"Those are molars!" I said. "See? They're not as sharp. The first row is for cutting; these are for grinding. And look-do you see anything farther back?"
"Uh, I'm not sure. It's awfully dark down there."
"We can digitize this and bring up the resolution, but doesn't that look like a third row?"
"I can't tell. It could be."
I looked at him. "Ted, maybe these things have teeth all the way down their throats. That's why they can eat so much, and so many different things. By the time the food reaches the stomach, it's been ground to pulp. They'll still need strong stomach acids, but now the food has a lot more surface area exposed to the action of the enzymes."
"Well, this makes them a little more . . . believable." Ted grinned. "I find it very hard to trust any kind of creature that eats tennis shoes, wallpaper and baseballs, not to mention bicycle seats, clotheslines and Sergeant Kelly's coffee."
"Ted, give me a break. Please."
"All right-they wouldn't drink the coffee. That's probably what the Chtorrans use in that corral fence to keep them from getting out-Sergeant Kelly's coffee grounds."
"Oh, no," I said. "Didn't I tell you?" He looked up. "What?"
"You should have guessed. What's the one thing the millipedes won't eat-the one organic thing?"
He opened his mouth. He closed it.
"That's right," I said. "Used food. No creature can live in its own excrement-those are the things its metabolism can't use. And that's what the worms put between the double walls of their corral. As soon as the millipedes sense it, they back away."
"Wait a minute, boy-are you telling me the worms are going around gathering up millipede droppings for fence insulation?"
"Not at all. I didn't say anything about millipede waste. I just said it was waste"-he opened his mouth to interrupt; I didn't let him-"and it's not terrestrial waste either. Remember we were wondering why we never found any worm droppings? This is why. Evidently, the worms have been using it to keep their `chickens' from escaping. The worms and the millipedes must be similar enough so that it doesn't make any difference. What a worm can't use, neither can a millipede. The tests on the droppings from the enclosure and the specimens we've got here show a lot of similarities. Mostly the differences are dietary, although a lot of the special enzymes don't match up. If I had more sophisticated equipment, I'd be able to spot the subtler differences."
Abruptly, Ted's expression was thoughtful. "Have you written any of this down?"
"I've made some notes. Why?"
"Because I heard Duke talking to Dr. Obama about you-about us. He wants Obie to send us to Denver."
"Huh?"
Ted repeated it. "Duke wants Obie to send us to Denver. With the specimens. On Thursday."
I shook my head. "That doesn't make sense. Why should Duke do any favors for us?"
Ted perched himself on the edge of the table. The three millipedes looked at him with patient black eyes. I wondered if the mesh of their cage was strong enough. Ted said, "Duke's not doing us any favors. He's doing it for himself. We don't belong up here and he doesn't want to be a babysitter. And after what happened with Shorty-well, you know."
I sat down again. I felt betrayed. "I thought ... I mean . . ." I shut up and tried to remember.
"What?" asked Ted.
I held up a hand. "Wait a minute. I'm trying to remember what Duke said." I shook my head. "Uh uh-he didn't say anything. Not about this. I guess I just thought I heard-" I stopped.
"Heard what?"
"I don't know." I felt frustrated. "I just thought that we were going to be part of the Special Forces Team."
Ted dropped off the table, pulled the other chair around and sat down opposite me. "Jim boy, sometimes you can be awfully dumb. Listen to your Uncle Ted now. Do you know where these Special Forces Teams came from? I thought not. These are-or were-top-secret crack-trained units. So secret even our own intelligence agencies didn't know they existed. They were created after the Moscow Treaties. Yes, illegally-I know-and you used a flamethrower last week, remember? It saved your life. Guess what the Special Forces were for-and a lot of other innocuous looking institutions. Too bad you slept through history, Jim, or you'd understand. Anyway, the point is, these men have lived together and trained together for years. And they're all weapons experts. Have you ever seen Sergeant Kelly on the practice range?"
"Huh? No-"
"Well, you should-or maybe you shouldn't. You'd be too terrified to complain about her coffee. These people think and act as a family. Do you know what that makes us? Just a couple of local yokels. We're outsiders-and there's nothing we can do that will change that. Why do you think Duke gave us this labpractically shoved it on us? Because he wants an excuse to send us packing. And this is it. He'll be able to say we're too valuable as scientists to be risked out here in the field."
"Oh," I said. "And I was just beginning to like it here."
"Better than Denver?" Ted asked.
"I've never been to Denver."
"Trust me. You'll love it. It'll be just like civilization. Jim, do you really want to stay here, where the odds are seven to one that you'll end up in a Chtorran stewpot? Or didn't you know that?"
I didn't answer right away. At least now I knew why Ted had been so cooperative these past few days. But I still felt as if a rug had been yanked out from under me. I looked across at Ted. He was peering into my face, still waiting for my reaction.
"Damn," I said. "I wish you weren't always so ... ubiquitous." He shrugged. "So what? You'll thank me for it in Denver."
"I know. That's the annoying part!"
FIFTEEN
THE THURSDAY chopper was pushed back till Saturday, so we had four days left-if we were going. They still hadn't told us. Ted said that was the army way. If they told us, we'd only worry about it. This way, we didn't have anything to worry about.
I worried anyway-and made the best use I could of the time. I borrowed the helmet camera and set it up in front of the millipede cage. I digitized the image, fed it into one of the computers-and I had an activity monitor. The program counted the number of pixel changes per second, noted the scale of change, the time and the temperature. As it built up information, it correlated trends, fit them into curves and made them available for display on continually updating graphs.
The bugs did not like heat. Temperatures above twenty-five degrees Centigrade made them lethargic, and higher than thirtyfive degrees they refused to move at all. Generally they seemed to prefer a ten-degree environment, although they remained active at temperatures as low as freezing. Lower than that, they would curl up.
I repeated the tests under different lighting conditions. The bath house had been rigged with two bare twelve-hundred-lumen plates; when I replaced them with outdoor lamps, some of the vari-temp, night-into-day lights for hydro- and aeroponics, the millipedes curled up as if to shield themselves, regardless of the temperature. Clearly, they did not like bright light.
But I wanted to measure their activity levels through a full range of lighting conditions, charting the curve all the way from pitch dark to bright sunlight-and through a complete range of temperatures too.
We borrowed the air conditioner from Dr. Obama's office-we didn't dare try to take the one from the mess hall-and Larry found a spare heater for us somewhere. Between the two I was able to achieve most of the test temperatures I wanted. I rewrote the program, put the lights on a rheostat with a photodiode to measure the lumens and connected everything to the computer.
The result was a two-dimensional data-base demonstrating the millipedes' reactions to a variety of environments.
But it was inconclusive. The bugs liked low temperatures and dim lights. They tolerated high temperatures. They didn't like bright lights at any temperature. That didn't make sense. It was too simple. Did they come from a dark planet? There wasn't enough data.