Bug Park Page 5

  Then a tearing, crunching sound made her look up. One of the leaves up over her head was missing a saw-edged piece the size of a door. As she looked, another portion of the leaf disappeared, and suddenly the face of a caterpillar—if the obscene globular shape that was virtually all mouth, with just points for eyes could be called a face—was staring down from the front end of an undulating green mass the length of a railroad car, studded with spikes and portholes. Michelle retreated farther, instinctively restraining herself from moving too suddenly, but at the same time unable to prevent her steps from quickening. She knew that she was seeing through a remote sensor, and she guessed that the monster was probably harmless in any case. . . . But her capacity for reasoned control was reaching its limit. Reflexes were taking over now. Finally she allowed herself to turn, and hastened in a new direction.

  It brought her onto a house-size rock with a domed top. An impassable wall of dead leaves and pine needles lay to the left, while on her other side a ramp of sand scree and pebble-boulders led down. Scuffling and clicking noises came from ahead, growing louder as she moved forward. She crossed cautiously over the steepening slope of the dome until she could see down the far side of it . . . and found herself looking at an ant freeway.

  There were hundreds of them, streaming in a two-way column: pinch-waisted bodies the size of hogs, jostling and swerving, occasionally bumping to exchange pieces of substances that some carried in their mandibles. Others bore triumphantly aloft pieces of leaf and other trophies. The flowing patterns of bustle and movement were hypnotic, and even in her agitated state Michelle was unable to pull herself away. She had heard that a colony was in reality, somehow, a single, extended organism, its cells freely mobile as individuals, yet at the same time totally subordinated functional parts of the whole. She had never really understood what that meant; but here, watching them, she could feel it, chilling and unnerving, as if she were watching an entire race that had become zombies; individually mindless, yet collectively with a sinister single-mindedness of purpose evident in the endless, mechanical, marching lines.

  There was movement at the edge of her field of view. A scout on the flank of the column had detected her and was coming up the ramp by the side of the dome to investigate. And it was coming fast.

  Michelle finally lost the control that she had been striving to maintain. She didn't care about this being an illusion, didn't stop to reason or intellectualize. She couldn't have if she'd tried. The flurry of clacking, Erector-Set legs and the sight of the tapered head with its huge eyes, antennas switching like whips, crushing mandibles extended, triggered her most basic, animal survival responses. The next she knew, she was plunging back through shoots and vines, moving faster than she'd thought possible, not sure if she had shouted out her terror. All that mattered was to get away.

  A whine like a diving jet fighter came from overhead. She looked up to see a winged school bus coming out of the sky, straight at her. She certainly screamed then, but it streaked over her and came down among the overhanging leaves. One of the shoots sagged to reveal the green caterpillar that she had seen before, caged among the wasp's legs. It convulsed and squirmed, causing the whole frond of leaves to shake. Michelle saw the wasp's body arch, watched the sting drive into the quivering bulk. . . .

  Get away, anywhere! . . .

  She was back at the wood-chip mountain, scrambling frantically, causing logs and boulders to slide. The hillside burst open as the centipede emerged—amber and brown, armed with huge claws converging like pincers, and two trunklike antennas—a monstrous, loathsome, segmented train with waves of legs undulating in place of wheels. The avalanche of wood tumbled down around Michelle, bowling her over. A gigantic head studded with eyes loomed over her, ghastly beyond her worst nightmares, its sideways-gaping mouth open to expose slavering fangs. The horror overcame her. She had no voice, no will, was incapable of reacting.

  Then another whine, higher-pitched than the wasp's, came from close by; there was a quick rasping sound, and the centipede recoiled as one of its antennas flew away. Something long and deadly flashed above where Michelle was lying, and the monstrosity wheeled away, rearing to meet a different threat. Michelle rolled clear with brief impressions of a bright yellow, upright creature dodging in an amazing leap, then lunging. The centipede grappled with its claws and tried to bite, reeling back as two of its legs came off.

