Lapp was suddenly talking, fast, arguing with someone.
Sarah!
“There’s a Mendel bomb here,” she was shouting. “Please. You all have to leave.”
Lapp looked desperately around the room, back at Sarah, and finally nodded. “She’s right,” he said and caught my eye. “We all have to leave now.” He grabbed on to Sarah’s shoulder, and beckoned me to follow.
Amos had his arm around Laurie, and was already walking quickly with her towards the door. Everyone else was scurrying around, grabbing what netted cages they could.
“No,” I said. “Wait.” An insight was just nibbling its way into my mind.
“Doctor, please,” Lapp said. “We have to leave now.”
“No, you don’t,” I said. “I know how to stop the bomb.”
Lapp shook his head firmly. “I assure you, we know of no remedy to stop this. We have perhaps seven, maybe eight minutes at most. We can rebuild the barn. Human lives we cannot rebuild.”
Sarah looked at me with pleading eyes.
“No,” I insisted, looking past Sarah at Lapp. “You can’t just keep running like this from your enemies, letting them bum you out. You have incredible work going on here. I can stop the bomb.”
Lapp stared at me.
“OK, how’s this?” I said. “You clear out of here with your friends. No problem. I’ll take care of this with my science and then we’ll talk about it, all right? But let me get on with it already.”
Lapp signaled the last of his people to leave. “Take her,” he said, and passed custody of Sarah along to a big burly man with a grey-flecked beard. She tried to resist but was no match for him.
Lapp squinted at the flickering fireflies. They were much more distinct now, as if the metamorphosis into bomb mode had coarsened the nature of the mesh.
He turned to me. “I’ll stay here with you. I’ll give you two minutes and then I’m yanking you out of here. What does your science have to offer?”
“Nothing all that advanced,” I said, and pulled my little halogen flashlight out of my pocket. “Those are fireflies, right? If they’ve retained anything of the characteristics of the family Lampyridae I know about, then they make their light only in the absence of daylight, when the day has waned—they’re nocturnal. During the day, bathed in daylight, they’re just like any other damn beetle. Well, this should make the necessary adjustment.” I turned up the flashlight to its fullest daylight setting, and shone it straight at the center of the swirling starlight fountain, which now had a much harsher tone, like an ugly light over an autopsy table. I focused my halogen on the souped-up fireflies for a minute and longer. Nothing happened. The swirling continued. The harsh part of their light got stronger.
“Doctor, we can’t stay here any longer,” Lapp said.
I sighed, closed my eyes, and opened them. The halogen flashlight should have worked—it should have put out the light of least some of the fireflies, then more, disrupting their syncopated overlapping pattern of flashing. I stared hard at the fountain. My eyes were tired. I couldn’t see the flies as clearly as I could a few moments ago…
No… of course!
I couldn’t see as clearly because the light was getting dimmer!
There was no doubt about it now. The whole barn seemed to be flickering in and out, the continuous light effect had broken down, and each time the light came back, it did so a little more weakly… I kept my halogen trained on the flies. It was soon the only light in the barn.
Lapp’s hand was on my shoulder. “We’re in your debt, Doctor. I almost made the fool’s mistake of closing my mind to a source of knowledge I didn’t understand—a fool’s mistake, as I say, because if I don’t understand it, then how can I know it’s not valuable?”
“Plato’s Meno Paradox strikes again,” I said.
“What?”
“You need some knowledge to recognize knowledge, so where does the first knowledge come from?” I smiled. “Wisdom from an old Western-style philosopher—I frequently consult him—though actually he probably had more in common with you.”
Lapp nodded. “Thank you for giving us this knowledge of the firefly, that we knew all along ourselves but didn’t realize. From now on, the Mendel bombs won’t be such a threat to us—once we notice their special flicker, all we’ll need to do is flood the area with daylight. Plain daylight. Sometimes we won’t even need your flashlight to do it—daylight is after all just out there, naturally for the asking, a good deal of the time.”
“And in the evenings, you can use the flashlight—it’s battery operated, no strings attached to central electric companies,” I said. “See, I’ve picked up a few things about your culture after all.”
Lapp smiled. “I believe you have, Doctor. And I believe we’ll be all right now.”
“Yeah, but it was a good thing you had Sarah Fischer to warn you this time, anyway,” I said.
Of course, the enemies of John Lapp and Amos Stoltzfus would no doubt come up with other diabolical breedings of weapons. No one ever gets a clear-cut complete victory in these things. But at least the scourge of Mendel bombs would be reduced. I guess I’d given them an SDI for these pyro-fireflies—imperfect, no doubt, but certainly a lot better than nothing.
I was glad, too, about how Sarah Fischer had turned around. She’d come back to the barn to warn us. Said she couldn’t take the killing anymore. She said she had nothing directly to do with Mo’s or Jacob’s—her father’s—deaths, but she could no longer be part of a community that did such things. She had started telling me about the allergens—the irritation ones—because she wanted the world to know. I wanted to believe her.
I’d thought of calling the Pennsylvania police, having them take her into custody, but what was the point? I had no evidence on her whatsoever. Even if she had set the Mendel bomb in John Lapp’s barn—which I didn’t believe—what could I do about that anyway? Have her arrested for setting a bomb made of incendiary flies I’d been able to defuse by shining my flashlight—a bomb that Lapp’s people were unwilling in any way to even acknowledge to the outside world, let alone testify about in court? No thank you—I’ve been laughed out of court enough times as is already.
And Lapp said his people had some sort of humane program for people like Sarah—help her find her own people and roots again. She needed that. She was a woman without community now, shunned by all parties. The worst thing that could happen to someone of Sarah s upbringing. It was good that John Lapp and Amos Stoltzfus were willing to give her a second chance—offer her a lamp of hope, maybe the real meaning of the Mendelian lamp, as Lapp had aptly put it.
I rolled my window down to pay the George Washington Bridge toll. It felt good to finally be back in my own beat-up car again, I had to admit. Corinne was off with the girls to resettle in California. I’d said a few words about Mo at his funeral, and now his little family was safely on a plane out West. I couldn’t say I’d brought his murderers to justice, but at least I’d put a little crimp in their operation. Laurie had kissed Amos good-bye, and promised she’d come back and see him, certainly for Christmas…
“Thanks, Chief.” I took the receipt and the change. I felt so good to be back I almost told him to keep the change. I left the window rolled down. The air had its customary musky aroma—the belches of industry, the exhaust fumes of even EPA-clean cars still leaving their olfactory mark. Damn, and didn’t it feel good to breathe it in. Better than the sweet air of Pennsylvania, and all the hidden allergens and catalysts it might be carrying. It had killed both Jacob and Mo. They ’d been primed with a slow-acting catalyst years ago. Then the second catalyst had been introduced, and whoosh… some inconsequential something in their surroundings had set the last short fuse. Just as likely a stray firefly of a certain type that buzzed at their ankles, or landed on their arm, as anything else. Jacob’s barn had been lit by them. The lamp was likely the other thing Mo had wanted to show me. There were likely one or two fireflies that had gotten into our car on the farm, and danced unseen around our feet as we drove to Philadelphia that evening… A beetle for me, an assassin for Mo.