had lost. The scent was all that they responded to—and the scent by then was everywhere, especially on the little tent pitched just below the heather sprig from which the virgin female and the winner of the race now hung in ecstasy...
Somebody screamed and then they started to fight for air, ripping at the zip-fasteners of their sleeping bags, twisting and contorting their faces to escape suffocation, driven to terror and hysteria by a claustrophobic nightmare beyond the scope of human imagination. They tore at the heavy, inflated nylon with their bare hands—until Magruder managed to push off the bulky creature pressing urgently down on his prostrate body and dragged his knife from its sheath.
He slashed at the tent. By now it was being pushed
THE MICRONAUTS
and pulled, this way and that, not just by one huge creature, but by what seemed like a whole herd of soft, bulky bodies. The knife ripped through nylon. The tent deflated with a vast sigh. Magruder went on slashing with the knife. Somebody fired his pistol. An awful scent flooded down on them, the same sweet, musty scent they had vaguely noticed while pitching the tent.
Magruder pushed his head and shoulders into the open air.
In the half-light of dusk he found himself surrounded by furry monsters from a dream. He struggled to his feet, swinging the knife at thin legs and brittle membrane. The others fought their way out of the widening rip in the collapsed tent.
For a few moments, it felt as if they were fighting off a flock of mohair sweaters. They kicked and pushed at furry bodies. Robinson came up with his torch. In its beam, they saw a compound eye. He swung the torch around. The big shapes were all round them, like hugeeyed sheep. One of them bumped into Carr. He shoved it away with a curse. Where his hands touched the folded wings, they saw a cascade of scales, looking like opaque playing cards, pinks and greens.
“Give me the torch,” Bruce said.
“What the hell are they?�
��
“Moths, of course.” He swung the beam up toward the clump of heather under which their tent had been pitched. The mating pair were still locked together, the male hanging, head down, below the female. Bruce started to laugh. “Don’t touch their wings,” he said, “if you knock the scales off, they’ll be damaged.”
“But why should all these moths come crushing in on us?” Magruder asked plaintively, trying to dodge the big, cumbersome bodies still banging about at their waists.
Bruce swung the beam onto the flattened wreckage. Six or seven big moths were crawling over it, the fuselages of their furry bodies moving jerkily, their folded- back wings looking like the cloaks of comic-book spacemen.
In the half-light of dusk he found himself surrounded by furry monsters from a dream.
“Are they—dangerous?’’ Anne Richards asked nervously.
“No, just a bit clumsy.”
“But why are they so attracted to the tent?”
“You’re not going to believe this. They’ve come all this way to mate with that female up there, but they don’t know what a female looks like. Her scent must be all over the tent. They’ll try to mate with anything her scent is on. You know what we’ve just been through? An attempt at mass-rape—by moonmoths!”
“That’s— incredible. ”
“It is only the kind of madness I expect in this place of monsters,” said Khomich.
Through the rustling of the seething moths, they heard another sound. The soft hooting of an owl.. .
They huddled together against the warmth soaked up by the big stone during the long hours of sunshine. A few yards away, the big moths were still floundering over the ruined tent, still searching for the prize. Out in the terrifying infinity of the night, they saw hazy pinpoints of yellowish light, fireflies signaling to each other in the relentless merry-go-round of courtship and mating. Sometimes the owl’s hooting seemed to be just overhead and then it would come from a distant part of the garden. They took turns staying awake on guard as exhaustion began to overcome fear and shock. Bruce sat with his back against the rock, sleeping bag pulled up to his chest, his arms free to use the pistol which lay in his lap.
The Micronauts Page 14