  It was another mec! Michelle pushed herself up, staring disbelievingly. The assailant was another mec, with black and yellow stripes again, like the other one in the box back on the ledge. It was brandishing something that looked like a chain-saw ten feet long.

  Again, they closed. The mec evaded the snapping claws and sprung in nimbly to hack off another leg, causing the front part of the beast to lose support and lurch over. As it did, another mec, bright red this time, raced in from the opposite side, leveling a whirring lance even longer than the saw, and drove it into the base of the centipede's head. Coordinating perfectly, the striped mec swung the saw down at the back of its neck. The head dropped, almost severed. The remaining antenna flailed violently a few times, and then the rest of the body collapsed in a wave of shuddering legs that rippled down its length like a line of toppling dominoes. Some of the legs twitched spasmodically; then it was still.

  Michelle hauled herself slowly to her feet. Somehow a shaking from her own body managed to communicate itself to her mechanical one. "Guys?" She found that she could only croak. Her mouth had dried up.

  "Acme Pest and Dragon Control, at your service," Kevin's voice said in her phones. The tiger-striped mec saluted with its saw. "Hi. It's Kevin. Or in this outfit, better known as Tigger. What do you think?"

  Its red companion withdrew the lance, revealing a rotary cutting end that bored like a drill. "No job too small. Saving pretty damsels a specialty," Taki said. "Meet the Red Lobster."

  Just at that moment Michelle had never wanted to hug two people more in her life.

  Eric's voice cut in. "I think that might be enough excitement for now. Michelle's showing a cold sweat here. Can you two guys get Carroty Chop back up to the box if we decouple her?"

  "Sure," Kevin said. Michelle wasn't going to argue with that. . . .

  And seconds later she was back in the chair at the house. Her breathing was coming in quick, panting gasps, and she could feel her pulse hammering. But she was her own size once again. She wouldn't have believed that something so basic could feel so wonderful. A few seconds more, and the helmet and phones were lifted away. Eric was grinning at her.

  "Are you okay?" he asked, unfastening the collar. She nodded mutely but didn't feel it. He shook his head wonderingly. "Well, you sure believe in going for the spectacular, I'll give you that."

  "So what do you think?" Ohira asked her. "What would people pay to visit a safari park like that? A big difference from looking at stupid giraffes and zebras, yes? You think these two kids might be onto something good here?"

  Michelle's recent experiences didn't appear to have aroused much in the way of concern; but she'd worked for Ohira long enough not to be too surprised. She sighed inwardly and told herself not to worry about it. It was all part of the job. She was being paid for it.

  Eric passed her a can of soda. She sipped it gratefully and nodded. "Yes, I think they could all be onto something big," she said, at last finding her voice. "Really big."

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Kevin sat in his room with a deck of cards, practicing fan flourishes, false shuffles, and top- and bottom-palming. Two days had gone by since Michelle's introduction to Bug Park. Michelle was downstairs, having come back to the house on her own to talk about patents and licensing arrangements with Vanessa, who had the most involvement with the legal and financial side of the business—Eric was at Neurodyne, anyway. She had been there for about an hour. Kevin had a video cartridge that he'd promised to copy for her, a collection of highlights from other Bug Park exploits, and had asked Harriet to make sure that Michelle didn't leave without picking it up
. It would be an excuse for him to say hi again, too.

  He and Taki had agreed that Michelle had given a pretty impressive first-time performance—an unusually generous assessment to grant to an adult still in the yet-to-be-categorized category. Taki's older sister, Nakisha, had frozen in terror at the sight of a clawed scarab beetle, and refused to have anything further to do with the enterprise since. Ohira never displayed much in the way of feelings or emotion, but Kevin had noticed that he did more observing from the home base than active exploring these days. And Vanessa thought only in terms of the scientific and industrial possibilities that had spurred the technology into existence in the first place. The thought of any involvement in public entertainment evoked the kind of attitude that she might have held toward a game arcade or a VR parlor. Kevin had overheard her describe it to one of her friends as "vulgar." Kevin wasn't really that surprised. It was typical of the coolness that she seemed to display toward all of his and his father's projects.

