Spores

by Ike Hamill

  “It was a possibility,” Nelson said. “There was a gate at the end of this experiment. Nobody figured we would clear the gate, so we assumed that we wouldn’t have to come back out until tomorrow. But this result demands that we run another pass.”

  Marie let out a guttural pig noise as she turned her face towards the black sky. She was rewarded with new snowflakes falling onto her goggles and melting.

  “This is good news,” Tyler mumbled. He didn’t seem sure of his assertion.

  “I’m going back,” Marie said.

  “You can’t,” Nelson said.

  “Let me finish. I’m going back and I’ll load up the tents and camping gear. We should at least have a place where we can warm up a little and sit down somewhere dry while we’re waiting.”

  Nelson and Tyler exchanged a glance.

  “Good idea,” Nelson said.

  “I’ll go with you,” Tyler said.

  * * * * * * *

  (Warning)

  Marie rode fast through the night. Tyler kept his mouth shut about the speed, but his fear was evident in the death grip he had around her waist. On the last trip, she had warned him not to lean. Every time the trail took a turn, Tyler wanted to lean into it. He had nearly made them roll over more than once. This time—maybe because he was petrified by the trees whipping by—he tucked his head down and didn’t even look.

  Marie pulled her mask off. The cold air felt infinitely better than the damp mask. The yellow glow of the cabin made it an oasis in the night. Inside, it would be warm and peaceful. Marie imagined it as she brought the snowmobile to a stop. She was almost afraid to go inside. Once she got in there, she knew the pull would be too strong to ignore. She would crawl up into bed and sleep until spring.

  “You coming?” Tyler asked. He was already off the snowmobile and walking up the shoveled path. An inch of snow had collected since they left.

  “Did that seem strange to you?”

  “What?”

  “Nelson actually said that I had a good idea. Have you ever heard anything like that come out of his mouth.”

  Tyler gave her a little laugh as he climbed the stairs.

  Marie paused on the porch and looked over at the rental vehicle. There was something she had meant to do, but now she couldn’t put her finger on it.

  “Marie,” Tyler said, snapping her from her thoughts. He was holding the door open.

  “Right,” she said.

  While she checked the camping gear and hauled it out to the sled, Tyler stoked the fire so it would keep going while they were out. He also refilled the lantern. Once he pumped it back up and re-lit it, the light was more white than yellow. As Marie strapped the gear into the sled, she looked up at the cabin. With the lantern refreshed, the place didn’t look nearly as inviting. She pondered that as she went back in again.

  “Ready?” Tyler asked.

  “No, not yet. We have another ten minutes before we absolutely have to leave. I’m going to warm up a little and change my socks.”

  “Okay. I’m going to use the…” he said, pointing vaguely in the direction of the outhouse.

  Marie nodded.

  The door to her room was open.

  “Damn it,” she whispered. “It has to be a hundred degrees in here.” Nelson and Tyler both loved the heat. Marie couldn’t stand it. It made her sweat under the covers and wake up feeling all itchy. She pulled her bag from under the bed, placed it on top, and unzipped it to find fresh socks. With her boots off, she figured out why she had been so miserable. Snow had gotten inside her boots and made her socks damp. That little bit of moisture had sapped the heat from her toes. She dug around for her special socks—the kind that were supposed to wick moisture away from the skin. She found the socks quickly, but made a disturbing discovery in the process.

  “Tyler!” she called.

  He didn’t answer. She realized that he must be still outside, taking care of business.

  It was impossible—she had left the satellite phone and her cellphone together, in the bottom of her bag. Both devices had been off, to conserve the batteries. Now, all she had was her cellphone, and it was on.

  Marie backed way from the bed, trying to see the pile of possessions with fresh eyes. It had to be there. She just wasn’t seeing it. Marie dropped to one knee to point her light into the darkness below the bed. She didn’t see anything except a thick herd of dust bunnies. The place was billed as “pet friendly.” Unfortunately, it seemed more pet friendly than broom friendly.

  “Huh,” she said. “No. It has to be something silly.”

  Tyler had probably used the phone to check the weather or something. In fact, maybe he had borrowed it while she was outside, strapping down the gear.

  She finished changing her socks and closed the door tight before she went back downstairs.

  Marie tilted her head. “The door had been open for a while though,” she whispered. “Because it was so hot in there.”

  She heard Tyler coming back in from outside. She jogged down the stairs and found him pulling off his gloves to check the wood stove one more time.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “You ready to…”

  She put up her finger. “Did you borrow the satellite phone?”

  He raised his eyebrows and looked afraid for a moment. His finger extended slowly, towards the table in the corner. She followed the direction of his gesture and saw the thing. It was lying on its back. For some reason, it reminded her of a dead bug. The thing had spread its beetle wings and flown over to the table before rolling onto its back and dying.

  “Did you put it there?”

  “I assumed you did,” he said.

  Marie crossed to it and picked it up. She cradled it with both hands before she pushed the button to turn it on. The display flashed the outline of a cartoon battery and then went dark again.

  “It’s dead,” she said.

