Dominant Species Volume Two -- Edge Effects (Dominant Species Series) (26 page)

It never came.

When she worked up the courage to move, she looked around and took
inventory. Only a few of the canopy’s leaves had been lost and her larder was
still intact. There didn’t seem to be any damage to the structure itself.

She looked out the front and now had no idea which way she was
pointed. The idea of putting her arms into the water after seeing the maw that
wanted to chomp them off was more than she could stand. She gave another look
down, peering into the dark, shimmering water, trying to make out the thing’s
shape.

Nothing. She breathed deep. It was gone. She waited anyway.

Minutes later, she slipped her arms slowly into the water and
paddled lightly around, trying to get her bearings. She turned and studied the
scenery drifting by. She was relieved when she saw the clump of target foliage,
some twenty meters closer than it had been before. She stroked gently, quietly,
toward it. As she got closer and the water got shallower, she could begin to
see the swamp bottom again. This told her she was out of the deep channel. That
was a relief. When she was close enough, she reached out the front window with
the hook and grabbed onto a sturdy stalk to anchor herself.

She fixed the holes in the canopy, tightened the net around the
food and got her bearings. The way ahead was bushy with lots of broad floating
leaves, but the water was probably shallower, and hopefully too shallow for the
thing she’d left behind.

 
Using the hook, she could
pull her way along for quite a distance from this point. She fixed her sights
on a tall tree straight ahead, memorized its shape, then reached out with the
pole and grabbed a stalk with it. She pulled, lurched ahead, jammed up against
the stalk and stopped cold.

This would take some doing. She pushed off and tried again, this
time grabbing at a mass of floating leaves with viney stems. She pulled, then
cut loose at just the right moment. That worked, and she grazed the stalk and
drifted over the floating vegetation for a full five meters before bumping into
another clump. She sat up, tried it, and found she got much better control that
way.

Sitting cross-legged, she pulled her way along, all the way to the
tree she’d aimed for. The reaching, grabbing and pulling with the pole made her
arms ache, and she decided to tie off to the tree and rest.

The water around the base of the tree was deeper than she liked.
She looked down into the submerged tangle of thick, dull roots and just knew
something horrible was down among them, staring up, panting water, waiting for
her.

She cut short her rest and pushed gently away from the tree. She
felt she had no choice but to get out of the swamp before night.

17

"You can start with the tap water. Take some samples and
culture them in agar and blood. There’s some old blood in the back of the
clinic you can use. Nobody’ll mind. You probably won’t find anything. The
shelter’s water filters are pretty good, but look anyway. Then take some
samples from any standing water in contact with the ground—puddles, footprints
filled with water—that kind of thing. Anything with fecal material near it especially.
Runoff from the shelters’ roofs might be worth a look, too, if you can find
any. Keep track of where every sample comes from.”

“Then do the soil and any standing water outside,” Rachel said.
“See what you can find.”

“Okay,” Joe said too confidently. He made a note on his pad, his
brow tight and knowing.

Rachel glanced at him and sniffed. He didn’t have a clue how to
start, but she didn’t have the heart or the motivation right then to call him
on it.

“Okay.”

“You won’t have any problem with preparing the cultures will you?
Boiling the agar, that kind of thing?”

“Nah.”

“Good.”

“Not a problem.”

“If you get anything that looks like bacteria, try to type it. You
probably won’t be able to, but it might be useful to try. Just get the charge
at least, if you can. You can use my kits, I think I brought enough stain.”

“Okay.”

“Take some samples of the soil in the clearing and in the jungle,
but don’t go in too far. Make a map showing where you got each sample. Put the
samples under a scope and photograph anything that moves or has bilateral
symmetry. Jar up whatever you find, then culture the soil. We can do the
WM
's for them in the next few days.
Label everything.”

“Uh,
WM
's?”

“Standard Bio-hazard Weight Matrices. You know, like at school.”

“Oh, yeah. Got it.”

I’m sure
you do.

It was grunt work, but it would keep him busy and there was always
the chance he would find something important. She doubted it, but you never knew.