  He felt sometimes that Vanessa avoided emotional closeness deliberately, which struck him as peculiar for somebody who had taken on the challenges of becoming a replacement mother. But adulthood was full of peculiar attitudes and rituals that he didn't understand, but which he presumed—more through a primitive faith that the world he was becoming a part of was a product of people who knew what they were doing, than from any solid conviction that he could attest to—would make better sense one day.

  People of his age had generally discovered what they liked to do. And then convention seemed to require that they progressively abandon those things in order to spend what should have been their most enjoyable years pursuing "success," the object of which being, as far as he could make out, to make enough money to one day retire from it to do what they had always wanted to. The circularity of it all made about as much sense to Kevin as a solar powered tanning lamp, but nobody ever wanted to talk about it when he brought the subject up.

  The phone rang on the shelf above the computer—Kevin and Taki could tie up a line for a whole evening, so Eric had given him two numbers of his own. He put down the cards, reached across, and answered. "Hello?"

  "Knock-knock." It was Taki's voice.

  Kevin groaned. "Who's there?"

  "Acne."

  "Oh, tacky, Taki. Okay, I'll buy it. Acne who?"

  "A k-nee is a k-nob halfway up your leg. So, watcha up to?"

  "Nothing much. . . . Oh, I got that motor running for the KJ-3, so we'll be able to fly it this weekend. There was some gunk in the fuel line."

  "That's great, Kev. Hmm. But my amazing psychic powers tell me that other things have been preoccupying you more recently. I see shapes of diamonds, hearts, spades, and clubs. You're practicing your cardsharping, unless I'm very much mistaken. So, am I right or am I right?"

  Kevin frowned, taken by surprise. "Hey, what is this?"

  "And that book on MEGA-DOS that I lent you is right there by your elbow. If you're done with it, I could use it back."

  Kevin moved the phone from his ear and looked suspiciously from side to side around the room, across to the window, and over his shoulder at the door. "Taki, what's going on? What kind of stunt are you pulling here?"

  The voice on the other end of the phone chuckled. "Up on your bookshelf—the bottom one. Check about a foot along from the gap where the calculator and the stapler are."

  Kevin turned his head, more puzzled than ever, and looked where Taki had indicated. Even with the directions, it was several seconds before he located the mec standing in a space formed where a couple of volumes were indented between University Physics and The Guinness Book of Records: one of the older, inch-high models, metallic gray with square black eyes. It was one of several that Taki had had over at his place for a couple of months. Taki was obviously decoupled from it now, since he was using the phone. But he could have left it live and be copying its visual output to a screen.

  "Okay, I see you now." Kevin was intrigued, but at the same time baffled. Taki had been talking about developing a relay device that would enable mecs to be controlled from a distance—Taki's house was six miles away, outside the range of their regular transmitters, such as the one in Kevin's basement. "Are you at home?" Kevin queried. The first, obvious possibility was that Taki might have driven over with Michelle and brought the mec with him, sneaked in without announcing himself, and had used one of the couplers downstairs to send the mec up to Kevin's room as a prank. It was the kind of pointlessly silly thing that Kevin would have expected from Taki—if he didn't think of it himself first.

  "Sure, I'm at home. Where else?" From his tone of voice, Taki was clearly enjoying himself.

  Kevin frowned. "You've got a relay working? Are you saying you've cracked it?"

  "Right! So what do you think? It works just fine, eh? I got it up between your bed and the wall, and from there to the shelf via the window drapes. Getting it up the stairs was a drag, though. Pronged feet are a must for getting around in houses."

  That still didn't explain everything. "So how did you get it over here to the house?" Kevin asked.

  "In Michelle's laptop. She was here showing my dad some papers before she went over to your place. It was lying open, so I hid the mec in one of the pouches inside the lid. A bit sneaky, I guess, but I wanted to see it work for real."

  "I have to agree—but it's still pretty cool. Is that where the relay is too?"

