Swamp Thing 1 Read online

  “They want your substance, too,” Charlie said, relieved to be able to talk about it.

  “So—we’ll send ’em a generous sample. Big deal.”

  Cicadas had taken over the sounds of the evening; their shrill vibrations were constant and piercing.

  Suddenly there were four quick retorts, like gunshots.

  They came from the church.

  The guard opened the wide church doors; they heard a scream. It was Linda’s voice.

  “Dr. Holland!” the guard called frantically, unnecessarily; Alec, Charlie and Cable were already running toward the lab.

  The security door was standing open; two guards, their pistols drawn, stood just inside the lab.

  Linda Holland stood there alone with a silly grin on her face. “Sorry,” she said inadequately. She was holding a beaker of fluorescent yellow liquid.

  “Thanks, guys,” Alec said to the guards, dismissing them.

  When they were gone, and the door was sealed once more, Alec tipped his head inquisitively at Linda, who still grinned strangely.

  “The damndest thing,” Linda began, shaking her head in disbelief, “this newest batch you had me cook up.” She dipped her fingertips gently into the liquid. “I knew we’d formulated something revolutionary, but this is literally dynamite. Watch.”

  She flicked her fingers over the bare floor; several drops sailed from her fingertips and exploded with a bright green flash where they struck. The wooden flooring flared briefly into ordinary smoke and fire—which died down to leave small, round charred areas.

  “Dr. Holland?” a startled guard called through the closed lab door.

  “It’s all right,” he yelled back. To Linda, he said, “That’s incredible. Why should that much energy be released?”

  “Weird, huh?” said Linda.

  Alec knelt to examine the charred spots; he rubbed charcoal onto his fingertips and felt the consistency of the powder. He laughed—for reasons obscure to Cable and Charlie.

  Charlie said, “Wonderful. You’ve reinvented nitro. For this we’ve fed the mosquitos for ten months? If the taxpayers only knew, Alec. If the poor bastards only knew.”

  Alec chuckled; “You’ll find a way to break it to them gently, Charlie.”

  Charlie shook his head in mock consternation. “You people will be up all night, no doubt, testing this—whatever it is, right?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Alec.

  “You can give me a report at breakfast,” Charlie said as he reached for the wall panel that opened the security door. “Good luck,” he added as the door shut him away from the scientists.

  Charlie stood for a long moment staring at that door, that token of modern technology—a door with the built-in judgment to know whom to admit and whom to reject. He was thinking that it was minds—people—like the three in that lab who had given and would continue to give all such marvels to the world. At other times he knew better, but now he wondered what possible good he was doing the world: compared to progress and invention, of what value were government and diplomacy? Compared to this small hidden laboratory in no-man’s land, of what significance was Washington, D.C.?

  As he turned and left the church, he said to himself, in a rare moment of total honesty, “That’s why I’ve never made much of myself: I don’t believe in my own importance.” He shook the heavy thought away in an instant; if it ever came up again, he knew, he’d have ample rationales to diminish the truth of it.

  The cicadas were even louder now, and bullfrogs were agitated in the hot night air. Charlie heard a splash down the inlet. A fish breaking the surface? A bird diving? An alligator leaving the bank?

  Bright floods lighted the clearing and the fronts of the shacks. Voices came from Cable’s quarters. Charlie walked toward the sound; he recognized Ritter’s voice. He assumed that the security chief was making a cursory check of the remote sensors, seeing if more than number three was out.

  Efficient man, Ritter, thought Charlie; efficient, crude, dedicated, malevolent and violent. It was difficult to imagine why the man attached himself so to the welfare of the Hollands. Perhaps, thought Charlie, he’s one of those duty-above-all cop types.

  The light in the shack went out and the door creaked open.

  For some vague reason, Charlie did not wish to be seen; he stepped behind the broad trunk of a pine tree.

  Ritter and one of his men came out. Ritter was laughing at something as he slammed the door behind him and in the same sweeping gesture slapped the rusty chain of the porch swing.

  “What time is it?” Ritter asked his companion.

