"What do you think's inside?" Cameron asked.
"I don't know," Rex said. "But it must be for multiple specimens-it's certainly larger than any land form on the islands. It's also locked, which means Frank collected something before he disappeared." He tapped the door with his fingernails, making a hollow ping. "Ain't curiosity a bitch?"
Rex returned Cameron's smile, then ducked into the larger tent, sur-veying the dim interior. A rotting, fecund smell permeated the space. A mat and a single sleeping bag lay on the ground, along with a hurricane lamp that had broken in a recent tremor, a wooden chest, and a toiletries bag. He lifted the lid of the chest, and a swarm of tiny wasps rose up, clouding around his head. He cried out and stumbled backward, tripping over the chest. Swatting at the wasps, he shoved through the tent flap. The swarm lifted from around him in the breeze, flying in several tight swoops before disappearing.
Cameron and Derek looked at Rex, startled, then amused by his disheveled hair and red face. "Any stings?" Cameron asked.
"No. Podagrionids. Torymid family. Predators of mantid larvae." Rex dusted off his pants. "They use their sharp ovipositors to pierce the spongy egg cases before they've hardened, and lay eggs inside. Their off-spring hatch and feed on the developing larvae." He clapped his hands together and sank them in his khaki pockets. "They don't sting."
Cameron's lips pressed together in a hint of a smile. "The expression on your face, you could've fooled me."
Rex ducked back inside and approached the chest, raising the lid more cautiously. Sure enough, inside lay a segment of an ootheca about the size of a playing card, dotted with holes. He shooed the few remaining wasps and held it out before Cameron and Derek. "Case in point," he said. He turned the segment over, his fingers sinking into it. "Looks like it sustained some UV damage," he said. "That would have made it easier for the wasps to penetrate it." He held it closer to his face. Frank had written the estimated hatching date on a piece of tape stuck to the ootheca-11/25/07. "So Frank was alive through the end of Novem-ber," Rex said. "But this is odd. Mantids usually don't hatch until April. This is out of season."
He pulled one of Frank's T-shirts from the bed, wrapped the ootheca segment, and stuck it in his bag before heading into the other tent, which Frank had apparently used as a biostation. Cameron followed him in, and Derek waited outside. A folding card table remained stubbornly on its legs in one corner, though all the equipment it had held had slid to the ground in a quake-a cassette-tape case filled with glassine envelopes, a 160-watt mercury vapor lamp, a 10x loupe, a UV lamp, a Nikon with seven rolls of film, a dissecting microscope. Three killing jars sat in a cluster on the ground, the layers visible through the glass-crystalline cyanide, sawdust, plaster of Paris on top.
A sketch pad caught Rex's eye. He picked it up and set it on the card table, pulling an equipment chest over for a seat. When he flipped to the first page, an overscale sketch of a mantid stared back at him. Below it was taped a ripped segment of text that Rex recognized as belonging to an unpublished insect listing, one of several sheaves of reference notes about island fauna that Frank brought with him on surveys.
The paper was titled MANTIDS, and it read: Galapagia obstinatus: endemic species found on Baltra, Floreana, Isabela, San Cristobal, Santa Cruz, Sangre de Dios. Conventional collection methods-beating vegetation, malaise trap, or at lights. Arid to humid zones, though heavily prefers humid. Closely related to Musonia and Brunneria.
The "author," or discoverer of the species, was listed as "Scudder, S.H." in an 1893 article titled, "Reports on the dredging operations off the west coast of Central America to the Galapagos to the West Coast of Mexico and in the Gulf of California, incharge of Alexander Agassiz, carried on by the U.S. Fish Commission Steamer Albatross during 1891, Lieut. Commander Z. L. Tanner, U.S.N., Commanding."
Derek ducked into the tent, his hair damp with sweat. "Jesus, the sun," he said.
Rex waved a hand to silence him, focused on the next page in the sketch pad-another sketch, this time of a praying mantis ootheca. It was ensconced along a branch on a tree that had fallen over, making a clearing in the forest and leaving the ootheca exposed to the sun. Rex tapped the bulge of the ootheca segment in his bag. "Frank must have pulled this from the ootheca he drew," he said. "The picture explains the sun damage."
To caption the sketch, Frank had scrawled the mathematical symbol for "approximately" and then 250 offspring. Beside that, he'd written Ten viable.
Cameron pointed at Frank's note. "What's that mean?"
"Mantids usually lay oothecas from which two hundred to two hun-dred fifty nymphs are spawned. I don't know what 'ten viable' means. 'Viable,' as an evolutionary term, means that a mutated organism can develop and survive given favorable circumstances, but I don't see how that would be relevant here." Rex shook his head. "That's Frank for you. Typically vague."
He flipped the page, but the next sheet in the sketchbook was blank, save nine tallies, ticked off like a billiards score on a chalkboard. Rex tapped the sheet, frustrated. "Frank usually took copious notes," he said.
Outside, the flap came loose on the other tent, snapping in the wind, and they all started at the sudden sound.
Derek shrugged. "That was before the tree monster got him."
Chapter 29
Samantha had finally drifted off when she heard Tom Straussman yelling at her through the glass. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed, rubbing her eyes and feeling like a zoo animal.
"Get over here!" Tom shouted. "Take a look at this!" He slamm-ed a micrograph against the glass and Samantha hazily rose to her feet and shuffled across the slammer, muttering something about ticktacktoe.
When she saw the micrograph, her eyes widened. The virus that Dr. Denton had sent over, stored in the dinoflagellates of the water samples, had been blown up to enormous magnification. The micrograph showed several pairings of slender strands connected by horizontal bars, like tiny ladders. The pairings were all twisted and bore a remarkable resemblance to DNA, which was odd since the magnification was only high enough to capture gross viral particles.
Samantha stared at the print, her mind racing. It was unlike anything she'd ever seen.
"I've sent it to diagnostics to run genetic sequencing on it," Tom said. "Reverse transcriptase, polymerase chain reaction, nucleic acid probe test-the whole nine yards. I'd like to see if we can find a match in the gene bank."
Samantha tried to swallow, but her throat clicked dryly. She felt the movement of her heart in her chest. "You won't find a match in the gene bank."
"Well, we'll see after diagnostics-"
"You can run diagnostics all year, it's still not gonna show us how the virus acts." She blinked hard, trying to focus. "That shipment of rabbits for the Crimean Congo tests. Did it arrive?"
Tom nodded.
"I want them in here," Samantha said. "In the operating room." She pointed through the crash door. "And I want a pellet of the virus." Tom started to object, but Samantha closed her eyes, feeling her heartbeat pounding in her temples. "Now!"
Fifteen minutes later, she stood in the operating room, the rabbit cages at her feet. A syringe full of the virus poised in one hand, she bent over and opened the top of the cage, pulling up a rabbit by the scruff of its neck. Tom and several other colleagues watched her from the obser-vation post. Samantha injected the first rabbit, setting it back in its cage, then followed with the remaining five. The other scientists looked on silently.
She finished and crossed to the window, looking at Tom. Behind her, the rabbits thumped softly in their cages.