  "Yes. That's what I'm calling about. Could you get it out of there before she finds it, and hang on to it until I see you next? She's probably not the kind of person who'd get mad about something like that if she did find it, but why risk it?"

  "Okay, sure—if I get a chance. You said in a pouch in her laptop?"

  "Inside the lid. There's a row of elastic pockets for holding diskettes and stuff. The relay is in a black plastic pack with a rubber band around it—it's a two-inch card with some chips and a couple of batteries."

  "I'll see what I can do. . . ." Kevin glanced huffily at the mec still staring at him from his bookshelf. "And we need to call a truce on this business right now, Taki. I don't think I like the thought of being spied on like this anytime, anywhere in my own house. So let's draw the line right here, okay?"

  "Okay. You've got it."

  There was a tap on the door, and Harriet stuck her head in. "Anyhow, I have to go," Kevin said, nodding at her and speaking into the phone. "I'll do that thing for you if I can. You take care, okay?"

  "Thanks, Kev. Talk to you later." Taki hung up. Kevin replaced the phone and looked at Harriet.

  "It looks as if Vanessa and Michelle will be finished soon downstairs," she said. "And Beverley called from the office with some figures that your father said you wanted." Beverley was Eric's secretary at Neurodyne.

  "Oh, great. They must be the scaling constants."

  "I haven't the faintest idea. They're written down in the kitchen. Oh, and speaking of kitchens, a tin of black, sticky, nasty-smelling stuff has appeared by the side of the sink. You wouldn't know anything about it, by any chance?"

  "Oh, yeah, right. That's mine. I'll move it."

  Kevin got up to follow Harriet back down. As he turned to close the door, he looked across at the mec again. Just for a moment, he thought he caught it starting to wave at him. . . . But then again, he could have been mistaken.

  He heard Vanessa talking as he and Harriet reached the bottom of the rear stairs. "Oh, Eric's up to his eyes in something or other all the time. But there's no need to tie him up with this. I'll have Phil Garsten call you first thing tomorrow morning. He can give you all the details." She was coming through the door from the den. Michelle answered, following immediately behind her.

  "I'm glad I stopped by. Things still get done quicker face-to-face in the long run. Is Kevin in? I wouldn't want to rush off without saying hello."

  "He should be about somewhere. . . ." Vanessa looked around as Harriet appeared through the archway from the rear hall. "Have you seen Kevin anywhere, Harriet? Ms. Lang was just—oh, there
he is. Kevin, Ms. Lang is just about to leave. She wanted to pay her regards." Harriet nodded and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen.

  Michelle smiled. "Hi, Kevin."

  "Hi." The wheels in Kevin's head slammed to a halt. Again, the adult knack for instantly following up with something that didn't sound dumb eluded him.

  Michelle smiled. "Well, you'll be pleased to know that I seem to have survived it all without mishap—no midnight screams or trips to a psychiatrist." She was carrying a burgundy attaché case, Kevin saw. There was no sign of a laptop.

  "That's pretty good, I guess," he responded. Maybe they spent hours thinking things up and then waited for the right occasion. Or was it that they'd just had more time to collect material?

  "Oh yes, and while I think of it—did you run me a copy of those movie clips that you told me about? They sounded fascinating."

  She remembered! Kevin nodded a head of shaggy dark hair. "Yes. It's down in the mec lab."

  "Do you want to run down and fetch it?" Vanessa said.

  "Sure."

  "I'll come with you and pick it up," Michelle suggested. She looked at Vanessa. "Then we won't have to keep you standing here waiting. I can go out the back way and walk around to the car. Kevin will see me out."

  Vanessa made no protest. "Very well. Thank you again for coming over. I think it was quite productive. Were there any other points?"

  "No, I don't think so."

  "Goodbye, then."

  "For now, anyway."

  They shook hands. "If anything further occurs to you, give me a call," Vanessa said. She stood watching with a formal smile while Michelle and Kevin crossed past the plants and the grand piano to the stairs leading down. When they had disappeared from view, she turned away and retired to another part of the house.