Bhumi Bhap lost sight of the scorpion as it crawled beneath his bent right knee. He was being tickled on the sole of his left foot. The claws appeared, like blind insects, over the curve of his thigh. Up it came, laboring to gain a purchase, its segmented body gleaming faintly in the lamplight.
His right hand was spread on the crown of his knee and the scorpion used his fingers as the rungs of a ladder to haul itself onto the back of his hand. There it rested, claws raised in the attitude of a boxer wearing outsize gloves, prepared to defend itself.
Bhumi Bhap could hardly feel it, it was so light. Just a few grams on delicate jointed legs--yet the bulbous gland with its pointed sting at the end of the coiled tail contained enough venom to kill a creature several thousand times its size and weight, including a man.
A mosquito whined in the stillness. The oil lamp unfurled its dark ribbon of smoke to a blackened spot on the ceiling. Unlike a Christian or a muslim, Bhumi Bhap could not pray to God or Allah for deliverance from this peril; his faith admitted of no supreme deity. Instead there was the impersonal concept of a vast oceanic experience with which selfhood could be merged. Brahman, or the ultimate reality, could be attained by any method the disciple wished, providing he had dispensed with ego. And without ego there could be no fear of death of self, since that imposter no longer existed.
The scorpion (Bhumi Bhap knew) was a test. Had he felt fear he would have failed. It would have shown that his ego, his identity, was intact.
But he felt no fear.
His ego was dead.
He had passed the test A-OK.
He raised his hand and brought the scorpion level with his eyes and looked at it. The creature was alerted. Its tail sprung up and arched stiffly over its head, the sting extended and poised to attack. Slowly and carefully Bhumi Bhap placed his hand flat on the floor. The sting retracted and the tail coiled back on itself and the scorpion crawled off into the darkness.
From outside came a low rhythmic chanting. Over and over the chant was repeated until the night air vibrated and seemed to solidify around him.
With the index finger of his left hand he traced the sacred symbol in the circle of lamplight at his feet. Bhumi Bhap knew what had to be done, and knew that he had the strength and the will to do it.
He would become death, the shatterer of worlds . . .
"You think he's worried about something?" Chase scooped up a forkful of mashed potatoes and peas. "The letter doesn't actually say
so."
"How could it?" Cheryl said impatiently, chewing on a piece of steak and swallowing it. "They'd never have let it through. Besides, it would be far too dangerous." She took a drink of water, ice cubes clinking in the tall glass. "But I know Boris and I know he was trying to tell me something."
"That was weeks ago, almost three months, and you haven't heard anything since."
"That's what worries me. I wrote back at once--just acknowledging his letter, that's all--and haven't heard another word." She dug into another piece of steak.
They were in the Scripps cafeteria eating a late lunch among tables that bore the debris of several hundred people, now departed. Cleaners moved methodically along the aisles pushing rubber-wheeled trolleys that reminded Chase of stainless-steel coffins.
The scrape and clatter made it difficult to concentrate, though Cheryl seemed not to notice. It was four years since their last meeting. At that time she was still suffering the loss of her father, grief that was churned up with anger because in bland police jargon "Vehicle unknown, Driver unknown" had been responsible for the so-called accident.
Wiping his mouth with a paper napkin, Chase said, "You could be right, but you'll admit it's pure conjecture until you hear anything more."
"What if I don't hear?"
"Then you don't. Perhaps he is trying to tell you something, but there's no way of knowing or finding out."
Cheryl pushed her plate away and toyed with a dessert spoon. "It really gets to me. This damn world is full of closed doors. You bust through one and, boy, there's another--locked and barred and plastered with no entry signs."
"We all suffer from that," said Chase with some feeling.
Cheryl raised her eyes. "You too?"
He told her about his meeting with Bill Inchcape at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and of the classified predictions that DELFI was supplying to ASP in Washington.
"What's ASP?" Cheryl asked.
"One of these cloak-and-dagger organizations at the Pentagon. Advanced Strategic Projects, which is a handy catchall title meaning almost anything. I got the impression that Bill Inchcape was reluctant even to mention it. It isn't supposed to exist."
"It's a new one on me."
They left the cafeteria and strolled in the sunshine down to the long concrete arm of the pier jutting out into the ocean.
"It's good to see you again, Gavin," Cheryl said, taking his arm. "How's Dan?"
"He's fine. At the moment he's exploring the difference between the sexes."
"At six years old?"
"Well, he's a late developer."
Cheryl laughed, squeezing his arm. He imagined her for a moment as a schoolgirclass="underline" blond pigtails, wide blue eyes, snub nose, and drenched with freckles. Maybe the American habit for braces was vindicated after all, he thought, in her bright perfect smile. But there were underlying changes he hadn't seen before, not so much in her physical appearance as in a hardening of her attitude, her old cynicism now edged with despair.
Cheryl's office was in the glass-walled annex of the marine biology division, set among lawns and shrubs and gravel paths. Much of her work these days was concerned with evaluation of data for the Marine Life Research Group, whose main function was to record low-frequency fluctuations in the ocean currents. Not only did these affect the growth and distribution of marine life, but their dynamics played an important role in determining the atmospheric climate, particularly in the Pacific Basin.
"Every little bit adds to our picture of the biosphere," Cheryl said. "I divide my time between the research I'm required to do for Scripps and compiling information on the oxygen deficit."
She pointed and Chase swiveled in his chair to look at a chart, black-painted words on a glossy white board, which took up most of one wall. It was headed "Oxygen Balance Sheet." He studied it for several minutes.
He swung back to face her, shaking his head. "It's going to need something cataclysmic, like the Tokyo Alert on a global scale, to convince people that it's really going to happen. The trouble is that on the human time scale the process is hardly discernible. It's just creeping up on us day by day, until one day we reach the point of no return."
"The creeping pace could turn into a gallop," Cheryl said. "As our friend over there discovered."
On the window ledge stood a two-foot-high model of Tyrannosaurus rex, its terrible plastic jaws agape, rows of pointed teeth gleaming in the sunshine.
She was referring to the theory put forward by Drs. Luis and Walter Alvarez that the dinosaurs were wiped out in just a few short years, possibly less than twenty. It had always been assumed that the extinction of such a powerful and dominant species, which had existed for 150 million years, would take many thousands of years, but now it was believed that toward the end of the Cretaceous period, about 65 million years ago, an asteroid several kilometers in diameter had hit the earth and the impact had thrown up a mantle of dust that completely shrouded the planet. Over five or six years the dust had filtered down and the atmosphere gradually became clear again. But during that short time sunlight was prevented from reaching the surface, with the result that photosynthesis was impeded. No photosynthesis, no plant life. So the animals that fed off the plants starved and died, and the animals that fed off those animals starved and died, and so on up the food chain. Within a very short space of time three quarters of the earth's species had been wiped out.