“Dirk pulled you all out. He says that you’re going to be okay in a month,” Liebchen said. Ohura’s lungs were too seared for her to speak, but she smiled slightly.
“Are our babies all right?” Colleen’s eyes were swollen shut.
“I’ve got them all right here. They’re fine. Lady Mona said you two did everything perfect,” Liebchen said.
“Oh, good. I hope Pinecroft’ll be all right,” Colleen said, before putting herself to sleep.
“What’s the status on the bomber crew?”
“Six of the original eight are alive, my lord. Three of those are capable of talking. Their flight orders were signed by Major General Hastings, chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency.”
“Hastings, huh?” Copernick said. “That’s perfect, politically. I want those three men programmed to make complete confessions to the news media, and I want it done in three hours. They are to say that they had orders to drop an atomic bomb on American citizens, and that they would have done so if their plane had not developed engine trouble. Call for volunteers among the valley’s citizens. I need all roads out of the valley blocked by ‘refugees’ for three hours. We need time to set the stage before the newsmen get here.”
Guibedo said, “What do you figure that’s going to accomplish, Heiny?”
“We were lucky this tune, and we can’t repeat the performance. Bringing that plane down cost us five hundred birds.
“CCU. See that all of the birds are cleaned out of the wreckage. I don’t want the government to know that we have any capability of fighting back. Save any birds that can be saved and… give the rest an honorable burial.
“Uncle Martin, our only hope is to kick up so much political flack that our opponents will wait a few months before attacking again. And with luck, by then they won’t have anything to attack with.”
“Heiny, it’s time we let our bugs loose.”
“Do you want the honor, Uncle Martin?”
“Yah. Now I want the honor. Telephone! Do it!”
In subbasements below their feet, long ceiling-high racks were filled with white eggs the size of beachballs, each connected by a black umbilical cord to the mother—being and by a thin pink string to the CCU.
The eggs began to open. By the thousands, full-sized swans broke soundlessly from their shells and started their silent, orderly, mindless procession upward. They climbed the wide circular ramp four hundred feet to the surface, and beyond, through the burned-out shell that was Pinecroft. They climbed until they were a hundred feet above the ground then dove into the night air. The great white birds circled high, then each flew off to its own separate destination.
Guibedo climbed Pinecroft. Still a wanted man, he couldn’t attend the press conference at the auditorium, but he could see the flash of strobes, the milling crowds. None of Copernick’s creations was in sight. They had been hidden, and the valley’s citizens had been cautioned not to mention them.
He could make out the long line of beds set up near the band shell, an outdoor hospital and morgue.
Guibedo watched the swans flying high and away. “Fly high, my pretty friends. Do your job, and this will never happen again.”
Each of the myriad birds headed to its five-square—mile target zone, then started flying a zigzag pattern. At four-second intervals, it discharged two mosquitoes, one a shiny aluminum, the other a duller iron. When it had discharged 1,024 of each insect, it froze in the air, its programming and life completed. It fell to the ground and became fertilizer for the food-making tree in its breast.
Each of the mosquitoes sought out metal. A car, a plane, a tin can. It laid an egg and flew on to do it again, a thousand times more. And then it died.
Each egg hatched and grew into a larva which, in three days’ time, would eat two ounces of metal and then become a mosquito and lay a thousand eggs of its own.
They would do this for eighty generations, and then their short-lived race would become extinct. Or rather, would try to, for after forty generations there would be neither iron nor aluminum nor any of their alloys left in an unoxidized state on Earth.
Patricia Cambridge came up and stood at Martin Guibedo’s side.
“There were too many old colleagues at the press conference. It sort of hurt, seeing them again. We talked, but I wasn’t one of them anymore.”
“It doesn’t matter, Patty. The world you knew has ended. Now we will build a better one.”
Patricia thought he was talking of love, and snuggled closer.
Chapter Nine
JUNE 20, 2003
MAINTENANCE of a proper resource allocation scheme will require a continuously updated local census of the humans and other bioforms under our jurisdiction.
Local ganglia are therefore instructed to inform me of all human activities within their assigned areas.
“I’m sorry that it had to be you, George,” General Powers said. “You were right in doing what you did, and it certainly wasn’t your fault that the bomber crashed. But political realities force me to relieve you of your command.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Officially, our position is that you went insane because of the death of your family some years ago. You will be assigned to a psychiatric ward under sedation for about a month. By that time we should have a final solution to this bioengineering problem, and your name can be cleared,” Powers said.
“A month or so in the funny farm won’t kill me, sir.”
“No point in that. I said ‘officially.’ Actually, I’d just like you to go away for a while. Take a vacation somewhere. You’ll know when you should come back.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“And have a good time.”
Hastings cut himself a set of orders assigning himself to the 315th Fighter-Bomber Squadron at Westover Field, Massachusetts. Then he cut a second set reassigning himself, his plane, and one atomic bomb to the Naval Testing Lab in San Diego.
Eight hours after leaving General Powers’ office, Hastings was flying his F-38 Penetrator at forty thousand feet over the Utah desert. Death Valley was thirty minutes away.
“Like the man said, if you want something done right, you’d better do it yourself,” Hastings said aloud to himself.
Directly below him, a single mindless larva was sinking its solid diamond teeth into a contact pin of an electrical connector. This connector was mounted directly to the solid-fuel rocket that powered the F-38’s ejection seat. The contact tasted bad, like gold, so the larva crawled to the next pin to see if it was aluminum. In the process, its aluminum body touched both contacts simultaneously and the resulting electrical current killed it. It also ignited the solid fuel rocket, which blasted Hastings out through the F-38’s plastic canopy.
Hastings was unconscious, but his flight suit had been designed for use at L-5. It protected him from the cold and near vacuum. At five thousand feet, his parachute opened automatically.
The plane had been set on full automatic and programmed to fly to San Diego, so that its transponder could assure Ground Control that the aircraft’s flight plan was being followed. It continued the journey without pilot or canopy, made a perfect landing on its assigned runway, and stopped, awaiting further instructions. Within minutes it was visited by an egg-laying mosquito.
The crash truck was unable to go out to the plane to investigate. A larva had eaten a hole in the truck’s fuel pump.
The swans looked like ordinary birds, and so attracted little attention. Bored radar operators noticed unusual migration patterns, and properly logged them. But the logs were not due to reach the scientific community for months, and actually would never be examined at all.