“I’ll start on the arthropod-likes. Those are gonna keep us busy
for a while.”

“Yeah . .Yeah,” Joe chuckled.

“Ummm . . . okay. Get on it. Let me know if I can help you out.”

“Sure will.”

She stood there for a moment with her hands on her hips and watched
him think, waiting for the questions that should have come but didn’t. Finally,
she turned away and thought about what she herself had to do. If he hit a snag,
he could call her, or not. It didn’t matter.

She went in the back and found the containers that her equipment
had come in and looking at the contents, was pleased with the anal part of her
personality for the very first time in her life. She’d packed more than she had
originally thought to bring, but now it didn’t seem like so much at all. She took
out her empty field pack, unfolded it and opened the top. She’d brought
hundreds of half-liter, accordion-style sample bottles with wide necks. Exactly
what she wanted. She dumped several packages of them in the bag. She took a
pair of rubber gloves, a small spade and two sizes of tongs with her, too. Of
course her medium-sized net had to go. Then she added her camera and her
favorite field scope. She thought about taking some Stunzem but figured the
tough plastic bottles would hold anything she might find today and skipped it.

She picked up her pad and checked the batteries before she put
that in the pack, too. She added to her list of equipment a simple, large
cotton sack with a draw string closure she’d found in the back room.

“Well, good luck Mr. Devonshire,” she said as she walked out.

“Yeah, thanks. You, too.”

The sun was halfway to overhead, bathing the terrain in dull wet
heat. She started to sweat and wished she could have worn shorts and a
ventilated, sleeveless top. There was no possibility of wearing such a
skin-exposing item on this planet. It would be quite stupid.

She wanted to work the jungle’s edge, the area where clearing met
foliage just now.

As she approached, she marveled at the variety and number of
flowering plants. The rich sweet scent filled her head and washed away the odor
of all the bullshit she’d experienced since yesterday.

There was a fallen log about the size of her thigh just where the
foliage met clearing. It was rotten and covered with brown fungi
—
a good place to start. She moved to
one end and lifted it out of the ground. It came away with a sound like tearing
rot and she slowly swung it out of the way. As she sat it down, she saw that
the depression under the log was honeycombed with neat channels running in all
directions like veins.

Nice.

She squatted down and found several large black and shiny beetles
running like mice in the groves. She jabbed at one once, twice with the tongs
and caught it. When she picked it up, its legs waved and clawed at the air. It
was the biggest she’d ever seen. She turned it over and took a look at its
glossy brown abdomen. Nothing spooky there. The head and mouth parts were
always a giveaway. This one’s small head and minute mouth proclaimed it an
eater of debris and the jungle’s dead and rotten. It probably wasn’t much of a
threat. It would have to be ground and cultured anyway. Innocuous vectors
transmitted some very nasty things. She unfolded a bottle, dropped the bug into
it with a plunk and capped the bottle off. Its legs scratched noisily at the
slippery plastic. She put the bottle in the bag.

What she wanted were the larvae if she could find them. If she
could find one here in the soil or close by, she could probably rule out that
stage of its life cycle as being dangerous as well. She probed around with the
spade, taking a scoop of moist soil and shaking if off a little at time,
flicking the last of it off the spade with a finger. On the third try, she
unearthed a black pupa, about the size of the adult form. Its immature legs
were visible and folded tight to its body. She dropped it in the same bottle
with the adult.

Bugs are
so predictable.

She made a note on the jar’s label.

She scratched around at the dirt some more and found a few other
pupae that she ignored. Then she stripped some of the rotten bark from the
tree and found some interesting maggots and smaller beetles. She took a few of
those.

The undersides of leaves were one of her favorite places for
arthropods. You had to lift a lot of them, but the rewards were great if you
had the patience. She started one leaf at a time, lifting them gently and
checking carefully. She’d lifted only a few before she saw the first one,
clinging to the leathery leaf's thick vein. It was long with the texture of a
dried pepper. Its hook like legs and long snout were damned interesting. She
grabbed it with the tongs and wrested it off the leaf. She was amazed at how
tenaciously it clung. When it came off, completely limp, it seemed to be
lifeless. She dropped it in a jar.