  The young man pressed the light on his watch and said, “Early yet; eight fifty-three.”

  “Did you get Holland’s boat back under the camouflage?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The two walked across the clearing and into the guard house.

  Charlie leaned against the tree for a moment and then stepped to Cable’s porch. He reached for the door, knowing it might be locked. Ritter kept a pass key, but Charlie did not.

  The door opened easily, with a loud creak.

  Charlie stepped inside. He decided that he really did not need light; he could see the instruments well enough by moonlight. He switched off the lamps on the master circuit and threw the switch. Transformers buzzed faintly as myriad signal lights winked on; the instruments pertaining to security—the ones Ritter had evidently just consulted—came to life.

  “SENSOR OUT/SECTOR THREE,” the disaply still announced.

  Charlie studied the keyboard and thought he remembered a thing or two about the use of it. He typed in SCAN and hit the start button.

  SENSOR OUT/SECTOR FIVE.

  The screen went blank, then:

  SENSOR OUT/SECTOR NINE.

  Sectors ten, eleven and twelve were also out. As security measures, the perimeter sensors were useless. No alarms would go off.

  Why had Ritter been laughing, Charlie wondered suddenly. He must not have checked the system after all. Or maybe that wasn’t the answer.

  Charlie turned to the camera monitors. Four infrared video cameras were trained on the principal access routes leading to camp; Charlie activated their powerful zoom lenses. The night photography with its highly exaggerated contrast took some getting used to. Charlie had to use his imagination to separate the moonlight on tree trunk; from the moonlight on streams and inlets. The image was more a result of heat than of visible light.

  Not far from camp, on a path one might take to reach or return from sector three, something on the ground glowed. Charlie zoomed in on it. He felt almost certain it was a man’s body—a living body, judging by the heat radiating from it.

  Sound was arriving from one of the few working sensors—in sector six, several miles from the body. It was Bill Darkow’s voice calling for his brother.

  Charlie thought. The body on the path could very well be Sam Darkow.

  The radio on the table before him might be able to contact Bill, if he carried a walkie-talkie. It would also contact anyone else listening; and Charlie was somehow convinced that that would not be a good idea.

  He left the instruments operating and ran from the shack. It occurred to him briefly to tell Alec what he was doing, but clearly a life might depend upon his reaching that body as quickly as possible.

  Charlie ran until his middle-aged heart was thudding in his chest. Just as he feared he’d have to slow to a walk, he saw the body in the path ahead of him. He’d been right; it was Sam Darkow. He was lying on his back, his eyes closed, his clothes and skin dripping with sweat.

  “Sam!” Charlie said, drooping to his knees. He tried to rouse him by moving his head.

  The young man’s eyes opened slowly, and his lips parted.

  Charlie stood and called out, instinctively, incautiously, “Bill! Can you hear me? I’ve found him!”

  “No!” Sam said weakly. “Quiet.”

  “What happened, Sam? Can you walk if I help you?” Charlie asked as he knelt down a
gain.

  Sam said, “Don’t think so.” He tried to lift an arm, and it was barely evident to Charlie that that’s what he was doing; he couldn’t lift it off the ground. “Cottonmouth,” Sam said in a whisper. “Deliberate. Ferret. Men.”

  “Ferret?” Charlie asked, not sure whether Sam meant a man or a thing.

  The ferns to the side of the trail rustled, and a dark shape emerged. “Yes,” it said in a rough voice, “Ferret.” Moonlight glinted from his gold earring and the white of his teeth.

  Four other men, slightly smaller men, stepped out of the underbrush and stood near their master.

  6

  When Charlie left the lab (“Good luck,” he had said as the door hissed shut) Alec said to Cable and Linda:

  “I think we’ve had our good luck; now we’ve got to get to work!”

  Cable noted enviously how effectively Alec and Linda worked together. He took the beaker from Linda, whisked it to a workbench crowded with implements and glass containers; she immediately went to a wall safe and took out a worn notebook. Alec pulled up two tall stools, one for himself, another for Linda, while she took several chemicals—the ones she knew he’d want—from a shelf. Together, they were as efficient as a machine.