  “What?” Tyler asked. He rushed to her side.

  “Just the battery. Don’t worry about it. I can recharge it from the vehicle.”

  Tyler exhaled loudly. “Good. Don’t scare me like that.”

  “You need to chill out a little, Tyler. I thought you were loosening up.”

  “I thought so too. I just don’t like it when a safety net disappears.”

  Marie nodded. She knew how he felt, in a way. But for her, the jarring part wasn’t the dead battery. It was the issue of why the phone was sitting dead on the table instead of safely tucked in her bag upstairs.

  “We have to go,” Tyler said, looking at his watch.

  “You’re right. I’m just going to pop this phone on the car charger so it can get some juice while we’re gone.”

  “I think we should get back right now,” Tyler said. “If we miss the start time by even a minute, Nelson is going to void the whole experiment and then we’ll have to start over again tomorrow night.”

  Marie cursed her own vivid imagination. Her brain told her that there was no way that Nelson would throw out all that data and start again, but she was easily able to imagine him doing just that. Nelson would give them his most disappointed and arrogant stare and then he would inform them that, due to their tardiness, the whole scientific integrity of their follow-on experiment had been compromised.

  “Yeah, okay,” Marie said. She put the phone back on the table and followed Tyler out of the cabin. She reasoned that even if there was an emergency, she could always plug the satellite phone into the car charger and use it off the car’s batteries. There was no concrete need for the thing to be fully charged. As they walked the snowy path back to the snowmobiles again, she took one final glance at the rental. There was some odd regret tickling the back of her neck. She had forgotten to do something. Marie shrugged and reminded herself that the experiment was the important thing tonight. Everything else could wait.

  * * * * * * *

  (Flares)

  Tyler had been exactly right in his timing. Even pushing the snowmobile as fast as she dared, they arr
ived back at the ridge with just enough time to scramble back down to Nelson’s position. They didn’t even have time to unstrap and carry down the camping equipment. Nelson was calling out a countdown as Tyler and Marie slogged through the snow to get to their positions.

  “Fifteen. Fourteen. Ready position one?”

  “I’m ready,” Marie yelled. She held the flare in one hand and the igniter in the other.

  “Eleven. Ten. Ready Position two?”

  “Ready,” Tyler yelled.

  As she waited for the signal, Marie’s anger started to flare. There was no way that the fungus cared if they started precisely forty-five minutes after the termination of the last experiment. She couldn’t imagine that the other teams in the world had counted down like they were launching a rocket or something. At best, the forty-five minute gap was probably supposed to be a general guideline. Nelson had invented all of this split-second timing bullshit in order to make himself feel more important.

  “One. Ignite.”

  She struck the cap against the end. It felt like touching off a giant match. Across the field of sensors, Tyler was laying his flare down in the snow. Marie did the same, trying to set hers down at exactly the same time.

  “Bullshit,” she whispered to herself. The snow was pretty, bathed in the hot pink glow. It was hard to hear over the hiss of the flare, but Nelson had already started another countdown. Marie dug in her pocket for the next flare so she could pull of the cap as she moved to her next location. When he counted, “Three. Two. One,” Marie was already standing, waiting to strike. She and Tyler synchronized each movement this time, looking at each other across the row of sensors.

  Marie didn’t feel any wind, but the smoke from the flare wafted right back into her face. She blinked even though the goggles protected her eyes. She smelled the smoke through her mask and wondered if it really did any good. If smoke could get through the patch of material, would it really filter out anything else?

  Nelson was already counting down.

  “This is theater,” she muttered. Stumbling on a rock and nearly losing her balance, Marie barely got to the third location.

  “How can something this dull have so much stress associated with it?” she asked.

  “What?” Tyler called from across the way.

  “Nothing.”

  They placed the next flare and the next. As they moved farther and farther, Marie’s gripes didn’t make it past her lips again. There was something building beneath them—an undercurrent of something. She thought about a video she had seen one time. It was monkeys pestering tourists on a beach. One minute, the monkeys were all trying to steal fruit and sandwiches from reclining sunbathers, the next minute, all the monkeys were chattering to each other and running for high ground. Some monkeys climbed the nearest tree. The camera turned and followed other monkeys as they climbed buildings or even continued across the street and headed uphill. The camera kept recording and swung back to the ocean. The people in the video didn’t realize until a full minute later—a tsunami was coming.

  The monkeys had sensed the disaster long before their eyes, noses, or ears told them that deadly water was rushing towards them. Marie had always wondered what those monkeys felt. Was it specific, or a general sense of dread. Did they always climb away from danger, or had they known that the situation demanded it?

  They placed another flare. They only had a few more to go before they would be back to Nelson.

  Marie looked across the row and watched Tyler as he moved. They both uncapped their flares at the same time and struck the caps to ignite the ends simultaneously as well. They placed them on the ground. The symmetry of their movements captivated her until they reached the last flare. When that was done, they both walked towards Nelson.

  An animal—a squirrel or something—chattered up in the trees above them.

  Tyler looked up. Nelson was lost in his device again. It would be useless to try to communicate with him until he finished whatever he was doing.

