Hoffstetler bolts upright and stands face-to-face with Strickland, his glasses sliding down a face suddenly slicked with sweat, unable to stop from pooching his lip like a surly mal’čik defying his papa. He won’t get anywhere with Strickland, he never has, but Fleming has come with news, and Hoffstetler has a hunch that it might be the tool he needs to keep Strickland at bay. He prays that Elisa can hold on, just for a few more minutes.
“Tell him, Mr. Fleming,” Hoffstetler says. “Tell him about General Hoyt.”
The mere word does it. It’s a small satisfaction for Hoffstetler to see what he’s never before seen, a crease of disorientation fold through the center of Strickland’s face: forehead wrinkle, brow furrow, lip rumple. Strickland takes a step away from Hoffstetler. His heel lands upon a fallen object, and he looks down, seeming to notice the overturned tables and spilled implements for the first time—a mess he has, in fact, made and can’t hide. Strickland clears his throat, gestures vaguely at the spill, and when he speaks, his voice makes a pubescent break.
“The… janitors. They need… to clean up better.”
Fleming, too, clears his throat. “I don’t want to be awkward about this, Mr. Strickland. But Dr. Hoffstetler is right. General Hoyt called me this morning. Direct from Washington. He asked me to prepare a document for him. Clarifying, you know, the two different philosophies you and Dr. Hoffstetler have regarding the asset.”
“He…” Strickland’s face has gone slack. “… called you?”
There is unease in Fleming’s small, tight smile, but there is pride, too.
“An unbiased recorder,” he says. “That’s all he was looking for. I’m just to collect the information and present it to General Hoyt so he can make an educated decision about which course to take.”
Strickland looks sick. His face is pale, his lips an ill violet, and his head tilts slowly downward, as if by rusty crank, until he is staring at Fleming’s clipboard like it’s a saw blade about to start spinning. Hoffstetler doesn’t understand what kind of hold Hoyt has over Strickland, and he doesn’t care. It is an advantage, for him, for the Devonian, for Elisa, and he leaps at it.
“For starters, David, you can tell the general, that I, as a scientist, as a humanist, beg him to explicitly forbid behavior like this, unilateral decisions to harm the asset without reason. Our study has not yet left its crib! We’ve so much to learn from this creature, and here it is, beaten half to death, suffocating while we stand and watch. Let us move the creature back into the tank.”
Fleming lifts his clipboard. His pen zags across a piece of paper, and just like that, Hoffstetler’s objection is logged, down in permanent ink. His chest warms with victory, so much so that he finds Elisa again and flashes his eyes to say that it’s all going to be okay, before looking back at Strickland. The soldier is staring at Fleming’s ink squiggle, his jaw quivering, his eyes blinking in addled horror.
“Nn,” Strickland blurts, an ejection of nonverbal upset.
Hoffstetler is energized, powered by the same rich fuel he used to burn during big university lectures. Quickly, before Strickland can achieve anything more intelligible, Hoffstetler kneels beside the creature and indicates the shivering gills and shuddering chest.
“David, if you will, take note of this. See how the creature alternates—perfectly, flawlessly—between two entirely separate breathing mechanisms? It is too much to hope that we can replicate, in the laboratory setting, all of its amphibious functions—lipid secretion, cutaneous drinking. But respiratory emulsions? Tell General Hoyt that I am confident that, given enough time, we can formulate oxygenated substitutes, fabricate some semblance of osmoregulation.”
“A crock—” Strickland begins, but Fleming’s doing what he does best, taking notes, giving Hoffstetler his full attention. “All this is a crock of—”
“Imagine, David, if we, too, could breathe as this creature breathes, within atmospheres of incredible pressure and density. Space travel—it becomes so much simpler, does it not? Forget the single orbits toward which the Soviets work. Imagine weeks in orbit. Months. Years! And that’s only the beginning. Radiocarbon dating indicates that this creature could be centuries old. It dazzles the mind.”
Hoffstetler’s chest, ballooned with confidence, is pinpricked by shame. He’s telling the truth, but it’s arsenic on his tongue. For two billion years, the world knew peace. Only with the invention of gender—specifically males, those tail-fanners, horn-lockers, chest-pounders—did Earth begin its slide toward self-extinction. Perhaps this explains Edwin Hubble’s discovery that all known galaxies are moving away from Earth, as if we are a whole planet of arsenic. Hoffstetler comforts himself that, on this morning, all such self-contempt is worth it. Until Mihalkov can authorize the extraction, Occam’s dogs need bones on which to chew.
“… of shit.” Strickland manages to complete his sentence. “Crock of shit. You can tell General Hoyt that Dr. Hoffstetler—Bob—sides with the Amazon savages. Treats this thing like some god. Maybe it’s a Russian thing. Write that down, Fleming. Maybe in Russia they got different gods than we do.”
Hoffstetler’s throat clogs with alarm; he swallows it down, a hard bolus. Richard Strickland wouldn’t be the first colleague to undermine him for his ancestry, but he might be the first with the means to uncover the full truth. Although Hoffstetler has never met General Hoyt, not even seen a photo, he feels he can see the man take shape against F-1’s ceiling, a giant puppeteer who enjoys butting two marionettes against each other to see which one deserves sponsorship. Hoffstetler conceals his unease by looking back down at the wheezing creature. Hoffstetler’s career path is marked by spikes of ego, it’s true, but this is one kind of attention he’d never wanted.
It is also, however, a fight from which he can’t withdraw, not if he wishes the Devonian to live, if he wishes Elisa Esposito to live, if he wishes to live with himself. Beneath the medical lamp, squatting in the dying creature’s coagulating blood, Hoffstetler has the abrupt notion that the Devonian’s melding with the natural world only begins with the Amazon, and that its death might mean the death of emergence, the cessation of progress, the end of everything and all of us.
“The keys.” Boldly, he holds out a palm to Strickland. “We must return it to the water at once.”
13
LATELY HE CAN’T sleep. Until he can, and then it’s into the pitch. Three in the morning, he’s gasping and choking, and Lainie’s rubbing his back like he’s a boy, but he’s not a boy and those can’t be tears on his cheeks, and he repels her hands, and still she goes on shushing, asking if it’s his fingers and won’t he let the doctor examine them again, but it’s not his fingers, and she starts in about how it must be the war, then, she’s read about it in magazines, how war can haunt a man, but what would this woman know about war, how it eats you, but also how you eat it, and what would she know about memory, for it doesn’t seem possible that she, in her life of ironing boards and dirty dishes, has forged a single memory like those scorched onto Strickland’s brain.
In the dreams, he’s back on the Josefina, skating beneath cutlasses of fog, the blood of the crew drooling from the deck, the only sound the slavering suck of toothless mud. He steers the ship into a grotto as tightly curled as a conch, and a curtain of insects parts, and the being rises, except it’s not Deus Brânquia, it’s General Hoyt, naked and pink and shining like rubber, holding out the same Ka-Bar knife he’d held out to him in Korea and making the same grim bargain.