“Mendel bombs?”
“Wasn’t he a genetical scientist? Worked with peas? Insects are simple like that too—easy to breed.”
“Yeah, Gregor Mendel,” I said. “You’re saying Sarah—your sister—was involved in this?”
He nodded.
I thought about the lamp on Sarah’s floor.
“Look, Amos, I’m sorry about before—I don’t really think you did anything to Laurie. It’s just—can you show me any actual evidence of this stuff? I mean, like, the fireflies before they burn down a house?”
Amos considered. “Yeah, I can take you to a barn—it’s about five miles from here.”
I looked at Laurie.
“The Lapp farm?” she asked.
Amos nodded.
“It’s OK,” she said to me. “It’s safe. I’ve been there.”
“All right, then,” I said. But Mo’s car—and my car—were still gone. “How are we going to get there?”
“I parked my buggy at my friend’s—about a quarter of a mile from here,” Amos said.
Clop, clop, clop, looking at a horse’s behind, feeling like one—based on what I was able to make sense of in this case. Horses, flames, mysterious deaths—all the ingredients of a Jack Finney novel set in the nineteenth century. Except this was the end of the twentieth. And so far all I’d done is manage to get dragged along to every awful event. Well, at least I’d managed to save Laurie—or let Amos save her. But I had to do more—I had to stop just witnessing and reacting, and instead get on top of things. I represented twentieth-century science, for godsake. OK, it wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t all-powerful. But surely it had taught me enough to enable me to do something to counter these bombs and allergens, these… Mendelian things.
I’d also managed to get through to Corinne at the funeral home, from a pay phone on a corner, before we’d gotten into Amos’s buggy. I’d half expected his horse and buggy to come with a car phone—a horse phone?—that was how crazy this “genetical” stuff was getting me. On the other hand, I guess the Amish could have rigged up a buggy with a cellular phone running on battery at that. Well, at least I was learning…
“We should be there in a few minutes.” Amos leaned back from the driver’s seat, where he held the reins and clucked the lone horse along. He—Amos had told me the horse was a he—was a dark brown beautiful animal, at least to my innocent city eyes. The whole scene, riding along in a horse and buggy on a bright crisp autumn day, was astonishing—because it wasn’t a buggy ride for a tourist’s five dollar bill, it was real life.
“You know, I ate some of your sister’s food,” I blurted out the qualm that occurred to me again. “You don’t think, I mean, that maybe it had a slow-acting allergen—”
“We’ll give you a swig of an antidote—it’s pretty universal—when we get to John Lapp’s, don’t worry,” Amos leaned back and advised.
“Sarah, your sister, was telling me something about some low-grade allergen let loose on our population after World War II. Didn’t kill anyone, but made most people more irritable than they’d been before. Come to think of it, I suppose it indeed could have been responsible for lots of deaths, when you take into account the manslaughters that result from people on edge, arguments gone out of control.”
“You’re talking the way Poppa used to,” Laurie said.
“Your dad talked about those allergens?” I asked.
“No,” Laurie said. “I mean he was always going on about manslaughter, and how it had just one or two little differences in spelling from man’s laughter, and how those differences made all the difference.”
“Yeah, that was Mo all right,” I said.
“That’s John Lapp’s farm up ahead,” Amos said.
The meadow was green, still lush in this autumn. It was bounded by fences that looked both old, and, implausibly, in very good condition. Like we’d been literally traveling back in time.
“So, Amos, your opinion on your sister’s idea about the allergens?” I prompted.
“I don’t know,” he said. “That was my sister’s area of study.”
A barn, a big barn, but no different on the outside than hundreds of other barns in the countrysides of Pennsylvania and Ohio. How many of them had what this one had inside?
Variations of Sarah’s words played in my ears. Why do we expect science to always come in high-tech wrappings? Darwin was a great scientist, wasn’t he, and just the plain outside world was his laboratory. Mendel came upon the workings of genetics by cultivating purple and white flowering peas in his garden. Was a garden so different from a barn? If anything, it was even lower-tech.
A soft pervasive light embraced us as we walked inside—keener than fluorescent, more diffuse than incandescent, a cross between sepiatone and starlight maybe, but impossible to describe with any real precision if you hadn’t actually seen it, felt its photons slide through your pupils like pieces of a breeze.
“Fireflight,” Amos whispered, though I had realized that already. I’d seen fireflies before, loved them as a boy, poured over Audubon guides to insects with pictures of their light, but never anything like this.
“We have lots of uses for insects, more than just light,” Amos said, and he guided me over, Laurie on his arm, to a series of wooden contraptions all entwined with nets. I looked closer, and saw swarms of insects—bees mostly, maybe other kinds—each in its own gauzed compartment. There were several sections with spiders too.
“These are our nets, Phil,” Amos said. “The nets and webs of our information highway. Our insects are of course far slower and smaller in numbers than your electrons, but far more intelligent and motivated than those non-living things that convey information on yours. True, our communicators can’t possibly match the pace and reach of the broadcast towers, the telephone lines, the computers all over your world. But we don’t want that. We don’t need the speed, the high blood pressure, the invasion of privacy, that your electrons breed. We don’t want the numbers, the repetition, all the clutter. Our carriers get it right, for the jobs that we think are important, the first time.”
“Well they certainly get it just as deadly,” I said, “at least when it comes to burning down houses. Nature strikes back.” And I marveled again at the wisdom of these people, this boy—which, though I disagreed about the advantages of bug-tech over electricity, bespoke a grasp of information theory that would do any telecom specialist proud—
“Nature was never really gone, Dr. D’Amato,” a deep voice that sounded familiar said.
I turned around. “Isaac…”
“I apologize for the deception, but my name is John Lapp. I pretended to be Jacob’s brother at his farm because I couldn’t be sure that you weren’t videotaping me with some kind of concealed camera. The two of us are roughly the same age and height, so I took the chance. You’ll forgive me, but we have great distrust for your instruments.” His face and voice were “Isaac Stoltzfus’s,” all right, but his delivery was vastly more commanding and urbane.
I noticed in the corner of my eye that Laurie’s were wide with awe. “Mr. Lapp,” she stammered, “I’m very honored to meet you. I mean, I’ve been here before with Amos,” she squeezed his hand, “but I never expected to actually meet you—”
“Well, I’m honored too, young lady,” Lapp said, “and I’m very very sorry about your father. I only met him once—when I was first pretending to be Isaac the other day—but I know from Jacob that your father was a good man.”
“Thank you,” Laurie said, softly.
“I have something for you, Laurie Buhler.” Lapp reached into his long, dark coat and pulled out what looked like a lady’s handbag, constructed of a very attractive moss-green woven cloth. “Jacob Stoltzfus designed this. We call it a lamp-case. It’s a weave of special plant fibers dyed in an extract from the glow-worm, with certain chemicals from luminescent mushrooms mixed into the dye to give the light staying power. It glows in the dark. It should last for several months, as long as the weather doesn’t get too hot. Then you can get a new one. From now on, if you’re out shopping after the Sun sets, you’ll be able to see what you have in your case, how much money you have left, wherever you are. From what I know of young lady’s purses—I have three teenaged daughters—this can be very helpful. Some of you seem to be lugging half the world around with you in there!”