  “Is that a squirrel?” Marie asked.

  “I guess? Maybe it's a bird? You know, vervet monkeys have different alarm calls depending on whether they’re being stalked by a snake or a bird.”

  “What?” Marie asked.

  Nelson didn’t look up from his device. His voice was monotone, but perfectly expressed his irritation when he said, “Could you two take your conversation somewhere else? I’m busy here.”

  Marie nodded towards the slope up to the ridge. “Want to help me carry gear?”

  “Yeah,” Tyler said.

  She let him lead the way. Marie still had purple streaks floating across her vision from the last flare she had stared at. She glanced down at the collection site below. The columns of flares looked like a landing strip for aliens or something. With all the trees, it would be a terrible place to try to land. There was something apropos about the idea of aliens in that forest though. Marie couldn’t figure out why the idea was so unsettling.

  “Why did you bring up vervet monkeys?” she asked.

  “The call,” Tyler said. “That squirrel, or whatever. It occurred to me that the squirrel might be warning other squirrels about our flares, you know? Or maybe it was warning other animals. I think there are examples where other species will listen in to alarm calls. It is a cross species communication. For instance, I think some birds listen to prairie dog chirps?”

  “Yeah, but why just bring up monkeys?” she asked. In her head, Marie asked, “Can you hear my thoughts?” She immediately blushed, angry at herself for entertaining such a weird idea.

  “Because of what you said, about the tidal waves,” Tyler said. He reached the sled that they had towed behind the snowmobile. He began to loosen the straps.

  “What did I say about tidal waves?” Marie asked, moving alongside him. He lifted a bag that contained one of the tents and tried to hand it to her. Marie only stood there, looking at him. She wasn’t going to take the tent until he answered.

  “You were talking about how the monkeys sensed that the tidal wave was coming in and they all climbed trees. I feel it too—like there’s something bubbling just below the surface, ready to boil over.”

  Marie shook her head. “Tyler, I didn’t say anything about monkeys. You brought them up.”

  “Down there,” Tyler said, gesturing with his headlamp. “When we were setting the flares.”

  “The flares were so loud that I could barely hear myself think. When do you think we talked?”

  He turned his stare back to her and she blinked against the glare of his headlamp.

  “But you said…” he began. He trailed off.

  She finally took the bag from him, just to break his stasis.

  “Tyler, I don’t know what you think you heard, but we didn’t talk about monkeys until you brought them up.”

  He only shrugged and picked up the next bag. Marie watched him as he stepped around her and started back down the slope. She followed. It took them a few trips to transport all the gear down to Nelson’s position. Just as they finished, he was wrapping up whatever analysis that had stolen his attention.

  “Let’s take all this stuff about ten yards that way and set up,” Nelson said.

  Tyler started to move. Marie stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

  “Wait, that will put us on top of the sensor field, won’t it.”

  “Just at the edge,” Nelson said.

  “But why risk contaminating the grid? We can just set up back here. You’ve already stomped down a decent area—it won’t take long to flatten out the rest of this snow and we can put up a…”

  Nelson cut her off. He was practically shouting. “I’m setting up over there. You can do what you please, but that’s where the main tent will be.”

  Marie’s shoulders fell as she sighed.

  “Neither of you guys are making any sense,” she said.

  * * * * * * *

  (Warmth)

  Nelson kept his word. In a way, it was refreshing. Normally, Ne
lson just stood around and watched while Marie and Tyler did all the grunt work. After insisting that they use his location for the tent, Nelson actually unpacked the tarp and began to stretch it out. He did a shitty job of preparing the site, but that was easy enough for Tyler and Marie to fix. The three of them were working together by the time they raised the tent and moved in the supplies they would need. This was their big tent—the one that they called the “meeting tent.” It wasn’t for sleeping. It was tall enough in the middle that Marie could nearly stand upright.

  Marie set up a couple of stools while Tyler started up the heater. The tent didn’t have any insulation, of course, but it trapped the warm air and cut off the wind. It was infinitely warmer than standing around in the snow, waiting for the next experiment, and it was a lot more convenient than driving the snowmobile all the way back to the cabin. Even Tyler seemed to like the idea of the tent, and he had been the most reticent to the idea of staying out in the woods all night.

  Beyond the nylon walls of their tent, the flares still hissed and danced pink shadows through the woods.

  “We don’t have to replace the flares when they burn out?”

  “No,” Nelson said.

  When it was clear that Nelson was done on the subject, Tyler leaned a little closer to finish the explanation.

  “The flares were to simulate a nearby fire. Some of the other teams found that they could train the fungus to not respond if they gave them consistent false stressors over the course of a night.”

  “To not respond?”

  Tyler nodded, excited to fill her in. “This is more advanced than some of the other communication we have observed in other species. Remember the first study, out in Colorado? That was mostly about resource distribution and long-term geographic changes. In this study, the phenomena are a direct response to immediate predation or threats. But it takes energy to respond to these stimuli and the fungi will quickly learn to discern between false threats and real ones.”