Within an hour she’d used up nearly all of the jars, the cotton
bag bulging with the number of them. In her search, she’d passed over many
multiples of most of the samples she’d already collected. She’d found organisms
on nearly every plant and in every pile of detritus. What she hadn’t seen were
colonial insects; ants, termites, things that nested. She was sure she would
find some eventually. She hadn’t seen any vertebrates either; snake forms or
mammalian-likes, nothing that scampered or cheeped. It was odd not to have seen
something else, something bigger and non-buggy, but it was an alien
environment, after all. There had been reports of them. They’d turn up
eventually.

A broad smile transformed her face, coming on her like an
autonomic response she had no control over. She looked around her and into the
thick tangle of jungle.

I haven't
even scratched the surface.

She headed back to the lab feeling like a kid in a candy store. It
wasn’t hard science; she knew that, especially under the circumstances. But it was
going to keep her busy for the next period doing what she liked best. And she’d
already found something very, very interesting.

She lined up her samples on one of the benches in neat rows and
stood back and looked at them. She shook her head in disbelief. She leaned in
and scanned the translucent vessels.

“Wow,” Joe said walking up behind her.

“Yeah,” she said. “Wow.”

“Where’d you catch 'em?”

“I didn’t
catch
them. I
took
them,” she sniffed. “I took them at the jungle’s edge. All from
the ground to about two meters.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Do you see it, Mr. Devonshire?”

“Which one?”

“Well, all of them. Don’t you see? Each one of these organisms is
uniquely different from the next in some way. Well, I take that back. Some are
fairly close in some way. But a good number of them could easily be a unique
class of organism. See?”

“Oh, yeah. Right.”

She picked up one of the jars by the lid and looked at the
creature inside it. She shook it a little and the disk-like organism stirred.
She read the label.

“I found this one with its mouth parts stuck in stem as tough as
oak. Count the legs.”

Joe bent down and counted.

“Twelve?”

"Twelve."

“Body
segments?”

“Two?”

“Very good. No thorax, no middle. It’s got an exoskeleton and twelve
little legs. No wings.”

“Okay.”

She picked up another one, the one that looked like a dried pepper
with hooks. She opened the lid and poured the inert organism into a stainless
steel tray. She picked up its limp form and held it in her hand and nudged it
around.

“Is it dead?”

“No. It’s asleep. A lot of them are like that. Strictly nocturnal
and in a state of torpor during the day.”

“Why is that, do you think?

“I’m really not sure. You would expect a certain number of
organisms to be more active at night. But that jungle is still and quiet as
death right now. There may be daytime predators we haven’t seen yet, something
from which they all hide. Or not. I really don’t know. Now, look at this one.”

“Right . . .”

“It’s got eight legs and very little exoskeleton. But look at the
joints in the big legs. Clearly like Terran arthropods, almost like a
grasshopper. And I’ve seen variations of that head on bugs on Earth and several
other planets, too.”

“So each one of the things here could represent a separate class
of organism, not just a different species.”

“And within each class, many orders and within each order many
families and species. I bet of the sixty samples I’ve got here, we could
classify out at least fifteen separate classes of organisms.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, wow. Here’s a question. Of these two, which one is the
insect?”

“Neither.”

“You’re smarter than you look, Mr. Devonshire.”

She dropped the limp form back into the bottle. It crumpled and
folded up in the bottom like it were made of rubber.

“So you’re saying there’s quite a lot of bio-diversity here?”

“Oh, yes,” she snorted.

She handed the bottle with the organism in it to him.

“It may be too soon to give this animal a Latin moniker, but how would
you like to give it a colloquial name, Mr. Devonshire?”

“Me?”

“Sure. Someone’s got to do it.”

“Well, I guess I could.”

He looked at the bug and thought about it.

“Anything I want?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said smiling a big magnanimous smile.

“Pepper Bug, then,” he said self-consciously. “Pepper Bug.”

“Pepper Bug?”

“Pepper Bug.”

“Okay. Great.”