“She would have rested in the subway tunnel,” Joyce said. “Besides, there’s no blood.”
Gentry looked around. “So I didn’t even hit her freakin’ tail!”
“No,” Joyce said. “You didn’t. You only scared the bat off and saved my life. What was it you said to me back in the car? About asking too much of yourself?”
“I saidyou shouldn’t. I can, though.”
“Right.” Joyce knew he was joking but not. She let it go for now. She continued pacing in a circle as she looked around the room. The sleeping bags were ripped where the bat had walked across them. A few videocassettes had been crushed, and the TV was blank.
“So what do you think?” Gentry asked.
“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“How do I start thinking like a bat?”
“You ask yourself what sensory input could have brought you here,” she said. “All right. Let’s go back. The bat left the museum and entered the subway. She got down here fast, which meant she had to be flying. Flying and echolocating because the subway tunnels are a snug fit and she’d have to watch out for girders and posts. She probably intended to stay underground until she reached her nest.”
“Maybe she came out to eat.”
“Unlikely.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because shedidn’t eat. She didn’t attack the police at the station stop or the people here. Besides, if she were hungry she would have waited until she was closer to home. Less distance to carry her meal. No. As she neared here she either heard or smelled something that made her leave the subway. She flew straight to the roof and came down through the skylight. Then she entered the playroom. She attacked no one but encountered something here that made her cry again.”
“Wait. Again?”
Joyce nodded. “The bat also cried when she realized that her mate was dead.”
“You mean she cried like a human being?”
“I believe that’s exactly what it was, yes. Of course, that grew into rage back at the museum and caused the other bats to go berserk. But not here. She left without hurting anyone. Why?”
“What were the kids doing?” Gentry asked.
Joyce was still walking around the room. “Coloring, reading, resting, snacking.” She looked down at a half-eaten peanut butter sandwich, an overturned container of milk, a banana. The bat hadn’t touched any of the food.
Was it a scent? Someone who smelled like Joyce? The bat could have detected that from the subway, but she didn’t come here to kill. She was looking for something.
“Maybe some of the kids were watching TV,” Gentry suggested.
“Possibly.” Joyce walked toward the overturned set.
“Maybe the bat heard her mate’s voice on the news.”
“A lot of people would have been watching TV along her route,” Joyce said. “Why would she stop here? Anyway, even if a tape of the male bat was on the news, she’d hear the sounds differently from the way we do. They would register as a series of strobing pulses, not as a continuous sound. It would be like you mistaking a black-and-white newspaper photograph for reality.” She stopped at the TV and looked down. “On the other hand-”
“What?” Gentry asked.
“She could have heard something that we recognize as one thing but that she heard as something else.”
“Such as?”
Joyce righted the stand and the TV. She reconnected a loose cable in back. The static vanished and a solid blue screen appeared. Joyce looked at the VCR that was on a bookcase behind the TV. The unit was off. “They weren’t watching a videotape,” she said.
Gentry moved one of the sleeping bags. There was a small plastic console beneath it. The red “on” light was glowing. “No,” he said. “They were playing video games.”
Joyce stepped over and crouched beside it. The game cartridge had popped partway out. She pushed it back in and then looked at the TV. The title screen of the game came on. “Feather Jackson,” she read. She pushed “start.” The legend scrolled down the screen, recounting the history of the girl who could fly. As it did, the theme music came on.
Gentry said, “Maybe we ought to ask one of the kids what part they were up to.”
Joyce nodded absently. She was listening to the game.
Gentry turned to go.
“Wait!” Joyce said suddenly.
Gentry came over and squatted beside her. “What’ve you got?”
She punched up the volume on the TV. “Do you hear that?”
“The music?”
“No.” She raised the volume. “The drum underneath it.”
Gentry listened again then nodded with the beat. “Drums of doom,” he said, then read from the screen. “ ‘The approaching armies of the Pillow People want to conquer Featherland and turn its inhabitants into-’ ”
“Robert, don’t you get it?”
He shook his head. She turned the volume higher. The music itself became a broken, crackling noise, but she could still hear the drum.
“This is just a hint of how the bat heard it. Loud and thumping.”
“Okay. But there had to be thousands of radios on along the way, a lot of beats. Why would she respond to this particular drum?”
“The drumbeats in music change, don’t they?”
“Most do, I suppose.”
“This doesn’t. It’s constant.”
He listened.
“Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Hear it?” Joyce asked.
“Yeah.”
The legend finished, and the game began. The drums continued.
“The beat keeps going when the introduction ends,” she said with growing excitement. “The sound probably continues through the entire game. Don’t yousee?”
“No.”
“Robert, that sound is in the audible range. When would the bat have been exposed to a regular drumbeat like it?”
“I have no idea.”
Joyce rose. She shut off the video game and started toward the door. “In the womb, Robert. The bat came here looking for her mother.”
Thirty-Six
Gentry and Joyce went back to the car and continued downtown. Joyce was revved up again. Gentry was not. He had some major problems with what Joyce had come up with.
“You really believe that a bat flying through a subway tunnel heard a video game that sounded like her mother-”
“Her mother’s heart.”
“Like her mother’s heart,” he said. “She heard that and she flew over to check it out?”
“Yes. It’s very possible.”
“One sound in a city of millions upon millions of sounds.”
“That’s right. Again, think like a bat. Its hearing is extraordinarily sensitive and multidirectional. A bat can pick up and follow a distinctive sound the same way a shark sniffs blood in the water.”
“But even if that’s true, her mother died eight years ago,” Gentry said. “How could the bat remember that?”
“It’s not in the conscious mind, but it’sthere, ” Joyce said. “The sound triggered some kind of memory. Think about it. She left at peace, without hurting anyone, without stirring up the small bats again. She was obviously calmed by whatever happened here.”
“All right. Assuming that’s true, why didn’t she get angry when she saw that her mother wasn’t here? She was in a rage when she left the museum.”
“You just said why.”
“I did?”
“All the giant bat knows is that her mother wasn’t in the playroom,” Joyce said. “As far as the bat knows, she might still be alive somewhere. But when the bat came to the museum laboratory, shesaw that her mate was dead. She didn’t see or smell anything to suggest death here in the shelter. Maybe one of the kids accidentally pulled out the cable when the bat came in. Maybe the bat did. So the video sound stopped suddenly, and the bat-”
“-thinks that mommy may still be alive?” Gentry said.
“We’ve got a name for that at the zoo,” she said. “It’s called the Dumbo effect. We use smells and sounds to wean animals from their parents.”