  Cable’s instinct was to leave them to their work. She headed for the door.

  “Hey, don’t go,” Alec said to her. “This is going to be exciting! At least, I think it is. Pull up a stool.”

  When Cable spoke she did not like the accusing tone she heard in her own voice, but there was nothing she could do about it. “I thought you had to be working on some sort of weapon system. I didn’t think all this security was to protect a lot of—”

  “Plants?” Alec finished. “But that is what it’s for. The only way I ever expected my work to be explosive was socially. We just developed this formula last week. We haven’t even tested it beyond microscopic analysis; so give me a break.”

  “Okay,” she said, smiling.

  “Look around. Let me get started, and then I’ll tell you what we’re doing.” From his pocket he took the orchid he had picked in sector three, and set it on the desk in front of him. He said to it, “Been a rough day for all of us, hasn’t it?” It was wilted and crushed.

  Cable looked around. As a scientist, Alec might be precise as a printed circuit, but in other ways he was evidently as messy as his swamp. The railing of the sleeping balcony above was draped with jeans and shirts, and Cable saw the end of an unmade bed. Among the centrifuges, spectroscopes, heaters and refrigerators on the lab racks there was a stereo player with a dusty disc ignored on the turntable. Albums on the shelf below were filed unevenly, and she glanced at them to verify her suspicion that they would not be in any intelligible order. She thought of her own collection—all in new plastic sleeves and in alphabetical order. It would have been nice if she could have liked him less for his sloppiness; unfortunately, it did not affect her feelings at all. There were two discarded pairs of sneakers on a table piled high with scraps and parts of instruments. There were no women’s things in sight. Linda was neater.

  Although instrumentation was a specialty of Cable’s, there were machines here she had never seen before—some simple, some peculiarly complex. Like the array of modules at which Alec began to labor. She moved closer to watch him.

  “You like gadgets,” he observed. “Bet you never saw this kind of electron scope before. Made it myself.”

  Her eye went immediately to an open box of circuit work. Messy, at first glance, clean but chaotic on closer inspection.

  “You ought to put a cover on that,” she said.

  “I’ve got one for it somewhere,” he said, unconcerned.

  The video display of the scope faded on. The super-magnified image there looked like a lunar landscape. He turned knobs, and faint colors—pink, green, brown—tinted the shapes.

  “Holland,” she said with a touch of exasperation, “what are you doing? I mean, it’s time: tell me what this lab is all about.”

  Alec appeared to ignore her; he concentrated on tuning the scope before him. As he turned dials and flipped micro-switches, the image was sharpened, enhanced, intensified. The picture began to move, to pan right to left, and the “terrain” changed.

  “Ignore that first picture,” he told her. “It’s just imperfections in the glass slide. I know, I know, I ought to be neater.”

  “This isn’t a transmission-type scope,” Cable observed.

  “No, sort of a scanner.”

  “What’s the order of magnification?”

  “What you’re seeing is seventy thousand times. By the way, don’t touch anything. We’re using thirty thousand volts—which isn’t all that powerful for a scope, but it’ll kill you.”

  “I thought I saw the lights dim.”

  “All over camp. Everybody knows when we’re magnifying.”

  The picture became smooth, showing an unpitted surface, and into view came a cluster of segmented organisms. Like round tape worms. Alec sharpened the image further.

  “Ah,” he said, satisfied. “See these little guys here? They’re DNA chromosomes from the common lab bacilli E. Coli.” He typed an instruction into the computer keyboard at his side. “Now hold that picture in your mind.”

  The screen went black as he carefully removed the carrier that held the slide that held the specimen; he replaced it with another, and quickly focused in on it. “This is another common bacilli, a plant matrix called D complex.”

  After typing further instructions for his extraordinary microscope, he leaned back and waited for the machine to do his bidding. “Each of those organisms has been around labs for years,” he remarked. Again he removed the slide and inserted a third. While he was doing this, the image processor displayed a split-screen picture, the segmented E. coli on the left and the rod-shaped D complex on the right. “There’s nothing unusual about either of these—except that one is animal and the other is vegetable.”

  The split-screen picture dissolved into the contents of the third slide: a segmented E. coli with dark, rod-like spurs from D complex grafted onto it.

  While she watched, Cable saw one of the organisms twitch.

  This sample was alive.

  Alec tapped the screen like a proud father. “This is the new guy. He’s never existed before on the face of the earth. A basic vegetable cell with an animal nucleus.” Alec turned on his stool to face Cable. He smiled at her wide-open mouth. “A plant,” he continued, “with an animal’s aggressive power of survival. If we can do it on this scale, we can do it on any scale—algae to trees. A plant for the twenty-first century.”

  She turned from the screen to look at Alec. “Recombinant DNA. But I never thought—”

  “You’ve read about it?”

  “Yes, I—I’ve followed your career rather closely. I know enough about the subject to be awed, and scared. What are you after—tomatoes the size of weather balloons?”

  Linda arrived with a newly prepared slide. As Alec inserted it in the microscope, he said to Cable, “I wouldn’t mind having tomatoes that would grow in a desert, or orange trees for the Arctic, or vegetables that would grow like weeds in depressed countries, say, by 2001 when there’ll be six-and-a-half billion people on this planet, most of them hungry.”

  Alec spoke so matter-of-factly that Cable realized she had never seen him so solemn. Her eye now made sense of a Xerox photo she had half-noticed; it was stuck to the back of the microscope. A child—a child ravaged by famine, with wide, wet eyes.

  Alec grinned. “I’m no crusader, Cable.”

  “Yes, you are,” she said softly.

  He shook his head. “I want truth. Power over nature. I want to know we’ve left no stone unturned, no secret unexamined, in our drive to put ourselves and our universe to good use.” He nodded toward the pathetic little girl. “She says to me, ‘Look a little harder, Alec; you’re so close to the answer.’ ”

  Alec drummed his fingers on the CRT display. “Here’s one of those answers . .
. I think. If this stuff works—and it’ll be a long time before we know—it will make, well, a little difference. To me. And to her.”

  Linda bent over and kissed him on the cheek.

  Cable felt a nagging unease inside that continued to make her argumentative. She felt a bit like a debate defending a position she did not believe in. “If it would alter plants so drastically, what would it do to animals? To people?”

  “I wasn’t planning to market it as a new soft drink.”

  “Maybe not you, but what if it fell into the wrong hands?”

  “What wrong hands?” he asked. “That’s boogey-man mentality. ‘Somehow’ thinking. We’re a long way from having to worry about control of it. It might turn out to be as safe and common as garden fertilizer. A dozen brands. Buy it at your local hardware and nursery.” He chuckled. “Nothing wrong with you, Cable, that a few months without television won’t cure. Television makes people paranoid hypochondriacs. What if the worst happens to you?—That kind of thing. That’s why I haven’t wanted any publicity. If people get worried before there’s anything to worry about, they have the power to put the brakes on the development of everything worthwhile.”

  Linda had been watching the CRT display with fascination. “Alec. Look at that!” she said. “The new formula—it’s replicating like mad!”

  The display showed a writhing tangle of rods and segments that moved erratically, energized by the miraculous medium they found themselves in. The cells divided—unzipped like animated DNA demonstrations Cable had seen—and recombined in a random order that resulted in many animal/vegetable cells. Incredibly, in the short time the scientists watched, one of the new combination cells itself divided into identical combined offspring.

  “Good lord!” said Linda.

  Alec dittoed her sentiment with a nod. His mouth had been dangling open; he closed it with a click of his teeth. “Let’s try it on something,” he suggested. He held the beaker of yellow fluid up to the light. “I just put that microbe from Alessandro’s fur in here for the heck of it. Do you suppose that triggered accelerated growth?” He answered his own question, “No, it couldn’t have.” He walked to another workbench, placed the beaker in a rack there, and returned with the shriveled orchid.